The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  Dana gazed out to the flat horizon of the sea, where the wyvern had gone and she couldn’t reach it. Somewhere, under that mass of sea surrounding the British Isles, Cerberus lay, unable to reach the surface and manifest its malignant interests, and whatever was left of Ivor, burned from the Compton bomb explosion, smashed to pieces, flesh eaten away by little carrion fishes...

  But why would the dead wear digital watches and aftershave?

  Some questions would not be answered.

  Dana rose stiffly from where she’d been sitting. Her wet clothes were making her cold, despite the warm afternoon. Perhaps moving would help.

  “I’m ready to go to see Jananin.” Dana could feel heat building up in her face when she said the next bit, despite the chill of the sea. “Rajesh, I’m really sorry I thought you were working for the Emerald Forge and I tried to frighten your horse. You did all this stuff to help me, really, and I was ungrateful.”

  “It’s no problem,” Rajesh replied. “I owe a debt to Jananin that I can never repay. You didn’t know, and now you do, and no harm has come about because of any of it.”

  -14-

  RAJESH Rajani had a large band with a screen on it strapped around his left forearm. He tapped a few controls and studied it for a moment.

  “What’s that?” Dana asked.

  “It’s my feedback for the horse, that lets me check it’s okay and what it can sense. A bit like a systems report.”

  He put his foot into the stirrup and heaved himself into the saddle. Then he turned to adjust it and pulled out a second seat from the back. “You ready?” Rajesh offered Dana his hand and leaned the other way to help her up. Dana got hold of the back of the saddle and slid her knee over; the last time she’d been this close to a horse was when Jananin had stolen one from the police during the Information Terrorism attack.

  She held on to Rajesh around the waist and the horse set off over the dunes, winding its way through sandy paths between hummocks of thick scrubby grass.

  “You see the wood up ahead?” Rajesh pointed. “That’s where Jananin will meet us.”

  A narrow strip of copse had become visible where the dunes ended. Rajesh checked the band on his arm and pressed the horse’s sides with his heels, and it broke into a trot. Rajesh bobbed gracefully with the motion of the horse, apparently supporting his weight with his thighs. Dana held on to him and bounced uncomfortably in her seat.

  As they approached the trees, however, an inexplicable feeling of dread began to take over. Dana looked up at the forbidding canopy of dark leaves with an irrational sensation of being watched from the heights. As Rajesh guided the horse in through narrow paths worn by deer and rabbits, the trees closed ranks around them and the sunny afternoon dwindled into a claustrophobic gloom. The wood was alive with a kind of malice Dana couldn’t pinpoint nor identify.

  “There’s something wrong. There’s signals here. Lots of signals.”

  Rajesh shifted his weight in the saddle as he looked around. “There won’t be any signals out here. There’s not even a road nearby. Jananin tracked you as far as the woods and we couldn’t get any closer, not even in the four-wheel-drive. That’s why I brought the horse down. Perhaps it’s the horse’s systems you can feel?”

  “No, it’s not the horse. I know what the horse feels like. It’s all around us. There’s something in the trees... in the ground.” She found her attention drawn to the bank below where the horse walked. The soil there looked freshly scraped around the entrances to tunnels, and dried grass had been thrown out on the ground. A stronger signal had risen above the unnerving background sensation, and that was where it originated. “It’s something down there.”

  Rajesh checked the computer on his forearm and stopped the horse. “Are you sure?”

  “I can still feel it.”

  “Okay. Slide your right leg over behind you, and come down on the left side of the horse. I want you to wait by the horse and I’ll go down and investigate.”

  Dana did as he asked and waited by the horse as he dismounted. He went to the edge of the bank and started to climb down, placing his feet cautiously. Dana was now getting more feedback from the signal, and she sensed behind it a mind that meant no good. “Rajesh, please be careful! I don’t think it’s safe.”

  Rajesh removed a small gun from a holster at his hip. He held it in both hands and aimed down the bank, scanning steadily over an arc.

  “No, it’s in the ground!” Dana realised.

  A black-and-white-striped blur flashed out of the soil at Rajesh’s ankle, and before Dana had registered what was happening he was on the ground. “Rajesh!” She slid down the bank to try to help him. His right leg had sunk into a hole, right up to the hip. He held on to Dana’s arms and braced with his left leg, and with a forceful grunt through gritted teeth he pulled his leg out of the hole. His boot had disappeared and his sock was dark with blood.

  Rajesh stumbled forward from the force of the exertion and fell on his knees.

  “What’s happening?” Dana searched the trees above for the sinister eyes she could feel upon her but could not see, stared into the empty mouths of the holes in the bank.

  Rajesh’s eyes were wide. “A badger! A badger attacked me!”

  The signal she had sensed before was rising again. “Oh no. It’s coming back! Let’s get out of here!”

  Clutching at each others’ arms for stability, they slithered down the bank. The soil crumbled and slid under Dana’s feet and she couldn’t get away fast enough. A low, guttural sound came from the hole, and a large grizzled shape with a striped wedge-shaped snout erupted from the ground and lumbered down after them. Dana screamed.

  A dark figure sprang over the summit, too big and upright to be another animal, a long coat flapping behind. It flailed down the bank and fell upon the badger.

  Dana let go of Rajesh and got up from where she’d slipped over on the ground. “Jananin.”

  Jananin Blake got off the badger — it lay motionless on the ground, and the braided leather handle of a wakizashi protruded from between its shoulderblades, the steel running straight through its heart and into the soil beneath. Its death hadn’t made a sound. Right in the centre of the badger’s head, buried in the fur between and just above its eyes, something caught the light: a plastic gem like what is found at the pointing end of a television remote control.

  “It’s implanted. The wood’s full of implanted wild animals that have been programmed to attack us!”

  Jananin leaned her foot on the badger’s back and pulled the bloodstained blade out of its body. “I suspected so. They’re drawn to your signal. We must leave at once.”

  “Perhaps we should take a sample from the badger to compare,” Rajesh suggested.

  “There’s not time.” Jananin raised a hand and turned to face up through a gap in the trees. “Look.”

  A grainy texture hazed the blue of the sky, rippling like a gauze curtain in the wind. It appeared to be made from hundreds of small distant objects all moving together. Rajesh narrowed his eyes. “What is that, a swarm of insects?”

  As Dana watched the mesmerising folding and unfolding, the sliding densities of many lives moving as one, a deep sense of unease began to clutch at her stomach. “No. They’re birds.”

  Rajesh and Jananin exchanged glances. They’d both been there and seen the bodies of the birds lying with the bodies of people at the ruins of the hospital. “I suppose it would be wishful thinking to presume that might be a natural phenomenon?” Rajesh said.

  “They’ve made a network,” Dana said after a long pause. “A network out of animals they implanted and released. They’ve been alerted to us and they’re coming.”

  Rajesh took a step back towards the horse. “Go to the vehicle and get the engine running. I’ll load up the horse.”

  “The car’s not far away,” said Jananin. “Come with me.”

  Dana followed her back up the bank and through some undergrowth. She could still sense many primitive and malevolent
minds around her, although none of them showed themselves. The only living thing she sighted was a toad sheltering under a tree root, and there was no sign of an implant on its head. They reached a clearing where an off-road vehicle with a horse trailer had been parked. Jananin made for the driver’s door while Dana stumbled around the front of the car, grabbing at the roo bars to stabilise herself and unable to look away from the swarm of birds drawing nearer. Immediately when she got in and shut the door, nearly all of the malign signals from the wood disappeared. A sense of relief came over her. The car was coated in polymer alloy. They wouldn’t be able to sense her here.

  Jananin took the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. She turned the key in the ignition, but there was no click of electronics coming to life, no lights on the dashboard, and no whinny from the starter motor turning the engine over. There was only a dull scrape of the key moving in its slot.

  Jananin swore.

  She opened the door and got back out. Dana stayed still in the car, her hands clutched together in her lap, but she heard Jananin say outside, “Rajesh, the engine won’t start.”

  Dana opened the door and got back out as the two of them came around to the front of the car. She could sense no signals from the car, but the air around was filled with sinister thoughts, repulsive little minds pressing against her own.

  Rajesh hooked his fingers under the edge of the car’s bonnet and pulled it up. A sudden deluge of sharp signals protested at the sudden ingress of light, and a fuzzy mass of small, dull, grey-brown bodies poured off of the engine and through the gaps in the car’s undercarriage. Dana let out a small cry and stepped backwards, away from the fleeing mice, and Rajesh took hold of her arm to steady her.

  “They’ve eaten the electrics!” Jananin exclaimed.

  Dana wanted more than anything right now to get away from these horrible thoughts from minds that meant her harm. In the car, she hadn’t been able to hear them. “The car is still safe! It’s a Faraday cage, and they’re still just birds and they’re not going to get through glass and metal. They won’t be able to detect my signal and we can hide there until help comes.”

  “No,” said Rajesh. “There’s a problem.” He pointed to the car’s open passenger door, and the window that showed a gap of several inches between the edge of the glass and the upper rim. “The windows are electric. We can’t close them. The birds will be able to get in.”

  Jananin pointed to the horse. “That leaves one option remaining, but it can’t carry all three of us. These constructs are attracted to signals. We saw it with the phoenix, and it would seem with the badger you just disturbed. We can hide in the car if we turn off all our electronic devices, but Dana and the horse can’t simply be switched off like everything else. Therefore, it makes the most sense for the safety of everyone involved that Dana take the horse and go as fast as possible to Site Twelve, while you and I stay in the car and await retrieval.”

  Rajesh let out a sharp exclamation. “Without one of us? She’s not an experienced rider. A fall could kill her.”

  “I can’t ride a horse!” Dana interjected.

  “Dana, you should have the ability to interface directly to the horse.” Jananin turned to Rajesh. “She will not fall if she is in control of the animal. It doesn’t matter that she is not trained to ride.”

  “Please, at least let me ride with her. Or accompany her yourself.”

  “No. The horse will be swifter with only one rider.”

  “No, let someone come with me,” Dana pleaded. “Either of you, I don’t mind who. I don’t know how to control a horse.”

  “You just controlled a wyvern as you call it, did you not? And in that instance, there was much farther to fall. How is this different?”

  “The wyvern was my friend. I wasn’t controlling it. It let me ride on it; it wasn’t just doing what I told it to.”

  “There is no time for any more discussion. This is what is happening, and if you are not ready for it, you had better prepare yourself now. Rajesh, give me the console for this horse and send out a call for help.”

  Rajesh unfastened the band from his forearm and gave Jananin a disapproving glower as he handed it over. He walked back to the car with what looked like a big mobile phone held to his ear. “Mayday, mayday.”

  “I’m going to disconnect the horse from this interface now, and I need you to make the connection and synch yourself to it. Ready?”

  Dana did not like this idea, but she could think of no other, and the birds were coming, and all around in this wood she could feel the conspiracy against her. She nodded, her mouth dry.

  Jananin pressed a button that switched off the armband, and simultaneously she put her hand to the armour on the horse’s forehead and adjusted something. Another signal appeared, searching for something to connect to. Dana hesitated for a second, and then adjusted the frequency of her concentration to mesh with that signal.

  Consciousness shifted. She could feel damp soil and leaves under her feet, the heavy beat of a powerful heart and breath in great lungs. She could hear the drone of flies in ears that twitched and turned restlessly and see the world in a flat, panoramic rendition that encompassed both sides of the horse and was oddly drained of the red portion of the spectrum. The horse didn’t filter which parts of its experience of the world were shared with her as the wyvern did.

  “Ready?”

  Dana let out a shuddering gasp, and nodded again.

  Jananin offered her the stirrup. “Put your left foot in here and hold on to the saddle at the front and back.”

  Dana did as she was told. Jananin caught her right leg and pushed it up over the horse’s back, and now she was sitting up high with the horse’s long neck and twitching ears in front of her. Jananin hurried to adjust the stirrups and get Dana’s feet into the right position. She pressed a leather strap into Dana’s hands. “You may not be able to use the reins, but try to keep hold of them or they’ll cause problems if they go over the horse’s head and get in the way. Don’t stop until you get to Site Twelve. Now go!”

  Jananin gave the horse a push and it began to move down the bank, its body swaying with each stride. And with each step it took, Dana began to understand more of it, what each group of muscles felt like and what it did. Jananin was right. With this connection, even though it had a mind of its own, the horse was an extension of her own body, the same as any unliving device or machine.

  She felt for it, finding the point in its neural connections that would trigger the thought of moving faster. The horse was accustomed to taking instructions, if not normally in this way, and responded. Increasing pace to a trot brought an uncomfortable bounce to the horse’s pace, although now with Dana able to anticipate the rhythm of it through the horse’s muscular memory, it was less jarring than it had been when Rajesh had controlled it. Dana pressed her knees in tight and urged the horse faster. They came upon a clearing in the trees and the horse broke into a rolling canter. Dana aimed for a gap in the trees, planning to stick to the wood to hide them from the skies for as long as possible.

  The horse thundered through muddy ground wet from the recent rain, splattering its legs and undercarriage, and charged up into the trees. A rush of adrenaline hit home. This animal exulted in running. It was what it had been born to do, what it was alive for. The horse had by now accelerated to a flying gallop that shook Dana’s eyes in her head so much the view ahead became a blur. Shafts of light between the trees flashed by, sending her eyes into blinking spasms. The breath rushing through the horse’s nostrils, the pounding of its hoofs and its green-blue view of the trees rushing past on either side were overwhelming, and Dana struggled to keep focus on the sensations from her own body and to hold on and duck from the branches passing overhead.

  They reached the edge of the wood and the horse galloped out into an open space. Dana forced it to slow to give her a chance to reorient herself and get a better seating. They’d reached a meadow of grass going to seed, teeming with purple-crested thistles
that blended into a lavender haze over distance. Insects buzzed and chirped in the warm sun. Dana looked over her shoulder, up into a still blue sky. Nothing. Perhaps they hadn’t followed her after all.

  Then a dark cloud reared behind the trees, and she sensed signals. She turned her head, trying to locate their source: one in front and two either side and slightly behind, coming in to converge on her. She shouldn’t have stopped. Dana gave the signal for the horse to run again, aware it would bring them towards one of the signals, but unable to think of any alternative. As it charged forward, a russet shape somewhere between a dog and a cat leapt from the thistles in front of them. Dana flinched but the horse didn’t shy or balk — it ran straight into the fox and trampled it. A stringy electric fence was fast approaching, and Dana had no time to compose herself before the horse jumped over it. She fell forward in the saddle and had to cling to the horse’s mane while she struggled to get her legs back into position and recover her seat in the saddle. No sooner had she regained control when the horse jumped a stream and landed running in a grassy field. The speed seemed dangerously out of control, but she couldn’t risk going slower. Dana leaned forward over the horse’s neck, trying to lower her centre of gravity and reduce the wind whipping past. As they passed what she calculated to be the halfway point between the wood Jananin and Rajesh had been trapped in and Site Twelve, the horse galloped along the bank of a river, and it was only now she stopped feeling overwhelmed long enough to notice the grass rushing past a long distance below and felt able to chance a look over her shoulder.