Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [151]
But it still wasn’t finished. Moving with jerky, spastic movements, it got its feet under it and tried to stand. Riss swore and kicked it in the face, knocking it flat. He wrenched the cutlass free and beheaded it with a second stroke.
Riss turned away from the corpse of the Mane and looked up at her. He held out his hand: come with me.
Something snapped inside her. The accumulated horror and shock of the attack broke through. She lost her mind and fled.
She ran, through the passageways between the houses, out into the blizzard. The winds pushed and battered her. Snow stuck to her goggles. She could hear Riss calling her name, but she ignored him. At some point she realized that she could no longer see any houses, just endless, unmarked snow. She kept running, driven by the terror of what lay behind.
Only when exhaustion drove her to her knees did she stop. She was thoroughly lost, and all traces of her passing were being erased by the fury of the snow. She dared not go back, and she couldn’t go forward. The cold, which she’d barely noticed during her flight, had set in deep. She began to shiver violently. A tiredness overtook her, every bit as insidious and unstoppable as the power of the Manes.
She curled up into a fetal position, and there, buried in the snow, she died.
EVERY DAY SINCE, JEZ had wondered what might have happened if things had gone another way. If Riss hadn’t saved her. If she’d succumbed to the Mane.
Would it have been so bad, in the end? In that brief moment, when she touched upon the world of the Manes, she’d felt something wonderful. An integration, a togetherness above and beyond anything her human life had given her.
She’d never borne children, never been in love. She’d always dreamed of having friends she could call soul mates, but somehow it never happened. She just didn’t care about them enough, and they didn’t care about her in return. She’d always considered herself rather detached, all in all.
So when she felt the call of the Manes, the primal invitation of the wolf pack lamenting the absence of their kin, she found it harder and harder to think of reasons to resist.
Yes, they killed, but so had she now. Yes, they were fearsome, but a fearsome exterior was no indication as to what was beneath. You only had to know the secret of Bess to understand that.
Would the process have been half so frightening if she’d been invited instead of press-ganged? Might she have gone willingly, if only to know what lay beyond that impenetrable wall of fog to the north? Were there incredible lands hidden behind the Wrack, glittering ice palaces at the poles, as the more lurid pulp novels suggested? Was it a wild place, like Kurg, with its population of subhuman monsters? Or was there a strange and advanced civilization there, like Peleshar, the distant and hostile land far to the southwest?
Whatever had been done to her by the Mane that day was incomplete, interrupted by a cutlass to the neck. She was neither fully human nor fully Mane but somewhere in between. And yet the Manes welcomed her still, beckoned her endlessly, while the humans would destroy her if they knew that she walked their lands without a beating heart.
She never found out what happened to Riss. The morning after she died, she woke up and dug her way out of the snow that had entombed her in the night. The sun shone high in a crystal-blue sky, glittering on distant mounds of white: the roofs of the town. She’d run quite a way in her panic, but it had been in entirely the wrong direction if she’d hoped to reach the safety of the ice caves up on the glacier.
The corpses lay beneath the snow now. Whether Riss was among them or he’d been taken, the result was the same. He was gone.
Numb, she searched for survivors and found none. She stood in front of the snow-covered wreck of the aircraft she’d navigated for a year and felt nothing.