‘Follow the water,’ Tooms croaked. ‘Just keep following it.’ He held Skam’s lantern in one hand, illuminating floating spores and hummocks of fungus, rolling in the current. The walls were shaggy with the stuff, and the light caught on gleaming lengths of bone, picked clean by the mould that cocooned them. Not just one skeleton, but dozens – more, even, than that. Not just rats and men, but other things as well. Hundreds, perhaps, attached to the walls and rolling underfoot. As if they’d died, one after the next, all in a line.
He could not say how long they had been walking through the forests of the dead – days? Hours? Only minutes, perhaps. He was tired, and the song made it hard to concentrate.
‘They’re gone,’ Guld said, hoarsely, from behind him. ‘You understand? We’re alone, old man. Just you and me. We can’t keep going. We can’t.’
‘We will, or I’ll gut you here and now.’ Tooms turned and shoved the bigger man back against the wall. Puffballs burst around them, and Guld gasped as bones clattered down around him, freed from their mouldy prison. Tooms drew a knife and pressed the tip to Guld’s face, just below his eye. ‘We find them. We find Agert. That’s what underjacks do. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ Guld muttered.
Tooms let him slump, and turned. The water was still flowing, leading them on. Dayla and Huxyl couldn’t have gone far. Something told him that they were closer than he thought. ‘We’re close. The Cathedral Hill cistern is through the next archway. If Agert is down here, that’s where he’ll be.’
‘And the others?’
Tooms glanced at him. ‘We find Agert first. Then the others. Come on.’
The aperture that led to the viaduct wasn’t far. Two grim-faced duardin statues crouched to either side of the opening, their stout forms shrouded in mould. Clouds of water vapour emerged from the aperture, warm and damp. Tooms passed between the statues, without waiting to see if Guld followed him.
The cistern-chamber was like some great cathedral, rising up and spreading out before him. Great sheets of water hammered down, pouring through culverts and grates, filling the air with condensation. The thunder of its fall blocked out Guld’s voice, as he shouted something. Tooms shook his head.
Waters poured down, running to either side of a set of wide, semi-circular steps. The steps led up onto the stone causeway that crossed over the lake-like cistern and passed to the other side. Broken statues lined the causeway. Whether they had been duardin or human, Tooms couldn’t say and didn’t care. His attentions were elsewhere.
Shimmering fungal orbs of monstrous size floated in the waters of the cistern, or hung pendulous from the chamber ceiling. They spread across the walls and floor. A forest of human-like shapes stood silent around the cistern and along the causeway, their features hidden by the clouds of heat and vapour.
Guld leaned close, shouting. ‘What are they?’
Tooms lifted his truncheon. ‘Let’s find out.’ He started forward, ignoring Guld’s shout of dismay. As he drew close to one of the shapes, he saw that it was rooted to the stone of the causeway, its form covered in a thick, fungous shag. The others were the same. They swayed in the damp air, and he felt something – a pulse, a current travelling between them. As if they were speaking.
‘Can you hear them?’
The voice was hoarse and raw. But familiar.
‘Agert,’ Tooms said, as he turned.
Agert smiled, and mould burst and tore as his face moved. He was only barely recognisable, his body hidden beneath a tabard of mould and his head half eaten away. But it was him, the same Agert who’d taught Tooms about the currents and the dark.
‘What happened to you, Agert? What is all of this?’
Agert nodded slowly, and made a hoarse, gasping sound, as if trying to speak again. But the only sound Tooms could hear was the soft pop of puffballs, and the roar of the water as it carried the spores away. Agert uprooted himself, and took an unsteady step. Then another, growing more sure with each. Behind him, Tooms saw others – shuffling, shambling fungal shapes, creeping towards him out of the clouds of water vapour.
He hefted his truncheon, but they stumbled past him, heading away, into the dark of the tunnels. They crumbled as they walked, and he could see bone, in places. The fungus was eating them alive, devouring them bit by bit. But they sang as they stumbled, the same strange, sad song he’d heard in the tunnels. Sickened, he looked at Agert.
‘They… feel… nothing,’ Agert said, in a voice like breaking glass. ‘Kind. She’s… kind.’
‘Who?’ Tooms asked, not wanting to know the answer, but unable to stop himself.
Agert pointed. And Tooms saw her, then, and wondered how he’d missed her. His stomach lurched at the sight, and Guld made a strangled, animal moan. The… woman crouched over them all, a giantess made of spores and water and sound, filling the cathedral-like chamber with her presence.
She cupped her hands and thrust them into the cistern. Shambling, fungal petitioners knelt in her palms, in their hundreds, as she lifted them from the mould-shrouded waters. She lifted them up with gentle, hideous strength and blew on them gently. The petitioners came apart in clouds of spores that swirled away, filling the upper reaches of the chamber. The mould clung to every stone and duct, growing, creeping, spreading.
Vaguely, he thought he heard Guld screaming something that might have been a name, but he couldn’t look away from her. She loomed mountainous and impossible, filling his vision and his senses. She smiled at the shuffling things in her hands, and he felt his heart stutter in primal terror.
He knew her name, but could not bring himself to say it. He tore his eyes away, unable to bear such awful majesty, and found himself face-to-face with Agert. Over his shoulder, Tooms saw Skam, and Huxyl and Dayla. They surrounded Guld, moving with awful slowness, their voices raised in that sad, strange song. As he watched, Guld’s blade dipped, and they closed in.
‘It’s a kindness,’ Agert said, only it wasn’t Agert’s voice, now. It was a woman’s voice, issuing from Agert’s mossy lips. The words sliced into Tooms like knives. He shook his head, trying not to listen. Not to see. He backed away, but Agert followed. ‘You do not deserve pain, though you have caused much. It was not malice, but ignorance.’
‘Who are you?’ Tooms whispered.
‘You know who I am. This place was mine, before it was his, and it will be mine again. In time. I am patient. Eventually, my song will be heard by all, and all will know me and join their voices to mine.’ Agert’s face sloughed away, and something new peered out of his skull, a new face – one of golden spores and water vapour. Her eyes caught him, held him, and she began to sing, and Tooms felt as if he were burning under his skin.
For a moment, he saw things as Agert and the others must. The song folded him into itself, and he saw great shapes dancing in the light of phosphorescent mould. The fungal spheres were not simply spheres but shapes that were all things and none, silvery and bright. There were faces there, and he could hear them crying out, impatient and eager to be born. To see the light and taste the air.
He knew what they were. Every underjack did. They were the reason men kept to the roads and never went into the forests. The reason that the pyre-gangs had been formed, to clean the land around the city walls. They were worse than any orruk or troggoth. Older than any city, they had ruled this realm once, and some thought they would again, though it was a fool who spoke of such heresies where the witch-takers might hear.
And even as he recognised them, he knew at last what Guld had been trying to say. What Dayla had been afraid of. He knew her name now, though he could not say it.
They are beautiful, aren’t they, she whispered, in a voice like rustling leaves. And strong. So strong. Stronger than flesh, stronger than stone and steel. And they are kind, my children. So kind. They let you hear the song. They let you join it. Her voice became harsh. Sharp, like branches cracking in the cold. It is a kindness that you do not deserve.
He felt a different sort of heat now, and crushing, grinding pain. Smoke filled his lungs, and his flesh blistered. You burned them. Chopped them and beat them. For what? A grove of stone and iron? Is this what he teaches you, your God-King?
Tooms wanted to scream, but had no tongue. He wanted to beg forgiveness, to flee, but could do neither. Her eyes filled his vision, burning like the green suns of Ghyran, boiling into him, searing away all his courage and hope. Leaving him hollow and withered.
Stone does not live. Iron does not live. It is cruel.
He saw Greywater Fastness, a jumble of hard angles, and choking smog. Narrow streets, filled with huddled forms, and clattering machinery. Home, but distorted to grotesque proportions that he barely recognised. A darksome blotch – a tumour of stone. Was this how they saw it?
But we are kind… so kind. And you will thank us, when the rains fall, and the streets sprout, and you all, at last, hear the song he has denied you.
The city changed. It twisted and thrashed and was no longer a beast of stone and iron, but a great, heaving mound of fleshy, fungal growth. And within its runnels, hundreds of thousands of shaggy, unmoving shapes the colour of the dawn.
