by Andy Graham
“And you can save that” — she nodded down to his trousers — “until after the battle is over. You’ll need your testosterone to get through the night.”
“I got plenty—”
She placed a finger on his lips. “You, Ray Franklin, have been spending too much time with Jamerson Nascimento.” She stood on tiptoes and gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth.
“That’s supposed to help me?” he asked when they finally separated. Her answer was to pull him down the tunnel. “Where are you taking me?” For someone whose emotional range had always started at angry and stopped at confrontational, Ray was struggling to deal with Brooke’s onslaughts of love and honesty that flared and died like sunspots.
“Where I’m taking you’s not so important.” She pulled him left and left again, feet slipping on the wet rock. “It’s who I’m taking you to that you should be concerned with. I should have done this before but there never seemed to be the right moment.”
The tunnel walls brushed at Ray’s sleeve, sending a pitter-patter of tiny stones to the ground. Like rats, he thought. The big rats that live under the Bridged Quarter of Tye, where my mother died. He tugged on Brooke’s sleeve to stop her. “When this is over, we go to Tear, my village.” Brooke paused to catch her breath. “The sky, Brooke. I miss the sky. I’ve spent so much time underground recently I’m starting to feel like . . . like a rat.”
“We’re here,” she said by way of answer and gestured to the tunnel mouth behind her. The cave beyond Brooke was huge and filled with stone columns. The walls were lit by thin threads of slowly pulsing rock that twisted through the walls and ceiling, lighting them in reds, greens and blues.
“That gwenium isn’t red,” he said, hand resting on his revolver as he stepped into the chamber.
“Well spotted,” she replied dryly. “We haven’t found anywhere else in the mountain where the two types of rock coexist. The pool behind the waterfall and the Resting Room come close, but they’re nothing like this.”
“You make it sound like it’s alive.”
“Is that really so hard to believe after everything else that has happened?”
Ray chose not to answer that. He ran his hand over a pillar that stretched from floor to ceiling. It bulged in the middle. The cavern was dotted with them, all covered from head to toe in the tightly written script of what he assumed was the Donian language.
She slapped his hand away from the stone. “Careful with these. We only just found them and still haven’t annotated everything. I don’t want your fat fingers chipping off a bit of rock and changing the meaning of the sentence entirely. Dying for or believing in spurious causes is bad enough, but to do it for a typo is inexcusable.” Her smile was hollow. He placed a finger under her chin and lifted her head. Her eyes twinkled green in starlight that fell through a hole in the ceiling.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not now.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“What I want?” she muttered. “Men and their delusions of heroic self-sacrifice.”
The streak of moonlight on the wall was filled with a shadow. Ray spun, revolver already in his hand, as a man emerged from behind one of the scroll pillars. A head taller than Ray, the newcomer was olive-skinned and had eyes the colour of deep well water, his thick sideburns blending with a mess of tousled hair that was black streaked with silver. He didn’t have the slight stoop that many tall people adopted; this man wore his height well. He had a confidence that sat well on his wiry frame, the look of someone who could outwalk the day. As if reading his thoughts, the stranger gestured to his worn clothes. “I walk a lot. Underground. On the mountain when it’s safe. It helps me think. Helps me forget. Give someone a mountain, you give them health. Stops me getting too lardy, too.” He pinched the skin around his belly. “A common problem with middle-aged academics.”
“Who are you?” Ray asked, thumb hovering over the safety on his revolver.
“You didn’t tell him?” The newcomer nudged the bridge of his nose, as if he was settling a missing pair of glasses back in place.
Brooke plucked Ray’s revolver out of his hand and placed it back in the holster. “No, I wanted him to meet you first.”
“What’s going on?” Ray looked from one to the other. One wearing a wary expression, Brooke amused.
“This,” Brooke said, “is Professor E. G. Shaw. Eddie, this is Ray Franklin.” She pointed to her belly and grinned. “The belly’s Dad.”
Eddie Shaw held out a hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Ray.”
“Whoa! Wait up.” The backs of his legs knocked into a rough wooden table. A blue gas lantern fell onto a sheaf of papers. Shaw was there in an instant, long fingers setting the lantern upright, smoothing down the paper. “Oil, paper and flame aren’t a good combination. Especially as I only have one copy of the translation of these pillars.”
“No, never mind that. You’re—” A lanky figure. Wrapped in scraps of clothes. Bald flesh. Angry weals. Shiny scabs around its wrists. A hoof for a foot. Brooke’s legs pinned beneath her. Aalok choked. Sci-Captain James dead. Orr. Nascimento. Ray being manhandled like a rag doll. A subterranean sun blazing red as the Monster-under-the-Mountain ripped Ray’s old patrol to pieces. A monster that had been Professor E.G. Shaw. The memories drowned out the words that refused to be said.
“I’m different to how you thought I’d be?” Shaw smiled sadly. “I’ve lost many things, a wife and daughter chief amongst those. But I have not lost my mind nor body. It also appears I am immune to this red rock of the Donian Mountains. I can only suppose that my gradual exposure to it in my experiments allowed me to build up some tolerance. There maybe a genetic component? Professor Lind would be the man to ask about that but—” An owl hooted in the distance, cut off by a rattle of gunfire.
“Yes. No. Lind’s gone. Stop,” Ray said. “What’s going on? You’re the monster—”
“Monster?” Shaw tutted. “I’m no monster. He’s no monster, either.”
“He?”
Brooke interlaced her fingers in Ray’s and pulled him round. “We haven’t got much time.”
“But—”
She kissed him, hard. Shaw coughed, discreetly, and Brooke sighed. “I finally meet a man who’s got more going for him than just his testosterone levels, and it turns out he has a suicidal need to make things right.”
“What? I—”
Brooke grabbed him around the neck, only for Shaw to cough, noisily this time, and say, “You were like a daughter to me, Karlyne. Please don’t let me see you maul this man like a tipsy teenager on their first date.”
Brooke pushed Ray away and sat down on a pallet behind the table, definitely not sulking at all. “When we met the Monster-under-the-Mountain that time with our old patrol, I thought the creature was Eddie,” she said. “I don’t know why. I’d been thinking about him a lot. I always did. Eddie kept me sane for a long time when I was in Sci-Corps. Maybe it was a natural assumption to make under the mountains, sent to get samples of this element you Ailan people named after Shaw’s daughter, Gwenn.”
“Gwenium.”
“Yes, Ray. Well done.”
It appeared Brooke was trying on this concept of affection like a new coat. Much as she liked it, the old one, in this case woven of cynicism and sarcasm and buttoned up with violence, fitted her much better.
“Just for the record” — Shaw held up a finger — “I called the element gwenium in my personal notes. I never intended for that name to stick.” Brooke waved the older man to silence and Ray thought he heard Eddie muttering something ending with: “fantastically headstrong and rebelliously wonderful”.
Brooke’s arms looped together under her breasts. As Ray realised they were rounder than before, she clicked her fingers and pointed to her eyes. “And I heard you and that idiot Sci-Captain James talking about Eddie. So I guess when we all met the Monster, my brain made too many connections and came up with Shaw.”
“OK, OK,” Ray said. “What’s going on?�
��
This time it was Eddie Shaw that answered. “The Man-under-the-Mountain lost a wife and child. He chose to give them up in order to save them. He built cairns deep in the mountain to remember his loss, in the room with the altar where you met him. His daughter, it turns out, went on to have three children of her own, one of whom is now expecting his own child.”
Each word cut through the emotional layers Ray had built up around him, squeezing out the dregs of hope he had tried to forget. Ray squeezed his eyes shut. The crimson flickering of his fight with the monster was vivid in its destructive, bruising glory. But heard through that chaos was his mother’s voice, telling a small child stories about her past, about her father.
“You know who it is, don’t you?” Shaw asked.
“He tried to kill us.”
“He didn’t recognise you. He was trying to save you and your society. He knows what this gwenium does to people in uncontrolled doses. He’s lived under the mountain for over thirty years. Hiding deep down where the tribes say the Devil walks. His bones were twisted by this stuff. He survived on food the tribes left. Kaleyne instilled the legend of the Others in the Donian people and they all started leaving food whenever they came underground.”
“Why didn’t he run?”
“Where? Deformed and hunted. He wouldn’t have survived a day. The wonderfully tolerant society of Ailan has used any number of methods to breed out and eliminate any kind of variation from the norm that was considered too unsightly or inconveniencing. He would have been spotted and reported if he’d gone to Mennai or tried to live more openly. He was safe here. He is here.”
Shaw stood to one side. A shuffling noise came from the shadows. Ray had dreamed of this moment as a kid: that he could meet the legend that had stalked his family tree since before Rose had taken up with the Resistance. But now he was scared this legend would be as broken as the rest of his family. Something stepped into the moonlight, a creature that had haunted Ray’s days and nights for months.
The monster was taller than Nascimento. Hunched. With odd lumps sticking out of its head. His face was an angry mess of boils and scabs. Skin twisted in spirals around its limbs as if it had been pulled on badly. And that foot, the foot that had resembled a hoof, was actually an ugly mess of bone and flesh. A pendant lay under its loose-fitting shirt. At the end of a leather string was a bent coin, blackened and burnt. The monster held out a hand. Heart thumping, Ray took it. It was angry red, the fingers welded together.
“Are you—”
And the Man-under-the-Mountain wrapped his arms around his grandson.
37
The Battle For The Angel City
The first rays of morning sun crested the mountaintop. They turned the snow capping the peaks pink and lit the forest in vivid greens and blacks. There was a sharp taste of frost in the air, unusual at this time of the year and enough to bring a smattering of gooseflesh up across the skin.
“Red sky in the morning. That’s supposed to mean something, right?” Nascimento asked.
Lukaz trained his binoculars on the forest edge. From their vantage point up on the palisade, they had an uninterrupted view to the treeline. “Only if you’re a shepherd.”
“They the fellows that look after sheep? We don’t get many animals in Ailan,” he said in answer to Lukaz’s puzzled look. “Live ones, that is. Even most of the trees in the museum look too glassy for me.”
“Yes. A shepherd looks after sheep, goats, too, sometimes. They’re—”
“Similar. I know. I’ve had this convo a few times,” Nascimento replied and tipped a mental hat to Orr.
Lukaz nodded to the black wing of clouds bubbled through with red. “It’s a Hell Sky. Means the angels are coming to claim the Devil’s leftovers.”
“Long as it’s the Unscum, I’m OK with that.” His jaw cracked as he yawned. He’d tried to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before dawn. He had lived up to his reputation for being able to sleep through and before anything until Mayka had found and woken him last night. Several times. The beating she’d got off the Unsung hadn’t slowed her down much. Nascimento rubbed the fresh scratch marks across the back of his neck. They were going to itch all the way through to the evening, provided he lasted that long.
There was a soft creak of wood to his left. Vena. A dishevelled Stella Swann behind her. “Are you sure,” she was asking Vena, “about the VP and my son?”
“It’s the way I would play it,” Vena said. Judging by the expression on Stella’s face, the response hadn’t helped. “Where’s Ray?” Vena asked Nascimento.
“With Brooke, I guess. If he’s got any sense, he’s making the most of the calm before the storm.” He fingered the scratches on his neck. “Or hurricane before the storm in my case,” he mumbled.
Lukaz nudged him in the ribs.
“What’s with you people and all the rib-elbowing? My folks gave me a name for a reason.”
“Look.” Lukaz held out the binoculars.
“No need, dude. Unless those trees have grown uniforms and legs, I think it’s game on.”
The rustling and cracking of branches breaking split the morning air. Dead centre, opposite the long wooden ramp that split the terraces and ran up to the gates, black-clad legionnaires emerged from the forest. They spread out in a ragged line, weapons held lazily.
“I’d love to carve us some new statues with these men inside,” Lukaz said.
“Makes no sense.” Nascimento pointed at the double-row of legionnaires. “They shouldn’t be bunched up like that. Why aren’t they attacking from two or three ends of the palisade? They’ve got the superior firepower.”
“It’s a defensive pattern,” Brooke said. “They’re protecting something.”
“Brooke?” Nascimento started. “How did you sneak up on me like that?” He craned his neck, peering along the palisade. The walkway was lined with the tribesfolk and dotted with the Resistance fighters that were left. People stood in the hollowed-out wooden statues along the walkway, peering through the arrow slits. Others leant on the spikes. “Where’s Ray?” Nascimento said. “We kind of need him.”
Brooke’s answer was to push a stray lock of hair out of her eyes and face the forest.
“Oh no.” Nascimento’s gut sank. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I was asleep.”
Vena pulled the binoculars out of Lukaz’s hands, and trained them on the forest. Swearing under her breath, she tossed them back to Nascimento. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “Franklin gave himself up? How did he get out?”
The lines of Unsung parted and Ray staggered out of the forest, shackled hand and foot. Through the binoculars, Nascimento saw a bloody bruise on one of his cheeks and the beginnings of a black eye. An Unsung legionnaire pushed him to the ground. Ray stood. He was pushed down again. He stood, was shoved face first in the dirt, a boot across his neck.
“Stay down, dude.”
“Would you?” Lukaz asked.
Nasc lowered the binoculars. “Only long enough to kick the guy in the balls.”
Ray thrashed and squirmed. A baton whipped down across the back of his legs, and crackling blue fire shone through the tail end of the morning mist. Brooke’s curse was heard all the way to the treeline. Several Unsung legionnaires jerked their rifles up as if expecting to see their enemies pouring from the Angel City.
Another man left the green shadows of the forest. His hair was immaculate, his clothes perfect, Nascimento would have bet money that this guy had leather shoes so shiny you could eat your breakfast off them.
“Randall Soulier,” Vena muttered.
“A walking corpse,” Brooke said, adding a string of swear words in her language.
“My son.” Stella gasped.
Randall ushered a small child out from behind a legionnaire. The boy came up just past the VP’s waist. Wide-eyed and drawn, he had a mess of matted, tousled hair that looked like a thorn bush.
Stella spun, tripping over her own feet, “I have t
o go to him.” And ran straight into Vena Laudanum.
“Look,” the older woman said.
The VP knelt next to Jake. He said something to the boy and patted him on the cheek. Jake set off towards the Angel City, alone.
“He’s letting him go?” Stella said, a painful hope in her voice. “He meant it. I need to go to him. Open the gates!”
“No,” Vena yelled. “Wait.” As the rattle of chains and creak of wood signalled the abortive attempt to open the gates, a black sphere rose into the air. It bristled with silver antennae and flashing red lights.
“Shoot it down!” Lukaz called. Rifles cocked and raised as dogs barked. A bowstring thrummed; an arrow grazed the drone, skitting off at an angle.
“No!”
They stared at Vena.
“It’s not a suicide-drone, it’s a speaker-drone.”
“She’s right,” Nascimento said as the drone got closer. “Good eyes, Vena.” He had a curious expression on his face. “You know a lot more than you let on.”
Vena’s finger drifted up to the mole on the end of her nose as the drone got closer. “A privilege of my looks.”
“Ray Franklin gave himself up.” Despite the metallic tang from the speaker, Randall Soulier’s voice was almost friendly. That unsettled Nascimento. He’d have preferred a series of shouted demands. Wasn’t that the way sieges were supposed to go? Ultimatums, starvation and disease. “And as the good people in the Unsung legions and you people cowering in the Angel City can see, I am an honourable man. I have kept my promise to give you Jake Swann.”
Ray was hauled to his knees. He was reeling, groggy from the stun baton. A second legionnaire handed the VP a snub-nosed pistol.
“That’s the pistol he used to kill his mother,” Vena said. “Their mother.”
“How can you see that from here?”
“I don’t need to see it.”
All along the walkway people were holding their breath. All except Brooke who was whispering all the things she wanted to do to the VP. Nascimento briefly considered telling her that was her future brother-in-law out there, but decided on a tactical silence being the safer option.