The Deserter

by Peadar O'Guilin

  Once her back was turned Stopmouth crawled to where the dead Wardens waited, praying the meat hadn’t spoiled yet in the heat. He took a knife from the woman’s belt. His stomach was cramping with a hunger so bad that, in spite of what had happened with Krishnan, he went straight for her liver and gobbled the whole thing down raw. He chased it down with a full container of water from the volunteer’s belt. What was wrong with him? He felt so strange. And he was still hungry! He ate as much as he could before Indrani came back, and stored a good bit more in a pouch.

  Finally they were able to turn their backs on the sun and set off for the dark corridors beyond, each bundled up in stolen clothing. Even better, they had the rope the Wardens had used to bind Indrani, which was far stronger and lighter than even the one Stopmouth had made of silk.

  While they walked, they played a game dating right back to the last time he’d crippled himself. That was when they’d first met. He’d managed to get his legs crushed, and but for Indrani’s nursing and her ingenuity in making his legs heal straight, he’d have been dead a long time ago.

  While he lay in his sick bed, he taught her words of Human, getting her to repeat them again and again. He’d never met anybody who couldn’t speak before, and her pronunciation was so bad that in her presence his own stutter would almost disappear. It was magic, purest magic. She had healed him in every way, and they’d laughed so much that even though she was supposed to be his brother’s wife, they caused a scandal throughout Man-Ways.

  Now, with the baby sleeping, it was as if the shadow of his brother had disappeared again from their lives. Stopmouth tested Indrani on her vocabulary: hand, ankle … baby, smell … nappy, awful.

  This time, however, the word game was different. Indrani tested him too. Because they were now in her world, not his, and all around them lay objects for which Human had no expression. Flickering torchlight revealed pictures of men and women relaxing on couches, staring into books. ‘Is good,’ Indrani muttered, fascinated. ‘Is good good.’

  ‘Very good,’ he corrected her.

  Other frescoes showing great beasts straining against ropes got her even more excited: ‘Look, Shtop-mouth! Look, is more very good! Wheels! You see? For you good!’

  All he saw was circles, and no matter how many times she rolled her hand, he could only shrug and smile. So she abandoned him against a wall and started lobbing little bits of wood at him, until his pathetic attempts to hop out of the way had them both laughing helplessly. Even the baby woke to smile and coo.

  But Stopmouth was always aware of the passing time and never fully relaxed until the torchlight revealed a room full of stone pillars with streams of slime cutting holes into the floor. If they were lucky, they could follow it all – or most of – the way to the Downstairs.

  ‘We’ll tie the rope around one of these columns,’ he said. ‘And I’ll lower you down.’

  ‘How …?’ she asked. ‘How you to come?’ She pointed into the hole.

  ‘I can do it,’ he said, hoping it was true. ‘I’m just not sure I could climb back up if I found the rope wasn’t long enough.’

  ‘Is good,’ she said.

  Like all his people, Stopmouth was an expert handler of ropes. Most, however, were made of hide or bark, and no matter how often the women chewed to soften them, none could ever approach the suppleness of the one he’d taken from the Wardens.

  ‘Please, ancestors,’ he prayed, ‘just let it be as strong as I think it is!’ His injury shamed him. He should have been the one going down there, not his wife.

  Before anything else, he dropped the torch into the hole. It found the floor easily enough, no more than four times the height of a man down. A few shadowy objects that Indrani referred to as crates – no threat, she said – lay just inside the circle of flickering light beside a small pool of slime. Other than that, they saw nothing.

  He anchored the rope around one of the pillars. Then he made a large loop for his woman to sit in while he and the baby stayed above in the blackness. Wallbreaker had been terrified of the dark, but his child took it well enough. Stopmouth could hear her cooing beside him and see the little kicks of her feet from underneath Jagadamba’s blanket. She was such a pretty child, he thought. It shouldn’t have made him sad, but it did.

  ‘Is good!’ he heard Indrani call as she reached the floor.

  ‘It’s good!’ he shouted back at her, and heard her snort. But he felt nervous for her. She had instructions to take the torch and look for a way out or for another break in the floor – with any luck the same streams of slime would just keep on going down. In any case, the important thing was not to land themselves in a dead end.

  He heard Indrani cry out: ‘Oh!’ He crawled desperately to the hole and craned over the edge, looking for the glow of the torch. It appeared almost immediately, Indrani’s face grinning up at him.

  ‘Is good, Shtop-mouth,’ she called. ‘It’s good – it’s much very good! Come. Flamehair come!’ She was practically hopping with excitement.

  First Stopmouth lowered the warm little bundle into her mother’s arms. He followed down, still a bit awkward with his ankle, but much less so than he should have been. Mustn’t have been as serious as it felt! When he got to the bottom and tugged to loosen the knot, Indrani kissed him, making him feel as happy as she looked.

  ‘You’re covered in slime!’ he said. She’d made efforts to wipe herself off – though it must have stung pretty badly.

  ‘Let’s clean you up first,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ll use one of the spare robes. We’ll—’

  This brought a frustrated response.

  ‘No good,’ she said. ‘No good, you see.’

  It felt even colder here than it had up above. The torch flickered dangerously in a current of air from way over on the right where Stopmouth fancied he saw another glow. Indrani dragged him towards it over a floor with no corpses and few pools of slime other than the one immediately beneath the hole. Sure enough, a blue light – many blue lights that seemed to blur and merge and blur again – shone from up ahead. All the while the cold grew stronger.

  And here, at last, he saw why Indrani hadn’t wanted to clean the slime off. A curtain of the stuff, hung between them and the source of the blue glow. It dripped in great blobs, thick as jelly. Indrani was able to part it with her hands, and the hole she made lasted for several heartbeats as it slowly healed. A huge shaft waited on the other side, enormous, sheer walls leaping into blackness, thousands of paces wide. It cut straight through the levels of the Roof, all those stairs he had climbed in the company of Hiresh and Jagadamba. Blue lights shone from it here and there, most of them lower down.

  Stopmouth shook his head. ‘This is our only way out? A hunter would have to be able to fly to travel through a tunnel like this!’

  His wife laughed at that, still delighted with herself.

  ‘Globe,’ she said. And he understood.

  All his life on the surface, Globes had spied on him and his people. Until the arrival of Indrani nobody had realized that humans rode inside these strange objects, studying the descendants of the hated Deserters, amusing themselves with the savages’ adventures.

  When Stopmouth enlarged the slime gap and looked carefully across the great pit, he could see that each of the dozen or so blue lights on the far wall shone upon metal eggs that seemed to be embedded in it.

  ‘Here too,’ said Indrani, pointing first above her head, then to the left and the right.

  ‘On this wall too, you mean?’ he asked. ‘We have Globes all around us?’ She nodded. ‘Well’ – Stopmouth ran a finger through the curtain of sludge – ‘won’t all the ones on this side be damaged by the slime? Like the Talker, I mean. Remember how that stopped working?’

  Her shoulders sagged. Of course, she should have thought of that before bringing them down here with their only rope. Or maybe Stopmouth shouldn’t have been so eager to loosen the knot! Even if they could lower themselves through the ooze and somehow get into a Globe, it might
well stop working and send them all plunging to their deaths. Her desperation to get back to the Downstairs had got the better of her.

  ‘I sorry,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief at what she’d done.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’ll be another way out.’ Please, ancestors, let that be true!

  After Stopmouth had wiped her dry she made a fresh torch and went exploring while he waited with the baby. Whenever the hole in the slime closed up, he’d open it again with a bit of corroded metal. He wondered what people Downstairs were doing to stop this stuff breaking all their magic toys. Nothing, probably. They’d be lying in the parks, staring into some Dream made for them by the Roof. The same Roof that fed them and clothed them, housed them and fought for them. If it couldn’t defend itself against this alien Virus, then how could they?

  And yet these same useless people now claimed to have a solution to the Crisis. He couldn’t believe that, but he had his own tribe to worry about.

  The baby started crying. ‘Stop that now,’ he said. He’d picked up babies before and knew it might help with this one too. He didn’t want to. ‘Hush,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘Hush!’ The blue light was strong enough to see her face. His brother’s features were written all over it, and he knew that when she grew up, she’d have his dimples, and everybody would fall over themselves to do her bidding, no matter what the consequences.

  Stopmouth felt a moment of hatred. But Indrani was in there too, especially in the dark, proud eyes. When they looked up, seeming to focus on him, he felt for a moment that it was his wife’s spirit that had conquered in the end and that this child would be courageous and loving; everything his brother only pretended to be.

  ‘Stop crying, little one,’ he said, trying to keep his voice gentle. ‘You’ll be safe with me.’

  Through the wall of slime he saw one of the blue lights begin to flicker. He counted fifteen heartbeats before it went out.

  ‘Shtop-mouth? Shtop-mouth?’

  ‘Over here!’ he shouted, realizing that the torch must have gone out too. Indrani should still have been able to see the blue light behind him, but some of the crates resting in piles blocked her view. Sure enough, she appeared with the useless burned-out stub of a stick in her hand.

  ‘We go now,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’

  Stopmouth considered telling her about the blue light that had died, then shook his head. They’d seen enough to be frightened of. Better to keep their minds on saving the tribe.

  Indrani helped him to his feet and gave him his crutch. He hobbled after his wife into the darkness. They passed among towers of wooden crates. Of course, they looked inside a few of them. Often they found sweet little crumbs that indicated the presence of Roofdweller rations at some time in the past. All were empty now, many lying on their sides like cracked bones at the end of a feast.

  Without the torch, Indrani kept bashing into things, startling the baby into tears. But soon their eyes detected a flickering light that guided them to a new chamber. A few of the lights here still worked. Slime slid down the walls, and in a few places it even seemed to move sideways from the broken lights towards the ones that were still working. As if it were alive and capable of hunting.

  Inside lay row after row of the beast sleeping capsules Stopmouth had seen before.

  The occupants had dozens of little hooked limbs. Some horrible event, perhaps the coming of the slime, had woken them. It must have, because holes had been smashed in the clear casing of several capsules from the inside, and a few of the creatures had managed to get an arm out into the air. One had battered its strange square face bloody and still failed to escape. Stopmouth felt sorry for the beast. Some of its blood lay congealed on the outside of the capsule. He rubbed it with a wet finger, but Indrani wouldn’t let him bring it to his mouth.

  ‘No! Not good!’

  ‘Flesh is flesh, Indrani. Do you see any other food around here?’

  She chewed her lip, as she often did when concentrating. ‘Not good,’ she said again. ‘Like … like to eat mossbeast, yes? Make to feel not good.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s poisonous? Because of the slime, maybe?’

  She shrugged, and he knew she just didn’t have the words to explain it. He thought back to the last time he’d seen a room like this. He remembered how many of the capsules had been broken open, and how one morsel of flesh from each type of beast had been cut away. As if … as if something else had tried to eat them and failed. That poor hungry beast – surely the one he’d fought – had been forced to eat its own kind instead because all other creatures were poison to it – until finally it had discovered Hiresh.

  Stopmouth shook his head. He came from a world where every intelligent being fed on every other. The thought that flesh could harm him seemed utterly unbelievable. And yet hadn’t Indrani said the beasts had to be changed before they were sent down to the surface, so that they and Stopmouth’s tribe could eat each other? For a people that hated cannibalism so much, the Roofdwellers certainly went to enormous lengths just to make it possible. He felt his lip curl in disgust.

  They edged around the room where there were fewer pools. Many of the green lights here had stopped working, and faint trails of ooze glistened on the wall beneath them. A few others flickered, and when Stopmouth studied them, he made out tiny perspiration-like beads on their surfaces. The slime was coming from within. As though some foul insect had laid eggs inside that were only now beginning to hatch.

  A door at the end gave onto another chamber, identical to the first in every way, except for the fact that blue light glared from its exit and a cool breeze froze their cheeks and ruffled their hair. Indrani ran towards it, her husband following along at a quick hobble.

  She skidded to a stop. ‘Slow,’ she warned.

  He shaded his eyes with his free hand. The floor extended no more than two body-lengths in front of him. After that there was jagged metal and a hole large enough to dwarf those in the previous rooms. Stopmouth could make out the curve of a Globe through a doorway on the far side of the chasm, bathed in blue light.

  It should have been impossible to cross, but somebody must have been there recently, because a slice of metal, half an arm wide and as long as five men, bridged the gap.

  ‘Is much very good luck!’ exclaimed Indrani. ‘Come!’ And with that, she strolled across to the far side while the ‘bridge’ wobbled and rattled beneath her.

  Stopmouth wanted to follow, but didn’t think the path was wide enough to hold both himself and his awkward crutch. Besides, one little slip would send him plunging down to … He moved to the edge and looked over. He gasped. The whole world seemed to spin around him. Beneath this level, no solid ground waited to catch him. Only a shaft, lit by flickering green lights that grew tinier and fainter the further they dropped away until they all merged into one.

  ‘I can’t see the bottom,’ he said.

  ‘Come,’ said Indrani. She mimed crawling on her hands and knees. ‘Like this, come. You must to be quick.’

  He nodded, his breathing too fast. ‘Of course,’ he said. He flung the crutch over to her. As he got down onto his hands and knees, the yawning gap only got closer. He wanted to shut his eyes, but they wouldn’t obey. They seemed fascinated by the drop, wondering how long it would take a man to fall and how many green lights he’d have to count before he found the bottom. And maybe there was none. What if he just kept going? Still alive, still screaming until he smashed against the rocks below?

  ‘Shtop-mouth? Come!’

  ‘I am coming.’ The metal shook under the weight of a hand. Then he had two hands on it, drops of sweat from his forehead trickling onto it in front of him. Now his whole body hung above the pit, every muscle trembling, as though he’d run half a day with a squad of Armourbacks chasing him for food.

  Stopmouth had been in high places before – the tops of buildings, even guard towers. Once, back before he’d ever met Indrani, he’d contemplated throwing himself off one t
o prevent his enemies taking his flesh. That fall would have been short, the end quick.

  ‘Shtop-mouth?’

  ‘C-come on,’ he said. He’d faced down Yellowmaws and Armourbacks; Diggers, Fourleggers and Skeletons. He’d led a whole tribe into battle. And all for the woman who waited now on the other side of this bridge. He saw she was planning on coming back over to get him. He wouldn’t allow that.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he told her. He kept his eyes away from the drop and looked instead at the beautiful face he had followed through so much terror before. The face that had saved him from a life in the shadow of a deceiving, self-serving older brother. He smiled at her and she smiled back, full of love.

  He crawled towards her, growing in confidence with each step. ‘Halfway,’ he called. Her smile grew wider.

  Suddenly Indrani blinked. Her eyes left his face to look past his shoulder, and one hand rose to cover her mouth.

  Stopmouth felt the ‘bridge’ shake and move to the right. He fell flat onto his stomach, his head hanging over the edge, staring into the unending depths.

  Indrani cried out. Then the ‘bridge’ was still again and Stopmouth heard a man’s voice behind him, speaking only a little louder than the sound of his own panting and the thundering of his heartbeat.

  Indrani spoke now, in her own language. The hunter wanted to climb to his knees to see who lay behind them. Wardens, he thought. No doubt they were bargaining with his wife again. The hunter’s life in exchange for cooperation. Stopmouth hated being a burden, hated to think that they might lose everything over him. And yet the memory of that lurch when the ‘bridge’ moved … He could still feel it in his stomach. He wanted to be sick. He brought his face back onto the freezing surface of the metal. Indrani was still talking to the stranger, but she seemed less worried now.

  ‘Shtop-mouth?’

  He looked up, vision blurred, ready to retch, and filled with shame for his weakness.