Dark Foundations

by Chris Walley

  Merral turned away, stabbed by agonizing thoughts. The envoy told me not to leave Isterrane, but I disobeyed and, as a result, I have brought the threat of utter disaster on myself and my town. What folly!

  Merral considered whether to confess to Vero what he had done. But as he thought about it, he had a strong reluctance to admit that he had done something so appallingly stupid as to disobey the envoy. Anyway, we’re not absolutely sure yet that this is a trap.

  Trying as best he could to hide his feelings, Merral said, “I resist that idea. But I suppose . . . I can accept that it’s a possibility.”

  Vero seemed to watch him intently and Merral sensed in the careful gaze that his friend suspected there was more than had been said.

  “We’d better break the news to the warden,” Merral said.

  “Here? All of them?” Enatus rolled his eyes and reached out a hand to steady himself against a table. “Around twenty thousand Krallen?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Merral replied.

  “Is there any chance that Colonel Thuron will come to our aid?”

  “I will talk to him again. But . . .”

  Enatus sighed. “But we can’t presume on it. By this evening you say?” The little man fell silent and his head and shoulders sagged as if they were pressed under a great burden. He peered up at Merral. “So, humanly speaking, there isn’t much hope?”

  He looked away and when he looked back, Merral was surprised at the resolution that burned in his eyes.

  “Very well,” Enatus said, his voice ringing with such defiance that people in the office turned to look at him. “However many there are, we will fight them. That’s that.”

  He clapped his hands in a gesture of determination. “We’ll make such a defense that the whole Assembly will be proud of us.”

  In spite of his own troubles, Merral felt proud of the little man.

  Enatus stood upright, his plump hand slipping to his sword hilt. “Gentlemen, ladies, we must do what we can. But we can promise our enemies this: a tough fight.”

  29

  After Vero left to see Balancal and organize the irregs, Merral walked down the corridor, found an empty room, and began to make some calls. The first was to Frankie Thuron. When he got through, the image on his diary showed a very troubled man. That makes two of us.

  “Merral, I’m very sorry,” Frankie said. “The whole Dominion army is on the move and heading your way: fifteen, sixteen thousand Krallen plus other things—ape-creatures, cockroach-beasts, and those flying things. I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “Come on, Frankie, you can move now. Come and help us. The threat to Isterrane is removed. Attack them from the rear.”

  Frankie’s lean face darkened. “I can’t. That’s a fact. I just talked to Clemant. We are not to move from our defensive positions. His orders.”

  “Look, from all we’ve seen, this town will fall this evening and the bloodbath here will make Tantaravekat seem like a minor incident.”

  “Merral, I am under authority.” Frankie’s open face plainly showed the torment of conflicting emotions. “I can’t rebel. I understand why you did what you did, but you’ve set a precedent. If we all followed it, we would tear this world apart.”

  It’s no good. Frankie takes his orders seriously, as perhaps I should. I thought I was just rebelling against Clemant. I now realize that I’ve rebelled against the Most High.

  “I understand,” Merral said slowly. “Colonel Thuron, you must do whatever you have to do.”

  “Sorry. You have to go to Clemant. . . .” Frankie’s voiced tailed off. “But whatever happens, you have my prayers.” Then, evidently close to tears, Frankie terminated the call.

  A minute later, Merral called Clemant. I will not get angry. That will do no good at all.

  A cold, round face greeted him. “Strictly speaking, Captain, I should order Enatus to arrest you, but I think he is going to need every man he can get.” Clemant sighed deeply, but Merral detected no sympathy in his face. “You have thrown away everything on what now seems certain to be an utterly futile venture.”

  “Sometimes, sir, one must do what is right, even if it does prove futile.”

  “I am sorry. You are in a mess of your own making.” There was a slight, stiff shrug of the shoulders.

  “Sir, I am not concerned for my own safety. I need help. I would like you to order Colonel Thuron to attack the Dominion forces.”

  “The answer is no. The interests of Farholme come first. Indeed, one might almost say that the interests of the Assembly come first. And there are other factors now.”

  “What other factors?”

  Clemant’s face remained impassive. “They are not relevant to you.”

  “So you won’t send us any support?”

  “I wish I could, Captain. I really do.” Clemant paused and looked away as if unable to look at him. “Necessity is, I’m afraid, a cruel business.”

  Barely able to constrain himself, Merral simply mumbled, “Thank you, sir,” and closed down the link. If I get out of here, I will deal with that man.

  Trying to bury his anger, Merral made a third call, this time to Jorgio. The old man, his head shaded by a battered straw hat, was out in the garden. Based on the glimpse of a trowel, Jorgio was weeding.

  “Why, Mr. Merral,” he said in a reflective voice. “I was wondering about you. I gather you’re in trouble.”

  “Yes, trouble’s the word. We’re trapped here with around twenty thousand Krallen on their way.”

  “Not nice, is it?” Jorgio rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “Not nice at all. I have been praying about it as I have been doing the weeding. My family too are in Ynysmant. . . . But truth to tell, Mr. Merral, I got the impression as the trouble you was in was something else. I couldn’t help but feel as there was something that you had to sort out with the King.”

  “I see,” Merral said, thrown into bewilderment. “I have felt in the last few hours that . . . well . . . coming here may not have been the wisest thing to do.”

  Jorgio brushed a fly away. “I don’t reckon as it being wise was the issue. It felt more . . . well, about obedience, if you understand what I mean.”

  “Jorgio, I came here to try and save our town. I chose to risk my life and the lives of my soldiers in coming here.” Merral heard the defiance in his voice.

  “Tut. I’m sure that’s what you meant, but I reckon as a thing can be good and still be the wrong thing.” He fanned his face with his hat and then seemed to peer thoughtfully at Merral. “See, Mr. Merral, if I worked for someone and they said, ‘Jorgio, grow nasturtiums’ and I grew dahlias instead, why that’d be a wrong thing—disobedient—even if they was beautiful dahlias.”

  “I will consider your words, Jorgio,” Merral answered, feeling accused by the conversation. “But please pray.”

  “Oh, I will. But I would say this: you might want to watch yourself.”

  “Thank you.” The call ended.

  He slipped his diary onto his belt and stared at the wall. I have rebelled against the Most High, and I know what I ought to do. I ought to repent. I ought to find Vero or Luke and admit that I disobeyed the envoy and I ought to pray for forgiveness. Yet as he thought this, the idea of admitting he was wrong seemed very unattractive.

  “Look,” he said aloud. “I had to defend my town. You have to understand.”

  Still bitter, he rose and went to find Lloyd.

  Merral exited the stairway by the sandbags and stared around Congregation Square, stunned into silence by the scene before him.

  Before him lay a scene of complete devastation. Where the Emilia Kay once stood was a smoldering, blackened hulk of torn and twisted girders that steamed as fire crews sprayed water on it. Smoke and steam drifted across the square and with them came the smells of burned synthetics and charred flesh.

  All around were fragments of wreckage, smears of lubricant, and scorch marks. A bladed vehicle bulldozed its way across the square, piling the wreck
age into large piles. Merral watched as a stretcher bearing something that had once been a living body was placed in an ambulance.

  Men and women peered out of the entrances to the refuge, their faces showing fear and incomprehension. A flock of pigeons wheeled across the square, apparently untroubled by the devastation below them.

  People have died here. Women and men who were alive this morning. The bitter thought seemed to harden his resolve to stay his course and not repent.

  He wondered about his parents and, on impulse, made his way to the nearest refuge entrance. Amid the men and women gaping at the scenes in the square were harassed officials with databoards trying to impose order while overseeing the delivery of supplies and assigning bunks.

  “Excuse me,” he said to one of them, “do you know if my mother is inside?”

  “Seeing as it’s you, Commander,” the official said with a weary sigh, “I’ll call her. But it’s pretty chaotic in there. Well over ten thousand here; almost every bunk taken.”

  As they walked to the door, Merral heard from within the echoing murmur of a thousand distant voices. Like bats in a cave. He resolved that, whatever his fate might be, he would meet it in the open air.

  As he waited for his mother to emerge and Lloyd did his tactful dozen-pace retreat, Merral stared at the massive doors with their great hinges and new bars. How long will they hold?

  Suddenly his mother was with him, her hair tied back and wearing overalls and an official armband. She blinked in the sun. “Merral!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. She then stepped back and scowled at his armor. “It’s hard! And that color!”

  “It works, Mother.”

  “I should hope so. I heard you were here. They were all so excited when they heard. ‘It’s all going to be all right,’ they said. ‘Mrs. D’Avanos’s son is coming. He’ll kill them all.’ I felt so proud.”

  Merral stared at the ground. They see me as the bringer of deliverance, when in truth, I seem to have brought disaster. “I will do all I can, Mother, but that may not be enough.”

  Her gaze moved past him toward the devastation, then turned back to him. He saw certainty in her eyes. “No,” she said, her tone suddenly subdued. “It may not be enough. There’s a new rumor that there are lots more of these Krallen things on their way. Thousands.”

  Merral nodded.

  “I see,” she said. “Look, your father is working on the defenses at the third circle. If you see him, give him my love. And tell him—” she bit her lip, her eyes moist—“that I could have done things better the last few months. I’m sorry.” She looked around. “I must go, Merral. There is work to do.”

  She paused, as if struggling with what to say. “I want to tell you to stay out of harm’s way. But you have to fight.” Without another word, she turned and, her shoulders heaving with emotion, walked back inside the hall.

  With Lloyd once more at his side, Merral made his way to the new gateway. He stared at the walls. They were twice his height and made of thick, overlapping dura-polymer panes and buttressed every few meters by angled massive steel stanchions driven deep into the surface of the square. Around the top of the wall, in which firing slots had been regularly placed, a broad walkway ran.

  Exchanging salutes with the irregs at the new gate, Merral walked down Island Road. He stared around, seeing the new defenses and passing doorways sealed off with rough-cemented masonry. Crude work. Is this how the Assembly ends, in an ugly untidiness?

  At the main junctions on the road, barricades of brick or metal had been erected and behind them stood brown-clad irregulars with guns and the new swords. In other places, firing positions had been made that pointed down the street. There and elsewhere Merral glimpsed keen-eyed men and women with guns.

  Almost everywhere, Merral was recognized and forced himself to respond to the waves and salutes. He smiled and admired the defenses with as much confidence and good humor as he could manage. It’s a pretense, but a necessary one. I need to give these people hope.

  As they descended, they made a brief detour up a side alley to a house that had been hit by an artillery round from a cannon-insect. Merral paused, watching the rescue workers lift rubble and seal off the broken pipes, seeing the roof tiles flung everywhere, and stepping respectfully around the drying blood on the cobbles. It is not just an ugly town; it’s a wounded one. He felt a surge of anger, but didn’t know who he was angry with—God, the devil, the Dominion, or even himself.

  He turned away and walked on. A minute later, he passed a group of six teenagers stringing up wire mesh across an alleyway.

  One of them looked up. “Hey! Commander D’Avanos!” he shouted, dropping the wire and walking over.

  “Remember me?” the lad asked, as his friends gathered behind him.

  After a minute’s puzzled reflection, Merral suddenly recognized the youths who had troubled him on his visit home after Fallambet.

  “Wait. You were in the Hanston Road ga—”

  “S’right. Sir, we want to apologize.” There were nods from his friends. “Things just kinda got out of hand. Sorry.”

  There were other apologies.

  “Apology accepted.” All shook hands.

  “Commander, do you know as they put us in jail?” one lad said. “Me mum nearly died of shame. ‘The first convict in our family for a thousand generations,’ she said.”

  “Me too,” chorused a smaller lad.

  “But they let you out today?”

  “Yeah. The warden gave the police their orders. He let us out so that we could have a go at these Krallen things—goblins, your soldiers call ’em. We’re sort of . . . well . . . irregular irregulars.”

  “Dead right,” said the smaller lad.

  “Well, be careful. It’s not a game. But . . . glad to have you with us.”

  “You kill ’em, Commander!”

  Merral and Lloyd moved on, soon reaching the third-circle defenses where the new wall was broken by a narrow gateway with doors made of steel-reinforced polymer plates.

  An earnest captain of the irregulars insisted on showing them the defenses and pointing out how every window and doorway facing out had been sealed off by bars or masonry.

  Spotting a group of men carrying welding gear, Merral walked over to the nearest man. “Do you know where Stefan D’Avanos is?”

  “Ah, your father,” the man said, a weary smile on his grubby face. “Over there. The yellow door.”

  Merral found his father changing the battery on his welding rod. For a second they stared at each other.

  “Son!”

  They hugged each other and Merral caught the odor of sweat and burned metal.

  He stood back to look at his father, struck by how haggard his face was.

  “You haven’t shaved,” his father observed.

  Merral playfully tweaked his father’s beard. “And neither have you.”

  “I’m not a commander,” came the reply. With a weary smile, Merral’s father wiped the sweat off his face with an oily rag. “But it’s good to see you. I like the armor, by the way.” He prodded it and grunted with approval. “Nice work. Clever stuff with the elbow joints. Need to keep it lubed though.”

  He stood back, a sudden look of disbelief on his face. “This is an odd business, Son. Who would have thought it? War! And in our town, too. Still, we’re glad to have you here. Your coming has cheered a lot of folk up.”

  “I had to come. I really did.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not planning to fight, are you, Father?”

  “If it comes to it,” he said, looking stern, “I will. I may try and get one of these new swords.”

  “If you think that’s wise. But, Father, I must leave you. I have to go down to the Gate House and the causeway.”

  “Of course.”

  “Mother sends her love. And . . . she apologizes.”

  His father smiled weakly. “That’s good. Things have been a bit strange. I’ll call her when I get the chance. Tell
her I’m sorry too. No excuses.”

  Their eyes locked and there was a intense moment of silence between them. We both know that this may be the last time we meet.

  His father rubbed his beard and shook his head. “A bad business,” he said slowly, “a very bad one. But I’m proud of you. You have done it before. And you can do it again.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Merral and Lloyd returned to Island Road and continued down its loops to Causeway Square and the Gate House. As they drew closer to the level of the lake, Merral met more of his own soldiers. Some were checking weapons; others sat in the shade eating lunch, while still others lay under trees or in doorways, trying to catch up on sleep.

  They roused themselves as he passed, but he put them at ease. All that could be done on the defenses had either been done or was being done and there was little point in draining their energy in the midday heat. They would need all their strength later.

  As they turned a final bend Merral stopped, awestruck at the transformation of the entrance to Ynysmant. All his life, people had entered Ynysmant by walking, riding, or driving off the causeway through the archway, a structure that served no function other than as a mounting point for flags and banners, and traveled past the Gate House, a three-story, balconied building of character, and so entered the broad expanse of Causeway Square.

  All this had changed, almost beyond recognition. Between the causeway and the town and incorporating both the Gate House and the archway lay a high, buttressed wall, part beige masonry and part black dura-polymer sheets. Along the top lay a walkway with parapets. The archway had been broadened and reinforced by girders to give a stark and barbaric structure, with two massive doors.