She could smell her own loathing. She could taste it.
Gath turned his head towards the open room. “We should get to work. We’ve wasted enough time already.”
“Oh, come now,” said Ewald. “Let’s have a little more fun. I want to see the ferral do some tricks.”
Gath scowled. “There’s no need to keep mocking her, just throw on the locks already. I’m not comfortable with the girl walking around, she’s an untested experiment as far as I’m concerned.”
“Oh, you of little faith. It won’t hurt to let her know how things stand.” Roache smiled. “Come Sylvaine, sit. Roll over. Stand. Stay still.”
One by one she followed his instructions, as her rage grew to take up every corner of her mind. There was no room left for anything else, even self-pity. She just hated.
Ewald walked over and stood in front of her. Then he poked her forehead and giggled.
“Can’t do a thing!”
“Come on, Ewald,” said Gath. “You’ve seen this show before with the mutants.”
“Yes, but this is far more interesting.”
He poked her faced, pressing the skin of her cheeks and giggling like a child. “Say, Roache, you ever fucked this thing?”
Her hatred was now mixed with embarrassment, and a growing sense of disgust as Ewald looked her body up and down.
“Now, now, I’ve kept our relationship focused on business,” Roache said. “Though I suspected she may have had an interest.”
“Been in heat, then?” Ewald suggested. Roache just laughed.
Her hatred devoured these new emotions, growing larger. She could feel herself shaking against invisible shackles.
“But you never tried? No curiosity?” said Ewald. “I’m sure you’ve forced it before. I know I would with your power.”
“Come now, Ewald. I do have standards. She’s a beast!”
There it was. Twenty years of mockery, of disgust, distilled into those words. Memories soaked with hatred and humiliation tried to force their way into Sylvaine’s mind, but they were drowned out by the roars of rage, or something deeper, simpler than rage. There were no longer coherent thoughts flowing through her mind, but emotions and instincts of the most primal sort. The howls of her chained fury.
Ewald stuck his face right into hers. “I suppose so! I’d imagine you’d get fleas.” He giggled without restraint. She could smell the mockery on his breath, imagine the taste of his blood, his neck flesh beneath her teeth.
“Can’t be any worse than fucking a dog!” Ewald continued. “Be going from bitch to bitch, if you could even tell the difference!”
Sylvaine roared. She could see nothing but red, but she could smell, she could hear. She slashed toward Ewald. Warm blood met her claws.
“Stop! Heel!” shouted Lazarus.
But she didn’t.
“It’s her damn beast-blood acting up!” Gath shouted. “She’s going berserk!”
The words’ meanings, even the idea that words had meaning, seemed to Sylvaine a distant, alien notion. There was only blood and the smell of Ewald’s fear.
She heard Gath cock a pistol. “Don’t shoot,” Lazarus yelled. “We can’t attract the police.”
“Fuck that,” Gath snarled, arm waving for a clear shot.
Ewald swung at her, but she ducked, even before her conscious mind recognized the fist. Then she lunged at the man, claws cutting straight through, the two of them flying back into the dark room behind him. The man coughed blood as he landed, and then, nothing.
Dead. It wasn’t a thought but an instinct.
She could smell oil alongside the blood. She started to sense the room around her. It was a small industrial workshop. Huddled figures chained to pipes held wrenches and soldering irons in the near darkness. Her vision was still blurry and crimson, but she could make out the shock of their expression. There was one face she could see clear in the light. It was as if time froze as she saw it, familiar yet grotesquely foreign to her. The man’s visage was twisted and burned, his hand callused and bloody, a single grotesque horn grew out of the side of his head. Yet, she could recognize his youth-filled eyes, now turned yellow, and his olive skin now stained with bright red strands, poxed further with metallic-colored boils.
“Sylvaine?” Javad asked.
A gunshot rang through the room, ricocheting off the floor beside her. She turned to see a figure blocking the doorway, pistol drawn. Fear screamed for her to hide.
Sylvaine scampered towards the machines on wall, dashing on all fours. She jumped and climbed their tubing, scaling the mechanical mass as fast as if she was running across the floor.
“Where are you beastbitch?” came Gath’s voice as he walked in, aiming at shadows. Sylvaine skulked on the ceiling, hanging from the tangle of pipes. Gath stepped into the pool of Ewald’s blood, grunted and scuffed it off his shoe.
From outside came the sound of glass bursting. Gath turned back a moment. “Coward!” he shouted, and Sylvaine took her chance, dropping onto her prey, smashing his body into the floor. The pistol went off as he fell, blasting open a pipe. Steam flooded the room. She went to bite his neck, but he elbowed her jaw. She jumped back into the steam, and he got up, aiming his pistol.
“Don’t fucking run from me.”
He shot blindly into the steam. A bullet grazed the fur of Sylvaine’s back. She leapt behind a machine some muzzled part of her still recognized as an ætherial frequency modulator.
Gath jerked around, pistol forward, blinded by the fog. Sylvaine, however, could hear his every movement and smell his fear.
Two more shots ricocheted around the room. “I’ll blow your fucking head off,” Gath shouted.
Each gunshot sent her scrambling to a new hiding place, the primal fear of the sound greater than any conscious avoidance of death. The steam condensed on her fur, and blood mixed with sweat. She skulked around the machine, trying to find an angle of attack. Then suddenly, through the steam she saw two sets of red arms grab Gath’s legs.
“Skinsick fucks!” he yelled, and aimed his pistol down. Sylvaine leapt into him, claws and teeth tearing into his stomach and shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Lazarus. The name rang through Sylvaine’s head. She scampered out of that room of shadow and steam. The window was broken open, and beyond it a fire escape. She crawled outside, ignoring the glass as it cut her. Through the dim light of the night she could see a man jumping into a red autocar.
Lazarus.
Sylvaine brachiated down the metal scaffold, leaping floors at time. Her movements shook the structure as she flung herself at near terminal velocity. The autocar’s engines sputtered to life while the street flew towards her. As she landed on the sidewalk with a clang, the ‘car sped off. Sylvaine gave chase, running on all fours in a mad frenzy. She could feel the metal carapace of the city street under her hands and feet, her claws occasionally cutting sparks.
Lazarus.
The autocar zoomed ahead, careening around pedestrians and skidding by the nighttime traffic. Sylvaine ran as fast as she could manage, pushing herself beyond sweat, beyond pain, but as fast as she ran, as deep as she panted, she could not keep up. Every metre she leapt, the ‘car gained another three, until finally it took a distant turn and flew out of sight.
Lazarus…
Sylvaine slowed. The crimson in her vision faded. Her rage faltered and her mind began to focus, with instinct congealing into coherent thoughts. She stopped and looked down at herself. Her dress was torn to shreds, long strands of indigo stained crimson, ragged fur hanging out of its holes. Her claws were covered in blood and viscera, wet and cold. She closed her mouth. She still tasted Gath’s shoulder.
A scream grabbed her attention. A woman dashed into her apartment and slammed the door, lock shutting with a deafening click. All around her people stared in horror and disgust. A child ran as she caught his gaze, an old man held up his cane as a weapon of last resort. They were ter
rified. Terrified of the animal dressed in fur and blood that stood before them.
In the distance she could hear the sirens of the Icarian police. Sylvaine started to run again. She ran away from the police. She ran from the blood. She ran from whatever life she had built in Icaria. She didn’t know where she was running to, or what she would do when she got there, but like a hunted beast she ran.
Chapter 16
Marcel slept poorly. The past few nights had been miserable, twisting around in bed, his sweat staining the sheets. The dream had returned. He had been free of it for months straight now, but whether it was his time with Verus or the tussle in Fareau’s room, something had called the Demiurged-damned dream back.
The Huile Underway blanketed him in its damp, suffocating darkness. Footsteps and the occasional mechanical groan were the only sounds that cut through his gas mask as he skulked. He knew he would pass through sewer pipes, abandoned underrail tunnels, and then, into the bowels of the Lazacorp refineries itself. The journey played itself like a cinegraph show, one he might know the ending to but could not halt, only shout in the empty theatre. The difference was in this show he felt everything: the gas mask’s grip on his face, the weight of his airtight uniform, the icy stabs of fear, and eventually, the pain.
If only this show were just a fantasy, like the propaganda action cinegraphs of his Phenian childhood. Monochrome images of Resurgence heroes fighting Principate madmen in autoarmor of such ludicrous size that they could only exist in some engineer’s wet dream. Yet Marcel’s subconscious was not kind enough to mutate the day’s thoughts into an average nightmare. This dream was taken straight from memory, with only a few artistic liberties.
It was that night in Huile, the night of their victory, the night of red death. It was a chaotic jumble, but that chaos was accurate. They snuck through tunnels leading left, right, up, down, every which way; endless mazes of pipes and steam. His gas mask was fogged, always fogged. He could see nothing past the few feet of his tiny cone of vision. He kept his gaze on his squad mates, the Huile Sewer Rats. As long as they were in his sight he wasn’t lost. Just follow them, just follow them, just follow them, he repeated the mantra to himself.
In their gas masks they looked demonic, like black skulls attached to torsos of tubes and leather. He wondered which of these demons was Alba. She had given him the option of turning down the task, had given them each that choice. It was her one concession for agreeing to lead the attack. This was beyond their duty, she had told General Durand flatly, and it was an open secret that the only reason their squad had been tapped for Lazarus Roache’s desperate mission was that they were one of the few squads to survive the battle of Huile Field unscratched, the only surviving squad with any recon training, for that matter. They could sit this one out with honor, Alba had told them, but none of them took that excuse, save, of course, for the injured Lambert, who would have been of no use anyhow.
As for the rest, they had agreed to follow Lazarus’s plan, to descend through the Underway into the guts of the refinery, each for their own reasons. Some for duty, or for patriotism, for machismo, or for each other. Marcel did it for Alba. He did it to impress her and to protect her, to prove to her that he was the hero he had joined the army to be.
Thousands of Principate soldiers slept only a couple dozen metres above the squad, in their makeshift camp in the Lazacorp refinery of Blackwood Row. Marcel thought he could hear them through the floors, piping and asphalt. He could hear their snores, their whispered talks, their death screams. No, not the screams. That hadn’t happened yet.
“Hold up.” It was Henri. Henri was dead. No, he was going to die. Marcel tried to tell him to watch his back when he set the bombs, but his mouth wouldn’t open.
Henri took out a map. It was the blueprints to Lazacorp, a gift from Lazarus Roache himself. They had been told how Lazarus had fled the Principate camp to join the righteous side of the Resurgence, the evening after their horrific defeat. The tycoon had explained to them how, before he had fled, he had convinced the brutish General Agrippus to make her camp inside the Lazacorp refineries. His plan, the only hope now for the UCCR cause after the disastrous Battle of Huile Field, relied on them releasing pent up sangleum gas on the Principate army above.
It has seemed such a simple foolproof plan, until they had actually gotten below.
Henri and Alba checked the map, while Danel and Rada scouted out front, and Desct and Marcel watched the back.
“You managing to uphold your composure, or are you shitting your uniform?” Desct’s voice was muffled through the gas mask.
“Holding,” Marcel managed to get out.
“Good. These trousers are a bitch to wash.”
Alba waved them over. They snuck past a pile of rusting mining equipment, and down a thin hall, which opened up into the extractor room.
The extractor was massive, climbing up from the depths of the earth, towering above to pierce the surface. Around its trunk open sloughs released rivers of red liquid to the machines that swarmed the edge the extractor. Heat billowed from these rivers, an acrid scent that pierced even the gas masks. Marcel sucked back the urge to vomit. Sangleum. The natural, unrefined æther was highly reactive, and when converted to a gaseous form, highly toxic. Even the fumes were enough to induce illness, and its touch bred mutations, if not outright death. Marcel couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like for the soldiers above when they woke to red smoke.
But the Principate had started it. They’d forced their rule onto Huile after assassinating its elected mayor. Lazarus had told the Resurgence soldiers how the Imperator’s bootlickers were stockpiling sangleum gas themselves to use on the Resurgence forces, and were even planning to use the remainder against the innocent citizens of Huile as punishment for resisting. Gas warfare did not seem on its surface the most heroic path to victory, but that was the naivety of pulp adventures, the hollow denunciations of pacifists who lived far and safe from the battlefield. Whatever Marcel might personally feel about the methods was immaterial. To allow his reservations to hold him back from his duty would be the most detestable form of cowardice.
Danel and Rada skulked around the exterior of the extractor, turning valves and blocking up pipes. Marcel and Henri took out clockbombs from their satchels, setting each charge at calculated points. He’d helped with the calculations earlier that evening. Looking at the Lazacorp schema, they’d pinpointed which pipes to cordon off so that, when their explosions went off, most of the resulting gas would flow up to the surface. Most, of course, was not all. Hence the gas masks.
The bombs were heavy to lug. Marcel crept slowly through the maze of machinery. It took a century to strap each bomb to the proper pipework, millennia to turn each twitching clockwork timer. Marcel knew they had ten minutes to flee; just enough time, if luck held.
The squad appeared suddenly, like phantoms, six guards in imperial blue armed with shotguns and bayonets, their soft footsteps hidden by the sounds of the great extractor. Marcel nearly walked into the first soldier, jumping back behind a glowing vat to avoid the blades and bullets. It took only seconds for the vast room to be filled with the gunshots and screams. Marcel ran, firing blindly behind him. He could hear, in the brief gaps of the cacophony, the sounds of dozens of boots beating against concrete. Principate soldiers started to trickle in, firing and shouting in confusion.
Marcel saw Henri set the last of his clockbombs. Out of the darkness a bayonet appeared, glistening briefly in the red light of the sangleum before plunging into Henri’s back. Gunshots rang out from somewhere in the chaos, and the hand that held the bayonet fell to the ground. The blood of Imperial and Resurgence soldiers mixed in pools. At the far end of the room he could see one of his masked brothers, Desct it must have been, run down a hallway, firing backwards. Marcel tried to sprint after him, but the flow of Principate soldiers had diverted itself in the pursuit of Desct, cutting off that path.
There had to be another way out. Marcel
needed to find Alba. He turned around a vat of bubbling red and found a lone imperial. He aimed his rifle at the soldier, who turned at the sound.
Marcel froze. The soldier was young, barely in his twenties, if even that, his hair a light blond. His soft round face reminded Marcel of Kalem, a university friend. If those two had been in the same room Marcel wondered if he’d even be able to tell the difference.
Marcel had never taken a life. Not during the siege, not during the recon forays, not during the battle. He had once wondered, idly, if it would be like losing his virginity, to kill in the name of liberty.
Now his enemy stood before him. The boot and blade of the Principate, oppression made flesh. Marcel tried to pull the trigger, but found he couldn’t. Not when looking the man face to face.
The imperial could.
Marcel felt the burn of metal rip into his right leg. He fell to the ground. Pain. It ripped through his body in a flash, and his vision nearly went black. He squinted through his agony-fogged mask to see the imperial jerking his rifle down towards Marcel, aiming another shot.
Then a bang. The soldier’s forehead exploded from behind. A black-skulled figure came out from the darkness, pistol in hand. It spoke with Alba’s muffled voice.
“Get up, Talwar.”
She gave him her arm and pulled him up, the movement as painful as the initial shot. He hobbled with her, away from the chaos of the extractor room.
“Leave me,” Marcel said. “I’m going to slow you down.” No, that was a manifestation, an invention of later wishful thoughts. He remembered that in truth he said nothing as he held onto her arm. He merely moaned and screamed, nails deep into her coat, a desperate clutch for life.
A Principate soldier jumped out in front of them. As he aimed his rifle, the world started to shake.
All three of them fell to the ground. The imperial had almost lifted himself up when the red gas started to seep in. Marcel could see the realization grow on the man’s face, the solution to the puzzle of the saboteurs’ gas masks. It was quickly replaced by agony. He screamed death, blood pouring from his eyes. The soldier scratched at his face, skin melting away, falling to the ground in ribbons. Bulges grew under his flesh, twisting his features, and he started to vomit up chunks of his lungs. Marcel was horrified but couldn’t look away; his eyes were affixed to the disintegrating corpse in front of him.
The Sightless City Page 16
