SciFi Story
Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 9:53 pm
WARNING!!!! Does not relate to Star Wars or Halo!!!
Written as an English assignment in a hurry...had to cut it down a bit (about 2000 words), this version is 3500 long. Second Draft, far from perfect... Genre: Scifi/fantasy. Most stuff I write is this genre...
Copyright Skyhammer_216/Shuriken22.
Fissures 1
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“The tall alluring figure stood transfixed as Mina passed by. In one hand Mina held her notebook, in the other her audio recording machine. The tall dark figure follows her, moving like a shadow amongst the other pedestrians.” Imal al-Khallid, Arabic businessman on business to Tieranace (formerly Spain), glances out the window at the countryside. Rugged, rocky hills, fields of long greyish grass and the occasional tree pass by. He turns back to his Mala, the holy book of his own religion. Interesting passage, he thinks. Possibly one of the more metaphorical ones, although some scholars claim that—
‘Sir?’ asks Scrobey, his European bodyguard and porter, cutting through his thoughts.
‘Hmm…what is it?’
‘We’re coming up to our stop, sir.’ Scrobey stands, pulling down both their suitcases from the overhead luggage rack.
Imal places his bookmark in his Mala, closes it and places it carefully in the front pocket of his carry bag. A minute later they stand on the tiny, brick platform, with two drab, squat buildings and a fence the only barrier against the surrounding countryside. They walk through the tin-roofed exit, their tickets and passes accepted by the guards.
Outside the station is unimpressive. The land is steep and dotted with stones, with grass the only vegetation. A dusty dirt track leads off to the east and west, skirting around the bottoms of the steeper hills and cutting across others. Imal takes out his expensive pocket watch, noting with satisfaction that they are on schedule.
Shortly their driver arrives. Imal is impressed to see he has a small, worn motor vehicle rather than a horse-drawn coach. Imal talks to the driver periodically as the vehicle makes its way (somewhat bumpily) along the dirt track. Apparently, Lord Marcio is a popular ruler, is as peaceful as lords get and is keen to have a more reliable source of electricity than the technologies used in Tieranace (awfully primitive ones, Imal thinks).
Soon they come in sight of Lord Marcio’s hillfort, crowning a rocky escarpment, a wide path leading up to its huge wooden gates. The fort itself is a cluster of taller and more impressive buildings behind a high stonewall armoured with sheets of beaten scrap iron. Two towers rise above the wall on either side of the gate, a sentry in each. They wave them through, obviously expecting them. The driver parks the vehicle in a barn next to one of the towers. He tells them to walk closely behind him, and trots off towards the keep, the guests following.
Hunger. Well...not exactly hunger; more a sort of…longing. The watcher stares at the two newcomers in the doorway. The tall man with the headband walks towards them, talking and making enthusiastic gestures…now he is shaking the dark man’s hand with his own, looking pleased with the newcomers. The man with the headband turns to the watcher, and says ‘Dione, take the guest’s belongings up to their room’s.’ The words cut into the watcher’s mind. The watcher nods and walks forward to pick up the suitcases and bags. Then he turns, silently, and marches up a spiralling iron stairway to the hall’s upper level, holding the bags above the stairs easily.
That evening, Imal is seated at the end of Lord Marcio’s table, with the Lord opposite. As he places his knife on his plate the quiet, thin servant who took their bags earlier walks over, takes his cutlery and plate, bows and leaves to the kitchens almost soundlessly. Imal stares after him, puzzled. Lord Marcio seeing his expression, chuckles.
‘Don’t mind him,’ he says, ‘he’s a little odd and barely says a word, but he’s a good servant, and we need all the help we can get around here at the moment.’
‘What do you mean, lordship?’ Imal asks.
‘Had a little bit of a problem a month or so back. A few people got sick with something. It made those who got it act a bit strange. We had a couple of farmer’s go mad down in the village, shouting and trying to thump people. All over now though, no-one’s been sick with whatever it was for three weeks at least.’
‘That is relieving’ Imal says. ‘Out of curiosity, how many people did you lose to this disease?’
His Lordship thinks for a second, ‘Eighteen dead. Plus five ran away. And two killed by those farmer’s. Nothing compared to the numbers we used to lose back in the plague days.’
The conversation turns to business matters, and Lord Marcio’s desire to purchase a steam-powered electricity generator, to be fed by local heat vents. Matters such as legal documents of ownership, transportation and installation of the necessary machinery, maintaining the generator once built and what parts the Tieranacens can construct themselves are addressed. Imal is impressed by Lord Marcio’s grasp of the science behind the generator, nearly as good as that of an average Arab’s. Eventually his Lordship stands from the table and bids Imal good night. Imal climbs the metal stairway just outside the dining hall that leads to his room.
It lies at the end of a small wooden corridor, with lamps hanging off the walls. He nods to Scrobey, sitting at a desk by his bed near the door, checking his crossbow and pistol just in case, and seats himself at his own desk, next to his own bed at the other end of the room, by a large window. The window is glass, rarely seen in Tieranace, in a large frame that is partly open.
Imal sits in his chair and reads his Mala.
Annriss
“The Saviour saw the wickedness of the people, the darkness that grew inside them, the poison that lived in their veins. And this enraged and saddened the Saviour, yet it showed mercy, and declared to it’s chosen ones that it would stop the wickedness.”
“For three years the sovereign stayed in the shrine, and with compassion and mercy and desire for justice it made the antidote for the poison, the poison that made darkness and war grow in men. Yet to make its antidote work it had to give it to it’s people, yet none were strong enough to live through the cleansing in the antidote’s newborn state. So the sovereign took the antidote, the glorious concoction that would wash the darkness away, and took it into its own fleshy apparition, and let it flow in it’s living body’s veins.”
Imal yawns and closes the book. He stands, says good night to Scrobey and gets into bed. Within a minute he is asleep. Ten minutes later Scrobey gets into his own bed.
Cold. Not that the watcher feels it anyway. The wind tears past him, tugging at his clothes. Gently the watcher eases the window open, and once open enough he climbs over the sill, retracting his claws as he goes.
Slowly the watcher walks across to the Arabic man’s bed. Silently the watcher bends over him, one hand just above his neck. A tiny, hair-like claw flicks out from one finger. The, it slowly touches his skin and pierces it, the needle becoming darker for a second.
The watcher pulls the needle back and walks over to the other man. Two minutes later he clambers out of the window, closing it behind him.
The next morning Imal wakes up groggily, hearing a knocking on the door. He sits up, pulls a clean shirt from his suitcase and over his undershirt, and calls out ‘Enter.’ Scrobey is already up, meticulously fine-tuning his weapons again.
The door swings open slowly…
In the doorway is a grotesque creature, about the same height and shape as Imal, with thin, sinewy, arms, long claws on its hands, an ape-like face with huge, pointed teeth jutting from its lower jaw and only a loincloth covering its body. The nightmarish thing makes a horrible, low hissing noise.
Suddenly it’s head snaps backwards and it crumples to the floor, blood dripping from its head, and only then Imal realises he has been screaming. Scrobey slots another bolt into his crossbow and pokes his head out of the doorway, ducks back inside, seizes his weapons and backpack and walks over to the window. He pushes it open.
‘Out. Now.’
‘But–’
‘There’s more of those things downstairs. And lots of dead people.’
Imal picks up his own backpack and his Mala. He climbs out of the window after Scrobey, his hands shaking. A few metres below the windowsill there is the roof of a small storehouse. They drop onto it and skirt around the edge of the hall, then the edge of the large barn their driver parked the car in yesterday, Scrobey in the lead, crossbow raised. As they jog across the gap between the barn and open the gates, Imal glances back and sees another of the monsters walking the other way. As he follows Scrobey he hopes it didn’t see them.
Two hours later they are walking at a fast pace through the grey meadows in the direction of the train station. Neither of them talks to the other, but Scrobey says ‘goblins, there’s bloody goblins’ under his breath. They don’t use dirt track, but are keeping it in sight. Both of them are silently thinking about the one ‘goblin’ they saw walking away from them, and trying not to think about what horrors might be even now pursuing them.
As they reach the top of the hill Imal turns and sees, galloping towards them, two hundred metres away, a creature like a horse, with great clawed feet, oily looking skin and huge reptilian jaws. On its back rides one of the goblins, brandishing a curved weapon.
Scrobey hisses ‘Run!’ and dashes down the side of the hill away from the beast. Imal sprints after him, trying to keep up. A few trees are scattered around, but none large enough to offer protection.
They reach the base of the hill and running across the wide fields beyond by the time the beast appears around the side of the hill, its great feet flattening the long grass as it races towards them.
Half way to the next hill the beast is only twenty metres away. Scrobey is between Imal and the beast; he raises his crossbow and pistol and fires straight at it. A shot catches it in the torso, the beast howls and collapses into the grass. But the goblin springs from its dying mount’s back. Scrobey pulls back the string of his crossbow, reaches for another bolt and nearly has it loaded before the goblin brings its curved weapon down on Scrobey’s arm. With a sickening crunching noise Scrobey stumbles backwards, his still good arm reaching for his knife; as Imal stands, paralysed with horror, the goblin lets out a shriek of pain.
Imal barely hears it. A shadow is moving across the field towards him. He looks up, sees a bulbous, leathery-winged shaped hanging in the air above the combatants, feels a sting in his shoulder and falls to the ground, the world fading…
Imal is vaguely aware that he is lying on something soft. Ah. A bed. So it was a nightmare. He yawns, and opens his eyes.
What he sees does not make him happy.
He is in a bed, but the sheets are grey rather than light brown, and there is a metal wall with a short door opposite him. The floor appears to be metal panels riveted together. There is no window, no desk, no sign of Scrobey.
The door swings open, and a tall, thin African man in a Madagascan surgeon’s uniform walks in.
‘Your friend is dead,’ he says in an emotionless voice. ‘You are onboard a small armoured war zeppelin, although you will remember it as something else.’
‘So the goblin was—’
‘The goblin did not exist.’
‘What?’
‘Come and see.’
Imal follows the man out of the door, along a narrow iron corridor, to a little room with a large, curved glass window, reinforced with iron bars.
Through the window the field is visible. In the centre is a dead horse on its side, a few red stains around it. Twenty metres away from it is a Tieranacen man lies on his back, a knife hilt buried in his chin, a mace next to him. A metre or two from him is what remains of Scrobey: a thin figure as pale as death, with one arm mangled and bloody and another wound on his stomach.
Imal turns to the tall man. ‘How?’ he asks in a quiet, hoarse voice.
‘You were infected with a disease that lives in the blood and preys on the mind. It makes you see all those who do not have a closely related strand of it as monsters. The hallucination is complete as well: all your senses tell you they are real.’
‘The dart we knocked you out with delivered a dose of an antidote to it. We gave you a more refined one to combat your strain of infection once you were aboard.’
Imal takes all this in silently, staring at the wall. Something is nagging at his mind. ‘But that man…if he wasn’t infected then why did he attack us?’
The tall man shrugs. ‘Maybe you did something while you were infected that gave the lord reason to hunt you,’ he replies. ‘Or maybe he was infected. We have reasons to believe at least someone else in this area must have been.’
‘The lord said farmers went mad in one village and attacked people.’
‘Well? What would you do if their appeared to be monsters in your home?’
Imal looks away, vaguely aware of dull feelings of sadness and horror inside him. ‘What made this happen?’ he asks.
‘You need to come upstairs and talk to our captain about that’, replies the tall man. ‘I am Leter, by the way. Follow.’ he walks out the door, along another corridor and climbs a ladder leading upwards, Imal following him. They are in a semi-circular room with a window stretching across the curved edge, and a bench several sets of radio equipment on it.
There are also three other people in the room. The first is a heavily built European man with long grey hair, a short beard and several layers of rough clothing.
Leter introduces him as ‘Ivor Fenrirson, our navigator, and a native of the lands of the old Norse, the place you call Ganorksland.’
Next to him, sitting at the desk, is a short oriental woman in some sort of aviator’s uniform. ‘Hanaka Seyen, our pilot, a former captain of the Imperial Korean Air Forces.’
The third person turns to Imal. She is quite tall, and thin as a skeleton. She has greyish skin, and two dark grey, eye shaped pods instead of eyes, with metal coils branching off them and sinking into her face. Her face and limbs have dark lines running across them, just underneath the skin, and in a few places they are visible enough to be recognisable as coils and cables.
‘You’re a mixer.’ says Imal, flatly. Although it has been nearly sixty years since the League’s war against the Congo warlords ended, ‘mixers’, humans partially rebuilt and improved with machinery by the warlords’ engineers when they were near death, are still seen as monstrosities by many Arabs.
‘So?’ says the mixer. ‘Were you at Malawi, Mr Buissnessman? Or the deep jungles? Did you ever hole up in Cairo while the bombs rained down? No you weren’t, and we just saved your life, so don’t moan.’
‘This is Etara, our captain,’ says Leter.
‘And what do you people do?’ asks Imal.
‘At the moment we are hunting a Valkyrie.’ replies Etara. ‘It looks like a person, but it’s more like a mixer. A really well built, really old mixer. It might not have been a person to start with. It’s weapons, are what it got you with – a dose of whatever strains of the disease it’s created.’
‘Now, I want you to think carefully, Mr Businessman. Was there anyone strange in that castle?’
Imal opens his mouth to reply ‘Not really.’ Then he remembers…
…a thin figure climbing up a spiralling staircase, holding two heavy suitcases, neither of them even touching the floor, but no muscles standing out at all in the thin, wiry arms…
‘There was a servant. Didn’t say anything. The lord said he was new.’ Imal tells them about Lord Marcio’s talk of people going mad, and how the servant carried two heavy suitcases without effort, and how he had turned up just after the disease outbreak.
‘What did he look like?’ Etara asks.
Again Imal opens his mouth to reply and stops. He can’t actually remember what the man looked like. Just sort of…normal, average, unremarkable. But he can’t remember any fine details about his appearance.
‘I can’t quite remember’ he admits.
Etara nods. ‘They make themselves look bland if they’re unsure of you. We’ll be going back to the hillfort shortly. We can drop you off somewhere along the way.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Imal says. Somewhere inside him is anger, anger at the thing that killed Scrobey and can make people kill each other for no reason at all.
‘It is likely that there will be fighting. The disease has probably been spread by now, and this ship is not armoured enough for us to shoot darts at everyone without a high chance of us being destroyed. You could be injured or killed.’
‘I don’t care,’ says Imal, and realises he doesn’t. He has been driven mad, chased, attacked and failed in his business task.
Etara shrugs. ‘As you wish. You can use this.’ She unhooks a bulky pistol with an ovular barrel from a bracket on the wall. ‘Bullets hardly do a thing to them, but these fire shells with a powerful electric charge. You’ve got to hit them just below the chest or in the head. That’s where their electric brains and engines are. Go down the corridor to the armoury and Ivor will fit you out.’
The watcher stands by the lord of the castle, staring at the sentry in front of it. Before the watcher was subservient; now it is the one giving the commands. The sentry says there is a great winged beast heading towards them, and he asks what to do. The watcher replies ‘Place armed men on the walls. Destroy it, or it will kill us.’ The sentry turns to Lord Marcio, who gives a tiny nod. The watcher reflects how easy it was to make these people its servants, how willingly they call it ‘master’ and ‘saviour.’
As the zeppelin floats toward the castle there are two puffs of smoke from the towers overlooking the gates, then a dull thump as a shell strikes the ship and ricochets off. ‘Diet Dr. Pepper it,’ mutters Etara in the cockpit.
The guards on the ground aim their rifles as the great beast flies over, spitting jets of flames at the towers—both are torn apart in flames. Another jet strikes a wheeled cannon, and two armed men fall, darts in their sides. The beast glides low over the keep, and three shapes detach themselves from it and fall.
A guard walks along the corridor to the guests’ rooms and collapses, a dart sticking into his thigh. Etara steps over him and continues along the corridor, Imal and Ivor following. At the top of the stairwell all three pause; Ivor and Etara raise their dart rifles and fire at the two guards at the door, and
The watcher turns on the spot, looks upwards at the three people at the top of the stairwell and smiles.
Crouched on a shadowed rafter in his own hall, Lord Marcio aims at the reptilian monsters at the top of the stairwell and fires.
Ivor Fenrirson falls to the floor, chest bleeding. The Valkyrie leaps sideways as a shell from Imal’s gun strikes the floor next to it, Imal running down the stairs as fast as possible, clicking another shell into his pistol. Lord Marcio rolls backwards of his rafter, a dart from Etara’s rifle in his shoulder.
Imal is on the ground…
The Valkyrie rushes towards the Arabic man, a Tieranacen sword in one hand, moving faster than any human could…
Imal’s pistol is not even aimed above the floor when the Valkyrie is in front of him, sword slashing through the air…
Imal is wrenched sideways so fast that he skids across the polished wooden floor. The Valkyrie snaps around, stares—
Straight into the barrel of Etara’s pistol.
There is a dull crunching noise and the Valkyrie falls backwards, one leg jerking madly, skin crackling with sparks.
‘We’re out of here’ says Etara, heading for the stairwell.
Viewed from the roof of the keep the hillfort is a wreck. Twenty men and women lie on the ground, Leter bending over one, a needle of antidote in one hand.
Imal sits on the roof quietly, sunken in gloom. He flicks through his Mala. I helped kill a monster, he thinks. A monster that makes us monsters.
Then he thinks about how he thinks the Tieranacens are primitive, how the Arabs see mixers as subhuman, about the accounts of holy wars and religious mania in the Mala.
Does it make us monsters?
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Written as an English assignment in a hurry...had to cut it down a bit (about 2000 words), this version is 3500 long. Second Draft, far from perfect... Genre: Scifi/fantasy. Most stuff I write is this genre...
Copyright Skyhammer_216/Shuriken22.
Fissures 1
[hide
“The tall alluring figure stood transfixed as Mina passed by. In one hand Mina held her notebook, in the other her audio recording machine. The tall dark figure follows her, moving like a shadow amongst the other pedestrians.” Imal al-Khallid, Arabic businessman on business to Tieranace (formerly Spain), glances out the window at the countryside. Rugged, rocky hills, fields of long greyish grass and the occasional tree pass by. He turns back to his Mala, the holy book of his own religion. Interesting passage, he thinks. Possibly one of the more metaphorical ones, although some scholars claim that—
‘Sir?’ asks Scrobey, his European bodyguard and porter, cutting through his thoughts.
‘Hmm…what is it?’
‘We’re coming up to our stop, sir.’ Scrobey stands, pulling down both their suitcases from the overhead luggage rack.
Imal places his bookmark in his Mala, closes it and places it carefully in the front pocket of his carry bag. A minute later they stand on the tiny, brick platform, with two drab, squat buildings and a fence the only barrier against the surrounding countryside. They walk through the tin-roofed exit, their tickets and passes accepted by the guards.
Outside the station is unimpressive. The land is steep and dotted with stones, with grass the only vegetation. A dusty dirt track leads off to the east and west, skirting around the bottoms of the steeper hills and cutting across others. Imal takes out his expensive pocket watch, noting with satisfaction that they are on schedule.
Shortly their driver arrives. Imal is impressed to see he has a small, worn motor vehicle rather than a horse-drawn coach. Imal talks to the driver periodically as the vehicle makes its way (somewhat bumpily) along the dirt track. Apparently, Lord Marcio is a popular ruler, is as peaceful as lords get and is keen to have a more reliable source of electricity than the technologies used in Tieranace (awfully primitive ones, Imal thinks).
Soon they come in sight of Lord Marcio’s hillfort, crowning a rocky escarpment, a wide path leading up to its huge wooden gates. The fort itself is a cluster of taller and more impressive buildings behind a high stonewall armoured with sheets of beaten scrap iron. Two towers rise above the wall on either side of the gate, a sentry in each. They wave them through, obviously expecting them. The driver parks the vehicle in a barn next to one of the towers. He tells them to walk closely behind him, and trots off towards the keep, the guests following.
Hunger. Well...not exactly hunger; more a sort of…longing. The watcher stares at the two newcomers in the doorway. The tall man with the headband walks towards them, talking and making enthusiastic gestures…now he is shaking the dark man’s hand with his own, looking pleased with the newcomers. The man with the headband turns to the watcher, and says ‘Dione, take the guest’s belongings up to their room’s.’ The words cut into the watcher’s mind. The watcher nods and walks forward to pick up the suitcases and bags. Then he turns, silently, and marches up a spiralling iron stairway to the hall’s upper level, holding the bags above the stairs easily.
That evening, Imal is seated at the end of Lord Marcio’s table, with the Lord opposite. As he places his knife on his plate the quiet, thin servant who took their bags earlier walks over, takes his cutlery and plate, bows and leaves to the kitchens almost soundlessly. Imal stares after him, puzzled. Lord Marcio seeing his expression, chuckles.
‘Don’t mind him,’ he says, ‘he’s a little odd and barely says a word, but he’s a good servant, and we need all the help we can get around here at the moment.’
‘What do you mean, lordship?’ Imal asks.
‘Had a little bit of a problem a month or so back. A few people got sick with something. It made those who got it act a bit strange. We had a couple of farmer’s go mad down in the village, shouting and trying to thump people. All over now though, no-one’s been sick with whatever it was for three weeks at least.’
‘That is relieving’ Imal says. ‘Out of curiosity, how many people did you lose to this disease?’
His Lordship thinks for a second, ‘Eighteen dead. Plus five ran away. And two killed by those farmer’s. Nothing compared to the numbers we used to lose back in the plague days.’
The conversation turns to business matters, and Lord Marcio’s desire to purchase a steam-powered electricity generator, to be fed by local heat vents. Matters such as legal documents of ownership, transportation and installation of the necessary machinery, maintaining the generator once built and what parts the Tieranacens can construct themselves are addressed. Imal is impressed by Lord Marcio’s grasp of the science behind the generator, nearly as good as that of an average Arab’s. Eventually his Lordship stands from the table and bids Imal good night. Imal climbs the metal stairway just outside the dining hall that leads to his room.
It lies at the end of a small wooden corridor, with lamps hanging off the walls. He nods to Scrobey, sitting at a desk by his bed near the door, checking his crossbow and pistol just in case, and seats himself at his own desk, next to his own bed at the other end of the room, by a large window. The window is glass, rarely seen in Tieranace, in a large frame that is partly open.
Imal sits in his chair and reads his Mala.
Annriss
“The Saviour saw the wickedness of the people, the darkness that grew inside them, the poison that lived in their veins. And this enraged and saddened the Saviour, yet it showed mercy, and declared to it’s chosen ones that it would stop the wickedness.”
“For three years the sovereign stayed in the shrine, and with compassion and mercy and desire for justice it made the antidote for the poison, the poison that made darkness and war grow in men. Yet to make its antidote work it had to give it to it’s people, yet none were strong enough to live through the cleansing in the antidote’s newborn state. So the sovereign took the antidote, the glorious concoction that would wash the darkness away, and took it into its own fleshy apparition, and let it flow in it’s living body’s veins.”
Imal yawns and closes the book. He stands, says good night to Scrobey and gets into bed. Within a minute he is asleep. Ten minutes later Scrobey gets into his own bed.
Cold. Not that the watcher feels it anyway. The wind tears past him, tugging at his clothes. Gently the watcher eases the window open, and once open enough he climbs over the sill, retracting his claws as he goes.
Slowly the watcher walks across to the Arabic man’s bed. Silently the watcher bends over him, one hand just above his neck. A tiny, hair-like claw flicks out from one finger. The, it slowly touches his skin and pierces it, the needle becoming darker for a second.
The watcher pulls the needle back and walks over to the other man. Two minutes later he clambers out of the window, closing it behind him.
The next morning Imal wakes up groggily, hearing a knocking on the door. He sits up, pulls a clean shirt from his suitcase and over his undershirt, and calls out ‘Enter.’ Scrobey is already up, meticulously fine-tuning his weapons again.
The door swings open slowly…
In the doorway is a grotesque creature, about the same height and shape as Imal, with thin, sinewy, arms, long claws on its hands, an ape-like face with huge, pointed teeth jutting from its lower jaw and only a loincloth covering its body. The nightmarish thing makes a horrible, low hissing noise.
Suddenly it’s head snaps backwards and it crumples to the floor, blood dripping from its head, and only then Imal realises he has been screaming. Scrobey slots another bolt into his crossbow and pokes his head out of the doorway, ducks back inside, seizes his weapons and backpack and walks over to the window. He pushes it open.
‘Out. Now.’
‘But–’
‘There’s more of those things downstairs. And lots of dead people.’
Imal picks up his own backpack and his Mala. He climbs out of the window after Scrobey, his hands shaking. A few metres below the windowsill there is the roof of a small storehouse. They drop onto it and skirt around the edge of the hall, then the edge of the large barn their driver parked the car in yesterday, Scrobey in the lead, crossbow raised. As they jog across the gap between the barn and open the gates, Imal glances back and sees another of the monsters walking the other way. As he follows Scrobey he hopes it didn’t see them.
Two hours later they are walking at a fast pace through the grey meadows in the direction of the train station. Neither of them talks to the other, but Scrobey says ‘goblins, there’s bloody goblins’ under his breath. They don’t use dirt track, but are keeping it in sight. Both of them are silently thinking about the one ‘goblin’ they saw walking away from them, and trying not to think about what horrors might be even now pursuing them.
As they reach the top of the hill Imal turns and sees, galloping towards them, two hundred metres away, a creature like a horse, with great clawed feet, oily looking skin and huge reptilian jaws. On its back rides one of the goblins, brandishing a curved weapon.
Scrobey hisses ‘Run!’ and dashes down the side of the hill away from the beast. Imal sprints after him, trying to keep up. A few trees are scattered around, but none large enough to offer protection.
They reach the base of the hill and running across the wide fields beyond by the time the beast appears around the side of the hill, its great feet flattening the long grass as it races towards them.
Half way to the next hill the beast is only twenty metres away. Scrobey is between Imal and the beast; he raises his crossbow and pistol and fires straight at it. A shot catches it in the torso, the beast howls and collapses into the grass. But the goblin springs from its dying mount’s back. Scrobey pulls back the string of his crossbow, reaches for another bolt and nearly has it loaded before the goblin brings its curved weapon down on Scrobey’s arm. With a sickening crunching noise Scrobey stumbles backwards, his still good arm reaching for his knife; as Imal stands, paralysed with horror, the goblin lets out a shriek of pain.
Imal barely hears it. A shadow is moving across the field towards him. He looks up, sees a bulbous, leathery-winged shaped hanging in the air above the combatants, feels a sting in his shoulder and falls to the ground, the world fading…
Imal is vaguely aware that he is lying on something soft. Ah. A bed. So it was a nightmare. He yawns, and opens his eyes.
What he sees does not make him happy.
He is in a bed, but the sheets are grey rather than light brown, and there is a metal wall with a short door opposite him. The floor appears to be metal panels riveted together. There is no window, no desk, no sign of Scrobey.
The door swings open, and a tall, thin African man in a Madagascan surgeon’s uniform walks in.
‘Your friend is dead,’ he says in an emotionless voice. ‘You are onboard a small armoured war zeppelin, although you will remember it as something else.’
‘So the goblin was—’
‘The goblin did not exist.’
‘What?’
‘Come and see.’
Imal follows the man out of the door, along a narrow iron corridor, to a little room with a large, curved glass window, reinforced with iron bars.
Through the window the field is visible. In the centre is a dead horse on its side, a few red stains around it. Twenty metres away from it is a Tieranacen man lies on his back, a knife hilt buried in his chin, a mace next to him. A metre or two from him is what remains of Scrobey: a thin figure as pale as death, with one arm mangled and bloody and another wound on his stomach.
Imal turns to the tall man. ‘How?’ he asks in a quiet, hoarse voice.
‘You were infected with a disease that lives in the blood and preys on the mind. It makes you see all those who do not have a closely related strand of it as monsters. The hallucination is complete as well: all your senses tell you they are real.’
‘The dart we knocked you out with delivered a dose of an antidote to it. We gave you a more refined one to combat your strain of infection once you were aboard.’
Imal takes all this in silently, staring at the wall. Something is nagging at his mind. ‘But that man…if he wasn’t infected then why did he attack us?’
The tall man shrugs. ‘Maybe you did something while you were infected that gave the lord reason to hunt you,’ he replies. ‘Or maybe he was infected. We have reasons to believe at least someone else in this area must have been.’
‘The lord said farmers went mad in one village and attacked people.’
‘Well? What would you do if their appeared to be monsters in your home?’
Imal looks away, vaguely aware of dull feelings of sadness and horror inside him. ‘What made this happen?’ he asks.
‘You need to come upstairs and talk to our captain about that’, replies the tall man. ‘I am Leter, by the way. Follow.’ he walks out the door, along another corridor and climbs a ladder leading upwards, Imal following him. They are in a semi-circular room with a window stretching across the curved edge, and a bench several sets of radio equipment on it.
There are also three other people in the room. The first is a heavily built European man with long grey hair, a short beard and several layers of rough clothing.
Leter introduces him as ‘Ivor Fenrirson, our navigator, and a native of the lands of the old Norse, the place you call Ganorksland.’
Next to him, sitting at the desk, is a short oriental woman in some sort of aviator’s uniform. ‘Hanaka Seyen, our pilot, a former captain of the Imperial Korean Air Forces.’
The third person turns to Imal. She is quite tall, and thin as a skeleton. She has greyish skin, and two dark grey, eye shaped pods instead of eyes, with metal coils branching off them and sinking into her face. Her face and limbs have dark lines running across them, just underneath the skin, and in a few places they are visible enough to be recognisable as coils and cables.
‘You’re a mixer.’ says Imal, flatly. Although it has been nearly sixty years since the League’s war against the Congo warlords ended, ‘mixers’, humans partially rebuilt and improved with machinery by the warlords’ engineers when they were near death, are still seen as monstrosities by many Arabs.
‘So?’ says the mixer. ‘Were you at Malawi, Mr Buissnessman? Or the deep jungles? Did you ever hole up in Cairo while the bombs rained down? No you weren’t, and we just saved your life, so don’t moan.’
‘This is Etara, our captain,’ says Leter.
‘And what do you people do?’ asks Imal.
‘At the moment we are hunting a Valkyrie.’ replies Etara. ‘It looks like a person, but it’s more like a mixer. A really well built, really old mixer. It might not have been a person to start with. It’s weapons, are what it got you with – a dose of whatever strains of the disease it’s created.’
‘Now, I want you to think carefully, Mr Businessman. Was there anyone strange in that castle?’
Imal opens his mouth to reply ‘Not really.’ Then he remembers…
…a thin figure climbing up a spiralling staircase, holding two heavy suitcases, neither of them even touching the floor, but no muscles standing out at all in the thin, wiry arms…
‘There was a servant. Didn’t say anything. The lord said he was new.’ Imal tells them about Lord Marcio’s talk of people going mad, and how the servant carried two heavy suitcases without effort, and how he had turned up just after the disease outbreak.
‘What did he look like?’ Etara asks.
Again Imal opens his mouth to reply and stops. He can’t actually remember what the man looked like. Just sort of…normal, average, unremarkable. But he can’t remember any fine details about his appearance.
‘I can’t quite remember’ he admits.
Etara nods. ‘They make themselves look bland if they’re unsure of you. We’ll be going back to the hillfort shortly. We can drop you off somewhere along the way.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Imal says. Somewhere inside him is anger, anger at the thing that killed Scrobey and can make people kill each other for no reason at all.
‘It is likely that there will be fighting. The disease has probably been spread by now, and this ship is not armoured enough for us to shoot darts at everyone without a high chance of us being destroyed. You could be injured or killed.’
‘I don’t care,’ says Imal, and realises he doesn’t. He has been driven mad, chased, attacked and failed in his business task.
Etara shrugs. ‘As you wish. You can use this.’ She unhooks a bulky pistol with an ovular barrel from a bracket on the wall. ‘Bullets hardly do a thing to them, but these fire shells with a powerful electric charge. You’ve got to hit them just below the chest or in the head. That’s where their electric brains and engines are. Go down the corridor to the armoury and Ivor will fit you out.’
The watcher stands by the lord of the castle, staring at the sentry in front of it. Before the watcher was subservient; now it is the one giving the commands. The sentry says there is a great winged beast heading towards them, and he asks what to do. The watcher replies ‘Place armed men on the walls. Destroy it, or it will kill us.’ The sentry turns to Lord Marcio, who gives a tiny nod. The watcher reflects how easy it was to make these people its servants, how willingly they call it ‘master’ and ‘saviour.’
As the zeppelin floats toward the castle there are two puffs of smoke from the towers overlooking the gates, then a dull thump as a shell strikes the ship and ricochets off. ‘Diet Dr. Pepper it,’ mutters Etara in the cockpit.
The guards on the ground aim their rifles as the great beast flies over, spitting jets of flames at the towers—both are torn apart in flames. Another jet strikes a wheeled cannon, and two armed men fall, darts in their sides. The beast glides low over the keep, and three shapes detach themselves from it and fall.
A guard walks along the corridor to the guests’ rooms and collapses, a dart sticking into his thigh. Etara steps over him and continues along the corridor, Imal and Ivor following. At the top of the stairwell all three pause; Ivor and Etara raise their dart rifles and fire at the two guards at the door, and
The watcher turns on the spot, looks upwards at the three people at the top of the stairwell and smiles.
Crouched on a shadowed rafter in his own hall, Lord Marcio aims at the reptilian monsters at the top of the stairwell and fires.
Ivor Fenrirson falls to the floor, chest bleeding. The Valkyrie leaps sideways as a shell from Imal’s gun strikes the floor next to it, Imal running down the stairs as fast as possible, clicking another shell into his pistol. Lord Marcio rolls backwards of his rafter, a dart from Etara’s rifle in his shoulder.
Imal is on the ground…
The Valkyrie rushes towards the Arabic man, a Tieranacen sword in one hand, moving faster than any human could…
Imal’s pistol is not even aimed above the floor when the Valkyrie is in front of him, sword slashing through the air…
Imal is wrenched sideways so fast that he skids across the polished wooden floor. The Valkyrie snaps around, stares—
Straight into the barrel of Etara’s pistol.
There is a dull crunching noise and the Valkyrie falls backwards, one leg jerking madly, skin crackling with sparks.
‘We’re out of here’ says Etara, heading for the stairwell.
Viewed from the roof of the keep the hillfort is a wreck. Twenty men and women lie on the ground, Leter bending over one, a needle of antidote in one hand.
Imal sits on the roof quietly, sunken in gloom. He flicks through his Mala. I helped kill a monster, he thinks. A monster that makes us monsters.
Then he thinks about how he thinks the Tieranacens are primitive, how the Arabs see mixers as subhuman, about the accounts of holy wars and religious mania in the Mala.
Does it make us monsters?
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