The Atomic Sea: Part Four: The Twilight City

by Jack Conner

  If he stayed he could free Ani.

  “Francis!” Sheridan shouted. “No!”

  She was turning back to look at him. Was she bringing her gun around, too?

  He grabbed the Device off the seat and leapt from the car. He hit the ground and rolled, scraping his back, arms and legs, and slicing open a small wound on his scalp, but he was careful to keep the Device from being crushed under his weight. He came to rest in a puddle.

  Panting, he forced himself to his feet. He ached all over. Blood matted his hair.

  The limousine, with Sheridan and Carum still firing out the back, vanished up the alley. Sheridan met his eyes, looking disappointed in him, and was gone.

  He was tempted to laugh, but he had more immediate concerns. Hurriedly he donned the pack carrying the Device. It was heavy.

  Footsteps sounded down the alley, coming straight for him.

  They propelled him toward a dumpster, and from there he managed to climb to a fire escape, wobbly because of the new weight on his back. Even as the mob flooded the alley, he heaved himself onto a rooftop garden, where he lay panting on his side against warm bricks while the sounds of violence echoed all around. He didn’t think they had seen him. Please let them go past. He wondered if Sheridan had made it. He smelled lilacs and honeysuckle.

  When he could, he picked himself up and pushed his way from rooftop to rooftop, away from the mob. Several times he was obliged to flee.

  The rioting continued for hours. By nightfall it was still going, and it would move from one part of the city to another, then back again. The Lai were removing the bodies from the statues of Lagu and impaling Octunggen soldiers on Lagu’s fangs in their places. Several victims wore no uniform and looked like civilians; the Lai were massacring any foreigner they could get their hands on.

  Avery saw fires around the palace and knew that General Carum, if she still lived, had been besieged. Sheridan, too, presumably.

  Hunger gnawed at him, and he realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He harvested some plums from the tree of a particular garden and ate them ravenously while the shouting and madness continued—yelling, the crashing of metal, the breaking of glass. It looked as if the flare-up had exploded into an all-out riot. Perhaps even a revolution. Avery allowed himself to feel a rush of hope. That is, until he looked to the skies. A long wedge of transport planes hurled out from the Over-City and swept low over Ayu. They landed at the airfield to the west, dropped something off, and took to the skies again.

  Soon Octunggen military vehicles, loaded with troops, trundled through the city from the direction of the airfield. Large guns thundered. People screamed. The mobs began to disperse.

  Avery stayed on the rooftop for as long as he could, until its owner stepped out to observe the chaos. He didn’t see Avery, but Avery saw him, and the doctor quickly crossed to anther rooftop, then another. He traveled not over the crude aerial bridges of Ghenisa but over stately, arched spans, ornately carved and painted. The Lai loved their rooftop gardens, and they devoted much time and craft into their keeping. The craft must have taken up whole facets of their culture, as there were innumerable bridges from building to building, as if travel to a neighbor’s garden was such a common occurrence a shortcut was required. The gardens, as a rule, were lush, exotic, and gave off heady perfumes. Some had streams cutting through them, or little hillocks. Many were walled, with ornate gates leading out to the bridges. This was obviously not a poor district.

  Avery found a quiet spot under a bush to sleep in when it grew dark, and though he could still hear the sound of rioters clashing with troops in the background, he closed his eyes and slept. The Device rested beside him.

  The next day the fighting continued, though it was more balanced now, and the ending inevitable. The screaming of victims writhing on Lagu’s fangs chewed at Avery’s nerves. He wandered through gardens, watching the sporadic violence and doing his best to keep well away from it. He had no plan, other than simple survival. He had no hope. No money. No weapons. All he had was the Device.

  He had to get out of the city, had to get it away from the Octunggen. He didn’t know how he could activate the Device without Layanna, but he had to try. At the very least, he had the opportunity of delaying Octung’s victory for a hundred years.

  How can I survive the swamps on my own? He would need the help of the resistance. The locals wanted blood, which wouldn’t make it easy, but the whole war had come down to this. Layanna, Hildra and Janx may have given their lives for this chance. If only he could find Dr. Lis—

  There was only one thing to try: approach the participants of the violence; many of them would be resistance fighters. He would have to trust to luck.

  He squared his shoulders, adjusted the pack on his back and made his way from roof to roof until he found a group of men smoking and staring down at the street. They were in the religious quarter, and temples loomed to all sides. Somewhere fire crackled, and gunshots popped. On the street below people were looting the holy buildings. Dead priests lay before smoking doorways. Avery stepped forward, through a row of banana trees. The men had their backs to him, staring downward, four of them. One said something to another, and they laughed coarsely. With any luck one of them spoke Octunggen. With even more luck, one could be persuaded to take Avery out of the city, or at least into the folds of the resistance movement where he might find Dr. Lis.

  “Excuse me,” Avery said.

  They turned about, holding blood-spattered machetes in their hands. It had been too dark for him to see the weapons. The men saw him, and their eyes widened as if they had just received a present.

  “I’m a friend,” Avery said. “I’m not Octunggen. I’m on a mission to stop Octung.”

  “Stop this,” one said in heavily-accented Octunggen, shaking his dripping machete.

  Leering, they fanned out and stepped closer.

  Avery had known this was a possibility, and he had already mapped out the best escape route. However, as he poised himself to run, he heard a sound behind him and turned just in time to see a Lai, doubtless one of the group, rush him from behind. The man had likely been urinating behind a hedge. Now he barreled into Avery and seized his arms from the rear, but awkwardly, having to contend with the backpack.

  The others laughed and cracked jokes in Lai, all very close now. Avery could smell the overly sweet stench of their alcohol mixed with the sour smell of their sweat. They were dirty, begrimed men, with dark stains on their clothes.

  One said something and the others leapt forward, pushed Avery to the floor and bound his hands with rope they must have carried on them for this very purpose. They hefted him over their shoulders, not even pausing to remove the Device. Three of them carried him while the other two went ahead. They picked their way across a bridge, to a building with a fire escape, and clattered down it into an alley.

  No no no, Avery thought. Panic flooded him. He could barely breathe. How had everything gone so horribly wrong?

  They jounced him up and down so hard he could only blurrily see where they were taking him, but he was aware of passing down a wide street with statues of strange gods to all sides. Bodies littered the road. A boy clutching some shiny object fled just steps ahead of a gaggle of other boys. The sound of organized machine-gun fire echoed in the near distance; the Octunggen weren’t far away. But too far to be of any help to Avery.

  At last he saw where they were going, and his heart sank.

  The grand façade of the Temple to Lagu reared ahead, the great dog statues flanking the wide marble steps leading up to the red-lacquered door. Bodies hung from the statues’ mouths. One wore a dark uniform.

  The body impaled on the other tooth caught his eye, and with a swell of dismay he realized why Dr. Lis had not come to him. The sign dangling from her body was in Lai, but he had come to recognize several Lai words over the past few days. It read Collaborator.

  The men bustled Avery past her, up the stairs, through the doors and into a cavernous main room
. Instantly Avery was engulfed with the stench of rotting meat, and those around him waved stalks of incense or held perfumed kerchiefs over their mouths. He was offered neither. The main room had a lofty, gold-leaf ceiling supported by beautiful jade columns. There were no pews but rows and rows of velvet cushions for worshippers to kneel on, and looming over everything, just as Avery had known it would be, was the great statue of Lagu. This one was much bigger than the ones outside, perhaps fifty feet high, of gleaming black onyx and a shockingly red mouth in its jutting snout, and blazing eyes with onyx pupils, jade irises and ivory whites. A large group of Lai had already gathered here, praying on the cushions. Ornate steps curled up the sides of the statue, half hidden by the canine body, leading via several switchbacks to the great gaping mouth. There two bodies hung, one from each lower canine. One still moved. Blood dripped from them over Lagu’s jaw, and fell almost fifty feet to spatter the floor below. There were no jars to collect the victims’ bloods, no one to mourn them.

  The stench of rotting meat grew stronger with every inch the men took toward the statue.

  “No,” Avery said, as they neared the stairs. “No, please, you don’t have to do this. I’m a friend.”

  They ignored him. His body shuddered as they reached the stairs. To make it easier to carry him up, the men tore the Device off his back, tossed it to the floor like scrap, then proceeded upward, toward Lagu’s waiting maw. The men laughed, then muttered things that might have been religious in nature, judging by their more serious tone. As Avery neared the mouth, the reek of rotting meat grew so strong that he was nearly sick.

  The men drew abreast the mouth, and Avery saw what caused the stench. The Lai had stuffed their various sacrifices over the years down Lagu’s gullet, perhaps after impaling them, and they had doubtless filled a massive hollow interior. General Carum had told him that they burned the remains periodically, but the resulting stink was so bad and lasted so long that they didn’t do it very often. The priests lived in perpetual disease.

  They had filled it so full of corpses of various animals that they had stuffed it to capacity, and bodies jutted up from its gullet into its mouth, reeking and swollen, slits crawling up their sides as they swelled. The last half dozen bodies were of men and a couple women, but beyond that it was a nightmare of what looked like rotten chickens and goats. The smell was so bad that Avery would have retched if he’d had anything more in his belly than a few peaches. The flies were thicker than hardened blood.

  They reached the top. The front two men pulled off the body impaled on the nearer tooth and stuffed it with the others, using a long pole that stood in an ornate mount, some sort of holy stuffer. Flies exploded at the commotion.

  The Octunggen man on the other tooth, his face a mask of misery, the fang protruding from his belly, looked over to see who his new death-mate would be. His eyes locked with Avery’s, then rolled up in spasm of pain. Flies crawled along his cheek.

  Avery stared from him to the tooth that had just been vacated. He thought it was made of onyx, painted white but now stained with half-dried gore. This was it, he realized. His battle to unseat gods from their power had resulted in him being fed to yet another god. Was the whole world mad?

  Grimacing at the smell but somehow smiling at the same time, the four men grabbed Avery by each limb and manhandled him half inside Lagu’s mouth. They were so close to the dying man that he actually reached out and grabbed one Lai ankle, only for a moment, then fell away.

  They positioned Avery over the fang. Its tip, duller than he would have thought, pricked his lower back. That’s where it would go. Right beside my spine. He wondered if it would paralyze him as it went in. The men began to press—

  A gunshot blasted from within the temple.

  Everyone turned to look.

  Screams erupted. Avery was tilted up, so he couldn’t see what had caused the sensation, but he did make out new, strange lights bathing the roof of Lagu’s mouth, which had been painted red. He made out blue and green and many other colors, rippling like sunlight on the sea.

  The men dropped him. They hadn’t driven him down, so his fall didn’t have enough strength to impale him, not on that dull tooth, and he merely hit the rounded tip, slid sideways and landed face to face with the dying man. Veins protruded on the man’s face, and his eyes bulged out in pain. A bit of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  The sound of many footsteps reached Avery’s ears, as of a great number of people fleeing in terror, and shrieks went with them, echoing off the inner walls. From the sound of it, they ran from the entrance, dividing around the statue to vanish into the rooms beyond, the abode of the priests. Avery’s abductors must be among them, as they were gone.

  Gasping, feeling a throb in his back where he’d struck the tooth, he craned his head to see what had happened, but the jut of Lagu’s lower jaw prevented him from seeing anything below.

  Shortly, footsteps sounded on the stairs coming up. Avery struggled to break the ropes that bound him, struggled to sit up, but he could only wriggle helplessly.

  Strong arms seized him and lifted him up.

  Hells, Avery thought. They were going to impale him after all. Or perhaps it was Octunggen this time and they would simply shoot him.

  The arms, which were unusually thick and muscular, spun him about and brought him face-to-face with a brutal visage—a long, broad, square-jawed face covered in scars and stubble, a leather patch where the nose had been torn away, and two intense blue-gray eyes staring back at him.

  It was the most beautiful sight Avery had ever seen in his life.

  “Janx!”

  The harsh face split into a grin, and the huge whaler embraced him tightly, slapping him soundly on the back, so hard it hurt—but at the same time was a more welcome feeling than any Avery could remember—then pulled back.

  “You’ve looked better,” Janx said.

  Avery felt tears in his eyes. “You, too.”

  Janx smiled, a gold tooth winking.

  “Is everyone else here?” Avery asked. “Are you all alive? How did you get here? How did you free me?”

  “Let’s get out of here first. Answers later.”

  * * *

  At the base of the stairs Hildra was pointing a gun at one of the doorways the mob must have taken, and Layanna sat on the floor taking deep, ragged breaths, her face slick with sweat. The Device rested near her. Avery assumed she had just brought over her other-self, that that had been the cause of the strange lights. That’s what had frightened Lagu’s worshippers away. One god invading the temple of another.

  When she saw Avery, she climbed to her feet and embraced him tightly. He hugged back, unable to remember at the moment that they were supposed to be mad at each other. When they separated, though, she looked suddenly uncomfortable. What am I going to tell her about Sheridan?

  Hildra patted him on the shoulder. “Good to see you, Doc. Where’s Hildebrand?”

  “Back at the Palace. In our ... my room. I guess, uh, Sheridan has him.”

  Hildra didn’t look pleased at this, but instead of commenting on it, she said, “Let’s book.”

  “At least we have the Device,” Avery said.

  Layanna frowned at the backpack. “That’s it?”

  “Of course.” All I had to do was sacrifice Ani to get it. But he did not tell them that.

  Janx strapped the pack on his back and they left the temple, found stairs leading up to a rooftop and fled from roof to roof until the temple quarter and the sound of rioting was well away. When at last they’d put enough distance between them and any visible danger, they stopped and regrouped. Hildra gave Avery a hug, and Janx squeezed his arm. Avery’s eyes burned, and he realized he was crying. More embraces and exclamations ensued.

  Panting and sweating, they collapsed into chairs and benches around a pretty, lily-covered pond. Frogs croaked in it. It was a large, walled garden whose gate Janx had casually forced opened. Exhausted, Avery settled into a chair fashioned of bri
cks of soil and overgrown with fragrant grass, so that he set in a green, velvety cushion of sweet aromas. White flowers sprang up between his fingers. The moons and stars wheeled overhead, in between the drifting airships of Lai quasi-nobles—and of course the Octunggen soldiers—and such was his giddiness that the shapes made him dizzy.

  “Tell me how you came to be here,” he said.

  “Slowly,” Janx said, unstrapping the Device and setting it down. “We just followed you up the tracks.”

  “And up them. And up them.” Hildra groaned. “We walked down that damned tunnel for ages. Finally we found a hand-cart. Oh, and then that dead-flesh town! Shit! And the fucking swamp!”

  “Lucky our resident goddess was able to impress some of the locals,” Janx said, hiking his chin at Layanna. “Got them to let us use one of their flat-boats and guide us over. It was a near thing even then. We had to dodge Oct patrols the whole way. Once we almost got et by some sort of giant snail.” He made a face. “It’s been a time.”

  “Sounds like it,” Avery said.

  “We just followed the Device,” Layanna said. “I could sense it.” Her gaze returned to the backpack, but she wasn’t wearing the relieved look Avery had expected. She looked confused.

  “Got here just in time to wind up in the middle of an uprising,” Hildra said. She sounded disgusted, and Avery didn’t blame her. “We figured you’d be in the middle of it, so we went straight to where it was thickest. Lucky we heard you screaming. It was the only Ghenisan we’d heard in weeks, so we knew it must be you.”

  “And I will thank you for it to the end of my days for it.”

  “You better.” She laughed. Then her face took on a distant look. “I wish Hildebrand were here, though. That bitch better not hurt him.”

  Layanna’s voice was oddly quiet. “Let’s see it.”

  “Excuse me?” Avery said.

  “Let’s see the Device.”

  Avery regarded her, then the others. Shrugging, he climbed down and knelt over the backpack. He unfastened one button, then another. Slowly, dramatically, he lifted the lid of the backpack he knew so well—every chip, stain and mar—and revealed the gleaming orb that rested in the depression. As he did, a wave of horror fell over him.