by Matt Langley
Galdar wasn’t in the mood to argue with him.
“I don’t believe him.” Galdar closed her eyes. “I don’t think you do, either. We know the truth; God’s birthplace is in the earth. In Safehome. He comes from the earth, and we worship the earth in God’s name.” The light from the dawn edge of the Shadewalls reflected in Carlow’s eyes as he took Galdar’s hand and poured a tiny amount of dirt into her palm from a pouch he took from his belt. “Pray with me, sister.”
Galdar looked at the centre of her palm, at the grains.
She thought about what they represented and what they had meant to her over the years.
She smiled at Carlow, and kissed his cheek, “I forgive you, for everything, for every ounce of anger, for your betrayals, because I knew they came from a good place, but I can’t do that. Not anymore.”
And with that she let the grains of dirt slip through her fingers like grains of sand, and spill away over the side of the airship, falling like stars from the point of their creation.
Chapter 32
The three vultures circled overhead. They had the faces of the Skull. Their wings were flapping red robes edged with tiny imperfect feathers.
The more Barl stared at them, the more they changed.
He could hear laughter above the throng of the endless battle.
A woman’s voice; ageless and cruel.
It hissed across the clouds.
It echoed off the mountains.
It sank into the dead marshes.
It was the laughter of a God.
The armies broiled and fought.
Barl was in the battle’s heart, on the same raised hill of bones as before, but when he looked up, it wasn’t the golden-haired woman he’d seen before, it was Summer.
But not the Summer he recognised from their universe outside this blasted Plain. It was a taller, larger Summer. A more powerful Summer. An elemental Summer. A titan. Twenty feet from boot to hairline, pulling on a breastplate and securing the straps at the side.
“You killed yourself,” he said, disbelieving. “You left me.”
Summer finished buckling the final strap before she answered him. “I made a choice, my love. I sacrificed myself in that world to become something greater.”
“How, how can anything be greater?”
“I will never leave you again. We are fused. Two aspects of one soul. A shared purpose. A shared power.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am your Familiar on The Plain. You will forever come to me for the powers needed to cast the spells that you weave in both protection and wrath. Sometimes you will project a memory of me as an extension of your will, a warrior to do battle on your behalf, an avatar to save you.”
Barl stood there as the enormous woman bent, picked up a huge helm and placed it on her head, covering her face completely. She locked the catches down the side of the steel construction, each one clicking into place like nails being driven into his coffin one after the other.
Summer began sliding on mailed gloves so large they would have fitted Barl like a tunic.
He looked up at her, awestruck by the giantess.
Her voice changed when she spoke from within the helm. It was deeper, darker, charged with indefinable magicks and spells. In her hand she held a beautifully inscribed battle-mace. Barl hadn’t seen her pick it up. It was just there.
“Hold out your hands,” she told him.
Out of habit he pushed his elbows into his side and turned his palms face-up. Instead of a punnet of yellowberries, a battle-mace appeared across his hands. The weight felt perfect. The balance as if it had been made for him. He grasped the handle and swung it. It moved through the air with easy grace—it felt light but deadly.
“Go.”
Barl knew what he had to do.
He leapt into the battle, desperate to please his Familiar.
The airship reached the Shadewalls.
Crove was instructed to keep pace with it.
The sheer magnitude of the wall was humbling. It swished silently across the sky; bringing night as world sized shadows to the links below, leaving a trail of dawn behind it. Off in the distance Galdar saw other Shadewalls at different pitches and angles, each doing the same job for the sixteen other links in the Chain.
Compared to the flying walls, the airship was smaller than a tick on a mammoth’s back.
The surface of the wall was smooth and dark.
There was no visible means of propulsion; it hung in the space between the loops blocking the sunlight.
And now Shryke was going to take them all beyond it into the Sun-Machine.
Galdar had no idea if she was going to survive the day, but in a small way, she no longer cared. She had seen these wonders up close; it almost erased the loss of her purpose down on the Chain…almost. There was still a hum of regret around her thinking and emotions. Scripture jarred in her thoughts, but she no longer clung to it for answers. There wasn’t the same strength to be found in those beatitudes.
Perhaps she would find a new purpose?
Perhaps Shryke was leading her to it beyond the Shadewalls?
Galdar was painfully aware that Carlow had been avoiding her since she had refused to pray with him. She could understand his rejection of Shryke’s word and for her loss of faith. The idea that Gods… Yes. Not one God, but Gods… were real, not in some distant spiritual sense, but in a tangible physical sense as beings, was an idea she was still processing… but his rejection still stung.
Physical beings, so powerful they mimicked all the qualities of the Gods who had created everything. Created her. She no longer had to work at having a faith. The certainty of faith had been replaced by the certainty of reality. It felt like a big change inside her. It was awkward in her thoughts. It lay there strangely. An alien idea. She wanted the idea to fit. For it to continue to challenge her thoughts and her feelings until she’d worked through them. Maybe she would still come out of this process with a faith…just a different one?
Having something to believe in; something she could take back to the peoples of the Chain was planting a tiny seed of missionary zeal within her.
Perhaps the Congregation of the Moveable Church could once again travel the links of the Chain, bringing a completely new message and story?
Galdar’s eyes glistened as she thought of the possible futures and hoped against hope that she would have one. A future that is.
She didn’t attempt to pray for it, because she didn’t know who to pray to, or what the energy from that prayer would feed…
Shryke and Crove were up in the wheelhouse. Galdar watched through the glass as the navigator threw her hands in the air and stormed away from Shryke.
Shryke shook his head and took the wheel with one hand, weaving a codespell with the other.
With a hiss and a clank, the steam engine was silenced.
From Klane to the Townsguard, to the fireman, to Carlow and Lucillian, everyone looked up at the wheelhouse.
But Shryke wasn’t looking back down at them.
With an expression of supreme concentration, Shryke was turning the wheel.
The airship began to adjust its course, moving directly towards the featureless expanse of the Shadewalls.
Galdar had no real idea of the sense of scale, so couldn’t judge how long it would be before the airship smashed into the enormous object. But, if the speed she felt within the timbers of the craft was real, it wouldn’t be long.
“He’s mad! Completely mad!” Crove yelled bitterly as she stomped back down the narrow stair to the deck.
That was difficult to deny.
Barl fought with the battle-mace, facing down warrior after warrior, the weapon singing in his head as he smashed bone, ripped through armour, and stoved skulls in. Swords swung at him, bending and buckling into unusable shapes against the incredible weapon.
Barl fought out his frustrations.
Barl fought out his homesickness.
Barl fought out his gr
ief at the death of Gharlin.
Barl fought out the unbearable sadness at Summer’s transformation.
Barl fought.
He carved a swathe of death around the hill of bones, stealing a glance through the starbursts of blood and falling bodies, up past his Familiar Summer to where the circling vultures were more feathers and beak than robe and Skulls.
The laughter had dissipated, too.
Barl felt the surge of relief within him.
He breathed hard, wiped blood from his eyes, killed two more and leapt back up onto the mound.
“Enough?” he asked Summer in her armour.
Summer’s helm nodded, “For now, yes.”
Barl knelt.
Thought of God’s Heart.
Thought of his father.
Thought of his mother.
Barl just thought.
And waited.
The Axe came down, it sizzled and spat with heat as it were made of molten metal, it left a trail of black steam as he felt every moment of its journey through him, cleaving his body asunder.
And it was glorious.
Barl was back in the room.
Summer’s body, her face gone from the blaster shot, blood seeping across the floor, lay at his feet.
Explosions raged outside.
Still the screams came.
Barl he held the battle-mace from The Plain in his first.
He took a moment to study the curlicues and carvings. The patterns moved. Twisted. Was that Summer’s face he saw in there for a heartbeat? His father?
Barl bowed his head, saying goodbye to Summer, and then looked at the door.
All it took was the slightest inclination of his head and the door blew away on a gust of flame.
Outside the bubble, the Nest had become chaos.
Flames cackled and raged everywhere. He walked through a trail of dead bodies. Trainees and staff. In the distance, Barl heard a battle being fought, the distinctive sizzle and snap of energy weapons being discharged. As he stepped over the bodies, Barl looked up through the superstructure of the Nest and saw ships, tiny fighters and larger dreadnoughts, engaged in a brutal conflict across the bruised face of the Gas Giant.
It was all out war.
He headed for the armoury.
Barl reached the bubble without incident; the battle around the Nest too ferocious for anyone to worry about one person walking away from it. Assassins raced in their hundreds to defend the Nest. There was no one left in armoury to stop Barl from getting the Techtomesh armour and hand-cannon he had come looking for. He knew that if he were to survive the day, he would have to find a safe way out of the Nest and off Pantonyle.
Barl loaded a magazine of close-quarter explosive rounds into the hand-cannon, then climbed into his armour.
It closed around him, shaping itself to his body.
Slinging a bag of hand-cannon magazines over his shoulder and sliding the battle-mace into his belt, Barl left the armoury intent on waging war for everything that had been stolen from him.
The airship passed through the Shadewalls with a ripple in reality and a blast of hot white light.
The shell of warmth he had woven around the craft turned near-black with a wave of Shryke’s hand, shielding them from the thirty-two suns that made up the Sun-Machine.
Nothing could have prepared Galdar for this.
“Into the armour. Now!” Shryke yelled.
The Techtomesh whirred and buzzed as it fitted around her. She didn’t like the sensation of the faceplate up against her skin, moulding itself to her features.
However comfortable the suit was, she wanted that faceplate off her skin.
The faceplate swung up.
Galdar thought the opposite.
The faceplate swung down and fitted back perfectly over her face.
She raised it again, realising that the suit shaped itself to her commands, all she had to do was think it and the suit would react.
Lucillian flexed her arms, testing the limits of her own suit.
Carlow, reverting to type, refused to wear any unholy armour, arguing, “God will protect me,” loudly to anyone who could hear him.
The few remaining Townsguard, Crove and Klane took refuge in the remaining armour, some being forced to share, it was uncomfortable but better than being seared alive by the intense heat of thirty-two raging suns, and a grim silence enveloped the airship as it travelled between the whirring, whirling suns.
Carlow knelt apart from them all, eating his dirt and praying.
Shryke left the wheelhouse to Crove to pilot the airship between the spiralling suns. The suns moved in circles and arcs across and around them, peeking between Shadewalls. They were held in place by a network of immense girders. Each star was much smaller than Galdar would have imagined given the size of the Shadewalls. But even behind the dark of the shell encasing their airship it was painful to look directly at them, such was the intensity of their brightness.
Shryke, in his armour now, stood at the prow of the airship, steadying himself with a rope from the rigging.
He pointed in the direction he wanted Crove to steer.
Suns on their girders slid silently past, leaving comet tails of fire which burned briefly and then dissipated.
The airship was heading deep into the centre of the cloud of tiny suns.
A golden plate spun at the heart of this magical impossibility.
Galdar couldn’t make out any details of its surface, but it glowed with a beautiful light all its own.
As the airship sailed on, perspectives began to shift and change, and Galdar felt a new weight in the gravity around her. They were no longer travelling up. They had begun their descent.
The golden, spinning plate grew.
The edges were battlemented.
Galdar saw spires and wide roads between the golden buildings.
Shryke signalled to Crove, getting her to trim the attitude of the airship so that the bottom of the gondola was now at the direction of the travel.
The airship was coming in to land.
Galdar stole a look at Lucillian.
Lucillian shrugged and smiled. “I’ve had less interesting days, it has to be said.”
Klane in his armour, sat hunched in the corner.
Galdar heard him gently keening through the communication grille of his suit, like a baby in the middle of the night. He had stopped acting like he had any special right to be heard and retreated into the pathetic wretch he had always been at heart.
Galdar put a comforting hand on Klane’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped, but as she lifted her hand, he had a change of heart and reached up, pulling it back down onto his shoulder. Galdar squeezed, not sure if the armour she wore would transmit such a subtle feeling.
As the airship sank lower and lower, beneath the spiralling suns on the ends of their whirling girders, Galdar wondered what they would find down there.
Life or Death?
Before Galdar had the opportunity to explore that line of thought, the airship heaved to one side and a gust of flame erupted through the rigging, bursting a hole in the metal cage surrounding the dirigible.
The world around them lurched to the right, as Shryke leaped towards the wheelhouse shouting, “Dragons!”
Chapter 33
The first energy bolt hit Barl so hard it blew him off the central Nest transept and sent him crashing down through three levels of dark, twisted, crowded walkways and bubbles, into the lower reaches of the Nest.
The Techtomesh deformed around him, taking the physical brunt of the bolt, and lessening the energy burn, even so he felt the force of the impacts and the heat of the blast as he rolled into a shadow. An overhang ensured that anyone above was unable to get an easy shot.
The battle raged on overhead.
The suit’s communication system and tactical display on the inside of the visor showed a swarm of hostiles and desperate defenders, but because both were Assass
ins in Techtomesh armour, the suit was unable to tell who would want to kill him and who was fighting to save him. All he could do was try to avoid them all.
The free-for-all shook the Nest to its very foundations.
Something exploded high above.
A rain of debris clattered down through the superstructure.
In that cloud of debris, he saw a body. It bounced off the walkways and slid lifelessly over the sides of bubbles, spinning like a Catherine Wheel into Nest branches, and crunched up against harsh metal rails. Shielded by Techtomesh, the figure crashed head first into a walkway just a few yards away from where Barl had rolled into cover. It lay on its back, possibly semi-conscious.
An arm waved slowly back and forward, before flopping to the floor and lying still. The emergency-evac light glittered on the left shoulder as the emergency protocols of the Bantoscree suit kicked in. It was sending coding signals to the nearest Guild Medical Team, calling out for help.
Barl went over to the body.
There were no identifying marks on it. The faceplate was dark. Whoever was inside had taken a huge hit in the blast; shrapnel was stuck in the suit’s webbing, and some parts of the breastplate had cracked. Sealant seeped up from the suit’s reaction layer, filling the tiny breaches in the outer skin. A hit capable of doing that to the outside of the suit like that was more than capable of breaking every bone of the body inside.
The suit’s evac light blinked faster, desperate, as the life inside failed, any hope of saving reaching a critical phase.
Barl didn’t have a lot of time, but a plan was coalescing in his mind.
Looking up, as the sounds of battle continued, hearing the sizzle and blast of energy weapons, the searing lightshow of war-spells being woven, fired off and countered, he knew his options were limited.
A green blinking light descended from above.
A Medical Team.
Either a Guild medics or ones from the attackers—homing in on the signal from the suit below him.
But which?
Taking a deep breath Barl activated his own critical injury alarm and sprawled across the dying body.