Storm Thief

by Chris Wooding

  “There he is,” said Rail.

  Moa scanned the city below them. A labyrinth of under- and overpasses coiled around each other, shot through by slender bridges. The streets were blotched with illumination, and darkness lay in between. The moon was hidden by cloud and only the arclights and lanterns held back the night in patches. The pallid gleam of the West Artery could be seen in the distance, peeking between the spikes and towers.

  A cool wind plucked at them where they hid, on a stone walkway that ran between two browned chimneys of metal. They were crouched behind the parapet of the walkway, the low wall that ran along the edge to stop people falling off.

  “I don’t see anyone,” she said. It wasn’t strictly true. She could see the odd person passing along the lighted streets, an occasional cart or a gyik-tyuk rider slipping through the islands of brightness. But not Finch, nor any of the other thieves that had chased them from their den, whom Rail believed were hunting them. Rail had been making cryptic hints about a plan that he had to get rid of the thieves, but first he had to make sure that they were really being followed. To that end, they had doubled back on themselves in the hope of catching a glimpse of their pursuers.

  “Down there. In that little square.”

  Vago hunkered closer, his tendons whirring softly as his fingers closed over the edge of the parapet. They had bought a voluminous hooded cloak for him in a vain attempt to disguise his freakishness. It made him look like something that mothers would terrify their children with. They travelled at night now, and they took deserted ways. As long as nobody came too close, they would not know him for what he was.

  “I see them,” he said. He pointed one long finger.

  “Get down!” Rail hissed, and Vago withdrew quickly like a scolded infant. Then, because Vago was cringing again and Moa would snap at him about it afterward, he added more gently: “We don’t want them to see us. OK?”

  Vago nodded, his good eye darting uncertainly from Rail to Moa. Moa gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder with one gloved hand, then looked over the parapet again.

  This time she spotted them, far away. They were passing through a tiny plaza that nestled between a thick clot of buildings with slanting metal walls. She could make out little detail in the harsh white glare of the arclights, but she could see enough to recognize the black-clad, cowled shape of Finch, and the five thief-boys who lurked with him. Then Finch moved away, into the shadow at the edge of the plaza, and his companions followed him.

  Moa looked at Rail, who was regarding her expectantly. “You were right,” she said.

  “They’ve got our trail,” Rail murmured.

  Moa slumped against the parapet and wrapped her arms around her knees. Vago hunkered down next to her, his hood shadowing his face.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “We’re about a mile from Territory West 190. It’s also the most direct route to where we’re going. I say we take it.”

  “West 190?” Moa queried. She thought a moment, then realized where she had heard the name before. “That’s one of the districts taken by the Revenants during the last surge.”

  “Exactly,” said Rail. “They’d never follow us through there.”

  Moa shook her head wearily, her lank black hair swaying with the movement. “It’s too dangerous,” she said. But her protest was already half-hearted. Rail always determined these kind of things. He was the one who made the big decisions, he was the one with the answers. She drifted along in his wake, happy to be guided by him. The responsibility of choice was something that she didn’t want.

  “You said yourself that we can’t lead anyone to Kilatas,” Rail told her. “And any chance we might have had of giving them the slip ended once you decided to adopt your little friend there. Eventually, they’ll catch us up. We have to take the chance.”

  Moa seethed inwardly. He had been needling her about Vago ever since the golem had joined them. He had made it quite clear what he thought of having Vago with them. Typical of him: one of the few times she made a decision and stuck to it, he made her feel foolish.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s such a risk.”

  Rail peered over the parapet again, searching for another glimpse of their pursuers. “Sometimes you have to take a risk, Moa,” he threw back at her.

  The crumbling warehouse stood amid the clutter of Territory West 217, a brutal block of mortar and bricks, built ugly. An enormous Functional Age building rose behind it, like a fin of greenish metal in the dim afternoon sun.

  How primitive they seemed in comparison to the Faded, thought Lysander Bane, as he studied the buildings before him. Like dull apes awed by magic of gods. How much greater was the glory of those past times, when everything worked as it should, when there was order and discipline. What mockery it seemed that they were left with this random world, where any attempt at bringing peace was rendered impossible by probability storms. For the storms brought the Revenants.

  He strode towards the warehouse, across a forecourt scattered with rubble and strewn with the dead. Most of them had fallen without a mark on them. They lay gazing emptily at the cloud-misted sky: men and women and children.

  The door to the warehouse was guarded by several Protectorate soldiers. They were shaven bald and clad in ballistic armour, and they wore wraparound glimmer visors over their eyes. Bane was wearing one himself. It gave everything a curious, sickly hue. The faces of the soldiers looked strangely unreal through it, like luminous charcoal sketches. But walking around Territory West 217 without a glimmer visor was foolish. Revenants were invisible to human eyes, and without a visor he might never see them sneaking up on him.

  The soldiers recognized him, even though none of them knew exactly who he was.

  He was a familiar face on the panopticon. Often he was seen standing in the background at the Patrician’s speeches. He cut a memorable figure, with his lean, stern face and short-cropped white hair. Always standing to one side of the lectern as their great leader spoke. Always dressed in black jackboots and a long trenchcoat with a high collar buttoned to his chin. He never said a word during the speeches, and nobody ever referred to him. He was simply there.

  Legends had sprung up around this mysterious figure. People wondered who he was, why he stood always at the right hand of the Patrician. Some said he was their leader’s son. Some that he was the greatest warrior in the Protectorate Army. Some that he was the Patrician’s personal assassin. They called him Grimjack, and made up their stories.

  Lysander Bane, Chief of the Protectorate Secret Police, let the rumours fly. It was good to have people afraid of him. They had reason to be.

  The soldiers saluted him as he neared, snapping their heels together and raising one clenched fist to their shoulder. Lysander barely gave them a nod in acknowledgement. He looked them over with cold grey eyes.

  “What’s the situation?”

  The soldiers looked uncertainly at each other, trying to determine who should reply. “The district has been cleansed,” the bravest of them said. “We have the last of the Revenants cornered in the warehouse. It’ll all be over soon.”

  Bane nodded slowly, letting his steady gaze rest on the soldier long enough to unnerve him. The faint sound of aether cannon discharge came from inside the warehouse. He raised his right arm, where the blunt stub of his own cannon projected from beneath the specially adapted sleeve of his coat.

  “Good,” he said, and walked past the soldiers without another word. None of them tried to stop him.

  The warehouse was gloomy and smelt of mildew and decay. Great drums of nutrient gruel were stacked like walls. Massive aisles of storage crates stretched into the distance, full of all manner of foodstuffs. The gruel had come from the Mereg Food Processing Complex; the rest was from the hydroponics farms in the Agricultural Zone. Mereg was one of dozens of complexes where much of the city’s food was pr
oduced. The gruel went to the ghettoes. It was mainly to prevent the people there from starving, for starving people were liable to riot, and that meant disorder. To the rest of the citizens went vegetables and meat from livestock herds bred in battery conditions. Much of the diet of the people of Orokos consisted of seafood, but there were measures in place to ensure that only licensed Protectorate fishing vessels caught any, and that the food went to the right people. Everything was taxed, regulated, controlled. That was the way it should be, thought Bane.

  But the Revenants . . . well, the Revenants didn’t fit into anyone’s scheme. They lived by their own bizarre rules, caring nothing for the well-being of the city. They unmade what the Protectorate made; they ruined instead of creating. And Lysander Bane hated them for it.

  The Revenants: invisible ghosts of energy that could possess the body of a person, could take them over entirely and live inside their skin. These possessed husks, animated only by the will of the Revenants, were called the Taken: unfortunate victims of the energy ghosts. The Revenants were the enemy. And Bane had sworn to stamp them out.

  Some would have said it was unwise to even be here, to risk himself in combat against the dreadful spectres. But he believed that the only way to know an enemy was to meet it face-to-face. And besides, he just couldn’t resist killing them. Nothing gave him such vicious satisfaction as being personally responsible for eradicating a Revenant.

  He followed the sound of aether cannon fire – and the occasional dull whomp of a thumper gun – until he found another soldier, who directed him onward.

  “They’re pinned in the south-east corner,” he said. “We’re just mopping up the last of them.”

  Bane stalked through the aisles, staying alert as he neared the firefight. Many of the crates had been broken open and the Taken had eaten what was within. Stinking slicks of gruel had been left to decay where they spilled. Taken ate like animals, with their hands. Bane kept an eye out in all directions, even looking up to where metal beams hanging with hooks and pulleys crisscrossed the warehouse. The cursed things might drop on a man from above.

  A soldier darted into the aisle in front of him, raised his cannon in fright, and then relaxed a little.

  “Are there any left, soldier?” Bane asked.

  The soldier had clearly recognized him from the panopticon. “We’ve brought down the last of the holdouts. But we think that there were one or two that slipped through. . .” He hesitated, unsure of how to address the man before him. “Sir,” he finished.

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ll join your sweep until your commander is satisfied that every last one is gone.”

  The soldier nodded and headed off again. Bane walked a little way behind him, treading silently through the wide, shadowy aisles, his glimmer visor cutting through the darkness.

  It didn’t take them long. They turned a corner and there it was, just standing there as if waiting for them.

  It was one of the Taken. A boy-child, perhaps ten years old, with long blond hair down to its shoulders and wearing a simple blue smock. Its feet were bare. It gazed innocently at them from a distance of a few dozen feet.

  But with the glimmer visors, they could see what was invisible to the naked eye. It burned with an inner fire, and its mouth and eyes and nose and ears glowed furiously. Raw aether seeped from them like smoke.

  Bane raised his cannon. “Get out of my city,” he told it, and fired.

  The Taken dodged the first blast, its expression of fresh-faced youth dissolving into snarling animal hatred as it attacked. It ran at them with teeth bared, fingers held out before it like claws, screeching. The soldier panicked, squeezing off a shot too early. The Taken leaped over the path of the soldier’s bolt and landed on him, hands clamped around his bald head. The soldier dropped without a sound. The mere touch of a Taken was death.

  Bane didn’t miss a second time.

  He caught it full in the chest as it bunched to spring, and it crumpled. But it wasn’t the husk that concerned Bane. The Taken were just the shells that the Revenants possessed. As he watched, the body began to steam aether as if it were a kettle. The vapour uncurled and rose up before him. With his glimmer visor, Bane could see an outline of crackling force, with a long tail and great triangular wings like those of a manta ray. Between those wings was the shape of a head and four thick tentacles of light that swirled and writhed slowly. This was the true form of a Revenant.

  It rushed at him, but Bane was ready. He fired again, hitting it square. The blob of green aether sent it flailing backwards with a dull explosion, trailing sparkling gobbets of light. Bane hit it again, striking it on one of its wings. It spun away, swimming through the air like a fish, attempting to make its escape. But it was wounded, and slow, and Bane quite calmly aimed and hit it dead on as it fled. It erupted in a shower of light and was gone.

  Two soldiers, drawn by the commotion, arrived to find Bane standing over the child, his head hung. The boy was dead, his eyes open but unseeing.

  “What a waste,” Bane murmured. “What a waste.”

  The soldiers watched him as he shook his head, turned his back and walked away.

  There was a man waiting for him outside the factory when he emerged. He was small, dressed in a similar manner to Bane, and his face was narrow and hard.

  “The Secret Police have news for you, Chief,” he said. “There were reports of a disturbance on the Elbow Road in Territory West 174. Soldiers intervened, but the perpetrator escaped.” He looked up into his superior’s eyes. “It was the golem. The golem is still alive.”

  Bane digested this news without expression, staring out over the industrial muddle that surrounded him. After some time, he spoke.

  “Find him,” he said.

  The streets around the gate to Territory West 190 were deserted, and the buildings stood empty. The Protectorate had evacuated all the dwellings along the wall. Not that anybody would have stayed anyway.

  The great city of Orokos was divided into hundreds of uneven sections called districts or Territories, and virtually every one was surrounded by a wall. The walls had been built by the Protectorate long ago. The energy ghosts could appear anywhere, and where they appeared they possessed the bodies of men and women and created armies of the Taken. So it was necessary to devise a method to stop them infiltrating all of Orokos. If one section of the city was breached by the enemy, it could be sealed to prevent the Taken flooding out.

  The energy ghosts were a different matter. How could the Protectorate contain beings that could fly through solid stone? Guards with aether cannons stood on the walls, but they were really only there to make the citizens feel better. There was little they could do against those Revenants that had no bodies, for the energy ghosts could pass under or over the walls as they liked.

  However, for reasons the Protectorate didn’t understand, the ghosts were not usually interested in crossing the walls. Though the Revenant ghosts could spread out through all of Orokos if they wanted, they never did. They tended to stay in tight groups, sticking with their Taken hosts, overwhelming one district at a time. There was purpose in their movements; though what purpose, nobody really knew.

  Usually, gates were left open and unguarded, but in some cases – such as the ghettoes, or in districts where Revenants were rife – both gates and wall were patrolled by Protectorate soldiers.

  So it was with the gate to Territory West 190. It was a great mass of grey iron, two sliding halves interlocked in the middle like clenched teeth. On one side, blistering out of the wall, was a squat rectangular guardhouse. Standing before the gate were eight Protectorate soldiers, their glimmer visors glowing pale green in the night. Arclights along the top of the wall cast a dreamlike, hazy illumination, haloed in the soft sea-mist that had gathered out of nowhere. The mist had brought with it a chill, and the salt tang of the ocean far below. Eerily silent streets surrounded the gate, crowded with rick
ety buildings of wood and stone and metal and clay.

  Rail, Moa and Vago had scouted the wall for half a mile either way, and found it impenetrable. It was walked by guards and topped with plasma wire that could cut through flesh and bone like butter. Eventually they had returned to the gate, and they observed it for a time from the safety of a thickly shadowed street.

  “All right,” Rail said, satisfied. “Nobody is getting through here. Nobody except us, anyway.”

  Moa touched the artefact that was stowed in the inner pocket of her dungarees, reassuring herself that it was still there. Would it even work a second time? Had the miraculous escape from their den been an accident? Maybe she had done something that had activated it without knowing, and she would not be able to do it again. Fade-Science was a mystery.

  “We’ll need glimmer visors,” she said.

  “I know,” said Rail. “And an aether cannon. We’re not going into a Revenant district without a bit of protection.”

  “I do not need a visor,” Vago volunteered.

  Moa raised an eyebrow at the golem. “You sure?”

  “I can see Revenants without a visor.”

  “Somebody made you with glimmer technology built in? Why?”

  Vago didn’t have an answer for her. Though he hadn’t had the opportunity to test it yet, he simply knew. His mechanical eye – the black, reflective orb – was capable of seeing the energy ghosts that were invisible to others. Just like it could calculate trajectories, target threats with astonishing accuracy, resolve images so sharply that he could count the legs on a spider two districts away.

  Rail shook his head; they didn’t have time to puzzle it over now. Finch and the others wouldn’t be far behind.

  “This is the plan,” he told them. “That guardhouse is where they’ll keep spare equipment. We go through the wall using Moa’s trinket, and we sneak along till we reach the spot where the guardhouse is on the other side. Then we come back, through the wall and into the guardhouse from behind. Nobody will be looking out for us. There’s only one way into that place that I can see, and that’s the door at the front. They’ll never expect us to come in from the back: that’s ten feet of solid metal.”