‘What is it?’ Rose asked, stepping to read over his shoulder.
‘John Parland is alive.’
‘John Parland?’
‘An old … friend. They call him Caeles now. Stupid name. No wonder the priests are interested in him.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘This is a warning to the Ministrati that the man they’ve been looking for is going their way. No doubt they’ll have found him by now.’
‘The Ministrati have been looking for this man?’
‘You’ll notice the scroll doesn’t say exactly which man. Parland may well be a side note, but I’m certain that the Ministrati will have been keeping an eye on him. John Parland is one of the few survivors of the Conflict.’
‘Like you.’
‘Almost exactly like me. But I’m sure that this message concerns another one, one they are more than interested in. Coincidentally Parland travels with the factotum they have been looking for..’
‘The one you—’
‘Yes. Johnmal, I want to see you in about an hour. Come down to the pen.’
Cleric left, leaving to two alone once more.
‘He’s always calling you away from me,’ Rose said.
‘Don’t pout,’ he replied, clasping her hands in his. ‘After the boss is finished, and we’re the only ones left, you and I might have to gelp repopulate the world.’
‘And how long until that?’ she asked. ‘Why do you have to be away for so long?’
‘Boss’ orders,’ he said, and gave her a final kiss before backing out of the doors, smiling as he went.
~
The route to the holding pens had always been dark. The lighting there was never fixed, and the air conditioning didn’t have the strength to push its breeze down the multiple flights of stairs to the third sub-basement of the facility.
The building had been standing for over two hundred years, and had it not been raped by the rainforest it would still have held the sterile modernism that had been the fashion for pre-war structures. Its walls were bare of all decoration bar paint, which was white the day it had dried but was now cracked grey. The place was all straight lines; it stank of minimalism. Most of the lower-level machinery was rusted or rotten, unused for so long and with no-one to repair them; the computers and equipment that were needed, though, still shone like the day they were made.
Walled into the centre of the basement was a room – a pen – and looking in on it through a nine-inch steel door was Tan Cleric, his hands up against the plastiplex window, eyes wide, absorbing light so that the creatures inside the pen might be seen.
‘Hiding again,’ he said when Johnmal joined his side. ‘They like doing that.’
The creatures moved about, barely visible in the darkness. Johnmal despised the noises they made: guttural and created by weird mechanisms in the throat that mammals were incapable of making.
He and Cleric travelled through the surrounding corridors, passing numerous windows that looked inside the hold. All that could be seen were shadows.
‘I’m lucky,’ Cleric said as they walked, ‘to have an adopted son like you. You can help me in so many ways. I just…’
He trailed off.
‘What is it?’
They stopped walking, and Cleric looked at him through the semi-darkness. His eyes seemed hard as diamonds, his mouth thin-lipped. ‘I just wanted to tell you how I felt. About what it is you’re doing.’
Johnmal’s insides twisted. Eels writhed in his gut, and he felt an infirmity shake his knees.
He knows!
‘What is it,’ he said quietly, ‘that I’m doing?’
Cleric put his hands on his shoulders, gripped tightly. ‘Following me, Johnmal. That’s what you’re doing. I’ve never lied to you about my intentions. You’re strong to follow me like you do, despite everything.’
Johnmal felt his body loosen, held back a sigh: unquestionable relief.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know that what you’re doing is right, after what happened in the war. There’s no-one left alive worth saving, except people like you and I. There are no innocents after war. And only the strongest should survive. Just like you told me, like the man Darwin used to say.’
‘I’m glad you see things that way,’ Cleric said, giving a small smile. ‘And that you realise we aren’t the first to consider the world in the way that we do. But whereas Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection, I believe in artificial selection of the fittest. That’s why you’re important, Johnmal. But come, let’s move. I need to use your errant skill one last time.’
~
‘So?’ Rosanna asked, leaning cross-armed against the kitchen wall. ‘Give word, messenger, of that which the boss told you.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ Johnmal said, pouring himself another drink.
‘Why not? Everybody else does.’
‘Not us.’ He downed the water and filled the glass up again.
‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘I’m in a funk.’
She approached him and took him by the waist. ‘So I noticed. What did the boss say?’
‘He wants me to talk to the boy again.’
‘Using your skill?’
‘He says it’s the last time.’
‘But you nearly got stuck last time.’
As she gazed up at him, he was again struck with how young and fresh she looked. At eighteen she was bright-skinned, and always pale due to a crippling agoraphobia. Her face was still soft, but now creased with concern. A few strands of grief-black hair had slipped from her ponytail and hung in sleek ribbons over her forehead.
‘I know,’ he managed, almost choking at the sight of her. He hated the way he reacted to her beauty; it made him feel infinitely vulnerable.
She buried her face in his chest. ‘Then don’t let him make you.’
They retired to her sleeping room.
‘Rose,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’
She rested her chin on his shoulder like she usually liked to keep it, her tears curbed. She looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Johnmal. It’s just … what if you disappear forever this time?’
‘I’ll haunt you,’ he said, attempting a joke that only earned him a sharp jab from her fist.
‘That’s not funny!’ she snapped, forehead trenched with worry lines that were new to him. The frown was a storm, eclipsing her face in sorrow. ‘What if I never see you again?’
‘Then I’ll be your own personal invisible angel, and I’ll show you the world and protect you as we go.’
‘I wish,’ she said, and sighed.
“Invisible” was a word Rosanna liked to use often. It held no meaning for her, not really – she hadn’t been around when the boss still had his collection of microdisc films, classic Hammer Horrors that made him laugh out loud at the absurdity of their spurious science. In those films, invisibility was a reality that made no scientific sense. Now, in a ravaged world, there were only tricks of the light and errant abilities.
Johnmal had often thought hard about his “gift”, how it worked and how best to implement it. He could tweak the minds of man and beast alike, tricking their brains into ignoring the space in which Johnmal resided; he induced a psychic blind spot that, for all purposes, rendered him invisible. It wasn’t a word Johnmal liked, but he let Rose use it whenever she fancied. She had that particular kind of hold on him.
She said, out of the blue, ‘I went up onto the roof last week. I sat there for an hour.’
‘But that’s wonderful! You weren’t afraid?’
‘Yes, but I did it. So maybe, if you were with me, we could go out for a walk together? Just around the outside of the complex,’ she added quickly.
‘Rose, I don’t want you to suffer on my account.’
‘I’m suffering in here!’ she said, eyes flashing. ‘In here, where I’ve been all my life. It’s okay for you. When father brought you here you’d already been outside. I was only little then.’
‘I know.’
‘D
id you know who I was?’
‘Not really. My step-brother worked for your father, and I saw you once or twice. You were so little.’
‘Look at me now,’ she said, sitting straight-backed and pushing her lips to his, her boyish short nails scratching at the back of his neck. He reached and clasped her waist, pulled her to him until their bodies met and he felt the weight of her breasts on his chest. She pushed him effortlessly onto his back and stripped him, then settled herself around him in the darkness.
Afterwards she lay beside him the way she usually did, and talked sleepily. It was this kind of circumstance that she liked to ask questions she never had the chance or time to ask otherwise. Tonight it was:
‘Johnmal, how many more of us are there outside?’
‘Errants?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Not many. We’re hunted now, like the sanguisuga and the blacks.’
‘Do you know any?’
‘Blacks, or sanguisuga?’ he joked.
‘Errants, you idiot!’
‘Only two,’ he said quietly, ‘but I know of several whom I’ve never met. They’ll be the ones living with us after Cleric is through.’
‘The other survivors.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Tell me about them.’
‘One is a man who’s old and thin, who lives on the other side of the great lake. He’s like a king, but very frail. He may die soon.
‘Another is a female who looks like a child but never ages, who lives in the mountains to the west, and has skin like ice and lives in the glaciers. Some say that she can brave the coldest weather and breathe underwater. I know she is called Durrdana, and she lives in a cave near the summit of Mount Gerizim in the range.
‘Another lives on the northern continent and possesses strength like yours. He kills bears with his fists and sells their pelts to traders. I’ve met him once, but don’t know anything about him or his name. The boss says he knows him well.
‘There’s another man who sells fish on the west coast, called Gideon. He wears rags and acts like a beggar, but he can control smoke or mist and wrap it around him like a cloak, to go stealing. He can move vapours as well, I’m told, like poison gas or incense, which he uses to lure the fishes.
‘A young woman lives somewhere far south, who they say is a witch because she can cure some illnesses, like fever, but I know she is an errant. The boss says he’s spoken to her once, and she tried to stop his organs from ageing inside his metal body, but couldn’t. He promised her a place in his new world, just for trying.’
He stopped and stroked Rosanna’s hair, which had been loosened from its rings during their coition. It splayed down over his body right down to his ankles, like a sheet.
‘Who’s the other?’ she asked. She looked concerned. Neither of them liked to be reminded of their boss’ mortality, however protracted it was. He may be a cybernetic remnant of the Conflict, as close to immortal as humanly possible, but there were parts of him that were still alive in the traditional sense, and which would one day wither and die.
‘How’d you mean?’
‘You said you know two errants, and you told me you’ve met the man who kills bears. Who’s the other?’
For a second his thoughts rose like smoke, out through his skin and up away somewhere, where he couldn’t grasp it. His mind went blank. He could think of no reply, until finally his thoughts came back to him.
‘Why, you, of course,’ he lied.
He felt her grin against his chest, and then kiss him on his shoulder. ‘You’re sweet,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ he replied slowly, and he tried to let the darkness settle over him and send him to sleep. It took much longer than he imagined.
*
Twenty
FANCIES—
‘I can smell the ashes of Iilyani,’ said Gabel. ‘Can’t you smell it?’
‘I can’t smell anything,’ Caeles muttered, motioning for his horse to continue moving along the trail. ‘You’re losing it, Gabel.’
‘I might lose my temper,’ the hunter warned. Rowan rested a hand on his forearm to try and placate him. Anger winged inside so fierce he felt that pacification seemed beyond likelihood, but he nodded to Rowan and they moved off once more toward the ghetto town.
They were only days away, and the group seemed to bleed nerves the closer they came. Plagued by the rustlings of the ever-present goyles and the discomfort of resting apart from one another without the heat of a fire to console them, the travellers had become weary and agitated.
The smoke of Iilyani became thicker in the sky.
Not too long before, Rowan had suffered a momentary muscle collapse, slipping halfway off her horse before Gabel appeared beside it and caught her. She had fallen into unconsciousness and spasmed in his arms; they spent the rest of the afternoon in a tiny clearing between the trees, Gabel treating her with the muscle treatment Doctor Fenn had instructed they use in such a case. The power muscle relaxant prevented her from spasming or damaging herself. Merely a drop was enough to help. The others walked in a circle around the two like bored vultures, warding off the goyles that would swarm stationary prey.
After almost an hour of being unconscious, Rowan awoke to say her limbs were unbearably sore. Gabel explained that she was stiff from the temporary paralysis the drug induced, locking her muscles to prevent fits, and Gabel felt disinclined toward letting her back onto her horse again.
As he was helping her to sit up, a bundle of some fleshy leathery thing dropped from the trees and landed with a soft thud just inches away from them. As black as soot with taught shiny skin, the small creature shook itself and looked up at them with tiny eyes.
It was a goyle. It bared its fangs, but took a fluttering hop backward as if frightened. It was easy for Gabel to understand why the creature had been named after the stone gargoyles he had seen crouched darkly upon the gutters of the church at home. He swept it back with his arm and called to the others.
‘Let’s move. The goyles are becoming more confident.’
The creature hissed at him as he stood, while the others broke their caravan and moved back to the horses.
‘Can you ride?’ the hunter asked Rowan in a whisper.
‘I can manage,’ she replied. ‘Hush now. I can ride.’
Now they were much closer to Iilyani, yet the prospect of rest had been wrenched from them; the town was alight with fire, but now it seemed to be little more than smoking wreckage. They all silently hoped enough of Iilyani had survived to house them for at least a night, to revitalise them before they set out. Iilyani was the last town before the trek through the desert and rainforest toward Hermeticia.
The evening before they arrived, Gabel heard hoof beats coming from behind them, way in the distance. The others strained to hear, but heard nothing for several minutes.
‘Come on!’ Gabel hissed, his voice hushed. ‘They’re almost on us. Into the trees.’
They dismounted and pulled their beasts quickly off the trail, as far into the forest as they could before the sound of horses raced to meet them. Now several yards from the trail and crouching low, they allowed the fern and bracken to serve as cover.
‘I hear it now,’ Caeles whispered quietly. ‘But how did you—’
‘Shh!’
A small army of twenty men, dressed head to foot in white, charged toward Iilyani on horseback. Silver chain mail was sewn over their chests, wrists and calves. The slack tops of cloth masks thrashed behind them with the rush of the horses. On their shoulders, Rowan could see emblems stitched into the white fabric of their robes: a red crucifix, contained within a red circle.
The ancient sign of the Luxers.
They heard the cries of the horsemen as they charged past, screams of jubilation or joyful anticipation, yells of ‘Yee-haw’ or ‘Kheia!’, forcing their bone-white steeds to pound the trail as they sped. Some carried burning torches, which rippled the air above them, and several had longbows strapped to their backs.
They vanished after a few moments, nothing more than a fearful memory.
‘The Luxers,’ the magus breathed. ‘Iilyani is in trouble.’
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Caeles said, getting his horse to stand. He’d somehow persuaded it to kneel, as if during his long life he had learned to speak to animals better than he could people.
‘Should we wait?’ asked Rowan.
‘We might as well get moving,’ Gabel told her. ‘We couldn’t catch up with them, not unless they turned around.’
‘Think they might?’ Sarai asked, her all-green eyes glinting as they slid from one member of the party to another. The others saw in her a deadly instinct kicking in, Scathac responses pushing through any inhibitions.
‘It’s possible,’ Gabel replied.
They mounted their horses and set off down the road. They would reach Iilyani two days later, without having met the Luxer riders.
~
It took them ten minutes to cross the great clearing that circled the smoking ruins of the town, even on horseback. A feeble river ran forty degrees around the outside of the settlement, vanishing into a muddy streak just beyond the tree line. It met a lake a little north of the Plains, where it had become drained with the heat. It could barely supply the demand of six dark-skinned men that walked dejectedly from the town and back with pales, filling the wooden buckets with the muddy water and using it to sooth the still-hot embers of the decimated buildings.
One of the men saw the party and called to the others. They all came, bare-chested and sooty-faced, to confront them.
‘What’s your business here?’ one asked. His face was creased with grief. Sweat ran from his furrowed brow and off his high cheekbones. His eyes danced from Gabel to Caeles to Rowan, and then settled on Sarai and the magus respectively.
‘We’d just like to stay a night or two,’ the old man said, moving in front of Gabel, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re friends to you and your town.’
‘Friends!’ cried one of the other men. Tears rolled freshly down his face, and he wiped them away with a forearm. ‘Friends! We need friends here! This place has become an ashtray.’
Half Discovered Wings Page 22
