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  *****

  Vora Mbuntu's copper-blood and witch-bone carriage ran the Hale enclave's high road while its massive heart beat through the bone at her feet and its equine legs galloped beneath it. It was horse and carriage both. From the high road's twisting line she could see out over the walls to the wilds and the badlands, to the patchy, ruin-filled forests and cracked blackstone rivers that flowed into the desert ruins of the fringe-sprawl and the dead cities beyond.

  In one of the nearest fallen cities she thought she saw the glow of far-off fires and signs of rebuilding, but even through the tea-saucer-sized corneas of her spyglass it was hard to say for sure.

  Some said it was Kitty Hawk's witchery that ended the world, but it wasn't. Kitty Hawk created the Stitchlife craft, an amalgam of the old science and ancient secrets, but it was her quest for power not her craft that destroyed everything man had built. After she saw the error of her ways, she swore an oath to forsake power and pledged her craft to help mankind rise again. She sent her witches to the new noble families to serve them so that all of mankind might be lifted up again on the nobles' rising tide.

  For over a century Vora had known in her heart that serving the nobles wasn't serving mankind as Kitty Hawk intended, but she didn't know what else she could do. Now, Vargas Hale had shown Vora something that could build more than toy castles for the nobles or Leviathans and cracken creatures. Sugar Music could build the great cities again. It could pull struggling men from the mud to live in the ancient glory of the world before it was destroyed, the glory evidenced everywhere in the overgrown ruins of what once was.

  The rhythm of her carriage's fast-beating feet drove her cartwheeling thoughts. If Sugar Music belonged to the Hales or any of the other noble families, Vora thought, then it would never be used to rebuild the world of common men. Vora looked over the walls, out at the wooded wilds and the ruins in the distance, and her mind's-eye filled the landscape with all the automata cities Sugar Music would build – after she stole it.

  *****

  Vora took all the memories of Sugar Music into her own wreath and crushed Tam Bataille's head under a golem's giant stone foot. The memories she'd been able to retrieve only extended back a couple of days before Bataille's death, but they would have to be enough. The secrets of Bataille's witchy sands weren't all there, but Vora was confident that with all she'd learned, she'd be able to figure the rest of it out for herself.

  Her young Stitchlife apprentice, Corina was more clever than she let on. If she was close by, she'd figure out Vora's plan, so Vora sent Corina off to supervise the Hales' factory farms. That way, Vora could prepare her escape unobserved.

  Vora scouted out a badlands shelter to hide in and sent everything she would need there carried by enormous bird-sized, copper-blood wasps she wrote and grew for the task. They secreted their cargoes in a long-forgotten crypt deep under the rubble of a ruined and poisoned city. Then they waited for her and slept.

  When everything was in place, Vora entangled the enclave's Archive with her witch's wreath. The Mnemonic Intelligence that grew deep underneath the Hale's enclave was three hundred and fifty years old, and the mycelium tendrils at the opposite edges of its growth were miles apart. From it, she stole three constructs – mind and memory impressions in active, cellular mnemonics – mind-ghosts of people both living and dead. The Archive didn't put up much of a fight to keep them. As Vora transferred the three mind-ghosts to her wreath, she wondered if the Archive was glad to be rid of their unceasing voices in its thoughts.

  Vora had a brief moment of pity as she released her worms into the Archive's mind and drove it mad. The insanity spread everywhere through the enclave, to every living system entangled with it.

  Whole crops of copper-bloods gave muffled screams and died in the syn-wombs of the factory farms. Arteries that pumped through the bone walls everywhere boiled and burst until the Hale family's great manor houses cracked and bled, and scalding geysers erupted from the fractures. Cellular automata lost all cohesion, and the twenty-foot-tall, stone giant golems guarding the Hale Enclave's gates turned to mindless sand.

  The destruction was appalling, but in the chaos, Vora's carriage galloped out into the wooded wilds unchecked by the Hales, their golems, or the soldiers of the Hale Guard. Once she'd gone far enough to be sure she hadn't been followed, her carriage's hoof-footed legs trotted up onto one of the cracked blackstone roads that led into the rubble-filled fringes of the dead cities.

  Chapter Three

  False Flags and the Hidden Witch

  Fin Singh made a point to take some of the Populist Musketeers alive. He could have cut their heads off and sent them to the Hales' Stitchlife, but he liked to do things himself. After a week of torture, over half of them had gone mad, but the other half told him what he wanted to know: which towns had given food to the Populists.

  A day later, he strutted up and down the blackstone fringe around the wooden walls of Little Falls so that the few surviving townspeople lined up outside could see him. He wore the red cloak that Juan Chang had made famous as the leader of the Populist rebels. Fin Singh's Hale Guardsmen were dressed as Populists, too, in leathers and animal skins. Their horses were better fed than the skinny nags the Populists rode, but he and his men still made convincing imposters.

  Fin Singh hadn't been able to kill Juan Chang, so he'd decided to strike the guerrilla fighter where he drew his strength and turn the people of the wilds against him. For weeks, Fin Singh and his Hale Guardsmen rode under a false flag. They impersonated Chang and his Populist musketeers and committed acts of savage banditry. They burned and pillaged and killed, but they always left a few alive to tell the tale of who'd done it: the Red-Cloaked Juan Chang and his Populists.

  “We've found the rest of the town's food stores,” Fin Singh's second-in-command, Hassam reported. “They've got so much grain that I don't think they could have possibly given food to the Populists. I think the rebels we tortured lied to us.”

  “Disappointing, but it doesn't matter,” Singh said. “Load everything they've got into the wagons and take those, too. We're playing the role of bandits, after all. When you're done, set torch to the town and kill all bu-” Fin Singh paused. His attention was caught by a thick swarm of insects hovering above him in dusk's dim. The fields beyond the blackstone were already filling with the firefly-blue lights of witch-writ lizards, and every insect in sight had been drawn to their glowing, bulb-tipped tails. All except the strange swarm overhead, Singh thought. And there's a reason for that.

  “Sir?” Hassam hadn't yet noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  “Wait here,” Singh told him.

  Fin Singh walked off the edge of the cracked blackstone to a field bordering the woods, and the thick swarm above his head followed him. He made a point not to stare at it. He was already sure. When he stopped and stood still, facing the woods, the swarm descended in front of him and flew in tighter and tighter circles around a nearby glowsie. The lizard's tongue shot out to pluck a meal from the air, and it fed off the swarm for a few seconds before its scaly body began to convulse. Then, the insects swarmed together and conglomerated into a solid mass over the lizard. They squeezed and contracted around its body until the glow from its bulbed tail faded and was gone. Then the swarm flowed off to one side of the dead lizard and formed itself into the shape of a spider as big as Fin Singh's hand. The individual insects that made up its form dissolved into each other, and the spider was no longer many creatures, but one.

  Singh tried not to flinch as it crawled up his boot and then his leg. The polymorph, undoubtedly Vargas Hale's avatar, climbed over the saber strung on Fin Singh's belt, up the right side of his chest, and perched itself on his shoulder. It drew closer to his neck, and Fin Singh wondered it he was about to feel its fangs. Then it whispered in his ear. “Mister Singh,” it said, “I think you make a dashing revolutionary, but my feelings are hurt to see your allegiances shift.” Fin Singh recognized the voice immediately as Vargas Hale's.
br />   “It's not what it looks like,” Singh said with a chuckle, playing along with Vargas Hale's joke.

  “It never is with you, Mister Singh, but it's not your loyalty I'm concerned with today.”

  “Sir?”

  “My Stitchlife, Vora Mbuntu has betrayed me. She stole Sugar Music and then nearly destroyed our enclave with whatever witchery she released into the Archive. Now, it spouts nothing but gibberish, and everything it controlled has spiraled to self-destruction. The walls of my manor are cracked. And bleeding.”

  “What does she intend to do with Sugar Music?”

  “How should I know what she intends,” the spider hissed in Fin Singh's ear. “She stole the Mbuntu construct that was modeled from her mind so that we can't ask it.”

  “I see.”

  “She also stole two other mnemonic constructs from the Archive before she drove it mad. She stole General Jin-Soo Hale, probably to give strategic and tactical advice. And she stole your construct, Mr. Singh. In a manner of speaking, Vora Mbuntu brought you with her.”

  “Why?”

  “I would imagine she stole a reconstruction of your mind so that it might advise her on how to be a ruthless, Machiavellian blackheart, unburdened by ethics or love of anything but power.”

  “Your words are too kind, Lord Hale.”

  “Find her, Mister Singh. Find Sugar Music. Find what she stole from me and bring it back.”

  “Yes, Lord Hale.”

  “Find her quickly and I might consider marrying you to my fair cousin Scilla.”

  The spider climbed off Fin Singh's shoulder and crawled across his torso and down his legs to rest on the ground next to the dead glowsie. There it transformed into the swarm again, and as the thick, elongated, buzzing cloud of automata flies ascended and disappeared into the treetops of the wilds, Fin Singh was already thinking about all the glorious things he would do with Sugar Music and the automata it made when he found it and kept it for himself.

  *****

  In the dead city where Vora fled, poison that ripped cells apart with invisible rays clung to every surface. Her carriage stopped and knelt in a cloud of swirling dust only long enough for her to cut out its mnemonic organs, stop the bleeding, and send it galloping on a mindless path into the sea.

  She found the shelter's massive door at the bottom of the cracked stone stairs, just as she'd seen it through the fish-eyed view of her wasps. They'd pushed the door open just enough to enter with their cargoes, but it took all Vora's strength to push it open far enough so that she could enter her new home.

  Her rainbow-skinned wasps were there, huddled together and sleeping. So were the cargoes they'd carried. Oyster-shelled syn-wombs linked to her wreath, yeast and protein culturing pods. And seeds. Dowser weed to seek water. Fast-growing, helio vines for sweet-sap and light.

  First, she wrote herself a modification to protect her cells from the city's invisible poison. Then she delivered it to her body with a fast-acting virus she kept in a vial around her neck.

  Vora started yeast and protein cultures to feed herself.

  Her dowser weeds germinated and burrowed deep through the concrete floor of the shelter, down through the ancient sewers and the collapsed tunnels, down through the very bottom of the dead city, stretching, reaching, feeding off the concrete and stone and growing, probing deeper until they found clean water to pull up through their hollow roots.

  The flowering helio vines grew quickly too, and they pumped their sugar-sap plasma to everything in her makeshift lab and lit it with a soft glow from their blooms.

  She woke the wasps and used them to deploy a network of twin-entangled eyes in the streets surrounding the shelter. As she waited for their zipping, iridescent streaks to return, Vora stood outside and listened to the wind whistle and whine through the broken buildings. When her wreath told her the rainbow-skinned wasps had all returned, she pulled the heavy, metal door of the shelter shut behind her and entombed herself with her work.

  Here, Vora thought, under the ruins and rubble of a dead city is where the end of the dark ages begins.

  Chapter Four

  The Witch-Sped Waif

  Molly woke wide-eyed and terrified. Her hair was matted and tangled with leaves and twigs that had clung as she ran through branches and bramble in blind and fearful flight. She was covered in scratches where the wooded wilds had reached out to hold her back.

  All night, she'd run through the thick-canopied forest where the moonlight only reached in thin, tarnished shafts. When Molly woke where she'd collapsed, she bolted to her feet and ran again.

  The edge of the wilds came abruptly, and she broke out of the shadows to find herself running across the sun-baked, blast-flattened landscape of a fringe-sprawl desert – a single, never-ending piece of crumbling, flash-melted, blackstone, peppered with piles of fractured rock.

  Many hours later, she staggered down canyons lined with high, hollow husks and naked rust-metal skeletons, bent and twisted, but still standing over mountains of rubble where their stony flesh had fallen.

  Molly felt sick to her stomach, and she was sure something was wrong with her when her nose began to drip blood and bruises began to appear on her arms. Her skin burned even when she found shade.

  When Molly turned a corner and saw a skeletal dog standing atop a pile of rubble blocking her path, she was happy at first to have some company in such a dead place. She knew it was happy to see her too because its naked, bone-whip tail wagged.

  In moments, the rest of its pack crested the rubble, too. They all barked and wagged at her. Then they snarled and bounded down off the rubble mound and charged.

  Molly ran inside a half-collapsed ruin and scrambled up a cracked stone slab that leaned against another at a steep angle. It led her to a vertical stone face where twisted, bent, rust-metal bars poked out. They flaked off in sharp layers that cut her palms and the soles of her feet, but the bars held her weight as she climbed up the vertical face and clung there, trembling with her eyes squeezed shut.

  The dogs had no trouble finding her. They charged into the ruin and up to the top of the steeply slanted slab where they jumped and snapped at the air just below her. After they realized she was too high up for them to reach, the seven of them growled and whined and turned themselves in circles below her while they waited.

  When Molly opened her eyes, she saw their hairless, gray skin was stretched taut over bones that threatened to poke through at the hips and shoulders. They were covered with spotting bruises, and pink foam frothed and crusted their jaws. Their noses dripped blood, and it had spattered everywhere.

  They smelled like they were rotting from the inside out.

  Molly heard a hum-buzzing behind her and looked over her shoulder to see zipping, iridescent lines draw themselves speeding and blurred across the shafts of dust-filled sunlight that penetrated the ruin from above. The creatures flew in perfect circles, and they crossed the sunlit shafts so quickly that Molly couldn't tell exactly what they were until one hovered next to her where she hung on the wall.

  It was a rainbow-skinned wasp nearly as big as a sparrow. It was fearsome, unnatural, and fantastic to her eye. As it hovered with its long, cruel stinger bent forwards underneath its segmented body and its blurred, fast-beating wings, it blew a breeze on Molly's face. When she looked into its uncanny eyes, it stared back at her with all the presence and force of a human eye.

  The wasp rejoined its circling flight, and all at once they dove straight down at near-right angles to the ground and threw themselves at the whining, feral dogs below.

  The wasps led with their barb-tipped tails, and as their stingers stabbed and sank deep into gray-skinned, bruise-patched dog-meat, their bulbous rear segments impacted on bony-ribbed backs with soft and hollow thumps. Then they took to the air again.

  The dogs began to yelp, but in moments, they all fell into the dust. Their legs splayed out and twitched. For a few more seconds, their naked sides heaved up and down, and their labored breaths blew
clouds of dust from the ground near their blood-dripping snouts. Then they were still and silent. Their tongues hung out of their mouths while their open eyes watched the dust motes and the unnatural wasps in the air above them.

  The insects circled and rose until they were level with Molly where she hung off the wall's rotting, rust-metal bars.

  Molly wanted to put more space between her and the wasps, so she climbed down to the top of the blood-spotted stone slab below and perched on the foot-wide ledge it made where it met the wall. She looked down at the unmoving bodies and then up at the orbiting terrors above and tried to decide if the dogs were truly dead and if it was safe to run past them to escape the wasps.

  She had almost gathered the courage to climb down when she heard the buzzing grow louder in her right ear. A lightning panic shot through her body just before Molly felt soft, slapping wing-beats kiss her cheek, and a stinger stabbed her neck.

  Numbness spread out from the wound and across her body. Her vision blurred and narrowed, and the last thing Molly remembered about that day was having no control of her limbs, rolling down the steep concrete slab, and coming to rest among the dogs.

  *****

  Vora didn't want to examine her motives. What was done was done, she thought, but the other Vora Mbuntu, the mnemonic construct projected from Vora's wreath into her mind didn't see it the same way. “You endangered Sugar Music,” it said. Its see-through body appeared to kneel on the other side of the unconscious little girl in a pose nearly identical to Vora's while the Stitchlife sampled cells from the waif's skinny body.

  One whole side of the girl was a crisscross of very recent scars. “Someone beat her half-dead,” Vora said. “Who would do that?”

  “You shouldn't have saved her,” the Mbuntu construct said.

  “It's already done,” Vora said. “Besides, I don't see any immediate danger from my actions.”