Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  “So long as we keep it on our left, it means we’re going the right way,” Nevele had said.

  Clyde liked that she knew which way they were heading.

  “And around to the south side,” Flam added his two cents, “where we can get to my auto and see if there’s anything of use left.” He took a few lurching steps so he was matching Nevele’s stride.

  Nevele bit her lip, seemingly patiently waiting for him to finish.

  “If the auto didn’t get completely destroyed,” Flam went on, talking big, “there will be food, some extra clothing, and a couple of guns in the hold. I know that I, for one, could use a new firearm since my blunderbuss got damaged in a scrape with a certain someone.”

  Nevele took a quick breath. “Who gave you the captain’s hat, huh? We should take this day and get as much distance as possible, get to the mines before dark. Surely the Blatta, if they’re like any other insect, mostly come out at night. They probably roam all over the mine entrance and even in the forests. We should get in while they’re asleep, go as deep as we can so we can prepare for their awake hours, find supplies as we go—not traipse all over the landscape way the hell out of our way for some knockoff weaponry and a few tatty blankets.”

  “Oh,” Flam bellowed, charging up with a stomp of his hooves to the front of the group alongside Nevele, “and I suppose there’s going to be all kinds of shops and places to get supplies en route, huh? Look around, Rag Doll. We’re in the Geyser underside forests. There’s nothing down here at all except maybe the occasional bandit or hawk turd. Meech almighty, you’re just like any other city dweller—think everything will be just hunky-dory, even in the wilds.”

  “I don’t think everything will be hunky-dory; I just believe that whatever your junker auto has in it isn’t worth going out of our way to retrieve. We don’t need guns, you have your knife, I have my fabrick, Rohm has countless teeth, Clyde has his club—we’ll be fine. That is, as long as I can remain at point and keep us going in the right bloody direction.”

  “You take point? A lady point man—point girl? Hardly!”

  Rohm leaned toward Clyde. “Perhaps the grumpiness couldn’t be subsided with a night’s rest, after all. Perhaps it’s terminal.”

  Clyde covered a grin.

  “Look, Mouflon, we do things my way. You may pride yourself on being this great and seasoned explorer, but I have traveled countless worlds. I have traversed the unmapped oceans of moons you’ve never heard of and could probably never even begin to spell! I’ve seen . . .” She stopped, cocked her head.

  Clyde listened, seeing that Flam’s ears had pricked up too. Next to him, Rohm’s numbers trembled. They all stopped in their tracks, Nevele’s hand shooting up, signaling them to halt.

  Far away, a low chant of several engines could be heard, whirring.

  “What is that?”

  “Is it the Blatta?” Rohm said.

  Nevele looked toward the sound. The trees were thick; nothing could be seen beyond them. But between the sturdy trunks could be seen the darting glare of gray light.

  “It’s the Patrol. Run.”

  All at once, they ended their argument and bolted away from the ominous noise. They cut through the forest, bounding over fallen trees and dodging reaching limbs.

  Nevele was the quickest among the group, throwing her stitches out to wrap around a tree and then fling her forward. Flam tromped along, his breath huffing and puffing. Clyde and Rohm rounded up the back, moving as fast as they could.

  The forest came to a slight dip, leading into a valley. Several trees had been cut down and heaped in neat pyramids.

  Nevele walked to the piles and ducked behind them, the group following. She frantically showed them how to take up lengths of loose, mossy bark for camouflage. “Stay quiet until they’ve passed,” she whispered, unable to hide the warble of fear in her voice.

  Flam had to brace a hand over his mouth to quiet his labored breathing.

  Clyde let a few of Rohm’s more terrified members climb inside his pockets.

  Within minutes, the Patrol came.

  Clyde dared a look through a knothole in a piece of bark.

  The forest at the top of the valley was occupied by several slow-moving Patrol guardsmen, some on foot and some saddled upon walkers. The vehicles looked like insects, roughly the size of a large dog or a small lion, six robotic legs crunching through the undergrowth.

  “Cover your eyes,” Nevele whispered.

  The command was perfectly timed, for it was then that the Patrol switched on their gray light lanterns at full power. They swung them, showering the surrounding area in steady, sick pulses.

  Clyde was too scared to close his eyes completely, so instead he kept them fixed on Nevele.

  Peeking from behind her strip of bark, she squinted directly into the light.

  Clyde could see its reflection in the wetness of her eyes—some of its effect reaching him.

  Her heavily sutured face hardened in bottomless woe.

  He had to ask. “Are they coming?”

  When she didn’t answer, he stole a peek.

  At the head of the pack was a man who was clearly the leader, perhaps because of his hair pulled back into a severe pitch-black bun or his armor just a touch shinier than the other men’s. He just had the look about him of someone who told others what to do, who estimated situations and made decisions. His face was gaunt, thin as a skull. He wore a frown Clyde guessed was the man’s standard expression. He imagined his voice had a haunting timbre to it, throaty, flat, and without a scrap of emotion. He was just turning his head to scan along the valley, and Clyde couldn’t help but stare. Those eyes . . .

  “Look away,” Nevele whispered, ashen.

  But for whatever reason, Clyde could not. The man was too fearsome, commanding his attention. If he looked away, Clyde felt the man would somehow materialize wherever he turned his gaze next.

  The Patrol platoon came to a stop. The man at the lead sat atop the walker, holding its reins and scanning the valley, one hand up in the same gesture Nevele had used to halt their group. Glance passing right over them, the man sat up in his saddle, bent forward, and sent out a flash of gray light directly at a pile of fallen trees a few yards beyond them.

  The gray light only minutely stung Clyde’s spirit, it being an indirect hit. Nonetheless, it sent shivers to his core, stirring memories and awfulness in him like a disrupted stagnant creek bed, muddiness charging downstream, polluting all. It was then and only then that Clyde forced his eyes closed. He felt if he didn’t, he risked his very soul becoming permanently tarnished.

  The bearded man snapped his reins and led the guardsmen along around the corner of the Geyser stem, into the next patch of forest. They fell out of sight, and soon thereafter the low drone of their mechanical insects was gone.

  Nevele pitched the plank of bark off and shook her head till her hood dropped. She brought a hand to her face, covering half. The visible corner of her mouth was drawn down, her brow crinkled, and she appeared to be nearly in tears. Beyond the sound of Flam’s labored breathing and the clicking of Rohm’s innumerable teeth chattering, her soft sob could be heard.

  “Lord, no,” she said. “Not him. Not him.”

  Flam stood and made sure the coast was clear before saying anything, since his voice was naturally loud and carried better than the rest of theirs. “Who is he?”

  “We’ve never seen a guardsman who can do that,” Rohm said. A few of the frisk mice rubbed their eyes with their pink, balled fists.

  Nevele glared back at each in turn: Flam, Clyde, Rohm. She took a breath to say something but then didn’t speak. She spun and strode through the knee-high grass into the center of the valley.

  “Well, that sure doesn’t answer my question,” Flam said.

  Clyde followed her.

  At the center of the valley, there was a small creek-fed basin that looked good and clear, free of sediment. Nevele sat on her knees at its edge, drowning the canteen Flam had given
her. Clyde approached but kept a respectful distance. Canteen filled, she tipped it back and drank a few swallows before plunging it in again. Clyde couldn’t see her face entirely from this angle, only her shimmery reflection in the pool’s surface, but her body language spoke volumes. Her shoulders jerked, and her hands shook as she capped the canteen.

  “It’s all right, Nevele. They didn’t see us,” he said, trying to stay positive.

  “We just need to get to the mines,” she murmured as if she hadn’t understood him. “We can probably avoid dealing with him at all if we go down there, get to the surface, and find a way to cut power to the elevators and trap him here.” She paused, her breathing sounding wet and ragged. “They must know what we’re up to. They must’ve seen us on security cameras or realized I wasn’t in my room. The Patrol never comes down to the island unless they’re after someone.” She moaned, thumped her knee with a fist. “We should’ve stayed in the city.”

  “We should rest,” Clyde said, sitting beside her. “We all got kind of a startle. We should save our energy. We’ll let them search the woods, and when they don’t find anything, they’ll probably go back.”

  She looked at him finally. “He’s my brother.”

  “The Patrol leader? He’s your—?”

  After just one glance at the terrifying man, it didn’t seem possible that Nevele could even exist in the same world as him, let alone be his sister.

  “His name is Vidurkis. He was one of King Pyne’s security officers.” She rolled her sleeves down until they covered her wrists, her hands. “He was cruel, even as a boy. Later, a murderer. He was in the keep beneath the palace last I had heard, sentenced to death sometime this cycle. A day, as ashamed as I am of it, I personally was looking forward to . . .” She looked down a moment. “Never mind. Of course, that was before Gorett took over. Now, he’s out here with us.” She sounded as if she could scarcely believe it herself. “Of course Gorett would send him.”

  Her tone was panicked. Her look of fear reminded Clyde of Mr. Wilkshire, on his back, proudly facing death. That look, Clyde now knew, could burn itself into his mind. He looked away.

  With a throttled sigh, she continued, “We’ll just have to deal with it, I guess. No other option.”

  “He didn’t see us,” Clyde said, trying again to reassure her.

  “Oh, but he’ll make sure he changes that.” Nevele chortled sardonically. “We used to work together in the palace, and every other day he was pursuing someone new. He has fabrick as well: double sight. The gray lights? That’s where they come from. They took samples of his eyes and duplicated them. He can see for miles; he can flash gray light with them too. He was given a gift and didn’t even consider using it for anything but—”

  “What’s the double edge to it? What’s his weakness?” He felt bad for interrupting, but it had to be done. She wasn’t saying anything that would help them. “You said all fabrick weavers have two sides to their abilities, so what’s his?”

  “Unfortunately for us, his fabrick doesn’t come with a curse that’d bother a person like him. It is a curse, certainly, but it would only be one to someone with a heart.”

  Clyde was afraid to ask. “What is it?”

  “If he wants to keep his gray light and the ability to see at all, whatever he lays the gray light upon, whoever he glares at with it, he has to kill. If he doesn’t, in three days, his vision will cloud to the point he cannot see at all. It’s never happened, since he’s always gotten the person he’s after, but we assume he’ll go blind if it goes much past that third day. It’s what made him so good at his job, having a deadline such as that to work by. Not that he ever needed the additional motivation. It’d be a curse to anyone else, having to choose between sight and murdering someone, but to him . . .”

  She looked up, toward the city shadowing them from high above, a circle spiked on a stone needle. “Gorett must know you and Flam are in the city, or at least that I’ve escaped. He wouldn’t send anyone else otherwise . . .” She pressed her lips so hard together they paled to a ghostly white. “Gorett knows; he must. This won’t be a surprise attack anymore. He’ll be prepared. With just him out here, it shows Gorett’s ready for us.”

  Clyde had no response. It was all too much, too big and new for him to wrap his mind around. He was still reeling at the fact that their trip from the city to the mines and up to the palace wasn’t going to be a pleasant go-as-we-will sort of occasion. They were being chased. And ahead of them, the enemy was waiting, prepared. But being pursued by Nevele’s brother, a fabrick weaver who enjoyed killing, scared Clyde most of all.

  She corrected her hood. “Please don’t look at me like that. I don’t like being stared at.”

  “I apologize; I didn’t mean to,” he said, even though he hadn’t realized he was looking at her. But once it was brought to his attention that someone might stare, he found himself doing just that for a second. He tried to see beyond the stitches and imagine what she would look like with whole skin, without all the different panels.

  It was easy for him. He prided himself on his imagination. He saw her healed and beautiful. But even with the sutures running every which way upon her face, a splendor was concealed within. To others, he imagined, it would be hard to see, but it was quite plain to him, shining through the roping stitches, how striking she really was.

  “You shouldn’t be uncomfortable with people looking at you. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of, Nevele. Nothing at all,” he tried, feeling that it was the right thing to say.

  She stood and stepped past him. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  Chapter 23

  Broken Auto and Carrion

  Vidurkis stared at the sleek body of the ruined auto. Among the broken trees it had landed upon, a good score of stolen merchandise had spilled out. He dismounted his walker and dropped to the ground. He gestured, and the guardsmen set to scouting the area. Vidurkis knelt before the broken machine and sifted through the goods. Plenty of ammunition, parts for various mechanical things, spoiled food, a few treasures—antique candleholders and a bundle of gold flatware bound in a length of twine. The final item he focused on most. He took up the twine and let the ornate spoons and forks clatter to the ground. He held the ratty hank of string and pinched it by one end, the loose strand dancing and coiling in the salty wind.

  He thought aloud, a nasty habit that had begun in his cell. “She hasn’t been by here. She would’ve taken this for sure, my little string collector.” He turned toward the ocean, surveyed the surrounding woods, shot his vision out, and scanned the beach on the south rim of the island. Nothing. The footprints there were small and sharp, those of seafaring birds and nothing other. “That fall must’ve cost you quite a bit, Sister. You need your string to keep your pieces together, lest you tumble apart.” He wrapped the twine around his hand and made a fist.

  “Executioner Mallencroix?”

  His concentration was shattered.

  “There’s no sign that anyone has been by here. Perhaps we should circle the island again. There’s no way she could’ve left. King Gorett ordered all ferries and aircrafts to avoid Geyser.”

  “I know that,” Vidurkis rumbled, stepping among the disgorged flood of loot from the auto’s wreckage. The Mechanized Goddess hated uselessness. Anything without function, her teachings said, should not exist. “And I think the search would probably go a bit more expediently if I weren’t so weighed down. Seems a trimming of the fat might be in order.”

  The other guardsmen, poking at what might be tracks in the mud, all heard this and faced him, lowering their binoculars. Everyone stood stock-still.

  The wind whistled, grave and cold.

  They made the first move, collectively, reaching up to clamp down their visors, but Vidurkis was quicker.

  A slap of light hit them all, sending them dancing and fumbling backwards, gripping their ruined eyes and screaming. He had made it a hefty blow, with particularly incommodious images.


  Guns fell from hands rendered useless. A few men dropped to the ground and brayed wildly, like tortured animals.

  Vidurkis took his time, going from one to the next and sticking his dagger into the weak spots between the panels of armor. None seemed aware that the others were being slaughtered, too overcome by their plagued minds to notice.

  One after another, the screams died out.

  One guardsman, despite being blind, tried to run down the cliff face, tumbling as he did and dropping a few feet until landing on a rocky patch of sharp rocks. Vidurkis went to the outcropping and watched the man in his clunky armor struggle to find footing on the slanted earth.

  The Executioner extended his arm over the edge, gripping his dagger with two fingers directly over the Patrol flunky’s head. Vidurkis whistled to bring his attention upward, freeing the blade at the same moment.

  The man looked, swinging up his unseeing stare as the blade connected with an eye, making a soft wet sound. He crumpled noisily; armor slapping against rock and helmet knocking on the stones like a plastic bowl on cobblestones, his body vacant of a spirit before his short, awkward roll down the hill even came to a stop.

  All was quiet then. Vidurkis sighed. He could think more clearly without them buzzing around him, trying to best one another, each hungrier for promotion and Gorett’s praise than the other. A massive burden had been lifted, indeed.

  He went to his diligently waiting walker and took a canister of fuel from its saddlebag. He doused the auto, the goods, the bodies, and lit it all on fire. He shouldered his rifle, mounted his walker, and continued. The metal feet of the robot insect expertly gripped the rock face, descending with ease. He would circle the island again, working at his own speed, unhindered.