by Conner, Jack
Finally, though, Virine had had enough. Sweating and breathing heavily, he said, “Fuck this shit. Look, I’ve had it. It’s been fun and all, but I’m heading the fuck outta here.”
Coleel thumbed the hammer back on the pistol he was pointing at Virine’s head. “Leave and die.”
Virine sneered. “You won’t shoot me. Do it and my glabren’ll drill you were you stand. Remember, I don’t need to be conscious or even alive for them to carry out my orders. I’ve already ordered them to kill you if you fire at me, and, believe me, they will.”
“They’ll try,” Layanna said. She was sounding much more confident. Avery wondered if she were able to bring her other-self over yet. She had been eating infected vegetation nonstop.
“Let’s not do this,” he said. “Let’s just continue on. We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?” Coleel said.
“You’ll find out when we get there,” Avery assured him. “Our deal still stands.”
Coleel spat. “This deal hasn’t gone the way you said it would.”
“We’re not the ones who brought him into it,” Layanna said, indicating Virine. “Anyway, it’s done now. You will honor the deal, won’t you?”
Coleel nodded raggedly. “You give me sanctuary, I tell you how to acquire the nectar.”
Virine’s eyes gleamed. “That almost might be worth sticking around for. Almost. No, I’m gone. Farewell, you motherless sons of leprous whores.” He turned about and marched away, his glabren, walking awkwardly backward so that their guns were still trained on Avery and Coleel, following after.
Virine stopped cold.
“Shit.”
Avery looked past the gangster to see several robed figures climbing onto the roof from the fire escape Virine had been making toward. It was too dark to see them very well, only as shadows against the blackness, but even from here Avery caught the odor of rot.
“The priests,” he said. “They’ve found us.”
“Bastards,” said Layanna. It was one of the few times he’d heard her swear.
Virine stumbled back, behind the wall of his glabren. Two of them spun about and trained their weapons on the advancing priests. The third alternated its aim between Avery and Coleel.
The priests, and there were about ten of them, flowed forward, not even seeming to touch the gravel of the rooftop, just drifting like ghosts between the strange trees and vegetation. Some animal shrieked in fright and fled them, the bushes shaking where it passed; Avery could hear it if not see it. Two of the moons were out now, and many stars, but the trees cloaked much of the roof in darkness. Still, he could see the line of priests, moving in single file through the vegetation, as they drew near.
Avery moved backward, Layanna at his side. Behind him was the wall around the edge of the roof, then a broad street below. Gunfire popped in the near distance, growing more frequent. The fighting had been in a lull, but it was returning in full force.
“The woman must come with us,” the priests said. As before, they all spoke in unison, but not with human voices. Their radio static hisses chilled Avery and made cold sweat pop out on his brow.
“Get away from us,” he said.
“She must retrieve the Key. The Sleeper must be woken.”
“I’m not retrieving anything for you, whatever you are,” Layanna said. She sounded as unnerved as Avery had ever heard her. Even she had no idea what these things were or what their agenda might represent.
It was as if her refusal were irrelevant. “You must come with us.”
“Fuck your mother up her cancerous ass,” Virine said, and there was satisfaction in his voice. As the last syllable fell, his two male glabren let loose with their weapons, firing directly into the first priest in the procession. The bullets punched through the man and out his back, showering dried flesh and gore, and struck the robed figure behind him, who seemed to be a woman. Neither the male priest nor the female one slowed but only continued forward through laden trees sheathed in hard carapaces adorned with subtly glowing moss and lichen.
The glabren continued firing, and at last the lead priest, his legs disintegrating under their hail, collapsed to the ground, where he still continued forward, dragging himself with his fingers. The woman, and the others behind her, stepped over him and closed on the glabren without pause. The woman, taking a long blast right in her chest, clapped her hand on one of the glabren’s shoulders.
Virine screamed. Surprised, Avery spun to see the gangster’s face screwed up in pain. Whatever the woman was doing to the glabren, he could feel it through the psychic link.
The glabren fell to the side, though whether that was Virine severing the link or the work of the priestess Avery didn’t know. Another priestess had clapped its hands onto the face of the other combatant glabren, and that glabren shuddered and twitched, its gun arm hanging slack.
The robed figures poured around them, making for Avery and the others.
“Come … with us …” they said. “You must … retrieve …”
“Bastards!” Virine said. He yanked a pistol from his jacket and pressed it to Coleel’s temple. “We’re getting out of here, Losgana. Drop your gun.”
Coleel obeyed. “There’s no way down.” His voice betrayed only a slight undercurrent of the fear Avery knew he must feel; Avery felt it if he didn’t.
Virine’s free hand pulled on the vines that grew over the side of the roof. “These look like they’ll bear our weight. Go! Now!”
Coleel hesitated.
“Go!”
The priests stalked forward. The final glabren and the others pulled back.
“You’re not taking him anywhere,” Layanna told Virine. “He’s ours.”
Avery pointed his gun back at the gangster. “Let him go.”
Virine lifted his lip, exposing his fang. “Fuck with me and die. Let me go and I’ll leave the last glabren to fight for you.” To Coleel: “Now go!”
There was no time to argue about it. Coleel reached out to grab a handful of vines—
Layanna’s other-self erupted outward, spilling alien light over the roof and knocking everyone back with the wind of its coming. The smell of salt and ammonia filled Avery’s nose even as Layanna’s human self lifted off the ground and seemed to hover, weightless, inside her amoebic sac, filled with white and pink and purple lights that seemed to glow from her various organelles. The sac’s perimeter was marked by her tapering pseudopods, each fringed in curling tendrils.
“What in all the milkless mothers … ?” said Virine. Instantly his last glabren, the female one, spun from facing the priests of the Restoration to facing Layanna. The glabren fired directly into Layanna’s sac, but she couldn’t penetrate it. Just the same, Layanna didn’t appear to appreciate being fired at, and before Avery could stop her (assuming he could) she reached out a tentacle and coiled it around the glabren, whose dance Avery had so reluctantly admired earlier and who was truly an innocent in all this, and she burst into blue fire and burnt to blackened cinders in seconds. The ash blew away as the priests closed in.
Coleel, though clearly awestruck, seized his chance. While Virine was rooted in shock, perhaps even sadness, the merchant grabbed his gun arm, balled a hand into a fist and smashed it into Virine’s face. Avery heard the crunch of bone and Virine fell to his knees. Coleel snatched the weapon free.
“Surrender,” the priests told Layanna, coming closer. “You must retrieve the—”
Layanna grabbed them all up in different tentacles. One she passed poison into. It squirmed, and its flesh boiled. Another she crushed into pulp so that its rotting innards trickled to the ground. Another she filled with alien fire, and it erupted in otherworldly flames.
“Wait!” Avery said. “Leave one alive!”
Too late. She had destroyed them all. At least she hadn’t eaten any of them. Avery crept forward and investigated the bodies, and what he saw shocked him—but, at the same time, knowing what he knew about the priests, didn’t completely surprise hi
m: maggots squirmed among apparently decayed remains.
“They’re dead,” he said. “Dead bodies, somehow animated …”
The maggots squirmed toward his shoes. He hastily backed away. Something about those maggots didn’t look quite right, and he wasn’t sure they were maggots at all.
“Interesting that they had no plan to deal with your abilities,” he said to Layanna. “Almost as if they couldn’t imagine you refusing them.”
Fanatics, she spoke into his mind, and he was forced to agree. Still, he thought there might be more to it than that—some inhuman, mindless need that would brook no refusal or alternative. And, now that the priests knew that there was an alternative—that Layanna had a will of her own and the means to implement it? What would they do now?
Turning to the others, he saw Coleel staring in fascination and horror up at Layanna, whose attention was on Avery and the bodies. She was still encased in her other-self. Beside Coleel, Virine moved. Holding one hand over his bloody nose, his other hand groped for the pistol he’d made Coleel drop. Avery dashed forward and kicked the gun aside, then collected it.
Look, Layanna said, speaking, again, directly into Avery’s mind.
She watched something to the south. He looked. There the combined aerial fleet of the local Octunggen, the two zeppelins and dozen dirigibles, angled toward them.
Chapter 5
“He felt me,” Layanna said. “The Octunggen have a military psychic with them, I touched his mind. When I changed, he felt me.”
The air started to shimmer around her in preparation to her releasing her other-self.
“Wait,” Avery said. “Can you last much longer?”
“Not for long.”
“Then grab us up and run. If we can veer around the outer edge of the battle, it will either draw the airships into the fight or make them go wide around. In either case, they won’t be able to continue the chase.”
“If I can last long enough to get us away.”
She didn’t waste any time. She grabbed up Avery, Coleel and Virine—both of whom screamed and cursed and tried to resist, to no avail; she removed their guns, just in case—then bounded over the edge of the roof and alit on the next roof, her movements fluid and graceful. Her great size didn’t seem to have any bearing on her weight in this world, and she moved as buoyantly as any of the airships following them, perhaps more so.
Maybe I should deposit Mr. Virine somewhere, she spoke into Avery’s mind, something he would never get used to. We don’t want him summoning his glabren after us. Or maybe I should just kill him. The world would be better off without him.
“No. He commands an army of glabren, and he’s at our mercy. He could come in handy later. Keep him, but put him out, if you can. He can’t know where the rebels are hiding.”
She apparently passed a non-lethal poison into Virine, or a small dose of a lethal one, as he screamed and went limp. Gripped in a transparent, whitish tendril, Coleel watched all this with wide eyes. When he could speak, he shouted—having to pitch his voice over the sound of the wind, the nearby gunfire as the battle escalated, and the rasp of Layanna’s tentacles on the gravel of the rooftops—“What is she?” His face glowed not only with his own lights now (which were becoming visible as the dried mud flaked off) but with Layanna’s lights, too.
Avery thought of lying to the man, or even telling the truth, but in the end he just shook his head. Coleel asked no more questions, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Layanna as she bounded from rooftop to rooftop, circling around the battle just as Avery had suggested. Behind them, the zeppelins hesitated, then veered to the west, taking the long way around the fighting. With any luck, it would take them an hour or more to circumnavigate it, and by then the group should be well away and Layanna back to her normal self and hopefully less visible to the psychic.
As she went, she grabbed fruits and entire infected trees—and some infected animals, too—from the rooftops and shoved them through her sac wall, eating to keep up her otherdimensional strength. Eventually, though, she had to release her other-self, and the three continued on foot. If anyone had seen them leaping from roof to roof through the city, they must have ascribed it to some phenomenon of the Crothegra, since no cries rose up and no sirens wailed in their direction. Avery tore a strip off of his shirt and bound it across Virine’s eyes as the gangster started to rouse, and Coleel ripped a strip off of his shirt and tied the man’s hands behind his back. They half-supported the criminal as they went. They’d left their tree behind and had to descend a fire escape to the road. They were close to the temple of the Sisters of Jucina now and most people in the area were squatters or rebels; the group received some strange looks but no one tried to stop them. Though clearly fascinated by her, Coleel did his best to put as much distance between himself and Layanna as he could.
“Are they still after us?” he said at one point.
“The Octunggen?” Avery said. “No, they’re far behind us, and I don’t think that they can track us now that Layanna’s back to her old self. And I don’t think we need to worry about bringing Virine to the rebel hideout now that he’s alone and unable to know where he’s going.”
The temple drew closer, and Avery heard the sound of singing coming from its great open doors with light spilling out of them. As the group approached the grounds, dark figures burst out of the doorway of an abandoned, overgrown house and surrounded them: rebels. They shouted at the group in Kuskian. A gun was thrust in Avery’s face.
“Hold it!” called a familiar voice. “That’s the doc! Leave him alone, damn you!”
Avery grinned, relief washing through him. He turned to see Janx gesturing to Avery and the others and talking to the rebels in their own language. Hildra stood at his side, her gaze on Coleel and her eyebrows arched. The mud had almost completely flaked off him now, and his glow lit up the overgrown ruins all around.
“Janx! Hildra!” Avery said. “I’m so glad to see you again.” He let Coleel take Virine’s weight—the gangster was mostly supporting himself now anyway—and shook Janx’s hand, then was engulfed in a crushing hug. He laughed against Janx’s chest. “I was afraid you hadn’t made it.”
Separating, the whaler said, “Naw, we made it back alright. First thing we did was make sure to get on the sentry crew to make sure you didn’t get shot by accident.” He tipped his head at Layanna. “Blondie.”
“It’s good to see you again,” she said.
Hildra spat. “Looks like you’ve got some new friends.”
“Losg Coleel, meet Hilda and Janx,” Avery said. “Hildra and Janx, Losg Coleel, holder of the monopoly of ghost flower nectar merchandising.”
One of the rebels spoke into a radio, apparently asking for permission to bring the group inside. It was granted, and a detachment of the sentries escorted them into the temple through a side entrance, then to the wing the rebels operated out of. General Vursk was off leading the attack on a bank controlled by Octung—that was the source of the fighting they’d seen; the general was trying to separate Octung from its stolen money and thereby force them out sooner—and the group was obliged to wait for awhile. Avery, Janx, Hildra and Layanna became reacquainted, and Coleel spoke with them, then was given a room to lie down in and food to eat. He seemed weary, and Avery didn’t blame him. He himself was exhausted. Virine was tossed into a windowless room and a guard placed on his cell.
Avery and Layanna ate and rested, and eventually Vursk returned. After he had met with some of his officers, he summoned Avery’s group, including Coleel, into his office, and they all hunched around his desk.
“I’m glad to see you survived,” the general told Avery and Layanna. “Your friends were convinced that you had, but I wasn’t so sure. They tried to get me to send another team out after you. Sadly, I needed all the men for the strike.”
“Did the soldiers you sent with us return?” Avery asked.
Vursk frowned. “Some of them. Lisam and a dozen others made it back, with Janx and Hil
dra here, but the rest fell during the ambush, including Major Nezine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It seems that’s how I lost the previous team, as well.”
“Yes,” Layanna said. “We still don’t know why the Octunggen wanted to capture me.”
“If that’s what they were doin’,” added Hildra, never one to allow Layanna any airs.
“They may’ve been tryin’ to find out what we knew about him,” Janx said, hiking a blackened thumb at Coleel.
Attention turned to the merchant, who shifted uncomfortably. “I’m grateful for being allowed sanctuary,” he said to Vursk. Off the general’s nod, he said, “I’ve been living on the run for too long. I’m only sorry my men weren’t able to make it here with me.”
“We’re not done running, I’m afraid,” Vursk said. “We move camp every few days. But for your help in repelling the Starfish—”
“What?”
“—we will give you what asylum we can. The good news is that we won the battle today. We deprived the occupiers of a major source of their ill-gotten funds and now have those funds to spend on ousting them. It’s only a matter of time now.”
“Starfish,” Coleel said. Suddenly he seemed like a man who knew he should have bargained harder.
“What I want to know is, was it worth it?” Janx said. “What about it, Losg—you know where we can get our hands on some of that nectar?”
Coleel sucked in a breath. It was time to earn his keep, and he obviously knew it. “As I’ve told Ms. Layanna and Dr. Avery, my stores of the nectar in the city have all been sold and consumed.”
“But …” said Avery, leading. When Coleel didn’t volunteer anything further, he added, “You said you could get more …”
“No. I said you could get more.”
Avery frowned. He was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. “What exactly do you mean, Losg?” He spoke slowly, as if afraid of the answer.
