Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Monika as she remembered the white-clad arm stabbing her with a syringe, injecting the chem-restraint into her while she was trying to convince the inquisitor of the imminent attack.

  ‘Let me see your other hand, Amalia.’

  The Sister’s eyes widened, which was all the proof Monika needed. She fired, the sound of the autopistol drowned out by the roar of the typhoon. Sister Amalia’s head snapped back and her body collapsed on the landing pad. A small chem-restraint syringe bounced from her dead hand to roll away across the rain-drenched rockcrete.

  Monika punched her old code into the lander’s keypad, smiling when the ship unlocked for her. She could hear a chorus of screams from deep within the abbey announcing the arrival of the full force of the drukhari, but the door soon closed behind her, sealing her away from the wind, rain and noise. She slid into the cockpit, firing the lander into its pre-flight sequence. If the Ilarch wanted to waste her time searching a hospital full of maniacs and traitors, she was welcome. By the time the drukhari pirate realised her quarry wasn’t there, Monika would be gone. It was only a short jump to a port city, to a black market identity and to freedom. Let the Inquisition think her dead, let the drukhari think her vanished. It no longer mattered what other people thought about her.

  Lifting off from the landing pad, Monika banked in a wide loop and flew into the storm.

  Cade peered out from between the mountain crags and gazed across the forbidden lands beyond the Cradle. He was always struck by how those rolling prairies below seemed limitless, unbounded by the sheer cliffs that enclosed his own domain. He tried to pick out roads or villages, or perhaps one of those great walled cities of which Abi had spoken. He had been born somewhere out there in that ocean of green. In a farmhouse, perhaps. Or some lofty palace tower. Who knew? His parents had known, their graves lost too beneath these darkening skies.

  Cade squinted at the storm clouds mounting a barricade across the horizon, seemingly in defiance of the prevailing wind.

  A voice bellowed up at him from behind and he jumped in fright, almost losing his grip on the rocks.

  ‘Get down from there, boy!’

  He looked back to see Barrion frowning up at him from below, a tusked hog slung across his huge shoulders and a brace of purple gillybirds strangled at his belt.

  ‘I got tired of waiting for you,’ said Cade, feigning annoyance as he clambered down the rock face as casually as he could manage.

  The master hunter continued barking at his apprentice as he descended. ‘What’s gotten into you, lad? You know the Lands Beyond are not for your eyes. Nor for anyone’s.’ His icy blue stare was livid above the black beard that consumed the lower half of his face. ‘Unless you want the Nothings to come after you.’

  Cade could not help but shiver at Barrion’s words and hoped his companion hadn’t noticed.

  ‘I’m too old to be scared by fairy tales, Barrion.’

  ‘Disobey the Horned Throne and you’ll soon see what’s a fairy tale and what’s not, lad.’

  Cade jumped down beside him and threw him a look of defiance.

  Barrion chuckled. ‘Oh, so he’s a big man now at seventeen harvests old? Big enough to carry that all the way back to the village, is he?’

  Barrion indicated the enormous dead stag that Cade had somehow managed to roll onto a makeshift sled. It must have been some ten harvests old, its antlers grown to a sprawl. The thing weighed as heavy as sin, heavier still after being hauled from the woods in which Cade had killed it, those antlers catching on every root and branch on its way out.

  Barrion shook his head. ‘Did I not explain that we were coming up here for small game? Sweetmeats, Cade. Easy to carry. The harvest feast is tonight. Do you think the women will have time to prepare a beast that size? ’Tis a mortal waste.’

  Cade spoke excitedly. ‘I was in the trees gathering eggs when he plodded out the woods beneath me. The wind was before me for an hour. He had no notion I was there. It would have been a mortal waste not to take him.’

  ‘And how many herds did you scare away in taking him down?’

  Cade grinned. ‘One shot, straight in the eye.’ He patted the slender throwing axes at his belt.

  ‘Like hell, you did,’ said Barrion, taking a sudden interest in the corpse. Cade waited, and Barrion concluded his inspection with a snort. ‘And why did you feel the need to perform such a feat, lad? Who were you looking to impress by dragging this monster through the village?’

  Cade swallowed. ‘No one.’

  Barrion eyed him doubtfully and spat over the trail’s ledge.

  ‘A man should choose his burdens wisely,’ he said and trudged away, muttering under his breath. Cade grabbed the rungs of the sled and dragged it behind him, the stag’s weight already unbearable. He clattered down the narrow mountain trail after Barrion, careful to avoid the sheer drop beside them as they descended towards their village buried deep in the foothills below.

  They walked in silence until evening threatened the sky, casting an orange gloom over the horseshoe of mountains that encompassed the Cradle, shielding it from the Lands Beyond. Cloud-shadows crawled down those grey slopes, down acres of purple heather, over the bristling green woods and across the lake, a gleaming grey sheet spread across the valley’s basin.

  The Cradle was said to be accessible by a single secret road known only to the Matriarchs. But Cade knew the truth. The mountains were not completely impassable. His exploits as a hunter had taken him into every corner of the valley and he knew where in the lower ranges a man might pass into the Lands Beyond. Yet he also knew ancient measures had been put in place to prevent such excursions.

  The trail followed a bend and the Tor came into view. It had been carved out of the shoulders of the northern mountains aeons ago, a huge monarch reclining upon His throne. Even from this distance, Cade could see His cloven hooves awash with bright tributes of summer flowers and wicker poppets. The Horned King bowed His great goat’s head, forever contemplating His kingdom.

  Cade mumbled a prayer. ‘I am an orphan of the Cradle. I give thanks to the Horned Throne. He is sky and soil, root and branch.’

  A cooling breeze blessed him with the scent of wildflowers. The smell reminded him of his boyhood, exhausted in bed after a day of mad games in the fields with his friends, cool sheets wrapped tight and safe around him. How empty of such excitement and comfort the Cradle seemed to him now. For all its majesty, the valley seemed devoid of allure and mystery these days. The Horned Father could give him no answers and all Cade had was questions he wished he could ignore. Why were they forbidden from leaving the Cradle? What was out there in the Lands Beyond?

  Barrion was trying to break the ice.

  ‘A fine harvest this year, lad. Enough to brew twice the mead we had last year. I doubt we’ll wake ’til long past sunrise two days hence.’

  Cade grunted, preoccupied, his arms in torment, though he was determined not to show it as he dragged the clattering sled behind him.

  ‘You know Estrilda?’ tried Barrion. ‘That dark-haired one from the stables? She was asking after you. Wanted to know where you’d be seated at the feast tonight. That Sara from the smithy asked the same, and so did her sister.’ He laughed.

  Cade scowled. Barrion clearly thought him a fool, a child, easily patronised.

  ‘Fish from the rivers, fruit from the soil, girls from the village.’ Barrion winked. ‘The Cradle provides, lad. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’

  ‘You’re wrong about Abi,’ Cade said.

  Barrion stopped dead and turned with a look of concern.

  ‘The rest of us call her “Abigael”, lad. When we have to. Sounds like you two have become close. For how long?’

  ‘Long enough to know that what everyone says about her is not true.’

  ‘’Tis true she’s trouble, lad.�
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  ‘So you keep telling me.’

  ‘So does everyone in the blasted village, but still you won’t listen.’ Barrion managed to staunch his frustration and laid gentle hands on Cade’s shoulders. ‘Understand. She’s not…’ Barrion struggled to find the words. ‘She’s not right! She doesn’t fit. You know even the Matriarchs couldn’t divine a use for her.’

  Cade snorted. ‘Abi shamed them all, that’s why. She could interpret the old scrolls better than any in the cloisters.’

  ‘And questioned those scrolls too often, which is why she’s shovelling dung in the goat pens these days. Not only that, she’s got your nose turned places it shouldn’t be. What are you thinking? I can see she’s got pretty eyes and a full figure. Come on, lad. Tell me that’s all you’re after…’

  Cade calmly set down the sled.

  ‘Speak of her that way again, Barrion,’ he said, ‘and see if I don’t raise my hand to you.’

  Barrion stepped back, muttering in astonishment.

  ‘It’s as they say, then,’ he said. ‘First she has you peering over the walls into the Lands Beyond. Then she has you threaten your master without a glint of fear in your eye. She has a hex upon you, lad, whether you know it or not. I knew she was wrong. She’s a mistake. She doesn’t belong here.’

  ‘Of course she belongs here, Barrion. She’s an orphan like us. Like all of us. She was sent to the Cradle from the Lands Beyond to be cared for after her parents died.’

  Cade jabbed his finger at the Tor. ‘Is that not His custom? The creed of the Horned Throne welcomed her. If there’s a mistake, Barrion, then is it not of His making?’

  The blow landed hard across Cade’s cheek, knocking him onto the sled. The stag shifted beneath him, the sled slipping down a shelf of rock onto the ledge beside the trail. He went to stop it, but Barrion grabbed him by his tunic, lifting him off his feet and bellowing in his face.

  ‘No orphan leaves the Cradle! That is His law. He provides and so we obey. That is His custom. For even one of us to cross the boundary would bring ruin to us all.’

  Cade struggled but Barrion’s arms were like branches of oak, his teeth bared behind his spit-flecked whiskers.

  ‘The Matriarchs cannot protect her forever, boy. Not when she persists with her blasphemies, and poisons others with them.’

  Cade looked down. The sled’s escape had been stopped by a sapling, perilously close to the brink. Realising his own feet hovered near the ledge, he grabbed Barrion’s arms for fear of being dropped. The man glared back at his apprentice, eyes cold.

  ‘Folk won’t stand for it,’ Barrion said. ‘And nor will I.’

  ‘She’s not what you think she is,’ Cade said. ‘She’s not a witch.’

  Before Barrion could answer, their attention was stolen by a soft but insistent chime, carried upon the wind. The village bell. Someone far below was hammering that bronze shell in a panic. Barrion flung Cade to the ground, shrugged the dead hog from his shoulders and bolted down the slope like a hound. Cade’s own heart rang as he gathered himself to sprint after him. The great stag shifted on the slope beside him, then vanished over the ledge. Cade peered after it. He watched the animal tumble through the air for a second before it cast a sheet of blood and spinning splinters over the rocks below.

  The goats had got loose. They were everywhere – braying, humping, clashing in the streets. They nibbled at the white cloths laid upon the feasting tables, spilling empty plates and cups onto a ground now strewn with dung. They gobbled fruit from the overturned horn-baskets woven by the children in annual thanks for the Horned Father’s protection. The animals munched and gazed stupidly as their human keepers raced about them.

  Cade stumbled and kicked his way through the whinnying throng, close behind Barrion as he entered the village. The alarm bell had ceased long before they arrived, but the place remained in a state of panic. Cade saw frightened nursemaids dragging children behind doors, infants bawling. Men rifled through sheds, barns and cellars, frantically searching. Cade froze as he heard one of them call out.

  ‘Abigael?’

  Barrion grabbed one of the field workers and demanded to know what was going on.

  ‘The queer one,’ the man said. ‘She’s gone missing, slipped away. Some say she’s already fled the Cradle!’

  Cade’s legs were reeds in a gale, his belly an empty pit. Abi was gone? She had been so distant these last few weeks, fearful. The awful logic of her disappearance knocked him dizzy. Perhaps she was only hiding in the woods. Perhaps she had stumbled upon a bear or a pack of sabre-wolves.

  Perhaps she was even more reckless than he thought. She may have crossed the boundary into the Lands Beyond, and she had done so without him.

  ‘Where is she?’ Barrion had Cade by his jacket once again, shaking him, flecking Cade’s face with spit.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cade spluttered.

  Cade had never seen Barrion so wild, his lips curled, snarling like a cornered bear.

  ‘You two are wedded in this mischief, I know it. Now tell me!’

  ‘Upon the Father,’ Cade said. ‘I know not.’

  Barrion swore and dragged Cade beside him as he lurched on, towards the heart of the village. He called others to his side, a captain rousing men to war.

  Cade did not struggle; his mind was too addled. Had she crossed the boundary already? Was he and every other orphan in the village already doomed? How could she be so callous? Again, that awful logic reminded him. She had terrified him in the past with talk of the Lands Beyond, yet intrigued him with her theories that nothing at all would happen should anyone leave the Cradle. The warnings of the Matriarchs were but an empty custom, she insisted.

  She had told Cade of things that she had read in the ancient scriptures, things that men like Barrion would call blasphemy, grounds for murder, even. She had been vague in detail, but seemed to suggest that the cult of the Horned Father was but a fragment of a truth greater and more glorious than any of their people might realise. Cade knew her certainty had been absolute; as absolute as her fear of those who hated her.

  But what if she was wrong? No one knew what punishment the Horned Father might visit upon His children for their disobedience. Tavern scholars spoke of harvests crumbling to ash or a winter that would freeze them to death in their homes. Others spoke of ghost stories heard as children, of spirits known as the Nothings. Then men would discreetly make the sign of the Horn-Star and talk would progress to other matters.

  Barrion hauled him into the village square amid a throng of other villagers, dragging him up to the huge table erected upon the steps of the Cloven Altar. Here the Matriarchs, honoured brides of the Horned Father, should have been sat feasting. Instead, Mother Alder stood alone, already addressing a fearful crowd. She wore only her green shift, still looking tall and proud, though shockingly plain and vulnerable without her veil of leaves and horned crown. The crowd had gathered bows and muskets. Torches had been lit, fogging the evening air with the angry stink of smoke and hot resin.

  Barrion thrust Cade into the arms of another man with orders to hold him tight. Cade felt strong hands gripping his jacket as he watched Barrion shoulder through the crowd, unsling his hunting bow and kneel as he presented it to Mother Alder. Ice wriggled down Cade’s spine as he heard Barrion speak.

  ‘In the name of the Horned Father, for the safety of the Cradle and its orphans,’ he said. ‘Mother, bless this, my humble weapon, for a witch may only be killed by an instrument thus sanctified.’

  Cade cried out, jostled by the crowd. ‘She’s not a witch!’

  ‘Whatever she is,’ said Barrion, still staring up at Mother Alder. ‘She means to cross the boundary and bring the Horned Father’s wrath upon us all.’

  Mother Alder looked weary. ‘You don’t know that, Barrion. None of you know that.’

  ‘She has stolen food and water from the stores,
’ someone cried.

  ‘And clothes from our porch,’ yelled another.

  Another was angrier still. ‘She flirts with blasphemy before our children, and she has done so for too long.’

  The men roared their approval, but Mother Alder did not wilt before the blast, though her handsome face darkened with a private sorrow.

  ‘Mother, quickly,’ Barrion said. ‘She may have passed the stones already.’

  Cade cried out as Mother Alder raised her hand.

  ‘Make it swift,’ she told Barrion, then made the sign of the Horn-Star over his bow, then over the lowered heads of the assembled. The men received her grim sanction with admirable humility. For they were to murder one of their own, an orphan of the Cradle.

  ‘But where are we to start looking?’ one of them hissed.

  ‘Fear not,’ another replied. ‘Cade here is the finest tracker in the Cradle.’

  The man’s words trailed off. Cade had already sidled from the crowd and he imagined his captor’s astonishment at the sight of the vacant jacket in his hand. He felt a glint of satisfaction and shivered as he scurried away down a darkened lane.

  Cade found her trail heading upstream. Blades of grass were broken, torn by the passage of stiff shoes, the kind worn by one who meant to travel far. He wet his parched mouth with a scoop of chill water then stooped to examine the ground. The emerald moon blazed green, full ripe tonight. Cade felt comforted by the presence of that great shining apple still dangling above his benighted world.

  The grass had not been pressed beneath any great weight. The shorter, stiffer reeds had already sprung back in place. Abi had passed through here less than an hour ago, ploughing this subtle furrow through the pasture as she hurried uphill. The stream wriggled for a quarter-league up the mountainside, a green snake glittering in the moonlight as it passed a dense line of trees that Cade knew all too well. A good long run lay ahead of him – longer still for Abi, a scribe from the cloisters unused to traversing the wild. But Cade could see no figure moving along the glimmering waters ahead, no tell-tale shadow creeping about the distant banks.