Relics--The Folded Land

by Tim Lebbon

  If that fight ended badly, then a victor might root through these objects, wrapped in fine microfiber cloth, and wonder what the hell they had found.

  He’d also considered what might happen if one of the Kin found him. They likely knew about him now, what with all that he’d done. Some of them were strong, vicious, and better at fighting than he was. He had the scars to prove it.

  One package contained a fragment of skull from a piskie. He’d found the creature in Buenos Aires, where it had lived in the basement beneath an old abandoned school. For a time he and the piskie had talked, and he’d even managed to befriend it. Far from its traditional Cornish home, it had seemed lonely, tired of its secretive existence in deep, dark places. It told him it was two hundred years old, but Gregor had decided it might have been six hundred or more. It told him tales of old times—though none of the Time, because it was far too young to know of that firsthand.

  He’d spent several weeks earning its trust and allowing it to relax in his company. It didn’t get to know many humans, it said. Most of them feared or hated it on sight, or coveted it. Gregor had replied that he was not like most humans.

  On the day he’d taken its life it had sensed something was wrong, and he’d realized his own mistake in regarding this small, melancholic Kin as anything other than dangerous.

  It had put up an heroic fight, slashing and cutting, fighting back as he tried to kill it. Even as his blade punctured its heart, his own blood had been spewing from a wound in his throat, spattering the screeching creature’s face as it drew its final few breaths. Its claws had missed vital arteries by a whisker, and before he butchered the corpse Gregor had cleaned and cauterized his own wounds.

  Then he’d taken the Kin’s small head and left the rest of its corpse for the rats. He’d fled the city before cleaning the skull and collecting the portion he needed, in strict accordance with the Script.

  The scar of that meeting remained, a knotted reminder of his lack of caution. There were others. A badly knitted bone in his left foot from the werewolf encounter in India. A rash of scar tissue across his right hip from his three-day chase and conflict with a faun in Norway. Other wounds, scars, and broken bones were as much a reminder of his mission in life as were the objects lined up before him now.

  Such scars should have urged more caution, but Gregor was growing impatient. He wasn’t sure how old he was, but he had gray hairs on his chest and head. His limbs ached on damp days, and the promise of the Script drew him on toward triumph. His old enemy, time, flowed around him and carried him onward. His great purpose was a rock in that flow of which he might grab hold, and if he managed to succeed in his aims, he would become the rock.

  He had never once doubted the outcome of his journey.

  Gregor knelt again beside the table and reached for the rolled Script. He untied the two bows and let it partly unfurl, rolling it delicately with his fingertip until it was open all the way. Ten inches long, six wide, the Script was treated leather on which a series of instructions had been inscribed. He had read these instructions many times, struggling at first to understand but, over the course of many years, finding that each reading brought him closer to a clear and concise translation.

  Its origins remained unknown. Jace Tan, the ancient creature who had bequeathed it to him, had been vague in his suggestion of the Script’s provenance. Gregor’s memories of that time were also vague, shadowy moments that skirted his memory like names on the tip of his tongue. What he could remember was Jace Tan’s words after he handed him the script.

  You may have to search the world, because I no longer can.

  Gregor had decided long ago that the origins of the Script did not matter. Whether or not the creature whose pale hide had been used as a canvas was alive when it was written, it was surely dead now. He passed his hand above the ancient symbols, left to right and then top to bottom, and whispered his own familiar précis of their directions.

  “Gather the parts, keep them close, wrap them well. The claws of a creature of the moon. The skull of a Cornish elf, the genital pelt of a faun…”

  He listed other relics, and then passed over a couple of lines that he did not know so well. Many long days and nights had been spent looking at these symbols, imagining meanings but never quite knowing. Perhaps there would be a blending of the parts, a bringing together. Maybe they would need to be set apart in a particular pattern.

  His plan was to ask the final Kin he had to kill, offering the false promise that he would spare its life if it translated for him.

  What he did know was that there were only two parts left to gather. That was why he sought out patterns, and why the strange patterns of these lightning strikes attracted him. Four Kin in two days. They hadn’t given him what he needed, and he felt a deep frustration growing inside. He had to rein it in, though, because it might lead to panic, and that might cause him to make mistakes.

  “Keep them dear, keep them secret, absorb their closeness while they absorb yours. When the pattern of them falls into place, they will shape your life, and you will become…”

  Gregor shivered as his fingers passed across those final symbols and he recited their meaning. Pleasure, fear, and the sweet anticipation that had been his driving force for so long. He repeated them.

  “And you will become Kin.”

  “And I will live forever,” Gregor whispered.

  He blinked his pale red eyes and remembered the tattooist’s needle in that San Francisco backstreet. He rubbed his hand across his scalp and felt the nubs of horns that had been implanted beneath his skin. Affectations. Falsehoods. The foolish adornments of a man searching for who he really was, or might become.

  It was time to follow the girl who had disappeared.

  Once again, he took out the angel’s feather.

  11

  The thing kept scratching at its chest. That’s what convinced Sammi that it was real, and not just a quirk of her imagination.

  Her mother had always commented that she had a great imagination, and Sammi enjoyed giving it free rein, writing down stories or simply telling them to herself. Since her mother had died it had become a kind of release for her. Sometimes. Other times it was no release at all.

  At first she thought she was making this up while she lay on the lawn, knocked out by the second lightning strike—

  From a clear blue sky?

  —her father hunkered over her and awaiting the ambulance.

  That was yesterday, she thought. The shape had come from nothing, arriving and helping her to her feet and whispering in her ear about her mother. She might have imagined that. Then it had guided her from the garden and out along the road, to take her to her mom. She could easily have imagined that, too.

  It was tall and thin, and not-quite-there.

  She felt a pressure on her arm when he held her—she was pretty sure it was a “he”—but not the warm pressure of a solid, living hand. Her ability to sometimes sense the presence of someone close by was more than a feeling. It was built from subtle tweaks on all her senses—body heat, the sound of a heartbeat, a flicker of shadow or light, the hint of someone else’s breath on the air—

  There’s none of that here, though.

  —and her companion’s presence was undeniable, though he still wasn’t solid. She might have imagined that, too. Built him from nothing, a guardian angel guiding her away from the pain and out toward somewhere her mother might be waiting.

  That, most of all, Sammi could have imagined, as she had countless times since her mother’s senseless death.

  I’ll walk around the corner and she’ll be there, sitting in a garden chair, she would think. I’ll open the front door and she’s walking across the lawn from the summerhouse, bare feet whispering through the grass. All these things were dreams and fantasies, yet every one of them was precious as anything real. I’ll look across the garden and see her hand curl around the gate to unbolt it from the inside. I’ll pass an aisle in the supermarket and she’ll be t
here, choosing which brand of cookie to buy for an evening treat.

  Mom is everywhere.

  But this scratch, this itch, this weird habit of a being that shouldn’t exist, that was… strange. That was odd. Sammi didn’t think she would have ever imagined that.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Old itch,” the thing said.

  “Is that your name?”

  It stared at her, frowning.

  “Don’t you remember your name?”

  It looked away, troubled, hand clawed, fingers raking back and forth across its chest.

  “That’s what I’ll call you then,” Sammi said. “Old Itch. It’s better than nothing.”

  They sat in a small patch of scrubland that had once been the garden of a large house. The house was dilapidated now, tumbling down, its story old and most likely forgotten. Fading memories at best. The garden had grown wild, with clematis plants subsuming the house’s sad remains and rose bushes bulging out from their ordered borders and beds and spreading across the lawn. Grasses grew long, weeds sprouted in delight at their freedom. It was the world carrying on when there was no one there to notice. It was beautiful.

  “Let me see,” Old Itch said again. At first Sammi had been afraid he was some sort of pervert, but his interest was in the patterns on her shoulder, arm, and neck, and nothing else. That was the only time his eyes had really come alight.

  She’d already forgotten that he’d appeared only-just-there when he’d guided her from the garden. Yesterday, or maybe two days ago, she wasn’t sure, there was something about the days and nights… something about their ebb and flow… She was tired and awake, alert and dozy. The world was several steps away from her, and her dead mother felt closer than ever.

  She slipped the tee shirt from her shoulder and turned so that he could look.

  The bus journey had been strange. With every trundle of its wheels she was being taken further from her father, but Old Itch comforted her whenever she thought about it, as if he could read her mind. He probably couldn’t, although there were things about Old Itch that she thought were pretty unlikely, and in some cases downright impossible. She guessed she’d discover more as time went by.

  “Your mother sent me,” he would say. “We’re going to see your mother. Don’t worry, your father’s fine, he’s okay with all of this.”

  Looking away from Old Itch as he examined the fern-like marks on her skin, she thought of her father and hoped that he really was well. Surely he would understand what she was doing. He would want her to find her mother.

  “Closer,” Old Itch said. Sammi turned and he was so close that she should have been able to feel his breath on her shoulder. He was tracing the markings with his fingertip, never quite touching her skin, yet she could feel him. Maybe his fingers were stroking the fine hairs there, even though most of them had been burnt away. “We’re getting closer but… it’s still moving.”

  “What is?”

  “The Fold.” His eyes flickered up to meet her gaze, then back down to the fine tendrils and sprays on her skin. “Here,” he said, moving around so that he was examining her back again. He grabbed the neck of her tee shirt and pulled it further down, lifting her arm with his other hand so that he could examine where the markings spread beneath it and across her armpit.

  Insects buzzed, a summer sound she had always loved. A bumblebee droned across the garden, skimming the long grasses and seeming to pause inches from Old Itch. It hovered for a moment, approached his head as if mistaking it for a flower. Then it zigzagged away, buzzing angrily and disappearing into a large rhododendron bush.

  One… two… three. He touched her, tapping just beneath her left shoulder blade. His finger was cold, so cold that she flinched, a violent movement that caused muscles to spasm in her back. So cold that it almost burned.

  Like lightning, she thought, and for a moment she felt portions of skin across her back, shoulder, arm, and chest shifting slightly, those fern-like patterns swirling like oil on water.

  “We should move,” Old Itch said. He sounded more confident than before, and she wondered whether this was the first time he’d had a real destination in mind.

  “Mom is in the Fold?” she asked.

  “Mom is in the Fold.” He itched at his chest again, a rhythmic scritch-scritch-scritch. This time the movement pulled aside the loose shirt he wore to reveal a flash of pale skin underneath. She saw ugly scars, and festering sores.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, shocked.

  “It’s where they killed me,” he said.

  Sammi’s eyes went wide and she pulled away, and Old Itch mirrored her expression.

  “Tried to kill me,” he said. “Where they tried. But… your mom made it all well again.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes.” Old Itch nodded, and the smile he tried on didn’t suit him at all. It exposed his teeth. Some of them were too long. “She’s a good woman.”

  “She always makes it well again,” Sammi said, and Old Itch blurred for a while in her vision. It might have been because she was crying. She was looking forward to seeing her mother again.

  * * *

  It is almost the place, almost the Time, but not quite yet. Not until she is ready to bind and tie the Fold. Before she can do that, she has to be certain that she is ready. Leaving the world, however much she has grown to hate it, will be a major step.

  She follows the borders of this new land. It still echoes and pulses with traces of the magic that formed it—deep, distant booms, shivers through the ground that transmit into her feet and legs. It’s as if the place has a breath, a heartbeat. She’s not troubled because the magic is hers, and she knows that its ripples will fade over time. As the Fold becomes better established, the magic will grow more stable. When she binds it closed and removes it completely from the old world, it will be self-sustaining, and barely even magic anymore.

  The Fold will be another place.

  She enjoys walking, and follows the edge of the Fold around a deep, steep-sided valley. It’s very beautiful, and parts of it remind her of the Time. That’s why she chose this place. Above her runs the ridge line and the edge of the Fold, and down in the valley a narrow river snakes through from west to east. The river has formed this landscape over eons, and she can relate. She and it are both timeless. From this high up she cannot make out its flow or surface detail, but she knows that parts of it are as still as a lake, while other parts are churned into white-water by sudden dips in the riverbed and protruding rocks.

  That’s another way that the river reflects her own life. Some peace, some tumult.

  She doesn’t like thinking about the bad times, but one of them is so close in the past that it still pains her. It feels like yesterday that she was released from the cell in the woman’s attic. She feels gratitude toward those who freed her, but the Kin are as distant as the humans who helped. She can’t understand the relationship between them all. There is nothing holding her to the world, no desire to remain, and the Fold is something she has been considering for several centuries.

  Freedom has given her the impetus to seek it out.

  The possibility of the Fold’s creation was always at the forefront of her mind, and she always knew that she could make it work. It took some effort, but in a way the woman in London did her a favor by keeping her imprisoned, allowing her mind to settle and the magic to build within her, build until it was strong, rich, capable.

  Those other things to which she was subjected… the tortures, the cutting, the slicing in an attempt to remove parts of her… they still echo and pulse like the magic in her land. She doesn’t like thinking of them. It makes her head itch on the inside where she cannot touch, like a bad memory taunting her from out of sight.

  In the Fold, she will be out of reach. Yet there is still some small part of her that wants company.

  She walks down the hillside, enjoying the rough terrain. It’s a beautiful valley, and she will be here forever. The hi
llsides are swathed with greens, blues, and deep purples, heathers and grasses providing a palette of colors and shades that will change through the seasons. Once the Fold is closed she will need to shift the seasons herself, but that lies well within her power, and such a task will fill some of her endless time.

  Sometimes she thinks she will make it autumn forever.

  The valley slopes are rugged, criss-crossed with paths trodden by animals that are no longer here. Rocky outcroppings provide fixed points on which she can concentrate as she works her way down toward the bottom, and in the shadow of the hillside she can look across and see the far slopes bathed in sunlight. Beneath one rocky promontory there are shadowy recesses that might be caves. She extends her senses to probe into the darkness, then withdraws again, coming back into herself and feeling a chill of sadness that whispers right through her flesh, bones, and blood.

  I should save that for another time, she thinks, and the prospect of forever hits her hard. This place is not large enough for forever. She can see the Fold’s limits all around the valley, north to south, east to west, and she could probably walk a circuit of the whole Fold in a day. This will be her world. This will be her eternity.

  She closes her eyes and sighs deeply, and there she finds comfort. Reality takes hold. It’s not about a place or even a time, it’s all about her. She has seen and done so much that being at peace is what she has sought for a long, long time. Longer than she can recall. The potential inside her mind is so much greater than a valley, a country, even a world can ever be. Though she will leave those caves for another time, the real exploration will take place within.

  Other than the river, the valley is almost silent. There are a few lonesome birdcalls, some agitated insect scratchings, and the occasional rustle of small mammals and reptiles in the undergrowth, but already their numbers are shrinking. These creatures of the wider world will never survive in such a closed environment. Perhaps here and there are the corpses of those that have already died, caught within the Fold, and discovering them might give her some other distraction. A sickly treasure hunt. She will make a necklace from their bones.