The Vorrh

respectful. Now he sat and waited to be ushered into the fort’s headquarters, not knowing why he was there and surprised at his own obedience. He was shocked at the scent of homecoming which befuddled his warrior’s instinct. He gripped the Enfield to fence it off, and used the swallows to gain focus before, during and after the event. He bled their speed into his anticipation, as the fierceness of the stars took command of the darkening sky.
    * * *

    I set my path by the night and walk out of the village while the track remains luminous. Later, starlight will make it shine in a different way, polishing the miles ahead with a bright, invisible velocity.
    I walk between banked walls of white stone as if in a riverbed, the road hollowed out by time, weather and the continual passage of humans, migratory as birds. Tribes crossing and re-crossing the same gulley, desperately trying to draw a line against extinction. It is with this herd of ghosts that I travel, alone.
    After some hours, I am stopped by an anxiety of sight. I have been aware for some time of tiny movements in the edges of my vision, fish-like punctuations breaking the solid wave of stone on either side, catching the light in dim flashes for less than a blink. Every time I stop, the phenomenon ceases. When I continue, the glinting peripheral shoal follows me. There is wonder at first, but it had now turned to unease, and I fear sentience or hallucination. Neither is wanted at this time: I seek only loneliness and distance, not wanting association or introspection, it being necessary to seek one dimension to understand with clarity. I have been crippled by complexity before, and the healing from it had taken too many years. I will not go there again and share my being with all those others who would claim and squabble over my loyalty. I need only to breathe and walk, but at this time of night, in that albino artery, I hear fear tracking me.
    The bow comes to my hand, wand-like and unstrung. She gives off musk into my grip, and her chemical blade reaches my pounding heart, which has also turned white, but away from stone. It touches my mind like her tongue, and I become calm and weightless, ready for the attack. Nothing happens. I stand, still as a post. After a time, I tilt my head slightly to see if anything moves. At first nothing, then a flicker, a single, tiny glimmer. I focus on this sprite, and move towards it in the manner of a cat stalking a sound. It is not in the air, but in the white stone. I can see it embedded in its cretaceous library. Starlight has ignited it, and a resonance of dim brilliance quivers about its edge. It is a fossilised shark’s tooth, a small, smooth dagger encrusted into the stone, its edges bitterly serrated and gnawing against the distant celestial light. There are hundreds of them stippling the rock.
    It was my movement between them which had rattled their light to give the impression of motion. These teeth were once greatly prized and, as I recall, had offered a small industry to the local inhabitants, who dug them out and exported them to political cities where they were mounted in silver and hung in a cluster on a miniature baroque tree. It was called a credenza, a name that became synonymous with the side table that once held it. The Borgazis and the Medici owned rich and sumptuous versions. When a guest was given wine, he or she was shown to the tree, where they freely picked a tooth and placed it in their chalice, its delicate chain hooked over the rim. If the tooth turned black, the wine was poisoned; if it stayed unstained, the credence of the wine and the host was proven and business and friendship could commence.
    I stand in the black night, musing on distant tables and forgotten aggressions, in a stone river of teeth, some of which I can use; their compact hardness and perfect jagged edges would make excellent arrowheads. In the approaching morning, I will dig them out and clean them, find straight wood for the shafts and hunt swallows; their wings will be my fletching. The wings are only perfect when cut from the bird alive, so I will have to make nets to trap their speed.
    * * *

    The officer hated this place, hated the forces that made it work so brilliantly in opposition to all that was sensible and ordered. He was driven into the fort twice a week to set its business straight before returning to the centre of one of the more civilised townships. He knew that every plan or order he made would be