The Bands of Mourning

“What do you think?” he asked. “Is that some kind of bunker?”

  “Doesn’t look like any fort I’ve seen,” MeLaan whispered. “With those flimsy walls? Looks more like a big warehouse.”

  A warehouse as large as a small town. Wax shook his head in bafflement, then spotted something near the far side of the village. A waterfall? It was outside the lights, but he thought he could see mist rising from where it plunged down, and a small stream did run through the village.

  “High ground that direction,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The maps mention the waterfall over there. Small but pretty, supposedly.”

  “Must have hooked a turbine up to it,” he said. “That’s where the power is coming from. Let’s get back to the others.”

  They crawled through the underbrush again to where Wayne, Marasi, and Steris waited in the dim woods. “They’re here all right,” Wax whispered. “We have to find a way to get in. Tons of soldiers. Well-guarded perimeter.”

  “Fly in,” Steris suggested.

  “Not gonna work,” Wayne said. “They had a Seeker back at the party; you think they won’t have one here? The moment one of us burns a metal, we’ll draw a hundred of Suit’s goons to welcome us with a handshake and a friendly bit of murderin’.”

  “What then?” Marasi asked.

  “I need to see,” Wayne said.

  “There’s a better vantage on the other side, we think,” Wax said. He pointed, and MeLaan led the way in the darkness, walking her horse between the towering hardwoods. Wax fell in with Steris at the tail of the group, and lagged a little to be able to speak with her privately.

  “Steris,” he whispered, “I’ve been considering how to proceed once we decide how to infiltrate. I’ve thought about bringing you in with us, and I just don’t see that it’s feasible. I think it would be best if you stayed and watched the horses.”

  “Very well.”

  “No, really. Those are armed soldiers. I can’t even fathom how I’d feel if I brought you in there and something happened. You need to stay out here.”

  “Very well.”

  “It isn’t subject to—” Wax hesitated. “Wait. You’re all right with this?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked. “I barely have any sense of where to point a gun, and have hardly any capacity for sneaking—that’s really quite a scandalous talent if you think about it, Lord Waxillium. While I do believe that people tend to be safest when near you, riding into an enemy compound is stretching the issue. I’ll stay here.”

  Wax grinned in the darkness. “Steris, you’re a gem.”

  “What? Because I have a moderately healthy sense of self-preservation?”

  “Let’s just say that out in the Roughs, I was accustomed to people always wanting to try things beyond their capacity. And they always seemed determined to do it right when it was the most dangerous.”

  “Well, I shall endeavor to stay out of sight,” Steris said, “and not get captured.”

  “I doubt you need to worry about that all the way out here.”

  “Oh, I agree,” she said. “But that is the sort of statistical anomaly that plagues my life, so I’ll plan for it nonetheless.”

  With some difficulty, they navigated to the eastern edge of the town, where they left Steris and the horses. Wax dug some supplies off the pack animal. Metal vials, extra bullets, plenty of guns—including the aluminum one he’d stolen back at Kelesina’s place. And the last of Ranette’s ball-and-string devices, which he tucked into the pouch on his gunbelt.

  After climbing up some switchbacks, they were able to settle onto a darkened ridge above the falls—which were nowhere near as impressive as he’d imagined—and study the town. Well, the remnants of it.

  “I wish we could see into that building,” Marasi said, handing back the spyglass.

  Wax grunted in agreement. They were almost high enough to see what was going on inside. Certainly, those flickering lights bespoke considerable activity: people moving down below, passing before the lights in the large chamber. But what were they doing, and why were they still at it well into the night?

  “Gonna be hard to sneak in there,” Wayne said.

  “You could kill one of the guards for me,” MeLaan said, settling onto a rock. “I’d eat him, take his shape, and slip us in that way.”

  Wax blinked, then glanced at Marasi, who seemed sick.

  “Really,” MeLaan said, “you all need to stop staring at me like that when I offer pragmatic suggestions.”

  “It’s not pragmatic,” Marasi said. “It’s cannibalism.”

  “Technically it’s not, as we’re different species. Honestly, if you look at our physiology, I share less in common with humans than you do with a cow—and nobody gasps when you eat one of those. You didn’t have trouble with it back in the mansion with Innate’s bodyguard.”

  “She was already dead,” Wax said. “Thank you for the suggestion, MeLaan, but getting you a guard’s body is out of the question.”

  “We don’t like killin’ folks,” Wayne said. “At least, unless they start shootin’ at us. They’re just chaps what are doing their job.” He looked to Marasi, as if for support.

  “Don’t look at me,” Marasi said. “I’m reeling from watching you trying to take the moral high ground.”

  “Focus, Wayne,” Wax said. “How are we going to get in? Shall we try a Fat Belt?”

  “Nah,” Wayne said, “too loud. I think we should do Spoiled Tomato.”

  “Dangerous,” Wax said, shaking his head. “I’d have to do the placement just right, between the lit perimeter and the shadowed part near the walls.”

  “You can do it. You make shots like that all the time. Plus, we got this shiny new metalmind, full o’ health waitin’ to be slurped up.”

  “A mistake could ruin the whole infiltration, healing power or no,” Wax said. “I think we should do Duck Under Clouds instead.”

  “You kiddin’?” Wayne said. “Didn’t you get shot last time we tried that?”

  “Kinda,” Wax admitted.

  MeLaan stared at them, baffled. “Duck under Clouds?”

  “They get like this,” Marasi said, patting her on the shoulder. “Best not to listen too closely.”

  “Tube Run,” Wayne said.

  “No glue.”

  “Banefielder?”

  “Too dark.”

  “Blackwatch Doublestomp.”

  Wax hesitated. “… The hell is that?”

  “Just made it up,” Wayne said, grinning. “It’s a nifty code name though, eh?”

  “Not bad,” Wax admitted. “And what type of plan is it?”

  “Same as Spoiled Tomato,” Wayne said.

  “I said that was too dangerous.”

  “Nothin’ else will work,” Wayne said, standing. “Look, are we going to sit here arguing, or are we going to do this?”

  Wax debated for a moment, eyeing the grounds, thinking. Could he get the placement right?

  But then, did he have a better plan? That perimeter was very well guarded, but it was a dark night. If his life in the Roughs had taught him one thing, it was to trust his instincts. Unfortunately, at that moment they agreed with Wayne.

  So, before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled his shotgun from its holster and tossed it to Wayne. The shorter man caught it with distaste—guns and Wayne didn’t agree. His arms immediately started shaking.

  “Try to hold on tight,” Wax said. “Make an opening on the north side, if you can.”

  He increased his weight, flared his metal, and Pushed on the gun, using it as an anchor to hurl Wayne out off the rocky outcropping and over the camp. The man soared from the Push before dropping through the darkness, some fifty feet toward the ground below.

  Marasi gasped. “Spoiled Tomato?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Wax said. “Apparently it makes a mess sometimes when he lands.”

  * * *

  To rust with that Wax, Wayne thought as he plummeted toward the g
round, his hat blowing off. Tossin’ a gun to a fellow without even warnin’ him. Why, that’s just—

  He hit.

  Now, there was a trick to falling to your death. Bodies hitting the ground were loud. Louder than anyone ever expected.

  He mitigated this by hitting feet-first—his legs both snapped immediately—then twisted onto his side, breaking his shoulder, but dampening some of the sound by rolling with the impact. He tapped his fancy new metalmind right before his head smacked the ground, dazing him.

  He ended up in a crumpled, broken heap beside a pile of rocks. Of course Wax would have sent him into a pile of rocks. As his vision cleared, he tried to glance at his legs, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t feel anything, actually, which was quite pleasant. It was always nice when you snapped the spine—helped with the pain.

  Not that the pain went completely away, mind you. But he and pain were old friends what shared a handshake and a beer now and then. Didn’t much like one another, but they had a working relationship. Sensation—and agony—flooded back into him as his metalmind healed his spine, focusing on the worst wounds first. He drew in a deep breath. A snapped spine could suffocate a man. People didn’t know that. Or, well, the ones who did know had suffocated already.

  As soon as he could move—even while his legs were healing—he twisted and used his good arm to position one of the large rocks in the pile. Looked like these stones were here intended for shoring up the sides of the stream, perhaps to make a pathway across. Wayne put them to good use, reaching up with his other hand as his shoulder healed. Wax had placed him well, right in the dark area between the perimeter watchposts and the building. But that didn’t mean he was safe.

  Wayne stumbled to his feet, dragging Wax’s gun, his leg twisting about and bones reknitting. Damn fine metalmind, that gold bracelet was. An extensive healing like this would have cost him months of saving up, but this metalmind was still mostly full.

  He stumbled away as quietly as he could, leaving a large rock balanced on the others as he sought a place deeper in the shadows, then hid the gun near the building so his damn hand would stop shaking.

  He got away none too soon. A pair of soldiers were approaching from the perimeter.

  “It was over here,” one said to the other. As they drew closer, one of the spotlights turned around and shone on the area, giving them light and quite nearly exposing Wayne. He froze in the shadows near a pile of work equipment, sweating as his toes popped softly, the bones grinding against one another as they knit back into their proper places.

  The guards didn’t hear. They stepped up to where he’d fallen—no tomato splat of blood this time, fortunately—and looked around. One nudged the stone accidentally, and it fell off the peak where Wayne had placed it, rolling down the side of the small pile and clattering against the other rocks. The men looked at it, then nodded, doing a quick sweep but heading back to their post and returning the light to its scan of the nearby area. The noise they’d heard had merely been some rocks shifting. Nothing significant.

  Wayne stood up straight in the darkness and stopped tapping the bracelet metalmind. He felt good. Renewed, like he always did after a big healing. Felt like he could do something impossible, run up a mountain, or eat the entire boar and chips plate at Findley’s all on his own.

  He crept off through the shadows, about important business. Fortunately, he found his hat almost immediately, near another rock pile. That done, he moved on to less important matters, like making an opportunity to help the others sneak in.

  Wax had said north side. Let’s see.… He kept close to the building, and even resisted the urge to go sneaking in on his own to find out what in Ruin’s name was in there.

  Time to think like a guard. It was hard, as he didn’t have a guard’s hat. He settled into the shadows and listened as a pair of them passed on patrol, digesting their accents like a nice snack of pretzel sticks with mustard.

  After about fifteen minutes of watching, he picked out a likely candidate and kept pace as the man did his rounds, though Wayne stayed in the shadow. The lanky fellow had a face like a rabbit, but was tall enough he could probably have picked all the walnuts he wanted without needing a stepladder.

  Here I am, Wayne thought, in the middle of nowhere! Guarding a big old barn. This isn’t what I signed up for. I haven’t seen my daughter in eight months. Eight months! She’s probably talking by now. Rusts. This life.

  The man turned to go back the other way on his rounds, and someone barked out at him from one of the stations with the floodlights, saying something Wayne couldn’t hear. The tone was unmistakable.

  And my superiors, Wayne thought, turning and slinking along in the shadows, still keeping pace with the man. Oh, how they lean on me! Every little thing gets me a talking-to. Shouting. That’s all this life is. Being yelled at day in and day out.

  Wayne smiled, then scuttled ahead of the man, looking for something he’d stepped over earlier. A set of black cords, each as thick as his finger, plugged into a big box near the building. As the guard came strolling past, not paying much attention, Wayne carefully lifted the cords.

  The guard’s foot caught on them. In that moment, Wayne yanked them from the hub.

  The floodlights nearest to him went out.

  Men immediately started shouting. The guard panicked in the darkness. “I’m sorry!” he shouted. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t watching my feet!”

  Wayne slipped away and found a nice quiet nook between two stacks of sandbags as the guards shouted and argued, and the poor man was chewed out. Some people came in to fix the cords, though Wayne had tossed them to the side, so it took some time searching in the dark to find the ends and get them connected.

  The lights came back on. Wayne was taking a long swig from his leather canteen as Wax, Marasi, and MeLaan joined him in the shadows. “Nice,” Wax whispered.

  “It wasn’t, actually,” Wayne whispered. “It was pretty mean. That poor guard ain’t done nothin’ wrong, and everybody keeps yellin’ at him.”

  Wax took the lead at that point, prowling along the side of the big barnlike building. The roof wasn’t the only thing still unfinished—the entrances were open, not fitted with proper doors. They stopped beside one and Wayne pointed, whispering to Wax where his shotgun was.

  Wax fetched it, then snuck through the doorway. They followed, Wayne last of all. The cavernous interior was lit by a few electric lanterns here and there, and they passed a long light lattice that was obviously going to be installed in the ceiling, once the roof was done. It was brighter than outside in here, but not by much, and there were stacks of boxes and supplies arranged in rows, which let them sneak through and stay hidden. Once they got to the front of the rows of boxes, Wax hesitated, and the two women peered around him. Nobody gave Wayne a good view, which was how it always went. First he got yelled at on the job, then this.

  He wiggled between them, getting a good elbow into Marasi’s midriff—which earned him a glare, as if she didn’t know that proper crowd-wiggling protocol involved getting friendly with one another’s extremities. He managed to peek between Wax and MeLaan, finally getting a glimpse at what had stopped them.

  It was a boat.

  Of course, the common word “boat” didn’t do the thing justice. Wayne stared at the massive construction, searching for a better description. One that would capture the majesty, the incredible scale, of the thing he was seeing.

  “That’s a damn big boat,” he finally whispered.

  Much better.

  Why would they be building a ship here, miles and miles from the ocean? The thing couldn’t be easy to move. It filled almost the entire building, with a curved bottom and a prow—unfinished on one side—that was easily three stories high. The thing had two long, armlike extensions at the sides. Pontoons? They were big, and one wasn’t finished yet, ending in a jagged line of construction.

  Jagged? Wayne frowned. That didn’t look like the way you built something. In fact, now that he s
tudied it, that prow looked more crumpled than unfinished.

  “Someone broke it,” Wayne said, pointing. “They were trying to move it, and cracked off one pontoon.”

  “It has to be a warship,” Marasi said. “They are preparing for a war.”

  “I think Wayne is right,” Wax said. “Look at the gouges in the dirt, the damage to the hull. They were transporting this thing through here, and it rolled free and cracked. So the Set constructed this building to cut it off from the view of anyone outside while they repair it.”

  “Engineers,” Wayne said, pointing at some people who were obviously smart types, walking along the outside of the ship and pointing, carrying clipboards and wearing dark brown suits and skirts. The type teachers at schools would wear, thinking they were the height of fashion.

  “It’s not like any ship I’ve seen,” Marasi said, shouldering her purse and clutching her rifle.

  “You brought your purse,” Wayne said, “on a darin’ infiltration?”

  “Why not?” she said. “Purses are handy. Anyway, if the Set has technology like that speaking telegraph, what will they put on a ship like this? And why did they build it away from the sea in the first place?”

  “Suit will have answers,” Wax said, eyes narrowing. “Marasi, I assume you’re still after the spike?”

  “Yes,” she said, determined.

  “I’m going to find my uncle. Who do you want? Wayne or MeLaan?”

  “MeLaan this time,” Marasi said.

  Wax nodded. “Stay hidden, but if Wayne and I get spotted, try to help. We’ll do the same for you. If you find that spike, return to this point and lie low. If all goes well, we’ll slip back out together.”

  “And if all doesn’t go well?”

  “Which it won’t,” Wayne added.

  “Meet back where we left Steris and the horses,” Wax said, sliding a gun from the holster at his side. MeLaan did the same, only her holster was her leg. Like, the skin split and she reached in through a slit in her trousers and slipped the gun out—a sleek, long-barreled thing.

  Wayne whistled softly. She grinned, then gave him a kiss. “Try not to get shot too many times.”

  “You neither,” he said.