by Andy Graham
“Where are the rest of your Hoyden?” Karaan demanded.
“Where’s Orr?” Nascimento asked.
“He betrayed us,” Brooke hissed.
Lukaz’s pink-tinted eyes took in Ray, Brooke’s flushed face, their linked arms, and said, “Baris Orr bought us time with his body while you were rutting with your boyfriend.”
“Orr’s dead?” Ray exclaimed. Behind Lukaz, the fisher gull threw back its head and swallowed what looked like a whole toe.
“I’m sorry,” Brooke whispered.
“I don’t want your apologies,” Lukaz said.
“I wasn’t apologising to you.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Nascimento said. “Baris the Bard finally started living.”
The gathering of people broke up into small groups. Each person seeking solace and security with their own. Atop the dizzyingly high walls of stone that formed the cauldron, birds screeched and hooted at the semicircle that had formed around Lukaz: “We must hurry.”
Karaan: “How many of your Hoyden are left?”
Lukaz: “Just over two score.”
Ray: “Injured?”
Lukaz: “Exhausted. I set them to man the palisade while they recover. Baris Orr warned us that the Unsung may try and land choppers close to the Angel City.”
Mayka: “That’s suicide. The Devils’s Breath, the mountain winds—”
Nascimento: “It’s not suicide for the people making the orders, only for those that do what they are told.”
Stella (in a quiet, hateful voice): “Is the VP there? Is Jake there? My son? Where’s my son?”
Karaan: “Move the weak and sick to the caves. The woman and children—”
“Typical,” Vena said, disdainfully, and the circle was broken. They looked at her, perplexed. “I have spent my entire life fighting this, and even here, amongst a people I have had a distant respect for, I find myself back where I started almost fifty years ago.”
“Who’s this?” Lukaz asked Karaan.
“This,” Vena replied in a voice that could crack glaciers, “has a pair of ears of her own and a mouth that works perfectly well.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Nascimento muttered.
There was a tickling at the back of Ray’s head, a whispering noise, regular, getting louder, like the tick-tock of the grandfather clock that had stood in Rick Franklin’s old cottage in Tear. Its pendulum was rumoured to stop whenever anyone died. Or did it stop first? Ray couldn’t remember. He scrubbed his hands through his hair. The thud of the pendulum mixed with the thud of his pulse and the thud of Baris Orr’s body hitting the ground. “Focus, Franklin. Focus,” he muttered, as Vena addressed Lukaz.
“My name is Vena Laudanum. I am the president’s sister.”
“She’s dead.” Lukaz gritted his teeth. — Against the pain in his shoulder or the woman facing him? Ray thought. — “And you get no standing because of her. Power doesn’t stick like dust if you kneel in it in front of those who have it. Not how it works.”
“How about respect, Lukaz, how does that work?” Eleyka asked. “Whoever this woman is, she is under our roof. And while she stands with us, will be treated as one of us.” Lukaz’s pink eyes met Eleyka’s green ones. She added something in their tongue
(“I do not trust her. She is lying to us about something. If she betrays us, you can do with her what you will.”)
that calmed him.
Ray craned his neck up and around, trying to mute the thudding in his ears. The stone cauldron cut a ragged circle out of the blue sky. The noise was in his teeth now, a rapid clunk as Rick Franklin’s dead pendulum raced ahead, stealing seconds and thieving lives.
With one hand resting lightly on Lukaz’s dislocated shoulder, Eleyka addressed Vena. Not quite snippy, not quite patient. “What is it we are supposed to have done to offend you?”
Vena pulled her coat tight. “It bothers me that it always comes back to this. The men fight and the women and children stay behind? Able-bodied females sit while broken males fight.”
“Who said it was to be like this?” Karaan asked.
And the noise was there again, thumping at Ray’s ears. That pendulum in Tear hadn’t swung in years. Last time he’d seen it, it was thick with cobwebs. It’s not moving, the fisher gull screeched in his head. People are dying. Baris died. That’s enough of a coincidence to spawn a religion. Enough correlation to justify genocide. Works for your half-brother. Doesn’t it work for you? What about Captain Lacky who died because you wanted Chester on your side? Would he have lived if that pendulum was swinging? He bent double, Brooke’s worried arms circling his shoulders. Above him the argument boiled. “Stop, please.”
“Who said it had to be like this?” Vena snapped. “You did, Karaan. ‘Move the weak and sick to the caves, the woman and children.’ I am tired of men who make no distinction between the above, men who view women as children with breasts. You are dinosaurs. You— what is funny?”
Beneath Karaan’s beard, he was smiling. “That is the problem with you free-thinking intellectuals, you are blinded by your own enlightenment. This is not our way, Vena Laudanum, sister of the president. If you had let me finish, you would have heard me say that women and children and men who wish to fight are to arm themselves.”
Eleyka circled an arm around Vena’s shoulders. The Laudanum sister stiffened. “In our tribes, the role of a parent is to protect and provide in any way they can. A person who gives up his way of life and role in society for someone else’s needs is bigger than the selfish person who won’t. Some are better suited than others to certain roles, but as long as all roles are filled, it doesn’t matter who does what. It doesn’t always work. Brooke’s father made a skill out of avoiding anything involving a mop or an oven, but our way works more often than it fails.”
Vena stood statue-still. Her black coat was covered in dust at the hem, the once-shiny buckles of her shoes now dull. Over the thudding in his head, Ray could see her judging, and, he thought with a grudging respect, reassessing her own position.
“You have my profound apologies.”
“Think nothing of it.”
Ray heard the words but not the voice. Was that Karaan or Eleyka or Lukaz or Nascimento’s new temptress, Mayka? He shook off Brooke’s arm and craned his neck up at the sky. It was empty except for a solitary black dot around which swirled spirals of blue. Nothing else. No clouds. No birds. Nothing but the clunk of the clock pendulum heard through dusty memories of childhood tales.
“What?” Brooke elbowed him in the ribs, like Mayka, ungently.
Then it hit him. It wasn’t a received memory of the pendulum in his grandfather’s old cottage nor the imagined noise of Baris Orr dying. “Hear that?” he asked.
Brooke cocked her head and her eyes went wide. “Chopper rotors.”
The immovable black dot sunk lower and the sky was filled with small specks that spread like the pox.
“The Unsung are going to parachute into the Angel City.”
32
It Begins
The tribes of the Donian Mountains say that God is good but the Devil tells the better jokes.
The Ailan god had been banned not long after the Silk Revolution, sacrificed to science on the altar of reason. That god had promptly been replaced by any number of other beliefs.
First there were the Phobes, people who eschewed any form of technology not driven by coal with an almost religious fervour. That belief died out as the realities of modern life and modern medicine proved a bigger draw than blood letting, trepanning, black lung disease and lugging that beloved coal up five flights of stairs purely to make a cup of tea.
The next main belief to stalk the cities, all the way from the mean streets paved in someone else’s gold down to the dark alleys of governmental power, was that genetics was the answer to all ills. The latter led, inevitably perhaps, to the rise of Genetic Supremacists and research camps like X517, where one-half of identical twins, such as Ray’s brother, were taken.
Slowly, the people of Ailan filled the Creator-shaped hole in their lives with other forms of worship, one of which was a devotion to the elements. Those ceremonies typically descended into lust, sweat and temporary promises made on dusty floors. (A different, yet common, form of the four elements: lust as fire, sweat as water, empty promises as air, dust as earth.) The high priestess of that cult, the Famulus, was currently squirming in excruciating agony under the precise ministrations of Professor Wu-Brocker’s scalpel. Benn-John — who had already experienced Lady Flay’s skill — watched, clawing at his skin as he tried to scratch the memories away.
However, in an administrative oversight, the Devil hadn’t been banned with God. (Whether He/She would have listened is another question.) And today, the Devil, the Jester who had claimed the underbelly of the Donian Mountains, was in a frivolous mood. The Great Deceiver had some jokes to share with the world that had some vicious punchlines.
Twelve men and one pilot had been ordered to make the perilous trip above the Angel City. Due to government-efficiency savings and an attempt to ‘streamline the military into a more efficient mobile force for a modern age’, none of the Unsung had a reserve parachute (though the politicians who had made that choice had several reserve houses and cars to go with their reserve lovers). For the abacus-wielding decision makers, a backup parachute was an irrelevance. That irrelevance was significantly less irrelevant for those Unsung about to leap out of the helicopter five hundred metres above a rocky landing surface.
The first man died when his chute malfunctioned. It opened immediately on him exiting the chopper and the updraft whipped him past the spinning blades. Fortunately for the rest of the jumpers, the parachute didn’t get entangled with the rotors. Unfortunately for him, the rotors cut a long slice through the silky fabric of his canopy. It turned him into a stone. A stone half a kilometre above a lot of other, much harder, stones.
The second man to die was the rope sergeant, a man with a permanent sneer welded to his face who’d had run-ins with both Baris Orr and Jamerson Nascimento in the past. He leant out to see what had happened without clipping himself in. (Because he had a hangover that could make a mute scream in agony, and besides, “I’ve done enough flights not to make silly mistakes. Been jumping since before you were chewing your mother’s nipples to shreds.”) The rookie behind him, who was on his first jump and staunchly teetotal, made a silly mistake. He bumped into the back of the rope sergeant. The screams of the latter faded after the first man who had turned into a fleshy stone.
The teetotal rookie’s chute deployed successfully. But as the snap of decreased momentum whipped through his body, a bird landed on his face. The Donian south of the Northbridge in Ailan (our friends) called this type of bird a sun owl. The Donian north of the Northbridge in Mennai (whom we haven’t met) called the bird a hawk owl. Both agreed that whatever the name, the birds were vicious bastards. It pecked out the rookie’s eyes. Unable to see, he piloted his parachute into a mountain ledge and died, but not before the sun/hawk owl had finished eating the man’s tongue out of his mouth.
The fourth man died for a more prosaic reason. His chute failed to open. The reason his chute didn’t open was less prosaic. One of his colleagues had cut the cords after discovering the doomed jumper had been doing his wife on their new Formica kitchen table.
The fifth man, who went by the name of Lenn — never Lenny, just Lenn — was the captain of the Unsung bodyball team. And never had you seen a collection of more violent thugs. But, and even their hospitalised opponents would grudgingly agree, Lenn and his team were fit. And with the arrogance of the fit and strong and handsome, Lean thought those qualities made him invincible, god-like. The Devil of the Lion’s Crest disagreed. And as occasionally happens to extremely fit young men, Lenn’s heart just stopped beating. By the time his feet hit the ground, the hypertrophied walls of his heart were engorged with useless, dead blood.
The sixth man sneezed, yanked on his steering cords and piloted himself straight into the seventh man, snagging their parachutes into an unusable tangle of flapping material which caused them to plummet into the canopy of the eighth man. They, at least, almost hit their target. Almost. They landed in the pond near the Dawn Rock. The trio drowned in a slow-motion dance of thrashing limbs, parachute cords and bubbles.
The ninth man did hit his target: the Dawn Rock. The jagged lump of stone that stood taller and broader than a man was stained rusty-red from all the blood that had been spilled on it, including some of Baris Orr’s. The Unsung legionnaire’s momentary elation at having landed was short lived. The restless wind tugged him and his parachute backwards. The sickening sound as he broke his neck was heard over the crash of the waterfall.
Numbers ten, eleven and twelve died together. The Devil’s Breath, the reason no one had tried to land a chopper or parachute into the Donian Mountains in over a generation, the sudden wind that the Unsung thought they could outwit by flying in above it and dropping through it, appeared from nowhere. Number ten had edged to the open door of the chopper. His toes were curled up tight in his boots, a nervous childhood habit he had never (and would never) break. The wind slammed him back into the belly of the matte-black bird with enough force to concuss him. He was lucky. His head was spinning so much he didn’t feel the chopper lurching as it was battered from side to side like a kid shaking a wasp in a jam jar. And then, inexplicably, the wind picked the chopper up up up into the sky. It was almost as if it was trying to get enough purchase to slam it down down down into the peak of the mountain. Which it did. And left a smoking heap of twisted black metal that melted the snow around it and turned it both the colour of oil and blood.
The last man, the thirteenth man who managed to get out of the chopper in time, was called Corporal Denniel P. McThwick the Third. Denny to his friends, Cock-snout on account of his nose to his enemies, of which he had more. He didn’t open his chute too soon. He didn’t get attacked by a sun/hawk owl. Denny didn’t get his parachute tangled in someone else’s, nor did he drown or break his neck or have a sudden heart attack. Denny executed a perfect jump and landing, where he jettisoned his chute, and rolled to his feet in one smooth move, and Brooke shot him between the eyes.
The sense of humour of the Devil of the Donian Mountains and the Lion’s Crest was not to everyone’s taste. But today, the people gathered in the stone cauldron found it, if not entertaining, then at least satisfying.
The first wave came at sunrise after the failed parachute attack. With the light of dawn shining green through the forest, a lone Unsung legionnaire planted his feet in the dew-soaked ground and swivelled his grenade launcher up to his shoulder. As legionnaires went, Ray commented to Nascimento, this guy looked like the 13th Legion had scraped through the bottom of the barrel into the filth beneath it and come up with him. He was the archetypal Man-Who-Knew-Solutions, his belly in first gear, arse in reverse and mouth in fifth, all while standing still.
“He’s still got a bloody big gun,” Nascimento said as they hunkered down behind the palisade.
To the cheers of colleagues that sounded like they had been on a buy-one-shot-get-the-bottle-free bender, the legionnaire squeezed the trigger.
The grenade detonated in the weapon. The Man-Who-Knew-Solutions exploded in a gout of soil. Three more legionnaires were ripped apart from gut to groin and the Unsung slunk back into the trees.
When the sun was directly overhead, a handful of legionnaires stumbled from the forest. They looked as if they had been pushed. A rifle shot kicked up dirt behind the boot heels of one and, with a weary cry lifted from the soundtrack of a budget war movie, they rushed the Angel City.
One managed to get through the hail of bullets and arrows. He made it as far as the garish flowers in the secon
d terrace and dived in for cover. His agonised screams were still sending shivers up Ray’s spine as the sun started its slide to the horizon.
That was the point when the Unsung unleashed what Nascimento called a ‘Hellfuck on Legs’.
There must have been no more than a dozen. They shambled from the forest, their skin a soup of sores and weals. Their purple eyes flashed round and large like the sick, yawning moons lurking in the sky. Fastened to the side of their heads were wires held down with clumsy cross-stitch. More than one was scratching at the amber flashing light that winked up at them from their wrists.
“In the name of everything that was ever holy,” Ray said. “I don’t believe it.”
“What are they?” Mayka was more fascinated than afraid.
“Kidnapped Donian,” Nascimento replied. “Mennai citizens that have been disappeared. Prisoners. Patients from hospitals looking to turn a quick profit. And waifs and strays from the streets of Ailan.”
Vena had gone pale.
“I’ve never seen any waifs and strays in Ailan,” Ray said.
“There weren’t any before you went AWOL and blew up that secret camp we’re not supposed to know about. And the waifs and strays didn’t last long because the Unsung were grabbing them off the streets. “Litter-picking,” Orr said they called it. Some for-your-eyes-only boffin injected them with the gwenium and turned them into these things. Looks like they upped the dosage from when I last saw them.”
“Poor things,” Mayka said. Nascimento put his arm around her shoulder. She removed it, took his hand in hers, and patted the back of it absent-mindedly.
The creatures got farther than the Unsung had. Mainly because the Donian were reluctant to fire at people that had obviously, and horrifically, been press-ganged into both bodies and a war that weren’t their own. Lukaz pointed, trembling. “That man was one of us. Kain. We cut our teeth on our first hunt together. I thought he’d gone to the tribes in Mennai.” One of the monsters had a scar that spiralled up from his hips to his head. The line was thick around his torso and thin over his neck. The look he turned on the defenders was one of pure terror. “We have to help,” Lukaz said.
