by Del Law
11: Blackwell
There’s a gasp of breath, the smell of smoke, as I push my way up out of the corpse road and into his cell. The air is damp, like Tamaranth air, and I can smell the sea. I pigment myself to match the shadows in the corner. A guard passes by outside the bars, but he does not see me. I’m good at not being seen.
But he knows I’m here. He always knows.
“Beast,” he says quietly, under his breath.
He doesn’t look well. He lays face down on the cot, with some sort of bandage on his lower back. He’s a short man, but a large one; his back is rounded like a barrel. His shirt, with the prison ID number 85 stitched over the chest pocket, is thrown over a small desk that’s built onto the wall. He sweats in the cold air, and his eyes roll a bit in their sockets.
It’s night, though his cell is never very dark. Somewhere a man is yelling, and it echoes around the prison. “Mr. Capone,” I say, quietly.
“I’m not feelin’ so hot today,” he says.
He’ll recover from the wound. It’s from a man named James C. Lucas. Lucas will die here, in about twenty-five years. I tell him that.
“Good to know,” he says. “I clocked him a good one, too, right to the head. I knocked his goddamn block off. He was spittin’ teeth.”
He sighs. “What have you got for me, Beast.”
He’s not sure I’m real, though I know I’m not the only one he talks to. His time locked in this cell, with a corpse road in the corner, has been pretty productive, and I know he has many agents on the other side of it.
But the syphilis is in his brain now, and he sees things.
Maybe I’m one of them, he thinks. Maybe not.
I tell him why I’m there.
He thinks about it. A tremor passes through one of his arms. He searches the corner, trying to see me, and I let a little of my color slip so he can make out the outline of my face, see my eyes.
“You’re just like Frankie, you know that?” he says, staring at me. The pupil in his left eye contracts. He means Frank Nitti, I think, one of his men. “Always askin’ for money. You gonna spend it all on whores, too?”
I don’t answer.
“You know what I want, Beast. You still prepared to help me out with that?”
“I am, Mr. Capone. When the time is right.”
“When the time is right, when the time is fucking right.” The cell block stinks of sweat and anxiety—it smells like the past. From where I’m standing, in his cell, you can see out to the ocean, and down to the floor of the cellblock. A janitor crosses there, stops and looks up at where I’m standing. He stares at my outline. I grin at him and he curses and jumps. I pigment out, and he stares at the spot where he saw me and then shakes his head. He keeps walking. I’m evil, I know. What can I say.
Capone sighs again. “What’ve I got to lose,” he says. “You tell them other monsters that I’m givin’ the ok here.” He rolls up on his side, grimacing as he does it, facing me. “And Beast,” he says. “I’m expectin’ results here, even if you are just in my head. People who don’t get me results? Well…”
He holds his fist up in front of his face. “Let me say that I have a long fucking reach. Get me? A long fucking reach.”
I get him.
12.
Back through the corpse road. It’s all tangled here, and I have to retrace my steps pretty carefully. It’s very foggy. I paid careful attention on the way in, though. Earth is even closer to Kiryth now than when I was a kid, and the roads are becoming more and more intertwined—it’s getting harder to tell past from present, one world from another. It’s easy to get lost. I pass a Buhr going in the other direction.
But I climb out on top of the tower. It’s still night here, too, not long after I left. Only two moons are up, but by their light I can see Kjat still standing watch down by the ship. The Kerul are curled up in blankets in the lee of the ship, out of the wind.
I cut a small white glyph into the air just outside of the entry to the corpse road, and light it up with a little of the residual energy in my knife. I wait. It doesn’t take long before a small three-fingered hand reaches out of the road, takes hold of the glyph as though it had physical substance, and pulls the rest of its hairy, ball-like body through.
It’s a Buhr, and it rolls to one side and unfolds three legs and the rest of its arms. It rises up, and its ugly face blooms open like dark, furred flower.
It looks exactly like the last Buhr. I didn’t like that one much either.
Its breathing tube rolls up into the air from the middle of it’s face, like a flower’s pistil, waving in the breeze. Three eyes blink open, spaced evenly around it’s middle, and one of them settles on me. It shakes itself all over, rattles its feeding tube, and then it shouts itself into my head.
HULGLIEV, WE REGRET OUR INDISCRETION. WE HAVE LEARNED FROM THE EXPERIENCE AND ARE DELIGHTED TO CONTINUE TO GUIDE YOU IN YOUR QUEST. I AM ASSUMING YOU HAVE THE PROPER PAYMENT?
It’s like a drunk, obnoxious person yelling right into your ear, only much worse. I smell cardamom, see an image of a Hunter’s spear coming at me.
I shake my head, getting angry already. “Indiscretion?” I go dark and growl low in my throat. “You wrecked my expedition and stranded me! Two of the team is dead, and the ship is now useless! You need to do better than that.”
RECOVERY OF ARTIFACTS IS ALWAYS DANGEROUS WORK, the Buhr replies, taking a step back and sounding offended. AS ALWAYS, WE ARE NEVER ABLE TO GUARANTEE AN OUTCOME.
“I arranged transport. I found the ship. What was it you did, exactly? Let me see. Oh, yes, you bumbled into warding, got yourself killed and nearly me along with you. That doesn’t sound like the kind of expertise we paid a great deal of money for.”
THE LOSS OF ONE MEANS LITTLE TO US. It’s hard to tell, but it might sound just a little sheepish. It turns in place, and looks at me with a different eye. This one is blue.
“The loss of two means a lot to me. So does the loss of me. You know who I work for, Buhr. It means a lot to him, too. He’s not someone you want to disappoint.”
The Buhr hums. WE ARE AWARE OF THIS HUMAN. It hums some more, thinking it through. YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE, HULGLIEV?
You’d think that might have been clear. “I do.”
MR. CAPONE HAS AUTHORIZED PAYMENT?
"He has."
The Buhr buzzes to itself, maybe talking to others of its kind. They’re not quite a hive-mind, some sages say. Others disagree. It could be checking with another Buhr that’s sitting in 1930’s Earth, right next to one of Capone’s accountants.
Or it could just want me to think that.
It waves the feeding tube at me. I take that for a good sign. WHAT IS IT YOU REQUIRE?
“Transportation to Tamaranth, for myself, the team, and the ship.” They won’t do it, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
The Buhr shrugs. NOT POSSIBLE, it says. NOT ON YOUR BUDGET. It buzzes again. YOU WILL PROVIDE US ACCESS TO THE CRAFT. WE WILL… REPAIR… IT, SO YOU CAN CONTINUE ON TO TAMARANTH.
I laugh. They’d repair it right back to wherever it is they call home, I’m sure.
I shake my head, and explain what I want.
The Buhr rotates again and studies me with a different eye, this one brown, as it studies the ship with another.
It names a price.
I name a much, much lower amount.
It pretends to act insulted, and we go back and forth like that for awhile. It amazes me how common these kinds of negotiations are, regardless of the species you’re dealing with. We lock on a price, actually a little lower than I expected.
Satisfied, the Buhr gets out of my head, which is a relief.
It steps to the mouth of the corpse road and starts to ramp up its buzzing and crackling, and it makes some awkward gestures I’m almost sure must be made-up to look mysterious.
It’s not long before another Buhr squeezes up through the hole, though, followed by another and another, pushing out in quick succession until there are so ma
ny it’s impossible to count them. They fill up the top of the tower, and start to spill down the wreck of a stair—the buzz of their breath and the chirps and creaks they make sound like a field full of a hundred barrel-sized, three-legged giant crickets, their striped feeding tubes all waving in the wind.
I can see Kjat watching us, from down by the ship, and I give her a wave to let her know it’s all right. I push my way through the crowd, down the stairs, and I lead them back to the ship.
The Kerul team emerge, blinking, from their blankets as the wave of Buhr converge around the ship like a cloud, swarm underneath it, and lift it as one onto the mass of their furred backs. There must be more than a thousand of them.
“So, it looks like we have a plan?” Mircada says, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.
Ercan studies me, and his hand is close to his knife—he’s trying to figure out if I’m taking just the ship, or them along with it.
Frankly, if I were smarter, I’d probably leave them here. But after that ceremony earlier, I know I can’t.
I nod. “Come on,” I say. “I got us a ride.”
The Kerul hurry to gather up their things, and climb up inside the ship. But I’ve got a better idea—I use some of the exterior handholds to climb up the outer hull, and Kjat follows me. We find an indentation from a cannonball up near the front, and I use some rope from my pack to tie us in. One of the Buhr climbs up too, and perches up near the bow to direct the herd.
And then, we’re off.
The Buhr haul us down the winding mountain path. The ride is surprisingly smooth, despite the snow and the uneven terrain. We move so fast that the wind pushes my ears back flat on my head and it whips through my fur, getting rid of some of my exhaustion. Sleep is overrated, I remind myself. They’ll be plenty of time for that when this is over, however it works out. (Though I could really use a good bowl of noodles, a shot of decent Solingi bourbon, and some leaf right about now.)
At several points the trail disappears or passes through clefts in the rock too narrow for the ship, and with a flurry of frantic effort the Buhr swarm up, over, or around whatever is in the way, each individual scrabbling for the best footing for each of its three feet, each working to carry as much of the great weight of the ship as possible.
We lose some of them, off the edge of a steep cliff, or crushed beneath shifting rocks. Some are even trampled underfoot by the Buhr themselves, after they stumble. I shout up to the Buhr at the bow, which might or might not be the one I negotiated with. But it waves its feeding tube at me. THE LOSS OF ONE MEANS LITTLE, it shouts back. I gather this is something like a mantra for them. THEIR EXPIRATIONS ENRICH US.
As we ride, the tides cycle rapidly through rising and falling as the moons pass overhead. When all the moons set, briefly, the stars emerge, dense and white and fiery in the temporary darkness. We pass down into the tree line, down through the snow, and out across rolling hills that bring us closer to the sea. The path takes us through a valley blanketed in a kinetic, phosphorescent grass that’s hunting insects. Sharp, carnivorous blades swat and glow in the moonlight. We move carefully through a clearing filled with a hundred pale, stone statues, each nearly twelve feet high. I don’t recognize the race—a stocky insect-like creature, each of them dressed for some ancient war, with elaborate armor and long swords they held before them. All of the statues’ heads have been severed and are nowhere to be seen. Their bodies are cracked and covered in moss.
“You were surprising back there,” I tell Kjat. She’s been quiet this whole time, and I feel the need to break the silence.
I see her tense up. “Surprising good? Or surprising bad?”
“Surprising good. You have a lot of strength in you. To be honest I didn’t expect it.”
“Thanks,” Kjat grinned. “I guess.” She relaxes, like she’s been holding her breath for most of the ride so far.
“Where did you train?”
She looks away. “Here and there,” she says. “A friend of the family showed me some things when I was younger.” She absently rubs the inside of her wrist, where a small black glyph lies on her skin.
I nod. I don’t want to pry. We all have our secrets.
We pass the mouth of an old mine, now abandoned, and we move toward a patch of deep forest where great flowering blossoms arch high above us. As we approach, the flowers swivel toward us and take on a predatory stance, heads low and forward, petals outstretched, and they shake themselves vigorously. The petals and fibrous stems are edged with spines.
Kjat draws her knife. “Wait,” I say. “They’re not things that you want to make enemies of. Watch.”
She nods and sheathes her knife reluctantly. The flowers study us, and we study them back. They are pale blue and white, stripes spiraling in from the petals toward the stamen like a whirlpool. Their fragrance is thick and fruity. They retreat slowly as the ship passes them by, most of them stretching skyward again to catch the next moonslight, but a few blooms still watch us until we pass out of the forest and on down the path, out of site.
“How did you know about them?” Kjat asks.
“There’s a great garden in the Chancellor’s Residence in Tamaranth. I had a chance to walk through it once, and there are a lot of plants like them. Some of them are almost sentient.”
“You worked for the Chancellor?”
“Sort of. We worked for someone who worked for someone. Just guard work, really.”
“But you fought at the ford, at Amontar. With Josik.”
I nod. And Pirrosh. “It was our first real fight. We nearly died, to be honest. There were so many Talovians, and they took us mostly by surprise.” It was one of the first major Akarii incursions, several years ago. Amontar was one of the outlying border towns near Tamaranth, and it had been completely overrun.
“I was with the Talovians for awhile.” She shakes her head. “Not fighting with them, I don’t mean that.”
“Josik had mentioned something. He didn’t say much.”
She turns her violet eyes toward me in the dark, and then looks away. “It wasn’t pleasant.”
“I get the sense you’ve been through a lot.”
She takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. She doesn’t answer. And then she shrugs. “It’s war. Lots of people have been through a lot. I don’t think I’m much different.”
“I’m sorry about Josik,” I say.
“It wasn’t your fault, Blackwell. We know the risks. He knew what he was doing.”
“You two were close, weren’t you.”
“He reminded me of my brother, the way he wanted to look out for me?” She smiles to herself.
“He was a great friend, he and Pirrosh both.” I tell her about some of the things we’d been hired to go find. A sage deep in the Warrens of Tamaranth had sent Josik and I into the southern swamps for an old Akarii database, supposedly lost when a podship had been shot down. I’d come back with the data, and a case of creeping mold that had stayed in my fur for weeks. Another had sent us into a series of tunnels near Crom’s Watch, in search of an old aetherbook that had belonged to Crom himself. Instead we’d found a pack of wild dogs that had chased us for miles, and when at last we’d hid up in a tree, we found a body there, the husk of a long-dead Talovian, clutching that very same book.
“He had a lot of respect for you, you know,” she says. “They both did. They would have followed you into anything.”
I frown. “They did. And look what happened.”
She shakes her head. “You’re missing my point. Do you think they would rather have died in the Warrens somewhere? From brownplague or starving or something? The way Josik talked, you gave them something to work for, to dream about.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I nod. “Thanks,” I say. It doesn’t seem like much consolation, though.
The wind picks up, and she leans in against me. I find myself talking about my childhood in Sartosh’s lands, on the steppes of the Ghibral Mountains. I talk about the kiva I’d grown up
in, about working in the fields, about my aunt and how she treated me, and about how there were long nights filled with nothing but wind and Sartosh’s books and the knife Sartosh had given me once, a knife that had belonged to Sartosh’s own father, that I kept now in a vault in a bank in Tamaranth for fear I’d pawn it.
As I talk, I can sense her relaxing more, settling into the ride. She asks quiet questions, and I’m surprised to find myself opening up to her.
“My childhood was a bit different,” she says, drowsily. I wait to hear more, but she leans in against me and is silent. I can hear her breathing settle into a deep, quiet rhythm that I sense doesn’t come easy to her. The Assassin’s moon is above the horizon again, and I study her in the moonslight. The patterns to her tattoos seems to shift and flicker.
She’s the last of my team, I think. I owe it to her. “I will get you out of this,” I promise, quietly. "I'll get you home." I can’t tell if she hears me.
• • •
The hills flatten out into a long stretch of warm, temperate lands that gradually slope down to the shore. The Buhr are moving so fast, the motion and my exhaustion take over, and when the Buhr from the bow wakes me, I realize two things—first, I’m a little embarrassed to see I’ve been spooned around Kjat. I extract myself without waking her.
Second, we’re reaching the port just before dawn.
There’s no live network here, since the town is off-lei. Mircada goes in ahead of us and comes back with a map and a bunch of keys. I guess the town is used to people coming in at all hours, being so close to the fallen city.
A fog has moved in off of the bay and the air is warm here, cloying even. The Buhr move us quickly through the streets, humming and clicking, the pads of their feet slapping at the dirt. It’s quiet. Ships shift in their moorings, lines knock against metal masts, waves slap against the docks. A dirty, rusted mech studies us for a moment, but then turns and rolls quickly down an alley. Rats look fat and lazy in the shadows, but the ones that aren’t quick enough to scurry out of our way are caught by a fast-moving Buhr, stuffed unceremoniously into a small spiked hole at the top of its feeding tube and quickly digested.
