There was Arves, like a heap of sticks that someone had bundled into prison greys. He was leathered and creased by the cruel sun, worn to the very rounded nub of his endurance. He looked older than Trethowan ever would.
“What’s the point of him?” Hermione grumbled. “He won’t last.”
Lucian disagreed, with his customary vacuous cheer. Why Lucian had seen people nine-tenths into death’s kingdom rally and pull through. Perhaps a little food would do him good. Maybe some exercise. In Lucian’s bubble-bright world, there was everything to hope for.
I thought Hermione had the right of it, and cut through Lucian’s amiable chatter with, “He’s a friend of mine from back home.”
Hermione grunted, unimpressed, and sat down in one corner. Gaki’s face appeared beside hers through the bars. The madman was unusually subdued, biding his time for something only he could name. Hermione began to speak to him, his soft replies quite lost in her blurred bass rumble.
I knelt beside Arves, wondering if he were dead already. He looked dead for some time. Even now, in the sanctuary of the Island’s gloom, he was hanging by the frailest thread.
I said gently, “Arves? It’s me. Stefan.”
His eyes opened, the irises were sepia and the whites had gone yellow. He could not see me.
“Arves, what happened to you?” I asked him. How long had it been since he and I, Giulia and Sergei, last drank together? A year, but that year had so ruined him that nothing of the outward man was left.
“Stefan…” His voice was a croak, strengthening as he forced the sounds out. “How did you come here? Did they get you as well? No, you were gone long before. Is this where you went? You can’t know, then. You can’t know what happened to us. They declared war on the Underworld!”
“They did… War?” I stared into that blind face. “Who? The Meat Packers?”
“The surface. Shadrapar. The Authority. War, Stefan. All gone to war. God save me, it’s all gone.”
“Arves, you are going to have to slow down,” I told him, because my head was so filled with horrible speculations I could not keep up with him. “Tell me what happened.”
“Tell us all,” Gaki’s voice cut in. “I know the Underworld. Tell us all what has gone on there.”
There were prisoners crowding in from the adjacent cells, and above and below as well, though Arves did not see them. I was the only thing in his life at that moment, aside from the story tearing him apart to get out.
I will not give his words verbatim. The story was so strong, and he was too frail to control it, and so it told itself in a great torrent through him. I will give you my reconstruction, then, of the war that came beneath Shadrapar, with assumptions, extrapolations and bridged gaps. There is no other account. You will have to be satisfied with mine.
*
It began with a death. News came down to the factions that some great man had died. None felt like mourning, and many prepared to celebrate, for the great and good of Shadrapar Above were ever the enemies of the Underworld. So it was that the factions speculated as to whom the death might belong to. A few were hoping that the President himself had died, and far more were praying for the demise of the Lord Justiciar, a most hated figure. Wagers were placed. The details trickled through the Underworld and brought a current of surprise. It was no member of the current Authority who had met his end, but a private individual of such wealth and power that it had been assumed he was invulnerable. I speak of none other than Jon Anteim the Elder. More, he had not passed quietly in his sleep but had been bloodily murdered in his private chambers.
This seems very clear to me. Someone in power, some rival of Anteim’s, had reached the far horizon of their patience, and had taken the ultimate sanction. Perhaps it was even Haelen Anteim, doting daughter, who had so coolly arranged the death of her brother and was surely impatient to claim her inheritance. Back when I was still a citizen of Shadrapar the idea would have been unthinkable. The rich did not have each other assassinated. It was not done. Perhaps it was just that I was lost in scholarly innocence and did not see the way the world turned, but I think there was more. Even on the Island I had seen signs of political upheaval, the first of which (unrecognised at the time) was finding ex-Lord Financier Valentin Miljus in my very cell.
So Jon Anteim the Elder was dead, and to the Underworlders this seemed as good a reason to rejoice as any. There were enough who had suffered from him or his corrupt family. There was further news on the way, though: a public announcement by the President himself; a eulogy for the fallen statesman in which he swore to take action against Old Jon’s killers. He swore that he would forever rid Shadrapar of the murderous scum of the Underworld who had dared to strike the old man down. It was the best-fitting cloak for the truth, whether Harweg was in on it or not. The Underworld was a vague terror to surface Shadrapar. Every citizen peopled it (with some justification) with thieves and killers and mad scientists’ mistakes. It was easy for the Authority to blame any kind of evil on it. That was nothing new.
The mood in the Underworld when this broke was of careless bravado. Many there would love to accept responsibility for the deed.
*
Then a couple of Exceptionals who were on their way out for a little freelance thieving found that others were already coming in. One of the two got back and barrelled into the Temple shouting out some mad story of invasion. “Outriders!” he declared. “Outriders are coming.”
Someone asked him what he meant. How many? A dozen? A score?
“All of them!” the frantic Exceptional cried. “All the Outriders there are!”
And he was right. He had seen tens of Outriders forming up in that cavern, more dropping in through the open hatch, all in full canvas and metal armour with two muskets and a long killing knife apiece. His companion had been less quick to run, and the musketry of the Outriders had got him, leaving only one to tell the tale. If the Underworld ever had a chance, that Exceptional was it. Had he not raised the alarm so soon, there is no telling how far the enemy might have got undetected.
A summons went out to every would-be general, strategist and mercenary commander beneath the earth. Actions move faster than words, though, and by the time those picked few were assembled in the Temple, gunfire could already be heard distantly through the tunnels as Underworlders put up an improvised defence.
*
It turned out that the entry point the Outriders had picked gave them three ways forward, two that led direct into the heart of the Underworld and one that led down. It was in these former two that the first organised opposition found them.
Down one tortuous tunnel, Sergei and a band of Fishermen set an ambush behind what cover they could find, and there followed a bloody and savage exchange of fire between the Outriders’ muskets and the Fishermen’s crossbows. The Fishermen were more used to the dark and knew the ground, but their opponents were well trained and outnumbered them heavily. The first Fishermen volley caught them unprepared and some seven or eight were cut down at once, but then the Outriders scattered to cover and began to return the favour. The skirmish was brutal with no quarter given. The Outriders were desperate to force their way forwards, for the passage widened beyond the ambush point and their greater numbers there would carry the day. Two or three at a time were constantly making a dash for the next niche in the tunnel wall under cover of their fellows’ fire. If even a few could get into close combat with their wicked knives then their comrades would be able to follow up. The Fishermen were forced to expose themselves to the musket-fire to pick off each moving man. They could not afford to miss any of them. More and more were getting closer, from cover to cover. Over half Sergei’s little force was dead, and the tunnel before them was strewn with fallen and dying Outriders. Another trio broke for the very rubble the Fishermen were crouching behind, the lead shot skipping and dancing from the walls. The defenders were moments away from being overwhelmed.
It was then that Pelgraine turned up on his own, a solitary reinforcement, and let fly with a charge from his light gun. The unbearable white flash of it stopped the Outriders in their tracks, just as it had the Mazen. The surviving Fishermen fell on them and wiped them out.
Then it was quiet and there were no more Outriders there, and Sergei knew something was wrong.
“Too few bodies,” he told Pelgraine. “Scouts only. We find the rest.” He told his men to hold the tunnel against any further comers and then he and Pelgraine made for the Temple.
*
The other approach that the Outriders tried was taken first by the non-combatant novices and scientists of the Alchemical Brethren, who were in no position to weather a serious assault. Some nameless innovator amongst them had brought along an explosive of his own formula which spectacularly collapsed the entire passageway and ensured that no surface-dwellers would be coming that way at all.
*
The bulk of the Outriders were making for the myoculture caves beneath them, Giulia’s maps revealed. Once there they would have access to the myriad tunnels the Fermers used to come and go, and thus they could take Underworld as and when they wanted it. Every able-bodied Underworlder armed and ready to go was sent down to the caverns with Giulia of the Fishermen and a Meat Packer known as the Count at their head. Their advance scouts discovered a fair concentration of Outriders at one end of the cavern with more filing in. Small groups were already crawling up the Fermers’ tunnels into the Underworld proper but the main body was just standing around in some confusion. The most daring of the scouts crept between the burgeoning piles of growing fungus and saw several officer types clustered about a number of charts. It appeared that the Outriders were lost.
The obvious thing to do would be to form a defended firing line at the other end of the cavern and shoot into their ranks, forcing them to take cover. This tactic would allow the Outriders to continue filing through the nearest exits, though, and sooner or later the Underworlders would be flanked and cut off by those that got out. Instead, Giulia and the Count conceived a desperate plan. Their ragged forces, bravoes from a score of different factions, would charge the unsuspecting Outriders, firing as they went, and pin them into as small a section of the cavern as possible. They were armed with a mismatched selection of flintlocks, crossbows and a few of the Waylun Armouries’ special creations, and until they had forced the Outriders back they would be fully exposed to enemy fire. It was a monstrous risk, but if they hung back and sheltered then the whole of the Underworld would be opened up like a shell.
“We are at the end of our time,” the Count told his troops, in words that would reach even Arves eventually. “We have lived, unnatural, between the depths and the sun. Now the jealous surface seeks to strip our heart’s blood from us. We may fall, and we shall fall, but we shall drive them before us like dust. If we fail, live or die, then true darkness shall take the Underworld. If we win, though we die, then we have the freedom at last that was always promised us!”
They stormed out from their tunnels and caves like demons, each one with a war cry or scream on their lips. The front rank discharged their guns and bows into the packed mass of Outriders, and surface men and women doubled up over puncturing bolts or fell back with shafts through limbs, flintlock balls breaking bones and lashing across faces. The fighting Underworlders tore across them and continued to run without pausing to reload.
The Outrider officers fled back to safer ground, and their sense of self-preservation saved countless Underworld lives, for many of their men followed their lead. There were others with enough sense to see the folly of their enemies’ move; a score or so dropped to one knee to steady their muskets, whilst a further score and more stood behind them levelling their own. I cannot say what thoughts must have passed through the minds of those at the fore of the charge. It cannot have been despair for not one of them broke or slowed. They were doomed and it was out of their hands and there is a kind of relief in that.
The volley of shot from the Outriders ripped into them and killed or crippled virtually the entire front of the charge, sending the attackers rolling limply back under the feet of their fellows. Electric Gangsters, Fishermen, Proud Walkers, Meat Packers, People of the Scarlet Sash and members of a dozen other factions, they all died together in a comradeship forged only through adversity. The charge barely faltered, the next wave vaulting and skipping over the dead. Most of the Outriders were forming up at the far wall, unwilling to be driven out of the myoculture caves altogether, but that firing line held fast, each Outrider changing to his second musket, taking aim into the storm and letting fly. The smoke from the first barrage was still in the air but they were shooting straight into the mob and accuracy was moot. The Count died in that second blast, he of the fine words, and two dozen others in the same moment. If twice the number of Outriders had stayed then the charge would have been shattered apart. Instead, the momentum of the attackers’ rush carried them down the very barrels of the muskets to tear into their enemies. They struck with knives and Waylun swords, with the butts of crossbows and pistols and with their bare hands. Some of the Outriders had got their blades out, and gave a bloody accounting of themselves, the others were simply butchered. Then the surviving Underworlders were finding rocks and mounds of fungus to hide behind, reloading their bows and guns or taking the weapons of their dead foes; firing upon the main force which had taken similar cover and was shooting back.
There was a shifting stalemate for the next few minutes. There were more Outriders, but a steady trickle of armed Underworlders came to reinforce the lines. Amongst these were Sergei and Pelgraine, who joined Giulia as she tried to find a way to force the conflict home.
*
The news and the call for recruits was coursing through the arteries of Underworld with the speed of running feet. It even came to Greygori’s door in the person of one of the Organ Donor Boys. This was how Arves became aware that his world was on the point of collapse.
Greygori was moved by the news as he had not been since Faith escaped. “So soon!” he hissed, as though he had known forever of the attack but had grievously miscounted the days. “I am not ready. Arves!”
He was halfway back to his laboratory, arm uncoiling for the door. “Arves!” he called again, but Arves was staring aghast at the messenger. One of Greygori’s three-digited hands spun him by the shoulder and he looked up into his own darkened reflections.
“Take this, Arves,” Greygori told him, and pressed a long-barrelled pistol into his limp hands. “Go with that man to the fighting. Buy time, Arves. I need some small time.”
Arves wanted to protest: his book-bound past had not credited him with currency to buy even the smallest increment of time. Greygori was forcing him towards the door and the war, and the Organ Donor Boy gripped his arm as the Transforming Man’s hand left off. Arves was hustled away to fight.
*
By the time he arrived things had started to fall apart on both sides. The Outriders had scattered behind four or five different outcroppings, and their officers were unable to get word between the groups without a crossbow bolt finding the messenger. Each group’s impression of how the battle was doing was at variance with the others. Some were trying to pull back whilst others believed they had to forge forwards. Giulia and the others, for their part, had never dreamed that they would be able to control their troops. Each band fought on their own terms and they were united only in their common enemy. The Outriders were constantly subjected to unexpected charges and oddly-placed snipers. Giulia’s tenuous authority was complicated further when a dozen or so Outriders who had been cut off since the beginning suddenly broke from their concealment and tried to fight their way back to their own lines, attacking the Underworlders in the rear. It was beginning to look as though a single unified assault from the surface-dwellers would break the defence entirely. Then Sergei arrived with a batch of explosive bolts, and began to use them, aiming high and letting them arc along the curve of the ceiling and fall amongst the Outrider officers, sowing confusion. In the gloom of the caverns it gave other marksmen something to aim at: running figures silhouetted against the sudden flash of flame.
Underworlder consensus had it that the Outrider commander was a junior officer who had risen to his position by dead man’s shoes minutes before. Finding himself suddenly under explosive attack he panicked and unleashed his secret weapon.
Grinding from the back came something like a barrel on wheels, ten feet long and half that across. It was pushed by a dozen Outriders and there was a snout at the front and some machinery at the back. Crossbow bolts spanged off its curved sides and the nearest bands of Underworlders shifted nervously as the jointed snout hinged towards them.
The machinery at the back set up an urgent clatter and the weapon spat a gout of black liquid over the nearest Underworlders and the fungus mass they were crouching behind. There was some chaos, but they realised within seconds that the reeking stuff was harmless. Then something caught at the end of the snout and the jet of fluid became a sheet of flame. That first band of Underworlders went up like candles, crisping and charring even as they ran. The fungus went up too, great boils of it cracking open and shrivelling. The Outriders wasted no time changing the angle of the weapon’s nozzle so that it vomited fire in a weaving, deadly arc across the defenders’ lines, setting the fighters and their barricades aflame in equal measure. The Underworlders started a retreat that became close to a rout. Sergei and the other de facto leaders did their best to rally, but the fire-gouting machine was too much. It rumbled forwards, invincible, and when one of its attendants fell another ran to take his place. The Outriders sensed victory. The torrent of flaming chemicals seared in a great rain over the stacks of fungus, burning and killing men and women with the sightless malice of an idiot child. Arves witnessed it all, and his voice shook as he recounted it.
The fire burned the Fermers too. It found the little creatures in their fungal lairs or as they trundled heedlessly about their business, and set them alight like torches. The results were startling: they went berserk. Stumpy arms waving in the air, spinning and hopping as the heat destroyed them, they charged and leapt at the Outriders and their machine. They clung to legs, clawed at the barrel’s sides and set the firestarters ablaze. Two dozen or more mobbed the advancing fire-thrower and dragged down several of the Outriders, the others halting their advance to chop at the little monsters with knives, because musket balls just passed through them.
Sergei stood up to his full eight-foot height and levelled his pistol, newly reloaded. A musket ball scored a line of blood across his bicep, but he never flinched, firing a single round into the body of the Outriders’ machine.
It seemed that he had achieved nothing, but Arves was probably too short-sighted to see the spurt of liquid from the finger-sized hole. In the seconds following there was a bang that deafened both sides, scything through Outriders and Fermers alike with jagged sheets of ripped metal and an all-consuming fireball.
The Outriders stayed at bay after that, keeping to their cover whilst their enemies picked them off. Their situation worsened considerably when an organised squad of Meat Packers arrived with what they called the Great Eye of Waylun. It was a glorious killing machine, a giant gun on two solid metal millstone wheels within an armoured housing of riveted plates. There was a single great central barrel surrounded by eight smaller guns that fired in turn, recoiling back into the housing and then extending outwards again, reloaded. The great central eye itself remained silent but was enough of a tacit threat that the Outriders began to fall back, and then to flee under the massed fire of the defenders. Very few escaped. The Great Eye of Waylun ground forward implacably, its operators guarded by its bulk, sending shot after shot whistling across the cavern.
It looked as though things were over and the war was won, but the tide of fortune never ebbed and flowed as it did that day. Arves saw some commotion at the far end of the cavern where the Outriders were now trying to leave. A new force was pushing its way through, indeed shooting its way through, cutting down the panicked Outriders even as the Underworlders picked them off from behind. As the Outrider discipline finally collapsed in its entirety, a squad of twenty Angels forced its way into the cavern and began a swift advance on the defenders’ lines. Each man had his energy shield on, and shot and crossbow bolts bounced and skipped from the crackling air before them. Their own weapons, projectile rifles, pulse and beam guns, began to rake across the Underworlders, burning through flesh and fungus without distinction.
The Great Eye of Waylun essayed a few rounds of its minor barrels, its whole iron frame shuddering with the recoil. The bullets struck the shields hard and made the Angels stagger, no more than that. At around that time the second Angel task force turned up out of nowhere, dropping from a cave mouth at the left of the defenders’ positions and opening fire immediately. They had entered the Underworld at some other point and navigated their way faultlessly to the battlefield. From being on the brink of victory the Underworlders were suddenly in danger of being annihilated by forty men.
It was later found that there had been a third squad, running for the myoculture caverns with their shields down to conserve energy. Unexpectedly, Yarmin’s Friendly Society had ambushed them and struck down over half before the others could activate their point generators and return the favour. It was a disorganised, hopelessly courageous attempt, typical of the Friendlies. Once shielded, the Angels shot them down, save for a couple who fled to bear the tale.
In the myoculture caverns the Angels marched forwards calmly and efficiently, putting a bullet or a beam of white light into anyone who tried to run, pinning groups whilst other Angels moved in. It was like some kind of pest-killing venture. At least the Outriders had been fighting for their lives.
As Arves crouched and hid, Sergei continued to fire off futile shots. Behind them, the Great Eye of Waylun finally loosed a shell from its monstrous central barrel. The missile impacted in the midst of the central unit of Angels and scattered them left and right, but when the smoke and dust cleared they were picking themselves up again with the same routine patience. One did not. A single armoured body lay like a discarded doll. Sergei guessed the man had fallen badly and broken his neck. Some of the Underworlders took heart from this and set up a ragged cheer. In response, one of the Angels levelled a long silvery weapon at the Great Eye. There was a shimmer and a sparkle in the air, and the wheels stopped grinding instantly, the mechanisms froze. A thin sheet of shining material condensed across the metal, and the skins of the operators. The Great Eye never spoke again.
Arves saw little more, for he was crunched up into a ball between the cavern floor and a wall of fungus as beams and bullets punched above him. His pistol was clutched, unused, in his hand. Around him the air was a thunder of gunfire as the Angels executed their prey and the Underworlders put up a powerless resistance. The Authority had mustered every Angel in the city whose shield still functioned and sent them in as a unified force. They were taking no chances.
Then a familiarly deformed hand touched Arves on the shoulder, and he looked up at the nightmare bulk that was Greygori Sanguival.
“How goes the war, Arves?” The Transforming Man bared atrophied teeth. From one claw dangled some device with straps and wings. Arves saw it was an Angel’s shield generator, although he could not know by what means Greygori had obtained it. In the hand that rested on Arves’ shoulder was a tiny object, small as a knife: a flat rectangle with a single button.
“Wonderful technology,” Greygori was saying, as people died around them. He was letting the generator pack spin from its straps. “Very advanced, Arves, but very reliant on frequency. Point generators, Arves, produce such an inordinate amount of energy, Arves, and it all must go somewhere.”
He stood up without warning and stepped from cover. Arves fully expected to see his grotesque body fall straight back down, riddled with holes. Instead there was a crackle and hum, and the firing from both sides slowed a little. Arves risked a look and saw his master standing taller than human, presenting the generator pack like a talisman. The fire from the Angels bounced and danced about him, springing away from a shield that could only be seen in the moment of contact. Greygori had managed to repair the generator; perhaps only he or Father Sulplice could have done it.
The Transforming Man strode forwards and Arves appreciated that the lurching shuffle he had affected in everyday life was not a crippling of the limbs but a conscious effort to keep to a human pace. Greygori made eight feet to a stride, advancing with great telescoping bounds on the Angels, who were beginning to back up.
Greygori levelled the bronze device at the Angel with the frost ray, even as that weapon was discharged harmlessly against him. There was no sound from the little toy, no beam of light or any other indication that it had worked, save that the luckless Angel’s generator pack exploded in a violent storm of shrapnel and searing blue-red energy. There was precious little left of the man from the knees up.
In the resultant seconds of silence, Arves heard Greygori say, “Well, that worked slightly better than I expected.”
Idly the Transforming Man clicked his little trigger at another two Angels with similarly pyrotechnic results, which was quite enough for the rest. Some were trying to get their packs off when Greygori destroyed them whilst others were running for cover, only to find that the mysterious medium that Greygori used to transmit his signal was not blocked by fungus or even stone. The Underworlders roared their triumph and sent shots into any Angel who managed to divest himself of his shield whilst Greygori calmly blew up generator after generator with the air of a man conducting an educational, but essentially routine, scientific experiment.
The very last Angel was spared, the final man of forty. Greygori pointed his device and clicked away but nothing happened, leaving the man to flee. Greygori seemed a little disgruntled. He returned to Arves and Sergei and Giulia and the others.
You might think the Underworld won its freedom as the Count had promised, save that of course Arves had not come to the Island for his health.
There was a sudden outbreak of firing at the far end of the cavern, and Arves saw a further mass of Outriders flooding in. These were not the ousted remnants of the previous force but new, fresh fighters. Nobody at the time could say where they had come from. My guess is that the first wave represented those Outriders immediately available for service. This second batch comprised those who had been engaged elsewhere, hunting Vermin or patrolling. The call had reached them, wherever they were, and they had been rushed hotfoot to the front. Who would have thought the Authority kept so many under arms?
There was a scattering of Angels in their midst as well, the remnants of the third detachment the Friendlies had engaged. The whole force was smaller than the first wave, but the Underworlders were in no position to stop them now. Too many had fallen, too much ammunition had been spent.
“Ah well,” said Greygori. “So much for that.” He turned his humped back and made to go. Arves grabbed at his trailing robes and asked him where.
“The depths, Arves,” Greygori told him. “I have my eye on an old medical installation in which to continue my work. They will not find me there.”
“But what about me?” Arves demanded. Greygori stared at him, and a musket ball whistled through the air between them. The Transforming Man shrugged, perhaps his most human gesture, and made off for his buried refuge in a manner that did not invite followers.
*
The first charge of the Outriders met with such a fierce barrage of fire that it faltered and stopped in the open. Sensing that the tide could still be turned, Giulia took up her crossbow and vaulted over the barricades with her Fishermen in tow. She might well have done it, but a beam of ruby light dissected her heart even as she called for her followers. She fell back into the arms of Charno, who died a moment later.
The Underworlders began fleeing in droves. Arves saw Sergei finally abandon all hope and retreat with his ragged Collective. Pelgraine and a few other Fishermen made a fighting withdrawal another way, running for that eternal Fishermen haunt, the lightless, Mazen-haunted depths.
Arves himself ended up in the Temple, the Underworld’s beating heart, beneath the backlit form of the Coming Man who had not arisen to defend his adherents in their time of need. There, he witnessed a final stand against the invasion, armed Underworlders crouching either side of the Temple doorway and loosing bolt after bolt into the advancing enemy, while the non-combatants reloaded their weapons for them.
When the Outriders broke through into the Temple they fired at everyone they saw, even the poor Caretaker which never harmed anyone. The spider-like machine scuttled down the wall, perhaps to look at the damage the musket balls had done, and was hit four or five times. It jumped and fell onto its back, legs waving jerkily, and then let off a great cloud of choking powder from nozzles along its rim that drove the Outriders briefly back. In this confusion, Arves escaped the carnage and saw no more of it.
He was picked up by another band of Outriders minutes later. This group was less bloodthirsty and simply took him captive. He was one of perhaps a dozen taken to the surface as trophies.
While waiting in the prison boat he heard that the invasion of the Underworld was a grand civic success. The haven of the dispossessed, the lower frontier of human knowledge, had been swept away at the cost of countless lives for the sake of some rich man’s lie.