by Nathan Long
“Can you stand?”
“With some assistance, I believe so. Thank you, Mistress.” He was slurring his S’s like he’d had half a bottle of Jim Beam.
I set him on his feet and aimed us at the door. “Then let’s get the fuck outta here.”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, missy.”
I looked around. Wainwright was leaning against one of the consoles and raising that ten-gauge wand of blue fire to his shoulder.
“’Cept back to the hell you came from.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
INFERNO!
I froze. Wainwright had us dead to rights. He mighta been weaving like a tree in a windstorm, but that wand had a big enough bore that all he had to do was fire it in our general direction and he’d get a piece of us.
He shook his head as he aimed. “A damn shame, missy. A damn shame.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s a damn shame you’re a piece of shit cracker prick.” I raised my hand and flipped him off. “Go fuck yourself.”
And just as I jerked that bird up to give it a little more emphasis, there was a muffled boom from somewhere down below and the whole temple rocked like it had been hit by an earthquake. Things in the ceiling cracked and groaned, and the console panel next to Wainwright popped like a overamped fuse, showering him in sparks. Lhan and I staggered a little at the impact, but with his butchered leg Wainwright fell against the console and had to take one hand off the wand to catch himself.
That was all I needed.
I grabbed Lhan around the waist and bounded for the door as fast as I could. Halfway there, the room lit up bright as day and I heard the crackle and whump of the big wand firing. The beam shot past off to our left and burned a twitching, shovel-wide scar in the wall, then steadied and swung toward us like a search light. I dove for the door with Lhan in my arms, and rolled into the burning hallway just as the beam swept over our heads, melting everything in its path.
Another tremor hit as we scrambled to our feet, and there was a huge crash back in the control room. It sounded like the ceiling had caved in. I nearly fell into the flames, but Lhan caught me and we went down on our knees in the center of the hallway, which was the only place that wasn’t on fire. Everything else was going up like kindling—the walls, the ceiling, the dead guys that lay all around. The smoke was so low that if I stood up straight, my head was in it, and the fire was closing in on both side, tighter and tighter every second, cooking my naked skin like I was a piece of toast in a toaster. I was having a hard time breathing, and it wasn’t just the smoke. My claustrophobia was kicking in big time.
Lhan took my hand. “Mistress, you must help me. I fear I cannot stand on my own.”
I looked at him, bleeding and weak, and my panic started to fade. Maybe he meant it that way.
“You doing that on purpose?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Mistress?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
I pushed up and helped him to his feet. The floor was slanted under us. Shit was really not right with the temple.
Lhan pointed left. “The stairs were… this way, I believe.”
The flames were too close on either side for us to go side by side, so I put Lhan behind me and told him to put his hands on my shoulders, and we went forward single file.
It was like walking through hell. The air was mostly smoke, and smelled like I was inhaling cancer with every breath. My tongue tasted like a burnt match.
“We’re gonna die here, Lhan.”
“If so, then I am well satisfied. The church has been dealt a killing blow, and I am with you.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. Did that mean he’d changed his mind? Was he ready to let go of his bullshit at last? I was just about to ask when he pointed over my shoulder.
“There!”
I looked around. The stairs were just ahead to the left. Fine. Time for a heart to heart later if we got out alive. We hurried through the doorway and started down, then dropped to our hands and knees, hacking and coughing. The stairwell was completely filled with smoke, which was weirdly all rushing down the steps like upside-down rapids and howling like a hurricane.
“Gonna have to crawl down!”
“Yes! Crawl!”
We started down backwards, heads down, but halfway down there was another terrible crash and the stairwell crumped inward like a beer can crushed by a redneck. Lhan and I were slammed together and fell against the ruptured stairs, which continued to groan and twist.
“Okay, fuck this. Run!”
We bolted down like shit-scared schoolgirls and threw ourselves through the door at the bottom of the stairs into the hangar deck. It was just as bad in there. Everything was on fire, but that was only the beginning. There were bodies all around, and to the left of us, the ceiling had caved in, burying men and smashed fliers in burning rubble. Far to the right, there was a huge bulge in the metal floor, like some gigantic beam underneath was trying to poke up through, and all the vehicles around it had slid down the slope and smashed into each other.
Directly ahead of us the hangar doors were open, and that was where all the smoke from the stairs was going, funneling out like it was an exhaust fan. Lhan and I stumbled out of the flow and sucked in a few breaths of clean air as we tried to see past the tears in our burning eyes. There were a lot of priests running around, and more coming up the stairs from below every second, and they were all trying to get onto or into the few Jetson-mobiles that were still in one piece.
Some of ’em took off as we watched, the globe things on their undersides vibrating and glowing as they lifted off the ground, then turning toward the open doors.
I pointed. “We gotta get a hold of one of those things!”
But we weren’t gonna get one without a fight. There were priests climbing onto every single one of ’em. In fact, most of ’em were so overloaded that they’d wobble up for a couple of seconds, then crash down again, with the priests punching and kicking and telling each other to get off.
I wanted one of the ski-doo ones that Ru-Sul had ridden. They looked the coolest and the fastest, and even better, you rode ’em like a Harley—even if you had to sit on a weird little priest-made booster seat to reach the handle-bars. More clues to just how big the Seven were, I guessed. I just hoped I could make the damned thing go.
I looked at Lhan. He was still bleeding like a stuck pig, and looked pretty woozy, but his eyes were focused now.
“You ready?”
He pulled a crossbow off a dead paladin and cocked it. “As I can be, beloved.”
“Okay.” I pointed to the nearest ski-doo, which was struggling to get off the ground with twenty priests piled on top of it and more trying to climb on. “That one.”
“As you say.”
We took off at a dead run, and I knew we had it. They didn’t see us coming. There was too much noise and movement and fire, and they were all way too focused on getting on and getting out, but before we got halfway there, the apocalypse happened. The big bulge in the floor off to the right went up like a volcano and blew the place to pieces.
Lhan and I were knocked fifteen feet to our left and missed getting fried to a crisp only because we landed on the far side of a broken vehicle and the fireball passed over us. Body parts and bits of hot shrapnel flew threw the air like confetti and pattered down all around us. I felt a burning in the small of my back and flailed around until a piece of burning metal fell off and clanked on the floor. My right ear was screaming like a steam whistle and I felt cooked all down my right side.
“Lhan, are you all right?”
For a second he looked up at me with absolutely no comprehension in his eyes and my heart flip-flopped. Had the blast knocked him stupid? Did he have a concussion? Was he brain dead? Then he frowned at me.
“Did you speak, Mistress?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. He was just deaf. That I could deal with. “I said, are you all right?”
“I—I… well, let us see.”
He staggered up and looked down at himself. He was covered in cuts and scratches, and he had some massive bruises on his legs and arms, but nothing seemed broken. I was about the same. Good. It was time to get gone. Past time.
I looked toward the ski-doo. It had shifted ten yards to the left, but it was still floating, only with less priests on it now. The rest were all over the floor, mostly dead, but a few trying to crawl for the boat.
“Come on, Lhan. One more time.”
It was hard to run straight. The deck was buckled, my bones hurt like I’d fallen off a cliff, and my inner ear was all fucked up. I felt like I was falling sideways with every step, but we made it at last, and I kicked up into the air, screaming like a banshee, and came down right in the middle of the boat. Of course I came down off balance and landed on my ass, but the swerving jolt as I hit sent half the priests slipping off to the floor.
I sat up, swinging around with my sword, and sent most of the rest after them, but then the guy at the controls kicked me on the teeth and I flopped back as he rose over me, shouting and stabbing with a sword.
A crossbow bolt thwacked into his chest, knocking him ass-first over the handlebars and sending three guys who had been riding the fender to the ground with him. That was it. Everybody was off.
I staggered up, holing my mouth, and looked back. Behind me, Lhan was fighting through the wounded, braining guys with his spent crossbow and hacking around with his sword and. I stepped to the edge, a little nervous the boat was gonna flip, and cleared his way with my sword, then hauled him up.
Another explosion thudded on the right, and people screamed somewhere in the smoke. I flinched, then then kicked back the priests who were trying to climb back on board and scrambled to the saddle with Lhan. “Here. Sit behind me.”
I swung a leg over and instantly felt like that kid on the back of dad’s Harley. It had looked weird when I’d seen the priests riding it, but it felt weirder, like I was the one that was out of scale. The booster seat at least allowed me to touch the handlebars, but it left my feet dangling, and I felt like I was riding a scoot with ape-hangers, which I’d never liked.
Also, I didn’t know how to make it go. There was no clutch and no throttle I could see. In fact there didn’t seem to be any controls of any kind. I couldn’t have told you how to turn it on or shut it off. I kept feeling with my feet, hoping to find something I was supposed to push, but there was nothing, and shit was starting to blow up all around us.
“Goddamn it!”
I shook the handlebars in frustration and almost fell off as the boat-bike swerved around in mid-air. The handlebars! Duh! They were split, like the bars on those fancy exercise bikes where you pull with your hands the same time you’re pedaling. I pushed forward on them. The bike jerked ahead and Lhan almost fell off.
“Hold on, Lhan! I’ve got it!”
He gripped me around the waist and I leaned forward, pushing the right bar forward a bit more than the left to angle us toward the nearest hangar door. It was awkward as hell with the bars so high over my head, but I managed it, and we started to skim past the other vehicles.
Most of the priests who were trying to fly out were too deep in their own shit to notice us, but a few looked up and shouted. One raised a wand, but another blast ripped through the hangar and knocked everybody sideways—us included.
“The wall, Mistress! The wall!”
“Got it. Got it.”
Actually I didn’t, and I had to pull back hard on the bars to stop from slamming into the burning wall to the right of the door. The door itself was twisting and distorting like the mouth of somebody shouting in slow motion as the weight of the stories above started to crush it.
“Fuck!”
I reversed hard, then veered left and gunned it just as another explosion rocked the hangar. We shot out into the night sky with a fireball erupting behind us. All of Ormolu was laid out in orange and black below us, reflecting the fire that was eating the temple, and I could see crowds of people in the streets.
I looked back, terrified. “Is it falling? Is it falling?”
It wasn’t, but we had another problem. Two other boat-bikes shot out of the fireball just as the hangar door crushed closed, and swooped toward us.
“I’m afraid we are pursued, Mistress.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
DOG FIGHT!
I jammed the bars forward and the race was on. The other bikes were covered in priests, and slower than us, but that was changing fast. With every turn they made, more guys lost their grip and flew off, screaming, and they started to gain. Also, one of them had a wand, and started blasting at us.
It was then that I realized I didn’t know how to go up or down. From my Ranger training I knew the basics of flying, but this was nothing like a plane. Pulling back didn’t raise you up and pushing forward didn’t lower you. What was it?
I leaned way forward to see if there was some other control hidden between the two bars, and all of a sudden we were plunging down like we were doing a bombing run. Lhan yelped in surprise and clung on as both of us lifted up off our seats. And as we did, we leveled off, and thumped down on the seat again, all wobbly and scared shitless, and about fifty feet below the other bikes.
Lhan clung to me, gasping. “That was… precipitous.”
“Yeah. But why did it…?”
I looked at the bench under our makeshift saddle as I floored it again, and saw it was built like a wah-wah pedal. If I leaned far enough forward I’d press down the front of the bench and the nose would go down. If I leaned far enough back, I’d press the back down and the nose would go up, and the priests had built the bottom of the booster seat like a rocking chair so it would all still work. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants! Or no pants, in my case.
“Jae-En. They come.”
A burst of wand fire carved a black line in the skin of the boat-bike, nearly cutting off one corner. The two fliers were angling down at us, and the guy riding bitch on the second one was firing over the driver’s head.
I leaned forward hard and plunged straight for the ground, but this time I meant it. “Hang on, Lhan! We gotta ditch this thing, and fast.”
I banked right around the burning temple, hugging the wall and trying to put it between us and that wand, but as we skimmed down the curve of the thing Lhan gripped my shoulder and pointed south.
“Jae-En! Look!”
I looked. Us and the priests weren’t the only things in the sky that night. Off in the distance a bunch of airships were coming our way, and I thought I recognized Ku-Rho’s warship, and Kai-La’s repainted church ship among ’em.
I got a little thrill as I realized our friends were coming to rescue us, but a second later it turned to dread. Off to the east, more airships were rising into the sky from Ormolu’s naval base.
“Holy shit! It’s the whole fuckin’ Oran navy!”
Lhan’s fingers dug into my shoulder. “We must return to Kai-La. She has come for us and will die for it if we tarry.”
I gritted my teeth and looked back. The boat-bikes were screaming down around the temple after us. They were zeroing in. “We gotta take these guys out first. That blue wand could bring down the whole fleet.”
Lhan pulled his crossbow off his back and loaded it, then tried to twist in the saddle. “I will attempt a shot.”
“Not yet, Lhan. We need the high ground. Lean back. Now!”
I pulled back hard on the handlebars and threw myself back. Lhan did the same, and we almost went off the back as the boat jerked up out of its power dive, then got thrown forward again as it jerked to a stop with a roar of reverse thrust. The stop was so fast it felt like we’d bounced off the ground and into a brick wall. The ski-doos had to veer left and right to avoid us, and one fishtailed right into the temple wall, smashing to pieces like a bike hitting a semi, and sending its riders flying as shattered cowling and smashed engine parts spun down toward the ground.
I angled after the other one, or tried to anyway. I fe
lt like a kid trying to learn how to use a stick shift for the first time. I kept jerking forward, dropping, jerking forward, rising, stopping dead, swerving. It probably saved our lives. The guy on the back kept shooting at us, but I don’t think even a targeting computer could have tracked us the way I was driving.
We couldn’t keep playing dodgeball forever, though. We had to get going.
“Shoot ’im, Lhan! Shoot ’im!”
Lhan grunted. “Were you to hold steady for but a moment…”
“He’ll kill us.”
I swerved again and Lhan fell against me, banging my head with the stock of the crossbow.
“Ah, better. If I may lean on you?”
“Do it! Shoot!”
Lhan braced on my shoulders and fired over my head. There was a TWANG in my ear and the gunner on the last bike toppled off, a bolt sticking out of his back, and his wand falling with him.
“Yee-haw!”
The driver started taking evasive action, but I ignored him and floored it straight for Kai-La’s fleet, screaming over the orange and black city like a hornet and keeping one eye on the Oran ships, which were all up in the air now, and slowly turning our way.
“Come on. Come on.”
Pretty soon I could see people on the decks of Kai-La’s ship, all standing at the rails and armed to the teeth, with more up in the rigging. Ku-Rho’s ship was right beside Kai-La’s.
“Hang on, Lhan. Almost there.”
A sharp-tipped bolt like a fence post shot out from Ku-Rho’s ship and nearly punched us out of the sky. I flinched aside and swerved all over the place in surprise. A bunch of crossbow bolts whizzed out after the flying stake, but all fell short.
“What the fuck? What are they doing?”
“They know us not.”
I reined to a stop and stood up on the saddle, waving my arms. “Hey! It’s Jane! And Lhan! It’s us!”
There was a tense silence, and I was afraid they didn’t believe me, or couldn’t hear, but then I saw a little figure in red hop up on the rail of Kai-La’s ship and put a megaphone to her mouth.