by Tim Akers
"You're famously in trouble, Jacob. Not the same thing." Wilson readjusted the blanket across his multitude of shoulders and stared at the slowly approaching docks. "Not the same thing at all."
"Still. Be interested to hear what Valentine knows of the guy." I stood up and stretched my legs. The many wounds I'd taken in our fight were starting to get stiff. "Be more interested to hear what the guy has to say for himself."
"Yeah. Me too." Wilson grinned, and I shivered a little more. Wilson was kind of creepy when he smiled. All those teeth, small and sharp and so incredibly... uncivilized. "But I think..."
There was a pause of some seconds, then he stood.
"Jacob?" he asked.
"Yeah?" I was staring down into the water, trying to not see floating faces and pearl-white fists grubbing to the surface. I blinked and it was just water again. Turned to Wilson, then looked where he was pointing.
The docks were swarming with Badge. Most of the harbor was shut down, the workers and shipmen shoved away from the water and cordoned off. The whole fleet bobbed quietly on the water, tied down and shuttered.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"After what we saw?" Wilson asked. "Gods know."
Signal flags came out as we got close. Quarantine. The raft shuddered to a halt, and a rapid semaphore flashed from boat to shore. I didn't know the language well enough to follow it, but I saw the quarantine fly a couple times. Wilson shook my shoulder.
"Over there," he said. There were a couple ships that looked poorly treated, anchored off the dock. One of them was burned down to the shell. There were bodies across the deck. Skin white as pearls.
"Looks like we're going to be famous," I muttered.
"Famously in trouble," Wilson agreed.
An impact siren spun up behind us, out in the fog. A smallboat, narrow and fast, came tearing toward the docks. It ripped past us, its engine groaning. The deck was a horror show of gorey crewmen and white-skinned dead, struggling. The crew held the tiny cabin, and that at bloody cost. The captain had his fist down on the throttle, all ahead full, and no amount of flagging was going slow him down.
The crowds of Badge on the dock began yelling and ordering and counterordering. There was a warning shot, then another, then a firing line was drawn up. A crackling report and the water and wood of the ship danced with lead. The throttle was still down.
The smallboat bounced off an anchored barge, scraping metal plates with a wrenching sound that screamed across the water. That slowed the vessel, but still it crashed into the docks and skipped up into the air, collapsing onto a barricade of crates that the Badge set up.
The officers were quick. The firing line reformed, bolstered by other units. They advanced, weapons hot, firing as they marched. The ship danced, the bodies got redder, sparks glittered whenever lead struck metal. Not a minute it took, not more than a handful of heartbeats. Then they stopped firing, and not a living thing remained on that ruined ship.
"I'm not sticking around for that," I said. Wilson agreed. Panic had a firm handle on those men. Panic and fear, and a deep belief that such things could be handled with firearms. I shucked my blanket and crept to the side of the barge, out of sight of the docks. When we were good and close, Wilson and I slipped into the water and started to swim.
Tough thing to do, to slip into that cold, black water after what we had just been through. All the way in I kept imagining dead fingers slipping around my legs, kept seeing bloated faces just beneath me in the water. I fought the urge to go straight in. We swam to one of the burned-out wrecks that were tied down just beyond the docks. The water around them was thick with ash and wreckage. Stopped long to rest our lungs, refusing to look down into the water, our arms draped over the charred remains of a barrel.
By then our raft was taking on agents of the Badge. They came out in tiny boats, yelling at the captain through bullhorns and bristling with longrifles. I waited until they were fully occupied with the boarding process before I nodded to Wilson and pushed off towards the docks.
One of the tricks to the Ebd-side harbor has to do with its inlets. The Ebd feeds into the much larger Reine, providing ship access to both rivers. Smaller vessels from the outer provinces travel the Ebd to where it meets the Reine, then transfer their cargo to one of the huge rafts that ply the wider river.
This meant a lot of cranes, and not just cranes but towering monsters that lived out in the water so the Ebd boats could pull right up next to the Reine-bound rafts and have their cargo offloaded directly to the larger vessels. This meant that the Ebd-side harbor was an archipelago of cranes and drawbridges and iron towers, an infinitely permeable system of platforms and docks. Quarantine depended on the goodwill of the ship captains, rather than the iron rule of the Badge. We didn't have to go far before we found a crane tower that had been abandoned in the excitement, and hauled ourselves up to its covered platform. The iron belly of the engine was still warm. Wilson huddled next to it, his thin arms shivering against his ribs.
"We can't stay here," he said. I nodded and stripped off, laying my shirt and pants across the warm shell of the engine. He grimaced impatiently. "Jacob, the men on that boat know our names. The Badge is going to ask questions, and then they're going to notice that we're not around. They're going to figure out that we slipped off before they boarded."
"That they are," I said. There was a stack of fire blankets by the engine, for smothering embers. I unfolded one and tossed it to Wilson, then wrapped myself in another and sat on the other end of the engine, my back against the metal.
We sat quietly for a while. Steam from my clothes mixed with the fog that curled across the platform. We lost sight of the raft, but could still hear the voices of the Badge. Other horns sounded in the distance as ships came in to dock and were quarantined.
"What do you think is going on out there?" Wilson asked quietly, after about twenty minutes. The fog was starting to burn away.
"I think our little event wasn't isolated. I think that whatever happened to the Fehn, it happened to a lot of them. I'm guessing lots of boats went through what we went through." I turned to Wilson and sighed. "And I'm guessing a lot of them didn't make it out."
"If it was all the Fehn, everywhere," Wilson scratched his eye and peered out at the ghosts of other towers and ships that were finally becoming visible. "That means a lot more than just the river. There are Fehn in the cisterns, in the canals. They're all through the lower city."
"Yeah. Which means the Badge has a lot on its plate right now." I stood up and peeled my clothes off the engine. They were warm and stiff. "It's going to be a while before they start asking questions."
"Not forever, though."
"Nope. They'll come looking for us, eventually." I finished dressing and shook the last numbness out of my fingers. "So let's go find some answers, before they ask them."
IT WAS WORSE than we imagined, out on the crane. There was a collapsible raft in the emergency cabinet of the tower. The seals had gone rotten, so our boots got wet on the way in, but it didn't sink until we were safely on dry land. No one saw us make shore because they had other things on their mind. Lower Veridon was in chaos.
Veridon is a city of terraces. The old city sits in stony quiet at the top of the delta, draped in gentle waterfalls and ancient canals. The canals travel the whole length of the delta in a series of locks or decorative waterfalls, sometimes disappearing into cisterns or underground rivers and pipes, until they finally feed into one of the city's three rivers. The Reine itself continues into parts of the city, where the streets are built up over stone arches. Many of the homes in Lower Veridon have private docks in their basements that lead to some tributary of the Reine or Ebd.
When the Fehn rose from the water, their bloated hands suddenly violent, those private docks became gates into the city. The monsters tore their way through living rooms and formal dens to spill out into the streets. The result was horror, evenly spread throughout the Lower City.
We climbed out o
f the river about half a mile from where the raft was quarantined. Wilson looked terrible, between the fight and the soaking we had taken. I couldn't look much better. But the streets were crowded with panicked citizens, flushed from their houses by fear of their own basements, all of them in various states of dress and injury. Some had been in fights, some had just woken up when the screaming started. All of them were very nervous.
"Right out of the basement," one man whispered to his neighbor. "Just right through the door like it wasn't there. Molly dropped her breakfast and started screaming. It was the screaming that snapped me out of it."
"Godsbless the Badge, though," the woman I assumed was Molly said, standing nearby. "Godsbless them. If they hadn't come in the front door I don't know if we would've made it out."
"To hell with the Badge," her husband answered. "If I hadn't cleaned and loaded the hunting rifle that morning, we'd still be in there. Bleeding to death."
"You won't talk like that in front of the children, Howard, you won't!" The woman was nearly in tears. She had blood on her face and hands. I didn't see any children. "If the Badge hadn't come in when they did..."
We moved on. Similar conversations were happening everywhere. Lots of folks were armed. The whispering quickly became an angry murmur. For all that people were willing to bless or curse the Badge, there didn't seem to be any officers around to hear it. No one here but citizens.
"This could get nasty," Wilson said. "If even one of our drowned friends stumbles into this crowd."
"Yeah. Nothing like panic to make everything infinitely worse. Come on."
We left the crowd behind. There were others like it, mobs of nervous fathers and mothers standing in their morning clothes, clutching brooms and shotguns and peering nervously at their own houses like they were seeing a nightmare. Which they probably were.
"You there!" someone hailed us. "You! What have you seen of the river?"
Hard to deny we hadn't been near the river that morning, not in our state. I turned to see who was talking. A very proper man, improperly dressed. He was unarmed, but the crowd behind him was bristling with antique hunting rifles and polo mallets. We had moved into a more expensive neighborhood, then.
"Hard to say, in the fog. Something's happened, though. What about here?"
"Bloody Fehn, trying to take over the city. We've killed a dozen here." He nodded over his shoulder and the crowd murmured. "The dead stay dead on Barling Street."
"Heard much from the rest of the city?" I asked.
"No. Folks are staying to their own. Badge is a damn mess, running around. Never around when you need them, but always there when you don't." He didn't seem like the kind of man to get into the kind of trouble where he wouldn't want the Badge around. I smiled, and he took it for agreement. "What district are you from? Where are you headed?"
"Just trying to get away from the river. Think I might head up, maybe to the Torch."
Before he could answer there was a shout from the crowd, and then a shot. I ducked and looked behind me.
One of the Fehn, the legitimate Fehn, his skin gray and soft, was creeping out of an alleyway. He turned toward us, startled, then disappeared.
"After him, boys!" the proper gentleman yelled, like a master at the hunt. The crowd whooped and gave chase, pushing past us.
"Jacob," Wilson said, his voice nervous.
"Yeah. That guy wasn't changed yet." I turned to the proper gentleman, who was beaming after his little war party. "You have to stop them."
"Yes, we do. We'll stop them all, one at a time. The dead stay dead."
"No!" I shouted, grabbing the silk lapels of his morning coat. "Not that. Your little friends, they're going to kill that guy. He's not one of them!"
"My boy, if you don't know what the Fehn look like, then..."
I turned and ran after the party. There was shooting up ahead, and yells. The alley was short, and opened onto a warren of back roads and tiny passages. It was the kind of roadway servants used, to get packages between buildings without spoiling the master's view with their presence.
The crowd was surging through this tiny space like a flood, running down alleyways and kicking over trash cans in their excitement. More than one shot was fired, all from different directions. The narrow passageways didn't allow for much traffic.
"Screw this," Wilson spat, then cast aside his jacket and flipped his array of arms open. Just like a spider, he scrambled up one of the walls and made his way over the heads of the crowd, dagger-like talons finding purchase on both sides of the passageway. I struggled to keep him in sight.
"Bug!" someone screamed, and now the shooting turned toward Wilson. He flinched and disappeared around a corner. I yelled at the shooters, but they weren't listening. Things were getting out of hand.
I pushed through the press of bodies, shoving the crowd aside to get to Wilson. A scattered popping marked his passage, gun shot rattling off the tight alleys, voices raised above the din. Why were they even chasing him? How easily startled were these posh gentlemen, with their antique rifles? There was a crowd up ahead, surrounding a boarded-up shack, beating on the shutters and door with their priceless weapons. The men around me surged, and I fell against the wall and slid down to the muddy cobbles. They swept past.
The world trembled around me. A muster siren from some Badge station droned under the clouds, and the mob roared with it. Wood was breaking, and other screams joined the cacophony. Terrible screams. I pulled myself up and looked around for something to fight with. A club, a bar... anything. Anything to use against the madness of the crowd.
Wilson flashed past above, jumping from one building to the next, giving me a nervous look as he passed. I looked back down at the mob, tearing the shack to pieces with their bare hands, then followed Wilson's path. My heart was hammering. I tried to not hear the screams of terror behind me. I hadn't gone far before they stopped.
Wilson waited for me in a dark alley, perched above a tiny barricade of trash cans. His eyes were dark.
"I thought they had you," I said.
"Keep your voice down," he spat. Rows of tiny teeth glittered wetly in the dark. "Those are old men. Fox hunters, and gamesmen. Do I look like a fox to you? Do I look like game?"
"No, I just..."
"Quiet." He unfolded from the wall and walked with exaggerated care around the cans, motioning for me to follow.
The Fehn was there, curled into a ball, making soft, horrible sounds. I shook him by the shoulder. His skin was nearly dry. It took several seconds for him to realize I was there, and several more to stop shaking in fear. His eyes, when he finally looked at me, were a thousand miles away.
"Are you okay?" I asked, or tried to ask. He wasn't hearing me. And when he answered, it was in a voice that was a dry trickle in the back of his throat. He was out of water. The Fehn drink water like I breathe, their lungs are full of it, their voices are wet and sloppy. He coughed at me, a sound like mud settling in a creek bed. I pulled him to his feet. He could barely stand.
"He's been out of the river for a while. He might not even have been there during the attack," Wilson said.
"Look at him. Look at his eyes. He was there. We need to get him some water, and then some shelter." I pulled his arm over my shoulder. "Let's get going."
"Let's not," said a voice at the end of the alley. The proper man.
"Leave him alone," Wilson said. His voice was silken and dangerous. I understood why people feared the anansi, even the tame ones. Especially the tame ones. "He's not one of them."
"He's not? Fascinating." The man strolled into the alley, some of his compatriots sneering behind him. "Tell me, Mr. Not-Fehn. What brings you to our lovely city this morning? Was it a long trip?" He poked at the Fehn with the tip of a ruined spear, the barbs poking at his naked chest. "You look wretchedly thirsty. Don't you think, boys?"
"Of course he's Fehn, idiot." I stood as tall as I could, tried to summon a little of the old Burn family charm. "He's not one of them, though. Look at
him. He couldn't harm anyone. Now, if you'll let us through we'll be on our way."
"Oh, of course. Immediately." He turned to his nervous friends. "Boys. Let these gentlemen through, will you?"
They raised their rifles and smiled. Wilson drew steel, and I drew iron. The Fehn tore away from my shoulder and ran.
The mob hesitated. They weren't really a mob, after all. Just some proper gentlemen riled into a frenzy by a great deal of fear and a little encouragement from their leader. I stepped forward and popped the old boy on the chin. He went down, but that seemed to do it for the crowd. They steeled their nerves, sighted their rifles, and fired. I bowled into Wilson and we went down.
The Fehn didn't get far. There was a lot of lead in the air, and a lot of it went into him. Still, he stumbled on down the alleyway, howling in that silent dry cough. The mob rushed forward, not bothering to reload their weapons, and fell upon him.
The sound was awful, a hollow thumping like rotten logs crashing together, over and over, and then a crackling like kindling being crushed. They screamed in triumph, lifted the limp form above their heads and swept down the alley into the street. They were still yelling when I got to my feet. The proper gentleman was still there, on one knee, glaring at me. His lip was bloodied.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked. "Standing with a bug, defending one of those... one of those monsters? What's wrong with you?"
I dusted off my pants and retrieved my pistol. Realized it was damp all the way through. Never would have fired, even if it had come to that. Wilson was already stalking down the alley, away from the scene of the murder. I flipped the pistol in my hand, then put it through the gentleman's teeth. He crumpled.
"Gentlemen need to stand, sometimes," I said. "Gentlemen don't need mobs."
I put away the revolver and ran to catch up with Wilson. We walked past the tiny shed that the mob had shattered. There was blood on the wood, pooling between the cobbles, making a sluggish stream to the drain. Neither of us stopped.