Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  They leave through the hole to the sound of dry joints grating, and ribs fluttering, and teeth grinding.

  The unease of the dead.

  [mark: –?]

  They sleep the next night in a wood, in the rain. They make a shelter using canvas rolls they brought from the trailer, and eat some ration packs. Artillery thumps and drums in the distance. There is a war going on over the hill.

  Oll knows he is being played with. It is a pine wood, a familiar scent. He is not sure, but he is pretty convinced he knows this place too. Is this benevolent guidance, or someone leading him into a trap?

  Most likely the same person, either way.

  Damn you, John.

  Oll gets up early, and leaves them sleeping. If he remembers it right, there is the end of an old communication trench not three hundred paces from the line of the wood. He can smell the river, which means that Verdun is to the west.

  The trench is right where he remembered it, right where he and the other men dug it. It is abandoned, slightly overgrown. A shift in shelling caused a tactical displacement, and this part of the line got emptied out. Small blue weed-flowers nod. Grass sprouts between tumbled sandbags. Bulwark armour-plates are rusting. The trench floor decking is sodden and unmaintained. He can smell coffee grounds and nettles, and latrines. The bright brass of spent shell cases litters the ditch and the sandbag line.

  Oll follows the jink in the zigzag trench under a low cover-top. He walks slowly, warily, carrying a rifle that will not be made for almost another thirty thousand years. There is the down-step into the officer’s dugout. He remembers it all, as if it was yesterday.

  In the dugout, there is a small desk made from a fruit box: a coffee pot, a stove, a dirty enamel mug. There is a dark stain on the back wall. Someone left in a hurry, someone who was hurt.

  On the desk, there is a log book. He opens it.

  It is a repurposed civilian diary, locally manufactured. The paper is cream, the numbers and the ruled lines all printed in the faintest blue. The diary was intended for a year ‘1916’, a date so antique that he can barely make sense of it.

  The first half is filled in with neat handwriting, ink pen, well-schooled. He wonders if it is one of his own hands, though he remembers the place so well that he would think he would know.

  It is not his. There is only one word written in the diary, over and over again.

  M’kar.

  [mark: –?]

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ he says.

  Oll turns, bringing the rifle up. John is in the trench outside the dugout entrance, leaning against the back wall. He is wearing a bodyglove and dusty overalls.

  ‘Damn you,’ says Oll, letting his aim slacken, feeling stupid for being surprised.

  ‘You got it, I see,’ John says, nodding at the athame wrapped up and hooked in Oll’s belt.

  ‘It’s really that important?’

  ‘It really is,’ says John.

  ‘You should be doing this, not me,’ says Oll.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ says John. ‘You could hardly stay on Calth. It was a friendly warning, to help you get out of there. Besides, I’ve got my hands full. I’ve got a job of my own to do.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t ask and I won’t tell.’

  ‘I thought this errand you had me were running was the really important one?’ asks Oll.

  ‘It is. It honestly is. But my job is important too and frankly, you were in the right place. I’m on Cabal business, Oll. They sign my paychecks, you know that.’

  ‘That’s not a phrase I’ve heard in a long time,’ says Oll. He almost smiles.

  ‘The Cabal watches what I do. I can’t be everywhere.’

  ‘So I’m not on Cabal business?’ asks Oll.

  ‘No, you’re not. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.’

  For the first time in a long time, Oll sees a look in his old friend’s eyes. It is a look that says he is trying to do the right thing, even though the universe is out to make sure he does not. It is the first time that Oll Persson has pitied John Grammaticus in a long, long while.

  ‘Look, Oll,’ says John. ‘I’m going to try to be there, when you arrive. I’m going to try my damnedest. But–’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I’ve got this presentiment, Oll. A dark gloom.’

  ‘That’s the way your mind works, John.’

  ‘No, Oll, this isn’t a psyker thing. It’s like… just knowing something in your bones. I think I may be running out of road at long last. I think this may be my last adventure.’

  ‘They’ll just bring you back,’ says Oll. ‘The Cabal will just bring you back like they always do.’ He says it fast, almost like an accusation. He says it to cover what he is thinking. Why do we both feel the same thing? Why do we both feel like this will be the last adventure for us? The universe is in trouble when Perpetuals feel mortal.

  ‘I thought you said this would be pretty bad for everyone,’ Oll says. ‘On Calth, you told me that. You said it was make or break.’

  John nods.

  ‘It is. I meant it. I just… I mean, personally speaking, I’ve got things to do and… I’ve got a choice to make, Oll, and I don’t think I like either of the alternatives. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I wish I could do this instead of you, and not put this responsibility on your shoulders, but I can’t. I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing, Oll. I honestly think you’re a better man for this job than I am.’

  Oll does not reply.

  ‘I’ll try to be there when you arrive,’ John says. ‘But if I’m not. If I’m… late… I think you’ll know what to do.’

  ‘What have you got me into, John?’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘John, you’ve been guiding me this far… the weapons, the food, the locations. All very apt and ironic. The typical Grammaticus flair for the theatrical.’

  John shrugs, snorts.

  ‘You’re trying to smuggle me along, aren’t you?’ Oll asks. ‘Take me on an indirect route. Take me the long way around so I’ll be harder to track and find.’

  Oll steps out of the dugout into the early sunlight to stand face to face with John.

  ‘That’s why it had to be me, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘God, I see that now. I’m not a psyker like you. When I move through the warp, I’m not as visible. You’d show up like a beacon. That’s why I’m doing this dirty work for you.’

  John does not answer.

  ‘What’s M’kar, John?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought the others with you,’ John replies.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They won’t make it.’

  ‘They certainly wouldn’t have made it where they were,’ replies Oll.

  ‘It would have been quicker. Kinder.’

  ‘They’ll make it if I make it.’

  John nods. It is not reassuring.

  ‘What’s M’kar, John?’

  ‘Come on…’

  ‘What does it mean? Is it a name?’

  John looks towards the river.

  ‘Time’s out of joint for us, Oll. Nothing’s in the right order. M’kar is its name.’

  ‘Not a human name.’

  ‘No. I don’t know if it’s called M’kar yet, or if it will be called it one day. The warp doesn’t work in step with time as we perceive it.’

  He looks at Oll with sad eyes.

  ‘The Foe won’t let you just walk away from Calth, not with that dagger. It’s sent something after you. That something is called M’kar. It helps that you’re taking a roundabout route, Oll, and it really helps you’re not psykana and glow in the dark like I do. Yes, that’s why you’re doing this instead of me. Yes, okay? I admit it.’

  ‘But even so–?’

  ‘Even so, it’s coming. M’kar is coming. You watc
h your back. The only real help I can give you is to warn you to keep away from it for long enough.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means it’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. Keep going, keep down, stay out of sight, and it will eventually have to give up and turn back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It has a destiny of its own. Just watch your back, Oll.’

  ‘Give me more help than that, John! Damn it! I deserve more than that! How do I fight this thing?’

  ‘I can’t, I’m sorry,’ says John. He looks genuinely apologetic. ‘I’ve got my hands full. I can’t–’

  ‘You’re not even here, are you?’ asks Oll, realising. ‘Where are you really?’

  ‘The wrong side of Ultramar,’ says John.

  Oll sighs.

  ‘So if you’re not here, I’m not either, am I?’

  [mark: –?]

  He wakes up, in the shelter, in the pine wood, just before dawn. Rain taps on the canvas. The others are asleep.

  He knows there is no point heading down to the trench. John will not be there, and Oll has already learned everything the trench can tell him.

  It is time to push on.

  [mark: –?]

  They enter the dead city. No one knows when it was or where it was, not even Oll. The city is made of a dry white stone like chalk, but not chalk. Its surfaces are beginning to turn to powder at the merest touch. Age does that. The sky over the towering city is the blue side of violet, and there are eight bright stars dotted in it. When the wind lifts, as it does now and again, sighs of white dust trail from the sills and corners of the white walls like vapour: a city slowly being erased.

  It is an empty place of white buildings with empty doorways. There is no furniture, no sign of decoration or possessions, no sign of the long dead. Oll thinks that whatever used to be in these buildings has long since resolved into dust, along with the inhabitants. Only the silent towers remain, the chambers, the vacant stairways.

  After walking for an hour or two, they realise two things. One is that the city has no limits. As they move past towers and walls and rooftops, they sight further towers and walls and rooftops beyond.

  The second thing is that the emptiness is unnerving. They feel anxious, though there is no sound except their footsteps and the sigh of the wind, and no movement except the faint streamers of white dust peeling off the edges of walls and doorways.

  When they speak to each other, their voices echo from the surrounding streets, but not immediately. Each echo takes a few minutes to return, just a little too long for it to feel comfortable or natural, and each echo returns as a perfect facsimile of the original words, not a sound hollowed by acoustics.

  For this reason, they quickly stop speaking.

  Oll stops and checks his compass. They have found another cutting place, and by no means too soon. As he takes out the athame and prepares to make the incision, an echo comes to them along the dead, white streets.

  The echo is a word, and the word is, ‘M’kar.’

  None of them had spoken.

  [mark: –?]

  The humidity on the far side is intense. They feel it coming through the slit before they step across. Beads of sweat immediately manifest on their pale skins, gleaming like diamonds.

  A rainforest awaits them. It has been waiting forever. It is an endless jade twilight of water-logged glades, and they are knee-deep in bright green murk. Graft struggles to maintain traction and stability. Sunlight sparkles and shafts down through the canopy. Moss as thick as emerald velvet coats the tree trunks and half-sunken logs. There is a throat-tightening smell of rot.

  Winged insects – each one looking like a watchmaker’s intricate masterpiece – whir past them, hover, and then speed on.

  It is another place that Oll does not know. He wonders if this is a sign that their route is less guided now, more random. Or is it a sign that it is becoming all the more concealed? Which forsaken outworld is this? What rimworld hell? His sweating palms shift the rifle nervously. The rainforest is a bad place for a fight. He has never liked jungle warfare.

  They keep stopping to help Graft free himself, sometimes having to lever him out of the ooze with blackened lengths of log.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Krank remarks. It is matter-of-fact. Oll wonders if the young soldier means the physical discomfort of the wet heat and the toil, or simply the location. The attitude applies convincingly to both.

  Then the place falls silent.

  It is a chilling thing. Until the silence, they had not realised the rainforest was so full of noises: the buzz of insects, the splash of water, the crack of undergrowth, the chirp of amphibians, the whistle of birds.

  Only when it stops, when it all stops at a stroke, do they recognise it by its distressing absence.

  They all freeze, listening, willing sounds to return.

  Oll holds up a hand, and turns slowly, training his rifle. His movement makes the very slightest slooshing sound in the water around his shins.

  Something rushes them from the stand of trees behind them. It is man-sized and man-shaped, though its legs are proportionally shorter and its arms proportionally longer than human standard. It is an ape-thing, scrawny and lean. It has no eyes. Its head is entirely a gaping mouth of carnivore teeth, lips pulled back.

  It shrieks as it charges. Water sprays. Katt screams. It bounds over a half-sunken log, leaping, clawing paws outstretched.

  Oll fires. Three shots smack into its torso and bowl it backwards into the green soup with a clumsy, slapping splash. Thrashing, it sinks.

  ‘What in the name of–’ Zybes starts to say, but there is not time. There is another ape-thing charging them, and another, and then a fourth. They come pounding out of the topaz gloom, shrieking, unmindful of the fate that greeted the first of them.

  ‘Rapid fire!’ Oll commands, shooting. Multiple targets. He cannot take them all. He needs the others. Krank is fumbling with his rifle, his frantic hands caught in the strap. Bale fires, winging one of the creatures enough to slow it, and then aims to kill it. Zybes misses everything including tree trunks.

  Oll has shot two more, both clean kills, but other ape-things are appearing, a half-dozen, a dozen, all bounding and charging. Only he and Bale hit anything. The shrieking wounded drop hard into the murk, but others take their place. Their teeth are yellow bone, their maws red. One gets so close that Oll barely gets his shot in.

  Krank has finally lined up. His firing is messy, but he adds to the stopping power, dropping one, and then a second.

  Katt has taken out her pistol. Bracing it with two hands, she shoots alongside them, and makes hits. She understands the extremity of the situation. She winces every time the creatures shriek.

  Zybes makes a kill, but it is a rare success. He is simply not a natural marksman. One of the ape-things gets too close to him, past his ability to hit it, and reaches out to tear his throat out.

  Graft grabs it by the neck with a manipulator arm, lifting and hurling it away into the trees like a straw doll.

  Oll shoots and brings down the last of the ape-things. No more come. Silence falls again, apart from their rasping breaths and the tap of falling leaves and bark fragments.

  Then the noise of the rainforest resumes as if it had never gone away.

  Oll breathes out a long breath, and wipes the sweat from his brow. He has finally realised where they are, when. Some kind of intuition has informed him, some kind of deep-time memory.

  This is Terra, before the rise of man. The things that attacked them are things that might one day evolve into men.

  Except these, these corpses floating face down in the green soup, show how early the taint of the warp touched man’s home world.

  Oll does not speak to his companions about any of this.

  ‘Push on,’ he tel
ls them instead.

  [mark: –?]

  The compass stops working. The pendulum hangs heavy and refuses to swing.

  ‘We’re lost,’ says Krank, watching Oll’s work.

  ‘The word is becalmed,’ Oll snaps, but it does not matter what the word is. He has never attempted this kind of journey before, so he does not know if the problem with the compass is to be expected or not. Nothing he has ever been told or taught about the art of travelling this way has prepared him for the idea that the compass might stop working. He tries to cover his tension. He tries to reassure himself with his own analogy: becalmed. At sea, sometimes, the winds drop away and all is still, and then there is nothing anyone can do and nowhere to go, until the wind comes back.

  That is all. That is all that is happening. The winds of the empyrean have simply eased off for a moment, their breath spent. All is still. They will pick back up, soon as you like. They will pick back up, and the pilgrims will be on their way again.

  ‘Everything’s okay,’ Oll tells them. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

  They are in some autumnal place. The sky is dark like smudged charcoal, and the distant hills loom, brown with gorse and sedge. Black birds circle in the distance. The surrounding thorn wood, bared of leaves, is an endless thicket of spikes and claws, an organic cage. The thorns and twigs are all pale and cold, like bone. Small birds or insects have speared red berries on some thorn spikes so they can be gnawed and pecked at. The juice drips like blood.

  Oll keeps working at the chart and compass, rattling the rose in its little, silver skull-box, rubbing the pendulum weight between his palms, as though communicating body heat may somehow activate it. They remain dead, inert. The others move away from him in different directions, scouting the area. Everything is quiet apart from the sporadic chatter of birds.

  What if we’ve made a wrong cut? he wonders. What if they have stepped off the wind routes and now cannot find their way back? What if he made an incision in error, and they are marooned on God-knows-where in God-knows-when?

  How can any place, any place in the cosmos, not be touched by the empyrean winds?

  The analogy suddenly seems so banal. Even when the winds have dropped and the ship is becalmed, a compass will still spin towards magnetic north, and if there is no wind, a man puts his back into it and rows. He rows, like a bastard, to the beat of the stroke-drum. He had learned that on the voyage to Colchis. That was when Colchis was still a kingdom on the Black Sea, not the home world of the treacherous XVII.