“Doctor Avery?”
The voice belonged to a thin man approaching. Black, like many here, he was scarred and hard-looking, his face etched in a scowl.
“That’s me,” Avery said.
“I was told that you and your friends accompanied a certain woman.” The man stuck a toothpick in his mouth and chewed it as he appraised Layanna. “That you?”
“I need to reach General Vursk,” she said. “Are you Lisam?” It was the name of the contact that was supposed to meet them.
“I am. Follow me.”
They fell in behind him as he led the way through the chaos of the airport. Armed men stormed past, sweaty and grim. Passengers hastened, and baggage unloaders swore and hurried, eager to be indoors. As they were leaving the tarmac, Avery saw something in the distance that made his blood run cold. He stopped and swore.
“What gives?” said Hildra.
He pointed, but the figure was gone. “Probably nothing.”
“But?”
“It … could have been Sheridan.”
“Damn,” said Janx.
“If she were to get in touch with the Octunggen forces still in Ezzez,” Layanna said, “it could pose a major problem for us.”
Hildra glared at Avery. “Godsdamn, bones, if she screws this up, you’re the one to blame.”
Avery couldn’t meet her eyes. “I know.”
Lisam showed them out the disembarkation exit and to a green truck idling at the curb. The sweat-drenched driver slumped at the wheel, breathing heavily in the heat. The sun baked off everything, and the humidity was fierce. More startling, as they headed into the city, were the myriad vegetations growing up the sides of the buildings and creeping along the sidewalks.
“Well, that’s new,” Hildra said.
Avery turned to see her indicating trees and vines growing up the face of a certain building; the Crothegra Jungle was very literally reclaiming the city.
“Gods,” Avery said, looking closer. “Is that … ?”
Slabs of rust-colored lobster carapace sheathed the trees, whose limbs drooped oozing and pink and tentacle-like. The trees’ roots dug deep into the concrete building, and where they did cracks spread out from them. Vines bearing misshapen fruit erupted from the fissures, and strange, vaguely monkey-like animals (if scaled and striated), clinging easily to the vertical jungle, munched on the mottled, unwholesome-looking fruits as they scampered about. A claw sprouting from an armored limb of one of the trees snapped around a pseudo-monkey and shoved it through a pulsing sphincter. The nearby monkeys hooted and scampered away.
“Wasn’t like this last time I was here,” Janx said. “The locals’ve always had to fight the jungle back, but they’d never let it get this bad before. Guess their troubles with Octung’ve got them busy, and they’re keeping the Octs too busy to worry about it.”
Avery watched blood drip from the pincer, which had gone still again, though the monkeys were keeping their distance now. “How many trees in the area are like this?”
“Oh, there’s a load, or there was. What I hear, there’s more now. But that is the one and only Atomic Jungle out there beyond the city, Doc, and it’s a wild and woolly place, however it got that way. Some say it’s the rivers that became infected and brought the corruption to the Crothegra, but there’ve been a lot of rivers around the world that’ve been infected and it didn’t do this. Maybe some mix with the local alchemical shit. Well, gods knows how the sea really infected the plants here, but it sure did. Better hope our mission doesn’t take us outside the city.”
Avery tried to imagine traveling through the alien jungle and shuddered. He thought it would be like swimming through a breathable version of the Atomic Sea.
He and the others marveled at the sights of the city, and Avery enjoyed the sunlight on his skin, even though the air conditioner was broken and they had to leave the windows rolled down. The wind that poured in was filled with grit and dust, and he coughed often. The air was filled with other things, too, though—the scents of spices and roasting meat from a nearby market, the vaguely fruity reek of something growing from a nest of vines along a brick wall, and the stench of shit from a back-upped sewer system. The recent conflict had evidently diverted attention away from the sewer crews, as well. Yet another reason to hate Octung.
Great, colorful minarets rose here and there through the fog, as did grand, elegant golden domes, some of them scored by artillery, one completely collapsed. Other, more foreign architecture showed itself, too—an amber fortress reared by the Gveshtrac Empire (whose buildings had inspired the Amber Ziggurat of Azzara), black, sinister buildings spawned by the Ysstral Empire, even some jade columns left by L’oh. Many countries had conquered and occupied Kusk throughout history, enticed here by the wealth of resources, especially the alchemical kind, and the locals, though numerous and advanced in many ways, had not been able to fend them off. The cities of Kusk were scattered, divided by the jungle, and their bureaucracy was mired in corruption and superstition. Not only that, but a myriad of peoples lived here, not all of them human, and each belonged to its own faith. The result was a hodgepodge of a place, not cohesive enough to defend itself, but that had never mattered. No foreign power had been able to occupy the country long. The very corruption and disorganization that stymied cohesion also defeated the occupiers’ ability to instill order, and the locals did not take the yoke of a foreign power lightly. Armed with strange alchemical weapons and, some said, magical spells, they whittled away at the occupiers’ forces at a deliberate and inexorable rate, so much so that no foreign power had been able to retain its grip on the country for more than twenty years. Octung was just one in a long line of doomed conquerors, or so Avery hoped.
Buildings of the natives thrust up here and there amongst those of would-be conquerors, and they were grand, mysterious buildings of green stone. Fog coiled through the streets, and Avery marveled—the famous Breath of Ezzez. Legend said that it spilled out of the exhaust pipes of various alchemical processing plants and was thus unnatural—some said cursed, some said enchanted. There were many tales told about it. Some were romantic. Some were horror stories.
Through the eerie greenish vapor, Avery saw people going to work and about their errands, though they glanced over their shoulders as they did. Some sections of the city appeared to be under the control of the Resistance, some by Octung. Once Avery’s group had to pass out of one checkpoint, cross a no-man’s-land peppered by ruined buildings and bloodstains, and enter another, policed by local soldiers with a variation on an Octunggen armband about their biceps. Fortunately they proved bribable, and they didn’t inspect the vehicle or its occupants very carefully.
Occasional gunfire cracked in the distance, and once the thunder of bombs. Roadblocks slowed traffic, and several times the convoy had to stop and tolerate more inspections. These were always carried out by local soldiers under the direction of a small team of tense, sweaty Octunggen, and at each one Lisam simply passed a wad of bills to the soldier in charge of the inspection and the convoy was waved through. Avery didn’t know what the Octunggen were hunting for, but it wasn’t them. Likely they were hunting for General Vursk and his people—Lisam included. Luckily the local soldiers were sympathetic to their cause. The Octunggen were stretched too thin to carry out the searches themselves and were evidently afraid of appearing weak by attempting to compel the local soldiers to perform their jobs with more thoroughness. They’ll be looking for us soon enough, Avery thought, thinking again of the figure at the airport.
The car entered a darker, more frightening area, with large buildings all but completely overgrown with unnatural foliage, great fish-scale-covered branches jutting from their faces, some even meeting overhead and blocking out the light, plunging the car into shadow. With the windows open, Avery could smell the reek of the vegetation, of ammonia and salt and brine and more.
“Gods,” Hildra said. “Does that tree have teeth?”
“We’re there,” Lisam said, before Avery could take a look, and the truck pulled to a halt. Fantastic trees and shrubs, some moving under their own power, stretched all around them, along sidewalks, cracks in the road, and vertically along the building faces. They were completely enclosed in the environment, with strange little—and some not so little—animals moving in the vegetation. “This way,” Lisam said, leading up a broad set of cracked steps toward the building they’d pulled up to. Thick bulwarks held up a heavy, multi-pointed roof, its pink stone facets and nicks glinting in the sun, vines curling around them, and grand, slender towers framed the sky, what little of it Avery could see through the vegetation.
“An old palace,” their guide said. “Ruined in some long-ago war and now a temple for the Sisters of Jucina.”
People, worshippers apparently, streamed in through the ruined doors, which gaped open and were carpeted in jungle. The worshippers carried candles and looked expectant. Music flooded around them, light and lilting—flutes and reed instruments of some kind, Avery thought. His group fought their way through the press of people and inside the hot, packed interior. The former palace had been remodeled, and a grand room yawned before them. Shafts of sunlight, muted somewhat, shone down through the overgrown and shattered windows upon a congregation in ornate pews wearing their local finery, with cotton shawls and colored robes. A paradoxically lewd display went on atop the stage the audience faced; naked nubile girls sparkling with golden glitter and glistening with oils danced in a circle while musicians played jaunty music to the side.
“The Sisters of Junica?” Hildra said.
“The junior priestesses,” said Lisam.
The girls wove among a copse of beautiful trees, and after a moment Avery realized there were men operating the trees. They shook and occasionally apples or oranges dropped from the branches.
Suddenly, men in fox masks popped out of trapdoors. Smoke billowed out, half concealing them as they danced about sinisterly. The girls screamed and ran, and the music grew tense as the chase went on.
Avery and his group descended along one side of the stadium toward rooms in the back. On stage, just as the foxes were about to catch the girls, the trees trembled to life, and their roots dragged the foxes under the ground, or through more trapdoors, to the accompaniment of more smoke. The girls and the trees danced together, and Avery received the impression this was the reenactment of some famous religious event, maybe the union between humans and nature. This was a nature cult, then. Well, that made sense. The city was surrounded by nature—of a sort, anyway.
Lisam conducted them into the back rooms, which led around, down a side hall out into a courtyard garden, all overgrown and dangerous-looking, then across it to another wing of the ruined palace. This apparently was where the Sisterhood lived, and they had made accommodations for the Resistance headquarters at the end of the upper story. Roots groped in through the ceiling and had ripped out chunks of the wall, and vines redolent of vinegar and cinnamon covered the walls. Avery was glad of the holes in the walls, as they admitted a breeze; without them it would have been awfully stuffy.
