The Abyss Beyond Dreams

  Slvasta didn’t trust himself to answer; it was difficult enough to keep his shell solid. He’d never known regiments were used to keep order, let alone trained for it. But then the Meor was always regarded as an elite regiment, directed by the National Council. And . . . guns? Fired at civilians?

  ‘You can take me out for a drink tomorrow evening,’ Arnice said cheerfully as he left. ‘I haven’t seen you properly for ages. I want to know all about her – whoever she is. This girl you’re spending all your time with and ignoring your best friend in the city: your loyal friend, your drinking friend, the friend who showed you round right from the start, your friend who managed to get you laid a lot, the one friend who—’

  Slvasta smiled sheepishly. ‘Bethaneve. Her name is Bethaneve.’

  ‘Lovely. And I’ve got some news, too. Tomorrow.’ A final wave, and he scurried out.

  *

  The mob was over a thousand strong as it finally spilt out of Bromwell Park. Shared ex-sights allowed the whole city to watch as they started to make their way along Walton Boulevard. Jeering and chanting, they launched half-hearted teekay attacks at statues of historical dignitaries. The surprisingly large number of the protestors encouraged more hesitant people to join and make their opinion known to the arseholes in charge. A steady stream of fresh supporters swarmed in, bolstering the scale and determination of those leading the push up Walton Boulevard. Government buildings along the road were now locked and sealed. Teekay punches from the sneering crowd slammed into the windows. Blizzards of shattered glass began to rain down onto the broad pavements.

  Troopers of the Meor regiment filed across Walton Boulevard, forming a resolute barrier, five deep, blocking the approach to the palace. The first rank carried long batons, as did the second. The third rank was made up of strong teekays, well practised in cooperative techniques, shielding their comrades. The fourth and fifth ranks were armed. Sheriffs and marshals scurried onto the road behind them, bringing jail wagons. Officers used strong ’path shouts to order the mob to disperse.

  The two sides faced each other for several minutes, with the mob flinging taunts and the occasional teekay-boosted lump of stone. Then a clump of protestors broke off and started running down Cantural Street, shouting, ‘There’s the regiment offices, they’re all in there.’ More hate-inflamed protesters were pouring out of alleys and side roads – those who were genuinely aggrieved by the disaster and blamed the regiment for not stopping it, and others who simply fancied giving the sheriffs and troopers a good kicking, revenge for a life lived at the bottom end of society.

  ‘Oh, Uracus,’ Slvasta grunted as it became clear that their target was the Joint Regimental Council offices.

  ‘What do we do?’ a terrified Keturah asked as she ran out of his office.

  ‘Stay in here,’ he barked at her. ‘Lock the doors and don’t let anyone in that you don’t know.’

  Officers were running out into the main corridor, the majors trying to shout orders. The chaos was ridiculous.

  ‘We have to coordinate our teekay to defend the building,’ Slvasta said.

  Nobody paid him any attention. Cursing, he ran for the stairs. The building’s big front doors were shut and bolted, but the broad windows would be easy points of entry once the glass and shutters had been smashed down. They had to be reinforced. ‘Come on,’ he ’pathed to some of the junior officers he knew. They acknowledged his intent and started to follow him. Outside, the shouting was getting louder.

  Four squads of Meor troopers came up the narrow stone stairs from the deployment bunker in the basement of the Joint Regimental Council offices. Arnice led them out through a small door at the side of the building. They came round the corner to confront the mob swelling across Cantural Street.

  *

  ‘This has been declared a restricted area,’ Arnice announced, ’pathing as strongly as he could. ‘Disperse and return to your homes.’

  The squads lined up in single file all along the front of the long stone office building. They were spaced wider than he would have liked, but then they were a reserve force. The main body of the Meor was still guarding Walton Boulevard.

  ‘Get some wagons here,’ Arnice ’pathed the local sheriff’s station. ‘We need to make arrests, show these bastards they don’t have free rein.’ He stood at the top of the stone steps, his back to the office block’s sturdy double doors, obviously trying not to let any concern filter out through his shell. Behind him, the teekay of the officers inside the building insinuated its way into the doors, strengthening the wood. On either side, more teekay was weaving into the shutters and glass of the windows.

  ‘We’re sealing it up,’ Slvasta’s ’path assured him.

  Bolstered by the support, Arnice bellowed: ‘Go home!’ at the mob. ‘This is your final warning. I have been authorized by the police councillor herself to use force.’

  That was greeted with a chorus of booing and obscenities. Stones began to fly through the air, accelerated and guided by teekay. Several were aimed at him. His own teekay batted them away. Just.

  ‘Stand by to fire warning shots,’ Arnice told his squads.

  He was appalled to see women in the frenzied crowd, and even some children. All of them animated with hatred, letting loose vile ’path images of the Captain and First Officer.

  Someone with disturbingly strong teekay wrenched the glass oil reservoir from a lamp post, sending it arching towards the office. It ignited at the top of its trajectory and smashed against the stone wall just above the front door. Flames cascaded down. Arnice ducked, flinging his teekay around himself for protection.

  The mob yelled its approval. More reservoirs were snatched from lamp posts.

  ‘Aim high,’ Arnice instructed. ‘Fire!’

  *

  Her name was Haranne. She was twelve years old, and jumping up and down amid the crowd in Cantural Street, enthusiastically chanting the new and wonderfully rude song about rich boys loving an egg up their bottom. She was there with her father and older brother, Lonnie, caught up in the excitement and drama of an extraordinary day. She stopped singing as the first flaming oil bottles went flying overhead. Pointing and going: ‘Look, look, Dad.’

  The bottles from the lamp posts smashed against the front of the big office building, and bright flame went ripping across the stone wall. That drained the smile and joy away from her face. The sheet of flame was scary, with long streamers pouring down close to the regiment soldiers standing along the base of the wall. She was worried one of them might get burnt.

  But they were all raising their guns in one hand. A volley of terrifically loud shots crashed out. Haranne ducked instinctively, hardening her shell around her at the same time as her dad snatched her and held her tight as he crouched down.

  ‘Go home!’ a strong ’path voice commanded.

  She recognized the regiment captain again; he’d been telling them to leave as soon as he emerged. People in the crowd around her groaned and shouted in antagonism. An astonishing sensation of anger washed against her mind. There were more shots.

  ‘This way,’ Dad ordered. They started to run, hunched down.

  ‘Together now,’ a calm ’path voice commanded. And she could sense teekay slithering through the air, many strands combining into a tight bundle like some invisible giant’s arm. It lashed out at the regiment captain, knocking him sideways. Blood poured out of his broken nose and torn cheeks. Then one of the glass yalseed oil bottles smashed on the ground beside him; flame burst out.

  Haranne cowered away from the brutality, retracting her ex-sense. ‘Daddieee!’

  More shots rang out. They seemed closer, different somehow. Then the soldiers were shooting again, and they weren’t aiming up into the air any more. Her father pulled her along frantically. ‘Bastards, bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Out of the way, I’ve got childr—’

  An incredible force smashed into Haranne’s side, actually lifting her off the ground for a moment before she crumpled onto the granite cobbles of
the road. ‘Dad?’ She was completely numb, staring up into the warm sapphire sky, somehow removed from all the frantic activity churning around her. The angry voices and ’path shouts were becoming muffled. ‘Dad?’

  His face slid across the sky. And the way he looked down at her was frightening.

  *

  Shock and dread hit Tasjorka as he stared down at his daughter’s wound. Blood was running from the appalling hole the bullet had torn in the side of her ribs, and her gorgeous eyes were dazed with confusion and trust as she tried to grab him.

  ‘Haranne!’ Adrenalin and terror gave his voice and ’path shout a power far beyond normal. Everyone within two hundred metres winced as the image of Haranne burst into their consciousness. A pretty girl with dark hair and rich olive skin, lying awkwardly on the cobbles, her dirty old green dress soaked with blood. More blood starting to glisten on the cobbles beneath her, spreading out. Eyes filled with uncomprehending tears. Breath coming in jerks as shock set in.

  ‘Help me!’ he commanded. ‘Help!’

  The conflict along Cantural Street faltered.

  ‘Stop the bleeding.’

  ‘Put pressure on the wound.’

  ‘I’m a nurse, let me through.’

  ‘Help her breathe.’

  ‘You have to stop that bleeding – here—’ Tumbling memory images of how to apply teekay to human flesh.

  Too many people crowding round. A hundred different haunting images of the shot girl rippled out across the city, the gifting passed from shocked mind to shocked mind.

  ‘A girl. They shot a little girl!’

  ‘I’m a doctor, damn you!’

  Tasjorka, along with two others, was trying to staunch the flow of blood with their teekay. He was crying, his mind too frenzied to direct teekay accurately.

  ‘Let me through!’

  ‘Please.’

  A circle of tough angry men had formed a guard around tragic Haranne. They parted with snarls as a young regiment officer pushed through. He was carrying a fat satchel with a red cross on the side. He fell to his knees beside the girl.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ he said. His teekay reached out, and flowed over the wound. Pinching and squeezing in clever little pulses. His ’path voice spoke quietly and calmly to Haranne. She managed a brave smile. He opened the satchel and dressings rose out of it like a slow-motion explosion, hovering in the air. He began applying them to the wound. The nurse arrived and helped tie them properly. A phial of amanarnik was broken under Haranne’s nose, and she sighed as the narcotic hit. Her eyes closed.

  *

  Along with most of the city, Slvasta watched through other eyes as Haranne’s travails were gifted openly. How the mob parted for her, using combined teekay as a protective umbrella from the stones and firebombs arching overhead. How the Meor regiment blocking Walton Boulevard opened their ranks so she could be carried through to the Captain’s Free Hospital on Wallace Road. How the hospital staff clustered round and transferred her onto an iron gurney. He clenched his teeth, his thoughts riding in tandem with Tasjorka’s anguish as the surgical team elbowed everyone away from his precious daughter, now desperately pale, her breaths coming in short gasps. A father’s fright as needles were slipped into arteries, and foreign fluids started to seep along veins.

  Then the hospital’s senior doctor hurried in, snapping instructions, and the entire building fuzzed, giving Haranne her rightful privacy.

  Every Varlan resident not involved with the riot waited anxiously for news on Haranne’s progress. They endured three fraught hours while the battle of Walton Boulevard raged with escalating violence. There were dozens of further injuries and even two deaths, but it was little Haranne’s plight that had captured everyone’s heart.

  Finally, Tasjorka emerged through the fuzz around the Captain’s Free Hospital, and announced in a shaky ’path that Haranne was out of the operating theatre, and the doctors were confident she would recover. He thanked everyone for their help and support. ‘And please, no more violence. No one should suffer as she has.’ With that, he turned round and walked back into the hospital.

  The clashes reduced after that, flaring sporadically throughout the afternoon before people finally drifted away as the sun sank below the horizon.

  *

  Slvasta stayed on at the office that night, helping to clean up and secure the building. The deployment bunker was now serving as a triage post for regiment troopers who’d been injured, which was most of them.

  Oil lamps hanging from the bunker’s brick arch ceiling cast a pale yellow light and filled the air with fumes. Slvasta ignored the groaning as he walked along the line of cots, trying not to flinch at the troopers with bloody bandages. Arnice was lying motionless on the cot at the end, his head swaddled, leaving only narrow slits for his eyes and mouth. The white linen was stained crimson in several places. Slvasta’s ex-sight probed below the bandages, revealing the disturbing extent of burnt, ruined skin, the missing part of his lips. A drip bottle hung above the cot, a rubber tube snaking down to his arm, where an intravenous needle had been taped in.

  ‘I was wondering where you were skiving,’ Slvasta said, keeping the tone just right, the joshing bluster – nothing wrong here, no allusion to the disfigurement and thick scars Arnice would be left with even if the surgeons did a good job.

  Arnice didn’t reply. His shell was tight, allowing no emotion to show.

  ‘The girl’s all right,’ Slvasta said. ‘Haranne. The Free Hospital staff are sending out general ’path reports every hour, reassuring people. It’s helping, I think.’

  Arnice stiffened, his muscles tensing up. ‘We didn’t do that,’ he ’pathed. ‘My squads are good men; they wouldn’t shoot into the crowd. Not a girl. A child.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s what everyone’s saying. I can hear them, the whole city felt her, they saw her through her father’s eyes. They knew a father’s pain. And they blame us. Me. They hate me for giving the order.’

  ‘You didn’t give that order. We all know that; your last order was to fire into the air.’

  ‘And who’s going to remember that?’

  ‘There’ll be an inquiry. There’s got to be one. You were struck by the mob’s teekay well before the shot was fired; I’ll stand in the witness box myself and swear it. Everyone will know you’re completely innocent.’

  ‘Officially. That’s what it’ll be: officially vindicated. And we saw today what everyone thinks about official, didn’t we?’

  Slvasta gripped Arnice’s hand. ‘We know the truth. That’s what matters. I know. Your friends know. You know.’

  ‘Slvasta, you’re a good friend. Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to thank friends. Ah, here are the ambulance wagon fellows. Can you walk?’

  ‘I’m not sure. These damn drugs. I hate them. But there’s not much pain now, thank Giu.’

  ‘Would you like me to come with you? Or shall I go get Jaix?’

  ‘No!’ Arnice lifted himself from the cot, and created a thick fuzz around himself to deflect any ex-sight. ‘No Jaix. She can’t see me, not like this. Please, Slvasta, promise me, you won’t let her see me.’

  ‘Yes. All right, I promise. I have to say, I think you’re underestimating her, though. She’s a lovely girl; she’s not going to be turned away by a few scars.’

  Arnice clenched his fist and started hitting it on the side of the cot. ‘Scars? Scars? You moron, I have no face left! I’m going to be a freak. I’m going to be a fucking freak! I can’t live like that. I can’t.’ His voice rose to a frantic shout. ‘What is there now? I shot a girl! I shot her!’

  Slvasta tried to grab his fist as it pounded the cot. ‘You didn’t! You didn’t shoot anyone. Nurse!’

  ‘She’s dead!’ Arnice cried. ‘I’m dead! I can’t live like this. I’m a monster. A monster without a face!’

  ‘Nurse!’ Slvasta bellowed.

  The doctor came running down the aisle.

  ‘They hate us. Eve
rybody hates us! Kill them. Kill them all. I’ve Fallen, Slvasta, I’ve Fallen! Kill me. Somebody, please!’

  Arnice started to thrash about. Slvasta had to use his teekay to pin him down on the cot as the doctor fiddled with the mechanism on the bottom of the drip bottle. It took a few moments, then Arnice subsided. Slvasta looked on in anguish as his friend began to sob.

  ‘Slvasta. Don’t leave me! Don’t . . .’ Arnice sank back, unconscious.

  The doctor patted Slvasta on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. It’s the drugs talking. I’ve seen it a hundred times. He won’t even remember in the morning.’

  ‘Of course. Thank you, doctor.’

  ‘They’re taking him to the Hewlitt Hospital now. I know some of the surgeons there, good chaps. They’ll fix up what we can of his face. Damn savages, doing that to him.’

  ‘Yes, quite.’

  *

  Slvasta watched Arnice’s unconscious body loaded onto the canvas-covered ambulance wagon. The driver was an ordinary cabby, volunteering to help out. ‘Don’t you worry, gov, I’ll get the major there okay,’ he assured Slvasta. ‘I haven’t lost one today.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Slvasta hadn’t realized his shell was so flimsy that it was allowing his worry to show.

  Keturah hurried across the rear courtyard. ‘Captain?’

  ‘Why are you still here?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘Because you are,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Giu, Keturah, you should have gone home hours ago. I’ll get a trooper to escort you.’

  ‘That’s very kind, sir. But there’s someone here to see you. Says she’s a friend. She was very insistent. The building guards are holding her in the main entrance.’

  Slvasta sent his ex-sight out into the building’s main entrance hallway. It was Bethaneve sitting on the bench between two suspicious and tired guards.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Slvasta told the guards as he walked across the marble floor to her. ‘I know her. Well done for being vigilant. Dismissed.’