Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

‘Zelia!’ he yelled into the maelstrom. ‘Goddammit, Zelia, where the hell are you?’

He wondered if her subterfuge had been discovered, and she had decided to cut him loose rather than admit responsibility for bringing him back to Vanaheim against Father Cheng’s wishes. Whatever the reason, if he could get back to the flier he could at least get the hell out of there.

By now, the mountain peaks had disappeared behind flurries of ice and snow raised up by the wind, and he had to fight for each step he took. A part of him wanted to lay down and rest, to be done with it all.

But if he did that, he knew, he’d never get up again. So he pushed on regardless, leaning into the wind, face numb, teeth gritted. The sky had turned almost completely black.

An eternity passed before he stumbled down a steep incline to where he’d left the flier. It wasn’t there.

Looking around wildly, he squinted in the freezing dark. Maybe he was in the wrong place.

Again, he tried to pick up the flier’s tracking signal, but still got no answer.

He turned, and looked back up the slope of the hill he’d just descended. There had been a rockslide some time in the recent past that had scattered a couple of large, distinctive boulders nearby, and he remembered seeing them when he’d disembarked from the flier. He was definitely in the right place.

The wind wrapped itself around him, as if trying to carry him off. He screamed his fury and frustration into a black and turbulent sky, but the words were lost amid the tumult.

There was still one other option open to him. He could head back the way he’d come, make his way to that rock hangar and see if he could find some way inside Javier Maxwell’s prison. It was probably his one chance at staying alive.

He trudged back up the slope he’d just descended, every muscle in his body protesting at the ordeal he was putting them through. His footprints had been almost entirely obscured by the storm. Sometimes the outline of the mountains became briefly visible, allowing him to confirm he was still heading the right way and hadn’t got turned around.

It’s easy , he told himself. Just put one foot in front of the other, and repeat. Couldn’t be simpler.

An eternity passed in this way, until his legs felt as stiff and unyielding as frozen rock.

He almost cried with relief when he found his way back to the granite-topped hill, and tried not to think about the many kilometres he still had to go before he reached the hangar. The ridge he was ultimately headed for was, by now, almost entirely invisible amidst the storm.

The night surged around him, howling and tugging at his shoulders like some predator determined to torture him before making its kill.

At some point, he came to the realization he had no idea which direction he was headed in. He turned around, trying to see his tracks in the snow, but the storm had become so vicious they were obscured in seconds.

Picking a direction, he started walking. It became harder and harder to maintain any sense of time. He might have been walking for an hour, or a whole day.

He became aware that he had collapsed to his knees in the snow, but couldn’t recall just when he had come to a halt.

Forcing himself upright, he managed a few more feeble steps before feeling his legs give way beneath him once more. He collapsed, tipping forward onto the snow, the breath rattling in his throat.

Lights flickered through the darkened haze around him. To his astonishment, Luc saw that the storm was starting to clear. The stars were revealing themselves, one by one, between drawn-out wisps of snow and cloud.

Some of the stars broke away from the firmament and dipped down towards him, so that he could see they were attached to a dark outline that blocked out part of the sky. But before he could work out what it was, his thoughts had faded into darkness.

FOURTEEN

The journey to the well, the old man told Jacob, was likely to take the better part of a day, and quite possibly longer if the weather turned for the worse. For this reason they left not long after dawn the following morning, with Jacob once again hidden beneath a carpet in the back of Kulic’s horse-drawn cart.

At one point, as Kulic guided the cart out of the village, cajoling his horse with whistles and muttered grunts, he drew to a halt by the roadside in order to exchange a few words with a fellow villager. That proved to be the high point of what was otherwise a cold and desperately uncomfortable journey, marked by spine-jarring jolts and bumps that did little to improve Jacob’s mood. He hated everything about Darwin he had so far encountered; the early years of his life had been spent in Sandoz combat-temples amidst wild and tropical forests and, despite his training, he had never quite shaken his distaste for the cold and damp.

But what made it all so much worse was that the rag under which he was forced to hide for the first leg of their journey stank of shit and hay, while the only refreshment Kulic had to offer was a sealed clay jug of nearly intolerable home-brewed beer, alongside hard, unleavened bread that Jacob was forced to chew with grim determination before it became even vaguely digestible.

Jacob finally emerged from beneath the blanket an hour out of the village, but soon draped it back over his shoulders when it began to rain, a freezing drizzle that shrouded the hills and forest around them in shades of grey. Kulic had given him some of his father’s cast-offs – a rough woollen shirt and a pair of patched cotton trousers, along with a broad dark coat that swept against his ankles. Underneath it all he still wore his one-piece combat suit.

Kulic guided the horses along a dirt path that cut through the woods and ran roughly parallel with the course of a stream intermittently visible through the trees. Before long it became clear they were headed inland, towards a valley beyond which a Coalition city could be seen in all its shining technological splendour.

They stopped late that afternoon so they could both take a leak. When Jacob returned from the woods, he saw Kulic rummaging around in the rear of the cart, as if searching for something. As Jacob watched from amongst the trees, the old man glanced around with a furtive expression.

Jacob waited to see what the old man was up to, and watched as Kulic turned back to the cart, lifting out the case Jacob had earlier retrieved from his ship. Holding it carefully, Kulic turned it this way and that, as if trying to work out how to open it.

Jacob stepped out from his hiding place and quickly slipped up behind the old man without making a sound. Kulic was pressing dirty fingernails against the surface of the case, apparently trying to prise it open.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ asked Jacob, from directly behind him.

Kulic let out a cry of shock, and span around to regard Jacob with an expression of terror. ‘I’m sorry, I . . .’ his mouth trembled, the case still gripped in his shaking hands. ‘I was just . . . just curious.’

‘Curious about what?’ said Jacob, coming closer, so the old man was forced up against the side of the cart. Kulic’s mouth trembled with fear.

‘I . . . I just wanted to know what was inside.’

Jacob stared at him in silence for several long seconds, then reached down to take the case from Kulic’s grasp without breaking eye contact.

‘It’s lucky you have no idea how to open this,’ Jacob said quietly. ‘It would have killed you even faster than I could. Now get back on that horse and let’s be on our way.’