by Andrew Post
Nevele peeked around the corner, then pulled back. “If that’s what we want to do, we’ll need to act soon. That door of his won’t hold forever.”
Clyde ran his gaze about their surroundings.
The base was a bent horseshoe shape. Directly across the hall from their hiding place, Clyde could see out a set of frost-smudged windows: not only the sprawling icy wasteland but the room in which Dreck was hiding across the small gap. In the well-lit room, set with a giant pane of glass at his back, the bloodied pirate captain was using his flipped-up bed as a barricade in case the diseased pirates managed to break in. Kneeling behind the makeshift shelter, his hands shook as he fed shells to his scattergun. He didn’t see Clyde watching him, and the moment he had his gun reloaded, he marched to the door, sweat-slicked face scowling. Clyde looked farther out, to the blowing white past the windows, seeing a glass tunnel connecting another hallway with the room Dreck was in. He wondered if the plague-ridden men had gathered at only the one door or both. He couldn’t see into the glass tunnel, with it wearing a dense sleeve of ice end to end.
“Come on,” Clyde said, and together they moved out into the hall, carefully plodding up the other direction. They turned a corner and went up to where the tunnel would lead them to the second door of Dreck’s chambers.
Down the tunnel, it was blindingly bright with the suns cutting in through the ice, causing refractions and brilliant little warped rainbows to puddle the floor. None of the plagued attempted to siege this entrance.
Carrying Commencement low at his side, Clyde tried shielding the midday suns with his arm, but the brightness was all around, bouncing into his eyes from the crystalline formations sleeved around the glass tube. Eyes stinging from the suns’ rays, he banged on the door, beating rhythmically to let Dreck know the person outside was in fact human, still capable of more than animalistic thumps.
The reply came at once: a gunshot to the door.
Clyde leaped away. None of the scattershot had broken through, but a cluster of small dents goose pimpled their side. Keeping clear in case Dreck repeated his greeting, Clyde shouted, “You’ve lost, Dreck. There’s nowhere to run. It’s either them or us, so choose.”
“Who is it?” Dreck said in a cheery falsetto.
“Clyde Pyne. Steward of—”
“Fancy this. I’ve got the Sequestered Son, undoubtedly accompanied by his merry band of thumb suckers, at one door and this unholy accident at the other. Gee, decisions, decisions!” Another blast rang out. “Go find the abomination Gorett turned out to be, see if you can talk any pity into him. I may have painted myself into a corner, but I’ll find a way out. Always do.”
Clyde turned back to the others, whispering, “Abomination?”
Flam drew a deep breath and stared vacantly.
Nevele swept a hand through her hair, gathering a handful of it and squeezing, as if to push the notion out of her head.
Höwerglaz’s warning haunted them all. He’d done something to Gorett. And now Gorett was something else. What, though, was still a mystery they were all hesitant to crack.
Clyde shouted through to Dreck, “Is that what you did? Have Höwerglaz use the wendal stone on Gorett?”
“How many times do I have to say it? Piss.” Blam. “Off.” Blam. Through the clatter of reloading: “You can tell Queen Disease that she may think she’s being all secretive and shite, hiding behind that cult of ninnies of hers, but I got little birdies too. I know right where Miss Nimbelle Winter is, and she’s on my to-do list. Matter-of-fact, when I get out of this, she’s going to be bumped up to priority one.”
“I say we go back and join forces with the uglies,” Flam said. “Help them break down the door and just let them have the arsehole.”
“Nimbelle Winter,” Nevele was saying, saucer-eyed, barely audible with a hand crushing over her mouth. “She’s Queen Disease?”
“Do you know that name?” Clyde said.
Nevele’s focus moved back to Clyde, as if she were surprised she’d been heard, that she’d spoken aloud. “I do, and if he’s telling the truth, then . . .”
Over her shoulder, Clyde caught a glimpse of a figure at the far end of the glass tunnel. Nevele turned and raised her gun in time with Flam. Clyde stepped forward, Commencement at the ready.
A man, alone, in shadow, remained at the far end, where the sunlight didn’t reach.
Tall, lithe. The illumination from the tunnel seemed to not fall upon it but pass right through it. He was blurry at the edges but with a core that seemed to pulse—solidify and drift apart, solidify and drift apart—like the disturbed floor of a muddy creek. He had an emaciated face and chest, exposed ribs, seemingly no legs, as if the torso hovered, in an armor of wispy darkness. Within the chest, something chalk white throbbed, like tree roots or some wraithlike tumor.
When Flam fired, the bullet passed through, sparking off the wall behind. The entity didn’t react whatsoever, as if it weren’t even aware it was being observed. Black vortexes in its gray skull stood in for eyes, mesmerizing in their ceaseless, pulling swirl.
Daring a single step forward, Clyde said, “Pitka Gorett?”
It remained still, saying nothing. It bore no features resembling him, but Clyde couldn’t help but feel this was Gorett. He’d been pursuing this man for so long. He’d seen his picture plenty of times, crumpled a few copies, but he’d never actually laid eyes on him. And, really, if this thing before him now was Gorett, he never would see him alive—for this thing seemed not of blood and bone, just living smoke.
When it spoke, its voice was so low-pitched it was nearly incoherent. “The Pyne boy.” It had an almost effeminate lilt to it, unlike the recordings of Gorett’s speeches. Not his voice—if it was him—but another’s.
“You need to call off the men you’ve . . . possessed,” Clyde said, unable to find a better term, “and come with us to Adeshka. You’re guilty of usurping the crown from Francois Pyne, hiring an assassin to kill both him and Albert Wilkshire, and most of all aiding in the destruction of Geyser.” With one hand still blocking out the blinding rays, Clyde used the other to present Commencement as authoritatively as he could. “There’s nowhere left to run.”
Ignoring the threat, the entity moved into the tunnel with them but immediately shirked back, a scrap of its darkness fizzling away. Its eyes of eddying pitch studied the ice, the glass, and the light passing through—and didn’t dare a second attempt.
“Come out, Dreck,” it murmured at length, apparently not needing to move its jaw to speak. “Accept your quietus.”
Behind them, Clyde heard Dreck rustling about. “Is that him? Is that you, Gorett? How are you liking it, being a weaver? I bet you regret all that shite you said about us before, don’t you? Not so easy, is it? Think you and her pulled a fast one on me, working together? You’re twice a traitor, I hope you know. The Goddess has a particularly deep place in the junk heap for tossers like you—nothing but beds of barbed wire and battery acid rivers.”
The swirling gray on the entity’s left shifted, like wind cutting through ash. For an instant Clyde could see a word glowing, as if it’d been written upon the being’s soul. Trayter?
“Assist us, Pyne,” it said. “He is the true threat here.”
“Go ahead. Bark all you want,” Dreck shouted, “but you showed your hand a bit prematurely, jumping back like that when I blew the armory. Explosion didn’t do anything, so I knew you couldn’t be harmed that way, but the hole it made sure had an effect. It’s the light you don’t like. Your fabrick’s flip side, your curse. And if it’s one thing any weaver knows, it’s to never let anyone know your flip side if you can help it.”
Clyde took stock of where his feet were. He was four paces from the edge of the tunnel, where the sunlight made a vague line Gorett didn’t dare pass, if it was Gorett. He still wasn’t sure why he was referring to himself as us.
Its whirlpool eyes settled on Clyde again. “David Joplin—or Dreck, as you know him—took from me just as G
orett took from you,” the entity said. “Aid us.”
It made a soft choking sound. Skeletal, long fingers clutched at its gray rib cage. It tipped its head as if in a great deal of pain. The ashy mass within, where a heart should have been, gave great heaving pulses—then slowed again. The entity stood upright and looked about, as if surprised to find itself here. When it noticed Clyde, its voice changed—even deeper than before, more like the Gorett whose voice Clyde knew from his archived speech recordings.
“Clyde Pyne?” Again, the entity coughed, its edges going wild for a moment, a riot of sharp edges, then smoothing back to a cloak of ever-shifting dark whorls. The female voice again: “Break open the door, boy. Bring him to us, and we’ll allow you the pleasure of watching him die.”
It was as if it had two minds.
Nevele stepped forward. “Are you Nimbelle Winter? The teacher, at Srebrna Academy?”
The entity’s gaze icily slid to Nevele. “How . . . do you . . . ?”
Nevele sank back.
Clyde flashed upon her story, the one that’d saved his life in Nessapolis. Nevele raised the machine gun, training it upon the shadow creature. “I trusted you to take care
of her.”
It stared at Nevele with eyes that didn’t blink, unreadable. “Zoya. You brought me Zoya, didn’t you?” It sounded pleased. “I should thank you for her.”
“What’d you do with her?” Nevele demanded.
“She’s still a student. Doing well, I might add. High marks all around.” If it was going to expand upon that, the entity never had a chance.
The door opened behind them, and Dreck stepped into view in the hall.
The Nimbelle/Gorett creature’s edges went into a frenzy of darting spikes, eyes growing into enormous gray-black storms, nearly overtaking the entirety of its bony face. “I’ll kill you,” it screamed.
Dreck, almost heedlessly, brandished his scattergun. “Down.” He aimed at Nevele, who reluctantly raised her hands after tossing down her machine gun.
Flam slowly turned in place with his rifle held at waist height.
Unfortunately, Dreck noticed. “Nope. Drop it, Mouflon. On the floor.” Dreck pulled back the hammer of his scattergun. “Your sort might be tough, but not this tough—not at this range.”
Flam grumbled something and clunked his rifle onto the glass floor.
“Good boy.” Finally, Dreck came up to Clyde, standing before the swirling thing trapped where it was. The pirate captain smiled. His lip was split, and he bled from a gash on his neck. He was so close Clyde could smell him: sweat, grease, and gunpowder. He slung his arm over Clyde’s shoulder as if they were old friends, peering indifferently at the entity as it raged back and forth just outside its invisible barrier. Just sunlight—that’s all that was keeping it back.
Now’s your chance, Clyde thought. Act. Do something.
“See that, boy?” Dreck said. “Gorett-slash-Queen-
Disease here doesn’t like the light. Not one little b—”
Clyde brought Commencement around, intending to drive its point into Dreck’s ribs.
The pirate was quick. He threw his free hand in front of the slashing green blade.
The sword stopped as if hitting a tree trunk. Dreck held it locked where it was in space, his open palm spread before it, not even touching. Eyeing Clyde, Dreck flexed his index finger, just a twitch really, and Commencement broke apart, raining down in green metal mulch, leaving Clyde only the hilt.
“Nice try.”
The double-voiced entity continued shrieking, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” until it blended into a single sound: “Kilyukilyukilyukilyu.” Sometimes, apparently, they thought as one in this shared body—and at other moments, they clicked in and out of the smoke-ghost shell independently. Detached some moments, unified others.
Out of the room Dreck had emerged from came a loud bang. The plagued pirates rushed their way.
With a toss of his hand, Dreck reassembled Commencement. “Just remember who’s full of ick and who isn’t.”
Accepting the sword, Clyde almost bolted ahead, passing over the line of light on the floor, into the shadow creature’s waiting hands. He turned to Dreck, who wheeled on his heel and fired past Nevele and Flam into the flood of black-dribbling pirates.
“Trapped, trapped, trapped,” Nimbelle/Gorett cheered.
Dreck threw the scattergun down and raised an empty hand.
The first pirate nearly reaching Nevele splattered apart, meat cubes rolling between her feet. Nevele kicked away the ones that settled on her boots.
Flam snatched up his rifle and, with his final shot, took out one of the nightmares before it could grab him—and used the gun like a club on the next.
Nevele sent out one lash of threads after another, cutting deep bloody swaths into the sea of oncoming bodies, distributing plague-blackened viscera onto the glass walls, floor, and ceiling.
The four were pushed back by the ceaseless onslaught, until they all had their heels on the edge behind them. The entity reached as far as it dared before the sunlight seared its hands. They were slowly being pushed back, with more and more of the plagued pirates coming in. Behind him, past Nimbelle/Gorett stirring at the tunnel’s edge, the sound of pirates came around from the other side. They, unlike their maker, suffered no ill effects from Aurorin and Teanna’s light.
Dreck and Clyde were killing them as fast as they were coming, but each one that fell sprang a dozen or more black worms. Several of them attempted to climb Clyde’s leg, forcing him to stop worrying about the pirates for a moment to peel another slimy thing off. Each was hard to grab, and once in his clutch it writhed and twisted about. One even tried looping itself around his arm to continue ascending him. He threw it to the floor and stabbed Commencement into the end he assumed was its head.
The carnage raged on, their small pocket of space in the hallway reducing as more plagued pirates rushed in. Dreck turned and fired through Nimbelle/Gorett to kill those now coming from that direction. Nevele and Flam took care of those flooding in through Dreck’s chamber from the opposite end. Clyde killed the worms that came their way, those his friends—and Dreck—hadn’t noticed while they fought off the larger, bipedal enemies.
Nimbelle/Gorett spoke to him, his back nearly within its reach. He could feel its radiating coldness on his spine, the smell wafting off it like sour sickness, contagious hopelessness. It spoke in its own voice alone now, the stronger of the two that could apparently shove Gorett aside when it wished. “Ernest is using you, Pyne,” she whispered. “Tells you not to come to a place and you do, because he knew you would. Tells you that you need to act and you don’t, because he knows you won’t. You’re obstinate; I’ll give you that much. But in reality, you’re not much harder to steer than a horse with a carrot.”
The pirates kept coming in a constant wash as if being freed from a faucet. Clyde kept stabbing and slicing the worms, unable to ignore Nimbelle Winter as she whispered behind him, inches away.
“Why do we build sand castles? To kick them over. And what do you think life is to someone as old as he? We’re all his playthings, his amusements. And when he’s done with you, he’ll find someone else to fix with puppet strings. But since you came here even though he said not to, I can assist. I can be your true friend here. Turn around, give David—Dreck—there a shove so I can end him, and I’ll let you and your friends live. The pirate deserves it, Pyne. You’ll be doing Gleese a favor. And I assure you, if Höwerglaz had found himself in my position, he’d sooner let you die. I, however, am being most kind.”
Clyde turned to Dreck, who was busy putting down a pirate—smashing its head in with his gun’s spiked pommel. He was distracted. He’d never even know it was coming. Two hands to his side, one shove toward Nimbelle/Gorett, and Clyde could avenge Geyser. And maybe she’d keep her word, call off the plagued. Or maybe not. But was justice worth the act? Dreck cared nothing for his own life. He’d welcome death. But living out the last of his year
s in Adeshka’s underground prison? That’d be a fitting end for the likes of him, one that didn’t involve ending any life.
“Do we have a deal?”
One of the plagued ran at Flam, who was already busy dispensing another. Frustrated, Flam grabbed the oncoming pirate, hoisted him over his head, and slammed him headlong into the floor. The pirate, like the others, shed its worms upon its carcass, but as the worms spread away, cracks splintered the glass floor as well. The ice was all that was holding the tunnel together for a moment, before everyone began to slide on the leaning, breaking panels—right toward the hole in the floor as it sprang apart, shattering under them.
Clyde fought to find Commencement among the blocks of ice and glass and the swallowing snow. While the entity that’d spawned them couldn’t chase any farther, the pirates could. They streamed out of the hole Flam had made, raining down all around them, just as one pirate sprang out next to him. Nevele snatched its head off its shoulders with her threads before it could bite into Clyde. Together they pulled themselves from the snow, then got Flam. Dreck had already pulled himself free and was running away, leaving the others to their fate. More pirates flooded from the hole in the glass tunnel, Nimbelle/Gorett roaring with dissatisfaction from above, trapped where they were, in the shadows.
Clyde, Nevele, and Flam charged away, lungs burning and eyes tearing up from the cold and brightness, to the clearing behind the base.
“This way,” Dreck shouted. They reached where he’d fled, at the feet of the Mechanized Goddess. They put their backs to one another, as from every door, window, and blasted hole in the surrounding buildings came more and more of the plagued Odium.
They came stumbling and dragging broken limbs, eyes uniformly rolled back into heads, hands reaching, drooling blackness staining the snow at their feet. Clyde felt something bump into him, realized it was Dreck who was backing away too. The pirate captain must’ve, for all his power, still had a zero point to his gift—and it’d been reached. Each swing toward one of his former peons was fruitless. None scattered into bloody cubes as before, only shed the snow gathered on their faces or shaved away a scrap of beard or tatty clothing. They marched inward, from all sides, unhindered, moaning, seemingly wanting nothing more than to infect.