There is dark in the Pocked Plank’s corners, rats in the cracks and walls, a blazing fire in the hearth, a raucous cheer for a band crying a fluting wail that drifts and eddies and flows beneath the door like mist on a barren moor. Frozen fingers, a funereal grasp on an old man’s shoulder, then the door is open, and water floods into the room, just like in the place Stalt thought was the Glownabar. He looks down and sees he is in the Skelton again, only to turn and find it’s the Pocked Plank, but that it’s both places on two sides. A fish in the door with a huge gaping mouth swims straight towards him. It vanishes.
Stalt has known men to walk blindly into danger. They are in the dirt now, burned or stranded somewhere he doesn’t know or care for. A lucky few could be hiding, watching, counting down the days. Such a life would be worth all the dangers the world threw at Stalt, the chance for nothing to watch over his shoulder ever again.
Yet would he be so lucky if he were alone?
The Skelton fades, taking with it the thing that was the Pocked Plank and replacing them both with the broken glass of the gondola’s door. A blink later and there’s no glass at all, and the whole complete side of the vessel’s been torn off. Stalt’s outer lungs pump hard to filter out the toxins in the putrid air wafting in, but it’s not the only organ keeping him alive, and he tires from their combined effort.
His eyes fall closed and open just enough to see maligned gulls swooping by, taking no interest in him.
It’s a week’s ride, Gen. Hang on.
I can’t.
You must, Gen.
What’s left?
No answer for a time. Days elapse in that folded space. He feels he is a seedling sheltered against the passing elements and acid rain. His metabolism slows to a crawl and almost stops entirely. His entire being seals the cracks the acolytes tore open, the Chant days behind them along the cord.
He reaches a feeler out towards the thing that was Bolen and finds its face. The only part that moves is its lips as it tries to speak. “Both in the shit now,” says Bolen, “though I’m a little deeper.”
A puff of breath. Bolen’s body sags and never tightens again.
The gondola creaks as the days drone onward. Stalt reaches out to Bolen’s mass and, without shame, begins to consume it. It’s not eating or chewing or swallowing but draining and extracting. He takes the body’s nutrients and water and imagines Bolen laughing at the process. He had always ordered Stalt into the shit, but he was the first to go.
Blackness becomes Stalt’s entire being, heat arriving then fleeing. His body adapts like many organisms do in new circumstances. The first voice recedes then vanishes, giving way to Delah’s sobs and assurances.
Up, Gen, she says, as if pulling him out of bed in the morning. Up, up, up. The voice is abundantly familiar, the closest it has ever been.
Where’s Bolen?
Damn it, Gen, your losing your memory now. You reclaimed him. Hurry before it gets worse!
Gen doesn’t want to ask what that could entail.
He looks down, seeing nothing of his former self, only a pile of brown maligned flesh. Is this all mine?
Ours, more like. Sorry, I can explain in a bit. There’s a pause. You should come down here, Gen. Any way you can. I’m straining to hold this thing.
I can’t get up, Deh.
Then I’ll do it.
The sensation is strange at first. Stalt’s spine bends—or at least what he thinks is the spine. Feelers emerge from his side and push down onto the gondola’s floor. The appendages that are now his legs straighten, hardening and shaping into a visage of the human limbs he once had. From their bottoms sprout tiny bulbs that seem to approximate toes. It’s painless and liberating when Stalt twitches those bulbs and feels them move.
I got it from here, he tells Delah and climbs.
A massive maligned appendage reaches from the edge of a shoreline where hardened raw ground has almost wholly consumed a ropeway support tower. Beyond it lies the shape of a vast temple, casting against the Lone’s Light. The stone walls peek through the gaps of raw that cover every inch of it, flowing over its walls but more or less keeping the shape of the place intact, like a too-thick coat of paint.
Jubilee? He guesses.
At least this is it when they left it here.
Gen turns himself around, climbing feet first—if he can even call them ‘feet’—and looking back to where the small gondola he rode in on sways underneath the grasp of the appendage. The tentacle snakes around to the other side and envelops the vessel. As Stalt takes this in, the giant arm retracts and drops the gondola into the dried shore, smashing it to pieces.
I’ll make good use of that, says Delah. Watch your step.
Stalt’s feet slip. He loses his grip and is about to fall until a smaller feeler shoots out from the larger appendage and catches him.
Told you.
Always saving my ass, even now.
Yeah. Big dumb brother.
No words are spoken as he steps onto the shore. He compares how small he is to the temple’s walls and follows the roots flowing over them to a mound, where a plant not unlike the one he’d seen near the Basket sprouts. Its fungal tips form a soft carpet of moss that glows a fluorescent blue.
Some semblance of home, Gen. Don’t ask me what it is. I only watched over it.
Home changes, Deh.
He finds a thin layer of flesh in the ground, and as he approaches it parts like a curtain of an opening act. Through it, he climbs down into a passage of thick dirt, then tangled raw ground roots, and then just flesh.
The passage opens just as the heat slams into him.
He gazes upon a vast cylindrical structure of maligned tissue that seems to have carved its place down to the topsoil. It reaches ten or fifteen stories, where stone bridges run high above the space, and jagged holes pock the ceiling. The flesh fills the cracks of many other rooms in the area and climbs up a set of pillars that surround a single tear in the ground in the center of the floor.
“That’s the biggest fucking one I’ve ever seen,” says Stalt, referring to the Gash before him, burgeoning with roots.
It’s actually relatively small.
Stalt slides off the appendage onto a floor of maligned flesh, pink like the kind that had once been underneath his skin. The large appendage retracts, burrowing into the ground and leaving him behind. He walks into the space, testing the ground beneath by pressing his boots in deeper, and as he does, the flesh beneath tightens, encircling his boots as if embracing him.
Something sprouts from in front of him: a figure built before his eyes, planted and grown to adulthood in seconds. Her body is not separate from this place but a part of it, connected by elastic tubes, webs, and gel. She stands resolute as she had in his dreams, staring off perhaps toward a greater understanding. Beneath the Lone’s waning light that even now finds its way into this place, she turns and captures him with pits that are eyes of molten orange.
What is the appropriate response? He has not seen her in nearly five years but has felt a part of her always there.
Delah senses this distance of time translated into physical space in front of him. “Much easier to talk this way, isn’t it?” she asks. Her voice crackles with age like crushed bark, but her youthful curiosity and emphasis have persisted.
“Deh,” Stalt manages and swallows. “Are you alright?” It seems a strange question in an even stranger place.
“Been worse, if you can believe it. Better than you, certainly.” A gray tinge dominates his sister’s flesh, pocked with holes where fish could swim through. She is a hollow husk, bones poking out from under thin skin, her long stream of gray hair a rough waterfall hanging over sharp shoulders, covered little by a checkered dress Stalt had seen her wear that night on the ropeway cord. The muscle from training with the Flung is still there, though her hairline is receding. She withers, but her commanding presence remains.
Stalt ignores inhibition and runs for her, but something shoots out from the ground and wraps his feet in place. “Deh? What the Hells?”
“You’re fine, Gen. I don’t trust everything here.” The feelers that grip Stalt do not tighten. “So much has happened. The world has happened. I should not have dragged you down this path, but you are here. I can’t believe you made it all this way.”
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The pang of relief Stalt had first felt when seeing his sister now swells to bursting, but he deflates it slowly. “Took a lot to get here.”
“I noticed.”
Stalt looks around for a place to sit and surmises it as a leftover human instinct. “Your entire navy is after you.”
“No, they’re after the Monad Ortet or working with it. One of the two.”
Stalt pauses. “Mona, right?”
Delah’s squint could be the closing of deep sea trenches. “Monad. Not Mona.” She shakes her head. “Such a simple subterfuge. Disguise the term under a name.”
Stalt certainly fell for it, thinking. ‘Mona’ was a name. Now, he isn’t sure. “How deep does that corruption reach within the Flung, anyway?” He asks, returning to the earlier point.
“Deep, Gen, but it’s exposed now. They’ll crack down on it. The Second Signature will, hopefully. It’s what I would do.” Delah lifts her arm, eager to show him a feeler connecting from her armpit to the ground. “It is an extension of my body now. I can see everything here. Move everything. My flesh is throughout the whole archipelago, not just Jubilee. I guess they thought I’d crumble like the rest, just buried by raw ground.”
Stalt sees no evidence of ‘the rest’ Delah refers to, save for a collection of pods sitting on a raised dais on a platform at the side of the ground. “Like those?”
“That’s the strange part,” Delah says. “They’re women, can you believe that?”
Stalt can very much believe anything now. He explains to Delah what the Second Signature told him about the Inciter strand. It must be related.
“That’s an interesting name for it,” Delah says.
“You know of it?”
“Saw it turn two Thurmgeists before it got me. Hells, Gen, I was going to vomit before…” She trails off, remembering something.
“And it’s still inside those things?” Stalt nods to the pods.
“Not just them, Gen, but me.”
The significance takes its sweet time pushing Stalt over. “Deh.”
“Relax, it’s dead, or… inert. I don’t know. So far as I can see, it’s inert everywhere on this archipelago. At first, it didn’t make sense, but now I see it’s all probably residual. It wouldn’t kill itself off, so I’m guessing wherever it went, it had done so a long time ago. Just… moved away, casting its hosts aside as they’d already done their duty, though remaining inside them.” Delah looks at Stalt, seeing him confused. “I still don’t understand it completely, Gen, but I believe it is quite influential on the hosts it focuses on but has no effect if directing its attention elsewhere—onto greater things.”
Greater things. Stalt can think of only a handful of prospects that would be, and one stands out. “Kaskit.” He doesn’t need to ask Delah to know she’s thinking the same thing, the mycorrhizal offering an adequate glimpse.
“If so, it’s been there for years,” says Delah. “Just… waiting.” She paces. “Ah, but it’s so obvious now, isn’t it? It messes shit up here, moves to Kaskit, waits, and strikes again. It has the mind of a distracted child.”
The explanation seems insignificant to Stalt now, involving problems he couldn’t care less about. He just ran through days of Lapasian countryside and lost most of his humanity. That distant, coddled city is the last thing on his mind.
But it is there, in the back, still brewing.
Stalt looks into one of the pods. Sure enough, a woman sits inside, her hair held gently by veins running from her skin into the object’s lining. She shares the pristine complexion of a newborn child. “You’ve been keeping them alive.”
“Trying. There isn’t much food left here, Gen. Obviously. I don’t want to give them anything maligned.” She frowns. “Do you know how hard it is to remove that stuff? It’s like cleaning a vase with bare, dirty hands.”
Stalt can guess, and as he stares into the pod, he remembers when he tried to remove the mycorrhizal from himself using Delah’s neutralizer. “Insom, Deh?”
She frowns. “I wanted you to find the cheque, Gen, but I knew I would cave and tell you about the mycorrhizal someday. Hopefully, you would see the two and soften the blow.”
Stalt shakes his head. “You can’t bribe your brother.” He would bump her on the shoulder if she would let him touch her. “But the money’s in better hands now.”
He moves on, examining the woman inside and her silver hair, close to the shade of the Second Signature, the little girl with a century-old mind who told him how to find his sister. She had been mistaken, like the rest, but she had led Stalt along the path that brought him here. Without her, he would have never known what happened to Delah. Now, it’s probably her city that’s in trouble. “She would probably want these.”
Delah bobs her head, seeming to get it. “I suppose she is a better recipient than most.” Delah turns her back, holds her hands behind her, and stares at the cavern of flesh surrounding them. “Can you believe I created all this? It’s like sewing or woodworking. Every piece is intentional.”
“And it’s spreading?”
“I can go far, Gen. Slowly, but certainly. I follow the raw ground and extract what I need from it.”
Stalt has always thought the practice strange—the maligned consuming the roots that birthed them. It almost seems like a civil war.
“Not quite that,” says Delah, reading his thoughts, “but if I keep going, the entire Swathe could be covered in this stuff. It could be a patch larger than the Abscess itself one day.” She spreads her arms. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
“To you.” He checks her tissue, clutching his feet. “Is this really what you envisioned as 'The Twin Admirals?' I was to be a part of this expansion of rot and raw? Ingram said it was for military prowess.”
“And it was, Gen, but I admit that the scope of my desires has expanded since then. Such is the way of things when you see the world for what it truly is and become aware of your sway on it.”
A time ago Stalt never wanted to feel that urge for himself. That was before he tasted it. “Why me, then, Deh? It could have been someone else.” Though, he knows the answer already. She had said it before.
“You’re my brother.” She lowers her arms. “But don’t get too cocky about it. Have you thought that we cannot beat the maligned anyway? We can push the raw ground back, but it returns. Thus, eventually, we will have to become one with it. It is like trying to defeat rain or clouds.”
“Drain the oceans,” Stalt posits.
“Trees, then.”
“Burn them all.”
“The Lone Soldier? The Twin Pales? How do you suppose we fight those, Gen?”
He remains silent.
She continues. “Raw ground, the strands, and the maligned are all products of nature. That is what I noticed while I was with the Flung: our efforts are futile in the face of what is Written. We cannot stop this, so living with it is the only path worth pursuing. Join it.”
Perhaps a part of Stalt thought he could convince his sister to change her ways, to undo the process, if such a thing is possible. Hearing her speak now, it’s clear such an event is impossible. Besides, she has a point. It’s not as if malignment has steered him wrong before.
He thinks of something, but before he can act on it, Delah’s fleshy floor extends an arm that snaps around his wrist with the strength to rival Bolen’s. Something snaps around his psyche like a vice, but when he looks down, he finds his sister’s hand barely touching him. Then there is a transference, a swimming presence, and Stalt’s head pounds and batters until he’s on the brink and wants to scream. A ringing emerges from nowhere, then bursts, then rises to a crescendo, and then all he can do is empty his lungs of screams.
His mouth hangs open, but no sound emits. He blinks, focuses, and finds he is not screaming at all. He coughs, and he hears himself cough. The ringing is gone, and his head feels lighter. He stares into his sister’s molten eyes, and there is an understanding as she tilts her head.
“That,” she says, “is better than ripping it out, Gen. Idiot brother.” She laughs. “Monad Ortet is out of our heads, but the presence that probably controls it is still here.” She holds that hand up, splaying seven fingers. “Though, it’s not listening.”
“How long is that going to last?”
“Probably not that long.”
Stalt rubs his temples, searching for the pain, the commanding presence that invaded him at the Basket. He speaks in his mind and finds himself alone, as if a carnival had just moved along and taken everything with it, leaving the land torn open. “Why didn’t you do that before? Now she knows where we are.”
“Doubt it. She’s too far. Even if she does, she has bigger things to worry about. You and I may be long gone by the time she comes here—if she comes here.”
Grand plans, then. Stalt searches his sister’s gaze for confirmation as if to quadruple-check.
“Yes, grand plans,” she says, “though…”
The implication hanging there refers to an earlier thought, its suggestion pulsing between them. It’s as if they are lost in a deep forest and have stumbled upon a pool that holds their future. That inference beats down harder than anything, save for the pressure in his jacket’s pocket.
He removes the glass case holding the fire seed. “They told me it was the one you tried to use.”
Delah shuffles over, gliding as if without legs, and inspects the case as Stalt holds it. “Who told you?”
“The Second Signature.”
Delah pauses. “That city is doomed, Gen. If the Inciter strand has been there for years, it might have already gone on your journey over.” She stares at the case a little longer. “Gen?”
Stalt stares at the case, at a crossroads. He owes it to tell Delah the next point. “I can end it all for both of us.”
She nods in thought. “You could. Certainly, the Monad Ortet would like that.” The name sounds off from what the Chant acolytes whispered. “I dare say she doesn’t like us.”
“Nor I, her,” especially after it strung him along. “Is she really gone?”
“Yes, brother.” Another point lingers. “I can go, too, if you want me to. If you think that’s best. Maybe I can’t predict what is good for me anymore. I trust your instincts better than mine.”
“I don’t.” Though Delah has evolved into this thing, Stalt guesses the two are not so far off. Still brother and sister, and still family. Perhaps that is a bond stronger than any malignment. “The Twin Admirals,” he dwells. “Hells, Deh, you should have told me.”
The smile that comes next from his sister is knowing, apology replaced with a pang of playful guilt as if he has just discovered he’s been the butt of some playground trick.
The fire seed still in the glass case, Stalt makes no effort to release it into the world. He is here with his sister, the only trace of a family he thought had died years ago. A part of him wants her to be nothing more than a ghost, a figment removed in the blink of an eye. That would certainly make the process easier.
Yet it is not hard to make this choice; perhaps he had known it all along.
He places the glass case of the fire seed down on the fleshy floor. “We could use it,” he says.
At that, the flesh pulls the case down into itself. Stalt does not move, looking at Delah one final time in this state before she pulls him down too by his leg-like appendages and closes the darkness around him.
There is nothing foreign in the warmth that follows, nothing that would cause him to scream and run. Delah is all around him, pushing him, pressing him into place, adjusting and correcting him. Her hundred fingers prod him with the grace of a mother and then they are digging deep, but he hardly feels their invasion, the way they rewrite his genetic code and produce something better.
The process takes time, maybe days or weeks; he loses track and doesn’t much care for everything he left behind, save for the pulsing weight of obligation that he can’t seem to shake as his body transforms.
How fast can we go?
Very.
Delah gets it—of course, she gets it. There will never be a single thought out of reach between them anymore.
When the process is over, Stalt speaks. “Then allow me.”