James Swallow: Nightfall

He had disobeyed before.

He had done it so many times that it had become a joke among many of the adults in the settlement. He saw it, in smirking asides or quick grins, in comments made that they thought would fly above the head of a youth. There’s Laaro, they might say, the reckless boy who climbed atop the grain silo roof on a dare and fell in. The careless boy who tried to swim the shallow lake where the root-taps grow. And then they would shake their heads at his folly, as if they felt sorry for him. But no, not for Laaro. For his mother and father.

He paused in the undergrowth and crouched low. His heart was hammering in his chest, so loud in his ears he would have sworn they could hear it all the way back to the lodge house. Larro chanced a look behind him, through the snarl of twisted scrubland, off in the direction of home; and he immediately regretted it. Rods of faint yellow lantern-light bobbed and shifted, sweeping this way and that across the grasslands, coming closer. On the cool, still air of the night he could hear the grunt and spit of mai cats on their leashes, pulling at his scent. With them, the rumble of adult voices, most distinctly the dry snap of the Elder Aaren’s words.

A tremor of fear shot through the boy’s body and he let it go, for one moment wondering how he might be treated if he turned back and went to them. He studied his bare arms, his thin shirt. Perhaps, if he bit himself, drew blood, ripped his clothes, he might sell them on the idea he’d been chased by a wild mai.

Laaro’s teeth bared in a smile. They would never believe me . He had told tales too many times to be trusted now. He could come home with the head of a Wraith in his back pocket and Aaren would be the first to claim he had made it from sticks and mud.

The smile became a grin. Somehow that seemed funny to him. Somehow, that was enough to push him back to his feet, from the undergrowth, back to running. Laaro’s bare feet pat-pat-patted across the earth, as he zigzagged wide of the well-worn hunting trails.

I will not go home. Not yet. The boy’s jaw set firmly, but his outward defiance was weakening by the moment. He had been out here in the savannah since second sunset, moving in the pattern that his uncle Haafo had taught him, the way that a tracker would loop back and forth, as they searched for animal signs before a hunt. The quarry he tracked was the most important he had ever hunted; his father Errian.

Laaro’s mistake had been to speak of this idea to his mother, and in turn she had told Aaren, her face all pinched and sad as it had been since Errian’s disappearance. Aaren, blunt and graceless like a mud bovine, made stern rebukes and waggled his fat fingers at the boy. Aaren told him it was not the business of a youth to interfere in the order of things; and then he had forbidden Laaro to leave the settlement.

All of which showed how little Aaren understood Laaro. Why else had he climbed the silo, swum in the lake? Because he had been told not to do it. Someone slow and ugly and old like an Elder couldn’t understand that challenge was what Laaro looked for every day of his life. It was that or boredom — the tedium of schooling and housework had to be broken by something.

But still he felt his resolve faltering. If Aaren was out here, then his mother knew he’d fled. He saw Jaaya’s pinched face again in his mind’s eye and felt a stab of guilt. Laaro didn’t want her to be sad; he wanted to come home having rescued Errian, and reunite his parents. To be the hero for real that he was in his games and play.

Fear seeped into him, pushing aside his boldness. He was caught between two compulsions; what scared him more? The thought of the punishment he’d get if he let himself be caught, or the fear of what lay out in the night? Not the mai cats or the arachs, but the bigger, less definite things. The Giants that hid in the stars. Maybe even the Wraith.

Reflexively, he looked up and saw the glittering ring of the sky river that bisected the night above, from horizon to horizon; and beyond the great moon with its smaller brother peeking over its shoulder. Laaro shivered and moved on carelessly, his foot catching an exposed root.

The boy grunted and stumbled, turning in place as a strange new sound reached his ears. It was like thunder, it was like the roar of a great cat, it was like the crash of a cloudburst. It was all these things and none of them.

Panic seized him. Suddenly, he felt lost. Laaro looked around, abruptly aware that he had gone beyond the limits of his own explorations. His gaze found motion and light, down in a shallow vale where pillars of old brown rock five times the height of the boy stood sentinel.

The light was a cool silver, glittering and shifting. It reminded him of moonlight cast off water; and in a swift, dizzying rush, Laaro realized where he was.

The Gateway .

There were many rules Laaro was happy to break, many adult edicts he would ignore without a care in the world — but the Gateway… To come here without the blessing of the Elders was said to mean death. Uncle Haafo had told him stories of the ghostly guardians there that allowed only the chosen, the knowers of the symbols, to approach the great ring of grey metal. Some said that voyagers could come and go through the centre of the Gateway, to other places — even to the stars, although Laaro doubted that could be possible. He had never seen voyagers; only the Elders had, in the years before his birth. Everyone knew how long it had been since the Gateway had opened; ever since the coming of the Aegis and the Giants.

And then there were the other stories. The old, terrible stories of the Wraith, the monsters that ate men like an arach would kill a click-beetle.

With a shriek of sound the shimmering light vanished, plunging the vale into darkness once more. Laaro blinked furiously, his night vision lost to him for a moment where he had been staring at the brightness in the ring. In his fascination he had meandered further down the shallow incline, almost to the shadow of one of the outermost pillars. The boy hesitated, the question on his lips; what had come through the Gateway? He backed off, staying low, desperately trying to look in every direction at once —

— and bumped into something soft, covered in cloth.

Laaro spun about and found himself staring at figure a good head taller than he was, clad in a dark, matt clothing that seemed to suck in the faint light from the night sky; and the face…

Pale skin and wide eyes caught the lunar glow, and Laaro glimpsed a mouth open in an ‘O’ of fury. The intruder howled and the boy screamed back at it, unable to stop himself. Wraith! his mind cried, and he threw out his hands, swatting at the alien.

Laaro hurled himself away and broke into a full-pelt run, charging toward the lip of the shallow valley as fast as his legs could propel him. Sharp beams of light stabbed out after him, trying to fix Laaro in their centre. He clawed at the ridge as he pulled himself up it, frantic to escape. The question as to what he was more afraid of had been answered for him, and now all he wanted was to get away, to find an adult even if it was Elder Aaren.

But on the lip of the ridge there was another one; this figure was larger, and for a second Laaro thought it might have been one of the Giants. The chasing lights caught up to them both and he saw clearly a man. He was broad across the chest, his face a dusky shade a little lighter than Laaro’s, and his hair was wild in thick locks that cascaded down over the shoulders of his leather jerkin. In one hand he held a weapon that dwarfed the spindly rodguns used by the Elder’s watchmen.