by Andy Graham
Ray pointed. “Your zip.”
“Yeah.” Nascimento shrugged unapologetically. “She ripped it. Anything else?”
“There’s blood on your earlobe.”
“Occupational hazard. Looks cool, too. Anything else?”
“Laudanum’s sent us to fight the Unsung in the woods.”
“About time! When?”
“Now.”
33
Higher Ground
Ray pushed a moonlit leaf out of his face. “Quit breathing so hard, Matt. You sound like a drunk feeding through a straw.”
“It’s not my fault. Lukaz broke my nose. And I didn’t ask to be here.”
“What did you think the Resistance was about? Passing secret notes to men in long coats? Wearing berets at a jaunty angle?”
Matt’s response was to spit at the ground. Not on, at. Not quite at Ray, either. But not quite away from him. Ray let it slide. There were more important things to deal with, like how to keep the rest of the Resistance hidden. No easy feat for a group who moved with the grace of slugs crawling through salt. It was a far cry from the Hoyden who had disappeared into the forest night as if it owed them. Ray raised a fist and, amongst a cracking of sticks underfoot and a thumping of scavenged helmets on branches overhead, the Resistance stumbled to a standstill. Lukaz and Ray’s plan was to keep as many trees between the two groups as possible to stop any accidental retribution while they dealt with the Unsung. So far it was working. So far.
“I didn’t ask to be here, either,” Ray muttered to himself. Brooke had gone back to the caves “to deal with something”. He had a sneaking feeling this ‘little something’ was ‘a large something’ to do with him. Matt nudged him, harder than necessary, and Ray bit back his retort.
“Why we listening to Vena Laudanum anyway?” Matt hawked and spat again. It gleamed a sticky silver on a tree root. “She’s the president’s sister.”
“Doesn’t matter who she is or who her sister was. Laudanum’s right. We got to do this. Seems like she’s the only one thinking straight.” Though how much of Laudanum’s idea had been common sense and how much part of some greater game, Ray wasn’t sure.
The rattish-nosed legionnaire held up a fist. Major Henndrik stopped behind his temporary leader and looked back along the line of men. Their eyes gleamed in the half-light given off by their helmet-torches, camo paint breaking up the lines of their faces. Some had even blackened their teeth. Henndrik gave a satisfied nod. These were the real Unsung, not the half-baked, half-cut fuckwits who had been sent into the forests to soak up the Donian lead. These men were hard, culled from the ranks of the Unsung on Randall Soulier’s orders and placed under Henndrik’s bruising command. These men, seasoned and proper nasty, loved it. They were also packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, squeezed into awkward positions by the low ceilings and twisting walls, and had been here for too long.
“How long we going to be in this shithole?” one whispered, his clothes covered in cave dust.
A glare from their new leader, flushed with his new promotion, silenced them. “Whispers carry underground. Quiet.”
The men glanced at Major Henndrik who, reluctantly, backed up his temporary boss. The slow crunch of their feet continued, split by the occasional clank of metal on stone or rustle of cloth. They stopped at a junction. There was a distant plink of water and what he could have sworn was a roar. Henndrik cursed. As good as his men were, the longer they were in these tunnels, the more the darkness started playing games with them, feeding their imaginations, and the more of an advantage they lost. “How much farther?”
“Not far,” their leader replied.
“You said that last time.”
“Not as far then.”
“We’re lost, aren’t we? If we’re lost then I’m going shove your rifle up your arse and make you pull the trigger.”
“Then you’ll never get out,” the leader replied.
One step.
A second.
Soft moss underfoot.
Quiet.
Ease the branch out of the way.
A shadow in the shadows.
A man.
Immobile.
Not a man. A scare-devil.
Exhale.
Step.
Stick snaps.
Freeze. Movement is obvious.
(And drunk officers had been known to play a sadistic version of musical statues with rookies during Basic Training.)
Nothing.
Move. Slow. Careful.
An explosion of red light.
Bullets hissing past his ear.
Ray hit the ground with a thud.
Rolled.
“Never hero-roll,” Reza Aalok’s dead voice.
Return fire. Wide. Splinters of wood burst from a tree. More fire. Sparks of ugly crimson. Blinding.
Focus. Inhale. Aim. Exhale. Fire.
A yelp.
A crack of sticks as the shooter went down.
The moon painted the dead man’s face the colour of a corpse.
More noise. Blood thrashing through ears. Adrenaline steaming through veins.
Fight. Run. Stop.
Breathe. Ease. Relax.
Light and noise. Flashing. Raucous commands.
Obvious bait but the Unsung fell for it.
Good job, Matt.
Legionnaires in the killing zone.
Gunfire.
Malakan crept away from Major Henndrik’s sour breath, faking a calmness he was losing. He’d walked these tunnels no end of times as a kid, squeezing through spaces no adult could follow. It had proved useful, spying on his brothers and sister, eavesdropping on the Elders and escaping from his parents. When he’d been caught, he’d been told not to do it again in case he got lost and the Monster-under-the-Mountain got him. No one had ever suspected that a gangly youth with a spiteful attitude had mapped more of the hidden tunnels of the mountains than anyone in living memory.
Only now, that spiteful boy was worried. The internal compass Malakan had developed was wonky. Too much time in the cities of Ailan and he wasn’t as sure as he once was. Addling his sense of direction even more was not so much the major’s threat, nor was it Malakan’s desire to prove to the VP that he was useful, it was his overpowering urge to prove to the people of Donia that the one they had spurned wasn’t a ‘waste of skin’.
Something cold and hard nudged him in the seat of his trousers. “Just warming the rifle up,” Henndrik whispered. “I got no lube here, but I’ll let you spit on the muzzle if you like.”
Malakan’s mouth dried up. He crept forwards. Left or right? Heart thumping, he sucked in a bellyful of air through his nose, exhaled it and sucked it in again, the way the dogs and wolves did. There was the faintest hint of fresh air, of grass. “This way.”
“Sure?” Henndrik’s rifle pushed hard into Malakan’s tail bone. His helmet-torch illuminated a tunnel slick with damp that curved gently down into the mountain. “Shouldn’t we be going up?”
Malakan’s brow was damp with sweat. His confident promise to the VP to lead a squad of Unsung into the heart of Donian territory now seemed a sham.
“Well?”
The tiniest of splashes, not the incessant drip of water off stalactites, but of an underground stream. Malakan made his decision and led the men left.
Less than a kilometre away from the Resistance, separated from Ray’s men by a ragged bunch of Unsung who had no more idea of what they were doing than a chicken in a foxes’ den, Lukaz and his Hoyden were slaughtering their targets.
There was no time for the traps the tribes had perfected in years of forest warfare: the pits, the whipping branches, the tumbling log piles. There was no need, either. They settled for simple things: bear snares, trip wires and stealth.
They dropped from the trees as silent as a falling leaf and with as much mercy as winter. Throats were slit. Blood soaked into a forest floor that sucked it into roots and left a tithe for the Devil under the mountain. Mud-caked tribesmen contorted
themselves around the twisting trunks of wolfbark trees. They appeared from nowhere. Gave the Unsung enough time to realise that life as a pub bully would have been better. Enough time to realise that the Unsung recruiter hadn’t mentioned the real risks of warfare against people who knew what they were doing, people who were both prepared to fight back and very capable.
One legionnaire had brought the cut-throat razor his mum had given him on his eighteenth nameday. He felt it being lifted from his belt. Then he was pinned to the floor by four scar-covered shadows of mud. They gagged him. And the youngest of the Donian slid that razor into the Unsung’s belly. He dragged it in an agonisingly slow arc, drawing a bloody smile in the kid’s stomach. By the time he added two laughing eyes to the smile, the legionnaire had passed out. He was left in the sticky warmth of his guts that had the noses of the forest carnivores twitching.
Lukaz lost only one man when a bullet clipped the base of his neck.
“My feet. I can’t feel my feet. My left arm. It’s numb.” One leg was drumming a rapid, rustling rhythm in the leaves where he had fallen.
“He’s pissed himself,” someone said, wrinkling his nose.
“He was shot from behind.”
“How? There are no Unsung behind us.”
“The Resistance.”
Lukaz knelt over his fallen colleague. “Ray Franklin and I set up a safe zone. There shouldn’t have been any Resistance fighters there.”
“Shouldn’t.”
Dark mutterings from dark-hearted men.
“What’s your choice?” Lukaz asked the fallen man. “Do you want us to take you back to the Angel City?”
“Like this? Never.”
“You may recover.”
“I will slow you down.”
The bole of the giant wolfbark tree above them creaked, the branches spreading to allow the sky in.
Hard mutterings from hard-hearted men. They knew what was coming.
“OK.” Lukaz held out his pistol. “Me or you?”
“You,” the man said, eyes washed pale by moonlight. “Suicide is the easy choice.”
“Not for everyone.”
The thunder of the bullet was swallowed by the trees.
Lukaz knelt, opened the man’s eyes as wide as they would go, and left him to watch for the End Times. A single tear hit the forest floor, turned a tiny patch of light soil a dark brown, and faded.
“Be quick,” Lukaz said to his colleagues as they formed a circle around the body.
“Patient like the mountains.”
“Sturdy as a tree.”
“Angry like a bonfire.”
“Loyal like the sun.”
“Fickle as the weather.”
“Docile as a wolf.”
More tributes were said for their fallen comrade, a tiny package of grief to remember him by. When the last man finished, Lukaz holstered the pistol. “Leave two Unsung alive as a warning. Gut the rest.”
(And of the two Unsung that lived, one hung himself to escape the nightmares, the second was never sober again.)
Dr Stella Swann pulled the door to. The latch clinked in the evening light, shutting out the silent streets of the Angel City. Facing her was the dead bonesetter’s home-cum-hospital, lit by flickering candles. Beds were made, chunky brown bottles of medicine lined up on counters, multicoloured mixtures of herbs stood on tables, bandages had been checked and water simmered on a stove. There was even real paper, something that only existed in museums in Ailan. It looked like a hospital from a living museum. The room also looked to be waiting. It was the only way Stella could describe it. But waiting for what?
She’d worked in emergency rooms. She’d even done a stint in a military hospital. She had a sneaking feeling that the injuries she’d been allowed to treat in that hospital were the mild ones — the inconvenient ones rather than the deforming ones that broke people and their families inside and out. The Ailan government didn’t allow civilians, not even civilian doctors, to see the true horrors of war, horrors which were so much more real for being man-made. A gust of cold air crept under the door and Stella’s sneaking feeling gave way to a sense of nausea. Whatever happened today, there would be no editing of injuries, she was going to get the full force of mankind’s bestiality in all its stinking glory.
She checked her supply of drugs, knives and needles again. All in order. No stethoscope, though. Shame. Nothing said experienced doctor as much as the practised flick of a steth over the head.
No steth.
Not enough drugs.
The bonesetter’s hospital was going to struggle tonight.
Stella straightened a scalpel on its boil-washed cloth, twisted a bottle so the label was facing front, did anything to calm her hands and placate her memories. Feelings don’t belong in science. Impulses don’t belong in medicine. She’d given in to both and it had cost her more than she could ever have imagined.
That day in the Persistent Pain Clinic in the military hospital she’d faced a young man in the prime of his life, a legionnaire struggling with a career-threatening injury, a man that excited her and scared her; while she, a doctor, wife and mother, was struggling with illicit feelings of want and lust that thrashed in the white-coated chains of professionalism and what she’d seen as the straightjacket of marriage. Her hand drifted down to the wedding band she wore. It was loose, rattled up and down a finger that was more knuckle than flesh. Those secret feelings she’d harboured for Ray, feelings she would never have acted on, now mocked her, pointing their crooked, wizened finger at her burning cheeks. Her husband was dead. Her son missing. And she and her daughter were in a war zone. And, Dr Swann realised, the limited resources she had in her new hospital were going to sit here unused if she didn’t get some help. She scribbled a quick note on a piece of paper, her letters clumsy and childlike as she tried to remember the last time she’d actually needed to write something rather than type, pulled her coat on and knelt by her sleeping daughter. As if on cue, Emily stirred on her bed and reached out for her. “Mummy, where are we going?”
“To the others. I need to find some help. We could have a busy night.”
“I like the people here. They let me run around lots. We can’t run around at home. Will Jake be here soon?”
Stella whipped her hand back from the bedpost. A bead of blood stared back at her, red and dark. Just a splinter. Not an omen or a sign, a coincidence.
“Mummy?”
“Jake will love it here, Emily. Daddy would have too. He always wanted to live in the country.”
“Why didn’t he move then? We all could have gone and grown chickens and bunnies and run around lots and even” — her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper — “run around in only knickers like the kids here do. In the mud! Outside.”
“We didn’t move because—”
Because what? Because they’d been too caught up in what they had to do rather than what they wanted to do. Lost in earning the comforts and status that society dictated they needed. Lost in the narrative of giving something back to a world that would suck the generosity out of you like a leech on a battlefield. Dan hadn’t been lost. Her husband had known where society truly lay: at home. Make that right, raise good kids and everything else slots into place. Stella clutched Emily to her. The little girl melted into the gaps and holes in her arms and soul, filling them, completing them in a way Stella had been too blind to see. “We didn’t move because I didn’t listen to Daddy.”
“We’re not going to see Daddy again, are we?”
“No.”
Emily wriggled free and thumbed a tear away from her mother’s face.
“Will we see Ray?”
Stella jolted upright.
“I like him. He helped me and Jake in the woods when that bad man was chasing us. Even though he hurt the bad man and that makes him a bad man, too, and—” Her face puckered up, a line appearing in the centre of her forehead that reminded Stella uncomfortably of Captain Brennan. “Ray didn’t really kill Daddy, did
he?”
“No.”
“Good. That means I don’t have to kill him.”
“Emily!”
“That’s what all the grown-ups are doing,” the little girl protested, frown turning into a pout. “You keep telling me and Jake to stop behaving like children.”
“Hey.” Stella poked Emily in the ribs. The little girl folded her arms and refused to look up. “Hey, Em.” This time the girl looked. Her blonde hair was in need of a wash and a brush. Her eyes were as bright blue as her brother’s were deep brown. She had the beginnings of one oversized adult tooth in her mouth that looked like she had borrowed it from someone ten years older than her. “Killing is bad, little girl.”
“Ray killed someone.”
“Sometimes you have to do bad things to stop bad things.”
“Like when you shout at me and Jake when we leave toys out and you and Daddy step on them? Daddy uses bad words when he steps on some toys.”
Stella’s laughs were answered by a hooting owl. “I guess not tidying up isn’t really such a big problem, is it?”
“So you won’t shout at me anymore when it’s messy and I don’t need to tidy it ever again?”
“Maybe not never again.”
Emily’s answer was cut off by a distant shout from the guards on the palisade. Someone was returning.
“Quick. We need to go and get help, just in case these people need help.”
“You going to do doctoring?”
“Yes.”
“Can I help?”
The instant answer was no. Kids didn’t belong in hospitals. Kids belonged in war even less. They did, however, belong with their parents. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
Stella wrapped a coat around her daughter and the two of them left the makeshift hospital behind them. Punching up puffs of dust from the dirt tracks, mother and daughter ran towards the cave the Donian were sheltering in.
By the time they had scrabbled their way down the tunnel to the next junction, Malakan’s fingernails were split and bleeding. He was so desperate for a piss that when Major Henndrik’s bristly cheek shoved against his, Malakan felt a squeeze of warm urine running down his thigh.
