We ran across it. Could’ve jogged—Mum was a good distance behind now, and not catching up any time soon. Then we ran back the way we’d come, passing her by on the opposite sides of this manmade ravine.
Finally, to some steps set into a wall. Up them we jogged—and there was the Arts Center, converted from a church, just round the corner from the Mercury Theatre and a little walk from the Odeon where the buses stopped.
Sometimes it was open during the day, but usually only for the local farmers’ market. Tonight there was a comedian on, someone who I’d never heard of but who was very likely a C-lister brought in for the odd panel show on the BBC when eighty percent of the budget had been spent on stars people had actually heard of.
“Where’s the cut-through?” Borrick asked.
I snapped my compass off of my jeans, and surveyed its face, stalking round the edge of the church’s entrance, past gravestones—a very morbid thing to wait by if you were going to an event here—and then—
“Here.”
—the familiar stretch of mist that clung to the Spurn Wyle’s endlessly twilit moors.
I gripped my talisman, cutting a gate with a swipe of my hand—this spot was secluded, out of the way of the street and overlooked by trees and bushes, so unless you were world-hopping when people were queueing for a gig, you never needed to be too careful.
It had been so long since I’d cut the last, the action was almost alien. But it was familiar too, the same with the subtle warmth of the talisman in my fingers, like an old glove I was slipping on.
The gate widened, its edges white and shimmering and kind of warbled, like the oval had been drawn by a slightly unsteady hand. Colors twirled in the blackness within its edges, all the colors of the rainbow exploding like a dizzying stream of fireworks.
I cast Heidi and Borrick a momentary look, checking over their shoulders to ensure Mum hadn’t caught up yet—she was still likely on the bridge, if indeed she were still giving chase—and then I stepped through, my breath held.
I pitched forward. It had been so long since I’d done this—it felt that way anyway; five weeks was not so very long at all, really—and I was disoriented for a second in the same way I had been the very first time I cut a gate, as a kid, stealing my dad’s talisman from where he’d left it in his office, on his desk, as he bustled out to attend to Millie’s crying …
The tunnel between worlds deposited me. I landed in the Spurn Wyle awkwardly, nearly rolling my ankle. Biting off a curse, I overcorrected, sort of leaping down the rise my gateway had opened onto—
I hit the path, gravelly stone impressed into mud that snaked through the misty, rolling hills of the Spurn Wyle. Perpetual semi-darkness pervaded this place, hanging over it like a blanket, but there were no stars to pock diamond holes into this chilly, endless night.
There were, however, ten figures. Arrayed upon the opposite hill, they appeared like statues amongst the spires of rock that littered the landscape. From a distance, at a glance, they could blend right in.
But I knew these figures, and the mere sight of them caused me to suck in a breath.
Cloaked, hooded, they stared down at me as one.
The Order of Apdau were back.
10
Now
“Hey, you!” shouted a voice from up high. “Get off of her!”
Stuck between a rock and a hard place—or rather a steel wall and an automaton, whipping at me with four tentacle-like, whirling arms, a hole in its carapace where I’d driven Decidian’s Spear into it—I jerked my head up to follow the voice.
Heidi Luo. She stood atop the rearranged concourse, which had risen in sections to box me in. Feruiduin’s Cutlass in her hand, it almost blended into the murky sky, rich with pollutants and pouring with rain.
She leapt, and the automaton lifted its arms to grab for her—
The cutlass sliced clean through two of them.
Heidi landed nimbly on a slick of water.
The automaton’s severed arms crashed down a moment after her.
“Hi, Mira,” she said grimly. “Thought you could do with a bit of help.”
“Took you long enough to get here,” I huffed. Did she realize just how close I’d been to having my head pummeled into a mashed-up smear of gore against the concourse’s newly formed walls.
Heidi shrugged. “I got held up. So did Borrick. He’ll be along shortly.”
“Excellent—my favorite person.”
Heidi snorted. “Overtaken me, has he?”
“You’re a close second.” One eye on the automaton, which had now edged backward to reassess us, its arms contorting and its two new stumps sparking madly in the rain, I moved around to my left. “Cover me while I get my spear, will you?”
“Got it. Make it snappy though. This place is teeming with these bloody things.”
Yeah, no kidding. “You don’t need to remind me.”
Decidian’s Spear had ricocheted off the automaton’s heaving mass of arms, coming to rest some ten feet away. I hurried to it, body pressed low, feet eating up the space between us and it—
“Get back!” Heidi roared.
The automaton had lurched forward, presumably detecting that I was unarmed, and that Heidi was—presumably—too distant to stop its assault. Using the bottommost pair of airs, the ones acting as its legs, it propelled itself toward me in a flying leap, the motors in its broken shell screaming as they spun at their highest gear—
I ducked just in time for the automaton to slam headlong into the concourse wall.
It reeled backward, arms flailing.
I dodged one—
The next swiped me in the stomach.
All the air was forced out of my lungs in one immediate exhalation. I sailed backward, too winded to cry out—
I hit the metal ground backside first. Pain ratcheted through me, radiating up my spine from my tailbone—that and the aforementioned winding was a particularly nasty one-two punch if I’d ever felt one. And I would’ve let Heidi know that too, via an agonized scream, if only I had the damned air in my lungs to do it.
“Mira!” Heidi shouted from someplace distant.
I pushed myself up, body groaning. The rain on my face had been so pleasant, lying there for a moment, a welcome respite. Didn’t I deserve that, after the day I’d had?
Apparently not: Heidi was shouting me again.
I blinked, the world momentarily blurry—no, spinning; the fluid in my inner ear must’ve gotten pretty well churned up, because the ground did not want to be flat as I sat, but rather insisted on canting sideways, right side up and left side down. Or was that the concourse rearranging itself again, trying to split me and Heidi up?
No, it wasn’t. I’d feel myself rolling if that were the case.
Heidi and the automaton warred. She’d rushed in with Feruiduin’s Cutlass raised. It arced around her, like an extension of her body, as if she were a dancer who wove through the wild scrambling of the automaton’s remaining two arms to grab her.
A metal scree! rung out.
Feruiduin’s Cutlass split another of the arms apart. Closer to what I’d call the elbow than the shoulder—though it had neither; it was snakelike, flexible down its whole length with no joints to speak of—it broke apart, the cut not quite clean through. The severed end of it hung suddenly limp, lifting another metallic whine into the air as it dragged across the concourse—
The automaton reared backward. The motors in its body shrieked—and then shrieked louder still, as another swipe of Heidi’s blade cut open a new hole in its body.
“Would you just die already?” she demanded—and then she jabbed the cutlass into the gaping wound she’d just cleaved open. It sunk into some vital component, because the automaton fell backward, suddenly juddering—and then the motors silenced.
The remaining arm crashed to the ground. The stumps lowered. And the pair that had acted as the automaton’s legs gave up too, so the boxy, vaguely tablet-shaped body of the thing landed on the st
reet with a resounding thunk.
“Thanks for your help,” said Heidi, tossing me Decidian’s Spear.
I caught it. “I sense sarcasm, but I’ll take it.”
“Oh, no, I’m serious,” she said. “You taking that beating gave me my opening.” She gave me a grim smile, then surveyed the concourse. “Tried boxing you in too, did it?”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
She nodded. “Roll on getting out of here.”
I breathed a laugh, not amused in the slightest. “You can say that again.”
Heidi had just opened her mouth to ask something—it started, “Where—?”—when the concourse began to shift. The walls that had been erected to block me in came down, lowering in levels, such that it looked like a sine wave converted to a bar graph, each graduated line descending once more to ground level.
The greater city came back into view, the towering high rises, few lights to them, no square windows cut into their bulk like a skyscraper back on Earth. Against the murk of the sky, black with storm cloud and night and smog, they were little more than monstrous silhouettes—
And all of them were alive with automatons. The robots scaled the buildings’ exteriors, using their long arms and legs to pull themselves along. All sorts of configurations—there were distinctly bipedal ones; long, loping ones; little boxes with a single short arm, a stub really, to pull themselves along—they moved like bees crowding a hive.
“No,” I breathed.
“Fantastic,” said Heidi, clutching Feruiduin’s Cutlass tighter. “We’re even more outnumbered.”
I had no time to mull over that, because from the next street over came—
“Guuuuuys!”
Borrick burst out. His long jacket flapped madly behind him as he sprinted.
He caught sight of us—and the panic in his face was utterly wild.
He forked around in our direction. Maybe a hundred meters away, he tore up the concourse, feet devouring it with a speed that would have given Usain Bolt a run for his money.
“Alain,” I said, and started toward him—
“RUN!” he belted.
And out from behind him came dozens more automatons, spilling out in a seething, heaving mass, all shapes and sizes—and all of them bearing down upon the three of us.
11
This Morning
Heidi and Borrick fell out behind me. She was first, and just as graceful as I remembered her; rather than letting out a strangled sort of grunt, as I had, and damn near tripping over her own feet, she leapt down easily to the pathway.
Borrick came with an almost insulting degree of poise too. He landed easily on the other side of me.
“Oh, great,” said Heidi. “These guys again.”
“What are they here for?” Borrick whispered. Not that there was a lot of point in that; in the eerie quiet that hung over the moorland, like the blanket of pre-dawn darkness, you could be a quarter-mile down the way and still hear it.
“Same thing as always, I’d guess,” I said through gritted teeth. “Decidian’s Spear.” I raised my voice, just a fraction, the equivalent of a shout in this place. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? The spear?” I removed it from my belt loop, keyring intact this time. “It’s been in a drawer for the past five weeks, did you realize? I’d have given it to you, if you just came to find it.” I considered it, in its glamoured form, this striped umbrella, a bright red and yellow that looked terrifically out of place here in the eigengrau murk of the Spurn Wyle. “Know what? I’m done with this whole thing after this anyway, so … you might as well have it.” I extended it in my hand.
“Mira,” Heidi warned.
But the Order of Apdau didn’t move. All ten of them remained still, there amongst the rock spires that rose from the moorland, the debris of carvings like the Easter Island heads that had long ago been shattered and rained down upon the land, a hail of rocky detritus.
“Right then,” I said, lowering my offering. “Guess you want a fight. Is that it?”
One of the Order stepped forward.
Heidi moved reflexively. Feruiduin’s Cutlass burst to full length beside me—she’d lifted it from her back pocket in one smooth, practiced motion that I didn’t see, shaking loose its glamoured form too. The blade was onyx-black, and if there had been a visible sun, a frail and milky orb in the sky of this place, it would have glinted off of the polished metal.
Borrick withdrew a dagger from his inner jacket pocket, wide to the base, shaped almost like the club on a deck of cards. He twirled it in his fingers, a show that might’ve been impressive, if I had anything more than disdain for him.
“Back off,” he warned. “This one might have qualms—” he indicated me with a sideways tilt of the head “—but I can assure you that I do not. You step too close, and I will gut you, you understand?”
The member of the Order who’d stepped forward did not move.
But he did speak.
“You have seen.”
I frowned. What happened to the silent Order I’d come to know and love? Oh, no, wait—they weren’t all silent. I remembered now—the altercation with them in the throne room at the castle of Ostiagard, before Carson banished them to a void of their own. Which meant this guy wasn’t the leader I’d run into before—he had none of the gilding on his cloak, for starters—but someone else; some other up-and-coming, probably. Which was just fantastic—I wasn’t through with these idiots at all.
“Seen what?” I challenged.
He repeated only, “You have seen.”
My frown deepened. “Riiight.” To Heidi and Borrick: “Any idea what this is about?” Then—a needle of suspicion in my chest. “Or is this a setup?” I wheeled about, pointing the umbrella at them, ready to turn it into Decidian’s Spear at a moment’s notice. Putting a few feet between us, I moved around so that I could see all twelve of them at once.
“Of course it’s not a setup,” said Heidi hotly. “You’ve seen me cut some of these guys’ hands off. I’ve killed a couple of them—we all did, sending them into a void. Forgotten that, have you?”
“Liars go a long way to covering their tracks,” I said.
Heidi harrumphed. “I gave your grandmother some information about how you were getting on in life. I wasn’t working with the Order to get my hands on your damned spear. If I was, don’t you think this is kind of a long con, when I could’ve just snatched it any night you were asleep in the hideout?”
My lips tightened. Good point.
“What about you?” I demanded of Borrick.
He held his hands up, dagger with them. “Hey now. I’ve got nothing to do with these guys.”
“So what are they doing here?”
“Waiting,” said the man from the Order who’d spoken.
“For what?”
“You.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And you knew I’d be here how, exactly?”
“You are the vessel.”
“Uh …”
“You have seen.”
“If these riddles are supposed to mean anything—well, they’re not. Sorry.”
“You have seen.”
“Repeating things does not make them any clearer,” I grunted. “Just like talking louder in a foreign country does not make you any more comprehensible.”
“You have seen.”
I shook my head. Months, it had been since I last saw the Order of Apdau. And in less than two minutes of their presence, they’d once again reminded me just how happy I was to see the backs of them. “I haven't seen you lot of late and let me tell you – I've been all the happier for it. Absence has not made my heart grow any fonder. I think we’ll be on our way. Heidi? Borrick?” And off I went, Decidian’s Spear still in my hand, disguised as an umbrella and looking not very threatening at all, unless you knew what it really was. I kept an eye on them as I went, as well as Heidi and Borrick—still couldn’t be totally sure this wasn’t a con (a very long, nonsensical con—oh, okay, it almost certainly wasn’t)
.
The Order didn’t move from the rise.
When we’d put some thirty, forty meters between us, and I was just feeling safe enough to turn around rather than walking backward—
“We will meet again, Mira Brand,” the speaker called. “You have seen. You know.”
“I really don’t know,” I countered. And then I turned and put them behind me.
When I looked back, a few seconds later—they were gone.
“What was that all about?” Heidi asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” I answered.
But I probably could. I’d played dumb—been dumb, actually, because in the moment when I was faced with them, believing another fight on my hands, I hadn’t clicked two and two together. Now, though, the Order gone, it wasn’t hard to figure—
What I’d seen was our place in the universe. The Antecessors. The truth behind their puzzles. The sheer meaninglessness of it all.
But then that grew new questions. Across the few months I’d crossed paths with these guys, the Order of Apdau had been very determined to acquire Decidian’s Spear. Yet this spear was ultimately pointless—and if they knew that, as I now did, then why did they even want the damn thing? What purpose did it serve?
I couldn’t guess at it. And if they were here, and we had all the time in the universe to talk things out, I still didn’t think I’d get to the bottom of it. The Order, when they weren’t trying to murder me, were infuriatingly vague to the point that I wished we had had an altercation, if only to get some of my frustrations with them out.
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