His hand smeared a fresh jelly of blood on his face. He looked at the deck beside his navigation chair before he looked at his hand. The tips of three of his fingers lay on the velvet cushion floor, bitten clean off and spat out. He looked at his hand. The blood on it was still fresh, but the skin covering the three newly grown digits was fresh, pink and glossy, like a burn scar beneath a scab.
You should have gone to the storm, he thought. You should have had the courage to die long ago.
He stared at the new flesh, and felt his empty stomach contract, and then fell to his knees and retched.
PART TWO
PATHS TO NOWHERE
VIII
TRANSITIONS
The sun rose red above the bleached horizon. Iobel walked on, feeling the heat beat down on her, and the dryness become a thirst in her throat. She did not look around, there was no point. Sand extended to meet the sky in every direction. She had looked up once to see a shimmer of water on the horizon, but had known that it was a mirage, just like the cities which beckoned from the distance.
She kept on walking.
She had stopped sweating, a bad sign. She had wanted to stop and rest for some time, but the desert had withheld even a scrap of shade. The promise of water, cities and forests loomed in the distance only to dissolve as the sun moved. She was tired, and thirsty, and she very much wanted to stop. The presence of each of those sensations was strange, very strange in fact. In a very real sense they meant nothing; she had no body, and the sun’s heat was no more real than a memory. That, in truth, was what the desert was: a crystallised reflection of a world of imagination. And she was the same.
In the way that most would consider it, she was dead, and the shadow which walked across the dunes was a ghost walking in a realm no thicker than a thought. She should have been able to shrug off the heat and fatigue, should even have been able to rise from the ground and skim the desert like a hawk. But she could not. She had tried and failed. The desert pressed on her, squeezing her into the shape of a thin figure climbing dunes and breathing dry air through cracking lips.
When night came, it came quickly. The sun seemed to fall to the horizon. The sky darkened from blue to indigo to black. Stars lit, shining bright and hard, as the heat drained from the air. She found she was shivering. The breeze slipping across the dunes now felt like a knife.
She pulled the robe closer around her. In the sunlight the fabric had been deep blue, like the surface of an ocean spun in threads. Under the stars it was black, and the idea caught her that she was a shadow left over from the day.
But shadows don’t feel their teeth chattering, she thought. She kept on moving, following the light of the brightest star in the sky. No more mirage cities grew and withered on the horizon. Sounds gathered in the distance, cries which rose and lingered in her ears even after they were gone. They sounded like animals, jackals perhaps, or even some form of feline. Once she thought she heard a human voice cry out, and the sound had made her pause, ears and eyes reaching into the dark. The cry had not come again, and she had walked on.
She saw the light a long time before she reached it. The desert had become a frozen sea of silver. The fire was a pinprick flicker, far off and weak, but in the steel and sable monochrome it shone clear. She watched the light for a while, blinking to try and keep the cold and fatigue from pulling her eyes shut. Then she pushed off the crest of the dune she had paused on, and slid down into the dip beneath. The firelight disappeared behind the silhouette of the next dune, but it was there again when she reached the top. She moved towards it, step by step, until it was a blur of orange filling the bowl just beyond the next crest of sand.
She paused. She could taste the smoke, heavy with a dry resin scent. It seemed familiar, but she could not say how.
Given what you are, and where you are, and how far you have come, she thought to herself, now seems like a strange time to become timid, Selandra.
She climbed the face of the dune, and looked down into the space beyond. A fire burned at the base of the slope. It was large, and she could see tree branches standing out as twisted lines amongst the flames. A figure sat beside it, huddled beneath a robe much like her own. She could not tell if the figure was truly small, or only seemed small. Somewhere close by, a jackal cry cut into the night.
She glanced behind her, and then back to the fire and the figure.
‘So easy to find,’ she muttered to herself. ‘That’s never a good sign.’
She slid down the slope, as soft and silent as a breath of breeze. The figure beside the fire did not look up as she walked into the circle of light.
‘Did you know I would come looking for you?’ she asked as she sat and felt the warmth wash over her face. ‘Or is this supposed to be a convenient coincidence?’
The figure’s head snapped around. Iobel had the impression of wide eyes beneath dark hair, and the soft features of a boy’s face. She felt a surge of surprise, and the figure leapt up and back. The firelight caught a knife clutched in his hands. He circled to the opposite side of the fire, eyes fixed on her.
‘Who are you?’ he snapped, and she caught the tremor of fear in his voice. His eyes were dark and bright in the firelight. Slowly, without breaking her gaze from the boy’s, she raised her hands, palms open. Light caught the reflections of rings on her fingers.
‘I am sorry,’ she said carefully, keeping her voice level. ‘I did not mean to startle you. I… saw the light. I thought someone I am looking for made the fire. I thought you were them.’ She stared at the boy for a second. There was something in the face that was familiar. ‘It is not you, is it?’ she asked carefully. ‘If it is, I would appreciate it if we could move past this… lack of understanding.’
The boy shook his head and jabbed the air with the knife.
‘You are from them, aren’t you? I will not come with you. I won’t.’
Iobel tilted her head. The boy was starting to shake as the adrenaline trembled through his muscles.
Familiar, she thought, familiar… But it did not feel like it had before, and she was starting to believe that in this realm of dream and memory that difference mattered a great deal.
‘You leave me alone!’ spat the boy, but he did not move closer.
‘I am sorry,’ she said again, and let her hands drop. ‘I am not here for you.’
The boy did not move for a second. She kept her eyes on his, steady, calm, patient. Slowly, breath by breath, the knife point dipped lower. At last he gave her an obviously considered look and sat down.
‘May I stay by the fire?’ she asked.
The boy nodded but said nothing. He was staring into the fire, the knife gone into the folds of his robe.
The warmth was starting to seep into her, and she could feel herself begin to flutter down towards unconsciousness.
She jolted upright, eyes wide. Sleep, warmth, tiredness… What was she doing? None of those feelings were real. She had no body, no skin to feel the warmth of fire or the ache of fatigue. This, like her, like the sky and sand and heat, was the underworld of Ahriman’s mind. Nothing here was real, and everything was here because of him.
Somewhere in the distance another jackal call shivered on the low breeze.
She looked at the boy. His face was thin and the creases of worry seemed out of place on one so young. How old was he, seven, eight perhaps?
‘Who is it you thought I was?’ she asked. His eyes flicked to her, and then back to the fire.
‘Them,’ he said. ‘They will want to take me back, but I won’t go. I did nothing wrong.’ He looked back into the fire, the frown scoring the skin of his forehead. Iobel was about to ask another question when he spoke.
‘Who was it that you thought I was?’ he asked, his eyes sharp, calculating, measuring.
‘Someone I have met beside a fire once before,’ she said.
‘A friend?’
She felt the chuckle come from her lips before she could stop it.
‘An enemy,’ she sai
d. ‘A very old enemy.’
‘Then why are you looking for them?’
She shrugged.
‘Because… because unanswered questions are not something I like.’ She paused, felt herself bite her lip, and then shrugged again. ‘And because if I can find him, there might be a way of destroying him and another enemy at the same time.’
‘Destroy…’ said the boy carefully, ‘enemies… You don’t sound like a good person.’
‘Good?’ She almost laughed again. ‘No, no, I am not.’
She glanced out into the dark behind her at the sound of another jackal’s cry, closer this time.
‘Do not worry,’ said the boy. ‘They won’t come close to the fire.’
He nodded confidently as she looked back to him. The frown had faded from his face.
Familiar…
She had walked and seen the far reaches of Ahriman’s memories, but had never seen this face before. But it was… so… familiar.
He looked away and picked up a dried branch from a pile on the ground beside him, and placed it on the fire.
‘What is the name of this enemy you want to find?’ he asked as the wood blackened and began to catch.
‘Magnus,’ said Iobel, and glanced at his face as she did. ‘He is called Magnus.’
The boy shook his head.
‘What is he? What does he look like?’
‘An old man in a tattered red cloak. He has a scarred face and only one eye. The eye is blue.’ The boy’s face did not show a flicker of recognition. ‘But I think he might look like anything or anyone as he chooses.’
‘A djinn?’ said the boy, a smile on his face. ‘You are chasing a spirit of dust and air?’ He shook his head. ‘You know they do not exist? They are just a mythological echo, a shadow left by the past.’ He straightened slightly as he delivered his verdict, like a student proud to demonstrate knowledge learned, but not fully digested. It almost made her want to smile.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we are both right.’ She took a breath. The smoke from the fire smelled slightly sweet. ‘Who are the people you are running from?’ she asked carefully. He did not look up from the fire. ‘You seem to be very educated to be hiding from jackals beside a fire.’
‘I am not hiding,’ he snapped, but then sighed, the gesture seeming like an imitation borrowed from an older soul. ‘I did something I shouldn’t have. I made something happen that means that I don’t want to go back.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing, really. But they will find out. They will have to, and they will take me away. I know they will.’
She heard another jackal call, and then an answer, further off. She did not look around this time.
‘Who are they?’
‘My brother,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘People who come from my brother.’
She felt cold prickle up her spine. She took a slow breath.
‘Your brother?’
‘Yes.’
Iobel tried to keep her face still and her breathing steady, even as her thoughts were racing. All she could do was stare at the boy’s face, the eyes made black by the firelight, the simple youth and humanity in the features. And familiarity clicked over into recognition.
The boy was talking again, his eyes on the fire. The flames pulsed and streamed in the wind. But there was no wind.
‘I can’t go back. It is not my time. Not yet.’ He looked up at her and she thought for an instant she could see the bright blue glitter from his irises.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Does it matter?’ he asked. He was staring at her now, his eyes hard and old in a young face.
A growl chuckled just behind her. Wet, meat-rank breath touched the skin of her neck. She turned and began to rise, hand reaching for a branch from the fire.
A wall of eyes looked back at her from the dark. The flames caught the teeth and tongues beneath the discs of reflected light. Iobel’s hand closed on… nothing. The fire was gone. But the jackals’ eyes still shone, as cold and bright as coins in moonlight.
The boy stepped from behind her, his movement smooth as he raised a hand to the nearest jackal. The creature was the size of a pack-beast. Blood glistened on the fur of its head. The boy ran his hand down the creature’s neck, and a breath sighed from its jaws. The boy turned to look at her, and his eyes were now the same as those of the jackals behind him.
‘I have not seen the djinn you seek, Selandra Iobel,’ he said, the words cold and solemn. ‘But this is a realm of secrets, and those who hide them.’
‘It’s you, isn’t it, Ahriman?’ she asked. ‘This is your memory of yourself before you were taken by the Legions. A memory cast to the edge of yourself.’
The boy smiled for the first time, and she saw that his teeth were black stumps crumbling into dust within the circle of ragged lips. The shadows in the crevices of his face were cracks in paper-thin skin.
‘I am not my brother,’ he said. ‘Just as you are dead, so am I.’ The eyes of the jackals were unblinking beside him. Around her the dark deepened. ‘But this is the realm of the dead past, and here I am free.’
The chill folded over her, cutting her, wringing her out.
‘Free?’ she managed to say.
The boy shook his head, as though weary.
‘You are not a good person, Iobel, nor an honest one, but thank you for sharing my fire. You may never reach the end of your journey, and if you do, you may wish you had not.’ She blinked and there was just blackness and cold, and his voice seeming to call to her from high above. ‘Go to the beginning of things. That is where all things lead in the end.’ And then she was floating in the dark, and could hear nothing at all.
She came to under the high sun with the sand pressed against her face. The wind was already stripping the cool from her skin. She had not slept, but for a moment had simply stopped being. There was no sign of a fire, nor any footprints save her own, already blurred by the wind.
She pulled her robe closer around her and began to climb the face of another dune. On the horizon, cities of glass shimmered. She walked on, wondering if night would come again.
The Changeling waited. Patience was a part of its nature, just as was its impatience with order. Both qualities drove it to perform its amusements for the Great Unknowable Changer Of All, but it was patience that made those grand jests possible. And the task it had been bound to was amongst the greatest and grandest. It would take subtlety, a great deal of subtlety, and the most circuitous of routes between where it was and where it needed to be.
So it lay in the gap between two events: one which had happened, and one which had almost happened.
It watched. It saw the details of the past pinwheel into the present and twirl on into the future. It did not try to see where those spinning puzzles of cause and effect would go. It could not see, and it did not care. There were others that observed such things endlessly, but just as their nature was to predict and to shape, the Changeling’s nature was to confuse, to muddle, to spoil. It was its lord’s infinite whim and spite.
It watched as a boy grew on a planet which would one day die. The boy became a creature greater than a man, and discovered the powers within himself. Calamity and mischance brought the boy, who was now a warrior, to ruin. The whirl of cruelty and pride was delightful, or it would have been delightful if the Changeling had been a creature who could feel.
It watched and millennia passed and no time passed at all. And then the event it had been waiting for happened.
It was a small thing, a very small thing.
A human on a ship went to sleep. The human was a man, and the man had been born on the ship and grown old on it. He did not know it, but he was dying. His body had grown weak through years of pulling chains to raise shells through the hole in the floor and up through an opening in the deck above. The polluted water and thin food had done the rest. In a week or a month or a year he would fall while pulling the chain, and never stand
up. Except none of that would now happen.
The Changeling reached into the man’s dreams, and he never woke.
Though he had never realised it, the man was gifted. Just like the boy who had become a warrior, he had the seed of the extraordinary in him, but the seed had never grown, and the man had never realised that the dreams he had for his three decades of life were not his own.
The Changeling rose in place of the human when the shift bell sounded. It shivered beneath its blanket and coughed just as the mortal, whose skin and face it wore, had done every morning.
‘Up and move,’ called a machine voice, and a whip licked the deck. The Changeling shuffled forwards, shedding the blanket. There was a lot of noise, lots of flesh sweating and hurrying. It watched carefully, looking for the next face.
The tip of a whip caught the Changeling’s human face. It reeled back, feeling the wet blood wash from the cut on its cheek.
‘Move faster,’ said a voice from just above. The Changeling glanced up. A slab-bodied overseer was looking down at it. A metal jaw covered the lower half of his face. A sheen of oil clung to the muscles. The whip was spooling back into the metal of his right arm. ‘Stare at me any longer and I will pull your face off.’
The Changeling bobbed its head and scuttled away.
It would have to wait until it could exchange faces with the overseer, but it could not wait too long. It had to be wearing the right face when the ship reached Prospero.
Knekku searched the city but did not find the Tower of the Cyclops. He had not expected to. The disc beneath his feet was a circle of polished silver. A ribbon of fine tentacles trailed from its edge as it slid through the air. Knekku could hear the disc whispering and burbling to him even as it moved in response to his will. Bridges and shifting streets flicked past him. Crowds of mutants and slaves knelt at his passing, and he felt the ritual words leave their lips, but he never looked at them. His gaze was always on the distance.
The Omnibus - John French Page 79