“Bigger holes,” Shanter commented. “We must be near the southern line.” When Caulie looked at him quizzically, he added, “The Haphan artillery is better.”
As they jounced back and forth, the rim of the crater collapsed suddenly inward, slamming into the panther like a wall of rotten meat, covering it with mud and everything the mud contained: barbed wire, fragments of shells, damp black lengths that might have been wood or bone, and the uniformed bodies of the dead.
The panther sank deeper. As the mud covered its sensors, the video screens in the cockpit went blank one by one. Soon, the cabin was dark, lit only by the flickering seismolocational sensor. Shanter’s arms wrapped around Caulie and she was grateful.
“My regrets, effendi.”
The panther sounded calm, but that that didn’t soothe her. “You’re not giving up, are you?”
“No. I only say farewell in case my batteries drain completely.”
“Oh . . . ” The seismolocational screen refreshed. “I see something below us, panther.”
“I see it too,” it said. “A vein of stone below the soil, not yet completely pulverized by shelling. It will have a better compaction ratio. It may support our weight.”
Shanter leaned forward. “Panther, you must never mention Caulie’s weight.”
The machine’s hind legs finally found the stratum and, for several tense moments, it stopped sinking. It stood nearly upright like a human, but was still mired in the glue-like sump of mud.
“I can extract us from this crater, Caulie,” the panther said, “but it will drain my batteries to their margin. I will run at reduced capacity for the remainder of this mission.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“I sink out of sight and we wait until the ground freezes. It will take perhaps a month.”
Shanter laughed. “I know what I’d pick.”
“Keep going, panther,” she said.
The panther adjusted its balance, rocking the cockpit as it turned to face south. Then it went into a frenzy.
Caulie could not see what it was doing, but the panther’s forelimbs bracketed both sides of the cabin and their servos went from a rattle to a buzz before settling on a scream. The mud slid off the sensors and the screens flickered to life, showing the panther’s blur of activity. It was clawing the soil with movements as fast as the centrifuge in Caulie lab. She could only imagine the epic geyser of mud jetting behind them. The panther shifted to a crouch, still pawing the wet mud—any pause would undo all their progress. In just a few more minutes, the panther had excavated a broad trough with glistening, nearly stable walls.
Without hesitation, it leapt for the far edge of the hole. It caught the ridge at the top, which immediately collapsed, but its hind legs landed just in time and it leapt again. Torrents of mud sluiced into the pit and the panther only made a few feet of progress, but it immediately jumped again.
Inches at a time, the panther outran the mudslide and finally emerged. Caulie exhaled as the panther resumed its sprint.
Almost immediately, they arrived at the enemy trenches. The earthworks were, oddly, lined with flashing lights and pretty puffs of smoke. She suddenly realized they were gunshots.
The panther bolted into the fusillade and then leapt over the Southerners. These trenches were less defined but more populous than on the Haphan side. As they hurtled overland in plain view, the panther bowled into groups of enemy soldiers toiling in the mud. They crossed another trench that looked like the first, full of Southies with weapons ready.
“Is that a reserve trench?”
“Neh.” Shanter was locked on the screens. “A place to be safe? They don’t use that concept. They only have these extra trenches because they love digging in the dirt.”
They crossed two more trenches and arrived at the slope of the far mountain. The South didn’t have railway like the north; instead, long lines of individual Tachba snaked back and forth on shallow paths carved up the rock face. The panther leaped onto the road, knocking men off the cliffs in clumps as it darted from switchback to switchback.
In moments, they climbed above the human activity, scrambling ever higher over the barren rock. The panther only stopped when it reached the peak of the mountain, a bald granite finger jutting into the sky. Caulie once again had a full and commanding view of the valley—this time from the other side. The trip had taken twenty minutes.
The panther didn’t delay. “Where is our enemy, effendi?”
Shanter was already searching. He spun and zoomed the views, moving from screen to screen.
“That gold band around the screens means the panther is guessing,” Caulie told him. Most of the screens were banded.
“Yes, anything lined with yellow is never to be trusted. It is the way of the world,” he muttered. “And you’d think we could see everything up here, but lots of wrinkly folds in the rock. We might have to peek into all of them.”
She touched the seismolocational screen. It was updating slowly, picking up the vibrations that travelled through the colossal volume of mountain rock and into the panther’s paws.
“That’s good,” Shanter said. They watched the sensors aggregate a dimensional view of the mountain. A third of the way from the bottom, the mountain face was riddled with caves, ledges, and redoubts. “The artillery would be there. We passed through it without seeing.”
Caulie studied the image. “If that’s the artillery, that’s where we want to be.”
The panther leapt off the peak and down the mountain.
The seismolocational view sharpened as the panther brought them closer. The South’s guns were much larger than their Haphan counterparts, crude and slab-like in comparison. They occupied caves carved into the mountain, which, Caulie realized, would protect them from artillery counter-fire. Then again, the sensors also showed that the caves were mere pits in the face of the mountain, not connected to each other in any way, and that seemed unwise in the extreme. Instead of tunnels, the gun emplacements were linked by exposed, narrow cliff paths. Thousands of men toiled in the open, passing artillery shells hand-to-hand and maneuvering the larger shells on narrow carts.
She studied the screens but found no hint of the wizard. There were easily four thousand Tachba in front of her, though it was hard to be sure because Shanter kept the screens dancing.
“Do you see anything, panther?” she asked.
“I see all. What do you hunt?”
“The person in charge, obviously.”
The panther dropped silent for a moment. “In one hour, I can distinguish the influencers among these groups of Tachba. Given more time, I can distinguish the lines of authority connecting the influencers. However, my batteries are low and we do not have that much time.”
“Simply look for the disturbance.” Shanter jabbed a finger at a screen, then zoomed in closer. “Leaders always make a disturbance wherever they go.”
On the screen, a densely packed group of Tachba was shuffling along an exposed path, the widest path she’d seen. Despite the road’s width, the group had created a blockage. Individual Southies tried to slip around the edges, some of them nearly plunging off the mountain.
The panther reoriented its body. “The individuals on that screen are normative Tachba. Singletons.”
“Individuals . . . what do you mean, panther?” But Caulie knew the answer even as she asked. Her stomach clutched.
“That large clump of bodies is not normative,” the panther said. “It is a composite creature.”
Chapter 38
“Did it—did the panther really say what it just said?” Shanter’s voice shook. “Listen to me!” he said, his voice back to its cheerful and dismissive norm. “Asking if I heard what I did, almost a kind of madness. Maybe I was asking for a friend, one with bad hearing.”
No, the Tachba don’t speak nonsense, Caulie thought. Not really. Their words originated from a place of negotiation with the Pollution, not madness. She squeezed Shanter’s hand to show she understood.<
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“There is a volume of water in the composite creature,” the panther observed. It shifted and zoomed the screens for them.
The visuals only generated more questions. The cluster of bodies was obscured under a vast drape cloth that covered it like a parade float. The cloth bulged above the packed men, and at the front was an opening and a kind of awning—but it faced away from the panther and Caulie couldn’t see in.
The thermal view was even less helpful. It penetrated the cloth covering, but revealed only a blur of heat from which nothing could be discerned. The bottom of the creature consisted of nearly one hundred legs. They shuffled or dragged under the thermal mass, some of them wildly out of sync, making steady progress along the mountain.
As for the water the panther had noticed—at the top of the heat mass was a shimmer of blue that was cooler than the packed bodies beneath it. According to the measurements annotating the screen, the pool was four feet on a side and perhaps three feet deep. Something floated in the middle, something alive and moving. Caulie had no doubt what it was.
“That,” she said. “That thing there.”
The panther blurred into motion. Caulie didn’t tuck her hands beneath the netting fast enough and managed to club herself in the face. The panther pounded across the cliffs and closed the distance, launching into a final horizontal slide above the wizard’s path. Gradually it curved as gravity took over.
The panther dropped in front of the composite creature.
The regular singleton Southies shouted in surprise as the machine bowled them aside. With broad swipes of its forelimbs, the panther swept the ledge clean, sending men pin-wheeling over the cliff. Caulie concentrated on the massive cluster of conjoined bodies before of her. She couldn’t discern much. The composite creature stopped walking, and the dark window in the canvas bulge at the front seemed to regard the panther—and watch her specifically.
More Southies appeared from both directions. They were taller and twitchier than the northern Tachba, but gaunter, as if they spent most of their time starving. Their uniforms were dilapidated even compared to the northern Tachba’s, being made up of multiple layers of fragmented and decaying fabric that gave the Southies the look of corpses. They did not look like military men, but they coordinated like soldiers.
Faster than she would have thought, they swarmed over the panther. They carried rifles but used them as clubs, wedging barrels and butts into the panther’s joints, not letting up even as the machine knocked them off the ledge in clumps.
One of the panther’s hind legs slipped off the path and it had to claw back to safety.
“Panther, connect me to your external speakers,” Caulie said tensely.
“Done.”
She tapped a song of sleeping.
A maiden with a kind heart bids you rest. Rest from your good service. The maiden wants you at peace, so you may serve again and better. The maiden with the warm eyes knows you wish to sleep . . .
Within three repetitions of her improvised song, the Tachba began tumbling off the panther. Some slipped dreadfully over the ledge. The rest collapsed where they fell, eyes closed but fluttering—their Pollution working to reawaken them and return them to service.
“Panther, keep that song looped. Can you bring us closer?”
“As you wish.”
The panther slinked up to the composite creature. It paused mere feet away.
“Shanter, are you seeing this?”
She glanced back and found he was asleep. Of course he was. She tapped a new song on his forearm. He drew smoothly awake and pointed at the screens.
“It’s drunk.”
“It’s fighting the sleep-song.”
The mass of legs and feet under the covering had fallen into chaos. The entire living raft wobbled and pitched.
“It can’t fall off the ledge,” she said. “I need that thing in the middle. It’s the enemy wizard. They’ll need to study him at Falling Mountain.”
The panther went still. “That is not the plan you told me, Caulie.”
“The wizard is much more than I thought he was.”
“He’s too dangerous,” Shanter said.
She was briefly confused, before realizing that both the panther and Shanter thought they were talking to a different Caulie—the softhearted Caulie who would have wanted to capture the wizard alive.
“I only need his body,” she said. “But I don’t want you to hurt him, panther. I need to see him up close.”
“Very well.” The panther reached out and snagged the drop cloth with one claw. The covering slid away, revealing a wooden framework that supported the cloth like a tent. The cloth fluttered into the sky.
The creature was horror stacked upon horror.
Each pair of legs had once belonged to a discrete man, but they had been joined together front to back, from hip to shoulder. The interior bodies were further braced by interwoven arms that were joined at the wrists and elbows. The only functional arms belonged to the bodies at the outermost edges of the creature—a hideous fringe that groped blindly in the air.
Most of the men did not have heads, and their tall bodies ended at the shoulders in red, lumpy piles. Tucked among them, difficult to notice at first, were shorter men who still had heads that were crooked upward in the tight press. Were these the mouths that breathed and ate for it? The more Caulie stared, the more of these small men she noticed—panting men with hopeless expressions, staring at the sky through gaps in the mesh of tormented bodies as if they were forever in the act of drowning. What would that feel like, trapped in that agony, fighting for breath?
It was too much. Caulie’s eyes fled from the composite creature to the burden it was carrying.
A wide and shallow pool of pounded metal, filled with water that sloshed over the sides. In the middle floated the enemy wizard, an obtained man.
He appeared normal at first, certainly compared to the atrocity below him, but the illusion fell away quickly. Caulie noticed his hunchback—a second torso, mounted against his spine. It connected to the wizard through a tangle of veins and intestines that exited the torso’s unclosed cavity and entered his flanks through raw tears in the flesh. The detached torso appeared to be dying; it was gray and slack, with every appearance of something exhumed from a shell hole and put to use.
Caulie didn’t understand why this man would need the extra lung capacity or the extra heart—until his platform pitched forward and the rest of him came into view.
The wizard’s neck was punctured by an inflamed and grotesquely swollen wound. Tissue hung out of the hole like a thick red tongue, connecting to something that dangled between his shoulders and swung back and forth. With frozen horror Caulie realized what she was seeing. A rope of nerve tissue had been spliced into this man’s skull, and from the rope swung a cluster of round, red pods.
Some of the pods still had hair.
Brains. The brain stems of men, tied directly to the wizard’s mind. They were protected by bags of skin and partial skulls. On each bag of skin, a vacant and skewed face with the eyes and mouth sewn shut.
Caulie tried to look away but her eyes kept noting specific details. She struggled to be clinical but the sheer blasphemy was disorienting, as if she was drunk or in a dream world. She didn’t know where to look but then it didn’t matter; she found the wizard’s face. He was staring into her eyes.
He couldn’t see her. There was no way he could know Caulie was in the panther, or even that the panther might have passengers. Nonetheless, his gaze seemed to perforate her dark, closed cockpit and see into her mind. His eyes were sunken, bloodshot, with bags as dark as bruises. His gaze was filled with hatred and disgust, as if he saw what she was becoming—another mad wizard, made callous by power and isolation. He would not merely kill her. His eyes spoke of tearing her to shreds and leaving her as scattered pulp on the mountain path, all the while screaming his rage until his throat filled with blood.
He is the reason for the cloth, she realized. It wasn
’t to hide the wizard’s obtained body or the composite monstrosity that carried his pool—it was because of the corrosive madness radiating out of the man. It had to be hidden or no one would draw near.
“Shanter, can you wound him for me?” she asked. Southie rifles scattered the path, and surely one of them . . . “Shanter? Wake up!”
Shanter was staring at the obtained man, blank-faced and hollow. She slapped him, with no result. So much for that plan. She slapped him once more for good luck and told the panther to let her out.
It lowered to the ground with none of its regular nonsense and, in moments, she stood on the rocky path. The mountains in the south were no less freezing than in the north. Wind from the ledge blew upward and with such strength that it buoyed her from the path, making her feel weightless and ethereal. Her sleep-song filled the air—she glanced over her shoulder and yes, hearing it anew it had put Shanter back to sleep. She felt as if she was in a dream, and in this dream, the next thing was for her alone.
She picked up a Southie rifle and tried to divine how it worked. There was not even a trigger to be found, merely knobs and latches of soft metal and some scrollwork carved in the wood by a bored soldier. Most promising was a brown knob at the end of the stock where the metal started—it looked suspiciously like a metacarpal bone. She pointed the rifle at the wizard’s chest and yanked the knob. No gunshot, just a hard click. A cartridge ejected from the bottom of the rifle, came apart, and showered the path with rounds. At the same time, the metacarpal knob came away in her hand, along with a slim metal bracket and another bullet. Before she could even drop the rifle, it fell apart into four pieces and clattered at her feet.
Classic.
She checked the enemy wizard. His blazing eyes were locked on her, but he seemed absent somehow. She wasn’t sure if he’d even noticed her feat with the rifle. He looked more human now she wasn’t zoomed in with a glowing screen, and she could see the tension in his body. Her sleep-song hadn’t completely knocked him out, but he was struggling.
What the Thunder Said Page 31
