by Nate Crowley
“NEED-YOU-TO-DRAW-ON-WHAT-EV-ER-YOU-CAN-MAAAATE-MAKE-SOME-DEAD-THINGS-MOOOOOVE-THE-BIG-GER-THE-BET-TER!”
She repeated the final words over and over, raising her arm to the sky in mirror image of the skeletons on the obelisks, and let her voice climb to a prolonged shriek. Wrack took his cue, and let his mind loose in the waters of the lake.
The small things came first; insects singed in the flames that began skittering on the stones, dead frogs that lolloped out of the water and began lurching up the stairs. He ripped through the minds of fish carcasses, had them thrash in the shallows beyond the firelight. Then his thoughts went deeper, probing the stony spaces beneath the island, and he found larger vessels to inhabit. Much larger vessels.
It began as a rumbling in the stone beneath them, deep and visceral, as if the world was shifting in its sleep. Then cracks emerged in the masonry, and a low howl echoed in the hollows beneath. In the wide plaza that encircled the dais, great humps of stone rose into the air, flagstones falling to reveal withered flesh.
First one, then two sets of vast jaws burst from the rubble, yellowed tusks parting to release natal screams in dread harmony. Wrack fought to hold his vision as he hauled the beasts from their graves, let his shriek of exertion billow from their throats as they crawled, immense and dessicated, into the night. Blackness hammered at the edge of his perception, but he held the weight. He would not buckle.
The grave-beasts lumbered towards the fire, and the etchings on their mummified flanks flickered into new light as they swung their heads. With his last shred of energy Wrack walked the monsters to either side of the obelisks and, as his thoughts collapsed into manic slurry, had them bow to Mouana.
The last thing he heard as darkness took him was the elders, crying out together in what could only be called joy.
IT WASN’T MUCH of a siege, but it would do.
The river—narrower, here—was packed bank to bank with her forces; the barges had to jostle past each other to move to the front, and it was easier to simply move infantry across the mass of decks than try to move the transports around.
Her flotilla had been compacted into a huge mass that filled the river for miles behind her. Even looting fuel and watercraft from every settlement they had passed, they had been forced to leave almost a third of the craft behind along the way. More still had grounded on sandbanks, or smashed on rocks or tree trunks.
Those that remained heaved with soldiers, and with sickness. Food had run scarce along the way, and medical supplies had been the first thing she had ordered left behind to lighten the load. The men and women on the barges, many already wounded from Lipos-Tholos, were growing thin, and swarmed with bites, infestations and fevers from the relentless insects. Some lost their minds each day and were executed, but tens of thousands still remained.
It did not matter how many she had lost in keeping pace with their quarry—once she seized the Teuthis device, she would be able to take it all back ten times over. Even now, every soldier that fell took the miasma, and joined the growing mass of dead in the column, the kernel of the legion she would build.
Still, the fight against attrition had enraged her. When Mouana had betrayed her, had scorned her generosity, she had been filled with a hatred like none she had ever known. For the first time, she had offered to share some of what she was with someone; had left something of herself vulnerable. Mouana had spat on her heart.
Ever since she had returned to the flotilla, she had been consumed by a fury that had no outlet in the glacial management of the army’s progress. She had sent ahead what few speedy craft she had to harry her prey, out of sheer frustration more than hope of success. But the bulk of her force had been maddeningly slow. She had compensated by slaughtering and burning everything they had come across, setting vast fires that had left the river’s bank blackened stubble, had raised a smoke cloud of continental size.
It had been tedious. Now, at least, it was time for a proper fight.
Far back in the column, the artillery barges fired another volley, and fire bloomed across the river gate. Impressive though the primitives’ barrier was, it was nothing to an army built to smash energy shields. There was a ponderous creak in the dark, and something huge gave way. Then, almost gracefully, the entirety of the left gate collapsed forward into the water. Behind its wreckage, lit by the flames of the burning timbers, weapons gleamed.
Dust couldn’t resist it. Protocol demanded she bombard the enemy for hours yet, reducing the whole place to mud before moving in infantry. At the very least, it made sense to break up the gate debris before launching an assault. But both protocol and sense had been left behind in the fires of Lipos-Tholos. What was left was art. She didn’t care if she lost another few hundred now, when so much more lay just beyond her grasp. It would be so much more beautiful to assault the breach immediately.
Pumping boosters into her system, she climbed to the podium of her command craft and thrust her sabre out towards the collapsed gate. The sound of the firelight on the blade filled her to the fingertips, rough and hollow as warm milk poured onto embers. She could almost taste the dread of her army as the blade gleamed, as she held the order to charge for a full, agonising minute. Then she let the blade fall, and the engines of the assault barges sang.
The first screams from the gap curled round her with the smell of tea fumes, spiced with the cries of the defenders. They didn’t sound human, and it lent a rich undertone to the sound of the fight, a blend she had never smelled before. Dust almost shivered in pleasure as a new sound rolled over the rest; the deep, undulating cry of something big. As if on cue, a monstrous form burst into the firelight; a sinuous neck and snaggled jaws that swept her troops from the logjam like children’s toys.
Perfect, thought Dust, turning back to her army. She scanned the jostling boats, and found the torchlit bulk of the Atlassian’s stable-barge. The expense of contracting the Afferitter brigade to travel through the Gate with her had been vast, but she had kept them on even when she had dismissed the other subcontractors. Because, despite the sheer logistical hell of ferrying a full pithecus unit with her, the smallest chance of an opportunity like this had made it worth it.
“Send in the apes,” called Dust, and trumpets sounded.
As the Atlassian barge steamed towards the carnage at the gate, she took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Perhaps Mouana’s betrayal had been necessary. Without it, all of this would have been so easy. She would still have her prize, and it would be all the sweeter with the defeat of her former pupil.
The apes howled in the breach, the first hints of the feast to come, and Dust ran her tongue over lips that had been dry a hundred years.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SEABIRDS SQUAWKED, indignant, as he rolled limply on the grey swell. “Wrack! Wrack!” they cried.
He thrashed weakly at them with a hook-suckered arm, but it was losing strength and could barely breach the surface.
“Wrack, we’re here!”
Where was here? His eye creaked in its mount, struggling to focus in the air. A bile-green slick lay on the water, his blood spreading out across the waves. Harpoons quivered in his flesh, trailing taut wires. At their terminus, black shapes moved towards him across the water. Pathetic, fragile. But they had conquered him. Behind them, grey and continental, a great ship waited on the horizon. The waves slapped over his eye and dissolved the vision.
“Wrack.”
Agony, and confinement, and metal. Confusion, as drugs pushed their way through him. Monkey voices, endlessly chattering. A hundred thousand eyes, but none of them his.
“We’re here. High Sarawak.”
A swampy creek, overhung by trees that burst from ruins on the banks. Bats dipping low over the water to snatch fish. A night loud with life, but louder with death. He looked through the eyes of dead things—a hundred thousand eyes, none of them his—and saw a procession of reed boats, poled by corpses. In the last lay a huge cylinder, and a towering creature of metal and wreck
ed meat.
“Wrack, mate, we’ve nearly done it!” said the creature.
“Who’s Wrack?” he said, drowsily, not sure where his voice was coming from. He couldn’t remember who that was. Had that been the boat? Or the crab? Or had it been the thing before, dying on the surface of a bottomless sea?
“You are,” said the metal one, talking to the cylinder.
“Right,” he said, for lack of any better information. “Where am I?”
His voice was coming from a dead crab, nailed to the huge woman’s shoulder. That didn’t make any sense, but it was happening.
“High Sarawak, remember? We’re here, brother. We have to leave the boats now.”
She pointed ahead, to a glade where the creek petered out to little more than a trickle, and a huge steel platform waited on the bank. Behind the enclosing trees, he glimpsed crumbling ruins. They felt powerful, familiar. But he was exhausted, and all he wanted to do was rest.
“Good for you,” he said. He was about to go back to sleep when the word caught in his mind. She had called him brother.
“Bear with me,” said Wrack. “I lost the plot for a minute there. But I’m with you.”
“HEAVE!” CRIED MOUANA, hauling on the rope with all the strength left in her body. Eunice pulled with her, and behind her the whole crew threw in their weight. Wrack’s casket came up the bank inch by torturous inch, carving a deep trough in the mud. Her feet slipped on the bank, but caught on roots; she shoved against them with everything she had.
The lake city’s elders had granted them passage, and boats that would handle the shallow water nearer the ruins, but would not send anyone with them onto what they saw as holy ground. Her performance with Wrack had left them awed, but wary; certainly, it would have seemed odd for her to have asked for help at that point. She was lucky to have been given the boats.
But now the river had run out, and the only way forward was overland. They had no choice left but to drag Wrack with them.
After an agonising climb, the casket finally tilted forward to sit on the top of the bank, and they paused to look back over the glade. They stood on a broad steel platform, sunk into the red soil and overlooking what might once have been a city, its streets collapsed beneath the shroud of ancient greenery. It looked as if there had been a rail terminus here once: a rusted engine lay in pieces, swathed in vines, and segments of track peeked through the loam.
The rail stretched into the distance, forming a long channel through the forest where no trees grew. Foraging animals snuffled over the leaf litter, indistinct in the gloom. At the far end of that avenue lay what could only be High Sarawak. There was little to separate it from the green darkness of the forest—just a single point of light, cold and faint as a distant star.
Mouana paused for a moment and leaned on the casket. The humid air thrummed with an insectile dirge, an eerie sound that swelled like a broken accordion from the eaves of the forest. She let the moment last, but there was no time to dawdle any further. Fingal was calling for them to take up ropes again, and she braced herself to heave, but Wrack interrupted.
“I think I can make it easier for you. Hold on.”
The ground quivered as he spoke, and dead leaves rustled beneath the casket. Worms and worm-eaten animals rose in a hump, taking his weight: generations of dead things, soaked through with miasma and convulsing as Wrack swam through them. They rippled, and Wrack was pushed along, gliding on the ghosts of the soil as his friends walked beside him.
In time, Kaba began to sing a boat-loader’s song; the one she had sung once before, when they had been adrift in a boat on Ocean’s depths. The whole crew joined in, one by one, and the song soared above the moaning of the forest.
MUCH OF WRACK was lost to the soil, in the arcs of the worms as they bore him on their backs, the crackle of old carcasses. But what remained of him was lost in thought.
As memory came back to him, he remembered what he had done at the lake city. At first he had been relieved that Mouana’s ploy had averted the death of the living sailors, that she had risked her own destruction to protect her crew. But had they swapped one atrocity for another? They had ploughed through a peaceful culture, tricked its leaders into obedience, and played with what, for all they knew, had been their deepest beliefs. And worse yet, they had drawn an army led by a monster to their doors. By now, the place would be in ruins.
And all for what? Wrack didn’t even know what they were fighting for any more. Did they still hope to extinguish the technology that had enslaved the dead for Lipos-Tholos? Or were they just trying to stay ahead of Dust? How long would it be before someone admitted they had no real plan?
Fingal’s voice broke his train of thought with something like an answer.
“See that ahead, lad? The dawn’s coming now, and that’s the end in sight.”
Wrack looked. High Sarawak was revealed: a tight black filament, rising up past the clouds, that didn’t so much as waver in the breeze. A squat tower rose from the jungle at its base. Still, other than the power that throbbed in his head, there was no sign of life to the place. Just that single white light.
High Sarawak. The vertical city. The bone-state. The place where the dead walked as revered machines. The city that had dug too far into old tech and destroyed itself. Myth and rumour, condensed now by their insane journey into a tiny, cold twinkle and a crumbling hulk.
The power throbbed in him, kept him moving despite his every wish to sink. The tentacles waved in the deep water, beckoning him down to rest. It would be so easy just to lose himself, to cease caring. But even if she had no idea what she still hoped for, Mouana wanted him beside her. He had to anchor himself.
“Fingal,” he said, from the crab on Mouana’s shoulder. “Would you walk beside me, and talk to me about home?”
“Sure, lad,” said Fingal. He began to talk.
He spoke about sports teams, and bakeries, and pubs and traffic restrictions, the minutiae of city life, and Wrack felt himself buoyed by memory. It was comforting beyond measure at first, but then began to hurt, as the stark gulf between the stories and their current reality became clear. They were memories of a destroyed city, and a destroyed life. The boy who had once played on those streets had torn them apart, had slaughtered men and raised monsters from alien tombs. Despite Mouana’s desperate wish to believe otherwise, Schneider Wrack was long gone.
Nevertheless, the pain seemed to strengthen him, as if it catalysed the power he drew from the monolith ahead, and he quickened his pace. The sooner this was over, the better.
THE SUN ROSE somewhere behind the clouds, and the jungle’s murmuring rose to a clamour. Kaba’s song faded from their throats, leaving only the bass rumble of the casket as they pulled it along the restless ground, and Mouana looked ahead at their destination.
Stark against the sky, the line that sprung from the old city’s crown was revealed without doubt for what it was—a skylift. She’d seen the ruins of the one on distant Shinar, as they had fought for the city at its base. Her own home, Mīhini, bore the scars of no less than three. But nowhere had she heard of one that remained intact. Looking at it, her engineer’s heart soared, and she followed the line up through the clouds, aching to know what was tethered at its other end.
As they approached the skylift, the avenue broadened into a semicircular clearing against its vast foundation. The edifice must have been at least a mile across, yet only a hundred yards or so, here at the end of the rails, were clear of forest. Its side was sheer and featureless, save for the towering archway and its sealed gate, and that lone white light. Mouana hoped against hope that gate would open at their approach, but nothing moved.
Fingal called a halt, and they set Wrack down before it. Mouana stared up at the dull metal cliff, and Fingal came to stand beside her. There was nowhere left for them to go. Free of the jungle’s cloying grip, and not yet warmed by the sun, the ground here was chill, and faint mist drifted across the gate’s face. As a morning breeze kicked up, it sang a
gainst the cable in the sky, soft and low.
“How does this end?” asked Mouana.
“Same way it was always going to end,” said Fingal, fetching his pipe from the pocket of his tattered waistcoat and lighting it. “We do our best to get inside that thing, and destroy any rods we find, or anything to do with them.”
“And then?” said Mouana, before he could.
“And then, Dust comes,” finished Fingal, and gave a meaningful look back at Wrack’s casket.
“You can’t,” she hissed, covering the microphone on Wrack’s crab and praying he couldn’t hear them anyway.
“We must,” whispered Fingal. “She’s got an army with her, Mouana. There’s no way any of us are getting away from here. What would you have us do? Run away into the jungle and live in harmony among the apes? Take him with us through the trees?” He shook his head, and drew on the pipe. “No. It has to end here. I can understand if that’s hard for you, so I’ll be the one to do it, when the time comes. Before we left the boat, I fitted a mine to the end of his casket, pointing inwards. All it’ll take is a three-number code, one-two-three, and it’ll all be over. He won’t know it’s happened.”
“You can’t,” repeated Mouana. “We’ve brought him all this way. He’s my friend.”
“We needed him to get here, but he’s done his job. This is the end, Mouana. We only ever set out to get this far, and when Dust comes—whether or not we’ve achieved our ends—it’s over. You made me captain, Mouana, and you know I’m right anyway.”
She tried to answer him, but the words wouldn’t come, so she just looked forlornly at the gate.
“I know it hurts, but there’s no time to come to terms with it,” Fingal continued. “She can’t be far behind, and there’s work to do yet, especially for you. Out of all of us, you’ve got the best chance of finding a way past that door. So put your mind to the problem and I’ll talk to the boy, make sure he stays calm. Don’t worry, I’ll be kind to him.”
