The Ironclad Prophecy

by Kelleher, Pat

  “What do you mean?” said Atkins, pushing through them to where the foliage draped across the opening. He parted it with an impatient sweep of his arm.

  The ground fell away. The tunnel opened onto empty space. A hundred or so feet below, he saw the canopy of the jungle spread out before him.

  “Eh, up!” said Mercy, grabbing Atkins’ webbing as he flailed to keep his balance.

  The tunnel came out on the side of the precipice. Only it wasn’t just a precipice. Looking out across the top of a jungle canopy below, he could make out the far side of the valley with its rising cliff face, the one he’d seen before, when Jarak tried to sacrifice him. He saw now that it wasn’t a rift valley as he previously thought. From here, he could see that the cliffs curved round and met, the sides of a vast crater hundreds of feet deep and filled with jungle. Over to his right he could see the mysterious discoloured line of vegetation in the crater that he’d noticed before.

  None of which helped them now. They were trapped, and the creature was rushing towards them.

  ALFIE SHUFFLED CAUTIOUSLY down the passage, holding the torch high, and peered into the gloom. From somewhere up ahead he could hear a constant muttering.

  “Sir?” he called. “Lieutenant Mathers, sir!”

  At the very edge of the torch glow, he caught sight of the scarecrow figure of the tank commander in his shamanistic rain cape.

  “Perkins? Don’t move. Stay there.”

  Beyond Mathers, something filled the tunnel space, writhing. Alfie held his breath. The creature waited, small tendrils waving tentatively in the air around Mathers, apparently mollified by the Lieutenant’s muttering. The tentacles retreated into the body of the creature, and Alfie watched it withdraw back down the tunnel with a sucking sound, the way it came.

  Alfie edged forwards, uncertain as to whether the thing had truly gone. “How?” he began.

  “I wondered that myself,” said Mathers, unperturbed. “But you’ve seen them.”

  “What, sir?”

  “These things inside me. I think it could sense them. I don’t think it likes them.”

  Alfie remembered the glimpse he got after being forced to drink the petrol fruit. He didn’t like them either.

  Mathers turned to the Gearsman. “I need to get back to the tank, Perkins. I can’t fight them any longer. I was ready to give myself to them just then. I can feel them interfering with my mind. They want me, need me to die, for some reason. The fumes seem to subdue them somehow, but I can’t hold them back by myself for much longer.”

  “We’ll get you back, sir.”

  “Don’t tell them, Perkins. Don’t tell them about the things inside me. They don’t need to know.”

  Alfie thought they did. He didn’t want to be a confidant. He didn’t want to be burdened with secrets, but he bit his tongue. “My lips are sealed, sir,” he said, guiding the weakened officer along. Mathers offered no resistance.

  Alfie saw the bloom of torchlight ahead. “We’re here,” he called. The light moved along the passage towards him, highlighting Jack and Frank below it, as they approached.

  Mathers had lapsed from lucidity again and, vacant-eyed, muttered to himself.

  “We need to get him back to the Ivanhoe,” said Alfie, as Frank and Jack took Mathers from him.

  “Alfie!” Nellie rushed forwards to hug him but stopped herself, the fleeting moment of impropriety before the others embarrassing her. Alfie was amused to find the tank men averting their gaze and shuffling awkwardly.

  “We must carry on,” Napoo reminded them.

  The crew picked up their jar-stuffed coveralls and let the urman take the lead, thinking to blame him if they remained lost. They pushed on, the tunnel spiralling upwards at a gentle gradient.

  Mathers was delirious. He revived briefly when they felt the fresh air blowing down the tunnel. The tank crew stumbled towards it, finding a breach in the wall. They pushed through the tangled mass of creepers and vines obscuring their view, and caught sight of the tank across the clearing.

  “Yes!” A weary cheer went up. Even Alfie was relieved to see the great iron beast again. It was like coming home. Inside that, they would be safe.

  MATHERS ROUSED SLIGHTLY, his brow furrowed as he listened intently. He couldn’t hear it anymore, the constant whisper of Skarra. It had gone and he didn’t know if it would ever return. He felt an unassailable grief so profound he wanted to howl. Then he felt the wind on his face. For a fleeting moment, he caught sight of the faint scent spectre of Jeffries, a supercilious smile on his face, as he turned and waved before walking away from the edifice and dispersing on the breeze.

  As the breeze blew, all his cares blew away on it. He forgot Jeffries. He remembered a vague feeling of sorrow, but not why. A moment later, he no longer even remembered that. All he knew was the wind. He turned to face it and waited.

  THE COLUMN OF air pushed ahead of the creature and ruffled the curtain of foliage behind them.

  Chalky was whimpering with fear. Gutsy muttered to him in calm tones.

  “We’ve got bombs. We can kill it,” suggested Pot Shot.

  “If we don’t bring the tunnel down with it, it’s still going to block our way back,” said Atkins. “No, we’re going to have to lure it out of the opening.” He peered out of the gaping hole at the surrounding rock. Above, there was a large overhang, that looked impassable. The top of the cliff was seventy or eighty feet above them, but seemed too sheer to climb. Around the opening, however, were small trees with spreading root systems, holding them to the cliff face, that might hold a man? There was only one thing for it.

  Atkins swung back in. “There’s a small ledge to the right, and creepers that should hold our weight.”

  “Should?”

  “Best I can do.”

  Gazette shook his head. “I’m not bloody going out there.”

  “Well, that creature is headed this way whether we like it or not. Jump or be pushed.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Gutsy, reaching out and grabbing a root. The plant creaked, but held, as he stretched out for another further along. “Well, if it’ll hold me... You follow me, lad,” he called to Chalky, “and just follow the advice of me missus when she’s getting undressed – don’t look down. Many’s the time I wished I’d followed her advice, son, believe me. Brr.” He shook his head vigorously until his jowls wobbled.

  Gazette edged out. “I hate heights.”

  Pot Shot, Porgy and Mercy scrambled out over the other side.

  “You too,” Atkins told Chandar.

  “But what about you?” the chatt asked.

  “Oh, I’ll be joining you shortly, don’t you worry.”

  The chatt scuttled out with a cockroach-like speed that startled Atkins as he watched it use the invading roots to scurry up the passage wall and out of the tunnel mouth. He shuddered, then checked that his men were out of the way.

  He ran back down the passage a short distance, intending to bait the creature. He fired a couple of rounds, not imagining that he’d stop it, but just to goad it. The bullets buried themselves in the oncoming flesh with sucking thwups. “Come on, then, you ugly bugger. Come and get me.”

  He turned and ran. The great glossy wet bulk, spraying its lubricating oily mist to ease its way, barrelled towards him. He could see the opening ahead. It wasn’t far, but it was further than he wanted it to be. He had grossly underestimated the speed of the thing, and its blind, instinctive need for food. It began to put forth thin tendrils that flailed blindly, closing the distance between them.

  As he raced towards the end of the tunnel, he saw Mercy’s face and arm silhouetted against the light. “Run!” he yelled.

  How the hell did he think that was going to help? Of course he was bloody running.

  As he pounded the last few yards, Atkins felt a tendril wrap round his puttee. No! He was so damn close. A couple of yards shy of the tunnel mouth, he took a deep breath and bellowed his rage and fear, putting everything he had into one last, despe
rate lunge. He leapt through the curtain of foliage.

  For less than the space of a heartbeat, he hung in the air. He saw the blue sky ahead and glimpsed the awful fall to the jungle below, before strong hands grabbed his webbing and swung him aside.

  Another heartbeat. He crashed into the cliff wall with a force that winded him; one of Chandar’s precious amphora shattered in its pouch. He saw Mercy’s sweaty, grinning face and grabbed instinctively for the roots in front of him.

  A heartbeat later the newly birthed creature, oiling the tunnel as it came with its greasy black vapour, shot out, arcing into space, glands on its body spraying Atkins with the disgusting stuff as it passed.

  The limbless thing tumbled down through the air to the jungle canopy below, losing the slug-like shape forced upon it by the constraints of the passage. Freshly extruded tendrils writhed helplessly in mid-air.

  Atkins breathed a sigh of relief. “Blood and sand, that was too close by –”

  He felt a tug on his leg, and then a wrench that almost pulled him from the cliff. The creature still had a tendril wrapped round his leg as it fell, threatening to drag him down with it. He could feel the root he held tear from its anchorage. Wide with horror, his eyes met those of Mercy.

  Mercy made a desperate grab for Atkins’ wrist, but his hand was as sweaty as Atkins’ own. Atkins slithered from his grasp.

  “Only!” roared Gutsy, fumbling to free Little Bertha.

  He could feel his wet clammy fingers slipping from the root. His eyes still locked on Mercy’s as he shook his head, absolving him of any blame. There was nothing more to be done.

  The coarse texture of the root began to slip away under his fingertips.

  With a rapidity of movement none had seen from it before today, Chandar scuttled, face-down, over Atkins’ back. The chatt’s mandibles scythed through the tendril holding his ankle, and the creature crashed down through the canopy below and was lost from sight. Atkins felt Chandar’s vestigial claws bite deep into his tunic, gripping him long enough for hands to reach down and haul him back up.

  They clambered back into the tunnel and the shocked party caught their breath.

  Gutsy looked at Chandar and shook his head in wonder. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I didn’t know they could do that. Did you know they could do that?”

  Slumped against the tunnel wall, Atkins looked up at his saviour. “Thank you.”

  The chatt sucked in a chestful of air. “It was Kurda,” it lisped.

  Atkins nodded, still catching his breath. He regarded the chatt for a moment. “What is that place?” he asked, waving a hand at the crater beyond the tunnel mouth.

  Chandar hissed and sank down on its legs. “Forbidden. That place does not exist.”

  “Well, it clearly bloody does exist. It damn near killed me!”

  “It is forbidden to the Ones.”

  “I like the sound of that,” said Gutsy. “Anywhere the chatts can’t go has got to be good.”

  Mercy snorted. “I wouldn’t be too sure. This world would kill you at every turn. If you ask me, there’s probably a bloody good reason why they don’t want to go there.”

  Atkins got up and stepped towards the chatt. “You’ve been windy since we came across the Gilderra enclave. When the Zohtakarrii captured us, you knew then where we were, didn’t you? You knew about that place down there, that crater.”

  “It is forbidden, forbidden to speak about. It does not exist for us. Other Ones, like the Zohtakarrii, whose territory borders it, patrol to make sure no One goes in and nothing comes out. It has been that way for spira upon spira.”

  Atkins stared hard at the chatt, but its facial plate gave nothing away. It had no expression to read. He had no choice but to take what it said at face value. For now.

  “Let’s get moving before another of those things decides to corner us here again.”

  In the birthing gallery, two creatures were cracking the dead chatts’ chitinous shells. Another freshly-birthed horror had fallen upon the urmen bodies, gripping them with extruded tendrils, and sucking the meat from them, leaving nothing but ichor-covered skin and bone, like discarded greasy chicken carcasses. Such was their voracious appetite that they paid no attention to the Tommies.

  Atkins tapped the air with a finger, pointing towards a passage on the opposite side that seemed to run upwards. They skirted the repulsive, shapeless things and, once the section was safely in the tunnel mouth, Atkins ordered Pot Shot and Mercy to throw a brace of Mills bombs into the centre. The creatures exploded in balls of flame and silent thrashing tendrils that shrivelled in the heat.

  They followed the passage as it curved upwards, until Atkins felt sure they had climbed more than the hundred or so feet that would bring them back to ground level. Light blossomed in the distance, filtered through hanging foliage. With the point of his bayonet, Atkins parted the curtain of leaves and vines. “Blood and sand, not again!”

  Wherever the passage may once have led, it now looked down on a large overgrown amphitheatre formed by the collapse of the entire central core of the edifice, the once raw and jagged violence of the edifice’s destruction now softened by alien nature’s reclamation, overgrown with tangles of creepers, fighting for dominance. Tree-like things clung to the shattered walls. Around them, on the now exposed and weathered walls, they could see other tunnels and runs, at various levels and angles, opening just as abruptly out into the central space.

  It reminded Atkins of when he and his brother William dug up woodland ants’ nests as boys, breaking open the mound to reveal the network of tunnels within, Flora protesting as the disturbed ants swarmed around their feet.

  Looking down into the ruined bowl beneath them, it became clear that the great creatures that had pursued them through the chatt-built tunnels, that had come out to the jungle to search for prey, were not many creatures at all, but a single many-tentacled one. The small ones they killed were merely hatching young.

  In the basin of ruined tunnels and collapsed chambers, something huge and shapeless heaved and pulsed. They could see no eyes or mouth, in fact no organs or limbs of any kind other than the tendrils that fed into open tunnels like roots.

  Atkins had no doubt that Jeffries could well have summoned what he saw from some demonic circle of hell. Its existence stirred a deep revulsion, not just in him, but the whole section, and this from men who had seen bloated corpses move and writhe obscenely in the Somme mud, infested by feeding corpse rats burrowed into their putrefying innards.

  This was the evil spirit that had been stealing urmen. This was what they had come to kill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “You Have Only Once To Die...”

  THE THING SQUATTED in a large ruined central chamber. The roof had collapsed around it, leaving its back, if that’s what it was, half-exposed to the elements. It was a great black mass larger than several zeppelins. The black, feathered tripe-like flesh bore a cross-hatching of scars, old and new. It had tentacles sunk into lower tunnels, like roots. Others were constantly dipping into seemingly random passage openings around it, even as others withdrew. It seemed rooted to the spot. That would explain the absence of animals around the edifice. It had exhausted its local food supply. Forced to stretch its tentacles further to find food, it had encroached on the enclave’s hunting grounds to snatch urmen.

  The thing throbbed as it withdrew a tentacle from a tunnel below where the Tommies stood. It was wrapped delicately around the remains of one of its young. Following some primitive instinct, it dangled the sloppy, burnt, shapeless mess before it, shaking it gently, trying to revive it. It created other, more delicate, tendrils to prod and probe it. After a cursory examination, they retreated into the mass. Then it drew the tendril, holding the dead creature, back into its body, and its offspring along with it.

  “It doesn’t look happy,” said Mercy.

  Gutsy peered down. “You wouldn’t be, either, if someone had killed your baby.”

  “It just ate its dead baby, so I
hardly think it’s that bothered,” Porgy declared.

  “What the hell is it?” Atkins asked Chandar.

  “This One does not know,” it wheezed, forcing out the words. “It – it is not mentioned in any aromapedias. It is not GarSuleth-made.”

  “Whatever it is, I think we’re going to need the damn tank to take it out,” said Gazette, unfazed, his mind never straying from the job.

  “Hell, no!” Porgy slapped Atkins on the back. “Only here can do it single-handed, can’t you, Only?” He grinned at his mate. “Come on, Chalky’s told us all the tales.”

  “Aye,” said Mercy with a grin. “Seven at one blow!”

  Atkins curled his lip. “Piss off. How many bombs do we have left?”

  Gazette did a quick tally. “Six.”

  Atkins leant forward to get a better look at the thing, doubting that they would be enough. He stepped back sharply as the edge of the lip crumbled away beneath his feet. Several large chunks skittered down the exposed walls before hitting an outcrop, and bouncing off over the lower slopes, where some were ensnared by thickets of creepers. The rest bounded down in ever increasing arcs, before landing on the creature’s back in a shower of thuds.

  A stream of tendrils exploded upwards towards them from around the fallen rubble.

  “No, it’s definitely not happy,” said Mercy.

  “Back!” ordered Atkins, but the section was one step ahead of him. Chandar, though, hesitated, mesmerised by the sight, until Atkins put a hand on its carapace and pulled it away.

  He took a last look over his shoulder as thin black tendrils appeared over the lip of the truncated tunnel. Some had already begun searching the gaping hole where they had stood. As they explored the tunnel further, they began to entwine and merge into one, growing in bulk, thickening and expanding until one single tentacle filled the space, blocking out the light.

  Rushing down the tunnel, it expanded further until the walls began to crack and shudder under the pressure of its passing.