Art of War

by Triantafyllou, Petros

  He stood there for moment, gazing blankly at the river’s current and trying not to think of the two people he’d just murdered.

  His mother’s voice floated into his head. “It’s not murder,” she’d told him when he’d expressed remorse over being drafted. “The Sixers aren’t people like you and I, Neph. They’re Heathens. Sinners. You’re not killing them, you’re cleansing the world of their taint.”

  A devout woman, his mother. In truth, Neph had lived in fear of her for most of his life, though he missed her dearly now. She’d be proud of him, if he managed to make it home.

  Screams and spinneret fire pricked his ears. He turned to survey the forest behind him.

  There’s Eights in the trees, he recalled the woman saying. “Well, then,” Neph muttered. “The trees it is.”

  He stopped to loot the woman’s pistol, making a point of not looking at her face, then straightened and set out for the tree line. He started out a sprint, but was forced to settle for a shambling jog. A few of his ribs were broken, Neph suspected, and he’d bruised his leg bad when he’d struck the cliffside on the way down.

  To the east (or west—he honestly had no idea which direction was which) the battlefield lay beneath a shifting blanket of black smoke. Neph could see distant figures scuttling like ants, the bright flash of gunfire, the glint of wan sunlight on steel. The wreck of two spider tanks were burning, and a razorfly buzzed in the low clouds, though he couldn’t know if it belonged to the enemy or not. The Sixers’ razorflies were almost identical to those piloted by the Eights, save for the blasphemous decal painted on the side of their shells.

  The forest didn’t provide as much cover as he would have liked. The trees were tall and too-slender to hide behind in case he spotted the enemy. He heard distant shouts, and the successive thwumping of bomb clusters going off somewhere ahead.

  Something chirped on his right. Neph spun, fired, and cursed himself for a fool when he saw the squirrel that had startled him. He lobbed the scalding gun at the animal, but it missed, as well.

  The squirrel’s chittering sounded an awful lot like laughter.

  “Something funny?” he asked, knuckles whitening on his weapon’s hilt as he started toward it.

  “Hello? Help!”

  Neph looked around, wishing to hell he hadn’t wasted the mandible’s shot on a fucking squirrel. There was a toppled tree nearby, a woman pinned on her stomach beneath it. She was wearing an Eight’s blue-grey uniform. Her cap had fallen off, and her muddied blonde hair was in disarray.

  “Can you help me, please?” she prompted.

  “Oh.” Neph blinked, dimply aware of something clanging off to his right. “Yeah. Sure.” He stabbed the point of his tarsus into the mud and knelt by her. “What happened?”

  She looked at him as if he’d asked something idiotic (like how many legs a spider had, for instance) and blew a strand of yellow hair from her eyes. She was younger than Neph had first supposed. As young as him even. “A tree fell on me.”

  “I can see that,” he said. He hooked his hands under the trunk and hoisted upward. His arms strained, his knees shook, and something in his lower back tore like a loaf of fresh bread.

  “You’re not strong enough,” she pointed out.

  “I’m strong enough,” he assured her, failing to mask his sudden breathlessness.

  “Maybe go get some help,” she suggested. “I can wait.”

  “I don’t need help,” he snapped. “I just need a better—”

  “Hurry!”

  “Hurry? You just said—”

  A beam of splintering energy missed him by inches. It carved through the tree in his hands, cauterizing the stump of both halves. Suddenly, he was strong enough to lift the tree off the girl. She scrambled out from underneath, and he dropped the trunk.

  “Thanks. C’mon.” She took his hand and pulled him off at a run. Neph yanked his sword out of the ground as they went by it, then made the grave mistake of looking over his shoulder. A behemoth crashed through the forest behind them, a mechanical monstrosity with segmented legs and clustered green eyes.

  “A spider-tank!”

  “It’s malfunctioning!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Look at its head.”

  He did. The top of its head—where the cockpit should have been—was blown apart, smoking and sparking as the giant spider charged clumsily after them. Neph tripped over a tuft of earth, stumbling.

  “Watch where you’re going!” said the girl.

  “You just told me to—”

  “This way!”

  She dragged him down a slope, toward a steep-sided cleft in the valley below. A pair of snarling lasers crossed overhead, sawing through branches, slicing through trees like a sword through shards of grass. The girl—Neph still didn’t know her name—stopped short as one crashed down in their path.

  “It’s targeting matrix is fried,” she said, yanking him along. “The autopilot has kicked in, but it thinks everyone’s an enemy. We need to get away, or else damage it enough to override its survival scheme and trick it into self-destructing.”

  Neph was impressed. “How do you know so much about spider tanks?” he shouted, ducking as a stray laser tore a gouge in the earth beside them.

  “I’m a driver!” she explained. “That was my tank.”

  Neph risked another glance over his shoulder. Four of the tank’s eight eyes were cracked and damaged, while the other four rolled sporadically, firing beams of crackling energy at anything it deemed a threat. He saw the squirrel who’d tormented him earlier get caught by a laser’s blast. Good riddance, he thought. Little fucker had it coming.

  “How did you escape?” he asked the girl, who pulled him behind the sheltering bulwark of a grassy ravine. Whatever wrecked the spider’s head should have killed her as well.

  The girl stopped to catch her breath, swiping hair from her eyes and wincing as she pressed fingers to her ribs. “I wasn’t in it at the time. I got out to pee, and the enemy ambushed us. Meleagant went crazy and wiped out both squads.”

  He’d meant to inquire who stops to pee in the middle of a battle, but she’d caught his interest on something else. “Meleagant?”

  “My tank. We name them. Meleagant was a hero from—”

  “The Anthrology, yeah. I know him.”

  She favoured him with a grin. “Pious, are we?”

  His attempt to grin back resulted in a harried grimace. “My mother—”

  The earthen bulwark exploded, showering them with dirt and stones. They crouched, huddled against the hail of debris. The girl smelled (not unpleasantly) like sweat and spring lilacs. Neph was suddenly conscious of what he must smell like: water-logged corpses, blood, the charred tang of pistol-smoke, abject terror…

  It’s a wonder she isn’t gagging right now.

  He considered offering up an apology, but the giant mechanized arachnid straddling the sky above them proved a more immediate concern.

  Neph stifled a yelp and started to rise, but the girl clutched him hard, hissing into his ear. “Wait. It doesn’t see us.”

  He squinted against the falling grit. She appeared to be right. The spider’s remaining eyes looked everywhere but down, occasionally firing off random bolts of crackling energy. There was a spinneret gun on its abdomen, and Neph saw blood splattered on the fractured window of the rear cockpit. “So what do we do?” he whispered.

  “We split up. You run that way.” She glanced over his shoulder. “Distract it. I’ll get on top and—”

  “What? Me, distract it? Why not you?”

  “Do you know where its OS hub is? Or how to disable its gyrospanner?”

  Neph frowned. He didn’t even know what an OS hub was—let alone where to find it—and couldn’t have picked a gyrospanner out from a pile of coat-hangers. “Okay, fine. I’ll distract it.”

  “You will?” She eyed him seriously.

  “I will,” he said, feeling inexplicably brave for the first time today.

  The girl took hol
d of his shoulders. “You can do this.”

  “I can do this,” he repeated.

  Neph started to rise, but paused in a crouch. “What’s your name?”

  Her smile showed white through the grime on her face. “Tisca. What’s yours?”

  “Neph,” he answered. He wanted to say more—to ask her where she was from, what House she belonged to, and why she’d come to war against the Sixers—but all that could wait. He turned, took a breath, and sprinted for all he was worth.

  For a moment, all Neph could hear was his pounding heart, his huffing breath, and the snap of twigs underfoot, but then came the whir of motors and the raw sizzle of an eye-laser cutting across on his right. He dove as it passed overhead, then leapt to his feet and took off in the opposite direction. Another beam tore a vertical stripe before him. Neph sidestepped it, heard the canopy come crashing down behind him, and juked again as more lasers—three this time—cut trisecting paths ahead of him.

  He dropped, skidding on his side beneath the lowest beam, closing his eyes against the glare of the blistering torrent.

  The lasers disappeared. Neph lay on his face in the mud. His whole body ached. Something—the ground beneath him—was trembling.

  Get up, he urged himself. Get up! She needs you to distract it, fool, not lie here like a Sixer coward. He rose, but his jaw remained pinned to the forest floor.

  The tank—Meleagant—charged him. Its legs hammered the earth as it crashed through the brush. Its eyes pulsed red. Its pincers hinged open, coughing acrid black smoke as the chain-edged blades roared to life.

  Neph briefly considered offering a prayer to the Goddess, but since she’d been actively trying to kill him all day, he decided on a wordless scream instead. He ran straight at the behemoth, sword raised, and figured that he’d at least die a hero’s death, running fearlessly (well, relatively fearlessly) into the chainsaw pincers of certain death. He glimpsed a figure—Tisca—clinging to the tank’s sternum, tugging desperately at a braided blue cord.

  The spider collapsed, sloughing like a boulder behind a rising tide of black earth and wet leaves. Tisca was thrown from her perch, landing hard at Neph’s feet.

  “You did it!” he cried, kneeling beside her.

  “…elf…uct,” she murmured.

  Beep went something on the tank’s blasted console.

  “Huh?”

  Beep.

  “It’s going…”

  Beep.

  “…to self-destruct.”

  Neph’s eyes went wide. He grabbed the girl by the collar and hauled her to her feet, then hurled her, stumbling, away from the crumpled spider. There wasn’t time to take shelter, so Neph tossed his sword aside and threw himself onto Tisca, shielding her.

  And he prayed, after all, that the Goddess would spare their lives.

  Things got very bright and very loud. He might have screamed. He almost certainly lost consciousness. Eventually, Neph became aware of a shrill blaring in his ears. He’d closed his eyes at some point, and when he finally opened them, he found Tisca blinking up at him.

  “We lived,” she said, as though marvelling at something she’d once thought impossible.

  “We lived,” he breathed.

  “You saved my life,” she pointed out.

  “You saved mine first,” Neph said. He rolled off her and sat up. Pieces of charred scrap-metal lay scattered all around them. “Praise the Eight Legs of the Goddess!” he almost laughed for joy. “We lived! You did great, Tisca. I didn’t think—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you did great.”

  “Before that,” she snapped. “About the Goddess. You said, ‘Praise the Eight legs of the Goddess.”

  “So?”

  “So…she only has six.”

  Neph opened his mouth to protest, but then (as if his mind was just now piecing together the events of the last few minutes) he recalled the six-legged tank she’d piloted plodding toward him, remembered that he was wearing an enemy soldier’s six-legged pin, and realized belatedly that Tisca’s uniform really was more of a greyish-blue than a bluish-grey.

  His eyes strayed to the sword laying discarded in the leaves between them.

  So did hers.

  He leapt for it.

  She didn’t.

  She drew the gun at her hip and shot him in the face.

  Heaven was not at all what Neph had expected it to be. He was under the impression there would be sweet music in the air, silver webs spanning the sky, and that everyone he’d ever loved would be on hand to greet him with open arms.

  Instead, he was chained by the ankle to a stranger while the two of them pushed a massive stone up a seemingly endless rise. And worse, the old man claimed he’d been a Sixer once upon a time.

  “So why are we both here?” Neph asked him. “If the Spider Goddess has eight legs, I should be in paradise right now. And if she had six legs, which is fucking stupid, mind you, then you should be in paradise.”

  “Keep pushing,” the man grunted. He seemed weary, as if he’d been here for a very long time.

  “But I don’t understand,” Neph complained, straining under the weight of the stone. “Which one of us is right?”

  His partner nodded toward the top of the rise. Following his gaze, Neph could make out a vast, horned shadow rearing against the glow of hellish fires.

  “Neither,” the old man growled. “She’s a dung beetle.”

  The War God's Axe

  Anne Nicholls

  "Goat! Watch out!"

  Too late. The flashing hooves connected with Goat's shoulder, catapulting him head-first into the stable wall. His skull rang, sparks burst in his vision, then everything went black.

  "Perrick, you idiot!" snarled Jash, hurrying to kneel by his friend's side. "What d'you go and do that for?"

  Innocent as poison ivy, Perrick picked a bit of straw off his novice's robe and smirked. "I didn't do anything! Not my fault Firestorm felt like kicking out at a passing nutcase. Goat should know better than to walk behind a stallion, let alone a mad bastard like Firestorm."

  "Ole Firestorm was fine 'til you spooked him. You done it a-purpose `cause he made you look bad in front of Presbyter Meran." As he spoke, Jash tore off his sweat-rag and pushed a flap of Goat's scalp back into position. Blood poured out around it. "Go and get a healer."

  "You can't tell me what to do! You're only an ostler, and he's only a Flatface who spouts nonsense in his fits of lunacy. And I'm—"

  "You're an arrogant dick-head who's only down here as a penance. I know. I've heard it all before. I'm not leaving you alone with him so take your holy novice's arse over to the Temple and get a healer or your next punishment'll be back down the sewers."

  "You wouldn't dare tell on me!" Perrick blustered, but his patrician face paled. He couldn't meet Jash's penetrating gaze. Everyone knew Perrick hated the smell of the stables at the best of times, but what made him retch now wasn't dung but acid fear. Under Temple law, the penalty for harming a citizen was a flogging in front of the altar. One stroke from each cleric on his naked, humiliated flesh. Powers only knew what the archbishop would deem a suitable penance afterwards.

  "Goat's not even a citizen!" he exclaimed as a thought struck him. "He's a vagrant Flatface, mad as a kite in a storm! He babbles like a lunatic whenever the fit takes him. He's probably a traitor just waiting to let the tribes in at the gate."

  Jash stood, walked over to the pitchfork he'd abandoned when Perrick had flapped his cloak at Firestorm and the stallion lashed out. He picked it up, walked slowly right up to Perrick and stabbed the prongs into the ground not a hair's breadth from Perrick's sandalled toes.

  Perrick jumped back. Jash laughed up into his face. "Yeah, that's right. I never done nothing neither. But watch out who you go round calling a traitor. Goat's got no love for the tribes. When he was crippled, they exposed him on the steppes. It's a miracle he survived to get to Temple City. This…" Jash flourished the fork around at the racks of saddles
, the hay-loft, and the horses, who were trampling nervously at the tension vibrating between the two men, "this is his home." With a final flourish of the pitchfork, he backed the bully out into the sunlight. "And don't take too long about it!"

  "Shaman eyes!" Goat gasped. Thrashing, he tried and failed to sit up. Jash rushed back to catch him before he could crack his head on the stone. "Spying on us. Monkeys! Crawling up from below!" He threw his arm across his face as if he could hide. "Don't let them get me!"

  Jash held him still, crooning, "What eyes? There ain't no eyes, nor monkeys neither. Sssh, Goat, it's all right. It's all right, me ole mucker." He stroked his friend's raven-dark hair that was soft as silk. "You just wake up now. It's only a dream."

  Far from waking, Goat became more agitated. His mutterings slipped from the common tongue into something barbaric. He writhed and strove to break free. By the time the healer arrived, Jash, red-faced and dripping with sweat, was losing the battle to stop him flailing.

  The healer was an impressive figure shrouded in satin that shone now emerald, now bronze. She paused, looking down at the two youths wrestling in the straw. With one gesture she stilled Goat into sleep. "You can let go now," she said, smiling at a gaping Jash.

  "But-but you're a—" His tongue stumbled to a halt as his flush threatened to boil him alive.

  "A what?" She cocked her head. "A girl? A healer? A Flatface? The only one who would come? Take your pick." Now she knelt, too. "Let the dog see the rabbit."

  Such a homely phrase for such an exotic bird, thought Jash, pleased at the way her skilful hands tended her patient. Taking cloths and lotions from a belt-pouch, she cleaned Goat's bloody wounds. The only sound was his stertorous breathing. When she touched the jagged cut on his left temple, though, he cried out in his heathen tongue.

  She answered it in the same. Pushing her damascened hood back the better to hear him, she crouched at his side, her voice soothing. Hypnotic. Goat talked on, more calmly now but disjointed.