The Vorrh

that was a cross-breeding of multiple ferocities, one taken from cats and snakes, birds and winds. The hand sprang back to hang limp and tingling, as if electrocuted, at the terrified soldier’s shivering side. Tsungali’s eyes drummed the officer’s attention. He swallowed his contempt and waved him away. The shivering soldier left the room.
    Tsungali walked in and smelt himself there years before, the rush of memories filling the hollows of his previous nervous system. For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: they keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current useable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.
    That old part of him swelled with an essence of himself before, nudging the now in a physical déjà vu, becoming two in the stiff interior of his body, ignoring the even stiffer officer who glared in his direction. The overhead fan waded in the congealed air, stirring heartbeats of a larger beast and giving rhythm to the mosquitoes queuing to taste the sweating white skin of the officer, who choked out, ‘You have been asked to come here’ – the claws of the word ‘asked’ scratched the inside of his throat – ‘for a very special purpose.’
    Night and insects.
    ‘We are looking for someone to hunt a man, someone we can trust.’
    ‘Trust’ nipped at his balls and diaphragm.
    ‘Someone with all the skills, a bushman warrior.’
    Even the officer heard the condescension and it halted him, giving him time to look more appraisingly at the man before him. He was tall but slightly bent. His formidable skeleton had been broken and repaired many times. The flesh and muscle was hard, dark meat, pliant and over-used, solid. The skin was losing its once blue-black sheen, a faint grey opalescence dusting its vitality. The uniform was worn-out and rearranged, mended into another version of itself, turned into how he had wanted it to be: the opposite of its function of uniformity and rank. Its blueness was waning, building a visual alliance with the man’s skin. He looked like a shadow in the room and perhaps he was: a static shadow being cast by what was now happening in his swirling being, a gap of light spun out of a space in time.
    In this departure, the officer was given a moment to look at Tsungali’s face, which was now still – not in calmness, but more like a single frame taken from a fast-moving film, held in blur at an unnatural rest. It had been some years since the officer had been this close to him. He had been in chains then, manacled to the courtroom floor. The ferocity of that man’s face had been in the wild passion of its movement and malice. Now it was formalised. The lines of twisted hate had been wrought into signs and contrivances, the spitting screams written in careful glyphs. His motionless face writhed in a balanced book of deep scars, an illuminated tapestry of skin, not unlike his grandfather’s. Neither was it unlike the body of the Enfield, which had itself become a carved narrative.
    The officer stared at the polished bolt of the rifle; polished not by pomp or fetish, but by use.
    ‘Where is he from?’ said Tsungali. His voice stopped the mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.
    For a moment, the officer was jarred back into the abhorrence of their business, and didn’t understand the question. Then he said, ‘He’s a white man.’
    * * *

    Ishmael did not know that he was not a normal human, because he had never seen one. The gentle, dark brown machines that nurtured him from infant to child, child to adolescent, looked like him in shape but were made from a different material. He had grown in their quiet, attentive care, knowing he was not the same, but never dreaming that he was a monster. There were no monsters in his world, deep under the stables in the old city of Essenwald.
    It was a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made in the perimeter of the forest. It was built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine, while the extremes of weather had set about another form of fakery, forcing the actions of seasons through the high velocity of tropical tantrum. Many of the old stone houses had been shipped in, each brick