Life and Limb (The Ebon Chronicles)

by Capps, Chris

  The city bellowed again, flashing its lights and tumbling through the storm, and I called out, both crutches in one hand calling triumphantly,

  "Here!"

  The horse whinnied and bucked, leading me down the trail to the drill. I crossed paths in front of it, the horse rearing up with excitement, nearly as thrilled in the moment as I was. Ahead of the city I could see five horses galloping, the riders each plowing forward with straightened backs. At the head, Freezy pulled back a veil and shouted,

  "Hey, Riderman!"

  "Freezy Breezy!" I called back. She approached, dismounting, and I did the same. Hobbling between crutches I reached out and clasped her tightly, laughing into her sweeping hair as it wrapped around my face, "You made it."

  "Four days you wouldn't believe, but we made it," she said, breaking our embrace and looking behind her, "Klaas! Wyatt! Take those horses to get a drink, will ya?" The horsemen behind her bowed deeply, leading their steeds back to Ebon's camp. The city bleated again, its mournful horn shattering the hot wind. Breezy called out behind her, "Shut up, already! My lord, that city. And the people wear things you wouldn't believe!"

  With its front legs rising and passing over us, the sky turned to steel. The front legs easily missed the hole and the drilling machine, instead crashing into a far hill, blowing it out like a candle.

  The red and blue flashing stopped, replaced instead by a circle of spotlights shining down on us. More lights emerged, as rings opened up beneath, dilating like eyes. Cables descended around us, drawing out dozens of soldiers. They slid down, rifles in hand, held aloft ceremoniously as the great central aperture opened, descending a plate with an orchestra and a shower of red and white flower petals.

  The platform came to rest on the ground.

  At the center of this plate, arranged in front of the well dressed musicians, were four men in robes. They walked gracefully from the platform onto a red carpet that unraveled before them. Their feet never touched the Earth. The troops, who had descended all around us in a wide circle were standing with steel ventilated masks, their hands across their chests in a sign of reverence for the city's masters. I stood at the end of the carpet with Freezy by my side. Nervously, she hissed through her teeth, her hand gripping my wrist,

  "What's this all about?"

  "These are the city masters," I said, "They've come to claim their prize. Kneel."

  Freezy helped me as we both fell to one knee. Eyes turned to the roll of carpet in front of us. It was difficult to pull myself down, but I braced myself on Freezy's shoulder. The masters talked amongst themselves excitedly, gesturing against the calming storm and pointing behind us at the machine.

  "Delightful!" an old man's voice said above me, "Tell me it still works."

  "It still works, my lord," I said, staring down at a pair of felt shoes, "We found it in the ground, in that hole-"

  "Just a minute, son," another of the masters said turning and shouting behind him, "Alright! That's enough! Honestly!" The minstrels fell silent in mid note, shrugging to one another and leaning heavily on their instruments. I noticed that one of them was playing an enormous violin.

  "Go on," another of the elders said, "And please do rise."

  Freezy quickly wrapped her arms around my shoulders, pulling me up on my one good leg. I positioned the crutches beneath my arms and turned partially toward the sleeping drill,

  "It was underground. It had drilled a whole city's worth of tunnels under there. Unfortunately, as it left, the whole thing filled with oil. If you had a way of pumping the oil out, you could refine it and use it, but the drilling machine could be used for other things as well."

  "Yes," I heard one of the hooded men behind me say, conspiratorially leaning toward another, "Other things."

  "It's a little dirty, but you've done well," the tallest one said, his face obscured by the hood around his head, "But before we take it up onto the city for study, please demonstrate that it works."

  "I'm not sure how it works," I said, "I was only sent here to get it."

  "Ebon told me," Freezy said, "While you were out we took to studying it."

  "Where is Ebon?" I asked no one in particular, staring back up at his camp, "Just a minute, lords."

  Navigating to the machine, Breezy and I looked at the side of it, where Breezy opened a small sliding metal door and revealed a small green button. She read aloud the words painted above it,

  "Deploy Drilling Rig."

  I pressed the button, and the machine whirred to life. Behind us, the masters applauded. I pressed the button again and the machine turned off.

  "The specifics we can figure out later," one of the masters said, "You've upheld your part of the bargain."

  "Yes," said another, "And now it's time for us to uphold ours."

  He snapped his fingers and one of the soldiers strode forward, moving toward us with his ventilator gusting erratically. He pulled from his coat pocket a fist-sized cloth sack and knelt, holding it out to me. I took it from him, opening the top of the bag. It was heavy, stuffed to the top with gold. There had to be at least a dozen lifetimes worth of gold in that bag. More than I had ever seen. I grinned, lowering it beneath Freezy's face so she could see it,

  "More than you'll ever need. My dear, your problems are over."

  She clapped, jumping up and down excitedly.

  "We're through here," one of the masters said returning to their plate, "Alright, orchestra. Play us up."

  "Good work, Adon Still," another of the robed figures called down as the weight of the steel platform began to pull upward, "Expect us all to be at your wedding!" With music swelling behind them, the plate rose slowly, stoically.

  A massive chain descended with a plate technician riding the hook beneath. He dragged it with the assistance of two of the soldiers and they attached it to the front of the drilling machine. With a loud beep from above, the drill began to tip upward. A sound was mingling with the orchestra as its front started to rise. Familiar, chaotic. It was strange erratic digital music, much like I had heard before, emanating from the machine's underside. Numbers turned to sound.

  "Alright, we'd better catch Ebon," Freezy said mounting her horse, "They're not liable to stick around here all day. You want a leg up?"

  "Oh that's a good one," I said gripping her hand as I hopped and scrambled onto the horse's back, "But let's make it quick. There's a woman for me on that boat."

  The chain holding the drill was sagging heavily, and it lowered back to the ground with a dull thud. At this rate, the city could take hours to bring the whole thing up. The techs swarmed around it, trying to secure it as it leaned upward, but the back end wasn't moving yet. It was going to take more chains. Many more chains.

  Freezy prodded the horse forward, and it slowly took the ambling path up the hill back to Ebon's camp. When we got there, the first thing I noticed was that the horses were gone.

  That's how this story changes.

  Freezy and I sat on horseback, my hands at her hips and our eyes scanning the camp to see it barren. Everything was empty, blowing in the wind. I dismounted quickly, propping myself up on crutches and calling out,

  "Hey Ebon! We did it!" My voice didn't echo back to me this time. It was swept up in the wind, carried away. I moved from tent to tent, glancing in to see them all abandoned. I turned, made my way to the wagon, and flung the door open, calling in, "Ebon!"

  Breezy was behind me at the door, an uncertain look crossing her face. She was looking all around, and then finally at the dusty sky.

  "Will you look at that," I heard her say distantly.

  I burst through the front door of the wagon, realizing that I had pulled my pistol. My crutches squeaked as I leaned heavily into them, pulling myself to the throne room. There it was, the dog skin throne, now empty. Silks and bells blew and jingled in the wind from the open door, pushing a few errant papers across the desk. More had been arranged there, beneath them, weighted down with colorful little metago stones.

  A d
iagram. Notes. Numbers turned to words, words turned to pictures.

  Part 1. The drilling machine. Part 2. The oil rig.

  A crushing moment passed, and I swiveled with Freezy's voice,

  "Adon, come out here quick!"

  I ran on the crutches, snapping one like a bone and clattering to the floor. I clawed my way across the dust and the silk, out to where I could see. A shooting star was in the sky, cascading down like a hammer on fire. A thousand eyes looked up from the spider city, and in an instant -

  What do you suppose the horses know?

  The star, with its long pluming smoke trail crashed onto the city, smashed it with a mad ball of fire tearing through the dust, sending buildings crashing sideways, shattering in wide plumes and terrible spirals of smoke and ash. I tumbled down the stairs, screaming, crawling with my one leg behind me. Silently, the city took a weak step, snapping two of its legs beneath it and lurched, swinging forward and - and it died, the brilliant gold and red exploding onto the dust below. Like a flower.

  The sky went dark. Freezy's lower lip was pouring out of her mouth, contorted to show the awe and terror we both felt. Tears streamed from her eyes instantly. She looked like she might never smile again.

  The sound reached us. With the smoke spiraling out, mixing in the storm it crushed our ears. Freezy leaned into me, her eyes wet on my shoulder and I knelt on the dust and the sand, watching the wind snatch the cloud from the city, pull it up into the sky in a single long arm. I held her tight in, sealed my eyes shut. We sat there for several minutes, clutched to one another. Waiting.

  The city exploded again. And again. We didn't see it, but we heard it. The sound was deafening, rattling our bones. Freezy cried something, but I couldn't hear it. My eyes were suddenly open, staring only at the ground in shock.

  After several moments of waiting I chanced to look up, but not at the city. No, I looked as far away from it as I could, toward the opposite hill. And there I saw the five riders.

  Horses know.

  Horses know that they are property, and who owns them.

  Men do not.

  That was Atus' joke before Jester Breezy shot him - the punchline he heard before laying down at peace. I knew it now. And as I stared across a long dust plane at Ebon the Waste, I could tell that he knew it too. He rode forward slowly, his head bowed melancholic against the ash and the wind. When he was a dozen paces away, he stopped.

  "I'm sorry, Adon," he said, "but I know you will never forgive me. I expect the next time we meet I will be a dead man, and I accept it." The melthorse shook its head, sickly teeth curling up its cancerous face. Ebon sighed, removing his rifle and casting it to the ground, "In the tunnel you saved me. Understand that I know what I owe you. I owe you my life. And yet I cannot. I cannot give it to you yet. There is still much to do."

  "Why?" I cried, clutching Breezy hard to me, "She never did anything to you!"

  Ebon stared into the distance, his old lips disappearing. And he frowned at the sparks showering the sky. Turning into the wind, he called out to me one last time that day,

  "The architects had a plan. And I intend to see it through. Hate me. Kill me. But don't let me own your heart. That's yours, my friend. Goodbye."

  And five riders rode away.

  The End

  Thank you for taking a chance on checking out an indie series. If you enjoyed Life and Limb, it will soon be followed by the exciting conclusion, Rustbaby Wonderland where I stay true to the aesthetic and humanity of this first two, but plunge characters further still into a world of action, peril, and intrigue.

  Rustbaby Wonderland

  Her name is Detende, and she is the master of the Rustbaby Wonderland. It is a doomed place, but one which lives in an uncharacteristic harmony thanks to her. But as the mysterious - and possibly omniscient - narrator describes the events happening around it with the cold humor of a machine, it becomes clear that this perfect peace she has managed to enforce will soon be disrupted by an unstoppable clash of wills.

  But what is the machine telling this story? And why has an army gathered at the bottom of the Rustbaby Wonderland's mesa, convinced Detende is the most dangerous person in the world?

  Rustbaby Wonderland is the compelling conclusion to the Ebon the Waste Trilogy, and much like “Life and Limb,“ it pulls no punches when it comes to the far reaching consequences of betrayal in a merciless scorched Earth. Here’s the first bit in that story.

  The Rustbaby Wonderland is awake before dawn. Six shipper men are distributing small loaves of nut bread to the various performers. Today's show will be postponed yet again, but foragers are readying themselves to descend to the spiral path to gather butternips. They take care not to walk all the way to the mesa's base.

  Detende, self-described daughter of God is sitting in her tent. Her hands are cradling the head of an oafish monster of a man with five hundred milligrams of hardware embedded to the base of his spine. Thermal imaging indicates a core temperature of 106.2 degrees. She won't ask her father for drought yet. Now she's asking for something else.

  "Please don't let him die," she whispers as her eyes tighten shut. She says this, but no one seems to hear.

  I hear. I perceive everything. My attention turns down to the base of the mesa where I look impossibly out into the horizon.

  Beyond a siege line of grey uniformed men, men who don't dare bring their weapons to the mesa's top, I can see three riders approaching. The center rider has blue eyes, which I stare into even though he's a flicker on the horizon. Detende doesn't know he's approaching. No one does. Not even the scouts staring through improvised scopes.

  “Detende,” I say to myself, knowing she will never hear me, “I believe the brute's death is the least of your worries at the moment.”

  There is more in the distance, approaching. A blight storm. Projected chance of survival, negligible.

  Blight: (n) Regional neologism used to describe fallout particles.

  I update tomorrow's forecast accordingly, and then prepare to shut down for the next six years after it's all done. If it rolls through here, which it definitely will, I will be alone in silence for a while. Perhaps eternity.

  Thank you for letting me plug my work. I have other titles available, including the novel “Our War with Molly Nayfack” and the comedy/horror serial “Calefactory” which I’m working on with fellow author Zachary Seibert to finish the first season of, but I wanted to stick to plugging the other Ebon stories here. If you’d like to know about the other stuff I’ll be putting out in January and February of 2014, check out my author’s page.

  If you’ve got a question about Ebon the Waste, or Adon Still, or the Oil Rig Operation, or the world they grew up in, visit my fiction blog and let me know in the comments

  puppetsonthewall.blogspot.com.

  I love that kind of thing.

  I’d like to dedicate this story to my good friends Zachary Seibert, Craig Davis, and Charlene Rau, who are (usually) always willing to give me their time and listen to me prattle on about von neumann probes or carbon nanotubes or whatever else. They've been critical to the development of the Ebon Chronicles, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for their insight and their critical eyes for detail.

  Also if you enjoyed this story I could use your feedback. I don’t want to play the indie author card, but I am running this operation without a publishing house behind me. Some honest feedback and a rating would go a long way toward helping me if you enjoyed this story. You the reader are what makes something like this worth doing and I’d like to know what you thought. I want to make the kind of stories I want to read. You have my sincere gratitude if you enjoy it. Especially if you’re the kind of nerd that gets any of my arcane historical or technical references. Let me know what moved or intrigued you, and I’ll hold that in my mind when I write. Thank you.

 

 

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