The Semaphore

On its northern border, the hills of Rapidan petered out into a flat expanse. There was still grass, but it dried up and became sparse the further north one went, until eventually it disappeared completely. In its place was a parched, barren earth for hundreds of miles, where nothing grew and nothing could live. It never rained, and the sun never broke through the layer of smog suspended in the windless sky. There were roads, but they were cracked and rarely used. Someone had tried to build a home off one of the roads, but it had long fallen to disrepair, abandoned or overrun by a maddening loneliness—the only thing that thrived in this place. A thousand years ago, there had been forests here, and cities, and millions of people living their lives. The capitol of a powerful nation had resided on its eastern edge, just north of Blackwater. Now it was a wasteland, a permanent reminder of a War that most people did not even believe had taken place. This was a scar on the flesh of the earth. This was Senescence.

Mondagreen fucking hated Senescence. He’d driven through it more times than he could count, but usually only to make shortcuts from Blackwater to Allegewi or points west, cutting parallel through its southern border with Rapidan to avoid the hills. It had been years since he’d driven its entire length, from south to north. Five hundred miles through this miserable place was six hundred too many.

It was the smell, mostly, that got to him. It smelled like rotten eggs mixed with a million ashtrays. Not to mention the nauseating hue of the stagnant sky, which glowed brown even at night, as it was now. There was also the matter of the flatness; it was hypnotizing and mind numbing at once, the geographical equivalent of a dead-eyed stare. Every time he found himself in this place he swore he would never come back. But here he was again. And what was he gonna do? It was the only way to get to Osseon.

He and the girl had been driving since the previous morning, almost nonstop save to give her water. They were making good time. Assuming the smell and the endless flatness didn’t drive Mondagreen to suicide in the next three hours, the two of them would be in Osseon before sunrise.

It wasn’t an easy decision, to take the girl to Osseon. He had told Pontis and Varia he would take her to Tecca, and had meant it at the time. But after his encounter in the clearing he began to feel that maybe he owed it to someone—to Pontis and Varia, dead at the bottom of a hole, or to the guy who came looking for them, who had given Mondagreen no choice, or to all the people of Arborvale, whatever happened to them—to do something better for the girl. She had no one left otherwise.

His decision had also been influenced after finding the letters in the guy’s bag. Three from Pontis and three from Varia, written to their families. Mondagreen had read them by lamplight. They were sweet kids, earnest and full of love. Mondagreen had never been like that, even in his youth. It was a weakness where he was from. Or at least that’s what he was raised to think.

In two of her letters Varia mentioned Osseon, and taking the girl there to find answers. Mondagreen told himself that was why he was doing it, why he was making this drive through this forsaken landscape to a city from which he was permanently barred. But maybe it was also that he didn’t want to return to Tecca. Not yet. He could use a bit more time. He would run this errand to Osseon, and then he would deliver Pontis's and Varia’s letters to Lowood Den. Then, assuming there was nothing else to do, he would finally go home and face the music.

He reached into his shawl for a cigarette but found only crushing disappointment. He glanced at the satchel on the seat beside him. He almost envied the girl, wrapped so completely in her white cloth. At least she didn’t have to deal with the flat, smelly, shit-colored drive across Senescence. She just got to lie in the dark. But the thought drove a pang of guilt through his heart, and he placed his hand gently on the satchel, channeling an apology through it and into whatever soul she still possessed.

Two roads crossed up ahead, one from southeast to northwest and the other from southwest to northeast. Typically, Mondagreen liked to avoid the roads in Senescence, since the only people who used them were people that he didn’t want to run into. But today he had no choice. The northeastern road was the one that would bring him to Osseon. If he knew another way, he would take it. He considered heading a ways out onto the plain and following parallel to the road, but that would involve adding extra time to the trip, and ultimately his priority at this moment was to get out of Senescence as fast as possible.

He slowed slightly to guide his vehicle onto the road, and then gunned it again across the cracked pavement.

He allowed himself, briefly, to imagine his home of Tecca: its low brick houses overlooking the maze of piers stretching into the bay; gulls suspended in the sea breeze like kites; the aggressive aroma of raw seafood and seafood cooking over charcoal and tufts of feathery smoke rising into the pale sky; children scurrying along the sand in search of clams and mussels and inshore crabs; the colorful patchwork of sails anchored offshore, their nets coiled and poised, their lines hooked and baited—the whole thing awash in the fiery red of sunrise. He had not been home in a long time. He thought about his brothers and his brothers’ children. He thought about a woman with curly hair and the tattoo of a whale on her thigh. He thought about her laughter and her smoky voice. He thought about the baby—a son—that likely, right at this moment, she held in her arms, no one to take him from her if she got tired. He blinked out at the desolate expanse of Senescence and his heart broke softly for the thousandth time.

A pair of vehicles approaching from ahead, their headlights blurred in the dinge. He should have followed his instincts and avoided the road. His impatience had got him in trouble before, and yet he never seemed to learn his lesson. He figured it was too late to veer off now. If the approaching vehicles were merely travelers like him, they would pass by with no incident. But if they were Toymakers, or the Osseon security forces that patrolled Senescence, and they saw him veer away, they would chase him down. He did some quick math, figured his best bet was to avoid raising suspicion, and continued toward them on the road.

They were not Osseon security forces. He could tell because their vehicles were too old, and their engines too loud. This left two possibilities: fellow travelers merely trying to get from one place to another, or the Toymakers that plagued Senescence and parts of northern Rapidan, rapists and marauders with a taste for physical torture. They got their name from their penchant for sewing the orifices of their victims closed and stringing their bodies on their compounds and vehicles. Long ago they had some affiliation with a religious sect—the Eschatons who now ruled Osseon—but had since splintered off into a more secular kind of fanatacism. Regardless, Mondagreen wanted nothing to do with them. He watched the vehicles approach, and his stomach dropped when they neared enough that he could see the outlines of the bodies fastened to the hoods and roofs.

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It was too late to evade them. He double-checked that his katana was fastened securely to his back. He lowered the satchel onto the floor in front of the seat, and slowed his vehicle in anticipation that the oncoming vehicle would veer sideways across the road and block his path, which is exactly what they did.

There were five people in each vehicle that Mondagreen could count, not including the six corpses—one on each hood and two on each roof—in various stages of decomposition. One of the bodies, on the hood on the nearest vehicle, appeared to be that of a child no older than fifteen—though it was hard to tell for certain given the mess of stitches sealing their eyes and mouth and nostrils. Mondagreen made sure not to glance at the satchel; he did not want to draw attention to the girl, because her fate was gruesome enough without spending eternity strung to a roof on the plains of Senescence.

The Toymakers all wore variations of the same costume: black clothes and black robes that concealed their necks, a holdover from their days as proselytizers of Eschaton, worshippers of the Blisstaker. Some of them also wore black scarves over the lower halves of their faces, and others wore wide-brimmed black hats. It was all warpaint, designed to intimidate their victims, and as much as Mondagreen hated to admit it, it was far from ineffective.

A Toymaker in nearest vehicle—the oldest among them—stood in his seat and leaned on the windshield. His long, feral beard was the same color as the sky, and his wide-brimmed hat concealed his eyes.

“Are you lost?” he called, his voice raspy from years of swallowing the Senescence smog.

Mondagreen remained seated, eying the Toymakers through his vehicle’s windshield. “No,” he called back. “Are you?”

The man grinned a bank of yellow teeth.

Two more Toymakers emerged from the second vehicle and started slowly toward Mondagreen. One of them carried an axe, and the other a thin strip of metal that might have once been part of a gutter.

“A tithe for protection from the Demiurge,” the bearded man said, invoking their abandoned affiliation. “Everything you have.”

Mondagreen sighed and climbed out of his vehicle. The two Toymakers were fast approaching. They held their weapons like people who had done heinous things in their lives. Mondagreen would know. He had done a couple himself.

He drew Sarabeth. As he did, the two Toymakers faltered, unsure whether to continue their approach.

“Reckless,” said the bearded man, unmoved by Mondagreen’s show. “This could have been a nice little painless transaction.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know Britches of Tecca?” Mondagreen held his sword casually at his side, allowing its blade to glint in the dim glow of the sooty sky. “Or Young Tales?”

The bearded man frowned beneath his hat. “As a matter of fact, I might have heard of one or both of them.”

“Those are my brothers,” said Mondagreen. “Used to make runs up here. Figured maybe you crossed paths.”

The two approaching Toymakers diverged, attempting to flank Mondagreen from either side.

The bearded man spat over the side of the vehicle. “If I recall, Britches made deliveries for us to Cade before running off with our property. And Young Tales assaulted one of our lieutenants at a bar in Salò and left him toothless.”

Mondagreen laughed. “Yeah, that’s them. Good kids.”

“You are making this worse on yourself,” the bearded man said, his voice terse.

“Just wanted to make sure you had context for what’s coming.” Mondagreen grinned his gold and silver teeth at the two approaching Toymakers, both less than fifteen feet away on either side. “So. Which of you’s first?”

#

The Toymaker with the axe was first.

He charged Mondagreen with the axe raised. Mondagreen confused him by stepping abruptly toward the second man—who recoiled, equally caught off guard—and then pivoting back to the first, who had already started to change course, his axe lowered. He sliced the man across the face, cleaving his skull and sending him thudding to the ground.

The second man charged from behind, swinging his scrap of metal at Mondagreen’s head. But Sarabeth cut faster through the air than dull metal, and it caught the man’s wrist before the blow landed, severing his hand and continuing on through his throat.

Four more Toymakers piled out of their vehicles, each brandishing a different jagged, metal weapon.

Mondagreen turned to face them. He did not like to maim people. If Sarabeth was swinging she was swinging to kill. But the precision required for consistent killing was hard work, and Mondagreen was tired. He wanted to get off the road. If he managed to make it into Osseon, he wanted one of those hotel rooms with a bathtub the size of a swimming pool. He wanted a drink that wasn’t the stomach corroding proof Pontis had given him. He needed a cigarette. Most of all he wanted to find help for the girl—if there was help to be found. Plus he had a special disdain for Toymakers, who reveled in the art of cruelty. So if some maiming happened, it could be said he had done his best.

Two Toymakers came up on him at the same time. He did not bother to inventory their weapons. He crouched and swung, slicing them open at their stomachs.

The bearded man leapt from his vehicle and reached into the backseat.

A Toymaker swung a knife at Mondagreen’s face. Mondagreen saw a flash of an eyeless man climbing a rope. He leapt onto the hood of his vehicle and kicked the man in the face so hard his neck cracked and his eyeballs rolled back.

Another Toymaker with another axe swung at Mondagreen’s feet. Mondagreen leapt, landed behind him, and drove Sarabeth through his back.

He turned to the remaining Toymakers. There were only three, not including the bearded man, who stood near his vehicle holding something that looked like a small telescope. Mondagreen wiped Sarabeth’s blade across his sleeve, and held it at his side.

“You all can clear off whenever you like,” he said, fighting to conceal how winded he was. “I’ve already taken up plenty of your time.”

The bearded man bared his teeth. “You’re going to pray for death.”

Mondagreen shrugged. “Probably. Life ain’t been easy. My old man used to tell me I had about as much potential as a shit that’d left an ass. You remind me of him, actually. Just a lot nicer.”

The remaining three Toymakers rushed forward while the bearded man lifted his telescope. Mondagreen slashed one of them across the neck, sending a fan of blood into the air. The next two were upon him at the same time. He saw their deaths in his mind: He would duck between them, forcing them together, and then slice their faces as they turned. From there he would rush the bearded man, corner him against his own vehicle, and cut off his head.

There was a sudden whining sound, and a burst of red light so intense that Mondagreen’s vision collapsed into a single dark point. A moment later something struck his head, sending him to his knees. Another blow struck his neck, and another struck his back, and then he was flat on the pavement, blows raining down, driving him into unconsciousness.