Beasts of the Walking City

by Del Law

  Most of my team doesn’t look any better. Josik is a bright shade of green. I’ve never seen a human go quite that color before, and against his bright red hair it makes him look like some strange, undead version of himself. His eyes are closed, his lips are moving soundlessly. He hangs on to the frayed straps that hold us all in with a death grip. Pirrosh grins back at me. He’s a Solingi, I get that. They’re mostly human, but they live in the air, and apparently they like this shit, but despite that I can tell this is a lot even for him. I can see it in the tight skin at his jaw, the whites around his eyes. This isn’t a lazy blimp ride. This is a nightmare. The Buhr we hired is curled into a ball of fur up in the corner. There’s so much noise from the rattling of the ship, the storm outside, that if it’s making any sounds I sure can’t hear it.

  And then there’s the girl with the tattoos. She’s staring out the window at the ocean below us. She’s new, and I haven’t worked with her, though Josik swears she’s got a lot of potential. Matthais, the kid we’d originally trained up, got himself cut up over an orange he’d bought in the market. Some withered old thing, not good enough to get shipped up to the mansions on the cliffs where all the real money in Tamaranth is. It probably didn’t have any juice left in it. Some thugs had jumped him, deep in the Warrens. We’d bandaged him up as best we could and left him with a friend to heal.

  The girl is a mystery to me. She senses me watching her, looks over in my direction, and nods. I can see in her eyes: she’s been through a lot of crap, and this is just another day of it in a long string of bad days.

  I can relate to that. I can respect it, too.

  Below us is nothing but the southern ocean, and now it seems we’re falling into it. I can hear the pilots cursing to themselves in some languages I don’t understand. The water is dark, steel grey and edged with whitecaps—just the way oceans look in my dreams.

  And then, without warning, the ship rolls over and we plunge into the middle of a storm of these fat, glowing bags of fluorescent water. Like big electric blimps, they’re suddenly all around us. They are everywhere in the sky now, great volumes of flashing light and water and air. They’re huge, each at least ten times the size of this old, tiny ship. Kittiber fluvare, right out of Sartosh’s old books. It’s freaking Gloaming Day, I think. And here I am to see it at last.

  It's not at all like I thought it would be. It’s crazy how different your life goes from what you imagine as a kid. When I was looking at those books, for so many long hours while my aunt fumed in front of her hearth, I was always some great mage leading an army, the fluvare overhead, my enemies (the hunters, always the hunters) running from me.

  Instead I’m broke. I’m starving. I’m stealing artifacts for some dead Earth gangster I met while I was drunk and wandering too long on the corpse roads, just to get by. I live in a dark hole in a dying city, and my friends are getting knifed over pieces of old fruit.

  The podship sideswipes one of the fluvare, and sets off a jolt of electricity that crawls across the hull the ship. The hair all over my body stands on end. Josik looks like some strange red flower, with all that hair. Pirrosh’s two rows of teeth chatter so loud that I can hear them over the sounds of the ship.

  The pilot curses again, and spits out the open hatch. She barks an order at the other guy, a thin man, wrapped in a mottled assortment of blankets and a pair of thick goggles so dark I think he’s probably blind, and he gets behind a big aethergun and fires off some blasts that open up a gap in the fluvare. But it also sets one of the creatures on fire, and it burns so fast it looks like it will blow.

  The pilot hits a lever here, a dial there, and we drop like a rock through the gap. Sure enough, the fluvare goes up, a big ball of smoke and fire. Flaming jelly blows in every direction. Other fluvare start to burn, then, and I think Josik might have the right idea. Better not to watch. Better to pray to whatever you think is holy, if you're lucky enough to have something to believe in.

  The pilot rolls the ship again to dodge the long tentacles. The gunner squeezes off some more bursts of energy to cut our way through. The sky is all on fire now. The pilot stomps on a foot pedal, throws three separate levers forward, and I hear the engines engage. My stomach drops, the metal bolts from the hull dig into my side, the goggled copilot howls like a dog, and Josik finally lets loose a cloud of pale vomit all over the cargo hold.

  “I warned you guys it’d be rough! I was right, hey!” The pilot cackles back at us. She blows smoke into the air from a cheap, mech-rolled cigar that seems to be permanently adhered to the left side of her face. “Now this is fucking flying!”

  I wipe the vomit off my face, blink to clear my eyes. Out through the scratched and dirty windscreen, through the flaming tentacles of the fluvare, I can see the black peaks of mountains rising up out of the sea.

  We’re almost there.

  The pilot accelerates. We’re squarely in the leiline now, and the ship has all the power it needs. “It’s going to be fast,” she yells back. “Get ready for your drop. Dead storm coming in from the north," she says. "No telling what direction it’s going to move in."

  We skim in low over the mountains—there’s dirty snow still there, a herd of something that spooks and scatters—and then the black city of Tilhtinora opens up beneath us like a giant, rotting maw.

  • • •

  Tilhtinora, the dark city! I talk about it with earth humans, through the corpse roads, and they tell me stories about Atlantis, El Dorado, Camelot: these ancient cities that disappeared thousands of years ago that may or may not actually have existed, that may or may not have had advanced civilizations living in them, that just might hold ancient secrets or magical technology. If only they could be found.

  I have to correct them. While there are some similarities, Tilhtinora is very real. We know exactly where it fell out of the sky. (It burned for a decade, so it got some attention.) We know roughly when it happened, about three hundred years ago, give or take a few years, during one of the worst parts of our world’s wars. (Kirythian years are a little longer, so I’m translating here for you earthers.) We know for a fact that the Tilhtinorans were in touch with many worlds through corpse roads that we no longer know how to reach, and we know there are a lot of artifacts deep in the broken towers and crumbling warehouses that are stronger, more powerful, and much more advanced than what we have now. (Our wars have really taken a toll on our science.)

  And unlike some of the places that earth humans have rediscovered, say Pompeii or Troy or Ubar, Tilhtinora isn’t deserted. Now that the dead storms have cleared some, in the last six or seven years or so, we’re able to get some ships in and out. We know there are creatures in Tilhtinora that haven’t been catalogued on any of the known worlds, ones that that will rip you apart and eat out your organs for breakfast. (They’ll save your bones for later.) There are pools of residual energy that can detonate with the slightest shift in the wind, old wards that have gone erratic with the energy of the dying city, crazed mechs that will try to disassemble you for your spare parts, and intense dead storms that still whip through the ruins cutting through rock and concrete. There are these jagged dimensional rifts to strange worlds so far out into the aether it’d take years searching the corpse roads to get you back, if you fall in. Assuming someone cared enough to bother.

  Important people go to Tilhtinora if they want to get rich. They generally have a lot of backing from some big Family behind them, and they’ve likely pissed someone important off politically and they need to make amends. You'd want a big ship to tap the lei, some primitive weapons to fight off the natives and not set off any chain reactions. And you'd want a decent guide.

  Even then, the odds are twenty-to-one at best that you’ll make it back alive.

  Otherwise, you go if you’ve got a deathwish. Something very wrong in your head. Your lover has left you and has gone off with five of the worst creatures to ever have loped the ground. Your creditors are about to lock you in irons. Your landlord is shopping for weapon
ry. Your mother spits at the mention of your name.

  Or you go if you’re broke and starving, you have no real hope of any sort of income and no other choice left, and someone named Al Capone you met in some earth place called Alcatraz (while you were very, very drunk) says you should go, gives you some money, and tells you bring him back something expensive. Or else.

  I’ll leave it to you to figure out which category I fall into.

  • • •

  The drop is fast, all right. The pilot accelerates in close to where I think the Akarii excavation site will be, hovers low over a tall domed building and pulls something that opens the rusty cargo doors. The gunner hits our net releases, all the straps cut loose, and all of us are dumped out onto the roof. We hit and roll as best we can, grabbing onto the broken stone to keep from falling.

  The gunner swings himself out onto the combat platform, welded near the front of the hull, and grins at me. The bright white of his false teeth flash in the moonslight, and something glints off those dark circles he’s got over his eyes. He gives me an ironic wave, that’s both a farewell and a question—am I sure about this? If we fail, or have made a mistake with the map, if the Buhr has lied to us, we now have no way home.

  I wave back. We’re here. We’re going forward. He nods.

  Then the pilot banks away, gains altitude, rolls the ship once in farewell and with a flash and a burst of blue lei and smoke, the podship is gone.

  • • •

  I stand up and shake myself, and try to get most of whatever Josik had for breakfast out of my fur. I might die here, but I’m already happier with something solid beneath my feet. I am a Hulgliev, after all. I’m tall and thick-shouldered and muscled in a way that makes humans take three steps backwards, if they come on me by surprise. Some earth humans tell me I look vaguely like a snow leopard, though I've never actually seen one. I’m covered in pigmented hair that changes color depending on my moods, and I can change that color, too. Sometimes that’s helpful. I have a face full of fangs and retractable claws, eyes that can see in more spectrums than some species (but not all).

  But I’m not exactly built for flight. And in water? I flail about like an epileptic wurf for awhile, and then I sink like a rock.

  No, I don’t have a tail. But thanks for checking.

  The humans on the team are getting to their feet, too, and brushing themselves off. Josik looks sheepish. Pirrosh pulls a beat-up metal flask out of somewhere and takes a shot, and then offers it around. The girl with tattoos declines. The rest of us are not so fastidious—Pirrosh makes his own bourbon, and it’s wonderfully awful. The spindly, barrel-shaped Buhr unfolds itself from a ball and stretches its feeding tube high for seconds.

  The air smells of sulfur, of smoke and something dead. The Assassin’s Moon and the Merchant’s Moon hang low in the sky. The black towers of Tilhtinora cast their long shadows to the west like jagged teeth. The city isn’t endless, but with the podship gone it sure feels that way now. It’s ready to swallow us whole.

  The Buhr points. I nod to Pirrosh, and he and the girl spread out. They draw their knives and write some simple wards that shimmer in the air around us. Tilhtinora is right at the intersection of several major leilines, so power isn’t any problem. But given the instability of the whole area, we need to be careful, and I know Pirrosh knows that. Josik and I pick our way across the roof, careful to avoid the places where it has collapsed. We scale a crooked tower on the far end of it to get a look around.

  I take out a small eyeglass, something I’d picked up in a junk shop in San Francisco. Up the north, I can see that storm the pilot had been talking about. A mass of bright, roiling clouds lit up from within by lightning and fire, moving low to the ground. For the moment it was moving in our direction, but it was far enough off now that I’d worry about it later. I scan slowly across the surrounding buildings. All of them are slanted, charred, crumbling onto each other—it’s clear that when the city fell out of the sky, it fell hard. A herd of something, sandcats maybe, leaps across rooftops chasing what will soon be dinner. Something large and oblong, with way too many legs, moves away to the northwest. It’s taller than the buildings around it, and it glows bright green.

  And then I see the ship.

  Off to the east, no more than a mile or two, right about where the Buhr told me it might be. The tall masts of an Akarii family Retriever, stretching up like a clawed hand against the night sky. It’s lit up from below, a mix of fire and magefire, which means they’re digging there, and if my information is right then they are digging up what I hope to take back for Capone.

  The realization goes through me like a shock of cold water.

  There they are.

  We can hit them tonight.

  I shiver. There are reasons people don’t steal from the Akarii family. Good reasons, and if I had any real sense, I’d turn back now. Josik and Pirrosh are pretty good. If we were careful, given time, we could ditch the Buhr, make our way to the coast somehow. Catch a ship back. Some of us would probably make it back alive. Sure, Capone had other agents here, in this world. Yes, they’d be looking for me. But would they find me? Could I deal with them if I had to?

  I take a deep breath. I look at Josik. We’ve worked together long enough, I know he knows what I’m thinking. Underneath that shock of red hair, his pale face has a wide grin.

  “There’s no going back from this,” I say.

  He laughs. “Come on. Since when do we let a couple of wurfin’ Akarii get in our way? You know this is why we’re here.”

  I nod. He's right. We drop back down to Pirrosh and the girl. “Game on,” I say.

  Pirrosh tilts his head and looks sideways at me. “What does this mean? What ‘game’?”

  “He means it’s time to stomp some Akarii ass,” Josik says.

  “Ahhhh,” says Pirrosh. He grins at us with his double row of teeth. “This expression, I like.”

  3.

  We rappel down the side of the building. It’s some immense theater hall, with cracked stone columns, frescos across the walls showing masked players on stage, men and women with swords, dragons and chimera with many heads. It’s surrounded by other tall buildings that might have been offices or warehouses or apartments—it’s hard to tell. They’re all collapsed into one another, canted at angles.

  Knives drawn, we make our way through the dark streets. I lead, with the light from my knife stretching ahead of us. The Buhr rides in a harness on my back, humming and buzzing to itself. Josik and the girl watch the sides, and Pirrosh brings up the rear. We move carefully, but fast, and we cover half the distance in less than an hour, over rubble, through alleys. Two moons rise. Another sets. Rodents are everywhere, with glowing eyes, and we can hear them high up on ledges, or moving behind us, as our light falls away. We startle something large and bear-like on a cross street. It rears up on hind legs and sniffs at us, feeling the air with its long, speckled tongue, before it runs off in the other direction.

  The light here is weird, and shifting. Lights in buildings flicker. Ashes blow in the wind, and we smell smoke and ozone, mold and rotting meat.

  It’s another half an hour before we run into their wards. If you haven’t seen Akarii warding before, imagine complex sketches in the air made with pale blue lines of energy. Pictures and diagrams, strange letters and numbers and glyphs, all shimmering in thin, gossamer layers that lie one on top of another, until the air is thick with them like fat, electric spider webs. Other Families use wards, but I’ve always found that the Akarii glyphs looks sharp and choppy, carved out with quick, impatient strokes.

  A group of mages spent more than a week putting these together, I bet, and even now I’m guessing they’re off in that Retriever ship, tucked into their niches, eyes rolled back into their heads and connected to them like the glyphs are alive, monitoring the power that pulses through the wards. These were built for defense as well as warning—anything that blunders into them will be badly burned, and won't be able to get much farther th
an a foot or two before the wards throw them back.

  It takes a careful hand to move through warding like this, and Josik is one of the best I’ve ever seen. He learned it as a thief (though he doesn't know I know this), stealing old paintings from some of the big residences in Tamaranth. It came in handy for him later, too, as an Akarii prisoner of war.

  He takes another shot from Pirrosh’s flask and dons a pair of dark goggles that makes the wards stand out more clearly. Then, delicately, he dips his knife into the edge of the ward and starts making small, careful cuts. He peels each layer aside, like the thin skins of a marsh onion. He goes slowly, pushing and curving the wards back onto themselves, rewriting patterns and fusing symbols together, reconnecting severed ends to each other in a way that maintains something of the inherent logic of the writing while making just enough space for us to pass through.

  It’s hard work. If he cuts too much, pushes too hard, the mages at the other end will know we’re here. But if he’s careful, there’s a lot of warding to manage and only so much space in those mages' brains to keep track.

  Sweat drips down the sides of his head, soaks into the straps of the goggles. Gradually, he’s opening up a passage. He steps into the wards, going deeper.

  “Nice work,” the girl whispers. Pirrosh grins with his two rows of teeth and nods. We pick up our packs and follow Josik, and in minutes we’re on the other side.

  We hug the shadows of the buildings. We move like ghosts. The Retriever is a long and wide platform, with multiple layers of exposed decking, and a powered keel that arches up in the bow with the carved head of a demon-bird. The Akarii have clearly spared no expense getting into Tilhtinora—the demon’s head is covered in gold feathers, and gold embellishments trace down the sides of the hull. Cannons line its fat sides. The decks are covered over with dense, flickering wards, and shiny mechs are working to tie down tarps in anticipation of the Dead storm, I guess. (I can smell the ozone growing stronger, and feel a thudding and rumbling up through my gut as the storm gets nearer.) The stern curls up into a tail that branches into three carved, golden spikes. Sentries stare out over the city from each of them. Guards are positioned up and down the decks. A faint sound of music drifts out from the hold, all pipes and flutes and woodwinds.