The Ruined Land

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Mashtuk kept his eyes closed. It was enough to be awake. He could hear so much, and feel so much, that anything more seemed an impossible burden.

He lay as still as he could, feeling every fibre of the dried grass that had been laid under him, as if his pelt had been stripped off and the indentations of leaf and stem and grain were being imprinted onto his bare muscles. He suppressed a moan. He should be grateful that he did not have the barren rock floor of the den for his bed. After lying motionless on his side for so long he desperately wanted to shift his position, but held himself immobile with an effort of will. He wasn’t ready to let the pack know that he had regained his senses.

Truth to say, he wasn’t ready to face a pack that no longer contained his beloved Zélie. She had been killed in the vulpini attack that had left him so direly wounded. She was a whisper on the wind, and he was hanging to life by a mere scrabble of claws. He could feel, with every shallow breath, the emptiness of her passing, the gaping abyss in his mind where her voice had been for so many years. Despite his best efforts, a shudder passed over him, and he could sense others stirring, looking at him, speaking to him. There was Callan, his great friend of many years, and young Enis, his son. His and Zélie’s. The surge of his grief met the weight of their worry, the emotion pulsing against Mashtuk’s mind, clouding his thoughts and blurring their words. He wondered if his ears had been damaged too, or maybe his mindspeech knocked completely out of his head. This foggy pushing of words without meaning was excruciating, and he could no longer pretend even to himself that he was unaware of his surroundings. Mashtuk yielded to the ache of his body. He stretched his limbs, pushing through the pain of his injuries.

His movement prompted more noise, more activity, and more mindspeech clutching at him. All of it was muffled into a formless wave of sound, empty of meaning, foamy and insubstantial. Mashtuk opened his eyes. Why could he not hear them properly? Every other sense said that Callan and Enis were touching-close.

The big white canine was leaning over him, a quizzical look in his eyes, while young Enis had reached forward to cradle his father’s head in his hands. They were speaking to him, Mashtuk knew, but his mind could not separate the words they used. He let out a fretful whine, and Callan and Enis looked at each other. At last, thought Mashtuk, at last they know they can’t get through to me with mindspeech. They must know that I can’t hear them properly.

He struggled a little in Enis’s arms, managing to drag himself into a sitting position, even if he leaned heavily on his son’s strong body. The pain of his broken foreleg was less, he realised, if he rested the damaged paw on top of his other one. Callan and Enis continued speaking over him, around him, but nothing they said was clear to Mashtuk. He would have tried shaking his head clear, had it not felt so heavy and throbbed so much. He whined again, and his two supporters grew silent, their eyes meeting across him.

More canini entered the den, apparently alerted to Mashtuk’s awakening. They smelled of cold and mud. With them came humans. Mashtuk recognised their scent. These were tribesmen of the Storm, old friends of Callan, whose pack had run with them for almost two decades. They, too, tried to mindspeak to him, but their words were fuzzy, faint. He couldn’t hold them long enough to read them.

One of the women kneeled down next to him, and he realised that she was setting down two squirming infants. Within seconds, the two human babies had hitched themselves toward him, one flinging both arms around his neck, the other crawling close enough to take a gentle hold of his leg, just above the splint.

‘Papa! Papa!’ said the first twin in crisp mindspeech. It was Romulo, the one with the red birthmark over his lip and muzzle.

Mashtuk almost yelped in surprise, at last able to understand a mindspoken word. He leaned forward, licking the faces of both babies, his heart swelling again as he remembered how he and Zélie had saved the little humans from under the very gates of the Pale. So much love he and Zélie had given these two little ones, and now he felt it redoubled as they crooned comfort to him in perfect mindspeech, their little voices cutting through the haze in his thoughts, dragging him back to life.

Hector rose to his feet. At well over two metres tall with a width of shoulder to match, he made a superb target for anyone wishing to attack his sentry position from the plain below. His silvered skin caught every stray gleam of light that pierced the storm, reflecting off the tawny rock behind him like a misty halo, and the narrow pinch point he was guarding was perfectly bare of cover.

He knew he was quite safe, though. The strangers who were struggling up the steep track that led into the ravine were totally engrossed with their ascent, watching their steps on the rain-wet path. He could have blown them off their feet with one blast of his weaponised forearm before they had a chance to realise where the attack had come from.

Well, he corrected himself, maybe two blasts.

Since he had left the Pale and its steady diet of biofuel, all of Hector’s in-fitted weaponry was slowly but steadily losing power, although his enhanced sensing was undiminished. Hector raised the viewfinder on his wrist to eye level and focused tightly on the pair approaching. He nodded, confirming his first impression that these fellows offered no threat to him or to the various members of his adopted pack.

He dropped to one knee, watching the two climbers curiously while he thinned his mindvoice to call his great friend Enis. He and the canine had an unusually close bond, and the range and inflection of their silent communication was greater than most of the pack could manage.

‘INCOMING!” announced Hector, with a tone that called for attention but relayed calm.

‘???’ and ‘On my way,’ replied Enis immediately. Something in his mindvoice was edged with excitement and confusion, and Hector felt him pushing the emotions aside as he answered the call.

‘Two humans,’ added Hector. ‘Tribal, I think. Footsore and hungry.’

He adjusted the viewfinder to scan the intruders from head to heel. On this precipitous trail where they needed to lift their faces into the rain to see the ground ahead of them, they were wide open to his inspection. The foremost was definitely a tribesman, thought Hector, and he guessed that the man may even belong to the Storm, the tribe that was currently camping in the ravine. The Storm had long been allies of the canini, and close contact with them had taught Hector something of their preferred markings—the specific way they braided their hair, the particular outlines of their face paint, their slender style of bow and arrow. The second man, though, made Hector frown. A young fellow, skinny and rather unkempt, this stranger had dark skin and hair bleached tawny by the sun. He wore a single mourning stripe of paint on his cheeks, and his gear looked makeshift, cobbled together from badly dressed skins and roughly woven reeds. Hector had never seen a human quite like this one, and though admittedly his experience of humans was small, he could find no exact match in his data sets either. ‘A wild man’ was what his data suggested, though why a wild man would be travelling with a tribesman was an anomaly he could not fathom, and the stranger did not wear the grotesque finery of the few wild men Hector had encountered. He continued watching as the pair slowly advanced toward his lookout post.

A tiny scatter of scree announced the arrival of Enis on the path above him, not that any such announcement was needed. With his mind so closely attuned to the young canine, Hector had been aware of him leaving the den, loping across the shared meeting space, and threading his way through the twisted paths of the thorn forest, his footfalls sure and steady. Enis would be here in a moment. The fact that the pack leader Hippolyta was coming down with him surprised Hector much more.

‘Where?’ asked Hippolyta, pushing past Enis to take up a position as close to the guard point as she could come.

Hector, being larger than any two canini put together, generally worked alone when he stood sentry duty, simply because he took up so much room. The fact that he had enhanced sensing was an added bonus. His mindspeech was so strong, too, that he was able to summon the pack with ease, even without the ability to howl a warning. He peeled back from the overhang that marked the narrowest waist of the trail, the place they knew as the pinch point, and stuck himself as close as he could to the rock wall so that both Hippolyta and Enis could look down on the visitors.

‘I see,’ remarked Hippolyta.

‘You were right about one thing, brother,’ Enis commented over his shoulder. ‘These are no threat.’

‘Bring them up,’ commanded Hippolyta, turning to make her way back past Hector and up to the ravine. ‘I will let the Storm know we have visitors. Likely they are known to the tribe.’

As the scrabble of her claws receded up the path above them, Hector and Enis looked at each other.

‘So, brother,’ said Enis, ‘we had better let the visitors know we can see them.’

‘Will you mindspeak them?’ Hector dropped to his knees beside his friend, both watching the path below.

Enis tossed his head. ‘Not all tribesmen can hear me,’ he said.

Hector knew this was a matter of some annoyance to him, as he had always imagined a close connection with the tribes, who—in canini terms—were the most sensible humans left on the land. Hector had slightly different ideas, but these he mostly kept to himself. He caught Enis by the eye, the canini equivalent of calling for attention.

‘Well, how about you give a yap to let them know we are here, and then I speak aloud to them?’

‘Yes. One moment.’ Enis c****d his head, his over-large ears pricked toward his friend. His eyes were steady.

Hector wondered why he did not immediately announce them to the travellers below. Then Enis spoke words that Hector had feared he may never hear.

‘Hector, my father has woken.’

‘Mashtuk is awake?’ Hector jumped to his feet. He felt like running all the way back to the den immediately.

Enis raised a paw to stay him. ‘He’s awake. He isn’t speaking yet, and we’re not sure he can understand us. He seems rather confused. But Callan says it is a good sign, and that he will most probably continue to improve.’

‘I—I hope so. Yes, that is good news. Yes.’ Hector looked aside, a canini trick he had learned to hide the powerful emotion that bloomed inside him. After a moment he turned back to face Enis. ‘Good news, yes. Now it’s time to deal with these sorry two.’ He tipped his chin toward the wet, weary travellers below.

‘Yes. I will alert them, and then you speak.’ Enis looked up at him, a wry twist to his lips. ‘But, if you don’t mind, you need to speak gently, and maybe crouch down a bit. The sight and sound of your ghastly self might just make them run all the way back down to the plain.’

Hector smiled. He rather enjoyed the canini sense of humour. Enis stiffened his forelegs on the crest of the pinch point and tipped back his head, emitting a sharp volley of stern yaps. Hector nodded approval. Friends though they might prove, no visitors to the canini of the ravine would escape a brisk challenge.

The two men froze on the trail, snapping their gaze to the place from where the sound ahead of them had originated. Enis shifted a little to allow Hector access to the crest. As he came into their line of vision, Hector noticed that both men seemed to shrink into themselves, shoulders tensing, hands straying toward their weapons. Recognising their fear, he felt something grow dull within himself. But he knew well that this was always what happened, here in the Outside, whenever a living creature caught sight of his metallic-looking bulk. Although he and his friends knew that his skin had paled, that his hair had grown thick and even more dense with curls, and that his offensive hardware had diminished with every day he spent Outside, to a stranger he looked every inch one of the Pale’s monstrous humachines. He lifted his voice and spoke evenly, careful to use all the polite forms he had learned from the canini.

‘Welcome, travellers on the land,’ he said. ‘I am Hector, of Hippolyta’s pack that guards the ravine. My brother here is Enis. Do you seek entry to our den?’

He watched as the leading man stood straight, shoulders going back as he relaxed into a polite greeting stance. He also grasped his fellow by the upper arm in a gesture of reassurance. Hector’s sensors, making instant calculations from the angle of his post, told him that the stranger was not quite as tall as most of the tribesmen. His newly honed canini perspective read the man’s posture as confident and polite, quite different from the fearful, bewildered look of his fellow. Hector waited on their words, aware of Enis beside him tilting his ears this way and that, trying to hear whether the strangers had any mindspeech.

‘Our thanks,’ said the foremost traveller gravely. ‘We are pleased to meet you, Hector and Enis of Hippolyta’s pack. Our business is indeed with the canini of the ravine. I am Feather of the Storm, and this is my foster brother Jarli of the outclan Owl. We have travelled far in search of your den.’

The tribesman’s respectful attitude, his careful use of their names, and his own name made Hector’s heart warm. ‘Feather! He is of the Storm. Freya’s father, yes?’ he asked in a private aside to Enis.

The young canine gave a tight nod, and then turned his attention to the strangers.

‘You have found us,’ said Enis in a brisk, broadcast mindvoice, watching with his eyes narrowed to see if there was any response. Hector felt him twitch with delight as he saw Feather’s face break into a wide grin.

‘And we are glad of that,’ Feather responded in kind. ‘We have a matter of the gravest importance to discuss with you.’

Hector saw him glance swiftly at his companion, and then up again at the two sentries. He saw wonder in Feather’s clear grey eyes as he realised that Hector, too, could hear their mindspeech. Hector decided that it was time to confirm his position as a pack member.

‘Approach, then, travellers,’ he mindspoke them. ‘Already the pack is preparing to greet you.’ He rose slowly to his feet, aware again of their inevitable flinching as the Outsiders realised just how large and threatening a creature he looked.

‘Be welcome to our den,’ he said aloud, believing from his wide-eyed stare that Jarli was not as adept at mindspeech as Feather. ‘You will find friends ahead.’

With his fingers clenched in Jarli’s tattered cloak, Feather of the Storm led his companion up to the sentry point. Hector approved of the way the tribesman met his eyes without a shadow of fear. He stepped back to allow them to climb over the crest, and motioned for them to follow Enis up the last section of the trail.

He watched them go past, settling again to his sentry duty. There were some hours yet until he would be relieved. He wanted to see Mashtuk, and hoped that by then the old canine would have regained even more of his senses. He also hoped that by the time he re-entered the den, the two travellers would have discovered all that awaited them in the ravine. The presence of the entire tribe of the Storm, for example. Feather would be reunited with his daughter Freya. Jarli—Hector had no idea what Jarli’s business was with the ravine canini, but he had detected a bio-echo that troubled him. Jarli’s life-force, Hector’s sensors told him, read very like that of the human twins the canini had saved from the Pale. Jarli must be, the twins must be, thought Hector in confusion, from the same gene pool. He shrugged off the unease that came with this thought.

And when eventually he went up to the den, he consoled himself, the strange circumstance of a humachine living with a canini pack would be a matter of complete indifference, and the new humans would no longer gape at him.

‘I have never seen so much rain,’ said the regent Adaeze in amazement, looking across the rooftop garden of her new home.

Renamed the regent’s stronghold, the imposing building had until recently housed the Pale’s forecasters along with their trainees, their precious archival storage banks, and their prodigious stocks of finely calibrated equipment. Extensive remodelling and redecoration had transformed the forecasting tower into a more gracious and impressive place, suitable for a queen’s residence. Adaeze declared herself content with the changes, although she still expressed regrets about the superb views she had enjoyed from the regent’s tower. All considered, though, her move to the forecasters’ oikos had been a success.

The outcome for the forecasters was not quite as happy, mused Jaxon Tangshi.

The Pale’s senior forecaster, who was also the regent’s most powerful adviser, was at that very moment making plans to draw the plight of his colleagues to his queen’s attention. He knew, for example, that she preferred not to have homeless forecasters underfoot when she took her daily exercise along the go-ways of the policosmos, and that she would rather not be confronted at every turn by layers of blinking, beeping equipment stashed under random porticos. She was young and vigorous, and easily affronted by signs of disarray and decay. Judicious—not to say more obvious—placement of these encumbrances, Jaxon was thinking, could readily prompt Adaeze to agree that other arms of the service might be ousted from their oikoi so that the forecasters could be housed in a manner more befitting their station. And out of her way, of course. He was considering the relative merits of various buildings when the regent spoke again.

‘Have I? Jaxon, have I ever seen so much rain?’

The senior forecaster blinked, his own train of thought interrupted by her direct address. He suppressed the irritation that pinged through his biowires as they reacted strongly to the primacy of her question. Sealed into his very codes was his key directive to advise the regent, to place every scrap of his extensive data set at her instant disposal, no matter whether or not her request was fatuous. In more than two centuries, no other regent had interrupted his important thinking time with such inane wonderings. A pity that Adaeze, beautiful and vital as she was, did not quite have the intelligence to match her physical perfection. None of this showed on Jaxon’s face as he ran the query in milliseconds.

‘No, my lady, indeed you have not,’ he said gently. He had found that, overall, an avuncular attitude was the best way to handle this young ruler.

‘I thought not. Surely I would have remembered.’

Jaxon inclined his head. ‘No doubt,’ he agreed. ‘Your memory is excellent, my lady. But in fact, there has been very little rain since the last aftershock, the PPA—the post-post-aftershock as we call it.’

He had also learned that, notwithstanding the superior grade of her liveware and software, it was wise to reinforce Adaeze’s knowledge of the Pale’s history at every opportunity. Her education had been skimped in the rush to replace the former regent, and indeed her attention span was not quite of the quality that previous rulers had enjoyed. Of course, for many matters, that was all to the good. Jaxon outlined the recent history of their weather clearly, in simple terms, reminding her of several other facts as he did so.

‘Our rainfall has indeed been scarce, compared to previous decades. And as you, my lady, were no more than an unprogressed embryo at the time of the PPA, you could have no memory of the raging storms that occurred.’

‘I have heard that said,’ commented Adaeze, her golden brows slanted into a frown. ‘That the storms were terrible. My, er, my cousin Élin spoke of those storms more than once.’

There was a short silence. Jaxon imagined that Adaeze, like him, was thinking of how the two of them had combined to bring the last regent’s reign to an end, using a plot conceived by Jaxon and put into action by Adaeze. Élin Patraena had fallen to her death from the terrace at the top of the old regent’s tower, assisted by a shove in the back from her chosen successor. However, this was a memory on which neither cared to dwell for too long.

‘Oh, yes,’ Jaxon replied calmly. ‘All of us who experienced the PPA have very vivid memories of that time, my lady. Indeed, it was the ferocious and damaging nature of the weather that prompted your predecessor Élin to order the progression of the paramount embryos, including yourself, my lady. This happened long before she might have considered such an arrangement, in the usual way of things.’

‘The usual way,’ echoed Adaeze. She raised her face to the sky, looking through the curved dome that enclosed her roof garden to the low clouds that seemed to lean down, searching for entry into the policosmos.

Jaxon followed the direction of her gaze and frowned. Crystal beads of rain gathered into strings and chased a steady path south across the plexiglass, showing that the wind had swung around and was now coming from the north. Autumn weather from the north promised cold, and more cold. Likely the rain would soon turn to snow.

‘There is nothing usual about any of this, is there?’ Adaeze asked solemnly, turning to face him. ‘This weather is, well, bizarre. Wrong. It’s not normal, is it?’

Once more, Jaxon was jarred out of his own thoughts. He looked into the regent’s perfect golden-brown eyes, reflecting that she seemed at last to have realised the gravity of their situation.

‘No, my lady. Our policosmos is facing the most desperate crisis of our entire existence. You and I, Adaeze, must ensure that our citizens survive this period. As many of our citizens as can be saved, that is. The Pale must endure, must continue. Save the Pale—it is our first and foremost duty.’

‘Yes, I know.’ A great gust of wind rattled a handful of hail against the plexiglass roof. Adaeze looked up again, and then away. ‘I am ready now. Call the senior officers to the meeting room.’ As she spoke, she pointed at the single huddled servant waiting by the door, and the fellow turned immediately to the stairs to carry her message.

Jaxon heard her give a small sound of impatience, no doubt remembering the days, not so long ago, when she had been surrounded by dozens of lackeys, all dedicated to her comfort. Much had changed since Adaeze had ascended the throne.

More had changed since that disastrous crack had opened in the earth beneath the policosmos, splitting the Pale in two.

And Jaxon, for all his centuries of experience and his absolute command of every available data point, was not entirely sure that this was a situation they could overcome without a severe disruption to their comfortable existence. Nevertheless, he was determined that the Pale would survive, no matter the cost.

The cost to everyone but himself, of course.