Tim Akers - Dead of Veridon

Signal flags came out as we got close. Quarantine. The raft shuddered to a halt, and a rapid semaphore flashed from boat to shore. I didn't know the language well enough to follow it, but I saw the quarantine fly a couple times. Wilson shook my shoulder.

"Over there," he said. There were a couple ships that looked poorly treated, anchored off the dock. One of them was burned down to the shell. There were bodies across the deck. Skin white as pearls.

"Looks like we're going to be famous," I muttered.

"Famously in trouble," Wilson agreed.

An impact siren spun up behind us, out in the fog. A smallboat, narrow and fast, came tearing toward the docks. It ripped past us, its engine groaning. The deck was a horror show of gorey crewmen and white-skinned dead, struggling. The crew held the tiny cabin, and that at bloody cost. The captain had his fist down on the throttle, all ahead full, and no amount of flagging was going slow him down.

The crowds of Badge on the dock began yelling and ordering and counterordering. There was a warning shot, then another, then a firing line was drawn up. A crackling report and the water and wood of the ship danced with lead. The throttle was still down.

The smallboat bounced off an anchored barge, scraping metal plates with a wrenching sound that screamed across the water. That slowed the vessel, but still it crashed into the docks and skipped up into the air, collapsing onto a barricade of crates that the Badge set up.

The officers were quick. The firing line reformed, bolstered by other units. They advanced, weapons hot, firing as they marched. The ship danced, the bodies got redder, sparks glittered whenever lead struck metal. Not a minute it took, not more than a handful of heartbeats. Then they stopped firing, and not a living thing remained on that ruined ship.

"I'm not sticking around for that," I said. Wilson agreed. Panic had a firm handle on those men. Panic and fear, and a deep belief that such things could be handled with firearms. I shucked my blanket and crept to the side of the barge, out of sight of the docks. When we were good and close, Wilson and I slipped into the water and started to swim.

Tough thing to do, to slip into that cold, black water after what we had just been through. All the way in I kept imagining dead fingers slipping around my legs, kept seeing bloated faces just beneath me in the water. I fought the urge to go straight in. We swam to one of the burned-out wrecks that were tied down just beyond the docks. The water around them was thick with ash and wreckage. Stopped long to rest our lungs, refusing to look down into the water, our arms draped over the charred remains of a barrel.

By then our raft was taking on agents of the Badge. They came out in tiny boats, yelling at the captain through bullhorns and bristling with longrifles. I waited until they were fully occupied with the boarding process before I nodded to Wilson and pushed off towards the docks.

One of the tricks to the Ebd-side harbor has to do with its inlets. The Ebd feeds into the much larger Reine, providing ship access to both rivers. Smaller vessels from the outer provinces travel the Ebd to where it meets the Reine, then transfer their cargo to one of the huge rafts that ply the wider river.

This meant a lot of cranes, and not just cranes but towering monsters that lived out in the water so the Ebd boats could pull right up next to the Reine-bound rafts and have their cargo offloaded directly to the larger vessels. This meant that the Ebd-side harbor was an archipelago of cranes and drawbridges and iron towers, an infinitely permeable system of platforms and docks. Quarantine depended on the goodwill of the ship captains, rather than the iron rule of the Badge. We didn't have to go far before we found a crane tower that had been abandoned in the excitement, and hauled ourselves up to its covered platform. The iron belly of the engine was still warm. Wilson huddled next to it, his thin arms shivering against his ribs.

"We can't stay here," he said. I nodded and stripped off, laying my shirt and pants across the warm shell of the engine. He grimaced impatiently. "Jacob, the men on that boat know our names. The Badge is going to ask questions, and then they're going to notice that we're not around. They're going to figure out that we slipped off before they boarded."

"That they are," I said. There was a stack of fire blankets by the engine, for smothering embers. I unfolded one and tossed it to Wilson, then wrapped myself in another and sat on the other end of the engine, my back against the metal.

We sat quietly for a while. Steam from my clothes mixed with the fog that curled across the platform. We lost sight of the raft, but could still hear the voices of the Badge. Other horns sounded in the distance as ships came in to dock and were quarantined.

"What do you think is going on out there?" Wilson asked quietly, after about twenty minutes. The fog was starting to burn away.

"I think our little event wasn't isolated. I think that whatever happened to the Fehn, it happened to a lot of them. I'm guessing lots of boats went through what we went through." I turned to Wilson and sighed. "And I'm guessing a lot of them didn't make it out."

"If it was all the Fehn, everywhere," Wilson scratched his eye and peered out at the ghosts of other towers and ships that were finally becoming visible. "That means a lot more than just the river. There are Fehn in the cisterns, in the canals. They're all through the lower city."

"Yeah. Which means the Badge has a lot on its plate right now." I stood up and peeled my clothes off the engine. They were warm and stiff. "It's going to be a while before they start asking questions."

"Not forever, though."

"Nope. They'll come looking for us, eventually." I finished dressing and shook the last numbness out of my fingers. "So let's go find some answers, before they ask them."

It was worse than we imagined, out on the crane. There was a collapsible raft in the emergency cabinet of the tower. The seals had gone rotten, so our boots got wet on the way in, but it didn't sink until we were safely on dry land. No one saw us make shore because they had other things on their mind. Lower Veridon was in chaos.

Veridon is a city of terraces. The old city sits in stony quiet at the top of the delta, draped in gentle waterfalls and ancient canals. The canals travel the whole length of the delta in a series of locks or decorative waterfalls, sometimes disappearing into cisterns or underground rivers and pipes, until they finally feed into one of the city's three rivers. The Reine itself continues into parts of the city, where the streets are built up over stone arches. Many of the homes in Lower Veridon have private docks in their basements that lead to some tributary of the Reine or Ebd.

When the Fehn rose from the water, their bloated hands suddenly violent, those private docks became gates into the city. The monsters tore their way through living rooms and formal dens to spill out into the streets. The result was horror, evenly spread throughout the Lower City.

We climbed out of the river about half a mile from where the raft was quarantined. Wilson looked terrible, between the fight and the soaking we had taken. I couldn't look much better. But the streets were crowded with panicked citizens, flushed from their houses by fear of their own basements, all of them in various states of dress and injury. Some had been in fights, some had just woken up when the screaming started. All of them were very nervous.

"Right out of the basement," one man whispered to his neighbor. "Just right through the door like it wasn't there. Molly dropped her breakfast and started screaming. It was the screaming that snapped me out of it."

"Godsbless the Badge, though," the woman I assumed was Molly said, standing nearby. "Godsbless them. If they hadn't come in the front door I don't know if we would've made it out."