She had no memory of how it had got there but at least now she didn’t have to go without a fight of her own. She primed the safety and pulled down the hood, standing up to get the chance of one clear shot.
The opponents spun and struggled, scales and skin, orange and green – she saw Tzaban flung back first into a tree trunk but it was a clear separation. Her hand closed and the lizard thing’s top half blew apart into tiny, fleshy bits, spattering the leaves and the ground in a sudden shower of green, pink and red. The gun felt warm and good, like a friend’s hand in her hand. It hummed as it recharged. A sense of vital triumph spread like poison through her, seeping from that hand. A giddy lurch of safety and hope made her gasp and the air was fresh suddenly, for that moment.
She walked out of her place slowly, still on guard, ears straining as she covered the ten metres to Tzaban’s position. A sweet, citrusy reek alarmed her, and she tugged the scarf’s near dry cloth up over her nose again, stuffing it into the neck of her worksuit to hold it in place as she couldn’t let go of the gun. Tzaban was moving at least. He leaned forward and fell to his hands and knees, breathing heavily. The sabre was missing and he was bleeding from his right leg but any other injuries were hidden in the coat of gore covering him. Yellow eyes stared at her. ‘Good shot. Now you go first. Shoot everything.’ But then he hesitated and a darkness came over his face and over his gaze at the same time. Belatedly, she realised it was a shadow as his face changed from agonised to a form of aweful dread. He said, ‘Not that though. Don’t shoot that.’ He was mortally afraid otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to hold herself back from turning and doing exactly that. She wanted to. She longed to. She wanted the feeling of being safe and powerful to go on and on, even if she didn’t.
‘No,’ he said, quietly, even his breathing reduced to a whisper. His yellow eyes, sepia in the darkness that had silently grown over them, blinked slowly as they looked up over her head. Her skin felt like it was trying to escape by itself as she froze in place. She stared at Tzaban’s face as she’d never stared at anything, like she could cling to him that way. The most minute movement of his nose side to side told her she must not move as his gaze remained huge and glued to a thing that must have been double her height, right behind her.
The gun butt became a hard, painful lump of metal in her hand. She looked only into Tzaban’s eyes, the golden yellow of the master, as a tiny piece of her at the back of her mind told her that this was his version of the Empress’ magic. The Karoo, of course, were not so different, or the Imperial lines were of similar lineage to them somewhere. She was wearing his collar around her neck, chained to him by the scent magic that sapped her will.
Even if her life now depended on turning around and shooting she could not do it – a greater compulsion made her stay, frozen rabbit stupid, watching his face for his instruction. The cool engineer inside her was charmed, amazed, impressed, marvelling and calculating as the animal part of her lay flat and domesticated entirely in its mortal terror. The bizarre contrast of two such simultaneous experiences was exhilarating in a way she had never experienced anything before, like joy.
She felt a second of immense gratitude to a universe that could contain so much wonder and power and strangeness even as she was completely at its mercy, all her pride and her sense of independence, of mattering, stripped away to reveal only a person in great danger whose hopes and dreams, whose consciousness could at any second be ripped away and made nothing without her permission. Without a warning. She wanted to fall on her knees and cry for the insight and the fear, the perfect feeling that even this was an illusion. She was part of a whole so majestic and strange it didn’t even matter if she fell and was gone, because it was going on like a wave rushing in, always rushing on and on. Tumble today here or tomorrow or another time, she was right here and right now aware that she was eternal, only the small brief spark in a gigantic powerhouse fuelling unknown machineries to destinies so far beyond her ken that she could not even dream them in a thousand years of dreaming. She was so happy, and so sad. Happy to have glimpsed it and sad because she would never know its reach or its end.
‘Come, child,’ said a strange voice over her and behind her.
Tralane remained as she was, anchored by the pain of the gun, as Tzaban got up slowly from his fallen state. His every movement was strange, jerking to the obedience of unseen strings pulling him about. He got to his feet, and she saw that the leg wound was a human bolt shot. He must have taken it before they even went through the portal. Now his blood was dripping on the mud and the leaves, as it had since they had passed through. The red stood out against the brown and green and at that moment she saw that it wasn’t blood, but a voice, talking to the mud, to the leaf, to the things it touched that were and were not Karoo. It was like the voice behind her, almost human. All living things talked this way.
She saw herself in her mind’s eye rushing to write this down, to begin tests, to look for the grammar and the code, the patterns and the meanings. In her mind’s eye she was at home, researching, days and nights passing unnoticed until the puzzle was solved, the mystery undone. All the days of her life in the University, years and breakthroughs, highs and boring lows when nothing seemed to come right and she doubted her sanity in even trying to make her slow, one-way magical brain understand something it could see only from the corner of its blinkered vision. And she would have stripped all the blinkers from them all, to see, to know what others took for granted. If she had been there. If she were not here, watching the magnificent and wounded man stagger in her direction to where he, like she, must obey the one who held him prisoner and who had found him by his blood.
She felt sure that if anything threatened him she would not be able to prevent herself trying to save him. Her loyalty was absolute. Her devotion unwavering. Remembering she didn’t know him. Remembering she wasn’t devoted to him at all.
He stopped beside her. She could just see him from the corner of her eye. Now he was so close she could feel the tension in him, fighting to resist and remain himself in a battle of wills that was entirely still and silent otherwise. The ties that bound them together were stronger than anything she had ever experienced. No human man, and not even her own children, exerted such a compulsion, nor such a clear two-way communication that took place beneath her understanding, though it was so certain she would have bet her life on it. Through it, she found she could perceive his war, even his opponent; a female of the Karoo, and more, a queen.
It was because of that she realised it was not she in mortal danger at all. She would always be spared, purely because she was as the queen was, female. Tzaban was the quarry and the charm, the bait and the threat. His life hung by silken threads of the blood’s voice as it seeped into the queen’s demesne and she listened to it through every quivering blade of grass and thirsty root.
The queen advanced a step and Tralane felt her warmth even through the heat of the morning. The shouts and cries of torture, mere metres away, might as well be in another world. Tzaban’s scent beside her changed markedly and he cowered. They were engulfed by a primal presence so intense Tralane could only think of the word, ‘Mother,’ and, remembering her own mother as if she were simply a baby and had never been more, she began to cry silently with the sudden upwelling of love that she felt. All her intellect and the experiences of her life counted nothing in the face of being able to feel an emotion so completely as this. She knew why Tzaban was on all fours. She smelled his submission and adoration.
The engineering voice in her mind made its notes, hoping there would be someone to give them to later. It was the only thing that she felt good about, clinging to the one bit of her that the Mother did not command. She wondered if life was like this for Zharazin, if he could witness these forces at work as though they were simple tools before him, if he felt like she did when he used his abilities. A sense of violation had steered her imagination from dwelling on it, but she found to her total surprise that it was nothing like that, if
it was the same. This was much more like dancing than fighting even though she was clearly the subjugated and either of the other two controlled her every move. It was the most inopportune time to think of it but she saw where her hesitancy over the infomancer lay now – in a place she didn’t want to admit as her own. She thought of them all as rapists by any other name. An immediate shame came over her and she felt Mother’s attention sucked in by it, as sure as a cat at the twitch of a mouse.
‘Please, don’t,’ Tralane heard herself say as she tried to cower smaller, hiding under Tzaban, as if that were possible. Even so she felt him give a little and move in an effort to accommodate her. Tralane clawed the boggy ground, searching for a hole to hide in. Her eyes were squeezed shut so tightly that colours blared in her head. Her last thought as a stinking, body-hot blackness closed over her was that cat and mouse was an apt analogy, as cats had no appreciation of the hunt beyond their own play, but the mouse still went unspared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
TZABAN
Tzaban felt the human woman crawl beneath him, moving so he did not crush her as he began the change in response to the queen’s command. He tried, for her sake, to cling to his awareness of the outside world, though all of him wanted to surrender. Within the confines of the subtle, where he and the queen met through blood and scent deep beneath his surface, he felt the queen’s spark ignite him. Slowly at first, then with accelerating power, he began to burn.
He slid in the mud, falling to his back, arched over the engineer’s small form as the queen opened him and he began to bleed out into her sweet, welcoming veins, her blood running back against his tide, stronger, more alive, seeking all his knowledge, all his being. The burning became a fierce, bright pain that consumed him and he leaned into it, every memory incandescent and brilliant before him as it was borne away. The smallest things, held in such light became the veils of the goddess and her handmaids, the angels, beings of such beauty and intensity their presence within him was blinding, terrifying. Wave after exultant wave, they came, the legions of his soul, transcending him as she consumed them. The pleasure, the delight, the joy was beyond expression. Bound with the pain, it was a river of fire that swirled him under and brought him up. Beyond senses he was all that he had ever seen and then, in moments, he was done and no more than a drop of water in the queen’s belly, her shimmering light all around him, her contemplation as fierce as the primal hungers that drove her.
He longed never to leave her, for her to carry him or to consume him entire in this warm beauty, a place of peace amid violence. He had been returned to fear’s heart and it was divine in the ending of his terror. He never wanted to be let go. Instead take one step further and be ended in it. The bliss of her presence enfolding him was too profound and inside her he was completed, purpose done and passions spent, ferocity sated. But she held him apart and he was compelled to remain in the balance, enough of him to beg her, Don’t let me go, as her attention turned to the woman below his back.
Somewhere Tralane was bleeding. The queen tasted, and waited. He saw eight rivers and one heart, a scattering of colours like fallen leaves on dry ground, wind blowing them closer together, all making an image he did not understand. The rivers joined. They flowed towards an ocean of green and this he knew – Karoo was green.
Then the swift tides that had brought him there turned. Against his will he was poured back into an agony of sensation, the queen’s commands shackling him once more to a body she had re-sculpted. He tried with all his will to resist her but it was as useful as resisting a waterfall you were already immersed in. The shock of the return left him reeling in pain, paralysed by the venom she used to keep him still while she worked.
A final jolt, a final tearing, and he was alone on the mud. He rolled and got to his feet. The engineer was still there, rolled tightly, breathing like a frightened rabbit. Her fear stank so strongly he almost tore her head off on the spot.
Behind him, the queen withdrew and he didn’t bother to watch her form dissolving between the trees. Her interest in him was over and her mercy at an end.
TRALANE
Tralane tasted mud, smelled mud and opened her eyes to find them stinging and watering so much she could barely see. Spitting, she found her mouth was full of mud. Then she remembered why she had passed out and groped around mentally for the overpowering presence of Mother. Nothing.
She pushed herself upright and rubbed her eyes on her sleeves. The fetid cloth around her neck was nearly choking her and she yanked it off, unable to stand the obstruction a moment longer. A gasping breath filled her mouth and nose with horror. She groped blindly for the hood, surprise blocking the things that wanted to pour themselves into her mind: she tasted blood and the sharp tang of vomit, the salty and ill reek of open guts. A low noise, part scream part growl, pushed through her lips and she let it go, wishing that this unending assault of stenches would end. She wondered how she could find in it the traces of herself, and Tzaban, two other dead humans and an avalanche of plant fluids that she would have had to search the University botany log to discover. They were all there and they told her an alchemical story of mixing and mating. She set the kerchief hood in place and breathed inside her collar, finding her own strong scents of fear and sweat dear and sweet in comparison. Little by little, she blinked and cried her eyes clear, wiped her nose, spat her mouth free of grit though nothing got rid of the tastes. And then she was able to look about in the fading light.
The fighting was done and a stillness claimed the land, marked only by her own sounds and the drip of water from leaves overhead. She sat in a small clearing of crushed bush and grasses, trees flattened to make a rough round with her at the centre, and, at the edge of the clearing, the crouched and hulking form of the Karoo, his striped colours darker in the seeping twilight. She blinked and blinked again but she could not resolve what she saw into the shape she remembered. She wondered if he was alive but she saw him rock with breathing. She listened hard but only the patter of a new rain from grey skies sounded. Something had happened to her. Something had happened to him. As the droplets began to fall steadily they ran over her bare arms and she saw that her sleeves were gone, ripped clear off at the seams, and her forearm and underarms were covered in a set of red circular marks like the bites of tiny mouths.
Now that she saw them they stung. On closer examination they were more like rings of tiny needle punctures. Trembling a little with anxiety, she made herself check for any other damage but she was apparently unharmed. She looked about through steadily pattering rain, trying to get her bearings, and saw the cockeyed post of the portal gate to her left, then the other further off in the dimming light. The powerpack was still attached to her bag of tools. Some of these were squashed into the mud. She recovered them with shaking hands, slotting them into their places. It calmed her enough that by the time a few minutes had passed uneventfully and she was done she could get to her feet.
‘Tzaban?’ she called across the short distance between them, as quietly as she could. She daren’t approach him, she found.
He straightened at the sound of his name and a chill ran through her, sending every hair on end. Her skin crawled with unease at the sight of him. He was still recognisable but where he had had deeply animal traits he had lost some of them. His ears were smaller, shorter, his tail gone. The mane was hair proper and his skin was human skin, coloured as it had been but in subtler shades. It was as though he had been diluted one third in the image of her kind.
He was still massive. Unfolding in the ragged remnants of his clothing he must have been at least two feet taller than she was. She found him strangely more alien now than she had before. He turned and faced her, a look of bitter disappointment so strongly written in his features that she almost backed off from it, though she knew it was not concerning her. He gave her his attention without the slightest willingness, even though it was absolutely hers. She saw no resentment, nothing to fear. He was however, in contrast to his former self, anoth
er being entirely. She knew then that he was somehow slaved to her and that Mother had done this.
Already even thinking about that thing as ‘Mother’ felt obscene. Now this was visited on them. To what end? Why was she not dead like the rest?
‘Engineer,’ he said finally, as if the word would break the deadlock of silence and horror growing between them. ‘We should get to the camp before dark.’
Between them the lengthening shadows were already blue and purple. She saw only hints of colour in the world. ‘Yes. Do you know the way?’ The foggy dampness swallowed her voice, but he heard it.
‘Yes. Come.’ He waited for her.
She made her way across to him, aware now of her hunger and exhaustion from terror. She had felt so much of it in the last hour she had gone dead to it. A numb pragmatism sat in its place which he seemed to share. As she reached him he turned and set off at a slow pace into the murk between the trees. She trod in his footsteps, with an extra step every third, to catch up. After a time they came to a broad, muddy and rutted lane. Blood darkened the water and reflected the grey starlessness of the sky. He kept to the edges, pausing to turn and drag her up by her arm when she fell, her boot stuck deeply into the sucking boggy ground. As she fell against him she felt how warm and strong he was, and leaned into it for a second. He let her, though there was no care in his grip on her arm beyond what was required to keep her standing.
‘Tzaban,’ she said. ‘How many people did you eat to become as human as you were?’
His yellow eyes, changed, looked down at her. Their pupils were huge in the near darkness, much larger than hers could ever be. His face was grim. After a moment he glanced down at himself and growled in a voice the texture of mud, ‘Apparently not enough.’
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