Half Discovered Wings (51 page)

He fell
back.

She looked over at the hunter, who seemed to be awake but
breathing hard, lying on his side. The knight squatted nearby,
keeping watch. He looked like a great horned dog, crouched by a
kill and waiting for its master.

‘
You know,’ said Caeles, ‘you’ve been gone for so
long.’

‘
Not that long,’ Sarai said.

‘
Through the war, I never … I liked the blue, best. The pink
was nice, but the blue … was…’

‘
Caeles,’ she said, seeing his eyes close. She shook him and he
started, as if woken mid-dream.

‘
I wish it had been born,’ he said quietly. He ran a hand over
his blood-spattered face, and she saw the star, dark against the
back of his pale hand. ‘Sorry.’

‘
It’s okay. It’s fine, Caeles.’

‘
No, sorry. It was … Can you…?’ He stopped, brow furrowed. He
tilted his head slightly. ‘Are they roses I smell? Or is it,’ he
said, trying to reach up but unable to, ‘your skin again? I
remember you liked to…’

‘
Caeles,’ Sarai said. Her green eyes swam with tears. ‘Rest,’
she said, putting his hands flat. He kept trying to lift them.
‘Just rest.’

‘
Oh God.’ He spasmed sharply, grabbed her hand and nearly
crushed it. He coughed violently and blood hit her in the chest.
‘Oh God, it’s not right, you can’t tell her…’

‘
I won’t,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Just—’

‘
No, listen to me.
Don’t tell
Rowan
.’

From over near the caravans, Rowan looked up. The magus held
her, but she pushed against his chest, and walked slowly
over.

‘
Don’t worry,’ Sarai said. She saw Rowan just behind her, who
stood unsteadily for a moment, then knelt, taking his
hands.

‘
What is it?’ Rowan asked, and Caeles looked over at her in the
same way he had been looking at Sarai. His ruined chest, a hollowed
drum, rose and fell arrhythmically, and his eyes were bloodshot.
The colour seemed to have drained from his irises and his lashes
dripped blood.

He said, ‘Don’t tell her. About what’s wrong with her. She
can’t know.’

Eyes closed,
lips parted. The strength in his hands turned to water, and they
fell to his lap.

‘
What?’ Rowan asked, holding his cheek in her hand, putting the
other on his damp arm. ‘What?’ she asked again, with tears.
‘What?’

‘
She’s not ill,’ he barely whispered. ‘She’s just … shutting
down. She’s … like me. Different. Cyborg.’

Rowan froze
for only a second, then shivered ferociously as she shook him.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Wait—’

The magus
appeared next to her. He put his hands under her arms and pulled
her slowly back, and she stammered as he lifted her to her
feet.

Caeles
groaned, twitching his fingers. Sarai moved over to touch his lips,
and he leaned into her. The water dripping from the canopy above
steadily increased, loud and omnipresent.

‘
Claire,’ he said hoarsely, ‘I trust you, love. Keep my secrets
safe.’

The body went limp. Sarai was too weak to hold it up, and she
moved awat. The corpse slipped from the tree trunk and settled,
half-curled, in the darkened grass. The patter of falling raindrops
made the whole rainforest seem too vast, too hollow to be real.
Plasticised organs and shards of coiled metal lay like wreckage
about the body.

Sarai stood
quickly, feeling the wetness on her knees and stomach, where she
had been cradling the dying Caeles.

‘
He…’ she said quietly. No-one heard.

‘
What did he mean?’ Rowan cried tearfully. ‘What was meant by
that?’

The magus, beside her, stood in pained silence as she stared
at him.

‘
No, it can’t be true,’ she said. ‘It can’t!’

‘
Please,’ said Colan, his metallic bulk towering over her. A
gauntleted hand reached out to comfort her, and she knocked it
back.

‘
Get away!’ she yelled.

She pulled away from the magus and began to run into the
forest, the others unable to stop her, but she stumbled across
Gabel’s folded form and froze, eyes wide. She gasped, reversing
then, running back toward the caravan and disappeared into a small
wagon. She quickly tied the canvas behind her.

~

Her head was spinning and it was making her feel sick. She
clutched her stomach and tried to put together what she had seen
just a few minutes ago: a dark winged figure gliding across the
clearing to Caeles’ caravan and pulling him out, dragging him
helplessly across the wet ground, then flinging him like nothing
against a tree, right across the clearing. The demon had flown
across to him, and with clawed hands rammed his skull into the
trunk, torn open his chest and stomach, slicing through thick metal
as if it were water, pulling out pink organs and splattering blood
for metres around.

It then stepped back, as Caeles slipped to the ground, and
put its hands to its head as she screamed, and suddenly, in a coil
of black smoke and mothscales, the monster was suddenly
Joseph
, standing there
bloody and alone, over the body.

Of
course his monstrous secret made sense: the red gleam to his eyes
whenever his emotions got the better of him. The way he had
identified the thrum of the Luxers’ distant horses before any of
them had heard a thing. How he’d seen Hînio Colan through the heavy
mist of the Resting Place before Caeles.

Caeles who, in his dying state, had said that Rowan wasn’t
dying but
shutting down
; an ancient machine that had finally run out of power. Could
it be true? Her memories before twenty months ago were
non-existent; she couldn’t remember her childhood, her old family …
All she recalled was the Father of Niu Correntia, finding her dazed
and confused in the forest. She recalled how he’d taken her back to
the church and looked after her, even after she had begun to
deteriorate; when her skin became more and more pallid, her
strength spiralling away as if made of steam.

‘
No,’ she stammered, feeling the nausea again. It wasn’t true.
How could it be?

She felt fiery rage toward Caeles, who had kept it secret.
She picked up a large obsidian chest, which must have weighed a
hundred pounds, and crushed it to splinters in her hands, cutting
the flesh.

What was she? Another ancient relic from the war? A secret
weapon? Why make her so human, so real…? Caeles didn’t need food,
or water, or sleep. He could go on for days and days, and then only
need to rest his eyes for a few hours to recharge. But she ate! She
slept! She
bled
!

But, she thought wearily, tiredly, she had survived this
long, and her illness was indefinable, and she could crush obsidian
chests with her bare hands…

‘
Irenia,’ she wept, putting her cut palms to her face in
prayer. ‘Irenia help me, please. Please…’

~

The nomads of
the camp were very superstitious. They demanded that Caeles’ body
be taken away and buried, lest the angry spirit that previously
occupied it linger for too long. They were also displeased at
having what they called a metalman in their camp, and admonished a
numb Gabel for bringing it to their homes. They were glad it was
dead.

They were, however, troubled. In their folklore, metalmen
were indestructible, like gods. The strength of such a man was
unequalled by any except another metalman, and finding one torn
open like a paper bag made them uneasy. A group of three men,
entirely shaven including their eyebrows, gathered around a small
fire and chanted, wringing chains of small beads in their hands,
and drawing pictures in the dried mud. Though their language was a
derivation of the travellers’, some words were similar, and the
word
monster
could be heard repeatedly. Colan believed the three men to be
shamen.

The magus had asked that the knight and the ninja bury the
body. Gabel had disappeared, having wandered away in the night. The
old man had assured them that he would be back, and would be safe,
and that for now the nomads would have to be appeased.

Colan managed
to pull the body upright, and Sarai had the strength to lift his
legs. They carried him for five minutes into the deep forest. They
found a place where the foliage was light and the earth soft, and
began to dig with shovels provided them by a nomad farmer.

For most of the morning they dug, making a grave at least six
feet deep, their work confounded by the steady rain that turned the
soil to mud, which slipped back down into the hole. They kept
digging, even when the grave was just a muddy slush, and the
shovels picked at nothing but water.

Eventually the grave looked deep enough. Just as they
finished it they heard the peal of thunder, and the rain
intensified. Quickly, together, they pulled Caeles’ body across the
mud and slid it into the hole. It landed on its back, the arms
pushed up because the grave wasn’t wide enough. Water bubbled up
from around it, squeezed out from little pockets of trapped air
underneath. The mud continued to wash in, refilling the hole
without the toil of shovels. The bloodless face was enveloped by
liquid earth, until the grave appeared quite empty
again.

Colan and Sarai looked at each other, soaked by rain. With
silent agreement they began pushing in the last of the dirt,
filling the hole completely, and putting Caeles’ to rest. Sarai
knelt and prayed, though she was not a pious woman, and the
armoured knight stood behind her, a black metallic sentinel in the
darkness of the flooding rainforest, with his clawed hands on her
shoulders.

~

Colan and
Sarai had been gone for about five or six hours when the man
appeared at the magus’s wagon. Rain beat against its curved roof.
The magus had been sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed,
waiting for the visitor.

‘
Come in,’ he said calmly.

The visitor
said nothing, but removed his hat and placed it behind him as he
sat on the wooden lip with his feet and hands still outside. He was
rubbing his palms together in the water that ran down off the
wagon’s top.

‘
Can’t get your hands clean?’ the magus asked.

‘
I’ve had this problem all my life.’

‘
That’s an exaggeration.’

‘
All right. Since Rebekah, then.’

‘
Rebekah. The woman whose life you could not save, nor the life
of the child within her womb. Both slaughtered by an enemy always
out of reach, it seemed. Yet you caught him, did you not? And you
killed him.’

‘
Like the beast he was,’ Gabel said. ‘But not before he killed
Bethany, who had only just begun to fill the gap that Rebekah had
left.’

‘
And what kind of a beast are you?’ asked the old man. His eyes
were still closed. The patter of the rain outside was like an army
of teeth-chatterers sitting in and amongst the trees, behind the
leaves, hidden in the grass: a freezing throng, waiting for the sun
to come out.

‘
I don’t know,’ said the hunter. ‘I came to you for
answers.’

‘
Answers can destroy a man, Joseph. You are a hunter, and a
factotum. A mercenary. You’ve lived all your adult life knowing not
to ask questions, that answers mean nothing. Do you not find that?
That answers are entirely, and inevitably,
unsatisfying?’

‘
These are answers that I
need
. And I know that you can give
them to me. What happened to me?’

‘
You changed,’ the magus replied. ‘But the question is not to
what, but
from
what. Don’t interrupt. Listen to me; this is why I’m here.
You want to know what you are? Who you are? You are Joseph Gabel,
and you are the monster that Rowan saw. The monster that killed
Caeles, fuelled by your own anger and hatred. This is something
that has always been with you, Gabel. The nature of the hunter. The
lust for death. Do you remember Caeles, after he had fought in the
streets of Iilyani? His body covered with blood, his chest heaving,
his hands dripping thick red. Do you remember…? That isn’t a
rhetorical question.’

‘
Yes,’ Gabel said, rubbing his palms together.

‘
You are of the same ilk, you and he. But you are also
something else, and you have always known this. You have just
never
known
.’

The visitor picked up his hat and donned it. Then he kicked
away from the wagon’s rim, but held open the canvas for a second,
letting the rain in. The outside was much lighter, and he was only
a man-shape to the magus, standing there quietly.

‘
What can I do about it?’ Gabel asked.

‘
Nothing.’

‘
I might hurt someone else.’

‘
You will. Only next time, it will be someone who deserves
it.’

~

They had
started burying the corpse just after first light, and now it was
past noon. The rainforest was thick with heat and insects. When
they came to the edge of the camp, Sarai stopped. Colan waited for
her to speak. In her hand she carried Caeles’ silver wakizashi,
fastened securely in its onyx-black scabbard.

‘
You’re leaving us, then,’ she said.