‘Just wanted to talk,’ Caeles said, bending to pick up a small dry branch. ‘We shouldn’t argue.’
Gabel stopped and looked at the ground for a second. ‘Yes,’ he said, conceding. As influenced by his frequent rages as he was, he was still intelligent and practical enough to know when two men would better serve themselves by putting aside their differences. He had enough smarts to know that the more one man knows about another, the more irrelevant those differences seem. ‘I was taken aback when I heard you were a cyborg. I didn’t believe they existed anymore. In fact, I was never sure they existed at all.’
‘They did. I was one of the first.’
‘You must be over a hundred years old.’
‘Around a hundred and sixty. It’s been a few decades since I stopped counting.’ He put the branch on Gabel’s pile, then reached to scratch the long scar running from his nose to his jaw. ‘Now I want you to tell me more about this supposed mission you’re on.’
‘The old man’s told me little,’ Gabel said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the mission is to reach Hermeticia and cure Rowan.’
‘She’s sick? With what?’
‘We don’t know. She gets tired and weak. She has trouble remembering things. Sometimes her vision fades and, she told me three days ago that she has brief delusions.’
‘Amnesia. And what delusions?’
‘She didn’t say. I don’t think even she knows.’
Caeles seemed to think on this for a while, walking with Gabel and continuing to pick up dry-looking twigs and branches. They walked in a wide circle around the camp, not wanting to go too far away from the light of the fire and become lost in the deep darkness of the forest.
‘So where’s this Hermeticia?’ Caeles then asked.
‘To the west, in the centre of a great recess, which is a crater from the war. They seclude themselves behind their wall of rock and talk to no-one. Nobody leaves the city, as it’s a fine one, and the people who enter rarely leave, through choice or otherwise.’
‘A crater to the west? D’you mean Shianti?’
‘That’s its given name. Everyone outside the city calls it Hermeticia, because of the nature of its inhabitants.’
‘I get it,’ he replied. ‘Why d’you hope to find a cure for Rowan there?’
‘The doctors there are the best in the world, I’m told. They have shamen and apothecaries. Someone in that city must be able to save her.’
Caeles met his gaze. ‘She doesn’t look as if she’ll last to Shianti. We have the lake, and the Plains.’
‘We will make it. And they’ll see how ill Rowan is. She may be close to death by then. They will let her in, even if we have to wait outside for her.’
‘You wouldn’t fight to get in?’ asked Caeles. He seemed surprised, standing still as the shifting beams of moonlight drifted over him.
‘What good would it do? You seem too ready to battle. Although if you survived the war, you must be a great warrior.’
A gruff laugh. ‘I was called that once, by a general. She said: “You’re a warrior, Caeles! Keep fighting. You’ll win this war for us.”’
The hunter glanced over, looked at this man with his curious outfit, and the short-sword hanging heavily from his waist. Caeles was nudging clods of earth with the toe of his boot, digging little trenches and then filling them in again. Was this man truly a survivor of the war, a cyborg? Had he killed, and would he have it in him to kill again, if the situation demanded it? Gabel hoped so. He sensed that they might need it.
He looked up at a sharp rustle of branches to the left, and saw a few leaves drift down to the ground.
‘I think—’ he said, and then the attacker was upon him. A blade struck him by the shoulder, piercing the flesh just above the collarbone, in the soft spot on his neck where the muscle was. A black-gloved hand flashed again, slashing upward across his chest. Gabel felt hot blood leap from his veins, as if his body was rejecting it, and then he was sprawled across the ground.
There was blood on his hands, making them slippery on the leaves. He slowly pushed himself away and up against a tree at the very edge of the clearing. Upright he could breathe easier. He pressed down on the chest wounds with his right hand, his left on his neck. Blood oozed from between all his fingers.
Caeles had pulled the attacker away, shoved him back between the trees, but the attacker’s heel dug into the dirt as he crouched, leapt, and sailed over Caeles’ head to land a few metres away. Gabel caught a glimpse of a wrist-mounted kukri knife, bloodied and dark in the moonlight.
The attacker’s face was concealed under a strange all-body cotton suit, which clung tightly to his figure. He was in no way bulky, but athletic and lithe with narrow hips. His hair, the only part of his body that wasn’t covered, flicked back and forth in the wind, a greasy jet black. Over the eyes a thick leather belt was strapped, drawn tightly over a mask.
Caeles had his wakizashi drawn, and the silver blade struck the attacker’s own as they met. There was a flurry of polished metal. The figure jumped back.
‘Who are you?’ Caeles cried, but the attacker only looked hard at him before turning to Gabel, his chest heaving deeply. Lank hair hung over where the eyes would have been, and yet the attacker had seemed to know Gabel’s exact position without the need of conventional sight.
Caeles recognised the man as a Scathac ninja: a nomad warrior, a masterless and subordinate-free condottiere, a nomad, one who apparently had them tagged as adversaries. The Scathac walked toward them, the blood on the curved blades dripping.
‘This is your end,’ he said, and the voice was strange and synthetic; Caeles could see the square shape of a voice-temper beneath the mask that covered his mouth.
‘Wait,’ said Gabel, holding up a palm, but the attacker jumped, and at once a cotton-sheathed foot was on Gabel’s chest, pinning him down like a mouse under a cat. The attacker slashed with the kukri across the hunter’s chest, and blood flew in a perfect, thin arc from the new wound.
The Scathac appeared suddenly before Caeles, pulling two short knives from somewhere and coming down hard. Caeles blocked the daggers with his sword and pushed him away. He swung and hit nothing but air, and then felt himself knocked to the floor from behind; the weapon slipped from his hands; the attacker fell upon him, kneeling on his chest with the blade raised high—
There was a click, and Gabel aimed his cocked pistol. Turning, the man froze, saw the pistol somehow through the mask and leather strap, and then leapt into the treetops, tearing over the branches and into the distant darkness.
A shower of leaves settled around them.
‘Who d’you suppose that was?’ asked Caeles.
‘I don’t know,’ breathed Gabel, standing and clutching his wounds. ‘But we seem to have made an enemy already.’
*
Six
SHIVERS
Judging by the width of the river, which grew steadily wider as it approached the great lake Lual, the party was still weeks away from the town of São Jantuo. Weeks away, and the winds that bowled through the forest were becoming colder.
Around them the bark of the trees became defensive against the cold and pulled itself closer to the trunks. Barely a leaf still clung to a branch and, underfoot, a vast palette of fallen foliage crunched as they moved. Frost became almost a daily thing; winter was well on its way.
Gabel cursed himself for not buying warmer garments in Pirene. He had underestimated not only the distance between Pirene and São Jantuo, but the turn of the planet as well; the cold season was coming too soon, and it had caught him unawares. Rowan was suffering as a result. Gabel had given her his leather jacket, frayed and torn though it was, and it seemed to help. He walked beside her now, wearing two shirts, and tried not to imagine Rowan as Bethany, mauled in that same jacket by William Teague.
‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked, by way of distracting himself.
‘As warm as you, I think,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘You shouldn’t have given me your
coat if you only had a shirt to exchange it for.’
But she didn’t offer to give it back, and he didn’t expect her to.
‘We’re on this journey to keep you alive, Rowan. It wouldn’t help to have you fall to the weather before we got to Hermeticia.’
She felt his arm go around her shoulders, and they walked together. ‘What happened to you and Caeles the other night?’
‘I already told you. We were attacked by a stranger.’
‘Was it one of the Caballeros?’
‘No,’ he replied curtly. ‘Just a stranger.’
Her questions, which Gabel had hoped he would get used to, were beginning to grate. She was curious about a world she had never truly inhabited, only subsisted on the border of, and naturally wanted to know more about everything they encountered. Unsurprisingly Rowan absorbed details from conversations she overheard, and then brought them up later for clarification. She asked about Hermeticia and the huge crater that housed its inhabitants; about the Conflict and the cybernetic soldiers, of which Caeles was one; and about the Caballeros de la Muerte, who Gabel refused to speak of at all.
Gabel recalled his puzzled conversation with Caeles after the attack. Caeles had said, ‘Must have been an errant.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘Sure. Pre-Conflict terminology; you guys are used to freaks, I guess. It’s what we call people born with strange abilities. There was quite a lot at one time or another. It was a mystery for a while until we realised that most of them had been created in a lab. Our ninja-guy – he had a belt over his eyes. He didn’t need to see.’
The reality of this caused them great perturbation over the following days. An “errant”. A Scathac ninja. Why?
The days passed, and though she knew it was hurting her, Rowan insisted on resting for at least the morning of every Sabbath that passed. On the third Sunday from Pirene, Caeles sat by Gabel and helped him make the fire.
‘As far as I can tell, the old man is happy to let you think of Rowan’s good health as our objective, for now at least. If that’s what you’re after, then we should keep on moving just as quickly as we can.’
‘When we visited you in Pirene, you behaved as though you and he had met before. Is that true?’
‘You could say that. I’ve see him from time to time. Not through choice, you understand. It’s hard to explain, and it’s a long story in any case. Usually violence makes him … go away for a while.’
Gabel took a moment to digest that. ‘What do you think the magus’ objective is? The job he’s given us?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Caeles replied. He looked at the lines he was making in the earth with a stick – an eight-pronged star.
‘Do you think the lake will kill her?’
Gabel thought Caeles looked surprised at such a flat question. He watched Caeles stand, rubbing his thighs, and wondered if the cyborg saw in Gabel what Gabel tried his hardest to hide: stubborn stoicism and an unhappy vulnerability.
‘I don’t know,’ Caeles said simply.
The hunter looked over at the young woman and nodded. ‘I would not wish it.’
~
The next week was still cold, but the chill seemed to have reached a peak. The only change came exactly a week later, when the magus opened his eyes in the morning to find his vision blurred by frost on his eyelashes, and a thin sheet of soft white snow all around him. The clearing was patched with it, as only some of the snow had slipped through the canopy of trees. It had only been a light shower, but something that put foreboding into the magus’s heart.
He stood and brushed his blankets down. He hung them up to dry. His fingertips were cold, and he clasped them tightly in his wrinkled fist, heating them. The magus rarely felt the cold like this.
‘Gabel suggested we set off as soon as possible,’ Rowan said, walking up. In her hand was a large piece of stiffening bread, which she passed to him. ‘I hope we arrive in the next town soon.’
‘São Jantuo is still a while off, unfortunately.’
‘Is it a large place?’ She asked it as she strapped her blankets to Gabel’s backpack. Each time she did so, the magus felt a pang of guilt emanate from her, that Gabel should be burdened with her luggage.
‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘It’s barely a city, if you ask me. But larger than a town, and bustling; the market places there are pleasant and full of interesting things.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll buy you a trinket if you keep it quiet from the hunter.’
She offered a grim smile. ‘I’d like that very much, sir. But I sincerely doubt … What I mean to say is that I’m weakening, more so than when I was home, to be sure. There I lay in bed and could recover my strength, but out here…’
The magus nodded. He had noticed the same deterioration in strength and energy. He had similar doubts that Rowan would succumb to her illness all too soon on this journey.
The four ate breakfast, and it was that day when Gabel finally removed the bandages from around his torso. The wounds given to him by the Scathac had been deep, but he recovered quickly. The bandage around his shoulder, however, would remain there until they reached the city by the Lual.
Caeles sat close to the fire. He didn’t need warmth – everything his body needed was always inside him – but neither did he need food, yet he still ate, in moderation.
‘I’m not willing to give up food,’ he said, passing around the cheese he brought from Pirene. ‘It is one of the Three True Necessities.’
‘What are the others?’
‘Warmth,’ he said, ‘and justice.’
He no longer seemed to mind sharing; the cheese would have turned green if he’d kept it with his cold, frost-covered blankets any longer, and it was squashed from being in the bag too long. Yet, following that he fell silent, as if contemplating a difficult problem that would soon need to be overcome.
~
They travelled the rest of the day, and they camped several hours after sundown.As he set the fire going, Caeles told them of his problem.
‘I can’t go to São Jantuo.’
Gabel and the magus turned around suddenly. Rowan, who was sitting nearby watching him make the fire, looked up.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Gabel.
‘I’m not allowed to go there.’
‘Not allowed?’
‘No. The Regent is an enemy of mine. After the Conflict, when I found out that our new hometowns neighboured, we agreed to stay away from each other, and signed an agreement. That was many years ago and if he’s still there – which I’m certain he is – then I can’t go through the city.’
‘But the city is right on the lake!’ Gabel pointed out. ‘There’s no other way across.’
Caeles started to rub sticks together, which soon caught. ‘Sorry.’
‘That isn’t good enough,’ Gabel growled. He took off his hat and dropped it on a log. ‘You should have warned us earlier.’
‘Wouldn’t have made a difference. I’m willing to carry on to São Jantuo to see if the Mayor is still alive, and if he isn’t the agreement will be void. It’s only valid until one of us is dead.’
The magus sat by Gabel’s dropped fedora, picked it up, and examined its cold steel rim. ‘And if your old enemy is not yet deceased?’
Caeles shrugged – that annoying little habit of his. ‘Then I guess I go around. Find another way across, which I’m sure there must be, seeing as the lake is so big. There must be a private dock somewhere along the coast beyond the town. There’s miles of it.’
‘What if there isn’t? Are we supposed to wait for you on the other side? You’d be weeks behind us.’
Caeles stoked the fire and seemed to think for a while, his hand absently pushing the burning logs with a stick. ‘It has been a long time. Maybe he’ll let me through, if he knows the reason.’
‘How much of an enemy are you to him?’
‘I killed a lot of his friends,’ Caeles replied quietly. His eyes closed. ‘But that was ages ag
o. If he’s still alive then he’s monstrously old. He wouldn’t pose too much of a problem if it came to that.’
He looked up at the others. ‘It would mean a quick pass through the city. No stops, not even one night.’
‘That would be impractical,’ said Gabel, ‘but we’ll see when we get there. Now isn’t the time for creating plans, while the sky prepares to drop more snow on us. Better we get into our bags before that.’
They ate and then slept, all waking the next morning to a fresh blanket of snow. The going became harder then, and Gabel was glad that at least the winter had come at the start of the journey, rather than near the end when they would be too exhausted to manage. At least the snow was thin and sparse; heavy snowfall at this point would slow them down considerably.
He worried about other things. In particular, his body was showing strange signs of some other illness. He knew that his stress was to blame: he had never enjoyed being around other people. In fact, he preferred the company of a quiet horse and the twittering birds as he hunted. His concern for Rowan only made his anxiety worse. That morning, when rising to consciousness in the snow, he had scratched his scalp and his fingers returned with a thick lock of dead hair.
*
Seven
TEAGUE
William Teague, once devout, smelled the burning first. Then came the stench of bubbling flesh, and his ears, though blocked with ash like his mouth, could hear screams.
Pain; pain in his eyes … He felt in his sockets and they weren’t there. He let the useless flaps of skin that were his eyelids open and (somehow still with the power of sight) implored the heavens – but they were too far away, and neither they nor he could hear his cries.
He was in a pit. Alive, somehow, and in his human form, not the monstrous hulk of the theripe. He touched the hole where Joseph Gabel had shot him and found it clogged with the soot: solid and immovable. If any of the soot came away onto his fingers, he couldn’t tell. He was filthy, scarred and burned.
He scrabbled in the grey dustiness of the pit until he reached its rim, and looked out.
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