by Col Buchanan
Somehow, he’d expected more of a challenge.
The old farlander cast his gaze around until it settled on a hut of small cages, where small colourful birds sat on perches within. They chirped and fluffed up their feathers at his approach.
‘What are you doing?’ Nico demanded as Ash opened up the cages one by one, the birds chirping wildly now. The boy hissed and crouched down on the path as animal sounds erupted all about them, making a drama of their presence there. Ash was too absorbed in the birds hopping from the open cages to answer him. Some tried their wings first while others launched themselves straight into the air.
A few lingered within the cages, chirping quietly, refusing to leave their captivity. It provoked Ash, those remaining birds fearful of their freedom. It spurred him further, so that he began to jog around the area, opening larger cages, even releasing the prowling panther so that it set off into the darkness with a growl.
‘Are you mad?’ Nico whispered, then jerked around as a wolf pattered past him, though the animal only gave him a cursory, canine glance, seemed to be smiling with its toothy open mouth. ‘They’ll know we’re here now!’
The young man’s breathing needed working on; his sense of stillness.
‘Calm yourself, boy. Focus on your breathing.’
Nico opened his mouth to protest but stopped, swung his head around in alarm.
Ash had already heard them though. Clawed feet racing along coral paths towards their location. Guard dogs perhaps, or worse.
‘Get behind me,’ he advised his stunned apprentice, and began the deep breathing exercise that would allow him to project his voice.
For a short time the sound of running feet disappeared – the animals loping over grass – then returned with a splash of gravel, nearer now, off to their left.
Ash swept around.
The first creature came into view with a speed and muscled grace that made his blood sing. A banthu – a larger, running cousin of the kerido, no doubt trained to strip the flesh from men. First one and then two, three, four of the animals sprinting towards them.
‘I knew you should have brought your sword!’
With his body telling him to run, the old farlander stepped forwards to meet the creatures head-on, throwing all his power into his voice as he did so.
‘Ssqhuon!’ he exclaimed as he raised his arms high. ‘Ssqhuon!’
He had only ever tried the trick with dogs – yet the animals faltered in mid-step, kicking coral up around them, and then they were drawing up in sudden confusion. ‘Ssqhuon!’ he tried once more, risking another step forwards with arms flung high, and they clacked their razor beaks and turned to flee, speeding back from where they had come.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Nico with a gasp.
Calls now from the great house. Voices raised in enquiry.
We must be quick!
Ash scattered a pair of spotted cats with his stride, following the distinctive scent of tallow flowers in the air until he came at last to a darker area of ponds and marshy ground to the west of the menagerie.
‘Here. This must be it.’
Frogs croaked in the darkness as he stopped next to one of the pools covered by domes of wire mesh.
‘I doubt we have long,’ Nico said breathlessly, curious now.
‘Then pay attention.’
Opening the lock took a matter of moments with his picks. Inside the wire dome, Ash hunkered down on his belly and looked out across the dark water, his exhalations sending tiny shivers across the surface. He saw a brilliant white tendril as thin as a hair rise and float amongst the surface tension before disappearing again.
‘Fresh-water pelloma,’ he explained to the boy. ‘The estate sells their eggs to the local restaurants.’
‘We came here for eggs?’
‘Precious eggs, renowned for their benefits to health and spirit. They will make an excellent parting gift for your mother.’
Nico was down next to him, panting fast. ‘How do we get them?’
‘Put your hand in the water. You’ll feel them.’
The boy gave a long, studied gaze at the black surface; saw another swirl of a tendril in the centre of the pool. ‘Whatever that is, it looks dangerous.’
‘I can think of worse stings, but not many.’
‘Then you do it!’
‘I will, after you. Don’t worry. I know how to deal with it if you’re stung.’
They could both hear guards in the distance. A panther roared and a rifle shot fired out in response. Women screamed from the house.
Nico was ready to bolt for it, he saw. No good for the boy’s confidence if he did.
‘Consider it another part of the lesson.’
‘Of what, simple-mindedness?’
‘Call it trust.’
‘Admit it, you’re making this up as you go along.’
Too early to admit to such a truth yet. Ash grunted and lifted his hand towards the water, prepared to do it himself, but the boy stopped him, slipped his own hand into the pool with a gasp.
‘Feel around the edge until you come upon their bubble nest,’ Ash advised the young man as he groped frantically around the pool. ‘The eggs are the size of your fist.’
Ash followed the trembling of the water. If they were in luck then the pelloma in the pond would be in their usual sluggish night mode. If not though . . .
A ripple erupted in the centre of the pool. More tendrils broached the surface. Nico yanked his hand out with water and bubbles raining off it. He held aloft a small translucent egg in triumph.
‘Here,’ the boy exclaimed and tossed it into his hands. Ash gripped the slippery egg and returned the boy’s gaze, which glanced towards the sounds of approaching guards and then back again, as though he no longer cared about their danger. His blood was stirred. The spirit of the challenge was upon him.
He has heart, Ash thought with a surprising spark of pride, and realized then what the test had been tonight, and that Nico had just passed it; for heart, most of all, was the one thing Ash could not teach him.
Thrashing in the water now. Ash was glad the boy’s hand was out of it and that he’d been spared the pain and shock of a sting. Let him wait until later in his training for such lessons as those.
Nico’s teeth shone white in the darkness.
‘Your turn.’
CHAPTER TWO
The Great Hush
In the afternoon daylight a fierce odour drifted from the hole, a stench that caused the flying insects to swerve away from its vicinity, seemed even to have leached the colours from the nearest fronds of tropical grasses.
The hole was a vertical opening in the foot of a clay-brown cliff of earth, small compared to most of the other openings in the earth, the same size as the mouth of a wine barrel, though the daylight that entered a few feet inside it showed a tunnel widening downwards into blackness. The earth was hard and bare around it, covered with traces of a faint, milky membrane.
Beyond the hundreds of other openings that pocked the base of the cliff, the ground was a pan of beaten earth with islands of faded grasses. No animals were to be seen but the hundreds of six-legged kree scuttling back and forth in their work beneath the afternoon sun, an orange disc way up past the highest flanks of the rift valley, way up in a sky that was like a wide river of running blue.
From the tunnel a sudden sound emerged. The blackened tip of a velvety-blue limb protruded from the orifice to be followed by others; a young worker kree, squeezing its great size through the dimensions of the opening.
It was out and away as quickly as it had appeared. Behind it, a long time later, the same sound of movement returned. Another limb extended from the hole – though this one had fingers, a hand, a greasy arm.
With a gasp, a heavily scarred face pushed its way outwards; a slick and gleaming skull with a crop of dark hair; eyes that were slits squeezed tight against the daylight. Finally a pair of shoulders popped out, and then the rest of the body slithered free behind it,
naked, coated in oily grime, reeking of kree.
With deep, sobbing breaths of air, the longhunter hauled out the net bag after him filled with clinking wooden jars.
Sweet Holy Mercy! thought the man with relief as he finally rolled away from the opening of the kree nest, and lay back against the slope of earth wiping his eyes clear of grime, the scars of his face rough against his shaking palm. The longhunter gulped down the fresh breeze and shook with the elation roaring through him.
He felt reborn, as he always felt reborn upon emerging into the light.
Cole breathed deep until his shaking subsided, though the elation remained as a surging flow of his blood. The jars were still intact. The Royal Milk gurgled heavily inside them when he gave the netting a jostle. He looked up and watched countless kree coming back and forth across the ground before him, blinking as though in surprise.
‘This is the last time, you hear me?’ Cole breathed to himself as he climbed shakily to his feet. ‘The last time!’
*
On those nights, returning alone through the wilderness of the Great Hush, Cole would bed down in his sleeping furs fully aware that he might never waken from his slumbers again, or worse still, that he might awaken as prey in the midst of some gory feeding frenzy; a few awful moments of agony and terror, he always supposed, a few brief glimpses of their barbed lashes thrashing against his face and the dark sheen of their carapaces, before he was gone.
Cole felt this more strongly the longer he remained so close to the rift valley known as the Edge – an actual sensation like stones rolling around in his stomach and a light prickling of his scalp, knowing that he was prey in a predator’s land.
It was the beginning of the cool season, the traditional time for expeditions into the Great Hush, this endless continent to the south of the Broken Spine of the World; for in the more tepid air the kree were slower and less likely to rush at you out of nowhere. It had taken him more than a month to make it from the Aradèrēs mountains to the great rift valley of the kree, and a further week to prepare and then descend into the rift itself before returning with his haul of Royal Milk.
Now, ahead of Cole, over the thousand and more laqs of grasslands he had ridden on his way here, a string of small supply caches stretched back all the way to the Broken Spine of the World, his only assured means of getting back to the known world without starving in the trying – for he would need the food stored in them, and the black powder to hunt for more. The line of caches was like a rope holding him over a void, and so he thought of them often, along with the haul of Milk he carried with him, and tried not to dwell on those things that could go wrong.
All about him, as he headed home across the badlands bordering the rift valley, he saw sign of the kree everywhere: stripped trees and the bones of killing grounds scattered across the grasslands, where the kree had ingested the liquefied innards of large animals, entire herds of them.
Diligently, each morning the lone man continued to smear himself from head to toe with the kree blood he carried with him, and smeared his remaining zels and his hunting cat too until they all stank from it. The reeking grease made his clothes stick to his skin, but Cole tolerated the discomfort, knowing that it helped to mask their scents from the native kree.
It was his only protection in this barren land, that and making sure to keep his distance whenever he sighted the scuttling creatures through his eyeglass. During the nights he simply hoped that his camp would not be discovered by chance, and bedded down listening to the chirp of the small birds in their cage that would be his first and only warning of attack, brought all this way on the back of a zel.
This close to the Edge, nothing lived on the ground but the grasses and trees and the small animals that buried themselves deep in their warrens during the hours of daylight. In every direction, the horizon maintained the same unremarkable flatness, save for the occasional grassy hummock standing there like an island, topped by stands of the strange boli trees. While riding, Cole would never tire of watching the trees at this time of the year, their crowns of resinous leaves ablaze with flames, trailing smoke into the sky that carried their sweet scents and seeds. Or at night, burning like stands of torches against the stars.
The longhunter saw no birds in the sky, none at all. It was believed the birds were afflicted by the air here, afflicted in the same way that humans were whenever they stayed too long in the Hush, rendered infertile, melancholic, even mad.
Indeed, his own moods only worsened, just as they had done during his previous solo expeditions. Cole snapped at the big cat that accompanied him whenever she got in the way; a lean domesticated prairie lynx with reddish fur and a manner more doglike than feline. Always she growled back at him just as moodily. The zels snickered and nipped at each other’s necks, and the birds in the small cage grew silent. He started talking to himself and the animals more often. It became hard to focus on simple tasks, and Cole’s heavily scarred face set itself into a permanent scowl of concentration beneath the brim of his hat.
At night, the dreams oozed into his head whispering of dark and lonely things. Cole would waken with his hands trembling and his mind filled with isolation, wondering for the hundredth time why he was here in this forsaken place, why he insisted on putting himself through this misery year after year so far from home and family.
But then he knew the answer, even if he did not wish to face it.
Deep down, he knew that he was a coward.
*
It was the first wind of the night and it came without prelude, a sudden tussle of air that made the badlands all around him sough in their empty vastness. Its breath rattled the bare limbs of the tree beneath which Cole lay deep in troubled sleep, though the long-hunter did not stir.
Above him in the tree, a solitary seedwing swung from a bare and twisting branch, the last of this year’s crop tugging as though for its release. Somewhere out in the corrugated badlands, a mott called out beneath a sky made bright by the low hanging moons.
From his dreams the longhunter cried out and then fell silent. The cat too, curled and sleeping against him, whimpered in distress. Moonlight from the Sisters shone on Cole’s white, clammy face, painted shadows in the folds of canvas wrapped around the longrifle propped against the trunk, before they faded behind drifting clouds. The breeze across the Hush faded to a trickle.
In the sudden darkness of his night camp, in the small wicker cage he had brought all this way, the pair of chirl birds suddenly ceased in their chirping.
Nearby, where his three zels stood out as slashes of chalky white in the blackness, heads went up as the birds fell dead to the floor of their cage and a little bell tinkled into the night. Nostrils flaring, ears twitching, the zels scented the air and listened to the nearing murmurs in the ground.
Still Cole did not awaken.
From the east the pack of kree scuttled towards the sleeping man’s position, the breeze carrying their hunting spores before them. In silence the predators split up to surround the camp from every direction, scrabbling on their six legs across the scrubby ground with tiny puffs of dust.
The zels tensed for flight, but the hunting scents of the kree seized them and froze their bodies to the spot, their muscles locked and trembling. They could make no sounds from their throats. Eyes rolled animal-wild in their heads. Cole too sniffed the air and croaked in sudden despair. Next to him the cat pricked up her ears, opened her eyes into slits. She tried to stagger to her feet, fell over onto her side. With a surge she tried again and forced herself up, where she stood rooted to the spot unable to growl, her glassy eyes staring out at the darkness, fixed on the motions of an approaching kree.
Again the wind came, stronger this time. It was enough to tug the solitary seedwing in the tree above the man. Once, twice, three times it tugged before the seedwing detached itself with an inaudible snap and fell spinning towards the ground, where it settled on the man’s right cheek.
His face flinched.
In an instant,
Cole was struggling up from his sleeping furs with bile and the reek of kree burning his throat, knowing that he was in danger, and that his worst fears were about to come true. Instinctively, he swung for the longrifle and grabbed it up, then swung back again to appraise his chances, seeing the shivering rumps of his zels and the dark form of the cat rooted there on the spot. The hairs on her back were standing up on end.
A zel cried out, and then something hidden by the darkness dragged it to the ground.
No time for his pack or saddle. No time for anything but to run.
Sweet Erēs, the Milk! he thought, seeing the bundle of jars sitting next to the bird cage, everything he had worked so hard to gain. But then he spotted the oily dark sheens of kree carapaces coming right at him, and he thought no more of anything but escape.
‘Cat!’ the longhunter shouted as he ran for the nearest zel.
At the sound of her name the cat snapped from her spell and launched herself snarling into the darkness ahead. Cole grabbed a fistful of the zel’s mane and leapt onto its back. The animal came to life beneath his weight, and he spun it around in a kicking panic, searching for a way out. Movement all around them now. He spotted the cat loping past, choosing a direction of escape.
‘Yah!’ Cole yelled, kicking the zel to follow after her, and his young mount sprang forwards. Cole rocked into its lengthening stride and with his teeth tried to pull the canvas wrapping free from his rifle, jouncing wildly without a saddle and stirrups.
He chanced a glance over his shoulder. The second zel was following behind them with white foam frothing from its mouth. Shapes were closing fast on its tail.
Cole brought the wrapped longrifle down behind him and aimed it at the creature – his fingers seeking out the trigger through the canvas – and on the next upstride he fired, the end of the wrapping bursting into flames.
In the momentary flash of light Cole glimpsed the zel falling, and instantly set upon by dark carapaces.
