Read The Vorrh for Free Online Page B

trust.’
    ‘Trust’ nipped at his balls and diaphragm.
    ‘Someone with all the skills, a bushman warrior.’
    Even the officer heard the condescension and it halted him, giving him time to look more appraisingly at the man before him. He was tall but slightly bent. His formidable skeleton had been broken and repaired many times. The flesh and muscle was hard, dark meat, pliant and over-used, solid. The skin was losing its once blue-black sheen, a faint grey opalescence dusting its vitality. The uniform was worn-out and rearranged, mended into another version of itself, turned into how he had wanted it to be: the opposite of its function of uniformity and rank. Its blueness was waning, building a visual alliance with the man’s skin. He looked like a shadow in the room and perhaps he was: a static shadow being cast by what was now happening in his swirling being, a gap of light spun out of a space in time.
    In this departure, the officer was given a moment to look at Tsungali’s face, which was now still – not in calmness, but more like a single frame taken from a fast-moving film, held in blur at an unnatural rest. It had been some years since the officer had been this close to him. He had been in chains then, manacled to the courtroom floor. The ferocity of that man’s face had been in the wild passion of its movement and malice. Now it was formalised. The lines of twisted hate had been wrought into signs and contrivances, the spitting screams written in careful glyphs. His motionless face writhed in a balanced book of deep scars, an illuminated tapestry of skin, not unlike his grandfather’s. Neither was it unlike the body of the Enfield, which had itself become a carved narrative.
    The officer stared at the polished bolt of the rifle; polished not by pomp or fetish, but by use.
    ‘Where is he from?’ said Tsungali. His voice stopped the mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.
    For a moment, the officer was jarred back into the abhorrence of their business, and didn’t understand the question. Then he said, ‘He’s a white man.’
    * * *

    Ishmael did not know that he was not a normal human, because he had never seen one. The gentle, dark brown machines that nurtured him from infant to child, child to adolescent, looked like him in shape but were made from a different material. He had grown in their quiet, attentive care, knowing he was not the same, but never dreaming that he was a monster. There were no monsters in his world, deep under the stables in the old city of Essenwald.
    It was a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made in the perimeter of the forest. It was built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine, while the extremes of weather had set about another form of fakery, forcing the actions of seasons through the high velocity of tropical tantrum. Many of the old stone houses had been shipped in, each brick numbered for resurrection. Some of the newer mansions and warehouses had taken local materials and copied the ornate, crumbling splendour of their predecessors, adding original artistic brilliance in their skeuomorphic vision of decay. It was prosperous, busy and full of movement, with solid roads and train lines scrolling out from its frantic, lustrous heart. Only one track crawled into the dark interior of the forest. Into the eternal mass of the Vorrh.
    The city fed on trees, devouring the myriad of different species that ferociously grew there. Sawmills and lumber yards buzzed and sang in the daylight hours, rubber works cooked sap into objects, and paper mills boiled and bleached the bodies naked, ready for words. All this appetite was allowed by the forest. It encouraged the nibbling at one of its edges and used it as another form of protection – a minor one in comparison to the arsenal of defence that kept the Vorrh eternal.
    Essenwald’s declaration of power and continuance