War of the Maps, page 23
‘What worries me,’ Cyf said, ‘is that you think that you and Remfrey He have some kind of special bond.’
‘Let’s hope that Remfrey He thinks so. It will make finding him much easier.’
The lucidor was feverish with anticipation, thinking of the hostile territory beyond the city, infested with alter women and other monsters, where Remfrey He waited like some orb spider squatting at the confluence of a fan of threads, monitoring the tugs and tiny displacements that signalled the presence of potential prey. The mercenaries were armed with pistols and crossbows and fat-barrelled long guns; explosive and gas grenades hung like ripe fruit from their bandoliers. Angustyn had several thin-bladed throwing knives sheathed at his belt. Surmal carried a double-headed axe. Veca had an ivory-handled blazer holstered at her hip. The lucidor did not doubt that they were adept at taking down ordinary monsters, but their arsenal would be of little use against the kind of traps and tricks Remfrey He liked to deploy.
Angustyn came back from the end of the platform and made a big deal about how distance and the usual static meant that he hadn’t been able to acquire their target.
‘Kid’s trying to prove he’s the expedition’s only true scrier,’ Cyf told the lucidor. ‘He knows fine well he won’t be able to pick up any trace of Remfrey He until we get much closer.’
‘You’ll let me know as soon as you do get a sense of him,’ the lucidor said.
‘I intend to let everyone know.’
They saddled up and rode out, Cyf and the lucidor behind Orjen, Lyra and their pack horse, the three mercenaries in their boiled leather armour riding at point as they trotted down a cobbled road between brick-built warehouses. Huge ships loomed above flat roofs: the hulks of arks that had once carried people and cargo across the World Ocean to other maps on voyages that lasted years, the paintwork of their hulls and superstructure mostly gone, their control towers empty shells with shattered windows, the stacks of decks where crops had been cultivated on the long voyages overgrown with weeds and hung with shrouds of ivy and red-leaved vines. Cranes reared above one ship and people were working on its deck and in cradles hung alongside its hull; Orjen dropped back and told the lucidor and Cyf that it was the First Pilgrim, the smallest and oldest of the arks, built three centuries ago to circumnavigate the map and chart its reefs and coastline on a voyage that had lasted two decades, now being modified to serve as a command base.
‘After she’s been commissioned, I hope to spend some time on her and extend my work on sea monsters,’ Orjen said. ‘Not the little monsters I was collecting in the Horned Strait, but true leviathans. Creatures so big that only a ship the size of the First Pilgrim can trawl for them.’
‘Perhaps they would be better left in the sea,’ the lucidor said.
‘Knowledge drives out fear,’ Orjen said serenely. ‘That’s why we are here.’
They rode past a long stretch of demolished warehouses, with a view across slumps of brick rubble towards the wreck of an ark that lay on its side, revealing its keel and splayed ranks of propellers. The seawall of the harbour loomed in the distance, with the white pillar of the great lighthouse marking its entrance: the tallest building in the map, crowned by iron bowls where fires fed by forests of pitch pine burned, visible for a hundred leagues at night.
They were riding now through a grid of blasted streets. Scarcely a wall left intact. Shell holes. A tank washing a swale of rubble with long arcs of blue flame. Troops moving in a line across a field gone to scrub. Troops sitting in the lee of a broken wall, dirty faces lifting to watch the party ride past. Trash fires in the streets and the taste of smoke and burned plastic in the air. A manufactory standing in a desert of rubble, its brickwork pockmarked by shrapnel.
This dead zone gave way to marshes that had overtaken the city’s eastern outskirts centuries before. The road ran on top of an embankment raised above long stretches of reeds and reaches of black water. It reminded the lucidor of the Land, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Alcnos and Doros part the reeds and clamber up the steep side of the embankment, eager to join the expedition. But apart from brushstrokes of smoke leaning at the western horizon there was no sign of human life anywhere. No sound but wind rustling in reeds, the plash of water, the lonely cry of some unseen bird, the clop of their horses’ hooves on the road’s stone paving. And then the road curved along the inner edge of a bay, and for the first time in his life the lucidor had a proper sight of the World Ocean.
Late afternoon mirrorlight sparked on the waters of the bay, glinted on long parallel white lines where waves that had rolled across ten thousand leagues of open water broke on the adamantine reefs the creator gods had raised around the coast of the map. Beyond, a desert plain of iron-coloured water stretched to a haze that hid the joint between water and sky. Mountainous ranges of cloud hung in the sky out there, so far off that they seemed level with the lucidor as he sat on his horse and took in the view. A clean wind blew from the ocean and things like giant naked birds, their long jaws crowded with needle teeth, hung on the wind above the bay, now and then stooping down and skimming the waves with hook-clawed feet and snatching up a fish.
Beyond the bay, the road ran straight across another stretch of marsh, and a clot of figures in the far distance slowly resolved into a small band of soldiers. Some mounted, some on foot, all of them bedraggled and battle-worn. A man lay on a travois dragged behind a warhorse, bloody bandages wrapped around his bare chest. Three bodies were draped over the back of another warhorse, their heads and feet jostling limply as it went past.
Veca reined in her mount and talked with the leader of the band, a sturdy woman who took off her leather helmet to reveal close-trimmed blond hair and a square-jawed pugnacious face. She turned to point over her shoulder, shook her head when Veca asked her a question, and spoke at some length before slapping palms with the mercenary and riding on after her troops.
The expedition dismounted and let the horses graze along the edge of the embankment. Lyra handed out pocket breads stuffed with diced vegetables and soft cheese, and Veca explained that the soldiers had been ambushed by alter women while manning a watch post on the coast, about six leagues ahead. They had been overrun, lost five people as they fought their way clear, and had to leave two bodies behind because the alters kept coming.
‘If it was on the coast it won’t be anywhere near our route,’ Orjen said.
‘That’s true,’ Veca said. ‘But we might have to change our plans if we run into the same bunch, or another like it.’
‘And no one bothered to warn us,’ Angustyn said, around a mouthful of food.
‘It might be a splinter group, looking to set up a new nest,’ Orjen said. ‘The nests further east are three or four years old now, well established and no doubt ready for division. It’s bad luck for the soldiers, but it shouldn’t affect us as long as you make sure that we know where the alters are before they find us.’
She was overtopped by the three mercenaries but had a determined commanding air. Lyra stood behind her, arms folded across her denim work shirt, fists resting in the crooks of her elbows.
‘I can spot any that get close,’ Angustyn said, looking at the lucidor, ‘as long as this walking blank spot keeps away from me.’
The lucidor stared back until the scrier looked away.
‘You and Surmal ride point,’ Veca told Angustyn. ‘The rest of you stick close to me. Saddle up and stay sharp.’
As they mounted their horses, Cyf said to the lucidor, ‘Do you think these irregulars know what they are doing?’
‘I’d trust Veca in a fight. But I also know that plans don’t often survive contact with the enemy.’
‘Don’t hope to take advantage of any confusion. Whatever happens, I’m sticking right by your side.’
They rode on, the mirror arc sinking behind them. The lucidor was alert and apprehensive, watching for movement in the marsh’s reaches of black water and stands of reeds. The human bustle of the railway station and the hulks of the arks and ruins of the great city seemed a long way behind.
The marsh gave out and in the incarnadine flame of the setting mirrors they rode on through a bald scrubland. Low rounded hills gouged with slumps and pockmarked with shell holes. Scant grass and brush burned to char and ash.
At last, Angustyn and Surmal halted beside a pair of posts crookedly crowned with wagon wheels, disturbing a handful of large black birds that flapped heavily into the air and circled high above, calling hoarsely each to each. When the lucidor and the others caught up they saw child-sized bodies had been lashed to the wheels. Alter women, gone mostly to leather and bone, broken legs and arms threaded through spokes.
‘These weren’t here the last time we came through,’ Angustyn said.
‘Are they supposed to be a warning to other alters?’ Cyf said.
‘More likely a warning to travellers like us,’ Lyra said. She was sitting straight in her saddle, scanning the land around them, one hand on the hilt of the knife slung from her bandolier.
‘Any live ones about?’ Veca said.
‘Sure,’ Angustyn said. ‘Before your man there rode up and shut me down it was like a thousand tiny snakes were hissing in my head. Same as it always is out here.’
‘I mean close at hand,’ Veca said.
‘None I could tell.’
‘It’ll be dark soon. Gus, you and me will go on up the road to where it tops that rise and take a look around.’
‘I already told you it’s clear.’
‘And I want to be sure. Surmal, you take our guests up there,’ Veca said, pointing to a group of standing stones on the crest of a distant hill. ‘Long as it’s safe, that’s where we’ll make camp.’
‘I’d like to go with you,’ Cyf said.
‘I don’t need any help,’ Angustyn said.
‘I’ve been riding close to Thorn all day,’ Cyf said. ‘I’m curious about this interference the alter women are supposed to put out.’
Veca studied him for a moment, said she didn’t see why not. ‘Take the rest of ’em up there, S. Keep ’em close.’
They were big, the stones. Roughly squared pillars three times the height of a person, set in a circle. Two pairs were still joined by crosspieces; others fallen long ago were half-sunk in the ground. Soldiers and mercenaries had painted their unit or company signs on several of the stones, and left the blackened circle of a big camp fire. Surmal sifted ashes, said that it could be days or weeks old, and walked off to the edge of the circle to keep watch as Veca, Cyf and Angustyn rode towards the crest of the road.
‘This is a temple from the first days, built by the so-called Primitive Folk,’ Orjen told the lucidor. ‘Some say that the godlings hunted them like animals, others that they rode them like they rode the First People. Anyway, they’re gone now. All that remains of them are places like this and a few traits from their life maps, preserved in ours. It seems that, after the godlings left, the First People enslaved some of the Primitive Folk’s women and had children by them, which means that they must have been more closely related to us than the old scriptures claim. Some say it’s those fragments that confer gifts, rather than direct descent from those ridden by godlings, but I am not aware of any study that shows a direct correlation.’
The lucidor said, ‘If this was a temple when godlings walked the world, what kind of worship was practised here?’
‘No one knows,’ Orjen said. ‘But there are stories that feral tribes of the First People took over these circles and performed human sacrifices inside them.’
‘What’s up?’ Lyra said to the lucidor. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘In a place like this, it wouldn’t be surprising,’ the lucidor said.
The shatterling had been absent for so long that he had let the stark cold reality of his link with it slip to the edges of his mind. But now he felt, faint but clear, its presence at his back again, and remembered the vision it had spun at the City of the Copper Mountain. The ranks of whitewashed captives. The ceremonial decapitation. The shatterling had told him that the industrial slaughter had marked the fabric of the world, and he wondered if that fabric had been likewise marked here, wondered if that was why the shatterling had been able to reach out to him from its pit. A chilly thought. If it found it easier to contact him in those places where the world had been stained by murder, what did that say about its nature?
Surmal was coming towards them, grim-faced, telling them to quit their chattering and look sharp.
‘Are we in trouble?’ Lyra said.
‘Don’t know yet,’ Surmal said. ‘But Veca and the others are coming back in an awful hurry.’
29
Foraging Party
Veca said that they had spotted alters moving across the top of a hill about two leagues away. ‘Five or six workers, most likely a foraging party. They won’t be a problem as long as they keep heading south, so I reckon we will be safe enough hunkering down here for the night.’
‘If it is a foraging party, it’s a long way from any nest,’ Orjen said.
‘They have to range far and wide these days,’ Veca said. ‘If we move on now we could run into more alters. And there are other things just as bad out there, too, and some of them like to hunt at night. Gus, you take first watch. Keep an eye on that little party, let me know at once if it changes direction.’
‘I’d rather not have to set up a ways from the old guy,’ Angustyn said. ‘Maybe he should set up his own bivouac a ways from us.’
‘If you’re scared of the dark, I can keep track of that party for you,’ Cyf said.
‘You and your friend can best make yourselves useful by scouting up kindling,’ Veca said. ‘We’ll cook some food, boil up a pail of chai. Everything will seem better once we get things civilised around here.’
They hobbled their horses inside the stone circle while Angustyn walked out into the dusk and took up position behind the shelter of a stone fallen some way from the circle. Tiu stood bright and blood-red above the largest of the stones and Surmal said that it was a good omen: the wanderer was the sign and symbol for war and warriors.
‘I would be happier to see the star for a safe journey,’ Cyf said. ‘If there is one such.’
‘Some say that Tiu is the remnant of the world of the Ur Men,’ Orjen said. ‘Whether or not that is true, we do know that it appears to be a body of stone and is much smaller than our world – if you could peel it like a pippin and lay its skin on the World Ocean it would be larger than Gea but smaller than most of the other maps. Small though it is, it has an envelope of air, and seas and polar ice caps, and perhaps even some kind of life. And it shines so brightly because it is lit by mirrors. Recently, the skywatcher Albus Starstrider was able to split their light into its component colours, confirming the claims of certain old texts it is identical to the light of our own mirrors, and therefore must have the same source, namely the Heartsun.’
‘People once rode through the air and went to war against Tiu,’ Veca said. ‘So I read in one of those old texts, anyway. But who’s to say what they tell true and what is fantasy got up to scare children?’
They were all sitting around a fire pit, eating fish and rice cakes Lyra had cooked on a griddlestone.
‘We can test ideas with the tools and methods of practical philosophy,’ Orjen said. ‘Such as Albus Starstrider’s experiments in splitting the light of Tiu’s mirrors using a telescope and a prism. Or calculating Tiu’s mass from the radius and period of its orbit around our world, and its density from its mass and volume. As for your story about a war of the worlds, anything thrown hard enough into the sky would either keep falling around the world or escape it entirely, so flying to Tiu, or anywhere else in the sky beyond, is not as impossible as it might seem. That’s what the creator gods did, and the Ur Men in time’s dawn. Perhaps we will be able to do it one day, and find out if there are people like us on Tiu.’
‘Not too much like us, I hope,’ Veca said. ‘The present war is enough for me. I don’t need to go looking for another.’
After a short silence, the lucidor asked Cyf if scrying the alters had been very different from scrying people.
Cyf brooded on the question and said, ‘You ever go to the Founding Day fair?’
‘Once or twice.’
With friends, when he hadn’t been much older than Panap, and later with his wife, but he wasn’t going to tell Cyf about that.
‘Then perhaps you remember there was a tent where you walked through a kind of corridor of mirrors.’
‘The ones that were all bent and warped?’
‘They gave back your reflection as a fat dwarf or a skinny giant, gave you two heads, and so on. It was a little like that with the alters, except the mirrors were reflecting each other. I can’t think of any better way to describe it. They weren’t human, they weren’t like animals, and it was hard to tell one from another. For once, I’m glad to be sitting inside your cone of silence. Glad I don’t have to worry about having them inside my head.’
Lyra looked at them across the fire pit. ‘Way I see it, the soldiers took a hit for us. Alter foraging parties don’t search for anything in particular. They wander randomly until they stumble over something tasty or useful, and draw others to the spot. So if those alters hadn’t found the soldiers, they might have found us instead.’
‘We have certainly been lucky so far,’ Orjen said.
‘Don’t count on luck to see us through,’ Veca said. ‘Stick together and stay sharp. See trouble before trouble sees you.’
‘And if trouble finds us, stay out of the way when I start swinging,’ Surmal said, patting the axe on the ground beside him.
They slept, or tried to. The lucidor lay a little way from the others, looking up at the red tides of stars and frozen billows of star stuff, wondering again why Remfrey He had put himself in danger by heading out into alter women territory. Not to help the army or end the war, that was certain. And the man wasn’t interested acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake, either. He was a pragmatist, only interested in devices and ideas that he could use to assert his authority, to manipulate or humiliate and hurt other people, to make mischief. To amuse himself. That most of all. He had once asked the lucidor if he had ever, as a child, poked a hole in the side of a white ant castle. If he had watched the insects boil out, swarming everywhere, looking for something to fight and failing to find it because they could not understand what had happened. Could not grasp the nature of their human enemy, let alone his motive.
