Part 12 (1/2)

The river spread into the land. In places it seemed to vent into underground routes, clouds of spray catching the last red touch of the sunset. Elsewhere it parted around islands on which grew short, craggy trees, and flowed into wide areas of water that seemed hardly to move. In these watery landscapes, bubbles rose and broke as if the ground below were breathing. The air was already tainted. Bon breathed lightly past the tadcat oils, afraid of what that taint might do, and whether he would even know.

Juda grew heavier. Leki's face mirrored Bon's own weariness. But they had to move on into the vast marshland. Somewhere, soon, they would need to hide.

Their night in the gas marshes became a blur of vision and a haze of sensation. The sense of being elsewhere was overwhelming a Bon soon felt dislocated from Skythe, and from the whole of the world. Juda was a sleeping creature slung between them, Leki a stranger, and Bon even grew distant from himself. His history became an echo in another mind, and his present lacked definition and importance.

The slayers a the main reason for them venturing into the gas marshes in the first place a were very far away. Bon barely thought about those monstrous killers that whole night.

Later, he would remember their experiences there like recalling a dream from his youth. And thinking back to the few clearer moments he could remember a constructing them piece by piece, like writing a letter with words he barely knew a he would begin to doubt himself. Had he lived those moments, or were they simply a dream? Had he truly seen those things, and run from them, and found that place to hide? Or perhaps he and Leki had simply collapsed beneath the weight of their exhaustion, urged down into dream-haunted darkness by the noxious fumes of that place.

Bon was left wondering at reality, and how real anything might be.

And those few clear memories, like dreams given life ...

As the marshes grew wide and the water sluggish, and it became impossible to define the river any more, the air was heavy with steam and gas. It was difficult to distinguish the two, and they coated Bon's nostrils and the back of his throat with slick sourness. They paused often, lowering Juda to the damp ground and trying to catch their breath, regain strength in their straining muscles. Bon's hand still burned. And once, standing beneath the cover of tall trees whose mult.i.tude of roots stood proud of the ground like exposed bones, Bon rubbed at his ears. Something was making them buzz. Wet air, he thought, gas nestling inside my ears. He pressed in with his fingertips and the buzzing ceased. Seeing Leki doing the same, he realised that the sound came from outside.

They ducked down beside Juda and looked up. Noticing the sound made it louder, and also gave the previous silence more weight. Gas made no sound when it drifted, and water sat quietly with no ravine to power along.

Leki leaned across Juda and clasped Bon's shoulder, other hand pressed to her lips. Then she pointed up through the spa.r.s.e tree canopy. He looked, and Bon's first thought was that fumes had reached his brain and he was pa.s.sing out. He blinked several times, but the s.h.i.+fting dark blots were still there.

Above the trees. Flitting back and forth, drifting, searching. Hunting. Buzzing.

'Are they wasps?' Leki whispered.

Bon nodded, because he had already recognised their sleek bodies, pale yellow and black markings, and the blur of wings keeping them aloft. The buzzing sounded angry and loud, yet they moved with an easy grace. They owned the air.

'What in Fade do they eat to get that big?' Leki whispered. She was still leaning across Juda, maintaining the contact. Her hand on Bon's shoulder squeezed. It was warm.

Juda muttered and then shouted, and Bon's heart sank. We forgot to gag him! Leki stared at him wide-eyed, panicked into stillness. The wasps' buzzing changed in pitch, but Bon did not look up, could not, as he bunched up the front of Juda's jacket and shoved it into the sleeping, nightmaring man's foam-flecked mouth.

The wasps came then, drifting down through the branches like unnatural windfalls. Bon sensed them drawing closer. He heard their drone increasing in volume and changing pitch, and he was the focus of their attention. He could feel them against the back of his head and neck, as surely as if their wings were already caressing there. He looked up from the writhing man to Leki, but she only had eyes for the wasps.

He has a pistol, Bon thought, going to root through Juda's clothing to find the weapon he had seen him bearing more than once. But he was already out of time.

A wasp drifted down before him. It was even larger than he had at first thought a the size of a newborn child, body heavy and bristled, wings tearing the air, buzz almost as loud as the river had been in the ravine, breeze lifting the hair from his forehead. It moved back and forth before him. Up and down. As if attempting to hypnotise him, yet so inhuman. Another fell slowly behind it, turning, looking around as if watching for dangers, though Bon had no idea what could be a danger to these things.

They carried a smell with them. Rain on a summer day, Bon thought, and each time he inhaled he caught a memory flash of his wife walking by the river in Sefton Breaks, Venden laughing and running before them.

He looked across at Leki, and she seemed rapt. There was no fear on her face. Ten, twelve, fifteen wasps hung in the air around them. The creatures hung in the air around them and temporarily stole fear of the slayers.

Bon could see stings glistening at the blunt tips of their abdomens. The stings were as long as his finger, and even if their poison did not prove fatal, the stabbing might.

Are they going to kill us? he wanted to ask, but Leki was smiling. He wondered what memories she was living, and what scent she gained from these beasts.

The wasps might have been there for heartbeats or days, but then they started to drift away. Interest sated, perhaps. Or maybe the fleshy, b.l.o.o.d.y humans would simply not make much of a meal. Leki watched them go. Bon watched her, trying to define the strange expression on her face. It might have been nostalgia, or loss, or a species of both.

They rested for a while, not speaking. Juda struggled in his sleep. Marsh fumes hazed the air.

One memory faded, melting away into quiet confusion while another rose, slaughtering it with the promise of terror ...

They crossed the marsh on stepping stones of dryish land, trying to avoid the sucking depths that might pull them down to viscous darkness, feet permanently wet, looking for somewhere safe in case the slayers could still track them this far, still catch their scent through the masking odours of the marsh gas and mysterious darkness. A steam geyser exploded barely a hundred steps to their right. It blasted at the sky and ripped it open, gus.h.i.+ng a shower of hot mud, water and steam into the night sky. It spattered down around them, speckles of muck scorching their exposed skin where they hunkered down and held their hands over their heads. Bon felt it splash heavily and wet across his back, scorching skin through his jacket and s.h.i.+rt where he lay protecting Juda from the downfall.

'The ground is spitting at us!' Leki said, 'And it's hot!'

Strange words, but then something made Bon sit up and turn around. The geyser still steamed and roared, but there was something else moving closer to them. Slick and wet, s.h.i.+fting like thick boiling blood, there was nothing sharp about the movement, but still he knew it could bite. His hand stole into Juda's jacket in search of the pistol once more.

Electrical light flickered back and forth through the atmosphere, illuminating the marsh gas and the thing that had erupted from the geyser with greenish light.

'Leki!' Bon whispered, but she had already seen.

'Out of the ground,' she said, 'and it has teeth.'

It had a body of mud and filth, thick enough to retain form but fluid enough to be in constant movement. No eyes, unless they were also of mud, but Bon could see several slippery gashes moving across its surface that could only have been mouths. Teeth s.h.i.+mmered there, formed of steam; mini-geysers, perpetuating the promise of danger the main geyser had made. When the teeth dispersed to the air others replaced them. The thing moved closer, slicking across the wet ground.

Bon brought out the steam pistol and registered the irony of using it against this thing.

'That won't touch it,' Leki said, but Bon asked her what other hope they had.

It closed on them, he fired, a splash of mud. Another venting of steam, more mud, even closer than before and hard enough to punch the ground and bounce them from it, a momentary freefall that seemed to continue for ever. His memory took the same plunge.

Whatever followed was ambiguous in his mind as the marsh hazed his sight, and for a long time after Bon was not entirely sure they had survived. In the belly of the beast, he thought, scooping mud from his ears and picking it from where it had dried on his stubble. Still in the belly of the beast, remembering as I am slowly digested ...

And the next moment in those marshes that persisted as memory ...

Deeper into the nightmare landscape, changed so much. Islands were less frequent, but they could follow the higher ground by aiming for where the moon did not reflect. Juda moaned and struggled, but Bon and Leki seemed to marshal more strength, sensing that they would find somewhere to hide soon. Juda had not told them where, or how long they needed to run to evade the slayers. He had not told them what to do. But somewhere there was a haven, and they were close to finding it. Once inside, the slayers would pa.s.s them by, their terrible persistence confused by the mixed odours of marsh gas. Perhaps Bon would know they had pa.s.sed, perhaps not. But once settled, they could wait out the night.

Maybe the ghosts would guide them. They rose like drifts of steam, glimmering with promise. Some drifted with the breeze, enclosed in clouds of gas that Bon and Leki did their best to avoid. Other moved against the wind and came closer. They did not last for long a lost to the air before Bon had a chance to really see a but those that approached close enough seemed to whisper to him. He could not hear their words or sense their intention. Leki would not meet his eye.

Juda became heavier, as if absorbing the air of this place and ingesting it. They had to put him down to rest more and more, their brief burst of strength failing.

'They're gathering,' Bon said, looking around at the wraiths haunting the landscape.

'Watching,' Leki said. 'I can't go on. Not any more, not with him.' She dropped Juda's legs and stretched upright, hands pressed into the small of her back.

'So we leave him?' Bon asked. He did not mean it, and hoped that Leki would not agree.

'No,' she said. 'No ...'

'Leki?'

She looked at him, and her eyes seemed distant.

'Leki?'

'I think we should ask them for help.'

'Them?' He nodded at the strange figures, some fading and manifesting again, others drifting. They exuded no menace.