Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  THIS WAS ACTUALLY quite a lot of fun, thought Wrack, as he concentrated on slapping a tentacle round the slippery chain link.

  He’d found an octopus languishing half-finished in one of Tavuto’s labs and, since Mouana wasn’t responding to any of his messages, he had decided to see if he could get the thing into the City to pass the time.

  It was bleeding hard to move the thing around, though. Every time he managed to achieve any finesse with one of its arms, the rest would contract or flail and put him off-balance. It definitely wasn’t a question of skill, he insisted to himself; after all, his brain was clearly well-acquainted with tentacles. Clearly, he thought, as his body dangled precariously from the anchor-chain, it was shoddy work by the technicians who had put the creature together.

  He thrust out another arm and managed to wrap it round the next link, but the rest gave way and left him hanging. His body swung in the wind and he cursed to himself.

  This was a rubbish game, admitted Wrack, letting the octopus drop onto the rooftops below.

  THEY HAD MOVED into the Ministry’s Fellows’ Bar to negotiate. It was easily fifty yards from end to end; an expanse of tiled marble, potted ferns and—since the Pipers had stormed the place—the bloodied bodies of ministers.

  On one side was wooden panelling; on the other, floor-to-ceiling windows, beyond which lay the factory floor far below. Where the dead were made. Viewed from up here, it could hardly be described as a factory—the side visible to the ministers was as grandly decorated as their own bar. Dominating the space was a row of colossal gilded faces; saints and knights from the City’s convoluted national mythology, snarling in ecstasy. Their gaping mouths led through to the warren of chambers where reanimation took place, and the cellars where the fresh dead would be stacked in crates, ready for transit.

  From here, the ministers would have been able to dine in comfort, eating real meat as the magistrates carried bagged bodies in from the execution wing and out through the mouths of the saints.

  The atmosphere in the bar today was more raucous. For a start, the Bruiser was behind the bar—although he wasn’t much of a host. Mouana shook her head in disbelief as he ripped a pump from its mounting and held it above his head, jetting a torrent of foaming lager into and around his mouth. He emitted a strange, gurgling roar, perhaps in delight on realising that, without the need to breathe, his lungs were just two new organs in which to put drink.

  Mouana wasn’t sure how he’d made it here—she hadn’t seen him since her call to Tavuto’s engine hall, until a few minutes ago when he had walked in, hands drenched in blood, and marched over the Pipers at the bar to quench his thirst. As far as the Bruiser went, it was best not to ask too many questions.

  Some of the more lucid sailors were wandering round the bar, making strange attempts at conversation with the living. The Pipers seemed to be doing their best to bring the dead folk into their circles, but the smiles were a little too rigid, the gesticulations a little too wild. There was no way of making those encounters relaxed: despite any amount of shared purpose, it seemed nobody could quite handle conversing with a corpse.

  Others had made their way downstairs, where they were aimlessly breaking things. A mob of former citizens was busy prising one of the saintly heads from the wall, while a woman in the grey remnants of a summer dress was smashing the teeth off another with a crowbar.

  Mouana was distracted from the cathartic bedlam when a tumbler full of rum was slid onto the table in front of her. Fingal, the Pipers’ haggard leader who had met her at the doors, sat down across from her and raised his own glass in salute.

  “Not sure if you’re thirsty, friend—but we should at least toast before the serious talk starts.”

  Fingal was clearly the type of man who could make any gesture a threat unless he made a conscious effort not to, and the creases beneath his good eye suggested he was making every attempt to seem cordial. Even so, Mouana struggled not to feel intimidated by default until she remembered how frankly terrifying she looked herself. Going by the principle that the more fights you’d visibly lost, the harder you looked, you couldn’t really beat being a dead soldier.

  Mouana cemented her confidence by sinking the rum in one gulp and looking Fingal in the eye over the rim of the glass. The last drink she had shared had been with Wrack; a bottle of dirty preservative they had swigged in a leaking whaleboat, rowing home from a disastrous hunt. It reminded her.

  “You knew about Wrack,” said Mouana, setting down the tumbler like a full stop. Fingal nodded as he swallowed, then tilted his head as if weighing the question.

  “We knew Wrack, sure. Knew he’d gone to Tavuto in the end, and all. But we didn’t know about Wrack. When word first came through about trouble at Ocean, we had no idea it was to do with him. And when we saw his name in the radio transcripts... well, that was a surprise.”

  “So you knew Wrack,” pursued Mouana, brow crackling as she frowned. “He was one of yours, right?”

  Fingal shrugged, and refilled their glasses. “I used to do a lot of jobs with his old man. I knew him from when he was a kid. But let me be clear—we thought he was gone, like every other Piper gets captured and zedded. Gone for good. Certainly weren’t expecting him to hijack the City’s bloody slave ship. Neither was the Ministry. It was days before they worked out what was going on; they figured it for just a rough patch, a bad batch of zeds, poorly processed, acting up.”

  “But you knew what was going on?”

  “Honestly? No idea. The Blades outside the wall stepped up their assault when the Tavuto news hit, and the Ministry was caught in a spin. Figuring we were never likely to get a better chance, we made our play.”

  “And the navy?” quizzed Mouana, thinking of the ships that had struck Piper flags and distracted the Eschatologist on the way in.

  “Happy accident,” answered Fingal through a rum belch. “We’d had assets on those ships for a long while... been planning a breakthrough to try and raid Ocean, one day. Course, when Ocean came to us, courtesy of your good selves, we figured we had to be adaptable.”

  “You mentioned Wrack’s old man,” said Mouana, as she raised her glass for another gulp. “Who was he?”

  Fingal chuckled in response, a sound that belonged in an alleyway shadow.

  “Old King Pipe. The boss, or as near as we came to one.”

  “And where’s he now?”

  Fingal’s face fell. “Dead, unfortunately. Caught a ricochet in the first scrap as we came in here and burst his head. That left me in charge, and it’s a damned shame; all I ever did was organise the muscle.”

  Light pulsed through the skylights of the bar, and a deep booming rolled across the city sky; another barrage pattern was beginning. Weakening the shield enough for a full assault would take a while, but that didn’t mean there was time to waste. Finding out about Wrack’s family history could wait. Mouana downed her last drink, and pushed it aside with an open palm: it was time to get the job done.

  “So. Looks like we both got here at once. What was your plan?”

  “Kill the Chancellor, take the Ministry and smash the machines. Stop the abuse of the dead, or die trying—that’s all the plan ever was, far as I know.” Fingal sipped on his pipe. “If I’m honest, we were surprised to even get this far. The assault drew a lot of troops to the wall, and we had an asset on the inside to let us in—but even so, once we breached the Ministry, we were getting hammered. We’d been in a stalemate out back for hours, lost most of our people, by the time your boat showed up.” The scarred man paused to spit on the floor and stoke his pipe to a ruddy glow.

  “Then suddenly, half the defence ran off in a panic to the Scholar’s gate. We pushed through, and ended up taking the whole place before we knew our own luck. As for the Chancellor, well... I believe you met the Chancellor on your way in.” Fingal grinned, stretching his long scar, and nodded in the direction of the lobby. Mouana remembered the body lying under the statue, and smirked. That was one job done.


  “So,” said Fingal, spreading his hands. “That’s as far as I’ve worked things out. You’ve been asking a hell of a lot of questions, and I’m dry from the talking. My turn; what’s your plan?”

  Mouana nodded. “Same as yours, so it looks. Find the machines they made us with, and destroy them. So they can’t be made again. Then die. Properly.”

  “Well, we can help with the first”—Fingal looked up through the skylights and nodded at her regimental tattoo—“and your old mates should help manage the second bit. For all of us.”

  “What do you know about the machines?”

  “Quite a lot, you know,” said Fingal. He whistled. “Or she does, anyway. Oi, Pearl!”

  A young woman came over from the other side of the bar, pushing a cart stacked high with brushed steel canisters and a crate of narrow leather cases.

  “Mouana, meet Pearl; she’s the asset on the inside I mentioned earlier. Worked as a vapourer here at the Ministry, and she’s been our eyes and ears here for some time.”

  Mouana stood abruptly, knocking her chair aside, and the room fell silent. The Bruiser, smelling a fight on the wind, turned to regard Pearl with unblinking eyes. Pearl, to her credit, stood still, looking more angry than frightened.

  “Kill me if you want,” she sighed. “It’d be fair enough. But listen first. And before you ask, I don’t know if I did any of you. They always came in bags, so we didn’t see the faces. Did my own brother, though. They didn’t tell me, but I checked the serial number. So I hate them as much—”

  “Piss off with your speech, and explain the machines before I do something stupid,” interrupted Mouana, and took a step toward the woman.

  “Fine,” whispered Pearl, and picked up one of the larger canisters. “We call this ‘miasma.’ One of these does about fifty bodies. It’ll inject, but it’s usually applied by mechanical ventilation. It works fast; hardens nervous tissue with carbon and reconfigures stuff to work anaerobically. I know you don’t want a lecture, but truth be told we don’t know much more about it than that. It’s old tech; really, really old.”

  Hands trembling as the silence hardened, she slid one of the leatherbound boxes from the crate and walked over to Mouana with it. She snapped open a fastener, reached inside and withdrew a matte black rod, its surface inscribed with a spiralling filigree of printed gold. It looked indescribably alien, and sickeningly familiar all at once.

  “This is a necrod,” said Pearl. “It’s even older, and a lot harder to explain.”

  “Try,” hissed Mouana, with a queasy sense that she knew what the woman was about to say.

  “It programmes the miasma. Miasma itself is easy to make, but without these it’s just a colloid of inert theurgitons—it won’t do anything. These canisters have already been activated.”

  Mouana snorted in bleak amusement. Theurgitons; tiny machines. She remembered old Captain Aroha cursing the things, as they had spent a roasting afternoon failing to repair a collapsed coolant pump on one of the antique railguns. “Tiny fucking machines,” he had ranted, wiping grease from his brow, “it always comes down to tiny machines.”

  Pearl had stopped at the half-laugh, but Mouana glared at her, and she continued.

  “Nobody knows how the necrods work, or how to make them. We looted them from another city, which looted them from somewhere else, centuries ago. All we do know is that when you run the right current through them, they... well, they put out something like a neural signal. But definitely not a human one. It activates the miasma, makes it do—well, what it does.”

  “And it can’t make it do anything else, can it?”

  “No. Miasma could probably do a lot of things, but these rods will only make it reanimate,” said Pearl, as Mouana stalked closer.

  “And how many rods are there here?”

  “Just the ones on this crate.”

  Thunder rolled as Mouana took the rod gently from Pearl’s hands. She called softly to the bar, where the Bruiser, having grown bored with the technical discussion, had a Piper in a headlock and was making them drink lager. Nodding at his leader’s summons, he dropped the spluttering rebel and lumbered over to Mouana, who handed him the ancient machine.

  The Bruiser turned the thing over in his hands, brow furrowed, then weighed it like a cudgel as he looked Pearl over. After some calculation, he gave Mouana a questioning glance. She in turn looked to Fingal, who drew deeply on his pipe and shrugged, and then to Pearl, standing with her jaw clenched and her eyes fixed on the floor.

  Mouana knew what she had to do. Here was a woman who had worked the factory floor for years, making slaves of her friends and sending them to rot on an alien sea. Even the ex-vapourer’s own comrades knew she’d earned her death, no matter the mitigation since. It would be justice, and fair revenge, to give the Bruiser the nod.

  She summoned all of her anger, let it pool like hot oil in her rotten head, but all she could think of was Wrack. Poor, mad Wrack, who still couldn’t quite cope with it all. As she gave the tiniest shake of her head, she told herself she was still a soldier; that the mercy was all his.

  The Bruiser looked profoundly disgusted, but nodded back all the same, then raised the necrod like a bottle in a brawl.

  “Fack off!” he screamed, smashing it to pieces on the bar counter.

  WRACK HAD THE most terrible headache, all of a sudden. Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t had a headache of some description, but this was different. It felt like broken glass ground into his nerves, like his axons had been stretched tight and plucked like guitar strings. He could taste it, like a mouthful of hot vinegar.

  It took him out of himself, left whatever lay beneath writhing and snapping its beak in the sudden light.

  Then it passed, as quickly as it had come on. It was as if a wind had blown through him, leaving his mind thrumming and muddled. Vision returned, but he had no idea what he was looking at, let alone what he had been doing when the pain came on.

  The number 32, brass on chipped paint. Chipped green paint, of the most familiar colour. A colour that smelled of book-dust and roast cod, metallic like die-cast toys, stale like pipe smoke. Like... like home.

  Schneider lit up with joy; he was home! He was going to visit Dad, after his long trip. He rapped jauntily on the door, grinning at the prospect of the old man’s surprise on seeing his son again. There was no answer, but that was fine—his father’s hearing had never been great, and he was probably out in the conservatory, fussing over herbs. He would have to take his old route in, the one he had used as a teen when coming home at dawn.

  Schneider moved to the bay window beside the door and fished in the gap in the wooden slats, worn smooth through years of covert entry. After some fiddling, the catch released, and the sash window slid silently upwards.

  He hopped over the sill and into the study, but it wasn’t a study any more. The furniture was all wrong, and the pictures on the wall were different from how he remembered. Where was the painting of the viaduct, the watercolour with the badly-painted dog in the background? It didn’t look right, and it didn’t smell right either.

  Then the door swung open, and revealed a grimacing man with a kitchen knife. It was not Schneider’s dad. Behind him was a woman in a nightgown, her eyes bulging and her mouth twisting around the beginnings of a scream. Behind both of them was a monster. It reared above them in a mound of tattered flesh, eyes white and edges flapping like a ragged, wobbling skirt.

  Schneider was about to warn them of the devil behind them, when he realised it was his own reflection in the hallway mirror.

  The man waved his knife and the woman screamed, but all Wrack could do was laugh. Of course! He was a massive, rotting stingray on mechanical spider legs! How had he forgotten that? He laughed and laughed, and the thing in the mirror shook with it, spraying black gore from its spiracles. What a thing to forget!

  Wrack wanted to double over, to shriek and giggle until he was sobbing for breath, but of course he had no lungs! Somehow
, it made things even funnier. That poor baffled family, he thought, as they ran screaming to the front door. Woken in the night to find a monster in their house, getting confused by paintings.

  Wrack roared with mirth as he stared at the mirror, and the ray laughed back. You had to see the funny side of things, he thought to himself as phantom tears began to pool.

  And this was fucking hilarious.

  Drawing back from the ray, Wrack began to laugh with all of himself. With the sharks and worms and the crabs that capered through the streets, with the quivering pallor of his mind, with the raging, shattered heart of Tavuto. His sides throbbed, his bones glowed. His laughter belched from him like a thunderhead, rolling over the city and dancing with the growl of the guns.

  You had to laugh.

  TO HER UTTER astonishment, Mouana was giggling. Maybe it was the release of tension, or just the relief of knowing it was all over—she had no idea. But she was shaking with it, and as she looked around at the mayhem in the bar, she saw it wasn’t just her.

  The dead were laughing. Not with the black, sardonic grunts that had passed for humour on Tavuto, nor with the elation of warriors with nothing to lose, but true laughter—the kind that shook ribs and wetted creased eyes. It was infectious. As Fingal lined up his crowbar to smash a rod balanced across two chairs, he had to stop to wipe away the tears. Even Pearl was grinning, and Mouana could hardly begrudge her.

  When the first rod had exploded into gravel on the bar, so had the tension, and a mad sort of playfulness had developed around the destruction of the rest. Eunice had managed to crack one with a squeeze of her hydraulic bicep, and sailors and Pipers alike had cheered her on. Kaba had struck up one of her boat-loaders’ songs, and the rest of the dead had joined in, bellowing together as they took hammers to the instruments of their enslavement.

  Catharsis had become carnival. Zombies were lined up before the Bruiser, who sat atop the cart of miasma, cracking the canisters open one after another. As the sailors passed, he would spray the grey gas into their mouths, baptising each with a merry cheer of “fack off!” before slapping them on the back and sending them back into the chaos.