by Tom Lloyd
‘Irato and me lead,’ Enchei said as he readied his helm again. ‘Narin, Kesh and Myken behind us. Watch our backs and follow us up to the top. The summoner’s likely to be up there with the shrines. We go when the guns start, with luck it’ll distract them and give us room to move.’
‘And us?’ Enay asked.
‘You two take the rear. Maiss, take Enay’s pistols and cover her. That lance is slow to move and they could be coming from all sides. Enay, leave a trail of destruction in our wake – make it clear for anyone investigating tomorrow that Dragons were here and dealing with the threat to the city. I’m no fan of House Dragon, but anything that pisses on our enemy’s plan works for me.’
‘What if they are here?’ Narin asked suddenly. ‘What if we meet Dragon Astaren?’
Enchei shook his head. ‘They’ll be back in Dragon District; they’ve got enough on their plates. Their remit’s to protect their own, protect Lord Omteray. If they hadn’t been ambushed, sure, but they don’t have the numbers to rule the city right now. Their only goal is ensuring the ruling lord of Dragon District lives through the night – if they can’t protect their own, the shame’ll be doubled.’
‘And Iron’s Astaren?’
‘Most likely killed before the shrines were activated, or they’re keeping their heads down. Only Dragon keep units of combat troops in the city, so far as I’ve ever heard, the rest mostly have just spies. They’re much tougher than normal soldiers, but they’re not here to challenge Dragon’s authority. You don’t piss off the prime hegemony in the Empire unless you really need to.’
He slipped his helm on and readied his weapons, tucking back the sleeve of his left arm to uncover twin holes the width of a knitting needle that could spit darts hard enough to punch right through a man. In his hands were his Astaren baton and a triangular-bladed dagger of the same dark metal as the rest of his armour.
‘Now we wait.’
On the western flank of the Minerild, Lawbringer Rhe glanced left and right at the figures waiting in the shadows. The gaudily-dressed Imperials had split into two groups and flanked Rhe’s Lawbringers, pulling on nondescript grey capes that blended into the smoke-blackened stones of Iron District. Through the mist he caught Prince Kashte’s eye and the young Imperial nodded to him, the jewelled hilt of Kashte’s broadsword protruding from his coat while his rifle nestled in his hands.
Rhe set off, moving swiftly through the narrow side-streets until he reached the broad cobbled road that surrounded the Minerild. His neck prickled as he felt the predatory attention settle on him, but he strode on regardless until he was out in the most exposed part – a looming ghost in the starlight.
He looked around, seeing faint red glowing eyes in the shadows of a darkened archway, then two pairs, then three. The outline of a head appeared over the high wall almost directly in front of him.
‘You are all under arrest,’ he called loudly. His voice echoed around the deserted streets, met by a low growl just on the edge of hearing. ‘You will receive no second warning. The summoner and all members of the Etrage Merchant House are to surrender immediately.’
Behind him the Lawbringers and Investigators emerged too, guns already drawn. He couldn’t see the Imperials but Rhe knew they would be there, keeping to the shadows themselves and readying a volley if the Lawbringers were attacked.
There was no reply. Rhe drew his sword and transferred it to his left hand. All nobles and warriors were taught to use both gun and sword in either hand, but the pistol holsters were traditionally angled towards the right. Few became more than competent with either in their off hand; Rhe had even seen one youth manage to stab himself when ordered to switch hands in duelling practice. For Rhe there had never been such problems, never anything more than puzzlement that skilled fighters could be reduced to childish helplessness that way.
‘No answer?’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Very well.’
He didn’t get a chance to take a step forward. A small figure burst forward from the archway, blond hair flying, face contorted and distended as it leapt for Rhe. Such was its shocking, unnatural power that it covered the ground in the blink of an eye. With blurring speed Rhe drew and fired. The figure’s head snapped back as though on a leash, black blood exploding from its throat as the bullet tore through and shattered its spine.
It fell like a broken toy, but Rhe was forced to dart to one side to avoid the tumbling bundle of fangs and ragged limbs. He almost didn’t see the second possessed novice charge out, but behind him, Investigator Soral was the first to aim and fire. She caught it dead-on, a black flower blossoming on the possessed’s chest before it staggered back.
Rhe made up the ground in two steps and brought his sword around in a long arc before the novice could right itself. He slashed up at its armpit and opened a deep cut, but didn’t wait to see if that was enough to kill. He brought his blade back around to chop into its nape hard enough to break bone. It fell.
From the roof of the building off to his right a pair of pale, hairless figures dropped. Rhe left the Lawbringers there to deal with them and one was spun right around by the double-crack that split the night. The second ducked down and leapt like a hunting dog, scampering forward at the nearest Lawbringer and ignoring the shot that grazed it. The pale man drove up at the Lawbringer, daggers outstretched as though for leverage before he bit at the man’s face.
The Lawbringer howled – the first cry to part the night – and fell. What happened to him Rhe couldn’t say, as the sound seemed to herald a dozen more possessed novices and pale ones emerging as one from the shadows of the Minerild. Rhe sheathed one gun and fired again, taking one of a pair through the forehead. From both sides the night was shattered by a volley of gunshots – both pistols and Imperial rifles.
Many of the newcomers fell but the second of Rhe’s pair zigzagged towards him, thrown off-balance by the lead that ripped through its ribs but did not slow it down. Powerful strides covered the ground so swiftly that Rhe only just had time to drop his spent gun before it lurched within cutting range, hooked daggers slashing wildly.
Instinct drove Rhe forward. He slipped both hands around the sword’s grip and thrust straight. He caught the man high in the chest, felt the crackle of bone parting as the tip drove through and into the vital organs behind. Such was the pale man’s momentum he drove right up the blade, still flailing with his daggers, and Rhe felt a burning pain open on his bicep as his coat and flesh were sliced open. He gave ground, startled more by the unnatural ferocity than anything else, before finally managing to raise a leg and kick the staggering man in the gut.
The kick drove them apart, Rhe almost falling as the pale man finally came to a halt. Both were still for a moment, Rhe afforded a clear view of the man’s rounded face, strangely thin lips and lolling black tongue. His eyes were black, no gleam of infernal light there, but the light of the Gods illuminated slender fangs in his mouth and Rhe didn’t wait to see any more. A second kick and a renewed grip on his sword shoved the pale man off it before Rhe spun and slashed in one fluid motion.
Nearby there were others not faring so well, several of his comrades taken to ground by the attackers. No more rushed from the Minerild, however, and the remaining Lawbringers quickly went to their comrades’ aid, impaling the snarling defenders until they were at last silent.
All was quiet for a moment. Before anyone could speak or Rhe could assess the dead and wounded, a haunting howl rang out from somewhere deep within the great circular building. Despite himself, Rhe felt a tightening in his stomach at the unnatural sound. He straightened and let his sword fall so the guard rested on his boot, ready to flick up again in case of attack, hands already moving to reload his pistols.
‘Ready yourselves,’ he called and a cold knot of anger twisted inside him. ‘These streets are the Emperor’s own, we do not suffer demons to walk them.’
He finished one pistol and sheathed it, picking up the second and quickly reloading that too. One quick jerk of the foot and h
e caught his sword again, advancing forward with pistol and blade ready. If the others were behind him, he did not notice. He saw only the shadows ahead. As he entered the Minerild, the light of the Gods went with him.
CHAPTER 37
Enchei didn’t speak. He didn’t need to; the stuttered whip-crack of gunshots told their own tale. With Irato close behind he ghosted forward, footsteps silent and weapons ready. Emerging into the open ground he found no one waiting for him, only the white flash of a Sea Snake devotee rounding the curve of the Minerild towards Rhe’s troops.
It didn’t last long. Just as they reached the nearest archway, recessed between a shuttered bakery and a blacksmith’s, a possessed novice came sprinting in the other direction. Barely an adult, the young woman had red burning eyes, huge lower canines and every finger had morphed into a hooked claw. She bounded towards them, hurling herself through the air.
Enchei shot her in the face, but it did nothing to slow her flight. He twisted, battering at her reaching arms as he dodged. She fell heavily, but landed on all fours. Before Enchei could bring his darts to bear a second time, Irato reached out and almost lazily grabbed her by the scruff of the neck.
The possessed snarled and wrenched around, scrabbling to tear Irato’s face open. The former goshe looked unperturbed—
—no, Enchei corrected himself, Irato’s not even there now.
A blank expression on his face, eyes and mouth shining with bluish light, Irato swatted away the flailing claws and shook the novice like a rat. Enchei heard the crack of her spine breaking, saw the shudder of air around her as the hellhound inside was half-dislodged by the death of its vessel.
Should’ve run, Enchei thought idly as some shadowy limb reached up from the dead novice’s body. It’ll get you now.
Irato somehow grabbed the insubstantial limb and yanked it forward, hauling the hellhound out into the night’s sky before a bright flash of light tore through it and the shadows evaporated. The Apkai, or whatever fragment of its self it had left behind, let the corpse fall from its fingers – already forgotten – and stalked towards the arched entrance to the Minerild.
Enchei watched it for a moment as the scent of snow filled his mind, quite separate from the freezing weather that surrounded him. Memories of a mountain valley with fresh snowfall and glimpsed figures in the darkness. The place that would become known as the Fields of the Broken, the fragments of a waking god’s thoughts that brought horror and ruin to five armies.
A sudden and powerful sense of hatred filled him, though he knew the Apkai was nothing like what had been found in the valley tombs. For a moment it didn’t matter and he felt his arm rise, ready to fire at Irato’s back. Some scrap of revenge for the pain and death, the nights of horror that had strained the minds of even the Astaren among them, but he quelled the thoughts and forced his hand down again.
You killed it, there’s no more revenge to be had.
With an effort, he stopped his hand shaking, old instincts screaming in the cage of his memories until he was back in control. Just the memories were enough to nearly paralyse him. Every second he watched some demon avatar hunt in the darkness brought fresh reminders of those months he could not forget.
Enchei glanced back at the people following him. Wide-eyed Narin scurrying behind and veiled Myken moving with drilled purpose, Kesh taut and tense, his daughters standing tall and ready as they watched their flanks.
Always leaving folk behind, Enchei, he said to himself. And you left a part of you in that snow-choked valley. How much is left of the girls you once knew? Of the father they once knew? The dead lie in my wake, that’s what a survivor carries through the years, but sometimes I feel like more. Like some avatar of destruction – I break what I touch and leave the pieces of lives behind me.
He shook his head. His purpose was clear. Whether this was his last mission or not, success would make those girls a fraction safer. Whatever part of him had broken, the fracture had created enough jagged edges for a weapon and like it or not, that was how he was most comfortable. He turned and followed Irato into the Minerild, the edge of Irato’s long-knife laced with starlight even in the dark.
The blackness closed around them like the advancing grave. Enchei felt a tremble in his eyes as they sought to adjust, settling on a washed-out grey view just in time for another attack. Four Sea Snake devotees burst through a doorway in the side of the curved tunnel wall, daggers in their hands. He fired the baton at one and the man folded like a child’s toy, falling stunned under his comrade’s feet and getting trampled in the other’s desperation. That one Enchei dodged, rolling right around the reaching blades. He popped the man’s shoulder out of joint with a deft swipe, jerking the drug-fuelled warrior to a halt long enough to jam his dagger up through the base of his mouth. As the devotee dropped, Enchei was already finishing off the unconscious man.
Beyond him, Irato whirled and slashed with swift, awkward movements, his skill with a blade superseded by the demon avatar’s brutal speed and power. One Sea Snake threw himself under the blades and buried his fangs into Irato’s arm, only to be half-decapitated in the next instant and never see the venom of his bite fail.
‘Move,’ Enchei yelled, pointing towards where the brick passage opened out on a sliver of star-lit ground.
A set of stone steps led up the side of one building and Enchei ran past Irato to reach them. Another possessed was descending but it stumbled under the twin effects of the baton and darts ripping through its body. Enchei left it for Irato to finish as it tumbled down the steps, vaulting the first few as he ran for the rooftops.
Up there the starlight burned in his mage-sight – white against a dirty red haze around the shrines. The columns of pale stone fragments hummed with power, the wire surrounding them seemingly part of some complex web that snared power from the air. His eyesight fluttered again, shifting through complex colours and forms as it sought to identify a surge of power in the air so great that it set Enchei’s teeth on edge.
He could hear the calls of hellhounds more clearly from here – the howls and rushing wind of their home just a step away as the shrines thinned the wall between the worlds. He looked around, shot once, twice at a possessed creeping forward at him. The impact threw it off a rooftop to the ground below and won him a moment to properly inspect his surroundings. The configuration of the shrines had been changed, that much was obvious – the cone-shaped ones having been connected in a double prism, the columns in a horseshoe form. The heaviest chains now formed a gathering rune that led to a bound figure at the back wall, while lesser ones had been jury-rigged into a summoning rune with bent metal struts forming the vertices where there was no stone shrine.
As he took it all in, he sensed movement in the shadows. Great shapes circling around them. Enchei turned once then raised his arm and sent a volley of darts into the figure bound to the wall. It was a woman, he guessed, maybe House Gold by the look of her, but horribly injured and twitching under the force of the power being driven through her. Whether she was the summoner or not, what flowed through her needed to be stopped.
It wasn’t. Even though the woman stilled, the power continued unabated – but now it all flowed down, like water draining away. Behind him, Irato rose up, a contrasting light in Enchei’s mage-sight. The demon avatar turned left and right, inspecting the shrines and the shifting bulky shadows beyond them. He outstretched a hand and the nearest of the shrines burst apart in a flare of sparks.
Snarls came from the shadows; deep and threatening growls from the guarding hellhounds. In response Irato gathered more light to his hands, forming a cat o’ nine tails of spitting energy that he used to flay the nearer shadows. The hellhound there was torn open by the force of the blow and Enchei was already moving – content to leave Irato to deal with the remainder.
He ran over the rooftops, quick jumps taking him between buildings, until he was at the centre of the Minerild. There the power still flowed, running down through the roof of one unremarkable structu
re. He plunged forward, leaping for the small brick parapet around its half-rotten, pitch-stained roof. Whoever controlled the hellhounds, whoever was using the woman on the roof as a lens for their workings, had to be here.
Before he could drive down through the roof, it exploded. Enchei’s mage-sight went white as a hammer-blow of noise and roof fragments struck him face-on and threw him backwards. All-consuming white light, then the studded black of night, then a second impact and a long moment of silence.
Narin was halfway up the steps when he heard the explosion. He reached the top in time to see the after-glow of fire vomit up into the sky and a dark figure pinwheeling into the crumbling dirty brick of a neighbouring house. A section toppled inward under the impact and the body fell in a cloud of dust through the wall. Narin ran the last few steps up, Myken on his heels, and dodged around Irato. Light blazed from the former goshe’s hands, long spitting streams that raced around the rooftops with a will of their own.
A clamour of lupine sounds assailed Narin’s ears, howls of rage and pain, while shadows burst under Irato’s assault and the dust and embers of the shattered roof spiralled through the cold night air. He staggered forward through it all, trying to blank out the shrieks and growls, the gunshots echoing through the guts of the Minerild, and pushed on after Enchei.
He reached the edge of the rooftop and looked down. The central structure was burning, twisted fragments of metal glowing inside what remained of its walls. Just beyond that were two figures – a pale-skinned man poised in the act of firing a pistol at someone below Narin while supporting another, darker one. Nearer, half-inside a broken building, lay Enchei amid the rubble.
Something about the pale-skinned man demanded Narin’s attention. He was House Ghost – both his clothes and features confirmed it. That he was Astaren seemed likely when he fired a second time, then a third, with the same pistol. One glance up at Narin and he raised the gun to shoot. Narin found his body wouldn’t react at first – he was hypnotised by the slow, smooth movement, while around the man grey flowers of dust burst into life where the Lawbringers’ bullets struck brickwork.