The Atomic Sea: Part Three

by Jack Conner

  Avery was only mildly surprised to find himself wedged between two vaguely fishy men in business suits; one was slick, his entire body mottled in dark orange splotches, while the other simply possessed fishy-looking eyes, which was somehow creepier. More shocking was the smell that filled the tight space, like being locked inside a sardine-canning factory after the place had been shut down for weeks and the sardines allowed to rot—but the infected men and women aboard didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps it smelled good to them. They did seem to notice Avery and the others. Several shot them glares or simply lifted their noses righteously. Avery realized it was because they were uninfected; or, more properly, they had not accepted the Sacrament. Interesting. The everyday Octunggen seemed more devout than he had expected. Then again, they were involved in a holy war.

  He was also interested to note how neat and clean it all was, not the dilapidated, graffiti-covered subway cars he’d ridden in Ghenisa. Not only were the Octunggen industrious, they were neat and efficient. His hatred of them, and he hated them more than ever, was becoming mixed with a growing, reluctant admiration. If nothing else, it was easy to see why the R’loth had chosen them. If Avery were going to subjugate and brainwash a people to enslave the world for him, he might very well choose the people of Octung.

  “Come,” Layanna whispered to him and the others.

  She led them to the exterior junction between two subway cars. Wind howled around them, and the unsteady platform they stood on, meant to be traversed quickly on the way from one car to the next, wobbled and groaned.

  “What are we doing?” Hildra shouted over the wind. “Don’t tell me we’re jumping!”

  “We’re not,” Layanna said. “I am.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “And I’m taking you with me. Now, on the count of three. One—”

  “Wait a minute,” Avery began.

  “Two—”

  “Ah, darlin’—” said Janx.

  “Three.”

  “Bull—” started Hildra.

  Layanna changed, bringing over her amoeba-facet with its tentacles, organelles, and glowing, radiant interior for the second time in an hour. It squeezed up against the sides of the subway car and would have shoved Avery, Janx and Hildra out into nothingness had her tentacles not latched firmly onto them. These were the same tentacles, Avery was horribly aware, that could pass venom and fire into their victims. Instead, Layanna used them to gather Avery and the others to her proverbial bosom, then reached overhead with still more tentacles, grabbed onto some projection or handhold Avery could not see, and pulled.

  Avery experienced a moment of weightlessness, and then he heard screaming and knew it was coming from himself. The train passed in a rush below, a great roar that vibrated off the walls and seemed to rattle his very bones. Layanna held him and the others as she roosted in some alcove in the tunnel ceiling, then, when the train had passed, lowered them all to the tracks.

  Avery watched the train recede into the darkness, lights fading, then wheeled to face Layanna, who was releasing her amoeba-facet, an angry retort on his lips. Janx just looked weary. Hildra, though obviously angry, comforted Hildebrand, who shrieked in fear, his noises especially jarring in the tight confines.

  Layanna merely took a deep breath, wiped sweat from her brow, and said, “Wasn’t that easy?”

  Avery held himself back. He quickly checked Janx’s wound, using the flashlight Layanna had purchased. As he’d feared, there was some seeping.

  “I’m sorry,” Layanna said.

  “Ain’t a scratch, darlin’,” Janx said. To Avery, he said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “You will,” Avery agreed, “after I have time to fix the damage.”

  “Later,” Layanna said. “Now, if you all don’t mind hurrying—we don’t want to get run over by the next train, do we?—we have somewhere to go.”

  Reluctantly, they followed her down the tunnel. Bats and other things chittered and shifted in the darkness, and Avery was aware of a sooty, iron reek mixed with the stench of animal droppings. It was cold in the shadows, which were not lightened much by the infrequent bulbs set into the ceiling. Avery played his flashlight before them as they walked, and Layanna showed them to what appeared to be a service entrance.

  “This is it,” she said.

  Avery tugged on the door experimentally. Iron and rusted, it stuck fast to its frame.

  “Nothing’s ever easy, is it, Doc?” Janx said.

  The door required some grunting from Avery and Hildra—Layanna was exhausted and Avery forbid Janx to strain a muscle—before it grudgingly ground open. The rattle and roar of a train coming up the tunnel chased them into the hole. Layanna appropriated Avery’s flashlight and marched down the narrow, musty stairs first. The steps soon led out onto a platform on a lower level. Layanna’s light revealed benches and past them tracks, but it was all covered in grime and dust.

  “Welcome to your first stop on the way to the Black Sect,” she said, seemingly proud, though whether of the Sect, the measures they had taken to hide themselves away, or her own maddening sense of showmanship Avery couldn’t tell.

  “So what now?” Hildra said.

  “Now we wait.”

  Hildra, pacing and cursing, found plenty of debris to kick and berate while Avery set Janx down on one of the moldering benches, which protested the big man’s weight but held, and checked his wounds. He had to redress the sutures on Janx’s abdomen, but other than that the big man seemed fine.

  “How long has this section of the subway system been abandoned?” Avery asked Layanna, when he had finished with Janx.

  “A very long time,” she said.

  “Why?” said Janx.

  “Shifting and flooding, mostly. But also, as the roads and above-ground transportation systems enlarged, there was less and less need of the subways. There are numerous abandoned areas and even entire abandoned levels of the system.”

  “I just want to know what we’re waiting for,” Hildra said.

  “Our ride, obviously.”

  “Why weren’t they waiting for us? We’re the ones who’ve come across half a continent to get here!”

  “They didn’t know at what point I would come down,” Layanna said. “As soon as I accessed the terminal in the statue, it would have alerted them to my presence, and they would have sent someone to fetch me. But he or she wouldn’t know where I would be, exactly. And so ...”

  “We wait,” Hildra finished.

  She had lit a fire in one of the trashcans at Layanna’s suggestion. By the light of this flickering flame they settled in. When the fire began to die, Hildra gathered up trash and debris and tossed it in. Hildebrand ambushed rats in the shadows.

  Avery felt himself grow excited. Finally, at last, he was going to meet the Black Sect! It seemed he had been on the journey here half his life. In a way, he reflected, he had, as his entire life before meeting Layanna had been another existence—some other man’s life, perhaps. A sad, lonely man trapped in a loveless relationship. A man whose only fulfillment was out of a bottle. Now here he was, defiantly shaking his fist in the face of Octung and carrying out an affair with a goddess. And, not least, about to rendezvous with a veritable cabal of gods.

  A roar and whistle sounded down the tracks, and a stir of wind flapped the piece of paper Hildra had been reaching for, hurling it beyond her grasp.

  They all rose and faced the coming train. Avery’s heart pounded. At first he could only see a bright, shining point of light in the darkness. Then, gradually, as it slowed, coming abreast the platform, he saw it outlined by Hildra’s fire—a battered, graffiti-covered and thoroughly abused subway engine, not like those above, trailing one pitiful car behind it. Perhaps seeing their light, the train slowed further and stopped with a squeal and hiss.

  The doors opened and half a dozen men with guns rushed out.

  “On the ground!” one shouted. Like the others, he wore a rough-spun black wool mask over his head. “On the ground now!”

/>   Avery, Janx and Hildra eyed each other, then Layanna. She nodded. Avery grimaced as the floor caked his knees and palms with grime, and he screwed up his face with distaste when the men forced him to his belly. He made sure they were gentler with Janx. They quickly searched Avery, removed his gun, and removed Janx’s and Hildra’s as well.

  Throughout it all, Layanna remained standing. Avery turned his head, spitting out dust, to see three of the gunmen kneeling before her. The apparent leader kissed her outstretched hand.

  “You may rise,” she said.

  “It’s an honor,” the leader said, standing, then removed his mask. His wide, stubbled face showed no obvious signs of infection, but it did show stress and worry. “Please, if you will ...” He gestured for the subway car.

  She indicated Avery and the others. “Release them and treat them well. They have earned your trust and mine.”

  The leader hesitated, then nodded. “Of course, mistress. You’ll forgive me if I wait till we join up with the others before I give them back their guns? They don’t all look conventional. They could pose some risk.”

  “Is that acceptable to you?” Layanna asked Avery. Off his nod, she told the leader, “Very well.”

  Quickly they were all bustled aboard the passenger car. Hildebrand, who had fled at the approach of the gunmen, barely scampered back in time to avoid the closing of the doors. Spitting and dusting himself off, Avery took a seat beside Layanna as the train lurched away from the platform. Across the aisle hunched Janx and Hildra. The young woman stroked her monkey and told him everything would be all right.

  Janx grinned at Avery, his metallic teeth winking. “Off to see the gods, eh, Doc?”

  Avery couldn’t help but smile back. “Off to see the gods.”

  Rattling and thumping around them, the train rushed off into darkness.

  * * *

  “So who are these jerkwads?” Hildra said, indicating the gunmen. The leader narrowed his eyes but did not otherwise respond.

  “They’re the Sivusts, worshippers of the Black Sect,” Layanna said, her face tight and a not-so-subtle warning in her voice. “The only true gods.”

  Hildra looked at her, then to the gunmen. She shook her head and snorted. At least she seemed to get it, or what Avery assumed was it, that Layanna didn’t want to discuss the issue in front of the men. Avery found it fascinating that the Black Sect had actually formed a true sect that worshipped them and not the mainstream Collossum. How long had that taken? Decades? And just how tight-lipped were their parishioners? It would only take one of weak faith to bring ruin to them all.

  “Brother Sygrel here has led numerous operations against the Collossum,” Layanna said, shifting the topic. At her words, the leader of the gunmen, Sygrel, straightened and tried to put on a modest face. “He and others like him are the very hand of the Black Sect, striking against the false gods.”

  Avery sensed more than a little religious manipulation in her words and was not surprised when Sygrel said, “Anything for the Revered, mistress. We won’t stop until all the pretenders are put down.”

  She nodded, as if she had both expected and demanded such a response, but Avery could see the lines of discomfort around her mouth.

  The train continued on, and those within lapsed into silence until Janx leaned across Hildra and tapped a window. “What’s that?”

  Avery strained his eyes. By the meager light of the passenger car, he received a vague impression of old, strange structures set into the wall of a large cavern they were passing through.

  “Ruins of one of the pre-human races,” Layanna said. “This region was home to several of them, and more than one made their lairs underground.”

  The train tore through the darkness, at times passing through narrow channels, so narrow Avery feared the train’s sides would scrape against the rock walls, and at times passing through what seemed to be vast caverns, twice over bridges that spanned some fathomless abyss. It was on the second of these that the train slowed. Avery, lulled by the rocking of the car, had drifted into an uneasy sleep, but when he opened his eyes lights glimmered through the darkness ahead—weak, feeble lights to be sure, but lights nonetheless.

  “We’re there,” said Sygrel.

  The train was passing over the abyss toward a large heap of buildings—ruins, probably—that clung to the very lip of the chasm. The cavern was quite massive, and the ruins, beginning at the chasm, stretched away from it across a wide shelf of rock, a sort of plateau, to gradually climb the cavern wall. Likely there were tunnels and rooms cored out of the rock there.

  As the train chugged to a creaking, unsteady stop before the structures, the gunmen threw open the doors and lit lanterns and flashlights.

  “If you’ll follow me, mistress,” Sygrel said.

  He led Layanna and the others out of the ancient passenger car and across a rocky expanse toward the buildings. The stale air stank of dust and stone. Rocks littered the way, and Avery stumbled several times. He and Janx shared more eager glances. Finally, the gods!

  “So why do you call yourselves ‘Sivusts’, anyway?” Hildra asked Sygrel. Sivust meant ‘center’ in Octunggen.

  “It signifies the central tine of the Holy Trident Vilgest,” Sygrel said, “symbolizing that we are the true faith while those who worship the Collossum of the Temple are the side-tines, the heretics.”

  “Interesting,” Avery said. With a glance to Layanna, he said, “Is that—”

  He heard drumming, and the words fell away.

  The sound tolled, slow and ominous, from a large structure that reared some distance ahead, right in the middle of the ancient settlement—for that’s what it was, Avery saw. He had expected the ruins of some pre-human city and had been mildly excited to see them, but what he saw disappointed him—all-too-human shacks and sheds, lean-tos, large buildings looming over them made of what looked like metal recovered from junkyards. Much of it was ancient, the wood of the sheds falling apart, some of the metal coated with verdigris. It looked like this town, if that’s what it was, had been cobbled together over many years by various peoples, likely for different purposes.

  “We call the city Golna,” Sygrel said. “Named after the old city of sin. It’s a hodge-podge place. Centuries old. We think smugglers founded it. Most of those big buildings you see are warehouses. Others came later. Some are obviously illegal drug labs, so there were definitely drug manufacturers, presumably dealers, as well. And whores. There’s a couple of two-stories here that are nicer than the others and have many small rooms—brothels, we think. And there are pits where arena fighting took place, maybe underground slave trading. The rest came later. Vagrants. Squatters. People that had nowhere else to go and settled here, at least for a time. An underground, centuries-old shantytown. When we arrived, it was empty, but there were signs people had been here fairly recently. Used condoms. Syringes with fluid still in them.”

  “Hell of a place for a gathering of gods,” Janx said.

  Privately Avery agreed. After the grandeur of Lusterqal he’d hoped for something more from the opponents of the Collossum.

  “Whatever,” said Hildra, who was frowning at the sometimes rickety and small, sometimes heaping structures that now surrounded them. “All I wanna know about is the drumming. What gives?”

  A shadow flickered across Layanna’s face. She didn’t answer. Neither did Sygrel.

  Hildra shot Janx first, and then Avery, a triumphant glare, as if to say she had been right about Layanna and her people all along. Avery shifted uncomfortably. He had an all-too good idea of what the drumming signified, and he was afraid Hildra’s assumption was correct.

  The sound of the drums picked up, steady and nerve-racking.

  Sygrel led them through the forlorn little community, and Avery saw that most of the structures were occupied. Families sat in rotting huts, or stood over campfires roasting some sort of animal, possibly game caught down here, rat or bat or flail or the like. Lights lit the shattered windows of a two-st
ory building that Avery assumed to be one of the former whorehouses Sygrel had spoken of. Young men sparred in one of the dug-out pits where slave trading had likely once taken place. Avery was shocked at how many people he saw. Hundreds, certainly. Maybe thousands. Were they all worshippers of the Black Sect? There were so many children. Women. Elderly ...

  Sygrel brought them to the building the drumming issued from, the largest in the city, what had to have been a warehouse at some point but which had been added onto over the years so that many buildings and entire wings jutted out from its flanks and rear, like undersea fauna and flora growing on a coral reef, and it now resembled some monstrous building as formless as the gods it served. Sygrel showed them through the warehouse’s large hangar-like entrance, and Avery received the impression that this building had become some sort of temple, an impression augmented by the ritualistic drumming—and chanting, he now heard—as well as by the religious-looking symbols painted on the filthy walls with glowing alchemical paint—a trident, a crown, an arm reaching from the sea. Dirt and grime covered every bit of it, and cobwebs and slime mold ran rampant. It was altogether a dark and unwholesome place, and through its murky outer halls the drumming continued to toll, low and sinister.

  They emerged into a great open chamber, the main room of the warehouse. Avery heard singing or chanting clearly now, and saw rows of men and women bowing to something on a sort of stage, where the podium in a church might be. The thing they bowed to was one of the Collossum with its other-self about it. The great, gelatinous mass with its squirming tentacles and pseudopods, all bathed in weird lights from the being’s interior, poised over a black slab that must be an altar. As Avery watched, a prisoner in chains was being led out from a side-hall and forced to lie down on the altar. It was an infected man, Avery saw, who wore an Octunggen military uniform.

  “I knew it,” said Hildra, somehow sounding both victorious and horrified at once.

  The Collossum—or former Collossum, if it was a Black Sect member—swelled and rippled, basking in the worship of his congregation, while unseen drummers beat an increasingly frantic tattoo, until at last, when the drumming reached a crescendo, the Collossum reached forward, lifted up the sacrifice, and pulled the man into itself. As one, the congregation shouted a single word that Avery did not catch. The man began to dissolve, his flesh boiling away and swirling about the R’loth’s amoeba-like body in fantastic patterns quickly sucked up by the greedy organelles. Through it all, the Octunggen soldier did not scream or thrash. He must be drugged, Avery realized. One mercy, at least.