“I didn’t mean to sound critical, Meredith,” said Rose placatingly. “I just worry she won’t be able to rest.”
“It isn’t as if any of us will be sleeping tonight anyway,” said Meredith snippily. “Not until the children get back.”
By ‘children,’ Meredith was referring to the fact that with the exception of Irene, all her grandchildren, along with Gram, were elsewhere, facing who knew what sort of danger. Penny found herself smiling faintly. Actually, she’s probably referring to Mort too. Meredith Eldridge was only slightly more protective of her grandchildren than she was her son.
“You make an excellent point, Meredith,” said Elise, chiming in. “None of us will rest easy tonight.”
Rose actually agreed with them, but her irritation had made her argumentative. It was a sign of her inner turmoil that she had put herself in a position to be verbally outmaneuvered to begin with. Rather than argue, she gave a small nod and took another sip of her tea.
“I still think it would be better for me to be with Irene,” muttered Penny. Her daughter was spending the night in the control chamber, in order to respond if there was an actual attack.
“If anything happens, you’re only a couple of flights of stairs and a short run from her side,” said Elise. “Besides, Alyssa is with her.”
“The girl is a formidable warrior,” observed Rose.
That was certainly true, thought Penny. In fact, without armor and a sword in hand, she wasn’t entirely sure she could defeat the young woman if she had to. Alyssa had been trained in the same style of combat as Cyhan and Gram. Though she didn’t have a dragon-bond, the woman fought with almost supernatural skill. It was ironic that Irene’s one-time kidnapper was now her bodyguard.
“Besides,” continued Rose, “the most probable outcome for tonight is that we all lose sleep for nothing. In my experience, nothing ever happens when we expect it. Bad things always happen when you’re relaxed and feeling secure.” By the time she finished her remark, she realized how dark it sounded. “My apologies, I didn’t mean to sound morbid.”
Elise grinned wickedly at Rose while waving one hand at Penny. “My daughter-in-law is just as anxious and miserable as our armored Countess here.” Then she turned to Meredith. “Would you like some wine? I don’t think tea is going to be sufficient for us this evening.”
Penny gaped at the two old women. “You would drink when there may be an impending attack?”
Meredith laughed. “I’m eighty now. What would I do if there was an attack? I’d rather be useless and tipsy than useless and cranky.” Then she smiled. “Thank you, Elise, I think I could stand to have a glass.”
***
Penny hadn’t expected to fall asleep, but when her eyes flew open she realized she must have. Her eyes darted around, finding Rose sitting upright across from her, alarm on her features. “What is it?” said Penny, unsure of what had awakened her.
Both of them were on their feet, rushing toward the window, when a boom so deep it was more felt than heard shook them. “I think that’s what woke us,” offered Rose. They looked out the window in time to see the outer wall of the castle collapse. Then they felt the floor shake beneath them.
“Take them to the cottage!” yelled Penny, running for the door. By ‘them,’ she was referring to Elise and Meredith, who had retired earlier. To reach the mountain cottage, they merely needed to leave the apartment and return by the same door, activating the portal. That hadn’t been the plan, of course, but Penny’s feet had already communicated the fact that the castle was far from safe.
Rose, ever quick to react, was already hurrying to fetch the two elderly women.
Penny ran down the castle hallway, her feet driving her so quickly that she was forced to run two steps up the wall when she reached the end and had to turn. Then she was in the stairwell. Ignoring the steps, she took each flight in a single bound. The observer at the back of her mind commented dryly, You’re going to regret that tomorrow when your body figures out what you’ve done. She ignored the thought. For now she felt nothing.
She was almost to the bottom floor when the wall to her right exploded into a cloud of dust. Stone shards ripped through the air, and she felt a stinging pain on her face. Then the walls above began to slide down, sagging now that their support was gone. Stumbling, she made her way through the rubble, moving as quickly as possible, for it seemed the entire stairway might soon collapse. She emerged into a hallway that was now less of a corridor than it was a bizarrely designed, partially enclosed room. The wall on one side had fallen and large sections of the ceiling were now part of a floor that was half-buried by stone blocks, wood planks, and broken support timbers.
People stumbled through the dust, crying and yelling, lost in the chaos. Penny added her own voice, yelling for all she was worth, “Irene!”
She could see the control chamber now, though it had been hidden. One of the walls had fallen away, leaving it exposed. There was no one within, though she ran to it anyway, to make certain her daughter wasn’t trapped beneath something. It was empty. A blue light stood out, glowing on the central pedestal.
She activated the shield, Penny realized. But where is she now?
Another thudding boom sounded, and Penny saw one of the castle servers vanish as a stone wall behind him disintegrated. People were screaming from all sides. Penny knew she needed to take charge, but it was impossible. She needed to know where the enemy was, where safety was, and where her people were. She knew none of that. Castle Cameron was coming down around her.
Outside. I have to be able to see. But fear for her daughter stopped her. Where was Irene?
Then she heard men yelling from what she thought must be the castle yard. A strange, high-pitched whine grew and then became a roar. The yells of her guardsmen turned into screams. With no better options, Penny ran toward their cries, leaping over broken stone and piles of timber. Seconds later, she found herself outside the walls of the keep, staring at a scene from a nightmare.
Guardsmen lay everywhere, some moaning and others simply dead. The bailey was still intact, the gates closed, but the east wall on one side of it was largely gone. The shield barrier, normally invisible to ordinary eyes, flashed periodically as something powerful assaulted it.
But the worst was inside already. Two large, metal monstrosities stood in the center of the yard. Each stood on three metal legs, and while they didn’t appear to have heads, they each had two menacing arms. The roaring noise came from these. One arm on each of them was a blur, as though it was spinning, while spitting flashes of light.
Their torsos rotated slowly in a circle as they targeted the remaining guards, who were trying to find safe cover. Most were already down.
Penny had never seen such things before, but she knew of them from Moira’s story of the battle outside of Dunbar. She even had a name for them, from Matthew’s journey to Karen’s world: ‘tortus.’ Strictly speaking, they weren’t alive, they were military machines, designed for one purpose.
One of them was strafing the inside of the walls, but the other was firing more deliberately on an unmoving target. Penny’s eyes followed, and she spotted two figures huddled against one of the surviving walls of the main keep, Irene and Alyssa.
Light and sparks flashed around them, and her daughter had a look of furious intensity as she focused on whatever it was that protected them.
People often ascribe emotions or thoughts to such moments of stress or danger, but the truth is both simpler, and more complicated. The body acts so quickly that the conscious mind of thought and experience is left behind, merely a witness to the subliminal decisions of the heart. They analyze their actions afterward, within seconds, giving words and meanings to their doings, but the reality of such moments is immediate and without verbal description.
Penny flew across the courtyard at a speed that would have been impossible if she had consciously attempted it. Simply thinking of it would have made the coordination required unattainable, but Penn
y didn’t think. She launched herself, a missile of flesh and blood, across the intervening space between her and the thing attacking her youngest child.
At the end she leapt, turning her body, cat-like in the air, to land feet first against the tortus’s metal torso, while simultaneously driving her sword point-first into the whirling blur of its weapon. The hilt was wrenched from her grasp as the machine’s weapon exploded into deadly fragments of steel and fire.
Penny was sliding downward, for there was nowhere to stand. She scrabbled for purchase, with both her living arm and the phantom arm that her body continually forgot was gone. Her right hand caught the tortus’s second arm, the one bearing what she had been told was the machine’s heavier weapon.
Still sliding down, she gripped the other weapon fiercely, her legs flailing beneath her. The large, box-like weapon was beginning to hum as it charged up, its torso rotating to bring it in line with Irene and Alyssa. The movement brought Penny’s legs into contact with one of the thing’s three legs and without thinking she wrapped her own around it.
Using her arm and legs, her slender body strained to arrest its motion, to keep the point from lining up with her daughter. Despite her awkward leverage, for a second, she achieved a stalemate. Her muscles were taut, and somewhere, deep in her chest she felt a pop, followed by searing pain. The tortus began to move again, slowly, but Penny continued to struggle.
And then the second tortus opened fire again, not at the wall this time, but at the woman struggling with its complement. Penny’s world flashed red as hammer blows too fast to separate slammed into her back and legs. For a moment, her vision went black. She felt herself sliding as the tortus’s main weapon lined up on its target.
The movement took her out of the other machine’s line of fire, and after a second her vision returned. The arm she held onto, the weapon she was still pushing against, was already pointed at Irene and Alyssa. The humming within it had changed to a chilling whine, and she knew it was about to fire.
Screaming her rage and defiance, Penny reversed her push, pulling on the arm instead, wrenching it toward the other tortus. A heavy ‘clack’ sounded from the weapon, and the other machine exploded, the force of the blast slamming her back into the tortus she was wrestling with.
Penny fought to hang on. It wasn’t over. The enemy machine still had its main—and most devastating—weapon left, the one she was still gripping. But her body began to fail, her hand growing weak. Tears of frustration ran from her eyes as she tried desperately to hold on.
Then she was falling. More pain blinded her as she struck the ground, insulting bones that were already broken. When she looked up once more, she saw one of the tortus’s legs descending. It had taken the simplest course. It would use its multi-ton weight to crush her.
She tried to roll, but her body was no longer responding.
And then the tortus rocked backward as a stone the size of a mule slammed into it. The machine staggered, trying to maintain its balance, but the stone returned, smashing into it once more. It fell.
Twisting her neck to the side, Penny could see Irene standing closer now. Alyssa leaned against the slender girl, her arm draped across Irene’s shoulder. But Irene didn’t seem to notice the other woman’s weight. She stood ramrod straight, her eyes blazing as she continued to batter the remaining tortus with the giant stone. Behind the two women, the side of the keep was shuddering as thousands of stone blocks surrendered to gravity without Irene’s power to support them any longer.
But Irene no longer cared. Her only focus was the metal colossus in front of her. She kept battering it until the stone she was using shattered, and then she pulled more from the rubble behind her. These were smaller blocks, so she whipped them at it like an angry flock of birds.
They were too small to do significant damage, but Irene did not relent, and when the tortus began trying to regain its footing, she pulled some of the ground away, causing it to sink. It was helpless now, its last weapon ruined, while its body was hopelessly mired in the torn earth.
Irene wasn’t done, however. Releasing the stones, she tried fire, and when that failed to produce results, she began slamming the downed tortus with blows of pure force, hammering it until its outer shell began to bend and deform under her assault.
Penny could hear her daughter’s voice, hoarse from screaming, but she could make out the words. “Don’t you dare touch her!”
Penny’s world faded, and soon all she knew was a throbbing pain, accompanied by the sounds of Irene’s fury as she pounded the tortus. When silence arrived, she thought perhaps she had passed out, but then she felt soft hands on her.
“Mom! Wake up! Please!”
Chapter 36
By the time Castle Cameron came into view, the dawn was over and it was well and truly morning, and I was feeling mostly human once more. The sky was clear, so my first sight of it was from more than ten miles away, too far to see much.
At five miles, I could tell something had happened, and I used a neat trick I had learned years back—compressing the air in front of me into a lens to magnify my view. Part of the castle’s outer wall was down, the keep was half demolished, and there was smoke rising from several farms nearby.
Washbrook itself appeared intact.
A glint of sunlight on metal alerted me to the fact that there was something in the wide field that surrounded the castle. Focusing, I spotted the unmistakable form of a tortus, much like the ones I had seen near Halam, in Dunbar.
But those had been badly damaged, rendered inoperative by the efforts of Gram and Moira. This one was fully functional. As I watched, I saw its upper portion turn and one of its appendages came up. It was aiming—at me.
My initial thought was that it was ludicrous. I was still roughly five miles distant and flying at a good clip. It couldn’t possibly hit me. But then again, Gary had been very emphatic when we had questioned him about these things and their weapons. What did he call it? I replayed the conversation in my head until the term emerged, a railgun. Gary had said they fired projectiles at many times the speed of sound, and that they were deadly accurate.
I changed direction, heading for the ground, and very nearly lost control of my flight. Sudden changes weren’t easy when flying at significant speed, but I managed to regain control of myself. I felt something tear through the air above me, moving too fast even for my magesight to register it. A loud crack echoed in my ears, announcing its passing a split second after the fact.
Reducing my speed even further, I continued toward the ground, adding what I hoped was an unpredictable series of lateral movements. I needed to get out of its line of sight before it turned me into a soggy mess of ruined flesh and bloody rain falling toward the earth. The next few seconds were tense, but I was below the tree line before it could fire again.
I didn’t land, though. Instead I increased my speed, flying just a few feet above the ground. Normally, flying close to the ground was less effort, but not at this velocity. At this speed, I ran the risk of smashing myself into jelly with the slightest mistake. I had focused the shield around me into the shape of a spear, imbuing it with all the power I could manage, but that was just to protect myself from the flow of air. If I actually made contact with anything solid, I had no doubt it would kill me and almost certainly destroy whatever I hit.
With one hand, I reached into my belt pouch and drew out one of my iron bombs. They were simple iron spheres, enchanted and packed with as much power as they could contain without spontaneously detonating. They were one of my oldest weapons, and over the years they had been useful on numerous occasions. Because of their explosive nature, they were too dangerous to carry on my person, but the pouch I wore was actually a type of portal that connected to a chest stored in the mountains.
I was following the road now, ten feet above the surface, and the wake of my passage kicked up clouds of dust and shook the trees behind me. I had to increase my altitude as I reached the turn that would take me toward Cameron, sinc
e it was simply impossible to make such a turn at my current velocity. I soared over the trees and curved to the left, catching a glimpse of the castle and the tortus briefly before I was able to complete the turn and drop back down to follow the lane that led homeward.
There was more than one tortus. I had spotted three as I made my turn. Reaching into my pouch, I took out two more iron spheres so I could adjust my plan. Encasing each iron bomb in its own small, arrow-like shield, I extended them outward, pushing them through my own shield. Just the force of the air would set them off if I didn’t keep them protected, for I was moving faster than the speed of sound.
Then the trees were gone, and the castle loomed before me. One of the machines I had spotted was directly ahead. I kept one of my iron spheres on a direct line toward it as I adjusted my own path upward and to the right.
Almost too late, I realized the shield barrier around the castle was active. I was forced to use everything I had to make my upward turn sharper, otherwise I’d obliterate myself against it. I had only been planning to skim above the castle walls.
The first tortus disintegrated in a showy conflagration of smoke and flame as my body screamed through the air overhead, barely managing to avoid the shield barrier. The other two were firing at me with their spinning guns, but my appearance was too sudden for them to aim accurately. Taking advantage of the active shield around the castle I turned my flight into a looping turn that took me out of their line of fire, flying behind the castle and Washbrook in a long elliptical.
That gave me time to examine the damage, and I wasn’t pleased. The husks of two more tortuses lay dead in the castle courtyard, but it was apparent they had exacted a terrible toll before they were destroyed. Half of the main keep had collapsed, and the castle wall to the east of the bailey was nothing but rubble. Bodies were everywhere, though I could see people working steadily to line them up in the yard.
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