The Land You Never Leave

by Angus Watson

  She went to join Sitsi Kestrel, looking over the other edge with Paloma Pronghorn.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  “Tornado storm,” said Sofi Tornado, joining them at the rail.

  Sassa had never heard Sofi talk apart from to order people about. “What’s a tornado storm?” she asked, not sure if she was going to get a reply.

  “There was a storm here the day before yesterday.” The Owsla captain sounded weary but not annoyed. “It was so powerful that it created multiple tornados which the buffalo were unable to escape. Yoki Choppa saw their suffering in his alchemical bowl. Thousands upon thousands were killed.”

  Sassa pictured a black sky full of spinning buffalo. It would have been a sight.

  “He also saw the magic that caused it, and is sure that it was the force at The Meadows.”

  “But that must be more than a thousand miles away!” said Sitsi. “If it’s that powerful here …”

  “Indeed,” said Sofi. “That’s why, according to Yoki Choppa, it’s vital that we get you there.”

  “I’m sorry about Bjarni,” said Sassa.

  “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “And don’t dwell on it. We need to work together now to break these spider traps. The Badlanders have done us a favour bringing us so far west so quickly, but only if we—”

  “Why so glum, why so glum!” Chapa Wangwa came bounding up. “There are plenty more buffalo where these came from. Plenty! Oh, I know what’s upsetting you! Are you worried that we will take longer to get to the Badlands because all these dead buffalo are blocking the way? Well, I’m afraid you are right! We would have been there this evening, but now we will have to take the southern approach. So we will arrive tomorrow. Don’t worry! There will still be plenty of excitement for you all when we get there. Excitement, and slow, horrible death! What is it that some of you say? Oh yes, Wooo-tah!”

  Chapa Wangwa looked at them one by one. His permanent grin faltered when he saw the small smile playing on the Owsla captain’s lips.

  Chapter 16

  Chippaminka Reigns

  Luby Zephyr walked along at the head of her section, a good way behind the vanguard of the vast Calnian army that was marching across the Ocean of Grass to its doom.

  It was four days since Luby had crept into Ayanna’s tent and had the living crap scared out of her by Chippaminka. They were four days closer to the Badlands, four days nearer to Calnian destruction, and Luby had been able to do precisely nothing to stop them or even slow them.

  She was seriously bewitched.

  If she so much as thought about returning to Ayanna’s tent, or approaching Ayanna on the walk, her stomach cramped and she struggled to breathe until she forced her mind onto something else. She’d seen Chippaminka once since the night in the tent, and an overwhelming, unnatural terror had nearly made her pass out. Even trying to think of asking someone else to talk to Ayanna on her behalf or kill Chippaminka made her mind flood with a debilitating horror and stifled all rationality and planning ability.

  Unable to act otherwise, Luby had focused her energies on training her section of warriors to defeat the other members of the Calnian Owsla. The Owsla, she reckoned, could be beaten by a combination of two tactics that had never been tried before—to attack them in overwhelming numbers and to try to capture them rather than kill them. The Owsla’s skin was tougher, their bones stronger and they were much faster than normal people, so the last thing you wanted to do was take them on in a fair fight.

  So Luby’s squad had made nets and catch poles and practised with those. If the rest of the Owsla really had joined the Badlanders, she reasoned, then they must have been bewitched like her. If she could restrain them and talk to them, she might be able to snap them out of their bewitchment. Then Sofi Tornado would know how to defeat Chippaminka.

  Around noon, as always, she was walking along and trying to think of ways to capture the Owsla more efficiently, with fewer of her own warriors dying, when a woman from another division ran up.

  “Luby Zephyr, can you walk ahead with me for a moment?”

  “Sure,” said Luby. Did she know her? She didn’t think so.

  The woman said she was a captain. She was on her way to confront Ayanna about the madness of the venture and wanted Luby’s support.

  “You have my support,” Luby managed, the familiar dread storming her mind,

  “Let’s go then, right now.”

  Luby thought about running to the front of the column to confront the empress and nearly vomited. She staggered.

  “… I can’t,” she said.

  The captain stared at her for a moment, muttered “you’re as bad as the rest of them” and ran off.

  Luby followed the captain to apologise and explain her position. She’d run fifty paces when she realised that she was nearer to Ayanna than she’d been since she was in her tent. She immediately felt sick and scared and had to stop. No, she told herself, I am not getting closer to Ayanna. I am following the captain to apologise. I was rude to her and I must apologise, that’s why I’m headed this way.

  Her stomach steadied and she carried on, following the captain’s run to the head of the marching column, all the while looking out for Chippaminka. She couldn’t see the warlock, but when the captain reached Ayanna and Luby was about thirty paces away, a great fear clutched at her throat and stopped her very legs from moving and she could go no further.

  The captain said something that she couldn’t hear, and Ayanna replied. Luby stood and watched, feeling sick and wretched, theoretically ready to help but sure that she wouldn’t be able to.

  “Empress, I beseech you. This is a mistake and we must return to Calnia immediately.”

  The captain blocked her path, sweaty and panting. The Swan Empress Ayanna blinked. She couldn’t remember the captain’s name, but she remembered her story. She was a young, high-born woman who’d been grossly overweight. She’d accepted a bet to lose her flab and become a squad leader in the army. She’d won the bet, and more. She was now in good physical shape, if saggy-skinned, and had risen to captain, a couple of ranks above squad leader. She’d been brought to Ayanna’s attention as a possible future general or even leader of the army.

  The empress looked about for Chippaminka, but the girl was nowhere. She fought to calm herself. She needed Chippaminka.

  “Halt!” she shouted to the twelve men carrying the swan litter. Inside it, Calnian screamed as if he were having his limbs ripped from his body. A few days before, Ayanna would have rushed to see what was wrong, but she was used to it now. The baby was outraged when the litter stopped, when it started and when it changed speed. She loved him unconditionally, which was lucky for him, because if anyone else had made as much noise as he did she would have had them executed.

  “Why is it a mistake?” she asked the captain.

  “Where do I start?” the woman beseeched. “We have no beef with the Badlanders, so there’s no need for a punitive raid. If your intention is to expand the empire, this is not the way to go about it. We’ve marched far too far from Calnian territory without consolidation. It’s not that our supply lines are stretched, we don’t have supply lines. A well-marshalled force led by people who know the land could surround and annihilate our army with ease.”

  “We will take the Badland capital,” Ayanna replied. The geographers had raised the same concerns, but Chippaminka had explained them away. “Then we will be supplied by the Badland empire.”

  “Any army, even one this size, would have trouble breaching Calnia’s low walls. One of my men has been to the Badlands. He says that the capital, the seat of their chief, has one narrow road leading to it, up a cliff several hundred paces high. With what we have, it will be impossible to take.”

  Ayanna was confused. She felt a little faint. The Badlands’ natural defences were something else that had troubled the geographers. What was it that Chippaminka had said to appease them? She c
ouldn’t remember. The geographers had become upset and then … no, it had gone. All she knew was that the geographers had been wrong and Chippaminka had been right.

  But it did seem like a startlingly good point. How could a force armed with bows, slings, spears and clubs assault a cliff? Was the captain right? No, she couldn’t be. Ayanna looked about for Chippaminka, but she was nowhere. Calnian wailed on—she would have to feed him soon.

  “We have hunters and buffalo are plenty.” She sounded more confident than she felt. “The army is the largest ever assembled. We will swarm up and over the Badlander defences. Calnia’s empire will be doubled and in one moment become strong enough to last for ever.” She needed to sit down. Where was Chippaminka?

  “That makes no sense.” The captain was wide-eyed and earnest. Believable. “Perhaps if we had the Owsla they might spearhead a successful attack, but we have only Luby Zephyr.

  “Worse that that, there are rumours that the rest of our Owsla are with the Badlanders. If that’s the case, we are in even more trouble. Sofi Tornado and Chogolisa Earthquake alone could hold a narrow pass in a cliff until they grew old. Meanwhile, the Badlanders will be able to sally forth and pick us off. If we attack, fail and retreat, they can follow us all the way home, destroying our army warrior by warrior until there is no army left. And if we lose the army? If we lose you and Calnian? Then there is no more Calnian empire. This is not the campaign that will double the empire, it’s the campaign that will lose it.”

  Tears sparkled in the captain’s eyes. “My dear Swan Empress, I am no coward. I would die for you a thousand times over, but the situation here is clear. If we fail to penetrate the Badlands, which we will, it is the end of the Calnian empire. If we do conquer the Badlands, then we win the Ocean of Grass,” she lifted her hands to indicate the endless prairie. “Why do we want it? It’s enormous and sparsely populated. Its only assets are buffalo, deer and dung and we have plenty of these in the empire already. What are we doing?”

  Behind them the Calnian expedition stretched back to the horizon. It was a vast army, but it was dwarfed by the everlasting grasslands and the overbearing sky.

  “If we turn now,” the captain continued, “we have a chance. We’re six or seven days from the Badlands. If we retreat with the army intact we should make it back to Calnia. Please consider what I say, Empress. I was wrong to approach you like this, but I have been trying to talk to you since before we left Calnia, been snubbed again and again, and I was desperate. Kill me for insubordination, I don’t care, but please consider what I say.”

  Ayanna looked at the captain’s beseeching face and the enormity of what she’d done came washing over her. The captain was right. Of course she was. The weight of realisation made her feel faint. She staggered back into a guard’s strong support.

  “I …” she managed. “I …”

  Chippaminka strode past the empress and drove her stiffened fingers into the captain’s neck, then turned to Ayanna.

  The captain stood behind the warlock, eyes wide, clutching her throat and gasping.

  “What …?” managed Ayanna.

  “I have executed a Badland infiltrator who was spreading defeatist nonsense. You are ill. Give the order to make camp here. I will tend to you and we will continue tomorrow.”

  Behind the young warlock, the captain fell to her knees. Nobody helped her.

  Luby Zephyr saw Chippaminka marching up and tried to shout a warning, but the words stopped in her throat. She tried to run to help the captain but could not. Instead, she watched the girl kill the warrior.

  Then Chippaminka saw her, and she had to run.

  Luby sprinted back to her division, ashamed that the relief at getting away from Chippaminka was greater than her guilt for not helping the captain.

  Ayanna was ill. She heard herself giving the orders to make camp as Chippaminka had bidden, her own voice echoing around in her head. Someone ushered her onto a chair, someone opened her shirt and someone delivered the wailing Calnian to her breast.

  She sat with her eyes closed against the painful light, listening as the tent was erected, and was soothed to sleep by the boy’s suckling.

  She was woken by Chippaminka at sunset. She was fully dressed, spread like a starfish on the bed in her tent. Not her most goddess-like of poses.

  The warlock stripped the empress and fetched her tub of magic salve. Initially the girl used her hands, then her arms, and then her entire naked body, sliding over Ayanna’s own nakedness, gliding, pressing, melting away all physical and mental concerns, breathing warm words of comfort into her ears. Once the empress was relaxed into a warm state of near bliss, Chippaminka morphed her manoeuvres into something altogether more thrilling, using all of her body and her mouth to stimulate and arouse.

  Ayanna’s breath was shortening, her climax welling, when she felt the girl’s small, strong hands around her neck. This was unusual. Thumbs pressed into her windpipe.

  Ayanna tried to sit. The girl slipped a little on her oiled torso but gripped strong legs about her waist and held firm. The grip about her neck tightened. She couldn’t breathe. The empress panicked but couldn’t break free. She stopped struggling and looked at her lover, eyes pleading. She didn’t want to die. She could not leave Calnian alone.

  Chippaminka leant forwards, her lips brushing the empress’s. The pressure on her neck released and the girl’s hands were now caressing and soothing. The salve’s spicy bouquet mixed with Chippaminka’s odour flooded into Ayanna’s nose and filled her head, intoxicating her. She breathed in several times and kissed the girl’s neck from collarbone to jaw, again and again. How she adored her!

  “You are mine,” said Chippaminka, sliding and pulsing her body rhythmically against the empress’s. A slim, firm thigh parted the empress’s softer legs and pressed into her. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Ayanna breathed.

  “You listen to nobody but me. You do what I tell you. Do you understand?”

  “I will do what you tell me to do.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “Good. That’s very good.”

  Part Two

  Spiders of the Badlands

  Chapter 1

  Into the Badlands

  Finnbogi the Boggy stood at the rail of the Plains Strider between Ottar the Moaner and Freydis the Annoying.

  The land was lumpier than it had been and there was a monumental flat-topped hill—or was it a mountain?—in the mid-distance to the south. Nearer by and all around were outcrops of bare white rock, stark against the green grass. Some of these outcrops were angular, with wall-like sides, others were domes. Some outcrops stood on their own, the size of longhouses, others were grouped into what looked like towns of lumpen white huts and sheds. The rock looked soft, as if a good kick would explode it into a cloud of powder.

  Grazing here and skulking there were buffalo, elk, foxes and the other standard critters, but there were also thousands of furry creatures that looked like oversized, short-haired, fat-headed squirrels. Some of these were running around chasing each other. Some saw the Plains Strider, screamed and dived into holes. Some reacted to the colossal vehicle’s approach by jumping about and squeaking weirdly. Others stood on their hind legs and watched them pass, forepaws held in front of them like meek men waiting for a Jarl to finish a conversation so they can petition him with a proposal that they know he’ll reject.

  “They’re prairie dogs,” said Sitsi Kestrel, joining them at the rail. “Black-tailed prairie dogs.”

  “Are they dangerous?” asked Finnbogi.

  “Of course they’re not dangerous!” scolded Freydis. “Do they look dangerous?”

  Sitsi laughed. “They’re dangerous if you’re a grasshopper.”

  “But there are so many. If they got a leader …” Finnbogi mused.

  “Then they’d take over and the world would be a better place,” said Sitsi. “At least the Badlands would be. We can’t be far now.”

&nbs
p; “Why do you say that?”

  “The Badland capital is a great outcrop of rock into which the Badlanders have carved their dwellings. These bare rocks we can see all around must be outliers of that rocky terrain. Look,” Sitsi pointed, “that one’s got red stripes. It’s the first one we’ve passed like that. The rocks of the Badlands are red, yellow and white rock, so I suspect we’ll see more colour as we approach.”

  “Have you been here before?” asked Freydis.

  “No, I learnt about it in Calnia.”

  “Are those the Badlands up ahead, do you think?” Finnbogi nodded to the ominous dark mass on the western horizon.

  “No, those are clouds. I think the Badlands are north-west of here. We’ll probably turn northwards soon. Those clouds, I think, are over the Black Mountains, further west than the Badlands.”

  “What do you think will happen when we get to the Badlands?” asked Finnbogi.

  Sitsi looked at him and the children sadly. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Woo!” shouted Ottar, trailing off with a sad, “taaaaaah.”

  “It’s not going to be good,” said Freydis. “We should probably try to enjoy ourselves before we get there.”

  Finnbogi looked across at Bjarni, still trussed to the rail and unconscious after the large dose of Loakie-knew-what Yoki Choppa had made him drink. Erik was sitting next to Bjarni, even though the warlock had said he was going to keep him unconscious for a few days. It was his only chance, apparently, of fighting the infection which had spread to his chest. Erik’s hand was bandaged over the burn that Chapa Wangwa had inflicted.

  “Yes, Freydis,” said Finnbogi, “you’re right, you die when you die. Let’s get back to the game. I think the next predator we see will be a bear.”

  “I think lion and Ottar thinks sturgeon.”

  “Sturgeon? Come on, Freydis, what did he really say?”

  “Wolf.”

  “That’s better.”