this? You won’t have any of us left if we go much farther,” Lucian said.
Vandeborn guffawed. “Wouldn’t put it past the sick fucks to have it as their plan all along. March the lot of us into the ground, then keep the strongest for house-slaves. Men can be cruel. Just read your history. It’s the same story, over and over. All that crap about civilisation was just a phase … a spark in the shadows.”
Charlie laughed openly. He was within shooting distance of genuine humour. “Don’t you worry now. Won’t be long.”
As though to illustrate his point, he pointed to a sign that had appeared from over a hilltop ahead.
“No,” Lucian whispered.
“What?” Vandeborn said.
Lucian didn’t reply. He wasn’t sure he could even if he’d tried.
The sign was old, beaten and so weathered that the paint had been stripped away completely. But the raised lettering was still there, and Lucian read it with mounting terror:
WELCOME TO RADDEN COUNTY
Welcome home, James, he thought.
SIXTH INTERLUDE
James’s frosted breath twirled upwards in the cold night air as he saddled his mount. He took his time, moving with calculated smooth movements, lest he make a single rattle or chink of metal on metal. His head ached, fuzzy with exhaustion, but his vague stab at sleep had ended only in frustration.
That strange moorland the traveller’s hands had zapped into his head had hijacked his mind’s eye. Whenever he had dropped towards the warm miasma of sleep, the strange vision had become animated, spooling to life before his eyes like an Old World clockwork music-box. He’d flown over heathland, past cragged iron-grey peaks and the haunted remains of clusters of towns and satellite villages, hugging the rugged terrain. Each was wreathed in thick fog that slugged across the low-lying moorland, sheathed obsidian-black lakes from view, and made islands of naked rocky bluffs—they thrust through the blanket of land-cloud along the myriad ridges, as though the Earth had grown teeth.
Despite his efforts, his tossing and turning, he had been trapped with the flickering film reel behind his eyes.
He should have been thinking of Beth. He was worried for her, and a dull ache had already taken up residence in the fibrous meat of his heart.
Then there was the animal part of him that throbbed blue agony from his loins, calling out to the ruddy-faced angel who had put her hands on him and set a fire down there that would take days to die down.
One way or another, he knew she should have been the sole cause of his insomnia.
Yet still the staring images played out, etched onto the backs of his eyelids. He knew it was Radden. There was no merit in doubting it; the certainty nested inside him like a cold perfect sphere, unblemished and impenetrable.
Then there were the tunnels. They had come again after he had abandoned any hope of sleep and taken to padding the icy flagstones in his room, looking out over the moonlit wheat stalks that were growing lush and tall under their hands’ tending love.
Reaping time would come soon, and they would be kept busy for many weeks with the grinding, the bagging, the storing and the trade—trade that would see dozens of caravans trail across the vast emptiness between them and the rest of their tenuous fledgling alliance. And when that happened, they would scarcely have time for anything else, least of all the schooling Alexander had prostituted them out to deliver.
But for now, all that wheat just lay swaying in the crisp night air, and their pupils-to-be were miles away.
He thought he would find that comforting. Instead, all it did was bring yet more mental images. This time it wasn’t of the ancient weathered landscape that had birthed him, yet he had no memory of—but still could somehow see—but instead the tunnels he had flown down so briefly when the traveller’s hands had rested over his ears. He had been flying along them once again, and had come rushing up on that final room with shocking speed, and he could have sworn he was actually flying. His stomach fluttered, and the deceleration as he came rushing up upon the room’s single occupant was potent.
The young man had been there once again, his hands splayed out in welcome. “I’m waiting,” he said, just as before.
Then the visions had died, the mental images vanished, as though a thought bubble had popped somewhere in his head.
In that moment a new sensation had come: a strange impetus in his feet and lower legs, an