Glorious Angels

by Justina Robson

  She heard Zarazhin swear and pass her, lingered only to realise that Amber wasn’t going to or couldn’t answer and then rushed after him, pushing doors open along the way. Nothing. They paused at the stairfoot and stood in a moment of breathless silence. In that moment Tralane saw Minna’s purple silk shoe on the stair and heard a distant grinding clank she knew better than the sound of her own breath.

  ‘The elevator!’ She dropped her own shoes and picked up her skirt, starting to run up the flight two at a time, shouting Minna’s name. She barely noticed Zharazin pass her and saw the evidence for herself as she reached the door to the stairs that led up to the laboratories – it hung on one hinge and beneath it Best lay unmoving, blood on his face. If there was worse she didn’t hesitate to see, stepping over him with an unspoken apology in her soul for being so callous, her voice snapping out to Zharazin to look after him as she pushed the door wide enough to pass and carried on running.

  Her legs burned and she cursed herself for becoming complacent and out of shape but her terror carried her up the twists and into the tower base. The laboratory door was matchsticks. They were scattered in the shape of a blast that had been delivered from the landing and shattered it. Some kind of energy weapon or spell she thought dimly as her feet automatically made the turn into the lowest of her dust-ridden antiquity halls. A bright line of carpet showed through the muck – everyone had taken this way – and at the end of it the cage of the elevator shaft glowed wavery yellow, empty but for shivering cables and motes of rust. The squeaking and grinding echoes told her the car was nearly at the top of the rise.

  She didn’t have the breath left to call even if it had been a worthwhile effort. As she stabbed at the control panel with her fingers, Zharazin arrived. He assessed the situation in a split second and left her, heading for the stairs again, faster than she could have gone. She heard him call out, ‘Concussion!’ on the way as the bang and rattle of the top cage opening mocked her efforts to stop the car. For a moment that stretched into an eternity she stood staring at the circuits, trying to force her mind to master the uncontrollable, then bent down and ripped the tape off the gun.

  Beside the car cage was the closed section of shaft that concealed the passage of the counterweight. She yanked the maintenance panel open and crawled through the hatch, grabbing the cable and setting her bare feet on the cold iron ingots of the counter. She made a short range adjust on the gun grip, put out her arm through one of the air vent partitions into the main shaft and set the gun muzzle against the narrower cord of the brake control cable, pulled the trigger. With a sudden, terrifying jolt and a scream and whinny of vibrating machinery she began to rise with increasing speed. The counter was unstable with her on it and nearly flung her off in the first moment, bashing her against the shaft sides though it could not turn or swing thanks to the tracks it was forced to follow. She passed the falling car in the blink of an eye and she prayed that the emergency brake would work as the car passed the trip switch. If it didn’t, her effort to pursue Minna was going to end spectacularly and very soon.

  Metal screamed and banged as the trip went off but it was late, and slow. The counterweight jerked and jounced as the cable was pinched tight, groaning like a dying animal. She heard more metal screaming just near her head as she reached the claustrophobic tiny space at the head of the shaft. There was shuddering and the counterweight dropped an inch, then a few more as she tried not to listen and slammed her foot against the shaft wall where the exit hatch was marked in mouldering paint. In her efficiency she had, of course, latched it closed from the outside last time she worked on it in some sunnier, distant year.

  Her hammering punctured an ominous quiet, interrupted only by the tocks and, ticks of metal parts straining against gravity. A peculiar vibration in the counterweight cable made her suspect they were losing the bout. With a scream of frustration she aimed the gun at where she though the latch was and fired. A hole the size of her hand appeared in the hatch, then another and another and another, almost silently. She felt heat and heard the pinging of the hatch door as it expanded. Her foot hit it a final time, sending the counterweight and herself back hard. The door flew open and slammed into her as she threw herself at it, trapping her for another few seconds. A few dozen heartbeats later she had wriggled through the hole and was standing up when she heard a crack. One of the wheels started to spin again. The car crashed the last couple of metres into the buffers at the bottom with a tinkling of glass and then there was a massive bang as the counterweight hit the springs at the top of the shaft though she hardly noticed it – she was already running for the open doorway and the harsh grey daylight.

  On the weedstrewn deck a Flit of a design she didn’t recognise was preparing for takeoff. A figure in purple and black clothing was fighting with Minna, still in her party dress, attempting to force her into a wide door in the craft’s flank where other gloved hands waited to pull her in. Minna was bellowing in rage, struggling and kicking out, but her assailant was much taller and stronger. Dodging a punch they wrestled her off the ground, tottered two steps and flung her halfway through the opening.

  Tralane lifted the gun, spinning the dials with her free hand. And hesitated in an agony of indecision, sure she might hit Minna even though most of her was blocked from her sight by the body of the kidnapper. The gun was precise on distance, and her mageskill was good for estimates but the gun beam would disperse anything in range. She aimed with determination, wishing she had the goggles. Then she saw Minna’s feet disappear inside the craft. The kidnapper’s back was to her as they reached for the handgrips either side of the doorway. Tralane closed her hand and suddenly those other hands let go and the figure fell awkwardly to the stone flags, a red blotch blooming suddenly across its left shoulder.

  Aboard the craft others saw her as she scanned the fuselage, searching for places to disable it. She heard their shouts but was lost for that moment in searching the flaps, ailerons, cables when something hit her solidly from the side and back and she fell hard, gun skittering out of her hand, her cheek suddenly and painfully in contact with the cold, wet stones. Someone said ‘Whuff,’ or a similar ridiculous and out of place word, rather quietly, and it almost made her laugh through her frenzy and sadness as she heard the burr of the twin hotburn cylinder engines and the whirring drone of blades slicing air.

  ‘No no nonono!’ She scooted forwards on her hands and knees for the gun, a mere metre out of reach, but then the sounds all changed and she looked up to see the aircraft already lifting off. It moved vertically, to her surprise, without a trace of forward motion, magelight streaming around its undercarriage and into vortices that pushed it off the ground. The idea had not occurred to her but it was obviously genius, now she saw it and pictured the hidden internal motors and gears that channelled the air in different directions – the engines were mounted to move which meant they were using metal alloys she didn’t have access to and this was a very foreign device, even more so than it first appeared.

  It was strange to see this as she strained to get any glimpse of Minna. Bits of stone flicked and bit at her bare legs and the sound of metal bullets ricocheting pierced the drone of the plane. Belatedly she realised someone in the aircraft was shooting at her. She raised the gun but they were already more than ten metres clear and heading north. If she shot them down they could easily end up dropping all the way to the city base. The tilt and turn of the angles prevented more shots coming her way. All she could do was kneel on the stone and watch the peculiar sky-blue machine take her daughter away.

  ‘We have to get them,’ a hoarse voice, taut and breathless, said behind her. She turned and saw Zharazin lying on the ground, holding his arm with his hand. Blood was running through his knuckles and he was pale but he jerked his chin in the direction of the fallen kidnapper. ‘Find something to tie them with, quickly. Hurry up.’ He started to walk across to the body, pausing to bend down and pick up a chunk of loose stone in his good hand.

  Tralane knew
he was right though she could barely bring herself to stop looking at the receding blob of blue against blue that was rapidly disappearing into the distance. She memorised the bearing – three degrees west of true north – although of course they could turn at any time, and then she ran over to the sheds.

  Inside the metallic smelling dark she found a coil of small-link hoist chain and a couple of butterfly bolts. She slipped a screwdriver into her bodice and kept the bolts in her hand, chain on her arm. All the while she thought longingly of the Flit, wanting to push it out and pursue more than she had ever wanted to do anything in her life, but knowing that by the time she was airborne with just a direction as her guide they could be anywhere and with those engines instead of the winds and the magefire they’d be too fast for her to catch. She could waste hours and get nowhere. Staying here made more sense, she told herself, hating every second, feeling numb as she shouldered the chain and gripped the gun firmly before going back outside. Mazhd was standing over the body, rock raised, his bad arm hanging loose by his side, blood dripping from the tips of his slack fingers.

  As she jogged across the runway surface she saw him turn the person over with his foot. They rolled heavily but one hand was moving, searching weakly around their waist for something. The glint of a blade flashed the cold grey sky back at her for an instant as she reached them and dropped the whole spool of chain down on that hand before it could manage whatever it intended. Only then did she glance into the face of the kidnapper, lifting the gun at the same time, and saw it was a young woman, not much older than Minna, but bigger and significantly stronger. She had a strange pale face, with the distinctive flat features and smoothly rounded high forehead of the peoples who surrounded Spire’s distant city. From a long ago geography class Tralane remembered tribes living on pontoons on the lakes, the city shore-side on the solid earth which they scorned to tread. But this one had trod here, on her earth, taken her daughter.

  She pointed the gun into that ashen, angry and defiant face and saw it falter for a moment, staring at her own visage with recognition. Tralane and Minna bore a strong resemblance. The gun’s point shook but her voice was loud and steady. ‘Who are you and where are you taking my daughter?’

  Tralane was vaguely aware of Zharazin getting down on his knees, taking the chain and beginning to tie up the prisoner. She dropped the bolts to him without letting her gaze move a millimetre from the other woman’s face.

  The prisoner hissed with pain and her accent was strange as she bit out the Imperial words, clipping the ends of them. ‘She’s insurance. You’ll have her back once the Empress is deposed and the Empire united once again.’

  The news barely filtered into Tralane’s mind. It was nonsense. There was no such thing as a war between the cities, depositions – unthinkable. ‘Who are you?’

  But now the narrow lips were bitten together, white with strain as Zharazin tugged the chain taut, joining wrists to her waist, his hisses of pain and her grunts of it some ghoulish accompaniment as both were forced to use their damaged limbs. The silence regarding her question made Tralane furious. She felt her arm shaking with the effort of not squeezing more on the trigger.

  ‘If you shoot her we’ll never get the answers,’ Zharazin said, his voice neutral and almost toneless. She glared at him for a moment and saw dark bands under his eyes, his bronzed skin tarnished. He held the free end of the chain in his good hand. ‘I can hold her here. Go get help so we can take her inside.’ His eyes were dulled and distant in the way she had come to understand was him communicating with the Infomancy.

  She looked into the sky and saw only clouds. Turning to do as he said was harder than she imagined possible for a simple step and then another, retracing her way back into the house without Minna. The short journey passed in a blur of dislocated moments, her hand fumbling and slipping in the dust on the stair rail and only just saving her from a fall. She nearly trod on Best at the lab door. He was in the act of pushing himself up on to his elbows as her legs bore her unsteadily down, tentacular and unwieldy for their task, jelly instead of bone. She jumped and stumbled to avoid him. As she bent to assist him she marvelled at the callousness of her feelings – it was not care that made her stoop so much as pragmatism in the knowledge he might be able to help her if he could function.

  She crouched down and carefully aided him into a sitting position against the wall. He moaned and moved slowly. There was a lump in his hair the size of her fist and blood ran freely down behind his ear. She thought he was lucky to be alive and knew he was not the one to be asking for anything right now, though her mouth said, ‘We have to get help,’ even as she left him propped there and pushed through the door into the wreckage of the lab.

  Fortunately, most of its cluttered mess was simply its natural state, with only a few signs of searching or destruction. She found the device she was looking for on the floor after a panicked minute of forcing herself to look properly and not throw things around any more. She guessed Minna or Best had dropped it as they were attacked. Normally, it lived in a housing on the bench leg. She’d never been more grateful for anything in her life as when she felt its ergonomic shape settle into her hand and flicked it into action with her thumb. She had never had cause to use the emergency communication system before. It was an antique that was maintained as part of city security ordinances and had a working counterpart at the duty officer’s post by the palace gate where two hundred patrollers were always ready.

  ‘I need help,’ she said, not needing to identify herself as the device did that for her. ‘My daughter has been kidnapped. We have a prisoner.’ Then she put it down on the desktop, hearing a startled, anxious voice babble questions for a moment before fading away into giving orders.

  As she looked about, her sense of numbness melted into a hot, consuming hysteria that faded as fast as it arose to be replaced by a cold, calm precision; terror refined into fuel for her mind. It clicked into gear with an almost physical jolt and her vision became crystal clear.

  There was no sign of the goggles. She wondered if Minna had them but unless she found them would be forced to consider them in the hands of the enemy now. A thundering sound, far too soon to be palace guard, made her spin and clutch the desk behind her. It approached from the main house at a great rate, making no effort to be quiet, catching every creaky board on the way so that she could tell its passage was puzzlingly accurate through the winding, twisting ways of the house. It was coming straight for her. She found her hands empty and realised she must have dropped the gun in the stairwell when she almost fell.

  Her fingers closed on something smooth and metallic – a spanner – and then dropped that too as the door was suddenly filled entirely by the huge blue, orange and white figure of the Karoo. His disturbing slitted eyes stared at her with alien intensity for a microsecond before sweeping their gaze over the rest of the room and determining it of no interest. His nostrils flared as the gaze came back to her before he straightened and assumed a more human posture so that he seemed a man now and not a beast.

  ‘I’m late,’ she said, finally reaching the end of a chain of reasoning that led to him being here at such a coincidental moment. They were, at this point, meant to be en route to the portal. He must have arrived to collect her after she didn’t turn up at their meeting spot by the palace gate. His slight nod confirmed it as he apparently lost interest in her too and turned back to sniff the air in the hall. He ignored Best entirely.

  ‘Go on up to the roof. Zharazin needs your help,’ Tralane said and, without a backward look, Tzaban vanished, his feet hammering the rickety steps in just three bounds. Behind him the slack face of an astonished corporal took in the sight of her before looking quickly away and barking a series of commands to fumble-booted persons behind her.

  The corporal procured a medic to treat Best and Zharazin and ordered her other two guards to help Tralane collect what she wanted. By the time Tralane had packed her carryall she was much more herself. She gathered from overheard conv
ersations that there was a brief argument about who owned the prisoner first but in order to circumvent it for the sake of speed the corporal ordered all of them into the dining room while her two-man unit searched the rest of the house and made it secure. As they assembled the panic unit from the palace and two infomancers also arrived and so the room was full before Tralane assumed control of the situation. Given that none of the officers present technically held authority over the others her status as householder and senior mage and female gave her the lead.

  The prisoner, now given first aid and transferred to the chair at the head of the table paid no attention to any of them. Her wide-eyed stare of horror was fixated irrevocably on Tzaban who had chosen to stand alongside Tralane as if his position as Consort extended to her too for the time being, she being Empress of the room. The prisoner’s complexion was ashen and she pressed into the chair in an effort to be as far away from him as possible. She was not the only one who gave the Karoo a wide berth though the Glimmers had mostly mastered their responses and made their fear seem merely respectful by now. Maybe, Tralane thought, this intimidation alone would be persuasive, but she didn’t have time to find out. She turned to Zharazin, who had the medic’s fingers stuck in his shoulder muscle at that moment although he was looking at her for an instruction.

  ‘Find out what she knows,’ Tralane said.

  ‘Mom, that’s…’

  Tralane recognised Isabeau’s voice and closed her eyes in a gush of relief immediately followed by annoyance. ‘Against the protocol. I know. Sit down and shut up. Minna’s missing. They’re from Spire.’ She knew that Isabeau at least had a sense of the importance of that, being privy to knowledge of the advancing army where others had not yet been informed.