by Gary Gibson
Ursu nodded. It was the sign of an outcast, a criminal, and he’d never be able to find shelter or aid, not even from others in the priesthood. ‘I understand,’ he said.
The sound of voices rose from the edge of the camp, and Ursu heard the distant, heavy whuff of an icebeast approaching. Xan’s men, Ursu realized, seeing the sudden expressions of fear around him.
‘Ree, Eif.’ The older male gestured at the two younger ones. Ree? So that was her name. The older male, he was sure, must be the chieftain.
Suddenly a couple of tribesfolk scrabbled forward, pushing him down on the mat he had been sitting on, one clamping a hand over his mouth as he started to protest. After tying his limbs together again, he was unceremoniously shoved back into the same sack he had woken in. At least he was not to be handed over to Xan’s army just yet.
He wriggled around in the sack for a moment, until he heard another voice, loud and aggressive, in a strange, foreign accent. Just then an additional weight thudded onto his back, pushing his snout against the ground. They’d thrown a blanket or a carpet over him, he realized.
He listened hard, the fur on his skull prickling. Everywhere, voices chattered incomprehensibly amid the sound of icebeasts snorting, snuffling and braying.
Some time later, long after the unwelcome visitors left, they let him out of the sack again. This time he blinked in early morning light. Ree was standing next to him, a knife in her hand. Eif sat again by a fire, his expression still inscrutable.
Strong hands gripped Ursu’s shoulders from behind, and he was propelled into one of the tents. As he fell onto rough furs still imbued with a faintly milky, rotten smell, the older male with the jewelled ears kneeled beside him, turning his knife over and over in his free hand.
‘You did good, keeping quiet like that. And I want you to understand that we don’t want to harm you. But we won’t let you go either.’
‘If those soldiers suspect you have the god, they’ll slaughter all of you and take it anyway,’ Ursu said as the other got up to leave, sounding a lot braver than he actually felt. The other studied him for a long, cool moment, then shook his head.
‘You Nubalans were always a pitiful lot,’ he said. ‘Imagine using someone like you to steal their god away to safety. Didn’t they teach you anything about life outside your walls? The soldiers won’t touch us. If they did, every other tribe between the ice and the sea would shun them, harass them, steal their cattle and their supplies. The tribes are greater than any army of city folk. Remember that.’
And then he left, leaving Ursu on his own. Ursu waited a few seconds, then crawled to the entrance of the tent and peered out.
Two or three pairs of watchful eyes sat within several metres of him, their owners’ wickedly long knives clearly visible in the dull morning light. Ursu slowly pulled his head back inside the tent.
Ursu woke again with a start, and listened to two voices arguing. One of the voices was an incomprehensible gabble of words.
‘I don’t trust him. Why does it have to be you, anyway?’
‘Shut up, Eif, and leave me alone.’ The harsh reply was barely above a whisper. So Eif could speak the Nubalan tongue, Ursu realized; although he had chosen not to before.
‘I’ll tell Yé.’
‘Go shit in your own bed,’ came the reply, and then he knew it was Ree. So Yé had to be the one with the jewelled ears. A shadow fell over the door of the tent, and Ursu dropped his head back, pretending to be asleep as she came in.
‘Wake up.’ She kicked him hard in his side. He rolled away from her, in case the knife was next. Instead she knelt to set a plate of desiccated fruit on the furs where he had slept.
‘I heard you arguing with your boyfriend,’ he wheezed.
He was pleased to see the spark of anger in her eyes. ‘Eif is a worm-headed idiot,’ she said. ‘He stinks worse than you do, and he tries to touch my fur when nobody’s looking. I told him I’d cut him, but he still won’t leave me alone. Not that you care. They’ll soon sell you to Xan.’ The girl stared at him wildly, then ran out.
He drifted into sleep after a while, more from boredom than fatigue. He had given up watching his guards, whose attention seemed unwavering.
The orchard was ripped apart, blasted, dark. Immediately he knew that Shecumpeh was with him, and he tried to turn, not knowing what he would see. The same small clay statue sitting in the dirt? For some reason, that thought frightened him.
– Turn, Shecumpeh seemed to say. – Turn and face me. The voice was like the milky smell of the ragged furs beneath his cheek, like the pale light of Hesper’s Crown reflecting off the irises of an icebeast, like the scent of his mother’s fur when he would wake in the night, the gift of knowledge still lingering as an aftertaste on his tongue.
No. I can’t.
– Turn and face me.
He turned to face Shecumpeh.
There was a brief glimpse of something terrible, monstrous, withered and scarred. A mouthful of broken teeth, and eyes that glinted with enormous intelligence within a face like nothing Ursu had ever before imagined.
Then Ursu descended into a dense mist, sparkling with light.
Not mist, stars, he realized, not understanding where this awareness came from. Some invisible force was dragging him at tremendous speed through the stars . . . through Hesper’s Crown itself, a voice explained, in that same language of images and sensations.
Am I in heaven? Ursu wondered. No answer came, but it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. There were whirlpools of smoky gas, great pillars of dust that rose around him like mountains, seeming to stretch from one end of eternity to the next, stars burning red deep within them.
He tried to find his fingers, but realized his body had simply vanished, like morning mist. He was awareness and thought only, drifting through . . . through . . .
The images came faster, and somehow Ursu knew what they meant, what he was being shown. He saw Nubala, as if he was a glider bird, high in the clouds, looking down on it. Nubala fell farther away below him, in seconds, his world becoming a great orb. He saw seas, rivers and great mountains laid out below him, all so fast he could barely comprehend. Then even that sight fell away below him.
He saw the blazing sun, his world now a little ball flying around it. Then that fell away too, and he was back amid the light of Hesper’s Crown. For an instant, he saw his world and the star it circled as tiny motes, less even than that, floating in the majesty of innumerable stars.
His perspective then appeared to rotate, and he felt fear at what he might see next. But, understanding came, from nowhere – as if he was simply an empty vessel, and knowledge and comprehension were being poured into him.
There was something beyond the stars of Hesper’s Crown; no, inside it. A light, a terrible light, an explosion of furious, incandescent energy.
There – a tiny mote upon the face of that light. Something small and dark, floating there in the vastness of the heavenly firmament.
He floated closer to it, staring, seeing . . .
– This is where the killing light comes from, Shecumpeh informed him. – It was sent by creatures like gods, yet not gods. All that lives, from one end of the universe to the other, is their enemy. So they seek to destroy your kind and mine.
But what is it? asked Ursu, and though the words had only half formed in his mind, the answer came.
– Think of it as a kind of reconnaissance. Your gods – or those who created them – trapped those inimical to life deep within Hesper’s Crown. There are ways to contain them there, far from natural life forms, in a place where no true life could possibly exist. But they are now using the stars of Hesper’s Crown as a weapon. They can destroy stars in a way that makes them radiate the killer light that is currently racing towards your world.
The creature I saw? thought Ursu. He was hovering over the world now and he could again see the Great Northern Sea far below him. Are you Shecumpeh? Is that what you look like?
– I am not Shecumpeh.
<
br /> Then what are you?
Ursu looked down to see the lands that lay beyond the northernmost Teive Mountains. Something black and massive sprawled there, like a canker.
– The gods are not gods, said the voice. – Look below. Do you see that city beyond the mountains?
Ursu could see the canker-like shape more clearly now. It was unlike anything he might have recognized as a city.
– That is Baul.
Baul is a legend, thought Ursu. Isn’t it?
– No, said the voice. – It is real, and you must go there.
Nobody can go there, Ursu protested in his thoughts. Not beyond those mountains.
– Nonetheless, you must, said the voice. – You must go to Baul.
The visions suddenly faded – along with the voice.
Ursu smelled him even before he opened his eyes again.
A totem-reader, although Ursu did not realize that at first.
He was old, his fur patchy, his ears badly mutilated with poorly healed wounds. He wore brightly coloured rags, however, and Ursu was sure he detected a glint of madness in the old one’s eyes. Ursu froze still where he lay, watching as the old one squatted down on his haunches, staring at him intently.
He had the god, the effigy of Shecumpeh, cradled in his arms. But something was different about it, and Ursu stared at it, trying to work out what.
There was a crack running across the body of the effigy, and something shiny glinted deep within.
The totem-reader barked something at him. ‘I don’t understand,’ protested Ursu.
More nonsense syllables; the old one appeared to be agitated. Ursu lifted himself up slowly, wishing Ree or even Eif were there to translate the mad old fool’s ranting.
‘Make it speak!’ the old one shrieked, his words suddenly comprehensible. ‘Make it speak!’
Ursu didn’t know what to say. And then he realized . . . something had happened to him while he slept. As the totem-reader’s lips moved, the words that came out of the old one’s mouth were more of the incomprehensible tribal gabble Ursu had no understanding of. Nonetheless, he found he understood the old one perfectly.
‘I don’t know how to make him speak,’ he said carefully.
More nonsense syllables followed, that somehow translated into meaning in Ursu’s mind. But not words themselves, he thought, just meaning, comprehension. The old one was asking him if he came from Nubala, though he pronounced it like a foreigner.
‘Yes, I’m from Nubala.’
The old one’s ears were cocked towards Ursu. And then it dawned on him: I can understand what he’s saying, but he can’t understand me.
The totem-reader spat out another jumble of words, but Ursu just stared back at him, tired and weary. The old one twitched his ears and bared his teeth, then retreated out through the flap of the tent.
They came for him again a few hours later.
He’d heard increasing whispers from outside as dusk began to fall. The food provided earlier hadn’t been enough to sustain him, and a powerful hunger filled his gut. He heard something that sounded like their word for Nubala, and some other words that they spoke in hushed tones. Even though he could not quite make out what was being said, he heard two words repeated over and over. Shai. Again, Shai – the word always spoken in a harsh whisper. The other word was Fidhe.
Shai? In Nubala, of course, the Shai were the mythical Pale Ghosts, the icy white phantoms that roamed the ice in stories and legends.
Suddenly Ursu heard the rapid movement of leather-clad feet across the icy grass outside. Then his two guards burst in, seizing him by the arms while a third came up behind him and slid a bag over his head, pulling it tight behind him so that his protests were reduced to a slurring mumble. Cold air nipped his fur-clad flesh as Ursu was suddenly thrust out into the open air. He struggled desperately, convinced they were about to kill him.
He hit the ground hard, feeling heat near his face. The bag was wrenched off his head after a few minutes, and smoke stung his eyes, flavouring the air with its thick scent. He peered into half-darkness and realized he was now in a much bigger tent, with a hole at the top through which drifted much of the smoke from a great central fire of dried grasses. Perhaps the entire tribe surrounded him, facing towards the fire, conversing in low mumbles. But there was no mistaking the sounds of pain from some of the tribesfolk, stretched out on furs.
There were more tribesfolk than he’d previously realized. And Ursu recognized the smell of Blackface fever. When he was very young, two of his uncles as well as his brother had died of it. His skin now crawled, wanting to be far away from the source of it.
Yé kneeled by him, stared into his eyes. ‘Tell me that your god is real.’ There was a curious urgency in his voice.
‘Our god?’ said Ursu. ‘Shecumpeh is the soul of Nubala.’ He remembered the most recent vision, where the voice had declared it was in fact not Shecumpeh. It had also declared that the gods were not gods. But that didn’t make sense. If the gods weren’t truly gods . . . then what were they? And what had spoken to him?
‘Without it, you are nothing,’ Yé paraphrased the sacred lines. Ursu licked his lips nervously. Yé was perhaps no stupid barbarian after all. ‘You stole away the god of Nubala, and your fellow citizens would, I’m sure, be delighted if we skinned you alive for doing what you’ve done to them.’
‘It’s not so simple,’ protested Ursu.
‘I don’t believe you. You’re a thief, the lowest of the low, and your ears should be sliced off. You should be cast out onto the ice, for the Shai to eat.’
‘Shecumpeh is real,’ insisted Ursu. ‘I told you I was escaping because Shecumpeh commanded me to take him to safety.’
‘I need you to do a Raising.’ Yé spoke with a new authority, which reminded Ursu of Uftheyan’s voice.
‘Why should I help you?’
Yé glared at him, and Ursu eyed the long, tribal knife clutched in one clawed fist.
‘You’re a city priest who’s never known real toil, who’s never understood what it means just to survive from day to day, or to be responsible for the lives of so many others. But I don’t have any choice in what I must do.’ He now spoke in a low semi-whisper, as if he didn’t want the others to hear. ‘I need you to help us.’
Ursu stared at him for a long moment. ‘I can’t agree to anything unless I know you’ll let me take the god to safety.’
‘I can’t let you take the god,’ said Yé carefully, ‘but I’ll let you yourself go. I swear it. But you will never have the god.’
‘You’ll let me go?’
‘You, yes, but not the god. That belongs to us now – or to Xan, if negotiations are satisfactory. I’ll fetch it back to you for the Raising ceremony alone.’ Yé put one hand on Ursu’s shoulder. ‘I am asking for your help, boy. You’re a priest, and are bound by holy practice to assist any who ask for your help.’
Unfortunately that was all damnably, sadly true. Ursu had been brought up by rules ingrained in his mind from the first day he had set foot inside the House of Shecumpeh, as a barely sentient acolyte still learning to walk on two legs, but that House was far away now and nothing but a smoking ruin. He might well be the last surviving priest of the House of Shecumpeh, and it was not a happy thought.
I have carried Shecumpeh this far, he thought. If I don’t obey the Rule of Assistance, then why even contemplate carrying him farther? But he instinctively didn’t want to help them, would rather leave them to rot with their foul smells and worse manners.
‘Listen,’ said Ursu, ‘if I tend to these tribesfolk,’ he pointed to those lying sick in the smoke-filled tent, ‘it is solely with the power of Shecumpeh that I restore them to health. You understand that much?’
Yé nodded.
‘Shecumpeh is our god, and has brought me here for a reason – perhaps even to help you. But when Shecumpeh heals these people, it is because he has chosen to, not you. And when you see the power of the god of Nubala, you would be well advised to be
humble towards that which you have kidnapped, for legend warns that Shecumpeh, when affronted, is a god of righteous wrath and anger.’
Yé stared at him. ‘Are you saying that Shecumpeh brought this Blackface plague to us?’
Ursu hadn’t thought of that.
‘Perhaps. And perhaps he has decided now to be merciful by allowing me to help you. But you will have to give me the effigy if I’m to perform a Raising.’
Yé’s left ear twitched with a life of its own, a rapid, insect-like flicking. Ursu suspected he wasn’t aware of it doing so. ‘We’ll speak of that later,’ said Yé. ‘Assist them first.’
Ursu sighed and stepped towards the first of the sick.
Kim
‘Calm down. Take it easy.’
‘I’m not mad at you, Bill, I just need to know more about those Books. You have to tell me.’
‘Come on, Kim,’ said Bill, ‘you know I can’t. The people . . . see, where I get things from, I don’t just get them one at a time. They get hold of lots of different things, and I keep my mouth shut so they don’t lose their jobs. And some of them . . .’ He sighed. ‘Let’s just say they’d be extremely unhappy if they thought I’d betrayed them.’
She stared at him for a long moment, and he flinched.
She cocked her head, curious. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘I – nothing,’ he said. ‘Just like—’
‘What?’
He shrugged, laughed. ‘I don’t know. Like someone else was looking at me, through your eyes, you know? Weirdest damn thing.’ He shrugged, smiled gamely.
‘Bill. Listen carefully. Are you listening carefully?’
‘I’m listening, Kim.’
‘You don’t have the bioware, so you don’t know what it’s like to take one of those Books. It’s not just happy memories or family snapshots in 3D. It’s complete immersion in another person’s mind: everything they feel, whatever they see, how they react to it.’
‘I thought you were able to move around, and stuff, of your own free will. That’s more than just a memory, though, isn’t it?’
Kim closed her eyes for a moment, then reopened them. ‘Yes, you can. You yourself can interact, just a little bit. You can explore, but you’re just exploring someone’s memories. Except if you do that too much, some of it will be coming from you, not from them. That’s what it’s like, Bill’ – she raised one finger, as if signalling for attention – ‘if you eat a Book made from human memories.’