The Atomic Sea

by Jack Conner

  “We may have to set down amongst them,” Layanna said.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Avery said. “Hopefully our fuel will last.”

  “Last till when?” Hildra said.

  Avery sensed it before he saw it, the roar and susurrus of water. And even, from up here, the stink of brine. The others noticed it, too, and they all rushed to the bow.

  The cavern they were passing through had opened out and become enormously tall and wide, almost so wide that it was like being outdoors. Below them the land terminated at a rocky shore extending left and right as far as they could see, and ahead stretched a vast black body of water.

  “A sea,” Avery muttered. “An underground sea.”

  Far above the water, what seemed like perhaps a mile, a shaft of sunlight lanced in through a thin crack in the cavern ceiling. The shaft beamed down past massive stalactites about which flittered dark shapes that might be giant batkin or slug-like flails, beamed down through air so black that the light only seemed to illuminate how dark it truly was, down onto the slowly surging sea below. White caps denoted waves, turgid, lazy waves that rolled back and forth, sometimes smashing with languid force against rearing stone towers that must be ancient stalagmites from before this area was flooded. Ghostly wisps of fog curled above the waves, coiled about the stalagmites and then pressed on, moving with mysterious purpose. A huge white shape breached the black water far out, let out a strange moan, then sounded.

  Avery stared. The others made sounds of awe.

  The ship sailed through the air over the water, below the huge stalactites that hung down like the fangs of gods. Avery felt their weight hovering over him, immense and deadly. The muddy nests of flails studded some of them, and the sticky, winged slug-things could occasionally be seen sweeping over the misty water or sucking slime off a jutting stalagmite.

  The ship passed through drooping bulwarks of minerals, and Avery felt small and puny, aware of just how insignificant the ship was over such a sea. The waterway wound along a huge cavern, then hit another. Avery supposed a whole system of great caverns must enclose the sea.

  “At least it’s not the Atomic,” he said, the wheel gripped tightly in his hands.

  Janx grunted. “Ain’t that the truth. Don’t have to worry about gettin’ hit by lightning. No environment suits. Shit, you could take a swim if ya wanted.”

  “Have at it,” Hildra said.

  Bubbles ripped the surface of the water, and Avery saw a huge steaming burst of air belch from the sea. The gas, methane possibly, drifted up and up to lodge against the ceiling overhead. He saw other bubbles, too, spaced out over the water. There could be whole clouds of trapped gas over the sea, slithering among the stalactites. Possibly volatile gas.

  For a moment he feared that the dirigible’s flame might ignite the vapor, but the flame was well enclosed. However, if someone lit a match ...

  “No cigarettes,” Avery warned, then, to Janx: “Or cigars.”

  Avery felt as if he was in some primordial time, perhaps back when the giant bugs known as Carathids lumbered across the land and filled the skies with their incessant buzzing; even the atmosphere felt different. And all the while the dirigible sank lower ... and lower ...

  At last it skimmed above the water, and Avery recoiled at the thought of setting down. The dirigible might float, but—

  “I hear something,” Hildra said.

  “What?” said Avery.

  Her expression was puzzled. “I don’t know. Just a general ... humming.”

  Frowning, Avery guided the ship through up-thrusting spires of rock while Hildra stood at the bow and used a pole to shove them off any stalagmites that drew too close. Avery could smell their mineral reek, the odor of copper and iron and ozone and stone. The air grew colder, and when the fog caressed his skin he found it oily and unpleasant.

  Shortly he heard sounds. At first he perceived the sounds collectively as a sort of hum, a background noise, oddly familiar. Then, as they grew louder, he began to break the sounds down into their component parts. A clanging here, a squeal there ...

  They came upon it with unexpected speed. It rose out of the mist like a mountain. Like a range of mountains. The mist seemed to roll away from the dirigible, clear from it for just a brief moment, and in that moment Avery felt his jaw drop open.

  Ahead, beyond a rocky beach, huge towers rose high, strange and humped—and many. One after another, great spires hunched and thrust toward the cavern ceiling, some even seeming to merge with massive stalactites hanging down. A layer of mist—no, cloud—stirred against the ceiling between the giant stalactites, and to Avery’s shock he saw what looked like precipitation falling onto the city below. Those towers were buildings. Lights blazed in a thousand windows—ten thousand. Bridges spanned the airy gaps between structures, and figures shuffled across the bridges bearing torches and lanterns which shone even over the mist-filled sea.

  All at once the strange hum Avery had heard, and the clangs, and screeches, and the rest, all resolved itself into an unmistakable noise—the noise of a city.

  “Gods below,” said Janx.

  “Cuithril,” Layanna said.

  “Are you certain?” Avery asked.

  “Yes. I can feel the altar. We’re here at last.”

  Chapter 21

  “Just in time,” Janx said, his eyes on a light blinking from the console. “We were about to have to start using this heap as a boat. Get ready to set down.”

  “The locals may not be friendly,” Hildra said.

  “At least they’re civilized,” Layanna said. “Unlike the ferals we’ve been seeing.”

  Avery lowered the dirigible toward the shore, not that it needed much lowering. Vast docks crawled along the beach of the metropolis, heaped and shambling. Small wooden towers blinked lights out over the harbor. Numerous boats plied the harbor’s black waters, the activity clearing some of the mist. Hunched forms carried nets and poles. Fishermen. Avery realized he and the others must have passed over boats on the water without even realizing it.

  Avery set them down on the rocky ground just past the docks, with a groan and a jar that nearly pitched him off his feet. He climbed out and shook his head.

  The stench of fish was everywhere as fishermen hauled in their catches, some still squirming in their nets. The fishes’ sides flashed and glinted by the light of torches mounted on regularly-spaced poles. Some were not normal fish but held interesting deformities, spines adorning fins, tongues growing out of gills. Avery didn’t have time to study them, though. Janx, veteran of the wharfs of the world, shoved the way before them and barked for the others to follow at his heels.

  The fishermen were mutants, of course. Infected. Or at least the progeny of infected people. Avery had noticed it without surprise, but now he saw specific details; a scar bisecting a set of pulsing gills, still glistening; a bulging red-shot eye, a fishy mouth whose slashed lip oozed pus; catfish-like whiskers.

  “A city of mutants,” Avery marveled.

  The mutants eyed Avery and the others doubtfully. He knew his little band didn’t look normal to them, or whatever passed for normal around here. However, there was enough variety among the mutants around him—indeed some looked more human than not—that he hoped their physical appearances would escape suspicion. Or perhaps it had been their method of arrival that drew the attention. There was a lot of activity along the docks, though, and dirigibles were apparently not unheard-of, for the people here only took passing notice before going back to their business.

  A mutant emerged from the throng and stepped in their path. He was tall and broad, covered in scales, and when he opened his mouth he revealed jagged needle-like teeth. Coal-black eyes with no whites whatsoever glared at Janx in the lead.

  “Ti gunth ir ablun se cun gana?” the creature barked, his hands tightening on the length of pipe he carried. Two thug-like specimens that seemed to be his mates hovered at his back, tense and ready with the rusty chains they carried a
t their sides. One boasted spikes and barbs, the other heavy blunt objects, oversized nuts and bolts.

  “What the hell’d he say?” Hildra said.

  Avery was trying to decipher that, as well. As best he could tell, the creature spoke some degraded and likely ancient form of Ungraessotti. Translating it to himself, he said, “I believe he wants us to state our business.”

  “Suyen!” ordered the creature with the black eyes. He was growing visibly agitated. “Suven un grata!”

  Avery was mustering his Ungraessotti together for a reply when Janx spoke up.

  “We’re here on our own business,” the whaler said. He spoke, clearly and levelly, in modern Ungraessotti .

  “Where are you from?” the dock creature responded in the same tongue as before. His voice was thick and watery, his dialect strange, but after struggling with it Avery began to pick up his words. The creature evidently understood Janx just fine.

  “Like I said, that’s our business,” the whaler said.

  “I must report you.”

  “No. You don’t.” Janx clapped a huge hand on his shoulder, and the creature raised his pipe. Janx squeezed, just a little. “Not so fast. See, we’re on your side.”

  “How’s that? You’re foreign, maybe hostile. From Castursab for all I know. Whatever you’re about can’t be approved by the Great One.”

  “What I’m here for is to make you rich, my good man.” Janx gestured back the way they’d come, toward the dirigible. “See that? That’s yours if you can answer one question the way I want it.”

  The fish-man studied the ship, and his eyes widened. “Is that ... a ship of a God-Emperor?”

  “It is indeed. Now the question: what place is this?”

  The man looked at him as if he were an idiot. “This is Cuithril.”

  Janx turned to Avery and the others and muttered, “Had to be sure.” To the mutant, he said, “The ship is yours.”

  The infected man cast a nervous look back at his thugs, perhaps wondering how much of a cut they would demand. At last he told Janx, “You’ve got a deal.”

  Janx grabbed his hand and pumped it, then, without giving the others time to object, he ushered them quickly past the docks.

  “Nicely done,” Hildra said.

  “Bribery works on every dock I’ve ever been on.”

  Avery was hardly listening. “We’re here,” he said. “We’re finally here.” It seemed as they had been traveling toward Cuithril forever.

  “Now all we have to do is locate the altar,” Layanna said.

  Their feet found a road and took it. Reeking mutants flooded all about them, jostling and lurching, hooting and squelching. Avery had never been in so alien a place, never seen so many wild mutations. Generally he was used to seeing a certain mutant trend in an individual—a resemblance to a certain sort of fish, say—or squid, or crab, or what-have-you. Here he saw mutation stacked on mutation, a jellyfish creature with crab-like legs, a man with the hide of a stingray but the mouth of a barracuda and the eyes of a dolphin, a beautiful woman with the coloring of an angelfish but the lower limbs of an octopus.

  “Amazing,” Hildra said.

  They moved on, and towers rose to either side of them. Avery felt the coldness of their shadows, felt their immense weight looming over him, ready to fall, to crush him. And the towers themselves were amazing. Some looked like coral monoliths. Many had been hewn out of massive stalagmites hundreds of feet high. Doorways and spiraling stairs dotted their surfaces. They were grand, monolithic structures, their windows winking, their facades shaped into great, fishy faces or fantastic forms, with windows and doors for eyes and mouths. Huge bridges arched from one stalagmite spire to another. Other buildings had been cobbled together from immense stones, or erected from what looked like mud, or junkyard debris, or both, held together with wire and great rusty metal bands. Some listed and sagged. Ragged tenements clustered, rickety lean-to’s flowering from the sides of tipping buildings, tacked-on structures winding hither and yon. Avery received the impression of beehives, of honeycombs. There were ghettos, even in the afterlife.

  And more. Much more. Palaces and mansions crowned stalagmite mountains, which seemed to have been hollowed out. Greenish light flooded from yawning doorways that would have dwarfed most houses back home. Even more impressive, Avery saw what looked like beautiful manses depending from the ceiling what seemed a mile or more overhead, carved out of stalactites. Their downward-facing domes glinted with crystal facets, and Avery saw strange lights flashing in the buildings’ interiors, bathing their domes in surreal illumination.

  And all around him mutants thronged and called to each other. One brushed up against him, and he felt for his wallet. Still there. The heady reek of fish and sea creatures filled his nose.

  Deep gorges spilled down into valleys, then plunged into terrifying abysses. Shadowy structures struggled up low ridges. Great hills bristled with monolithic towers. It truly was a vast cavern the city occupied, or perhaps caverns. Mist pattered on him from above, and looking up he saw vapor roiling against the ceiling—clouds. Would there be lightning, too?

  Barking vendors displayed cuts of meat that at first looked appetizing. Then Avery saw fingers, toes, identifiable arms, trays full of human or human-like eyeballs ...

  Starting, he saw a group of mutants in chains being whipped before an armored crew, whips and guns in hand. Some of the captives were children. One especially large taskmaster slashed his whip across the chained mutants’ backs, and they groaned and pulled forward. Avery and the others had passed into a ravine, and Avery saw other groups of what must be slaves being herded in and out of dark caves.

  “Cannibals and slave-owners,” Hildra said. “It just gets better.”

  Avery noted the naked, scarred and ragged state of the captives and said, “The slaves seem to be the ones we’ve been calling ferals. I would bet that these so-called civilized mutants hunt and round up the feral ones for use as labor and ... whatever else.” He didn’t like to think on what that would be, but it wasn’t hard to guess.

  Shadowy figures stirred to either side of the little valley, and Avery felt queasy at the way their eyes glinted. More and more he became conscious of the great buildings looming above him. He continued seeing activity above, figures stirring on the levels and tiers and the bridges that spanned misty gaps from tower to tower. Lights and music and activity. Things that might be restaurants or bars. Apartment buildings. Hotels. Offices. And more and more he came to regard his fellow wanderers of the streets as rough-looking and dangerous.

  “I think we’re in the wrong place,” he said.

  Janx and Hildra had pressed close together. The big man looked tense, and Hildra had her hook half raised. Thugs with glowing alchemical tattoos had drawn near.

  Layanna pointed to a ramp. “I suggest we go up.”

  Soon they realized that the city was a vertical one, and that much if not most of its commerce and activity took place high above the dark and deadly streets, with their slave pens and ghettos and diseased food and worse. Above, fresher-smelling food sent sweet smells to entice Avery’s nose, and festive music poured out of cantinas bored into stalagmites or junkheap structures bound together by wire and luck. More healthy and reputable-looking mutants thronged about him, passing from tower to tower over wide bridges, gracefully moving about the great stalagmites via ramps and scaffolds and ropes and ladders. The further up Avery went, the darker and more dismal the winding ways below seemed.

  Just as he was about to investigate a restaurant, curious as to whether they would accept the few coins he had left, the drumming began.

  Deep, throbbing drum rolls erupted from somewhere in the heart of the city.

  Avery jerked to a stop and snapped his head up. Janx and Hildra did likewise. Hildebrand shrieked. Layanna only frowned. Around them, the citizens of Cuithril paused in their actions, looking toward the source of the noise. It rolled on and on, boom boom boom, rhythmic and awful.

  Then, as
one, the people stopped what they were doing—and moved toward it. They picked their way in the direction of the drums.

  Avery exchanged glances with the others.

  Janx grinned nastily and waved a hand as though he were a waiter seating an honored guest.

  “After you,” he said.

  * * *

  “I’m really not sure we should be doing this,” Avery said as they followed the throngs of mutants that crossed dizzy gulfs and scrambled around rusty spires, making for the center of the city. “I think our primary goal should be to find the temple.”

  “The drumming probably comes from the temple,” Layanna said.

  That was true, Avery realized, falling quiet as they made their way toward the sound. He held his breath as they crossed rickety bridges, and though he tried not to look down into the black gulfs, he couldn’t help it. At the sight of dark canyons stretching away under his feet seemingly without limit—and perhaps they had none; there seemed to be a sort of chasm below—his stomach seized into a knot, and bile burned the back of his throat.

  All around and in every direction mutants swarmed through the city, making toward the drumming, which still rolled, slow and rhythmic, summoning the denizens of this black place to some event Avery couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to. The entire city had simply dropped what they were doing to attend. Some citizens looked eager, some blank, some fearful.

  Avery swallowed and forced himself on. The drumming surrounded him.

  At last they reached it. He pressed into the backs of those who had already arrived and nearly received an elbow in the face. Confusion reigned as the city-dwellers spread out, above and below, straining toward the platforms’ railings and ropes, trying to get a better view. Infants perched on fathers’ shoulders, and those behind them threatened the fathers. Scuffles ensued. With Janx shoving a path clear, Avery, Hildra and Layanna made their way and eventually found a position a few levels up from the one they had started on, pressed up against a fraying rope that served as barrier between the creaking wood platform and the empty air beyond. Around them mutants pushed and cursed, and Avery had to struggle not to be thrown off.