It was day seven of the battle for the English wall, and the giant snails had been at it for hours. Snailmate behind them and snailmate ahead. The emerald dragons had been defeated, and waves of the utterly unreliable tripod bombs concocted by H. G. Wells had detonated their magic cargo as much upon the defenders as upon the Burrower—and in any event, earthworms transformed into eels made little difference to Verne. They even, under the demi-mages’ deft control, could be considered an improvement.
Still, this change did not improve the vigor nor the complexion of the defenders. Verne could through the spyglass tell where along the walls humans no longer stood, where instead white-and-gray eels spilled writhing over the edge in their masses. Defenders either had to abandon those sections of the ramparts, as they had been reduced to seething troughs, or find buckets of water for the eels, in the hope that they might still in some way fight for England in their current form, or survive long enough to transform back to human shape.
Even as ominous reports came from the most distant demi-mages over their antiquated intercom. “It were naked and it were runnin’.” “It were sad and mad and I were not glad.” Which perhaps confirmed a fraying of wits at the edges of their enterprise as the battle raged on.
Verne had even used the mushrooms during a break in the battle, after they had finally overcome the noxious fumes, launching them by hastily assembled trebuchet back at the defenders on the walls (who, sadly, appeared to already have been given an antidote).
As for the fallen micro-dragons, the mages and their helpers had plucked them from where they lay amid the fragrant loam and stinking mud—and shoved them into the Burrower’s fuel supply. The dragons ran not quite as smooth as pure earthworms, but still they worked, replacing the earthworms lost. Thus, the Burrower had become an engine running on a hybrid fuel source of eel, micro-dragon, and earthworm. It was something of a minor miracle.
Twice now, too, they had gotten close enough to ram the wall. It had buckled, yet still it stood, and in the end the Burrower had been so swarmed over by the defenders and all manner of wyrd magical creature that they had to fall back.
By then, after the second retreat, LX had come to his senses in a peculiar way, as memories seemed to return to him from a past life, from before he had been conscripted and brainwashed as a demi-mage.
Perhaps, in fact, he now remembered his real parents, the bomb brain surgery he had been exposed to finally jolting it loose—Or perhaps it was just that he could ignore the extent of his injuries through magical means for only so long.
“I don’t want to die, Jules,” LX whined, and it was not so much the whining that offended Verne’s sensibilities when he was expending so much energy just on keeping them alive as the grotesque familiarity of using his first name.
“You’re already dead, Laudinum, in a sense,” Verne replied. Very much so in one particular sense—although his nostrils had been subjected to much abuse from all directions during the various battles, none was so blunt an attack as the stench that emanated from LX.
But Verne regretted the jibe as LX once more submerged his budding maudlin qualities, or drowned them in the tub, long enough to lunge at Verne so hard in his harness and stays that the Burrower took the gesture as a command and lunged and bucked as well—flinging demi-mages affecting repairs to the infrastructure right off the sides in a flurry of surprised screams.
LX had devolved into more of a demi-urge than a demi-mage. Once the undead spouter of insults had subsided, returning to a semicomatose state, Verne managed, through jury-rigging the latticeworks of metal and fabric that lay between them, to more securely lash LX in his place.
Taking care the entire time, as he worked, feeling at the literal end of his leash. There was still the deadman’s button beneath Laudinum X’s buttocks, and, perversely, Verne’s priorities and sense of what was possible had so diminished that he felt a desperate need to deliver their magical payload to the wall. If they were to explode and die all over the place, his flesh unsure what was brain and consciousness and what just meat, he would like it to count.
But even this terrible, irrational thought was eclipsed by the snail mating. Great gray-shelled creatures with luminous light green bodies and the delicate tendrils of eyestalks topped with golden eyes flecked with purple. They had risen up spontaneously with the failure of the giant fungi and the rout of the micro-dragons. In thick bunches of normal-sized snails at first, they had engaged in an astounding orgy of snail sex. Some might have believed it part of the natural ecology of the place, or not, but in any event, the snails had appeared at dusk while magic fire wreathed the wall in green and gold, and could not be combated until dawn.
For what could have been combated anyway? Verne could hardly, through LX, command the demi-mages and their sub-mages to interrupt the mass consummation of snail desire, nor were attempts to put the mating snails to the flame advisable; the ground in front of the wall had proven remarkably prone to wildfire.
Unstable magic was as like to turn a controlled burn into an inferno as be snuffed out by the damp suspicious moss that crowded the ground. The most aggressive of the mosses at times called out to the attackers with lichenous mumbles of “Who goes there?” and “Is that you?” Some of these mosses tripped Crowley’s foot soldiers as they advanced.
So, throughout the night, they had had to endure the faint crackle and pop of snail consummation, continuous and magnified by the odd acoustics of the land bridge and accompanied on either side by the roars and sometimes ridiculously donkeylike braying of a wealth of sea serpents eager for blood they could only spill if the Burrower were foolish enough to plunge into the ocean.
Snap, crackle, snap, crackle, into the early morning, which, when the fog had lifted from both land and sea, revealed that the sorcery lay not just in the replication of snails, their astonishing numbers, but now in size. For overnight the snails had grown until each would have been a match for a wild boar, or even larger. Thus, their continued activities had become not just much louder and more difficult to watch, but also a veritable wall, some ten snails high and twenty deep.
Both before them and behind them.
Overnight, the Burrower had gone from resting on level ground to lying in a trench. A ravine, really.
This could not stand.
And, of course, it didn’t.
But not because of anything Verne attempted.
LX, made lucid by the sight of a mound of giant snails, screamed out, “They’re coming! Battle stations!”
Through tunnels dug during the night under the massing snails, now the wall’s defenders sallied forth in a sortie from all sides, while from above an air force of crows came down like a black storm, blotting out the sun.
This latter threat they had at least prepared for.
“Shields up!” LX shouted, and the order traveled up and down the sides of the Burrower, from demi-mage cage to demi-mage cage. With a mechanical groan, plates of metal slid into place to protect the latticework atop the Burrower from the crows, while on the sides, the demi-mages picked the birds off with common crossbows or even more common spells.
The crows fell from the sky in droves, covered the top of the Burrower and part of the control limpet in a coat of black-feathered carcasses with glassy eyes.
They had meant to eat all the earthworms. They had meant to plop through the spaces in the latticework, these not-ravens, and eat away the Burrower’s strength. But now it was Verne crowing in triumph.
Yet the ground attack had not quite failed. Demi-mages fell to what looked like a rough lot assembled from every pub in England. Among them motley Viking types and Celts in war paint and British regulars armed with swords and pikes and muskets that shot out those accursed bears and other creatures—large and hairy or small, deadly, and without hair. Something about a naked creature of any kind was more terrifying than one with fur, and England appeared well stocked with furless, reckless animals for some reason.
Pikes jammed in the Burrower would surely stop it from ever moving again, without time to pull them all out. But Verne had no idea if they could create velocity enough to break through the snailwall ahead anyway.
But they must try. They had no choice. Even a lurch forward that failed might dislodge the boarding ladders and thwart the sappers at their sides. Magic here was still so unpredictable, anything could happen—to them or to the wall’s defenders.
“LX—we must move!”
Exasperating that LX still had control over steering. More so that he was mumbling to himself. Or was it a quiet gibbering? Verne couldn’t quite tell.
“Laudinum X! You must get hold of yourself! We must move. Don’t you hear the ladders?”
Over the antiquated intercom Verne could hear the demi-mages begging for instructions from their cages.
“But me mommy is dead and I never knew my daddy and I had a toy stuffed badger named Roy and I don’t have him anymore.”
Verne took a breath so deep it took a few seconds to reply.
“LX. Can I tell you something?”
“What, Jules? What do you want to tell me?”
“England, LX, has lots and lots of badgers. And I am more than certain that Roy the Badger came from England and that he is waiting for you there.”
A pause. A quieting of the blood tears from Laudinum X that Verne so loathed and which had made Laudinum’s already filthy shirt and breeches look like an advertisement for leech cures.
“You think?”
“I do think.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise,” Verne lied.
Another pause.
Then a return of the triumphant psychotic Laudinum: “To England it is, then! To the badgers! For the badgers! We will free the badgers! All the badgers!”
Verne rather thought any self-respecting badger would flee at even the most distant sighting of Laudinum X, but with any luck they would all be dead before LX had a chance to pursue a badger. Any sort of badger.
LX shook off his stupor, cranked the gears, pulled the levers, to bring the Burrower from slumber to full-on top racing speed, belching and bellowing in eagerness to lunge forward.
“We’re going to take the wall!” LX shouted. “We’re going to win! For the badgers!”
“Yes, LX, yes!” Verne shouted back. Only half ironically. Only half.
LX pulled the final lever, and the Burrower, released, shot forward, defenders dropping off the side in screams and most of them crushed beneath the metal framework, grist for the mud and the complaining moss.
At a hellish velocity that shook the Burrower’s frame, flinging micro-dragons, eels, and earthworms to both sides, they smashed into the wall of snails in front of them.
Which did not give as Verne had supposed. Which was hard as steel or iron, not snail-fragile at all.
There came a scraping whine and the dread crumple of the Burrower’s nose splitting and shattering.
The impact threw Verne forward in his harness, and he smashed his head against the dashboard in front of him, while he saw, turning his head through the blood, Laudinum X boomeranging back and forth in his seat, the impact having split his skull the rest of the way down to his brain stem and neck.
Yet still, thankfully, his buttocks rested upon the deadman’s button. Even though he was incontrovertibly more dead-ish, not just dead-alive.
The snailwall had hardened from some sort of natural glue like the snail’s version of drywall; although snails had flown everywhere, the Burrower, nose capsule split to both sides, now lay buried and trapped in the snails. A fire had started around the nose, and the attackers had regrouped, emboldened by the failure, were already rushing the sides again.
The Burrower lay there, unmoving and exposed, less vehicle than castle keep.
How could something soft as a snail, brittle as a snail, be so hard? They’d been fooled by escargots. They, the French, had been fooled by a food they knew too well.
LX had begun to prattle on again, all about the badgers. Oh oh—apparently he’d resurrected once more.
It was too much. A burning desperation and anger erupted in Verne, and he turned to LX meaning a sharp rebuke … but burst into tears instead. The tears were like an epiphany, like something coming free he hadn’t known was lodged there.
He could not keep hardening and hardening his heart. LX, damaged, trying to tell Verne about the damage. Verne, pushing it away, wanting LX to be a demon, not-real. When, in fact, he’d been human once, before Crowley changed him. As Crowley had, in his way, changed Verne. It wasn’t Verne’s fault. It probably wasn’t LX’s fault. All of this was on Crowley, on Wretch. The horrible war. Being lashed together into this confined space together, likely about to die. Such a cruelty to it.
“Hush now, Laudinum,” Verne said, wiping the tears from his face, “Hush now. It will all be all right soon enough,” and as he reached out his hand to LX, the demi-mage settled down, stopped rambling, relaxed back into his seat, if only for the moment.
And, lo!, there came a great outcry on the English wall and once more Verne put the spyglass to his weary eye, unsurprised should there be a further surprise.
Yet, still, on the face of it, Verne would admit later he found it surprising.
Across the main length of the wall, tall, muscular half-naked men had appeared and formed a line. They carried spears that curled absurdly forward at the end and wore metal helmets with gray plumes. Their nether regions were protected by enormous codpieces.
The codpieces were shaped like the heads of cod.
The men thus attired smashed the butt of their spears against the floor of the wall, creating a mighty clatter. Some among them carried hoses also crowned with cod heads.
From the mouths of each cod-hose erupted a spray of magical red flame, arcing far out into the hinterland between English wall and snailmate wall and setting fire to the ground there. Yet another … wall. “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” came the awful chant from the codpiece soldiers, distant but carried by the wind.
Verne frowned. Or was it “Bill! Bill! Bill!”?
Or even some interspersing of the two?
Over the English wall then appeared Doom himself, ancient of days and so enormous he seemed bigger and longer than the wall itself.
Framed by the men in codpieces, arcs of red fire spewed farther, more intensely, and the spear stomps became louder.
“Bill! Bill! Bill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Bill! Bill! Bill!”
In their cockpits stuck to the Burrower, so many of his demi-mages craned necks skyward, jaws dropping, as the monster climbed the sky.
The eye black as death, the mighty gray-white head, the hungry jaws, and the coils beneath uncurling and uncurling, the shadow vast across the wall.
The sight made Verne forget his despair. A vast calm came over him as he braced for the assault. For the first time, an anger beyond his control began to smolder. It really was too much. Well too much.
“To arms!” he shouted over the intercom. “To arms!”
“For Crowley!” LX screamed.
“No—for France,” Verne screamed back. “FOR FRANCE!”
And up and down the line, within the Burrower, the demi-mages took up the cry: “For France! For France!” Not for Crowley.
“For France and badgers!” LX screamed.
They could still repulse the enemy. The snails. The moss. The torrents of flame.
It was still possible.
Or perhaps not.
For, lo!, the Great Behemoth Cometh, to the adulation of His followers.
William the Conqueror Eel.
Bill.