And now it faded, reluctantly receding, defeated by the barrier of her will. Her eyes flicked open, bloodshot and tear-reddened, and she gasped and panted hard. The physical effort had been immense. But she had won out, for now.
The Aberrant beast hauled on the manxthwa again, bringing her
roughly back to reality as the caravan was wrenched another few feet closer to the burrow. The manxthwa in its grip was apoplectic with fear, almost within biting distance of the thing. Kaiku cringed as the thing’s chitinous limbs stroked the air above her.
She pulled a knife from her belt. It had been with her ever since the Forest of Yuna, when Asara had given her travel clothes to change into; she had scarcely noticed it until now. It was a good forest knife, adapted to skin animals or cut wood with equal ease. Swiftly, she began to saw at the tethering ropes that held the driver. He squirmed, attempting to break free before she had even got through the first one.
‘Stay still!’ she hissed, and he did so.
Tane and Asara fired, and fired again. The creature that had hold of the manxthwa was by no means immune to the bullets, for they could see the dark splashes of blood that spattered its black body; but it seemed possessed of a suicidal persistence, and would not release the bucking manxthwa from its grip. Tane’s weapon fired dry, and he broke it open to put new ignition powder in the chamber, glancing at Kaiku as he did so. She was frantically working on the ropes, her arm pumping as she cut, her face red and sweaty.
The creature braced and hauled with a greater effort than before, desperate to get its meal and get away from the stinging rifle balls. It could not understand why the manxthwa was so heavy, for it had not the brain to realise it was tethered. The puzzle frustrated it mightily. It applied brute strength.
Kaiku cried out as the entire caravan shifted a metre across the road. Asara and Tane had to scatter as the passenger cart finally toppled upside down. Kaiku was pitched over with it, landing heavily on the stony dirt of the road and rolling to a stop a short way distant. The driver gave a strangled shriek, and then the tethering ropes, weakened by Kaiku’s efforts, finally gave way. With a triumphant squawk, the Aberrant monstrosity bundled the manxthwa into its burrow and dragged it underground.
Tane scrambled to Kaiku’s side, but she was already levering herself up on her elbows. Asara stood over the two of them, framed against the clouded sky, her rifle trained towards the Aberrant burrow.
‘Are you hurt?’ Tane asked, almost touching her and then thinking better of it.
Kaiku shook her head. ‘I do not think so.’ She stood up. ‘Bruised,’ she elaborated. ‘Why have the guns stopped?’
Tane and Asara noticed it at the same time. The guards on their side of the caravan pricked up their ears. The train of carts that was snarled and corkscrewed along the centre of the road formed a barrier that prevented them seeing to the other side.
‘Ho! Is all well over there?’ one of the guards called.
‘All’s well,’ came the reply.
They hurried around the end of the caravan, and there they saw the remainder of the guards clustered around the grotesque corpse of the second Aberrant creature. Its massive jaw lay on the road, its legs limp around it, half out of its burrow.
‘It must have been a lucky shot,’ said one, prodding it with the barrel of his rifle. ‘We got the brain.’
‘We should move out of here,’ said a short, grizzled guard, evidently the leader. ‘Take the remaining manxthwa, and two carts for passengers. Leave the rest.’
‘Leave the goods?’ another protested.
‘There’s no caravan master to sell them. We’re not paid to deliver goods.’ The leader jerked a hand at the approximate location of the other burrow. ‘And that thing is still alive, and it will be out again as soon as it’s finished its meal’
All of them began to untangle the carts and right those that could be righted. Three guards stood near the burrow entrance, from which the sounds of crunching bone could be heard as the unfortunate manxthwa was devoured. The driver was disentangled from the ropes, but it was too late for him. His neck had been broken, and he stared glassy-eyed towards the earth.
‘What was his name? The driver?’ Tane asked as he lent his back to the effort of tipping a cart back on to its wheels.
‘Why?’ one of the guards replied.
‘He should be named,’ Tane grunted. ‘To Noctu, recorder of lives.’
But nobody knew his name.
They managed to get two carts tethered to the remaining manxthwa, who could smell the blood of its departed companion and was snorting skittishly. The Aberrant beast did not emerge again, even after the sounds of feeding had ceased. Leaving the train of goods on the road, they took the body of the driver, wrapped in a tarpaulin, and bundled it in with them. In that manner, they drove on towards Chaim.
‘Those monsters are your Aberrants, Asara,’ Tane said as they set off, dejected and shocked and tired. ‘Those are your
superior
breed.‘
Overhead, the gristle-crows circled and swooped.
Seventeen
Chaim had little to offer the traveller. It was a skeletal, sparse mountain village, with low houses of wood or stone scattered around a few rocky trails that wound haphazardly through the village. Everywhere the eye roamed it struck a hard plane; there was no softness of foliage, no sprinkle of mountain flowers or grass. Even the people seemed hard, squat and compact with narrow, dull eyes and brown, wind-chapped skin. It could not have been more different from the quaint, provincial charm of Pelis; this place seemed to have been scratched from the mountainside and built out of grudging necessity, and it loured in a stew of its own bleak misery.
It was not a place that welcomed strangers, but neither was it hostile to them. Kaiku, Asara and Tane found themselves simply ignored, their questions responded to with unhelpful grunts. Kaiku tried asking about for anyone who might remember her father passing through, but what began as a slim hope petered to nothing in the face of the villagers’ stoic rudeness. In this place, a person either lived here or they didn’t, and outsiders got short shrift from the natives.
They arrived in Chaim in the late afternoon. The caravan guards bade them a peremptory farewell, and they were left to themselves. Wandering through the simple streets of the village, buffeted by occasional gusts of cold wind and frowned upon by the rising peaks all around them, they felt curiously alone.
Asara’s talents for procuring aid failed them in this desolate place. Their inquiries after a guide were met with ignorance and surliness, and her striking beauty appeared to have no effect on the men here. It piqued her mightily, Kaiku was amused to note.
‘Probably they find their relief with their pack animals,’ she muttered.
Eventually it was a guide who found them, as night gathered and lanterns were lit.
They were sitting in what passed for a bar here, merely the downstairs portion of someone’s house that sold a raw local liquor. It was devoid of joy or atmosphere, a simple scattering of low, round tables cut from rough wood and a few threadbare mats for patrons to sit on. A stone-faced woman meted out measures of the liquor from behind a counter in the corner. Lanterns half-heartedly held back the gloom, while simultaneously contributing to it by the fumes from the cheap, smoky oil they were filled with. Despite being so small, and half-full with villagers who muttered to each other over their tumblers, the place still managed to feel cold and hollow. Kaiku could scarcely believe that a place like this existed. She had no illusions about the state of many bars in the Poor Quarter of Axekami, but she had always imagined them to be at least raucous, if not exactly brimming with celebration. This place seemed like a gathering of the condemned.
The three companions were contemplating their next move when a short, scrawny figure sat down with them. He was buried in a mound of furs that dwarfed his bald head, making him seem like a vulture. By the condition and tone of his skin, he was a mountain man like the rest of them, but when he talked it was in a rapid chatter that seemed quite at odds with his kinsfolk.
I’m told you’re looking for the mask-makers, that right?‘ he said, before any of them could wonder who he was. ’Well I’m here to tell you that it can’t be done, but if you still want to try I’m your guide. Mamak!‘
‘Mamak,’ Kaiku repeated, unsure if that was his name or some local exclamation that they did not understand. ‘You will take us, then?’
‘What do you mean, it can’t be done?’ Tane interrupted.
‘As I said. The paths have been lost, and not even the greatest of mountain men have ever found them.’
‘We knew that,’ Kaiku said to Tane, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Do not be discouraged.’ She knew him well enough by now to see the signs of an impending mood swing, and Tane had been overdue for a plunge into miserable despair for hours, beleaguered as they had been by the events of the day. Apart from the frustration they
had experienced since their arrival in Chaim, Tane had been dwelling on the fate of the driver of their caravan. The lessons of his apprenticeship to the priesthood were gnawing at his conscience. Nobody should die without being named to Noctu, he said; and yet it was only the caravan master who hired him who must have known the driver’s name, and he was gone.
‘If you cannot take us there,’ said Asara coolly, resting her elbows on the table, ‘then why do we need you?’
‘Because you’d be lost within an hour,’ he said with a quick grin, showing long teeth narrowed into crooked, browned columns by decay and neglect. ‘And up in the mountains there’s creatures so warped that you’d never be able to guess what kind of animal they originally came from. Like the thing that nearly had your lives on the way here.’
Asara did not trouble to ask how he knew about that. The guards had been talking, it seemed.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘It’s not my way to pry into your business. You say you knew you were looking for a place that couldn’t be found, and you still want to look. I’d guess you know something I don’t. Or you think you do.’ He sat back, splayed his fingers on the coarse wood of the table before him. ‘I can take you to where the monastery
ought
to be. It still shows up on old maps, and nobody knows the mountains better than me. But when we get near, you’ll see what I mean when I say it can’t be found. You’ll be walking down a trail, heading north, and all of a sudden you realise you’ve ended up a mile south, though you could’ve sworn you were checking your bearings every step of the way. There’s something there, clouds a man’s mind, turns you around, and no amount of care can get through it. Believe me, people have tried.’ He tipped them a conspiratorial wink. ‘Still want to go?’
‘How much?’
‘Five hundred poc. No, round it up to ten shirets.’
‘You can have it in coins. I do not have paper money,’ Kaiku lied. Her grandmother had always warned her about showing money in public, especially in places like this. Presumably Mamak thought he was overcharging, but it was still cheap by city standards.
Mamak shrugged. ‘Five-seventy poc, then,’ he said. ‘In advance.’
‘Three hundred now,’ Asara said. ‘The rest when we are up in the mountains.’
‘As you’ll have it,’ he said.
‘Good. When do we leave?’
‘Have you booked into the inn yet?’
Asara made a sound to the negative.
‘Then we can leave right now.’
‘It’s dark,’ Tane pointed out.
Mamak rolled his eyes. ‘The first stretch is a trail as big as a road. It’ll take a few hours. We camp at the end of that, and in the morning we tackle the rough stuff. I suppose you have some kind of warm clothing?’
Asara showed him what they had brought. He tutted. ‘You’ll need more. This isn’t the mainland. The nights up there aren’t so warm, and the weather’s a beast even in summer.’ He stood. ‘I have a man we can see. Best to get going.’
The next few days were hard.
Both Tane and Kaiku were quite used to the physical exertions of long journeys. Both had hunted in the forests, chased down deer and travelled far to lay traps or find a picturesque spot to fish or bathe. Tane, for his part, had often made forays for rare herbs into the lesser teeth of the TchamilMountains, which blended into the Forest of Yuna on its eastern edge until the soil gave way to rock and the trees disappeared. But neither of them was quite prepared for the sense of wilderness that overtook them as they ascended into the LakmarMountains that dominated the northern half of Fo.
The mountains seemed to exude a sense of something that was like death but yet not: the absence of life. The unforgiving rock shouldered all around them in great, flattened slopes, yet there was rarely more than a fringe of tough grass or hardy weeds to be seen. What trees there were served only to remind them of the caravan driver’s warnings of blight in the mountains; they were gnarled and crooked, sometimes with several scrawny trunks sharing the same withered branches, joined seamlessly together. Jagged peaks reared across the horizon, made bluish by distance; but the world around them was grey and hard. The silence was oppressive, and seemed to stunt conversation. The only one who seemed unaffected was Mamak, who chatted away as he walked, telling them old legends and stories of the mountains, many of which were variations of ones they knew from the mainland.
Kaiku, at least, was glad of his talk, for it distracted her from fatigue. The paths had become progressively steeper and harder as
they travelled onward, and they were forced to climb often. This was the first serious exercise she had undertaken since her convalescence in the temple of Enyu, and her muscles ached. Tane seemed to be doing better, though his pride would not let him show fatigue; Asara was tireless.
Given time to contemplate, Kaiku found herself wondering more and more about Asara. During her time as Kaiku’s handmaiden, they had been good friends, and shared many secrets. They had talked about boys, made fun of her father’s foibles, teased the cook and picked on Karia, Kaiku’s other handmaiden. And even though she knew it now to be a charade, and that Karia had ended unwillingly giving her life to resurrect her dead mistress, she missed that person Asara had been. This new Asara - presumably the real one, though how could she be sure? - was colder and harder, fiercely asserting her independence from everybody. She did not need reassurance or company, it seemed; she had no interest in talking about herself, nor did she appear to care about Kaiku or Tane. Tane accepted this as the way she was, but Kaiku was not so certain. Sometimes she caught glimpses of a stubborn child in Asara, balling its fists and scrunching its brow and protesting that it
didn’t
want to talk to anyone. She was an Aberrant, that much Kaiku knew; but beyond that, her beautiful companion was still a mystery.