by Tim Lebbon
‘That sounds like something the Ald would have us believe,’ Bon said, only part serious.
‘You’d suggest that of me?’ she asked, suddenly cold herself.
‘No. No.’
‘Come on. The ravine’s ending, the gas marshes beginning. I can smell them even past this paste. You say you know something of the marshes, so it’s time to use what you know.’ Leki heaved at Juda’s legs, and Bon picked him up under the arms once more.
‘We can’t carry him far like this,’ Bon said. His poisoned hand was still swollen and its muscles and bones ached.
‘Hopefully we won’t need to.’
The river’s anger lessened as the ravine sides fell away, flattening into the beginnings of the marshes. The gas was noxious, rotten, stinging the back of Bon’s throat. Juda had said that they could lose the slayers here because their scent would be lost amid the gaseous exhalations of the wet ground. But there was much more to the marshes than wetness, and gas. In losing the slayers, Bon began to fear they would expose themselves to dangers even more terrible.
He had not been entirely truthful when he said he knew about the marshes. Dangerous, wild places even back when Skythe had been a thriving island with commerce, art and science, they had interested him little in his readings. They were almost the same now as they had been back then – larger, perhaps, and less well fed by wandering, lost humans. And though undoubtedly the flora and fauna of Skythe had changed since the war, and was still changing now, the marshes themselves stood testament to the differing touch of time. Not timeless, but ancient. The matters of humanity held little significance for such a place.
Bon had heard rumours of the marshes’ changing geography, steam and gas geysers, and wildlife peculiarly adapted to the environment. But the detail would be for him to discover along with Leki.
The river spread into the land. In places it seemed to vent into underground routes, clouds of spray catching the last red touch of the sunset. Elsewhere it parted around islands on which grew short, craggy trees, and flowed into wide areas of water that seemed hardly to move. In these watery landscapes, bubbles rose and broke as if the ground below were breathing. The air was already tainted. Bon breathed lightly past the tadcat oils, afraid of what that taint might do, and whether he would even know.
Juda grew heavier. Leki’s face mirrored Bon’s own weariness. But they had to move on into the vast marshland. Somewhere, soon, they would need to hide.
Their night in the gas marshes became a blur of vision and a haze of sensation. The sense of being elsewhere was overwhelming – Bon soon felt dislocated from Skythe, and from the whole of the world. Juda was a sleeping creature slung between them, Leki a stranger, and Bon even grew distant from himself. His history became an echo in another mind, and his present lacked definition and importance.
The slayers – the main reason for them venturing into the gas marshes in the first place – were very far away. Bon barely thought about those monstrous killers that whole night.
Later, he would remember their experiences there like recalling a dream from his youth. And thinking back to the few clearer moments he could remember – constructing them piece by piece, like writing a letter with words he barely knew – he would begin to doubt himself. Had he lived those moments, or were they simply a dream? Had he truly seen those things, and run from them, and found that place to hide? Or perhaps he and Leki had simply collapsed beneath the weight of their exhaustion, urged down into dream-haunted darkness by the noxious fumes of that place.
Bon was left wondering at reality, and how real anything might be.
And those few clear memories, like dreams given life …
As the marshes grew wide and the water sluggish, and it became impossible to define the river any more, the air was heavy with steam and gas. It was difficult to distinguish the two, and they coated Bon’s nostrils and the back of his throat with slick sourness. They paused often, lowering Juda to the damp ground and trying to catch their breath, regain strength in their straining muscles. Bon’s hand still burned. And once, standing beneath the cover of tall trees whose multitude of roots stood proud of the ground like exposed bones, Bon rubbed at his ears. Something was making them buzz. Wet air, he thought, gas nestling inside my ears. He pressed in with his fingertips and the buzzing ceased. Seeing Leki doing the same, he realised that the sound came from outside.
They ducked down beside Juda and looked up. Noticing the sound made it louder, and also gave the previous silence more weight. Gas made no sound when it drifted, and water sat quietly with no ravine to power along.
Leki leaned across Juda and clasped Bon’s shoulder, other hand pressed to her lips. Then she pointed up through the sparse tree canopy. He looked, and Bon’s first thought was that fumes had reached his brain and he was passing out. He blinked several times, but the shifting dark blots were still there.
Above the trees. Flitting back and forth, drifting, searching. Hunting. Buzzing.
‘Are they wasps?’ Leki whispered.
Bon nodded, because he had already recognised their sleek bodies, pale yellow and black markings, and the blur of wings keeping them aloft. The buzzing sounded angry and loud, yet they moved with an easy grace. They owned the air.
‘What in Fade do they eat to get that big?’ Leki whispered. She was still leaning across Juda, maintaining the contact. Her hand on Bon’s shoulder squeezed. It was warm.
Juda muttered and then shouted, and Bon’s heart sank. We forgot to gag him! Leki stared at him wide-eyed, panicked into stillness. The wasps’ buzzing changed in pitch, but Bon did not look up, could not, as he bunched up the front of Juda’s jacket and shoved it into the sleeping, nightmaring man’s foam-flecked mouth.
The wasps came then, drifting down through the branches like unnatural windfalls. Bon sensed them drawing closer. He heard their drone increasing in volume and changing pitch, and he was the focus of their attention. He could feel them against the back of his head and neck, as surely as if their wings were already caressing there. He looked up from the writhing man to Leki, but she only had eyes for the wasps.
He has a pistol, Bon thought, going to root through Juda’s clothing to find the weapon he had seen him bearing more than once. But he was already out of time.
A wasp drifted down before him. It was even larger than he had at first thought – the size of a newborn child, body heavy and bristled, wings tearing the air, buzz almost as loud as the river had been in the ravine, breeze lifting the hair from his forehead. It moved back and forth before him. Up and down. As if attempting to hypnotise him, yet so inhuman. Another fell slowly behind it, turning, looking around as if watching for dangers, though Bon had no idea what could be a danger to these things.
They carried a smell with them. Rain on a summer day, Bon thought, and each time he inhaled he caught a memory flash of his wife walking by the river in Sefton Breaks, Venden laughing and running before them.
He looked across at Leki, and she seemed rapt. There was no fear on her face. Ten, twelve, fifteen wasps hung in the air around them. The creatures hung in the air around them and temporarily stole fear of the slayers.
Bon could see stings glistening at the blunt tips of their abdomens. The stings were as long as his finger, and even if their poison did not prove fatal, the stabbing might.
Are they going to kill us? he wanted to ask, but Leki was smiling. He wondered what memories she was living, and what scent she gained from these beasts.
The wasps might have been there for heartbeats or days, but then they started to drift away. Interest sated, perhaps. Or maybe the fleshy, bloody humans would simply not make much of a meal. Leki watched them go. Bon watched her, trying to define the strange expression on her face. It might have been nostalgia, or loss, or a species of both.
They rested for a while, not speaking. Juda struggled in his sleep. Marsh fumes hazed the air.
One memory faded, melting away into quiet confusion while another rose, slaughtering it with th
e promise of terror …
They crossed the marsh on stepping stones of dryish land, trying to avoid the sucking depths that might pull them down to viscous darkness, feet permanently wet, looking for somewhere safe in case the slayers could still track them this far, still catch their scent through the masking odours of the marsh gas and mysterious darkness. A steam geyser exploded barely a hundred steps to their right. It blasted at the sky and ripped it open, gushing a shower of hot mud, water and steam into the night sky. It spattered down around them, speckles of muck scorching their exposed skin where they hunkered down and held their hands over their heads. Bon felt it splash heavily and wet across his back, scorching skin through his jacket and shirt where he lay protecting Juda from the downfall.
‘The ground is spitting at us!’ Leki said, ‘And it’s hot!’
Strange words, but then something made Bon sit up and turn around. The geyser still steamed and roared, but there was something else moving closer to them. Slick and wet, shifting like thick boiling blood, there was nothing sharp about the movement, but still he knew it could bite. His hand stole into Juda’s jacket in search of the pistol once more.
Electrical light flickered back and forth through the atmosphere, illuminating the marsh gas and the thing that had erupted from the geyser with greenish light.
‘Leki!’ Bon whispered, but she had already seen.
‘Out of the ground,’ she said, ‘and it has teeth.’
It had a body of mud and filth, thick enough to retain form but fluid enough to be in constant movement. No eyes, unless they were also of mud, but Bon could see several slippery gashes moving across its surface that could only have been mouths. Teeth shimmered there, formed of steam; mini-geysers, perpetuating the promise of danger the main geyser had made. When the teeth dispersed to the air others replaced them. The thing moved closer, slicking across the wet ground.
Bon brought out the steam pistol and registered the irony of using it against this thing.
‘That won’t touch it,’ Leki said, but Bon asked her what other hope they had.
It closed on them, he fired, a splash of mud. Another venting of steam, more mud, even closer than before and hard enough to punch the ground and bounce them from it, a momentary freefall that seemed to continue for ever. His memory took the same plunge.
Whatever followed was ambiguous in his mind as the marsh hazed his sight, and for a long time after Bon was not entirely sure they had survived. In the belly of the beast, he thought, scooping mud from his ears and picking it from where it had dried on his stubble. Still in the belly of the beast, remembering as I am slowly digested …
And the next moment in those marshes that persisted as memory …
Deeper into the nightmare landscape, changed so much. Islands were less frequent, but they could follow the higher ground by aiming for where the moon did not reflect. Juda moaned and struggled, but Bon and Leki seemed to marshal more strength, sensing that they would find somewhere to hide soon. Juda had not told them where, or how long they needed to run to evade the slayers. He had not told them what to do. But somewhere there was a haven, and they were close to finding it. Once inside, the slayers would pass them by, their terrible persistence confused by the mixed odours of marsh gas. Perhaps Bon would know they had passed, perhaps not. But once settled, they could wait out the night.
Maybe the ghosts would guide them. They rose like drifts of steam, glimmering with promise. Some drifted with the breeze, enclosed in clouds of gas that Bon and Leki did their best to avoid. Other moved against the wind and came closer. They did not last for long – lost to the air before Bon had a chance to really see – but those that approached close enough seemed to whisper to him. He could not hear their words or sense their intention. Leki would not meet his eye.
Juda became heavier, as if absorbing the air of this place and ingesting it. They had to put him down to rest more and more, their brief burst of strength failing.
‘They’re gathering,’ Bon said, looking around at the wraiths haunting the landscape.
‘Watching,’ Leki said. ‘I can’t go on. Not any more, not with him.’ She dropped Juda’s legs and stretched upright, hands pressed into the small of her back.
‘So we leave him?’ Bon asked. He did not mean it, and hoped that Leki would not agree.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No …’
‘Leki?’
She looked at him, and her eyes seemed distant.
‘Leki?’
‘I think we should ask them for help.’
‘Them?’ He nodded at the strange figures, some fading and manifesting again, others drifting. They exuded no menace.
‘I think they were all someone,’ Leki said, and she started down the gentle slope. They had paused on an island of dryness in a sea of marshy land, and it took Leki only a dozen steps until her boots sank into the ground. Dirty water seeped around her feet, and when she knelt her boots squelched in the muck.
‘Take a breath, Bon,’ Leki said. ‘We’re looking for somewhere we might never find on our own.’
Leki leaned forward and pressed both hands down into the mud.
Reading the water, Bon thought, and he knelt down beside Juda to watch. Juda was stirring again, struggling feebly against his bonds and humming behind the temporary gag. He had brought them here, and then abandoned them to weather his own nightmares.
Leki remained motionless for some time, head dipped down and hair hanging around her face. Some of the wraiths faded away, and others drifted off into a darkness the moon did not touch. But some remained, seemingly more solid than before. Bon thought that he could make out features – a mouth here, deep, impenetrable eyes there. It was as if they were remembering themselves, and he suspected it was Leki, the amphy, inspiring those memories.
As Leki read the waters, Bon caught his breath.
‘A mile to the north,’ Leki said at last.
They went that way, and all the time those wraiths seemed to merge from the darkness and the mists to follow them. Juda moaned, Bon’s shoulders ached. Leki remained silent, answering nothing, and it was only as they neared a forest of huge trees that she revealed what else she had heard.
‘The slayers are here,’ she said. ‘Searching the marshes. Their senses harried by the environment. Juda might have been right – if we can hide in here away from them, they might just miss us.’
Leki led them to a massive tree that had rotted from the inside, forming a hollow tree cave in which they might find protection.
‘They’ll smell us around the tree’s base,’ Bon said. He was panting now, sweating, exhausted from carrying Juda so far. He so wanted this to be the place where they would hide, but he could not avoid his doubts.
‘Maybe,’ Leki said. ‘But Bon. Do we have anywhere else to go?’
So they entered the hollowed tree, climbing a little so that they were above ground level, inside the trunk that might have been five thousand years old and which perhaps had housed a hundred refugees fleeing a hundred different dangers. Things grew in there, plump, damp fungi that whistled as they pushed past. Insects and other creatures scuttled in the darkness. But Bon found that he was too tired to be afraid, or to care.
They perched halfway up the inside of the hollowed trunk, settling within creases of wood and wedging Juda tight onto a ledge. Leki found a rent where an old branch had fallen away, and she watched outside. Bon was so tired.
‘What did you find?’ he asked, nodding at Juda. They’d strapped his pack to his stomach, and one hand seemed to rest protectively on the canvas.
‘Things he shouldn’t have,’ Leki said.
‘Such as?’
She did not reply for a while. She watched outside, and Bon felt the tension in the silence as she strove for the right words.
‘I think he might be a Wrench Arc,’ she said. ‘Or close enough that distinctions barely matter.’
Wrench Arc, Bon thought. Juda was a danger, perhaps a murderer. Yet he had hinted that he could lead t
hem to Venden.
Bon was so tired. He could hear, taste and smell alien things. Venden smiled in his memories, the joy of a young child untouched by the concerns that came with age.
It grew no darker, and yet Bon Ugane slept.
‘Bon!’
The first thing he noticed was the smell. Then he felt something pressed over his face, bunched beneath his nose, and Bon snapped awake. He opened his eyes to complete darkness – even the moonlight that had filtered into the ancient tree was absent. He tried to breathe in but was hampered by the thing pressed there. A cloth, bunched and pushed hard against his nostrils. Odours from it played with his senses.
‘Bon! Keep quiet.’ That was Leki. Bon pawed at his face and felt a hand there, and then another hand grasped his and entwined fingers, squeezing softly, comfortingly.
Bon inhaled slower, and found that he could breathe through the cloth.
‘Keep it tight to your nose and mouth,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Sit up slowly. Lean into me. Look.’
Bon did everything she had told him. Leki was warm, and when he put his arm around her she did not pull away. She touched the tree beside the crack in the trunk to show him where to look, and then her own arm went around him. She, too, held a cloth to her nose with her other hand. She had gathered the scents of marsh, tree and filthy water; added camouflage to the tadcat liver oil.
‘This is when we see,’ she said, and she was talking about Juda. This was when they saw whether he was telling them the truth, or not.
The slayers were outside. They crossed the marshy landscape, moving slowly and without deliberation. Their faces were upturned, and Bon could see the glimmer of moonlight on mucus spread across their mouths and chins. They were too far away to hear, but he knew that the hunters were sniffing for them, and breathing in only the scents of the gas marshes.
The female slayer was closest. She moved with a grace that belied her bulky form, spiked with the points and blades of packed weapons, stocky legs sinking into the marshy ground. She was covered in mud, from her toes to the top of her head. She must have been wading straight across the marshes rather than going for higher ground, and Bon was not sure what this meant. It was either foolishness, or a need to move faster in a straight line. And they could not assume that the slayers were fools.
