The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “Get out of the way!” Cheydar bellowed, running after Dagon.

  Eric took careful aim, pressed the trigger. The hyaenodon stumbled, shook its head. Eric shouldered the air gun, reached up, and hauled himself up onto the oak limb above his head. Dagon met the second hyaenodon like the first, brought it down, heart stabbed. It died vomiting up its last meal in which Cheydar was sure he saw the chewed remains of a human hand. Eric grinned like a maniac from the oak tree. Suen just kept saying, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” But she shrugged away Cheydar’s hand when he rested it on her shoulder. A third hyaenodon retreated into the fog.

  In the middle of the afternoon the fog cleared as far back as they could see through the trees, and the hyaenodon that had been trailing them disappeared. Then they saw a herd of chalicotheres that were the hyaenodon’s usual prey. Perhaps it went after them or returned to the ready source of meat its fellows had become.

  The trail began to cut across the face of a steep slope, and after consulting his map and compass, Cheydar led them down the slope to a fast-moving river, with gravel beds between half submerged slabs of rock. Armour-headed salmon swam in the deeper pools hunting trilobites the size of a human hand. They followed this river downstream and as evening encroached they heard the cadence of waves on a shingle beach and came out of forest by the sea, gleaming in yellow moonlight.

  “Not a place to swim,” said Cheydar, pointing out at a huge fin.

  “It’s only a basking shark,” said Dagon.

  Cheydar looked at him with annoyance.

  “Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked sarcastically.

  Dagon looked at him, didn’t reply.

  They walked on for some while longer until the setting sun illuminated a silver post in the trees above the beach. They climbed above the beach and came upon the post, no closer than five metres. The post was higher than a man and as wide. It was a plain silver cylinder with what could have been runes, or could have been circuit diagrams, etched into its surface.

  Cheydar stared at it and felt a crawling superstitious dread. He had been raised on stories about these things, about the power, the death. So many people had died trying to cross fence lines, or by just crossing accidentally. He glanced to his left, into the forest. No trees grew in line to the next post. There was just short grass and lichen on the ground. It was like this all the way along; trees never grew close enough to a fence where their falling might damage a post. No creepers or vines grew, nothing grew that might obscure posts from view. A human, crossing the line between posts would die, dramatically. Animals crossed the line without ill effect. It was just the way it was.

  “Where are these words?” Suen asked Dagon. He pointed to a framed area on the post and looked at her. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in sudden anger. “And how are we supposed to understand that?”

  “Your husband would have understood it. The language is old-Earth English; the language of scholars, the language that was yours when you came here.”

  “Ours,” said Suen pointedly. She led the way into forest then, keeping to the edge of the trees, away from the death posts.

  Eventually they came to an area where trees had fallen on ground turned boggy, their roots clawing at the sky. Beyond this was a break in the ground risen to head height; a recently risen wall of mud. Just before the break, spring water bubbled and new streams were cutting their way into the forest. They moved away from the fence line and got past this by climbing the trunk of a fallen elm. Above the break only a couple of trees had come down. The ground was dry here, but there were deep cracks in it where it had moved.

  “Underground river,” said Dagon. “Changed its course; undermined everything.” And one of the things it had undermined was a death post. The post was tilted at an angle and glassy underground cables exposed.

  “Here,” said Suen, “if we cross on the side the post is tilted from we will not be harmed.”

  “It is good to be so certain,” said Dagon.

  “You do not have to try,” snapped Suen.

  Cheydar gazed across the line and wondered if he dared cross, even to follow Suen. There was too much dread caught up in the idea. Never before had he so feared death. Perhaps it was because there was nothing here he could fight. He turned to say something to Dagon; anything to ease the tension in him. The snarling bark came just behind him and he was jerked off his feet by his back pack, shaken, then hurled to one side as the straps of his pack broke. He struck a tree and fell to the ground half-stunned and staggeringly tried to right himself as the hyaenodon went for Suen. Air guns cracked and the creature turned, its teeth clashing at the air. Cheydar ran at it, drawing the sword Dagon had given him. He saw Dagon in front of it, sword drawn, ready for the cut, but the creature turned at the last moment and its jaws snapped on the sword and broke it in half. Then it had Dagon in its jaws, shaking him, still running, into fence line. The air filled with lightnings. Clamped in the creature’s jaws, Dagon was sheathed head to foot in fire. The hyaenodon went down, releasing him; a burning thing on the ground that after a moment rose into the air again as if impaled on the lightnings. Cheydar saw this, smelt burning fur and burning flesh, black after-images flickering across his vision. Then the lightnings went out. Dagon’s blackened corpse dropped to the ground beyond the fence, extremities breaking and falling away in charcoal shells. The hyaenodon was not burnt, but it did not move again. Cheydar gritted his teeth over sickness and horrified surprise. Not him, not Dagon, he shouldn’t have died.

  “Why did it kill the hyaenodon?” asked Eric, his voice flat.

  “The power was there to kill a man. The hyaenodon just got in the way because it was holding him in its mouth,” replied Cheydar. They were both standing back by the trees looking at Suen who stood close to the fence and stared at the blackened corpse. What could she possibly say or do now? It was time to turn back and follow David and Sheda to Elmarch. Time to end this pointless quest. Perhaps, thought Cheydar in the most secret part of his mind, for an ending to oaths. Suen had ceased to have a right to his loyalty when she no longer supplied his food, a roof over his head, and a means to decent interment after his death. Only plain stubbornness had kept him with her.

  “What will we do now?” asked Eric.

  Cheydar paused a moment over his reply and saw Suen take a step towards the fence. He did not believe she would go further. She feared death as much as any and a working fence was certain death. In some stories it had even been described as the fence separating the living world from the land of the dead.

  “We will go to Elmarch, perhaps down the coast so we avoid all the Cariphe’s lands. We’ll take service there. Perhaps the army…No!”

  Suen was striding towards the blackened corpse of the Daybreak Warrior. Cheydar ran after her with Eric close behind him. They did not reach her in time. She crossed the line of the fence, came to stand over the corpse. Cheydar hesitated only a moment at the line, Eric not at all. As they reached her she was breathing heavily and had an insane look to her face. Cheydar realised she had meant to die. The fence had not killed her, perhaps something had gone wrong, burnt out. Cheydar realised he was shaking. He reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder, but at that moment she dropped to her knees and bowed down, sobbing. Cheydar felt sick with fear after the fact. He glanced at Eric whose face was now white with shock at the realisation of what they had done. They had crossed the fence. They were in the Forbidden Zone.

  Digging with Dagon’s broken sword and the pan Cheydar carried, they buried what remained of the warrior and stabbed the broken sword in the ground to mark the spot. By the time this was done they had all regained a certain grim composure. They would go on and find this building that contained Proctors, and then…Cheydar had no idea what would happen then. Perhaps the Proctors would kill them for being in the Forbidden Zone. Perhaps Suen would lead them to Ompotec and there exterminate the Cariphe and his priest soldiers. Whatever, Cheydar preferred to walk forwards. He doubted he would have the nerve
left to turn around and walk back through the fence. In the long shadows of evening, after covering perhaps two miles, they built a fire and roasted a wild pig Eric had shot only a short distance from the fence. It was one of the normal kind; similar to the domesticated ones, not one of the forest giants Cheydar had heard tell of. They really did not need another encounter like the one with the hyaenadons.

  “I thought there was something special about him,” said Eric. “He stood watch all night without moving.”

  “There was something special about him,” said Cheydar. “He was a great warrior, fearless and strong. It took death posts to stop him. Nothing else could.” He looked at Suen who was staring out into the darkness. “What did you think, my lady?”

  “He knew things, and he was not one of us,” she said. “He wasn’t meant to die.”

  “None of us are,” said Cheydar, then he stood to take the first watch. As he stepped away from the light of the fire to stand in darkness, he felt bitter. Her final comment had been right, he felt, yet he dared not admit to himself why he thought this was so. He walked a circuit in the darkness then slowly made his way back to the fire where he sat warming his back and watching. A chill breeze shifted the fire behind him when he had been watching for an hour. This slowly increased in strength and in only a few minutes the others had woken.

  “Winter is upon us,” said Suen, sitting up with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Cheydar wondered why he thought this comment so futile and why he felt that this wind had nothing to do with Winter. It grew in strength, at first a muted roar through the trees blowing leaves before it. Then its strength increased. Soon the roar was no longer muted and a blizzard of leaves was blasting across their campsite. The flames from the fire came out below the stack of wood and flat along the ground. Out in the darkness a tree went down with an abrupt crash, then another. They huddled against the wind. Cheydar tossed a log on the fire and this prevented it being blasted away. The wind fed it leaves and it spat out sprays of embers.

  “This is not right!” he shouted over the roar. Suen and Eric just stared at him. They were in the Forbidden Zone Who knew what was right? Cheydar looked up, why, he did not know. “God save us,” he said, and they heard his words clear and gazed up as well.

  Steeleye, the third moon, now filled a quarter of the sky, gigantic, impossibly close. It wasn’t a moon like the others. Cheydar realised he had always known that. It was one of those things never spoken of in the Cariphate; it was a moon put there by god to light our nights. Heretical to believe otherwise. Cheydar saw the constructions on its surface; the angular shapes and the towers, the glint of power, vast cities of machines, giant ramscoop engines, and the flare plates of fusion drives…here, no moon fallen in place by the luck of natural forces brought to balance, but a ship, a ship so vast it stunned the mind, a Great Ship. Here then was the Vardalex; the Owner’s ship. And as Cheydar stared, wondering when he might be crushed, red fire flashed and swirled between constructs the size of mountains and flashed down, here, there, again and again.

  “That was over Ompotec!” Eric shouted.

  Cheydar wanted to crawl under his blanket and hide, or he wanted to get up and shout at the sky. He sat, unable to move. There could be no doubt; this was the stuff of ancient stories, of the wars they had fled, of vast ships and planet-destroying powers. What of Ompotec? Granted the place was a sack of scorpions, but there were good people there as well.

  “The wind is easing,” he said, because it was, and there seemed little else to say. He lowered his gaze, returned his attention to the forest, to things he could deal with. “Suen, Eric.” They turned to him, then turned to see what he saw, said nothing, again, what was there to say?

  The Proctor stood five paces from the fire, leaning on a thick metal staff intagliated like a death post. It was eight feet tall, robed and hooded, but the hood not enough to hide the eyeless leathery head and grim slit of a mouth. It gestured with one huge six-fingered hand. It wanted them to follow, this was clear. Cheydar stood up. At least it had not killed them, perhaps it intended to throw them out of the Forbidden Zone. Eric and Suen stood also. They grabbed up their belongings and followed the Proctor into the darkness and the leaves, and the cold blast of the wind. It was leading them away from the fence, Cheydar realised.

  As they walked bowed through the darkness the wind began to abate, and a stinging hail rattled on the leaves. Every few hundred paces Cheydar had to look up at the sky to remind himself what was happening. He tried to recapture the excitement he had felt as a youth when Steeleye had first appeared in the sky. There was awe, but with it the wisdom of age had brought fear. He saw that after the first time Suen did not look up again. She stared resolutely ahead and was the first to see the grey loom of the building in the darkness, and the dark mouth of a doorway. The Proctor led them into that darkness.

  “This must be the place,” said Suen. There was something avid in her voice. Cheydar surveyed the dusty gloom and wondered at it. He had not been able to see much beyond the grey bulk of this place in the concealing trees, but it had not seemed to him to be of any great extent. The Proctor had gone to one side. He could hear it moving about. Suddenly there was light. Suen gasped. Eric swore.

  “Nothing here,” said Cheydar. He turned to the Proctor for answers and saw that it just stood with its back to the wall, waiting, patient as a stone. Something stirred then. Air feathered his face. He turned, felt Eric’s fingers digging into his biceps, heard Suen moan with fright, felt his legs go weak and his stomach turn over.

  “No Proctors here but Galeb,” said the apparition. “He stayed for whatever reasons Proctors have. His fellows went to other worlds, other civilizations, a long time ago. There is nothing here for you.” Cheydar could see Dagon in there; in the shape of the face, somewhat in the tone of the voice, but otherwise this could not be mistaken for anything less than the Owner himself. His eyes were pupil-less red, and he was pale like an albino, half-seen machines hung about him, were connected to him, plugged down into sockets in his head, neck and spine; his link with the ship and with the rest of a mind that had outgrown its human skull, his mind. He seemed solid, the machines less so. There was a feeling of power in the air, of forces bearing down on this point like mountains turned on their tips.

  “You…the Owner,” said Suen.

  Dagon, the Owner, looked at her and she flinched back.

  “Didn’t you know that?” he asked.

  “I thought…but you died.”

  “Dagon is just an aspect of me, a part of me, the oldest part and a part not yet reintegrated else Ompotec would still be standing and the Cariphe’s garrison still living.”

  The red fire, thought Cheydar, and felt a deep vicious satisfaction.

  “What do you mean?” asked Suen.

  “I do not interfere in human affairs,” said the Owner. “The Cariphe would not have lasted. The King of Elmarch was preparing to bring him down even as your husband burned…All part of the ebb and flow in the tide of human affairs.” There was a shimmer. Something changed. The machines became distant and Cheydar saw that the eyes were no longer red.

  “But I do interfere in human affairs.” And it was Dagon speaking now; the man they had travelled with. He looked directly at Suen. “Proctors would have done no good, but this has, for you. When I died on the fence all that I was returned here to this.” He gestured behind him at the half-seen machines. “I held my integrity long enough to open the fence, to destroy the Cariphate. That I speak to you like this, now, is a boon my whole self grants. There will be more killing, Suen, when the army of Elmarch hunts down the last of the priest soldiers. But once the King has access to the mines around Ompotec, a new age will be born. You’ll see the start of that.” He turned to Eric. “Join the the Border Legion, like I said. You’ll do well there.” Finally he regarded Cheydar. “And you…do what you must. You are a good man, Cheydar.” There was pain then in Dagon’s face. The last he managed was, “I’ve been before, perhaps…s
ometime…”

  “Wait,” said Cheydar, and knew his request to be futile. The Owner was back, the eyes like a fire seen through rubies. The machines showing a solid face turned out from that other place where they were, somewhere above.

  The Owner said, “That is all. Galeb will lead you to the fence. The death posts will be reactivated in the morning.”

  “But you can’t—” began Suen, a note of righteousness in her voice that had Cheydar cringing. The Owner interrupted, “Suen, you are on my property. You have until morning not to be. Galeb will lead you and if you will not go he will kill you. That is all.”

  Air dragged at them as it rushed to fill the space the Owner had occupied. Dagon had been there even at the end, but buried under layers of something ancient and frighteningly complex. Cheydar took Suen by the arm and led her out. Eric followed, trying not to grin at such adventure.

  “We’ll go by the coast to Elmarch, find David and Sheda,” said Cheydar, wondering if Suen would ever be able to live.

  “Yes,” she said, and leant against him. He shrugged her off and followed the grey shape of the Proctor into the dark.

  ABOUT “THE TOR-BEAST’S PRISON”

  Now onto the additions to this collection. The Tor-beast’s Prison was first published in Graeme Hurry’s excellent Kimota (issue 13, 2000), is an off-shoot of Cowl, but not the novel, the novella that came before it. I guess I have always liked time travel ever since hiding behind the settee when Dr Who was running away from those mobile dustbins. In a story-telling context, I love the self-referencing logic of it all and how very often the story arc can be tied into a loop. And now, proving that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction: I wrote Cowl (the novella) with its tors and its tor beast, before any publisher called Tor had even impinged on my consciousness. Strange how I am now being published in America by Tor and in Britain by Macmillan’s Tor UK imprint. A bit loopy really.