The Vorrh

that he did not hear the fast rustle of leaves or the velocity of the twigs breaking behind the cyclops. But Ishmael did, and he swung around, glaring down to where he imagined he would see the squat yellow bodies of the attacking anthropophagi. To his shock, he was confronted by the charging blur of an enormous black warrior carrying a rifle, a viscous knife gleaming at its snout. It was coming fast.
    Ishmael did the only thing that he knew would awaken Williams into that lethal moment: he snatched the bow from his hands with such force that it jarred the Bowman’s eyes open and alert.
    The cyclops turned again to the assailant, and his glare was like a slap across the hunter’s eyes. This was not a Whiteman – it was not a man at all. Ishmael’s glaring eye hit his sight and he faltered, slipping on the sticky path. He slid to almost all fours, but never lost his momentum or his grip on Uculipsa. He caught himself without falling and stumbled forward, pulling his lope upright and back into a charge.
    Williams saw the charging man; watched him lose focus and slither in his approach. Lifting his hand to his shoulder bag, he pulled out the hefty, eager weight of the Mars pistol before the hunter had righted himself and gathered speed.
    As he ran, Tsungali saw the creature raise the bow over his head, he saw the quick, unfolding movement of the other man and he knew the voice he had heard below really had been his grandfather, not a demon or a ghost. The monsters did not whisper below: they were up here, with him, and he was running straight at them.
    Williams cocked and aimed the pistol as he saw the Blackman’s eyes.
    The point of the bayonet was within two metres of Ishmael’s chest when the great roar put a stop to all motion; all, that is, except for the birds, who threw themselves from every branch and beat their wings upwards and out of the forest, into the bright, dazzling air and away from the terrible sound.
    Ishmael had dropped the bow, letting it spring away from his fast hands as he grabbed at his ears, a hot, white flame passing over his shoulder. He sank to his knees, howling.
    Williams stepped past him, the pistol never wavering from its attention. He stared down the track to where Tsungali lay, lifted off his feet and thrown back to the exact spot where he had regained his momentum only seconds before. He writhed in an excruciating tangle while Williams slowly walked the narrow distance to stand over him, the smoking barrel at his side.
    * * *

    Charlotte watched him as he stared out to sea from the quarterdeck of the great white and silver ship. He was motionless and uncommunicative; every day spent on the endless water made him drift further and further away. She tried to be close, but a barrier was forming as he fell inward. She had never felt so lonely or so helpless as she did while watching the sea turn from blue to green, pondering on its unfeeling and enormous depth.
    At night, under fierce stars, they ate in silence, with all her attempts at gentle conversation ignored or rebuffed. She knew he could not help it, that it was not vindictively aimed at her, but it still wounded her. She told herself that her hurt was nothing compared to his; his most overwhelming feelings were attached to an irredeemable absence. Every hour of his waking and sleeping life was given to searching the recesses of his blank memory for a face or a moment to hold and flood with his tidal wave of emotion. But all he ever found was a distant, grey, empty shore, and by the time they had reached Marseille, he barely noticed she was there at all.
    He no longer shared his hurt with her. Instead, she became the brunt of his disappointment and his growing, aimless anger. Their return to Paris was peevish and numb. He refused to be enlightened by her happiness of homecoming. Every effort she made was wasted and disregarded. He was punishing her inability to solve or reduce his misery, demanding rather than asking her for things, especially his fastidious meals and his increasing supplies of barbiturates. She had to keep a record of his experiments with these, so that he might calculate different alchemies of unbeing and find the limits of his non-existence to balance against the volume of his pain.
    He was listless, he could not settle or write. He roamed the rooms, peering through the curtains into the diminished City of Light; he talked about travelling again, used movement as a surrogate for thought. For the first