“Sorry about this, Gezer,” the Sergeant said in a broken voice that welled as if from a great cavern. “If you had excepted the drink, none of this would have been necessary. You would’ve just gone to sleep real gentle like, but orders are orders. You understand?”
Enk felt his face wet against the street, sensed his fingers twitched uselessly on the shaft of his musket. He lay there breathless, his mind a cauldron of swelling pitch. But if he did not move now, the sun would at last set upon House Gueye.
Up . . . get . . . up.
“When this is all over, we will all get a drink on me,” the Sergeant was saying, stepping closer.
A kind of knifing terror overcame Enk, one that reminded him of the helplessness he felt when Inanna had left, when Merka had been taken from him. It did not so much lance into him, as reach out of him. Wretched, clawing desperation, mixed with welling skirts of brilliance.
No. Not again. Never again.
He screamed and rolled, still clutching his musket. A dull roar rang behind him, then he was beneath the Padraig Wagon, sheltered from the reach of booted feet, hooking arms and legs about the wagon’s reach. Safe in shadow, if but for the moment.
The wagon sprung forward, serenaded in violent sounds—beasts and men alike, lifting voices in shock an awe for something alien sensed but not understood.
Suspended above rolling ruin, darkness gathered Enk closer to her bosom. He blinked back the blackness and grunted as a wheel struck a pothole and the contraption rattled for the fury of the road. The street flashed below him, one slip away from scraping his face raw.
He clutched at purchase—fingers aching, clung on for beloved life. The shadow of chasing Peacebringers fell away completely, and new voices pierced the air, furious and fading.
A brief span of monumental bliss. . . .
Then the driverless wagon made a recklessly precarious turn, and existence tilted as wheels left the surface of the road, stirring the fine threads on the back of Enk’s arms to further erection. For the first time he realized the utter madness of his escape scheme.
A bone-jarring jolt. The elevated wheels bobbed across the road, returning to the ground with marmoreal folly. Enk gulped from the impact, sensed his sword slid backward. The pommel of the weapon caught the street, and all was a jumble of flailing limbs and voiceless screams.
The world spun and spun . . . then stilled.
Agony, like a dozen clubs wracking his body all at once. The kind of pain that reduced reason to instinct, that made a bumbling fool of intellect. But there was no time to indulge, no span to gather breath, not here—not now.
The Padraig Wagon sped as it increased the interval between it and Enk’s prone form. The scarlet-splattered street shuddered beneath his chest. The sound of unseen boots scuffed the air, drawing nearer.
Enk lifted his hand, reached out toward the retreating wagon. His blood-smeared digits quivered, blurring into multiples of five. A sudden warmth washed through him as gold-glistening droplets rose from depths both fathomless and surreal.
Stop, damn you. Stop!
The four tethered-horses reared up almost as one, front limbs kicking emptiness, yoked to otherworldly metaphysics. The wagon lurched roughly and came to a halting stop.
Rather than flop about in a vein attempt to throw off torment’s embrace, Enk pushed himself onto his knees, sheathed his retrieved sword, and crawled toward his lost musket. Oxygen starved, his body pleaded, begged for mercy. He gave it none.
It was this or capture. This or death.
The watchers surrounding him and his misery flinched back, servants with faces pressed against black iron wrought gates and distant windows. Forced to stand on his own, the young scion wobbled onward, noticed the watchers’ attention had shifted from him to what lay behind him.
“STOP!” not one but a cacophony of voices yelled.
Enk dared not probe the source, dare not slacken his pace. All his focus lay on mastering the weeping wound he had become. The air about him roared with the thunder of discharged muskets, mixed with a buzz like a swarm of bees.
He dipped to the ground before the Padraig Wagon, watched its thick wooden doors erupt as it sprouted oval wounds—wounds that bleed splinters. The tethered-horses cried, and the wagon trotted forward again.
“Hold your fire, God damn it!” a voice shouted somewhere behind Enk. “That wagon is filled with enough black powder to level the Lord-Governor’s Palace.”
Enk’s bowels fluttered as he spat sputum onto the street. Gunpowder? In the Padraig Wagon?
He shook himself free from the sensation and gave chase after the wagon, his innards flaring from spheres of overlapping fire. It did not matter if it held Shaitan himself, he could not turn away now; It was his only avenue of escape.
The leather-backed driver platform hung just out of reach, as long and broad as any found on an upscale carriage. Enk tossed his musket onto it and quicken his lumbering pace, barely matching its ever increasing speed.
Without warning, the beguiling wagon swerved to one side. . . .
Enk fairly gagged for the approaching apparatus, for the pain that would come if it struck. . . . Horror clenched wings as talons about his back and spine. Leaping, he caught hold of the driving platform, only to collapse head over heels as it shifted to occupy the space he had just inhabited.
He clawed at the seat, stopped himself from tumbling off the other side. His heart made obscene sounds trapped within his tortured breast. That along with the emptiness where his lungs should be lent an air of unreality to the whole event.
Enk sat up bedeviled by a similar disorientation to what had plagued him earlier, fastening hands about reins, wheezing sensation back into lungs. The Padraig Wagon and tethered-horses settled into his ministrations without scruples as the glittering shouts of their pursuers dwindled in the azure bright.
But Enk could not bear to celebrate. Vengeance sang as Merka once sang from rumpled bedsides, recounting lives and mysteries, a voice like starlight clothed in moonlight, sweet enough to burn. It sang to what made him, him—the blacken heart, the disheveled past, the lacquered acid that labored as blood.
Tizkar had thought him his instrument, but soon the fool would learn as Mother had learned. His hate would be the only thing left when everything else was ash and cinder. . . .
Sorrow fell as moisture from eyes contemplating the absence of love.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Conflagration
The tethered-horses floundered, then became no more than husks for the ethereal seed Enk poured into their animal souls as he made them
charge the shuttered factory from a place of safety. Great swaths of lucent gold held the surface of the Padraig Wagon captive, devouring wood as flesh on the way toward its unglimpsed heart.
He stood riven beneath the obscene sky, his iron will a bastion raised against weakness and madness. Blood sheeted his chin, dripped from his nose, but he refused to pause long enough to stem the tide. He had ridden through disaster to get this far and did not mean to falter now.
Peals of human passions flared from points about the horizons, overlapping voices hanging on the verge of violence. Dozens of faces watched him from the street, hard-eyed men standing where gates had once barred entrance onto the property, indignant for the pallor of his Peacebringer uniform. But the advance of the fiery missile held the lion’s share of his attention.
The burning wagon erupted as the flames at last reached the black powder ensconced within it smoldering interior. The air fluctuated as though it were a sheet of silk cast upon a tender breeze, and the young scion of House Gueye set eyes upon the first manifestation of his ire.
An eruption of splinters, charred, fleshy remnants, and uneven quills, gowned in plumes of obsidian, swelling as if opening wings of midnight-colored reverence.
Then he was tumbling, carried backward by an unseen front of air. The sound of a muffled groan scraped his ears. The paved earth shuddered beneath his back.
&nbs
p; A void of rippling nothingness swinging upon a celestial wheel, revealing . . . revealing. . . .
Enk blinked up at the sky, gagging on something unfathomable. Not merely the pain of the explosion’s blow but the horror of being mentally linked to creatures embracing death, of being observed by something with marmoreal inscrutability.
When Enk returned upright, he found the watching throngs crouched on the street, unnerved by what his fury had wrought. An unconscious pang tightened his throat, and he spat crimson splotches onto the ground.
How? How could he feel sorrow—however slight—for those who had chased him through rioting mobs, hurling rocks and insults?
Fools. He and them both.
An entire city with nothing but fools, and, he, the biggest one of the lot, their savior, though they knew it not. It was almost enough to make him laugh and cry in equal measure.
Look how far our House has fallen, Father. Look!
And it seemed he stood as he had always stood, as one unworthy, as the dissolving of greatness into mist.
He turned to peer at the factory, which now stood doused in flames and plumes of smog. The view loosed a susurrus of muted passions within him, chief among them rekindled rage.
“Tizkar,” he whispered, raising his musket as one properly trained in its use. Revenge called to him the way a lover might, in tones that perfectly matched Inanna’s inflection.
The young scion strode forward. The cuts and scabs that crisscrossed his shoulders and torso were so numerous as to become one throbbing wound, a wound that pulsed in counter to the pang in his breast. It was will alone that kept him moving as his body longed to slump into slumber. Will and hatred.
Nightmare-colored smoke hung as a cloud about the fiery opening the explosion had created in the building’s side. Enk could do naught but hold his breath as he entered it, avoiding the chunks of burning timber that littered the ground. The smoke stung his eyes, blinding him to what waited.
Then he was free of the worst of it, coughing as he used his tattered sleeves to dab at his eyes. Blurred shapes reformed into the familiar warped-iron of broken looms and shattered machinery.
Enk heard the fire stir above him, the murmuring groans of beams too ancient to burn, yet burning nonetheless. Other than that and his own panted breaths, silence. Then the hesitant clatter of his booted steps.
Empty. The factory was—
No! Tizkar had to be here. He had to be.
If not, it would be nigh impossible to find someone with his ability in a city of half a million souls.
A hibernal chill invaded Enk’s limbs. He clamped his musket tighter and passed great rows of the clotted refuse of industry. Faint lights dazzled the doorways of the elevated offices, visions that gave him hope, yet left him no less fearful. Tizkar was nothing if not cunning, this much was known.
But what would be gained by retreating now?
Nothing . . . nothing.
He warred against the stairs, booted feet lifting to conquer step after step, lungs spasming for emptiness. Flames vast and golden climbed and soared overhead, devouring timber. Embers whirled and swirled downward, caught by drafts of heated air. The chuckling of a growing inferno.
Brushing soot and sweat from his brow, he faltered upon level ground, pierced to the pith, heaved himself forward upon a cataclysmic cough. He hefted his weapon, kicked opened the first door.
Naked corpses hung from the ceiling like grisly decorations, bodies mutilated, organs dangling from slashed stomachs, lidless eyes glaring. The stench of voided bowels. The reek of smoke heavy with blood and gore.
Enk staggered back, overwhelmed by shock as much as recognition. There, Anad hung, his chubby fingers twisted like crab claws above his head, and next to him, Faith, her weathered face almost peaceful in death. He remembered their hallowed company, the way they had attempted to comfort him by making him a part of their community.
Why? Why would Tizkar do such a thing?
Not pausing to fathom the answer, he stumbled for the next door, fearing what he would find. The door lurched open, smashed by the violence of his foot, revealing what he knew must be there. More corpses, likewise hanging, plucked and shorn by the same dolorous hand.
Lulu. Cat.
Terror gouged his pith as he spun away, turning toward the last door—Tizkar’s office. He knew with a certainty that made fiery mountains of his insides what the last portal must contain. His eyes spat hot tears across his cheeks. His lungs spewed flames along his throat.
Heartache. Swelling clouds of blackish gray. Elevated beams transforming into smoldering coals, collapsing to the factory floor. Schools of incandescent fishes tumbling to hardened earth.
Enk ran onward, heedless of all else but the horror that awaited. A spell of dizziness struck him, set the floor and scorching ceiling to spinning. He careened before the final threshold, gritted his teeth.
Narrowing his eyes against the wheeling world, the young scion batted the door ajar. . . .
The rind of the existence revolved and reeled about a kneeling figure, who appeared ecru for infernal light, like a virgin placed upon a pyre. She knelt with her back to Enk, scrawling scarlet patterns on the wall, dripping pale fingers into the gutted corpse slumped at her feet. Azure threads lifted to crown the area above her head before joining the plumes of obsidian smoke hugging the ceiling, and a dark stain marked where the musket ball had grazed her shoulder.
“Lulu!” Enk shouted, raising his weapon. He lumbered past an overturned chair and table, wobbled toward her as existence slowed its lurching pitch.
“He told me you would come,” she drawled in the spacey way of the mind-addled.
“Where is he?” the young scion asked, shaking his head. “Where is Tizkar?”
“Remember, my story? Marbles? Tizkar smashed all but his favorite one, thinking it alone had no flaw, but when his mother died, he destroyed that one too. If me and my sister only knew what we had done. . . .”
“Lulu!”
She rose, turning on a dancer’s pirouette, a puff of blue smoke escaping past her nala-packed pipe, her eyes agleam for watery torment. “I killed them all, Enk,” she said, tears adding new tracks down her blood-stained cheeks. “No one screamed. They just stood there while I stabbed . . . and. . . .”
“It wasn’t you,” he said, inhaling past a hacking cough. “Tizkar made you. You’re—”
“No! It was me!” Her knees slapped the floor as her throat convulsed about a soundless shriek. “I watched myself do it, watched bodies part beneath the edges of my blade. Watched . . . watched. . . .”
The whoosh of overhead flames. The crackling of burning timber.
Enk paused before her, but dared not lower his weapon, all the same his insides roiled in turmoil. He was not stupid, he could see the shape of Tizkar’s ploy. This was no more than one colossal—
A flurry of movements. Lulu uncoiling, one hand pushing a gun barrel to the side as the other skewered an unsuspecting stomach. The roar and noxious gush of a fired musket. A feminine limb sweeping out and overturning a masculine pair.
The young scion grunted as he plunged to the ground. His head struck the carpeted floor with such violence that the very world seemed upended, as if he had remained unmoved, as if the world had moved in his stead. The rioting chaos of the burning chamber flew away as a stone thrown, only to return as a metal wire tightened about his throat.
So it was that Enk writhed and careened, slammed into walls and chairs, a bull bridled by death clothed in a girlish guise, clawing at his neck, struggling to get bloody digits under the garrote locked about his throat. Airlessness conjured bright and indecipherable splotches across his vision, inked dark squiggles across a smoldering interior.
“Betrayer!” Lulu hissed into his ear, her voice wracked with sobs. “Betrayer! Betra—!”
Enk reeled through an opening, struck something that gave way beneath his and Lulu’s combined mass, then all was wailing debris and tumbling through emptiness.
&
nbsp; Then the weightlessness ended and everything became stillness.
■■■
Enk meandered beneath the dark waters of a fire-rimmed surface, dread hammering like a knotted hand in his chest. It was difficult to breathe, difficult to think. Thoughts had become anxious eels, slipped and weaved out of reach. Simply noticing them had become nigh impossible.
How had it all devolved to this?
Torment seized him, thrust him upward, smashed him into consciousness upon a hacking spasm. He blinked, stared up at the glowering distortions consuming the ceiling and elevated offices. Something fluttered beneath him—something broken and alive.
Enk rolled free upon a knifing moan. Lulu lay agog and groaning, a scarlet sheet unfolding out from the base of her skull. Her chest thrashed as she writhed, struggling to inhale through what sounded like flooded lungs.
“No,” he spat upon a screech, then shuffled back to her. Heat battered his face and back like an overwrought fist. Golden debris spiraled to the floor like hissing rain.
Lulu’s dozy eyes hooked him, pinched by what might have been recognition. “C-Cat. . . .” she whispered. “Tizkar’s daughter. . . . He . . . doesn—”
“Don’t try to speak,” he hissed, lurching to his feet amongst the ashy-plumes. “I’ll get you out of this.”
The young scion grabbed Lulu’s arms and dragged her toward the hole his gunpowder-filled carriage had made in the building. He strained from the effort, gasped and wheezed from the choking sting of noxious fumes. Sections of the ceiling crashed to the ground all about them with thunderous concussions, kicking burning timber across the world.
“Hurts. . . .” Lulu cried. A vermilion streak marked their path across the stone, brilliant for the gleam and glare of hellish lights. “It hurts!”
“All. Most. There,” he spat in between smoldering intakes of air.
Mindripper Page 24