The Tangled Lands by Tobias S. Buckell & Paolo Bacigalupi

Author:Tobias S. Buckell & Paolo Bacigalupi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 2018-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

1

MOP KNELT IN THE ASH of bramble burn, seeking bramble pods and seeds. Smoking dirt sieved between his gloved fingers. Sweat stung his eyes. Ash leaves swirled through the air, black crows’ wings, tumbling and swooping, coming to rest on the scorched land.

All along the bramble wall, fires blazed.

Burnmasters sprayed flaming paste from bladder sacks while assistants worked their bellows. Poisonous tangling vines ignited and writhed. Thorny, woody trunks collapsed, crackling, hissing, and spitting sap.

The stink of dying magic washed over Mop, rancid yellow smoke, obscuring his sight. He coughed and checked again for Rain. Once again, she was lagging, a crouched form trailing behind the rest of the pickers. Leather-stitch shadow of a girl, all alone.

Mop sidled back to her. “Keep up,” he whispered. “You have to keep up or they’ll find someone else.”

Rain peered up at him through the sewn holes of her leather cowl. Her eyes were dull and shadowed. “I’m tired,” she whispered.

“You think we all aren’t?” Mop motioned at the other seed pickers, women and children kneeling in still-smoking ash, humped figures laboring, working the dirt like drab curling beetles. Trains and clots and clods of them. Women with rakes. Children crawling about their mothers’ skirts. All of them sifting blackened ground for bramble seeds and sprouts.

“Don’t stand straight or pause,” he said. “Cojzia will find others.”

“How much longer until we’re through?” Rain asked.

Never, Mop thought. Never and never and never. Not until Borzai comes and gathers us into his arms for judgment.

The burn had been going all day, and yet it seemed that their work had taken but the barest bite out of the leading edge of the bramble forest. A day’s tilling cleared, perhaps, along with some peasant’s stone hut that they were now fighting to disinter—a hovel of chinkstone and boulders, built generations ago, and then swallowed by bramble’s encroach.

Children clambered up the hut’s stone walls, lighting ancient roof beams and thatch on fire. Flame licked about the base of the hut as well, blackening stone. Just clearing the hut would take hours. Tomorrow they would be back again, doing the same work, hacking away at the encroaching bramble.

Duke Malabaz said he wanted land cleared east all the way to the old village of Kem.

“If we’re lucky, we won’t be done for weeks,” Mop said. “Malabaz is paying, and we’ve got work, and that’s all that matters.”

He said the words, and they were true in a way, but even as he said them the forest wall of poisonous vines seemed to mock him with its loom. The bramble would never be banished. They might slash and hack and torch the thorny woods, but in the end, they sought to shove back an ocean.

No matter how much they labored, the waves of bramble would always be there, threatening to crash down upon them. Bramble reached north to green ice, and south to blue seas, and smothered all the East in thorns. It choked valleys and blanketed mountains all the way to the fabled city of Jhandpara, and yet here they pretended as if they could turn the tide.

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