by Andrew Post
The fire popped, and both of them flinched.
“Do you suppose he’ll find a way through the collapsed entrance?”
Rohm spoke up. “I calculate roughly fifty tons of rock fell. There’s no way one man could move all that in time to catch up to us. Besides, Mr. Nigel is still down there keeping watch. He won’t let Vidurkis past.”
“If I know my brother, and it pains me to admit I do, he’ll find a way to get to us that won’t involve so much work. He has probably already abandoned the idea of coming in through the collapsed entrance and is trying to find a weak spot above to head us off at the pass.”
She watched without joy as the big, dark puffball flakes tumbled down slowly. “I’ll take first watch tonight.”
“No, you need your rest. I don’t sleep, remember?”
She looked at him and forced a smile. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight even if I want to. Knowing he’s out there is nearly unbearable. I can work on little sleep; it’s fine. Once we hit the sewers, we won’t have so much climbing. It’ll be pipes we can actually stand in and actual ladders. This will be the hardest part of the ascent.” She gestured at a nearby passage.
“But thanks to all the volunteers. Your generous offers don’t go unnoticed,” she called out, voice ringing off the walls.
Off by himself, Flam grunted, mumbled, and rolled away, pulling his sackcloth blanket tight up around his head and neck.
She looked at Clyde and shrugged. “I’m trying to play nice with him.”
“No suns,” Clyde mouthed.
Nevele nodded. “Right,” she whispered. “I forgot about that.” She smirked. “Explains a lot, actually.”
“It’s not nice to talk about others as if they aren’t present,” Flam said. “You’ve decided who’s taking first watch. Fantastic. Now cut the chitchat. Some of us still want to get some shut-eye.”
Nevele twisted in her place at the fire and stared at the back of Flam’s head. She popped up to her feet and said, “I’ll start my watch by going down that tunnel over there, see how far I go down it. I’ll shout if I run into anything.”
“Okay,” Clyde said, watching her enter the tunnel marked with a crudely written O that looked more like a G.
“Finally, some Meech-damned quiet.”
When Clyde was sure Nevele was out of earshot, he flung an empty canteen at Flam’s back. It collided noisily off him, and he rolled over, giving his attacker a confused sneer. “What’s your problem, Pasty?” He threw the canteen back.
Clyde caught it, the velocity slapping it painfully into his hands. “What’s gotten into you? I stood up for you just now, saying it was just a lack of morning suns, but it’s not that. You’ve been nothing but a pain since we got in here.”
Flam picked at one of the several knobbles of lint peppering his blanket, stalling. “I don’t like confined spaces.”
Clearly there was more going on. “Did something happen at Nigel’s?”
Flam closed his eyes and shook his head. “It’s not that. I just . . . I’m going through something. If I put my mind to it, I can work through it. It’s not worth wasting your or anyone’s time bellyaching about it.”
“Flam, we’re friends. Talk to me.”
The Mouflon pushed himself up onto one elbow and finally looked at him. And just as he was about to speak, the entire world shook. Deep within the stem somewhere, a hefty boom signaled what felt like their doom.
Nevele.
Clyde jumped up and was about to charge for the tunnel in which Nevele had gone, but a firm hand grabbed him from behind by the belt banding his waist. He spun and saw Flam staring ahead.
“We have to get Nevele,” Clyde shouted, pointing.
“Just wait. It’s the backed-up water. Wait a second; let it depressurize. If it breaks when you’re in there, you’ll be cooked alive.”
Clyde wriggled. “Let me go! I have to see if she’s all right.”
“Mr. Clyde,” Rohm added, “please be sensible.”
With the final word of that plea, as if on cue, Nevele charged out of the tunnel into the cavern with them, carefully minding the cliff where the plateau terminated into the pit, giving it ample breadth. Behind her, the tunnel lost all its darkness. It wasn’t becoming brighter, but the murk seemed to be retreating into the walls. Clyde watched, perplexed. After a moment, the air began to mist, and a long gray tongue of steam gently wafted into the chamber. He understood.
After a few minutes, the rumble faded and then stopped altogether, but the loosed steam seemed as if it might go on for much longer than the quake that had freed it.
The four stood completely enveloped in a bubble of soft white so dense that none of them could see very well. They held on to one another’s suit straps to prevent anyone from taking a bad step into the pit. The fog was made doubly worse when the atmosphere mites above contributed their own visible reaction to the shake-up.
Clyde looked at the three others around him and laughed with relief.
“Guess we can consider that way out of the question,” Nevele said, staring hard into the gray where she assumed the tunnel was. She shook some mite snow from her hair. “Too bad, too. Looked like it connected with a main shaft. Might’ve been able to get out of this mess by tomorrow afternoon if it hadn’t . . . exploded like that,” she yelled. She probed a pinkie into her left ear, wiggled it around. “Mercy, that was loud.”
“Can I propose a new rule?” Clyde said, still catching his breath. “Can we please not split up anymore?”
Nevele grimaced. “Gross. Who spit up?” She eyed Rohm. “It was one of you, wasn’t it? I know that was scary and all, but there’s no reason to go vomiting all over the place. Where was it? I don’t want to step in it.”
“Not spit up—split up,” Clyde said, laughing.
“Yes, and we do not throw up,” Rohm said. “Some might say we’re incapable; others say we’ve evolved to genetic superiority.”
“Well, you learn something new every day,” Nevele said.
Clyde took her new pluckiness to be a direct reaction to her near-death experience. It was a playful side he hadn’t seen, and he hoped to see more of it.
As the mist cleared, collecting on the walls and floors, the four let go of one another and returned to their campfire, now just a soggy black smudge on the floor.
Nevele dropped to her knees on her blanket and then spun to sit. In a heartbeat, her movements went from twitchy and excited to languid. “You know, I might take you up on your offer to take first watch. I suddenly find myself very much in need of rest,” she announced, still shouting.
Clyde smiled. “Certainly.”
“If you don’t stop screaming like that,” Flam said, “I might be forced to . . . to think of something nasty to say to you once my heart stops pounding so hard.” He gave Clyde a wink and bent to rebuild the fire.
“Ha,” Nevele said, pulling the blanket up to her chin and staring at the chamber ceiling. “You’re a funny one. A real laugh a minute.” She looked to Clyde. “My throat hurts. I’m still talking loud, aren’t I?”
“It’s okay.” Clyde sat next to her. He patted her knee, which was trembling.
She met his gaze. She had been really, really scared. Her hand found his, mittened in the wool blanket. She patted it and held on.
Clyde turned his hand around so they were palm to palm. The amber glow swelled upon her face. Soon her smile was gone as she watched the timber take to the fire.
He gave her hand a squeeze and hoped it freed her thoughts from the fearful events. When death was narrowly evaded, he didn’t feel plucky. All he felt was thankful.
Chapter 35
The Loss of Many, the Loss of One
Vibrations loosened some cinder blocks, sent them tumbling off the walls and raining around Vidurkis. Pressing one hand to the sewer wall, he brought his opposite arm overhead to block any pavers that might fall his way. The eruption was an immeasurable distance below, but he could feel it in his legs as i
f the entire island had become dislodged from its groundings and was now floating freely in the bay. In a moment, it was over.
Sitting before his meager fire, he stared into the open sewer tunnel ahead. He had gotten through the catacombs with no difficulty. The Blatta were dumb beasts that attacked impetuously, going at their prey with no tactical foresight. For such notoriously indestructible predators, their bony husks were no match for his guns. Each bullet had found its mark, piercing their shells with remarkable ease, spraying their guts out in satisfactory splats.
He had hollowed a few of them out, wearing their wings on his armor and spreading their green blood on his face. From inside their bodies he pulled slippery organs, things he couldn’t identify, and even though he had more than enough rations to spare, he cooked and sampled some. Not one was worth another bite.
He felt like an animal again, in the wild—something he hadn’t had the pleasure of experiencing for quite some time. Sure, in the palace keep, he’d used the gray light on the occasional rat, instilling a desire in it to be found and released from torment with a quick chop, but those were rats. Mouflons were known to be incredibly stubborn creatures. Vidurkis hoped he had an ally of sorts in the band of travelers, steering them wrong so they would cross paths with him quicker, but he couldn’t rely on that entirely. He had only himself to be certain of.
The Executioner sat in the dry sewer tunnel, studying the brickwork all around him. The aqueduct ran parallel, taking water out of the geyser floodway up into the city. If he needed drinking water, presumably all he needed to do was tap the stone pipes, canteen ready. But he wasn’t sure what sort of pressure had built up, with the Blatta clogging the floodway. Surely a great amount, considering that eruption a minute ago.
He checked his mental time line. Geyser hadn’t had a single rotation of its turbines in close to a week. He pictured hitting the wrong tunnel, tapping the wrong rock, laying a single foul step—and meeting his end.
It’d be a shame when he was so close.
Margaret Mallencroix, her doting pale-faced assistant, the mice, the Mouflon—they were all deep in there, beyond his sight, scant hours away from being found.
Anticipation chased away sleepiness, even though Vidurkis’s body pled for rest.
He held a hand in front of his face, fanned the fingers out, and brought them together again. It looked like one triangular black flipper in front of his face. Using his flashlight didn’t help. His eyes were dying.
Drawing a deep breath, he lowered his hand and stared into the flames, a mercurial blob of orange wiggling in the surrounding darkness. It made him remember what the Goddess said about hope and those who had it, and he got to his feet. He scraped some dried filth off the sewer floor with the edge of his boot, smeared it over the fire, and pressed on.
Rest was for the weak. He would rest when the Mouflon, his sister, and the others were dispatched.
For hours, he walked.
He arrived at a collapsed tunnel and turned around.
Another was flooded a good six paces in.
Distantly, he heard a low screech: Blatta alerting each other. With failing eyes, he had to rely mostly on his hearing. Dropping to a knee, he snatched off a glove, set a palm on the sewer floor, and held it there gently to pick up any vibrations.
Oh, they were in there. Skittering about drunkenly, screaming at one another. He hoped this trick would allow him to pick up on where his sister was, but there were no telltale two-footed steps being made, just those of the frantic six-legged ilk. Stampeding this way, then that, and back again. Getting closer?
He murmured, “Those who have the best tools will always survive to serve the Goddess best; preparedness overcomes skill.” He repeated the last bit a few times, each pass rising in volume until he was shouting down the brick tube where he thought the insects would hear it best. In his palm, he felt the vibration of them halting, shifting, and then charging as one. They organized it that way, it seemed. For that, Vidurkis had to give them a scrap of admiration.
He patiently took the rifle from his shoulder, pulled back on the bolt, and loaded the chamber with a round. Rancid breezes blew into his face. There were so many of them approaching that they were moving the dead oxygen out ahead of them in one big, displaced wave of stinking air.
A scuttle, a low buzz of wings, and a thud of six legs hitting dirt. A slight hesitation for the thing to get its bearings, taste the air, and then another scuttle—this time fast.
He fired. The sound of the Blatta catching the bullet with its carapace was the same as if someone pitched an earthenware bowl to the street off the top of a house.
More filed in behind, stampeding over their fallen brother. The kill was all they sought.
In a flash of his hand, the rifle bolt was worked and a new round readied. He fired, but the bullet made the sound of striking rock and ricocheted noisily.
A strange thing happened then. The insects seemed to get what was going on, that they were outmatched even though they outnumbered the interloper greatly, and retreated.
Palming the floor, he felt their descent, a quaver that turned one way, then another, as they expertly navigated secret passages. Soon the floor didn’t shake and he couldn’t hear anything but the calm rhythm of his own inhales and exhales.
He approached the kill. It was a larger Blatta, most likely a male. On its back with all six legs ramrod in the air, it was like an overturned table of Cynoscopian design. Comical.
He knocked on it, as one would a door, the firm thuds demonstrating its thickness. He was surprised he’d punctured such a sturdy carapace. He searched for the bullet hole, feeling the thing’s belly. He found the rifle shot had been drilled right into its horrid face, an inch or two above its vertically opening mandibles. Just for curiosity’s sake, since this one was different from the others—bigger and sounded fuller inside—he jammed his first finger in the entry wound, popped it out once it was slathered with blood, and brought it to his nose.
It smelled worse than the others, too. Like a bucketful of congealed sickness. Probably to prospective mates, it was a smell that sang of the creature’s virility and genetic prowess, proving he was an alpha.
It made Vidurkis think. “Evolution is just the Goddess’s way of going back to the engineering drawing board for redrafts.” He dabbed the blood onto his forehead, drawing glyphs on his cheeks and chin in praise of her: the First Wrench, the Divine Rivet Gun, the Bloody Hammer.
Finished, he wrung his hands to spread the muck out, then dragged the stuff down his beard’s length. He who wears no crown but the blood of the old king is the man in charge, he thought. Or maybe said aloud. He was losing track of the difference between thinking and speaking now, not caring at all that he was forgetting it.
He kicked the insect over. When it rolled facedown, Vidurkis thought his eyes deceived him.
The Blatta was wearing, squarely on its abdomen, a saddle. It was crudely constructed, seemingly of repurposed Blatta bones and cartilage, but was clearly a saddle. He bent and touched its seat: well worn. The saddle horn showed where four fingers and thumb would rest. It had gotten plenty of use. It wasn’t tied around the thing’s middle but fastened to the Blatta’s shell itself with organic nails hammered in around the edges.
“Is this your work, Stitcher?”
The prospect of being run down by a herd of domesticated Blatta with Margaret as the lead wrangler made his blood boil. Sometimes he felt like he was possessed, and when a thought crossed his mind that made him angry, he dwelled on it until he was positively seething. He did this now, picturing not only Margaret but the Mouflon and that pale-faced thing reducing Vidurkis to pulp under a thousand trained bug feet as they danced him into bloody mush, blind and unable to fight back. Dying disgracefully.
“No,” he said, or thought. “No.”
He stomped the head of the saddled Blatta flat and moved on. Time was waning.
The sewer wall at the end of the pipe’s line was broken. Bricks lay everyw
here, Blatta tracks pounded in the mixed soup of mud and waste. Vidurkis ducked in through the narrow opening and saw that the Blatta’s tunnels were not for anyone taller than three feet. Feeling a little disgraced by having to do it, he dropped to his hands and knees and shuffled through the tunnel.
He crawled for what felt like days until it came to a wide opening, the air here surprisingly fresh and cool.
Getting to his feet, he turned and was immediately struck with awe.
Moonlight poured in from above into the interior of the geyser floodway—the actual main line where the water passed from deep within Gleese to the surface, like a volcano but with less smoke and no fire at all, just the occasional column of steam. At first, he thought his mind was painting in what his eyes couldn’t see. Certainly it wasn’t a perfectly crisp, vivid sight before him, but he could still hear the enormity of this space. How the wind moved and how his own shuffling steps echoed.
He squinted and could mostly make out where, far below, the Blatta had meticulously plugged the floodway. He leaned out a little over the edge, staring till he soon developed a headache. Sure enough, it was the geyser itself, dead and dry. He eased back from the edge, amazed. He had grown up staring at this thing and never thought he’d be inside it.
A movement brought him back to business. Something far below had zipped by, causing him to lift his rifle.
One Blatta, apparently too preoccupied with its work to notice him. A moment later, it wedged into some hidden crook in the wall and was gone.
Now instead of the sky, he was marveling at what the insects had been working on. What they’d done to the geyser nearly appeared to be the work of humans in design.
