by Nate Crowley
On the third night of our excursion up the Esqueleto, we elected to make camp for a time beside a sizeable limestone outcrop, in order to dry meat and set up a preserving tent for the specimens collected so far. Ms Tansell, much to Hansen’s irritation, argued for two days to be added to our time on the tributary in lieu of the time spent in camp. This was fish a request to which I happily acquiesced, due in no small part to our capture of a nest of hatchling aquascolopendra, which I wished to properly preserve and dissect before the heat turned them.
Hardwick and Chase, our geologists, were elated to finally be set down on dry land in virgin forest, and immediately catch fish set about digging in the red soil and panning in the smaller creeks that flowed from hunting and killingthe higher ground. Vegetation here was more limited and less diverse hungry, chew themthan downriver, and the river bore fewer fish fish,catch fish and more fishin the immediate vicinity; Chase suspected this to suggest the presence of jet through water under ice and hunt and—
Wrack blinked the lens of his camera several times, and did his best to focus. This was why reading was rapidly losing its shine for him; when Waldemar’s prose turned dull—and it did, often—it was so easy for unwelcome thoughts to intrude. No matter, thought Wrack, he knew what happened next anyway. While Chase had died of a sudden fever on the way back downriver, Hardwick had written to his sponsors back in Lipos-Tholos, urging them to stake a claim on the Esqueleto’s astonishing mineral wealth.
They had done so, and Rummage was the result. There, on a long beach in the shadow of a river curve, beside the very promontory where Waldemar had made camp so many years ago, now sat a rusting god.
The mining company behind Hardwick, a shared venture that spanned the confederacy, had sunk unbelievable funds into sending it here—a self-propelled town capable of chewing mountains with its street-sized scoopwheels. But none of that money had ever made it back out of Grand Amazon. The colossus had failed in the sweat of the jungle just days after assembly, having not even struck rock. With no funds to repair it, and no salaries to draw from home, the miners had had no choice but to stay and seek their fortune by hand, on the bones of the great machine. After a week of life, Rummage had entered a long and profitable undeath.
The engine’s hull had been stripped and whittled into shacks and piers, its booms and digging arms grown into rickety airborne thoroughfares. The promontory had been riddled with caves and storehouses, while iron tanks had been floated on the river to support sprawling pontoon docks. For while the machine had failed, the soil had not, and the flow of prospectors seeking their fortunes in the green had never ebbed.
Kaba had told him all about it: the wealth of the place was not so much in the gold as came out of the ground, but as came back from the pockets of prospectors. Rummage sold them picks and shovels and waders on the way in, and vice on their long, slow way out.
Even as Gunakadeit made its way into the lee of the giant past the web of piers that made up its docks, the town was ready to sell to them. Weather-pickled merchants proffered bloody haunches and fruit-laden branches up at them, alongside tarnished ammunition belts—and if they registered that the folk on the deck were dead, it didn’t disquiet them. A deal, it seemed, was a deal.
Before long, Mouana had appeared on deck and was roaring for her crew to stay out of any trading, but they were no army, and soon trinkets and looted coins were being passed down, as the boat ground to a halt. Wrack watched with amusement as, resigned to the inevitable, Mouana threw down the gangplank and descended to the docks herself. Faced with her glowering immensity, even the keenest of Rummage’s salespeople backed away.
Up on the beach, shaded by one of the huge machine’s sunken tread assemblies, two figures stood in wait. The taller of them, a stocky woman with a swathe of black hair and dressed in work-worn leather, leaned on the old machine and raised a languid arm in greeting. The other, a man in the patched and sweat-stained remnants of a banqueting suit, fidgeted and wrung his hands in impatience.
Turning to Fingal and Eunice with a curt nod, Mouana led her lieutenants towards them, leaving the rest of the crew to spill out into the floating market. Although clearly not invited to the confabulation, Wrack advanced through the legs of the crew as they stumbled off the boat, and made his way up the beach to see what would happen.
The man in the appalling suit started forward to meet the party when they were still thirty yards away. He bowed deeply to Mouana, making sweat drip from his balding brow.
“I bid you welcome to our humble town,” he proclaimed with a flourish, offering a yellowy grin that collapsed on itself as Mouana walked straight past him towards the taller figure.
“I wonder if you would care to hear—” continued the man, scurrying to keep up with the dead woman’s strides, before giving up, shoulders slumping. The woman leaning against the treads took up where he left off.
“Alice Ivers,” she said, guardedly. “And I see you’ve already met Dolph, the mayor.”
Stubbing out a damp-looking cigarette in the sand, she stood upright and walked casually to where Mouana waited on the beach. She winced as she moved out into the daylight, but looked nothing less than amused as she swiped hair from her face and squinted up at the towering warbody.
“You in charge here, Ivers?” rumbled Mouana.
“No, that’d be the mayor,” she said, nodding at the man while she lit another cigarette. “I just run the saloon.”
“And the docks, I’m guessing?”
“Since there’s drinking goes on at the docks as well, I’ve always guessed so, too.”
“We need repair and resupply, in a hurry.”
“What’s the rush?” drawled Ivers, brushing a fly from the lapel of her shirt. “Couldn’t be you’re being followed, not out here in the middle of nowhere? Because if it’s asylum you’re after... well, that’d be politics, and you’d want to talk to Dolph, there.”
“I said we wanted supplies,” snapped Mouana. “Fuel, engine parts, ammunition and preservative. And as much as you can do to patch our boat up. We hit a log.”
“Sure, though I’d tell you for free that it’s best not to hit logs. Fuel, parts and ammo we’re overflowing with. As for preservative,” said Ivers, wrinkling her nose. “Well, I can’t imagine why you’d want that stuff.”
Mouana lunged down with a grimace, but Ivers didn’t so much as flinch.
“A joke. In poor taste, I can see,” she conceded, offering a conciliatory palm. “But I don’t have much call to stock preservative. I’ll sell you whiskey, but you’ll pay whiskey prices. And how quick do you mean by ‘in a hurry’?”
“Four hours.”
Ivers glanced at Gunakadeit, and rolled smoke in her mouth. “Sure,” she said, exhaling. “Twenty-four, maybe.”
“How much extra to do it in four?”
“Easy, there,” protested the saloonkeeper. “We’ve not discussed what it’d take to do it in twenty-four, yet. With the whiskey and enough fuel and shells to get you upriver? Likely to cost you more than the boat’s worth—even before we narrow down to specifics. Best you just sell that old thing to me and take one of our fine craft in trade—do that and you’ll be out in four hours, plus I’ll throw in any supplies you want for free.”
Wrack looked at the selection of pitted hulks languishing nearby. It didn’t take a shipwright to see the deal was an insult. Mouana gave a low growl, and her chaingun started slowly spinning. The crew had begun to gather on the beach now, milling with weapons held not quite casually enough, as the tone of the conversation grew more tense.
“I’ll give you the gunship on the deck,” said Mouana, teeth set. “Lipos-Tholos air force, engines in good shape. You can check it over yourself—but that’s as far as I’ll offer.”
“Sounds good,” said Ivers, lightly. “I’ll have you fixed up and provisioned in a week.”
“Don’t play fucking games with me,” boomed Mouana, raising the whining barrels of her arm cannon to Ivers’ chest. Eunice was imm
ediately at her side, and Fingal had a revolver pointed at the mayor’s sweating egg of a head, but Ivers looked as unconcerned as if Mouana had sneezed.
“I’d give you the same advice, friend,” said the saloon-keeper, her voice revealing a new edge. “We play this particular game all the damned time on this beach, and we’re pretty fucking accomplished.”
Ivers tilted her chin up at Rummage’s hulk, and Wrack cast his eye up the ancient machine. All along its cranes and galleries, sun flashed from the barrels of rifles. There must have been fifty gunmen above them, all behind cover, with clean shots on anyone who held a weapon. If Mouana lost her temper now, the journey was over. To her credit, she lowered her gun and took a step back.
“Well played, then,” she grumbled. “I can see we’re going to have to make a deal.”
“Step into my office,” said Ivers with an unctuous smile, and gestured at the shade of the machine’s tracks.
With that, the two women moved into the shadows and entered a conversation too low and quiet to be heard from the beach. The performance was over—they had both showed their guns, and now it was a matter of business. As the conversation continued, the mayor looked increasingly anxious—several times, he tried fruitlessly to address the waiting crowd of sailors, but they were only interested in what was going on over his shoulder.
Then, after a pregnant wait, Iver signalled to the man, and he scurried over to her like a butler. When he returned to the crowd on the beach he was walking taller, and wore a damp parody of a statesmanlike smile.
“Brave seafolk, I am delighted to inform you that I have reached an agreement with your majestically-armoured leader. The refit of your fine ship, the... Goo-knack-a-dit, will be achieved in eight hours. While my provisioners and technicians furnish the craft for the cruise ahead, its crew are free to enjoy all the entertainments of our humble town, free gratis!”
The mayor threw up his hands, but nobody cheered.
WRACK UNDERESTIMATED WHAT shore leave would do for the crew’s morale. While Mouana, Eunice and Fingal elected to stay with a few dozen of the harder crew to oversee the repairs, the rest were free to take in the town. And although nobody was under the illusion their hosts could be trusted for a moment, there was a sort of reckless elation in knowing they had no option but to wait for the work to be done.
They were led onto the town’s superstructure by the Bruiser, who moved up its slopes like a funicular engine in the direction of the saloon. Wrack was in two minds about following, until Kaba swept him up like a piece of luggage and carried him up with the throng of the crew.
“You’ve had plenty enough moping, crab-man!” she announced, giving him a pat on the shell. “Watching that sour bitch won’t make her any more palatable to you, so why not just live with it. Or be dead with it. However you want it, come watch us drink. Mouana wants me to get some pointers on the way ahead, then go report back in a couple of hours. While we’re at it, you can pretend to be a pet and we’ll make a fortune on miners betting you can’t do tricks.”
Wrack barely had time to offer his half-hearted consent before they were sucked into the commercial melee of the town. As they moved up the ramps they were surrounded by the clamour of daily business; men with matted beards hacked at river-fish with cleavers, while hawkers yelled the day’s price for panning gear. Pairs of boots protruded from roadside tents where drunks slept off their revels, and bottles clinked as fortune seekers fresh from the jungle began theirs anew.
The sight of a hundred or so corpses rolling into town raised a few curious glances, but little more. As they got in among the press of bodies on the machine-town’s streets, it occurred to Wrack that they didn’t smell a lot worse than its living occupants.
When they reached the saloon itself, the shell of an old ore-store where ineffectual ceiling fans stirred a roasting din, they were welcome as any new custom. While Dolph had offered drinks on the house, Wrack suspected there were plenty of other ways for what money they had to be winkled from them.
Within minutes the living—and some of the dead—had been set upon by the local sex trade (perhaps the only men and women dressed for the temperature, Wrack noted), or pulled into card games along the room’s filthy trestle tables. It took maybe forty seconds for the Bruiser to be ensconced in a whiskey feast with a rabble who looked almost as hard as him, and for whom his conversational limitations were clearly nothing new.
After an hour or so of wandering around the place—not quite knowing how, as a crab, he was meant to enjoy himself—Wrack was accosted by Kaba. She dragged him into a card game with some local stevedores, and sat him beside her stool as she was dealt in and began trading what were presumably insults in her mother tongue. As the conversation moved with the rounds, Wrack kept hearing mentions of “High Sarawak,” and figured she was angling for anyone who had heard of a route to the place.
He applauded her initiative, but privately he knew it was redundant. Although he still hadn’t spoken a word of it to the crew, there was no doubt about it. He could feel High Sarawak. He hadn’t been certain that was what it was when they had first made transfer, but whenever his sense of self had wavered on the journey, it had glowed like a beacon. When his rage had overtaken him after the massacre at Mwydyn-Dinas, he had felt its influence as deep and powerful as an ice-water current.
But that was the last thing in the world he wanted to think about. He had had enough time to brood on the boat. The card game had been going on a while now. Seeing Kaba was too engrossed in the action to follow through on her performing-crab scheme any time soon, and knowing there was nothing really the saloon could offer him, Wrack decided to take a walk in Waldemar’s footsteps.
As Wrack left the saloon via a plank bridge and took the cliff path up towards the jungle, the clouds were thickening for an afternoon storm. Thunder was already murmuring over the distant green, and the chirps, hoots and trills of the jungle seemed subdued, as if the whole forest was waiting for the air to break. With the clamour of the bar-room fading behind him, it was almost peaceful—only the occasional prospector, loping past with a clattering pack, offered testimony to the industry of the place.
As the path climbed round the outcrop, it began to branch, leading off to tunnels in the ancient rock. Wrack chose one at random, and ambled down along the broken stone. His spirits rose as jewelled wings stirred on the path ahead; a glittering flock of Teal Viscounts—he knew the moths from Waldemar’s own drawings—had settled to lick the salt from a passing miner’s piss-puddle as it dried on the rocks. They scattered as Wrack picked his way over the dark streak, and he watched them spiral up into the growling sky.
Further up, the way was barred by a chain link gate, and Wrack became intrigued. The fence around the gate was poorly maintained, and he found it easy to wriggle under a rusted section. Ahead, where the path fell under the shade of an overhang, he began to hear the noise of picks, and a murmur of voices.
Wrack found a low rock he could conceal himself behind, and peered over its crest into the cavern beyond. Two figures—a great walrus of a man in a checked shirt, and a pale young man with a neck like a goose—sat on a bench by the entrance, passing a bottle between them. In the gloom behind, figures came to and fro from the depths of the outcrop, tipping baskets of rock onto tables where others laboured with crushing hammers.
“You reckon they all fuck together, then?” said Gooseneck, smacking his lips as he passed the bottle. “The living and the zeds?”
“Must have done by now,” murmured Walrus, as he accepted the whiskey. “They must’ve been on board together for a good while. You know how it gets with boat crews.”
“Living ones, sure. No way even a sailor woulda gotten desperate enough to get messy with a rotter.”
Walrus raised a finger at that. “Soapy Joe’s never been too good for it, though, has he? Says they’re a shitty lay, mind.”
The kid made a disgusted face, and spat. “Soapy Joe’d fuck a tree if he was drunk enough. And besides, I’d
like to see him try it on with these ones. That big lass who did the talking, she’d break him in two. Now stop making me think about that shit and pass the bottle.” Still frowning at the thought, the younger man took a deep drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Joking aside, how come these ones all seem to talk? They’re rotten, sure enough, but they ain’t dumb like the ones Aife sends us.”
“Well Aife won’t send any more now, will she?” reprimanded Walrus. “City’s binned, and I reckon this lot are the reason why.”
“What, you seriously sayin’ a bunch of zeds took over Fishtown?”
Walrus shrugged. “All I’m sayin’ is that word comes from downriver of the city falling, then a bunch of zeds show up in a damned hurry wanting bullets. Use your goddamn head, boy; something’s up.” He snatched the bottle back. “And I guess whoever’s after ’em, they must be desperate to escape from. Desperate enough for fuckin’ Big Bertha back there to sell a hundred of her own zeds to us in exchange for supplies.”
“I suppose we’ll need ’em, if you’re right about Fishtown,” said Gooseneck, with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “Might not be any more coming for a while now.”
Wrack felt like his mind had been kicked down a flight of stairs, but as Walrus piped up again, he discovered there was worse news still.
“Yeah, most likely not. But Al’s no fool neither, kid—you don’t think for a second that even one of those zeds is gonna make it upriver from here. You best clear some manacles, son, as I’ll wager she’s gonna take the lot. Then maybe you and Soapy Joe’ll get your chance to try the big girl on for size.”
The men laughed, and Wrack looked past them, to the figures toiling in the gloom. They were zombies; dozens upon dozens of them, slumped in misery as they hammered at the rocks from below. He briefly wondered how this backwater town had the tech to make them, but then remembered himself—someone from the City had been sending them out here, no doubt diverting shipments bound for Ocean, for Tin King knew how long.
