Abaddon - Chapter 19

Day Eleven

"Quam diu hortatus es", said Percival to the dark, forgetting to talk to it in English.

"You are getting more difficult to sneak up on", said the dark back.

"I have more outlying reconnaissance nowadays", said Percival, craning his neck up at the acres of overhang above him. Somewhere in that overhang hung a man. "You got the message."

"I could hardly miss it. The letters must be five feet across. Everyone else can see it too, even the cavers. The Man's had to kick 'em out saying an urban gas main's been ruptured and vented gas into the Abyss. Smart move writing it in English, by the way. There must be, oh, only about one-hundred-odd English, American and Australian cavers up here."

"I wanted you down here, not Waldrop and his goons, and I didn't think you'd understand Ecclesiastical Latin or New Testament Greek. So what's the answer? Can you get what I want? I had to march an army three yards up a garden to get an excuse to be up here."

Around Percival, the outriders of his army squatted combat-ready, hands curled around the shafts of their pila, every one gazing unerringly upwards at the same pitch-black point in the dark. I'm glad someone knows where he is, at any rate, thought Percival.

"Oh, I can get it all right. Your message to Waldrop made them anxious to cooperate with me. I have recently received gifts of socks. And a month's supply of chocolate, a lovely new sleeping bag, a PornoSoft 128-bit Masturbation Station, and a portaledge to hang outside the Hermitage on bolts as a veranda."

"On bolts? You're turning into some sort of big soft aid-climbing homosexual."

"It's carefully colour-coordinated to match with the abyssite", said the Stylite huffily.

"So what about the goods? Can you deliver?"

The dark was dubious. "The hundred litres, yes. The Russians' black marketeers sourced plenty of it stored in a warehouse just outside Na International; the owner was trying to negotiate sale to a third world country where this sort of shit's still legal. They discovered he was the source of my own supplies as well. He'd been selling dribs and drabs of it to cavers on the cheap."

"What about the other stuff?"

"The second item on your list was easier to come by, though expensive. Have you any idea how much one of these things costs? Once all the nitrogen cylinders, flatline barrels, collapsible stocks and Cyclone Feed Systems are factored in? An Armalite is cheaper, and I need hardly add has considerably more killing power. "

"Ah, but in order to shoot your enemy, you need to see him. Armalites would have been nice nonetheless."

"They were very firm on that point, I'm afraid. No automatic rifles, no hand grenades, no running with scissors. I managed to haggle them round on ammunition, though. 5.56 mm NATO, 7.62 mm long and 9 mill parabellum, a thousand rounds of each."

"Haggle? You haggled with the Intelligence Services of the free world?"

"I knew they were going to say yes anyway, so I kept on at them till they did."

Percival grinned. "Never argue with a man who can see the future. They probably think they got the good end of the deal anyway. NATO see any quantity of ammunition of a thousand rounds or less as chickenfeed. When are they likely to be delivering it?"

"They already have. It's been left five hundred metres up the road, just on the other side of the gate in the wall. They, uh, didn't want to send their troops too far into your territory."

"My territory? Am I a card-carrying troglodyte now?"

"They have their doubts as to your loyalties. They view anyone who spends too long in the Abyss without dying as suspect."

"How's it stored?"

"One-thousand-round crates for the 5.56 millimetre, 7.62, and Parabellum alike. And ten thousand-round crates for the, uh, other stuff."

"We'll not be needing the crates. If I send one of our men over one of the rope bridges with an ammo crate on his back I'll lose the whole load and the man as well. Probably the bridge as well. The ten thousand-round crates - are they exactly what I asked for? I provided a colour sample."

"I told you already, that part of the order has been delivered in full, though they're mystified as to why you want it."

"I have a heavy-duty painting project that is well overdue."

"Are you going through a Blue Period?"

"I fear", grinned Percival, "I might be about to enter a Bloody Red Period. No pun intended."

"You're making something big with this."

"Pale blue Weapons of Mass Destruction."

“Hmph. As you wish. I always knew you weren’t going to tell me.”

“I believe you.”

“As regards item number one on the list, as I said before, a hundred litres of it are stored with the crates, under a canvas sheet."

"I'm warning you, if these are booby-trapped in any way, nothing will be gained. I'm sending two men up there at a time, no more. And we haven't taken any of their sentries for days."

"They've noticed. They think you must have snipers with infrared sights."

"We took the sights they brought down with them last time."

The overhang chuckled and echoed. "Some of their madder military analysts suspected you had a fully equipped ancient Atlantean electronics workshop down there with you. They also suspect you're mining iron and copper."

"All we do is take what people keep chucking down the chute at us. Weaponry, votive inscriptions to the devil and sewage, mainly. Sewage is an abundant source of saltpetre, of course. In any case, I must go now. My people need me. And I can't keep them from killing and skinning you for your beautiful hairy pelt forever."

"I thank them for their kind restraint."

***

With that, the man in the dark was gone. The natives' massive eyes followed his invisible progress up the overhang above.

Percival rose to his feet, rubbing the back of his spine - no matter how much good posture he adopted, it always seemed to manage to hurt by the end of the day - and paced over to the edge of the Abyss. The edge had been marked out with candles by Loquax and his auxiliaries, purely in order to stop Percival from putting a foot wrong and plunging to his doom.

Deep beneath, a ruby red glow showed that the City was burning. He could even catch a whiff of it on the wind, whenever the breeze chose to blow his way. Not far away, securely chained to no less than four firmly bolted anchor points, the prisoner brooded darkly. Occasionally, it muttered to itself in imp-latin.

He, Percival reminded himself. It's a he.

The day's exercise had been a success, with no actually fatal casualties, which was an improvement on the day before. The inhabitants of the City responded well to tactical instruction. Their ancestors had been drilled by Macedonian hoplites, Thracian peltasts, Persian Immortals, Roman centurions, Turkish janissaries. And now one British Tommy. Though I've only ever watched soldiers drilling. I've never done it myself. I wonder if they know that?

He turned to look at Loquax standing beside him.

"Today, we are being defeated", he said. "Tomorrow, we will conquer."

***

The home fires were still burning as Percival's army approached the walls. He had been expecting jeering and catcalls. Instead, there was an eerie silence, the inhabitants watching with blackened faces from the battlements. When the army column rounded the city walls to approach the main gate, Percival felt his stomach turn to ice.

The south-west tower had completely vanished. The south-west corner of the the city, in fact, had vanished, leaving a vast and rotten wound in the ledge the city stood upon, filled with a stink of shit and corpses.

At once, he realized what had happened. Burn the buildings from the ground up. One of the City's rudimentary sewers had exploded. The force of the blast had shattered the walls outwards.

The mysterious south-eastern tower had not been damaged during the fighting - this was hardly likely, after all, as it lay in that part of the City furthest from any possible incursion across the walls. Beneath the walls of the south-east tower, there was nothing but air and sheer rock going all the way down to - whatever.

A native militiaman ran out of the main gate up to Loquax and fell in the gravel, chattering uncontrollably. Before Loquax could translate, Percival spoke up.

"Don't bother. What he's saying is that a small enemy scouting force came over the wall, probably anywhere but the south-west tower. They captured one of the buildings in the south-west quarter, and our soldiers, following my instructions to the letter, set light to it. And blew out the entire south-west quarter of the city. Destroying the walls and allowing the enemy, a whole enemy army, to pour in from that direction and slaughter one quarter of our citizens. Am I right?"

Loquax hesitated a moment, then nodded stiffly.

The carnage, looking on what could be construed as a bright side, had been double-edged. Many of the Enemy had died in various random blasts as cesspit after cesspit had exploded when the City's defenders put Percival's disastrous 'scorched sewer' policy into practice. And what the Queen had said was true; once the Enemy had been made visible in the streets by the brilliant light of burning buildings, they had been porcupined with pila and bone shard darts. He noted, also, that the forest of newly sharpened, newly poisoned stakes he he'd ordered erected by the south-west tower now lay trampled, broken and encouragingly bloodstained across a wide area. Many stake fragments still lay inside the rapidly cooling bodies of Enemy dead and wounded. Children were running from body to body, smashing helpless skulls with rocks without any apparent compunction whatsoever. Percival was reminded of British children gleefully smashing limpets in seaside rockpools.

But as the army column entered the town, there were no impassioned tirades of recrimination, no hisses, no thrown stones. The worst the people did was to look up at him in reproach as they loaded their dead and dying onto handcarts for transport to the simple-makers. The logic, he supposed, was probably that the dying would be dead by the time they got there. The handcart wheels were made of human femurs. This was, after all, Bone City.

Somehow, the looks of mild reproach seemed worse to Percival than any actual attempt on his life would have.

The main square was also littered with bodies, friendly and Enemy. He examined the friendly bodies critically. It appeared the Enemy had their archers too. Percival picked an Enemy arrow out of the back of a dead man, snapping the shaft, and looked at the flights quizzically. It was feathered. The feathers were huge.

He stroked the flights and looked up at a soldier questioningly.

"Simurga", said the soldier fearfully. “Avis est.” He said nothing more.

What sort of birds could live down here? thought Percival. The City's archers fledged their arrows with paper and steel, and the word simurga was not one he was familiar with.

Simple-makers were arranging dismemberment of the dead on an assembly-line basis. Friendly citizens with, for example, a gangrene of the leg, were having their legs amputated. Percival doubted, in the brutal society of the City, that this was being done to save them pain. He mentioned this to Loquax, who confirmed his suspicions. "If the poison rot travels throughout the body, it will consume valuable meat", replied the little troglodyte. "These people will be well fed, if the rot stops at the amputation and they survive. Then, when they are fat, their remaining limbs will be harvested, while they are unconscious if at all possible. Eventually, of course, they will die, but they will do so knowing that they have been of service to the polity even to the moment of their passing -"

Percival couldn't stand it any longer and lurched to the nearest noissome sewer entrance, where he leaned on a wall alive with maggots and heaved into the evil-smelling dark. For the first time ever, he was glad of the stink and crawling parasites, as they helped it all to come out.

He raised himself upright again and turned to face a semicircle of respectfully cringing citizens. He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, then clapped Loquax on the shoulder with one hand. "Better not show too much weakness, eh, old chap? Or you might decide I'm more use as an hors d'oeuvre than a general." Loquax did not react. "Of course, I forgot - it doesn't matter how much I try to shock you. You've heard it all before."

"You love your children", said Loquax suddenly.

Fuck me, talking bacon. Percival, taken aback by what sounded like an actual question from the little translator, considered it.

"Had I ever had the opportunity to have children", he said, "I would have loved them."

"We", said Loquax, "also love our children." He turned away and moved toward the Bathopolis. The Queen was not enthroned at the entrance. Instead, a pair of massive doors had closed across the only way in. The doors, to Percival's amazement, seemed to be made of solid blocks of stone. On his previous visit, they had been open. Rather than doors, he had taken them to be architecture.

"They move on rollers", volunteered Loquax. "Stone rollers", he added. "Steel rusts. Stone endures."

"What do the rollers rotate around?" said Percival suspiciously.

"Steel", admitted Loquax miserably. "She is still inside", he added. "She is too valuable to be risked."

"But you must have known she would survive the battle", said Percival.

Loquax shrugged. "To protect her is the proper thing to do." He nodded upwards at the Bathopolis battlements. "They are flying signal flags."

"The signal flags", said Percival, "are all blue."

Loquax grinned a smile full of stalactites. "The Queen regrets being unable to venture outside to greet her gallant general and champion", he translated. "She wishes him well on his journey into the nether dark, and awaits his first victorious return."

"Jolly dee", said Percival. "Makes you feel all warm and tingly."

As they walked away from the Bathopolis, Percival saw the enemy prisoner, now standing in the centre of a circle of jabbering angry Citizens who were baiting it with spears. It had not been seriously injured, however - if Percival's troops had intended to kill it, it would have been dead already. But it was screeching with rage and pain. One of the Citizens had pulled a pair of ironworking tongs from the ruins of one of the buildings, and using the tongs, thrust a steel stiletto into the flames of another. With the red-hot dagger at arm's length, he was now burning little cruciform dagger marks into the flesh of the prisoner; the metal was so hot that the flesh crisped and bubbled as it was touched.

"Let it go", said Percival.

Loquax looked up at Percival, shrugged tight-lippedly, and motioned to the Citizens around the creature to stop tormenting it.

"Let it go completely", said Percival. "If I have to politely pretend that you can see the future, I'm damned if I'm going to repeat myself. And no-one is to attack it once it gets outside the walls, either, not until it's crossed back into its own territory."

Loquax resignedly waved a hand, and a disbelieving troglodyte jailer scuttled forward to unlock the creature's chains, with the usual mild frown of reproach at Percival.

"We do not kill helpless creatures", said Percival. "That is what the Enemy does. If we do the same thing, we become the Enemy, and the Enemy has won."

"It will only return with more of its kind and kill more of our own", said Loquax.

"I know", said Percival. "But what additional harm can one more enemy soldier do?"

Loquax sighed, hung his head with an expression of immense sadness, and said nothing.