The journey to the city had not been especially rambunctious or as thigh-slapping as an adventure of a different hue might have been – the city’s reputation had done a lot to undermine that sort of ebullience. The journey back, however, had been envisaged as a far more joyful event; they would not, after all, be dead, and that’s always nice. So pre-eminent had the possibility of a total massacre with no survivors been in their minds, however, that none had ever considered a result midway between annihilation and complete success. One man dead and another dying had never been seen as possibilities.
On the first evening of the return trek, it became apparent that the hand that had torn Holk’s leg away had carried some contamination from the blood of the wamps it had slaughtered previously. Holk’s skin became drawn and wrinkled like wet paper, and beneath the yellowing surface, small bumps moved freely like protozoa upon a microscope’s slide. It seemed that Holk had survived one wamp-induced parasitic infestation in his life only to succumb to another. Thirsh and Osic spoke together in hushed tones, then came to Cabal as he watched Holk’s symptoms progress. ‘Is there anything you can do for the sergeant?’ asked Thirsh.
‘No,’ said Cabal.
Thirsh and Osic exchanged glances, and Thirsh said, ‘No, Master Cabal. We know he cannot be saved. We mean to ask, is there anything you can do . . .’
‘His suffering,’ said Osic. ‘The sergeant does not deserve to suffer.’
‘What we mean to say is, is there anything you can do?’
For a moment Cabal thought they were asking him to resurrect Holk after his inevitable death, and his raised eyebrow communicated this.
‘No!’ said Thirsh. ‘No, that would be wrong. Please, Master, that is not what we are trying to say.’
But Cabal had already moved past that misapprehension, and now understood their intent. ‘You don’t want him to suffer. Yes, I understand.’ He knew they were soldiers, and had likely killed in cold blood as well as in battle before. This, however, was different. ‘Start gathering wood. We shall have to cremate him immediately afterwards to prevent the contamination spreading or a new wamp forming.’
They left quickly, taking the members of the Fear Institute with them, the latter’s confused objections being quickly silenced with barely cloaked threats. Cabal watched them go, then went to sit by Holk. He was deteriorating rapidly, his skin starting to become baggy and threatening to slough in places, his breathing thick and ragged as his lungs slowly flooded. The worst of it was that he could not slip into sleep, but remained conscious and lucid as his body turned into a swamp around him. His eyes, filmed and yellowish, looked up at Cabal as he sat and took in the extent and variety of symptoms. With difficulty, Holk gathered enough breath to speak.
‘I did not want to die this way,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper that bubbled up from his chest.
Cabal shook his head. ‘No.’
There was silence for some minutes but for the crackling of the campfire. Then Holk said, ‘Make it quick, Master Cabal.’
When the others arrived back, carrying wood, Cabal was already sewing Holk into his bedroll. ‘Better it were done quickly,’ he said, as they stood over him. His eyes were not cold, but they were empty, and when he looked up, at least one of them wondered if they had left all the monsters behind them.
‘But,’ said Thirsh, both horrified and relieved, ‘you said . . . a wamp . . . you said . . .’
‘I took a leaf from Ercusides’ book,’ said Cabal, calmly. Covered by the sheet, none could see the thin stake Cabal had fashioned from a fallen branch, then driven through Holk’s eye and into his brain once he had breathed his last breath. There would be no wamp cracking its way out of Holk’s skull.
They made a pyre and placed Holk upon it. As he burned and the wamp filth in his veins boiled and died, Cabal threw the block of sinew wood he had been carrying on his saddle pack into the flames, and they watched it twist and flex as the fire took it too. It would have been about large enough to carve a wooden leg from, but that happenstance was now gone for ever. When the fire finally burned low, Cabal gathered up Gesso’s helmet, unfastened the chain lattice running across its mouth, and let the dreff free. They watched it run up the hillside towards the treeline. Two thirds of the way there, a white eagle with lines of black and gold upon its wings stooped down from the cloudy sky and took the dreff cleanly, flying away with the unmoving animal in its claws. If it was an omen, it was an uncertain one.
Their arrival in Baharna was unheralded. They rode in during the morning of a market day, overtaken by farmers, traders and lava gatherers, and the little troupe of dusty travellers sitting silently on their zebra mounts drew little attention, or even that two unridden zebras followed the column, led by their tied-off reins.
Their passage through the eastern gate was untroubled: the guard who dealt with them had been on duty the day they left and already knew where they had been. He eyed the trailing zebras, but said nothing.
Once within the city, Shadrach concluded their dealings with Osic and Thirsh. Holk had no family, but Gesso had a wife and a young daughter. Shadrach refused to be taken to see them, but gave the zebras to Thirsh, with a fistful of gold, and told him to see Gesso’s family all right. As the mercenaries walked away, Corde moved alongside Shadrach and said, ‘How do we know they were telling the truth? Gesso never spoke of a family – we only heard of them after he was dead. How do we know they haven’t just taken you for a fool?’
Shadrach just looked at Corde with something like loathing in his face. ‘We don’t know,’ he said in disgust, and turned away, abandoning a dialogue before it had even started.
Cabal had noticed that Shadrach had seemed to be ageing rapidly ever since the battle in the nameless city on the banks of the Lake of Yath. His hair was greying at the temples, the lines of his face deepening, and now he walked with a stoop. It seemed that the Dreamlands were not the only thing that could be physically influenced by the psyches of dreamers.
In contrast, Corde was developing a distinctly lean and hungry look. Whereas earlier he had only been play-acting the role of a latter-day Caesar, now his profile was becoming more patrician, his eyes hooded and predatory, and his armour seemed far less of an affectation than it once had. There was something thoroughly rapacious about the way he watched Osic and Thirsh carry on down the Great Market thoroughfare, the string of zebras behind them. It was the expression of a man denied his spoils and already scheming to regain them. Cabal did not care for it at all, and put part of his intellect to the task of devising ways to dispose elegantly of Corde should he prove troublesome.
Having placed an abeyant death sentence on Corde’s head, he turned his attention to Bose, who, for his part, looked vapid and without a shred of malice or machinatory instinct about him, a soft toy in the great department store of life. In short, just the same as he always did. He seemed to bimble around the Dreamlands like somebody at a museum exhibit of how frightful foreigners are. He would look, and gasp, and be appalled, then go home, have a boiled egg for tea and be utterly untouched by what he had seen in any lasting sense.
Inevitably, Cabal wondered if he, too, was changing in appearance. If the mechanism was one of altered perceptions, then it was unlikely; he was as sure as he could reasonably be that he was of the same mind and worldview as he had been the day that the Fear Institute had first come to call. It’s difficult to be objective about the subjective, but Cabal maintained assorted mental checks and balances to confirm that he was reasonably sure his mentality remained recognisable, and that he had not gone inconveniently mad. As Descartes would have been quick to tell him, his perceptions could not necessarily be trusted, but – then again – if he was so mad that he didn’t realise he was utterly mad, it was academic anyway. He would have failed in his life, and that was that. He could just get on with learning to enjoy institutional food and the sure knowledge that electricity makes your eyes go black.