The Vorrh

self-sanctified chivalry brightening his view of the grubby streets outside.
    * * *

    After his duties at the train station were finished, Maclish had rushed to find the doctor, his expression grave and urgent.
    ‘It went terribly wrong. We must find Sidrus at once.’
    ‘What went wrong?’ said the doctor, obtusely.
    ‘The Orm, man, the Orm! It hollowed the wrong man, some other poor black who was guiding a stranger through the forest. Not a hunter, anyway, and not Tsungali,’ said Maclish.
    ‘But how could that be?’ said the doctor, finally relinquishing the remnants of his peaceful day. ‘He was spoored, he had the trace string…’
    Maclish shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, man, I don’t have the answers. It didn’t work this time.’
    Sidrus fumed, his head shaking in dismay; its soft, bald surface rippled and wriggled his disturbing face, looking even more unreal in the pallid light of Hoffman’s laboratory.
    ‘He had the string worm and you had the description of the prey; how could this happen?’ he said ominously.
    The doctor looked at the floor and Maclish tried not to look at the articulation of the face, as anger slid beneath its baby-smooth skin and wrinkled between its wide-set, piggish eyes. He had seen many things, worked with all kinds of freaks and barrack life, but this man gave him the horrors, made his flesh creep.
    ‘You have wasted my time and my money, and the one opportunity I had of stopping that animal from killing Williams in the Vorrh,’ he snarled.
    ‘It worked with Cornelius and the Silver Man,’ mumbled Maclish, his words barely escaping before the cleric turned on him, crossing the room and looming into his face.
    ‘Then what fucked up this time?’ he shouted, his breath hot and fast on Maclish’s face, forcing him to close his eyes. No one had ever dared try this before; the consequences of insulting the fire-headed Scotsman were broadly known. But on this occasion, he looked away. The deepest levels of his well-sprung instinct locked down his hands and his rage, quelling it beside his opponent’s ferocious power.
    ‘We will give the money back,’ said the doctor, trying to defuse the situation. The cleric sent him a withering gaze, as if to silence him forever; alum for the tongue. The stringent moment lengthened. Sidrus stormed out of the pale room, snapping the atmosphere’s tensile thinness with his stomping feet.
    Anger was not the most useful tool in his armoury. He had achieved everything without its obvious help, could reach the far points of expression and action without the adrenaline other men required to achieve half as much. So he marched through the streets, wanting to dissipate his rage and think more clearly, but he could only contemplate the dismal outcome of what should have been a foolproof plan – what had those idiots done to ruin such a perfect solution? Now he had to find another way of stopping the wretched Englishman from being butchered in the Vorrh as he tried to pass through it for a second time. Nobody had ever accomplished such a thing; the great forest protected itself by draining and erasing the souls of all men; all except this one, apparently, who walked through it with impunity, even appearing to gain benefit from it. Sidrus did not know how or why this unique possibility had manifested itself, although he guessed that the witch child of the True People had worked some blasphemous magic with her protégé. What he did know was that if the Englishman passed through the forest again, he alone would have the opportunity to understand its balance, its future and maybe even its past. Not since Adam had such a single being altered the purpose and the meaning of the Vorrh, and now he was being hunted by a barbaric mercenary, one these fools had let slip through their grasp.
    Sidrus was faced again with the impossibility of his task – he could not go into the forest, and there was nobody else who could prevent catastrophe. It had been easier dispatching the Erstwhile than trying to protect the straying man from afar. The twins had been easy enough, but he knew there would be others sniffing out the bounty attached to Williams’ desertion, and the murders he had committed that had sparked the tinder of the Possession Wars.
    His only hope now was that Tsungali would be lost in the tangled depth, or that one of the creatures of the core would permanently interrupt his travels. But Sidrus had little faith in these hopes, and he prayed