Episode XV - Blackfeather

            “Now what?” he asked.

            “Now you try it on.”

            Ellis glanced warily at the ring, then prodded it with a finger.  It seemed cool already.  Carefully he reached out and picked it up, then started to slip it onto his finger.

            “So, what have you roped-”

            Ellis began to turn, expecting to see the strangely comforting sight of Siren descending into the laboratory, but instead he felt a sharp, stinging sensation in his finger as the ring slid into place.  Then there was a flash of light, like something bright passing before his eyes.

            He was outside.  It was evening.  The momentary flutter of hope that he might have actually arrived back in his own world was killed off by the green tinge to the light.  It didn’t look like he was in Larksborough either.  To either side of him rose tall crumbling walls of charred stone in which every crack and dimple had been colonised by some herb, shrub or fungus.  Despite the flora growing beneath his feet, Ellis realised he was standing in the remains of some sort of street.

            “Hello,” he called out, “is there anyone around?”  His voice echoed off the walls and came back to him in a haunting ghost whisper.  “Siren.  Former Baron?  Amy?”  There was no reply.

            He wandered along the street, looking left and right into every gap he came across, but all he could see was more foliage and more ruined masonry.  The place seemed to be half Pompeii, half Amazon rainforest.

            Eventually he found a large rock sticking out of the undergrowth and he sat down.

            “Just where the hell am I?” he asked aloud and tried to ignore the whispering echo that replied, Hell, hell, hell…

            He stared down at the ring on his finger.  It looked dull again, as it had when he had first found it in the alleyway.  Carefully he slipped it off his finger and then, slowly, almost ceremonially, he replaced it.

            Nothing happened.

            “Damnit!”

            His voice echoed again, louder than before and then something rustled away through the undergrowth; a startled animal, perhaps.  Ellis didn’t want to know what kind of animals might live on this world.  The ones he had heard about so far had not sounded friendly.  Above, the sky was slowly dimming towards the night, so Ellis stood and began to move again.  He didn’t want to be caught out in the dark.

           

            As he walked through the ruined streets, passing beneath archways supported only by branches, climbing logs and having to backtrack for half an hour at one point because a whole section of the ruins proved completely impassable, he began to notice a pattern to the ruins.  Mostly they seemed like any other ancient ruin he had ever seen, either in real life or in fantasy films, but all were charred as if by some ancient fire and every now and then he would catch sight of a stone, perhaps at the edge of a wall, or maybe lying in a pile of debris where once a wall had stood, which had not been worn down all that much by time and instead looked like it had been sliced clean through, as if solid stone could just be divided like an orange.

            He wondered what could do such a thing and why, in this supposedly eternal city, there should be anywhere ruined for long enough for the plants to take over.  Then he remembered something the Former Baron had told him: There was an event a long time ago that… well it was something of a disaster, destroyed a whole section of the city, never to be rebuilt again, but in the process we broke into your world, just for a little while.  He felt a shiver run down his spine.  The power that had rendered the place a ruin forever was the same power that had brought him there.

            It was almost completely dark by the time he heard the voices.  They were loud and raucous, perhaps a little drunk, all male and completely out of place.  It sounded like the ambience of a tavern somewhere, not the middle of a ruin-filled forest.  He slowed down his pace and moved cautiously towards the noise, not wanting to be noticed until he was sure about just who it was that might be doing the noticing.  As he crept along in the shadow of a low wall, brushing through the undergrowth and trying to catch sight of some sign of the voices’ physical presence, he began to wish he still has the sword from the Former Baron’s collection.  As far as he knew Von Spektr had retrieved it from Kerring’s shop and it was back in the rack in the museum, but he would feel a lot better if it was sheathed over his shoulder once more.  It might not stop a Grinder, but he was pretty sure it would stop more than his fists ever would.

            Then he saw something, a dancing flame in the middle of what might be called a clearing and which was once probably a square and, sitting around it were a group of three men, downing the contents of their canteens and spitting into the fire.  he froze, leaned back a little and then everything seemed to go horribly wrong.  His weight shifted to the back of his heels and then something snapped, caught around his ankles and yanked him backwards through a bush and up into the air, swinging and spinning as all the blood drained down into his head.

            “Oy!” one of the voices shouted suddenly, “Oy, look, we’ve caught something!  The line’s gone taught!”

            Ellis caught a glance of them again as he spun around once more.  They were rising from their seats atop their travel packs and were turning towards him, blinking into the darkness.  They each began to pull out knives, wiping them on the fabric of their trousers and shirts before flicking them forwards.

            “What do you reckon it is?” one asked, stalking forwards slowly.

            “I’m willing to bet it’s a Tusker, a nice juicy fat one!” said the first.

            “Oh, it better be,” added the third, his saliva audibly spilling through his lips, “I don’t think I can stomach another Blood Widow.  Agh, the legs!  Just the thought’s enough to put me off eating full stop!”

            Ellis’ rotation put them out of his line of sight for a second and he wondered whether these would be the kind of men who would respond well to one of their traps being tripped by a strange young man or not.  Thinking about those knives he decided that he had better remove any possible ambiguity before it might be too late and then play the rest by ear.

            “I’m not a Tusker or a Widow or whatever!  I’m a human!”

            The rope spun him back around and it was all he could do not to yell out when he came face to face with one of them.  It was a grinning, ruddy, scarred face, the eyes of which were reflecting the gleam from his knife.  Ellis eyes bulged, but the man’s face fell at the sight of him.

            “Awh, damnit!  It’s just some kid!”

            The other two men came up behind the first and stared at Ellis with the look of the desperately disappointed.

            “How did he get here?”

            “Oh, why couldn’t it have been a Tusker?  I’m so hungry…”        

            The rope began to pull Ellis back around away from his captors, but the first man reached out his knife hand and suddenly the tension on Ellis’ ankles disappeared and he fell to the ground.

            “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt,” said the first man, with only the faintest hint of guilt.

            “So, what were you doing creeping around the edge of our camp at this hour?” said the first trapper after Ellis had taken a seat beside their fire.

            “I… I was lost.”

            “Lost?” laughed the second man, “How’d you get lost in the middle of Blackfeather?”

            “That’s quite some skill at losing yourself,” added the third, “I mean, I’ve heard of people going that far out of their way to find themselves, but…” he trailed off into drunken giggling.

            “It’s kind of a long story,” Ellis said.

            “There ain’t nothing but long stories out here, kid.”

            Ellis glanced around at the trapper’s travel packs.  They were old, worn and mostly empty.  The trappers themselves looked the worse for wear and their clothing was caked in mud.

            “So I can imagine,” he said, “what’s yours?”

            The first trapper sighed, took another swig from his canteen and then threw the empty vessel into the fire.

            “We’ll start with names before we do stories, right?”

            “Sure, I’m Ellis.”

            “Pleased to meet you.  My name’s Galen and these are my brothers, Max and Theo.  We had a lucrative business as explorers, adventurers, historians and tour guides to the more exclusive tourist set.  You may have heard of us?  The Horne Brothers?”

            Ellis shook his head.

            “See,” slurred Max, “no one cares.  No one’s looking for us.  We’re just… forgotten…”

            “Times were getting a little hard for us,” Galen admitted, eyeing his brother with contempt, “The nobility were less keen to be seen outdoors with rumours of there being another dynastic upheaval in the borough and, well, you know how it is.  We got a bit desperate for jobs.”

            “We did everything that was offered to us, even digging out old mine shafts!” Max added.

            “You could say we got shafted,” giggled Theo.

            “Anyway,” continued Galen, “we got this job about a month ago from a real fine lady-”

           

            “A proper noble type, like we’re used to,” interrupted Max.

            “-and we thought we were back on top.  Even when she said she wanted to come to Blackfeather we were all too happy to oblige.  We’d done tours like it before; rich people wanting to see some of the more dangerous parts of the city and whilst were weren’t all that familiar with this particular district, we figured it would be doable, after all, what’s here that we haven’t seen anywhere else?”

            “Only the biggest bloody colony of Stoneskins we ever saw,” answered Max a little too quickly, “not to mention that double crossing-”

            “I’m telling the story, Max,” Galen said, fulfilling the role of the stern older brother with practised efficiency.  “So, yeah, anyway, we take this lady and lead her out here to the middle of nowhere and she stops every five minutes, raking through the undergrowth and digging up the ground with this little trowel, not listening to a single word of our tour.  We repeat this for two weeks, our supplies running down the whole time and she’s still rooting around, obsessed with this thing she’s trying to find and then-”

            “Then the Stoneskins came,” Max interrupted again, his face a contorted rictus of terror, a drunken mask which Ellis assumed was meant to convey more than the words he had spoken, but which actually made the story seem more like some sort of ludicrous farce.  “In the middle of the night, it was.  They charged our camp, ate our donkey-”

            “Poor Juan Burro,” Theo muttered sadly.

            “-and chased us into the wilds!” Max finished.

            “And of course, in the middle of all this chaos, we failed to notice that the other donkey was already gone and our ‘fine lady’ was nowhere to be seen.”

            “So, you think she found what she was looking for and left you for the Stoneskins?”

            “Left us,” said Max in slurred disbelief, “no, I don’t think she bloody left us for them, I think she bloody called them in!”

            “What Max means”, clarified Galen, “is that you remember little details afterwards and you can kind of piece together a picture.  She didn’t just spend her time digging in the ground after all.  When we thought back on it we remembered her staring off into the forest sometimes, or listening to sounds we couldn’t hear and I remember seeing her wander off from the camp for a while one night while Max and Theo were asleep.  She was up to something, but it didn’t mean anything to me until after the Stoneskins attacked.  Anyway, what does it matter now?  We’re stranded out here, the food’s running low, there’s still Stoneskins out there somewhere and I don’t know the first thing about finding the way back.”

            “And now the rum’s gone!” wailed Theo.

            Ellis stared out into the darkness beyond the firelight and shuddered.  There were monsters out there and he was unarmed and utterly unprepared to face them in anyway.  All he had was a troupe of drunken explorers and their suddenly very unimpressive knives.

            “So,” Galen said, suddenly cheery, “tell us your tale!”

            Ellis sighed and then began at DUSK once more.

NEXT EPISODE

PREVIOUS EPISODE