The city was going to fall. Anyone with any sense knew that. The die-hard optimists and denialists who had refused to evacuate had now abandoned their homes and havens and were jamming up the streets and roads leading westward way from the onslaught of invaders. Yesterday they were die-hard optimists, today they were likely to just die hard. The stark grey stone that made up most of the city’s architecture was now dyed red by the unnaturally crimson sky, the city itself bloodied by the assault. The screams of the terrified, the wounded, the desperate almost drowned out the unholy screeching of the invaders as they advanced inexorably from the direction of the dawn that had not come.
It had been called Vanguard, this city on the edge of civilisation. The name now seemed a hollow boast. First-to-Fall it would be better named. Hopeless. Abandoned. Cut-Off. Not names chosen by some vainglorious imperial official but more true than the name carved over the great stone gateways in the walls that separated the inner city from the outer. The walls protected the nobility of the city from having to see and mingle with the common folk. From the invaders they offered only the illusion of protection and everyone knew it.
Not quite everyone actually. In a chamber in the heart of the Imperial Ministry of Prosperity an old man who should have been wiser glared down at a map of the city on the table before him, and at the flickering pawns of coloured light, red and blue and white, that cluttered its surface. At each corner of the table a small thurible was fixed, acrid incense smoke rising from them for only a few inches before fading away to nothing.
Opposite the old man, two other people stood waiting anxiously. They wore the silver-grey uniforms of the Imperial Ministry and expressions of terrified passivity, awaiting the next declaration of doom. The old man, bald-headed and with a neatly trimmed squared off beard of white hair took his time, considering. He extended one finger toward an area of the map where the blue and red pawns pressed against each other.
“Send a strix to General Bolevin,” he said, “instruct him to fortify the Wintergate and defend it at all costs. We can then use the Lady Marina’s Boulevard to advance upon the central district and take the invaders in their flank.”
The two listeners knew better than to question their superior, and on any normal day in any normal situation the thought of doing so would have sent each of them into a cold-sweating panic. Today though was not a normal day and they could both hear the distant endless shrieking as a relentless undertone to everything else. One of them swallowed hard and spoke up, voice cracked in her dry throat.
“Minister. Minister, forgive me. General Bolevin’s forces are here, at the Sonne Plaza. They are pinned down and cannot reinforce the Wintergate. And if they could, they are too few.” She fell quiet under the sudden angry glare of her superior and lowered her head. What she said was true, and clearly displayed there on the living map of the city. The red pawns outnumbered the blue and pressed in at all angles. The entirety of the eastern ward of the outer city was theirs and they spread like blood on cloth toward the inner city.
“The General has been foolish to be so encircled,” the Minister said with cold emphasis, as though this rebuke would change the truth. “Very well. Order him to withdraw along these routes here, here and here. Form a defensive line at the river’s edge and hold the enemy there until we can reform our reserve.” His finger drew out the three routes he had decided upon, but before he could withdraw it the seeping red stain of enemy pawns filled each of the roads, racing inward. The blue cluster in Sonne Plaza shrank visibly as one by one the tiny pawns winked out of existence. The two aides saw it too, and saw the slow inward curl of the minister’s index finger as though it was the sniffing nose of a pet dog shrinking back from some unpleasant smell. They looked at each other, these two aides, and knew everything was lost. When Sonne Plaza fell, and it would surely fall, the many encroaching lines of enemy approach would meet and press more firmly inward and the ministry district itself was directly in their path. The aide who had remained silent remained so no longer. He was a young man, clean-shaven and now wild-eyed, who had shown great promise in his examinations and the first few years of his career, but he was utterly unprepared for this.
“We should have left a week ago, we knew this was coming. It’s your fault, yours!” He backed away from the minister, shaking his head and gesturing wildly around. “You stay here and die. I won’t. You can’t make me!” He turned at that and ran to leave the room, pulling open one of the great double doors whose size and grand decorations now seemed nothing more than a testament to hubris, like a molded crown on a tombstone. His colleague gritted her teeth. She’d felt the same instinct but had, she hoped, more self control.
The minister’s glare followed the fleeing bureaucrat until he had slipped through the half-open door. Then he sighed and turned to his only remaining aide.
“What do you think, Parial?” he said, his voice cold and angry, “Do you think this is a lost cause? That we are a lost cause?”
Parial looked down at the map, which had changed for the worse in the short time their attention had been diverted. General Bolevin would never receive another strix message, unless strixes somehow managed to find a way into the afterworld.
“I think we have no chance of victory, and almost no chance of survival,” she said in tones as calm as she could make them. “If any of our troops are to have any hope of life it is only by a full and complete retreat.”
They both looked at the map and knew that was a futile thought. The white pawns of the civilians jammed up the entire western half of the map. If the troops were ordered to retreat they had no way to do so. And even if they had, the civilians would be slaughtered. Lost cause, the minister had said, and he had been right, for the first time in weeks. The minister did not reply. He closed each of the thuribles in turn shutting off the smoke, starving the coals of air to burn their precious incense. The ruddy glow of many red pawns, and the other dim lights, faded away to nothing leaving only the outline of Vanguard as pristine and unblemished as it had ever been, giving the lie to what they both knew was happening beyond the walls.
“Send for the captain of the ministry guard,” the minister said. “He will escort me to the Draklyn Storm. I will bear our final report to the Imperial Court.”
The screeching of the invaders was everywhere and it was almost deafening. A high pitched assault on the senses that made the hearer feel like they were being scraped over rough stone and broken glass. It made the head pound and the teeth ache and it drove terror into the souls of the unprepared.
Karol Perdov prided himself on rarely being unprepared and he was coping with the auditory onslaught albeit with an ill grace. He hadn’t considered joining the rest of the populace in the streets, realising immediately that the city’s roads and avenues would soon simply be different paths through the slaughterhouse. Grabbing his sword and a few other basics he’d decided to head upwards. In the poorer regions of Vanguard the buildings were so close together in the interest of maximising the amount of profitable property in the space available that a careful planner with a modicum of ingenuity and nerve could make their way for some distance before they’d have to descend. He kicked open the shutters of the window on the highest floor of the boarding house he’d been lodging in and looked out. Down below there was a pushing shoving tide of panicked people. Here and there among them he saw the royal-blue tunic and gleaming helm of one of the Imperial Guard. They were as lost as the others, flotsam on a futile tide, poor bastards. Clambering out through the window he perched with surprising grace for a man of his muscular build on the narrow ledge and looked upward. The wall was rough stone, and the edge of the roof was only a few feet above him. It should prove no problem under normal circumstances. What then? He would trust himself to figure that out once he was on the rooftop, and he shifted his balance, stretched, and felt for a handhold and then began, trusting his weight to the rough stonework and the grip of his fingers. He reached the lintel of the roof easily enough and pulled himself over, crouching down on the gently sloping slate and looking around.
Things did not, he decided, look good. The sky was a bloody ruin of deep red and there was no sign of the sun though it should certainly have been high in the eastern sky by now. He saw the dark winged beasts of the enemy rising and swooping over the city, descending with triumphant screeches below the rooftops before rising again clutching and rending at talon-grabbed victims before letting them fall again out of sight as little more than bloodied bundles of rags and flesh. The ground-borne enemies he could not see from here but they were there, he knew, in vast numbers and drawing closer.
This was hopeless, he knew. He’d seen enough conflict in his life to have an instinct for such things, and in an instant he knew that Vanguard was done for. The people down there may as well be dead already. The Imperial Guard would do their best, but they were like well armed and highly trained men standing on the shoreline with spears nicely polished, demanding that the tide stop approaching in the name of the Imperial Crown and all the high and mighty gods. The tide cared not at all, and nor did this enemy. The sane and sensible thing to do, Karol knew, was to go as fast as he could and as far as he could away from here.
“What bullshit,” he muttered to himself, not even sure in his own mind if he meant the situation or the solution. Why not be sane and sensible for a change? What did the Empire mean to him? Or Vanguard? Or anybody here. The owner of the boarding house had treated him like dirt and called him a vagabond and a sell-sword. The class-conscious Imperial citizens, even the lowliest of them, knew an outcast when they saw one and knew exactly where people like Karol fitted on the social pyramid, and that was somewhere beneath the foundations. He owed them nothing.
“What bullshit,” he said again. Turning westward and keeping low he ran along the rooftop as surefooted as an unobserved cat, holding his sword and scabbard in his left hand, ready for action just in case.
“Dad, please, what’s going on? Dad!” The boy’s voice was high and terrified, and he clung to his father’s thick-coarse jacket with both hands. His father didn’t turn from his task to comfort him. Comfort would be no use if they were dead.
“Quiet,” the man grunted, saving his breath for his work. The air was foul and choking down in the underways, but that was better, far better, than the clean air of the dying city above. The damned gate-lock had rusted itself shut and all his strength on the prybar seemed to be eaten up by the mocking immovability of the iron barred obstacle. The boy fell quiet, too scared to question or disobey, not scared of the father that he loved, but scared of a world turned upside down. He looked back anxiously at the brick tunnel behind them, curved ceiling and narrow raised walkways on either side of the trickling river of unspeakable sludge and effluent. There was little light down here except for the flickering pale glow of his father’s rock-lantern, now standing by his father’s feet on the raised pathway. Here and there though behind them there was an unpleasant reddish pallor in the darkness filtering down from drainage grates high above. There was red in the river of filth too the boy saw. More horrible things than filth had been running down the drains and grates of Vanguard today. He clutched his father’s coat more tightly, sure he had heard a thump thump thump of movement somewhere behind them.
“Dad,” he said again, and “Dad!” a little louder.
“Quiet,” the man said once more. He was focussed on his task, now slamming the edge of the prybar against the rusted metal, chipping a little away with each strike. It was loud when he did, and echoed a little. The boy stole a glance around his father’s burly form and saw the metal being revealed blow by blow from beneath the dull brown crust. He would be quiet. He would be brave. He was nearly ten years old and he was terrified but he would be brave.
The prybar clanged again and his father swore, a quiet grunt of a bad word, as the bar struck but slipped past its target and he grazed his hand.
“Dad, where’s Mum?” the boy said, his father’s speaking giving him permission to answer.
The strong man froze, and if his son could have seen his face he would not have recognised the expression there. What should children know of such things? The honest man lied.
“We’ll meet her soon,” Perhaps it was not a lie, but the man with the prybar prayed that it would not be very soon. Not for his son anyway. Ignoring the pain across his knuckles, ignoring the blood welling up through the grazed skin, he jabbed the prybar again and again at the rusted metal.
Both father and son heard the horrible screeching in the same moment, behind them, bouncing hungrily off the brick walls of the tunnel. The father said the bad word again and struck harder and harder at the gate.
“Once it’s open, you go first and run and run,” he snapped out the words, punctuating them as a staccato declaration timed with the clangs of the metal. “I’ll catch you up, but run, run and run. Do you remember where to go?”
The boy nodded desperately, tears in his eyes despite his inner declaration to be as brave as a ten year old though he was only nine.
“Tell me again,” the father said. There was a gap. There was a gap. He jammed in the prybar and pushed for all he was worth. “Again!”
The boy glanced back down the tunnel and then at his father’s efforts, then down the tunnel again. “Straight on as far as it goes. Then right fork. Then up. Dad you said there’s another gate there.”
“It’s fine, it’ll be fine. Better kept I’m sure. Open straight away. It will be safe there. They won’t be able to get in there.” The gate flew open suddenly and knocked the rock-lamp over. It rolled across the raised pathway and half over the edge. The boy crouched and reached for it, his foot stumbled forward and he slipped himself and fell. His father caught him, a strong grip from a bloodied hand, painful on his shoulder and yanked him back to a sure footing, but the lamp fell. It was dark now except for dim puddles of awful red light on brickwork and filthy water. The screeching was closer.
“Go on,” the father urged, pushing the boy through the gate, run like I said.”
“What about-”
The man pushed his boy further and stepping through the opening himself he pulled the gate closed. There was no way to lock it, he knew. The honest man lied.
“I’ll be following. Go.” The screeching grew louder and eager, and the boy clung to his father, his arms around his waist, sobbing now in ten-year-old terror. It was too dark to see tears though and the man was glad of it. “I’ll follow.” He pried the boy’s arms from him, and shoved him. “Run! Stay quiet! Run!”
And the boy was a good boy and he turned and he ran and the screeching rose behind him as his feet pounded on the brick pathway and he did not hear the clang of a fallen prybar as he ran and ran and ran.
The captain of the Ministry guard had heard Parial’s urgent instructions on behalf of the minister. Despite the growing panic and disorder around her, the captain was professional to the core. She’d summoned a five-strong unit of guards and drove the fear out of their actions by sheer commanding personality. The captain and the hand of guards formed up around the minister and Parial and abandoned the Ministry of Prosperity building for the open streets. The captain and her guards were all veteran soldiers in the service of the Empire but this was beyond their experience. They kept it together though beneath the ruined sky and moved as they had been trained through the wide avenues of the inner city, from cover to cover, wary and watchful and professional to the very core. It had not saved them. A trio of terrified civilians, uselessly wealthy and pointlessly privileged fled toward them, ignored by the haughty statuary still dauntless and magnificent that lined the way. Behind the three, catching up with them impossibly quickly, were the abominations that had swarmed the city of Vanguard. Parial had never seen them before, few if any had. They were man-like in their form but in little else. Their limbs were long and jointed wrongly, their heads flatter and wider. They were armoured darkly, but whether their armour was natural to them or something they wore Parial could not tell. Where the red light of the ruined sky hit it there were glimmers of iridescent blues and greens. They slew the trio of fleeing meats with blades then raced onward toward Parial and the others. Parial had grabbed the minister and pulled him after her as she fled, the guards falling, the captain falling behind her with the sounds of slicing and hacking drowned by the exultant screeches of the monsters. He was old and ungainly, the minister, but fear gave Parial strength and she did not look back until the two of them fell exhausted and helpless at the foot of a monument to the benefactor of the small raised plaza they had reached. Eternal Glory, Eternal Prosperity, the carved words read, the letters obscured by fresh blood.
“I never suspected,” the minister wailed, “I never knew things would come to this pass. How could we know.”
There had been warnings, Parial thought, many warnings of an unnatural danger building, a catastrophe in the wilds. Many warnings ignored, dismissed, derided. Ignored because taking action would require change, effort, expenditure. It would impede the business of rulership. Her job, her training, had taught her to keep such thoughts not only to herself, but also from herself. She opened her mouth to reassure the minister and heard herself say, “You should have known. You could have. Now everyone’s dying.”
The old man showed instinctive shock at this contradiction but even he knew it was deserved.
“We must get to the Draklyn Storm,” he said, “I will answer to the Imperial Court for my failures when I give my report.” He actually smiled weakly, ironically, “I may receive a posthumous rebuke in my final review.”
“I’m sorry,” Parial said, “I shouldn’t have-”
“Help me up,” the minister said, and shocked them both with “please.” He stood with her help and raised a rod of wood and metal from where it hung at his waist. The end was a complex gridwork of brass and steel and wheels, and it represented to him what hope there was left.
“Come, minister,” she told him, “We must reach there first.” Parial gave an encouraging and respectful bow of the head and peered around the monument, along the equally grand avenue that led in the direction they must go. There were bodies there, and shattered stonework, and in the midst of it a guardsman stumbling aimlessly among the dead, but there were none of the enemy there. She led the way, the old man following obediently behind, both of them nervously half-jogging from point to point as they advanced.
Parts of the city were ablaze now. From his vantage point the support column of a shattered bridge Karol could see angry clutching hands of flame reaching upward from districts to the east and north. The enemy had no ambition for occupation, seeking only destruction. It was presumably in their nature, Karol thought, though what that nature was he did not know. Nobody did. The rumours had been circulating for a while among the population of Vanguard, but rumours always did. Nobody believed everything they heard, and there was always an instinct for story-spreaders to fill in the blanks of the unknown with some explanation of theirs that made sense. Then that story fabric would be passed on to the next artist who would embroider their own addition, and so on and so on. What had been known, and it was little enough, was that working parties and exploration teams working beyond Vanguard’s borders reported strange sightings in remote places. Some had failed to return. Those that did return sometimes spoke of being attacked and escaping with their lives. The embroiderers of tales took those details and made a design of them. Outlaws fleeing Imperial authority had an enclave that had been discovered. They were defending their free territory. Or they were deliberately striking at Imperial resources out of greed or malice or vengeance. Or they were not Outlaws, but savages who had never been under any civilised guidance and they were fighting back against the encroaching colonisation of their land. Or they had dreadful appetites for human flesh and their attacks had a more sinister motivation. Or they worshipped incomprehensible savage gods and their primitive creed drove them to attack anyone unlike themselves. No, others said, these are not people at all but creatures of some kind, and all that is required is preparation and fortitude to clear them away.
Once the situation had worsened, Karol recalled, and armed parties had been slaughtered, and the broken and scattered survivors had made their way back to Vanguard with appalling stories, the embroidery changed a little. This was deliberate enemy action, some covert operation by the foes of Imperial power. This was infighting between Imperial factions on this the border-territory, with forces in the employ of some minor noble house seeking power by building up its own military forces illegally, but now discovered. This was a hoax designed to keep the population compliant and obedient to the authorities, terrifying them with imaginary threats in order to make them reliant on their masters.
The flames, Karol thought, did not look imaginary. It had been all too easy when faced with the barrage of truths, half-truths, speculation, imagination and sheer delight in outright fabrication for the extent of the threat to be missed. The embroidered tapestry of narrative had been ripped apart and the tatters thrown into the furnace, and all hope had gone with it. Vanguard was, he knew, utterly lost. From his position on the ledge of the stone support the scope of the disaster was all too apparent. The entire eastern and northern regions of Vanguard had already fallen. Those districts were ablaze and the smoke rose to the tortured crimson sky like banners of despair. At the edges of those areas was rout and massacre and he could see the rising and swooping winged beasts above the roofs, marking out the advancing edge of the enemy’s forces. And each edge was a reaping blade into the harvest of the desperate citizens. Next came the Imperial guard, and the local militia, and whatever forces could be mustered to hold choke-points. Barricades had been improvised and false-hope kindled. There would be fighting and dying in those places, held at all costs to allow the citizenry behind them time to flee. But they could not flee. The enemy had penetrated the city more deeply than that, bypassing choke-points and barricades, and hopeful heroic actions. Each mass of desperate escaping civilians was being harried by the horrors that had reached through beyond the defenders. The city had fallen, Karol decided, and there was nothing here worth saving. It was time to leave.
He did not think it would be easy, he was too experienced to be foolish, but this would not be the first challenge he had faced alone and he was still alive to face this next one. Even to the south and west where there was as yet more desperate flight and fewer outright massacres he knew he would have to fight every step of the way to reach the edge of the city. Even then he’d have to hope the enemy would be content with stopping at the outer fortifications of Vanguard and why the hell would they do that? No. He needed a better way out than that. He inched along the ledge of the column on which he stood and looked inward to the heart of the city. The enemy was already there of course, and the winged predators already hunted there, but that was his destination. He lowered himself from the ledge having noted the landmarks he’d need to use to find his way, hung from his fingertips for a moment and then dropped down, landing expertly on the flagstones beneath. There were none of the screeching horrors of the attacking force nearby but the sound of their triumph still echoed from all the grand and civic surfaces. They’d been here though, that was clear, for they had left ragged death behind them. Karol picked his way through the pools of blood and tattered flesh and moved step by careful step toward the heart of the city.
The boy had waited for his father in the darkness, the red-tinged darkness of the tunnels beneath the streets. He’d found the place he’d been told to go, even in his terror his feet had remembered the directions his father had given him, and they’d obeyed even though his thoughts were shouted down by dread and the awful screeching of the things that had come rushing through the dark. He’d found the way, he’d found the second gate he’d been so worried about, but Dad had been right, of course he’d been right, and this gate was better kept and not rusted shut. It was fastened by a simple turning bolt and the boy had learned a long time ago how to operate those. He’d gone through the gate and seen the metal runs in the wall beyond it, leading upward through a shaft of brickwork. His Dad had told him to go up, but he’d waited instead.
The screeching had died away soon after he’d reached the gate and that meant his Dad had killed the monsters he decided. He’d used the prybar as a club and he’d driven them off. So all the boy had to do now was wait for his Dad to catch up. So he waited, cold and shivering in the darkness, hope as dim as the blurry pools of red light from above. Maybe Dad had got lost, he thought, and he should go look for him. Maybe Mum had caught up with Dad and they were both coming. He was nearly ten years old though, and couldn’t convince himself with such a childish lie, so he sat down with his back against the filthy bricks, wrapped his arms around his knees and cried for a long time, sobbing and shaking and not caring if he made a noise or looked like a baby. Some time later, when nobody had come to comfort him he knew that nobody would, so he uncurled himself and reached up for the highest metal rung he could reach, put a foot on another, and began to climb. The rungs were spaced for a grown man so there was a lot of stretching and straining but the boy was determined to do as he’d been told and so he went up. It would be safer there, his Dad had told him, safer where the powerful people lived with walls and guards and wealth. In the city above their district was cut off from the others by the grand inner walls, but in the tunnels below the city there were fewer divisions between people. The boy climbed to the very top of the shaft and reached the barred hatch at the top. There was another turning-bolt here but it was a larger one and when the boy gripped it, one handed since the other hand was clinging to the uppermost rung, the thing did not turn. Not even a little. He could see the deep red sky far above him, and even over the thumping of his own heartbeat he could hear the horrible screaming that never stopped. But even so he wanted to be out in the air again, beneath the sky even if the sky was so strange and tortured, but the turning-bolt would not turn. It was not rusted, he could tell that even in the dim light from above, it was just too stiff for his small fingers, for his ten year old strength. He didn’t cry out, or shout for help, or sob or wail, he just kept trying, bracing himself as best he could with his legs and shoulders so he could get both hands on the bolt’s wheel mechanism. Gripping it with all his strength he pressed and pushed it, trying to turn it even an inch anticlockwise. Once it got moving it would be easier he guessed, but it did not move. He tried again, gripping and straining, and now he did hear himself crying out a little but whether it was from fear, frustration or sheer exertion he didn’t know. The wheel, uncaring, did not move even a little. Abandoning the turning-bolt and common sense, the boy put both hands on the grating above him and just pushed with all his might, but nothing moved and he nearly pushed himself out of his footing with the effort. The red sky far above looked down without caring.
Then there was a man’s face looking down through gaps between the thick metal bars.
“Move down a little,” the man said. “Quickly. Just a step or two.”
The boy was startled but obediently did. His arms and legs were shaking now from the strain he’d put them under, but he did as he was told. He saw the man grip the grating, his fingers curling round the bars and tensing, knuckles whitening. The boy wanted to tell the man that he wouldn’t be able to lift the grate without the turning-bolt being opened from below, or unless he had one of the special key-bars that could be inserted from above to turn the bolt from the street and lift the grate that way. He didn’t say a word though, and hoped the man didn’t realise this was a pointless effort; if he did then he would just leave.
The man was pulling hard against the grating, and the boy heard him mutter a very bad word and then he stopped heaving. The fingers withdrew and the boy felt weak and afraid again. The man would go now, and he’d be stuck alone in the underways waiting for the monsters to come again. The man’s face appeared again above the grating.
“Do you know another way out?” he said. His accent was unusual to the boy’s ears but the frustration and anger was clear enough. The boy shook his head. “Alright. Wait,” the man said and then he moved out of sight. The boy waited as he had been told. Halfway between the city above and the darkness below and growing numb in body and mind. Even when he heard the first rising notes of the screeching of the monsters in the tunnels below his perch on the rungs he did not feel anything, no fear, no panic. He just noted one more awful thing to add to his memories of the day. The man had gone and would not come back, just like Dad, and Mum and everyone. There was nothing of his life remaining, not his house, his room, his toys, his playmates, the stories he loved, the big boy who had bullied him out of his birthday money, nothing, nothing, nothing, except for clinging to metal rungs halfway between nowhere and nowhere, and monsters creeping through the dark. Below coming into view beneath the shaft the darkness revealed movement to the boy, darker shapes in the gloom, hunched and smooth and screeching like wind being drawn over jagged teeth by a breath that never ended. Now the numbness in his heart shattered and gave way to terror as the thing below stopped and turned its oddly shaped head slowly to gaze upward into the shaft, toward the dim redness of the distant sky, toward the boy that waited for the end. The boy’s world narrowed at once to that single awareness of approaching death, the mouse caught in the serpent’s gaze. Nothing existed except for the hungry anticipation in those inhuman dark eyes set like gleaming black stones in the thing’s head. Then the boy was wrenched from the rungs to which he clung and was falling through the air to land hard on unforgiving stone. He yelled in pain from the impact and only then realised he’d been falling upward at first, grabbed by the shoulder and pulled upward through the hole where the grating had been. He tried to rise but his legs gave way beneath him, and he stumbled and fell again. The man who had gone had come back, and he shoved the boy with his foot so hard that the boy skidded over the stone for some distance, feeling it graze his arms and legs, but now there was something between him and the man and it was the thing from the tunnel below, large and long-limbed and hunched and ready to kill. It turned and flailed its arms, clutching blades or perhaps having blades instead of hands, to tear and rip at the man who had plucked the little mouse out its grasp but the man moved just as quickly and the boy saw him step beneath one swinging arm and around the second, with all the grace of someone who had faced this exact peril a dozen times before. The creature reared up, lunged forward and down and the screeching rose to a painful pitch as its arms reached around to clutch and grab and drag the man toward it but the man was no longer within that closing circle of limbs, but somehow outside it and striking down and back and down again first at the creature’s arms and then at the strange flat circle of a head. Each time he struck there was the noise of green-wood splitting and the screeching fell in pitch and became a long dying wheeze that trailed away to nothing as the creature fell broken to the ground. The man looked at it for a long second then cast aside the steel bar he held, walked a few paces away and picked up a scabbarded sword from the ground. Then he looked around, up and down the street, to satisfy himself that they were still alone. Only then did he approach the boy, reached down to take him by the arm and pulled him to his feet.
“You injured?” The man’s voice was rough and stern. Although the boy felt the pain of being flung around, and the grazes on his arms and legs were stinging, he did not think these things counted, and that to claim them as injuries would seem childish. He tried to say so but words wouldn’t come so he just shook his head.
“Where are you from? Are your parents nearby?” Even through the accent the boy could tell the question was asked with little expectation of a positive answer. He thought of his Dad, and his Mum and how nobody had come when he had been weeping, and he could not put into words the enormity of that thought. He shook his head again. The man closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again and his expression was one of tired resignation.
“Alright. Come with me. What’s your name?”
The boy opened his mouth to answer but too much had happened today that was blocking his words. His name belonged to the world that he had lost, to the world of stories, and schoolwork, and games, and friends, and that big oaf who had bullied him. He could barely remember what those things had been like, they were just part of an older story and so was his name. All he could think of now was the strange red sky, and the horror that lay broken on the ground, and how he’d felt when those gleaming black eyes had held him paralysed and waiting for death.
“Mouse?” said the man, and the boy was surprised, not realising he’d spoken aloud. “Alright Mouse, come with me. We’re going to get out of here.”
Otherworlds 