by Tim Lebbon
“Fuck!” he shouted, scrabbling to his feet, reaching for the barrier.
“No!” someone shouted, but Kel was angry, and it was too late for him to take heed. He grabbed hold of the black linked chain. And his world exploded.
HE WAS SITTING in a chair in the Dog’s Eyes. His head throbbed and swam, consciousness expanding to encompass the world, then contracting to a point too small to know. Expanding, contracting …
A million tiny insects crawled across his skin. He could feel each of them individually, and every one of their legs pricked him. It was not painful, but uncomfortable. The discomfort kept him pinned to the world like a moth gatherer’s display. He was there, in the Dog’s Eyes, and the world grew larger and shrank down to nothing, again and again.
Someone was sitting across the table from him. He couldn’t quite make out who it was, but he knew that he was being watched.
Kel reached for a shape on the table, but the movement unbalanced him and sent him spinning. Floor and ceiling changed places, and his surroundings faded to a level blankness, speckled here and there with bursts of bright light.
The insects had finished crawling, but he could still feel every single one of them standing still. They stood like a threat. Touch the chains and we’ll start moving again.
Chains? Kel shook his head and reached for the ale tankard. Neak’s Wanderlust ale would always calm, soothe and settle him in those moments when panic overtook him. And those moments still came. He knew that Noreela was not alone, and sometimes that knowledge was too much for one person to bear.
“Take a drink,” a voice said from a hundred miles away.
Kel smiled. “Trakis,” he drawled, though the voice was not quite the same.
“Take a drink.”
Kel grabbed the tankard and drank. It was water, not ale, and it coursed through his body and drove away those millions of tiny insects. They lifted from him in waves, and he sighed as his skin settled, his flesh stopped quivering and his head ceased its interminable spin.
“Better?” the voice asked.
Kel took in several deep breaths, and his world expanded outward again, farther than ever before. He looked. A man sat across the table, and Kel did not recognize him. They were not in the Dog’s Eyes at all, but a low, long building with several tables set against one wall and a pile of canvas-wrapped packages along the other.
“It may tingle for a while, but there’ll be no lasting damage. Not this time. But the chains remember; touch them again, and next time the pain will be worse. Again, and your muscles will knot and cramp for days. One more time after that, and you’re dead.”
“Then I’ll be dead,” Kel said.
“I don’t want that.” The man lifted a mug to his mouth and took a long drink. He smacked his lips and sighed.
Kel looked around, and he realized where he was. From the outside, the building had looked like a parked machine, and the inside only confirmed that suspicion. There were pipes and ducts, wheels and spindles, and steam leaked from several places where joints had worked loose.
“Why am I here?” Kel asked. Ignorance was the way to go… at least until he could see how much this man knew.
“Because you were trying to escape from the village.”
“I was going up the valley to see how far the damage went. Not beyond. I’ve no reason to go beyond.”
The man stood and reached down behind his chair. He lifted Kel’s sword and placed it on the table, followed by his knife, crossbow and throwing knives.
Kel eyed the weapons, then glanced around without turning his head. Two metal-clad Strangers shifted in the shadows, just enough for him to see them. He sighed. Not yet, he thought.
“Strange tools for a fisherman,” the man said.
“I’m a wood-carver.”
“Then wood carving in Noreela must be a dangerous business. My name is Lemual Kilminsteria. You can call me friend.”
“Does everyone out there call you friend?” Kel asked, nodding outside. “I saw my friends, before I touched the chains that keep them here.”
“Their own safety,” Lemual said.
“I don’t understand.” Ignorance, ignorance. “You’re helping our village, and I thank you for that. We’ve suffered such a terrible loss. My own friends …” Kel looked down at his hands on the table, and at the edge of his vision lay a throwing knife. When he shifted slightly he heard metallic movement behind him, but also felt the weight of the two communicators in his trousers pocket. Can they not know what they are? Can they not know who I am? Hope touched him, and he did his best not to let it show.
“It doesn’t hurt a bit,” Lemual said, standing back from the table as though inviting Kel to reach for a weapon.
Kel looked up. “What doesn’t hurt?”
“What you saw today, on Komadia. What you know. We’re lost and in pain and our island is cursed, but nothing has ever made us monsters.”
Kel stared at the man, the Komadian, and all the while he was aware of the two armored Strangers watching. He remembered O’Peeria dying beneath one of their kin, and Trakis out on the island, taken over by whatever the thing in that crystal had once been. He remembered his friend’s screams. No, of course, not monsters.
“Fuck you, friend,” Kel said.
“Let me tell you!” Lemual said, and the appeal in his voice could not have been feigned.
“Tell me what?”
“About us. About the island, and what happened to us.”
“So you know that I know what you do,” Kel said, “and you’re wanting me to feel sorry for you?” He began to stand, but one of the Strangers closed in, quickly and quietly. He could see the projectile weapons, their smooth snouts both pointing at his head.
Lemual looked at him for a few beats, frowning, then sighed and shook his head. “I just don’t want you to fight,” he said.
“So tell me,” Kel said, sitting back in his chair. Perhaps this will be the truth, he thought, or perhaps not. Whatever, it will buy me time. And it might be priceless to the Core.
Lemual glanced up at the Strangers. “You can leave,” he said. The metal-clad men did not question him, but obeyed like soldiers listening to their commander. They left the strange building, and Kel knew one more thing about them.
“You’re not afraid of me anymore?” he asked, looking down at his weapons displayed on the table.
“I never was. I’m from a land so far away that you people can’t possibly imagine, and I can move faster than you blink.” His smile remained, perhaps meant to be calming, perhaps superior.
“Then maybe I won’t blink at all,” Kel said.
Lemual sighed. “I hate trouble. I hate killing. I hate it every time Komadia moves somewhere else, and we face the whole cursed process one more time.”
“I know what you’re doing to us. To my friends. The curse is on us, not you.”
“Komadia can’t just die,” Lemual said. “We can’t just give in, let our land cease to be.”
“So you’re fighting for your future, and you don’t expect us to fight for ours?”
“Every time The Blighting shifts us somewhere new, we expect the people there to fight. I’m one of those who chooses to try to stop the conflict before it begins, because it never does any good. We always win. I’d rather we grow and restore, then move on, without losing too many people.”
“Don’t like it when your soldiers die, is that it?”
“They’re animals,” Lemual said, waving his hand over one shoulder. “Born from slime, they’ll return to it, unless they’re …” He trailed off, looked away, and Kel thought of that strange pool back on the island, with things growing and shifting just below the surface.
“I’ve killed them,” Kel said, frowning as he thought of the Strangers he had killed or witnessed killed over the years. Certainly not animals, they were intelligent, sly and fast, possessed of a cunning which often meant they evaded capture by the Core for many moons.
Lemual’s face darkened, t
hen the smile broke out again. But this time it was sad. “I’ve told you everything, yet still you cannot understand.”
“I’ve got quite an imagination,” Kel said. Maybe you can use their magic against them, Namior’s great-grandmother had said. He looked down at the table and saw the nugget of crystal from Namior’s chest, but he did not require that. He possessed his own source of power.
“If the woman dies,” Lemual said, “it’s because of your anger, and your fight. If she survives, we’ll take her.”
Kel tried to hide his surprise at how much Lemual knew about him. “You’ll take her, drive out her soul, give her body to something else.”
Lemual looked away. “The core of her will remain.” That’s the first thing he’s told me without looking me in the eye, Kel thought. And the first time he’s betrayed his lies.
Kel reached into his pocket and brought out the communicators.
Lemual tensed and opened his mouth, ready to call the soldiers back in.
“Nuts,” Kel said. “I’m hungry. If I could kill you with one of these, they’d be on the table before you.” He picked up one communicator, held his breath and put it into his mouth, tucking in into his cheek. He pretended to chew. The moisture would keep it wound.
“Where is the crystal you took?” Lemual asked.
“So that’s it,” Kel said. “Why? Friend of yours?” He held the other communicator in his hand.
Lemual glanced aside.
Kel let the first communicator drop from his mouth, and as he raised the other one in his right hand, he reached for a knife with his left.
The man had not lied about one thing; he was very fast. Before Kel’s fingers had even touched the blade, Lemual was pressing his hand to the table.
Kel breathed on the communicator, letting its curled tail unfurl and harden along his forearm.
“I told you—” Lemual said.
“—only what you want me to hear.” Kel tugged, trying to free his hand, and when Lemual looked down again he struck.
The tip of the communicator parted the man’s skin at the nape of his neck. Kel pushed hard, and it cut through flesh and bone like the sharpest of knives.
Lemual coughed blood. He tried to stand, but Kel kept his hand on the communicator. He leapt across the table, turning the man as he went, then pushed him to the ground.
No alarms sounded, no steam vents gushed, no Strangers streaked into the building.
Lemual was moaning softly, his hands reaching beneath him where the spike protruded from his stomach.
Kel kicked his legs from under him, driving him down to the ground. He felt the impact through the communicator’s head as Lemual struck the hard soil, then he pushed with both hands.
This is when I live or die, Kel thought. Because he could not leave. He had to wait and see whether the communicator worked, and if this man died the same way as the Strangers, his wraith would rip from his body and tear Kel apart. But there were no arcing limbs streaking white lightning on Lemual’s back.
“Work,” Kel said quietly. “Work!”
“What… ?” Lemual whispered, but talking hurt him too much.
“You’re not getting us,” Kel said. “All the other worlds you’ve visited, all the people you’ve taken, they’re nothing to Noreela and Noreelans. We’ll fight until we’re dead or you’re dead, and fuck you both ways.” He touched the communicator head, twisted, then jerked his hand away.
It was growing hot.
It’s working!
Lemual vomited. It was a violent, unexpected action, and Kel stepped back in surprise. There was a lot of blood in there. The dying man’s arms thrashed, pressing at the ground to try to lift the communicator’s tip from the soil, but whatever held him there was strong. His legs kicked, and Kel sat on them so that he did not make too much noise.
Kel reached up to the table, grabbed as many of his weapons as he could, and watched the communicator as it began to glow.
Then he lifted his sword, turned its blade flat and brought it down on the communicator’s head.
It smashed.
There was an explosion inside Kel’s mind; a rush of heat, an expansion of light, a blast of realization. It would have woken him if he was asleep, sobered him had he been drunk, and for a beat he felt a welcoming link to hundreds of other people all across their vast land.
He gasped, then fell to his knees beside the dying man.
“Message sent,” he said.
“What… have you …?”
Kel did not even bother to reply. He shoved his sword into the prone man’s back, piercing where he assumed the heart to be. Lemual’s body stiffened and went limp. Kel withdrew the sword, then used the blade to lift the dead man’s clothes away from his back. There were no proboscises, no gills.
His own sickness rising, Kel turned away and tried to calm himself. Killing was never easy. But the war had begun. He only wished O’Peeria could be there to fight it by his side.
HE HAD TO get away from the place as soon as possible. Strapping on his weapons once again, priming his crossbow, keeping the short sword to hand, Kel tried to imagine what was happening across Noreela.
If the communicator had worked as the Core’s witches had intended, it would have sent a signal directly into the minds and dreams of every Core member. A warning, telling them that the long-expected invasion had begun, and planting a seed of direction that would bloom as soon as they set out on their way. Several hundred Core, many in Noreela City and others much farther out, would hurry there by the fastest means possible. They would ride their transport machines until they reached the place where Komadian interference interrupted the flow of magic and language in the land. Then they would walk, warned by the failings of magic that something momentous was happening, and that this was not a false alarm.
They would likely not be there that day, or the next. Help was coming, but it would not be quick.
He was faced with a stark choice: leave and await the Core, or go back into Pavmouth Breaks. But even before deciding that, he first had to find his way out of the machine-building, and the compound surrounding it.
Footsteps.
Kel held his breath and crouched, rushing to the sidewall of the large room. The doorway was a few steps from him, curtained by a fall of gauzy material, and the footsteps came closer, metal scraping stone. A Stranger… and all Kel had on his side was surprise.
The guard paused outside. Kel heard the very faint whisper of metal on metal. He thought of Namior, tried to imagine her lying in her house with her mother fussing over her. Core? her great-grandmother had asked Kel, and she obviously knew far more than she had ever revealed. Then he remembered O’Peeria, and though he wished her by his side, her mere memory aided him, making him angry and determined. The time has come, he thought, and he saw O’Peeria grinning, her pale face and dark hair beautiful in the strange light inside the machine.
Kel closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
The curtain shifted aside and Mell entered.
He could kill her within a beat, his crossbow aimed directly at her face. Mell… who he had yet to tell what he’d seen happening to Trakis, back on that damned island.
She looked at him, let out a huge sigh of relief, and smiled. “You made it!”
“Mell?”
“Who else were you expecting?” Her voice sounded flat. She looked down at the body, and it was just too dark for him to see how her expression changed. “You’ve been busy.”
“Are you one of them?”
“Of course not. I’m Mell. You said so yourself.”
“How did you—?”
“I heard they were keeping people here, came here to see if I could do anything.”
“What’s your favorite ale?”
“As if you didn’t know.” She smiled, but it was not Mell’s smile. Too easy, and too wide, because she’d never liked her crooked teeth.
“I know,” Kel said, raising the crossbow again. “But do you?”
M
ell came closer then paused again, glancing across at Lemual’s body. Kel saw such grief on her face that it knocked his guard aside, just for a moment.
A metal-clad Stranger breezed through the door, aiming its projectile weapon at his head.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Mell said.
Kel dropped to the floor before her. The Stranger would not shoot through her body, and he still desperately needed that surprise, that element of shock that would set him half a beat ahead of the soldier.
He aimed the crossbow at Mell’s face.
She gasped and dropped to one side, and Kel fired past her left ear.
The bolt struck the Stranger’s face and ricocheted into the gloom. His head flicked back and his weapon fired, the projectile passing above Kel’s head and impacting the machine’s wall.
The whole room shuddered, and a tapestry of weak blue sparks appeared across its surface before quickly fading away.
Kel rolled, priming and reloading the crossbow as he went. Back on his knees, aiming again, and he was already looking into the black tube of the Stranger’s weapon. He gasped and looked up at the ceiling, glancing down again quickly, amazed that the Stranger had fallen for his deception and looked up as well, releasing the bolt, hearing the screech of metal turn into a scream of pain as it passed through the plates across the thing’s neck. Its shiny chest glimmered as blood flowed, and it went to its knees, dropping the weapon and clasping both hands to its throat.
Don’t die yet, Kel thought. He went to run past the Stranger, but Mell—or who-or whatever had taken her body for its own—reached out and tripped him.
Perhaps she thought he would still be reluctant to hurt his friend. Maybe all their studies, their spies, their covert observations of Noreela had told them that Noreelans were so attached to friends and family that confusion would be his reaction, not action. But Kel was Core, and the past days had confirmed everything the Core had ever suspected.