by Nate Crowley
And Mouana, after all they had been through, after being a slave herself, had been willing to sell half her crew into the hands of these degenerates for the sake of the mission. Wrack could no longer fathom the former mercenary’s moral framework, but as far as he was concerned it was little better than that of the men in the cavern.
Sitting behind the rock as he watched the men toast their upcoming windfall, he almost felt it was worth letting Mouana get taken in by the saloon-keeper’s plan, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Sooner or later, the army pursuing them would come round that bend in the river, and would swarm over the place like ants. When that happened they—and he—would be in the hands of Dust, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
Wrack kicked a pebble in frustration, and scuttled off back down the path. He was going to have to save the bloody day again.
TEN MINUTES LATER, Wrack was back at the place where the butterflies had been at the piss, this time with a very confused and highly irritable Bruiser in tow.
“Fack off,” said the Bruiser, in a tone which suggested he hoped Wrack had a very, very good reason for taking him away from the bar, and drank irritably from one of the two bottles of lager he had brought for the journey.
Wrack shushed him and pointed ahead at the mouth of the cave, motioning as best as he could with his claws for the big man to approach on his hands and knees. The Bruiser was having none of it, though, and swaggered straight into the cavern with a bottle to his lips.
Gooseneck and Walrus leapt from their bench and started firing questions at the hulking interloper, but the Bruiser didn’t so much as glance at them. He was staring past them, bottle still held to his lips, at the zombies in the depths of the cave. Thunder rolled as the storm broke outside.
“You fackin’ cahnts,” roared the Bruiser, smashing the neck of his bottle on the cavern wall. Then the stabbing began.
THE WORK WAS taking too long, thought Mouana anxiously, as the rain battered the corrugated roof of the boat shed. Gunakadeit had been hauled out of the water on enormous chains, and workers clambered over it with ropes and welding torches, patching the rips and dents in its hull. But they were half way into the refit, and nobody seemed in a particular hurry to get it over with.
She longed to be out of there, not only so she could stay ahead of Dust, but so she could be away from the decision she had made. Knowing that no-one who had gone up into the town would ever come back, that their enslavement was the price of getting out of here, was unbearable. But the idea of Wrack falling into the hands of Dust, of the horrors that would come into the world if she had that power, was unthinkable.
For a moment back on the beach—for a long moment—she had been about to call Iver’s bluff and start shooting. But the odds had been too long. If a fight had kicked off on the beach, at the very best they were going to escape with their crew in tatters anyway, and no provisions for the journey—the fuel alone would have been gone inside of three days.
At least this way, they knew how many they would lose, and would get out with a fighting chance of making it to High Sarawak. Wrack would hate her, and she would hate herself, but the job would get done, and then that would be the end of it.
Still she dared hope they could find another way out of the situation. The crew that had stayed with her in the boat shed had not stopped looking for an opportunity to get the better of their hosts, standing in a mob at the shed’s back wall, but it just wasn’t coming. Iver and the town’s guns were watching them as closely as they were watching back, and the work crept along with a hundred fingers resting on triggers.
“We still on schedule?” Fingal called out, although the question had been asked three times already that hour.
“We’re still on mine,” said Iver. “As I keep telling you, it’ll be done when it’s done. Go join your friends in the saloon, have a drink, if you’re tired waiting.”
“We had a deal,” warned Mouana, as lightning flickered on the river’s far bank.
“Deals change,” said Iver, and grinned. Mouana didn’t know whether it was just because everyone was shouting to be heard over the storm, but there was something seriously wrong about the woman’s tone.
Then lightning struck again, somewhere up on the outcrop, and she saw them. Waiting at the shed’s side door, where the track led across the beach to the town proper, were another dozen hired guns, faces set in grim sneers. She risked a glance behind, to where the shed opened out onto the river, and there were twenty more, crouching waist-deep with knives and shotguns. They’d been so intent on watching Iver’s posse that they’d been quietly surrounded.
Mouana figured they had around eight seconds to make their move before things kicked off. She was about to start firing when she realised there had been something else. Something important. Whipping her head back to the shed’s side door, she looked past the gathering thugs to the cliffside sprawl of the town, and saw she hadn’t been mistaken. Rummage was burning.
“Hey,” said Mouana. “Your saloon’s on fire.”
“Never heard that one before,” said Iver with a smirk, at the same instance as one of her men, who happened to be looking out the side door, yelled, “Shit, the saloon’s on fire!”
Iver glanced at the door, her mouth falling open, and the thugs behind her turned to see what the fuss was about. Thunder shook the roof of the shed, and Mouana fired a six foot harpoon through the saloon-keeper’s face.
It looked as if they were going to fight their way out after all.
GROWING UP, WRACK had seen plenty of pub fights on Lipos-Tholos’ grimmer streets. But compared with what he now experienced, even the bloodiest had been mere disagreements.
He was fairly sure a fight had been going on in the saloon already when they burst through the door; it seemed the sort of place where these things were as common as the drinking. Regardless, the arrival of a hundred corpses armed with hammers and picks, led by a man with a chin caked in human blood, left no room for ambiguity. It had really livened the place up.
Much as he had expected, there had been little need—or time—to explain the fine details of the situation. For the crew of Gunakadeit, the sight of the Bruiser at the door with a mob of emaciated slaves was enough; they took one look at them, then set to maiming anyone who reached for a weapon.
Kaba lunged over the card table and had a knife in a woman’s ribs in the blink of an eye, while one of the boat’s living sailors took hold of a prospector fumbling for a pistol and impaled him on a pair of wall-mounted horns.
Within seconds, all the bar’s patrons had chosen their allegiance—some ran at the zombies from the mines and Gunakadeit’s crew; some sprinted for the nearest exit or rushed the bar to loot it for money or booze. Some laid into one another, taking the opportunity to settle old grudges. Bottles flew, knives flashed, and the room shook with haphazard, point-blank revolver fire. Tables were kicked over, and the floor filled with jostling bodies and swinging fists.
The newly arrived zombies were weak and poorly co-ordinated, but what they lacked in skill they made up for in enthusiasm—the Bruiser had spent a good five minutes bellowing them into a frenzy back in the cave, and though few could even remember their names, they were keen as hell to put their picks through their captors. The Bruiser had led them down the path through the rain with something like paternal pride.
And there, striding through the middle of it all, was the man himself, rapture in his milky eyes as he kicked a brazier over onto the floor. He had the look of a man who had always hoped for an afterlife of unending combat, and couldn’t believe it had come true. Liquor bottles crashed onto the floor behind him, their contents bursting into flames on the spilt coals—in no time at all, the timber in the walls had caught, and the combatants had the extra excitement of roaring flames to contend with.
As the flames spread, so too did the fight; already it was spilling out onto Rummage’s rusting thoroughfare, and down towards the docks. Wrack scurried across the room between sheets of flame, anx
ious not to be kicked, and made it out onto the street just behind the Bruiser.
Outside, the brawl went on in the torrential rain, fists throwing arcs of droplets that shivered white in the lightning. Wrack had to dive to avoid the body of a miner plummeting from a gantry overhead, and ended up in a tangle of weeds beside the street. As he righted himself with his claws he saw the flash of gunfire from the boat shed, and knew things must have kicked off there too.
And as if to cap things off, a wall of smoke rose above the treeline a few bends downstream—Dust’s army was coming for them, and could only be a couple of hours away.
They needed a way out of this town fast, and that meant finishing this fight as soon as possible. Wrack squatted dejectedly, his claws sinking to the ground as knife-wielding lunatics slashed at each other around him. He was definitely going to have to lose his mind
And he had been doing so well.
Nevertheless, it was all too easy to let his mind retreat back to the hold of Gunakadeit; all he had to do was think of the deal Mouana had been prepared to do, and the blackness rushed at him. The last thought he could articulate, as he hurtled towards the hunger and the fury, was how worryingly easy this had become. After that, things became odd for a long while.
HE AWOKE ON the deck of a boat, and all around him were corpses. Their faces streamed with lightning-strobed rain as they stared at him, and they howled. He scrabbled to get away from them, but there was nowhere to go. Every inch backwards seemed to put him a foot closer to the grasping hands of another ghoul, and the circle was closing around him. He raised his hands to fend them off, but they were the claws of a crab. He screamed, and cowered as the bloated, peeling hands of the dead descended on him.
“WRACK!” they moaned as they loomed over him. “WRACK! WRACK! WRACK!” came the noise from their lipless mouths, but he didn’t know what it meant. Then their slippery fingers wrapped around his body, and he lost his senses again.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
TWO
“HE’S NOT LIKING that, is he?” noted Fingal, as he packed sealant foam into the wound in his shoulder. The crew had lifted Wrack in the air and were chanting his name as they passed his body along the length of the deck, but he was screaming in terror.
“No, he’s really not,” agreed Mouana, with a grim smirk. The crew didn’t seem to have noticed, any more than they had registered the wounds on their hands inflicted by his spiny shell as they tossed him about.
He was their totem; when he had sounded the black pulse from Gunakadeit’s hold, the fight in the town had turned from a doomed brawl in the rain to a triumphant rout. Rummage’s militia had quailed in horror when it came, while the dead—bolstered by the newcomers who had appeared out of nowhere with Wrack and the Bruiser—had fought on with something between rage and rapture.
In the boat shed, too, it had turned around a losing battle. Pinned behind Gunakadeit’s hull, with Eunice gushing hydraulic fluid where a grenade had taken off her arm, they had been minutes away from being overrun when the pulse fired, and the ship’s beasts had come pouring out of the hold onto the heads of their attackers.
If Wrack hadn’t intervened, they would all have been in Dust’s hands by now. Even now, looking back through the storm, she could see the glow of the town burning above the forest as the Blades overtook it.
But owing her escape to Wrack only made the crew’s jubilation more bitter for Mouana to take. Once again, the librarian was being celebrated for what amounted to magic tricks, while she had only been reviled for the hard decisions she had made at Mwydyn-Dinas.
“I’m sure he’ll get over it,” said Fingal, slinking off to the cabin. Mouana grunted assent, but she wasn’t sure that he would. Every time Wrack retreated into the pickled mental bulk of Teuthis, he came back more gradually, and less intact. And she was starting to worry about what would happen when he did.
Although nobody but Fingal had been party to the details of the deal she had struck with Iver, Mouana was nagged by an uncanny sense that Wrack knew.
During the fight, as the ship’s beasts had run wild in the boat shed, there had been a strange moment. A wolf-eel, black flesh streaming from its body after days in the heat, had paused after savaging a gunman. It had skittered across the floor and up onto her chest before she could react, then regarded her with a queer look of calculation in its rot-murky eyes.
For a moment she had been certain it would lunge for her face, before a ricochet knocked it sprawling to the floor. By the time the thing righted itself, the feeling had passed; Dolph, the town’s mayor, had stumbled past, fumbling to reload a pistol, and the beast had launched itself at his leg. Mouana had never seen a man die with so much screaming.
It would have been easy to discount the incident as paranoia, but for what had happened at the end of the fight. When the way to the boat shed had been cleared and the crew had come down from the town, she had come face to face with Wrack.
He had been the last to arrive, picking his way down the path behind the stragglers as bullets blew spigots from the puddles around him. She had been holding the shed doors with Eunice, covering the crew’s retreat as Fingal got Gunakadeit back into the water.
But as Wrack had passed the threshold, he had stopped and looked at her. Maybe she was going as mad as he was, reading so much into the mute gaze of a crab, but she could have sworn it was the exact same look as the wolf-eel had given her. Somehow, he knew.
Looking now at the crab as it flopped in the hands of the crew, the town just another decaying memory, it seemed ridiculous to worry. They had won, they had stayed ahead of their pursuit, and the goal was getting closer. But more and more, the irritation she was so used to feeling for Wrack was giving way to a creeping fear of what lay beneath the doors of the hold.
“Hey, chief, you coming—?” Kaba’s voice from the cabin shook Mouana out of her reverie, and she looked away from Wrack’s limp form. “Fork in the river not far ahead; you’ve a choice to make.”
THE MAPS WERE spread out on the tables by lamp light; some time during the storm, night had crept up on them. They were drenched and crumpled, smeared by the rain, but still readable.
Fingal and Kaba were trying to make sense of them as Mouana ducked under the lintel. Eunice was slumped in the corner, on the bench that had become the boat’s de facto operating theatre, while Pearl worked with shaking hands to clean the mess the fight had made of her left side.
It was the first moment of peace since the violence of the escape, and the roar of the engine as it drove them upriver was like a strange, throbbing silence. Out in the gathering dark the banks rushed by, unbroken walls of rain-lashed trees, and as the river narrowed, the forest seemed all the more vast. They were hurtling out into real nowhere country, with little more to go on than a stolen map and a madman’s hunch.
“What’s ahead?” said Mouana, leaning on the map’s edge.
“The Esqueleto splits ten miles yonder,” explained Kaba. “Main channel goes on eastward; there’s a brace of colony towns up there, farms out among the reed marshes, then maybe loggers’ yards ’til the map runs out. I never made it up that way. Northways fork’s a tributary, a blackwater channel called the Extrañeza. Smaller and meaner than the other branch.”
“And what’s up there?”
“Hard to say, truly. This chart’s too old. Used to be a fair-sized town, Raglan, but that went. Gone with the trouble-wash of some outworld grief years back. Now? Couple of villages maybe, some broken down warehouses. Then nothing, all the way to nowhere.”
“What’s your feeling?” asked Mouana, looking the woman in the eye. Rain rattled on the cabin window and smeared the deck’s light into sheets. If they made the wrong choice, there would be no doubling back. Gunakadeit was a fast boat; she’d been built to run down monsters, and with a full tank of fuel and no reason to save it, she tore down the river like the storm itself. But they would need every scrap of speed—when they left Rummage, the drone of Dust’s flotilla wa
s already audible, its smoke visible just a couple of bends away. They had an hour on them at best—less, if the Blades had gotten their aircraft working.
“My bet’s the Extrañeza, chief. Weirder stories from up there. That and a guy at the card tables back there, he said his grandfather still called it the ‘bone-road.’ I think Wrack, he mentioned—”
“East or North, Kaba,” interjected Fingal, leaning forward.
“East. But surely we—”
“East it is,” concluded Mouana. “Plot the course.” If it seemed sound to Kaba, then they’d take the Extrañeza. Even if they could get sense out of Wrack before the river forced the decision on them, to beg him for help now might lose her the ship—especially if he chose that moment to expose what he knew about her. No: it couldn’t be risked.
“Chief,” said Kaba, her face grim even for a corpse. “We’ve got to ask Wrack on this.”
“Why?” barked Mouana. “Because of that damned book of his? There’s piss-all in it, and he’s beyond cracked even it was any use. This is my fucking ship and I’m asking you which branch to take.”
“But he knows, chief.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mouana quietly, her voice cold as an Ocean dawn.
“High Sarawak,” said Kaba. “He knows where it is. There’s something weird going on and he can feel it, I swear. In his brain,” she added, tapping the side of her head and gesturing belowdecks. Mouana gaped, not knowing what to feel more unnerved by—the revelation of yet another mystery around Wrack, or the fact it had been kept from her by her first officer. She was trying to find words when Fingal cut in.
