The Long War

64

WHEN HE WOKE, he was sitting on some kind of hard chair, slumped forward. The pain in his back was exquisite, a tapestry.

A face floated before him. A dog, a wolf . . . It showed tenderness.

It was the one called Li-Li. She peered at him, lifted one eyelid with a leathery finger-like extension of one paw. Then she growled, ‘Sorr-hrry.’ She backed away.

Now Sally was here, standing before him.

Beyond her he could make out a room, a big chamber, stone walls and floor, well-built, roomy, drab, undecorated. The air was full of the scent of dog. There were other people here. And dogs. His head was clearing, slowly; he felt like he’d been drugged.

‘Joshua. Don’t step.’

He focused on her with difficulty. ‘Sally?’

‘Don’t step. Whatever you do, don’t step. Well, you’re here at last. You took some tracking down, you and the professional Irishman here, in your travel-trailer in the sky. But I see the clue I had to leave finally percolated through your brain.’

‘The ring . . .’

‘Yes, the ring.’

‘Why’s it so important, suddenly?’

‘You’ll see. Sorry.’

‘Sorry? Why? And why the hell not step?’ He was mumbling, he discovered.

She took his cheeks in her hands, making him face her. He tried to remember the last time she had touched him, save by the scruff of the neck to rescue him from some calamity or other, such as from the wreck of the Pennsylvania. ‘Because if you do, you’ll die.’

He guessed, ‘My back?’

‘It’s a kind of staple, Joshua.’

That was Jansson. He looked around, blearily. He saw Jansson sitting on the ground by the wall, a beefy-looking dog standing over her.

He said, ‘A staple? Like the North Koreans. An iron staple through the hearts of prisoners. So if they step away—’

‘Yeah. In your case it’s a cruder variant, of a type used by some warlords in central Asia, we think. Joshua, don’t sit back. There’s a kind of crossbow fixed to your back. It’s just wood and stone and sinew, but it has an iron pin. You can walk around, you understand? But if you step away—’

‘The pin stays behind, and boing. The bow fires, and the bolt goes straight through the heart, right? I get it.’ He began to drum the message into his own head. Don’t step. Don’t step. He felt at his chest. Under the ruin of his shirt he found a stout leather band. ‘What’s to stop me just cutting this off?’

‘First, that would set it off,’ Sally said. ‘And, second, they sewed the weapon to your skin. I mean it’s supported by the strap around your chest, but . . .’

‘They sewed it?’

‘Sorr-hrry, sorr-hrry,’ Li-Li said. ‘Order-hrrs . . . here.’ She brought Joshua a carved wooden mug, plain but smoothly shaped.

It contained a lukewarm, meaty broth. He drank gratefully. He found he was hungry, thirsty. He couldn’t be that badly hurt. ‘Orders, eh?’

‘It’s not her fault,’ Jansson said. ‘She’s a kind of doctor, I think. She tried to do the work cleanly, competently. Gave you some kind of painkillers. If it had been left to others – Joshua, I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were going to jump you like that.’

‘Nothing you could have done, I suspect, Lieutenant Jansson.’

‘We have a plan, of sorts. Or had one before you showed up. We’ve been trying to adapt . . .’

Sally said, ‘We’re second-guessing the motivation of non-human sapients. We weren’t expecting them to treat you like this. Maybe this is what passes for diplomacy, among beagles. Just attack the ambassador when he shows up. However the staple is our technology, after all. Humans invented this stuff to control other humans.’

Joshua grunted, ‘So I’m learning a moral lesson. But somebody brought it here, right? And somebody had to show these dogs—’

‘Beagles,’ Sally said.

‘How to manufacture the iron components.’

‘That would-ss be me. Hell-llo, pathless-ss one . . .’

Joshua looked around, more carefully, systematically. There was a row of dogs – beagles? – standing as if to attention over one of their number lying on a kind of scrap of lawn, green growing grass, like a carpet. Sally was standing before him, Jansson and Bill sitting on the floor, against one wall. And, in another corner, with a dog guard hovering over him—

‘Finn McCool. I’ve seen you looking better.’

The kobold had evidently been worked over. He could barely sit up straight. His sunglasses were gone. One eye was closed, bruises showed down one side of his bare torso, and one of his ears had been bitten off; Joshua could see the marks of teeth, a crude stitching. Still, McCool grinned. ‘It was all busines-ss. We told the beagles-ss of you, pathless-ss ones. Your ships flicker in the ss-ky of this world. You would notice beagles-ss soon. We told them, be ready. We taught them how to ss-taple the ss-teppers. We got good price-ss.’

‘Did you have this done to me?’

The kobold managed to laugh. ‘Not me. But I would hav-ve, pathless-ss one.’

Bill Chambers snarled. ‘Pogue mahone, gobshite.’

Joshua said, ‘So what the hell happened to you, McCool? Contractual dispute, was it?’

‘Or-hrrders again,’ came another voice, canine, but with a more liquid quality than the rest. Female. ‘My or-hhrders. Always my orders . . .’

Joshua turned to the group of dogs by the podium. He recognized the tall warrior – Snowy. He still had that ray gun dangling from his Batman-type utility belt, like a prop from one of Lobsang’s old 1950s sci-fi movies, alongside crude blades of metal and stone. He stood at ease, but with an air of constant, competent alertness.

He was watching over another, a female, the one who lounged, very dog-like, on the grass. It was she who had spoken about orders.

Sally was studying Joshua with some sympathy, leavened by amusement at his probably obvious disorientation. ‘Classic Long Earth set-up, isn’t it, Joshua? A mash-up of three disparate sapient species – four if you count the Rectangles builders, off-stage – nurtured on separate Earths and now all mixed up together like this.’ She nodded at the reclining female dog. ‘Joshua, meet Petra. Granddaughter, ruler of this city – this Den, whatever – which is called the Eye of the Hunter.’

‘Granddaughter?’

‘Two down in the hierarchy from the Mother, I think. The big boss of this doggy nation is the Mother, then you get Daughters, Granddaughters—’

‘Petra?’

‘A human nickname, apparently. You’d probably ruin your epiglottis if you tried for their true names. Not that we mere humans are told them anyhow.’

‘We’re not the first to pass through here, then.’

‘Evidently not. Those damn combers get everywhere, don’t they? . . . Now pay attention. Petra’s in charge, and she knows it.’

Joshua faced Petra. ‘It was your orders to staple me?’

‘Let me make it plain, Josh-shua. What is it we each-shh wann-t? You, the tr-hrrollss. Yes? Make peace.’

‘That’s why I came here.’

‘Me too,’ Sally said.

‘Ve-hrry good. But I care not for you, or tr-hrrolls. Though t-hrroll music pleases. I care for these.’ And she plucked the ray gun from Snowy’s belt, hefted it in her graceful fingers, pointed it straight at Joshua’s head – and pulled what was obviously the trigger.

He didn’t flinch, though from the corner of his eye he saw Jansson and Bill shrink back. Of course nothing happened. It wasn’t the moment in the game for him to die, though he suspected that would come later.

The Granddaughter said, ‘Weapons. Come from him.’ She gestured at the cringing, grinning kobold. ‘Where from? From scentless wo-hhrlds.’

Sally murmured, ‘She means, stepwise. These canine conquerors can’t step. Which is why they needed to staple you.’

‘Weapons make Eye of Hunter-rhh strong Den. Stronger than foe dens.’

Granddaughter, Joshua thought blearily. Dogs had big litters. This granddaughter of the queen must have a lot of rivals.

Sally said, ‘Joshua, you need to understand. As far as I can make out these canines don’t care about us, or about stepping, the parallel worlds. All they care about is their own wars, their own agendas, their conflicts. We’re just a means to an end.’

‘We’d be the same, probably.’

‘Right. And all they really want, right now, is weapons to fight their wars.’

‘The ray guns?’

‘But weapons die.’ The Granddaughter threw the weapon, a kind of laser pistol, Joshua saw, contemptuously on the floor. ‘That-tt one knows.’ She pointed at the kobold. ‘Whe-hrre weapons a-hhre. How to get. They dhrr-ibble into my hands, for ho-hrrible price, then die. Enough. We have per-hrrsuaded him to help.’ She fingered something at her neck, a scrap of flesh dangling on a thong. It was an ear, Joshua saw. A kobold ear. And beside it, on a second thong, now he looked more closely – a ring, like his own, a Rectangles ring. ‘But kobold has no weapons-ss fo-hhr us.’

‘Prob-lemm for me,’ hissed the kobold, his anxious grin showing bloody teeth, his gaze flickering over the humans’ faces.

‘I’ll bet it is,’ Joshua said.

Joshua couldn’t figure it all out yet, not quite. But these rings, from the world a few steps away, were evidently crucial. As Sally had seen. And by retrieving their own ring she had sought some kind of advantage.

‘Here’s the deal,’ Sally said quickly. ‘The beagles want more ray guns. They are in caches, over in Rectangles.’

‘They are where? In what?’

Sally gritted her teeth. ‘Is this really the time for an archaeology lesson, Valienté? Just listen . . .’ She spoke very rapidly, and he realized she was hoping the beagles, and the kobold, wouldn’t be able to follow fully. ‘The caches the kobold raided before are all exhausted. Locked up. To get at fresh ones he needs another key.’

Joshua’s mind, unusually flexible for once – maybe it was the goad of the lingering pain – made the connection. ‘The key is the ring we found in the cave of bones. The ring I kept, the ring you took from the airship—’

‘The ring I now have secreted on my person,’ Sally murmured. ‘But they don’t know I have it.’

‘I’m not surprised. And the ring the Granddaughter is wearing—’

‘Opened a weapons cache that’s now exhausted.’

‘He needs a new key. He, or his buddies, must have combed Rectangles for the keys. How come he didn’t find the one we did?’

‘On the finger of a long-dead corpse? Some taboo, maybe. Or instinct. He’s not human, Joshua. He’s not going to seek stuff out the way a human would.’

‘OK. What now?’

‘So here’s the deal we made. The beagles can’t step, right? So we go over to Rectangles – that is me, Jansson, the kobold. He shows us where the cache is, we open it with the ring, we come back with more ray guns, nicely charged up. That was the plan. But I’ve been playing for time, Joshua. For a month now. Time before I had to give away our only advantage. Time before I had to hand over high-energy weapons to these sapients we’ve only just met. I just hoped something would turn up, that we’d find some other way out. You were a wild card, Joshua. Once you got here – if you got here at all – I hoped I could use you to force a bluff, somehow. Get out of here, get to the trolls. Instead of which—’

‘Here I am with a crossbow stitched to my back. Sorry to let you down.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ Sally said without a hint of irony. ‘Not your fault. Once again I didn’t guess the non-human motivation right.’ She sighed. ‘Look. While you were out we talked, came up with a deal. I think we’ll have to hand over the damn weapons. If they exist, if we can bring them back. The deal is that if we do make it back with the weapons, you get to speak to the trolls. But you’ve also become a kind of hostage, to make sure we won’t just step away out of here.’

‘Maybe you should do just that. Step away. Take Jansson, Bill with you—’

She sighed, irritated. ‘You’ve always been an idiot, Valienté. If I left you here I wouldn’t care, but Helen would kill me. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good in the long run. We have to handle this situation with the trolls here somehow. And resolve humanity’s relationship with the beagles. We come back, and then, when everybody’s got what they want—’

Joshua, his back twinging every time he moved, turned to the Granddaughter. ‘Yes, what then, uh, Granddaughter Petra? Are we free to go?’

She smiled. Her lips pulled back over gleaming teeth. It was an almost human expression, if a chilling one. ‘You will still be alivve. And perhaps you will live on, if you display honour-rhh . . .’

Joshua tried to make sense of that.

Bill spoke up. ‘Joshua. Remember, they’re not human. “Honour” meant something different to that gobshite kobold, didn’t it? I wonder what “honour” means to a sentient species descended from pack-hunting carnivores.’

‘I have a feeling I’m going to find out,’ Joshua said with dread. ‘First things first.’ He stood carefully, but his back flared with pain and he staggered, until Sally grabbed his arms. ‘Where are the trolls?’