Mate, woulda been really useful if you’d given me some sort of sword instead of a cane. I mean, I like it as a cane but I think I would’ve really liked a sword.
I swear on my mother’s grave sergeant, it is a sword! You just need to twist it the right way!
I did twist it!
You weren’t doing it right. Give it here. Hmm. Like, uh. No, clearly not. Mm. Wait like, no. Ah. You know what, sergeant? It appears that I broke the latch. At least the lead was useful?
The l—Fuck’s sake Wajet. I’m not even going to touch that one.
Contain yourself Sen, I’m spoken for.
Sibbi couldn’t go, and Ajat wouldn’t—she refused to leave her wife’s side. Sen was similarly out: his leg was healing, but there was no way he could climb. The remaining sailors and cops were needed to guard the hotel.
That left Cannath. She’d been thrown against the gunnel in the crash, but wasn’t too badly hurt. She healed fast, anyway. It was amazing to watch her threads move. Yat swore she could see the cuts on her arm closing up as they discussed their plan.
East first, out through The Shambles, then a jack-knife northeast through the merchant quarter. The more built-up parts of town would mean more contiguous buildings, which made it easier to move without touching the ground. It also meant more people, and more meat.
“Stay indoors where possible,” said Yat. “Most of the buildings should be abandoned, and we don’t want to risk being spotted. Lots of mu-go, which should give us more options. We’ll need to cross the bridge cover at Kanajet Canal—I can’t see any other way of getting across.”
“The closest barricade is about four blocks away, facing south,” said Sen. “You should be fine; they’re not meant to leave their posts. Just keep an eye out.”
Cannath grunted. “We’ll be fine,” she said. “So long as Little Pig here doesn’t start to question her loyalty.”
Yat tried to make a joke of it. “Hells,” she said, “you still owe me five ox.”
Cannath fidgeted with an unlit cigarette. Nobody laughed.
The warehouse had roof access, and from there it was a straight shot east to the edge of the district. The houses they moved through were empty. They did their best to ignore the broken plates, and half-packed cases, the boundless silence. They found a woman, perhaps seventy, naked on the bed with her wrists open and a photograph on her chest: her, younger, smiling, with a handsome lantern-jawed man at her side. The skin on her shoulders was scale-like with tumorous growths—she’d stopped the spread of the infection the only way she could think of. It wasn’t clear how much had grown after her death, but it couldn’t have been long. The spores needed a living organism, even if it was a small one: the yeast in the beer, the tiny cysts that made up the cnidocyte walls. The woman’s body wasn’t free of infection, it was just … quiet. Dormant spores, feeding for months and months on some other tiny organism until they went into a human body and suddenly their famine turned into a feast.
Cannath wouldn’t leave the house without placing a coin on each of her eyes, and muttering a short prayer. Northern didn’t sound like Yat thought it would: all clipped vowels and liquid consonants, like bad wine being poured out in an alley. Yat stayed outside the bedroom—she’d been the one who found the woman, but she couldn’t bring herself to stay in there. She couldn’t look at the scars on her arms without thinking about her own, couldn’t stand that close to death without it catching her. Instead, she looked out the windows. There was no life outside: no people, no cats, not even any birds in the sky.
After a minute or so, Cannath came out of the bedroom, and they kept going. Yat had thought the woman would need help, but she moved smoothly from house to house. She knew her cat leaps pretty well for a sailor. The humidity made it hard to go far: their clothes were quickly slick with sweat. The last mad week had hardened Yat’s muscles, but she struggled to make some of the leaps.
They stopped to catch their breath in the apartment above an upscale tailor’s shop. They stood in the kitchen, leaning against the counter. They broke the wax-seal on a jug of water: somebody had been preparing for the long haul, but they weren’t here any more.
“You been to Hainak much?” said Yat.
“Grew up here,” grunted Cannath. There was something in her voice that was hard to place: annoyance, or agitation? Yat didn’t push it any further. They drank the water, then kept going.
Sunset bruised the sky in greys and pinks. It was behind them, and they cast long shadows as they broke open windows, picked locks, scurried from room to room. At one point, they saw a large steamship moving down a canal, absolutely packed with survivors. It was sitting too low in the water: it wasn’t built for that many people. It scraped along the canal walls, and Yat worried for a moment that its hull would collapse like the Kopek’s. They waited for it to drift out of sight, then they kept going.
They came, at last, when the sun had been eaten by the jagged teeth of the Hainak skyline, to Kanajet Canal. It was deep: one of the arterial canals that connected the ocean routes to the inland train system. The bridge was new. It had a network of vines growing through the canal walls that responded to pressure in the water by opening to let the ship through. The organic components would reseal after the split, including the train tracks.
They watched it for a few minutes. They were about to jump down when wood groaned, and the bridge split. A dark shape glided through the water. It surfaced, and Yat saw maggot-white puckered flesh, thousands of red, rolling human eyes in two great fly-like clusters, and a human face on the top that opened its toothless mouth in a mock-scream to eject a plume of water and spores. So much for the salt theory. Yat knew the reek of ocean-bloated corpse too well, and she had to fight back a scream—it smelled like the body at the docks, when this had all begun. As she watched, a roiling mass of fish followed it, eating up the spores it left behind. She couldn’t see them well enough to tell how it was changing them. She didn’t want to. The beast descended under the water again, and its awful dark trail made it hard to tell where it was. The bridge stayed open for a full minute. It was the longest minute of Yat’s life. The cover sealed last: its vinework interlacing like long, pale fingers. She dropped down onto it, and its surface sunk a little beneath her feet. She steadied herself, then signalled Cannath to follow. The woman was mid-leap when the beast surfaced again.
It must’ve come up from the very bottom of the canal: the bridge didn’t register it until it broke the surface of the water. Wood groaned, and the structure split. Yat grabbed a vine and planted her feet as the bridge lifted her up and back. Cannath—twisting in mid-air, trying desperately to adjust her landing—hit the wood, and slid. She was muscular, and heavy: the whole bridge shuddered when she hit it. The angle changed: went shallow, then jerked back in response and almost bucked Yat off. Cannath fell back, rolled, then began to fall. In the water below, a titanic mouth opened. It was filled with tens of thousands of human teeth, at a riot of angles, running down into a deep, pale gullet.
Cannath fell, and Yat—
Reached out. A vine shot out from the bridge, and Cannath snatched at it. It snapped taut. For an electric, blinding half-second, the two women were connected, and Yat sent one panicked thought down the line.
Momentum.
Cannath swung her legs as she hit the bottom of her fall, and swung. The creature lifted itself out of the water, with grasping pale limbs pushing it up the wooden canal walls. Cannath swung, and Yat hauled on the vine just as the vile maw snapped shut with a chittering click-clack. Cannath swung, then let go. She hung in the air for a moment, then reached out and—
grabbed the other side of the bridge. Her body moved like a pendulum, and dumped her on top. She slid, rolled, then hit the ground on the other side of the canal. The monstrous whale hit the water with a wet slap, and the bridge groaned and began to lower. Once it had laced itself back together, Yat scurried acr
oss, then dropped down beside Cannath.
The two women regarded each other.
“We good?” said Yat.
The response didn’t come straight away. Cannath had that same energy she’d had when Yat first met her: wound tight like a spring, about to either break or launch her into the sun.
“Yeah,” said Cannath, “we’re good. For now.”
It would have to do.
“Let’s get away from this bloody canal, aye?” said Yat.
Cannath nodded. “Anyasz Fireworks is close,” she said. “I can feel him. He’s like a toothache in the world, you know? He’s all rot now, all poison.”
Yat didn’t want to say it, but she’d been feeling it too: a colossal pull, somewhere on the edge of sense. The world bent around Źao, like his sheer magic weight was pushing down against reality, ready to tear a hole. A nearby Tinker’s Horn crackled, then blared to life.
“Nine p-m,” it said. “Nine p-m and all’s not well.”
“You can say that again,” said Yat and Cannath.
They spoke on top of each other, almost in harmony. Their eyes met again. Cannath broke first; she turned away, and started to scale a nearby drainpipe. Yat stared after her, and furrowed her brow. Another thought had moved between them, bright and sweet. She’d reached for it, then pulled back. Something stirred on the edge of memory, but she shook it off, and they kept going.
They smelled Anyasz before they saw it. The Xineng district was the home to fertilizer factories, kiro refineries, the dodgier sort of alchemists’ shop: anything that belched smoke and fumes got pushed to the outskirts. Most of the buildings were stained black with soot. Very little out here was grown: nobody had managed to engineer cellulose that could withstand that level of industrial pollution without wilting. It was the part of the city least-changed—trapped in amber. Red brick and smokestacks dominated the area. Cruel rows of iron spikes surrounded each roof, and forced the climbers down to street-level.
They stepped over the body of a man. He was missing his head. It hadn’t been blown off: it looked like it had just grown down and in, so the neck was a u-bend of shattered and fused vertebrae. One arm ended in a series of hooklike claws. He’d been shot in the stomach, and the blood was long-since dry.
The buildings were pressed tightly together, but Anyasz had a wide berth around it: even with space at a premium, nobody was stupid enough to share a wall with a firework factory. Yat realised with a sick jolt that she was staring at the ramp where Varazzo had shot a woman. It was caked with blood. The factory’s impressive iron doors were shut. She couldn’t see any blanks, or soldiers.
Cannath took a step forward, and that’s when they heard the click behind them. It froze the blood in Yat’s veins. She’d last heard the exact same click when a smiling man in a police uniform put a gun to her head; when Dao blew her entire world away.
“Ladies,” said Varazzo. “Hands up.” He sounded like he was enjoying himself.
Yat raised her hands. She reached out for Cannath’s threads—no sudden moves, okay? Let him talk.
There was nothing to take from the environment: no magic in the buildings, no surviving animals, no other people.
“You’ve brought a friend,” said Varazzo. “No problem, I’ve got enough lead for you both.”
He laughed at his own joke. Yat couldn’t see him, but she could feel his threads—the same febrile panic, but twisted into a vicious molten chokecherry. He was scared, and he dealt with it by attacking the things that scared him until they were broken. He felt like nothing, so he reduced things until they were just as small as he felt. At the core of everything was fear, burning heavy in his chest. She could use that.
He was coming closer, his heavy boots clacking across the stone. Yat thought back to when she’d calmed down Fea: take the threads, and push. He was scared: he did a good job of hiding it, but it was there. She was scared too: scared of everything. Scared of the city, and the spores, and of Crane’s long shadow. She took her fear, wove it together, and pushed. The fear hit his threads, and blossomed outwards.
“Don’t move,” said Varazzo. “Don’t you fucking move. I’m warning you.”
Run.
His fear flooded his body, overwhelming reason. It didn’t take much: he was halfway there already. He was a little boy again, scared of the shadow on his bedroom wall. The women were giants, monsters, typhoons. The gun wasn’t a comfort: it was a burden. His hands shook. He let out a sick moan.
RUN.
The gun clattered off the cobbles. Yat turned to face him, just in time to see him fall to his knees. He prostrated himself, pushed his forehead against the street, and wrapped his arms around the back of his head.
“Please don’t kill me,” he said. “Please don’t kill me. Please.”
Yat took out the Lion Gun. She had three bullets left. It was tempting. Would it make her as bad as him? Of course not. Would it make her somebody she didn’t want to be? That was trickier.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Cannath. She snatched the gun, raised it and—
Varazzo coughed. He pushed himself up, clutching at his throat. His face was white, turning a pallid shade of blue. His neck twisted. At first it was as though he were trying to look at something behind him, but then it kept going around with a series of concussive cracks. A bone spur exploded out of his throat, and the back of his neck: a lumbar vertebra but swollen and sharp, piercing through his throat.
“P-p,” he spluttered, through bloodless lips, “p-lease.”
He fell, and so did Yat. She had no control over her knees: somebody else was in charge of her muscles, and they snapped tight and forced her down. She tried to put out her hands to brace herself but they weren’t working and she hit the stone face-first. Cannath fell beside her; her mouth was stuck open in a silent, furious shout.
“I’m getting tired of you, Constable Hok,” said Źao. “I am getting so very tired.”
Mist whipped around his feet, and spilled out across the ground. He stepped over Varazzo’s body.
“You’ve met Crane,” he said. He spoke febrile bursts, as though the words were some creature living inside him, trying to break out. “I can, c-can always tell. I can see her poison in your mind. She wants to, to destroy this beautiful thing. Did she tell you where this gift came from? She dreamed of the great tree for a thousand years, and thus the earth gave life to its seeds. She gave us a gift to take back those we love: to build a bridge to heaven. Suta, they, they tried to harness it, but they weren’t ready: they went wide, when they should’ve gone tall. Little doses everywhere, you see, all over their worthless continent. They saw Her vision: they built the towers, after all. They just didn’t put it together: take the gift, and build the tower. My brother loved silk, you know? He told me they had to boil thousands of worms to make a single piece of clothing. Me? I’m just a tailor. I am here to complete Crane’s work. We will weave a tree to heaven: mankind will ascend into the sky, and there—
there we will meet our maker.”
He knelt, and placed a palm against Yat’s forehead. She saw—
A great tree, upward and upward and upward, its bark made of skin, its core made of flesh, its great green heart pumping blood from its deep roots to its towering peak. Piercing the sky and going further, until it went so far beyond the top that it found itself at the bottom, in the darkness, bridging the lands of the living and dead. Across that bridge, the souls of ten thousand years, lost no longer. Friends, lovers, family, pouring down, home at last. Źao’s mother, smiling, her arms spread wide. Yat’s father, whole again, walking hand-in-hand with a woman she’d only seen in dreams.
Something touched her hand. Cannath, joining their threads, pushing something to her: a memory. She reached out, and grabbed it and—
—sitting on a rooftop over Henhai Lane, watching the crying girl who just lost her father—
—dre
aming of running her fingers through her hair—
—tentative at first, sharing bread with her, showing her how to pick a lock—
—a whistle, the rough hands of an officer—
—drinking the bitter water, and feeling something vital come gushing out—
—hearing the technicians wonder whether they’d ever get the reversal tech right, whether she’d be under long enough that they could bring her back, or whether they’d just extend the sentence again—
—silence, silence, but still in there screaming as her body lifted sacks, and pushed carts—
—in a moment of madness, she had control over her shoulders, and she rammed her forehead against a loose nail, not quite flush with the wall—
—waking in the water, where they’d dumped her—
A jolt ran between them, and Yat’s muscles screamed as they broke free from Źao’s bonds.
“Kiada,” she said. How had she missed it? Ten years, a lot of scar tissue and about seventy pounds of muscle, but she couldn’t believe she’d missed it. They rose together. Źao wasn’t ready for it, and Kiada rammed the heel of her palm into his jaw. For a single moment, her body was illuminated in gold: a clear line running from her hip, up her waist, into her shoulder, along her arm. Źao staggered and tried to grab Kiada’s threads, but Yat grabbed his elbow and pulled. His chest came down, and Yat smashed her knee into his ribs.
The flesh on his hand yawned open, and a shard of bone slid out. He squeezed it, snapped it off, then slashed out with it like a knife. It sunk into Yat’s shoulder, and she screamed. The bone was a conduit between them, and he was draining her dry. She could taste iron. A sudden pressure threatened to split her skull, and she could feel it coming apart—
The first shot blew through his knee at point-blank range, severing his lower leg entirely. He squawked and pitched backwards. The connection tore, and Yat screamed again as his pain lanced through her then broke away.
He lay on the ground, panting. He grinned at them, and Yat realised that he was looking over her shoulder. She turned to see something tearing through the night: a tiny, distant, indistinct shape, followed by a thousand more. The firework reached the apex of its arc, and exploded. One bloom of green sparks, then another, and another, and another: dozens of them, then hundreds, then thousands. The biggest fireworks display in the city’s history, each one carrying a deadly payload.
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