Fear The Reaper Read online

  ‘Cursed foe,’ muttered the general under his breath, careful not to catch her eye.

  The angel glanced at him. ‘Could I persuade you if I killed your foe?’ it asked. ‘Would that be your price?’

  She snorted. ‘The lord o’ rhetoric? He ain’t my foe, I’m his.’

  ‘Surely it must be both?’

  ‘I don’t have foes; I’m a bloody barmaid and cook. He calls me his foe cos I ignore him mostly, and I won’t sleep with Moss. In his eyes, that makes me in opposition to his entire army – which I guess it is, except I don’t give enough of a shit to call ’em much at all.’

  ‘What must I do to persuade you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, incredulous. ‘I’m going nowhere – certainly nowhere with you and certainly not over a bridge at the bloody edge of the world and into the cold hell where a mouthless demon lives. Fuck off.’

  The angel took a considered breath. ‘My duty does not permit that.’ It drew the massive sword and stepped back. ‘If you will not come, I must kill everyone in this village until you change your mind. You have been here for years. Eventually I will find someone you care for.’

  She stared at it long and hard, but her eyes betrayed the fact she believed it. ‘Bastard,’ she said eventually, quieter than before.

  AT DAWN THE world was remade in mist. The first light was dull and grainy through the uniform cloud, buildings loomed like the islands of some fey realm that haunted this one. Shell slipped out of the inn with barely a sound, an enormous green shawl wrapped around her body for warmth, a stuffed saddlebag and bedroll in her hands. The strange blackened marks on her wrists were covered by long, fingerless gloves. In daylight they looked nothing remarkable, not so sinister as the liquid blackness that seemed to writhe over her skin in the depths of night, but if she was leaving she wanted the marks hidden from the eyes of strangers.

  The angel was waiting for her – stock still in the centre of the village, on the low bank of the pond where the geese waited silently for day. During the rainy season, the river would rise far enough to subsume the pond and thousands of tiny silvery fish would slip into the world beyond. Until then they lived only to be prey for birds.

  She felt the angel’s eyes on her though it did not move an inch.

  Has it been there all night? she wondered. Do angels sleep?

  She turned her back on it and went to the stable. All five of the beasts within were awake and solemnly facing the wall, beyond which the angel stood. The general’s mule greeted her enthusiastically, nosing impertinently at her chest and neck until she produced a carrot she’d taken from the kitchen.

  The beast mollified, she slipped a blanket onto its back and then the bags. It looked a pitiful summation of her belongings, but for years now Shell had been careful to never own more than she could carry. The marks of the Voiceless on her skin had been enough for many to drive her off and though she had been here a long while now, she would never be one of them – never be certain of her place here.

  The mule allowed Shell to lead it outside, barely twitching its ears as it saw the angel. It was a prideful beast, she thought; possessing more dignity than most people she’d ever met. It had nothing but contempt for the general who owned it and consequently he never went near it except when he needed to travel. Often enough any journey would begin and end with him being chased by the vengeful mule after one slap too many. He’d not miss it, would think it only right that his foe had stolen his steed away – that his two enemies had at last joined forces.

  ‘Sneaking off without me?’ called a voice from behind her. ‘Shell – you wound me, love.’

  She sighed and turned to face Moss as the big soldier led his own steed around the stable; the tall warhorse laden with provisions and Moss’s armour. It was a powerful beast, brown with one white sock on its left foreleg and the scars of battle on its flanks. As insolent a creature as any horse she’d ever met, Shell preferred Horse to its owner. Similar in most respects, the horse at least didn’t love the sound of its own voice quite so much.

  ‘What makes you think you’re coming, Moss?’ she called. ‘I don’t even bloody know where we’re going.’

  ‘All the more reason for me to come too,’ he said with a grin. Moss was every inch a soldier – tall and muscular, his arms scarred, his battered face always twisted into a grimace or a smile. His sense of humour was just as twisted – his long pursuit of her affections seeming as much a joke with himself as anything, but she’d never understood exactly what he found so funny in all he did.

  ‘We travel to the ends of the world,’ the angel announced solemnly. ‘Across the great divide to the airless plains of dead gods.’

  ‘Reckon you’ll need my wit and wisdom then,’ Moss replied.

  The angel regarded him. ‘I have lived a thousand years – seen the sky burn and mountains crumble to dust. I am a warrior of the Knightly Host of the God and Guardian of the Seven Gates. What wisdom could you bring that I do not possess?’

  ‘None,’ Shell snapped. ‘He’s a damn fool whose wit’s appreciated only by goat-herds and the stupidest of soldiers.’

  ‘Angel of the word, you wound me twice!’ Moss cried, thumping one fist against his leather jerkin. ‘Muse of my army, soul of beauty – how could I fail to follow you on your quest?’

  ‘It’s not my bloody quest,’ she replied. ‘I’m being dragged on one against my will. This one’s not even told me exactly where we’re going, but I’d guess I’m little more than wolf-bait and so’s any mortal who comes with me.’

  ‘But still I must come. My heart would have it no other way and my wit’s sharp enough to deal with wolves.’

  ‘Your wit will not help with wolves,’ stated the angel. ‘They lack humour.’

  Moss nodded and came closer, slipping his long axe from the saddle as he did so. He held the weapon out towards the angel and it tilted its head sideways, seeing curved engravings on the head.

  ‘Wit,’ it read aloud, the angular foreign script that no one in the village could read apparently not a problem for one of the angelic host. ‘And you wear wisdom on your belt?’

  Moss beamed and slapped a meaty palm against the hilt of his sword. ‘The army o’ rhetoric’s always got its weapons close to hand.’

  ‘And you wish to come with us?’

  He shrugged. ‘Free world, ain’t it? You’re taking my love away with you, I’m following on too.’

  ‘Love?’ the angel asked, turning to Shell.

  She scowled. ‘He’s as daft as the general, only he thinks he’s in love with me rather than at war.’

  ‘Surely he cannot help who he falls in love with?’

  ‘Announced it the first damn day we met, he did – call that love? It’s foolishness, nothing more. An army of madmen they are.’

  ‘Driven mad,’ Moss beamed, ‘by love and longing. I write her poetry, angel – beauty in the most perfect script and she tosses it away without reading it. But I persist, one day I’ll have my prize.’

  ‘I can’t bloody read it!’ Shell snapped. ‘You’ve never learned to write any language I can read, you dumb ox.’

  Before Moss could respond, the air was torn apart by a jagged crack of thunder rolling across the village. Shell grimaced and ducked her head, eyes screwed shut as a gust of wind lifted the dust from the ground. The angel merely looked up, unaffected, and watched enormous faint black shapes passing overhead – indistinct through the clouds. In moments they had passed and the sky seemed to part in their wake, the pale blue of daytime forcing its way overhead as the sun illuminated the world.

  ‘It is time to leave,’ the angel announced. ‘The dragons of dawn have passed.’

  ‘Don’t have morning prayers to say?’ Moss asked, taking a short spear from his pack and handing it to Shell.

  It had a leaf blade as wide as her hand and twice as long; much used by the edge on it, but kept wickedly sharp. She gave him a questioning look, but took the weapon and stowed it on the mule. She had her hunti
ng bow in an oilskin sheath and knew Moss would have one too, but on a journey such as this she’d not complain about a weapon with a longer reach than her knife.

  ‘Prayers? I have nothing to ask of the God this morning,’ the angel said.

  ‘What about devotion?’

  ‘What of it?’

  Moss gave up. He offered Shell some imitation of a courtly bow, which was ignored, and set off towards the bridge, heading for the main road east. Horse sniffed at the angel’s wing as it passed, brushing the tip of one crisp white feather with a long pink tongue. The angel stared after it, apparently bemused.

  ‘Don’t worry, you get used to them,’ Shell advised wearily. ‘If not, you can always just kill them.’

  The angel blinked. ‘We must leave.’

  ‘Before I go anywhere,’ she said firmly, ‘I at least want to know your name.’

  ‘You would not be able to speak it,’ the angel replied. ‘Humans cannot.’

  ‘What do I call you then?’

  ‘Will Angel not suffice?’

  She shook her head. ‘That’ll only encourage Moss and it’s not a name anyway. I may not like you, but you’re a person of sorts and they all need names. Otherwise they’re just a thing to be bought and sold.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You don’t care?’

  The angel turned away and started off after Moss. ‘It only matters to you – choose as you will. I have been named several times in scripture but none matter unless granted by the God.’

  Shell bit back her first response and took a breath. ‘Fine, I’ll call you Ice to remind myself you’re a cold bastard. First time I forget that, I’ll likely end up dead.’

  ‘Ice is pure,’ the angel commented. ‘It is acceptable.’

  ‘Not the sort of ice I’m thinking of,’ Shell said darkly.

  The angel turned to face her, but if there was anger or incomprehension in that blank look, she couldn’t tell. Deciding it a victory of sorts, Shell walked on and refused to look at Ice as she passed.

  They crossed the slowly mouldering bridge and Shell found herself hugging her arms to her body as she went. She disliked crossing it, though it was still safe. There was something about the age hanging like creeper from its lichen-tinted stones that made her uncomfortable. The slight creak of its weathered, half-fossilised boards were nothing compared to that. Halfway across she paused and looked back.

  The village was still and quiet behind. Morning’s shroud was fading as trails of smoke started to rise from more chimneys, the blacksmith’s and baker’s already going by the time Shell had left the tavern. Her eyes picked out the small window of her room at the top of the tavern. Strangely, it didn’t stir much emotion inside her, leaving this home of sorts. There was apprehension at what lay ahead, but she’d been moving long enough to never feel as though she would stay anywhere forever.

  ‘Could’ve built my own house by now,’ she commented, as much to the ancient stones of the bridge as the angel walking behind her.

  ‘But you did not.’

  She shook her head. ‘I belong nowhere, why pretend otherwise?’

  The angel inclined its head and they continued on in silence aside from occasional comments from Moss on the sights they passed – inconsequential all; cows that reminded him of generals he’d once known, the age of the great oaks standing on a hillside. Fortunately, they were infrequent enough to not irritate greatly, only break up the hours of walking. If the man had stories of distant lands and battles he’d fought, adventures he’d got up to, he was saving them for a harder day of journeying than the first.

  During the morning, they stopped only to drink from a stream and attempt to shoot a rabbit for their supper. Both Moss and Shell missed, the rabbit darting into the long grass as their arrows fell wide. As they cursed their aim, Ice clapped its hands once with great finality, prompting a strange look from the mortals accompanying it. When they went to retrieve their arrows, the angel accompanied them and plucked the still-living rabbit from the grass near where it had disappeared. It held it out to Moss wordlessly, the creature rigid as though frozen with fear. Shell had to turn away when the soldier shrugged and broke its neck. She realised then she’d have preferred to eat dried biscuits or gone hungry than have it die. The rabbit had eluded them. It seemed cruel to then discover it had never had a chance; Ice’s power over the God’s creatures unnatural and out of place.

  The miles passed quickly on a level, chalky road and they camped for the night beside a deep blue lake, in which the angel ritually washed itself as the sun went down. The following day, they hitched a ride on the great makeshift rafts of logs being sent downriver to the Yellow City. The miles drifted steadily past to the sound of swifts and hunting kestrels – punctuated only by excited flurries of barking by the watchdogs as they flushed deer from the rush banks.

  An hour after dawn the next day, the river turned and they rejoined the road they had been on. Shell waved a brief farewell to the old man in charge as his barge, trailing the logs, slipped out of sight. They set off under a warm sun while the clouds thinned to nothing overhead. The roadside was scattered with wild flowers, tiny specks of yellow, blue and red amid the dry grass of the verge. Isolated humps of old walls rose here and there, the last traces of a forgotten time, just glimpses of their stones visible behind the long grasses and pale pink roses that grew wild over them.

  Most of the land was open savannah, the great logs having travelled a hundred miles from the colder east. In the distance they saw the passage of herds, mostly hidden in the haze of their kicked-up dust clouds. The heavy zip of insect wings accompanied them along the road; the lazy hum of bees and urgent dart of dragonflies proving a familiar, comforting sound to Shell’s ears. They encountered no one in those isolated parts, keeping to the abandoned highway for which the village’s ancient bridge had been built as it headed north-west.

  The first few days, Shell found herself in unfamiliar terrain. Her own journey through these parts, coming the other way, had been far longer and oblique. She had walked at random and begged or stole to keep herself alive, travelling eastwards for several seasons before circling back this way without any will or goal driving her journey. Unable to protest further at what the angel demanded, Shell was resolved not to care about where she knew they would end up – until weariness began to take its toll and travelling became more arduous.

  At the hottest point in the afternoon they came to a rise in the land, slowly ascending to the peak of a hump of ground from which they could see miles in every direction. The long grey gleam of a lake to the east caught Shell’s eye. The prospect of fish bigger than the brown trout and muddy-flavoured eels they’d had in the river sent a tantalising sparkle across her tongue, but then a muttered curse from Moss dragged her attention away.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Dead man walking,’ he growled, unshipping his bow.

  Shell followed where he was pointing down the road ahead of them and saw an indistinct shape a hundred yards ahead, moving slowly towards them.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, shading her eyes to try and see better. ‘I can’t make much out.’

  ‘Aye, I’m sure. Could be a beggar in some tattered cloak I suppose, but it ain’t. Can’t you smell ‘im?’

  Shell flinched at that, instinctively covering her mouth for fear of spores, but Moss made a dismissive gesture. There was a faint odour on the breeze; old dust and mould that tickled horribly at the back of her throat and now that she noticed it, the smell of a diaspore was unmistakable.

  ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get nothin’ this far. Spores don’t drift far, but the stink of a man rotting from the inside out – that tends to linger on the wind.’

  ‘We’re still downwind of him.’

  ‘Aye. If he don’t move off the road, I’ll take him down.’

  Shell looked around at the savannah surrounding them. She couldn’t see any diaspores walking the grasslands nearby, but you always heard stories of people bei
ng woken as something crept into their tent.

  She’d had a fright herself, years back when she first came this way; camping out at night when she’d not found anywhere better to sleep. Lions and wolves had been the true danger, she knew, but she’d been careful to find herself a long fallen tree as shelter. At dawn she’d woken to a strange silence, one that had frightened her so much she didn’t dare look outside her tent for a long while. When she did, she almost wept with both fear and relief.

  Caught on a large jutting branch of the tree, barely five yards from where she sat, had been a small humped shape like a hunched man in a sack. The diaspore was still and silent, caught fast on the branch and trapped there, apparently content to wait out the branch’s hold in as much as it could be seen to think. She’d covered her mouth then too, irrespective of the fact the breeze was behind her, and it had been an effort not to just abandon her camp and run.

  ‘Why do you wait?’ Ice called to them, having moved a little further ahead while the other two admired the view.

  Moss pointed.

  ‘He is infected,’ the angel agreed. ‘Will you kill him?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ Moss said. ‘I’d prefer not to waste the arrow myself, but I ain’t going near him that’s for sure.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything, Ice?’ Shell asked, the name feeling strange on her tongue. She had to remind herself it was better than calling it “angel” but it felt awkward and wrong somehow.

  ‘You want me to kill him?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, perhaps – but it’s still a man isn’t it? Or a woman maybe. Right now I mean. Is there no hope for them?’

  ‘There is always hope in the presence of the God,’ Ice replied.

  ‘You can heal him?’

  The angel gave her a curious look. ‘I am imbued with the spirit of the God, a mortal vessel of divine will in this mortal realm.’

  Shell hesitated, irritation welling. ‘So that’s a yes, is it?’

  ‘The spores will obey me; they are subject to the God’s laws just as you are.’