Bladeraver (pt60) (273 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 7 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Tactile Ire (View user info) at 2007-05-04 02:27:53 EDT
Puila was still too shocked to be really angry when he arrived home nearly an hour later. He'd had everything on the fight. Everything. He'd had too. It was his chance for true wealth. He'd needed every penny to finance the expedition. And now it was gone. He'd lost everything.
He opened the front door to his large apartment and moved inside. As he stepped into the room Puila felt something different, wrong. She wasn't here. The bright and shining woman who had been his force, his reason, for so very long was not here to greet him. But that was not all. There was a presence in the room. He could almost taste the hate. On his guard now he stepped sideways, squinting into the light. Hidden in the deep corner shadows of the room was a man. He was lithe and poised and he carried two polished brushman blades. Bandages wrapped his middle and red flowers opened against their clean whiteness as he moved into the light.
"Problems at work Puila? How does it feel to have feel everything that is yours taken from you by somebody else - just because they can?" Spikehand's voice was as smoothly modulated as ever.
"You? How dare you come into my home? I'll have you falling killed. You set me up!"
"No shite sherlock. Well I'd love to stay and chat but it seems I have a guest."
"You have my wife? What have you done with her?" asked Puila.
"Nothing. Yet. Hmmm, now there's a notion. Lets go see the slut get hers." Spikehand exploded into motion faster than Puila had seen anyone move in a very long time.
*
Puila came to with his ears full of miserable sounds. He was in a large space and the noises echoed, brief repeats of horror. He ignored the ache in his head and struggled to his feet. He knew the voice making those wet, pleading, pained noises. In the middle of the only patch of light in the room was his beloved. She was spread-eagled on the floor a few yards in front of him. A large, tattooed man with brushman's scars was raping her as she cried and whined and choked. A mute audience of other solid, fetid men could be half seen on the edges of the pool of light.
Puila growled and surged forward. A hand like a steam press caught him by the throat, reaching from behind to stop him cold. As he choked for breath the hand flitted from his throat and out towards his shoulder, finding the pressure point behind the right collarbone. Two stiff fingers pressed down hard. He squirmed, writhing around until he fetched up against his captor's legs. "Good boy," those well modulated tones, like this was one of their business meetings. "Now watch these men do their job. Take it all in."
And he sat and watched as these men did their awful, brutal thing to his woman. Held in place by a man whose grip and will seemed like twinned forces of nature. Her piteous noises continued. Sometimes she screamed.
After the longest time it was over. The men were all spent. Done. They faded back into the shadows and the pain under his collarbone was taken away. Pathetically, he actually felt grateful for that small release. He crawled towards the broken woman on the floor. She was gone someplace deep inside herself, her eyes open and unseeing. She was emitting a high soft keening in her ravaged, shattered voice. He wanted to sooth her, call her back to herself. Hold her and take the horror away. He was almost to her when a booted foot smashed down on his outstretched hand.
"You see, I hunted for you so hard. I put the questors on it. I found where you lived, how you did business. That's why I got into the bladeraves. Why I sent pathetic little Flens out into the cold for you to find. One of Sun Tsu's maxims. Always control the avenues by which your enemy can approach. Make him pick the one you want. It was all going so well. And then you came into my home, again! Stole peace from me. AGAIN!"
The fighter Puila knew as Spikehand stepped away, shaking off the emotional turmoil. He heaved a sigh to the rafters. Externally calm again, he continued. "Ahh, who cares about this shite anyway. I just want to know - do you remember the cheminer Lyon?"
Puila's eyes flicked briefly to the huddled woman. "No," he lied.
The Mantling kicked him in the head. Again and again and again until the skull cracked open and grey matter sprayed in the concussion of boot strikes.
*
He gave a long look at the woman on the floor. Then he called into the darkness. "Now you men. You really shouldn't have done that to my mother. No matter how much I was paying you." He leapt into the hot air, brushman's blades spinning into his hands as the wetworks began. The swearing of men and wet, heavy thuds were the only noises for the next few minutes.
He stepped back into the light and gave the woman on the floor another long look. His face was impassive. His hands betrayed a tremble.
He walked to the double doors, unlocked them, swung them open and walked away.
MAN
The election campaign volunteers and their families, Jeena, the children - in fact anyone who was connected with the enclave, even scowling Flens - had taken a lift up to the top of the tree early that morning. They were to spend three days out in the canopy, visiting Arjl's school. A break from the city after their recent election defeat. A lavish time of rest, according to the instructions the Mantling had given the caterers.
He had ignored Jeena's injured looks and their collective disappointment as he had loaded them into the lift cages. At the last minute he'd changed his mind about joining them and walked off, motioning Drewhldt to follow.
They spent the day in the Repository, much to Drew's disgust. The Mantling took hours, just walking amongst the shelves, stroking the books, only occasionally reading a passage from one chosen at random. His casual reverie was broken when the jowly questor came cadging for a commission. The Mantling sighed and replaced the book he'd been holding. "Even here, they bring their petty venality," he said to the shelves. And than he walked out.
As evening fell, they wandered away from the city, talking for the first time that day.
"We told the people the truth," said Drewhldt. "Why didn't they see that on polling day?"
"Don't you know? Most people don't bother seeing. They don't want to know anything past their own troubles. Their own small lives. If there is a big issue to resolve they say 'what can I do - I am only one amongst all these people' and they leave it to the press to tell them what everybody else thinks - and they go along with that - as long as it doesn't fall with them and their own. They don't care. Not in any real way. All I see in this city is small, venal, self-interested people with no social morals. No collective responsibility. No interest in anything but their own little pile of cash."
"Well what do you want from people - really," said Drewhldt. "We can't all be poets, leaders, great thinkers. We're only human. We live according to our nature."
"Human nature," the Mantling replied. "You know, it's almost funny. In my research trips to the Repository I came across on old book on origins theory. Fall knows when it was written but it was old. This guy put forward the theory that the Ancients didn't Fall. They jumped. That our coming to this light world of huge creatures and massive trees was no accident. That they deliberately set down in a place with no metals, no sulphur, where most of their science was unsustainable. You see this author had found old texts alluding to this. He's even found an old name for the people. Altruists."
"Makes sense, in a stupid kind of way," the Mantling continued. "You see, when a group of people are threatened they'll behave in the most beautiful ways. Look at what you all did back on the nest. Look at Stefan, at Tarl, at Ishant. People will sacrifice themselves for each other. They show love and honour and bravery. It's only when we defeat danger, as the Ancients had done, as we have done in the cities, that we become this lazy, self-interested, grasping thing. This ape. As you said, human nature. Immutable as time." The Mantling turned and looked back at the North Tree, running his gaze up the towering wall of wood as he went on. "There's another part of our nature too. Our reaction to pain. If you get one of us and you hurt him deeply you get someone focused on two very clear things. First survival. Then vengeance. But where does vengeance stop? My father was killed by an arachnid in a clearing not far from here. So do I revenge myself on the worgspider? Father killed it as he died. On all worgspiders? On those mants who were directing the beast? On the whole mant nest? Or do I look further back - to the man who broke open our home and lowered our defences, enabling the mants to get in? To the bitch who gave him the key by opening her legs? Or back further still - to the society so corrupt and twisted my father had to take his family away from there to raise them healthy and strong. To the city that made him leave and the people who allow it to be run that way?"
"It's a fine line to walk and I'd hate to get it wrong. So I gave the city a choice; one chance to change its ways, to mend what is wrong. I offered them sweet Jeena. And the city has ignored me. Well, one chance is all they get." He heaved a sigh. "I suppose it's for the best. Fall knows how I'd stop it now. And I'd have really hated to do this to a repentant populace."
"What do you mean?" asked Drewhldt. "What have you done? What's going to happen?"
The Mantling turned then and gave one of those weird smiles that made you want to shrink from him. "I'm giving people their altruism back." With that he bent into the underbrush and picked up a bundle. Unwrapping it, he revealed a loaded springbow. He checked the tension, bought the weapon up to his cheek and drew a bead on the base of the North Tree. And fired.
The shaft struck near the base of the North Tree and vanished in a sheet of yellow flame.
The explosion went on and on. Sheets of bark and splinters of wood erupted at crazed and random angles from the base of the tree.
An impossibly large rent opened in the base of the trunk. As the explosion died away the wall of wood began to move, falling back and away.
MAN
The Mantling had pushed the drillworms into place in prepared holes in the North Tree. The bark had hidden them as they began their work. The chemically treated sap plugs he'd pushed in behind them had saved them from the city's regular fumigation program. Each of the worms had been fed a mixture of charge and pure, golden honeysalve. They had become viciously voracious, strong and virile. They had chewed into the wood with preternatural speed. The North Tree had been the subject of much abuse by the humans of the city for many moons. It was sick and poorly used - slowly dying. The drillworms found much deadwood to consume. The eggs they dropped on their way quickly hatched and the new young worms spread from the central bore line, widening the growing fracture in the strength of the once mighty tree.
First one drillworm then tens then hundreds. All chewing into the base of the North Tree in a wide flat pattern. A cut.
Then, in the dark of night, the Mantling had visited again with flasks of nitro-glycerine made from Gilgamesh's rendered fat. Gallons of the stuff, brought to the city by the unquestioning Drewhldt, had been carefully and slowly poured into the wormholes, impregnating the wood.
The Mantling's shaft had ignited the nitro. The resultant explosion had been shaped, contained and directed along the wormholes - magnifying the damage done to the surrounding wood.
*
In a high evening wind the North Tree swayed and yawed. The people in the Northern Nest - the sentries, the stall keepers, the few travellers in the way-stations and bars, felt the tremors running through their host and looked at each other uneasily. The tree seemed to screw to the right infinitesimally. Drinks spilled, shelves toppled and those walking tripped. A hubbub of concern rose from the small community - quickly rising to shouts of alarm as the floor beneath them listed over.
Walkways and safety lines snapped as the upper end of the tree moved with slow and inexorable might out over the city.
*
The night air swirled and eddied as the tree gathered momentum through its fall.
The many lines and stays it had supported preceded the tree. Thick cables accreted with the dust and weeds of ages lashed the upper reaches of the city as they fell. They broke the polished sap skylights of the rich, rousing some of those worthies to come and stare at the damage. To lift shocked gazes to the sky where the colours of sunset silhouetted an impossibly angled shape. A shape that quickly grew.
The tree was nearly denuded of branches on the city side. The few massive boughs that remained slammed down first, impacting towards the far side of the pile. Giant ironwood spears bored through the skin of the city, lancing straight down through the upper levels, into the middle of the pile and on into the lowest caverns. For the briefest moment they stood like the claws of some great beast hooked into the city's carcass. Then they exploded under the compression of the falling trunk. Chunks of wood as large as people's homes splintered and tore themselves loose - slamming through walls and support pillars, through c'kroach's and people. Alcofuel mains ruptured and ignited, exploding back down the lines to the nearest stop valves. As sporadic fires caught, the whole structure of the city wrenched and tore.
The trunk hit the top of the city without slowing. Over the moons of development the city had been whittled and honeycombed until could barely support its own weight. The massive bole of ironwood tore through the weakened trunks of the pile with the ease of booted foot through a hollow skull. The screaming rush of wind gave way to the implosion of wood, the shattering of ossified fibre. As North Tree cut through the mid-levels of the city it slowed slightly, dragged towards rest by an impact cushion of made of thousands of carved homes. And their occupants.
The Repository imploded, firing tomes from its shelves, filling the interior space with briefly deadly knowledge. The port of Beldentree smashed flat, slaying sleeping impossums and their crews alike. The bladerave clubs were blasted apart by the titanic force.
The sound was that of a pack of worgspiders, each as large as the sun, all in full voice.
The trunk hit the ground and gave a shivering bounce. The city was not blown out by the fall but pulled down by the sudden weight on its structure. Ancient wood bent then snapped, leaving shattered remnants of the old trunks on each side of the impact zone. Comparatively small jutting stumps and tree heads formed two half-moon ridges around the crater of carnage and broken wood and flame that had been the heart of a city.
The North tree lay across the middle of the shattered pile like a raping member; black, tumescent and spent.
*
All was still as the fires caught and the dust rose. Then the voices of the hurt and dying started to sound in plaintive patches from the killing ground.
Drewhldt stared at the destruction with tears rolling down his face. He looked at his master. He spat his words. "You're mad. I can't believe I helped you do this. I was right about you at the start. You're twisted. Evil. If I ever see you again you'll find out exactly how much I do love the burn, you bastard. I hope you die screaming and alone."
He left then, running across the broken ground towards the flaming and broken city, determined to try and help.
The Mantling watched him go. He felt numb. Not unburdened. Not joyful. A trifle sick. Where was the giddy triumph? Where was the peace? His thoughts kept returning to the crumpled old woman on the warehouse floor. The keening noise she had been making. A noise shaped into the half-forgotten name she had once given him.
He found himself running into the underbrush. Running from the phantom sound of his own name.
EPILOGUE.
They found him on his knees in a sun-dappled clearing. Holes had been dug in the loam. Deep holes, randomly spaced. The work of many days of dedicated digging. But he dug no more. He was hugging something to his chest. He had not moved in the two days they had been watching him. Two days to get word back to the remains of the city. Two days to get a response. They had not expected her to come herself.
Every survivor knew Goodwoman Jeena. She had been one of the first to recover from the Cataclysm of the New Fall. She had worked tirelessly for the last few terrible weeks to aid people, to organise them, to help them get over their pain. She always appeared where there was looting or disagreement or dissent. With quiet force of personality she would calm tempers and recall the maddened to themselves. She stopped violence and discord and brought in their place organised relief efforts.
She worked with her friends, the other ex-prisoners of mants, who seemed to know what to do. As though they had experience of horror like this.
One of them was always in her footsteps. A stocky, broad faced young flamepoler who watched her back and helped in her works. Always as she finished speaking he would interject. "Listen to her. She's a good woman."
And so she had become known.
In the weeks since the New Fall, when all was chaos and no-one seemed to know what to do, she had attracted a loyal following. People who just wanted to help. Who knew that the best way to do that was by following her simple and sensible suggestions.
So when she had asked that they find this man in the clearing, they had.
And then she had come.
*
Jeena walked over to the thin, huddled figure. The once broad and erect back was bent under the weight of grief and guilt, ravened by lack of nutrition. She spoke his name slowly, gently. "Mantling."
He turned a ravaged face to her. The features, normally composed and controlled, were so twisted with anguish and pain that she barely recognised him. Tears - unbelievably, tears - were rolling down his cheeks. He was huddled over, clutching to his chest the rotted remains of an old brushman's blade. "I survived." His voice was a cracked, whipped, beaten thing. "I swore I'd survive. I swore I'd revenge him. I did it. Oh Father forgive me, I did it."
She was unsure how to proceed. This broken, mewling thing was not what she had been expecting. Not what she had come to find. He'd been through catharsis. His deep healing had begun. Left alone to grieve and think and settle he might come back from this a well man. She didn't have the time. Hating herself,thinking of the carnage back in the city, the carnage this man had caused, she spoke with the voice of a whip-crack. The old voice of command. "Get up!"
"The city is broken - our people are in pain and we need your skills. What gives you the right to sit here on your arse while our people strive for their survival? Who the fell do you think you are? You owe me. You owe them. Falling grace you owe them. Now stop whining and get up."
His face registered shock, then anger, and then nothing.
She saw the walls drop back down. Slowly with what seemed to be the greatest of effort he stood and faced her - features an impassive mask once more. She studied him, up and down.
Then turned to go.
He followed.
*
Soft light pushing in, pheromnemonics follow....
It pushed the egg skin away and sat in the light breeze filtering down from the nest mouth. Exhausted from birthing, it stood motionless as carapace hardened and darkened, so so slowly.
When it felt itself hard it bent its head to the floor, tasting the layers of secretions and reading there instructions. Shaking, it went forth to serve.
It nearly died the first day. A lurking mantis attacked the column foraging through the high Veldt. Responding to instinct it had leapt towards the dark green menace, thrusting its truncated tail section at the beast. In some deep inner cave of the mind it realised that something was wrong with it. Where there should have been a stinger, strong with the poisons of its kind there was nothing. Its attack was limp and ineffectual, unlike those of its brethren. I was a soft, deformed thing, and the knowledge that this was so came, impossibly, from somewhere within, from some internal animus, not from the chemical secretions of the mothernest.It looked down at its soft skin, seeing the red as different from the brown of its brothers, perceiving difference that it knew, bu the nest did not. An impossible angle of perception that overloaded itself and the thing (not a brethren, a thing) to falter and halt in mind-darkness, right at the feet of the grasping mantis. It was saved by the brethren, who did not yet know it was a thing.
The sole offspring of the redqueen, the lost abortion that had found this nest and crashed here, still cluthing the dead body of its single and strangly warped drone mate, felt a strange burning, a desire to rend and tear and destroy. It knew then that it would not selfend, would not seek the worgspiders. It would live and grow and gather strength and knowledge. There must be a reason for the way it was. Its haterd told it so. There must be something to blame. Its hatred needed a focus. The must be revenge.Its hatred would be unleashed.
User Reviews
Submitted by genericIntent (user info) at 2007-05-04 17:35:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Sorry about your sister.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-05-04 16:47:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-05-04 13:44:08 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by zwerg (user info) at 2007-05-04 11:20:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Sorry to hear about your sister.
I thought the description of the tree falling was sort of devastatingly beautiful. I'm sad it's over, but I actually like how it ended. It all came a bit full circle, and it's definitely open-ended if you decided to pick it up again. I've really enjoyed reading it.
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-05-04 05:44:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This rating is for the poster, not the post. I know, we at Uber don't do that, except when we do.
If you want my literary critique, let me know. This disappointed me.
But I get not wanting to tell stories in this place you're in right now. And for what it's worth, I'm sorry.
Submitted by messmind (user info) at 2007-05-04 04:17:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
hey man, that sucks ( below here)... Take care!
The post was ok, as usual..
Submitted by Snare (user info) at 2007-05-04 02:33:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
One post a day, yeah fuck off.
Earlier this morning they went into my sister's room and injected some poison into her spinal cord.
The cancer doesn't hurt her anymore...
Of course she can't walk now.
And she'll spend the rest of her life in a daiper.
...i don't feel like telling any stories right now, but here's what I've got, for those of you who were kind enough to stick with me...