Stitch, p.28
STITCH,
p.28
“Why don't they break through the gates?” Molly asked.
“They probably saw us set traps in the night along the main road,” Juan Chang said. “Molly looked across the enclave to the shaking bone wall. It began to crack and bleed bright blue.
Teddy Da sniffed at the air. “I don't smell fear.”
“Wait. You will,” Juan Chang said. “Both of you, listen to me carefully. Make sure to let all the nobles and their Guard pour in and engage us. When they have, I want the two of you to run witch-sped fast out the hole in the wall. Make for that hill there.” Juan Chang pointed to a hilltop a mile outside the enclave.
“But we can fight,” Molly protested.
“I know, and you will,” he said. “Before the army escapes and follows you there, someone has to scout that hilltop and make sure it's safe.” Molly looked at her feet. “I know you'd rather be with us, Molly, but those are your General's orders. Take care of each other.”
It sounded like a goodbye, so Molly tried to say goodbye, too, but her words were lost as the nobles' golems broke through the wall.
*****
The golems advanced first. They walked through the gap they'd knocked in the wall and even from a half-mile away, their combined footfalls made a terrifying sound that rumbled up and over and through Juan Chang's body. “Steady...” he shouted, “Steady...” The golems could charge across the ground between them, but he knew they wouldn't.
The noble's combined Guard came next, and they marched behind the golems' stone legs in a long line that stretched almost a full quarter mile. There were nearly a thousand of them, and they all marched to the war-drum of the giants' stone feet. The Walton Guard marched in the front; he could see the purple. The Ortega Guard was next; he knew the look of them. The Holtz Guard came last. He thought it was the Holtzs' Guard; he wasn't sure. It was hard for Juan Chang to see the figures in the very rear of the long column because it was coming right at him.
It sounded like one of the golems was walking out of time, but he saw them all stepping together. The head of the column closed on them quickly. “Steady...”
As the last of the nobles' Guardsmen entered the enclave, Juan Chang saw the nobles enter too. They streaked off to their right and headed straight for Hassam, his red cloak, and the hundred-and-twenty-five of his men who pretended to be the remaining, witch-sped Populists. The red-haired Macks and their two-handed bastard swords approached first. Then, the wide Ortegas and the Austins with their curve-tipped blades. Waltons and Lees made extra-colorful streaks behind them. Southern Gentlemen Schwartzs and Holtzs came last. In only seconds, all of the nobles were inside the enclave, facing Hassam in a crescent-shaped battle-line. Then, the mass of them walked slowly to meet the fake Populists with almost seven hundred blades.
Juan Chang felt an extra vibration in the earth. The golems shook it, too, but he was sure that this tremor wasn't from any golem.
At two hundred yards, the thirty stone giants broke into a run and charged Juan Chang and his formation. He saw Molly and the fur-belly moving for the hole in the wall. Juan Chang shouted, “Now! Go! GO!” Garrick Jayce's men shifted themselves to their right, spread out, and raised their rifles at the golems. Their poison thorns wouldn't even scratch them, of course. The only point of their fire was to keep the golems briefly distracted.
Juan Chang's witch-sped men darted through the legs of the giants and tore straight down the length of the noble Guards' thousand-man column.
*****
Molly and Teddy Da streaked past the nobles' Guard before they could react. When she reached the wall, she looked back and saw the air above the Guard's column was filled with an iron-red fog. She turned and kept running, and as she and the bear approached the hilltop, she saw it was completely empty and wondered what danger Juan Chang could possibly have imagined there. She also wondered why the rumbling under her feet was getting even stronger since the golems were so much further away now.
*****
Hassam didn't want to be a hero. He wanted to run, but there was no point.
When the nobles finally came to a stop in front of his men, Hassam saw the red-haired giants and their two-handed swords clearly. The wide-bodied Ortegas appeared next, turning from streaking blurs to walking, grinning, blood-hungry blades in an instant. In moments, all the nobles were there. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. More. All witch-sped. All stepping forward for the fight.
Hassam was distracted by the vibrations coming up through his boots. He had to glance over his shoulder to make sure a golem wasn't stomping up behind him. When he looked back at the nobles, he saw a darkness far in the distance. It looked like a low and solid thundercloud blowing forward fast. Or a mountain. There was no more time to look; the nobles were too close to take his eye off of them.
Hassam let them walk forward until they were only fifty feet away. Now, he thought, before they're close enough to snatch the weapons from our hands. Hassam stood tall in his red cloak and shouted his last command.
His hundred and twenty men dropped their sabers, picked up their thorn-spitters from the grass at their feet, and concentrated their fire in a single area directly in front of them, in the thick of the nobles' battle line.
The Waltons, the Macks, and the Lees charged first. They cut all of Hassam's men down in less than three seconds, but that was long enough for a few of the dying to see the heavy Ortegas and the hooded Austins turn to panicked, colliding blurs trying escape the cloud of poison thorns. A few of Hassam's men even got to see scores of nobles fall to earth before two-handed Mack blades, Walton cutlasses, and Lee scimitars cut them down.
In his last moment, from where he lay bleeding out on the ground, Hassam glanced up through the blurred, noble blades, up at the darkness on the horizon and decided it wasn't a mountain because mountains don't have legs.
*****
Juan Chang saw the moment when the nobles realized they been fooled. It happened too soon. Once they saw Hassam's men die statue-still under their blades they knew. The nobles looked behind them, saw the Populists cutting down the last of their thousand Guardsmen, and as the Populists ran for the hole in the wall, the nobles ran to close it and block their escape.
As he and his men reached the breech in the wall before the nobles, Juan Chang glanced up to the hilltop and tried to find Molly and the bear. He didn't see them, but there was something behind the hill, approaching fast.
It was beyond big. It was as tall as the highest mountains this side of the Great River. The very top of it was shrouded in clouds. It had seven legs, and the ground quaked with its approach. It was a misshapen horror of a creature, and from its sheer size Juan Chang knew immediately what it was: Kitty Hawk's Gargantuan.
If the Populists ran to escape into the wilds, he thought, then the nobles would follow and escape, too. But if we can just hold the nobles here, bunched together for a few moments, that should be all The Witch and her destroyer of worlds needs to end this. With a single cry, he stopped his men at the breech in the wall. Then he turned them around to stand and fight and hold the nobles inside the enclave until Kitty Hawk's monster could crush them.
The nobles made themselves into a wedge, and then all six hundred and fifty of them charged for breakout.
*****
Molly saw the nobles' charge. The Populists didn't run. They were supposed to escape out the hole in the wall and come to the hilltop and flee into the wilds, and Molly didn't understand why they turned to fight instead.
Scores of men on both sides fell in the first, astounding moment when the nobles' formation drove into the Populist line. She couldn't see Juan Chang. The ground shook beneath her, and she ignored it.
Molly wanted to run back and help them, but as she stepped forward, the earth lunged upwards, and she was nearly thrown off her feet. It was still for a moment, then the ground shook again so hard that she and the bear bounced up in the air and fell on their bellies. Something blotted out the sun and threw the entire battlefield into deep shadow at once. The next time the ground moved, it threw Molly and Teddy Da up in the air again, and they landed on their backs.
Molly smelled the ocean.
The earth rumbled and rocked and shook and then there was an impact so powerful that it knocked the breath from her. Looking up from the ground she saw something enormous, hundreds of feet overhead. It was a club-foot a thousand feet wide, and above it, rising into the haze, was a lumpy and misshapen leg, scaled to match. Not witchy sands, not flesh. Something else. Something gray-green and mottled. Something that smelled like the sea. High above was the silhouetted edge of its body, dark against the cloudy sky and diffused with nearly a mile of atmosphere and shadow between them. The world went dark as it passed overhead.
Molly screamed as the foot passing above began to descend, and she closed her eyes because she couldn't watch it growing larger and larger knowing that it was so big, so broad, that even with all her speed, she could never escape it. The rushing air driven in front of it was a gale, and when it blew into her mouth, she tasted doom. Molly covered her face with her arms, and the ground threw itself at her back and knocked all the breath out of her again. She found herself ten feet in the air, tumbling. When the sound of the impact reached her, it was loud enough to rattle her head and knock all the sense from her skull.
After she came to earth again, all she could see was dust, the irregular column of a mile-long leg rising above, and the body of the god-creature Gargantua overhead. In the hills and the fields around her, more legs came down to meet the earth and bounced her again and again. As she and the bear tumbled and fell with the creature's every step, she saw the Gargantuan's feet fall on the battle, on the nobles and the Populists and Juan Chang.
It wasn't until the billowing clouds of dirt and dust cleared that she saw the great, twenty-foot-deep, thousand-foot-wide footprints where only a moment before, the battle had been. There was no sign of Juan Chang or his Populists or the nobles' army except for a darker stain to the dirt around and between the broken lines of white bone dust where the breech in the enclave's wall had been.
Gulls flew and screeched underneath as the impossible, walking mountain continued on its way across the enclave and its thousand-foot-wide feet flattened everything in its path. Molly and Teddy Da watched the back edge of it clear from over their heads and saw the sky again. As Kitty Hawk's Gargantua walked up and over the mountain ridge to the other side of the enclave, it left nothing but its own footprints behind it.
Epilogue
Molly returned to the Haunted City with Teddy Da.
The ghosts in the wreath withdrew its tendrils from her mind, and she lifted it off her head. She buried it along with her blade.
People returned to the Haunted City. Men like the Long-Knives and men like Uncle Ho came with them. Molly didn't want to rule the city, but she remembered the words that Fin Singh and the General had spoken. “There will always be some with power and some without,” Fin Singh had said. “It's the way of things. You can't change that.”
“But what you can do,” she remembered the General had told her, “is make sure that you're the one in control. What happens after that is up to you.” So Molly dug up the wreath, placed it on her head again to retain their terrible council, and ruled the city with her speed and her blade.
And the people hated her. Again.
Traders from the West arrived. They said they'd walked from one coast to the next on a highway made by the footprints of a monster bigger than a mountain. They said the tracks came from the sea South of Wrecks' Landing, passed over every flattened noble enclave, and went into the sea on the other coast.
A year later, the Gargantua returned as a seven-legged mountain on the ocean horizon, wading across the sea from the East. It stopped in the deep waters beyond the bay and became an island. That night, Molly stood on her balcony and watched the glowsies' constellations in the fields beyond the city's walls. Kitty Hawk appeared next to her, translucent like the ghosts in her wreath. “It's a beautiful city,” she said, and Molly nodded. “I think it needs is a Stitchlife to take care of it, but there are no more left at the Coral Castle or in the nobles' enclaves. I killed them all.”
“Did you kill all the nobles, too?” Molly asked. Kitty Hawk nodded. “You killed all the Populists. And Juan Chang. You killed Juan Chang,” Molly said. “Why did you do that?”
“There was no other way. I didn't want to.” They stood in silence for long minutes before Kitty Hawk asked, “Would you like to come and be my apprentice, Molly?”
“Are you going to destroy the world again?”
“I already did,” Kitty Hawk said.
“Can I bring the fur-belly?”
“Of course, Molly,” Kitty Hawk said. “I wouldn't have it any other way.” Molly nodded her agreement.
“Round and round and round,” Molly said, and Kitty Hawk cackled long and loud at the night.
A.D. Bloom's Stitch Series:
The Bone Blade Girl (Stitch: Book One)
The Fall of the Haunted City (Stitch: Book Two)
The Stitchlife Rebellion (Stitch: Book Three)
All three novellas are available together as
Stitch: All Three Books (306 pages)
Also by A.D. Bloom
Lost Dogs and Monsters (the kaiju queen)
22nd century science fiction thriller, featuring rogue geneticists, thumbed canine assassins, and giant monsters made to rampage over the world's cities. Distilled, novel-length prose from the author of 'Under a Vulgar Sun'. 255 pages. 2013
Under a Vulgar Sun
Hyper-sexed inter-dimensionals, giant monsters, shades, shadows, and killer robot marines.
Six stories. Distilled short fiction. 63 pages. 2012.
http://www.amazon.com/A.D.-Bloom/e/B0054RE7TE
For updates on free kindle books: @AfterDeathBloom
Table of Contents
The Bone Blade Girl
The Fall of the Haunted City
The Stitchlife Rebellion
A.D. Bloom, STITCH
