by Andrew Post
“I agree. He ranked high among my best mates.” Nigel raised his wooden cup in salute, but his smile faded and he stared at the pot of stew, then at all the other chairs at the big table, empty.
He’s lost so much, Clyde thought.
“Wait a second,” Nevele said. “Flam is your last name? Then what’s your first?”
Flam cleared his throat and murmured something.
Nevele smirked. “Sorry. I didn’t catch that. It sounded like tinkle.”
“Tiddle,” Flam shouted. “My first name is Tiddle, all right? Everyone have a good laugh. My name is Tiddle Flam.”
They all chuckled, even Rohm, but Clyde tried to be at least a little polite by covering his own smile and turning away to pass his laugh off as a cough.
Nigel continued, “Remarkable bloke, he was. What ever happened to the big lug?”
Flam sank a little in his chair. “He was lost while on the job, in the city sub works. They assume he came to a cross tunnel and fell in.” Barely audibly, he said, “They never found his body.”
Nigel looked at his place setting, his brow wrinkled. “Those cursed tunnels . . . I always said they should spray something in there to reduce that algae. It can get slick. Heard of quite a few fellas meeting their end that way.” Solemnly, he lifted his glass of beer again, this time much higher. “For Greenspire Flam.”
Flam lifted his stein. “Greenspire Flam.”
They clinked, finished their drinks, and set the glasses down.
After some lighter conversation, Nigel clapped his hands together. “I suppose it’s bedtime for this particular bloke. Do I need to show ye to yer rooms, or do ye think ye can manage? I don’t get upstairs a lot, and if ye wouldn’t mind finding the way by yer own ingenuity . . .”
“Sure,” Flam said, “we’ll figure it out. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Yes,” Clyde said, “thank you.”
Nevele added, “We really appreciate the semblance of normalcy after all we’ve been through. The eggs were delicious.”
“Ah, well, ye can tell Scooter in the morning,” Nigel said, heading through the kitchen. “She drops about ten a day, and it’s good to have someone else around here to eat them so they don’t go to waste. At any rate, good night.”
The others echoed, “Good night.”
Vidurkis watched the walker take one rock at a time, as he’d programmed it to, and move it away from the pile in front of the cave. Slowly. So slowly. He sat atop the mining machine, legs dangling out of the cockpit, watching the walker work in the darkness. He couldn’t believe his luck, giving the Mouflon the gray light just as the wall came down. He drove his fist into the steering wheel, and it issued a long bleat.
He dropped to the ground and watched the walker as it pushed a boulder out of the pile with its hind legs in the fashion of a dung beetle. Working so hard, trying and trying to finish its task in a timely manner, beeping occasionally as it processed how much farther it had to go and which rock would be best to move next . . .
He couldn’t take it another second.
Vidurkis kicked it out of the way, overturning it onto its back. He took the boulder it had been working on and pressed his shoulder against it. He succeeded at rolling it a few feet, but if he pushed for another solitary second, he might peel the skin right off his shoulder.
He slouched against it and withdrew his pipe. He struck a match and held it before the pipe’s end but didn’t touch it to the waiting fragrant green mold.
He looked up and felt as if he were, at that moment, the dumbest person on Gleese. There was the mining machine all along, built for exactly his predicament. He had even been sitting in the cockpit but never thought to give it a try. He threw the pipe aside and climbed back in, frantically searching for the ignition. He pressed it, and the mighty machine gave one heave. The blade made one rotation, then stopped. He looked at the instrument panel. No gas. He realized he was not the dumbest person on Gleese but perhaps the unluckiest.
He dropped out and gave the walker a thorough trashing until all six of its legs had broken off and its metal exoskeleton was flattened. He wiped the sweat from his brow and sighed, feeling a touch better. He canted his head back to really suck in some deep breaths of the cold night air. He caught himself staring up the hillside to where the stem reached out of the ground—and higher up, where Geyser stood like a gigantic stone mushroom. The well-oiled cogs of his mind spun full steam ahead.
“I’m going about this all wrong,” he muttered.
Chasing them, dodging all the obstacles they threw over their shoulders for him, would waste too much time. Perhaps going in through the geyser and meeting them halfway would be the best approach. They’d gone into the mines voluntarily. Whatever they were up to, he assumed their goal was to get back up into the city. To what end, he didn’t know. His sister was crafty and undoubtedly vengeful. She had been thrown out of the palace and caged in that hospital. She probably wanted the same fate for Gorett that Vidurkis did. Surely she was going in there to try to steer the Blatta to the man who’d released them in the first place, to make certain the puller of the floodgate switch was among the drowned. He had to hand it to Margaret. She may have gone about things arse backwards, but she still had the Mallencroix cruelty to her.
He would help his sister, if only to get at her Mouflon companion. After that, he’d kill her, the others, Gorett too if Margaret couldn’t manage it, and then . . . well, that was up to what the Goddess wanted of him, wasn’t it? Better left unknown. “Having all the answers, like Gorett,” he muttered to himself, breath steaming, “would lead only to complacency.”
After packing up, he began his long trek north to the palace elevator. Doing some quick arithmetic along the way, he decided he would return to his cell under the palace, one of the lowest places in Geyser’s platter, and begin his own tunneling there. He’d take to the task smartly, though: long after Gorett had laid down his head in his heavily fortified private chambers, where the so-called king would be none the wiser to the digging just ten floors beneath him. Even if he dared wake and storm down there and say something—well, with the Goddess on his side, Vidurkis knew he’d just have to kill Gorett and continue as a functional cog, a good cog, a man of purpose who sought not only a Mouflon but everything he could lay his hands on beyond it.
He marched through the dark. Rain pelted him, and his boots squished in the mud. One foot, then the next, one turn of the cogs after another.
Flam found a workbench in the basement of the house and decided to repair his blunderbuss since he was almost sure sleep would not come to him easily this night.
His head still felt abuzz after the Executioner had hit him with the gray light; traces of the gloom were still in the peripheral of his mind, like resonances of a scream from inside a well that refused to degrade to silence, ringing and ringing forever. He kept seeing flashes of possible outcomes, horrid ones.
Nevele in a heap, all her threads unspooled from her body and collected around her like beach-washed seaweed. Immobile and sprawled in a pool of red. Her face devoid of its flesh patches, raw and leering, lidless and dead.
Then there was Clyde and the foreboding flash he had about him. That citizen dagger he carried now jammed deep in his belly. His mouth sewn shut and his ears blasted deaf, unable to take any confession or utter any plea to receive a new one.
Rohm. Every single frisk mouse stamped to smears, ground under a hoof.
Flam wasn’t sure if these images were the result of his own morbid imagination or if they had been what Vidurkis had wanted. Either way, Flam found busying his hands the best way to shake the images loose. He hummed a familiar ditty to himself as he doused the barrel of his gun with the torch to make the metal pliable for straightening.
The hum transitioned into soft singing. Then muttered lyrics became clear. Each word deliberately sung loud, and off-key despite his best efforts, to drown out any more waking nightmares.
Nestled deep into a richly upholste
red love seat, Clyde and Nevele sat together in the study.
She slouched and stared at Rohm, still at the dining room table, poring over one of the leather-bound volumes on the maintenance of mining equipment with a particular attention paid to the proper care for drill tips. In a complicated process of timing and precision, like a trapeze act, the mice lifted, caught, and turned the pages.
“I wonder if they all made it,” Nevele said.
“The miners?”
“Well, them too—but I mean Rohm. There’s so many of them. I wonder if they’d know if one or two of them got killed.”
Clyde watched the studious mice and contemplated this. “It’s hard to say.” He hated the idea that some of the matron mice were doing head counts before tucking their children in for the night and coming up hand-to-heart short.
Not wanting to think about any of that, he turned away and stared out the front windows. Outside, all was dark in the cavern at first glance. Here and there, pools of light from the house gained purchase on a few towering stalactites. His gaze found the new wall that was an opening just a few hours before.
With the living room’s amber glow, the faint shape of the rocks that had made the blockade in front of the entrance stood stalwart, unmovable. Still, he knew what was beyond those rocks—who was beyond those rocks. Deciding he didn’t want to think about that, either, he noticed Nevele.
She took a deep breath, the sutures across her chest creaking. She picked at a rogue strand lacing her hand to her wrist, the threads splitting, knotting, and resetting. But seeming discontent with the completed look of it, she redid it again and again until the knot lay flush.
“What’s on your mind?” Clyde finally said.
She answered at once, as if she had been waiting for him to simply ask, the plug pulled free. “My brother won’t give up. Ever. I saw him throw the gray light on Flam. Now my brother has to hunt us.” She blinked slowly. “I can picture him pulling himself through there, forcing his bones out of socket and slithering out of the mess to come and kill us in our sleep.” She looked at Clyde. “Sorry.”
Attempting to lighten the mood, Clyde took the guardsman helmet from the arm of the love seat and flipped the visor down. He turned this way and that, looking about the room. “I don’t know how they see anything through this thing.”
She snickered. She flipped the visor up and cradled his cheeks in her hands. The sutures mapping her palms were surprisingly soft, like waxed cotton strips and not rough twine or leather at all.
“If you’re going to confess something,” Clyde said, “I might ask you to wait until after we get to the surface. We have kind of a harrowing day ahead of us tomorrow.”
She stopped, a slightly annoyed expression on her face. “I was going to kiss you.”
“Oh . . . in that case . . . well, I suppose . . . never mind, then.” He closed his eyes, for that is how he had read people prepared to be kissed. He often wondered why, but he supposed kissing was one of those things too beautiful in life to witness up close, an art meant to be witnessed blind.
It felt like an eternity packed into a moment, that lingering silent time before she actually pressed her lips against his. When she did, a song erupted in his heart—a bright tingling that ran the length of his body, down the backs of his arms, and across his knees.
Her hands moved off his cheeks and onto his shoulders, the kiss developing into a deeper contact, her arms looping his neck in a full embrace. Her hands, so warm. Unsure what to do with his own hands, he kept them at his sides.
But when he tried to lift them, he couldn’t.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, her breath sweet and tickling his ear, which he didn’t mind whatsoever. “Don’t tell me kissing someone will curse you to forget them.”
“No, it’s not that. I can’t . . . move.”
They looked down and saw her threads were cocooning them both from head to toe. He brought his gaze back to meet hers and saw mild humiliation marking her face. Just as it started to slip, her left eyelid drooped and her nose went crooked.
“Whoops,” she said with a slur.
Clyde smiled, correcting his bow tie to busy his hands.
She stood and pulled herself together again. The last of the dark bindings uncoiled from Clyde’s arms and legs and leaped back to her, some of them cracking like a tape measure in their speedy retraction.
“Quite the grip you got there. Yes, a kiss is admitting feelings, but since my fabrick works on words, I think we’re safe.” He looked at his fidgeting hands. “I want to tell you that I care about you, Nevele.” He met her eyes. “But I won’t. And I’m not, right now, for whatever persnickety fabrick weaver fates are listening right now. I could, I want to, but I won’t.” It felt like tempting fate even saying that much.
She leaned in and patted his cheek, gave him another small kiss. Her face was back to its normal state, everything in its place. “It’s fine. I know how you feel.” She gathered her things and headed upstairs but stopped halfway. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a book or something? I can’t imagine it’s going to be really fun staying up by yourself all night.”
“It’s fine. I think I might go check on Flam anyway.”
“All right. Well, good night.” Nevele gave a brief smile and clunked up the remainder of the stairs.
“Good night.”
For a while Clyde was content just listening to her above, the click-clock of her boots, the two squeaks of bedsprings, and the silence that followed. He hoped she had pleasant dreams. Perhaps even ones that could be considered fun and good, and not at all about their present reality: sleeping in a house flanked on one side by an army of hundred-pound bloodthirsty insects and on the other by a murderous sibling. To Meech or whoever might listen, he prayed for her to dream about flying, his own favorite imagination.
Heading toward the basement, Clyde found himself smiling. He wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about their kiss for quite some time. The smile remained glued in place his entire way down the narrow basement passageway. He felt as if he were floating, the buzz singing in his chest and making him feel like nothing bad had happened to anyone ever. He knew it wasn’t true, but for the time being, in this glowing little bubble, it felt like it.
He did a quick rewind of his entire life. Nope, in spite of the looming circumstances, he’d never felt as good as he did right now.
Downstairs, Flam was enveloped in his task, running a blue flame up and down the flared barrel of his blunderbuss.
“How are you doing?” Clyde asked.
The Mouflon twitched. It wasn’t as if Clyde had snuck up on him, but maybe he was just deep in thought. Clyde’s concern was abruptly cleared when Flam said, “What in the plummets has got you grinning like a fool?”
Clyde took a seat on the floor and hugged his knees. “Oh, nothing.” He tried not to sound like a dopey, dreamy victim of Cupid’s sharpshooting, but it was impossible.
Hammer in hand, Flam paused before giving the blunderbuss another blow. It was nearly straight. He stared at the hammer’s head and weighed the tool in his hand with a loose grip. His face went serene, his eyes glassy.
Clyde didn’t particularly like the look in his eye . . . “Everything okay?”
Flam snapped out of his stupor. His answer was a grunt, a shrug, and a quick return to his job, giving the blunderbuss one high swing after another—bang, bang, bang. Somewhere in the cacophony, Clyde thought Flam answered, “I’ve been better.”
Chapter 29
Rewired and Rekindled
An unnerved guardsman private bowed at the main chamber doors, and Gorett waved him in.
The private removed his helmet and put it under his arm, busying his hands. “My lord,” he said at last, “I want to suggest something that may be of use.”
Gorett rolled a limp hand. “Go on.”
“I believe if we use one of our fleet’s autos, I can rewire it to supply electricity to the palace. Of course, we’d need to select which
electronics would be of priority since we can spare merely one auto and a single machine can supply only so much power.”
Gorett brightened, lifted his chin. “Do it at once. Splendid thinking. Once this is all resolved, consider yourself at the front of the line for a promotion.” He feigned making a note of the guardsman’s name.
The private smiled, replaced his helmet, and left the chambers with a slight skip in his step.
Alone again, Gorett tossed the scribbled sheet in the bin. On the next clean sheet, he decided to make a list of electricity priorities. He looked out the windows lining his main chambers, then at the spire sprouting out of the town square. No steam had shot from the geyser for days, and it had been nearly as long since the lights on its stone flesh had flickered. It was almost impossible to see it against the night sky, the stone blending in with the starless expanse beyond it. He told the dead power source, “Seems I’ve found a way around you, after all.”
Returning to the sheet of parchment, he dipped his quill into ink. Below the list, he began the first draft of a letter. A letter that would be immediately handed off to the communications department, the first department to receive electricity once it was resupplied. Otherwise, it would be impossible to send a wire to the Odium requesting a temporary treaty.
Gorett scratched out three drafts. Each time he sounded like he was begging, he’d ball the sheet and throw it away. He hated doing this, but this was the point they were at. The Executioner wasn’t answering any calls—hadn’t in hours—and was now most likely dead. This was necessary, Gorett kept telling himself. It wasn’t surrender; it was a strategic maneuver, a tactic. Yes, Gorett thought, signing his name in big, black, darting swirls, a tactic.
As much wendal stone as the heathens could carry if only they’d allow him safe passage off-world. He would return when it was all settled, repay his debts. Putting forth this request had been on his mind for the past few weeks, an option forever hanging in the back corner of his mind, nailed in place by more than a few factors.
