Chapter 3: No Easy Way Out

Lone Pine was two weeks away on foot. Faster on a two wheeler, of course, and the roads were good so it was doable. A cheve was faster in short bursts, and provided animal comfort. Not to mention that they were less tiring to operate. Unfortunately, Mazelton had hardly ever ridden longer than a few hours at a time, and the experience left him raw in several meanings of the word. He would go with the two wheeler. Easier to find and more low key than a cheve. Famously easy to steal too.

So the to-do list now looked like this- Make his way from the catacombs to the… hmm… the sunken shopping plaza. Then from there up and over to the abandoned sewers that ran to the old northwest drainage pipe. Down the pipe into the swampy seasonal pond, evading the blizzards of biting flies, loop around to the road and either steal a two wheeler out of a suburban house or, just… mug someone?

He had some recollection of bandits who would string wire at neck height across roads. He didn’t have wire. And had never mugged someone. Probably took practice. He had stolen a two wheeler many times, though, so that can be plan A. Problems? Well… thinking was hard right now, so let's just get it done regardless.

 

He staggered down the catacombs. He felt like he should keep to the shadows, but since he was carrying the only source of light he could see… Well, he didn’t see anyone else, at least. Maybe they were the ones keeping to the shadows. Maybe they thought he was a corpse light or a barrow wight or… something. Mazelton staggered on, having to stop and rest every few hundred yards. He couldn’t believe how thirsty he was. He had drunk his fill from the basin, packed some more water in the sack, but he couldn’t seem to drink enough of the stuff. He didn’t dare pee here though- too many spirits who might take offense.

Mazelton found the little crack in the ceiling where he remembered it, clambering over some shelves of corpses and pulling himself up. He had forgotten the chest wound, and nearly fell backwards with the shock of the pain as a torn lip of stone stabbed in. It hurt so much he sobbed, little tears of pain and frustration trickling down his face. He didn’t even bother wiping them. He rolled over a few times, just trying to let the feelings out. It didn’t really work.

He had made it to one of the hive-like cells of the sunken shopping plaza. The plaza had been conceived as a square of large flagstones surrounding a central “fountain,” and surrounded in turn by a giant, hollow four story building. Sort of like it was the giant courtyard of some aggressively blocky palace. Two floors of shops, two of offices. Then there was an earthquake and the whole thing dropped about twenty meters straight down. Most of the plaza collapsed into rubble, of course, but a great deal of it survived. It had been a great place to prospect for artifacts. Long since picked over, of course, the little protective bubbles and cavities of the shops popping as they were exposed to air. Things like the balcony Mazelton rolled onto were left in stu. He remembered this balcony. There was something he had always wanted to do here, and now was the time.

Bloody, battered, sick, hunted and possibly concussed, Mazelton staggered to the edge of the balcony, stood on what was left of the rail and unleashed a torrent of piss. He aimed at the old blurry monolith that allegedly was an ornamental fountain. The mental and physical relief was a moment of bliss. The sheer bodily joy of release. All the pain and madness of the day seemed to trickle down, down, down and away.

A horrified shriek caused his bladder to seize up, cutting the flow, and resulting in a stabbing pain in a very tender place. The combination of surprise and pain caused Mazelton to fall backwards, instinct letting him turn that into a roll, somehow missing his supplies but not missing the pinwheel of re-released urine.

“GHAST! GHAST! BOLIGHAST!”

The scavenger's screams faded away from the plaza. Mazelton wasn’t familiar with their cant, but figured it meant that he wouldn’t have company for a bit longer. He finished peeing, futilely wiped his face, and staggered for the lower levels. The shopping plaza connected with these particular abandoned sewers on the second level, through what Mazelton believed was once either a brothel or paper goods store. There appeared to be compelling evidence for both.

The sewers were starting to get a little busy, with people secretively moving from shadow to shadow, wearing masks or elaborate face paint. Sometimes there was a queue for a particularly long stretch of shadow. It was kind of reassuring- one person scurried, then someone from the other direction scurried, back and forth, crouching under the shallow ledge that went around the corner. Mazelton just walked right down the middle of the tunnel, and amazingly enough nobody looked at him. The whole… everything… just made people not want to see him, in the hopes that he would be someone else's problem.

There was a bit of a traffic jam midway through. Only a tiny shadow in a long stretch of tunnel. Mazelton decided to do everyone a favor and plucked the light cores off the wall as he went. The cores went into a pile in a bit of crumbled wall, making the shadows almost impossibly deep against the blinding light. He staggered on.

The silent creepers hunted one another. The tunnels were a slaughterhouse. Long blades, machetes, chunks of brick or stone or bare hands. There were probably Ma clansmen down there. Mazelton didn’t try to find them. Nobody looked at him. There were a couple of kids, teens, with their heads cracked open like runny eggs, still hanging on to each other. There was an old timer with their throat hacked apart, head lolled back and looking uncannily like a vase. There were some toughs who sold their lives dearly, but sold it all the same. What was it that the West Guardian said? “One’s enough, two’s a profit.” Old bastard liked to stare at the clan youth during martial drills, get right in their face with his one good eye and demand to know how many they would take with them. “Just one so far, Old Bastard.” Mazelton thought. “And I haven’t paid full price for it yet.”

Nice brickwork in these sewers, but a bit anonymous. Could be any of five epochs. Mazelton slid into a recess in the wall where that brickwork had broken down and shut his eyes. He stayed on his feet, not confident that he would be able to move again if he sat down. He crossed his arms and grabbed his shoulders, hugging himself. The smell of piss and corpses and sewage and rot would fade in and out. He would get scent blind, then the smell would mutate and come right back.

He slowly opened his eyes again. One of the sneaky creepers had left a fist sized stone with a hole in it by his feet- a trap for any wandering spirits and angry dead. Mazelton put it in the sack. Never know when you might need something like that. A long, long drink of water, then the push for the drainage tunnel.

The drainage pipe was mobbed with people. No, it was just a mob. As secret exits from the city went, it was apparently well known. Confeds and Clan partisans were ambushing and counter ambushing each other, while “unrelated” people tried desperately to keep out of it. There was none of the dance of blades they practiced on the martial fields. This was five on one, backstabbing, beatings, ugly brutal and merciless. The truly desperate tried to edge around the fights. It sometimes worked.

Mazelton didn’t even bother shaking his head, just kept looking down and pretending he didn’t see what he was seeing. If it was like this in here, there would be people standing guard outside to pick up any escapees. Mazelton turned sharply left and, when the floor opened up, down. There were secret exits, then there were exits that didn’t really exist at all, until you made them.

Back into another abandoned sewer, finding his way with a light core in a sack tied to his waist. The light bounced and shivered and made the shadows jolt over patchwork cement and thin brick. It was enough. Mazelton staggered on and on, trying not to think. Just… one foot in front of the other.

Pretty sure that was Mazelfo he saw get beaten to death with ax handles in the culvert. Funny guy. Did he ever start dating Mazelmia? Did they share a sweet summer, before the fall? He forced his mind back to his feet. One after the other. Get to the colonnade.

The colonnade was probably once a very wide room, more than a hundred yards on the square, reduced to a long triple row of pillars running in a straight line from the only entrance to the room to the back wall. The pillars were huge- some two paces across and tall enough to give you vertigo looking up. There was what looked like a high water mark, some twenty feet up, as well as enormous craters about six feet up.

At some point, people had built a shanty town here, but it was so long ago that the leathery skins had lacquered onto the antique bones scattered around the only exit. Mazelton had never been bored enough to guess the cause of death, just bleakly amused by the fact that all the corpses were, after all this time, intact.

Mazelton walked under the gray brown roof, between the gray brown columns, over the gray brown corpses, until he reached the back wall and the final row of columns. No way out. Oh no. But wait. He looked up. A series of hollows were carved, almost stamped, into the ancient concrete. Perfectly spaced, perfectly rectangular, going all the way to the ceiling. Where, if you had a very, very bright light source and quite good eyes, you would see… something. A hatch, maybe. A hundred or more feet of vertical climb, and a possible hatch that was certainly sealed by time. Quite impossible. A few considerably less intact corpses at the foot of the column attested to that. Pretty bead work on the tunic of one of them, but he couldn’t place it. Clearly, they were people without core polishers.

Whoever built the colonnade had them.

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Four rusty holes were hidden under the dust on the wall. Mazelton found them while he was exploring the place. He had dramatically collapsed against the back wall in a show of deep spiritual exhaustion, as he was fifteen and feeling it. Directly below the holes was a small indentation, likewise invisible to anyone who was not busy brushing off six plus millennia of dirt from their clothes and desperately trying not to look at the state of their brand new robe. A small hole that did nothing if you stuck your finger into it. However, if you ran a trickle of heat through it, just a bare trickle…

With a rusty “KURRR-CHUNK,” the hatch began to lower itself to the floor. The basket on top of the hatch was made of some undying material, still soft and strong after all these epochs. A safety measure, to keep people riding the platform from falling off. Mazelton waited until it reached the bottom, staggered in, and ran heat into the only hole he could find.

The lift terminated in an incredibly boxy room. Everything squared off, save the enormous pulley attached to the basket, and even there they put a rectangular box around it. Mazelton still couldn’t place the style of the décor. How many hundreds of hours of history did he study, precisely so he could identify ruins? He didn’t slack off either, he loved seeing how epochs past found different ways to answer the same old questions. And yet, he had no idea where or when he was.

There was a door still on its hinges. It was the only door in the room, and nothing in the room looked particularly lootable. He staggered towards it. Held the lever-

“Boundless World, if you ever choose to intervene in this poor speck’s life, I ask you, please… no more sewage. Please. Thank you and Amen.”

He pushed the door open. There was no sewage. He had the sudden hallucination that he was staring out into a void, into the vast empty cradling the planet, devoid of stars or life. Then his little light started picking out the tops of trees and rocks. The door opened in a crack in the foot of Old Radler, some forty feet above the ground. He had made it out. Praise the Ælfflæd and the vast Dusty World, he made it out alive!

Mazelton collapsed on the tiny ledge in front of the door, feet swinging out over nothing. He was drunk on the night air. Drunk on having escaped the city.

“My thanks, Ælfflæd. I remember our bargain. A life shall be yours.” Mazelton wanted to shout his gratitude, but all that came out was a hoarse rasp. The water had run out hours ago. No matter. He wasn’t actually expecting a reply.

He nearly spasmed off the ledge when he heard the stones begin to ring.

“Scatter, my children. Avoid our old fortresses, and scatter. Carrion. Carrion. Carrion.” It was the voice of the Hag.

She must have burned a mountain of cores, a sun’s worth of heat, to power such a vast stone unification. No, how was it even possible to unify with all the stones in Old Radler? Not even she could manage that.

With growing horror, Mazelton realized that the voice was in his skull, but not his ears. The stone was hanging right under his heart, just where the Hag left it.

How bad did it have to be for the Hag to tell the clan to scatter and run? She would never run. The deathless old witch would rather see the city… burn.

Mazelton had no recollection of how he got down off the ledge, or how his fingers tore open. He didn’t recall how long he ran until he found a road. It couldn’t have been long, given the state of him. Something was prickling his back, like a slag pile spitting sparks.

Even at this distance, miles away, Mazelton could feel the heat boiling out of the mist. The Hag had run the filters in reverse, spewing core dust across the city, from the top of the hundred towers all the way down to the catacombs and hidden ways in the sewers. Anyone who breathed it in, even if they were a strong polisher, was dead. Their hair would fall out. Organs would fail. Puking black blood as their body collapsed from the inside out. Heavy metal poisoning of the worst sort. And then there was the heat. It stabbed out, shredding the soft tissues and burning away the trillions of cells that made a human. Anyone who didn’t die fast would be sure to die slow and ugly.

Fires broke out fast, and swept the city. The warehouse district. The clan halls, the rookeries. Old Radler was dead, and its people knew it. Mazelton could see them boiling out of the city gates. Bravos on cheve, cutting holes in crowds of civilians, desperate to gain even one extra yard on the radioactive clouds. Partisans waving flags, trying to organize the mob as they fled. None of it would be enough. Between the poison fog and the fires and the stampedes, hundreds of thousands, near a million souls, would be sure to die.

It was a very Ma choice. The Cabells wanted power? Then let them eat carrion, and grow strong if they can.

He couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t go to Lone Pine, he needed to start running and keep running until he got so far away that no one had ever heard of the Ma Clan of Old Radler. His body was done. He could barely stay upright as it was, but he had to run. Get a two wheeler, or anything, and go.

Mazelton fumbled in his sack for anything that might help, and found the rock with a hole in it. He tore off what little remained of his burial shroud and used a length of it for a rope, knotting it through the hole. Naked and hideous, he staggered down the road.

He saw someone sitting on a trike, staring at Old Radler in horror. Delivery trike? But there was no one else around that Mazelton could see, so he swung his stone around a few times to build momentum and slammed the rock into his victim’s head. Like the auroch, it took a couple of blows for them to go down. Mazelton pushed the body off the bike, too tired to even try and hide it.

“A life delivered, Ælfflæd. The life is yours, the dross shall be taken by me. My thanks, gracious one.”

Mazelton muttered his prayers of thanks as he collapsed on to the trike. Hundreds or thousands of these things would trundle in and out of Old Radler daily, delivering goods to and from the city. Slow, much much too slow compared to a two wheeler. But he would take it. Mazelton pedaled on. He didn’t care where he was going, as long as it was far away.

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