by P. K. Lentz
Blaik leveled his fracker at the Priest and fired. The axe descended, missing Qilliara by a fraction as she slithered off the train car's edge, while the Priest flew backward, smashing into two others who in the meantime had emerged from the same hatch.
Aiming at those two, Blaik fired again and again, and they flew like children's dolls off of the carriage roof. A burst of movement from below drew Blaik's attention to a fresh fight on the ground. More Priests had come from the carriage interior by the side door, where doubtless they had lain in ambush since seeing their comrades' doom become inevitable.
Qilliara threw one, snapping his thick neck in the process, then grabbed another's pole-ax, ripped it from his hands and gutted him with it before recovering her fallen razer and blasting a third in the face at close range.
This last fell on top of her, pinning her momentarily before she easily kicked off his considerable bulk and sprang up, ready for more.
What she found, however, was that Blaik had already fracked the last standing Priest in sight, sending him across the tangle of armored bodies to land hard and join its number.
After checking the carriage, Qilliara holstered her razers, then wiped and spat dark red Warpy blood from her lips. From behind the firegun, Blaik surveyed the carnage which he had helped to create.
He laughed in disbelief. “I started this turn thinking I'd die,” he said. “Instead I'm going to bring down Jaxitza.”
But Qilliara was busy causing some metallic sounds out of sight at the engine's rear. Emerging, she extended an open hand toward Blaik. “Throw me the infractor.”
Blaik obliged. Catching it and making an adjustment on its handle, Qilliara waded a few feet through the pool of armored dead, then aimed and fired the weapon at the empty first train carriage. With the groan of straining metal, the carriage began to tip away from her. A second and third shot sent it tumbling onto its side, off of the track. The scraping sound had evidently been that of her detaching the foremost carriage from the engine. But not the second; as the first fell, it twisted and slid halfway off the tracks.
Walking down the train's length, Qilliara fired a fracker blast at each carriage, until all were derailed and lay on their sides, and only the engine remained upon the tracks.
“You just watching?” Qilliara asked acidly on her way back.
“No.” Quickly, Blaik ducked inside the engine to start tossing out corpses.
In his present company, that seemed to be one of his main functions.
“Your vehicle has been commandeered by the Blue Fire Army,” he announced to the dead engineer as he dumped him out the side hatch.
Shortly after, Qilliara entered and wasted no time surveying the engine's assortment of levers and dials.
She was no time-waster, this one.
“How many Priests was that?” Blaik asked her. “A hundred?”
“Hundred and twenty-two,” she corrected, tracing the path of a winding brass tube across the chamber.
“This thing is facing the wrong way,” Blaik observed. “How do we ride it to Witch City?”
She answered: “Backwards.”
* * *
Six
There were no portholes in the rear of the engine, so once Qilliara got it up to speed and set the controls, they rode on its roof. Qilliara stood in the top firegunner's post while Blaik climbed out entirely and found holds among the various pipes and cables. Under a canopy of billowing steam, he closed his eyes and savored the swift air on his face .
“I've never traveled this fast before!” he commented, overloudly to combat the rush and the rhythmic chugging. “When I wasn't falling, anyway!”
Blaik looked over to see silent Qilliara's violet eyes intent on the arrow-straight track to Witch City.
“I bet to you this seems slow,” he went on. “Your people must have machines that go much faster, right?”
“Yes,” she returned without looking. “It's not possible to take you with me. Quit asking.”
“I wasn't—!” Blaik protested, although he had been working toward it. “I'm keeping my mind off whatever's ahead. It can't be good.”
“I wouldn't blame you if you got off now,” she said. “You should act in your own interest.”
In fact, self-interest was exactly what drove Blaik to stay with her. “You need me.”
“From this point, if and when I shut down, I dislike your chances of surviving, much less providing any help.”
“I've been useful until now, and I have no plan to stop. I could help out there, too, in your war. If things are as desperate as you say, you can't turn down volunteers.”
“To be of use out there, you would require more training and enhancements than it is practical or even possible for us to give. And again, I can't take you anywhere. My capsule is for one. Me. The choice you have is to give up that line of thought or jump off this train. The further you are from me and Witch City—” She spoke it with a curl upon her lip not unlike the one which appeared when Wirzel had served her the stew. “—the greater will be your chances of avoiding death or capture.”
“No chance,” Blaik said glumly, allowing no space in which logic might dent his determination. “I'd rather be a part of bringing down Jaxitza, even if it means I die. I was about to die anyway. Didn't bother me that much.”
“You should know that I have no interest in 'bringing down' Jaxitza. If she has the Piece, I'll take it by any means necessary and leave. If her reign ends in the process, so be it.”
“So be it,” Blaik sighed.
Mere moments ago, atop this train he had felt more free than at any point in his life. After a few words shared with Qilliara, the rush of air battering his face and hair became a chill nuisance.
Mean lady. She was as proficient at killing spirits as she was at killing Priests.
When next Blaik shut his eyes, it was not to savor visions of a grand future but in surrender to the demands of a severely mistreated body which had not slept at all in this turn of the Wheel or half of the last.
“You should go below and rest,” Qilliara said observantly, “while there's a chance.”
“Don't tell me what to do,” Blaik snapped.
Still, a moment later he clambered down a ladder on the side of the speeding train and ducked into the cabin, where he sat in a corner and rested his head on vibrating metal.
“You should stay and take her place,” he muttered. “You'd make a good Witch-Queen yourself.”
From above came Qilliara's agreement. “I would.”
Blaik aimed his response at her calves on the ladder, all that was visible of her. It was a type of reply she could not overhear.
He tried to rest. For a long while, sleep eluded, kept at bay by the sense that attack might come any moment. But at length, when no sounds of such pierced the rhythmic chugging of the engine, the bulk of Blaik's consciousness fled, leaving him only to lift his lids now and then to be sure it was no mad dream that he sat aboard one of Her Majestrix's trains on the way to overthrow her. If Qilliara's mission so required.
After fifty or a hundred such fleeting returns to reality, Blaik was awakened by a loud thump and a nudge on his leg. He had slept with the fracker in his right hand, resting on his lap. Instantly becoming alert, he aimed it down his legs—
—at Qilliara's head. Her eyes were shut, body twisted with one foot hooked on a rung of the ladder on which she'd been standing. There was no immediate sign of injury, nor any sounds of conflict without.
“No, no, no...” Blaik breathed, scrambling to his knees over her inert form. “Don't do this now.” His mind raced. “Not now. Come on. Hey, wake up!”
He shook her violently, knowing it was of no use.
“All right,” he said aloud, to Qilliara or to the ladder, it didn't matter which. “It could be worse. Death-slide was worse. Just have to wait thirty-seven... whatevers. Probably won't get attacked in that time. Until then...” He realized in a flash: “Got to stop the train.”
He rushed to
the front, where the dials and levers were located and where the terrain they had already crossed was visible through a few small panes of scratched glass. Studying the controls briefly, Blaik came to no conclusion... and so just began pulling and spinning.
The engine rumbled and lurched, nearly sending him sprawling onto a floor which suddenly shivered. Recovering, he spun another dial, which must have been the right one, since the shaking and rumbling eased, leaving only the familiar squeal which had earlier accompanied braking. The plain and sparse trees outside the windows passed ever more slowly, until they, and likewise the engine, were still.
Returning to Qilliara, Blaik unhooked her boot from the ladder and set his hand on the nearest razer. It inflicted no pain. He drew it and kept it in his right hand, switching the fracker to the left, then looked up through the open hatch.
Whatever his plan might have been, it evaporated at the sight of balloons and bat wings.
They could not have just arrived, Blaik concluded from the four balloons' high altitude and position. Qilliara must have seen them before her crash to the engine floor.
“Which means...” Blaik concluded aloud, “they're following us, letting us continue. Why do I feel like that's a bad sign?”
Sliding the top hatch shut, he put his back to the ladder and weighed his options.
He could start shooting, of course, and keep on shooting for thirty-something somethings. But Qilliara hadn't fought them, which suggested it was an awful idea for a mere human to attempt it without her. Besides, who knew if whatever the razers used as ammunition would last that long. If it didn't, he was clueless how to reload them.
“Thirty-seven is a long time. At least it felt that way while I was carrying you. But you're heavy.”
The Witch-Queen's watchers had seen the train stop, but it might take them a while to build up the strength and/or nerve to come knocking. He could sit and wait until that time.
And then start shooting.
“Better...” he remarked. “Of course, you could always—Blaik, would you be quiet? I'm trying to think.”
“Enemies of Her Majestrix! You are surrounded. Throw out your weapons and exit the train!”
“I said shut—” Blaik began. Then, “Oh.”
The artificially amplified voice seemed to have come from just outside the train.
“So it's worse now. Probably should have kept moving. Shut up, Blaik! What now?”
Looking down at Qilliara, he rubbed jaw-scruff with the back of the hand that held the razer, and he thought.
“Exit the train now and you will not immediately be harmed!”
Not an ideal offer, but it did fit well with the germ of a plan that had come to him in the preceding moments.
“No time to think this through,” he said as he stooped and returned the razer to the prongs which held it on Qilliara's hip. “But I don't sense a better one coming along. Time to act without cal... calcu... thinking a lot.”
Sliding the top hatch open, Blaik mounted the ladder, pitched out the fracker and climbed into view on the train roof with open hands upraised.
The amplified voice had come from a rusted device held to the mouth of a tall, chalky-faced human male in the black robes of Jaxitza's highest officials. Arrayed around him were a few dozen Priests whose armor was heavier than the ones from the train and bore the red bat-wing-like insignia of the Witch-Queen's elite. Instead of pole-axes and hammers, they carried miniature cannons, the barrels of which were connected by twisted cables to bulky backpacks.
Behind the Priests were six large-wheeled vehicles covered with plates of rusted armor, like lighter-weight train engines that needed no rails on which to move. No two were quite alike, but each had in common a single, long-barreled weapon, with some sporting a number of smaller ones besides.
Some distance behind those vehicles, and on the other side of the engine, too, stood arrayed an uncountable number of Jaxitza's ordinary forces, both Priests and lesser footsoldiers.
Above, the balloons had descended and the flyers wheeled lower.
Blaik complained inaudibly to Qilliara, “You couldn't have given me a poke and told me, Whatever happens, don't stop the train?”
“Where is the other?” the official in black demanded without aid of his amplifier.
“Inside,” Blaik answered. “She's knocked out. I've captured the killer and wish to turn her over to Her Majestrix.”
* * *
Seven
“You?” the pale official questioned. “How?”
“With that.” While keeping hands open and raised, Blaik indicated the fracker on the ground.
The official gave a signal which sent several Priests rushing toward the engine. One recovered the device.
“Yes, it is very like criminals and heretics to turn on each other. On behalf of Her Glorious Majestrix, I accept custody of the prisoner,” the official pronounced.
“You've got it all wrong,” Blaik said. “She forced me to be her guide. I've been waiting for my chance.”
As Priests yanked open the side hatch and poked mini-cannon barrels inside to rule out ambush, Blaik climbed up fully out of the engine. Only a few of the hulking, armored Warpy Priests were small enough to fit through the hatch, and these only if they shed their bulky weapons, which they did before entering. The rest kept their cannons on Blaik.
“To the ground, please,” the official ordered. “Her Majestrix desires both of you delivered to her in a living condition.”
Earlier, Blaik had been correct to interpret a seemingly good sign as a bad one. The phrase 'delivered in a living condition' inspired a similar dread.
Too late now for second guesses. Climbing down, Blaik submitted to a rough search of his person by the Priests. Meanwhile, the smallish troops who had gone inside the engine emerged carrying the inert Qillara by legs and shoulders. They set her on the ground.
“She be right heavy, Ark-Bishipp,” one reported.
Another, kneeling, reached for a razer on Qilliara's hip.
“He really shouldn't—” Blaik started.
The Priest yelped in pain and drew back clutching his hand. His comrades tensed, their many mini-cannon barrels sweeping rapidly back and forth between the two captives.
“Only she can touch them,” Blaik explained. “I got zapped, too.”
No need to update them on his subsequently acquired permission.
“Try again,” the official instructed.
Another, larger Priest shouldered his weapon, knelt by Qilliara and attempted to remove a razer. He shouted in pain, lost his balance, and tumbled over.
“Again!”
A third and fourth Priest likewise failed before their superior relented.
“Very well. Put extra irons on her. Tie the weapons to her legs, and be sure she cannot reach them.”
Worryingly heavy iron shackles appeared. One set found its way onto Blaik's wrists, binding them in front of his body.
“If you're open to a suggestion...” he ventured when the Priests looked set to bind Qilliara in the same way, with hands in front. “Put her arms behind her. Much safer that way.”
“Why, thank you,” the official said. Then to the troops: “As he says.”
From among the vehicles parked behind the pale official, two rectangular boxes of rusted metal were brought forward on creaking wheels. Standing upright, they were about as tall and wide as an average human, with a small, barred window about where said human's face would be. Even did he not already know their purpose from having seen them before (he was fortunate enough never to have occupied one), it was easy enough to ascertain.
“Arketchup—” Blaik pleaded.
“Ark-Bishipp,” the chalky human corrected coldly.
“Is the box really necessary? I've delivered this enemy of Her Amazing Majestrix to you. Is that not proof enough of my devotion?”
The Ark-Bishipp smiled thinly. “Our reports indicate the female's partner taking an active role in the aggression against Her Majestrix.
”
“Confusion, Ark-Bishipp, that's all! It was chaos. Things happened fast. You know what reports can be like.”
“Indeed. That is why Her Majestrix wishes you to live. The truth will be ascertained.”
Priests grabbed either of Blaik's shoulders and force-marched him to one of the metal boxes. Two more carried Qilliara, wrapped in chains, to the second. She was clumsily maneuvered inside while Blaik stepped into his and turned around to see its door shut loudly in his face. Four bolts slid decisively into place from without.
Horrible plan, Blaik, the thick bars of the little window said to him. Horrible, horrible, horrible!
“Shut up.”
The box lurched and tilted. On wheels that jarred and squealed, Blaik was carted to the waiting vehicles, then tossed about inside the container as it was loaded onto the rear of one. The box remained in an upright position that forced him to stand or lean uncomfortably.
Outside, commands were issued and obeyed. Shortly Blaik's vehicle, along with others he could see through his window, roared to life. The metal walls of his prison shook and vibrated, and he began the final leg of his journey to the Witch-Queen.
Yes, quite final! taunted the bars.
That Blaik could not, and had not, seen Qilliara's box on any of the other visible vehicles gave him reason to think it might have been loaded right beside his own. The thought gave some comfort, but not too much. Qilliara seemed just as likely as not to save herself and leave him to rot, and that was even before she blamed him for their current... inconvenience.
Granted, it was his fault. Arguably. But it was her mission; she might have given better instructions.
How many of the thirty-seven m-things had passed? When she recovered, Blaik wanted to be sure he communicated with Qilliara quickly, before she could decide not to bother with him.