“My target is the Guardian,” Argentum said. “He got in the way.”
“Did he, now?” Ashton smiled and looked from Argentum to me.
Argentum looked over his shoulder at me. I held the gun out.
Ashton folded his arms across his chest and nodded at him. “Well then. Do as you will.”
The tall dauger turned, and I half-expected his unchanging mouth to have split into a grin. He chuckled to himself—a strangely hollow sound—as he began to stalk toward me. His knife, still smeared with Kiver’s blood, was held out in front of him.
“Wal,” I heard Samantha say. My name was swallowed by a sharp intake of breath.
“You heard the... man,” said Argentum. As if the permission mattered to him.
At that moment I no longer cared who had hired Rulon Argentum. I no longer wondered what strings were being pulled. I was going to end him right here.
I breathed deeply and lifted the gun, pointing it directly at him.
Argentum barked a laugh.
That cool metal face with the placid expression didn’t change. In the confusion he hadn’t seen me reload.
“You’re out,” said Argentum, moving quickly towards me.
“Am I?” I said coolly.
I wish I could’ve seen his eyes.
The Judge boomed.
Argentum jerked backward. A hole appeared in his forehead. A single rivulet of blood ran from the hole and down the silver. The knife fell from his hands, and his arms dropped to his sides. Then, slowly, the dauger sank to his knees. He gurgled something unintelligible, then fell forward, landing facedown only inches from my boots. I could see where my bullet had exited the back of his head. The perfect hair was a mess, tangled and bloody. Argentum—the assassin who had chased me through Lovat—was dead.
The buzz grew louder and I could hear whispers pass through the gathered gargoyles.
“You killed him,” Samantha said.
I nodded. Looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at Argentum’s corpse. Her face drawn, her expression serious, her eyes cold.
From across the room Ashton clapped, and my attention moved from Samantha to him. “I see our Guardian has a bit of a bite.”
I looked at the gun in my hands. I didn’t like killing. Didn’t like killing people. Argentum might have been a bastard, but he was still a person. Yet, he had killed Kiver. He had been willing to kill me. Justice? Of a sort, I supposed. I wondered if I could end Ashton in the same way. Stop him here and now. The gun had been useless against Curwen, but was Ashton the same?
“I wouldn’t bother,” said Ashton, reading my thoughts. “It’ll just piss me off.”
I slipped the Judge back into my shoulder holster.
Ashton turned from me and began to walk towards Janus Gold. The small dauger whimpered and began to scoot backwards. He held up his cut arm like some sort of shield. Ashton’s smile wavered, and he narrowed his eyes.
“Now, Janus, you and I have some business to attend to.”
I could see the look in Ashton’s eye. The seething hate and anger.
I had to stop him. But how? The Judge was worthless against a First, which left me with nothing. I looked down at my hands. Held them out pitifully. Samantha reached out and took one, her dark eyes flashing up to meet mine. The vibration at the back of my skull roared with her touch. Around us the gargoyles hissed, a hot white noise.
Ashton stopped and looked at us, saw Samantha gripping my hand. His expression changed. He looked... was that fear? I blinked, and his expression changed. But there had been something. I had seen it dance across his face. His eyes had been focused on my hands. He saw me catch him looking and then he smiled. He turned, moved towards Gold.
My hands? What about my—oh... The scene in the entresol beneath Paramount Square flashed though my mind. The gargoyle hadn’t been able to stop me. Unlike Elephant’s goons, I had been able to stand against them. I had been able to fight.
Ashton was worried. About me.
The vibration now sang. It flowed through me.
“Wal...” Samantha asked, imploring. “What are you going to do?”
“Get yourself away from the ledge,” I said.
“No,” Samantha said. I looked at her. I could see the stubbornness in her eyes. “I’m staying here. I’m staying with you.”
“He’ll kill you,” I said.
“He’ll kill you!” she echoed.
“No,” I said. “Not like this.” I gave Samantha’s hand a squeeze and released it as I took a step forward.
I could feel her standing behind me, feet planted. Arms at her sides. She gave me strength.
“Ashton.” I spoke his name calmly, my voice sounding stronger than I felt. All around me the gargoyles tittered and warbled in strange noises. Probably calls of Aklo or some other alien language but at that moment I didn’t care.
“You need to stop,” I said. I had no plan, I had no idea what I was going to do but I knew my duty. I was the Guardian. I was here to protect the people of this world from creatures like Ashton. That protection extended to even the bastards. Even Janus Gold.
“No more death,” I said.
“Oh?” Ashton cackled. “Is that for you to decide?”
I said nothing.
“Do you realize how long I have been used by this abomination?” It pointed a lazy finger at Gold. “How long I have been made to serve a creature such as him? My followers beckoned me, called me here, and I was trapped.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I forced the words out.
Ashton’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, there will be more death.”
“It stops now.”
“And what will you do to stop me?” Ashton growled. He took three large steps to the edge of the apartment where Janus Gold lay whimpering. He thrust a finger down at the cowering dauger. His hair whipped around in the wind, gray smoke that circled around his naked feet. “He wanted to kill you! When they saw you had caught them in the ritual they wanted your head.”
“So did you,” I said.
Ashton snorted. “Technicalities.”
He reached down with a human arm and lifted Gold by his collar. The short dauger rocked in the icy breeze. His eyes behind the golden mask were wide, the flesh below his chin quivered, tears rolled down his mask. His facade had broken, and all that was left was a pitiful little dauger, hanging from the hand of the First.
“He seems to want to defend you,” said Ashton to Gold. He was between the two of us, his back to the dauger.
“He’ll face the consequences of his actions,” I said. I balled my hands into fists and stood my ground. The world around me faded. The gargoyles were forgotten. Samantha was a shadow on my periphery. The back of my head buzzed. I breathed deeply in the thin air of the elevated sky.
My teeth clenched and I ground them together as my eyes narrowed. I didn’t feel the cold. I hardly felt the breeze. Any pain in my chest or knee was gone. It was just Ashton and me, staring and sizing one another up.
I was going to rush him, I realized. I was going to fight him, challenge him in hand-to-hand combat. My gun might do little harm, but somehow I knew I could hurt this monster. Seconds felt like hours as Ashton and I stared at one another. His smile widened but it didn’t meet his narrowing eyes.
“Stop! Police!”
Everyone turned.
A mass of LPD officers clustered on the edge of the common room. In the middle stood a red-faced and sweaty Carl Bouchard, his snub-nose revolver clenched in his thick hand.
Ashton gave them a glance, and then tilted his head at me. He smiled a final languid grin, and then he threw himself out into the open air, carrying a blubbering Janus Gold with him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
TOO LATE I REGISTERED THAT SAMANTHA AND BOUCHARD WERE SHOUTING my name. I was already dashing forward, their words becoming an unintelligible echo behind me. The drop wasn’t far—only a story—but my right knee rang as I hit the steel plating.
The wind howled aro
und me, unrestrained at this height. It pulled at my coat, blew my long hair around my face, and tugged at my beard. My heart pounded, and though I knew that the wind was cold, I didn’t feel it. The sharp sensation was numb, a mere annoyance below the buzzing at the back of my skull.
Ashton was moving quickly, already a block away and gaining ground with each moment. He moved gracefully, like he was born to leap across the half-completed framework of Lovat’s upper reaches. A hand was wrapped around Gold’s neck, and the dauger fought against his grip as he was dragged along. The First bounded across beams and careened around a partially poured concrete floor before disappearing behind another tower.
Recovered, I leaped towards the spot where Ashton had fallen. When he landed, his impact had cratered the cement surface. A much larger impact than a normal-sized human should produce. He might be wearing the form of a human, but he was still the immense thing I had seen in the pit below the city.
Over my shoulder, I saw Samantha standing at the window of Kiver’s apartment. She was shouting something. Her hands cupped around her mouth. Her words were stolen by the combination of the howling of the wind and the clamor of the streets below. Next to her appeared Bouchard. The detective looked angry, he was doubled over, his hands on his knees, his back heaving as he sucked in air.
I stepped back, stunned, when I saw what had happened to the Shangdi Tower. It had become a skeleton. The entire facade, all forty stories that extended upward from Level Eight had shed their skin. Its windows had all been blown outward. Smoke billowed a few floors above Samantha and Bouchard, and sparks and fire rippled from others.
Down on Level Eight’s streets I could see some of the destruction the Shangdi’s shattering had wrought. People lay in the streets, trapped or crushed by fallen debris. The sun reflected on a sea of a million shards of glass. It painted the streets, and from this high up they looked flooded, like channels of blood. Hell, it could have been blood. The glass would have torn through the crowd like hot knives.
Paramount Square was madness. People screamed and shouted, they mobbed the courthouse, barreled past the riot police that had lined its entrance as protection. Smoke burned at the base of a tower on the square opposite the Shangdi. I could feel the vibrations as millions shouted and screamed and rushed City Hall.
This was Ashton’s doing. He had wounded these people bleeding in the street below. He had torn through this tower. He had to be stopped. The destruction he could bring to Lovat would be unprecedented. He could bring the city down. Topple its towers and destroy its foundations. He could bring about millions of deaths.
I turned, and felt my coat pull around me. I had to give chase. Protect this city and its people. I looked over my shoulder, back toward the window. I wanted to see Samantha one last time, but she was gone, the hole where she stood was empty.
I took a deep breath, and then I followed. Level Nine was the smallest of Lovat’s levels, only the size of King Station, Pergola Square, and part of the Business District combined, and about a quarter of it was still incomplete. I rounded the tower following Ashton’s path and came across a wide expanse. A vast plain of steel extended between clusters of buildings. Ashton was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t be that fast? Could he?
A scattering of sheds occupied the wide empty space between the towers. Smoke trailed from a few, their doors closed to the wind. These were the mobile offices for the construction crews that lifted Lovat ever higher.
I rushed past the nearest of the small sheds but slowed to a stop as I passed the third. It was missing its door. I looked around and spotted it, laying a few feet off to one side, tangled in a pile of rebar. Its hinges, still attached, fluttered in the wind. Smoke billowed from the shed’s stubby chimney.
My heart drummed heavily, and I held my breath as I stepped inside. I wasn’t sure what to expect. A smiling Ashton? A cowering Janus Gold? Instead, I found a fat dimanian foreman with four stubby horns that poked up around his head like a crown, clad in the yellow of a construction worker. He gasped when he saw me and jumped behind a big metal desk.
“Go away!” he shouted. He peeked up over the desk. His eyes were as big as saucers. His hands gripped the edge of the desk, pale around the spurs on his knuckles.
“Did you see a man come through here? Human, about my height. Big eyes, wide mouth. He was dragging a dauger with a gold mask?”
The dimanian whimpered and squeezed his eyes shut.
“He r–ripped off the door. Ripped it off! Like it was nothing.”
“Sounds like him.” I stepped inside. The small stove in the corner radiated heat and I could feel its warmth through my jeans.
“He came inside. He just looked at me and laughed. Then... ” His voice grew silent and his eyes popped open. In a whisper he said, “What is he?”
I could hear the fear in his voice, the madness that lurked at the edges. What else had Ashton done in here? Done to him?
When I first saw Cybill I had been nearly driven to insanity myself, and she hadn’t even been fully formed. Ashton was at full power...
“Where did he go?”
The foreman stared through me, his eyes focusing on the corrugated metal of the wall. I stepped forward and asked again. The dimanian looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time. He blinked, and said something in a language I couldn’t understand.
I shook my head. “Wha—”
“The disciple completed his duty,” he said in Strutten. “The Herald has awakened and now all rise. The Aligning has begun.”
I left the babbling foreman in his office and stepped out onto the open expanse of Level Nine. In the distance, I could hear the ruckus from Paramount Square. Behind me the Shangdi rose, a tattered ruin among the other high rises.
I continued to move south and east, away from the Shangdi and following the course I thought Ashton would travel. He left no trail and I expected him around every tower. I was unsure of what I would do when we finally met. The Judge was useless, but he had been afraid. Something about me scared him.
As I emerged from between two towers that rose another twenty stories above, I saw him. Standing along the edge of the road in front of a building I recognized: the Arcadia Hotel, its top ten floors rising above Level Nine. It was older than most towers. Built of steel but draped in brick. The top was a small pyramid crested with a radio tower.
Ashton saw me and now I could see panic on his face. His eyes wide, his teeth locked in a grimace. He shook Gold, and the dauger seemed to go limp for a moment. The fear drained from the First’s face and was replaced with a grin. Then he punched his way through the outer wall of the hotel. He dragged Gold by the collar. The dauger was shouting and kicking at the air as his fists beat at Ashton’s arm.
“Let me be!” The First shouted.
I followed, leaping the space between street and tower where the eventual sidewalk would be constructed. Below me flashed the ten-story drop to Level Eight. I landed inside the Arcadia, stumbling.
Ashton had blown through the next wall, and then the next, tearing a tunnel through the building with his fists as he dragged a choking Gold.
Dust filled the space between us, obscuring my line of sight, but I plowed forward anyway, walls and beams flashing past. I entered living rooms and exited into bedrooms and bathrooms and closets. Sparks danced on the air, they slipped down my collar and scorched my neck. I saw the open-mouthed faces of occupants confused at the destruction, the men appearing in their walls, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
Somewhere ahead Ashton growled. He shouted something—was that Aklo?—and then came another rumble. A gust of cold wind hit me from ahead, blowing my hair back. He had exited the other side of the building.
I careened to a stop, emerging suddenly into the cold air of Level Nine. The crumbling face of the building dropped away, tumbling down to Level Eight below. Level Nine extended away, but there was a five or six-yard gap in between. Jagged spikes of rebar stuck out from the unfinished floor and pointed at me.
It was too far to jump though I might be able to clear it with a running leap. There were a few spaces I could land, but if I miscalculated I’d be skewered.
Ashton had stopped and turned to face me. He smiled a languid smile and held up Gold like some trophy he had captured in a game of keep-away. The dauger kicked and spat a curse.
I blinked. The First seemed to shimmer in the wind. He was there, in human form, but he was also there in the shape of the creature I had seen before, and there was something else, something much larger. Looming behind and around him, around all of us, around the city. A titanic form, the size of a mountain. It scraped the sky and regarded me with eyes like small moons.
“You’re persistent. I will give you that.”
I judged the space between us. It’d be close.
“What do you expect to do? Shoot me?” he asked.
I stepped back and eyed the distance, rocking slightly.
Ashton could see what I was planning.
“Dangerous. Especially with that knee of yours.” He sniffed the air. “You’re losing blood.”
I felt the burning in my chest again, but my wounds were far away, somewhere behind me. Wavering at the edges of my perception.
There, near Ashton’s feet. I could land. It’d be close, tight. A jagged piece of rusted rebar just to the left gleamed threateningly.
Ashton frowned. “You fool.” He turned and ran, still dragging Gold.
I ran, my legs churning below me, my right knee popping with every curl. The edge of the Arcadia came up fast. My legs pushed me forward.
I leaped. Time slowed around me.
The walls of the Arcadia disappeared and I flew out into open air. I felt the wind catch me and lift me forward. The cement edge of the unfinished Level Nine rushed towards me. The jagged rebar reached out like desperate hands, coming ever closer. Too close.
I had miscalculated. Something in my head screamed.
Panic flooded me.
The edge closed in, I squeezed my eyes shut and readied myself.
My chest slammed into the cement. The air exploded from my lungs, and I gasped at the sky. I opened my eyes. The rebar was just to the side! I hadn’t miscalculated! I had made it. I struggled to breathe as I wrapped my hand around the rebar and swung a leg up and over the edge, pulling myself onto Level Nine.
Red Litten World Page 27