‘His friend told him that he’d seen another theriope, a second one, that appeared to have replaced the first provocateur. But the young man didn’t realise that William was the second theriope.
‘This same man often ridiculed William for falling foolishly in love with a whore – a beautiful whore – named Lucia. He pestered and provoked him, and eventually William exacted his revenge. He killed and ate someone close to his friend, a woman named Rebekah. He did this in full view of the entire town. In order to further torture his friend, revealed to him his identity. We were enemies ever since.
‘A full sixteen years later, on the same day, William returned from his half-home in the woods to kill another woman who his friend held dear, one who could have given him all the happiness he needed. She was called Bethany. William couldn’t tell you now why he did that, murdered that beautiful young woman. Perhaps it was spite. More likely it was motivation to have someone end his suffering.
‘Eventually his friend, the factotum, caught up with William, and they fought. William was defeated, and … the rest you know. Except his friend’s name. Joseph Gabel. There was a time when William wouldn’t have rested until Joseph was nothing but tatters of flesh. But now…’
He looked down at Verlaine. She was asleep, breathing shallowly in the darkness. He kissed her on her burnt forehead and settled down himself. There was still most of the hour’s respite left. He rested, but didn’t sleep.
They would be moving off again soon.
~
They could see the end of the Plains. Up ahead the forerunners spied a barely visible scribble of green: the tree-line of the rainforest. The party moved on with re-enthused spirit.
By night, one or two of the acolytes had to stand guard. Recently there had been noises in the darkness, coming from all directions: the click of angry teeth, the scrape of heavy footfalls, and the noise of whipped air as something moved very quickly from one place to another.
There must have been at least a dozen of the creatures, whatever they were. Brother Elkin guessed sanguisuga, lost and starving out in the wilderness, perhaps drawn to the ultra-thick blackness of the desert night. The other watchmen had heard snarls and hisses, frighteningly close by, but had been unable to see anything.
They came closer to the rainforest. They could see the trees stretching far upward from the ground – a curious change from the never-ending horizontal Plains. They were only half a day away from the rainforest when the night set in, and people voted to keep moving toward the safety of the trees even in the darkness.
An hour after dusk, the stalkers attacked.
Plumes of dust rose from the ground a few hundred feet away as something sped toward the travellers, kicking up a sandy storm as they came. They didn’t take long to arrive.
They were sanguisuga. Snarling, vicious animals, burnt black and bald, naked and hungry. They were a terrifying horde, each one of them ravenous and red-eyed. Their iron teeth glinted in the darkness as they tore across the landscape, ploughing into the group of travellers, tearing open bodies and hacking limbs.
Screams erupted all around Teague. Glancing this way and that in the darkness, he swung the limp Verlaine up across his back, gripped her thighs as he felt his small body buckle under her weight – Why did I have to come back in such a pathetic vessel? he thought – and then bolted with the rest toward the forest.
People fell around him, knocked by great speeding bullets. Someone next to Teague was hit and spun under his feet, cascading blood from an immense gash up from his waist to his throat. Another brother, up ahead, was decapitated by a blur and fell, colliding with a third and sending both sprawling across the hard ground.
‘Come on,’ Teague urged himself, feeling his body weaken beneath Verlaine, his thighs and calves aching.
‘Please…’ she whispered into his ear, and he was so glad to hear her voice, to know she was still awake and alive. He compelled himself to go faster, drawing from an unknown source of energy.
At least six people had fallen as he ran, getting ever closer to those trees, and now it seemed that he was in front of the group; the shrieks and snarls were all behind him. He ran on, and on.
About two metres in front of the first great capsicum tree the ground was a carpet of fern and bracken. He ploughed through it and then into the rainforest, snagging himself on branches, feeling immediately the dampness of the place, the humid oppression. His feet caught on roots, his hair in the spiny flora clinging to the trees, his robe in the thick undergrowth. He felt soaked in less than a minute.
There were still noises behind him, people crashing through the trees and fern. Teague couldn’t tell if they were other members of the Sect or the sanguisuga.
Something whacked against the back of his legs, and then an injection of adrenaline slowed everything down: his feet out from under him, falling backward, Sister Verlaine slipping from his grip and rolling in the plants behind, and then his traitorous breath escaping as his back crunched against the hard clay floor beneath the ferns.
Finally there came the sanguilac, rushing over him, carried by its own momentum, skidding.
Stopping. Turning.
It stood in front of him, knees bent, shin-hooks twitching. It stooped and hissed, baring its teeth. Scrambling to get back to his feet, adrenaline releasing its time-slowing grip on him, Teague managed to stand upright. He got between the thing and Verlaine.
There was blood under his tongue and he felt the feeling again, the itching inside him, in his chest, in his heart, as if his blood had mites. He shuddered, then pulled himself together as the sanguilac began to move forward. His hands rolled into fists…
Something fast dropped from the trees in a blur and streaked across the ground, leaves spouting upward in its wake, and it knocked the sanguilac back. The things stood and faced each other: a sanguisuga, wiry and pale, naked and semi-decomposed; and an indistinct spiritual shape, heavy-set, muscular, smokily translucent…
The newcomer bared its fangs and its eyes flashed in the moonlight as the weaker creature snarled and pelted back into the desert, knocking Teague off his feet as it went. The figure glittered in the air, visible only as a shimmering red simulacrum of a man. It hovered, blinking in and out of existence, toward Teague.
‘Get away!’ he barked, and squirmed backward through the ferns to Sister Verlaine.
He checked her over. Her head was facing toward the canopy, shaded by the darkness of the rainforest. The rest of her body tilted to the side. She was dappled with light, deathly still. The skin of her neck was twisted into deep folds. She was dead. He bit into his right hand, using the pain to fight back his grief. With his left hand, he pointed at the vague shape.
‘You leave me alone, spirit.’
It blinked at him, its stance predatory, muscles collected.
‘Leave me alone, I tell you!’ Teague was walking laboriously into the forest. ‘Thank you for your help, but don’t ask me for anything. I’ll never give it to you.’
‘The Daemon is looking for you,’ said the flickering shape.
Teague whirled around, and there was nothing but unsettled leaves where the shape had been.
‘What?’ he yelled, looking up into the trees. ‘What?’
He suffered disturbing images of the black Beast looking at him as he cowered, his feet burning on the black marble.
‘You were the first. You should not be here,’ the voice called, coming from some indeterminable direction. ‘You found your way out somehow and it has been angered! It looks for you. I know its thoughts…’
‘The Daemon can look all it likes!’ Teague screamed, suddenly frightened, terrified, and he began to run. ‘I don’t intend to die again! I’d sooner live forever here as a wraith than go back to that thing and its eyes!’
‘You know its thoughts too,’ said the inconsistent shape, effortlessly following him through the forest. ‘You looked into its black Soul and saw its plans. You know what comes!’
‘If what I saw w
as true, then we’ll all be its playthings soon anyway! Leave me be.’
‘We can stop it,’ the voice rasped, and Teague slowed his running. He looked up into the lush canopy. ‘There is a traveller who can bring an end to it all.’
‘How? How can a man defeat Erebis?’
‘Not defeat. But postpone Erebis’ arrival. Interrupt it. This man has the power to take all Erebis’ strength away.’
‘Who?’
‘You know. The man who destroyed you. You know in your heart; it is how I know.’
‘Joseph Gabel.’
‘Of course.’
‘No! How can he have the power to do such a thing? I won’t believe it.’
The shape was suddenly right there, snarling in Teague’s face. Hot breath licked him. The features of its shifting face were painfully familiar to Teague. ‘Quiet! You will be quiet! You will listen! You must understand!’
‘What is there to understand?’ Teague snapped, standing, aware of that feeling inside him again, like an itching, flaming snake. ‘That my killer is the one to prevent this catastrophe? That my burier is also my saviour? I can’t fathom such a thing!’
‘You must understand because he needs help. Our help.’
‘How? Why?’
‘You know the answers to those questions!’
‘Then how do we find him?’ Teague snapped angrily.
‘He travels parallel to us toward Shianti, inside the Great Crater.’ The smoky red shape pointed, but the trees obscured the peaks of the nearby range.
‘You mean Hermeticia. Why there?’
‘He seeks the cure to his friend’s illness. He will not find it. It is incurable.’
‘Who is ill?’
‘Joseph knows what is coming; his travelling companion told him not long after your ‘death’. He means to stop it.’
The shape began to dissipate, shifting into transparency.
‘Wait,’ Teague implored. ‘How will I find him on my own?’
‘He will be coming soon,’ it said, pointing north-east. ‘Listen out for him.’
‘My hearing isn’t that good!’ Teague yelled, in time for the thing to vanish into the trees.
‘It used to be. Listen to the voice of your lost spirit.’
Teague cried out for further explanation, but heard nothing but a faint rustling, getting ever distant, and the tiny patter of a few falling leaves.
Then, a voice like fog in his mind: I will find you again. We will be rejoined once more.
And then, just as suddenly:
Nothing.
*
Twenty-Six
THE OTHER SIDE
They stood at the bottom of the great ladder, many metres down below the desert. Standing now on what felt like sturdy ground, they could see a small rectangular block of light far in front of them. It wasn’t close to providing enough light for the members of the party to see each other, but it was enough to guide them, so they set off moving, feeling their way through the darkness.
The air was stale and hot. Caeles, who had no trouble seeing in darkness with his bionic eyes, talked as the others fumbled. He said how he believed the great door to have been a vent of some sort, and the corridor an access tunnel leading from it. He’d seen great circular vents in the walls beside the ladders as they had descended, where the steam came out before going upward.
The others murmured disinterested replies, more concerned with keeping their footing than hearing speculative details about the place’s inner workings.
‘These walls are made of metal,’ said Colan. ‘Where would someone get the resources to build such structures?’
Caeles’ voice came to him through the gloom. ‘I told you, this is pre-Conflict. Buildings like this weren’t uncommon. I remember whole fortresses built of zirminium steel; and ships, giant starships made of it, where all the walls and floors were metal…’
There was no debris at all in the corridors. They were indeed clean and preserved, almost sterile; not a particle of dirt could be seen, not a single grain of sand. No grime, no dust. It was as if time had clean-wrapped the whole place and left it in storage, ready for humanity to come back to it once it was ready.
‘It’s hard to believe that no-one has rediscovered such a place,’ said the magus.
‘The world is a large place, Mister Magus,’ said Colan. ‘You could search forever and never find what you are looking for. However, some people get lucky,’ he added, and then collapsed into an embarrassed silence, very aware of Sarai’s presence next to him.
Caeles shot a glace at the knight. Over the last few days the disgraced Caballero had insinuated himself into the group well, attaching himself to the Scathac as if that gave him some kind of cover. Caeles still did not trust Sarai, who was still a relatively new member of the group herself, and he held nothing but contempt for the arrogant, fallible Joseph Gabel, who continued to make misjudgements and allow his emotions to dictate his actions.
The more they travelled, the more they realised there were noises coming from deeper inside the place, the angry hiss and clang of machinery working in the heart of the complex.
‘Something’s still running in here,’ said Caeles.
‘The door did open for us,’ Gabel said. ‘It’s still venting.’
‘Yes, but I thought that would be automated. You have to understand the complexity and efficiency of the machines built at the time before the cybernetic war. They were made to be competent and productive, and above all to last. No time could be lost on maintenance.’
‘Nothing works forever,’ the hunter countered brusquely.
‘You just don’t get it. In times of war, you can’t be thinking about fixing little problems in your machinery and tiny little bugs in your computer systems. You just make sure you build it right the first time. Otherwise all the hours spent plugging leaky piping and sealing cracked motherboards means you have less time to deal with the things that matter.’
‘Killing, you mean?’ asked Rowan.
They had come to an area where the colours of the walls were different. Before they had been a pale steely blue, and the group hadn’t even realised they were painted at all. Now they were a muted green, and they realised the colours reflected the areas they were in.
‘Exit this way,’ Caeles said laconically.
Rowan put a hand to her head. ‘I feel dizzy.’
Caeles nodded, but said nothing.
They moved on. There were no doors on either side of the hallway, merely the same pale strip lighting and spotless tiles. They soon arrived at a gate, the lights and screens of which were long since dead, and passed through into a wide open room with a vast door on one side.
‘What’s this?’ asked the magus.
‘It’s a Transitway,’ Caeles replied, a smile splitting his face. ‘Super-fast transport beneath the desert. I never dreamed any of them had survived. They were locked down and used purely by the military, but common bombing targets.’
‘Have you used one before?’
‘Only a couple times. I had a lot of odd jobs through the military during the Conflict, and I got to use a lot of top-secret tech. Look, this console should operate the platform.’
Caeles yanked a burned-out battery from a computer consule and soon found a replacement. Amazingly it worked, its translucent symbols buzzing to life the second he waved his hand over it. After keying in a simple code, the huge door in front of them opened like an eyelid, disappearing into the ceiling. Behind it sat a large metal platform mounted on rails.
‘Get on,’ Gabel said to Rowan, seeing exactly what the Transitway was: a way to expedite their journey and reach the city where Rowan’s cure awaited.
They piled onto the Transit platform, lying flat as Caeles ordered them to, while he pushed further buttons and then leapt onto the thing as it began to pull away. The dark tunnel echoed with the sound of heavy clanging machinery.
Behind them, as the platform picked up speed and they shot off down the channel underneath
the desert, they saw the muted illumination of the Transitway control room recede. The great door to the tunnel slowly lowered itself, rapidly getting smaller through distance, sealing itself closed and plunging the party once again into total darkness.
~
They lay for two hours on the platform as wind whistled over them, snatching at their clothes and drying the sweat off their skin, with nothing but the darkness to keep them company. They could see nothing but each other’s outlines. Caeles shifted against the warmth of Gabel’s arm, uncomfortable being so close to the man. He wondered if Rowan’s new anger toward the hunter was rubbing off on him.
At the end of the second hour the platform ground to a halt, and the travellers came to another heavy steel door. Caeles opened it by another computer panel and the group climbed up and out into a freezing desert’s night.
Immediately in front of them stood the startling greenery of the rainforest.
They had crossed the Sinh-ha Plains.
~
Venturing as far into the rainforest as they dared, they set up camp in a sandy break in the foliage. A large fire was lit and food was prepared, but no-one was in the mood to eat. The long silence of the Transitway journey continued into their camp amidst the dense bracken, saturating them just as the moisture of the rainforest saturated the air. They all sensed the approaching closure of their respective journeys.
The magus sat by Caeles but said nothing, only picked at a small piece of bread and gazed into the fire. Beside him, Caeles looked on as Rowan allowed herself to be held by Gabel. The two sat on the opposite side of the blaze, and further around Sarai and the knight sat close together. Her hand was on his armoured wrist, and they talked quietly.
‘We’re getting close to the end,’ Caeles muttered.
‘And that concerns you?’ the magus replied.
‘There’s no telling what Tan Cleric has been up to all this time. And you can damn well bet he’s got something special for me, just waiting until we bump into one another again. I bet that’s the first thing he prepared after the war ended.’
‘You’re not worried that an errant freak can get one up on the mighty John Parland, are you?’
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