Half Discovered Wings (32 page)

Johnmal had
often thought hard about his “gift”, how it worked and how best to
implement it. He could tweak the minds of man and beast alike,
tricking their brains into ignoring the space in which Johnmal
resided; he induced a psychic blind spot that, for all purposes,
rendered him invisible. It wasn’t a word Johnmal liked, but he let
Rose use it whenever she fancied. She had that particular kind of
hold on him.

She said, out
of the blue, ‘I went up onto the roof last week. I sat there for an
hour.’

‘
But that’s wonderful! You weren’t afraid?’

‘
Yes, but I did it. So maybe, if you were with me, we could go
out for a walk together? Just around the outside of the complex,’
she added quickly.

‘
Rose, I don’t want you to suffer on my account.’

‘
I’m suffering in here!’ she said, eyes flashing. ‘In here,
where I’ve been all my life. It’s okay for you. When father brought
you here you’d already been outside. I was only little
then.’

‘
I know.’

‘Did you know who I
was?’

‘
Not really. My step-brother worked for your father, and I saw
you once or twice. You were so little.’

‘
Look at me now,’ she said, sitting straight-backed and pushing
her lips to his, her boyish short nails scratching at the back of
his neck. He reached and clasped her waist, pulled her to him until
their bodies met and he felt the weight of her breasts on his
chest. She pushed him effortlessly onto his back and stripped him,
then settled herself around him in the darkness.

Afterwards she lay beside him the way she usually did, and
talked sleepily. It was this kind of circumstance that she liked to
ask questions she never had the chance or time to ask otherwise.
Tonight it was:

‘
Johnmal, how many more of us are there outside?’

‘
Errants?’

‘
Hmmm.’

‘
Not many. We’re hunted now, like the sanguisuga and the
blacks.’

‘
Do you know any?’

‘
Blacks, or sanguisuga?’ he joked.

‘
Errants, you idiot!’

‘Only two,’ he said
quietly, ‘but I know of several whom I’ve never met. They’ll be the
ones living with us after Cleric is through.’

‘
The other survivors.’

‘
That’s right.’

‘
Tell me about them.’

‘
One is a man who’s old and thin, who lives on the other side
of the great lake. He’s like a king, but very frail. He may die
soon.

‘
Another is a female who looks like a child but never ages, who
lives in the mountains to the west, and has skin like ice and lives
in the glaciers. Some say that she can brave the coldest weather
and breathe underwater. I know she is called Durrdana, and she
lives in a cave near the summit of Mount Gerizim in the
range.

‘Another lives on the
northern continent and possesses strength like yours. He kills
bears with his fists and sells their pelts to traders. I’ve met him
once, but don’t know anything about him or his name. The boss says
he knows him well.

‘
There’s another man who sells fish on the west coast, called
Gideon. He wears rags and acts like a beggar, but he can control
smoke or mist and wrap it around him like a cloak, to go stealing.
He can move vapours as well, I’m told, like poison gas or incense,
which he uses to lure the fishes.

‘
A young woman lives somewhere far south, who they say is a
witch because she can cure some illnesses, like fever, but I know
she is an errant. The boss says he’s spoken to her once, and she
tried to stop his organs from ageing inside his metal body, but
couldn’t. He promised her a place in his new world, just for
trying.’

He stopped and
stroked Rosanna’s hair, which had been loosened from its rings
during their coition. It splayed down over his body right down to
his ankles, like a sheet.

‘
Who’s the other?’ she asked. She looked concerned. Neither of
them liked to be reminded of their boss’ mortality, however
protracted it was. He may be a cybernetic remnant of the Conflict,
as close to immortal as humanly possible, but there were parts of
him that were still alive in the traditional sense, and which would
one day wither and die.

‘
How’d you mean?’

‘
You said you know two errants, and you told me you’ve met the
man who kills bears. Who’s the other?’

For a second
his thoughts rose like smoke, out through his skin and up away
somewhere, where he couldn’t grasp it. His mind went blank. He
could think of no reply, until finally his thoughts came back to
him.

‘
Why, you, of course,’ he lied.

He felt her
grin against his chest, and then kiss him on his shoulder. ‘You’re
sweet,’ she said.

‘
Thank you,’ he replied slowly, and he tried to let the
darkness settle over him and send him to sleep. It took much longer
than he imagined.

*

Twenty

FANCIES
—

‘I can smell
the ashes of Iilyani,’ said Gabel. ‘Can’t you smell it?’

‘
I can’t smell anything,’ Caeles muttered, motioning for his
horse to continue moving along the trail. ‘You’re losing it,
Gabel.’

‘
I might lose my temper,’ the hunter warned. Rowan rested a
hand on his forearm to try and placate him. Anger winged inside so
fierce he felt that pacification seemed beyond likelihood, but he
nodded to Rowan and they moved off once more toward the ghetto
town.

They were only
days away, and the group seemed to bleed nerves the closer they
came. Plagued by the rustlings of the ever-present goyles and the
discomfort of resting apart from one another without the heat of a
fire to console them, the travellers had become weary and
agitated.

The smoke of Iilyani became thicker in the sky.

Not too long before, Rowan had suffered a momentary muscle
collapse, slipping halfway off her horse before Gabel appeared
beside it and caught her. She had fallen into unconsciousness and
spasmed in his arms; they spent the rest of the afternoon in a tiny
clearing between the trees, Gabel treating her with the muscle
treatment Doctor Fenn had instructed they use in such a case. The
power muscle relaxant prevented her from spasming or damaging
herself. Merely a drop was enough to help. The others walked in a
circle around the two like bored vultures, warding off the goyles
that would swarm stationary prey.

After almost an hour of being unconscious, Rowan awoke to say
her limbs were unbearably sore. Gabel explained that she was stiff
from the temporary paralysis the drug induced, locking her muscles
to prevent fits, and Gabel felt disinclined toward letting her back
onto her horse again.

As he was helping her to sit up, a bundle of some fleshy
leathery thing dropped from the trees and landed with a soft
thud
just inches away
from them. As black as soot with taught shiny skin, the small
creature shook itself and looked up at them with tiny
eyes.

It was a goyle. It bared its fangs, but took a fluttering hop
backward as if frightened. It was easy for Gabel to understand why
the creature had been named after the stone gargoyles he had seen
crouched darkly upon the gutters of the church at home. He swept it
back with his arm and called to the others.

‘
Let’s move. The goyles are becoming more
confident.’

The creature
hissed at him as he stood, while the others broke their caravan and
moved back to the horses.

‘
Can you ride?’ the hunter asked Rowan in a whisper.

‘
I can manage,’ she replied. ‘Hush now. I can ride.’

Now they were much closer to Iilyani, yet the prospect of
rest had been wrenched from them; the town was alight with fire,
but now it seemed to be little more than smoking wreckage. They all
silently hoped enough of Iilyani had survived to house them for at
least a night, to revitalise them before they set out. Iilyani was
the last town before the trek through the desert and rainforest
toward Hermeticia.

The evening before they arrived, Gabel heard hoof beats
coming from behind them, way in the distance. The others strained
to hear, but heard nothing for several minutes.

‘
Come on!’ Gabel hissed, his voice hushed. ‘They’re almost on
us. Into the trees.’

They dismounted and
pulled their beasts quickly off the trail, as far into the forest
as they could before the sound of horses raced to meet them. Now
several yards from the trail and crouching low, they allowed the
fern and bracken to serve as cover.

‘I
hear it now,’ Caeles whispered quietly. ‘But how did
you—’

‘
Shh
!’

A small army of twenty men, dressed head to foot in white,
charged toward Iilyani on horseback. Silver chain mail was sewn
over their chests, wrists and calves. The slack tops of cloth masks
thrashed behind them with the rush of the horses. On their
shoulders, Rowan could see emblems stitched into the white fabric
of their robes: a red crucifix, contained within a red
circle.

The ancient
sign of the Luxers.

They heard the cries of the horsemen as they charged past,
screams of jubilation or joyful anticipation, yells of
‘
Yee-haw
’ or
‘
Kheia
!
’, forcing their bone-white steeds
to pound the trail as they sped. Some carried burning torches,
which rippled the air above them, and several had longbows strapped
to their backs. They vanished after a few moments, nothing more
than a fearful memory.

‘
The Luxers,’ the magus breathed. ‘Iilyani is in
trouble.’

‘
There’s nothing we can do,’ Caeles said, getting his horse to
stand. He’d somehow persuaded it to kneel, as if during his long
life he had learned to speak to animals better than he could
people.

‘
Should we wait?’ asked Rowan.

‘
We might as well get moving,’ Gabel told her. ‘We couldn’t
catch up with them, not unless they turned around.’

‘
Think they might?’ Sarai asked, her all-green eyes glinting as
they slid from one member of the party to another. The others saw
in her a deadly instinct kicking in, Scathac responses pushing
through any inhibitions.

‘
It’s possible,’ Gabel replied.

They mounted
their horses and set off down the road. They would reach Iilyani
two days later, without having met the Luxer riders.

~

It took them ten minutes to cross the great clearing that
circled the smoking ruins of the town, even on horseback. A feeble
river ran forty degrees around the outside of the settlement,
vanishing into a muddy streak just beyond the tree line. It met a
lake a little north of the Plains, where it had become drained with
the heat. It could barely supply the demand of six dark-skinned men
that walked dejectedly from the town and back with pales, filling
the wooden buckets with the muddy water and using it to sooth the
still-hot embers of the decimated buildings.

One of the men saw the party and called to the others. They
all came, bare-chested and sooty-faced, to confront
them.

‘
What’s your business here?’ one asked. His face was creased
with grief. Sweat ran from his furrowed brow and off his high
cheekbones. His eyes danced from Gabel to Caeles to Rowan, and then
settled on Sarai and the magus respectively.

‘
We’d just like to stay a night or two,’ the old man said,
moving in front of Gabel, who had been about to speak. ‘We’re
friends to you and your town.’

‘
Friends!’ cried one of the other men. Tears rolled freshly
down his face, and he wiped them away with a forearm. ‘Friends! We
need friends here! This place has become an ashtray.’

‘
We saw the Luxers coming down the trail,’ the magus explained
cautiously. ‘We hid from them in the trees. We would have stopped
them—’

‘
Don’t worry,’ said another. ‘You were lucky you didn’t witness
this latest attack.’

‘
We saw the town burn a while ago,’ Gabel said, talking to the
leader. ‘How many times have they attacked this place?’

‘
Many, many times. Nowadays they come once a week, or ten days
if we’re lucky. They don’t care if they kill the women or
children,’ the leader replied, and now he too had tears in his
eyes. He said to the magus and Sarai: ‘You must know our grief. How
many times have your loved ones been cut down?’

‘
I’m lucky to have avoided the hot ends of their torches thus
far,’ Sarai said. ‘But I’ve lost a son and am searching for
him.’

‘
We may be able to help you,’ the leader of the five said.
‘Please. I am the Mayor’s son, Saykaan. I have the authority to
grant you stay for two nights in what is left of
Iilyani.’

‘
Thank you,’ said Gabel, ‘and we’d be more than happy to help
you with your duties here.’

‘
The fires are all out for now, so you needn’t bother yourself.
Rest if you can and move on, as I might not be able to keep you
safe here for long. Few here are trusting of outsiders
anymore.’

He led them
through the rest of the clearing, which was made of clay that was
pressed so hard that it looked almost polished. There were a few
footprints, and some patches of wet where presumably some water
being ferried from the river had been spilt. Other than that there
was nothing but a thick trench carved by horses, coming from the
trees to the town.