Chapter Seven

I Could Destroy You

It was three days since Riddis’ ultimatum. Three days that blurred in a flurry of thoughtlessness and fatigue. Agloff was no closer to a solution to Winter’s mess, while Ariea refused to even discuss it. At every attempt at conversation, Ariea politely removed herself. Agloff couldn’t tell if she was avoiding it or trying to spare him her responsibility. After all, Ariea was the one who killed Jask.

Agloff found himself in one of these pits of thought as a badger scampered through his eyeline. He shook his head and rode on a little through the dense weave of trees.

‘We’ll split up,’ said Ariea from next to him. ‘You and Merry take the south, me and Memphis will go north.’ She stroked the neck of her mare and nodded the way to Agloff.

He wondered if this was one of those moments where she was removing herself from a conversation about Riddis and Winter.

Agloff knew better than to argue. This part of the Erwood was too dense to hunt in any case. They’d cover more ground and faster by splitting up.

He raised a limp hand in farewell, and she smiled reassuringly, led off by Memphis.

‘Love you,’ she mouthed back and Agloff reciprocated. He wondered if the distance between them spared the strain on their relationship.

‘You shouldn’t worry. She knows what she’s doing,’ Merry said a few hundred feet deeper into the wood. ‘She’s the smartest of us, no offence.’

Agloff laughed, rocking on the back of his horse. ‘None taken. She’s a good hunter.’

‘Oh, I meant about Winter. I think her mind is already made up. It was made up the moment Riddis spoke to you. Ariea’s always been assured of herself like that.’

‘Wish I could say the same of me half the time.’

‘You’re more decisive than you think. You didn’t hesitate going Eden, not after Ariea was taken.’ Merry looked at him. ‘You’re decisive when you need to be. The right thing will figure itself out.’ She smiled widely at him, and he responded in kind. ‘What’s your gut say?’

‘Honestly? Renounce Winter and let the North decide They know better than to go to war with each other. Although, being a geek for history I wouldn’t be sure.’

‘Oxford would know. He knows his way around powerful people. The stories he told us when he came for a drink after going halfway up the Colony. You learn a lot.’

‘You miss him?’

‘Course. He’s the only friend we had before you and Ariea.’

Agloff supposed he never really thought what Oxford leaving meant to Merry and Memphis. Agloff knew his relationship with Oxford could never heal, and that was fair enough. Oxford held the world against Agloff for his suffering as Agloff held the world against Thawn. If it brought Oxford any peace, Agloff could forgive that.

‘If I know him, he would say the same as you, I think. Renounce it. They might fight, but there’s no reason to say they wouldn’t if you gave Winter to Riddis. And if you let Poll rule, is she any better than Winter? I think your instinct is right, and I think Ariea agrees.’

‘Then why doesn’t she talk about it?’

‘She probably doesn’t want to burden you anymore than Riddis has. If you want to renounce it, and she knows she feels the same, why stress yourselves talking about it? Talk about other things, like how stupid this forest is.’ Merry swatted at a low-hanging branch. Flecks of leaves caught in her hair.

‘We should move in-land, thin these trees out,’ Agloff said, bobbing under twisted branches. ‘Get out of Erwood.’

The bounty hunter, Kira Stone, prescribed their routes. They called her and her cronies ‘bone hunters, for the fort they served. Like most privateers, she canvassed more land now Winter was banished to the south, and for her part in Agloff’s escape to Eden, Riddis had rewarded her with a fancy title; Chief of the Border Watch. She knew these lands. She set and assigned Wishbone’s patrols deeper into wild country.

That made Agloff one of the Border Watch, but it felt more like community service than a job. His pay was his home and little more.

‘Do you feel him?’ whispered Merry then, through the hustle of morning wind.

‘What?’

‘The forest.’ Merry closed her eyes. ‘Erobo.’

‘Yeah. It’s a cold feeling. Even used to it, I can’t shut him out.’ It was a buzz of coolness like someone was walking over his grave; a shadow reaching over his shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’

Merry smiled like always. ‘Like you, cold.’

What Erobo showed a person was sacred. Agloff supposed even if Merry did see anything here, she would never speak of it.

The woods opened up and Agloff glimpsed the cascade of the Flatlands through spindly trees. The mind of Erobo tugged him back like a stone in his brain. It was the same force that had guided him to Erobo’s homestead when he was trialled for trespassing at Wilder.

He looked back.

The gaunt figure of Malvo Jask stared at him with a crooked smile, pale and emaciated, a hole through his chest.

‘It’s yours now, boy,’ he said hoarsely. Agloff blinked and he was gone, and that cold feeling came over him again.

Merry watched him but knew better than to ask.

Agloff pretended he saw nothing and raised a pair of binoculars from his saddle to the southern edge of the plains. He spied diminutive turrets poking over misty crests of green and morning blue. Flecked men and women hauled logging to where more towers were being erected.

‘Spearmen,’ Agloff said.

While Wishbone guarded their frontiers with scouts and patrols, Fort Spear had permanent borders, guarded ever more fiercely in Winter’s absence. And they were growing. Agloff saw mustard banners flap from the border wall with mustard men gliding between its towers. He had heard they were within eyeshot of the Erwood. Seeing it was worse. He understood now why Yara Poll was such an irritation to Riddis.

Two more soldiers rode closer, through a ribbon of thick grassland and the taller rose binoculars to Agloff as he did to them. They were like the knights of ancient history, bolstered in silvery chains. A sun-yellow shawl draped from their necks denoted high status. One sneered through the veil of his helmet, then Agloff prodded Merry.

‘We’ll circle back east. We’ll put this in the diary, but we shouldn’t get closer alone.’ He said it with the kind of authority that came to him thoughtlessly these days. Maybe he was decisive.

Merry nodded. Agloff took one last sweeping look at the low mist of dawn hanging over the fields, washed in the light of the sun ahead of them. Then, he turned around and cantered up the thinned edges of Erwood.

They rode a mile on further north where Agloff hoped they might reconnect with Ariea and Memphis.

‘You forget it sometimes with all the people, and everything that happens, but where we live is quite beautiful,’ said Merry.

Her gaze caught in a pasture of bluebells, a river between two belts of woodland. The current opened into the wide reach of long grass, of greens upon greens below the glazed crests of the Silver Blemishes. In their shadow somewhere sat Eden.

Agloff sighed deeply. ‘It has its moments.’

‘It’s always beautiful. Just most of the time people don’t look properly.’ Merry clicked at her mare, brushed its mane, then dragged herself down. She led it a few feet and stooped to the grasses. A jackrabbit zig-zagged in front of her.

‘Much as I wish I could,’ Agloff said, watching her, ‘it’s hard to be grateful all the time. You take it for granted because you can.’ His fleeting self-awareness wouldn’t change the fact he would take this place for granted tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. But it was damn pretty true enough.

‘We should get back,’ Agloff said. He beckoned Merry onto her horse, but she stayed and watched the land for a few more moments. The world was beautiful in its ignorance of mankind.

Then, from the plain, a curdling wind fell over them, and they were struck in shadow. The land turned grey. Cerberus and the sun behind it were blotted by a thick shape, hanging in the cloud.

Agloff processed it in less than thought. The ship poured through into open sky, flat and wide, like a disc.

He called his horse and it seemed to understand. Merry mounted hers and they broke like the wind along the edge of trees. Jets of hot air blasted over them, and the whole ground tremored. Agloff looked back and the diminutive Spearmen shouted and ran, panicked. He half-smiled at this.

‘The hell is that!’ Merry yelled into the wind.

‘Whaddayouthink!’

‘People!’

‘Departed!’

‘Why!’

‘Been a long time! Maybe they’re coming back!’

Agloff looked up at its grey belly. It reached across them like the end of days itself. Printed on its underside were giant red letters:

Confederacy of Colonies

Type-Z-01

‘Merlin’

‘And why now?’ Merry said, quieter. They darted into the foliage, and the horses calmed to a canter. They rode slower into the angry gloom of the forest. As the way ahead darkened still, Agloff surmised the ship above was making its approach, lower and with a rising thrum.

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Where was Ariea in this? And Memphis. She was the smartest, coolest person Agloff knew. She had the head to deal with it. She glimpsed through these moments with clarity most didn’t have. It was her unfailing logic, her smarts that he fell for.

For some reason he didn’t worry. But maybe he should.

‘We’ve got a choice,’ he said then, slowing his horse.

‘A choice?’

‘We can head north, try find Ari and Memph. See if we can pick up any other patrols, stations on the way. Or we can go straight back.’

Agloff glanced up. The thing was so wide and so long, he felt it could move for miles and they would still be under it.

‘We go straight back. Everyone else will do the same. Riddis will want no one unaccounted for. Ariea will expect you to go straight back. So I expect her to.’

Agloff nodded. He tugged at the neck of his shirt and shuffled in his coat. He baked in the heat of the ship above. Columns of air blasted onto the woodland floor. Leaves danced in vortices between trees as birds scattered from their lofty nests.

He looked at Merry, sweat beating down her brow.

‘Keep going,’ she said. Their horses whinnied, slowing as they did. ‘Keep going.’

They plodded on through heavy breaths. Agloff saw the trees begin to shimmer and fizz, in fits of dazzling colour. Green became blue became purple. Leaves shined like diamonds. As his body weakened, so did his mind. Erobo was creeping in.

Still, the ship sank and still the air became hotter, humid with the vapor deposited from the engines. Agloff had to keep righting himself on his horse. The morning was like jaded twilight.

He rubbed his eyes sore. He could see nothing for trees anymore. He wasn’t even sure how much of it was real. The world felt heavy like lead and floaty like a dream. Still, Merry told to him keep going.

Agloff yelled numbly for his horse to move faster, even as the heat suffocated them both. It wouldn’t obey. He saw wisps of smoke breaking out on the forest floor. He could no longer tell how far above them the ship was. It could have been touching the canopy, or hundreds of metres up. It was just a grey smear.

Wisps of smoke scattered into sparks round them, kindled into flame. The tops of the trees above caught alight, and Agloff yelled in sudden alertness.

Their horses neighed and rode at speed. The trees faded back into green and grey, and Agloff came to his senses. Sparks flew in updrafts of hot air. Rosed smoke came at them from all sides. Agloff told Merry it was alright. They would be okay, and he wondered if she saw the shadow of March Town in the flames. But this wasn’t the work of pilgrims.

Ariea, thought Agloff again. We have to find Ariea. He could see the path ahead begin to clear. He could make the outline of Wishbone’s through a gap in the greenery, backlit by wild, chasing flames.

They carried through the edges of the forest, where the gates to the city were knocked open. Thirty men and women or more climbed down towards them, suspended from the walls by lines of rope and cloth. They rushed, single-file towards the road at the far end of the city.

Agloff rode over the trampled gate. The ship had passed over them now, humming towards the bay of Principia. It hung low over the city. Its jets blasted down in superheated vortices. Flames carried from building to building in seconds. Some alit in a moment.

It was the apathy of their assault that struck Agloff. This was not an attack. It was indifference that devastated all in its path all the same. Over the pier, water whisked into a frenzied vortex, then fell like a dawn fog into the dock.

Agloff rode down, hard and fast. None seemed to notice him. People flooded the streets, beckoned by guards into lines almost as wide as they were long. The people parcelled belongings into their arms, as dazed children tugged at their trouser legs.

He watched the people, noted the saccadic movement of his eyes scan from shadow to shadow. Each looked vaguely ill in the rosed air.

Someone shouted and Agloff’s ears popped. A guardsman beckoned him from his horse, begged him into the lines. But he seemed to whimper, absent of any authority now the world had ended. Agloff rode down further still, unsure if Merry was following him.

The road arrowed straighter than straight out to the bay. There, he saw tiny wires propel from the fuselage of the beastly ship. They pierced the water below and bodies fell down their lengths- black and suited.

These Others moved towards him in precise movements, like minute gods. They walked the water as though it were ground, a dozen of them or more. Agloff rode further. He saw only the gentlest of ripples in their wake.

He wondered if it was his place to greet them. He was alive when they left the first time after all. He knew them as well as any. They were returning, not invading. Long had they lived in their faraway worlds and towers and oceans. What could ever make them want to come back?

He muttered to himself, confusedly watched these gods walk towards him. A current of bodies flowed at the sides of his mare, as though he were an upturned rock in a river.

‘Agloff,’ Merry said behind him.

Her voice drew him to attention. He swivelled his horse and saw the outpouring of smoke above Merry. Stoned granaries and factories and schools and hospitals were firebreaks between wooden houses stacked up the slant of Wishbone like staircases.

Then a cluster of shirtless men scurried by them, fell to their knees on the cobbles and raised their arms aloft. Pious men for an unseemly god. Thick inky lines painted their backs in two. They called themselves the Waning Arch: generations of Cerberus worshippers.

The fire was punishing now. It swept with the wind south westerly, sweeping down the slant of the city. At last, Agloff nodded at Merry, and she led him through the bodies at crawling pace. He ushered her over, and she leapt from her own horse to his. It was quicker to cut through the crowds this way.

Agloff kept glancing back at the Others walking across the water. There was menace in their gentle pace.

Merry shepherded him up to the plateau where their home was. Flames pushed in their direction, ushered by rampant wind. Agloff saw a moment there he had to act. If there was a chance Ariea and Memphis made it back, made it inside, he had to take it. Reason couldn’t argue with him now. Agloff dismounted before Merry could say anything. He ran inside with the strength of his convictions.

As if to mock him, the walls caught flame there and then. Agloff dragged the cuff of his sleeve over his mouth, watched his every movement against the heat. He had two minutes, maximum. He took the stairs three at a time. Smoke swelled at the ceiling and Agloff ducked to avoid it. It rose with him to the top floor.

He thought he might glimpse over the landing and see Ariea panicked in bed, and he might get to save her again. But the bed was bare.

There was no one here.

There’s no one here!

In Ariea’s absence, he began to panic. His lungs vented shallow breaths. The harder he tried to breathe, the less strength it gave him. He knew he couldn’t last more than a few seconds now.

He turned and made down the stairs, before the first step gave way under him. Agloff fell in slow motion. His legs swatted at absent floorboards, as if he hoped to catch himself. Why did he expect her to be there, he thought at ten times speed? It was stupidity, or desperation. Lady had got out the house too.

Agloff’s back levelled against the bottom floor with a dead thud. He yelled, then felt himself dragged against the swelling smoke and flame and misery, and all the life lost in there. He saw a thousand scenes play out in his mind, now consigned to memory, never to be repeated.

Merry held her hand over Agloff’s face, brushing away dust.

‘You’re strong,’ Agloff said weakly, closing his eyes. He coughed and choked as his body gorged itself on cleaner air.

‘Why did you think she’d be in there?’

‘Because I wanted her to be!’

‘Lady?’

‘Gone.’

Agloff saw Merry nod, reassured through his half-open eyes. Lady was a smart kid. She’d tack onto the safest route out and sniff any trouble a mile away.

‘Let’s go,’ Merry said. ‘We can catch up to them.’

She aided Agloff gingerly to his feet. But he turned the other way, looked down the hoards scrambling over the plateau. He staggered. Pain seared through his back. His body tingled with latent heat.

‘I need to make sure she’s not— That she’s.’

‘Agloff, if she has any sense, she’s already gone. She’s out the city. In the crowds. Come on. Please.’

‘I know Memphis and Lady are out there somewhere too. I’m not saying you have to wait with me.’

‘I do, don’t I. You’re my friend and you just fell down two flights of stairs. You are not going anywhere alone.’

Agloff let her follow him. He walked, checking every face that rushed past him, racked his brain for anywhere she might be. Down at the dock perhaps, but the Others were clearing people out from the shoreline. She could even be up at Riddis’ offices. But his overriding instinct was just that she was helping. Because that’s who she was.

He imagined her helping people out their homes, ushering them uphill, yelling and organising people into rows and carrying their belongings. Because she helped people. Merry was wrong to assume she had left. Agloff knew with certainty that she hadn’t.

‘I wouldn’t go that way, boy.’

Boy? Boy? Agloff heard Riddis’ voice boom over him, and a dozen horses’ steps spread into a ring around him. He threw his arms out, his shoulders back and sighed, even as his skin screamed. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t deserve it. Because he knew what she was about to say.

‘I cannot allow you to leave,’ she said quietly.

‘I figured as much.’

‘Ariea is unaccounted for. I cannot lose you too. You mean too much to the Colony. You can come willingly or bound.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a fair choice.’

‘Life is seldom fair.’

‘You have no right to control mine,’ Agloff almost whispered.

Riddis’ voice began to shake. The ensnaring guards closed a touch. ‘You have a home here by my good grace, by our protection. All… All that I ask is that you come now to Eden and resolve this. We’ve… I’ve lost everything. I can stand up to her now.’

‘I understand, Ellen,’ Agloff said her name as a kindness. He heard the frailty in her now. ‘I understand.’ At last, he turned and looked at her. She was manic-looking with rosed cheeks. Her white coat flowed at her back but blackened and scorched in places.

‘With Ariea gone, no one can dispute your claim,’ she murmured, voice breaking.

Agloff’s pity soured then. His gentle look turned back to stone. ‘Is that all you think about, politics? Human life means more. These people mean more than your politics! Ariea does.’

Riddis stared vacantly. ‘Generations hinge on this. Nothing means more than human life, but the future invariably comes at the cost of the present. It’s more than you and her. It’s everyone. But you miss that, in your small-mindedness.’

‘You don’t want me as an enemy, Ellen. Bring me willingly or bring me bound, I could destroy you. Silence me, Wishbone is nothing. I am not so small-minded.’

Riddis did not react. She knew he was right. She had no games to play. No threat that could stop Agloff ending her world, more utterly and completely than the flames that ravaged it now.

She spoke then. ‘I’ve heard what Governor Fall planned for you, and Jask and Drake and all those weak and failed leaders. Tell me that without my protection Poll would treat you any differently. She would keep you beyond daylight, until you sanction her dreams.’

‘Then we understand each other,’ Agloff said calmly, though he was sure than Riddis needed him more than the opposite.

‘Then you understand the nature of politics. You play the game well. As I do: as it suits you.’ Riddis was struck in silhouette by a wall of flame some way behind, reached a hand to the inside of her robe, and pulled a pocket watch, laced in golden inkwork. ‘You have five minutes,’ she said. ‘Then you’re leaving. With the girl or without. You have no say in this.’ She pointed at Merry then, ‘You. Stay. I want a guarantee of Agloff’s return.’

He felt Merry shift closer. She held his arm before letting go.

He didn’t wait for anything. Agloff sprung down the hill, pushing and pulling bodies this way and that. Gravity carried him. If Ariea was helping in the evacuation, he just had to trace the retreating crowds backwards. Like a river to its source.

He picked the largest, trudging up one of Wishbone’s wider roads. He could see better now; some of the flames were diminishing. Every few metres, he spied men and women, some uniformed, some not, shepherding the evacuees.

Hoards flooded from close to the dock. It was the low-lying land where most of the folk lived, in half-erected patchwork houses of wood and fabric. Windows were hand cut into the walls by those that lived there. They had layers of draped fabric for ceilings, suspended from tightly wound rope.

In the flames, they crumpled like paper.

Agloff smeared an ashen hand across his face, felt the wetness of his skin in the heat. The fire was louder than he expected, but somehow he tuned it out.

Every direction called him. Ariea could have been in any of them. He ran to the edge of the dock, the shore of Principia and turned. The city was struck in raging streaks of black and orange. From here, he scanned up and down, eyes bobbing between men and women and children for Ariea’s familiar outline.

There was nothing.

He staggered, followed the shore south where one of the larger lines were scurrying. Sweat rolled down Agloff’s temples and his eyes wandered in their sockets.

Then his slitted eyes burst wide. Between a lamppost and a narrow terrace: that bob of auburn hair.

Ariea!

Strength returned to Agloff. He fell into the crowd as the bob round a corner and up a side street. He pushed and was pushed between bodies.

He yelled. Then again—

‘ARIEA!’

Agloff stretched an arm when the bob stopped, jolted in recognition. In a moment, she turned, and her face broke into a panicked smile. Relief washed over Agloff like a waterfall against the flames.

But it only lasted the moment.

Screams flooded from the building adjacent, and their bodies spilled between them. Agloff heard a faint hiss of gas, long enough to process it.

A boom shredded his ears, and Agloff felt his weight thrown across the street by waves of smoke and flame. Time ground into a crawl.

The explosion threw Ariea the other direction. Agloff’s eyes tracked her arc through space. Then his body crunched against the concrete and time resumed its flow, if only for an instant.

The wails and flames that were so loud were stunted into a blur of white noise, a whistling in his brain.

Seconds or hours later, Agloff felt arms haul him to his feet.