Aijlan

by Andy Graham

  The image scrolled across a basement room. Thick metal pipes ran across the ceiling. Large, rectangular glass tiles lined the walls and ceiling. A stained sink stood in one corner, and a long metal gurney next to it. Hamilton, the new president, was talking to someone off-camera. He was bobbing his head, laughing, his shoulders twitching like a rat’s nose.

  By Hamilton’s feet lay the rigid body of Private Marka. Her face was purple, her tongue distended, bulging eyes staring straight at the ceiling. Next to her was a man Rick didn’t recognise, blood pooling under his head. There was a soldier that Rick had briefly served under: Range Sergeant Jilji, nicknamed Horsefeather, a legend amongst the troops. Dr Neumann, a woman who had briefly been the public face of dentistry in Aijlan. Despite her pro bono publico work, she had achieved infamy for claiming that people were underestimating the long-term cost of anaesthetics compared to the short-term inconvenience of pain. That had been twisted by the press, and she had been unable to escape the tag that she believed anaesthesia was for wimps. Not even the popular outreach project she had started in the Free Towns had survived the media feeding frenzy; patients had decided to live with rotting teeth in their mouth instead of having free dental care.

  A couple of others lay in crumpled heaps. The outspoken leader of the fringe Egalitarian party, Josephus Pepika. His short white beard now crusted red. The last body was a man with colourful, dusty trousers, his beard an odd yellow-brown. One of his crooked teeth was now missing. The man from the line of traffic, who had given Rick the gift stuffed into his pocket.

  All of them had silk hankies strewn about their bodies.

  Rick placed the bottle down, not trusting his limp fingers to hold it. His eyes slid back to the image of Marka, and the man standing over her.

  Hamilton, sweat beading on the paper-thin skin of his temples, trailed his finger along a groove running down the centre of the gurney. He poked his finger through the hole near the base, giggling at a comment that Rick couldn’t hear. The smile disappeared from his face as his finger got trapped in the hole.

  The camera lurched, a thumb smudging the lens. The image spun drunkenly around the room. It stopped, the picture filled briefly by the back of an aide rushing over to free Hamilton.

  The glass wall tiles above Marka were tilted at a sharp angle. A bulbous shadow split the light a colour of dirty teeth. It fell across Marka’s swollen face. The image blurred as the camera automatically focussed on the man who had walked into the picture. Rick’s jaw dropped open, a numb feeling spreading in waves down his arms and legs. The video finished, and started replaying from the beginning. Rick froze it on the man’s face at the end. This changed everything.

  He stumbled out of the chair, stamping his feet on the floor to get the circulation going. The room full of old computer parts seemed different. The air was heavier, more oppressive. It was the same in his village of Tear after days of stifling heat and the summer thunderstorms that refused to burst.

  He ran over to the shelves, and grabbed a handful of discs from the box Beth had labelled. The video was playing again, the image tracking past the dentist. Rick could hear her voice from the many TV shows she’d done before her fall from grace. She had a theory that teeth were the great levellers, common to rich and poor; everyone started out and finished up with the same number, an inbuilt lesson in equality and personal growth that no amount of expensive enamel bleaching could mask.

  Rick slotted an old cassette disc into the computer, fumbling to get it in the slot. Nothing. He grabbed another. The computer refused to register it. The next two failed as well. He sprinted back and grabbed the box. Parts, pen drives, and discs scattered across the floor. The spider that had sought refuge there earlier fled into the shadows. Rick tried one after another, alternating between curses and prayers. The last one popped up on the screen, and he transferred the files. The progress bar filled with the agonising slowness of a rock being rolled up a mountain.

  He grabbed the water and took a mouthful. There was a wet ring on the notepad he’d been using. The computer pinged, and he pulled the pen drive out, wrapping it in the silk hanky.

  His eyes drifted back to the notepad. He’d felt so old fashioned, jotting things down on paper, like a magician from the fairy tales Thryn read Rose, awash with broomsticks in magic bottles and invisible candlesticks. Dragons with eyes that saw everything, bellies full of a vengeful fire, wings that could take them anywhere, and hydras that couldn’t be killed. A thought, half-formed, surfaced in his head. What was it Stann had said, who watches the watchers?

  He glanced up at the camera, and then to the door. Wiping his hands on his trousers, he crashed down in the chair, and started scribbling in the margins with a stub of a pencil.

  What seemed like hours later, he transferred his notes into the computer, his fingertips throbbing from the frantic typing.

  It was a hack. It may never work. It had to work.

  XXV - Roundabout

  Belching out clouds of smoke, the jeep thumped over a pothole. The rattling of plastic and glass around him was drowned out by the chattering of his teeth in his skull. The harder he jammed the accelerator pedal into the floor, the slower the drive from the capital to Old Town seemed to take. As the litter-strewn hedges whipped past him, Rick decided that next time he was going to hot-wire a car rather than sweet talk a sleepy quartermaster.

  There had been a burst of rain during the night, just as Rick was sneaking out of the city gates. The shift in the weather had helped with the guards that had been stationed at every entrance since his time locked in the office. Men and women strutted around sporting brass badges of a sharpened portcullis, badges that gleamed just that little too much. A dishevelled woman, with a face like an empty potato sack, had eventually waved him through. She’d grumbled that the people complaining of the heat would soon be whinging about the cold.

  He swerved to avoid another rut in the road and screeched to a halt. Clambering out of the car, he looked back at the black tyre marks pointing at his sloppy parking like a pair of crooked fingers. A chunk of stone broke off under a wheel, and the jeep shifted. Did they manufacture these concrete roads precrumbled, he wondered?

  The rain had left a freshness to the air that you could smell as well as taste. The damp chill clinging to his skin brought a lightness that had been missing for weeks. It went some way to relieving the tiredness that clawed at Rick’s eyelids, the trembling feeling in his hands that wouldn’t quite do what he wanted them to. Whether that was fatigue, nerves, or fear, he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure the body distinguished too much between these things. Checking in his pocket for the small object he had smuggled out of the city, he left the jeep behind him.

  As the moons clung onto the morning sky, the sun rose. It chased off the shadows of the enormous trees he was heading for, burning away the welcoming coolness, a threat of what was to come.

  The legends said that the fiercer the Ancestor’s summer, the late autumnal burst of heat, the harsher the winter. Tear and Old Town maintained that the heat was created by their ancestors as they tried to get back into the world, that the boundaries between the living and dead weakened as the seasons changed. The cold that followed and froze the ground deep was needed to seal them in: the harsher the winter, the safer the world.

  He reached a tree that hadn’t been much taller than him last time he had been here, and stood in the shade of its branches. Running his thumb around the contraband in his pocket, Rick dug his toes into the ground, tracing the tip of his boot along the cracks in the earth. Acres of yellowing grass and bristle bush stretched away from him, surrounding the village that was slowly waking up. The artificial surface of an old bodyball pitch stood out, an unnatural, perfect rectangle of vivid green amongst the sandy coloured surroundings. Thistles were growing up out of the gaps in the material, weeds forcing their way through the threadbare patches around the goal mouths.

  He heard a scuff of feet, and a low curse. He squinted into the sun. A lone figure limpe
d towards him, a limp that was almost a swagger. The regular dip and rise of one shoulder offset the odd-sized puffs of dust bursting from the ground.

  Rick’s sweaty fingers closed around the pen drive in his pocket, squeezing it until his palm hurt. He walked towards a rusty metal circle on the ground, now strangled by weeds. An old A-frame stood next to it, the plastic swing seat long gone, the chains cannibalised by a local villager. A forest was unlikely to be bugged; cameras up in the branches weren’t practical. But the more space around them, the better.

  “Thank you for coming,” Rick said. He nodded to the other man’s leg. “You’re walking better than before. Don’t need the crutches now?”

  “Barely use the things these days,” Stann replied. He watched Rick warily, his body listing to one side. “I don’t know why I’m here after what you did, but you said it was important. I guess I can listen, at least.” He looked around them, his face crinkling into a smile. “This is where the old sand pit was, wasn’t it? I remember your dad filling it with red builder’s sand from Skaldar’s yard.”

  “Sand’s sand,” Rick said. “He bought the most he could with the amount he had. Skaldar was just happy to see the money.”

  “Our mums weren’t so pleased at having to wash it off us.”

  Rick smiled, rubbing the pen drive between his fingers. “Your mum. Mine made my dad do it.”

  “Your life does seem to be littered with strong-willed women.”

  “Not littered, Stann, and just women, not strong-willed women. Would you have described a man like that?”

  Stann scowled at him. “OK then, unusually strong-willed. But yes, if a man was strong willed, I would. It’s just an adjective, get over it.”

  Rick kept his face impassive. He didn’t want to argue with Stann, not today. He rubbed his hand through his hair, looking around them. The roundabout, a swing, and a sand pit filled with red sand, gravel, and the occasional glass shard had been Old Town’s playground for years. It had been all the younger kids wanted, all they’d needed, apart from each other. The bodyball pitch had been added later. It had been a bonus for the older kids, kept them out of the yeasty shadows behind the village pub. But the amount it had taken out of the town coffers had almost bankrupted them. It had led to disputes with children from other villages. They refused to pay to use it, arguing that they might as well use it when Old Town’s kids weren’t, that Old Town would have had to pay for maintenance anyway, and at least this way their money wasn’t being wasted. So the maintenance had been stopped.

  Rick kicked the rusting metal circle with his foot. “What did you do with that motorbike? The one you almost killed me with?”

  “Sold it when I got enlisted,” Stann said. “Gave the money to Mum in case I didn’t come back. She didn’t want to take it, said that no amount of money could ever make up for losing a child. ‘You can’t buy what children bring’, she’d said. Mum put the money under the clock on the mantelpiece, saying I could have it, as long as I picked it up from the house in full dress uniform.” He paused, scratching at the stubble on his chin with the remaining digits of his left hand. “So, when I passed out, I came back. I was going to take her out with the money, take her to the city, buy her something new.”

  His eyes glazed over, and he stared up at the sky, blinking hard. “My old man had drunk it, pissed it away, and then beat her.” He rubbed his eyes. “Damn dust,” he said, “gets everywhere.”

  “Why did you never tell me, Stann? I could have helped.”

  “How? You had no more money than me back then, and even if you had, I wouldn’t have taken it. Or are you going to invent a time machine, take the credit for that too, and go back and fix everything, discover a cure for a violent drunk?” He snorted, and wiped a thin trail of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “Dads prided himself on being a high-functioning alcoholic. He wasn’t. He was a drunk, a clever drunk, but still a drunk. They all are, just some know longer words than others.”

  “Like strong-willed?” Rick asked, attempting a smile.

  “What are you saying?” Stann rounded on Rick, fist raised. There was purple paint under his fingernails.

  The heat haze was rising around them, distorting his jeep in the distance. Rick could feel his sweat burning off his face as quickly as it formed. Stann raised his fists. Rick shifted his weight forwards. He didn’t want to have to fight Stann, not now, not like this.

  Something cracked in the woods. A pig — pink, dirty, and scrawny — was snuffling through a pile of twigs and leaves under a tree, sticking its snout into the dirt. A raised, red brand on its hide was clearly visible.

  “Isn’t that one of Hanzel’s?” Rick asked. “I thought they were all slaughtered?”

  Stann’s shoulders slumped, his hands thumping into his trousers. “Yup,” he replied with a sly grin. “Old Finn couldn’t bring himself to kill them all, and he didn’t trust many people not to snitch. So he altered the brand on some, and smuggled them into the Weeping Wood while I kept watch. I got a couple for my help. I never thought a man could tire of fried bacon, but I’m almost there.” He nodded to the pig. “One of them got away before we could rebrand him. Looks like he’s doing better than the rest. We burnt as many straw-filled blankets that day as we did real pigs, but it was still a gruesome, senseless waste. The blood was everywhere, practically coming out of the pigsty like water from a burst main. It was so bad that the authorities didn’t want to get too close when they did the final check. They make all these decisions behind their sterile plastic desks, but none of them have the balls to actually see the job done.”

  He laughed, a low bubbling sound that Rick knew well. A cautious smile spread across Rick’s face, as his friend’s infectious laughter got louder.

  “I was trying to make a joke, Stann, about being strong-willed.”

  “Like you did about my mother’s moustache back in that castle in Somer?” Stann’s voice trailed off. He shifted on the spot, flexing and extending the remains of his left hand. “Neither joke was funny, but you’re almost right. Dad wouldn’t have said strong-willed, he’d have used something with more syllables.”

  Stann scowled. “I had a word with ‘Dads’ as he liked to be called. ‘Too much father for just one woman’, I heard him say in the pub once.” Stann grimaced and spat in the dusty grass. “His friends loved that quote. And once we’d done talking, he was never a problem again.”

  “Is that why he disappeared?” A thought struck Rick, chilling him despite the rising heat. “What did you do to him? You didn’t—”

  “Kill him?” Stann laughed. “No. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my illustrious military career behind bars.” He stared down at his left hand, at the gun-shaped shadow it cast on the ground. “Dads was very strict with himself. He’d be up at six every morning, no matter what, and in the pub at six every evening. So, at five to six every morning, I’d find him, wake him, and break one of his toes. And at five to six every evening, I’d drag him out of whatever corner he’d scuttled into, and do the same to one of his fingers. I had ten days’ leave, so I figured one of each a day was a good routine. I broke his nose too, just for good measure. He never touched my mum again, nor drank, as far as I’m aware. He left town, shouting stupid threats that the sins of the son visited on the father would come back to haunt the son. That life was too short to forgive.” Stann pointed at his prosthesis with his ruined hand, and made a soft shooting noise. “I guess he was right.”

  Stann limped over to a tree stump near the old swing. Its insides were caving in, and filled with bits of rubbish. Lowering himself down slowly, he shaded his eyes against the glare.

  “What do you want, Franklin?”

  XXVI - Donarth

  Rick explained what had happened, what he had seen, who had been standing next to the corpses. Stann’s eyes narrowed when Rick mentioned Beth, and Rick glossed over the finer details. He’d never told Stann why they’d split up, and Stann had been too discrete to ask. He was sure Stann had sus
pected it was something to do with Rick’s and Beth’s different views on what they wanted from their relationship and careers. At one point Rick swore he could smell her perfume, and glanced furtively over his shoulder. Stann listened, sucking on his teeth.

  “And what do you want me to do?” he asked when Rick had finished. He used both hands to shift his left leg into a more comfortable position. “I can’t exactly go storming in to help them now, even if I wanted to. The Old Town militia can’t ride to save Tear again, like in Green Fields. Not gonna happen.”

  Rick pulled the pen drive from his pocket. “Take this. Hide it. I’ll be back soon, I promise. I just need someone to look after it while I find out what’s going on, and make it stop.”

  Stann took the pen drive, dangling it between thumb and forefinger. “This is it? This is what you’re going to save the nation with?”

  “I’ve made another backup, but I’m not sure how reliable it is.”

  “Where?”

  Rick pointed at the tell-tale flashing lights of the drones and sun-fans circling them like crows. “Who watches the watcher, right? You gave me the idea.”

  Stann craned his neck around, following Rick’s finger. “The drones?”

  Rick grinned at him. “The sun-fans. I did it while I was working on their new dragonfly lenses. I buried it in code so deep that they’ll never know even to look.”

  “Clever.” Stann nodded. “If it works.” The pen drive glinted as he bounced it up and down in his palm. “But why not give this to Thryn?”

  “She’s my wife. I can’t risk her or Rose. I’m not sure I should go home now. I thought about Lenka, but I don’t want to drag her into this either.”

  “But you can risk me?” Stann asked, face impassive.

  Rick took a deep breath in. “Over my wife and child, yes. You’d do the same. You’re ex-army. You know how it goes.”

  “Your child.” Stann nodded, licking his dry lips. “Did you forget that my child, little Donarth, turned nine last week?” Stann sat up straight, losing the hunch that had warped his back since his dismissal. “Not so little anymore, he’s going to be a fearsome unit before long. Rose was at his birthday celebration, Thryn and Lenka too. You were right in Castle Anwen — the only thing you did get right — little Rose does seem enamoured of my Don. He was sore upset that you didn’t come, though. Where’s Uncle Rick, he kept asking?”