by Andrew Post
“He will, and he has.” Vidurkis glanced at the young man but had to look away. Had to. “Don’t look so damned surprised. It’s frighteningly pathetic to see that look on someone as young as you. You should be in the prime of your rebellious years, traveling the world, doing what you want to do, not taking orders from anyone. But I reckon it was a family trade, was it not? Pop a guardsman, Grandpop a guardsman, now you. Perhaps you should ask to be relocated in the next life. Somewhere warm, maybe, where independence and free thinking are encouraged instead of frowned upon. But I suppose idiocy runs in your family, too, eh?”
Vidurkis heard a gun pop from a holster. The click of a hammer being cocked. Vidurkis glanced over his shoulder but had to turn to see him clearly through the fog in his eyes. The guardsman was aiming right at him, hands shaking. “You’re a liar. They all said you were. I don’t know why I’m—why any of us are down here helping you. Just because you outrank us doesn’t mean we have to listen to you.”
Vidurkis knew the guardsman boy felt as if he were serious and choosing a side. It made him sigh. “Even though I just suggested adopting independent thought, I’d recommend reminding yourself who you’re pointing that at. My recommendation: put that steel away, boy.”
“Draw and f-face me,” the guardsman barked, voice cracking.
Vidurkis estimated him a moment, chuckled, wiped his brow, and lifted the pick to return to his task.
“Face me! Face me and d-draw! In the name of King Gorett, I c-command it.”
Boots grated on flagstones. Vidurkis couldn’t see them but knew the other guardsmen were making a slow retreat. At least some of them had sense.
A shot rang out, colliding with the wall of the cell. Vidurkis glanced and was in awe to see how close the boy had dared to shoot. Mere inches away. It was sufficient to get him to wheel about, casting the pick aside and going for his own sidearm.
The guardsman fired a second time and missed again. Vidurkis made no move to dodge and weave. The others made for the staircase, and the prisoners in their cells flanking the carnage let loose the exclamations pouring from minds they had lost long ago.
The boy didn’t have it in him to fire again. Vidurkis slapped the gun from his hands, maneuvered the barrel of his own weapon up fast, tucked it under the guardsman’s chin, and discharged—all in a singular, swift motion. The man lay dead at his feet, the chorus of prisoners’ anguish reaching a crescendo.
Vidurkis pointed his weapon at them until they stopped screaming. They had been his caged neighbors for years. He’d probably spent more time in close proximity to them than his own kin but had never spoken a word to any until now. “Shut up!”
Even in the silence, he didn’t feel sated. Knuckles white on his gun at his side, sweat squeezing from every pore, he needed something . . . more. He brought his focus to the guardsman he had just slain and examined his slack face, his still-open eyes. He fired again and again until there wasn’t much of a face left. He dropped the empty brass onto the guardsman’s chest, reloaded, returned the gun to its holster, and went back to work, mumbling to himself.
Gorett paced the communications room countless times. The message had been sent to the Odium leader, but no word had yet come back. For hours he listened to the endless hammering, drilling, clanging of pick on stone. He cursed the madman. “I should’ve left him down there to rot,” Gorett muttered to himself. “But if he stops the girl and her pack of troublemakers, all the better. One less way the wendal stone has to be divided.” He wasn’t planning on paying Vidurkis, anyway. Gorett had managed to pull the rug out from under a king before; a strange-eyed psychopath would be no trouble at all.
“Message incoming, sir,” one of the communications officers said, pressing the headphone tighter to his ear.
Gorett leaped toward him and yanked the headphones off the guardsman and strapped them to his own ears. A spray of his white hair cut over his eyes. He listened, staring ahead. The screen of the receiver was picking up the signal from eighty thousand kilometers away, in the Gleese ice cap region.
The voice was drawling, words incomplete or slurred, a strange vernacular spoken. Gorett listened intently for his answer.
“Here we are, right after we gave you a thorough bashin’, and you, the stinkin’ King of Geyser, want to make a deal.” Guttural laughter. “You wanna put aside our differences and talk about givin’ you a lift outta town? Why’s that, Gorett? Got a bit of the bug problem? Can’t get an exterminator on the horn? You evacuated the damned city. You know now it’ll be all the easier for us to boot you and your men off that footstool you call a city and keep the place to ourselves, don’t ya? Mayhaps that’s what we’ll do.”
There was a long pause. Gorett was terrified the message had ended.
The Odium leader smacked his lips and continued. “You say you got wendal stone under that mushroom of yours? Consider me interested. You and your merry band of men can come aboard; we’ll go out a few clicks, maybe have a picnic and a sleepover or two, come back and take care of that creeper-crawler problem o’ yers, but—listen good now, okay?—we want half of that deposit. We want to be there when it’s weighed. We want to see each pebble of that shite pulled out of the ground, and we want to see the math bein’ done. You ain’t going to cheat us like you did your townsfolk. No, sir. We get half, and if it’s as much as you say it is, then we have ourselves a deal. Day after tomorrow, we’ll be by to pick your arse up. Be out front, town square, highest suns.” The message ended with a mechanical bleat.
Gorett held the headphones to his ear, the drunken and crooked talk of the Odium leader silenced. Half. They wanted half of the deposit. He threw down the headphones and marched away from the communications room. Whether he agreed or not, they’d be there the day after the next—at highest suns. He couldn’t imagine how it would go if he went to their waiting ship and told them to forget the whole thing. He saw the slaughter that’d surely follow. They’d probably rig Geyser’s stem with explosives and topple the whole city, just for having wasted their time.
A shot rang out from somewhere in the palace.
Gorett rushed into the hall but kept his distance from the staircase.
Up from the stairwell on the north wing rushed a platoon of guardsmen, all too frightened to answer, and the ones who met his gaze had a marked look of disgust in their eyes.
“What’s happening?”
As if in answer, the piercing screech of the Blatta echoed through the palace, followed by a bevy of muffled gunfire. Gorett spun. He rushed to his private chambers, threw the security switch, and closed the room up tight.
Hours passed. No one called; no one knocked.
Gorett smoked one pinch of mold after the other, stared out the slits in the windows between the security panels, and watched the town square. He begged time to speed up. He wanted to be gone from Gleese, away from all this trouble. Even if it meant being half as rich as he’d expected. Whatever it meant to avoid being ripped apart by Blatta and having his body used to feed their young.
“Damn you, Vidurkis.” He’d said it countless times since locking himself in. He looked at the windows where his reflection, crumpled in the throne, hands shaking, glared back. He had no one to blame but himself, but he would never admit it.
He continued cursing the Executioner, watching the purple sky darken past his own ghostly image, which became clearer with each passing minute. He watched for trailing, blinking starboard lights of an incoming craft, but after an hour he finally locked with his reflection. For the first occasion in time beyond counting, he saw his age: the creases and dour expression he apparently carried all the time now. He still fancied himself straight backed and strong in build, a young buck in the tumultuous world of Geyser public office and, before, on the street with his mum. Not so much anymore. The grief and paranoia had taken their toll patiently, between glances in the looking glass.
“Damn you,” he said, not meaning the Executioner this time.
The four didn’t encounter
any Blatta from the time they left Nigel to when they arrived at the first widening of the cave. As Nigel had said, there was an area where the miners could gather tools and supplies. Everything looked ransacked and broken, as if the Blatta had ruined anything humans had ever touched out of sheer spite. Nestled between two jagged outcroppings at the farthest back wall of this new cavern was a corrugated steel lean-to with a crank-operated water pump. Flam gave it a couple of pushes, but from its spout came only a cough of rusty dirt. Flam sighed and recapped his canteen.
Clyde looked to the far corner of the next set of mine chambers. One was marked with an X and a second with an O. He considered insisting they press on, but exhaustion gripped him. His knees and back roared, and the bottoms of his feet felt as if they’d been handed over to a carpenter and sandpapered to the bone.
They had been at it for hours, climbing steep inclines of one tunnel after another, wiggling through tight corridors, and negotiating dark passages, always with the fear another wave of Blatta would bottleneck them in. He wasn’t sure if it was the worry of being cornered and unceremoniously eaten alive or the trek itself that wore him out so.
He toed the plateau’s edge in the miners’ rest area, seeing the infinite crevasse stretching down, down, down to where the light terminated in vast, swallowing darkness. It might take entire minutes to fall, an endless drop of kicking and screaming and tumbling, before the abrupt end. The thought triggered his feet to step back.
He turned and scanned the area. If they stayed away from the edge, used the lean-to as a shelter from the cold, and always had someone on watch, it might make a suitable temporary camp. “I think we should take a rest here.”
Flam kept his distance, staying at the opposite edge of the yawning gap. He played with the pump handle some more, filling the chamber with a metallic screech with each pull and push. “Fine by me.”
Rohm’s overalls crumpled and deflated into a pile, mice filtering out through the sleeves and collar. They seemed happy to be out, the final few bleary eyed and panting from the congested heat in the suit. “Whatever you think, Mr. Clyde,” they chimed as they sought out some soggy cave mushrooms and a wispy strand of tree root to nibble.
Nevele pushed back her hood and straightened her hair. Her eyes never rested on any one thing for longer than a heartbeat, Clyde noticed. She’d twitch at every movement, drip of water, or anyone taking a step by her. She blinked and stared past the dripping stalactites at the slumbering bats, hanging inverted high above. “I don’t care for this place. Nope. Not one bit.” It sounded as if she was attempting to be humorous, but the truth of her joke fell on Clyde’s ears.
Flam grunted, picked up a pinch of mold from the wall, and stuck it in his pipe. “I don’t think you have any room to talk. It was your idea to go this way. If it was up to me, I would’ve sooner stayed down there with Nigel and his bird. At least they had bathrooms.”
Nevele turned toward him, put her hands on her hips. “And what? Just wait for all this to blow over? Either way, we were going back to Geyser to get at Gorett. If it were up to you, we would’ve knocked on the front door, asked if we could allow Clyde in for a moment to get his revenge, had tea, and been off.”
“We haven’t even gotten through a full day yet, and you two are already fighting?” Clyde lowered his voice. “Either way, let’s try to keep it down. Who knows how many more of those things are in here.”
Nevele looked down. “You’re right.”
Flam seemed incapable of looking Clyde in the face, returned to toying with the pump handle, clutching his empty canteen in the opposite hand, hoping for a miracle. Finally, he pitched the canteen away and, leaving a trail of smoke puffs in the air behind him, approached Clyde, face serene, determined. He got halfway to him and stopped and, as if remembering something, turned around. Then he turned back around. He walked toward Clyde again, one hand balling into a fist over and over. He seemed to remember something else and walked in a different direction altogether.
Clyde looked to Nevele.
She shrugged.
They watched Flam mosey around the space awhile, shaking his head and lightly pounding a fist against his forehead.
Clyde took a wide sidestep away from the edge. “Something wrong, Flam?”
Flam muttered a halfhearted apology, faced the wall, and began picking at his fingernails.
It was only when Nevele spoke again that Clyde’s attention was peeled from the Mouflon’s back. “To answer you, yes, I too think this would be a fine place to camp for the night. And I agree: the fighting needs to stop.” She dropped her bag, which slapped against the stone.
The noise made Flam jump. He shot Nevele a glare over his shoulder and returned to facing the wall, picking his nails.
“A lot stands between us and Gorett,” Clyde said. “The Blatta, Vidurkis, Gorett’s men. And who knows what the conniving crook himself will have in store for us. So let’s keep the quarreling among ourselves to a minimum, yeah? It’s the last thing we need.” He wasn’t sure where it came from, this new take-charge way, but he hoped it would hang around. He didn’t like being bossy, but the fighting needed to be addressed, sternly, once and for all.
Flam grunted at some frustration he alone was feeling and returned to the pump handle, raising and lowering it in slow, grating screeches. “Fine,” he said after a moment. “Sure thing.”
Two of Rohm’s members approached and offered Flam a twisty length of root. He shook his head, and the mice brought it next to Nevele. She accepted it, chewed it as if the hairy, kinked brown thing were bubble gum, and thanked them. The two mice, fascinated by her willingness to eat something so ugly, immediately bolted off to find more.
Time was impossible to gauge down here with no suns or clocks. It was dark for as long as it was cold, which was to say those conditions never changed. They rested for what Clyde approximated to be an hour, but he knew he couldn’t trust his own internal clock: what felt like three weeks to him was apparently six months.
He was glad to see Nevele get to her feet, brush herself off, and walk to him. At the brink of the plateau overlooking the gap, she kicked a rock into the darkness. There was silence for a frighteningly long stretch and finally a soft crack, then another, then another, as the rock pinballed between the walls until it made one last resounding clack and all was still again.
“I liked what you said.”
Clyde looked away from where the rock had gone, still imagining it was himself down there, broken and lost. He slowly stood, knees stiff. “What did I say?”
She stared into the dark but smiled. “Kind of reminding us what we’re doing. How he and I”—she thumbed over her shoulder to Flam—“need to cool it with the bickering.” She looked at him. “You took charge. Like any prince should.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? That’s what you are, the Sequestered Son, Prince Pyne, Clyde Pyne. A folktale come true, in the flesh right before me. I have to say, I really believed in you about as much as I did Meech, the Great Mouflon from the Mountain.” She flicked her eyes toward Flam to see if he caught that slip, but he appeared to be asleep.
Clyde shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”
“I can’t imagine you would, really. Big changes take time to sink in. But you sure sound different. You did for a moment there, anyway. Like him, your father.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. Kind of freaked me out. Clear message in a big voice. Exactly like him, when he wanted something to be known that was important.”
“I wasn’t trying to sound princely, though. I guess I was just fed up with you two tearing into one another all the time.” He smiled.
“Well, let me be the first to tell you that you sound the part, even if you don’t want to.” She kicked another rock over, and this one hit the opposite wall sooner than the first had. It banged back and forth all the way down. She watched, long after it wasn’t visible anymore.
“You’ve certainly come a long way i
n a matter of days,” she said. “From servant to adventurer to prince, all in about a week.”
He grunted, simply to let her know he’d heard her. He didn’t really want to talk about this much more but was happy to oblige Nevele now that she seemed to be happier since resting. “So you knew my father?” It felt like everyone knew him except Clyde.
Nevele shook her head. “I worked in the palace, sure, but I knew King Pyne about as well as someone gets to know their boss who’s ten levels up. On occasion I’d have to bring something to his attention, and when he looked at me, he really . . .” She laughed. “Yes, just like that.”
“I’m sorry. Was I making a face?”
“I really can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. Take your mother, take your father, put their images together, and then remove all the color, and . . . sure enough, it’s you.”
“I look like them?” His voice hitched, mimicking his heart. He wished Nevele had a picture or a bit of footage—anything. His imagination could scratch out only so much detail.
Nevele nodded, auburn hair falling from behind her ear and into her eye. She swept the unruly strand back with a pass of her hand, momentarily covering her averted eyes. He wanted to ask her to describe them, but she spoke calmly and quietly before he could ask, her gaze fixed on the shadow-choked abyss. “I want to tell you about them, everything I know and remember, but the memories wouldn’t compare to the people they really were. Not at all.” She looked at him. “You should feel honored having been among some amazing people, Clyde. Not just your mother and father but Albert Wilkshire too. I barely knew him, but if he raised you—even somewhat—he must’ve been a great man.”
“What were they like, my parents? I mean, I know you didn’t know them really well or anything, but . . . for the few times you did see them?”
“Well.” Nevele developed a broad smile, looking out to the cavern wall across the way as if they’d appeared to her among the rocks. “They talked to me, looked at me like I didn’t have . . . all this.” She gestured at her stitched cheeks, her sewn forearms. “Just like you do.”
