The first thing I saw, when consciousness returned to me, was Kiera’s face. It is testament to my situation that even this failed to cheer me. I felt as though every part of me had been kicked by every Warden on the Island. It took several minutes for the preceding events to filter back into place. Before then, all I knew was that I hurt.
Kiera had a bruise over one temple and a black eye. She seemed to have come out of the whole business better than I had.
“I’m alive,” I said fatuously. “You’re alive. Right.” I had to keep collecting my thoughts, or they would fragment and drift apart like the broken ice around the spires. I tried to sit up, and the resulting pain in my head was so thunderous I fell back instantly.
“Is Peter all right?”
Peter’s own voice came to me, complaining, “I smacked my knee something wicked. There must have been a rock or something in the water. Hurts like hell.”
It was obvious from the tone that he was well enough to complain. Kiera’s silence was making me worried, though, and there was an undercurrent to Peter’s voice I disliked. I picked over my memories of the incident and went suddenly cold.
“Thelwel! What about Thelwel?” I got out. I saw Kiera glance unhappily at something, and Peter said, “Thelwel is… fine.”
Despite the pain I forced myself into a sitting position, clutching my head. I saw Peter sitting beyond Kiera, one trouser leg slit to mid-thigh. We were all sprawled across a tangle of mud and roots that passed for solid ground here in the swamp. I looked in the direction that they were unwilling to.
It took me some time to accept and understand what I was seeing: it was such a grotesque sight it quite escaped me at first. Thelwel was sitting, away from the three of us. His prison greys were torn to shreds, and I could see a faintly curving line of livid puncture-marks across his bared chest. His arm had taken the worst of it, though. It looked like one of the anatomy sketches I had seen in textbooks, and all the more so because Thelwel was methodically laying out all the various torn and damaged ends. With his left hand he was arranging the components of his right arm: the bone, the sheets of muscle, tendons and ligaments, blood vessels and serrated flaps of skin, all with the same careful patience that hung about him when he was repairing any moderately complex machine. I watched silently as he smoothed two ends of muscle together, and they knitted and joined under his practised touch. Some of the skin had already healed up, leaving bruised red-purple scar lines that looked weeks old. There was a lot of blood staining his skin and clothes, but no more forthcoming.
He looked up at me with an expression I had not previously seen on his face. Peter and Kiera he did not know, but I was a friend as much as anyone was anybody’s friend on the Island. I could see fear and regret amongst the fading marks of the struggle.
There was a long silence in which his left hand continued sightlessly ordering the tissues and structures of his right. I could sense Kiera and Peter waiting for me to speak, and Thelwel also. There was a tension in the air, and I had felt it before in the mob when Helman and the others died, and many times on the Island. It was where fear of the unknown curdled into hostility. And perhaps, in that moment only, I was the most perfect emissary to bridge the gap between the human and the artificial worlds. Thelwel was not the first such entity I had the privilege of knowing. I came to this discovery prepared.
I said, “Are you going to turn out to be a homicidal killer or a cannibal, or anything else in that vein?” I could not believe how calm I felt.
Thelwel shook his head silently.
“Then I don’t care,” I said. I sensed a flinch of surprise from all concerned. My head was aching, and I had no time for any kind of wasted effort. “I know you. You’re the most decent man on the whole Island. You’re the only one that I thought never deserved to be there. I like you. You’re a friend. So you’re… not what you seem. Who is? It doesn’t change anything.”
Still silence. Thelwel’s expression was melting by degrees. It must have been a long time since he had bared this particular secret.
“You don’t even have to tell us,” I continued. “I’m curious, obviously. I’d love to know. I’m not going to make a big deal of it, though. Your choice.”
I glanced back at Peter and Kiera, and saw that they had relaxed also. It was something of a surprise to discover that they both trusted my judgement that much.
When a man is on the rocks of emotion and about to open up some inner box of troubles, he talks about his mother. Thelwel’s voice was calm and level when he said, “I had no mother, only a father.”
“Father Sulplice,” I prompted.
“Even he.” Thelwel examined his injured arm, over which skin was creeping like mould. “He is my creator. I am a made thing.”
It was so matter-of-factly said.
“Most cunningly made,” Thelwel continued. “The sciences of past ages were of great span and complexity, and they had the craft to assemble the blocks of life as easily as they could stone and metal. My father is a man unparalleled as an engineer, but who never found wife, nor family. So he determined that he would fashion a son, which to him seemed simpler than wooing a woman and conceiving a child. So it was that I was brought about.”
“Anyone else’s son would be at the bottom of the swamp and cut in half right now,” Peter pointed out.
Thelwel shrugged, and I watched the scar lines on his arm jump. “My father set out to make a human being, no more, no less,” he confessed. “Being an engineer, and taking pride in his work, he decided to make some small adjustments to the original plan, so that his son would not have to suffer some of the design flaws that human flesh and blood usually owns. So it is that my tissues will heal. So it is that I can know I am hurt without being a slave to pain, and can know feeling without being a slave to emotion. I am well made, but I am still a made thing.”
“So what landed you on the Island?” Kiera asked him. He looked at her warily. Father Sulplice had given him little when it came to dealing with women.
“My father’s projects became known,” Thelwel said. “The Authority became involved. It was not well-publicised, but there was a great commotion within the corridors of power, so my father tells me. There were old laws, from a time when the matter was more pressing, forbidding the artificial creation of human beings. They wanted me destroyed.” There was a hint of real pride in his voice. “My father, they would not harm. Who else could have done what he did? The Authority could not be sure they would not need him some day. But me, they wanted destroyed. My father called in every favour and debt he had ever acquired, and spent everything he had left to hire a very skilled lawyer. The matter was settled by court and our advocate found an ingenious paradox on which to base our case.
“The paradox runs like so: if my father was guilty of creating a human being then he was indeed guilty as charged, but I was innocent, having committed no crime, and therefore I could not be disposed of without splitting open the law at the seams. On the other hand, if I was a made thing and not a human being, to be destroyed at the Authority’s pleasure, my father would have committed no crime and therefore I was still his lawful property and not subject to confiscation. It was a legal fiction, but lawmakers must cling to the law even as the Marshal does. If they lay that crutch aside once it will not support them later. There was some negotiation, and we were sent here, my father and I, as a compromise.” I think he was mostly recounting his father’s words verbatim, or else he had rehearsed this story in the solitude of his head a very many times. I would too, if I had such a frail justification for my existence.
Eventually, Kiera asked something like, “… how long…?” and Thelwel replied, “On the Island? Fourteen years. All the life I ever had. No-one is left who knows our past and what I am, for the Island keeps no records. I would appreciate your keeping it to yourselves for obvious reasons.”
*
The next blow was the boat, which was so completely buckled that, from the side, it described an “L” shape. The dead monster had come down that hard, flattening lockers and bursting open the tanks, releasing a thick slurry of harvested chemicals. It was the presence of those tanks, taking the brunt of the impact, that had saved Kiera and myself from instant crushing.
The question of whether Thelwel would sabotage the boat for Peter was now moot. I have often wondered whether his reluctance stemmed not just from the professional pride of an engineer, but a dislike of machines treated in such a cavalier manner. It would have been a policy that might rebound on him some day.
Peter declared that the Marshal would send another boat in search of us, although he did not sound overly happy. The Marshal, he explained, would suspect some foul play and, for that reason, the search would not stop until trace of us was found. In the meantime we would have to survive the hostile environs and the monsters, and perhaps other things.
Food and shelter were first. While Peter, Kiera and I made the world’s least desirable residence from man-sized leaves we tore from the nearest tree, Thelwel got one of the boat motors running, and compromised its efficiency to the point where it was hot enough to cook on. We ate the most readily available food: grey slabs of monster steak from the beast that had wrecked our boat, cut from its half-submerged body by Peter’s deadly sword.
Thelwel managed to get a lamp working too, for the gloom was growing. The spitting, bluish illumination was not cheering, but it would give us a chance to see monsters before they reached us. The chemical slick seemed to be keeping all forms of life at a healthy distance, but Peter decided that we would have to set watches. He would go first, then me, then Thelwel and then Kiera. As it fell out, by the time Peter woke me to take my turn, Thelwel was still finishing up on the boat. He had been salvaging every mechanism he could get his hands on, putting power through each in turn in search of any lingering function. He needed less sleep than we did, but that is a trait I have observed in most engineers. Whether it was a gift of his heritage I could not say.
He had made something ugly and cumbersome, like a holed metal box that had been attacked by cables and riveted copper pipes. “This,” he explained to me, “is the ignition. This is the nozzle. It is a weapon.”
I looked at it. It could have been a weapon; I was none the wiser. I secretly wished never to have the chance to test it.
After Thelwel had finally bedded down, the jungle resumed its busy watch over us. Insects clustered around the unhealthy lamp, and were picked off by fleet flying things that could not believe their luck. Peter snored, lying on his back with his arms outstretched, taking up as much room on our narrow root-bank as possible. Kiera was curled into a tight ball. Thelwel lay peacefully on his side. There was a light mist in the air and water condensed off the leaves of our shelter and dripped on us at random. Beyond the reach of the lamp was the old, malevolent night that is always waiting for the power to die and the lamps to wink out. We fear the dark in Shadrapar, and we fear the wild, those places from whence we came.
There were monsters abroad in the jungle that night. I heard many, roaring and trumpeting their fury amongst the maze of trees, none close enough to wake my sleeping friends. I saw only one.
Out of the pitch and the shadow and the silver sheen of the mist, stepping lightly from root to root and not a toe wet in the water, came a monster in the form of a man. I must say I have no idea if this happened at all. I might so easily have slept my watch away and conjured all this up in my uneasy mind. I wish it were so. I can only tell you that this is what I remember happening.
Out of the swamp and the night came Gaki, stalking silently. The blue light shone from his bald head, from his precise and clever eyes. His expression was mildly amused, as always. He walked right up to me and it did not occur to me to use Thelwel’s weapon, and just as well.
“Stefan,” he said, “You appear to have had some kind of accident. How unfortunate.”
“How did you get here?” I demanded. The enormity of his presence was so great that I felt I could make demands.
“I told you before,” Gaki told me, in the manner of one gently remonstrating with a child. “The Island is no prison to me. I stay there because it pleases me, and I move where I will. I wanted to come and see how you were faring, Stefan.”
I glanced at the others, and my intent must have been writ plain on my face, because he told me, “I do not wish to be seen, Stefan, save by you. If they should catch sight of me I will have to kill them. Best they remain sleeping.”
There was not a spot of mud on him, not a drop of water, save for where the mist had condensed slightly on his scalp. His eyes glittered in the artificial light. “It is astonishing, out here,” he confided. “Why, if I were to dispose of you four, I could believe that I was the last man left on Earth. Have you not thought the same, Stefan?”
“The thought of being left alone here does not delight me,” I told him.
He made a face. “You disappoint me. You’re crippling yourself with these companions. A thug, a whore and a menial. Honestly, Stefan, you have to move in better circles. Perhaps you should not have been so quick to upset the Lady Ellera. She read your book.”
“She said as much.”
“Everyone’s a critic, then,” he said lazily. One hand flickered briefly, and he had one of the flying insectivores between his fingers, vaned wings twitching madly. He looked at it with genuine interest.
“I read your book,” he said. “I stole it from Herself.”
“You read—”
“You have no gift for titles,” he told me. “On the other hand, the matter itself is fascinating. I have always had a fondness for the human mind.”
“She wanted me to teach her,” I said. “She lacked something, some quality. When I pushed against her, there was nothing in return.”
Gaki smiled at the struggling flier. “Well,” he said. “If I were you I would destroy her mind as you did with that other creature. Dead enemies are easier to live with.”
“It… it doesn’t work like that.”
“When you were worried about this one,” he gestured at Kiera, and the flying thing skipped from his hand unharmed and winged off into the night, “I felt your mind ready to kill Tallan. Do not tell me that it does not work like that. You have a rare gift for death, Stefan.”
“I do not want any gift for death,” I said. His words cut me deeper than I expected.
“Such a gift always comes unasked,” he said, seeing something in his own mind that was denied to me, “and cannot be refused. Do I have it, Stefan?”
A terrible fear came over me then, of Gaki’s mind like steel pincers reaching out to pierce my own. He was looking straight at me with all the murderous mildness he had, and I tried to form the force of my own brain into some kind of shield, but the fear was too great and I could not muster anything.
I felt the first slow movement, that was all. It was like watching a poisonous spider hatch, seeing the sluggish motions of its legs. Gaki was teaching himself, building on Helman’s writings. I swear to this day that of the very few who actually read that damned book, not one of them meant any good. It was a cursed undertaking from the start.
Again he read my expression, and his face took on an almost childish delight. “I have it then. I will practise, Stefan. You must be ready for me. I will need a sparring partner.” Abruptly he was standing, looking out into the carnivorous night.
“It would be such a crowning achievement,” he mused, almost too quiet to be heard, “to be the last man on Earth. With the race in decline, who is to say it cannot be done?” His look to me was benignly predatory, a raptor that had fed enough for now. “Be ready for me, Stefan,” he instructed, “when my mind needs something to gnaw on.”
Then he stepped lightly away into the jungle just as he had come, and was gone into the night, and beyond. As I said, I cannot tell whether he genuinely found me in all that expanse of wild, but if there was a man to do the impossible it was Gaki. Later, I was forced to decide whether I would act upon these events as though they were real, or discard them as bad dreams. I chose the former. It is always better to be safe.
*
I was awoken by Peter saying, “So, how many shots can you get out of this thing?” I had a vague idea that I had passed the watch over to Thelwel at some point, but the events of the previous night were those I would rather forget.
“Nine,” Thelwel said after some calculation.
“Enough for a test then.” There was complicated metal sound, and I sat up to see Peter juggling the contraption that Thelwel had built, pointing the dangerous end out into the trees.
“Bang,” said Peter, and slapped at the ignition switch. There was an extraordinarily violent convulsion from the machine, the noise you might hear if you eviscerated an iron giant. Something a hand’s length long, visible only in retrospect, shot from the gaping nozzle and exploded the branch of a tree a hundred yards away.
“Sod me,” Peter said, sounding awed. “What is it?”
“It uses the charge from one of the point generators to explosively accelerate simple fixing bolts,” Thelwel replied. “I hadn’t thought that it would be quite so… effective.” He took the thing from Peter and examined it for damage. “It may not last the full nine shots,” he said mournfully.
“You’ve just told every single monster in the jungle where we are,” Kiera pointed out sourly.
“I’ve just told them not to mess with us,” Peter told her, obviously happy with his noisemaker.
Peter wanted to explore then. He loaded himself up with his sword and Thelwel’s creation (which he nicknamed “the Junker”) and wanted us to set out into the wilderness to see what we could find. I think he had images of hidden cities, treasure, ancient artefacts. Mine were of huge toothy jaws, tentacles and poisonous stingers, but Thelwel seemed quite happy to go wandering. Kiera was strangely quiet about it all. I think she was again weighing up the odds between the mercies of the Island and those of the jungle. She let Peter and I argue until Peter inevitably won out, and we all gathered what little we had in readiness for the expedition.
“Stefan,” Kiera said just as we were about to set off, voice abruptly trembling. “What are those things?”
We were being watched. When I saw what by, my heart jumped horribly. I was taken right back to the prison boat, standing on the deck with Peter, watching the forested shore; the boat’s captain saying, “They call them web-children.”
There were three of them, and they were very much like children of twelve or so in size and build. No living children ever looked like that, though. They were thin enough to seem starved, and we could count their too-many ribs easily through the taut skin of their narrow chests. Their heads were like skulls, their eyes huge and very dark, with no white at all. Their noses were tiny, just bumps with two raw holes, and their mouths were far too wide, stretching almost ear to ear in a constant hungry grin. Their heads were round and earless with no more hair than the Governor. They had astonishingly pallid skins, glistening slightly with a greenish tint in the light. Their limbs were long and thin. Feet ended in prehensile toes that clutched the branches on which they crouched. There were folds of skin between those toes, and between the equally long and clever fingers that were unlike a man’s, the forefinger being the longest and the others declining in size to form a webbed fan with only the thumb free. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female, or if the distinction held any meaning for them. If they were children they were children of the damned, spawned here where the canopy obscured even the view of God.
It was not their caricature of human form that froze me, but their possessions. No animals these. All three had hemp-woven baldrics from which small hide pouches hung. One wore a kind of kilt of knitted reed, although the others had nothing visible to hide. Another had a band across its brow, just like Destavian or the Marshal, but made of snakeskin.
One had a simple bow, and the bone head of the arrow was levelled at Peter, the string half-drawn back. Another clutched a long and jagged shaft of rusty metal salvaged from some submerged ruin. The last held a length of cane that might have been a blowing tube for darts.
We stared at each other. The nonchalant half-aiming of the bow matched Peter’s vague pointing of the Junker. The web-children did not seem hostile, and I am certain they did not recognise Thelwel’s contraption as a weapon. Instead, they examined us avidly, huge eyes devouring every detail.
“I have seen them before,” Thelwel said softly. “Never so close. They have always been here, since before I came.”
“But what are they?” Kiera demanded. She sounded appalled.
“This thing is getting really heavy,” Peter muttered, shifting his grip on the Junker. “Someone tell me whether I have to use it or not.”
I wished I had not dawdled over my transcribing. “Trethowan mentions them two or three times, and he was obviously building to some conclusion. I haven’t got that far, yet. Trethowan is too much of a showman for his own good.” I cut off abruptly as one of the web-children, the one with the salvaged spear, leant forwards on its branch, staring right at me with those cavernous eyes.
“Drethouen.” Its voice was high and fluting, too strange and fey to be a child’s. I was abruptly back Below, listening to that speaking monster. It was not kin to these slight warriors, but there was the same sense of man’s supremacy usurped.
“Trethowan,” I said, dry-lipped, and the creature joined in with its “Drethouen,” and then, as if to show that it was not just mimicking, it said, “How’d you know Drethouen?”
Peter, Kiera, even Thelwel, froze rigid at this prodigy. Only I had been expecting it. Had they learned our language from eavesdropping, like the thing in the water? Or perhaps, their kind had been visited by explorers from the city, by the one man who claimed the jungles as his field of expertise. Had Trethowan become a god-figure for them? Was he the spiritual father of the web-children?
“I am a friend of Trethowan,” I stated, reasoning that student and friend were within arm’s reach. I had spoken very slowly and deliberately, and in the aftermath one of them gave a high, quick chitter that must have passed for a giggle amongst them. They seemed to think I was simple-minded.
“Drethouen,” one of them told me again, speaking just as slowly and patronisingly. I heard Peter snort with amusement despite himself. The Junker had dragged at his arms enough to be pointing at the ground.
“Follow,” said the web-child, cocking its head to indicate direction. All three stared at me until I nodded unwillingly. Then two of them kicked off from the branch into the water and were away, nothing more than ripples even as we tried to track them. The third lowered itself to the ground before us. The top of its head came to around the base of my ribs, and it stood stooped, back crooked, limbs held at odd angles.
“You’re not seriously going to go with those things,” Peter said.
I shot him an aggrieved look. “I assumed you would be going with me.”
He exchanged glances with Thelwel and Kiera; none of them were happy about it. In the end, though, Kiera summed it up. “If they want to trap or kill us, then this is their place. We’re in no position to stop them.”
The web-child waited until we were at least moving towards it, and then it was hopping off from root to root, faster than I expected, occasionally dropping to all fours for balance.