The Deserter

by Peadar O'Guilin

  She sighed. ‘Do you really think they’ll be watching every exit now?’

  ‘It makes sense. Otherwise they’ll have to try and track us in this dark place.’

  ‘If the secret is important enough to them, they’ll have the resources to do both. And if we can’t use the doors, I don’t even know how we’re going to get out of here!’

  ‘I might have an idea,’ said Stopmouth.

  She looked up. ‘Really?’

  ‘We need a rope,’ he said. ‘Where can we get one?’

  At that moment Jagadamba’s harsh breathing stopped. It had been such a continuous presence since their escape that even the baby woke up and started crying for its lack. Indrani pulled Flamehair away while Stopmouth made sure that the old woman hadn’t simply woken up at last. But no. An ear to her chest confirmed that her crotchety heart had finally given up the struggle and her spirit had flown off to join her ancestors.

  The hunter shook his head. ‘People aren’t meant to live so long,’ he said. ‘But, Jagadamba, you were there when I needed you. We will honour your flesh.’

  ‘We will do no such thing,’ said Indrani. ‘You know she wouldn’t have wanted it, and there are plenty of others around here.’

  ‘Would they have wanted it?’ he asked.

  ‘You didn’t know them!’

  ‘All the more reason—’

  ‘I said no, Stopmouth! Enough. We have to eat, I accept that. But you’re in my home now, not on the surface. And anyway, look! There is our rope! A lot of the dead Religious around here are wearing silk robes that we can tie together. Oh, don’t look like that! Yes, it’s light, but it’ll be stronger than anything you have on the surface! Now, what are we going to do with it?’

  ‘I’ll show you!’ was all he’d say, knowing it would drive her mad and enjoying the fact. But they had a lot to do, and Indrani was occupied with the baby. So he set to work by himself.

  First he took several portions of flesh from a nearby volunteer and put it to smoke over the fire – they might not be able to cook later, and even though they’d only just eaten, his stomach was already demanding more.

  Poor Jagadamba, he thought. He’d never met anybody so nasty in all his life, and yet he knew he was going to miss her. He thought about cutting off her left hand as she had demanded. But he knew that all the stairwells would be blocked. A pity.

  He gathered the type of robe that Indrani called silk. It took him a few goes before he could tell it apart from the other kind. On the surface, he’d grown up with only scraped and cured beast hides for clothing. These silk skins were amazing, though; supple and light, yet so strong.

  ‘Will you just tell me now?’ asked Indrani when he’d finally gathered enough of the clothing together.

  ‘I prefer to show you,’ he said.

  He scattered the fire and hid Jagadamba’s body in a niche where he hoped the Elite wouldn’t find it and recognize her. Then, by the light of the Talker, he led Indrani to an area where the floor grew rough underfoot with corrosion, and slime could be heard dripping in several places.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘when I was coming from the Downstairs, I saw that there were other floors underneath us – every two levels or so there were doorways, and we came up sixty flights in total.’

  ‘Yes, the storage levels, but so what? I heard those areas are in an even bigger mess than here.’

  ‘Well, look at this!’ Stopmouth had found what he was looking for – a great, slowly plopping river of slime eating into the floor at the far end of a long corridor. It had probably been flowing here for thousands of days, for it had worn a hole big enough to drop a Globe through. A warm breeze blew in from beneath.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ said Indrani.

  ‘There’s a dead tree against that wall, see? We can tie a free-up knot around it to reclaim the rope after we climb down.’

  ‘And we can do this for every floor? You’re sure?’

  ‘The slime is everywhere,’ he said.

  She smiled, proud of him, and his chest swelled. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m going first.’ She raised a finger when he started forward. ‘I am, Stopmouth. I’m lighter than you, remember? You get to lower me down. And to mind Flamehair.’

  Stopmouth had no chance to protest. A loud ping rang against the metal roof of the corridor. Then he heard another, and something zipped past his ear with a sound like the buzzing of a surface insect.

  ‘By the gods!’ hissed Indrani. ‘Deactivate! Deactivate!’

  Their light went out. More pinging sounds whipped and buzzed around them. The darkness was now total. Then Indrani was grabbing his hand and pulling him away, both of them stumbling, the baby crying. He heard a voice shouting from the far end of the corridor, but didn’t understand a thing it had said. The noises stopped, but Indrani’s tugging hand never lessened its grip. She must have felt an air current from their left, for she suddenly dragged him in that direction, taking more and more turns in an effort to lose those hunting them. How stupid they’d been to keep the Talker alight like that! And who knew what other clues they’d been foolish enough to leave behind them!

  Stopmouth heard shouting. Their pursuers couldn’t have seen them, but they always seemed to know which were the correct turns to take no matter how much Indrani wove left and right. Any moment now, one of the fugitives would trip on a body – or, worse, fall into a hole, and that would be the end of them.

  Forcibly, he stopped Indrani and placed a hand over her mouth to quell her protests. ‘Activate,’ he said, knowing it would allow him to communicate properly with her.

  ‘It’s not the light they’re tracking,’ he said. ‘And with the racket they’re making it’s not the baby crying either. We’ve got to fight them. We’ll never get away by running.’

  The noise got steadily closer in the cramped, echoey corridors they’d been fleeing down. But they still had a few dozen heartbeats before their enemy caught up with them. Stopmouth found a little cross-corridor with a niche halfway down. He persuaded Indrani to leave the baby there. Alone. The little thing started to cry at once and he had to practically drag the poor mother back to the cross-corridor, where the two of them held the ends of the rope and extinguished the light of the Talker.

  Right behind the hunter, a little stream of slime rolled down the wall. He realized he was kneeling in it, probably destroying his clothing. Already he could feel the skin of his leg starting to itch.

  They heard running feet. Not too many, thank the ancestors, but they’d be strong.

  ‘The baby!’ somebody shouted. ‘And their uniforms are close. Run, boys! Run! We’ll hunt them down like beasts, but keep aiming low! Don’t kill the woman!’

  The men careered down the corridor in the darkness, the clatter of their boots suddenly thunderous. Stopmouth felt a fierce wrench on the rope and knew the Wardens had fallen in a heap.

  He leaped up with the Talker in his hand. He’d had one of the machines on the surface and had learned a few tricks. Like, for example, how to blind an opponent. Keeping his eyes tightly shut, he cried: ‘Bright! Brighter than the Roof!’ It flared, as it was supposed to, but only for the briefest of moments. Men cursed, but Stopmouth, his stomach tightening, suddenly realized he couldn’t understand them any more.

  Then he heard Indrani shout; heard an impact as she kicked hard at somebody on the ground. Stopmouth let forth a chilling cry of his own and joined in.

  Somebody grabbed at his foot. He knew by the grip that this was no Elite. Still, the man toppled him onto a pair of others. He punched out for all he was worth. His target wore a mask over the eyes. It splintered easily under Stopmouth’s fists and he used little shards of it to slash at necks and faces. He kept seeing Krishnan in his mind’s eye, kept imagining the blood spouting and hearing screams from all over.

  More cries echoed through the darkness. Then he heard footsteps running away. He allowed himself another yell of triumph, then all was quiet again, but for the sounds of his breathing and the
baby’s whimpers from the niche.

  ‘Indrani?’ he called. ‘We’ve done it! We’ve chased them off. Indrani?’

  Only the silence answered him.

  ‘By the ancestors,’ he moaned. The men hadn’t come for him, of course. They hadn’t wanted him at all.

  Two of them still lay unconscious on the ground. Stopmouth didn’t want to leave them to rot away in the slime, but Indrani mattered more to him than any number of Wardens, so he ran to the end of the corridor until he collided with a wall. He tried to listen for the kidnappers, but all he heard was a wailing cry from back the way he’d come. The baby! He cursed and cursed. His brother’s child … Indrani’s too, and she’d never forgive him if he lost her, no matter what else happened until the end of time.

  While tripping over the unconscious men on his way back to Flamehair, he saw that one of them had a faint green light on his face. Stopmouth touched it and found it was the man’s mask, similar to the one he’d broken on his other opponent. He pulled it off, ignoring the Warden’s groan and the baby’s continuous wails, and put it over his own eyes.

  Green dots appeared in front of him, the kind he saw sometimes after a blow to the head. He held his hand up and couldn’t see it, but his tattered uniform shone before him very clearly indeed, like a spirit. The men on the ground glowed too. Further green shadows, albeit faint ones, drifted somewhere towards the top of his vision. Instinctively he knew they represented his fleeing enemies. He’d heard them, hadn’t he? In the last heartbeats before attacking they’d said something about seeing the ‘uniforms’ … He moved the unconscious men away from the slime before collecting the wailing child.

  Stopmouth tried bouncing her as they walked. ‘You’ll give us away!’ he scolded.

  She was too young for any food except mother’s milk. If he didn’t find Indrani, Flamehair would die. He didn’t know how he felt about that. Selfish. Despicable. ‘You are Tribe,’ he said to the little one, to reassure her. Or maybe to reassure himself that he wasn’t a monster. ‘You are Tribe.’

  He came back to the wall he’d run into earlier. The green dots had gone left here, and so did he. What would he do when he caught up with the Wardens? They had some kind of weapon: a powerful sling, perhaps, that threw stones so fast they buzzed as they passed your head. Their aim had been pretty bad, but they hadn’t been trying to kill. Not Indrani, anyway. They wouldn’t be so gentle when he showed up without her.

  He wandered into a huge cavern. A terrible smell filled the air here, like meat that had been overcooked again and again. But that wasn’t what stopped him dead.

  At the very top, all along the ceiling, were thousands and thousands of tiny lights. They were like the tracklights that surface-dwellers could see on the Roof. Except that these did not march across the sky in orderly lines; rather, they lay scattered at random, as though the ancestors of these people were particularly clumsy in where they lit their campfires. It was a stunning sight. He felt dizzy, his knees weak. Even the baby stopped crying. When he could finally bring himself to look down again and search for the green dots on his mask, he found they were all around him. A light came on, another Talker.

  Four Wardens stood in a semicircle before him, their clothing torn and their skin scratched. They’d been in a fight. One of them shifted from leg to leg as though barely able to stand. Two others, a man and a woman, pointed metal tubes at him. The magic slings, he thought.

  ‘I warned him,’ said the leader. He had little coloured patches of cloth on his uniform that none of the others had. Lines marked his face, and a layer of tiny grey bristles reached all the way down to his Adam’s apple. ‘I warned Krishnan you’d be a danger even to the likes of him.’

  ‘You were the chief we saw,’ said Stopmouth, ‘waiting at the top of the ladder?’

  A nod, as between peers. ‘You may call me Hanuman. I have been a fan since I saw your very first hunt. For that reason I am truly, sincerely honoured to know you. But equally, I would be remiss in my duty if I let you live beyond this point. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What about Indrani?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve tied her up, but we won’t hurt her.’ The man grinned. ‘She had no such compunction about hurting us, of course.’

  The Talker in Hanuman’s hand flickered. He glanced at it, puzzled, but the Wardens with the metal tubes raised them and aimed them squarely at Stopmouth’s chest.

  ‘And the baby?’ asked the hunter. ‘Are you going to kill her too?’

  Hanuman looked outraged at the question. ‘Certainly not! Put it down and step away. Slowly.’

  Stopmouth bent to comply. His heart was hammering. The men had him surrounded and he suspected that even if he turned and ran, he’d be lucky not to get one of those magic slingstones in the back. At least they’d promised not to hurt Indrani. But what if they handed her over to the Elite? What then? How could he die here with his woman still in trouble?

  The child trembled in his arms, as if responding to his fear. He felt a strange reluctance to put her down.

  ‘There’s slime everywhere,’ he said. ‘Let me find her a dry spot.’

  Less than a day ago Krishnan had beaten him half to death, but he felt none of those injuries now. His muscles all but hummed with strength. His flesh did not belong to these people. They were not Tribe and they would not take him without a fight!

  Just as he placed Flamehair on the floor, Hanuman’s Talker flared once and went out.

  The hunter dived forward, hearing a deafening bang that set his ears ringing. Another followed, and another. Then he was among them, just one more green dot. The only difference was that for him, any body he encountered could be safely attacked.

  He punched a Warden in what might have been the throat. His opponent fell away with a wheeze, but somebody else caught him by the shoulder, shouting out in triumph. The hunter twisted away from the hand just as one of the strange slings went bang! A man screamed and fell.

  Two down! he thought. But they weren’t out of the fight.

  A fallen man grabbed Stopmouth’s leg, throwing the full weight of his body against it and bending the hunter’s ankle until the pain made him cry out. They both hit the floor. Stopmouth kicked back with his other leg and connected with his opponent’s face even as two enemies – probably Hanuman and the sling-woman – approached. The newcomers were so close together, their two green dots had merged into one.

  The Warden’s grip lessened. The hunter pulled his foot free and tried to get up, but the ankle gave way, tumbling him to where the wounded man could grapple with him again, rolling him over into a pool of slime.

  The footsteps were now right behind him. When they figured out which dot was Stopmouth, they would shoot. He scooped up a handful of stinging liquid and shoved his fist right into the other man’s mouth, as hard and as deep as he could. There was no scream; only horrific, horrified choking. He rolled his victim off him, then pushed the man at the newcomers as hard as he could.

  He saw two brief flashes of light, heard two bangs. The body jerked and lay still. The hunter squeezed in beside it, hoping they wouldn’t be able to tell his uniform from that of his enemy. He struggled to keep his breathing quiet, almost bursting with the effort.

  Hanuman said something; called out what might have been a few names – but with the Talker out of action Stopmouth didn’t understand a word of it. There was no reply. Stopmouth felt the body beside him being kicked. Then he heard breathing as the sling-woman bent down to feel the face of the man she’d shot. Even in the dark, it was the easiest thing in the world for the hunter to take the shooting club out of a startled grasp and smack her over the head with it.

  ‘Hanuman?’ he called. ‘Hanuman?’ He listened carefully. He’d hoped to provoke an attack, but the man had already said he knew how dangerous Stopmouth was. The hunter’s mask showed the glowing figure of his last enemy moving off a dozen steps before coming to a halt. Did he know the hunter was wounded? Or that he had a super-sling now? Did he perhaps have o
ne himself and was just waiting for Stopmouth to stand up?

  Maybe just as well I can’t, he thought. He pushed one of the heavy bodies ahead of him as a shield and crawled through stinging slime towards the spot where his last opponent lay in wait. But all he found when he got there was an empty uniform, glowing in the dark. The man had fled. Stopmouth knew he wouldn’t be long in coming back with more Wardens. Maybe lots more.

  Only one more green dot remained on his mask now. Indrani? Or just her uniform? He heard her terrified voice calling out as he approached. ‘Shtop-mouth?’

  Only then did he realize how exhausted he was, how unnaturally hungry.

  ‘You’ll have to speak Human, love – the Talkers are all dead for some reason.’ His own voice seemed far away to him. He picked at the ropes that bound her with clumsy fingers, distracted by his throbbing ankle. Slime had soaked into his clothing and found every scratch on his body. He wanted to wail like Flamehair was doing – a terribly lonely sound. At least they’d be able to find her again in the darkness!

  Then he felt Indrani’s hands against his cheek. ‘To sleeping,’ she told him in clumsy Human. It must have been a long time since she’d spoken the language, but her magic worked on him at once.

  13. THE SHUTTLE

  HIRESH OPENED HIS eyes. The blurry face in front of him sharpened slowly into features he knew well. ‘Tarini?’ The sound emerged as more of a gurgle than anything else. He had to spit up onto the floor beside the bed before he could try it again. ‘Tarini?’

  She beamed at him. Her little eyes sparkled and she grabbed his left hand in both of hers. ‘About time you woke up!’ she said. ‘They’ve had us in here a whole day.’

  ‘That long?’ This was not the Academy, he could be sure of that much. Dense forests decorated the walls, with birds flitting between trees, and insects of every kind buzzing and crawling and burrowing. The whole room glowed with the green of living things, and so it was some moments before he noticed the sheath of the same colour that encased his right arm. A flick to the Roof told him it was a Nurse – nowhere near as valuable as Medicine in that it only healed local wounds. But even then, it was surely too rare to waste on a mere apprentice. This one looked like it had nearly completed its job. All the swelling had gone down.