Glorious Angels

by Justina Robson

  Gau Tam drew a breath, looking at Tzaban as if she didn’t exist. ‘You’ll stay with us. Engineer, the machinery is disabled, you will have to repair it to make passage. I will distract the others as you do so and tell them that you are ensuring it cannot be used.’ He paused and swallowed, looked at the others with him but they just exchanged glances and nodded. ‘Close it after you. I suggest that you disable it, regardless of any orders you may have to the contrary from the Empress. Leave me to deal with the rest.’ At last he turned to look at her with a glance that combined with his treasonous suggestion to tell her all she wanted to know about what lay in store for her. His face was scored with exhaustion but it was his eyes that made her simply nod rather than question him. He looked ineffably fragile, as if a single blow of one finger would snap him.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to it. Engineer. Gentlemen.’ He rode forward and let them trail after to display they were no threat but at the sight of Tzaban getting nearer some of the soldiers at the camp got up and began to separate themselves, melting silently into the buildings that remained standing.

  Tzaban, now pacing at her horse’s side rather than leading it, snarled quietly but Gau Tam waved him down and raised his sword as they came through the gate, shouting in a voice that carried clear across the yards, ‘Stand down and stay back. She comes to secure the gates.’ He sounded nothing like the way he had looked to Tralane. Power and arrogance shone through his tones. He expected obedience and in any case the men and women she started to pass looked as though they had no heart to resist him or to fight. They didn’t look able to do more than they did; sit and shiver like the old in winter.

  They passed a long gauntlet of silent stares. Someone in one of the buildings ran a sword along the boards in a slow scrape. Every pair of eyes slid around to fixate on Tzaban wherever he moved. It was the most desperate, empty kind of watching she had ever seen, so at odds with the eager curiosity and speculations of the city. She shrank in the saddle as the horse plodded along, nudging it with her foot towards the outlying column of stone and metal that was the portal’s right pillar. Behind her she heard the hoofbeats of at least two of the others and the jingle of their armour and harness.

  They stopped at the pillar and she slid out of the saddle, the pain in her legs almost enough to make her cry, she felt so vulnerable and stiff. Instead she undid the saddlebags and equipped her own harness and toolkits. Her fingers undid the safety cover on the gun holster of their own accord in passing, keyed the charge on. She felt the presence of Tzaban close, as if he was radiating heat.

  ‘Do what you must, I will guard you,’ he said and his words were followed by the whispering zing of a blade being drawn.

  Tralane muttered quietly to him as she walked around the pillar, examining it. ‘What’s all that facegear and smelly stuff for?’

  ‘To block the hunting scent of the female Karoo,’ he replied. ‘What I have given you will work better.’ He pulled the stinking scarf out from the saddle and handed it to her. ‘Put it on now.’

  She saw that he and the two men on horseback had formed a rough shield for her, blocking the bonfires, but she didn’t think anyone there would have a clue what she was doing; even she didn’t. Gritting her teeth against her resentment she tied the heavy, abominable cloth around her neck, arranging it under one arm so it could not be easily pulled off and so that she could use it as a hood if she must. Her own eyes began to tear up.

  ‘If only it fuckin’ worked,’ she heard one of the horsemen mutter as he lifted his kerchief and spat on the ground.

  ‘I thought the fighting was between us and the Mudlanders of the Circle,’ Tralane said, clinging to the conversation even as almost all her attention now focused on the formations of the pillar, reading the signs of link and component until she located the access panelling. It was, on inspection, crudely welded shut. At the grass beneath the pillar she saw a microtorch and silver drops of metal amid dark smears of blood and mud. She bent to pick the tool up from the crushed area.

  ‘Was between us and the fuckin’ Mudders,’ the man said hoarsely, coughing. ‘Until someone used a fuckin’ mage attack from some blasted machine. Then the Karoo decided to join in. This here is all that’s left. An’ if you open that fuckin’ gate and they come through it then there won’t be this either. Won’t be nothin’.’ Tension in his voice made it crack and his horse shuffled backwards under the pressure of the reins until he kicked and cursed it back to position. ‘Speed it up. They want his hide on a post. Won’t be long before too many of ’em find their mettle.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ Gau Tam’s voice was laced with warning. There was no more talk.

  Tralane glanced at the camp. Sure enough a loose group was forming by the near gate. She used the torch to burn out the welds, trying to breathe slowly and steadily, the stink of the metal harsh and sudden. She finally broke in and pulled the panel away, dropping it.

  The command pane was cracked so badly, a star right across it, that she could barely see the lights in it. She draped her scarf over her head and shrouded herself with it to block out the sunglare. Though she didn’t know the pictograms of the object she recognised solid University work when she saw it. The protocols for images and controls were the ones she had seen in other people’s lectures and papers. How it worked exactly was beyond her knowledge, science was for people like Carlyn to mine out and deduce. Mastery of method and construction was her business. Fortunately, nothing important had changed since its last use and she assumed the plate welding had been done to try to protect this. She did not think there was more than one other gateway, so she felt confident they would not be catapulted into an unknown space. The only place this had ever been meant to go was to the far southern camp. A power check suggested it had life in it but the startup command – a universal symbol among engineers – did not work. After a moment of stabbing at barely understood glyphs she figured the fault was on the other post.

  She looked up and across to it and was staggered to see that they had been surrounded by soldiers while her attention was distracted. Now the officers’ horses circled her at the post, shifting nervously as men shouted at one another. Tzaban stood beside her, tulip ears moving as he listened, though his eyes looked at nothing and his body hung relaxed from his shoulders as though he was hearing a faraway music. The white tip of his tail beat from side to side, swishing the few remaining standing stalks of grass.

  ‘I have to get to the other post,’ she murmured to him, sliding tools back into their positions at her belt. The gun grip appeared under her palm and she settled it into her hand, drawing it but keeping it pointed to the ground.

  At first she didn’t think he had heard her. Into the gap the words being spoken over her head and their meaning filtered through to her.

  ‘…filthy piece of Karoo shit is dead we’ll settle. You know what’s there, Commander. You know it’s the only way.’

  In response Gau Tam pointed his sabre at the man between them and the far post. ‘Move aside. They’re going through.’

  ‘An’ what if something comes through the other way?’

  Back near the fires a woman’s voice rose in a sudden hysterical shrieking, followed by gruff bellows and the sounds of thumping, then silence.

  ‘Then we’ll kill it.’ Gau Tam made it sound as if this was simply a formality but the iciness of his voice belied its calm tone. He nudged his horse forward and it moved steadily. Tzaban pushed Tralane in the middle of her back and propelled her close after it just to its nearside, using it as a barrier. Her legs shook but she walked, eyes on the protesting soldier. For a moment his gaze met hers and if it weren’t for Tzaban’s solid pressure she would have stopped.

  ‘If you care at all Ma’am, don’t go on,’ the soldier said, unmoving as Gau Tam’s horse advanced within two metres of him. ‘Especially not with that thing. He may be the Empress’ choice but she knows nothin’ ’bout what it is. She’s just a silly child, dreamin’. Nothin’.’ He was holding a
polearm, the spike at its point was covered in dark stickiness, describing the same juddering tiny circle in the air over and over again. At the last moment he made one step to his left, sabre met wooden stock, and the warhorse shouldered him aside. As if connected by strings the others in the ring loosened their stances and backed off.

  ‘Stand ready, Master Fath,’ Gau Tam’s voice sliced across the air to his second. ‘Engineer, be quick about it, we want no accidental trouble.’

  ‘Be sure not to fuckin’ come back,’ someone murmured and she felt Tzaban stagger as they covered the final stride to the post.

  A roar of rage from Gau Tam, a sudden clack and whirr of a shot right next to her, a steady thock of bolt hitting its mark, a strangled cry and the thump of a body falling but the hand on her back remained where it was. She turned to see but Tzaban pushed her hard and hissed, ‘Make your moves, mind your business.’

  ‘Anybody else want to revolt?’

  She realised Gau Tam had shot someone with a crossbow. A lever action reloader, handheld but deadly within twenty metres, her mind reliably informed her. This one sounded loose but it had worked well enough. She tugged at the access panel and it fell away at a touch. The fault turned out to be a timed-out power relay. It was the work of only a minute to reset it. She thought that three seconds was more than enough given they were standing right on it and set a countdown.

  ‘Portal in ten,’ she said, trying for loud but at least managing to be heard by Tzaban. ‘We need to run through. Stand clear. In five, four…’

  The soldiers ran back, the horses thudded away. There was a buzzing sound of bad connectors fudging a power bridge and the sharp sudden smell of arcane discharges that often heralded major failure, or potential damage. She glanced at her arcmeter and saw a phenomenal reading just as the air next to her sheared with an undescribable sound. Tzaban’s hand at her belt propelled her forward with shocking speed and force. She opened her mouth to scream but her feet were faster, already running so she didn’t simply fly on to her face in the dirt.

  There was a moment of blackness, a perishing cold, then an ocean of heat, light and noise that engulfed her. Someone was screaming, not her. Tzaban’s growl beside her turned from rumble to deafening roar. The smell was a thick, fetid miasma of rot overlaid with a sweet perfume that made her head spin. She barely remembered the hood, fallen on her shoulders, her nose dead to it until it was yanked over her face by an unseen hand, then gripped there at the back of her neck so she was held like a puppet She could see through the weave, just, as that hand propelled her. It was a brutal vice that permitted no disputes as it demanded she go this way, that way seemingly at random. Her legs staggered on soft, squishy ground in obedience to its bone-cracking pressure. All over she heard human shrieking and screaming, and the strangest voices shouting, so loudly, things that did not make sense in both Imperial and Swaffish, the lingua franca of the Mudlanders. Suddenly her face was up against a metal post and Tzaban, nearly unrecognisable, snarled, ‘Do your work. Finish it.’

  ‘But the city,’ she said into her tiny, noxious, chequered world. Visions of explosions, Isabeau, Minna, swam before her eyes.

  The hood was yanked off. Tzaban’s face was close enough his longer whiskers tickled her cheek. His hard, massive body pressed the length of hers against the dull roundness of the post as he transferred his grip from her neck to her harness. Despite the hood’s proximity to her face she was hit by the sharp heat of his sudden stink. Her head reeled. Dimly she realised that all these odours were the codes of systems fighting to control her: a powerhouse of instructions all delivered in the air. One demand was overlaid on another with conflicting commands. She felt acutely sick to her stomach as her body reeled but powering across all that was the crushing force of his weight and the imposition of his body on hers, unasked for and unexplained. The combination made her lightheaded and afraid. As the first seconds passed and she had taken several breaths he let her go. The sudden absence had her sliding to her knees, hands in front of her as she got her bearings though this was only in the service of his order. She scrambled to open the small door, lucky that the lock was broken. Inside, lights flashed errors, warnings, pleas. Even though it was barely useable the portal functioned on the last of its redundancies like a faithful old dog. She felt a moment of kinship with the machine, and then she looked up. It was only for a moment, only to see where he went after she felt the sudden draft of air that signalled his going. She was totally unprepared for what she saw, so much so that it took a while for the shapes and movements to resolve into anything she could understand.

  The portal had been erected in a flat area surrounded by scrubby trees, all of which were now flattened or snapped in half. There had been some human-made Imperial tents and huts. These were also flat, some smouldering. For a large distance in all directions the land was destroyed, greenery pounded into mud, huge areas blackened and giving off trickling smokes into the grey air. The smokes compounded in the windless, humid heat to create vast clouds that towered up to the sky. Through these clouds huge creatures moved, and humans – not many – ran and fought in their shadows with lesser beasts. Some were plants, like huge cats made of flowers and vines. Some were flesh and bone, raw golems with many limbs. Some were furred and scaled with features of so many animals she couldn’t begin to name them. They were unified in their savagery and the splatter of blood that was everywhere, on everything. Their brutal sounds drowned the human screams, and she saw them speaking with a nonsense of human words, though not human voices. In hoots and yodels they called through the veils of smoke. One was playing with dead bodies as if they were toys, tossing them in the air over and over again; delighted, even as they fell to bits under the treatment.

  She shut her mouth when she realised the air and smoke was filled with death. She looked to see where Tzaban was – turned and found him fighting only metres away from her with a strange dark creature half again his size. The claws on his hands had become daggers and the relentless, desperate violence of the struggle as he slammed them in the direction of the beast’s shaggy neck told her there was nothing foregone about the results. Possibly she had minutes to live.

  The imperative to obey him coupled with the realisation about what was going on and had her turning back to the simple clean emptiness of the machine. Even now she could not bring herself to destroy something others had so painstakingly crafted with skill and ingenuity. She supposed that would not be required in the circumstances anyway, and reached inside it to undo the couplings that held the power unit in place. With a few sharp tugs and curses the unit came out. It was akin to her crystal pieces and not so heavy – the size and measure of a large book.

  Behind her she heard Tzaban grunt in pain. She turned and was knocked over, the wind shooting out of her as the creature he had fought came and hit her in a head-on charge. She felt a degree of strange satisfaction that the soldiers who had wished her gone would not have to receive more of this; that Isabeau in the city and Minna, far away, would not have to see these things. She landed on soft muddy ground on her back and lay there, trapped, flailing automatically to try and free herself.

  The creature that had tossed her up had hit the post and was standing, stunned, about five metres from her. She stared at it as her mouth gaped and fished for air, pain in every bit of her chest and nothing helping her. She watched from that position as Tzaban appeared suddenly on its back, a military issue sabre in his hands as he hacked at the back of its neck. Wet, crunching noises, muted by the humid stillness of the air, reached her ears and then it slowly toppled over with a huffing sigh almost of relief. It looked rather like a horse once it had laid flat and expired. Atop its ribcage, more red than striped, Tzaban crouched, licking his hands and forearms. He paused, nostrils wide, and then jumped forward, the sabre held carefully at his side.

  Before she could object or even draw the first whinnying breath, he had grabbed the front of her gear harness and hauled her back on her feet. Far in the distance an
Imperial bugler sounded a retreat. His ears flicked towards it. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘My pack…’ It was still on the ground where she’d left it, next to the dead thing’s muzzle.

  He let her go and went back to snatch it, swinging it on to his own shoulders. ‘Put hood up.’ He was back, helping her again, a constant assault on time and her space, then he was dragging her by the arm at a pace faster than she had ever gone on two legs though she felt light with the desperate need to stay close and safe, if that was possible. It seemed that he was her only hope here. They passed a human, still alive, unidentifiable as man or woman, part mired, part bound in twisting, tightening vines. She slowed but he jerked her onwards and over her protest said, ‘No. Can’t help them. Too late.’ But she felt it hadn’t been. A few sabre cuts would have freed them. She was certain.

  They tore through the smoke and trees, going wherever the cover was thickest and taking a route away from the path which was busy with activity. She coughed and choked, half blind, her arm almost broken as it was yanked this way and that, her body just a burden in its wake. She ran and when she stumbled he dragged her by main force. This was so painful she always struggled to run again. She would have screamed but she hadn’t breath to spare. At one point he kicked her knee out from the back, folding her leg up and pushing her down into some vegetation, then left her without a word. She put her arms over her head and rolled up into a ball. Through the darkness and the pressure she still heard the fight, snarling, screaming, his huffs and grunting booms of pain and surprise when something struck him and made him hollow for a moment, like a drum. She was beyond terror in a strange still place that suggested she should peacefully wait for death except for the nagging pain in her head where something hard was pressing into it. She shifted a little and felt that it was the bulky shape of the gun.