by E. E. Knight
Reaper!
Valentine crouched, tried to lower his lifesign, tried to box up the cold and his sore knee. He gripped the splintered femur in both hands, left steadying it, his right on the ball joint, ready to drive it....
He heard panting and saw Colin running wildly down the path, feet muddy, favoring one leg, but fear driving him through the pain. A cloaked Reaper, its face white-painted with eyes and lips blackened to imitate a skull, thin chest similarly decorated to enhance the ribs, skipped along behind him, raising first one long arm and then the other in a sort of dance.
"And I run and you run and I run and you run ...," it sang as it hopped.
Could he catch it unaware?
The Reaper halted, pointed a long black-nailed finger at Valentine, "you! You wait your turn! Gimpy’s first!"
Colin sprawled, tripping on the same hole that had injured him earlier, "oh, you've tripped, get up, you're not finished yet. Run run run little silly man."
They disappeared toward the buildings, the Reaper harrying its prey like a dog driving a lone sheep.
Valentine angled toward the western wall. Twelve feet of brick, with trees well cut back, was topped with electrified fence.
"Don't even think about it," a megaphoned voice from the trees called. Valentine searched the timber, saw a hunting blind. "He's busy with the others. If you hurry, you'll make the finish line easy."
Valentine trotted back into the woods.
He ran faster as he saw the two red lights, broke out of the trees and up a long meadowed path, thick with night dew. Valentine saw more lines of fencing, angling toward the finish line. A couple of New Universal Church robed types stood before a candlelit table with food and bottles and a trophy cup.
But there was a cold piece of evil lurking just on the other side of the victory tape.
Valentine sensed a Reaper under the table, alive and pulsing. A final shock for the winner?
He couldn't say why that one little detail bothered him more than the nests of sharpened pungi sticks on the path, or the humiliation of being stripped in front of joking guards. He turned and trotted back along the path toward the buildings.
* * * *
He found them on the other side of a little wall-less Japanese building, between two gardens filled with stones. The Reaper loomed behind Colin, poking him in the kidneys with a long, black fingernail, urging him toward Mona, crying, holding out one hand as a plea to stop and covering her sex with the other. Valentine could hear the breathy, high-pitched voice.
"One two three four, I declare a food war. Five six seven eight, the winner gets to make the gate."
The Reaper jumped and landed next to Mona, who tripped and fell.
"You can take him. He’s out of breath, wounded in the foot! Go for his other leg!"
Colin jumped on her, got his fingers around her throat.
"Now rape her! Spread her legs, inside, inside, and I’ll let you live." It hung over the couple, its cloak drawing a curtain around them....
Valentine flitted between trees, put the cement of the little pagoda between himself and the scene.
"No! No, please! Oh God!" Mona screamed.
Something at the base of his spine woke up and twitched. It ran hot up his back, perched between brain and skull atop his head like a spider.
Valentine hopped up on top of the pagoda, and made the jump with the thoughtless ease of a house cat leaping to a kitchen table. Dirt and clinging plants fell, displaced by his weight, but before they hit the ground he was a gargoyle shape half-hanging from the pagoda roof.
Below, the Reaper opened its jaw and shot its tongue toward Colin's back, teeth following. Colin screamed.
The greenery hit the ground next to the Reaper. It turned its head; eyes followed the trajectory up—
And met Valentine on the way down.
He landed atop the Reaper, driving the femur down toward the great beehivelike organ that sucked down the blood. It reached up, backward-hinging arms moving for him, but Valentine was off it, moving on white-hot instinct, hardly knowing what his body was going to do next.
He swung a stiff-fingered uppercut, felt fingers break through skin, grabbed the Reaper under its hyperextended jaw, fingers closing on bone, dragged it off Colin, who had a gaping, tongue-sized wound in his back. Valentine whipsawed and the Reaper sprawled.
He held its white-painted jaw in his hands.
The Reaper rose, confusion in its eyes as its tongue lolled. Valentine cast the jawbone aside and readied his femur for another strike.
The Reaper turned and ran, but Valentine was after it, a wild predator drawn by flight, got on its back and drove the sharpened femur up through the gap left by the jaw.
Crying, Mona pressed her hands against the wound in Colin's back. Blood came up under her fingers anyway.
As the Reaper collapsed there was another, running from the woodland path in the direction of the goalposts, its feet a blur, a strange oversized leering jack-o'-lantern mask atop its head. Valentine picked himself up, left the twitching, dying, genetically engineered corpse, and ran toward the new one, ink-smeared bone in his hands. The Reaper slowed, perhaps not used to a man running toward it.
A mindless feral howl sounded from Valentine's throat. His heart seemed to fill his entire chest cavity, its throb rattling his ribs and collarbones....
Some sane corner of his mind hammered out thoughts as fast as letters flew from a quick typist:
You don't know how to fight you great thirsty slug you've forgotten how, send all the puppets you want, you can no more fight than fuck time to face me, product of a warrior race bred and tested in ten thousand years' battle, scarier than any costume, don't run you'll just die tired. . .
The Reaper turned and ran. Its mask slipped, and it blindly plowed into a tree, lurched onward, tearing the mask free to run.
Valentine angled through the trees, yipping like a hound on a hot scent, caught up to it just outside the glowing eyes of the goalposts. It turned at the last second, threw up its arms to ward him off, and Valentine caught it at the knees with a diving tackle, knocking it down, felt claws open wounds in his shoulders as he drove his femur up between its legs. The Reaper didn't have sexual organs, but its skeleton had a gap.
Kill it so they send me another. And another. . . no.
Valentine fought to form words.
"You," he said, straddling the Reaper, feeling stronger than he had ever felt in his life.
He twisted the femur. "You, at the other end. Talk, or I make your puppet into a corn dog."
"Sssstop! Pleasssse."
Valentine withdrew the femur, and the Reaper lashed out with its free arm. He caught it at the wrist and twisted it until he heard a snap.
"Stop it," Valentine said. It was like talking in a foreign tongue; he had to force himself to make words. "I'll take your toy apart a limb at a time. Then I'll hang your churchmen from the goalposts."
"What do you want? I give you your life, I give the female her life, I give the man his life, just let my servant go."
"Are you Seattle? The head honcho?"
"No, I am but a keeper of—"
"I want to talk to your chief. King. Grand and Exalted Overlord, whatever he calls himself. The one in the big tower."
"He does not deal with your kind directly."
"Then through you. I don't care. Tell him I have an offer."
"What could a human give such as he?"
"Adler. The leader of the resistance."
The Reaper's slit eyes widened, "impossible!"
Valentine reached up, got his hand around its windpipe, felt the thick muscles that drove the tongue.
"Grraack..." Valentine released his grip, "yes, yes, cease and desist, I contacted, he assents, you shall have your meeting with his representative among the mortal."
Chapter Thirteen
Mouthpieces: Every Kurian organization depends on layers of intermediaries between the Kurian Lords and their human herds. Seattle is no different
.
All the layers of police, troops, secret police, church investigators, even diplomats to other Kurian Zones, report to one man's office in Seattle, and that man is Maxamom Silas. Impressive looking, with a good eye for clothes, and an even more impressive speaker and judge of character, he's something of a born second-in-command. Some in the know of the ins and outs of Seattle's realm believe him to be more important than the lesser Kurian Lords in the feudal conglomeration, especially with recent desertions of the Kurians supposedly guarding the borders of Seattle's empire.
He has his faults, of course. If an original thought ever entered his head, it got lonely and left. He's also a man who lives very much in the present day. "The past can't be changed and the future has too many variables," he's been known to say.
Maxamom Silas watches over his city from the old Space Needle, overshadowed by the greater Kurian Spire doubling the highest heights of the Seattle skyline, as if contesting Mount Rainier itself. Why he chooses the Space Needle as a location for the meetings of his highest military, industrial, and church leaders might be answered better by psychology than logistics or practicality or even sybaritic comfort—after all, he often weekends at the much more congenial Gates estate. He's earned the view. As a Seattle-born NUC altar boy, he impressed the church hierarchy enough for them to send him East for an education. He returned a bright young graduate of Harvard's Population Management School, not inspired with any particular vision, but crammed with the latest skills and theories.
Silas receives credit for his division of the city into neighborhood-sized "quads"—each ruled by a Kurian. School and work and sports teams encourage quad loyalty. These in turn are gathered into "conferences" where a presiding Kurian clan works out squabbles. In theory, a human need never leave his conference; the whole of his existence is encompassed in the square miles that make up a conference, though he will sometimes travel to another conference to root for a home team in a championship, or listen to a political speech.
Seattle himself oversees the conferences as sort of a supreme judge. His conferences reside in his own massive tower, where they may be more easily watched and controlled. Treachery has been unknown since the great purge of Year Forty, when three leading conference clans were killed in a single deadly night.
It is this simple system that allowed Seattle to expand his realm in the 2050s, owning all the land between the Grogs in Oregon and the thinly inhabited coastline north of Vancouver. From the Kurian point of view, the apparently powerless "quad" role was attractive, for the number of human auras he had to pass up the food chain was strictly limited, and in return he received the military protection of Quisling formations organized at the conference level. While there is some dispute on the matter, Seattle can at least be credited with being the only Kurian overlord who regularly saw his fellow Kurians petition him to be included in his empire.
Until, of course, the advent of Adler and his brutal strategy. Adler would strike in secret, hard and fast, at the quad level of the Kurian Order, harassing and chipping at the vulnerable fringe of Seattle's realm. He avoided every trap laid for him, seeming to know which quads were strongly garrisoned and which were weak-Even Maxamom Silas had few ideas of how to cope with the crisis. His expertise in security was limited to quelling dissent from within and breaking up organizations like the Resistance Network. After three conferences contributed to a "Guardian Army" that plunged into the mountains, only to dissolve thanks to desertion and harassing attacks from mountain-wise guerrilla bands, no further attempts were made to take the offensive.
But Seattle himself is not without the canniness of a hunted fox. He sent to his subrealm of Vancouver for the "Big Mouth" amphibian Grogs, and used the numerous waterways around Seattle to gird his realm, though a good deal of his productive capacity is now spent feeding Grogs rather than trading with other Kurian Zones for the goods that once made Seattle such a pleasant place to live and breed.
* * * *
Valentine watched Seattle through the outward-slanting windows of the Space Needle. He tried to imagine what the roads looked like long ago, filled with cars and trucks—the crushed remains of which now formed barriers between Seattle's zones. Now there were just bicyclists and a few motor scooters, making way for smoke-belching army trucks, biofuel buses, and the occasional gleaming SUV.
He'd first relayed the bare bones of a plan to a pair of skeptical military adjutants, but as he spoke they grew more and more interested. Then he spent a day in an apartment on what he guessed was a military base; BELLEVUE CONFERENCE IS THE FIRST WITH THE MOST read a banner hanging over an exercise field that he could just see through his grimy window. Later they told him that he'd need to speak to Chief Executive Silas' Regional Security Work Group. So they gave him soap and a razor, sent a girl in to trim his hair and nails, and gave him an afternoon to present his plan.
They shuttled him to the Space Needle in a motorcycle with a little encapsulated sidecar that reeked of sweat and tobacco. A cold front had parked itself over Seattle, and the normal drizzle had turned to sleet the previous evening and promised to do so even earlier tonight. From the road Valentine got a closer look at the Lord's Tower, as it was called, and didn't care for what he saw.
Five great shafts, laid out like the dots on the "five" on an ordinary craps die, rose straight up in shafts of blue green like a fountain frozen in time. Above the tallest of the city's buildings, the Kurian compartments, as Valentine thought of them, began. They looked like mollusks or barnacles clinging to a pier, rather than the spider-egg-sac orbs he'd seen in the middle of the country. Atop all, like a great mushroom cap, was the dome of Seattle himself. Valentine thought he saw trees up there but could not be sure if the green caps were vegetation or just some odd element of Kurian architecture.
"That must have taken some time to build," Valentine said as they parked beneath the Space Needle and the driver opened his canopy.
The driver shrugged. "My dad knew a guy from the conference who worked on it. Once the foundation went in, they grew the columns. Only steel in there as far as I know is remnants from the scaffolding."
The driver passed Valentine on to one of the military attaches he'd first talked to. They took an elevator up the Space Needle. Some minor earthquake damage had been patched over and painted, but otherwise it still looked fresh from the World's Fair.
Valentine idled in a waiting room, downing a mug of the best coffee he'd had since his last trip to Jamaica. Photographs of post-'22 reconstruction projects and the Victory-5, a super-fuel-efficient observation plane and light bomber produced at the Boeing works, filled the waiting area. A card listed an impressive set of specifications. The plane's lines reminded him a little of the gliders he'd trained on in Yuma, wide flat wings with little stabilizers at the tip, though with a heavier body and push-pull propellers.
He listened to a pair of engineers breaking for coffee, grousing about the state of the sewers. Seattle was only a third as populous as it had been pre-2022, and as the remaining humans no longer produced enough waste to keep the sanitary system working, they were closing off vast sections so as to divert into the still-working parts and narrowing pipes.
"You'd think PVC was gold, they way they stint," one said, sipping his coffee.
"The shit's gold, that's for sure. Energy wants it for the biofuel stills. Fisheries want it for the hatchery. Agriculture needs fertilizer.
If they only would let us get a per-gallon rate, we could buy all the tubing we needed from the Oakland Bay Company. But no, 'waste' it remains."
Next trays of food—Valentine smelled fish and roast beef, along with onion and potato—came up the elevator and disappeared into the meeting room.
Valentine wandered to the observation rail while the Quisling leadership ate. A sharp lemony smell filled his nostrils, and Valentine heard a heavy, shuffling step.
He turned. A squared-off man, all right angles and pinstripes, stood on the observation platform, looking at him. He had golden rings on e
ach hand.
Behind him was a big gray Grog, who evidently was the source of the lemony smell. Valentine couldn't remember ever seeing one of the long-armed grays so neatly trimmed and coiffed. It wore a kilt with sewn-in scabbards for weapons, and the butts of two rifles projected from its shoulders. Silver-capped teeth shone against lips greasy with roast beef juice, its tongue discreetly probing for trapped morsels.
"I take it you're Valentine," the man said, stepping up with hand out. He was about Valentine's height, but built a little heavier. "I'm Silas, chief executive around here. Kur commend you." He had what sounded to Valentine like an odd manner of speech, as though all the words were formed in the top of his throat and passed up through his nose as well as his mouth.
"David Valentine. You could get a fair price out of the Louisiana Kurians for me, by the way." The Grog hovered as Valentine shook hands.
"You're not frightened of Grogs, are you? Silvers is well trained," Silas said.
"U-koos," Valentine said to the Grog, lowering his left hand toward the floor and bringing the right to the center of his chest. The greeting was a fairly universal one in St. Louis, but he didn't know if it applied out here.
The Grog slapped his own centerline a few times and hooted. Valentine saw an old white scar on his right breast, sloping down toward the Grog's navel.
"Introductions being over, we've got another hour or so of work after lunch. Sorry to keep you waiting, but we're running late. Then it's going to be all military, and you're first on the agenda. Seattle himself is curious as to what you're going to propose, you know. It would be in your own interest not to disappoint him. If I understand, you're some kind of assassin? You took the measure of two Reapers, unless I'm being misinformed."
"It was me or them. I'm glad Seattle is the forgiving type." Valentine felt shaggy and uneducated in the light of Silas' controlled diction.
"Nobody much likes the Bellevue clan. They trade with the insurgents and word gets around about that little exercise field. Unsettles the herd."