by Kin S. Law
In the end, there was nowhere else to go but down. Down and deep into The Nidhogg until we reached a bronzed, smelted door. We couldn’t have been anywhere else but the exact center of the ship. There was no choice but to tumble through, barring it as best we could behind us. I could feel the ship rising, with no end in sight. We needed to find Albion, find the Core, and destroy it, before Mordemere got his hands on the crystal and reached the Laputian Leviathan. Or before we could no longer breathe.
“By Queen and Country…” Hargreaves’ labored wheeze was the first sign of something terribly wrong.
It was dark deep inside the bloody ship, and the pervasive smell was stronger than ever. Rotted meat, raw sewage, or simple garbage could not account for the rancid egg stench. In the blackness, it was one of those scents all the more nauseating for its mystery. A nose kept sniffing at it, trying to figure out what all the familiar components were, all the while becoming increasingly sick from it. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I immediately wished they had remained blind forever.
White.
Blinding, maggot-white filled the chamber, occasionally interposed by the glossy grease-black of machinery.
At first I thought I was looking at some enormous worm, grown huge on the feed of Mordemere’s conquered. Pinkish growths poked out of the mass at intervals, like the stubby legs of some monstrous larvae- and each one moved constantly. They writhed, they struggled, and the whole mass pressed itself against the center of the room, braced against smaller columns holding up the ceiling. Occasionally one lump brushed black grease clean from chains that gleamed gold beneath. My eyes adjusted some more, and I gasped, for I had glimpsed the unmistakable configuration of brown eyes, perched alarmingly over some gross swell of flesh.
“The worm that gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil…” Blair murmured, then began to wretch in a corner.
Hargreaves took Cezette for a moment. I couldn’t stand the horrible stink of what lay before us. It completely eclipsed anything a healthy person could dredge up from their stomachs. The stench heaved itself at us in waves, as if a massive, rotted bellows was churning the stagnant air into hot, thick soup. No, not a bellows. Great lungs, meaty and riddled with consumption.
“Clemens said…Oh, God, Cid said aeons react to emotions. People’s emotions…” Hargreaves managed, though she could not cover her visor from the sight.
Cezette shivered, her eyes buried in the linen of Hargreaves’ bosom.
With a wrenching pop, something fell from the mass of flesh wrapped round the core of The Nidhogg. It landed with a splat, scrabbling and writhing onto the grating. It had two arms and two legs, but the thing wasn’t a person anymore. It drooled, it bled from every pore in its skin, and it reached out as if for some small morsel of food or human warmth. I started to step toward it. It recoiled as if in horror at even the kindness of a warm hand. After watching its eyes darting around, I realized it was after the touch of the chains again.
In the end it simply collapsed and lay still. The look on its face was one of agonized rapture, as if it had spent all its life fighting free of the mass beside it, only to die in the attempt. With a squelch, another chunk fell out of the mass on the other side, landing with another splat. It was brown. What I had taken for dark machinery was not only gears and cogs. This close the susurrus of moaning just beneath all the steamwork was hard to bear.
“We destroy it,” I heard myself say. “We find Albion, and we—”
“We can’t,” the Inspector said. “Blair was facing death, and Clemens used the Moore crystal to save him. We all heard him use the last one on Captain Samuel.”
“It’s a machine! We’ll throw a wrench into the gears!” I yelled.
This Core, this thing that Jonah Moore had helped build, it was monstrous. It could not exist any longer, but there it squatted, holding up the ship, nourishing itself on the lives of everyone in its body. I suddenly remembered all the missing persons posters plastered on the streets of Leyland.
“I suspect our involvement will no longer be necessary,” Blair’s voice cut through. “Jonah Moore never predicted Valima Mordemere’s insanity would reach so far. He intends to fly the Nidhogg directly into the Leviathan. Cid figures the concentration of aeon particles could do anything to this horrible thing. We should not be aboard when that happens.”
“But we have no guarantee!” I began.
“We do,” Hargreaves said.
When I looked at her I almost wretched. She was touching the Core! Her bare fingers rested on a bulge of flesh near us. It was dewed with sweat. Cezette had been set on the floor, in a fetal position. The caps of her missing legs gleamed alarmingly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled.
I hurried to pick up Cezette off the fetid floor. “Get away from it!”
“No,” Hargreaves said. Her eyes were unfocused in the dim light, dilated to black circles rimmed in blue. “These people…they’ve been here so long, they’ve forgotten who they were. They’ve forgotten their dreams, their hopes, friends, lovers…They only know suffering. It’s the great secret of this place, you see…the Core yearns for memories. The yearning draws the memories in the monuments near, right into the sky. This one, here.”
Hargreaves touched a mass of ruddy flesh barely recognizable as a person. For a moment I tasted bile, but I was able to hold it down. Hargreaves went on. “This used to be Maddie McCreedy…she once saw the Eiffel Tower in a book, and dreamed of meeting her paramour on the observation deck. There, that brownish lump, that used to be a steel worker named Robert. He always wanted to go to Big Ben, and climb it when nobody was looking. Over here, this used to be Esteban Dio, Templar Champion, in exile from his home in Barcelona. He used to sit in the Vatican, the last bastion of his faith, and play chess with a friend who had never heard of the Bible. They can’t go any more, so they’re pulling the places closer to them.”
Hargreaves laughed, quite suddenly, and a moment later started tearing up.
“Snap out of it!” I cried, and delivered one of my patented roundhouse slaps. It was one tailor-made for Nessie Drake’s temper tantrums.
As my hand made contact, I got a flash of something: images, feelings, a smell I couldn’t place. The meat of the Core felt electric, only instead of the touch of an arc outlet, it was something harder to explain. If the river Lethe could be dammed and a spigot installed to unleash the stolen memories of the dead, it might have felt a little like this. Then it was gone, and I found my face wet. Blair stood over us, holding the Inspector back. In a moment, she stopped, shaking her head.
“Are you all right?” Blair asked, reluctant to let go. He had a hold of Hargreaves’ chest, innocently, and when he saw he released her immediately.
“Yes…yes, thank you,” the Inspector said, after a moment. “We should find the Captain…we need to leave.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Fuck this place.”
32
Future that Never Was
Albion
To my surprise, the tower anteroom I emerged into was already filled with the scintillating brilliance of the Laputian Leviathan. The lift shuddered to a halt, the gate rattled open, and the blue of the room made it too bright to shoot.
Once hailed as a city in the sky, the shades of cerulean, azure and lapis streaming in through the French doors could not be mistaken for anything else. I had felt my ears pop as I rode up the lift. The air was difficult to breathe. We must have risen over the cloud cover, or ridden out of whatever dread mist Mordemere’s contraption had created, for the Leviathan’s light lanced through in neat, ordered rows. Were we still over Europe? How fast could this city in the sky move?
The Nidhogg was, understandably, unlike any airship I had ever hijacked, threatened, or seen. As far as I could tell, the place was laid out like a manor home. The anteroom ran in a ring right round the edge of the spire, like a tower battlement. I dragged muddy boots across the lush carpeting, staggering past an astonishing array of artifacts. Plu
sh Chesterfields and Victorian brocade sofas reclined near walls full of ancient tomes gleaming with patina. Crystal learning cubes full of plant samples and insects sat neatly in a mahogany box on one shelf. Another held a series of anthropological artifacts, including a series of human skulls. Some were the size of my hand.
As I trudged through, I could see Mordemere’s stolen landmarks slowly pulling away from the Nidhogg proper. The room might have been meant as a parlor or observation deck, save for the obelisk on the opposite side of the spire from the elevators. After inspecting it, I found it was a door, one of so cunning a make that it was impossible to discern what seams lay within it. I pushed on the obelisk before me experimentally. It swung open on invisible oiled hinges, hidden mechanisms whirring away in two wide slabs, and I stepped through. Immediately, they shut again, locking with thundering snapping and clicking sounds.
Now I found myself in another room much like the first, still filled with the casual luxury and beauty of a man used to the highest echelons of society. The only major difference was a majestic crystal glass dome overhead, spilling the radiance of the Leviathan onto a mural set over the elegant bookshelves. It was brighter in the center of the spire. A raised dais sat in the middle. A bank of controls and gauges sat on it that seemed to defy understanding. There was a certain undersea quality in the place, with the odd specimens suspended in taxidermy or crystal here and there. It was a little like being in the inside of a rainbow.
“Nobody ever lets a villain monologue anymore. Where’s our sense of the dramatic, you think? Blown away with the first of us aeronauts, or rent asunder by our tedious coal mining?” An aristocratic, sonorous voice echoed through the chamber. “I will settle for a dialogue instead.”
I froze. Where had Valima Mordemere come from? Not a single person had ever gotten the jump on the Manchu Marauder before.
Valima Mordemere stood quite casually by one of his bookshelves, his nose buried in a book. He looked exactly as the daguerrotypes and photograms made him out to be. He had gray eyes, gray hair, and a smooth chin. The man was the picture of aristocracy, though it was public knowledge he came from common engineer stock. There was an oddly aquiline quality to his uncannily youthful features. Slotted precisely into a herringbone suit, Mordemere seemed to embody the idea of nobility, rather than the actuality. It was a fatuous irony I now associated with those who attained wealth by trampling over the backs of others.
I started, his breath catching. Atop the dais the body of my assailant, Wood Shoes, lay crumpled before a polished silver pedestal. Had he attempted to resist Mordemere? On top of the pedestal, Captain Samuel’s guidance crystal floated over an eldritch reddish glow. It hung there pointing at an angle, presumably at the Laputian Leviathan. I didn’t like the look of the light. I would have bet a prize stash of aged Scotch it had something to do with Jonah Moore’s dreaded Core.
“Would you like to sit?”
“How did you find the Leviathan so quickly?” I asked instead.
“There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio…” Mordemere began, but he trailed off when he looked at my face. From his expression, it was clear he saw I didn’t give a damn. Mordemere sighed. “The Leviathan isn’t in any one place. It exists all around us. I merely needed to assemble the appropriate pieces, and voila!”
I scoffed, sure I had foiled his plan. I should have known it would not be so easy. “But we set the landmarks of Europe free. You shouldn’t have been able to gather the lift compound for...”
“My dear Jonah Moore has been telling tall tales again. To my advantage, I might add,” Mordemere mused, as if he was alone.
He put an ornate silk ribbon into the book and placed it back in the shelf, then immediately looked for a second one. I was about to go for Victoria, but thought better of it. However he looked the part of an absentminded professor, Mordemere held a strange, silvery weapon in his other hand. “I’m afraid my colleague and I were mistaken,” Mordemere continued to speak. “We were led to believe the Leviathan is a physical thing, floating here and there like a nomad. It is not. I know not where the aeon stones come from, but they are not affected by the Leviathan. Rather, it is the other way around. The aeon stones create the Leviathan, from our thoughts, and dreams. You have just witnessed their effect yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered, not quite honestly.
“Come now. If you truly intended to shoot that other stowaway below, you would have hit him on the first shot,” he said. He was talking about Captain Sam. “Ever since the advent of your ‘lift compound,’ all of our aeronaut alloys have become tainted with aeon stone particles. At this density, even a blind man could hit a fly at fifty paces.”
“You’re saying simply being in the vicinity of the stuff is enough to summon the Leviathan,” Albion guessed. “You only needed to have the five landmarks of Europe in the same place.”
“If you want it enough. If you have something to focus your intent, like this magnificently fortuitous crystal here. Ah, ah, ah, I would not touch your weapon, if I were you. Set that beastly pistol over there, beside my bust of Aristotle. There’s a lad.”
I did as I was told. I wasn’t sure if Mordemere was entirely sane, or what the odd silvery weapon did. I also wasn’t sure if the one bullet I had removed from Victoria earlier and hid in my boot would work in the Red Special.
“What do you want from the Leviathan? If Moore was wrong about it, he might have been wrong about you too,” I said, biding for time.
“Should I? No, there isn’t any need…though I suppose…” Mordemere said. “I guess all genius requires an audience. It’s the great failure of the species. All right, I will tell you. You survived my little creations below, after all, which shows you have some ability…though this one seems to have taken the brunt of the punishment.” Mordemere nudged the body of Wood Shoes off the dais with his shoe.
“All ears,” I said, barely holding back a wince.
Where had Rosa, Hargreaves, and Blair gone? Was the ship about to come down around our ears? I had barely spared them a thought, everything was happening so quickly. Now I couldn’t help but worry about them in the face of Mordemere’s ranting. No. I had to stay in the moment, watching for the one chance to strike.
“See this mural?” Mordemere began.
The light of the Leviathan was now bright enough to see all the details of the room. In the mural all around were fantastic scenes of tall, shining ziggurat shapes, men and women conversing through strange devices, vehicles seeming to defy the laws of physics much as Moredemere’s flying city defied them. The Leviathan lit all from overhead. Were those galleries closer, the halls and vaults mortared with deadly light surrounding The Nidhogg?
“There, a man who can talk to his fellow on the other side of a country, without resorting to dirigibles or telegraph, but through a device no bigger than a pocket-glass,” Mordemere said, pointing. “An airship flying through the air with no dangerous gasses, but by great forward momentum and the innate nature of air to occupy space! Vast networks of metal filament, linking everyone to everyone else! At the center of it all will be my Laputian Leviathan, an infinite power source fueling it all, at cost to none! The animals of the world will live rationally once more, wanting for nothing, yet possessing of everything! What a glorious future!”
“Animals?” I asked, to fuel the alchemist’s passion.
The silvery weapon was caught up in gesticulations, aiming at and away from my head in turns. I scented a chance, yet the words pricked at something in my chest.
“What else are they?” Mordemere asked.
Now the alchemist’s attention was square on him. Mordemere took in the goggles, the airman’s jacket, my inquisitive brown eyes. “Animals fighting over coal, water, steel. Animals willing to do anything to survive, betray each other to get ahead. Animals fighting over who gets to live where. Look at this world, this Europe at the brink of war. The sky is endless and free, yet the Ottomans think the
mselves rightful possessors of a piece of infinity. The British are no better, trundling their Knights of the Round over trade routes until they’ve driven their competitors to drastic measures. Surely you understand this travesty, air pirate!”
“You sold the Ottomans arms,” I accused.
“Why not? Their way leads only to war,” Mordemere continued. He seemed to be confirming the statement to himself. “Let them scour the land clean of the surplus population. Better my way. Better I take the ruin they leave behind, take this Leviathan and rebuild. I can use it to provide free energy, clean energy to the world! With energy comes food comes potable water, warm places to live. Think of it; when an animal receives everything it needs, it becomes tame. Surely it is better than this chaos? I can bring to our world a new Energy Age, an Age long since abandoned and forgotten. I can restore a Future that Never Was, the one depicted there!”
Mordemere gestured widely, at all the magnificence he had surrounded himself with.
He looked to his captive audience, and for a split second I thought I saw the alchemist seeking approval. How alone must he be? I could not fathom the nights here in this tower room, for months on end, meticulously playing with others’ lives and bodies, selling weapons to both sides of a war in hopes of scavenging the carrion leavings. Suddenly I saw through the veneer of mature aristocracy at a soul even younger than my own sophomoric one. It was a weak, lonely soul wishing for a better tomorrow.
It was always children who were the most unforgivingly cruel.
“You’re right,” I agreed in spite of myself. “It’s not a conflict I want to happen. But you’re wrong, also. This energy you want? It’s not free.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve seen where this energy comes from. You have, too, if you think about it. All this aeon energy doesn’t just come from the stones alone. Even the stones are not unlimited.” I knew it was not wise to stir up the alchemist, whose brows were beginning to knit, but I could not stop. “Perpetual energy comes from people. Not animals, people who have emotions, who have dreams and wish for your better tomorrow. Maybe, if you had involved others in this epic quest, it could have come true. But by stealing the Big Ben, the Vatican, even Red Square, you’re stealing their fondest dreams to fuel your own.”
