Context

by John Meaney

Calling to me.

  Tom wrenched his gaze away, and looked at Lochlen.

  ‘How very interesting, that you can resist . . .’ A smile creased Lochlen’s lean face, and he made a control gesture. ‘But Kraiv and Draquelle have left.’

  The patterns faded, were gone.

  ‘I need ...’ Tom turned away, blinking tears.

  ‘Stokhastikos.’ Lochlen had been tugging his goatee in thought; suddenly he looked at Tom’s shoulder, then up at Tom’s face. ‘I should’ve known—’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Tom began to rise. ‘It was wrong of me to come here.’

  Thrumik’s words: you’re to attend Penitents’ Chapel. That would sort out his confusion.

  ‘No, my—’ Lochlen stopped, then continued. ‘I can find out which way they went. I know something of their purpose. Can you come back tomorrow?’

  After Penitents’ Chapel?

  ‘Perhaps they...’ Tom frowned, trying to think. ‘Perhaps they went home, to the Hong.’

  ‘The Bronlah Hong?’ Lochlen was looking at him strangely. ‘In the Bilyarck Gébeet?’

  ‘Yes, that’s—’

  ‘The last place they’d go. Haven’t you heard?’

  Tom stared at his features, not quite processing the words.

  ‘It fell,’ continued Lochlen, ‘to the Blight. That whole sector—’

  Words like fading echoes, like roof-fall in distant caverns, crashing down where no-one waited to hear.

  I must get back.

  ‘—is Dark Fire territory now.’

  For the sake of the Way.

  Keeping that mantra in his mind, making use of the deepest principle of his conditioning.

  The Way...

  In the darkest, quietest hours, Tom slipped from his cell, and returned to the kitchen-lab once more.

  ~ * ~

  32

  NULAPEIRON AD 3420

  Tom was no logotrope designer.

  He lay on his mat, alone in his cell, writhing beneath the tortured images—surreal, bloody, sexual, morbid—which tore at him, dragged him through a place that was neither sleep nor waking but more akin to a blistering, morphing, confused and agonizing hell.

  And snapped awake, wide-eyed and drenched with sweat.

  Outside, the sound of running footsteps.

  A yell, a clatter.

  And a scream, high-pitched as a woman—suddenly cut off.

  Followed by a cold and heavy silence.

  No logotrope designer ...

  Tom stepped out of his cell, and into Chaos.

  Dressed in ordinary clothes, long dark cape across his shoulders, he walked through the refectory, among rows of writhing monks who tore at their skin, their eyes, each other.

  Saw the Abbot face down in a bowl of clear broth. Ignored him.

  ‘Help us, brother!’

  A splintering sound.

  Goodbye, my Brothers.

  Passed into the Outer Court where two guardian-monks stood in an agony of indecision: whether to remain at their posts, or investigate the yells from inside.

  But then one of them collapsed writhing, foaming at the mouth—halberd clattering to the flagstones—and there was no decision to be made. The other monk ran.

  For the Way.

  Tom was no logotrope designer...

  Retrieving the fallen guardian’s control-bracelet, he caused the great bronze door to swing open.

  ... but sabotage is easier than design.

  And stepped through, into freedom.

  Inside the darkened, empty tavern Tom sat alone—sipping indigoberry daistral Master Lochlen had served himself—while Lochlen made arrangements out of sight. Low voices, words indistinguishable, drifted back from the rear chambers.

  ‘It’s hardly your fault,’ said Lochlen, returning.

  He spun a floating seat the wrong way round and sat down, forearms draped over the back.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A man with your background ... Zentropes. Sweet Fate. It’s surprising the treatment didn’t kill you. Bad enough for someone who’s never had ‘trope infusions at all.’

  ‘I don’t—’ Tom closed his eyes, opened them. ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘The monks? From what I hear’—Lochlen glanced towards the tavern’s rear—‘they’ll mostly recover.’

  Mostly.

  For the Way...

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘I’ll help, my Lord.’ Lochlen made a recognition-mudra, a flickering gesture like a conjuror’s sleight of hand. ‘For Freedom’s sake.’

  Surely the old ways of LudusVitae had been forgotten.

  But there was a dark enemy within the world—he must remember that—and perhaps the movement, the alliances, still had their part to play.

  ‘... and Kraiv,’ Lochlen was saying, ‘have been travelling for several days. But with a few judicious shortcuts, and a bit of luck’—with an ironic smile—‘you’ll catch them up, my Lord.’

  ‘Call me Tom.’

  The next night he found himself inside a sealed, darkened cargo bubble—in the middle of a two-hundred-bubble train—floating along a black canal.

  Bonded, their contents—theoretically—inspected and officially guaranteed, the bubbles floated through two checkpoints in as many days without being opened.

  Tom passed the time in isometric exercise, used the gel-block sanitation with distaste, ate sparingly from the food satchel Lochlen had given him.

  And let his thoughts slowly coalesce from the zentrope trance he had been trapped in for far too long.

  On the fourth night he drifted through another border, after which the tunnel walls grew opalescent. Some ten hours later, at the start of morningshift, the bubbles slowed.

  It was his cue to disembark.

  Up ahead, beneath armed guard, stevedores were marshalling clawdrones, lifting cargo out. But there was a subtle green mark upon the bank nearby, before a narrow exit; Tom climbed swiftly ashore, spun into the darkened gap, waited for a shout or a burst of graser fire.

  Nothing.

  He followed the dark horizontal shaft, ducked through an opening at its far end, and came out into the middle of a group of men, dressed in heavy workers’ surcoats stained with black grease and worse.

  They were chatting, and appeared to take no notice of the stranger who suddenly stood in their midst. But Tom was holding out a sigil which Lochlen had provided, and he was under no doubt of their reaction had he failed to produce it.

  No energy weapons were visible, but each man bore heavy steel tools, and had the strength to use them.

  ‘This way,’ someone muttered, and they began to walk.

  Tom stood at the top of a ramp which led down onto a wide platform, beneath a square-edged archway decorated with dull gold. People were milling down there, trying to get through; but membrane had been stretched across the archway’s width, leaving just a narrow portal at the centre, through which mirrormasked soldiers let people pass after checking authorization.

  The tunnel beyond was hundreds of metres wide; in it, a multitude of floating vehicles—lev-platforms, some levanquins, half a dozen stub-winged flyers—massed in readiness, preparing to take the escaping refugees.

  Tom’s contacts, the heavyset men, had provided him with a travel-tag, fastened a fake ID-stud in his ear, and left him here.

  Still, Tom could not see how so few soldiers could control such a large crowd, liable to panic. Obviously, there were rumours of the Blight’s spreading this way, and any freedman of means would try to—

  Chaos.

  On either side, scarcely visible, a slender monographite pillar rose. Each supported a small, transparent platform; and on each one stood a Jack.

  Tom’s skin crawled. He could not imagine a threat so great that two Jacks were required.

  Don’t worry... Not wanting to call attention to himself.

  In their dark sleeveless uniforms, the Jacks looked small from here. But their senses could detect Tom’s fear pheromones, listen to his s
ub vocal mutterings as if he were talking aloud ...and could pick out any individual, even from this crowd of thousands.

  A Jack had been hunting for the Pilot, when Tom was young...

  That was long ago.

  But it was not just their sensory capabilities which made Jacks a breed apart. Either one of the two individuals overhead was capable of laying waste to this entire platform, and all the people on it, and that would have been true even if the mass of panicking civilians were magically replaced by professional enemy troops, armed and armoured, and looking for a fight.

  A tingling spread across Tom’s entire skin. He grew aware of the mass of people behind him, jostling and muttering; of the soldiers pressed against him, weapons cold against his throat; of the two Jacks high overhead. Of the glistening, hardened membrane which separated the restless throng from safety.

  His ear grew hot. The fake ID-stud sparked ruby red.

  Tom held his breath.

  ‘OK. Let him through.’

  Pressure behind him, as the membrane pulsed. The force of it spat him through, and he nearly fell flat on the dock beyond.

  ‘Over here, friend.’ Someone reaching down.

  He clambered aboard the dangerously overloaded levanquin—filled with wide-eyed families who did not yet believe themselves safe—and stared around at the rest of the flotilla, wondering when they would begin to move.

  Almost as if that were a signal, the first lev-platforms rose higher, then forwards, and the great evacuation commenced.

  Three days later, in an inn called the Lair Of The Silver Slug, Tom was reunited with Kraiv and Draquelle.

  ‘I prayed to Rikleth you’d be safe, my friend.’

  ‘Come here, Tom, and let me kiss you.’

  They hugged him simultaneously; he squeezed his eyes shut, determined not to cry.

  ~ * ~

  33

  TERRA AD 2142

  <>

  [10]

  When Ro walked into the village from the desert, the notion of salvation took a moment to register. There was orange-red sand still beneath her feet. A small tan dog ran towards her, barking with impossible energy in the blistering heat.

  Her skin was burned, her tongue parched; but she was walking, buoyed up by the water from yesterday’ s storm, and her memory of the power inside her.

  ‘Come inside, girl.’

  It was a flat-faced Navajo woman, her grey hair bound in braids, wearing a man’s shirt knotted at the waist. She gestured back towards her home, a pale peach ceramic hogan. Behind, a tiny robot crabbed its way along her neat vegetable plot.

  This was a long way from any sizeable town, but the woman was already speaking into the silver-and-turquoise bracelet on her left wrist, then pointing it at Ro: transmitting her image.

  If they’ve got scanAgents in Every Ware—

  But she had to leave the burning desert—regardless of who ‘they’ might be.

  It was an hour later when she jerked awake, sitting in a hard-backed rocking chair—she had refused to he down—and saw, through the polarized window, a whitish desert-stained flyer kicking up dust clouds as it descended.

  There was a red cross emblazoned on the hull, but it wasn’t until the hatch slid open and Sergeant Arrowsmith poked his head outside that she—

  <>

  A woman’s scream, oddly attenuated by distance and the twisted rock channels—a klick away? More?—echoed around the small cavern. Tom, sitting, wiped the holo.

  He was sealing up his stallion talisman, mu-space crystal secreted within, when Draquelle stumbled into the cavern.

  ‘Tom, did you hear?’

  ‘Of course I—’

  ‘It came from that direction. The way Kraiv went.’

  After five days hiking through raw, interstitial territory, their supplies were lasting well; but Kraiv had offered to scout ahead for water while Tom and Draquelle put together a makeshift camp.

  Crouching down, Tom unsealed Kraiv’s discarded pack -heavier than anyone but the huge housecarl could have carried—searching quickly for weapons.

  Found none.

  Doesn’t matter.

  He stood up, noted Draquelle’s compressed lips, the paleness of her skin.

  ‘Show me.’

  ~ * ~

  34

  NULAPEIRON AD 3420

  He hurdled a fallen, shattered pillar, ran on across the broken ground. Hoping that Kraiv was far from danger; praying -somewhere inside—that there would be trouble. Because some part of Tom needed action, massive and immediate: to rip and tear more than imaginary enemies; to work out his rage with blood, not some prissy logotropic sabotage.

  He ran.

  For the...

  No. Not that.

  For Elva.

  And then he was past the camp’s perimeter—so much for the sentries—and skidding to a halt on shale almost before he realized that he was in the renegade band’s midst.

  They were seated, drinking, around a large thermoglow. None of them, not even the sentry standing on an outcrop overhead, wore his uniform correctly fastened; they looked like deserters, probably marauders.

  Too late, Tom saw that Kraiv was sitting among them, on a flat rock with a large flask in his hands—the morphospear laid aside, out of reach—and deduced that the carl’s strategy had been more subtle than frontal attack.

  Behind them lay a black cave where fluorofungus did not grow; that would be where they kept any prisoners who still lived.

  ‘Stranger!’ It was a warning, not a greeting.

  But the sentry’s words—as he fumbled for his graser rifle—were unnecessary. Exploding from their places round the thermoglow, the men grabbed weapons without hesitation, swinging them round to bear on Tom.

  Then it all happened very fast.

  Kraiv was on his feet—big and ursine—smashing two soldiers’ heads together before anyone knew he had moved. Another stepped into his path; Kraiv banged him in the centre of his forehead with one great fist: he dropped like a marionette whose lev-field had crashed.

  And Kraiv now held the morphospear.

  Three soldiers split from the group—two youths, and a veteran who probably knew of the carls’ prowess—and ran towards Tom. A scything kick took the first one down, but the others kept coming ...

  Move.

  Sentry, overhead.

  The air cracked. Graser fire blew apart the rocks beneath Tom’s feet. But he was already going down, snatching the fallen man’s graser as he rolled, and came up on one knee taking careful aim upwards, and pressed the firing stud.

  An explosion of blood ripped the sentry’s body in two.

  Tom spun back towards the camp—and froze.

  What took place next defied any description he might later give, awestruck before an exhibition of warrior spirit such as he had never imagined, nor ever hoped to see.

  For few men witness true berserker rage and live to tell it.

  Two dozen soldiers—more, thirty—came for him in a pack, but Kraiv’s great figure moved fast—massive muscles sliding beneath glistening black skin: a warrior—as the great opalescent morphospear slid and moaned through the air like a living thing.

  As a wide flat halberd, it sliced through limbs. Then it snapped into a cupped, parabolic configuration, shielding Kraiv from spitting graser fire, before lancing out, long and straight, to impale the shooter through his soft throat.

  Huge, heavy, blood-hungry: only Kraiv could have wielded such a weapon.

  Roaring, he swung in a great arc, and four men fell before his long—now scimitar-bladed—morphospear. Then a group of their comrades, armed with entrenching cutters and bare hands, fell on Kraiv—and died, as he appeared to shrug his huge muscles, threw them in all directions, then sliced them down.

  Two soldiers had graser rifles but they looked in fear as Kraiv reared up before them, swung down, and then their butchered limbs lay streaming blood upon the stones beside their fallen weapons.