Diary of the Displaced Box Set

by Glynn James

  "Good luck," he said, and then turned and began walking away in a direction that would take him even further from the Exiles. I was disappointed to see him go. With that gun and his obvious sense of direction he would have been very helpful to have with us, but something in the expression on his face when he had looked at the three of us told me that he had made a judgement of some kind, and the verdict was that we weren't up to the task ahead. I also wondered if we were.

  We camped up that night in yet another run-down building; this one I thought had once been a cinema. The foyer was still covered in dark red carpeting, but it was torn and dirty. There were crumbling wooden counters with broken computers hidden behind them, and a row of smashed, see-through plastic containers that still contained a smattering of sweets, all of which looked dried and solid.

  Day 62

  I awoke in the middle of the night to sound of voices outside. GreyFoot was curled at my feet, and for a moment I forgot about the voices, puzzled that she had suddenly taken to sleeping so close to me, but a quiet sniff from just a few feet away brought me back to the noise. DogThing was crouching next to a film display a few feet away, and glaring out at the darkness beyond the entrance to the cinema. There was no light outside except for the dim moonlight, but my eyes had already adjusted to it.

  Dark figures moved past the shattered glass doorways. They were moving swiftly along the street and passing the cinema without a pause. I watched them, trying to focus on the figures, but couldn't make out any details other than they weren't stumbling and dragging their feet. Not Zombies. Every few moments one of them would speak but I couldn't understand the language. It was more guttural than that spoken by the Exiles, who had spoken clear English.

  How was it that so many places that I had been to spoke that same language? Were they all linked in some way? I couldn't even put it down to common ancestry from thousands of years past. Ancient civilisations hadn't spoken English, but the people of Riverfall had, and those that I met during our time in the last place - whatever that had been called - also spoke the same. Had the Resistance spread the language across the worlds they travelled? No, even Nua'lath and Dha'mir spoke it, though I knew that it was not their native tongue.

  Anyway, this was the first time I'd heard a foreign language spoken in a long time.

  They continued to pass by for a few minutes, and I guessed that there had to be at least a hundred of them. It wasn't the Exiles, at least I didn't think it was. Unless of course the Exiles had their own language and they had come through the portal in huge numbers.

  A long time after they had gone I drifted back off to sleep again. I hadn't intended to, but the last thing I could remember was thinking that it had been an age since I'd slept so well. Had it been at the road junction where I met Eleanor? Or did we sleep at the stadium in the city of the Sisters of Rahl? I couldn't remember.

  It was daylight again outside when I did awaken, and that had only happened because DogThing woke me up.

  "The trail is getting weaker."

  I sat up, rubbed the dust from my eyes, nodded, and quickly collected my things. Five minutes later we were following the road again.

  After roughly two long hours of walking through crumbling streets the city finally gave way to countryside, but this wasn't a kind of countryside that I was used to. I'd seen the arid deserts and lush green fields of many worlds, but I'd never before walked a barren wasteland like this. The buildings gave way to broken and cracked ground that was covered in a thick layer of grey dust that looked like ash. Dotted across the endless expanse of almost perfectly flat land were small outcroppings of black rock jutting out from the ground like sores. There was no sign of plant life and no animals wandering across the deserted landscape, just dead greyness that drained me of courage every time I looked up at it.

  Bones in the dust.

  The journey along the road felt like it took days, though in reality only hours passed. The road itself went from reasonable condition, to broken, to nearly absent as the dry desert and dead nature took over. I saw many more skeletal remains as we travelled. Some of them looked once human, but most were much larger, the size of a car or in a few cases a double-decker bus. Sunlight was almost fading into the pitch darkness of a desert night when DogThing finally perked up.

  "There."

  I looked along the road where DogThing was facing and saw the change in light almost immediately. Further up the road, about two miles from where we were, was a petrol station and behind the building was a huge metal roof held up by metal columns. The whole structure was glowing, the light jumping and dancing, and much brighter than the pale sun that now barely made an effort to cast light upon the ground.

  The light from a portal.

  As we drew closer I saw the first body.

  The petrol station was as dilapidated as everything else I had seen in this world, and far more degraded than any place I had ever visited in my travels. I know, I can't remember everywhere that I have been right now, but something inside me said that nothing I'd seen before had felt this lifeless. I felt a pang of regret for the Exiles and for Ellis. I had inadvertently led them to this place and I didn't think that they would remember me kindly for it.

  The windows of the petrol station were broken, and glass littered the ground in pools at the bottom of each gaping window hole. The paint on the walls had peeled away so that there was barely any of it left clinging to the grey and mottled concrete underneath. A dozen rusted vehicles sat by the piles of scrap metal and plastic that had once been petrol pumps, their colour now rusted metal, the bodywork long ago having lost its colourful coat. Inside a few of the vehicles were the skeletal remains of the long dead, blackened and wasted. They were a stark contrast to the freshly killed and bloody bodies that now lay scattered across the ground around them. I couldn't say why, but I knew that these new people were the ones that had passed us in the night, and as I approached the first body and turned it over with my boot I saw why they had been coming this way and why they had been killed.

  Staring at me out of the thick hood was Dha'mir, or Nua'lath. It didn't matter which of those you chose, the face that stared back at me with eyes as dead as the ashen ground around us was the face of one of their kind. The man, at least I thought it was a man, lay there with his mouth open wide in a final painful grimace, and sharpened teeth snarled motionlessly back at me.

  The face was half pale skin, almost translucent, like his kinsmen that I had met, and half blackened like burnt leather. There was a blue tinted marking tattooed upon his forehead, and as I walked around examining more of the dead I found that they all had these same markings. I couldn't tell you what they meant, but they were almost identical. A blazing blue star, surrounded with what I could only describe as tentacles, with a dark blue compass face in the middle. I say it was a compass face, but the polar letters were confused. East and west were reversed.

  They all had this marking, and all appeared to be the same until you looked carefully and noticed the small differences in the tiny sigils that encircled the compass in the middle. What each of the sigils meant was beyond me, but I couldn't help but think of the markings around the engraved circle in the dark cellar room that DogThing took me to when we found the ruined outpost in the desert near the field of white flowers.

  I'd looked at half a dozen of the bodies, whilst DogThing and GreyFoot sniffed around the rest of the petrol station, before I leaned over one of them and it moved.

  The creature rolled over and spat at me from six feet away, and a tirade of what must have been curses in its own language spewed from its mouth in the same harsh and guttural voice as Nua'lath.

  I took a step back, drew my blade and then advanced, shoving the tip of the blade into the creature's chest. I didn't stab it, only pushed hard enough so that the creature stopped cursing me and made a quiet choking sound.

  "Shut up," I said.

  The creature tried to take a breath but grimaced with pain. Blood was oozing out of anywhere tha
t it could - ears, nose, eyes and mouth - and also from blackened burns that covered much of its exposed skin.

  "Did you fight Nua'lath here?" I asked.

  The creature laughed at me, coughing with every heave of its breath.

  "Answer me."

  "Why should I tell you anything, human?"

  "Because I hunt him like you do."

  "Yes. Maybe you do, but it is to take the power that belongs to our people. You humans interfere so much in what is none of your business, and you steal."

  I shook my head. I could hear DogThing and GreyFoot approaching now, and noticed the change in expression upon the creature's face. He was frightened - no. He was terrified of the Maw.

  DogThing came to stand next to me, and the creature tried to move away.

  "Please... Don't let it."

  I pushed the blade harder.

  "What? Don't let it what? You don't like the Maw?"

  He shook his head, still choking.

  "Please...they consume my kind. If they...I will not go to the sacred halls. Please."

  I had never seen this side of Nua'lath or Dha'mir. Maybe they had somehow overcome their fear of the Maw, or maybe they knew something that this unfortunate thing didn't. I knew what it did mean though.

  "Answer my questions and I'll leave you alone. If you don't, I let them eat you."

  DogThing snorted at this and bared his teeth. GreyFoot seemed to understand as well, and did the same. To me it was comical seeing such a small Maw growling, but the effect was not lost on the creature lying at my feet.

  "Yes, we fought Nua'lath. He has grown so strong now. We could not reach him before in his prison, but now he is free again we may track him down. The power is not rightfully his, and it must be returned. But he had new Icons, the ones in the chains. They are strong. We were not prepared."

  He started coughing again, and I drew the tip of the blade away to give him space for a moment.

  "You are trying to kill him, and so am I. I don't give a damn about some mystical fairy power that he has, that you want back. I really don't care. His new Icons, as you call them, are my family and I want him dead, and them free. Can you tell me how I can do that?"

  He was staring up at me now, puzzled.

  "Humans lie. But you? I cannot sense a lie in your mind."

  "I'm not lying. Tell me how to kill him. We tried for centuries, but he is too strong. Weapons seem to have no effect. You shoot him and he laughs at the wound as it heals right in front of you."

  "You must separate him from the Icons," he said. "The ones in chains."

  "How? He apparently heals them too."

  "You must sever the link."

  He was coughing heavily now, and struggling to speak. Blood poured from his mouth.

  "How do I do that? Break the chains?"

  "No. The chains are merely bonds. The link is not physical. They must be separated in mind, or if you do break the chains you must either take them far away from him, or kill them."

  "Then what? How? Tell me."

  I wanted to kneel down and shake him, but I knew it would do no good; it would only accelerate his death.

  "Separate..."

  I was too busy with these thoughts churning around in my head to even notice the creature's hands reach out to grab my blade, and I wasn't quick enough to pull it away. Before I could react he pulled the blade and impaled himself through the neck with it. I drew it back, but only aided him in his suicide. The blade swung out in a short arc and sliced the wound in his neck wide open.

  A few moments of coughing, and a shudder, and the creature lay still.

  Nothing. I knew nothing that I didn't know already. I wanted to scream out loud, but just stood there, breathing slowly. I needed to keep calm and go on. A few minutes passed before I was ready.

  "Let's go."

  I looked across the parking lot behind the petrol station at the glowing, crackling portal under the huge metal roof. That was where we were going.

  I started walking towards the glowing portal, staring straight at the picture of darkness beyond. I could see a wall of some sort through the hole, and on the wall's surface was a pattern like the one upon the floor in the desert outpost and the tattoos worn by the dead that surrounded me. The sigils surrounding the pattern seemed to etch themselves into my mind, just as a bright sun leaves spots of lingering light in your eyes long after you look away from it. But when I was about thirty feet away the crackling energy stuttered once and then disappeared. The huge hole that for a few moments had given me a glimpse of a dark place beyond simply vanished.

  The portal had gone.

  I didn't know what to do for a few moments. I had presumed that the portals would stay long enough for me to step through them. I had been travelling so fast all this time that I had completely forgotten that there was a chance that I may suddenly be stopped dead if one of the portals shut before I could travel through it.

  I looked around me at the bodies scattered on the ground, wondering how I was to carry on. I couldn't. That was it. My journey was over. Wasn't it?

  After everything that I had been through, everything that I had discovered, the way to kill him or at least the way to distract him long enough to separate him from my family who were now his power conduits, I still wouldn't be able to find my family or Nua'lath.

  GreyFoot made a whining sound behind me.

  "Here."

  I turned around and looked at DogThing, who was now pawing at the body nearest to me. Despair was clouding any rational thought that may have helped me understand what he was trying to show me, but he was persistent.

  "Look. Here."

  I looked down, frowning at the body, and it took me a few seconds to understand.

  But then I saw it, something so obvious about the dead body that I shook my head at my own stupidity and lack of observation.

  Around his neck was a metal chain, and attached to that was something that looked just like...a compass. I reached down, pulled the chain from his neck and examined it.

  It was obvious then. They had to have travelled to this world, somehow. These would-be assassins had to have had some way to follow him.

  The amulet was almost identical to the one that I had reassembled when I had been trapped in The Corridor. It had the same polar markings, wrongly placed so that they faced backwards, the same multitude of many smaller markings. Only the chain was different.

  "It's a portal key," I said.

  "Yes."

  I smiled.

  "You, my furry friend, are a damn genius."

  "Yes."

  "I found it, not you," said another voice. This one was softer, and distinctly young and feminine.

  I turned to look at the pair of Maw. DogThing was now lowering his head a little, and GreyFoot was scowling at him.

  "Hmm. It was better when you didn't speak."

  I closed my fist around it and envisioned the pattern that I had seen on the wall through the portal that had just disappeared. I forced my mind to focus on those burning sigils, on the pattern that had stared back at me from the darkness. The thought grew, until I could vividly see swirling, twisting lines, glowing with fire. Then I could feel a connection, and the air around me crackled with energy.

  Wait.

  I was in too much of a hurry to keep up the chase, and not thinking clearly. I had a key that could take me anywhere, open a door to any place in my memory if I could just focus on it.

  And so my thoughts shifted to the desert, and to the way station where I had last seen Rudy, Adler, Reg and Marie. I tried to find something in my memory that stood out, something that would be detailed enough that I could call it up. I thought of the front door, the road, the pile of debris out the front, and the yard. The yard where Eleanor, my granddaughter, played.

  The air around me shifted and a blast of hot desert air brushed my face as a portal opened in front of me.

  Rudy looked back at me through the void, his expression shocked.

  "James!
" he shouted.

  I stepped through, followed by DogThing and GreyFoot. Rudy was still speechless when I noticed Adler rushing from the house.

  "Why, James," he called out. "You're alive."

  He smiled. "And DogThing! And, oh you seem to have found a young friend I see."

  "We thought you were dead," said Rudy. The relief on his face made me smile.

  I looked around.

  "Yes. Look. It's such a long story that I will have to tell you as we travel. I'm on CutterJack's trail. He has gone to somewhere called The Ways. He has my family bound to him as his gate openers, the ones in chains."

  The smiles vanished instantly.

  "He has them?" said Rudy, his voice weak.

  "Yes. I don't have time. I'll have to tell you as we move. Where is Reg? Marie?"

  "They left," said Adler. "They've gone south again, heading for the Resistance base that Reg says is there. We said we would stay in case you came back. They are going to try to contact your brothers and the other Resistance leaders. We couldn't think of a way to get to you, to help, so they were going to try and get the Resistance to help."

  "Well it will have to be just us then. Are you willing to come with me?"

  Rudy nodded. "Of course."

  Movement from the trees around us. Shadows amongst the low branches and the undergrowth.

  "Others come."

  I glanced at DogThing.

  "Who?"

  "Some of my kin that stayed here."

  They appeared one by one from the amongst the great desert trees that surrounded the way station. Large, black-furred Maw that were much bigger than DogThing. The warrior caste. I remembered them from our exodus from The Corridor, and from the battle against the mass of creatures in the ruined city where we found the Sisters of Rahl.

  A few minutes later and there were two dozen of them surrounding us, all standing and looking directly at me, waiting.

  Waiting for me to do something.

  "What do they want?" I asked, looking at DogThing.

  "They come to help."

  "They're coming with us?"

  There was a moment of silence before he answered again.