Infernal Machines

by Jacobs, John Hornor

  Eleven, all told, and one at the head of the party approached. Looking at them, I realised how ridiculous the name stretcher was. Our mortal way of belittling something beyond our comprehension. I felt ashamed, then, that it had ever fallen from my tongue.

  ‘Thou hast returned,’ she said in an antique and formal common speech. ‘It has been many years.’

  Fisk said, ‘We have never been here before.’

  ‘Ah,’ the vaettir said. It was such a human sound – a pause, vocalised. Nothing you’d expect from beings so otherworldly. ‘Thou seemest so familiar,’ she said.

  ‘You have met our kind before?’ Livia asked.

  The vaettir slowly turned her head to consider Livia. ‘Of course. How else would we know this rough speech?’ She placed her hand slowly on the hilt of her greatsword and turned her head up and away from where we stood. For a long moment, she remained still. ‘Hast thou brought us steel?’

  Fisk blanched. ‘Steel? We—’ He paused, glanced at Sapientia.

  She shrugged and mouthed the Typhon.

  ‘Yes. We have brought steel and other metals,’ Fisk said.

  ‘This news is well met,’ she said. She turned about, looking at the gathering gloom. ‘Thou art in danger, here. Yon fire was unwise.’ She smiled, then, a great crevasse appearing in her implacable white face. ‘A scaled one hast sensed us and approaches.’ It was an altogether strange response to the statement that something was coming. It was as if she had grown excited, a warrior called to battle. Her heart’s desire.

  Many of the other vaettir shifted their stances. A pair of them, both carrying bows, vaulted away to the nearby trees, scrabbling up to a great height in moments.

  One of the vaettir called to the others in a sharp language that was shockingly familiar. ‘One of the unripped!’ he cried. ‘Down from the heights, to prey upon we meagre few,’ he said.

  A response: ‘It will find this meal full of steel and gristle.’

  Swords were drawn, flashing. The long halberds brought to a ready position. The vaettir fanned out, bright atavistic gleams in their eyes, in crouches that were still higher than the heads of men. We drew our guns. A cracking sounded, in the trees far away but drawing closer.

  Once, when I was younger, I found myself on the Illvatch Mountains in a wood when an ice-storm occurred. I hunkered down in my shelter, knocking the freezing ice from the canvas of my tent and feeding the fire. When it was over, the world was cast in crystal and then the boughs began breaking with amazingly loud cracks and crashes. The ghostly sound of falling timber.

  Whatever approached sounded the same. The echoes of falling trees resounded through the misty air.

  Silence.

  ‘Taken to the air,’ one of the vaettir cried.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Fisk asked, looking wildly around.

  ‘Taken to the air,’ Lina said, sighting down her carbine. She glanced at me. ‘Am I hearing this right? Dvergar?’

  ‘Seems like,’ I said, guns out and looking at the treetops. ‘Strange, though. Archaic.’

  A shadow passed overhead, stirring the vapours of the valley, and a wind followed with it. Something I’d never smelled before – a dense, rich scent, with hints of manure and cracked peppercorn. Tea leaves and sweetgrass. A jumbled odour. A mystery, like a stable that had housed all sorts of animals: horses, aurochs, cougars, serpents, crocodiles, bears. The scents of a thousand wild creatures mixed into one.

  One of the vaettir gave a joyous ululating cry – a challenge and an expression of glee all at once. I’d heard that cry before, on the shoal plains, but now, to hear it in this place, gave it all new meaning. Gone was the wild harshness of it. Gone was the wicked mischievousness. Now it was exultation. The breath of rising spirits called to battle.

  A shadow descended, roaring. It moved like the vaettir – blindingly fast, wickedly precise. The gun-shroud pavilion was ripped away and the fire exploded into a million sparks. I fell backward from the thing that had come into our camp, overwhelmed, and sensed my companions finding positions behind the bellicose vaettir, like children hiding behind their mother’s skirts.

  It looked like some strange hybrid of lion and serpent fused with wings. Powerful clawed feet churned the rocky earth, and a wedge-shaped head above a ruffled neck with gleaming, voracious eyes moved sinuously about. Leathery wings unfurled from its landing.

  The dragon whipped around, lashing a spiked tail in a wicked arc. I felt myself being pulled backward and Gynth bellowing. A vaettir lashed forward, whipping his greatsword at the dragon’s shifting head – the steel rang out and bounced off the thick scales.

  Feathered shafts appeared in its neck, and the creature bellowed, releasing a trumpeting sound that would knock any strong man from his feet just from the shock of it. While it was distracted, a vaettir vaulted upon its back and, in a flash, brought its sword down to either side of the creature, cutting through the membranes of its wings.

  The dragon went berserk, writhing, thrashing on the ground. I feared the vaettir on the creature’s back would be crushed, but at the last moment he pushed himself away and rolled, coming up in a crouch, his sword still in hand. Grinning.

  ‘He is torn!’ he cried. ‘Earthbound!’

  The belch of Hellfire sounded, once, twice, and the dragon jerked. It wasn’t clear if it was the impact of the bullet or the surprising boom of gunplay that caused the reaction. It began righting itself, levering itself up and over with its wing-arms and its tail.

  The vaettir hooted as the dragon came to its feet and stilled. It seemed to coil in upon itself, gathering, bunching. It seemed as deadly as a drawn bow. It raised its now shredded wings – he is torn, earthbound – testing the damage there.

  It uttered a desperate screech, and I couldn’t help but think it was a realisation of the wounds on its wings.

  The dragon exploded forward, ripping the earth with its great claws, propelling itself ahead with the impetus of the locomotive Valdrossos. It barrelled into a pair of the vaettir, who went flying sideways, arse over end, and disappeared into the trees with thunderous cracks and tearing sounds, moved away through the forest.

  ‘It flees!’ came the cry in ancient dvergar from the vaettir.

  A male vaettir with a long metal spear loped away, chasing it.

  ‘Let the scaled one flee!’ another vaettir cried in dvergar. ‘Yon beast will be great sport once its wits return.’

  A moment of silence occurred, as the monster’s retreat diminished and quieted altogether. The vaettir collected themselves, evaluating the states of the two who had been knocked aside, near senseless. For our part, Fisk, Livia, Carnelia, Sumner, Sapientia and I looked at each other with expressions that ranged from stunned to Ia-damn-what-have-we-got-into.

  The leader of the vaettir said, ‘Collect thy belongings and follow. This is no place for the short-lived.’

  They made no introduction of themselves. As ancient as they were and there being so few of them – only eleven! – maybe they had no need of names. Maybe, having lived so long, they knew each other solely by tone of voice, or some other ethereal marker only vaettir could perceive. I could not tell. Vaettir are beyond mankind and dvergar’s ken, this I know now with a certainty. Here they live, in constant joyous battle with the great wyrms (though wyrm was an archaic term that had no true bearing on the creatures I had witnessed).

  Some creatures find their bliss in struggle; reach their heaven by fulfilling their own natures. A hind falls to a wolf’s teeth and that is right and just and so falling, does not mourn but goes in fullness to its blood-spiked end. The dominant wolf meets its fate at the jaws of the rising young and by falling fulfils its destiny – finding, if not joy there, then purpose.

  Here the vaettir have found their heaven – only a dragon could be the vaettir’s equal.

  I came to think of their leader as Principia; her command as such seemed unassailable. She led us away, deep within the island, and closer to the Emryal Rift. The other vaettir gath
ered up their wounded and encircled us – either to protect us from any other wayward dragons, or to keep us from wandering about the island on our own, I could not tell.

  At first I thought weariness might overcome me, but a curious vigour coursed through me. We were fatigued from our long journey, it was true, but the strange wonder of the island, its unforeseen inhabitants both scaled and vaettir, and possibly the frisson of the churning cut between worlds casting off thick clouds and swirling vapours energised me. I felt I’d drunk whiskey and chicory, that I’d chewed cocoa leaves. A thrumming in my chest. My fingers tingling with inaction. We climbed now in full dark; dark except for the shifting light coming from the rift. It turned yellow and orange, blue then livid green and then blood-red. It pulsed like some great throat, eager for morsels to fall in and find themselves shat out into whatever infernal realms it led to.

  We came to a low stone wall, older than the oldest Ruman remains on the Cælian and the Latinum shore. Older than dvergar warrens and high reaches. Beyond the wall, we encountered an intricately carved archway that led into the living stone mountain itself. We passed within, through winding passages and a small lightless cavern perceived only by sound, and then we rose once more, out into the thin rift light again. Another archway and we emerged onto a glade, full of grass and living things, as if we had entered the atrium of a Ruman villa. But instead, this was an open-air arbour, ringed in impassable cliff walls, hidden within and upon the mountainside. Among intricately carved pillars connected by high-spanned arches and a delightful running creek pouring out of a riven cliff wall, we found a series of stone dwellings, built to a scale suitable for vaettir, but not man.

  The other vaettir dispersed, several of them tending to the ones who had been injured by the dragon. There were fires in some dwellings, which were not so much houses as round, elegant huts. Principia gestured to a large building made of carefully carved stacked stones, black as onyx. ‘We have kept thy home as it was when thou left. In preparation for thy return,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve never—’ Fisk began. Livia shook her head. ‘Fine,’ he said, throwing up his hands.

  The vaettir leader entered and we followed – there were multiple rooms arrayed around a central chamber. A triclinium without any settees or chairs in the ancient fashion – basins of spring-fed water. A bust of obsidian stone depicting a revered old head of a Ruman household, the like of which you might find in any noble villa. At the base was chiselled Myrddin.

  Sapientia ran her fingers over the rough letters there. ‘So,’ she said.

  ‘It comes together,’ Livia said.

  Lina moved to stand before Principia. She put her hands on her waist. ‘How do you speak dvergar?’ she asked in Ruman. ‘I think we can see here how you speak the common tongue. You’ve met us before.’

  Principia said, ‘Our tongue is the first tongue. What you speak must be some derivation of it.’ She switched to dvergar. ‘From where hast thou come?’

  ‘Oof,’ Lina said. ‘The thees and thous give me a headache. We can stick with Ruman,’ she said.

  Principia nodded her acquiescence. ‘In answer to your question,’ she said. ‘Once we were many, here. These are the arteries of energy that flow through the earth and sky. Yes?’

  Sapientia said, ‘Yes. The old straight track. The ethereal causeway, it is called.’ At our puzzled looks she said, ‘Numen, household gods, genius loci – these are all forces that tap into the old straight track. Connections of power between all things.’

  ‘Qi,’ Livia said. ‘Sun Huáng would be happy to hear of it.’ A faint smile touched her lips as she thought of her old friend. And then her face clouded with concern. No happy bower, this. No blissful end.

  Principia continued: ‘And from these we sprang. But over the eons, a slow dispersal. We cannot remember all that came before, nor all who have left, because of the long sleeps from which we awake new and unblemished,’ she said. She turned to look at Gynth who, until then, she had seemed to ignore. ‘You are but a child, are you not? And have had only one of the long slumbers. I can tell.’

  Gynth nodded. But, as he inclined his head, it wasn’t so much agreement as obeisance.

  For the vaettir, life was a spiral where each sleep brought forgetfulness – a snake eating its own tail.

  ‘Are you the oldest?’ Livia asked.

  ‘I am the first of the quickened, but not the oldest. There are those that slumber within the mountain for a thousand years.’ Something about her demeanour darkened. ‘Let the earth keep their slumber eternal. I dread the day when they awake.’

  ‘I’m confused,’ I said, and stomped over to a stone bench that was short enough for one of my stature. I rolled a cigarette and lit it with a match – a luxury I had not indulged in much on the Typhon. I drew the tabac smoke deep in my lungs and exhaled.

  Principia observed me closely, head cocked. I held out the smoke, butt-first, and she took it in massive fingers. She sniffed the cigarette and crinkled her nose at the acrid smoke and then took a puff. The cherry ate away the cigarette. She held in the smoke as I had and then exhaled it, a cloud of blue to hang around her head. She did not cough.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘And not entirely distasteful. Do you have more of this?’

  ‘Some,’ I said. ‘But let’s get down to business. What you’re saying is—’ I waved a hand. ‘That dvergar speak a shitty version of your language? And that all vaettir come from here? This island? And there are ancient ones sleeping in the mountain. And these vaettir—’ I paused. ‘These you don’t want to wake up?’

  ‘I think that’s what she’s saying, Shoe,’ Lina said. ‘Looks like you’re not the old one, any more.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ I said, shaking my head. I patted my jacket, looking for my flask. I’d left it back on the Typhon. ‘It’s all too much for me.’

  ‘Does it even matter, Shoe? We didn’t come here to figure out your family tree,’ Fisk said. He turned to Principia. ‘The rift. You were here when Emrys made it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, opening her white hands as if explaining to a child. ‘It was after my last awakening.’

  ‘Can you take us there?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do you wish to go there?’ she replied.

  Sapientia stepped forward. ‘When it was opened, it allowed certain …’ She thought for a moment. ‘Certain dark energies through. They have destroyed many lives. We would close this rift.’

  ‘It has only been here but a short while,’ Principia said. ‘How many lives could it have harmed?’

  ‘We are not as permanent as you,’ Sapientia said. ‘We have but short lives. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of generations have grown and died since the rift was opened.’

  Principia seemed slightly amused. ‘It is hard to fathom. How can you find meaning in anything, your time is so short?’

  ‘That is a damned good question,’ Fisk said.

  ‘We do our best,’ Livia added. ‘We keep those we love safe and try to make their futures brighter.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Principia said. ‘It is something I will spend seasons pondering. Thank you for this. It is a novel thought and that is a great gift,’ she said.

  She paused for a moment. ‘It is a dangerous place, the Gullet. The scaled ones make nests within the clouds it creates,’ she said. ‘It makes hunting them difficult.’ Then an expression of grim satisfaction crossed her features. ‘But worthwhile.’

  ‘The Gullet?’ Livia asked.

  ‘The throat of the world,’ Principia said.

  Gynth said, ‘At least it is not the arse.’

  When I could stop laughing, I found all eyes on me. ‘What?’

  ‘Shoe, this is deadly serious,’ Fisk said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s always deadly serious.’ I winked at Gynth. ‘A good one, my friend.’

  Principia looked between Gynth and myself. ‘You are kindred, I can see. Closely matched, descended from the same line.’

  The mirth washed from my
face. I had always thought that ‘gynth’ was more of an expression of brotherhood, of camaraderie. But this put a whole different spin on things. I looked at my tall friend with whole new eyes.

  ‘The Gullet,’ Fisk said. ‘Can you take us there?’

  ‘Of course. But I do not think I will,’ Principia said. ‘You have just arrived and I would not have you die so quickly.’

  ‘But if you accompanied us?’ Fisk said. ‘We could manage it? It would not have to be a long while. It would need be only moments.’

  Principia looked thoughtful. ‘I can imagine a possible future in which this can be done,’ she said, in the odd way she had of phrasing things. Maybe her great age twisted her perception and then her use of language twisted it again, until it was just an intimation of the original thought and meaning. She continued: ‘Possibly the newly torn one will be close. We can finish that chase.’ She placed her hand on her sword and turned to go. She stopped at the entrance to the dwelling. ‘Are you not prepared?’

  ‘We must rest,’ Sapientia said. ‘Sleep. A little sleep. Not a long one. And afterwards, we will remember.’

  ‘Ah,’ Principia said again. ‘I remember. You go silent for moments and then return. Echoes of dreams.’

  ‘In the morning,’ Livia asked. ‘Can you take us then?’

  ‘If my warriors are well, we will take you,’ she said, and left.

  We looked at each other in silence, stunned at all that had occurred.

  Carnelia said, ‘Well, that’s a whole lot of jabbering for a stretcher.’ She stretched like a cat and then bounced on her toes. ‘I’m knackered but at the same time, I could spar a whole legion.’

  ‘The proximity to the rift,’ Sapientia said. ‘And the ethereal causeway. This whole island is supercharged.’

  ‘I could use an Ia-damned drink,’ Fisk said.

  Livia rested her hand on the back of his neck and he closed his eyes and pressed into it. The rest of us left them alone and went to find places to sleep.

  In the morning, Principia and her clan had a massive haunch turning on a spit, dripping with fat and juices. It became obvious it was the remains of a dragon. All utensils were made from carved bone and claw. All plates and cups from the same, or scales. The dragonflesh had no discernible spice, but was delicious and unlike anything I’d ever tasted before. This meal was accompanied by some sort of cake made from mashed nuts and baked to hardness. To drink there was what seemed like some kind of mead. Terra Umbra offered many plants, and what appeared to be a single harvestable creature – dragons. We drank and ate to our hearts’ content and spent a long while languishing about the vaettir’s arbour. Carnelia went through her armatura and what Livia had called the Eight Silken Movements while vaettir watched with implacable but nonetheless interested expressions.