by Chris Capps
“So you met with them, then,” he said.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Crassus and I would have returned with the first morning’s light whether we met with the Thakka Cluster or not,” he said picking up a fragment of blackened wood and knocking it against the rim of a barrel, “I didn’t expect to see you again. The fact that you’re here suggests to me that you succeeded.”
“Yes,“ I said nodding gravely. I was trying to summon the faintest confident smile. It couldn’t have looked convincing. Looking between me and his work, Euclid said,
“We should survive this battle. I don’t know what comes next. I’ve never met someone from the Thakka Cluster. What are they like?”
“Abrasive,” I said, “Unique. After spending an uneasy night with them waiting for my throat to be slit, I have to say this: they’re consistent.”
“Consistent,” Euclid said, his eyes lighting up a little, “That’s good.”
“No,” I said, “No it isn’t.”
After the meeting with the matriarch, I had been witness to the nightly rituals of the Thakka Cluster from afar, cowering in a ditch and waiting for light to scare the real predators away. Profane inhuman screaming seemed to be a constant theme in each of them.
Crassus emerged from the constantly moving line of Plexis tribesmen engaged in processing the saltpeter and the coal. He had in his hands a dish of water for the milling stone, which he discarded upon seeing me. He ran over and grabbed my arm, pulling me toward him and reaching around to slap my back,
“You lived.”
“What’s more, I found the Thakka Cluster,” I said grinning despite myself, “They have agreed to help us.”
“On what condition?” he asked.
“They will live in the Plexis.”
Crassus pulled away, staring with furrowed brow and an intensity wholly unlike him. I looked away after only a moment from his judgment. Could he have done better? Could he have won their allegiance with nothing more than empty promises? No. These were people unmoved by the plight of outsiders He moved his own eyes to follow mine. By some uncanny fortune we found ourselves staring at nothing less than the projection screen that had promised horror by fire only a night before. He closed his eyes, sighed heavily,
“Then all of the preparations are made. Victory will be ours today.”
Still staring into the vast grey screen adorning the front of the walking city, I found myself shaking my head. It was a reflex, not for anyone else’s sake but my own. The vast machine that stood before us was something designed by another age. The smoke pouring from its chimneys foretold of mysteries beyond our comprehension. It was a device that had been lived in, operated for a long time even as the Plexis was still being born. Even if we could bring the great beast down with Euclid’s powder kegs, what would spill over the edge? What would we find ourselves facing once this hive of wasps had been toppled?
“There,” Euclid said pointing as he joined us, “Just under the bent leg, to the left side. The outcropping beneath it is cracked. It could have fallen while the beast was still moving even. But now it has rested with that cracked ledge beneath its foot. The leg will descend along with the rocks, carving the Earth behind it and shifting its weight even further back. That evenness the plate values will lock the other legs into a cascade - into the dry and cracked soil. It will avalanche with the rocks.”
“I’ll have to trust you on this,” I said, “I can’t imagine anything bringing something that large down.”
“You can’t imagine anything lifting something that large up to begin with,” Crassus said, “So yes. You’ll have to trust us. I looked over Euclid’s equations. There‘s a wide margin of error, but not so large that the city is likely to remain standing afterward.”
The outcropping was one of sandstone, with iron deposits riddled throughout. By no means did it look precarious, but with the leg resting on it a small crack had formed. A hairline fracture from our vantage point, but it could have been as wide as a man at this distance. A few powder kegs placed inside could easily blast it apart, removing the platform the city had placed one of its legs on. I tried to imagine the city’s vast claw being tripped unexpectedly behind it, being dragged down by the sudden weight, only to be followed by others in a cascade of shifting land. As I did so, hope began to gain traction in my mind.
“Will the Serpentine be done in time?” I asked, looking over to where a small line of carts was forming at the door. Men and women were pulling loaded pallets into the Plexis, loaded with casks I figured to be filled with volatile black powder. Crassus and Ebon shared a look. In the distance I could see a woman standing next to a tied melthorse loading her rifle. She was wearing one of the red cocktail dresses advertised on floor nine.
“The powder we need to topple the city has already been assembled, and delivered,” Crassus said, a hefty dose of compassion entering his voice, “The powder we make now isn’t for that.”
“We make it in plain view now in front of the Plexis,” Euclid said, “They are meant to see this. From here it goes inside. To The Egg.”
“The Egg?” I said, remembering the whispered words of my brother over the past months. Where is the light coming from? It comes from the metal egg. The radioisotope generator.
“The nuclear core,” came Thunfir’s voice behind me, “I see that you lived.”
“And you,” I said turning to see Thunfir standing behind us, “Are we going to blow up the Plexis if we lose?”
“We couldn’t if we wanted to. We’ll breach the wall in the generator, though, and poison everything for miles around with blighted smoke and glowing waters.” He clapped his hand down on my shoulder, pushing me off balance.
Blighted smoke and glowing waters. That was often the only legacy left behind in conflicts of this nature. I thought of the blue pools of glowing water surrounded by dead rats I had once come across in the wake of a particularly troubled blight storm. I remembered it clearly. Crassus and I had traveled for two days, drinking only the water we carried until we reached higher lands. Blight water death is painful and slow.
A gunshot startled me from the fugue I had entered, wondering which side of us would commit the lesser crime if we lost.
The tied melthorse fell sideways, sending a cascade of dust up as it further cracked the dried Earth. The iron in its blood would be mixed with the soil, used to process the next batch of Serpentine. It pumped out from the hole in its neck staining the yellowed sands and filling in the cracks. The woman, who had traded her rifle for a shovel, dug deeply into the now wetted soil, knocking away flies as she slopped the solution over her shoulder into one of the carts. The deeper she dug, the more dried Earth she found.
From that spectacle I turned my vision just north of the glowing sunrise. A shadowed line of men and women were navigating the circumference of the hill around and behind the city. They were too distant to identify positively, but my trembling hands knew who they were. The Thakka Cluster had arrived.
“How will we get the gunpowder kegs into the crack under the leg?” I asked Thunfir as his eyes too focused on the line.
“That was done before you arrived,” he said with a wry smile, “Under the cover of darkness, of course. I oversaw the operation personally.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Enough,” he said, laughing heartily, “Six of us resorted to filling bottles on our second trip. The casks of Serpentine were too cumbersome after the first one. By the third expedition we were carrying bags suspended from poles like a bindled well-dipper. I don’t think they were watching very closely. After the third trip we were singing drinking songs. If we were seen, they probably thought we were all drunkards. Introduce our smuggled cargo to the most modest of flames and I assure you, that rock will be no more.”
Blue and red lights erupted from the plate of the spider city, cutting Thunfir’s laughter short. He grimaced and spat on the ground as the lights were accompanied by that mournful bleat echoing a
cross the valley. He shielded his eyes against the lights and the brightening sun as he looked toward the city, “What is it now?”
“I’m sure they’ve changed their minds and decided to leave us alone,” I said, hoping to disguise my fear, “Let me go with you.”
Five minutes later we would be once again in the city’s shadow, approaching to continue our parley with Kitchains. When we arrived, the lights descended from the metal plate and focused in on us. The aperture above opened, only this time we did not hear the clicks and whirrs of a harness system. Instead, we heard a familiar voice. It was Kitchains, screaming,
“No! Please! Stop this, friends!”
A massive shape plunged through the open portal, trailing a long stream of red silk above it. With arms and legs flapping in the wind the shape grew. For what felt like an eternity of anticipation, the shape’s trembling jowls shook with the man’s gutteral scream until finally it was silenced by the hardened Earth below. He lay a dozen feet from us, deflated and wet, mercifully covered by the massive silk dress that had been trailing his descent.
He had failed.
Thunfir and I were silent for a moment. The aperture above slowly closed, the light shining on the shrouded corpse narrowing like a spotlight. It became a pinpoint of light, a directed star illuminating only a tiny column of dust that swirled and danced before finally going completely dark.
And then there were more pillars of illuminated dust near us. First two, then four, then sixteen. More apertures were opening all around, secreting ropes and masked men. Their faces were covered with masks designed ages ago to filter out the blighted air. I had seen these before, sold by superstitious merchants who believed the air itself to be a source of grave illness. The masks, which connected to metal helms, had slits where the eyes would be, covered in black glass. Each man held in his hands a rifle or a curved knife as large as his forearm. There were hundreds now, descending from ropes, suspended from a belt, or a hook between their shoulder blades. The city bleated with excitement, likely signaling more from within to begin their descent to slaughter this audacious rebellion of savages.
My eyes focused from this spectacle to a man running along the edge of the rock, rounding the edge of the city at the cliff face. Running in the other direction was a plume of smoke, racing like a jackrabbit toward the crack in the cliff’s face. I admit I hadn’t seen him before, and when I saw him throwing off the dust grey camouflaged jacket I could see why. He held the long torch raised above him like a banner, signalling that the trap had been set.
In the explosion that followed, countless tons of rock were instantly pulverized into dust, crushed by the combined explosive force of the gunpowder and the tremendous weight from the spider city. The leg crashed into the liquified boulders, quickly falling and shattering down like a dry rain. It gouged deeply into the Earth, scraping with such friction that the uppermost layer of ground in its wake melted and left a trail of glass.
The city lurched as other legs moved to compensate for the sudden shift, buckling and trodding desperately up the incline to reach an equilibrium that was now impossible. Euclid’s calculation had been perfect. The city teetered for a wild moment as every eye turned to watch the useless leg spasm with hydraulic fury, before finally bending at a newly twisted joint. Above Thunfir and myself, the metal sky began to coast backward as the city fell.
We ran.
The men above, now held captive by their own ropes, were dragged backward as the city fell, many of them electing to cut the bonds that held them and take their chances with a high fall rather than be dragged and pulverized backward into the wreckage that would become of the city.
Pumping our legs mercifully away, we dared not look behind us now at the horrific sound of metal crashing against Earth. My eyes were turned up, watching the blue and white of a calm and open sky warming my limbs. I could have sworn that day I saw a bird. Not one of the black hook crows you tend to see crowding around refuges, but a fragile dove caressing the wind with its fluttering wings. Had this too once been a citizen of that city we left behind us? As my eyes tried to drink in the rare sight, Thunfir’s powerful arms grabbed me and pulled me to the ground.
“Down!” he shouted into my ear, “Pay attention, boy. I need you alive.”
Beside us a line of thirty horses rode in the opposite direction, moving to intercept the falling bodies tumbling from the city that had stumbled. One voice in particular stuck out in my mind, accompanied by the wild firing of a custom zip pistol,
“For the Plexis!” It was Euclid, his strange bespectacled gaze sternly coupled with a savagery I hadn’t seen in him before. His cherry brown horse snorted as he rode past, a hungry look in its eyes. To the other side of me, Crassus stopped and threw down the hunting rifle that had served us so well. I retrieved it and looked up at him.
“No quarter,” he said, his voice as dry as sun bleached bone.
The gentleness I had always known in him was gone now, washed away in that flow of blood the Earth demanded. He had in his hands not a rifle, but a long unwashed sword, beaten and sharpened into this shape from metal torn from within the Plexis itself. The blade was drenched, dripping with a vile black fluid. Poison. With fire in his eyes eating deep into him, he kicked his horse hard, driving it onward toward the city that leaned and crashed even now. The horse lunged forward and bounded into the snapping and smashing of battle ahead.
Wiping salt from my cheek, I lowered myself to one knee and watched the soldiers rising to be cut down by the Plexis tribe’s hussars. Firing on this wave would mean nothing. The soldiers descending from ropes had been caught off-guard by the fall of their city. Still more crowded around the port holes, ready to descend from makeshift harnesses down to the grounds below. As the city leaned heavily on the valley slope, the others hung like condemned men or lay on the ground with broken limbs.
“The city hasn’t fallen completely,” Thunfir said pulling me up, “We must get to the top. Wrap around the plate and get to where the leaning city’s edge touches the ground. The Thakka cluster may already be there.”
“Unless,” I began, but then stopped. Unless they betrayed us. We ran like refugees around the circumference of the city’s edge, clamoring between the massive trunks of legs as stray bullets rained around us. In the chaos further into the city I could see the second wave of masked soldiers touching boots to the ground, leaving their comrades still hanging far above them, swinging helplessly or attempting to take shots down below.
Thunfir, bracing both hands against the grip of his blade, quickly closed the gap between himself and one of the city’s shock troops, swinging the hefty blade with tremendous speed, breaking armor and bone with a crack. The armored soldier, realizing too late the rage that had descended upon him, hardly had time to turn his helmet before the sword hacked deep into him.
He fell without a sound.
I too found a target just beyond Thunfir, one of the men spraying automatic fire toward the next wave of our cavalry. Taking only a moment to drop to one knee and look through the scope I covered him with the twin dots in my scope and squeezed the trigger.
The shot dented on his helmet, knocked him from his feet, but didn’t kill him. Thunfir, still spinning from the first masterful strike he had landed, turned now and drove his sword into the armored figure. We ran, heel over heel up the hill, kicking dust behind us and clawing at the dirt.
The last portion of our journey we walked, unable to run up the steep hill any longer. It was Thunfir who first rested his hand on the city plate when we reached where it met with the ground. With a grin, he reached his broad arm down to help me up.
“This is it,” he said drawing a short sword from his belt. Below us the sounds of battle were intensifying. The second wave of soldiers had descended from the plate, this time prepared for the maelstrom they would be entering. Automatic gunfire was once again erupting beneath us. I prayed silently to every god, offering my fealty to whichever one would keep Crassus safe until I returned
.
I looked down into the popping and shadowed landscape beneath us, at the thick cloud of smoke rising from staggered lines of our men. The troops still descending past us paid us little mind, instead focusing their attention on the swirling grinding storm of flesh and steel below.
In that brief moment I darted my eyes across the battlefield, trying to identify where Crassus could have gone. Of the two dozen horses I had seen, few still had riders. Did he dismount and flee? Or did one of the agonized gritted faces below, charting the trajectory of careful bullets belong to him?
In that moment of scanning I saw several of our men and women fall, clutching opened wounds. From the west a thin trail of the Thakka Cluster sprinted across the battlefield. With an unparalleled avarice for blood they descended from the valley’s edge on the other side of the spider city’s troops, tearing with short blades, each drunk in the ecstacy of their rampage.
The plate was moaning as metal does, heavily sloped to one side, and the smooth ground beneath our shoes made it difficult to ascend further into the city without slipping. As I looked for the first time onto the plate’s surface, I was struck by the outrageous ambition of the long dead architects. Several buildings, each one no less than six stories tall stood in two rows. Around them were concentric rings of houses, some of them burning now. And at the other end, behind an empty fountain, lay a brick factory with towering smokestacks. A trail of molten red was pouring from one of the barred low hanging windows.
We began our ascent, deeper into the city, and I saw statues ten times the size of men cracked and diminished by the fall. They leaned now, pointed with marble fingers at the sky, each looking as if it would snap from its foundation and spiral backward into one of the structures.