Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  They needed a way out of this town fast, and that meant finishing this fight as soon as possible. Wrack squatted dejectedly, his claws sinking to the ground as knife-wielding lunatics slashed at each other around him. He was definitely going to have to lose his mind

  And he had been doing so well.

  Nevertheless, it was all too easy to let his mind retreat back to the hold of Gunakadeit; all he had to do was think of the deal Mouana had been prepared to do, and the blackness rushed at him. The last thought he could articulate, as he hurtled towards the hunger and the fury, was how worryingly easy this had become. After that, things became odd for a long while.

  HE AWOKE ON the deck of a boat, and all around him were corpses. Their faces streamed with lightning-strobed rain as they stared at him, and they howled. He scrabbled to get away from them, but there was nowhere to go. Every inch backwards seemed to put him a foot closer to the grasping hands of another ghoul, and the circle was closing around him. He raised his hands to fend them off, but they were the claws of a crab. He screamed, and cowered as the bloated, peeling hands of the dead descended on him.

  “WRACK!” they moaned as they loomed over him. “WRACK! WRACK! WRACK!” came the noise from their lipless mouths, but he didn’t know what it meant. Then their slippery fingers wrapped around his body, and he lost his senses again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “HE’S NOT LIKING that, is he?” noted Fingal, as he packed sealant foam into the wound in his shoulder. The crew had lifted Wrack in the air and were chanting his name as they passed his body along the length of the deck, but he was screaming in terror.

  “No, he’s really not,” agreed Mouana, with a grim smirk. The crew didn’t seem to have noticed, any more than they had registered the wounds on their hands inflicted by his spiny shell as they tossed him about.

  He was their totem; when he had sounded the black pulse from Gunakadeit’s hold, the fight in the town had turned from a doomed brawl in the rain to a triumphant rout. Rummage’s militia had quailed in horror when it came, while the dead—bolstered by the newcomers who had appeared out of nowhere with Wrack and the Bruiser—had fought on with something between rage and rapture.

  In the boat shed, too, it had turned around a losing battle. Pinned behind Gunakadeit’s hull, with Eunice gushing hydraulic fluid where a grenade had taken off her arm, they had been minutes away from being overrun when the pulse fired, and the ship’s beasts had come pouring out of the hold onto the heads of their attackers.

  If Wrack hadn’t intervened, they would all have been in Dust’s hands by now. Even now, looking back through the storm, she could see the glow of the town burning above the forest as the Blades overtook it.

  But owing her escape to Wrack only made the crew’s jubilation more bitter for Mouana to take. Once again, the librarian was being celebrated for what amounted to magic tricks, while she had only been reviled for the hard decisions she had made at Mwydyn-Dinas.

  “I’m sure he’ll get over it,” said Fingal, slinking off to the cabin. Mouana grunted assent, but she wasn’t sure that he would. Every time Wrack retreated into the pickled mental bulk of Teuthis, he came back more gradually, and less intact. And she was starting to worry about what would happen when he did.

  Although nobody but Fingal had been party to the details of the deal she had struck with Iver, Mouana was nagged by an uncanny sense that Wrack knew.

  During the fight, as the ship’s beasts had run wild in the boat shed, there had been a strange moment. A wolf-eel, black flesh streaming from its body after days in the heat, had paused after savaging a gunman. It had skittered across the floor and up onto her chest before she could react, then regarded her with a queer look of calculation in its rot-murky eyes.

  For a moment she had been certain it would lunge for her face, before a ricochet knocked it sprawling to the floor. By the time the thing righted itself, the feeling had passed; Dolph, the town’s mayor, had stumbled past, fumbling to reload a pistol, and the beast had launched itself at his leg. Mouana had never seen a man die with so much screaming.

  It would have been easy to discount the incident as paranoia, but for what had happened at the end of the fight. When the way to the boat shed had been cleared and the crew had come down from the town, she had come face to face with Wrack.

  He had been the last to arrive, picking his way down the path behind the stragglers as bullets blew spigots from the puddles around him. She had been holding the shed doors with Eunice, covering the crew’s retreat as Fingal got Gunakadeit back into the water.

  But as Wrack had passed the threshold, he had stopped and looked at her. Maybe she was going as mad as he was, reading so much into the mute gaze of a crab, but she could have sworn it was the exact same look as the wolf-eel had given her. Somehow, he knew.

  Looking now at the crab as it flopped in the hands of the crew, the town just another decaying memory, it seemed ridiculous to worry. They had won, they had stayed ahead of their pursuit, and the goal was getting closer. But more and more, the irritation she was so used to feeling for Wrack was giving way to a creeping fear of what lay beneath the doors of the hold.

  “Hey, chief, you coming—?” Kaba’s voice from the cabin shook Mouana out of her reverie, and she looked away from Wrack’s limp form. “Fork in the river not far ahead; you’ve a choice to make.”

  THE MAPS WERE spread out on the tables by lamp light; some time during the storm, night had crept up on them. They were drenched and crumpled, smeared by the rain, but still readable.

  Fingal and Kaba were trying to make sense of them as Mouana ducked under the lintel. Eunice was slumped in the corner, on the bench that had become the boat’s de facto operating theatre, while Pearl worked with shaking hands to clean the mess the fight had made of her left side.

  It was the first moment of peace since the violence of the escape, and the roar of the engine as it drove them upriver was like a strange, throbbing silence. Out in the gathering dark the banks rushed by, unbroken walls of rain-lashed trees, and as the river narrowed, the forest seemed all the more vast. They were hurtling out into real nowhere country, with little more to go on than a stolen map and a madman’s hunch.

  “What’s ahead?” said Mouana, leaning on the map’s edge.

  “The Esqueleto splits ten miles yonder,” explained Kaba. “Main channel goes on eastward; there’s a brace of colony towns up there, farms out among the reed marshes, then maybe loggers’ yards ’til the map runs out. I never made it up that way. Northways fork’s a tributary, a blackwater channel called the Extrañeza. Smaller and meaner than the other branch.”

  “And what’s up there?”

  “Hard to say, truly. This chart’s too old. Used to be a fair-sized town, Raglan, but that went. Gone with the trouble-wash of some outworld grief years back. Now? Couple of villages maybe, some broken down warehouses. Then nothing, all the way to nowhere.”

  “What’s your feeling?” asked Mouana, looking the woman in the eye. Rain rattled on the cabin window and smeared the deck’s light into sheets. If they made the wrong choice, there would be no doubling back. Gunakadeit was a fast boat; she’d been built to run down monsters, and with a full tank of fuel and no reason to save it, she tore down the river like the storm itself. But they would need every scrap of speed—when they left Rummage, the drone of Dust’s flotilla was already audible, its smoke visible just a couple of bends away. They had an hour on them at best—less, if the Blades had gotten their aircraft working.

  “My bet’s the Extrañeza, chief. Weirder stories from up there. That and a guy at the card tables back there, he said his grandfather still called it the ‘bone-road.’ I think Wrack, he mentioned—”

  “East or North, Kaba,” interjected Fingal, leaning forward.

  “East. But surely we—”

  “East it is,” concluded Mouana. “Plot the course.” If it seemed sound to Kaba, then they’d take the Extrañeza. Even if they could get sense out of Wrack before the river forc
ed the decision on them, to beg him for help now might lose her the ship—especially if he chose that moment to expose what he knew about her. No: it couldn’t be risked.

  “Chief,” said Kaba, her face grim even for a corpse. “We’ve got to ask Wrack on this.”

  “Why?” barked Mouana. “Because of that damned book of his? There’s piss-all in it, and he’s beyond cracked even it was any use. This is my fucking ship and I’m asking you which branch to take.”

  “But he knows, chief.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mouana quietly, her voice cold as an Ocean dawn.

  “High Sarawak,” said Kaba. “He knows where it is. There’s something weird going on and he can feel it, I swear. In his brain,” she added, tapping the side of her head and gesturing belowdecks. Mouana gaped, not knowing what to feel more unnerved by—the revelation of yet another mystery around Wrack, or the fact it had been kept from her by her first officer. She was trying to find words when Fingal cut in.

  “Mouana, look. On the deck.” Beyond the choppy drone of the engine, everything had gone very quiet. Mouna turned around.

  There, outside the rain-smeared window, her crew had gathered in a wide semicircle around the cabin. And in its centre, rain sleeting from his outstretched arm, stood the Bruiser. He was pointing directly at her.

  “We need to ’ave...” he said, brow clenched for a long moment as he wrestled for speech. “We need... to ’ave... some fackin’ words.”

  Despite the fact she stood in nine feet of hydraulic armour, Mouana had to force herself not to show fear as she stepped out of the cabin, not to let her huge hands shake as she closed the door behind her. Eunice lurched to her feet as she left, sending spanners and clamps clattering to the floor, but Mouana waved her down—this was something she had to face alone.

  The boat, already crowded when they arrived at Rummage, was packed to the gunwales now it had taken on the slaves from the town. The crew, both living and dead, covered the deck in a mass, shivering as they watched to see what would happen. The sky above was a black vault, the river a churning, ripple-crazed darkness around them.

  Mouana entered the space that had formed around the Bruiser, and the big man paced sideways, keeping opposite her without breaking his reptilian gaze.

  “I’ve... I’ve seen you,” he gargled, finger stabbing out again in accusation. “I... know you.”

  “I know you too, sailor,” said Mouana, as calmly as she could. “What’s your issue, man?” Choked sounds spluttered from the Bruiser’s throat as he struggled to speak, and his arm trembled with the effort. When the words emerged, they came through his rotten teeth with the heat and pressure of engine steam.

  “I... know. I know... what... you was gurner do. In the taahn. And it ain’t right.” The last word was a roar, fury mixed with triumph, and his pointing hand coiled into a fist as it came.

  “You’re as bad as... as... as...” stuttered the pub hulk, gesturing back through the storm, “as bad as fackin’ Dust.”

  Fear ran cold down Mouana’s spine, and rage flooded after it. In all her worrying about what Wrack had learned, she hadn’t thought for a moment that the festering, near-mute old brawler could ever have been a threat. But somehow, he had figured things out, and had regained his tongue at the worst possible time. Her eyes flicked to the crowd on the deck, to the faces furrowed as they worked through the Bruiser’s words. This had to end now. It had to be silenced, before chaos overtook them and damned their chances of making it any further.

  “Is this a mutiny?” boomed Mouana, loud enough for the whole boat to hear, and throwing out her arms in challenge.

  “Nah,” spat the bruiser, as he cracked his knuckles. “It’s a fackin’ FIGHT.”

  And with that he charged, arms spread as he pounded across the rain-slick deck. He slammed into her, and despite outweighing him five times over, she still rocked with the impact. She couldn’t believe his strength; if she hadn’t been wired into the warbody, she would have been sent flying.

  But unfortunately for the Bruiser, she was built for this. Clamping a hand around his shoulder and sweeping her right arm between his legs, Mouana heaved the man over her shoulder and into the air, to land on the deck with a wet crack. She turned to face his crumpled body, hoping that was the end of it, but the Bruiser clearly felt differently.

  Rising to his feet as if he had tripped on a shoelace, the glowering giant grabbed his head in his hands and set his neck with a sickening crunch. Then he charged again. Mouana twisted her whole body from the hips, throwing herself into a haymaker aimed at the brute’s chest, but he simply ducked under it, bringing himself to a stop by snatching a fistful of her underarm cables.

  Swinging round behind her, the Bruiser growled and leapt onto her back; his half-brick of a hand gripped her shoulder, and his legs wrapped round her waist. She flailed behind her with her right arm, trying to swipe him away, but the warbody was too inflexible to score a hit. Then metal flashed in the corner of her vision, and her arm began sagging; the Bruiser had pulled out a blade and was stabbing away like a jackhammer at the cables nested in the crook of her arm.

  Realising he was only a thought away from scrambling up and doing the same to her neck, Mouana threw her leg out and fell backwards, hoping to crush him beneath her weight. But again the Bruiser was too quick; with a speed that should have been impossible for a corpse, he leapt aside and left her to hit the deck with a bone-shaking crash.

  As she struggled to right herself, her weak arm scrabbling for purchase on steel, he came on her again, throwing himself onto her chest and smashing her in the face with his forearm. Next was his fist, and Mouana felt her cheekbone crumple under the impact, her vision flaring white. The third blow would have crushed her good eye socket, but her left hand shot up to block it and grabbed his fist in mid-flight. She squeezed, and heard the pop of his hand turning to liquid in hers.

  But the Bruiser was undeterred; already he had the blade out again, and would have sunk it into her face if she hadn’t jerked him sideways by his pulped wrist. Feeling strength coming back into her right arm as its hydraulics self-sealed, she put a palm to the deck and shoved herself up, keeping the bruiser pinned to the deck by his wrist as she rose. But as she got to her knees, the man threw himself backwards, tearing his arm free of his hand and leaving the sodden thing in her fist.

  Mouana rose to her feet, the Bruiser to his, and they circled each other in the rain. His right forearm ended in a mess of crushed bone, but he held it in front of his face like a shield while his left waited bunched, blade in hand.

  “COME ON, THEN,” bellowed the Bruiser, beating his chest with his stump, and Mouana lunged. He leaned back under her first wild swing, then ducked in close with a flurry of stabs between the plates on her side. But the swing had been a feint to get him low, and when Mouana came back round, her left fist hit him in the side like an artillery shell.

  The Bruiser skidded five yards across the deck, coming to a crunching halt against a stanchion, but still tried to haul himself up despite half his chest being a mire of caved-in bone. Mouana strode slowly to where he lay, giving him time to surrender, but he only hissed at her as he flailed. She knelt over him, rain washing scraps of his flesh from her armour, and put a hand on his chest.

  “Stay down,” she said quietly, so only he could hear.

  “Fack off!” he screamed in her face.

  Mouana had done her best. She had given him a chance. But she could see in his eyes that he, like she, understood how this had to end. They had fought together to liberate Tavuto, and had laughed together as they burned the factory that had made them. But now he held knowledge that could turn her crew against her, and they both knew he couldn’t keep it to himself.

  She raised her arm before she could think about it any further, before she could talk herself out of it. Her fist slammed down, and cracked the Bruiser’s skull like rotten fruit. It took three more blows before his arms sank to the deck, knife rolling from his fingers to com
e to rest in a puddle.

  Mouana stood, gore sleeting from her fingers in the rain, and looked around the circle of staring faces. She looked down on them, silently challenging them to come forward and face her, but nobody would raise their eyes to hers. Where once had been loyalty, now there was abject fear. No matter, thought Mouana, as she turned her back on the crowd and plodded back to the cabin. It would do just as well.

  The crowd melted away and went silently back below decks, or to the tarpaulin shelters that had been strung across the foredeck. As she returned to the maps, Mouana tried to tell herself she had done the only sensible thing. That the Bruiser had been dead in any case, and that they all faced annihilation once they had done their work at High Sarawak. But as Fingal gave her a stern nod of approval, and Kaba slunk past her with a mutter about having to watch for fallen trees, the Bruiser’s words echoed in her head: as bad as fackin’ Dust.

  THE STORM FINALLY broke at dawn. The air turned gold as the last drops fell, and mist shrouded the river, broken only by the splash of breaching fish and the flapping passage of river birds.

  Nobody in the cabin had spoken to Mouana for the rest of the night, and she hadn’t wanted them to. Gunakadeit had steamed on, the river black in front as it was behind, and taken the turn up the Extrañeza with its crew huddled sullenly under canvas. They had stayed there as morning approached, bodies piled together in a fitful approximation of sleep.

  Only a few souls, the most bewildered of the rescued miners, wandered the deck as the sun rose. Fingal had gone with Pearl during the night, to go and see to the living rebels who had made their shelter under the boat’s forecastle. Eunice was largely repaired, and lay slumped in whatever passed for rest, motes dancing in sunlight above her vast shoulders.

  Mouana stood where she had spent most of the night, silent at the tarnished dials of the captain’s station. She had not wanted to rest; wakefulness had been haunting enough, and she dreaded what visions might come to her if she let vigilance slip.