Cutter felt as if the path they left was an infection in the land. At dawn on their third day out from the cruciform militiaman, they approached the last village. And as they came nearer the sun crested and they were washed in roseate light and something moved, that they had thought a rock spur or a thinning tree.
They cried out. Their mounts stumbled.
A giant came at them, a cactus figure far greater than they had seen before. Cactacae stood seven, eight feet tall, but this one was more than double that. It was like an elemental, something base and made of the land, the grassland walking.
It jerked on twisted hips, its vast legs and toeless stump-feet ricketed. It swayed as if it would fall. Its green skin was split and healed many times. Its spines were finger-long.
The massive cactus staggered at them, fast for all its palsied gait. It held a cudgel, a slab of tree. It raised it as it came, and from a face that hardly moved, it began to shout. It called words they did not understand, some variant of Sunglari, as it lurched murderously toward them.
“Wait, wait!” Everyone was shouting. Elsie pointed, her eyes bloodshot, and Cutter knew she was trying to reach its mind with her feeble charms.
The cactus came in unstable strides. Fejh fired an arrow that hit it with a moist drum-sound and remained dripping and painless in its side.
“Kill you,” the cactus crooned in its feeble voice, in an ugly Ragamoll. “Murder.” It heaved its enormous weapon.
“It weren’t us!” shouted Cutter. He threw the militia insignia in the cactus-giant’s path, and fired his repeater at the badge, making it dance and ring until all six barrels were empty. The cactus was still, its shillelagh paused. Cutter spat at the badge until his mouth was dry. “It weren’t us.”
He was something they had never seen. Cutter thought he must be Torqued, cancered by the bad energy of a cacotopic zone, but that was not right. In the last empty village, the vast cactus-man told them of himself. He was ge’ain -between them they rendered it “tardy.”
By arcane husbandry, cactacae of the veldt kept a few of their bulbs nurtured in a coma for months after they should have been born. While their siblings crawled squalling from the earth, the ge’ain, the tardy, slept on below in their chorions, growing. Their bodies distended as occult techniques kept them unborn. When finally they woke and emerged they were mooncalf. They grew prodigal.
Their aberrance afflicted them. Their woody bones were bowed, their skins corticate and boiling with excrescence. Their augmented senses hurt. They were the wards, the fighters and lookouts for their homesteads. They were tabooed. Shunned and worshipped. They had no names.
The fingers of the tardy’s left hand were fused. He moved slowly with arthritic pain.
“We not Tesh,” he said. “Not our war, not our business. But them come anywise. Militia.”
They had come from the river, a mounted platoon with rivebows and motorguns. The cactacae had long heard stories from the north, where militia and Tesh legions skirmished. Exiles had told them of monstrous acts at militia hands, and the cactus villagers fled the snatch-squad.
The militia reached one village before it was emptied. Those cactacae had sheltered northern refugees full of carnage stories, and they had determined to fight first. They met the militia in a fearful band, with their clubs and flint machetes. There had been butchery. One militiaman body was left behind, to be punished by the ge’ain amid the ripped-up cactus dead.
“Two weeks gone they came. They hunt us after that,” the tardy said. “They bring Tesh war here now?” Cutter shook his head.
“It’s a fucking mess,” he said. “The militia we’re following-they ain’t after these poor bastards, they’re after our man. These cactacae’ve panicked because of what they’ve heard, and made themselves targets.
“Listen to me,” he said to the leviathan green man. “They who done this to your village, they’re looking for someone. They want to stop him before he can give a message.” He looked up into the big face. “More of them’ll come.”
“Tesh come too. To fight them. Fight us on both sides.”
“Yes,” said Cutter. His voice was flat. He waited a long time. “But if he’s to win… if he can get away, then the militia… maybe they’ll have other things to think on than this war. So maybe you want to help us. We have to stop them, before they stop him.”
With misshaped hands to his mouth the tardy gave a cry as base as animal pain. His lament rumbled over the grass. The animals of the hot night paused, and in the still there was an answer. Another cry, from miles off, that Cutter felt in his guts.
Again and again the tardy sounded, announcing himself, and over the hours of that night a little corps of the ge’ain came to him on huge and painful steps. There were five, and they were various: some more than twenty feet tall, some barely half that, limbs broken and reset, unshapely. A company of the lame, the crippled strong.
The travellers were cowed. The tardy mourned together in their own language. “If you might help us,” Cutter told them humbly, “maybe we can stop the militia for good. And either way, it’ll mean a reckoning, and that can mean revenge.”
The tardy spent hours in a circle, talking with brooding sounds, reaching out to each other. Their motions were careful under the weight of their limbs. Poor lost soldiers, thought Cutter, though his awe remained.
At last the convenor of the parley said to him: “Them gone, one militia band. They gone north. Hunting. We know where.”
“That’s them,” said Cutter. “They’re looking for our man. They’re the ones we have to reach.”
The tardy plucked handfuls of their spines and lifted Cutter and his comrades. They carried them, easily. The deserted sables watched them go. The cactacae took mammoth strides, swayed across terrains, stepping over trees. Cutter felt close to the sun. He saw birds, even garuda.
The ge’ain spoke to them. The feathered figures circled when they passed, with a sound like billowing. They jabbered in severe avian voices. The ge’ain listened and crooned in reply.
“Militia ahead,” said Cutter’s mount.
They staggered, resting rarely, their legs locked in the cactus-manner. Once they stopped when the moon and its daughters were low. At the very edge of the savannah, west, there was light. A torch, a lantern moving.
“Who is he?” said Cutter’s tardy. “Man on horse. Follows you?”
“He’s there? Jabber… get to him! Quick. I need to know his game.”
The ge’ain careened in drunken speed, eating distance, and the light went out. “Gone,” the tardy said. A whisper sounded in Cutter’s ear, making him start.
“Don’t be a damn fool,” the voice said. “The cactus won’t find me. You’re wasting time. I’ll join you by and by.”
When they continued the way they had been going, the light came back, kept pace with them to the west.
After two nights, breaking only for brief rests or to sluice Fejh with what water they found, the ge’ain stopped. They pointed at a track of pulped greenery and ploughed-up landscape.
Over miles of dried grass, before greener hills, a haze was ris-ing, what Cutter thought was dust-smoke, then saw was mixed with darker grey. As if someone had smudged an oily finger on a window.
“Them,” said Cutter’s ge’ain. “Militia. Is them.”
The tardy did not plan. They uprooted knotted trees of the prairie and made them bludgeons, then continued toward the murderers of their kin.