The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  Wrack skipped ahead, doing all he could not to rip the beloved pages with his pincers; Waldemar spent some time discussing the riverbank fauna, and then the narrative was broken by several pages illustrating catfish collected in light traps. When it resumed, it was with a paragraph that had always made Wrack squirm, especially when read with the knowledge of what had later befallen the expedition.

  Once in the night, the lightsman begged a halt, claiming he had seen men on the bank; there was a rush on deck and the crew called out across the dark river, but when the searchlight came back to the place he’d marked, there was nothing but tangled thorns.

  Relishing the familiar discomfort, Wrack flipped ahead again.

  We came to the mouth of the tributary, where the river’s black water blended with the milk-tea of the Sinfondo, just before dawn on the third day. At first we planned to move out into the channel and make immediate headway against the current, but a near-collision with a fallen blastwood curbed our excitement. The tree, near a quarter-mile in length, must have fallen deep inland—by the time we encountered it, it had become the spine of a raft of smaller trees, uprooted shrubs and riotous water flora. Only quick thinking on the part of the helmswoman avoided our hull becoming part of the travelling island.

  The decision was made to wait until the light was strong enough to spot further rafts before moving out into the Sinfondo. In the end, our patience was rewarded—by the day’s first light, with the river still swathed in thick mist, we saw one of the great worms breach. Though it was far off through dense fog, I made it out to be an Ormsley’s Phosphorescent—one of the larger deep-channel predators, and nearly fifty yards from horns to hindbeak. It emerged from the water in silence, throwing off a cloud of droplets as it twisted in a liquid arc, then returned to its element with a splash that would have dislodged all but its sturdiest parasites. Seeing the breach as an omen, the helmswoman moved us out into the channel.

  A particularly vivid slew of sparks in the sky broke Wrack’s concentration, but it was easy to shrug off. The city could fall to pieces around him, and Mouana could enact whatever gruesome revenge she had in mind by herself; he was done with it all. As far as Wrack was concerned, he would sit there with his book until it all blew over, or someone came up the belfry stairs with a hammer. If he was left alone for long enough, he might even have another go at Comedy of the Sandwiches. Nevertheless, the barrage had made him lose his place, and he clucked his mandibles in irritation as he dug back in at another marker.

  On the twenty-fifth day we reached the mouth of the Rio Esqueleto on our way upriver from Candlewood, and anchored the boat to make council on our course from there. While the dockmaster at Candlewood had updated our charts, giving us the positions of the towns still standing on the upper Sinfondo, many of the crew—led by Ms Tansell, the archaeologist—argued in favour of an extended detour up the Esqueleto before heading upriver. The Esqueleto was unsettled beyond its lower reach, and trappers’ reports from before the disconnect suggested an overland route to High Sarawak from its upper channel. For a historian, therefore, it offered more than did the Sinfondo.

  In the end, the discussion was settled by the wurmjäger, Hansen—the rich waters of the upper Sinfondo offered us the chance to add further wormskins to the six in the hold, and thus to pay for the voyage. At noon, it was decided we should make a four-day expedition up the tributary, before turning back and heading north again up the Sinfondo.

  Wrack’s attention was torn from the page again, and not by the bombardment. There was something in that paragraph that really should have triggered recognition—he was sure of it. Wrack would have frowned, if he had had the anatomy; the feeling was akin to the sort of half-memory fumble experienced by the very tired or the very stoned, and had become monstrously familiar in the wake of death.

  When he scanned the page again, however, the words hit him like a shovel: an overland route to High Sarawak. He had been curious about the reference when he had read the book as a living man—now he was dead, it held extra resonance.

  High Sarawak, the vertical city. The bone-state. The place where the dead walked as revered machines. Until Wrack had seen Tavuto from its gore-slicked deck, all he had known of reanimation came from the vague cultural conception of High Sarawak. It was part of any Lipos-Tholon’s primary education in myth, along with the Tin King, the Horse Fleet and the God-Times. The city that had dug too far into the old tech and destroyed itself; it was now long cut off through the decay of the Lemniscatus, taking its mythical necrotech with it.

  By adolescence, most kids had quietly filed it in the pinch-of-salt component of world history, one of the colourful metaphors the City used to teach its children the morality of statecraft. The revelation that Waldemar had considered it a real place; that he had soberly dismissed an expedition in search of it, should have seemed ludicrous. But then Wrack was reading Gustav’s words as a victim of the very technology it had been famed for.

  Wrack had walked as a dead man; he knew that the supposedly forbidden knowledge of the bone-state had persisted past its disappearance, despite the City’s insistence otherwise. Finally, he understood why Waldemar’s book, which had always seemed so drily uncontroversial, had been so hard to come across in its unabridged form. High Sarawak was not only real, but there was a good chance it was accessible through Grand Amazon, one of the City’s longest-standing colonies.

  Wrack had to tell Mouana. Given her obsession with the technology that had doomed them, there was no way she wouldn’t want to know about this. She probably wouldn’t want to chat with him, he thought, remembering the crack of her boot against his carapace, but he had to give it a go. Suddenly, he wasn’t so keen to get lost in his books.

  MATE, thought Wrack. THE THING THAT MADE US? MIGHT NOT HAVE COME FROM THE CITY AFTER ALL. IT’S FROM HIGH SARAWAK. AND I RECKON I KNOW A WAY THERE. GRAND AMAZON.

  He waited, watching the shells fall on the shield through the belfry window, too curious to go back to Waldemar’s book. Surely, Mouana would write back any moment now.

  “HE’S NOT DEAD yet,” said Kaba, crouching by the Chancellor’s side.

  It was raining now, fat drops that stank of ozone from the beleaguered shield. The steps of the Ministry were slick with it, and the Chancellor’s robes were soaked to a deep maroon. If he was bleeding, it didn’t show.

  “No, I’m not,” spat the Chancellor, from beneath his own statue. The bronze cast had landed head-first on his hips, flattening his pelvis, and Mouana could scarcely imagine the man’s pain. He must have been a desperately tough old bastard. She gave a small shake of her head to the rebels pushing the miasma trolley, keeping them from moving within the Chancellor’s line of sight.

  “Where are the other rods?” asked Mouana, as she knelt by the crushed man’s side. The Chancellor snarled.

  Her wrist console beeped; she ignored it. No doubt Wrack had some inanity or other to share with her—maybe he had seen an interesting statue, or remembered a poem. There was no time for his nonsense now.

  “Where are the rods?” repeated Mouana. The Chancellor spat, landing a pinkish blob next to her boot, and gave a shuddering grimace. Mouana sighed: no doing things the easy way, then.

  Looking down at the quivering statesman, she remembered the soldier being eaten alive, and the overseer they had captured in the opening chaos of the Tavuto uprising. Time and time again, she had gone against her instincts for the sake of her soft-hearted friend. But whatever Wrack would think of her, there was no time for mercy now. Judging by the near-constant battery of the shield, the siege was nearly broken, and if there were rods elsewhere, she needed to be on her way to them before the City fell. It was time for expediency.

  “Where are the rods?” she repeated, and stamped on the man’s outstretched hand. Her wrist chimed again, as the screams began.

  The Chancellor passed out twice in the first half hour, requiring amphetamines from the rebels’ aid kits to bring him round, but still said nothing. After another
twenty minutes, he went into cardiac arrest, but still all he offered was curses. It was all Mouana had expected.

  As he died, she called for miasma; Pearl offered up the cylinder, and she jetted it into the Chancellor’s ruined mouth as he sucked in his final breath. Ten minutes later he was back, screaming. With so little time dead, Pearl explained, the Chancellor would experience very little of the vacant bafflement that afflicted most miasma victims. They could continue questioning him immediately.

  “Welcome back,” said Mouana, as the Chancellor thrashed broken limbs and gaped blindly in terror. “The rules have changed. You’ve taken miasma, so now you can’t feel much pain. But there are worse things than pain. The City is about to fall. If we leave you, the Blades will find you here, and they will be able to keep you around as long as they like. The rest, you can imagine. But if you tell us where the rods are, I will kill you.”

  She figured the Chancellor had slipped into the fugue of the newly-woken, but then he cleared his throat.

  “Fine,” he whispered, expression unreadable behind what she had made of his face. “I’ll tell you.”

  Mouana was taken aback. For the Chancellor to have collected his thoughts and weighed up his options so quickly, he must have had phenomenal presence of mind. She felt grudging respect for the old bastard, which curdled as he opened his mouth again.

  “They’re at High Sarawak,” he grinned, and spat out a tooth. Mouana’s hopes collapsed; the Chancellor hadn’t seen reason—he’d gone mad. High Sarawak was a myth; if it had ever existed, it had been cut off long ago. He may as well have told her the rods were in Metal Heaven, or the Emerald City.

  All the cutting had been in vain; she was no nearer an answer than she had been in the burning Ministry, and they were running out of time to draw sense from him. As if to underline the fact, an apocalyptic crack came from the horizon, where a great cloud of dust was rolling in slow fury.

  The City was breached.

  Mouana stood and drew her gun. This was the end: she had failed. The rods were still out there somewhere, and all she had done was shed an ocean of blood to wipe out a single batch of them. Her gun wavered over the Chancellor’s head as the rebels watched, silent. The Chancellor began to laugh, and she lowered the weapon.

  Fuck it, she thought, with a flash of anger. He hadn’t come good on his part of the deal, so she wouldn’t come good on hers. She would leave him for his enemies, crippled, blind and deathless.

  In fact, thought Mouana, she could leave the lot of them. Fingal, and Pearl, and the Bruiser and the Chancellor, who she could barely stand to look at. They were doomed anyway—what use was there in her staying around to see the last acts of her failure play out?

  She raised the gun, and was about to turn it to her temple, when her wrist chimed once more. Wrack. She would say goodbye to Wrack. If there was anything she still owed anyone, it was that. Mouana looked at her wrist, and stood stock still. The words blazed, orange on black.

  THING THAT MADE US. HIGH SARAWAK. A WAY THERE. GRAND AMAZON.

  The message had been sent more than an hour ago, and repeated seven times since. While she had tortured a man in and out of death in search of the same answer.

  Mouana’s vision swam. She looked up slowly, at the rebels and the sailors as they waited in the rain for her to act. There was no reason they should have any idea what had just happened, or that she had been on the edge of annihilating herself. If she just frowned back at the console, as if taking in a minor detail, they would be none the wiser.

  Mouana frowned back at the console, typed YES, JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT HS MYSELF, with shaking hands, and shot the Chancellor in the head.

  “I know a way there,” croaked Mouana, the pistol dropping from her hand, and the crowd cheered. All she could do was stare into the wall of dust, rising from the city’s edge like the closing fingers of a fist.

  “BREACH! BREACH! TO THE BREEEACH!”

  The howl from the radio stretched into a dopplered scream, climaxing with the scrape of ceramic on meat as Dust plunged her hatchet into the soldier’s chest.

  She bared her teeth and shunted another bar of drugs into her system. Synaesthetic boosters and kinetics, blended hot and raw. Her armour, tuned to sing with every kill, thrummed with the quiver of haptic fibres. Dust stared down into the soldier’s faceplate, blank as the desert sun, and tore her blade free in a cataract of gore.

  Immediately she sought another kill, and there it was: her blade tore greedily into the next man’s neck, sizzling through kevlar, colliding with soft cartilage and ripping through into redness. More she demanded, her interface growing hazier before her eyes with each kill. More. Make me faster, make me harder, give me more flesh to rend.

  Before her prayer had finished she had answered it, yanking the weapon’s hooked beard through another man’s throat, and was dancing in the rain of his heart’s last shudder. Every droplet, every hiss of blood on ceramic, paid for years of waiting. Every step she took was conquest.

  Even before the wall had fallen, five endless minutes ago, she had sent her chariot screaming ahead of the charge on a plume of black smoke. When the atomic slug had blown the breach she had been close enough for it to turn the world white, to roast her face through her helmet and baste her in a creaking wash of geiger-clicks.

  Her boots had hit the ground moments later, leading her personal guard over the waste and into the near-molten maw of the breach. There they had met the City’s kentigerns, as they raced forward into the oven-hot rubble with cables and projectors to set up a temporary shield. They had set upon the defenders like beasts.

  The air throbbed with screams and shots, blade-clash and frantic shouts; lights blazed and shadows flickered in billows of pulverised stone. Dust they called her, and dust she was, swirling and lethal in the breach of the wall.

  A man loomed out of the madness with a shotgun, but one of her guard took the blast; only a handful of sodden shrapnel made it through to embed itself in her amour. She pounced over the guard as he collapsed, and was bearing down on the attacker before his face could even register surprise. A whicker of steel, and his gun was hooked from his hands; terror was just beginning to dawn when she beat the life from him with the thing.

  Another kentigern was opening up on her with a machine gun, the bullets chewing eagerly into the armour above her ribs. Dust simply flexed her shielding around the point of impact, shuddered in pleasure as the slugs slid harmlessly aside from its field, and stalked up the stream of fire to the terrified gunner.

  After he collapsed with her blade in his skull, there was nothing—only yelling in the dark as the defence pulled back. Her guards were all but fallen, and the enemy were in retreat. Dust screeched in affront, and hurled the bloodied body of the gunner into the dark. Why could they not have sent more?

  Every second of quiet was agony; it squeezed her heart and dripped across her shoulders in sheets of sweat. She could hear the ground hiss, still roasting from the blast. It crashed in her ears like a sandstorm. Only the sound of the artillery kept her sane, the deep pounding of the guns as they worked to open further breaches down the line.

  Eventually, after long, dragging seconds, the vanguard of the main assault caught up, leaping from the decks of transports that nosed through the murk like sharks. These were not her uniformed troopers, the ranks of veterans who would carry out the long, slow work of advancing through the city’s streets. These were her irregulars. The mad, the dying, the devout and the hungry; men and women who had waited years to be first into the fight. Some wore no armour, ran with sandals on skillet-hot rubble. Others waded in iron suits, great rigs of salvaged plate that strained their wearers’ g-boosted muscles. Some were strays from the war-drained countryside, others were thrillseekers from distant colonies—all were willing to take the breach in the hope of impressing her and earning a place in the company.

  As they streamed past her, whooping and raising their weapons, their rage ran down her back like fingertips, and she hissed. Th
e quiet was over. As if to reassure her further, the air cleared ahead of them, revealing a row of monstrous forms advancing through the dust. They boomed and chittered, swinging eyeless skulls and extending awful scythe-limbs as they sensed her troops. Even above the reek of hot stone, she could smell the sulphur of their breath—Lipos-Tholos had unleashed a full brood of its famous destriers.

  Already the first of her irregulars were falling to the towering exobionts, run through by their claws as they hacked at their striding hindlimbs. It was the start of massacre, and the drugs pooled in Dust’s synapses growled at her to run in and sink her hatchets into the monsters. But she knew better than to lose patience, for she had monsters of her own.

  Perfectly in time with her armour’s chronometer, the armoured carriers jutted from the clouds behind her. These were not the sputtering junk-barges that had ferried the irregulars into the breach, but the baroque, rust-red warcraft of the Atlas Stables, emblazoned with heraldry and festooned with campaign banners.

  Dust cranked up her armour’s shielding and shunted a fresh vial of warjuice, sending her to the dizzy precipice of consciouness. The mouths of the transports lowered, and from within came the pounding of huge fists on metal, a hoarse, simian grunting, and then the blast of a dozen bugles all at once.

  An avalanche of fangs and white fur burst from the transports, and Dust let the drugs take her. Time slowed to a glacial grind, and she marvelled in the ferocity of a full Atlassian pithecus charge.