The march’s days blend. Anthem, as close as possible, keeps to the 3rd squad while avoiding Frine’s mates, though they look to have forgotten about the man. After leaving the RLZ and Lomlen, Anthem surmised most had rid his defense against Frine from their minds, perhaps intentionally.
He has stopped overextending while gathering neutralizer ingredients. He mixes sporadically and only in the presence of that fragment of the 3rd squad that he trusts. His haversack is half empty, having spread the carafes out among Unwin, Hamill, Orey, and Devitt, choosing not to burden Nedland because of his regular exposure to commanding officers, to men who wouldn’t think twice about stringing Anthem up for insubordination if they discovered the bottles. For himself, Anthem only wishes to drag the secret out as long as possible, hoping Fletcher’s disdain of crafted neutralizers tempers before it is revealed.
Anthem watches Grace Kanis approach on a morning that could have been the fifth or sixth week out of Lomlen. “The girls and I cleared a nest today,” she says. “What the fuck have you all been up to?”
Staring at his boots, Anthem wonders how many Thurmgeists follow the column. “Why even come back at all?”
“Got hungry.” The woman snatches an unattended ration container. When the owner returns, Grace prattles her fingers on her bloody machete and the private steps away.
Then, looking down at Anthem while he sits, the woman taps her belt and mimics a drinking motion. She smiles.
The gesture’s meaning hovers. How long has she known? He wants to ask but saves energy for more worthwhile debates. Still, the urge to let another person in on this exciting process pecks away at him. Nedland had told him the carafes were the best weapon the Corps would ever use, and Kanis had commended him for offing Frine. Maybe she can be trusted.
The platoon has stopped at an escarpment underneath a tall cliff. Kanis trudges up a path out of sight of most men and the patrols, probably off to join the other Thurmgeists. Anthem lets his curiosity get the better of him, following her, hoping to meet another of the women and possibly divulge his experiments to them if they listen.
The top of the path emerges onto a precipice where Lieutenant Fletcher stands, overlooking the platoon below. Another man sits beside him, dangling his feet over the edge.
“You like bacon, zoo man?” asks the one sitting.
Fletcher appears to have stumbled upon the man. “Private Watse?” asks the lieutenant.
“I haven’t eaten the stuff in years,” Anthem indulges, wondering what strand Watse hosts that enables him to perceive Anthem’s presence without turning around. “I’d say I enjoy it, though. Why?”
“Yeah, I don’t like it either.” Private Watse focuses somewhere in the valley. “I’m asking ‘cause we’re about to be cooked alive.” He points far off, toward nothing discernible. “A heat wave is forming, gentlemen, and… Thurmgeist.” He finds Kanis standing beside him. “LT won’t listen.”
Fletcher gives Anthem a look free of accusation, triggering a tingling relief in the back of Anthem’s neck. He follows Fletcher’s implied order and kneels to study Watse. “Shit,” Anthem says. “How long you had that?”
Right on the tip of the man’s nose, where there should be cartilage, is a rhinarium, an embossed area of skin you’d find on mammals like cats, lemurs, walruses, but never humans—not usually. It seems this man is full of peculiar strands.
“How long do we have?” Anthem asks, referring to Watse’s earlier words.
He hears Fletcher grunt as he accepts the prediction. Trust your zoo man—that phrase should catch on instead.
“Four hours?” says Watse. “Five?” He looks at Fletcher. “I can feel it in my wet nose, LT.” He sniffs. “If you think I’m lying, fine, but I won’t be here when you guys are scorched. I’ll be in there.” Watse points in the direction he had before.
Fletcher calls up Orey, the scout’s patch of red hair dry, while others are caked in sweat. He raises a spyglass to his eye and scans the valley, focusing on that place far off. “Ah, yes. There’s a gate, too. It leads underground, sir, but not far under.”
Underground? “Like the tunnels under the RLZ?” Anthem asks about the places where the men were ordered not to venture.
“This one is likely deeper,” says Fletcher. He inhales from his vesicle as if in anticipation. “Is it breathable?”
“Oh yeah,” the scout says. “The Lakkies built these, though the earlier scouting parties probably widened it. Since it’s underground, it’ll be closer to the average climate. From what I've read, some can fit four battalions.”
“But not from what you’ve seen, correct?” asks Fletcher.
The scout shrugs. “Haven’t had the honor of meeting the earlier scouting parties.” Without the lieutenant verbally directing it, Orey leaves.
“This is going to be a problem,” says the lieutenant, and finds Kanis. “That crater is a seven-hour march from here.”
“What do you want me to do?” The woman folds her arms and smiles. “My girls have caves we can hide out in.”
Fletcher shrugs. “It would be nice if you went ahead and cleared it.”
“Yeah, it would be, wouldn’t it? It would also be nice if you gave us all your food.” She smiles. “The rest of the girls are doing the work here. You’re all just getting eaten alive, slowly.” She leaves the three men alone.
“Fucking Thurmgeists, I swear.” Fletcher shakes his head and regards Anthem as if he’s the awkward third to their meeting but does not order him to leave. “That none of us know what’s in that cave bothers me. What if we have to share that space with a maligned nest? Muskets will mean nothing. Fire, yes, but there’s not enough of that.”
Perhaps Anthem is reading too much into that last sentence, which sounds like a request. Why else would Fletcher allow him to stay here? Anthem doesn’t risk proposing that his neutralizers adequately replace sap-induced flames.
Anthem only nods. “Better start running soon then, sir.”
“Looks like our friend got a head start,” says Watse.
They share a look down the valley to Orey, who has already started running full tilt towards the tunnel.
----------------------------------------
Watse’s prediction became known to the column minutes after Anthem left the hilltop. Since then, it’s been close to 4 hours of running, sweat soaking every part of Anthem’s being until his existence is nothing more than wetness, scrapes from where his boots don’t quite fit, and the bugs plastering his skin.
A cartridge box is slung over his shoulder, containing forty paper cartridges, each with a .69 caliber musket ball and sixty grains of black powder. A two-liter canteen with water as warm as piss. Two haversacks full of the ingredients and equipment for crafting neutralizer agents. A pack containing his sleeping bag and his tent. A scabbard for his bayonet. His machete is long gone, but even without it, Anthem runs with sixty pounds of gear and is on the brink of fainting.
“Legs up, men!” Kanis taunts. “Move!” She carries half the weight Anthem does and weaves through the jungle like she was born here. She passes underneath a swinger hanging still from a tree, only this one is thrice as thick as usual, with a mouth closer to a borer. Before Anthem can warn a man standing underneath it, the thing snaps down like a whip, opens its mouth around the man’s head, and pulls him up. The swinger has already swallowed half of him before Anthem and the others pass twenty feet below.
“Heave!” Unwin cries from somewhere behind. He leads three other Ox-infused pulling the six-pound cannon they found weeks before in the crater. As they round a corner, a wheel catches and splinters, throwing one of the Ox on the ground. He doesn’t get up, leaving the other three to carry the thing while pieces of its frame break off.
The Twin Pales blaze high overhead, ignorant of the oven they create for the men. “Don’t blame the Twins too much!” Watse calls, running beside Anthem as if reading his mind. “It’s all air pressure!” He empties his canteen over his face and runs ahead.
The column is a lumbering mess of supple, vulnerable flesh, and the cotinga mosquitoes know it. They circle in a black cloud high above, contemplating the cost of the incoming maneuver on the tip of their hungry instincts. After deeming the efforts sufficient, they plunge like a wake of vultures, a wave of disease and yearning.
A burner throws a flaming torch into the swarm, and it disperses, but not before pushing three men out of the column and into the trenches lining the sides of their path, minutes away from the tunnel. The men cry out, swatting the insects away from their faces. One is Frine’s ex-squadmate. The column only has time to spare a glance.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
A straight path leads to the gate at the tunnel’s mouth. Kanis runs ahead of the pikemen leading the platoon, yet all yield to the technicians who surge forward and fiddle with the gate’s mechanisms. The rest of the men form a sloppy crescent moon to guard them.
Above, the cotinga swarm blots out the two suns, casting a relieving shadow that loses its comfort as the men stare up, load their muskets, and train them on the bugs as if such a thing will stop that onslaught.
A loud creak, the cranking of steel teeth on links, and the gate yawns open. Men force themselves against it, crawl under, and barrel down the path descending into the depths of the Hyrnlak Archipelago. They trip over each other and pull themselves up, dead insects and dirt plastered on their faces. The cotingas drop, fly overhead, and miss the entrance, flying off toward a greater calling.
Inside, the darkness encompasses all, warded off only by sap-induced torches that will burn for hours but are in short supply, leaving one for each squad. Anthem suppresses another urge to tell the men they should save the sap for light, that his alternative is just as effective.
The column reaches the first opening in minutes, a vast dugout large enough to fit 1,000 men of the 1st battalion. They slump against walls or on the ground in clumps, representing their platoons and the squadrons within. Darkness still enshrouds most of the cave, torchbearers fanning out through the web, encouraging men to spread the warmth of their bodies so as not to turn the space into a furnace.
“Smart bastards, eh?” Unwin says, slumping next to him, their backs to hard stone. “Patient gradients. Easy to transport soldiers and artillery.”
“When men fought men.”
“What a luxury.”
Still, Anthem can’t give the Lakkies much credit. The underground hovel is disorganized, calculated, maybe, but still a mess. It’s nothing like the lost palaces he read about in the deserts underneath Bijigress, with their oases and town-sized temples. He hoped for some semblance of that, not a web of dirt. Unwin gives the place too much credit.
To his right, Hamill sits and coughs as the bottles in his sack clink.
“Careful with those,” Anthem says as Hamill pushes up against the wall.
The boy leans in closer. “I’ve been imagining hundreds of these things,” he whispers. “At least two for each man. You could have others create them, you know. Set up an assembly line.” Hamill seems the right person for such a job, with no heavy lifting involved. You’re not much better yourself.
“You’re forgetting the biggest hurdle,” says Unwin, echoing Anthem’s thoughts.
“No, I’m not.” The boy looks around. “I’ve been thinking that-”
“Don’t,” Anthem says, knowing fully what Hamill would say. “Nedland meant what he said.”
Hamill scowls and sits back but doesn’t look satisfied, and then a real possibility dawns on Anthem: how can he stop anyone from telling Fletcher? He looks to Hamill again and thinks how dangerous some thoughts can be.
Unwin’s whisper snaps him out of it. “I just hope these get us closer to home, zoo man.”
Home. Before Frine made his move, Anthem had consigned himself to the pyres. Since then, the doors have opened, leading to Galt Alese, Kaskit, his study, the pubs, warm food, cold coffees, and temperate nights. All that lies just in arm’s reach, contained in those bottles.
Fletcher orders the platoon to gather in the center of the dugout. Orey sits beneath the lieutenant, cross-legged and drawing up a new map of the underground web based on the information the other squads and scouts are feeding him. Kanis sways above the two with her machete drawn, looking eager to be anywhere else.
“We’re not staying here long,” Fletcher tells everyone. “The heat wave will dissipate by nightfall in about six hours.” He looks to Watse for confirmation, and the private gives a barely perceptible nod. “In the meantime, we clear this place out, look for any maligned that could bite the column on its ass after we leave. Check for Gashes, too. We are not getting into the situation where we must turn back and can’t because we left the maligned and the raw ground inside here unattended.”
Anthem looks around. This alcove has no raw ground but could have burst through a lower passage, now working its way up.
“The 1st and 3rd platoons have already started clearing,” Fletcher continues, “and they’ve got most of the sap.” He looks to Anthem just for a moment, then away. “So be sparing.”
There’s no way everyone else missed that glance. Anthem peers over to Kanis, and she turns as if she was staring at him a moment ago.
----------------------------------------
Nedland takes the 3rd squad down a passage, Anthem, Hamill, Unwin, Devitt, and the others following close. Kanis joins for some reason, and Paulson too, though his stares are the kind of cold Anthem wishes he could harness and apply to his water. The man hasn’t stopped gazing that way at him since Frine’s death. Well, maybe a scrawny, inexperienced, and cowardly soldier can’t replace an Ape-infused, but a medical zoologist can and will.
They wind twenty minutes away from the central dugout, veering to the left and never once splitting from the group. They pass what look like discarded toolboxes, scrapers, and pickaxes strewn about, likely leftover equipment from earlier technicians who would have helped widen the space. As they delve further, Anthem finds scaffolding lining the tunnel and tarps covering what appear to be misshapen bits of stone jutting out from the dirt. Anthem walks close to one and touches it. “Limestone?” he asks.
Unwin smacks it. “Sandstone,” he says. “I used to lift this stuff.”
“So, an archaeological dig?”
“Maybe. The earlier teams got curious when they didn’t deem this place so threatening.”
And where are they all now? Anthem stares down at the tools, entertaining the idea that these may have belonged to the earlier expedition teams at Hyrnlak when the raw ground was barely a threat.
Anthem’s about to pick up a trowel when Hamill speaks. “Guys? What’s this?”
Anthem peers down to something that could be raw ground but is only the dead form of a hammerhead bat, maybe only days gone. Anthem searches its body for anything to salvage, and the thing has only one eye socket in the space where there should be two.
“Beacon strand,” Anthem says, searching his memory for zoological notes. “I think we should stop.”
But the others already have stopped in front of a larger inner cave, mostly dark. The men and even Kanis stare into it as if they can see every inch of its walls. Beside Anthem, Unwin looks stunned.
“What’s going on?” Anthem asks.
Something stirs in the black. Unwin plants a hand over Anthem’s mouth, and when he tries to scream, the Ox-infused pulls him close enough so their eyes lock. He shakes his head, his mouth clenched tight too, and then he opens it slightly and mouths just one word to Anthem. “Screamer.”
Flapping above the larger room in a slow circle is a man-sized maligned shaped like a hammerhead bat. It lands on the ground in front of them, its wings folded inwards, its one eye socket empty. Its head dips up to reveal a toucan’s beak, blood red and perhaps two feet long. It has the effect of a pointed cannon as it scans the area. Then, with two horse’s hooves, it starts clomping around, sniffing. Unwin’s got Anthem in a sort of dancer’s dip, but he holds it as the screamer steps right up to them, looks down, and then moves on.
“Don’t make a noise, boys,” says Kanis, calm as if she’s watching the men and maligned act out some elaborate performance. “They won’t pounce if they hear me, but you? They would love you.” Her gaze settles on Anthem a moment longer than it should, as if the whole statement is directed at him.
The screamer walks towards Hamill when Kanis taps its beak with the end of her machete. It turns around to regard her, opening its mouth to wail, challenge, and alert, but with no sound.
Kanis raises her machete and bows. “Oh, but I wanted to hear it this time. Tsk.” She grabs the hilt with her other hand. “Sad things, all of them. Rude and loud and just sad, sad, sad.” She waits for the maligned to crook its head like a confused dog before hacking into it. The maligned drops, sags, and goes still.
She walks over to the corpse and kicks it once, twice, another for each syllable. “That’s. What. You. Fucking. Get!” Kick. Kick. Kick. A chunk of the maligned’s beak flies off, its head snapped back. Kanis rips the rest of it off and hurls it up to the ceiling. “Come on down, you fuckers!”
“Fucking lun-” Anthem almost manages, but Unwin clamps his mouth shut again.
Kanis throws another chunk up. “Hey!” she yells. “Get down here. One at a time or all at once, sure. I don’t give a shit.” Out of beak chunks, Kanis hurls a stone up to the ceiling. “Come on!”
It connects with the head of a maligned hanging above. Its eye bulges open, a singular, omniscient thing that seems to peer through them all. It looks down on Kanis, squinting and calculating, and at that moment Anthem knows this maligned is unlike any they have encountered before.
The screamer drops. Anthem only has a moment to reach into an open slit in his haversack, pull a carafe out, and hurl it, straight where the dropping maligned will be in the next second, right above Kanis’s head. The Thurmgeist stares above and shrieks, but the choir of bats hears her and drowns out her wails as they launch from the ceiling.
The bottle connects and clips the maligned right in the side of the torso. Kanis covers her head and runs. The beast bellows, rolls onto its stomach, and crawls towards them. The other screamers drop and shoot toward the closest men. Hamill has only a second to register the running Thurmgeist, the angel of war fleeing the battle, scared, terrified, sobbing.
A screamer grabs Hamill, wrapping feelers around the boy, their tips turning from horse’s hooves to talons that dig into his chest. He writhes as he’s lifted into the air, his yelps of pain screeching into a new pitch, one that matches the maligned holding him above the ground. Hamill convulses, his mouth and the maligned’s syncopating. The thing opens its beak, and Hamill copies the gesture in perfect time.
Unwin throws his carafe at the maligned’s chest. The bottle smashes and sears a hole in the thing’s flesh. It drops the once-Hamill on the ground and flies away, crashing into two others.
“Fire!” Nedland yells.
The other men discharge a volley, clipping the maligned in a wall of lead, but there’s no time to reload.
“We go,” Nedland says to them while the screamers are distracted, pulling Hamill’s form towards their jumping and jibbering collective. “Now!”
Kanis runs past, more confused and vulnerable than Anthem has ever seen her. The men follow, barreling full tilt away from the screamers, leaving behind the sounds of yipping birds. Nedland’s carrying a torch, and Anthem runs not so much for an escape but for that only source of light in this swallowing darkness.
Wings flap behind as the screamers take notice and resume their pursuit. Someone else yelps, but Anthem can’t make out the voice.
“This way!” someone cries. Orey, the scout, runs with another squad and Lieutenant Fletcher.
Anthem falls in behind them, Kanis too, who slumps and pants. When the lieutenant sees the Thurmgeist visibly shaken and on the ground, he’s unsure what to think. He lends a hand to her, but Kanis shrieks again and points, eyes wide.
A screamer with its all-searching eye finds Kanis and dives. Fletcher raises his hands between them, only comprehending what is happening in that split second.
Kanis rolls over before the maligned ejects a proboscis straight through Fletcher and sinks into the dirt floor, missing Kanis. The feeler searches around and grabs the woman’s feet. She hacks it off, screaming. The men join her and rush at the maligned, skewering it with their bayoneted muskets. By then, it’s too late.
“The carafes!” Anthem reminds them, uncaring now who sees and wondering if it’s because the private that could have exposed him or the lieutenant who would have denied him are both dead.
Unwin smashes a bottle against the bat’s head. The thing shrieks and pulls back, taking Fletcher with him. Orey and Devitt add their carafes, everyone watching as the neutralizers evaporate the thing.
The greatest weapon the Corps ever had.