* * *
They were hauling the Drill out of its carapace with hooks and bare tentacles, clouding the water with rage, excitement, amber-streaked triumph. Four Warm Currents abandoned the skiff for the final stretch, sucking back hard, jetting harder. The mob milled around the engine in a frenzy, too caught up to notice one late arrival.
Four Warm Currents screamed, dragging sonar across the crowd, but in the mess of motion and chemicals nobody felt the hard clicks. They’d brought a coring charge, one of the spiky half-spheres designed for blasting through solid rock bed to the nickel veins beneath. Four Warm Currents had shut down a foreman’s lobby for such explosives during a particularly slow stretch of drilling. Too volatile, too much blowback in a confined space. But now it was here, and it was going to shred the Drill to pieces.
Four Warm Currents jetted higher, above the chaos, nearly to the mouth of the tunnel. No eyes followed. Everyone was intent on the Drill and on the coring charge being shuffled toward it, tentacle by tentacle.
Four Warm Currents sucked back, angled, and dove. The free-swimmers towing the coring charge didn’t see the interloper until it was too late, until Four Warm Currents slid two tentacles deep into the detonation triggers and clung hard.
“Get away from me! Get away or I’ll trigger right here!”
The crowd turned to a fresco of frozen tentacles, momentarily speechless. Then:
“Blasphemer,” signed the closest free-swimmer. “Blasphemer.”
The word caught and rippled across the mob, becoming a synchronized wave of short, chopping motions.
“The Drill is not going to end the world,” Four Warm Currents signed desperately, puffing up over the crowd, hauling the coring charge along. “It’s going to break us into a brand-new one. One we’ll visit at our choosing. The deep ocean will stay deep ocean. The Leviathans will stay skeletons. Our cities will stay safe.”
Something struck like a spar of bone, sending Four Warm Currents reeling. The conical head of a screamer poked out from the crowd, held by a young guard whose skin was no longer inked with the council’s sigil. The name came dimly to memory: Two Sinking Corpses. An unfamiliar taste was clouding into the water. It took a moment for Four Warm Currents to realize it was blood, blue and hot and saline.
“Listen to me!”
The plea was answered by another blast of deadly sound, this one misaimed, clipping a tentacle. Four Warm Currents nearly lost grip on the coring charge. The mob roiled below, waving curses, mottled black and orange with fury. There would be no listening.
“Stay away from me or I’ll trigger it,” Four Warm Currents warned once more, then jetted hard for the mouth of the tunnel. The renewed threat of detonation bought a few still seconds. Then the mob realized where the coring charge was headed, and the sleekest and fastest of them tore away in pursuit.
Four Warm Currents hurled up the dark tunnel, sucking back water in searing cold gulps and flushing faster and harder with each. Familiar grooves in the ice jumped out with a smatter of sonar, etchings warning against unauthorized entry. Four Warm Currents blew past with tentacles straight back, trailing the coring charge directly behind, gambling nobody would risk hitting it with a screamer.
A familiar bend loomed in the dark, one of the myriad small adjustments to course, and beyond it, the service lights, bundles of bioluminescent algae set along the walls, began blooming to life, painting the tunnel an eerie blue-green, casting a long-limbed shadow on the wall. Four Warm Currents chanced a look down and saw three free-swimmers, young and strong and gaining.
“Drop it!” one took the opportunity to sign. “Drop it and you’ll live!”
Four Warm Currents used a tentacle to sign back one of Three Jagged Reefs’s favorite gestures, reflecting that it was a bad idea when the young-blood’s skin flashed with rage and all three of them put on speed. The head start was waning, the coring charge was heavy, the screamer wound was dribbling blood.
But Four Warm Currents knew the anatomy of the tunnel better than anyone, better than even the foreman. The three pursuers lost valuable time picking their way through a thicket of free-floating equipment knocked from the wall, then more again deliberating where the tunnel branched, stubby memento of a calculation error.
Four Warm Currents’s hearts were wailing for rest as the final stretch appeared. The coring charge felt like lead. A boiling shadow swooped past, and Four Warm Currents realized they’d fired another screamer, one risk now outweighing the other. The roof of the world, stretched thin like a membrane, marred with the Drill’s final twist, loomed above.
Another blast of sonar, this one closer. Four Warm Currents throttled out a cloak of black ink, hoping to obscure the next shot, too exhausted to try to dodge. Too exhausted to do anything now but churn warm water, drag slowly, too slowly, toward the top.
The screamer’s next burst was half-deflected by the coring charge, but still managed to make every single tentacle spasm. Four Warm Currents felt the cargo slipping and tried desperately to regain purchase on its slick metal. So close, now, so close to the end of the world. Roof of the world. Either. Thoughts blurred and collided in Four Warm Currents’s bruised brain. More blood was pumping out, bright blue, foul-tasting. Four Warm Currents tried to hold onto the exact taste of Six Bubbling Thermals’s love.
One tentacle stopped working. Four Warm Currents compensated with the others, shifting weight as another lance of sound missed narrowly to the side. The ice was almost within reach now, cold, scarred, layered with frost. With one final, tendon-snapping surge, Four Warm Currents heaved the coring charge upward, slapping the detonation trigger as it went. The spiked device crunched into the ice and clung. Four Warm Currents tasted something new mixing into the blood, reaching amber tendrils through the leaking blue. Triumph.
“Get out,” Four Warm Currents signed, clumsily, slowly. “It’s too late now.”
The pursuers stared for a moment, adrift, then turned and shot back down the tunnel, howling a sonar warning to the others coming behind. Four Warm Currents’s tentacles were going numb. Every body part ached or seared or felt like it was splitting apart. There would be no high-speed exit down the tunnel. Maybe no exit at all.
As the coring charge signed out its detonation sequence with mechanical tendrils, Four Warm Currents swam, slowly, to the side wall. A deep crevice ran along the length. Maybe deep enough. Four Warm Currents squeezed, twisted, contorted, tucking inside the shelter bit by bit. It was an excruciating fit. Even a child would have preferred a wider fissure. Four Warm Currents’s eyes squeezed shut and saw Six Bubbling Thermals smiling, saw the egg sacs glossy and bright.
The coring charge went off like a volcano erupting. Such devices were designed, in theory, to deliver all but a small fraction of the explosive yield forward. The tiny fraction of blowback was still enough to shatter cracks through the tunnel walls and send a sonic boom rippling down its depth, an expanding globe of boiling water that scalded Four Warm Currents’s exposed skin. The tentacle that hadn’t managed to fit inside was turned to mush in an instant, spewing denatured flesh and blood in a hot cloud. All of Four Warm Currents’s senses sang with the explosion, tasting the fierce chemicals, feeling the heat, seeing with sonar the flayed ice crumbling all around.
Then, at last, it was over. Four Warm Currents slithered out of the crack, sloughing skin on its edges, and drifted slowly upward. It was a maelstrom of shredded ice and swirling gases, bubbles twisting in furious wreaths. Four Warm Currents floated up through the vortex, numb to the stinging debris and swathes of scalding water. The roof of the world was gone, leaving a jagged dark hole in the ice, a void that had been a dream and a nightmare for cycles and cycles. Four Warm Currents rose to it, entranced.
One trembling tentacle reached upward and across the rubicon. The sensation was indescribable. Four Warm Currents pulled the tentacle back, stared with bleary eyes, and found it still intact. The other side was scorching cold, a thousand tingling pinpricks, a gauze of gas like nothing be
low. Nothing Four Warm Currents had ever dreamed or imagined.
The chief engineer bobbed and bled, then finally gathered the strength for one last push, breaking the surface of the water completely. The feel of gas on skin was gasping, shivering. Four Warm Currents craned slowly backward, turning to face the void, and looked up. Another ocean, far deeper and vaster than theirs, but not empty. Not dark. Not at all. Maybe it was a beautiful hallucination, brought about by the creeping failure of sense organs. Maybe it wasn't.
Four Warm Currents watched the new world with eyes and mouth, secreting final messages down into the water, love for Six Bubbling Thermals, for Three Jagged Reefs, for the children who would sign softly but laugh wildly, and then, as numbing darkness began to seep across blurring eyes, under peeling skin, a sole suggestion for a necessary name.
The Souls of Horses
Beth Cato
Ilsa knew the souls of horses, how they twined between her fingers as silky and strong as strands of mane, how even in death they ached to gallop across fields or melt lumps of sugar upon their tongues.
Few men could understand them as she did.
“Sweet Jesus, are those the flying horses?” asked Lieutenant Dennis.
Ilsa granted him a curt nod. Captain Mayfair and more soldiers waited in her house, and she didn’t know what they wanted of her. Only that she must pack her necessities and best tools and leave promptly.
Her barn held a fully assembled flying-horse carousel. A dozen horses dangled from a wooden canopy that could be dismantled to fit in a large wagon. For many years she had traveled summers and worked fairs from Virginia to Connecticut. Cannon fire at Fort Sumter had ended that.
“Pardon my blasphemy, ma’am. I’ve never seen the like before. Is it steam-run?”
“Yes.” She eyed the Confederate officer. He couldn’t be older than twenty. His gray uniform draped from his reedy frame.
He frowned as he circled a piebald Arabian mix. “Why carousel horses? Why would dying horses even want this … existence?”
“The Captain said you were a cavalry unit, correct? I assume you know horses well?”
“Yes, ma’am. My mama had me on a horse when I could scarcely walk, and my father breeds racing stock.”
Ilsa had no desire to get chatty with a soldier, much less one who intended to drag her from her home, but this was a horseman. “Then you understand that horses know what they want. Like a person, they hate some tasks and love others. These horses love people, being ridden, and don’t want to lose that joy. I show them what awaits, and they make this choice.”
“They really have a choice?”
She stiffened. “Of course. An unwilling soul can’t be bound. A horse might lose its body, but it doesn’t lose its kick.”
“If they are a different sort of horse, one that wouldn’t like a carousel, what happens?”
“They float away.” She left it at that.
Her papa had been a transferor, too. He had staunchly believed that since a dying horse’s soul drifted upward, it must travel to heaven. When Ilsa was a child first witnessing those tendrils of escaping souls, such a thought had been of great comfort and joy.
It had been a long time since she was a child.
Ilsa rested her hand against the smooth paint of a mare’s neck. Beneath her touch, the soul stirred. The mare was strong, even after death; Ilsa needed that same resilience.
The officer darted out a hand to touch the mare’s blaze. Astonishment brightened his face. “It … quivered?”
Lieutenant Dennis was a special sort of horseman to sense that. “Souls can only inhabit something that once carried life. Wood works well. The carousel grants them some locomotion, too. They miss the ability to move.”
“I’m glad this horse can move then, be happy. What about that horse figure in the house, ma’am? That one—I stared at it, and it stared straight back. Gave me chills. That horse wasn’t the sort for a carousel?”
“No. Some aren’t content to spin in circles. Bucephalus … he’s the kind of horse who would unlatch his stall and that of every other horse in the barn, and kick his heels like a colt afterward.”
Lieutenant Dennis burst out laughing. “I’ve known the very sort, ma’am. He’s named after Alexander the Great’s warhorse?”
“The same.”
“We could use more horses like old Alexander’s.” His expression sobered as he looked to his pocket watch. “We must go, ma’am. The Captain’s waiting.”
Ilsa looked to her tools again, remembering why she was there, who she was with. She hefted a skew gouger in her palm, the handle’s patina dark. These tools had been brand-new when she bought them in New York City twenty years before. They had aged with more grace than her.
She found Captain Mayfair in her parlor. He scowled and motioned her to the door. She looked to her mantle.
Bucephalus was carved in pale butternut and no larger than a grown man’s hand. Three hooves were grounded, the muscles of his hindquarters tensed as if ready to rear. Ilsa wanted to plead for a few moments of privacy with her horse, to say farewell, but she had no desire to show any weakness to these men.
She turned away and blinked back tears to find Captain Mayfair gazing past her to Bucephalus, his grizzled features softened with wonder.
* * *
They arrived at the encampment of the newly formed Confederate Independent Provisional Cavalry, and Ilsa was escorted straight to a makeshift foundry. Men talked in the shadows, metal clanging, their furnaces like blood aglow in the weak evening light.
“Captain Mayfair, why am I here? You do know I can’t transfer into metal?”
“Yes.”
Ilsa opened her mouth to scold him, to demand answers as they entered a dim room. Light slanted down from a high window, as if in a cathedral, and illuminated a gleaming horse. She gasped.
Silver skin flowed with the ripple of muscles, highlighting an arched neck and strong hindquarters. It stood fifteen hands tall, the same as an average horse. Black orbs for eyes had the dull sheen of rocks worn smooth in a river. This was no crude machine. It was a sculpture, a masterpiece.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“The auquine, the automatic horse,” said Captain Mayfair. Lieutenant Dennis stood beside him. “This is our prototype. Steam-run in part, but requires the motivation of a soul.”
“I already told you, I cannot—”
“You will carve the wooden heart. Its nervous system consists of vine coated with gutta-percha. The soul will have room to expand, control the limbs.”
Ilsa knew the relentless, unfilled ache to truly move that irritated every horse bound to the carousel. “The engine and soul together. It could work.”
Bucephalus would love such a body, but he’s no warhorse, nor could I steal a creation like this. There would be no way to keep such a thing a secret.
Dennis cleared his throat. “It has worked, ma’am, in Britain. They’re readying cavalry units for India.”
“People with your skills are scarce, Mrs. Klein,” said Captain Mayfair. “We’re in dire need of horses.”
She looked between the metal horse and the soldiers. A horse’s soul—one suited to be a warhorse—would delight in this new form, so much closer to its original. She touched the metal neck, almost expecting the lurch of life that pulsed within her own carvings. “Who made this?”
“Culver,” said Captain Mayfair.
She wondered if she should recognize the name, but a shadow shifted behind the horse, and she realized it had been a summons.
The Negro looked of age with her, his white hair bound in a queue at his neck. He was clean-shaven, his clothes tidy despite their extreme wear.
“Culver’s from my father’s plantation. No one knows horses and metal like him,” said Lieutenant Dennis with obvious pride.
“Impressive,” Ilsa murmured. Impressive that a slave had been granted such a role in this army.
“Master Dennis.” Culver bowed, the motion slow and
heavy like an old oak bent by a fierce wind.
“Sir! Captain Mayfair!” Another soldier strode in. “An urgent telegraph from General Lee, sir.”
“Culver will show you how the auquine works, Mrs. Klein.” Captain Mayfair exited. With a bright smile for both her and Culver, Lieutenant Dennis departed as well.
Ilsa considered the craftsman. “Is everyone in the forge working on these … auquines?”
“Yes’m. This’s the first one done, ’bout twenty more juss ’bout there, and salvage aplenty for makin’ more.”
Her hands traced the seams of metal, the large eyes. “You modeled this on a Morgan.”
“Y’know your horses, missus.”
Her voice lowered. “Metal is soulless, dead, but this—this works. You know horses’ souls.”
“Slave’s not supposed to know ’bout such things, missus.”
“Neither are women.”
“God’s truth, missus.”
“How do you open up the horse?”
Culver crouched down. His leg wobbled, and he landed on all fours with a grunt.
“Are you well?” Ilsa lay a hand on his shoulder. Through the worn fabric, she felt the ridged scars of the lash—layers, mottled like cold candle wax.
Equine memories flashed in her mind. Agonized neighs. The fall of the whip, the fierce sting, the heat of weeping blood.
“I’m sorry,” she said, recoiling, and knew he wouldn’t grasp the full meaning.
“Body don’t work like it used to.” He trembled as he leaned on the auquine.
She shivered, too, willing away the shadowed pain of other souls. Culver was property, same as a horse.
Ilsa made herself focus on the task at hand as he opened a hatch in the auquine’s chest to show her the fundamentals of its design.
Lieutenant Dennis beamed with pride as he reentered the room. “The auquine’s a beauty, isn’t he?”
She liked the boy, his enthusiasm for horses. He’s of attitude and age to be my son. The thought provoked a twinge of grief that hadn’t stirred in years.
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