by Col Buchanan
‘They can see motion, if it’s close enough to them.’
‘Hear, smell?’ asked Ash.
‘They seem to be deaf. Smell is their primary sense.’
‘They can smell far?’
‘Hard to say exactly. Far enough though. If you’re upwind of them they’ll know you’re there for certain. Downwind, and you can breathe in those scents they release and find a whole lot of strange things starting to happen. Can even cause paralysis if you’re close enough and they’re hunting you.’
They sobered as he spoke the words, and even Ash grew cold in his bones. Seeing it on their faces, the man offered them more.
‘They wage war as a species, that’s why they have warriors born and bred for killing. Always move in packs. Sometimes whole armies. That carapace of theirs, on the warriors it’s like two-inch-thick plate armour, except they can move as fast as a wolf when they need to.’
‘More chappa, if you please,’ Kosh called over to the bartender, holding up his empty cup.
Another click of wood from the players, the game carrying on.
‘What about those fellows?’ Kosh whispered. ‘That talkative one sounds like he knows his business.’
‘To lead you into a kree warren?’ Meer retorted as he took in the old fellows. ‘He must be in his sixth decade.’
‘And your point?’ demanded Kosh with a scowl.
‘You want to get in and out of there alive, don’t you?’
When the young bartender came over to refill their mugs, Meer leaned towards him over the table and spoke in a lowered tone, feigning a casual manner. ‘Last time I was here the room was packed to the rafters with longhunters.’
‘Must have been a different season then. All the big expeditions are in the Hush now. Best time to be there. You’ll not see them again until the passes reopen in early spring, when they return with their loads.’
Ash and the others all glared at Meer in silence.
‘They can’t all be there, surely?’
The barman glanced over at the man sitting in the corner with his face hidden. Leaned over the table in a pretence of wiping the surface with a rag. ‘You’re looking for a longhunter?’
‘Yes. Someone still active.’
‘If you carry on from here, follow the first track you come to on your left. The cabin’s about an hour out of town but it’s an easy hike. Cole’s his name. Not from around here. Interesting fellow. Likes to go into the Hush alone which makes him crazier than most, but they say he’s a good longhunter.’
‘You think he’ll be interested in some work?’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Longhunter
The air up there was cold enough to chill his fingers to the bone, yet the man was sweating from his efforts, and droplets were shaking loose from every sudden motion he made, so that as he climbed his body rained into the gulf of space.
Occasionally, Cole would pause spreadeagled in his precarious ascent of the cliff, with his leather-bound toes perched on a knob or sill of rock and his calf muscles straining, and he would ram a hand into a crack in the wall and make a fist of it, locking him in place there. Without hesitation he would release the grip of his other slick hand to dip it into the leather bag at his waist, filled with powdered chalk.
Blinking his eyes clear of sweat, he would catch his bearings on his route up the face, gasping in the high rarefied air of the Untamed Plateau, trying to think of nothing but what he was doing.
Cole wasn’t certain how much further he could make it today, nor how much he should push his weakened body still recovering from the long journey back from the Great Hush; an experience he was now coming to terms with in his usual manner, by trying to forget about it entirely.
He should have died out there, he knew only too well. After the kree attack on his night camp, after he’d lost everything but his rifle and cat and his last saddle-less zel . . . Well, it was what you got when you ventured early-season into the Hush all on your lonesome, then found yourself asleep in the midst of a grisly kree attack. You died.
Yet miracles had saved him, one after the other. Waking when he had done from his delirium, just in time to flee. Then finding his nearest supply cache without his compass, and every one after that all the way back to the northern highlands. And there, stumbling across the friendly Inchita in their winter camp during a storm. A string of unlikely chances.
The rock face was all he could see before him now. Already Cole’s muscles were verging on numbness from the strains he was putting on them. But he needed to keep going, to push it further; climb and keep on climbing without thoughts of return, away from the call of memories altogether, up into the limitless sky.
Clarity; he could see it up there in the bleached sky when he leaned back and squinted past the vertical world he clung to like a fly.
Cole was high now, though still the lone trees sprouted from the rock here and there to the left and right of him. Of all the climbs he had made of this cliff, he was yet to reach the line where they ceased to grow. He doubted if today would be any different.
Below and behind him, the gulf of air was a windy nothingness that waited to claim him body and soul. It was waiting there for the first and last mistake that he made, the slightest shave with bad luck, but more than that – for he was culpable in this – it was waiting for his own surrender to it.
Maybe there was a name for his condition, or maybe he was crazy after all; for whenever Cole looked down from any real kind of height, he was prone not to shiver with fear from it but instead to feel drawn to the empty abyss it offered him.
Down there in the world, down in Lucksore and most of all in the Last Chance taverna – one of the few places in town that he frequented other than the brothel – they did indeed call him crazy, and right to his face too. Cole the crazy foreigner who ventures into the Hush alone. Who throws away the fortunes he makes from Milk on gambling and women. Who climbs rock faces for the sport of it. The crazy longhunter with a face that looks like a dog has been chewing over it for the better course of a day.
And now, the man who had somehow made it back across the Aradèrēs passes in winter and lived to tell the tale. Not that he would be telling it. Not unless he wanted to risk getting strung up for his previous dealings in Milk without a licence.
Smoke rose through the canopy far to the east of him. The Selak Contrarè most likely, holed up in their wintering campground. Even now the forest remained home to scattered tribes of Contrarè living and dying in the old ways, taking only what would be restored to the land in the turning of a year.
Cole was climbing again, pushing himself harder as memories returned unwanted, panting ragged breaths from the effort.
On the other side of the Aradèrēs, living there on the edge of the Great Hush, the highland natives had thought him crazy too for wanting to cross back over the Broken Spine in winter. Wait for spring, they’d advised him. Wait until you’re recovered and the passes are clear again. You will die of exposure if you try it now.
But they were wrong, he’d known. Too many unlikely events had brought him here for it all to end in the high frozen passes of the Spine.
Something calls me back to my world, he had tried to explain to the highland natives one night around a high-banked fire. Something wants me to return to the life I once fled from. Ever since I awoke beneath a tree with the kree attacking me, I’ve felt it guiding me every step of the way.
They had sensed it too, for the natives were Contrarè in their own ways and they knew of these things. Relenting to his vision, they gave Cole thick furs and stout snow shoes and blessed charms to aid his way; the crazy man following the path of the Great Spirit.
Later, up in the high passes, Cole and the cat had indeed walked into an unseasonable spell of remarkably fine weather. Still damnably cold at night, enough to frostnip his nose and cheeks, but survivable if they huddled together, and with the snow hard packed and easy to traverse the entire way. Another miraculous window of good fortun
e.
So much good luck, yet a King’s ransom remained behind in the Hush, the entire venture for nothing.
Had it meant anything, really, that sense of being guided homewards – home to the family he had so long ago deserted? Or had it been the simple cravings of his desperate mind?
Returned at last to the sanctuary of his remote cabin, the question had lingered on without answer, while his desire to return home to Khos diminished by the day. It was only the Hush, he began to tell himself. The Hush did strange things to a man’s mind, that was all.
Cole grunted. Kept on climbing hard.
‘Hello!’
Glancing down, he instantly lost his toehold on the rock. Cole hung there staring at the figure far below him, scrambling up the rock face so fast that even Cole was impressed by it.
A bounty hunter, perhaps? Cole was still wanted in Dasun for that road robbery after all. But that couldn’t be it, he’d gone by a different surname in those days. Had he given himself away somehow? Loose pillow talk with one of the girls in town?
Regaining his toeholds, he relaxed the strain on his arms by leaning outwards, then cast a look over his shoulder.
‘What do you want?’ he hollered.
The figure glanced up just then, and Cole saw his black skin, the black skin of an old farlander no less, all the way here in the mountains of Pathia. One of the old exiles. Interesting.
‘Can we talk?’
‘We’re talking now, aren’t we?
‘Can we talk below? I have some friends waiting.’
‘What is it you want?’
‘We need a guide. A guide into the Hush.’
‘Then you’re a little late in the year!’ Cole called back, and started to climb again, aiming for a ledge he knew was wide enough to sit upon. When he reached it at last, he settled himself against the rock with his legs dangling over the edge.
The climbing farlander was still a long way below.
A guide. Why in Erēs would he need a guide into the Hush?
For the first time since fleeing Khos, Cole felt the same sickness in his stomach that he’d carried for all those years he had fought beneath the Shield; a cold and coiled thing living within him. A portent, perhaps.
Waiting, he drank some water and tried not to look down at the climbing figure. Instead he gazed out across the land, filling his eyes with one of the known world’s greatest remaining forests, the unspoiled wilderness of the Untamed Plateau. A land of clouds and visions.
Shades of green and red everywhere he looked down there, save for where deciduous trees were prominent, their bare limbs frosted with snow. Ancient highland tiq, featherwood and black pine were the commonest trees in the forest, though the chiminos towered over them all, their trunks of furred bark as wide as some rivers, their diamond leaves broad enough to roof a house. Indeed, tribes of snow monkeys favoured them for their homes, as did the brushtails and the ponderous long-fingered sequat, and countless other species found nowhere else but here.
Once, if the Contrarè were to be believed, forests like this one had covered all the lands around the southern Midèrēs, until the people of the alhuthut had arisen to devour them for farmland and resources, and much later to deprive those who would live free within their protection. Now, native forests survived only across the highlands of the Aradèrēs mountain range, and in the lowlands where pockets remained as tribal lands or unexploited commons, and even right out there in the Midèrēs sea on his homeland of Khos, as the ancient forest of the Windrush.
Westwards Cole’s eyes were drawn towards the frontier town of Lucksore and its azure lake reflecting the sky, surrounded by blankets of snow where the land had been turned over to goats and hill zels, pretty against a backdrop of forested slopes. With reluctance he took in the vast swathes of logged land to the north of the town, and in his unwavering gaze held the sight of the bald and stubbled hilltops – laq after laq of them – pushing into the deep forest like an affliction of mange.
The Empire’s ever-growing need for prime tiq and other timbers, now reaching even to here on the Untamed Plateau.
With spirit, Cole raised his flask of water to the remaining forest, toasting the trees and sweeping mesas below him before taking another swallow, wondering how many more times he would lay his gaze upon this great sight before it was gone, or he was dead.
A chip of rock came loose against the kicking heels of his bare feet. Cole glanced down as it fell past the old farlander not so far below him now. The old fellow snapped his face up with a scowl, so that Cole saw the small goatee on his chin and the gleam of his shaven head, his eyes hidden by dark goggles. Cole raised a hand by way of apology.
The farlander seemed hesitant as to which way to go next. No wonder. He had reached that difficult final section at last – the section that had caused Cole’s recent lather of sweat. No further handholds lay within easy reach of it. In fact the nearest required a leap in which you had to release all contact with the cliff face for an instant, and the distance seemed a touch too far. One mistake and that was the end of it.
If he goes for it, I’ll listen to what he has to say.
The farlander leapt, grabbed the protrusion of rock he’d been aiming for with a grunt and hung there for a moment while he found purchase for his bare feet. He flashed a grin at Cole.
Soon he was pulling up to the ledge and swinging himself onto its thin relief.
‘Drink?’ Cole asked casually and offered his flask to the old man, who heaved himself further onto the rocky shelf clearly out of breath, his tunic clinging wet to his skin. The fellow pulled up the goggles with trembling fingers to reveal dark eyes bloodshot and tired, as though he was ill. He accepted the offering with a nod.
‘Cold day for a climb,’ the farlander gasped as he tossed back the flask, and up close there was a curious humour in his expression which somewhat disarmed Cole just then – something in his eyes that he recognized from his own mirror; a certain recklessness of spirit.
‘I’ve felt colder.’
The farlander craned his head to look directly up the cliff. ‘You are trying for the top?’ he asked, incredulous.
‘Yes,’ said Cole, then shook his head. ‘No. Not today.’
‘You climb for the thrill of it then?’
‘Do we always need a reason for what we do?’
‘I suspect so, even if we do not know what it is.’
Fair words, and spoken openly enough that Cole could not help but feel relaxed in this fellow’s presence. They sat there studying each other in silence, until a gust came that made them press their bodies against the cliff.
‘Who are you?’ Cole asked through the rush of wind.
‘Call me Ash. Will you come down and speak with us? My companions are waiting below.’
‘What is it you really want?’
‘I told you. We need a guide for the Hush. We were told you might be interested in the work.’
‘Well unless you’re damn well planning on flying over those mountains, there’s not much point in us talking, old man.’
For some reasons his words caused the farlander to grin.
‘You coming?’ the fellow asked brightly, and slid himself over the ledge.
*
‘You want to do what?’
The man who called himself Meer sat back in his chair and smiled apologetically.
‘We need Royal Milk. A great deal of it. Much more than we can afford to buy at market value.’
Cole was fetching the cat some supper while he listened, strips of jerky hanging from the beams of his cramped cabin. He offered some to the rest of the group but the strangers politely declined. Their minds were set on business.
‘You’re crazy, all of you,’ he decided as he marched through the open doorway, where the farlander was sitting on the rail of the veranda, and filled a bucket from the stream that ran not far from the cabin.
‘Maybe,’ replied the farlander as Cole returned. ‘But crazy or not, we will pay well.’
Inside, the other three were waiting in silence. The young man with the blond hair took a step out of the way as Cole banged the bucket on the floor and water splashed over the sides. With all of them looking on, Cole removed his sodden tunic to wash his face and neck and bald head with soap leaves and shockingly cold splashes of water.
‘Pay me how well?’ he gasped.
‘A fifth of the haul.’
‘And how much Milk are you after?’
‘Five rhuls, at the minimum.’
‘Five rhuls!’ Cole stood upright so that water cascaded from his head. ‘And you can’t tell me what it’s for?’
‘No.’
Instinctively, Cole looked back at the bearded farlander through the open doorway, which framed Ash in the fading twilight, the crows coming home to roost loud and boisterous behind him. The man was watching Cole from his perch on the veranda rail, his arms crossed together, one booted foot swinging back and forth above the fascinated eyes of the cat, which had gulped down her jerky and now lay there beneath him, her tail lolling in lazy excitement.
‘There aren’t five rhuls of Milk in all of Lucksore, old man.’
‘We know that,’ said Meer, trying to catch his eye again. ‘That’s hardly the point.’
‘But why do you need so much of it? Is this a commercial venture?’
The second farlander, the fleshier one called Kosh, leaned forward in his own chair, and his gaze was a spear that tried to pin Cole where he stood. Cole held it steadily, feeling the past rushing through him once again today. It was the gaze of a hardened military man, a man who had killed many times in his life; yet otherwise there was little whiff of soldiering in any of them. The two farlanders were an enigma. The fellow called Meer might as well be a monk, with his shaved head and easy smiles. And the young blond man carried himself with the self-assuredness of a street prince, afraid of no one.
Who were these people?
‘No,’ Meer told him. ‘This is a private matter, not a commercial one. What we need to know is whether it can be done.’