Entangled (27 page)

Slowly the chanting rose in intensity, the air around them grew charged, and Ria again became aware of the presence of some uncanny power. The Uglies were the source of it. She looked down at her beautiful, broken brother – he seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep – and watched, daring to hope, as the web of fine blue light wove itself around him, cocooning him from head to toe. Streams of the same substance poured into his wounded side from Brindle’s hands, and his weight in her lap was lifted as his body floated free of the ground.

Was she imagining, or had some colour returned to his face? Had
his breathing become easier? Were there fewer new droplets of blood beading his lips?
What’s happening?
– she threw a thought-question at Brindle –
Is he getting better?
Her friend gave no reply.

It was a long while before the circle of Uglies broke apart. When they did the blue light that had webbed Hond’s body seeped away and he lay still and silent. At first Ria feared that his breathing must have stopped. But when she put her ear to his chest she could sense its minute rise and fall, rise and fall. There were no more of the horrible rasping and bubbling sounds.

Brindle stood up, reached out his big hands and helped Ria to her feet.

‘Is my brother going to live?’ she asked.

‘Don’t know,’ he pulsed back.

‘What do you mean, you don’t
know?’
Ria was suddenly shaking with fear. ‘You made Trenko better. I saw it happen. You can make Hond better too.’

‘Cases different. No vital organs of Trenko destroyed. But wound of Hond goes through lung. Lot of bleeding inside. Very hard for Uglies to make better.’

Ria could feel tears welling up. ‘So does that mean he’s going to die? Am I going to lose
both
my brothers today?’

‘Hope not, Ria. We sang the healing song and magic entered Hond’s body. We took his pain away. Eased breathing. Sent him sleep. Tomorrow we will know if we stopped bleeding.’

‘But I think you have, Brindle! I think you have! Look!’ Ria stooped and gently touched her brother’s lips. ‘No more blood.’

‘It’s good sign. Tomorrow we will know.’

‘I believe you’ve saved him,’ Ria insisted.

‘Tomorrow we will know,’ said Brindle again. ‘Better for Hond if we don’t move him, but don’t have any choice.’ He looked around the battlefield and scanned the surrounding forest. ‘We already been here too long.’ He returned Ria’s flint knife to her, being careful to hand it over hilt first.

The danger was that other Illimani forces might be somewhere nearby. That was why Ria took the tough decision to leave Rill where he lay on the battlefield. No burial for him, nor for any of the fallen. She could only concern herself with the living now.

From the war party of fifty Uglies who had set out with Ria only thirty-seven remained alive. Six of these could not walk and a further fourteen walking wounded, including Trenko, were needed to carry them back to the safety of Secret Place. Of the seventeen able-bodied fighters still at his disposal Brindle sent twelve more, under Grondin, to bring in the outlying Ugly communities.

That left five to accompany Ria and Hond to the Clan camp on the Snake River. Ria already knew the names of three of this reduced escort – Brindle himself, Oplimar, and the gangling broken-nosed brave called Brigley who’d been one of the first to welcome her outside the Cave of Visions. The other two she remembered from the battlefield for showing none of the squeamishness over taking human life that had doomed so many of their fallen comrades. One was a pink-eyed albino in early middle age. He looked strong, with short, thick legs and a long, massive upper body covered in bulging muscles. He introduced himself as Porto. The second was much younger, lean and very slight by Ugly standards, but in the battle he’d fought hard and fast. ‘I am Jergat,’ he told Ria, ‘and you are good fighter too.’ He held out a skin-wrapped bundle to her. ‘You will need these again,’ he said. The bundle was heavy. With her heart beating faster she opened it and found her five quartz throwing stones nestling within. ‘Brindle told me to collect for you after fighting,’ Jergat explained. ‘That my job from now on.’

Another thing that Brindle did was insist on keeping the captured Illimani with them, rather than sending him with Grondin’s larger group. Keeping the weird bastard alive
at all
seemed like an unnecessary luxury to Ria, but Brindle was stubborn: ‘Wrong to kill if don’t have to.’

‘That sounds wonderful,’ said Ria. She was tired of this side of the Uglies. ‘But think about what it means.’

‘You thinking it means he must be watched all the time, we must hustle to guard him, make sure he doesn’t knife us in back or run off to get other Illimani to attack us.’

‘Right! So can we please just kill him now?’

The prisoner’s expression was steady, almost insulting. Ria allowed her hatred to show. ‘Hey, you!’ she yelled, switching to out-loud speech. ‘What’s your name, you piece of shit?’ But of course he didn’t speak her language.

She crossed the few paces to where he was standing in the middle
of the battlefield, guarded by Oplimar and Brigley, his hands tied behind his back. He was a full head taller than her, with a long mane of thick dark hair, pale skin and fine regular features. She took him to be no older than eighteen. His teeth hadn’t been filed and, were it not for his startling blue eyes, he could have passed for a good-looking youth of the Clan.

She prodded his chest and repeated: ‘WHAT’S YOUR NAME, YOU PIECE OF SHIT?’ When there was no response she tapped her own chest, pointed at herself and said: ‘RIA.’ Then she pointed back at him, and gave him a questioning look. He still didn’t get it, so she pointed at herself again: ‘Ria,’ she said. ‘My … name … is … Ria.’ Then she pointed back at him: ‘What … is … your … name?’ Suddenly his face lit up: ‘DRIFF!’ he barked.

‘Good.’ Ria leaned closer: ‘So here’s how it is, Driff.’ Even though he couldn’t understand a word, she figured he’d get her tone. ‘Give me the slightest excuse and I’m going to gut you without mercy. OK? Got that? You ignorant barbarian.’ She was holding the flint knife, not exactly menacing him with it, when Brindle laid his hand on her arm.
‘That enough, Ria. Please try to think like this – we very lucky have this Illimani. He can teach us lot about his people. Help us defeat them.’

It was late afternoon – shadows lengthening, the air beginning to cool – when they left the battlefield. Hond was still deeply unconscious but the Uglies lashed together a stretcher for him and took turns to be his bearers, conscripting Driff to the task as well. Whenever the prisoner was relieved from stretcher duty Ria noticed that Brindle made a point of walking with him and that the two seemed to have struck up some rudimentary form of communication.

In this way they kept moving through the long summer evening, the last daylight leached from the sky, and night fell around them. The moon had not yet risen and the darkness became almost absolute. They did not pause for rest but it was hard to sustain a fast pace and Ria guessed it would be morning before they reached the Clan camp.

If they managed not to stumble on another Illimani war band first …

She marched beside the stretcher, fingers touching her brother’s shoulder, from time to time smoothing his hair back from his brow. Although he was hot, and his skin damp, she never doubted he would recover if she could get him home.

As they walked she watched the big three-quarter moon rise slowly in the east, flooding the sky with light. It climbed higher and she began to recognise valleys and hills she’d hunted in before. The distance was far – they would still have to march the whole night – but now at least she could take the lead and pick out the best route.

Following a deer path, she guided the Uglies through a forest of ancient gnarled oaks and brought them out by the side of a little lake with still, dark waters that reflected the dazzling moon. They skirted the lake, climbed a steep hill and descended into a narrow winding valley where the hunting for deer and rabbits was good.

As they began the trek along the valley floor a cloud scudded across the moon and Ria sensed more than saw the sudden wild rush of an ambush. Her first thought was the Illimani and the flint knife was in her hand, stabbing and slashing, piercing flesh and striking bone, before she realised their attackers were Clan braves. She saw Hond spilled from his stretcher, Brindle clubbing a man to the ground, Brigley and Jergat back to back fending off a ring of assailants, and Oplimar wrestling with Grigo’s father Murgh. But the surprise and speed of the attack, and the overwhelming numbers of the Clan, meant it was all over in moments. Something hard smashed against the side of Ria’s head, stunning her. As she dropped to her knees she saw Porto go down, and Driff, unnoticed by anyone else, slipping away like a phantom. A second savage blow smacked into the back of her skull, bright lights exploded behind her eyes, and she fell on her face.

The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was rough hands at work, trussing her with ropes, and the hated sound of Grigo’s voice: ‘I told you I’d kill you the next time I saw you,’ he smirked.

The young woman’s cornflower-blue eyes were open wide and a smell of raw sewage wafted out of her mouth, as she and Leoni stood face to face in the long corridor lined with plastic chairs outside the DMT treatment room.
Uggh!
Leoni retreated and averted her nose to avoid breathing more of the toxic halitosis, but the woman followed and crowded her against the wall.

‘What do you want?’ Leoni yelled.

‘I want to FUCK you,’ the woman growled. Her voice had become deep and resonant, like a man’s. ‘Then I want to skin you ALIVE. After that I’m going to eat you right off the BONE.’ She snapped her teeth together: ‘Think you can stop me?’

One word was going through Leoni’s mind and that word was …

(
possessed
).

This crazy bitch was possessed. By Jack.

Leoni turned to run, but the woman was all over her, fat and heavy, smearing her with slobbering, foetid kisses, forcing her squirming tongue into her mouth, groping her breasts.

Leoni got mad. She grabbed hold of her attacker’s hair, banged her head against the wall and brought her knee up into her stomach. ‘Fuck you,’ she shrieked. ‘Fuck you if you’re Jack. Fuck you whatever you are. Just stay the fuck out of my life.’

The woman kept on coming. Her expression blank, she locked her pudgy hands around Leoni’s neck and began to throttle her. Leoni fought back but her eyes were starting to glaze over when she saw Monbiot and Shapira burst out of the treatment room and charge to the rescue.
Useless fucks!
Far from breaking the woman’s stranglehold their ineffectual tug-of-war only seemed to encourage her to tighten her grip. Thrusting her face forward again she planted more slobbering
kisses on Leoni’s mouth and whispered in her ear:
‘You stole SOULS from me. Nobody gets away with that.’

Leoni’s head was spinning, and she’d started to black out, when she saw a lanky long-haired figure looming up – the guy from UC Berkeley who’d kept on trying to talk to her over the last couple of days. He shouldered Monbiot and Shapira out of the way, got hold of the woman’s hands and did something to them that made her screech with pain and let go. Then, despite her great bulk, he swung her round – it looked like a dance move but there was another yelp of pain – and threw her face down on the floor. As she struggled to get back up he put her into an armlock and immobilised her.

‘Hey, Becky,’ he said. ‘Chill, babes. This isn’t you …’

But the woman wasn’t listening. Her pale blue eyes were fixed on Leoni with hideous intent and dawning recognition. ‘I remember you,’ she snarled. ‘We’ve met before!’ She slobbered and drooled yellow spit: ‘Oh, this is going to be so much fun.’ Her eyes rolled and she began to howl like a wolf.

In the previous days, despite his attempts to talk to her, Leoni hadn’t paid any attention to the guy from Berkeley. His British accent – but with odd American notes and undertones – was the only interesting thing about him. Otherwise she’d assessed him as a tall, annoying, badly dressed nobody.

But the way he’d handled crazy Becky called for a rethink.

His sun-bleached blond hair was unkempt and almost shoulder-length. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a week and he was wearing torn and repeatedly patched baggy trousers, flip-flops and a much faded, stained and stretched Burning Man T-shirt. Obviously he didn’t care about his appearance, but once you got past first impressions he was quite cute in a beach-bum sort of way.