by Jack Conner
“I know, and I’m sorry for betraying your faith in me. It won’t happen again.”
He looked incredulous. “You’re saying you want back into my good graces—into the arms of Octung and the R’loth?”
She hung her head, hands still raised before her. “If you will have me, Great One.”
His glare deepened, grew thoughtful. Rain beat down on them, and Avery itched to interfere. Meanwhile Ani was getting away. Still, he could not idly let Sheridan go to her death.
“Fine,” Uthua said. “In light of your past service and the fact that you did just save me, I will forebear to destroy you. For now. You must continue to serve me, and serve me well, to the utmost of your ability and beyond, if you intend to preserve your wretched, traitorous life.”
“I understand, my lord.”
“Then rise.”
She stood. He lifted a claw to her face and drew the sharp edge along her cheek. She cried out and stumbled back, putting a hand over the wound. A trickle of blood welled out between two fingers.
“So you remember,” Uthua said. He turned to the bodies. “What have we here, Doctor?”
Avery wanted to go to Sheridan and inspect the cut, but he made himself kneel over the bodies of the mystery party instead. Now, for the first time, he would get to see just what the members of the party were.
“Human,” he said, poking one with a stick. Rain beat down on the bullet-ridden cadavers, puddling in their wounds. Red fluid trickled out. “But altered.” His stick toyed with the half dozen long, tapering tentacles that sprouted from their backs and shoulders.
“But how?” Hildra said. “I don’t get it.”
Avery looked to Uthua. “I’ll bet he does, but there’s no time. There may still be a chance to get to Ani.”
Janx pointed up the alley the mystery party members had been defending; it led to a wide street filled with fleeing people, with heavily armed mutants that must be the pirates advancing on them. Gunshots peppered the night, incessant and from all directions. Bombs sounded nearby, too, and pirate airships by the dozen flew overhead.
“She’s gone, Doc,” Janx said. “These bastards stayed back to delay us, and they did.” He nudged one of the dead men with his boot. “Sacrificed themselves whether they meant to or not. Whoever they serve, they’re devoted to them.”
“But what were they?” Hildra said, eyes on the corpses.
To Uthua, Avery said, wearily, “Shall I tell them, or will you?”
After a moment, Uthua said, “I’ve never seen the likes of these people before, but I can guess at what might have made them. Aboard the Over-City we engaged in experimentation, trying to create the perfect mutations—trying to design mutations. Your doctor saw some of it when he was there, I suppose, and Colonel Sheridan has long known of such endeavors, but that facility was only part of it. There were other labs, throughout Octung and beyond. It looks as if somehow our enemies co-opted one of those facilities and designed mutants—with more success than we ever had, apparently—as weapons against Collossum instead of soldiers for them.”
“Does that mean that whoever is behind all this is not Collossum?” Sheridan said.
“It just means they wanted weapons. Living, thinking weapons that would die for them. Whoever these wretches serve inspire as much loyalty as we do among our own flocks.” He nodded to Janx. “You were right about that.”
Janx didn’t nod back. Uthua may have saved his life from the lobster, but the Mnuthra still wore the body of Janx’s best friend, and the whaler wouldn’t forgive that.
“A shame we can’t eat them,” Layanna said.
“To hell with that,” said Hildra.
Layanna cast her a withering glare. “Uthua and I nearly died saving you, but now we’re weakened. We need to feed. These corpses, though, they’re filled with poison.”
“The buffet will have to wait,” Janx said. “We need to get the hell out of here.”
Avery shook himself. He’d been consumed with the realization that Ani was gone. He could only trust that she was fine and that he would find her again whole, alive, and soon. Please, he thought. Be well, Ani. Be safe. I’m coming for you.
“That’s right,” he said. “We must get to the Codex before they do.”
“Is she coming with us?” Layanna said, eyes on Sheridan. The two stared coolly at each other.
Avery raised his eyebrows at Sheridan. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded.
“We can’t all fit on my motorcycle, though,” she said.
“How, then?” said Hildra. “It looks like we’re already behind Segrul’s line of advance.”
Rain pounded down, and gunshots cracked. Somewhere a man screamed, then was hastily cut off.
When no one answered, Avery said, “I think I have an idea.”
* * *
The snail herders on their salamander mounts glanced up fearfully as Layanna and Uthua descended on them, amoeba-forms drawn about them. Layanna moved ahead of Uthua, as he’d been tasked with holding Avery, Janx, Sheridan and Hildra; he was unlikely to kill the four at the moment, but he could not be trusted in dealing with the shellers. Avery only prayed his other-self didn’t give out while he carried the four.
The shellers screamed as Layanna’s tendrils wrenched them off their mounts, one by one. There were eight of them, and Avery’s group only needed six mounts, so she deposited the ones she removed onto the backs of the last two salamanders or, in the case of two of them, onto the backs of a couple of brightly-shelled snails, where they clung desperately. Avery’s stomach lurched as Uthua glommed forward across the vertical surface, and he tried not to glance downward—or sideways, rather—at the ground a hundred feet below. The snail herders had sheltered under an aluminum overhang (which rat-ratted incessantly) in an alley, and the advancing pirates had had no reason to move against them. Now Uthua placed Avery in the saddle of one of the herders’ giant salamanders, a lime-green creature mottled black and yellow, and Avery hastily stuck his legs through the stirrup loops and lashed himself on.
The salamander hissed at him, but fear had temporarily immobilized it, or perhaps it had stayed in place due to the psychic influence of one of the Collossum.
“This is some way to ride,” Janx said as he tied himself onto his saddle.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Hildra said.
Avery choked down bile. “If you do, I’ll be next.”
“I preferred my bike,” Sheridan said. Avery didn’t ask how she’d acquired it; some things he didn’t want to know.
Layanna maneuvered herself onto the back of a salamander, allowing her other-self to disappear as she did so, and Avery wondered how much longer she could maintain that form without feeding.
“What are you?” one of the herders cried, an infected fellow with what looked like a conch shell for a head. The rest were sobbing or silent. All looked stricken. Two, still clinging to the topsides of their respective snails, were frantically looking for some means down. Avery supposed their mates would have to help them when their mounts could accommodate a greater burden.
“I am Lord Uthua,” Uthua said, settling himself into his own saddle; his mount trembled beneath him. “You may weep, for these fools would not allow me to take you to the House of Joy.”
“Leave them alone,” Layanna said.
“They asked. And several have been kissed by the sea.”
“Come on,” Avery said. “Let’s move.”
It took some experimentation to find out how to ride the great salamanders, and some interrogation of the herders, who answered quickly and without dissembling—their eyes often rooted on Uthua—but finally the group threaded their way through the scattered snails, still gobbling up glowing moss, oblivious to the battle raging about them, out from under the overhang and across one of the aerial bridges to the next building, and the next. The city had many such spans, as the upper reaches had been designed to accommodate the snail herders, who provided much of the economy and food for the city, as well
as the octopod-mounted aristocracy, and it was relatively simple for the group, once mounted, to navigate their way toward the Ghenisan Embassy.
Bombs and gunfire still sounded, but they were growing more distant, the defenders falling back. It was amazing to Avery that the Ysstral Empire could not resist a ragtag group of pirates, but then again, Segrul’s armada was the R’loth’s replacement for the Octunggen fleets, and the god-things had given them much of the weapons and means they had previously gifted to Octung, perhaps even some new ones. Not only that, but this was the concentrated force of Segrul. This was all he had, and he was unleashing everything, while the Ysstral forces were scattered throughout their empire and across the seas. Even now they were hurrying home, but too slow.
In the distance, toward the south, Avery saw new fires, and he wondered where they could be coming from. Segrul’s forces struck from the east. From the sea. Not south. Toward the south stretched rocky land and marshes, with only scattered settlements all the way to the Borghese Mountains ... where the ngvandi lived. Avery’s gaze strayed to Uthua, then hastily jerked away.
“There it is,” Janx said, as the salamanders crested a tall building and the city was laid out before them. “The embassy’s right ... shit.”
Ice touched Avery’s spine. Right there, where the Ghenisan embassy should be—and more importantly where the Codex should be—stood only flaming ruins and ashes being damped into the ground by rain. It looked as if the whole building had been melted by some sort of acid.
“One of Segrul’s extradimensional weapons did this,” Layanna said. “It must be.”
“No shit,” said Hildra. “But did the Codex melt, too?”
“They wouldn’t have done that,” Uthua said. “The bomb must have melted the building slowly. It forced everyone to evacuate and in the chaos our enemies grabbed the Codex, probably from those relocating it.”
“They’ll be on their way to the Necropolis,” Avery said, with a horrible sinking feeling. “They have Ani. They have the Codex. They have everything they need.” Trying to suppress an upwelling of despair, he looked west, toward the twisted purple spires of the Necropolis at the heart of the Ygrithan quarter, home to many similar strange buildings. But of them all it loomed largest and most mysterious. The lights of many zeppelins winked in the air above the structure, and guns flashed from the sides of one, punching into the flanks of another, which fell from the skies, crashing into the face of a building across the Plaza of Dreams and erupting. Ysstral aeroplanes zipped through the lines of the pirates’ airships, firing and getting fired at, but the downed zeppelin had been the last one of the defenders, it seemed, at least in the region of the Necropolis. The pirates owned the skies in that quarter now. Avery had to assume they controlled the ground around the Necropolis as well.
“We’ve lost,” he heard himself say. “The enemy planned this well. I ...” He sagged backward. “I don’t see a way forward.”
“Come on,” Hildra chided. “You always have a plan.”
Avery felt as if someone had carved out his insides. “Not this time.”
Rain pattered against his waxed hood and on the spiky rooftop around him, glistening on the ruby eyes of gargoyles. Not far away another Ysstral zeppelin was going down, its gondola afire with green flames. What sort of weapons did the pirates possess? How could they have technology the R’loth didn’t? Just who or what was behind all this?
Avery wondered where the Empress-Regent was. Did she still live? Had Duke Leshillibn taken command of the Palace yet? How was Ani? Suddenly it all seemed too much for him, too big, too dark, a crushing wave of horror ready to drown him.
“Don’t give up, Doc,” Janx said, apparently reading him all too well. “There has to be a way.”
“There is,” Uthua said quietly, and they all turned to him. Doubly sinister with the hood shadowing his eyes, he smiled, and his teeth were sharp and wet. “I did not come alone.”
“The Octunggen delegation, you mean?” Layanna said. “They’re helping you? I don’t see how that could benefit us, unless they managed to bring whatever Octung can muster to our aid aboard their submarine.”
“Octung can barely hold its own borders,” Uthua said. “No. I look to my own people now.”
“It’s true, then,” Avery said. “You really did it.”
Before he could go on, a searchlight fell on him and the others, and he spun to see a pirate warship lowering from the dark clouds overhead, dark yet gleaming in the rain. Before he could say another word, the zeppelin began to fire.
Chapter 6
“This way!” Uthua said, and spurred his salamander over the crest of the building and down its black face.
They must have a psychic aboard, Avery realized. It must have sensed Uthua and Layanna’s presence. He thought this even as he spurred his own mount, following Uthua over the lip of the building and down. The others came, too, their mounts finding footing easily on the wet black surface. Avery’s heart leapt into his throat and he had to wrench his gaze away from the ground hundreds of feet below ... and getting closer with each leap of the animal that bucked beneath him, pitching him forward and backward. He had to grab on tight or risk injury to his back. Thank the gods his legs were thrust through hoops or he would’ve gone hurtling to his death.
Bullets tore by, shattering glass windows above him. A shard grazed his cheek. He felt blood spatter his mustache and stick the hairs together, making it so that he breathed in the smell of his own blood with every inhalation.
The salamanders charged toward an aerial bridge that led to the next spire, one of the network of such spans used by the shellers and the aristocrats—or did they use different bridges? The aristos might not like to share their high places with such riffraff. Whichever, it didn’t matter now. The zeppelin descended toward them, having to move more delicately now as it navigated the valley between buildings. Fewer bullets rained down, as the view from most of the ship’s terraces had been blocked.
The two turrets mounted on the underside of the zeppelin suddenly let loose. They showered the night with bullets, and Avery screamed when he heard the thunder of mounted machine guns. The slugs blasted the building just as the salamanders reached the bridge and bounded across it, swinging around to the side opposite the zeppelin. Avery heard the bullets harmlessly smashing into the span on the other side, but as he was now all but upside down and coming loose in his stirrups, he found it hard to feel relief. He held on tight.
Uthua reached the connecting building and led the group around to the side as the zeppelin, still lowering, gave chase. They rounded the side of the building and scampered around to the face opposite the first bridge, having to thread their way through a herd of grazing giant snails as they did. The zeppelin hove into view behind them, its machine guns blasting the snails and glass around them and scattering the herders that had been camped under the canopy. One was hit and crumpled in his saddle. His salamander mewled, annoyed by the sudden dead weight.
Avery craned his head back as his mount reached the corner and saw the zeppelin driving toward them, guns firing, relentless. Uthua led them to the next bridge and across, then around this building to another bridge, this one sprouting from the side of the spire and quite high up. Some well-dressed people riding giant furred octopods hunkered for cover inside the bell tower of the building they crossed to.
Around Avery the battle seemed to be spiraling out of control, the defenders forced back, having to occupy various structures and making their stands there. In some cases soldiers piled behind barricades in attempts to block off certain streets.
Uthua seemed to be leading the group in a certain direction, over bridge and building. The zeppelin followed, losing them, then gaining them again. At any moment Avery expected to feel a round tear through his chest.
“Almost there,” Uthua called over his shoulder.
As they raced over what turned out to be the final bridge, rockets fired out from the spire’s top, streaking down toward the ze
ppelin, and part of the airship’s gondola exploded brightly. The zeppelin wheeled away, smoke trailing from its side, and Janx whooped.
Avery steeled himself, however. He was all too aware of who must have fired that rocket. His group might have survived the zeppelin, but would they survive what came next?
Smiling, Uthua rode up the face of this building and over the lip of its roof. Instantly a swarm of infected men and women in ragged clothes and patchwork or clearly stolen hooded robes surrounded the group, pointing assault rifles, pistols and spears.
“Ngvandi!” Hildra growled, a hand going to the butt of her pistol.
“So it is,” Uthua said.
Sheridan caught Avery’s look and nodded; she had predicted this.
Uthua slid down from his mount, and the ngvandi fell to their knees in worship, some going all the way to their bellies on the wet, hard pebbles of the roof. Avery knew that these creatures had worshipped Uthua as the leader of a triumvirate of gods in their mountains for hundreds of years. The last time Avery had encountered them they had killed a friend of Janx’s and Hildra’s and Uthua had possessed Muirblaag.
“I knew you would not fail me,” Uthua told the leader of the ngvandi party; Avery could tell he was the leader because of his triple-pointed crown, which thrust up the hood of his stately and surely stolen cloak. That would make him a high priest. In the mountains they had worn robes crafted of the hide of humans they’d worked to death in their mines or given as sacrifices to the black pillars in their town centers. Thankfully, they’d exchanged those garments for wax-treated outfits that could repel the rain.
“Of course, my lord,” said the high priest, who was a bright lime-green fish-man striated with dark bands. He wore human fingerbones on a string around his neck; each one had been tarred, charred or painted black. “We came a long way, threading our way through the human settlements, making outposts for those who would come later.” He touched his fingerbone necklace and sort of grinned. “I collected several trophies. We arrived and have been setting fires to portions of the town we needed to pass through, as your brother instructed, distracting the populace for the greater army to go undetected.”