Penult (17 page)

Sure, I could still weave myself a
nice pair of jeans, but I couldn’t fix anything on this scale. I
couldn’t repair whole mountain ranges.

I leaned back on my mud throne,
feeling just as grave and gloomy as I had on that wicker chair in
Fiona and Britt’s garden. There was a grave beneath the weeping
willow across the pond, a grave that I dug myself with a shovel
woven from the same patch of roots I had mined for my clothes. I
had once laid Karla’s body down into it on a bed of reeds, covered
her with willow branches, covered her with dirt. But then, I had
managed to find her in the Deeps, and with the help of Olivier and
his ‘will bomb,’ resurrect her.

I used to think of bodies as necessary
prerequisites to sustain a consciousness. Now I knew they were just
hunks of meat, loosely associated with the core of our
being.

I wondered if that original corpse of
hers, the one that was ravaged by Fellstraw, still remained where I
had placed it, or if it had ceased to exist once Karla shifted back
to this realm. It was a mystery that would have to remain
unanswered, because I wasn’t about to go and dig her up.

I could only hope that her latest
physical form was unharmed and that her soul was safe. Might she be
here right now with me in the Liminality? If so, she knew where to
find me. We had often told each other that if either of us made it
back to the Liminality with the other, this pond would be our
meeting place. I was prepared to wait here for as long as it took
for her to show.

I sat there in a daze, pitying myself,
when a dark object came darting out of the hanging valley where the
waterfall used to flow. It came hurtling at high speed in my
direction.

It sent my heart thumping. I took
cover, ducking down against the bank. I sneaked a peek to find the
creature hovering an arm’s length away. It was a
honeybee.

It landed and crawled over to me,
raising up on its rear two pairs of legs, exuding a globule of
nectar from its mandible.

I drank my fill and patted its furry
head, and sent it on its way. The Dusters, at least, would soon
know I was back, if any Dusters remained alive in this shattered
world. At least there are some bees left in this place. How did
they always manage to find me so quickly, no matter where I
roamed?

I climbed back into my throne of dried
mud and resumed my moping.

***

Hours passed and still nothing
happened. I felt a little miffed that no one but that one bee had
come around yet to find me. If they were so desperate to have me
back, you would think they would put a little effort into finding
me.

I was more than ready to fade. I
couldn’t wait for my soul to get sucked back to Brynmawr and that
lonely futon in the attic.

The skies remained eerily devoid of
mantids and dragonflies. Every other time I had come to the pitted
plains I had always seen scouting parties of some sort. That did
not bode well. Did that mean I had come too late? Had they all been
exterminated? Was the war with Penult already over?

I was hungry again and having already
eaten my last crumb of Duster food, I rounded up some stray bits of
root left over from weaving my hoodie and jeans. Some of them had
already beginning to disperse, dragging themselves across the mud
flats like inchworms, while others writhed in place like half-dead
eels.

I gathered them together and conjured
myself a pulled pork sandwich, extra spicy on a sourdough roll. It
wasn’t bad. The aftertaste was a bit earthy but it hit the spot.
Maybe next time I should rinse them off first. But it was nice to
know that I still had the knack.

A beer would have hit the spot right
then, but I didn’t have Lille’s skill for flavoring liquids. The
best I could do was a paper cup of pond water that I managed to
tinge kind of amber. No bubbles though. And it tasted like stagnant
water.

“
Come on, Zhang!” I shouted
into the hollow. My voice reverberated back. “You wanted me. I’m
here. Show yourself! What the fuck?”

In the other world, the ‘real’ world,
Wendell might have heard me. He stashed familiars as spies
everywhere I went, not just in that black credit card but every
leaf and dust bunny that drifted by in the breeze had to be viewed
with suspicion.

I was more than ready to go back now.
I had seen enough. There was nothing for me to do here. If Karla
hadn’t come by now it probably meant she hadn’t crossed. Karla
insisted that all Hemisouls could will themselves to Root by
manipulating moods. That might be true for some people, but the
reverse was most definitely not the case. Fades were always
unpredictable. The Liminality decides when it’s time for you to go
back.

The silence of the hollow was
interrupted by a low rumbling. I looked out past the bluffs to see
a large dust devil spinning out over the plains. This was no
ephemeral whirlwind. It was stable, like an F4 tornado, and like
the Horus, but a fraction of their height and breadth. It hovered
in place over what had been the river valley and outflow
plain.

I got up and plucked my sword out of
the mud and walked out towards the bluffs for a better look. When I
reached the edge of the broken ground, I climbed a little ways up a
pile of scree. There were people out there, hundreds of them,
tromping towards the whirlwind.

I left the hollow and went after them.
Could they be refugees? Survivors of the cataclysm?

It was difficult keeping my bearings
climbing up and down these ridges and rifts, but as I topped each
ripple the whirlwind provided a guidepost.

High above the column of marchers I
spotted something winged and dark, silhouetted by the low-hanging
sun. I stood and stared for a long moment, unsure whether to hail
them or to hide. But as it swooped about, I saw that it had the
wrong shape. This was no mantid or dragonfly. I dove for cover in a
cleft.

Chapter 15:
Kitt

The winged creature cast long shadows
over the rumpled terrain. I kept low, tracking it from beneath an
overhang of frayed roots. Six wings, I counted. This was no insect.
It had to be a Seraph, strapped into one of those multi-winged
flying contraptions like the one I had seen in the
Deeps.

Silhouetted against the glare of the
setting sun, three pairs of wings beat in a graceful, loping
rhythm. Yet somehow his arms stayed free, allowing him to carry a
strange kind of crossbow-like weapon, sprouting multiple shafts and
with no drawstring.

The Seraph hovered over the marchers,
keeping pace as they swarmed towards the giant dust devil at the
base of the valley, a miniature version of the Horus, only a
fraction of its height and breadth, and so translucent I could see
through it to the landscape beyond. It didn’t seem to be doing much
damage. It was just blowing dust around. It could not have been the
cause of all this destruction.

The marchers’ bodies were afflicted
with grotesque distortions. Each of their left arms was
misshapen—variously swollen, elongated or tapered.

A scattering of men with normal limbs
guarded the flanks and tended stragglers. They had ordinary
longbows and quivers lashed to their backs and they carried short
staffs tipped with spikes and barbs. These had to be Hashmallim,
the lower rank overseers of Penult.

Unlike those in the Deeps, these
marchers were not pilgrims or refugees. They had to be soldiers.
They were inhumanly disciplined. Not a word was spoken among them.
They were uniformly and absolutely focused on their task. Where
were they headed and what were they up to?

I chose a route that would angle me
closer, gradually converging towards the marchers. My path kept to
the deep gulleys between the wave peaks, deep enough to hide a
small house. The ground, a mix of rubbled stone and severed roots,
was rough on my bare feet. But I didn’t care. It was only
flesh.

I poked my head up, once in a while
just to make sure I was still on course. I spotted another more
distant whirlwind on the horizon, guiding, I assumed, another
contingent of marchers.

The Seraph descended to confer with
his Hashmallim, before flying off in the direction they had come. I
was close enough now to hear the marchers’ grunts and snorts. I
pulled myself up to the lip of the groove and was startled to find
them in the very next gully. They too had edged closer to my
position.

I crawled over the top of the rise and
settled into a crevice tangled with loose and inert roots. From
here I could watch them without being noticed.

Their grotesque deformities repulsed
me. They had to be product of extreme flesh weavers. They were
naked, but armored with overlapping plates of exposed bone that
protruded through their skin, helmeted with mats of hair, studded
with more knots of bone protruding from their skulls. Their
modified appendages resembled tentacles and elephant trunks more
than human limbs.

“
Ugly bastards, ain’t
they?”

The voice, feminine and with a mild
Midwestern American drawl, came from nowhere. I almost knocked my
head against a boulder flinching away.

A young woman in cargo shorts and a
photographer’s vest straddled the cleft, hands on her hips, showing
no concern for concealing herself.

“
Get down! They’ll see
you.”

“
Nah. It’s cool. You can
come on up out of your hidey hole. The Seraph’s gone and the
Hashmallim all went forward. These drones won’t come after us
without orders. They don’t let them use any initiative.”

“
Who … what … are
they?”

“
Cherubim,” said the girl.
“Volunteers, the Seraphim will tell you, but we know better.
They’re slave soldiers. Brainless. Soul-less. This is a patrol
unit. They travel in packs of forty nine. Seven squads of seven.
See their arms? There’s four kinds here. Two Slingers, a Boomer,
two Slashers and two Bashers per squad.”

I could easily match each of her
descriptive nicknames with a different type of freak. The Slingers
had one normal arm and one whip-like appendage that ended in a
pouch. The Boomers had a hollow and flexible snout in place of an
arm. The Slashers were clearly the ones with arms ended only in a
curved blade while the limbs of the Bashers terminated in bony,
fist-like bulges.

“
There’s other kinds too.
But these are your run-of-the-mill grunts.”

“
What’s with the Boomers
and that … trunk thing?”

“
They shoot stuff. Rocks.
Whatever. Don’t ask me how but they’re super accurate and forceful.
Boomers they use mainly to pick off Dusters on those flying bugs of
theirs.”

She reached out her hand to help me up
and out of my hiding place. She had sharp features and jaunty
eyebrows. Her arms and shoulders were pretty jacked for a
girl.

“
My name’s Kitt, by the
way.”

“
I’m James.”

She stared at me, squinting, for the
longest time. The situation was starting to get a little awkward.
“You’re not … ‘the’ James … are you?”

“
The?”

“
Moody?”

“
Yeah, that’s me. That’s my
name.”

Her eyes popped wide. “Holy shit!
You’re like a celebrity.”

“
Get out.”

“
No, really. Luther and
Olivier talk about you all the time.”

“
How’s Olivier
doing?”

“
Great. He’s like Luther’s
right hand man.”

“
What happened to the other
guy? What’s his name?”

“
Harvald? He … uh … didn’t
make it out. Went down with the ship, so to speak. He was in the
city when it fell.”

“
Sorry to hear. He was a
bit of a jerk to me, but ….” I thought better of speaking ill of
the dead. “Well, I should just shut up.”

“
Penult hit Frelsi first,
so we had some warning. Luther and Olivier took a bunch of refugees
underground. So our losses weren’t too, too bad. Unlike …
Frelsi.”

“
What happened?”

“
They tore down the whole
mountain is what happened. The Frelsians never knew what hit them.
If it wasn’t for the Dusters they would have been completely wiped
out. We tried to help from Luthersburg, but we never had a chance.
They tore into us just as hard.”

“
So … you guys basically
lost. The war … it’s lost.”

“
Not quite,” she said. “Not
yet anyhow. Word is … the Dusters are regrouping with their Old
Ones and what’s left of the Freesouls under Master Zhang. Olivier
wants us to join up somehow, but Luther’s not crazy about the idea.
It’s not clear how we would do it. The resistance has been driven
way the heck up the valley.”

“
Zhang’s the one who wanted
me here.”

She looked me up and down, admiring me
like I was some kind of hot, new sports car or something. It made
me feel real awkward.

“
Shit yeah! James Moody. I
heard stories about you. To think I took you for a
newbie.”

“
Yeah, well I kinda feel
like one. It’s been a while. I’m not used to being here
anymore.”