by Tim Lebbon
The pombero has heard of Ascent, and it has become its greatest passion.
“She’s eaten from you again,” Mallian says.
“A while ago, but the wound still hurts.” He turns his leg this way and that, revealing the dried gash on his thigh. It is an indentation, an ugly scoop of missing flesh. “This is the third time, and it’s taken longer to heal than before.”
“Maybe our great and wise fairy isn’t so great and wise.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perhaps you, her victims, will rot away and die after all.”
The pombero makes a sound somewhere between a purr and a groan. He is a small creature, more man than Kin, his mixed heritage giving him the appearance of a short, stocky human, but with the mind of something other. Mallian first saw him on his twelfth long night in the Fold, stalking along the river close to where he was trapped against the ground by Grace’s glamour. He was only a shadow then, one of many that Mallian had seen and was still trying to put a name to, a face, a history.
He dislikes and looks down upon humans, but he hates mongrels. They are a taint on the purity of the Kin. But just as he spends time talking with the human Vince—and is even starting to enjoy some of their conversations—he has to hold his hatred deep in order to achieve his aims.
“You really think she’d have made such a mistake?” the pombero asks.
“What’s your name, creature?”
The man looks troubled. Mallian has asked three times before, and each time the pombero has scampered away and remained absent for many days. There’s power in a name, Mallian thinks. He knows that. Not as stupid as his human face seems, perhaps.
This time he does not run away.
“I don’t seek to own you,” Mallian says, lying. “Only to know you.”
“My name’s...” The small man looks away, frowning.
“I’m your friend. I’m not here to eat you.”
“Markus.”
“Markus. Very human.”
“As was I, until she brought me here.”
“You were never fully human.”
“I know that now,” Markus says. “I didn’t know it back then. Back in the real world.”
“Not even an inkling?”
The pombero shrugs. “Always knew I was different, of course. But mostly that’s just taken as madness.”
“Do you feel mad now?”
“Only at her.” He looks off into the distance, even though any distance here is finite.
I have to be careful, Mallian thinks. I have to lure him in, because I’m in no position to grab. His friend Jilaria Bran had sacrificed herself for his cause, but they had been close for many decades. This part-human, part-Kin mongrel creature might be far less likely to accede to his request. The time to ask is not yet, but it will be soon.
First, there are other ways to build Markus’s confidence in him and get him on his side.
“Why are you mad?” Mallian asks. He doesn’t really care, but letting the creature vent will give him more cause to listen to what Mallian has to say next.
“She took me away from everything I love,” Markus says. “The first time lightning struck me my wife was there when I surfaced, nursing me back to health. My daughter, too, back from university to help. Days later, maybe three, maybe four, we were sitting on the deck in our garden. Clear blue sky. No clouds. I was feeling better for the first time, and Sarah was tracing those strange patterns on my calf and foot. The bolt came from nowhere.”
I don’t care, Mallian thinks. “Go on,” he says.
“This time they were close,” Markus says. “When I woke, they were dead, both of them. Burned. Scorched and melted. And a creature, a fleeting thing, took my hand and guided me from that place as if it were saving me.”
“But it wasn’t saving you,” Mallian says. “It was taking you from your dead wife and daughter and bringing you here, to this place.”
“Yes. Bringing me here.”
“Just so that Grace can eat you, watch you heal, eat you again.”
The pombero looks down at his scarred leg. Around the wound radiate the old lightning scars, like fine fronds or a satellite image of a complex river tributary.
“If you wish to hit back, there’s something you can do for me,” Mallian says.
“Does it have to do with Ascent?”
“Quiet, quiet,” he says. “I’m not sure how far her senses reach, and if she hears that word on the breeze she might come back to feed on you sooner than you’d wish.”
A visible shiver passes through the pombero. That’s good. It draws it more onto Mallian’s side.
“But yes,” he says, “it has something to do with that.”
Markus’s eyes light up. He nods.
Mallian tells him what he wants.
“That’s all?”
“For now.” There’ll be more, he thinks. Much more. When the time comes for you to suffer for me, then we’ll see just how much you’ve embraced your Kin blood.
He watches the pombero dash away along the riverbank, back towards where the human has made his home in the small cave. Markus runs with an animal gait, and exudes a strength that no man can project on his own. Mallian thinks, Perhaps this mongrel is not so unnatural after all.
8
Not long after he arrived, Vince began mapping the Fold. He had no pens or pencils, and nothing to draw on even if he had, but his memory had always been good. It gave him some small sense of purpose. Rather than moving on through the days and weeks with little to occupy him other than striving to survive, it became a project. He didn’t walk its hills and forests every single day, but most days he went some way from the cave he used as home. Whether foraging for fruit and nuts, or simply trying to get to know the Fold better, he tracked his routes and remembered what he could of the landscape’s contours, twists and turns.
In doing so, he had come to understand a little of how the Kin brought there by Grace existed. Though some of them were humanoid—and several could have easily passed as completely human—others had fully adopted their Kin heritage and adapted accordingly. He’d witnessed from afar several strange metamorphoses as the deniers no longer denied, and the people they had been living as in the real world melted away to allow their true natures to the fore.
It was a disturbing process to witness. Every week that passed left Vince feeling more and more alone. The Fold grew stranger, not more familiar. Even though he was not averse to strangeness—he had spent some time as a relic hunter in London, seeking out peculiar objects wherever and whenever he could, and as such becoming au fait with many of London’s most obscure locations—he felt any semblance of his old life being steadily wiped away.
For the first few weeks he had seen other humans who often appeared just as lost as him. Now, he was the only human left. Even the shapeshifter Fer had not projected as human for a long time, instead choosing to live its life as creatures known or less familiar. To Vince, it felt as if the Fold was growing, expanding and moving on, and he was the single point keeping it locked into the past. He was becoming rare.
He was also learning where some of the Kin lived. Many of them were elusive, and whether shy or simply secretive they kept away from him, ensuring that he knew as little about them as possible. Others were quite open about their movements through the irregular days and nights, and a couple were happy to converse with him, telling him their names and the names of the others.
Fer lived in a small shack it had built high up on one valley side, close to the ridge but not so close that it could look over the ridge and beyond. Perhaps that meant it had accepted its lot living in the Fold. The shack was a beautiful affair, built from fallen logs and twigs, mud and leaves, flowers that still bloomed and shrubs that formed hanging curtains over the doorway and glassless windows. There were heavy blocks as cornerstones, silt from the riverbed formed into strange, haunting gargoyles around the walls’ upper reaches, and a slab of slate was used as the main door, hung on heavy bone hi
nges that came from no animal Vince recognised. It was a fascinating building, reflecting Fer’s wide and varying range of appearances in its diverse materials and construction. It seemed to grow up out of the ground, and Vince was certain some of the walls were still expanding, the roof still sprouting ferns.
Shashahanna was a mermaid, her name almost as musical as the songs she sang as she bathed in the river, and the pools and ponds that it fed close to where it entered the Fold. She seemed unafraid of Vince, and unconcerned when he sat at a distance and watched her swimming. She was distinctly alien and entirely beautiful, and she lived in a clump of fallen trees washed up on one shore of the river. He sometimes saw her climbing in and swimming out of the pile, like some exotic otter, but he never ventured close, and neither did she invite him in. Theirs was a comfortable relationship, silent and maintained at a distance.
High up on the opposite side of the valley from Fer’s home, Dastion the dwarf had his mines. He had only spoken with Vince once, soon after the Fold was closed and Vince took to wandering day and night looking for a way out. Dastion had already started digging then, using his big strong hands to haul at rock and soil, and fashioning levers and props from tree branches he tore down. Vince found him sitting on a rock one day, a powerful short soul who seemed to bear a heavy weight on his shoulders and in his sad, deep eyes. Back then he still looked like a swarthy, strong human, not the hairy tunnel dweller he had become. For a second Vince had convinced himself that another human soul had become trapped with him.
Dastion swayed where he sat, and Vince saw the almost empty bottle in his hand. It must have been the dregs of a drink he’d brought with him. They exchanged names and some of their histories, spoke of what had happened and what might come, and although Dastion was quite welcoming, Vince quickly came to realise that he was just like the other deniers. Kin, although he had not yet accepted the fact.
His acceptance came quickly.
Dastion’s underground explorations had progressed rapidly, and the refuse piles from his excavations grew across the hillside, forming a new landscape that looked moonlike and alien. For a while the large swaths of detritus were home to nothing alive, but then grasses quickly spread, and plants made this new fertile soil their home. Vince hadn’t seen Dastion for a long time. Perhaps the dwarf now preferred to spend his time deep down below the surface.
Maybe he was hiding from Grace down there. Maybe he was digging towards the boundary, only to find his direction reversed, much like when Vince walked up over the hilltops.
Grace was the Kin who remained most elusive. Vince had no idea where she made her home—if indeed she lived in any single place—and although he sometimes saw her from a distance, she always ensured that they never drew close. She often travelled back and forth across her domain, and after all this time if they were destined to simply bump into each other it would have happened by now. He might have welcomed a chance to confront her. She kept apart from Vince on purpose.
With a map growing in detail in his mind every day, the one place that still disturbed him most was the clearing by the river where he had last seen Angela.
It wasn’t only the memories that plagued him when he went and sat at that place. It was as if it did not belong inside the Fold at all.
His walks often veered that way, and he’d given up pretending to himself that it was not on purpose. There, he was as far away from Angela as anywhere else, but he felt close. She felt closer. The ground was twisted into swirls, grass stripped from the surface and mud turned fluid and hardened again into patterns that might tell a tale, if viewed from the correct angle. It reminded him of the trace-work of burn scars that had bloomed on Sammi’s arm and shoulder. He had not been able to translate them, either. Rocks were scorched, plants withered, and even the air seemed to carry an uncertain tinge, like heat haze where there was little heat.
Whatever strange magical violence had forged a path from this contained world and into another still hung there, echoes held in the land and remembered in the air. He wished he could read the signs and understand those echoes. He wished so much that he could replicate the fairy’s power and open the doorway one more time. But he was only a human being. In this world, he was a little less than nothing.
As he stood to leave the site of the vanished doorway, he spied something from the corner of his eye. A shape moved in the shadow of trees, then grew still again when he turned to look. It was large, too big to be one of the smaller mammals that the Fold supported. Somewhere beneath those trees, a Kin was watching him.
He stared, glancing left and right in case he could catch that movement again. Leaves fluttered on the trees, stirred by a gentle breeze. Nothing else moved.
“Come on out,” Vince said. Whatever was there, he would be less afraid if it was ready to reveal itself. He’d seen a lot in his short life. He much preferred to confront dangers head-on than to have them haunting him, unseen and ready to pounce.
Nothing emerged.
He started back along the river, staying close to the bank where a path was slowly being worn into the landscape. He was partly responsible, but he also saw footprints there he did not recognise, especially after one of the regular afternoon storms.
He glanced back every few seconds, but there was nothing behind him. Neither was there anything ahead. Yet still he felt eyes upon him, the attention of some inhuman thing that set his skin afire with dreadful anticipation.
Vince had often wondered whether some of the Kin trapped here with him might eventually see him as food, much like Grace saw them. Could he fight off Dastion if he chose to attack? Or Fer, if it came at him in the guise of a bear? He thought not. He doubted he’d even be able to run very far.
He walked faster, then started running. One thing he’d noticed since being here was that his fitness had improved. There was no alcohol, no processed foods or refined sugars. He walked miles every day. He ran sometimes, too, enjoying the sense of freedom it gave him.
He heard nothing matching his footsteps, so he sped up and veered away from the river. The forest swallowed him up. As far as he was aware nothing lived nearby. Some birds were startled from bushes to his left, though he didn’t know whether they’d been frightened by him or something else.
Switching to the right, he ducked down and glanced back.
The creature paused, looking around in confusion. Then he locked eyes with Vince.
It was not the first time Vince had seen this Kin close up: very man-like, small and stocky with no particularly animalistic attributes. He’d spoken with the pombero before; the creature was open about what he was, and although he did not claim some of the more unsavoury aspects of the traditional myth—the sexual predator, the sullied outlook—he admitted that accepting his blood and birthright had given him a sense of freedom that he’d never previously experienced.
Vince suspected the pombero had endured deep loss, but he would not discuss it. Both times they had spoken, Vince’s probing questions about who he’d left behind had sent the man fleeing.
This time it was Vince who was running, and he didn’t know why.
“What?” Vince asked.
The pombero stared at him. Something about his bearing set Vince on edge. There was threat there, violence coiled in his stance, a promise of something in his eyes.
“What?” Vince repeated, voice weaker than before. Fear could do that.
He stood and started running again, flitting between trees and heading back towards the river. He heard the Kin chasing him. This time he did nothing to mask the fact that he sought to capture Vince, though his intentions were still unclear. Vince didn’t imagine they could be benign.
The trees didn’t grow so thick there, and the path worn into the riverbank meant he’d be able to run faster. A few hundred metres ahead was a small gulley where a tributary joined the river. It was overgrown, but Vince knew exactly where it was. He could leap it if he really stretched, and perhaps the pombero would tumble in behind him.
; If he reached it without being caught.
He had been hunted before, by humans as well as Kin, but his terror was as rich, his fear cutting. With very little left to live for, he wanted nothing more than to survive. He still wanted to find his way home.
He leapt a fallen tree, skirted around a rocky outcropping, sprinted through a wide swath of long grasses and brambles that scratched his legs through his jeans, then as he approached the river, he risked a look back.
The pombero was less than a dozen steps behind him and closing fast.
Gasping in shock, Vince cut left and went for a rise in the landscape. There were tumbled rocks on the other side, and perhaps he could lose himself in there, or at least confuse his pursuer long enough to—
The hand grasped the back of his shirt and pulled, jerking him backwards so hard that his feet went from under him and kicked upwards. He landed hard on his back, the wind knocked from him. The blue sky blurred and grew darker, and he feared he was about to lose consciousness.
Then the pombero’s face appeared above his, and Vince bit his own lip, hard. If he was about to die, he wanted to stare death in the face.
The pombero panted, sweat beading his face.
“Er...” he said.
“What do you want?”
“I didn’t mean to...” Vince’s attacker drew back, allowing Vince to sit up.
It was ridiculous, and Vince almost laughed. He’d run fearing attack, terrified that the pursuing Kin wanted to run him down and eat him to refuel and recharge itself after having been feasted upon by Grace. The scars were obvious, the more recent wound on his calf still weeping and wet.
“What do you want?”
“The backpack,” the pombero said.
“What backpack?” Vince risked the ruse, emboldened by his would-be attacker’s apparent reticence. Maybe he had run because Vince had run. But he needed the backpack for something—or someone—and that could only be Mallian. Vince was surprised it had taken the Nephilim this long.