‘We’re going to have to row,’ Oll says out loud, but the others have moved too far away to hear. He gets up, looking for them, and sees their shadows moving through the thorn wood.
‘Come back!’ he calls. Someone answers him, but he cannot make out the words.
Damn them. They are being stupid. It is not safe. Oll knows that with certainty. He knows it suddenly, as suddenly as the tingle of cold at the base of his spine. That is not just the cool woodland air chilling the sweat there. It is a hint, a sign, like the way the root of his tongue used to itch before a big fight, or his hands used to tremble when someone was going to die.
He felt none of those things on Calth, because Calth had happened so suddenly. The doom came masked, until the very last moment, by the darkest treachery.
But here, wherever ‘here’ is, doom is not coming suddenly. It is stalking them. It is drawing close, a relentless predator tracking them, keeping steady, keeping low, just beyond the line of sight. He knows the predator’s name, and it is not a human name.
M’kar.
It is a thing sent to end them, a thing sent to take back the blade, a thing sent by the malicious deities of the warp to ensure that their plans would not be upset.
Oll feels he ought to be flattered. He is a Perpetual, and such beings are far from common. Nevertheless, they are insignificant in the universal pattern. Perpetuals do not upset the plans of the Warped Ones. A renegade Perpetual, on the run with a handful of humans… that is hardly a threat against schemes that encompass light-centuries of space and epochs of the universe.
Yet M’kar has been sent. Flattered, that is what he ought to feel.
Oll hefts his lasrifle, getting it set, as though a lasrifle will be of any assistance when the time comes. He wonders how far off the predator is – a cut or two away, or already in this world, out there in the sedge beyond the thorn wood?
What was it John said? It’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. It has a destiny of its own.
Typical gnomic Grammaticus, but the basic advice is sound. Go the long way round, stay low, keep out of sight. You cannot fight it, so wait for it to run out of time and give up.
Yes, sound advice. The trouble is, Oll knows too well, that it has already got their scent. M’kar is tracking them.
It will be a daemon thing, with a non-human name like that. How is it tracking them? The life-glow of the dagger? It is not as if Oll’s a psykana, lighting the way. Oll’s never had the sight, or any of the other gifts that the Perpetuals often have: no sight, no mindgloss, no telekine or pyrokine.
All he has are the tics and twinges, the chill on his back, the itch in his tongue, the hand-tremble. His left eyelid used to flutter when there was a psykana nearby. It used to happen all the time when he was near Medea on that ship. That is why he knew before Iason that the Colchis witch had real gifts, and was not the usual brand of yowling, histrionic soothsayer.
As if on cue, Oll’s left eyelid twitches.
He freezes.
Hands tight on the gun, he waits for the stink of the warp, waits for M’kar, whatever form M’kar takes, to erupt through the thorn wood and finish them.
He waits for M’kar to finish them, and make this place their communal grave, unmourned and unmarked.
The dusk continues to close, however, and the birds continue to circle.
He turns. The others are still wandering around, exploring, but Katt is right beside him. She came back when he called.
His eyelid flutters.
‘Oh god,’ he murmurs.
It is not just her dark eyes that remind him of the witch he knew all those centuries ago. He understands why she is quiet and reserved, a loner, an outsider. He understands why she came to do piecework on his farm, like a runaway looking for work in return for lodging. He understands where her knowing questions come from.
He is pretty sure that even she does not know what she is, that she has never been assessed, never been recruited by the Black Ships. She is a latent, touched just enough to give her a life of sorrow and trouble, a life of not fitting in, a life of depression and of not being understood.
She is touched just enough to make her shine like a little lamp in the night.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asks him. ‘Are we okay?’
She smiles at her clever use of the unfamiliar word.
‘We need to find shelter,’ he says. ‘There’s a darkness coming on.’
He wonders, seriously wonders, if he should kill her. Then he wonders at himself for even thinking it.
‘M’kar,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘That word. The echo in that city.’ Katt looks at him with Medea’s big dark eyes. ‘Ever since I heard it, I haven’t been able to forget it, as if the word is poison, filling my mind up.’
Oll lowers his rifle and touches the wrapped athame at his waist. That is what it wants. That is what they are not allowed to have. That is what they must not deliver.
Something occurs to him.
They do have a weapon.
If the athame is so powerful, if it is so precious that the Warped Ones sent a daemon to recover it, then it is a serious damn thing. A serious, serious damn thing. It cuts a path through the warped universe. What else might it cut?
The thought gives him a glimmer of hope, and Katt, at his side, feels that hope and smiles at it, without even realising why she is doing it.
Then the hope goes.
The root of his tongue itches suddenly. His hands tremble.
There is going to be a battle. A battle and a death.
[mark: –?]
What sun there was has gone. The sky is full of banked grey clouds running in the wind, and the breeze makes the thorn cages around them creak and rattle. They feel the wind on their faces, but there is still no wind to stir Oll’s compass.
‘We can’t move from here,’ Oll tells his accidental pilgrims. ‘We can’t go back or forwards. We have to stay here, and that means we might have to make our stand here.’
‘Our stand?’ asks Zybes.
‘This is no place for a fight,’ says Bale Rane. The boy has not seen much war, only been schooled in it, but he is not stupid. A ragged tract of hillside scrub, thickly wooded by autumn thorn and bounded by gorse? It is no place for a fight indeed. If they had an hour, they could trek up the hill to the ring of standing stones, maybe dig in up there.
They do not have an hour. Oll’s tongue tells him that. So does his eyelid, and his hands, and the cold sweat on his back. So does the look in Katt’s eyes.
‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank asks, swallowing hard. He flicks a hand at the nearest branch of brittle, dry thorn.
‘This? This stuff? This won’t stop las-rounds! There’s no shelter! Do we entrench or–’
‘Shhh,’ says Oll.
‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank insists.
‘It won’t be las-fire,’ says Oll.
‘What will it be?’ asks Zybes.
‘M’kar,’ says Katt, unable not to.
‘What does she mean?’ asks Krank, hysteria in his voice.
‘Stay calm,’ Oll tells him. He tells them all. ‘A bad thing is coming our way. We have given it the slip so far, but it’s found us at last.’
‘What bad thing?’ Krank asks.
‘Something from Calth,’ murmurs Bale, understanding. ‘One of those things that came to Calth. Or one that was on its way…’
Oll nods. Krank screws up his face, lets out a squeaking moan, and starts to cry.
‘How did it find us?’ Bale asks.
Oll cannot help looking at Katt.
‘We just got unlucky,’ he replies. ‘We did well for a long time, but we got unlucky. So now we make the best of things.’
‘Where do we find cover from a thing like
that?’ Krank wails.
Oll taps his chest.
‘In here,’ he says. ‘Back in the days of faith, that’s how we kept the daemons out. Belief. Strength. Fortitude.’
‘Oll the Pious,’ laughs Zybes without humour.
‘Piety is a virtue,’ Oll nods. ‘I’ve always had faith, right from the moment of the anointing of my newborn head in Nineveh. Always had it. Always kept it, even when all the churches were swept away. Swept away for being anachronistic. I believe in a higher power, and that’s what we’re facing now. Another power, anyway. Higher, lower, other. Not a human thing. Not a mortal thing.’
‘You’re not mortal,’ says Katt.
‘But I’m human. This is god and daemons stuff, and in the midst of that, faith is all you can hold onto. I’ve always had faith. That’s why he never liked me, and never brought me into the trusted circle.’
‘Who?’ asks Bale.
Oll shakes his head.
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve always kept faith. And I’ve never tried to push it on anyone. Never evangelised. Well, not for a long time anyway. So I’m not asking you to do anything strange.’
He thumps his trembling hand against his heart again.
‘Just believe. Believe in whatever you like. Believe in the Emperor, or in yourself, or in whatever light you see in your dreams, or the solidity of the ground beneath your feet. Believe in me, for all I care. Just believe.’
‘We have to do something else, Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘I cannot believe. There has to be purpose. There has to be activity.’
‘He’s right,’ says Bale.
‘Okay,’ says Oll. ‘Okay, then we sing.’
‘We sing?’ Krank splutters.
‘Yeah, we sing together. Strengthens the mind. I’ll teach you a song. A hymn. In the old days, the faithful sang together to keep their spirits up and keep the daemons and the darkness out. We’ll do that.’
He teaches them the words. Just a verse or two, O Lord and Master of Mankind…
They start to sing, reluctantly. They fumble the words, forget a few, mangle the tune. Graft cannot hold anything but the one drone note. Oll keeps going at it, over and over, repeat and repeat, checking over his shoulder all the while, checking the tingle in his hands and the twitch of his eyelid.
That is all hymns and prayers were, back in the day, when real daemons walked the earth. They were utterances of protection, articulations of defiance. They joined people in the act of singing, joined their strengths, their beliefs. They made faith a weapon, if only a passive weapon – a shield at least. Or, indeed, at most.
Even for those who did not believe like Oll did, there were other benefits. Joined in singing, people were joined in activity. They were reminded that they were not alone. They were connected and bolstered. It gave them something to do, something to focus their minds on instead of fear. Last thing Oll needed was anyone panicking.
And sometimes singing is just noise, and it protects, like Orfeus protected them.
‘Keep going,’ Oll says. ‘Keep singing. Get to the end and start again. Keep singing.’
He turns and goes to the edge of the thorn thicket. Behind him, they are singing as loud as they can. He scans the brown sedge, and the hollows of the land that are already shaded with night. How many thousand battlefields has he surveyed this way, watching for the enemy to show himself? The land here reminds him of the moors beyond the Wall, when he was patrolling the parapets, watching for the painted men. It reminds him of the rolling grasses of the Altai, watching for the approach of the Sarmatian riders. It reminds him–
His hands tremble.
M’kar is not down there at all.
M’kar is here, right at the edge of the thorn cage, looking in.
[mark: –?]
The thorns catch fire.
A stretch of the thorn brush three or four metres broad bursts into bright orange flame, burns up like paper, and spills into ash, leaving a gap big enough to drive a transport through.
Oll backs up, his hands trembling on the grip of his rifle.
It is dark out here, beyond the gap in the white thorn wall, as though a piece of midnight has arrived early. But there are eyes in it. He saw them looking in, ancient eyes for an ancient, feral mind, yellow slits with black slash irises. Glaring eyes. Evil eyes.
Eyes that stared forever from the prow of a ship.
Cursed eyes that mean the end of everything.
Oll backs away. He ignores the twitch and the itch and the tremble. He ignores the lump in his swallow, and the tears in his eyes.
In his long lives, he has seen plenty. He has never seen anything like this, though.
The daemon enters the thorn wood through the gap it has burned in the thicket. It bubbles in, like fluid, spilling over the boundary and collecting in the clumped soil. It is like tar. It smokes in the darkness. All Oll can see is the spreading wet stain of it on the ground, growing like a shadow. There is a bulk of it above, a monstrous, monolithic shape, a slice of darkness cut from pure night, super-heavy like spent plutonium. Above the eyes loom the impression of horns wider than an aircraft’s wings.
He smells it. He retches.
In the seeping black pools around its feet, spider-leg stalks and spastic pseudopods sprout and fade, jutting briefly from the steaming tar and dying back like a time-lapse pict-feed of nocturnal weeds. It is a shadow, straining to exist.
Voices chirp and snigger. Oll hears the voices of people he knows on the wind, and realises they are lies. He hears the voices of people he has not seen alive in thirty thousand years. Lies. Lies.
He hears John’s laugh. He hears Pascal at Verdun, asking for a light. He hears Gaius on the Wall, cursing the rain and praising the virtues of Galician girls. He hears Commander Valis whisper the name of a forgotten god as they both flinch from the nuclear light blooming across the Panpacific horizon. He hears a man question the quality of bronze stirrups in strongly accented Scythian. He hears Zaid Raheem, pinned in his burning T-62, begging to die. He hears the shocktroopers around him moan as the officer tells them that their objective will be the Brumman Hives. He hears Iason and Orfeus, singing together. He hears Lieutenant Winslow dictating his will the night before Copenhagen. He hears Private Labella whistling as she fries beans and eggs the morning after the Socal Basin fell.
He hears his son, five days old, crying lustily in his crib, the day that the Norsemen landed. As if he knew, five days old and knew what was coming.
Oll raises his rifle, slips the toggle to full-auto, and fires.
The advancing darkness ripples as his streaming shots strike it. The darkness absorbs the bright bolts, but spatters too, each wound squirting fluid like milk.
The wounds vanish as fast as he makes them. The lactic blood fades. He cannot hurt it. It knows it, and he knows it. It does not just want him dead, it wants him broken. It wants his soul burned out with misery before it consumes him. It wants to anger him, wants him to feel rage and pain and frustration, and all the other human inadequacies of a thirty-five thousand year long life.
It knows he is a Perpetual.
Oll realises that suddenly, despite the pain robbing him of sense. He is caught up in the death of his son, a loss that took him three centuries to come to terms with, a loss he had pushed to the back of his over-stuffed mind, a loss M’kar has gone straight for, but even so, Oll realises.
It knows he is a Perpetual.
They would all be dead already, otherwise. It does not get to do this very often. It does not get to torment a being with such a great capacity for torment. Oll is a treat, a delicacy. All those heartless centuries of pain and loss and disappointment to tease out and relive, so many many more than a human life can encompass.
The pain is going to kill me, Oll thinks. The very thought of me is going to kill me. To remember all I have ever been through will kill m
e stone dead.
It will not be quick.
He stops shooting. His anger is as spent as his power cell. He throws his rifle aside. He turns his back on M’kar and walks away. He walks back to the others. They are still trying to sing, but it is not working.
‘Keep going,’ he urges, his voice breaking. ‘Keep going… “forgive our foolish ways”… come on! Don’t listen to it! Drown it out! Don’t listen to its lies!’
He hears an old friend in a Dresden shop, chatting as he packs china in newspaper, ‘in case the planes come tonight’. He hears his sisters calling his name from the cages on the caravan. He hears Him, the day they met, recognising a kindred being.
‘The likes of us,’ He says to Oll, ‘the likes of us will leave our print on things down the ages. That is why we were made the way we were. The courses of our lives will not go unmarked.’
‘Mine will,’ Oll assures Him. ‘I have no stomach for the games you want to play with the world. I just want an ordinary life.’
‘My dear friend, you’ll have as many of those as you want.’
It was summer, a meadow beyond the walls of Nineveh. He had never met another Perpetual before. He would never meet another like Him.
Look at him now. After all this time, having turned his back on all those games, and never being a part of any of them, look at foolish old Oll Persson. Crossing the universe on a knifeblade for his sake. Running a fool’s errand through the warp and weft of the cosmos to stop his games from unravelling.
M’kar comes closer, gurgling laughter in the darkness. The voices swirl around him like blossom, the voices of Oll’s life. The pain, the lies.
Oll and his pilgrims are in a circle, their backs facing outwards. Oll’s back is directly to the darkness.
‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘Don’t listen. Sing up. Drown it out.’
Mark of Calth Page 35
