by P. K. Lentz
Blaik didn't, really, but answered, “I think so.”
“Machines...sometimes...” Qilliara resumed. Again, as at the bar in Wirzel's, she hesitated. “...break.”
Her eyes narrowed, and her lips became a thin line. Clearly this was not an easy subject for her; it was a source of embarrassment.
“What you saw happen to me was the machine portion of me shutting down. It's been happening since some damage I sustained a while back. In better days, someone would be able to fix it, but it's not better days. There's never any warning, but when it does happen, it's always thirty-seven-point-three minutes until I recover. So that's why I need you. Or someone, who may as well be you. To protect me during those gaps.”
“I'm your human,” Blaik said swiftly. He still did not know what a minute was, but if it had taken thirty-seven of them to reach this spot from Scratch, he had a vague idea. “I've already shown you you can count on—”
“Save it. The job's yours until it kills you. Speaking of which, have I already seen the worst this Witch-Queen is likely to throw at me?”
“Oh no,” Blaik answered. “No, no, no, no. She has creatures. Some of them really big. Some of them, in the Sky Wing, can fly. And because the Sky Wing controls the air, her servants and no one else can travel by balloon. And she's got killer machines... bigger and way uglier than you.”
“You've fought them?”
“Not exactly. Mostly seen them from afar, which is why I'm alive right now. She also has the Maelstrom.”
“What's that?”
“A man... maybe. More of a monster, I guess. Put it this way: if someone says, 'Hey, what happened to that town that used to be here?' the answer is probably, 'The Maelstrom.'
“There,” Blaik finished with a sigh. “You see how easy it is to answer questions when someone asks? Honestly, it's harder not to. My turn again. You come from outside the Wall, right? What's out there?”
After more reluctance that seemed almost calculated to make it clear she considered him a nuisance, Qilliara yielded, “What's out there is a war. This world you know, everything you have ever seen, everything that exists inside your Wall is just a pocket. A broken fragment of a destroyed reality, or layer, as we call them. Thousands of layers were shredded at the very start of the First Layer War by weapons designed for that very purpose. Others opened doorways into a dimension of chaos, evil, and depravity, which is where your Warpies came from.” Qilliara looked down her nose at Blaik. “You wanted answers. You have them. Let's move.”
“People who go through the Wall,” Blaik prodded, “what happens to them? If I had gone down the slide—”
“You would have died instantly in the subverse. You can't exist there.”
“Hmm.” Blaik took an instant to absorb the sureness of the death he had just avoided. However, given the vastness of information Qilliara possessed and the difficulty of conversing with her, he was loath to pause too long in needling her. So he asked, “Who's at war? Over what?”
“Thanks to me, you know more about your world than anyone else in it, and you need more. Are you rested yet?”
“No. Stop being a stuck-up bitch and tell me.”
Qilliara's freezing stare made parts of Blaik's anatomy consider seeking the safety of higher ground. But they held fast, and he delivered a hard return glare.
“One chance,” Qilliara told him.
This was effective enough shorthand to make Blaik recall her warning from earlier, when he had laughed at her name. One chance to reconsider before I kick the crap out of you.
“Sorry,” Blaik said, less than sincerely. “But I do have a right to know what I'm fighting for. Maybe you're on the wrong side of this war, and—”
“And?” She had called the bluff which Blaik instantly knew he should not have bothered making.
“And nothing. I'd still be on your side. But come on, why are we wasting breath arguing when... Well, you don't breathe, but still—”
“The previous owners,” Qilliara interrupted loudly. “Other beings ran the universe before humans. The Gra. They came to take it back.”
“Oh,” Blaik said dumbly. “Who's winning?”
“Are you seriously making that one of your questions?”
“Oh,” Blaik said dumbly, again. “How bad is it?”
“We haven't won a battle. And here I sit, talking to you.”
“Oh. What will the Mind Collapser do?”
“Set it off in an enemy's layer, and higher thought becomes impossible, making everyone... pretty much like you.”
Blaik scoffed. “You're a mean lady, you know that? Do you have any friends?”
“They're all dead.”
“Hmm. Yeah, mine, too. So the plan is to turn all your enemies' brains into mush?”
“No, just the Supreme Intellect that guides them. It's less a plan than a last hope. And it won't even be that if you don't get off your ass at some point.”
“Fine, fine...” Blaik stood and stretched. “Never too tired to save the—what was it again?”
“Universe.”
“That.”
* * *
Three
Guided by Blaik, they walked a barren landscape of cracked, dusty earth from which jutted jagged rocks of reddish-brown. Blaik meant for them to use the rocks' shadows as cover, but Qilliara did not cooperate in this plan, preferring instead a straighter path. Only begrudgingly would she divert, never failing to make clear with a look that Blaik was testing her patience. Although she accepted him, for now, as her guide to the Witch-Queen, she did not allow him to lead. Or rather, she declined to slow her stride enough to let a mere human keep pace.
“How far is it?” Qilliara asked early on.
“We're near the Wall, and Witch City is at the center of the world. I always avoid it, but... six turns, I'd say. Four at your pace.”
“'Turns'?”
“Of the Witchwheel, in Witch City. Every time it completes a turn, bells ring in all the cities' towers.”
“Of course they do,” Qilliara said, clearly not meaning it. “How long is a turn?”
Blaik had to give that some thought. “I don't know in minutes, but as long as it takes for most people to get tired, sleep, wake up, and start over again.”
“Right. No night or day,” Qilliara observed, cryptically. “We'll make it in two. And Witchwheel, Witch City...? You actually might be the brightest human here.”
Moments later, lagging behind far-striding Qilliara, Blaik muttered, “It's a city where a witch lives. What would you call it?”
“Anything else,” she answered loudly.
Evidently, earshot meant something different for an unbreathing half-machine. Better he learn that now than later, Blaik decided, so that he might better decide when his thoughts were best left unspoken.
Probably all the time, according to her. Would that some gentler creature had fallen from the sky in a flash of blue fire and saved him. But Qilliara had come, and drifters could not be choosers.
After what Blaik judged to be about a quarter-turn spent trudging with gaze firmly underfoot, he unexpectedly bumped into Qilliara, who had stopped.
She stood staring into the distance. Blaik stared at her face.
“What color is that?” he asked.
“Balloons,” she said. It did not seem a sensible answer.
“Your eyes,” he clarified.
Qilliara reached up with one gloved hand and aimed Blaik's head in the direction hers was facing. “It's violet. You said only the Witch-Queen's forces use balloons.”
“That's right.” Two black dots hung over the distant horizon. “They're probably coming for us. I've never seen that color. Not just eyes. Anywhere.”
“Can you pilot one?”
Blaik laughed sharply. “I was unlucky enough to be in one once. A passenger. Well, cargo. Wait. What? You don't want to—I can't even make myself say it.”
Before Blaik finished, Qilliara strode away in the direction of the two dark, bulbous shapes
in the gray sky. Blake hurried behind and saw her hand go to the small of her back and vanish briefly into a slim satchel affixed there.
The hand emerged seconds later holding a black baton which, as with her knife earlier, could scarcely have been concealed on that part of her body.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
“Neg-pouch. Portable gateway to a self-contained pocket of subverse.”
“Oh,” Blaik said, continuing to follow her swiftly toward a sight from which he had only ever hid.
“You were right. It is easier to just answer your questions. Shuts you up.”
Blaik sighed, a sound little differentiated from the hard breathing brought on by this turn's not fully unwelcome exertion.
“Mean, mean, crazy machine lady,” he muttered. “And I know you heard that.”
After too long, they reached a formation of rough red rock which Qilliara wasted no time in beginning to ascend. For a mere human, the going was hard. Where Qilliara strode or hopped from sharp crag to perilous outcropping, Blaik was forced to clamber on all fours and find circuitous routes to avoid potentially neck-breaking stumbles. To save himself from one of these, he was forced to release his stolen saber, for which he had no sheath. It clanged loudly on several rocks on its way to vanishing.
Eventually Blaik rolled onto the top of the formation, where Qilliara had been standing for some time, facing the two balloons. They loomed closely enough now that Blaik could see the rigging ropes, the dangling bags of ballast, and the gondola's slowly rotating propeller blades whose faint whup-whup carried on the desert wind.
“What does that do?” Blaik asked of Qilliara's black baton while brushing reddish dust from his duster.
“Watch.”
But for now, Qilliara did nothing worth watching. Instead she just stood as if waiting to be seen, which surely she—they—had been already.
“Ehn'mies of Her Maj'strix!” cried an amplified Warpy voice from one of the gondolas. “Sur'nder now or be stirm'nated whar you stand!”
“Balloons are armed with shard cannons,” Blaik pointed out to Qilliara, who was sure to choose neither of the two options just presented to her. “They'll cut us to pieces. Me, anyway. I imagine you'll be fine.”
Under power of their lazy, stern-mounted iron props, the balloons drifted closer.
“Get behind me,” Qilliara instructed.
That idea had occurred to Blaik, but he had resisted the urge to ask, favoring the alternative of just doing it once the shards started flying. As such, he forewent token protest and assumed the suggested position.
Small side-bars popped out near the thinner end of Qilliara's black baton, making it cross-shaped. She wrapped her fingers around these, two on either side of the shaft, holding it so that the main tube of the baton ran along the inner part of her forearm. With the other hand, she extracted a long strap hidden inside the tube, which she wound multiple times around her arm before securing the strap's end to itself.
When she had finished, the baton was tightly affixed to her left forearm.
“Wrap your arms around me,” she said. “Hold on.”
“Signal yer c'mpliance by lying face-down!” the amplified voice from above commanded. “This's yer final warn'n!”
Faced with two conflicting instructions, Blaik chose to heed those issued by the one who might possibly take him beyond the Wall, and only likely to his death, rather than the one who surely would take him to death, and nothing else.
He hugged Qilliara's waist. Warmth radiated through the skin-tight black garment that filled the large gaps between plates of armor which remained in place in spite of a lack of visible buckles. He pressed his cheek against one such plate. Once it must have been smooth, but now its surface was pocked and battered.
If it turned out that Qilliara had only delayed his death by some portion of a turn, Blaik thought idly, this would not be a particularly unpleasant place to meet his end.
“Shard cann'n, ready!”
Even as the balloon captain shouted this order, Qilliara took aim at his distant gondola with her arm and the tube jutting from it.
“What does it do?” Blaik asked again.
At first, he thought that her answer was, Tsk, as a sharp breath blown through sealed lips. But quickly he realized this sound had been made by the tube, from the end of which suddenly protruded an exceedingly thin black line. Being so thin, the line all but vanished into the distance on a course for the nearest of the two balloons.
At the moment the Warpy captain cried, “Fire!” Blaik was dragged forward in a jolt which sorely tested the strength of his grip on Qilliara's waist. It held, if just, while his stomach lurched, the ground dropped from under his feet, and an embarrassingly high-pitched yelp was wrenched from his throat.
Wind buffeted his face and tugged the greasy tendrils of his hair, and he knew he was doing what men were not meant to do, and not simply because the Witch-Queen ruled the skies.
Williym Blaik flew.
Hugging Qilliara more tightly than he had ever hugged anything, he sailed with her into the air, moving upward (his stomach informed him) instead of the more natural down. It was the string-like line from Qilliara's forearm-tube which drew them up, closer and closer to the metal gondola of the balloon, or so Blaik judged when he opened his eyes a crack. That Qilliara's arm was not ripped from its socket in this enterprise Blaik could only conclude was due to her being forty per-something machine.
If Blaik's body could have tensed any more, it would have at the sound which accompanied their ascent: a steady, metallic rattle that he had only been unfortunate enough to hear one time in the past. This was the sound of a shard cannon, the cylindrical barrel of which belched out jagged bits of metal in a steady stream.
Eyes tightly shut, breathing not at all, Blaik clung to the back of the warm, hard body on which his life fully depended, and he awaited the ripping of his flesh.
What came instead, as the deadly rattle grew ever louder, was a heavy impact on his upper arm. Though his mind spun, it managed somehow to conclude from available evidence that this represented his meeting with the hull of the balloon gondola. As such, his mind at last begrudgingly signaled his eyes to open, that they might facilitate his body's continued survival.
Qilliara dangled by one hand from the gondola's rim, while Blaik in turn clung to her. Sensing that this state could not long endure, and also sensing her imminent boarding of the crew-filled gondola, he began (while pointedly avoiding looking down) to search for handholds. Fortunately, the metal hull of the gondola being quite irregular, as if built from rusted scrap, he quickly found some sort of vent and stuck one hand into its slats whilst keeping the other arm wrapped around Qilliara.
Unsurprisingly, this did not fit Qilliara's plan. She hoisted herself up and over, heedless of the human baggage attached to her back. Forced to quickly choose between adhering to her or to the hull, Blaik found it not a hard choice. He chose the hull, for although the chatter of the shard cannon had ceased, the frantic shouting and scrape of drawn blades which replaced it made the inside of the gondola an unappealing destination. And so he clung by fingers and boot-toes to a spot arguably just as bad, with a heavy wind chapping his face and doing its best to return him to a distant desert floor at which he dared not look.
Williym Blaik was not a talker to himself, but in the absence of human ears he was not averse to addressing an inanimate object or two.
“Screw,” he said through clenched teeth to the thing nearest his face. “It's time to be bold. You're meant to help her. Being a hanger-on won't get you outside the Wall.”
Your funeral, replied the screw.
“Shut up,” Blaik told it, and he threw one arm up and over the rail and hauled himself in.
Qilliara was already on deck, the focus of a mad melee. The balloon's crew consisted of perhaps twenty human and Warpy servants of Her Majestrix, all dressed in the light green jackets of the Sky Wing. All presently were focused on expelling the boarder (or
her corpse) from the gondola. They were having little luck: as Blaik watched, Qilliara hoisted a pink-skinned little Warpy bodily over the rail, his scream fading as he fell. She spun and blocked the swipe of a fat, serrated cleaver, the holder of which became the next whose scream trailed off to nothing. An elbow to a horned head and boot to a pig-nose sent two more crewmen to the deck.
You're unarmed! the screw called up as Blaik was pondering that very point. She doesn't need you, anyway.
“That's your opinion,” he said back, silently, lest he call attention to himself.
While Qilliara sent a few more crewmen to their deaths far below and others sprawling on the deck with broken necks, a human crewman offered a solution to Blaik's dilemma by leaping onto a crate near to Blaik's spot on the rail. In the human's hands was a crossbow, and in aiming it at Qilliara over the heads of his crewmates, he obligingly gave an unseen Blaik the back of his light green jacket.
Taking no time to think, Blaik threw himself over the rail, into the gondola. His feet were on the deck of rusted metal grate for but a second before he jumped up behind the crossbowman, grabbed his weapon and kicked him down to the deck. As he fell, the bolt flew wild, taking a Warpy in his crooked neck.
The bow was an auto-loader, Blaik was pleased to see. He had not used them before, but had held one, and knew enough to pull the long lever under the stock to re-tension the string and load a fresh bolt.
Two Sky Wingers at the back of the crowd now noticed Blaik and turned to come after him. With four shots and three pumps of the lever, Blaik took them down, along with the man from whom he had stolen the bow. With his next pull, he took aim at the elaborately uniformed Warpy captain, who stood upon a bench at the rear of the battle shouting guttural encouragement at his dying crew.
Blaik's first shot pierced the captain in the eye. Silenced, the captain twisted and doubled over so that Blaik's next bolt got him in the back, and he rolled forward over the rail, vanishing. He put two more bolts into the backs of two of Qilliara's remaining assailants before the crossbow's store of missiles was depleted. Discarding the thing, Blaik leaped to the deck on a course to trade it for an even better toy.