She reached into that thread with the coils of her own weave, and tied herself anchors into it, and began to pull.
And she pulled, and she pulled, and she reigned the threads in and began to see them shake and tremble, a spiderweb jostled by prey far too heavy for it to hold.
Her sense of Ada was fading, her sense of Cherry growing distant, that nightmare storm beyond them falling to dust - but they were still there, the impossible where their hands met was still breaking all the rules, all except those so deep and true none had perceived them before. And she pulled and she pulled and she pulled, and the geometries creaked, and the interlocking patterns overlapped, and the knots unfurled.
The shield unwove.
In her elation she lost her grip completely, and the rules pounced on her and slammed her down like the oathbreaking speck of dust she was, and Ada was torn from her again, gone, vanished, never there in the first place.
In front of her the vast honeycomb dome cracked with lightning and shattered with a thunder to hush hurricanes. The pools of light on Azure’s skin that wove the shield burst into black fire and white smoke. Exotic metals that once bent the base rules of matter died with agonized screams. Sol cast its fiery light out to its fourth daughter, radiance still unchallenged by any petty god, and its light bathed on these fields the olive skin of the legion of her that coiled through time, a thing of a sort she had never known, a thing that could crush a god.
Chapter 21
The air above her head exploded with weaponfire.
She was lying face-down in the red, sputtering sand and warm martian noon.
What had happened?
She felt disoriented, incredibly tiny, reduced from something far greater. A leaf cut from the tree of the world.
But she was still alive.
Her skin had melded to the sands around her, but clothes could not meld, so how much protection that would be, so close to the city, was unclear.
It was made quite clear as she tried to pull herself up and was shot through the shoulder.
Pain flared as her left arm only twitched when she meant for it to move. She raised a shield on her right and did the only thing that gave her a chance of finding cover: she staggered across the remaining distance separating her from the outlying stonework of the City Azure. Cannonfire slagged against her shield, slowing her and nearly knocking her off her feet, but she managed to slam her back into an alcove in the nearest building, temporarily sheltered from any attacks from up high or deeper in the city.
Breathing hard, she gripped her wounded, bleeding left shoulder in her right hand and let the medic’s gift flow through it, feeling the torn tissues and pressing them back together with a soothing cool. The blood would seep back into the body, wherever it could. As she knit herself back together, she looked out at the plains, trying to find some evidence of what she had done - but only one lone track of feet led down from the hills.
Yet the shield really was down, and Azure seemed certain it would not be coming back. Two blue-bannered war barges were already soaring towards the incoming red fleet. Hundreds of galhak were bounding down the gentle slope of the plain towards them, and all kinds of guns were firing back and forth in every direction.
The godshell was sundered. What her ancestors had built, she had unravelled, until it tore itself apart under its own might.
She closed her eyes and tried to reach for that strange, transcendent connection again, but it wasn’t there. She gripped the locator stone; nothing. Try as she might, the opportunity had passed. For now. If serendipity had taught her anything, it was that she and Ada weren’t done with each other yet. She smiled, and the lover lost held her hand, and the warrior slapped her back, and the dragoness grinned all teeth and scales inhuman. There was a battle to be won.
She rolled her shoulders, feeling cool air brushing against her melding skin. If she let them forget about her - not too difficult under the circumstances - she might be able to get up to where gunners were firing on the incoming army. She waited a few more beats then scampered from her alcove to the side of the building, where she jumped and clawed her way to the top in seconds.
There was nobody here, but she spotted gunners the next tower over, something heavy and long-barreled resting across the side of the roof and firing into the fray. She jumped across to that roof, took the two martians by surprise with a few swipes of the white blade on her hand, and smashed the gun before ducking back down to street level to avoid retaliation.
She looked out into the battlefield in time to see galhak cavalry from the city meet the attackers, though they were fewer in number as well. It was still a mess, blue blood suddenly spilling into the rust, animals braying and gunfire giving way to the metallic clang and din of swordfights. Given the firepower flying overhead, swords seemed like madness, but the martians would do what they willed.
She spotted heavy gunfire from another tower and scrabbled her way up it, needling both gunners before grabbing the weapon and dragging it into cover. She wasn’t going to waste her own strength on this, but she needed to try. From the window of an unoccupied building she aimed the gun straight up at Azure himself and fired. As the shot flew she darted out of the building, in case he fired back, but the shot simply struck and burst into a tiny, distant puff of metal and smoke. She saw little shapes move across the dark bulk, probably watchers looking to repair what they could.
Suspicion confirmed; she’d need to find a way in. Azure himself had taught her, with a single shot through Hail, that a even small wound could kill if well-placed. She just needed to find the right organ, and she had one prime suspect already.
Battle reached the city quickly; she turned in time to see a mid-sized barge careening towards the outlying buildings, ribboned with blue, cracked down the middle by an unseemly black blotch wrapping itself around the hull. Sulakaz wailed as the barge burst with a tardy cloud of orange dust and smoke. Great lances of fire stretched hundreds of metres across the sky before tapering off, and one of Azure’s war barges, freshly built for all she knew, split in half and began to sink.
That was the nature of the world they lived in - things were destroyed faster than they could be built, if they could even be built at all. Maybe one day that would change; maybe it wouldn’t. For now, all she could do was try to point entropy in the right direction.
She was far enough away, but still ran as the hulk burst from its orange death shroud and slammed into sandstone towers. It kept going, digging into walls and grinding everything to dust. She bounded up an unoccupied tower and ducked behind a wall, risking another glance outwards.
Rokh flying overheard were sweeping down near the edges of the battle, picking off martians with serrated claws before casting them down again. As another of Azure’s smaller airships came crashing down, splitting under fire before its parts bored into the plains, she realized she needed to stay ahead of those airships or be caught in their storm. She could heal piercing cuts, but being crushed under the weight of a crashing barge would not be something her medic’s blood could fix.
She skipped across the city, letting her wings bridge gaps legs alone could not. A few gunshots from keen-eyed martians found her shields, and she dove down into the dusty streets. There were soldiers here, too, but between the hunter and the warrior both saw the openings and the mistakes and the weaknesses, the lines of fire and the angles of attack. She cut and shot, palm ablaze, zigzagging through the twisted grid of streets. Her wings still flexed and fanned, cutting like the blades they were at anyone who came too close. A heavy shot impacted somewhere on them and she let them drop, letting the pathfinder paint her skin many shades paler, borrowing the warrior’s shields to bend and crack blues and bronzes, mimicking the patterns of the martian armour all around her. For all that she was aglow and unmistakable, she could try to make herself a less instant target.
Somebody got too close, pointed his gun, and the dragoness roared a fire that scorched to the walls behind him. Something burst in the blaze, bir
thing fire wilder and more raw, and she felt the heat growing from the ground around her. A brief wingbeat before letting her wings fade back into her skin was all it took to fan the flames; more of the buildings than she first realized had wooden struts, doors, windows. And it was dry here, even more so than to the west. Chaos. Animal calls echoed through the narrow streets, and the whinging of metal grew closer and closer as distances beyond the city shrank to nothing. Isavel swept martians aside with ease, striking at anything blue that crossed her field of vision.
There was more shouting, more shooting, more blue banners and bands and weaves rushing past who barely even gave her a look, so urgently were they trying to reach the front.
Suddenly there was a great thrum and her hunter yanked her out of the line of fire she could otherwise never have seen, a beam of hot death searing into the ground moments behind her. The dragoness lent her fire to the hunter’s keen eyes, bursting it around Azure’s followers in the dry grasses and dessicated lumber, the streets roaring ablaze all over.
The wraith bruised the sky again. She looked up and saw it - Azure’s Bruise - disintegrate a tower and send the upper half of it, including gunners and swordsmen up top, tumbling down into the city at an unearthly languid pace. Buildings collapsing on Mars were a whole other kind of sight.
A barge surged overhead, fleeing something, dragging its orange cloaking smoke across the sky. At first it just blotted out the sun and Azure’s own glimmers, but as she fought her way towards the god it began to pour down into the streets, orange smoke mixing with the black from the fires burning through weeds and city. There was fire everywhere, and if she didn’t find a way to outpace the martians around her she might get caught in it, but the pathfinder revelled as her skin simmered with blotches of powdery orange and black.
She was getting closer to the heart of the city, starting to feel light in her heart. She had brought down the shield - it barely mattered how. They were in the city. They had the element of surprise, and outnumbered the enemy for a short time at least. They had her .
All she needed to do was figure out how to kill a god.
She looked up at the looming bulk, still visible between columns of smoke. That was what it was like to be a god, wasn’t it? Chaos, destruction, and the indomitable privilege of being above it all. He looked back down through the smoke at her and she could have sworn he agreed.
She smiled up at him. Things changed.
A thousand drones burst out of every seam in the god’s armor, a flock of whirring metals and electric blues to rival the greatest fleets of birds to flock the skies of Earth, the entire thing moving as one vast limb. Towards Isavel. Then the sky suddenly filled with bursts of light from the drones as the swarm curved towards the outer city. Dronefire poured into the outskirts, indiscriminately cutting down martians on both sides. It flowed into the tangled orange and black smoke, slamming into airships and cutting them from the sky.
There were so many drones they couldn’t help but make themselves targets. Vast swathes burst to ash in war barge lances like flies in dragonfire. Isavel reached up with one palm and flung light towards them, filling it with red flashes, a clear call to a clear target. And through the smoke and the haze and the din of battle, hundreds of guns - those too far behind the front lines to shoot into the fray, those reckless and risk-taking, those with nothing left to lose - followed her lead. Gunfire sprayed up into the air at the drones, ripping into the formation as the machines descended. Sulakaz dove into the flock like a falcon, spewing shrapnel and ash in its wake as it chewed through things too old to know its name and too dumb to learn.
Death flew both ways, everything was rust and ruin, and Isavel knew she had to end this as fast as she could. For all that they were weak, these damned machines were numerous. She couldn’t let them be the end of the day. That was her job.
Drones started rocketing down into the city like meteors. Some tried to ram her full-tilt, one slamming into her shield and exploding on impact. The force of it threw her back, twisting her through the air. But the dragoness caught her, up and down and around all became one, and she swung up and away from where she could have been. It worked, her wings swung her up, and suddenly she was in a cloud of orange, choking around the thick, chalky smokescreen.
The shooting did not abate, glimmers crisscrossing the dry haze, and a drone streaked through the cloud in front of her, barely missing her to slam into something below. Then she stumbled onto an airship lodged into the peak of a tower. Somebody scrambling over the hull tried to shoot her, and the hunter shot back and the warrior hefted the body aside as the pathfinder found sure footing across the teetering surface. The ship’s blue banner bled down the side of the tower underneath her.
Then she was out of the smoke, running deeper into the city, closer to that strange point where Azure’s tapered heart seemed to reach for the planet itself. Drones swarmed overhead, but there were only so many - there must be. Isavel kept her eyes up for a few moments and smiled as she realized Azure must be empty, unable to spill forth anything more even in the name of sheer survival.
Still, there were too many.
As they cut through the sky, curving and shooting and being burned away, Isavel raised her palms and started firing at them, striking them down easily and impotently. They had no sense of self-preservation, no sense of danger. They moved and swarmed and fired, but gunfire chewed into them from all sides. The swarm did seem to tremble each time Sulakaz struck at them, though. She could only imagine what the wraith was doing as it devoured them.
A crash sounded out behind her, and she turned to see another airship crashing into the city, flying the colours of Red Rise this time. Retribution, one city to another. The power core must have been damaged, because as tiny martian shapes leapt off the deck, guns blazing, a white explosion ripped through the hull and sent metal flying in every direction, the shockwave knocking down walls in all directions, blasting a crater in the city.
She ducked inside a building, hoping to catch her breath, and instead found herself facing down two swords and two frightened faces. Her own blade cut through their weapons and sent them scampering, and she didn’t waste any time running them down. She darted back outside and skipped up to the second floor of the next building, finding it empty, and tried to judge how close she was to the god’s throat.
Closer. Still too far.
Further ahead, more of Azure’s soldiers climbed onto rooftops. It was hard to tell if they were reinforcing defenses or trying to cover a retreat. It was hard to tell anything at all, with smoke and gunfire and screams sloshing between the buildings like the freakishly fluid waters of martian rivers. Sulakaz descended onto one unlucky roof, leaving behind only chewed and bloodied sandstone devoid of human shapes. It lashed out at a swarm of drones that were trying to circle it, devouring each with frog’s tongues of black and then sliding back down into the city like sand.
There were more soldiers here, more fighters bearing blue. More than she had expected. She saw mirrans leaping onto roofs nearby and firing guns at the enemy, their movements swift and predatory, alien to the steady stolid poses of martian gunners. Isavel darted past them all.
Let her allies deal with this. She was coming for Azure.
They couldn’t resist her and they knew it. They leapt off of rooftops, landing awkwardly on nearby buildings or in the streets, but she was still able to shoot some of them down even as they tumbled through the air. A few turned around, shots grazing her on all sides. Dragonfire. A building lit up, people screamed. She had wings, she flew, honeycombed blades of light stabbing through blue-bronze armor. It didn’t resist - how could it?
She held up a shield to catch dronefire coming her way, filled it with hot, explosive rage, and let it go. The hard light shield ribboned through the air and cracked in the midst of a drone swarm, catching several of them and knocking them into their fellows as they burst, a chain reaction that took out at least a dozen of the things. But there were so many more.
> A heavy weapon started firing at them from somewhere to the south, and she dropped back into the streets and kept running. Deeper into the city, gunners vainly trying to train their weapons on her. She was too fast, too shielded, too good - and they were no hunters. A single shot barely touched her wings before she ran into a group of them down the street, and her blast of dragonfire and warrior’s force slammed the gunners into a rock wall.
The city’s streets were not all equal, and it occurred to her she might try the smaller-looking passages. She dove into the sides, into the narrower alleys where it would be harder for dozens of people and drones to shoot at her at once, and the gamble paid off. Less of Azure’s people seemed to be moving through these. She hid her lights, melded in, tried to look as unremarkable as possible. She had to move faster - the god had to die.
She blasted the few martians that stepped into her path, leaping and bounding through the alleys, getting closer and closer. The pillar of blue light connecting the god in the sky to the planet below was always visible, always drawing her in. What was it? Would she have to destroy it? Would it be that easy?
The closer she got, the further the din of battle receded into the background. She was getting further and further from the fighting, and the blue-armoured martians she was running into now seemed less and less prepared, more and more surprised in their brief final moments before she cut them down or blasted them out of her way.
Then she finally found the god’s throat. It was a huge, blocky metal structure that seemed to hold the opposite end of the pillar of light. It was only a few floors tall, no great hurdle in the lightness of Mars, and Isavel jumped easily to the top, looking into the blue. There was a kind of circular platform inside the ground structure, below the roof, where the light seemed to end.
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 35