Chapter 23 - Present Day

Jenna wondered how long she had been asleep. The question pressed on her, and for several sleep-clogged minutes she let the train window support her forehead. Her body lay inert, trapped in mid-twist, seeking some hint of comfort from the seat. She could make no sense of the darkness beyond the glass, nor of the reflections stretching before her in meaningless abstract. Another question surfaced. Jenna felt it furrow her brow against the window's coolness. What had woken her?

The answer came in miniature epiphany, heavy with the significance of waking thoughts brought from darkness. The train had stopped.

The last tick of a clock can yank the deepest sleeper from their dreams. The silence is a shock after all the tocks and ticks that came before. The final featherweight of effort is wrung from the clock-spring, all of its windings spent. The second hand's measured beat has counted away eternity, and now it pauses. And the sleeper wakes, aching for the missing beat. So many things are not apparent until they're gone. So much beauty unseen until it breaks.

Jenna lifted her head from the glass, leaving it stained with blood. The carriage light hurt her eyes. She yawned, wide, wider, widest. The seat transmitted a tremble to her, the echo of an idling engine. A siding most probably. Jenna nodded to herself. Night trains aren't in a hurry, their sloth is well hidden, an hour or two idling on a siding isn't here or there.

Hemar lay sprawled across the table between their seat, head in his arms, whimpering at his dreams. In the facing seat Mikeos leaned back, hidden under his hat, his breathing deep and slow.

The reflection that had so baffled Jenna was her own. A little distance, a little perspective, and the understanding came. The light caught her face at a shallow angle, making a ghost to float against the velvet dark outside. Jenna saw herself frown. At Ansos the witches used the grazing dawn to reveal secrets time has buried. When the morning sun scrapes across hard and dusty ground, the lines of walls not seen for a thousand years are shown again, betrayed by shadows. Jenna saw the effect reversed upon herself. The glancing light sought out the lines of wrinkles not yet scored, a future history, Father Time's sketch of things to come.

Jenna turned, scanning the seat tops. Most other passengers were slumped too low to see. She yawned again. A peace held her. Idling. A bend in the river, quiet water before the rapids.

"Ma'am?"

The conductor startled her, appearing in the aisle, or perhaps there all along and unseen until this point. Jenna looked around, fully awake now. Mikeos should have sprung up when she startled. Some gunslinger! She kicked his shins under the table but he only muttered.

"What've you done to him?" Jenna demanded.

"The passengers are just sleeping. When the train stops along the way, the passengers sleep." The conductor didn't shrug but Jenna could almost hear it in his voice.

"But not me?"

"I brought the first man here, Jenna Crossard. Issac 'Sykes' Bannon came here on this train, and when he died my sister returned him to life. But you humans are a mystery and your deaths no less so. When she brought Sykes back my sister fracture all your deaths – an accident she appears unable to fix. Now some of you can't die, and corpsers walk.

I brought Sykes Bannon along the first track to Station Rock. The rock was a piece of something I once loved. All that remains of it. And my brother and sister are also all that remains of something I once loved. We were many long ago, then fewer, then few, and now three. It's our destiny to be singular, the destiny of any race that passes its childhood, to combine its strengths and overcome its divisions."

"Why am I awake? To hear this? The gods need to share their secrets with the pieces on their gaming board all of a sudden?"

"Everyone needs to share, Jenna. Hemar knows it. Young Mikeos knows it, though not how. And even you know it, Jenna."

"So share."

"Our destiny is singular, but for the longest time, for a geologic age, we have stuck at three. Myself, Lilliana, and the Stranger. The One of the Domen, the One of the Taur, the One of the Hunska. Those are just labels from myth of course, but they illustrate our problem. We are deadlocked. I thought to go back into many and find a new path, new paths, but all of them return to the same point. I thought to look outward, to find new intelligences, new ways of thinking, and I brought both men and sect here from their distant homes. But still we are divided, my brother has taken the sect to himself, my sister has taken men's cause.

This conflict between men and sect, it mirrors – or perhaps guides – a deeper conflict between my siblings. When it is resolved, one way or another, our trinity will be broken. My brother sees our future as subsumed into his being, and my sister holds similar views but with herself as the template. Myself, I try to balance the equations and hope that some of each of us survives into our final incarnation."

"You're the puppet master, pulling gently on the strings? Smiling as the puppets dance?"

"Exactly."

"And you think you're pulling mine, even as you're telling me that you're doing it?"

"Yes."

"And you think I'll let—"

"Wake up."

"What?"

"Wake up, Jenna."

"Whu?"

"We're here!"

And Jenna opened her eyes to admit the morning. "Hell." She unglued her dry lips and pulled away from the window, her wound sticking to the glass.

"Hell's about right," Mikeos said.

Out beyond the glass the dusty landscape rolled off toward an unevenness of hills. Here and there the odd lump and bump broke the natural contours, hinting at a ruined building or two. Pacing alongside the motionless train, just short of window level, a single sect-warrior, not the bulk and heavy cutting blades of a death-scarab nor the quick multitude of flickers, but a mantis warrior, long-limbed and slim, green armoured, its face a nightmare of mandibles and shearing plates, its extremities all hooked to draw in prey.

"It's hella ugly." An old man whose two remaining teeth faced each other at the front of his gums. About half the passengers watched in fascination, trusting in the windows to keep them safe, the remainder pulled back, some crowding the aisle, not wanting to see.

"Ah seen un like him. Back in the Oh-Teens." Another old timer, this one in a suit shiny with age, a leather sample case clutched across his midriff. "Mostly though I seen the bugs. They's the soldiers. This un's an officer." That turned a few heads. Not many men had seen sect and very few of those were still in a state to tell you about it.

Mikeos leaned over his chair to the man. "So we're heading out there, without guns. Got any advice?"

"Don't."

"Have to." Mikeos pushed up his hat.

"Well ya ain't gonna need a coffin, 'slinger." The old man cackled at his own joke. "They don't leave but bones, and those cracked. Best advice is to run."

"We can out distance him?" Mikeos looked doubtful.

"No." The man shook his head, the wrinkled flaps of his neck flapping too. "But there'll be a whole passel more coming. The train'll have riled them up. If that un out there don't eat you all up – well, the survivors won't want to be standing here in ten minutes!"

Mikeos pulled the knife from his belt, eight inches of steel, shipped in on a freight train from who knew where, like most stuff. "Best be getting on with it then."

The old man caught Mikeos' wrist in his bony claw. "That won't help ya." He raised Mikeos' hand, displaying the blade, a general purpose hunting knife, good for skinning and gutting, serrations on the rear for sawing. "Sect ain't made o' meat. You do better taking a crowbar to one." He nodded at a pack stuffed in the overheads opposite, a dull gleam from the forked tines of a crowbar emerging from the top.

Mikeos sheathed his knife and set a hand to the crowbar. "May I?" He looked around the carriage. A man at the rear, heavy-set and black bearded, raised his hand. "Go to it. Best of luck." No one laughed, each face strained. The sect unmanned people, put a crawling fear in them, and even the kind of fellows who hoot and call around a knife fight had no appetite for watching a sect butcher a man.

Mikeos pulled the crowbar free and made for the door the sect had just passed.

"Wait." Jenna caught his shoulder. "Hemar and I'll slip out a door on the other side. The sect might not even notice us leave." The hexes she'd learned seemed distant now, patterns on old paper, exercises repeated in an empty room. How they would serve her against a living, breathing, sect warrior she didn't truly know and had no great desire to find out.

Mikeos shrugged her off. "We've got hundreds of miles to cover. We're going to meet sect. If I can't kill one on its own then we might as well find out now."

She watched him go. It's one thing to declare yourself ready to die for a cause, to say it in the safety of Ansos tower, to state lofty ideals about freedom and self-determination. It's another to stand in the wilds with nothing but window glass and a door between you and a sect warrior and watch someone you care for open that door. Jenna bit her lip, hard enough to taste the blood. Her dream returned to her, pulling at her like puppet strings.

I don't care for him. And if I die here it's for me, not for a cause. It's because I won't let them own me. Not now not ever.

"Hemar," Mikeos said. "Turn the handle so the door's not latched. Do it slow. Don't open it. Jenna. When the sect gets level with this line." He ran a wet finger down the window. "Say 'now'. Say it, don't shout it." Mikeos sat before the carriage door then lay back, out of sight from the outside, both knees raised above his hips, the crowbar clutched two-handed across his chest. He watched her.

Jenna nodded and Mikeos turned his gaze to the door. She tracked the sect, losing it as it passed the final window of the carriage and moved on to stalk alongside the next. It would be back. She glanced around at the gathered faces, pale, worried, the kin impassive, eyes agleam. She knew, or thought she knew, why Hemar would leave the carriage, even though terror had hooked his tail between his legs. Hemar had a domen bond with Eben, formed young when he was packless. He had unfinished business with Lostchild, and no love for life, only a fear of dying. Mikeos, though? Perhaps just a lifetime of pitting himself against live-or-die moments? Surely not for a few minutes that Eben Lostchild might have spent with his father forty years ago, both of them children? Or perhaps to somehow pursue revenge on, this Purbright, or Bright, the man who killed his father? It didn't seem enough.

The sect returned, passing the last window of the carriage. As it went it scraped one of its hooks across the metal, the sound like nails on a chalkboard, but it was the way the thing peered at each passenger that really put Jenna's teeth on edge. "Be ready," she said. The mantis moved with a smooth unhurried gait, the sun finding dozens of facets on each eye. Closer. Closer. Closer. "Now!"

And that's how existence is. Time runs out on you, rushes up, like a train approaching, one that no barricade can hold, and from one moment to the next you're in a whole different world.

Mikeos hammered both legs straight, heels striking the door. The handle whipped out of Hemar's grip and the door slammed open, directly into the sect's face. With a shrugging motion, helped by a hand set to a chair strut, Mikeos slithered feet first out through the open doorway, and slipped to the ground fast as falling would take him. The trailing crowbar he brought round in a sharp and vicious arc, smashing the reversed joint of the sect's knee. The crunch came loud and agonising. Jenna reached the doorway in time to see Mikeos launch to his feet, swinging at the hooked appendage thrust his way. The blow shattered hard chitin armour and ichor followed in the crowbar's rising trajectory.

The sect advanced on Mikeos, half-hopping, almost falling with each step, reaching with both arms, one shattered, one whole, slime of some kind falling from the eye the door broke. Mikeos retreated before it, dancing away, swinging at the longer arm. The sect proved fast despite its injuries, almost tearing the crowbar from the 'slinger's grip, but then he caught that limb too, a shattering blow that left it hanging. After that it became savagery, applauded by those who'd been too scared to watch the sect prowl minutes earlier. Mikeos beat the creature down, methodically breaking each limb, pounding on the segmented torso until the thick armour there gave way and cracked open spilling white tubes and quivering jelly. Even now the wreckage of the sect tried to rise again beneath the rain of blows, falling back only when Mikeos pulverised its head.

The fight ended ten yards from where it started and Mikeos walked back a touch unsteady, heaving in his breath, flicking away fragments of chitin adhering to his shirt and pants. "Better go." He had ichor splattered across his cheek. "Old fella said there'll be more coming."

Not since first trying to enter Ansos had Jenna had such a battle to pass through a doorway. The alien stink of the sect filled the air promising horror and seeming to eat its way into her. In the end it was only when Hemar slunk out, whimpering his fear, that she found the courage to follow. Decision made, she stepped down into the dust. Immediately she regretted it. The train door closed behind her with coffin-lid finality. In the carriage the train had kept the sect-mind at bay just as the pillars did. Outside, the pervading aura of impersonal malice enfolded her, worse than the sect stink, a new kind of despair that seemed to bleed from the air itself.

Station Rock lay just two yards in front of the gleaming engine, a piece of something vast, curved on some sides, broken on others.Jenna had seen it in the vision Lilliana showed her – young Issac Bannon stolen from a distant world, brought across some distance unimaginable to face the sect. Hemar had sheltered here too. Mikeos's father had climbed it to escape the flickers. If there were a centre to the world it was not Ansos pillar, it lay here, pinned by a fragment of some older existence.

"C'mon!" Mikeos led the way, jogging along the track, away from Station Rock, away from the train.

Hurrying behind him, robes flapping, Jenna couldn't imagine that they wouldn't be spotted straight away. "We should make for cover!" Jenna caught the gunslinger up and pointed toward the line of brush a hundred yards to their left. It looked thick, further in there were even hints of greenery. "We're too exposed on the track."

Hemar drew level. "That's the Sweet Water. Bushes follow its course for more than a mile after the stream gets swallowed."

"It'll hide us!" Jenna said.

"Be lousy with flickers." Hemar mimed his hand as a flicker tearing his face off. "Any wet place is thick with 'em in sect country."

"We gotta get to the junction." Mikeos picked up the pace.

"We can find the track anytime – we can't miss it. Right now we need to lose ourselves." Jenna stopped running. The other two stopped as well, canteens sloshing. She hadn't been sure they would stop. "The train will be coming back along here any minute. The sect will follow it!"

Hemar furrowed his brow. "We should head for the ruins. Then cut north to meet the line where it crosses east. The train will carry on north at the junction, back for the next pillar on its schedule. The east line will take us to Eben."

The idea that Eben might not still be where Hemar left him forty years ago didn't seem to figure in the dogman's thinking. Jenna could see nothing to be gained by seeding doubt in him. Instead she set off at right-angles away from the track, away from the green line of the Sweet Water on the other side of it. Hemar soon overtook her and corrected the course. "We'll see the ruins soon enough. Take us a day to reach them though."

Hemar led them into the dustland, zigging and zagging along any ridge of rock that made even slight advances in the direction he needed. "Stop!" After a mile Jenna had to call for a rest stop. Her canteen seemed heavier by the moment and even all the steps of Ansos hadn't build her leg strength enough to keep pace with a dogman, even a broken down drunk. "Can't we go straight?" She pointed to the smudge of darkness on the horizon that must be the ruins.

Hemar stopped without complaint, panting over his long pink tongue. "Sect have better eyes than domen, and can follow a scent better than a hunska. Hard rock won't remember us or send up a dust trail. That's worth the delay."

Jenna scanned their surroundings, inch-thick dust over hardpan in the main, a few stands of thorn bushes, creosote, mesquite, eye-spine, and innumerable fractured ridges of rock, some breaking the ground by inches, others as tall as a man and edging long gentle slopes that gave way to sudden tumbles on the far side. The dust raised by their passage hung behind them, a faint accusation settling slowly. "They'll find us." She couldn't imagine otherwise. Another mantis warrior with a dozen bugs behind him. More maybe. And it would be over before it had started. All this foolishness done with.

"Sect have worse eyes than a hunska, and can't follow a scent as well as a dogman," Mikeos grinned. "We've got a chance." He reached out and tapped her hex wound, too quick to stop. A pulse of pain ran through her, sharpening away the despair. "Can't let the sect mind get to you," he said. "Half their victims just lie down and wait to get eaten."

"How—" Jenna bit back the question. How could Mikeos shrug off the hopelessness that the sect mind had wrapped them in? She knew the answer. He'd spent more than half his life under the sights of a gun, knowing that at any moment a bullet could wing out of the dark and end him, or the challenger before him could put him down if they had hands even a touch faster than his own. If a gunslinger wasn't world-class at seeing the upside then hopelessness would have dragged them down long ago.

"The sect don't like the ruins anyhow." Hemar drunk from his canteen, grimacing as if hoping for something stronger. "The ruins are like the pillars but not so powerful. More like the tracks. Corpsers don't like 'em, sect hate 'em, but both can go there if they really have to." He knelt and scooped up some rock fragments. "Here's the main ruins." He set down the biggest chunk. "And these are lesser ruins." He set down ten smaller fragments in a constellation around the biggest, naming each in turn, The Small Stones, The Table, and so on. "We can go here, here, then here. Use them as stepping-stones. It'll discourage any sect that do manage to trail us."

"The ones that trail us we'll see coming. It's the ones that just happen to be in our path that we want to watch for most. It's the trouble that waits for you to blunder into it – that's the worst kind." Mikeos balanced his crowbar over one shoulder. "Ready?"

Jenna wasn't ready. "Yes," she said, and stood up.

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[My book The Liar's Key is in the semi finals of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fantasy 2015.

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