Sired by Stone

by Andrew Post

  With each step, his boots bumped around loosely on twig legs, the air growing more oily and humid. He entered the mess hall, where it was the most powerful, that lovely greasy moistness he could feel almost slicking his skin.

  He took up a plate—not caring if it was a hubcap—and approached the counter, behind which they were preparing the breakfast on long charcoal grills.

  The two fat cooks, squinting past the fragrant smoke, greeted Gorett with bovine stares. They were the only ones in the Odium who weren’t emaciated to husks. And maybe they weren’t that plump, Gorett considered, but regular-sized. It’d been some time, after all, since he’d seen anyone with any meat to them.

  “Could I possibly request that piece there?” Gorett said, pointing furtively at the fatty neck section of the slitherer.

  The cooks, sharing some unspoken inside joke, grinned as a cut from the other end of the snow-snake was slapped onto Gorett’s waiting plate: a rubbery hank of tail that still wore some corkscrewing black sprigs of singed hair. “Enjoy that.”

  Bringing the plate up to take a powerful sniff of the portion, Gorett tried to not appear too happy, it being the piece he actually desired all along.

  He, too, could play their game.

  Upon the bearcat rug near the fireplace, he ate with his hands.

  Pulling at a sleeve to wipe his mouth, he noticed his tattoo again. Funny, how easy it was to forget it was there. On the inside of his veiny forearm, scrawled while he’d put up a struggle, was trayter. They’d done other things too, but this was the most lasting reminder of their abuse, a bruise that would never fade. The Odium, despite being the dregs of humanity, valued loyalty above all, even if it wasn’t to them.

  Chewing the last squeaky bit of slitherer tail, he examined their handiwork by the light of the fire. They’d used cable wire to punch in the ink. Dot by dot. For hours.

  The next stringy tug on the snow-snake, something snapped. Not breaking like a tendon or an elastic artery, but something else. Within the crescent-shaped divot he’d bitten away, a small yellow worm—well, half of one—squiggled in deeper, to hide. A close call. Who knew how many he’d eaten without knowing?

  Spitting the mouthful onto the floor, much to the disappointment of the cooks across the room, Pitka Gorett stared at the half-chewed hunk, feeling a lurch in his heart. Starting small and rising to a roar, declaring he deserved better since, after all, he was technically still a king.

  Geyser never had crowns, but he’d considered having one fashioned, perhaps even by the local smithy Grigori Gonn. And he would’ve worn the thing everywhere he went. Rise in the morning from the lush defarr down from the giant birds in the exotic west, snap his fingers, and his squires would bow and gently rest it upon his brow. What an image he would’ve cut then. Spiked golden summits raising his height, making him stand straighter, someone nobody would ever defy.

  Maybe then, crowned, none of this would’ve happened. He could’ve commanded someone to go down there after the deposit and shoo the Blatta. Never would he have had to strike a deal with these heathens at all!

  Seated upon the floor, grease on his chin, Gorett received a staggering revelation. It was all because I had no crown.

  He shot to his feet.

  This. Until I can fashion something better, this will be my crown.

  And then some time passed while the sensible side of Pitka Gorett took a holiday.

  When he spilled from his cyclone of momentary insanity, Gorett heard laughing, finding himself standing on the long mess hall table with a hubcap on his head, arms crossed over his bony chest as he stared down all present.

  Slitherer grease got in his eye. Springing a hand to rub it away, he knocked off his crown, which went rolling on its edge like a coin. When he dropped off the table to chase it, the laughing exploded to a deafening volume. But right then, Gorett didn’t care. He needed his crown, the plate, his crown, so he wouldn’t get in trouble with his mother. This is all we have, Pitka. We have to treat it with care.

  “With care,” Gorett murmured, bending to retrieve the plate. But it was still greasy, and every time he tried to hook a fingernail under, he’d just push it across the floor. “With care.”

  The hubcap parked against a thick-soled boot he immediately recognized.

  Dreck Javelin flicked back his neon-green tri-corner hat. “Providing morning entertainment for the boys, are we?”

  “I . . . just dropped my plate.” Pitka Gorett retrieved it, clutching it to his chest. His eye stung, and his back hurt from all that racing around. “But I have it now.”

  “That you have. Get your breakfast?”

  “Yes.”

  The men were still laughing. Those with two hands clapped; those with one slapped their knees. Bone-worm infections had robbed them all of one piece or another.

  “And did you finish everything on your plate?”

  Gorett peeked out from under wild brows, hate in his heart. They think you’re just some funny old man now, dancing about like a feverish monkey one minute, demanding respect the next, nose in the air like some spoiled princess. You’re a broken thing now, Pitka.

  Odd. That last bit came to him with his mother’s voice. And never once did she say anything like that to him. She hadn’t lived to see him become king.

  Gorett twitched when Dreck touched his arm.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Don’t treat me like some fool,” Gorett said, spittle flying.

  The laughter filling the room shut off, as if a lever had been thrown.

  Wiping the foamy spatter from his cheek, Dreck said with ominous mildness, “Come along. We need to speak. In private.”

  With one shove after another, Dreck moved Gorett down the hall. Once out of his men’s view, he said, “Good Goddess, man, we need to get you a sign. Something you can wear when you’re feeling squirrely.”

  “I’m perfectly coherent—oof—and in full command of my faculties.”

  They passed through a glass tunnel connecting to Dreck’s quarters, which had been the observatory when this place was still a research center.

  Once in, under the enormous telescope angled heavenward, Dreck slammed the door behind them. Gorett remained where the last shove had placed him: in the open space of the expansive room. Realizing only now that he’d carried the hubcap all the way here, he set it aside.

  Unlike Gorett’s chambers, Dreck’s didn’t store heaps of junk. He had a nicer bed, even an armchair and a chest of drawers. Gorett suspected it was fear that a worm infection would rob him of his skills as a Fractioner that prompted Dreck to make his own meals. He began doing so now by starting a small fire in the corner of the room. A molecule is all it’d take, one pregnant germ. Gorett ran his tongue over his teeth, stomach turning with the memory of his plagued breakfast.

  Obscured by soot and frost creeping its surface, a large window of thick glass showed the frozen world in a panoramic display. Just outside and below was a starship, dappled with white. The Magic Carpet, the ship they’d picked Gorett up on—painted in the style of a luxurious rug, tassels and all.

  Behind it, a field of goods—still shrink-wrapped—that’d been intercepted during delivery. Bales of swiped jewelry bound with large rubber bands. A hundred armories’ worth of weaponry both new and ancient: a small mountain of assorted swords, daggers, pole arms, and battle-axes. An overwhelming assembly, the product of many years’ diabolism.

  But to the pirates, Gorett had learned, it was not theirs directly. Loaned, more like. Because lording over it all, the loot and its dedicated amassers, was a twenty-foot sculpture. A woman. The woman. Arms outstretched, face laced with the silver snakes of weld lines, eyes a beaming set of headlights, starship wings hammered into a gown clasped with a string of boat chain. Their Mechanized Goddess.

  Every calculated effort of the Odium was in her honor.

  Above her, the glacier’s fissure. The crack’s twin precipices hung agape, a serrated icy maw. Past its sharp teeth, paling
the suns to faint white disks, a blizzard blew—the same that’d been pounding the ice caps for centuries, keeping their arctic aerie hidden, to Seddalin Chidester’s chagrin, the king of Adeshka’s best efforts proving to be a repeated waste of time and money. So maybe the Goddess did do more than just give the Odium permission to gather wealth by whatever means they deemed appropriate; maybe she was sheltering them, keeping them invisible. Or maybe the pirates’ dogma was infectious and he had spent far too much time here.

  “Have they found Father Time?” Gorett remained standing even though Dreck had taken a seat by his makeshift fire pit, logs crackling in a shallow dent in the steel floor.

  Dreck worked a frostbitten piglet from a sack. Gorett had seen Dreck use his inborn talent to dismantle many a metal thing, but whenever it was anything of flesh, his blood chilled.

  “They’ll figure it out eventually, you know,” Dreck said, spreading his fingers over the animal, causing it to gently explode. Bone and flesh tumbled about in a slow tempest of pink cubes.

  Watching, Gorett observed the strata of the pig in the sides of the cubes: skin fading into a thick layer of yellow fat, and the white-pink stuff of actual muscle. Sickened but oddly hungry, he remembered Dreck had asked him something. “Um, figure what out?”

  With a guiding push of his hand, the meat cubes drifted over the waiting grill as if filled with helium. They touched down upon the metal, sizzling. The rest—those that contained bone and organs—Dreck returned to gravity’s mercy, and they flopped to the floor in a loose red heap. “Your act.”

  “Act? Clearly I’m the victim of a mental disorder,” Gorett said, staring at the gore pile. “Brought on, I suspect, by the constant abuse over this past year.” Mindlessly, he rubbed his sleeve over the tattoo.

  Dreck squinted into the smoke. “Is that all it’s been? Huh. Feels longer to me.” With a poke of his thumb, he rolled a cube to an uncooked side. “And you might be right, with how you’ve started to show signs of . . . terminal squirrelliness. Or you play it that well. Been checking your eyes?”

  “Yes, I have, but . . . playing what well? Why would you think I’m—?”

  “You don’t like it here,” Dreck interrupted, fingering his rust-colored beard. “Can’t blame you. If I was so accustomed to the pampered life, I would too, I suspect.”

  Gorett ignored that. “Again, why would you think I’m acting, Dreck?”

  “I can only assume you haven’t been to war.” And before Gorett could answer: “You must’ve been, what, thirty or so at the start of the Territorial Skirmish, right?”

  “I was twenty-eight, but no, I haven’t been to war. What’s that got to—?”

  “No surprise there. Probably told the draft office you had a bum heart or something.”

  “I was working in the palace, a page, I—”

  “I’ve been. Last big one.”

  “The Skirmish? But you would’ve been a child, a boy—”

  “Being a Fractioner has values beyond the obvious.” Dreck nodded at the sizzling pig dice. “Locks my bits and bobs when things get creaky. Keeps me spry.” He flexed his hands as if they ached. “But we’re getting off topic. Suffice it to say I was, hand to the Goddess. And anyone who finds themselves in any war, I reckon, will make it tolerable somehow. Shut off inside”—he poked the chest of his dense coat—“or temporarily wear the face of another man who can weather things the bloke within cannot.”

  The wind howled, loose powder hissing past in sparkling white waves.

  Saying nothing, Gorett watched Dreck press on one of the cubes with the heel of his hand. A spurt of grease made the fire whoosh hungrily.

  “But playing a role can be revealing,” Dreck said. “Those actions done whilst masked speak more of the man inside than you’d expect.” Wiping a rag across his hand, he said, “Peril is a stage upon which we don’t wear masks but instead take them off—sometimes have them taken off by no choice of our own.”

  “But I’m not in peril,” Gorett quietly stated. “You said so yourself, when we set our arrangement. I’d be protected, long as I kept my word. Which, I’ll add, you haven’t entirely held up.” He tugged up his sleeve.

  “Is that supposed to say traitor? We need to nab a tutor sometime, I think.” Dreck chuckled. “But you’re still alive, aye?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Oh, cut the melodrama. Could be worse. At any time, in fact.”

  Gorett pulled his fur collar tighter. Threats were nothing new, but this felt sharper—how casually Dreck had said that. “What’re you saying?”

  “You’re alive only because I bumped the boys’ wages up. And I was able to only because of how bountifully we’ve been blessed as of late.” He motioned at the snow-buried loot out the window. “In times any leaner than these . . .” He clicked his tongue. “Well.”

  “I’m aware of how it works,” said Gorett. “And living under such a cloud as that, how could I be expected to keep my sanity?” The question was genuine.

  Dreck creaked his chair back on two legs. “No, I still think you’re pretending. A defense mechanism, like I said.” He nodded in agreement with himself and returned his gaze to the grill. “Because you’ve nothing else to keep you strong, something that makes you want to fight.” Dreck dropped his chair onto four legs with a slam, took up a plate—one of actual ceramic, not a hubcap—and scooted two blackened dice on.

  “I have nothing to fight for?” Gorett said, offended. “What of my half of the deposit?”

  “Aye, true.” Dreck flicked open a knife and began sawing into the cube, crunching through the charred exterior. “But I think you heard that the Sequestered Son came out of hiding shortly after we picked you up, when you thought you’d be taking a holiday. Now you letting us take our half of the stone, as agreed, and you getting your city back? Well, neither of those is going to happen.” He pushed what he was chewing to one cheek. “Shite’s changed, Gorett. You’re a wanted man. Not that Geyser would’ve been much to return to, considering how I’ve rejiggered the extraction plan.”

  “It was your plan to take the stone that way all along. You stole that warhead before picking me up, remember?” He’d been sitting on that for a while.

  “Huh.” Dreck’s eyebrows rose. “And yet you’re not going off on some tirade, calling me a madman?”

  “No,” Gorett said, looking down at his too-big boots, “I’ve come to terms with it. The deposit’s what’s important. There was never any talk of how you’d retrieve it, nor any regarding Geyser’s protection. Half the deposit to you and half to me. I’ll take mine off-planet, change my name, be the wealthiest man in whatever system I choose to plunk down in, while yours will be going toward . . . strengthening your efforts, as it were.”

  Dreck speared another cube and popped it in his mouth. “I detect doubt.”

  “It’s not my place to speculate on whether or not it’ll work. What you do with your half is your business.”

  “Colin is excited,” Dreck said, swallowed. “Seen him in the halls? That spring in his step? Well, as springy as it can be, down a leg as he is. Still, he’s going to be fearsome. Like me. He’ll be the little weaver brother I always wanted. Two days and some change, Pitka. Champing at the bit? I am.”

  Gorett said nothing. Colin had been there to hold him down for the tattoo. That braying laugh of his . . .

  “Go ahead. Speak your mind. It’s just you and I.”

  Finally, Gorett sat—not in the stained lawn chair near the cook fire but on a corner of the bed, testing its enviable resilience. “Pyne’s firstborn didn’t really drown because of bleeding lungs like we’d all been told. So imagine my surprise, having worked in that palace for years alongside Francois Pyne, up until he . . . passed away.”

  Dreck laughed. “Needn’t keep that under the rug anymore, Gorett. We all know you’d done it or had it done.”

  Gorett’s cheeks grew hot. To air secrets he’d kept so securely buried felt strange, at once invigorating and unner
ving. “Yes, well.”

  “Ever hear from Vidurkis? Shame, if he’s lost. Heard he was awfully committed to the Goddess.” Dreck took a moment to bask in the amber luster of the statue’s all-seeing headlights.

  “I assume he’s either dead or suffering whatever young Pyne decided was fitting for him.” Either would be fine, long as I needn’t deal with that mad dog ever again.

  “Vidurkis had a little sister, right? Worked in the palace?”

  “Margaret, yes, the Royal Stitcher.”

  “Heard it announced on the radio they’d become engaged—the Sequestered Son and her.” Setting his plate aside, Dreck got to his feet, grunting as he straightened his back. “Your man’s little sister is betrothed to the Pyne who’s calling the shots now. Funny how shite works out. Well,” he added, “he named himself steward. Throne’s to remain empty.”

  “We have plenty of radios here. I’m well aware of current events.”

  “Yes, but you do know why Pyne did that, what that says?”

  “He suspects I’m still alive.”

  “He knows you’re alive and won’t take the throne until the old king has been retired permanently.” With his hand, Dreck made a gun. “Gotcha in his sights. Ka-bang.”

  “Best of luck, Little Pyne,” Gorett said, chuckling. He’d meant haughtiness, but it’d come out an anxious titter. “With us way up here, under these constant blizzards, we’re good as off-planet.”

  “Aye,” Dreck said with disinterest, wandering the room in endless circles. “Sometimes, though—and this is just me spit-balling here—I can’t help but wonder if, given the chance, you’d trade the wendal stone for the throne. Or at least a wiped slate.”

  “We’re being honest with one another?” Gorett glanced at the door. It was closed.

  “Just two blokes, chewing the fat.”

  Gorett let himself say, “In that case, I might, if I could.”