by J. S. Morin
Madlin muttered to herself as she set off in pursuit. “I’m crazy. He needs my help like—” She cut off abruptly, not that anyone was around to listen. Up in one of the upper floor windows of a multi-apartment worker barracks, she saw a glass-masked kuduk taking aim at Dan with a tri-barrel rotogun.
The call of warning died in her throat. Madlin couldn’t risk drawing the kuduk’s attention. She drew her revolver and took careful aim through the site, lining up the kuduk in the crosshairs much as the kuduk looked to be sizing Dan up for a barrage. She put a bullet through the center of the mask, shattering the glass. The rotogunner fell out of sight away from the window. She had no time to waste. Dan was continuing away from her, not fast, but not stopping, either.
The boy warlock kept his path erratic. He turned down side streets and doubled back after clusters of troops, but always kept a general course toward the world-ripper. It took all Madlin’s efforts to keep up with him without stumbling into an ambush. Twice more she fired on and struck kuduk soldiers too preoccupied with Dan to notice her in time.
Peering around the corner onto the main thoroughfare of Tinker’s Island, she saw Dan standing off against two steam tanks and half a dozen soldiers on foot, bunched toward the rear of the steam tanks for cover. Dan shimmered in the air, and a moment later there were eight of him standing abreast across the road. Rotogun fire tore through the images, but from Madlin’s vantage she could see where Dan had slipped across to cover on the far side of the street. Two kuduk soldiers unclipped twist-top canisters from their belts and lobbed them into the mass of illusory Dans. Yellowish smoke hissed from under the lids, and the gentle on-shore wind blew the noxious fumes up the road in Madlin’s direction.
Though she could feel the tug of aether in her, she saw nothing to make sense of how Dan lifted one of the steam tanks off the ground and flung it into the other.
“Dan, the smoke!” Madlin shouted across the way. Stealth be gutted, she didn’t want to chance outrunning the wind. She didn’t have to. Seconds later, the wind reversed, and gusted with vigor back in the masked faces of the kuduks. By dint of Dan’s twisted sense of humor, the masks of the soldiers shattered one by one. As the smoke poured over them like a bank of fog, they fell screaming and clutching at their faces.
“Thanks,” Dan called over to her, grinning like a demon. “Great idea.” Without pause for respite, the warlock ducked out from behind cover and swaggered down the street. Madlin’s heart was hammering to get out of her chest, yet Dan looked like someone playing crashball against a team of younger children, relishing the chance to dish out a thumping with hardly an effort.
Kthooom.
Madlin was several blocks inland, but the deck guns of a steam ship still sent shockwaves through the air and ground, which hit her ears and feet a fraction of a second apart. At close range, the blast was even louder, another split of the same second later. She didn’t see where it hit.
As they got closer to the world-ripper’s workshop, Madlin heard human shouts, drawing her attention to warehouse roofs and the upper floor windows of the inns just inland of the harbor.
“General. We’re holding out. What’s going on down there?”
“We’ve got us a Veydran, and they don’t.” That summed it up as well as she could explain it. If Madlin had half an hour, she couldn’t wrap the turn of the battle in prettier words.
Hired gunners show loyalty in precise proportion to the pay they get, and when that pay begins to look as if it’s destined for their next of kin, the value of loyalty plummets. Soldiers fighting for their country might sometimes stay and fight until dead or captured because they believed in the cause, but by the sight of several abandoned steam tanks along the road, Madlin suspected Dan had reached the financial tolerance of this particular band.
Growing bolder as she found dropped rotorifles with no signs of an owner, more abandoned steam tanks, and a lack of kuduk bodies, Madlin picked up her pace. If only the road had been clear of human bodies as well, she might have found some cheer as she rushed after the warlock, but Dan had merely turned the battle, not undone its beginnings. She strode past red puddles and broken friends, faces she’d known since she was a little girl, turned grotesque.
However it ended, Madlin had to see it herself. Cadmus might have been pushed away as if docile while he emerged from his lethargy, but Madlin wasn’t going to safe ground while Dan took her vengeance out from beneath her. If the daruu was to die by the boy’s hands instead of one of her guns, she at least had to be there. If she could get her own bullets into him first, all the better. Madlin made it to the workshop and skidded to a halt, thumping shoulder-first into the door before twisting around to peer inside. Dan stood with a pile of the kuduks’ gas canisters at his feet. As she watched, he lobbed one through the open portal, hissing smoke the whole way. From the entrance, Madlin felt a sucking wind at her back—not aether, but the breathable sort, carrying the scent of the Katamic into Korr along with Dan’s toxic farewell. The warlock picked up another, gave it a twist, and heaved it through as well.
She could have kissed him. Not only had he driven the kuduks back, but he had chased them away from their world-ripper’s controls. Madlin scanned the room, trying to ignore the human bodies while her eyes moved from corpse to kuduk corpse. There! She found what she was looking for: one of the fallen soldiers still wore an intact mask.
The stench inside the workshop was not so bad as when she’d left it. The Katamic breeze was stronger than the slow-wafting odors of the newly dead. Madlin kept her eyes from the charred hole through the kuduk torso as she unbuckled the mask and put it on her own head. It felt ludicrously large on her, though it fit easily over her spectacles, which was conducive to her plans. It smelled of stale kuduk breath, but luckily for her kuduks didn’t sweat like humans. She strapped it as tight as it would go and breathed deep. The hissing echo of the filtered air had the ominous sound of steamworks with a leak, but she could fill her lungs through the filter and that was all that mattered.
“Keep throwing those,” Madlin said, her voice reverberating in the enclosed space behind the mask. “Just don’t hit me.”
She saw the manic grin on Dan’s face as he winked and nodded. “And don’t blow the controls while I’m on the other side,” she added.
Without further introspection or argument, Madlin rushed through the hole and into Kezudkan’s lair. She searched the tables, the console, anyplace where there might have been notes. She grabbed every scrap, every bit of documentation she could find. She didn’t know how long she had before someone might be brave enough to come back and look. Seconds? Minutes? When she’d taken all her hands could carry, she ducked back through.
“Blow it.”
“I don’t do this often, so watch close. This is real magic. Halatu ... dunaxi ... tukaso ... xatagotagi ...” Dan’s hands twisted, forming incomprehensible shapes and patterns in the air as he continued his chant. Madlin noticed that his left hand was a bloody ruin, missing two fingers and a chunk of flesh. If it had any bearing on his conjuring, it didn’t show.
As Dan finished his spell, the entire room beyond the world-hole caught fire. For an instant, she saw metal panels boiling before the machine failed and the hole closed.
Madlin tore the kuduk mask from her face. “Are you all right?”
Dan furrowed his brow a moment, before checking his hand. “Oh, this? Hurts like I stuck it in a hornets’ nest. It’ll be fine though. Fingers grow back.”
Madlin stood there watching Dan, unable to form words to continue a conversation from that point.
The conjured garb faded back into a nightshirt and slippers. Dan yawned and finished the stretch he had started back in the Errol mansion’s foyer. “It’s still too bloody early to be up after a night in those books. Don’t let anyone wake me unless it’s a line of pretty girls come to congratulate me.”
Madlin’s feet were bolted to the poured-stone as she watched him go. Rabid dog or perfect weapon? Where can I get a do
zen more like him?
Chapter 25
“War is like chess, except that in war, you can lose your king and keep fighting.” –Rashan Solaran
“What was that hollow-eyed monster?” Kezudkan asked. He knocked aside a fragment of metal with his cane. It was an unrecognizable lump that had once been a part of his world-ripper machine. The piece was warped and the surface ran like candle drippings, freshly cooled.
“You’re the expert on this other-world rat dung,” Draksgollow replied, his voice echoing behind one of the glass masks. There were still lingering fumes in the air from the fogdeath canisters, and the kuduk tinker was taking no chances with his lungs. His steamworks hissed and ground as he bent to inspect the debris for himself. “Never seen nothing like this before. It’d take days to get a smelter up and running to the kind of temperatures to do this to steel.”
“Undoubtedly,” Kezudkan replied. “But not if you drew runes over them all.”
“That little shit didn’t cross through and rune this junk.”
“Indeed not. I think we’ve seen unbound runes flying about.” Kezudkan flicked a cracked and blackened bit of stone out of his way. It looked like part of the stool he’d fashioned for himself. “I think it’s high time we made an investigation of the far world.”
“What?” Draksgollow stood with a clatter of gears. “I think it’s time we stopped this world-jumping nonsense entirely. Take what we want right here in Korr.”
“It’s amazing your people ever took over Korr. You lose a fight and you curl up like a beaten animal. They think they’ve won. We just need a way to deal with that young rune-thrower the humans found.”
“You’re off your rails.”
“What’s that? Speak up,” Kezudkan said. He lifted his cane and held it close to the glass of Draksgollow’s mask. How much effort would it take for those stony muscles to flick and smash the tip into the mask? The old daruu seemed unbothered by the remnants of toxin in the air, but daruu weren’t kuduk. Draksgollow had read the pamphlets that came with the canisters they’d bought. It was all couched in military regulation-speak, but it told without softened words what would happen if anyone breathed it, kuduk or human. The only recommended treatment was sedation—a quiet moment of peace before death.
“What do you think we should do?”
Kezudkan smiled and lowered his cane. He walked over and looked at the frame of the former world-ripper. The bulbs around the outside rim had shattered in the heat, and the shape had drooped from circular to a valley between two hills. “We build another. We find a new hideaway. We find new allies.”
“Allies? Where?”
“What does it matter where? We have gold, and gold puts loyalty in places it would never grow otherwise. If there are rune-throwers out there, we’ll find some of our own. Even if we have to pay humans.”
“Humans don’t fight their own.”
Kezudkan snorted. “Your kind wrote a bunch of nonsense into history a long time ago. I’ve seen my people’s records. Before you stomped the fire from them, humans fought each other with a ferocity and a barbarism that your kind couldn’t dream of. They fought over money, over land, over honor and respect and women. Us? We just need the ones who’ll fight for money.”
Draksgollow kept silent. He had no argument to refute Kezudkan’s ancient history, and didn’t know that it would even have been worth trying.
“How long before your workers at Machine Two decide to come looking for us?” Kezudkan asked.
“Can’t say,” Draksgollow replied. “They didn’t have orders to come get us, so it could be a while. Then again, they’re pulling about five hundred pounds of gold out of that Telluraki mine every day. Dunno if they’re the kind who’d fight for money, but if they’re the kind who might do nothing and hope to inherit it, we might be in for a long, long wait.”
Waves broke against the docks of Tinker’s Island. The off-shore wind carried the Katamic’s brine with a low howl. The city was otherwise silent.
A hole opened, torn from the deck of the Jennai, where the repaired world-ripper was back in operation. Men poured through, armed with coil guns, and set up a defensive perimeter. Workers scurried out in their wake, entering warehouses and workshops, carrying through all that wasn’t bolted down, then unbolting those that were, and carrying them off as well. After a few minutes of frantic activity, the workers and soldiers slipped back into Korr and the hole vanished.
The city was silent once more.
“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him.” A tall, slim figure in comfortable trousers and a loose brown tunic lounged on the rooftop of the Errol mansion.
“Come on, Brannis, it’s been six years,” said Juliana, sprawled out beside him, their heads just a handspan apart. “You couldn’t expect to recognize a young man by the boy he was. They get taller, thinner in the face—”
“And turn into bloodthirsty madmen?” he finished for her. “Face it, Danilaesis turned into a young Rashan while we were absent. Maybe you should stick to calling me Kyrus while we’re here. Brannis is dead; he would have stopped this.”
“While we were absent? You mean Kyrus and Brannis, right? I never had any say with the boy. Besides, it’s not like you knew how to get back to Veydrus.” Juliana thumped a hand on one of the mysterious books. “Now that we do, maybe you can go back and set him straight. Knock him around a bit; he’d understand that sort of language.”
“This is the world I get by standing idle,” Kyrus swept his hand over the city. “Piles of dead men and women. Invaders from across the deep aether. A demon-hearted boy made a savior because he’s better at savagery than the rest. The question is what could I have done that would have been any better?”
“You could have saved those people.”
Kyrus glowered at her. “You were the one who first warned me of the easy trap of power. Tallax must have thought the same thing once: ‘I can do better.’ And look where it got everyone.”
“Over six hundred years of peace.”
“Oxen are at peace,” Kyrus countered. “You’ve heard their stories, these Korrish twinborn. They’d just trade one master for another if I got involved.”
Juliana reached over and ran a finger through a lock of Kyrus’s hair. “You could do better. Maybe seeing the trap is enough.”
Kyrus swatted her hand away. “Now you’re just teasing me. I’ll keep my promise and stay clear. Although ... if they start mucking about with Veydrus, I might see that others keep clear as well.”
Juliana’s grin was infectious. “I can imagine all sorts of unhappy demons if you do.”
“Their problem.”
Juliana stood, heedless of the thirty foot drop beside her on the tiled roof. “Come on, cheer up. We’ve got a whole city empty to play about in. Let’s go see what they’ve left.”
She stepped over the edge to plummet, absorbing the impact on the street below with no sign of difficulty. Kyrus winked out of existence and appeared beside her. “Let’s.”
* * * * * * * *
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About the Author
Born in New Hampshire in 1977, J.S. Morin found himself captivated by the wonders of fantasy novels at a young age. He was introduced to the
genre via the works of R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood, and Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. He loved exploring other people’s worlds, from Shadowdale to Hyrule. He also quickly found Dungeons and Dragons to be a creative outlet for stories, characters, and new worlds of his own creation.
His other passion was for building and designing things, and when it came time to choose a career, he went down that road. A Mechanical Engineer by day, he spends his evenings with his wife in their New Hampshire home, enjoying the simplicity of life in a quiet state.
By night he dreams elaborate dreams of visiting fanciful worlds, performing acts of heroism, and solving intriguing puzzles, which inspire him to craft stories that he hopes will help shape the lives of the next generation of fantasy readers. He hopes to avoid finishing growing up.