Page 5

VULNERABILITY

Don’t give up, skeleton!

~ Runes carved in stone beside skull, author unknown

* * *

Esterra and Tarr had travelled through half a dozen tracts.

They did not speak of the darkness that haunted a buried city, nor the fact that Esterra had taken a little too long to come back for him when he hung from the breaking shelves of the burning library.

She wondered if he had noticed her indecision, and whether the tension between them was real or all in her head.

He seemed content to continue his journey with her, but that meant little, since the linear nature of the past few tracts had forced them onto the same path.

Allies were rare enough, so she did not.

They did not discuss their destinations.

They both knew they could not return the way they had come, so it was simply a matter of moving forward.

Verpace was like that.

Sometimes you simply kept travelling in the hope of a journey’s eventual end.

They had passed through a crumbling city of odd minarets and shattered spires, where bronze-cast figures limned in green oxidation danced in perpetual stasis, four arms held in a lurid pose and the figure’s head a flat outline of a shattered circle.

Tarr told her it was the goddess of the kanikani, the infamous dancers who now only twirled in the far yaelu , beyond the plague-ridden tracts of the Sunken Hamlets and the raging Scathefire.

She doubted anyone had made it across that cursed swathe of flame and floodplains, and if they had she doubted they still worshipped this deity, who would have proffered no helping hand in such tribulations despite having four arms.

Stars damn it, I could do more with one, she thought to herself, her silent joke drawing a grim smile across her lips.

The current tract was filled with trees with smooth, pale bark all bent like blunt farmers’ sickles, rising straight from the ground for half a pace before twisting at a harsh right angle to begin a long, slow sickle curve.

They all bent the same way, the pale trunks almost exact copies of one another and all bending away in precisely the same direction.

They seemed to grow in pairs, as well.

It was as if they had been carefully planted and shaped by unknown hands, a garden perhaps.

She had heard of such things, though she could not comprehend the effort wasted on such an idea.

Dark hued leaves carpeted the flat ground in between, purples and cerulean mixing with the decomposing browns and blacks of their fallen predecessors.

Nothing moved and nothing made a sound.

The pair crunched through the tract like noisy children in a hallowed place, each step an intrusion into this forest tabernacle.

A craggy hillock rose before them, square slabs of stone piled up like discarded pieces of a city, dirt and grass and tree roots filling the spaces, the weird sickle trees perched in pairs all over it.

Still they faced the same direction, even in their weird climb up the broken hill.

“We’ll get up top and see what there is to see,”

Tarr said, leading the way.

He had woken fresh and full of an energy that Esterra did not feel.

The darkness in the dead, underground city had haunted her sleep every night.

White hands and black shadow pursued her through endless hallways, ever on the cusp of clutching her and hauling her into the abyss.

She would wake with cold sweat on her temple and a half-strangled scream caught in her throat.

She knew it was simply her exhausted mind replaying the events, trying to heal or make sense of them or some such nebulous reason.

The knowledge brought her no peace.

She never managed to get back to sleep after waking, and this was taking its toll.

But Tarr’s presence brought her some distraction in the waking hours.

He bore things with a certain humour, and was more resourceful than her first impression of him might have suggested.

Three tracts back he had spotted a few wild berry bushes which had escaped Esterra’s notice, and they had eaten heartily.

In the Tract of Undulating Filth, as she had named it, he had somehow filtered dirty water through stones and pebbles and sand into clear liquid, then boiled it till her finally declared it safe to drink.

He said the Grey Meditators once made a portable version, made of soft glass and changeable filters.

She scoffed at the concept, despite having heard rumours of such ingenious devices before.

She considered herself a pragmatist, and this nonsense about little machines of malleable glass was all a little too fanciful.

In any case, Tarr’s trick had saved their lives.

They had been trapped in the steaming crevices and canyons of that place for days, and the water had saved them from certain death, what with all the heat and dehydration due to sweat. She begrudgingly admitted that she might, might be feeling some growing respect for the man, but decided to withhold judgement till a later date. When that date might be, she had no idea. Maybe never.

“What are you smirking about, Esterra?”

“Your hat.”

“Ha ha.

That joke got old five tracts back.”

“Why did you wear the ugly thing anyway?”

“Why does anyone wear a hat?”

“No idea.

Hoods are far more practical.”

“I stored my styluses and brushes in the band, and the inside was a great place to store extra kindling.”

“Might explain why it fell like a rock while you ran.”

“Again, not particularly witty.”

She snorted and shrugged.

“Time for a break.

My calves are killing me.”

“At the top of this hill.

We can then sit and survey the area.”

“Fine.”

She climbed past him, rushing up the steep incline in an attempt to show that she was not tired in the least and needed no break.

That went well for a few paces until her boot slipped into a gap between a stone and an old tree root and twisted. Hard.

Her curse words resounded off the great stones above, and echoed down into the grey-white trees and mottled carpet of leaves that suffocated the bottom of the tract.

The windless sky opened itself to her cries, sent them across all the tract.

Tarr looked about in a panic.

Esterra realised her mistake and shut her mouth.

Stars cursed basta… She internalised her rage, which wasn’t half as satisfying but a damned lot more prudent.

They had no idea what creatures might haunt this forest.

Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

She hadn’t felt such pain in a long time.

“You need to keep quiet and let me look at it,”

Tarr said.

“Let me lift it…”

“Don’t touch me!”

she hissed, looking down at her leg, boot still wedged in the hole.

“Back off.”

Tarr shrugged and stepped aside, watching with a slight frown.

Esterra used her left hand to guide the leg slowly out of the hole, wincing each time the swollen flesh within the leather pressed against the hard edges of the root and stone.

Finally she had the limb free.

She sat down and gingerly unlatched the bootstraps one by one, cursing horribly under her breath in every language she knew.

Tarr listened in wonder.

She ignored him.

Her ankle was swollen, reddened skin straining against the dirt-stained foot wraps until she yanked them free.

She splashed a little water over her foot, muttering a fresh series of curses.

Poking at the swelling only encouraged further foul language.

“Are you going to swear all day or would you like my help?”

Tarr asked.

“Don’t need your help,”

she said.

“Go do something useful.”

“Your anger is misplaced.

I’m not the one who was clambering up her like a monkey.”

“Go screw yourself, Tarr.

Find a flax bush and weave yourself a damned hat or something.”

“I’ve treated injured limbs…”

“I can bloody manage.”

Tarr shook his head, hitched his pack up on his shoulders, and continued the climb, muttering something about stubborn tractwalkers.

She made a face at his back and spat to the side.

I don’t need any damned help from any damned man, let alone a self-important so-called member of some dead college.

She slipped her boot back over her foot.

The pain spiked and she muttered a curse.

Leaning on the dead tree whose root had caused the pain, she tried to stand.

The next curse was a lot louder, and she saw Tarr’s retreating shoulders flinch.

Stars damn it all… I have to keep it down.

Who knows what lives in this stars-cursed tract.

This proved more difficult than she thought.

The pain steadily increased with each movement, fresh throbs of pain pulsing through her calf.

Bloody tract.

Her ankle was already pressing against the inside of her boot, and that pressure only fed her bruised nerves.

She grit her teeth and swallowed hard.

Everything in her past, her entire life, was about survival, and a large part of that survival was ensuring that no one and no creature knew of any vulnerability.

Tarr had proved a safe companion thus far, but she had been strong and shown her capacity for great violence.

Yet there were men more clever than her and more sly who would happily bide their time, use her for protection while she was healthy and then rob her blind when she fell.

Or worse. Her hand drifted to her knife, and she sighed a slow breath of relief to find it there. The sigh broke off midway when another spike of pain took hold of her.

She hobbled some way up the incline, but gave up after barely a dozen paces.

Her ankle was broken or sprained.

Either way, she was getting nowhere tonight without some serious rest.

She sat down and considered the landscape about her in the dying light.

The heat of the day died away as if Verpace was breathing its last and soon only the eternal frozen night would reign over it and its horrid denizens.

Overhead, the branches of the sickle-trees rattled in a restless wind, and a weird, whining wail echoed from somewhere far in the distance and yet altogether too close for Esterra’s comfort.

A stale stench poisoned the wind, like death and decay had conceived a child and it crept about the tract with a dry, withered foulness, seeking a place to expire.

Esterra drew her scarf across her nose, grimacing, and dragged herself to the nearest tree.

Swearing under her breath, she gathered fallen twigs and sunbaked leaves.

A few minutes later she had a decent little pile of kindling with heavier branches snapped and arranged on top, a little bundle of leaves at the bottom.

Each movement was unnecessarily difficult, and her arms burned with the effort of half-dragging herself from the tree to her pack, and then dragging that back with her.

She rested for a moment, catching her breath.

Where is Tarr? she wondered.

It doesn’t matter.

Never needed him before, don’t need him now.

That stink of old rot came on the breeze again, and she gagged behind her scarf, struggling to focus on the flint and ever-shrinking nub of steel in her hand. She was an expert, though, and soon a tiny flame licked at the wood.

Not a moment too soon.

There was a clatter of hooves on stone, and something large clomped off into the bushes.

Esterra gasped and tore her knife from its sheath, falling back, heart pounding.

In her shock her boot had kicked into the little bundle of leaves and twigs she had assembled so carefully.

The flame vanished.

Silence swept into the little clearing again, but now it shimmered with whispers of dark things and unknown dangers.

Its stillness railed against the sputtering campfire, as if determined to dampen the tiny spark that had birthed fire there.

The silence wanted to drown any heat with its emptiness.

The leaves smoked, ripples of embers running along them but failing to catch, leaving behind only ash.

Her little fire had died.

She placed her knife down and felt around for the little bit of steel, found it, placed it carefully to one side.

Then she rebuilt the structure again, but with frantic energy now, nerves on edge.

Once that was done, she put the flint between her knees again and tapped the steel against it again and again, minuscule sparks flashing in the night.

Each little flash captured a still image of her surroundings in her mind, like a painting where the artist had used too much black paint and everything was just a hint of itself in a world of ebony dark.

She would find herself looking into the night instead of the flint, and only years of hard experience gave her the strength to refocus on the job at hand.

The scrape of steel on stone seemed deafening, the sparks blinding.

None caught.

She strained to listen for the slightest noise, kept flicking her eyes up between strikes to peer into the darkness despite the flashes blinding her, making the effort an exercise in futility.

Sparks flew and died.

Esterra swore.

Hooves clopped against flat stone in the night, loud, close, heavy.

She scraped steel across flint, but too roughly and the flint slipped from between her knees and went skittering off.

She leapt after it, her breath quick.

The hooves clattered off into the distance again, sharp and clear in the terrible silence. Her fingers found the stone, and she pincered it between her knees again and struck decisively. The sparks from her third try set the leaves ablaze. She dropped down, face inches from the tiniest flame that emerged, and forced herself to adopt a false calm before blowing ever so gently on the little embers. Flames licked up, cutting through the smoke and consuming the tiny amount of kindling she had gathered. The hooves were far away now, and her final exhalation into the leaves was a sigh of relief.

The light splashed across the clearing in defiance, driving back the dark and glistening off Esterra’s bared teeth.

Her eyes never stopped moving, scanning the emptiness between the trees with terror burning cold within her chest.

The night had fallen quiet again, and the thudding of her heart was distractingly loud.

She fought to still her panicked breathing. “Focus,”

she whispered between clenched teeth.

Careful breaths created a sense of calm, of control.

She packed away her flint and steel, the mundane actions helping her smother her emotions.

The fire took her attention after that, requiring constant little adjustments to ensure the wood didn’t collapse and kill the flames before they sustain themselves.

Warmth caressed her skin and her jaw relaxed, her teeth stopped grinding together, and the panic seeped away bit by bit.

The sickle moon breached the clouds in a silent slice, mirrored by the pale sickle trees, and everything became sharp white edges and shadows melting into the night.

Only the little fire crackling in the clearing held any colour.

Esterra raised her palm to it, relishing the heat while keeping watch.

Tarr was surely out there, and as much as she hated the thought, she found herself waiting for him to return.

Fighting in her condition was sure to end terribly.

Mobility was everything when one of your limbs was hanging useless in a sling, and she was about as mobile as a corpse.

She was in a rather open area, a few boulders around, nothing substantial.

Nowhere to hide.

Her ankle would not take her weight, she knew that much, so any fighting would be down here on the ground, stabbing upwards at the creature.

Or creatures.

She swallowed, eyes wide, knife out.

The fire meant she was not entirely blind or defenceless, but she had to move.

Before the sun had vanished behind the tawil she had spotted a group of three pillar-like stones leaning together.

It was some ways up the hill, but not impossibly far.

Their positioning had suggested a space beneath. Suggestions, that’s what I’m working with? Stars damn it all. She had relied on less in the past.

She could barely see the stones in the dark, but knew they were no more than a few minutes climb, even with her ankle the way it was.

She could not walk, and so began to crawl.

The ground beneath her hand and knees was made up of rough pebbles and dry grass, and the roots of the weird sickle-trees.

Her breath came hard and fast behind her scarf.

She had to leave her fire behind, but perhaps it would be a good distraction while also providing her with a light source down the hill.

She swore again, though it came out more as a grunt than anything coherent.

It’s the thought that counts .

The stale stink of the monster out there was soon muffled beneath the odour of her own mouth.

I need to chew some damn fennel once in a while , she thought. Might help me when I trade. Anything to distract her mind from hooves stamping down on her spine and immobilising her, ugly jaws with crooked teeth coming down to clamp her head and wrench it from her body. Yeah, don’t think about that. She smiled without humour, and crawled faster.

Stones sliced into her palm and knees, but she had no time to worry about minor grazes when something huge and unknown could stomp her to death at any moment.

Arm straining and legs kicking, she pushed and pulled herself up the ruined hill.

Finally the large stones came into view, her night-eyes adapting quickly now that she had left the fire behind.

There was a large gap at the base of the stones, large enough for a person but not for a monster.

At least, so she hoped.

She sucked in a heavy breath and… saw that the gap was covered by thorny brambles.

She moaned out a vile curse.

Hooves thundered across the pebble-strewn dirt below, raising clouds of dust.

She saw the briefest glimpse of a vast shadow in the flickering light.

Esterra scrambled forward, wincing each time her ankle twisted to a new position, trying her best not to place any pressure on it.

Still the thunder came.

She decided to risk the thorny brambles, and yanked herself towards them with quickening gasps.

Her muscles were on fire and her ankle screamed out like a starving child, desperate for attention.

The creature burst through her campfire below, a mess of smoke and sparks.

It reared up on its hind legs, the flames painting the mottled fur of its belly maroon.

Two great horns in the exact same shape as the weirdly curved trees of the tract towered up through the night.

The horns burned, the embers of Esterra’s fire eating into the bone.

The creature had torn her campfire apart with great strokes of its head, but had inadvertently set itself aflame.

Now it had become rage incarnate, a massive beast formed of purest fury.

She continued to push her way up, clawing at bushes and grass to pull herself towards the safety of the great stones.

The chimera stepped forward, cloven hooves thudding into the hard ground and raising leaves in a whirlwind.

The central goat’s head had three licht-blinded eyes, and behind it sat a shaggy mane with a mangled leathery face in the centre.

The win horns and mane burned, the stink of smouldering bone and hair cloying in the night.

Most horrible of all was the skeletal tail that twisted up from the spine, skin barely clinging to the vertebrae, topped with a half-shattered snake’s head.

The white bone was covered by a tumour composed of eyes, some scarred by licht, others black and shrivelled by flame.

The snake’s fangs were broken, but venom still glistened on the edges.

Dozens of goat-pupilled eyes fixed on her.

The burning horns turned toward her.

“Fuck.”

Esterra threw herself into the brambles headlong.

Thorns flashed across her cheeks, one cut her lip, and her hand was sticky with blood by the time she was halfway through.

Her ankle ignited with pain.

Tears blurred her vision, and she bit down on her tongue in agony.

The ground shook.

She kicked again, pushing through the bushes, her skin and clothes torn to shreds.

The pounding hooves thumped harder and louder.

Each movement reignited the sprained ankle, but Esterra had to move.

Staying here was certain death. Her face leaked blood, mixing with her tears. She moved by feel alone, the clouds of rising dust blocking out even the light of the burning beast. The boulder trembled beneath her hand, and the stones bit into her ribs.

The beast barrelled into the giant stone above her, a sick crack breaking through Esterra’s mind.

A horn snapped off and dropped onto her back, still aflame.

She rolled over, and saw the maddened chimera rearing above her, flaming mane now burned to a crisp and the skin beneath bubbling and blistering with the heat.

It wailed at her, a dozen blind eyes wishing death on its torturer.

She screamed as a hoof crashed down beside her calf, cracking stone with its strength.

Smoking tendrils of fur fell across her, and she spun to put them out.

The hoof smashed down again, ripping the hem of her trousers.

She kicked and pushed herself deeper into the recess, but it was tight and full of vicious thorns.

The shrieking beast pulled back and charged at the boulder again, its burning face smashing senselessly into the stone. Its slavering jaws leaked spit and blood all over its chest, and it lapped at the flames with its goat’s head, desperate to put them out.

Esterra slumped on her belly, covering her head with her hands and trying her best to keep her screams within.

If she played dead, perhaps the thing would stop.

The ceaseless rage crashed all about her, shaking her world and bruising her body.

Chips of stone rained down.

The stench of burning flash and bone flooded her lungs.

The hoof smashed down again, ripping straight through her trousers and gouging into her ankle.

She shrieked then, and the monster screamed with her.

Then it turned and fled, spraying sparks and embers as it ran.

As the pounding hooves vanished into the night, Esterra finally dared to open her eyes and draw breath.

A burning scrag of flesh lay by her face, and her stomach lurched.

Pushing her way free of the thorns and stone, she sucked in the night air, struggling to hold back the wild panic that boiled away beneath her mind.

The remains of her little campfire far below vanished as the last embers died away.

Jaw clenched, she drew her trouser leg up and saw the bloody wound that was her ankle.

Using the very last of her drinking water from her gourd, she washed the blood and dust away, then pulled a flaxen bandage from her pack.

The cloth was stiff and difficult to wrap around the limb with only one hand.

Her lower back ached insistently, begging her to lean back and relax.

But she knew the blood loss could prove fatal, not only in and of itself, but by attracting predators.

Though stars know what kind of creatures would be up the food chain from that thing.

She yanked the knot tight and fell back into the pebbled ground with a groan.

Her vision faded.

For a moment, she thought the comparative bliss of unconsciousness would claim her, but the pain came back, kicking her in the ribs and stomping down on her wounded leg.

Her teeth chattered, the cold and shock setting in. She set about collecting more sticks and twigs for a new campfire, trying to keep the darkness that swirled about her vision at bay.

Something clicked through the pebbles in the darkness.

Her knife was drawn before she saw that it was a human.

Tarr squeezed between the stones and plopped down beside her.

She saw he was not wounded but rather weighed down by a huge pile of wood, dry grass, and various herbs.

“We need to light another fire,” he said.

“There was a…”

“I know.

You wounded it, but it rampages still some ways off in its den.

We need to build a nice, big fire.

It fears us now, though hunger may win out eventually.

That abomination has eaten literally everything else in this tract.

I found the bones of another one of its kind, gnawed and cleaned of every bit of flesh.”

They worked together to push back the brambles, sweating from their efforts despite the cold.

The moon looked down on them between the clouds now and then, but they barely noticed.

Esterra was thankful that the work did not involve any movement of her leg, because her entire calf and foot had joined in the chorus of pain.

They felt eyes on their backs, either imagined or real they could not tell, and turned often lest the creature come upon them unawares.

Each rustle of the branches in the pale wind sent a tremor of panic through their hearts.

Shadows moved with malicious intent, but melted into stillness as soon as one turned an eye on them.

The corpse-rotted stench of the thing lingered like an omen of things to come.

Esterra collapsed back against the stone and let Tarr do the honours of trying to light the fire.

He had his own flint and steel, and set to work with diligent focus.

It took him only two strikes before the sparks caught the dry leaves.

He’s not working with one hand , she told herself in a vain attempt to soothe her ego.

The man had clearly survived more than first impressions might suggest.