Genebrict Stalt catches the hanging lanterns in the cabin’s interior set against the stars in the midnight black. The cabin hovers above him, a ten-seater commercial transit vessel with ample bed cells, lavatories, and common areas to accommodate all the passengers and crew. The curious city dwellers, probably heading home after an excursion in one of Kaskit’s outer colonies, congregate at their observation window to peer down to where Stalt’s gondola rides on a lower line. He thinks to wave back, retracting once they sneer.
The entire sum of Stalt’s savings at Basket Y-64 is just enough to purchase a two-week ride to Kaskit along the HSG Stowaway’s Quandary. The Ferrence Gondola Company favors efficiency over comfort for their fifty-passenger vessel, trading amenities like outer observation decks and recreation rooms and foregoing personalized suites for extra bed cells and cafeteria space. Despite the demand for tighter association between passengers, Stalt hardly finds himself within arm’s reach of anyone.
In the corners of cafeterias, he feasts on scavenged fruits, which the suppliers claim are free of disagreeable strands. Stalt’s outer lungs don’t filter food so he does his best to pick off the bruised bits of the fruit while biting chunks out of high-energy biscuits that must have been pilfered from the Emergence Corps stores and sold at a ten times markup. Ferrence also supplies cultured meat, a process they claim ‘grows’ meat from the animal’s existing cells. The menu is exhaustive, ranging from fish that Stalt had thought were extinct to cows, dogs, and even rats. Stalt wonders how this process is possible until he considers that the price of every cultured item is less than the biscuits, meaning strands must help replicate those cells. Culturing was not a trend when Stalt left Kaskit those years ago.
When he’s not confined to his bed cell bunks, Stalt curls up in hidden corners on observation decks, behind unmonitored cargo, and underneath stairwells, memorizing the faces of passengers and crew while the vessel creeks ever onwards.
Eleven day breaks in and the jumble that is Kaskit presents itself. First comes one ropeway running parallel to their own, then two, then twenty-two, and soon, the sprawling mass of the great city is indistinguishable among a tangle of cords and the beads dangling from them that represent gondolas. The vessels crisscross, seeming on the brink of collision with every pass. He catches one that must have been the size of a Far Flung war galleon, those ships of old that held thousands of naval soldiers before the raw ground sucked most of the water and left continent-sized pits in the earth. These days, the only boats Stalt sees are those confined to sheltered lakes or washed up on shores and beaches.
When the Twin Pales rise on the morning of the twelfth day, the massive bubble surrounding Kaskit’s inner city core reveals itself. Airlocks admit gondolas safe passage inside the enclosure to the soaring bullwheel towers that are twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty stories tall. The Quandary’s cooks, custodians, and security all agree that the city has around two hundred terminals. If you’re leaving Kaskit and want to reach any place of noteworthy significance on the Salvarin continent, you never need to touch the raw ground.
The city's most formidable and confusing area, cloistered right in the center of the protective dome, is the Second Signature’s alcazar. From far off, the complex resembles a garden surrounded by dirt that is the rest of the city. Plants rise to several stories, with white and yellow flowers at their tips. Stalks of grass several floors high jut out between them, lazing down to obscure the buildings underneath. Some of those plants dangle spheres the size of houses, and it takes Stalt a moment to realize they could be residential buildings, offices, or labs. Tiered gardens on balconies jut out from stone towers that brush against the burgeoning plants, bridges connecting the tall structures. Despite the lattices of stone decorating the plants, Stalt’s been told most of the complex is contained underground, using heat from many of the Gashes underneath Kaskit to power all of the Second Signature’s experiments and her secrets.
On the final days of the approach, the Quandary dangles over the city’s majority that is not sheltered underneath the bulging enclosure. Smaller collections of towns and hamlets are mostly abandoned, but farmers still plow their fields while fending off the encroaching raw as best they can. There are bridges fraught with roots, mills with their wheels crumpled after the rivers dried up, quarries protected by burner crews, manufactories for stringing ropeway cord, and, perhaps the most significant industry Stalt can surmise, the shipspinning yards. These latter areas once constructed naval vessels but now focus on gondolas.
An older gentleman sidles up to Stalt, one of the Ferrence employees who had seemed to end up in Stalt’s plain of view daily. “Jowles,” says the man, pointing to the company logo stitched on his jacket. He possesses enough respect to avoid looking down on Stalt’s stained clothing or outer lungs. “Genebrict Stalt?”
He nods. “There is a problem?”
“Not to my knowledge.” Jowles reads from a crisp sheet of paper. “As deemed by the Kaskitian Far Flung Sails, you are to be monitored as the neutralizers take effect.” He looks down at Stalt along the bridge of his nose. “For adverse conditions.”
The Far Flung oversees all gondola traffic out of the Basket, so they must do the same into Kaskit. Once the great city’s navy, their responsibilities changed with the disappearing oceans.
“Seems standard,” Stalt says, assuming he’ll have to take an injection or three. “Do we do this here, or should I wait?”
“Oh, they’re already taking effect.” Jowles checks something off on the sheet. “Follow my pen, please.”
Stalt does as instructed, tracing the utensil’s movement as Jowles swings it around like a drunken bird while reciting the details of the two dozen inoculations Stalt has apparently received already. “How?”
“In your food and your water. Have you experienced any nausea? Discoloration in your stool?”
“I stopped shitting years ago.”
Jowles takes the comment as an invitation to inspect Stalt further. He points to his outer lungs. “About as long as you had those?”
“Just about.”
More scribbles, during which Jowles shows no signs of repulsion. He seems to enjoy all this bookkeeping. “A change of clothes, certainly, and new boots.” He scans Stalt again, shoulders to head. “A shave and a trim as well.”
“I wasn’t aware I paid for all this.” He wishes he could take the words back as soon as they leave his mouth and continue playing off his ignorance.
“You didn’t. Courtesy of the Flung’s treasury. Don’t ask me why; I’m just the messenger.” Jowles peels off a slip of the paper from its bottom and hands it over. “This is a ticket, proof of payment, and identification. Flash it at customs, the tailors, the barbers, wherever. If you get lost in the city, there are clear instructions to law enforcement on how to best return you.” Jowles shakes the slip. “Best be going now, Mr. Stalt.”
Genebrict takes the slip, but Jowles is already pushing his way through the crowd before he reads it. He doesn’t stop anyone else on the observation deck but is not in any hurry, either.
Why me?
He stands perfectly still, the slip in hand, and listens. A few passengers converse on benches, taking in the sight of Kaskit’s outskirts below, but otherwise, no one regards Stalt. The voice has not returned since leaving the Basket, and he would be lying if he said he hasn’t been searching for it. It must have been an episode, after all, a product of his malignment. It’s getting worse.
When the docking bells ring, and the passengers gather at the exit ramps, Stalt stays right where he is and reads the sheet in full detail.
KASKITIAN SPECIAL PERSONS (KSP) CLASSIFICATION
1. Bearer must have minimal contact with other Kaskitian citizens and non-KSP.
2. Bearer’s purchasing restrictions are WAIVED to 10,000 Kaskitian Culas (KC).
3. Bearer’s travel restrictions within the Kaskit City Enclosure are WAIVED.
…
The list stops at a stamp of the Far Flung Sails. It looks damn official, and Stalt runs his thumb along it to check that it wasn’t tacked on at the last minute by Jowles, the oldest scam artist Stalt may have ever met. If it is a scam, it’s a convincing one.
Perhaps they have him mistaken. Stalt’s name isn’t on the slip, only an empty line at the bottom—like a blank check. He keeps scanning the paper, finds a sketch on the right side, and stares back at a depiction of himself from the chest up, without the outer lungs. It must have been inferred, assuming he would be clean-shaven by now. The features are close, the jawline square enough, the hairline still not receded—thank the Hells—though it assumes he’s skinnier than he is now. Whoever drew this had not seen him in person recently.
Yet if this is Stalt, who would go through all this trouble?
The slip answers the question when Stalt finds the signature at the bottom right corner. It’s messy, and the ink is fading, but he knows it. Staring at it while the gondola creeks into the terminal, he waits for her voice.
It comes. Welcome home, brother.
----------------------------------------
The cemetery for the Far Flung Sails is nestled in Kaskit’s center commercial ward. Stalt recalls the directions by memories formed of his many visits here with Delah as she recounted the exploits of long-dead Far Flung admirals. He never thought he’d have to return to this place, but if there are answers to the voice he’s hearing, he’ll find them here.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The cenotaph is a crypt of stone with the statue of a woman standing atop an arch. Even as a portrayal, Fleet Admiral Delah Stalt raises her sickle in pride, her lengthy hair flapping behind her, caught in a sculptor’s wind. The prowl beneath her feet must have been the Glownabar, her flagship gondola she often boasted about. The visage seems pulled from Stalt’s past, encased and waiting for his return.
Far Flung marines march along the cemetery’s pathways, three groups standing vigil outside the arch’s base, one lighting a brazier. An entrance leads deeper into the monument, just behind the line of men. As Stalt walks closer to read Delah’s plaque, the marines in front of the entranceway part, not once asking to see his slip.
What have you gotten me into, sister?
No response.
Inside the monument is Delah’s casket carved of stone, resting on a dais, her letters etched on its face. Stalt runs his fingers along his sister’s name as he had after the funeral, believing he would never hear her utter a single word again. Now, she is a voice in his head.
“A remarkable woman, wasn’t she?”
The man who speaks must have been reading one of the plaques detailing Delah's accomplishments in a corner of the room. Slick jet-black hair mars the man’s head, and his face is neat, well-routined, and clean-shaven. What looks like a compass is stitched into one of his epaulets, the needle pointing to his heart.
“A lot more than that,” Stalt says. “You knew her?”
“I served under her.” The man salutes. “Fleet Commander Yosalus Ingram.”
Stalt wonders if he should be saluting back until he notices the title. “Fleet Commander?”
“There hasn’t been a fleet admiral since Admiral Stalt’s passing. We’re both equivalent in seniority; only the title differs.” Ingram glances across the coffin. “She requested to take the rank with her if she ever did go.”
It is something Delah would have done. She was proud of her accomplishments, almost to the point of boasting, but never that far, and never vocally, either.
“Did you grant this?” Stalt holds the slip up. “That’s my sister’s signature on it.”
Yosalus Ingram squints and nods. “It’s a bit complicated.” He stares down at the casket again. “She was a strong leader, wasn’t she? Ruthless, yet careful. Considering. She was like a surgeon’s needle, never striking until she knew the prick would be fatal. On the way out, she left only the faintest drip of blood.”
Delah did not like to talk about her military exploits, so Stalt learned of them through broadsheets or second-hand accounts from inebriated Flung marines. Only a few times had her officers ever spoken to Stalt, and when they did, it was usually with the courteous caution they apply to all civilians.
“You said you served with her?” Stalt asks.
“Under her, yes. I was the first mate of the Glownabar when she had only just been made commander.”
Stalt remembers Delah’s reserved excitement at the time, conveying it as only a ‘promotion.’ To hear this man speak of his sister again brings the process back around, the recognition of someone’s life well-lived. Conversations like these usually calm Stalt, but now, with the voice in his head and his arrival in the city intercepted, he doesn’t know what to believe.
This Ingram fellow eyes Stalt up and down. “You’ve been harvesting cord?”
Stalt nods and grunts.
“Still coherent, then?”
Stalt stiffens. “Seems so.”
“I am just a curious man. My apologies. I’ve never encountered a man so entrenched in the raw, yet still…”
“Human?” Stalt snickers. “Look, if I wanted to be insulted, I would have paraded myself through the streets.”
“Apologies again.” Ingram placates with his hands, gloved with golden cufflinks. “I’m just glad our efforts worked. I trust you found the acolyte?”
Stalt frowns, remembering the Swallow Den. “That was your doing?”
“Delah knew how much you hated the Chant of Harmony.”
“Still do.” Even more because of you, sister—because of what they did to you.
“And we needed a way to trigger a memory, you understand… or maybe you don’t.” Ingram looks around awkwardly. “I’m not sure how to ask this, Mr. Stalt, but… did it work?”
Genebrict looks back to the exit of the cenotaph. He could climb those steps quickly and be gone, but no faster than Ingram or any of the men outside could stop him. “Did what work?”
This officer looks as if he’s hiding decades of knowledge. He scratches the back of his head. “Has she…well… has she been trying to communicate with you?”
In that instant, Stalt thinks about lying, saying such a thing is impossible and that he’d very much like to return to the Basket and forget about all this. Yet just by that question, Ingram implies he has the answers. “I started hearing her voice about three weeks ago,” Stalt says. “A day before I left the Basket. They are just comments on what I am seeing. And thinking.” He stares at his feet. “You have something for it?”
The fleet commander doesn’t answer, looking down at the head of Delah’s coffin.
“Is this the part where you tell me to keep everything in the strictest confidence?” Stalt asks.
“We will ensure that.” The fleet commander hesitates. Then, he begins the explanation that will define Stalt’s life forever. “Your sister underwent rigorous medical examinations before becoming Fleet Admiral.”
“Sounds usual.”
“It was, at first, all routine and nothing out of the ordinary. She had hundreds of strands within her, but they were all generally passive and balanced appropriately. There were no significant anomalies, save for one: a fungal organism growing in her brain.” Ingram walks to the opposite side of the coffin. “It was a parasitic relationship. A Myco strand had chosen her as its host and planted a mycorrhizal fungus in her brain. The Surgeon Elder said it was the most potent case of the Myco he’d ever seen in a human being, for that strand is very particular in its hosts.”
Stalt has seen the fungal products of Myco strands littering the Basket. The Swallow Den, in particular, has many of them: tiny spotted mushrooms of all sizes. If you speak into one, you can hear the words through another. It was a game the men in the Basket played, and sometimes the children, before Kaskit swept their illegal mothers away to become incubators. Yet a mycorrhizal in someone’s brain? “Go on.”
“As potent as it was, her cognitive functions were still intact. So, we decided not to take any action that could complicate things. Instead, we monitored her health.” He sighs. “In hindsight, that was a horrible decision.”
“Why?”
Ingram shrugs. “After it planted itself, the mycorrhizal dug deeper and deeper, so rapidly to be unexplainable in its normal sense, and so we investigated the Admiral and found her…” The next part seems difficult for the man to say. “We found her to be in league with the Chant of Harmony. She had… welcomed more of the Myco strand into herself, partaking in rituals to exacerbate its transformation. Gruesome rituals.”
Stalt’s teeth rattle against the cool air of the cenotaph. “You’re lying.”
“I’m afraid I’m not. It had been going on for quite some time, long before she attained fleet admiral. We guess she was involved with the Chant for five, maybe seven years before her death.”
Stalt employs a conscious effort to keep from punching the man. “She would never have joined those sick freaks.”
“And yet that is exactly what she did. It confuses us as much as it does you, but the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can help us.”
“After all this slander about my sister?”
“I don’t expect you to believe it, at least not immediately. It’s a lot to take in.” Ingram rests a hand on Delah’s casket. “What if I told you that Delah signed that slip herself? That she anticipated you’d return to Kaskit at some point?”
“I would say this is all a strange joke I’ve been wrapped up in.”
“Your reaction is unsurprising, but you don’t have to believe me.” Ingram studies the casket. “There is an engraving inside that you did not see during her funeral. Amid all that’s happened, I have an idea of its meaning. Context is everything.”
The commander calls to the guards outside the cenotaph, and a few seconds later, a host of Ox-infused workers step inside. The strand had settled early in them, perhaps during childhood, for their muscles seem too big for their bones to support. One pries the casket’s lid free with a crowbar while the others lift it, pull it aside, and set it on the floor.
Stalt peers inside, finding one of his sister’s spare tunics. It has the same compass as the epaulets that Ingram wears. Otherwise, there are no other belongings, and the absence of such trinkets speaks louder to Stalt of his sister’s presence than anything else. She was a minimalist at heart, never owning anything unless she could use it daily. The coffin, Stalt notices now, is too wide to accommodate Delah alone, and it is the only detail that betrays her minimalism.
“What happened on the Glownabar?” The last time Stalt heard the story was five years ago, and not from anyone as high ranking as a fleet commander. Delah’s spare Flung outfit reminds Stalt it had been set there instead of her body, which was never recovered.
Stalt’s eyes begin to water. Delah’s death is why he has hated the Chant for so long.
“The Chant intercepted her on the way back from Hyrnlak,” Ingram says before pausing for a long time. When he finally does speak, it is as if he is opening a sewer grate. “We believe your sister organized the raid on the Glownabar to extract her.”
A cold draft wafts in from somewhere Stalt can’t place. “Impossible.”
Ingram gazes into the coffin as well before pointing to the lid. “Well, you should read this.”
Stalt does, finding carvings on the casket’s interior that Delah must have demanded. There are quotes from thinkers she admired and phrases she uttered and lived by. Culminating above them all is a single sentence with five words.
HERE LIES THE TWIN ADMIRALS.
Twins. Stalt reaches out to the blind spot for an answer, but silence meets him.
Ingram plants his foot on the lid and coughs as if clearing a cannon’s barrel. “We believe that her Myco strand jumped to you when she was still alive, but the transformation occurred much faster in her than yourself. Likely, she did not intend for this outcome.”
Stalt hears him with one ear, processing, repeating the final two words of the engraving in his head. Twin Admirals. They were twins, after all, born of the same incubator. “That’s just not correct. I was never an admiral.”
“If the Myco has transformed you at the rate she intended, you wouldn’t need to be. Sounds heard by one mycorrhizal can be transferred to an adjoining one, as you have undoubtedly seen. What you might not have known, however, is that two joined instances of a mycorrhizal can communicate across vast distances, kilometers away or even half a world away, in some cases. Generals would trade whole armies for this sort of link.” Ingram finds Stalt’s eyes. “She did this on purpose. You are her twin brother and were to be her twin admiral. That was her plan.”
None of this makes sense. “Delah would never infect me like that. It’s the Chant. They killed her and engraved all this slander. I… was just a part of it. The Chant must have got to me, too. Somehow.”
The Ox-infused men are still inside the room, hands folded, standing at attention. Stalt only now notices the maces on their waistbands, perfect for bludgeoning heads. He thinks about risking a run, seeing how far he could get.
Ingram notices Stalt’s concern and gestures to the door. “You’re a free man, sir, and you may go as you wish. I’m sure she would have wanted that. But now that the Chant is involved, we can’t let this rest. What is happening here is greater than you and I, and she is integral to everything. That makes you a part of this as well.”
Too much to take in, too much time passed. Stalt kneels and studies the engravings again, checking to see if this is all an elaborate hoax. He looks for peepholes that an audience in the stone walls of the cenotaph could see through and checks there are no strings from a puppeteer attached to this marionette of a naval commander, this harbinger of false news.
A month ago, Stalt had forgotten his sister. Now, she’s all he can think of.
Ingram walks up the stairs. “If you want to know more, I’ll introduce you to others.” He leaves with those words hanging.
Stalt helps the three men seal the lid, who leave him alone with his grieving. He dwells on Delah, the only part of his family remaining, now gone, but then back again—somehow. He considers what he would do if she were beside him.
Why me? It seems the fiftieth time he’s asked it, but he hasn’t gotten any closer to an answer.
What speaks next could be from inside the walls of the cenotaph itself. Mumbled but faint, Delah may as well be murmuring in her sleep. Stalt doesn’t hear it as much as he senses it, a pulsing emotion that translates into two words.
Follow him.