Red Spikes

Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan

Book: Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online
Authors: Margo Lanagan
they go back to other worlds; I don’t know whether back to those they came from, or on to fresh ones, or what.
    What do you mean , what other worlds ? Teasdale scoffed. You talk so much rot, Anderson; why don’t you run orf and write one of your po-wems or something?
    I’m telling you, I talked to Razor; he told me.
    He filled your head with gumf, is what. Razor is a filthy peasant what has et one toadstool too many. You there, pass the bread-and-dripping.
    But why don’t they come here?
    What do you mean, Rickets?
    When they’re in our world. Why don’t they do anything here? Come over to Grammar and – I don’t know – flatten Raglan for us? Rickets finished under his breath. Flatten that one. He nodded faintly towards Teasdale, who was biting bread and calling up the table to someone.
    Oh, they never come out of the Vale. Least, that’s what Razor says. The sides are too steep, maybe. I don’t know; I’ve never been there.
    And you never will. There was Teasdale again. You piece of slop.

    Diammid’s eyelids unstuck from each other. The hero’s booted iron legs led up to the bells and blades at his waist, to his swords in their battered black sheaths, to the head that blotted out so much of the sky.
    ‘S-sir.’ Diammid’s whole painful body trembled.
    Ah. The hero’s head tilted, the boots stepped away, the giant eyes came down. First the painful amber eye regarded him through the mist, then the other slewed grey across the eyeball, seeming to see nothing.
    The hero opened his neat mouth. Diammid sensed a much larger, rawer mouth opening somewhere nearby.
    Gorwr hay sheen hee pashin drouthsh, the hero said. Then both his eyes turned amber as the mist thickened, and he tried again: You hay seen hee passin throok .
    The mist furred Diammid’s eyes and brain. The hero was saying several things: You have seen me passing through this place, as well as You have seen things you were not intended to see. But most urgently the hero wanted to know, Have you seen him? Which way did he pass?
    ‘Who, sir?’ cried Diammid, but the mist had frayed and faded, and only the grey, uncomprehending eye swerved and slid above him. Diammid felt ill watching it – at any moment he would be sick all over the hero’s boots.
    But then the eye flickered, and steadied amber again. Crothel had a piece of Baltic amber in the glass case in the Science Room; there was a lacewing trapped in it, with some scraps of ancient leaf-litter. That specimen was a poor approximation of the amber world into which these eyes were windows. A dragonfly hung there, its thorax the length of Diammid’s arm; whole thorny lizards hovered, wrinkled-leather birds with tooth-edged beaks, entire mammoths – bubbles clung to their flanks and crevices, golden with the hero’s interior fire.
    ‘Who, sir?’ Diammid said again, to stop himself dying of the sight.
    This time the hero understood. Mine enemee. His voice rumbled in the ground. Skulls hung on cords at his waist, skulls of wolves and of Diammid-sized people and of horned, toothed beasts Diammid did not recognise. They clacked and clinked together on many notes. My foe! The mist thinned, the words turned to roar, the eye dimmed and slithered, and the ground shook hard, banging against the back of Diammid’s head. The hero blurred against the clouds, and the skulls became dull metal bells, and swung and sang.
    Then the amber eye burned above him. You cain tell me, said the hero, into whuchaputchatha . . . The eye dimmed, then shone very bright and hot. Into which aperture did he flee?
    ‘I have seen no one but yourself today, sir.’ Diammid trembled, pinned to the ground by the heat.
    And other days? Many years might pass in this place, that do not signify for the duration of the Chase. The eye came closer and hotter. Diammid squirmed.
    ‘But I have never been here before, sir!’
    I could crush your head like an asp’s under my boot-heel, rumbled the hero, pushing his face lower. I could cut

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