Omnix

Chapter Twelve

"Say I don't run you through where you stand. What use are you to me?"

"I can show you the way-out." Out, as if this was a tour. Out, as if I'd let these infidels live.

"The only exit I see is dead Rebels. Help me or watch, I don't care which." Maddened, hushed sniggers bleated from his mask.

"To help, I must beseech you." An ugly sound, chopping springs, popping composite. He was holding a rifle. "To help"--a long pause-"an Almat of my age must submit themselves to weakness."

"Embarassing-How could you use such things?" His bushel body beat into a kneel. Breath hit the ground; only grass looked upon him with any reverence.

"Exile has tainted me. O, how I've transgressed. O, how I will. This blight, it grants me the curse of their weapons."

Rebels approached. He managed a stand, readying some contraption which hissed and reeled. Only, he brought the function to latch my plate with a hook. Before I could protest, we flew upward. He said, "Thousand pardons" against our velocity. A thousand too little. Blackness overcame me completely, true blindness when we scoured the maximum of the wire.

"What-have you done to me?" A branch thwacked my face.

"Helped."

He smiled in the way his rotten breath twisted. It was only then I noted a whiff of him; this jungle has contorted his musk, mystified his Almat blood. He lost the feramones of his kin, forever disconnected from House Cren. I couldn't help but pity the old thing. Casted out, yet still he continued to live out his exile protecting Tenoch.

I allowed him to guide me onto the trunk of a mighty tree which tapered into a small cable-like walk. Beneath lied several famished demons hungering for my fall. Crestfallen, as the tales went. Warriors who broke the code of Almat's great Houses. Mulch's eminence twisted then. He and I knew he would become one in time.

I wondered then, would Helford be somewhere down there? Did speaking of the Final Purge condemn him once he scoured the Great Apparatus?

Would you be there, too?

I hoped to not find out either as we crossed. Mulch slowed, guided down. The bramble plucking at my tuft of hair told me the tree line was beginning to tunnel. "First of many infidels, my Lordess." And a shot cracked the sky. I know little of these accursed firearms, but I know enough of my tours to tag the roar of a sniper.

Scurried steps out of line. Mulch was winding functions in blasphemy, surely chasing down these steps with deadly sway as if he assumed authority of the red silk death.

"You hunt like a wild hog, Mulch. Have you no tact? They will know we're coming!

He had the gall to hush me again. "Fret not. You may not be keen as I but I've the trees to mask me. All they hear are faceless, directionless things." After a stilled breath, another shot came. "Two. The fathers gifted me only five shots." And he was keen to load the third as he muttered to hide his voice from the jungle itself: "Thoust wise. There is no honor to what I do here."

But limbs hitting the ground, that was an unmistakable sound. An intoxicating smell. Ghosts of flying rounds lingered in our air, and I could practically taste panic below.

Tremor kits began to hit the trees the next time we shifted. Strange, I believed I saw something pass by gun smoke. An eminence below. "So, you have eyes after all." Mulch's remark cadenced with shifting bush arms. No wonder he evaded me-he sounded no different from leaves. "Remarkable."

"There is nothing remarkable about it."

"I-beg to differ." He turned then to the bramble below. "I saw you see so. How many?"