Blightcross: A Novel

by C. A. Lang

“I will not.”

  Now nude from the waist up, she stuffed the shirt into the pack, even though they likely would not come back to retrieve any of it.

  She peeled off the rest of her clothes and began to step into the leather suit. “Come on, then. Self-consciousness is a luxury, remember? You know better than to put your own embarrassment ahead of the survival of your people.”

  “These are not my people,” he said, and began to unbutton his shirt. Every few seconds, his eyes drifted towards Capra struggling into her leather.

  “Might as well be.” She at last thrust her arms in, and tightened the laces. “What’s the matter now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s the suit, isn’t it? Look, I’ve been surviving by breaking into things and being where people least want me. I’ve learned a few things. This was one of them.” She then clasped her armband back to her arm, and plaited her hair as tightly as possible.

  The jar of oil came next. “Be quick and rub this all over me. It’ll be a tight fit up there.”

  Even in the dim gaslight, his face showed a slight shift in colour. “Capra, this is ridiculous.”

  “Alim, grow up. I’ll do you too. It’s messy but you don’t want to get snagged between metal teeth in here.” A burst of cannon fire thundered outside. “This is for real. Grease me up.”

  He sighed and took the jar. He coated his hands in the thin oil. Now behind her and rubbing her shoulders, his touch made her flinch. He was in a perfect position to snap her neck. Here she had unknowingly caused the death of his wife, and was forcing him to rub her with oil...

  She felt his hands stop around the middle of her back. “Alim, I’m serious. My behind will be one of the areas most in contact with the machinery. Every part of this suit must be lubricated.” Under other circumstances, she would laugh. Even now, she let out a tiny chuckle. His hands shook as they stroked her, at times showing an interested pressure, other times backing off as though she were a poison-skinned amphibian.

  Accomplishing full coverage of her front was even more amusing: his wide eyes and clumsy touch reminded her of the younger men she had teased on the continent. A deep frisson tickled her when he applied the oil between her legs, and she did catch him spending more time than necessary around her chest.

  “Interested, Alim?”

  He withdrew and grimaced. “No. I am... I am disappointed.”

  “What?”

  “With myself.”

  She shook her head and grabbed the bottle and began to coat his bare skin. She worked quickly, as though she were a surgeon who knew too much of the anatomy to sexualize every encounter with another’s body. Still, the excitement from his touch hounded her in the background, and she did try hard to remember the chaos outside as she worked her hand around his buttocks and thighs.

  She fanned herself and closed the jar. “We might still need the rest, in case any part of the machine seizes and blocks us.”

  He cleared his throat. “Yes. Sounds like a great idea.”

  “These gears are not just the mechanism for the clock at the top. These shafts drive every other machine in the tower,” she said, recalling the schematic. She caught his face in the wavering gaslight and smoothed a forgotten glob of grease across his cheekbone. “Now, I intend to follow it into one of the elevator shafts. Which one is another matter.”

  Alim looked in a daze. He brushed his finger on the spot on his face where she had touched him, as if confirming that it had actually happened. Then he shut his eyes tightly for a split second and opened them. “Rovan has become Sevari’s favourite errand boy, so that means he should have access to the upper levels. They are secure, and you can bet Sevari is either hiding from the shadows there, or directing them. I think this is where we should start the search.”

  “And you think Sevari would keep the boy with him at a time like this?”

  “He is very loyal to the few he trusts. He is... strange.”

  Already a nervous sweat gathered beneath her suit. Maybe she could just run away now, and nobody would notice. Maybe Alim could just go by himself and bring Rovan and Helverliss out of there. Yes, she would only slow the operation...

  “What’s the matter? A moment ago you were playful and quivering like a schoolgirl, now you look like death incarnate.”

  She took a deep breath. “I am terrified of tight spaces.”

  “Nobody likes them.”

  “Yes, but I get physically sick from them.”

  He gave her a sceptical look.

  “It’s true. All I can think of is the raid shelters. My father’s was especially small. He... he said it was because the smaller the hole in the ground, the less chance of the Ehzeri either finding it or destroying it.”

  “Yet you do it anyway.”

  She shrugged. “Kind of hard not to. My own interests are bound with the interests of others. Just like The Doctrine, Alim, only I’m applying it to non-Valoii.”

  “That is...”

  “What? Treason? Grounds for execution? Whatever. Let’s just get going.” She slipped on a pair of gloves and tossed her extra pair to Alim. “Hands are the one thing we need to have traction. Try to let the gears do most of the work.”

  She grabbed onto one of the horizontal bars that spanned the ring of drive shafts. She swung around and around, then leaped upward to grasp the next one. “Once you get going, you won’t be able to stop for long.”

  Since the machinery did not yet block view of the ground, Capra was able to stave off her panic. But the higher she climbed, the harder it would be to talk herself down from paralysing nerves.

  The gears spun at wildly different rates. Under one foot, the gear moved at a reasonable pace, while the shaft above whirled faster than the eye could track.

  “Capra...” The voice nagged from below, and it only made her work faster.

  A hand slipped, and a gear she hadn’t noticed dug into her side. Luckily, the leather held together. “Not now, Alim. We’ll have it out later. I promise. You want me to go back, you can earn it.”

  “I was just going to say that I thought it was admirable.”

  Another slipped hand, and her foot lodged between two slow moving gears. She struggled to free it and yanked herself up to another driveshaft. “You think what?”

  “That you could apply the Doctrine to these foreigners. I don’t know that I could do that.”

  Was he serious? It could be a trick. Appealing to her guilty conscience, her desire to make things right and to help, might be the best way to defeat her.

  But something about his tone told her that this wasn’t the time for paranoia. “The Doctrine is great, except that it excludes most of the world. Why can’t everyone live by it? That’s what I figure, anyway.”

  “I disagree. Why we should feel equal with Yahrein, for example. I would not share a meal with them, much less share the land with them.”

  A standard Valoii answer, and one that to her was equivalent to the very prejudice implied by Yahrein during the war. There was no point in trying to convince another Valoii that their utopian views should apply to everyone else.

  “If this is going to work, we need to stay relaxed and supple and not argue. I’ll start us off with something more pleasant.” She grunted as she pulled herself onto a large cog and rode it towards another shaft which she wanted to cross. “How are your brothers doing?”

  There was a moment of hesitation, but Alim eventually said, “Fine. Koval has been assigned to a new experimental unit. Something involving flying boats.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He left the army last year.”

  She stepped onto the shaft. It was turning faster than she had anticipated, and she stumbled. Heart thudding and limbs jerking without thought, she recovered and began to tread in the proper rhythm.

  Just a few moves behind Capra, Alim struggled on a cog. And below Alim was a mesh of machinery, and no longer could she make out the bottom. Her breaths came short, and she jumped from the sha
ft just as her head swam with a dizzy panic. She looked above, hoping to find comfort in the tower’s immensity, but from here it seemed as though she were locked inside the workings of a child’s music box.

  Too late to back out now, though. “Remember that one midwinter break where I got you back for that shower prank?”

  “What shower prank?”

  “Remember, the bottle of soap. Only when I got to it, it wasn’t soap.”

  “Ha. Yes. And I never lived down that walk to my barrack without my clothes.”

  Laughter was the appropriate response, she knew, but she had just pulled herself in between two very tight gears, and was surrounded by a crown gear at either side. A ticking metal casket.

  Only one way to go—through the gears. Gears that only became thicker and more complex the higher she climbed. They ground against her legs and her knees. Already her new technical suit of leather was chafed and worn more than the one she had left behind with the Baron. Now, she pulled herself upward, and this time her arms began to shudder. In the struggling, a knee slammed into the outer part of a crown gear, and it tore a gash through her skin. She hung still for a moment, dazed.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just a nick.”

  “I’ve had a few already.”

  “Now you see the wisdom of the tight-fitting leather?”

  He made an agreeable grunt. “I would say we are about a fifth of the way to where we need to be.”

  She went still—as still as one could stand on a rotating gear. It had seemed like an eternity. The heat, the close quarters, couldn’t she get just one damned good breath? A fifth. A damned fifth, that’s all they had progressed? Her muscles already ached, hair soaked in sweat and oil. In the back of her mouth lingered a bitterness, an oily and metallic taste.

  Five more times, it’s not that bad, right?

  “Capra? What are you doing?”

  She couldn’t find anything to say. Her legs just kept marking time against the gear, and she tried to breathe away the heaviness setting into her chest.

  “You have to keep going. There’s a cam here moving closer towards me.”

  The words sounded as though someone else was hearing them, and she was just a removed observer, simultaneously hovering over the scene yet still chained to a panicking body.

  “Capra? What now? Just move aside a little, so I can dodge this cam. The way below has closed up.”

  Somewhere inside her, the logical side, the trained soldier, cried out against the paralysis. Are you just going to backwards-walk on the spot for another hour when you could use the same amount of energy to get this over with?

  A breath—a small victory against the panic.

  “Capra...”

  Grinding metal, whirring gears...

  Capra...

  She was supposed to be doing something other than walking backwards on the spot inside a cramped machine. Something, something...

  “Jorassian! Get your fucking ass out of the way!”

  Alim’s hollering cut through it all—noise, panic, paralysis—and she grabbed onto the gear above her head. It lifted her out of Alim’s way, and she looked down just as the large cam spiralled into where he had just stood.

  He wiped his brow and shook his head. “You’re going to have to move faster. What were you thinking?”

  “I... I wasn’t thinking. I told you about my problem. I’m doing my best.”

  “You can’t just run away from this one. You have to focus, if only just this once in your life.”

  “You bastard.”

  She leaped onto another shaft. Her balance held, if only because Alim’s comments distracted her.

  “That’s what you do—you talk your way into people’s hearts and expect them to pick up your slack.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Yes, it is. And when that fails, you hit them.”

  Up again—if he wanted speed, he could have it. Through a gear, skip an whole shaft and grab onto a cam...

  This time, though, she had failed to map out her course. The gear spun her towards the meshing of two gears. These heavy mechanisms wouldn’t even flinch if she were crushed between them. She reached frantically to a post above, then flipped around the side of the gear. Her legs and knees knocked into every jagged bit of metal possible, and she skirted around to pull herself on top of the gear that had nearly crushed her.

  She felt the panic again. The walls falling in, clockwork death.

  “Hurry up, Jorassian. There’s nowhere to run this time.”

  “Alim, shut up. Act like everything is fine. Talk about something else while we climb. Like I was before. Okay?”

  “Like what?”

  “How much you enjoyed fondling my nether regions. Your brother’s cat. Anything.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “So you don’t find me attractive, then?”

  “Yes... wait, no... what kind of question is that?”

  All of the times in the communal baths, she had thought he had been looking at her. Maybe he had, but it probably was more plain curiosity than anything of substance.

  The banal thoughts distracted her enough that she quickened her rhythm of swinging and squeezing through the machinery.

  “I think it’s a valid question, so long as my vanity eclipses my panic.”

  “But I mean... I am sure you have made many men very happy.”

  “Rather diplomatic.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said it was rather diplomatic. Your answer. Or a polite way of calling me a slut. Maybe both.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Oh, sure you did.”

  The next clump of machines was a new arrangement, with several gears rotating around the inside of a larger one. If the food tasted as delicious in Blightcross as it did in Prasdim, Capra wouldn’t have a chance at making it through.

  She thanked the divine for any role it might have in the primitive palates in Blightcross, then paused to grasp the pattern of the contraption’s movement.

  Just when she was able to predict its rotation, it sped up and tripped another set of machines.

  “Damn it, I can’t hang here forever.”

  Alim appeared deep in thought as he negotiated the gear below her. “It sounds like it drives one of the elevators, perhaps.”

  “Yeah, knowing that sure helps me...” Her arm began to shudder. “So that’s why you settled on Jas? Even back then, you thought I was a little too fast for you? She wasn’t so innocent, you know.”

  And his tone drifted into the cold steel shank that had pierced her when they had met on the flying boat. “You know nothing of her, Capra. You insult her with your stupid corrupted memory.”

  “I’ve known her longer than you, Alim. Don’t forget that.”

  “She was my wife.”

  There was a loud clunk and a grating sound. The gears returned to the pattern she had remembered. “Wait two seconds after I go through this thing, and go for it. You don’t know when it’s going to speed up again.”

  Once she squeezed through, she returned to Alim’s asinine comment. For a moment, she thought about waiting for him to clear the dangerous arrangement, but her vindictive side spoke louder. “She may have been your wife, but I grew up with her. You would shit yourself if I told you about even half of what we did before you entered the picture.”

  “Jasaf was a soldier, a brave field surgeon, and my wife. Whomever you are talking about is someone else.”

  “Suit yourself, Alim.” If they were at a café or on the street, she would have goaded him into a fistfight. It would be easy. All it would take would be to point out his hypocrisy—the hypocrisy of his blind nationalism, which was supposed to include unity and total equality and breakdown of the traditional mores that had nearly led them to extinction, and his unwillingness to accept that his wife had behaved just as modern as Capra did.

  If he were truly unwilling to see his wife as she really had been, Alim would probably be
better off in Tamarck, with the king’s obsessions about purity and chastity and temperance.

  That would be the ultimate insult to him.

  She smirked to herself. In her mind, she had beaten him. Uttering the insult was just a formality, and one she knew to keep to herself until the threat of being shredded by spinning jagged metal passed.

  It had been a long time since Dannac had gazed with his own damaged eye. He sensed the enemy more than saw them, and if he thought too hard about the vague shapes dancing around the bleak reality of his blindness, he would lose his ability to sense who to kill.

  Even then, it was hard.

  “The three ahead of me,” he said to Vasi. “Are they shadow men?”

  The air crackled and he saw little sparks in his limited vision. Sparks from Vasi charging his hand-cannon with vihs, and he took this as a confirmation that there was something to attack. He fired, reloaded, and repeated this twice.

  “You must still retain some of your family’s power,” she told him.

  He ducked behind an overturned oil barrel. “Why would you say that?”

  “Blind men usually have shit accuracy.”

  “It is luck, nothing more.” He dropped a shot into the weapon and loaded the powder. Everyone was fighting everyone, and the deaths far more gruesome than anything that happened in Red Sector.

  He gauged this not by his limited sight, but by the rattling screams counterpointing the roar of both engines and the giants. Just now, the wind carried a wisp of smoke across his nose, and luckily this time he did not retch from the stink of burning flesh.

  “Tell me what it looks like out there.”

  “The giants have not moved since that last skirmish we had. And the shadows... the shadows have abandoned their human forms. They are swarming the giants, like corpse flies.”

  He stood, though it didn’t improve his view. “Do you hear the chanting?”

  “I have heard it since it started.”

  The chants wove in and out of his perception. “They know things... what do they know?” He stuffed the hand-cannon into his belt and listened, as though he were standing in a meadow of songbirds.

  “What the giants offer is no better than the shadow men.”

  “But they will undo everything we have done, won’t they? Erase our mistakes?”