Beasts of the Walking City

by Del Law

  “The better shape we get them in, the less we have to do work with them,” the director quickly agrees.

  “This ship in particular could have been handled a great deal more effectively. There was a significant amount of recent damage evident to the power conduits and the shielding. The data stores were largely scrambled. The external warding completely gone. Who knows what we might have learned, and might have put to practical use, had more caution been exercised?”

  “Yes, well,” Bakron frowns, and waives his hand dismissively. It's all too many words for him. He takes a step closer to me and leans his face up toward mine. “But you understand what they’re saying, Hulgliev? I believe they’re telling you in their polite and roundabout way that you’re a sloppy Retriever, with pedestrian tastes, as well as a mage with poor judgment.”

  “Members of my family would likely agree with you,” I say, with a wide grin full of teeth. At least one member in particular. Whatever fur I have left is jet black now, I’m sure.

  The marine studies me for a minute, his hand resting on the hilt of his knife. He leans in even closer, and I can smell onion on his breath. “You’re being insulted, you know. Perhaps you’re unaware that many of us view an insult as something that warrants a response.”

  I hold his gaze. I can feel Gravhnal’s claw on my shoulder, and the collar at my neck. Starting something here, in the middle of this Akarii ship would be suicidal.

  And yet there’s a part of me that’s just fine with that.

  “I expect I will recover,” I say reluctantly, from between clenched teeth. "Khalee."

  Bakron leans back on his heels, then, takes a step backward and shakes his head dismissively. “Well, then. If you’re the shining example of legend that the Fleet Captain is pushing off on us all, perhaps we might still want to keep our own knives sharp too, just in case?”

  Bakron turns to the director. “Two cycles of the Shepard’s Moon, Halfernal. We need these ships in the air for drills, and I don’t want any excuses.”

  “Yes, khalee.”

  The marine spins on his heel dismissively, and walks purposefully out of the chamber.

  The director glares at Gravhnal. “You really do have a talent for pleasing them, don’t you.”

  “You might have mentioned that he was coming by.”

  “You had as much warning as I did,” the director says. “What in Crysius’s name made you think it would be a good idea to bring this…” He looks again at me, as if seeing me for the first time. He makes a guttural sound deep in his throat and clicks his beak. “To bring him down here? Of all creatures!”

  Gravhnal lowers his voice. “I will not explain myself to you. You may be my director, but you are still my son.”

  The director squawks and raises his feathered arms up in frustration. “I may be your son, but I am still your director! Two cycles, pap—you heard him! We’ll all be working through the night now for the tenth straight time, and even that won’t be good enough!”

  The director makes another sound deep in his throat and spits something dark and viscous at my feet. I don’t think he’s trying to feed me. “And you,” he says. “I don’t know what Nadrune sees in you. Or why my father is tarnishing all of our reputations by associating with you. But I will not forgive you for Haramai’s death.”

  I nod. “I understand,” I say.

  And I do, really—how would I react to someone that had killed one of my kind? Is that something I could ever forgive? Not likely. I want to say more, but I can’t think of the right words.

  “Haramai was a fool,” Gravhnal says, almost too quietly to hear.

  The director’s eyes go wide and he studies his father. “Is that truly what you think?”

  Gravhnal rests one stunted claw against the hull of the podship, running it over the metal as if he’s studying the faint lines of the glyphs there. “You know what I think, Hal. Or you would if you spent some time thinking about it.”

  The director presses his beak together so firmly I think it might snap. “Haramai was dedicated to the Family,” he said. “She died for them, and that makes her a martyr.”

  “A martyr for the Akarii. We agree on that much.”

  “And what else matters, pap? We live in their world now. At least some of us do. I can’t believe we keep having the same conversation again and again.”

  Gravhnal doesn’t look up from the ship. “Well, then. A conversation is, by definition, two sided. You can decide whether or not you want to choose to participate.”

  The director throws up his arms again, and clicks his beak three times in rapid succession. “Two cycles, pap. If these ships aren’t in the air by then, they’ll mount our beaks to their walls.” He turns and walked away down the length of the chamber. He ignores the men at work on other ships, who had all turned to stare at us, enters a small room at the chamber’s far end and slams the door.

  Gravhnal sighs.

  “I didn’t mean to cause any…”

  “You didn’t,” Gravhnal says.

  “And I very much regret…”

  Gravhnal turned to me and gestured sharply with his beak. “Do not speak of it. The Akarii will waste many, many more of our lives in a very short time, and Haramai was neither the brightest of us nor the most talented. And the director and I have more than just you between us. If you truly do regret her death, however, there are things you can do about that.”

  “Show me,” I say.

  The Stona nods, walks to the ladder on the podship and climbs to the hatch. He opened it and calls me inside. The interior is still scorched and it smells of smoke. Gravhnal places his hand on a panel near the doorway and the walls light up and glow.

  “Close the hatch,” he says. “Follow me.” He heads up the corridor.

  “So there are several things you need to know about this craft,” he says, dropping all pretense. “I’m no sage—someone could make much better work of the data here. And someone has begun to organize it, you know. But it’s a Calist ship. Do you know of them?”

  I shake my head.

  “You’ll have to wait for a history lesson. The short version is that the Calist once built some of the best crafts we have found. They’re very, very rare. I’ve only seen a few—the Tel Kharan have one in use running patrols up in the northern reaches, and I believe the Fjilosh have one they use for surveillance, though I’m sure it’s not as nice as this one. A ship of this type is said to have escorted the Sultana of the Calist’ai to negotiations with the Lunar Council when their world was about to leave the joined worlds. That was a big deal back then.”

  As Gravhnal clears his throat again, we emerge into the control room. The space on the main panel where the knife had been driven has been patched, and though dust remains across the seats the displays across two walls are lit up and the light from them gives the whole room a greenish glow. “As I said,” he continues, gesturing around, “the Calist built well. They even taught the Khrytin a thing or two in their day about underspace travel. In fact, you’ve got indications of prior underspace jump engines, if they can ever be brought online. You’ll need someone smarter than me for that, however. As for the weaponry, I confess wasn’t entirely truthful with young Bakron. The Calist were fine artists and not warlike, but they weren’t exactly fools either. After a full overhaul in my workshop, with enough time to do the job right, you’d have the standard complement of the times: lowerspace emitters, scatterguns, phase cannon. Not enough to stand up to a phalanx of Tel Kharan ships, say, but enough to hold your own.

  “Those are the things I understand. Now, come this way.”

  He walks over to the wall that we’d all fallen against when the ship had gone down in the mountains, and touches three specific sections of the panel, and then steps back. I hear small motors humming, and a small section of the wall slides aside. Lights come on, and Gravhnal climbs in. I duck my head and follow.

  Inside is a plain chamber, smaller than the control room and triangular in shape from being p
ressed up against the hull. The walls are bare metal, and along the inner wall is a row of metal loops, paralleled by a row on the floor, maybe used to tie things down?

  “Lead,” Gravhnal says, tapping the wall with his claw. “For shielding. It's extremelly thick. You could probably carry a True Glyph in here and no one would ever know.” Gravhnal clicks his beak together a few times and turned to Blackwell. “It is no surprise to find something like this in a podship today. You probably can’t feel it with that collar on you, but the lead keeps any aether from getting in or out."

  So now I know: it is the collar that's keeping me from sensing the aether.

  Gravhnal continues, "Retrievers from other families put rooms like this in all the time to get past our patrols, and sometimes they even work. But they’re a modern convenience, you understand? In this ship’s time, no one was digging things out of Tilhtinora and trying to smuggle them past patrols. They were building them new. So sometime before that city was going to fall three hundred year ago, someone had something important they that needed hiding.”

  “There’s more to it, Gravhnal,” a familiar voice says from the doorway.

  I spin around in the small space, and grab for a knife that isn’t there.

  But it’s Fehris, dressed in Akarii robes that are smeared with dirt, with a pair of welding goggles pushed back on his furry forehead. There are patches of grease on his face and down his front.

  “Allow me to introduce my…assistant,” Gravhnal says, tilting his head sideways and crinkling his eyes.

  “Assistant?” Fehris raises his eyebrows.

  “Cabin boy?”

  “In your dreams, Chicken-man.”

  Gravhnal clacks his beak, amused, though Fehris just looks annoyed.

  “You made it,” I say. “Onboard, I mean.”

  “Of course,” he says dismissively. “I basically never left. Look, Blackwell. You need to see this.” He squeezes past me, and squats down near a handle in the floor that I’d taken for another tie-down, but he pulls at it with both hands. “Give me a hand here, will you two?”

  I take over, give it a tug, but it doesn’t move.

  “Try twisting it.”

  I twist, and hear motors engage below the floor. A smooth metal cylinder rises up from the floor and stops at about the height of my waist. Gravhnal and Fehris study it for a minute, and then Gravhnal reaches out and touches something I can’t see on the side closest to him.

  The top of the cylinder cracks open. Inside of it is a padded compartment.

  A compartment in the shape of a rose.

  “Look familiar?” Fehris says. His eyes are glowing with a golden light. “I think we know what they were carrying.”

  My mouth moves, and no words come out. Then I say “But where did they take it?”

  “According to the stories I found in the hold, Farsoth’s two brothers caught Te’loria when it fell from his hands after a great battle. They took Te’loria to hide it. Hide it…” Fehris says, his voice trailing off uncertainly.

  “Hide it in a well, apparently.” He frowns.

  “That’s helpful.”

  Fehris shrugs and runs a hand over his head, smearing more grease into the fur there. “It’s a symbol for something, I’m just not clear what. The Lunar Council had many secret meeting places—it could be one of those? There’s a spring somewhere in the Southern continent that the Solingi think of as sacred, that they say their moon came up out of.

  "It could be a literary reference, too.” He sighs. “And about a hundred other places.”

  “My friends.” Gravhnal reaches up and places a stunted claw on my shoulder again, and one on Fehris’s as well. “The details will work themselves out. Do you really want to do something about this war, Blackwell?"

  He studies me with one dark eye. "Then you find this flower. And you use it, khalee. You use it well.”

  24: Kjatyrhna

  Work in the Akarii drone pits is eerie, disgusting, and incredibly boring. It’s dark and cold—the chill of the sea comes right through the hull, and the low lights of mage globes flicker and pulse to some erratic heartbeat. It stinks of fish and sewage. Rats move across the floor in packs, dodging pools of bilge-wash that slosh back and forth across the floor planks with the hovering motion of the ship. Kjat takes the mop bucket over to the low sink and empties it, and then fills it again with water from the spigot.

  And then there are all the drones.

  They’re strapped in the coffin-sized niches all along the corridors on these lowest parts of the ship. Their hands rest on shelves that close across the niche at about waist height, and each of them holds a cheap knife loosely before them. Their eyes are rolled back in their heads, their bodies are slack, their mouths wide open to the flies and spiders and worse down here. There were thousands of them, mostly naked, all packed in shoulder to shoulder, twitching and shaking as all of the aether from the entire ship-city passed through them.

  Rehdr had been right—it was hard not to think they were watching her with those eerie white eyes whenever she turned her back.

  She wonders it’s like for them, swimming in that huge sea of energy. Do they talk to each other across the network? Tell stories? Sing? Or was it some sort of quiet hell, filled up with endless slicing and dicing of the aether, parceling it into smaller and smaller branches for the upperdecks?

  She can see how it devours them. Many of the drones here look old before their time, with hard, drawn faces and leathery skin, bony wrists and arms and legs that looked nearly skeletal. She doesn't know how long each of them spends in the pits, though there are some she’s come to recognize that are here whenever she comes through.

  Clearly they didn’t get to leave to use a bathroom.

  Rehdr said they all made decent money, much better than Kjat would ever see in the scullery, and it was a way of life for many families. And after all, this was how all of the walking cities got their power, and how the flying cities that were left stayed aloft. The role of the drone was a fact of life.

  But Kjat decides she’ll take her own life before becoming one. Better scrubbing shit out of niches than that half-waking existence.

  A week back, Eeg had asked her to help carry out the body of a woman who had stayed too long. They wrapped her in burlap. She was light, her skin crisp, like the dried-out carapace of some insect. They weighted her with lead, and rolled her out one of the hatch doors without ceremony. Kjat had pocketed her knife when no one was looking. No one had known her name.

  Other nights, she and Croah roamed through the hidden corridors of the ship.

  She is surprised there are so many, and wonders what that said about the Akarii culture. She is surprised, too, at how intelligent Croah actually is once she got past his bravado, and once he realized she was really interested in understanding the inner workings of the ship. He takes pride in showing her ways to get past the stair guards and to the upperdecks, how to sneak into the upperdeck crew galley and raid the food storage there (which was actually no better than Targluck’s food downbelow, and maybe a little worse). They sneak into cargo holds and vast rooms where the engines that powered the ship’s keel lay, and he showed her how to look into certain private quarters of the Akarii upperdecks crew, though they rarely saw anything more than some woman or man sleeping soundly.

  He makes a few passes at her, but after the fourth or fifth time he seemed to get that she wasn’t interested (the knee in the groin may have helped that along) and he settles into their other nighttime explorations with good nature.

  Kjat keeps a careful watch for Blackwell, who is the subject of much conversation, but she sees few signs of him. Once they’d been looking out through a spyhole onto a main thoroughfare in the marketplace, and heard some Akarii men dressed as birds discussing Fleet Captain Nadrune’s ‘Beast’. Another time, they lay flat and looked down through the ceiling of a Stona hatchery, and overheard three young Stona strutting and boasting in their high-pitched chirps of how they would exact reveng
e on Blackwell for the murder of someone called Haramai. And once, she thought she saw him pass quickly just on the other side of the wall from her, wearing some sort of golden collar around his neck. But the wall was thick, and the spy holes were small. And it was only a momentary glimpse.

  But it gives her hope. If he is alive, and walking around, then she can find him. Together they will find a way out of here. She will just have to look harder.

  She does see the Kerul, Ercan—he is wrapped and skull-capped as a middleclass Akarii, but the sound of his voice and the flash of his eyes is unmistakable. He is kneeling, using a tape measure on a young Stona, flattering the boy on its choice in fabric. He is some sort of tailor, and a multicolor Krukkruk in a tunic that is much too clean was working at a sewing machine of some kind to assemble the Stona a new set of wraps. He pauses in his work and looked up, and Kjat swears he met her gaze directly, through the spyhole. But he doesn't react, and doesn't interupt his flattery. The young Stona, standing on a small, raised platform for the measuring, preens.

  This night, Croah is nowhere to be found. He’d been talking about a girl named Sotha for a few nights now, and she’d coached him to not be such an arrogant jerk so maybe that was paying off. Good for him. Kjat scrubs out another rough niche that stinks of urine, and tries not to jump when something scurries across her foot.

  The drones are restless tonight, she thinks. Someone somewhere is pulling a great amount of aether for something. She can feel it cracking around her, flowing through the drones in rivers. Even with the totem the Buhr gave her the blackjackals and the featherwolves kick and mutter in their sleep, roused by so much aether so near.

  She dumps another bucket, sighs, and then she sits down and extends her senses out with the old drone’s knife, tracing the paths of aether in her mind.

  It’s like the glowing roots of some upside-down, ancient tree, tendrils moving drone to drone and branching off into smaller and smaller channels that stretch into different sections of upperdecks.