The Atomic Sea: Omnibus of Volumes Six, Seven and Eight

by Conner, Jack

  “We’ll make it,” he assured her. “Hopefully Janx and Hildra will be waiting for us back at Vursk’s headquarters.”

  When they emerged into the street, the green mist swirled even thicker than before, and weird glows could be seen pulsing in a much greater darkness. The songs and noise of the multitudes (however diminished at this hour) echoed strangely in the fog and seemed to come from far away, as if on another world. Avery felt unsteady.

  “Well?” said Coleel, appearing from the gloom, his tattoos lighting the fog up around him like a rainbow-hued nimbus. His guards, one of whom was Yoi, ranged to either side. “Which way?”

  Avery steeled himself and marched forward, supporting Layanna as they went; she was still sickly. Just as they rounded a bend, dark figures appeared before them—hunched shapes in tattered black robes, vultures in the mist, extrusions of its malevolence. Avery shrank back.

  “W-what do you want?” he said.

  The shapes all spoke as one, and their voices sounded something like the hiss of radio static merged with the mindless buzz of insects:

  “Give us the woman.”

  Avery glanced to Layanna, but she looked just as perplexed as he felt.

  “Leave us alone,” he told the shapes.

  “She must awake the Sleeper.”

  “Didn’t you hear the man?” Coleel said. “Get out of here, you bastards.”

  Angrily, one of his bodyguards stepped toward the figures. A robed form raised its hand, and shapes could be seen wriggling under its cadaverous flesh. With shocking speed, the figure plunged its palm against the bodyguard’s chest, and the man gasped, stopped, then, slowly, sank to his knees. His gun clattered to the ground. His large body trembled and shook. The figure didn’t take its hand away, and the shaking went on.

  The other bodyguard, Yoi, pulled his gun. “Get back,” he told Coleel, who obeyed. Yoi lifted his gun and fired a round at the robed figure’s feet. “Stop!”

  The shape didn’t obey. Yoi aimed at its chest.

  Three more figures stepped forward, around the first one, still doing whatever it was doing to the first bodyguard, and made for Yoi. He fired. Streamers of flesh and clothing fluttered behind the vulture-like shape, the former just as dry as the latter. The shapes came on.

  Yoi fired again, again, then reeled back as the figures converged on him. Avery pulled out his own gun and fired, but though he was certain he’d struck two of them—he could see little puffs where the rounds hit—the shapes didn’t stop.

  Yoi tripped and sprawled backward, a cry on his lips. The three shapes fell on him, though what it was they did to him Avery didn’t know. Others moved around the three, toward Avery, Layanna and Coleel.

  “Run!” he said.

  He wheeled about, off balance and slow with Layanna at his side, and marched her forward. Coleel fell back ahead of them, looking ashen. Passing a corner, Avery handed him his pistol, since Coleel didn’t appear to be armed.

  “Fire back,” Avery said, since he himself was occupied.

  Coleel swore but dutifully loosed a couple of shots around the corner, then recoiled. “They’re still coming.”

  They ran.

  “The priests of the Restoration,” Layanna panted. “They must have been.”

  “But what could they … want with us?” Avery said.

  “Not us. Me. I … have no idea.”

  At least it explained, or partly explained, why the Father had stared at Layanna at the temple of the Sisters of Junica. He had recognized in Layanna something that was important to him or his group. She must wake the Sleeper.

  The three turned down an alley, hit a cross-alley and took it. The dark shapes followed. Avery yanked his pistol back from Coleel, who didn’t seem interested in wasting time on something that hadn’t worked so far, and swiveled to fire, but he could see no sign of their pursuers, not at first. Then he heard the sound of static. He fired. There came no grunt, no cry of pain, and the static-y sound didn’t even pause … but only drew closer.

  The three stumbled out onto a street and ran down it, rounded a corner. Passing a busy establishment of some sort, its glow cutting through the fog, they hit another street and started up it, then drew back.

  “Shit!” said Coleel. “Collaborators.”

  Indeed, they’d almost run straight into the cordon of Octunggen-controlled troops and their vehicles that fenced the Maze in. A line of cars waited to clear the checkpoint before being allowed to leave, and the soldiers were searching each car thoroughly.

  “Shit,” said Coleel.

  They started back, passing the establishment again, but before they’d hit the alley they’d come from the dark shapes poured from it. Knives glimmered in their fists, but the rest of them remained in shadow. Avery and the others drew back, caught between one doom and another.

  “Into the club,” Layanna said.

  Coleel stopped them as they approached the establishment with its bouncers and line of would-be patrons. He stared up at its ornate, sinister façade grimly. The doors were set within the fanged mouth of a demonic serpent skull whose eyes glowed with golden alchemical fire. The Snake’s Tongue, Avery thought its name read. The building was all of eerie green stone.

  “I have enemies, too,” Coleel said in a low voice. “One of them might be in here.”

  “What choice is there?” Avery said.

  Coleel must have agreed, as he scowled, paid the bouncer, and the three entered past the fangs, having to walk along the snake’s tongue as they did. Apparently Coleel was a recognized enough figure that the three didn’t have to wait in line, which was fortunate. Avery wasn’t sure how far behind them the priests of the Restoration were or if the clergymen, whatever they truly were, would be willing to follow the three inside, but Avery wasn’t prepared to bet against it. Smoke surrounded him, as well as the press of people, and a strange, metallic thrumming noise filled his ears. He realized he’d been hearing the noise for some time but hadn’t had time to focus on it until now.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw a strange sight. The room was large and cavernous, dark where it wasn’t lit by glowing columns of quartz-like rock; each one burned, deep in its interior, a lurid sunset red-orange. The lights were set on low, so that only the reddish heart burned in the columns of stone; the rest was black and opaque, so that the illumination shown like lightning behind a bank of clouds. The quartz columns illuminated a stage upon which musicians played odd, alien-looking instruments, with a great deal of metal and wires and things like brass coils. The music they produced was hideous to Avery, but not less than three hundred people lolled on the pillow-covered floor before the band. Some were naked or half-naked and rutting senselessly, their eyes rolled up in their heads, while others touched themselves or simply twitched and shuddered in apparent delight.

  A line of standing patrons waited to gain access to the area before the stage, and men and women who must be bouncers let them in one at a time after receiving payment. Upon receipt of it, they handed each patron what looked like a piece of hard candy. The patron would pop it in their mouths, then, clutching a pillow or blanket, move into the area before the stage, where they quickly laid down and made themselves comfortable. Some went in groups, some alone. Some alchemical drug, Avery realized. They take it and then … what? The musical instruments must be specially designed, he thought, to produce very specific effects in people who had taken a very specific concoction. Fascinating.

  Those who didn’t want to participate in the drug-induced euphoria, or were gearing themselves up to join it, lounged at the long wooden bar that ran along the opposite side of the room or played darts or other bar games native to the area. Many hunched over a sea of scarred-looking tables.

  “They still after us?” Avery said.

  The three paused after the entryway and turned to watch the doorway. Someone entered. They all tensed, but it was only two young women clutching pillows and looking excited. The women moved toward the sunken area before the stage.
/>   “Maybe there’s a rear exit,” Layanna said.

  “There is,” Coleel said. He appeared stricken but resolved. He’d lost two men, but he was alive and was going to make good on their sacrifice. “This way.”

  They pushed their way through the smoky room, past a stairwell and into a dark hall. At the end, a door led out onto an alley. Coleel shoved it open—then jerked back. Avery just barely saw around him several hunched forms clothed in tatters, cowls pulled low over their corpse-like faces. A radio static hiss emerged from their mouths, along with a fetid stench that Avery could smell five feet away.

  Avery slipped around Coleel and slammed the door in their faces. It locked automatically. The door bucked as the figures on the other side threw their weight against it, then again. Avery and the others drew back, waiting for a third attempt, but none came. Avery checked his pistol: one bullet left.

  “Who are they?” Coleel said, staring at the door. He was breathing heavily. “You said … priests of the Restoration?”

  “That’s right,” Layanna said.

  “I’ve heard of them. Some new cult. There’s always another one in this city. I myself have belonged to many. I always leave when it grows dull. But this … what did they do to Yoi and Greel?”

  “I don’t know,” Avery said.

  They stared at the door. Nothing happened.

  “Do you think they’ve gone from the front?” Layanna said.

  “I wouldn’t want to chance it,” Avery said. “We don’t know how many of them there are, but it seems more likely they simply divided their force into two groups, or more.” He gulped down a breath, some sense of sanity returning to him. “I propose we get a drink.”

  They moved to the bar and took seats at a shadowy booth, where a man with glowing tattoos took their order. Avery caught Coleel examining the tattoos with professional interest.

  “To Yoi and Greel,” Coleel said, raising his glass.

  They all drank. Avery tried not to imagine Yoi and Greel rising from the dead and donning robes of their own. Have the priests just multiplied? With every murder, do their ranks swell?

  Coleel swore. “I thought you were going to get me out of here, Doctor, not land me in deeper shit than I was.”

  “I’m sorry. Things took an unexpected turn.” To Layanna, Avery said, “And you have no idea who or what this ‘Sleeper’ is?”

  “None,” she said, then attempted a smile; it came out awkwardly. “Only that I’m supposed to wake it.”

  Avery drained his beer, then ordered another. As he did, his eyes fell on one of the bouncers. The man stood in a niche along the wall. So did the others, Avery saw, at least those not about their various duties; some accepted money and handed out pills. Even some of the waitstaff appeared to be bouncers; Avery thought of them as bouncers because they all wore the same black pants and shirts and carried themselves with the same rigidity. It was as if they were all automatons, almost. Even their eyes …

  Avery started. The whites of their eyes were purple.

  Coleel saw his surprise. “Never seen a glabren, then?”

  “Glabren?” Layanna said, turning to study the bouncers, too.

  “It means ‘slave’ if you interpret it into Ghenisan one way, ‘mindless’ another. They belong to him.” Coleel glanced upward, toward the ceiling, and Avery guessed he meant someone on the floor above them.

  “Your enemy?” Avery said.

  Coleel nodded, sipped. “Maz Virine. A merchant in darker things than me.”

  “Does he too hold a monopoly on some alchemical substance?”

  “No. He acquires the substances by force. Then uses them for his own purposes. A few years ago he murdered the man who had the monopoly for glabrus, an herb, then took over the operation himself, killing anyone else who knew its secrets. Now he alone controls the substance, and he uses it, well …” His gaze flicked to the bouncers. “It can take over one’s mind, make you a slave to the will of another.”

  “Damn,” said Avery, remembering that Janx had mentioned something about this. If this was what he’d been referring to, then this Maz Virine must be a local boogeyman, one that was all too real. “And that’s what these, well, bouncers are—enslaved?”

  “If you like. It’s more complicated than that.”

  Avery, though expecting the priests of the Restoration to burst in at any moment, said, “Go on. We’re stuck here for the moment. We might as well know what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

  “Virine is an underworld figure. A boss. He controls a large and shady network. One of his rackets is loansharking. If you don’t pay up on time, he takes you and forces you to imbibe glabrus, then by some process only he knows compels you to obey him for whatever term of service he requires to pay off your debts. When you borrow money from him, you know that’s a possibility, and you even sign a contract to that extent. Believe it or not, it’s all quite legal. Mostly. What he does with the glabren, though … what they’re made to do …” Coleel visibly shuddered. “Some survive. Some don’t. Many that do are never the same afterward, in mind or body. Virine’s a part owner of this club, and he makes some of his glabren work here. They’re the lucky ones, believe me.”

  “And you think this man is here? Upstairs?” Layanna said.

  “I don’t know if he is or not, but I hope not. Like I said, he murders people like me to get control of the substances they have a monopoly on. He’s been wanting the ghost flower nectar for years. He’s tried to bribe me, threaten me, blackmail me, I’ve always held out. And I’ve had enough people around where I could afford to. I’m no small player myself, or I wasn’t. But now, to be in his establishment, at his power … If he finds out I’m here, it could go bad for us.”

  “Great,” said Avery. He eyed the beer before him, what was left of it, then shoved it away. He needed to be clear. He would have liked to have bummed a cigarette off one of the people about him, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t alchemical—and it probably would have been.

  Suddenly there was commotion by the front door. Avery and the others leapt up, expecting robed figures to be entering, but instead it was a group of new patrons. They were talking animatedly amongst themselves, and the news of what they were saying began to spread throughout the room. Avery listened, but most of the discussion was in the local language, which he didn’t speak. He turned to Coleel for explanation.

  The glowing merchant, wearing a pained expression, sank back into his seat.

  “Well?” Layanna said. “What is it?”

  Coleel gulped down a large portion of his beer. “It’s the Octunggen. They’ve sent their minions into the Maze. They’re going door to door.”

  “They must have spies here,” Layanna said. “They found out about my presence.”

  “Just who are you people?” Coleel said.

  Avery reached a decision. “The roof. We have to get to the roof. It worked before.”

  “That’s madness. We’d have to go up the stairs. Virine …”

  “We’ll have to chance it. We can’t go outside, and we can’t stay here, that much is certain. But the roofs …”

  Layanna was watching him. “You have an idea, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, maybe, I just might, but it will depend on luck as much as anything else.”

  She sort of smiled. This time it looked better. “I think we’re due for a bit of luck, don’t you?”

  They moved to the stairs and up them, and Avery was glad to have the screeching, thrumming and altogether unpleasant music recede behind him. At the top of the stairs was a door, and beyond this a room with a desk manned by a beautiful woman whose kinky black hair had been arranged in long tendrils. She had evidently applied some alchemical compound to the hair, for the tendrils actually contrived to move, however sluggishly, giving the impression of snakes writhing on her head. Another devotee of the snake cult, Avery thought. Behind her stood three velvet-curtained doorways, and beside each one a strong-looking individual, two men and one woman.
None of them were glabren, Avery was happy to note, but they were obviously there to restrict access to the rooms beyond nonetheless.

  The woman started to smile at Avery’s group, but her face fell when her eyes landed on Coleel. “Mister Coleel,” she said, in tones of both awe and fear—not fear of him, Avery felt certain, but for him.

  “That’s me. Listen, I’m in a hurry. Can my friends and I have a pass to the rooms? No need to let us choose our own escort—we’ll find one ourselves—or two, if the mood strikes.”

  “But … you can’t be here,” she said, with a quick dart of her head to the nearest goon. None of the guards seemed inclined to do more than stand there; they weren’t paid to think or carry out company policy. “I mean, I’ve always wanted to meet you—” Though she was dark of skin, Avery thought she was blushing “—but Sir Virine … it’s not safe for you here.”

  “So he’s in, then?” Coleel shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. My friends and I are really in the mood for company. Just, uh, do me a favor and don’t spread word that we’re here.”

  Hoping it would speed things along, Avery deposited what he thought was a generous amount of money on the desk. The receptionist, if that’s what she was, stared at it blankly for a moment, studied Coleel once again, then began counting the bills. While she worked, she said, “I really wish you would just leave. If you won’t, though …” She inclined her head to the left doorway. “Go down that way. But … he has eyes everywhere.”

  “Understood.”

  Coleel tore the velvet curtain aside and pushed through. After a moment of hesitation, Avery and Layanna joined him. A hall lined by doorways stretched before them, and they started down it. Avery saw a man leave a room, then turn to kiss a woman on the cheek. She smiled, and her purple eyes flashed. She closed the door, and the man shouldered his way past Coleel, Avery and Layanna, back toward the reception room.

  “A glabren whorehouse,” Avery muttered, disgusted.