No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  “I don’t know, sir. We came across it tracking the tank. We couldn’t dent it, or scratch it, not even with a grenade, and as you can see, no markings, no doors, no windows, no features of any kind. Nothing. It might as well be solid for all the good it did us.”

  Everson took off his cap, smoothed his hair back and, slipping the cap under his arm, pressed a cautious ear to the metal.

  “And no sound from within?”

  “None we could hear, sir.”

  He stood back and replaced his cap. “I’m hoping the Signals chaps can pick up something we can’t,” he said, considering the wall.

  He was silent for a moment, then let out a sigh. “But right now we have more important objectives to achieve.”

  “The Ivanhoe, sir?”

  “Yes, I want to get it back to the camp as soon as possible. If Chandar’s scheme fails, we’re going to need it.” He paused, considering the wall a moment longer, then clapped his hands. “Right,” he said and began to pick his way down the scree slope, sending rocks skittering down as he picked up speed and momentum.

  Atkins followed unsteadily, and more carefully, so as not to dislodge rocks onto his superior.

  “Sergeant Dixon, you and your work party see if you can’t clear some of this scree by the time we get back, so we can get a proper look at this thing.”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  “Riley!” Everson called as he reached the bottom. The Signals corporal turned from overseeing the unloading of gear from one of the panniers on Big Willie.

  “Sir?”

  “See what your man makes of that by the time we get back,” invited Everson, gesturing towards the wall.

  Riley turned to Buckley and put his arm around his shoulders. “Buckley, I’m leaving you here with this sorry bunch of reprobates and a Moritz station. See what you can pick up. And don’t get into trouble while I’m gone.”

  “No, Corp.”

  “Good lad.”

  Everson wasn’t unduly concerned about leaving the two sections of working party at the canyon. They had Urmen Karnos to guard them, and Tulliver would be flying over three times a day. The party could signal the aeroplane if there were any problems or important developments.

  With a last look at the wall, Everson ordered the battlepillars to move out, and they set off for the Croatoan Crater.

  ALFIE AWOKE WITH a start to find himself lying in darkness. “Lieutenant?” he croaked. His lips were dry and cracked, his mouth parched.

  He felt around with his hand and was startled to find warm, damp earth under his hand, not iron plate. He wasn’t in the tank, then. He lay still for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts. All around him, with his petrol-fruit-muddled senses, he could see the faint ambient sounds of animals’ noises bursting and fading like Very lights. He felt a vague craving for the fuel. He didn’t usually feel that unless he’d been away from the tank for some time. How long had he been here? Where was he?

  He could make out a soft, low horizontal glow of light, as if from under a door. He raised himself up on his elbows to get a better look. His head began to pound and his right leg jangled with pain. He let out an involuntary cry.

  The hide draped across the doorway as protection against the elements swept open, and the shock of radiance caused Alfie to cry out again, throwing up an arm to block the light.

  The silhouette of a man resolved itself against the flare. It spoke. It took a moment for Alfie to make out the words, as his fuel-addled brain interpreted them as the bittersweet flavour of marmalade and the childhood feeling of the tassel ties on his mother’s front parlour curtains against his skin.

  “...name is Ranaman, shaman of the Ruanach clan.”

  In the light, Alfie could see he was no longer wearing his coveralls. His right leg had been crudely splinted. Lengths of wood had been strapped against it, and they had unwound and used his puttee to bind it.

  He tried to move, thinking about escape, but his leg was bound tight; and if that didn’t stop him, the pain surely would.

  The man, clearly an Urman, knelt before Alfie and bowed until his forehead touched the earth. The youth who entered behind him did the same.

  God, not again, thought Alfie. They revered him. The crew of the HMLS Ivanhoe had met such reactions before. Lieutenant Mathers had decided in the past to take advantage of it and of the Urmen they met. It started out as a scam, growing into a mad scheme to build a colony of the British Empire here on this world. Urmen had bowed before them, thinking them gods, or the heralds of gods. Some, like the Khungarrii, thought the tank to be Skarra, the Chatt god of the underworld. The crew didn’t disabuse them of it; it had got them food and women. Alfie’s opposition to this madness had almost cost him his friendships. He had never agreed with Mathers’ scheme, but now it might save his life.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Croatoan’s Barrow,” said Ranaman, hardly daring to look up. “After his battle with GarSuleth, defeated and cast down, here fell Croatoan. To be thus conquered broke his heart in twain, and he was dragged into the underworld to be punished by GarSuleth’s brother, Skarra. And here the Ruanach stand vigil, as our ancestors did before us, keeping watch over his heart, awaiting his return and eventual triumph over GarSuleth.”

  The crater, thought Alfie. They must mean the crater.

  “Where are my friends?” he asked in a deep imperious tone, one that he’d heard Norman adopt on occasions like these.

  Ranaman cocked his head to one side and frowned. “Friends?”

  “Others. Like me.”

  The youth shook his head, puzzled. “There were no others. There was only you. You were alone. You appeared before Tarak on his vision quest to become a man, a warrior.”

  The words spilled from the youth’s mouth in a torrent of nervous energy...

  TARAK WAS NOT yet a man but no longer a boy. He was in the process of becoming. Or dying. That was always a possibility. It was his time, and he had undergone the rite. He had ingested the venom of the hurreg and had then been ceremonially cast out of the enclave. Now he must circle the Barrow and seek out his vision. If he survived, he would return to the enclave a warrior.

  His skin burned, his eyes itched from the poison, his palm felt slick around the handle of his knife and otherworldly visions came and went. He heard a tortured screech that made him wince, followed by a roar so terrible that it silenced the jungle. There followed an impact he felt through the soles of his feet.

  Fearful, he headed towards the sound. He stumbled through the undergrowth until he saw it, resting where it had fallen, as Croatoan had once fallen from the sky.

  He watched as if in a dream as an opening appeared in the sky rock and an Urman like himself—no, not like himself—stepped out and fell to the ground. Tarak watched, trying to decipher the vision.

  There was a deep growl and something dropped from a low bough and landed on all sixes, ready to leap on the sky-being.

  Though the hurreg poison seared his joints, Tarak leapt on the creature’s back with his knife firmly in his fist. He felt the warm pelt beneath his flesh, smelled the damp fur and thrust the blade in. The creature bucked and writhed, trying to throw him off, but he pressed his thighs against its flanks, tightened his hold on the shaggy fur with his other hand and drove the knife in again. And again. Its legs crumpled beneath it. Tarak pulled back on the horns, exposing its throat, and slipped his knife across it. The creature shuddered beneath him, blood pulsed out of the ragged slit. He held it until it had stopped, then let the head fall. Ordinarily he would have taken it back to the enclave as a gift from Croatoan and returned a hunter. But he had something more important to bear.

  He looked at the sky-being.

  He stood up and circled the great iron rock from which he’d appeared. Never had anyone in his clan had a sign like this, though many had sought it. This was his omen, given to him, but he had no idea what it meant. Ranaman would know.

  He hoisted the sky-being over his shoulder
s and began his triumphal return to his enclave, not as a boy but as a man. As a warrior...

  “TARAK IS TO be envied,” announced Ranaman proudly as the young man finished his tale. “But his fortune is the clan’s fortune. Your arrival when the Torment of Croatoan is nigh, when the earth erupts with his pain, is a great omen!”

  “And if the boy’s vision proves false?” Alfie’s voice quavered, looking at Tarak.

  “Then he will be cast out as punishment for bringing a Dulgur, an evil spirit, amongst us. He will die and his spirit will not join the ancestors in the Village of the Dead. His body will be left to ward off other Dulgur.”

  Tarak looked alarmed and glanced at Alfie for confirmation that he had done the right thing.

  God damn it. He couldn’t risk harm to the lad who’d saved him.

  Very well, he would play his part. As much as it stuck in his craw, he would have to play the game for which he’d held Mathers in such contempt. He needed to buy time. He had to stay alive until the crew of the Ivanhoe could find him. He couldn’t be sure that they would look, but he had faith in Nellie.

  “The man Tarak has acted truly,” intoned Alfie, cringing inside as he spoke.

  Ranaman nodded in approval. He bowed before Alfie. “The one who was sent before has gone to prepare the way.”

  “The one who was sent before?” asked Alfie, confused.

  “He, too was garbed as you are.”

  Alfie looked down at his khaki uniform. Another soldier? There was only one man he knew who had been as far as this. Jeffries. If the rumours were true, the man could beat Mathers at his own game.

  “Where is he, this other one?”

  Ranaman looked at him blankly, as if Alfie should have known. “He communed with the ancestors and joined them in the underworld.”

  Jeffries was dead?

  “Soon you must do the same to make possible Croatoan’s return. The ritual must not fail.”

  A chill froze halfway down Alfie’s spine. Dear God. He’d always known Mathers’ deception had been a fool’s game, and now it was going to kill him.

  He was going to be a human sacrifice.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “They Were Only Playing Leapfrog...”

  THE PADRE BLINKED and looked up. They were alive. Around him, the gathered scentirrii stepped back and parted.

  “I thought they were going to kill us,” said Edith in a low tremulous voice, checking her hands and face for acid burns.

  Trembling with fear and relief, the padre turned to Chandar for an explanation.

  It spread its vestigial middle limbs. “They cannot hurt you,” it said. “They have received this One’s blessing. They have merely scented you. If you are not scented, you will be killed. Now you will smell Khungarrii. You will be safe.”

  The precaution proved well founded. As they journeyed, they met more scentirrii patrols and parties of worker Chatts in the forest. They noted their approach with a cautious waving of antennae, and then ignored them.

  Ahead, dominating the large managed clearing, was the mound-like Khungarrii edifice, rising hundreds of feet from the cinnamon earth, like a cathedral tower. The last time the padre had seen the edifice, a large section had been destroyed by Jeffries, blowing up a stolen dump of grenades, mortars and other weapons. It had since been repaired and once again stood pristine and whole above the forest. Unadorned and functional, the structure bore no ornate inscriptions or decorations, no carvings, but was speckled with a thousand points of light as the sunlight caught flecks of mica bound into the dirt walls.

  Scattered around the perimeter of the edifice were the peculiar funerary mounds of large clay balls, each sphere containing the body of a dead Chatt, waiting to be rolled into the underworld by Skarra, the dung-beetle god of the dead. There were a good many of them—no doubt due in part, the padre realised, to the actions of the Pennines.

  Ahead of them, columns of worker Chatts, djamirrii, and Khungarrii Urmen, carrying the day’s harvest in baskets or on litters, streamed into the edifice through great open bark doors some fifty or sixty feet in height, bound into the edifice itself by root-like hinges and framed by great earthen buttresses.

  The padre noticed that the shantytowns that had once clung to the midden heaps against the edifice had been swept away. The free Urmen who had dwelt there under sufferance, scraping a subsistence from the scrap heaps of Khungarrii society, were gone; the first victims of the reprisals after the Pennines’ attack to rescue the padre and some twenty-odd Fusiliers and the three nurses captured by a scentirrii raiding party.

  He felt Edith’s small hand slip into his, giving reassurance and seeking comfort in equal measure. His hand closed about hers and together they walked toward the cavernous entrance of the edifice.

  INSIDE, THE GREAT cathedral-like entrance hall bustled with activity. Chatt workers and djamirrii assessed and sorted the continual influx of the day’s harvest; battlepillars berthed against earthen jetties to be unloaded. The place seemed half port, half market.

  Edith could remember arriving at Calais on the boat from Dover to scenes such as these. She had been a very different woman back then. The sharp formic smell of the place, of the Chatts, made her want to flee. She had to force herself to walk on.

  The scentirrii led them up inclined passages lit by niches of bioluminescent lichen to the higher reaches of the edifice, to the network of sacred chambers where the dhuyumirrii conducted their ritualised business.

  The scentirrii left them by a circular portal, a door grown from a tough fibrous living plant. Chandar breathed a mist at it, and the plant matter recoiled from it, dilating open. Rhengar ushered them through into an ancillary chamber. They had barely arrived when the circular door shrivelled open again. Two scentirrii stepped through, followed by a tall, regal dhuyumirrii wearing a similar over-the-shoulder arrangement of many-tasselled silken cloth to the one that Chandar wore, with the addition of a light, finely spun cloak. They had both seen this creature before.

  “This One is Sirigar, Liya-Dhuyumirrii, High Anointed One of the Khungarrii Shura,” it said, surveying the chamber. It had chosen to speak in English, something it was not wont to do. It was making a point.

  Chandar bent its legs, sinking into the Chatt submissive posture. Sirigar looked down on it. “So you have returned, Chandar?”

  “This One went to observe the battle at the direction of the Shura and was captured. This you know,” said Chandar.

  “And they let you go?”

  “They wish to bargain.”

  “The time for bargaining is long past,” said Sirigar. “And these creatures?” it said, indicating the padre and Nurse Bell. “What are they doing here? This One could smell their stench the moment they entered Khungarr. Your fascination for them is unbecoming, Chandar, maybe even heretical.”

  “The Shura has not declared it so, yet,” said Chandar.

  Sirigar hissed and turned to inspect Edith, who shuddered in spite of herself. Sirigar’s mandibles opened wide, as if to suggest that it could take her head within them and crush it. Warm breath washed over her as moist labial folds opened, exposing its glistening mouth palps. Its long segmented antennae waved above her head.

  She held its gaze, defiance and terror wrestling within her, conscious of the contents of her haversack. In moments like this, she thought of Edith Cavell and found a well of courage within her which, while not inexhaustible, saw her through the moment.

  Sirigar hissed and withdrew, immediately losing interest in her. “They... they are emissaries. They cannot harm us. They have been anointed with the blessing of GarSuleth,” Chandar gestured toward the padre. “That one took the Kirrijandat, the rite of purification—”

  “So did their Jeffries,” said Sirigar, loading every word. “And look at the ruination that he visited on Khungarr. They are the Great Corruption. Their presence here sickens this One. Yet again you have exceeded your bounds, Chandar.”

  The padre saw his chance. He had expected to persua
de them, but to have the opportunity presented to him like this seemed heaven-sent.

  “Jeffries was not one of us. You cannot judge us all by him. We are not answerable for his sins. I will take the rite again!” he declared.

  Edith stepped forward. “Padre, no. Remember what it did to you the last time.”

  The padre remembered very well. The rite was one that new immigrants to Khungarr were required to undergo as a test of loyalty and faith. It was seen as a symbolic washing away of old lives and old beliefs. He would be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t afraid, but he was more fearful of the shadow it had cast over his life since he first experienced it, of the night terrors that hid in the dark corners of his mind during the day. This was why he had returned.

  He clasped Bell’s hand in his own and flashed a beatific smile. “I survived last time, I will do so again,” he reassured her.

  Sirigar regarded the padre, its large dark eyes unblinking. “Very well, undergo the Kirrijandat. It will not save you. When the Shura stands behind this One and decrees your herd to be the Great Corruption the perfumed prophecies speak of, you will be the first of the Tohmii to die. You and your djamirrii.”

  Sirigar turned and directed its ire at Chandar. “Despite knowing what they are, you dare bring them here, when the Great Corruption has already tainted Khungarr and may even now threaten the very future of the colony itself—”

  Sirigar glanced at the padre and lapsed into its own tongue; a guttural stream of harsh smacks, clicks and snips. Chandar countered him, both creatures swaying and moving with each exchange, until Sirigar, rearing up on its legs, let out an aggressive hiss. It swept from the chamber, its scentirrii following. The plant door contracted shut behind it.

  Both Padre Rand and Edith held their breaths for a heartbeat before exhaling with relief. They were still alive, and the seditious scents they had smuggled in had not been detected.

  Chandar turned to the pair. “This One has bought some time, but precious little. Your submission to the Kirrijandat has bought more. But unless this One succeeds before the Shura then it will have been to no avail. Sirigar will consolidate the Shura behind it and your herd will be culled.”