by Nate Crowley
They had kept the prisoner in the bilges since the fight, roped to a stanchion. It had cursed and bitten everyone who had come near it, and near chewed through one of its wrists in an attempt to get free. Swathed in stinking pingvin hide, black-toothed and stippled all over with bone-tapped tattoos of the Blades’ ringed-world emblem, it was typical of the most wretched of Dust’s irregulars.
But it was also a zombie. The inch-wide hole through the thing’s throat left no doubt, and even as the Bruiser hauled it up the stairs, it ranted about the dust of war, the breath of life, the cold chance. They had found plenty like it in the aftermath of the fight; perhaps a third of the bodies cut down in the assault had gotten back to their feet with a blade during the cleanup, or had gone into the river hissing. But this one had talked, and so she had kept it aboard. Ostensibly it had been retained for intelligence on their pursuit, but Mouana had a more personal curiosity.
She stopped the creature’s feral chants with a steamhammer slap that crunched its neck and left its head at an angle, then grabbed it by the collar of its rags.
“What do I mean to you?” she snarled.
“Aaah!” gurgled the zombie, lifeless breath slurping through stump teeth. “Traitor-gunner and runaway! Failed war-child! The thief! Maow-aaah-nerrr!” The wretch broke into a sucking parody of a laugh, and she knocked him to the floor of the cabin, but it didn’t stop the noise.
“War-mother sent us, breathed into us the breath of life, the cold chance! Sent us to make good!”
“Make good on what?” said Mouana coolly, planting her boot on his squirming body.
“Make good the theft, the failed task, the dereliction! Return the thief, return the treasure!” The ghoul hacked a glop of black fluid as her boot pressed down on its sternum, but carried on in a crushed whisper. “The traitor, the failure, the company’s shame! A place in the war tent for them that brings it back on a rope, a spike on the war-mother’s tank for the traitor’s unliving head!”
“Get some fresh air,” said Mouana, looking up at Eunice and the Bruiser, and they wandered off onto deck. Mouana looked past them at Wrack, but the fool hadn’t even noticed what was going on in the cabin. He was sat on the hatch of the hold, playing cards with a circle of grinning sailors. Their bottled miracle, sauntering along as they blew their bodies apart to protect him. Her supposed friend, who had rescued her from slavery, and pulled her back from the hopeless fugue of death. Subduing a spike of rage, Mouana planted her foot-wide toeplate delicately on the wretch’s forehead, and steadied her voice.
“What failed task are you talking about?” she asked, keeping a feather’s pressure on the zombie’s skull.
“The ship-taking, the great trick! The journey through death and the seizing of the treasure! The special mission!” Mouana began to press down, feeling the skull flex under her boot, but still the thing continued its demented rant. “You, Maow-aaah-nerrr! You, you are the failu—”
Mouana stamped down hard, and bone-flecks bounced in the corners of the room.
She closed her eye, and tried to drown out the sound of the card game with the thunder building in her head. She had feared the truth for some time, if she was honest with herself, had suspected it ever since her visions during the escape from the Ministry. This time, she needed no visions to understand.
Her being on Tavuto had been no misfortune, no accident of war. She had been there on a mission, and she had failed.
Her ‘necronaut,’ Dust had called her, as they had spent long nights practising the hypnotic and mnemonic exercises that would allow her to wake from death. Her voyager, she had named her, as she had emerged from a coffin after four weeks buried alive. Her prizewinner; her protégée, who would take command of her new army on recovering the tool of its creation. The tool which now lay in the hold of her ship, possessed by the mind of a fool.
That ancient brain, which the Lipos-Tholons and their enemies had mistaken for a simple control device, when all along it had dwarfed the power of their coveted relics. Her task had been to seize the ship that held it and bring it back in triumph, shattering the siege and gifting its terrible power to her mistress. In taking on death, she had been assured never-ending glory.
Only she had never woken up. She had not been up to the task. She had wandered, wretched and hopeless, just another slave in that vast grey factory. But for sheer chance, she would have ended up fodder for the teeth of a watchbeast, as she dragged blocks of fat to the try-pots.
But for Wrack. But for that happy-go-lucky, whimsical cretin, who had come to his senses through some disastrous act of chance, and seized her from the jaws of failure. For all her training, she had been bested by a librarian. And no wonder, once she had joined him in consciousness, she had been so keen to help him take the ship and sail it back to port with guns blazing. She had been carrying out her task, with no idea who she had been doing it for.
Opening her eye again, she stared straight at that stupid little crab, and felt her steel-bolstered nerves sing with violence. She leaned against the cabin wall, and fought every urge to pound through it with her iron fists. If she had only woken up of her own accord, if she had only had the strength, she could have taken the prize. She could have been seated at Dust’s right hand side, rather than being hunted as a traitor.
But she hadn’t. She had joined Wrack’s silly revolution, and sworn herself to the destruction of all that had made it necessary. Mouana had known, had felt, that everything that had happened on Tavuto was evil, that it had to be stopped. Glaring at her fist, looking at the power of those hard fingers, she wondered how much conviction she still had in those feelings, when they were all that stood in the way of redemption. With the simplest command, backed up by those fists, she could turn the convoy around, and be welcomed back with open arms. She could finish the mission.
But she couldn’t. No matter the lure, she would not swim towards it. Because for all the hate she felt—and it was hate; what was left of her brain was sure of it—Wrack’s silly revolution was right. So long as anyone had the means to force the dead to work on their behalf, there was something that needed to be stopped. Now that she was dead, she couldn’t see it any other way.
So there was no way she could turn the ship around; the only end to this was to lead these leaking boats all the way to High Sarawak, and destroy whatever it was that waited there. And she had to do it with Wrack, the constant reminder of her failed mission, inhabiting the very fucking thing she had been sent to seize.
He was such a pain in the arse.
And worse yet, she considered, as her gaze drifted from the crab to the doors of the hold, he was now part of the very problem they were sworn to solve. If Dust had been right; if the brain at the heart of Tavuto really had been a resource to make the rods from the Ministry look pitiful, then Wrack himself represented at least as much threat as whatever waited for them in the jungle.
What’s more, she had the means to snuff it out, and end her pursuit in the process, all in a matter of minutes. All she had to do was walk down to the hold, where Wrack’s monstrous form lay in its tank of preservative, and let loose those fists.
But she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t turn Wrack over to Dust, nor should she destroy what he had become. Because no matter how much she hated him right now, he was her only friend in the world. He was the only one, even among the dead, who might truly understand, and—
A shout came up on the deck. A cry of surprise, followed by a rustling against the hull, and then a solid bang that nearly shook her off her feet.
A fight. Mouana abandoned her self-indulgent reverie, and cranked her guns to full power as the deck shook. There was a terrible creak, and more deep, slithery rustling; Mouana snapped her head around, waiting for the next impact, but the night air was silent but for the flutter of bats as they swooped for moths in the lights.
“Blastwood,” came a cry from down the deck; Kaba’s voice. The ship’s searchlight came on, illuminating a colossal shape in the water.
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The tree had ploughed right into them; if their prow hadn’t been designed to ram leviathans, they would have crumpled against its mass. It must have been a hundred yards long, with bark like rock and branches that jutted into the air like sails. It was swamped in vines all over, and had tangled a dozen smaller trees into a raft, their canopies half-submerged like the heads of drowned men.
As their searchlight swept across the vegetable platform, hoots and shrieks and skitters rose. A pack of things like insects hammered into the shape of monkeys bounded in terror from the beam, and a wildcat hissed from a tangle of branches, its eyes glowing like mirrors. Something big and green and doleful was nursing a wound on the edge of the dark; Mouana thought it was vegetation ’til its eyes shone. They were all castaways, trapped on the tree as it fell and now separated from the jungle by a mile of water.
Kaba fired a blast from her shotgun to scare the animals to the raft’s edges, then set a crew of the more able sailors to dislodging them from the morass with poles and chain-cutters. Once again, Mouana was quietly pleased her de facto first officer had chosen not to throw all the ship’s old whaling gear overboard before transfer.
“We’re on the Sinfondo now, chief,” called Kaba, gesturing at the wide dark with her scrawny arm. “Drifters like this’ll be a lot more common here on in, and we’re headed upriver now too, so they’ll smack harder with it. And that yonder’s a tadpole compared with some you see on the open channel. She’s a hard boat sure, but won’t take kindly to a waltz with a whale-oak.”
“How far upriver is Mwydyn-Dinas?” asked Mouna.
Kaba waggled her crooked jaw thoughtfully as sailors hacked and shoved to disentangle them from the tree, then answered with a wave of her hand.
“Some hours yet; we’ll likely reach it a stroke before dawn. That’s a long yomp in the night; might be cannier to pause for a spell, ’til the light’s fat enough to see more logs on the float?”
“Not an option; she’ll be on us before we know it. Soon as we’re free, pick up her speed again, have the Bastard pull in behind us, and keep the searchlight sweeping. Put out a launch too, to keep ahead and shout back if anything big’s coming our way. Any damage we take, we can patch up with the rest when we dock.”
Kaba nodded, then tipped her head towards the fallen blastwood. “And the gobbler?”
“You what?”
“The big green thing, out on the raft. Ugly thing with the hands. They’re good eating, and we could use the meat.”
Mouana peered at the potbellied giant on the edge of the light, then gave a grunt. “Take it if it’s easy, then take us on upriver.”
IT WAS STILL too dark to read, so Wrack crouched by the mount of the searchlight and looked out into the boundless night. As the light swept across the water its beam caught on countless insects, their wings drawing lambent arcs within its slow swoop. The river was everywhere and invisible, glimpsed only in the circle of choppy brown that roved over its surface in search of trees.
Wrack wished the light could penetrate the river’s muddy thickness and shine down to its hidden lower layers. The Rio Sinfondo, “river without bottom”: Waldemar had sent a diving bell into its belly, then hauled it up again when he had run out of rope. Even in daylight you could see no banks from its centre, and at night its immensity was crushing. Wrack was enraptured by it; deep water held little terror for him after Ocean, and besides, the sheer fecundity of the place wholly denied that other world’s anxious, alien bleakness.
From beside him rose the smell of the watch team’s meal of gobbler meat; roasted for the living, raw for the dead. It stank of the beast’s algal blood, a weird mix of offal and cabbage that married greasily with the breath of the river. He had tried some for curiosity’s sake, picking shreds from a glaucous haunch with a secondary claw, but he had a strange appetite these days and soon lost interest.
A wary cry went up as the searchlight caught another log—a true giant, this time—and the ship banked to port to avoid it. Wrack pondered how long that log had been floating, and how many others, over how many years, the river had carried from its banks to the distant sea. Trunks like that had drifted over these depths since before Waldemar, before the Lemniscatus, since before people, for all he knew. Back in the library, Wrack had spent the best part of a term curating an exhibition on the allegory of history-as-river. Central to it was a famous verse by Chancellor Regina, regarding states as logs afloat on time. The scansion had been shit, and so had the woodcuts used to illustrate it, but watching the wooden hulk drift past as Lipos-Tholos burned in another world, it seemed suddenly shrewd.
At the thought of burning, Wrack dipped his eyestalks in what had become his version of a frown. There was a definite tinge of smoke on the air, and it was not coming from the roasting fire amidships—there was a strong katabatic breeze blowing downriver, carrying the scent from upstream.
From Mwydyn-Dinas. Wormtown, and the island it sat on, had been visible as a smear of light over the horizon for some time. Now the old colony was only a few miles upriver, the light was brighter, and it had changed colour to a deep orange. Wrack peered at the horizon through his zoom lens, hearing murmurs of consternation on deck as watchers on the top-cranes called down the news; Wormtown was on fire.
Orders rang out across the gnat-haunted river, and an engine revved in the dark as Gunakadeit’s launch was sent ahead to gather a report. Weapons were retrieved from their lockers by cautious sailors, and the lights of the Bastard loomed as the warship pulled in alongside them again. In the absence of information, speculation rippled over the deck. Some were convinced the Piper uprising had spread to the Lipos-Tholon outpost, while others suspected an attack by an opportunistic foreign colony, launched in the knowledge that no reinforcements would be sent. Others still feared the worst, that Dust had beat them there by marching overland, and was bearing down on them as they spoke.
The island came into range of their telescopes as the greyness of dawn crept over the world, but nothing became any clearer. Gunfire echoed down the river, and the town docks swarmed with fleeing boats, but the nature of the conflict—or any idea of who was winning—remained obscure. In the cabin, Mouana was locked in heated discussion with Fingal and Kaba, while the Bruiser gulped at his can of oil and stared blankly ahead in the clear hope of a punch-up.
Two miles from the Wormtown docks the convoy changed course, veering sharp to starboard and heading towards the Sinfondo’s banks to give the island as wide a berth as possible. The argument in the cabin still raged, and the sailors on deck were clutching their weapons, rumours giving way to mute anxiety as the colony burned off to port.
Not long after that, the boats started coming. As dawn shimmered over the river they were everywhere, from worm-steamers a third their size, to leaking dinghies just a few yards long. They speckled the river like drowning insects, and all floated low in the water, packed with people and their possessions. Some were fleeing downriver, but more were turning in their direction, abusing struggling engines to try and intercept their course. Gunakadeit’s hard-faced crew rushed to the rails with their guns, but this was not an invasion force—they were ordinary civilians, desperate for the prospect of escape and a sheltering hand.
Their shouts rang across the water as the fastest boats approached, but Wrack couldn’t understand their dialect. When the lead craft was close enough for Wrack to see the desperation in the eyes of its occupants, Kaba emerged from the cabin and began shouting back through a loudhailer, gesturing wildly with her other arm.
Remembering what Fingal had said about sticking it out and pitching in, Wrack scuttled to Kaba’s side, and tapped at her leg with his claw.
“What is it, crab-man?” she said, looking down at him, still gesturing at the boats.
“We’re taking them aboard, aren’t we?” said Wrack, already fearing the answer.
“That’s a no, Wrack,” answered Kaba, her tone suggesting she felt as comfortable with it as he did, but offering no avenue for pers
uasion. “Mouana wants no part of whatever’s going on over there. We’re changing course and heading for the Esqueleto, with a mind to making dock at Rummage.” Wrack tried to hold her attention, but the conversation was clearly over, and she began shouting on the horn again.
Nevertheless, the boats showed no sign of slowing their pursuit. Those with oars had fallen behind now, but the larger craft were gaining, and their occupants were crowded on the gunwales with grapples and ropes. As they drew level with the colony, more still were pouring from its docks, cutting across the channel so as to fall into their path. In minutes they would be surrounded.
With a mounting sense of horror, Wrack saw there were families in the boats. There were elders wrapped in blankets, children clutching rags, and babies deep in wormskin swaddling. Men and women were waving their arms, calling out with a mixture of terror and exasperation. But Kaba’s refusals only grew more emphatic, and the convoy did not cut their speed.
When the lead boat, a sleek river cutter with perhaps eighty souls aboard, got within a hundred yards of them, Mouana emerged from her cabin like a creeping mountain. Her footsteps were slow as she plodded down the deck, and her face was hard as she began slowly spinning up the barrels of her gun. Waving Kaba silent with a flick of her hand, she mounted the ladder to the quarterdeck and stood at the stern.
Wrack rushed up after her, claws scrabbling on steel, and began burbling pleas through his speakers. This couldn’t be happening. He knew Mouana was ruthless, and seemed to be becoming more so every day, but surely this was beyond even her dissolving scruples. Nevertheless, there she stood, a ton of metal crowned with the withered sneer of a cadaver, sizing up the pitiful armada that jostled in their wake.
“Let them aboard, mate,” begged Wrack, wishing that damned voice they’d given him could do anything but read the words out. “At least talk with them. They’re scared! Please!”
