There could be no victory in this fight for them. Bell could see that now. How many of the dead there had encountered the thing in groups of three, or four, or more? Given time, it would triumph over a regiment. That was if they played the game on its terms, of course. If Ryder had obeyed with alacrity, a game new to the thing was about to begin.
“Green! Get Owen back to the breach and get him out! You as well! I’ll slow it as much as I may.”
Green knew better than to disobey a direct order in combat. He ducked around to reach Owen, now leaning against the tunnel wall, pale and gasping, and half carried, half dragged the man toward the dim light of the brands above the tunnel breach, leaving Bell with the thing.
He knew he would not see the dawn. The knowledge gave him a clarity he only ever felt under fire, and he was satisfied that this was the last emotion that he would ever experience. Better this than to die an old man, toothless and confused.
For its part, the creature seemed confused by the loss of two of its opponents. Its head, the helmet rocking loosely across the hairless skull, swung this way and that way, before settling its gaze once more upon Bell.
“Aye,” said Bell, too at peace with his imminent extinction to offer house to anything as base as animosity. “Just you and I now. Lead on.”
The monster, however, did not wish to lead on. It looked at Bell with an expressionless countenance, yet with an air of curiosity. Then it spoke, and its voice was as empty of life as the gulf between the stars, and the syllables that came from a mouth without tongue and a throat without cords were too primal, too sophisticated for Bell to even guess at their meaning.
The words came, and the peace he had felt was stripped away to leave him naked and freezing before a truth too simple to be denied. A lifetime of faith was swept away as childish fancies. Before him was no puppet, but a priest of the one truth, the vicarious embodiment of it, the undeniable proof of it. No faith was necessary. No faith could ever prosper in the mind of John Bell ever again, an intellect sterilized of such fancies by the awful light of true revelation.
“Iä… Zschekerith… H’ethkyicin mu… ech Lloigor mar’Zschekerith… Zschekerith mu fhtagn…”
Bell had no memory of running, yet he must have. He had no memory of the explosion of two barrels of powder. He had no memory of being pulled from the sucking earth, and the touch of pulseless hands around his ankles that tried to pull him back into the churning soil. These he only recalled in dimly remembered nightmares for the rest of his life.
His first clear memory after that night was a day and a half afterward, when he awoke in his own bed in the hospitium, Captain Harker surprised in the act of leaving as Bell stirred. Harker called for the surgeon to attend immediately, before resuming his seat by Bell.
Harker told him how long he had been unconscious and raving, although he forebore to mention some of the dangerously blasphemous things Bell had said. Instead, he told Bell that Fairfax had attended him for an hour the previous day and had been very concerned by the major’s accident.
“Accident?” said Bell through cracked lips. “Did they not tell you of what we encountered in the tunnel?”
Here Harker had frowned at the prospect of an unpleasant duty to perform. “The powder brought down this tunnel you speak of, and the workings that led down to it. Your man Ryder who set the charge, he didn’t escape in time. I am sorry, sir.”
“But… the others. What of the others? Owen?”
“He was sorely injured, and never awakened. Green was smothered in the collapse.”
Bell was filled with horror. What he had seen in the chamber was well nigh unbearable, but the thought of no other trustworthy witness surviving to corroborate his memories was a sharp additional wound.
The captain was still speaking. “I am truly sorry, Major Bell. We’re searching the city for your attackers. They will be brought to justice, I assure you.”
Bell looked at him blankly.
“Royalist sympathizers, probably, or perhaps just common criminals. Whatever the case, they will not escape. Your foreman gave us good descriptions.”
“Foreman?”
The door opened and both men looked to the newcomer. Harker nodded, for he saw Hensley there. Bell screamed, for he did not.
Daughter of the Drifting
Jason Heller
Waves of mud from the Ocean Amorphous tugged at the hobnails of my boots as I trod the shore that morning. The soil undulated nauseously beneath my feet. It wasn’t a large quake. I trudged on.
The stench of rot, fetid and heavy, rose from the squelching sea. No gulls wheeled in the sky above its gray-brown swells; no fish wriggled in them, save for the lungfish that trawled its murky floor, occasionally to emerge, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.
I had partaken of such a creature the night before. Lungfish could only be eaten raw, as fire caused the meat to sublimate into a noxious vapor, and pickling it produced a mucus nigh on poisonous. Choking down its oily flesh, I had pondered my path thus far.
It was not a comforting path to retrace, nor an easy one. The small islands that comprised this world shifted constantly. There were no continents of which to speak, or islands so large they couldn’t be trodden across in a day. They roiled constantly, like blobs of sludge in the glutinous soup that was the Ocean Amorphous — the body of water, if indeed it might be called that, that encircled the world. One often awoke after a haunted sleep, adrift on a clump of slime and flattened ferns; it had been, just the night before, the promontory of an entire island. People lived upon these clots of muck, fought over them, died for them, only to have them dissolve and drift away before each sunrise.
It was a world that afforded no constancy, but my path was difficult to contemplate for another reason. Like the lungfish, I did not belong here. My body — its piebald skin, its pendulous breasts, its robust hips — was native to this filthy hell, all too true. But my spirit had long ago been hurled across the cosmic void and back by the hand of a Great Old One, whose immeasurable, skull-bejeweled hilt protruded from my eternal soul like some scabrous and cancerous growth.
My path, deformed as it was, had been prescribed by the arc of the Blade of Anothqgg.
My name is Y’vrn. I am a daughter of the Drifting. It was on the eighty-fifth day of the month of Ornuary, in the two thousand and eleventh year since the world was set Adrift, that the Blade of Anothqgg — as deftly as it had pierced the flesh of untold multitudes in battles both ancient and yet to come — entered my own life.
I know not why I remember the date. I do not linger on the past; sentiment, as L’kmi once taught me, is the swain of bloodshed. Of what consequence, he used to instruct, are the mawkish chalk-marks of the chronologist to a blade that can slice into eons long forgotten as keenly as it cleaves the dim mists of the future? Not that I was a woman — at least not at that tender age — apt to contemplate the finer points of philosophy. All the points that concerned me could be found at the ends of sabers.
Many blades had come by me over the course of my brief life. I’d even accommodated a host of them in my belly, my arms, my thighs. My many scars, tawny across my dappled skin, marked my history; they were the fossils of my intimacy. Swords, perhaps, were the only lovers I sought, not counting a quick fuck in the oozing mud-rain after battle. Or on the caked, quaking shore of the Ocean Amorphous, sludge mingling with the spent juices of our union. Like lovers, blades were neutral, utilitarian, to be wielded however one’s will might bend them. They could be friends or foes, stolen or won, relations or strangers.