Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  AT LAST THEY reached a place where they could go no further. It was just past dusk, and Mouana was down in the hold, using a bit of pipe and some bones to show Wrack how a railgun worked. It was engaging at first, but she wasn’t much of a teacher, and had soon veered away from the interesting stuff into a seemingly interminable discussion of what could go wrong with poorly-maintained coolant systems.

  Now that Wrack’s legs couldn’t support his carapace, he had been taped to Mouana’s shoulder, so he didn’t have much choice but to watch whatever she was doing. Nevertheless, he made plenty of encouraging noises, and only occasionally gave in to the temptation to squawk “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” in her ear. She hadn’t laughed yet, but he was sure that was because she still hadn’t gotten the joke.

  The discussion of coolant methods was threatening to creep into its second hour when—to Wrack’s relief—Mouana was interrupted by a strange horn blowing, followed by a commotion on the deck above. Her head jerked up from her diagram as the sound came again, and she hurried up on deck to see what was going on.

  As they joined the crew in staring at what awaited them on the river, Wrack found words in his head, from an old treatise on mapping the Lemniscatus. Travel far enough into nowhere, leave the borders of your own city far enough behind, and eventually you will come upon somebody else’s.

  Across the river, as tall as the forest that crowded the banks around it, was a great stockade. At its centre was a gate with doors of blastwood timber, clad in the shells and hides of a dozen species, and stippled with patches of glowing moss. Painted skulls, yards long and gnarled with tusks, hung from chains across the barrier. A line of torches blazed on the parapet above it, and figures gathered before them in silhouette. The horn blew again, low and blatting, and Gunakadeit’s own foghorn sounded in answer as they approached.

  “High Sarawak!” said an awed voice from somewhere on deck. “We’re here,” said another, and soon a murmur had spread across the deck. Wrack was not convinced; there was no denying they were close now, but he was sure he would be able to feel if High Sarawak lay just behind those gates.

  Besides, he figured that whoever had crafted the necrods would be using more than logs and animal shells to guard their treasures.

  When they came to within a hundred yards of the stockade, a volley of arrows hissed into the water directly ahead of them, and Fingal called for the crew to cut the engines and kill their lights. Kaba hauled herself painfully up the boat’s central mast and called up to the ramparts in her mother tongue, but there was only silence in return. She tried again, in another language, and then haltingly in a third, clearly running out of options. She repeated herself, and at last a voice came back, low and rasping.

  The exchange proceeded slowly, with long gaps in between responses, but eventually a word began to emerge from repetition—a word Wrack knew. “Dead?” questioned the unseen sentry. “Dead!” replied Kaba, whispering to Fingal to get the boat’s searchlight turned on the mast. “Dead,” she repeated, her good arm outstretched in the lamp’s beam, spiralled in a raiment of moths. “Dead.”

  The horn blew again, and others sounded in answer from far behind the wall. Then, with a deep crack, the gates began to open.

  WRACK WAS SURE he had fallen into another dream, the strangest yet, as the boat nosed through the gap into the still water beyond. The gates concealed a city like none he had ever read about—it sprawled across the surface of a shallow lake, stretching a mile at least within the long palisade. Its channels and streets were marked out with wooden pilings, and light twinkled everywhere—both the dry flicker of fires and the steady glow of bioluminescence. Buildings rose from the clear water on carved pillars, three storeys high in places, with lights strung between them in webs of vine. Tiered ponds thronged with floating vegetables, and squat trees bobbed on forested barges.

  And everywhere swarmed... Wrack imagined he was Waldemar, and searched for a word that might seem believable to city readers. But there was no route around the obvious. They were lizard-people. Of course, they bore little in common with true lizards—their tails bifurcated halfway up their broad backs, and he could find as much of a mole shrimp or a bat in their anatomy as anything reptilian. But their lipless mouths and slit-pupilled eyes evoked pungent memories of the Lipos-Tholos reptile house, and that’s what Wrack was stuck with.

  They moved as gracefully in the water as out, membranes spreading as they surged along beside the boat, then folding away as they hopped out onto jetties and pilings. Hundreds were flocking to stare in fascination at Gunakadeit as it eased into the city, gesturing with three-fingered claws at the exhausted bodies on its deck. The crew stared back, some offering tentative waves, others flinching at every sudden movement from their watchers.

  There was a sudden splash as a dozen or so of the lizard-people leapt into the water from a low hump, and a deep growl resonated through the shallows. The sound drew a low moan from the dead, caught between resignation and dread. Then the hump shook, and an eye opened on its side. It rose from the channel on a thick ochre neck, water sluicing from between tree-trunk-thick tusks as the vast head turned to regard them.

  The boat rocked on a swell, and Wrack glanced over to see a second giant rising on their starboard side. It stood twenty feet clear of the water at the shoulder, and peered down on them from higher still, a spiked crest spreading above the tombstone battlements of its jaws. The monster gave a curious rumble and lights smouldered along its body, from its red-rimmed throat wattles to the tails swooping from its hindquarters. The light pulsed in jagged patterns along the behemoth; glyphs and cartouches that swam with bacterial calligraphy.

  The beasts stood on either side of the boat, lowering their heads to inspect the newcomers; as their illustrated flanks shimmered, chanting began among the lizard people. Whether this was a ceremony of joy, the prelude to a swift ending, or both, Wrack had no idea. If he was honest with himself, he was too enchanted to care.

  “Please tell me,” asked Mouana, as the monster’s head turned sideways and its tiny eye regarded them from its cliff of bone, “that you read all about this place, and were just saving it as a little surprise for us.”

  “I wish I could tell you that,” said Wrack, as foetid lakewater fell on them from the titans’ jaws. “I really could. But this is all excitingly new to me.”

  Of course, that wasn’t strictly true; truthfully, there were stories about lizard people from Grand Amazon. There always had been. Waldemar himself had come across them in travellers’ tales ancient even in his time, snippets from before the failure of the Gate. He had scoffed at them in footnotes, reading them with the same scorn he’d felt for tales of rhinoceros from long-lost Komkhathi. But that had been in his early writing. Now Wrack thought about it, his later work steered clear of such matters entirely. Either way, he figured, now wasn’t the best time to get stuck into a discussion of narrative authority in the Rückgewinnun, and so he stayed quiet.

  “What in the six skies are they chanting, Kaba?” called Fingal, hand curling around a shotgun as one of the lake giants nudged him with its snout.

  “Not a lot I understand, boss. Only words I’ve got to share with ’em is scraps of old wormers’ glot, and they’re using scant little of that. ‘Open again’ is all I’m getting, though that’s only a best guess.”

  “Well if that’s all you’ve got, then shout it back,” barked the rebel boss, patting the monster on its tusk with the enthusiasm of a cornered caniphobe. “Open again, Kaba, that’s the ticket.”

  Kaba called the words back at the glistening throng, and the chanting intensified. She shouted the words, and they rasped back from all around, rising from throats not built to carry them. The lake beasts let out a strange sigh in harmony, then drew back their heads and let the boat chug on. Wrack was elated at their passage, if only because it let him see more of the place. Even as the monsters sank back into the warmth of their guard-hollows, he gazed at them with wonder. But there was so much m
ore to see.

  As they passed into the witching glow of the lake-city’s heart, they passed ramshackle towers of woven wine, vertical pastures that rattled and thrummed as insects the size of hounds careened against their walls. Past them were floating butchery yards, where a bulkier breed of citizen worked; they hauled the bugs from the corrals onto tables before setting on them with cleavers, splitting off the meaty legs and throwing the shells into simmering stock pots.

  In a viscous pool behind them, another giant lurked. This one was almost all mouth. Its huge scoop jaw lay half-submerged, churning in the mire as labourers shovelled heaps of detritus into its pit. At its rear, lizard-people daubed in nacreous script waited with broad pans, collecting its luminous excreta.

  Further in they passed a series of corrals, circles of white gravel where fat, feather-gilled tadpoles wallowed. Most were the size of a person’s torso, but each pen held one or two of truly enormous size, their mouths already budding with cartilage tusks. All were tended together by wading lizard-people, who sang softly as they scattered the water with smashed fruit and chunks of fish. By the time Wrack realised he was looking at the city’s nursery, the larval pools had almost receded from view. He made a resolution to himself that he would come back and see this again, before the crushing realisation set in—this was a one-way journey. He had lived his life, and was crawling towards the end of its unintended epilogue.

  Worse yet, he thought, it was unlikely there would be anything left to see here, even if he could manage to return. Dust was coming with guns and rage and roaring diesel, and would not stop to negotiate at the gate. All of this—the orchards and the tadpole baths and the beasts with their word-pocked flanks—would be gone soon, casualties of someone else’s injustice. It stirred him to shame, quickly sublimated into black anger. High Sarawak tugged on his crackling nerves, and his mind raced with thoughts of surging brine. He could feel the world greying out, when a soft voice brought him back.

  “Hey,” said Mouana. “I guess it’s time to get off the boat; looks like we’ve reached the end of the line.”

  Wrack’s mind snapped back all at once, to a riot of colour and sound. The boat had come to rest in a circular pool, surrounded by cut stone and painted columns. Ahead of it, broad stairs led up a causeway to an island at the lake’s centre, and they thronged with lizard-people. “Open again!” they cried in Kaba’s old trader tongue, “Open again!” as they lowered gangplanks onto the boat’s gunwales.

  All at once the boat was flooded with the lizard-people; they scurried up the planks on their knuckle-claws, and moved about the deck taking reverent sniffs of its charnel filth. Wrack feared the blades were about to come out—but instead came garlands; ropes of glowing blossom were draped on the shoulders of the dead as three-fingered claws took their hands. Those who could no longer stand were scooped from the deck, and carried on the plated backs of their hosts.

  “Stay together,” cried Fingal as a pale creature scrawled in light led him from the bow, but the words were next to useless—they were caught up in a rapturous tide. Mouana allowed herself to be led by a trio with lilac-striped jaws, and they took their first steps on dry land since Rummage.

  As they moved up the causeway steps, however, Wrack noticed that not everyone in their party was being offered the same reverence. The remainder of their living crew were huddled together in a knot as they hurried along, and nobody had taken their hands. Their hosts circled them warily, snapping and hissing at their limbs. Mouana had clearly spotted it too.

  “Oi,” she growled, yanking her hand free, and stomping over to the living crew’s tormentors. “Leave off—they’re with us.” The lizard-people looked to each other in what seemed like disgruntlement, then glanced back at her with cocked heads—they kept their distance from the living after that, but Wrack had the sense that the incident had confused them mightily.

  “What in grief was that about?” muttered Mouana, as they found their place in the column again.

  “I’m not sure,” said Wrack, “but I think a hypothesis is presenting itself. Look ahead.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said Mouana.

  The stairs ended in a great dais, carved with channels of light, and with a swirling green fire at its heart. Behind the fire waited a crowd of ancient-looking lizard-people, and behind them, rising into the night’s gloom, stood a pair of vast, glowing skeletons.

  The figures, unmistakably human, towered in blue light, painted on a pair of fifty-foot-high obelisks. Their skulls were tilted up towards their raised arms, as if calling something down from a high place. And above them, dwindling into dimness up the length of the great rocks, were painted countless stars.

  “Yeah, does rather suggest we’re on the right track, doesn’t it?” said Wrack, marvelling at the giants in the firelight.

  Up ahead, Fingal and Kaba were deep in conference with the city’s elders. From what he could hear from Fingal, they were trying to leverage whatever strange goodwill they possessed for passage onwards to High Sarawak, a deal which Kaba was struggling to convey in detail. Wrack could only guess at the elders’ body language, but there seemed to be an obvious and growing sense of affront at the lack of ceremony. Somehow, he doubted Kaba had explained the reason for the urgency of the discussion.

  Then, as the negotiation progressed, it took on a more sinister air. Again and again, the elders would issue sharp barks of refusal, and thrust out their claws at the anxious bunch of living sailors. Wrack understood then, looking at the fear stretching across their faces, what the sticking point of the deal must be.

  The gates opening when Kaba said they were dead, the skeletons on the stones, the cries of ‘open again’: it all made horrible sense. Whoever these people were, and however they fitted into this world’s mangled history, they had clearly once traded with High Sarawak, and had been waiting centuries for its gates to reopen, and for trade to resume. How surprised they must have been—suspicious, even—for the dead to come from the opposite direction, and to come hand-in-hand with the living.

  As the impasse continued, their hosts grew restless, and the elders began whispering to one another, glancing sidelong at Fingal. Fingal in turn was growing increasingly exasperated as he failed to understand what Wrack had just worked out—that they weren’t going anywhere so long as the living stayed that way. If things carried on this way, it was only a matter of time before they were cut down on the spot as imposters, or Dust arrived and made the whole issue moot.

  “Mouana?” asked Wrack, speaking as softly as he could.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know when you shot all those people at Mwydyn-Dinas? How you did something awful because it was the only way we were going to stay ahead of Dust?”

  “Yes,” said Mouana, after a very uncomfortable pause.

  “Well, obviously I understand why you did it, because I’ve been in your head. But now... now I really understand. And I don’t hold it against you one bit.”

  “Wrack, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Look, there’s no time to explain. I just wanted you to know that before this happens. Can you walk us to Fingal?”

  “Alright, Wrack,” sighed his friend, and stomped forward to the edge of the negotiation circle. Fingal looked round as she loomed, and frowned. “Wrack wants a word,” she said, laconically.

  “Not now, man,” hissed Fingal, glaring at Wrack. “I’m in the middle of a bloody negotiation he—”

  “We’ve got to kill them,” said Wrack, cutting him off. “The living. Don’t make me explain, but we have to kill them. There’s no way we’re getting past with them in one piece. They’ve got to die, and the longer we refuse, the more likely it is they’re going to turn on us. We need to kill them, now.”

  Fingal was slow, but he wasn’t stupid. Recognition flashed across his face as Wrack spoke, and he took one look at the living crew before putting a hand on Kaba’s shoulder and cutting her off in mid-flow.

  “Kaba, Wrack’s right. New plan. Tell
them we’re going to slaughter the living.”

  Kaba’s broken jaw fell in horror, but Fingal stayed stern. “Tell them, right now.”

  Kaba opened her mouth, and was about to speak when Mouana piped up, turning every head in her direction.

  “Tell them,” she roared, taking a mighty stride into the circle, “that I am the War Princess of High Sarawak, and that I have had enough of their shitty manners.” She shoved one of the elders in the chest with a fingertip, rocking him back on his haunches.

  The crowd exploded onto their feet and began hissing together, sounding like a sudden downpour. Mouana was undeterred. Scowling, the green light of the fire flickering on her face, she stalked around the circle and jabbed her finger at each of the elders in turn.

  “I am heir to the skeleton throne,” she boomed above the hissing of the crowd, “and I have come to claim it. How dare you stand in my way?” The elders scurried back at the force of her voice, and she threw her palm out to gesture at the living.

  “These quick ones are my slaves, and among them is the Queen of Lipos-Tholos,” she thundered, adding, “Pearl, get over here,” in a hurried mutter. Pearl shuffled forward, looking thoroughly wretched, and stood with her head bowed by Mouana’s side.

  “I have conquered her city and now,” she cried, slapping the woman to the ground with a monstrous backhander, “now, I am dragging her back to pay for her sins. Would you dare take that from me?”

  Her words echoed into silence, broken only by the chirping of frogs far out on the lake. All around them in the dark, blades glinted, and a thousand bodies crouched in readiness for the tension to break.

  “Alright, then, Wrack,” she whispered, “work with me.” Then, she began chanting. At first, he thought she was just bellowing nonsense, but as he listened closer, the words became obvious, disguised as they were by the weird rhythm of her ersatz incantation.