by Col Buchanan
‘You never had these dreams before the Hush?’
He shook his head, and it was only a partial lie. ‘I thought I was at peace with this business of ours. Yet clearly not.’
‘It’s because you’re nearing your end, Ash. You face up to what lies behind you at long last.’
It was the first time Kosh had openly acknowledged the truth of his worsening condition, and his friend’s words surprised Ash enough that he was rendered speechless by them.
‘You know,’ Kosh went on, ‘I always thought I would be the one to go first. Somehow it feels wrong any other way.’
‘Maybe you still will,’ he quipped around the lump in his throat, but then he thought of the Edge of the world they were camped beside, and the warrens of the kree at the very bottom which they would soon be entering, and he regretted the joke bitterly. He was only tempting fate.
Something wet and cold settled on his shoulder. It was Kosh’s hand, squeezing hard to show how much he meant to him.
Please, enough!
Perhaps Kosh sensed his tension, or simply knew him well enough after all these long years, for he took his hand away and fell to silence.
A crack rang out in the darkness of the night like a branch breaking, though it came from far beyond the hillock of their camp. The zels shifted uneasily and the voices of the Caffey brothers ceased for a moment. Another crack sounded, this time even further away.
‘Do you ever dream of your apprentice?’
Ash winced in the darkness, gripping his hands together even tighter.
‘Every single night,’ he admitted in a whisper. ‘Nico is one of my victims.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Into the Edge
Next morning, the looks in their eyes said it all.
‘Is this really necessary?’ asked Jarad, oldest of the skymen, putting words to their incredulous silence.
Naked now and smearing himself down with a fresh coat of kree oil, the longhunter Cole scowled but did not look up from what he was doing. ‘No clothing beyond this point. They’ll scent the sweat in them even soaked like that.’
Across the small clearing, Dalas signed something quickly with his hands.
‘Aye, what about that cat of yours then?’
Cole threw a jar of oil into the man’s hands in reply.
‘Cats only sweat through their feet. Now strip.’
By the time they were all undressed, Cole was already slinging a bandoleer of cartridges over his slick torso and the longrifle over his shoulder. He strapped a wet belt across his torso, crisscrossing it with the bandoleer, and hung his glistening machete from it and a netted bag of food, then as many empty water skins as he could fit. At last he fastened on his bundled pair of hooryas, weapons from his old days as a Special, designed for fighting in the close confines of the tunnels beneath the Shield; wide scythes which curved around the knuckles of his hands, with a punch-blade protruding from each of them.
Meer the monk watched on in glum silence, knowing he would be left here alone with the zels when they were gone.
‘Each of you take as many empty water skins as you can,’ Cole instructed. ‘And bring all your weaponry. Those grenades too.’
Aléas chuckled incongruously to himself, drawing curious looks from Ash and Kosh.
‘I can’t help it,’ claimed the apprentice. ‘I feel giddy.’
While the men donned scarves over their mouths and noses, Cole dipped his fingers into an open jar and painted numbers on the skin of their backs in vivid green dye he had borrowed from the ship, filled with a luminous living algae that would glow in the darkness. After a final inspection, he nodded that they were ready.
At last the party gathered along the lip of the rift valley. Early mists swirled beneath their feet, as though they were high in the mountains looking down upon the clouds. In the silence of dawn, under a sky flourishing with light though still scattered with diamond stars overhead, they glanced at one another for reassurance, nine naked, frightened, mortal figures standing over the precipice that was the Edge.
There was still time, many of them were thinking. Still time for sanity, time to turn around and return to the world of man.
Their gazes questioned each other and lips twitched into nervous smiles, each waiting for another to speak sense at last, to voice aloud what was rushing through each of their beating hearts: that this was madness.
But no one did.
*
‘Tiring work,’ Kosh remarked, and dabbed the back of a hand against his right eye, squinting as though in pain. ‘This damned grease,’ he complained. ‘I can’t abide it. I’ll lose my mind if I don’t get this stuff off me soon.’
Tension stretched out his voice. The kree scent was strong here on the steep forested slopes of the Edge, borne on the rising up-draughts. Even behind the scarf over his mouth and nose Ash could smell little else but the heavy stench of it. He felt his stomach begin to cramp and growl with nausea. Strange moods and thoughts were riding through him in waves now. It would only get worse, Cole had told them.
‘Best not to dwell on it,’ Ash suggested, stepping ahead of his old friend on the trail, and even as he spoke he was surprised to hear the annoyance in his own voice. ‘Try to remember when you were not always so old and soft. How once upon a time you were Rōshun.’
‘I should knock you off your feet for saying such a bloody thing!’
‘Thirty years ago maybe, when you were not so fat.’
Kosh’s strangled breath of anger was broken by a sudden curse. He had trodden on another thorn with his bare foot.
Too long from the field, Ash thought sourly, for his head was split in two today, and his temper evidently as short as the rest of them. Without looking back he continued walking down the trail along the fast-running stream they were following, focused on placing his footfalls carefully so as to negate the shocks shooting up into his skull with every jolt.
The air had been growing thicker, hotter, more potent as they descended the great slope of the valley. Vegetation was lush here, and at times they had to hack through it with machetes, panting and sweating in their greasy nakedness. Insects swarmed in clouds amongst the trees, but at least the oil covering their skins held their bites at bay. Brightly striped snakes writhed through the long grasses. Frogs croaked beyond sight. Still no birds to be seen or heard anywhere though.
Down below, their longhunter guide had stopped to hunker next to the stream with one hand resting on the hilt of his machete, his other motioning for the party to stop. He was watching a pair of kree pass by on the opposite bank, loaded down with their inflated sacs of amber juices, near hidden by the undergrowth. Upstream from Cole, the two Caffey brothers were arguing fiercely as though they didn’t see them, or didn’t care. Aléas too used their halt to hop onto a flat rock in the midst of the flow, where he stood precariously with one foot raised like a crane, his arms outstretched for balance, seeking equilibrium. A whimsical smile creased his handsome features, and for a moment Ash thought that he looked like one of the naked blissed-out holy men of the far east, save that his skin was too light, and the colour of his blond hair was wrong, tussling about in the cool breeze of air over the water.
The cat bounded past Aléas, leaping gracefully from rock to rock as though she wanted to be closer to the pair of kree on the other side. Cole whistled almost inaudibly across the burbling flow and she stopped, hunkering down, trembling and alert.
Suddenly the undergrowth right next to the longhunter snapped apart as another kree stepped out onto the trail they were on. Ash paused six feet from the man, who had frozen where he knelt and was now turning his head slowly to watch the creature tread past him.
‘Nobody move!’ Cole warned as the creature made its way along their line. ‘It won’t notice you if you don’t move!’
Striped spines lifted slightly along the creature’s back, rattling softly like cane grasses. On six legs it ambled past Ash where he stood rooted to the ground, gripping the hilt of
his sword for reassurance. He inhaled the reek of the creature, glimpsing the hood which Cole had told them to aim low for if it ever came to that, where the open mouth could be seen with its pink lining, barbed tendrils floating all around it in a cloud.
Across the top of the hood, sets of glassy eyes reflected the light like those of something dead.
A longing filled him to reach out and touch the creature. Even as Cole hissed a warning at him, Ash raised a hand just enough to brush its carapace as it went past. A jolt ran through his body at the contact, something of fear and awe in it. He felt the sharkskin roughness of the carapace sliding beneath his fingertips, the great weight of the animal shifting through its lumbering strides.
Slowly the kree ambled up the trail while the men stood motionless in terror.
‘We need to turn back,’ the skyman Jarad said aloud as it neared him. The man was visibly trembling now. His reddened, puffy face glanced over his shoulder, back up the slope past the great bulk of Dalas. ‘We need to turn back, all of us, while we still can. This isn’t worth all the riches in the world.’
‘Jarad, stay where you are!’
But Cole’s words had the opposite effect on the skyman. Jarad took another glance at the nearing kree then ran from the trail towards the thicker undergrowth, croaking with panic. Instantly the kree swung its head towards him with its spines rising erect. It surged after the skyman, rearing up to knock the shambling man to the ground, flailing its barbed lashes at him. Jarad screamed.
‘No one move, damn it!’ Cole yelled as Ash swept his blade free from its sheath, saw others doing the same. ‘If you attack it now we’re all dead!’
Frozen in horror, they watched Jarad screeching as the kree shook its maw over his prone form, its barbed lashes rending his flesh. Ash felt sickness boiling in his stomach. Guilt washed through him as he looked away, unable to watch the man’s fate. He met Kosh’s wide-eyed gaze and locked onto it fiercely.
With a final chilling cry the skyman fell silent and moved no more. Ash looked back at last, and saw the kree slowly working over him, nuzzling their mouths against his cooling body, sucking out his insides.
In anger or grief, Dalas broke a branch off a tree and smashed it to pieces against the trunk while his dreadlocks flew about him wildly, grunting in his mute silence while the cat jumped in excitement next to him, trying to snatch the branch in her teeth in play. A retching sound carried through their stunned silence, one of the Caffey brothers bending to be sick.
‘Anyone else feel like ignoring what I tell them?’ Cole demanded to know.
*
They continued descending the slopes throughout the short night, using the light of the stars and the milky glow from the unseen moons to see ahead. As weary as they all were Ash was relieved not to be stopping, knowing it would spare them another night filled with nightmares. The kree were less active too in the cooler darkness, and the party only heard a few from a distance as they carried on downwards. Cole pushed them hard, wanting to make the most of it before sunrise.
In the first rays of dawn they reapplied more kree oil in silence, too tired to speak, and then stumbled on down through the mists and the brightening light of the new day. Deep in the valley, the air was a reeking heady brew, thick with moisture, hot against the skin and in the lungs, upon which they grew ever more intoxicated. Their moods reeled from one moment to the next, and men mumbled darkly or laughed out in sudden humour.
Colours swamped Ash’s vision this morning, leering around with a life of their own. He stumbled often, grazing himself a few times, until at last he swallowed his pride and cut himself a stick to walk with, ignoring the raised eyebrow of Kosh behind.
‘Old blind man with his walking stick,’ muttered Kosh from behind.
Ash let him have that one, knowing he deserved it.
Right now his mood had flattened into a single focused desire to keep going. For a long time he simply stared at the ground before his tired feet as he walked, chewing on some dulce leaves and using the stick for balance. So intent was he on his footfalls that he hardly noticed how the slope was beginning to level off at long last, and that they were nearing the valley floor; not until he almost collided into the back of Aléas.
They had stopped. Cole stood at the tree line looking out through an eyeglass, perched on the low limb of a tree. By his side the cat stared too.
Swallowing down his nausea, Ash leaned against a trunk to catch his breath. Out there beyond the tree line, the plain of the valley floor lay shrouded in thinning morning mists. A river meandered through it as brown as dark chee.
Everywhere he looked the black forms of kree scrambled back and forth in their thousands, like a massive army in disarray. To see the creatures in such numbers was enough to steal his breath away, just as their bitter scents made his blinking eyes sting. Every man stared hard with reddened eyes, sobered by what they saw; save for Aléas, who gazed with fascination and flicked his sheathed sword minutely, whipping the tip against a frond of grass.
They were right all along, Ash suddenly realized with a grim certainty. This scheme of mine is insane.
One by one the others were turning away from the sight of the kree with their eyes wide and round, a huddle of owls blinking at their guide Cole for reassurance. But dread seemed to have fixed the muscles of the longhunter’s face into a rigid mask. Cole was clearly unnerved by what he saw out there, or by what still lay ahead.
This work was a kind of penance to the man, Ash saw now. Yet there was something of longing in his stare too, a lure he could not break free from. A deathwish perhaps.
*
The scents were almost overwhelming here, enough to bring tears to the eyes. They flowed from the holes in the face of the cliff, where kree came and went from their subterranean hive.
From the base of the steep earthen slope, Cole slowly climbed up to the mouth of one of the smaller entrances with the cat at his side, flapping his hand for the rest of them to follow. He had assured them that the kree would pay them no heed so long as they moved without sudden motions.
Climbing up after him, Ash stopped by the side of the tunnel mouth and gasped for air, trying to clear his head. The dirt cliff rose above them higher still, and he saw how the earth here seemed to be bonded together with some kind of silky white substance.
A kree worker emerged from one of the higher tunnels and scuttled down the slope without noticing them.
‘The natives say the kree use murmur worms to craft their warrens,’ Cole was telling Aléas as he lit the end of his torch with his metal lighter. ‘Probably bullshit, though.’
Deep, deep darkness in there. A flutter of anticipation ran through Ash’s spine.
Big Dalas looked dubious at the size of the hole they were studying. The cat sniffed around the entrance.
‘Rope up,’ Cole told them, and while they tied themselves to the rope they had brought with them he described what they should expect.
‘We’ll be looking for the main shaft to lead us down into the Royal chamber. That’s where we get the Milk. Remember the route, all of you, and stay together no matter what. The cat will lead the way for us.’ He paused as one of the skymen retched from the reek tumbling out of the hole.
‘We go in fast and you follow my lead. Whatever you do, no matter how desperate it gets, do not cut yourself free from this rope. If you get lost down there, you’re dead. Ready?’
No one said a word.
He clicked his tongue. The cat took one last look back before scampering inside.
‘And remember,’ Cole declared hotly, ‘no one kill any bloody kree in here, or we’ll have the whole hive down on us!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Descent
‘You do this alone?’ Ash asked in wonder, grunting each word over the snap and crackle of the torches they held, which were loud in the tomb-like silence of the hive, their brilliant smoking flames leaving a blackened trail along the roof of the tunnel just above their heads as they desce
nded ever deeper into the earth.
‘It’s a living,’ acknowledged the longhunter Cole ahead of him, treading carefully with his gleaming head stooped beneath the low roof. ‘Wouldn’t want my son to be doing it, mind.’
‘You have a son?’
‘Aye.’
The man’s attention was fixed on the darkness ahead just past their circle of light, where the cat had disappeared moments earlier. From behind, his bare body glistened with the oil and sweat that coated his skin, and Ash could see the scars on his back rippling in his own watery vision, red slashes and the puckered puncture marks of stabbings. Old wounds, Cole had admitted, from his time as a soldier.
Ash blinked to clear his sight, eyes stinging from the smoke and the harsh concentrated scents of the kree that wafted in the subtle movements of air; like holding his face over a bowl of onion juice and pepper and a heady dose of something rancid. The scarf over his face seemed to make no difference at all. He had already pulled it down so that he could better breathe.
The motes of pain in his head had coalesced into a single blade that hefted through the middle of his skull from between his eyebrows to the nape of his neck. Ash chomped on the leaves and concentrated on the feel of the dusty hard earth against the soles of his feet, the rub of the sides against the prints of his fingertips. He was thirsty all of a sudden, but they had left their water up on the surface.
Behind scraped the feet of the others. He felt the tug of the rope tied around his waist, turned his head to see Kosh’s face etched deep in the torchlight and set into a grimace of fear, his scarf pulled down around his neck like his own.
Suddenly, they heard the cat crying out from somewhere ahead.
‘Clear a way!’ Cole declared and pressed himself hard against the side of the passage. Ash did the same, just as a small kree scuttled past them heading up to the surface. ‘Clear a way!’ Kosh passed on, and back along the line the men swore and shoved each other to one side roughly.