Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  At the other side of the bar, a dead man had stuffed a lit rag in a bottle of brandy, and was looking in Mouana’s direction for approval. She put on an expression of mock severity but flashed him a thumbs up; he returned it, before hurling the firebomb through the glass wall and onto the factory floor. The flames rose and their shadows danced, dead and living both made indistinguishable by the fire.

  A cheer went up, and Mouana’s attention was drawn back to the throng. A circle had formed, and at its centre stood Fingal, with the last of the necrods. He held it out to her like a party cracker, eyebrows raised in invitation, and the crowd began to chant her name. She took the rod, warm and light as charcoal, held it up in the air with both hands, and brought it down hard across her thigh. The noise as it snapped was drowned in roaring.

  The chanting and the clapping died down, leaving only the crackle of the flames as they spread through the factory. Mouana was just looking down at the shards of the necrod and wondering what to do next, when Pearl spoke up.

  “Well, that’s all of the ones here!” she said, beaming.

  Mouana turned to her, very slowly, and asked her what exactly she meant by that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NEARLY EVERYONE WAS gone from the library. A man had scurried past Wrack with a stack of books as he climbed the stairs, but had been in too much of a hurry to offer any challenge.

  Wrack was relieved, as he didn’t feel remotely in the mood for confrontation. After the laughter had faded following the fiasco with the stingray, he hadn’t felt very well at all. Things he had just about accepted as reality at sea felt freshly horrifying on the streets he grew up in.

  Seeing his demonic reflection in the hall where he had played as a boy had done something foul; had forced the grey horror of the Tavuto and the warm, safe memories of his youth into the same reality, leaving him cowering at their vertex. No longer could he tell himself he was an accidental consciousness, a jockey on the memories of a dead man now at rest. He was Schneider Wrack, the boy who had grown up in that house, and he had come back to it a monster.

  It was all a bit much, really.

  Figuring he might as well confront the familiar head-on, he decided the library was the place to go. He had taken the crab again; climbing the stairs was a bit of a labour as the thing had cracked two legs when Mouana booted it, but it had a much better chance of handling a book than a gore-caked stingray.

  Wrack picked his way across the empty lobby, claw-clicks echoing on marble, and headed for the fellows’ reading room. It too was abandoned save for a vinegary-looking old man, deep in an armchair and scowling at a book of poetry.

  Somehow the sight of the Doctor of Poetic Engineering, in the same chair he’d sat in each day for as long as Wrack could remember, was oddly comforting. It would take more than the return of the City’s dead to distract him from his work. The Doctor murmured his usual greeting as Wrack clicked past, not so much as glancing aside from his text, and Wrack waved back with a claw as he passed into the librarians’ tower.

  The old electric lift took him up to the belfry, nine storeys above the library’s roof. It was where he’d gone to read whenever he’d felt overwhelmed (although, Wrack mused, he’d never really known the meaning of the word)—a place of cool stone and pigeon shit where nobody went, and nobody looked for missing books.

  He had no lantern, but the lights of the bombardment were enough to read by; the sky pulsed and blazed, smeared itself across the brass of the old bell like summer fireworks.

  Wrack’s claw levered away the loose panel beneath the belfry’s inner window ledge, then rummaged inside. Ah yes, there they were. The crab dribbled a froth of foul bubbles from its mouthparts as he allowed himself a sigh of contentment; he had found his old stash of books. Dragging them out one by one with his claw, he looked at what he had been reading when he died.

  “HONESTLY, I DON’T know anything else,” stammered Pearl, her eyes flickering nervously to the harpoon pinning her jacket to the table. “It might not be anything. I just overheard they were thinking about getting more!”

  “From where?” growled Fingal, grabbing a fistful of the woman’s vest. He was furious as Mouana was—clearly, this was the first time he’d heard of this too.

  “Wherever they came from? I don’t know! I barely heard anything. A rod failed last winter, and it was the second in fifty years, and the ministers were getting jumpy. It was the end of a quota meeting, I was walking past. I heard one of them talking about an expedition, about them not being able to spare the forces because of the sieg—ah!”

  Eunice snorted and twitched her harpoon arm, raising a line of blood on the side of Pearl’s neck. Mouana was about to berate her for failing to mention the existence of other rods before they had set the place on fire, but the words caught in her throat.

  She had been in command: why hadn’t she stopped them torching the place before she’d made sure they didn’t need anything more from it? One look at Pearl’s face told Mouana she was telling the truth—she didn’t know anything else. And if there were any record of what the ministers knew, it was almost certainly now cut off by fire.

  “Who else would know?” Mouana asked Fingal, not really expecting a response, and was startled when Pearl answered.

  “You could try the Chancellor?” she suggested, tilting her head towards the miasma cart as far as she could without cutting her own throat.

  WRACK TURNED COMEDY of the Sandwiches over in his claws a couple of times before putting it aside. He wasn’t really in the mood for fiction, and besides, he had no hope of remembering how far he’d gotten—death hadn’t been kind to memories like that.

  Next was a doorstep of a text, a treatise on the nature of music by a long-dead academic. Wrack was fairly sure he’d been reading this to try and impress someone, but he had no idea who, or why. It was the kind of book you soldiered through a few pages at a time; the kind where you found your eyes sliding along sentences without taking in meaning, just to move down the page.

  Wrack shoved it aside, and picked up the next book—Winter in the Labyrinth: A History of the First Canyon Wars. This one seemed fascinating in theory, but had tested his attention span almost as much as the last—it turned out the Canyon Wars had involved a lot of senatorial wrangling and arguments over tax before the ironclad duels and the amphibious landings had kicked off. And in any case, Wrack was fucking sick of war.

  There was something on stone ants, and a related volume on cloudsifters—great things to talk about in the pub, but which rapidly dried out when reading through pages and pages of population density charts. Then there was Recipes of the Herring Men, the curated notes of a mining platoon that had been stranded on a kuiper fish farm for a decade. It was good for a browse, but it got repetitive.

  Wrack pulled the books one at a time with bloodstained pincers, not fancying anything, with a creeping dread that he had simply lost his taste for reading. The thought made him all the more anxious to find a distraction; if he was no longer able to sit and enjoy a good book, his efforts to convince himself he was still human would become very precarious.

  It was with a rush of relief, then, that he dug out an old favourite. Its weight, its texture, the flaked gilding of the letters on its spine, all triggered the warm anticipation of a familiar pleasure. He couldn’t smell, but the phantom musk of dust and binding glue swirled in his head as he pulled it from the pile. This book, he had read for pleasure alone.

  GRAND AMAZON, proclaimed the spine in tattered gold, A personal narrative of a journey through the equinoctial regions of the reclaimed world, by Gustav Waldemar.

  It was a rare text, and one the library had been missing for years. Wrack had seen it once as a boy and been enchanted—and when he had unearthed a copy during the excavation of one of the south wing cellars, he had quietly pocketed it for his own reserve.

  Waldemar had been a paragon of the Rückgewinnun, that optimistic age when the Confederacy—long-since shattered—had managed to reopen hal
f the world’s ruined gates and bring them back into the Lemniscatus. He had made his expedition to Grand Amazon right after the gate-mines had been defused, along with the fur trappers and the first, hard-faced pioneers, to a world isolated since the wars of antiquity.

  Wrack dove into the book with a clumsy claw, parting the pages where a strip of card marked the start of what he had come to think of as the ‘exciting bit.’ Struggling a little to focus with the crab’s peculiar vision—it was less about moving his eyes and more choosing which part of a wider image to bring into focus—he began to read.

  After transition, we found ourselves some way up one of the tributaries of the Rio Sinfondo, the primary river feeding the Cloud Bay delta. It was an hour past dusk on orientation, with a warm katabatic breeze blowing south across our bow. Turning to align with the current, we made for the Sinfondo; by the charts we should have been nearly within sight of the Torsville colony, but we saw no lights. Anticipating that the colony had faltered during the disconnect we had packed with no expectation of resupply, but a sense of disquiet spread among the boatmen as the banks offered nothing but mangrove and cottonbark thickets. When we reached the place marked on the charts as the colony site, we steered close to the bank and swept it with the searchlight. Other than a few rotten pilings and the remnants of walls, there was no sign of human habitation. Regardless, the Torsville bank gave the first demonstration of the world’s fecundity: moths and fat-tailed riverflies swarmed against the lights, while the eyes of moss-bears and tree porcupines shone in the dark as they ambled the bank in search of fallen fruit.

  Wrack skipped ahead, doing all he could not to rip the beloved pages with his pincers; Waldemar spent some time discussing the riverbank fauna, and then the narrative was broken by several pages illustrating catfish collected in light traps. When it resumed, it was with a paragraph that had always made Wrack squirm, especially when read with the knowledge of what had later befallen the expedition.

  Once in the night, the lightsman begged a halt, claiming he had seen men on the bank; there was a rush on deck and the crew called out across the dark river, but when the searchlight came back to the place he’d marked, there was nothing but tangled thorns.

  Relishing the familiar discomfort, Wrack flipped ahead again.

  We came to the mouth of the tributary, where the river’s black water blended with the milk-tea of the Sinfondo, just before dawn on the third day. At first we planned to move out into the channel and make immediate headway against the current, but a near-collision with a fallen blastwood curbed our excitement. The tree, near a quarter-mile in length, must have fallen deep inland—by the time we encountered it, it had become the spine of a raft of smaller trees, uprooted shrubs and riotous water flora. Only quick thinking on the part of the helmswoman avoided our hull becoming part of the travelling island.

  The decision was made to wait until the light was strong enough to spot further rafts before moving out into the Sinfondo. In the end, our patience was rewarded—by the day’s first light, with the river still swathed in thick mist, we saw one of the great worms breach. Though it was far off through dense fog, I made it out to be an Ormsley’s Phosphorescent—one of the larger deep-channel predators, and nearly fifty yards from horns to hindbeak. It emerged from the water in silence, throwing off a cloud of droplets as it twisted in a liquid arc, then returned to its element with a splash that would have dislodged all but its sturdiest parasites. Seeing the breach as an omen, the helmswoman moved us out into the channel.

  A particularly vivid slew of sparks in the sky broke Wrack’s concentration, but it was easy to shrug off. The city could fall to pieces around him, and Mouana could enact whatever gruesome revenge she had in mind by herself; he was done with it all. As far as Wrack was concerned, he would sit there with his book until it all blew over, or someone came up the belfry stairs with a hammer. If he was left alone for long enough, he might even have another go at Comedy of the Sandwiches. Nevertheless, the barrage had made him lose his place, and he clucked his mandibles in irritation as he dug back in at another marker.

  On the twenty-fifth day we reached the mouth of the Rio Esqueleto on our way upriver from Candlewood, and anchored the boat to make council on our course from there. While the dockmaster at Candlewood had updated our charts, giving us the positions of the towns still standing on the upper Sinfondo, many of the crew—led by Ms Tansell, the archaeologist—argued in favour of an extended detour up the Esqueleto before heading upriver. The Esqueleto was unsettled beyond its lower reach, and trappers’ reports from before the disconnect suggested an overland route to High Sarawak from its upper channel. For a historian, therefore, it offered more than did the Sinfondo.

  In the end, the discussion was settled by the wurmjäger, Hansen—the rich waters of the upper Sinfondo offered us the chance to add further wormskins to the six in the hold, and thus to pay for the voyage. At noon, it was decided we should make a four-day expedition up the tributary, before turning back and heading north again up the Sinfondo.

  Wrack’s attention was torn from the page again, and not by the bombardment. There was something in that paragraph that really should have triggered recognition—he was sure of it. Wrack would have frowned, if he had had the anatomy; the feeling was akin to the sort of half-memory fumble experienced by the very tired or the very stoned, and had become monstrously familiar in the wake of death.

  When he scanned the page again, however, the words hit him like a shovel: an overland route to High Sarawak. He had been curious about the reference when he had read the book as a living man—now he was dead, it held extra resonance.

  High Sarawak, the vertical city. The bone-state. The place where the dead walked as revered machines. Until Wrack had seen Tavuto from its gore-slicked deck, all he had known of reanimation came from the vague cultural conception of High Sarawak. It was part of any Lipos-Tholon’s primary education in myth, along with the Tin King, the Horse Fleet and the God-Times. The city that had dug too far into the old tech and destroyed itself; it was now long cut off through the decay of the Lemniscatus, taking its mythical necrotech with it.

  By adolescence, most kids had quietly filed it in the pinch-of-salt component of world history, one of the colourful metaphors the City used to teach its children the morality of statecraft. The revelation that Waldemar had considered it a real place; that he had soberly dismissed an expedition in search of it, should have seemed ludicrous. But then Wrack was reading Gustav’s words as a victim of the very technology it had been famed for.

  Wrack had walked as a dead man; he knew that the supposedly forbidden knowledge of the bone-state had persisted past its disappearance, despite the City’s insistence otherwise. Finally, he understood why Waldemar’s book, which had always seemed so drily uncontroversial, had been so hard to come across in its unabridged form. High Sarawak was not only real, but there was a good chance it was accessible through Grand Amazon, one of the City’s longest-standing colonies.

  Wrack had to tell Mouana. Given her obsession with the technology that had doomed them, there was no way she wouldn’t want to know about this. She probably wouldn’t want to chat with him, he thought, remembering the crack of her boot against his carapace, but he had to give it a go. Suddenly, he wasn’t so keen to get lost in his books.

  MATE, thought Wrack. THE THING THAT MADE US? MIGHT NOT HAVE COME FROM THE CITY AFTER ALL. IT’S FROM HIGH SARAWAK. AND I RECKON I KNOW A WAY THERE. GRAND AMAZON.

  He waited, watching the shells fall on the shield through the belfry window, too curious to go back to Waldemar’s book. Surely, Mouana would write back any moment now.

  “HE’S NOT DEAD yet,” said Kaba, crouching by the Chancellor’s side.

  It was raining now, fat drops that stank of ozone from the beleaguered shield. The steps of the Ministry were slick with it, and the Chancellor’s robes were soaked to a deep maroon. If he was bleeding, it didn’t show.

  “No, I’m not,” spat the Chancellor, from beneath his own s
tatue. The bronze cast had landed head-first on his hips, flattening his pelvis, and Mouana could scarcely imagine the man’s pain. He must have been a desperately tough old bastard. She gave a small shake of her head to the rebels pushing the miasma trolley, keeping them from moving within the Chancellor’s line of sight.

  “Where are the other rods?” asked Mouana, as she knelt by the crushed man’s side. The Chancellor snarled.

  Her wrist console beeped; she ignored it. No doubt Wrack had some inanity or other to share with her—maybe he had seen an interesting statue, or remembered a poem. There was no time for his nonsense now.

  “Where are the rods?” repeated Mouana. The Chancellor spat, landing a pinkish blob next to her boot, and gave a shuddering grimace. Mouana sighed: no doing things the easy way, then.

  Looking down at the quivering statesman, she remembered the soldier being eaten alive, and the overseer they had captured in the opening chaos of the Tavuto uprising. Time and time again, she had gone against her instincts for the sake of her soft-hearted friend. But whatever Wrack would think of her, there was no time for mercy now. Judging by the near-constant battery of the shield, the siege was nearly broken, and if there were rods elsewhere, she needed to be on her way to them before the City fell. It was time for expediency.