by Nate Crowley
As if on cue, a monstrous cracking rolled in from far inland, followed by a rumble through the ground. Another few volleys like that, and a breach was inevitable. The Blades of Titan, the mercenary company Mouana had served her career in, was finally making its play to take the City. And to have ground down its defences to a point where such an assault was even feasible, Lipos-Tholos must have been on its last legs even before they had arrived.
With the threat of full assault on its landward side looming, the City would have had to keep its troops out in the suburbs, massed anxiously behind the walls. When the Tavuto came through the Gate, what choice had they but to pray the naval blockade held, and that the citadel’s standing garrison would be enough to mop up anything that made it through?
And to give credit to whoever had arranged the defence, thought Mouana, it nearly had been enough. She doubted she still had seven hundred sailors standing, and wouldn’t have had that if Tavuto hadn’t been able to bombard the city from under its shield.
But it had, so there they were. And there was the Ministry, just half a mile ahead up an empty street.
Mouana wondered why nobody was running for it, then realised they had all stopped to wait for her as she stared at the sky. Looking behind her, she saw the street filled with dead faces, patient yet alert, waiting for her to signal the advance. The mindless and the muddled were gone now; they had either wandered off into the streets in search of meat and old memories, or had long since found a gun to run at. These were the ones who had made it through Tavuto with a semblance of self, and there was something like hope in their clouded eyes, now the end was in sight.
There was Kaba, Tavuto’s former turret commander, and there was Eunice, towering two feet above the rest of the crowd. Two of the other warbuilt had made it through the assault, though one was missing an arm, and all through the crowd were women and men in the same rags as her, the remnants of the company uniform. They were mixed in with thieves and brawlers, pamphleteers and preachers; a raft of dread flotsam drifted back to the city that had cast them overboard.
The Blades’ attack on the walls no longer mattered to Mouana; they were not her army. This was, and their work was almost done. She had no idea what they would find ahead in the place of their monstrous birth; all she knew was that they had to break it so it would never work again.
Another barrage raked its claws across the night and Mouana started up the hill, with death at her back.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
FIVE
WRACK FOUND HIMSELF somewhere on Scullery Street, eating a dead hound.
Wrinkling his snout in distaste, he coughed out the rancid mouthful and scissored his jaws in a nearby puddle to rinse them. These things were necessary, sure, but he didn’t really fancy experiencing it if he could avoid it.
As the puddle’s surface flattened out, he turned his wedge of a head and eyeballed the reflection: he was a Mako this time. Or was it a Grey Gorger? Either way, some sort of shark, fitted with the usual hydraulic cradle and crown of steel legs that most of Tavuto’s beasts had been built into.
They hissed and clattered as they carried him along the street’s cobbles, through a scene of howling chaos. This close to Tavuto (its flank loomed just a few blocks ahead, like a crude new street) the roads were swarming with zombies; those either too degraded or confused to have followed the logic of the invasion, and who had wandered down the chains and boat-chutes to see what they could find.
For much of the citizenry, already terrified by the interposition of a town-sized ship in their postcode, this had proved too much. Families were fleeing their tenements wholesale, clutching their children as they sprinted up the street in bug-eyed terror, while militiamen fleeing from the fighting on College Hill accelerated past them.
For the most part, the wandering dead were harmless—Wrack witnessed one woman with a sagging vest and exposed vertebrae, leaning down to a letterbox and repeatedly bellowing to ask if Lottie was home. Others, however, had come to the streets with more than just fog in their heads. For some of the dead, any revenge would do.
A piercing scream caused Wrack to turn; a child had tripped, been sent sprawling in the debris of a toppled poem cart. His mother had noticed, but so had a huge old bastard with a crushed face and a metal spar in his hand—and the dead man was a lot closer.
Wrack sprinted for the corpse, raising sparks as his claws crashed across the cobbles. The sight of a quarter-ton shark racing towards her son did nothing to allay the mother’s screaming, but it managed to distract the crushed man.
Spar still raised in readiness to spear the boy, the corpse swung round and threw the thing at Wrack instead. It was a classic harpooner’s throw, sending the pole smoothly through Wrack’s mouth and skewering virtually everything vital on the way back.
Still, Wrack didn’t mind that much; since he’d worked out how to get telemetry from the ship’s beasts (after Tavuto’s impact, he’d needed something to distract him from the pain), he had no shortage of bodies to resort to.
The shark’s vision drained like a drunk’s bladder, greying out even before he collided jaws-first with the corpse, but lasted long enough for him to catch the mother scooping up her son in the corner of his vision. As it faded entirely, he found his relief turning swiftly to cold slush. How many dead men, on how many streets, had he not managed to stop? Seeing it at street level, hearing the horror in that woman’s voice as she wondered how this could possibly be happening to her... it had made it all a bit too real.
Maybe the shark had been a bad idea, thought Wrack. So he looked somewhere else.
“TWO... THREE!” ROARED Mouana, pushing forward with all the strength her salt-cured calves could muster. The makeshift battering ram surged forward on the shoulders of the mob, and the Ministry’s mahogany gates bounced in her vision as they broke into a run.
She did not expect them to be flung open, nor for a pair of burly women to step forward from a cheering crowd inside and hurl a man’s body into their path.
From the looks on their faces they were just as shocked to see a gang of corpses rushing at them, brandishing a piece of public statuary as a ram.
There was a lot of shouting, a lot of falling over, and then a gruesome, clanging crunch as the ram—a bronze casting of the City’s Chancellor—pitched forward right on top of the body on the floor.
The echoes of the crash were still ringing as the crowd inside exploded into motion, drawing weapons and diving behind whatever cover the Ministry’s lobby offered. Despite their decay-numbed reflexes, Mouana’s crew nearly matched their speed, drawing their weapons and aiming at the doorway with teeth bared. Eunice’s gun was already whining when Mouana gave the order to hold fire and—to her immense relief—the same order echoed from inside the building.
The silence that followed was dense and dangerous; a soft chorus of clicks, coughs and shuffles, each of which threatened a hail of bullets if it tempted a finger to slip. Then came the deliberately heavy slap of soles on marble, as a rangy figure strode out of the Ministry to stand on its threshold.
Initially, Mouana took him for a dead man. His face was tight as sheet rubber across a skull like a fist, and riven down one side by a scar that left one eye a milky wart. His arms were twisted bunches of tattoos and veins, and his waistcoat hung from his ribs across a painfully empty abdomen. But his good eye was sharp as sea ice, and the way he sucked at his tobacco-pipe betrayed an uniquely living thirst.
Mouana let go of the fallen ram, and walked towards him without breaking eye contact. Her wrist panel beeped, but she ignored it. Standing just six feet apart, they nodded at each other. He took in the remains of her uniform, the regimental tattoo of the ringed world on her forearm; she flicked a glance at the blue-inked pipe-smoke wreathing his own. They had an understanding.
“Wrack?” said the man through his thick black moustache, emitting a cloud of blue smoke.
“Yeah,” answered Mouana. “Wrack.”
Both mobs
erupted in rhythmic chanting of the name as the two of them shook hands and broke into the strangest of smiles.
THIS WAS ACTUALLY quite a lot of fun, thought Wrack, as he concentrated on slapping a tentacle round the slippery chain link.
He’d found an octopus languishing half-finished in one of Tavuto’s labs and, since Mouana wasn’t responding to any of his messages, he had decided to see if he could get the thing into the City to pass the time.
It was bleeding hard to move the thing around, though. Every time he managed to achieve any finesse with one of its arms, the rest would contract or flail and put him off-balance. It definitely wasn’t a question of skill, he insisted to himself; after all, his brain was clearly well-acquainted with tentacles. Clearly, he thought, as his body dangled precariously from the anchor-chain, it was shoddy work by the technicians who had put the creature together.
He thrust out another arm and managed to wrap it round the next link, but the rest gave way and left him hanging. His body swung in the wind and he cursed to himself.
This was a rubbish game, admitted Wrack, letting the octopus drop onto the rooftops below.
THEY HAD MOVED into the Ministry’s Fellows’ Bar to negotiate. It was easily fifty yards from end to end; an expanse of tiled marble, potted ferns and—since the Pipers had stormed the place—the bloodied bodies of ministers.
On one side was wooden panelling; on the other, floor-to-ceiling windows, beyond which lay the factory floor far below. Where the dead were made. Viewed from up here, it could hardly be described as a factory—the side visible to the ministers was as grandly decorated as their own bar. Dominating the space was a row of colossal gilded faces; saints and knights from the City’s convoluted national mythology, snarling in ecstasy. Their gaping mouths led through to the warren of chambers where reanimation took place, and the cellars where the fresh dead would be stacked in crates, ready for transit.
From here, the ministers would have been able to dine in comfort, eating real meat as the magistrates carried bagged bodies in from the execution wing and out through the mouths of the saints.
The atmosphere in the bar today was more raucous. For a start, the Bruiser was behind the bar—although he wasn’t much of a host. Mouana shook her head in disbelief as he ripped a pump from its mounting and held it above his head, jetting a torrent of foaming lager into and around his mouth. He emitted a strange, gurgling roar, perhaps in delight on realising that, without the need to breathe, his lungs were just two new organs in which to put drink.
Mouana wasn’t sure how he’d made it here—she hadn’t seen him since her call to Tavuto’s engine hall, until a few minutes ago when he had walked in, hands drenched in blood, and marched over the Pipers at the bar to quench his thirst. As far as the Bruiser went, it was best not to ask too many questions.
Some of the more lucid sailors were wandering round the bar, making strange attempts at conversation with the living. The Pipers seemed to be doing their best to bring the dead folk into their circles, but the smiles were a little too rigid, the gesticulations a little too wild. There was no way of making those encounters relaxed: despite any amount of shared purpose, it seemed nobody could quite handle conversing with a corpse.
Others had made their way downstairs, where they were aimlessly breaking things. A mob of former citizens was busy prising one of the saintly heads from the wall, while a woman in the grey remnants of a summer dress was smashing the teeth off another with a crowbar.
Mouana was distracted from the cathartic bedlam when a tumbler full of rum was slid onto the table in front of her. Fingal, the Pipers’ haggard leader who had met her at the doors, sat down across from her and raised his own glass in salute.
“Not sure if you’re thirsty, friend—but we should at least toast before the serious talk starts.”
Fingal was clearly the type of man who could make any gesture a threat unless he made a conscious effort not to, and the creases beneath his good eye suggested he was making every attempt to seem cordial. Even so, Mouana struggled not to feel intimidated by default until she remembered how frankly terrifying she looked herself. Going by the principle that the more fights you’d visibly lost, the harder you looked, you couldn’t really beat being a dead soldier.
Mouana cemented her confidence by sinking the rum in one gulp and looking Fingal in the eye over the rim of the glass. The last drink she had shared had been with Wrack; a bottle of dirty preservative they had swigged in a leaking whaleboat, rowing home from a disastrous hunt. It reminded her.
“You knew about Wrack,” said Mouana, setting down the tumbler like a full stop. Fingal nodded as he swallowed, then tilted his head as if weighing the question.
“We knew Wrack, sure. Knew he’d gone to Tavuto in the end, and all. But we didn’t know about Wrack. When word first came through about trouble at Ocean, we had no idea it was to do with him. And when we saw his name in the radio transcripts... well, that was a surprise.”
“So you knew Wrack,” pursued Mouana, brow crackling as she frowned. “He was one of yours, right?”
Fingal shrugged, and refilled their glasses. “I used to do a lot of jobs with his old man. I knew him from when he was a kid. But let me be clear—we thought he was gone, like every other Piper gets captured and zedded. Gone for good. Certainly weren’t expecting him to hijack the City’s bloody slave ship. Neither was the Ministry. It was days before they worked out what was going on; they figured it for just a rough patch, a bad batch of zeds, poorly processed, acting up.”
“But you knew what was going on?”
“Honestly? No idea. The Blades outside the wall stepped up their assault when the Tavuto news hit, and the Ministry was caught in a spin. Figuring we were never likely to get a better chance, we made our play.”
“And the navy?” quizzed Mouana, thinking of the ships that had struck Piper flags and distracted the Eschatologist on the way in.
“Happy accident,” answered Fingal through a rum belch. “We’d had assets on those ships for a long while... been planning a breakthrough to try and raid Ocean, one day. Course, when Ocean came to us, courtesy of your good selves, we figured we had to be adaptable.”
“You mentioned Wrack’s old man,” said Mouana, as she raised her glass for another gulp. “Who was he?”
Fingal chuckled in response, a sound that belonged in an alleyway shadow.
“Old King Pipe. The boss, or as near as we came to one.”
“And where’s he now?”
Fingal’s face fell. “Dead, unfortunately. Caught a ricochet in the first scrap as we came in here and burst his head. That left me in charge, and it’s a damned shame; all I ever did was organise the muscle.”
Light pulsed through the skylights of the bar, and a deep booming rolled across the city sky; another barrage pattern was beginning. Weakening the shield enough for a full assault would take a while, but that didn’t mean there was time to waste. Finding out about Wrack’s family history could wait. Mouana downed her last drink, and pushed it aside with an open palm: it was time to get the job done.
“So. Looks like we both got here at once. What was your plan?”
“Kill the Chancellor, take the Ministry and smash the machines. Stop the abuse of the dead, or die trying—that’s all the plan ever was, far as I know.” Fingal sipped on his pipe. “If I’m honest, we were surprised to even get this far. The assault drew a lot of troops to the wall, and we had an asset on the inside to let us in—but even so, once we breached the Ministry, we were getting hammered. We’d been in a stalemate out back for hours, lost most of our people, by the time your boat showed up.” The scarred man paused to spit on the floor and stoke his pipe to a ruddy glow.
“Then suddenly, half the defence ran off in a panic to the Scholar’s gate. We pushed through, and ended up taking the whole place before we knew our own luck. As for the Chancellor, well... I believe you met the Chancellor on your way in.” Fingal grinned, stretching his long scar, and nodded in the direction o
f the lobby. Mouana remembered the body lying under the statue, and smirked. That was one job done.
“So,” said Fingal, spreading his hands. “That’s as far as I’ve worked things out. You’ve been asking a hell of a lot of questions, and I’m dry from the talking. My turn; what’s your plan?”
Mouana nodded. “Same as yours, so it looks. Find the machines they made us with, and destroy them. So they can’t be made again. Then die. Properly.”
“Well, we can help with the first”—Fingal looked up through the skylights and nodded at her regimental tattoo—“and your old mates should help manage the second bit. For all of us.”
“What do you know about the machines?”
“Quite a lot, you know,” said Fingal. He whistled. “Or she does, anyway. Oi, Pearl!”
A young woman came over from the other side of the bar, pushing a cart stacked high with brushed steel canisters and a crate of narrow leather cases.
“Mouana, meet Pearl; she’s the asset on the inside I mentioned earlier. Worked as a vapourer here at the Ministry, and she’s been our eyes and ears here for some time.”
Mouana stood abruptly, knocking her chair aside, and the room fell silent. The Bruiser, smelling a fight on the wind, turned to regard Pearl with unblinking eyes. Pearl, to her credit, stood still, looking more angry than frightened.
“Kill me if you want,” she sighed. “It’d be fair enough. But listen first. And before you ask, I don’t know if I did any of you. They always came in bags, so we didn’t see the faces. Did my own brother, though. They didn’t tell me, but I checked the serial number. So I hate them as much—”
“Piss off with your speech, and explain the machines before I do something stupid,” interrupted Mouana, and took a step toward the woman.
“Fine,” whispered Pearl, and picked up one of the larger canisters. “We call this ‘miasma.’ One of these does about fifty bodies. It’ll inject, but it’s usually applied by mechanical ventilation. It works fast; hardens nervous tissue with carbon and reconfigures stuff to work anaerobically. I know you don’t want a lecture, but truth be told we don’t know much more about it than that. It’s old tech; really, really old.”