Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  The phalanx of dragons rose up. Up. Up.

  They surrounded the airship.

  There was a moment of stillness, the fulcrum of danger hovered at some insensate mid-point, before falling rapidly to puncture the gondola’s structure and ripped through it in a gout of dragon flame.

  The gondola dropped like a stone.

  Galdar clung to Lucillian as the massive scaly beasts, their horned heads turning, huge leathery wings slowing their beating, fanged mouths widening, banked in the air, kicking their tails back before they launched arrowlike downwards, chasing the spiralling wreckage of the airship.

  The gondola twisted, the spiral tightening the faster it fell.

  Carlow clung desperately onto the bulwark but there was no way he could possibly hold on long enough; Klane slipped and rolled past, clattering into the boy and sending him spinning away like a skittle.

  Shryke was caught in the first syllables of a codespell.

  He stood on the prow of the gondola, balanced perfectly, his arm hooked around a stanchion, as bolts of lightning crackled from his fingertips. He raised his hand, finishing the words of weaving and loosed his own fire. The elemental lightning streamed from his fingers, searing the air around the head of the first great dragon, leading the charge. From there, crackles of bluish flame rolled out across its hide, spilling over from one to the next until all seven beasts were wreathed in a complex web of power.

  That power didn’t just light the sky, it burned with the brightness of the Sun-Machine, searing hot.

  The dragons screamed as one.

  Shryke moved his fingers, the motion was so subtle Galdar almost missed it, but it was impossible not to see the connection between the sheet of magical flame and his movements as the broken dragons were hurled, spinning and flailing, far from the falling airship. The huge creatures spun away, immense bodies tumbling end over end, slamming into each other as they fell through space, speeding away with gathering momentum. They couldn’t slow their wild fall. Further, faster, they fell until they were reduced to little black spots against the illuminated Shadewalls, and then they were gone, lost to sight. She had no idea if they were dead or simply banished. It didn’t matter much.

  Dragons?

  She shook her head. She couldn’t believe she could think about something as incredible as dragons in such a banal, matter-of-fact, manner, like they were some beast of burden she saw every day of her waking life. She had never seen anything approaching the mythic, majestic beasts. She wasn’t even aware that they…

  Oh yes.

  We’re falling.

  The ground raced up at them faster than they fell, or so it appeared, and there was nothing she could do apart from cling on and hope, because prayers were beyond her, as the great gondola hit the ground and tore apart amid the impact, scattering cargo and armoured bodies in all directions.

  The Techtomesh protected her from injury, but it didn’t stop the impact driving the air out of her body and hurling her through the rigging and across the shattered deck. Much of the ropes and the punctured sheeting of the dirigible part of the airship had dropped onto the gondola, suffocating the wreckage. Ropes were looped everywhere, masts and stanchions smashed like balsa.

  Galdar heard groans, and curses, and somehow, in the midst of it, Carlow.

  He hadn’t been wearing armour. How could he have survived? For a moment, half a heartbeat, she thought that his God really had protected him, but when she saw him struggling in Shryke’s arms, twisting and spitting and slapping at Shryke’s faceplate as he tried to escape his clutches, and she knew his salvation had been less than divine.

  Shryke had used his body to shield Carlow as the airship crashed.

  He put the boy down.

  When he spoke, his voice was weary. His shoulders sagged. He went down on one knee, steadying himself with a hand on the ground. “You…slap…like…a…girl.” Shryke said, trying to muster a smile.

  “You might want to rethink sexist bullshit like that if you don’t get me home in one piece,” Lucillian said, reaching out to help Shryke stand. For the longest time it looked as though the warrior wasn’t going to take her proffered hand, but eventually he stood.

  “Thank you,” he said simply but with conviction.

  Carlow clambered out of the wreckage with some of the Townsguard, and for the first time Galdar took in her surroundings.

  They had come down in a town square, steeped in ivy and enclosed on all sides by tall golden buildings with high windows and flat roofs.

  In the near distance, spired buildings thrust up into the air over the golden plate rotating at the centre of this astonishing place.

  Up above the sky was filled with suns on their impossibly long girders, revolving, dancing and spiralling through space, keeping pace with a hundred Shadewalls.

  They were in the clockwork of heaven.

  The skies between the suns and the city were darkened. They held the same quality as the shade Shryke had put around the airship. It had protected them then from the blazing pinpoints of whirling fire and it protected them now.

  “Do I need to ask where we are?” Lucillian said to the still hard-breathing Shryke.

  The warrior shook his head, chest heaving.

  It’s obvious, Galdar thought. We are inside the Sun-Machine.

  Rough hands took Barl’s body and threw him face down onto a flat surface.

  He heard a murmur of voices around him but because of the suit’s critical injury shut down protocols, most of the actual words weren’t getting through.

  He’d wove a small spell which he hoped would make his breathing inaudible, even through the amplification of the suit’s vented breathing apparatus, and another to make the armour look as though the release mechanism was malfunctioning. Both were simple glamour’s, but he hoped they would be enough trick those around him into thinking they’d need technicians to work on the suit before they could get to him.

  It wasn’t much of a plan.

  The ground, if that’s what it was, began to move beneath him, then he felt his body accelerate upwards. He didn’t dare risk defogging the visor so that he could see where they were taking him; any change in the blank slate of the protective visor would necessitate turning off the injury protocols first, and that wasn’t happening.

  Yet.

  Best guess, was being evacced by the medics, shipped away from the Nest to a designated hospital facility or mediship somewhere safe from the battle.

  He listened intently, straining to hear the explosions and brutal clash of battle in the Nest, but it faded evermore distant into the deep background.

  He felt more small bumps and jostles before he settled, being moved into some sort of transporter. Doors sealed around him. Silence. He had to assume he was inside a Guild Hospital Carrier, meaning he was bound for a field infirmary some miles from the Nest. He knew there to be one on the outskirts of the Pantonyle Spaceport, which was exactly what he had hoped for when the plan had formulated with feverish haste back at the Nest.

  Barl released the two spells with a twist of his fingers and turned off the critical injury protocols.

  The faceplate defogged.

  Barl screamed.

  He was miles above the surface of Pantonyle, suspended in mid-air without any visible craft to hold him.

  The Nest was burning.

  Vultures circled around him as the robed skull climbed into the suit to join him.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “You’re in no fit state to go anywhere.”

  Shryke pushed Lucillian’s hand away and shook his head. He took off his helmet. The toll such powerful magic had taken on him was plain to see; his eyes were hollow, lips bloodless and a sheen of sweat glistened on his skin.

  Shryke blinked and almost fell again.

  “The Guild Assassins will have a fix on me. They can send an army to destroy us. I shouldn’t have done that. It was stupid. I’ve made too dangerous a disturbance. Carry me if you have to, but we
must get away from here until the shadow I’ve cast across the Quantum Aether has diminished enough that there isn’t a target on our backs.”

  “Help him,” Lucillian barked orders at the Townsguard, making them carry Shryke. He directed them with slow, painful gestures, making sure they knew which way to go.

  Klane went next, with Crove.

  They whispered frantically to each other. The fat Governor could scheme and plan to his withered little heart’s content. They were weaponless, and a long way from home. The only thing that should matter to them, Galdar reasoned, was ensuring Shryke stayed alive. He was their only route home.

  She tried to walk with Carlow, but he refused to be anywhere near her.

  He wouldn’t make eye contact.

  He only said one word to her in the next hour, “Traitor.”

  She didn’t bother arguing. She didn’t want to waste a second of what was most likely her last hours like that.

  The Sun-Machine was the whole city.

  As they moved through narrow golden streets, they heard the constant hum of unknowable machinery behind the walls. The Sun-Girders were located over the horizon, and Galdar fancied she could hear the low rumble of gears and gimbals on which they ran. In certain areas among the buildings, as the suns moved overhead on their fifty-thousand-mile-long struts, crazy shadows swirled around corners, high building casting shadows like sundials, but sundials over which unruly suns marched and danced. Shafts of light burst through high crenulations and cool areas of shade pooled in unsuspected lees between buildings.

  In a world where everything was possible, Galdar still had the capacity to feel the sheer wonder of this creation.

  “Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

  Shryke fell from the arms of the Townsguard and slumped to the ground with a sickening thud.

  There was another scream of terror.

  Four of the Townsguard simply liquified, and were smeared on surrounding walls; as corrupt, sickening, analogues of shadow.

  Shryke lay still on the floor.

  Galdar began to move towards him, but almost as soon as she took the first step, a hand fell onto her shoulder, biting into the flesh.

  She gasped with pain and confusion.

  The hand spun her around and shoved her into one of the golden walls, her head cracking back against the surface, dazing her. Through dizzied vision, a blackening shape swam through the tears and coalesced into…

  …Carlow’s black mouth moving with spit and worms.

  His eyes ran with bloody tears.

  His smile cracked open his face and his tongue reached out like a poisonous snake. His skin, dry as dust, and as Galdar watched with growing horror, his throat bulged and pulsated as Carlow fell to his knees, hands now claws, reaching up towards her, tugging at her clothes, the whirring suns reflected in his inflating eyes.

  The last thing she saw was Carlow’s wide screaming mouth and a robed skeleton, impossibly large, climbing out between his chapped and bloody lips.

  Chapter 34

  The Quarternight was chilly.

  A damp mist moved through the trees.

  Carlow had moved from the clearing. Yane refused to listen to him. She had rejected his pleas to banish the warrior and refused to punish Galdar for her unholy relationship with his black heart. She was a fool. She tried to convince him he was letting his personal dislike for Galdar cloud his judgement. What did she know? She wasn’t party to the inner workings of his mind. Just like the others she made proclamations based on nothing and pretended at wisdom.

  He needed to take time. Reassess his thoughts and consider his commitment to the Congregation and the Moveable Church.

  She had threatened to divest him of his curate’s trappings and cease his training in the priesthood, calling it a personal vendetta against Galdar.

  She was blind.

  Carlow had been sure he’d be able to convince Yane of the dishonour Galdar brought upon their people, but the reverend had merely shaken her head, and looked at him with that unbearable face of disappointment before she sent him on his way. Well, he wouldn’t just shuffle back with his tail between his knees. No. He was a bigger man than that. He owed more to their God. So, yes, he left, crashing away from the encampment, stamping through the ferns, pushing back branches against tree trunks in ever-harder swings of his branch as he walked, determined not to look back.

  It wasn’t until the makeshift weapon in his hand finally snapped with a sharp crack that Carlow realised the mist had all but enveloped him. He looked up and around, and realised he had no idea where he was, or even what direction he needed to take back to camp.

  He stood still, lost in more ways than one, breathing heavily; taking in great lungfuls of the cold mist that stuck in his throat. He felt the cloying dampness of the stilled air and the silence where there should have been a wealth of forest sounds in his ears.

  Not silence.

  He heard a low, deep throated growling of a wolf and spun on the spot to stare into the muzzle of a huge white hunter. Its red eyes bored into him, but all he could look at were the razor-sharp incisors, like arrows bared behind black lips, dripping with foaming saliva.

  Behind the wolf he saw a woman dressed in red nun’s robes.

  Her face was wizened and pinched, but her eyes were keen.

  There was nothing remotely kind or benevolent about her expression. Nothing spoke of service or prayer. Nothing promised a lifetime of devotion to God. To Carlow she appeared to be the antithesis of the robes she wore, utterly undeserving.

  “Carlow,” she said, stepping alongside the wolf. She ran the bony fingers of her hand through the fur on its head, scratching its ears. The wolf relaxed a little, its eyes were still locked on Carlow.

  He couldn’t move. His feet were rooted to the spot. It didn’t matter that his body screamed: run. How could this woman, this stranger, know his name?

  “How I know who you are is neither here nor there,” she said, speaking directly in answer to his thoughts, “And there is nothing to be gained from running, believe me, my wolf friend here would take you down before you had made twenty yards. All it would need is a word from me.”

  “What…what do you want?”

  “Now that’s a much more intelligent question. Well done.”

  With a soft rustle of cloth, the robed woman was suddenly nose-to-nose with him. There was no moment when she had taken a step, she had been beside the wolf, and then she was in Carlow’s face, her foetid breath swimming into his lungs. She cracked a smile full of rotting teeth.

  Carlow couldn’t back away.

  His feet refused to obey his fear.

  “I am going to use you, child.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Shryke is travelling to the Sun-Machine.”

  The words were meaningless.

  “I will travel with him.”

  Carlow felt his throat tighten.

  “He is poisoned. I have poisoned him. But it is a mere distraction.”

  “It is?”

  “You will help him find someone to remove the poison from his body.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes.”

  “While he is concentrating on that, he will not notice or think about you.”

  “He won’t?”

  “No.”

  The nun’s face was changing. The skin shrivelling and shifting. Wasting. Her eyes puckered, draining of liquid. Worms moved in her mouth, curling around her teeth. Carlow heard a sinewy, tearing crack as the cadaver standing before him twisted off one of her fingers and stabbed the wet bone into his belly.

  The pain was excruciating but faded after a second.

  Carlow gasped and fell forward onto the wet ground.

  The mist had cleared.

  The cadaver and the wolf were gone. The only sound in the silent forest was a whisper in his ear. “Go to the valley. Find the Assassins. Tell them about Shryke. Bring them to the encampment. Do this for me and you will be rewarded.”
/>   “Rewarded? How?” Carlow said, bringing himself breathlessly to his feet.

  “With a painless death,” the voice promised.

  The suit bulged to accommodate both Barl and the robed thing in there with him.

  As he watched, with eyes that refused to close, he saw it grow itself skin. He saw its eyes reform. Liquid flesh ran over the bones, as though the skeleton had arrived here first, the flesh only now beginning to catch up.

  As its eyes grew, Barl was close enough to see the veins in them begin moving, pulsing once more with grey, lumpen blood.

  Now skeleton had the means through which it could look more closely at the boy.

  Barl couldn’t move.

  The suit had him trapped. It clamped ever tighter around both of their bodies. Words stalled in his throat. The skull’s face was almost complete, a wizened, pinched faced of a woman, somehow a contradiction, both ageless and yet full of years. Her mouth was black and deep inside he saw bloated fat-bodied worms writhing and coiling around coffin-nail teeth. She couldn’t be alive and yet wasn’t dead.

  She had lips so the skull’s rictus grimace became a smile.

  Past the head of the thing in the suit with him, beyond the wings of the vultures, out to the huge columns of smoke, full of red explosions, punching up like fists, Barl saw the ruin of the Nest.

  Battles still raged around it, different factions of Assassins fighting to the death and in some cases beyond.

  The war was far from over.

  “This war will never be over,” the stinking woman answered his thoughts, “I have been fighting it forever, in your terms. It will continue to the end of time itself. Chaos will reign. Everywhere.”

  “Who are you?” Barl finally found his voice. It was dry and brittle in his mouth.

  “Have you truly forgotten me?”

  Barl had no idea what she meant. “I am Barl. Barl from God’s Heart. How can I have forgotten someone I do not know?”

  The woman smiled sadly and Barl felt her bony arms encircle him in a deathly cold embrace. She put her forehead on his shoulder, hugging him tight. “Sweet summer child, you know that I must end you,” she said simply. Barl felt the bones of her hands begin to burrow into the flesh of his back. No suit of armour could protect you from an enemy if they were in there with you.