by Andrew Post
“I found Mann and your fellow Blaggards. They’re dead.”
Erik ran his hand down his face. Under heavy lids, his eyes were bloodshot.
“They sided with Lyle some time ago,” Anoushka said. “You really didn’t know?”
“No. I’d been with them only since last year. I only carried the stuff. Cranked the spiralphone for Mann, took notes. Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” She filled him in on everything Mann had claimed, about the Ma’am and the Committee hiring an inclined file clerk to stand as Rammelstaad’s false public enemy number one.
“Blazes,” Erik said by the end of her story.
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I do. I’d still like to speak to Lyle about it, though.”
“Where is he?”
“The Error.”
“Did you find your squad?”
She nodded. “They’re gonna try to go home.”
“What about us?”
“You can come with me.”
“Where?”
“The Error.”
“He’s there, for sure?”
“That’s what he said,” Anoushka said. “I think—if the orcs haven’t taken her—Joan will be the best way to cross. I don’t know if Lyle has people out there; I only know there’s no cover out on the ice. I’ll need you to help pedal.” She took his hand.
His fingers wove between hers and squeezed. “Okay. I’m with you.”
* * *
The square was as they’d left it. They splashed through the orc blood, Anoushka under Erik’s arm, up to Joan. She lifted the tank’s side flank until it locked and helped Erik inside. He collapsed into Zuther’s pit, struggled to lift his legs to put his feet on the pedals. She took his left boot, set it on, buckled the strap, then the right. She pulled down the side armor, locked it snug, and was about to move back to her seat when he reached for her hand, too weak to take hold. She put her hand in his limp grasp. Holding it for one second, then two, Anoushka turned his hand and set his palm onto the handlebar of the pedaler pit. “There’ll be time after.” She sat behind him in the second pit to help him get started. One revolution, then the next. His legs began turning, too, small pushes, at half her speed.
Erik turned over his shoulder. “In a different life . . . do you think we might’ve . . .” he started, talking over the squeak of the springs creaking, stretching long.
“Maybe. A little faster, if you can.”
He leaned forward in his seat, his legs pumping. The springs, under the glass panels, were nearly there.
The spiralphone, next to Kylie-Nae’s empty station, began dragging its needle over the rolling wax. Anoushka watched their reflections in the brass bell: two figures sat one before the other, legs churning. Could’ve been a laughably awkward photo put through Raleen’s papers, announcing their engagement. Replace the pedalers’ pits with a rowboat, complete with frilly parasol. She in a summer dress and bonnet. Him rowing in a crisp suit and bow tie. A different life.
Ding!
“Okay, we’re wound,” Anoushka said, getting up out of the pit.
Hands on the yoke, she rumbled Joan about the square, the terrain soft under the tank’s treads. Crunching bone, squishing meat. Up one brick lane, down another. She took them through New Kambleburg in a zigzag, following the suns over the rooftops. The buildings peeled away at last, the ocean spreading before them. Long docks stretched out over the ice, their pylons vanishing deep under the hardened water. At the end of one, at its limit, stood a sole broad-shouldered figure. Anoushka squeezed the brake, telling Erik to stop pedaling.
Her boot heels clicked on the brick, then thudded hollowly on the dock’s wooden planks. The ice creaked and cracked under, long lightning bolts darting out and away from the moorings. Teetee, sitting beside him, turned around. Only a small growl until he recognized it was only Anoushka. One small whimper and soft swipe of his paw on his master’s armored leg took Peter’s focus off the stretching blue nothing, and he turned.
Since she’d seen him in the brewery basement, he’d gained several new cuts and bruises. His left eye was swollen shut. He rested his hand on his ax pommel, using it like a cane to keep himself upright. The crank gun, his scattergun, and his helm were nowhere to be seen.
Anoushka approached, smelling the coppery tang of his own blood and the vinegar reek of orcs’ on him before she was even ten paces close.
“I know where he is,” Anoushka said.
“Out there,” Peter said, pointing in no direction. Past him, Anoushka could see the Error—a six-fingered stone hand rising out of the frozen sea. Spiked in the middle, in its palm hidden under the water’s surface, taller than the rest, was the stone tower with the derrick mounted atop. Foggy and vague this far away. Obscured each time the snow came down in heavier rushes. Tracks, mostly filled in now, dotted their way out. Several sets. He wasn’t alone out there.
“I’m going,” Anoushka said.
“Where’s everyone else?”
“Running. That’s an option for you too, you know.”
With the suns on the horizon behind him, the wisp of steam lifting from Peter’s head was easy to see. Like a small ghost rising out of his armor’s high collar. Just one. One small leak of berserker heat. “No.”
With two bloody fingers, he pinched free the work-in-progress cover sheet for Dark Against Dark from the slats of his armored side. Crushing it into a ball, he tossed it off the side of the dock. Teetee watched it fall, looked up at Peter as if to ask if he wanted it fetched. Peter shook his head.
Peter looked over her head, to something behind her.
Anoushka turned. At the end of the dock’s far end stood Kylie-Nae. At Joan parked in the alley, Zuther was extending a hand to Erik. They shook, neither smiling. Zuther took the pedaler pit behind the former Blaggard. Ruprecht clutched his arm to his belly, hobbled down the street last, and took in the view of the dawn sky a moment before looking Anoushka and Peter’s way. Peter gazed back at the bard in the distance. Neither made a move to greet the other.
Kylie-Nae clunked up to approach Anoushka at the end of the creaky dock. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, shoulders crushed in, head low. The wind tore over them, throwing her hair about her head, lashing gold.
The three stood facing one another for a breath before Kylie-Nae said, “I haven’t seen her since she was a week old. Ossie’s mum sent me her picture. It came in the post the day after his letter asking me to stay away.” Her gaze moved from Anoushka to Peter briefly, then past them both to the Error standing hazily, miles off. “I guess even if I don’t want to, it looks like I’m gonna.”
“You don’t have to,” Anoushka said. “You can try to go home. You’ll be wanted, but you’ll be alive.”
Kylie-Nae met Anoushka’s eyes. “This is what we do. This was all we were ever good for. So we shouldn’t be surprised that this is how it ends. By your word, Cap’n.”
The Chase Is Better Than the Catch
“Forward!”
Joan lurched out onto the ice. Each small correction on the yoke made their rear end swing out. The suns’ glare on the ice leapt into the periscope, blinding Anoushka. She relied on Kylie-Nae’s direction at the forward viewport. “Degree left,” she shouted over Joan’s metallic racket.
Anoushka tweaked the yoke. “Good?”
“Yeah. Straight on from here.”
Anoushka locked the yoke in position and sat back in her seat.
Erik and Zuther kept the springs drawn, Erik still laboring to keep pace. To Anoushka’s left, Peter sat on the floor with Teetee curled in his lap. To her right, Ruprecht sat staring at the steel floor. He still had Russell’s revolver, tucked into the tie of his riding cloak. These were close quarters with so many bodies, and with the side armors drawn, their breath helped to warm Joan’s belly a little.
Anoushka tracked where Ruprecht was staring. His blood was still spattered about the pedalers’ pit.
“
I’m sorry,” Anoushka said.
“I appreciate that, Miss Demaine,” Ruprecht said. He paused when Joan made the ice under them crack loudly. When they didn’t break through and sink to the bottom of the bay like a mithril brick, he continue his thought. “But I feel as if I should be the one apologizing.”
As he detailed how he had made this trip such an “unmitigated disaster,” his words, Anoushka noticed he was speaking louder than necessary. And she also noticed how he kept glancing ahead, to Kylie-Nae’s left, where the spiralphone’s wax was turning, catching every syllable.
“—between mistrusting a conniving grocer who shorted us crucial supplies and, in my admitted ignorance, not realizing those were actually donkeys and not horses.” He laughed. “And, of course, fibbing all those times to you. I should really be the one apologizing. And so I shall: Miss Demaine, my sincerest regrets.”
Anoushka said nothing, annoyed to see him only express regret knowing there was a record of it, as if someday, there would need for proof for the Committee historians he wasn’t a complete shit. She let him talk, to explain himself. Perhaps it wasn’t always a performance, even when he got that edge in his voice and overrolled his Rs. She, too, knew there was more than one of her sharing the same cover of skin. There’d never been an issue of too little room.
A few miles more over the ice, Erik collapsed in his pit, his feet falling off the pedals. Kylie-Nae checked him. Still breathing. She pulled him from the pit and laid him aside, over the glass spring-covers, and took his place pedaling. “He’s okay. But are you sure we can trust him? He was one of Mann’s.”
“We can trust him,” Anoushka said and triggered a few lenses, peering through the periscope through the veil of falling snowflakes. As Erik had said, there were the ships. Six black shapes, like surfacing whales’ backs—their masts like spears driven into them. They had no sails dropped; moving wouldn’t be possible for another few months. She clicked another lens, zooming in farther. No movement on the decks was discernible at this distance. But Anoushka didn’t doubt they were full. She imagined the orcs, crouched around braziers deep belowdecks, waiting for the red arc of light to shine through the portholes. Their weapons waiting in racks, loaded. Hundreds of green hands, waiting idle, patient.
Another mile of ice, barren as the one before it. The Gods’ Error waited ahead, enormous, growing larger in the periscope tick by tick, rumble by rumble. Its sickness snuck its way into Joan, through every little opening it could find. It couldn’t be seen or discerned as clearly as it had been in the Scorch, but Anoushka still felt it ripple past her in increasingly heady waves. With each mile over the ice, it redoubled. She heard whispers at her ears, snapped to rear view. A crowd of shapes followed. A shadow for each life she had snuffed.
She clicked forward, and there they were already, watching the tank pass. Side view, same. Side view, same. She held her eyes closed, counted to ten, then opened them. They were still there, just as close, trailing along. She made herself look past them, to the landscape, to not mistake a single one of the entities as a dark spot in the ice. They might be trying to steer them toward a thin spot. If they were even really there. Anoushka chose not to explore that thought much, figuring it’d only cement them in her vision further.
The ice held.
Joan passed between two outer fingers of the Error and rumbled up to the center spire.
It had a staircase chiseled steeply into its side, corkscrewing around and up its craggy height. Anoushka threw the brake, then helped Erik out onto the ice. The group stood at the base of the Error. The derrick couldn’t be seen this far below, hidden by its broad curves and outcroppings. It’d been a mountain once, she remembered seeing in the Hall, taller than even the Burned Mountain. Perhaps this was its core. Upon detonating, maybe debris, flung high, once, had rained down to spear into the bay. She thought about the many other tomes waiting there in that nowhere place. Everything that could be known, if only the inclined could be allowed to dredge it out, one trip at a time.
Erik slipped through her arms, his knees knocking hard on the ice. Peter stepped over, bending to take Erik by the waist and hoist him onto his shoulder. “No,” Anoushka said. “Lead the way. I’ll carry him.”
Erik didn’t fight Anoushka lifting him. He was limp in her arms as he struggled to get his weight up onto her back. Kylie-Nae tied a blanket around him, to fasten him to Anoushka. He hung over her shoulder, his hair brushing her cheek. She turned to face the others, her steps splashing. The ice under them had a thin skin of slushy thaw. It didn’t matter; they’d made it across. This was almost over. She nodded, and they started up the stairs.
From a distance, the crude staircase had appeared much more deeply carved into the stone. Once climbing, Anoushka felt her heart drop; they were barely two feet wide. The frozen water below waited to accept them smashing upon it. Each step higher meant a longer fall, but Anoushka, following behind Kylie-Nae, continued. When the wind threatened to pull them off, they paused until the worst of the gale had passed. Anoushka tried to match her own breaths to Erik’s slow, dozing ones close in her ear. Everyone was shivering but her, but she didn’t rush them. Just kept her own momentum, following. Lift a boot, place it somewhere that looked stable and clear of ice, then the other. Erik’s weight threatened to pull her over backward, but she leaned into it, watching her feet, and ignoring the open air next to her—even as the wind came screaming for another attempt at peeling them off.
Peter, ahead of Anoushka, was breathing heavily. Each clang of his steel boots fell heavier and heavier. At the lead, Teetee kept close to the tower’s stone face, mindful of the edge, panting tiny ghosts of breath.
“We’re almost there,” Kylie-Nae called. She helped to pull Zuther behind her, his arms wrapped around himself, bent at the waist, shuffling.
Next, the bard hissed and made small whimpers as he braced himself against the ripping currents of air. Anoushka, more than once, had to give him a gentle bump to keep him moving.
The suns peeked in flashes from the dense cloud cover. The gods, if you were an Aurorinist and believed, were watching.
The stairs terminated at a plateau cut into the tower. High above, the steel derrick thorny with antennas of varying sizes and design—some rudimentary as lightning rods, others complex almost like laundry racks with multiple prongs. The connecting cables and wires fed down to the derrick’s wide-set legs and into the presumably hollow stone it had been set upon.
The collected snow was tossed, swirling in tiny dancing vortexes. Frozen, blue bodies lay about the plateau. Twenty orcs. Without any indication they’d been shot, Anoushka assumed they had frozen to death. Blackened fingers raised with cracks, arms prying free of the swaddling ice. Peter drew his ax, but none continued to try to stand. Only pointed in unison, cold-blackened skin splintering from the effort. Ahead, camouflaged among the crags, a passageway into the wall. The snap of something metallic sounded within. Something unlocking. He had made them carry all his things, then locked them outside.
Gun up, Anoushka took the lead. The passage snaked into the rock, each turn tighter but warmer. She pushed aside the thick steel door. A fire burned inside somewhere; she could smell smoke and the sinus-tickling whiff of something electric toiling. The cave’s walls bore the signs of years of pick throws, pocked and rough. It was a dome, cut into the Error, with big boxy machines set about the walls, cables running every which way. Each bore the stamp of the Committee, stenciled in black, except one. It appeared slapdash with its raw circuits and tubes held together by bare, amateur soldering. Next to it was a small fire, ringed by boots of orcish design to keep it contained. Squatting near the meager flames was a man in a dense black cloak. Thinning, center-parted hair. Round-lens spectacles, fogged and filthy. Looking like a completely different man from the photo she’d seen in Ruprecht’s office—what felt like a lifetime ago—Lyle Eichelberger was grossly thin, his eyes behind his glasses sunken into a long face. His body had eaten his significant double chin,
shrinking it to a deflated rooster’s waddle of loose skin on his neck.
“Hello,” he said. “You guys want some coffee? Cold out there, huh?”
Anoushka, keeping her eyes on Lyle, eased down to let Erik onto the floor. She stood, knees on the brink of buckling, her back screaming, her half-healed bullet wound in her leg throwing bolts of pain. She stepped into the congregation of radio equipment, close enough to feel the heat of Lyle’s dying cook-fire. He had a pipe laid out on a leather sheet and several small pinch purses. It reeked of mothdream.
She drew and leveled at Lyle’s sunken eyes. “Do you require the details of the contract that’s been placed on you?”
Unfazed by the sight of the gun, he knelt to hold his hands near the fire again.
Anoushka tracked the gun’s barrel, dipping her aim as he nonchalantly warmed himself.
“I don’t need the details, no,” he said. “But I thought we might talk for a minute.”
There was a shuffling of metal boots as Peter came near, the click of Teetee’s nails on the cold stone floor. They kept their distance but remained ready.
“Talk about what?” Anoushka said. “That you are aiding the enemy, that you’re a traitor against your own realm?”
Lyle looked up at Anoushka, a smile making his chapped lips crack. “I would’ve thought we were past all that. Because if you spoke to Mann, he said he was going to fill you in. Or did you just kill him as soon as you laid eyes on him, like you were about to do with me?”
“He told me. But we still have a mission.”
“All right,” Lyle said and stood. “On with the show, I guess. Ahem. My repeater, here, is hooked up to the tower above us.” He was practically shouting. “If you hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve been able to throw my spell all the way to New Delta City. Once my invisible fingers had penetrated its walls, I would’ve brought all of the Ma’am’s ancestors to rise from their sepulture beneath the palace, storm her chambers, kill her, thereby opening up the throne for War King Haine Skivvit, praise his name, Rammelstaad’s new ruler. But, lucky for the Ma’am, she chose some very talented folks to stop me.” Stepping over to the device, its wires plugged in to the Committee-stamped machines, he tore it free. He lifted the repeater overhead to smash it to the floor. “Confound it all, you best me!” he said and rolled his eyes. “The Ma’am wins again!”