by Ian Whates
More than one scream rent the air now.
Further figures were pressing through the doorway behind the first. One or two had human features but most seemed composed of nothing more than silver light, dazzling to look upon. All were of similar stature to the first. Carla gaped, unable to rationalise what she was seeing. She couldn't move, didn't know how to react. She was supposed to be the perfect party host, ready for any eventuality, but not for this.
Several things then happened at once, snapping her out of her paralysis. The tall windows which dominated the wall opposite the stage shattered, seemingly all at once, sending shards of glass raining down on those nearby, and more of the silver light giants strode through the broken windows. This registered only at the periphery of Carla's awareness, her attention focused elsewhere. She stared in horror at the shimmering figure who reached out towards Jean while the maître d' was still recovering from his brush with the first giant. As a glowing finger touched him, a cocoon of light enveloped Jean's body and he froze, all except for his face, which took on an expression of wide-eyed horror that swiftly transformed into one of excruciating agony; eyes screwed shut, mouth thrown open as if screaming, though Carla couldn't hear him. It was a moment she would never forget, as if every tortured line of Jean's face burned itself into her retinas and hence into her memory. A second later the expression was gone, vanishing as his face exploded. No, that was wrong, the process was less dramatic. Jean's face, his whole body, seemed to simply drift apart. One moment there was a shape within the glow that was recognisably Jean, the next nothing human stood there at all. In the brief instant before the glow which had surrounded the maître d' faded, Carla watched a cloud of russet flakes drop towards the floor like ruddy brown rose petals.
The glowing silver giant was no longer silver or glowing. It now looked like Jean.
Only then did Carla grasp the full horror of what was happening here; only then did she realise their doom.
She stumbled away in a daze, with no clear idea of where she was going, just the certainty that she had to get away from these creatures. Somebody bumped into her, causing her to stagger, and she was abruptly aware that pandemonium had broken out and that everyone was trying to get away. The thin veneer of politeness, of etiquette, had been abandoned, to be replaced by the drive to survive. Men, women, young or old, it didn't matter; all were screaming, fighting, pushing and elbowing in their desperation to reach the stairs and escape. Never mind that more of the creatures waited below, a whole cordon of them, herding folk towards the stage, instinct still drove people to flee the most immediate threat, and a bottleneck started to form at the top of the mezzanine stairs.
For those at the back there was no hope of escape. The silver giants moved implacably forward, killing with a touch. The ones that had already adopted a semblance of human form simply killed. The crowd discovered new levels of desperation. Carla watched an elderly woman, resplendent in diaphanous gown and diamond jewellery, knocked from her feet and trampled by her fellows, with no chance of recovering.
A small part of Carla's mind remained detached, refusing to accept any of this as real. A symptom of shock perhaps, but that small corner of sanity brought her hope. She realised that the stairs which those all around her were straining towards offered only temporary respite, that even those who reached them would still be trapped. Then her gaze fell upon the door, off to one side, evidently overlooked by everyone. The kitchens, deliberately designed to lead off the mezzanine to ensure that a supply of freshly chilled champagne was always on hand during greetings and that diners could fully appreciate each new dish as it was paraded down the stairs prior to serving. She started to forge her way in that direction, moving across the flow of panicked people. She prised a woman's chest away from a man's back and inserted first an arm and then her whole self between. Moving against the human tide proved to be an unexpected advantage. While others were faced with a wall of backs and had nowhere to go, she could slip through – with a little persuasion. Somebody dug her in the ribs with an elbow, someone else struck her shoulder with bruising force. She ignored the minor flares of pain and kept going, focussing only on that door.
Doubtless she knew these people, many of them would be her friends, yet terror and desperation had converted their faces into those of strangers. She pushed, kneed and fought with the best of them, forcing a passage, closing her vision and her mind to everything else and refusing to think about how close the death-dealing giants were coming.
She was nearly there, with just a few more people to fight through, when it happened. In her eagerness to find sanctuary she overstretched across intervening legs and feet. Somebody trod on her gown, her beautiful gown, tearing it, and she was jostled as she tried to bring her trailing leg through. Carla stumbled and tripped, falling heavily onto a man's knee and then the floor. Desperately she tried to pull herself along, no longer keeping track of the number of bumps and bruises. Somebody stepped down on her calf and she cried out, barely hearing her own voice above all the screaming and the shouting, which suddenly seemed to intensify.
A woman to her left, oblivious to her presence, looked about to repeat the act of stepping on her but this time in stiletto heels, when she froze and her body began to glow. Carla scrambled away, pulling her legs in frantically, determined not to touch that nimbus. Within seconds the woman imploded, disappearing in a cascade of rusty flakes, some of which fell onto Carla's exposed arms and legs.
She lost it then. All rational thought deserted her as she opened her mouth and shrieked and writhed and kicked, not even aware that she had broken through the crowd of people until the door to the kitchen loomed before her nose. She pulled it open and half-rolled half-crawled inside, to collapse, her body wracked with sobs.
Heat washed over her. The lights were still on but the kitchen was deserted, the cooks and waiting staff having presumably fled. The rich aromas of cooking, which normally Carla would have breathed in deeply and relished, now only made her feel nauseous. She reached up to grip the harsh metal edge of a table, pulling herself to her feet, and stumbled across the empty room towards the service door. Two thirds of the way across, her stomach heaved and she was forced to double over, throwing up onto the floor. It seemed an age before the retching subsided and she could move forward. Not even pausing to find water and wash the sour taste of vomit from her mouth, she finally reached the door, thrusting it open and staggering into the corridor beyond.
She stopped to draw in fresher, cooler air, amazed at how muted the noise from the ballroom had suddenly become. From out here the shouting, the screaming, the sounds of people being slaughtered, it could almost be mistaken for over-enthusiastic revelry. Almost.
There was nobody else in sight. Part of Carla was glad, conscious even now of what a mess she must look and relieved that there was no one here to see it, but guilt immediately swept such concerns away as the implications sank in. Surely others must have escaped? She couldn't be the only one; but, if so, they were already long gone. Not that she could blame them.
Carla took a deep breath and braced herself. It was time to forget that she was Carla Birhoff, celebrated socialite, and remember that she was Assembly Member Birhoff. Her city needed her.
She wriggled her feet and kicked off the impractical shoes that still somehow clung to them, gathered up the skirt of her ruined gown, and started to run; a somewhat shuffling gait perhaps, but it was the best she could manage – the greater part of two decades had passed since she last attempted to move this quickly. As she ran, she bent over to spit out the taste of sick from her mouth, all decorum forgotten. Such considerations seemed no more than petty affectations in the light of what she had just been through.
Carla determined to find the city watch, to alert the Kite Guard, to rouse the Assembly, to mobilise the Blade. The people of Thaiburley needed to be warned, they had to be told the unthinkable truth, that the Rust Warriors had returned.
TWO
Tom couldn't breathe. Coldness e
nveloped him, pressing in on his chest, sapping warmth from his body and strength from his limbs. Bitter chill nipped at his cheeks and hammered at his ears and forehead, to set searing pain dancing behind his temples. He tried to suck in air and found only icy water – more cold, this time drawn inside his body. He was drowning.
Frantically he thrashed, straining to reach the surface which had to be somewhere above him. Yes, there! His head breached the boundary between the elements and he emerged gasping and spluttering, dragging his arms out of the water.
"Tom!" Someone called his name. He blinked, wiping his eyes and face with clumsy numbed hands. A name fell into place: Mildra. She was there, wrapping something around his body. Instinctively he grasped it, finding soft warmth which his fingers sank into as they fastened on the swathe. A towel, all fluffy and soft and warm. Mildra was trying to wipe his face with one corner of it.
"Come on," she said, placing an arm around his shoulders and urging him to stand. "Let's get you out of there. He was sitting in the water, he realised. Was it really so shallow? Felt much deeper when he first came round. Of course it was shallow, this was the ice tank.
He was shivering violently now, his legs mere pillars of ice. In fact, he'd lost all sense of feeling from the waist down and needed to lean on Mildra for support while he halfclambered and half-fell out of the submersion tank.
"Thaiss," he muttered, forgetting himself for a moment, "Why the breck does it have to be so cold?"
"The cold is an essential part of the process," said an older, strangely accented woman's voice. "As you well know."
Looking a great deal healthier than the gaunt figure that he and Mildra had revived just days before, the living goddess strode towards him. She was moving a lot less stiffly as well. Her long silver-grey hair had been tied back so that it fell past her shoulders in a ponytail, while the pale blue onepiece she'd worn during her centuries-long sleep had been replaced by a much darker black-blue outfit with white trims. Combined with the serious-looking black boots she wore, the effect was very much that of a military uniform.
"Doesn't m-mean I have to l-like it," Tom replied, his teeth chattering as shivers coursed through his body in violent spasms.
"Like?" the old woman said, pausing to stare at him with arched eyebrows. "Whoever said that you or indeed any of us has the luxury of liking whatever role life allots us, hmm?"
"No-nobody," he conceded. Whatever this walking fossil was – aged human, eternal goddess, the living dead, or ancient spirit in human form – she could learn a thing or two from Thaiburley's Prime Master when it came to teaching methods, that much was for certain.
Tom automatically lifted first one foot and then the other, allowing Mildra to slip soft furred and instantly warm garments over his feet, drawing them up his legs. Realisation of two things struck him simultaneously. The first being that this was a Thaistess waiting on him as if she were some servant girl, the second that he was stark naked.
Fortunately the numbing cold and assorted distractions had prevented the otherwise inevitable reaction to having a woman he was attracted to so close to his exposed genitals – evidently "frozen stiff" was merely a saying, at least in this instance. Even so, he reached down hurriedly to grasp the hem of the soft-furred one piece garment with both hands, his fingers thick and clumsy, still tingling with the return of circulation.
"Thanks," he told her, "I can take it from here."
She raised her eyebrows and showed him a hint of a smile, a welcome reminder of the friend he knew. In recent days such glimpses had become all too rare. Tom didn't really understand what had changed between him and Mildra, but there was no question that she was acting differently towards him. They had grown so close during the long trip from Thaiburley to the icebound Citadel of Thaiss, a closeness that culminated in their intimacy in the meadow of flowers just days ago, a memory which still burned fresh in Tom's mind. A real bond had formed between them, one which had proved strong enough to survive any embarrassment over indiscretions provoked by the flowers' aphrodisiac pollen, but which seemed to have frayed dramatically since they arrived here. And he had no idea why.
Images assaulted his mind's eye as he straightened from pulling up the clothing. A bewildering array of memories not his own, their sudden eruption causing him to stagger, disorientated for a moment.
"Are you all right?" Mildra asked, steadying his arm.
"Yes, I'm fine," he assured her, pulling away, embarrassed by his feebleness and reacting before he considered how this might look to Mildra. "It's just all these things that keep swirling around in my head," he added, suddenly afraid that his actions might distance her still further.
The old woman, whom he still had trouble thinking of as the same goddess to whom so many temples had been raised in the City Below, was beside him now, looking into his eyes and frowning, though whether with concern or disapproval he couldn't be sure. "Give it time," she told him. "Your subconscious will already be working on coherency, pulling the various fragments of imposed memory together." She was walking away again, saying over her shoulder, "Another session or two, three at the most, and it will all fall into place, you'll see."
Tom didn't bother trying to mask his horror, turning to Mildra and mouthing three at the most? This had been his second stint in the ice tank and he'd hoped it might be the last.
The Thaistess grinned and gave Tom's arm a reassuring squeeze before hurrying after her goddess, who had to be the most unlikely, not to mention sprightly, deity Tom ever expected to meet.
Since their arrival and the old woman's awakening – she really did seem to be the Thaiss of legend despite Tom's reservations – they'd been kept constantly busy, driven by the goddess's conviction that Thaiburley stood on the brink of disaster. To Tom it felt as if he were being shunted from one teacher to the next, his life a constant round of lessons. Back in the city it had been the Prime Master, then on the road their self-styled leader Dewar set about teaching him how to use a sword, and now that he'd reached the river's source as instructed a whole new load of lessons were being pummelled into him, even more difficult to understand than the old ones. What was it with everyone wanting to educate him all of a sudden? He'd done fine with breck-all learning up until now.
The ice tank was part of what Thaiss described as a "crash course". While he was submerged and all but unconscious, information was fed directly into his brain – weeks of concentrated lessons crammed into hours. Quite where the cold came into things he wasn't sure, but Thaiss assured him it was essential, slowing bodily functions and focussing the mind. Who was he to argue with a goddess? She claimed that only by being subjected to the ice tank could he hope to absorb the wealth of intimate detail needed to save the city.
Him? Save Thaiburley? Ridiculous. Yet she insisted that he was the city's only hope. Tom had always found it hard to accept the Prime Master and others telling him he was special back in Thaiburley, but now here he was half a continent away hearing much the same thing. Maybe all these folk really did know something he didn't; though, if so, shouldn't he feel special in some way? Instead he continued to think of himself as an ordinary street-nick swept up in events he didn't fully understand, things that someone like him had no right being a part of.
Apparently, one of the Prime Master's motives in sending him on this journey was the hope that Tom might grow into his abilities and responsibilities. He had changed, he knew that; maturing in all sorts of ways, though not perhaps in the directions his mentor had intended – memories of the flower meadow crossed his thoughts again. Therein lay the worry that niggled away at his innermost thoughts and fuelled his self-doubt. Tom was afraid that even after all he and Mildra had been through he was still going to disappoint those who believed in him, that he was destined to return to Thaiburley a failure rather than the saviour people anticipated. He winced as a new montage of images cascaded through his thoughts. He'd be a brecking knowledgeable failure though, that was for sure.
Tom didn't follow after Mil
dra and the goddess, not immediately. Instead he sat by himself, allowing the last of the cold and the damp to seep from his body, leached away by the wonderfully soft clothing Thaiss had provided, which somehow absorbed moisture while remaining dry and warm against his skin. As he sat there he did his best to assimilate this most recent torrent of knowledge, determined to follow the advice the goddess had given him first time around by relaxing and allowing the memories to come to him rather than chasing after specifics – a habit which experience had taught him brought only frustration.
If he could start making sense of it all now, perhaps he could get away with just one more session in the ice tank rather than the two or three Thaiss had so casually suggested. In a strange way, the bits and pieces he was already able to glean both increased and decreased his awe of their host.
Assuming that all these images and history were true, Thaiss and her brother genuinely had been responsible for building Thaiburley. Tom witnessed vast machines of impossible size straddling peaks and canyons. Monstrous drill bits hewed into the face of a mountain, while beams of raw energy melted and blasted away rock that had withstood the elements for millennia. Tom knew that he was witnessing time compressed, that the work of months passed before his mind's eye in seconds, the years in minutes. As he watched, the city of Thaiburley steadily took shape before him.