Vale of Blood Roses

by Tim Lebbon

  “Barr,” Jakk says again.

  “Who is he?” Bindy asks.

  “Someone I thought was dead.”

  “You know I’m stronger,” Barr says. “You know it take a lot to kill—”

  “Someone I wished was dead.” Jakk raises the bow again. The gut creaks as he pulls back, a sound that fills the clearing in the forest that he calls home. Livestock grow still, birds’ singing fades, chickens stop pecking at the ground. Jakk remembers the woman dropping those fluid seeds, how Barr had killed her and what he did to her after she was dead. He’d seen that many times before – especially from Barr – but this first dead woman of the folded valley stuck in his mind. He supposes it was the first truly innocent death he had seen.

  “Won’t be long now,” Barr says. He has stopped vomiting and he sits up, moving slowly as if every move pains him. “They’ve killed Rufiere and Leeza, and two moons ago they came for me. I got away, but …” He indicates his stomach where the blood roses bloom. “Soon, they’ll come for you.”

  “Daddy?” Romana says. She is standing at the door to their home, a jug of water slowly tipping in her left hand and darkening the front of her dress.

  “Stay back,” Jakk says.

  “But …” She is looking at Barr’s injuries and what grows there, and the bloody mess on the ground beside him. Jakk wonders what she makes of this man’s drawn, haunted expression. Haunted, even through his grin.

  “They’ll die too,” Barr says. He nods at Romana and she drops the jug. “Her. And the woman. They’ll kill them too, and they won’t be as lucky as me. You should hear what they did to Rufiere. How he screamed. How he begged.”

  “The woman is my wife,” Jakk says. “Don’t you even look at her.”

  “Remembering more now, Jakk?” Barr stares at Bindy, very obviously looking her up and down.

  “Enough.”

  “Jakk?” Bindy says. Jakk can hear the fear beneath her voice and he goes to her, keeping the arrow trained on the wounded man.

  “Enough to know you won’t escape?” Barr asks. “You must know that.”

  “Then why come to me?”

  “Because I’m twisted.”

  “You’re talking shit.”

  “Enough to realise you were just as bad? We were all just as bad, Jakk. It’s just that some of us lived with it, while others fought against it. And lost. Fight it and you always lose.”

  Jakk has the sudden feeling that Barr is not only talking to them. He looks around, and there is no one visible through the trees, no hint that they are being watched. But he can suddenly smell those blood roses again, and the scent is so much sweeter than that rising from this man’s death-vomit, the blossoms on his stomach, the redness seeping from their leaves. His rush of memory solidifies some more.

  “I was not as bad as you,” Jakk says.

  Barr laughs, a wet croak. “You always knew what you wanted, you were just never strong enough—”

  “I was nowhere near as bad!”

  “Jakk, what’s happening?” Bindy says, and Jakk can see that she is glancing around the clearing as well. Because she saw me doing it? he wonders. Or can she sense something as well?

  “In the house,” he says, and Bindy knows the gravity in his voice.

  “Romana.” Bindy ushers their daughter inside, but the door does not close. She is watching her husband.

  “I came to warn you,” Barr says. He coughs another spurt of blood, dark and rancid.

  “Why?” At the edges of his perception more of those nightmares dance, memories stalking him like wolves probing a field of sheebok.

  “We were brothers,” Barr says quietly.

  “No.”

  “Brothers of the sword, the knife, the bolt.” Barr spits and groans, pressing one hand to the roses sprouting across his stomach. They seem to envelop his hand, curling and stretching to cover his skin.

  “What has come?” Jakk asks.

  “The ghosts. Ghosts of the folded valley. Come for us.”

  “What killed Rufiere and Leeza?”

  “I just told you! What we did killed them. The heart and mind has come for us at last, and—”

  “You did it, not me. It was over for me by then.” Jakk still holds the bow, aim never wavering. He has seen Barr’s tricks before, knows him too well.

  Romana whispers something behind him, but Bindy hisses something in response.

  “I’m dying,” Barr says.

  “Good.”

  “Maybe you can …”

  “I can what?” Jakk is becoming impatient, eyes flickering around the clearing as he senses something not only watching him, but marking him, knowing him.

  “Make amends.” Barr grins again, and Jakk can no longer see the bleeding, wounded, dying man. He sees the warrior that was – a murderer by any other name – and the chord of severed thumbs he wore around his neck. And he remembers more of what that warrior-murderer did in the valley they unfolded.

  Jakk blinks slowly, then fires the arrow into Barr’s chest.

  The dying man gasps in surprise, and it is the last sound he makes.

  “Jakk!” Bindy shouts. The door slams shut.

  I can’t hear Romana, Jakk thinks. If she saw, she’d have screamed. If she saw what I did, I’d have heard her by now.

  Barr writhes on the ground for a few beats, hands pressing around the arrow but never actually touching it. He blinks rapidly at Jakk, eyelids moving slower, and then finally they, and he are still.

  “If making amends is the only way, then that’s a good beginning.” Jakk turns away without another glance and walks to the house. He must prepare his family to leave.

  *

  He could have turned around and walked out of the valley. After all they had been through – fighting for the Ventgorians, losing comrades and friends to the Soyaran raiders from the Poison Forests, hearing of the Cataclysmic War and feeling the impact of its culmination reverberating through the land – Jakk should have known what to expect. He had known Barr well enough by then to understand.

  But he did not turn around. Part of the reason was the companionship he felt for these survivors with whom he had been fighting for the past several years. He may not particularly like them, but each of them had been saved by the others many times over. The more they killed, the more precious their own lives became, and they owed each other everything. And another reason was a fascination with what the valley may contain, and the simple fact that it should not have been here at all.

  Machines! They had heard that the machines were dead all across Noreela. They had seen many of them themselves, already rusting and rotting down into the land wherever they had come to a halt. The thought of life going on without them was dreadful and difficult to comprehend. Jakk had felt more than most of them the sickening, gut-twisting hollowness of magic fading from Noreela at the end of the war, so the prospect of seeing it at work again was something he could not miss.

  And yet, looking back at the dead, raped, mutilated woman, he could not help but wonder at his true motivations.

  This place shouldn’t be here, Rufiere had said.

  “Then neither should we,” Jakk muttered.

  “What?” Barr marched ahead, face glowing with the thrill of recent bloodletting.

  “Nothing,” Jakk said.

  Barr smiled gently. “You always were the weak one, Jakk.”

  “And you’re always the first to remind me of that.” Jakk looked at Rufiere and Leeza, and their expressions were unreadable. They followed, that was all. And Barr was the strongest – outwardly, at least – and so it was him they chose to follow. So simple, yet it was a hierarchy that had been maintained for over a year.

  Barr glanced up the slope at the small machines still harvesting the purple plant. “You’re too easily distracted,” he said. “That’s all.” He bit the woman’s sliced-off thumb between his teeth and smiled.

  Leeza laughed out loud and Rufiere shook his head, and Jakk somehow found a smile to prese
nt to Barr. “You’re sick,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Barr muttered. He opened his mouth and caught the dropped thumb, shoving it into his pocket. “I’ll string that later. May be more to go with it before the day’s out.” Then he turned and walked down the hillside. His feet crunched in the loose shale, sending small drifts down towards the lower levels of mist that shrouded the valley.

  There’s no need, Jakk wanted to say. These people aren’t part of what we were doing. But he could not find his voice. Silence had always been his greatest weakness.

  *

  Sunlight faded, the mists closed in around them like a false night, and the ground they walked on turned from shale to soil. They saw no more people or machines, but there was evidence of both. The hills had once been farmed and here and there were fields still planted with crops. Much of the crop was the same purple plant the machines had been harvesting farther up the slopes, but there was also a tall, light green grass, and a pungent yellow crop that seemed to sway with a life of its own. Leeza stepped into a clump of these yellow plants and they turned to her, leaning in from all sides as though attracted by her life force. She swept her sword around her and cut them away, and Jakk listened hard for their screams.

  The mist was heavy and it dampened their clothing. Their weapons quickly beaded with moisture, and they started perspiring in the close heat of the valley. It made a trap for the sun, and once contained below this level of mist there was no escape.

  “What are we looking for?” Jakk asked.

  “Stuff,” Rufiere said. “Spoils of war.”

  “The war’s over,” Jakk said.

  “Fuck’s sake.” Leeza mumbled, but her words carried.

  “And you think now it’s over there’s a place for people like us?” Barr asked without breaking step or turning around.

  “I’m a blacksmith,” Jakk said. It was the first time he had thought about that for a long time, and the memory of his former occupation now seemed like the recollections of someone else. His forge, his tools, his customers, the man sweating as he moulded and cast horseshoes and other metalwork now seemed like a person he could never know. He tried to recall the smell of the fire, but the valley was filled with other scents today.

  “You’re a killer,” Barr said. He carried on walking, as if they were talking about the weather or something equally banal. “Have been for a long time. Remember the first person you killed? I do. Soyaran woman wearing a green dress, long yellow hair. Quite a pretty face beneath the scars.”

  Jakk remembered. She’d smiled at him and he’d felt wanted, and then she had come at him with fingers hooked into claws.

  “She had enough venom beneath her nails to kill you ten times over,” Leeza said.

  “Knife to the throat,” Rufiere said. “Then you severed her spine when she was down so she couldn’t crawl.”

  Yes, Jakk could recall everything. Her smile, her smell, the sway of her hair as she came at him, the feeling of the world moving around him as opposed to him moving through the world, slipping aside, avoiding her hands and green-tinged fingernails as he swept a knife across her throat. The gush of blood that he was keen to avoid. The thump of her hitting the ground, and she was still smiling as she crawled at him. He’d stuck his sword between her shoulder-blades and leaned on it, then let her bleed to death before him. She had wanted him dead, that was for certain. He could still remember her face.

  “She wanted me dead,” Jakk said.

  “We’re all changed.”

  “You’re a fruit grower, Barr. You had a farm on the Cantrass Plains, and you left your wife and three sons to come down here and fight. Wanted to make enough money to go back and buy more land, a machine to tend your crops, another to dig a water well.”

  “I’m no longer a farmer,” Barr said, stopping and turning around. “And all the machines are dead.”

  “I just don’t see—”

  “There could be anything down here!” Barr said. He gestured at the mist and headed off again, and the anger was apparent in the length of his stride.

  It turned out that he was right.

  *

  The mist began to clear, revealing a wide swathe of valley below and ahead of them. And it was more than beautiful. The hillsides were gentler down here and planted heavily with yellow and purple crop, a few wilder areas speckled green and grey. Not far from where they now stood a small waterfall came down from the cliff face, tumbling from protruding rocks, whispering secrets to the air and splashing a small rainbow into existence at its base. A network of streams originated in the hills where they now stood and merged in the distance, forming a wider river that wended its way northward. The valley there was still swathed in sheets of mist, and more coloured rainbow sheens arced from one side to the other.

  It was also instantly apparent that the valley did not belong. Rufiere was right; it should not be here. Jakk had never seen anywhere so unknown and alien, and it was not the landscape or what was upon it that gave that impression. It was the sheer size and feel of the place. Here was a valley unaware of the fact that magic was no longer in the land, and where machines still drew power from and communed with that magic. Here was a place where the sky seemed shielded by a constant mist, and yet sunlight shone through and made the plants grow, the waters shine. It gave the feeling of being somewhere else entirely, and when Jakk turned and looked back the way they had come, he could not picture the plains of Noreela lying above that low cloud cover.

  “There,” Barr said.

  “I see vineyards, and plenty of cattle,” Leeza said.

  Rufiere frowned down into the valley, passing his small tatty book from one hand to the other. It’s him I can work on, Jakk thought. He doesn’t think we should be here either.

  The idea of turning around and retreating on his own crossed his mind again, but it felt impossible. He was here with the others, and he would do his best to make sure they walked out as easily as they had walked in.

  “Good,” Barr said. “A meal, wine, and then some village virgins to fuck.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Leeza said.

  Barr glanced around at Jakk and Rufiere, smiling an awful smile. “We’ll let you watch, dear Leeza.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  Barr started for the village they could see nestled on the valley floor. The river flowed through it, and tall trees grew throughout the settlement, separating large, solid-looking houses and providing areas of alternating light and shade. From a distance it could have been anywhere, but as they closed in Jakk realised that it was nowhere at all.

  An old man approached them. He seemed cautious but harmless. When he saw their weapons he paused, then turned and started running back the way he had come. Leeza took him down with a crossbow bolt to the lower back. She ran to him, and he was still screaming when she knelt on his back, lifted his head by the hair and hacked into his throat.

  Jakk paused and closed his eyes, but that smell hit him again. Sweet, heavy and promising wonders. And he suddenly needed to know what it was.

  *

  They saw more machines as they neared the village. Two sat motionless beside a wide stream, and to begin with Jakk thought they were dead. They were sunk in the mud at the edge of the stream, stone hides green with moss, metal protuberances brown with rust where they extended out and down into the water. Some patches of skin on their backs sprouted thick black hairs, and it was when Jakk saw the wisps of steam issuing from the ends of these hairs that he realised that the machines were not dead at all. Whatever their purpose by the side of that stream, they were as alive as those they had seen on the high hillsides.

  They walked on, closing on the village, and Barr led the way. He had a natural arrogance about him that had been there even before they had started fighting in Ventgoria, and it had served him well as he blooded himself, scaring the enemy and unsettling his comrades. He projected a sense of immortality, or not caring about death. Both were effective.

  There were heavy
stone bridges crossing the streams, and when they came to the river they followed its course towards the village. There was a well-worn trail here, lined with stone slabs to prevent it becoming too marshy for travel, its route carved through small rises and mounds of heavy rock. Jakk recognised the signs from a hundred other places in Noreela, and he knew that machines had made this road.

  From somewhere came a deep, pounding roar that filled the air with its bass tones and thumped at the ground, reverberating up through their feet and into the bones of their legs. Jakk’s stomach rolled and he gagged, swallowing hard to hold down the vomit.

  “Alarm,” Barr said. “They know we’re not good news.” He sounded delighted.

  Jakk scanned the village for signs of opposition but saw none. Machines, yes. One of them sat beside the road where it passed the first village building, gathering something from the ground with long, swooping passes of its fluid limbs. It seemed to pay them no heed. Another drifted from one building to the next, slamming shutters. He saw the glint of a metal machine cast into the wall of a house beside the river, and fleshy appendages pulsed as water flowed through them into the structure. But none of them seemed ready to fight.

  It confused him. If the villagers were wary enough to have constructed some sort of alarm, surely they would have weapons of their own?

  “We shouldn’t be too confident,” he said.

  Barr scoffed. “Pah! I smell weakness on the air as strong as shit on a shepherd’s foot.”

  Leeza laughed. “I smell no shit, but I do smell food.” Her arm was still bleeding from the cut she’d put there after killing the old man, and she smeared the blood on her thumb, put it to her mouth. She raised an eyebrow at Jakk. “I’m hungry for something rare.”

  Jakk suddenly caught that scent again, the rich smell that had been wafting at them ever since they had entered the valley. He closed his eyes briefly and breathed deep, and when he looked again he saw where the smell originated. Along the muddy river bank to their right grew a profusion of red flowers. They were beautiful, yet something about them unsettled. He had never seen blooms like this before; the way they hung heavy on impossibly thin stems, the unnatural brightness of their colour. And the aroma was more animal than plant, the meaty scent of something living opened up to the air and venting blood. Blood roses, Jakk thought. As if to acknowledge that name he saw the effect on the mud beneath them, wet and glistening but not with river water. The colour was difficult to discern against the dark mud, but he had seen the stickiness of spilled blood many times before.