Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Oh God…’

I suspect you have arrived, said Nandru.

Polly did not have the energy to scream as a skeleton wrapped in shadow was revealed through the shattering struts of the cage. Then, after a moment, she realized that this was not what she was really seeing. But still the rangy dark figure terrified her. Even some evil demonic face might have been more acceptable than the featureless ovoid that was his head. The skeletal impression, she now saw, was created by a network of hyaline ribs and veins inlaid into his black carapace.

Cowl, I would guess.

Too weird, far too weird, Polly thought.

Cowl grabbed her, one long hand closing round her thigh, and jerked her up out of the wreckage of the cage. The blood-rush to her head, as she was held suspended, made the world fade in and out of focus for Polly, but she saw that blank face tilt as she was inspected like some interesting bug. Then, with one swipe of his free hand, he tore away her greatcoat, pulling it down and over her head and off her arms. Then he caught her flailing arm, long fingers closing doubly around the tor. Inside her she felt the webwork jerk, then sensed the horror of it withdrawing, pulling back—its elements coiling up like the tentacles of an octopus dropped in boiling water. Then Cowl released his hold on her hip and she dropped, her arm wrenching painfully as she was suspended only by the tor. Cowl now gripped her elbow and pulled the tor closer to his blank face for inspection. It was as if Polly herself was utterly irrelevant—a pendulous piece of rubbish attached to the real centre of his interest. With vision now blurred, she saw him probing at the edge of the tor with one sharp finger, then drive the digit in. Polly howled.

The tor loosened, peeled up and she slid out of it like a mollusc discarded from its shell. Hitting the floor on her boots, consciousness fled her for only a moment, then she found herself lying over on her side, her arms stretched out before her face. The one from which the tor had been removed was now a flayed mess of tendons and exposed muscle.

You have to move, Polly. You have to escape.

Easy enough advice from someone who had probably forgotten what it was to be at the limit of endurance. From where she lay, Polly could see Cowl squatting, with his knees projecting way above his head, running long fingers around the inside of the tor, before abruptly sending it skittering across the floor. Gasping from an agony that just went on and on, Polly became subliminally aware of her surroundings—of curving walls of ribbed metal inlaid with esoteric circuitry, seemingly fashioned of other coloured metals and polished crystal. Above her, yellow light beamed down from a circular skylight; while, opening at intervals around the wall, were doors revealing a gleaming chaos beyond; and beside her, at the bottom of a slope, an intestinal tunnel dropped down into darkness, into which the now discarded tor had fallen. But mostly her attention was fixed on Cowl himself as he stood, with a motion both abrupt and fluid. The man—the creature? — was about to stride away, but then turned and stepped back towards Polly. This was it—he was going to kill her.

However, that was not his intention at all. Almost impatiently he snatched her up by the shin and in one motion, turning to leave, tossed her towards the tunnel’s black mouth—like so much garbage.

Polly yelled as she slid down a frictionless slope, she flailed to grab at one side with her undamaged arm, but her hand slid off metal that had the feel of slime, and she plummeted down into blackness. In the brief, hurtling transit that followed, she coiled up protectively around her damaged arm. Then she shot out into yellow daylight, dropping to hit a ledge, to which she clung briefly, but seeing it occupied by skeletons and decaying corpses, screamed and released her hold. She then struck water, cold and salty, and began to sink. Polly still had some fight left in her — struggling weakly for the surface, her flayed arm burning in the brine—but in her weakness and confusion, she took in a breath, and the numbing water filled her lungs, curtailing her struggles like a body blow.

Polly, I am so sorry…

Drifting in golden depths, Polly now knew her ending. But then a beetle-black hand grabbed her under the chin, and some monstrous being began to haul her back to the surface.

The pseudo-mantisal completed around Tack on the next shift; then on the following one he observed the red filaments expanding in its structure as it pushed to its limits, hurtling for home. Each time-jump he estimated to be in the region of a hundred million years. At each barren destination reached he stuffed himself with food and drink, taking glucose and vitamin supplements to stave off that point when the tor, detecting his blood sugars had dropped below a certain level, would become truly parasitic on him. This, he knew from the study of numerous torbearers encountered by the Heliothane, was the point of dying for many of those not killed by carnivorous fauna earlier in their journeys—their decaying bodies, still dragged back to Cowl, being fed upon by their tors.

Arriving here in a time when no life yet existed on the land, not even smears of blue-green algae, he set up his tent in the shelter of a frozen lava flow sculptured like some vast wormcast and, while sitting in front of it, ate and drank his fill. Thereafter transferring the remainder of his rations to the pack containing his equipment, he walked away from the tent—and immediately came upon a fellow torbearer.

She was sprawled on the ground, and wore the tattered remains of a richly decorated Elizabethan dress. There was a net of pearls holding her once dark—but now bleached-ginger—hair in an elaborate style. It confounded him how she had managed to keep it secured this way throughout what must have happened to her. Then he realized she had likely died much earlier on her journey through time, to be fed upon by her tor as she decayed. This was perhaps why her tor and the arm it had once enveloped were both gone—breaking away from the putrefying remnants of her body. The desiccating wind here had mummified her, and her hollow eye sockets gazed up endlessly into the sky. Tack turned away from the corpse and headed back to his tent.

Spewing brine from her lungs, Polly returned to abrupt and painful consciousness. The troll who had been battering at her chest now turned her unceremoniously into the recovery position and reached out to touch something recently attached to the side of her neck. Polly felt something happening—then recognized a drug hit coursing through her bloodstream.

Coughing up the last of the sea water, she rolled over onto her back and lay gasping below the lemon sky. But no matter how hard she inhaled, she was simply not getting enough air into her lungs. Then her rescuer loomed over her, a grotesque insectile mask covering its face. Polly baulked when a six-fingered hand offered her a similar mask, but she was too weak to resist as it was pressed wetly over her face.

Blessed oxygen surged into Polly’s lungs. Within a moment she was feeling light-headed, but then, with a sound like a liquid kiss from inside the mask, the air mix changed to normal.

With her vision clearing, Polly studied her rescuer. The woman’s skin was a metallic grey, glassy veins inset in its surface just like Cowl’s. A wide and powerful body was contorted by a hunched back, and supported on bowed legs. Her arms were malformed: the left arm, grotesquely muscular, terminated in a three-fingered hand that looked strong enough to crush granite, while her right arm was of normal size, but possessed a hand with two opposable thumbs. This strange creature stooped closer and said something to her she did not understand.