“… Without agreeing with you, I will allow that it is probably best if we reach your people as soon as possible.”
“Yes. We’re talking to the captain. Now.”
Chapter 9
“This is turning out to be an awful long five minutes, Kent,” Lil said, her pistol still pointed resolutely at the explosives.
“Just a few moments more! Just look how thick the fug’s gotten.”
“Uh-huh. You’re sure good at excuses. You planning to make excuses for whoever it was tried to kill us too? That what passes for a lawyer in the fug? Fella who makes up the best excuses. … Though I suppose that’s what passes for a lawyer in our parts too…”
“I knew it was a mistake getting these people involved!” barked one of the other fug folk. “They’re madmen, the lot of them!”
“Hey!” Lil snapped. “I’m a madwoman, thanks very much.”
“You don’t think she’s actually going to let us live, do you? These people aren’t heroes! They’re just lunatics who want to kill as many fug folk as possible. If they weren’t on Skykeep when it went down, they’d have let it smash into the ground with all of us!”
Lil glanced wearily to Kent. “You fixin’ to make excuses for him too? Because he’s doing a fine job of making me think he might’ve been in on rigging the gun.”
“She’s just one woman! If one of us tackles her, we can get the gun away from her before she fires, and then she’s done for!”
“You better be awful sure about that,” Lil said, lowering the pistol to touch the lid of the crate of explosives. “Seein’ how things’ll go for you if you’re wrong.”
“Look, just look!” Kent urged.
Ahead, the train of cargo carts pulled by the foremost of their convoy wholly vanished into a wall of fug too thick to see through. Lil grinned.
“Looks like it’s about to get dark,” she said, raising an eyebrow. The corners of her eyes crinkled with an unseen grin, and she glanced to the jumpiest of the fug folk in the cart. “Guess this is your chance coming up. If you’ve got the nerve.”
Their cart trundled onward, rattling across the ground. The chemical chill of the fug-drenched air grew stronger. Even having had to endure it for days, the potency of the sensation was almost more than Lil could bear. Her eyes began to sting, but she tugged at the strap for her goggles with her free hand and kept her gaze trained on the fugger who seemed all-too-eager to see her blink.
Total darkness swept across the cart. The fug was so thick now that the phlo-light may as well have been extinguished. Over the hiss of the engine and the clatter of the wheels, she could just hear the sound of someone scrambling across the cargo toward her. As mad as the fug folk believed her to be, Lil wasn’t interested in blowing herself to pieces if it could be avoided. As her mind was well suited to split-second strategic brilliance, she instead skipped the pesky “planning” stage and simply acted on intuition. She dropped to her back, flattening against the uneven cargo. From the sound of his scrambling, her would-be assailant couldn’t see any better than she could.
A boot came down heavily upon her midsection. It was more of a misplaced step than a kick, but it was still more than enough to knock the wind from her. She wrapped her free arm around the leg and rolled sharply to the side, overbalancing the blindly flailing fugger. He cried out and pitched over, tumbling off the edge of the cart. If she’d not held tight, he would almost certainly have dropped between their cart and the ones trailing and fallen victim to a not-entirely-undeserved fate. Instead she kept her grip, and he instead struck the barbed-wire-topped railing. It was unpleasant, but at least not fatal.
The chill of the fug dropped away, and the green of their light rushed in again. It seemed brighter than before, though Lil was a bit preoccupied with the struggling attacker dangling off the wall of the cart. It wasn’t until she considered pulling the mask from her face to give the man a bite on the calf that she realized how clear the air was. The Well Digger at the controls pulled a sharp left, clearing the path for Nita’s cart, and released the pressure in the engine until his whole cargo train rolled to a stop.
Lil let go of the leg she’d been holding, dropping her hapless opponent to the ground, where he yelped painfully and uttered a few choice words.
“Oh, stifle it. You earned that and more,” Lil said.
She raised her goggles to find the anticipated stinging sensation absent and took in her new surroundings. The place was… bizarre. A dome of dense purple fog hung over them, several hundred yards in diameter and a few dozen yards tall. Stiff wind deformed and stirred the very edge of the clearing, but for the most part it was a safe and stable shelter from the toxic fumes. The trees here were enormous, even compared to those in the densest parts of The Thicket. Their growth was unnatural, somehow. The trucks were thin and extremely long, relatively free of branches except for at the very tops where they vanished into the clouds of fug. Stubbier undergrowth—bushes and other brush—increased sharply in both quantity and hardiness the closer to the center they grew. Around the middle it was an uninterrupted mass of purple leaves and maroon thorns. At the very center, however, there was no brush and not a single tree. Instead the thick thorn-vines curled downward and dangled into a pit almost ten yards across. From Lil’s vantage she could only see the opposite edge of the pit, but that was enough for her to notice the golden light that dimly smoldered within.
“Well heck. There’s a well after all,” she said.
Lil hesitantly put her fingers to the bit of cord that had been used to repair her mask and undid the knot, letting the breathing apparatus slide away from her mouth. Instead of the searing bite of fug-laden air, the experimental breath she took was clean and pure. Ichor did an astounding job of chasing away the fug. Even the residual vapor that clung to their clothes whenever they surfaced out of the fug was visibly streaming toward the edge of the dome, forming thin threads of purple that curled from every surface and every person until the last of the fug was gone.
The deckhand treated herself to three deep and cleansing breaths, reveling in the simple joy of filling her lungs without having to drag the air through a complex filtering system. For the first time since they’d dipped down from the surface for this mission, she smelled something besides the fumes that made it through her mask. The foliage had a sickly sweet smell, syrupy and cloying. And then there was the ichor. She’d gotten a tiny whiff during the demonstration, but this was different. It was a spicy aroma, and warm. It reminded Lil a bit of when Butch would make rum cake and fill the galley with the potent scent of the high-proof booze she reserved for the purpose. It was pleasant in its way, though the smell was somewhat tempered by its intermingling with the smell of a dozen hardworking fug folk and humans who had not had a proper bath for the better part of a week.
She blinked tears from her eyes. They weren’t tears of emotion, but rather an attempt by her body to take full advantage of the comparatively clean air to wash away the lingering effects of the fug. When her vision was restored, she found all six of the fug folk from her cart staring at her uncertainly, and a handful from other carts had begun to gather. For her, having a pistol in her hand and having one or more people nearby who had clearly been at the receiving end of a well-deserved tumble was nothing unusual, but the Well Diggers did not share that opinion. Words filtered in harsh whispers between those men on her cart and the ones from others.
“Now, now, now. Before your buddies start telling fibs about what’s been going on, let me lay it plain,” Lil announced. “You all saw and heard what happened there. Near as I can figure, someone decided they were sick of us and wanted to feed us to the critters in the forest, so they rigged up some ammo that’d jam our gun and make us real interesting to that big ugly thing we just shot up. Didn’t work, no thanks to most of you, but I’m a mite peeved at the attempt anyhow. Now if these boys here are to be believed, Branca was the one who handed out the ammo.”
Lil squinted and swept her eyes across the fug fo
lk assembled before her. The potential culprit caught her eye as she tried to step behind a crewmate.
“There she is,” Lil said brightly, pointing her pistol and beginning to stride forward.
The fug folk in her line of fire wisely separated, leaving Branca to back uncertainly against the cart behind her.
“I-I don’t know what you think happened, but you’re wrong.”
“Am I now?” Lil asked, getting closer. “Funny because I’m pretty sure that gun started screeching like a banshee right about halfway through the belt of ammo you handed us. And then a big ball of fur and teeth tried to make a snack of me for being so close to the sound. You telling me I was daydreaming all that?”
“It was a mistake! An honest mistake!”
“I’m not so sure about that,” called a voice from the edge of the fug-free area.
All eyes but Lil’s turned to the source. As the final member of the convoy, Nita had guided her lightly loaded, moderately damaged cart inside. While Lil had been sampling the air and making her accusations, Nita had been busy with other tasks. She hopped down from the cart with a clattering bundle of canvas and metal under one arm and a single spike in the other hand.
“It’s a tube fléchette. This weighs a third what the other spikes do, and they come in special sabots to allow them to fire. I can’t imagine anyone loading an ammo belt could make that mistake.”
“These things are loaded by machines! From a hopper!” said Branca, hands up and eyes wide as Lil backed her against the cart behind her. “Someone could have just tossed the wrong sort of spike in the bin. Simple as that! How could I have known it happened? It was just bad luck that you got the defective belt.”
“So how do you explain this?” Nita asked.
She tossed the ammo belt on the ground between Lil and Branca. A large star, drawn in yellow chalk, marked the leading end of the belt.
“That doesn’t prove anything! What does a star prove?”
“Huh,” Lil said, looking at the mark. “Silly me, didn’t think twice about that when I loaded up this morning.”
“I wonder if any of the other belts have stars,” Nita said.
Branca glanced back and forth. If she was hoping to see one of the other fuggers rise to her defense, she was sorely disappointed. None of the other Well Diggers seemed happy about what was going on, certainly, but a distinct tone of confusion and suspicion was beginning to color their faces. Kent in particular was glaring at her.
“Stark, go fetch the other ammo crates, will you?”
“You aren’t taking their word for this, are you?” Branca said.
“No, I’m not taking their word. I’m checking for myself,” Kent said. “That make you nervous?”
“These are bandits! Maniacs!”
“Yeah, but you knew that going into this mess,” Lil said. She looked to the others. “She have anything to say against it before?”
“You weren’t pointing a gun at me, accusing me of being a traitor before!” Branca countered.
The fug man Kent called Stark dropped a half-empty case of fléchette belts on the ground, startling Branca. Fortunately for her, Lil wasn’t so quick to flinch or the deckhand might have pulled the trigger. He popped the lid off and began to dig through, piling belt after belt on the ground. None were similarly marked. When the case was empty, he slid another crate from the back of a cart. This one had its lid askew, and the contents were churned up and poorly packed. After clearing the disorderly top layer, he revealed a second layer with only one belt missing. Beside the empty spot were two more belts marked with the same star. He selected one and unfurled it across the ground. One spike stuck out like a sore thumb. He tugged it free to reveal a matching hollow tube, loaded backward and without a sabot.
Lil looked Branca in the eye. “Another rigged belt, and tucked away in a separate box so no one else gets it by mistake? You better get real creative with this excuse.”
Branca glanced about again. Now the suspicion was plastered across each and every face.
“Come to think of it,” Kent said, “you made quite a fuss about being the one in charge of the ammo when we were dividing up the jobs…”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you people!” Branca snapped.
“If I do what I’m itching to do, you won’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again, fugger,” Lil rumbled, pressing her gun into the traitor’s ribs.
“Lil,” Kent interjected, “I know you want to shoot her, and I’m not so sure she doesn’t deserve it, but you putting a hole in one of us is liable to make things tense from here on, and there’s plenty more work to be done. Seeing as how that squirrel that attacked you isn’t too far off, and it isn’t the only one, do you think you can hold off on this bit until we’ve got camp laid out a little better?”
Lil didn’t take her gun or her eyes off Branca. “Did you say that critter was a squirrel? I thought it was a sort of a fancy bear or some such.”
“No, no. That was a squirrel,” Kent said. “At least, that’s what you get when you pitch a squirrel into the fug near an ichor well, I suppose.”
“You don’t want to see what the fug does to a bear…” Stark added, eyes distant and voice wavering like he was at that moment reliving his last such encounter.
“… Yeah, I’d say we ought to get some walls up,” Lil said, sagely. “After we get this traitor here tied up so she don’t get up to any more mischief.”
#
“This fella sure does like his name,” observed Coop as he ransacked the inside of the stolen ship.
Through a complex sequence of lashings and unlashings, Gunner and Coop had lowered Alabaster’s gondola and aligned its crew hatch roughly with their own. They’d then slung a rope ladder between the two and had been transferring anything of value into their own cargo area. A few feet of frigid wind separated the two vessels, but that didn’t seem to bother Coop in the slightest, nor Gunner, who was observing from the cargo hold/gig room/Nita’s quarters.
“He’s got handkerchiefs and pads of paper with his name. His pens all have his name. He’s got it on the desk here. You’d think he was afraid he’d forget,” Coop continued.
“You’ve got more important jobs than criticizing the man’s obvious egotism and narcissism,” Gunner called from above.
“I ain’t doing none of that. I’m saying the man’s full of himself is all.”
“Yes. I see. Entirely different.”
“Ain’t you supposed to be watching that doctor we snagged?”
“She and Lester are having a chat with the captain. To the woman’s credit, she seems rather reasonable for a fug person.”
“I think she’s just got the same sort of mind as Nita’s got.”
“And what exactly do you mean by that?”
“Just that once she starts to sink her teeth into something, she’s liable to forget the bits around it that she don’t like.”
A loud smash rang out from within the gondola.
“What was that?”
“He had glass doors on this one cabinet here. What sort of fella puts glass doors on a cabinet in an airship?”
“I would imagine the same sort who would emblazon his name on the side of a stark-white ship.”
“Hang on… I got a big black book here. Leather and that fancy gold stuff on the edge. The first page says… ask… ask-end… it’s got lots of big, long words.”
“Give it to me,” Gunner said, bending down.
Coop heaved himself up to sit on the edge of the hatch and handed the thick volume up to Gunner. It was indeed a rather elegant tome. At a glance one might have imagined it was a holy book, or perhaps the registry at a particularly fine hotel. Gunner flipped to the first page and began to read aloud. “‘Ascendancy Toward Greatness: An Autobiographical Record of the Rise of Lucius P. Alabaster.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s his personal journal.”
“Why didn’t he just write that?”
&nb
sp; “Because the man clearly appreciates pointlessly flaunting his academia at every opportunity.”
“Oh yeah? I s’pose that’s the sort of thing they teach to college types.”
“What are you implying?”
“That you and him like to point out to regular folk that they’re regular folk and you ain’t. What’s the book say?”
“It’s… rather voluminous. There are dates at the top of each entry.” He flipped through several dozen pages entirely covered with thin, sprawling script. “The last entry is from yesterday morning. … ‘A thought occurs. As I endure the grueling final hours of this interminable flight toward Fadewell Academy and the first public evidence of my genius, I realize that, though impeccable in both taste and presentation, the power of this vessel leaves something to be desired. If I recall correctly, and naturally my unaccountable brilliance comes part and parcel with flawless recollection, the Wind Breaker is said to be quite ably equipped for swift voyage. As enticing as it is to retain its broken husk as a trophy signifying my great conquest when the plan reaches fruition, perhaps I would be better served to lay claim to it, and to embark upon my well-earned celebrity and simultaneously famous and infamous endeavors riding atop the very chariot that once conveyed…’”
Gunner flipped ahead. “The man takes three pages to say he wants to steal the Wind Breaker.”
“Is that what he was working at? With all that talk of trophies and husks I couldn’t make heads or tails of it all.”
“I think we’ve got what we need here. The good news is, the man’s ego is such that he couldn’t help but brag to himself about what a genius he is.” He flipped through a few more pages. “The bad news is, he’s clearly got the money to make himself a thorn in our sides, and he’s long-winded enough that finding anything useful in this is going to be agony. Get up here. We’ve got to get this up to the captain. There’s no doubt, whatever this is, the whole ichor well fiasco was a plan of which we were a part.”
Ichor Well Page 24