I didn’t. Not for sure, anyway. I could only hope that my guesswork would be correct.
“Aim at the wall at the far end.”
“That’s a distance of five miles,” said one of the boys.
“Will the shell reach that far?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never had to fire an eighty-pounder before. Those are heavy suckers.”
“Good,” I said emphatically. “Then maybe they’ll do some real damage at last.” My eyes raked their faces. “Because if this works, we’re going to have to leave Bastion. Things can’t go back to the way they were.”
“Leave?” One of the gunners was horrified. “Where would we go?”
“We can’t stop here. We’ll get no more deliveries of food.”
“Of course we will.”
Athena shook her head. “Not anymore you won’t. We used to be the ones that supplied it.”
For the first time the gunner seemed to notice that there was a girl in the cupola. A radiantly attractive sixteen-year-old, at that. He stared at her as if he’d just seen a demon leap out of the wall.
“Okay,” I said. “Aim this cannon at the wall at the far end of the Factory Floor.”
Training overcame the gunners’ bewilderment. They carefully turned beautifully polished steel wheels at the base of the howitzer. The chief gunner peered at the old-style TV, which was the primary sighting mechanism. He read numbers from the screen to complete the targeting adjustments.
He turned to Mott. “Ready to fire on your command, sir.”
Mott gave me a salute. “The privilege is all yours, John Karroon.”
“Thank you, Commander.” I smiled. Then I took a deep breath—every nerve in my body sparked, fizzed, and ignited. This was the most exciting, and absolutely most terrifying, moment of my life. “Fire!”
The howitzer let out a mighty roar. Through binoculars fixed to the observation portal in the wall I could see the shell hurtle across the Factory Floor. A moment later it struck the far end. There was a colossal explosion. A black streak appeared on the concrete.
“We hit the target,” the chief gunner told me. “There’s no visible damage.”
Mott’s eye met mine. He nodded. “I believe in you, Soldier. Make this work.”
“Reload,” I ordered.
The gunners reloaded.
“Fire!”
Once again a shell screamed through the air to slam into the wall. Smoke poured out across the machines on the Factory Floor. This time a fall of debris cascaded from the point of impact.
“Reload,” I ordered again. “And keep reloading and firing until I give you the order to stop.”
The gunners fired shell after shell at the massive concrete structure.
High explosives blasted the obstruction. Detonations rumbled with a noise like thunder. Flashes of light. The scream of shells. More flashes.
Then this:
The huge, vertical slab of concrete that formed the end of the strange world that was the Factory Floor began to sag. Even when no shells were striking it, debris began to fall from its gray face.
“Cease fire!” I shouted.
There was silence in the cupola. Through the binoculars I watched what happened next. Huge shards of concrete dropped away to smash down onto the floor. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I was five miles away. I could hear nothing. But it had begun.
I shouted, “The wall’s starting to collapse!”
Entire sections dropped away now. They fell onto the machines at the far end, crushing them. As that wall fell something of great power entered the void above those factory engines of the damned.
For a moment, I stared at what penetrated the dust without understanding what that unearthly presence was.
Then I understood.
“Sunlight,” I breathed. “Sunlight’s coming in. We’ve broken through.”
As the titanic wall collapsed—one perhaps a thousand feet high by ten thousand feet wide—beams of golden sunlight pierced the dust clouds. That’s when the machines began to stop. One by one, cogs stopped rotating, drive shafts ceased their relentless spinning. Pistons seized and died.
I stared through the binoculars. Beyond the curtain wall I could make out blue sky, green hills, a river sparkling in the sunlight. Although most of Bastion, the Factory Floor complex, and the Farm must have been underground, I realized that this place had been built into the side of a mountain. Because, with the wall gone, I now found myself gazing out over a valley.
“Mott,” I said, turning to him, “order your men to bring as much food as they can carry. Athena, gather the girls together. It’s time to tell your people that we are leaving.”
* * *
—
It took an hour to get everyone ready. Then Bastion’s doors were opened for the last time. More than six hundred people—a mixture of males and females—made their way between rows of machines that were now devoid of life.
The air was fresh. The rumble and hiss of industrial engines had been replaced by sweet silence.
Mott smiled at me. “Soldier, this is your victory. Lead the way.”
“Something tells me we’re all going to start aging,” Athena told us. “You boys will probably also start to remember. That’s going to be hard. When the memories begin to come back of your mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters. Believe me, that’s when you’re going to start hurting.”
“Hence the human condition,” Mott announced in that wise way of his. “So we’ll get old, we’ll remember people that we loved. But from now on we’ll be the ones to decide what we do with our lives.”
“There’ll be nice things, too, Mott.” Athena smiled. “One day you’ll remember when we were friends.”
As I walked, I started to feel happy. A weight seemed to rise up from my heart and float away. The sun was shining. The air was clean. The Bog Hornets and the Flukes were nowhere in sight. Maybe the sunlight dispelled them, like they were nothing more than a bad dream.
Very soon I started to whistle happily. The rest of those young people picked up the melody. And we went marching out of the gloom and into the light of a brand new day.
From Bastion Wars by J. B. Kirklees:
The rest of this history is bittersweet.
Back then, my friends knew me as Mott: the teenage kid with freckles and red hair. Within a few months of leaving Bastion I remembered my name was Jason Kirklees. With a silver hair or two of belated maturity, other memories returned, too. I recalled the faces of my mother and father. One day the name Casie Fitton ghosted into my head. Casie Fitton: my best friend. I think about him a lot now. Yet for a time I’d forgotten him entirely. And when I think about Casie it’s in that happy-meets-sad way we reserve for people that we care about and have lost.
We were liberated, because an individual by the name of John Karroon arrived at Bastion. The twelve-year-old with a ferocious appetite for questions.
Questions breed answers. Sometimes those answers reveal our true nature, our actual situation, and demand that we fight for the life that we deserve.
What of the world beyond Bastion? There are no cities, there are no other people. And, apparently, no way back to our homes and families. Instead, we have discovered virgin territory. Our battles continue as we fight to turn that wilderness into a world where, one day, we will raise our children. Those sons and daughters of ours will remember their parents, they’ll know that they have the right to a childhood safeguarded by adults. What’s more, they will look forward to a future where they can enjoy the happiness and fulfillment of those few decades, which we human beings call “a lifetime.”
And what of John Karroon? What happened to him?
Recently, John asked the question: “Does anything lie beneath Bastion
?”
Two weeks ago, he headed back across the ruins of the Factory Floor to the fortress. We haven’t seen him since. Naturally (as he remains cleaved to his inclination), he’s looking for more answers.
I believe that the man we call John Karroon is on a personal quest. He’s determined to find those individuals he describes as “our real enemy.” The evil ones who stole us from our families long ago, and who are the real villains of the Bastion Wars.
On Amen’s Shore
by Clive Barker
“My pagan soul is greatly comforted by this place,” Beisho Fie announced to Rutaluka as they descended the steep, winding thoroughfares of Joom to the harbour. “It may not be entirely godless—I’m sure there’s some dupe on his knees somewhere in the vicinity—but I don’t see a steeple and I don’t hear a call to prayer, so maybe the gods are illegal here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Rutaluka—universally called Ruty (as in beauty)—remarked.
“It’s no more ridiculous than wishing there were gods watching over us every moment of our lives,” Beisho replied, slipping his spectacles off his lumpen nose and squinting down the hill at the purple-black lake. “There’s talk between the two of us I wouldn’t want heard by anyone, least of all some gossiping god.”
“What kind of talk?” Ruty wanted to know. He was much the squatter of the two wanderers—the mule to Fie’s thoroughbred; the parrot to his stork—and had developed a way of walking backward a step ahead of his comrade, so as to watch Beisho’s face without putting his neck out of joint. “What have we talked about?”
“You tell me,” Beisho replied.
“Well…food, of course,” Ruty said. He wore his taste for candies and pig flesh on his hip and backside. “And the state of our shoes,” he went on. “And lust.”
“Ah…”
Ruty smiled, a vale of dimples appearing on his round face. So that was the subject Beisho the Laureate felt so tender about. “You’d rather nobody knew that your equipment leans to the left,” he said. “Is that it?’’
Beisho glowered down at his comrade. “Rutaluka…” he said.
“How many times have I asked you not to call me that?”
“Then never again mention the angle of my erection,” Beisho countered. “I shared that with you in a very private moment.”
The moment had indeed been private. They had been locked together in the water closet of the Margravine of Cataglia, who, in order to pay off her gambling debts, had invited the pair into her chateau to filch—for a price—her husband’s collection of erotic vases. Unfortunately, her spouse had returned from his dog racing early, and the Margravine, her legendary taste for farce never more evident, had shut Beisho and Ruty in the toilet and had proceeded to distract her husband from his suspicions (the scent of Beisho’s cologne hung in the air like laughter at a wake) by making her body available to him from every possible direction. As the sound of coupling had drifted under the door, Beisho’s prong had swelled in his pantaloons, and in reply to Ruty’s confounded stare Beisho confessed, in a whisper, that it had always leaned to the left.
The escapade had ended better than this sweaty interlude might suggest. With her husband coupled comatose, the lady had smuggled the thieves and their booty out of the chateau, and they had subsequently parlayed the five vases (one of which depicted acts even the Margravine, in her desperation, had not stooped to) for a considerable profit. But all profit dwindles, unless invested or saved, and the pair had too little patience for the former and too much appetite for the latter. The money was spent on bread, beer, and bosom in a matter of days, leaving them near as damnit penniless.
“What I need to find is an author,” Beisho announced. “Someone who needs his works translated.”
“I doubt you’ll find much in the way of writers here,” Ruty replied. “This is a fisherman’s town.”
“Fishermen tell tales,” Beisho observed.
“Yes,” said Ruty, “but how often do they write them down?”
Beisho never had a chance to reply to this, because the sound of sobbing drew the attention of both him and Ruty down a trash-strewn alley off to their left.
“A woman weeps!” Beisho said.
“So?”
“So it’s the first sign of finer feelings we’ve encountered in this damn town. We should seek out its source.”
Ruty shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “You go. I’ll wait here.”
Beisho was already off down the alleyway, leaving his companion to idle at the corner to watch the good people of Joom climbing and descending the hill. It would be a poor place to look for loveliness, Ruty mused. Maybe it was the effort of struggling up the slope that left the citizens looking so vacant. Or—more likely—the fact that every dish served in Joom was scaly, finny, and glassy-eyed.
He glanced back along the alleyway to see that Beisho had discovered one of the town’s better-looking women sobbing on a doorstep.
“What’s the problem?” he asked her.
She looked up from her grief, her eyes large and silvery.
“Do we know each other?” she asked him.
“I am Beisho Fie. Poet, wittier, and seducer of wild dogs.”
“Well, you’re not much use to me,” the woman replied, “I don’t need poems—”
“What do you need?”
“—unless it was a dirge,” the woman went on, tears coming again. “Yes, maybe a dirge, for my beloved brother.”
“Is he dead?”
She shook her head.
“Dying?”
Now a nod, and she pointed toward the lake.
“Drowning?” Beisho said.
“Eaten!” the woman replied. “He’s in the belly of some fish.”
“And yet you know he’s alive?”
“We’re twins,” the woman explained. “And our minds are…intertwined. I would know if he were dead.”
“Terrible,” Beisho said. “Terrible.”
“What is?” Ruty enquired. Bored with watching Joom’s piscine parade, he had come to find out what all the sobbing was about.
“This lady—”
“My name is Leauqueau,” she put in.
“Leauqueau’s brother has been devoured by a fish.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Ruty replied. “Was he a midget, or was it a very big fish?”
“There are all manner of beasts out there,” Leauqueau replied, staring off toward the lake’s obsidian waters. “And not all of them are fish.”
“Oh?” said Ruty, interested now. He had for many years been creating a bestiary; a catalogue of every species of fauna in the Colonies. Perhaps there was an unknown creature out there in the lake’s cold waters, awaiting both a discoverer and a name to be known by.
“We should find this man-eater,” he said. “And save the lady’s brother.”
“We would, of course,” Beisho swiftly replied. “But regrettably we have no boat.”
“Then we’ll hire one.”
“We have no money.”
“I have money,” Leauqueau promptly interjected.
“But how will we find the beast?” Beisho protested. “In such vast waters?”
“Maybe we won’t,” Ruty said, “but I’d rather spend the day fishing that trying to find a scribe—”
“You want a scribe?” said Leauqueau. “Then we are indeed well met. My brother is a poet.”
“Indeed?” Beisho replied, feigning indifference.”
“Are his works translated?” Ruty asked. “Only Laureate Fie can perform that function, for a very modest consideration.”
Leauqueau turned her silver gaze on Beisho. “I think the gods intended our paths to cross,” she said.
“Are there gods in Joom?” Ruty inquired
.
“I didn’t believe there were, until now,” Leauqueau replied.
Ruty laughed. “There!” he said to Beisho. “She thinks you’re proof of the very thing you denied.”
“Sophistry,” Beisho snapped back.
“Then let’s turn our attention to more practical matters,” Ruty said. “Lady, if you will supply the wherewithal, I will hike down to the harbor and hire a vessel forthwith.”
“Don’t tell anyone what we’re about,” she warned, passing a few coins over. “The mariners are superstitious.”
“Then they’re fools,” Beisho said. “We’ll find your brother for you, without the aid of gods. And then I’ll turn his rhymes to quicksilver in a dozen tongues, and we’ll all be happy.”
* * *
—
“How do you know your brother is in the lake?” Beisho asked Leauqueau as he escorted her down to the harbor. “Perhaps he was eaten by a Steliamak. I’ve seen several circling.”
“I know it was the lake,” she said. “It obsessed him.”
“Why?”
“Because of Quiddity.”
“Quiddity?” Here was a word not often breathed in daylight.
“You have heard of it?”
“Of course. What man of culture has not heard of the great dream-sea? Why, we met a fellow just a few months ago, Ruty and me, who claimed to have been a beacon keeper on its shores. But it’s a thousand miles from here.”
“More. Much more.”
“So how—?”
“There’s a legend in Joom. A legend my brother believed to his very soul.” That said, she fell silent.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?” Fie asked.
She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s said that in certain seasons the waters of the dream-sea find their way through channels far below the earth into the lake,” she replied.
Beisho made a low whistle. “That is a tale,” he said.
“There’s more,” she told him. “The legend says that we’re all descended from dreamers cast up by those tides. Dreamers from another realm of being.”
Volume Ten Page 10