“Serpentine?”

“Saint. Ready.”

“Hold Fast?”

“Saint. Hoses primed, and our tanks are full.”

“Gospel?”

“Saint. Reticles aimed and set on the southern edge.”

“Prosaic? … Prosaic?”

“Dangling right behind you, Saint!”

Torus Orgonek, Artillery General of the Far Flung Sails at the Abscess, plants two hands on the HSG Bait and Switch’s stern side railing. The broadside-class gondola dangles along the ropeway cord that circles the center of the Dalgesh region. Less than three minutes from its attack point, the men aboard the vessel hold their breaths.

The Salvo Saint—Torus himself—squints far off through the bloody mist, following the ropeway cord thick as a tree’s trunk. He finds, pulled along it ahead of them, the Gospel, a gondola the size of the ships that used to sail the oceans before they dried up. Twenty cannons poke out of the Gospel’s starboard side. They are a quarter of the Bait and Switch’s total arsenal, but the Gospel more than makes up for this with its firestarter tanks, thrice the size of the Bait and Switch, Torus’s flagship gondola. All of it and more is necessary for what’s to come.

Torus turns his attention back to the mycorrhizals arrayed in front of him. Each is a spotted mushroom sprouting from boxes sitting on tables on the deck. There is one for each of the five gondolas dangling on the Dalgesh West ropeway cord, the other gondola commanders holding the second of each pair.

A compressed air tank rests on Torus’s belt, and he takes the respirator attached to it and inhales a whiff.

“When you see movement below,” Torus says, after inhaling, “aim for the Minds first. We want as many as we can.” He remembers lying restlessly the night before, wondering how to address the next possibility to the commanders serving underneath him. He decides to wing it. “If Dalgesh falls, we expend everything on the Gash and tell Kaskit we tried.” Better to use blunt words than anything else.

Then, Torus utters a worthy addition. “Expect immense retaliation.”

The commanders on the other side of the mycorrhizals remain silent, all four privy to the plan, all involved in the weeks leading up to today.

They had orchestrated the mutinies wonderfully, overpowering any dissenters and even throwing some off the side of their gondolas. Torus is now sure every man among the five gondolas, including his own, is loyal to the cause they have been building here: destroy the Gash and set the maligned back decades.

He is done waiting for Kaskit to send the orders. No one in his home city knows the lay of the land that is the Abscess better than he does. These men on these five gondolas are experts, seasoned veterans, and should make the call themselves. Torus’s only regret is that they hadn’t done it sooner when the city still fed reinforcements into Dalgesh. Some will look back and call the attack desperation, but Torus will always know it was necessary.

“We’re getting reports from Cackles, sir,” says the commander of the Hold Fast. “What do we say?”

The question lingers in everyone’s throats, but no word is spoken; all are hesitant to mention the mutiny, though they were each a huge part of it.

Torus is about to reply when his brother steps beside him, taking a swig from his canteen. “Not a word,” yells Lucius Orgonek, holding the same rank as Torus. “You all understand? Stall. If that doesn’t work, Cackles will reach out to us.”

“Yes, Saint!” respond all the other gondolas at once.

Lucius, the second of the Salvo Saints, shares a look with Torus, his older brother, and peers over the railing. Lucius scowls, takes another swig from his canteen, then pours the remaining water over the side rail. The liquid whips on its descent trajectory before reaching the Abscess’s surface as nothing more than a drizzle. Yet even this morsel of sustenance is enough for that fleshy layer to respond. It pulses, opens up a shallow trench precisely where the drops had fallen, and swallows. The pink and red tissue closes.

Torus settles his gaze on the passing roiling hills of maligned flesh spreading below, making up the Abscess and extending east and north beyond sight. Behind them, the southern and western sides begin as beaches that recede into the Swathe, the largest of the world’s dried oceans. Across that ocean lies Kaskit, their home, and distant for decades, not because of physical space but because of circumstance. Maneuvers like today’s, if successful, will bring them one step closer to it, even if it means returning in chains.

The whole continent-sized nest known as the Abscess makes Torus’s stomach rot. The maligned landscape is one massive organism with its own underground chambers, bodily systems, and organs. Every day, it expands, reshapes, heals, and creates new structures upon its fleshy surface, not to mention what is probably happening underneath. The process is but inevitable, and there is no way the Far Flung or the Emergence Corps could upset that system on a wide scale without triggering a response.

Thus, Torus does not consider this operation a mutiny, only an expedited attack. On their terms. On the men that have boiled and burned here for decades, holding off the encroaching flesh. Historians will immortalize these ensuing hours as thousands of men fend off the Abscess.

A torrent of rain hammers onto the deck of the Bait and Switch, and not the kind you’d find back at Kaskit. The water here evaporates from the Abscess itself; strands tinging every drop. The cellular parasites could infect him at any moment. Torus and Lucius keep their mouths down and inhale from their vesicles, storage tanks on their waists containing a mix of vapors that kill the strands and stop existing ones from leaving their cells. The gas is their best defense against the parasites, and a puff every thirty minutes keeps them from turning into shapes like the landscape below.

Torus steps closer to his brother, sensing an invitation.

Lucius closes his canteen while murmuring low. “I’ve been thinking,” he starts, “that if I go down, maybe I can explore the place. Crawl around through the flesh. Roll around until it takes me. Hells, maybe I can even climb it.” He dips his head forward. “What do you say, Torus? Jumping off that thing would be the best way to go. I think.”

The topic of Lucius’s attention materializes on their starboard side, brightening at a burst of lightning. A colossal tower of hardened, rotted flesh taller than anything Kaskit’s architects ever erected stands with three more around the same height, located in the center of the ropeway cord circle that the five gondolas dangle along. The Chitten Spires are why the Far Flung hasn’t run the ropeway cord straight through the center of Dalgesh, as the land would swallow any support tower near that edifice.

Torus still remembers embarking from a transport gondola decades ago and gazing upon the looming spires, one of apparently hundreds around the Abscess, though this one is the tallest the scouts can reach. The Chittens are spiked at all angles, and other smaller protrusions of puss and tissue the size and shape of men flail out from them, still with their arms waving and their silent screams. There is a five-minute stretch where the gondolas creak close enough to where some men claim to have heard the hardened mouths and teeth chatter.

Torus looks at the Chittens—the pinnacles that have defined his life at the Abscess—and frowns. “You see that?”

Lucius pauses a moment before nodding. “Structural weakness?”

Torus shakes his head.

“Erosion?”

Torus shakes his head again. “Maybe it knows we’re here,” he thinks out loud, comparing the orientation of those spires to the angle he has always known. Lucius sees it, too.

The Chitten Spires have started to bend.

A messenger approaches, a fifth mycorrhizal in its box opened before him. “Saints, it’s Cackles.”

Lieutenant General Herbert Gauss—Cackles, known by most of the military divisions of Kaskit—can be heard wheezing on the other side of the mycorrhizal. It’s a smoker’s rasp—the kind you’d make after coming down from a deep laugh. The man is more like a hyena than any human Torus can recall.

“Let me speak to them!” Gauss cries out on the other side of the mycorrhizal. His spraying spittle is audible.

Torus begins, thinking of how to instill civility in his impending outburst. “Sir…”

“No, you listen to me. Call this off immediately. You’re going to bring down the Hells on the entirety of Dalgesh. You’re going to fuck everything up.”

“We’re prepared for this Cackles,” Lucius puts in. “Sorry, sir, had to be this way.”

“Fuck!” The mycorrhizal lets loose a crack, the sound of something on Gauss’s side being thrown against the wall. “If you two make it out alive, I’ll make a public display of your burning.”

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“Going to have to take us home to do that,” Lucius utters and slaps Torus’s shoulder.

Torus says, “Nice,” like he always does when impressed by his brother’s wits and quick thinking. Torus, on the other hand, prefers the calm and collected approach. Mutinies require a lot of planning, after all.

Gauss continues voicing his concerns over mycorrhizal, but the brothers tune out his ranting until the lieutenant general calms, sighs, and says something the two will never forget. “We exist in a sort of unspoken stalemate. Only we control the air.”

“And they the ground,” Lucius puts in. The point is an understatement, given how far the Abscess stretches. Torus’s younger brother never shies away from adding his quips, not even to the leader of Kaskit’s Emergence Corps.

“I don’t quite like what it’s doing,” Torus says, explaining to Gauss the past of the four pillars and how their arrangement differed only this morning. He can recall the landscape of the Dalgesh like he can the back of his hand and often does in his nightmares when he’s falling off the side of the Bait and Switch. In those realms, that sea of hardened flesh and rawness swallows him and only spits him back out when he wakes.

Gauss is not without his analysis, but even he lacks definitive answers. “If this is indicative of something larger, it’s too dangerous to just send scouts inside and find out, let alone platoons or dedicated medical zoologists. We haven’t conducted operations down there since…”

The Lieutenant General trails off, but the look Torus and his brother share hold the answer. Abolishing the Decree messed everything up. That Written truth, that document existing conceptually as much as physically, had once enforced itself by bending the laws of nature and human intention. It protected women from maligned and maligned breeders from men and had been thought to be the floodgate that kept the hordes of the grotesque monstrosities at bay. Its disappearance was once believed to end the world.

But we’re still here, Torus thinks. Not a single attack since.

“Why?” Lucius asks. He doesn’t clarify the point and doesn’t have to, for it is unspoken in each of their mouths and has been for years since the Decree was abolished.

“I don’t know, men,” says Gauss on the other side, “but assume the worst, as always. Be ready for anything.”

Nothing definitive in those remarks, nothing that can be acted on. Fear has removed specificity from their orders, leaving generalizations that are nothing more than manifestations of anxiety. That the maligned aren’t stampeding against human civilizations while the figurative shields are down has sat worse and worse with every soul in the world but is felt most by defenders like the Orgoneks, who sit on the edge of a cold war. They’ll be the first in the firing line when it turns warm.

But there is one option.

“Permission, sir,” says Torus, “to launch a broadside against it.”

Lucius claps his hands together before his older brother finishes speaking. “I’m all for that!” He says it as if they have a choice in the matter.

Gauss, however, thinks otherwise. “Denied. You may be the Salvo Saints, but that does not mean you can unleash your ammunition whenever you feel. There is no way all of those balls will hit. One will miss, and even a glancing blow to other areas of the nest may trigger a chain reaction.”

Torus and Orgonek have known this for years, and to be reminded of it seems an affront to their ranks. Still, the sad reality fumes Torus beyond comprehension. He wants to raise a city-sized machete and hack the Spires down instead of staring into its phallic posturing all these days as if goading them.

A cough on the other side, probably to dull the edge the conversation has sharpened to. “For now,” Gauss says, “we must theorize why this is happening. Without going inside.”

“Extra weight, Cackles,” Lucius proposes, but even this analysis is shallow. Torus knows his brother is only doing it to fill the air, to act like he’s contributing to the proceedings, when the two know well what course of action they’d take if it were up to them. “A greater shift?”

“Could be,” says Gauss. “I’ll have our men look at it. In the meantime-”

An opening door behind the brothers cuts off the lieutenant general’s words, and the man on the other side of the mycorrhizal seems to hear the creaking hinges and silences.

A messenger stands on the precipice. “Saints,” he says, panting. “Something’s on the Chittens. It’s…” He stammers, leaning against the door’s frame. “It’s huge.”

The brothers follow the pointing arm of the messenger towards a blot on the furthest of the Chitten Spires. From this angle, it’s nothing more than a bulb-shaped mass that could have been a hardened boil on someone’s face. As the Bait and Switch approaches, the shape unfolds to reveal what is not far off from a vampire squid: bell-shaped, red, with the frames of its circular portion covered in an almost translucent membrane. The maligned must be only half the size of the Bait and Switch. And it’s turning in their direction.

“What are you seeing?” asks Gauss from the other side. Saints? Orgoneks?” But no one is left in the mycorrhizal chamber.

Torus enters the Bait’s cannon deck and sees the men sponging the balls into the guns. His lead cannoneer, Romig, approaches at a run. The man is Ox-infused, carrying a ball in each hand as if they’re the projectiles you throw in shot put. “On whose mark?”

“Mine,” Torus says. Lucius is snappier and quicker to act, but that energy also magnifies his confidence. Torus is better at times like these. “I want the retractor sights at full concentration. The brightest you can make them.”

Romig nods, the order likely already funneling through his men. “And the flags?”

Torus shakes his head. “I’ll be in the optic. Keep yourselves safe.” He’s not sure why he voices the last part.

Romig doesn’t hear that last remark and doesn’t ask questions, either. When he runs to relay the orders to his men, Lucius emerges from a side door, his armorers in tow and strapping the remnants of their commander’s heavy shell to him as he walks to meet his older brother. “Feels like forever since I put this on!” Lucius calls out to Torus, holding his helmet in one hand. His provisioners fasten his lifelines to a giant two-cylinder vesicle tank hanging at his back, and once they’re on, Lucius looks to his brother before giving a thumbs up and bolting the helmet.

We won’t need all these precautions, Torus wants to say, but the words sink in his mind as much as his brother’s coffee in the Abscess minutes ago. Who knows what will happen next?

The maligned squid’s open mouth faces the Bait and Switch as it dangles closer to the nearest spire, and it is clear now the thing is trained on them, slowly following like a lighthouse’s refracted lens warning a distant ship. Inviting.

Never mind Gauss’s orders, the Salvo Saints would not have ascended the ranks and entered choir verses if they had sat around waiting for instructions to materialize. Now more than ever, the two souls know this is the stuff that makes the tales.

Lucius swings a machete with a blade as thick as a plank of wood just as Torus enters and bolts the door to the optic shut, cutting out the stir of commotion on the other side and submerging the artillery general in pure unadulterated silence. The room is a glass bubble, the only one on the Bait and Switch’s starboard side. Lucius would be in the port-side optic now had this been a regular exercise, but it’s not, and Torus can feel that the entire of the Bait’s crew has switched to face the Spires.

Torus confirms this when he looks down at a panel full of levers that can be turned into a dome shape. There are more than thirty arrayed in front of him, just for the starboard side. A switch sits beside each lever, denoting READY and PENDING positions. As he watches, Torus sees them flick to the READY—one attached to each of the Bait’s cannons, harpoons, and firestarter hoses.

Torus slumps in the optic’s only seat just as the retractor sights burst to light, almost all at once, as if defecting his eagerness. Thirty concentrated mirrors shine green dots the size of human heads onto the landscape of the spires, their resolution growing as the Bait approaches the mass. Torus adjusts each of them, feeling the cannons move along with him. He accounts for wind resistance and the gondola’s movements, not just its forward dislocation but the displacement from dangling. He places cannons where he thinks the maligned will crawl and concentrates others on the thing’s weak spots: where its brain should be, its heart, its lungs, every conceivable organ he can comprehend. He attempts to make some sense of the being he’s seeing that’s almost as large as the Bait itself, but though he can’t entirely, he knows how he can kill it.

Seconds pass. The Bait is silent as every man on the gondola holds their breath. Torus has created a puzzle of dots that, in moments, will match to fit the maligned and all of the places he wants the guns to hit it. The creature still waits, its bell-shaped bottom opened towards them, displaying five tongues with serrated ends, and what look like eyeballs on their surface.

A flick of that earlier instinct; a suggestion. Maybe it could have been brotherly, but it’s enough to pull Torus over the optic’s control panel and look down. Below stands another smaller spire, nowhere near as tall as the Chittens, but holding another maligned the same shape as the one hugging the Spires. This one has its bell pointing at the ground, its head and huge eyes trained on the Bait, watching.

Then, it launches.

Torus pulls the master trigger switch, and every cannon on the Bait’s starboard responds in thunder. A colossal fusillade shakes the gondola’s being, throwing it to port at the recoil and hurling Torus against his seat. Cannonballs rush through the air, pocking the spire and the surface of the Abscess. Harpoons loose, shooting spears the size of tree trunks. Then come the firestarter hoses, releasing gouts of white and gray liquid that douse the raw below and the air in front of them.

But every shot, Torus knows, was a wide miss.

A second, fainter rumble emanates not from the Bait’s starboard but from the cannon hold on the other side of the optic’s closed door. Torus’s fingers move away from the control panel’s trigger just as the maligned on the Chitten Spires watches and, in Torus’s mind, laughs.

The optic’s door opens to a wall of flesh, muffling the screams of men on the other side, the clatter of flintlock pistols loose, the wall of pressing heat. Torus pounds the maligned’s skin as it tries to close around his fists. He kicks as a feeler gropes his skin. Startled and collecting himself, he removes his flintlock pistol and fires.

The sound in the confined space is no less than the Bait’s broadside, and it deafens when the maligned appendage blocking the door retracts, and he stumbles out to chaos. Romig’s men prod the maligned seeping in from all angles. Four dozen feelers shoot from the squid at the bottom of the Abscess, right below the Bait and Switch. Waiting for them.

It peers inside the hold, thrashing about from the hold in the deck’s window it shot through. Its tentacles throw men to the walls, not grabbing but scraping as if struggling for purchase, as if it’s as clueless as a beached squid. Torus runs to a corner, loads another powder charge, and readies it. He finds a machete hanging on the wall and takes it just before a tentacle hammers through an observation window, but does not reach for anyone.

The creature thrusts its way into the hold, but its eyes are nauseating, weaving in every direction like its appendages are, as if there are a million things to see, and it can recall them all.

Lucius and his heavy shell men joined, gaining ground on the creature and prodding it back, setting fire to its body. Tentacles start to go limp, men cutting them down, riding the things, the maligned seeming to have no interest in turning any men, just clumsy and unknowing. Naive. Like a child throwing a tantrum.

Lucius and a burner approach the maligned, right in front of a pulsing sack in what should be the squid’s main body. Its eyeball searches around the room in no pattern. Lucius finds the sack and hacks away at it. The other men climb up and join him. Lucius drives his machete deep, the maligned convulsing with each slash. Its tentacles are all limp, save for one.

Torus’s brother raises his machete high, but by then the maligned’s pupils have stopped, and are turning up to the man standing on top of him.

Torus aims his pistol, runs, and screams. “Lucius!”

The maligned’s last writhing feeler grabs Lucius and throws him to the port side, hitting Torus on the way through the window. Torus falls over and smashes into glass, his head thumping, the world swirling. He’s looking down to the Abscess rolling past, where Lucius tumbles like pollen towards the ground.

The Abscess opens up and swallows Lucius Orgonek.