when she felt the call of the Manes, the primal invitation of the wolf-pack lamenting the absence of their kin, she found it harder and harder to think of reasons to resist.
Yes, they killed; but so had she, now. Yes, they were fearsome; but a fearsome exterior was no indication as to what was beneath. You only had to know the secret of Bess to understand that.
Would the process have been half so frightening if she’d been invited instead of press-ganged? Might she have gone willingly, if only to know what lay beyond that impenetrable wall of fog to the north? Were there incredible lands hidden behind the Wrack, glittering ice palaces at the poles, as the more lurid pulp novels suggested? Was it a wild place, like Kurg with its population of subhuman monsters? Or was there a strange and advanced civilisation there, like Peleshar, the distant and hostile land far to the south-west?
Whatever had been done to her by the Mane that day was incomplete, interrupted by a cutlass to the neck. She was neither fully human nor fully Mane, but somewhere in between. And yet the Manes welcomed her still, beckoned her endlessly, while the humans would destroy her if they knew that she walked their lands without a beating heart.
She never found out what happened to Riss. The morning after she died, she woke up and dug her way out of the snow that had entombed her in the night. The sun shone high in a crystal-blue sky, glittering on distant mounds of white: the roofs of the town. She’d run quite a way in her panic, but it had been in entirely the wrong direction if she’d hoped to reach the safety of the ice caves up on the glacier.
The corpses lay beneath the snow now. Whether Riss was among them, or if he’d been taken, the result was the same. He was gone.
Numb, she searched for survivors and found none. She stood in front of the snow-covered wreck of the aircraft she’d navigated for a year, and felt nothing. Then she found a snow-tractor and began to dig it out.
It took her several days to find another settlement, following charts she’d salvaged. Since she felt perfectly healthy she didn’t question how she’d survived at first. She assumed her snowy tomb had kept her warm. It was only when she was far out in the wilderness that she noticed her heart had stopped. That was when she began to be afraid.
By the time she reached the settlement, she had a story, and a plan.
Keep moving. Keep your secret. Survive, as much as you can be said to live at all.
But it had been a long and lonely three years since that day.
She passed over the southern part of the Hookhollows, their glowing magma vents making bright scribbles in the dark. The Eastern Plateau rose up before her, and she took the Ketty Jay down through the black, filthy clouds. Her engines were robust enough to take a little ash. Once she’d broken through, she brought the Ketty Jay to a few dozen metres above ground level, and skimmed over the Blackendraft flats. She glanced at the navigational charts she was following. Charts that had been meticulously kept by Dracken’s navigator since they’d commandeered the Ketty Jay.
Trust me, she’d said to Frey, when he demanded to know how she was going to fool Dracken’s men into thinking she was dead. The kind of trust he’d shown when he gave her the ignition code to his precious aircraft, the one thing he could be said to love. Even though he was afraid she might steal it and fly off for ever, he’d trusted her.
And he trusted her to come back and save him. She wouldn’t let him down.
She was under no illusion that she was risking her own life, and she knew that even if she succeeded, she’d probably be despised. They couldn’t be her friends. She’d never belong to that crew. If they learned how she was slowly, steadily becoming a Mane, they’d be forced to destroy her. She couldn’t blame them for that.
Yet she’d try anyway. Perhaps afterwards she’d go to the north, to the Manes; but first, she’d try.
It made no sense. But sometimes, humans did things that made no sense.
