The pooling mass of fat, on the other hand, hardly seems to have noticed. In fact it’s starting to turn into a clearly defined shape: a massive head with whiskers, a sinuous body with patchy scales of glass and metal, and legs with claws made of rusty nails. A dragon made of fat. A fatdragon.
‘If that spell didn’t do it, then nothing else we have will stop it,’ the Witch says with a grimace.
‘So what do we do?’
‘May I suggest running?’ King says, lifting his kaftan gingerly up around his ankles.
Running. Always running. Still, it’s a solid plan and I like it. We turn and sprint just as the fatdragon becomes aware of our presence and lurches towards us. A warm, mucusy blast of breath follows us as we tumble down the corridor.
I shoot a look over my shoulder. The dragon is squeezing its way through the tunnel like toothpaste from a tube. Its snout writhes from side to side and a deep, squelching roar erupts from its mouth, bringing with it a river of diapers and sanitary towels. It looks up at me with strange multifaceted eyes, dozens of globules of fat like jellyfish stuck together, and seems to give me a gormless smile.
Just for the record: there is no way I’m getting eaten by that thing. Beaten to death by goblins? Fine. Decapitated by Crows? I’ll take it. But going anywhere near that clearly unhygienic maw is completely out of the question. Non-negotiable. I run faster than I have ever run before.
The dim concrete tunnels rush past us as we sprint. The fluorescent lights begin to flicker, making everything look like it’s happening in slow motion. Sweat prickles on my face and starts to burn my eyes. I trip on a rusty bicycle frame and pitch head first into the gunk.
‘Come on, sparky,’ Ronin shouts over his shoulder.
‘Thanks for the encouragement.’ I wipe sewer grime from my glasses, push myself up on to my haunches and look behind me.
The fatdragon is dragging itself through the tunnel with gooey squelching and sucking noises. It smiles again, and the jagged brown glass shards of its teeth glint. I leap to my feet and run. There’s heavy gunfire up ahead, but I can’t turn back.
‘No retreat, no surrender,’ I whisper to myself, pushing my glasses firmly back on to my face.
I blunder out into a vast circular concourse where several tunnels meet. Ronin and the rest of our team have dug in behind a huge sewage tank. They’re being pinned down by a platoon of goblins with automatic weapons.
I dive behind a rusted staircase that leads up towards some sort of control station, just as a line of gunfire chews into the wall behind where I was standing. Another sewer grime facial. I look across to Ronin and the others. Trying to reach them will get me ventilated by goblin bullets, but an old staircase is hardly what I’d called a primo bullet shield. Already a couple of rounds are zinging past my head, and I don’t really want to wait until the goblins’ aim gets more accurate.
That’s when I come up with the brilliant idea of making a break for it. I dart out from behind the staircase, and immediately a bullet clips my scalp and spins me to the ground. I scrape my hands breaking my fall but my jaw still thuds painfully into the concrete. The searing pain from the head wound is white-hot, and I scream. A sticky wetness runs into my eyes and I try to wipe it away with my sleeve.
Another scream fills the concourse as if parodying mine. I stop screaming and look up. Through a veil of my own blood I see the fatdragon coiling above me. Pieces of goblin drip from its smirking mouth, and it stares at me with those bubbling translucent eyes.
I’m pulled to my feet and propelled forward into a run by a pair of hands.
‘Hope I didn’t interrupt a special moment,’ Ronin says. ‘But time to move.’
We duck through into one of the tunnels at random. A dead dwarf lies slumped over the handlebars of his four-wheeler, a bullet hole through his cheek.
‘Gremesh nasta ek.’ Ronin touches the dwarf’s forehead and then pushes him off the bike and into the muck. ‘Get on, sparky,’ he says, clambering on to the bike.
I slide on to the seat behind him and wrap my arms around his waist.
‘Please be advised that we might experience some mild turbulence,’ Ronin recites in an air-hostess voice.
‘Oh God,’ I say.
He fires up the engine and the wheels spin, sending a barrage of muck everywhere. My arms are almost pulled from their sockets as we roar off. I can feel the maggoty moistness of the fatdragon’s breath on my neck.
‘Faster,’ I shout to Ronin.
‘What’s that?’ he shouts back. ‘You want me to slow down?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘Can we not do this now?’
He slows the bike down.
‘Maybe I should take it easy,’ he says. ‘Laws ARE there for a reason.’
‘OK, you’re a good driver, is that what you want to hear? You drive fantastically, you should be a driving instructor.’
He guns the engine and my arms are jolted again.
‘You’re such a fucking child,’ I shout as we hurtle around a corner.
The dragon gains on us slowly. Ronin’s trench coat flaps against me as we speed through the tunnel, a rhythmic dapdapdap that for a second is in perfect rhythm with the slapping of fat behind us.
‘Do something,’ Ronin says. ‘Try to slow it down.’
I sigh, untie a dead rat from my belt and look at it. There’s a horrible spell that the Boer taught us. Not pleasant at all. I really don’t want to do it.
‘Sparky,’ Ronin calls. ‘Running out of time here.’
I steel myself and then bite into the little rat body. Blood, dark, obscene and metallic, rushes into my mouth. I gag several times but manage to stop myself from either swallowing or spitting it out. I drag the bok spoon from my mojo bag and use it as a focus point, and then turn and spit the blood out behind me in a dark fountain.
The blood starts to shriek and transforms into a huge throbbing net across the mouth of the tunnel. The fatdragon slams into it and is momentarily stopped. It thrashes and whines, infuriated by the sticky obstacle that is stopping it from devouring us.
We careen up the curved side of the tunnel wall to avoid a pile of debris and then swing madly back the other way, Ronin only managing to maintain control of the bike with his superhuman drunk reflexes.
‘Up ahead,’ he shouts. ‘There’s a ramp.’
Sure enough, I can make out the outline of a ramp leading upwards to where construction work has opened a ragged hole in the tunnel ceiling. I immediately know what Ronin is thinking.
‘No!’ I shout. ‘Ronin …’
He guns the engine and sends the bike towards the ramp with the precision of a kamikaze pilot. I lock my hands together around his waist and brace my head against his back.
My stomach hops as we hit the ramp, does a double backflip as we ascend it, and pikes as we sail through the hole in the ceiling, hanging gracefully for a moment in my abdomen before plunging into my intestine as we hit the ground above. The wheels slide along the dirt of the construction site as if on ice, then lock and tip the bike over. I’m plucked from around Ronin’s waist and flung across the empty lot in a flailing tangle of limbs before slamming into a large mound of sand.
Ooooooooof. Air. That’s what I need. Lots of it. Unfortunately my lungs have been shocked into forgetting how to breathe. I suck vainly at the atmosphere around me like a goldfish out of its bowl before finally sweet, beautiful oxygen rushes into me.
I have sand in the bullet wound in my head, blood and dirt mixing together into a gruesome failed toddler art project on the side of my face. My mouth tastes of rat blood and I retch several times.
Next to the mangled corpse of the bike, Ronin is picking himself up out of the dirt and brushing off his trench coat. He limps to the edge of the hole and looks down into the tunnel.
‘It can’t get up,’ he says, and gingerly walks over to me, clutching his leg. He slumps against the pile of sand next to me, fishes around in his coat pocket and hands me a grimy bandanna. I pres
s it lightly to my head and wince.
‘Just a scratch, sparky.’ He takes a swig from his hip flask.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You OK?’
He nods, smacks his lips together and contemplates the flask.
‘Can’t believe drinking is actually a positive thing,’ he says. ‘Kinda takes some of the enjoyment out of it.’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Yeah,’ he agrees. ‘True.’
We sit for a while and nurse our wounds.
‘Back there, when I was trying to kill you …’ he starts.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. Thanking each other is not really our thing.’
‘Who said anything about thanking you?’ He takes another swig. ‘You’ve turned me back into an alcoholic. You’re an enabler.’
‘I’ve decided I’m no longer going to try and be good,’ I say. ‘It’s not really who I am.’
‘Well we’ve both failed then.’
‘Yep.’
‘Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?’
I look at him and smile. ‘It’s the best thing ever.’
I grab the flask out of his hand and wash out the taste of rat blood with the bitter alcohol. Ronin stands up and holds out his hand. I grab it and he pulls me to my feet.
We locate a manhole a few blocks away and Ronin wedges the cover open. We climb down in the dim, flickering light. The tunnels are older here, crumbling and permeated by a dank and musty smell that clings to my skin. Scrawled graffiti covers the walls. Ronin runs his fingers over some of the Afrikaans words.
‘From the eighties. Army kids on guard duty did this,’ he says. ‘I think we’re near the old bunkers.’
We follow the tunnel to where it ends in a thick, rusting steel door with the Forked Tongue sigil painted on it.
‘Dwarven black ops?’ I say.
‘Project Staal. I used to hear about this place when I was on the Border,’ Ronin replies. ‘This is where Basson and the Legion did their dirty work.’
I push the door. It creaks as it opens and we step into a lab filled with old vats, jars and hastily destroyed equipment. The floor is a mess of shredded documents and burnt files.
‘They wanted to get rid of all this stuff when the government changed,’ Ronin says.
We look around. A mouldy old South African flag adorns the wall, along with gold-framed photos of stern-looking uniformed men with moustaches.
‘C12,’ he says, picking up a half-burnt document and pointing to the letterhead. ‘What MK6 used to be called.’
‘MK6 used to be called something else?’
‘Yeah, genius. The MK designation is from Umkhonto we Sizwe. Hardly something the old fascists would have used.’
He sits down in an old swivel chair and takes another swig from his hip flask. His eyes are hard as he kicks some of the files from the desk.
‘What’s the matter?’ I say. ‘Are you freaking out again?’
‘Memories from the old days. Really bad memories. It’s weird how you can start to pretend that none of this shit existed.’
‘Project Staal,’ I say, leaning against the desk. ‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know much about it. Way above my pay grade. I know it was linked to Basson’s weapons project, but it was mostly run by the Dwarven Legion.’
I shift through shredded documents and find a few untouched pages. It features diagrams of the biology of bok-people, detailed notes about horrific experimentation, and a single grainy black-and-white photo of a bok-boy just like Klipspringer. He has been opened up, his torso splayed open and his organs visible, but his innocent eyes are wide with horror. He is still very much alive.
A sour, sick feeling creeps down my throat. ‘They’re still doing this?’
‘I don’t know, sparky. I’ve heard rumours …’ Ronin says.
I read from another page. ‘“The Hidden are a fundamental threat to safety and stability. Learning to exploit their vulnerabilities is essential.”’ I look up at him. ‘This is sick. I’ve given up being needlessly good, but this is way beyond good or bad. This is plain evil.’
He sighs and nods. ‘I know.’
‘So why haven’t you done anything about it?’
‘Like what? Let Lefkin win?’
‘No,’ I reply. ‘He’s just using this as an excuse to kill people.’
‘Listen to me,’ Ronin says. ‘The Legion is rich beyond comprehension. They have mercenary armies in all the major conflict zones in the world. The superpowers depend on them. Stopping them will take more than saying, “Like hey dude, this is like way uncool.”’
‘Then what will it take?’
He claps me on the shoulder. ‘That’s what I like about you, sparky. You’re barely into being an apprentice and you’re not satisfied with fighting a Crow shaman. You want to take on one of the most powerful organisations in the world at the same time.’
‘Well, what can I say? I’m an overachiever.’
He nods. ‘You’re right. What they’re doing is wrong. There are agents … not all of them, but some who want things changed.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’s a start.’
‘A start we can build on if we stop Lefkin.’
I nod.
‘Don’t look so depressed,’ he says. ‘We could still get killed.’
We wade through the debris in the old bunker. The lab branches off into a series of offices, apartments, and an old apartheid-era nuclear fallout shelter. I’m peering through dirty reinforced glass into a room plastered with nudie pics and posters from eighties magazines when the fatdragon pulls itself through a huge vent in the lab and grins at us with glee.
We turn and run, but the dragon wriggles after us like a viper.
‘No, no, no …’ I scream, feeling its toxic gassy breath on me. It’s too late. We’re slurped up. My jacket is caught on one of its glass-shard teeth and I thrash and kick, screaming soundlessly to try to escape the horror of it all. Nope.
I tumble after Ronin into its gullet and cringe into a little whimpering ball as its oesophageal movements push me through its wet and gooey insides. I scramble blindly for my gun but I can’t move my hands through the stinking froth of its stomach. I gasp and hold my breath, not sure whether to be more afraid of being digested or of drowning.
Neither should have been my primary worry. There’s a sudden retching sound and I’m sucked upwards and spat out on to a hard concrete floor. I lie shivering, soaked in sewer fat and unable to see anything around me.
‘Ronin!’ I scream. ‘Ronin, I can’t see.’
Something grabs my head and wipes at my glasses, revealing Ronin standing over me shaking fat from his hands.
‘Well, we found the place,’ he says, flicking his wet hair out of his face.
We’re standing in a blue-carpeted corporate office. There’s a fax machine, a water cooler, and a giant whiteboard filled with motivational messages. FOLLOW YOUR PASSION AND YOU’LL NEVER WORK A DAY IN YOUR LIFE, I read before I’m dragged across the floor by strong hands. I manage to headbutt one of my assailants, but three more overpower me, force me into a chokehold and manhandle me into a glass-fronted boardroom. I’m knocked to the floor with a swift kick to my patella. Next to me, Ronin is being forced to kneel by a sizeable group of goblins. Hands reach into my jacket to relieve me of my weapons, and my mojo bag is pulled from my belt. They even take the dead rats. Ronin swears as an assault rifle is jammed against his temple and the Blackfish is torn from his hands.
A figure in a blue pinstriped suit, a starched white shirt and a thin black tie sits in a leather chair at the head of the board table, his hands behind his head. He is wearing a huge crown of teeth.
‘Welcome to the office,’ Lefkin says. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?’
‘How about a shower and all the disinfectant you have?’ I’m still trying to scrub the fat from my face.
Lefkin smiles, his twisted beak and half-human face curling into a rictus of triumph. ‘Hygiene should be the l
east of your worries.’
‘What happened to your cloak and staff?’ I croak. ‘I like that look better.’
He waves a hand. ‘That was theatrics. People expect that sort of thing from the Muti Man.’
‘This from a guy with a crown made of teeth,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘Muti is muti.’ He holds one of the dead rats taken from my belt. ‘Sacrifice is part of magic. You are only just beginning to learn this.’
‘Oh fuck off,’ I say. ‘Don’t start with this you-and-I-are-alike bullshit.’
‘You misunderstand. I don’t think we’re alike at all. You’re human. That makes you completely foreign to me: an alien, a parasite. But it doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. The egregore is nothing but humanity amplified. When I was captured and brought to this place, I realised something about my tormentors, the men and women who attached me to probes and killed my Crows in front of me to test whether we feel the same way humans do. I realised that it’s not some kind of moral bias that stops people from doing evil, but rather a certain social pressure. To maim, kill, dismember only requires encouraging the natural human to come out.’
He gets out of his chair and walks across to Ronin. He reaches down and grips him by the throat. ‘Let me tell you this, agent. We feel just as vividly as you do. Monitoring me as a Crow child was killed in front of me convinced them of that.’
He turns to me. ‘So I’ll offer you a deal. Kill yourself and I’ll let him go.’
‘Don’t give him a fucking thing,’ Ronin shouts, struggling against the hand at his throat.
I force myself to look Lefkin in the eyes. ‘I’m not going to kill myself.’
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I think you are.’
He weaves his fingers together in an intricate pattern and then points at me.
‘What are you doing?’ I croak.
‘Something you would have learnt to do if you’d had a decent teacher,’ he says, and crooks a finger at me in a beckoning motion.
I feel a force sucking at my psyche. An incredible pressure hits me in the temples and I collapse with a gasp. The room flickers in and out of focus for several seconds before I lose consciousness.
‘What the hell?’ I say, looking around the pagoda.
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