Authors: Kin Law
15: The
Worm
In the face of an unending tide of monstrosities, we nearly collided into one another escaping in the same direction. We didn’t waste any time, heading right into the spire’s open portal, an arch of what looked like dull lead carved in strange runes. Even I did not know from what tradition they hailed.
Ammunition gone, knives spent, we despaired of going back the way we had come. Even Elric Blair’s photogrammer was out of exposures. The way back was blocked by a vast, coursing river of air. It gaped between the various landmarks freed from the yoke of the
Nidhogg’s
metal tentacles. Her emptied, ruined gantries hung across the void, taunting us with bridges to nowhere. Only a thousand-foot drop into Eastern European sky awaited those who dared pay the toll.
I turned back, once, hearing my hair whip across Blair’s long-suffering face. My gorge rose at the glimpse of bluish limbs studded with tubes, joints sliding on milled grooves instead of tendons. I couldn’t help but trace the pressure points, the rivers of nerves where I might have put some stupefying needle, surely to be thwarted by plates leaking an old, red putrescence.
Vanessa Hargreaves loped down the corridors at my side. Her scorched pencil skirt made me wince momentarily. Were my skirts as ripped and bedraggled, as coated in blood and machine grease? Steam was good for cleaning, but I knew this bodice would never be gorgeous again. I would dig up these tights and find them stinking of this place. The
Nidhogg
bled a rank miasma, venting steam purple with the smell of something unclean.
Blair was having the worst of it, carrying Cezette Louissaint, who seemed to have curled up into his arms, shivering.
In the end, there was nowhere else to go but down, down and deep into the
Nidhogg
until we reached a smelted door. We had no choice but to tumble through, barring it as best we could behind us. Ill-lit schematics showed we were in the center of the ship. We needed to find Albion, find the Core, and destroy it, before Mordemere got his hands on the crystal and reached the Laputian Leviathan. With the full intention of carrying out our ill-conceived mission, we turned to behold a terrible sight.
“By Queen and Country…” Hargreaves’ labored wheeze was the first sign of something wrong. She had been wearing a
ppropriated headgear, polarized against the light, and whipping it off, was already adjusted to the relative gloom. She was the first to see beyond the portal.
It was dark, deep inside the ship, and the pervasive smell was stronger than ever. Rotted meat, raw sewage or simple garbage could not account for the rancid egg stench.
In the blackness, it was one of those scents all the more nauseating for its mystery. A nose kept sniffing at it, trying to figure out what all the familiar components were, while becoming increasingly sick from it. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I immediately wished they had remained blind forever.
White. Blindng, maggot-white filled the chamber, occasionally interposed by the glossy grease-black of machinery. At first I thought I was looking at some enormous worm, grown huge on the feed of Mordemere’s conquered. Pinkish growths poked out of the mass at intervals, like the stubby legs of some monstrous larvae, each one grasping and reaching unceasingly.
They writhed, they struggled, and the whole mass presented itself against the center of the room, braced against smaller columns holding up the ceiling. Occasionally one lump brushed grease clean from the chains, gleaming gold beneath. My eyes adjusted more, and I gasped, for I had glimpsed the unmistakable configuration of brown eyes, per
ched alarmingly over some gross, pink swell of flesh.
“The worm that gnaws at the roots of the tree of life…” Blair murmured, then began to wretch in a corner. Hargreaves took Cezette for a moment, obligingly. None of us could smell the sick coming out of Blair. The horrible stink of what lay before us blew away anything a healthy person could dredge up. It heaved itself at us in waves, as if a massive, rotted bellows was churning the stagnant air into hot, thick soup. No, not a bellows, lungs, great and meaty and riddled with consumption.
“Clemens said… Oh God, Cid said aeons react to emotions.
Peoples’
emotions…” Hargreaves managed, though she could wrench her eyes from the sight. Cezette was visibly shivering, her face buried in the linen of Hargreaves’ bosom.
With a wrenching pop, something fell from the mass of flesh wrapped round the core of the
Nidhogg
. It landed with a splat, scrabbling and writhing onto the grating. It had two arms and two legs, but the thing wasn’t a person anymore. It drooled, it bled from every pore in its skin, and it reached out as if for some small morsel of food or human warmth. I started to put one high-heeled boot towards it, but it recoiled, as if in horror, at even the kindness of a warm hand. After watching its eyes darting around, I realized what it was after- the touch of the chains, once again.
In the end it simply collapsed, and lay still.
The look on its face was one of agonized rapture, as if it had, paradoxically, spent all its life fighting free of the mass beside it, only to die in the attempt.
With a squelch, another something fell out of the mass on the other side, landing wi
th another splat. It was brown. What I had taken for dark machinery was not only gears and cogs. This close, the susurrus of moaning just beneath all the steamwork was hard to bear.
“We destroy it,” I heard myself say. “We find Albion, and we-“
“We can’t,” the Inspector said. “Blair was facing death, and Clemens used the a Moore crystal to save him. We all heard him use the last one on Captain Samuel.”
“It’s a machine! We’ll throw a wrench into the gears!” I yelled, furious. This Core, this thing that Jonah Moore had helped build, it was monstrous. The sheer wrongness of it seemed to defy reality. It could not exist any longer, but there it squatted, holding up the ship, nourishing itself on the lives of everyone in its body. I suddenly remembered all the missing persons’ posters, plastered on the streets of Leyland.
“I suspect our involvement will no longer be necessary,” Elric Blair’s voice cut through. “Do you hear? This horrible thing is coming apart at the seams. It’s going to collapse at any moment!”
Indeed, this great worm was shedding its ghoulish components to the faint grind of misaligned machinery. My fine helmswoman’s senses told me this ship was deeply sick, in its death throes- unless, my intuition suggested, the Leviathan crystal was used.
“But we have no guarantee-!” I began.
“We do,” Hargreaves said, and when I looked at her I almost wretched. She was
touching
the Core! Her bare fingers were resting on a bulge of flesh near us. It was dewed with sweat. Cezette had been set on the floor, in a fetal position. The caps of her missing legs gleamed alarmingly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled. I hurried to pick up Cezette again, off the fetid-smelling grating. “Get away from it!”
“No,” Hargreaves said. Her eyes were unfocused in the dim light, dilated to black circles rimmed in blue. “These people… they’ve been here so long, they’ve forgotten who they were. They’ve forgotten their dreams, their hopes, friends, lovers… They only know suffering.”
“
It’s the great secret of this place, you see… the Core yearns for memories. The yearning draws the memories in the monuments near, right into the sky. This one, here,” Hargreaves touched a mass of ruddy flesh barely recognizable as a person. “This used to be Maddie McCreedy… she once saw the Eiffel Tower in a book, and dreamed of meeting her paramour on the observation deck. There, that brownish lump, that used to be a steel worker named Robert. He always wanted to go to Big Ben, and climb it when nobody was looking. Over here, this used to be Esteban Dio, Templar Champion, in exile from his home in Barcelona. He used to sit in the Vatican, the last bastion of his faith, and play chess with a friend who had never heard of the Bible. They can’t go any more, so they’re pulling the places closer instead.”
Hargreaves laughed, quite suddenly, and a moment later started tearing up.
“Snap out of it!” I cried, and delivered one of my patented roundhouse slaps. It was one tailor-made for Nessie Drake’s temper tantrums.
As my hand made contact, I got a flash of something- images, feelings, a smell I couldn’t place.
Then it was gone, and I found my face wet. Elric Blair was standing over us, holding the Inspector back.
“Are you all right?” Blair asked, reluctant to let go.
“Yes… yes, thank you,” the Inspector said, after a moment. “We should find the Captain… we need to leave.”
“Agreed,” I said emphatically. “Fuck this place.”
16: Future that Never Was
To Albion’s surprise, the tower he emerged into was already filled with the scintillating brilliance of the Laputian Leviathan. The shades of cerulean, azure and lapis streaming in through the French doors could not be mistaken for anything else.
Albion had felt his ears pop as he rode up on the elevator. The air was difficult to breathe. They must have risen over the cloud cover, or ridden out of whatever dread mist Mordemere’s contraption created, for the Leviathan’s light lanced through in neat, ordered rows. He looked outside, and immediately regretted it- the shimmering galleries and halls hanging in midair seemed nearly real, like he could step outside the porthole and stand on a city in the sky.
He had to hurry.
The
Nidhogg
was, understandably, unlike any airship Albion had ever flown, hijacked or threatened. The elevator opened onto an anteroom. It was laid in a ring right round the edge of the spire, like an enclosed tower battlement. Albion dragged muddy boots across the lush carpeting, staggering past an astonishing array of artifacts. Plush Chesterfields and Victorian brocade sofas reclined near walls full of ancient tomes gleaming with patina. Exotic plants stood in ancient China vases. Crystal learning cubes full of plant samples and insects sat neatly in a mahogany box on one shelf. Another held a series of anthropological artifacts, including a series of human skulls. Some were the size of Albion’s hands.
As Albion trudged through, he could see Mordemere’s stolen landmarks slowly pulling away from the
Nidhogg
proper.
The room might have been meant as a parlor or observation deck, save for the obelisk on the opposite side of the spire from the elevators. After inspecting it, Albion found it was a door- but a door of so cunning make, it was impossible to discern what seams lay in it.
Albion pushed on the obelisk before him experimentally. They swung open on invisible oiled hinges, hidden mechanisms whirring away in two wide slabs, and Albion stepped through. Immediately, they shut again, locking with thundering snapping and clicking sounds.
Albion found himself in another room much like the first, still filled with the casual luxury and beauty of a man used to the ripe fruits of society. The only difference was a majestic crystal dome overhead, spilling the azure light of the Leviathan into the room. A mural clung to the skirts of the dome roof, lit by its radiance. It was brighter in the center of the spire, like being in the inside of a rainbow. A raised dais sat in the middle, presenting a bank of controls and gauges that seemed to defy understanding.
An aristocratic, sonorous voice echoed through the chamber.
“Nobody ever lets a villain monologue anymore. Where’s our sense of the dramatic, you think? Blown away with the first of us aeronauts, or rent asunder by our tedious industry?” The voice sighed. “I will settle for a dialogue instead.”
Albion froze. Where had Valima Mordemere’s voice come from? There was a certain undersea quality, with the odd specimens suspended in taxidermy or crystal here and there. Yet, even in this place, it would take Kitty Desperado to get the jump on the Manchu Marauder.
Mordemere was standing quite casually by one of his bookshelves, a slim tome in one gloved hand. He looked exactly as the daguerrotypes and photograms made him out to be: gray eyes, gray hair, smooth chin, the picture of aristocracy, though it was public knowledge he came from common engineer stock. There was an oddly aquiline quality to his uncannily youthful features. Slotted precisely into a herringbone suit, Mordemere seemed to embody the idea of nobility, rather than the actual
ity.
Albion started, his breath catching. Atop the dais, the body of his assailant, Wood Shoes, lay crumpled before a polished silver pedestal. On top of the pedestal, Captain Samuel’s guidance crystal floated over a reddish glow. It was a jagged, shining knife, pointing doggedly through the air, presumably at the Laputian Leviathan. Albion didn’t like the look of the light; he would have bet his prize stash of aged Scotch it had something to do with Jonah Moore’s dread Core.
“Would you like to sit?”
“How did you find the Leviathan so quickly?” Albion asked instead.
“There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio…” Mordemere began, but he trailed off when he saw Albion understood, and didn’t give a damn.
Mordemere sighed. “The Leviathan isn’t in any one place. It exists all around us. I merely needed to assemble the appropriate offerings, and
voila
! Like Faust conjuring Mephistopheles. Like how I summoned your adoptive father by seeding the haunts of scoundrels with rumors. Where Albion Clemens goes, so too goes Samuel Clemens, with my athame.”
Mordemere gestured towards the guidance crystal, so recently plundered from the body at his feet. Albion suddenly felt like a foil.
“But we set the landmarks of Europe free, you shouldn’t have been able to gather the...”
“My dear Jonah Moore has been telling tall tales again, to my advantage, I might add,” Mordemere mused, as if he were alone. He put an ornate silk ribbon into the book and placed it back in the shelf, then immediately looked for a second one. Albion was about to go for his Victoria, but he thought better of it.
Though he looked the part of an absentminded professor, Mordemere was holding a strange, silvery weapon in his other hand.
“I’m afraid my colleague and I were mistaken,” Mordemere continued to speak. “We were originally led to believe the Leviathan is a physical thing, floating here and there like a nomad. It is not. The aeon stones create the Leviathan, from our thoughts, and dreams. You have just witnessed their effect yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Albion answered, not quite honestly.
“Come now. If you truly intended to shoot my old collaborator Samuel, you would have hit him on the first shot. Ever since the advent of your ‘lift compound, all our alloys have become tainted with aeon stone particles. At this density, even a blind man could hit a fly at fifty paces.”
“You’re saying simply being in the vicinity of the stuff is enough to summon the Leviathan,” Albion guessed. “You only needed to have the five landmarks of Europe in the same place.”
“If you want it enough. If you have something to focus your intent, like this magnificently fortuitous athame here. Ah Ah Ah, I would not touch your weapon, if I were you. Set that beastly pistol over there, beside my bust of Aristotle. There’s a lad.”
Albion did as he was told. He wasn’t sure if Mordemere was entirely sane, or what the odd silvery weapon did.
“What do you want from the Leviathan? If Moore was wrong about it, he might have been wrong about you too,” Albion said, biding for time.
“Should I? No, there isn’t any need… though I suppose…” Mordemere spoke aloud. He seemed to come to a conclusion. “All genius requires an audience. It’s the great failure of the species.”
He hovered, uncertain.
“
All right, I will tell you. You survived my little creations below, after all, which shows you have some ability… though this one seems to have taken the brunt of the punishment.” Mordemere nudged the body of Wood Shoes off the dais with his shoe.
“All ears,” Albion said, barely holding back a wince.
Where had
Rosa and Hargreaves and Blair gone? Was the ship about to come down around his ears? He had barely spared them a thought, everything was happening so quickly. No- he had to stay in the moment, aware of the one chance to strike.
“See this mural?” Mordemere began. The light of the Leviathan was now bright enough to see all the details of the room. In the mural all around them were fantastic scenes of tall, shining ziggurat shapes, men and women conversing through strange devices, vehicles seeming to defy the laws of physics much as Moredemere’s flying city defied them. The Leviathan lit all from overhead.
“There, a man who can talk to his fellow on the other side of a country, without resorting to dirigibles or telegraph, but through a device no bigger than a pocket-glass,” Mordemere was saying. An airship flying through the air with no dangerous gasses, but by great forward momentum and the innate nature of air to occupy space!”
He seemed to grow more impassioned by the second.
“Vast networks of metal filament, linking everyone to everyone else. At the center of it all will be my Laputian Leviathan, an infinite power source fueling it all, at cost to none. The animals of the world will live rationally once more, wanting for nothing, yet possessing of everything. What a glorious future!”
“Animals?” Albion asked, to fuel the alchemist’s passion. The silvery weapon was caught up in gesticulations, aiming to and fro. The Captain scented a chance, yet the words pricked at something in Albion’s chest.
“What else are they?” Mordemere asked. Wrong move, Albion thought. Now the alchemist’s attention was square on him. Mordemere was taking in the goggles, the airman’s jacket, the inquisitive brown eyes.
“Animals fighting over coal, water, steel. Animals willing to do anything to survive, betray each other to get ahead. Animals fighting over who gets to live
where. Look at this world, this Europe at the brink of war. The sky is endless and free, yet the Ottomans think themselves rightful possessors of a piece of infinity. The British are no better, parading their Knights of the Round over trade routes until they’ve driven their competitors to drastic measures. Surely you understand this travesty, air pirate!”
“You sold the Ottomans arms,” Albion accused.
“Why not? Their way leads only to war,” Mordemere continued. He seemed to be confirming the statement to himself. “Let them scour the land clean of the surplus population. Better my way. Better I take the ruin they leave behind, take this Leviathan and rebuild. I can use it to provide free energy, clean energy to the world!
Casually, Mordemere held out a simple compass with his free hand. The needle stayed resolutely north, until it hovered over the crystal pedestal. Then, it began to spin with such violence that it cracked the glass.
“With energy comes food, comes potable water, warm places to live. Think of it- when an Animal receives everything it needs, it becomes Tame. Surely it is better than this chaos?” Mordemere continued.
“I can bring to our world a new Energy Age, an Age long since abandoned and forgot. I can restore a Future that Never Was, the one depicted there!”
Mordemere gestured widely, at all the magnificence he surrounded himself with. He looked to his captive audience, and for a split second Albion thought he saw the alchemist seeking approval. How alone must he be?
Albion could not fathom the nights here in this tower room, for months on end, meticulously playing with others’ lives and bodies, selling weapons to both sides of a war in hopes of scavenging the carrion leavings. Suddenly Albion was seeing through the veneer of mature aristocracy, at a soul even younger than his own sophomoric one, a weak, lonely soul wishing for a better tomorrow.
It was always children who were the most unforgivingly cruel.
“You’re right,” Albion agreed in spite of himself. “It’s not a conflict I want to happen. But you’re wrong, also. This energy you want? It’s not free.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve seen where this energy comes from. You have too, if you think about it. All this aeon energy doesn’t just come from the stones alone. Even the stones are not unlimited.”
“Ridiculous! This ship here is proof enough!”
Albion knew it was not wise to stir up the alchemist, whose brows were beginning to knit, but he could not stop.
“Perpetual energy comes from people. Not animals- people who have emotions, who have dreams and wish for your better tomorrow.” Albion said. “Maybe, if you had involved others in this epic quest, it could have come true. But by stealing the Big Ben, the Vatican, even Red Square… you’re stealing their fondest dreams to fuel your own.”
He knew what would come next.
Like Mordemere said, even a blind man should be able to hit at this distance- but Albion was not blind. He was a seeing, resourceful air pirate, and when he saw Mordemere begin to aim his weapon, he didn’t even need to think about moving. He simply reached for the closest object, the marble bust of Aristotle, and flung it at Valima Mordemere.
“Bollocks,” Mordemere said, laconically, as if he’d scorched himself making beans and toast. His silvery weapon discharged a blue streak, profanity given fire and life, arcing through the air. It struck the bust of Aristotle and detonated it with a pop, filling the room with a great cloud of powdered marble and a smell of burning copper.