by Andy Graham
Observe. Act. Survive.
Ray squatted next to Brooke. She started, her lips puckering up to spit at him before her eyes went wide with hope.
“What you doing, legionnaire?” Major Henndrik called. “I told you all to leave the goods alone.”
Ray pulled his knife and trailed it lightly along Brooke’s cheek. “Do it,” he mouthed.
“Do wh—” As realisation dawned, her tongue curled around the spit that had been gathering in her mouth and she spat in Ray’s face.
“Hey!” Ray shouted and dropped the knife at her side. He staggered away, wiping the warm phlegm from his eyes, when a hand clamped down on his shoulder.
“You dropped this.” The major held out Ray’s knife. The thin lines of red rock that swooped through the cave pulsed. “Rookie error. Wouldn’t want her getting free. She’s a rough one.”
“No, sir.” Ray grasped the blade of the knife, his hands clammy.
As he tried to take the knife, the major tightened his grip on the handle. “What’s your name? New boy, are you? Thought I knew all my men. Too many transfers and dodgy promotions for me to keep up with.”
A man scurried up the back of the cave. “Noises, sir. In the tunnel that leads to that room full of statues.”
“What noises?”
“Sir, it’s—”
“What?”
“Voices. Sounds like ghosts, sir.” The legionnaire flipped a middle finger at a couple of his sniggering colleagues.
“What?”
The legionnaire blushed and rushed the words out. “Could have sworn something was saying, ‘I’m coming to eat you.’” The hoots of laughter were cut off by Henndrik’s slashing gesture.
“No such thing as ghosts, only people with an overactive imagination and a guilty conscience. There is such a thing as a tether, though, and I’m at the end of mine.”
“Sir?”
“Appears you’re at the end of your vocabulary, too. Take three men and check our hungry ghosts out.”
“Yes, sir.” The legionnaire hurried off.
“I’ll go,” Ray said.
“Not until you give me your name.” The major’s implacable gaze slid back.
“Just transferred in.”
“That’s not a name, son. Which legion had you before? You remind me of—”
“Ray Franklin!” The dark-skinned legionnaire who’d been sitting on the rock yelled it again: “Ray Franklin, it’s him!”
“Bastard.” Henndrik grasped the knife and thrust. Ray twisted. The blade snagged the lapel of his tunic and ripped a hole in the fabric. The major reached for his revolver as Brooke slammed into his knees from the side. The four who had survived the swim burst out of the shadows, knives raised and teeth bared. One Unsung fell, throat slashed. His finger caught in the trigger of his rifle. There was a deafening crash of bullets into rock.
A stalactite split from the ceiling in an agonising splinter of stone. It burst on the floor in a shower of milky brown splinters and shards that left people cut and bleeding and shattered one man’s spine into a thousand pieces. Gunfire lit up the cave. Flickering shadows struggled across damp walls as their owners fought. The captives, those silent men and women and children the Unsung had thought cowed, burst out of clouds of dust, their hands still bound. A woman threw herself onto an Unsung rifle. A black red hole appeared in the back of her dress. She fell at his feet, knocked him off balance, and he disappeared under a hail of stamping shoes from his former captives. The three Donian women cuffed together looped their arms around a legionnaire’s neck to form an unbreakable steel necklace, rammed their feet into his body and, with beads of sweat popping out on their foreheads, pushed and pulled, choking the man to death.
The silver-haired girl cut Brooke’s bonds with an Unsung blade and set about freeing those of her friends still tied up. She stopped when she could to stab any legionnaire that had fallen. At the front of the cave the sentries were caught between firing at the rushing advance of Lukaz and his people and the carnage unfolding behind them. Unsung seemed to be slipping on gravel, tripping on unseen stones and banging heads against rocky outcrops. It was almost as if the mountain was on the Donian’s side.
Laudanum had one of the Unsung stun batons and was working her way up behind the legionnaires. The crackling blue fire as they fell mixed with the red pulses from the cavern, painting the violence a sickly green mess of colours. And in the midst of this chaos, Ray found Brooke’s hands. She grabbed him by the back of head and pulled his head close, kissing him with a ferocity that drew blood from the back of his lips. Ray forced her away, drew in a breath to say—
“Bastard!” Brooke shrieked. “Malakan! I’m going to hang you with your own guts.” She shoved Ray out of the way, and barged through the melee.
“Brooke, wait!”
Malakan sped to the back of the cave, past the pool and the floating body of Long-Gone Non-Jonn. Brooke was only an arm away from him. Ray raced past a man impaled on a stalagmite. His fingers grasping at the blood-slick rock. He ducked under a roaring Jamerson ‘Nasty’ Nascimento, bare-chested with an Unsung legionnaire held up above his head, and disappeared into the blackness.
The screams faded. The cackle of blue fire dimmed. Ray was left in near pitch darkness with just a hint of crimson reflecting off his fingernails. The scrabbling noise of Brooke and Malakan was gone. He was alone. Crowded by darkness. Jostled by silence. A breeze tickled his skin, first one way, then the next, as if the mountain was breathing.
Fingers groping along the slick walls, he edged forwards. The Devil of the Donian Mountains whispered to the demons that haunted Ray’s memories. Huddled under a blanket as a child. Feeling like part of himself was missing. His mother absent. Not present even when she was home. His life spent running. Seeking. Serving. He heard Lenka’s voice. “The horses can’t see to themselves; the wood won’t saw itself. Get up and do your chores, young man. You can feel sorry for yourself when you’ve done what needs to be done. And that only happens when Old Man Time comes knocking.”
Lenka had raised him. He’d killed her. “A mercy killing.” Professor Lind’s voice in Camp X517. “The only way.”
Lenka was dead. Rose slaughtered by her son. Dead. Too many. Captain Aalok. The twins from the Resistance: Dylan and Seren. Sebb. Kayle — the Donian gunslinger with the big irons. Ernest Hamid. Skovsky Junior. Dan Swann. Eleyka. Kaleyne. Baris Orr. Sci-Captain James. Laudanum. Donarth Taille, the father Ray had never known. What of Stann Taille? Tear’s bitter old man? He would always be alive. Nothing could kill him. Rick Franklin. Missing. Gone. Dead. Too many dead and still more dying behind him. Ray’s throat was tight, full of dust. The air was warm. It stank of sweat and fear. The light was gone.
He reached with a hand. Hit a body, small and furry. Leathery wings beat at his face. He ducked. Smacked his head on a rock. Screeching animals batted their way past him, beating at his head with wings, dragging pincer-like claws over his skin. Ray flapped his arms. Cracked his knuckles on the wall and shouted. His shout echoed through the tunnel, twisting, swooping, echoing. Lighter now, higher, female.
“Brooke?” His head snapped up. “Brooke!”
On hands and knees he crawled forwards, sliding between rocks, down gravel chutes, following the noise, towards a glimmer of greyness in the black. A stone snagged his foot, he tumbled through a hole in the floor and jerked to a halt as his stolen vest caught on a rock. It ripped and he landed in an awkward heap of bruises. Rows upon rows of statues stretched away under the mountain in a forest of shadows. All lit by a dull red light that gave them just too much life to be comfortable. Up above, the hole he had fallen through yawned wide and black.
How the hell did Nascimento get through that? Ray rolled to his feet and saw a wide tunnel entrance to one side. By taking the proper tunnel, that’s how Nasc did it. Ray unsheathed his knife and crept towards his family.
Stooped, Ray Franklin wound his way through the lines of statues. The scream he’d heard in the t
unnel was gone, leaving only an imprint in his ears. He twisted, straining to hear or see anything that would lead him to Brooke and Malakan. Each footstep sounded like glass breaking, his breath like a steam train. Forwards. Keep moving forwards. The only thing that mattered. Which way? A yelp. There? He spun. There? An echo or the real thing? Focus! He stood, a live statue amongst the dead ones, listening, eyes struggling to pierce the red-limned darkness.
“Help!” The word skittered around the cavern, twisted by the rock walls into something that sounded like a growl.
“Where are you? Brooke?”
The statues, men and women from the mountains frozen in stone, seemed to reach out of the gloom. A shoulder nudged Ray one way. His trousers caught on a hand, pulling him another way. A third, one that looked like a baker covered in dust rather than flour, stared sightlessly at a squirming darkness within the shadows. Ray’s fingers gripped the hilt of the knife. Stood tight with the baker. Black tunic scraped on her stone skirt. He whispered, “Where are you, B—”
Light exploded in Ray’s eyes. He threw up his hand to cover his face. Something hit him in the midriff and carried him to the floor. His head caught the edge of a stone foot and pain whiplashed through his neck. Winded, blinded and dazed, he responded on instinct, wrapping his arms and legs around his attacker and pulling him close. The man’s skin was slick on Ray’s. The torch his attacker had used to blind him pointed up at the statue of the baker. Her stern, unseeing face gazed into the blackness. Teeth sank into one of Ray’s ears. He yelled, twisted away and the attacker ripped one hand free. “You’re dead, Franklin. Fuck what the VP wants. You’re mine now. Mine.”
The hiss of steel on leather. An oily flash of metal. Ray grasped the man’s hand as it lashed towards his neck. An ice-cold line burnt across the side of his throat. The tip of the blade pressed into the skin. A line of blood tickled its way across his neck. Ray pushed. Scrabbled with his feet to get more leverage as the attacker tried to force the blade home.
“Your girlfriend’s unconscious,” the man hissed, his hand shaking with the effort of maintaining his downward pressure on the blade. “When she wakes—”
The stone face of the baker disappeared into the black. The line of light arced up, illuminating a smooth ceiling lined with red filaments and stalactites like the mountain’s teeth, then it whipped down and slammed into the attacker’s head with a wet thud. The man went limp, knife dropping into the dust without a sound.
Ray scrabbled away. One side of his neck wet with blood from his ear and the scratch across his throat. Strong hands dragged him up, pulled him tight and Brooke whispered, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
He buried his head in the thickening curls across her scalp. In the light of the torch she had used to club the legionnaire, gleaming silver lines cut through her dust-covered face. “You’re crying.”
“You’re bleeding,” Brooke replied. “I win.”
The legionnaire moaned. Ray nudged him with his foot. “What are we going to do with him?”
“Malakan?” Brooke passed Ray the torch and scooped up the knife. The tip was covered in dust and blood. “I’ll deal with him.”
“You sure?”
And the old Brooke was back, defiance flashing under the tears. “Yes, I’m sure. He’s one of us.” She slid the blade under Malakan’s trousers.
“Hey! He’s unconscious, you can’t—”
“Back off, Franklin.” And with a whipping move the knife hissed through the fabric. Long shreds fell to the floor. “Hold this.” Brooke thrust the knife into Ray’s hands and, in seconds, Brooke had hog-tied the rat-faced man. “Did you think I was going to kill him here?”
“Yes.”
“That was stupid. I’m going to kill him on the surface where everyone can watch.”
“You’re going to do it?”
Brooke took Ray’s wrist in her hand and pointed the torch at the fallen man. “In all matters in the mountains, family comes first.”
“What?”
She sighed. “Not always the brightest, are you, Franklin? Do you remember the first time I fought Nascimento in wrestling training?”
“You almost broke his arm.”
“And the reason I gave?”
“‘Brothers and bullies — don’t like either.’”
She pointed. “Malakan was both. He was why I learnt how to fight. He made my life hell, until I learnt how to hit back. One of my other brothers, Kames—”
“I’ve met him, kind of.”
“—taught me which were the hard bits of a body and which were the soft ones. Smack the first into the second and you win. Elbows into eye sockets. Heels into balls and so on. And when Malakan couldn’t win the physical stuff anymore, he stole things and spread rumours. When I and others tired of that, he started hiding out in the tunnels and caves.”
“He’s your brother?”
Brooke squatted down next to the now fully conscious Malakan. Naked from the waist down, his eyes were wide with fear and embarrassment. “Yes.” She grinned as she tapped the knife blade on Malakan’s teeth. “But very soon he’s going to be ash. I might kill him before I burn him, just to save having to listen to him squeal.”
“We should get back.”
She froze.
“What’s wrong? Talk to me?”
Brooke took his hand in hers and placed it on her belly. “It moved.” A smile crept across Brooke’s face, bashful and unsure. “Our baby moved.”
“I can’t feel anything.”
Brooke grunted. “It kicks, too. Feels like he’s got steel-toe-capped boots on.”
“10th-Legion issue?”
Brooke’s grin faltered as she bent double in pain. The head of the statue behind her exploded. A chunk of grey rock whistled past Ray’s face, filling his ears with a high-pitched whining. Brooke was on her knees, blood streaking from a rent in her uniform.
“I’m fine.” She clutched her shoulder. “Only a scratch.”
The pallor in her face gave her lie away. Another crash of gunfire. The two ex-legionnaires sprawled onto the floor. A shower of stone fragments pattered around them. The baker woman’s head had been bitten off by a bullet, the remains of a blackened-yellow spine poked out of the hole where the neck had been.
“You weren’t joking, there really are dead people in these statues.”
Brooke grabbed Ray’s hand. “Run.” They sprinted into the labyrinth of statues.
Major Henndrik slammed another round of ammo into his rifle.
He’d seen them. Ray Franklin and some Donian woman. Henndrik had had a clear shot but at the last second the woman had bowed out of the firing line. Then the statues just got in the way. Every shot he tried to take the statues were in the way. Like they were moving. He stepped between the shadows, eyes and ears straining. Where are you, Franklin?
Under what looked like a decapitated baker lay Private Malakan. He was moaning softly, a messy red mark on his temple.
There.
A shift of movement in the darkness. A change in the way the shadows fell. Henndrik raised his rifle and fired.
The noise was deafening. It reverberated around the cavern. The seams of gwenium raged, bathing the shattered statues in a crimson light. Muzzle flashes sparked in the gloom and another statue disintegrated. The remains of the body within it sloughed out onto the floor, releasing a smell that turned Ray’s stomach. “We can’t run for ever. We have no idea how much ammo this guy has.”
“I’ll slit his throat!” Brooke face was smeared with blood and dust. “He comes into our sacred place where our dead wait and does this to them?” She held up a handful of gravel and rock.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving this man here.”
There was a rattle of gunfire and a row of statues disappeared in a haze of smoke and shrapnel. Ray and Brooke sprinted towards the front of the cave. Brooke’s foot hit a lump of rock, and her ankle twisted. As she collapsed on her shoulder with
a grunt, a constellation of red flashes lit up the ceiling. A huge stalactite thundered down from the ceiling and exploded amongst a row of the stone dead.
Henndrik padded forwards, picking his way through the debris. His mouth was full of dust. His face was warm and sticky where he’d been clipped by a flying shard of rock. The stalactite he had aimed for hadn’t fallen, one much closer to him had. That made no sense. Henndrik didn’t do ghosts or angels or demons, didn’t do none of that hippy shit, but this mountain was beginning to creep him out. He could hear it chuckling, a deep throaty laughter that unnerved him.
“Fuck that.” He was going to kill Franklin and the woman and then go have some fun with Malakan. The kid was tied up already. Shame to waste an opportunity.
Brooke probed her ankle. “Not broken. I can probably stand on it.”
Ray pulled her to her feet. Ripples of blue-green lit up her face, shimmering across her skin in waves. It looked like—
“Water.” Spinning round, he pointed through the settling dust. “The underwater stream to the waterfall. It’s here. We can swim it.”
Brooke lifted her injured arm weakly. “With a screwed up shoulder and ankle? Maybe.”
“I could tow you.”
Brooke hobbled over to the edge of the water. The light from the rock beneath the surface cast their figures in huge shadows on the ceiling, where thin red veins of gwenium raged through their limbs. It was an impressive sight. It was also a very obvious sign to where they where. He heard an intake of breath. Brooke pinched the bridge of her nose with her good hand and—
“What are you doing?”
—jumped into the water.
She emerged seconds later, spitting out water. The darkness suited her, fierce and proud and vengeful. And in the bone-chilling, dust-covered hell under the mountain Ray kissed her.
“You’re beautiful, Karlyne Brooke.”
She grinned. “You’re a romantic fool, Ray Franklin. Now pull me out. I’ve got an idea.”
