by Jeff Kamen
‘Once it’s loose,’ she reminds them, ‘you climb away. They mustn’t see you. If they do, they may stop, so no ropes until it’s about to cross. We’re just dislodging it for the moment. Are we clear?’ She looks round facelessly, just glittering teeth and eyes. ‘Remember, when we use the blocks, we pull to the side, away from us.’
Jakub spits. They murmur in agreement.
‘Good. Now, let’s start.’
As the vehicle revs distantly on the road, they climb beneath the track on the southern side and take up positions. One after the other they grip the metal along its edges and push upwards. Jaala moves along to the end nearest the road, rising so that her eyes are level with the thick layer of concrete that forms the body of the deck. She touches its rough surface, as if to better understand the materials she is confronting. It seems the villagers must have chipped away for years to cause such damage. A thought she will have again before the night is out, but for now she climbs down a little and plants her feet securely and raises her palms to the track and grips along it with her fingers. The metal is cold and uneven, covered in a peeling skin of paint the colour of the metal itself. She pushes up at it, as the hunters are doing, and a minute later the blood is rushing to her face and she finds herself gritting her teeth. A few loose flakes drop away and she has to close her eyes against the particles she is prising loose. Soon there is an icy tinkling sound. ‘Hear it?’ she says, and the hunters tell her they can.
‘It’s speedin up,’ Karl hisses a few minutes later.
She turns to watch the headlights roving on the slope, then looks back. The hunters are panting with effort. She closes her eyes, pushing again, applying pressure grade on grade until she hears a sudden sharp crack, not so loud that she stops to check for guards, but enough for her to feel encouragement. Down it will tumble, like a tusked boar into a pit. The vehicle crashing and struggling. Raging impotently. She maintains the pressure and another crack results in a release of dirt and paint and welding dust. After another huge push she lets her arms fall and stands breathing heavily. When she looks across, she sees Gustav perched with his bow trained upwards, his head cocked like a vengeful little bird. Teeth appear in the dark and the hunters whisper to one another in acknowledgment of the effort they are having to make. ‘Keep going,’ she says. ‘It’ll come.’
Shaking her hands to life, she takes a fresh stance and pushes once more. The vehicle is taking another turning, she can tell by small changes in the light. She parts her feet again, and as the hunters strain and gasp she refocuses, opening herself, connecting to what is driving her, feeling the electric strength of her trunk and thighs as she wills the plates to break their hold.
She pushes with the wind blowing cold through the metal rafters, pushes with the presences swirling in her head, forming patterns, motions, scratchy pictures of various overlapping pasts. She pushes with her breath coming in snorts as she continues to assert her power, her wrath, her need to destroy that which has made her what she is and taken everything away. Again she hears the tinny cracking sound she seeks, and she pushes again until more little flakes of paint come away, and then, grimacing, she’s forced to stop and rest. She takes a few deep breaths, then watches the hunters. They are gasping noisily, wheezing as they jostle around the support posts to attack the thing from different angles.
‘Can’t do it,’ says Karl, panting.
‘Keep trying,’ she says.
‘Is it working your end?’ Laszló croaks.
‘It’s working,’ she says, then looks along the grid for Tanya and Radjík. It seems they’ve climbed up the sides somewhere. She rises, flexing her hands, and when she reaches up again the metal feels warm to the touch. Preparing herself to push once more, her eyes flicker. Then she attacks. She thrusts upwards, cursing, and a minute later instead of stopping for breath she continues, going through to another threshold, increasing her efforts so that the sweat runs down her neck and collar bones and seeps into her clothes. She pushes until her muscles are quaking. Pushes so that the pressure racks all through her body and then she hears a long thin creak. It comes again. Something is splintering. She pushes into the sound of it, wanting to break upwards through it all, erupting with a terrible cry of vengeance, and as she forces herself to keep going, to complete the task, to push on through the muscle pain, the scratchy images fade from her mind and another image replaces them. That of a woman being carried across a sandy courtyard on a stretcher of canes, her face smashed by stoning and the copper skin ripped along a dozen wounds.
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
Shuddering, she knows she is entering a dangerous region where the strength of her body risks destroying itself, the programmed tissues she is built with ratcheting close to breaking point; but she pushes all the harder in any case, knowing that finally the track is unsticking, is lifting a fraction, and the crowds are with her, chanting in her mind, and she sees a thick-bodied slave buckling against a sunlit wall as the irons hiss into his flesh, his screams high and shrill as a child’s.
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
‘Harder!’ she urges the hunters, and she knows she can do it, and she pushes until the droplets are running from the pits of her arms and down her ribcage, pushes until she hears the taut metal ligatures snap and click and squeak, and within it all the promise of release. ‘Harder!’ she snarls, and she can feel a cold rush of pleasure coiling through her arteries, wild effervescent jets of it, and framed before her eyes as she stares furiously ahead is a tall throne of purest alabaster, the segmented tail like a rapier arching overhead, forever poised to sting.
‘Harder!’
And she the one sitting there, owner of all she surveys, the white pincers raised in a flourish around the cool white seat.
As the join cracks again she thrusts harder still, and then with a sudden stifled cry she lets go, stumbling, and she sinks down clutching at the girders, clutching at anything which will support her, drained for the moment and unable to do anything but draw in great lungfuls of the damply perfumed air.
Dazed, she sees the headlights sweep across the rocky hillside as the vehicle makes its final turn before reaching the muddy slopes of the bank. She glances at the hunters as they work. They stand in dark profile beneath the track, heaving, straining, cursing, and in response to their efforts she rises again, urging them on, demanding more, and with a glint of teeth she climbs up to complete the job.
~O~
‘Clear these tarps away,’ Pétar orders. ‘Someone’s going to slip over.’ He checks on the bridge, dark now that the tunnel lamp is out, then turns to those crouching nearby.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Leave your spare bundles behind you in case somebody else needs them. And be careful firing around that middle area. It’s our own people down there.’
‘What about the prisoners?’
‘Just keep to the plan. Our main job’s to provide cover for Jaala’s team. I can’t be respon ... what is it?’
‘Sorry, Pétar. They’re at the river.’
‘Okay, take positions. Move up along there, they won’t see you. And remember — if we’re lucky the vehicle will be stuck down there. If it returns, keep your eye on the back of it. We don’t know how many they’ve got inside.’
‘They’re turning, they’ll stop any moment.’
‘Okay, you heard him.’
He watches as they arrange themselves. Looking along those darkened ranks he picks out silhouettes drawing on their bowstrings in preparation. Then a dull rose of light appears briefly over the embankment area and cuts away. He wipes the moisture from his face.
Know this. Death is waiting. You go to this dawn like children and you will die …
He checks behind him, looking up past the rocky crest. The night sky is yielding something. He sees hints of grey. A sparse wind is blowing through, bringing with it the chill smell of morning.
Be the night. Be this dark dawn now, deep inside you. Be the dark before the sun, and you will return to the day. See it. See it deeply. See the power the
re. If in all your lives you were afraid, be more afraid now. Feel the terror in you. Feel its shape, see the colour of it, see it bright, like blood. Death is waiting ...
He reads the patterns of the few stars he can see, and then he turns back and runs his palms down his trousers and takes up his crossbow, the string already taut on the catch. At his feet a canvas roll of bolts he’s been cleaning. The heads are lethal bronze triangles, the tips overlong and jaggedly beaded. Mankillers, designed to pierce deep into the flesh and break on contact. He wipes the track with a greased cloth and fits one of the bolts and checks it sits evenly in its groove. Then, with the stirrup pointed at the ground, he begins to turn the crank. He turns the small handle methodically, one eye on the roadside guards, and drives the handle round until he hears a long nagging creak. He checks the moving parts. Then squats down to a better position and takes in a full view of the bridge.
He thinks he can see another glow to the south but does not want to look, fearing he’ll be distracted. Someone is coughing. ‘Keep it down,’ he says. Shortly afterwards an archer creeps behind him muttering an apology and he shakes his head. The man creeps towards a pile of kitbags and quickly returns and goes on.
He maintains his watch on the guards. One male, one female, both exploring the nearby terrain with their torches. He sees the man stroll out to the road and stop a moment. Then turn around and stroll back again. If the guards had been worried about something before they appear to be no longer. The female seems to be checking that her torch is working properly. He sees her great pale face lurid and expressionless as she peers down into the beam and switches it off and on again as though to test it. Then she wanders across to the railings on the southern side. He watches her looking down at the dull configurations of the river.
He lifts the bow and pulls the heavy yew stock into the meat of his shoulder.
‘Erik,’ he whispers. ‘Keep your eye on the woman.’
‘Got her.’
He breathes in slowly, tracking the male guard alone as he bends to pick up something from the ground — a pebble, a fircone — then tosses it idly away into the dark. He watches him tug down his mask, the torchbeam flaring off the pale road.
Then he stiffens, thinking he’s heard a noise from the southern slopes, a muffled cry or yell. He is not alone. Others are muttering, altering grips.
Leaning forward, he focuses on his target and holds the man level with the raised sight and keeps him there as the target moves back towards the woman. He hears another faint cry in the distance and this time there is no mistaking the cause. ‘Here we go,’ he says.
The male guard is breaking into a run when the sound of gunfire explodes from the embankment, a raw and blistering sound accompanied by scatterings of light. As both guards swing weapons down from their shoulders, he turns slightly. Firing from such a height, he knows that the bolt will not follow the usual trajectory. The wind is lifting and he takes this into account as he steadies himself and squeezes the long brass trigger. Gently, then a little more. The man is back in target position, shooting through the railings, targeting Markos’ party. He raises the stirrup half an inch, keeping his body very still.
Then he fires. The bolt leaves with a slamming kick. He draws back the string, his boot in the stirrup, and when he looks up the man is tearing at his waist as if he’s burning. The woman has two long shafts in her side and she swings to her left and aims her weapon at the ridge but she is no longer firing. Another shaft strikes the ground and another strikes the man in the lower abdomen and seems to pass clean through and another plants in his thigh and another flits overhead and the woman is making a hideous bellowing noise, snapping off the wand-like shafts with her fists. As she drops her weapon she takes another shaft in the chest and topples backwards into the shadows.
The injured man is heading towards the gap. He goes along staggering and limping and he falls to one knee and gets up and two more arrows pierce his back and he goes on like a mad puppet falling down and getting back up again and the gunfire coming from the embankment is now a visible stream of upward fire travelling in the direction of the southern slopes and there are screams and hoarse cries echoing all across the ridge.
With a new bolt fitted, turning the crank, he looks to the tunnel, finding some kind of disturbance within it. A little way to the south, a handful of Versteckts have appeared on a ledge and are firing across the river. He cannot tell if they have come from the side pass or the tunnel, or if more will follow. ‘By the cliffs,’ he calls. His first target has fallen by the overlaid tracks but he sees no other movement in the light spilling from the guard’s abandoned torch. There is no sign of Jaala’s party there or anywhere. ‘Get them, get the guards,’ he calls, and kneels and aims.
~O~
‘Radjík’s signalling,’ Jakub gasps. ‘They’re coming from the tunnel.’
‘Keep trying. Let the archers deal with them.’
‘What if they see us?’
‘Keep pushing.’
She checks the embankment as a series of faint cries emerge. The boulder-like shape of the vehicle is still stationed on the bank and she can see thin flashes go streaming up from it. The river has lit up grey and silver in the headlights and there are flames rising from the lonely black skull of the container. As fresh gunfire breaks out from the deck she levels her shoulders and continues pushing until the bonds crack again. She holds her pose and continues applying pressure. There are bootsteps pounding towards them and guards cross the very track they are lifting and run on again and she pushes harder still and hears another squeak but the welded bonds will not give. She leads off the other foot and tries again, urging the hunters to continue in spite of the pain they feel, telling them they can do it, they just have to combine their efforts. Then a roar of gunfire breaks out overhead and a moment later arrows are showering over the tracks, the heads clicking and rattling off the concrete and hurtling through the gap and one of them goes hissing past her hand. She hears a choking cry followed by a clang as a guard falls. Then Karl says, ‘Look it’s leavin, its fuckin leavin,’ and after a last great effort she gasps and drops her fizzing arms, raging at herself, at the track, at everything, and then she turns. With a chill sensation she sees the vehicle crawling uphill, growling and revving monstrously, its headlights flooding the road.
A few guards have been left stranded down there and she can see them firing at the hillside. Behind them, the container is fully ablaze beside the tinted foaming water. A mandala of bodies decorates the mud. All this she sees in an instant as Gustav twists and fires. A moment later a heavy figure comes crashing down among them with his arms flailing and his bare scalp thudding against a beam. He lies there sprawling and winded, bleeding from a chest wound. She thinks he might get up but Gustav leaps at his throat with his knife, cutting a ruff of blood from him just as Jakub swings down and boots at the body until it slides off the beam and falls. Gustav swivels, stringing another arrow, and is ready to fire again. Jaala sees the guard drop clanging down through the matrix and enter the mist. When she looks up she takes in the slablike plates of steel above her head, the track’s chipped and hammered surface, and she is shaking now, her eyes vitreous with inhuman fury. Eyes that might splinter bone, crack the mind apart, destroy whole worlds with the power of their hatred. The vehicle will soon be there, bearing down on her as it had in the gorge, and she wants it dead.
She thrusts upwards with a roar. She can hear the hunters groaning and she shuts them away and shuts out the shooting overhead and then a few seconds later hears the sound she is after. A cold metallic splintering. ‘Keep going,’ she growls, ‘keep pushing, it’s coming up.’ She can hear the plates separating in cold and resistant fibres and she pushes all the more but doesn’t know how long she can keep it up. The vehicle is on its way. She snorts, aware of its lights sweeping across the rain-wet and pitted slopes. Then a crack above her becomes a biting sound, and it grows louder by the moment, like a nail being torn from wood. She can see a gap between
metal and concrete. See the bolts they’ve driven through. The track shudders further upwards with every new assault and she pushes into it with everything she is and has ever been; she pushes harder and harder and there are flames rising through the presences as vast and deep as the fires over Ansthalt, and the hunters are begging her to try the other track, try anything, are pleading with her, saying they can’t shift it no matter what they do, and she orders them to continue and the welded plates creak and shudder but will not fully give. Her muscles are beginning to lock and she is quaking visibly above the knees and she looks towards the road and what she sees coming around the turnings has her pushing until the veins bulge in her face and throat but still she cannot win. ‘Break,’ she hisses, ‘break,’ and then she thinks she has it, feels something giving way, but all that is moving is herself, her arms burning uselessly as they fall away in spasms. Her face creases and she sinks down with a fateful cry, gasping for breath, knowing she cannot give more than she has given.
The hunters drop down beside her and while Gustav keeps watch they sit holding themselves, a couple of them retching, unable to speak. She does not hear them, does not see them rise up a minute later as they clamber up to give it one last go. Her mind is elsewhere, dwelling on the folly of tampering with the arts of people she cannot comprehend. The same kind who’d once built their cities into great towering islands, who’d turned the air to the colour of stone. People who’d sent vehicles the size of mountains shooting out to the planets, who’d reduced the flaming kingdoms of heaven and hell to tiny gobs of brain flesh. She thinks of the awful weight the tracks had borne and sees that whoever can make such materials can do anything, is surely invulnerable, and it is into this haze of realisation that the guttural sound of engines comes drifting. The headlights are blazing on the road.
Metals. The weight of it … what else …
She turns, staring at the lights, then looks slowly back to the hunters as they cry out in frustration.
