For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) (20 page)

“How do we find it?” Kane repeated. “They talk about a town called Wormwood, a place that lies on the frontier between the Dominion of Circles and the world we left behind. If we can find that then we’re free.”

“You think Arno will let us?” asked someone else.

“He’s not our keeper,” Kane said. “We’re grateful to him of course, but there’s only one who could tell us what to do and if He is dead then I say we do whatever feels right.”

Kane thought about that. Could God be dead? It seemed unlikely. Whether He still existed or not, He had not played a significant role in Kane’s life. There had been no sign of His mercy or kindness on the fields of battle. He couldn’t have been ignorant, didn’t they say He heard everything? And His name had been called so many times by the dying. Hadn’t Kane even uttered it himself as the bullet holes let his blood run out into the grass beneath him? Yes, he had. And if God hadn’t cared to involve Himself then, Kane wasn’t inclined to allow him a say now.

“And if He’s not dead,” Kane continued, “and the doorway to the mortal world does lie open, it can only be His doing. In which case He wants us to walk through it.”

“Maybe it’s all been part of His plan?” asked another voice. Kane didn’t recognise the speaker; it was one of the many whose heads had been worn down to the bone, interchangeable off-white faces with unnaturally voracious smiles.

“Isn’t everything?” he replied, not believing a word of it but only too happy to peddle such thoughts if it got the crowd on his side.

The murmurs turned into full conversation now as they all began to talk amongst themselves. He had set a fire burning here, he realised, and all it had taken was a few words.

“Be still,” he said, waving his hands for quiet. “We don’t want to wake the others.”

“But surely we should all discuss this?” That was Rachel Watson again.

“Of course,” Kane replied, “but there is something else to consider. You notice how they all talk as if the...” he left a pause here, for maximum effect, though in truth he had his audience well and truly under his control, “
things
that live here, the
demons
... don’t wish us harm? That we were trapped here by our own guilt, or confusion?”

There was a mumble at this. Even though they had all taken the opportunity to leave once offered, the issue of culpability was still uncomfortable.

“Well,” Kane continued, tugging at his belly, “I sure as Hell know I didn’t do this to myself.”

There was a mixture of agreement and humour at this.

“How about you, Rachel?” he asked, addressing her directly, “you pluck your own eyes out? Or you, George Oskirk, you try and suffocate yourself in that sand pit? All of you, look to your wounds, your pain, you do all that to yourselves?”

Again, a murmur of consideration. For most of them, they had fallen victim to cursed landscapes, wild animals or the traps they had subconsciously wished into existence. Certainly though, some had fallen foul of the demon castes. While they had not been charged with the heavenly role of chastisers, there was no question that some played merry with the mortal souls that cluttered up the Dominion with their wailing and begging. Some had done it to line their pockets, some simply because they could. Looking around, staring at each other’s wounds, at the haunted look in their neighbours’ eyes, Kane’s words had weight amongst the crowd.

“Has it occurred to anyone that all of this... the offer of freedom, of paradise, might just be a trick? A way of torturing us some more? Building us up to knock us back down?”

“I don’t believe that,” came a voice. “Arno’s a good man, he wouldn’t play us false.”

“Who says he knows?” Kane replied. “He might be being played for a sucker the same as the rest of us.” He shrugged, his dangling fat quivering as it was hoisted up to reveal his feet. “All I know is that I don’t trust anybody anymore, not completely. The first opportunity I get I’m going to make a break for the world I left, the world I know... I hope that many of you would want to join me. But I’m not about to make such thoughts public in front of all of them,” he gestured towards the camp, “not until I know who’s who and what’s what. Who’s my enemy and who’s my friend. When we know who we have on our side we can either make a stand or a break for freedom. Until then, we play it clever, we talk amongst ourselves, we deal with only those we know we can trust. There could be demons hiding amongst us even now! Waiting for the chance to drag us all back to the pain and misery we’ve only just put behind us.”

That caused a little panic, people looking around, judging, paranoid.

“We’ll be careful,” he said, “we’ll be safe, and we’ll talk again soon.”

And with that, Kane left them to their private conversations, satisfied that he had begun the shift in power he wanted. Soon, these people would no longer be looking to Arno for leadership, they’d be looking to him.

WHAT AM I DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE REVOLUTION?

(An excerpt from the book by Patrick Irish)

T
HE BRIEFEST GLANCE
at Arno’s progress reassured me that trouble was brewing for that noble man and his partner. Kane was almost a mirror of Atherton, the soldier who was not content to follow, who could never truly rest until he had stirred up a mob. What the result would be I would find out in due course, first I wanted to know what had become of Henry Jones. The man who had set all of this in motion, but not—as was unquestionably the case with Atherton or Kane—out of a lust for power but rather through bitterness and, as much as the word seemed unsuited to him, love.

Was there ever such a conflicted emotion? It brought euphoria and blood, creation and destruction. I would not wish to live in a world without it—though it had been some time before I had met someone towards which I was inclined to feel it, at least romantically—but I could only dream of the lives that had ended in its name. Perhaps that’s the writer in me thinking, is it love that takes the blame or the person who cannot endure it? We are inclined towards the tragic, we inventors of fictions, an unhealthy desire, perhaps. Unhealthy or not, I asked the room to find the man.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A GUN FOR A HUNDRED GRAVES

1.

“N
OW HEAR ME,
” said the voice of Henry Jones, echoing out over the plains outside Golgotha, “I am the God Killer, I am the wasting, I am the bullet in a thousand backs. I have taken the Exchange and toppled it. It didn’t please me. Will you risk the same? There’s a new power in the Dominion, and it is the ultimate power, the only power. It is me. And you would do well to remember before I come looking for you too.”

Preacher listened to those words. He stirred them around in his head as if he were looking for a dead fly in a bean stew, then swallowed them. It would be what it would be, he decided, climbing onto his horse, despite its usual complaints, and continuing his slow progress towards civilisation.

He had been lost in Saul’s Hex for the best part of three days. Allegedly, the area was named after a demon who had fallen foul of a local landowner. The demon cursed the soil and now it was a plot of land that stretched and contracted while you crossed it. In theory, the field was no more than an acre, in practice, some had been known to lose themselves in it for years. Preacher, having only skirted its edge, had been lucky he had camped out there, blithely ignoring the siren calls for help that came from deeper in. He was not a man naturally inclined towards helping others, so it was no hardship. He was lucky that he had enough provisions to keep both himself and his horse alive; had he chosen to eat the fruit that grew in Saul’s Hex he would never have found his way off it. The apples that hung there brought confusion rather than nourishment. He had bought a couple of packs of dried meat from a vendor on the road outside Chatter’s Munch. It was magically enriched, the vendor claimed, so that a small cube of it could keep your energy up for a whole day. That was certainly true, though Preacher found the hallucinations a distraction and he’d found riding with the runs almost as uncomfortable as the horse beneath him.

His first promise to himself on leaving the field had been to find somewhere that offered proper food and drink. His belly needed rewarding.

The outpost was the first opportunity to present itself and, despite the mess out back (when the trash in your bins appeared to be talking to itself, you just knew you had a major hygiene problem) he decided there was nothing they could serve that would make his guts riot any worse than the dried meat had.

The owner sat in a rocking chair outside the front of the hut, surrounded by ramshackle tables and chairs. The creature contained aquatic blood, vestigial fins jutting out from its wrists and ankles, its eyes large and resting on either side of its head. It sprayed itself with green liquid from a can, alternating between dousing its scales and smoking a pipe so large the bowl rested in a cradle on the ground next to it. The pipe’s smoke bore a faint orange tint and when Preacher caught a breath of it, it made everything glow for a few moments.

“What is that you’re smoking?” he asked.

“You’ve got to take your pleasure somewhere,” it replied, “and who wants to look on a view like this without a little pharmacological enhancement?”

Preacher could see the creature’s point. The landscape was a dirty yellow, the road lined with trees whose leaves looked like broken glass, glistening with the blood from careless birds.

“What’s that you’re riding?” the creature asked him.

“My horse.”

“Horse? Never heard of one. Like a rakh, is it?”

The species was known to Preacher, though he had never owned one. “A different beast, but it serves the same purpose.”

Not that his horse gave exemplary service. Preacher wasn’t much of a burden, he’d been mortal once but his time in the Dominion had worn him down, altered him as sometimes this place did the most susceptible souls. He didn’t know where the magic lived, whether it was in the air he had breathed or the soil beneath his feet, but over time he’d begun to change. Now his outside appearance better reflected the man inside. He had lost a couple of feet and a few stone, his skin dry as sand, his fingers and toes little more than claws. He was a nasty little runt, a wizened, ugly bastard. Still the beast struggled to carry him; tired and undernourished, it limped its way across the Dominion, always appearing to be minutes from death. He took some pride in the dedicated regime he put it through, consistently rescuing it from the point of physical collapse with a burst of food and rest only to run it into the ground once more. He figured he could keep the thing alive for some time as long as he kept alternating between the carrot and the stick.

“Hungry?” asked the outpost owner.

“Ravenous.”

“I’ve got some ribs good to go. You like Gwanish?”

“No idea,” Preacher admitted. “Is it a local dish?”

“I guess, maybe, I invented it. Some folks love it, others say it makes their stomachs bleed. I’ll let you try a spoonful. Best not to risk a whole portion until we know how good your digestion is.”

“Maybe I’ll stick to the ribs.”

The creature shrugged. “It’s all better than dirt and fresh air, which is about all you’ve got to look forward to on this road for a few miles.”

“Then I’ll take my fill. You got drink?”

“I wouldn’t get through the day without it. I’ll get the gas on first then bring you beer. Tie your animal up and grab a seat.”

Preacher did so, doing his best to be upwind of the pipe smoke so he might clear his head a little before the meal arrived.

“You hear that man earlier?” he asked the owner on its return. “Henry Jones?”

“The God Killer?” the creature nodded. “Always someone wanting to rise to the top of the shit heap. Why people can’t be satisfied with carving themselves a little slice of life and eating it to the full I’ll never know. Never satisfied, some people.”

“Sounds dangerous to me,” said Preacher, “like he wants to set the whole world burning.”

“Good luck to him.” The creature had brought a tankard of warm ale. “Shit don’t burn so well.”

Preacher took a sip of the ale. It was good and he set to work at it with enthusiasm, hoping the food would be of similar quality.

It was, though the ribs were small and, he suspected, more likely to have come from a domestic animal than anything found on a farm. The meat was tender and the sauce hot enough to clean his teeth. The Gwanish also turned out to be pleasantly edible, like a jambalaya made out of something that wasn’t quite dead yet. It wriggled in his mouth but the spices kept it from making a break from his plate and he shovelled down extra portions.

Leaning back in his chair to enjoy another tankard of ale, he watched his horse work its way through a bucket of slops.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got anything I can smoke that won’t make me see visions for a week?” he asked the owner.

The creature went back into the hut and, after a good deal of rattling and cursing at the furniture, returned with a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers.