Pull on the barb, now, Chay.
So still you seek to deceive me. But I’ve seen through your shallow hope.
Chay! We have no time for this! I can’t do it for you! It only works at our own touch. Pull the fucking barb!
I will not. I press it instead, see? She winced as she pressed the barb further into her own neck, the other end impaling the tip of her trunk finger.
Prin sucked in his breath so hard and fast he saw the nearby osteophager turn its massive head in the direction of their shelter, ears twitching, gaze flicking this way and that, then settling on them
Shit! Right…
Prin pulled on his own necklace’s barb; the contraband code it symbolised started running. Instantly, he had the body of one of the grinning demons, and the biggest and most impressive type at that; a giant six-limbed predator long extinct in the Real, trunkless but with trefoil-fingered forelimbs that doubled as trunks. The rationalising rules of the Hell immediately caused the body-laden cheval de frise to rear up to accommodate his suddenly increased bulk so that he wore it on his broad, green and yellow back like some monstrous piece of armour. Chay cowered at his feet, suddenly small. She voided her bladder and bowels and curled into a rigid ball.
With one forelimb he picked her up by both of her trunks, the way he had seen demons do to his kind countless times before, and with a roar shrugged the cheval de frise off his back, letting it thunk down to one side, bodies and parts of bodies flopping and falling from its spikes.
There was a shrill scream; one of the carts carrying the corpses had been almost alongside, hidden by the weight of bodies on that side of the device, and when it had fallen, one of its spikes had pierced the foot of the Pavulean hauling the cart, pinning the creature to the ground. The osteophager who had been looking suspiciously in their direction took a step back, its ears suddenly bolt upright, an emotion between surprise and fear evident in its stance.
Prin snarled at it; the creature took another half-step back. Its fellows across the hillside had stopped and now stood motionless, looking on. They would wait and see which way this was going to go before deciding either to join in with leave-some-for-me! bravado, or pretend it had been nothing to do with them in the first place.
Prin shook the still-catatonically-inert Chay towards the osteophager. She’s mine! I saw first!
The osteophager blinked, looked round with apparent unconcern, checking to see what the rest of its detail was doing. Not coming bounding to its side to face down this sudden interloper steadfastly and together, clearly. The creature looked down, brushed at the ground in front of it with the back of one paw, claws mostly retracted.
Take it, it said in a grumbling, seemingly unconcerned voice. Consider it yours, with our blessing. We have plenty. It shrugged, lowered its head to sniff at the patch of ground it had scuffed, apparently having lost interest in the whole exchange.
Prin snarled again, clutched Chay to his chest, turned and bounded down the hillside past decaying corpses and spikes pennanted with ragged strips of flesh. He splashed through the dark stream of blood and went springing diagonally up the slope towards the mill. The group from the giant beetle had disappeared inside the building. The beetle itself had closed its abdomen and was unpacking its wings from beneath its gleaming wing covers. Prin was close enough to see demons moving inside its enormous faceted eyes.
Pilots, he thought, for an assemblage of code that might as well have been kept aloft through the wielding of an enchanted feather, or a magic anvil for that matter.
He leapt on up the hillside, towards the mill.
Five
From somewhere came the idea that there were many different levels of sleeping, of unconsciousness, and therefore of awakening. In the midst of this pleasant woozy calm — warm, pleasantly swaddled, self-huggingly curled up, a sort of ruddy darkness behind the eyelids — it was an easy and comforting thing to contemplate the many ways one might be away, and then come back.
You fell asleep just for an instant sometimes; that sudden nod and jerk awake again, lasting a moment. Or you had short naps, often self-timed, limited by knowing you had a few minutes or a half-hour or whatever.
Of course you had your classic Good Night’s Sleep, however much things like shift systems and all-night facilities and drugs and city lighting might sometimes interfere.
Then there was the deeper unconsciousness of being knocked out, put carefully under for some medical procedure, or randomly banging your head and briefly not even knowing your own name. Also, people still lapsed into comas, and came out of those very gradually; that must be an odd feeling. And for a while there, for the last few centuries, though not so often these days because things had moved on, there was the sub-sleep of deep space travel, when you were put into a sort of deep, long-term hibernation for years or decades at a time, kept frigidly cold and barely alive, to be revived when your destination approached. Some people had been kept like this back at home, too, awaiting medical advances. Waking up from something like that must be quite a strange thing, she thought.
She felt an urge to turn over, as though she was nestled in a fabulously comfortable bed but now had spent enough time on this side and needed to shift to lie the other way. She felt very light, she realised, though even as she thought this she seemed to feel very slightly, reassuringly heavier.
She felt herself take a deep, satisfying breath, and duly turned over, eyes still tightly closed. She had a vague feeling that she didn’t entirely know where she was, but it didn’t bother her. Usually that was a slightly disturbing sensation, occasionally even a very disturbing, frightening experience, but not this time. Somehow she knew that wherever she was she was safe, cared for, and in no danger.
She felt good. Really good, in fact.
When she thought about it, she realised that she couldn’t remember ever having felt so good, so secure, so happy. She felt a tiny frown form on her face. Oh, come on, she told herself. She must have felt like this before. To her slight but undeniable irritation, she had only a vague memory of when she had last felt anything like this untroubled and happy. Probably in her mother’s arms, as a little girl.
She knew that if she woke up fully she would remember properly, but — much as a part of her wanted to be completely awake, to answer this question and sort all this out — another part of her was too happy just lying here, wherever she was, drowsy, secure and happy.
She knew this feeling. This was often the best bit of any day, before she had to wake and fully face the realities of the world and the responsibilities she had fallen heir to. If you were lucky, you really did sleep like a baby; completely, soundly and without care. Then it would be only as you awoke that you were reminded of all the things you had to worry about, all the resentments you harboured, all the injustices and cruelties you were subject to. Still, even the thought of that grim process somehow couldn’t destroy her mood of ease and happiness.
She sighed; a long, deep, satisfying sigh, though still with an element of regret as she felt her sleepiness drift away like mist under a gentle breeze.
The sheets covering her felt outrageously fine, almost liquidly soft. They moved about her naked body as she completed the sigh and stirred a little under the warm material. She was not sure that even Himself possessed such fine—
She felt herself spasm and jerk. A terrifying image, the face of someone hateful, started to form before her, then — as though some other part of her mind came to soothe her fears — the fear subsided and the anxiety seemed to be brushed away, like dust.