by Del Law
The expression on Semper’s face moves quickly from shock and surprise to something like disappointment.
“Don’t,” he whispers. “You can’t stand against her. You must know that. If you stop now, no one will have to know. She needs you, Blackwell, even more than she thinks she does.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I don’t make a very good pet.” I slip the knife in between my neck and the collar and concentrate. The collar cracks apart, and falls to the deck at Semper’s feet.
I reach down and help him up. “Be well,” I say.
Semper sighs. “I will see you again, my friend.”
Then I sprint for the podship. Gravhnal sees me coming, drops the cloth he was using to polish with and urges me on. “They’re already inside!” he says. “You must hurry!”
“They?” I say. But I’ve got no time to hear his answer. The podship has already lifted into the air and is headed out over the water, and I have to jump for the ladder that is still hanging from the hatch.
I hook my arm into a rung, and look back to the Mercy where Gravhnal and Semper stand watching me from the open landing bay. I raise my hand to them as the ship turns, and both of them wave back. The ship crosses back over the deck of the Mercy and I can look down onto the Sister below.
Would it actually have spoken to me if I’d stayed? I’ll never know, now. I'll admit I'm a little disappointed, but I can live with that.
I begin to climb the few rungs to the hatch when Ercan’s head appears over the edge and looks down at me.
“Where in Dekheret’s name did you come from,” Ercan said, in mock surprise.
“I am a creature of legend!” I call back up.
“You’ve come to steal my dreams?”
“Just your ship.”
Ercan barks that laugh of his. “Well, you’d better come aboard then.” He reaches down a hand. I take it and climb up through the hatch.
“Your distraction worked even better than mine,” Ercan says. “Nice going.”
“Those were your ships? That skirmish?”
Ercan nods. He’s got dark circles under his eyes, and a tired slump to his shoulders. “It wasn’t cheap, either. If I knew you were bringing over a whole new Sister, I could have saved a bit of cash.”
“Is Mircada with you?” I try unsuccessfully to keep the anticipation out of my voice.
“Mircada?” Ercan raises one eyebrow, and then shook his head. We start up the corridor toward the control room. “No. We need to talk about Mircada,” he says. “And that drone of yours, when we have a chance.”
“Kjat? You found her? How is she?”
“See for yourself.” I see a Kruk at the controls, and the flicker of many of the displays now lit up, and then one of the chairs turns around and it’s Kjat.
If Ercan looks tired, she looks utterly wrecked.
Her eyes are dark and sunken, her dark skin is drawn and haggard. She hugs herself with arms that are cut up, covered in makeshift bandages, and she hunches forward, slowly rocking back and forth like there’s some terrible weight on her shoulders.
“Chief,” she says, in a neutral tone. “Blackwell.” There’s a tic in her face that makes her left eye twitch. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
She brushes a black feather off of her lap, stands, and then rushes forward impulsively and wraps her arms around me. She lets out a great sigh of air as she holds me.
“Kjat,” I say. “It’s wonderful to see you again. You look like you need a drink,” I say. “Maybe a couple.”
She grins then, and nods. “You got that right.”
But I notice the grin doesn’t make it to her eyes. As she steps back, I see there are new tattoos all over her face and arms that weren’t there in the Framarc town. I can’t imagine what she’s been through.
The ship gives a sudden lurch, then, and we all stumble and grab on to something.
Then it picks up speed and altitude, lifting above the last of the rocks in the Devil’s Grip, and it flies us high over the sea toward where Tamaranth lies on the horizon now, glittering like a necklace of slick black pearls.
III: Tamaranth
28.
“I’m getting something,” Fehris calls from the corner. He sits on an overstuffed chair that is too tall for him, and his feet jut straight out into the air like a child’s—one with a cast on it, one without. He’s got his shoe off the good foot, and I can see his brown toes are webbed. Really, he’s like some sort of glowing-eyed, half-otter. I’ve never seen someone else like him. He holds a knife absently in one hand while flipping through a large, heavy book that’s covered in illustrations and text. Most of the illustrations I catch a glimpse of are of the rose, and of Tilhtinora being lifted into the air.
I’m standing out on the terrace, staring into a telescope there. Kjat is pacing restlessly in the courtyard. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. No, wait. Lost it. Hang on.” He sets down the knife to sneeze into his hand, and for the tenth time wipes it on the chair’s arm. When he sneezes, his fur all stands on end and crackles with static.
He picks up the knife again. “No, lost it.”
I sigh. It’s been three days since we landed at Ercan’s house, up in the cliffs above the Old City. Three days of monitoring knife transmissions about the Akarii attack, and waiting for Kerul to make up their minds on what they want to do about it. “Do you need me to take it?”
“I’ve got it.” He shuts the book. “It’s amazing that someone can write such a heavy book and say absolutely nothing new.”
He sighs. We’re all frustrated. Ercan’s place is this large, renovated Flowermech mansion that sprawls up a cliff on a ridge that overlooks the Old City. It’s got a lot of curving, glassy domes grown from some fibrous material that was apparently as hard as stone, all of them intersecting and overlapping in geometric ways resembling the petals of a flower. Different domes were at different elevations, and tall banks of windows like the eyes of insects opened out onto different gardens and terraces. It was all furnished with classic pieces and artwork, and it was all empty except for the Krukkruk staff. There’s nothing from Earth in it at all, and after everything on Nadrune’s ship I’m just great with that.
It also has a killer view. I can watch my home city getting bombed with great clarity through this really expensive telescope, drinking this bottle of really expensive bourbon.
“Where are you at with that?”
“Where am I at?”
“What are you finding in all of those books.”
Fehris has been nose-down since we’ve gotten here. I’m sure we’ve missed more than half of the transmissions coming up from the Old City because of it. Not that it would have made a lot of difference.
Fehris sneezes again. “I’m finding that we should have stayed on the damn Akarii ship. I told Ercan that, but did he listen? Of course not. Even he could see that podship light up like a mech on fire when that Sister of yours was brought on board. But it didn’t make a damn bit of difference to him.”
“You think Te’loria is in the Sister?”
“In it?” He blows air out between his lips. “That's a strange idea. It’s not in it. But you, the ship, and that Sister are all closely tied together somehow, and I need all of you in close proximity to figure out what we do next.”
“I’m still not sure what I’ve got to do with it.”
“You keep saying that. Your gigantic head is stuck as deep in that lagoon as Ercan’s if you don’t see it yet.” He frowns and wipes his nose. “Look, there’s a story about the Fall of the Third Transcendency, you know. There are lots of stories, and this one is Talovian, so who knows the real truth of it, but it puts the collapse of the whole world entirely on your race.”
My ears go up. “Really?” I shake my head. “I knew I’ve felt guilty for something. I just always wondered what.”
“Well, let me enlighten you," Fehris says. The Talovians claim that it was Dekheret’s right hand, Farsoth the Hulgliev himself, who
brought about the Fall. The way they tell it, he had grown restless as the mere head of the Tel Kharan, and jealous of Dekheret. He wanted to rule everything himself. So in the dead of night, Farsoth attempted a great bridging on his own, to a secret world only just discovered. He took the best mages that he could convince. It was a powerful matrix, deep in some secret site in Tilhtinora, and at the peak of it was Farsoth with Te’loria.”
He sneezes, wipes it on the chair again.
“Ignore the fact for now that you don’t actually join worlds this way. It’s a story, right? As the Talovians tell it, Farsoth was so filled with his own sense of power that he opened up the bridge and found something there that destroyed him, the great city of Tilhtinora, culture as we know it. Other worlds abandoned us, and nothing was ever the same again. Typical stuff, really.
“What did he find there?”
“Does it matter? Some great black bird-things. Some historians actually think it was Lasser Arbellin, Dekheret’s nephew, who called the birds anyway? Now there was a twisted man. But what’s really interesting about the Talovian version here, though, is that they say another Hulgliev, or a pair of Hulgliev twins, caught Te’loria when it fell from Farsoth’s grasp. These Hulgliev, who aren’t named, supposedly stole away with the rose and hid it with the Hulgliev people, so that no other race would ever again benefit from its power. It took the great Lasser Arbellin and his personal army of Bloodknives and the all of the great Talovians to bring the world back together. And that’s why you’ve been hunted ever since, at least according to the frogs.”
“So we've recovered the the ship of the Hulgliev who stole the flower.”
“Exactly!” Fehris hops up and starts pacing. “Well, not exactly. I have yet to see the Talovians get much of anything right. But parts of the Talovian story are echoed in the story written on the wall of the ship. At least the part about two Hulgliev brothers taking the rose at Farsoth’s request, hiding it away somewhere, someplace that only a Hulgliev might find it. That, plus the Hulgliev skeleton we found? There's only one of them, but it could line up. And you did say that the ship seemed to have some sort of affinity to you when you were flying it, which wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility in Dekheret’s… Hang on, I’ve got something,” Fehris says, interrupting himself.
He sends me a tracer and forwards the broadcast over. I let the image take shape around me and I’m standing at the waterfront, seeing a view of Akarii podships coming down on me in formation, much the way I’d watched them from Nadrune’s city. But this is no drill. Mages attached to the combat netting on the ships’ exteriors throw down lances of fire, cutting through defenders who are manning the guns on the Tamaranth walls and the rooftops of buildings, and from the hatchways of the podships fall those large shimmering balls of flaming death.
Whoever sent the images had a vantage point near the Alabaster Tower—I recognize the position of the lagoon, the long dark curve of Hechinger’s Bridge, and some of the buildings that make up the Warrens. From where he or she stood, we can see that parts of the city were on fire, and off near the Tower are more flashes of battle. The Akarii ships make another pass, and then communication breaks off.
I shake my head. With the networks all down, lots of people are resorting to low power point-to-point transmissions like this one, from knife to knife, to get information out to the rest of the world. With these, we’ve patched together a view of what’s happened so far: hours after we landed at Ercan’s place, Nadrune had begun her aerial bombardment of the Old City. The city guard had taken the majestic white grohvers into the air. Those large winged-and-feathered lizards have been part of the city’s defenses nearly forever, but it was largely a symbolic gesture. The podships easily out-maneuvered the grohver, and the Akarii bombardment quickly brought down the power grids and with it, many of the wards around key governmental buildings. Official protests from the Chancellor had gone out to the other major Families, but got little reaction. Some ships set out from the harbor to engage the fleet directly, but I was guessing that they’d had about as much success as the grohvers did.
The Akarii then began landing small divisions of Tel Kharan with the podships, and the marines spread through the Old City, slaving mages that stood up against them and getting stronger as they went. They secured the Council Chambers and the Chancellor’s residence, the tall energy transmission towers, the twisting streets of Warrens where the merchants gathered for the daily markets, and even secured the Alabaster Tower, where the Twin Sisters were housed.
We relay transmissions to a Kerul operative even farther out in the suburbs, and they’re passed on from there. Some of them are from the Chancellor Aart himself, who still remains at large, moving from shelter to shelter. His traditional Krukkruk skin paints are bright and kaleidoscopic, his mane is spiked as impeccably as ever, and the tone of his words are relentlessly defiant, even though the Krukkruk language isn’t entirely intelligible to any of us. Some of the broadcasts are from others in the city’s service, Council members mostly, who give updates on the Akarii occupation and who call out to other families and smaller cities for assistance.
No one is answering.
Right now, Tamaranth is pretty much on her own.
Many of the transmissions are Nadrune’s propaganda. We don’t relay those. She’s working hard to portray herself as the next coming of Dekheret, and if I try and be somewhat objective about it, they’re doing a good job. Some even feature me, which pisses me off. Me standing next to her, like we are the best of friends. The two of us speaking in her quarters, and watching the podships fly—you get the sense that I helped plan the whole invasion. Someone has patched together an image of Nadrune, the Sister and me, which looks totally fake if you study it really closely. But it’s getting passed around a lot, and we’re told that the podships are dropping leaflets with the image into some of the residential areas of city.
Other transmissions make it out to us, too, that tell the broader story of the battle. People in several districts are working to get their part of the city walking again, and are sharing technical information back and forth. One shows one of the Akarii podships, evidently shot down, lying half submerged in the lagoon as the tide retreats around it. A riderless grohver perches defiantly atop it and cleans blood from its feathers with a long blue tongue. That one is faded from many forwards, and it flickers in and out with static, but we pass it along anyway. Talovians, who hate everyone most of the time, have begun to riot in the Stellar Downs and in the Commons. A lone mage had placed herself before the historic entrance to the Warrens, and had held off a full division of the marines with awesome skill. That’s an incredible scene to watch, filled with screaming civilians in Festivaal costumes and masks, coats and bowler hats running for cover, and there in the center of the chaos the mage rises up, in the carved lacquer armor of an ancient grohver-rider. She catches and holds all of the Tel Kharan’s force, spinning it in the air before her and then throws it back at them, until two more divisions finally bring her down.
I wonder, sadly, if anyone would ever know her name.
Why am I up here, you’re wondering, and not down with the fighting? Honestly, I’m struggling with that myself. I feel like I should be down there, in the streets, making a stand somewhere and helping in any way I can to do some damage before the Akarii decide to move out of the Old City into the rest of Tamaranth.
But Ercan convinced me to wait, and he had some good points:
1. I’m not part of the city guard.
2. I don’t have an army with me.
3. I’m just one person, and even I took the podship in now, I’d probably end up like that woman. Heroic and dead.
He wanted some time to see if he could mobilize more of the Kerul families, and is talking with them now.
But I don’t have to like it. And I don’t. I feel like I want to chew someone’s leg off. And Fehris is awfully close by.
There’s also the small matter of what to do about Mr. Capone and his
expectation of a podship delivery. I haven’t completely figured that one out yet, either, though I have an idea.
I’m staring at Kjat now, out the window.
She paces back and forth in that courtyard that’s loaded with bright, exotic plants. She’s pacing fast, talking to herself and kicking at rubble and watching the horizon, edgier and more restless than I am, if that's possible. I’ve tried to talk with her twice since we’ve landed—I don’t think she’s eaten anything or gotten any sleep either, and it’s clearly weighing heavily on her.
What did that fight in the warehouse do to her? What happened to her on the Akarii ship? She’s not talking.
She senses me watching her, and turns. I catch her eye. She jerks as if shocked, gives me a dark glance and then turns away from me, muttering and gesturing. Frankly, I wonder if she’s gone mad.
I walk out into the courtyard. “Are you all right?” I say.
She looks up into the sky, her head tilted as though she is listening to something else, and then she looks back at me. She nods, and then shakes her head. “I…I need time, Blackwell. I’ve got it for now, but I need time to… to get this under... to get this right.” Her eye twitches and she shudders. I reach out to clasp her on the shoulder, just camaraderie, really, but she backs away from my hand. I nod and back away. I give her some space.
Back in the garden room, Fehris is deep in a book again, so I go in search of Ercan.
I follow the sounds of shouting from deeper in the mansion, and I find him in some sort of cage. It’s in the center of a large, elaborate, circular room that has no windows, and only one door into it. In keeping with the house’s Flowermech architecture, the cage is shaped like a blossom descending from the ceiling, with metallic petals that enclose him. It’s all crawling with aether. A Kruk with a knife stands off to one side working a set of controls.