Angel Stations (21 page)

No
, Vincent thought firmly.
That way madness really does lie
.

Eight

Roke

Beyond the open flap of his tent, Roke glimpsed a hunched shadow flitting between tall marsh-roots that dangled their wide leaves down to touch the ground. Hesper’s Crown was low on the horizon, hanging over the distant mountain peaks to the south. He stepped to the open mouth of his tent. Two guards stood there, both wearing the distinctive jewellery that marked them out as native to the city of Roke’s birth. He asked them if they’d noticed anything, knowing that if it had been anything natural out there prowling on the edges of the camp, they would have seen it too.

When they told him they’d seen nothing, Roke nodded, then told them he would be leaving camp for some minutes. He needed time to think, which meant getting away from the camp.

But Seheren, the taller of the two guards, looked worried. ‘Master Roke, we were charged by the Emperor to protect you. If something happened to you, the blame would fall on us, and we’d deserve it.’

‘But I am still in command, and your orders are to follow my orders, Seheren. I don’t do things like this lightly, and I’ll only be gone a short while. If too much time passes, certainly come looking. But I assure you that that won’t be necessary.’

The expedition was, by necessity, large: a consignment of troops, plus servants, cooks, even some wives, and a small herd of icebeasts which could serve as mounts, or as a source of food, or be traded if necessary. Roke carried papers that guaranteed them safe passage through any of the cities that now formed part of Xan’s Empire. But now they had crossed the Northern Sea, a journey of two or three days by sail. Roke had not relished it, being trapped on one of several tiny vessels, whose constant swaying had not been good for his health. We were meant to be land creatures, he reflected, unsuited for the open seas.

Now they were here on the far northern shores, a long way from Tibe, and it was already considerably colder than the southern climes Roke had grown used to. Although his formative years had been spent close to these shores, revisiting this region failed to bring about any kind of nostalgic glow. Instead, it seemed merely bleak and forbidding.

Leaving the camp behind, Roke started walking towards the open land fringing the marsh-roots. When a small brown canthre came sniffing after him, he shooed at it. Looking old enough to be ready for its first embedding, he could as yet detect no glint of intelligence in its eyes. It soon gave up and wandered back to the camp.

He was alone now, the lights of the camp flickering distantly through the trees. He stared after the canthre. One day, he would die, and his flesh would be fed to other such canthres in what was known as the embedding ritual. His intelligence and his soul would flow into their receptive flesh, and they would learn to walk on two legs, and to speak.

After a few moments, a shadow moved from deep between the marsh-roots and slipped forward, hunched low. Roke could see the bright intelligence burning within its eyes, as if with some fever. The Monster opened its mouth briefly, showing, again, funereal rows of pitifully small black ruined teeth.

‘Whatever it is you have to say, Monster, say it now,’ snapped Roke. ‘I have to return to the camp.’

– Call me Sam, it said. – It is my name, after all. Do you remember what I told you about the true nature of your gods?

Roke felt a deep chill spread through his bones. ‘All too well.’

– What do you know of the city of Baul?

Roke stared at the Monster. It seemed even more ethereal, even less real, in this place of cold and shadows. ‘A story, a myth – the lost city of the gods, where the world was created. It’s a fantasy.’

– Baul is
real
.

Roke listened intently as the creature continued.

Ursu

Ursu remembered dying: he remembered the water sucking him down. He had no memory of spilling out of the deep tunnel caves and into the open air. He had no idea how long it had been before they found him by the river’s edge.

His memory was hazy. He remembered a voice calling to him, urging him to leap into the well – an insane, suicidal act. The tribesfolk who found him told him he had actually been dead, but that he had come back to life, raised by the god they had found him clutching.

His rescuers were from one of the many thousands of nomadic tribal families who criss-crossed the icy wastes extending between the great city settlements of the north. The routes they followed were sacred, the same paths taken by the migrating icebeasts since long before the time of the cities. The routes were now marked by great stone pillars dotted everywhere. Some of these tribes were better trusted by city-folk than others, but they all embellished their sparse nomadic existence by trading goods from one city to the next. These ancient trade routes wound through valleys and through mountain passes.

At first, the effigy of Shecumpeh was nowhere to be seen. He tried to mumble the god’s name to the tribes-folk tending to him, but they said nothing in reply. Whenever they did speak, it was in their own language, of which Ursu had no comprehension.

When he had first come to, bound and sightless, he had poked out his tongue. When it encountered dry, rough cloth, he realized he’d been stuffed into some kind of sack. The ropes were tight around his feet and arms. Long hours passed, giving him plenty of time to speculate in the most negative ways on what had happened to him.

It was only with nightfall that his restraints were cut away. When released, the cold summer light of Hesper’s Crown dazzled his eyes with its great pearly band stretching across the horizon. When he could focus, he saw he lay in the centre of an encampment, surrounded by tents, with small open fires dotted around in the semi-dark.

Somewhere far out on the tundra, he reckoned. He looked up, and saw a series of low hills extending into the distance. They were strangely familiar. Much closer were snow-apple trees scattered over their lower slopes, sufficiently ordered to show that they had once been carefully planted in long rows. Now wild roots clung to them, and sap-leeches, and he realized this was the city orchard.

He saw several adult females nearby with their newly embedded offspring tottering upright as they learned the unaccustomed art of walking on two legs. Unembedded canthres also darted here and there on all fours, their long snouts quivering in the cold air. A distant rushing of water indicated the Teive, which also nourished the orchard. The tribe had probably followed the course of the river for part of their never-ending journey. Some of the females came to him and tended to his wounds, all minor scrapes and bumps. They told him the story of how he had been found.

While this was happening, a couple of adult males sat by him, watching him carefully, their deep-set dark eyes glittering in the starry dusk. They sat with their traditional tribal knives – short, serrated affairs with handles made from leather dusted with baked icewort, so that the handles glittered in the night – lying handy before them, in the dust.

‘Where am I?’ he croaked.

‘Priest?’ said a voice behind him. He turned to look into a pair of wary eyes. A young female, not much older than himself. She pointed at his chest. ‘Are you a priest?’

‘Yes. I don’t know. No.’ What was he indeed? ‘I used to be.’

The younger of the males barked something in his own language at the young female, who hissed something back. She turned to Ursu. ‘He wants to know if you’re the one the soldiers are looking for.’

Ursu fought a powerful instinct to fold his ears flat against his head. As he felt them quiver above his scalp, he flicked them alert, trying to hide the gesture of fear. ‘What soldiers?’

She eyed him unbelievingly. ‘You’re from the city,’ she said firmly, ‘and you had something with you. I think those soldiers want it badly. You were lying by the river when Eif found you.’ She pointed to the young male who had spoken to her.

Eif was studying him intently, an unpleasant look on his face.

Ursu asked the question uppermost in his mind. ‘Can I go?’

The young female seemed to find this amusing. She turned to Eif and mumbled something to him. Eif stared at Ursu with contempt, but what was it, Ursu wondered, that brought that glint of fear into Eif’s eye?

He realized she was questioning him on behalf of their whole tribe, which consisted of perhaps a little over thirty individuals of all ages, from youngest to oldest, not counting the canthres. ‘But you’re our guest,’ said the girl, and giggled.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ Ursu suddenly felt defeated.

‘That depends,’ said the female. ‘My father hopes to trade you to the soldiers. He would have done so already, but he thinks he can drive the price up. He believes the thing you carried might be the god they are looking for, and they may be stupid enough to pay a lot of money for it – and for you.’

Ursu blinked. They had Shecumpeh? ‘You still have it?’

‘Yes, we have your little clay god,’ said the older of the two males, his ears distinctively rich with jewels. The girl’s father, perhaps? So she wasn’t the only who could speak in a civilized tongue.

‘You . . . intend to sell it to the soldiers?’

The older male slid forward quickly, in a fluid motion. Ursu felt his ears instinctively flatten in fear, but he forced himself to keep calm. It wasn’t easy. The older male nodded slightly as if he approved.

‘You know, the soldiers flayed some of your priests to discover its whereabouts.’

‘I don’t know what’s been happening.’

‘You knew enough to escape with your god.’ The older male leaned back on his haunches, withdrew his dagger, and held it close to one of Ursu’s ears. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do, then. You know what it signifies if I cut off one of your ears?’

Ursu nodded. It was the sign of an outcast, a criminal, and he’d never be able to find shelter or aid, not even from others in the priesthood. ‘I understand,’ he said.

The sound of voices rose from the edge of the camp, and Ursu heard the distant, heavy whuff of an icebeast approaching. Xan’s men, Ursu realized, seeing the sudden expressions of fear around him.

‘Ree, Eif.’ The older male gestured at the two younger ones. Ree? So that was her name. The older male, he was sure, must be the chieftain.

Suddenly a couple of tribesfolk scrabbled forward, pushing him down on the mat he had been sitting on, one clamping a hand over his mouth as he started to protest. After tying his limbs together again, he was unceremoniously shoved back into the same sack he had woken in. At least he was not to be handed over to Xan’s army just yet.

He wriggled around in the sack for a moment, until he heard another voice, loud and aggressive, in a strange, foreign accent. Just then an additional weight thudded onto his back, pushing his snout against the ground. They’d thrown a blanket or a carpet over him, he realized.

He listened hard, the fur on his skull prickling. Everywhere, voices chattered incomprehensibly amid the sound of icebeasts snorting, snuffling and braying.

Some time later, long after the unwelcome visitors left, they let him out of the sack again. This time he blinked in early morning light. Ree was standing next to him, a knife in her hand. Eif sat again by a fire, his expression still inscrutable.

Strong hands gripped Ursu’s shoulders from behind, and he was propelled into one of the tents. As he fell onto rough furs still imbued with a faintly milky, rotten smell, the older male with the jewelled ears kneeled beside him, turning his knife over and over in his free hand.

‘You did good, keeping quiet like that. And I want you to understand that we don’t want to harm you. But we won’t let you go either.’

‘If those soldiers suspect you have the god, they’ll slaughter all of you and take it anyway,’ Ursu said as the other got up to leave, sounding a lot braver than he actually felt. The other studied him for a long, cool moment, then shook his head.

‘You Nubalans were always a pitiful lot,’ he said. ‘Imagine using someone like you to steal their god away to safety. Didn’t they teach you anything about life outside your walls? The soldiers won’t touch us. If they did, every other tribe between the ice and the sea would shun them, harass them, steal their cattle and their supplies. The tribes are greater than any army of city folk. Remember that.’

And then he left, leaving Ursu on his own. Ursu waited a few seconds, then crawled to the entrance of the tent and peered out.

Two or three pairs of watchful eyes sat within several metres of him, their owners’ wickedly long knives clearly visible in the dull morning light. Ursu slowly pulled his head back inside the tent.

Ursu woke again with a start, and listened to two voices arguing. One of the voices was an incomprehensible gabble of words.

‘I don’t trust him. Why does it have to be you, anyway?’

‘Shut up, Eif, and leave me alone.’ The harsh reply was barely above a whisper. So Eif could speak the Nubalan tongue, Ursu realized; although he had chosen not to before.

‘I’ll tell Yé.’

‘Go shit in your own bed,’ came the reply, and then he knew it was Ree. So Yé had to be the one with the jewelled ears. A shadow fell over the door of the tent, and Ursu dropped his head back, pretending to be asleep as she came in.

‘Wake up.’ She kicked him hard in his side. He rolled away from her, in case the knife was next. Instead she knelt to set a plate of desiccated fruit on the furs where he had slept.

‘I heard you arguing with your boyfriend,’ he wheezed.

He was pleased to see the spark of anger in her eyes. ‘Eif is a worm-headed idiot,’ she said. ‘He stinks worse than you do, and he tries to touch my fur when nobody’s looking. I told him I’d cut him, but he still won’t leave me alone. Not that you care. They’ll soon sell you to Xan.’ The girl stared at him wildly, then ran out.

He drifted into sleep after a while, more from boredom than fatigue. He had given up watching his guards, whose attention seemed unwavering.

The orchard was ripped apart, blasted, dark. Immediately he knew that Shecumpeh was with him, and he tried to turn, not knowing what he would see. The same small clay statue sitting in the dirt? For some reason, that thought frightened him.