Half Discovered Wings (46 page)

They would be
moving off again soon.

~

They could see
the end of the Plains. Up ahead the forerunners spied a barely
visible scribble of green: the tree-line of the rainforest. The
party moved on with re-enthused spirit.

By night, one
or two of the acolytes had to stand guard. Recently there had been
noises in the darkness, coming from all directions: the click of
angry teeth, the scrape of heavy footfalls, and the noise of
whipped air as something moved very quickly from one place to
another.

There must
have been at least a dozen of the creatures, whatever they were.
Brother Elkin guessed sanguisuga, lost and starving out in the
wilderness, perhaps drawn to the ultra-thick blackness of the
desert night. The other watchmen had heard snarls and hisses,
frighteningly close by, but had been unable to see anything.

They came closer to the rainforest. They could see the trees
stretching far upward from the ground – a curious change from the
never-ending horizontal Plains. They were only half a day away from
the rainforest when the night set in, and people voted to keep
moving toward the safety of the trees even in the
darkness.

An hour after
dusk, the stalkers attacked.

Plumes of dust rose from the ground a few hundred feet away
as something sped toward the travellers, kicking up a sandy storm
as they came. They didn’t take long to arrive.

They were sanguisuga. Snarling, vicious animals, burnt black
and bald, naked and hungry. They were a terrifying horde, each one
of them ravenous and red-eyed. Their iron teeth glinted in the
darkness as they tore across the landscape, ploughing into the
group of travellers, tearing open bodies and hacking
limbs.

Screams erupted all around Teague. Glancing this way and that
in the darkness, he swung the limp Verlaine up across his back,
gripped her thighs as he felt his small body buckle under her
weight –
Why did I have to come back in
such a pathetic vessel
?
he thought – and then bolted with the rest toward
the forest.

People fell around him, knocked by great speeding bullets.
Someone next to Teague was hit and spun under his feet, cascading
blood from an immense gash up from his waist to his throat. Another
brother, up ahead, was decapitated by a blur and fell, colliding
with a
third
and sending both sprawling across the hard ground.

‘
Come on,’ Teague urged himself, feeling his body weaken
beneath Verlaine, his thighs and calves aching.

‘
Please…’ she whispered into his ear, and he was
so
glad
to hear her voice, to know she was still awake
and alive. He compelled himself to go faster, drawing from an
unknown source of energy.

At least six people had fallen as he ran, getting ever closer
to those trees, and now it seemed that he was in front of the
group; the shrieks and snarls were all behind him. He ran on, and
on.

About two metres in front o
f the first great capsicum tree the ground
was a carpet of fern and bracken. He ploughed through it and then
into the rainforest, snagging himself on branches, feeling
immediately the dampness of the place, the humid oppression. His
feet caught on roots, his hair in the spiny flora clinging to the
trees, his robe in the thick undergrowth. He felt soaked in less
than a minute.

There were
still noises behind him, people crashing through the trees and
fern. Teague couldn’t tell if they were other members of the Sect
or the sanguisuga.

Something whacked against the back of his legs, and then an
injection of adrenaline slowed everything down: his feet out from
under him, falling backward, Sister Verlaine slipping from his grip
and rolling in the plants behind, and then his traitorous breath
escaping as his back crunched against the hard clay floor beneath
the ferns.

Finally there came the sanguilac, rushing over him, carried
by its own momentum, skidding.

Stopping. Turning.

It stood in front of him, knees bent, shin-hooks twitching.
It stooped and hissed, baring its teeth. Scrambling to get back to
his feet, adrenaline releasing its time-slowing grip on him, Teague
managed to stand upright. He got between the thing and
Verlaine.

There was blood under his tongue and he felt the feeling
again, the itching inside him, in his chest, in his heart, as if
his blood had mites. He shuddered, then pulled himself together as
the sanguilac began to move forward. His hands rolled into
fists…

Something fast dropped from the trees in a blur and streaked
across the ground, leaves spouting upward in its wake, and it
knocked the sanguilac back. The things stood and faced each other:
a sanguisuga, wiry and pale, naked and semi-decomposed; and an
indistinct spiritual shape, heavy-set, muscular, smokily
translucent…

The newcomer bared its fangs and its eyes flashed in the
moonlight as the weaker creature snarled and pelted back into the
desert, knocking Teague off his feet as it went. The figure
glittered in the air, visible only as a shimmering red simulacrum
of a man. It hovered, blinking in and out of existence, toward
Teague.

‘
Get away!’ he barked, and squirmed backward through the ferns
to Sister Verlaine.

He checked her over. Her head was facing toward the canopy,
shaded by the darkness of the rainforest. The rest of her body
tilted to the side. She was dappled with light, deathly still. The
skin of her neck was twisted into deep folds. She was dead. He bit
into his right hand, using the pain to fight back his grief. With
his left hand, he pointed at the vague shape.

‘
You leave me alone, spirit.’

It blinked at
him, its stance predatory, muscles collected.

‘
Leave me alone, I tell you!’ Teague was walking laboriously
into the forest. ‘Thank you for your help, but don’t ask me for
anything. I’ll never give it to you.’

‘
The Daemon is looking for
you
,’ said the flickering
shape.

Teague whirled
around, and there was nothing but unsettled leaves where the shape
had been.

‘
What?’ he yelled, looking up into the trees.
‘What?’

He suffered
disturbing images of the black Beast looking at him as he cowered,
his feet burning on the black marble.

‘
You were the first. You
should not be here
,’
the voice called, coming from some indeterminable
direction.
‘
You
found your way out somehow and it has been angered! It looks for
you. I know its thoughts
…’

‘
The Daemon can look all
i
t
likes!’ Teague screamed, suddenly frightened, terrified, and he
began to run. ‘I don’t intend to die again! I’d sooner live forever
here as a wraith than go back to that thing and its
eyes!’

‘
You know its thoughts
too
,’
said the
inconsistent shape, effortlessly following him through the
forest.
‘
You
looked into its black Soul and saw its plans. You know what
comes!
’

‘
If what I saw was true, then we’ll all be its playthings soon
anyway! Leave me
be
.’

‘
We can stop
it
,’ the voice rasped, and Teague slowed
his running. He looked up into the lush canopy.
‘
There is a traveller who can bring an end
to it all.
’

‘
How? How can a man defeat Erebis?’

‘
Not defeat. But postpone Erebis’
arrival. Interrupt it. This man has the power to take all Erebis’
strength away.
’

‘
Who?’

‘
You know. The man who
destroyed you. You know in your heart; it is how
I
know
.’

‘
Joseph Gabel.’

‘
Of course.
’

‘
No! How can he have the power to do such a thing? I won’t
believe it.’

The shape was suddenly right
there
, snarling in Teague’s face.
Hot breath licked him. The features of its shifting face were
painfully familiar to Teague. ‘
Quiet! You
will be quiet! You will listen! You must
understand!
’

‘
What is there to understand?’ Teague snapped, standing, aware
of
that feeling inside him again, like an
itching, flaming snake
. ‘That my killer is
the one to prevent this catastrophe? That my burier is also my
saviour? I can’t fathom such a thing!’

‘
You must understand because
he needs help. Our help.
’

‘
How? Why?’

‘
You know the answers to those
questions!
’

‘
Then how do we find him?’ Teague snapped angrily.

‘
He travels parallel to us
toward Shianti, inside the Great Crater.
’
The smoky red shape pointed, but the trees obscured the peaks of
the nearby range.

‘
You mean Hermeticia. Why there?’

‘
He seeks the cure to his
friend’s illness. He will not find it. It is
incurable.
’

‘
Who is ill?’

‘
Joseph knows what is coming;
his travelling companion told him not long after your ‘death’. He
means to stop it.
’

The shape
began to dissipate, shifting into transparency.

‘Wait,’ Teague
implored. ‘How will I find him on my own?’

‘
He will be coming
soon,
’ it said, pointing north-east.
‘
Listen out for him.
’

‘My hearing
isn’t that good!’ Teague yelled, in time for the thing to vanish
into the trees.

‘
It used to be. Listen to the
voice of your lost spirit.
’

Teague cried
out for further explanation, but heard nothing but a faint
rustling, getting ever distant, and the tiny patter of a few
falling leaves.

Then, a voice like fog in his mind:
I will find you again. We will be rejoined once
more.

And then, just
as suddenly:

Nothing.

*

Twenty-Six

THE OTHER
SIDE

They stood at
the bottom of the great ladder, many metres down below the desert.
Standing now on what felt like sturdy ground, they could see a
small rectangular block of light far in front of them. It wasn’t
close to providing enough light for the members of the party to see
each other, but it was enough to guide them, so they set off
moving, feeling their way through the darkness.

The air was stale and hot. Caeles, who had no trouble seeing
in darkness with his bionic eyes, talked as the others fumbled. He
said how he believed the great door to have been a vent of some
sort, and the corridor an access tunnel leading from it. He’d seen
great circular vents in the walls beside the ladders as they had
descended, where the steam came out before going upward.

The others
murmured disinterested replies, more concerned with keeping their
footing than hearing speculative details about the place’s inner
workings.

‘
These walls are made of metal,’ said Colan. ‘Where would
someone get the resources to build such structures?’

Caeles’ voice came to him through the gloom. ‘I told you,
this is pre-Conflict. Buildings like this weren’t uncommon. I
remember whole fortresses built of zirminium steel; and ships,
giant starships made of it, where all the walls and floors were
metal…’

There was no
debris at all in the corridors. They were indeed clean and
preserved, almost sterile; not a particle of dirt could be seen,
not a single grain of sand. No grime, no dust. It was as if time
had clean-wrapped the whole place and left it in storage, ready for
humanity to come back to it once it was ready.

‘
It’s hard to believe that no-one has rediscovered such a
place,’ said the magus.

‘
The world is a large place, Mister Magus,’ said Colan. ‘You
could search forever and never find what you are looking for.
However, some people get lucky,’ he added, and then collapsed into
an embarrassed silence, very aware of Sarai’s presence next to
him.

Caeles shot a glace at the knight. Over the last few days the
disgraced
Caballero
had insinuated himself into the group well, attaching himself
to the Scathac as if that gave him some kind of cover. Caeles still
did not trust Sarai, who was still a relatively new member of the
group herself, and he held nothing but contempt for the arrogant,
fallible Joseph Gabel, who continued to make misjudgements and
allow his emotions to dictate his actions.

The more they
travelled, the more they realised there were noises coming from
deeper inside the place, the angry hiss and clang of machinery
working in the heart of the complex.