The contraptioneer took a long metal screwdriver from her apron and with remarkable efficiency and brutality drove it into the meat of the guard’s shoulder. Cressia grabbed the fire lance from his hands and aimed it at the woman who’d thrown Reichis into the cage. The guard looked like she was trying to decide whether she could bridge the distance before Cressia fired. Apparently she figured wrong, because a second later she had a burning hole in her leg.
I ran back to the cage. No one had bothered to take my pouches from me, so I pulled powder, tossed it in the air and spoke the incantation as my hands directed the blast at the locked door. The twin red and black fires erupted in a deafening explosion, only to disappear as they hit the bars. Reichis screamed again, all the fur on his body sticking out as the lightning passed through him.
I tried a second blast against the cage, using even more powder and burning my fingers, but it did nothing. The guard with Janucha’s screwdriver in his shoulder, apparently offended by my attempts, grabbed a fire lance and aimed it at me. I drew a pair of steel cards Ferius had given me a while back and flung them at him. The first caught him in his good shoulder and the second sliced a line of blood across his cheek. Before he could recover, I ran over and grabbed his arm, twisted the fire lance from his grip and bashed his head with it. He collapsed to the floor and I drew powder a third time.
‘The power of the lightning creates an energy field that fire cannot penetrate,’ Janucha warned. She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Kellen. This will be over soon.’
‘Can you not see?’ Altariste shouted, running over to his mechanical dragon, stroking the metal plates along one of its wings as they shook and shimmered into life. ‘This is not death, it’s creation!’
‘Kellen!’ Reichis screamed, struggling to rise, futilely searching for some way out of the cage. ‘Kellen, please! I promise I won’t steal any more. I promise!’
I went over and grabbed Altariste by the collar. He was heavier than me but I managed to swing him around. ‘Tell me how to stop the process!’
‘You cannot,’ he declared proudly. ‘No more than any man can stand in the way of—’
I punched him in the face and threw him down on the floor before turning to Janucha. ‘There has to be a way, please!’
She got that look in her eyes that I’d seen once before, when Cressia was being tortured by the mages – shedding her emotions so she could work through the problem. ‘The field is a reaction of the lightning with the alloys on the plates inside the cage. To break the connection, you’d have to change the geometry of … Ah, I fear the complexities are far too—’
‘Actually, I understand geometry just fine,’ I said, pushing past her. I reached inside my coat and took out the five coins Savire had given me. The castradazi had said the secret was in making the coins dance. I flipped one at the lightning field. It shot back at me, but I grabbed it out of the air. I stared at the five of them in the palm of my hand.
‘The alloy isn’t enough,’ Janucha said. ‘It is a matter of distance and spatial relationships. It requires perfect calculation of the—’
‘Shut up, please,’ I said, still staring at the coins. She was wrong. Sure, you could create the alignments with mathematics, but there was another way to do it: the way Savire had shown me. I touched one to my forehead, then to my heart, and finally tapped my hand again. A prayer, I guess, which was odd since I’ve never been religious. I walked closer to the cage. The energy from the lightning tickled the hairs on my hands and arms. I tossed one coin in the air lightly, then a second and a third. I juggled them around and around, then added the fourth. Each time one landed in my palm, I felt for the weight of it, the way it either dropped quickly or hesitated. That pause, that hesitation, was from it coming close to its natural distance from the other coins. So I adjusted each time, not trying to think my way out of it but instead letting my hands work instinctively as they searched for the perfect distance between each coin in the air, spinning them as I went.
‘They must be in perfect alignment,’ Janucha said behind me.
‘I’m on it.’ It was incredibly difficult to keep the coins going, and I had to close my eyes to stop being distracted by the lightning and the cage and, most of all, by my business partner’s spirit being stolen from him.
‘Kellen,’ Reichis chittered, this time softly. I couldn’t resist opening an eye and seeing him slumped against the floor of the cage, the sparks dancing around his fur that was now a uniform dull grey. ‘I think I’m done, Kellen. I think I’m …’
Wind came from behind me, nearly knocking me down. ‘Look!’ Altariste said, crawling along the floor towards the dragon whose wings were now beating. ‘Look upon the future of Gitabria!’
Suddenly the dragon launched itself from the stage, flying into the centre of the amphitheatre, climbing towards the open ceiling.
‘No!’ I screamed. I lost control of the coins for an instant and they tumbled down. I barely managed to catch them all. Don’t fight, I told myself. You can’t win with force. Let the coins feel your spirit. They want to dance. I closed my eyes again and tossed the coins into the air. By sense of touch alone I juggled them until I could feel them almost in alignment, and then, my fingers moving faster and smoother than they ever had before, I gently tapped each one to make it spin.
‘By the first principles,’ Janucha breathed close behind me.
I opened my eyes. The five coins floated in the air, turning slowly around an invisible axis as each one spun on its end. Inside the space left between them was a gap where the lightning couldn’t touch. Reichis was flat against the bottom of the cage now, becoming ever more lifeless as the mechanical dragon circled higher and higher into the air. I’m too late, I thought. No. You don’t know that! I drew powder from my pouches a third time, tossed them into the gap between the coins, formed the somatic shape with my hands and said, ‘Carath.’
The twin fires roared through the empty space, smashing into the apparatus powering the lightning and holding the cage door shut. The sudden blast of light blinded me, then, just as quickly, everything was dark.
‘What have you done?’ Altariste screamed. I turned to see him racing down the stairs. In the sky above the amphitheatre, the dragon’s wings had stopped beating. The stars disappeared from view as the metal beast came falling back down to earth, smashing into the centre of the amphitheatre. Stone benches shattered under its impact, sending dust and debris into the air. Broken gears and pistons erupted from the beast’s outer shell. The creature tried to rise, the whine of its battered and twisted metals parts like the beginning of a scream. It teetered for a moment, then toppled and fell at the feet of its creator. ‘No,’ Altariste said. He repeated the word over and over as he knelt down and stroked the mechanical dragon as though love might bring it back to life.
I ran back to the cage. With the lightning gone, the stage was dark and I fumbled blindly for the cage door. My hand hit one of the coins, knocking it out of alignment, and all five scattered to the ground. I managed to find the latch and opened it. Reichis’s fur was cool to the touch. I couldn’t feel his heart.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘No, no. Please. Please, Reichis!’
A match was struck and dim light brought his still form into view. ‘Quickly,’ Janucha said, grabbing my coins from the ground and placing them in my hand. ‘You must make the coins dance again, draw what is left of the animal’s spirit back from the dragon.’
I did as she commanded, sending the coins spinning in the air above my palm. Blue shimmering sparks drifted up from the broken remains of the mechanical dragon. They came towards me, pulled, it seemed, by the coins. They floated like fireflies around Reichis’s limp body, dancing there as if uncertain whether to come together or fly apart.
Janucha brought her hand down on the coins, flattening them against my palm. ‘What do I do now?’ I asked.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ the inventor replied. ‘Either his spirit is strong enough or else—’
/>
‘There’s no “or else”,’ I said. ‘There’s no creature alive with more spirit than Reichis.’ I picked him up in my arms, whispering in his ear. ‘You hear me, you mangy little thief? You rotten, uncouth son of a bitch? You murdering, eyeball-eating little varmint? Nobody breaks your spirit apart. Nobody.’
As I spoke, the dancing blue sparks spun around each other, much as the coins had done. They shimmered and shook, as if everything in the universe was intent on pulling them apart, then, just as suddenly, they disappeared. ‘No,’ I said, stroking the fur of his muzzle. ‘No, please don’t go, Reichis. I can’t do this without—’ I howled in pain as something sharp – no, several somethings – pierced the skin of my hand. When I pulled my hand away, tiny drops of blood welled from four little punctures.
Reichis opened one eye. ‘Oh, hey, Kellen. What’s going on?’
I put him down on the floor. ‘You bit me, you little bastard!’
Slowly he rolled over to get his feet under him and pushed himself up. ‘Really?’ He gave a little snicker. ‘Sorry. Instinct.’
Despite how badly I wanted to make him pay for that, and despite the shaking in my hands, I grabbed him and held him to my chest. For once he let me, and I could feel him trying to get warmth from me. ‘Kellen?’ he asked.
I barely trusted myself to speak without turning into a crying mess. ‘Yeah?’
‘Two … Two things …’
‘What is it?’
‘First, I was kidding about never stealing again.’
A sob escaped my lips, which was embarrassing, but at that precise moment I didn’t care.
‘And second …’ He made a small motion with his head, his nose pointing towards Altariste, who was very slowly walking up the stage stairs towards us. ‘Would you mind killing that guy for me? I think I need a nap.’
I held the furry little monster close for a moment more before gently setting him down and turning my attention to the guards. I was going to need both hands for what came next.
61
Deaths of Necessity
I’d thought maybe Altariste intended on trying to kill me for having destroyed his grand invention, but I guess not everyone’s a murderer at heart. ‘Please,’ he wept, holding his hands out to Janucha. ‘Please, wife, help me rebuild him.’
I had already resolved in myself that if he got any closer I was going to beat him unconscious and then wait until he woke up so I could beat him again. I felt Janucha’s hand on my arm. ‘This is a family matter,’ she said.
I was surprised to see the mechanical bird back in her hand. She whispered to it for a moment, and it took flight, circling above Altariste. He gazed up at it in wonder. ‘It is so beautiful, Janucha.’ He reached out a hand towards it. The bird glanced back briefly at Janucha, as if seeking permission. The contraptioneer nodded, and the bird landed on the proffered perch. ‘How can something so miraculous be a sin?’
‘I don’t know,’ Janucha said. ‘But it is.’ She gave a small whistle and the bird’s claws dug into the flesh of Altariste’s hand. He gave a shout of surprise and pain, and shook it off. The bird flitted away, and he sucked at the tiny bleeding wounds. ‘Such a small thing,’ Janucha said sadly. ‘Barely more than a pinprick.’ She reached into her apron and withdrew a thin glass vial half-filled with a green oil.
Altariste’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then he removed his hand from his mouth. The slightest hint of green intermingled with the red of his blood. He fell to his knees.
Cressia gave a cry and ran to her father. ‘Mother, what have you done?’
‘What I would have died to prevent, were the choice still left to me,’ Janucha replied. The bird came to land on her shoulder again. She went to kneel beside her husband. ‘You understand now, my love? Even something so delicate can be deadly when it is controlled by the will of fools.’ Altariste started to gag. Green foam escaped from his lips. Janucha put her arms around him and wept. ‘This is the means by which miracles become abominations.’
It didn’t take more than a few minutes for him to die, and, as these things go, it didn’t seem very painful – not physically at least. He lay in the arms of his wife and daughter. As the light left his eyes, though, I saw a sorrow so profound that it made me hate myself for having been willing to murder him myself. It made me hate the world in which I lived all the more.
For a long time I just stood there, waiting. Janucha spoke to her daughter. They argued, and cried, and finally held each other awhile before Cressia turned and walked away, pausing only to wave at me once before she left the amphitheatre. Janucha stared after her. ‘Of all the wonders I have seen, none confound me more than my own daughter.’
‘Where will she go?’ I asked.
‘A ship awaits her in the harbour to take her across the waters to lands untainted by the madness that plagues our own continent. Cressia always wanted to be an explorer. She will travel to places beyond the reach of the secret police.
‘They won’t stop trying to find her,’ I said. ‘The lords mercantile, the secret police … They’ve invested too much, risked too much. They’ll do whatever it takes to force you to reproduce the experiment, and if you keep failing, eventually they’ll find someone else.’
Janucha came to stand next to me. ‘You are a clever young man, Castradazi Kellen té Jan’Tep, but the world is full of clever young men.’ She gestured towards the front of the amphitheatre where it led out to the city. ‘My country is full of clever men.’
‘But you aren’t simply “clever”, I take it?’
She gave a weary smile. ‘Would it sound presumptuous if I were to tell you that what Altariste kept shouting to anyone who would listen was, in fact, true? That mine is a once-in-a-generation intellect?’
‘No, but couldn’t Altariste have made the same claim? You said you worried he would figure out how—’
‘I walked a thousand steps up a mountain of complexity to uncover the secrets of the alloys. Standing there, at the very summit, one step from the answer, Altariste was able to make the final leap.’ She knelt down to pick up one of the sketches he’d strewn on the floor of the stage. ‘Without my work? He could have lived for a thousand years and never found the answer.’ She placed the sketch back among the others, then took another vial from her apron and spread its contents over all of them. Within seconds they had dissolved into nothingness.
The bird came and landed on her shoulder. ‘You must return to my home and use that clever little powder spell of yours to destroy my workshop. There must be no trace of my experiments for others to follow.’ She reached up a hand and stroked the bird’s metal feathers. ‘There is one last thing I must ask of you. Would you … I cannot bring myself to destroy her.’
‘I’ll … I’ll do what has to be done,’ I said, hating myself at the thought of ending the life of even a mechanical being, which I guess is how you’re supposed to feel.
Janucha took my hand in hers. ‘Goodbye, young man. Leave no trace of our passing, and forgive me the enemies my actions have brought you.’
‘I’m getting used to enemies,’ I said, but I don’t think she heard me. She gave a soft whistle to the bird and, as it had done to Altariste, it dug its claws briefly into her flesh.
‘Fly,’ she said softly, and the bird rose up to flitter about the stage. Janucha lay down on the floor and gazed up at her creation flying overhead, and smiled at the bird’s antics, even as her eyes closed a final time.
I picked up Reichis and went down the stairs to where one of the guards had left my pack. I slipped the strap over my shoulder and gently placed the squirrel cat inside. It was only then that I realised I wasn’t alone.
62
The Red Mercy
My enemy was facing away from me, standing next to the remains of the mechanical dragon. The red silks of his garments glinted as they reflected the lights from the stars above the open roof. The effect was oddly beautiful.
‘Hello, Kellen,’ he said. His voice was spell-masked with bre
ath magic, as it had been in each of our encounters. I couldn’t say whether it was deep or high-pitched, or even whether his diction was clear or mumbling. How long he’d been out here I couldn’t know, but with the world being the way it is, I had no doubt he’d heard everything that had transpired.
‘Where is Nephenia?’ I asked.
‘On the Bridge of Dice. She’s with another of the Argosi. Seems this city is filthy with them.’
His casual, almost conversational words threw me. ‘You let her go, just like that?’
‘Just like that. She shouldn’t have to be part of this.’
I thought about that for a moment and decided I agreed. ‘In all the old stories,’ I said, ‘the great mages were said to duel three times. This is our third meeting.’
He turned to face me, the crimson lacquer mask showing an expression of cold determination. ‘And our last.’
My hands were relaxed at my sides, as were his. Neither of us were amateurs, and neither of us so much as let our fingers twitch despite the urge to run through the somatic forms for the spells we’d use against each other. No, all the preparation was inside. This was something I’d never really understood before – that what really happens before a duel is what Janucha had saved me from a few minutes earlier: preparing to commit a murder.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ I said. ‘I’m so sick of death now that I’d almost rather you kill me first.’
‘Easily arranged.’
‘But I can’t,’ I said. I removed my pack and placed it gently on the floor a little way away. Reichis, who claims to have a sixth sense for danger, was still dead asleep. ‘The squirrel cat is my responsibility. So are Ferius and Nephenia and even the hyena. So are all the people I care about. And if there’s one thing you’ve made perfectly clear, it’s that you’ll hurt them if I let you get past me.’ I flipped open the tops of my powder pouches, though I wasn’t planning on using them. I’d already let one of the coins slip down from my cuff into the palm of my right hand. I’d use it as a distraction and then duck left before I … It really didn’t matter. The only preparation that mattered was the one that had already happened in my mind. I’d decided I was ready to kill now. Or at least I thought I had, which, unfortunately, isn’t the same thing at all.
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