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Under the Outlands
There was a tug on the pulling line again. Marchant felt it even in his hazy, half-waking languor. It was tiny, but it was clear and sharp, a stinging thorn on the edge of his kias.
Not good.
He’d been trying to sever the connection for months now, completely ineffectually.
He sat up on the edge of the sleeping-ledge, feet firmly on the floor and elbows on his knees, hands shoved through his hair.
Break, damn you, he thought. Just...break. He visualised a knife, gleaming gold and edged with fire, and brought it down through the image of the pulling line he held in his mind, not-quite-visible to his everyday sight but completely visible and glowing in his kias-augmented vision.
The imaginary line bent under the imaginary knife, thinned, stretched...and sprang back into place like a rubber band.
It was no good. It was too strongly fixed.
He let go and gave a single, cut-off sob and stopped more sound emerging with a stifling gasp.
The small, stone-walled room was cool, warm enough under the blanket he’d been given, but now he was upright the drop in temperature had brought him to full waking. Waking was not a comfortable place to be. He’d lost count of the days, but he thought he’d been here going on for eighteen months. More than five hundred days, anyway.
“God!” The curse exploded out of him as his fingers tightened and pulled at his over-long hair with frustration, although his eyes were screwed shut. Why couldn’t he cut the line? It shouldn’t even still be there. The person he had the original connection with was dead. He’d felt him die. The line shouldn’t still exist. It certainly shouldn’t be connected to the dead man’s brother.
He hadn’t known what he was getting into when he’d originally started working with Arthur Webber, that was for sure. He rubbed his hands over his face and stood, taking the handful of steps across the flagged floor to the door leading to the small washroom and sanitary facilities. He poured a little water from the pitcher into the bowl and cupped his hands to splash it on his face and then dipped the flannel in, wringing it out, and putting it on the back of his neck. As usual, it was extremely cold and woke him entirely. He used the lavatory, still unable to work out how it didn’t smell vile without a water flush or soil to sprinkle on top. Then he washed his hands with the small piece of soap he had left. He made a mental note to ask for some more.
It wasn’t that they were keeping him in poor conditions. He had food, water, clean clothes, frequent if irregular exercise. But he was confined. He couldn’t leave and go home. Plus, no-one would help him cut the line.
The living conditions were different to anywhere he’d ever stayed before. It was better than the Western Front and he supposed the poor bastards he’d left behind there would be grateful to exchange places with him if they were ever offered the opportunity. He’d be pleased to swap with them now, though. He’d had enough.
He’d been corresponding with Webber since he’d bumped into him in London a few weeks before the Coronation. So, nearly ten years. Literally bumped into him, in the hall of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in St James. Marchant had been walking as he read the paper—a terrible habit—and Webber had been doing the same thing but in the opposite direction down the carpeted hallway. They had collided head-on and then both stepped back in surprise, muttered an apology, and Marchant had been about to continue on his way when Webber had suddenly raised his head like a pointer taking scent. With his head cocked to one side in enquiry, he invited Marchant to take a drink with him in the library.
He’d presented Marchant with a utterly unfeasible tale of mysterious books and implausible magic that Marchant had rejected out of hand, and then—after glancing around cautiously to check whether they had company—conjured a small but perfectly formed violet flame in the palm of his hand. Marchant’s rejection quickly turned into fascination and by the end of a week not only were they sleeping together but Marchant could produce his own burgundy-coloured flame.
After six months the sex had tailed off. But the magic became stronger as Marchant used it; and when Webber left London for his family farm, they’d continued to correspond and swap techniques. Occasional meetings for bed sport and trying new spells had meant that over the years they’d developed a visceral connection that Marchant could feel every time he brought the other man to mind.
Webber stayed at home when the war came, and Marchant took himself off to France with the Sunday Post. Their correspondence continued intermittently. Webber was getting more and more invested in a book he’d come across on his travels. Pulling energy from a ‘border’ that he said had infinite energy. Learning ever more complex spells. Marchant stopped being interested at that point. It sounded insane. Letters were difficult because of the censor, but Webber intimated that he was exploring a way to make a weapon that would end the war. The one time Marchant managed to visit him when he was back in England in 1916, he looked almost crazed, his previously immaculate grooming tattered around the edges, his hair wild, and his moustaches untrimmed. Marchant hadn’t been able to get much sense out of him about his work with the energy.
After that, he’d felt the link between them becoming stronger and the energy becoming brighter, like an electric light running from a really good generator. If Marchant tried, he could take some of the energy to power his own minor excursions into spell-craft, making lights and suchlike...and he could feel when Webber drew Marchant’s own energy back down the link to power whatever he was doing. Marchant wasn’t that bothered by it. He had enough going on up to his armpits in mud and blood and bandages and trying to bang out copy that would simultaneously get past the censors and wasn’t so bland that the paper would sack him. He started to feel that the war had been going on for ever and that the future stretched out in front of him as an interminable shattered landscape of broken men and mechanised death.
One night in spring 1917, though, all that changed. He was in his bed at the Hotel St James when he felt Webber start to pull from him. Luckily, he was already lying down. The sensation got stronger and stronger and he began to feel sick and faint. Then abruptly, the sensation became painful, a sharp, spiking pain in his abdomen. He couldn’t bear it any longer and he tugged back. Like he would on a rope if the man tied in front was going too fast. Instead of easing off though, Webber continued to pull, harder and harder.
Marchant found himself on the floor, gasping with pain, barely coherent. Eventually he gathered himself and began to pull back more firmly, taking back what was his. An observer would have had no idea what was taking place—an unseen battle for dominance on the etheric plane. Marchant got a small advantage when Webber faltered for some reason and he continued to pull. To pull and pull and pull. Webber was much stronger than Marchant remembered. The energy seemed unending, flowing bright and strong into his body. He found himself feeling sick and faint and overwhelmed for the opposite reason than he had before...it was simply too much. Too much. He had to get rid of it. So, he pushed and twisted and started to push the energy out of himself as well as accepting the flow from Webber. It was now flowing into him on its own, he wasn’t having to pull at all.
He realised he was pushing the energy into the mythical border Webber had spoken of when a sheet of something like heat haze slowly appeared and started to glow. He lay on the floor unable to move and watched the shimmering haze grow from a small, almost invisible patch to a circle the size of a church doorway. As his struggle to contain the energy flowing into him from Webber continued, as the power flowed through him and out again, the patch grew brighter and brighter and brighter. Webber started to pull back from him and Marchant fought it. He wasn’t going to let Webber drain him like that again. He pulled and tugged sharply, and physically rolled away from Webber’s pull, toward the light.
There was a clattering bang like a shell going off and an animal screaming. It wasn’t him making that high-pitched noise, but he was certainly shouting. He’d rolled right into the border, into the light. It hurt. God, it hurt. He’d never felt anything like it. The pain went all the way down to his marrow and he rolled over onto all fours on the carpet and started retching.
It took him a while to realise he wasn’t kneeling on the carpet at all. He was on sandy, gritty ground, dry except for the bile soaking in where he had vomited. The animal screaming was still there, but he was returning to himself and had stopped making noise. There were other people shouting. He seemed to be the centre of a circle of people, all milling about him. The extra power flooding into him had stopped, although he could still feel Webber at the end of the line.
Someone said something in a liquid language he didn’t understand and a pair of hands under his armpits pulled him to his feet. They weren’t particularly gentle getting him up, but when he started retching again, they eased him down carefully. He didn’t pay much attention to what was going on around him until he’d finished retching again and lay stretched out on the dry sand.
By then, the shouting around him had quietened a little, although there were still a lot of legs he could see through his half-closed eyelids. He didn’t open his eyes any further, taking the time to gather himself. The feet he could see were mostly clad in low, comfortable looking boots with trousers that tucked into them. There were no uniform boots or puttees that he could see. The colours of the clothes were muted browns and greens and blues. No skirts.
At that point, someone poked him with the toe of one of the boots and said something in that lilting language. He flinched before he could stop himself and whoever it was crouched beside him and put a hand on his shoulder to push him backward. The hovering nausea and dizziness returned as he propped himself up on his elbows and opened his eyes properly.
He was in the centre of a ring of faces staring down at him.
The person crouching beside him said something to him in that music-like tongue he didn’t understand and then stopped and looked at him for a moment. Marchant felt a slight touch on his energy field and then, after a pause, the man said slowly, in English, “Who are you? What are doing here?”
Marchant dragged the sleeve of his pyjamas roughly across his mouth, trying to get rid of the disgusting taste of vomit. “Peter Marchant. I’m Peter Marchant. And I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He scrambled to his feet, followed by his questioner, and the circle around him opened out slightly as the watchers took a step back.
The animal he had heard screaming screamed again, further away this time. A couple of the men in the crowd turned to look in the direction it came from and one said something to the other before they looked at him again. He felt a sharp tug to his centre, where he could still feel the connection to Webber.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Who are you? Where is this? What happened?”
The person who had been crouching beside him looked to an older woman who was at the front of the crowd. “Malach?” he said. She stepped forward.
“You are in the undercaves of the Frem,” she said.
* * * *
THAT HAD BEEN EIGHTEEN months ago.
He had been treated with courtesy, but it was clear to him that the Frem, whoever they were, were keeping him prisoner. He had done his best to learn that bell-toned, liquid language of theirs, despite everyone he spoke to being able to speak to him in English. He had asked about it, early on, and Lin, who he had most contact with, had looked him with a raised eyebrow and said, “It is in your kias. Anyone can touch your kias and the words become clear to us. Is it not so with your people?”
Marchant had shaken his head. “No. And kias...you mean the magic? The energy?”
Lin nodded.
“I only know of one other person who even knows it exists and he is on the other end of this line that I can’t break. And tried to drain me.”
Lin nodded again. “It is an extraordinarily bad thing, the line. No good things ever come of a permanent connection. Severing it is almost impossible now it has been used for such strong work. We cannot break it safely for you without him here and we only cross to the Delfland in dire crisis.”
Marchant took from this that his situation was not a dire crisis. “What happens to me, then?” he had asked Lin. “What do I do?”
Lin looked at him almost sympathetically. “You wait.” He stopped walking and turned to face Marchant. They were walking their regular circle around some of the inner halls where there seemed to be a market and places that sold food. It was crowded and humid and warm. “You wait, and because his kias is bleeding through you and into the shimmer, eventually he will die, and the line will die with him.” He was very matter of fact.
Marchant swallowed. “He’ll die?”
“Yes. His kias will eventually run out.” Lin looked at him sternly. “This is why using kias is not a game, as you have been using it. And Webber.” He paused. “Well. From what you say, about the books and ‘magic spells’, Webber seems to have been using not only his own kias but pulling from the shimmer on a regular basis. And of course, from you. Without your consent.” He looked angry. “This is not done. It is dangerous. As you have found out.”
Marchant swallowed. “I didn’t know.”
“No. And that is why you are still alive.” He looked at his feet, drew a pattern in the dirt ground with his toe, and then scuffed it out again before looking up at Marchant again. “Malach is fair. It is the job of the Ternants to protect the shimmer. If too much is drawn from it, the barrier between the worlds becomes thin. Things can cross. Carnas.” He bit his lip and dropped his eyes again. “You heard one, I think, when you first arrived. You do not want them in your world.” He swallowed. “They are bad enough here.”
“Carnas?” Marchant repeated.
“Yes. Carnas. They feed on kias. They drain it when they can. They are drawn to the shimmer, but they cannot pull energy from it. They can only draw from people. Your people and my people. I know not why. But they are dangerous. Sometimes the Ternants use them to protect the shimmer...the Ternants are charged with keeping the shimmer safe from harm. They monitor it. They are immensely powerful.
“So, they could tell when Arthur... When Webber—” He wasn’t going to think of him as Arthur anymore, “—when Webber tried to pull all the kias from me and I pulled it back and it went into the shimmer?”
“Yes. The carnas sense that kind of manipulation of kias. As do some of the Ternants. Some of them are exceptionally old and skilled. That’s why they were there when you breached the shimmer. And you heard the carnas calling. They brought it with them.” He turned to start walking again. “If it had been one of our people who had done what you had done, then they would have let the carnas have you. You were lucky.”
Marchant swallowed. “Let the carnas have me?”
“Yes.” Lin swallowed too. “They like to maul their prey as they drain them. They usually bite out the throat as they feed.”
Marchant was silent and after a few moments, Lin continued. “What you did, when Webber tried to use your kias for whatever he was doing, reversed the way the line works. You permanently changed it by the strength of your response. He had taken so much kias from the shimmer when he started working that he was incandescent with it. You took all that from him in the course of defending yourself. Kias is now trickling constantly from him to you and from you into the shimmer, because you opened another line to it to get rid of all the kias. Your system couldn’t hold it.”
Marchant nodded. “I can feel it. But whatever I do, I can’t shut it off.”
Lin nodded too. “Yes. I can see it. It was created with such force, you were in such a panic, that there is nothing that can be done without Webber here.”
“Why can’t I go back and fix it from there?”
Lin shook his head. “They...we...don’t trust you. You were using kias that you did not understand. You created a gate in the shimmer. I have never heard of one person doing that by themselves. Even the Ternants work together when they send hunters through. I think it scared them. You and Webber scared them. They aren’t sure of your purpose. With you here and Webber there, you cannot work together again.”
Marchant nodded glumly. He could see their point. “I wasn’t doing anything. But Webber told me he was creating a weapon to stop the war.”
“A weapon of kias strong enough to stop a war without doing catastrophic damage to the shimmer is extremely unlikely. If he has created one or thinks he has, then there is even more reason not to send you home to support him. And now...with his kias draining into you and thence into the shimmer...you can see how Malach wishes you to stay here until he is no longer a problem.”
Marchant could see. He didn’t like it, but he could see.
He spent his time learning the language, Fremish, and getting Lin to teach him how to use his kias properly. In return Lin picked his brains about life in the Delfland. He was never allowed anywhere unescorted and Lin wasn’t allowed to take him outside the undercaves. He understood the Frem lived largely underground. Outside their caves was the Outland. The Outland was mostly desert as far as he understood it. Very hot or very cold. There were plants and animals, including the carnas, that were adapted for the environment, but it was more comfortable for the Frem to reside deep in the mountains. Some of them never went outside at all. The young people slept in barrack-like dormitories and family groups had sets of rooms together. Almost every adult was part of a family group of some kind or another as far as he could make out. It wasn’t clear if they married in a traditional sense and Marchant wasn’t going to ask. Lin mentioned that he was in the dormitories and had no family yet and he left it at that.
The Outlands were on the edge of the Inner Hills and the Inner Hills were not somewhere the Frem went. There was some sort of battle for territory over the Inner Lands that they had exempted themselves from by moving to the Outlands and taking on oversight of the shimmer. That was all that Marchant was able to make out. It seemed unnecessarily complicated, but he supposed that if he tried to explain Imperial politics to Lin, Lin would be equally at a loss.
One day, the kias coming to him from Webber became so faint that he thought it was gone. He hammered on the door of his room furiously, shouting for Lin. Lin came and looked at him with eyes half shut and then said, “I’m going to get Malach,” and disappeared. He returned a few moments later with Malach and another person Marchant recognised as one of the Ternants.
“It’s fading,” he said, in a panicked voice. “What do I do?” There had been some suggestion that if the line to the shimmer was not closed off at the same time as the line draining Webber, Marchant’s own kias would start to drain into the shimmer in the same way.
“Sit,” Malach ordered. Marchant sat on the bed, abruptly.
The three of them hovered over him in a semicircle with Malach in the centre. She withdrew a green stone on a leather thong from the folds of cloth around her neck and held it in the palm of her hand. “Now, please,” she said. The other two were silent with half-closed eyes and Marchant was aware of kias flowing from them to her. “Be still, Marchant,” Malach ordered him. “We will try and sort this out once and for all.”
There was a period of kias shifting and swirling around him that he didn’t really follow, and he was aware of his link to Arthur...Webber he had trained himself to call him now...fading and becoming more and more faint. It paused. Then it stopped. The link draining into the shimmer stopped at the same time and Malach made some sort of tying off gesture that seemed to bind everything together.
He sighed in relief. It was over. He could go home.
Then he realised that far from stopping, the flow of kias had resumed more strongly, and his link to the shimmer had reopened. He looked at Malach. “What’s happening?”
She lowered the stone, clutched in her hand. “He has passed his end of the line on to someone else. I think, a family member.” She shut her eyes again and grasped at the stone. Lin and the third woman were silent as she sorted out what she could feel. “Yes. The first man is gone. The one with the strong kias, who stole from you and from the shimmer. But he has tied the line to a sibling.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I am sorry, Marchant. His death should have been an end to it. I don’t know how he has done it, but the line now links you to the new person. I cannot untie you without causing you harm.” Her eyes were grey, sympathetic, but unbending. “If the other person’s kias keeps flowing to you and you don’t have that out line, it will hurt you, so although I could tie that, it would be wrong to do so.” She tucked the stone back in the neckline of her loose clothing matter-of-factly. “We must go on as before. This one has no knowledge of kias or pulling. It won’t take long and then you will be free and can return to your Delfland.”
“What do you mean ‘it won’t take long?’” Marchant stood up, toe to toe with her and she stepped back to give him room.
“Eventually his kias will drain through you into the shimmer and he will die. Then you will be free.”
Marchant looked at her. “He’ll die?”
“Yes. As his kias drains. Was I not clear?” She was annoyed with him.
“You were clear. I just don’t like it. I remember Webber’s brother. Matthew. He doesn’t deserve to die because Arthur and I were playing with things we didn’t understand.”
She looked at him. “If he doesn’t use kias the drain will be very small. He will live a long time.” She turned and swept out, her companion following her.
Lin lingered, shutting the heavy door behind them in the stone archway, and sat on the bed next to Marchant as Marchant sank down again. He put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “I am sorry, Marchant. Peter.” He put his hand on Marchant’s back tentatively. “I did not know this was a thing that could happen. I am sorry.”
Marchant let himself take a tiny bit of comfort from the hand between his shoulder blades. It was an exceedingly long time since he’d been touched by anyone.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“We wait, I suppose. Unless you can cut this line yourself?”
Marchant visualised giving it an experimental tweak. Nothing happened except a flex and swell of kias toward him. If he messed with it too much, he was going to end up draining the poor kid quicker than was already happening. He shook his head. “No. I can’t.”
“Then we wait.”
* * * *
HE EXISTED FOR A COUPLE of months on a day to day basis, staying in his cell, meditating to learn to control his kias, trying to cut the line draining into him from Webber’s brother and the line draining out of him into the shimmer, and failing at both those things. The people he met on his supervised perambulations and trips to the baths were kind, polite, smiling. And purposefully distant. He wasn’t really lonely, because he had never been a lonely person. If he had been though, he would have been desolate. The only person who talked to him about anything in depth was Lin. And Lin wasn’t always there. He didn’t say where he went, except for ‘Malach is sending me out’ and Marchant didn’t ask.
He was aware of small changes in the energy coming through him. Matty was learning to use kias. Maybe not even consciously using it, but whatever he was doing was making the link between them stronger. He wasn’t drawing energy from Marchant—Marchant didn’t know if that was even possible—so he must be drawing from the shimmer itself, using it and then letting it flow on to Marchant and thus through him, back to the shimmer. That wasn’t good, but Marchant had no way of warning him.
Lin had a few days away at one point and came back dishevelled and grim looking. It had coincided with an enormous swell in energy from Matty and a push-pull coming down the line.
“What did you do?” Marchant asked him, the minute he stepped into the cell. “Where did you go? I felt it, Lin! You did something to Matty!”
Lin was silent for a moment, then let out a breath as if he’d made a decision.
“Not deliberately,” he said. “There was a weakness discovered in the shimmer.” He shook his head as Marchant opened his mouth to speak. “I don’t know why.” He stepped toward the bed and collapsed to sit on Marchant’s neatly tucked blankets. “A carnas nearly managed to break through. They sent me to stop it.” He put his head in his hands. “There’s something going on, Peter. I don’t know what. I don’t know why they are keeping you here. It’s not altruism. There must be a reason. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
It was Marchant’s turn to put his hand on Lin’s back. “I don’t understand at all, Lin. I didn’t think it was possible for the line to transfer to Arthur’s brother. And if he’s not using kias, how can there be a weakness in the shimmer?”
“Webber transferred the line to his brother. That much I know. There’s no other way for that to have happened. Whether it was intentional is impossible to say without speaking to the man. And I didn’t have a chance, not properly.”
“But you did see him? How is he?”
“As far as I could see he was healthy. There was another man with him there, who seemed to know a little about the gate and the shimmer. I didn’t have much time with them. But they looked well enough.” He rubbed his hands over his face and looked up at Marchant. “I closed the gate. I don’t know who was trying to open it, or what was going on. There was a carnas. Someone must have tried to send a carnas through and that would have been terrible for your people.” He drew his hair back from his face with his fingers and sighed. “I need to sleep. I came as soon as I could; I knew you’d have felt it.” Marchant realised that Lin’s shoulders were wet. He must have come the moment he’d got back.
“Go and sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
