by Nate Crowley
It was almost identical to the black pulse she had known since Tavuto, but in every way inverted—a searing wave of warmth and strangeness and mirth. It blasted across the field, and Dust spasmed as it passed through her. A high-pitched whining rose from her lines and she turned in horror, blade still caught in Mouana’s chest, just in time to see her countermeasure device explode in a geyser of cerulean gore.
It had been overloaded. It could not cope with, had not been created to withstand, what was happening then in Wrack’s casket. Dust goggled at it in disbelief, stunned to stillness, as gobbets of it steamed on the ground.
As she turned back, Mouana greeted her with a gargantuan, piston-driven punch to the face.
Dust was flung ten feet by the impact, landing in a rumpled heap, and the shield around them flickered and vanished. Slowly, achingly, with a black stew pouring from the hole in her body, Mouana rose to her feet and stood over the general.
At the edge of the clearing, her army were looking at each other with expressions of complete bafflement, flickering with questions that quickly congealed into dark purpose. They began to shamble across the field, not in the regimented march of soldiers, but with the hungry, disorganised lope of a mob.
Dust looked up at Mouana, eyes wide in profound confusion, and shook her head. Then a rattle of claws came from Mouana’s shoulder, and Wrack spoke.
“It has to be said, Mouana, that... that was a terrible joke. I don’t think she thought that was funny at all.”
The ground quivered, and bone fingertips began to push through the loam like spring shoots. Hands emerged, then forearms, damp soil falling in clots from the bones. The arms curled around Dust’s limbs and clamped down with horrible strength, keeping her fast to the earth. They clasped at her armour and tugged at her cloak.
Then a lone arm emerged from the earth, curled in front of the general’s face, and gave her a sturdy thumbs up. Mouana was in no doubt; Wrack was back with her.
DUST EXPECTED RAGE to come. She had been tricked by her betrayer, humiliated in front of her legion. Her prize, which she had schemed so many years to acquire, had been snatched from under her nose and used to beat her down. As the old bones creaked around her limbs, and the moans of her army grew louder in the dawn, she clenched her fists, waiting for the fury.
But there was something else there; something she wasn’t sure she had ever felt. It shimmered over her bones, plucking her ancient muscles like harp strings and bathing her mind with warmth. Her interfaces nudged at the edge of her vision, urged her to activate the black mechanisms at her core. Even now, with their help, she could probably break free and fight.
But rage was such a stale old taste; it had blasted through her so often her nerves were dull to it. Even triumph felt flatter, more sour than it once had. This new feeling, by contrast, was intoxicating. To know defeat—to know the end was coming, at the hands of the army she had spent an age building—this was fresh, like sunlight on mountain snow. It meant no more fighting, no more planning, no more nights spent grinding her teeth in anxiety over how to fill the ever-deepening hole.
It was relief.
Dust let her fists unwind, and reached for the bone fingers that held her. Slowly, awkwardly, she clasped hands with the dead. It was, she realised, the first time anybody had ever held her hand. Even if this was the last thing she ever experienced, she thought, it was worth the trade.
But there was, of course, one last thing to experience. As the first of her soldiers loomed above her, Dust reached into the recesses of her endocrine rig and wrung it for every drop of synaesthetic boost it could give her. It would be an unsurvivable dose, but that didn’t matter anymore. Her death would be music, and light.
The first blades fell, like waves breaking on endless white sand, and Dust smiled in welcome.
WHEN DUST WENT, she went silently, but Mouana had long since stopped watching. She was gone, and that was good enough—there was no need to stay for the gory details.
And besides, there was a more pressing concern. When she turned to walk back to the casket, she found her crew all staring the other way.
Silently, and slow as dawn, the gates of High Sarawak were opening.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a slightly longer book than the last one, but a shorter list of acknowledgements, which probably means I’ve become an ungrateful bastard. Nevertheless, I’m sincerely thankful to: Tom Bowers for his marvellously dark medical knowledge, Emma Southon for consistent help with latin, everyone else on twitter who pitched in with trivia when I needed it, Josh Fortune for endless camaraderie, Daniel Barker for being good enough to let me start a career by writing insane fanfiction about his birthday, Mark Kuggeleijn for the Skeleton Economy, Margaret Atwood for Alex Thomas and all he wrote, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alexander Humboldt, Charles Waterton, Redmond O’Hanlon and all other adventurers who have written about the tropics, the city of Iquitos in 2007, Chris Farnell for an incisive beta read, plus tremendous company and support, Dave at Abaddon for a solid editing job, mum & dad for being the best parents I could hope for, and Ashleigh Timmins for being unfeasibly kind, supportive and enthusiastic while I had my head stuck in the jungle. You got your bloody lizardmen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NATE CROWLEY LIVES in Walsall, but will sometimes show up in London if you shout his name into a bag full of bones. He loves a good trip to the zoo, a nice plate of prawns, and staring into the wasteland behind his house. If you want to talk to him about animals or the like, he is @frogcroakley on twitter. As well as his debut novella The Sea Hates A Coward, he has written the appalling saga of Daniel Barker’s Birthday, and is currently working on Big Mike Lunchtime’s Business Training ‘95, a computer game best euphemised as “a bit like Jumanji, but with businessmen.”
Schneider Wrack was never a dissident. But since he’s serving the sentence anyway, he may as well become one.
Because in the city, the sentence for sedition is death. Death, and then reanimation, before being shipped out to Ocean to work until you fall apart – or something gets you. There’s always a need for fresh bodies in Ocean. In the 70 years the city has been under siege, it’s been the only place to get food, and so the whaling barges work night and day to haul in enough meat to keep three million people from the edge of starvation. Human labour isn’t an option – Ocean’s too big, too cruel, too full of monsters – so it’s the dead that man the whaleboats. They’re meant to be mindless, empty vessels, but the procedure isn’t perfect. Schneider has woken up months into his sentence, trapped in a living hell of meat and brine, and he’s not happy.
It’s going to take a lot to stir the workforce into revolt; few of them have all their original limbs, and fewer still can remember their own names. But you’ve got to do what you can with what you’ve got.
It’s time to bring hell back to the city.
The Sea Hates A Coward is the debut novella of Nate Crowley, who as @FrogCroakley wrote Daniel Barker's "increasingly nightmarish" (Buzzfeed) birthday party in January and February 2015.
www.abaddonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Title
Indicia
Grand Amazon
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Abaddon Books
ilter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
