‘I will, as soon as I figure out what’s about to happen. Quell! What warren are we using now? And hadn’t you better get the way through opened?’
Quell stared at him. ‘Get on the damned carriage!’
‘Fine, but tell me-’
‘You idiot!’ shouted Faint from where she sat on the roof. ‘Don’t you get it?’ And she jabbed a finger at the churning black cloud now almost towering over them.
‘But-wait-how-’
‘Climb aboard, you oaf, or drown!’
‘Climb aboard,’ shrieked Sweetest Sufferance, ‘and maybe drown anyway!’
Gruntle saw that the corpse had tied itself to the wheel.
He lunged for the carriage. As he scrambled up the side of the carriage and fumbled for the lashing, Reccanto Ilk, squinting, asked, ‘Is it here yet?’
The horses began screaming in earnest.
And all at once, the shortsighted idiot had his answer.
xx
You would call us weak?
Fear talks out of the side of the mouth
Each item in your list is an attack
That turns its stab upon yourself
Displaying the bright terrors ‹
That flaw the potential for wonder
You drone out your argument
As if stating naught but what is obvious
And so it is but not in the way you think
The pathos revealed is your paucity
Of wisdom disguised as plain speak
From your tower of reason
As if muscle alone bespoke strength
As if height measures the girth of will
As if the begotten snips thorns from the rose
As if the hearthfire cannot devour a forest
As if courage flows out lost monthly
In wasted streams of dead blood
Who is this to utter such doubt?
Priest of a cult false in its division
I was there on the day the mob awoke
Storming the temple of quailing half-men
You stood gape-jawed behind them
As your teachings were proved wrong
Shrink back from true anger
Flee if you can this burgeoning strength
The shape of the rage against your postulated
Justifications is my soldier’s discipline
Sure in execution and singular in purpose
Setting your head atop the spike
– Last Day Of The Man Sect, Sevelenatha Of Genabaris (Cited In ‘Treatise On Untenable Philosophies Among Cults’, Genorthu Stulk)
Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.
Bainisk was still, in the sheltered core of his being, a child. Ungainly with growth, yes, awkward in a body in which he had not yet caught up, but he had yet to surrender his love of the unknown. And so it should be wholly understandable that he and young Harllo should have shared a spark of delight and wonder, the kind that wove tight between them so that not even the occasional snarl could truly sever the binding.
In the week following that fateful tear in the trust between them, Harllo had come to believe that he was once more truly alone in the world. Wounds scabbed over and scabs fell away to reveal faint scars that soon faded almost out of exis-tence, and the boy worked on, crawling into fissures, scratching his way along fetid, gritty cracks in the deep rock. Choking at times on bad air, stung by blind centipedes and nipped by translucent spiders. Bruised by shifting stones, his eyes wide in the darkness as he searched out the glitter of ore on canted, close walls.
At week’s end, however, Bainisk was with him once more, passing him a jug of silty lakewater as he backed out of a fissure and sat down on the warm, dry stone of the tunnel floor, and in this brief shared moment the tear slowly began to heal, reknitted in the evasiveness of their eyes that would not yet lock on to the reality of their sitting side by side-far beneath the world’s surface, two beating hearts that echoed naught but each other-and this was how young boys made amends. Without words, with spare gestures that, in their rarity, acquired all the necessary significance. When Harllo was done drinking he passed back the jug.
‘Venaz is on me all the time now,’ Bainisk said. ‘I tried it, with him again, I mean. But it’s not the same. We’re both too old for what we had, once. All he ever talks about is stuff that bores me.’
‘He just likes hurting people.’
Bainisk nodded. ‘I think he wants to take over my job. He argued over every or-der I gave him.’
‘People like him always want to take over,’ Harllo said. ‘And most times when other people see it they back off and let them. That’s what I don’t get, Bainisk. It’s the scariest thing of all.’
That last admission was uncommon between boys. The notion of being fright-ened. But theirs was not a normal world, and to pretend that there was nothing to fear was not among the few privileges they entertained. Out here, people didn’t need reasons to hurt someone. They didn’t need reasons for doing anything.
‘Tell me about the city again, Mole.’
There’s a haunted tower. My uncle took me to see it once. He has big hands, so big that when he holds yours it’s like your hand disappears and there’s nothing in the world could pull you apart. Anyway, there’s a ghost in that tower. Named Hinter.’
Bainisk set on him wide eyes. ‘Did you see it? Did you see that ghost?’
‘No, it was daytime. They’re hard to see in daytime.’
‘It’s dark enough down here,’ Bainisk said, looking round. ‘But I ain’t never seen a ghost.’
Harllo thought to tell him, then. It had been his reason for bringing up the story in the first place, but he found himself holding back yet again. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because the skeleton wasn’t a true ghost. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the dead don’t go away. I mean, sometimes, they die but the soul doesn’t, er, leave the body. It stays where it is, where it always was.’
‘Was this Hinter like that?’
‘No, he was a real ghost. A spirit with no body.’
