Authors: David Gunn
Chapter 15
IT IS SO COLD THAT THE INNKEEPER’S NIECE NODS WHEN I offer her my coat. She’s carrying a plate, plus a fresh bottle of beer. The plate has a lump of goat’s cheese, a slice of bread and a dollop of chilli jam.
‘What happened to the stew?’
Her scowl says this is better; then she realizes I’m teasing her and blushes in the light of the lamp she’s carrying.
‘Put that out.’
She kills the light.
‘No point making yourself a target.’
The girl glances round the courtyard and resists the urge to tell me it’s locked and all of its windows are shuttered. In turn, I resist telling her that once you’ve learnt combat skills you keep practising them, even when they’re not necessary.
‘This should do,’ I say, settling myself against a wall.
It takes me a few seconds to struggle out of my coat. And the girl’s eyes widen when she spots my metal arm. ‘Lost it to a monster. Bigger than me, with slit eyes and armour across its chest.’
She thinks I’m joking.
‘I’m serious.’
‘Must have hurt.’
I hide my grin behind the bottle of beer.
Truth is, shock carried me back to the fort, and the lieutenant poured so much brandy down my throat that the entire week after I lost my arm is still a blur. He could have used battlefield morphine.
But we didn’t have any.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Sit down.’
She begins to settle herself next to me. Pouting when I pick her up bodily and put her on my lap. Now we can’t see each other and it’s hard to wrap my coat round her shoulders. So I swivel her towards me, by which time I’m definitely interested and she’s grinning.
‘That’s better,’ I say.
Her name’s Mary. She’s nineteen.
Maybe twenty. She’s not sure.
Mary’s father died and then her real uncle died and her aunt married the innkeeper, who isn’t really her uncle. She calls him that because it keeps her aunt happy. She stops to check I’m following.
I am, I’ve known families like that too.
‘So life’s OK?’
She’s not sure she’d go that far. But it could be worse, she agrees.
The bread is stale and the cheese so hard it cracks rather than crumbles. The chilli jam is so hot that sweat breaks out across my scalp.
Just the way I like it.
When I’ve eaten enough I offer her what’s left, and watch as she chews her way through the bread and wolfs down the remains of the cheese. She giggles when I wipe chilli jam from her chin with my thumb. And she doesn’t protest when I take the plate and put it on the ground beside us.
Guess we both know what’s going to happen.
Not surprisingly, her kisses taste of chilli and goat’s cheese and what was left of my beer. She raises her chin and opens her mouth and locks one hand round the back of my head. I like a woman who knows what she’s doing. As the kisses get harder, my hand drifts and she opens my coat to make access easier.
She shivers.
Unfortunately, her shivering is from cold, and not excitement.
There’s undoubtedly a point at which fucking becomes impossible because your brain simply can’t deal with your body being that cold. This isn’t it, and I suspect for me that it’s not even close. Mary, on the other hand, shivers so hard her teeth begin to chatter.
‘Here,’ I say. ‘Let me.’
Fastening her blouse, I wrap my coat tight around her and button it all the way up, ending with the storm fastening at the collar. Then I lift her slightly, until she gets the idea and kneels over me while I undo my combats and snap free her panties. One yank at the hip is all it takes.
Stuffing them into her pocket, I spit on the fingers of my good hand and find one place where she’s definitely still warm.
This time there’s a grin to match her shiver.
Positioning myself, I grip her broad hips through the coat, and then I position her in turn, lowering her onto me.
‘Fuck,’ she says.
The grin on her face is looking less certain. So I hold her frozen in place until she nods, and then lower her more slowly. She takes her weight on her knees. Very slowly, she comes to rest and then lifts away.
I can see the shock in her eyes.
A second later she slides down again and winces.
It takes another three goes before she can drop onto me without gasping. And then she’s away, and her hand comes up to grip my skull and her kisses become fierce and she buries her head against me to muffle her cries.
‘Oh shit,’ she says finally.
I like women who enjoy themselves.
There was a time when I bought my sex in brothels. In the Legion you get the women no one else wants and the ones everyone else has already had. The whores hate us because fucking us tells them how far they’ve fallen.
Mary doesn’t want the coin I offer.
‘It’s not like you asked for it,’ I say, returning the silver to my pocket. Her eyes watch it disappear, but she doesn’t change her mind. Asking for money is my definition of payment. Anything else is a present.
Struggling to her feet, she slides off my coat.
So I stand and turn her to face me. Wide cheeks, full lips and pale blue eyes almost lost in the darkness. The fullness of her body hidden under a shapeless skirt, washed-out blouse and thin jacket.
‘What do you want?’ I ask.
‘Told you,’ she says crossly. ‘Nothing.’
‘I mean from life.’
Mary looks at me strangely. ‘You’re not what I expected.’
Begs a sub-menu of other questions. That’s something my old lieutenant used to say. Although it seems right. ‘What did you expect?’
She gets embarrassed.
‘You know,’ she says. ‘You’re weird.’
Well, she’s got that right. My skull is broad, my eyes wide set. I’m a foot taller than most of the men in the inn behind me. My shoulders sometimes scrape both sides of a door. I heal faster and have a higher pain threshold than anyone I’ve met.
And that’s before we deal with my metal arm, my collection of scars, the symbiont slug that’s taken up home in my throat or the fact I get strange turns when the slug wakes, and information flows through me like water.
But I don’t think that’s what Mary means.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Weirder than you imagine.’
Mary shakes her head and wraps her arms around me.’ Sven,’ she says.
I’m surprised she knows my name.
‘Take me with you.’
‘Can’t,’ I say, watching hurt flood her eyes.
Turning her face to the moon, I wonder idly what I’m seeing.
A girl who sees me as a ticket out of here? Someone so unhappy that anywhere else is better than this? If so, I’ve been there myself. So I can understand how she might want to get out.
‘Now’s not a good time.’
She turns to go and swings back when I grab her wrist. Her other hand is already raised to slap me. She lets it drop when she sees my grin.
‘Listen,’ I say. ‘Weird shit’s going down.’
Mary looks around her.
‘Not just here. Everywhere. Farlight’s a bad place to go right now.’
‘How do you know?’
The answer is, I don’t know how. I just know that I do. It’s a feeling more than anything. Like static raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
‘Just do.’
She nods. ‘You’ll be back?’
‘Should be. If all goes well. In a week or so.’
‘Maybe I’ll see you then.’
She turns for the broken door of the inn, holding my empty plate and her unlit lamp, and this time I let her go. She’s on my fingers and I can taste her on my tongue. Some of the questions she’s asked are wriggling in my head like worms.
But I’ll deal with them later.
Chapter 16
WHEN I GO IN TO BREAKFAST, ANTON’S AT A TABLE WITH Sergeant Toro. Leona is sitting opposite Anton, concentrating on her plate. It doesn’t look that interesting to me. Mary comes out from the kitchens, and puts a plate of cold chicken in front of me before I have time to sit.
‘You want coffee with that?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble . . .’
She scowls, then ruins it by grinning when I slap her arse in passing.
The next person to try it gets hot coffee in his lap. Since he, his boss and his oppos are on the point of moving out, and I’m looking over, he decides there’s not much he can do about it.
‘Sven,’ says Anton. ‘Our friend has a plan.’
I’m on the point of saying I’m not interested in plans. I want to get to Farlight, warn Colonel Vijay about General Luc and get Anton back to Wildeside before anyone discovers he’s missing.
Added to which, the idea of Debro having to defend her compound against stray furies doesn’t make me happy.
‘Toro,’ I say. ‘What do you know about furies?’
He looks up with a start.
‘Theoretically speaking.’ That’s something Aptitude says.
‘Theoretically?’ Sergeant Toro says it like he knows what it means. ‘Ugly bastards . . .’ He stops to consider his words. ‘I’ve met them in battle. Only once, Legba be praised. Don’t want to meet them again.’
‘Where was that?’
He names a planet even Anton doesn’t know.
‘They guard the Uplift temples at night.’ Swallowing most of his coffee, Sergeant Toro wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. As an afterthought, he wipes sweat from his bald scalp with his fingers.
I get the feeling this isn’t a good memory.
‘That’s what we were told. The metalheads wake them up when it gets dark and put them back to sleep come daylight. Use some kind of magic.’
He sees my doubt.
‘Just saying what we were told.’
I tell him about the Uplifted temple at Ilseville. I scalped a metalhead and used its braids as a disguise. He likes the story but doesn’t know the planet. When I figure I’ve made enough conversation, I get back to the questions that matter.
‘Can furies die of hunger?’
The sergeant’s gaze sharpens.
‘Just something that occurred to me. You know, maybe they could . . .’
‘Sven,’ says Anton. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I heard.’
Sergeant Toro glances between us.
And I see his point. This doesn’t sound like a conversation between a high clan member and his hired bodyguard to me either. ‘Maybe this is a bad idea,’ he says, scraping back his chair.
‘Wait,’ Anton says.
It’s only when I nod that the sergeant sits down again.
‘You’re right about the furies,’ he says. ‘Well, almost. They hibernate after three days without food.’
‘What wakes them up again?’
‘The smell of blood.’ He says it like it should be obvious.
‘Sven,’ Anton says. ‘If we could get back to the plan.’
‘In a minute . . .’ I’m trying to work out if giving the SIG to Aptitude was a wasted move or not. Aptitude uses wasted move, it’s to do with chess. If the furies are going to go to sleep then she doesn’t need my gun.
That pisses me off.
On the other hand, the furies might smell blood or attack before three days are up. That means she will need the gun. So then it was a good move. That’s why I need the SIG: it does this kind of thinking for me.
And I know what Sergeant Toro’s going to suggest anyway.
His version of Mary’s plan. Although his reasons worry me more.
Largely because he reminds me of myself. This isn’t someone who needs to travel in a pack. In all probability, this isn’t some-one who even likes travelling in a pack. So why saddle himself with an ex-Legion sergeant, a thinly disguised trade lord, and a militia sergeant, no matter how good?
The sergeant claims to know where Vijay Jaxx lives. This is more than we do. He used to work for the general, seemingly. I guess that means he did things too dirty even for the Death’s Head.
‘What do you reckon?’ Anton says.
He’s making it my decision.
Wise choice.
‘You know we’re on gyros. Single-seaters.’
‘So am I.’ Nodding to the door, he shows me a canvas heap in one corner of the courtyard. A new-model Icefeld lies underneath. A ground-to-ground missile system is bolted either side of the light. A stripped-down gearbox sits in the dirt. The flywheel of a gyro rests beside it. With a rat’s nest of optic.
‘Take me ten minutes. Fifteen at the most.’
A man after my own heart.
‘You’ve got until tonight,’ I tell him. ‘We travel in darkness and you’ll need to mask your headlights. ‘OK?’
He nods.
Sergeant Toro is as good as his word. His bike is back together, parked next to ours when I get downstairs, and its headlight is masked, and so is its instrument panel. Darkness has fallen, I’m buttoning my fly and Mary is waving from an upstairs window.
‘Sven,’ Anton says.
‘What?’
His gaze slides from mine.
Flicking my bike to life, I feel its gyro settle.
Anton rides behind me, Leona slots into place behind that and our newest recruit rides tail. As we move out, I see his gaze skim the windows to see if anyone other than Mary watches us go. He double-checks for snipers on the roof.
This man’s good.
Too good to need our company.
Makes me wonder again what he’s getting out of this.
We’re all used to the cold, which is interesting. Leona and Toro have done time in sub-zero combat zones. So they say when we stop to sit out the next day in the shade of a sandstone butte. In an hour, the road surface goes from ice-flecked and frozen to hot enough to fry an egg.
Even in the shadows it’s so hot it hurts to breathe.
‘Never thought I’d miss the cold,’ says Anton, and ends up telling Sergeant Toro that he’s just back from an ice planet. He leaves out the bit about it being a prison planet. And so I tell them about the siege of Ilseville, which I sat out in a ruined house, with snow banked against our ruined walls.
All that was left of most of the city.
Of course, I was drunk.
But that doesn’t change how cold it was.
Ilseville was where I met Neen, who became my sergeant. His sister Shil. A girl called Franc, who slept with her knives, loved cooking and could make rat taste like chicken. The other was a boy called Haze, who turned out to be a baby metalhead, complete with braids growing straight from his skull.
Always wonder whether I should have let him live.
They formed the core of the Aux. Short for Death’s Head auxiliaries. A name I gave them to keep the Aux alive when some of the regular Death’s Head were showing too great an interest in them.
Even the Death’s Head think twice before killing their own.
There was another, but he died quickly and I can’t remember his name. We picked up Rachel, our redheaded sniper, after Ilseville fell.
Franc died on Hekati.
That was later, half a spiral arm away. We won. OK, Hekati was destroyed, along with almost everyone we met. But it was a victory. Almost as glorious as Ilseville.
And we left that in rubble.
‘Sir,’ Sergeant Leona says, ‘you’re grinding your teeth.’
She takes one look at my face and apologizes. Excusing herself, she heads out of sight to take a piss or something. It takes her longer than it should. So I guess she’s sitting out my anger.
Firing up my laser sabre, I strip a thorn bush to twigs and a twisted trunk, then cut the trunk into equal lengths. The dry twigs catch quickly and within minutes I’m feeding the fire bits of trunk.
‘What’s that for?’ Anton asks.
‘Breakfast.’
Pulling a dagger from my belt, I check its point.
Not sure why I’m bothering. It’s as sharp as it was when I put it away. And I’ve honed the edge so sharp that flesh cuts like paper. I know that from the trickle of blood on my wrist when I draw the blade across my thumb.
‘Keep the fire burning,’ I tell Leona.
She nods, still buckling her belt. ‘Sir . . .?’
I turn back.
‘You want company?’
‘Work best alone.’
She grins. ‘Right you are, sir.’
‘Leona. You know how to cook?’
‘Yes, sir . . . I think so.’
‘How about using a knife? Any good at that?’
When she nods, I throw her my blade which she catches cleanly, and tell her to kill something edible and cook it. Then I go take a piss of my own.
That night sees us descend to the low plains, beginning a run that will take us to the slopes of Farlight. We pass villages and small towns, goats eating rubbish on dumps beside the road, and small children who wave.
The older ones spit.
Sergeant Toro asks if I’ve seen the city before and seems surprised when I say yes. He’d be even more surprised if he knew the story behind my arrival.
Farlight is a sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. To enter by road you take a track that snakes up the volcano and drops into its crater. Slums cling to the highest slopes of the inside edge. The air there is fresh, but water’s rare and so are jobs. The rich bits of Farlight huddle on the floor. The really expensive bits circle Zabo Square and the cathedral.
A virus hit that area years back.
Imagine blowtorching a toy city until the biggest buildings start to melt, then letting them set again. That’s what the boulevards around Zabo Square look like. Debro has a mansion there. Aptitude’s ex-husband had one also.
Until I burnt it down.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
Everyone nods.
We fire up our bikes.
The blacktop gets better the closer we get to the city. But the road still twists and turns viciously. And we waste hours running parallel to our old path, only heading in the opposite direction and fifty paces higher. With the next stage of our route switched round again and fifty paces above that. Our pegs grinding sparks as we navigate hairpin bends.
Any army that tried to take Farlight using this road would be hacked to pieces before they reached a third of the way up. In all of this, our lights only show the narrowest sliver of blacktop.
As one hairpin leads into another, it occurs to me we’re going to hit a bigger problem and hit it soon.
‘What?’ Anton demands when I pull us over.
‘We’re going off-road.’
He wants to protest that on-road is dangerous enough.
Sergeant Toro is watching. As we wait, his eyes flick to the corner ahead, the strip of road beyond that and the road above. He keeps his opinions to himself and his engine running.
A man after my own heart.
‘Want to tell him why?’
‘Roadblocks,’ the sergeant says.
‘We can talk our way through,’ Anton insists.
‘And if it goes wrong? You happy for me to cut their throats? We might as well send a message saying we’ve arrived.’
Sergeant Leona goes still.
Maybe she’s not used to people openly discussing the slaughter of Farlight’s finest.
‘So,’ I say. ‘Since we can’t kill them . . .’
Anton nods reluctantly.