The Engineer Reconditioned (28 page)

"My husband recorded here that there is a breach in the fence two miles in from the coast. Only a few miles North East of this there is a building in the forest. In that building are the Proctors." Dagon looked thoughtful for a moment. "What makes you think the breach is still there?"

"Why should it not be?"

Dagon grimaced. "What would you intend should you reach this building?"

"I will wake the Proctors and lead them back through the breach."

"Why should they go with you? Why should they even wake for you?"

"They will. I'm not interested in argument, Dagon. I did not ask you to join us. You said when you first joined us that you believed the Owner to be returning for an accounting and that his Proctors would once again walk the world, yet you show no signs of this belief. I am going there. Cheydar will follow me because I know he would not obey me if I ordered him not to. Eric should perhaps return ... " She looked at Cheydar, then returned her attention to Dagon. "You do not have to come, yet you are, that's your choice. Kindly stop trying to dissuade me from the choices I have made." Dagon bowed his head, "I apologise. You are correct. I do not have the right to make other people's choices for them, even should those choices kill."

Suen turned her face from him. "Here is Eric." Eric came back to the fire with four squirrels, skinned and gutted, hanging on a stick. He was grinning like a maniac. He had been enjoying himself. Cheydar thought it unlikely he would be able to send this son away. He took a pan out of his pack and tipped in a little water. They dined on squirrels broiled with mushrooms and sweet chestnuts. They ate walnuts while they waited for the squirrels to cook, as there were plenty on the ground, then they sat around the fire talking of anything but Proctors and the Owner. It was pointless moving on, as darkness was gathering the forest close about them. Dagon took first watch.

Waking to take his watch, Eric saw that Dagon had apparently not moved all night. So
that is it
, he thought, remembering footprints in frost. He wondered how any man could be possessed of such a stillness.

"You have not moved all your watch," Eric said to him.

"That is true," said Dagon. "The leaves create too much noise."

"How can you be so still?"

"It comes from inside."

Eric did not understand, but was not prepared to admit this. He saw that Dagon had his arm out of its sling.

"You can move your arm?"

"It is healing quickly. This is a good body."

Eric watched him walking back to the embers of the camp-fire.
He is deliberately mysterious
, he thought,
to make us think he is more than we reckon ... or is he deliberately mysterious to cover
that there is something strange about him?
Eric blinked in the darkness. It was all too complicated. Morning brought a thick fog into the trees that coated everything with well-defined ice crystals and brought leaves tumbling down ungently. The fire was roaring up well with the extra wood Cheydar had thrown on it and he kept it within sight as he patrolled, his air gun charged and ready to come up against his shoulder. It would be too easy to get lost in this, and he definitely did not want to be lost now. The chuckling bark came again, to his left this time. Whatever it was it could be circling around to get at the others. He hurried back to the fire. When he got there he saw the other three were awake.

"What is it?" Eric asked.

"Hyeanadon," Dagon supplied. He tossed his air gun to Eric then drew his sword. Eric looked at him with surprise. "Our darts will not stop it if it decides it is hungry enough to attack us." He glanced at Suen who was staring at him white faced. "You take Eric's gun." He turned to Cheydar. "I know, I'm sorry, but I know about these creatures and I doubt you've encountered one."

"Your other sword," said Cheydar, holding out his hand. His own blade was a short stabbing blade used in combat with an armoured opponent. He would use that as well as the sword Dagon handed over. It was light. Just holding it gave Cheydar a surge of confidence. It was so very very sharp.

"Let's move," he said, taking up his pack. "We cannot stay here all day." He led the way back onto the path, sliced a leaf in half as it fell in front of him. Confidence died as the two halves reached the ground and Eric fired one shot. The huge creature made a yipping growling sound, its teeth clashing over where the dart had struck it, then it disappeared into the fog. That sound was answered by chuckling barks from two different directions.

"They hunt in packs," said Dagon.

"Really," said Cheydar, studying the sword he held and wishing he was somewhere else. Eric loaded another dart. He looked no less scared than the rest of them. Of course Cheydar had heard of such creatures. It made him cringe to think of how he let his son go hunting squirrels.

"Remember, they are only animals," said Dagon.

"That's a comfort," said Cheydar. How long had those teeth been? Two inches, three inches? And how high at the shoulder had the creature been? Higher than his own head at least.

"Shoot for the eyes, cut for the legs," said Dagon.

"Yes, of course."

The fog seemed to grow thicker as the morning progressed, and frost formed on loose clothing. Cheydar was thankful for Autumn leaves as the hyaenadons could not attack in silence. Any other time of the year and they would have been dead long since. One hyaenodon would make a noisy growling feint while another tried to sneak up on them. Every time it was the noise of the leaves that gave it away. The leaves also told them that the creatures were still with them all the time between attacks. Two attacks were driven off, steel darts smacking against rock-hard skulls. On the third attack the hyaenodon kept coming. Cheydar dropped his air gun and braced himself with the sword held two-handed before him. The hyaenodon came in a snarling charge, its shoulders and head thick with the blood of its dart wounds. Eric pumped darts into it and it was half blinded by the time it reached them. Dagon strode to meet it, stepped neatly to one side and cut across with full force, his whole body in the cut. A ton of hyaenodon went past him nose down in the leaves, its left forelimb clinging by a sliver of flesh and skin. Cheydar struck down with his blade and it carved meat from the creature's face but did not penetrate bone. Its huge jaws clashed at him as it struggled to right itself. Dagon's sword went in through its side, twisted, came out on a fountain of blood. Cheydar stepped around, hacked down on its neck. Three hacks it look to reach a spine he could not sever. The stink of the creature's vomit and excrement thickened the air. Cheydar drew his short sword to drive between vertebrae, then turned as Dagon bounded past him. Another of the creatures was coming from the other side and only Eric faced it. Cheydar felt his stomach clench. Eric had perhaps one shot to fire. He was dead.

"Get out of the way!" Cheydar bellowed, running after Dagon.

Eric took careful aim, pressed the trigger. The hyaenodon stumbled, shook its head. Eric shouldered the air gun, reached up, and hauled himself up onto the oak limb above his head. Dagon met the second hyaenodon like the first, brought it down, heart stabbed. It died vomiting up its last meal in which Cheydar was sure he saw the chewed remains of a human hand. Eric grinned like a maniac from the oak tree. Suen just kept saying, "Oh my God. Oh my God." But she shrugged away Cheydar's hand when he rested it on her shoulder. A third hyaenodon retreated into the fog.

In the middle of the afternoon the fog cleared as far back as they could see through the trees, and the hyaenodon that had been trailing them disappeared. Then they saw a herd of chalicotheres that were the hyaenodon's usual prey. Perhaps it went after them or returned to the ready source of meat its fellows had become.

The trail began to cut across the face of a steep slope, and after consulting his map and compass, Cheydar led them down the slope to a fast-moving river, with gravel beds between half submerged slabs of rock. Armour-headed salmon swam in the deeper pools hunting trilobites the size of a human hand. They followed this river downstream and as evening encroached they heard the cadence of waves on a shingle beach and came out of forest by the sea, gleaming in yellow moonlight.

"Not a place to swim," said Cheydar, pointing out at a huge fin.

"It's only a basking shark," said Dagon.

Cheydar looked at him with annoyance.

"Is there anything you don't know?" he asked sarcastically.

Dagon looked at him, didn't reply.

They walked on for some while longer until the setting sun illuminated a silver post in the trees above the beach. They climbed above the beach and came upon the post, no closer than five metres. The post was higher than a man and as wide. It was a plain silver cylinder with what could have been runes, or could have been circuit diagrams, etched into its surface.

Cheydar stared at it and felt a crawling superstitious dread. He had been raised on stories about these things, about the power, the death. So many people had died trying to cross fence lines, or by just crossing accidentally. He glanced to his left, into the forest. No trees grew in line to the next post. There was just short grass and lichen on the ground. It was like this all the way along; trees never grew close enough to a fence where their falling might damage a post. No creepers or vines grew, nothing grew that might obscure posts from view. A human, crossing the line between posts would die, dramatically. Animals crossed the line without ill effect. It was just the way it was.

"Where are these words?" Suen asked Dagon. He pointed to a framed area on the post and looked at her. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in sudden anger. "And how are we supposed to understand that?"

"Your husband would have understood it. The language is old-Earth English; the language of scholars, the language that was yours when you came here."

"Ours," said Suen pointedly. She led the way into forest then, keeping to the edge of the trees, away from the death posts.

Eventually they came to an area where trees had fallen on ground turned boggy, their roots clawing at the sky. Beyond this was a break in the ground risen to head height; a recently risen wall of mud. Just before the break, spring water bubbled and new streams were cutting their way into the forest. They moved away from the fence line and got past this by climbing the trunk of a fallen elm. Above the break only a couple of trees had come down. The ground was dry here, but there were deep cracks in it where it had moved.

"Underground river," said Dagon. "Changed its course; undermined everything." And one of the things it had undermined was a death post. The post was tilted at an angle and glassy underground cables exposed.

"Here," said Suen, "if we cross on the side the post is tilted from we will not be harmed."

"It is good to be so certain," said Dagon.

"You do not have to try," snapped Suen.

Cheydar gazed across the line and wondered if he dared cross, even to follow Suen. There was too much dread caught up in the idea. Never before had he so feared death. Perhaps it was because there was nothing here he could fight. He turned to say something to Dagon; anything to ease the tension in him. The snarling bark came just behind him and he was jerked off his feet by his back pack, shaken, then hurled to one side as the straps of his pack broke. He struck a tree and fell to the ground half-stunned and staggeringly tried to right himself as the hyaenodon went for Suen. Air guns cracked and the creature turned, its teeth clashing at the air. Cheydar ran at it, drawing the sword Dagon had given him. He saw Dagon in front of it, sword drawn, ready for the cut, but the creature turned at the last moment and its jaws snapped on the sword and broke it in half. Then it had Dagon in its jaws, shaking him, still running, into fence line. The air filled with lightnings. Clamped in the creature's jaws, Dagon was sheathed head to foot in fire. The hyaenodon went down, releasing him; a burning thing on the ground that after a moment rose into the air again as if impaled on the lightnings. Cheydar saw this, smelt burning fur and burning flesh, black after-images flickering across his vision. Then the lightnings went out. Dagon's blackened corpse dropped to the ground beyond the fence, extremities breaking and falling away in charcoal shells. The hyaenodon was not burnt, but it did not move again. Cheydar gritted his teeth over sickness and horrified surprise. Not him, not Dagon, he shouldn't have died.

"Why did it kill the hyaenodon?" asked Eric, his voice flat.

"The power was there to kill a man. The hyaenodon just got in the way because it was holding him in its mouth," replied Cheydar. They were both standing back by the trees looking at Suen who stood close to the fence and stared at the blackened corpse. What could she possibly say or do now? It was time to turn back and follow David and Sheda to Elmarch. Time to end this pointless quest. Perhaps, thought Cheydar in the most secret part of his mind, for an ending to oaths. Suen had ceased to have a right to his loyalty when she no longer supplied his food, a roof over his head, and a means to decent interment after his death. Only plain stubbornness had kept him with her.

"What will we do now?" asked Eric.

Cheydar paused a moment over his reply and saw Suen take a step towards the fence. He did not believe she would go further. She feared death as much as any and a working fence was certain death. In some stories it had even been described as the fence separating the living world from the land of the dead.

"We will go to Elmarch, perhaps down the coast so we avoid all the Cariphe's lands. We'll take service there. Perhaps the army ... No!"

Suen was striding towards the blackened corpse of the Daybreak Warrior. Cheydar ran after her with Eric close behind him. They did not reach her in time. She crossed the line of the fence, came to stand over the corpse. Cheydar hesitated only a moment at the line, Eric not at all. As they reached her she was breathing heavily and had an insane look to her face. Cheydar realised she had meant to die. The fence had not killed her, perhaps something had gone wrong, burnt out. Cheydar realised he was shaking. He reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder, but at that moment she dropped to her knees and bowed down, sobbing. Cheydar felt sick with fear after the fact. He glanced at Eric whose face was now white with shock at the realisation of what they had done. They had crossed the fence. They were in the Forbidden Zone.