He looked at the sky-being.
He stood up and circled the great iron rock from which he’d appeared. Never had anyone in his clan had a sign like this, though many had sought it. This was his omen, given to him, but he had no idea what it meant. Ranaman would know.
He hoisted the sky-being over his shoulders and began his triumphal return to his enclave, not as a boy but as a man. As a warrior…
“TARAK IS TO be envied,” announced Ranaman proudly as the young man finished his tale. “But his fortune is the clan’s fortune. Your arrival when the Torment of Croatoan is nigh, when the earth erupts with his pain, is a great omen!”
“And if the boy’s vision proves false?” Alfie’s voice quavered, looking at Tarak.
“Then he will be cast out as punishment for bringing a Dulgur, an evil spirit, amongst us. He will die and his spirit will not join the ancestors in the Village of the Dead. His body will be left to ward off other Dulgur.”
Tarak looked alarmed and glanced at Alfie for confirmation that he had done the right thing.
God damn it. He couldn’t risk harm to the lad who’d saved him.
Very well, he would play his part. As much as it stuck in his craw, he would have to play the game for which he’d held Mathers in such contempt. He needed to buy time. He had to stay alive until the crew of the Ivanhoe could find him. He couldn’t be sure that they would look, but he had faith in Nellie.
“The man Tarak has acted truly,” intoned Alfie, cringing inside as he spoke.
Ranaman nodded in approval. He bowed before Alfie. “The one who was sent before has gone to prepare the way.”
“The one who was sent before?” asked Alfie, confused.
“He, too was garbed as you are.”
Alfie looked down at his khaki uniform. Another soldier? There was only one man he knew who had been as far as this. Jeffries. If the rumours were true, the man could beat Mathers at his own game.
“Where is he, this other one?”
Ranaman looked at him blankly, as if Alfie should have known. “He communed with the ancestors and joined them in the underworld.”
Jeffries was dead?
“Soon you must do the same to make possible Croatoan’s return. The ritual must not fail.”
A chill froze halfway down Alfie’s spine. Dear God. He’d always known Mather’s deception had been a fool’s game, and now it was going to kill him.
He was going to be a human sacrifice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PADRE BLINKED and looked up. They were alive. Around him, the gathered scentirrii stepped back and parted.
“I thought they were going to kill us,” said Edith in a low tremulous voice, checking her hands and face for acid burns.
Trembling with fear and relief, the Padre turned to Chandar for an explanation.
It spread its vestigial middle limbs. “They cannot hurt you,” it said. “They have received this One’s blessing. They have merely scented you. If you are not scented, you will be killed. Now you will smell Khungarrii. You will be safe.”
The precaution proved well founded. As they journeyed, they met more scentirrii patrols and parties of worker chatts in the forest. They noted their approach with a cautious waving of antennae, and then ignored them.
Ahead, dominating the large managed clearing, was the mound-like Khungarrii edifice, rising hundreds of feet from the cinnamon earth, like a cathedral tower. The last time the Padre had seen the edifice, a large section had been destroyed by Jeffries, blowing up a stolen dump of grenades, mortars and other weapons. It had since been repaired and once again stood pristine and whole above the forest. Unadorned and functional, the structure bore no ornate inscriptions or decorations, no carvings, but was speckled with a thousand points of light as the sunlight caught flecks of mica bound into the dirt walls.
Scattered around the perimeter of the edifice were the peculiar funerary mounds of large clay balls, each sphere containing the body of a dead chatt, waiting to be rolled into the underworld by Skarra, the dung-beetle god of the dead. There were a good many of them – no doubt due in part, the Padre realised, to the actions of the Pennines.
Ahead of them, columns of worker chatts, djamirrii, and Khungarrii urmen, carrying the day’s harvest in baskets or on litters, streamed into the edifice through great open bark doors some fifty or sixty feet in height, bound into the edifice itself by root-like hinges and framed by great earthen buttresses.
The Padre noticed that the shantytowns that had once clung to the midden heaps against the edifice had been swept away. The free urmen who had dwelt there under sufferance, scraping a subsistence from the scrap heaps of Khungarrii society, were gone; the first victims of the reprisals after the Pennines’ attack to rescue the Padre and some twenty-odd Fusiliers and the three nurses captured by a scentirrii raiding party.
He felt Edith’s small hand slip into his, giving reassurance and seeking comfort in equal measure. His hand closed about hers and together they walked toward the cavernous entrance of the edifice.
INSIDE, THE GREAT cathedral-like entrance hall bustled with activity. Chatt workers and djamirrii assessed and sorted the continual influx of the day’s harvest; battlepillars berthed against earthen jetties to be unloaded. The place seemed half port, half market.
Edith could remember arriving at Calais on the boat from Dover to scenes such as these. She had been a very different woman back then. The sharp formic smell of the place, of the chatts, made her want to flee. She had to force herself to walk on.
The scentirrii led them up inclined passages lit by niches of bioluminescent lichen to the higher reaches of the edifice, to the network of sacred chamberswhere the dhuyumirrii conducted their ritualised business.
The scentirrii left them by a circular portal, a door grown from a tough fibrous living plant. Chandar breathed a mist at it, and the plant matter recoiled from it, dilating open. Rhengar ushered them through into an ancillary chamber. They had barely arrived when the circular door shrivelled open again. Two scentirrii stepped through, followed by a tall, regal dhuyumirrii wearing a similar over-the-shoulder arrangement of many-tasselled silken cloth to the one that Chandar wore, with the addition of a light, finely spun cloak. They had both seen this creature before.
“This One is Sirigar, Liya-Dhuyumirrii, High Anointed One of the Khungarrii Shura,” it said, surveying the chamber. It had chosen to speak in English, something it was not wont to do. It was making a point.
Chandar bent its legs, sinking into the chatt submissive posture.
Sirigar looked down on it. “So you have returned, Chandar?”
“This One went to observe the battle at the direction of the Shura and was captured. This you know,” said Chandar.
“And they let you go?”
“They wish to bargain.”
“The time for bargaining is long past,” said Sirigar. “And these creatures?” it said, indicating the Padre and Nurse Bell. “What are they doing here? This One could smell their stench the moment they entered Khungarr. Your fascination for them is unbecoming, Chandar, maybe even heretical.”