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Canning nodded.
‘Controller,’ he said. He placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘I remember you, now.’ He smiled. Memories are such precious things.
Arlan nodded. ‘There’s no time to reminisce, your majesty.’ He seemed to catch himself. ‘Apologies … I did not mean …’
Arna was at Canning’s side, then. ‘These are Manipulators from the Secondmost City, your majesty. Our part of the Remnants has been under great … strain, in recent times. We’ve become the focus of a particularly nasty Autocrat, and it’s almost broken us.’ She gestured at the unconscious Manipulators. ‘All of these warriors fought him at once – and all of them have been defeated. I took them here, to seek your assistance.’
‘I’ve been keeping watch on them,’ Arlan said.‘They’ve not moved a muscle. Sometimes you can see a Manipulator fighting back, even in this state, just by the flicker of a finger or the blinking of their eyes. But not with these ones. I think they might be gone for good.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Arna snapped.
‘Apologies, my lady.’ Arlan bowed, before returning to the side of the courtyard.
Canning studied the Manipulators, glancing from one to the other. He felt something, as he gazed at them: a kind of presence, as of a great pressure bearing down on them all, or a fog blocking them from view.
‘Where are they?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know.’ Darrlan was speaking, now. ‘They’ve been taken somewhere, by this thing. We can’t do anything for them. We’ve tried.’
‘Perhaps you could help, Great Manipulator.’ Arna’s voice. ‘This Autocrat would be no match for you. You could find them, and bring them back.’
There were more noises; more words being spoken. But Canning could no longer hear them.
‘What did you say?’ he asked.
He realised, too late, what had happened. He had gone to the other side of the fog.
CHAPTER 5 (#uef57288c-4ff0-50f4-8e12-2300f85234f7)
‘Who are you?’
The question seemed to come from far away, repeated in a pained voice. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Brandione paid it no mind. He focused on the sand, the black, black sand, as it fell away beneath his boots.
‘Who are you?’
The desert was empty. The desert had always been empty.
‘Who are you?’
There was no one there but him. The desert was empty.
‘Who are you?’
He looked up from his feet. He looked away from the sand. And he saw that the desert was not empty at all.
There was a young man at his side: a man of many contradictions. He appeared youthful, at first, with unlined, pale skin and long blond hair. But there was an air of age about his watchful eyes, which could not be concealed. Stranger still was his gown, a green thing that writhed with symbols and shapes, numbers and figures and moons and stars.
How did this young man come to be here, in this desert of black sand, under a red sun in a dark sky? Where had he come from?
This is the Underland, and things are not the same here.
Brandione stopped walking, and the man came to a halt, too.
He grinned at the one-time General, and clapped his hands together. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Charls Brandione. At least, that’s who I was.’
‘So you aren’t him any more?’
‘I used to be a soldier. Now I’m nothing.’
‘Nothing? Hmm. You wouldn’t be here if you were nothing.’ He snapped his fingers together. ‘I have it! The Queen. You are the Queen’s pawn.’
Brandione nodded, and braced himself. He knew what was coming next.
‘The Last Doubter,’ the man whispered.‘I have heard your name. She has seen such things for her Last Doubter. Oh, I know what she thinks. I’m the Gamesman – I know what everyone thinks will happen, in all the games. She thinks you’ll find the First Memory. Amazing!’
He laughed, and Brandione was struck with a sudden image of this man, long ago, standing before so many tables, a dominant figure, a power of the world.
The Gamesman, as he called himself, came up close to him. ‘She is deluded. Do you know why, Last Doubter?’
Brandione shook his head.
‘Because this is the game. The Old Place runs this game, Brandione. Hmm? We do not know what it is thinking. We do not know the rules. When it decides to …’ He snapped his fingers again. ‘When it decides to end the pawns, or take them away, we do not know what forces its hand. All we can do is watch. Now tell me this, Last Doubter – why, exactly, would the Old Place want to show you the First Memory? Why would it reveal its most powerful secret, and risk losing it forever? It wouldn’t, is the answer. It never has, and it never will.’
‘Then how is it played?’ Always the same question, over and over again. ‘I think I should know, if I’m a player.’
The Gamesman shrugged. ‘That’s the delicious thing, Brandione. It changes all the time.’ He looked up at the sun. ‘It knows when we are coming to play. It knows what we want. And it does what it likes. The Operators watch you all, on my lovely table: helpless.’
‘So I’m not playing a game at all. I’m only walking through a nightmare, until it decides it’s had enough of me.’ Brandione felt perversely piqued at the injustice of it all. ‘There is no fairness, here. There is only death. It kills us in the order it wants, or throws us in some corner of this place, never to return.’
The Gamesman turned suddenly serious. ‘Perhaps, perhaps. But to survive in the game, even for a while, is such an honour. The Old Place is everything, Brandione. I never question it, and neither should you. Its mind is unknowable, its highways endless, its thoughts too subtle to comprehend, even for the Queen herself – its first child!’
Brandione held up a hand. ‘Enough. I can’t listen to this nonsense any more.’
The Gamesman cocked his head to the side. ‘Interesting. Nonsense.’ He giggled. ‘Well, here’s something you’ll understand. If one person lasts longer than the rest, it would be better to be that person, than any of the other pawns, wouldn’t it? You would have time, then. Time to defeat the game.’ He laughed derisively.
Brandione nodded, and looked out to the desert. ‘That I can understand.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Where does it take them – the ones it doesn’t kill?’
He turned back to the Gamesman, and found he was alone again.
Brandione walked on, through the black sands. At one point – he did not know when, or if ‘when’ even mattered here – he looked up and saw the outline of an object far ahead. He kept his eyes on it as he went. Once, he turned in another direction. But as he walked, the lines of the object reappeared. It is meant for me.
It became clearer over time. At first, he thought it was some kind of building: another tower, perhaps, like the one where he had met the Dust Queen. But soon he realised it was not a manmade structure at all: it was a mountain.
It was the smallest mountain the General had ever seen; so small, in fact, that it took him time to realise it even was a mountain. But soon it was clear. Rising from the desert before him was a sharp mound of rock, small but perfectly formed, its peak frosted with snow, its body wreathed in shadow.
Its size was deceptive. As he walked, the mountain seemed to leap towards him, growing with every jump. The experience was familiar; he had seen it many times before, in the Overland. In those days, he thought it was some trick of perspective or light. He wondered, now, if he had seen the Underland itself, back then, seeping into the real world. Perhaps there was no difference between them.
The sand at his feet began to slowly dissipate, giving way to rough, sparse grass. The mountain leapt forward again, until all the world before him was taken over by the rock.
Brandione began to climb.
A path had been laid out into the side of the mountain, cutting its way sharply upwards through jagged rocks. He was glad of his old boots, his military garb, as he made his way up the path, into the heights of the mountain. He stopped, once, and looked out at the world below. Blasted grasslands stretched away from the great rock, merging into the black sand somewhere far away. He thought he saw something else, out there: one of the great statues of the Strategist that now stood in the Circus. He thought she was raising her arms, but he could not be certain. There was a kind of fissure in the air behind her, like someone had torn out part of the black sky; a haze of blue light crackled in the beyond.
In the sky above, the red sun had gone. In its place was a moon, a vast, perfect sphere, casting a blue light down upon the desert.
Brandione turned back to the path and carried on up the mountain. The path began to twist and turn in tighter and tighter corners. Eventually he came to a wooden sign propped up on the rock before him, on which a question had been scrawled in black ink.
Who are you?
The one-time General stopped for a moment before the sign. Was he meant to answer this question? If so, how?
On he went, around another corner.
Who are you?
He stopped again. This appeared to be the same sign. He walked up to it, studied it, felt its edges; it was identical to the one before. He did not allow himself to feel any surprise. This is the Underland.
Brandione turned another corner, and there was the sign again, with those same three words leaping from its surface. Now, however, things had changed. He was no longer alone.
A young girl was sitting beside the sign, nestled among the boulders and smiling up at Brandione. Unlike the Gamesman or the Dust Queen, this girl had no hint of humanity. She put Brandione in mind of a figure from a painting, sliced out of the canvas and brought to life: a beautiful drawing of a blonde-haired child in a white dress, but nothing more than that.
‘Who are you?’ she asked him. The voice did not belong to a girl of her age, or to any girl: it was more of a rasp than a voice, the pages of a book blowing open in the wind.
‘Charls Brandione,’ he said. ‘I seem to always be introducing myself.’
The girl climbed to her feet. ‘That is not you.’ The voice rattled around his ears.
She reached out a finger and tapped Charls on the nose. ‘Soldier, and scholar. Last Doubter.’
Brandione felt a sudden burst of anger. ‘How do I play the game?’
The girl looked to the sky, whispering something incomprehensible, before she snapped her head back to Brandione. ‘There will be no game,’ she said. ‘Not like the old ones. The game has changed.’
Anger burned in Brandione. The one-time General was a furious insect: a wasp, trapped in a jar.
‘How?’
The girl became a man, then an older woman, then a thousand other people, changing madly in the course of a minute, before returning to the person he had first encountered.
She walked up to him and whispered in his ear.
‘You are not here to have fun, this time. You are here to help.’
She nodded behind Brandione. He turned, to see a doorway in the mountainside.
CHAPTER 6 (#uef57288c-4ff0-50f4-8e12-2300f85234f7)
‘Death is coming.’
Drayn opened her eyes. Jandell and Jaco were at her side. She knew, somehow, in her bones, that these were the realJandell and Jaco. There was something in the way they held themselves, something in the way she felt when she looked at them, that told her they were flesh and blood. But it was instantly clear that everything else in this place was a memory. Does that make it any less real?
A man sat at a desk before them. He was fairly young, perhaps in his late thirties, with neat black hair and smooth pale skin. He had an air of precision, of order. But there was something harried in his expression, something wan and fearful. The table was covered in papers, which the man sifted through with his fingers.
This was a younger version of Jaco. Drayn glanced from the old man at her side to his counterpart in the memory. There was a strange look in the old man’s eye: a kind of affectionate disdain.
There came a great lurch, and Drayn almost tumbled to the floor. This was a ship like Jandell’s, the one that had carried her into the East. But it was very different. On Jandell’s vessel she had sensed his power, carrying them across the waves. There was none of that here. There was only the peril of the real.
At the doorway stood another man, who must have been the speaker. He was a short, stocky type, who seemed to have sprung from the ship itself, a thing of seasalt and cold winds, his unblinking eyes making Drayn think of some animal of the depths. His head had been shaved with such severity that only the barest hint of stubble could be discerned on the gleaming pate.
‘Who, Teel?’ asked the memory Jaco.
The man called Teel entered the captain’s cabin. He glanced at the floor and lifted a torn black cloak.
‘Harra,’ Teel said. He tossed the cloak to Jaco. ‘She’s above deck, my lord. It is cold.’
The younger Jaco stood and tossed the cloak aside. ‘Let’s go.’
They found themselves on the deck at night, staring at a dead woman.
Her corpse was positioned against a mast. A handful of other crewmembers were spread around the deck. Some watched Jaco, as he knelt down by the body of the woman called Harra. Others stared out to sea, to impenetrable blackness.
Drayn looked to the real Jaco. If he was surprised to find himself in a memory, he did not look it. Instead, he stared ahead with a dark gravity. Jandell seemed lost in thought as he watched the unfolding scene.
‘How did you bring us here?’ he asked Drayn, emerging from his reverie. ‘Do you remember how you did it?’
‘No.’
‘And can you … what do you feel?’
‘Nothing,’ Drayn said. But perhaps that was not true. Perhaps she was once more deploying her tricks, as if to ward off the Voice, that thing that had watched her in the Choosing. It’s gone, now. Isn’t it?
She could feel something: the edge of the memory. There was something there: a whisper of power …
‘What killed her?’ asked the Jaco of the memory.
Teel crouched down beside the captain. ‘It’s the same thing that gets them all,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is. The Blight. She was fine this morning, or as fine as you can be, out here. And then …’ He shrugged.
The young Jaco nodded. ‘The Blight,’ he said. ‘What is it?’ He lifted Harra’s arm, turning it over to study the underside. ‘When I was a boy, I used to hear of terrible scourges. They came from the swamps in the South, folks used to say, from the festering waters. People would come out in blotches, and that would be the end of them. You never got rid of it, when it arrived in a town. You had to keep the people inside, until they were all … gone.’
‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t be touching her, my lord.’
‘That’s just it, Teel – there are no marks on her.’
Jaco brushed a strand of thin black hair away from Harra’s forehead.
‘If it is the same thing, we’re all dead already,’ said Jaco. ‘But I don’t think so. I think it’s something else. It’s as if the spirit falls out of them, somehow.’
