by Nate Crowley
“Well played, then,” she grumbled. “I can see we’re going to have to make a deal.”
“Step into my office,” said Ivers with an unctuous smile, and gestured at the shade of the machine’s tracks.
With that, the two women moved into the shadows and entered a conversation too low and quiet to be heard from the beach. The performance was over—they had both showed their guns, and now it was a matter of business. As the conversation continued, the mayor looked increasingly anxious—several times, he tried fruitlessly to address the waiting crowd of sailors, but they were only interested in what was going on over his shoulder.
Then, after a pregnant wait, Iver signalled to the man, and he scurried over to her like a butler. When he returned to the crowd on the beach he was walking taller, and wore a damp parody of a statesmanlike smile.
“Brave seafolk, I am delighted to inform you that I have reached an agreement with your majestically-armoured leader. The refit of your fine ship, the... Goo-knack-a-dit, will be achieved in eight hours. While my provisioners and technicians furnish the craft for the cruise ahead, its crew are free to enjoy all the entertainments of our humble town, free gratis!”
The mayor threw up his hands, but nobody cheered.
WRACK UNDERESTIMATED WHAT shore leave would do for the crew’s morale. While Mouana, Eunice and Fingal elected to stay with a few dozen of the harder crew to oversee the repairs, the rest were free to take in the town. And although nobody was under the illusion their hosts could be trusted for a moment, there was a sort of reckless elation in knowing they had no option but to wait for the work to be done.
They were led onto the town’s superstructure by the Bruiser, who moved up its slopes like a funicular engine in the direction of the saloon. Wrack was in two minds about following, until Kaba swept him up like a piece of luggage and carried him up with the throng of the crew.
“You’ve had plenty enough moping, crab-man!” she announced, giving him a pat on the shell. “Watching that sour bitch won’t make her any more palatable to you, so why not just live with it. Or be dead with it. However you want it, come watch us drink. Mouana wants me to get some pointers on the way ahead, then go report back in a couple of hours. While we’re at it, you can pretend to be a pet and we’ll make a fortune on miners betting you can’t do tricks.”
Wrack barely had time to offer his half-hearted consent before they were sucked into the commercial melee of the town. As they moved up the ramps they were surrounded by the clamour of daily business; men with matted beards hacked at river-fish with cleavers, while hawkers yelled the day’s price for panning gear. Pairs of boots protruded from roadside tents where drunks slept off their revels, and bottles clinked as fortune seekers fresh from the jungle began theirs anew.
The sight of a hundred or so corpses rolling into town raised a few curious glances, but little more. As they got in among the press of bodies on the machine-town’s streets, it occurred to Wrack that they didn’t smell a lot worse than its living occupants.
When they reached the saloon itself, the shell of an old ore-store where ineffectual ceiling fans stirred a roasting din, they were welcome as any new custom. While Dolph had offered drinks on the house, Wrack suspected there were plenty of other ways for what money they had to be winkled from them.
Within minutes the living—and some of the dead—had been set upon by the local sex trade (perhaps the only men and women dressed for the temperature, Wrack noted), or pulled into card games along the room’s filthy trestle tables. It took maybe forty seconds for the Bruiser to be ensconced in a whiskey feast with a rabble who looked almost as hard as him, and for whom his conversational limitations were clearly nothing new.
After an hour or so of wandering around the place—not quite knowing how, as a crab, he was meant to enjoy himself—Wrack was accosted by Kaba. She dragged him into a card game with some local stevedores, and sat him beside her stool as she was dealt in and began trading what were presumably insults in her mother tongue. As the conversation moved with the rounds, Wrack kept hearing mentions of “High Sarawak,” and figured she was angling for anyone who had heard of a route to the place.
He applauded her initiative, but privately he knew it was redundant. Although he still hadn’t spoken a word of it to the crew, there was no doubt about it. He could feel High Sarawak. He hadn’t been certain that was what it was when they had first made transfer, but whenever his sense of self had wavered on the journey, it had glowed like a beacon. When his rage had overtaken him after the massacre at Mwydyn-Dinas, he had felt its influence as deep and powerful as an ice-water current.
But that was the last thing in the world he wanted to think about. He had had enough time to brood on the boat. The card game had been going on a while now. Seeing Kaba was too engrossed in the action to follow through on her performing-crab scheme any time soon, and knowing there was nothing really the saloon could offer him, Wrack decided to take a walk in Waldemar’s footsteps.
As Wrack left the saloon via a plank bridge and took the cliff path up towards the jungle, the clouds were thickening for an afternoon storm. Thunder was already murmuring over the distant green, and the chirps, hoots and trills of the jungle seemed subdued, as if the whole forest was waiting for the air to break. With the clamour of the bar-room fading behind him, it was almost peaceful—only the occasional prospector, loping past with a clattering pack, offered testimony to the industry of the place.
As the path climbed round the outcrop, it began to branch, leading off to tunnels in the ancient rock. Wrack chose one at random, and ambled down along the broken stone. His spirits rose as jewelled wings stirred on the path ahead; a glittering flock of Teal Viscounts—he knew the moths from Waldemar’s own drawings—had settled to lick the salt from a passing miner’s piss-puddle as it dried on the rocks. They scattered as Wrack picked his way over the dark streak, and he watched them spiral up into the growling sky.
Further up, the way was barred by a chain link gate, and Wrack became intrigued. The fence around the gate was poorly maintained, and he found it easy to wriggle under a rusted section. Ahead, where the path fell under the shade of an overhang, he began to hear the noise of picks, and a murmur of voices.
Wrack found a low rock he could conceal himself behind, and peered over its crest into the cavern beyond. Two figures—a great walrus of a man in a checked shirt, and a pale young man with a neck like a goose—sat on a bench by the entrance, passing a bottle between them. In the gloom behind, figures came to and fro from the depths of the outcrop, tipping baskets of rock onto tables where others laboured with crushing hammers.
“You reckon they all fuck together, then?” said Gooseneck, smacking his lips as he passed the bottle. “The living and the zeds?”
“Must have done by now,” murmured Walrus, as he accepted the whiskey. “They must’ve been on board together for a good while. You know how it gets with boat crews.”
“Living ones, sure. No way even a sailor woulda gotten desperate enough to get messy with a rotter.”
Walrus raised a finger at that. “Soapy Joe’s never been too good for it, though, has he? Says they’re a shitty lay, mind.”
The kid made a disgusted face, and spat. “Soapy Joe’d fuck a tree if he was drunk enough. And besides, I’d like to see him try it on with these ones. That big lass who did the talking, she’d break him in two. Now stop making me think about that shit and pass the bottle.” Still frowning at the thought, the younger man took a deep drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Joking aside, how come these ones all seem to talk? They’re rotten, sure enough, but they ain’t dumb like the ones Aife sends us.”
“Well Aife won’t send any more now, will she?” reprimanded Walrus. “City’s binned, and I reckon this lot are the reason why.”
“What, you seriously sayin’ a bunch of zeds took over Fishtown?”
Walrus shrugged. “All I’m sayin’ is that word comes from downriver of the city fa
lling, then a bunch of zeds show up in a damned hurry wanting bullets. Use your goddamn head, boy; something’s up.” He snatched the bottle back. “And I guess whoever’s after ’em, they must be desperate to escape from. Desperate enough for fuckin’ Big Bertha back there to sell a hundred of her own zeds to us in exchange for supplies.”
“I suppose we’ll need ’em, if you’re right about Fishtown,” said Gooseneck, with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “Might not be any more coming for a while now.”
Wrack felt like his mind had been kicked down a flight of stairs, but as Walrus piped up again, he discovered there was worse news still.
“Yeah, most likely not. But Al’s no fool neither, kid—you don’t think for a second that even one of those zeds is gonna make it upriver from here. You best clear some manacles, son, as I’ll wager she’s gonna take the lot. Then maybe you and Soapy Joe’ll get your chance to try the big girl on for size.”
The men laughed, and Wrack looked past them, to the figures toiling in the gloom. They were zombies; dozens upon dozens of them, slumped in misery as they hammered at the rocks from below. He briefly wondered how this backwater town had the tech to make them, but then remembered himself—someone from the City had been sending them out here, no doubt diverting shipments bound for Ocean, for Tin King knew how long.
And Mouana, after all they had been through, after being a slave herself, had been willing to sell half her crew into the hands of these degenerates for the sake of the mission. Wrack could no longer fathom the former mercenary’s moral framework, but as far as he was concerned it was little better than that of the men in the cavern.
Sitting behind the rock as he watched the men toast their upcoming windfall, he almost felt it was worth letting Mouana get taken in by the saloon-keeper’s plan, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Sooner or later, the army pursuing them would come round that bend in the river, and would swarm over the place like ants. When that happened they—and he—would be in the hands of Dust, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
Wrack kicked a pebble in frustration, and scuttled off back down the path. He was going to have to save the bloody day again.
TEN MINUTES LATER, Wrack was back at the place where the butterflies had been at the piss, this time with a very confused and highly irritable Bruiser in tow.
“Fack off,” said the Bruiser, in a tone which suggested he hoped Wrack had a very, very good reason for taking him away from the bar, and drank irritably from one of the two bottles of lager he had brought for the journey.
Wrack shushed him and pointed ahead at the mouth of the cave, motioning as best as he could with his claws for the big man to approach on his hands and knees. The Bruiser was having none of it, though, and swaggered straight into the cavern with a bottle to his lips.
Gooseneck and Walrus leapt from their bench and started firing questions at the hulking interloper, but the Bruiser didn’t so much as glance at them. He was staring past them, bottle still held to his lips, at the zombies in the depths of the cave. Thunder rolled as the storm broke outside.
“You fackin’ cahnts,” roared the Bruiser, smashing the neck of his bottle on the cavern wall. Then the stabbing began.
THE WORK WAS taking too long, thought Mouana anxiously, as the rain battered the corrugated roof of the boat shed. Gunakadeit had been hauled out of the water on enormous chains, and workers clambered over it with ropes and welding torches, patching the rips and dents in its hull. But they were half way into the refit, and nobody seemed in a particular hurry to get it over with.
She longed to be out of there, not only so she could stay ahead of Dust, but so she could be away from the decision she had made. Knowing that no-one who had gone up into the town would ever come back, that their enslavement was the price of getting out of here, was unbearable. But the idea of Wrack falling into the hands of Dust, of the horrors that would come into the world if she had that power, was unthinkable.
For a moment back on the beach—for a long moment—she had been about to call Iver’s bluff and start shooting. But the odds had been too long. If a fight had kicked off on the beach, at the very best they were going to escape with their crew in tatters anyway, and no provisions for the journey—the fuel alone would have been gone inside of three days.
At least this way, they knew how many they would lose, and would get out with a fighting chance of making it to High Sarawak. Wrack would hate her, and she would hate herself, but the job would get done, and then that would be the end of it.
Still she dared hope they could find another way out of the situation. The crew that had stayed with her in the boat shed had not stopped looking for an opportunity to get the better of their hosts, standing in a mob at the shed’s back wall, but it just wasn’t coming. Iver and the town’s guns were watching them as closely as they were watching back, and the work crept along with a hundred fingers resting on triggers.
“We still on schedule?” Fingal called out, although the question had been asked three times already that hour.
“We’re still on mine,” said Iver. “As I keep telling you, it’ll be done when it’s done. Go join your friends in the saloon, have a drink, if you’re tired waiting.”
“We had a deal,” warned Mouana, as lightning flickered on the river’s far bank.
“Deals change,” said Iver, and grinned. Mouana didn’t know whether it was just because everyone was shouting to be heard over the storm, but there was something seriously wrong about the woman’s tone.
Then lightning struck again, somewhere up on the outcrop, and she saw them. Waiting at the shed’s side door, where the track led across the beach to the town proper, were another dozen hired guns, faces set in grim sneers. She risked a glance behind, to where the shed opened out onto the river, and there were twenty more, crouching waist-deep with knives and shotguns. They’d been so intent on watching Iver’s posse that they’d been quietly surrounded.
Mouana figured they had around eight seconds to make their move before things kicked off. She was about to start firing when she realised there had been something else. Something important. Whipping her head back to the shed’s side door, she looked past the gathering thugs to the cliffside sprawl of the town, and saw she hadn’t been mistaken. Rummage was burning.
“Hey,” said Mouana. “Your saloon’s on fire.”
“Never heard that one before,” said Iver with a smirk, at the same instance as one of her men, who happened to be looking out the side door, yelled, “Shit, the saloon’s on fire!”
Iver glanced at the door, her mouth falling open, and the thugs behind her turned to see what the fuss was about. Thunder shook the roof of the shed, and Mouana fired a six foot harpoon through the saloon-keeper’s face.
It looked as if they were going to fight their way out after all.
GROWING UP, WRACK had seen plenty of pub fights on Lipos-Tholos’ grimmer streets. But compared with what he now experienced, even the bloodiest had been mere disagreements.
He was fairly sure a fight had been going on in the saloon already when they burst through the door; it seemed the sort of place where these things were as common as the drinking. Regardless, the arrival of a hundred corpses armed with hammers and picks, led by a man with a chin caked in human blood, left no room for ambiguity. It had really livened the place up.
Much as he had expected, there had been little need—or time—to explain the fine details of the situation. For the crew of Gunakadeit, the sight of the Bruiser at the door with a mob of emaciated slaves was enough; they took one look at them, then set to maiming anyone who reached for a weapon.
Kaba lunged over the card table and had a knife in a woman’s ribs in the blink of an eye, while one of the boat’s living sailors took hold of a prospector fumbling for a pistol and impaled him on a pair of wall-mounted horns.
Within seconds, all the bar’s patrons had chosen their allegiance—some ran at the zombies from the mines and Gunakadeit’s crew; some sprinted for the nearest exit or r
ushed the bar to loot it for money or booze. Some laid into one another, taking the opportunity to settle old grudges. Bottles flew, knives flashed, and the room shook with haphazard, point-blank revolver fire. Tables were kicked over, and the floor filled with jostling bodies and swinging fists.
The newly arrived zombies were weak and poorly co-ordinated, but what they lacked in skill they made up for in enthusiasm—the Bruiser had spent a good five minutes bellowing them into a frenzy back in the cave, and though few could even remember their names, they were keen as hell to put their picks through their captors. The Bruiser had led them down the path through the rain with something like paternal pride.
And there, striding through the middle of it all, was the man himself, rapture in his milky eyes as he kicked a brazier over onto the floor. He had the look of a man who had always hoped for an afterlife of unending combat, and couldn’t believe it had come true. Liquor bottles crashed onto the floor behind him, their contents bursting into flames on the spilt coals—in no time at all, the timber in the walls had caught, and the combatants had the extra excitement of roaring flames to contend with.
As the flames spread, so too did the fight; already it was spilling out onto Rummage’s rusting thoroughfare, and down towards the docks. Wrack scurried across the room between sheets of flame, anxious not to be kicked, and made it out onto the street just behind the Bruiser.
Outside, the brawl went on in the torrential rain, fists throwing arcs of droplets that shivered white in the lightning. Wrack had to dive to avoid the body of a miner plummeting from a gantry overhead, and ended up in a tangle of weeds beside the street. As he righted himself with his claws he saw the flash of gunfire from the boat shed, and knew things must have kicked off there too.
And as if to cap things off, a wall of smoke rose above the treeline a few bends downstream—Dust’s army was coming for them, and could only be a couple of hours away.
