The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

The riders were a sight in themselves. Albino giants in grey dress uniforms, each had earned their commission by wrestling an infant pithecus, had spent their lives taming and training their mounts in their mountaintop stables. The apes themselves were simply terrifying. Polar predators from a dying world, they weighed close to a ton and could crush a man’s skull like a grape. They were the most feared cavalry force in existence.

  This single squadron had cost Dust more than a regular brigade of infantry to hire, and as much again to procure meat for the beasts. But watching the pithecus as they thundered towards the line of destriers, their value was without question.

  The apes howled with the bleak ferocity of an arctic storm. Dust howled with them, released her mind from conscious thought, and ran with the beasts.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  SEVEN

  MOUNA LAY IN darkness, gazing at distant yellow lights. Distant murmurs receded into a weighty, velvet silence. She sank deep into it and exhaled slowly. Whatever nightmare she had woken from was gone, diffused into the quiet like blood in a summer stream. Perhaps she would finish her letter now, she thought, as the lights twinkled before her. Finally, she would gather her thoughts and write, tell them she had had enough, that she was coming home at last.

  Then she smelled the herbs, heady and astringent as they curled through the dark, and fear took hold of her. She scrambled to get to her feet, but only tangled herself in sheets that seemed to grow tighter and more twisted with each jerk of her limbs. The lights drew closer, resolved into huge blank eyes, and peered down at her with malevolent fascination.

  “Do you know how many companies have presided over the siege of Lipos-Tholos?” asked the voice, warm and sharp as desert stone, as the darkness around her resolved into the gilded gloom of the command tent. Mouana gulped, and admitted she did not know.

  “Twenty-three,” answered Dust, speaking over her mumble, and turned to regard a row of faded portraits. “We are to be the twenty-fourth, and the largest yet employed by the Principals. Just think, commander; thousands upon thousands of soldiers, and all their beasts and machines and shells, hired each day for decades in the hope of breaking that city.” Dust’s eyes moved away from the procession of her failed predecessors to stare back at where Mouna struggled to stand.

  “Now what, do you suppose, could be worth so much to the Principals that they would keep throwing such astronomical sums into the siege?” pondered Dust acidly, as she crouched by Mouana’s side.

  Mouana fought not to stammer as she answered, fighting to rise from her prone position, yet ensnared by sheets that now gripped her like limbs. “The... the connection with Ocean?”

  “...will become more relevant than you think, but for a reason you might not suspect. Simple fishing access would mean little, were the city not cut off from its landside holdings,” snapped Dust, and took a long sip from her bowl of tea before setting it down on the tent floor. “No, commander, the real value in Lipos-Tholos is in something it stole a long time ago, and which many other cities—chief among them those four Principal states which employ us—would like to steal from it in turn.”

  One of the general’s attenuated, indistinct limbs folded into the blackness where her body should have been, and withdrew a folded, smudged diagram. It was hard to focus on, but seemed to show some sort of black cylinder, decorated all over with layers of fractal patterning.

  Mouana wanted to scream when she saw the cylinder; it brought on a maddening spasm of recognition, the feeling that she had seen it in a dream and had, even then, seen it before in this very moment. She wanted to stand and run, but the sheets held her as fast as steel cables even as she thrashed against them.

  “Lipos-Tholos, commander, holds power over the dead.”

  Mouana strained to turn away as the general approached, fought to cry out as the familiar blade slid from its scabbard, but could do no more than shudder as its tip slid between her ribs again.

  “GRIEF AND FIRE, Mouana, come back!” shouted a broken face, just inches away from her own. Behind it, the world was a rushing blur.

  Mouana screamed and tried to swat at the apparition, but she was held fast by a pair of vast, rotten arms. She blinked hard, then rolled her one good eye as she realised she had slipped away again. The arms were the Bruiser’s, and the face was Kaba’s, and the vision of the general faded into a blurred mess of dream and memory.

  Still, it was near-impossible to put away the fear the dream had left. Dust as a theoretical presence on the other side of an energy shield was possible to abstract and put out of her mind; knowing the old monster was now in the city with her was another thing altogether. Worse yet, she knew the image of that diagram had been no invention of her fermenting mind. It had been a memory. Dust knew about the rods, and she would do anything to get her hands on them. It was only a matter of time before they had her on their tail.

  “We need to get to Grand Amazon,” shouted Mouana, before wondering why there was so much wind. “Quick, before the general realises what we’ve done, before she—”

  “Boss, we know,” frowned Kaba, talking over her in a way none of her gunnery sergeants ever would have done. “You kept saying that after you shot the Chancellor-man.”

  The Bruiser backed her up with a contemplative “fack off,” and Mouana blinked again, trying to piece together exactly what might have happened in between bouts of consciousness. They were in some kind of vehicle, hurtling through the city towards the docks, with Fingal at the wheel. Ahead of them, the Tavuto’s beached prow rose like a mountain; behind them, a line of similar vehicles raced, packed as theirs was with rebels both living and dead.

  “They’re hearses,” grinned Kaba, their speed whipping at what was left of her hair. “Used to use these to ferry the body-crates down to the docks, Fingal says. Took ’em from the Ministry garages and packed as many as we could aboard—heard what you said about Grand Amazon, so figured we just gotta find a boat and cast off. I was a delta goon myself—big A was where I spent most my life—so I figure I can get us there.”

  Mouana knew Kaba was trying to reassure her, but the fact that so much of a plan had been made without her left her feeling sick. She looked at the sky. Dawn couldn’t be far away, and the wall must have been blown over an hour ago now. How long they had depended on how long the City could hold off her old company at the breach, and she didn’t give the defenders great odds. They had to get out to sea as fast as possible; there wasn’t even time to loot the Tavuto for weapons or...

  Then she realised. Wrack.

  “What’s Wrack doing?” snapped Mouana at Kaba, making her recoil.

  “Ask him yourself,” protested the old boat-loader, spreading her arms. “He’s strapped to your fucking wrist. You ask me, he’s gone crazy, proper sunbaked. Been sending you book reviews for the last hour.”

  Mouana glanced at her wrist, just as a fascinating fact about herring—one of a long list, by the look of the message archive—came through.

  WRACK, typed Mouana. CN U GET OFF TVTO?

  SURE, I’LL JUST STROLL YOUR WAY SHALL I? came the instant reply, but she was too tense even to curse him.

  SRSLY. GOT TO BE A WAY TO EJECT, OR STHNG? she implored.

  YES, BUT THERE’S NO POINT. I’M STAYING HERE.

  Mouana felt frustration rising, when another message came through.

  I’M NOT BEING SILLY, THIS TIME. YOU’VE GOT A MASSIVE JOURNEY AHEAD OF YOU, AND I AM—VERY LITERALLY—A MASSIVE BURDEN. YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE AS FAST AS YOU CAN; I’M BEST OFF STAYING HERE AND COVERING YOU WITH WHAT’S LEFT OF THE WEAPONS. THEN, HOPEFULLY, I CAN GET KILLED AND FINALLY GET SOME KIP.

  For once, what Wrack was saying made perfect sense. With Tavuto rammed into the dock side of college hill, it could put up a hell of a rearguard action once the Blades made it this side of the Ministry. And even if Wrack could eject from the ship, getting him aboard another might take hours they didn’t have. But at the same time, Mouana knew with a weird clarity that W
rack simply could not be left behind.

  Apart from anything else, he would be useful. If he could remote-operate the ship’s beasts as he had done that bloody crab, they’d have a lot more muscle on side for the journey. And if he could muster the sort of weird, black pulse that Tavuto’s overseers had wielded against the dead by jacking into the vile old brain themselves, they might actually have a chance.

  She knew there was another reason he had to come with them, but couldn’t fathom what it was. Mouana hoped for all the world that it wasn’t some flabby notion of friendship masquerading as reason.

  Whatever it was, she needed him on board, and she didn’t have time to argue with him.

  TOUGH LCK MATE, she typed, her shredded hand shaking with exhaustion.

  YR COMING WITH US. SO EJCT OR I WLL FKN CUT YOU OUT.

  There was no answer; nothing showed on the screen save the blinking cursor inviting her to send further threats. Mouana waited, dreading some facetious comeback—or worse, rejection of her obvious bullshit; there was no way she would have time to cut his cylinder free if he refused to budge. But there was nothing.

  Then, just as she was about to send a second message, the ground shook. It rumbled up through their bodies, deeper and smoother than the rattle of the hearse’s wheels on cobble, then blasted out into the air and shook tiles from the rooftops. Tavuto’s foghorn, blowing its final challenge to a world of monsters.

  Mouana felt the blackness gathering again, and gripped at Kaba’s slime-smeared rag of a vest.

  “He’s coming with us, Kaba. Wrack has to come with us. Take us to Tavuto, and get him on one of the launches. Then get us to...”

  Speech failed Mouana just before vision did, but as she slipped away, her comrade was already relaying frantic instructions to Fingal.

  “WELCOME BACK,” SAID Dust, as she wiped her blade in the shadows of the tent. Mouana looked down at her chest in panic but saw no wound—although the cloth came away red from the general’s sabre.

  “What do you mean, wel—” started Mouana, but the old warlord was already talking over her.

  “You’re finally starting to remember, aren’t you?” said Dust, sliding the blade back into its scabbard. “Took you long enough—and after all the work we put in together, too. It’s a shame you couldn’t have managed when it mattered most... but you’ve not been an entire disappointment to me. Not yet. Now where were we?”

  The general stalked to her bedside, elongate and indistinct like a shadow cast by a guttering candle, and fell to a crouch. Despite urging every muscle to move, Mouana could do nothing to get away from the dreadful shape.

  “Strange, isn’t it, how these people can sit on all the knowledge left in the world and not notice what it points to, even if it’s right under their noses? Our employers and their enemies both; how many years, how many resources, have they put into children’s slap-fights over the discarded toys of their forebears, with no thought to finding another way of doing things?” She picked up the diagram of the rod again, and cruised back into the darkness.

  “How absurd, how sad, that it should be left to a woman of war to innovate for them. But there it is. I have seen what they’re missing, and if they refuse to see the opportunity, then I may have to take it for them.

  “These silly rods. Powerful, certainly, but just one way of doing things, and so limited. Not even full tools, just part of something forgotten, looted and looted again between barbarian nations. And the Lipos-Tholons, bless them, had something better all this time.”

  Mouana had lost sight of Dust in the depths of the tent, could not make out her shifting form between the shadows of the campaign furniture. When her voice came again, it came as if from everywhere and nowhere all at once, the venomous throb of a tight-circling insect.

  “This is why I have taken this ludicrous commission, commander. We are going to end this miserable squabble, take for ourselves what they are too stupid to use, and show them what they’ve been missing. We can do so much more.”

  Silence fell in the stifling tent, and what little light there was shrank to a dim halo around her bed. She dared to hope the vision was fading but then the voice came again, close and invasive as jointed legs settling on her ear.

  “But you knew this already, didn’t you?” whispered Dust, and the sabre’s tip pressed cold against her side. “This is a memory, and you’ve been here before. Now it’s time to go and do something about it.” Mouana’s face twisted in horror, but the blade was already inside her chest.

  “I DON’T KNOW what I’m meant to do,” gasped Mouana, staring up at a smoke-drowned dawn.

  “Shhh,” said a figure beside her, and she jolted at the sudden presence, but it was just Fingal. He did not have the sort of face that anyone should feel reassured waking beside, but at that moment his scarred grimace was as comforting as warm milk.

  “Few of us ever do,” he murmured, handing her a flask of something strong.

  They sat together, propped against a crate, and drank silently in the dawn. The feeling of the morning breeze on Mouana’s face, dulled though it was by her dead skin, did just enough to dispel the nightmare. Even so, she feared there was more lurking in her head than she knew yet; she had only glimpsed it, like a monstrous tail disappearing into murk.

  They were sat on the forecastle of a boat, itself perched in the cityscape of Tavuto’s starboard launch racks.

  From here they could see the city spread out before them, a dirty white patchwork pricked by a thousand needles of rising smoke. Gunfire rattled in the far distance, and explosions growled in the dark cloud that followed the invaders through the suburbs. But from here it was peaceful, like birdsong and wind-rattled twigs before a gathering storm.

  Above them, chains creaked as Tavuto’s monstrous central crane tested their weight. Sailors rushed back and forth with arms full of ammunition and machinery, calling to each other across the deck as they made ready for launch. In the middle of all this, Mouana had no idea how Fingal could find the time to sit and drink with her, but she was glad of it.

  “Shouldn’t you be rushing?” she wondered aloud. “Shouldn’t I be rushing?”

  “Nah,” muttered Fingal, taking the flask for another sip. “Might as well take a moment while we can—things’ll only get more hectic from here. Besides, Kaba’s got things under control—she’s been good while you’ve been out, you know. Spent her life on the delta boats, after all, so she knows what’s needed.”

  Fingal nodded to the rear quarterdeck, where Eunice cuffed a sailor sprawling, ending an argument over a rope. “That one’s no poor enforcer, either. Anyway, there’s not a lot left for either of us to do just now—we’re ready to cast off, once we’ve got one last piece of kit aboard.”

  Fingal pointed down at Tavuto’s deck below them, where what seemed to be a funeral procession was taking place.

  Glinting orange in the rising sun, a huge casket was being carried down the deck. The armoured tube rode on the shoulders of a hundred or more sailors, dead and living both, chanting a labour-dirge as they hauled the load towards their boat.

  It was Wrack. Under that iron skin lay what remained of her friend, trapped in the preserved remnant of a monster’s mind. Wallowing in darkness, preparing to endure whatever came next. Watching his coffin carried across the deck, Mouana felt herself pitching into confusion and worry; it took all her resolve to put all thoughts of friendship out of her head and remember she had done the right thing. Wrack was a potent weapon, he was coming with them, and that was that.

  “How much time’ve we lost?” she asked, putting the old steel back in her voice as she gauged the sun’s position in the sky.

  “It didn’t take as long as we feared,” replied the rebel, as the pallbearers set Wrack down in a winching cradle. “And besides, from what we’re hearing over the wires, looks like the City’s putting up a spirited defence. They’ve lost the wall, but they’re pulling back into the streets and making your old lot fight for every house. At this rate, it
could take them days to force a surrender.”

  “Wouldn’t count on that,” said Mouana grimly, remembering the Red Tent at the siege of Mashina-Zavod, the screams as Dust had made good on her chilling ultimatum and lowered the mercy banner.

  “Well I suppose you’d have a better idea than me,” said Fingal, breaking the memory. “Either way, we’ll be gone long before it’s over. Once we’ve got him winched up into our hold, that crane’ll lift us up and put us to sea at the stern. And then the real work starts.”

  Fingal gazed out to sea and Mouana followed his eyeline, to where a cluster of ragged warships waited at anchor. All seemed damaged; smoke rose from the wounds in their hulls, and one was listing alarmingly to port. “The mutineers?” she asked.

  “Aye,” said Fingal. “Some of ’em. Others left already; figured with the Chancellor dead and the City toppled, the job was done and they were wisest making good speed away. Can’t hold it against them, eh? They’ve done the work they signed on for, and taking on your fight too was a lot more to ask. Plenty’ve stayed to help, mind.”

  “They’re coming with us?” asked Mouana.

  “If you’ll have ’em, yes. Sorry I couldn’t get you a better navy, but there it is. They’re a bit banged up, but with the pounding those boats took as you came in, it’s amazing anything’s still afloat. Three or four’ll probably still make decent speed, they tell me, and they’re cutting free anything useful from the stricken boats, loading it on the rest along with those who’ve not already fled the City.”

  “How many crew?”

  “Besides our lot from the Ministry? Looks like we’re still a few hundred strong. Course, more will probably leave—there’s plenty wounded, and some who’ll get second thoughts and try their luck running with the rest of the civilian refugees. But those who’ve still got fight in them want to come with you—there’s sure as hell no point anyone staying here to get cut up when that Dust makes it through the last of the kentigerns.”