by Adam Vine
“You did that, Leech?” Bunny said, eyes widening.
“Wanderer’s wisdom,” Vole said.
Cheese Eater slapped me on the shoulder. “And here I was, thinkin’ you wouldn’t survive more’n five minutes.”
A wave of impressed musings rippled through the crowd, then hushed as Barn Owl raised one hand. “Does everybody have a weapon?” The prisoners murmured in the affirmative. “All right. On the count of three, we’re heading for that back gate. Do anything you have to to get outside. We can lose them in the train graveyard, but if we get stuck behind that fence, we’re all dead. On my count.”
“Dan. It's the final stage. They took everyone... because I left… now it’s empty, like a grave...” Zaea said.
“One,” Barn Owl said. A chilling wind rose off the prison yard.
“Dan…”
I held Zaea’s head close, cradling it under my arm. “Stay with me. We’re going to get through this. You and I can get through anything, together. I need you to hang on for me, okay?”
“Two!” Barn Owl said. The wind howled, lashing my face with frozen knives and rending snow devils from the dormant drifts of the yard to spiral up through the scattered, probing beams of the searchlights.
“Dan.”
She was slipping away. It wouldn’t be long, now. The breath caught in my chest, choking, suffocating me. “Hang on. Please. Don’t do this again, Car. I can’t lose you again.”
“Dan, I know who I am,” Zaea said.
“Three!”
The group charged, splintering off from the shadows of the barracks into a free-for-all of vague shapes of men and women sprinting wildly in the pale dark. I did what I could to help Zaea along, keeping my eyes locked on the distant beacon of the gate shining through the moving, periodic walls of white, but we fell behind.
Barn Owl hung back to help, but it didn’t do any good. We could only move as fast as Zaea allowed us to, barely more than a slow limp.
A chorus of heartless screams tore above the wind far behind us on the hill. I glanced over my shoulder to see an army of Snowmen pouring into the yard from God knows where. It looked like they were coming from the mountain above the academy’s main hall.
Caves? I wondered, but I didn’t have time to contemplate the living conditions of the Snowmen. They’d catch us before we were even halfway to the gate. There was nothing we could do to escape them that didn’t involve leaving Zaea to die.
“Dan, I know who I am,” Zaea said again, louder and clearer than before.
“Zaea, we really don’t have time…”
“No. Listen to me.”
“Wanderer damn this,” Barn Owl said.
“Listen! It’s important! I remember who I am. Why I know this place. Getting hit like that, it woke me up, shook me out of this foggy haze I’ve been wandering through ever since I woke up with you in the Crypts. I know why I was there, why this place is so familiar. And I know what the ghost is saying.”
“Leech, if you don’t shut this bitch up and haul ass right now…” Barn Owl started.
“Zaea, what the hell are you talking about?” I said.
“It’s for brain surgery,” Zaea said. “The ghost is a precision instrument invented by Yesaedan neurosurgeons for fine operations inside the human mind. That’s what it’s for. It opens a new axle on the Spiral that divides matter, but it can also heal. It wasn’t meant to be a weapon.”
She’s lost it. That blow to the head didn’t kill her… it just made her batshit insane.
“Did the ghost tell you that? Are you hearing voices? Because now is not the time to be listening to them,” I said.
Zaea’s voice was calm. “No. It reminded me.”
“Can you stop being such a cryptic asshole? If you’ve got something important to say, say it.”
“I didn’t kill that woman, Daniel. The ghost reunified her consciousness with the Spiral. The ghost is the Spiral’s axle. It wasn’t meant to be a weapon. We used them for surgery. To make…” Zaea said.
“What? I can’t hear you. Speak up!”
“To make…”
A deafening crash split the air, drowning out the last of Zaea’s words. Zaea, Barn Owl, and I all watched in silent horror as one, then both of the gate towers shook, shuddered, and blew apart in a rain of mangled wood and barbed wire, and the two Lice that had been sleeping inside them stretched and rose.
The Lice let out a blood-curdling shriek. Their lures bloomed, brightening the ground all around us. The prisoners froze under those twin cones of scorching, brilliant white, clutching each other and weeping in the shivering cold.
And now the trap is sprung. We almost made it, too, I thought.
All around the perimeter of the yard, the guard towers quaked and shattered, a chain reaction of rending wood and iron shrapnel giving birth to a dozen other colossal, insectoid monstrosities. A roll call of shrill sirens sounded from each flattened tower where a Louse now stood. Hundreds of filament legs danced into motion. Flame buds primed, spitting blue-white spears of fire into the frozen night. Their translucent carapaces gleamed like clouds of ghostly mist moving on an invisible wind.
In an instant we were surrounded.
I’m going to die. This truly is the end. I’ll never be able to overcome my failures. Carly, Kashka, Evan, mom and dad. Not only am I going to die, but Zaea is, too; and Barn Owl, Bunny, Cheese Eater; everyone I’ve grown to call my friends here on this lost, desolate world.
But maybe I deserve this. Not just this place, but this end. How would Arkadius meet his death? How would Ink?
“Dan. You’re not listening,” Zaea said again. I hadn’t realized she was still talking. “I wasn’t here a century, or a year ago. It wasn’t even one week. The ghost chose me because I’ve been trained to use it. I’ve been using this instrument for years. Well, not this exact one, but there are many here at this facility. I used it to make the Snowmen, and to pilot those tundra drones, that you call Lice.”
“Wait. What?” I said.
“That’s what I keep trying to tell you. I can control it. I can control them,” Zaea said.
I didn’t believe a word of it. But there was no other choice. “So do it,” I said.
Zaea extended her hand, and a dozen slim, ebony beams grew from her palm, curving, swirling, giving birth to dozens, then hundreds of smaller ones, until the yard was covered with a gargantuan black web of interwoven spirals.
The ghosts found their endpoints and the Lice stopped cold, each bowing and falling to trembling, triple-jointed knees as slender filigrees of shadow entered their brains. I knew from the blank way they swayed and stared at her that they weren’t dead.
They’re awaiting orders. Holy Jesus. She was telling the truth. Thank God. Thank the Wanderer. Zaea was telling the truth. She can control the Lice.
The sirens ceased. The bloodthirsty cries of the Snowmen ceased. The despair on the prisoners’ faces transformed into overwhelming joy.
Cheese Eater walked over to the nearest Louse and hacked its shin open with his sword. The Louse didn’t move. He shrugged and hacked it again until Barn Owl took away his weapon.
Zaea summoned one over to us. It skipped silently above the snow and kneeled at her feet. Zaea stepped carefully into the bent stirrup of the Louse’s lowest knee, grabbed a handful of its flame bud, and pulled herself up onto its back. She placed one hand gently over the Louse’s brain and spurred it into a canter, circling left, then right, then finally, back to where I was standing.
“How?” I said, crisp and biting over the stunned silence of the crowd.
Zaea raised her head, triumphant. “Because I was the doctor here.”
THE NIGHT COUNTRY
THE BATTLE was short, hardly enough to be called a battle at all, save for the streaming gouts of blue fire that lit the night like fireworks. The Snowmen scattered. They ran back into the bowels of the mountain, the facility, or through holes in the perimeter fence left by the destruction of the watchtowers, to anywh
ere they could to escape Zaea’s Lice. The Lice scoured the prison yard with the cold efficiency of a unit of pack predators in the bloodlust of a hunt, all led by Zaea on her tall, crystal-armored mount.
I was too distracted to join in the prisoners’ revelry. The familiar squawking of a bird drew me to a distant corner of the yard, where I found a large, white hawk circling over the battlements. The errant floodlights caught its brilliant, moon-white feathers every time it wheeled close, like an indecisive shooting star.
The hawk had been watching the fight with rapt attention.
I’ve seen that bird before, I thought, but as soon as it noticed me watching it, it took to the sky and quickly vanished from sight.
The prisoners spent some time scouring furs and weapons from the dead Snowmen. Many were already showing mild signs of hypothermia. Zaea led the desperate, shivering crowd out of the compound some time later, through the melted ruin of the same gate we had come in, the battle-weary Vermin trailing close behind. We crossed again through the Graveyard of Trains and the frozen mirror of Lake Bagra. Barn Owl stayed close by me the entire time, silent and deep in thought, giving Zaea the occasional signal.
It made me nervous walking so close to the Lice. There were twelve of them, and less than forty of us including the Vermin, not to mention they had us completely boxed-in. If Zaea lost control of them somehow, it would be a massacre.
When I tried to mention this to Barn Owl, she ignored me. Maybe she didn’t believe any of this was happening, or still thought Zaea was a spy and was waiting to get us out on the thin ice before finishing us off. Zaea’s words echoed in my mind’s ear: I was the doctor here.
I thought that the descent down the glacier would take at least as long, if not longer than the way up with so many more bodies to move and so many of us exhausted from the fight. But in fact, it was much faster.
Zaea commanded several of the Lice to descend the icefall ahead of us. They were remarkably well suited for climbing due to their anatomy and weight distribution, appearing as nimble as spiders as they picked and leapt their way down the slick, sheer cliffs. She made the rest of the Lice stand directly above them on the cliff’s edge, and then ran ropes down to those acting as anchors at the bottom.
This crude elevator could lower five people at a time. I was one of the last to tie in, choosing to remain topside with Cheese Eater and Barn Owl in case the Snowmen decided to ambush us when we were most vulnerable. I fought the urge to put my feet on the ice and rappel during the short, jerky descent. Zaea said the friction might confuse the Louse, and cause it to stop feeding the rope. All that stood between me and a deadly plunge to an icy death was the rope slipping out of my anchor’s grimy chitin claws.
My eyes stayed fixed on the white hawk circling high above the cliffs the entire way down.
The hawk followed us all the way back to the entrance to the Burrow. I should have been happy just to be alive, and proud of the glory and praise that would be showered on me for defeating the Ratkeeper. But touching the shattered pieces of his mask inside the pocket of my jacket did not elicit the visceral satisfaction I expected. For that whole, cold and lonely climb home, I felt nothing but the same familiar emptiness I had felt every day since I arrived in Country.
THE BURROW
FOR THREE DAYS I didn’t sleep or leave my room at all. Queen Rat announced there would be a party thrown in Zaea’s honor on the twelfth torch after we returned to the Burrow. But I didn’t care. I was so enraged and overcome with the sadness of Zaea’s betrayal that I lay awake, thinking the same thoughts over and over:
She’s the Crippled King’s daughter. The Crippled. King’s. Daughter.
Sometime before the feast I began to feel the strangest sensation, a tingling that ignited in my chest and grew until it became a scorching inferno consuming me head to toe.
The physical part of that revelation is almost impossible to describe, as all such experiences are. May as well ask somebody what it feels like to be touched by God. The description I’ve given here is an appallingly threadbare approximation. But spiritually, mentally, even rationally, I knew in that moment what Len’s body was trying to tell me.
It was telling me that I was in control of the Blot, and not the other way around. That I was the one in control of where and when I went and always had been, but up until that moment only my subconscious mind had known it.
I stopped tossing and turning on my moldy straw mattress and concentrated. The more I focused my thoughts on becoming the string rather than the marionette, the more the sensation condensed into a single point that seemed to be floating inches in front of me, directly between my eyes, a magnetic pulse pulling me upward out of my body. I let go and surrendered to that pale vertigo, plummeting up toward the new gravity spiraling away from the here and now toward the infinite unknown.
I was no longer in a body. Len was lying dead on the straw mattress several feet beneath me, just a corpse, a riddle of matter that had been preserved by the revitalizing force I’d breathed into it, that would now be seized by rot and time once more.
But I wasn’t in my own body, either. I wasn’t back on Earth. I was still in my room in the Burrow, clinging to my tiny, single thread of the vast unwinding that had brought me here. And I was so cold.
There was a knock at my door, someone bringing me food, or - had it been twelve torches yet? - maybe even to summon me to the party.
I swung on that string and the unwinding thing carried me outside into the hall. I was warm again, had hands, feet, a mouth, a gut gnawing itself with hunger at the smoky smells of meat roasting somewhere else in the Last Station. I looked down my long, crooked nose to legs that seemed miles longer than I was used to. I wasn’t as strong as Len, but I was taller. I had the nagging urge to wash my clothes, or other people might think I smelled at the feast - like a rancid combination of fertilizer and moldy mushrooms - even though I couldn’t smell it myself.
I pulled the dagger out of my belt, pricked Vole’s thumb, gasped as the blood welled, and woke up in my own bed a few feet away, on the other side of the apartment wall.
THE BURROW
THE AIR WAS FILLED with laughter, song, and the smell of spilled beer and roasting meat. The queen’s dining room had been transformed from an empty cellar into a roaring carnival.
Every living soul in the Burrow seemed to be there. Long tables packed every inch of the chamber. Fires blazed in open braziers, pigs, chickens, rats, and snakes sizzling over the embers on slow-turning spits. Horns of ale and open bottles of young potato vodka made orbital rotations around every table. A five-piece band composed of strings, wind instruments, and an accordion played lively polkas at the foot of the dais, where I sat at Queen Rat’s table with Zaea, Barn Owl, and the rest of the Vermin.
I barely said two words the entire feast. I picked absently at my food - there was probably more on those tables than the people of the Burrow produced in a year - and avoided smalltalk with the Vermin sitting next to me. It wasn’t hard. There were constant interruptions from the Burrowers who approached the dais to see the shards of the Ratkeeper’s mask and to give praise to Zaea. A steady procession formed that seemed without end, all of them repeating the same tired platitudes:
“It’s a good thing, what you did,” a random old man with a face full of scraggly stubble told me.
Another one said, “Tough guy, you are. I wonder how you’d do against my own boy. He’s sixteen, but he’s the best fencer in the Burrow since Katherine left us.”
“I can’t believe it. That whoreson killed my aunt. Thank you for avenging her. Leech, was it? I’ll say a prayer to the Wanderer for your soul,” a plain-looking woman with twin baby girls clutching her bosom said.
Bob o’ the Knob took a long look at the clay shards, grunting as he ran his fingertips along their jagged edges, but said nothing.
“Took my own brother is what they tell me, the bastard. Your - ‘scuse me, I mean Len’s – father, Vojciek. May he rot,” a very drunk Uncle T
ermite said, then raised his glass, spilling half of the vodka inside it down his beard, and shouted, “Glory be to the heroes!”
“Glory be to the heroes!” the Vermin all chanted, slamming their glasses down on the table. A moment of silence gripped the Vermin as they remembered the ones they’d lost. Everyone took a deep, hearty drink. The music resumed.
They want to see the mask, but they’re not here for me, I thought, swishing a mouthful of mulled wine. Hot spice, orange and cloves danced over my tongue, spilling down my throat to warm my insides, but the wine brought me little enjoyment.
They’re here for her. The one they think is the Wanderer Returned. The spy of the Amber City who walks among us. The Crippled King’s own fucking blood.
I drained the rest of my wine and held my glass up over my head. A scrubby boy carrying a huge, earthenware pitcher rushed to our table to refill it.
“I remember hearing stories about the Ratkeeper when I was a girl,” Bunny Rabbit said at last.
“When you were a girl? Did you become a woman when we weren’t looking?” Cheese Eater said. The Vermin broke into rolling snickers.
“Grow mold,” Bunny said, but even she was forced to smile. “I was about to say that in the stories I heard when I was a little kid, the Ratkeeper was always portrayed as some mindless automaton.”
“A mindless what?” Cheese Eater said, biting into a hunk of crusty, fresh-baked bread.
“It means a drone or golem, an empty vessel without a brain of its own. You should know all about that,” Bunny said. Cheese Eater chuckled, chewing with his mouth open. “Anyway, from the way Leech described it, old Ratty wasn’t exactly an automaton. He was enslaved by that mask, the way Leech is enslaved by the Spiral in his eye. The Ratkeeper was just following orders.”