by Tim Lebbon
Time turned their escape into a long, painful haul instead of a panicked flight. They were both still conscious of the danger behind them, but the effort of navigating the seam occupied most of their thoughts. They had already made their way through one narrow passage—at least three hundred steps long—in which Trey’s mother had almost ground to a halt, too exhausted to pull herself through. He had tied his belt beneath her arms, hauling her after him like a mule pulling a fledge-laden cart.
Five hundred steps after this narrow stretch, Trey began to notice something in the air. A smell. The smell of people.
And beneath it, so distant so as to be almost imaginary, the tang of blood.
“How long have we been moving?” his mother asked.
“A shift,” Trey said.
“A topside day,” she muttered. “I need to sleep, Trey. Very soon, I’ll need to sit and sleep. Are the Nax following? Do you think they have our trail?”
Trey sniffed and knew that there was a menstruating woman in the group that had come this way before. For a hopeful moment he thought that could be the blood he sensed, but there was something else. He kept up the pretence, though he knew it was false.
He had chewed a finger of fledge a few hours before. He had cast his mind back several times since then, searching, watching the way they had come to see if anything was following. Clumsy though this casting was—he was doing it on the move, trying not to let his mother know what he was doing—he was certain that the psychic picture he drew of the empty seam behind them was true.
“Nothing following us,” he said, and his mother breathed a heavy, heartbreaking sigh of relief and exhaustion. “But mother, someone has come this way before us.”
She sniffed at the air for a few seconds, an old person’s heavy, unsubtle inhalation. “I smell nothing,” she said. “I used to have a nose like a cave rat, though I know I’m old now. Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Trey said. Because there is blood there too. Human blood. He wished he had cast forward too, but now that he smelled the blood he was afraid. If there were still minds to meet, he would meet them soon enough.
“How far away could they be? Surely not that far, nobody had a chance to get into these caves much before us.”
“We had to get across the cavern from our side,” Trey said. “Then we stood talking with Grant for a while. We’ve rested a good few times, and when the seam narrowed …”
“I slowed us down, I know. But still, they can’t be more than a couple of hours ahead.”
“Probably not.”
“We should try to reach them, Trey. I’ll do everything I can, I’ll breathe harder, I’ll push harder. Let’s go and meet up with them. The more of us there are, the better the chances of reaching the rising in one piece.”
“I guess so.” The pause stretched into an uncomfortable silence.
“Trey?”
“There’s blood, mother!” he blurted. “I can smell blood. It’s one of the women’s time, but it’s not only that. I’m afraid of what we’ll find.” He started to cry silently, and his mother knew. Not because of the smell or the way it changed his voice, but simply because she was his mother.
“Oh Trey, we won’t know until we get closer. Maybe one of them was injured. Perhaps one of them fell and cut themselves, or ran into some stingers. With our own people ahead of us and the Nax behind, I know which I choose.”
Trey tried to stifle his sobs but failed. The shock of what had happened hit hard at last. Beneath it, always there but so easily shut away, was the idea that it was all his fault. He had touched on the mind of the Nax and sensed the strange happenings topside that had woken it, but still, if he had not disturbed the fledge demon perhaps it would not have come at them. It was a crazy idea, but right now he felt crazy.
“I’m proud of you, son. Your father would be too.”
“I’m useless!”
“No, I don’t think so. Let’s go. Trey, I can’t lead the way. Next to you I’m blind in these caves.”
They moved on. The smell grew in strength, and Trey could make out now that its source was stationary. They passed through another narrow seam, this one sloping steeply, and they had to slide down feet first. His mother managed on her own, though Trey could sense the effort draining her final reserves of strength.
For an hour before they found the bodies the stench was strong and sickening. Blood, insides, shit, everything that went to make up people laid bare to the air. It went a little way to prepare Trey and his mother for what they found.
The bodies were scattered across the floor in a wide part of the seam, ground into the walls, their clothes ripped and soaked with blood. The smell was bad enough, but the feel of the human wreckage beneath their shoes was enough to make them retch.
“Anyone alive?” Trey asked, already certain of the answer. For some reason talking to the darkness made him shiver. He felt as if he was conversing with wraiths.
“Let’s move on, Trey,” his mother said.
“The Nax may be ahead.”
“Well, they’re behind us for sure. I think whatever did this came at them from up ahead. There must be ten dead folk here, and most of them are in one huddle. One or two back here, nearer to us, as if they were caught trying to run away.”
Trey turned his head left to right, sniffing. She was right.
“Nax probably found another way through. Whatever Grant may have said, those things have been down here thousands of years longer than us. They know their way around. The one that did this is probably back in the cavern right now …”
Sonda was here. Trey stopped breathing, terrified of the scent he had just caught. It was the dusky, slightly spiced hint of Sonda’s skin, the warm herby smell of her breath … and drowning it all, her blood.
“Oh no!” he said, leaning forward until he slumped down onto the ground. He pleaded with the dark, asking its wraiths to prove him wrong, but there was no answer. Sweet Sonda, barely aware of his existence, yet at times throwing him a coy smile that set him alight and fuelled many guilty fledge dreams, and many castings to seek her mind. He had always drawn back, guilty and respectful, but how he wished he had been more brash. He had thought he’d seen love in her eyes once, but he had so little confidence that he believed it must have been for someone else, leftover from a previous thought as Sonda chatted to him in a food cave, smiled, ran a hand through her braided hair. Love in her eyes, warm and bright and so often hidden in the pitch darkness of the caves.
His mother held him and tried to give comfort, but for a while Trey was far away.
Later, Trey pushed them on. They had to move quickly, although deep down where he barely even knew himself, he no longer believed they could escape. They had been given this subterranean world for a short-term loan, allowed to plunder its wealth, wound it, pull fledge from its ancient seams as if drawing blood from the veins of the world. Foolish, smug in their pride, thinking they now ruled this place. Even after the Cataclysmic War the fledge miners had considered themselves insulated from the rot setting in topside. They had heard of the strange things happening to the land, as if the ties that bound it together safely were slowly snapping and unravelling. And stories had filtered down with topside runners of the world slowing down, tales that the retraction of magic had murdered the peoples’ confidence. Three centuries after the withdrawing of magic, humankind topside was like an old person waiting to die. Still eating, still drinking, still dreaming, looking to the rich past more than the short, doomed future.
Down here, smug and foolish, the fledgers had believed themselves safe. Now they were being shown just how unimportant they were.
Any petty plans Trey had once entertained for his future were slaughtered as surely as Sonda and those others, ground into the rocks and spilled across cold stone by the Nax that truly knew and possessed this place. Fledge demons, the humans had called them, unconsciously classing them as monsters. People know so little.
So he pushed on, and his mother never once com
plained. They stopped now and then, licked moisture from the rocks, ate a handful of moss even though they knew it could make them sick. They needed the energy right now, the input of sustenance to carry them the distance to the rising. They hoped that Chartise was still there with the mules, ready to rise them up to the surface. All the while, unuttered, not even hinted at, the certainty in Trey’s mind that they were both destined to die down here. And he did not care. Grief and exhaustion had hobbled his mind and distanced him from the truth.
Eventually they halted to sleep. They were both cut and bruised from the last thousand steps, all of which had been uphill through a narrow, twisting seam. It had taken them four times as long as it should have, because Trey’s mother was exhausted beyond tears. Still she did not complain. Trey pulled her, she pushed, and they made it. But time was running out.
Once, halfway through this narrow and dangerous seam, they had heard a loud noise from far, far behind them. A scream or a cry. Pain, or anger. It had not been repeated.
Trey chewed on a fist of fledge as he drifted into a sleep bordering on unconsciousness. His mother sat beside him and whispered in his ear, motherly things that he would only remember much, much later. She stroked his cheek, ran her fingertips across his closed eyelids with the subtlety of a breath of air, and when she was sure he slept she stood and walked away.
Trey wandered the nearby caves in his sleep, his mind distanced from his body through the influence of fledge. He took some control—he knew what was happening—but he did not steer where he went. There was nobody to touch upon, nothing to find, so he drifted into one large cave, passed down into a deep, dark lake filled with unknown things, forced through a hundred steps of solid rock, found himself in a smaller cave … and suddenly there was someone there he knew.
His mother.
She had not taken fledge before sleep, he was sure, though he had hardly been in a state to know. This was really her, her bodily self, not just her wandering mind. She noticed him suddenly, spinning around and smiling as his presence made itself felt.
Son, she said, and invisibly he smiled back.
What are you doing here, mother? How did you get here? It’s dangerous, you should be back with me.
I thought I should let you sleep. And I want to set you free.
What do you mean?
There’s a long way to go yet, Trey. Distances to travel, days to work through. And already I’m a hindrance.
Mother …
I’ve been topside, son. It’s a wonderful place. And hateful. Wide open spaces, and terribly confined outlooks. The people up there are so different, remember that. Some will love you for who you are, and some will cut your throat for a fistful of fledge. There’s no finer sight than seeing the sun sink behind the hills, but as it leaves, danger arrives in its wake. It’s backward up there, Trey. They live in the light and find safety in it; it’s the darkness they fear.
Why?
Because they never know what’s in it. We thought we did once, son. That’s what pride does. It blinds you better than the dark.
Come back now, mother. I’ll wake. We should go.
I am going, Trey. I love you. I’m proud of you, so proud. But I’m old and weak, and … and I don’t want to be the cause of your death. She was crying now, really crying, and in his sleep Trey could almost hear her sobs echoing through the caves.
Mother, I don’t know what—
Don’t follow me, son. Follow yourself. Always.
Trey’s disembodied mind watched his mother tip sideways into a black maw, a hole with sharp edge that seemed to go down, down … She fell, and although he obeyed her last wish and did not send his mind to follow her, he sensed in her last moments an immense peace and conviction that she had done the right thing.
Seconds later, suddenly, she was gone.
Trey screamed himself awake. The sound terrified him—they had been almost silent for the entirety of their journey—and so he screamed some more. He thought he heard something answering from far away with a scream of its own making, but perhaps it was an echo already lost.
Trey went on. He remembered only brief flashes of the remainder of his journey. He continued to lick moisture from walls or drink from underground streams. He ate moss and it started making him sick. He had to defecate every few hundred paces, feverish, dislocated, driven now by instinct alone. Images flashed in and out, places and smells and distant sounds, but he did not know whether they were true memories or imagined by his fledge-fuelled mind. He saw an underground waterfall venting itself into a bottomless pothole, but its sound could have been the roar of a victorious Nax. He swiped with his disc-sword at something in the dark as it flapped in and bit him, slapped at his ears with leathery wings. He cried himself to sleep as the minds of the dead touched his own. He dreamed of Sonda.
Trey remembered reaching the rising. It was a great cavern carved out of the bowels of the world centuries ago by machines as large as the entombed Beast. Traces of them remained, littering the cavern’s perimeter, metallic ribs exposed and rotted with rust, old byways and hollows where something once existed now sad and vacant. In a pit in the centre of the cave flickered the Eternal Flame of the underground, ever-lit to guide in miners with their cargoes of fledge. It illuminated the whole cavern and blinded Trey, showing just how deserted that place was.
He had expected to find people here, but there was no one. Even Chartise, the Chief of the Rising, had vanished. But the rising still turned. A great construct of wood and steel, it was pushed by a team of fifty mules, each of them tethered in its own enclosure, each of them forever stepping forward to bite at the food that hung from a huge cogged wheel just above and ahead of them. And this wheel was slowly spun on its axis by the constant motion of the mules. If they stopped in unison they might never start again, but once the rising was begun they only halted when forced to do so. The construct kept turning, and the cogged wheels and giant oiled pulleys continued to lift the timber platforms up, up, topside. The rising was the closest thing there was in the mines to a living, working machine. The mules were its living part; the rising, adapted by Trey’s ancestors soon after the Cataclysmic War, the machine.
Trey should have been awed. This was beyond belief. But he was way past any outside influence, immersed as he was in a miasma of grief, sadness and terror. Every creak from the rising was the sound of the Nax bearing down on him, saving him as their final sacrificial victim because he had woken them, he had cast himself too far and disturbed them from their endless sleep …
Trey fell onto one of the moving platforms and was carried higher than he had ever been.
Time passed. He slept. He raved and raged. And even when he felt sunlight on his skin, helping hands shading his eyes and giving him water, hands which touched him and communicated along with the gentle voice as if their owner knew the language of the mines … even then, he did not believe that he had escaped.
The heat on his face married with the cool certainty that he never would.
6
Kosar the Thief had not been to Pavisse for a long time.
He had been in Trengborne for most of the three years since he had been caught and punished, and that slowing down of life had suited him. He had been a traveller for most of his fifty years. He had seen many things, and stolen more than a few of them. That little, unassuming farming village had quickly become a sort of home, and he had barely strayed beyond its borders in all that time. There had been those there that shunned him because of his scars, but a greater number accepted him, though grudgingly. And it was the first place that he had felt accepted since he was a child.
His long career as a thief had come to an end far to the north in Long Marrakash, stealing furbats from a caravan of rovers. It had been a foolish, clumsy endeavour, and pointless. There were a glut of the unfortunate creatures for sale in stalls and shops all across Long Marrakash, and any of them would have been easier to rob than the rovers. But he had followed the caravan for two days, staying up
in the hills as they traced the Long River along the valley bottom. There were maybe fifty rovers with two dozen wagons, horses, a herd of sheebok and a hundred furbats flapping in their cages. As each hour passed, Kosar became more and more certain that it was folly to steal from these people. Rovers were not renowned for their charity at the best of times—they had a law and a religion of their own, both actively excluding outsiders—and to steal from them was madness.
Perhaps he had wanted to be caught. He had thought about this long and hard since it happened, trying to recapture his mind on that day, in that place, just to look inside and see exactly how it was working at the time. He’d had tellans in his pocket, having robbed a group of rich traders just a death-moon before. He rarely used rhellim, because his drive in that matter had always been strong and balanced. And furbats themselves were not easy to transport in relation to what they would be worth. Perhaps he could have made away with a dozen at most, each of them worth six tellans, and he already had three hundred tellans in his backpack. There was no sane reason why he should ever have tried to rob those rovers. Trade with them, maybe. Sit around their camp fire, talking of dark days and drinking bad wine perhaps, if they had let him.
To rob them was suicide.
They had caught him as he slipped a furbat cage from the fifth wagon. The wagon was rocking as he stepped onto it, and he heard the guttural grunts of a couple fucking inside. They must have noticed the change in rhythm beneath them, however, because he was suddenly face to face with the two rovers: an ugly, tattooed man, and a young long-haired woman, both of them flushed and panting from rhellim.
The next few minutes would have been comic, were they not so painful and destructive.
The man had pushed him from the wagon and proceeded to beat and kick. Kosar had been in more than a few fights and he could look after himself, but this rover’s rage had been beyond anything he had ever encountered. Kosar fended the first few blows, but then his rhellim-flooded attacker knocked him to the ground and, erection waving and glistening in the moonlight, started kicking his head. The naked woman jumped down to join in, and even through the pain Kosar noted her beauty. Others added to the beating, almost all of them naked and drugged. Kosar was beaten into unconsciousness by a group of naked men sporting erections and women glistening wet.
