Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  He kept in the background and out of everybody’s way as best he could, trying to get the sense of how these people worked. The unbelievable shoddiness of their bodged carpentry made him wonder how the whole structure didn’t just break apart and float away, though he imagined that they were all very proud of how well they were ‘making do’. He spent a while watching the black man and the boy struggling to lash together a framework for one of their shelters – they kept tangling up the rope’s leading end with their feet and having to start again – before sheer frustration moved him to intervene.

  ‘Look, coil it like this,’ he said, grabbing it off them and flicking it around his elbow with a few deft turns which left it stacked neatly out of the way. He was surprised to find that it actually felt good working a line again after so long. ‘And that’s just going to fall apart if you so much as piss the wrong way. Ain’t either of you ever heard of a shear lashing?’

  Seb and Joe looked at him blankly.

  Degan sighed, picked up the rope again and showed them.

  Bobby watched this awhile and then turned back to helping Lachlan stacking piles of dreamwrack for the fire. ‘It looks like the new chap is starting to settle,’ he commented.

  ‘He would, if he could curb his gutter mouth,’ Lachlan replied, unimpressed. ‘It’s been less than forty-eight hours. Let’s not be in a hurry to give him the keys to the city.’

  Mercifully for Degan, they asked him no questions about who he was or where he’d come from. The hints he picked up from their conversations suggested that he should be shocked into a state of amnesia, and he was happy enough to play along. During the evening meal – his second there but the first of which he was properly conscious – their talk was all of weather, currents, the conditions of the booms and the treasures that had been thrown up in the previous nights’ dreamwrack, whatever that was. He wasn’t expected to join in, and nothing was demanded of him. He’d helped repair a shelter, in return for which he’d been given food, and that simple arrangement seemed to suit them.

  Degan distrusted it profoundly.

  In his experience no arrangement was ever that simple. There were always conditions and hidden agendas. Dress it up any way you liked – in religious commandments, political alliances or naval regulations – there was always someone getting shafted, and someone doing the shafting. He sat eating his fish stew in watchful silence, seeing the firelight on their happy, empty, chatting faces, and knew that it was going to be the simplest thing in the world to keep them sweet just long enough to find out whose hand turned the wheels around here – and then cut it off.

  But he found out who that was much sooner than he’d expected when the beaded curtain parted and Sophie came out to join them, trailing her long chain behind.

  It was all he could do to keep from leaping up and gutting her then and there – or running in terror, he couldn’t tell which. The stew was suddenly a mouthful of dry fishbones. The fire baked sweat out of his pores, despite the gooseflesh which stippled his arms. He couldn’t breathe.

  It was her. There was no way it could possibly be her, of course, that went without saying, but it made no difference to what his eyes were seeing: Vanessa Gail. The witch who had thrown him back here like a reject from somebody’s catch.

  And she looked right through him as if she’d never seen him before in her life. As if butter wouldn’t fucking melt.

  ‘You okay, man?’ Seb asked, concerned.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ He manufactured a cough and thumped his chest. ‘Just a bone, I think. Pass me that water, would you?’

  He drank, and he laughed, and he joined in with the small talk, and later – when everybody was snoring their stupid, complacent heads off – he found a knife and went to have words with the woman who had exiled him in his own world.

  4

  Sophie was reading a book by her pool, and the flickering light of her lamp competed with its own sinuous reflections on the ceiling beams and walls. She looked up as he came in, and provided a small, polite smile.

  ‘It’s late,’ she said.

  ‘Oh sweetie, you’re good,’ he sneered. ‘Even with nobody around you’re still going to pretend that you’ve never seen me before. Well you can cut that shit out right now.’

  She laid the book aside and got to her feet, confusion and fear in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Degan, I swear I don’t…’

  ‘Send me back!’ he barked and drew the knife.

  ‘Send you…?’

  ‘Back! Back to the world, bitch! Back through that fucking painting of yours!’

  He lunged and grabbed her by the throat before she could call for help. He didn’t have any of the power which had bled through to him from here when he was in the Realt, and he was still weak from his time adrift, but nevertheless he outweighed her considerably. He drove her back against the wall of her chamber, the only thing putting up any resistance being the length of chain which clanked out of the pool link by link after her. He held the point of the knife to the soft underside of her chin.

  ‘Send me back,’ he repeated with soft menace, his face inches from hers, his breath stinking. ‘I don’t know how it is that you’re here and there at the same time, and I don’t give a fuck. Send me back, or I will gut you where you stand.’

  Her lips moved. She was trying to say something. He eased the pressure on her throat slightly so that he could hear better. It was barely a whisper, and it sounded like: ‘Wake up.’

  ‘What do you mean, “wake up”? I’m already awake, that’s the fucking problem.’

  She smiled painfully. ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’

  There was the sound of water moving behind him. Then something black lashed itself around his waist and hauled him backwards with appalling strength, straight into the pool at the centre of the chamber. Water closed over his head before he had a chance to so much as catch a breath, and panic made him gasp a burning lungful of water. He couldn’t see anything in the night-black pool except the shimmering brightness of its surface, already impossibly far above him, and he could feel other things wrapping themselves around his thighs, his torso, his arms, his head. Too late, he remembered Maddox’s briefing back at the Park. It isn’t from anywhere in either your world or this one, he’d said. It’s from Between. At the moment we believe it to be dormant.

  It didn’t seem to be dormant any longer.

  His scream disappeared upwards in a stream of unseen bubbles, and those things were tightening, crushing him as he was dragged deeper into darkness. Then they weren’t just crushing, but biting too, scissoring through his clothes and into his flesh like ribbons of razor wire. And even that wasn’t as bad as the feeling that something similar had wrapped itself around his brain and was feeding on the terror that it found there, luxuriating in his horror at the violation being inflicted upon him, feasting on his soul as well as his body. Then the blackness was inside him too, and in the end it was everything.

  Chapter 23

  Mind-Forged Manacles

  1

  Bobby was dreaming about earthquakes.

  He was back on the quay at Timini, surrounded by Hooper’s thugs and watching helplessly as Allie was carried aboard their clunking great steamer, but every time he tried to take a step forward to stop them, the ground bucked under his feet, throwing him off balance. The motion became so violent that it woke him up, but even as he struggled out of sleep, he found that it had somehow followed him. The hammock in which he and Allie lay curled was rocking wildly, as if someone in passing had given it a good hard tug. But everybody else was asleep. Impossible as it seemed, Stray itself was moving. The huge raft was pitching up and down – a movement it had never been designed to suffer, and it was voicing its protest in a loud creaking and snapping of timber.

  He fell out of the hammock, Allie a moment later. The other Strays were rousing too, their shouts and cries of co
nfusion coming from all over.

  ‘It’s a storm!’ yelled Lachlan, his voice high with panic. ‘God help us, we’ll break apart!’

  ‘Is he right?’ Allie sat up, rubbing her head where it had smacked into the deck.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Bobby got to his feet – which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. It was like when he’d been given the bumps on his birthday at boarding school, tossed up in a blanket once for each year; trying to stand up on that. ‘For one thing it’s not raining.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Ten to one it’s got something to do with Sophie. Wait here.’

  ‘Screw that,’ she replied, and staggered after him as he reeled toward the Hub.

  2

  They found Sophie grimly hauling, with every sinew in her body as tight as cords, at the chain which led from her wrist into the pool – and stopped, shocked. The water was turbulent, as if boiling, and bright red.

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed through clenched teeth. ‘Both of you! Get out before it kills you too!’

  Ignoring her, Bobby grabbed the chain below her hands and added his strength to hers. The chain was as unyielding as a metal bar and thrumming beneath his hands like a guitar string. If he’d ever gone deep-sea fishing he would have recognised the sensation for what it was: something on the other end was fighting back. Something absolutely huge.

  Allie moved to join him.

  ‘No!’ he grunted. ‘Get the others first.’

  ‘NO!’ Sophie protested.

  ‘But…’ Allie hovered, uncertain.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he groaned, ‘for once will you just bloody do it?’

  She did it.

  Abruptly the chain was dragged sharply left, almost jerking Bobby off his feet, and it ground against the edge of the pool hard enough to splinter the wood. Then it repeated the action to the right, and back again, like a dog worrying at a slipper. It was as much as he could do to simply hold on, never mind pull. How the girl had managed it…

  Something wrapped itself around his lower leg. It was dark and thick and muscular; he could see and feel it pulsate as it adjusted its grip – then agony exploded in his calf as teeth on the tentacles’s underside shredded his flesh, and it started to drag him towards the water. Sophie shrieked at it in anger, let go of the chain and threw herself on him, wrapping her arms in a fierce bear-hug while he howled at the pain. More tentacles emerged from the water and fastened about the pair of them, exploring. Tasting. But they shuddered as they touched her and recoiled from both – the one slipping from his leg with the wetness of his own blood – and slithered back into the pool.

  Then the chamber seemed to be full of shouting people: Seb whacking the surface of the water with a wooden pole, Lachlan dragging at Bobby’s arm, Marjorie’s face simply an O of paralysed shock, and Sophie clinging to him and moaning into his shoulder: ‘Get them out of here Bobby, please get them out of here. It’ll kill them all. It’ll kill every last one of them, just like before, and I can only hold it, I can’t stop it. I can’t ever stop it.’

  Then Marjorie said – in a very quiet voice which nevertheless seemed to cut through the chaos – ‘Oh. Oh my. That’s. Well that’s quite…’

  Something thick and muscular was draped across her shoulders, almost casually, like the arm of an old friend.

  She was gone with barely a splash.

  ‘NOOOOOOOO!’ Lachlan’s howl threatened to burst the very timbers around them as he threw himself after her. Seb rugby-tackled him and brought him down at the very edge of the pool, close enough for him to paw desperately at the surface, making awful, raw animal noises of denial.

  ‘Bobby!’ Sophie’s eyes burned at him. ‘They will all die if you do not get them out of here now!’

  Somehow he managed to do it – limping, bleeding, driving them out of the chamber with pleas and curses and shoves, and then up onto the Hub as high as they could get, as far away from the water as possible, until they collapsed sobbing under the indifferent stars.

  3

  Towards dawn, an exhausted-looking Sophie joined them. ‘It’s a bit quieter now,’ she said, and sat with her head in her hands, the long chain still trailing.

  The others just looked at her.

  ‘It,’ echoed Allie.

  ‘The araka. The thing under Stray which none of you believed in. Crazy little Miss Sophie,’ she added bitterly.

  ‘Don’t you dare say you told us so,’ whispered Lachlan hoarsely; his throat was raw with a night’s weeping. Joe lay curled in his lap, but he was awake, staring at nothing as his father stroked his hair absently. ‘Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Sorry Stuart, but I did. All of you. Repeatedly.’

  Lachlan closed his eyes and moaned.

  ‘What happened to Degan?’ asked Seb.

  She hesitated. ‘I’m not sure. He was in my room – we were talking – he must have been too close to the pool, or something, because one second everything was fine and the next it just came out and… and took him.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ insisted Lachlan. ‘I’ve been in your room plenty of times – all of us have – and nothing like that has ever happened before.’

  ‘It was only a matter of time. I tried to warn you.’

  ‘This is pointless,’ said Bobby. He didn’t believe a word of her story, but couldn’t be bothered trying to force the truth out of her. It didn’t matter – the man was dead. ‘What is it? How did it get here?’

  ‘How do we kill it?’ added Seb.

  Sophie gave a hollow laugh. ‘You can’t kill it. I’d have done that years ago. The best that can be done is to keep it chained up and out of harm’s way. It’s been in me since I was a child – in my mind, I mean. It’s not a physical thing. At least, not usually, not in the normal world. It is here.’

  ‘Making about as much sense as ever,’ Allie muttered.

  ‘It wasn’t in me at first. It was in my parents. It’s like a parasite that only exists in your mind. My Dad was a soldier; I think he must have picked it up in Afghanistan. It feeds on the pain that it inflicts by making a person do terrible things, and it moves from one person to another when they’re dreaming. It was feeding off them for years, and just before I got taken into care it moved into me. I already had Vessa to help me, but we knew it was only a matter of time before it moved out of me and into one of the other kids. We couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t kill it, couldn’t get rid of it. All I could think to do was stop sleeping and prevent it from getting out. I didn’t think I’d end up here, but I did, and the araka came too, chained to me. It wasn’t very happy, but after a while it was too weak to do anything about it. I made Stray to live on, and the Flats to keep people away, and Vessa did my dreaming for me, and everything was fine until you people started to appear. And now it’s woken up. If you’ve got any sense, you will too. Go back to the real world, please. I’m begging you.’

  ‘That’s not an option for some of us,’ said Allie coldly.

  ‘This is our home as much as yours,’ added Seb.

  ‘Let it go,’ said Bobby. ‘Easy. What happened to you is not your fault; whatever this araka thing does when it goes free is not your responsibility.’

  ‘How can you say that? Of course it is, when I have the power to prevent it!’

  ‘Not compared to your responsibility towards the lives of the people around you right now.’

  ‘But you can leave! Haven’t you been listening? In case I didn’t make myself understood the first time, let’s be clear: that thing,’ she jabbed a finger downwards, towards the base of Stray, ‘goes nowhere. I am staying here and starving it until I die, and then I’m taking it with me. If you lot want to stick around and die too, that’s your suicide. Don’t put it on me.’

  ‘You have the key to the chain around your neck,’ he pointed out. ‘What’s to stop us just taking it from you and lett
ing the damn thing go without your say-so?’

  Her hand went to her throat protectively. ‘You’re a good man, Bobby Jenkins,’ she said. ‘Degan wasn’t. He put a knife to my throat, so I fed him to the araka. You’re a thousand times the man he was, but I’ll do exactly the same thing to you if you try to force me. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied with distaste. ‘I think we probably do, finally.’

  ‘Good. You have your options.’ She went back down the Hub to her chamber, leaving them to huddle in the chill, discussing how they might use Tatters to escape to the Islands, and waiting for sunrise.

  Dawn, when it came, rendered all of their discussions moot when it showed them a column of thick black smoke from the stack of an Oraillean steamer heading straight towards them.

  Chapter 24

  The Araka

  1

  Berylin watched the raft grow larger ahead of her, and the small specks on top of its central platform grow into frantically gesticulating human figures, but couldn’t summon any empathy for them. Her experience told her that all of its inhabitants would be unfortunate locals suborned against their will, and she tried to put their interests ahead of the visceral need to simply make it go away as quickly and completely as possible. Stray was a gigantic scab on an unhealed wound in her world, a tumorous excrescence which shouted its wrongness at her across the water. The long wooden booms were like metastising tendrils of the cancer, pushing out further and further. They’d start with those, she decided.

  She ordered a course correction and instead of continuing straight towards the raft, the Spinner began a circuit. She overran the booms without even feeling it, pulverising them into splinters which followed in her wake as she circled Stray. Frenzied shouts and curses came from the suborned, but Berylin ignored them.

  Then one of the watches shouted ‘Ware! Whirlpools a-port! Ware!’ and the crew snapped into the routine which had saved them numerous times over the past day and a half it had taken to get this far into the Flats.