The Deathless

by Peter Newman

  Chandni watched the way the old woman walked, slow, unhurried, she slipped easily under low hanging branches. No brambles caught on her clothes, and when she looked at the path behind, it was only her and Varg’s tracks she could see.

  ‘You need to start listening. Get to know the sounds that are natural so you can tell when they stop. The paste I gave you makes us hard to sense but we’re not invisible.’

  ‘What do we do if they stop?’ asked Varg.

  ‘Move away but don’t run, that’s like shouting here. You can usually tell which way the trouble is from the way everything else reacts.’ She stopped and looked at them. ‘But if it’s close, then you don’t move at all. You hide and wait. Let something else get its attention.’

  Chandni digested that as they travelled. Up till now, she’d seen the Wild through a filter of fear, the whole place a jumble of shadows and sharp edges. Travelling with Fiya, it was possible to appreciate the beauty and variation of the place. Whiteleaf flowers as big as her hand, their petals like velvet, that moved whenever they sensed sunslight; Stranglethorn vines lashed between trees, so thick as to bury them; and what she thought were brambles but actually turned out to be baby Hedgekin, rolled up tight while their mother was away.

  She edged closer to Varg. ‘Aren’t they adorable?’

  ‘Nah. Just looks like another thousand ways to get cut and die to me.’

  ‘They are so much more. It all is. Don’t you see? We’ve been scrabbling to survive on the edge of the Wild for as long as I can remember. Only the hunts go deep enough to bring back the plants we need for medicine, face paint, and food dye. Imagine what we could learn here! If we could bring that knowledge back home, it could change the way we live.’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ He gave a wary glance in Fiya’s direction. ‘She thinks we’re exiles like her. Better keep it that way if you want her to stay friendly.’

  Chandni nodded. ‘Of course, but aren’t you a little excited?’

  ‘Getting to the end of the day is enough for me.’

  As they walked on, Chandni flexed her right hand, watching the fingers to remind herself they were there. Since their visit to the Hunger Tree, the poison had stopped spreading through her body. While the numbness hadn’t got any worse, stopping halfway along her upper arm, it hadn’t got any better either.

  I have to prepare myself for the idea that it will never improve.

  She had to actively work to stop knocking into things, as if some part of her mind had forgotten that the arm was there. Her main fear was that she would cut herself while travelling and not notice the blood until it was too late. In a way, it was like having a second baby to look after, one that never complained or woke her in the middle of the night.

  She noticed that Varg had gone closer to Fiya. ‘When this is done,’ he said. ‘Would we be able to go to Sorn?’

  The old woman could not have looked more shocked if his beard had suddenly burst into flame. ‘What? No! Why in the name of the Thrice Blessed Suns would you want to go there?’

  ‘We thought there might be supplies, y’know, things we could use.’

  ‘Sorn belongs to the Corpseman now. To go there is death.’

  Varg said nothing after that and fell back, the colour gone from his face. Before Fiya had picked them up, they’d been leaving a trail for Lady Pari to follow. Now it seemed that they had unwittingly set a trap for their saviour, one that would send her straight to the Corpseman, and whatever else dwelt in the ruins of Sorn.

  Sa-at yawned, his mind stretching along with his body.

  I have a yawn!

  He wasn’t sure which part of him a yawn was yet, but the fact that he had one was very exciting.

  Devdan appeared excited too, humming to himself as he gathered various objects Sa-at didn’t know and placed them carefully into a bag. ‘Big day today!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re going to go and meet the family. Most of us are old, and even the young ones are full grown now, so they are all going to be fussing all over you.’ He gently prodded Sa-at’s belly for emphasis.

  This initiated his new favourite game. Sa-at pointed at things and Devdan said their names. He started with things he knew:

  ‘Foot,’ said Devdan. ‘Head. Fingers.’ Devdan wiggled his and Sa-at giggled. Sa-at’s own finger kept moving. ‘Ear. Lips. Nose. How about we try something new today?’ The old man pointed to the thick curls of white above his eye. ‘Eyebrow.’

  Eyebrow.

  Its name is eyebrow.

  Devdan has an eyebrow!

  Devdan pointed at Sa-at’s face. ‘Eyebrow.’

  I have an eyebrow!

  ‘Right, now it’s your turn. Foot.’

  Sa-at pointed at his foot.

  ‘Very good! Head. Do you know where your head is?’

  Sa-at thought for a moment and pointed at Devdan.

  ‘No, that’s my head.’ He tapped his temple. ‘Devdan’s head.’ He tapped Sa-at’s. ‘Your head. Now, where’s your head?’ He smiled when Sa-at got it right and the baby beamed back. ‘Good! That’s real good. I’ve gotta say, you’re much smarter than the other babies I looked after. Maybe it’s being born in the sky that does it.’

  They went through the list, finishing with Sa-at finding their eyebrows.

  ‘Well, that’s us packed. Are you ready to go outside? Of course you are. You’re not going to make any noise when we go are you? Because if you do, I might have to drop you somewhere. Understand? We have to be quiet.’

  He wrapped Sa-at in one of the skins before picking him up.

  ‘Now, might be that one of those demons comes after you again but if that happens, don’t you worry. I’ll keep you safe.’ He bent down and scooped some ash from the floor. ‘Don’t know why, but everything that lives out there is terrified of this. That’s why I live in this old blasted trunk. Means I can sleep without having to worry about some demon coming to eat my face off. So, if anything comes to give us trouble, I’ll throw some of this at them.

  ‘All right then, you ready? Course you are. You’re a born Wildsman, you are.’

  They stepped outside, gold shining down through the leafless branches. Devdan and Sa-at lifted their heads to the warmth. ‘Feel that on your skin? That’s Fortune’s Eye. The big red sun is called Vexation and the little one, you can hardly see it with the other two so bright, is Wrath’s Tear. Might as well soak it up while you can because we won’t see much of them from here on in.’

  Sa-at stared about him at all the different shapes and colours. His finger hovered in the air, unsure where to point first. A part of his mind was still repeating the names of the suns over and over, while his head wobbled back and forth, trying to see everything at once.

  When he finally did start pointing, Devdan whispered in his ear, a barrage of new information. That, coupled with the gentle rocking motion, soon sent him to sleep.

  He dreamed of words and things and songs and wings and Whispercages and mouths and pain and – he woke up. Devdan still held him, the old man’s lips smacking occasionally as he worked a piece of scale jerky.

  ‘Welcome back. Think you were having a nightmare, had to shake you out of it cos I couldn’t risk you calling out. A baby crying out here, well, that don’t bear thinking about. Might be your new teeth playing up. Want something to chew?’ He fished out another chunk of scale jerky and Sa-at reached for it and stuffed it into his mouth. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Thought that was it. I’m a natural with little ones, me.

  ‘We’re not far from the meet now. Don’t worry if there’s no one there. I’m normally the first. It’s good though, means we can set the place up and we get to take the best seats. I can’t wait to see their faces when they get their first look at you. Yeah,’ he said, pausing to chew, ‘our first sky-born baby.’

  Sa-at looked up at the trees. From high up in the branches, he could see something familiar looking down at him. He pointed at it.

  ‘Hey, hey, what’s set you to squirming?’

  Sa-at pointed up and
Devdan stopped, squinting to try and see. ‘Whatever it was, it’s gone now. Probably just a bit of sunslight catching a wet leaf. They sparkle sometimes but that’s all it was, just a sparkle.’

  As Devdan set off again, Sa-at kept pointing.

  Crowflies, he thought, delighted. Memories of soft feathers and sour meat rising in his mind. Its name is Crowflies.

  Pari had followed the trail of white fur, some of it naturally caught on clawed branches, other bits stuffed by hand into bushes. They’d travelled through the night and not been challenged.

  ‘You see, Lan dear, nothing will attack while you’re with me.’ This was a lie but, like the one concerning the staff she’d given him, it seemed to calm the boy. The truth was more complicated. For all the things her tanzanite armour would repel, there were others it would attract. Her plan hinged on not meeting any of those others.

  They’d come across several hiding places that Varg had used to sleep in, and from the indentations in the earth he’d not been alone. I just hope the baby is still alive or this is all for nothing. ‘We’re getting closer,’ she told Lan.

  ‘We are?’

  ‘Yes. They rested here, in the hollow under this tree. You see the lines gouged in the dirt?’

  Lan nodded.

  ‘They’re a symbol. Varg left it for me. I know where they’re going. From how roughly its made I also know he made it with something blunt. That means he’s unarmed and we need to hurry and find him before something else does.’

  She made sure he’d had a good look at the sign, a set of simple lines, crisscrossing, to make an arrow. There would come a day when he might need to use it, if her plans for him came to fruition. That was part of being a Deathless, to prepare for the demands of the future even while attending to the present.

  ‘M-my lady?’ Lan stammered as she set off, her Sky-legs carrying her so fast that he had to hurry to keep pace. ‘Ain’t we going the wrong way?’

  ‘No this is the way, I assure you.’

  ‘But the arrow?’ he said, pointing off in the opposite direction. ‘It was showing that way.’

  ‘Indeed it was, my observant one. With that being the case, why do you think Varg set the arrow to lie?’

  Lan gasped. ‘Oh, he’s doing that so that if them killers find it, they’ll not know where he is.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Sneaky.’

  She winked at him. ‘Always.’

  They travelled on, the black of night shifting to grey as the suns prepared to rise. The ache in her back and thighs was mitigated by her armour but not entirely banished. This was a concern, as usually only the worst pains could reach a Deathless when fully exalted. If I feel this bad now, I dread to think what it will be like when the crystal comes off. She put it from her mind, focusing instead on the size of favour Rochant would owe her when this was done, and what kind of things she might ask him for.

  The trail became harder to follow and, after an abrupt change of direction, the tracks seemed to vanish entirely. She came to a stop and considered her options.

  ‘Can we go home?’ asked Lan, without much hope.

  She ignored the question. ‘We could go back to the original trail and assume they’d return to that course, or we could follow this one and hope to pick it up again, but in either case we might get lost and lose them entirely.’

  ‘Has he left any more arrow marks?’

  ‘No.’ She looked around. ‘Varg hasn’t left us anything for a while which, if I’m honest, is not a good sign. But if they were forced to run, there probably wasn’t time.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. From the direction they were going and the previous marks, I already know their destination. We’ll go there directly.’

  ‘Where they goin’?’

  ‘Sorn. It’s not far from here.’

  They reached the outskirts a few hours later, the light from Fortune’s Eye giving a golden glow to the leaves. Lan was puffing at her side, the tough pace and lack of sleep getting to him. Pari didn’t dare stop though, in part because she was genuinely afraid for Varg, but equally because she feared she’d not be able to start again.

  A savage strength had taken down the fence protecting Sorn’s farmland from the Wild’s edge. Amidst the broken pieces of wood, Pari found discarded tools and weapons. ‘There was a fight here. The people of Sorn mounted a resistance to whatever came for them.’ She shook her head. ‘Look at this, Lan. A few sharpened pieces of wood and the odd stone-headed spear. Not a piece of crystal to be found. They never had a chance.’

  Lan covered his mouth. ‘I know that hammer. Belonged to me cousin. She stayed behind when me an Ami left.’ Tears budded in his eyes as he stared at the shattered perimeter of his former home. ‘Why din’t the Sapphire help us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pari replied. ‘But I promise you I’ll find out. Lord Rochant would never have stood by when one of his settlements called for aid, and I’m sure this is connected to the attempts on his life. Something is rotten in House Sapphire.’

  ‘We gotta make ’em pay.’

  ‘Yes. Yes we do. The best way to achieve that is to restore Lord Rochant to power. I can only do so much from the outside, and to do even that, I need to find Varg.’

  Lan’s tears were flowing freely now. She sighed, not having the energy to be patient but not having the heart to force him on. The horrors hinted at here might only be a taste of what they could find further in.

  A single teardrop followed the line of Lan’s jaw to collect on the bottom of his chin, others followed, the droplet grew, fell, and her eyes tracked it down to the dirt. When she looked up again, there was a new addition to the landscape. It was watching them.

  ‘Lan,’ she whispered.

  Something in her tone cut through his grief and his eyes snapped up to meet hers. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Very slowly, I want you to get behind me.’

  ‘Wot is it?’ he asked, turning to follow her gaze.

  ‘Don’t look,’ she hissed, and he froze. ‘Just do it.’

  As Lan edged round behind her, it broke the cover of the trees, scuttling forward on five legs. Easily a match for Glider’s size, but black where the Dogkin was white, shiny where it was furred.

  Pari let the whip she was carrying uncoil, shaking it out, ready.

  The demon before her rose up on its rear legs, and in the sunslight she could see it in all its terrible glory. Three plated arms hung from its body where once there were four, and on its shoulders sat a large human skull. At first she thought that curved horns sprouted from the eyesockets, but with a start she realized they were moving, a pair of feelers straightening until they stabbed towards her. Smaller antennae grew from its knuckles and these too shifted, pointing the same way.

  Though Pari hadn’t met it before, she had heard the tales of the Story-singers.

  ‘Is that …’ asked Lan.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Pari, not wanting to say its name out loud: the Scuttling Corpseman. ‘Let us hope it is merely curious.’

  They stood facing each other while the Corpseman raised its arms, seeming to probe the air between them.

  The hairs prickled on the back of Pari’s neck. She could feel the demon as strongly as see it, a sense of strangeness, of something both alive and dead, visceral, almost a taste on her tongue.

  It was hard to read. There was no expression to be found in the bone of its face, and the chitinous armour hid the play of its muscles, but Pari somehow knew the attack was coming a moment before its knees flexed backwards.

  She bounded forward to get into range and lashed out with her whip, the barb seeking out one of the thick antenna on its head. Impossibly fast, the Corpseman flinched away, avoiding her strike, but the movement had stolen its momentum, giving her a precious second before it could spring for her.

  As Pari cracked the whip a second time, keeping the monster at bay, she noticed more details. An old wound where the fourth arm had been that had healed badly, and a fresh one at its shoulder where the s
hell was cracked.

  If a team of hunters were at her side, she would have used them to distract it and then exploit those weak points. As it was, it was taking all of her efforts just to hold the Corpseman back. The barb of her whip sparked off its armoured forearms as it made little hops towards her, closing the distance slowly.

  It isn’t scared nor is it attacking blindly. It’s wearing me down as I would a common animal.

  She tried a feint, seeming to aim for its head while she struck out for a knee, yet even as she switched stance, the small antennae on its hands twitched in response, and it leaped.

  It’s reading me!

  Too late, she realized it had been edging her into its range, and now it was in the air, arcing towards her.

  There was no time to turn, and she knew that meeting it in close combat was death, so Pari dived forward springing underneath its attack.

  They crossed in the air like gymnasts, one going over, one under. The Corpseman’s hard fingertips clawed against her wings but failed to take hold, and then she was through, the demon behind her.

  Pari landed on her hands and knees, scrabbling to get her Sky-legs beneath her as the Corpseman plunged into the dirt she’d been standing in just seconds ago.

  I have to run, she thought. Loop round and make for the Godroad. It’s my only chance.

  She jumped once, then twice, getting her speed up. The third leap took her high enough to trust her wings to the essence currents. They were too weak to climb but if she could maintain her height, she might be able to glide to safety.

  Again, she sensed the Corpseman as much as heard it leaping for her, and banked left.

  It was the wrong choice.

  Black shelled fingers curled around her left wing, locking them together, while a second and third fist struck her. There was the sound of shattering, of crystal screaming, and then Pari was falling from the sky.

  Any sense she had left was knocked from her as she hit the ground.

  Vasin hovered at the doorway, hugely reluctant to go into the room. His mother was by Rochant’s prone and tied body, close enough to touch it, her face trembling with suppressed emotion. He took an involuntary step back, into the cramped living space.