The Atomic Sea: Omnibus of Volumes Six, Seven and Eight

by Conner, Jack

  “I won’t be able to go with you,” she warned. “The Collossum would sense me coming and be on guard. And since he, to pick a pronoun, is here alone it’s almost certain that he’s more powerful than I am, anyway.”

  Avery let out a breath. “I know.” He patted the pocket where he kept the god-killing knife. Bleakly, he said, “I might finally get a chance to use this.”

  Someone knocked on the door, and Pete stuck his head in. “We found that boatman at a nearby whorehouse.”

  “Figures,” Hildra said.

  “When he’s done, we’ll send him to you.”

  Pete withdrew, and Avery returned his attention to the window. Lights of small boats bobbed on the water, mist curling around them. “It’s kind of beautiful here,” he said. “Strange, but I think I like it.”

  “Yeah,” Janx said. “Mu took me here a few times.”

  “There’s other cities, too, scattered about,” said Hildra.

  “Really?” Avery lifted his eyebrows. The idea was evocative. “Are they all independent, I wonder? Or are they all like city-states?”

  “Oh, there’s a common lord and master, all right,” Janx said.

  “I had no idea.”

  “Would I lie about the Sewer King?”

  Avery almost smiled. So did Layanna, sitting across from him.

  A sly gleam entered Janx’s eyes. “Y’know, one time me and Mu were in Doxer, that’s another city down here, an’ we met the King his own self. That’s right. Me and Mu were brought to his palace.”

  “Palace, you say?” Avery kept his face straight.

  “Well, so we were brought before the Sewer King, an’ he says to us, he says, I hear you’re some capable boys. I need you to do a job for me. See, my daughter’s been kidnapped by the White-Fash—that was the boogeyman of the town, said to be hundreds of years old, he lived in the tunnels no one went to—and so the King, he says, I need for you boys to get her back. Well, that started one of the weirdest adventures of me life ...”

  The group listened amiably, throwing in a question here and there and laughing occasionally, and Janx hadn’t finished his story long when the door cracked open and an old man stuck his head in.

  “I’m Jeffers. Wanted to see me?”

  They beckoned him in, and the wizened mutant, who had suckered tentacles for arms, three on his right, one on his left, entered cautiously, looking about him as if this might be a trap of some sort. Avery understood that he made his living ferrying messages and deliveries from one isolated township to another, traveling the eerie labyrinths of the sewers; he probably wasn’t used to the company of people, especially strangers from topside.

  “How c’n I help you?” he said, pulling up a chair. He had a tangled beard with what looked like barnacles poking through on one side, and one of his eyes bulged like a fish’s.

  “We understand you’re the one who found the bodies,” Layanna said. “The ones that were dismembered, some burned by acid.”

  “That’s right. A terrible thing it was.”

  “Can you tell us more about what you saw?”

  Jeffers rubbed a tentacle across his forehead. “What exactly is it you wanna know?”

  They traded glances conspiratorially, and at last Layanna said, “There’s a ... creature. A being. We believe it’s responsible for the murders and that if you told us more about how you found the bodies, it might help us find the killer.”

  Jeffers stared at them. “You wanna find the Collossum? You’re mad!”

  This time the looks they threw each other were surprised, not conspiratorial.

  “You know about the Collossum down here?” Hildra said.

  “’course. Everyone does.”

  “Michael said it was common knowledge,” Avery remembered, “but I thought ...” To Jeffers, he said, “What do you know of it?”

  Jeffers hitched his chin toward the window. “Only what the priests’ve said.”

  “Priests?”

  Jeffers seemed perplexed. “Yeah. ‘course. Shit, you folk don’t know that either?” He rose and pointed to some lights shining on the other side of town. “That’s where they are, the priests of the creature. That’s the church of the Collossum.”

  Fifteen minutes later they stood outside of (but not too close to) a squat, rounded structure with the symbol of a trident over the door. Low singing came from within.

  “Think they’re sacrificin’ somebody?” Janx said.

  “They must do other things besides human sacrifice,” Avery said, though, even as he said it, he could not discount the possibility.

  “Damn it all,” Hildra said. “A Collie church here in Muscud.” To Layanna, she said, “Is the Collossum there?”

  “No. I would sense it.”

  “Everyone knows its location’s secret,” Jeffers said.

  Avery peered at him seriously. “I think it’s time you told us your story.”

  The old man sighed. “A few weeks ago, I was travelin’ to Vosli, that’s another town down here if ya didn’t know, and as I was goin’ up the channel a buncha bodies come down toward me, driftin’ on the current. A whole mess of ‘em, all as bad as that one I gave Boss Vassas. I was so scared I wouldn’t go the rest of the way. Didn’t want to come on whatever’d done that. About a week later I got up the nerve, though. Vosli was gone. Blackened. Twisted. Half sunken. Bodies lyin’ in the streets, bein’ chewed at by bugs and ratkin.” Jeffers looked off, as if seeing it anew, and his face filled with horror. “I heard a sound. It were a boy, all dirty and starved. He’d been trapped in the rubble when it all went down and had been spared, or maybe whatever did it wanted the world to know and left him alive. He’d gotten free, anyway.”

  “What’d he say?” Janx asked.

  “Said a few weeks before it happened, some priests had come to town, preachin’ a new religion. The New Order, they called it. They worshipped some heathen god. They tried to pressure the town mayor to let ‘em build a chapel there, to help spread the word, if ya follow me. The mayor told ‘em where to stick it. A few days later, it came. The boy didn’t get a good look at it, but he heard the screams and the destruction right enough.”

  “What happened to him, the boy?” Hildra said. “You bring him back here, or to one of the other towns?”

  Jeffers seemed reluctant. “I tried. He wouldn’t come. Said the ghosts of his family talked to him there. He wouldn’t leave Vosli.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “Yeah. Well, after word spread of what happened there, no one went against the priests when they came to visit. Pretty much every town agreed to host a chapel if the people of the New Order’d spare them. But the priests keep the lair of their god a secret. They’ve only said it resides at the holy city that’s the local center of their faith, somewhere here in the sewers. This one in Muscud’s just what they call a satellite. A branch.”

  Layanna bit her lip. “So Vassas struck a deal with the Collossumists. That’s why he didn’t want to talk to us about it.”

  “He only did what he had to, to prevent Muscud from becomin’ another Vosli.”

  “Should we confront him?” said Avery.

  “Don’t you dare,” said Hildra. “He’d slit our throats.”

  “Maybe. Besides, he obviously hasn’t converted, himself, otherwise he’d wear a trident necklace or show some other sign of the faith.”

  “Not to mention he would’ve turned us over by now,” Janx said.

  “Maybe we should waylay a priest,” Hildra suggested. “Get the bastard to tell us where the main Collossum temple is.”

  Janx cracked his knuckles. “Works fer me.”

  Avery nodded. “Yes, we can use the priests to find out where the so-called holy city is. But Collossum priests are fanatics. He or she will die before revealing anything.”

  “Yeah? So?” The idea didn’t seem to bother Janx.

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t use him or her to show us where the Collossum is. If there is a main complex down here, the prie
sts of the order will likely visit it on occasion. We have only to establish a watch and have the priests followed next time they leave Muscud.”

  Somewhat hesitantly, they consulted with Vassas, finding him as he was leaving one of the back rooms of his casino, wiping blood off his knuckles and wearing a satisfied expression. When he heard what they wanted, he agreed readily enough.

  “Fuckin’ bastards,” he said. “Sure, I’ll help if it’ll get rid of ‘em. Even have some of my boys watch the church if that’ll help. They’re takin’ over the whole town. Just a coupla weeks ago, no one paid those damned cultists much attention. But now more and more people are showin’ up, comin’ from the surface, some of ‘em, and all worship the whatsit. Some weren’t infected before, but they’ve let themselves become that way in some fucked-up ritual. Some they sacrifice. And people have begun ... disappearing.” He looked pained. “Won’t be long before they just take over.”

  * * *

  That night, Avery found Layanna at the small tavern on the roof of the casino/brothel. It catered only to the workers and residents of the establishment and so was much smaller and quieter. The gathering sat under a canopy and watched the tumult of predatory flails, a subspecies that only came out at night, though what difference it could make to them here Avery didn’t know. Still, they knew when it was time, and in great numbers they swept and fluttered all around, a wet, nasty storm of whickering wings and splashing mucus—hence the canopy. The watchers drank, smoked and talked quietly from under its protection, enjoying the natural show all around them. Some threw the flails food. Some threw darts.

  Layanna was sipping a colorful drink and reclining in a chair far from the others, and she didn’t seem surprised when Avery sat down next to her. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him, however. He’d been afraid of that. It’s why he hadn’t bothered buying a drink; he didn’t know if he’d be up here long enough to down it.

  “Interesting display, isn’t it?” she said, her eyes on the flails diving for bugs and small batkin.

  More small talk. Good or bad? He cleared his throat. “Earlier, before the ray and the attack, we were talking, and ... well ...” He was hoping she’d supply something, but she didn’t. “I was hoping we were just about to reach an, uh ... understanding. A reconciliation.”

  She turned her head suddenly to face him. The movement was so swift that he almost recoiled. As it was, he did totter, somewhat off balance.

  “I’m not taking you back, Francis.”

  He steadied himself. “I know that you’re mad at me. I understand. But I think that—”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  He processed this. The implications weren’t encouraging. He opened his mouth to say something, then saw the firm set of her jaw and the cool look in her eyes and realized it would likely only damage things. She needed time. Well, he could give her that.

  He tried to smile. Nodded. He rose, kissed her on the top of the head (which she did not acknowledge) and left her there on the rooftop, surrounded by criminals and refugees, watching the flails flutter and feast.

  Chapter 5

  Over the next few days, Avery and the others kept tabs on the goings on at the church, frequently communicating with the men Vassas had tasked with spying on it. For whatever reason, they reported to Hildra, which had her wearing a smug smile whenever they came to deliver a message. That was the only time she smiled, though, and the rest of them rarely did. More worshippers of the Collossum arrived every day, and those already here were gaining power rapidly. One by one the businesses fell to them, and signs of the faith were hung in the windows of residences, even scrawled on the chipped sidewalks. Those who refused to convert grew fearful, and with good reason. More of them disappeared every day. It got to the point where Avery and the others feared to leave their suite.

  This compounded Avery’s difficulty in sending word to Ani. The couriers he could find would not deliver topside, especially not to such a posh area as that which the Voryses lived in (an area largely unaffected by the civil war, he had learned gratefully). Still Avery went at it, trying to find some avenue to reach her, to let her know he was alive and that he would come for her as soon as this crisis was over, if it ever was. He didn’t know how that could be. He only knew that it must. For the sake of them all, for the whole world, it must.

  He wondered if she were still having her strange dreams and, if so, whether or not Idris and his family had been able to help her deal with them. Avery found it difficult to believe the whole family, stretching back generations, suffered from the same sorts of nocturnal visions—such a thing made no sense, as far as he could see—and yet it seemed to be the case, if one believed Idris. Avery remembered Layanna mentioning that the Ysstral royal family (from which Idris’s and Ani’s line sprang) had belonged to some sort of secret cult, and briefly he connected the two pieces of (theoretical) evidence, but the pieces, when combined, didn’t form any clearer whole and so he dropped it. He had more pressing problems.

  Michael Denaris had hinted that General Hastur might have gone on the run in the sewers, and Avery, enlivened by the idea, went to Vassas to ask if the boss would send spies out to other towns in the so-called Stink to see if they could find her. Vassas said he already had eyes in other places, but he did say he would modify their instructions to be on the lookout for the general. Three days later he summoned Avery and the others to his office.

  “General Hastur’s been found,” he said.

  “Thought she was dead,” said Hildra.

  “One of Haggarty’s people in the Army tried to assassinate her, looks like, but she escaped and has been hiding down here. One of my men made contact.”

  “So the Army’s really gone over to Haggarty,” Janx said, looking dour.

  “The top has. The main body still supports Denaris and the general. If either of ‘em came back ...”

  Avery wrote a letter, delivered by a runner, to Hastur reminding her of who he was and asking for a meeting. The next day she replied. Meet me at noon tomorrow in Givunct at the Hooded Monkey. Come alone. Do not reply to this message. I’m relocating. Evidently I’m too easily found. Signed, H.

  * * *

  Avery roused himself at the sight of the lights. He’d been half asleep in Jeffers’s boat, he realized, and that surprised him. It had taken well over two hours to reach Givunct, and for the first hour he’d been tense and on edge, starting at every sound in the dank, dark sewer passages. The boat’s motor had drowned out many of the noises during long periods of the journey, fortunately, but there had been other stretches where Jeffers (and Avery) had been obliged to row instead, and those had been very long indeed. Avery was shocked at how much life there seemed to be in the Underneath, as some of the locals called it, even if it was no life he was familiar with—or wanted to be familiar with. He remembered one time during that first hour when the lanterns had picked out some huge white thing, long and serpentine and trailing whiskers from its horned head like a catfish. The creature had been over forty feet long, Avery was sure of it, even if most of it had been submerged. Jeffers had clutched his shotgun tightly till it had gone by, and Avery had felt the boat rock beneath him when it passed close.

  How he’d fallen asleep after that was a mystery. He supposed it was simple exhaustion caused by strain, coupled with the steady throbbing of the motor. I need a holiday.

  “Is that Givunct?” he asked, having to shout over the motor of the small boat.

  “That’s it,” Jeffers replied, a tentacle wrapped around the rudder’s handle. “Ain’t it a sight?”

  That it was. Givunct hadn’t been erected upon a cistern lake like Muscud but had been built into the facing walls of a great passage with a lofty ceiling hidden in shadows high above and a dark river flowing beneath. Sagging bridges of rope and wood drooped from one side of the town to another, with the town’s tiers jutting out from the walls, held up by timbers and iron beams that had been drill
ed deep into the stone and buttressed with remarkable engineering. Jumbled platforms vied with each other on the long tiers, crowded with huts and other dwellings, and mutants moved among them carrying on their daily business. To Avery surprise, the vertical city blazed with light—real, electric light. It burned from the windows of the huts and shone from bulbs hanging on cords throughout the town. As Avery tried to make sense of this, Jeffers switched off the motor and rowed toward the docks, and it was then that Avery heard another roar, this one coming from the town.

  “What in the world is that?”

  Jeffers grinned, showing brown teeth. “That’s the falls—and the dam.”

  “Dam?” Avery shook his head.

  The boatman laughed. “That’s why they built Givunct here, don’t ya know. There’s a big ol’ chasm just beyond there, see, where the lights stop, that’s all a lot of nothin’, a big cave or somesuch, only it’s got no bottom, does it, not really, only a body of water way, way below. An underground ocean, or part of the ocean what goes underground.” Jeffers spat out a wad of tobacco. “Anyway, the Givunctites built a dam over the falls. For the ‘tricity.”

  As if there was some other reason to build one. “Amazing.”

  They passed several boats bobbing on the water, and Avery blanched to see two women haul in a net full of wriggling, iridescent things that might once have been fish. To Avery’s shock, one of the flashing, snapping things had a hoof. Jeffers pulled into the docks, handed over a bill to the fellow that ambled up to collect the docking fee (Avery had provided the money), then turned to the doctor.

  “Well, this is yer show, ain’t it? I’m to go no further, you said.”

  “That’s right.” Avery removed his nosegay and stared beyond the docks at the “ground level” of the town, that being the first tier, whose platforms ranged along either side of the river underneath the rest, like shelves of fungus. The first tier seemed filled with strange machinery, noise and smoke, and there were no huts, as such, only large structures in which grimy mutants trickled in and out, some carrying gears or wrenches.