by Nate Crowley
Somewhere in the distance, a trumpet blew, and Mouana clenched with horror. The sound was coming from outside the vision.
“Wrack...” said Mouana, voice flattened with dread. “She’s here.”
The trumpet sounded again, and the vision collapsed.
“GOOD MORNING,” WHISPERED Dust, from the edge of the clearing. Behind her, filling the railway avenue from edge to edge, was an army of the dead. There were thousands of them, ranks upon ranks, their grey faces haggard and hopeless as they stretched back into the morning mist. In the distant fog, huge shapes loomed; beasts or machines or worse. It was an army fit to level cities.
Mouana looked to Wrack’s casket. The mass of skeletons had collapsed, little more than a heap of twitching bone on the ground around it. From the casket itself came a weak, muffled sloshing, but nothing more. And around it, shaken still from Wrack’s blast, the shivering remnants of her crew looked across the clearing at their doom.
“I see you managed to get my prize working, Mouana,” said Dust, still motionless. “I’m impressed. And intrigued, frankly. But you should know I came prepared for this. Look what I have brought.”
Dust gestured behind her, as a strange mass struggled forward from her ranks. It staggered on beetle legs, moving painfully with the dull clank of ceramic plates. Its upper surface was smooth armour, open in the centre to reveal a throbbing mass of wire-studded flesh. Blue lightning arced and crackled across the exposed meat, while liquid gases dripped from its underside, splashing onto the sodden turf in sheets of ice.
“There are always countermeasures, Mouana. The number of old machines you’ve played with, you should know that, just as I do. Powerful though the prize is, it remains—alas—the mind of an animal. And all animals can be leashed.”
Dust’s eyes bored into Mouana, and she knew the general was right. While Wrack was lost in the throes of whatever madness Fingal had set off, he was an animal, and there was nothing he or any number of skeletons could do for them. It was just them, a hundred or so exhausted bodies, against an army. Against Dust. It was over.
“Time to give up, commander,” said the general, almost kindly, and Mouana hung her head. Her thoughts raced. The mine on Wrack’s casing was just a few yards away; Dust was fast, but there was every chance Mouana could reach it, and put him out of his misery, before the general was halfway across the clearing. Then it would at least be over for him, if not for them.
Tassie’s shriek echoed in her mind as she took a step towards the casket. Then, as she repeated Dust’s words to herself, she stopped. Why should she let anyone else, let alone Dust, tell her when it was time to give up?
For all her preparation, and all her prowess, Dust had no idea of what had happened on Tavuto. As far as she was concerned, the thing in that casket was the senile remnant of an old monster; an animal indeed, with nothing human to it. Mouana knew better, and she refused to think so little of Wrack. Whatever relic Dust had dredged up from history, she was willing to bet it was geared to constrain the mind of something so simple as an alien gigapredator. Faced with a sarcastic librarian, it had another thing coming.
“Right you are,” called Mouana to Dust, raising a hand in casual surrender. “Just give me a moment to say goodbye.” She turned to the crew. They looked utterly bewildered, but were looking to her with cautious hope, as if she could stand between them and annihilation.
“Form up around Wrack,” said Mouana, as she met each of their eyes. “There may never be time to explain what just happened, but I need you to trust me.” Every head nodded. “Eunice, I want you out in front. Kaba, you lead the dead. And Pearl?” The woman nodded, clutching her rifle along with the living crew. “You take the living, and run. I know it’s not much of a plan, but there’s no point you staying here.”
“Not a chance,” said Pearl. “We’re dead anyway out there, and we’d rather be dead with you.” The other sailors nodded, and Mouana gave them a tight smile.
“Okay, then,” she said softly, “I suppose I’d better indulge the general.” She turned to Wrack’s crab—limp, now, like an appalling parody of a child’s doll—and grinned at it. “I don’t know if you can still hear me, mate, but watch this if you can. It’s going to be a hell of a show.”
Mouana walked out in front of her bedraggled crew, staring right into Dust’s eyes, and doing everything she could to pretend fear didn’t exist. She spread her arms wide.
“Alright, then,” said Mouana. “You win. But let me ask you something.”
“Go on,” said Dust, as near as Mouana had ever heard to showing irritation.
“Do you really just want to march that lot over here and overwhelm us? Because let’s be honest, you’ll manage it in a heartbeat. Or whatever it is that happens inside your chest. I think you can do better.” Mouana spat on the floor, then thumped a massive hand against her breast.
“Come on,” she roared. “I’m the woman who fucked you over, after all those years of training. I ruined your clever plan, stole your prize, and made you take your whole army through a thousand miles of fucking mud and mosquitoes to get it back. I’ve made you look like a clown, general—and if I was you, I’d want to settle this in person. So come on, why don’t you come over here and make a scene for the history books?”
“You’re assuming that wasn’t already my intention,” said Dust, nodding once and starting to walk slowly across the field. Her troops began to advance morosely in her wake, their shambling footsteps making the ground tremble, but she held out an arm to stop them. “No one is to take a step forward until I have the prize,” she commanded, unsheathing her blade. “I need no army for this.”
The rest of the distance she walked alone, her gaze never breaking from Mouana’s. When she got to within twenty yards, Mouana spoke again.
“Right. Rush her, lads.”
And so they did. Eunice stormed past her like a freight engine, growling as she came, but Dust dodged her without so much as looking aside. Her armour sang with the impact of rifle fire, but nothing even registered. She did not speed up, she did not change her expression—she just strolled towards Mouana with blank rapture on her face, drinking the moment. Mouana fired a harpoon as she came within ten feet, but the general ducked it with the slightest twist of her waist.
Then she was upon her, and Mouana was blocking swipes of her blade, monstrous blows that came almost too fast for her eye to track. Shards of metal flew from her armour and only Eunice, flying in from behind with a wild left hook and forcing the general to dodge, saved her from the stroke that would have taken off her head.
Then the rest of the crew joined the fray. They came on, howling, with no regard for their own bodies, and swarmed the general. Dust danced through them, hewing the dead as if she were thrashing through mist, but there was no way she could dodge them all.
One arm seized her, then two, and then twenty—they kept piling on, weighing down her limbs as fast as she could cut through them. She slowed despite her unnatural strength, and for a moment, it almost felt like they might take her down. But only for a moment.
“Enough,” said Dust, gesturing with her hand. Lights flashed on her armour, and something invisible rushed into the soil. The ground seemed to compress, to sink for a moment, then burst upwards and outwards, flinging Mouana high into the air. She crashed to the ground, bodies tumbling around her, and felt a wet crack as her body broke inside the armour.
Still she tried to struggle up, but before she could even raise her head from the floor, Dust was on her, springing up nimble as a cat and kneeling on her body. The general clicked her long fingers, and a sphere of light appeared around them.
“This will only last a minute, but that will be all I need to cut you free. After that I shall finish off the rest, and you and I shall be free to spend all the time in the world together.”
Dust’s blade hummed; it glowed white from hilt to tip, and she rammed it into Mouana’s torso. The sword slid through the warbody as if it were gel, and settled
deep in Mouana’s chest. It sizzled, and filthy steam gushed from the collar of the armour. Even as Mouana felt herself cooking from the inside, she smiled. This was exactly the moment she had been hoping for.
“Hey, Wrack,” said Mouana, voice hoarse as her core began to boil. “I’ve got a joke. You’ll love this one.”
Dust’s eyes narrowed and her head jerked back, in what Mouana suspected was the first genuine surprise in her life.
“What does it take to make a squid laugh?” wheezed Mouana, and waited a long moment before winking at Dust.
“Ten tickles!” she shouted, steam leaking from her mouth, gaping at Dust with a foolish grin.
Something changed, then, in the world. There was something there that had not been there before. Something Mouana would never have been able to detect without having spent so long feeling its opposite. It was barely there at first, but it built and built, until the air trembled with it, and then broke like white water from a breached dam.
It was almost identical to the black pulse she had known since Tavuto, but in every way inverted—a searing wave of warmth and strangeness and mirth. It blasted across the field, and Dust spasmed as it passed through her. A high-pitched whining rose from her lines and she turned in horror, blade still caught in Mouana’s chest, just in time to see her countermeasure device explode in a geyser of cerulean gore.
It had been overloaded. It could not cope with, had not been created to withstand, what was happening then in Wrack’s casket. Dust goggled at it in disbelief, stunned to stillness, as gobbets of it steamed on the ground.
As she turned back, Mouana greeted her with a gargantuan, piston-driven punch to the face.
Dust was flung ten feet by the impact, landing in a rumpled heap, and the shield around them flickered and vanished. Slowly, achingly, with a black stew pouring from the hole in her body, Mouana rose to her feet and stood over the general.
At the edge of the clearing, her army were looking at each other with expressions of complete bafflement, flickering with questions that quickly congealed into dark purpose. They began to shamble across the field, not in the regimented march of soldiers, but with the hungry, disorganised lope of a mob.
Dust looked up at Mouana, eyes wide in profound confusion, and shook her head. Then a rattle of claws came from Mouana’s shoulder, and Wrack spoke.
“It has to be said, Mouana, that... that was a terrible joke. I don’t think she thought that was funny at all.”
The ground quivered, and bone fingertips began to push through the loam like spring shoots. Hands emerged, then forearms, damp soil falling in clots from the bones. The arms curled around Dust’s limbs and clamped down with horrible strength, keeping her fast to the earth. They clasped at her armour and tugged at her cloak.
Then a lone arm emerged from the earth, curled in front of the general’s face, and gave her a sturdy thumbs up. Mouana was in no doubt; Wrack was back with her.
DUST EXPECTED RAGE to come. She had been tricked by her betrayer, humiliated in front of her legion. Her prize, which she had schemed so many years to acquire, had been snatched from under her nose and used to beat her down. As the old bones creaked around her limbs, and the moans of her army grew louder in the dawn, she clenched her fists, waiting for the fury.
But there was something else there; something she wasn’t sure she had ever felt. It shimmered over her bones, plucking her ancient muscles like harp strings and bathing her mind with warmth. Her interfaces nudged at the edge of her vision, urged her to activate the black mechanisms at her core. Even now, with their help, she could probably break free and fight.
But rage was such a stale old taste; it had blasted through her so often her nerves were dull to it. Even triumph felt flatter, more sour than it once had. This new feeling, by contrast, was intoxicating. To know defeat—to know the end was coming, at the hands of the army she had spent an age building—this was fresh, like sunlight on mountain snow. It meant no more fighting, no more planning, no more nights spent grinding her teeth in anxiety over how to fill the ever-deepening hole.
It was relief.
Dust let her fists unwind, and reached for the bone fingers that held her. Slowly, awkwardly, she clasped hands with the dead. It was, she realised, the first time anybody had ever held her hand. Even if this was the last thing she ever experienced, she thought, it was worth the trade.
But there was, of course, one last thing to experience. As the first of her soldiers loomed above her, Dust reached into the recesses of her endocrine rig and wrung it for every drop of synaesthetic boost it could give her. It would be an unsurvivable dose, but that didn’t matter anymore. Her death would be music, and light.
The first blades fell, like waves breaking on endless white sand, and Dust smiled in welcome.
WHEN DUST WENT, she went silently, but Mouana had long since stopped watching. She was gone, and that was good enough—there was no need to stay for the gory details.
And besides, there was a more pressing concern. When she turned to walk back to the casket, she found her crew all staring the other way.
Silently, and slow as dawn, the gates of High Sarawak were opening.
AFTERWORD
IT’S ALWAYS AN honour to be asked to write the afterword to a book that exists partially because you tweeted something on your birthday once and a friend responded with a joke that then escalated over several months into the creation of a dark fantasy world that attracted the attention of a publisher. So I’m sure you can imagine how it feels to be charged with putting some words at the end of this book by Nate Crowley. Or perhaps you cannot. Either is fine, I think, because as you may have noticed Nate’s writing strives to stretch the imagination. It pulls it taunt like old rubber on a hot day and twangs at it furiously so the vibrations permeate unevenly through your mind.
Nate’s own imagination doesn’t stretch so much as grow and blossom like a really messed-up tree. The seeds are always small and innocent-looking enough. A list of imaginary computer games, for example. An animated reality show about fighting. Some erotic furniture… okay, innocent-looking was the wrong term, but the point is they grow, far faster and more elaborately than you’d think possible, branches sprouting out like furious tentacles until daylight struggles to penetrate, creating countless nooks and no shortage of crannies—all populated with delightful and unexpected creatures. And still the tree squirms upwards, implausibly high and wide and gnarled as Nate’s world-building takes root and characters fight and love and die and psychically inhabit a crab. And on top of the glorious canopy flower the stunning blossom’s of Nate’s wit, catching the eye and wrinkling the nose, blooms exotic and sometimes predatory.
As you may know, I inadvertently planted one of these trees myself. On my birthday, to be specific. I complained on twitter (jokingly... I promise) that not enough people had wished me happy birthday. Nate decided to wish me happy birthday. Repeatedly. Through Twitter. Every day for 76 days. It was quite an experience. He didn’t know it was going to grow for 76 days when he started watering the seed. It was just a running joke. Tweeting a little poem one day, a cheerfully surreal birthday song the next. But the more he nurtured the idea, the faster it grew. Twitter as a medium for micro-fiction turned out to be an astonishingly fertile terrain. Themes and motifs emerged and a running joke gave way to a narrative. The scale and ferocity of the birthday celebrations grew, and grew, and days turned into weeks, never letting 24 hours pass without “happy birthday” in some form appearing. In that time the character in his story that had my name developed into a vicious yet fragile tyrant, destroying worlds and dispensing death with celebratory casualness in an increasingly complex fictional cosmos. Jelly, Skype, mutants and various types of animal blood were just some of the branches that knotted their way together through my social media. Imagery that would cause JG Ballard to wake in a cold sweat tripped merrily across my notifications tab. Clowns took on a whole new meaning for me. I learnt a lot of new words.
I should poin
t out that I’ve known Nate for a few years and consider him a dear friend. It’s important to note this, because otherwise the whole venture could have looked like unusually elaborate cyber-bullying. But it was honestly a delight to be part of such a ridiculous thing. And as it spiralled out of control we enjoyed picking apart the joyous silliness of it all over beers and spirits and an excellent stew. Because it’s necessary to remember that, as well as being a writer who conjures metaphors that could derail a freight train and treats adjectives as a form of artillery, Nate is one of the loveliest men you could hope to meet. He’s the only man I know who can speak with complete authority on both distressed securities investment strategy and the varying musculoskeletal characteristics of extinct megafauna whilst at the same time exuding charm and genuine warmth for anyone caught up in his path. He has a rare faculty for being hugely impressive yet hopelessly likeable at the same time. Which is why I managed to quite enjoy my extended birthday. Even when my phone nearly broke from the sheer volume of people tweeting “happy birthday.” And when I had to check Wikipedia to understand which celebrities were joining in. And when people started creating fan art.
Because, you see, this venture wasn’t purely for my benefit or punishment. It developed quite a fan-base. In the end, it culminated in a real-life party in the basement of a London bar, with clowns chanting my name and people dressed as leopards offering me chalices of fake blood. That was a deeply surreal evening for me, and I promise you can’t imagine quite that was like. It’s quite a demanding thing, cosplaying someone else’s fictionalised version of yourself as a hundred strangers in costume recreate a Twitter-based hellscape around you. But a fantastic party was the only reasonable conclusion to it all and we remain indebted to Nate’s partner and others for making that night happen. Two years on, I have a lot of friends who I made as a result of that ridiculousness and the enduring memories are of baffled glee and unexpected warmth as people came together to celebrate a bunch of tweets which got out of control.
