Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  The air cools and greys until you hit the Willamette River, where the heavy sky and din of cargo ships and industry induce you to check in the first vacant motel you see. You mill around the city, walking in expanding circles as the sun rises, until you see lit neon beer signs in a window and drift that way. The tables are filled with large men, dressed against the spray of water off the docks, and drinking pale beer. You edge into the most vacant corner you can find, on the far edge of the bar, and mumble something to the bartender that he interprets as an order.

  A slight figure with a shock of peroxide hair a few seats down catches your eye in the brief flash of her lighter’s flame, smoke halo obscuring her face as soon as you look over. It’s a face that’s dully familiar, a snatch of song you heard on the radio years ago. You take a long, long drink and stand from your stool and walk over to her, slowly and grinning in a hopefully nonthreatening sort of way. You lean against the bar until she looks over, then ask if she can spare a smoke, which she apparently can, reaching into her jacket pocket for the pack she shields from you as she opens it, but you’d swear that there are exactly two smokes left, and hold the lighter a second, two, three, longer than is necessary before setting it to the tip of the cigarette, smiling to yourself and feeling the time stretch itself out of joint, wondering if she might be amenable to a little road trip.

  mark jaskowski

  is a man in a sport coat listening to swedish death metal. he’s doing this, at the moment, in colorado, where he studies and teaches. some of his stories have landed at cool places like bartleby snopes

  and elsewhwere.

  BLOOD

  PRICE

  AXEL TAIARI

  An empath beckons from across the city. Burrowing deep into his brain, the distorted voice rips him out of a fitful sleep with a message spiked with static: a gate has opened in Ghoulish Bend. Unidentified wayfarers. Grab your gear and report to your squad within fifteen minutes. Acknowledge the message.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Efrim mumbles. “Acknowledged. Get out of my head.”

  He rolls out of bed with a groan and fumbles for his clothes. He feels mostly sober. Lighting up a smoke, he nudges the shape in the bed. The nameless, naked man moans in his sleep.

  “Hey, wake up.”

  “What?”

  “Where are we?” Efrim asks.

  “My apartment.”

  “No. In the city. Which district?”

  “Bousculaire.”

  “Fuck.”

  Efrim slips into his torso-armor, slides on his white combat helmet, and picks up his weapon. Out of the door with no goodbye. Elevator ride, a stuttering descent into ravine-black darkness accompanied by mechanical pleading. Snow outside, fat flakes the color of volcanic ash. The streets of Nualla-Stem shimmer blue from neon tubes lining wilted buildings, synthetic veins running along the city’s cement skin.

  Efrim brings his wrist to his mouth, and speaks into it. “Unit 23, serial 4792891-84. I need a ride in Bousculaire, get in on my location.”

  “Roger. Ride your way in four minutes.”

  “Thanks.”

  Grim visions disentangle themselves from a roving fragment of the past and pounce on him. Efrim dashes down a nearby cul-de-sac and sits against a wall, breathing hard. He removes his helmet, draws his gun out of its holster and brings it to his mouth. His teeth clink against the barrel. His finger rests on the trigger. Metal warms up. The ride lands in the main street before he conjures up the courage to end it. He holsters the gun, re-equips the helmet, rides shotgun.

  “What’s up, Ef?”

  Moric behind the handle tonight. Full armor and combat helmet strapped on, thank the gods. Moric is known for having an ugly case of the gutter-mouth and hanging belly-fat. He is also known for roughing up shub’nar, mutants, jentils, camazotzs—any of the chimeric races. A human supremacist. Efrim smiles as he pictures Moric found dead in the gutter one morning.

  “Nothing,” he says. “You know what this is about?”

  The four-person vehicle soars between black skyscrapers. “Just another gate,” says Moric. “Bursters won’t leave until they get what they want. We got two squads there already. Animists secured the perimeter. The local duke is on the way to initiate a parlay. No one can understand them.”

  “The intruders, where they from?”

  “Where the hell do those things hail from? An alternate plane, a different continent, somewhere below the surface, doesn’t matter. They get here, we kick the bastards out before they decide to stay. Look at this goddamn mess. Ain’t it grand?”

  Efrim leans his head against the transport’s window. Governmental dropships waft amidst mobs of viscous purple clouds, their searchlights probing the streets. Scouts buzz around the Core’s fortresses, their fuselage camouflaged by mojo, engines spouting blood-red trails in their wake. The city’s architecture is a treacherous thing, an uneven landscape of concrete and millennia-old bricks where houses and brothels cower in the shadows of skyscrapers. Temples grow twisted. To the east, the theme park from Eyes Of The Storm illuminates the skyline. To the south, the Old City burns, forever belching multicolored fumes behind a translucent wall taller than anything else in the city, an ethereal barrier woven out of bent reality and kept alive by never-resting shifts of benders and fringe machinery. To the west, at the edge of the city, the Jerkmouth ghettos.

  Home before he ran away from home.

  “You see that?” says Moric.

  Down below, the gate awaits. Ghoulish Bend’s shacks and burnt houses seem to recoil from the gate’s alien light. The portal is perhaps thirty, forty meters tall—a pillar of energy large enough to swallow a whole building. It pulsates with crackling blue lights, as if its insides were home to a raging thunderstorm. Floral barriers secure the zone.

  “Don’t get too close,” says Efrim. “Land a block away.”

  “No shit,” says Moric.

  The transport touches ground in a nearby park. No snow here. The two men exit the vehicle with their rifles at the ready. Ghoulish Bend is mostly clear of gangs, but rogue elements are always on the prowl, and law enforcement gear fetches a fat price on the black market. Organs are worth even more.

  They make their way to the vine barrier. Two animists guard the entrance. The women could be twins: tall and frail, moss-colored hair down to their knees, flowers as garments, eyes and noses bleeding from heavy mojo use.

  “Hello, ladies,” says Moric.

  The animists nod in unison and the barrier splits open. A door-shaped rectangle of vines turns autumn-red then winter-black, crumbling to dust and creating a corridor. Efrim and Moric pass through the foliage, and as soon as they reach the other side, hundreds of fresh stems sprout and intertwine behind them. The breach has vanished.

  Efrim and Moric join their squad, a dozen members from the Burnt Gallants—independent enforcers. Efrim recognizes the uniforms from other cells, too: Sky Burrowers, Blackpowder Masons, and a couple of Throne Breachers. Something like fifty men and women in triangular formation with their weapons aimed at the life forms standing by the gate.

  Ghoulish Bend’s duke, Iravi Zorem, towers over the troops. Two and a half meters tall, as wide as three men. The jentil’s crimson robe pulses with glyphs; its fabric spits out butane-blue sparks. Reality benders, wearing black cowls and robes, flank his sides.

  Three naked beings face the duke and his benders. The portal’s voltaic mouth twists and yawns at their back. No obvious physical differences between the three visitors—asexual at first glance. Reptilian skins, their scales pale as the desert sand. Humanoid-sized. Four ivory horns spear out of their faces in pairs: two on the forehead, two below the mouth. No eyes, no nose.

  The middle one speaks in a guttural language, a string of grunts and throat-rattles accompanied by tremors.

  Over the local dispatch, Moric says: “Aside from being wayfarers, anyone know what those ugly bastards are?”

  Silence over the radio. Efrim has never seen this particular race before, either
. Wayfarers is nothing but a generic term, only describes beings that travel through portals.

  Duke Iravi Zorem turns to the reality bender to his right. “Kaliv, act as a relay, please.”

  The bender takes a few steps forward, turns to face both the intruders and the duke. Her mojo-boosted voice comes loud from beneath her cowl. The air between her and the creatures undulates. “We want our due,” she says.

  All three wayfarers turn their heads to stare at her. They can’t stare, thinks Efrim, without eyes. They nod, understanding that she is translating.

  “Can you use the shared tongue, travellers?” asks the Duke.

  The middle wayfarer replies, spits on the ground, a thick gob of mold-green spit.

  “We understand your heathen language,” the bender translates. “We refuse to sully our mouths with it.”

  Duke Iravi Zorem chuckles. “I see. Where are you from? What do you need?”

  The wayfarer speaks.

  “Where we hail from is no concern of yours,” says the bender. “The boy. We want the boy who has requested our help. We have come to collect him. You must bring him to us. Or we will bring blood out of you.”

  The Duke gathers his thoughts, then extends his arms, opens his hands. “You’re going to have to be more descriptive. This is a city of over four million people. Who is the boy, what is the help you provided, and what is the payment? Where can we find him? Furthermore, do you understand that your presence here is a breach and you are in no position to make threats?”

  The wayfarer laughs, a bone-chilling chuffle crawling out of the back of his throat.

  “We wish to speak to a higher authority,” translates the bender.

  “No,” says the Duke, pointing at the ground. His voice drips with ire. “This is my dominion. I hold jurisdiction. There is no higher authority here. The Council Hands do not deal with this matter, and the Arch-Baron is more likely to nuke you than bargain. You,” he points to the middle one, “Speak to me. Answer my questions.”

  Overhead, two dropships float over the area, blocking the moonlight. Their searchlights zero in on the trio. The wayfarers angle their heads up, growl at the skies.

  The middle one speaks for a long time. It sounds like no language Efrim has heard around the city, not even the ghetto-slangs.

  The reality bender twitches as she absorbs the sounds, processes them, and then regurgitates them. “A boy from the northern parts of the city has requested our help in a private matter,” she says. “We have upheld our end of the contract, now it is time for him to follow through. You speak of jurisdiction—that is fine. We are in the right according to our credence. The boy was aware of what he was doing. He accepted the terms. There is no trickery, no hijinks. It is a clean deal. Ask him. There is no room to argue. You will bring him to us. He is a shub’nar. He lives in a yellow house on what is called Daboul Alley. His name is . . . ”

  The bender turns to the Duke. “I can’t pronounce that, your Highness. It’s a shub’nar name.”

  The Duke spins around, addresses the troops. “Shub’nar speakers, raise your hands, please.”

  Three hands go up, Efrim included. The Duke points at him. “You. Come closer”

  Efrim lowers his weapon and detaches himself from the squad. The intruders’ heads track his movements with their eyeless glare. He walks over and stands by the bender.

  Efrim looks at them and says, “Could you repeat the boy’s name, please?”

  The middle wayfarer clicks his canines, slaps his forked tongue against them.

  “Understood,” says Efrim.

  “Thank you,” says the Duke. “So, that is the deal, we bring you the boy, you leave?”

  The wayfarers nod.

  “Soldier. Your name, race and rank?”

  “Efrim D’am, sir. Human. Senior ensign in the Burnt Gallants.”

  “How’d you learn to click?”

  “Stepfather was a shub’nar, sir.”

  “You know the locale?”

  “No, sir, we lived in Jerkmouth. But I am as fluent as a human can be.”

  “Take your pilot with you, go fetch the boy. Yellow house, remember. Any shub’nar tries to bar your way, tell them you have carte blanche. They don’t move, you shoot. I’ll worry about damage control later.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Efrim.

  The Duke turns back to the intruders, raises his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “And be swift about it, ensign. Our unsolicited guests here are too cocky for my taste. I’m sure some of our biomancers back at the Core would love to dissect their corpses.”

  Headed north into shub’nar territory. The Bloody Sister River glows green in the night. Illegal campfires line its bank on both sides. Rilke is easy to spot from the air: it’s the only flooded district. Water from the river snakes through the streets, has been doing that since long before Efrim was born. Decades prior, shub’nar separatists blew up tremendous amounts of explosives to create a network of trenches, allowing the river to take over. The water was contained by cement dams tactically placed around the district, preventing it from spilling further into the city. Efrim remembers his stepfather on one of his drunken rants, clicking his beak madly between swishes of whiskey. We fucked the government. Fucked them good, you hear? We took over. Water everywhere! They should have seen it coming, we built the dams months before! The day the bombs went off, we cheered, all of us. We swam through the bellies of submerged buildings. It felt like home.

  Moric settles the transport on one of the rare landing pads in the area. He cocks his rifle, removes the security. “Think we should expect trouble from squids?”

  “Shub’nar won’t like us here, but we’re government. They’ll let us pass.”

  “Or drag us below the water and stab us with those wrist-blades.”

  Efrim smiles. He clicks the blades’ names. Dux’per. “Yeah, that’s always a possibility—especially if you keep using that racial slur.”

  “I call ‘em like I see ‘em,” says Moric.

  Out of the ship and onto a boardwalk. Water laps at wooden shores. No electricity here. Gas lamps and torches cast shadows on the brick dwellings. Beneath the waters, ghostly lights radiate from subsurface lamps—bioluminescent sea anemones twisted by shub’nar scientists to thrive in salt-free environments.

  The two soldiers turn a corner and find themselves in a large avenue. A pack of shub’nar on a plank up ahead are standing in a circle. No path around them.

  Moric takes the lead, and the plank is narrow enough that Efrim has no choice but to follow. As they approach, the shub’nar turn to them. Their dux’per unsheathe like poisonous claws as long as a human’s forearm. Moric holds his rifle in front of his belly.

  The four shub’nar eyeball Efrim and Moric. Human-tall, four arms, octopus skin reflecting light. Crow-black diving pants made out of arachnid weave, no shirts, no boots. Tattoos cover their bare chests.

  Moric says, “You gentlemen chat shared?”

  The shub’nar don’t respond, either not understanding or choosing not to.

  Efrim slides open his facial visor so they can see his mouth. He knows that his lips’ movements will make up for his flawed pronunciation. “I speak the holy tongue,” he clicks. “Many blessings upon you. May the sea carry its bounty to your doorstep.”

  “Many blessings,” the four shub’nar repeat back. Their mouth-tentacles wriggle, signing in respect.

  Moric snorts. “Tell the squids they should be wearing their communication masks. It’s a crime not to wear one.”

  Efrim considers clicking a more polite version of the sentence when one of the shub’nar clicks, “Tell your fat friend his armor is at least three sizes too small for his whale-body. Tell him we do not wear the devices in our home, no matter what the Arch-Baron might rule as law.”

  The shub’nar laugh, and so does Efrim.

  “What’s that one saying?” asks Moric.

  Efrim tries to keep his voice cool. “The shub’nar says they are very sorry, o,
prosperous one. They did not expect non-shub’nar visitors at this time of night.”

  “Tell your fat friend,” continues the shub’nar, “that if he calls us squids again, I will drink his sugary blood and craft a buoy out of his blubbery corpse for my children to play with.”

  They laugh again, and Moric raises his weapon. The laughter dies. “They mocking me?”

  “No,” says Efrim. “They are feeling foolish for breaking the law and joked that they feel quite naked without their communication masks.”

  “Human,” says another shub’nar, flexing his mouth-tentacles, “I am losing patience with your comrade. What is the purpose of your presence?”

  Pick your lies carefully. “We are here to enjoy the exotic products offered by your people. We have a transaction planned on Daboul Alley.”

  “Drugs?” clicks the shub’nar.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. Why didn’t you say so. Take a left at the end of the avenue, it’ll be right there. And tell your friend to watch his mouth, next time.”

  “Thank you. May the currents steer you towards home.”

  “No need, friend. We are home.”

  “Let’s go, Moric.”

  Efrim grabs Moric by the arm and drags the idiot away from his death.

  Daboul Alley: a crumbling passage. Algae grow on the faded brick walls as crabs scatter across slippery boardwalks. The yellow house lies sandwiched between two tenements with boarded-up doors. Two-floors with broken windows, frayed curtains blowing in the breeze.

  Moric knocks on the door. No answer. He kicks it open and enters, weapon raised. Efrim follows.

  The stench hits Efrim like a ringed fist. Broken bottles litter the floor. Glass shards glitter under Moric’s flashlight beam. Trash, soiled clothes. Fat flies gather on the walls in nauseating swarms.

  “Gods,” says Moric, shaking his head.