forward a degree or so too much. There's a structural flaw in its legs. It works just fine if the city keeps walking, but if it stands still on an incline - much like it is now - it is vulnerable. I'm not certain, but I believe from this angle, that the rear legs are - at the moment - under more weight than they were designed to be."
"How much?" Thunfir asked, turning to us with the carnage screen safely behind him.
"A lot," Euclid said, "Enough that we could topple the whole city if it lost one of its legs."
"Even a whole cask of gunpowder, if we could attach it to that leg, wouldn't even touch a metal structure that strong," Crassus said shaking his head as he loaded yet another disposable rifle.
"Crassus," Euclid said, "That's why I'm talking about weight distribution. Why target the leg itself when the land it stands on is so used to being pulverized? Even a small shift in land could slide the leg under the city. The other legs around it would be insufficient to hold the shift in weight toward the back and it would begin to slide backward. The city would become an avalanche. The Earth it stands on is not designed to hold the weight of something that big at such small points."
"Blow up the Earth behind it," Thunfir said with a bewildered grin slowly spreading across his grizzled face, "And what about the soldiers onboard?"
"Most of them will be dead, but unless the city is woefully understaffed following the death of its entourage, I expect there will be hundreds of well armed soldiers on-board still functional. These would be men trained to fight their whole lives, given equipment better than anything we have likely seen. And they will not all die from the fall. Like any well-trained fighting force, they will have prepared for the possibility of the city's collapse."
"We'll need help," Thunfir said gravely, jabbing his finger over Euclid's scratch paper, "The fallen city would still be a grave threat."
That death cult. The Thakka Cluster. None of us said it, but we were all thinking the same thing. Prior to the Plexis' landing, there had been a roving band of marauders ravaging the countryside, named the Thakka Cluster in the fire left behind their deadly raids.
They were primitives even by the standards of the wasteland. And while their religion held death in higher regard than life, they also frenzied like no other group in the region when it came time to battle. Thunfir had always considered them a threat, but their help would only be useful if the city fell. But what ransom would they demand in return? What could we possibly offer a tribe that had chosen to abandon their own humanity?
"If the Thakka helps us," Thunfir said, "we will offer them what remains of the spider city. If they decide to stay, we will find a way to live in harmony. If they wish to leave, we will be glad to see them leave in peace."
"And when they inevitably betray us?" I asked. It was a known fact even to me that the Thakka could not be trusted.
"We'll be a few hours older than we would be otherwise," Thunfir said.
Following a brief silence, we shared the only bit of laughter that would be had in the Plexis that night.
"Very well," I heard myself say, "Where are they?"
That night Thunfir, Euclid, Crassus, and I separated outside the Plexis and began walking in the four cardinal directions, each of us once again alone in the world as we picked across rubble and dust.
In the cold of night I chanced a look behind me to glance once more at home. The Plexis sat across from the slightly leaning city. The metal spider was sleeping but still playing its projected video feed, showing charred villages and silent open mouths screaming for mercy that would never come. Across from that I saw the Plexis, its own magnitude hardly dwarfed by the spider city. And yet it looked so benign. Knowing the inhabitants that waited in fear, I took one last glance at the smokestack covered plate, and the legs beneath.
It was obvious which leg would bring the city tumbling backward, falling in on itself before spilling its own occupants onto the cracked and bloodthirsty Earth below.
I paused for only a moment before taking off from the valley and into the distance. There were two possibilities now. Either one of us would succeed that night in finding the Thakka Cluster, or we would all die. In the distance I could hear a maddened ripper dog scream as it snorted the air. I brought my hunting rifle back over my shoulder, and crouched low as I ran.
- - -
The wasteland is a paradox. Nothing seems to change as you step over the hundredth burned house or family of fleeing skeletons. And yet despite the similarities from place to place, nothing feels familiar.
That night, clambering between ruins both new and old, I sniffed the air from time to time and relived the previous ten years of my life as Ebon the Waste before finding the Plexis. This time without Crassus by my side I found myself more mobile, easier to conceal, and ultimately more vulnerable.
I wondered how Crassus was faring alone in the waste without me. I prayed to no god in particular that he would reach the edge of the valley ridge and then turn around, terrified of what he remembered out here. Better that he fail and live than join the unspeaking people of bone beneath every other footfall. Of course my prayers could not have been heard. They sounded more like terrified breathing, even to my own ears.
Secluding myself behind a stone foundation I laid flat for a moment to catch my breath. The night was as vast in time as it was in space. Above me a starry field opened up. No veiled stars. No chance of an unexpected storm. At least there was that. The gentle breeze too hinted at a dry, if not cold, night. I lifted my head and glanced down to the next wrecked building.
I had seen no one since leaving the valley. No one. That was an easy riddle to solve. I didn't see them because they were all dead. Oddly enough, it was a good sign.
Ahead I saw my destination. A simple wooden guard tower had been constructed decades ago when this had been a village. No one had dared let it burn after the rest of the village was razed to the ground. A fire on a clear night like this would signal everyone for miles. Of them, only the most daring, the most brutal would investigate. Precisely the ones I was looking for.
I had with me only a small satchel with enough water to last me the night and three magnesium flares. Aside from that and the clothes on my back I had only my rifle, and half of its clip had been depleted on the journey out here to frighten away the less enthusiastic among the ripper dogs.
I rolled from my prone position into a small culvert and followed it nearly the whole way to the guard tower. It rose from the cracked Earth like a gallows made of ash and bone. With dust covered hands I piled shattered wood around one of its support struts.
To make a controlled burn it would take hours to prepare for something like this. If I were trying to carefully demolish the building with fire, trying to collapse it in on itself, it could take far longer than that. Luckily, the fire I wanted to make was neither controlled nor careful. The only virtue I needed this fire to possess was brilliance. A brightly lit candle to the world, set to summon monsters from the darkness. Monsters with whom I would try to strike a deal.
Unless they ate me.
Knocking the wood together in darkness was still dangerous. If I made too much noise, or kicked up too much of my own scent by allowing myself to be cut, it could summon the attention of a quite different sort of monster. The wildlife in the area around the valley was not unaccustomed to dining on lonely travelers. The ripper dogs, the velocitrops, and the cannibal horse were among the more pleasant predators I had heard fireside stories about. My hands shook just thinking about them, and I accidentally dropped a nail covered plank of wood into the pile at one of the guard tower's legs.
Cursing myself I hurried, and that quick movement only served to further panic me. I grabbed wooden planks by the handful, no longer caring if the rusted nails poking out from them stuck into the uppermost layers of my skin. Speed was the only way now. I heard a noise in the distance. A shriek I couldn't identify. Not human. I hoped not. It pierced the air, no more
than a hundred yards into the darkness.
I gasped, pleaded with my hands to work faster in the chilling air, clutched for more bits of burnable wreckage. A book, a dead bird, a straw doll. I hurled them into the pile and struck the flare. I looked at the meager pile at my feet in the sunrise glow I had struck. It would have to do. Placing the flare in a gap beneath the pile I counted in my mind how many minutes it would take to catch the rest of the building ablaze. The shriek sounded again and I struck another flare as the tiny pile of detritus caught with agonizing sloth.
The flare lit, nearly blinding me with its brilliant glow. I spun my eyes around the area, noticing with disdain that the center of my vision was blurry with ominous green and black blotches. With my other hand I tore off my glasses and clutched my eyes shut, desperately willing my pupils to open. I tossed the second flare blind into the night, then replaced my glasses and started scanning my surroundings. There was movement to be sure.
The rising and flickering flames were casting shadows on every surface, making the ruins all around me look as though they were dancing and waving. Every shadow was a ripper dog. Every skull grinning from the dirt was my own. Breathing heavily as I stripped the rifle from my shoulder, I let the gun barrel follow my wild gaze.
And then I saw it.
The darkness slowly receded in a small alley between two diminished foundations. And there I saw the beast. It was the head of a ripper dog staring with a sinister grin across its parody of a face. Its silver eyes reflected the light of my fire back at me, piercing my throat with its gaze alone.
Behind it there was another, this one with a massive white stripe running up its nose. Its yellowed teeth gleamed around its open mouth, like the stalactites of an ancient cavern. It was a cavern where death lived. Another ripper dog was behind these two, lying playfully on its side, prepared to tear life out of me to sustain itself. Two more eyes leered from the shadows beyond. I raised the rifle, my breath suffocating in the chilled night air. My heart was thumping like the drums of the northern death cults.
It was thumping, racing to carry terror through every limb.
My lungs argued, tried to pull air in and exhale at the same time, instead seizing in my tightened throat. I raised the rifle to the sky and pulled the trigger, murdering the stillness of night, ripping the silence open with a bullet.
They didn't move.
With terrified and uneven breaths, I stepped back and pulled the bolt of the rifle back, ejecting the wasted shell and loading another one into the chamber. The ripper dogs stood in wait. Even I, fully knowing I was firing into the air, had jumped at the sound. These animals, driven mad by the wild had lost their instinct to fear. They were now simply waiting for the universal sign that I should be ripped apart.
The small fire at the base of the guard tower licked its way up, traveling up the structure and starting to eat through the support struts. My back started to burn at the intense heat. If I stood here long enough I would be crushed by the building's fall. I needn't worry that the tearing and rending of my flesh at the jaws of these creatures would last more than a few minutes.
The middle creature, the one I had spotted first, moved forward from the shadows. I saw a hand slide along the ground, clawing outward and pushing a trail of the dead Earth toward me. It was a human hand. The lead ripper dog's head slid backward, and from its throat it appeared.
A scarred and painted human face rose up. Two pointed streaks of dark green were trailing down from its eyes. They were the tears these people were destined to shed forever in loss of the great mistress, the holy nameless concubine they worshipped.
These monsters, no longer allied with humanity, were what remained of the Thakka Cluster. Nearly thirty figures rose silently from the ruins around me, like ghosts pouring up from an ancient and forgotten cemetery.
"You came here for us," the first one said stepping forward, his eyes as grey as those on his headdress, "That much is clear."
I tripped over my tongue as I spoke, stuttering like a fool and dropping my rifle to the ground,
"The - - There's a city in the valley. We're going to war with it. I offer what remains of it to you as tribute if you help us." At first, he simply looked over his shoulder into the sea of white and green faces.
"Why do I need the city?" he said stepping forward, all trace of humor in his voice abandoned years ago, "If I needed cities I would have them."
"This could have gone better," I found myself saying.
"My name is Thurrus," the silver eyed man said, "And you have come into our land with business. For that reason I will have to wait until the matriarch has seen you before I kill you. But rest assured. You are now dead."
Behind me the blazing watch tower collapsed in on itself sending sparks into the night sky.
We soon reached a small demolished stone building. It was a tomb, a mausoleum abandoned years ago. A steel door was unbolted from the outside and swung inward with a rusted vulture's cry. Before us were stairs, lit at the edges by candles.
The Thakka Cluster's matriarch sat upon a throne of soot covered granite adorned with furs. Her eyes were covered with white silk bundled like a bandage that had gradually with time become a part of her face. Beneath the blindfold the twin trails of dark green traced her cheeks.
Atop her head she wore the four crisscrossing horns of different creatures, woven forever into her hair years ago in braids and knots. Her clothes consisted of blood-encrusted hides and silks torn from the backs of the tribe's myriad victims. She stared blind as I approached, one hand on her stomach, swollen in the late stages of pregnancy while the other held a burning bundle of leaves which she frequently drifted beneath her nose.
At the back of the room I could see the matriarch's attendants sitting, staring like owls at me as I passed between them. Their faces were blank, except for the paint which seemed to betray some deep and unknowable sadness. In silence I walked in front of the throne and, not knowing what else to do, knelt down humbly, pressing my cheek against the cold stone floor.
"Your name is Ebon," the matriarch said, "Ebon the Waste. And you're here to offer me ashes while you live in paradise." I hadn't even started to respond when she began speaking again - it was an ecstatic rambling, as if she was in a trance, "Silence. I know your thoughts. I have looked long into the savage land and seen the deep truths. It has driven me mad, as it does all things. Why should I help you save your paradise? What does it profit you to live in comfort?" She drifted the burning leaves beneath her nose, breathing deeply as I thought, feeling the coldness of the grave at my cheek. Finally, after a moment I spoke, still hugging the floor,
"Our identity. We have been made into what we are by a sign from the heavens - from the past. We have a way of life that is rare."
"Rare things aren't worthwhile simply because they're rare," she said, adding a scornful laugh, "That's a fool's tongue in your head. Perhaps I should have your brother Crassus brought here. He seems a bit smarter."
I lifted my cheek from the stone floor and slowly rose to my feet, standing before the matriarch. An idea brewed in my head, one that could very well have doomed us all.
"If you know this much about me, then surely you know something of the encounter we had earlier today. Crassus, my brother, hurled a rock at a man who could have him killed even now. Something inside him broke. He became like a rabid animal. He wanted to embrace the violence he had learned to fear in the wasted land of our youth. If you won't help us for the tribute we offer, help us for the sake of killing."
The matriarch was very still for a moment, passing the burning leaves once again beneath her nose and breathing deeply. With her hand resting on her bare and swollen stomach, she smiled faintly and nodded,
"Kill him."
"Do it. I'm already dead," I quickly added, feigning the same death stare I had seen earlier from the interlopers at the burning guard tower. Hands seized my shoulders. They were quick
ly pulling me back into the darkness of the chamber. With eyes unmoving, I continued, "I am dead. I am a vessel of death. Tomorrow I make war on the walking city. And they will know the embrace of oblivion by my hand."
The hands stopped, as if uncertain.
The matriarch gave a laconic chuckle and made a gesture with the burning leaves. Apparently convinced, she said,
“You say the right words, but you don't believe them. Ebon the Waste, child of no one, master of nothing is already dead. So killing him now would profit us nothing. But we won’t live in the wreckage you leave behind. Your tribe and our tribe will live together inside the Plexis. These are my terms. Will you accept them?”
I did. I accept full responsibility for everything that follows, but I knew we had no choice. It was the only way we would survive. I accepted those terms knowing that it may kill us all, knowing we would live a few weeks more. This time, when faced by the gravity of the situation, I did not laugh.