THE ORION TRILOGY by Darius Hinks

Author:Darius Hinks
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2019-06-18T07:31:38+00:00

WINTER

Gaurach-Dúin

The Season of Ice

Stillness

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ordaana lay in the dark, half asleep in the roots of a tree, imagining that flies were speaking to her. The words were amiable, soporific and lisping. ‘Hookworm, of fifteen varieties, emerging from the flesh of the joint cavity. Roundworm, of twelve varieties, covering the mucus lining. Lesser infestations of cankerworm, tapeworm, zeaspora, black pox, hair tongue and lung fungus.’

She ignored the flies, holding her child tighter for warmth and trying to regain the blissful nothingness of sleep.

The droning words continued, listing every conceivable fungal infection and disease. The voice was so lethargic that Ordaana might have succeeded in staying asleep if not for the other sounds that accompanied it. Nearby she could hear a clicking sound – bone, tapping against wood; an irregular pattern that caused her to flinch with every click. She clamped her eyes tighter but the sound drummed on. It was like a fingernail, tapping against her skull. And, in the distance, she could hear something equally jarring – a dull, repetitive clang, like two pans being banged together. The sounds combined into such an infuriating din that she accepted defeat and opened her eyes to glare at the insects.

‘Why can’t you just let me sleep?’

The endless clouds of flies were there, of course, but they were not speaking. She was being addressed by one of Alkhor’s servants – one of his muttering, shuffling lackeys. When she had asked, in disgusted tones, what they were, Alkhor had given her the name humans applied to them, seeming to find it incredibly funny. Humans called them tallymen, he explained, if they lived long enough to call them anything. This particular one was standing over her, fiddling with a tally stick and an abacus of finger bones. Like all of Alkhor’s brood, it was vaguely humanoid, but with an impossibly bloated stomach, a pair of ridiculous spindly legs, a single tusk sprouting from its skull and one, large cyclopean eye embedded in its forehead.

‘Ganglion,’ she muttered.

Ordaana would rather not have been on first name terms with such a being, but Ganglion’s particular gift made it quite unmistakable. It had explained, quite proudly to Ordaana, that Alkhor had blessed it with the blood pox. Constant bleeding beneath its skin made its body the colour of raw meat. The dark red was in sharp contrast with its eye – a lurid sack of yellow, laced with swollen veins and oozing a constant stream of pus.

‘Infinitesimal particles of white nose, loose eye and liver mould,’ it said, leaning so close that she could see the weevils rushing across its blackened tongue.

Ordaana groaned and backed away, struggling with the nausea that dogged her every waking moment. The thing spoke a language so base it hurt her ears, but Alkhor had cursed her with the ability to understand every loathsome word.

‘The tendons have erupted in thirty-seven places, Proctor,’ said Ganglion, using its counting stick to prod a lump of meat near her feet.

She hissed a curse and stood up. The

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