The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  The man'kin put on a surprising turn of speed. Shilly clutched the buggy's metal frame. It was going to be close. The shouts of the man'kin rose above the whine of the engine. This surprised her, as they looked so feral as to be incapable of language. It was hard to make out the words they called until the fastest was close enough to strike.

  “More humans!” screeched the bestial woman. “Why won't they leave us alone?”

  It lunged at them. Tom jerked the buggy out of range. The man'kin shrieked and fell back as they accelerated along the road. The other two had already diverted their attentions to the bus behind them. It dodged a clumsy attempt by the horned man'kin to spike its metal side. Peering over the back of the buggy, Shilly saw wardens on the back of the bus scrambling to get out of range of the snarling beast. Kail wrenched the bus from side to side, slamming into the whip-creature and sending it flying. Then he, too, was past the main threat.

  The second bus wasn't so lucky. The bestial woman had planted itself in the centre of the road, head dipped low to ram. In a desperate attempt to avoid the collision, the driver turned the wheel too far and lost control. The bus skidded off the road in a cloud of dirt and threatened to tip. “Don't stop!” yelled Shilly, although the driver couldn't possibly hear her. If the bus came to a halt it would bog for sure in the powdery soil.

  She could make out Marmion yelling instructions from the front passenger seat. Behind him, the wardens had linked hands and seemed to be shouting. As the bus stabilised, wheels spinning, slowly dragging itself back to the road, the horned man'kin tossed its head and charged.

  Two things happened in quick succession. First, the wardens in the back of the bus raised their hands as one and brought them down again, hard. Shilly felt a ripple flow through the Change, although she couldn't see what had happened. Only as the horned creature's feet scrabbled for purchase on the suddenly slippery sand did she realise: the wardens had frozen the traces of moisture lying under the ground's topmost layers, rendering the creature unable to find its footing.

  It tried nonetheless. Its legs kicked and its spine twisted. Instead of spearing the bus with its deadly horns, it merely broadsided it, sending it wobbling again.

  Then the slender whiplike man'kin placed itself between the bus and the other man'kin. It flailed at the horned creature, and drove it off howling in pain and anger. Its blows drew bright sparks from the wide stone back.

  The wheels of the second bus found purchase on the road at last and fishtailed out of reach of the bestial woman. The man'kin child on its rump shook its fist as the wardens sped away. Shilly could see its mouth opening and closing but couldn't hear the words. Its face was a mask of fury.

  As the man'kin horde receded into the distance, Shilly felt more puzzled than relieved. Why had one of the man'kin defended the second bus against its fellows? What had the bestial woman meant by more humans?

  “Sal!” she said. “It was talking about Sal! We have to go back!”

  “No! Keep driving,” said Chu, her eyes still fixed on the man'kin astride the road, her face pale with fear. “Keep driving!”

  Banner reached back to grip the young woman's shoulder. “It's okay,” she said. “We're not going to stop for a good while yet.” When Shilly went to protest, she added, “We can't go back. You know that. The road will be thick with man'kin by now. To turn would kill us all.”

  Shilly forced herself to see the sense in Banner's words. No word had come from Sal, but the certainty that he was alive burned in her. She clung to that knowledge like a life preserver.

  Chu remained tense, but she, too, nodded and pretended to relax. Shilly could see her hands shaking where they rested in her lap. Only then did she realise something.

  “That's the first time you've seen a man'kin up close, isn't it?”

  Chu nodded. “They're not allowed in the city. They're dangerous.”

  “Not all of them are,” said Shilly, thinking of Mawson. “They're like people. Some are good, some bad. Did you see the one that helped us out back there?”

  “It was horrible,” she said with a shudder.

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “As long as there's a wall between me and them, I'm happy to be deceived.”

  Shilly dropped the subject, knowing it would take more than words to convince Chu. The young flyer turned her attention forward, closing herself off to further conversation.

  Banner still twisted to the rear, and Shilly realised that she was looking at something behind the buggy. At the same time, Tom eased off on the accelerator. Shilly turned to look, too, fearing that a new man'kin threat had appeared. The truth was much less exotic. The first bus had fallen behind, allowing the second to overtake it. It was difficult to see what was going on through the dust the buggies kicked up, but she could make out Marmion waving impatiently for them to continue. Maybe, she thought, they had wanted Highson safe in the middle of the convoy rather than at the end. Or perhaps she was just being charitable, and Marmion was worried about no other skin than his own.

  Banner nodded and Tom increased their speed. They continued on across the bottom of the Divide, leaving Sal and Skender far behind.

  “Put behind you all thoughts of the outside world, for such are distractions and dangerous. The rules you knew are irrelevant. Those who enter a Ruin should do so only in the clear and certain knowledge that they may never return.”

  THE SURVEYOR'S CODE

  Skender stood facing the blank stone wall and resisted the urge to kick it. He and Sal had tracked the Change-dead spoor of the Homunculus across several kilometres to its terminus just short of the Aad. Instead of following a straight line—as Sal explained that it had from almost as far away as the Haunted City—it wound its way around and between obstacles, sticking close to the wall of the Divide where possible. Towards the end, for no apparent reason, it had kinked to the right and headed for the cliff. There, abruptly, it ended.

  “I can't see a door,” Skender said, tracing his hands over the rough sandstone. Layers of ancient sediment hung before him, preserved for eternity—or would have been but for the great rending that had separated the cliff face from its match on the far side of the Divide.

  “And we can't find a hidden door by using the Change because the Homunculus has sucked it dry.” Sal paced back and forth at the edge of the wake, testing for any sign of an opening: a sliding stone, a trapdoor, anything. “But there must be one!”

  Skender succumbed to frustration and kicked the stone. That gave him a sore toe to match his headache, but it seemed appropriate. Their search had come to a dead end.

  He turned away from the cliff and looked around. The sun was fading into the west, casting a shadow across the floor of the Divide. Soon, that shadow would hit their location and they would lose any chance of finding an entrance.

  Look on the bright side, he told himself. The tide of man'kin had finally run out. A few last stragglers had eyed the humans hatefully as he and Sal had continued on their way, careful never to leave the safety of the wake. A couple had tried to engage them in conversation, but they rarely said anything of relevance. One declared that the mysterious Angel had told it about them, but nothing else had been forthcoming. Who the Angel was, how the Angel could possibly know about Sal and Skender, and why that detail was important, remained a mystery. After a while, Skender had stopped responding to calls for attention from the stony mass of man'kin.

  As he stood gazing out across the Divide floor, he saw another cloud on the far side of the mighty canyon, along the eastern leg. At the rate it was moving, it would encounter the Wall protecting Laure before nightfall. Skender hoped the city's defences were ready for an onslaught.

  “There has to be a way in,” he muttered, turning back to the problem at hand. “We're just not seeing it.”

  “We could wait until the wake fades and try then.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “A few hours, perhaps.”

  “The Homunculus could be anyw
here by then. And if the wake has faded, how are we going to follow it?” Skender pointed at the second cloud on the far side of the Divide. “Anyway, I'm not sure I like the idea of being defenceless with so many of these things roaming around. I think we should just think harder.”

  Sal sighed and sank to a crouching position with his back against the stone. “I'm very nearly all thought out, I'm afraid.”

  Skender could see that his friend was exhausted. Sal had explained that few people in the wardens’ search party had slept the night before; the summoning of the storm had drained him further. There were heavy bags under Sal's eyes; his attention occasionally drifted.

  Skender lifted the water bottle from around his neck and offered it to Sal. The container was more than half empty, but it was the only reward they had for pressing on. No plants grew on the bottom of the Divide, so they couldn't even chew leaves or twigs for moisture.

  Ignoring his own thirst, he considered what they knew. The Homunculus had an agenda of its own, one which involved the Aad. Towards the end of its journey, it had obviously made a beeline for the Ruin. The wall couldn't be the dead end it appeared to be, otherwise what was the point of coming here? The Homunculus couldn't have doubled back on itself, since it would have encountered Sal and Skender along the way. So it had come to the wall for a reason. They just had to find that reason…

  His gaze drifted upward to where the sunlight cast the top of the cliff in brilliant gold, and he wondered if he should step out of the wake and study the complex weave of air through the charm of the licence. He immediately knew he didn't need to.

  He laughed, but the news wasn't all good. “I found it!” he told Sal, pointing up. “See?”

  Right at the top of the cliff was a spur of rock from which projected a metal hook.

  “A rope would have been tied to it.” Sal climbed to his feet and put his hands on his hips. His head tilted back to study the new development. “Or a rope ladder. Either way, the Homunculus climbed up there and reeled the ladder in behind it.”

  “And here we are,” said Skender, “stuck on the ground in its wake.”

  Sal nodded. He moved back several metres, trying to see what lay at the top. “There doesn't seem to be anything else up there.”

  “I think that's the idea. We wouldn't have noticed anything if the Homunculus hadn't led us here. It's the perfect place for a hideout, or the entrance to one.” He looked to his left, at the pile of rubble that was the Aad's doorstep, half a kilometre away. “I can see only one way open to us at the moment, if we're going to go up there.”

  Sal sighed again. “I think you're right, my friend. We can always double back when we're at the top.”

  Skender put a hand on Sal's shoulder to stop him as he went to pick up the wing and head off on their new tangent. “There's something else we should think about. The ladder can't have been hanging around forever, waiting for the Homunculus to come along. The miners would have seen it. Who put it there, and why?”

  Sal sighed wearily. “Yes, that did occur to me. There's no way we can know right now, unless you've had any other blinding revelations…?”

  Skender shook his head. “Alas.”

  “Then we'll just have to keep our eyes peeled.” Sal handed him back the water bottle. “Let's get going before I fall asleep on my feet.”

  Skender agreed wholeheartedly. They had no idea what they were heading into, but the Divide definitely wasn't safe, and he had no desire to experience it after nightfall.

  The wing slotted into well-worn grooves in his fingers. He hoped Chu would appreciate the effort they were making to look after it. That hadn't been the deal at all, he thought, as they raced the encroaching shadow for the entrance to the Aad.

  Sal sighed with relief as they left the Homunculus's wake. The very moment they did so, the normal background potential returned and the familiar tingling of the Change hit him. He felt in tune with the world again and revitalised for it. The wing wasn't as heavy; his feet no longer dragged. He could think again.

  There was likely more to come: significant Ruins were steeped in the Change. He automatically assumed that the Ruin Skender called the Aad would be like any other. But as they reached the tumble of masonry at the base of the city, there was no surge in the Change. It was, if anything, ebbing away. He stopped to see if the Homunculus was nearby, but he couldn't see or sense it anywhere, and Skender's wind-seeing charm, which had returned upon leaving the wake, discerned no distinctive spoor of the creature. This was something else.

  As they climbed the rubble towards the ruined city proper, Skender's black markings faded, and Sal's connection to the world faded with it.

  “It's a Change-sink,” he said, feeling the weight of exhaustion settle over him again like a heavy blanket. “A natural blank spot.”

  Skender was nodding, touching the deadened stone of a tumbled column as though it might rear up and bite him. “No wonder no one comes here. The air feels smothered.”

  “Do you want to keep going?”

  Skender didn't hesitate. “Of course. Don't you?”

  Sal nodded, although he would have done anything rather than keep walking. Fatigue had taken root in his bones again. He had forgotten how it felt to be awake.

  They climbed higher, to what might have once been street level. It was hard to tell exactly how the original city had stood because the ground had tilted under it and most of the buildings had collapsed as a result. Mounds of rubble lay between Sal and Skender and a relatively intact portion of the city. It was clear, though, that what Sal thought of as a city was really a slice chopped out of a larger metropolis. The Aad lay open to the Divide on three sides and had decayed heavily around those borders. Only the very heart of it retained any structural integrity at all.

  Skender had described tunnels gaping open to the Divide near Laure. During their ascent, they had seen nothing of the sort. Sal suggested that they had been covered over by landslides and were now only accessible from within the ruins. Skender didn't have a better solution, but he did look disappointed. It would have been much easier for him, Sal supposed, if they'd found his mother on their own. They could have dispensed with tracking the Homunculus.

  The Change-sink in the Aad wasn't as deep as the Homunculus's wake, but it nonetheless cut them off from everything outside the city.

  “Where do you think the heart of it is?” Skender asked.

  “The tower, perhaps.”

  “That would make sense, I guess. It's the only recognisable landmark.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  Skender shrugged. “Beats me. The study of Change-sinks is a forgotten art, even by me.”

  Sal didn't ask further questions. He was more interested in whether his father had woken and given an account of his reasons for summoning the Homunculus. He almost stopped and turned back, feeling a sudden and very strong concern for Shilly. He wanted to talk to her, to let her know he was all right.

  One glance back at the Divide, which was filling with darkness as dusk's shadow swept across it, put paid to that idea. There was no going back, not through nightfall and man'kin and whatever else might be out there. He had to keep moving forward.

  The last rays of sunlight rushed over the Aad, casting the tower in a blaze of golden fire. Sal stared at it, hypnotised by the strange beauty of the moment. The dead city surrounded them, its air filled with dust and decay. No animals disturbed the stillness; no plants invaded the tumbled masonry. He could have been standing at the end of history, surveying all that remained of humanity's works.

  The thought was maudlin. Much of the world already looked like this. Wardens and Mages alike built homes among the ruins, constantly reminded that theirs was an echo of a bygone age, one that had been capable of works unequalled since. What had happened to those lost builders was for the most part unknown. The Cataclysm had wiped them out and left the Change in their wake. Their world was difficult to imagine.

  The last light of sunset abandoned the
ruins and continued its march up the side of the Divide. The city plunged into gloom.

  “What do we do now?” whispered Skender. “It's going to be pitch black before long.”

  “We should have brought some matches and a candle.”

  “And food.”

  “Let's not be greedy,” he said, refusing to regret their impulsiveness. He took in their surroundings while a dusky light lingered. “We should find somewhere to take shelter.” His body ached; the thought of rest was overpowering. “Maybe we can explore when our eyes have adjusted.”

  They hurried through the ruined city. Most of the buildings had fallen in completely or were teetering on the verge of doing so. Their best hope lay south and uphill, at the furthest point from the Divide, where the ground beneath the Aad angled up to vertical. Gradually, the remaining walls became higher, their interiors less wasted. Finally, they managed to find a low building with all four walls standing and a relatively intact ceiling. There was no way of telling what it had once been, since no shapes of furniture or tools seemed evident. It had no doubt been stripped of anything useful long ago. Sal paced out the full extent of the small space and declared that it would do.

  “Do you want to wait here while I look around?”

  The darkness was absolute. Sal could barely make out Skender's silhouette against the open doorway.

  The suggestion was irresistible. “Maybe just for a little bit,” Sal said, sinking down into a corner next to where they had placed the wing. His feet and head throbbed; his throat was utterly parched. “You'll let me know if you find anything, won't you?”

  “Of course. This place is far too creepy for heroics.”

  Sal smiled and closed his eyes.

  “Don't go anywhere until I get back.”