Machinations

Far below them, a city screamed.

Torn apart by a million demons, Mershana’s great river drowned beneath thick blankets of smoke. In the cold mountain air, they could not smell the soup of singed blood and molten metal that broiled many straights beneath them, but its spectre clung to their clothing and hair.

The sight was too hard to process for the two meek creatures perched upon that mountainside, shivering in scouring harshness. Too grand to be properly understood. The melted towers and artillery-drilled avenues lay drenched in a magnitude that only artists and philosophers could hope to convey, now fated to remain unexplored.

The Deserter was the first to leave the scene. Silent apart from the grind of snow beneath his combat boots, he left the Girl to ruminate a little longer. Darkness would come soon, and its ice already invaded his blood, borne on winds that whipped and gouged. It was safer further along, less exposed, more distant.

After some time, the Girl eventually joined him. Behind them, back in that doomed city, a subterranean orchestra commenced their baleful symphony. The great guns of Authon signalled the start of a long-awaited counteroffensive. A hundred-thousand shells a day the officers had promised. The Deserter wished warmth upon the comrades he had left there. And if no warmth came to them, he wished the cold was only momentary.

More distance.

With a mumbled curse and a quick head-jerk, he demanded the Girl move quicker. She obliged as best she could without protest, her legs thrashing snow into frantic showers while she huddled herself with her arms against the unrelenting cold. The two cleared an outcrop to emerge upon a wind-scoured ridge. To either side, tortured gullies fell towards the Mershana Basin, peppered with vicious snowgrass and thorned Nus tree. They seemed to constrict the hill, carved deeply into its skin

Far below on one side, an extraordinary sight confronted them. Dividing the earth and sky as if by divine intent, the Mershana Umbilical thrust its way along the horizon, a primordial guy-wire to forever force the two apart. Like a cracked tibia through skin, its terminus broke out of the city dirt not far from the mountain’s foot. Around the base of the connection, a swarm of activity was just visible. The acrid smoke of hot-metal engines formed wispy tendrils that snaked over lines of cluttered cargo pulleys. Thousands of tonnes of ammunition, provisions and men passed through the Umbilical’s ancient elevators, flooding the tight Mershana city streets. The Umbilical was a city unto itself, a society of its own. An organism of metal and flesh.

To the Deserter, raised under the metal sky of Appencia’s Grand Artery Station, the structure roused no awe. It was, after all, just a line. Simple geometry no different to something drawn on paper or etched into dust.

To the Girl, however, the ancient highway seemed more. She dropped to the ground in apparent reverence of the construct, hands clasped to her chest and eyes squeezed shut. Without sound, her lips moved in a feverish dance. The cold that bit nipped the Deserter behind his ears and under his collar seemed kinder to her.

The Deserter spoke softly to her first, his words flatly spilling from his mouth and profaning the snow around her. “Enough. We must leave.’

When she did not respond, he blubbered out the same command in her tongue, the strident Aj tones tiring his mouth. “Loehki...loehki. Vorū loehki.”

She refused and sat still, her breath misting the air in defiant clouds.

The Deserter grew impatient. The Girl’s obstinance did not surprise him, her kind were known for it, but time was fleeing them, and he had killed men for less. He kicked snow at her first, and when she still refused to move, sighed and pulled her to her feet. She yelped at that, her plain red-cheeked face contorting in indignation, but fell silent.

“You’re lucky it was just the arm,” he said close to her in the familiar cadence of his own language, teeth bared.

She said nothing.

“Come on now. We’ve too many straights ahead to dawdle. We move now or we die soon.” Another round of thunder from the great guns shadowed his words.

Face set as solemn as ancient ice, the Girl obeyed, and they continued. While they trudged, the Deserter calculated his exact limits for such behaviour. Three more times, he decided. Three more times and he would simply end her.

Three for the one. One out the barrel.

He smirked as the soldier’s rhyme played in his mind. His hand ached for the grip of his repeater. I pump for three. I end with one.

But first, more distance.

Then shelter.

The air around him felt hostile and exposed. No doubt scout fliers would pass by here. Looking for a notable report. Looking for deserters.

Kuhyü, was the Girl slow! Easier to make a whore wash her feet.

In a fit of impatience, he pulled one of her scrawny arms. No yelp this time, she simply acquiesced.

Under his gloves, the Deserter felt nothing but bone and muscle. No fat on these Aj, all cold sinew and bird bone. No warmth in them. If one were to ask him to describe their race, he would simply say one thing: barren. Not once in the city had he seen an Aj show any emotion save persistent sullenness. His Group Father had been right, the Aj were the withered branch of the Belos tree.

But he could bare this one. As they said on the loading docks and amongst the refineries of Appencia’s Lower City, she was his khuỳgélát̀, his spare finger.

He had studied her for weeks at camp, behind the reserve lines. While other camp girls had kept to their chores—washing, cooking, fucking—this one was different. He had seen her tear into the circuitry of a ruined exosuit and, like a spirit-breather, pull it from oblivion.

Many times, the camp’s engineers had surreptitiously passed her a bent timing board or a mangled air-primer only for it to be returned near-pristine, and functioning better than before. The other Othenai soldiers had called her yuthollowáj,

Machine-Touched. The Bauk soldiers had instead called her Poiaihe, the fixer. And, hands-soaked in motor grease and hair stained with lubricant, she seemed to be both at once— a machine that repaired machines.

Whatever title, the girl had interacted with the Deserter solely through the language of machinery and arranging their service or repair. He did not even know if she had a name, and mostly did not care. Purely and simply, she was a tool. An effective one.

When the chaos had struck camp, and the other camp girls lay in heaps of jagged meat, the Deserter’s only thought had been her. Through swarms of blood-hungry shrapnel, he had clambered to the place he had known she would be. And he had found her there. Hair clumped in greasy strands, eyes obsessing over some broken piece of a then wholly needless vehicle. Barely dissuaded from her usual ambivalence. His fingers humming with the parasitic energy of nearby explosions, he had dragged her by her hair.

Analysing that moment, clawing through the many-pathed fog of memory, the Deserter supposed he should feel shame. Perhaps this was what gave the cold its extra sting? Shame? Like a stalking predator, an earlier, primordial memory rushed him.

Windows vomiting smoke.

Children, soot-smeared and wailing.

A gloved fist and a handful of hair.

Another spiteful gust seared his nostrils. Little particles of snow melted into rivulets that formed estuaries as they crept into his moustache. The sky seemed even wider. Oppressively open.

They needed more distance.

If he had estimated correctly, the path he had chosen would take them between rear outposts and then south-east to the backline hamlet of Kineu. There they would steal what provisions they could and continue southward. He hadn’t planned further.

He jingled a pouch at his waist. He felt fifteen, no, seventeen, small shards of metal--loose repeater rounds. On his other side, two full magazines weighed him down like penance-rods. Fifty-seven rounds total. Enough to cover, surely. Single round would bring down anyone unarmoured, three would cripple anyone else.

Unless they ran into composite. But anyone wearing that would be likely far from this front, sunning themselves on some Bestan lord’s beach. Next to the magazines, a weighted hand-pick menaced. He had yet to see a composite helmet.

The ridge opened gently into a flatter slope. Copses of nus were overcome by thicker-trunked meb tree, whose bare branches formed a latticework veil against the sky. The lattice’s shadow liberated them from the sky’s openness, a mother’s skirt against a father’s fury. As they became further entombed within the forest, partial calm, gat̀a, came to the Deserter.

He primed his repeater—three pumps on the compressor. Bowstring-taut, the air bladder on its side became fat with latent destruction. Ritualistically precise, he slipped in a magazine, satisfied as it clicked into place. A manual prime was not ideal, but he had no compressed air. Better hand-primed than not. Ỳorzdninmenáze – the false sword never leaves its sheath.

Another soldier’s saying.

Behind him, the Girl coughed into her mittens. Irises cold like polished river-stone, the Deserter spun around and hissed.

‘Be quiet! You’ll kill us!’

While she did not understand them, the angular words grated at the Girl’s ears, vibrating with disdain. With hidden liturgies, she prayed to the Fifth and Seventh Brothers. She prayed that they would allow her the fortitude to bear this man. The divine hammer and rifle. Concrete and hot-metal.

It was clear by the mask of alarm and fury contorting the stranger’s dark features that her noise had angered him. She stared back, face neutral. He thought himself a woodsman, she supposed. As if his heavy stomping had not already alerted anyone within fifty straights of them. Regardless, she bowed her head reflexively, a skill she’d learnt in the camps. These Othenai were fragile.

The web of branches above their heads grew denser. The already dying sunlight became a strangled dapple and withered hands of shadow enshrouded the two. The Girl wondered if the Deserter knew where he was going. She wondered if he knew what he was doing at all. She wondered why she had let him take her. Back there, in the death-stained bowels of Mershana, eyes looked for her. Though they lay trapped back there, in the overgrown warren that was the Black Quarter, she knew they still watched the door. They stared through its wood and beyond the city.

Waiting for her.

Pleading for her.

Under her breath, she uttered more cantrips. A request to the Eighth, a supplication to the Ninth. Protection of the spear, reprieve from the bells. Polished steel, burnished bronze.

Like celestial reply, the air erupted with sound.

Above the thorny canopy, a terrible throbbing shook the trees. The Girl covered her ears, but the noise tore through her mittens like the heartbeat of a giant. Between the branches, she saw the source of the cacophony: Othenai skybeasts, hundreds of them. A flock of titanic propellors greedily swallowed air as they struggled to keep bulks the size of small hamlets aloft. Below the bulk, smooth-bored cannon struck towards the earth like hollow spines. By her best guess, Authonta-Forge Thirty-Seven make. Or Forty-Five, perhaps. The old manuals she’d found in her ynopa’s cabinet were vague. Above the guns, the Girl could see magazine-towers fat with shells the width of a man. Shells so large they could erase whole village histories. She knew these immediately: Mikesh 15K black-cored, impact fuse. Far more powerful than anything the pathetic Belos flotilla could muster.

When she closed her eyes, she could still feel that power. Felt its thrum in the distance. Felt her heart slingshot into her throat. It was a power whose destruction could only be measured in city blocks. A Mikesh 15K, the Girl surmised, was equivalent to about one and a half city blocks. The armada that now drifted above her then held the destructive power of half a city.

The thought awed her. She pictured herself among the batteries as they fired. The soot-stained floors. The grim faces of artillerymen. The invisible sledgehammer of counterforce against the hull and the creak of the gun cradles. Thonk… thonk... thonk. The whistling of a hundred straights of empty space beneath her feet.

At the city, she had oftentimes snuck into the 21st Mu Roshi battery, closer to the front. There, she would watch the men work, enthralled by their little howitzers, all Ro Mep Concern-make.

Shell. Black-powder charge. Ignition. Shell. Black-powder charge. Ignition.

A younger version of herself hijacked her thoughts. She remembered the unpleasantry of the kakachūli she had been subjected to, the children’s plays held within the steamy clearings of Black Quarter markets. She thought of Pìkwi, the demon-mother, covered in her mass of glinting silver bells and long colourful ropes. Often, Pìkwi would find herself cornered by the heroes of the play, soon to be slain and returned to Ù, the divine wellspring. But despite their efforts, she would always escape, by oftentimes, like a mortar, ejecting her spawn at the hero, a creature of molten lead and tortured souls. In the plays the actors, dressed in gaudy fabrics, would writhe around in the mud, begging the audience to put out the fire.

The Girl wondered how many shells each skybeast gun birthed at the end of a shift. One hundred? One thousand? How many little infants of coalescent spite and fury splashed daily onto Mershana? How many people pleaded for salvation from countless little fires?

The Deserter seemed not to notice the roar above his head. He continued barrelling his way through the meb, shoving branches aside like an obstinate child. The Girl slid into his wake, her silent footsteps in his. She noticed that the repeater in his right hand, held with the light touch of one familiar with its function, had been primed. Though she could not see its serial, she knew its model, a Kan Half-Hand and Three.

The Girl eyed its magazine. From this angle, it was impossible to tell the coring of his rounds. She had heard most Othenai regulars carried only a single magazine of orange-core. She gambled that he would not waste orange-core on her. No. Like the miserly Belos rondai that infested the camp in Mershana, the Othenai reserved their orange-core for machine-things. An Aj girl would only require solid-core.

Shivers swept through her, a realisation.

The last ebbs of sky-beast propeller flowed away from the hill, pulling behind them an aching silence. Little vortices of snowflakes settled, and the trees quieted their shaking. Only the Deserter’s boots remained. Crushing the snow beneath him. Punishing it.

Outside the forest, a barren hill and a dying city. Inside the forest, a panicked stranger and a loaded weapon. She looked behind her, at the forest’s opening, at the portal of air growing smaller and smaller. She looked again at the repeater, at the incredible distance between her and it. Three hands turned into three hundred straights.

She felt the snow pawing at her shoulders and elbows. Before her, the forest seemed to branch out endlessly. It beckoned her with gnarled fingers. She knew beyond the safety of its thorns lay wide open plains. Plains so wide they would make her cry. With a small smile, she pulled her shawl closer and made one final prayer. This time she prayed to Raesam, the River of Being. Rapid water, yielding canyon.

The meb eventually gave way, gradually releasing its reign of the land to reveal a descending meadow. By now, dusk had settled over the hill like a burnished lamp-cover, smothering the last warmth of the sun, and the Deserter felt his senses heighten as the soft seas of darkness overcame him. While the path forward was thankfully devoid of any serious obstacles, he remained wary, pushing past a barrier of snowbush with the timidity of a tiny animal.

He turned to check on the Girl. Once again, she sat a few hands behind, just out of reach. Her eyes were fixated beyond him. The Deserter followed her line of sight, away and down the hill.

Lights. Many.

Muscles snapping in reflex, the Deserter threw himself back into the forest line.

Lights!

He was sure there had been no patrols at this time. Toruzh flay him!

He waved a hand at the Girl to do as he had. In the gloom, he picked out several sentry lanterns, and amongst them, the shadows of men. At least six. Armed. All walking up the hill. They bobbed closer, like mines.

He cursed again. Invisible fingers wrapped themselves around his neck. His lungs felt as if they would deflate permanently. His ridiculous pack was much too full, far too large.

Not here.

He would escape them.

He would not go back.

His feet refused to even turn towards Mershana. If he were capable of speech, he would have whimpered with the effort to move them. He felt the sky open like an eye, its great pupil fixated on him.

His fingers tightened on the repeater’s grip. They gripped so tight he felt his bones creak. His other hand sought out his tawshtawl. He gripped this, too, threatening to shatter the tiny reliquary. Wetness crept down his fingers as its edges cut him. Divine guidance dripped ruddy into the snow.

Heart shaking his chest like a giant bell, the Deserter sought gatá once more. Mind’s eye watering with the effort, he tried to hold its glowing symbol in his thoughts. It was a sun, and he a mote of dust, burning, burning, burning. Then, a pool of darkness. A tear in reality that beckoned for him to immerse himself. To sooth him on his transition, the faces of caring mothers came to him, emerging from the blackness, their hands adorned in gold and sheer-metal.

Like a sputtering engine, he vacillated between emotion and shávrúzut, void. He was himself. He was not himself. He was himself. Coolness came to his heart, and then flowed to his chest and his limbs. The coolness dripped from his fingers and pattered onto the ground like snowmelt. He was not himself.

He was beyond himself.

He was a glass floor above a roiling, freezing torrent. Its waters swirled immensely deep and maddeningly unknowable. He was the mountain above the belly of earth. Great buttresses holding down an inferno. He was the skin above the squirming flesh. His human energies and impulses churned just below him, squirming like foul viscera. For a moment, as one might a grotesque curiosity, he probed them. Something swirled in there. Deep in the waters, a creature of alien intent churned amongst the lesser emotions. Although the rest of himself had retreated, the Deserter could still feel it writhe within him like a bowel.

In the half-reality of gatá, he moved.

He would escape his pursuers. He would escape the churning.

Hugging the ground, he made his way down the hill in a semi-circle, clawing along the ground like some ancient horror. He did not hear the Girl behind him, but knew she dogged his steps. With silent fingers, he unslung his repeater.

The lights dipped behind a façade of scrub as the hill flattened, but the Deserter still held their location in his mind’s eye. Like a guilty soul, he crept from bush to bush and snowdrift to snowdrift. The noise of each step seemed to echo obscenely, and the Deserter cringed whenever he felt himself bathed in dim light from the patrol’s lamps. He had kept them distant, but now on flatter terrain, he could see them more clearly.

They were Belos, as their ribbed kuspoda breastplates and maned helmets revealed. One of the men, larger than the others, carried something bulky on his back, visibly straining under the weight. The Deserter knew what it was immediately: a transceiver.

A fucking transceiver.

He cursed once more. Any alert and half the city would know about it. His palms ached on his repeater again.

No mistakes.

A few straights away, a small copse of trees promised to hide him. With each painful step, he increased the gap between himself and death. In the damp air, he could hear muffled conversation, and then a bout of raucous laughter. The Deserter’s heart thrashed against him, threatening to pierce the shield of gatá. Threatening to burst through its glass cage.

How had they not seen them yet?

He continued, aware that each further straight exposed him more from their vantage. Like a promised land, the trees rose before him.

Breath puffing in infuriating clouds of mist, he reached the trees, its shadows welcoming with light-banishing fronds. He embraced them, sliding into its womb.

Something rustled. A surge and peal in the shadows. The Deserter’s fingers moved without him.

Gatá acted.

One hiss and the air erupted in violence.

The Girl fell backwards, her legs propelling her away from the treeline. She scrambled like a startled beast. A flash of sparks followed one heartbeat later. Stinging stars shot into the air as the Deserter’s round met its target, the darkness cleaved asunder as orange-core met air. Unwanted energy violated the night.

The Girl smelt ozone, then burning blood. Both too familiar. In the time it took for the smell to hit her nostrils, the Deserter had pumped and shot another round at the now illuminated shape barrelling towards him. The second round careened off distinctly-Belos armour and into a nearby tree, exploding into an afterimage.

The Girl shielded her eyes as fire begun to lick the night’s edge, searing its infant skin. Water droplets sizzled in the flames as icicles melted above them.

Again, her legs and arms sought to push her away. Away from the fire. Away from the blood. Behind, she heard the indistinct calls of the other Belos. They had seen it.

With a groan, the glowing Belos shape crashed into the Deserter. No functional words came out of it. Only guttural, pained screams.

The Deserter was a big man. But even he was pushed back by the death-drive of whoever he had shot. He fell backwards, his head landing a mere hand away from the Girl. The burning man flung himself onto the Deserter in an explosion of sparks, his glowing abdomen bathing the three in demonic light. With heavy thuds, he threw his arms wildly.

Again, it screamed. The Girl thought she heard him say “Why? Who?”

The Deserter remained silent. Clearly struggling, his hand crept towards his belt. The Girl felt the ground pulse as the dying Belos hit him in the head and his hand fell limp.

Something moved the Girl. With a grunt, she kicked outwards with both legs. One foot skidded off the Belos’ helmet but connected well. She felt something rattle behind his mask and heard another subhuman grunt. Adrenaline-spiked muscles twitched, and she found herself above the two men. Another twitch and she had the Deserter’s hammer, pulled straight from the belt loop.

It glowed in her hands, rolled metal shiny in the death-light. It glowed like the Fifth Brother’s vå̀bi̊̄. Her heart wanted her to bring it down on the Deserter. She brought it down on the Belos.

The blow was too weak. Or the angle off. Like her foot. the hammer glanced off the helmet, as flimsy as a child’s toy.

The writhing body beneath her spasmed and an armour-clad arm caught her hard in the stomach. Painful air escaped her in a hot cloud. She stumbled as the Belos rose above her, fists balled in death-fury. Lit by the flaming tree, his figure appeared celestial.

He asked her a silent question. No words—none were needed.

She could not answer.

The Deserter answered for her.

A sharp jerk pushed the Belo’s head towards his chest. Like an overheating boiler, his helmet glowed redder and redder. Then, as if someone were arc-cutting a door, a waterfall of sparks bled from underneath his chin. They showered onto the Girl, pockmarking the snow around her. She could smell his hair burning.

The Belos collapsed, helmet sizzling the snow around it. The shouts behind them grew louder.

The Girl could not think. She could not move. Her eyes remained fixed to the smouldering dome where once a mind had been. Where now a mind dribbled down a pair of shoulders in streams of rendering fat that clung to loose strands of blonde hair. She held the hammer to her chest. The divine vå̀bi̊̄ seemed to vibrate in her hands, penetrating through her ribcage, into the heart. The Brothers beat their hearts with her.

The tree burned as a cremation fire might. The Belos’ essence was dissipated amongst its steaming sap. Upwards and upwards, to join with the water in the sky. Her ynjopa had always said the rain were the dead returning. Soaking into the dirt. Seeping their way back towards the well at the centre of the world.

Born of water, returned to water.

Her conscious mind washed back to her, and she realised she was running. The Deserter was beside her. He seemed too calm, his face passive as a corpse’s. As he pushed her onto the ground, her arms scratched by nus bush, she wondered if the rain would ever return him back to himself. She searched for his eyes in the darkness.

Where once she found river-stone, she now found abyss. Scoured of light, the Deserter’s eyes were like flooded caves. What waters brewed there?

And then, like a curse, he spoke what she wished he would never.

‘Moryan.’

She let the word dissolve into the night air before she named herself.

‘Najki.’