by Nate Crowley
“So am I,” said Mouana, looking hollow, and held Wrack’s claw between two of her huge fingers. “But it doesn’t make it right, any of what I’ve done.”
“Maybe not, but I can hardly blame you for having lost your mind, given I spent a lot of this morning being a dead catfish. I wish we’d spoken earlier. I just thought you were really into... you know, war.”
“Yeah, well you can talk. You were a fucking battleship.”
They shared a weak laugh, and Wrack spoke again.
“I won’t lie; I’m still not comfortable with some of the stuff you’ve done. It could take a long time to get comfortable with. But we’ve both got a lot more past than we’ve got future left, and certainly there’s no time to unravel it all. Shall we just let all this be, and help Fingal get this over with? I daresay Dust is the sort of person who has a habit of coming back from being shot, after all.”
“I’d like that, yes,” said Mouana, nodding solemnly. Wrack had never heard her speak like this; not since those early days when they had shivered together on the slave ship’s deck. It was a world away from the grimacing warlord who had led them into Rummage, and a lot more like the woman he had just shared a head with.
“My legs are rotten as shit,” he announced. “Could you carry me up on deck, and we’ll see if I can work out where to go next?” Mouana fished him out from the mound of coiled sealife onto her slab of a shoulder, where he clung on with a claw.
“And bring my book,” he added.
WHEN THEY CLIMBED out of the dark a great shout crashed over them, bright and fierce as the midday sun. The whole ship had clearly been waiting up here in silence, to see if they would emerge together. Now they had appeared, the crew exploded into a mass of roaring faces and raised fists. It scared Wrack at first, seeing all those dead faces split and screaming, but when he saw the joy in their eyes, he raised his claw back at them. Another cheer rolled across the deck, and even Eunice broke into a grin.
Wrack’s speakers emitted a limp, tinny “Hooray” that was immediately drowned in the noise. It didn’t matter—the sight of him and Mouana together was enough to keep the sailors waving their fists. For those who had been with them since Tavuto, riddled as they now were with bullet holes, burns and bites, it clearly meant the world. Whatever her sins, and whatever his madness, the two of them working together had saved them all from that place, and Wrack could see from their faces that they believed they would do it again.
They clearly needed the boost. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty left, and many of them were hideously damaged. Even the couple of dozen living that remained were emaciated, and many of the dead were only held together with bandage, tar and staples. Their skin was peeling off in the heat, and insects swirled over the deck in a throbbing black cloud—only the weeks of preservative rub kept them from being eaten alive.
Wrack felt for them—even with the reinforcements the miasma had worked on the crab’s body, and the mechanical enhancements Fingal’s technicians had made, he was rotten through. Without Mouana carrying him, he would have been dragging himself across the deck on a trail of slime.
They wouldn’t have to last much longer. He could feel High Sarawak, like a second sun that shed no light, boiling in perpetual dawn on the horizon. It drew him like their flesh drew the flies, something at once alien and achingly familiar. As he focused on that strange, silent pulse, it reminded him—he was meant to be navigating.
“Where are we, then?” he said, in a businesslike fashion, as Fingal waved the cheering crew back to their work.
“Upper Extrañeza, crab-man,” said Kaba, who had appeared by their side as they moved to the bow of the craft. She had lost a forearm since Wrack had last seen her, presumably as they had duelled with Dust’s outriders. “Up past the next bend’s a settlement marked as ‘Big Mistake’ on the charts from Rummage, and then that’s your lot. The ink stops there. There’s a couple of shit drawings of monsters, but that’s it.”
“We passed Gustav’s Rest yet?” said Wrack, with a burst of excitement. On his third and final expedition to Grand Amazon, when he was an old man and the main channel of the Sinfondo had been heavily settled, Waldemar had finally made a trip up the Esqueleto, and settled on the banks of one of its tributaries with his family. He had never written again, and history had forgotten him.
“Yeah, actually—it said that in brackets next to Big Mistake, now you mention it.”
When they turned the bend, Wrack’s excitement faded. The forest opened up into a narrow floodplain, where a few feeble patches of mud sprouted crops in shoddy, yellowing rows. On the bank, perched on stilts black with rot, stood a cluster of tumbledown houses, paint flaking with age. Collapsed dwellings sprawled to either side of the meagre hamlet, while ruins poked through the tall grass of the plain. At first the place seemed deserted, but as they chugged by, pale faces showed at the windows and ragged figures appeared on the sagging excuse for a dock. The inhabitants, who looked barely more healthy than the boat’s crew, stood and watched them pass with hostile frowns.
Wrack could see why the town had been renamed. Clearly, the frontier metropolis Waldemar had dreamed of had never quite worked out. Still, now their voyage had surpassed the explorer’s last reach into the frontier, he felt the moment needed commemorating.
“Mouana, throw them the book,” said Wrack.
“Steady on, Wrack,” said Fingal, sucking on his pipe. “That’s all we’ve got, beside you and the map.”
“Believe me, I know it by heart,” he answered. “And anyway, the book runs out here too, just like the map. They’re probably better off with it than we are. Go on, toss it on the dock, for Waldemar’s sake.”
Mouana pitched the book out over the river, and it landed on the settlement’s dock with a dry thud. The villagers peered at it with a mixture of disgruntlement and fear, then went back to watching the boat.
“Well, there we are,” said Wrack, “The end of civilisation. For the record, I think we need to take the next left.”
And so they did, and sailed off the edge of the map.
THE DAYS THAT followed passed fitfully. Wrack spent some of the time playing cards with Mouana, as they shared what they could remember of their lives. Mouana usually won, but Wrack had his revenge by singing songs he half-remembered, rendered tuneless and mangled by the device that processed his speech. She was better company now she wasn’t leading a crusade.
The rest of the time, he spent drifting between the dead things as they tumbled past them in the river, and trying to shake off the sensation of tentacles and terrible hunger. Sometimes he would be woken by Fingal or Kaba, to settle one of their arguments about the best course to take, but largely he was left to himself.
In the time he spent awake and on deck, he saw marvels, the likes of which Waldemar would have given his specimen collection just to glimpse.
A wormer’s paddleboat passing in the night, refusing all contact, sigils of glowing blood daubed upon its hull. A figure crouched on its upper deck, silently nursing a harpoon.
A measureless lake, caked in grumous yellow skin, where pulsing larvae fired imagoes into the sky. The air thrummed with the hunger of the newborn, then with the clatter of rifles as the insects swooped.
The shell of a long-dead starship, strobed by lightning, as black-toothed cannibals shrank from their searchlights. Shouts and sirens in the dark.
Tracts of flooded forest, where osteoglossid titans swam. The crack of alien dentition on home-kind nuts; flickering shoals, and glowing worms beneath regis lilies.
Still waters, where church-gilled catfish cruised under duckweed, stately and ancient. The baking sun on silent water, songs chanted in a dozen tongues.
Shallows, and the perilous scrape of sand on steel; shouting and panic, as crates were hoyed to lighten the load. A gunfight, and Mouana’s staying hand as she warned him not to intervene, lest Dust learn their secret. Bullets thudding into wood, and the gush of water.
Monst
ers on the banks; a thing that chased them through the shallows on its haunches, and an awful fight. Cries of loss when it was done, as the beast’s mate followed them for miles behind the trees.
Pink shapes rolling; riverine orca, communing in clicks as they stalked lord-worms in the afternoon rain.
Species, taxa, systems that had never been documented, or whose origins had been forgot. Great leathery factory slugs, flesh-roots pulsing, as they struggled on the banks of nameless creeks. Metal ants, and smoke-belching spouts of cartilage.
True strangeness, where green lost its meaning in a forest of new colours. Places where the vines glowed black, and groves that ate light. Places where the water sang.
Determination, and bullets, saw them through. They were always just more aggressive than what they encountered, always made it through with a couple more dents in the hull, a few more bodies dragged into the water. Ahead of them, growing stronger with each mile, the ancient city called to Wrack. And always, a horizon behind them, their pursuit rumbled on in a distant wall of smoke and light.
AT LAST THEY reached a place where they could go no further. It was just past dusk, and Mouana was down in the hold, using a bit of pipe and some bones to show Wrack how a railgun worked. It was engaging at first, but she wasn’t much of a teacher, and had soon veered away from the interesting stuff into a seemingly interminable discussion of what could go wrong with poorly-maintained coolant systems.
Now that Wrack’s legs couldn’t support his carapace, he had been taped to Mouana’s shoulder, so he didn’t have much choice but to watch whatever she was doing. Nevertheless, he made plenty of encouraging noises, and only occasionally gave in to the temptation to squawk “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” in her ear. She hadn’t laughed yet, but he was sure that was because she still hadn’t gotten the joke.
The discussion of coolant methods was threatening to creep into its second hour when—to Wrack’s relief—Mouana was interrupted by a strange horn blowing, followed by a commotion on the deck above. Her head jerked up from her diagram as the sound came again, and she hurried up on deck to see what was going on.
As they joined the crew in staring at what awaited them on the river, Wrack found words in his head, from an old treatise on mapping the Lemniscatus. Travel far enough into nowhere, leave the borders of your own city far enough behind, and eventually you will come upon somebody else’s.
Across the river, as tall as the forest that crowded the banks around it, was a great stockade. At its centre was a gate with doors of blastwood timber, clad in the shells and hides of a dozen species, and stippled with patches of glowing moss. Painted skulls, yards long and gnarled with tusks, hung from chains across the barrier. A line of torches blazed on the parapet above it, and figures gathered before them in silhouette. The horn blew again, low and blatting, and Gunakadeit’s own foghorn sounded in answer as they approached.
“High Sarawak!” said an awed voice from somewhere on deck. “We’re here,” said another, and soon a murmur had spread across the deck. Wrack was not convinced; there was no denying they were close now, but he was sure he would be able to feel if High Sarawak lay just behind those gates.
Besides, he figured that whoever had crafted the necrods would be using more than logs and animal shells to guard their treasures.
When they came to within a hundred yards of the stockade, a volley of arrows hissed into the water directly ahead of them, and Fingal called for the crew to cut the engines and kill their lights. Kaba hauled herself painfully up the boat’s central mast and called up to the ramparts in her mother tongue, but there was only silence in return. She tried again, in another language, and then haltingly in a third, clearly running out of options. She repeated herself, and at last a voice came back, low and rasping.
The exchange proceeded slowly, with long gaps in between responses, but eventually a word began to emerge from repetition—a word Wrack knew. “Dead?” questioned the unseen sentry. “Dead!” replied Kaba, whispering to Fingal to get the boat’s searchlight turned on the mast. “Dead,” she repeated, her good arm outstretched in the lamp’s beam, spiralled in a raiment of moths. “Dead.”
The horn blew again, and others sounded in answer from far behind the wall. Then, with a deep crack, the gates began to open.
WRACK WAS SURE he had fallen into another dream, the strangest yet, as the boat nosed through the gap into the still water beyond. The gates concealed a city like none he had ever read about—it sprawled across the surface of a shallow lake, stretching a mile at least within the long palisade. Its channels and streets were marked out with wooden pilings, and light twinkled everywhere—both the dry flicker of fires and the steady glow of bioluminescence. Buildings rose from the clear water on carved pillars, three storeys high in places, with lights strung between them in webs of vine. Tiered ponds thronged with floating vegetables, and squat trees bobbed on forested barges.
And everywhere swarmed... Wrack imagined he was Waldemar, and searched for a word that might seem believable to city readers. But there was no route around the obvious. They were lizard-people. Of course, they bore little in common with true lizards—their tails bifurcated halfway up their broad backs, and he could find as much of a mole shrimp or a bat in their anatomy as anything reptilian. But their lipless mouths and slit-pupilled eyes evoked pungent memories of the Lipos-Tholos reptile house, and that’s what Wrack was stuck with.
They moved as gracefully in the water as out, membranes spreading as they surged along beside the boat, then folding away as they hopped out onto jetties and pilings. Hundreds were flocking to stare in fascination at Gunakadeit as it eased into the city, gesturing with three-fingered claws at the exhausted bodies on its deck. The crew stared back, some offering tentative waves, others flinching at every sudden movement from their watchers.
There was a sudden splash as a dozen or so of the lizard-people leapt into the water from a low hump, and a deep growl resonated through the shallows. The sound drew a low moan from the dead, caught between resignation and dread. Then the hump shook, and an eye opened on its side. It rose from the channel on a thick ochre neck, water sluicing from between tree-trunk-thick tusks as the vast head turned to regard them.
The boat rocked on a swell, and Wrack glanced over to see a second giant rising on their starboard side. It stood twenty feet clear of the water at the shoulder, and peered down on them from higher still, a spiked crest spreading above the tombstone battlements of its jaws. The monster gave a curious rumble and lights smouldered along its body, from its red-rimmed throat wattles to the tails swooping from its hindquarters. The light pulsed in jagged patterns along the behemoth; glyphs and cartouches that swam with bacterial calligraphy.
The beasts stood on either side of the boat, lowering their heads to inspect the newcomers; as their illustrated flanks shimmered, chanting began among the lizard people. Whether this was a ceremony of joy, the prelude to a swift ending, or both, Wrack had no idea. If he was honest with himself, he was too enchanted to care.
“Please tell me,” asked Mouana, as the monster’s head turned sideways and its tiny eye regarded them from its cliff of bone, “that you read all about this place, and were just saving it as a little surprise for us.”
“I wish I could tell you that,” said Wrack, as foetid lakewater fell on them from the titans’ jaws. “I really could. But this is all excitingly new to me.”
Of course, that wasn’t strictly true; truthfully, there were stories about lizard people from Grand Amazon. There always had been. Waldemar himself had come across them in travellers’ tales ancient even in his time, snippets from before the failure of the Gate. He had scoffed at them in footnotes, reading them with the same scorn he’d felt for tales of rhinoceros from long-lost Komkhathi. But that had been in his early writing. Now Wrack thought about it, his later work steered clear of such matters entirely. Either way, he figured, now wasn’t the best time to get stuck into a discussion of narrative authority in the Rückgewinnun, and
so he stayed quiet.
“What in the six skies are they chanting, Kaba?” called Fingal, hand curling around a shotgun as one of the lake giants nudged him with its snout.
“Not a lot I understand, boss. Only words I’ve got to share with ’em is scraps of old wormers’ glot, and they’re using scant little of that. ‘Open again’ is all I’m getting, though that’s only a best guess.”
“Well if that’s all you’ve got, then shout it back,” barked the rebel boss, patting the monster on its tusk with the enthusiasm of a cornered caniphobe. “Open again, Kaba, that’s the ticket.”
Kaba called the words back at the glistening throng, and the chanting intensified. She shouted the words, and they rasped back from all around, rising from throats not built to carry them. The lake beasts let out a strange sigh in harmony, then drew back their heads and let the boat chug on. Wrack was elated at their passage, if only because it let him see more of the place. Even as the monsters sank back into the warmth of their guard-hollows, he gazed at them with wonder. But there was so much more to see.
As they passed into the witching glow of the lake-city’s heart, they passed ramshackle towers of woven wine, vertical pastures that rattled and thrummed as insects the size of hounds careened against their walls. Past them were floating butchery yards, where a bulkier breed of citizen worked; they hauled the bugs from the corrals onto tables before setting on them with cleavers, splitting off the meaty legs and throwing the shells into simmering stock pots.
In a viscous pool behind them, another giant lurked. This one was almost all mouth. Its huge scoop jaw lay half-submerged, churning in the mire as labourers shovelled heaps of detritus into its pit. At its rear, lizard-people daubed in nacreous script waited with broad pans, collecting its luminous excreta.
Further in they passed a series of corrals, circles of white gravel where fat, feather-gilled tadpoles wallowed. Most were the size of a person’s torso, but each pen held one or two of truly enormous size, their mouths already budding with cartilage tusks. All were tended together by wading lizard-people, who sang softly as they scattered the water with smashed fruit and chunks of fish. By the time Wrack realised he was looking at the city’s nursery, the larval pools had almost receded from view. He made a resolution to himself that he would come back and see this again, before the crushing realisation set in—this was a one-way journey. He had lived his life, and was crawling towards the end of its unintended epilogue.
