The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  “Good for you,” he said. He was about to go back to sleep when the word caught in his mind. She had called him brother.

  “Bear with me,” said Wrack. “I lost the plot for a minute there. But I’m with you.”

  “HEAVE!” CRIED MOUANA, hauling on the rope with all the strength left in her body. Eunice pulled with her, and behind her the whole crew threw in their weight. Wrack’s casket came up the bank inch by torturous inch, carving a deep trough in the mud. Her feet slipped on the bank, but caught on roots; she shoved against them with everything she had.

  The lake city’s elders had granted them passage, and boats that would handle the shallow water nearer the ruins, but would not send anyone with them onto what they saw as holy ground. Her performance with Wrack had left them awed, but wary; certainly, it would have seemed odd for her to have asked for help at that point. She was lucky to have been given the boats.

  But now the river had run out, and the only way forward was overland. They had no choice left but to drag Wrack with them.

  After an agonising climb, the casket finally tilted forward to sit on the top of the bank, and they paused to look back over the glade. They stood on a broad steel platform, sunk into the red soil and overlooking what might once have been a city, its streets collapsed beneath the shroud of ancient greenery. It looked as if there had been a rail terminus here once: a rusted engine lay in pieces, swathed in vines, and segments of track peeked through the loam.

  The rail stretched into the distance, forming a long channel through the forest where no trees grew. Foraging animals snuffled over the leaf litter, indistinct in the gloom. At the far end of that avenue lay what could only be High Sarawak. There was little to separate it from the green darkness of the forest—just a single point of light, cold and faint as a distant star.

  Mouana paused for a moment and leaned on the casket. The humid air thrummed with an insectile dirge, an eerie sound that swelled like a broken accordion from the eaves of the forest. She let the moment last, but there was no time to dawdle any further. Fingal was calling for them to take up ropes again, and she braced herself to heave, but Wrack interrupted.

  “I think I can make it easier for you. Hold on.”

  The ground quivered as he spoke, and dead leaves rustled beneath the casket. Worms and worm-eaten animals rose in a hump, taking his weight: generations of dead things, soaked through with miasma and convulsing as Wrack swam through them. They rippled, and Wrack was pushed along, gliding on the ghosts of the soil as his friends walked beside him.

  In time, Kaba began to sing a boat-loader’s song; the one she had sung once before, when they had been adrift in a boat on Ocean’s depths. The whole crew joined in, one by one, and the song soared above the moaning of the forest.

  MUCH OF WRACK was lost to the soil, in the arcs of the worms as they bore him on their backs, the crackle of old carcasses. But what remained of him was lost in thought.

  As memory came back to him, he remembered what he had done at the lake city. At first he had been relieved that Mouana’s ploy had averted the death of the living sailors, that she had risked her own destruction to protect her crew. But had they swapped one atrocity for another? They had ploughed through a peaceful culture, tricked its leaders into obedience, and played with what, for all they knew, had been their deepest beliefs. And worse yet, they had drawn an army led by a monster to their doors. By now, the place would be in ruins.

  And all for what? Wrack didn’t even know what they were fighting for any more. Did they still hope to extinguish the technology that had enslaved the dead for Lipos-Tholos? Or were they just trying to stay ahead of Dust? How long would it be before someone admitted they had no real plan?

  Fingal’s voice broke his train of thought with something like an answer.

  “See that ahead, lad? The dawn’s coming now, and that’s the end in sight.”

  Wrack looked. High Sarawak was revealed: a tight black filament, rising up past the clouds, that didn’t so much as waver in the breeze. A squat tower rose from the jungle at its base. Still, other than the power that throbbed in his head, there was no sign of life to the place. Just that single white light.

  High Sarawak. The vertical city. The bone-state. The place where the dead walked as revered machines. The city that had dug too far into old tech and destroyed itself. Myth and rumour, condensed now by their insane journey into a tiny, cold twinkle and a crumbling hulk.

  The power throbbed in him, kept him moving despite his every wish to sink. The tentacles waved in the deep water, beckoning him down to rest. It would be so easy just to lose himself, to cease caring. But even if she had no idea what she still hoped for, Mouana wanted him beside her. He had to anchor himself.

  “Fingal,” he said, from the crab on Mouana’s shoulder. “Would you walk beside me, and talk to me about home?”

  “Sure, lad,” said Fingal. He began to talk.

  He spoke about sports teams, and bakeries, and pubs and traffic restrictions, the minutiae of city life, and Wrack felt himself buoyed by memory. It was comforting beyond measure at first, but then began to hurt, as the stark gulf between the stories and their current reality became clear. They were memories of a destroyed city, and a destroyed life. The boy who had once played on those streets had torn them apart, had slaughtered men and raised monsters from alien tombs. Despite Mouana’s desperate wish to believe otherwise, Schneider Wrack was long gone.

  Nevertheless, the pain seemed to strengthen him, as if it catalysed the power he drew from the monolith ahead, and he quickened his pace. The sooner this was over, the better.

  THE SUN ROSE somewhere behind the clouds, and the jungle’s murmuring rose to a clamour. Kaba’s song faded from their throats, leaving only the bass rumble of the casket as they pulled it along the restless ground, and Mouana looked ahead at their destination.

  Stark against the sky, the line that sprung from the old city’s crown was revealed without doubt for what it was—a skylift. She’d seen the ruins of the one on distant Shinar, as they had fought for the city at its base. Her own home, Mīhini, bore the scars of no less than three. But nowhere had she heard of one that remained intact. Looking at it, her engineer’s heart soared, and she followed the line up through the clouds, aching to know what was tethered at its other end.

  As they approached the skylift, the avenue broadened into a semicircular clearing against its vast foundation. The edifice must have been at least a mile across, yet only a hundred yards or so, here at the end of the rails, were clear of forest. Its side was sheer and featureless, save for the towering archway and its sealed gate, and that lone white light. Mouana hoped against hope that gate would open at their approach, but nothing moved.

  Fingal called a halt, and they set Wrack down before it. Mouana stared up at the dull metal cliff, and Fingal came to stand beside her. There was nowhere left for them to go. Free of the jungle’s cloying grip, and not yet warmed by the sun, the ground here was chill, and faint mist drifted across the gate’s face. As a morning breeze kicked up, it sang against the cable in the sky, soft and low.

  “How does this end?” asked Mouana.

  “Same way it was always going to end,” said Fingal, fetching his pipe from the pocket of his tattered waistcoat and lighting it. “We do our best to get inside that thing, and destroy any rods we find, or anything to do with them.”

  “And then?” said Mouana, before he could.

  “And then, Dust comes,” finished Fingal, and gave a meaningful look back at Wrack’s casket.

  “You can’t,” she hissed, covering the microphone on Wrack’s crab and praying he couldn’t hear them anyway.

  “We must,” whispered Fingal. “She’s got an army with her, Mouana. There’s no way any of us are getting away from here. What would you have us do? Run away into the jungle and live in harmony among the apes? Take him with us through the trees?” He shook his head, and drew on the pipe. “No. It has to end here. I can understand if that’s hard for you,
so I’ll be the one to do it, when the time comes. Before we left the boat, I fitted a mine to the end of his casket, pointing inwards. All it’ll take is a three-number code, one-two-three, and it’ll all be over. He won’t know it’s happened.”

  “You can’t,” repeated Mouana. “We’ve brought him all this way. He’s my friend.”

  “We needed him to get here, but he’s done his job. This is the end, Mouana. We only ever set out to get this far, and when Dust comes—whether or not we’ve achieved our ends—it’s over. You made me captain, Mouana, and you know I’m right anyway.”

  She tried to answer him, but the words wouldn’t come, so she just looked forlornly at the gate.

  “I know it hurts, but there’s no time to come to terms with it,” Fingal continued. “She can’t be far behind, and there’s work to do yet, especially for you. Out of all of us, you’ve got the best chance of finding a way past that door. So put your mind to the problem and I’ll talk to the boy, make sure he stays calm. Don’t worry, I’ll be kind to him.”

  “Promise you won’t hurt him.”

  “I promise I won’t do anything until I have to, Mouana. Now go and see to that door.”

  Mouana trudged to the gate housing, and tried not to think about what was going to happen when Dust arrived. The wind sang around the cable, and she remembered how it had sang that night in the tent, blending with the howls of the injured ’drick. Then, she had thought herself the only one hard enough to put the thing out of its misery. Now, she wanted nothing less.

  At least she had a problem to solve. Frowning up at the immense doors, she wondered what she wouldn’t give for a decent artillery piece. But she wasn’t out of options yet—what had appeared to be a featureless surface from a distance was stippled with panels and protrusions, and she would just have to start prying some of them open. She had gotten plenty of obscure tech working in her life, and saw no reason to stop now she was dead. Mouana sighed with her useless lungs, and got to work.

  YOU NEVER TOLD me, you know.

  “What’s that, lad?” said Fingal, turning to face the casket as he puffed on his pipe. If he was surprised to hear Wrack’s voice in his head, he didn’t show it. And if he had realised Wrack had heard everything he had said to Mouana, he didn’t show his fear.

  How my father died. We never found the time to talk about it.

  “I’m sorry, Wrack... in all the chaos as we left the city, it slipped my mind. We should have talked. I—”

  How did he die, Fingal?

  “He... he... it was all a mess, Wrack, when we rose up against the Chancellor. He caught a ricochet in ’Mander’s Passage, holding it against the militia on day one. It... it was quick for him.”

  Oh, said Wrack, leaving plenty of time for the pause to ice over.

  “You were, ah, you were a good lad, what you did for him.”

  What do you mean, what I did for him?

  “Your sacrifice. When you agreed, you know, you agreed to be found with those pamphlets, to take the heat off him so he could keep on operating. I’ve not said it to you before, lad, but you did more for the Pipers than you knew, with that. The militia was on the edge of turning your old man over, when you stepped in for him.”

  That’s very interesting, said Wrack, because it was. He had never agreed to be arrested. Remembering his human life now was like fishing broken glass from thick mud, but he was certain of that much. When they had arrested him it had come as a total surprise. He had been caught with his father’s pamphlets, and that had been that. An unhappy accident. He had taken the sentence and not said a word all the way to the execution chamber, as he hadn’t wanted them to punish his father for his failure. At no point, though, had he been in on any plan. Fingal’s talk of an agreement was... fascinating. Keeping his tone casual, he continued.

  I’m not sure I understand, Fingal. Do you mean to say that he planned for me to be found with the pamphlets?

  “Well of course—you remember, mate, don’t you?” said Fingal, a note of agitation in his voice. He had moved along the side of the casket now, sauntering all too unsubtly towards the mine. When he spoke again, his words were hurried. “That was always the plan. You were a hero for agreeing to it, lad. And you never said a word during the trial, neither. City thought... thought you’d been the one distributing the things, and never thought to raid your dad’s place after you were gone. If you, ah, hadn’t offered yourself up, that might have been the end of the Pipers.”

  Wrack had never agreed to anything. He had not sacrificed himself.

  I don’t think you’re giving me the truth, said Wrack, and Fingal scrambled to his side. So I am going to take it from you.

  The dead rebel shrieked as Wrack plunged into his head. He had eased gently into Mouana’s mind, but he tore through Fingal’s like a rusty saw through bone.

  Fingal in his father’s study, sneering at a boy playing with toy ships; wondering when the old man was going to hand the reins over to his useless son.

  Fingal in the library at night, stuffing the shelves with pamphlets.

  Fingal in an alleyway, whispering to a man in a uniform.

  Fingal in the pub, his hand on his father’s shoulder as he wept for his lost son.

  Fingal in ’Mander’s Passage, with a gun to the back of his father’s head.

  Fingal’s hands, scrabbling to reach the mine embedded in his side before he discovered the truth.

  That’s really is all very interesting, said Wrack.

  MOUANA WAS ON her hands and knees, peering in amongst the mouldering remains of the door’s workings, when the blast hit her. She had managed to prise the cladding off what seemed to be a scanning mechanism, and was brushing cobwebs from its interior.

  Inside were racks of glass tubes, and in them were scraps of flesh. She had no idea what they did, but she thought she recognised the look of them. Whatever they were made of came from the same anatomy as Teuthis, the mind Wrack was trapped in. No wonder Wrack had been able to feel this place; it contained what appeared to be pieces of him.

  Wrack was the key to this door; she was sure of it. She was just getting to her feet, opening her mouth to shout Fingal’s name, when the meat-scraps began writhing in their tubes. Then her head filled with thunder.

  The detonation knocked her from her feet, screaming as if every ugly moment she had ever lived were racing through her head in the same instant. She blacked out, came back, and blacked out again, her back arched in agony. When she was finally able to move she looked back, expecting to see Wrack’s casket blown open. But something very different had happened.

  Fingal was being dragged into the ground by skeletons. They were erupting from the earth in a spray of soil around him, clawing at his body, gnashing at his flesh with age-greyed teeth. Their bones were picked clean, but strung with strange black filaments—the strange physical changes inflicted by miasma, laid bare by the complete disintegration of soft tissue.

  Fingal screamed, but was cut off as he disappeared into the maelstrom of ancient bone. By the time the crew had picked themselves off the ground, there was nothing of him to be seen beneath the thrashing cadavers. Then the blast came again, knocking her flat on her back, and she knew it for what it was: Wrack’s black pulse, but stronger and more feral than she had ever felt it before. As it washed over the clearing the ground quaked, and a fresh thicket of skeletal arms sprung from the soil. Even prepared for it, it was all she could do to stay on her feet.

  “Wrack!” screamed Mouana, staggering towards the frenzy, but it was too late. When the skeletal throng withdrew, nothing remained of Fingal but his pipe, smouldering on the broken ground. Hunched and chittering, the skeletons loped towards Wrack and clustered around the base of the casket, their mouths gaping in rage. More and more were joining them, climbing from the ground and scampering towards the growing pile with inhuman gaits.

  GET BACK, shrieked the forest of skulls, half in her head, and half in the whicker of bone on bone. GET BACK AND LEAVE ME.


  “What did he do?” pleaded Mouana, keeping her distance.

  BETRAYED ME. USED ME. TRIED TO DESTROY ME.

  “How?” she begged. “What do you mean?” It had all happened so quickly.

  SEE, commanded the bone-mass, and light exploded in Mouana’s skull.

  The visions came with sickening speed, a zoetropic fever dream that hammered at her sense of self. Studies and tin ships and books and pamphlets, pipe smoke and rain and anger and courtrooms, cobbles and grief and guns. When they withdrew she was reeling, but the light came again, a star bursting in the centre of her mind.

  Then darkness, and cold. A clinging chill that seeped into every pore. Deep water, that stretched forever beneath her feet, and silence. After what could have been hours, she became aware of something in front of her. A deep red glow, on the very edge of blackness, cast the edge of something vast into silhouette. A leviathan shape, hanging motionless in the abyss.

  PREYMEAT, said the darkness.

  “This isn’t you, Wrack,” said Mouana, ice-water flooding her lungs as she spoke. “Please, friend, come back.”

  COME BACK FOR WHAT, MORSEL? SO YOU CAN USE ME? SO YOU CAN LIE TO ME?

  “Maybe that’s who I was once, Wrack. But not any more. You’ve been in my head. You’ve seen the worst of me, and the best. And you’ve seen how I feel about you. I don’t just want you back, I need you. Because you’re my brother now, and I can’t bear to see you hurt like this.”

  I AM NOT A TOOL, said the shape, mind-voice blasting like the heat from a furnace.

  “No, mate; no, you’re not. But you’re acting like one. And while we’re at it, you’re not a bloody squid either. You’re my friend, Schneider Wrack, and you’re being a fucking silly boy.”

  I... I AM NOT A TOOL, said the dark again, but with the hint of a question in its tone.

  “No. That’s exactly what I’m trying to save you from becoming, so come back.”