by Jack Conner
And exterior.
They were outside.
Avery stared. Buildings heaped up all around him, marching in waves to all sides. The train had emerged from the subway and now moved—or sat, rather, for the moment—along an elevated rail cutting through a large city. Avery felt the sunlight on his skin for the first time in a long while. He relished it. Sweat burst up from his pores. The light actually burned him. He threw back his head and laughed. In delight, he climbed to his feet and laughed. He rattled his chain and jumped up and down in glee like a schoolboy. Hildebrand, sensing his excitement, hooted energetically.
“We’re free!” Avery said. “We’re free!”
He was aware of the irony of this as he said it, but he couldn’t stop the feeling. Slowly, his eyes adjusted, and he began to take in his surroundings more carefully.
The buildings ...
The glee drained away from him.
“Dear gods, look at them.”
Clattering alerted him. Sheridan was coming. Hastily, he composed himself, but he couldn’t force away his shock.
Looking poorly composed herself, Sheridan entered. She was still blinking, and her eyes were red. He knew she wouldn’t have been able to continue driving the train till her vision adjusted.
“Good day, Doctor,” she said, sounding oddly cheerful.
“Good day,” he replied with the same cheerfulness. It was hard not to be chipper. He rattled the chain. “May I ... ?”
She shrugged and unlocked him. He rubbed his wrist in gratitude.
“Why don’t we go forward together?” she said.
That was an odd but welcome request. Still rubbing his wrist, he accompanied her, neither speaking of what was really on their minds—not yet, they had to collect their thoughts first—at last taking up station in the engine compartment. Ahead stretched an unobstructed view of the city, and he stared at it, unnerved, while she started up the engine once more, and soon smoke bellowed from the chimney as she drove them along the rails, which snaked through the spires in broad arcs and smooth straights. The buildings scrolled by.
The buildings ...
Avery fumbled for a word, but couldn’t find it. The buildings they passed were whitish and translucent, not like glass but rather like the sac of a jellyfish. One couldn’t see through them with any real clarity, but one could see through them; they seemed vaguely organic somehow, as if all that steel and concrete and glass had been transformed into fatty flesh. Avery and Sheridan were passing through mountains of dead, translucent flesh. He gaped at the towers, his mind spinning. Nothing moved on the streets. No activity was visible through the diaphanous walls of the buildings. The city ... was dead.
“What did you do to this place?” he asked.
“I didn’t do anything, Doctor.”
“Octung certainly did.”
She let out something that might have been a sigh. “This must be Vulat. I’ve heard about it. I—”
Suddenly she jerked the brake lever, and the whole train lurched. Avery was flung against the window, smacking his cheek so hard he saw flares burst behind his eyes. Metal squealed. Sheridan cursed. When Avery righted himself, he saw that the train was barreling down a section of tracks that changed. Not fifty yards down the rails, the rails became the same whitish, translucent flesh as the rest of the city. If the train reached that section, it would either sink through or hurtle off. Sheridan braked so hard and fast that Avery feared they would be thrown from the tracks in any case.
The fleshy tracks neared ... and neared ...
“Stop the train!” said Avery.
“Can’t you see that’s what I’m doing!”
The train finally squealed to a halt, and Avery and Sheridan lurched forward, then back. He took deep breaths, wiped sweat out of his eyes. Just a few yards beyond the engine compartment the tracks turned whitish and fleshy. If he looked hard enough and sort of squinted, he could see the ground and columns through them.
“What did you people do to this place?” he said.
She was sucking in deep breaths and wiping hair out of her eyes. “First let’s figure out what we’re going to do.”
“We’re not going back to the tunnels, I can tell you that much.”
“I didn’t say we were.”
“If you attempt to, I’ll leave, and you still need my treatments.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then what do you suggest?”
He nodded to the city. “We’re going to have to make our way afoot.”
“I suppose there’s no other option.”
They prepared themselves. Avery packed a backpack, some maps, gathered Hildebrand and rejoined Sheridan, who carried the Device on her back, outside on the flat coal car. He enjoyed the wind—the honest to goodness wind that gusted around him—and couldn’t resist a smile even as the sight of the fleshy, dead city stretching in all directions traced clammy fingers down his spine. The wind brought a hint of the unpleasant stench that would surely be waiting for them below.
“Well,” Sheridan said, “are we going to do this or not?”
They clambered down from the coal car and picked their way along the tracks until they encountered one of the main columns that held the tracks aloft. Working together, they attached the rope which Sheridan had coiled over her shoulder to the top of the column and lowered themselves down it, bit by painful bit. Hildebrand clung to Avery’s neck tightly the whole way, screeching in fear. “It’ll be okay,” Avery told him. “It’ll be okay.” He thought he was going to throw up at the sight of the ground tilted below him, but somehow he reached it with the contents of his stomach intact. Dizzily, he stared up at the train, which perched on its tracks far, far above. In some strange way, he realized he would miss it. It had been his home—their home, he corrected himself—for many days.
How many days? At least two weeks, surely, since leaving Golna. Add the four days in Golna itself after Deep Night ... That meant about two or so weeks before Octung drew the war to a close, if Uthua’s calculations had been correct. Two weeks for Avery to get the Device back from Sheridan, somehow rendezvous with Layanna and activate the Device ...
He turned sideways to see Sheridan looking at him. Then she sort of huffed and turned to survey the streets and buildings around them.
“This way,” she said, and set off.
With misgivings, but preferring this to the dark and lonesome tunnels, Avery joined her. He studied the buildings closer. They were exotic and strange, with flowering minarets for spires and huge hunched domes pushing against the sky. It probably would have been a colorful city, too, if not for its current condition.
“Laisha,” he breathed. “We must be in Laisha.”
Sheridan nodded. “Vulat is—was—one of its major cities.”
The city smelled like a million decaying sea creatures all piled up together. Soon he felt nauseas all over again, but this time exponentially worse than before. His eyes burned, and his sinuses stung. Even Sheridan appeared wretched.
“Dear gods,” she muttered.
They tore off pieces of their clothing and wrapped them about their lower faces, using them as impromptu filters, but it only helped a little.
Soon they were making their way down a broad avenue, what must have been a main artery of Vulat before whatever calamity had struck it had struck it. Great buildings reared to either side, and Avery saw their faces glistening in the afternoon sunlight. Sheets of moisture seemed to trickle down them in steady torrents, and it was actually quite pretty—until he realized what he was looking at. The buildings were rotting: the glistening waterfalls that coursed down the towers’ faces were actually the results of the buildings’ flesh liquefying. In some places the rivers of liquid pooled so thickly on the roads that Avery and Sheridan had to go around, and a few of these rivers had congealed into thick, hard pools that gave off a worse stink than the buildings.
Huge, sagging, decaying towers of flesh piled all around. That’s all there was. That and flies. Thousands, million
s of the horrid little monsters buzzed and swarmed, coating the faces of the buildings in black, living blankets. It must have been like heaven to the biters. But there was so much flesh, it even made the great numbers of the insects pale in significance to the seas, the oceans, of dead, rotting flesh.
“So,” Avery said, coughing through his filter, “you were going to tell me—what did your friends do to this place?”
“It happened fairly recently. Laisha was offered the choice of surrendering or being crushed. I don’t know how much you know about Laisha, but it’s in a huge swamp that stretches hundreds of miles. The rocky area we’re passing through gives way immediately past Vulat to a thick jungle, which quickly becomes swampland. Octung couldn’t afford to take the time or resources to conquer the country—its terrain is a repellant to any land invasion. So, when Laisha refused to submit, Octung hit Vulat, one of its prize cities, with a new super-weapon. You see the results.”
“A whole city ... gods. And what about the people?”
“What could survive this?”
“Hundreds of thousands must have died.”
“Millions. Anyway, it worked. Octung threatened to hit Ayu next—that’s the capital city of Laisha—and the government surrendered.”
“They didn’t have much choice, did they?”
“I believe that was the idea.”
Avery looked sideways at her. She seemed to show no emotion. The fleshy ground sucked and slurped at their feet with every step. He wanted to ask her how she could work for the people who’d done this, but he knew that would only get a curt reply. Instead, he said, “How? What exactly did they do to this place?”
Her brow furrowed briefly. “Some sort of planar bomb, I heard it called. Warped the planes where it struck. Allowed our world to be opened up ... to something else.”
He felt colder. “What ‘else’?”
She shrugged, the Device riding up on her back slightly. “I don’t know. You’re the man of science, you tell me.”
“I have no idea.”
“Then why are you asking me? Anyway, that’s my understanding. And it’s also why we need to avoid the town center.”
“Why?”
“That’s where the bomb struck. Some lingering effects of the detonation may still be present.”
“Is it possible the ... the door, if that’s the right word ... could still be open?”
“I doubt it. Our engineers are better than that. They wouldn’t have built the bomb if that could happen.” But he could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“On the other hand,” he said slowly, “there must be some reason why they haven’t deployed that particular weapon again. I think I would have heard if two major cities had been wiped out like this.”
The Device rose up and down. “Let’s hope for the best, then.”
They avoided the town center. Neither of them had been to Vulat before, but they could see the buildings getting steadily higher in a certain direction, and they went wide around it. The train had entered the city not far from the center, actually, so they simply went in the direction where the buildings seemed the smallest. Vulat was set in a valley in the Sironac Mountains, and a cool wintry breeze blew down through the spires, taking some of the stench away, but not nearly enough. Avery soon disgorged the contents of his stomach, as did both Sheridan and Hildebrand. They all vomited several times as the day waned, even though they heaved only dryly after the first time or two.
Sheridan couldn’t walk fast with her leg, and they had to take frequent breaks. Hildebrand attempted to explore periodically, but the sucking, fleshy ground seemed to terrify him, and he always scampered back to Avery quickly, leaving little fat-like deposits on Avery’s clothes. Avery was afraid to touch the globs, so he wiped them off with a towel he’d packed—which he then could use for no other purpose. He was mortally afraid of falling, of going head-first into the spongy, translucent material that used to be the streets and sidewalks of Vulat. What would happen if one ingested the substance? It didn’t seem to be hurting the flies any, but then he hadn’t exactly studied the effects on them, either. He imagined the residents of the region being frightened of flies for generations to come. Mommy, don’t let the flies get me!
When they came to a certain broad avenue that ran in a slope toward downtown, he and Sheridan were able to see a blurring, rippling effect right where the epicenter of the bombing would have been. It distorted the view of buildings and courtyards, and sort of ... shimmered.
“What is that?” Avery said.
“Echoes. Echoes of the bomb. That’s all.”
He hoped that’s all it was.
They walked on. The sun lowered behind drooping, translucent towers, turning red as it did, and the blood-red sun visible as a blurry sphere through the walls of the dead towers was a sight Avery knew he would never forget, whether he lived one more day or a hundred years to come.
“We do live in a strange world, don’t we?” he said.
Sheridan was reclining on a wobbly bank of flesh that had at one point been a short retaining wall bordering the sidewalk. What had been a grassy, tree-filled lawn leading to some exotic mansion stretched away in the background, but now the mansion was merely a blob of shiny decaying flesh. The strange thing was that, like the rest of the city, Avery could still see most of its minute details, from the ornate bases and heads to its columns to the delicate trim-work around the windows. Only it was all composed of dead flesh now, and where the flesh had decomposed the details were impossible to see. The windows themselves were like dragonfly wings.
“Yes,” Sheridan said tiredly, “and it’s only getting stranger.”
Soon after the sun sank behind the mountains two of the three moons became visible through the translucent flesh of the city’s buildings, and one mounted the sky overhead while the other made a slow spiral around the horizon. The dead city glowed eerily in the bone-white illumination, and somehow it seemed more at home in this light. It was a ghost city. Beautiful in a horrible way.
Despite his nausea, Avery grew hungry. He and Sheridan gnawed on snack bars they’d brought along, and he shared his with Hildebrand.
“Why do you keep that thing around?” Sheridan said. “He’s a rat with hands.”
“First of all, I seem to recall someone who has a batkin, and those are far less defensible pets. Second, Hildebrand saved my life.”
Hildebrand hooted, but this might have been because Avery was scratching him under the chin.
“I wonder where Janx and Layanna and Hildra are,” he mused.
“Dead, most likely. There are a lot of predators in those caverns.”
“Must you be so cheery?”
“If I were cheery I wouldn’t be here,” she said.
“That’s a rather dismal way of looking at things.”
“Says the man who’s watched the world out of a bottle for the last few years.”
He started to snap something at her, but he held it back. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve made some questionable decisions, I don’t deny. But who hasn’t? You?”
By the light of the moons, and their strange ability to make buildings glow, he saw Sheridan’s eyes narrow. “I’ve done what I had to do,” she said.
“For who?” When she didn’t answer, he prompted, “Your daughter?”
Her tone sharpened. “Don’t you speak of her.”
“I lost a daughter, too.”
“You didn’t lose mine.”
“So your daughter is more important than mine?”
She started to say something, but this time it was she who held herself back. “My daughter meant the world to me.”
Carefully, he said, “As did mine. She still does.”
“Bullshit.”
“How can you say that?”
“If she did, you would have done what I asked back in Cuithril. You would have saved her at the cost of Layanna.”
He wanted to strangle Sheridan. If he had done what she’d said, made that deci
sion in Cuithril, it would have meant the world. He literally would have chosen Ani over everyone on the planet, even the planet itself.
“I ... couldn’t have done that,” he said.
“Exactly. And that’s why I call bullshit.”
“So ... you would have traded your daughter for the world?”
“In a heartbeat, Doctor. In a fucking heartbeat.” She stopped and stared at him, and he could feel the rage radiating off her, the hate. “More than that, I would sacrifice the world just to avenge her. And if necessary, if it comes to that, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
With that, she marched off, leaving him behind.
He scrambled after her. “Are you really so full of rage that you would contemplate such a thing? That seems selfish to the point of madness. You’ve always struck me as a coolly logical person, and I don’t see how—“
Her next words came in a low voice. “First of all, you don’t know me as well as you think. Second, shut up. I heard something.”
“What?”
She cocked her head, listening.
Feeling a trace of fear, he listened, too. He heard nothing, save some vague slurping, glooping noises as the buildings, very slowly, settled and collapsed around them. He’d been hearing the noises steadily all day and they barely registered. But if he listened closely he could hear other sounds beneath them, a sort of ...
... slapping noise. Then again ... and again ... getting louder ...
“Hells.”
No sooner was the word out of his mouth than it sprang out from behind the corner of the nearest building.
Avery stared in horror, feeling his legs grow weak.
Sheridan swore.
There was something of the salamander in it, and something of the cricket. Overall, however, it resembled a sort of toad. A huge, white, ghostly toad, all covered in glittering, silvery feathers. It towered at least ten feet off the ground. Streamers of translucent flesh hung from its great maw; it had obviously been feeding. Its huge, weird, multi-faceted eyes stared unblinking.