Nightpeople (28 page)

‘How come?'

‘He's got an "interest'' in her let's just say.'

‘Ah …'

There was something odd in the way the first man spoke, but she didn't have time to worry about it. Once they'd disappeared, Saria gave them a good amount of time before moving again herself this time keeping her steps silent and light, as Dariand had taught her.

He was alive! The knowledge sent a tingle of joy through her. And if she knew Dariand, he'd keep Slander and his lot occupied long enough for her to get away. Then he'd do the same himself.

The final huts loomed in front of her and Saria stopped in their shadows, waiting to be certain she was alone. Ahead, the desert stretched, rising in a gentle slope to where the moon was hanging low above the nightwards horizon.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of ignoring the call. She thought about turning her steps dayward, back across the plains towards the valley, and home. But what would be the point? It wasn't home any more. Ma Lee had sent her away once. And Dreamer Wanji had died so she'd have a chance to follow the call. A chance to continue nightwards.

Saria!

The call came with a surge of heat through her shoes, echoing her thoughts. It came like another mind pressing gently into her own. Surrendering, Saria lowered herself to the ground, pressing her cheek into the hard dirt. Energy pulsed through her and it was difficult to tear herself away and set off again, to feel the warmth fade to a distant glow through her soles.

At the top of the slope, she stopped and looked back. Woormra crouched, still and lifeless, in its shallow depression, slumbering uneasily through the night. She remembered imagining it on the journey here with Dariand. Then it had seemed exciting, a place of answers. Now, though, she was glad to be leaving.

Out beyond the daywards horizon she caught a flicker of light as a Nightpeople patrol swung through the vault, but it was too distant for even the faintest hum to reach her, so she didn't allow it to concern her. Then she turned her back on Woormra for the final time.

She knew where she was going. The Darkedge. Once there, she'd find a way across. She'd find Jani, her mother. She'd answer the call.

She fell into the steady gait that Dariand had taught her and the desert slipped quietly past.

Something was different. Saria stopped and turned, taking in the landscape.

Under the moonlight, the desert was still and silent. The land, which would glow red during the harsh light of day, slept in muted tones of silver and black. Not a breath of air moved, not a sound disturbed the quiet.

And yet something was different.

Behind her, Saria's tracks were little more than faint scuffles of dust. When she'd started walking at dusk, the ground had been relatively easy underfoot, the sand soft. As she'd walked, though, it had grown steadily harder until she was walking on solid stone with just the faintest dusting of dirt covering it.

Again she turned, scanning the land. Nothing. There was no indication of anything or anybody nearby, but still she found it impossible to shake the sense that there had been some shift, some fundamental change. As though she was somehow even more alone than before.

She caught herself wishing that there was a creature nearby, something into which she could sink, something whose landsense she could borrow to scan the landscape much further out than she herself could manage. She wished the dog was still with her, trotting beside her, its mind open and willing, its senses hers if she wanted to borrow them. Then the memory of how she'd touched its mind at that last moment sent a prickle of coldness through her, and the empty eyes of Dreamer Baanti flashed into her thoughts.

With a conscious effort, Saria stopped herself thinking about reaching. She would never reach into anything again. Animal or human.

Saria!

Even the call, which grew stronger the further nightwards she walked, and the press of earthwarmth it brought with it, even that was a compromise she wasn't entirely comfortable with. And yet she couldn't fight it. She couldn't shut it out like she could the urge to reach, so she knew she'd have to learn to accept it. Perhaps in time she'd even be able to draw strength from it again.

She took a small drink from her water-skin, which was still half full, thanks to careful rationing. She'd have to find water soon, sometime in the next couple of days, or she'd be in trouble. She couldn't go back. Not to Woormra, or anywhere behind her. Even without the call drawing her nightwards, it would be impossible to return. The further she travelled, the more convinced she became of that.

She was the last child of the Darklands, the last Dreamer, and when she'd walked away from Woormra she knew she'd taken hope with her. Her only option now was to follow the path she'd chosen to its end, wherever that might be.

Somewhere behind her, the thrumming pulse of a hummer throbbed out of the nightvault, and Saria turned slowly, scanning the daywards horizon for any sign of it. There was nothing, only the slowly rising whine which floated across the sand and vibrated lightly through her clothes. Wherever the patrol was, it wasn't advertising itself.

This was new.

Since leaving Woormra, there'd been plenty of patrols – so many she'd almost become inured to them. The first time a hummer had filled the night with its sound, not long after she'd walked into the desert, Saria had stayed frozen for ages, crouched below a clump of spiny desert grass.

Now, she didn't even bother to stop walking unless she could actually see the Nightpeople coming her way, which hadn't happened very often. The patrols' paths seemed to take them across her own, a long way either ahead or behind. None had run along her nightwards track, and so none had given her much cause for concern.

Until now.

This hummer was closer than any since that first night, and approaching too, by the sound of it. But unlike the others, there was no telltale thread of a nightsun probing ahead, no light at all. Just that eerie, unearthly hum, growing rapidly louder.

Saria strained her eyes against the nightvault. The moon had not yet risen and the night was lit only by the distant glimmer of vaultlights. Back on the daywards horizon, the three vaultlights of the Child hung low in the sky, almost ready to set. As she looked at them, one seemed to wink at her, a fast blink that came and went almost before she'd noticed it.

The blink of something passing in front of the vaultlight.

Something like a hummer.

There was nowhere to hide, and instead of wasting time and energy Saria simply flung herself to the ground. She knew she should douse herself with water as Dariand had taught her, but her supplies were becoming so meagre now that she dared not. Instead, she just lay prone, scooping as much cool desert sand over herself as she could in the little time she had.

It wasn't much. It didn't seem like nearly enough, but only seconds later the hummer rushed out of the dark sky and roared over her almost directly above, sending a concussive wave of energy pulsing downwards and almost crushing the breath out of her. Looking up, she got a quick impression of something large and dark, of curves and odd angles hurling itself against the night.

And then it was gone. It gave no sign it was interested in her, or had even noticed she was there. Instead it held its course and melted back into the night, the noise of its passage fleeing with it.

Saria stood and stared after it, puzzled, but the darkness had swallowed it whole. She wished Dariand had been there to see it. He might've been able to explain it to her. She wondered if he'd ever seen Nightpeople behaving in that way. It had flown so intently, as though chasing something, not just randomly searching.

The thought of what might have happened to Dariand wasn't something she wanted to consider right now, and so as she started walking again she tried to focus on the call.

It was changing and had been ever since she'd left Woormra. No longer was it just an occasional surge of earthwarmth; now it was a more constant presence. It also brought an unrelenting sense of belonging somewhere else. Somewhere nightwards. It still came in bursts, waking her from her sleep during the day, or grabbing her from her marching stupor, but these episodes were less intense, and the periods between were filled with the reassurance of that distant summoning. It was enough to keep her putting one leg in front of the other and, until tonight, she hadn't thought too much about her new sensitivity to it.

The first traces of dawn were smearing the daywards horizon, and she began to look for a place to stop. Since leaving Woormra, she'd made sure to be well concealed by the time full daylight spilled across the land. Once he was certain that she wasn't in Woormra, Saria was convinced Slander would come after her.

To her left an angular outcrop rising from the flatness of the desert caught her eye. It was little more than a smudge against the horizon, and although it was still too dark to judge the distance, in this arid part of the desert it might well provide the only cover around. She turned her path towards it, but as the morning grew lighter she realised it was further away than she'd thought. It was too late to search for something closer, though, so she kept her course.

Ahead, the dark smear of a crumbling road stretched itself across the landscape at right angles to her course, and as she crossed it a strange sensation of dread filled her.

The call faded. As she stepped off the other side of the road it was gone, the ground below her feet cold and dead like the walls of the council chamber and tunnels back in Woormra.

At that moment, the sun peeped over the daywards horizon, flooding the land with light and revealing the outcrop ahead clearly for the first time. It wasn't a natural uprising of jagged desert stone; it was smooth. It was smoother even than the cut walls of the tunnels, and rose from the desert in an enormous, solid block, the sharp angles and corners in stark contrast to the world of her experience.

The Shifting House.

Unbidden, Dreamer Wanji's words leapt to her memory:
‘It's an empty place. It's where the Skypeople used to do their burning. There's nothing at all left there – no life. Just a shell of earth so burned out it's like a hole in the world.'

‘A hole in the world,' Saria muttered out loud as she studied the building.

Here and there, dark openings resembled windows, the holes uncomfortably like the black pinprick pupils of Dreamer Baanti's burnt-out eyes. The building was higher than any of the huts of either Woormra or Olympic, towering into the morning air like some kind of mountain made by humans. In the brightening dawn it didn't glow red, as most desert rock would, but stayed a dull, menacing grey. If anything, it seemed to suck up the daylight rather than reflect it, making it seem darker in the increasing light.

The sensation of coldness through her feet was distracting. It poured into her legs, making them heavy, but she kept walking and before long came across the remains of another road. The cracked black strip extended straight towards the towering hulk of the building.

She walked along it as through a dream. Even the crunch of her footsteps on the broken surface seemed distant. Soon she was close enough to see other openings in the building, long jagged cracks and gashes running the length and height of the walls, huge fractures where the earth below had shifted and the grey walls opened.

Saria approached slowly. Out in the desert, following the call steadily nightwards, she had felt sharp and alive. Now the coldness was an invisible fog, dulling her senses and cutting her off from the Earthmother.

A line of strange poles circled the building. Something about them reminded her vaguely of the thorn fence surrounding Olympic, but this barrier was different. The poles were cold, round and hard, each identical to all the others. Probably three times Saria's height, they were sunk at even intervals, rising straight from the sand, but with the top part of every pole angled outwards, towards the surrounding desert. Saria took a deep breath and stepped between them.

The ancient structure towered above, blocking a good proportion of the brightening dayvault. The sun behind her was rising fast, but despite it the touch of air on her skin was cold. Instead of approaching any closer, she began to walk in a huge circle, just inside the poles, studying the building from every angle.

The scale of it was breathtaking. She had to crane her neck back to see the top, so high up that even from this distance it appeared to tilt out over her, giving her a sense of vertigo if she stared too long upwards.

The ground around it was hard and grey. Not like the packed dirt of the desert, or the cracked and crazed evenness of the roads, but the same cold, even hardness from which the walls of the building seemed to be created. It was much harder than even the most solid-packed earth could hope to be.

And yet, despite this, the ground was a confusion of faults and fissures, just like the walls of the building. Uneven slabs rose and fell to trip her as she made her slow way around the perimeter.

On the nightwards side the building blocked the sun completely, throwing a long shadow far out into the desert. Passing through it, something at the base of the building caught her eye.

An angular black shape squatted there, deep in the gloom, completely still and silent.

Saria had never seen anything like it before, but she instantly knew what it was.

She froze. From the hummer there was no sign of life, no response to her presence. Her first instinct was to back away, around the Shifting House, retreating out of sight of the strange mechanism.

But where would she go? Away from the building was nothing but emptiness – certainly nowhere to run to, or conceal herself. And on the dead land surrounding the Shifting House she couldn't reach out through the Earthmother and find a hiding place, even if she'd wanted to.

And she was also curious.

She'd never seen a hummer in daylight, or up close. In fact, she doubted that anyone in the Darklands had, even Dariand. He would have told her about it. But here was one, right in front of her, still and silent and grounded, and posing no threat to her as far as she could tell. It didn't take more than a couple of moments for Saria to give in to the impulse to take a closer look.

It was hard to tell what part of the hummer was the front and what was the back. At one end, a dark, rounded dome gleamed, reflecting light back at her. It gave the impression of being not quite fully opaque, somehow transparent. In colour, though, it matched every other part of the hummer – black. Blackness like nothing Saria had ever seen. Darker than even the most lightless part of night, every polished surface of the hummer seemed to glow with lack of light and colour. The effect reminded her vaguely of the surface of the underground pool which fed the well at Woormra.

The sides of the machine slanted in long lines back from the dome, narrowing to where they met at a tapered angle. On top, a collection of oddly shaped protrusions clustered in the centre, a couple of tubes also running back from these towards the tapered end.

Below the hummer, two barrel-shaped devices formed the only contrast to the blackness of the rest of the machine. Mounted underneath and on either side of the dome, both had one surface facing down and forwards which, rather than seeming to absorb light like the rest of the hummer, reflected it back in two pale, shimmering circles.