by Samit Basu
‘I could make arrangements for you to visit Imokoi, Mantric,’ said the Civilian. ‘There is a lot Maya must know that would do us no harm to learn. And if she is being held prisoner in Imokoi, she must be rescued.’
‘Rescue Maya? She would be most offended,’ said Mantric. ‘She’s alive, and that is wonderful news. You can stop looking at your fingers, Amloki, I’m not going to burst into tears. I was never a very good father.’
‘Kirin wouldn’t hold Maya prisoner. Not the Kirin I knew, at least, but I clearly didn’t know him very well. What worries me is her silence,’ said Amloki. ‘There’s a mystery here that needs to be solved immediately.’
‘If she hasn’t bothered to write, it might be because she takes after me. I suppose I should be glad she remembered to invite me. How time whooshes. Maya married. Good for her,’ said Mantric.
‘I suppose this means Asvin’s dead,’ said Amloki. ‘Roshin, are you sure it’s Maya? What happened to the sorceress who left Kol with Asvin pretending to be Rukmini?’
‘This will take time to unravel, and time is a luxury at the moment. We will not make any assumptions until we know more,’ said the Civilian. ‘If it is Maya, we will resolve the mystery swiftly; for now, I might remind you that we still have a city to defend. Chancellor?’
‘Enki’s libraries are emptied,’ said Ombwiri. ‘And all my spellbinders have volunteered to help the city’s defence in any way they can.’
‘Today is a day full of surprises,’ said Temat.
‘Flight is not an option for magic-users. The ravians will not enslave us if they win; we will all be hunted down and killed,’ said Ombwiri. ‘If Enki survives, I will be remembered as the Chancellor who took his students to war.’
‘The city guards have also arrested several hundred people on various charges, mostly fabricated,’ said Roshin. ‘Some of them are important community leaders who were vocal in their criticism of the way you were running things. Their friends and followers are demanding justice.’
‘Ask the city guards to make them see reason in any way they choose.’
‘It will be done.’
The Civilian looked around the balcony, at the guarded faces of Ombwiri and Amloki and the openly upset ones of Mantric and Arathognan.
‘I wish to hear no speeches about civil liberties and the real casualties of wartime. Tell me, instead, what we can do to save our city,’ she said.
Around the palace, and every other building of strategic importance in Kol, the vamans toiled away, adapting their defences quickly to deal with the new threat. Incredibly tall skeletons of scaffolding, of beams and great wheels with pulleys and ropes and platforms sprung up overnight. Bulky catapults and ballistae were being hoisted to rest on rooftops and bridges, pulled up by ropes made from the webs of giant underground spiders. Armadas of flying carpets tied together tugged lighter machines and ammunition from tower to tower. The problem was one of scale. Kol was well-equipped enough to face a dragon onslaught with some degree of confidence, but would the vaman artillery be able to destroy the air-fleet before it burned the defenders to cinders? The catapults had been designed for speed and flexibility, with finely tuned calibrations that allowed their handlers to cope with the aerial acrobatics of swift-flying, looping dragons. There was no time to build the bulkier projectile-hurling machines that might be needed to penetrate the armour of the celestial chariots. Given the size of the airships, the massive vaman machines would look like toys, but as the story of Disegno and Brotozoan showed, a carefully placed, well-hurled missile could fell the mightiest giant (in the children’s version, Disegno‘s stone had hit the giant Brotozoan on the forehead).
The sky above the city was full of vroomsticks and carpets manned by guards, soldiers and civilian volunteers, wave after wave of human locusts going through carefully planned military drills; if the airships were close enough, spellbinders and archers could inflict deadly damage through hit-and-fly raids. Nearly every carpet and vroomstick in the city had been confiscated for this. Many of the chariots were piloted by firefighters with compact cauldrons of strange chemicals - foams that strangled fire, and boxes of powders that starved it. Those of the Champion’s League heroes who were not helping civilians leave the city peacefully led groups of air-raiders through their manouevres, and Kolis with any spirit left cheered as they passed; the noble figures of Reinforced Iron Man, Mr. Seik, the Hex Men, the Sadori Sisters and many others inspired nothing but confidence. Not as inspiring, but very valuable additions to the war effort given their natural aptitude in both flight and violence, were the leather-clad vroomer gangs, who’d surprised everyone by volunteering to help defend Kol, and had even taught the city guards a few new moves, crazy air-slaloms and brain-churning diagonal rolls and crow-swoops they’d perfected through decades of dedicated air-street crime. But if there was one man who made the citizens of Kol take heart and resolve to stay in the city, it was Arathognan, whose tireless efforts to rally his fellow Kolis had led to levels of popularity that would have had him assassinated at any other point in the city’s history.
Messages came to the Civilian at regular intervals regarding the progress of the ravian fleet. Vaman troops had been trailing the ships secretly since they had crossed Dorkinge, a former outpost of the ancient empire of Ventelot that now stood on the southwestern border of Potolpur. The vaman commanders had explained to the Civilian that the best time to attack the airships was when they landed to renew their supplies; unless they drew their sustenance from the air, there would surely be something they needed from the ground they were so eager to conquer, and on the ground, the combined might of the vamans and what was left of Askesis’ army could surely crush them.
But the airships had not landed, and the vamans had waited in vain. Still, the only plausible strategy for the Civilian to follow was to somehow keep the city standing until the ravians retreated to tend their sky-chariots, and then destroy them the moment they descended. What plagued the Civilian most was her almost complete ignorance about the capabilities of her opponents: If the ravian light-pillars were as large and incredibly destructive as Pataal-e-Gurh’s survivors had described, would they not destroy all resistance in minutes? And with fires raging on that scale, what could the firefighters do? How long would their chemicals manage to keep things under control before all of Kol was drowned in fire? What if the ravian ships did not need to come down to earth at all? Kol’s defence was based on the assumption that whoever attacked the richest of human cities would seek to occupy and control it; there were thousands of ways in which a ground invasion of Kol could be defeated, and enemies made to pay dearly for every street of the city they conquered. But what could the defenders do if the invaders wanted to utterly destroy Kol, and everyone in it? If the ravians continued to make no effort at diplomacy, thought the Civilian, it was probably because they now planned to reduce humans to the same state they had almost succeeded in driving the asurs to at the end of the last Age; a primitive people, hiding in hills and caves, or toiling in fields as indentured slaves while their feudal overlords pursued higher concerns. And if the ravians actually had the resources to carry out such an outrageous plan, what could be done to stop them?
The Civilian did have a second plan, as her nature demanded, but while the second line of defence was mighty, it was also most unreliable. The Kaos butterflies could, if they desired, fill the skies above Kol with thunderclouds and torrential rain, which would handle the threat of fire. But it would also mean the removal of all airborne defence, and cripple the vaman artillery; besides, there was the risk of flooding the underground shelters. If the airships could rise above the clouds, they would be safe and hidden. After that, it was a waiting game. Perhaps the intensity of the light-pillars could make the rain-clouds disappear in mountains of steam. And the Kaos butterflies were not born to follow commands – uncertainty was the very essence of their being. Using centaur shaman spells to control them shortened their life spans dramatically, and thus a sustained defence based o
n weather control had been deemed too risky. All the answers would come once the fires began; but by then, it would probably be too late for Kol.
That evening, the airships reached the outer suburbs of northeast Kol. There were no clouds to cover their approach this time; they wanted to be seen and feared. The last rays of the setting sun illuminated them in violet, pink, and orange as they floated in the sky, weird, beautiful animal-shaped palaces of marvels, their bejeweled bellies glittering, their ominous drones reverberating to the heavens. In central Kol, the vamans shouted orders and tuned their war-machines; Above Enki University, standing tall on a fluttering carpet, Arathognan raised his sword in the air in a gesture as noble as it was futile, raising half-hearted cheers all over the city. In the palace, the Civilian waited and watched her enemies in silence, Mantric toying idly with protective wards by her side. In the labyrinth under the palace, Violet the shapeshifter teleported back and forth with secret scrolls, weeping as she remembered the rest of the Rainbow Council.
The akashraths floated on towards the heart of the city, towards Kol’s tallest buildings and strongest centres of defence. The Civilian had left most of the city undefended – she had guessed, correctly, that the carnage would begin at the most potent symbols of Kol’s dominance, at buildings which represented everything Kol stood for – power, wealth, knowledge, diversity. They would break Kol’s heart before burning its body.
A blackout had been ordered in Kol, and as the light faded, the city that never slept hid its dazzling lights for the very first time in its history. Pale clouds that had followed the airships into the city blotted out the moon and stars. But there was still light in the sky; the symbols on the bellies of the akashraths glowed phosphor-green in the dark, spelling out messages of doom in alien tongues. The defenders looked up in wonder, expecting at any moment to see white light-rivers shining brighter than the sun, but the akashraths did not attack. The Civilian had predicted that the ravians would wait until the full extent of the damage they unleashed on Kol could be seen. Once again, she was right.
At midnight, a small swarm of black-clad figures on silent blackened vroomsticks, invisible in the night, swept towards the akashraths. The Silver Phalanx was on the hunt, hoping to storm the airships in secret and break and kill anything they could find. But the swarm dispersed and returned, frustrated; the akashraths were too high. The magic field was unstable, and their vroomsticks jerked and faltered. The Silver Dagger considered leading a raid and taking the Heart of Magic with him, but abandoned the plan almost immediately. If he were slain and the golden mesh destroyed, all would be lost.
The Hex Men tried their luck next, but even their spellbinding powers could not keep their vroomsticks stable. Messages were tapped from tower to tower; it was the vamans’ turn.
The tower-tops of central Kol were suddenly awash with sound, as the missiles of the vamans were loaded into catapults and ballistae. Hundreds of fire-balls lit up and an instant later, there was a fountain in the sky, as massive chunks of metal, wall-piercing siege arrows and chunks of masonry, all glowing with sorcerous fire, arced their way towards the ravian airships. Several found their mark, exploding with ear-splitting booms on the metal sides of the floating palaces; the air was full of smoke and the loud sound of metal screeching against metal, and the rooftops echoed to the roars of exultant Kolis and vamans. Lights were lit inside the air-chariots, stabbing out of the rows of portholes on their sides, and the droning altered in pitch; now there were dull, hammering sounds, high-pitched whines and the screech of great gears grinding. The vamans sent another round of missiles into the sky, and hurt the akashraths again, but they did not fall. Instead, they began to rise higher, taking barrage after barrage of siege arrows and explosives, but not retaliating, focusing their energies on moving out of range, until, an hour later, even missiles from the most powerful vaman catapults came hurtling back into the city, exploding in the streets, keeping the firefighters busy. The airships had escaped, but they had taken the pall of gloom that hung over Kol with them as they rose; hope had returned to Kol’s faithful. Surely the akashraths were too high to attack the city now, many said. After all, even dragons had to fly fairly low to burn cities; even their fiery breath could burn only up to a certain distance. What were these airships but dragons of metal? Kol had won the first round. They would hurl these invaders back into the heavens every time they ventured low enough to cause any damage, and wear them down until they tired, and descended to rest and die.
At dawn, they saw the airships, and realized they had not done as much damage in the darkness as they had hoped. The akashraths had all been hit; their bellies were dented, scratched and burned, but their armour had not, as yet, been breached. Some internal damage had been done, though; four of the six airships were trailing clouds of black smoke, and one seemed to quiver as it flew. They flew slowly and deliberately over the towers of Kol, finding their targets and hovering above them, ignoring the vaman missiles streaking harmlessly through the sky beneath them. The swan-shaped airship now cast its shadow over the Civilian’s palace, the fish over Enki. Others hung humming over Ossus Square, Hero School, the business district and the Ziggurat of All Religions. The Chief Civilian, flying with her Red Phoenix bodyguards towards the government headquarters in south Kol, did not look back; no one, not even the immortals who’d lived secretly in the city since its birth, loved Kol more than she did, and she could not bear to watch its greatest edifices crumble.
Hatches opened on the ships’ sides, and gleaming barrels emerged. All of Kol looked up. The droning stopped.
Pillars of white light and fire appeared out of nothing, lances of destruction boring into Kol. Enki University blazed in defiance, residual magic swirling and collecting into a huge explosion that shattered the buildings around it as it collapsed, Kol’s tallest spire sinking slowly into a mountain of rubble. The Civilian’s palace and its beautiful gardens burned, and the bridges between awe-inspiring interconnected towers in the business district snapped like matchsticks. Torrents of fire and smoke drew street-maps visible from the heavens as they raced their way through Kol’s empty boulevards. Hero School melted away. But the image that burned deepest in the eyes of the watching Kolis, the one that would haunt them until they died, was in Ossus Square, where the great statue of the hero Ossus, looking sadly southwards, stood proudly in the blaze, lit up like a god, until huge cracks crawled up his body, and he bathed in light, dead once again, his mournful face looking up at the sky reproachfully as it shattered into a million pieces.
The akashraths began to move, sweeping slowly across central Kol, burning up the vaman artillery within seconds as they passed over them. Several heroes died there, trying to save their brethren from the flames. The survivors fled on vroomsticks to pre-assigned points of assembly, but they were merely going through the motions now, and many considered escaping while they still could, before the gusts of flame that were sweeping from rooftop to rooftop, crackling insolently in the faces of the feeble efforts of the firefighters, engulfed them all. They had seen the world change, and new better than to hope for salvation. Kol was broken. The end was near.
Chapter Ten
Maya sat in the shadows of a gnarled, blackened tree in the Bleakwood, watching Kirin sleep and itching to send a few fireballs into the air out of sheer boredom. She wished she had her long-abandoned diary with her; the endless hours of inactivity might have actually made it possible for her to catch up with the present.
A thumping sound made her rise and spin around, but it was only Spikes. The pashan stomped up to the tree and looked down at Kirin.
‘I thought I’d come and see if he was up. I’m not sure our plan is a good one.’
‘Well, he’s not. And the unwaba did say you’d have to do all the talking.’
‘True. I will meet the Horsemen on the bridge where we met the knight, Sir Cyr, the last time we were here.’
‘Do you want me to come with you? I could hide behind a tree or something, and not g
et in the way. They might be a bit more than even you can handle.’
‘If they are supposed to end the world, I don’t think your presence would change things dramatically. I will do what I can.’
‘Good luck.’
‘If I do not return, please take care of Kirin.’
‘Coming from you, that’s the most sentimental speech I’ve ever heard. Now go, and come back soon.’
Spikes squatted, and patted Kirin’s head very carefully. Maya hugged him, and after an awkward grunt, he walked off westwards, soon breaking into a run. Maya watched him gather speed until he was a grey blur, hunched, splayfooted, faster than a horse, and wondered yet again what madness had taken them all.
They had wandered around the Bleakwood for several days in a vague sort of way. The unwaba had told them to stop the Four Horsemen, but had not mentioned where they could be found – the Bleakwood was not really useful, as directions went. There was also the question of adding another member to their team, someone who truly believed in gods, but that could presumably wait until the Four Horsemen had been deterred. The unwaba had also neglected to mention, despite his infinite wisdom, exactly how the Four Horsemen could be stopped, assuming they would not just stop if politely asked to do so.
Kirin had not helped matters much by falling ill five days ago. He’d been restless all day, that day, not talking much, looking deeply troubled. Maya had woken in the middle of the night to find herself alone in the Bleakwood. At first she’d thought Kirin had left again, but Spikes was still there, and an hour later they’d found Kirin, huddled up under of a tree, wearing the Shadowknife and the Gauntlet, unconscious. He looked as if he’d seen something terrible, but there was no sign of any enemy. Maya and Spikes had decided at the time that he must have seen the Horsemen and tried to stop them on his own to save his friends, which, Spikes had pointed out, was just the kind of behaviour the unwaba would have disapproved of. Kirin had not explained himself even after Maya had cast a dozen healing spells on him. This was because he had not woken up yet. Spikes had decided that carrying Kirin around in circles in the Bleakwood was a bad idea, especially if any gods were watching, so Maya had spent five days sitting and waiting for either Kirin or the unwaba to wake up, while Spikes stalked through the forest on his own, listening for the sound of hooves.