Celie leaned against the chimney, surveying the decrepit city. The Kark was establishing a perimeter, and she watched has the constant thundercloud of tobacco smoke drifted above him. There was no telling what he'd meant by "establishing a perimeter" but she suspected the flimsy platforms that had once raised new parts of the city above everything else were worse for the wear afterward; the Kark had a very terminal approach to home defense. Kingsley was being useful in his own way, getting the lay of the land. He was a remarkably proactive coward and believed that an intimate knowledge of escape routes was the best possible method of warding off the briefest possible futures. She agreed with him but admiration didn't suit the slender valet.
Eb rose around them in all directions, shambling dumbly off into the distance like a zombie, she thought. The city looked well preserved in spite of its emptiness; a few buildings had charred looks around the windows that suggested they had been gutted by fire, but every exterior was just a little grubby. Even where planks had been ripped from the wall or windows broken, it looked almost orderly. It looked less dead and more like the home of a league of extremely ambitious gardeners and somehow that made the entire place just a little bit more off. Back home, there were scholarly debates about the nature of the continent. When explorers had arrived, they had found towns, she remembered, much like this one, but it was widely held by scholars that they had been abandoned for two hundred years at least. This place looked as though the milkman had only stopped coming around the week before.
Her eyes rested on a stout tower in the middle distance that defied the trope. Its roof was gone, leaving bare and damaged supports and the wooden siding had been stripped off in places. Looking through one of the windows, was a person. Celie stared. A man. Mind racing, she pointed at him. "Hey!"
The Kark looked up from an improvised booby trap as Celie dashed along the railway, gesticulating wildly. "There was a man! A person!" She was pointing, and the Kark followed her finger. Then he shaded his eyes and looked towards the sun. He patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. Celie wheeled back towards the damaged building. There was no one there.
"I saw someone!" They both stopped as Kingsley arrived, waving his broken opera-glasses frantically and pointing. "A guy! He was sitting in a tower." He paused dramatically, then, impatient for his friends to draw the correct conclusion, offered it: "There might be more! We ought to do something."
The Kark shifted from Celie's motherly concern for a lost stranger to Kingsley's healthy xenophobia. Kingsley's eye narrowed and his arms crossed. "I meant we ought to batten hatches, leave the rake in the lawn, and man the spider holes."
Soon he crossed his arms and leaned against a rooftop shed as the other two assessed the tower, deliberately ignorant of his muttering. The buildings nearest it had been razed (the Kark approved) and in the murky water far, far below, the sunken-ship skeletons could be seen twisted nearly beyond recognition. The pipes that seemed omnipresent in Eb, large enough the Kark suspected they could allow him to walk in unbent, appeared in full force here; they represented the only connection between the tower and the surrounding architecture. Creeping tendrils disguised each, and they might have been disguised as the trunks of massive trees had the occasional valve not risen above the greenery. The Kark looked appraisingly at the building. "It's the perfect hiding spot. Already defended, practically, no way in except a few easily-controlled locations. If that guy doesn't want us in, we're not getting in."
There was a soft noise, which five eyes followed to its source. A round-faced man with a broken nose was visible over the the fence that divided the flat roof from the next building. Celie broke into a smile, one hand preventing Kingsley from breaking into a run. "Rickman, I knew that was you! King, Kark, remember? He was our radio operator back at the camp! Rickman! How did you get here? We've been wandering for weeks! You must be exhausted, wearing all that radio equipment still! Look here you've got..."
Celie stopped. Pickman had not smiled in recognition. Not so much as blinked; his entire body shifted to allow his eyes to follow her as she'd approached. She stiffened and began to back up. Pickman's chest was almost perfectly still. "Pickman?"
He rose bodily over the fence atop a massive quadrupedal machine. Oily metal hands scrabbled for purchase on the wooden roof, levering its steel frame clumsily upward. The hindquarters jerked forward, and it lurched sideways, inserting itself between the Kark and Celie. The machine came to a hissing stop and noisily settled into a sitting position.
Pickman watched Celie dispassionately, his head cocked at an impossible angle. The Kark twitched his right hand, deciding to feign a punch to see what happened. There was an imperceptible blur of activity from Rickman's hands. The metal beast's neck snaked around and its flat, painted face regarded the Kark threateningly, daring him to move.
No comments:
Post a Comment