by Anthony Huso
Those that surrendered or welcomed the police as saviors were stabbed with bulbous hypodermics and popped with enough arcane demulcent to cure a horse. Most were summarily herded into steam-driven wagons that sputtered in the rear. If they survived the treatment and whatever sentence awaited them at West Gate, they would be released into the populace again.
Anyone found with an advanced case of the nameless malady was ushered into quarantine wagons already packed with mounds of ulcerated flesh.
The sick were driven off by men in long red trenches and insectile masks with iridescent eyes. Though they seemed to head toward Tin Crow and the dubious resources of Bloodsump Lane, many of the inhabitants of Ghoul Court were lost even by the press. It was easy for them to simply disappear.
Gleaming copper canisters that sloshed with acid burdened the backs of enormous men who pumped liquid fire from their wands. The stones and bricks, the very masonry seemed to burn.
Men and women in rags erupted from the drains, dislodging dozens of thick metal lids. A grisly but euphoric effluence, like a cadence of champagne bottles. They clambered out of sewers and tunnels made for gas lines. They danced ferociously on cobblestones that their bodies quickly irrigated with endless rivulets of blood.
Their weapons were rude and freakish. Built of twisted nails that leapt from boards and crudely welded pipe. The reflective pink and amber orbs of their sunken eyes flared with intractable hatred—organic mirrors of the gas mask eyelets that floated in the haze while subhuman bodies were bludgeoned to the ground.
But Ghoul Court’s militia was not composed of the man-things that had besieged the opera. They were mere half-things, crawlers. They were the shadow populace, come to defend whatever clandestine monstrosity governed them from below.
The knights surged in and mowed them down.
Great crowds of bodies went up in sudden flame. Yellow entrails and barely human organs splattered the streets. The stench of opened bodies and vomit ricocheted off grisly slippery stone.
Disinfectant fog shrouded everything in gray.
Fulgurant, emerald-bellied crossbows twittered in the alleys and polluted lanes.
The watch was organized and determined. They encircled their prey with sharp-edged formations, whipped them and drove them and beat them down.
Shackles came out, snapped over ankles and wrists. Dozens were led away.
But the government did not have an easy time.
One unit was overwhelmed. It disappeared under leaping, peculiar forms and arcing lead pipes lined with metal spines.
By the time two knights and a second unit came to the rescue there was nothing left to save.
Another knight was overwhelmed, cut off from his unit and ambushed in the hollow of a barbershop.
Exultant for a few minutes, the creatures tore off his armor and dragged his body through the streets. But their celebration was brief and costly and their defeat guaranteed.
With wrath kindled by the sight of a fallen knight, the watch charged, canisters of acid spreading a strangely ebullient conflagration across bricks and flesh.
In the end, the watch won.
Men and women in uniform heaved the charred remains, took them by the wrists and ankles and swung then onto rising gruesome piles.
Caliph (as usual) had been precise.
Every stone was overturned, every building searched. Ghoul Court would be remade—from scratch.
When Caliph got the report on the sixth, he was horrified. The top page had an antiseptic whiteness with several objectives typed and centered. All were labeled: complete.
It has to work, he thought as he read the report. My plan has to work. If it doesn’t . . . if all of this is for nothing . . . He shook his head. I suppose I’ll be paying another visit to Hazel Nantallium, taking her up on her offer. But now that things were in motion, he wondered if all the votives in Hullmallow Cathedral could save his soul.
CHAPTER 33
Caliph woke from a terrible dream that he couldn’t remember. The report rested on a chair near the bed. It had settled in disarray like a white bird that had struck a windowpane.
There was little time to regret or even think about the day before.
Information had leaked that an Iscan zeppelin had crashed near Bittern Moor along the White Leech—territory now controlled by Saergaeth. It was a massive supply ship called the Orison.
In addition to food, medicine and military correspondence, the Orison had carried weapons. Gas bows, chemiostatic swords and other controlled munitions. Potentially as bad as the loss of troop locations and timetables, government sources had muttered that undisclosed highly sensitive technology had also been on board.
The papers were quick to black extras with headlines that read, ISCAN DISASTER MAY BE WATERSHED FOR MISKATOLL. And: HOW BAD IS IT? ISCAN WAR SECRETS IN SAERGAETH’S HANDS. The news was so stunning that the previous day’s events in Ghoul Court were mostly overshadowed.
CREW OF FIFTY FEARED DEAD AFTER ZEPPELIN GOES DOWN!
Family members of the missing airmen were rounded up and taken to a secluded government estate in Octul Box where they awaited further developments.
By late afternoon, commanders of small arrowy spy dirigibles confirmed that despite the crash’s proximity to Fallow Down, light war engines marked with burgundy emblems had already converged.
Apparently Saergaeth had no fear of the haunted wasteland of Fallow Down. Conspiracy theorists were already speculating that the two disasters were somehow linked.
Saergaeth had an array of sky sharks patrolling the region within hours. The prospect of several tons of food alone would have been sufficient to catch Saergaeth’s attention. Yrisl guessed his troops were being fed from supplies seized at sea before the Iscan dreadnought and her escorts had plowed north to guard Tentinil’s harbors.
Like a beached whale, the downed leviathan was to the rebellion as a carcass laid before the happy bewilderment of gulls and crabs.
Saergaeth’s troops were giddy.
Spies brought Caliph the details: Saergaeth’s soldiers poking gingerly through the wreckage, looking for booby traps. There were corpses strewn everywhere. Blackened and burnt or terribly marked with posthumous bruising.
But nothing sprang from the shredded compartments. No hideous automatons or holomorphic hexes triggered when grunts lifted timbers or huge sections of the punctured gasbag’s drapery of skin.
The booty was tremendous.
Saergaeth’s ranking officer found the schematics, the charts and battlefield maps. Caliph’s spies confirmed that Saergaeth would have the locations of troops hidden in the hills east of Forgin’s Keep. On top of this, there were two dozen chemiostatic swords, fifty gas-powered crossbows, five suits of chortium armor and a coffer containing a dozen trade bars in gold.
And then there was the massive reinforced tank covered with pipes and chugging engines that still hummed despite the zeppelin’s violent landing. A circular door, sealed with a great wheel at its center, capped one end of the vaguely cylindrical tank.
When the troops opened it, their astonishment distilled from silence. Drooling icy vapor trickled from its frosty mouth across the tilted floor.
Inside was surreal bounty.
On great hooks, fifty enormous bulbs of unidentifiable meat depended, each several times the size of an entire cow.
A soldier stepped forward and stabbed at one with his sword but the frozen carcass was like granite. His powerful thrust wasn’t even enough to set the obscene hunk of flesh swinging.
There didn’t seem to be many bones. It was all meat. Enough meat, in fact, to feed a huge amount of men. Besides the protein there were bags of flour and canned goods. Pearlums and beans and salted corn.
Lastly, in a vault, were the glass tubes flanged in bolted metal, glowing peculiar hues of purple, electric-pink and blue and other colors impossible to name. They shimmered in the vault like baroque jewels.
One of the sky sharks was signaled down. It dropped tethers and
an army of men strained to secure it along the river’s edge.
It took four hours to load all the new cargo into the belly of a ship no longer designed to ferry supplies.
The sky shark had been outfitted like the rest of Saergaeth’s fleet with turrets and ballistae and racks of aerosol bombs.
In order to fit the huge tank of meat, they had to shuttle some of the zeppelin’s munitions into the already cramped war engines chugging nearby.
The two-hundred glowing canisters were left strapped in their vault. The entire closet-sized room was then winched on a crane that extended off one of the engine’s scorpion-like tails and hoisted into the zeppelin’s hold.
Finally, just as night was falling, the sky shark revved its engines and headed into the deadened sky.
When Caliph got the news, he left Isca in the Byun-Ghala, escorted by several zeppelins that emerged like underwater creatures from the steel corrals of Malgôr Hangar. Dark spiny puffers floating out of candent holes, they pummeled the other side of day with their engines, left bands of soot and crossed the enormous double wall of the Hold, motoring into jellied air above the High King’s Moor.
Thick amoeboid clouds clotted the night. The glitter of crofts and villages flecked an indistinct and inky landscape several thousand feet below.
Though they were stocked with epicurean delights, Caliph left the warmth of his staterooms for the chilly observation deck.
He smelled fresh vapors shredding against the propellers. Cold spongy space smacked the deck beneath the airship’s turgid skin.
He had so much to think about that, for a little while, his course into darkness felt almost like escape. He soaked in the clammy wind.
With this small fleet, he had come to personally oversee the transfer of several unexpected prisoners of war. Taken in a recent skirmish west of Clefthollow and held in tiny cells, they had been confined for nearly a day aboard the same spy dirigible that had sent Caliph word of the Orison’s crash.
Thirty miles outside of Isca the rendezvous was about to happen in the dark, like insects coupling on the fly.
Caliph heard the engines shift; strange, auxiliary sounds reverberating through the zeppelin.
He braced himself against the rail as green lights skeletonized the dart-like shadow of some frail craft that had risen through the gloom and materialized above the deck. Like photophores on a deep-sea fish, the luminaries glistered and burned through the ether.
The spy dirigible’s slender frame slid knife-like into a mooring socket on the Precursor, one of the Byun-Ghala’s more heavily armed escorts.
Caliph had insisted on being present. After all, he knew one of the prisoners.
He smiled without mirth or patience.
Just about everyone in Stonehold it seemed had become a traitor.
Alani was blind.
Occasionally he squirmed in the tight darkness. His cramped, slippery prison had no door. His body ached.
Despite such constraints and a pair of stiff, ponderous gloves, he manipulated a slender humming device.
He twisted violently but it was no use.
He could taste his own breath against invisible glass, less than an inch ahead of his face. Like a fetus clutching its placenta he curled over a bulky bag that pressed his gut.
Swallowing fear he tried again but the slick, coriaceous walls held him fast.
He bowed his back and heaved left, thrusting with his legs. The pressure on his shoulder caused the socket buried beneath his deltoid to dislocate with a sick, internal pop.
He wrangled like something broken in the dark and managed to adjust, gain adequate leverage and proceed.
The object in his hand scraped against the wall. It still hummed and now shed a subtle light, stirring faint maroon patterns in the glass across his face.
Powered by a holomorphic tube, the instrument’s calescent edge shivered with a sonic whine. It bit the wall like a scalpel working in hard rubber.
Alani clenched his teeth against the pain and pushed with his legs, trying to stretch the compartment. Nothing moved.
The instrument grew hot even through his insulated gloves.
He had to get out. He could feel the plangent reverb of the airship’s engines slowing down.
He carved furiously at the wall.
A slit began to open in the thick hard blackness. He pushed with all his might. The wall began to give.
With three additional minutes of surgery and two more ferocious attempts, it finally broke. The crack stretched then tore along a fibrous grain, ripping apart like wood.
Alani fell out onto a hard metal floor covered with lumpy, bloody frost.
Above him hung a ruptured, hollow bulb of meat.
His metal helmet was caked with crimson ice. Rubber hoses trailed back into the carcass like umbilici. They breached the meat’s upper girth where pipe had once taken the place of a trachea, poking through just below the hook where hidden stitches sealed the point of Alani’s nightmarish insertion.
Chemiostatic coils warmed air in the helmet’s breathing apparatus.
His thick white suit was smeared and filthy. Braided wires webbed the chest, legs, feet and hands, coursing with inward warmth. Although very little heat escaped, the cavity inside the meat had indeed begun to thaw.
Alani discarded the gloves and peeled off the heavy jacket that buttoned up his side. The bag he had been clutching unrolled across the floor, revealing an assortment of tools in sparkling green beneath the beam of a fresh chemiostatic torch.
CHAPTER 34
Sena hits early snow in the mountains. She isn’t ready for the cold. It takes her breath, forces her into a substandard inn at Mossloch. In the morning, she watches helplessly as the sizable flakes come down.
What am I going to do?
She is almost out of money. The pass is choked with snow. She wipes tears with the black ruffle of her sleeve, leaves the inn, trudges north. She feels worse than miserable. She feels contemptible, despicable and vile.
It has been a long time since she cried. Normally she would try to stifle it, hold it in her throat like bile but today she does not care. She walks down the mountain, beaten and blubbering.
Bilious, dissimilar voices whisper in her head. Her vision blurs. The heavy book in her pack feels like solid stone.
For several hours she doesn’t have a plan.
She walks to Isca.
From West Gate, she follows Kink Street out of Gunnymead Square. The cotters have begun dragging in the grain tax and corpulent scurrying things shit and crawl and fuck contentedly between unattended sacks of barley and rye. A carriage driver takes pity on her and offers her a ride. He doesn’t recognize her. He is headed home, he says, and will drop her off along the way. She accepts though she doesn’t have a clue where she is going.
The driver leaves Three Cats on Sedge Way, turning north at Cripple Gate onto Isca Road. They trundle over streetcar rails into South Fell, rolling through the shadows of the Bîndsh Ruins which have long been gated up but still offer weekend tours.
In Thief Town, sea-weathered towers thrust gray stoic forms above narrow ticking streets. Sena gets out and wanders aimlessly through the tepid late-afternoon air. From the mountain pass to the valley floor, she thinks the temperature difference must be at least fifty degrees.
She heads west, muddles back into South Fell where six stories of barred windows cast block-long shadows off the edifice of Teapetal Wax. She wears her hood up for disguise, but in the ebbing light her identity is already totally diffused.
Vague human shadows inside lamp-lit shops haggle over the last transactions of the day. Clustered vertical meadows of leaded glass ripple with autumn-colored light.
Reluctant but resolved, she hurries out of South Fell into Blkton, up through fading blossomed lanes.
The smoky light of the markets dissipates before her eyes as she travels quickly through the sparsely peopled blocks near Gilnaroth and into the Hold.
The castle gates will close at
dusk. A sign of urgency: above the darkened rooftops the ancient mill has locked its sails for the day.
Although factories in Bilgeburg produce great dusty piles of flour and cereal, people who imagine themselves coinsurers spend stacks of extra money in the castle mill on flavored germades, coffee beans and jam.
Sena darts through the cobbled twilight, under chimney pots spewing madder-tinted air; their pleasant-smelling smut mixes with the warm fermenting odors of dwindling summer. Autumn smells are taking over: leather and shoe polish and chemical laundries that froth through vented pipes into the cold.
Just before the sun vanishes, she arrives.
Somehow it has snuck up on her and, for a moment, her determination falters.
In the last rays, the castle stones are orange. Long blue shadows, like banners, fall between the gates. Across the drawbridge, sparkling suits of armor shuffle in the gloom.
She bites her lip, clenches her nails into her palms and takes a final breath.
She storms the gate.
At first, the soldiers do not see her coming. They are mumbling over the smell of the moat, restless with the season. They scrape around their posts.
When she is halfway across, she sees them notice. They nudge each other. There are six of them and one of her but her title must still echo in their minds. The sight of her seems to freeze them.
Like the sun’s last ember trickling into dusk’s ash pan, she comes out of the slanting rays.
She crosses the bridge as orange light fades from the towers in an orchestrated west to east sequence. The sentries’ boots dull with cold; their ceremonial breastplates turn to tin. In her wake, the colorless ebb of day settles over the city. The sentries do not speak.
Sena levels her eyes and marches past.
She takes a carriage to the keep, dashes up the steps and into the foyer. Her feet echo down the hall, up more stairs, pulling a breeze with her that moves the tapestries.
