by Tim Akers
And that was Wilson. Always agitating to get me back into the kind of trouble I left behind. The kind of trouble that got the only woman I ever loved killed, the kind of trouble that would draw the attention of the Council. I swear, if I didn't know better, I'd think that boy wanted a revolution. Or at least a good blooding of society's higher ranks.
"Leave it alone, Wilson."
"You can't keep away from it forever. You've got responsibilities, no matter what your father says. Responsibilities to your name, yes. But responsibilities to the city as well."
"I brought you along to make sure your engine runs. If I wanted a lecture on my responsibilities to my family, I would have brought my father." I rubbed the cold out of my face and grimaced. "Maybe just to throw him over the side. Not a bad idea, come to think of it."
"Jacob, I'm disappointed. You don't contact me for a year, and then you want my help. I was hoping things were looking up." He looked around the ship and smiled. "And it turns out all you need is a mechanic. Well. All you want is a mechanic. I can't begin to go into your needs."
"Gods in hell, Wilson. Leave it alone."
He held up his hands and sighed.
"Never mind, Jacob. Forget I said anything." He grimaced and looked out at the river. "Let's just get your little job done, and get out of each other's hair."
"This is the place," the captain said from above. I looked up at the crew tower. I could just make out the rusty corona of the captain's bearded face, leaning out from his window.
"This is it?" I asked. "How can you tell?"
"It's what you paid for, Mr. Burn. Reliable passage to the Fehn, away from the docks. It's what you paid me to do."
"Reliable, covert passage, Mr. Hamilton." I looked over at the crew, suddenly busy with the crate we'd brought along. "And no trouble getting back."
The captain cleared his throat and spat out into the fog. "No trouble, Mr. Burn. You're not a man I want crossing me."
"Hear that?" Wilson asked, nudging me. "You've got that reputation to look after. Dangerous man."
"Yes, well." There were plenty others who might pay to have me crossed. There was good money in that kind of business. I watched the crew dismantle the box and remove the bulky iron man. Its chest creaked open, spilling hoses and dials onto the deck. "Not the best reputation to have."
The old man grunted, then closed his window. Wilson and I went over to the iron man. It was fat and bulbous, the head as wide as the shoulders and made of smooth, thick glass. The crew stepped back nervously, their eyes drifting between me and the cumbersome metal form. I took off my coat.
"You sure about this thing?" I asked.
Wilson nodded happily. Knelt next to the iron suit and started unstrapping the arms and adjusting dials.
"Absolutely. Safe as falling in love with a whore." He punched me in the arm, glint in his eyes. "Just as expensive, too."
"Fine. Let's have this done," I said, refusing to rise to his jab, then stepped into the iron man's embrace. It closed around me. There was a creaking sound as the thing sealed up, and suddenly the air was forge-hot. The crew gathered behind Wilson's strangely hunched shoulders, looking at me through the thick glass. I waved a heavy arm and they cleared away. Wilson led me to the rail and gave me a little push over the edge. The Reine took me without a sound.
It was like that for a while. Dark and darker, cold and colder. I fell through the water in absolute silence, my breathing swallowed by the tubes and metal of the iron man. I stared at my own face in the glass, reflected by some dim light from the machine's quiet engines.
My eyes looked dead, my hair a rambling mess across my head, my face pale and tired. I had aged ten years in the last two. Business had been bad. Ever since I'd held a pistol to the head of Veridon's top criminal and ended our complicated friendship, things had been bad for me. My contacts stopped talking to me. My regular clients stopped calling by my office. I was reduced to taking jobs from people I didn't trust, jobs I didn't want to do, working with people like Gray, getting myself into situations I wasn't sure I could get out of. Jobs like this one. Situations like this one.
A dead face bumped against the glass, his skin saggy and white, his eyes smooth pale marbles. I startled, banging my head against the suit. He put his hands against the glass, running them down the edge until he found a grip. He watched me with empty eyes. Other hands came out of the darkness and held my back, slipped around my arms. My first instinct was to struggle. I had to fight down the panic and let those riverbloated arms take me. They led me down. There were lights, a wide ring of them fading into the darkness. A door, flat and round, against a wall of barnacled iron. It irised open and we went inside. My guides drifted back out into the cold currents and I was alone in a small chamber. I drifted against the floor. A heavy thud and the water seemed to vibrate around me, then slowly drained away. The suit was heavy on my shoulders, and I struggled free of it. The air here was cold and sterile.
I let the iron man fall away and rummaged in the small leather satchel I had brought with me. My fingers were numb and I realized how cold I was. I fumbled the frictionlamp a couple times, then got it spun up. I stood. The room was full of bodies, standing close to me, closer than I would have believed. Dozens of them. It took me a second to realize that I was in a room of glass windows, looking out at the murky waters of the river Reine. On this side of the glass was my tiny, dry room, and out there, waving slightly in the currents of the river, hordes and hordes of the Fehn.
The Fehn… well. The Fehn freak me out. I had done business with them before, even counted a friend among them. Wright Morgan, though I hadn't seen him in a while. Perhaps he had passed from the ranks of the individual Fehn and joined the shambling choir of those who had lost their personalities and minds to the group consciousness of the Fehn hive. I suppressed a shudder as I surveyed my audience, their eyes loose in their heads, mouths open to the cold water of the river.
"Are we so foul?" a voice asked from behind me. I turned to see one of the Fehn rising from a ladderway in the floor. His clothes were mostly dry, and his eyes still held the spark of sentience. He crossed the floor and held out his hands in supplication. "Is our presence so awful, Jacob Burn?"
"Well," I said, glancing at the crowded windows around us. "It can be a little unnerving. For a man in my position."
"Mm." He drew a steel cylinder from his belt and unscrewed it, then took a long drink. Water splashed around his mouth and ran down his cheek. "A man in your position. As in, a man trapped in a small room, underwater, surrounded by the dead of Veridon."
"Yes, well. Something like that."
He nodded and drank again, then crossed to the nearest window and looked out at the tableau of slack faces and loose limbs waving like grass in the breeze.
"Do you know any of them, Jacob? Are any of your friends here? A man like you must have lost a fair number of friends to our beloved river?"
And that was the trick, the thing that made the Fehn so unsettling. They were our dead. Anyone who died in the river, drowned or dumped from some harbor back alley, any body that slipped beneath the Reine's dark waters became their property. Their citizenry. The Fehn were a symbiotic race, their mother-form hidden away in the depths of the river, but they infected the bodies of the drowned. For a while those bodies maintained their personalities, their minds, as with my friend Morgan. Sometimes they were able to last for months, or years… maybe decades. I never knew Morgan's age, but had the feeling he had been around for even longer than that. Something about the symbiote kept the bodies fresh. But eventually their minds would go, and they would become one of the numberless, mindless creatures even now floating outside this window.
"None of these, no. Most of my friends die on land."
"Fortunate," he said, turning to me. He drank a long pull of water. "For you, at least. Less fortunate for us."
"Yeah, well." I bent to the iron man and unfolded the package. "I'm kind of on a schedule here."
"Really? A busy ma
n, are you?"
"Sure," I said.
"I've heard different. I've heard that times haven't been too good to Jacob Burn." He leaned idly against the glass of the window. Behind him the silent choir raised their hands and stroked the glass, as if to touch his shoulder. "Ever since you pissed off your man Valentine, and the Council, and the Church… I've heard that business is a little light."
I stood up, holding the dull metal box I had been hired to deliver. "I get by. I'm working now, aren't I?"
"Sure. But this is a shitty job, Jacob. It doesn't pay well, and no one wants to do it. Times must be bad, for a man of your stature to serve as delivery boy for the river."
Something about the way he said it, something in his voice or his face. Something sinister.
"Do I know you?" I asked. The river had blunted his features, but I didn't think the guy looked familiar.
"Not really. Not anymore. I was one of your father's servants, a while ago." He raised one bloated hand and held it out. "Anthony Flowers."
"The Beggar's Feast barge," I said, pointedly ignoring the proffered hand. "You and your family drowned, along with most of the kitchen staff. I'm so sorry."
"We've gotten over it." He grimaced and lowered his hand, clenched it into a fist a couple of times, then tossed his head towards the window. "My kids, my wife, they're out there somewhere. I don't see them anymore. Don't really go looking."
"Yeah."
"Anyway. I hope we didn't ruin your Beggar's."
I shook my head and held out the package. "I was only a child."
"Yeah. So were they." He took the box and set it on a modest table built into the floor. "So what were you hired to bring us?"
"Not my business," I said.
"You're not curious?"
"Not in the business of being curious, Mr. Flowers. Is there anything else you need from me?"
He looked me over, then sighed and picked up the box. "I guess not. Get on your way, then. The room will flood once you have your clever suit on."
I nodded and turned back to the suit. He went down the ladderway, then a door closed and I was alone with the quiet walls of the dead. Without looking up, I clambered back into my suit and made ready for my return to the surface. I hoped the captain and his whispering crew were still around. That they hadn't jumped Wilson and thrown him over, then left me alone in the middle of the Reine. Never wanted to die in the river, and now I wanted it even less.
Chapter Two
Black Blood from the River
"Do you mind if I ask you something, sir?"
I looked away from the steamer's tiny window and turned to the captain. He was looking dead ahead, as if I weren't even there. I nodded.
"Go ahead."
"You were one of Valentine's boys?"
"Yeah."
"But not any longer?"
"Not any longer, no." I looked back out the window. The river was rolling in deep, heavy swells. The fog had cleared out some, but there wasn't much traffic out yet. I could see the climbing towers of Veridon above the gauzy bank of mists. I knew where this question was going.
"Most folks I hear about, they work for Valentine, they don't stop working for him." He glanced over at me, then back to the prow of his boat. "Not without getting killed."
"Not killed yet, am I?"
"No, sir. That's why I'm asking. You're not working for him still?"
"I'm not."
"Because if you were, you see, it'd do good if you could say a word for us. For our service here. Always good to do an honor for someone like Valentine. Or one of his boys."
"Well, next time I see him, I'll be sure to give the good word. Right after he finishes shooting at me, or whatever it is he's set his mind to doing."
"Ah, well." The old man nodded. "I was just thinking. If you were still working for him."
"Yeah." I opened the tiny door that led out to the lookout rail. "Well, I'm not."
Outside was better. Outside didn't smell like canned grease and desperation. Outside was cool and wet, the thin lines of fog streaming over the deck. Wilson was strolling across the deck, both hands shoved in the pockets of his coat. He looked nervous. The crew was nowhere to be seen. I let my eyes wander over the water, wondering at the life of the Fehn, at the fate of Wright Morgan and all the other people who ended up in the cold, dark river. I rested my elbows against the rail of the captain's little tower. Good thing I was braced, too. I barely heard the call of "Overboard" before the ship shuddered to the right and cut power. I nearly fell, if not for the rail. Wilson had fallen, but was already bouncing up and scurrying to the edge of the boat.
"Overboard, ahoy!" someone yelled to my right. I ran over to that side of the ship and looked down. There was a cluster of crewmen by the ship's rail, looking down into the water.
"Where is he?" the captain roared from his window behind me. The crew looked up at the two of us.
"One, sir, just off the rail. Don't know who it is."
"One of ours? Someone see him fall?"
"No, sir. Kelly spotted him. No other ships out here."
"Could be a floater, from the city," I said to the captain. I spotted the subject of the excitement, shirtless and bobbing with the gentle swell of the river. He didn't look alive. He was floating closer to the boat with each second. "He doesn't look too good."
"Could be just a body," one of the crew agreed. There was business, and a long hook was produced. They were poking at the shiny white flesh of the guy's back, and not getting much response.
"Overboard!" someone else shouted, and we all turned. One kid, standing up in the prow of the boat, pointing away to our left. I squinted my eyes and saw it. Another body. Then another. Half a dozen, all mostly naked, the pallid skin bobbing peacefully with the waves.
"Something's up," I said to the captain. He was peering out into the water, doing a count. I raised my voice. "Wilson, what'd you think?" He wasn't looking up at me, wouldn't look away from the water.
"Shipwreck?" the captain asked. "Fog's awful bad."
"We would have heard something," I said. "Open your engine and get us back to shore. These are bodies, captain. No one out here to be saved."
"We should bring 'em in. I'd want to be brought in, if my body was on the water like that." He pulled at the brim of his cap and turned to the controls. "Wouldn't want to be left, to pay the Fehn's percent."
I grimaced and turned back to the water. Couldn't blame him, not after the meeting I'd just been through. I made a note to die on high ground, away from the Fehn and their immortal drowning. Still, I wanted to be back to shore. I gripped the railing tight and watched the crew go about the grim work of rescuing corpses. Wilson was still at the rail, looking down. One hand was on the brace of knives on his belt.
I was staring at the water when something deep beneath us sighed and slithered toward the surface. It was only a lightening of the depths for a second, a grayness among the black. It quickly resolved into a roiling mass of white and gray and then we were swamped, a boiling leviathan of corpses breached the surface, bodies and arms and faces, dead and white, bubbling to the surface, their skin pale and shiny against the slate blackness of the Reine. They bumped dully against the bottom of the boat, slithering up the sides and churning against the prop in bloodless chop. The crew had abandoned their places against the rail, screaming as they sought the shelter of the pilot's deck. I pushed past them, down to the deck, down to Wilson.
We were adrift in a shoal of dead bodies, formerly the Fehn. The spaces between their bodies were slick with the flat black worms of their symbiotes. A living Fehn was choked to the lungs with those things, squirming in their veins and organs in place of blood and air and brains. The worms glistened in oily death, sloughing out of slack mouths to splash dully into the water. And for every body I saw, ten more were just bobbing to the surface, pushing aside their brothers. Our engines shuddered to a halt. We were befouled.
"I don't like this," Wilson whispered when I got to him. He was shaking, o
ne hand on his knives.
"Who would like it?" I asked.
"No, I mean, I really don't like it. What if… what if we…" He looked up at me, his face slack.
What if we did this, he was asking. What if our little delivery had just killed off the river's dead? What kind of trouble would that be?
"Get out, ya slugs! Get back to stations!" the captain howled from his cabin. The crew cowered on the stairs, looking out on the becalmed sea of bodies. The air smelled like river rot, tinged with the burned flesh rising from our own choked propeller. The captain pushed the last of the crew down onto the deck and retreated to his nest. Hesitantly, some of the crew went below decks to see to the engines. The rest stood beside us at the railing.
"What in hell is this?" one of them whispered. I didn't have an answer, or an inkling of one. We just stared at the lumpy shoal, shivering in the breeze. The fog closed in on us, leaving just the bodies and our ship.
"Get hooks to the propeller, see if you can clear it!" the captain yelled from his comfortable perch. A few of the crew roused themselves and went aft. We all seemed to be moving in a dream. You could hardly see water for all the bodies.
"We should light a flare," I said, turning to one of the crew. "Or maybe the horn. Warn any other ships coming this way."
"Captain won't have it. Not until we're closer to the dock, where we've a right to be." The man touched his forehead in some kind of benediction. "Signals bring Badge. Not something we want."
"Better than being ridden under by a cargo barge," I whispered, and looked up at the cabin. The captain was fiddling with some kind of control panel and shouting into a speaking tube. The oily reek of smoke leaked up from belowdecks.
"Should you go down to help?" I asked the man standing next to me.
"Sir? I'd rather not." A quick succession of bangs ran through the deck, and the engine roared into brief and angry life before sputtering to a halt. "All seems well in hand. Besides, I'm keeping watch."
"Right." I nodded and leaned against the rail. "I wonder if we'll be quarantined."
