فصل 21

21

“Ashfalls!” TenSoon said as he ran alongside Wax through the tunnels of the kandra Homeland. “I have told Harmony to pass the word to my fellows. We will stop our efforts immediately, but He says it might be too late.” Wax nodded, holding his lantern and puffing from exertion.

“We’re Harmony’s ears,” TenSoon growled. “That fits with her theme, doesn’t it? We listen, move among you, report back to God. She’s going to try to deafen Him.” Wax nodded again.

“That’s pointless!” TenSoon said. “She can’t stop Harmony. Even with all of this, she’s just a child throwing rocks at a mountain to try to move it.” “Yeah,” Wax said, scrambling over some rubble. Pieces of the kandra Homeland had obviously suffered from being shoved about in the earth during the Catacendre. Walls had collapsed, then had lain here, broken, for hundreds of years. “But she’s not really trying to kill God. She just wants to free people from Him, in her twisted way.” “Free them?” TenSoon said. He was silent for a time. “Emotion. That’s it, isn’t it? Vin liberated koloss by making them feel powerful emotions. It gave an opening into their souls, let her break through another’s control and seize the creatures.” “That’s what the old stories say,” Wax replied. “Good to have confirmation.” “Humans aren’t Hemalurgic creations like koloss. Powerful emotion won’t ‘free’ them from Harmony.” “Sure it will,” Wax said. “At least in Bleeder’s eyes. If you’re in a rage, you’re not following Harmony’s careful plans. You’re out of control. She’s going to drive this city to madness in an insane attempt to liberate it.” “Ruin!” TenSoon growled. “I may have to leave you behind, lawman. I must reach my people quickly and speak with them about what is happening.” “Fine,” Wax said. “But I might keep up better than you assume, so long as I—” A shrill howl echoed through the corridor, so chilling that Wax pulled to a stop. He drew Vindication, lantern held high in his off hand. The howl was joined by others, a terrible cacophony, each sound jarring against the others.

TenSoon leaned low, growling as the howls faded.

“What the hell was that?” Wax said.

“I have never heard its like before, human.”

“Aren’t you over a thousand years old?”

“Something like that,” TenSoon said.

“Holy hell,” Wax repeated. “Another way out?”

The kandra took off, leading him back the way they had come. The howls started up again, louder. The tight tunnels and uneven stones suddenly seemed far more confining.

Wax ran and, despite his earlier bravado, found he had real trouble keeping up with TenSoon. The stone around them didn’t contain any metals, at least not in a pure enough form for him to Push on. Besides, the tunnels twisted and turned too much for long Pushes.

So he ran, holding on to his lantern with sweating fingers, listening as the things behind seemed to grow more excited. Distracted as he was, he almost crashed into TenSoon when he caught up to him standing still in the tunnel.

“What?” Wax asked, panting from his run.

“It smells wrong ahead,” TenSoon said. “They’re waiting for us.” “Great,” Wax said. “What are they?”

“They smell like men,” TenSoon said.

More howls came from behind.

“Those,” Wax said, “are men?”

“Come,” TenSoon said, turning and scrambling away, his claws scratching on stone.

Wax followed. “Another way out?” he asked again.

TenSoon didn’t answer, instead leading them in a sprint through small caverns, around corners, through tunnels. They stopped at an intersection, TenSoon considering their options while Wax fingered his gun nervously. He swore he could see something moving down the tunnel they’d left behind, the one where TenSoon claimed to have spotted an ambush.

“TenSoon…” he said, nervous.

“This way,” the kandra said, dashing off.

Wax followed, entering a longer tunnel. Perfect. He let himself lag behind, holding up the lantern, trying to get a glimpse of whatever was following.

His light reflected from eyes in the shadows. Figures that were bent low, scrambling on all fours, moving in a distinctly inhuman way. Sweating, Wax dropped a shell casing and shoved it with his foot into a cleft in the rock. He Pushed, throwing himself down the corridor to catch up with TenSoon, landing just before they took a corner at speed.

“They’re not human,” Wax said. “Not completely.”

“Hemalurgy,” TenSoon said. “This is terrible. Paalm … She has gone further than I had assumed. She doesn’t just kill. She Ruins.” “They’re almost upon us,” Wax said, clutching gun and lantern. “How do we get out?” “We don’t,” TenSoon said, ducking to the side and into a small chamber. “We fight.” Wax followed, but stopped in the doorway, gun at the ready. They’d passed this room before, or one like it. It was filled with small baskets—glancing at them now, he could see they were full of bones.

The things chasing them had started yipping, but he could hear them scrambling on the stone—could hear them breathing in excited gasps—as they drew close.

Inside the room, TenSoon transformed.

It happened in a burst, the kandra’s skin sloughing off his canine bones and splashing to the ground like a bucket of slop tossed out the back of a kitchen. The muscles and melting skin slapped against one of the baskets, tipping it, dumping bones.

MeLaan had said he was fast, but that word didn’t begin to describe the sudden motion as TenSoon absorbed the bones. Arms sprouted from the side of his mass, then lifted it into the air even as legs formed beneath, thick like those of a wrestler. A skull emerged like a bubble rising through molasses, filling in with muscles stretched against bone, a jaw shifting into place.

In seconds, a short but robust figure stood in the chamber. The face of stretched skin and muscle reminded Wax of a koloss, but those forearms were like hammers, and the chest superhumanly powerful. It was nude, though the crotch lacked genitals of either variety.

Wax looked back down the corridor outside and raised his pistol, sweating. The things prowled closer. Heads emerged from the darkness, faces that twisted human features into something more canine. He counted five total. These creatures were no longer bipedal, but traces of humanity laced them—fingers that were too long, hands with opposable thumbs. The joints bent the wrong way at the elbows and knees, and the eyes … the eyes were dead. Pure black.

“What has she done to you?” Wax whispered at them.

The creatures didn’t respond. Either they could not think, could not speak, or didn’t care to do either. Wax fired upward, half hoping that the sound would scare the things away, send them scuttling back into the night.

The greater part of him hoped they would remain, so he could finish off every last one of the poor bastards.

The single shot rang loud in the tunnel, but the beasts didn’t flee. Instead they surged forward, their reluctance giving way to frenzy. Wax leveled Vindication and unloaded at the first creatures, aiming for skulls. Flashes of gunfire lit the tunnel. Though his bullets tore off skin and left streaks of bleeding muscle, not one of the creatures dropped.

Wax ducked back into the room, holstering Vindication and setting his lantern on an outcropping. “Their skulls have been thickened,” he shouted to TenSoon while reaching for his Sterrion.

The kandra stepped past him, both lithe and powerful. Wax could almost hear the muscles constricting, pulling taught beneath that skin. As the first creature entered, TenSoon smashed it on the side of the head, pinning it to the wall with one hand. Then he stepped back and raised his foot to crush the skull against the rocks.

The others leaped over TenSoon, dragging him down, biting his flesh. He grabbed at one, ripping it free by the hind legs and hurling it away. Wax fired, aiming for the eyes.

“They have been created to fight you,” TenSoon growled from the ground, where he wrestled with one of the creatures while others tore at him. “Flee. Your modern weapons are useless here, lawman!” Like hell they are, Wax thought, dropping his Sterrion and reaching to the large holster on his thigh, bringing out his short-barreled shotgun. He pulled out a handful of shells and tossed them to the floor with a sound like rain. Then he waded in, slapping the first monster that came at him across the face with the shotgun. It flinched, then howled—baring rows of uneven teeth.

Wax shoved the shotgun into its mouth and fired.

Bits of it colored the wall, and as it fell—thrashing—it knocked over baskets, spilling bones to the rock floor. The one creature’s death caught the attention of others, who turned from the bleeding TenSoon and charged Wax.

Wax naturally preferred the pistol. A handgun was an extension of one’s focus, a weapon of precision—like a thrown coin in anteverdant days. The soul of the Coinshot, his will made manifest.

The shotgun was something different; it wasn’t an extension of focus or will, but it did do a good job of representing his rage.

Wax shouted, slamming his shotgun across the face of one beast and Pushing on the barrel, giving the swing incredible momentum. The blow flung the creature to the side as Wax spun and pumped his gun, then blasted at the leg of the next one, ripping its arm free at the shoulder and sending it face-first into the stone.

He leaped over the next one that came for him, Pushing on a fallen bullet for lift. He fired a shotgun slug down into the beast’s back, stunning it, then multiplied his weight and landed with a crunch.

The thing thrashed and writhed beneath him as another leaped at his throat. He pumped and shot it in the head, then Pushed on the slug. His weight still increased—draining his metalmind at a furious rate—that bullet didn’t stop at the skull as the others had. It split bone and made a mess of the brain.

Wax sidestepped that corpse as it flopped beside him, then swung his shotgun upward into the head of the last beast coming for him. It flipped backward, exposing the belly.

Wax fired three times, emptying the shotgun. The underbelly was soft, as he’d hoped. The thing went down.

He stood, breathing deeply, the rhythm of the fight having consumed him. Nearby, TenSoon rolled over, the wounds to his arms and sides resealing. He had killed another of the things by ripping it in half. His eyes were wide as he regarded Wax. His bloodied face looked as inhuman as those of the creatures they’d just fought.

TenSoon climbed to his feet, surveying the wreckage. The lantern still burned calmly, illuminating bones scattered across the floor and masses that had once—horribly—been human, but now just twitched. Wax felt sick. He’d called them “things” in his head, but these had been people. TenSoon was right. What Bleeder had done here was worse, somehow, than even her murders.

“I will need to ask Harmony,” TenSoon said, “if I have failed Him in killing this day.” His voice was the same gravelly growl as before, when he’d inhabited the wolfhound’s body.

“Why would he care?” Wax said, still sick. “He uses me to kill all the time.” “You are His Ruin,” TenSoon said. “I am His Preservation.”

Wax stood in silence amid the dead and dying and lowered his shotgun, trying to suppress the immediate feeling of indignation he felt. Was that all he was to Harmony? A killer? A destroyer?

“Still,” TenSoon said, picking his way through the room and speaking as if he didn’t realize the insult he’d just offered, “I do not think Harmony will mind what I have done. These poor souls…” He knelt and prodded at one of the bodies Wax had killed.

TenSoon came up with a thin piece of metal, silvery and perhaps as long as a finger. Did it have a red cast to it, or was that just the blood? He used steelsight and found that while he could see the spike, the line was duller than it should have been. Hemalurgy.

“One spike,” TenSoon said, turning it over. “Any more, and Harmony might have been able to control these beasts. How could such a change be effected by a single spike? This is a level of Hemalurgy beyond my understanding, lawman.” Wax shook his head, checking on the creatures. Not to see if they were still a threat, but to make sure he didn’t leave one of them here to die a protracted death. He found one woman still alive, paralyzed by his shot into her back. She watched him with those eyes, shaped like a person’s, yet alien and dark. Whatever else had happened to these people, they should have been able to keep their eyes.

Wax put his gun to the woman’s eye and fired, up into the brain. Then he closed his eyes and offered … what? A prayer to Harmony? Harmony hadn’t helped these people.

I have done something to help.… The words whispered to him from the past. A memory of the last time Harmony had spoken to him. I sent you.

Wax wasn’t certain if that was enough this time.

“Tell me you’ll see these people buried,” Wax said.

“I will,” TenSoon said as a howl sounded in the distance. “More come. Do we fight here, or run?” “Can you get us out?” Wax asked, reloading the shotgun.

“Perhaps. Not by a conventional method, but there could be a way.” “Then let’s go,” Wax said. “This is another distraction, TenSoon. Those creatures only came for us when we left the other chamber.” TenSoon nodded, dropping his body to the floor and absorbing the wolfhound’s bones again. Only seconds passed before he’d restored himself, save for the hair. That started to sprout from the skin as TenSoon moved to the door, coming in waves as the kandra’s body arranged it and pushed it out.

Wax grabbed his lantern and they fled, TenSoon again leading the way.

“There he goes, boys!” Wayne yelled, pointing into the darkness. “I saw that dirty conner right ahead. You go that way, I’ll head around the other way, and we’ll trap ‘im between us, we will!” The small force of men with him—armed with wrenches and brooms—split off in a cheering, clangorous mass of spit and vengeance. Wayne egged them on while backward-jogging in the other direction. Eventually he slowed, finally alone, and shook his head. Not bad fellows, for all the fact that they had the combined wits of a brick.

Wayne spun a dueling cane in his fingers, rounding back through an alleyway and popping out near the governor’s mansion. He didn’t go toward the front—more and more angry people were gathering there, and some might recognize him from before. On his head he wore a newsboy’s cap, his other hat carefully stowed in a bush along the way. That was fine; he liked this new cap well enough, but he felt naked in another way—he was out of bendalloy. Completely dry.

That was bad. No more stopping time unless Wax had an extra vial for him. The fellow often carried one.

Wayne slipped around the mansion, intending to head toward the back doors, where he hoped the guards would let him in. He’d wasted time, far too much, getting away from that crowd. The sight of that poor kandra melting in front of everyone else haunted him.

Rusts. He wasn’t sure which side of the argument he came down on, but at least he wasn’t going around melting people for an audience. Besides, for the moment he figured he’d choose the side that wasn’t actively trying to kill him.

He strolled and stuck a new ball of gum into his mouth. Then he hesitated, mists swirling around him, the mansion looming before him like a mesa in the Roughs, lit up all white. He heard a voice drifting toward him.

The accent was wrong. Just slightly wrong, but in a profound way.

And suddenly he knew who Bleeder was impersonating.

The howls were distant from Wax, but they haunted him more than they had during the first chase, for now he knew what made them. If he survived this, he would have to see something done for these creatures.

TenSoon conducted them through the intestines of the Homeland, eventually reaching a wall full of cracks. Wax raised his lantern, inspecting it. The wolfhound beside him had a pelt that was missing hair in patches.

“Well?” Wax said, inspecting the dead end.

“We have been watching this spot,” TenSoon said. “It cracked long ago, and the cracks seem to have widened over the years. If it opens, it will provide another path into the Homeland, and we wish to be aware of each of those.” Wax ran his fingers along the cracks in the stone wall. Air moved through them, he thought, catching a whiff of something more … rotten. More like the city he knew. Familiar and disgusting all at once.

He tapped his metalmind, increasing his weight, then threw his shoulder against the wall. This was tricky, as his strength hadn’t increased except in its ability to lift his own limbs and manipulate his heavier muscles. That lent him some ability, but mostly he had to try to force things just right so that he was falling into the wall as much as pushing on it.

He finally got the correct leverage, shoving through the cracked rock and causing a clatter. He was able to pick his way through into a narrow rift, like a very thin slot canyon out in the Roughs. The walls were slick with water, and knobby as in so much of this underground realm.

“What now?” Wax asked.

“Now we climb, human,” TenSoon said. He melted again, dumping his bones and fur to the ground, becoming a group of muscles. Here, in these narrow confines, that was an advantage. TenSoon was able to push on both walls and start sliding up the crack, filling holes and clefts with his mass, then using his muscles to propel himself upward. A bag, like a stomach, had formed around the wolfhound bones, and he carted these up behind him.

It was grotesque yet fascinating. This was the natural state of the kandra, the sludgelike collection of muscles that at times acted human.

Of course, Wax thought, starting to climb, what am I but a pile of blood and meat that gets up and walks around?

This climb was difficult, particularly with the lantern, though decreasing his weight substantially helped. After only a short time, he heard the creatures come in below, howling and scrambling. His heart beat more quickly, but they didn’t seem to have much luck climbing. He continued to inch upward, until—in his haste for a handhold—he fumbled with the lantern and dropped it.

It bumped and clanged against the stones before smashing down below. The light went out.

In that moment, Wax realized he was buried in the earth, clinging to rocks in the darkness. The walls seemed to press against him, and twisted monsters howled below and sought his blood. He gasped in sudden panic.

Then his eyes adjusted and a soft blue light revealed the world to him. He wasn’t trapped. There was a way out above. He could see it by the patina of blue fungus growing on the walls, giving a gentle light to everything.

“Harmony made sure it spread here,” TenSoon’s voice said from above. “He wanted to make certain that no person was ever trapped in darkness in this place again.” Wax forced himself to continue upward. He recognized where he was now, from the stories. The holes in the walls that he used as handholds had once been overgrown with crystals, and within, geodes containing a bead of the lost metal. Legendary atium.

He was climbing the Pits of Hathsin themselves.

“Peace, lawman,” TenSoon said from above. “Keep climbing.”

Had he heard Wax’s breathing quicken? He steadied himself and continued. This place was no longer a prison. No more did it cut and lacerate, as it had done to the Survivor’s arms. The climb was actually easy, with all those holes. The sounds from below grew softer.

Finally, he crawled from the crevice into a section of man-made tunnel. One of the city sewers; the crack behind him was just a thin cleft in the rock that gave no hint of its ancient origin. Wax shivered, breathing in the awful stench of the sewers, but still glad to be free. TenSoon convulsed as a mass nearby, then formed into a wolfhound again. “I can see why Paalm might want me distracted and unable to stop my people from being caught in her trap,” he said. “But what happened below, that was not for me, but you, human. What was she trying to distract you from?” Wax didn’t reply, but could think of only one reason. Once she dealt with the kandra, her plan would be ready for the final steps. She’d need to drive the people of the city further into a frenzy, freeing them, as she saw it, sending them forth as a mob to rage and hate, destroying Elendel.

The governor was planning to speak to the people of the city. Bleeder hadn’t succeeded in killing him yet, and Wax suspected he knew why.

Because when she murdered him, she wanted an audience.