by Claire North
Chapter 26
Nadira was shot fleeing arrest. They shot her in the back, twice, and put her in an ambulance, but she died before she reached the hospital, eyes open, tubes down her throat, discarded surgical gloves on the floor around her. They’d have to clean the ambulance top to bottom, no doubt, empty it entirely and turn the hose on its interior, spray it with pink antiseptic and burn the white paper sheets that she expired on. The only photos they had of her face were a surveillance shot of her buying bread, moments before she recognised the danger she was in, and of her corpse. In the first image, she looked humble, charming, smiled at the baker as she took the loaf in her hands. In the latter, she was a martyr to violence, and so the news ran neither, and no one reported her death.
Three other members of the inquisition died that same day. I had not known how many agents Nadira had run, and felt brief disappointment that I had not been the only one, and wondered if I had been the most useful, and was ashamed at my own vanity.
In the winter wood, where all things slumber beneath the blackest black, Yue led me down a path of lightless lanterns to a clearing where once the people of the forest had come to spin their stories through the snow-bound leaves. On ancient tangles of dug-up thread and rotting polymer pulled from the landfill mines, on blue-yellow fishing lines scoured from the skeletal guts of calcified fish, suspended like bunting across the grove to create a second canopy between snow and moon, the memories of the past had been hung like offerings to star and sky. Silver spinning discs bubbling with chemical green that had perhaps once carried music or the sound of voices; long tongues of curling tyre and endless polished beads of green and brown glass, threaded through the forest weave. Distorted plastic bottle tops, painted mats of disposable diapers turned to brown stone through centuries of compression in the mines, cracked sculptures of broken computer chips and shattered metal casings which clunked and clacked against each other as we passed through them, a rubber windchime. Some still bore hints of archaic script:
CE COMPLIANT
MADE IN
CONTAINS PET
DO NOT EXCEED
Beneath an oak bowed by snow, Yue finally let me collapse, huddling against its trunk beneath a tapestry of woven metal shards, spun like a cracked mirror through its branches. The broken remnant of a child’s toy; a wrapped bundle of ancient pens, the ink turned to stone; the cracked remains of a wristwatch, time stopped for ever at half past three. The names of the dead had been carved below, etched into wood, landfill miners crushed when the tunnels gave way, or poisoned in the endless chemical stink that seeped through water and lung as they dug their way through the debris of the past. This was a place every bit as sacred as the kakuy’s shrine, a monument to the dead, a testament to human things in the place where the spirits reigned. I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the wood, and it felt warm next to my frozen skin. I tried to stop my teeth chattering and couldn’t. I tried to hold my knees so close to my chest that not an atom of heat could escape me, but there always seemed a place where the cold got in. Yue said: “They’re coming. Ven? They’re coming. Listen to me. Stay awake. Ven? Ven!”
It started to snow again, and the snow seemed warm, and I closed my eyes and welcomed it.
Chapter 27
A safe house, two kilometres north of the border between Maze and Magyarzag.
My first experience of coming back to life was a tepid bath. I wanted it scalding, and knew scalding would kill me, and howled as the warmth seeped into my fingers, and didn’t care. Strangers wrapped me up in warm towels, laid me down by the stove, talked in low voices and said things like: “At second watch,” or “Strategic assessment,” or, in the case of one young voice that was perhaps not meant to be overheard: “I swear I’m a slave to that cat.”
Then I slept.
Then I woke.
Then I ate, a little at a time, presided over by a man with a mole above his right eye and extraordinarily pink lips, who nodded approvingly when I took little bites and frowned deeply if it looked like I was going to take more than a morsel at a time. He never said anything reproachful, but something in the solemnity of his expression made me want to not disappoint him.
Then I slept again, and when I woke and asked for Yue, they told me she was gone.
In the Burning Age, militaries were confusing things. “Interventions” replaced “conquests”. “Enemies we wish to crush” were “rogue states”. “Strategic partners” replaced “too big to fight”. Huge armies were still kept as a sign of power and prestige, awaiting the day when victory was measured once again in how many hundreds of millions you could afford slain or when nuclear winter settled the matter. As it was, the kakuy ended that era before proud men in smart jackets could do anything too spectacular.
In the modern era, militaries were far smaller affairs. The resources required to sustain the flair and bluster of previous times, along with the classification of some of the more egregious military technologies as anathema to humankind, led to a looser military structure of small units designed to move fast through hostile terrain. The official motto of Lyvodia’s 14th Infantry – “our lives in service” – had always unofficially yet far more pervasively been “pedal faster, jackass”.
“Been in the wars a bit, been at the old stabbing, the old spying, yes?” The captain, a man in his mid-forties, patted me kindly on the arm. “Could have been much worse.”
The safe house was a cabin in the woods without electricity. Worn cushions were arrayed around a low ceramic stove; beeswax candles dribbled yellow into the night. My rescuers sat around reading or playing board games pulled from the cupboard. The largest of the games had a manual some sixty pages long, and play would stop every fifteen minutes to consult the nuance of an unexpected rule.
“This is an eight-roll test,” the gamemaster proclaimed. “But you have the salmon, so you must discount your modifier.”
Such statements elicited groans from half the board, whoops of glee from the other. I watched from my bundled corner, waiting.
When they decided to move me, they did so without warning, shaking me awake a little before midnight as the snow fell in the dead silence of buried sound. Boots were pulled on and trousers tucked in; revolvers hidden beneath outer clothes, rifles stuck in the back of a sled and covered over with firewood, dried mushrooms, fresh folds of spider silk and a waxed tarpaulin. I was handed documents, clean clothes, a hat that sank down over my eyes with every bump in the path. Then I was compressed into a nook at the back of the sledge, pulled by two men on skis who watched the darkness through their headtorches as if night were a hunting, tentacled thing, every shadow a limb waiting to strike.
Light vanished a few metres on every side whenever I turned my head. Look up and see only falling white, and then above it nothing save a hazy disruption in the dark, twisting sometimes in a billow of tree-top wind. Look to the left and perhaps a wolf’s yellow eye darted away; look to the right and perhaps the kakuy is watching, shaking the earth from which he arose and into which he will vanish, perhaps the forest is watching; perhaps the trees themselves bend a little closer to shadow us as we head into the night.
Perhaps not. The lives of humans are not special to the spirits of sky and earth; they will not bless us, they will not curse us, they do not care for our names, faces, moralities or characters. They care only for the water and the fire, for the river running and the mountain standing proud. They will destroy us, or ignore us, not because we are mighty and worthy of note, but because we are small, and it is a simple matter for the kakuy to step on us without noticing that there was something underfoot.
I close my eyes and wonder where Georg is. Who will translate documents for him now, or knows precisely when to bring him dinner? Perhaps I killed his trust in secretarial staff when I stuck a knife in his leg. The thought pleases me, and the surrounding darkness is merely life untouched by light, rather than endless terror waiting, as we glide on through the night.
We stopped three tim
es. Once, a little before dawn, to eat, drink, rest, without fire and with only muffled, murmured speech.
Once, as we were on the edge of a river crossing, ropes set up from one side to the other to guide the wobbling, balancing troops and their gear as they slipped from icy stone to icy stone across the ford.
Last, on a ridge high above a valley carved into a hard V by angry white water. Here, when the halt came, it was so hard and sharp that the momentum of my sledge nearly carried me into the knees of the frozen soldiers that pulled it, and I found myself sticking my hands out into snow to catch balance, kill a little momentum. Then everyone hunkered down, lying flat, and rifles were pulled out and passed around, and I was suddenly the tallest and most obvious target of the lot, so I disentangled myself from my den and wriggled into the shelter of an oak tree, terror hot and itchy in my palms.
There we remained for nearly ten minutes in absolute, motionless silence, as the chattering cold seeped into us. Finally the captain rose again, nodded once, and some semblance of calm was restored. I did not know what he had seen that stopped him so suddenly, but a few kilometres further on he called a halt again and, gesturing to me from his skis, summoned me to the front of the little line.
“There.” His voice was a murmur one notch above a whisper, a gentle finger twitching towards the edge of a ridge from which spindling black trees clung to sheer stained rock like breaking masts from a sinking ship. I looked where he gestured, between a break in the canopy, and down to the valley floor. It should have been impossible to see the riverbed below through the dome of winter branches, but the loggers had been busy, and the glint of their equipment still shone yellow and red against the black and white winter. The swathe they’d cut through the forest, a fist of ripped-up earth and spat-out tree, formed a line that stretched almost from one end of the valley to the other, a crumpled desolation. Figures moved against the tumbled-down mortuary of timber and snow, still clearing, pushing back through the cold, and behind them another machine, this one belching thick black smoke from a pipe above its hulking carapace, a beetle crawling over the half-crushed remnants of split forest floor.
“Where are their offerings?” he breathed. “Why are they taking the young trees too?”
“They do not make offerings any more. They say the forest belongs to men.”
His lips twitched in distaste. He pointed at the black, grumbling machine as it rolled on caterpillar treads over the fallen limbs of a young ash, white shards of still-living wood splitting open beneath its metal bulk.
“What is it?”
“It’s called a tank,” I replied.
“How do we destroy it?”
I racked my memory, trying to pull up the few details I’d bothered to absorb about that area of heretical history. “Mines, mostly, I think. Or a bigger tank.”
A nod, unhappy to have confirmed the worst. “Nasty things, mines. Never kill who you think they will.”
“Well,” I muttered, “let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
For a moment, his eyes met mine, and there was incredulity there. This was a man who had never once relied on hope to do anything; hope was for children and the elderly – he was paid to plan for the worst. I looked away, his opinion of me significantly lessened from its already low level, and slunk back to the sledge to be dragged like a log through the forest, towards home.
There was no fanfare when we crept across the forest border between Maze and northern Magyarzag. There was no sense of coming home, no change in the air, neither sign nor welcoming committee. There was, however, a path out of the trees onto a road winding through the wood, which no one had tried to clear of snow and which carried the marks of only a few bicycles and perhaps a single postier’s truck. Here we stopped. Here my guide turned and said: “We are back,” and his words were so devoid of feeling that I wasn’t sure at first what to make of them. “Home,” he corrected, seeing my face. Then, when I clearly didn’t exhibit the full comprehension this statement should have produced, he pointed east. “That way. Home.”
“We’re… in Magyarzag?”
“Yes.”
“When did that happen?”
“About two hours ago.”
“I… expected…” A gesture at the empty road beneath an empty noonday sky.
He shrugged. “You will be wanted in Budapesht.” And then a thought, a little sadder; a settled conclusion which had been gnawing at him for a while and which could no longer be denied. “There will be war soon.”
I tried to think of something to say. Nothing came to mind. This seemed to satisfy him more than any words. He nodded once, and turned to the east, and twenty minutes later we reached a crossroads where a single electric bus sat waiting, driver on the roof trying to dust off some of the snow from the solar panels to catch the meagre winter light. Seeing us, he hopped down, exclaimed, “No one shot? So glad!” and opening the door to the vehicle added, “Only got enough charge to get us to Vakch, then need to plug in. So no heating, I’m afraid!”
“That is acceptable,” the captain replied, before his soldiers could groan too dramatically. “Kindly choose a radio station of popular music,” he added, the words unfamiliar and uncomfortable on his lips, to which the troops gave a much more impressive cheer.
Chapter 28
It is a strange thing to come back from the dead.
I had clearly been dead; dead in the forest, dead in the shrine to the great kakuy.
I had in fact been dead almost from the moment the Brotherhood raided the temples and found nothing there, counting the hours away until my life was over, until Pontus found me and I was shot or stabbed or beaten to death in the cellar beneath Georg’s house.
Now I sat huddled in the back of the bus as it slowly drifted round the switchback roads to the river below, and even the radio talked of war between the music, and I was, in fact, not dead. With every sign to Budapesht, with every guardia post we passed where no one was in a hurry to shoot me, I came a little bit nearer to living. Had I ever lived before? I had studied in the temple, run through the remnants of the burning forest, reached for Vae’s hand in the river, seen the kakuy, waded through the flood of the Ube, and yet it seemed to me that I had not at any part of this process been alive. This heady drug of living again, this strange cocktail of delirium was, I knew rationally, merely a high from having come so close to dying, rather than any philosophical revelation. And yet now, close my eyes, and here, this blood is hot, and here, this heart is mighty in me, and here, I am alive.
I am alive again.
In Vakch, the bus stopped to recharge at the garage on the edge of town. A station, a little branch line into the city, was twenty minutes’ walk away. The soldiers asked if I wanted an escort, and I shook my head. One started to wave goodbye, and then, realising that no one else did, immediately stopped and looked away, rugged in his detachment.
Alive, I walked through the afternoon sun.
Alive, I walked through the smell of baked goods on hot plates, caught a whiff of fermentation, heard the scream of children fighting as only children can, as if the end of the world had come to their little corner through mysterious ritual and imagined disaster. I passed the open doors of a hearth, smelt fresh resin between newly laid bricks, heard the clicking of the compression battery, looked up into a sky through which the sun briefly broke in tuning forks of illumination before vanishing again behind purple clouds fading to crimson in the west. I passed the telegram office and thought of sending something to my own hearth in Tinics, a world away. Some few words of happiness, of wishing well, and realised there was nothing I could compress into a few hundred characters, no meaning that mattered, and that I needed to go home, and live again.
Opposite the station, a shrine to the kakuy of the winding river and soft marshes that fed this town. Cut reeds stood fresh in a vase by the door. The copper gong that hung beside the gate was warped with use and reuse, melted down and reforged a dozen times, each time growing a little more precious as hi
story was burned away. A novice, barely more than a year out of college, stood before the shrine of the kakuy and called out the evening prayer. Gave thanks for the fire that warmed us through the winter. Gave thanks for the water on our lips. Gave thanks for the wind that carried the day away. Gave thanks that this earth, mightier than we, carried us still through starlight.
I stood in the door of the shrine and could not go in. My hand rested against the timber, but somewhere there was the Brotherhood at my back, watching, watching, and if I went in they would know I was a spy; they would know and I would die, even though I was free and this was madness. I willed my foot over the threshold and could not make it obey, so I turned away and went to the station instead, to find my way to Budapesht.
Chapter 29
Budapesht, seat of the Council, capital of Magyarzag, city of domes.
It had once been two cities either side of the great river. Then the two cities had become one. Then the kakuy came, and the city was two again, the bridges swallowed, the world cracked apart. The first archaeologists who surveyed the ruins were confused by what they found – crumbled concrete and iron bar, slab stone and shattered brick. The groundplans they prised from the earth with their bristled brushes were functional, brutal, square. Were sprawling, luxuriant palaces. Were picked out in tile and terracotta. Were elegant, imposing without being grand, as if the city had not known which world it existed in and so lived within them all.
