The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption

by Denny, David S

  He shook his head in despair. Then there was the beast that followed Jonathon like an atrociously loyal dog. The Turkanschoner left him ill at ease every time it stared accusingly at him. It hated him because he was a Tallman, because of what they had done to it. It didn't see him, Rislo, as an ally, but as one of those who had given it so much pain. It would kill him as soon as it had the chance. It was an animal living on instinct and he was still its prey, Rislo reasoned. He could not understand why it had not killed him yet. Perhaps Jonathon did have some power over its actions but eventually, he feared his tenuous thread of control would snap and the beast's programming re-assert itself. Then it would tear him limb from limb. Rislo moaned.

  Fear! So much fear! He couldn't cope with it. Everything he had expected to happen had not. Their plans were falling apart. Jonathon's girl was still lost yet he had deserted her, possessed by the idea of confronting this Silus Flax. No, he wasn’t like Cornelius at all. He was just a boy motivated by his anger. Rislo decided that it couldn't go on. Why shouldn't he leave this place now? He knew of dimension doors he could use. He'd known of one for years that opened out into a world of forests and blue skies and no people. The prospect excited him now. Maybe it was preferable, easier to be lonely than to suffer the whims and pain others gave you. The giant rummaged through his coat and pulled out a grubby leather map and studied it intently, studying the places where he had found dimension doors in the past.

  He shook his head. Why should he sacrifice his future? Jonathon was disturbed. How could this vendetta with this High Hat mean so much? How could he give up this girl he loved so much to pursue him? How could he take the huge risk with the unstable door? Even if he were successful he might never get back. It was foolish and incomprehensible.

  He rose to his feet and put his map away. In an hour he could escape the horrors of this world to the tranquillity, the emptiness, of the other realm he had seen before. He could soon be devoid of any society and the painful complexity of relationships with others, a wild uninhabited place where he could escape all this fear. That dimension door was only an hour away from here, an easy hour travelling long forgotten tunnels and empty caverns. Just an hour!

  His alliance with Jonathon seemed crumbling with every second, there were more reasons for going than staying now he decided. His promises to Cornelius carried no weight at all. If he escaped this place, which he now so greatly desired, to his sanctuary, he would only have himself to live with.....and the guilt. The guilt that he had deserted someone who trusted him so much and relied on him almost entirely to achieve his goals. His mind ground on, his heart spoke.

  What if Jonathon did return and he was gone? What then? Rislo sighed deeply and closed his eyes to shut in the tears which were welling in them. He could not leave. He could not desert him despite his own fears. The past, the guilt, would pursue him as it does with us all. He could escape this place, but the guilt would always be with him, intensifying with the years slowly devouring him like a cancer from the inside and reduced him to a whimpering, regretful wreck. He could not flee now.

  Rislo sniffed back the tears and his resolve strengthened. He would carry out Jonathon’s resolve to destroy this vile world. He would assemble the machine and await Jonathon's return. He would give Jonathon the time it took to collect the machine and put it together, then he'd set it in motion and go. At least this would satisfy his conscience.

  The Tallman collected his belongings and prepared to plunge into the darkness of the Dubhian underworld again, when he heard footsteps behind him. He whirled around hoping to see an enlightened Jonathon emerge from the gate admitting to the foolishness of his actions. His look of delight drained away as the crouched, horned form of the Turkanschoner moved out of the whirling light of the dimension door. His

  heart pounded in panic. Jonathon had not returned.

  The Turkanschoner stared at the fearful giant for a while and then examined the scents that clung to the damp walls and broken floor of the building they stood together in. Satisfied he had Milly's faint scent and could follow his master's instructions he turned to Rislo.

  “Why?” he grunted. Rislo shook.

  “Why what?" he croaked in shock and confusion. “Why no tell of Jonathon's friend?” the beast growled

  For a moment Rislo stood open mouthed, and then he suddenly remembered the human bundle he had reluctantly brought back from the towers. Then it dawned on him. The girl, the Turkanschoner meant her. It was Milly? He opened his mouth in dumb disbelief, surely not!

  The surprise registered on his face and he leapt to his own defence despite the fears that the beast would not understand. The creature was clearly mistaken.

  “How could you know it was her?” he asked incredulously. "If it was her how could I have known?”

  The beast attempted a smile of understanding, but his face became contorted in a viscous snarl.

  “Master feels her presence, I smell here and there." The Turkanschoner pointed to the dark doorway.

  Rislo was dumbfounded, but a new fear arose in his mind. He searched for the light staffs he had stolen from the towers and was relieved to find one missing. She had not ventured out there without the protection of its light. Rislo waved his arms, half in apology, half in apathy. "What now then?" he asked meekly.

  The Turkanschoner moved toward the darkness beyond the doorway and peered out, his nostrils flaring the seeking scents on the damp air which painted a picture of the world there as bright as in daylight to him.

  “Now I find her and bring back. You go find machine. Make ready. Yes?"

  The Tallman stared at the beast who waited for him to force back the inky darkness through the door with his light staff. A chill ran down his spine and he felt sick as he looked at the terrifying profile of the beast lit by the light he carried. Its long riveted incisors gleamed threateningly as he clenched and unclenched his jaws. Its dark eyes accused him. Its razor sharp hunting talons scraped menacingly along the decaying brickwork.

  Rislo took a deep breath and passed the Turkanschoner expecting at any moment for those terrible talons and teeth to tear at his body and sink lethally into the soft flesh of his neck. They did not.

  The circle of light startled the rats that had waited ignorantly, but patiently, for the light that protected their prey to burn out. The two uneasy allies walked in silence through the lower realms of this forgotten area of the city and eventually found themselves moving upward through natural fissures and up onto the level above.

  From here Rislo knew his way back to his hidden workshop and looked back to find the Turkanschoner with his eyes closed, nostrils widened, as he followed Milly's scent.

  He turned quickly away and they continued to walk for half an hour and, as Rislo approached his goal, he checked behind him again. The beast was no longer behind him. Somewhere it had parted from his company, silently without a word of departure. But then why should it. It hated him and when he was no longer useful, Rislo decided that it would kill him.

  But now he felt relieved, the threat had been lifted temporarily. He moved on a short distance and looked behind him once more before climbing the narrow steps which led to his workshop. He shone the light through the light lock and smiled with satisfaction when the door swung open, unaware that he was expected and that his visitors were very glad to see him.

  A heavy blow from behind, which sent him sprawling to the floor, announced their presence. When his head cleared and he brushed the blood from his eyes he saw several pairs of Tallmen's boots shuffling around him.

  Dazed and numbed, he sat upright and stared disbelievingly at the glaring mirrored armour of several Tallmen soldiers. He was dragged roughly to his feet and spun around to look into his own astonished and bloody face reflected in the visor of a Tallman captain who lifted his visor and smiled.

  "Welcome back soldier." he laughed as his smile drained away. He hit Rislo hard in the stomach which doubled the renegade up instantly. "Take him back to the towers." he spat as he l
ooked down unsympathetically at the writhing form of Rislo retching on the floor.

  Rislo felt chains snap heavily around his wrists and ankles and a heavy iron collar locked with a loud clunk around his neck. He was lifted and pushed onto the steps towards the passage below. Plunged now into deep shock, he stumbled downwards, aided by the captain's hard boot. Fear coursed through his veins. Fear embellished by regret.

  “I should have gone! " he screamed in dismay.

  “You’ll wish you had." replied the captain. “A traitor's fate is not an easy one." he laughed with no humour at all.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  The Turkanschoner had remained hidden when he detected the scent of the Tallmen ahead and had already been alerted by another more ominous and disturbing odour of something which had trailed Milly. He had considered warning Rislo, but it was already too late by the time the had detected the Tallmens’ presence.

  The other scent worried him. It threatened Milly and his task was to make her safe. He could wait for a while, but time was short, he had to get to her before that which followed her did. He slipped back into the shadows as he saw Rislo stumble in chains out into the passageway followed by the Tallman patrol and watched as they marched him, sobbing loudly, away to the Towers. As their lights receded he moved stealthily towards the steps Rislo's hideout.

  Stealthily he moved upward. The scent of Tallmen filled his nostrils and hatred coursed through the body they had enforced upon him. As he rounded the curve at the top of the stairs, he realised that a light still shone from the room beyond the half open door. Someone was still in there.

  He inched forward and peered inside. Inside a single Tallman remained. He was leaning over a strange cylindrical construction in the centre of the room, which was made from glasslike tubes and pipes about half his height in size and a similar width.

  The Tallman was methodically dismantling Rislo's glass contraption and placing each part carefully into a large sack. The parts removed were small, but his dextrous fingers were quickly reducing the mechanism to its component parts.

  The Turkanschoner watched intently. In a few moments the device was all in the sack. The Tallman engineer completed his task and zipped up the bag with a look of satisfaction on his long featured face, stowed his tools in his belt and turned to retrieve his helmet from the floor.

  His eyes met the Turkanschoner's gaze and widened in terror. The beast leapt into the room and struck the gaping Tallman a powerful and accurate blow to the side of his head. He collapsed in a clattering heap on the floor and twitched uncontrollably as the life ebbed from his form.

  The Turkanschoner stood over him, his body trembling violently, jaws opening and closing as saliva flooded into his mouth. His heart pounded as adrenalin flowed into his veins. His conditioning and animal instinct urged him to tear his prey to pieces and satisfy his compulsion to eat, claim his grisly prize. But slowly his newly found being enforced its will over his naked and brutal being. He panted heavily and clenched his fists to hold back the fury that threatened to boil over inside him. Slowly the intensity of these primal feelings subsided and his rational faculties began to function again.

  The machine was important he knew. He should take it and return to his task. He glanced down at the Tallman's corpse and saliva dripped from his incisors, a ripple of hatred washed again through his being. He should take the machine and go. This was important to his master. His body obeyed.

  With his precious booty slung across his hunched back, the beast hurtled down the steps into the gloom of the corridor below. The girl's scent was still strong amongst the stench of Tallmen and with his senses concentrated through his muzzle he could follow it easily. But there was something else too, that something which followed Milly. He could not place the scent at all. Its odour was different from all he had encountered in this world, all he knew was that it hungered, hungered with a grim passion for Milly.

  The Turkanschoner sped through the darkness. He feared for Milly. She had moved quickly and upwards at every opportunity, exploring ever upward tunnel and fissure. Her pursuer had followed her. Eventually Milly's efforts had been rewarded and she had found herself a way to out of these gloomy tunnels. The Turkanschoner followed emerged out of a filthy, broken culvert into the Upper City close to the great, eclipsing domes of the Halls of Machines.

  From there she had sought the security of the rooftop world she was born to and had climbed up onto the domes. The Turkanschoner followed slowly, his hunched form not well suited to climbing and burdened additionally with Rislo's machine.

  The continual vibration from great lines of engines in Halls of Machines below him set the Turkanschoner on edge and made him wary. He crept from shadow to shadow across the roof tops as he followed the Milly's airborne scent. He broke from the inky dimness and climbed slowly up to the top of the first dome and surveyed the scene ahead.

  Before him the concrete landscape fell and rose again into the mountainous form of another dark dome. At its summit a large exhaust port poured its toxic gases upwards in a great, choking blue plume, which merged with the others from dome after dome to create a dense stagnant cloud of exhaust fumes which hung, almost motionless, above the Halls and the Upper City.

  From where he now squatted he could see far out across the fumes shrouded extent of Dubh. It disturbed him. The city was a foggy expanse of tumbling and chaotic concrete and blackened brick. No- where was a space that could support the grass and trees of the world he could remember from his past before the Tallmen had taken him. No trees, hills or mountains here - just the panorama of the domes. No sky or clouds. Just the huge smog filled ceiling above his head.

  His access to memories was becoming easier now. He could remember open grasslands and forests, rivers glinting in the distance. He found himself yearning for the sights and smells of pine forest and dew laden grass. He was homesick for a world, which for a many years, had been stolen from him. He missed people he could visualise, but not yet name. Yet he knew that he could never return to them. They were lost forever because of what he now was. He was an abomination that they would never accept as one of their own.

  He shuddered in realisation of what this meant, and he felt an up surge of grief as he had when he had stood upon the real earth of that world which lay beyond the dimension door where Jonathon searched for Flax. He was dead. The Tallmen had sentenced him to a living death.

  He growled angrily and tears flooded from his eyes. Then he howled as his anguish surfaced, bursting out of control into agonized cries which escaped his modified jaws to echo around the Machine halls and into the City of the Tallmen, piercing through the perpetual drone of the multitudes of machines below him. Searchlights on the in the sentry towers, alerted by the Turkanschoner's howls, slicked into being, their powerful beams lancing out through the stagnant exhaust fumes and playing across the domes as their operators seeking to identify the source of the unnerving cries which penetrated the iron and steel of their refuges.

  Although confused by the cacophony of long lingering echoes, they swept the roof top terrain of the Halls of Machines with a practised thoroughness and settled for a second on the silhouette of a crouched and horned form that stood arms outstretched accusingly toward the Towers.

  In the blink of a Tallman eye, the apparition vanished as the echoes of its anguish finally subsided. One by one the inquisitive beams were extinguished as the sentries shrugged their shoulders and dismissed what they had seen as a trick of the light and the dreadful sounds, the result of the distorted echoes from some innocent source.

  Other souls had been disturbed by the Turkanschoner's howling and the explosion of light which swept through the gloom which cloaked the domes. One was Milly. Curled in tight ball hidden in the shadow between the domes, she was jolted upright from her troubled sleep, aware of the tormented cries which broke her exhausted slumber and dreams of her lost friends. She was spurred in to movement again despite the protests from her aching limbs.

  Reality fell
upon her in a cold, heavy wave. She was alone here and frightened. Dale and Tefkin were dead and Jonathon was lost, his fate unknown to her. Those who had killed the Whisperers may have taken Jonathon too. Tears rolled from her tired eyes to her cheeks where the dirt and grime from the cities air had settled, tracing new salty tracks alongside those of earlier grief.

  The loss of Dale and Tefkin was a heavy burden for her to bear, but she lived in hope. Perhaps Jonathon had escaped too and searched for her right now. It was hope that sustained her. It was all she had. Without Jonathon she knew she could survive in this city, but it would be a life less than a life with one you loved and which made so many things possible. Such a life would seem almost impossible and a short vertical trip from the roof tops to ground might seem preferable, but for the moment she had hope and while it remained she would survive.

  As the piercing beams of the searchlights died away, she dragged herself wearily to the top of the dome and glanced over her shoulder. Someone or something was following her, the one who had issued those painful cries which had sent a wave of empathy through her soul. She crouched low as the pursuing phantom descended the side of the dome behind her and merged with the shadow in its lightless lea. Milly did not move.

  She searched around for a weapon but found nothing. Listening intently, she heard the metallic scrabbling of claws on concrete as her now invisible tracker made a hasty but painful ascent towards her. The sounds of movement stopped and were replaced by a harsh panting. Then a strange voice drifted up to her.

  The voice was deep, guttural and made unclear by a wheezing shortness of breath. Did she hear her name?

  Milly dismissed the thought, yet she heard it again. Who...?

  The sound of ascent began again, slowly closing on her position. The voice drifted up from the trough of darkness in which the identity of her pursuer was submerged. It came closer and now the voice was clearer. “Milly!” it coughed, a hint of urgency in the call to her. “Jonathon?” she whispered, her heart lifting, yet a shadow of doubt clung to her torch of hope ignited by the speaking of his name.