Angel Stations (3 page)

‘What you say?’ said Josh, staring angrily at him. ‘You want die slow?’

‘It’s Mia,’ Elias said, most of his attention seemingly focused elsewhere. He didn’t know if he could do it, didn’t know if he had the power. Always, before, he’d touched them, like Trencher had done, laying the hands on and feeling the light spill out. But Mia was in another room, and that made things very different. But having a gun pointed at your head, he was finding, tended to encourage remarkable levels of motivation.

Something shifted and banged in the room they had left only seconds before, and everyone around Elias froze on hearing it. The only thing in the room the noise had come from was Mia – and Mia was very, very dead.

What was it like, reaching in again, into that terrible place for a second time, finding the thin, delicate cord that led from this world into the abyss beyond life, somehow still connecting Mia’s spirit to her body? Like burying your face in wet, greasy compost and breathing in, he thought. It was the taste and the scent of death, the sensation of a dead soul being pulled back from the brink one more time, back into the light.

It’s lucky I don’t believe in God
, thought Elias,
or I’d burn in hell for this
.

Mik and Josh now had their attention firmly fixed on the room with Mia’s corpse in it. The two men at the table had also moved towards the room door, picking up the two rifles that lay on the table. Nobody, for a few seconds at least, was now paying any attention to Elias. Mik was still standing transfixed directly in front of him, only a few feet away. Elias propelled himself forward, finding it easy to push the kid over onto his back, pinning him down with his knees pressing the metal case into Mik’s chest. Mik’s eyes grew wide with surprise and fright, and could not even look behind him and see what Josh and the other two men were up to.

What happened next lasted only seconds. In his struggle to escape, Mik let go of the case. Elias snatched it up and flung it, hard. Words started to form on Josh’s lips just as the case slammed off his forehead. Meanwhile, the two nameless men with the rifles swung around and raised their weapons, aiming them straight at Elias’s head.

Then they noticed the case, which had burst open across the floor, a fine dust settling amongst shards of broken glass. For the briefest moment, it was as if the whole world had come to a halt.

Elias, still half-kneeling on the floor, realized it could only be the Blight he saw swirling through the air: that same gene-altered alien phage that had already devastated so much of Asia. He turned to see Mik come at him, snarling.

Elias caught Mik’s leg with one hand as the boy kicked out at him, reaching up with his other hand to grasp the handle of the sonic slammer where it was strapped against Mik’s chest. Finding the trigger, he pulled it.

The boy disintegrated. Or rather, the portion of his torso between his upper shoulders and his hips seemed to turn into a fine red mist that expanded rapidly outwards to fill one half of the room, mixing together with the fine, deadly powder of the Blight.

Elias only realized he himself had been shot at when he felt the bullet rip through the side of his arm. The sonic slammer had deafened him, the world around him reduced to death and silence. He groped for his small flechette gun and turned, firing rapidly behind him, while half-scuttling, half-crawling towards the shelter of the long table. He’d been lucky, the bullet hadn’t hit his gun arm, but it turned out that it wasn’t necessary.

Josh stood still in the centre of his room, one hand stroking almost absent-mindedly at the base of his throat. The tiny flechettes had found their targets all over his shoulders and chest, but it was soon clear they weren’t all that was killing him. Elias could feel the Blight working on himself too, as the gun slipped from Josh’s hand, his mouth working silently, his eyes becoming unfocused.

Behind Josh, the two other armed men were sagging to the floor, the rifles slipping from their hands. It had all been so quick, surely no more than a few seconds. Yet Elias was still alive. For the moment. Josh staggered forward, a thin line of drool slipping from his mouth, through air still filled with a mist of blood and Blight. Elias coughed, and coughed again, feeling the strength sapping from his own bones.

He forced himself to crawl towards the door that led back outside, all too aware that he would find more of the Mala Pata beyond it. He reached inside himself once again, trying to summon both the strength to reach the door and the healing light inside him, coaxing it out, willing it to propel his muscles towards the door – and any chance of safety, however slim.

The door opened, and a heavily tattooed face appeared, staring over Elias’s head to take in the attaché case, Josh still standing empty-eyed in the centre of the room, the shattered fragments of Mik’s body . . . everything.

‘Jesus fuck,’ the newcomer gasped, and ran off again.

Elias kept crawling – reaching the door, passing through the door. His hearing was coming back gradually. He could hear people screaming, could understand why. The Blight was still working at him, tearing at his nervous system, and all the time he willed the inner light – the healing light that flowed from his fingers, the same light that had brought Mia back – to resist, to get him out of there, out of the Arcology, away from the Mala Pata.

After a while, the ghost came to him again.

He had silvery grey hair, and walked slowly along beside Elias as he crawled through the now deserted Mala Pata safe house. Not even the Mala Pata, it seemed, were brave enough to stick around for the Blight.

‘Fuck off,’ Elias gasped, once he realized the ghost was there.

‘Now, now, Elias.’ The ghost had lines on his face, but distinguished lines, like an elder statesman or a movie star who’s put his best work behind him. His eyes even seemed to twinkle. ‘No need to be rude. What you did back there wasn’t very nice, was it?’ The words were spoken with the hint of a smile, as if only mock-stern.

‘They were going to kill me,’ Elias gasped. He was getting near to the wide atrium, the great open space filling the centre of the Arcology.

‘I meant Mia, who was once your friend. Bringing her back like that, not once but
twice
. I imagine her pain must have been beyond words.’ Elias knew it wasn’t really a ghost, that its name was Vaughn. But it was hard to think of this wraithlike thing that appeared and disappeared as anything remotely human, regardless of what Trencher had taught him. Vaughn stepped up to the railing, inspecting what he saw below like the king of some abandoned castle surveying his erstwhile domain.

Elias said nothing to that, because the ghost – Vaughn, whatever – was probably right. So he changed the subject.

‘Why don’t you leave me alone,’ he wheezed, pulling himself towards the railing and hauling himself up into a roughly sitting position. ‘I didn’t ask for you – but you keep on coming.’

‘That Blight powder must have been extraordinarily concentrated to do what it did to those men,’ the ghost said, as if ignoring him. ‘Usually it takes days, or at least hours, to strike people down. But look at you: still alive, still moving. Truly, Elias, you are remarkable.’ He said this without the least hint of irony. The City Authorities would be here soon, Elias thought, and he didn’t want to be here when they arrived. His bones seemed to be on fire, the Blight was spreading through his system, but despite his resentment he knew the ghost was right: he was still alive, still moving. He pushed himself from his sitting position and somehow, miraculously, pulled himself upright, holding on to the railing. The world swayed around him, and for a moment he looked down into dizzying depths, the roof of the Arcology only a few metres above his head. He retched, coughed, started to walk. There were shouts in the distance, and he saw people moving, all moving downwards, away from the Mala Pata safe house.

He decided this seemed a good idea, and found his way to one of the bridges, hauled himself across it.

He didn’t look back to see if the ghost was still there, but it was following silently. Voices echoed from far below, too distant to be made out. ‘They’re going to hurt you for this, you know,’ Vaughn said. ‘You let the Blight escape. Imagine the fuss that’s going to cause.’

‘I don’t need your fucking comments,’ Elias croaked, making himself turn around at last. But the ghost – Vaughn – was gone, vanished. As always.

Two

Ursu

It was on the fifth day of the Ceremony of Commencement that Shecumpeh ‘called’ to Ursu, and he found himself awoken in the depths of the night by Master Uftheyan. He had been dreaming of the orchards beyond the mountains, although he had never seen them. But his mother had, before he was even born, and he wondered how he came to dream of something he knew well he had never seen. He wondered what those orchards really looked like.

Not that he was ever likely to find out, the way things had been going recently.

Master Uftheyan was bent with age, his brow grey and mottled, but his eyes remained bright and piercing. When he shoved Ursu awake, he woke to see the old priest’s eyes gazing down at him. The old one was hard enough to read at the best of times but, for once, as Ursu sat up on his rough stone pallet, it seemed to him there was some hint of emotion in Uftheyan’s eyes which he could not readily identify.

The cell had a single window, covered over with wooden shutters inscribed and embellished with the teachings of the Speakers. From what dim light filtered through from the sky beyond, Ursu could tell that it was just after dawn.

His first reaction, on being woken at such a strange hour, was fear – fear that the invaders had launched their final attack, and were now scaling the walls of the city. But as he listened hard, his short, triangular ears twitching at either side of his elongated skull, he could make out hardly a sound. So perhaps it was something else.

‘Get up, Ursu. We all heard it,’ Uftheyan urged with a trace of excitement. Normally the old priest was careful to reveal no hint of emotion. He had been a soldier in his youth, apparently, but never spoke of his military life. There were rumours that he had grown tired of the killing, so had become a Master to remove himself as far from his previous lifestyle as possible.

‘Heard what?’ Ursu asked sleepily.

Uftheyan glared at him, revealing a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. ‘The voice of Shecumpeh,’ he said, in a tone of barely restrained anger. The name he uttered was a compound of words from the old language – the one spoken by the first race of city-builders, before they died amid snow and darkness. It translated, more or less, as
the-one-who-speaks
. Ursu stared stupidly at the old priest, not sure what he was saying.

Then he remembered.

In his dream, he had been walking through the orchard his mother had once spoken of. The smell of ripe fruit had filled his wide nostrils, and his long narrow tongue had flicked out and across his muzzle. It was a familiar dream, but this time he had not been alone; there had been another beside him. But in the dream it had never occurred to him to turn and see the face of that companion. Its voice had been moderate and pleasant, almost musical in tone. But for the life of him, Ursu could not remember the actual words it had spoken.

But, now he took the time to think about it, in those first blurry moments after waking there had been something about that voice – something that frightened him.

He looked up at Uftheyan. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that—’

‘You thought the words of a god would be clearer than that,’ the old man said, ‘like thunder from the skies?’

Ursu nodded. ‘Yes, exactly like that.’ Perhaps he had heard the voice of Shecumpeh after all. To hear the voice of the god, speaking directly to you? Raw excitement filled him, and he began to tremble.

Shecumpeh had spoken to him. And they had all heard it.

This early in the day the city was relatively quiet. Shecumpeh’s House was situated directly in the centre of the city of Nubala, so that the god was at the heart of all things that mattered most in the lives of its citizens. This had always been so, even in the depths of the Great Cold.

Ursu went over to the narrow window and peered through at the empty marketplace below. It occurred to him that almost a year had passed since the last great market held there, but that had been before Xan’s great army had come. As anniversaries went, it was unlikely to inspire much celebration.

Ursu felt his stomach rumble, and he thought again of those orchards from his dreams. Likely the same soldiers encamped outside the city walls had long ago trampled their trees and gardens under their boots and wheels. Out there you were more likely to find the frozen bodies of the elderly, ready for the embedding rituals.

Uftheyan made a sound of irritation and Ursu turned away from the window. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking.’

Then down the clammy stone steps they went, shivering at the chill wind that blew through the window slits. Ursu’s cell was high up in the god’s house, and from there he could just about see over the city walls to the encampments beyond, faint and almost hidden in the misty morning light. After a year, now, war had almost come to seem a normal part of their life. Along with starvation, and endless fear.

The god lived underneath the main edifice, in a cellar created for that express purpose (according to the Order’s holy book) more than forty-five generations before, during which time the city had not fallen once. Throughout the course of a normal year, acolytes such as Ursu were permitted to see the god on only three occasions: the Festival of Frost, the Festival of the Sun, and the Festival of the Waning.

Only a few from outside the Order – the city’s current rulers and various dignitaries and people who held hereditary honoured positions – were allowed to take part in just one of these: the Festival of the Sun.

Into the main hall next to the entrance, a chill morning wind came gusting through the open wooden doors, accompanied by a fragile chink of sunlight. Other acolytes and a few Masters were moving about, hurrying from the kitchens to the stables where the icebeasts were housed, and back again. A few of his fellow acolytes stopped and looked startled when they saw Ursu descend the rough stone steps accompanied by his Master.