Out of the Mouth of the Dragon by Geston Mark S

Author:Geston, Mark S. [Geston, Mark S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi

XIX

There was pain, a great deal of it, and blurred streakings of light that were ebon at their centers, white along the bodies and then refracted into rainbow edgings as they drove into the empty eye socket and ricocheted through his skull.

He could recall the background against which the lights moved turning from black to cobalt to silver and then back again; he could recall the sharp soil of the Burn grinding underneath him, how it sparkled in the reflections from the lights. Then it would become damp and hard; small, penitent waves would wash up against him. The salt stung in his wounds but they felt cleaner when they had been washed.

He moved away from the Sea and through the ruins of the camp; the vague and shadowed impressions were now punctuated with single details, unusually sharp against the formations of color; that was mostly gray now. Charred poles and family standards passed above him, their faces and wrought designs torn and brutalized.

He had thought the machines different from the men, with their filth and tattooed arms. But both had apparently died in the same ways: the smooth skins were bitten into by cold or flaming metal, wrenched away from the skeletons, and the guts of plastic or copper or blood or brain would be knocked loose, spilling through the wound like vomit from a drunk's mouth. The debris dried where it caught on the skin or poured upon the ground. He crept past a tank which had excreted its crew through a gaping hole in its forward parts; in turn, the concussion had torn the crew apart, allowing their own interiors to partially escape them.

A piece of silk, embroidered with swords and basilisks, came into his left eye; it was still flying proud and upright, pathetically arrogant to the wreckage that lay all around it.

Slivers of gray rested in the roadstead behind him. All that was left of the wooden fleets was a tangle of splintered masts, burned flags and rigging. A few shapes, silver or dull green, were piled up on the causeway.

Were they all dead? There was no sound, not even the crunch of sand or some victorious cry from the seabirds as they moved from one meal to another. Nothing: only his breathing, sharp and edged like broken glass—like Tapp's had been.

After the background had shifted from light to dark and back again several times, it abruptly became a flat gray that never changed; a noise finally worked back into his mind, a low purring as vague and ill-defined as the shapes that had moved before him.

The gaping hollowness in him, which had allowed the fires and then the charred silence to move freely in his body, was demarcated by a single bright coil of wire. Then a straight line and more coils until they defined the emptiness with their tapestries. They pulled the edges of the wounds together; the humming grayness was not shut out entirely now, but it was split up and filtered through the wires.

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