WELCOME TO RADDEN COUNTY
Welcome home, James, he thought.
SIXTH INTERLUDE
James’s frosted breath twirled upwards in the cold night air as he saddled his mount. He took his time, moving with calculated smooth movements, lest he make a single rattle or chink of metal on metal. His head ached, fuzzy with exhaustion, but his vague stab at sleep had ended only in frustration.
That strange moorland the traveller’s hands had zapped into his head had hijacked his mind’s eye. Whenever he had dropped towards the warm miasma of sleep, the strange vision had become animated, spooling to life before his eyes like an Old World clockwork music-box. He’d flown over heathland, past cragged iron-grey peaks and the haunted remains of clusters of towns and satellite villages, hugging the rugged terrain. Each was wreathed in thick fog that slugged across the low-lying moorland, sheathed obsidian-black lakes from view, and made islands of naked rocky bluffs—they thrust through the blanket of land-cloud along the myriad ridges, as though the Earth had grown teeth.
Despite his efforts, his tossing and turning, he had been trapped with the flickering film reel behind his eyes.
He should have been thinking of Beth. He was worried for her, and a dull ache had already taken up residence in the fibrous meat of his heart.
Then there was the animal part of him that throbbed blue agony from his loins, calling out to the ruddy-faced angel who had put her hands on him and set a fire down there that would take days to die down.
One way or another, he knew she should have been the sole cause of his insomnia.
Yet still the staring images played out, etched onto the backs of his eyelids. He knew it was Radden. There was no merit in doubting it; the certainty nested inside him like a cold perfect sphere, unblemished and impenetrable.
Then there were the tunnels. They had come again after he had abandoned any hope of sleep and taken to padding the icy flagstones in his room, looking out over the moonlit wheat stalks that were growing lush and tall under their hands’ tending love.
Reaping time would come soon, and they would be kept busy for many weeks with the grinding, the bagging, the storing and the trade—trade that would see dozens of caravans trail across the vast emptiness between them and the rest of their tenuous fledgling alliance. And when that happened, they would scarcely have time for anything else, least of all the schooling Alexander had prostituted them out to deliver.
But for now, all that wheat just lay swaying in the crisp night air, and their pupils-to-be were miles away.
He thought he would find that comforting. Instead, all it did was bring yet more mental images. This time it wasn’t of the ancient weathered landscape that had birthed him, yet he had no memory of—but still could somehow see—but instead the tunnels he had flown down so briefly when the traveller’s hands had rested over his ears. He had been flying along them once again, and had come rushing up on that final room with shocking speed, and he could have sworn he was actually flying. His stomach fluttered, and the deceleration as he came rushing up upon the room’s single occupant was potent.
The young man had been there once again, his hands splayed out in welcome. “I’m waiting,” he said, just as before.
Then the visions had died, the mental images vanished, as though a thought bubble had popped somewhere in his head.
In that moment a new sensation had come: a strange impetus in his feet and lower legs, an itch. And before he knew what was happening, his legs had carried him to his wardrobe, possessed by a will not his own, and stranded him there staring in at his things. He had begun to pack clothes and supplies, then, not sure why he was doing it but certain he had to. Once he had finished, as though satisfied, his feet had then carried him out to the stables, stopping along the way with foot-tapping impatience until he’d picked up the saddle before him.
He was alone in the courtyard, checking the restraints and tying a bedroll to the back of the saddle, his brows pulled over his eyes in a deep frown. Still his feet itched, pointing away along the path leading to the road. Despite the darkness, the way they pointed seemed lit up like a great glaring beam.
He had business out there. And it couldn’t wait.
Bathed in silver moonlight, in the silence of the courtyard with his friends and family sleeping peacefully not far away, something that felt like grinding gears spooled up deep in his head. Then, despite his disbelief, he raised his leg onto the first stirrup. He was sure he would have climbed on had the voice not sounded from close by.
“Looks like I’m not the only one who can’t sleep.” Alexander’s voice was calm, but confused. He was silent a moment, and James could sense his own form—which was surely a mere fuzzy silhouette in such low light—being scanned. “Going somewhere?”
James sighed and fell back onto the cobbles. “Go back to bed,” he said.
“Can’t sleep. Nothing unusual about that. All the years I’ve spent haunting the library until the early hours, I never knew I had a fellow insomniac.” His tone was conversional, but James wasn’t fooled. Alex was a master of distraction; James knew he was just filling the silence until he could get a better hold on the situation.
“Just go back.”
Alex stepped from the shadows. In the low light his big, frank eyes—those eyes that had won over angels and ogres alike—twinkled like shards of quartz.
“There’s a lot to talk about. We didn’t get a chance to go over what was said at dinner. Let’s step inside. What do you say?”
The rhythm of his speech was one James recognised all too well. The falsity that was Alexander Cain had appeared in the courtyard, standing where Alex had stood only moments ago.
“Don’t even try your charm on me. I’m immune.”
Alex smiled, and the persona evaporated. Now his brother stood before him. “Where are you going?”
James looked off along the path that was, at least to his eyes, lit up as though with beams of midday sunlight, then turned back to Alex, standing amidst the darkness of dead night, while nearby an owl hooted balefully. Even closer someone gave an explosive snore and rustled in their bed sheets. “I—I don’t know,” he said.
“Then won’t you come inside?”
“No.”
Despite the darkness, he saw Alex’s arched eyebrow.
He shook his head. “I have to go. I can’t explain why. I just have to.”
“And you don’t know where?”
James blinked. “We both know where.”
Alex was still for a moment, then ran a hand through the thickness of his beard. “You really saw something? And now you’re going to follow these … What? Flashes? Visions? You’re going to follow them off into the night?”
“Don’t say it like that!”
“How am I supposed to say it?”
“Not like it’s completely crazy at least.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’ve said yourself, nothing’s impossible. The End proved that.”
Alex scowled. He gestured as though to expound something forceful, then curled his finger back into his palm, and let his hand drop again. “Fine. But can’t it wait until morning?”
“No …” Even now the itch in his feet was throbbing, rising up his legs. Soon, he knew, it would be maddening. “It has to be now.”
“And what is it you plan to do when you get wherever you’re going?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know any more than you. That’s why I have to go. I have to find out.”
Alex mouthed in the gloom while James swung up onto the saddle. The silence was one other men might have filled with appeals like ‘What am I supposed to tell the others?’ or ‘We need you to help with the reaping!’ but Alex only watched.
He watched right up until James had swung his rifle up over his back, taken the reins up into his hands, and begun trotting a few paces from the courtyard.
Then his silence finally broke. “They’ll be here tomorrow.”
It was the tone that ma
de James turn: guilt.
He wheeled his mount around to face Alex, and suddenly the images of Radden and the young man with the streaks beneath his eyes were gone. “Not Malverston’s men?”
Alex’s throat worked up and down. “They’ll arrive by midday.”
James mouthed wordlessly, giving Alex time to step forward and take the reins in his own hands.
“How could you not tell me they were coming so soon?” James barked. “Were you planning on letting us know when they appeared at the bloody fence with their knapsacks and writing pads?”
“Malverston’s unstable. He hasn’t got long left, and he senses it. He’s going to hold onto whatever he has for as long as he can, and he’s trying to cement his legacy.”
“So he needs heirs who know the Old World.” James heard his own voice as though from far away. He felt as though a great weight had suddenly been tied around his ankle.
The itch in his leg was still there, but dulled now. And even if it had been raw enough to send him screaming, he couldn’t have moved from the courtyard. Alex’s shame alone, a thing he had seldom seen so naked and true, was enough to keep him rooted to the spot.
“Just give me a day,” Alex said. “Help me talk the others around, get Malverston’s men settled, get something going. If we can pull this off, we can have the Moon. The mayor’s time is almost up. All we have to do is give him the comfort of the lie, stoke his fantasy of a council of dedicated followers maintaining his empire after he’s gone. We both know those conniving bastards under him will tear each other apart as soon as Malverston’s gone. Then we can move in, and start doing some good.”
“Hark who’s calling those slime balls conniving,” James said. His heart sank. “Alex, we can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to play dirty, even if it means getting a leg up on the mission.”
“It’s the only way we’re ever going to make a real difference! That’s the real world, James. We don’t live in some storybook. Dirty politics have been a part of every society since the dawn of civilisation.”
Maybe we’re better off leaving civilisation in the dust, in that case, James thought.
“Give me a day,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
James hesitated, but Alex seemed to sense he would relent in the end. He’d already relaxed, and his shoulders had dropped.
James shivered in the chill of the night air. Now that the moment of flight had passed and he had grown still, the cold was beginning to seep through his thermal layers. For a summer evening, it was freezing. Thinking of it brought back memories of the ice that had formed on his head when the traveller had taken his hands away.
James climbed down from his mount, which snuffled as though in protest and dug at the cobbles with its hooves. “You don’t seem all that sceptical,” he said. “I expected you to tie me to the bed.”
Alex pulled a face, but James couldn’t place the expression. He took his mount by the reins at its snout and led it back toward the stables, and they walked beside one another. James waited for his reticence to wane.
“You said you were cold after,” Alex said finally. “That there was ice where he’d touched you, when you saw whatever it was he wanted you to see.”
“Yes,” James said carefully.
Alex sighed. “It’s called the Frost. At least, that’s what we call it. A cold that fills you up so deep it feels like you could never be warm again, right down to your bones. For just a moment you feel hollowed out, almost like you’re not real at all. And you see things, things in a deep, dark place …”
James shivered again, a full-body shudder, and this time it wasn’t from the midnight chill. “You’ve felt it?”
“Everyone who survived the End felt it. You did too, though you must have been too young to remember it.”
He’d been only a baby.
“So you believe me?”
Alex looked as though he was going to shake his head, but then he gritted his teeth and nodded. “I do.”
James thought of the young man again, those dark shadows, his low voice. ‘I’m waiting,’ he’d said.
Did Alex know about him too?
He thought about asking, but bit his tongue. Perhaps that was a step too far from good sense.
They reached the stables and Alex helped him loosen the saddle on his mount.
“Why me?” James said. “Why would that guy come all this way to make me see things of all people?”
A wry smile leaped to Alex’s face. The quickness of it told James it was an automatic reaction. “Because you’re special.”
He offered no more.
James didn’t ask for any. He was used to people saying that. They had been his entire life. Alex and everyone else expected him to carry on the mission when the elders had grown grey and turned to dust.
Except, now, maybe there was some deeper truth to it.
And Radden? What about that? There’s something special about that, too.
He looked at Alex, concentrating on stowing the stirrups in the dark, and made to ask him that question. They were both of that place, after all, but only Alex had any memory of it. What made it so different?
But it didn’t seem right to ask him, here in the dark. He wouldn’t get a straight answer, he sensed it.
Alex was right. It could wait until morning.
He had already begun preparing himself for a long night of restlessness, battling that irresistible urge to leap forth towards the fences and out into the world. Only moments ago it had been white fire, searing to the point of being blinding.
But now, curiously, he was astonished to find it gone. There was no certainty, no illuminated path, no itch. Nothing.
It seemed whatever possessive force that had infected him was satiated for now. It had got what it wanted.
In its absence, thoughts of Beth came flooding back, and fell upon his heart like a pile of masonry.
He made a promise to himself as they left the stables and headed back toward the courtyard: he would deal with this insanity in Radden, and then he would put an end to Malverston’s reign. And he meant it: he would put an end to it, not some common wasting disease that would take him while he was most likely in a bliss of mead and snuff. He didn’t deserve that.
Alex was silent as they walked back towards their bedrooms, his head low, his dark lips drawn so tight that they reflected slivers of starlight. James was surprised by how scared that silence made him, because maybe, just maybe, Alex was more afraid of Radden than any of them.
Now why might that be?
CHAPTER 14
Robert woke to the sound of distant rattles and popping.
He rubbed his eyes with bunched fists, feeling like the world’s biggest toddler, and started groaning immediately. Everything hurt. The kind of nebulous, woolly pain that comes with a twenty-hour sleep deficit drifted around inside his skull.
A day had passed. Endless hours of scouring the forests and meadows around New Canterbury had yielded no sign of the vagrants. They had melted away into nothing. The night had set eight hundred exhausted souls fit to tremble themselves into the nuthouse, but as twilight had fallen, something had changed in the folks locked up in the cathedral. Men and women who had only hours before been dull-eyed sheep had stepped forward with their hearts on their shoulders, ready to pitch in and stand watch and protect their families.
Hope had turned the table.
Over a hundred people had set up a tight perimeter around the inhabited part of the city, armed with every scrap of metal meanness their armoury had to offer. As the amber glow of approaching dawn had crushed out the pitch dark of starless night, they had started barricading the streets, pushing rusted motorcars and hauling sacks of grit, piling whatever Old World detritus they could find into walls as tall as a man.
By then, somebody had told Robert to go lie down. He must have needed it because he didn’t remember anything after that, nor who had wrested his weapons from him and led him home.
Now he groaned.
His head was throbbing and his muscles screamed in protest. His mouth tasted like a cat had taken a hearty dump down his gullet, and a great beast roared in the pit of his stomach. He groped the sheets on the other side of the bed, hoping to feel the warm softness of Sarah’s belly, but found only uncreased linen.
“Sarah?” he called.
No answer. The heavy fog of dusty silence.
Weak, yellow morning sunlight lanced in through the open window, pooling on the floor and setting the dusty Old World carpet alight. He swung his legs out of bed and groaned again before struggling to his feet and padding across to the windowsill. The distant rattle and pop was louder here, coming from afar.
For a minute, he leaned against the frame and massaged his aching head, looking through slitted eyes at the silhouettes still patrolling the nearby rooftops. It seemed the vigil had been kept at least this long. Perhaps the blind groping panic had passed. He glanced back at the bed, wanting nothing more than to climb in and pull the covers over his aching head.
Then something clicked in the back of his mind, and he bolted upright, sending his head crashing into the window box ceiling.
He knew that sound. The popping and cracking came in bursts, followed by the ring of stark silence in repeating intervals. And on the brink of audibility, preceding each bout of rattling, there was shouting.
Gunfire.
He ran for the stairs. The rickety old house rumbled and creaked on its foundations to the beat of his thundering steps.
*
He hauled on his boots and duster, and was pounding the streets before he had time to lose his balance. Once he was hurtling along the cobbles, however, he wobbled a moment, caught off guard by how weak his body had become.
I’m getting lazy. It’s this place. Food off the stove, running water, electricity. A sham of Old World suburbia. It’s been enough to fool us into thinking we don’t need to be ready. The body is just a machine, and badly kept machines run down.
He grabbed a lamp post and regained his balance, then wobbled off once again, heading for the nearest sentry outpost.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 22