The Gods and their Machines (15 page)

‘They’re warnings and holding curses. There’s a disease in there. I’ve heard of this place, this is Falkrik House. We’re not going anywhere near it.’

‘But it’s the first sign of home I’ve seen in two days. What disease? Who says the place is infected?’

‘Do you see any people?’

‘So? It’s just deserted.’

‘Listen to me. I’ve heard about this place,’ Riadni urged him away, talking as they walked past it. ‘The company that owned the mines around here, they built it. They had
scientists
working here, they were doing things with the rock that was pulled up out of the mines. They’d been here for a couple of years when people started falling ill. My uncle lived near here. He worked in the mines and he said that the scientists discovered a disease in the rock. Nobody knew where it came from, or how it spread, but it was the people who worked here who caught it; most of the miners didn’t. They called it Falkrik’s Bane. It made blisters come up on your skin and your teeth bled and you threw up and …’

She stopped abruptly.

‘You got diarrhoea?’ he completed her sentence.

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Some people even swelled up, like corpses, only they were still alive. At least, they were at first. The whole place was closed down, and the people taken away.’

She was staring at him, her face turning pale.

‘It’s okay,’ he reassured her. ‘I’m just sick from the water. We’re warned about it when we travel. Ours is sterilised with chemicals, so we’re not used to the water in other countries. It’s not a monster disease; it’s just the runs.’

Even as he said it, he wondered if the disease they had found in the rocks could be carried in the water. He shook his head. They had been drinking the water in the hills
above Falkrik. Water didn’t flow uphill. He stopped and examined the buildings, remembering the reports of a plague in Bartokhrin and the conversation he had heard from the railway room came back to him. The two strangers had talked to his grandfather about a disease like the one Riadni described. And they had said it was already spreading.

‘You know, now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard about something like this recently. Maybe we should get out of here. Better safe than sorry, yeah?’

Six

D
aruth looked at the message scrawled on the piece of paper and held his breath. They had hidden out in a basement flat in an unremarkable terraced street, where he had put Benyan to rest in a room with no windows. After the hazardous journey, they were relatively safe there…and now this. The message was quite clear. The Blessed boy was to be killed. He had never heard of such an instruction before. Why would they go to all this trouble, only to kill him now?

‘Master Elbeth has said it must be done,’ said Helthan, the man who had handed him the message, ‘and that you are to contact Thomex Aranson yourself.’

Daruth looked up sharply.

‘Not to execute him,’ Helthan assured him, ‘simply to deliver a message. We have the man’s grandson. From now on, the old man will be our eyes and ears in the military. Your instructions are in the envelope.’

A smile spread across Daruth’s face. It was a master stroke. To have a spy so high up in the ranks, what an opportunity! He turned his mind to Benyan’s death. It would have to be
sudden. If Benyan suspected that they were trying to stop him from completing his task, he could be dangerous. And the Blessed had uncanny senses. The thought of bearing the brunt of a martyr spirit’s revenge sent a shiver down his spine.

‘See to the boy … make sure it’s done before I get back,’ he told Helthan and the other man with them. ‘I want to get out of here as soon as I return. Be quick, don’t give him a chance to anticipate you. I am off to see Mr Aranson.’

Benyan sat in his room, chanting in one voice and then another as the ghosts passed control between them. The man who had sung the lullaby prayer was outside, he could sense him with two others. He could not tell how this sense worked, but it was as if he could smell souls, through doors or even walls. Their position could be marked and followed without any effort at all. Even now, he knew one was
leaving
the building and the other two were coming towards him. His eyes snapped open.

The atmosphere had changed, the men who had been leading him to his target were about to stand in his way. He lurched up off the floor and threw himself against the wall next the door. The door burst open and the one named Helthan fired a pistol at the point where Benyan had been sitting. The pistol had a silencer that muffled the shot. The moment he saw that Benyan had moved, Helthan turned reflexively and got off one more shot right in Benyan’s face. The bullet merely grazed his skull, but the muzzle flash scorched his face, blinding him. Benyan barely felt it. He was already reaching out and seizing Helthan’s jaw, his limbs moving like a puppet’s as the Lenttons manipulated
him. A twist of his wrist snapped the man’s neck and he threw him across the room. The other man ducked in through the doorway. There was the sound of three silenced shots and Benyan felt two impacts in his chest and one in his hip. But the Lenttons lashed out, a bone in his left wrist cracked as it bent the barrel of the gun, then he slammed his right fist into the man’s sternum, breaking it. His hands grabbed the sides of the man’s head and he charged forward until they hit the far wall, his attacker’s skull taking the full force of the impact. When he slumped to the floor, Benyan felt the life leave the man’s body.

Even as it did, Benyan himself collapsed. He had been badly damaged. The will of the ghosts urged him on to his target, but his body was failing. He could hear a bubbling in his chest and felt bone grinding against bone in his hip. He dragged himself blindly across the floor of the flat, but his strength finally gave out under the front window that faced a light-well below the street. He clung desperately to the image of the two men and the boy, the rage of the ghosts bruising his spirit, but it did not matter now. He had failed Shanna. He had lost paradise.

The voice on the telephone had a Bartokhrian accent and Thomex immediately sensed that it was the voice of a man with purpose, someone serious.

‘Thomex Aranson?’

‘Yes?’

‘Listen carefully. Do not interrupt. We have your
grandson
. He landed his little yellow biplane in a field when he
ran out of fuel. He is now in our hands. He will suffer if you do not do as we say. He will suffer if you try to involve the authorities. He will suffer if you try to deceive us in any way. Say “yes” if you understand.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Be in the Victovian Commerce Museum in one hour. Be alone.’

There was a click and then the dull tone that told him the other end had disconnected. Thomex put the receiver back on its hook. He sat there for a few minutes, deliberating. Then he picked up the phone again. Two minutes later, he put on his hat and coat and wheeled himself out of the office. One of the company drivers helped him into a car and drove him to Stock Market Square, leaving him outside the Commerce Museum. He rolled himself in and stopped in the main aisle by the telegraph exhibit. It was nearly closing time and there were very few people there.

After he had finished pretending to read the narrative for that exhibit, he started pretending to read the one for the
elevated
railway. A man came up behind him, acting as if he was reading over Thomex’s shoulder.

‘Don’t look around. Just listen. I am putting a piece of paper in your pocket. It has a radio wavelength, frequency and instructions for the use of a code. You will use these instructions to inform us of any military operations that will affect the Hadram Cassal. Any violence suffered by our people from now on will be visited upon your grandson. There will be further instructions in the future, but that is all for now. Say “yes” if you understand.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. We’ll be hearing from you, Mister Aranson.’

Thomex waited for a minute and then looked around. The man was gone.

They had not heard the dogs or any other sign of pursuit for some time. The night was clear and well lit by the moon, so they kept walking after dark, careful to avoid any farms or other settlements that they came across. When they came to a stream, they waded up and down it for several hundred yards, getting out and back in again to leave a few false trails before following it east as far as they could and then settling down for the night at a bend where the water grew deeper and trees overhung a small clearing. Chamus hung up the parachute again and then dashed off into the bushes as his bowels threatened once more. When he came back, he was surprised to find Riadni building a fire.

‘We need to wash as often as we can,’ she told him. ‘Dogs find a clean quarry harder to follow. Wash your socks and your underwear too, dry them by the fire. If we’re going to be doing a lot of walking you need to keep your feet and your … you need to keep clean and dry, or you’ll get
foot-rot
and the … the other …’

‘I get the idea,’ Chamus held up his hands, ‘although I think I’ll wait until after we’ve eaten. Isn’t the fire a bit of a risk?’

‘We’re sheltered here, so the fire won’t be seen,’ she replied as she took out some of the food they had gathered and prepared two pots that she had in the saddlebags, ‘and there isn’t much wind to carry the smell of smoke or food.
We need it, or we won’t eat.’

Riadni took a burnt piece of wood from the edge of the fire and ground it down between two stones. She brushed the powdered charcoal into a canteen half full of water, put the cap on and shook it. Then she handed it to him.

‘It’ll help … with your diarrhoea, I mean.’

‘Thanks,’ he said and took it with an awkward smile.

The taste made him gag. It was like drinking burnt chalk.

The food took some time to prepare and Chamus was ravenous by the time it was ready. There was a stew made up of mushrooms, potatoes, onions, basil and some other herbs he didn’t recognise, and to go with it they boiled some eggs and had some wild plums for afterwards. It was not what Chamus would have considered a lavish meal at home, but after a day of walking on an empty stomach, it was a banquet.

When they had eaten their fill, they rested for a while, then took discreet turns to bathe and do their laundry further downstream. With that done and the embarrassing ordeal of hanging the offending items out to dry achieved, Chamus took first watch. Riadni loaded the pistol and showed him how to use it, then spent some time in prayer before
crawling
into the tent.

The night grew overcast and dark and Chamus stoked the embers of the fire as a chill set in. His eyes were next to
useless
in the gloom, but he listened intently for any sound that was out of the ordinary. The quiet was unsettling and at the edge of his hearing he could hear the damned whispering again. It was barely audible, a breathy, haunting collection of voices. On the positive side, his bowels were returning to
normal. Riadni’s remedy seemed to have done the trick.

Careful to avoid staring into the fire and losing his night vision, he thought glumly about what his parents must be going through. He wanted to be able to tell them he was alright. He knew his mother in particular would be going out of her mind with worry. He checked his watch. It would be time to wake Riadni in another hour. He wondered what she would have been like if she had grown up in Victovia – probably just as stubborn and wilful, but maybe more relaxed; she always seemed to have a point to prove. He thought she would have made a good pilot. It was a pity she would never get to know the world outside Bartokhrin.

Chamus’s head jerked up. He had fallen asleep.
Something
had changed about the night. Everything was that little bit more still, and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He slowly turned around, peering into the darkness, and his gaze came to rest on a pair of eyes
reflecting
the glow of the dying fire. Whatever the creature was, it was beyond the light cast by the flames. But those eyes were hungry and far enough apart to suggest a large head, which would have large jaws and be mounted on a huge body. The thing made no sound. But it was coming gradually closer. Chamus’s breath came in strained, short gasps. Forcing
himself
to move, he reached carefully for the pistol, which stood with its barrel propped up against a rock. The creature prowled around him in a circle that grew ever smaller. It came slowly into view, drool hanging from jaws full of
saw-like
teeth, a high arched back bristling with stiff hair, a coat of mottled black and brown camouflage, ears that lay flat back against its skull as if to push its gaping mouth further
forward. He wanted to call out to Riadni, but was afraid to do anything that might trigger an attack. He lifted the pistol, but had forgotten not to drop the barrel.

The small lead ball rolled down the length of the barrel and dropped out the end in a small shower of black powder. And with it went his life. He saw the dark shape of the animal squat, its powerful haunches drawn up and he knew it was about to leap at him. There was no time to reload the gun. Aiming the empty weapon, he cocked it and fired. There was enough powder still packed in the chamber to let off a small explosion. The beast let out a frightened snarl, turned and lunged back into the darkness.