by Nate Crowley
“Where are the rods?” she repeated, and stamped on the man’s outstretched hand. Her wrist chimed again, as the screams began.
The Chancellor passed out twice in the first half hour, requiring amphetamines from the rebels’ aid kits to bring him round, but still said nothing. After another twenty minutes, he went into cardiac arrest, but still all he offered was curses. It was all Mouana had expected.
As he died, she called for miasma; Pearl offered up the cylinder, and she jetted it into the Chancellor’s ruined mouth as he sucked in his final breath. Ten minutes later he was back, screaming. With so little time dead, Pearl explained, the Chancellor would experience very little of the vacant bafflement that afflicted most miasma victims. They could continue questioning him immediately.
“Welcome back,” said Mouana, as the Chancellor thrashed broken limbs and gaped blindly in terror. “The rules have changed. You’ve taken miasma, so now you can’t feel much pain. But there are worse things than pain. The City is about to fall. If we leave you, the Blades will find you here, and they will be able to keep you around as long as they like. The rest, you can imagine. But if you tell us where the rods are, I will kill you.”
She figured the Chancellor had slipped into the fugue of the newly-woken, but then he cleared his throat.
“Fine,” he whispered, expression unreadable behind what she had made of his face. “I’ll tell you.”
Mouana was taken aback. For the Chancellor to have collected his thoughts and weighed up his options so quickly, he must have had phenomenal presence of mind. She felt grudging respect for the old bastard, which curdled as he opened his mouth again.
“They’re at High Sarawak,” he grinned, and spat out a tooth. Mouana’s hopes collapsed; the Chancellor hadn’t seen reason—he’d gone mad. High Sarawak was a myth; if it had ever existed, it had been cut off long ago. He may as well have told her the rods were in Metal Heaven, or the Emerald City.
All the cutting had been in vain; she was no nearer an answer than she had been in the burning Ministry, and they were running out of time to draw sense from him. As if to underline the fact, an apocalyptic crack came from the horizon, where a great cloud of dust was rolling in slow fury.
The City was breached.
Mouana stood and drew her gun. This was the end: she had failed. The rods were still out there somewhere, and all she had done was shed an ocean of blood to wipe out a single batch of them. Her gun wavered over the Chancellor’s head as the rebels watched, silent. The Chancellor began to laugh, and she lowered the weapon.
Fuck it, she thought, with a flash of anger. He hadn’t come good on his part of the deal, so she wouldn’t come good on hers. She would leave him for his enemies, crippled, blind and deathless.
In fact, thought Mouana, she could leave the lot of them. Fingal, and Pearl, and the Bruiser and the Chancellor, who she could barely stand to look at. They were doomed anyway—what use was there in her staying around to see the last acts of her failure play out?
She raised the gun, and was about to turn it to her temple, when her wrist chimed once more. Wrack. She would say goodbye to Wrack. If there was anything she still owed anyone, it was that. Mouana looked at her wrist, and stood stock still. The words blazed, orange on black. THING THAT MADE US. HIGH SARAWAK. A WAY THERE. GRAND AMAZON.
The message had been sent more than an hour ago, and repeated seven times since. While she had tortured a man in and out of death in search of the same answer.
Mouana’s vision swam. She looked up slowly, at the rebels and the sailors as they waited in the rain for her to act. There was no reason they should have any idea what had just happened, or that she had been on the edge of annihilating herself. If she just frowned back at the console, as if taking in a minor detail, they would be none the wiser.
Mouana frowned back at the console, typed YES, JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT HS MYSELF, with shaking hands, and shot the Chancellor in the head.
“I know a way there,” croaked Mouana, the pistol dropping from her hand, and the crowd cheered. All she could do was stare into the wall of dust, rising from the city’s edge like the closing fingers of a fist.
“BREACH! BREACH! TO THE BREEEACH!”
The howl from the radio stretched into a dopplered scream, climaxing with the scrape of ceramic on meat as Dust plunged her hatchet into the soldier’s chest.
She bared her teeth and shunted another bar of drugs into her system. Synaesthetic boosters and kinetics, blended hot and raw. Her armour, tuned to sing with every kill, thrummed with the quiver of haptic fibres. Dust stared down into the soldier’s faceplate, blank as the desert sun, and tore her blade free in a cataract of gore.
Immediately she sought another kill, and there it was: her blade tore greedily into the next man’s neck, sizzling through kevlar, colliding with soft cartilage and ripping through into redness. More she demanded, her interface growing hazier before her eyes with each kill. More. Make me faster, make me harder, give me more flesh to rend.
Before her prayer had finished she had answered it, yanking the weapon’s hooked beard through another man’s throat, and was dancing in the rain of his heart’s last shudder. Every droplet, every hiss of blood on ceramic, paid for years of waiting. Every step she took was conquest.
Even before the wall had fallen, five endless minutes ago, she had sent her chariot screaming ahead of the charge on a plume of black smoke. When the atomic slug had blown the breach she had been close enough for it to turn the world white, to roast her face through her helmet and baste her in a creaking wash of geiger-clicks.
Her boots had hit the ground moments later, leading her personal guard over the waste and into the near-molten maw of the breach. There they had met the City’s kentigerns, as they raced forward into the oven-hot rubble with cables and projectors to set up a temporary shield. They had set upon the defenders like beasts.
The air throbbed with screams and shots, blade-clash and frantic shouts; lights blazed and shadows flickered in billows of pulverised stone. Dust they called her, and dust she was, swirling and lethal in the breach of the wall.
A man loomed out of the madness with a shotgun, but one of her guard took the blast; only a handful of sodden shrapnel made it through to embed itself in her amour. She pounced over the guard as he collapsed, and was bearing down on the attacker before his face could even register surprise. A whicker of steel, and his gun was hooked from his hands; terror was just beginning to dawn when she beat the life from him with the thing.
Another kentigern was opening up on her with a machine gun, the bullets chewing eagerly into the armour above her ribs. Dust simply flexed her shielding around the point of impact, shuddered in pleasure as the slugs slid harmlessly aside from its field, and stalked up the stream of fire to the terrified gunner.
After he collapsed with her blade in his skull, there was nothing—only yelling in the dark as the defence pulled back. Her guards were all but fallen, and the enemy were in retreat. Dust screeched in affront, and hurled the bloodied body of the gunner into the dark. Why could they not have sent more?
Every second of quiet was agony; it squeezed her heart and dripped across her shoulders in sheets of sweat. She could hear the ground hiss, still roasting from the blast. It crashed in her ears like a sandstorm. Only the sound of the artillery kept her sane, the deep pounding of the guns as they worked to open further breaches down the line.
Eventually, after long, dragging seconds, the vanguard of the main assault caught up, leaping from the decks of transports that nosed through the murk like sharks. These were not her uniformed troopers, the ranks of veterans who would carry out the long, slow work of advancing through the city’s streets. These were her irregulars. The mad, the dying, the devout and the hungry; men and women who had waited years to be first into the fight. Some wore no armour, ran with sandals on skillet-hot rubble. Others waded in iron suits, great rigs of salvaged plate that strained their wearers’ g-boosted muscles. Some were strays from the war-dra
ined countryside, others were thrillseekers from distant colonies—all were willing to take the breach in the hope of impressing her and earning a place in the company.
As they streamed past her, whooping and raising their weapons, their rage ran down her back like fingertips, and she hissed. The quiet was over. As if to reassure her further, the air cleared ahead of them, revealing a row of monstrous forms advancing through the dust. They boomed and chittered, swinging eyeless skulls and extending awful scythe-limbs as they sensed her troops. Even above the reek of hot stone, she could smell the sulphur of their breath—Lipos-Tholos had unleashed a full brood of its famous destriers.
Already the first of her irregulars were falling to the towering exobionts, run through by their claws as they hacked at their striding hindlimbs. It was the start of massacre, and the drugs pooled in Dust’s synapses growled at her to run in and sink her hatchets into the monsters. But she knew better than to lose patience, for she had monsters of her own.
Perfectly in time with her armour’s chronometer, the armoured carriers jutted from the clouds behind her. These were not the sputtering junk-barges that had ferried the irregulars into the breach, but the baroque, rust-red warcraft of the Atlas Stables, emblazoned with heraldry and festooned with campaign banners.
Dust cranked up her armour’s shielding and shunted a fresh vial of warjuice, sending her to the dizzy precipice of consciouness. The mouths of the transports lowered, and from within came the pounding of huge fists on metal, a hoarse, simian grunting, and then the blast of a dozen bugles all at once.
An avalanche of fangs and white fur burst from the transports, and Dust let the drugs take her. Time slowed to a glacial grind, and she marvelled in the ferocity of a full Atlassian pithecus charge.
The riders were a sight in themselves. Albino giants in grey dress uniforms, each had earned their commission by wrestling an infant pithecus, had spent their lives taming and training their mounts in their mountaintop stables. The apes themselves were simply terrifying. Polar predators from a dying world, they weighed close to a ton and could crush a man’s skull like a grape. They were the most feared cavalry force in existence.
This single squadron had cost Dust more than a regular brigade of infantry to hire, and as much again to procure meat for the beasts. But watching the pithecus as they thundered towards the line of destriers, their value was without question.
The apes howled with the bleak ferocity of an arctic storm. Dust howled with them, released her mind from conscious thought, and ran with the beasts.
CHAPTER SIX
MOUNA LAY IN darkness, gazing at distant yellow lights. Distant murmurs receded into a weighty, velvet silence. She sank deep into it and exhaled slowly. Whatever nightmare she had woken from was gone, diffused into the quiet like blood in a summer stream. Perhaps she would finish her letter now, she thought, as the lights twinkled before her. Finally, she would gather her thoughts and write, tell them she had had enough, that she was coming home at last.
Then she smelled the herbs, heady and astringent as they curled through the dark, and fear took hold of her. She scrambled to get to her feet, but only tangled herself in sheets that seemed to grow tighter and more twisted with each jerk of her limbs. The lights drew closer, resolved into huge blank eyes, and peered down at her with malevolent fascination.
“Do you know how many companies have presided over the siege of Lipos-Tholos?” asked the voice, warm and sharp as desert stone, as the darkness around her resolved into the gilded gloom of the command tent. Mouana gulped, and admitted she did not know.
“Twenty-three,” answered Dust, speaking over her mumble, and turned to regard a row of faded portraits. “We are to be the twenty-fourth, and the largest yet employed by the Principals. Just think, commander; thousands upon thousands of soldiers, and all their beasts and machines and shells, hired each day for decades in the hope of breaking that city.” Dust’s eyes moved away from the procession of her failed predecessors to stare back at where Mouna struggled to stand.
“Now what, do you suppose, could be worth so much to the Principals that they would keep throwing such astronomical sums into the siege?” pondered Dust acidly, as she crouched by Mouana’s side.
Mouana fought not to stammer as she answered, fighting to rise from her prone position, yet ensnared by sheets that now gripped her like limbs. “The... the connection with Ocean?”
“...will become more relevant than you think, but for a reason you might not suspect. Simple fishing access would mean little, were the city not cut off from its landside holdings,” snapped Dust, and took a long sip from her bowl of tea before setting it down on the tent floor. “No, commander, the real value in Lipos-Tholos is in something it stole a long time ago, and which many other cities—chief among them those four Principal states which employ us—would like to steal from it in turn.”
One of the general’s attenuated, indistinct limbs folded into the blackness where her body should have been, and withdrew a folded, smudged diagram. It was hard to focus on, but seemed to show some sort of black cylinder, decorated all over with layers of fractal patterning.
Mouana wanted to scream when she saw the cylinder; it brought on a maddening spasm of recognition, the feeling that she had seen it in a dream and had, even then, seen it before in this very moment. She wanted to stand and run, but the sheets held her as fast as steel cables even as she thrashed against them.
“Lipos-Tholos, commander, holds power over the dead.”
Mouana strained to turn away as the general approached, fought to cry out as the familiar blade slid from its scabbard, but could do no more than shudder as its tip slid between her ribs again.
“GRIEF AND FIRE, Mouana, come back!” shouted a broken face, just inches away from her own. Behind it, the world was a rushing blur.
Mouana screamed and tried to swat at the apparition, but she was held fast by a pair of vast, rotten arms. She blinked hard, then rolled her one good eye as she realised she had slipped away again. The arms were the Bruiser’s, and the face was Kaba’s, and the vision of the general faded into a blurred mess of dream and memory.
Still, it was near-impossible to put away the fear the dream had left. Dust as a theoretical presence on the other side of an energy shield was possible to abstract and put out of her mind; knowing the old monster was now in the city with her was another thing altogether. Worse yet, she knew the image of that diagram had been no invention of her fermenting mind. It had been a memory. Dust knew about the rods, and she would do anything to get her hands on them. It was only a matter of time before they had her on their tail.
“We need to get to Grand Amazon,” shouted Mouana, before wondering why there was so much wind. “Quick, before the general realises what we’ve done, before she—”
“Boss, we know,” frowned Kaba, talking over her in a way none of her gunnery sergeants ever would have done. “You kept saying that after you shot the Chancellor-man.”
The Bruiser backed her up with a contemplative “fack off,” and Mouana blinked again, trying to piece together exactly what might have happened in between bouts of consciousness. They were in some kind of vehicle, hurtling through the city towards the docks, with Fingal at the wheel. Ahead of them, the Tavuto’s beached prow rose like a mountain; behind them, a line of similar vehicles raced, packed as theirs was with rebels both living and dead.
“They’re hearses,” grinned Kaba, their speed whipping at what was left of her hair. “Used to use these to ferry the body-crates down to the docks, Fingal says. Took ’em from the Ministry garages and packed as many as we could aboard—heard what you said about Grand Amazon, so figured we just gotta find a boat and cast off. I was a delta goon myself—big A was where I spent most my life—so I figure I can get us there.”
Mouana knew Kaba was trying to reassure her, but the fact that so much of a plan had been made without her left her feeling sick. She looked at the sky. Dawn couldn’t be far away, and the wall must have been blown ov
er an hour ago now. How long they had depended on how long the City could hold off her old company at the breach, and she didn’t give the defenders great odds. They had to get out to sea as fast as possible; there wasn’t even time to loot the Tavuto for weapons or...
Then she realised. Wrack.
“What’s Wrack doing?” snapped Mouana at Kaba, making her recoil.
“Ask him yourself,” protested the old boat-loader, spreading her arms. “He’s strapped to your fucking wrist. You ask me, he’s gone crazy, proper sunbaked. Been sending you book reviews for the last hour.
Mouana glanced at her wrist, just as a fascinating fact about herring—one of a long list, by the look of the message archive—came through.
WRACK, typed Mouana. CN U GET OFF TVTO?
SURE, I’LL JUST STROLL YOUR WAY SHALL I? came the instant reply, but she was too tense even to curse him.
SRSLY. GOT TO BE A WAY TO EJECT, OR STHNG? she implored.
YES, BUT THERE’S NO POINT. I’M STAYING HERE.
Mouana felt frustration rising, when another message came through.
I’M NOT BEING SILLY, THIS TIME. YOU’VE GOT A MASSIVE JOURNEY AHEAD OF YOU, AND I AM—VERY LITERALLY—A MASSIVE BURDEN. YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE AS FAST AS YOU CAN; I’M BEST OFF STAYING HERE AND COVERING YOU WITH WHAT’S LEFT OF THE WEAPONS. THEN, HOPEFULLY, I CAN GET KILLED AND FINALLY GET SOME KIP.
For once, what Wrack was saying made perfect sense. With Tavuto rammed into the dock side of college hill, it could put up a hell of a rearguard action once the Blades made it this side of the Ministry. And even if Wrack could eject from the ship, getting him aboard another might take hours they didn’t have. But at the same time, Mouana knew with a weird clarity that Wrack simply could not be left behind.
Apart from anything else, he would be useful. If he could remote-operate the ship’s beasts as he had done that bloody crab, they’d have a lot more muscle on side for the journey. And if he could muster the sort of weird, black pulse that Tavuto’s overseers had wielded against the dead by jacking into the vile old brain themselves, they might actually have a chance.
