Turned

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I left Haven in the manor, killing imp-Turned with his flying stick.  The coward feared for his life and thought it still worth saving despite the loss of everything else, hope included.

Anger powered my steps out of the manor grounds.  Despite knowing what Bent was I still couldn’t believe he’d killed all those people.  It was such a wicked thing to do that it was shame that drove me to search him out now for how could I, in good conscience, continue my relationship with him?  I’d kill him.  I’d bloody well kill him.

I’d thought we could be friends, thought I was finally beginning to trust him, but not now.  Not any longer.

In killing the Neverens he’d destroyed our only chance to protect the city.  I should’ve known better than to have trusted a Turned.  The bastard had let me return to Never under a false illusion.  He’d let me chance everything knowing I was on my own.  He’d set me up for a fall.

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There were figures thronging around the manor, uncertain and anxious, and they looked at me like they thought I knew what to do.  Captain Tankready’s shock return to the city, and the battle he brought with him, had unsettled them, chased them from their homes and they were coming to the one place they thought could protect them.

“Go home,” I shouted at them but they never moved.  “Go home, bolt your doors fast and pray for a quick end to your miserable lives.”

I didn’t know how the battle was going but there were sounds of a continuing struggle coming from the south.  Every now and then I would hear the clear sounding ring of metal, the monstrous shriek of a fallen Turned and the screams and rushed orders of the city watch desperately trying to act professionally.  They weren’t a trained fighting unit and I guessed they were losing the fight. Fortune didn’t favour the bold.

I’d left Tambroite Manor with no help and me, alone, could bring nothing to the battle.

Save utter despair.

A shadow slipped down a wall and when I looked next a solid thin line of black stood close to me.  “If your mission is to kill me then hurry up and do it,” I said, echoing a conversation I’d had with Bent many weeks ago.  Bent the killer of giants, the destroyer of hope.

The Turned walked with me.  “You travel with the General?” it asked of me.

“I don’t know, do I?” I supposed I should’ve killed the Turned but I’d bloodlust for only one.  Smidgen better not intervene.

“You’re the Blade?”

“S’right,” I spat.

“I’m Drawn.  I need to see the General.”

“General?  I don’t know no General.”

“I need to see the General.”

“You lack ears?  I said I don’t know no General.”  I took an anxious look ahead.  More people gravitated towards us and they looked uptight, angry.  “Make way,” I shouted at them and waved at them to move, to stand down.  They were hunch shouldered, had rudimentary weapons drawn.  They had broomsticks, shovels, long iron poles, and they came bearing down towards us.  “Put your sticks away,” I growled, forgetting the company I walked with, the reason for their agitation.  “Get out the gods damn way, all of you.”

Silently they moved off the streets.  I still commanded respect.  Maybe if I told the bad Turned to go away they would too.

“The General will want to see me,” said Drawn, ignorant of the furore he had caused.

“Regardless of how you phrase it I still don’t know no General.”

Unperturbed, Drawn said, “I have a message for him.  They come sooner than expected.”

I stopped suddenly, “Listen piss-wick, I can’t help you.  Even if I could I wouldn’t.  I despise what you are and I rue the day I ever put faith in one of your kind.  I hate you; understand that, I hate Turned.  Hell, I should let the locals have at you with their sticks and poles and press you flat to the ground like a worm.”  I realised that, in my anger, I’d been talking to his midriff and, with great composure, I tilted my head back and looked upon Drawn for the very first time.

He, like Bent, was black like a stub of charcoal; only Drawn was thin with it and tall, really tall.  He had been stretched to an unbelievable length, so too his face, his features.  His eyes were long, elliptical, his nose proboscis like, his ears stretched to black wands, pointy and painful and as black as night.  This Turned had been physically drawn out to a point just before snapping and it was a peculiar thing to look at for the longer I stared the more detail I noticed.  I thought he was smiling at me.  A thin v-shaped grimace, barely discernible in all the narrow black lines of his face, surfaced.

“Are you smiling at me?”

“I’ve travelled a long time to be here.”

“A simple yes or no would’ve sufficed.  What is it with Turned?”

“But I have travelled a long time to be here.”

“I’m not disputing that.”

“What are they doing?” Drawn enquired, towering above the quarter dividing walls looking south.

Being a short ape I couldn’t see what intrigued him but I could hear the roar as the first of the planet-stones was being rolled out.  Bannin must have won the fracas, must have Tankready safe.  Against all the odds, probably because of Smidgen and Bent, he’d beaten back the Turned.  “They’re getting ready for war,” I replied.  “The stones will help.”

“What do they do?”

There were four planet-stones, massive circular stones that, in times of crisis, were rolled out and placed across the four gates of the city, sealing the citizens in.  “They keep the bad things out,” I said.  A loud bang echoed through the empty city streets as a planet-stone rolled languidly into place.  Bannin was sealing the city.

One stone down, three to go.

“Good for keeping men out, but not Turned.”  Drawn appeared to sniff at the air.  Did he sense something I couldn’t?  Had he feral senses?

Thud, the second rolled into its predetermined position.  In all my days living in the city I’d never known the stones to be used.  What times were these to be alive in?  What terrible, terrible times.

“You and you’re damned kind.  Tell me, Drawn, how do I kill something that won’t die?”

Drawn bowed his long thin head towards me and a glint of morning light refracted off his sad, hollow eyes.  There was depth in his eyes, unfathomable, deeper than the coldest galaxy and, just like looking at a body of water or the crackling heart of a fire I could never tire of looking into them.  “With tenacity,” he said conspiratorially and suddenly blinked, severing the hypnotic link.

I was beginning to like Drawn, and I thought Smidgen got attached to others quickly.  I’d even teased him about his readiness to like people.  Oh the hypocrisy.

Perhaps my warmth to this Turned was because, at this perspicuous moment, with the reverberating thud of the third planet-stone rolling home, there was only it and I.  My friends were elsewhere.  Safe, I hoped, but elsewhere.

“Tenacity I got.”

The fourth planet-stone never made its site and we were showered with fragmented bits of it.  The Turned wagon of the Brazmen Circus had arrived and something on board had attacked the stone, all ten tonne of it.

I scrambled up the wall of Mirty’s Bake house and pulled myself up onto the roof.  Smaller parts of the planet-stone were still falling, making grit in the snow where it settled.

I was looking at the west gate and thought I could see people, small like beetles, running in panic before a wagon that was heading east.

“Ate Street,” I despaired.  “It’s heading towards Ate Street.”  I half slid, half jumped down off the roof.  “Who’s in charge of the wagon, do you know?”

“Hoolivard the Bold.  Untested.”

“Untested or not he’s heading towards Ate Street.  I can’t let him near the warrens.”

“I’ll come with you.  You know where the General is.”

I didn’t argue with Drawn, just ran as fast as I could through the streets.  I couldn’t let anything bad happen to the warrens.  They were beautiful, happy lithe things and they were delicate as gossamer.  They’d need protecting.  They’d need me.

Sweat broke upon my face and neck and I stopped at a crossroad looking this way and that.  “Where is it, Drawn?  Where’s the wagon?”  I didn’t want to lose sight of it.

Drawn looked over the walls.  “Can’t see it.”

“What?”

“It’s heading towards us.”

A bang and crash and the wagon passed through the wall nearest us.  Spinning brick tumbled through the air and I coughed at the clogging in my throat and blinked the dust from my eyes.  The cart sped past us and I could hear the gibbering and howling of its occupants.  Hoolivard the Bold waved his myriad arms in the air and as I stood and watched dumbfounded they doubled in length and groped at a passing building.

“The wagon’s going for the tower at the centre of the city.”

My friends Smidgen, Rauper and Nice were there, so too Bent.  Priority changed I headed at speed back in the direction we’d just come from.  “I know a short cut.  Can you jump walls?”

“I can keep up with you.”

As I ran I pulled my sword out and lunged at a wall.  I scrambled over the top of it, hampered by my blade, and dropped down into the street beyond.  Drawn could do more than keep up as he was there, waiting, ahead of me.

“Next one,” I spurted.  “Get over the next one.”

We hit the wall at the same time.  Drawn slid effortlessly over it, long seconds later my ungainly form still straddled the top.  In my desperation to reach my friends before the cart I slipped, grazed my chin on the brick and, cursing loudly, finally pulled myself over.  I landed in a heap on the other side.

“We’re too late,” Drawn realised and I looked up and watched as the wagon sped towards the tower.

It never slowed and the creatures that powered it, once white horses now crooked and grey and broken, hacked towards the bell tower without fear.  They hit the main doors of The Eagle and the Rose with force, concertinaing the flesh of their bodies and that which they had dragged behind them.  The wagon buckled, Turned were thrown out and lethal fragments splintered, soared through the air in all directions.

I covered my face, waited for the shrapnel to finish falling before I straightened up again.

I couldn’t see Smidgen, Rauper, Nice or anyone else and I looked for them with diminishing hope as a bit more of the tower broke away and shattered on the ground.

I heard Drawn say, “Perhaps you should linger,” but I needed to find my friends and so I set off across the plaza, through the blinding dust of the settling wreckage.

There were cracking noises coming from somewhere ahead of me, suggesting parts of the destroyed outside wall of the tower hadn’t stopped moving yet.

“Smidgen, Rauper, Nice,” I shouted but it was deathly quiet around me and no one yelled back.

Snow clouds formed in the sky and the morning turned cold and dark.

“Smidgen,” I called out and I whipped at the area ahead of me with my sword as if clearing a path.  Despoiled snow lay in heaps around the tower and more fluttered down.  This was fresh snow and it was settling on my shoulders, forearms and hood.  “Smidgen,” I called again and still no one answered.

The front of the tower groaned and a bit more of the wall collapsed, burying the abominable horses that had plunged headfirst into it.  They continued to struggle as I could hear the metal of their shoes clanging on the rubble on top of them.

“Somebody answer me,” I moaned, and the arm wriggling abhorrence that was Hoolivard the Bold pulled himself up out of the wreckage.

“You smell nice,” he said and made a grab for me.  More Turned emerged from the ruined wagon, and those thrown wide in the accident made it back towards Hoolivard by crawling on their hands, walking, or any other means their broken anatomies dictated.

One had double-hinged legs so that first it walked backwards, then forwards, then back again whilst another threw its tongue at objects with which to leverage itself closer.  The Golem was a mad architect.

I moved just slightly but enough for Hoolivard to miss and he made another play straightaway.  This time he hit me and one of his writhing arms pulled taut across my gut and lifted me up so that I flailed like a toy above him and his bastard Turned.  He squeezed hard and I couldn’t breathe and I gulped for air, then, just as it felt as if my head would burst, I was dropped and fell like a stone into snow.

“I won’t pop you yet Flendin.  It is Flendin, isn’t it? ”

I coughed and spluttered; a line of spit dangled from my mouth and I groped for my sword which had fallen some distance away from me.  My hand touched the hilt and I pulled it close to me.  I heard the blade sigh as it cut through the air.

“In the building, all of you.  Hurry up, we have things to kill.”  Hoolivard ushered the Turned into The Eagle and the Rose.  Those poor injured Neverens wouldn’t stand a chance against Turned.  They’d be massacred.

I lashed out where I sat on the cold wet snow, managed to clip Hoolivard on the shin and he laughed at me thinking that I couldn’t hurt him.  I hit him for a second time, the cut deeper, and he yelped and came at me.

One of his pink arms snaked out, fixed around my throat, lifted me up and squeezed.  My world became a place of indistinct shadows and strange shapes as my vision became fuzzy and I knew that I was close to death.  I hadn’t one clear thought save to breathe and that I couldn’t do and involuntarily I raised my sword and again he knocked it from my languid grasp.

“I’ll kill you now,” Hoolivard spat the words out.  “I shouldn’t touch you, but the temptation burns in balls of anguish behind my blind eyes.  I want to pop you.”

There was a whine in my ears, constant and high pitched, as all my veins were tourniquet.  This is it, I thought, I am going to die.

“Flendin,” a familiar voice called my name.

I tried to scream but couldn’t.  I gave in to the pain behind my bulging eyes and my legs twitched and kicked like a dead mans as I was held in the air by my throat alone.

“Flendin,” I heard my name called for a second time, the voice was loud, booming and angry.  Smidgen appeared giant mace in hand, and he hit Hoolivard as hard as he had hit anything before.

The Turned dropped me immediately and, injured, he rushed inside the tower.  The door slammed shut behind him.

“No,” I called Smidgen back.  “Don’t give chase.  Help me up,” I bid.  A rush of blood filled my head and I felt dizzy now, and sick and too weak to walk.  Oh boy, how my throat burnt.

Drawn reared up beside me and, mistaking him for one of Hoolivard’s Turned, Smidgen hit him.  Being a Turned of miniscule density, Drawn was sent flying backwards and stuck, like a line of black, to the side of the tower.

“Pull him off,” I said croakily, pointing at where Drawn landed.  I was barely able to speak.  My throat was so sore and stung whenever I tried to swallow.  It throbbed with pain like a living pulse of agony.  “He’s looking for the General.  He means us no harm.  Get him down.  Get him down.”

Smidgen tugged a dazed Drawn off the tower and threw him over a shoulder; next he scooped me up and carried me in his powerful arms back towards The Moss.

“Where were you?” I asked wearily.  I kept dipping in and out of consciousness.

“The Fortune of War.  We’re all at The Fortune of War.  Bannin’s been talking strategy.  He’s got a map of the Old Quarter and Evin keeps looking at him like she’s ready to kill him.”

“Thank you for saving me.”

“That’s what friends are for.  Besides, I couldn’t live without you, Flendin.”

I fell asleep in his safe arms.