“I could excuse one botanical term, but two? It also doesn’t help that most people mispronounce the two words. ‘Mona’ does not make sense in any context. Why would it? Alas, pedestrian minds will prescribe familiar meanings in the face of uncertainty. Please. Leave the discoveries to us.”
—Botanist Elder Mulkelvo “Mulk” Harbin of Vesh’Foktle. 127 AB.
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Stalt flicks the pension cheque, folds and unfolds it, and waves it like a whore’s fan. Where once he would have treasured any memento Delah left behind, now he can’t look at the thing without remembering his sister’s lie. Why had she told him there was a neutralizer? Why lead him on? Could this voice in his head and the apparition in his dreams be machinations created by his encroaching madness? If so, how did the Flung know about it? No, it is all true. Delah had left him a neutralizer that didn’t work. Probably, it never had.
However much betrayal the cheque represents, Stalt reminds himself it is of definite monetary value. Converting it to Kaskitian culas will be difficult, as he doubts they’ll have time to meet at a currency exchanger or find one with enough assets in their coffers to pay out the entire sum. He’ll have to wait until returning to Kaskit to do that if he ever makes it back. By the route’s calculations, he will return to the great city as a maligned.
Delah lied about the cure, so what if she lied about his inevitable death as well? His time could come later or sooner. Thus, how can he trust anything she says? His sister. His family. What else could she hide if she could lie about her brother’s life?
It would be much easier to take the pension and flee, living out the rest of his days in comfortable silence. He could spend his days eluding the Flung, the looming danger keeping him fit and attentive until the navy lost interest. They would be unlikely to find him among the raw ground and the scattered populaces outside the Smatter’s cities. The pull of such isolation and anonymity is too hard to resist.
“Gripping that thing pretty tight.” It’s Yosalus Ingram, with some of his marines out of earshot behind. Bolen’s already at the far side of the deck, but he and his youthful militia stiffen at the commander’s entrance. “Haven’t tried to off yourself again? Good.”
“Maybe soon, if that’s the only way to get rid of this thing.”
Ingram frowns. “With what you injected, you might just fall over any moment anyway. Do you want to know if it was harmful or not?”
“I’m still here.”
“Barely.” The commander joins him at the viewing window of the forward observation deck, where giant pines spring up from the passing countryside below. “It was an Insom neutralizer, so if you had a subdued appetite before, prepare for your return back to normal.”
That last point is a jest—Stalt’s too far gone to reach normality again. “Would have been useful.”
“You don’t care about anyone else besides yourself.”
I cared about Delah before all this. Is it all just a mistake?
Stalt stares at the cheque. “What would you do if you had one way out of everything?”
Ingram looks taken aback by the question. “Bite my hand?”
“Assuming you’re not dreaming.”
“Hmm.” The fleet commander seems to enjoy the tangent. “We like to think we’re out, but misfortune has a way of creeping up on us. You must fortify yourself during the calm bits and be ready for what’s around the corner.” Ingram balances on the balls of his feet. Then, he stands on his tiptoes. “Hells, already?”
Stalt squints, seeing Ingram’s attention focused on the closest of the forward skiffs. The first two in the line are always ahead by at least a day, the next two half, and the last two only a few hours out. Some mechanism Jowles explained before augments each Skiff’s grip with a pulley system that the vessel can use to travel along the cord, propelled by manual cranks inside. Judging by how quickly the rearmost Skiff is returning, the scouts must have found something important.
The Ferrence staff lower an outer ramp to admit a messenger from the Skiff after they’ve climbed on the Skelton’s outside railing. The lanky marine catches his breath just as the second closest Skiff crests a rise on its backward journey. “We need…” manages the scout, between breaths, “we need to stop.”
“Spit it out, man,” says Stalt, impatient.
Ingram waits for the man to speak. Bolen and his youths become curious, gathering around.
The scout takes an offered canteen and chugs it back. “The Chant have it, sir. They trapped the support tower, wrapping their tentacles around it like overgrowth. The hoses could burn it, but it’s growing inside the tower.” He pants again. “We’ll need burners in there.”
The fleet commander looks deep in contemplation as if not hearing the scout. Then he turns to the other men. “Old Glaive,” he says and finds Stalt. “How’s your memory? That was your sister’s training camp for years.”
Stalt does remember, for it was from there that Delah fled to the galley. He’d only heard of it from her stories, and the chance to see it up close marks the furthest he’s ventured from Kaskit in this direction since he was a child. “She could be there?”
Ingram nods to the panting marine.
“No sign of her,” says the scout. “Sir, it’s growing as we speak.”
Ingram’s nod is clipped, accompanied by an exasperated sigh. “Your boys can fight?” he asks Bolen.
With raised brows, the militia captain turns to the young men. “Could put a dent in your men, given the chance.”
“I doubt that.” Still, Ingram doesn’t push the point. “I want them all. We’ll go forward with the scouts, plus a contingent of my burners and marines.” He relays the orders to his messengers and adds, “We’re parking. Now.”
The messenger runs off, and in less than a minute, the cord stops its slither.
Stalt gets wind of the plan through implications, listening to the orders with half an ear and staring in the distance where he sees torchlight from patrols, Chant acolytes combing through the raw ground. Those men have a distinct advantage out there in the muck, and he wonders how deeply they’re entrenched. “Why not just let the skiffs plow through it?” Stalt asks.
Ingram has joined him back at the observation window while his burner marines fit into heavy shells, the others checking their weapons and testing their vesicles. “I won’t risk damaging my gondolas or the cord itself.” Ingram looks down to the first gantry of marines being lowered into the countryside beneath. “It’s not anything you’re not used to down there, anyway.”
It’s then Stalt realizes he will be a part of that burner squad assaulting the tower, with a bayonet at his back if he runs, most likely. So much for fleeing. “But she could be there, right?”
Ingram’s groan is soft. “Anything’s possible.”
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They come upon a scattering of dilapidated roofs just beyond where the pine trees recede to reveal a large clearing. It’s a military complex if Stalt ever saw one, its grounds fenced in, open and narrow, garages, and long single-floor houses that must be barracks. Remnants of ropeway cord hang laze on the roofs of some structures, still stiff as cut logs. Smaller bullwheels stick out like weeds from the complex, long dormant.
None of those structures hold a candle to the continental ropeway’s tall support tower that reaches several hundred feet off the ground to afford vessels like the HSG Skelton clearance above the tree line. Around the tower stand rickety shacks, swaying as if in the wind. Flames spark inside the windows of those stitched-on structures, still on as the mess of marines and raw men creep through the swamp-laden countryside.
“So what?” Stalt asks as they settle behind an overhanging organism that could have begun as a tree but is now a fungus. “We just walk inside?”
“I’m guessing,” whispers Bolen. “They’re not fighting men. They might scatter like rats if they see us.”
Or they might not, and Stalt gets the idea of running now. He thinks of roping Bolen into it, sharing the pension cheque with the militia captain, and hiring him as a security detail.
The thought vanishes just as Stalt’s head begins to pound. It’s faint but incessant, pulsing in the opposite direction of Old Glaive as if trying to pull him away from the place. The pain expands into breaths, into a wailing cry, into crunches that sound like something escaping from a shell. More people are screaming now, none of whom Stalt recognizes, but all shrill and feminine. The sensation and the sounds fade, leaving tears, chattering teeth, and what could be raking claws on stone.
Nothing you need to interest yourself in, Delah says.
They push on to Old Glaive, Stalt creeping forward with his head down. You’re back.
I told you to stay away.
And you told me you had a neutralizer for this thing.
A moment’s pause. Even if I did, would you still have left me alone?
So, she had knowingly lied to him. Are you just madness in my head?
Sometimes I wish I was. Stay away, brother, I mean it.
That was my first mistake.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She says nothing.
“Old man,” says Bolen beside him. “You gonna puke?”
“Maybe I’d feel better if I could.” He doesn’t elaborate and is not surprised when Delah doesn’t speak again.
The pang that creeps in next might be guilt or a longing to have his sister back. In another life, he may have continued being an overbearing brother. Maybe he shouldn’t have let her run off to the Flung so easily. Would things have been different?
Yet if he could have helped her, when would he have started? Ingram told him Delah had been in league with the Chant for years. How many years was he talking about? Decades? If that is the case, who else knew? Was he the only victim? Maybe she had conspired with the Chant but had later been coerced to infest him with the Myco strand. That situation would make more sense because Stalt’s having trouble believing anyone now.
Are you alone in this? Why me? If you’re in trouble, you can tell me. It pains him to realize he had never asked this before.
The only response is a gust of wind and, far off, the flickering of the torchlights outside Old Glaive. Then, one by one, they snuff, sinking the whole complex into darkness.
“Guess they see us,” says Stalt.
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Ghosts they could be, wayward spirits alive as illusions. In truth, they are far from either: youths with quivering legs, hardened men sweating to the core and blaming it on swamp water, awkward burner heavy-shelled goliaths that need their peers to steer them forward. They are clumsy, mismanaged, and loud, and once they enter the broken grounds, they come to understand what real apparitions are.
Old Glaive welcomes the men as a cave does its dark depths. The rawest of them takes the lead and kicks aside the creeping ground that he has come to know most of his life, the same that secretes the strands that gray his skin, bulge his chest, and grow thin eels from his scalp that he still thinks are gray hairs. Behind him whisk the flames of those paranoid youths burning every inch of raw but unable to ward off the fear that holds them.
A tenement wall cracked open, a gate, a shattered portcullis, empty weapon racks, smashed windows, stones with raw ground creeping out of their cracks, and overturned barrels with dead fish spilling out. An alligator is spread open, its innards pulled and strewn across the grounds. In the middle of the courtyard, closest to the gate, is an arrangement of stumps in a circle observing an empty fountain.
“That’s a carving,” says Stalt, and kneels to inspect the alligator. It may as well be a house chameleon the way it’s shriveled up on its back, but the signs are telltale: the slice across its belly, the organs snipped off of their vessels. “Some kind of ritual.” And yet, there are no Chant acolytes to perform it. All signs of human or near-human life receded, maybe cowering in corners or waiting in shadows. “Rats indeed.”
The militia captain calls a formation, and the Flung marines obey. Soon, the fifty souls are a rough approximation of a phalanx, its needles the bayoneted ends of muskets, with Stalt standing precariously in the center of that collection of stumps.
A chiseled woman of stone holds up a disc containing water in the middle of the fountain. Her face has been hacked away, carved anew sometime after creation, still recent enough to see the artist’s handiwork to make the woman’s face rounder. It is familiar, so much so that Stalt has trouble comprehending it isn’t part of a deep-rooted extension of his stint in the Glownabar, in that place that is not a place.
The Lone rises to its peak, and Old Glaive stirs. The men and youth weave through the base’s streets, not once straying—not once needing to. The corners are empty, doors flung open like pockets of an arrested thief. One boy’s teeth chatter incessantly at the emptiness, and another rips a piece of his shirt and ties it around the boy’s mouth. The boy bites down on it, and then he’s silent.
The base of the support tower looms ahead of them, looking down as a night watchman encountering vagrants. The derelict shacks that cling to it live as creeper vines snaking around a giant tree, sucking its vitality out. These shacks are the only light sources in Old Glaive, their windows flooding with radiance like a church’s stained glass eyes. Two front doors are bolted shut from the outside, but the door crumples when the heavy-shelled marines kick them in like curtains of rotten leaves.
A loon hoots far off, but there are none nearby. Twigs snap somewhere they shouldn’t. The marines and youths load their muskets and form a firing line. The burners douse their torches in sap.
“Into the shit again,” says Bolen, but this time it’ll be all of them.
From a burner, Stalt takes a belt with a sap barrel on the side and a quiver opposite, holding a dozen torches. He knows the task appointed to him not as he would at gunpoint but as an obligation. He takes the lead as they walk through those fallen doors into the stone frame of the tower. Who better to take the front than this abomination, this once-human? His body is transforming, but his soul is left unscathed, he hopes.
They wind their way through the tower, climbing overgrown staircases and clearing narrow hallways. Stalt feels something grab his feet and lose interest, and he regards how closely his skin's palette matches this tower's dead, broken stones. Something skitters behind them and spooks a marine, but not once do the men cry out, either because they shouldn’t or they can’t.
They’re about halfway up when they see the first robes thrown aside at the bottom of a staircase. With an unlit torch, Stalt lifts one and sees the familiar emblem of the Chant of Harmony. More of the garments litter the winding staircases, and when Stalt looks up, he finds hundreds more hanging on railings from where they were discarded. More lie separate from each other along the steps as if the acolytes wearing them had vanished all at once.
They climb until the sounds come, the hum of voices, protest, laughter, smooth transitions between pleasant and raucous conversation, the twang of zither strings, the assault on the men’s senses not once letting up. The boy with the cloth in his mouth screams, snot dribbling from his nose until he’s on the ground and squirming and then only whimpering. Another one pulls him up, but the boy is limp, and upon seeing this, they leave him in the hallway among the sea of discarded robes.
A complement of drums joins a thumping rhythm. Footsteps pound the floor, vibrations Stalt can feel walking hollow cavities inside his bones. The tower seems to shake, lights flickering around the corners, beyond closed doors that, when opened, reveal darkness. Life bleeds from everywhere the men are not, vanishing when they appear.
A door leads into the tower’s highest floor, and Stalt pushes it aside. He stomps up a flight of stairs, heavy boots damp, and sees where all the Chant in Old Glaive congregate.
The acolytes are in a circle, ten of them, twelve, to their left and right. Three circles. Six. They hold the guts of the skewered alligator in their hands, and in the center of those circles lie willing adherents. They are grown men, naked men, their faces birds, foxes, hounds with gazes of hysteria, arms and legs extending for tens of meters from their sockets, out the windows to wrap around the support tower and the ropeway cord. The bodies of the acolytes are withering, but their snaking limbs remain.
Those performing the ritual regard the new arrivals with little more care than squirrels. The Chant adherents fall forward, tentacles burst from their back, grasping the floor like desperate hands, calming as they find their brother limbs and entwine with them, outwards and up out the windows towards the ropeway cord.
It’s all too far gone, Stalt knows. Hundreds of bodies have been sacrificed to this ritual already to cut them off, to stop the advancing Flung fleet. These souls have been cast aside like peels of fruit. Stalt is only doing them all a favor.
He and the burners withdraw their first torches, dip them into their sap barrels, and listen as a murmur rises. It sounds like a hundred people are jammed inside the room, talking, clashing glasses, and dancing. Memories or cries for the past, they could be. Different voices speak, not in rhythmic chants but in sporadic, clipped sentences, where at one moment a man is talking, and at another a young boy, and Stalt wonders if those are inflections of the same voice. There is even a woman among them, two at once, then three, then none, and it isn’t conversation anymore but words strung together with no meaning.
-thigh nigh wrest wrought wreath rent rod wrast clast mast pass bow low cut strut turn burn scourge hewn bola mola mona-Mona Dortet. Mona Dortet. Mona Dortet.
Mona Dortet.
The phrase won’t stop. They all hear it. The building’s cacophony mixes with Stalt’s thoughts, which are already a soup. He wonders if he perceives any of this or if it’s all that spot in his head where someone else lives and won’t leave.
Mona Dortet, the voices say again. Mona Dortet. Mona Dortet! Ghastly cries. Choking. Gut-wrenching. There are shouts, and they are angry, and they are not coming from his head but from the tower. One of the youths behind him shrieks.
Stalt lights a second torch and throws the first. The burners follow. The torches sail like juggling pins. A tentacle bursts out from an acolyte’s back and grabs them, holding them in the air. It quivers as it drops flames onto the hoods of acolytes kneeling beneath it. Stalt lights a third torch and throws the second right as an appendage slithers on the floor toward him. It grabs his leg, but he ignites it as the firestarter sap runs down its length, a river of oil lit ablaze. He throws the third torch to the far side of the room, not aiming for anything but hearing it connect.
The burners move closer, smacking acolytes across the head with flaming torches. One of them bursts in a spray of tangled lines and tries to throw itself at the heavy shelled burner, but the armored man pushes the acolyte down and sets him ablaze. The rest of the adherents writhe, confused, mesmerized by the flames as if they’re animals now and unsure that their heat death is inches away.
The room erupts in flame, catching on the roots that snake out the chests of the acolytes on the ground, dead or almost dead. Bolen orders them away, and Stalt throws his fourth torch on the floor and runs as the men fend off feelers that try to spread and trap them inside. They barrel down the stairs three steps at a time, the tentacles chasing, grabbing the slowest men and turning them. One heavy shelled burner attempts to fend off the incoming wave before it pulls him in.
The sound that comes next is like a running swarm of rats. The men gather outside, but those rats thud louder and louder, in time with the crackling of flames, the bursts as the maligned appendages crunch through the walls and shoot down towards them.
The door of a nearby building swings open to a man three feet tall, but not a child, and runs towards them with crazed lunacy and one giant bulge poking from his head that pops and spews a writhing appendage. It launches forward, grabs a marine, and pulls him in. The youths spread and throw a torch at the thing and the boy together as they wrestle and then burn as one.
More acolytes rush in from the open door of a building they had cleared earlier: five, ten, then twenty. Stalt grabs one by that swinging appendage and pushes him onto the ground. Another lunges at him, but Stalt grips his throat and rams his fingers into the thing’s eyes. It falls, weak as if welcoming the moment its head splits open, and the appendage inside there limps and dies.
Bolen slams his hand down, and a line of men discharge a volley of musket fire. Acolytes fall, but the youths have no time to reload. They hoist their bayonets in front and drive them into the Chant, running at them from all directions. Men careen from the windows of the burning tower and jump, their bodies breaking on the landing, but still, they crawl, rise, running towards the intruders.
A hand on Stalt’s shoulder. “I heard it too,” says Bolen, and pulls him away, Stalt realizing he was watching the flames burst from the tower’s innards.
They run as far from the building as possible, threading through a gap in the surrounding crowd while Old Glaive’s streets close in. The doors, windows, and ground hatches of the base’s lower passages open up, and from them spring more robed acolytes, adherents, and youths, all on the brink of malignment or far into it. They run towards the fleeing men, and on their tongues is only one chant that all the men hear but cannot understand: Mona Dortet! Mona Dortet!
In front of the southern gate is a wall of unarmed men, some standing on their legs, others on their heads, crawling or lazing with their backs arched like crescent moons. On their flanks are no exits, and soon, they surround the runners and press in.
A screeching starts above, a sound that has always been there, though Stalt only realizes it now. He looks up to see the ropeway cord moving before his thoughts are assaulted by a crack that tears the night sky open, then another, then a pounding wall, the crunch of bone. An entire flank opens up. Stalt runs past and kicks open a rotted door that comes down like cobwebs. He rushes in, the marines following, forming a line that primes and fires another volley. The ones behind the line huddle like starved children and ready themselves to shoot the next thing to enter.
Above them sways the Skelton, and from it dangles grappling lines of the Flung marines, swinging down underneath a cloud of crackling powder and torches pinwheeling into the night. Gouts of sap spill from hoses jutting out of the swinging gondola, the waterfalls of fuel lighting as they come down, directing torrents of flame.
As the Flung settle into the streets and comb it, Stalt asks his sister, Mona Dortet?
This time, her silence says it all.