Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3)

by Steven Drachman

  I told her that I understood. I said that she had no cause for regret.

  “You saved us,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “You see,” she began, “in Vializ —” but I interrupted her, and I asked how it had come to pass that Theera had been in Vializ.

  “Madame Tang trained me well,” she said, and she smiled. “Plus, I have Rabbi Palache’s cut-rate disguise kit.” To my silence, she explained, “Rabbi Palache, the rabbi pirate. Or the pirate rabbi.”

  “I know who Rabbi Palache is,” I muttered.

  I shot a glance at Master Yu.

  “You knew as well,” I said. “You knew she was in Vializ. You trained alongside her with Rabbi Palache! Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  Master Yu stayed silent.

  “I might not have returned,” Theera said, “and had I never returned, you would have been angered.” She studied her map carefully, and without looking at me, she added, “Perhaps it would have affected your performance in battle, and perhaps that would have had a detrimental impact on the entire military operation. And thus, a detrimental impact on the future of the whole world and human history, and the universe. Who could have blamed you for being upset, had I never returned?”

  She smiled lightly, still looking only at the map.

  “I understand that you and I have a ‘history’ together,” she said, “in the sort-of-future, sort-of-past.” Her smile widened, as she continued to pretend to study her map. “And you, my friend, are very good with a secret.”

  She laughed, and the laugh caught in her throat, and she turned up and looked into my eyes, unembarrassed.

  I smiled, and I found that I was also not embarrassed.

  Was she almost-nearly the Theera I had once met? Not quite. Maybe not nearly.

  But closer.

  “Well,” I said, “now you know. You have meant quite a bit to me.”

  She nodded.

  “But that was long ago,” I said, “and years in the future.”

  She laughed.

  “You have been gone now,” I said, “for some great while? You are different. How long has Madame Tang trained you?”

  “If Time existed here,” she said, “it would have been a long time. She trained me behind the door.” She met my eyes. “I am almost an entirely different person now, Watt, although biologically nearly the same age.”

  She was more the Theera I had once met than she was the Althea I had recently known.

  I would miss Althea, I realized now.

  Master Yu congratulated her on her mission, and Theera told us more about life in Vializ, a little patch of Heaven in the depths of Hell, luxurious mansions, good food and wild devotion to the Falsturm and the ethos of the Red Eyebrows. But she had learned one other piece of information of interest.

  “They are rich like lard and butter,” she said then, disgusted. “They are happy in Hell. Some of them are Falsturmians. Some are Eyebrows. Some are Sidonians. Some are peuple de la mer. They are strong and they have an army, but they are all comfortable and furry, and they suck marrow as the betrayed masses outside their walls scream in the bitter wind. They are entitled and without any notion, and they deserve what is coming to them. And another thing.” She thought. “The ground trembles under the city.” She shrugged. “I have never felt anything like this. You can feel this when you walk around the city. The ground trembles, and they still feel invincible.”

  She looked down at her map.

  I pointed.

  “A thousand years ago,” I said, “I gather that there was no Mount Charon, no southeastern range. The demons lived here peaceably, in the little stone homes that remain just as ruins, and they were ruled by their king — or queen I suppose — over here,” and I pointed to the region in the northeast where a vast castle lay in ruins. “They were not really demons back then. This was a different land, and they were different as well.”

  “You see this?” Tang said. “Around Vializ, a valley with no ruins. None for miles around. Meaning that a thousand years ago, that part of the land was uninhabited.”

  Theera said, “Our armies are here” — she pointed to the area that overlooked Vializ — “and the Falsturm forces are massed here, at the lowest point.”

  Tang looked up at us all.

  “If the land is unsteady,” she said, “then perhaps the whole city stands over a natural fissure. If Mount Charon collapses, the water covers the valley, as before, the city is not only flooded, but the land beneath Vializ actually collapses. The Eyebrows and the other Falsturm loyalists who are not killed in the first moments seek to escape the city and the valley, and our armies slaughter them.”

  “And then,” Theera said — and now she swept her hand southward on the map, to its very edge — “and then we ride through the Gate, and we are all free.”

  “A good plan,” I said.

  Spirits rose, then Master Yu brought us down to earth.

  “Too easy,” Master Yu replied. “Why is Vializ built over a big hole?”

  “Our good luck,” I said, irritated.

  Theera added, “Vializ has an underground spring. That’s not entirely unhelpful, though perhaps it lends the city a certain vulnerability. Perhaps that is the source of the fissure and the reason for the city’s location.”

  Master Yu shook his head.

  “Who would risk his own civilization to give his people water that they don’t even need to drink?”

  Theera considered.

  “I understand what you mean,” she said. “The flood will destroy only Vializ. The architects of Vializ must have understood the risk of that location, which seems to be built only to ensure destruction someday.”

  She looked up at Master Yu, away from the map.

  “How could that be?” she wondered. “That the Falsturm built his headquarters on the one spot in Hell that would be destroyed if anyone blasted a hole in Mount Charon?”

  Master Yu nodded.

  He muttered again, “Too easy.”

  After a moment, of silence, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “So what should we do?” I asked in annoyance. “Lose?”

  Theera said, “Maybe our victory is part of his plan.”

  Master Yu thought.

  “Should we choose to lose because you believe it is too easy to win?” I demanded.

  Master Yu looked over at Theera, and she shook her head.

  “You see?” I asked. “We found a way to win, and we assume that it cannot be real. Because we cannot win; and therefore any possibility that we will win must be a trick or a mistake. So should we just lose?”

  “We should win,” Theera said.

  So here is what we did. We lay the black powder according to Tang’s direction, and Master Yu mixed nitroglycerine to place in divots strategically across the ridge. This was right up Tang’s “alley” and in her “wheelhouse,” as they say, so we followed her instructions, set the charge, and stepped back.

  But as we waited, uncertainty grew on Theera’s face.

  She saw something. Something was wrong.

  Tang saw it at the same time.

  “We’re missing it,” Theera said, and Tang nodded, her eyes dark. The explosives would do no more than noisily split us from the other side of the mountain, making it impossible to accomplish our goal without another two days of travel across southeastern territory guarded by the Falsturm armies.

  Theera grabbed the explosives, and she ran, before anyone could argue.

  You see this kind of thing in your “moving pictures,” but it looks different in real life.

  No music, no “slo-mo,” just sheer stupidity and tragedy; I shouted to her to come back, but she kept going, and she was soon trapped on the other side of the line of explosives, with no way down and no way back.

  Theera set the charge on the farthest peak, so that she was surrounded by explosives.

  She turned and met my eyes as the explosives began to detonate, and she smiled, and she blew me a kiss across t
he wall of flames, and then she was engulfed in smoke, till I could not see her.

  A great wave burst through the mountain wall, rock exploded on all sides, and one might certainly have assumed that this calamity would rip Theera nearly to pieces, and then drown her if she still lived.

  But a moment later, on the crest of the wave, there was Theera, a little thrill on her face, a glint of excitement in her eye, standing atop an old tree trunk that bobbed and skidded on the upsurge, visible for only a moment before the water and rock blasted her and her tree aloft through the clearing sky and straight into Resistance legend.

  You would have said she was “surfing.”

  I saw her then, truly, the woman I had known — my Theera — in that spark in her eye, in her crooked smile. In that moment, Theera was born, and Althea disappeared for good.

  “She’s fine,” I whispered to myself. “She is absolutely ok.”

  I told myself that she would live on, to meet me a few years ago and ninety years in the future, in Conconully.

  Master Yu gave the signal, I opened my pocket, the little girl’s shredded blue paper flowed up into the heavens, and the sky cracked in half, and rain poured down on the valley.

  Madame Tang stood, and she marched to the edge of the cliff, the last jagged peak left standing in the middle of the surging ocean, and at the very edge of this jagged peak, she reached out with her left hand to clutch a crumbling dead machineel tree for support.

  Tang called out, her voice wrathy and desperate:

  “This is the end, my friends,” she shouted, “or the beginning. We will either rise to the World of Light, or we will be no more, and the World of Light will be no more. You cannot return here, to your homes, to wait for your memory to fade and your eyes to grow dark, and your brain to rot through and through. You cannot content yourself with the happy thought that your children will go on living after you, that those whom you once loved will remember you, that the fruit trees you planted will hence bear fruit….

  “He does not wish merely to kill you,” she continued. “He wishes to suck the last bit of light and air from the World. You will not merely die; he wishes to remake the past so that you will never have lived; your children will never have been born, and their children after them. All gone; not even a fiction; never thought of, never remembered, not real, nor even imagined. You will be exterminated from the World; powder and dust will rain down upon you until the memory of you will vanish; your children will fade like a dream, and you will collapse in the dry, cracked earth; and your corpse will be food for all the birds in the sky and for the beasts of the earth, and no one will chase them away. Indeed, a darkness covers our World, and a dense cloud covers our Kingdom, but stand with me, Armies of Light: they will attack us on one road, let us make them flee before us on seven roads.

  “Bring down the curtain,” she called. “The farce is over!”

  Chapter 36

  I grabbed my Winchester, mounted my horse, and Tang mounted her armored steed, and together she and I galloped down the mountain ledges and ridges, eager (or, at least, psychically prepared) to plunge into the battle. When at last we reached level ground, Tang and I joined Warlord Hua’s army, which awaited the start of the war. Our rebel soldiers lay on their stomachs, trembled in their trenches and behind their earthen barricades as the rain fell, and as the dikes burst and the water cascaded into the basin beneath them.

  I also waited on the front line, in Hua Nau’s eastern regiment. This was unnervingly familiar, I had done all this not ten years earlier — the rain and the mud, the nervous chatter around me, and the occasional laughter. This was why we were here, after all. Why wouldn’t some of us laugh? Freedom was in sight. But also, perhaps, utter defeat, capture, torture. Death. One or the other. Lady or the tiger. It wasn’t funny, exactly. But it wasn’t unfunny. And so some of us always laughed. “I think,” said one of the soldiers, “that in this impending battle, I may be a great hero, and kill many men. Or I may die.” And his friend asked, “Which will it be?” to which the first soldier replied, “I don’t know. I am still trying to decide.”

  The ba, that human-headed bird, sang poetic exhortations in his squawky bird-voice, with his scratchy bird-tongue, waving his human hands expressively, and the result was weirdly stirring and beautiful. All of the bes’s nine heads were arguing military strategy and each had a different point of view; his fourth head, right in the middle of the whole teeming mass of heads, was the most agitated, and his eyes bobbed about as he shouted insults right in Ammit’s crocodile face.

  In the very far distance, the buildings took a beating from the rain, and the valley began to flood.

  Then it happened, all at once. The ground shook, and then cracked, the city collapsed into the Earth like a sand castle, and the Falsturm army poured out of Vializ. Many of them, a whole sea of bodies, washed out to the east, towards the Bay, struggling fecklessly against the surge, and some tumbled into the crack in the ground, but others managed to seek higher ground and headed our direction.

  Our soldiers aimed muskets, readied artillery swords. The enemy battalion was a blurry smudge of grey in the distance, faraway musket smoke, the crunch of boots, the thunder of hoof beats … we heard the inevitable collision of army against army over and over, imagined it in our minds many minutes before it happened, and at last the deafening crash as they pushed through our defensive lines.

  You know, you put on your military uniform, you look at your battle plan, but when the war begins, chaos is the first victor. Blood coated the wet grasslands and flowed out with the mud that drowned the Falsturmians, bodies churned in the undertow that washed from the valley toward the Bay, the land roiled with bloody water, limbs and death, and the air thrummed with screams.

  Lung-Ping led reinforcements in the west, and my regiment — Hua Nau’s troops — closed in from the northeast, but the muddy, battered and dwindling Falsturm soldiers cut us down at an alarming rate.

  Guerillas burst from their tunnels right in the midst of the Falsturm soldiers, and surprised them with swords and artillery fire. An-Lee rode her horse into a swarm of Falsturmians on their steeds, An-Lee swung her sword, our foes fell, and the air turned red. Ares flew overhead, shooting arrows, his stallions set the enemy soldiers aflame with the fire from their nostrils, and his vultures tore their flesh. The Warlord, Hua Nau, in his leather robe, leaped from his horse, his hair wild, and ran screaming into the crowd, his hatchet flashing.

  Far below, Theera appeared from out of nowhere, in the mud. She chopped at the loyalist soldiers as though they were jungle bamboo, hacking a pathway to the Gates; some of the Falsturm soldiers just popped (they were the Looees) and others burst into flame and dust (they were the Skimmies), but still more grew from the ground and refilled the gap like kudzu. Theera pulled her shoulder rifle from her holster and shot and shot again, and rearmed, but there were more loyalists than could be killed by one shootist, or a thousand, or ten thousand. Tang and I descended with the Warlord’s army into the basin, sought to prevent the Falsturm army from escaping the flood’s claws, and we plowed through the crowd of loyalists and stabbed them with our bayonets and artillery swords as they sought to ascend. Still more enemy soldiers flowed from the Vializ ruins and the surrounding hills. Aniwye, that gigantic and hideous skunk-god, blew his terrible farts at the oncoming hordes, and with each blast, three men died. But it takes a while to gas up, so to speak, and his effectiveness was thus limited, and he soon turned and ran for cover in the southwest forest.

  “We are losing!” Tang shouted.

  The girl on the Spacelander bicycle rode down the mountain, still wearing her shorts and her Don’t Panic t-shirt. She laughed cheerily as her bicycle bounced over rocks and over boulders, and she whooped with glee as it spun into the air. Her laughter echoed over the battlefield.

  Some miles distant, at the Gates of Hell, the Sidonian Princess stood overhead, and she gave a mirrored speech of crazed doxology to her own hordes, urging them to anger, daring the
m to destroy us utterly, to slay our pregnant women and exterminate our infants like rodents, and so on and so forth, and on and on. Her hawk sat on her left shoulder. She looked as she had when I had seen her in Sidonia, and again near the Maldensses swamp. She wore a sword holstered on her left hip, and a pistol on her right. She looked ever the same, because she was just an image, a painting of Lady Liberty, the Queen of Jhansi, Wonder Woman — not quite a person, not yet.

  Master Yu unsheathed his magic sword — revealed to him by a talking dog, bequeathed to him by a camel-headed dragon — and he threw it to Theera. Two of our soldiers bounded over the cliff face, one to Theera’s left, one to her right. The Sidonian Princess drew her .45, and she shot, but Theera deflected the bullet with the sword, which sparked and clanged but held steady, did not quiver. The Princess shot again, and the bullet again bounced harmlessly off the steel of the sword, then spiraled away into the canyon below.

  Theera lunged, intending to thrust the sword deep into the Princess’s heart.

  And then Time stopped, as Time has been known to do, occasionally. The armies stopped killing each other, the rain stopped falling, the floodwaters held back.

  She looked at me from miles away, Princess Joy, or Princess Death or whoever she was, and her eyes softened, and she was in my head, remembering the confusing few minutes that we had spent together in that little chess shop that didn’t yet exist and probably never would.

  Join me, she said, in my mind, and this quiet voice was filled with sadness and yearning. I had seen the city she had offered me, a return to my gilded life in the 1860s, and I had seen Lucy there, waiting for me. The Princess didn’t need to remind me.

  Join us, I insisted, but she told me with her eyes that she could not. She wasn’t programmed for this. As much as she seemed to be a person, she was not — she was still an idea, still just a strategy. It was Allen Jerome’s particular genius that he kept inventing fictional creatures manyfold more human than he. She was like that “sexy” robot from the “television” program that I had watched in Detroit. Very nearly something-or-other real, but not quite.