Speaker vs. Sniktch
There is a simple expression in physical activity. The body is forced to cope with rigours beyond the norm. Fingers strain with focused energy, then radiate pain as sores begin to open, then go numb and rigid. Feet ache from constant pressure. Eventually, the mind is unshackled from the body, and is free to loose itself as the body continues to move.
Throughout the years of quick training and sudden conflict, I have come to enjoy climbing. The same is not true of my mentor and partner, Pual. Looking over my right shoulder, I can see him grimly applying himself to the cliff face with a fierce intensity. I almost think he would rather reach the top and what is waiting there for us then remain clutching to the cold hard stone of this up thrust mesa. His leathery skin contrasts with his wiry ease, he manoeuvres his body to best reach the next upward point, ever ascending in tandem with myself. Pual is about half again as old as I am, my thirty-five to his sixty-five, but he doesn’t show it.
Below us, the other teams follow our trail. Someone watching from a distance would see us as tiny specks of colour slowly seeping up the rock face. Hand over hand. One arm length at a time.
(Insert “Climbing” picture)
There is a reason why Pual and I are first. Together, ignoring pain and weariness, we are nearly silent as we reach the top. Pual rests briefly on a outcropping, flexing his fingers. He motions carefully, and our long time together allows me to understand the movements of his body as clearly as speech. He wants me to skirt the cliff to the left, and then come up as he does. I work my way in the indicated direction, nod at him. My hands and feet pump in final effort, and I hurl myself upward over the cliff edge.
From the top the view is breathtaking. In a moment I take in the river snaking down below, the sparse vegetation. Before I get the full chance to absorb the view, I am forced to reality by the presence of our objective.
Perched upon the edge of the cliff opposite from me she sits. The last of her kind in this time. She whistles a truly unnerving tune, but the wind snatches it from her and flings it away from the mesa edge before I catch more then a strain. I glance at the rocky lip where Pual was supposed to have surmounted, but he is not there.
“This time or another, you will not win.” The female says, still looking away. She is wearing a period costume, Viking-esque. Most of her kind hold onto their original timeline with such reminders. This particular outfit is gaudy, includes a chain hanging down the back, of all things.
“This time or another, you will not win.” She says again, and turns to face me. Her mouth leaks blood. That is a good sign. She is stressed, preparing for sudden movement, and reacting as her species is wont under such conditions.
This warning is sufficient, and I am prepared as she throws herself clear across the breadth of the mesa rock, hands outstretched towards my throat. I dodge backwards, and foolishly trip over a jutting stone, falling pathetically in her path. She leaps upon me, in all likelihood she means to rip out my throat or snap my neck. I try and roll, but her arms are unnaturally strong. She holds me down, and prepares for the kill.
Then there is a loud noise, the sensation of movement. The creature’s left arm explodes. She rears up, chains flying, golden breastplate sodden with fresh blood. There is another crash, another unseen projectile, and she arches back. Her bloody mouth smiles, ignoring her pain. “This time or another, you will not win.” She whispers thickly, and falls over. Dead.
(Insert “Weird bloody girl picture”)
I see Pual before me, hands upraised and still glowing from the release of energy. He frowns for a moment, then bends over and funnels the unspent energy remnants into the ground.
“Does this mean were done here?” I ask, gasping for breath. I am still high on adrenaline, but I know that soon that surge will falter, and every ache I now feel will hit me with full force. I am not looking forward to that moment.
“Yes. We are done in this time. Now we must move on to the next.”
I groan. Truth to tell, after five years of training and fifteen more of hunting, I had hoped for a little rest.
A hunter never receives rest while there is still prey to catch. In this time or another.
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There is one more thing we must do before leaving this time. We must speak with the oracle.
Two flights, four days, and much aching later, Pual and I arrive at our destination, a sprawling city of ancient buildings mixed with modern architecture. We rent a small little car and head downtown, into the older sections in which the occasional ruin of pre-war buildings still stand, albeit in several different pieces. One of these pieces holds a special significance for the hunters we are. Of brick construction, overlaid by a now faded wash and graced with ancient wire boxes, this wall serves as the home for the oracle. It has for nearly eighty years, I am told. Put up when war talk was still an undercurrent of society, and not yet the destructive conflict nobody could have imagined. Here was where the first victim of the otherworlders fell into death, and in so doing became a spirit. Granted wisdom and insight, she now waits within the wall, dispensing lore to those that hunt her dispatchers through time.
As we get out of the car and approach, the wall bends outwards to meet us. The form of a women, trapped in brick and plaster residue. Waiting. Trapped forever. I cannot imagine her plight.
(Insert “Wall Women” picture)
“Pual…Apprentice. I am glad to see you. Now. What about the reverse? Time?”
“Yes, Oracle. When is the next outbreak occurrence?” Pual, straight to the point as usual.
“Always so very. Quick.” The oracle sighs. It resonates much like the rattle of a tile, falling down a roof full of its fellows. A very unnerving sound. “I much prefer talking to your master, when his time comes.”
While I have little idea what she is speaking of, I have to chuckle at Pual’s discomfort. “Forgive me. I am merely nervous about the reverse.” He eventually replies.
“Of course, forgive me for prolonging your. Time.” The oracle fades back into the wall. Just as I thought that she was gone sulking, the wall burst outward again. “The next outbreak will occur in forty. Years. Ten. Months. Five. Days. Recommended reverse; thirty. Years. Five. Months. Allow for extra. Training. You will need. Time. The others will. Follow.”
“Extra training Pual?” I enquire, setting up for a joke about old men fit for retirement. Both Pual and the oracle turn their eyes towards me and do not speak. I find their combined stare most unnerving. The oracle in particular can stare unabashedly with brick red eyes for long moments without blinking, encouraging watery eyes within seconds. I blinked rapidly, turned to avoid her gaze and focus on Pual.
“You will see.” He says, leaving my question hanging. I hate it when Pual does that.
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The oracle next revealed the “where” of the matter, without which the “when” would not be of much use. That meant that Pual and I had to go flying again. Planes are convenient, planes are relatively safe, but not all that comfortable. Then it was a three-day trip by bus and car to the edge of the Northern wastelands. No other place on the planet is quite the same. At the border you see the ultimate dichotomy, life against death, as the wastes creep ever southward year by year into the prosperous croplands. How green fields and barren land can exist within miles of each other is beyond me.
We stood in one of the bordering green fields, the bulk of a huge farmstead dominated the scene. The field grew right up to its tattered remains in orderly rows, as if reluctant to leave the carefully tilled soil of the long departed farmer. This was no coincidence. I now knew why the oracle had sent us here. Ritual power lay in the land, the last gasp it held before the waste advanced further giving it strength unmatched.
(Insert “collapsed house in field” picture)
Pual seems nervous. He paces. Pacing is a bad sign in my book. Action without purpose, undirected, often motivated by some inner conflict.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Reverse timing.” He barks. Terse, just like normal.
I press the conversation forward weaving around his blunted rebuttal. “From what you have told me, reverse timing merely jumps us forward over the years. It works, and all the hunters use it. What are you worried about?”
“Worried? Pah.” He dismisses the idea solidly.
I return to my silence. Pual does not often talk until he wants to. I was willing to wait. This being my first time to travel by reverse timing, I was not in a hurry for the experience.
“Remember when we first met?” Pual asks, abruptly.
“Is this a relationship question? I am not too good at those.” I reply. I earn a scowl in response. Pual continues pacing. I decide to act my age for a minute and give a real answer. “I was a total amnesiac. We were on a dusty road together; I didn’t know you or where I was, or even who I was. You took pity on me”, I say this with a sardonic grin, “Taught me how to hunt outsiders, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the past twenty years.”
Pual nods. Paces. Then he plants his feet and heaves a big sigh. Not a good sign. Pual never sighs. “No time like the present.” Says he. I groan, and he smiles…an uncharacteristic fissure cutting across his face.
I stand up to begin, my mind searching back for the words and gestures necessary to send us forward in time. But Pual looks at me and shakes his head. “Unlike most of the powerful magic we’ve done together, my friend, this one is done solo. You’ll have your chance yet.”
I am thoroughly confused. Rituals require energy, and the bigger and more blended the ritual, the higher the potency. I had expected to pour quite a bit of myself into this one. It was not a question of training—like all the rituals, I knew the reverse time one inside and out, never mind that I had never used it. But I had to assume Paul knew what he was doing by asking me to sit out.
I pick up a narrow sprig of ripening grain and placed it between my teeth in feign indifference as Pual closes his eyes and began to concentrate.
Time passed. Normal time, I mean, not the years we were about to traverse. “Are we there yet?” I whine in my best high-pitched nasal tone.
“It has begun.” Pual says, and opens his eyes. His cheeks are flushed, and he nearly collapses.
Before I can say another word, there is a sudden change in the environment. The sky becomes a blur as the sun and clouds race overhead and scar tracks across the sky. The stalk in my lips curls into itself, turns an unhealthy black, and then crumbles into dust.
Pual stiffens and slumps to the ground. He grasps a hand full of the larger field stalks, which immediately accelerate towards decay, leaving a green stain on his hand. Pual does not notice. He slumps forward onto the ground.
As I rush towards him, time swirls. The fields ripen, and then collapse as dry winter comes the cycle repeats again and again. The space of five years passes in the time it takes for me to lift Pual to his knees. The fields continue their seasonal converson, but the order they display begins to fall apart. Something is happening.
“Pual?” I ask. A dozen brief lightning storms spawn and vent their fury.
“I am conscious.” He replies. “Help me to my feet.”
I lift him up. He looks around, and so do I. The field life is nearly extinguished. The abandoned house has nearly finished falling completely apart. Although I do not feel it, I am sure that a hot wind is blowing from the north almost constantly. Fewer clouds drift through the sky. Pual lowers his head, and then turns to me.
“Understand this. The Pual you know is about to cease to exist, as surely as the waste will come this way.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, as the sun begins to shine near constantly and the ground begins to harden beneath my feet.
“Your amnesia… will now be mine. No ritual could throw two beings forward into the future without a price…” His voice fades, and he shrugs off my hands.
Cracks are beginning to form in the ground. The sun beats down upon us. How many years have passed already? Twenty? Thirty?
“What do you mean?” I whisper harshly. Although I as yet feel no heat, I have the urge to lick my lips thoroughly as the cracks in the ground begin to harden into solid rigidity. The mark of the waste.
Pual reaches down and tears apart a handful of soil. He rubs this between his hands, as if trying to remove the stain of green from those long lost plants. He wipes his face, and the soil follows his hand. His appearance is now wild. He does not look like the Pual I know.
He turns back to me and reaches out his hand. I then begin to see the price he spoke of.
(Insert “Man in the dust” picture)
He looks younger, much younger. Thin as a rail, his mouth drawn over with fine white dust. “To reverse time, I must give up years of my life… and all the memories those years contain. And a little more. I shall become as you were twenty years ago. Unable to recall my own name. Not knowing our mission. You will have to teach me.”
I now know the truth. “This has happened before, hasn’t it? That’s where I come from? I once gave my life for the same cause?”
Pual nods. That is all he has to do.
I have no time to dwell on my new situation. Time is beginning to restore itself to normal speed. I can feel it now, in the back of my head. The sun is beginning to slow its burning progress across the sky. I begin to feel the heat of the sky and the ground pressing towards me. Pual senses this too. He reaches up and pulls me towards him. “Continue the cycle, my new master. For in five years we must hunt.”
And so we will.