The Ironclad Prophecy (28 page)

“Lieutenant?”

“Yes, nurse?”

“I hear you were bitten a lot last night, I was wondering if you’d just let me look and make sure that you’re all right?”

He waved her away. “There’s no need.”

“Mr Mathers, it’s my job. It’ll only take ’alf a mo’. An’ if it’s serious, then maybe I’ve got something that’ll help, and if not, I’m sure Napoo could whip up one of his poultices.”

“This isn’t necessary.”

She reached up to lift his chainmail curtain and he slapped her hand away.

“I said it isn’t necessary. I’m perfectly fine.”

“Mr Mathers,” she said with wounded dignity. “I’ll be the judge of that. Now let me help you.”

Mathers turned to go, but Nellie, surprised by her own audacity, caught hold of the chainmail curtain in his mask and ripped it upwards and back, knocking off his toughened leather turtle helmet in the process. It clattered to the ground as he wheeled round and turned on the small FANY, who now held his mask in her hand.

She gasped as she saw his face. It wasn’t the usual impetigo and rashes from petrol fumes that she normally saw on tank crews. Large raised red plaques covered his skin and there were swellings at his throat, but his eyes – his eyes were completely black, upon which a shifting rainbow film swirled continually, like petrol on water.

He turned those eyes upon her now. “How dare you!” he snarled, before crumpling with a groan and clutching his stomach.

“Are you all right?” asked Nellie, putting her hand on his shoulder and noticing the growth at the base of his skull. “Let me help you.”

Mathers forced himself upright. “You’ve done enough. The fuel fumes help me all I need. They stop it spreading.” He snatched back his mask from Nellie’s hand and, stooping to pick up his fallen helmet, he stormed off to the tank.

“Wait, stops what spreading? Stops what, Lieutenant?”

The chunter of the tank’s engine filled the clearing, drowning out the possibility of any further conversation as Clegg ran the engine up.

“Did you see?” said Nellie, still shocked.

“Yes. Yes, I did,” said Atkins, thoughtfully.

“But his eyes!”

“The petrol fruit.”

“Alfie doesn’t have that, none of them have.”

Atkins shook his head. “No, they haven’t been drinking the stuff. Mathers has.”

“He has some kind of infection, too. Those plaques on his face and the swellings on his neck, I’ve never seen anything like them.”

Atkins hadn’t either, but then this world was full of particularly unpleasant surprises. “I think he’s drinking the petrol fruit to relieve the pain of it, but it makes him see things. Believe me, I know. I think he’s mad, Miss Abbott, but he has a great influence over his men. They’re fiercely loyal. If we move against him, they’ll do everything they can to protect him, which will get us nowhere, and we need that tank. Lieutenant Everson needs that tank.”

Napoo had a different opinion on Mathers and had no qualms about telling the rest of the section. “Someone has cursed him, and he has been possessed by an evil spirit. Who might have the power to do such a thing?”

“Jeffries,” exclaimed Chalky. “Jeffries could do it, couldn’t he, Only?”

Mercy clipped him round the back of his head. “Prat!” Some people just saw Jeffries everywhere.

Jeffries had sprung to Atkins’ mind, too, but he dismissed the idea. Despite all the claims and the stories, his own encounter with Jeffries suggested that he was nothing more than a man. “Can you help him?”

Napoo shook his head sadly. “Those possessed by dulgur are cast out of the clan for fear of the harm or bad fortune they bring. I do not understand why the Tohmii keep theirs around.”

Atkins frowned. It took him a moment to realise that he was talking about the shell-shocked. No wonder the urmen gave the Bird Cage a wide berth.

“So,” said Atkins, none the wiser. “Mathers is either possessed, or mad.”

“Well, that’s nothing new, he’s an officer,” said Mercy.

1 S
ECTION MOVED
out behind the tank as it rolled forwards, crushing a path through the undergrowth as they set off in the direction in which the smoke creatures had dragged the Zohtakarrii. The chatts had been hauled through the jungle at speed, even without the thin oily residue that coated the trees and undergrowth, the trail of snapped branches, gouged ground, and occasional chatt limb wasn’t hard to follow.

Atkins dropped back and matched his stride with that of Chandar’s. The chatt was silent, fidgeting with the tassels of its shoulder cloth, watching the tank closely as if still debating with itself on the matter of its divinity.

“You say the Tohmii came from the Sky Web?” it asked, unexpectedly.

“From the stars, yes.”

Chandar hissed and chittered to itself and came to a decision. “Among the Khungarrii Shura there is a secret olfaction of Ones who believe, as this One does, that urmen have a greater part to play in our Osmology. Sirigar holds the old-established view; that urmen, casteless and queenless as they are, were put here by GarSuleth merely to service the needs of the Ones as they see fit. Sirigar’s interpretation of the prophecy, that the Tohmii are the Great Corruption, is flawed and self-serving. That One seeks to unite wavering olfactions of the Shura behind it and consolidate its position with the defeat of the Great Corruption – the Tohmii.”

“So there are some chatts that believe we are not this ‘Great Corruption’ then? That’s heartening to know,” Atkins said sardonically.

“It is an ancient prophecy, its interpretation an old debate, going back generations. The arrival of the Tohmii is but the latest. This One, however, believes the prophecy refers not to an external threat but rather an internal one; the warping and narrowing of our own beliefs to serve a baser purpose.”

“Sirigar.”

The chatt concentrated as it gulped down air to speak. “Yes. The only way to challenge that One is through the Supplication of Scents before the Shura. If our argument proves persuasive only the Queen can issue the necessary chemical decree, acknowledging our interpretation as the correct one, to be accepted by all.” Chandar paused for another breath and bowed its head. “Our only hopes of distilling the essence of our argument lay in the Aromatic Archives of the Fragrant Libraries destroyed by Jeffries. There, too, were held the records of one of the Divine Disciplines, the recreation of the Celestial Scent, an attempt to understand its totality by alchemically capturing the Sacred Odour of GarSuleth itself. There are those, like this One, who believe that some note of the urman scent is inherent to this endeavour. Both of these sacred undertakings were dashed by Jeffries’ sacrilege and the Tohmii’s actions. We are diminished because of it.”

“That wasn’t our fault,” said Atkins. “We simply wanted our people back.”

“Nevertheless, the atrocity was committed,” said Chandar.

Atkins was shocked. Was it really all their fault? Had they brought all this on themselves? “Why are you telling me this?”

“Your act of Kurda, saving this One, was unforeseen, unprecedented. It has cast a new anchor line into the world, a silver thread of possibilities. A web of potential not yet woven. This One would know what may be spun from it.”

“You’re talking in riddles.”

“To you, maybe, but to this One these are signs, portents. Upon these rest the fate of your herd, make no mistake.”

It was almost too much for Atkins. Internal divisions within the Khungarrii, one of which might be sympathetic to the Pennines, now powerless because of the Pennines’ own actions. In one of his blacker moods, he could almost believe that God was having some cruel capricious joke at his expense. All he’d tried to do was the right thing. Almost fearing to broach the subject, he pressed on. “You said some things, yesterday. Was that smoke creature Croatoan?”

“This One does not know.”

Atkins felt himself beginning to lose his temper. “Look, chatt, I’m leading my men into God knows what here. If you have any information about what we’re heading into, then tell me. You once said that we had some sort of connection.”

“Kurda,”

“Right. Kurda, because I saved your life. Now it’s your turn. Save mine. What’s going on here? What is it you’re not telling me?”

Chandar fell silent, but glanced occasionally at Atkins as they walked. Perhaps, Atkins thought, the chatt was struggling with its conscience, if it had one. God help them if it didn’t.

T
HEY HAD BEEN
walking for about half an hour when Chalky stopped to relieve himself by the trackside. He screamed and stepped back, still voiding his bladder. Losing his footing, he turned round to maintain his balance, flinging out an arc of yellow drops as he went.

Mercy stepped back to avoid the spray. “Hey look out, Chalky. Bleeding hell, ladies present.”

“Ruddy hell, lad! Did Shiner coming a cropper teach you nothing?” bawled Gutsy.

“There!” Chalky cried, trying to tuck himself away. “There!”

“All right, lad. Leave this to us,” said Mercy, stepping past him as he, Gazette and Pot Shot approached the side of the tank’s path.

Pot Shot looked down into the scrub and found he was peering into the piss-filled eye socket of a skull staring up at him through the reddish bracken.

Living on the Somme had hardened most of them to such sights. You couldn’t walk ten yards without coming across a body in some state of decomposition. One trench they held had a Frenchie’s arm sticking out of the trench wall. Their old sergeant, Jessop, used to hang his equipment from it.

Atkins hollered forward for Gutsy to stop the tank.

It jolted to a halt, its engine idling, splutters of black smoke coughing from the exhaust on the roof. The port sponson door opened and one of the crew, Frank, poked his sweaty face out. “What’s the bloody hold up?”

“Bodies,” Atkins snapped back. “Urmen.”

They used entrenching tools to pull away at the tangle of bracken to expose what was left of several skeletons after the scavengers of this world had done their work. Red lichen partially covered the bones. Whatever clothing they might have once worn had completely disintegrated. There was no way of telling how they died, but this planet had a hundred and one different ways to kill you, none of them pleasant.

Mercy’s clearance also uncovered the remains of some kind of wagon. There wasn’t enough wood left to tell much more. It was rotten and crumbled at the touch.

These were no recent deaths. The bones had lain here for years, decades, maybe even longer.

Nellie shook her head sadly. “Poor people.”

Intrigued, Chandar came over to look, its stunted claw-like mid-limbs fidgeting as it clasped its hands together. “This One never thought to witness such a sight. At Khungarr, all this One had were the artefacts scentirrii patrols brought back. To see them like this is marvellous.”

Looking at the remains, Atkins thought of the old urman woman’s prediction concerning his own mortality. He shuddered. All of a sudden, he felt very vulnerable to the capricious whims of this planet.

They dug a small pit and buried what they could find of the bones, the sight of which unsettled Prof, already withdrawn since Nobby’s death, even further. Nevertheless, he managed to say a prayer over them before they moved on.

T
HE TANK LURCHED
to a halt. Before them, looming out of the thinning jungle, Atkins recognised a familiar structure: a chatt edifice, or rather what was left of one. It was an overgrown and crumbling ruin, swathed in vegetation, like an old dowager decked out in the family jewels. Vines overhung the main entrance into the edifice. The top half of the structure had collapsed long ago, and creeping foliage smothered the rubble and debris strewn about the clearing. The tide of alien nature, no longer kept at bay, had flooded in to reclaim the area once more.

The Section wandered cautiously towards the once great structure. Even in its heyday, it would not have been as big as Khungarr. Nevertheless, these places were feats of engineering on a par with medieval cathedrals. They stood over many generations of constant habitation, each generation repairing and expanding the ancestral edifice to house the growing colony. What catastrophic event could have overtaken this place to leave it abandoned and in ruins? Atkins couldn’t speculate.

“I have never seen such a sight,” said Napoo. The spectacle of the edifice, a symbol of the urman’s oppressors’ might and skill, lying shattered and dashed to the ground, must have been a profound sight; an intimation of his oppressor’s mortality, of their fallibility.

Pot Shot stood beside him and nodded, seeing in it the symbols of his own political beliefs. “And so shall tumble the ivory towers of all tyrants,” he muttered.

There was an abrupt silence as the tank engine cut out. The silence immediately struck Atkins. The trees and the undergrowth were still and quiet. There were calls and whoops, but only far off, in the distance, as if even the jungle creatures avoided this place.

Gazette sized up the ruined edifice. “Well, if I were a man-eating evil spirit, that’s where I’d set up shop, all right.”