Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  “My word,” he breathed.

  “Put it back on.” Nevele squeezed off a few more rounds, blindly firing in her brother’s general direction. She blinked with every shot.

  Between the shots, for a couple of moments, there wasn’t any shooting and each party listened to the other reload.

  It was Vidurkis who spoke first, his voice echoing and dividing in the chasm of the plugged geyser.

  “Where is the Mouflon, Sister? Didn’t you bring him with you?” Clyde wasn’t sure but thought Vidurkis sounded scared.

  “What did you do to him?” Nevele shouted from cover. “He nearly killed us.”

  “Just something I’ve been tinkering with during my time in the stockade. Now where is he?”

  For a moment, Nevele seemed to mull that over. A small grin materialized on her face before she called back, “Okay, so you learned a new trick. But does it still work the way it used to? What happens if you don’t get him in time? We’ve been underground for a while, and I do believe you tagged him nearly three days ago.”

  There was no verbal response, just a shot from his rifle. Then he began shouting, nearly incoherently, “Give him to me. You and the pale man can go as you please. Just give me the Mouflon.”

  Nevele looked at Clyde. She handed him her pistol and began unzipping the cuffs of her miner suit, then the elbow vents as well as the clasps in the armpits.

  Clyde’s eyes went wide. He was barely able to keep his volume reined in. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Run when you get the chance. I’ll hold him off. You get to the surface and find Gorett. Your safety is more important than mine.”

  “But I . . .” Clyde looked into her eyes. “We left Flam. I can’t leave you too.”

  A shot rang out.

  Vidurkis ranted chaotic curses, then fired again.

  Clyde’s focus remained on Nevele. “I can’t. I care too much about—” He clamped his mouth shut. He took a deep breath.

  Her eyes took on a heavy sheen, and she closed them. Her hand found his cheek. “I know. Me too.” She pushed herself near, crushing a small, warm kiss on his lips. “Now run.”

  He had to force himself up and away from her. As he jumped out of cover, Vidurkis got him in the sights. Clyde could feel the man’s gaze on him as he charged ahead, leading him. When Clyde dared steal a glance, he saw Vidurkis’s focus was being tugged away. He twitched his head birdlike, apparently operating almost entirely by sound now.

  He lowered the rifle as something gripped his forearm. His gaze dropped out from behind his rifle sights. He was unable to ignore that his entire right arm and leg were being entangled in a netting of coarse, black thread.

  Clyde continued, praying Nevele knew what she was doing, but his feet failed to find their next step. He couldn’t go. He watched from above, scant yards away, heart in his throat.

  Vidurkis tugged his knife free and swung at the threads climbing his arm. He cut himself more than the reaching tendrils, but didn’t seem to care.

  Nevele stepped out of hiding while her brother was preoccupied, continued to hold out the arm from which she was sending the threads, and pulled the trigger of the pistol.

  Vidurkis ignored his cocooned arm and made himself into an impossible target by moving this way and that, ducking and dodging, all the while progressing toward her in long, erratic strides.

  She tried to plant her feet and continued to fire.

  One bullet caught Vidurkis in the abdomen. Slapping a hand over it, he roared. A sound not of pain but intolerable frustration. He threw the dagger down, and it stuck into the macrobiotic bridge walkway. He reached for the threads and began to spiral his arm, gathering and pulling more and more onto himself. He began sidestepping to the edge, sneering as he led her into an involuntary sidestep.

  “Nevele, let him go,” Clyde shouted.

  The ends of the threads unraveled through Nevele’s chest, pulling out of her neck, unreeling out of her arm. She cast her pistol aside and clutched the threads in both white-knuckled fists a mere foot or two before they slipped out entirely. An alabaster square fell from her forehead, then a panel from her neck. A small, plaintive moan escaped her. She let herself be pulled in another few feet as Vidurkis wrapped another revolution of her threads about himself, all the while pulling her nearer to the edge.

  Boot heels straddling the edge, Nevele looked over the gap to her brother. “I’m not scared of you anymore.”

  “No? Funny. I am.” And with that, one last angry grunt and tug.

  Nevele tipped forward but kept hold on her threads.

  Clyde’s heart stopped as she fell.

  Vidurkis braced for the sudden pull and locked his legs. Nevele stopped with a jerk at the length of her stitches, a fatal sixty feet above the Blatta-made cork.

  No. Clyde’s feet pounded as he ran back down the incline, stomping into a stop at the edge of the bridge. Everything around him sounded muffled, his pulse was racing so hard. He cried out to Nevele and ducked down, snatching the dagger from the muck. He held it against the strings like a cellist ready to summon a note with a simple pull of the bow.

  Vidurkis flinched at the sound and angled his head toward Clyde. His face was dead, his lifeless eyes staring. “If I drop her, I don’t know how much weight that Blatta ’comb can withstand. The Mouflon, you hapless shite. Where is he?”

  “He fell. He’s gone.”

  “If he were dead, I wouldn’t have these spots in my eyes, liar!”

  Clyde glanced down at Nevele, hanging by her handful of threads.

  As she gazed up at him, her left cheek slid away. She couldn’t let go to grab it. She had to let it fall.

  Clyde gave her a resolute stare, trying to will her to chase away any thought of letting go to save him. When he shook his head, she looked away, down to where she’d fall. If it came to it, he knew she’d do it.

  “Pull her up,” Clyde said, the attempt at bravado abandoning him halfway through the shouted order.

  “Give me the Mouflon!”

  “I don’t know where he is. He fell into this hole and . . . he’s down there and . . .” For a moment Clyde considered suggesting taking Vidurkis to the spot where Flam had fallen in, but there was no way he would do that either. Flam was still a friend, and Clyde wouldn’t betray him. There had to be some way out of this mess.

  “Then she dies,” Vidurkis said plainly, bending over the edge of the bridge with his sister hanging far below. He held out the dagger. He wiggled it between two fingers so she could see it all: the hilt, the handle, the blade itself. “You remember this one, don’t you? You were good practice. Of course, since you never healed up, Mum and Dad always knew who it was who had cut up their little precious baby. The reason I got sent away.” He turned the blade around and looked at its dented, blunted edge. “But not just you. Your blood—and the blood of a lot of others—was drunk by this blade. Most recently, fellow guardsmen who seemed bound and determined to hamper my progress. Before that, Gorett only let me out for special assignments, you see. There was the old man, though. He put up quite the fight—”

  Something strange was happening. Clyde stood with his hands out, begging, begging, when he felt it. The same as when Flam had confessed, got on a good spiel, and just kept talking and talking . . . Clyde’s pounding heart eased a little. There was hope; there was a chance. He just had to keep him talking.

  “What was his name?” Clyde shouted, stepping onto the bridge.

  “Clyde, no,” Nevele shouted, trying to retain her grip. “Stay back.”

  “Yes, Clyde. Stay back,” Vidurkis spat, aping Nevele’s voice. “Can’t you see I’m trying to have a word of farewell to my sister here? Have some manners, man.”

  “Was it Mr. Wilkshire?” Clyde barked. “Did you kill King Pyne as well?” He reached to his hip, drawing his friend’s citizen dagger and Commencement at once. Attempting to distract the murderer, Clyde threw the citizen dagger.

  Without even rising from his bent p
osture, Vidurkis lazily slapped it out of the air. It landed at his feet on the bridge. So this would require using a gun after all, Clyde surmised and raised the emerald revolver and trained it on Vidurkis’s chest. For her, he’d kill. “Pull her up.” He thumbed back the hammer. “Now.”

  With cloudy eyes, Vidurkis gazed at the gun as nonchalantly as one would study a pineapple. “I don’t like guns pointed at me, boy.” But then his fixed stare returned to the gun, and pearlescent eyes softened in sudden reverence. He began to blink rapidly, his face softening. “Where did you get that revolver?” His expression went slightly slack, and his eyes pinched tight. “The Sequestered Son. I thought it was only . . . a story. King Pyne, the milquetoast that he was, could never do a thing like that . . . send away his eldest son for safekeeping. You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Pull her up,” Clyde said. He decided to try a phrase on for size. “By the order of the crown, I command you to pull my friend up.” He stepped forward onto the bridge, narrowing the gap between them. “Do it.”

  “Fine,” Vidurkis said dejectedly and began taking one handful of Nevele’s strings at a time and pulling her up.

  She struggled onto the bridge and darted away from her brother. She moved toward Clyde, where the bridge connected to the corkscrew path. As she limped, the threads dragging behind her became shorter and shorter, retracting as she got to safety. She stepped out of what could easily become the crossfire and went to retrieve her own gun from the ground. Clyde could see her in his peripheral vision, getting the gun trained on her brother once more. Her movements were languid; she was clearly exhausted from having been terrified to the core.

  “Now drop that,” Clyde said, jerking the barrel of Commencement at the knife in Vidurkis’s clutch. “And anything else you have.”

  Vidurkis sheathed the blade, drawing back his cloak, revealing the rifle on his back, the pistol in his holster. He undid a few straps and let everything fall over the edge. The heap of equipment hit the enormous cork below with a soft flump. The smell of acid eating through leather and steel wafted up a second later.

  Clyde kept the sights on the Executioner, unsure what to do next. He stepped backwards until he wasn’t on the bridge but on the solid pathway with Nevele.

  She was steadily trying to get her torn sutures to go back into her flesh correctly, slapping loose scraps of skin into place, the retracting threads zipping everything into order, all while keeping one arm outstretched, pistol aimed.

  “So what now?” Vidurkis asked. He shrugged. “Want me to jump?”

  “I want you to confess it,” Clyde said. “I want you to tell me what you did.”

  A smirk brushed Vidurkis’s pale lips.

  Clyde turned the barrel aside and fired once. Commencement was loud in here.

  Vidurkis visibly recoiled.

  “Say it! Tell me you killed Mr. Wilkshire and King Pyne.”

  “And what? You’ll kill me in return? Not very kingly of you. Especially if you’re the kin of Pyne. Never saw such a pushover in all my life. He couldn’t give a demand or boss anyone around. Even when Gorett gave me the order to go and pay the git a visit—” Vidurkis cut himself off. “Are you doing this?”

  “Go on.”

  Vidurkis puffed his chest out. “Well, I stuck him good. He was just dozing in his bed like a fat pig, and I ran in and jibbed him like he was a thief caught in my pantry.”

  He stopped and blinked. He brought a hand to his head as if he suddenly felt dizzy. After shaking it off, he continued, his voice sounding as if it were being drawn from him—like he was no longer speaking on his own accord but the words were on fishing lines being reeled up his throat one at a time. “And . . . he bled to death. I watched it till the job was done and he was just about gone. Then I called Pitka in, as I was told to do. And then, after he had done his business receiving the old codger’s soul and whatever pomp and circumstance needed doing, words said and all that shite, I was put back in the cell. I was released after everyone was getting booted out because of the Blatta infestation. And . . . and . . . I was told to go to Albert Wilkshire’s place a week later, on a Sunday bright and early. ‘Gun him down, and make it look amateurish,’ Gorett said.” He tapped his brow. “Two bullets. And I did it. I went there. I killed him.” By the end, he no longer had a hiss in his voice. He sounded tired. Fading. Almost . . . sorry, maybe.

  Clyde slowly lowered Commencement’s barrel. Next to him, Nevele stammered, “What are you doing? Shoot him.”

  “Just wait,” Clyde whispered.

  Vidurkis took the opportunity to make a move. With a winning smirk, he threw his hand down to cross draw a hidden pistol.

  Clyde let it happen.

  Nevele gasped.

  As his hand went down, Vidurkis’s weight shifted on the crooked organic bridge. Just a momentary lapse in his equilibrium. He threw a boot forward to get a better stance, his foot landing upon the flat of the citizen dagger’s blade. It skidded forward, out from under him. His arms pinwheeled, his aim momentarily thrown off. He wobbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bridge, but regained his balance. He took his foot from the blade that had so nearly made him topple into the ravine.

  He smiled again. Eyes set upon Clyde, ready, he aimed.

  The citizen dagger teetered on the edge. It hung there, seesawing for a moment, before its handle went skyward like a capsizing vessel, cutting in deep swings as it sailed out of reach.

  Vidurkis cocked the hammer.

  Nevele grabbed her friend. “Clyde . . .”

  Clyde remained, Commencement lowered at his side. He had been feeling weak since they had started into the mine, almost sick. Now he understood. Even though he didn’t ever require food or drink to refresh himself, his sustenance came from elsewhere. The taste of Vidurkis Mallencroix’s confession had enticed him. He knew what would happen when Vidurkis admitted it all. As much as he wanted to hoist Commencement, he did not. He hoped his fabrick would not fail him now, if it truly worked as he understood it. Please do this for me now.

  “Good-bye, my dear sister and her fair-skinned prince. It’s a crying shame it had to come to this.” Vidurkis smirked, blinked, savoring the moment.

  Below, the citizen dagger tip struck into the surface of the muck. Boiling water pushed up, squirting around the blade. A loud ping rang out in the empty geyser.

  Vidurkis, his resolve softening for only a moment, looked over the edge to the source of the noise. The dagger rocketed up and lodged squarely in his forehead, burying itself to the hilt.

  Nevele gasped—perhaps in shock or some lingering love for her brother, Clyde didn’t know. She turned away.

  Clyde forced himself to watch. This was what his fabrick could do. The jinx had been set.

  The Executioner remained standing for another second, his pearlescent eyes crossing as he looked at the dagger lodged in his head. His fists tightened, and his gun discharged without being aimed, the shot smacking the space behind Clyde, having missed him by a fraction of an inch.

  Vidurkis wheeled drunkenly, took one last lazy glimpse at Clyde and Nevele, and then went slack, shoulders slumping, hands falling open, back arching unnaturally. Gravity caught him and lulled him off his feet.

  As Vidurkis’s body began its tumble, Nevele wrenched Clyde by the arm, pulling him up the pathway. “We have to go.”

  Running up the corkscrew path, they heard the heavy thud of Vidurkis landing on the spongy membrane. It didn’t splinter or burst but somehow managed to take his weight. They didn’t stick around to question this lucky turn of fate but continued to run, ascending. It wasn’t but a moment before distinct pops and hisses announced that the plug was crumbling.

  The Executioner was a few pitiful seconds away from death, still seeing the world before his eyes. He felt the water come boiling up under him. His head hurt. Bad. He could feel the dagger in there, chiseled in place. His thoughts were loopy. His eyes caught white flashes where there shouldn’t be any. He heard himself breathing, groaning.
The pain came and went sporadically. Something was clearly broken inside his brain. He considered yanking the dagger out but knew this was the end. He smelled the water, like rotten eggs, like sulfur.

  When his dying eyes cooperated and weren’t cluttered with fuzzy swaths, he watched the two running up and around, his sister and the Sequestered Son, still alive. Amazing.

  What a week. Not only had he unearthed an urban myth, but he was undone by it as well. Not a bad way to go, as far as these things went.

  And then shadows scattered across, startling him. Dozens of naked people with painted bodies and two Mouflons as well, all saddled upon Blatta with their wings flapping furiously, soared over. The last thing Vidurkis Mallencroix thought about was that saddle he had discovered in the sewers upon that one Blatta.

  Two urban myths unearthed.

  “My Goddess, how curious—”

  It was all he managed before the membrane ruptured and incalculable gallons of boiling acid-rich water rushed around him. The Goddess would accept him. He’d had a function in death, setting off the geyser.

  Right?

  That’s all she wanted from him, from any of her followers.

  Can you hear me? Will you accept me?

  He wasn’t sure if he was thinking or speaking. And in a half-second-long fizzy burst, it didn’t matter as Vidurkis Mallencroix was blasted into nonexistence.

  Flam rode on the back of the Blatta, holding on for dear life as the whistling air pushed beneath the creature’s wings and launched him up. His uncle was at the lead, hollering for the uprising of the Lulomba, the swaddled insect infant clutched to his chest. Flam rushed up in the pack along the wall and caught a fleeting glimpse.

  Clyde and Nevele.

  He steered his Blatta and saw they had spotted him as well. He gripped the beetle and reached out two hands for his friends to take.