The streets before the Palace of Parliament are empty, the only sound being the echo of our footfalls off the abandoned buildings. That, and Yuvamai’s anxious breathing. He stands next to me, so close I can smell his sweat, laced with sweet wine from the evening prior. Oh, soft memory, but would you not give way to hard truth. Knowing that today would be our march on the parliament, we had imbibed the night before. We had taken the entirety of Chapel neighborhood. It had been ours for the past week, and it became our playground as we cemented the plans for our coup. Thurmond provided the music with his bass-saber and floating screen symphony, while Nazbeth had scoured the greenhouses and labs for the herbs and pills we’d require. Yavamai had stayed close to me throughout it all, trying to articulate the doubts and fears he had on his young mind.
“Whatever happens tomorrow, Drinkwater, I trust in you,” He told me, his pupils dilated, his words freely flowing. “I trust you, that all this is right. That what we’re about to do is right. My father believes in you, as do your men. I’m just... I’m just glad to have met you.” And I was glad to have met him, truly. He was beautiful and not jaded, despite being born outside the dome of Yama Dempuur, feeding off its scraps all his life. I hoped there was a place in the future for him. But now, with the building of parliament looming above us, with nothing but our gauntlets and wits to keep us safe, there was only war and duty. My time spent in the warm crook of Yavamai’s arm was in the past. There would be death today, though hopefully not among my ranks.
I’d made it known for some time that I was coming. After Chapel had been taken and secured, and our base set up in the Temple of the Spider Sisters, I had sent envoys to the parliament to give them an ultimatum: renounce power, or die. We knew what their answer would be, and had therefore expected a gun and steel retaliation, however futile it might be. Instead, parliament’s huge bronze doors stand unguarded before us, behind which were the rusted cogs of Yama Dempuur’s government.
“Where is everybody?” Mai’il says. No one amongst us is as tall as he, though Inchbald comes closest, just about as tall but doubly wide, with strong, corded muscle. A mechanical engineer before taking up the cause, Inchbald’s work has made him as as strong as five men. “I expected the palace guards to be out in full force, or to at least see some of those damn empresses.”
“Disappointed, Mai’il?” Nazbeth says. There’s not much that the rotund little man says which isn’t tinged with an acerbic wit. “I can go back to one of the engine rooms and find an empress, if you’d like. Surely they’d love the chance to come and play with you.”
“Shut up, both of you.” I say. There’s a whining in the air, barely audible. “Do you hear that?”
“What is it, Drinkwater?” Yuvamai’s voice breaks on my name. He doesn’t have the gauntlets that my men and I have, instead wielding a lightning staff that he clings to tightly.
“Above us!” Thurmond shouts. Here’s a man who’d rather pluck a string than speak, but he has the keenest sense for danger amongst us. It’s saved us quite a few times, especially when our first attempt at a coup was in danger of getting found out. That had been two years ago, and since then he had become quite the effective enforcer, quickly taking care of any threats to our safety.
“Gauntlets!” I yell, pounding my fist to the ground. My men follow suit quickly, our granite and amethyst gauntlets creating an electromagnetic force-field that goes up around us. The field forms just as a ray of concentrated lightning is let loose from the top of the palace, meeting our force-field dead on.
“Sneaky little weevils, eh?!” Mai’il shouts, thoroughly amused. The thunder that rumbles through the streets is deafening, and a sonic boom radiates out from where we’re all standing. I look up, and see the parliament’s stooges standing around a cannon on one of the higher towers of the palace. I can smell their fear from here. It won’t take much for me to turn the lightning back around on them. With a deft flick of my wrist, the lightning we had been absorbing in our forcefield re-fires, and makes its way back towards them. The top of the tower explodes, and the men who had aimed the cannon at us, with the intent to kill, fall through the air, their bodies aflame.
We drop the shield around us. Palios pushes a stray wisp of white back behind his pointed ear. Other than his one stray hair, we are completely unfazed. “There’s your welcoming party,” Nazbeth says to Mai’il, as smug as a fat kid who beat all the others to the janjan cake. Mai’il chuckles, before softly hitting Nazbeth in the arm, knocking him back. Nazbeth’s fish-eyes wince in pain, but he makes an effort of not showing it. I wave my hand forward, as the flaming bodies hit the pavement with a dull crash. There’s not much time to lose.
We’re marching into the palace, the seat of government on Yama Dempuur for time immemorial. The history books said that Yama Dempuur was constructed immediately following the Great Schism. With a name that literally means “dandelion puff of the Yama people,” the center of one of the oldest cities of the Yama, Vega Mardur, was placed on a platform with a dome above and six great legs beneath. The city could keep ahead of the Fade, or traverse it, if the need ever arose. Which it did, more and more often as the Fade swallowed all of Ameshka Vega. If not for the ingenuity and quick-thinking of our forebears in a time of such grave crisis, our entire heritage would have been lost.
Still, all things in this life eventually fester and die, and the parliament has long been the gangrenous limb of the city in need of an amputation. Nothing but a gaggle of inbred thieves and idiots, the parliament had led Yama Dempuur and the legacy of our people to ruin. The city had once been packed to capacity, the dome teeming with life. Now, half the city’s buildings stood empty and fallen to ruin.
On our march to the parliament, we had passed by our fellow yama. They’d watched us with vacant eyes, ignorant of everything we were fighting for, too stupid to understand the nature of their oppression. To them, we were usurpers and rebels, disrupters of the natural order of things. They were right, but what we sought to end was their slavery and the aristocracy which was kept fat and fed while the lights of the city slowly flickered to black. We were fighting for our history. My men and I were going to seize power and make for the center of all time and space. We were going to finish what the ancients had started. Helios would be bound to his mecha, Hyperion awoken from his slumber, and both bound to our will once and for all.
I was born in the blood of the sun, in the mud of the earth and the sands of time. I am Ma’atha and Yama in equal measure, drinking from the light as I learn from the book. I am beholden to no man, my bloodline descended from a long line of emperors and empresses, though my right to rule was taken away from me. My grandmother, a self-indulgent and ineffectual ruler, was deposed of in a bloodless coup. Her only priority during her twenty or so years as empress was to build monuments to herself all throughout the city. The walls crumbled and the legs the city walked on became slower and more clumsy, yet she ordered more and more statues built in her image, more and more regal courts erected. After her ousting, all the statues that she had made in her likeness were transformed into sentinels of the city, automatons which obeyed every order of the parliament. I was born with a royal name but no sort of inheritance. The parliament and the aristocratic sycophants all eloquently referred to me as Emperor Rag. It was this same Emperor Rag who had assembled the best the standing army had to offer, and had rallied them to his cause. It was Emperor Rag who was now on his way to the palace, to dole out a justice long overdue.
The bronze doors swing open, a slight creak to their hinges. The room beyond is crowded with dusty relics from the days before the Great Schism. Mannequins who have long since rusted and lost their ability to move stand in the vestments of the our ancestors: loose, metallic shirts that hang down to the knees of the wearer, small, squarish hats and pants that fit tightly around the ankle. There are stuffed beasts whose names have been forgotten to time, books in shelves from floor to ceiling, and tapestries of elaborate scenes from stories that all yama grow up hearing over and over
again. The relics line the hallway, which extends as far as the eye can see.
“Hey, look, it’s Pacheco,” Nazbeth says, eyeing one of the tapestries. It’s the famous story told in a twelve part scene, where the young doctor for Captain Lacko’s ship discovered the techniques required for extending one’s time in the Fade. Barbaric techniques to be sure, but desperate times called for desperate measures. That was over a millennium ago, before even the Ma’atha and Yama interbred. To think, there was a time when it was seen as taboo, when Yama prided themselves on their pure bloodlines, just like the members of parliament still do. Scenes from the age of heroes, long over and done. The day when our people produced those like Pacheco are long gone. No one is willing to search for Helios or Hyperion like our forebears did over a thousand years ago. No one is willing to make the sacrifice.
“Hey, fish-eyes, come on,” Palios says to Nazbeth, who has hung back to gawk at all the artifacts lining the walls, unseen by any eyes that did not reside in the head of an aristocrat. “We have to get moving. I’ve been waiting my entire life for this.”
“And I, this. You could stand to wait another few minutes, you bloated bag of oats.” Nazbeth mutters the insult under his breath as he reluctantly leaves the relics behind and trots after us. He and the others tip-toe around Palios, and for good reason. The man is as self-righteous as he is big, as wide of shoulder as Inchbald, but of a leaner build, a viper to a gorilla. Thankfully, his convictions match up with mine well enough that he’s been nothing but a fierce ally. Still, I’m well aware that he operates on his own agenda, and thus I couldn’t say I trust him. Not that I trust anybody.
As we pass down the corridor, the servants come out of the shadows to watch us. They’re stunted and terribly thin, their clothes old and threadbare. One man is shirtless, and so pale his skin appears to be transparent to where you can see the purplish veins underneath. “We’re here to liberate you, friend,” Mai’il says. The man starts to click his tongue against his teeth, and makes signs through the air with his hand. “Do you speak Yamas?” More clicks of the tongue, and the other servants start swaying on their ankles, their frowning faces locked on us. “Not the friendliest lot, are they?”
“No, Mai’il.” Nazbeth says. “They serve the parliament, and only the parliament. They’re pure yama too, by the looks of it.”
“And starved.”
“Disgusting,” I say. There was probably a time when I would have stopped to talk, to help. My view of the world and the problems that afflict it have grown as I’ve aged, and I see that in the time it takes to help one man, I could help all his children never suffer the same fate. I must think of the future, and not the here and now, which has been compromised and lost long before I was even born. The emaciated servants watch us with ill-intending eyes, but they do nothing to hinder us from delving further into the palace.
The floor begins to slope downwards, gradually at first, so that we don’t notice it. Then we see the doors appear, the sphincter at the base of a long gullet. One red, one blue. Legend states that Amesh’s first followers built the original academy following his death. These very doors and the large antechamber within were once all that consisted of the academy; it was around this place of learning that the parliament was built. The doors were painted by Amesh himself. The blue was to represent order, the red chaos, and he wanted all who entered to contemplate the one in relation to the other. The walls were conceived to shelter the brightest of ideas, to further the analysis of Infinite Duality and the nature of chaos. Now, all they housed was abject decay and ineptitude.
I knock on the door. A warbling voice answers from within, “Enter, Emperor Rag.” My stomach tightens up. The door creaks open, revealing a rounded antechamber. Eight men sit at a long wooden table, all of them of varying degrees of corpulence. Indeed, the fattest are so large they must be incapable of any movement beyond waddling their arms around in useless circles, waving for their servants to bring them more roast mutton or brandy. The chairs they sit in, which have small magnets on their bottoms, use the electromagnetic field of surfaces to move their fat frames around effortlessly. A waste of human intelligence, the invention of these baskets for the fat and lazy.
“You’ve finally decided to grace us with your presence, Emperor Rag,” The man in the middle of the table says to me. His name is Doog Valbair. One side of his face seems to melt into his neck, the result of a stroke or a birth defect. His hands are folded over top of his huge girth, his fingers as swollen as slug worms.
“You’ll do best to stop calling him that, fat man,” Palios says, stepping forward. Blue lightning crackles from his gauntlets. “We may yet have some degree of mercy on you and your cronies, were you to respect your new masters and abdicate peaceably.”
A man two to the right from Doog laughs. He sounds like he’s drowning on his own blubber. “Mercy? Oh, that is rich.” The man’s name is Oliver Tai’chik, and he’s descended from a long line of bankers and money-minded leeches. “Tell us how you will have mercy on us, half-breed.”
“Palios is too generous,” I say, laying a hand on my comrade’s shoulder. “There will not be any mercy. For any of you. You are the last of your lines. You’ve brought this once proud and thriving city to its knees, and have not even the decency to accept responsibility. The people of Yama Dempuur are stupid, ignorant and starving, and it is all because of your ineptitude. Still, you hide away in your palace, behind your relics and laws and traditions. Your days as rulers of Yama Dempuur are over, do you understand me? Now, do you have anything to say for yourselves?”
“Yes, yes, I do,” It’s one of the younger, and least fat of the eight men at the table. Even so, he’s still about five of me rolled into one. “Could you have one of the boys outside bring in another bottle of port? All this talk of relics and laws has gotten me quite thirsty.”
Palios shakes my hand off his shoulder, and aims his gauntlet at the man before I can stop him. The blue lightning crackles and fires, and the fat man is consumed. Or so it seems. There’s some sort of counteractive force, an electromagnetic shield which propels Palios’s lightning away.
“What the...?” Nazbeth says.
Doog begins to chuckle. “Can never be too careful. These are dangerous times we live in. Always have the forcefield up. Don’t want any of the help stabbing us in the neck with a dinner fork, now do we? Erm... empresses? Would you all be so kind as to escort our guests to their deaths?”
The chamber echoes with stampeding feet, and before any of us are ready for it, the empress statues encircle us. They’re fast, well-oiled machines, the smallest just shy of ten feet tall. They patrol the city streets, breaking up the occasional disturbance or skull, keeping the people trembling and afraid. On orders from the parliament, Inchbald’s father, also an engineer, transformed the empress statues from motionless monuments into a legion of mechanical soldiers. Perhaps most perfect for the parliament was that they barely had to lift a finger for the automatons to do their bidding. They were controlled, as was almost all of the ancient city, by the thousand year old man that had been bioengineered to be the master computer of Yama Dempuur. He was the very first yama who copulated with a ma’atha, and as a twisted punishment for tarnishing the bloodline, he was locked into the city’s mainframe. As his body decayed, his limbs were replaced with tubes and circuitry, until he was inseparable from the city. His name has been lost to history, and if anyone knew what it was, they dared not say it. He controls the empresses from somewhere deep within one of the engine rooms. Few men had ever seen him, save the head engineers who heeded his commands.
“He’s one ugly sight, and that’s an understatement,” Inchbald told us, one evening not so long ago. We were all sitting around a brushwood fire, the walking city glimmering in the distance. “They say it’s not the machines which keep him alive, but some darkness he’s come to know. My paw said he saw a group of shadows once deep in one of the engine rooms, moving about on their own, with heads like horses or birds.” We h
ad been chilled to the bone by Inchbald’s story, because at the end time, there wasn’t much that could not be true. We all knew there wasn’t much time left for the worlds of the spiral. We also knew that there was a darkness lurking in the walking city, that the parliament was just the edge of the cancer.
Yuvamai En’chik had spit into the fire at that. “I never set foot in that damned place,” He had said. He was a second generation wanderer, his father and mother having been exiled from the city for some forgotten transgression long ago. He had been born in the wasteland, alternately following the city and fleeing the Fade. “But I heard talk of that half-man-machine, and those kings that keep him alive. It’s a dark business, all of it.” It had been good to find the wanderers of a like mind to us. Yuvamai En’chik was their unofficial leader, a skeletal man with wide eyes and but three teeth in his head. There was nothing that he or his small band of scavengers liked about Yama Dempuur, but they still carried the torch for what Ameshka Vega had been. En’chik even carried a worn copy of “Infinite Duality” with him, though he could barely read a word. They were a hardy lot, living off the refuse of the walking city and the sparse vegetation that grew in the slowly fading world. If we had not proved ourselves capable, they would have slit our throats in the night and left us to the dire cats that wandered the wastes. They couldn’t take in stragglers. Instead, we more than proved ourselves. Two of them even volunteered to join our cause. En’chik’s youngest son, Yuvamai Orrn’chik, was one.
His hair was close cropped, the same length as his beard, as was the wanderer way. He had an easy smile, and a fluid grace to him that suggested he had spent a lifetime standing in canoes as opposed to wandering the dark desert. I loved him from the first I laid eyes on him. There was also Danda Ros. Danda was a scarred rare-metal miner and ex-weapons dealer who had a score to settle with the parliament. They had exiled him after replacing the entire military with the empresses, so as not to risk a military coup in the tumultuous political upheaval. “They should have killed me when they had the chance,” He would say, in between tokes of the chap weed he always had packed tight into his cob pipe. “I’m as close a thing to a royalist that a’int breathing dirt and worms. Your majesty.” He was a bitter man, but he seemed capable enough, despite his years. Still, as we climbed the grappling hooks we had attached to the walking city, Danda had fallen. The tractors, glass sentries which circled the city and guarded it against intruders, had knocked him off. We destroyed the rest of them easily enough. Danda became a necessary sacrifice, as we would have never made our way in if he had not died.
The Empress statues are solid granite, like our gauntlets. Their eyes glow a fierce orange, and their faces are all curled up into sinister smiles. It’s a face I’ve grown to hate, though it resembles my own more so than not. The face of my grandmother, the face which set in motion my awakening. “Forward!” I yell, and my men and I run into the fray, the blue lightning from our gauntlets crackling around the room, reflecting off the force field of the Parliament, and tearing pieces of granite off of the bodies of the empress statues. The fat men watch through lugubrious eyes, some of them sucking on the bones of their latest feast. I keep my gaze pasted on Doog, even as I deflect a skull-crushing windmill punch from one of the empresses with my gauntlet.
“This is for the ancestors!” I yell, winding up my fist and pummeling it through one of the empresses’ chest. The statue’s torso explodes in a splash of stone and blue lightning, and it even makes a gargled death sound as it falls to its knees. It’s eyes grow dim, and it doesn’t move again. All around me, my men are shouting their allegiances to the old ways:
“For Helios and Hyperion!” Thurmond rumbles, slicing an empress’s arm off with his bass-saber.
“For Amesh!” Nazbeth croons, his eyes flashing white blue with the lightning around his body. “For Vega Mardur!”
“For the yama!” Yuvamai Ornnchik, son of En’chik, shouts. He comes up behind the empress which has knocked Palios down, and cracks it over the head with his staff. The statue’s head falls to pieces, and Yuvamai’s beautifully bearded face shifts into a look of triumph. We share a look. For a moment, I see a future together, where we’ve succeeded in all we’ve set out to do and we can settle into our old age together. I don’t see the other statue coming up behind him. Before I can even scream a warning, the empress statue rears up, it’s heavy stone fists clenched, and drops it down on Yuvamai’s skull. There’s a crunch, and the young man goes down, his eyes rolled to the back of his head, the blood already pouring out through his nose and ears.
“No!” I yell, rushing to him. I know it’s already too late, that Yuvamai is gone. I dissociate from my body, escaping into a calmness that can only watch as my emotions take over, my body running, all on autopilot. I watch as I shoot a ray of lightning from my gauntlet, a ray as thick as a tree trunk, and disintegrate the empress who killed Yuvamai into a powder of fine black soot. I drop down to my knees next to the young wanderer, who the night before had told me how he had believed in me and our cause, who I had taken from his simple life in the wasteland to his death in the domed city. I cry, taking his broken head in my hands. Blood and gray brain pieces slip through my fingers. Palios watches, his brow furrowed. The calmness inside me can’t read his thoughts, but the sobbing creature who is cradling the dead boy, he doesn’t care. That semblance of Drinkwater is only concerned with delivering death, and has the parliament in his sights.
Of the dozen or so empresses that had swarmed out from the wings, there are only three or four which continue to fight. The rest are broken to pieces, short work for our lightning gauntlets. Palios looks more shaken than hurt, but Mai’il has a serious gash down his arm. Nazbeth, Thurmond and Inchbald are taking care of the rest of the empresses, more toying with them than engaging in heavy combat. I’ve only eyes for the men at the table of parliament. They all watch me silently, the unmistakable look of fear in their bloated faces.
“You killed him,” I say. I can feel the lightning from my gauntlets coursing through my body, building in intensity. It feeds me, gives me energy, as my blood feeds the amethyst orb in the center of the gauntlet. It’s all building. The anger feeds the gauntlets, the gauntlets feed the anger. It’s as close a thing to a closed, perpetual source of energy as ever there could be.
“You’re the treasonous one here, Drinkwater,” Doog says, his voice now deathly serious. “You march in here, attempting a coup. Well, it’s no surprise that the boy is dead! Playing at war with the lives of innocents. You’re no better than the supposed villains you fight against.”
By the table is a discarded fork. I pick it up, and make to climb the table. The force field comes up and blocks my way. I start hammering at it with my fists, as several of the fat men begin to laugh.
“Look at this fool,” the young one who had asked for the bottle of port before says. “All brute force and no brains. What a waste of technology, those gauntlets were for the likes of them.” But his smile falters as the force field begins to crackle, and shrink in on itself.
“I... will... kill you...” I say, the forcefield falling back enough that I can climb up on the table. I punch the forcefield again, and it gives under my knuckles, enough that my fingers can get a handhold between the crack that has formed. All is silent around me. My men must be watching me, as the parliament does. No one moves to help or stop me. What I’m doing is beyond the laws of science, beyond what should be humanly possible. Still, the forcefield yields, and comes apart, and soon I’m staring down at Doog, who sits motionless at the table. The sagging side of his face is mottled with sores and skin tags, but the other side is drawn up in surprise. I take the fork in my hand and jam it down, into Doog’s forehead, over and over, small ribbons of blood streaming out into the air and down his face.
“Oh god! Oh god, no!” He screams. I slap him in the face, then punch him so hard he falls back out of his chair. I’m on top of him, my lungs heaving. I jab the fork back down again and again, stabbing him in t
he neck, in the cheek. He’s coughing and sputtering up blood. There’s a pink froth on his wet lips. The rest of the parliament try to leave, their chairs floating away from the massacre of Doog. The forcefield goes down so they can try and escape, but my men are waiting for them on the other side.
“Help us! Oh god, please, no!” Oliver Tai’chik and the rest of parliament scream, but Palios and the rest are past the point of listening to amnesty. I look into Doog’s face, and he must give in to the fact that his time is up, his rule over. He cracks a smile, his worn down teeth covered in a bright red sheen. “You think you know how this all works, don’t you, Emperor Rag? Do you know what really runs the walking city?” I hit him again, so that a tooth flies out of his mouth in a pink froth, but he just laughs. “Do you know the darkness?”
“Where’s the book, fat man?” He slowly turns his head, and looks me dead in the eyes. The one half of his face is already corpse-like, swollen and purple, but his good side is more alive than I’ve ever seen it. Doog was never stupid, far from it. He knew the game, knew he had it rigged in his favor. His smile widens, the wounds in his face leaking fresh blood.
“I have it packed up and ready for you, your majesty. In the shelf behind the dining table. But do tell, which way did it go, Drinkwater? Did he put it in you, or was it the other way around? Did you fuck him the same way you’re fucking all your men, hm? Pulling the wool over their eyes, dragging them along to pump up your ego, to give you a sense of self-worth. You’re worse than any of us, Emperor Rag. You’re worse because you hide your ambition behind self-righteousness.” The rage overtakes me, and I hit him, until his eyes roll up in his head, much like Yuvamai’s did when the empress cracked him over the head. I hit Doog again and again, wanting to make his head break open.
When the fatigue in my arms finally becomes too much to bear, I roll off Doog’s fatness and make my way back over the table to my men. They all watch me with pursed lips and sad eyes. All around them are the corpses of the parliament, rounded like burial mounds. Their deaths seem like they were quicker than Doog’s was, a quick slit across the throat or a head shot from the gauntlet. The stunted, pale bodies of other yama also dot the room, their servants. “They came in to help their masters, loyal to the final moment,” Nazbeth says, coming up to me. He tries to place a hand on my arm, but I quickly shake it away. “Don’t touch me, damn it,” I say, making my way to where Yuvamai lies. Someone has draped a cloth over his entire upper body, so that only his thin legs and worn boots stick out.
“He’s gone, Drinkwater,” Inchbald says. The others are silent, as I drop down next to Yuvamai’s body. The sheet stays over his face, the fabric dark and heavy with blood. I don’t lift it, nor do I want to. I’d rather remember him as he was, the effortless smile, the naive glimmer in his eyes...
“Let’s go,” I say. “We shouldn’t waste any more time here. Palios, read the parliament’s crimes. Quickly now.”
“But... they’re all dead.” Nazbeth stammers.
“I know that. But we’ve standards to maintain. We didn’t just come here to overthrow their government. We came because we had to, because of the ruin the city has fallen into, because of the destiny we must reclaim. Now, please. Read their crimes.” Palios pulls a sheaf of parchment out of the satchel he keeps attached to his belt, and reads the crimes that the parliament had committed. There are a total of thirty-six, and it takes around ten minutes to read them all. He rolls the parchment back up, and looks at me with a firm mouth. The calmer Drinkwater who had been a spectator to the events following Yuvamai’s death has resurfaced and regained control of his emotions. I nod to my men. It is indeed time to go. Ousting the parliament was only the first part of our mission. The second part will be even more trying, as it involves a technology which no one in Yama Dempuur had used in several hundred years. At the center of the city lies the bridge, across which lies the other worlds. Qani Dariel. It’s buried under the tarmac, beneath the eight engine rooms, truly the heart of Yama Dempuur.
“Thurmond, go to that shelf over there. Yes, that one. Open it. There should be a satchel, with a book inside.” Thurmond does as he is told, the bass guitar with the diamond sharp axe blade along its body strapped to his back. He pulls the bag out, a plain potato sack that one of the servants probably brought over from the greenhouses over in the barkskin ghetto. “Bring it to me. Ah, yes, this is it. The Atlas. The Grid should be mapped out within, all the known bridges stemming from Yama Dempuur.” I pull the book out from the bag. It’s ancient, the leather on the binding crumbling at my touch. I place it on the floor, and open its crisp pages. In a delicate hand are drawn images of the bridges and the worlds they connect to. Equations run around the edges of the pages, spiraling in towards the center, symbols indicating how the spaces between worlds were found, the energy required to maintain the bridges, the nature of higher beings and gods.
“I’ve dreamed of this book,” I say. One of the bodies jolts up as rigor mortis sets in. A sigh escapes from the bloated corpses throat, and its like a haunted wind. This truly is a dead city, with only ghosts to inhabit its walls now. Yama Dempuur is dead and gone. There is only the way forward.
The tomb of Doog and his men fades away to memory behind us, as we make our way to Valence Aeterna, the square at the center of the city. Beneath the statue of the great spiral, built several hundred years ago by Umber Valbair, an ancestor that Doog always boasted his descent from, lies the entrance to the heart of the city. We easily break open the rusted locks and descend into the claustrophobic tunnel. The bioluminescent lights hum softly, and there’s a pounding on the walls, the hidden pipes tirelessly pumping the enzyme enriched water and luciferase. It’s the heartbeat of Yama Dempuur, keeping alive a body whose spirit has fled.
“What does the map say?” I say to Nazbeth, as we reach a crossroads in the narrow tunnels. His gauntlet glows softly over the ancient book, giving the aged pages a greenish hue.
“Left,” He says.
“Are you sure?”
“Erm... yes. I’m sure.” We cut left, and start heading down deeper into the city. The warmth is ebbing, and a musty odor starts to settle over us. The walls, which had been smooth throughout our descent, start showing signs of carving and design. “There are carvings down here. But why? What is this place?”
It’s the taciturn Thurmond who responds. “This is a burial chamber. Emperors, rulers, kings.” Sure enough, each block carving is of a central figure, usually a man with a flowing cape and a suit of armor. Even further along, as the mustiness becomes almost too much to bear, the vestments of the rulers engraved in the walls goes from that of armor to three-piece suits, with cravats and canes instead of gauntlets and capes. Statesmen, before Ameshka Vega’s military took control of worldly affairs and brought it to the center of all time and space.
“Who knew that this was down here,” Nazbeth says.
“The parliament knew. Of that, I’m sure.” Palios says. Even with the entire source of his malice dead and rotting, he still feels he has a grudge to settle with them. “They kept it hidden from us, from all the yama. Sheep in some stupid game...”
“Relax, Palios,” I say. “What’s dead is no threat to anyone anymore.” He makes to answer, but his attention is snapped away when there’s a clanging from further down the tunnel. It’s dark ahead, the lamps lining the hallway glowing no more. At the edge of the blue light flowing out from our hands, we can see a jagged piece of rusted metal. A pipe, or a blade. Whatever it is, it was thrown our way, by something hidden in the darkness. “Gauntlets at the ready,” I whisper. Lightning sparks from each man’s amethyst orbs. I wave them forward, to whatever awaits us, but I quickly see why the space ahead of us has grown so dark. In just a few steps, the tunnel meets a huge room, so large we cannot make out the room’s dimensions. What we do see, is the man towards the middle of the floor.
“Wait!” I yell, before Palios and Inchbald incinerate him into dust. They bring their gauntlets down, so I can see more cle
arly the man who kneels in front of us. He’s as gaunt as the servants that the Parliament kept, and his skin as translucent as wax paper. He glows in an unsettling way, as if he’s drunk off luciferase. His eyes are black and big, and he stares at us unblinkingly. His mouth is firmly shut, stitches running from one corner to the other.
“What the hell is this?” Palios says. The kneeling man gets up, and starts making his way towards us. “Not any farther!” Palios screams, bringing his gauntlet back up. The man stops, and puts his hands into the air. He smiles, the stitches making his facial muscles bulge grotesquely.
“Drinkwater, do you recognize him?”
“No, who...” But then I see. The grizzled chin, the missing two fingers on his right hand. He’s lost so much weight since we last saw him on the dome, but then again, he was wearing layers upon layers of armor and cloak. He had fallen. I saw the obtuse glass automaton cut his forearm clean away, saw him slip away in shock. His body soundlessly broke on the ground, and his mouth lay open, as if he drowned in the sand gasping for air. “Danda Ros. But how...” Danda starts twitching his head to the side, mimicking its movement with his long, bony index fingers.
“I don’t believe it... It’s... the White Bridge.” I say. In the darkness, hard to make out, is the bridge we had been searching for. It’s exactly as the stories told it would be: wide enough so we can all comfortably cross shoulder to shoulder, and arching up softly, so that we can not see the other side where it comes down. The white bannisters lining its edges are elaborately carved into spirals and points, tangled vines of alabaster. Danda starts to wave his hands at us, ushering us to go forward, to go across the bridge.
“Danda... but this doesn’t make sense. How are you here? I saw you fall...” He keeps waving his hands, moving us towards the bridge. From over his shoulder, I can see things moving in the darkness, humanoid shadows. He starts shaking his head. I can see fear in his immense, dark eyes.
“What is it?” Palios murmurs. There’s a trepidation in his voice like I’ve never heard before.
“It’s the vulture...” Inchbald says, breaking from our group and making for the bridge. The vulture, from the stories he’d told us of his working on the ship’s engines, deep in the city. The thing that had kept the ancient yama alive, or so the engineers said. “There is no machinery that is capable of keeping a yama alive for that long. He’s made a pact with darkness, traded his sanity for immortality.” Inchbald’s words from around the brushfire ring around in my head, as the dark figures dance closer. There are so many of them.
“Go! Men, over the bridge!” It’s the way between worlds, what we had been searching for. I had never thought to encounter anything below the city, had thought to only find a neglected relic from ages past. Instead, I had found the true plague of the walking city. The parliament was merely a symptom of a far greater disease that had undermined Yama Dempuur since who even knew when. A dark chaos, that slowly found it’s way into every pore and orifice the domed city had to offer, the people becoming incorrigible, their works stunted and failing. I see that now, as we escape over the bridge, a soft green light and an array of stars ahead of us, away from the darkness. The shadows behind me continue to dance, having made it up to the foot of the bridge. Danda watches us with those big black eyes, and there’s a smirk on his lips that had not been there before. Wisps of shadow lash around his body, taking pieces of flesh with them. Still, that smile. Under his skin, reptilian scales begin to appear, then feathers. The stitching rips apart, revealing a beak attached to a small, scaly head. The thing that does not change is his eyes, and they watch us with a malignant intent as we run further and further down the bridge.
Chapter VII: “Where the Stories Sleep”