by Conner, Jack
Not all the people in the town were infected. When Avery asked Janx about it, the big man said, “Pirates just capture the goods, Doc. They still need someone to sell ‘em to.” He nodded at a group of finely dressed men and women, and their bodyguards, as they picked their way down a narrow, twisting street. There were other buyers all over, some singly but most in groups, typically guarded. They were all too aware they would make good hostages, and their families could likely afford to pay the ransom. It was for these men—and women, too—that the air purifiers must have been installed around the city. And there must be some, as the visitors did not wear environment suits.
“Awfully risky just for the chance at some discount textiles,” Avery said.
“Oh, some merchants’ll do anything to get the leg up on the competition, Doc,” Janx said. “But that ain’t the only reason they come here.”
“Why else?”
Janx hiked his chin at something, and Avery turned to see a crowd gathered before a stage in a wide plaza. On the stage, a leering pirate showcased an obviously captive young woman. A leash trailed from a collar around her neck, and the pirate clenched it in one iridescent-scaled fist. He had already removed most of her clothing, and vivid bruises showed on her breasts and torso. Her expression was faraway.
“Slaves,” Avery realized dully. “They sell slaves.”
“Aye, and not just for sex, either.”
Janx indicated something to Avery’s right, and the doctor turned to see a pit carved out of the rock. A ring of shouting pirates had gathered around it, and down below two frantic-looking men, one armed with a hammer, another with a knife, swung and stabbed at each other, sweat flying from their filthy hair. Two corpses littered the pit already, flies buzzing about them. A swell of revulsion rose in Avery.
“Gladiators,” he said.
“Yep. And they’ll be others, too. Slaves for labor, slaves for sums. What else do you do with a captured clerk? Slavery ain’t illegal everywhere, an’ it can be hidden other places. I’ve seen places like this before, or near enough, many a time. They spring up like mushrooms on desert islands, ‘least till some navy or other gets wind of ‘em. Then anther springs up somewhere else. This looks a bit more settled than most. Guess the Magons really are shelterin’ Segrul’s lot.”
“The different branches of the R’loth faith uniting,” Avery said. “Charming.”
He glanced back to the pit. The man with the hammer swung a devastating blow, shattering the skull of the knife-man and spraying blood over them both. The knife-man flailed for a moment, scoring some minor wounds on his opponent, but these were just reflex gestures, and after a moment he sagged to the ground, the man with the hammer descending with him. Tears glistened in the victor’s eyes. He bent over and retched, right next to the dead man, as the crowd above cheered or booed depending on who had won or lost money.
On the auction block, the leering pirate was leading the young woman down, jerking her leash as he descended the rickety stairs. A man from the crowd, well-dressed and important-looking, stepped out and accepted the chain.
“It’s awful,” Avery said.
“Aye.”
Avery started to ask Janx a question, then thought better of it. There were some things he didn’t want to know.
Janx seemed to sense it. He sighed. “Ya wanna know if I did any o’ this, back in my piratin’ days."
Avery hesitated, then nodded. I hope I don’t regret this.
Janx cast a look at Hildra’s and Layanna’s backs—the women had been led ahead of them, toward the head of the line of pirates from Segrul’s party, Layanna assuming a place of perverted honor among the group—as if to make sure they couldn’t overhear.
“I never raped a woman, Doc, and that’s the truth,” Janx said. “An’ I never bought or sold one, either.”
Avery could hear the but. “But your men … you were a captain …”
Janx’s large head nodded slowly. “Aye. I couldn’t stop ‘em. If I’d tried, I would’ve had me belly slit open, live eels stuffed inside and sewn back up. I’ve seen it happen. No, I knew better than to fight it. Not all pirates are rapers. Some’re just outcasts with nowhere else to go, usually with some law or other gunnin’ for ‘em, like I was. But most are. The ones that manage to keep their honor’ve got to stay outta the way of the ones that don’t, and that’s just the way it is. Even if you wind up captain.”
Avery absorbed that. “It’s still terrible.”
“So’s the plague. Nothin’ you can do about it.”
They fell into silence as Segrul led the way through the town, and Avery wondered what had been here before. He assumed the Magons must have had a fishing village or the like on this spot before giving it over to the reavers, but there was no sign of it now, nor was there indication at all of the natives. They must stay well clear of this place for some reason. Religious, possibly. Or perhaps it was the R’loth keeping the right hand and left hand separated.
Segrul stopped at the edge of town, where a narrow path wound up a stone hill that flowed into a mountain. And above, more mountains.
A party of natives waited for them. They were not what Avery expected.
“Turtle-men,” Janx grunted. “I always wondered the Magons looked like.” Avery was forced to agree with the description, at least in part. Dark, ridged tortoise-like carapaces arched from the natives’ backs, and their chests, arms and legs were also encased in tortoise-like armor, though the joints were sheathed in fleshy greenish tissue. For heads they boasted a dark green mound bristling with a profusion of stalks and mandibles, not turtle-like at all, and instead of hands they had long, tapering dark-green pincers. From the last joint of armor at the end of their forearms, purplish tendrils writhed, very narrow, perhaps half an inch in diameter, mottled with black. Just a few inches of the tendrils' lengths were visible, but Avery sensed they could shoot out when needed and perform any actions that pincers could not accomplish. They were organically armed and armored creatures, and all of them seemingly alike, of which there were about half a dozen.
Avery’s attention shifted to their mounts. Huge, white and fleshy, the great slugs, fifty feet long or more, stared at him with eyes on the end of long white stalks. There were two of the enormous creatures, giving off so much heat they steamed in the humid air. One was wrapped in a hempen band of some sort about midway up its length, the other wrapped in over a dozen such bands. The six natives rode this second one, their tendrils gripping the bands, which must serve as crude saddles, or at least hand and footholds, while the first was unoccupied. The trail behind the Magon party was rocky and narrow and terminated at a sheer cliff face, begging the question: where had they come from?
The turtle-men (and women, Avery suspected, but it was hard to be sure; or perhaps they were asexual) slipped off the back of their slug with much clicking and clacking of armor, then strode forwards to greet the pirates and their charges. The natives towered a full foot over the pirates, and Segrul stared up at the lead one with wary respect.
The eyes of the turtle-creature that appeared to be their leader swiveled to Layanna. Weird clickings and throaty sounds emerged from his mandibles. Whether Segrul understood this or not, or whether the creature communicated on some other level to the admiral, Avery couldn’t tell, but Segrul responded with, “She’s all yours, High Speaker. You need my whippers to go with you?”
The High Speaker gestured and clicked, and Segrul grunted.
“If you say so.”
The pirates shoved their charges toward the slug that had been unoccupied. There turtle-beings helped propel Layanna into a sitting position astride the great beast, where she was obliged to grab the single hempen cinch that encircled the creature’s girth. The entire slug had been reserved for her. She might be a captive, but she was a captive goddess.
The pirates and turtle-men boosted Janx, Hildra and Avery onto the second slug toward its tail, and then, again with much clanking and jostling of armor, the turtle-people, using th
eir tendrils, hoisted themselves astride the slug ahead of them. Metal rings set in the cinches served as footholds.
“I wish I could see your final moments,” Segrul told Janx, “but we don’t get everything we want in life, do we?”
“Fuck you,” Janx said.
The pirate laughed. Graciously letting Janx have the last word, he turned to his men and led them away, leaving Avery and the others in the company of the Magons.
The High Speaker clicked and warbled, and his/her/its slug began a slow and laborious turnaround, at last facing the cliff the trail ended in. Once it had turned, Layanna’s slug followed suit, and the Speaker’s slug led the way toward the cliff.
“The whips are gone,” Avery called to her. “Can you pull your other-self over?”
He could hear the defeat in her voice: “Maybe,” she said. “But only for a moment. Not enough to help.”
“Anything’s worth a try.”
“I could kill maybe one Magon, Francis. No. Wait. Maybe there will be another opportunity.”
Avery’s hands, as well as the others, had been untied so that they could grip the cinches they’d been placed before, and he did so tightly. In theory they could slip off and run for it now, but as they’d just be stopped when they reached Segrul’s party there seemed little point. The slug swayed only slightly as it glommed forward, but the trail had narrowed and Avery couldn’t help staring over its edge at the long drop into the rocky gorge below. Stones and dust fell over the side as the slug’s flanks just slightly overlapped the trail, which meant that Avery’s right leg overhung the gap, too. Swallowing nervously, he thrust his ankles through the metal hoops studding the girth.
“Where are we going?” he said. “The trail ends.”
The question was answered a moment later when the slugs reached the cliff face—and began to climb it. Janx cursed and held on tight, his thick thighs pressed into the squelching sides of the slug. Avery was too frightened to swear, and he held on with whitening knuckles and quickly-numbing legs. Peering over his shoulder, he saw Layanna hunkering over, holding on tightly, tense but not panicked. Looking ahead he saw sweat begin to drench the back of Hildra’s shirt; she rode between him and Janx.
The Magons must live above to prevent attacks, Avery reasoned. If all the dwellings of the natives were perched on unassailable cliffs, and all their members were born armed and armored, this would provide quite a nice bastion for the worship of the R’loth if things ever went badly for them. Perhaps that is all the natives had been intended to be until the fall of Octung and the R’loth’s need to spread their worship among other sea-faring peoples.
Careful that his glasses didn’t fall off, Avery looked once again over his shoulder, not at Layanna this time but at the drop beyond her, and did not look again. It was a long way down.
His stomach spasmed, and his legs shook in exhaustion. The cliff face stretched on overhead, endless, scrolling up into the clouds while a light rain pattered down, but beside it now stretched a broad, winding shelf. This shelf led to others, and narrow ramps and stairs led to more above and below. Great pinnacles of rock jutted above them, and Avery saw that the rock had been carved into ominous towers and domes and elaborate facades, but the doorways showed the interior of caverns, not rooms of built temples and palaces; these had been carved. The natives had shaped the very mountains into their city.
Using what felt like every muscle in his body, Avery held on tight as the slug ascended the rough, pitted wall of dark stone, overgrown in spots by moss or lichen, punctuated by weird, inhuman gargoyles, cave mouths, terraces, some with ramps winding from one shelf to another, and other slug riders. The giant slugs left slimy trails behind them, and from them Avery could tell that riding the behemoths was a common occurrence among the Magons, although only a few were out and about at the moment. One stopped alongside and its two riders spoke with the beings escorting Avery’s party, then moved on, casting interested glances—Avery assumed it was interest they displayed; it was hard to be sure as he could tell no visible expression on the small green mounds that were their heads—at Layanna.
The slugs slimed a trail all the way to the distant peaks. Clouds stirred around Avery, wreathing the upper reaches in fog, and he thought that it was oddly beautiful, these elaborately carved pinnacles emerging from the layer of cottony vapor, like some exotic dream born of opium and hash.
Finally the slugs reached the last shelf. Before them yawned a great doorway carved in the rock, right in the midst of a most fabulous façade, shining in the rain. Four squat towers rose from it, and beyond them humped a strange, multi-faceted dome Avery could just barely glimpse. He was too tired to appreciate it all. Every part of him ached, and blood ran in streams from his mutilated hands and feet. Before him, around Hildra’s smaller, shuddering form, Janx’s broad back hunched and deflated as the big man drew in gasping breaths. Avery turned to see Layanna coming over the top, too; she gazed with tired trepidation at the yawning cavern.
The slugs stopped. One of the Magons clambered down from his perch, and as he (at least Avery thought of it as a he) extricated himself Avery saw how the Magons managed to remain on the slugs despite their surely immense weight. As the Magon descended, tendrils, which had been extended, curled back inside his carapace, and Avery realized that the tendrils had been hanging on to the girth along much of its length, distributing the creatures’ massive weights more evenly.
The Magon—it was the Speaker—vanished inside, and the rest waited patiently. A fine drizzle fell, and Avery lamented that they were not above the cloud ceiling, though they must be close. He thought of Ani. Soon I may not be able to protect you, darling. You’re strong, though, Hildra’s right. Stowaway to a far port and start a new life. Become a thief like her if you have to. You could do a lot worse. But be strong, and brave, and you’ll do fine. His throat closed up. He and Mari had raised Ani well, and she would do fine. She would. Perhaps she could even live a full life before the Starfish obliterated the world.
The Speaker returned and remounted, then showed the way inside the great mouth of stone.
Layanna stifled a gasp.
“What is it?” Avery asked.
“A Collossum,” she said. “One of my kind is ahead.”
* * *
Screams filled the air. They were high, thin, weird screams, and Avery didn’t think they came from a human throat. They grew louder as the company twisted down one high, echoing hall after another. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring along the knife—the one that had been used against Layanna in Ethali, the one he’d begun thinking of as the god-killing knife—when he’d left his cabin after hearing the screams, but of course he hadn’t.
At least it wasn’t wet in here, and his clothes started to dry against his skin. He appreciated the heat the slug gave off, soaking into his thighs and buttocks. A slight steam still rose off it, and in the tighter confines Avery noticed it had a distinctive odor. Not a stink, exactly, but earthy and pungent. It moved at a surprisingly fast gait on level ground, and before long they emerged from the tunnels into a large, arched room. Looking up, Avery could see the multi-faceted stone dome he’d noticed from outside.
A strange scene took place within. A Magon on a high throne oversaw the torture of a fellow of his species. Turtle-men and –women (if there were such things) scuttled about a framework erected or dragged before the dais, and from this frame a Magon—the screamer—had been strung, wrists and ankles bound so that he/she/it was spread-eagled and suspended in the air. Torturers had already been at work on him/her/it for some time, and large pieces of shell lay on the ground around it coated in dark blood or ichor. The victim shrieked louder as a torturer sawed off another section of carapace, this one on its chest. Blood wept from the wound. The victim shook in pain, and its screams had become hoarse; it must have been screaming for hours.
“What’d he do to deserve that?” Hildra said.
“Some blasphemy against the R’loth, probably,” Avery said.
As if his words had summoned the being, a tall, golden-haired man appeared from out of a side-tunnel, side by side—Avery’s eyes widened—with Admiral Jessryl Sheridan. Avery took her in, looking severe but (wisely, given the circumstances) humble, then the tall, handsome man she walked beside. Avery noticed Layanna staring at the golden-haired man. To Avery’s surprise it was a look of recognition.
“He’s the Collossum?” Avery said, and she nodded. He wondered what the Collossum could want with Sheridan.
The slugs had drawn to a stop inside the throne chamber, and now attention turned to them. The king or queen, if that’s what manner of thing occupied the throne, ceased issuing instructions to his torturers and allowed the Speaker to say something in their language, gesturing to Layanna.
The monarch stood and chittered, and his torturers dragged the framework bearing the victim off. The so-called Speaker dismounted and his underlings followed, removing Janx, Hildra and Avery from the slug as well. Avery’s legs shook as the creatures set him on solid ground, and he collapsed in a shuddering heap, his bloody hands just barely catching his weight. Janx, not much better, doubled over and sucked in long breaths, while Hildra sank to her knees, gasping.
The Speaker and his creatures moved to Layanna and helped her down, not gently, exactly, but with a certain air of deference. Now that the screaming had stopped, Avery caught snatches of the conversation between Sheridan and the R’loth.
“ ... have done,” the Collossum was saying. “And you will be rewarded.”
“But the Starfish,” Sheridan said. “Surely—”
“Yes, and that is why you will take it to him in Ghenisa. I lack the machines here.”
He gestured to the shadows, and two Magons stepped out bearing a strange box between them, composed of some material Avery was not familiar with and covered in equally alien symbols.