“No one shall leave their home after the hour of six o’clock in the evening. All spirits (in the libational sense) are hereby banned, and anyone found drunk or dancing shall be subject to immediate execution. Anyone harboring an animal of any sort shall have their left hand removed, cooked, and fed to their mouth or ass. Everything will get darker soon, if you do not obey.”
—From Part I of Lord Crowley’s Final Decree, distributed in peculiar and strange ways, at night, by Emissaries, demi-mages, and bats
With Wretch, Verne, and Laudinum X by his side—an army of demi-mages and Emissaries crammed in behind them for good measure—Crowley admired the Burrower in all its substantial glory from a rocky overhang. The Burrower filled almost all of one of the catacombs’ largest caverns, surrounded by workers making last-minute adjustments.
Hours since the explosion that had killed Dupin, but still no time to clean up proper. No time at all.
Crowley was covered in dried blood where it could not be wiped away, and he could not quite shake the ringing in his ears and the shaking of his hands. But he lived, praise the Devil and Demon both! The traitor had been blown to smithereens, yet Wretch had, with uncanny reflexes, saved him, even as Crowley had watched with disbelief as Dupin’s features came apart and then the eclipse that was Wretch slipped between to shelter him. Such a strong shield, so infernally dark. He should wear Wretch on the field of battle.
“Why, Wretch? Why?” Crowley asked, staring blank-eyed at the Burrower.
“Let us just say, my lord, that my inquiries reveal she had a lot of English friends for a Frenchwoman.”
“England. Prague. England. Prague. I say we burn them both down.”
“They do go together these days, like hearts go with blood,” Wretch said.
Why, he was trembling. Trembling. Him, the Emperor of a fourth of the world that mattered. Who would have thought? That she had hated him that much, to try to kill him in such a vile fashion. And he had continued to stand there, in his shock, splashed in various bodily liquids, as if baptized by a cult of autopsies, scraps of skin and fragments of bone sticking to him.
Until he’d caught sight of Laudinum X. Which was when he had started to laugh—pointing at Laudinum X and laughing, hooting even, slapping his knee. For Wretch had been less successful in protecting Laudinum X. Shrapnel from the blast had bisected LX’s skull as perfectly as if a butcher had had time to draw lines on his head and split it open five inches with a cleaver. His head was wrapped with blood-soaked bandages, but still Laudinum X lived, and not only lived but did not even blink, just stood there awaiting further orders.
“You look so stupid. So, so very stupid,” Crowley had shrieked at his chief demi-mage immediately after the explosion, and yet so did he, covered in exploded Dupin, and so did the All-Seeing Eye, victim of a food fight with lasagna in a thick tomato sauce. Only Wretch, floating there wrathful, surveying the cathedral for a second enemy, did not look stupid.
But Crowley had stopped laughing soon enough and a flood of fear came over him and he was drowning in it. They had come so close, the Resistance. They had come so very close to ending him, and his ambitions. After all the time and effort Crowley had put into his plans.
“I need a new garbage … I need a new garbage … I need … garbage …” The word escaped him, not only escaped him but sat at the edge of his mind making rude gestures at him.
“A new liaison with the citizens of Paris?” Wretch had suggested.
“Yes, that! And a maid. We need a maid in here. And some towels. And a mop. My kingdom for a mop.”
Then he was hopping and kicking at bits of Dupin and stomping on bits of Dupin, and if he could not stop laughing now it wasn’t because Laudinum X was so absurd with a split skull but because he could picture in his mind’s eye just what vengeance might look like.
The Burrower: A two-hundred-foot-long dreadnought, wide and thick and glutted with millions upon millions of its namesake: earthworms. Atop the blind, questing stump of a head lay the “command barnacle,” as Crowley called it. From there, the Burrower’s leviathanlike tendencies could be controlled for maximum devastative effect. Beneath, Verne’s most useful invention: a tread rotated via a pulley that helped the Burrower to move at speeds of up to thirty-five miles an hour over open fields; reversed, that same tread cut into the earth to allow the Burrower to dig with ferocity into the ground.
The vast and tumultuous frame represented a breakthrough in Crowley’s magic technologies. Whereas the blood of mammals powered his other creations and must be continually replenished with more blood, the Burrower required blood only to consecrate the latticework that formed the frame. Thereafter, the writhing balls of living earthworms that occupied much of the interior did the rest; Crowley’s minions must only use his necromancy to keep them alive without sustenance and, wherever the Burrower came to rest, dig up more earthworms to replace any casualties of the day. The small army of soldiers and mages that accompanied the Burrower had their living quarters in spheres hanging from the Burrower’s metal spine and could spill forth through tubes leading through the masses of earthworms to the exterior.
The Burrower had a squirmy feel to it, as the earthworms writhing out from the latticework gave the machine at rest a kind of creepy residual movement.
In the distance, the bleating of muffled goats, for this cavern was surrounded by Crowley’s surplus goat pens. Although, to be honest, it sounded more like Crowley had abducted thousands of human babies, such was the sort of noise goats made en masse. For this reason, Crowley often had his demi-mages, on their lunch break, drown out the sound by playing Beethoven’s Ninth, synchronized across a platoon of phonographs.
“Put a fresh towel on that,” Crowley said to Laudinum X, wearying of the sight of the cleft cranium. The injury was nothing a necromancer couldn’t withstand, but old LX still seemed in shock, had had to be led here by Verne, much to the Inventor’s distaste. “Someone put a goddamn towel over Laudinum X’s head !”
His hands were fists at his side, fingernails cutting into his palms. The explosion still rang in Crowley’s head. The look on Dupin’s face, staring blank into his eyes even as she came apart at all the seams. The thought that he might so easily have become chaos and void. This must never happen again.
“Of course, Lord Emperor,” Wretch said, and summoned over a worker, who was forced to take off his dirty white shirt, which then hung sadly across most of LX’s face like a flag of surrender.
Ever since the explosion, even in acknowledging Crowley’s curt thank-you for saving his life, Wretch had the look about him of a satisfied cat, one that had eaten a mouse, or a dozen mice. Not that Crowley was ungrateful, but …
Crowley turned to Verne, who had been trying to make himself small and invisible against the shadows of the gray rock.
“You now shall have an important opportunity. You and Laudinum X.”
“I don’t understand,” Verne said. “I am merely a novelist who dabbles in invention.”
“You shall pilot the Burrower from the command limpet.”
“Once the modifications are complete. The ones I gave you in the diagrams the other day?”
“They’ve already finished those—gone without sleep to do it, bless them.” Most were dead now, turned into goats and slaughtered.
“There must be at least a month of testing!”
“Oh no. We’ve stepped up the schedule while you were lounging around in your luxury accommodations. This is happening right now.”
“Now?” Verne practically shouted it. “Now? But you can’t. It hasn’t been tested. It hasn’t been tested. There has been no testing.”
“Are you a bloody parrot? Test it en route, inventor. Test it on your way to the front. Write another bloody boring novel while you’re at it, about your adventures.”
Verne’s mecha-elephant novel set in India had been a snooze; perhaps a Burrower novel would be more dramatic. But Verne was not enticed by the thought of novel-writing.
“The front?”
“You are a blasted parrot.”
“You cannot do this. You cannot.”
Crowley snarled. “I can and I will.” Laudinum X would oversee Verne, ensure he didn’t get any odd ideas about rebellion. While Verne would ensure Laudinum X didn’t fall over dead, because LX would have the deadman’s switch. Or in this case, a giant red button in the cockpit, safe(ish) beneath LX’s bum. If LX tumbled from his perch, the entire war machine would explode, spewing pieces of earthworm over half the continent.
The Burrower could not fall into enemy hands should his plans go the way of Napoleon’s career. Indeed, in the case of failure, the Burrower would become an enormous, earthworm-filled suicide bomb. Again, though, Dupin’s dissolving face came back to him, and he suffered a lurch, a dislocation, came slowly back to earth.
“But where will we go? What shall we do?” Verne staring distant, as if Crowley meant to just banish him to the farther horizon.
“It’s not a bleeding vacation, Jules. You don’t get to choose. You will invade England. You will utterly crush those pathetic eel eaters. We will kill them all. They will drown in their own blood. We will show them what it means to defy the great God-Emperor Crowley.”
Was there spittle? Was he shouting? Shrieking? He did not care. This defiance must end. This defiance must be put to an end. Everywhere.
The Burrower would take care of England, or at least keep them in check … and he would take care of the Czechs, as Wretch had long counseled.
“Wretch. Promote Laudinum X’s second, Opium Y, to head of the war factories. Ready the largest army of war elephants you can in one week. I shall personally ride at the head of them, and together we will crush Bavaria and lay waste to Prague. We’ll kill them all. We’ll wage such a war that they will wish they had never even thought about resisting. We will have revenge!”
“Most excellent, Your Excellency! It shall be as you command,” Wretch said, bowing. In his way.
Now if he could just be sure he wasn’t still wearing some of the brains of the traitor Dupin before he addressed the legions of demi-mages and Emissaries at his back and roused them to new heights of passion for the glorious adventures to come.
Which would, in the preparation for said adventures, just by chance, just by sheer coincidence, put immense hardship and new horrors squarely upon the populace of Paris.