Retribution Falls

Thirty-Three

Jez, in the pilot’s seat of the Ketty Jay, flew on into the night. The craft was dark, inside and out. The light of the moon edged her face in brittle silver. It fell also onto the two bodies on the cockpit floor, and glittered in their blood. Dracken’s men. The iron pipe that had stoved in their heads lay between them.

Jez’s jaw was set hard. Navigation charts were spread on the dashboard next to her. She stared through the windglass at the world below, eyes fixed. The Ketty Jay slid through the darkness, high above the clouded mountains, a speck in the vast sky.

She could see the lights of other craft, visible at great distance. A flotilla of fighters surrounded a long, rectangular freighter. A prickle of shining dots signified a Navy corvette, cruising the horizon. And in between, there were the invisible vessels, like the Ketty Jay, that had reason to stay hidden and wanted to move unobserved. Stealthy shadows in the moonlight. A pilot wouldn’t see them unless they were very close, but Jez saw them all.

Even hours later, she was still trembling with the aftershocks of murder. Had there been a gun to hand she might have used it to threaten the men, then tied them up and kept them prisoner. But they had the guns, and she only had a length of pipe. She crept into the cockpit and brained the navigator before he even knew she was there. The pilot turned in his seat in time to receive the second blow across his forehead.

She’d told herself that she was only going to knock them out; but as with Fredger Cordwain, the Shacklemore man, it only took one blow to kill them. She was far stronger than her small frame suggested. Just another aspect of the change, along with her penetrating vision, her ability to heal bullet wounds in hours and the frightening hallucinations.

And the voices. The dissonant voices, the crew of that terrible craft, which loomed out of the endless fog of the Wrack. She could hear them now, their faint cries blowing on the wind that rushed past the hull of the Ketty Jay. Calling her. Calling her home.

Why not? Why not just go to them? Turn this crate to the north and get it all over with.

She was tired of this life. The last three years had been spent discarding one crew and joining up with another, never putting down roots. She kept her distance from the men and women she worked with because she knew, sooner or later, they’d find her out. It had been the same with the crew of the Ketty Jay. Eventually, she always had to run. Now that moment had come again.

Why stay in a world where you’re not wanted?

Every day, it got a little harder to resist the call of the Wrack. Every day eroded her willpower a little more. Was it only stubbornness that made her stay among people who would kill her if they knew what she was? Was it simply fear that prevented her from going to the north, where they lamented her absence, where she’d belong? Like the distant howl of a wolf pack, their cries stirred her, and she ached to go to them.

What’s stopping you, Jez? What’s stopping you?

What, indeed? Where else could she go from here? Did she imagine she could effect some kind of daring rescue in the Ketty Jay? No, that would be suicide. She wasn’t even very good at flying her. It would take a long time to get used to the many quirks of a craft as patched together as this. And even if she did somehow save Frey and the others, what then? How would she explain how she’d convinced Dracken’s crewman that she was dead?

It was just like all the times before, with all the other crews. The small things were adding up: her fantastically sharp eyesight; the way she never seemed to need sleep or food; how animals reacted around her; the uncanny healing after she got shot in Scarwater; the way she’d been unaffected by the fumes in Rook’s Boneyard.

And now there was this new ability to convincingly imitate a corpse. The first time, only Crake had seen it, and he hadn’t said a word. It could have been passed off as the Shacklemore man’s mistake. But twice?

Now the suspicious glances would begin. She’d start to hear that wary, mistrustful tone in their voices. Even on the Ketty Jay, where you didn’t ask about a person’s past, questions would be raised. They could accept a daemonist, but could they accept her? How long before Malvery insisted on giving her a check-up to solve the mystery? How long before they found her out?

The reason Fredger Cordwain thought she had no pulse was because she had no pulse.

The reason Dracken’s man thought she was dead was because she was.

It had happened three years ago.

The first Jez knew of the attack was when she heard the explosion. It was a dull, muffled roar that shook the ground and spilled the soup she was eating, scalding her fingers. A second explosion sent her scurrying to grab her thick fur-and-hide coat. She pulled up the hood, affixed the mask and goggles, and headed out of the warmth of the inn, up the stairs and into the blizzard.

She emerged onto the main thoroughfare of the tiny, remote town in Yortland that had been her home for a month. The dwellings to either side were low domes, built mostly underground, barely visible. The light from the small windows and the smoke from their chimneys pushed through the whirling snow.

There were others already outside: some were Yort locals, others were the Vard scientists who used this town as a base while they worked on the excavation nearby. All eyes were on the bright bloom of fire rising from the far side of the town. From the landing pad.

Her immediate thought was that a terrible accident had occurred, some tragic rupture in the fuel lines. Even before she wondered how many might have died, her stomach sank at the thought of being stranded in this place. The aircraft were their only link to the rest of the world. Here, on the northern tip of Yortland, civilisation was scattered and hard to find. There was no other settlement for a hundred kloms in any direction.

She felt a gloved hand on her upper arm and turned. She knew it was Riss, the expedition’s pilot, even though his face was hidden behind a fur-lined hood, mask and goggles. Nobody else touched her arm like that.

‘Are you alright?’ he shouted over the whistling wind. His voice was muffled.

‘Of course I’m alright. The explosion was over there.’

But then someone pointed to a dark shape approaching through the grey chaos in the sky, and the cries of alarm began. Jez felt the strength drain out of her as it took on form, huge and ragged and black. The drone of its engines was drowned out by the piercing, unearthly howling coming from its decks. It was a mass of dirty iron, oil and smoke, all spikes and rivets and shredded black pennants. A dreadnought, come from the Wrack, across the Poleward Sea to the shores of Yortland.

The destruction of the aircraft on the landing pad had been no accident. The attackers wanted to be sure nobody got away.

The Manes were here, searching for fresh victims.

Ropes snaked down as the dreadnought loomed closer, its massive hull swelling as it descended until its keel was only a few metres above the rooftops. By the time the Manes came slipping and sliding to the ground, people were already scattering in terror. They’d all heard the stories. The appearance of the dreadnought, the sheer force of its presence, panicked them like goats.

Jez panicked with them, fleeing up the thoroughfare, thinking only of escape. It was Riss who grabbed her arm, more forcefully this time, and tugged her into a doorway. He hurried her down some steps and into a circular underground room full of crates of scientific equipment and boxes of food and clothing. It was cold down here, but not as bad as outside. The sound of their boots echoed from the grey stone walls.

As soon as she was released, she bolted into a corner and huddled there, hugging herself and whimpering. She’d always prided herself on being a level-headed sort, but the sight of the dreadnought was too much for her. The craft exuded terror, an animal sense of wrongness that appealed to the most basic instincts. Whatever the Manes were, her intuition shrieked at their mere presence.

Riss was faring better. He was obviously scared out of his wits, but he was moving with a purpose. He’d grabbed two packs and was shoving dried food and blankets into them.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said, in response to her unspoken question. ‘They’ll go through the whole town. It’s what they do.’

‘We . . . I’m not . . . I’m not going out there!’ Jez said through juddering lips. She could hear screams and sporadic gunfire from outside.

He pulled the packs tight, hurried over and shoved one towards her. She could see his eyes through the glass of the goggles. He was staring at her hard.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When the Manes hit a town, they don’t leave people to tell the tale. The ones who aren’t taken are killed. You understand? We can’t avoid them by hiding down here.’

‘Where can we go?’

‘The excavation. The ice caves. We can survive there for a night. If we get out of town, we can wait till they’re gone.’

Jez calmed a little as his words sank in. Professor Malstrom, their employer, was obsessed with the search for a lost race he’d dubbed the Azryx, whom he believed had once possessed great and mysterious technology. Based on slender evidence and some cryptic writings, he’d divined that they died out suddenly, many thousands of years ago, and their civilisation had been swallowed by the ice. He’d persuaded the university to fund him on various digs over the past year, hoping to uncover relics of that ancient people. So far, he’d not found a thing. But the excavation would provide them with the shelter they needed, and the Manes might not look there.

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, we can hide out in the caves!’

She clutched at the sanity he offered, soothed by the strength and certainty in his voice. Riss had held a candle for her ever since they’d started working together, as pilot and navigator for Professor Malstrom’s expeditionary team. She liked him as a friend, but had never been able to summon up any feelings deeper than that.

He’d always been protective of her. It was a trait she found annoying: she interpreted it as possessiveness. But now she was ashamed to realise she wanted a protector. She’d crumbled in the face of the horror bearing down on them, and he hadn’t. She clung to him gratefully as he lifted her up and helped her put on her pack.

The thoroughfare was eerily deserted when they emerged. The dreadnought had gone, and the blizzard was closing in, cutting visibility down to fifteen metres. The chill began to seep into them immediately, even through their protective clothing. From somewhere in the skirling mêlée of snowflakes came distant yells and the report of shotguns. Piercing, inhuman howls floated after them.

They stayed close to the buildings. Jez hung on to Riss as he led her towards the edge of town, where a crude trail led up the mountain to the glacier. The excavation site was up there.

They’d not gone far when there was the roar of an engine, and a blaze of light up ahead. Gunfire erupted, startlingly close. Riss pulled Jez into the gap between two domed Yort dwellings, and they hid behind a grit-bin as a snow-tractor came racing up the thoroughfare. The boxy metal vehicles were usually employed to haul supplies and personnel back and forth from the glacier, but someone was trying to escape on one. The Manes had other ideas: there were four of them swarming all over it, trying to drag the doors open or punch their way in through the glass. Jez glimpsed them in the backwash of the headlamps as they passed—ghoulish, feral approximations of men and women—and then the speeding snow-tractor fishtailed on the icy ground. It slewed sideways for an instant before its tracks bit and flung it into the wall of a building.

The Manes abandoned the snow-tractor as several Yorts, wielding shotguns, came backing up the thoroughfare, firing into the blizzard, where more shadowy figures were darting on the edges of visibility. Manes prowled on all fours along rooftops or slunk close to the ground. They flitted and flickered, moving in fast jerks. They jumped from one spot to another without seeming to pass through the distance between.

Jez cringed as she saw the Manes spread out to encircle their victims. She wanted to run, to break from hiding and flee, but Riss held her tight.

The Yorts wore furs and masks. The Manes wore ragged clothes more suited to a mild spring day in Vardia. The cold, which would kill an unprotected human in minutes, meant nothing to them.

She turned away and burrowed into Riss’s arms as the Manes sprang inward as one. She’d closed her eyes to the sight, but she couldn’t shut out the screams of men and the exultant howls of the Manes. Mercifully, it was over in seconds.

Once done, there was silence. It was a short while before Riss stirred and looked out. The sounds of conflict still drifted out of the blizzard, but the Manes had moved elsewhere.

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

Jez obeyed, reluctant to leave the relative safety of the grit-bin. His footsteps crunched across the thoroughfare, fading away. For a time, all she heard were faint gunshots and barked commands, carried on the breeze. Then his footsteps came crunching back. She looked out and saw him carrying a cutlass in one hand. There were several dead men scattered across the thoroughfare, their blood stark against the snow. At least three were missing. Not dead, but taken. Stolen by the Manes to crew their terrible craft.

Riss hunkered down in front of her. ‘The man in the snow-tractor is dead,’ he said. He held up the cutlass. ‘I got this.’

‘What about a gun? Don’t we need a gun?’

He wiggled his fingers inside his thick glove. Unlike the Yort suits, the scientists’ gear was built without much consideration for mobility; warmth was their primary concern. The gloves were too clumsy to fit the forefinger inside a trigger-guard, but without them his skin would freeze to the metal.

They headed away from the thoroughfare, through the gaps between the close-set dwellings. The snow had collected in drifts here, and they forged on with some difficulty, but at least the buildings hid them from view. Jez followed in Riss’s wake, allowing him to carve a path for her. Her breath was loud in her ears, trapped inside her mask. Her fur-lined hood obscured her peripheral vision, forcing her to turn to look behind her every few steps. She was afraid something was sneaking up on them, following their trail through the snow.

Something was sneaking up on them; but the attack, when it came, was from above.

Jez barely saw it. It was a blur of movement in the confusing whirl of the blizzard. Riss reacted with a cry before he was flung aside to crash into the side of a building. Standing in his place, right in front of her, was a Mane. It was the first and last time she ever got a good look at one, and it rooted her to the spot with fear.

The stories said they’d once been human, and they were recognisably so in form and face. But they’d been changed into something else, something that wore human shape uncomfortably, as a skin to contain whatever hid beneath.

The creature before her was scrawny, wearing a tattered shirt and trousers and no shoes at all. Limp black hair was smeared across a pale, wrinkled brow. Its features were twisted out of true. Lips curled to reveal sharp, crooked teeth. It glared at her with eyes that were the yellow and red of bloody pus. Its fingernails were long, dirty and cracked, and it stood low to the ground in a predator’s crouch.

It wasn’t what she saw, but what she sensed that paralysed her: the intuitive knowledge that she was in the presence of something not of this world, something that broke all laws and ruined all the certainties of a thousand generations of knowledge. Her body felt that, and rebelled.

Then it pounced, and bore her into a snowdrift.

She remembered little of what followed. It didn’t seem to make sense when she recalled it later. The Mane had her pinned by the shoulders, and stared into her eyes. Her gaze was locked, as if she were a mouse hypnotised by a snake. She could smell the stench of it, a dead scent like damp leaf mould. Her breathing dropped to a shallow pant.

She felt crushed by the weight of the creature’s will, oppressed by the force in its gaze. By the time she realised something was being done to her, it was too late to resist it. She struggled to oppose the invader with her thoughts, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was losing herself.

She became aware of a change all around her. The blizzard faded, turning ghostly and powerless. The world was darker and sharper all at once. She could see details where there hadn’t been details before: the fine jigsaw of creases in the skin of the Mane’s face; the shocking complexity of its feathery irises.

There was a whispering in the air, a constant hiss of half-spoken words. Movement all around her. She recognised the movement of the Manes, prowling around the town. She could feel them. She shared their motion. And as she sank deeper and deeper into the trance, she felt the warmth of that connection. A sense of belonging, like nothing she’d experienced before, enfolded her. It was beautiful and toxic and sugary and appalling all at once.

She’d almost surrendered herself to it when she was ripped back into reality.

It took a moment for her senses to cope with the change. She was being pulled to her feet by a faceless man in a hooded fur-and-hide coat. Her initial reaction was to pull away, but he held her firmly and said something to her. When she didn’t respond, he said it again, and this time the words got through.

‘—re you alright? Jez? Jez?’

She nodded quickly, because she wanted him to shut up. He was frightening her with his urgent enquiries. The Mane was thrashing and squealing on the ground. A cutlass was buried in the base of its neck, up to the collarbone, half-severing its head. There was little blood, just a clean wound, exposing bone.

But it still wasn’t finished. Moving with jerky, spastic movements, it got its feet under it and tried to stand. Riss swore and kicked it in the face, knocking it flat. He wrenched the cutlass free and beheaded it with a second stroke.

Riss turned away from the corpse of the Mane and looked up at her. He held out his hand: come with me.

Something snapped inside her. The accumulated horror and shock of the attack broke through. She lost her mind and fled.

She ran, through the passageways between the houses, out into the blizzard. The winds pushed and battered her. Snow stuck to her goggles. She could hear Riss calling her name but she ignored him. At some point she realised that she could no longer see any houses, just endless, unmarked snow. She kept running, driven by the terror of what lay behind.

Only when exhaustion drove her to her knees did she stop. She was thoroughly lost, and all traces of her passing were being erased by the fury of the snow. She dared not go back, and she couldn’t go forward. The cold, that she’d barely noticed during her flight, had set in deep. She began to shiver violently. A tiredness overtook her, every bit as insidious and unstoppable as the power of the Manes.

She curled up into a foetal position, and there, buried in the snow, she died.

Every day since, Jez had wondered what might have happened if things had gone another way. If Riss hadn’t saved her. If she’d succumbed to the Mane.

Would it have been so bad, in the end? In that brief moment, when she touched upon the world of the Manes, she’d felt something wonderful. An integration, a togetherness above and beyond anything her human life had given her.

She’d never borne children, never been in love. She’d always dreamed of having friends she could call soulmates, but somehow it never happened. She just didn’t care about them enough, and they didn’t care about her in return. She’d always considered herself rather detached, all in all.

So 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.

There was one last thing to do before she set off. Though she’d been lying in the infirmary with all the appearance of a corpse, she’d been wide awake. And she’d heard Dracken’s men talk. Not all the crew of the Ketty Jay had been taken on board the Delirium Trigger.

She slowed the Ketty Jay to a hover and consulted the charts again. She wanted to get this right first time. It was a small challenge to herself. She adjusted the craft’s heading, pushed her on half a klom, then stopped again. When she was satisfied, she engaged the belly lights. The ashen, dusty waste below her was flooded in dazzling light. She smiled.

Damn it, Jez. You’re good.

There, right where they’d left her, was Bess.