The Secret City

by Brian K. Lowe

  “Ready,” she said, and we were out the door before the echoes died.

  Finding the battle was not going to be a problem; it only got louder as we left the kinlama’s office. First it was a growl. Then it was a roar. And then—we were there.

  Gaz Bronn’s home also housed his offices as well as several departments that reported directly to him. As a result, the corridors of his home often lead to large rooms with satellite suites where the work of the kinlama was done. From Daela Pram’s description, the attacking forces had struck through offices that would normally be secured from the outside. They must have encountered more resistance than they bargained for, however, because the room was the scene of a pitched battle, with the lines surging back and forth but never straying far from the middle of the room.

  It was trench warfare without any trenches. Whichever side could bring more force to bear first would win—and Daela Pram, Sanja, and I were a poor excuse for reinforcements.

  Until now I not considered how we were supposed to choose between all the klurath trying to kill each other. Daela Pram solved that problem quickly.

  “Find Gaz Bronn! You’re his bodyguard—guard him!” And then he threw himself into the fight.

  I was honestly not sure that I could find Gaz Bronn in that maelstrom of ripping claws and flailing tails and swinging steel, but if he were the klurath I thought he was then there was only one place he would be: at the front and center of the soldiers protecting his house. With a “Follow me!” to Sanja, I plunged into the mob and fought my way to the front.

  Thank heaven I was known to Gaz Bronn’s troops by sight or description, because I was already bleeding when I reached him and I had not engaged the enemy yet. I thrust past his shoulder and did my duty by dispatching a lizard whose jab would have pierced his side. After that I had no idea if he knew I was there because I was too busy preserving my own life to protect his.

  I was an obvious target, and I probably deflected more blows from Gaz Bronn by drawing them to myself than by guarding his flank. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of Sanja’s knives—more than once I saw them dart out and succor me in a difficult spot. Of Daela Pram I saw nothing.

  I could not tell if we were winning or losing until I realized that we were pulling back. For a few minutes, I held onto the hope that we were executing a strategic withdrawal toward the only door, drawing the enemy into a position where they could no longer use their numbers to advantage, but eventually it became clear that we were being pushed. Our own numbers were dwindling. We were losing.

  Suddenly Daela Pram’s bloody face was next to me, shouldering me aside.

  “Get the kinlama out of here!” he ordered breathlessly. “We can hold them!” And with that he redoubled his efforts, not waiting to see if I followed his orders, hacking at the swords and arms and bodies crowding in on him. More of our soldiers enveloped me, pushing me back. Behind me I could hear Gaz Bronn shouting something but in the din I could hear neither his words nor his thoughts. Before I knew it I was forced through the door and it was being slammed against the forces outside.

  “Open that door!” Gaz Bronn demanded, but his troops were adamant. Their officer was pushing me toward the kinlama and screaming at me to get Gaz Bronn to safety. I turned and grabbed him.

  “There is nothing we can do! Is there another way out?”

  With a palpable wave of anguish, Gaz Bronn shook himself and forced himself to act like the leader his people needed—a live one. We had no idea how Fale Teevat, the inlama, was faring—for all we knew, Gaz Bronn was the inlama now.

  “This way.” He rushed off and I followed, grateful to find Sanja running with me, breathing heavily and streaked with blood, but moving with more grace than I.

  Gaz Bronn burst through his own office door, barely using the knob. I wondered what state documents, what badge of office was so important that he would delay our flight? He made straight for the same cabinet from which Sanja had taken her knives. I started to protest—more weapons were not going to help us now—but the words died in my throat as Gaz Bronn pressed a spot high up in one corner of the cabinet, and the entire back of it slid noiselessly aside to reveal a hidden passageway.

  “This was built centuries ago in case of another slave uprising,” he told us as he climbed through the opening. “It’s never been needed, but it’s been maintained all these years.”

  Sanja followed him and I did the same, one ear cocked for any hint that the enemy had broken through our rear guard. Were the noises getting louder? I carefully swung the cabinet shut behind me and closed the sliding panel with a button that was clearly marked on this side. Gaz Bronn and Sanja were well ahead of me, and I hurried to catch up.

  The end of the passageway debouched into a small cave that had been carved out to form hangar just large enough for a sleek black flying craft large enough to hold perhaps a half-dozen klurath. Much like the ship that had brought down The Dark Lady, it was tapered and glossy-smooth, an airborne shark that was probably invisible at night. It sat on a long track that stretched away to our left into a narrow tunnel.

  Despite our circumstances, Gaz Bronn stopped to lay a claw upon the vessel’s prow.

  “This is a special ship. There are only two of them, this one and the inlama’s, and I’ve had my best mechanics working on it. They assure me it can outrun anything else we have.”

  “Can you fly it?” Sanja, ever practical, asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Most of it is computerized, of course, but I learned to fly it just in case.” He pressed a panel and the hatch yawned outward. “Actually, I learned—”

  With a shout, I leaped forward, knocking Gaz Bronn aside. My guess of the ship’s capacity had been correct—it was exactly a half-dozen klurath who came boiling out of the ship and missed killing me by a hand’s-breadth.

  Chapter 29

  Escape

  As I have noted, my ability to detect kluraths’ minds is even more sensitive than in relation to my fellow humans’, but even I had no idea anyone was in the ship until the hatch was opened. At that, I barely registered the assassins in the ship in time to save Gaz Bronn, and in doing so very nearly doomed myself. But for the protection of the hatch door, I would have been cut down in their first rush. That same shield, however, blocked me from going to the aid of Gaz Bronn, who had been thrown off-balance by my unexpected shove, and the assassins, with the unerring timely instinct of all predators, closed in on his vulnerability.

  Except that Sanja got there first.

  This time I had the fleeting opportunity to see her fighting with the twin knives she had so happily taken up…and “fleeting” was all the chance I had. For Sanja, fighting was a dance, a double-bladed sword-dance that she practiced with a sinuosity I would have rather expected from her opponents.

  She was between them and Gaz Bronn with knives twirling before they fully realized her presence. The sight of an armed slave seemed to give them the merest moment’s pause—and a fatal one. Two fell almost simultaneously, and she danced without hesitation toward the rest, seeming to hold all four at bay for a pair of seconds, and by then Gaz Bronn and I had both recovered our bearings. The battle was over in a handful of heartbeats.

  I carefully stuck my head into the ship to ensure it was clear, although I could hear no other thoughts. When I emerged, Gaz Bronn had extended his claw to Sanja.

  “If this keeps up, I may have to rethink having humans for slaves,” he said solemnly.

  Again I was reminded of the differences between us. I tried to remember that he carried the weight of a culture three thousand years old. And then I remembered all of the Thoran slaves I had met while I was in Jhal. Three thousand years of history be damned. When we returned to Jhal, things were going to be different, or I would throw Gaz Bronn out of office myself.

  Sanja took his claw lightly in her hand. Knowing her fiercely independent background, I was impressed how well she kept her own feelings in check. How the klurath had managed to take this proud daug
hter of the Zilbiri alive—let alone imprison or enslave her—was a wonder.

  “We need to go,” I said. “Somebody knows about your ship, and their friends may be coming.”

  Gaz Bronn did not move. Head bowed, he seemed shrunken, as if events had finally caught up to him.

  “I’ve been betrayed,” he said slowly.

  “We knew that already,” Sanja reminded him. “Someone in your household let those warriors in.”

  Gaz Bronn was slow to reply. “It wasn’t them. The only people who knew about my ship were my mechanics, and Daela Pram—all members of my staff since they broke out of their eggs.” He raised his head to look at us. “I only told one other person.” He paused, and sensing his pain, I suddenly wondered if a klurath could cry. “Fale Teevat. The head of the war party is the inlama of Jhal.”

  Gaz Bronn had never bothered to acquaint me with his personal history, of course, but during meals in the slaves’ quarters I had managed to pick up an amazing amount of such information. Like all “superior races,” klurath forgot that their servants had eyes and ears; I had not been part of the system long enough to learn much of anything on my own, but I had learned enough of the history of Gaz Bronn and Fale Teevat to understand the former’s grief at this unwelcome realization.

  Fale Teevat had been a mid-level bureaucrat when Gaz Bronn came to work for him as an aide. Showing an innate brilliance in political science, the young klurath had boosted his master’s fortunes so that the older lizard had achieved a position of some influence in a surprisingly short time. Not being one to waste resources, Fale Teevat had brought Gaz Bronn up the ladder with him, and when at last he made the final leap to the post of inlama, nothing was more natural than he should appoint his own aide to be his deputy. Gaz Bronn owed Fale Teevat everything. Evidently Fale Teevat had seen their relationship in a different light.

  Time was of the essence, but it was obvious that Gaz Bronn could not continue without taking a few minutes to absorb this shock, so Sanja and I busied ourselves stripping our late foemen of all of their weapons. Only when we had amassed more swords and knives than we could ever wield and stowed them in the back of the small escape ship did we return to our comrade. He straightened up at our approach.

  “The inlama will be expecting these men to report back,” he said. “We should go.”

  Sanja and I exchanged a satisfied glance. Neither of us had relished the notion of trying to persuade a depressed klurath to pilot us past enemy lines to an unknown destination.

  I tried to watch him manipulating the controls as he brought the craft to life, but of course it was a lost cause. I had always intended to learn to fly an airplane but I had never gotten around to it. Perhaps it would have helped. Of course, the Librarian could have learned and imparted the knowledge to me in my sleep, but I had always shied away from doing that. The ship hummed and seemed to rise under our feet.

  “Magnetic levitation,” Gaz Bronn explained. “It’s quiet, so we don’t have to worry about the tunnel’s integrity. The rails will help guide us out of here, then we shift over to using the Earth’s magnetic field for power.” He seemed as pleased with this information as if he had performed the engineering work himself. I wondered what he would make of the Nuum’s anti-gravity technology. As far as I knew, the klurath had not made a detailed examination of The Dark Lady—but then again, I had no idea what might have happened to her in my absence. The idea sent chills down my spine.

  Without warning, the ship rocketed down the tunnel in almost complete silence. I scarcely had time to register the blur of the tunnel walls before we shot into the open air—or at least as open as we could heading toward a huge rock ceiling at the speed of a fighter plane…

  “We’re still inside!” I squawked despite myself.

  “Of course we are,” Gaz Bronn replied, his hands sure on the control, slowing us even as he spoke. “It was intended to get me out of my house, not all the way to the surface.” Before us, the landscape shifted as he turned toward away from the city. “We’ll need to—”

  Bang! Our craft bucked, knocking my teeth together. Bang! It shook again.

  “What is that?” Sanja cried, but Gaz Bronn had no answer as he tried to move us away from whatever was attacking us. I had never been in a dogfight, but I knew what was going on.

  “Someone is shooting at us. Gaz Bronn, get us as close to the roof as possible.”

  I felt my weight increase as he responded by sending our aircraft straight up.

  “Our sensors aren’t reporting any other ships in the air,” he said after a few moments’ study. He swiveled to face me, thoughts radiating disbelief. “They can’t be throwing rocks at us?”

  But a crushing thunk close outside followed by a skittering on the hull told me that the klurath were indeed attempting the unthinkable. Those last noises had been a near-miss and the rain of debris falling on us. But how much debris was falling on the city below?

  Gaz Bronn reached the same conclusion at the same moment and jammed the ship into drive, escaping the catapulted rocks and removing the danger to the people below.

  “We have to reach the crevice that leads to the surface.” His voice was tight and I could see his claws trembling on the controls. “I don’t know how many pilots and ships they have available or how fast they can get into the air.”

  Already I could see the lighter area of the ceiling that must mark the way to the surface. The walls of the cave were flashing by at speeds I had never seen, but the lit-up area seemed to grow with maddening slowness. Every moment my mind saw black airships rising like a swarm of flies from the ground to intercept us. Even one could block our path like a cork in a bottle and doom our escape. With each passing heartbeat, the tension ratcheted upward. My pulse seemed to throb in my neck.

  Then we were at the gap and sunlight was filling the cockpit, weak but blinding in comparison with the dimness we had known for weeks. The windshield began to darken automatically as we rose into the crevice, and now a new worry tugged at my mind: We were blind to all that was below/behind us. Blind, slow, and with no room to maneuver, a single shot could destroy us utterly.

  But after an eternity of seconds, we emerged from the earth and flew free at last, the sky beckoning in its enormity. I released a breath I did not know I had been holding, and I heard Sanja as well. Gaz Bronn leveled our flight and pressed a control before he slowly turned again to face us.

  “They threw rocks at us. They threw rocks at us.” We waited, but he could not continue.

  I was helpless not to try to imagine the scene we had left behind. In a city under the Earth, where a cave-in or an earthquake had held the populace in its hand for three thousand years, the horror of the very ceiling of their home crashing down, crushing buildings and humans and klurath without regard…

  “What do they want?” Sanja asked. “What could they want so badly as to risk destroying everyone—to risk destroying themselves?”

  “You have to understand,” Gaz Bronn said slowly, “that my people have been living underground for three thousand years. We are cold-blooded; the cavern is warm, but in order to live there we have to keep the air moving, and in order to have our slaves we have to keep it at a cooler temperature than we’d like. We live our lives in a constant reminder that we were meant to live above ground, not in a cave. The urge to escape is…very strong in some. Mental aberrations caused by living underground are actually quite common.”

  “Then why don’t you simply come out?” I asked. “It’s been three thousand years. Whoever drove you into the caves is long dead.”

  Gaz Bronn turned back to the controls. “We need a destination. The inlama’s ships will be after us.”

  Instinctively I looked at the sky outside our cockpit, but no black shapes arrowed through the air.

  “There’s a thousand miles of emptiness all around us. We should find a place to set down where we cannot be seen and plan our next move.”

  “If they have sensors, they might be able to fi
nd us even if we’re hidden,” Sanja pointed out. “We should get as far away as possible first.”

  Gaz Bronn was already gunning us forward, though we heard nothing and felt little. “I’m not as familiar with our warships as I ought to be. The inlama always took on those responsibilities himself Now I understand why. Every ship has a proximity alarm, but I don’t know what kinds of extra detection apparatus they have.”

  Suddenly a red light streaked past our nose, missing us by what appeared to be inches, and a loud beeping from the control panel overrode all of our conversation.

  It was the proximity alarm. Black airships were on our tail, intent on shooting us out of the sky.

  As fast as Gaz Bronn’s little craft was, it could not exceed the speed of light, and the deadly red beams of our pursuers grazed us again and again with the gentle touch of an ocean liner. Whatever propulsion and inertial systems our ship carried allowed us to dive and climb and bank until the earth and sky were interchangeable blurs without injury, but every near-miss shook us like a mouse in a cat’s mouth.

  It was all Sanja and I could do to hang on and pray. Our proximity detector said there were three of them behind us, and that was more than enough, for this skiff was meant as an escape craft and carried no weapons. Only the fact that Gaz Bronn had obviously understated his piloting experience had saved our lives, but it would not be enough.

  Even now he rolled us completely over, but a rending crash as we came upright told us our time had run out.

  Chapter 30

  Capture

  Our hull had been breached. We did not need the ship’s instruments to tell us what our ears already had, the high-pitched whine of wind rushing through a crack in the superstructure. Our flight seemed as smooth as ever—notwithstanding the aerial weaponry aimed at us—but I could see the Gaz Bronn was struggling with the controls, and a glance ahead showed me the horizon at an alarming angle.