by Matt Langley
“So, where have you been?”
“In terms of Nest time I’ve been gone, what, three months?”
Barl nodded.
“Space time, I’ve been gone four hundred years.”
“You don’t look four hundred years older.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere kid. One of the side effects of Guild training, becoming an Assassin, is that we live a very long time.”
“How long?”
“Essentially, until you’re killed.”
Barl looked at Summer more confused than ever.
“Put it this way, there isn’t a Guild Assassin who ever died of old age. We don’t really know how long we live. We don’t age in the conventional way. Best guess, it’s a property of the magic and the energy transfer with The Plain. It’s not something we understand.”
Being told he would live forever wasn’t something he wanted to deal with any more than being told he might die tomorrow was. There were too many revelations, new truths coming thick and fast, so he went back to his original line of questioning. “But where were you? Where did you go?”
“Names and places don’t matter, but I’ve been travelling, talking to people who might know, fighting a couple of very dull wars and falling in love. Twice. Bottom line there’s a whole bunch of scared people out there who don’t know what’s coming but know that it is. Wars are being started all over. Chaos is coming. Fast.”
“Can I go home? Will I be safe there?”
“No. This is the safest place you can be. I can protect you here; the Nest is safe. As long as you follow Rhoan’s advice about being alert, you’ll be ok.”
“For now.”
“There are no promises in this universe, kid. We need to study you; we need to find out what’s inside you and how it got there. And, to put it bluntly, we can’t do that on God’s Heart.”
Barl felt sad and a little angry. He didn’t want to be studied. He wasn’t an experiment. He felt like a worm wriggling on a fisherman’s hook.
“So as long as you get what you need from me, you’ll keep me alive. For now.” Barl said, bitterly.
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
Summer was quiet for a moment then reached into her blacks. She pulled out a small silver data-cube from her top-robe “Take this, go back to your dorm and read it. It’s about God’s Heart and more, and it’s the background you need.”
Barl was chilled, “Are you going away again?”
Summer smiled and touched his cheek. “I’m here for now and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you are too.”
He didn’t thank her. He knew it was petulant, but he didn’t feel like saying thanks given everything she’d told him. That kernel of resentment festered after they split up at the next junction. Barl walked on slowly. His thoughts on home and how it felt like whatever he did it was getting further and further away.
The data-cube felt warm in his hand. He was tempted to study it here, and wallow in images of God’s Heart for a while.
He certainly didn’t want to think about living forever or dying tomorrow.
What he realised then was that Summer hadn’t told him who the ‘we’ actually were. Why? Was she trying to protect them or him? Didn’t she know who she could trust?
He walked into his dorm bubble, a whirlpool of conflicting emotions; tormented by the revelations and heartened by Summer’s return.
The stench hit Barl as soon as he set foot inside.
Several of the beds had been overturned and a gassy, vomit-reek pervaded the air. The last time Barl had smelled anything like it he had been in the corridor of the Minular when it was under attack.
The realisation hit him like a battle-mace to the side of the skull.
He raced to the first of the overturned beds, his heart sinking as he saw Gharlin’s Pressure cage lying crushed and broken on the floor…
In a puddle of liquid and torn flesh, the Bantoscree lay dying, his tendrils quivering and his mouthparts screaming silently.
Chapter 29
Galdar couldn’t move.
The immense room was fashioned from stone, with a vaulted wooden ceiling, and was easily the size of a cathedral. Her mind struggled to reconcile how it could fit under the roof above the Governor’s residence.
It was impossible.
Steam rose from the centre of the impossible room.
A brass and copper engine belched into life.
Contraptions whirred and spun, men worked, feeding coal into a huge boiler and flames belched.
Above the engine was a fat, steel framed airship bumping gently against the vaulted roof. Slung underneath was a boat-like gondola, filled with crossbow wielding Townsguard and Governor Klane, sporting the same bloated sweaty red face as the mahogany carving on the devil-door. He shrieked, “Kill them!” at the Townsguard.
Carlow went down with a cry, taking a thick black bolt to the shoulder that spun him around, the impact enough to punch him off his feet.
Galdar threw herself behind a huge stone pillar.
Shryke pushed Lucillian out of the way as a barrage of bolts whistled towards them; the wooden shafts shivered as the steel slammed into the wall behind his back. Still bent in a crouch, he dragged the writhing Carlow to safety behind another pillar.
Gears and pulleys started to whir and clank.
One of the Townsguard cut a tethering rope with his dagger and with a deep groan that rumbled through the mechanisms, the airship started to rise. The gears and pulleys worked faster as the roof began to open like wings on a huge bird above their heads.
Shryke didn’t hesitate; he ran for the airship.
Dodging bolts and firing back with his own hand held, two-shot crossbow, Shryke covered the flagstones in a blur of speed and singing death.
As he ran, the crossbow shimmered in his grip from loosed to loaded—loosed to loaded, every other half-second as he wove a codespell of replenishment around the first bolts. Each subsequent bolt he loosed took out a Townsguard, pinning the corpse up against the bulwark of gondola with a thud, an exhalation and a lung-emptying groan. Shryke struck true five times before he reached the guide rope tethered beneath the keel of the gondola. He looked up, seeing a face peering down at him, and made it six. As the corpse fell, he began to climb.
Shryke climbed quickly, hand over hand, up the side of the gondola. As he reached the top, he saw another guard loom over him, a sneer on his twisted lips as he moved to cut the rope. Shryke was faster. The man hit the ground, the meat around his bones not protecting him from the impact as he was broken by the fall.
Shryke leapt onto the deck.
Galdar and Lucillian didn’t need his yelling to get them moving. Without a word exchanged, the pair nodded and in unison took one of Carlow’s ankles, and dragged him bumping and protesting over the stone floor towards the sky ship. At least if the fool’s protesting, he isn’t dead, Galdar thought grimly. They covered the twenty yards to the airship in a matter of seconds.
Three more screaming bodies crashed down from the gondola with sickening, bone snapping thuds as two rope ladders were unrolled over the side. The ladders were still long enough to reach the floor, but in a matter of moments the ascending airship would take them out of reach.
Galdar threaded Carlow’s arms through the bottom rung of the rope ladder as it lifted, then pushed his head through between two other wooden slats so that as it went up, it would carry him with it, even if were unconscious.
The bolt from the Townsguard’s crossbow was embedded deep in Carlow’s shoulder. The blood seeping out around the wound was slow and thick.
Lucillian was already clambering up the other ladder. She was half-way to the gondola as Galdar, stowing the battle-mace in her belt, began to climb.
In less than a minute the airship was free of the Devil-Room.
With a gust of squall and chill stab of vertigo in Galdar’s belly, it began to soar, sailing the skies ove
r the town.
Below was chaos.
Raiders still fought Townsguard in the streets.
Buildings were ablaze.
Galdar saw Assassins swept up in a battle that had nothing to do with them.
She didn’t care. Let them fight and die. She realised that the relative respite they’d had from attacks was because the Devil-Room had been fashioned by secret magic not of Shryke’s making, but now they were rising from that protection there would be more come to try and succeed where the others had thus far failed.
In the streets several of the Townsguard looked up at the airship, pointing. Their shouts of anger reached up to the deck; their rage at the Governor’s cowardly abandonment of them. The fight went out of them. She saw small pockets of anger, the Townsguard and citizens of Saint Juffour lowering their weapons in surrender.
The last thing Galdar saw before Lucillian’s hand reached over the edge of the bulwark and yanked her off the rope ladder were four Assassins in their blacks blinking out of existence.
Galdar lay breathing heavily on the airship’s heaving deck.
Through a forest of legs, she saw Shryke had Governor Klane on the point of his knife, with no resistance from the few remaining Townsguard who should have been protecting him.
“Are you Klane?” Shryke demanded.
“Pardoor Klane the Third of Saint Juffour, actually, you barbarian, and you are a dead man walking.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Shryke spat. “Where is your navigator?”
Klane pointed at a weasel-faced woman who had a chart under her arm and a pencil behind her ear. “Crove. Come here.”
The navigator shuffled forward. “Yes Master.”
“Tell her to do as I say,” Shryke said.
“Do as he says.”
“I was going to anyway,” Crove said, causing Klane’s already flushed face to burn an even darker red.
“None of your cheek, woman, or I’ll throw you off the ship myself.” Klane sneered. He nodded to Shryke, telling him to do what he will. He didn’t care. It was a pitiful attempt to cling onto whatever dignity he thought he still possessed.
“What course do you want me to set?”
Shryke wiped his mouth across his lips and stared up past the fuselage of the airship’s balloon.
“Up,” said Shryke.
Lucillian tended to Carlow, who gave good voice to his pain.
The Townsguard had drawn the ladder up to lift him up over the side as the airship continued to climb.
There was a precious hour of daylight left before Halfnight. Soon they would be above the grey heavy clouds that had brought so much rain to the town below.
Galdar couldn’t make out the streets of Saint Juffour; there was just the twist of the river valley and the heaving waves of Lake Tarsh.
Overhead the Loop glittered in its own night.
Up here in the higher atmosphere without clouds and heat hazes to obscure her view, Galdar could see further along the Chain than ever before. She fancied she remembered the route the Congregation of the Moveable Church had taken across those lands when she was a girl. Imagining the route, tracing it with her finger in the air.
Carlow’s latest scream of agony brought Galdar back to the present. Lucillian’s hands moved over the bolt, her fingers flexing, and as Galdar watched, the bolt began to lift clear of Carlow’s shoulder of its own accord, the metal tearing the wound wider as it came clear. It fell bloodily to the deck. The Townsguard looked on, shifting uncomfortably on their feet. Nine soldiers survived. They huddled together for warmth as the chill high-altitudes the airship was travelling through ate into their bones with a biting ferocity.
Lucillian began cleaning Carlow’s wound and then dressed it.
“This is just an escape ship,” Klane grumbled. “Short range, just enough to get us a few leagues to safety before setting down.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Shryke told the fat man.
“It is not a high-altitude machine,” Crove confirmed. “If you push us much higher, it’s going to start to ice up. That happens, we fall out of the sky. We won’t need anyone to shoot us down.”
“We go up.”
“It’s your funeral,” said Clove, “And everyone else’s of course.”
Shryke leapt up on the bulwark, a hawser wrapped around his grip, silhouetted against the misty face of the first rising Loopmoon. He looked up as the shadow of night began to move towards their section of link. “When the time comes, I’ll deal with the ice.”
“And fuel? Can you arrange that, too? We need fuel for the engine. We have about fifteen minutes of coal left.”
“I’ll deal with that, too,” Shryke said craning his neck up, “Trust me.”
He jumped down and stalked past the Governor, who sat shivering against the bulwark with cold or terror.
It was getting harder and harder to trust Shryke, but she did. With her life.
Shryke addressed the Townsguard. “You have all fought bravely, but when I use my spells to ensure the airship doesn’t freeze, and to replenish the fuel and to enable the engine to push us ever faster there will be a price to pay. The Assassins who seek my death will know where I am. And they will come in force. They won’t just kill me. They will kill you all. When the time comes, you have a choice to make. Fight with me, with my friends, or learn to fly. Understood?”
The nine soldiers nodded.
Shryke ordered Lucillian to leave the protesting Carlow and join him at the prow of the airship.
Lucillian stood ready to cast.
Crove looked with genuine concern at the dwindling hap of coal the firemen shovelled into the engine.
Klane cried.
Shryke closed his eyes, “I will be moments. The Plain calls.”
Galdar’s heart hammered in her chest with run-away anticipation, it reached an almost unbearable speed, and she thought it would surely burst clean out of her chest. After a few seconds, Shryke’s eyes opened. He spoke codespells and moved his hands.
Four things happened at once.
A huge scree of new coal appeared in the hopper by the engine. The roar of the steaming pistons turning the airscrew increased tenfold, belching steam and sparks, as the airship accelerated to unheard of speeds. Black steel swords and chaos imbued shields came into the hands of the Townsguard, and lastly, seven Assassins, in full Techtomesh Exo-Armour stepped from the air in front of Lucillian and Shryke.
The Assassin’s hand-cannons raised up, centring over their hearts, whining desperately as they charged.
Chapter 30
Rhoan promised Barl it was “just a room.”
Vilow didn’t disagree.
It had a bed, a terminal, a place to wash and defecate. But it was unlike any other bubble in the Nest. For one thing, the walls were opaque. If the light reflecting on the outside of the bubble was bright enough, Barl could just make out the vague shadows of people walking past, but that was it. The door to the bubble could only be opened from the outside, meaning he was essentially a prisoner, with food and refreshments passed through a lensing slot next to the door.
Room? No. It was a holding cell.
The days had been a rush and a blur.
Gharlin was dead, and no amount of wishing would change that. Barl was broken. He saw the way they looked at him. He knew that he was their number one suspect. He had wept for his friend even as Vilow told him was being sealed in the opaque bubble for his own safety.
Barl felt anything but safe.
Trapped.
Alone.
Rhoan promised him as they left that, “The investigation has already begun, boy. Believe me, we do not take this invasion lightly. We will find the source, and they will be brought to justice. The security of the Nest and the Guild is paramount,” and then the door had locked shut behind them, sealing with a vacuum hiss, and Barl had been left to his own thoughts.
The room was shielded against magical attack, and only accessible by highest level G
uild Authority. He was simply to wait until investigations were concluded.
That had been three days ago.
At least he thought it had been three days. They had fed him nine times.
Barl had been the only one to shed a tear at the Bantoscree’s murder.
He’d begged to see Summer, but Rhoan had shaken her ever reconfiguring head. Two mouths tutted and the third, sliding up her broad face told Barl that Summer was no longer in the Nest and hadn’t been for months.
Barl stopped himself telling Rhoan about the meeting with her in the bubble garden.
Not that it mattered.
He could not prove that he’d seen her.
The data-cube she’d given him had been confiscated before he’d been able to read a single entry. The battlemasters had scanned and had taken all manner of samples from him—as Xaxax assured him, to eliminate him from their inquiries, which only heightened his sense of guilt and despair.
Barl stopped pacing and sat down heavily on the bed.
The terminal remained untouched.
He’d be too tempted to input the words God’s Heart and after what had happened the last time, he didn’t want to risk triggering any similar response from the machine.
He tried several times to use some low energy spells, nothing exciting, not even a handful of yellowberries, but the room was shielding any use of magic.
Barl shifted uncomfortably on the bed.
He felt a sharp pain in his thigh and rolled sideways.
There was no one else in the room. The sudden jab had seemed to come from the bed itself.
He looked at the bed.
The covers remained undisturbed.
Barl gingerly ran his hand over the sheets until his palm snagged on something.
There was an object hidden beneath them.
It hadn’t been there when he’d sat down, and definitely hadn’t been in the bed when he’d slept in it last night.
Barl rolled the covers back, and there on the mattress was a data-cube.
It had to be the same small silver one Summer had given him, but how had it got here? Barl didn’t dare reach for it, remembering how the robed Skeleton had last come at him out of a piece of supposedly benign technology.