part0025

Too much so, in fact, and in the wrong direction. With a shock, Forrester saw that at any second he’d be into the ditch. He dragged the wheel, and the entire vehicle lurched.

He could scarcely make out the road. Nothing looked right. The problem was his left eye; the lids were clotted half shut. For one appalling moment, he thought he’d gashed the orb itself, but he found that he could feel the cut, as though his awareness had roused the sensation. The laceration ran diagonally across his brow.

No use in worrying about that now. Staying on the road was his one priority. The surface was worse than the gravelled drive had been, obviously never meant for a motor vehicle. Forrester felt as if his bones would be shaken from his body. Sure that he’d put a considerable distance between himself and the gates, he began to brake, and as soon as the road levelled fractionally, brought the lorry to a complete halt.

He slid from the cab and almost fell into the dirt, as a wave of nausea and pain dashed over him. Flinging out a hand, Forrester caught the bonnet and managed to keep to his feet. He clung until the worst dizziness had passed. Then he reached to make a gingerly inspection of his forehead. The cut seemed shallow but bloody. With a sleeve, he cleaned the gore from his eye.

When he could see again, Forrester stared back up the road. The gates were out of view, and no one, as yet, was pursuing on foot. Turning to examine the vehicle’s bumper and grille, he was startled by the damage he’d inflicted. The whole front was ripped open, the sort of devastation a shell blast might achieve. He was amazed the mechanism had held together at all, let alone kept functioning.

A noise drew his attention: a familiar hoarse grumbling. That was precisely the sound the lorry’s engine had made before he’d stalled it. This echo, distant but approaching, could only be the second vehicle from the garage. He berated himself for not attempting some act of sabotage, though his knowledge was hardly up to the task. He rebuked himself for being foolish enough to stop.

Forrester caught hold of the crank and gave it an experimental jerk, forgetting all technique in his haste. His lack of finesse made no difference: the crank barely rotated halfway, jammed with a decisive clack , and after that would go no farther. Probably the handle itself was bent.

Once more, Forrester cursed himself for an idiot. Already the second engine was noticeably louder. There wasn’t time to think. He clambered back into the cab and released the brake. He was dreadfully certain the lorry wouldn’t even roll, but then he felt slight motion, which was soon heightened as the road dipped.

The solution was temporary at best. If they didn’t catch him in the meantime, he’d be sunk at the first rise. Forrester wrestled frantically with the pedals and gearstick, and when that achieved no result, tried again with forced calm. The engine sputtered, complained. For a heart-stopping instant, the patter threatened to growl away to nothing. Then it roused, and this time held a discordant note. When he sped up, so did that grinding rhythm.

The timing was propitious. Scant seconds had passed before the way levelled out and began climbing toward a low rise. For all the commotion around him—the battered engine’s protests, the scrabble of the wheels upon the atrocious road, the rush of the wind that clawed at the cab—he could hear the other vehicle. It must be close; the driver knew his business better than Forrester did. He was going as fast as he had the nerve to, and keeping to the road demanded all of his strength and absorption. In any case, he daren’t speed up for fear that he’d miss his turning.

Even then, he almost failed to see the junction. It didn’t help that he hadn’t a clue what to look for, having only felt the motion and the change of surface as a passenger travelling in the opposite direction. Worse, the side road came upon him abruptly, hidden until the last moment by a copse of trees. Forrester jarred the wheel in a panic, and the whole cabin skewed distinctly as two wheels lifted from the earth. Tearing at the wheel again, he heard the crunch of metal on metal from beneath him, and the lorry righted with a jolt.

Though his arms were like putty and his head was ringing, Forrester fought to maintain his grip. This section of road was even worse than what had preceded it and ran in sweeping curves. The least lapse of concentration would carry him onto the heather-draped verge, and beyond that the hillside declined severely.

He imagined, briefly and naively, that he might have escaped the second lorry. But its rumble was still there, just fainter. The other driver, knowing the road, had merely slowed to take the turn more carefully. And Forrester, too, had lost speed, which he had no hope of regaining.

His one slender reassurance was the thought that there wasn’t much the other driver could do to interfere with him. The track was wide enough for one vehicle; his pursuer couldn’t possibly pull alongside. If they had a passenger, they might conceivably fire at him, but the rear of the lorry made for a more than adequate shield. Indeed, Forrester was so convinced that he slackened his speed to a pace that felt practically safe. He had his own reasons for urgency, but they all required that he arrive alive and in one piece.

As he’d predicted, the other driver could do nothing; nothing, at any rate, except hang to Forrester’s tail. He could hear their engine clearly, similar to but separate from the choking of the injured machinery before him, like the clamour of an avalanche distorted by its reverberation between peaks.

Forrester did his best to fixate on his driving. He felt the wound in his head as a slow pulse verging into pain at its extremes, and his leg was cramping badly. None of the training he’d put himself through had prepared him for the challenge of journeying at breakneck speed upon an unsurfaced road.

He wiped fresh blood from his brow and braved a glance to his right. He could just make out one corner of Sherston; that dismissed any doubt that he might have taken a wrong turn. And sure enough, as he rattled over a hillock, he could discern the route of the road ahead. Its grey line continued straight for a while, drawing farther from the house, and then drifted in a lazy bend, the course of which was hidden by the contours of the land.

Soon he was descending again. When he looked toward the house, the expanse of the moors had snatched the place from sight. A minute went by, and he saw that the track had begun its long swing to the right. Here the surface was worse still, and he had no choice but to slow even further. Doing so brought back sharply the worry of the other lorry behind. Yet when a few seconds had gone by and the driver seemed content to follow in his wake, Forrester felt confident that they were no readier to take unnecessary risks than he was.

Likely they had orders to take him alive. He’d gambled in letting Forbes know that anyone could commune with the Guest, but surely he hadn’t altogether outlived his usefulness. However, that mightn’t be the only reason they’d left him alone. As far as he was aware, this ancient, crumbling highway led to a single location, and why should they jeopardise themselves needlessly when they’d have him cornered once he gained his destination?

He was half right. The entire truth was revealed not five minutes later. The road, having reached its farthest extreme, had run straight for a stretch and then curved to reascend the hillside. There it levelled, and in the distance, Forrester could see the shallow cliffs, the disintegrating buildings, the ancient highway petering out at the black maw of the mine entrance—and a dozen diminutive figures.

They were spaced across the road between him and the opening. Some were kneeling, most were standing, and all of them were armed. Principally they bore rifles, but to his astonishment, Forrester also identified a Vickers machine gun perched on its tripod. Just what were they anticipating? But then he spotted Forbes and understood. This was a show of strength.

It was a potentially hazardous one, too. Freed of the Guest’s influence, Forrester might simply have kept going. He doubted even the Vickers could damage the lorry sufficiently to stop him in time. Of course, Forbes knew Forrester enough by now to recognise that the Guest’s proximity wasn’t all that deterred him from violence. Nevertheless, there was a moment when he sorely wanted to press on: to watch them scatter, or perhaps to feel the machine gun’s raking fire shred the lorry and his own flesh. He was stunned to find himself still capable of so much senseless anger .

Instead, Forrester brought the lorry to a steady halt, well in advance of the line of men.

Not one of them took their gun off him. What had they been led to expect? But probably they’d been told nothing. He’d always been amazed by the army’s blindness to the fact that ignorance only made soldiers more afraid, and dangerous in all the wrong ways. Certainly these men were frightened, he could see that in their eyes. And little would be required on his part to spark their fear into aggression.

As the engine spluttered out its last life, Forrester raised his hands above his head and climbed down to the verge. As he did so, he noticed that the second driver had parked his own vehicle diagonally across the road behind, cutting off any retreat.

“Hello, Forbes,” Forrester said.

“Lieutenant Forrester,” Forbes acknowledged. There was something new in his expression, all the more shocking for being upon the face of a man who usually controlled himself so prodigiously. Yet there could have been no disguising such naked hatred, and Forbes was not attempting to.

How had Forrester provoked his odium? He wasn’t persuaded that it was by escaping. Hadn’t there been the tacit understanding between them that one was jailer, the other unwilling prisoner? Forbes’s encounter with the Guest, it could only be that. How humiliating to be so totally humbled, so defenceless, and then to discover that the experience had been a ruse and a distraction. Yes, there was the true motive: Forrester had wounded his ego, and that sin was unpardonable.

The mine entrance was some way off, fenced in by men and guns. All Forrester could think to do was play for time. He was furiously wracking his brains for anything he could say that might divert Forbes and perhaps defuse the simmering tension, when Forbes motioned to one of the soldiers, and, clearly reacting to a predetermined signal, the man took a step forward and dashed the butt of his rifle into Forrester’s stomach.

The pain was as vast as it was unexpected. Sliding to his knees, Forrester wrapped his arms tight around himself, as though the conflagration in his guts was a real fire in need of containment.

Yet even that interval of raging anguish was an opportunity. He tried to attain some clarity, some edge of focus, tried to reach out...

And failed. The pain was too overwhelming, or the range was too great, or else something had gone wrong, terribly wrong. He saw no end of possibilities, but no answers. All he knew was that, when he probed, he found nothing.

Forrester let out the gasp he’d been holding in. He was almost disappointed when what issued from his lips was a wheeze like air departing a balloon. Unsteadily, he got back to his feet. The soldier who’d hit him was staying close, watching Forbes, presumably anticipating a repeat of the command. The man’s impassive countenance gave no indication of how he felt about his duty, if indeed he had any opinion at all.

“A warning,” Forbes said. There was a grating quality to his voice, as if some broken part had twisted and snagged inside him. “To advise you of what to expect if you don’t mind your tongue.”

They won’t kill me , Forrester thought. They can’t damage me overly much. They need me in one piece. But it was empty comfort. He’d learned at the front the extraordinary amount of violence a human body could endure and continue to function.

Regardless of what was sensible, he knew he mustn’t back down now. “There’s no need to threaten me,” he said. “Didn’t I give you what you wanted?”

“What I wanted?” Forbes shuddered. “That thing ...” For a moment, his eyes clouded, and he was staring anew at some vision only he could see .

“You compared it with a horse, with a cow,” Forrester reminded him. “Do you stand by that, Forbes? The consciousness that touched yours, is that how you imagine a horse thinks?”

“Fine,” Forbes spat. “So it’s intelligent. Do you really suppose that makes it our equal? Does that justify you in betraying your own country, your own species , to protect it?”

“Yes,” Forrester said, “I believe so.”

“Then you’re a fool, a fool and a traitor. But henceforward you’ll do exactly what I tell you, and you’ll do so in shackles. Unless you have any more tricks up your sleeve? Maybe you were lying when you claimed you can’t influence the Guest to use its power?”

“No, I wasn’t lying. I can’t do it, and even if I could, I’m too far away. Your plan would never have worked; the link grows weaker the farther we are apart. The idea that I could have ordered that poor creature off on missions for you is quite absurd.”

“I’ll find a way,” Forbes said, and there was no doubt in his tone. “Don’t confuse your own lack of ingenuity with impossibility.”

“Oh I don’t. And anyway, the solution was under your nose all the while. You were just too blind and egotistical to see it.”

Forbes considered him with renewed hatred. “I don’t know what you mean. But I’ll find out. Everything you know I’ll find out. And I assure you, that process won’t be pleasant.”

Then Forbes motioned to the soldier, and the man hit Forrester again, once more in the stomach. The pain coursed through him in a shuddering spasm, and he cramped around it, barely keeping to his feet. A third blow, this time to his jaw, took even that from him. Forrester keeled sideways with a sob, to land joltingly. He needed an instant, only an instant—but if they kept beating him, he was done for.

No fourth blow came. The pain remained appalling, his stomach was a sack of splintered glass and his jaw felt spongy and raw. But his mind was not his body, and this pain belonged solely to the latter.

Forrester retreated into the depths behind his eyes. He could hear Forbes talking, perhaps to him. He shut that out as well, since nothing Forbes could say had meaning anymore. Forrester merely had to concentrate. That was all that mattered.

He couldn’t feel the Guest, except by its absence, a blankness where he’d become used to presence. But he could feel something—someone —else. There was a dim shadow at least, like a much-faded memory.

Yes. He was certain. He could sense her there, at the absolute edge of his perception.

Now , he thought, do it now.

Rough hands caught his left arm, hauling him half to his feet, and then somebody clutched his other arm, so that the two were dragging him between them. Forrester’s heels scuffed helplessly in the dirt.

Still he refused to open his eyes. Still he pleaded within his mind. Abhaya, it has to be now.

They’d haul him into the second lorry. They would drive away, and in a minute or less this tenuous connection would be gone. He’d be separated from Abhaya and the Guest, maybe forever. The future would be arduous and possibly short for all three of them, because Forbes would never forgive this, and that would mean brutality without restraint.

Forrester wanted to resist, but they held him firmly. They carried him as easily as they might a child. He hadn’t the strength to fight them, nor even to slow them.

They had his body. Only his body. His mind was his own. And it had grown potent in these last days.

He focused all of his will. There, again, he felt her—distant, and yet something in her mental attitude was subtly different, and he was convinced she was aware of him. Just as they’d practised night after night, he put his thoughts into words, his words into images, knowing such distinctions were meaningless. He called to her—

And this time, Abhaya answered.

Forrester dug his heels in. He tensed in the grip of his captors, buying him a moment, all he needed. He opened his eyes and was glad to see Forbes and that Forbes was looking at him.

Forrester spat in the dirt, tasting the salt tang of his own blood. He wasn’t sure until he tried that his damaged jaw was up to the business of speech. He was surprised by how firm his voice was as he said, “I didn’t lie to you. I’ve never been able to influence the Guest. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t.”

The loathing in Forbes’s expression shifted, like a parting of storm clouds, as he laboured to make sense of what he’d been told. His mouth opened, perhaps with a question, or an order of more violence.