The Vorrh

explain than their abducted predecessors. There was something so terrible in their collective presence that most normal humans could not abide their company. Overseers lasted only a few weeks; even the most callous and brutal of souls found that, within a few days, they were questioning their own existence and the meaning of mortality. Those who could previously whip a man to death without rage or guilt found themselves waking at night, sobbing as questions about eternity bubbled in their ill-shaped minds. In the early days, it appeared as though it would never be possible to organise and focus this mass of free labour. Then the stillborn came, to offer a tool of control.
    There were some ragged legends, and a few squalid myths, but the truth was even more bizarre. The cleric knew that truth, and how to use it. He knew that it began with William Maclish, an ex-Black Watch sergeant, once a hard-drinking, no-nonsense kind of man, with a muscular personality and a wiry, red-haired temper. He had obtained the position of senior keeper to the slave house, and moved in to the keeper’s house with his pregnant wife and their few possessions. It had been a new beginning. He had changed his ways, his job and his country, and there was a bright, gruff optimism in the teetotal air. Three weeks later, beset by Limboia-induced depression, he was thinking of suicide. But his desperate plans were abruptly halted, and the course of his life forever altered, by the death of his first-born child.
    He had sat by his wife’s bed while the doctor wrapped the lifeless bundle tightly and put it into a canvas bag. A noise had come from outside, a growing song mixed with broken glass. His first thoughts were of riot, and he had hurried the half-finished doctor out of his house, unable to face the possible collision of these two parts of his life while in the man’s melancholy presence.
    His departure secured, Maclish had listened more carefully. One hundred and nineteen lost souls – the entire population of the locked house – had broken the windows of their dormitories and were singing out into the night. It was a call of loss – discordant, pure and hairraisingly eerie. His head cocked to the song of the Limboia, he heard pibroch woven inside the wail, highland dirges that uprooted his nerve and stitched him to a childhood which had been so gapingly forgotten. He stood at the door of his squat home and stared at the slave house, its every window filled with mooncalf faces, all calling to him.
    The next day he walked slowly from his sobbing home to the slave house. They were still singing. He unlocked the door and they fell still, remaining silent as he walked among them, each pointing at their own heart. He returned to reassure his wife that all was well, but she was sleeping at last, so he walked instinctively to where the doctor had left the bundle, picked it up and tucked it under his coat. He did not know why he was doing this; he could have given no man a sensible answer. He carried the concealment out of their home and into the hushed, glacial silence of the slave house. On the table that stood at the centre of the recreational hall, he placed the treasure, unwrapping it and arranging the tiny, stiff corpse for all of them to see.
    The response was astonishing. They became galvanised, moving as one, forming a queue from all parts of the three-storied jail which tapered to the hall and its table of focus. The first of the Limboia brought a piece of broken mirror, which he held close to his head. A tension was rising in the space between understanding and fear. When his bony legs touched the table, he looked away, holding the mirror with both hands. His body and head contoured so that he could hold the glass in a difficult position, to the side of his face. He squinted into the mirror, at the backwards-peripheral reflection of the dead infant. He looked there for a few granite- solid minutes, then passed the mirror to the next man, who imitated him exactly.
    Hours later, they had all made the same ritual, all seen his child in a squint, all shown respect. Maclish was exhausted and could not explain what had happened, except in the way of the tongue: deep inside, he knew that they had all taken something, not from the dead infant, but from the world that it would never walk in. He also knew that all of them were now his. He wrapped the little body up tight, and took it back to his home, hidden in the dark, silky lining of his