Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

God damn it. He couldn’t risk harm to the lad who’d saved him.

Very well, he would play his part. As much as it stuck in his craw, he would have to play the game for which he’d held Mathers in such contempt. He needed to buy time. He had to stay alive until the crew of the Ivanhoe could find him. He couldn’t be sure that they would look, but he had faith in Nellie.

“The man Tarak has acted truly,” intoned Alfie, cringing inside as he spoke.

Ranaman nodded in approval. He bowed before Alfie. “The one who was sent before has gone to prepare the way.”

“The one who was sent before?” asked Alfie, confused.

“He, too was garbed as you are.”

Alfie looked down at his khaki uniform. Another soldier? There was only one man he knew who had been as far as this. Jeffries. If the rumours were true, the man could beat Mathers at his own game.

“Where is he, this other one?”

Ranaman looked at him blankly, as if Alfie should have known. “He communed with the ancestors and joined them in the underworld.”

Jeffries was dead?

“Soon you must do the same to make possible Croatoan’s return. The ritual must not fail.”

A chill froze halfway down Alfie’s spine. Dear God. He’d always known Mather’s deception had been a fool’s game, and now it was going to kill him.

He was going to be a human sacrifice.

THE PADRE BLINKED and looked up. They were alive. Around him, the gathered scentirrii stepped back and parted.

“I thought they were going to kill us,” said Edith in a low tremulous voice, checking her hands and face for acid burns.

Trembling with fear and relief, the Padre turned to Chandar for an explanation.

It spread its vestigial middle limbs. “They cannot hurt you,” it said. “They have received this One’s blessing. They have merely scented you. If you are not scented, you will be killed. Now you will smell Khungarrii. You will be safe.”

The precaution proved well founded. As they journeyed, they met more scentirrii patrols and parties of worker chatts in the forest. They noted their approach with a cautious waving of antennae, and then ignored them.

Ahead, dominating the large managed clearing, was the mound-like Khungarrii edifice, rising hundreds of feet from the cinnamon earth, like a cathedral tower. The last time the Padre had seen the edifice, a large section had been destroyed by Jeffries, blowing up a stolen dump of grenades, mortars and other weapons. It had since been repaired and once again stood pristine and whole above the forest. Unadorned and functional, the structure bore no ornate inscriptions or decorations, no carvings, but was speckled with a thousand points of light as the sunlight caught flecks of mica bound into the dirt walls.

Scattered around the perimeter of the edifice were the peculiar funerary mounds of large clay balls, each sphere containing the body of a dead chatt, waiting to be rolled into the underworld by Skarra, the dung-beetle god of the dead. There were a good many of them – no doubt due in part, the Padre realised, to the actions of the Pennines.

Ahead of them, columns of worker chatts, djamirrii, and Khungarrii urmen, carrying the day’s harvest in baskets or on litters, streamed into the edifice through great open bark doors some fifty or sixty feet in height, bound into the edifice itself by root-like hinges and framed by great earthen buttresses.

The Padre noticed that the shantytowns that had once clung to the midden heaps against the edifice had been swept away. The free urmen who had dwelt there under sufferance, scraping a subsistence from the scrap heaps of Khungarrii society, were gone; the first victims of the reprisals after the Pennines’ attack to rescue the Padre and some twenty-odd Fusiliers and the three nurses captured by a scentirrii raiding party.

He felt Edith’s small hand slip into his, giving reassurance and seeking comfort in equal measure. His hand closed about hers and together they walked toward the cavernous entrance of the edifice.

INSIDE, THE GREAT cathedral-like entrance hall bustled with activity. Chatt workers and djamirrii assessed and sorted the continual influx of the day’s harvest; battlepillars berthed against earthen jetties to be unloaded. The place seemed half port, half market.

Edith could remember arriving at Calais on the boat from Dover to scenes such as these. She had been a very different woman back then. The sharp formic smell of the place, of the chatts, made her want to flee. She had to force herself to walk on.

The scentirrii led them up inclined passages lit by niches of bioluminescent lichen to the higher reaches of the edifice, to the network of sacred chamberswhere the dhuyumirrii conducted their ritualised business.

The scentirrii left them by a circular portal, a door grown from a tough fibrous living plant. Chandar breathed a mist at it, and the plant matter recoiled from it, dilating open. Rhengar ushered them through into an ancillary chamber. They had barely arrived when the circular door shrivelled open again. Two scentirrii stepped through, followed by a tall, regal dhuyumirrii wearing a similar over-the-shoulder arrangement of many-tasselled silken cloth to the one that Chandar wore, with the addition of a light, finely spun cloak. They had both seen this creature before.

“This One is Sirigar, Liya-Dhuyumirrii, High Anointed One of the Khungarrii Shura,” it said, surveying the chamber. It had chosen to speak in English, something it was not wont to do. It was making a point.

Chandar bent its legs, sinking into the chatt submissive posture.

Sirigar looked down on it. “So you have returned, Chandar?”

“This One went to observe the battle at the direction of the Shura and was captured. This you know,” said Chandar.

“And they let you go?”

“They wish to bargain.”

“The time for bargaining is long past,” said Sirigar. “And these creatures?” it said, indicating the Padre and Nurse Bell. “What are they doing here? This One could smell their stench the moment they entered Khungarr. Your fascination for them is unbecoming, Chandar, maybe even heretical.”

“The Shura has not declared it so, yet,” said Chandar.

Sirigar hissed and turned to inspect Edith, who shuddered in spite of herself. Sirigar’s mandibles opened wide, as if to suggest that it could take her head within them and crush it. Warm breath washed over her as moist labial folds opened, exposing its glistening mouth palps. Its long segmented antennae waved above her head.

She held its gaze, defiance and terror wrestling within her, conscious of the contents of her haversack. In moments like this, she thought of Edith Cavell and found a well of courage within her which, while not inexhaustible, saw her through the moment.

Sirigar hissed and withdrew, immediately losing interest in her.

“They… they are emissaries. They cannot harm us. They have been anointed with the blessing of GarSuleth,” Chandar gestured toward the Padre. “That one took the Kirrijandat, the rite of purification–”

“So did their Jeffries,” said Sirigar, loading every word. “And look at the ruination that he visited on Khungarr. They are the Great Corruption. Their presence here sickens this One. Yet again you have exceeded your bounds, Chandar.”

The Padre saw his chance. He had expected to persuade them, but to have the opportunity presented to him like this seemed heaven-sent.

“Jeffries was not one of us. You cannot judge us all by him. We are not answerable for his sins. I will take the rite again!” he declared.