by Andrew Post
Nevele was confused but not nearly as much as Flam, who kept looking from one face to another.
“The royal revolver,” Rohm added, reaching but not daring to caress the ornate grip of the gun flanking Clyde’s hip with their tail fingers.
Clyde felt funny, as if he’d been given a present he liked for one reason but was envied by all the others for entirely different, deeper reasons.
Nevele looked Clyde in the face, her eyes shining but her expression dire, as if she’d been tricked. She had to swallow twice and take a deep, hitching breath before she could muster the words. “I had thought it was like the stories about Höwerglaz. Just made-up things to keep young weavers having hope that there was someone out there who had it worse than us, who was just waiting to . . .” She huffed, going red faced, too astonished to speak for a moment. “I just never thought in a million years that the Sequestered Son was a real thing.”
Nigel piped up. “He is, lass. And here he stands: all one hundred pounds of him, shite-stained overalls and all.”
“You’re really him?” Nevele asked, afraid to be too close to him, it seemed now, as if he were a fragile piece of sculpture too delicate to even so much as look at.
Clyde shrugged and smiled. “I suppose I am.”
“How do you like that? Rags to riches in a Meech-damned week and never even had to leave the rock once.”
When Clyde looked at the Mouflon, he saw he was smiling with pride, but it was just his style to not let it be too obvious.
Nigel gave Clyde a swat on the butt. “Ye all can talk about it at the after-battle tea and scones.”
The declaration came as a relief to Clyde. He didn’t like all this attention on him, especially when it was for undeserved nobility.
“Fall in!” Nigel barked.
The ragtag group did their best to file before the miner.
Nigel circled them in his wheelchair, making sure everyone had the ventilation zippers done up, all boots laced, tools in their proper places.
Even Scooter scrutinized them from head to toe and nodded in a perfect mimicry of his companion.
Nigel drew a deep breath, and Clyde could hear the doubt it was packed with. “There were no maps of the mine,” Nigel said after a while. “We miners just knew our way by a few symbols that are pretty easy to understand. An O marking means it’s a safe tunnel, okay to travel. An X means it’s not safe. My little trick—ye see an X and think of a skull and crossbones. Of course, with all the activity going on in Geyser, the flooding and whatnot, ye may end up having an X tunnel that means O, as in, Oh, shite, instead of, Oh, okay, it’s safe. So be on the lookout.
“Once ye get through, ye’ll head up until ye hit a cavern like this one. It was kind of a base of operations, and there ye’ll find the rock crusher and maybe a few supplies if the bugs didn’t get them. Beyond that, taking the first O tunnel ye come to, ye’ll reach the way station at the base of Geyser. That is where the turbine works and sewer systems connect to the mines. Follow the turbine works up until ye hit the catacombs. The sewers will be right above them and the keep above that. Got it?”
They nodded.
“All right, then.” Nigel’s voice rose to an enthusiastic shout that got Clyde’s heart pumping. “Ye got the wardrobe. Ye got the know-how. And if I say so myself, it looks like ye rough-and-tumble nail eaters are ready. Let’s take this city back.”
Within minutes, from high in the cockpit of the digger, Nigel ducked and shouted to the group, “Ready? There’s going to be a whole slew of them, I hope ye know.” He took the controls of the massive digging machine and told Scooter on his shoulder, “All this time we’ve spent trying to keep these blasted things out, old chap, and here we are letting them in.”
Scooter picked at his fleshy side, indifferent.
“Here goes nothing.” He advanced the lever to activate the digger’s blade.
The four travelers faced the entrance, the screeches of the hungry Blatta beyond impossible to ignore. With the digger using its battery for the engines, the miner’s house went dark and the lights above flickered out. The whole cavern darkened, but the headlights mounted to the front of the tremendous machine were brilliant, throwing their passageway into luminosity.
Clyde swallowed, and his dry throat clicked from the effort.
Flam removed the light stick from his belt and swung it on. He looked Clyde’s way and offered a thumbs-up that would’ve been encouraging if it weren’t for the stream of sweat trickling off his brow.
Beyond Flam, the frisk mice steadied themselves within the sleeves of the miner’s overalls and inside the mask, using the goggle lenses as portholes.
To his right, Clyde glimpsed a bright flash. The blade slowly rotated against the wall, gaining speed. Crunched rock poured out, and the air thickened with dust. Beneath the blade, a small gap was made. Bony, yellow arms could be seen already reaching out. The Blatta’s heads appeared within the narrow space, pincers chomping and dagger-like teeth gleaming.
Clyde felt like his skeleton might pop right out of his body and run away screaming at any moment. He redirected his focus to Nevele, whose appearance had just the opposite effect. He felt grounded looking at her, as if his soul had suddenly been equipped with lightning rods, safety measures for what storms may come. Sure, there was danger ahead, but it was okay. She was here.
Over the ceaseless noise—the machine, the bursting rock, the screaming army of insects—he shouted to her, “I don’t know what to say to you right now. I mean, I should’ve told you as soon as Nigel told me.”
She interrupted him with a smile, blinking away one wave of brown dust after another. He read her lips: “It’s okay.”
Clyde withdrew his ornate pistol and, with some concerted effort, cocked the hammer. He’d had only a few minutes of training from Nevele as Flam and Nigel had prepped the digger. They couldn’t spare any rounds for the unusual weapon, so he hadn’t fired it. He didn’t want to, anyway. Holding the thing made the rumbling in his stomach double. He was afraid of hurting himself—or, worse, someone else. He kept it pointed toward the ground. Nevele had instructed him to never, ever aim it toward anything he didn’t want to see dead. She repeated the warning with unwavering sternness in her voice: “Never, ever.”
Letting one hand free of the revolver, he palmed his goggles to suction them onto his face. The dust was unbearable, and he dreaded getting a blinding face full of it right when he needed to see. With his thumb, he cleared the brown patina collecting on each lens.
Abandoning these last-minute distractions, he made himself look at the breach in the cavern wall. Long, jointed legs twisted in the opening, clawing at air. Once and again, an eye or a mandible passed—horrors they would have to fight in a moment.
Above, Nigel screamed to be heard over the digger. “Since counting to three is considered bad luck among miners and ye already got enough of that on yer side, we’re going to four. Understand? On four!”
Rohm held out the sleeves of the overalls, ready to spray its numbers out, ready to sacrifice its members. The ones standing as captain and cocaptain in the porthole goggle lenses gave one another a reverent nod.
“One!”
Flam cocked his freshly repaired blunderbuss, sweat freely dripping from his waterlogged fur. He blinked some away with his long, bovine eyelashes.
“Two!”
Nevele trained her guardsman pistol on the gap. The Blatta could see her; she could see them.
“Three!”
Clyde held Commencement with two hands, aimed the sights down, and found the trigger with a fear-numbed finger.
“Four!”
The digger’s arm lifted, and gunshots rang out in a frenzy.
The Blatta scattered into the cavern in a flood, tripping over their brethren, who were shot down immediately. They scattered up the walls, across the floor, toward the travelers.
Rohm pitched its arms forward one after another, throwing volley after volley of mice. They covered the Blatta clos
est, going between the plates of the insects’ exoskeletons and relentlessly biting.
Flam’s blunderbuss released one blast after another, sending scattering buckshot into the insects.
Clyde and Nevele, side by side, slowly backpedaled and fired round after round, covering for one another while each reloaded.
Nigel, in the digger’s cockpit, leaned out with his own tribarreled blunderbuss and killed those that climbed his way.
The pandemonium seemed to last for hours.
Soon the deluge tapered off. After a few of the fatter stragglers were put down, the cavern was quiet again.
The travelers were safe and completely unharmed, save for a scratch or two. They collected, carefully trotting through the mess of dead Blatta: broken, bony legs and spilled ichor. The entire place now stunk as if someone had extinguished a smoldering trash fire by getting violently ill upon it.
Nigel was waving his arms and shouting.
Clyde brought a hand to his ear, signing that they couldn’t hear him.
The digger’s engine still filled the cavern with its roars.
Nigel bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth, “Go! This thing is running out of gas. It can’t hold the arm up forever. You have to go now!”
The four exchanged glances, making sure everyone was ready to go, and charged. They ducked under the swinging blade of the digger, which came within inches of the tops of their heads, and through the tight breach. Flam barely squeezed into the gap last before the digger’s engine gave out and the arm slammed earthward, a foul gust chasing them as metal crashed against stone.
Behind them, nearly rendered inaudible from the commotion, came Nigel’s last call of encouragement: “Godspeed!”
Inside the cave, the floor was uneven and the walls jumped out in random, sharp outcroppings. It was a place where nature was still listed as owner, and it didn’t have any conveniences, such as lights or guardrails. Nothing but darkness lay ahead. And it was cold, Clyde noted, putting the revolver away.
Flam angled his light stick around the group. In the cobalt glow, Clyde saw behind them the digger’s blade parked among the rubble, completely blocking their path back. The sheer isolation of this place made him feel as if he’d been swallowed by the planet itself.
Still, on Nevele’s face he saw determination, although wavering.
Rohm, spying from behind the goggles, looked resolute, if faintly nervous.
Nevele said, “Well, whether we like it or not, we’re on our way.” Her voice echoed and returned to them altered. It was a haunting sound, as if there were dozens of women in the impenetrable darkness mocking her.
Clyde clicked his flashlight on, turning it toward the path ahead. The passage became tall but narrow, and the walls smoothed out like that of the Geyser’s stem, undoubtedly made up of the same sedimentary rock but covered in a thin membrane of Blatta . . . goo. Each time they stepped forward, the scent ripened. Pungent death polluted the tunnel.
Shining his light at something catching his ankle, Clyde gasped. The others moved up around him to look as well. He was ankle deep in what at first glance looked like a basket but was actually a human rib cage tangled with rotten clothing. Unable to help himself, Clyde yelped and kicked the bones away, sending them scattering.
Rohm pinched a broken rib off the floor, the captain and cocaptain in the portholes peering at the specimen. “They must use acids to break down their food. If they’re like their cousin, the cockroach, they reduce their prey to mush. In a crowded, close-knit society, where there’s such competition for sustenance, it’d be beneficial to make their meals as soft as possible so as not to risk damaging their teeth, lest they become unable to eat and become dinner for their fellow Blatta.”
“Isn’t that lovely,” Flam grunted.
Clyde took a step up the tunnel. “Let’s get moving,” he said, the idea of being turned to mush making his stomach flip.
The others followed, clicking on their torches. In single file, they ambled sideways into the first passage, marked with an O.
Chapter 32
Arrangements
The armory had more weapons than Vidurkis could carry on his back, so he had to prioritize. With a guardsman nearby, he went through the racks of guns: the rifles and pistols, the shotguns and harpoon launchers. He walked on to consider the bladed weapons: the swords, spears, and daggers. He pictured himself trying to get through a tight spot in the tunnels with a heavy sword and getting its cross guard caught on something, only to end up devoured by Blatta.
He kept his supplies to what he was familiar with: two daggers, which he slid into scabbards and clipped to his belt; the trusty rifle he’d carried since his security detail days; plenty of rounds, which filled four pouches on his belt. He added a few necessary items: a pick, a load of block-shattering explosives, a chisel, and a hammer. He went to the end of the line to a display of intriguing weapons behind a locked grate. “Open it.”
“Weapons for the Patrol elite guard only, sir.”
Vidurkis glared. “Do you see this on my lapel, boy? Executioner. Make with the key. Get this open. Elite. Honestly, now.”
The guardsman went through his hoop of keys and, with shaking hands, unlocked the grate. He pulled the doors open and gave the Executioner ample room to browse.
Vidurkis picked up what appeared to be a canister the size of a paint can, with a metal hoop stuck into a plug on the top. There were no markings on the black metal housing the device. He turned to the guardsman, holding it in both hands. “What is this thing?”
The guardsman swallowed. “It’s a winger grenade, sir.”
“A winger grenade?”
“One pulls the pin; out of the top come six dozen mechanical birds. They are used as scouts to report back or, with this switch on the side, can be set to kill on sight. It’s mostly used for recon, but it has been tested in the field for lethal purposes, with mixed results. But, sir, I wouldn’t recommend—”
“I’m taking it.” Vidurkis dropped it into his bag of supplies. He felt the third day niggling, creeping up on him, time running out. The device could be useful as a last resort. Perhaps one metal sparrow could find the Mouflon, dig out his heart, and save Vidurkis his sight as well as his fabrick.
“Any tool in the right hands can be useful,” he muttered, quoting the eighteenth decree of the Mechanized Goddess.
“Sir?”
“All right,” he said, seeing nothing else of interest within the cache of elite weapons. “Close it up. I’m ready to depart.” The guardsman closed and locked the cabinet, and they turned and exited the armory together.
They treaded the three sets of narrow circular stairways to the keep. There, the men were piled tightly into Vidurkis’s former cell, chiseling and hacking away at the stone. Many had stripped their armor in the heat. Piles of dirt lay everywhere. Prisoners coughed and sneezed from the dust as one shovel load after another was thrown through their bars so that the walkway wouldn’t get dirty.
Vidurkis got to the door of his old cell and peered over the hunched, sweat-slick backs of the toiling guardsmen. They had gotten nearly six feet down already and had just about broken through into the sewer system. Apparently it had been tapped already, perhaps in a single pock from a pick, because a nauseating odor wafted up. It was a smell he found grossly familiar. He’d spent years in this very room, stepping outside its walls only once a month, when they put the hose to it. No, he didn’t have an actual bathroom and working commode. The soles of his feet were still waste stained and probably would be to the grave.
The sharp recollection suddenly soured him and made his patience disappear as swiftly as a canary was turned into a handkerchief in a parlor trick. He shoved the men aside, toppling one. Snatching one of their picks, he brought it overhead and drove it into the gap, taking one bite of rock away at a time, as they had been doing but at triple the speed.
The guardsmen shrank out of the cell and watched him but genuinely recoiled, bringing their hands up l
ike spooked maidens when they heard the sole drawling howl of the Blatta inside. Vidurkis ignored it and continued picking in violent swings. When he heard a scuttle of the bony legs of a Blatta pass directly outside his newly made gap, only then did he stop.
He looked over his shoulder. “I hope you protect your king. I hope he takes you all with him, as he says he will. I even hope he pays you. But know this: Once I am in there, I will not hinder the Blatta’s desire to get in here with you and him. I have other objectives than His Majesty’s safety, whereas you men probably do not. Serve him well, and tell him that I saluted you.”
They nodded, readied their rifles.
He said to himself, hacking away at the stone, “Fools. Standing down here with me, with your backs to the man you think you’re protecting. All the while he’s slipping out the back door to leave you to this nightmare. You deserve what you get.”
“Pardon me, sir, but . . . what did you say?” Vidurkis remembered the voice: it belonged to the guardsman who had assisted him in the armory. He had stepped forward when all the others remained back with puzzled looks on their moronic faces.
“He’s leaving you all behind. He’s siding with the Odium,” Vidurkis spat. “Leave me alone.” He lifted the pick for another swing at the rock. Sharp bits stung his face. He squinted and continued.
“But surely he’s trying to make peace with them to prevent another attack.”
Vidurkis was out of breath. He set the pick down and leaned on its handle. He said over his shoulder, “Surely nothing, boy. As if you couldn’t tell, Gorett is as greedy as a two-ton sow, and if there’s one thing a sod like him understands more than how to finagle and cheat, it’s how to keep from getting caught.”
“But he’s our king,” the guardsman said, his voice hitching up at the end of the whine as if he were hearing his own naiveté for the very first time and trying to bite his words before they left his mouth. And then, as if trying to convince himself, “He wouldn’t do that. Not with them.”
