The badlands

 “If we die, we die together….”  Lady Believer’s voice was a resonant contralto that echoed around the stone-and-ash walls of the gulley.  She strode on ahead of the cart pulled by Dead Love which squeaked, creaked and groaned as it crushed cinders to more ash beneath its wooden wheels.  “You and I, we live and die; we die together.”  She kicked aside a head-sized mound with a crimson boot and a sooty skull, freed from the clinging ash and dirt, rolled and bounced across the path.

“Oi!”

Lady Believer halted, one foot still in mid-air, and looked around.  She set her foot gently down, adjusting her stance so that she was ready to fight, and scanned the walls of the canyon.  Ash had rained down from the sky for so long that it formed a distinct layer above where the natural stone ended, but that was hard to make out from the dusty, flaky ash petals that clung to the stone everywhere she looked.  The path was coated with cinders, most cold now, that offered no place to hide.  She stared into the shadows, hunting for signs of a cave, or at least an outcropping behind which someone could hide.

“Down here!”

She didn’t look down.  Skulls did not talk and anyone stupid enough to try lying down in the canyon would either suffocate under ashfall or be crushed by a cart like the one Dead Love was pulling.  Instead she thought carefully about where the voice had seemed most likely to come from and selected a point on the canyon wall a little her left.

“Boot,” she said quietly, not looking away from the spot.  She held her hand out and Dead Love, obedient and faithful, turned around in the traces and dug into the contents of the cart.  The contents were all similar in a sense: corpses were stacked with the more complete ones at the back and the ones broken apart into limbs, torsos and heads at the front, near Dead Love.  A cloud of black flies hovered over the cart and even more were disturbed and launched, buzzing, into the air as Dead Love tossed ragged-fleshed arms and legs aside, hunting for a boot.  Her white fingers closed on a heavy, metal-reinforced calf-high boot and she pulled it out.  Toe bones spilled from it as she emptied it into the cart, and then she tossed the boot with a low underarm throw to Lady Believer.

Lady Believer caught it, using her peripheral vision to watch the throw so that nothing could slither away from the point of the cliff she thought the voice had come from, and adjusted her grip on it.  It was, she thought, a good boot.

“No, really, down here,” said the voice again.  It sounded uncertain, she thought.  She drew her arm back and hurled the boot so that it thudded, sole first, against the cliff a little way above head height.  The cliff shuddered, if you were watching for it, as the packed ash was shifted and rocked.

“Waste of a boot,” said the voice, followed a couple of seconds later by a shocked cry that was neither scream nor expletive but some distorted combination of both.  Ash showered down, bringing with it small stones and a tiny rockfall.  Lady Believer relaxed a little, smirking.

“What did you have to go and do that for?” said the voice, coming now from a kneeling, ash-covered figure that had staggered out from the canyon wall and tripped over.

“Why were you hiding in ambush?” asked Lady Believer.  She waved a hand and Dead Love unbound herself from the traces of the cart and shambled over to the canyon wall to look for the boot.

“Hitch-hiking,” said the figure.  It coughed and sent up a cloud of ash around its head that prolonged the coughing fit.

“Here?”  Lady Believer didn’t need to say more; the badlands of Finerock started just outside the city of Maldice and finished at the shores of the East Sea.  No-one travelled across them because there was nowhere to go.

“Clearly,” said the figure as though they didn’t know that.  “Wouldn’t be much use me trying to hitch-hike in Maldice and standing out here, would it?”

Dead Love pulled the boot free from a pile of rocks and a faint smile appeared on her deathly pale face.  She lumbered back to the cart with it and the figure, now wiping ash from itself, watched her.

“Doesn’t she talk?” it said.  As it patted its clothes down more ash rose and the coughing started again.

“Dead Love?  They are voiceless,” said Lady Believer.  “What would they want to talk about?  But you’re trying to change the subject, aren’t you?  Why were you waiting to ambush us?”

“I told you, I was hitch-hiking,” said the figure.  Enough of a face had emerged now, though it was streaked still with ash and dirt, that Lady Believer decided that they were male, and very much alive.  This was unusual for the badlands.  “I got dropped off at the coast and I’ve been trying to reach Maldice.  But the roads here are something awful.”

Lady Believer tapped a fingernail against her yellow teeth making a sharp clicking sound.  She narrowed her eyes, watching the figure try to get cleaner, and listened to them cough, and thought about the implications.  She didn’t like what they entailed.  Looking behind her, she saw that Dead Love had harnessed herself back to the cart and was ready to move on.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Lady Believer looked back.  “Proof,” she said.  “No-one sails the East Sea.  So if you were dropped off at the coast… I want to see proof.”

The figure spread its arms.  It looked thin but wiry and Lady Believer could see a holster that seemed to have a gun in it.  Another strange choice for visiting the badlands; there was little out here that could be stopped by simple force.

“What kind of proof?” said the figure when Lady Believer didn’t say anything else.  “It’s not like I’ve got a bloody ticket to show you.  And the ship’s sailed off, not that you’d agree to walk all the way to the coast just to see it.”

“I might,” said Lady Believer.  Seeing a ship on the East Sea would be interesting enough to justify the diversion.

“Well it’s sailed!  You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“No.”

There was a silence.  Then, “So what would be proof then?”

“Show me something from the coast,” said Lady Believer.  “Or the East Sea.  Something that could only have come from there.”

“The coast,” said the man, “is rocky and ashy and barren.  It is slightly more pleasant than here, but only because the sea is there and that is marginally cleaner.  That’s it.  I can’t show you anything from there because there’s nothing there to pick up.  And it’s not like I was looking for souvenirs!”

“Food,” said Lady Believer.  “You must have had food with you.  Nothing grows in the badlands and any sea journey must have been longer than a day.  Or you would never have been dropped off on the coast.”

“Ah,” said the man.  “Well.”

He didn’t seem inclined to say anymore so Lady Believer gestured to Dead Love, who put one foot in front of the other and heaved, starting the cart slowly creaking and groaning along the path.  Then she moved forward herself, lifting her voice once more in song.

“This is where the truth is,” she sang.  “Where lies have come to die.  This is where—“

“You can’t leave me here!”

She didn’t slow down.  “Then find some proof.”

The man moved aside rather than be run down by Dead Love and the cart but before they were out of sight he started following them.  After an hour he’d sped up and was walking alongside Lady Believer.

“Proof?” she glared at him.

“I haven’t got any food,” he said.  “I wasn’t exactly dropped off on the coast.”

“Aha.”

“I was put there to die,” he said.

“Aha.”

“Aha?  Is that it?  I tell you people are trying to kill me and you just say ‘aha’?”

Lady Believer smirked at him.  “People are going to a lot of trouble to kill you,” she said.  “You sound like a political prisoner.  So if I decide to kill you and add your body to the cart… who will care?”