‘If I could do something, I would.’ But Quillon knew he would need to tap deeply into his supply of antizonals just to keep the two of them alive from now on.
‘We keep moving,’ Meroka said. ‘Just like I was telling you. Find the other meeting place, and hope someone shows up. What we don’t do is spend any longer here. Place is already starting to creep me out. I can smell those fucking vorgs.’
‘We just leave the horses?’
‘What did you have in mind?’
‘I don’t know. Bury them or something.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘So it’s not so obvious we were here.’
Meroka seemed to give the idea at least a moment’s consideration before answering. ‘Done much horse burying?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Take you a day with a little shovel like that, open a grave big enough, assuming the ground doesn’t turn to rock as soon as you get under the topsoil. Then you’ve still got the other horse to get rid of. Two days, and that’s assuming you’ve got the strength to move a ton of dead meat when you’re done shovelling.’
‘So we just leave? Just leave and start walking?’
‘Couldn’t put it simpler if I tried.’
‘This is easy for you, isn’t it? Change plans, change gear, keep moving. It’s what you do. But I’m not you, Meroka. I’m frightened and I’m not sure you really know what you’re doing.’
She looked around theatrically. ‘You see anyone else around offering you advice?’
‘No.’
‘Then it doesn’t look like you’ve got a fuck of a lot of choice, does it?’
Meroka went back down to the camp and began to sort through their belongings, throwing aside what they could not carry on foot. Quillon lingered for a while before walking down the slope to join her. Behind him, Spearpoint’s darkness had only intensified, even as the sky paled towards daylight and the steel-cold promise of a new day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They walked into dawn and then sunrise, following the wide, wheel-rutted path that the Skullboys had already traversed, Meroka never once looking back, as if she had seen all that she needed to.
Quillon envied her that pragmatic acceptance - taking it to be that, rather than some fundamental lack of curiosity - but he could not stop turning around to view Spearpoint, always with the hope that something might have changed, that there might be a glimmer of light where before there had been darkness. But as the day brightened, it became increasingly difficult to tell in any case. Spearpoint was no longer a black sliver against night skies, but a distant blue-grey mass, a mountain of impossible steepness, its intrinsic blackness muted by leagues of intervening atmosphere, making it virtually impossible to tell whether there were lights burning or not. Certainly he saw no evidence of movement, no trains or flying things, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some kind of civil recovery in progress. The complex, energy-hungry infrastructure of transit systems would be the last thing to return, in any district.
Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still.
Meroka’s pace was unforgiving, but he still insisted that they stop every couple of hours, either to re-administer the antizonals or to perform enough tests to satisfy himself that he had estimated the dose well. He had been monitoring his watches carefully. While they were no longer keeping synchronous time, the cumulative differences were no more than he would have expected if the zone had remained fixed after the convulsive change of the previous night. They would need to keep taking the drugs, but at least the situation did not seem to be worsening. Based on the dosages he was giving out now, there was sufficient vector-specific medicine in the box to last the two of them somewhere between a week and ten days. When that was exhausted, there were other drugs, less effective, less finely tuned, but which would still keep them alive for a few days more. But not weeks, and definitely not months. The medicines had been calculated to serve him under entirely more benign conditions, where it would only have been necessary to administer a tiny fraction of the daily dosage he was now measuring out.
During their second stop, when the day had brightened even further, he found Meroka kneeling on the ground with a map spread before her. The map was tattered, brown at the edges as if it had been rescued from a fire. Meroka was making corrections to it with the stub of a pencil, crossing out one zone boundary and adding another.
‘You think that’s accurate?’ he asked.
‘Unless you got a better guess, I’m going with it. We hit another boundary, I can make some refinements. For now, this is as good as we’ve got.’
The map had two sides. One face showed the terrain within a few hundred leagues of Spearpoint, the dashed line of the equator cutting almost perfectly through the city’s base. Quillon saw the road or trail they had followed since Horsetown, the point where it met the track where the Skullboys had passed, and along which they were now moving. They had been going due west; now they appeared to be moving in a south-westerly direction, although without a gyroscope or an accurate fix based on celestial navigation, there was no means of verifying this. Aside from the roads and semaphore tracks, a number of landmarks and surface communities had been marked on the map, but few of them meant anything to him. Fortune’s Landing - one of the names he did recognise - lay to the south, at least a hundred leagues from their present position. He knew it to be the nearest large community to Spearpoint, but it might as well have been halfway around the world for all the hope he had of getting there without Meroka’s assistance. Even with the map, he would be all but lost.
The other side of the map was not much of an improvement, but at least he recognised more of the landmarks. Soul’s Rest was the largest community anywhere on Earth, with the exception of Spearpoint, and that really was halfway around the world. It lay far to the west, beyond the Daughters, the three mountains punched in a sloping line with the regularity of bullet holes, beyond even the Mother Goddess, the tallest of all mountains, so tall and wide that from its footslopes it no longer seemed a mountain, but merely a gentle steepening of the ground. It lay west of the shrunken waters of the Long Gash and the Old Sea - marked in black on the map, although he had a suspicion that the waters had retreated even further since the map was drawn. Here, as on the other face, were the sinuous margins of zone boundaries. In Spearpoint, zones were large enough to encompass the precincts and districts of a city. Where Quillon and Meroka now stood the zones were larger still, but the zones on the other side of the map were expansive enough to swallow entire geographies, whole mountain ranges, plains and former seas. Despite the vastly different scales between one side of the map and the other, Meroka was even attempting to redraw the zone boundaries on this side as well, as if it mattered.
Quillon’s eye fell on a patch of the map that was completely blank, a featureless absence to the east of the northernmost Daughter. It was as if all the details and inked shadings had been bleached away.
‘What’s that?’
‘The Bane. But you don’t need to worry about that. It’s a long way from wherever we’ll find ourselves.’ She looked up, the pencil in her mouth. ‘Trust me.’
‘Why isn’t there anything marked on that part? Hasn’t anyone been into it?’ The emptiness, the Bane, was hundreds of leagues across - big enough to swallow everything on the other side of the map.
‘No one goes in. No one comes out. It’s just a big old dustbowl; makes the rest of this cold, dry shit-bucket of a planet look like the Garden of fucking Eden on a good day.’
‘It’s a good job you’re not religious,’ Quillon said sarcastically.
‘Can’t help what comes out of my mouth, Cutter. Don’t mean it correlates with what’s in my head.’ Satisfied with her corrections, she put the pencil away and folded up the map, doing so very carefully, so as not to tear the fragile document. ‘Break over,’ she announced. ‘Got to keep moving.’
Meroka was right about that. They couldn’t stay in this zone indefinitely, even if they had a limitless s
upply of drugs. They hadn’t been born to it, and it was still killing them - just somewhat more slowly than if there had been no medicines. But in the long run, they needed to cross into another zone, one to which they were better adapted. Quillon had only the vaguest idea of the old configuration of boundaries, let alone the new one, so he wasn’t sure how much faith to put in Meroka’s hand-corrected map.
They would just have to travel, and hope that sooner or later the watches registered the shift to conditions they could live in.
Of course, there were no guarantees that would happen. There was no law of nature that said zones retained their characteristics when they shifted size and shape. They were not like countries moving around on a map, retaining political and cultural identities even as their margins shrank or enlarged, even as they oozed and squirmed halfway across the world like roving amoebas. When a zone shifted, almost anything could change - including the very character of the zone itself. Even if there had been a way out of this zone before, a passage into a more habitable volume, there was no guarantee that one existed now. They might be hemmed in on all sides by zones that were even less hospitable than this one.
But they couldn’t think about that. Not now. All they could do was keep moving, and hope that something better lay ahead.
‘Fires,’ Meroka said an hour after noon, pointing to a series of smoke lines rising from the horizon. ‘Bad news for someone. Could be Skullboys burning some villages, or villages burning a few Skullboys. Lot of scores being settled today.’
‘How far do you think we’ve come?’
‘Four leagues. Maybe five.’
Whenever Quillon looked back, Spearpoint did not seem any more distant than the last time. It was as if the whole edifice was crunching slowly along in their wake, following them like a sick animal. He fancied he could make out thin lines of smoke rising from different levels, braided and tugged by the crosswinds and thermals as they rose.
‘And this meeting point? How much further is it?’ Without an obvious scale on the map, he hadn’t been able to work out how far they had to go.
‘Ten, twelve leagues.’
‘That’s what you said last time.’
‘Figured the pill needed sugaring. But rest easy - I’m telling the truth now. We’ll be there by this time tomorrow.’
‘If we make it through the night, with all these machines and vorgs you keep going on about.’
‘You think I made them up, just to gee you along?’
‘I’m just saying. There isn’t any sign of anything behind us. No fires that way, and no sign of anything coming along the same road.’
Meroka slowed and for the first time since leaving the camp, turned to face the way they had come.
‘Your call, Cutter. You can mosey on home now if you think your luck’s in. Maybe you won’t meet anything coming the other way, either. But I’m going on, with or without you.’
‘I’m with you,’ he said, readjusting the strap on his backpack where it had begun to dig into his shoulder. ‘All the way. All I ask is that you tell me the truth. No sugaring, all right? No matter how bad things look, I can take it.’
Meroka began walking again. ‘You think so?’
‘There’s really only one way to find out.’
After a few paces she said, ‘It’s a bit more than twelve leagues.’
‘Thanks.’
‘More like fifteen. And that’s God’s honest truth. But we can make it. We keep walking until we drop. You can rest all you like when we get there.’
‘Pity the horses died,’ Quillon said, gritting his teeth against the ordeal that lay ahead.
They came upon the wreckage and the bodies three hours later, when the sun was a good way towards the western horizon. A yellow-and-black-liveried steam-coach had come off the road and tipped over onto its side, smokestack buckled like a smashed limb, steam still hissing from its ruptured joints. One spoked wheel had broken from its axle and come to rest in the rut. The one that was still tilted to the sky was turning backwards and forwards as the breeze caressed it, squeaking gently. Luggage lay in piles where it had toppled from the roof. Two bodies lay on the ground, flung violently as the coach crashed. From their postures - one head-down, as if they had been rammed into the earth by a giant hand, the other lying on their side with one leg bent under them - it was quite clear that they had not survived the accident or ambush. Perhaps they had even been dead before they hit the ground.
Meroka kept walking so unconcernedly that Quillon began to wonder if she was just going to keep on past the wreck without giving it a glance. He even began to wonder if he was hallucinating it, or that Meroka was somehow hallucinating the absence of a wreck where one existed. Figments and mirages were to be expected when the antizonal dosage began to wear off, or was not quite correct to begin with. A steam-coach, however, seemed entirely too specific to be the product of Quillon’s imagination.
Meroka was fully aware of it, however. Quite casually, she dug into her coat and drew a gun, a long-barrelled, brass-ornamented thing of vague provenance. She had better weapons, Quillon knew, but they would be useless now, their functionality ruined by the passage through the low-state zone of Horsetown. It didn’t matter that they were in a high-state zone again; the iron rule was that what had been damaged remained damaged, for evermore. The only reason she hadn’t thrown anything away, he presumed, was that the guns still had some residual value, either as scrap metal, bludgeoning instruments or as broken goods a skilled gunsmith might be able to repair.
He took out the angel gun. Meroka stepped off the road and crept around the ruined steam-coach, paying little heed to the bodies on the ground. The wagon wheel kept squeaking, an eerie melancholy rhythm that only emphasised the silent desolation of the road. Quillon followed her and knelt by the figure that had landed head-down. It was a youngish man, wearing a dark, long-hemmed coat of tanned animal hide. The impact had broken his neck. Quillon doubted that had killed him, though. There was a bullet hole in his forehead, the wound circular and neat as if it had been made by a piece of industrial punching machinery. Quillon tilted the head slightly in search of an exit wound, but there was none.
‘I was hoping this might have been an accident,’ he said aloud, ‘that they were travelling when the zone storm happened, fell unconscious and lost control. But this man’s been shot.’
‘Shot?’ Meroka called back.
‘Clean through the forehead.’
‘Someone was a damned fine marksman, to hit a steam-coach driver.’
‘It would have been fast. I don’t think he felt anything.’
‘Problem is,’ Meroka said, ‘this wagon wouldn’t have been travelling empty.’
Quillon moved to the second body, the one with the broken leg, and found another dead man. This one was older, with a sharp, red-veined nose, straggly grey moustache, long grey hair down to his collar and small round glasses similar to his own, one coin-sized lens now a star of shattered glass. He also had a bullet wound through the centre of his forehead. The two men must have been sitting high up at the front of the coach, steering it as if it was still being drawn by a team of horses.
‘This man’s been shot as well,’ Quillon said.
‘You don’t say.’ Meroka peered into the now-horizontal windows of the steam-coach, steadying herself on the door handle and the rails either side of it.
‘You sound sceptical. But if someone was a good enough shot to hit one of these men, I suppose they could also have hit the other man. They wouldn’t have had to reload.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, on a falling note. ‘Why did it have to be a family?’
Quillon stood up and made his way over to her. ‘How many?’
‘Four. Mum and Dad and two girls.’
‘Have they been shot?’
‘No. Looks like they just died in here. Zone sickness, I figure. Want to take a look?’
‘Not that I can help them, but ...’ He watched as she scrambled up onto the side of the steam-co
ach and opened the door, then dropped elegantly into the compartment. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looting. What does it look like?’
‘I’m not sure this is right.’
‘Don’t go growing a conscience on me now, Cutter. These people are dead and gone. Anything they can give us that helps us, we take. Pretty soon someone else’ll be along anyway.’ She tossed something out of the compartment, a brown bottle. Quillon caught it - more by luck than judgement - and surveyed the sepia-coloured label and the pale pills the cork-stoppered bottle contained. ‘Something we can use?’
‘I don’t know.’ The label was written in a fussy, antique script with lots of capitals and exclamation marks.
‘Tell me later.’ Meroka grunted. Then: ‘Hey.’
‘Hey what?’
‘Pa’s got himself quite a firearm here. Still has a good grip on it.’
‘Rigor mortis,’ Quillon said, ‘suggesting that these people have been dead at least three hours.’
Meroka’s hand emerged clutching a heavy black weapon with a wooden stock and multiple barrels. ‘Volley-gun. Always wanted to get my hands on one of these. Friend of mine had one once, but—’
‘Is it something special?’
‘Impractical, but pretty good for scaring the living crap out of people. Kicks like a mule, too, ’specially if you fire all the barrels at once. You don’t so much aim as choose a hemisphere.’ She worked a catch and folded down part of the weapon. ‘Breech loader, with separate hammers on each barrel, able to be fired individually or all at once. Good to go, as well. Got off a couple of shots, but the rest of the rounds are still chambered. Now why would anyone walk around with one of these half-loaded?’
‘I’m presuming that’s a rhetorical question?’
‘You either keep the thing loaded, all barrels, or you keep it empty, ’cause you don’t trust it not to go off.’
‘Meaning they used it,’ Quillon said. ‘Presumably against the people who shot those men in the forehead. But where did they go?’ A worm of anxiety was beginning to uncoil in his stomach. ‘Three hours isn’t that long.’
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