The Vorrh

purpose, Tsungali would have to pay dearly, but not yet, and not to this doctor. Nebsuel attached a trace scent to the scarred warrior; he would be trackable for up to a year, trained beasts could be used to carry message of his whereabouts; it could be used to find him if he never returned – the state of his body, intact or otherwise, would not hinder its efficacy.
    The next day, Tsungali gave his thanks and said goodbye. For his treatment and recuperation, he had traded three-dozen safety pins, twelve blue shells collected by the coastal tribes, and five ampoules of adrenalin stolen from army medical supplies. He had also, unknowingly, traded a week of his life, and all possibility of the fulfilment of his commission.
    After his patient’s departure, Nebsuel opened a slanted box and removed a tiny piece of pungent, scrolled cloth, designed for the purpose, stretching it between intricate brass flaps. He took a delicately nibbed pen and scratched a musical, Arabic tracery into its waiting. When it was dry, he unpinned it and rolled it into a tiny tube, which he screwed into a weightless tin cylinder, not much bigger than the curved nail of his little finger. He cooed and hummed to the black pigeon he cupped in his hands as he attached the cylinder to one of the bird’s legs. He stepped outside and cast it to the skies, towards a flutter of rising stars, whistling after it to increase its speed.
    * * *

    The cleric sat at a circular table in his house, close to the forest. The bird arrived out of the sun and flew to its familiar perch and food tray in the Langhorne tower above him. Its weight set a light silver bell in motion, which called the gaunt man to attend. He peeled the message from the bird and straightened the scroll:

‘The assassin goes on into the Vorrh to kill the Bowman. He is spoored. Act with speed or be lost.’
    The cleric put the slip of cloth into a glass phial, and locked it in a steel box. It was impossible for him to enter the forest, but he needed to prevent the Bowman from dying within it. He would have to send another in his stead, someone to wipe out the fearsome warrior on the Bowman’s trail. There was only one: the Orm.
    The Orm lived and worked within the Limboia. It was at home in their blankness; it hid in their absence. In fact, no one knew what the Orm was: if it was to be used, a message was given to the lost core of them all. Something of them, something or other, stepped out; no one knew what, and most did not care to. It was said that its brain was black and hard as granite, unlike the limp mush that swilled in the walnut skulls of the Limboia. The process and the price of contact chilled even the cleric’s contaminated heart. But it had to be done, so he went to the slave house near the station, where the Limboia were kept when not toiling in the forest’s interior.
    * * *

    The slave house was isolated from all other buildings, three storeys high and surrounded by a fenced enclosure. It had been a prison, constructed to hold slaves in one part and criminals in another. Most of the criminals were simply escaped slaves, and eventually the two parts of the grim building had merged. The uncomfortable history of slavery was far too close; even in these more civilized times, its scars were far from healed. In other parts of the world, the abolition was a matter of growing moral rightness. Here, it changed by evolution, some said to a state of increased degradation. The slaves had been superseded by a deformed generation which developed inside them, replacing the stolen workforce with another that had been hidden all along. Continual, forced exposure to the Vorrh bred an alternative clan of beings, and within the original slave army grew another: the seed of the Limboia.
    Most of their number were black and of local origin, some were white, and a very few had strayed from Asia. Getting them to work was easy: they all longed to be in the Vorrh, and their addiction was easily exploited by controlled, rotating shifts. The train carried a continual exchange of those whose week’s containment in the slave house left them desperate to return to the swallowing forest, and those whose fatigue left them too dazed to know they were leaving it.
    The slave house and its upkeep was the collective responsibility of the Timber Guild, a society made up of the larger factories and exporters that fed richly from the forest’s abundance. The Limboia were far more difficult to control and