Unseen strings jerked me up to my feet. The body still wanted to live, even if the mind did not. I dodged as something fell toward me: half a biker thrown over the cargo crates. He hit the wall, rebounding to sprawl across the aisle. A tumbled pair of legs still in jeans and boots, a rope of intestine stuck to the concrete. There was an explosion of soil ahead of us as the giant insect crushed one of the cockroaches, impaling others on its legs as it fought like some kind of fucked up Chinese Dragon. I jumped over the dirt and continued on, Glory panting behind me.
“Go!” Glory shouted.
He didn’t need to encourage me. I rounded the last pallets and bolted for the door, struggling for breath. The Agents were outside, frantically trying to get their car to start. Keen was collapsed in the passenger side, his thin face a mask of agony. Black raised a hand behind the windshield, mouth opening, and I let off a burst straight at him on pure reflex. The bullets hit it with dull thumps instead of shattering, hazing the glass and causing it to crumble inward. The car reversed with a screech, and I followed it up with gunfire as the Agents fled.
Glory jogged past me in a trail of dirty white dreadlocks, bouncing around the corner of the building at top speed. At a loss, I followed him, only to skid to a halt as I saw his means of transport.
A horse. An honest to GOD horse, complete with a pack saddle.
“Help me get her up!” He looked back at me, violet eyes blazing and urgent. “We have to get her out of here!”
I’d taken too many hits to the head and heart to argue. Kutkha was pushing at me, wings beating a tattoo inside my skull, but my limbs seemed to move of their own volition. Glory was supernaturally strong, but he was too short to get the right leverage. I helped him arrange the pot in a saddle harness, the kind they used to carry the big drums during military parades. As I did, he desperately threw on layers of clothes: boots, a huge oilskin coat, a hat, scarf, and then a mask with a respirator.
Lifting and settling the pot took what was left of my strength. I stumbled dizzily against the horse’s flank once it was done, gasping. Its vivid green smell cut through my fugue. I breathed deeply, and my head cleared a little... enough to hear the small, strangely familiar feminine voice that had been trying to pierce the haze of grief and shock all this time.
No! Get away! Ah-Lexi!
The MahTree didn’t get another word in before Glory clubbed me over the back of the head.
Chapter 36
I am a man who usually makes good decisions. I’m correct often enough that I normally don’t question my judgements, but the circumstances in the warehouse were not normal. This time, I’d blown it.
When I came to, we were still on the horse. I was tied belly-down over the back of the saddle as we galloped through long grass. Queasy, head pounding, I was steeling myself to find a way to fuck up Glory’s day when the horse jumped, lifting me up against my restraints, and then slamming me back down again as we hit... water?
My body jerked with reflex panic as filthy swamp water swallowed us so quickly that it felt like we were falling instead of sinking. There was no bottom to this bog, only a void of freezing, empty space. The void howled like storm winds, a powerful current that flung the animal back and forth as it powered forward. I couldn’t breathe—I couldn’t anything, because all sensation of my body vanished into the intense emptiness of the fluid that swallowed us and then spat us back out again.
The water bowed up around us and exploded into a shower as the horse leaped up and clambered up out of a different pool of water. The place we emerged was dark, reeking of mold and moss, and chilly-damp. I heard Glory clicking his tongue to urge his mount to stay calm as it plunged headlong into a rushing stream, fording it up through an old, dank tunnel.
I was shivering like I’d been caught in a blizzard, too cold to move. Fuck. What the hell had I gotten myself into? I was gathering the will to struggle when Glory reached back with a hand, half-seen in the gloom. A weird, sweet, chemical smell stung my nose as I jerked my head away. The odor seemed to pass through me in a wave: my body flushed with heat, then numbness, and then sleep.
When I next stirred, it was to the uncomfortable sensation of wet skin against rough stone, the sounds of clicking and chewing, and the sickly smell of rotting, moldy meat. I was crumpled around the base of the MahTree’s pot in the center of a dimly lit room, a bare stone-faced alcove that was connected to a much, much larger chamber expanding into darkness behind a set of heavy iron gates. The Tree and I were surrounded by black mounds that seeped blood and rot onto the floor. As my vision swam back in, I realized these heaving, buzzing, putrid piles were the rotting remains of animals. Mostly. Dogs, cats, birds, raccoons, rats, pigeons, and gulls were stacked around us, wall-to-wall. Several of the bodies, however, were human. Badly bagged and left to decay, they were eyeless, sagging sacks of flesh, their lips ripped away from grim yellow teeth. The room reeked with an oily acidic smell that was oddly familiar, an odor that resolved itself as I startled to full wakefulness. Scuttling, squeaking… the strange robotic, mechanical sound of chitin scraping against the floor. Philimites. As soon as I spotted the first one, writhing inside the body of a dead rabbit, I began to hear them all.
The air crackled with a low, silent scream, the room itself rent with the unadulterated grief of the MahTree. The leather bag was gone, leaving her as naked as I was in the middle of this carnage. She cast a subtle glow against the darkness pressing in around us, but she was visibly ill. Her smooth, flesh-like trunk was withered like an old parsnip, scored with deep lines. Her branches curled grayish at the ends, as flexible and mobile as hands. She had lost most of her silvery-pink leaves, and the few that remained were streaked with powdery tarnish. The Edenic soil she stood in was no longer silver. It was lead-gray and heavily oxidized, but still gleamed like pearl under the single lightbulb that hung over us.
For several delirious minutes, I slouched against my restraints in a state of stark disbelief. The fever was back with a vengeance, along with a deep, rusty pain in my joints and my neck. My chest throbbed, broken ribs stabbing inward on every breath. There was a metal gag in my mouth that held my tongue down, trapping it and removing all ability to speak. Shifting around on the sticky ground, I could feel my wrists had been handcuffed in proper metal cuffs. My ankles were bound by a couple of rows of zip ties. There was something around my neck. But besides the pain, I just… didn’t care. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t afraid. There was nothing but gravity, crushing me against the earth like a cold hand.
I sunk into the pain, and for a while I stopped fighting. Levental. Ali. Vassily. The monsters had gotten them. No one was going to come along and tell me it was going to be okay, that it’d be alright, somehow, that I’d defy the bacterial poison brooding in my veins and find some way, any way, to help Vassily or make it right. The Vigiles were going to round up the Tigers at that fight, and I wasn’t able to warn them.
In the corporate world, you had fixers. In the law enforcement world, you had men like Joshua Keen. Ayashe had probably been reporting in innocence, unaware of why she’d really been recruited, of why she’d been allowed to exist as the only Weeder Vigiles Agent in the city. This had been his plan all along: to infiltrate, learn, divide, then conquer.
The Tree reached toward me with trembling branches, but I did nothing but stare at her. Every time I blinked, I saw Vassily’s face, heard echoes of cavalier remarks about Weeders and digester trucks, saw Ali covered in wasps. I flashed on Lee Harrison’s black, half-lidded eyes, and on Ayashe coughing her life out onto bland, lilac office carpet. And over it all, I felt the Yen inside me: grinning, wallowing in the horror.
“Ah-Lexi?” The MahTree’s telepathic voice was small, feminine and breathy. Like Kutkha, she didn’t speak the word so much as exhale the meaning into the front of my conscious awareness… a thought that you didn’t think.
I shuddered and peered down and around us, trying to understand why we weren’t being eaten alive. She and I were both contained inside
of a magic circle inscribed in thick white chalky lines, a protective ward that was kept the Philimites away from us. Bugs bloated on meat would scuttle in, hit an invisible wall, and bounce back to rejoin the mass that had been lured in by Glory’s offering.
“Ah-lexi?”
The second time the Tree called me, I looked up. The MahTree’s remaining leaves rustled as she moved, her branches curling and uncurling like tendrils. Beckoning me.
“What?” I didn’t have the energy to console myself or her.
“Touch me. Please.” Her voice was pitiful, desperate. Needy. Like the pleading of a starving girl-child.
I felt a push, deep down: The same kind of protective urgency I’d felt when I saw eight-year-old Josie curled up in the corner of her cell, feral with terror. It was enough to pull me to my knees so that I could lean in. When I managed to reach up , she bowed toward me, her branches caressing my face and head. It was an incredibly tender, sensitive touch, cool against my feverish skin.
“So much pain,” she whispered. “You are in so much pain.”
“It’s fine.” Not really, but it was what it was. I was beyond caring about the dirt I’d ground into my wounds, so I sat back down, leaning against the side of her pot, facing the rest of the room. It was seething, hissing, pouring with Philimites that continued to test the magical defenses in increasing numbers.
The little Tree bent in against me, wrapping her boughs around my head and shoulders. She was quivering with fear and relief. I found myself relaxing, slipping down until the back of my neck rested against her small buttressed roots. The agony and tension of a dozen injuries ebbed away, second by second, until I lay in a warm daze. There was a rhythmic pulsing, fluttering sensation at the base of my neck, but it was far off and inconsequential compared to the waves of relief that surged through my body. “Hey. What are you doing?”
“Do not fear. You are suffering, and I can relieve your pain.” The Tree sounded resolute, in her own, tired way. “I do not have the strength to heal you, but I am able to do this.”
She smelled good: subtler than the Gift Horse, but just as unearthly and sweet. It was a smell that made me think of Zarya, and strangely, of Binah. I missed my cat. “You… you shouldn’t. You should be saving whatever strength you have.”
My words hung between us, as my eyes drooped and the Tree slowly surged back from her desiccation. It was as if she was feeding on something. On… what? My relaxation?
“Ah-Lexi. My son will be here soon.” She spoke after a little while. “He will Ruin me.”
“I won’t let him.” On that, I was sure.
“You will not be able to stop him.” The Tree’s words were like a bow across a violin, high and sweet and sad. “This is the reality of what will happen.”
She was right, and I knew she was right, but it didn’t stop me feeling resentful. “We have to be able to do something.”
“There are times when we must simply submit to what comes. Sanity is the pursuit of reality.” A soothing, shooting warmth flushed through my body. It wasn’t narcotic, because it didn’t leave me feeling dull or sick, but it freshly tamped down the pain of my injuries. “Can I ask you for something?”
“What is it?” I drew a deep breath. My chest twinged, but the broken spur that pierced my lung was no longer painful.
“Hope.” The Tree was breathing, too: a subtle swell and ebb I felt through her trunk. “If you are willing to take a part of me with you… there is hope for my son. He is a sweet and gentle being, Ah-Lexi. This is not what he is. Someone has hurt him, exposed him to the NO and Ruined him. It is not his fault he is like this. If I am gone, he will never be healed… he will perish, and GOD will have lost another Stallion.”
Hope. What a novel concept. “Whatever you do, I’m going the same place you are. But if it makes you feel better... ” I trailed off.
“Thank you.” The small Tree was shivering harder than before. She was desperately, desperately afraid. “I will give you my Rhizomes. But… I fear it will burden you.”
“Why?”
The small creature shuddered, leaves clinking like glass. “You will take your story with you. I do not wish to harm you, but…”
My story? I frowned, puzzled, and edged closer. “What do you mean?”
“Once, long ago, I knew a You.” she insisted. “When I was captured and imprisoned in a place without hope, it was alongside an Ah-Lexi. It is this story I carry, and this story I will impart.”
I rested my elbows on my knees, confused. Apparently ‘I’ – that being my other incarnations – had gotten around.
“It is a hard story, but in that, too, there is hope,” the Tree continued. “Perhaps the greatest of all.”
Kutkha was watching me in solemn silence from behind my own eyes. When I felt back for his approval or comment, there was nothing but the weight of his patience, his judgment, his expectation.
“Alright,” I replied. We were going to die in this hellhole, or worse. What difference would it make, really? “Hit me.”
The Tree’s graceful gratitude rippled through me, fading off into something like concentration. I felt a momentary pressure at the base of my skull, and an electric current suddenly surged through my body. I barked a cry of surprise – there was no pain – as my body arched. My jaws snapped and locked as I blacked out in fits and starts, waking up to the brief realization that I could feel the fractalline map of the nerves in my body in technicolor as they lit up like Christmas tree lights, then passing out again.
When I woke, it was in a different place, a different time. And I was in Hell.
In the dank, cold darkness of this forsaken place, alike but so different from the room where my body lay, tiny mandibles rubbed together, exoskeletons chittering as they slid across one another. Countless Morphorde were tucked into the crevices, crooks, folds, crannies, and oozing orifices of HuMan beings. HuMans of every color and sex, forced by magic and violated biomechanics to stack and entwine with one another in a living matrix that comprised the walls, floor, and ceiling of this place. Millions of them.
I flew through this structure at dizzying speed, past the outermost walls of rendered, desiccated skeletons meshed together with metal and earth and into the bowels of this monstrosity. The twisted screams of countless people piped through vents and tunnels, channels and hallways. The flesh gave way to damp stone—the worst vision of a medieval past. Everything smelled like rotten blood and piss. Wet straw on the floor crawled with life and unlife, each consuming the other. Monsters leered, snarled, bickered and fought. The bodies of human slaves worked to death were abused by snorting, squealing creatures in the halls.
Calmly, my slave. A level, deep voice broke through the infernal whispering and the flickering, overpowering weight of memory. A man’s voice. This is an Engine of the Morphorde. You are brave and strong, and nothing is inescapable. Not even No-thing.
The pressure and speed at which I moved through this place terminated in a room filled with dead, gray light. An emaciated Gift Horse Mare hung by one heel from a huge steel tree. She was nude, covered in weeping sores, and stared through me with piercing red eyes. Those eyes were the last thing I saw before the experience of the place condensed into a vortex of horrific, half-glimpsed visions. Of small, white-haired, dark-skinned men like Glory chained to dungeon walls by their hearts, pierced by chains dripping with their silver blood. Monsters, tearing at people around me, throwing them into pits and dashing them against walls. Packs of twenty or thirty Ruined Stallions gang-raping prisoners, prisoners preying on each other... and then my spirit burst into an enormous diamond-shaped chamber where a tall, cowled figure stood within the center of a glowing white and silver garden.
Half a dozen MahTrees were planted in square, rusted metal pots big enough to hold a fully-grown silver birch. They were leafless and sick. The air was torn with their silent weeping, their futile strain to reach one another with their naked branches over the head of the nine foot tall, black-robed figure who c
ontemplated them. Its robe was short enough I could see their boots: cleated, bloody, the spikes dug into what could only be the soil of Eden. That figure sucked in the light around it, and when it turned, I felt a bone-deep, inescapable, wrenching terror. I felt the terror of a little boy watching his father advance on him with a weapon, of knowing, with full certainty, that he would be destroyed.
… You are brave and strong, and nothing is inescapable. Not even No-thing…
The MahTree let me go and I snapped back to my body. I tore away from her and vomited around the gag and onto the floor.
I was still puking when the slab-like iron doors across the room opened, and lights glared into the meat locker where me and the Tree were imprisoned. A deep rumbling sound rattled my teeth, and the reek of exhaust briefly overrode the smell of rotting meat as a truck slowly and awkwardly backed up toward us. It looked like a cement-mixing truck, much larger than the one that we’d found at the funeral home. A digester truck. The one that had gone missing.
The driver had little idea of what they were doing. The truck moved forward and back, angling weirdly, lurching, and then jerking to a stop. The cabin door opened, striking the edge of the entryway with a sharp bang, and Glory’s angry cursing broke through the sounds of my retching. Unbound, I probably could have escaped. Tied up and surrounded by Philimites, head hot as memories continued to flood in under the surface of my consciousness, I could do nothing but watch the small Gift Horse as he broke open a panel from the side of the truck with a crowbar, swearing and muttering to himself, and pulled out a long hose from inside.
“He has come. You must flee,” the Tree said. Her voice was… different. Clearer, the words formed with greater clarity.
“How?” The sickness was passing, but I was still tightly bound, dry-mouthed, and the pain was fading back in. Blearily, I struggled to kneel and groped for my magic. It was there, kindling deep in my belly. I’d barely formed the word of power in my mind’s eye when whatever was around my neck turned hot and began to squeeze. I fought against it as my breath cut, but it quickly became unbearable, tight enough to almost dislocate my head from my spine.
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