by Nate Crowley
Worse yet, he thought, it was unlikely there would be anything left to see here, even if he could manage to return. Dust was coming with guns and rage and roaring diesel, and would not stop to negotiate at the gate. All of this—the orchards and the tadpole baths and the beasts with their word-pocked flanks—would be gone soon, casualties of someone else’s injustice. It stirred him to shame, quickly sublimated into black anger. High Sarawak tugged on his crackling nerves, and his mind raced with thoughts of surging brine. He could feel the world greying out, when a soft voice brought him back.
“Hey,” said Mouana. “I guess it’s time to get off the boat; looks like we’ve reached the end of the line.”
Wrack’s mind snapped back all at once, to a riot of colour and sound. The boat had come to rest in a circular pool, surrounded by cut stone and painted columns. Ahead of it, broad stairs led up a causeway to an island at the lake’s centre, and they thronged with lizard-people. “Open again!” they cried in Kaba’s old trader tongue, “Open again!” as they lowered gangplanks onto the boat’s gunwales.
All at once the boat was flooded with the lizard-people; they scurried up the planks on their knuckle-claws, and moved about the deck taking reverent sniffs of its charnel filth. Wrack feared the blades were about to come out—but instead came garlands; ropes of glowing blossom were draped on the shoulders of the dead as three-fingered claws took their hands. Those who could no longer stand were scooped from the deck, and carried on the plated backs of their hosts.
“Stay together,” cried Fingal as a pale creature scrawled in light led him from the bow, but the words were next to useless—they were caught up in a rapturous tide. Mouana allowed herself to be led by a trio with lilac-striped jaws, and they took their first steps on dry land since Rummage.
As they moved up the causeway steps, however, Wrack noticed that not everyone in their party was being offered the same reverence. The remainder of their living crew were huddled together in a knot as they hurried along, and nobody had taken their hands. Their hosts circled them warily, snapping and hissing at their limbs. Mouana had clearly spotted it too.
“Oi,” she growled, yanking her hand free, and stomping over to the living crew’s tormentors. “Leave off—they’re with us.” The lizard-people looked to each other in what seemed like disgruntlement, then glanced back at her with cocked heads—they kept their distance from the living after that, but Wrack had the sense that the incident had confused them mightily.
“What in grief was that about?” muttered Mouana, as they found their place in the column again.
“I’m not sure,” said Wrack, “but I think a hypothesis is presenting itself. Look ahead.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Mouana.
The stairs ended in a great dais, carved with channels of light, and with a swirling green fire at its heart. Behind the fire waited a crowd of ancient-looking lizard-people, and behind them, rising into the night’s gloom, stood a pair of vast, glowing skeletons.
The figures, unmistakably human, towered in blue light, painted on a pair of fifty-foot-high obelisks. Their skulls were tilted up towards their raised arms, as if calling something down from a high place. And above them, dwindling into dimness up the length of the great rocks, were painted countless stars.
“Yeah, does rather suggest we’re on the right track, doesn’t it?” said Wrack, marvelling at the giants in the firelight.
Up ahead, Fingal and Kaba were deep in conference with the city’s elders. From what he could hear from Fingal, they were trying to leverage whatever strange goodwill they possessed for passage onwards to High Sarawak, a deal which Kaba was struggling to convey in detail. Wrack could only guess at the elders’ body language, but there seemed to be an obvious and growing sense of affront at the lack of ceremony. Somehow, he doubted Kaba had explained the reason for the urgency of the discussion.
Then, as the negotiation progressed, it took on a more sinister air. Again and again, the elders would issue sharp barks of refusal, and thrust out their claws at the anxious bunch of living sailors. Wrack understood then, looking at the fear stretching across their faces, what the sticking point of the deal must be.
The gates opening when Kaba said they were dead, the skeletons on the stones, the cries of ‘open again’: it all made horrible sense. Whoever these people were, and however they fitted into this world’s mangled history, they had clearly once traded with High Sarawak, and had been waiting centuries for its gates to reopen, and for trade to resume. How surprised they must have been—suspicious, even—for the dead to come from the opposite direction, and to come hand-in-hand with the living.
As the impasse continued, their hosts grew restless, and the elders began whispering to one another, glancing sidelong at Fingal. Fingal in turn was growing increasingly exasperated as he failed to understand what Wrack had just worked out—that they weren’t going anywhere so long as the living stayed that way. If things carried on this way, it was only a matter of time before they were cut down on the spot as imposters, or Dust arrived and made the whole issue moot.
“Mouana?” asked Wrack, speaking as softly as he could.
“Yeah?”
“You know when you shot all those people at Mwydyn-Dinas? How you did something awful because it was the only way we were going to stay ahead of Dust?”
“Yes,” said Mouana, after a very uncomfortable pause.
“Well, obviously I understand why you did it, because I’ve been in your head. But now... now I really understand. And I don’t hold it against you one bit.”
“Wrack, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Look, there’s no time to explain. I just wanted you to know that before this happens. Can you walk us to Fingal?”
“Alright, Wrack,” sighed his friend, and stomped forward to the edge of the negotiation circle. Fingal looked round as she loomed, and frowned. “Wrack wants a word,” she said, laconically.
“Not now, man,” hissed Fingal, glaring at Wrack. “I’m in the middle of a bloody negotiation he—”
“We’ve got to kill them,” said Wrack, cutting him off. “The living. Don’t make me explain, but we have to kill them. There’s no way we’re getting past with them in one piece. They’ve got to die, and the longer we refuse, the more likely it is they’re going to turn on us. We need to kill them, now.”
Fingal was slow, but he wasn’t stupid. Recognition flashed across his face as Wrack spoke, and he took one look at the living crew before putting a hand on Kaba’s shoulder and cutting her off in mid-flow.
“Kaba, Wrack’s right. New plan. Tell them we’re going to slaughter the living.”
Kaba’s broken jaw fell in horror, but Fingal stayed stern. “Tell them, right now.”
Kaba opened her mouth, and was about to speak when Mouana piped up, turning every head in her direction.
“Tell them,” she roared, taking a mighty stride into the circle, “that I am the War Princess of High Sarawak, and that I have had enough of their shitty manners.” She shoved one of the elders in the chest with a fingertip, rocking him back on his haunches.
The crowd exploded onto their feet and began hissing together, sounding like a sudden downpour. Mouana was undeterred. Scowling, the green light of the fire flickering on her face, she stalked around the circle and jabbed her finger at each of the elders in turn.
“I am heir to the skeleton throne,” she boomed above the hissing of the crowd, “and I have come to claim it. How dare you stand in my way?” The elders scurried back at the force of her voice, and she threw her palm out to gesture at the living.
“These quick ones are my slaves, and among them is the Queen of Lipos-Tholos,” she thundered, adding, “Pearl, get over here,” in a hurried mutter. Pearl shuffled forward, looking thoroughly wretched, and stood with her head bowed by Mouana’s side.
“I have conquered her city and now,” she cried, slapping the woman to the ground with a monstrous backhander, “now, I am dragging her back to pay for her si
ns. Would you dare take that from me?”
Her words echoed into silence, broken only by the chirping of frogs far out on the lake. All around them in the dark, blades glinted, and a thousand bodies crouched in readiness for the tension to break.
“Alright, then, Wrack,” she whispered, “work with me.” Then, she began chanting. At first, he thought she was just bellowing nonsense, but as he listened closer, the words became obvious, disguised as they were by the weird rhythm of her ersatz incantation.
“NEED-YOU-TO-DRAW-ON-WHAT-EV-ER-YOU-CAN-MAAAATE-MAKE-SOME-DEAD-THINGS-MOOOOOVE-THE-BIG-GER-THE-BET-TER!”
She repeated the final words over and over, raising her arm to the sky in mirror image of the skeletons on the obelisks, and let her voice climb to a prolonged shriek. Wrack took his cue, and let his mind loose in the waters of the lake.
The small things came first; insects singed in the flames that began skittering on the stones, dead frogs that lolloped out of the water and began lurching up the stairs. He ripped through the minds of fish carcasses, had them thrash in the shallows beyond the firelight. Then his thoughts went deeper, probing the stony spaces beneath the island, and he found larger vessels to inhabit. Much larger vessels.
It began as a rumbling in the stone beneath them, deep and visceral, as if the world was shifting in its sleep. Then cracks emerged in the masonry, and a low howl echoed in the hollows beneath. In the wide plaza that encircled the dais, great humps of stone rose into the air, flagstones falling to reveal withered flesh.
First one, then two sets of vast jaws burst from the rubble, yellowed tusks parting to release natal screams in dread harmony. Wrack fought to hold his vision as he hauled the beasts from their graves, let his shriek of exertion billow from their throats as they crawled, immense and dessicated, into the night. Blackness hammered at the edge of his perception, but he held the weight. He would not buckle.
The grave-beasts lumbered towards the fire, and the etchings on their mummified flanks flickered into new light as they swung their heads. With his last shred of energy Wrack walked the monsters to either side of the obelisks and, as his thoughts collapsed into manic slurry, had them bow to Mouana.
The last thing he heard as darkness took him was the elders, crying out together in what could only be called joy.
IT WASN’T MUCH of a siege, but it would do.
The river—narrower, here—was packed bank to bank with her forces; the barges had to jostle past each other to move to the front, and it was easier to simply move infantry across the mass of decks than try to move the transports around.
Her flotilla had been compacted into a huge mass that filled the river for miles behind her. Even looting fuel and watercraft from every settlement they had passed, they had been forced to leave almost a third of the craft behind along the way. More still had grounded on sandbanks, or smashed on rocks or tree trunks.
Those that remained heaved with soldiers, and with sickness. Food had run scarce along the way, and medical supplies had been the first thing she had ordered left behind to lighten the load. The men and women on the barges, many already wounded from Lipos-Tholos, were growing thin, and swarmed with bites, infestations and fevers from the relentless insects. Some lost their minds each day and were executed, but tens of thousands still remained.
It did not matter how many she had lost in keeping pace with their quarry—once she seized the Teuthis device, she would be able to take it all back ten times over. Even now, every soldier that fell took the miasma, and joined the growing mass of dead in the column, the kernel of the legion she would build.
Still, the fight against attrition had enraged her. When Mouana had betrayed her, had scorned her generosity, she had been filled with a hatred like none she had ever known. For the first time, she had offered to share some of what she was with someone; had left something of herself vulnerable. Mouana had spat on her heart.
Ever since she had returned to the flotilla, she had been consumed by a fury that had no outlet in the glacial management of the army’s progress. She had sent ahead what few speedy craft she had to harry her prey, out of sheer frustration more than hope of success. But the bulk of her force had been maddeningly slow. She had compensated by slaughtering and burning everything they had come across, setting vast fires that had left the river’s bank blackened stubble, had raised a smoke cloud of continental size.
It had been tedious. Now, at least, it was time for a proper fight.
Far back in the column, the artillery barges fired another volley, and fire bloomed across the river gate. Impressive though the primitives’ barrier was, it was nothing to an army built to smash energy shields. There was a ponderous creak in the dark, and something huge gave way. Then, almost gracefully, the entirety of the left gate collapsed forward into the water. Behind its wreckage, lit by the flames of the burning timbers, weapons gleamed.
Dust couldn’t resist it. Protocol demanded she bombard the enemy for hours yet, reducing the whole place to mud before moving in infantry. At the very least, it made sense to break up the gate debris before launching an assault. But both protocol and sense had been left behind in the fires of Lipos-Tholos. What was left was art. She didn’t care if she lost another few hundred now, when so much more lay just beyond her grasp. It would be so much more beautiful to assault the breach immediately.
Pumping boosters into her system, she climbed to the podium of her command craft and thrust her sabre out towards the collapsed gate. The sound of the firelight on the blade filled her to the fingertips, rough and hollow as warm milk poured onto embers. She could almost taste the dread of her army as the blade gleamed, as she held the order to charge for a full, agonising minute. Then she let the blade fall, and the engines of the assault barges sang.
The first screams from the gap curled round her with the smell of tea fumes, spiced with the cries of the defenders. They didn’t sound human, and it lent a rich undertone to the sound of the fight, a blend she had never smelled before. Dust almost shivered in pleasure as a new sound rolled over the rest; the deep, undulating cry of something big. As if on cue, a monstrous form burst into the firelight; a sinuous neck and snaggled jaws that swept her troops from the logjam like children’s toys.
Perfect, thought Dust, turning back to her army. She scanned the jostling boats, and found the torchlit bulk of the Atlassian’s stable-barge. The expense of contracting the Afferitter brigade to travel through the Gate with her had been vast, but she had kept them on even when she had dismissed the other subcontractors. Because, despite the sheer logistical hell of ferrying a full pithecus unit with her, the smallest chance of an opportunity like this had made it worth it.
“Send in the apes,” called Dust, and trumpets sounded.
As the Atlassian barge steamed towards the carnage at the gate, she took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Perhaps Mouana’s betrayal had been necessary. Without it, all of this would have been so easy. She would still have her prize, and it would be all the sweeter with the defeat of her former pupil.
The apes howled in the breach, the first hints of the feast to come, and Dust ran her tongue over lips that had been dry a hundred years.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
FOUR
THE SEABIRDS SQUAWKED, indignant, as he rolled limply on the grey swell. “Wrack! Wrack!” they cried.
He thrashed weakly at them with a hook-suckered arm, but it was losing strength and could barely breach the surface.
“Wrack, we’re here!”
Where was here? His eye creaked in its mount, struggling to focus in the air. A bile-green slick lay on the water, his blood spreading out across the waves. Harpoons quivered in his flesh, trailing taut wires. At their terminus, black shapes moved towards him across the water. Pathetic, fragile. But they had conquered him. Behind them, grey and continental, a great ship waited on the horizon. The waves slapped over his eye and dissolved the vision.
“Wrack.”
Agony, and confinement, and metal.
Confusion, as drugs pushed their way through him. Monkey voices, endlessly chattering. A hundred thousand eyes, but none of them his.
“We’re here. High Sarawak.”
A swampy creek, overhung by trees that burst from ruins on the banks. Bats dipping low over the water to snatch fish. A night loud with life, but louder with death. He looked through the eyes of dead things—a hundred thousand eyes, none of them his—and saw a procession of reed boats, poled by corpses. In the last lay a huge cylinder, and a towering creature of metal and wrecked meat.
“Wrack, mate, we’ve nearly done it!” said the creature.
“Who’s Wrack?” he said, drowsily, not sure where his voice was coming from. He couldn’t remember who that was. Had that been the boat? Or the crab? Or had it been the thing before, dying on the surface of a bottomless sea?
“You are,” said the metal one, talking to the cylinder.
“Right,” he said, for lack of any better information. “Where am I?”
His voice was coming from a dead crab, nailed to the huge woman’s shoulder. That didn’t make any sense, but it was happening.
“High Sarawak, remember? We’re here, brother. We have to leave the boats now.”
She pointed ahead, to a glade where the creek petered out to little more than a trickle, and a huge steel platform waited on the bank. Behind the enclosing trees, he glimpsed crumbling ruins. They felt powerful, familiar. But he was exhausted, and all he wanted to do was rest.
