by Jack Conner
She said nothing.
He opened his mouth to continue, but then he heard the soft, regular, almost purr-like sounds of her snores.
Chapter 9
Mourning songs rang out over the abyss. Avery, Janx, Hildra and various high members of the Black Sect’s worshippers stood on the pinnacle of rock that projected out over the bottomless chasm. The rest of the worshippers, thousands strong, occupied the area behind. Some held wax figures or candles; many were dressed in the traditional salmon-colored robes of mourning. All sang. The sound reverberated around the huge open space and echoed back, magnified tenfold. When the song was over, the High Priestess spoke a few words and ordered the casket lowered into the abyss. A junior priest led the lower-keyed song as it descended. They were all well-practiced at the procedure by now.
It had been painful for Avery to watch the Black Sect over the last four days, all of them working feverishly on the Device in a tight ring, tentacles plunged into the machine, some of the R’loth overlapping and interlocked, their gelatinous sides merging with each other, until finally one would crumple to the floor, its other-self slipping away. He or she would be carried off while another took their place. Sometimes Avery would administer to them, sometimes one of the various nurses; he was the only real doctor here. There had been seventeen members of the Black Sect when he and the others had arrived in Golna. On the second day there were fourteen. On the third there were eleven.
Today there were eight.
When the ropes ran out, the High Priestess nodded and the fallen god’s casket was released so that he may join his brothers and sisters in the depths of the world. The Sivusts believed that the R’loths’ essences lived on, somewhere outside the dimensions they knew, that they had, like butterflies emerging from their cocoons, been released into other, freer forms, but ones even more splendid and powerful. The Song of Transition soared as the casket fell, reached a final high note, then gradually tapered off. The High Priestess spoke a few more words, and the congregation—the entire population of Golna—broke up and returned to whatever they had been doing. Many ventured to the edge first, kissed the wax figures or whatever other offering they had, and cast the object into the abyss to join the casket in the deeps.
“Hell of a thing,” Janx commented, staring over the precipice. He and Hildra had accompanied Avery to the funeral, probably just for a break from their constant work on the trains. Layanna and the rest of the Black Sect, unable to slip away from their duties even for this, had remained with the Device. “The death of gods.”
Hildra snorted. “They’re not gods.”
“I wouldn’t say that around here,” Avery advised quietly.
Janx looked contemplative. “I don’t know,” he said to Hildra. “If they aren’t, who is?”
Avery walked with them back to the temple building, where they saw that another body was being laid out in the main room—a woman this time, Uvrista. Avery remembered her before the frantic work on the Device of the last few days—a lovely young woman, seemingly, with auburn hair and hazel eyes. Now Avery saw the withered, pale flesh, the smoky glass overtaking half her face, her neck and much of her body.
Neither Avery nor the others commented as they passed the body and entered the tunnels beyond. Janx and Hildra, who had come to the funeral dressed in their dirty work clothes, took their leave of Avery with his promise to visit them shortly and descended to the level below this one, there to continue their work on the trains. Avery proceeded to the laboratory room, where Layanna was just recovering from a recent bout of feverish effort. She was red-faced and panting. They shared a warm soda together while she gathered her strength for another go-round on the Device and Avery told her how the funeral had gone. She listened sadly, but when he was done she said, “At least it was worth it. It’s almost done, Francis. Almost done.”
Suddenly he felt sweat pop out on his brow. “How soon?”
“Within a day,” she said. “Hours, maybe.”
She resumed work and he tended to the R’loth for some time, doing what little he could for them, then went to visit Janx and Hildra. They were deep underground, far below Golna. The lowest tunnels of the smuggler-and-slaver city merged with, or had been driven into by, the upper-level of a system of maintenance tunnels that serviced the lowest, uncompleted subway level. The tunnels spilled out onto a subway-boarding platform, where Janx and Hildra had been assisting scores of Sivusts as they restored the ancient subway vehicles and tracks. They reconnected cars, removed debris from the rails, soldered and hammered and generally made themselves busy. And noisy. Avery’s head protested at the cacophony.
He was used to it, though. It had become his habit to visit Janx and Hildra on his lunch break every day—he had become the camp’s doctor, which took up most of his time not tending to the Sect—and they were expecting him.
“But where do they go?” he asked when they were gathered, gesturing off into the darkness where the tracks vanished. The question had been puzzling him for days. Yaslen had said the trains were supposed to help the so-called gods escape in case of emergency, but to Avery there was something off about the whole project.
Janx laughed. He and Hildra both dripped in grime and sweat. Sparks flashed nearby from a man soldering pieces of a train back together, illuminating Janx’s soot-stained face as he ran a calloused hand across his head. Sparks and fires and flickering bulbs lit the whole platform, throwing eerie strobe lighting onto the hulks of the trains themselves.
“They go ... on,” Janx said, giving his customarily vague response.
Avery usually let it go at that. It was enough for him to know that the trains would help the Sect escape, if there were any left to escape. More than that, he had sensed a certain reluctance in Janx and Hildra to talk to him about it, as if there was some secret they were protecting—or protecting him from—and he had respected it.
Today, however, he decided enough was enough. “Really,” he said. “Where do they go?”
Janx and Hildra shared a glance.
Shaking out a cigarette and sticking it between her lips, Hildra said, “Alright, bones, we’ll level with ya. These tracks were meant to be international.”
“International,” Avery repeated, waiting for the word to make sense.
She nodded. “Yeah. A big project, long ago, when Octung was gearin’ up for the war. They wanted to send trains out underground so they wouldn’t get bombed. Uninterrupted supply lines to the front. These tracks, they go off a long ways in all different directions.”
“But they were never finished,” Janx added.
“Yeah.” Hildra shrugged. “Too expensive, I guess. Or maybe the digging was too slow.” She sparked her cigarette and took a deep drag. “Y’know, I’ve come to like Oct tobacco. It’s stronger.”
Janx shook his head disgustedly. “Can’t stand the shit.”
“Well, it’s all these Sivust boys have.”
Avery had been standing, but now he felt suddenly drained and reclined on one of the benches, which creaked under his weight. It likely hadn’t supported anyone in fifty years. He looked out over the workers restoring two different lines of trains.
“Why are they coal-burning trains, not electric?” he said.
Thick chimneys jutted up from the engine compartments of each train, and a flatbed full of coal was hitched behind them.
“Cause there’s no electricity where they’re goin’, Doc,” Janx said. “They go a long damn ways, remember.”
Avery frowned. “It just seems like an awful lot of effort going into an escape route when the same effort could be applied to making sure the Black Sect doesn’t need to escape. Patrols, spies, something.” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. He still felt cloudy from his illness, and his mind had a tendency to drift, to think about Ani and Sheridan.
Hildra blew a plume of smoke at him. “They’re thinking big-picture, Doc. These tracks link up with other tracks, which link up with others ... I been studyin’ the maps, they’
re really complicated ... anyway, they all run west and east and south and north, some of the lines actually passing under Octung’s borders, some linking up with lines from other countries, lines that were abandoned or whatnot. Most of the lines were never finished, but we’ve been working on a way to get from Point A to B to M to Z. It’s a pain in the ass, sometimes we have to find ways to go north and then east and then south in order to finally go west again, but we think it’s possible.”
“Possible to do what?” Avery felt very tired. He’d brought a flask with him, but he was trying, heroically, not to drink from it. It was only just after noon, after all—at least, by surface time. It was always night down here. “Where exactly are you trying to go?”
Janx and Hildra glanced at each other again.
“I can’t believe she hasn’t told you yet,” Hildra said, disgusted. “It should be her, not us. Typical.”
“Told me ... told me what?” A fist was starting to clench and unclench somewhere in the front of his skull. A man hammering something on a piece of metal nearby made it clench tighter.
“The Device,” Janx said. “They’re trying to find a way to move the Device. To get it out of the country.”
“Ah.” Avery nodded, thinking he finally understood. “They’re wanting to work on it while on the move, then. To get out of the heat, so to speak. That makes sense. But ... I thought ... it will be finished within a day, maybe hours. They won’t have need of these trains. So why still work on them?”
Janx and Hildra continued to stare at him. They seemed uncomfortable.
“That’s not quite it, Doc.” Janx scratched the back of his neck and looked as if he were trying to avoid something.
Avery was beginning to think he’d need a sip on that flask, after all. “Please, just tell me, whatever it is.”
“I guess she didn’t want to tell ya when you were sick. Afraid to make you worse. And she’s been busy since. Well, all right then, but you’re not going to like it.” Janx took a breath. “The Device, well, it’s like a big engine, right? So what do you think fuels it?”
“I ... not gasoline, I take it?”
“I wish,” Hildra said.
“It needs—” Janx started.
Footsteps approached them, and a rough-looking man appeared, looking as if he had urgent business. “It’s the furnace, guys. There’s serious trouble.”
Janx scowled at him, then Avery.
“Later,” Janx promised.
He and Hildra set off to assist with the work, leaving Avery to wonder what their big news had been. Something to do with moving the Device, obviously, and something about its fuel. After a while, when they didn’t come back, he decided it was about time to resume his own work. Thirty minutes later a woman screamed under him.
“Stop! Stop! You’re killing me!”
Avery paused in applying salve to the wound on the woman’s ankle. They were in one of the ramshackle huts of the town. Some unnamed spider had bitten the woman’s leg two days ago and the venom had caused a nasty sore with dark blue lines radiating in every direction. A foul-smelling pus leaked from the wound.
“I know the salve’s painful, but it’s the only way,” Avery told her.
A roughspun woman with big bones and a heavy face, she glared at him. “Just ... go slower,” she said.
Avery nodded and resumed. The woman’s husband stood nervously over her, having been holding her down while Avery worked, spreading an unfortunately-painful salve over the lower half of the woman’s leg, where veins, growing darker, rose from the skin. The husband was a large, hard-looking man, and he wore a necklace in the shape of a jade trident. His young daughter, about Ani’s age, stood nearby, squeezing a ragged stuffed doll anxiously. She was very pale, and she flinched every time the woman screamed. Avery had concocted the salve himself, using recovered bodies of the toxic spiders and mixing their venom with certain chemicals he had in his new medical kit, but the salve was still in an early stage. The Sivusts who’d been squatting in Golna had no doctor of their own—the two they’d had originally had both died—but they had the same ailments as any other population, and a few new ones, too—like the bites of the weird and unclassified arachnids that inhabited the ruins with them. Avery had had to amputate three limbs in the last four days thanks to the bugs and he didn’t want to have to do a fourth today, especially with the woman’s daughter watching on.
“I’m done,” Avery said finally.
“Thank you, Doctor,” his patient gasped. Sweat bathed her face, and Avery dabbed at it with a wet cloth.
The little girl seemed to summon her courage and stepped forward, laying her hand on her mother’s. “Are you all right, Mama?”
The woman tried to smile, but it came out as more of a grimace. “I’m fine, darling. Go and ... fetch me some water.” Her voice faltered, and the girl turned and vanished from the hut.
Avery began wrapping up the wound, but before he could finish someone popped into the doorway.
“Doctor,” the youth said. “Come quick!”
“Just a minute.”
“No, you don’t understand. It’s Her Grace Layanna. She’s sent for you.”
Surprisingly, it was his patient who leaned forward, propping herself up on shaky arms, and said, “Is it … the Great Work?”
“Is that it?” the husband said, grabbing his trident necklace. “Is it done?”
The boy hesitated, then nodded. “They’re finishing it even now!”
The woman and her husband exclaimed joyfully. Avery felt a rush of eagerness, too. Finally. After all this time and distance, after innumerable deaths, the machine that would end the war was nearly done. He was speechless.
The husband patted him on the shoulder. “Go on, Doctor. I’ll finish wrapping the wound.”
Nodding, Avery gathered his medical kit and followed the boy through the settlement. “Is it true?” Avery asked.
“You’ll see, sir.” The youth’s face twitched with nerves. “You’ll see.”
Around Avery lights shone from the windows of the ruined town, and songs of mourning were already issuing from the warehouse/temple in its center. Even after nearly a week here, it was odd seeing this forlorn place so fully occupied, so full of life. Thousands had gathered to Golna, and they carried on the business of living much as they would anywhere else. Avery smelled cook-fires and meat smoking over the pit. People strung laundry lines between half-collapsed buildings and fanned the clothes to simulate the wind that was largely absent here. Occasionally a warm draft would belch up from the abyss, but that was it.
Avery’s mind spun at the thought of the Device being fired, but something was making him uncomfortable. There was a nervousness evident in the boy as well as excitement. His face was pale, his eyes shining over-bright. He moved quickly but warily, like a cat on the run, and he kept glancing around as if expecting someone to jump out at him.
“What is it?” Avery said. “What’s wrong?”
The boy swallowed. “It’s probably nothing.”
“But?”
The boy grimaced. “When they told me to come fetch you, they were interrupted by Captain Sygrel. He had a report. Something bad. Some of his men had gone missing in the tunnels. He’d sent out more to find them, but those went missing, too.”
Hairs prickled along Avery’s arms. “The Collossum’s soldiers. It has to be.”
The boy looked ill. “Maybe not. Maybe some thing in the tunnels. We don’t know what all’s out there. The hunters find new things every day.”
“We’d better—”
One moment Avery and the boy had been walking toward the temple, where tides of mourners in salmon robes were entering to begin the rites for Uvrista. Some held candles or offerings—a bit of jewelry, a child’s toy, a lucky pig’s ear—to hurl into the abyss after her. In the next moment, appearing as if out of nowhere, Octunggen troops rushed through the buildings in ordered rows, guns firing and mowing down everyone in their path.
* * *
It must have been a time-bomb, Avery thought in the instant after it began. The Octunggen must have triggered one of their weapons that suspended time over Golna while they began their attack, giving them the element of surprise and rendering the Sivusts all but helpless.
“But ... but ...” the boy said.
Avery grabbed his elbow and hurried on. “Run!”
Gunfire and screams sounded throughout the ruins. The stormtroopers were far away yet. Avery could just see them between the buildings near the tracks, advancing in ordered columns, shields high, firing all about them. A slim shape that might have been the little girl sent to fetch water ran to the hut where her mother was, clutching something that might have been a pail or a stuffed doll to her chest. Suddenly she stumbled, as if her strings had been cut, and fell to the ground. Blood spread around her.
Avery stopped, but the boy grabbed his hand and pulled him on.
“There’s no time! The Great Work!”
The Octunggen would have to push much deeper into the city to reach the temple, Avery saw. Already Sivusts with guns were organizing themselves. Bunches rushed out of shack and warehouse, drug lab and hovel, clutching whatever weapon was handy, be it pistol, shotgun, submachine gun or bat embedded with shards of glass. A stream of men and women in armor and bearing weapons, some decidedly strange, poured from the temple ahead, led by Sygrel.
The two sides rushed at each other through the narrow mazes of the city, meeting in a blaze of otherworldly weapons and gunfire. Weird green flames consumed a building near the tracks, then another. One whole warehouse seemed to melt. A phalanx of Sivust troops flickered and vanished. The Sivusts fought back, but it was a vain effort. They were outnumbered a hundred to one, and those that served the Collossum were better armed.
As Avery ran toward the temple, he turned to see strange-colored fires limn buildings and Octunggen troops swarm through the town. In the distance more troops poured from the train that had just arrived, and at their head—Avery stared—was Uthua. It could be no other. Huge and dark and gelatinous, the ancient R’loth in his other-form led the host of troops against the city’s defenders. He encountered a phalanx of Sivusts that, judging from their armor, were probably led by Sygrel, and tore into them with tentacle and pseudopod, a great mountain of death. He slaughtered the defenders like some sort of hurricane given flesh, or half-flesh, ripping them apart in fountains of blood, passing venom and fire into them, stuffing them inside his sac to be consumed—eaten—and then rolling on, plunging deeper into the city.