Faces Read online

  ‘A staff should no more be left in the grass than a spear, little cousin,’ Merelock whispered. Her voice doubled on itself, acquired an echo. ‘’Twould be good to have you running at my flank, little one, if you’ll stay with me. Green and white above the trees.’ The sentence made no sense to Jann but the words had an odd power over her, and she tilted her head back as though she could look up through the thick walls and roof and see a night sky where the green and the white…

  But Merelock was away, darting through the narrow spaces between the stacks. Jann smiled as she glided along behind, picturing Merelock as a night-hunting raptor, beak sharp as a spear, talons slitting the air, eyes as keen as its talons staring into the green-tinged darkness. But that laughter from the forge door would not leave her head now, and she found herself wanting to laugh, too, softly sing as she ran to and fro.

  ‘On and ahead, cousin!’ came the gruff hunter’s whisper down the trail, and Jann quickened her pace even though she knew it was only Merelock’s reedy voice from the other side of a pallet of hygiene packs. ‘On and ahead to the Great Caern! We’ll touch the stone for luck and turn about to hunt them!’

  The geography of this place unfolded in Jann’s mind with the quiet certainty of dream-knowledge, but as she ran up and down the aisles between the stores, her stave clanging awkwardly against crates and fittings, she was more and more aware that the place she was running through seemed phantom-like. Her mind kept dancing away through some great forest (she was sure that was the word; the last supervisor, Merelock’s predecessor, had read books and had described forests to them), gliding between the boles of trees, up into the rich canopy, slipping along through the underbrush, airy as a moonbeam, following her fierce hawk.

  All the places of the forest were known to her, their names talismanic weights in her mind. The Great Caern, the Tree of Hands, the Crying River, the Sky Hearth. Glorious places, wild places, and Jann cried out because now she was singing her dreams in the sky over the forest to a chorus of wind-chimes, and now she was tottering back and forth in a cramped and grubby storeroom, watching her portly little supervisor trotting ahead brandishing a splintered piece of pallet like some sort of spear, exulting at a mad beauty that she couldn’t convince herself she was really seeing, laughing in the dark while her friend shuffled around in the forge with Tokuin’s blood on his hands, crippled and beaten and… chained?

  There was that strange ghost-certainty again. Chained? She had seen no chains. Gallardi had killed Tokuin and taken the forge as his own. Why did her mind cling to the memory of him defeated and bound?

  Pad-pad-pad came Merelock’s feet around the end of the aisle. The supervisor had kicked off her workboots and was running barefoot, leaving bloody prints from where something had cut into her left heel. She had plastered engine grease across the rank swatches on her jacket and crude garlands of torn fabric flopped around her brow and her biceps. She shook the spear in one hand. Her other, Jann realised, was dangling at the end of a broken arm.

  ‘This isn’t the path,’ said Jann, propping her stave across the aisle to block Merelock’s way. ‘Ma’am? Merelock, do you even know where you are? Do you recognise this place? Do you recognise me?’

  The other woman stopped with her belly up against the pitted metal of Jann’s torque-stave, then stepped back and hefted her spear. Jann suppressed a wince as Merelock’s broken arm banged against a crate corner, but the supervisor didn’t even seem to notice. In the dimness her

  (how could I have ever thought that was her real)

  face was impassive, perhaps a little watchful. The designs around her eyes and across her cheekbones curled like rich summer leaves, like falcon-wings.

  ‘What strange questions you ask, little cousin! Have you been dreaming again? You should have asked me before you came down to sleep. There are places where it’s not safe to sleep, and your dreams are too precious for any of us to risk. Enemies make their way into the wild places, cousin. Stay close to my side.’

  ‘Merelock, listen to me! Where are you? Can you tell me where you are? Can you describe where you are? Do you know what happened to Gallardi and Tokuin?’

  ‘I…’ Merelock began, and then straightened. Her broken arm still hung but the other lifted her makeshift spear in a pose that brought back to Jann that maddening deja vu. ‘I run the trail like the moon and the wind, little cousin. I am the sound of my horn and the flight of my spear. When the nights chill and the green moon walks silent and alone, so there do I walk under it.’

  Other voices, other sounds. Something danced in Jann’s vision like the ghost of a hololith display in the instant after it was shut down. Merelock seemed to stand in the centre of a larger form, something tall and mantled in beast-pelts, lifting a lean arm, her/his words wrapped around by the dim sounds of wild horns and quick breathing. Merelock’s voice struggled for power and melody but Jann could feel the words coming from that other silhouette too. Their rhythm made her want to chorus along, dance in a circle with her stave lifted high before she could laugh and sing, leap and hang in the air, shine high and bright above…

  The sensation was like jolting awake just before the final release into sleep: Jann broke the reverie, pulled back from the brink, immediately felt guilty at disbelieving that beautiful voice. Before the guilt could lull her and draw her under again she gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes almost shut and hit Merelock’s broken arm with a clumsy, looping blow.

  The supervisor wailed in pain, but although she lurched she did not fall and the chunk of pallet stayed gripped in her fist the way the stave stayed gripped in Jann’s. For a moment, behind the sound, something in the darkness that might have been a sigh or a chuckle, but when Jann cocked her head to listen it was gone.

  ‘I am wounded, but not beyond fighting or mending,’ said Merelock, bent halfway to one knee before Jann and cradling her arm. ‘But see, Jann?’ Jann shook her head, not understanding, and for a moment not recognising the name Merelock had used. Her name, she was sure, should be longer, softer, more like a breathy lullaby on the tongue.

  ‘See, now?’ Merelock went on. ‘See how wrong it all is? My own domain, my hunting-paths. I climbed to spy and wait for my enemies and the bough cast me down. Wouldn’t bear my weight.’ Her head swimming, Jann got a hand under Merelock’s good shoulder and helped her to her feet, craning over her shoulder to follow the woman’s gaze. Her first thought was that of course it wouldn’t have borne weight: she was looking at a ripped stretch of tarpaulin over stacked drums of distilled water, and who would ever think that Merelock’s stout, stiff-limbed little frame would let her clamber up there without something going wrong? And yet it made perfect sense to her when Merelock talked of the stack as though it were a great tree, and one that had done her a personal wrong by breaking its branch and letting her fall. Falling. Falling and hurting. Jann breathed hard, shook her head, reminded herself of her purpose.

  ‘Look at it again, Merelock. Please, ma’am. Is it what you think it is? Look at me, do you see your cousin? I think I almost have what it is that’s happening to us, ma’am, almost in my mind, but will you help me to try and understand it?’ She could hear herself cracking and begging, near tears, but she seemed to have broken the trail of Merelock’s delusion. Hope bloomed warm in her. She met the other woman’s gaze, held it. Let her be jarred by the pain, Jann thought. Let her think! Let her see it in my

  (but it isn’t even my)

  face.

  For a long moment there was no sound, and then Merelock began making a low noise in her throat. Jann leaned in, listening for words, but there was just a soft moan of breath. Jann kept her eyes on Merelock’s, trying to ignore what her senses were telling her about the woman’s features, trying to pull insight out of the air by simple concentration.

  ‘Jann?’ The doubling of Merelock’s voice was gone. It was a simple voice now, the voice Jann was familiar with, but it was faint and confused. ‘J
ann, is that you? I can’t recognise you. What happened to us? What happened? I hurt, Jann. I hurt. I can hear the forge engines. Where’s Tokuin? Jann?’

  ‘We’re going up from the forge,’ Jann told her. ‘Up to the top level, where that thing is. I know we… weren’t always like this. I dream how we were before we found it. I think if we all go and find it we might understand about those people in my dreams.’

  ‘Up,’ said Merelock, still in that small, childlike voice. ‘We’ll go up.’ She tried to hold out her broken arm but it wouldn’t quite extend. ‘You and I. Together.’ Merelock wouldn’t release her grip on her spear, so Jann held her as best she could under the broken arm and tried to help her along. ‘We’ll walk together. You and I. Together in the dark.’ Grunting, Jann got Merelock to the end of the aisle and into a broader space where they could more comfortably walk abreast. ‘You and I, walking in the dark,’ Merelock said, ‘and not our first such journey, no,’ with an almost-chuckle that chilled Jann’s blood. The sound seemed to be picked up and echoed in the gloom around them. Jann thought she heard soft, rapid footsteps counterpointing the echoes, but who could tell any more what was happening around her and what was the ghost-pantomime in her own head?

  (‘Gallardi, Klaide, fetch a pair of piston-grips,’ Merelock said. Her voice, never very powerful, was fighting against the stiff wind on the tower roof but there was still enough snap in it to cut through the arguments. ‘Tokuin knows we’ve had a find, but he has some sort of ministration to attend to below before he’ll come up and look at this thing. We’ll make a start ourselves.’

  ‘Ma’am, Jann thinks there’s definitely tech in there,’ said Crussman, ‘and I agree with her. Look, that long curve has the line of an engine cowl, and if you look under it you’ll see, well, I’m sure it’s machinery.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Merelock said as Klaide, Gallardi and Heng came past pushing the big piston-grip pedestals on their rumbling wheels. ‘But the tech is the only thing I’m having him look at. If that stuff you think is machinery is part of the Mechanicus mysteries then we’re best served by keeping them sweet from the start, but whatever there is here that’s not machinery is legal salvage of the Filiate Guilds. There’s no lack of piety in doing things by the letter and sorting out what’s ours.’

  That was what Crussman had wanted to hear, and he and Sabila had actually clapped as the pedestals halted next to this thing they had found, the thing like a long iridescent arrowhead that looked so heavy and lifted so light, with its strange controls and its riding-rails. None of them had openly discussed the bright gemlike crystals embedded in its sleek curves: most of the deep-desert pipeline crews held the same half-formed superstitions about gloating over salvage before the bonus warrants had been signed. But Jann had found herself studying them, counting them, and wondering about the shapes she was sure now were cargo panniers. As Klaide shooed the others away and started working the controls, the arms extended with a piston-hiss and the three-fingered grips slowly positioned themselves over the pannier lids…)

  Jann didn’t want to think about it any more. Didn’t want to dream, didn’t want to remember. Wasn’t it her dream that had begun all this strife? She had dreamed of uprising (although that didn’t fit), she had dreamed of war between them all (but was that really what had happened?), she had dreamed of a bloodshed that the telling of her dreams had brought to pass, prophecy and fulfilment in one closed and shining circle like the edge of a full white moon. But she had never told anyone. She hadn’t even been the one to see the thing wedged in under the pipeline by the winds. Who had seen it first? They had been out checking that the new fixtures at pylon 171 had survived the hypervelocity sandblasting of the previous day and Tokuin’s drone had spotted something his image catalogues couldn’t quite identify. They had gone to hunt it out. But Merelock hadn’t gone with them. And wasn’t Merelock the one who hunted?

  The thought of her companion dragged Jann’s consciousness back to the moment. Merelock was still muttering to herself.

  ‘Oh, we ran together when the ghosts sang in the waterfalls, do you remember? And the quarrels, when I had rancour with my black-haired love, and you were always the quiet voice. You called to me when there was burning iron in the… the smoke… and you were the star by which my… my stave, my hunting, my friends…’ That throaty, guttural note was creeping back into Merelock’s voice like a hunting-cat slinking forwards through a thicket, but at the same time she was faltering, reaching for words as though each path of thought had run into darkness. That was wrong twice over. Merelock was the station supervisor, the order-giver, she should be the certain one. Merelock was one with her home, swift like running feet in the wild night, sure like the strike of a hunting spear or the lunge of the falcon. She should be the sure one, no indecision behind the features she wore.

  Jann was still trying to work out what that thought meant when she looked up and saw the figure watching them. It held itself in the light from the stairwell up to the living deck, and where that light fell on it it seemed to fray into crisscrossing sparks and threads. The thing moved a dancing half-step towards them and its whole skin cracked, shivered and crawled with glowing colour. For a moment the display calmed, and then it bent an elegant leg, cocked its head just so and somersaulted lazily backwards into the gloom.

  Jann stood and gasped, her mind thrumming like a plucked string but empty of thought. Her heart wanted to leap at the sight of the thing, but her bones wanted to chill. On her arm, Merelock was still sagging and murmuring, and up from the forge level came a burst of laughter and an echoing, grinding crash.

  Jann moved. She forgot about supporting Merelock along, simply dragged the other woman into a shambling half-run through the twisting, giggling shadows. Merelock stumbled at the foot of the stairs but pushed herself up with her spear and managed to keep pace. Climbing, Jann shot a look over her shoulder to see the supervisor panting hard two steps behind her, leaning forwards to run so she was bent almost double. Merelock’s cap was long gone and her braid had disintegrated, her black curls hanging in her face, and Jann jerked around to face up the stairs again, glad that she hadn’t seen Merelock’s

  (I can’t even remember her real)

  face in the brighter lights of the stairwell. None of the minds rioting in her head seemed able to predict what they’d see without the merciful blurring of the shadowy lower floors.

  The light grew brighter as they rounded the hairpin and clambered up the second flight. The glow-loop over the door to the living deck was defective, Merelock never quite having managed to bully Tokuin into making time to fix it, and so they came into the ransacked dormitory and into flickering light and weeping.

  The weeping voice was Klaide’s, and peering past the clinking and winking of the light just above her Jann could make him out. He was slumped across a twisted nest of bedclothes and curtains, torn from the sleeping-booth partitions and now choking the dormitory aisle. In the middle of it all Klaide knelt tilted against one of the stripped curtain frames with one hand cupped against his face. It was a pose of grief so classic as to look contrived, as though Klaide was the centre of one of the bright-lit tableaux that enactors performed in front of the temples on holy nights.

  At that thought Jann’s scattered thoughts seemed to interlock and move in unison. Insight was as brief as a bright moonbeam spearing down through clouds, but as powerful. She shook her arm free from Merelock and ran down the aisle, so fleetfooted she almost seemed to glide over the debris and litter, and knelt at Klaide’s feet.

  ‘Klaide? It’s me, Klaide,’ although if he had asked her who ‘me’ was she’d have struggled to answer. ‘Klaide, it’s okay. You don’t need to grieve. We’re not… like this. We’re not…’ It had seemed so clear in that brilliant moonlit moment but now she was grasping for the words. ‘We’re not who we are, Klaide. I think I understand. I’ve dreamed us as…’ and her voice choked in her throat because she
wanted to say ourselves and she wanted to say others, and both of those and neither were true.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Klaide told her, his voice a travesty: rumbling and chesty as Jann had known it in the years they had been crewmates, not the clear contralto she knew it should really be. ‘He’s gone, he’s…’ and Klaide’s body began to shudder, not with weeping now but with some more profound convulsion. He began shouting, spitting out words in a half-shriek.

  ‘Dying-dead-he’s-dead-he-will-yet-die-he-dies!’ and while Jann tried to hold the man’s hands down and murmur soft moon-songs to soothe him, still she understood. He had gone away to die. Who had? Jann couldn’t fix on a name, two separate sounds slid into and out of her mind, but she knew he was Klaide’s (champion-child-student-subject-follower), and she knew that whoever he was he had gone to die. He had gone to fight. He was already dead and they mourned. He lay dying, his wound mortal and his blood bright red as a moon whose light waxed upon his death and drenched the green and white moons and drowned their beauty.

  He was all these things, all these states, always walking out to his doom, always lying stricken, lying dead. In all these states he was timeless as the tableau they made up now: Klaide grieving, Merelock poised over them with her spear high, Jann kneeling and placating, speaking of dreams. Even as she fought back tears of grief and fear, the form the three of them made felt so right, felt like she was falling into the steps of a dance she had been singled out for while even her own mother was yet waiting to be born.

  She thought she heard a soft sigh of recognition from somewhere around them, but could see nobody but the three of them.

  She looked at Klaide again. He had wrapped himself in a green curtain-cloth, and torn the front of his tunic so that the edges now echoed the crude garlands of torn fabric Merelock had adorned herself with. He had yanked off his metal collar of rank, and the electoo that ringed his bull-like neck, the badge of a Mechanicus-ordained lay artisan, stood out in the brightness. Its hard geometry made a cruel counterpoint to the tapering lines of Klaide’s own features, elegant even in the depths of grief. It was not Klaide’s own