by Nathan Long
“Okay, fine, then I guess I’m just gonna have to threaten a holy relic again.”
I stepped to the headless corpse, then kicked the second wand over toward where the priest and paladins all huddled together.
“Lhan, aim at the wand.”
The paladins all backed away as he got a bead on it, but Lhan had caught the gist now, and raised his wand at them.
“Back where you were!”
They inched back. Lhan aimed at the wand again. I looked up at the ceiling.
“Okay, Ru-Kol, ready to open the door now?”
“I do not believe you will do this. The blast will kill you too.”
“Do you think I care at this point?”
“Perhaps not. But your lover will not kill you. I see it in his eyes.”
Lhan laughed. “You misread me, friend. I am ready to die if my mistress and I cannot be together. Will you test me?”
Sheesh! Was he bluffing? Or was he gonna kill us if this didn’t work out? I couldn’t tell, but if it was a game, I wasn’t gonna spoil it. I raised my voice again.
“Okay, Ru-Kol, here we go. If that door don’t open by the time I count to five, that relic is history!”
No answer.
I swallowed. “One. Two. Three. Four—”
It wasn’t Ru-Kol who blinked.
All of a sudden the priest broke for the door and slapped his hand against the circle beside it. It slid open. The motherfucker had some kind of override!
I jumped after him and hauled him back just as he was running through. The door whooshed closed again, but I didn’t care. I had my ticket out.
Ru-Kol was wailing on the intercom. “Reverence Ru-Vas! You should not have done that!”
The priest was maroon with rage. “And you should not have left us here to die!”
I bonked him on the head with the flat of my blade, then turned back to the paladins as he wilted, waving them away from the gun.
“Back off!”
They did, and I snatched it up, slung it over my shoulder, then hauled up the wobbly priest and put my sword to his neck.
“Alright, Lhan, keep ’em covered. Let’s—”
I stopped as I saw a string on the floor below the locker I’d ripped open—Lhan’s balurrah! I hesitated, afraid somebody would make a move if I stooped for it, but I had to get it. I took my sword from the priest’s neck, stepped out, reaching with the sword, and hooked the balurrah with the tip, then lifted. It dangled from the tip as I brought it to me. I pulled it off and looped it over my neck, then shoved Ru-Vas toward the door. Lhan had been covering the other guys. He hadn’t seen a thing.
“Okay, pal. Open sesame.”
Ru-Vas didn’t get it, but he got it, and put his hand to the circle. I held my breath, afraid old Ru-Kol had some kinda override for his override, but it whooshed open just like it should.
“Hallelujah. Let’s go.”
And that’s how we did it the rest of the way through the jail, door by door, hallway by hallway, until we entered a hallway with a big metal door at the end instead of a glass one, and two normal white sliding doors on each wall.
I nodded ahead. “What’s through there?”
Ru-Vas swallowed. “That is the entry chamber.”
“The way out?”
“Yes.”
And probably a welcoming committee. “Right. Lhan, stay behind me, and be ready to shoot if I drop.”
“Aye, Mistress.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
I put Ru-Vas more in front of me, afraid of what we might find when we opened the door, and we started forward again, but before we got halfway down the hall, I heard a “whoosh whoosh” behind me, then another pair of whooshes ahead. I hit the deck shouting.
“Lhan! Down!”
He dropped like a pro and four crossbow bolts whistled over our heads to thud into the one guy still standing, Ru-Vas. Then there were four paladins charging us out of the four open doors, shortswords raised.
Lhan rolled and fired and the two guys behind us died shrieking and burning. I sprang at the guys in front and sheared through their swords before crashing into them and knocking them flat. They came up again quick and reaching for daggers, but I slashed behind me and they collapsed, howling, their backs opened to the ribs. Lhan finished ’em off with a couple of quick bursts and we stood there panting and choking on the smell of cooked meat.
I looked down at Ru-Vas, who had toppled over, dead, with two bolts through the chest, and one in the gut. The last one was in the wall. Lhan’s jaw clenched.
“It seems we need another escort.”
“Maybe not.”
I grabbed the priest by collar and dragged him to the steel door, then looked back at Lhan. “Get ready, but don’t go crazy. We gotta leave one alive.”
“We do?”
“Misdirection, remember?”
“Ah, yes.”
Lhan raised the gun, and I raised Ru-Vas’s arm. Then I noticed a big silver bracelet around the priest’s wrist. I looked back at the guys we’d just killed. They had some too, but Ru-Vas had more bands on his. Was it that simple? I grabbed the bracelet and tried to pull it off. It was too tight, like it had been shrink-wrapped to him.
“Sorry, pal.”
I chopped his hand off at the wrist, then pulled the bracelet off his bloody stump and waved it in front of the circle.
Whoosh.
The door opened onto a dim, metal-walled room that looked like every prisoner induction center I’d ever been processed through, except for the sad-faced priest cowering behind the table with some kind of hologram of the whole jail on it like a doll house made of light. No wonder the little fucker had been able to see us so well! His hand was hovering over a panel covered with glowing white circles. Lhan aimed his wand at him. I checked around to make sure there was nobody else in the room, then gave him a smile.
“Hello, Ru-Kol. Wanna back away from that thing, or are you ready for that better birth in service to the Seven?”
Ru-Kol cringed back from the panel, whimpering, and we started working our way around him toward the main doors, which were thick steel bastards, like on a safe. Lhan was snarling. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“So you are willing to sacrifice the lives of others but not your own? You are contemptable, even for a priest.”
I whispered outta the side of my mouth. “Easy, Lhan. Remember?”
Lhan took a breath, then nodded. “Open the front door, you filthy shike. And if you betray us, you will not live long enough to regret it.”
Ru-Kol edged back to the table and pushed a button with a shaking finger. The main doors whooshed open behind us. We started to back up, Lhan’s wand still trained on Ru-Vas.
I gave him another side whisper. “Okay, now. Loud.”
“Was it the nineteenth floor, Mistress?”
“Shut up, you idiot! Do you want him to hear?”
I shoved Lhan out the door, then ran after him. It slammed closed behind us and we sprinted down an empty corridor. Lhan shot a sideways glance at me.
“Did I do well, Mistress?”
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!
I shouted over the alarm. “Perfect! I just hoped it worked, or we’re gonna have the whole temple on our asses.”
The hall ended in an intersection with a wide curving corridor just like the one that surrounded the water tank in the other hallways I’d been in, but this one didn’t have any fancy glass walls. It looked like it belonged on a submarine, all metal bulkheads and exposed pipes. There was a lot more noise and traffic down here too—slaves and guards and priests, all looking up at the alarm and trying to decide where to run, and any second they were gonna look our way.
There was an elevator right across the hall, but who knew how long it would take to come, and with both of us naked and one of us pink we’d probably be spotted pretty damn fast. No time for disguises either.
“I think we gotta just run for it. Come on. This way! I think.”
; I took Lhan’s hand and ran left down the hall, looking for the little service corridor that led to the turbine chamber. People started shouting as soon as they saw us, but we just kept running. Finally I saw a little door that looked right and veered toward it. It didn’t open like the ones upstairs had.
“Damn it! They’re locking down!”
Then I remembered I still had Ru-Vas’s bracelet in my hand. I waved it at the circle beside the door.
Whoosh.
Yes! We ran in and it closed again after us—same service corridor as all the other levels. Somebody started banging on the door behind us. Ha! Guess they didn’t have my clearance. I kicked through the door at the end and led Lhan into the freezing turbine chamber to the spiral staircase. I looked up. Nobody. Not yet. Good. This was the other part of my plan. The turbine chamber was dark, huge, god know how many stories high, filled with scaffolding and struts, and as noisy as a Nascar race. We could hide there all day and nobody would find us. We could also climb it without anybody seeing us.
At the end of the catwalk, I went over the railing and beckoned Lhan after me. We clambered across the scaffolding until we were hidden from the stairs behind one of the massive turbine shafts, then we started climbing. It was easy going, like climbing an endless jungle-gym. There was always another hand hold, and another place to put our feet. The worst part was the constant cold wind and the deafening noise. I felt like I was on the side of a mountain in the middle of a norwester, and I was beginning to regret not stopping to put on some clothes—not that a bikini and a metal-covered leather sleeve woulda made much of a difference.
A few minutes later a pack of guards came down the stairs, looking all around, and we held still, peeking through the whirling blur of the turbine blades. Before they passed us, another pack came up and met ’em in the middle. We couldn’t hear ’em, but we saw ’em waving their arms at each other and pointing in every direction. Finally they split up and went back the way they’d come, one up, one down.
We gave ’em a minute to get out of sight, then kept climbing. It probably took ten minutes to reach the nineteenth floor, and by then even I was starting to feel it, while Lhan was lagging hard. It wasn’t so much the climb, but the cold was stiffening our finger joints, and it made gripping hard.
We took a breather on a broad steel beam and looked through the scaffolding to the army of guards that were crowded onto the nineteenth floor landing, guarding the door to the service corridor.
I gave Lhan a tired grin. “See? It worked.”
He saluted me. “All hail the Mistress of Misdirection.”
We climbed on, staying tight behind the turbine shaft until they were out of sight beneath us. I was in unknown territory now, and wasn’t sure where to go. Wainwright had said the control room was right at the top of the temple, but was that just a figure of speech? Was it really on the top floor, or just somewhere near the top? And how were we gonna know it when we found it. A lot of places in here looked like control rooms—the front desk of the jail for instance.
“I guess we just climb as far as we can go, then see what happens.”
“As far as we can go,” turned out to be farther than I expected. Way farther. I swear we climbed three times as long after the nineteenth floor as we had climbing to it. Eventually, though, we found the ceiling at last, as well as the huge superstructure of mega-thick beams and struts that held the tops of all the turbine columns and cooling coils in place. There were also more guards, about a dozen, all standing on a wide platform outside a pair of big double doors in the inner wall of the chamber. That door was all she wrote, the topmost door at the last landing of the endless spiral stairs. If we wanted to keep going up, we’d have to go through it. Unfortunately, four of the guys in front of it had wands of blue fire. Damn it, the fucking things were getting less rare by the second!
“A considerable defense, Mistress.”
“Only if they get to use it. Listen up. I got a plan.”
Lhan stiffened. “If it entails you charging into danger without me at your side—”
“Don’t worry, sweet cheeks. You’re the one they’re gonna be shooting at.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
FIRE!
Five minutes later I’d ninjaed my way across the beams until I was above the platform, and right over the heads of the guards. I drew my sword as quiet as I could, then looked back toward Lhan, who was peeking around the dark side of the turbine column, and gave him the high sign. He waved back, then aimed the wand and fired twice.
The two guards closest to the catwalk went down screaming as blue-white bolts went through ’em like hot pokers. All the rest of ducked and shouted, raising their wands and scanning for the shooter.
“Where is he?”
“By the turbine!”
“I see him!”
That’s when I dropped in.
The poor bastards didn’t have a chance. They were all crowded up to the rail, pointing or aiming into the dark around the turbine. I butchered five of them before they even knew I was there, and the rest died trying to bring their weapons to bear. My sword cut through raised arms and spear shafts and white plastic barrels like they were so many corn stalks.
One of the wands fritzed and sizzled.
“Oh fuck!”
I backed up, heart pounding, and jumped straight up to the rafters just in time to miss being engulfed in a deafening blue-white explosion. Images of flying bodies were burned into the backs of my eyes, and every part of me that I didn’t manage to hide behind an I-beam felt like I’d got a third-degree sunburn. Smoke choked me. It smelled like porkchops and burning plastic.
When I could see again, I saw that the platform was cleared—and a little melted. There were a few bodies mashed up against the twisted railings, but the rest had either been vaporized or taken the long fall. I felt a little queasy as I looked at the shreds of burnt meat that were sticking to the warped gratings of the catwalk.
Lhan shook his head as he clambered to me through the struts. “Mistress, you are terrible in your wrath.”
I swallowed. “More terrible than I meant to be. Fuck.”
Lhan and I dropped down to the catwalk, then hunted through the mangled meat. Lhan found a captain—or most of one—and pulled the bracelet off his wrist. I doubted it would work, and I was right. Nothing happened when I waved the bracelet in front of the circle by the door. Ru-Vas’s didn’t work either. The whole place was on total lock-down now.
Lhan hefted his gun. “Can we cut through it, as we did those downstairs?”
I frowned. “These doors look a lot tougher than that. I don’t think it’ll work. But you’re giving me an idea. Look for more wands.”
There were two more among the bodies, partially melted but still whole. I took ’em and laid ’em against the door like wood in a fireplace, then added the one I had slung across my back.
“There. Now back to where we were.”
We climbed back into the scaffolding and took cover behind the turbine before I gave him the nod.
“You shoot better than I do. Go for it.”
Lhan braced himself between two beams, raised the wand, and squeezed off a shot. Nothing. I could see it hit the guns, but it didn’t do shit.
“Try again.”
He took another shot. Again he hit the guns, and again, nothing.
“Goddamn it. Just pour it on. Let ’em have it.”
Lhan took a third shot and leaned on the trigger button so that it shot a long stream of energy at the guns.
For a second I thought all he was going to do was melt them into a puddle, and I started to curse, but then there was a pop, and a flash, and an arc of blue like a spark jumping the gap of a spark-plug.
“Back! Back!”
I grabbed Lhan around the waist and dragged him behind the turbine just as the turbine chamber went from black as night to bright as day in a split second. The sound was like a couple of sledgehammers to the ears, and the shock wave knocked us sideways, even beh
ind the turbine. I had to grab a cable to keep from falling, and I could barely hold it. My brain was spinning so hard inside my head I didn’t know where my hands were.
Bits of hot plastic flew past, glowing, on either side of us, and the echo of the explosion bounced up and down the shaft like a ball bearing in a paint mixer. We stayed where we were for a while, coughing out smoke that smelled like a car-fire and getting our balance back, then looked around the curve of the turbine. The door wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the platform. The catwalk was just hanging in space at the top of the stairs, its severed end twisted like a tin foil gum wrapper. Part of the wall near where the door had been was on fire. I didn’t know steel could burn.
“Holy shit.”
Lhan looked aghast. “Holy indeed. What horrible power the Seven wielded.”
“At least it worked.”
We picked our way back across the superstructure. The part above the door was bent and almost too hot to step on or touch—not so good for a couple of naked people. Down below was even worse. The hallway beyond the obliterated door was filled with smoke and I saw that the walls were on fire, and sparks were spitting out of the fixtures.
From somewhere below a new alarm started going off. This one went, YEEN YEEN YEEN YEEN!
Lhan pointed. “There. A safe landing.”
I looked down. The floor just inside the door was all scraped up, but not on fire. We jumped down one after the other, then looked into the smoking corridor.
The broken door lay halfway down the hall, all crumpled up like a used Kleenex, and bits and pieces of smoking rubble and circuitry were strewn all over. The worst part, though, was the fire, which was climbing up both walls to the ceiling and melting all that smooth white plastic like it was wax.
I could hear things shorting and popping behind the panels, and a second later, weird doohickies that looked like tiny chrome pineapples popped out of holes in the ceiling and started spinning. A few of ’em started spraying water around, but most of them didn’t.
I hissed through my teeth. “What the hell? Why aren’t they working? This shit’s going to get out of control.”
“What are they, Mistress?”
“A sprinkler system, I think. It goes off automatically when there’s a fire. At least its supposed to.”