Excerpt: Flesh and Blood

“Daska?” he asked again, a little more worried now. He couldn’t hear her, only a mechanical thrum like a distant turbine which did nothing but get louder as the door closed behind him. Snow moved over to the table and ran her hand through the debris, then looked up in shock as Zem loomed over her. His arm reached over her shoulder, and his fist closed around the haft of a monkey-wrench. He picked it up, and tested its weight in one hand. His raised a finger to his lips, then stepped quietly around her to the door to the stairs. Checking her knife, she crept after him.

The stairs wound upwards, and the noise got louder and was accompanied by an overwhelming stink of petrol. The walls and ceiling, never particularly clean even in Sattvha’s day, were black with soot. The fumes, up here, were choking. Snow redoubled her grip on her knife, and shied at every corner. They reached the door to what had been Sattvha’s chamber, and Zem paused for a second. Snow made no such reservation, and in one swift movement kicked the lock through. The door slammed open.

Daska sat cross-legged in the centre of the floor, her arms resting limply on her knees and her eyes closed. Above her head, two bags of liquid choler drained down intravenous lines into her wrists. Her veins were black and distended, pulling the skin up around them. Zem could see them crawling up her neck and under her scalp. At her side knelt two of her automata, like angels over a crib, awaiting her command. Two more busied themselves with something at the back of the room. Snow recognised one of the kneeling automata as Octaviaan, but he didn’t seem to notice her arrival. Without warning, Daska spoke.

“Alastair Reventon and Isertana Snow. You have need of my services?”

She looked up at Zem, then slowly opened her eyes. Their whites were flooded with black choler, and her pupils filled her irises. Zem dropped the wrench in shock. For a second he considered telling her to stop dicking around and take the lines out of her arms, and then he realised what he was looking at. The two automata at the back of the room were slowly stripping pieces of flesh from Sattvha’s corpse and placing them inside the now all-too familiar mechanical spiders, which were swarming off down the drain by the bath . Daska noticed what Zem was looking at, and justified herself;

“I was his closest aide in life. Now he can help me in his death. Every fragment of tissue, every bone, every nerve, contains a spark of the power which made him Terator. With it, I can extend the network farther than he ever would have dreamed was possible…”

She was speaking slowly, as if reading from cue cards, and her eyes were no longer focussed on anyone in particular. Her voice slowed to a crawl, then stopped with a sigh. Octaviaan’s head rose from its attitude of penitence, and looked Zem in the eye.

“I am no longer limited by my flesh.”