The vodsel took a couple of shambling steps forward to greet their arrival. It lifted one of its arms and again pointed towards Tain, straining to erect a blueish thumb on its swollen paw. At close range they could see it was nearly dead with cold, swaying on pulpy feet in a vegetative trance of determination.
Still, the sight of a vehicle slowing to a stop brought a glimmer of sentience back to its eyes. Its mouth twitched, too stiff with cold and overfeeding to smile, but still the thought was there.
Esswis reached over to the back seats, groping for the shotgun, which had slipped onto the floor. The vodsel stumbled painfully to the car.
‘Forget the shotgun,’ said Isserley, and she twisted around, opening one of the back doors.
The vodsel bowed its head, heaved its body into the car, and collapsed in exhaustion across the seats. Isserley, grunting with effort, pulled the door shut with one hooked finger.
‘Four,’ she said.
Back at the steading, Esswis barely had time to speak his name into the intercom before the aluminium door rolled open. Four men jostled in the widening gap, their snouts straining out anxiously, their legs pawing the concrete.
‘Did you get them? Did you get them?’ they cried.
‘Yes, yes,’ growled Esswis exhaustedly, and motioned to the Land-rover.
The men piled out into the bright air, breathing a locomotive row of steam on their way to help with the cargo. Esswis and Isserley didn’t go with them, but remained standing in the doorway, as if to block the view of any trespassers who might stray by. There was, after all, a foreign cargo ship nestled inside the building. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be mistaken for a tractor.
Isserley watched the men wrench open a side door of the Land-rover, and saw the swollen, bloody legs of the last vodsel flop out like a pair of giant salmon. She looked away. The barn walls were brilliant white in the sun, making the yellow tungsten light inside look dim and sickly.
Suddenly Esswis slumped slightly where he stood, as if something had come loose inside his shoulders, and he leaned against the steading wall, his hairy hand trembling under the skull-and-crossbones sign.
‘I’m going home,’ he sighed.
Isserley couldn’t tell, from his hunched back, how far-reaching a statement this was supposed to be. But evidently Esswis meant his farmhouse, and he shambled off towards it.
‘What about your vehicle?’ Isserley called after him.
‘I’ll come and fetch it later,’ he groaned without turning.
‘I’ll drive it to your place, if you like,’ she offered.
Still walking, still not turning, he raised one arm and let it drop wearily. Isserley couldn’t tell if this was a gesture of thanks or discouragement.
A shocked expletive in her native language came from near the Land-rover: the men had found the messier specimens jammed into the back. Isserley wasn’t interested in their qualms; she and Esswis had done their best to retrieve the animals in one piece – what did they expect?
To spare herself the men’s complaints, and to avoid offering to help them carry the carcasses in, she slipped inside the steading to search out the true cause of all the trouble: Amlis Vess.
The barn’s echoing ground level was empty of movable things, apart from the great black oblong of the transport ship parked directly under the roof hatch. Even the token farm equipment that was usually littered about in case of government inspection had been removed for unimpeded loading. At this time of the month – all things being well – the men would already be busy packing the goods into the ship, but Isserley could smell that nothing had been done today.
In one corner of the barn stood a massive steel drum, seven feet tall and at least five in diameter, embossed with a rusted and faded image of a cow and a sheep. A brass tap beckoned out of its side; Isserley twisted the handle and the drum opened up for her, a concealed seam parting smoothly like a vertical eyelid.
She stepped inside, the metal enclosed her, and she was on her way underground.
The lift opened its door automatically when it reached the shallowest level, the workers’ kitchen and recreation hall. Low-ceilinged and harshly lit like a motorway service station, it was a utilitarian eyesore that always, always smelled of fried potatoes, unwashed men, and mussanta paste.
Nobody was there, so Isserley let herself be taken down further. She hoped Amlis Vess wasn’t hiding in the deepest levels, where the killing and processing was done; she had never been there and didn’t wish to see it now. It was no place for a claustrophobic.
The lift stopped again, this time at the men’s living quarters – the most likely place (now that she thought about it) for Amlis Vess to be. Isserley had only once visited here, when she’d first arrived at Ablach Farm. She’d never found a reason to revisit its musty warren of clammy maleness: it reminded her of the Estates. She had a reason now, though. As the door parted its metal veils, Isserley braced herself for an angry confrontation.
The first thing she saw was Amlis Vess himself, standing startlingly close to the lift. She hadn’t expected him to be so close; it was as if he was about to step inside with her. But he kept perfectly still. In fact, everything seemed to keep perfectly stilclass="underline" time appeared to have stopped, without a qualm, for Isserley to take Amlis in, her mouth open to spit abuse. Her mouth stayed open.
He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
Unsettlingly familiar in the way that famous people are, he was also utterly strange, as if she had never seen him before; the half-remembered images from the media had conveyed nothing of his attraction.
Like all of Isserley’s race (except Isserley and Esswis, of course) he stood naked on all fours, his limbs exactly equal in length, all of them equally nimble. He also had a prehensile tail, which, if he needed his front hands free, he could use as another limb to balance on, tripod-style. His breast tapered seamlessly into a long neck, on which his head was positioned like a trophy. It came to three points: his long spearhead ears and his vulpine snout. His large eyes were perfectly round, positioned on the front of his face, which was covered in soft fur, like the rest of his body.
In all these things he was a normal, standard-issue human being, no different from the workman standing behind him, watching him nervously.
But he was different.
He was almost freakishly tall, for one thing. His head was at the level of her breast; were he to be surgically made vertical, as she had been, he would tower over her. Wealth and privilege must have excused him from the typically stunted growth of Estate males like the one who was guarding him now; he was like a giant, but slender with it, not massive or lumpish. His colouring was unusually varied (gossips sometimes suggested it wasn’t natural): dark brown on his back, shoulders and flanks, pure black on his face and legs, pure white on his breast. The fur was impossibly lustrous, too, especially on his chest, where it was thicker, almost straggly. In musculature he was lean, with just enough bulk to carry his large frame; his shoulder-blades were startlingly prominent under their satiny layer of fur. But it was his face that was most remarkable: of the males Isserley worked with, there was not one who didn’t have coarse hair, bald patches, discolorations and unsightly scarring on the face. Amlis Vess had a soft down of flawless black from the tips of his ears to the curve of his throat, as if lovingly tooled in black suede by an idealistic craftsman. Deeply set in this perfection of blackness, his tawny eyes shone like illuminated amber. He breathed, preparing to speak.