Jolting vibrations quickly shocked her back to the present. If the other three survived the fall, she had to get them out of here now. Fearing she was already too late, Sabira stumbled toward the altars. Her vision slowly came back into focus. A toxic haze of chalky grit obscured everything. The air was acrid and thick, every breath abrasive. Her nose and throat were raw, irritated. She could barely make out the jagged terrain of deck-crashed-upon-deck. Broken ceramic and torn metal had fallen in clumps and mounds haphazardly around the grank pen and scattered across the deck. Biomech tubing sprayed noxious fluids and gasses from what remained of the ceiling. Blood and oils ran in dark rivulets and pooled around the debris mounds. The floor trembled beneath the charging granks, sending wreckage sliding and shifting, though she could only barely see the blurred movements of the war beasts through the haze. Fallen bodies of the injured and the dead, servant and warseer alike, lay strewn throughout the rubble. Whoever managed to somehow survive the fall would soon be ground to paste beneath grank hooves.
Sabira found Gabriel’s altar first, lying on its side atop a cracked slab of ceramic flooring. Sprawled across the top of the fallen altar lay an injured female godseer, obscuring Sabira’s view of the Emissary within. Splotches of dark green blood stained the Akuhn-Lo’s silver and black ceremonial robes. Chalky debris coated every surface. As Sabira approached, the Akuhn-Lo’s sense mounds twitched, and three orange eyes blearily tracked her.
“You!” spat the godseer in Ihziz-Ri. “You’ll freeze in the void for all eternity. How could you? How could—” The godseer’s cursing ended in abrupt, bloody gagging when Sabira drove the nihkazza into her abdomen.
She had just committed one of the most profound sins under Divine Will. Twice. Aggression toward Overseers meant death in the altar. But to harm Godseers? Even the redemption of the altar couldn’t save her soul. Digging the blade around inside, she it snagged on the godseer’s ribcage and used the leverage to push the corpse off the altar and out of the way.
The hover pod at the altar’s base was ruptured. The back control panel was a busted mess. After a few desperate jabs at the nerve cluster release, the ribs didn’t spread even a notch. Waste of time. She shoved the yarist inside her boot so that it remained in contact with her skin, and she tucked the nihkazza into her uniform belt. She positioned herself at the opening of the ribs, planted her feet on the lower half, gripped the upper tusks, and pulled with all the enhanced strength the gem gave her. At first, the ribs wouldn’t budge. Then with an abrupt crack, they pried open. She released the latches on the fetters binding Gabriel’s ankles and stump caps. Luckily, they weren’t damaged and dropped right off.
Sabira reached in to roll Gabriel’s body out of the sacrificial cage. A menacing, thumping tremor announced that the granks were headed their way. Gabriel, tall, thickly muscled, and mostly limp, posed an ungainly challenge, even with Sabira’s increased strength. Changing tactics, she grabbed his ankles and started pulling him out through the bottom of the ribs. The pack of angry granks charged at them, activated rupture fields sizzling between their horns.
The charging biomechs ran much faster than she could pull Gabriel free of the ribs. There was no way they weren’t both dead, yet Sabira refused to give up and turn away. She cringed and kept pulling, anxious she would be pulverized any moment. Less than nine meters away, the pack turned sharply to the left, plowing a wide path through the wreckage. They slammed through the pen’s bulkhead and burrowed into the guts of the pyramid.
Shocked to be alive, Sabira froze, eyes wide, knees bent deep, Gabriel’s ankles clutched in her hands. Granks didn’t just turn like that. Not unless someone was steering them. A heartbeat later and she was back in motion, confused, but not stupid enough to waste time questioning her luck.
Sabira pulled Gabriel free of the ribs. His eyes fluttered open, bloodshot and unfocused. She reached down and gingerly patted his swollen cheeks, trying to wake him. The yarist gem filled her mind with violent urging. She focused through the impulses and kept herself from mindlessly striking his defenseless face.
Without warning, his eyes suddenly rolled back, showing only the bloody, ghostly whites. His body stiffened plank-straight, every muscle yanked taut and rigid. He reminded Sabira of countless khvazol she had seen with an overseer’s prod hard-shocking their lower spine. An instant later the full-body convulsion released. Muscles unlocked but didn’t go limp, and his sharp, golden eyes rolled down to see her.
“What just happened?” Gabriel asked, slowly pushing himself up on his elbows.
“I think Orion happened,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if it was him at first or if the eon was tricking me or . . . But it must be him. He was real after all. Somehow he infiltrated the ship’s systems. I think he’s got a cure for Ed. Can you get up? Can you walk? We’ve got to find Ed and Maia and get off this pyramid.”
“I can walk. Just let me—” He gasped with pain as he tried to press off his amputated arms to get up.
Sabira crouched low, grasped beneath his armpits, and hauled the big man to his feet. It felt odd to be so intimately wrapped around a naked man and not be trying to drill or fight, but there was nothing sensuous about the contact. Desperate haste and barely controlled fury were the limits of her current emotional capacity.
“Follow me, and keep your eyes open,” she said. Sabira drew the nihkazza and picked her way through the tumult of wreckage, looking for the other altars. Gabriel followed, bare feet cautiously maneuvering through the ruins.
A sudden clang of metal and ceramic crashing down startled them both. Sabira looked up through the open wound of the deck above. Another pack of granks rammed straight up through the air into the upper decks. They still had hover pods installed from the invasion, allowing them to charge vertically through the heart of the pyramid, unimpeded by the ship’s artificial gravity. The other gravity-bound granks separated off into small packs and plowed their way out through the pen walls.
“Over there, to our right,” said Gabriel. The curved tusks of an altar stood askew behind a misshapen mound of piping and valves.
Chunks of the ship’s interior continued to rain down into the grank pens. Shockwaves of chalky dust blew across the deck with each loud, jarring impact as they stumbled their way to the next altar. They found the dead ahno godseer first, ahns head and shoulders flattened beneath a long metal strut. Splatters of green blood trailed over a mess of beams and ductwork, dripping towards the altar encaging Maia.
The altar rested at a precarious angle on the other side of the jagged mound of piping. Maia’s head tilted down. The sharp tusks were still savagely wedged into her left ribs and had shredded her breast during the fall. Blood and grit streamed down her neck, pouring over her bruised, upside down face.
Sabira thought about how they would share the same deformity now. She pulled open the ribs and freed the Oracle within. Gabriel supported Maia’s lolling head as she slid free.
“Cut some strips out of that dead priest’s robes,” said Gabriel. “Wrap that around Maia. Make it tight over the chest. Then go find Ed while I take care of her.”
Sabira did as he instructed, bandaged Maia’s streaming wound, and left her in Gabriel’s care. She found Edlashuul a few meters away, hidden beneath a jumble of twisted ducts and heavy cables. The altar had cracked open from the fall, spilling the young vleez free of the ribs. Both of his hind legs were bent in shocking angles. Thick smudges of black vleez blood coated his broken limbs.
“Be alive. Still be alive.” She scrambled through the wreckage to get to him. Two of his sense tendrils rose, swayed listlessly in her direction, and collapsed again as she approached. She whispered for him to hold on. Insisted that he stay alive, that they would get out of this, that he would be cured. Healed. Just stay alive. Just stay with her a little longer.
She carried him like a child, limp and bleeding against her breast, and headed back to the others. Every pained murmur from his grafted respirator urged her forward.
When she reached them, Gabriel held Maia’s listless body to him. The bandages Sabira had wrapped around Maia’s breasts were soaked. Dark red seeped out, pulse by pulse, saturating the cloth. Maia’s eyes were open, but unfocused and dazed.
“Ed’s alive,” gasped Sabira, “but only barely. We’ve got to hurry. Orion said his ship is nearby. The drop ships are on this deck. We can take one. Can you help her walk?”
“We need you to protect us on the way,” said Gabriel. “You’ll need at least one hand free for your knife. Give me Ed, and use your free hand to support Maia.”
“No,” said Maia, head wobbling as she shook it. “No, we won’t leave the others. Rain, Coraz . . . all of them. Not without them. I won’t.”
The adrenaline and urgency boiling within Sabira wanted to argue with Maia, force her to flee with them as fast as they could. But Sabira knew she was right. They were all brood now; their fates were entangled. Sabira looked to Gabriel. The same agreement was in his eyes.
“Let’s get our people and get the hell out of here,” he said.
Sabira handed Ed over to him. He seemed even smaller, frailer, cradled against Gabriel’s wide, dark chest. Sabira pulled Maia up, wrapped her left arm around Maia’s blood-soaked shoulders. She pulled the nihkazza blade free from her belt and searched through the choking haze of dust for the best route.
Maia’s chest disintegrated into a mist of scorched flesh.
Sabira felt the cringing heat of the plasma bolt. Felt the life burned from Maia’s body in an instant. Felt the weight of her droop and slip away as she fell dead at Sabira’s feet.
Battle instincts whipped her attention to the line of fire. Thirty meters ahead rose a misshapen tumble of wreckage that was once the walls of the Servants Hall. A torn banner draped the twisted face of the mound, the glyphs for the Pyramid Zol-Ori barely legible. Atop the jumbled pile, the shooter stood, palukai at the ready, staring directly at her through the haze.
Grandfather Spear.
42.
SABIRA CHARGED, SCREAMING, wild with pain and hostility. The fury unleashed by the yarist gem, no longer held in check by the force of her will, propelled her toward combat. Toward Grandfather.
Unable to charge directly at him across the broken terrain, she leaped as she ran, zigzagging from mound to mound of rubble and bodies. With the gem touching her skin inside her boot, she was faster, stronger, more agile. Harder to hit. Spear fired his palukai again and again. Bolts of plasma burned through the haze, slagging where she had been a fraction of a second before.
Torn cables writhed like biomech tentacles above them, showering sparks and steam into the heavy air. Through the gaping wound in the ceiling, even more heavy, jagged slabs of the upper decks came crashing down. A thick chunk of flaming machinery smashed in the center of the grank pens. The impact shuddered through the debris field and wobbled Sabira. A shockwave of hot dust stung her eyes, burned like acid up her nose.
She kept moving, knowing she couldn’t let herself become an easy target. With one hand wiping the grit from her eyes, she felt her way forward with the nihkazza extended before her, probing for a way through the chaos. Deep, wracking coughs shook her whole body.
Sabira was finally able to see again, blearily, as the newly fallen machinery exploded into a blossom of fire and sparks and metal. A pair of granks burst through the heart of the explosion, their ballistic force and rupture fields annihilating everything in their paths.
They headed straight for Spear.
Sabira ran as fast and as straight as she could. She had to beat the granks to him. They were faster, but she was closer.
The granks won.
They smashed into the rubble heap beneath him when she was still more than a dozen meters away. The same instant their rupture fields plowed into the rubble, he leaped straight up. Cracked slabs of metal and chunks of ceramic blasted around him. He tumbled in midair with the wreckage and landed hard on a grank’s hind eye mound. One hand gripped armored plating as his legs dangled wildly from the back end of the war beast. Through it all, he kept hold of his palukai.
Sabira froze, watched it all happen in a span of a few racing heartbeats. When the heap erupted she dove behind a wet pile of bodies to avoid shrapnel. From within a grisly tangle of human and warseer limbs, a woman stared back at her, alabaster face smudged with red and green blood; swollen eyes trembled with the last, fading spark of life; slow, raspy, hollow breaths stuttered from gray lips.
Buried beneath Sabira’s rage, a harsh sadness and shame gnawed through her guts. All the lives she couldn’t save. All the blood and pain and death catastrophically converging to give her a chance to escape.
Then the fury crashed through her again like a flood, body and mind swept up in its currents. Sabira wiped her eyes and spied over the rim of bodies, eager to resume her attack. The two granks continued their charge, plowing a wide, circling arc through the wreckage. She could just make out Spear pulling himself up the biomech beast. Once atop the stable platform, he appeared to quickly gather his wits. He scoped his palukai across the pens, searching for her.
Sabira darted. Spear fired. The plasma bolt seared into the mound of dead and dying. She burst into her zigzag charge through the rubble, but now she had to zone in on a moving target.
Spear only fired once more before the grank started bucking. Hind legs veered straight up like massive pistons. He managed to lock his feet into the platform well enough to keep from being thrown off by the first two wild bucks. The third launched him straight back. He landed in the open strip the war beasts had cleared out by their passage.
The two granks both reared up on their hind legs and pushed backward as they stomped. For a stiletto thin moment, she was sure they had crushed him beneath their wide, flat hooves. Then she caught a glimpse of him rolling back, alive and evading the beasts.
She continued to run for him, only meters away now. “No,” she screamed. “Don’t kill him!”
The granks bucked again but didn’t lunge back after Spear, stomped their hooves straight down instead. They shuffled erratically, still irritated and volatile, though somehow restrained. They circled around to face Spear as she ran up to the rim of their trail.
“Don’t kill him!” she yelled again, not quite screaming anymore. “He’s my fight.”
The granks backed off, jerking their thick heads back and forth, legs stomping harder than needed as they moved. She could feel their steps vibrate through the thick line of ducting she stood atop.
Using his palukai like a staff, Grandfather Spear rose to his feet. Blood dripped from a wide array of wounds. His natural eye was red and swollen shut. His silver biomech eye locked straight on her.
“That’s right, child of my blood,” he said. “I’m your fight.”
His palukai blurred with precise, deadly motion. As it spun, he transformed it into a curved halberd blade on one end, plasma blaster on the other.
Sabira knew his techniques. After a lifetime of following his path, observing and learning and emulating in every way she could, her reflexes knew the precise angle of his first shot. She launched herself. Plasma bolts crackled past her, searing empty air. But she still had ground to cover, and he had the longer weapon. His diamond-sharp halberd scythed toward her head. Her instincts expected that too. She parried with the nihkazza and kept moving to try and close the gap.
The blaster end of his palukai swooped up, firing instant death, and forced her to maneuver away. She crouched, ready to spring at the first twitch of his next attack. Instead, Grandfather Spear paused, gripping the stick in a ready position, blade forward.
“What did they do to my granddaughter? What did they do to poison her heart against me? Against her people? She could have been Handmaiden one day. She could have been raised up. Seen by all. Did their drugs really do this? Tell me, what did they do to her?”
“They freed me.”
She lunged forward with the sacrificial blade held
low and ready. Watched for the angle of the stick’s spin to anticipate the direction of plasma fire. He moved as if to swing the blaster end up, but speared the palukai straight toward her instead. She twisted away. A stinging bite on her left ear and temple felt more like an abstract idea of pain.
They fought in the center of the cleared-out grank trail. Blades swung and parried and clashed. Sparks and grit fell from above, and plasma bolts scorched through dust clouds, missing their mark. Even with one eye blind and fighting an opponent surging with the yarist gem, Spear proved he had earned every glyph of honor and glory on his head.
The yarist made Sabira nearly indefatigable while his thrusts slowed as the fight went on. A fraction of a second was all she needed. She quickly snatched the shaft in a tight, strong grip. When he yanked back on his weapon, she swung hers up.
The palukai dropped, clanking on the floor. Three fingers from his left hand fell in soft, wet flops beside it.
And then he plowed into her. His thick shoulder slammed her gut, knocking her off her feet and hard onto her back. His full weight smashed down on top, crushed the breath out of her. Her grip broke, and the nihkazza slipped free.
After a breathless heartbeat, his weight lifted off her right side, favoring his maimed hand. She rolled with his shifting weight. Her legs lashed out like serpents across his back and shoulder, trapping his head and left arm between them. She locked down the choke. His swollen-shut eye bulged out like it would spurt from his skull, while his silver eye stared into hers, cold and unchanging.
“See me, Grandfather,” she grunted, legs squeezing tighter, hand groping for the lost dagger. “See me now.”
Sabira glanced to the side to look for the blade, eager to finish this. The nihkazza lay where she couldn’t reach it without releasing the chokehold.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 4: Sacrificial Altars (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 4) Page 3