Beasts of the Walking City (14 page)

But they can cause an awful lot of it.

It takes a minute to get it to full size. Then I send it spinning down the length of the conduit.

“Bakarh!”
the Talovian curses, above the hissing and cracking. The construct hits her, climbs around her knife and wraps itself across her arms and chest. It burns there, drawing aether from her armor, sprouting more teeth and claws, spinning and churning and eating away at her. Kjat pulls up more energy from the ship, and I push it down to the construct to feed it and keep it strong.

The Tel Kharan snarls, and then reaches out with a wave of light and slaves the Framarc mage on the street. The man struggles, trying to resist, but as her energy envelops him his eyes roll back into his head, his body spasms once and then he’s under the Tel Kharan’s control. 

Tracers sprout from the clerk—calling out to other Tel Kharan, probably. 

We’re not going to have much time.

Now!
I send to Ercan, Mircada, and Kjat.
Now! Go!

Power is flowing back through to the clerk now, and being funneled up to the Talovian. She’s combining that with her own and using it to force the chords of the Bakarh construct apart. I try to hold it together, but I know I won’t for long.

We’re out,
Blackwell
, Mircada sends back.
Quimbii’s luck to you.

Kjat’s still there, though, keeping the matrix up. 

Pass me the conduit from the ship,
I say.
Get going!

She shakes her head.
I’m not leaving without you.
I can see her eyes flashing fiercely from the shadows.
You might try getting used to that.
She flashes me a tense grin.

I shake my head. The Talovian flares even more brightly as aether starts flowing into her from other mages. It makes a difference. She throws it all against the construct, which finally buckles and collapses onto itself, taking the whole conduit down with it.

But the Talovian immediately fires off two more tracers that lock on to me. She reinforces them and throws more fire up at us.

How much can Kjat take? How much can we funnel back to the ship? I don’t know. 

I portion some of the fire back to Kjat, but leave much of it crackling across my knife and forearms. My knife burns hot. The hair on my arms starts to smoke.

We spin up another construct between us, an different algorithmic sequence of interconnected squares, and together we roll it down the conduit, but even as I watch it go, and can tell it isn’t going to work. Another Akarii mage has stepped through into the warehouse, a human with pale skin, white-blonde hair streaming down his back, dressed in Akarii wraps. A second Tel Kharan stomps in behind him—a blue, speckle-feathered Stona—and it brings up a three-way matrix between herself, the mage, and the Talovian marine. Light ricochets back and forth between their knives.

There’s shouting outside the warehouse. The slaved Framarc mage groans and slumps to the ground as the Tel Kharan matrix comes up and the marines release him. The Tel Kharan matrix absorbs my construct and feeds on it, easily ripping it apart. 

The Stona catches another tracer from somewhere outside, and both suits of armor begin to glow hot and white.

The marines rotate their positions in their matrix. The Talovian drops back and the Stona moves to the fore. The Stona draws a second knife and holds them both before her, and I know we’re really in trouble now.

“They’re shutting us down!” Kjat calls. The Akarii mage is draining energy from the podship directly into their own matrix, now, cutting us off.

But there’s nothing I can do. There’s no time. 

The Tel Kharan are raining fire up through the new conduits. I pull together the power we have left and shoot it back at them, and our blasts meet in the air. It blows out the conduit, and sends waves of flame through the warehouse. 

The walls begin smoldering, the rafters spark and catch fire.

The Stona immediately throws out three more tracers.

Before I can move, I see Kjat has reached out and caught them all on the tip of her knife.

“What are you doing!” I yell, but Kjat shakes her head. Her face is grim and resolute. "I've got this," she cals. Her eyes are wide and unfocused. As I watch, she slices her palm open, a deep cut. The blood runs thick and red down across her blade. 

On her cheeks and down her arms, black glyphs begin to shimmer and glow with a baleful light.

I’ve never seen anything like this. 

I blink and shake my head to clear it, but no—a dark mist is clinging to her, too, oozing from her skin, wrapping her like a cloak. She holds her knife aloft, and liquid, violet flames spill all down the length of the blade, wrapping themselves around her hands and arms, expanding like wings in the air behind her.

As sudden as a snake striking, then, the darkness shoots down the tracers, leaps past the crossed blades of the Stona, and strikes the marine in the chest, blowing her backwards and knocking her helm off.  It rolls away across the floor.

It’s hard to explain what happens next. It’s so fast I doubt my eyes. 

The Stona
expands
, to something like three times her normal size, but it’s as though she’s stretched across the surface of some strange, giant bubble. 

Then, the marine collapses in on herself. It’s like she’s just gone supernova, exploded and then collapsed back into a much smaller space. 

There’s a roaring that sounds like a huge engine or a massive forest fire from the spot where she was standing.  There's the smell of woodsmoke, a rush of wind being sucked into the space, and I can feel myself being pulled in toward it—like there’s a leak in the universe, and I’m about to be the plug.

But then the dark around Kjat reaches out, strikes again at that spot.

The Stona's completely gone, and the only thing left is her helm. 

There’s a stunned silence, cut only by the cracking of the flames in the rafters.

The Talovian and the white-haired battle mage spin up warding. They stare fearfully up into the dark corner of the warehouse where we’re standing, and then they back slowly out into the street.

The Stona’s helm begins to pulse red. On the override channel of my knife I can hear the alarm going out, and so can every other knife in the Port now. A Tel Kharan is down. All of the other Tel Kharan who can hear it will come running. 

They’ll be an army outside the door in a matter of minutes, and we’ll be really, really dead.

Kjat has a lost look in her eyes. Her knees go weak, and I have to catch her. She drops her knife, and it bounces off the podship and spins off into a corner somewhere. Her face is pale and drained. Blood oozes from her hand and spreads down her arm.

There are three new glyphs on the side of her face that weren’t there before.

“Kjat,” I shout. “Kjat!” but she’s not hearing me. What did she do? I shake her gently, but she’s not reacting.

There’s no time. The fire in the warehouse is getting worse, and all the smoke is gathering here in the rafters. The Stona’s pulsing armor lights it all with a bloody glow. 

I lift her across my shoulders and jump for the ladder. The Buhr follows us down.

As I climb, I can see marines stomping toward the warehouse from the docks. White armor burns, turning the streets into daylight. The Talovian is out front croaking out commands, and the red-haired mage is sketching out positions for a complex matrix with chalk.

I duck behind the podship. The rear door of the warehouse is sheltered from view. I open it and looked out into the dark alley. The Kerul are gone, of course, and while I’m glad they are, I could have used some help now.

I lay Kjat down carefully in the dirt, against the far wall of the alley. I pick up the Buhr under two of its three arms and lift it up so we’re eyes to eye. “You will watch out for her, do you understand me?”

The Buhr buzzes and clicks.
YOU WILL PAY?

It’s lucky I don’t squeeze the half-digested rats out of it. I nod, drop the Buhr, and before I can think it over too much, I’m back inside the warehouse. I shut and bar the door, and then sear the bolt closed with a glyph from my knife to buy her some time.

If I were smart, I’d probably run too. 

But the Tel Kharan are legendary for hunting down anyone who kills one of their own, along with their family, their lovers, their friends. They’d track us up into the hills, out into Tilhtinora, out into the wastelands, Akarii war or no Akarii war--they wouldn't stop.

This is the only chance she’s got. I’m doing it for her, but I’m doing it for Josik and Pirrosh, too.

I steady myself against the podship. I take a deep breath. 

I can feel all of the energy outside on the street in the pit of my stomach, the back of my head. It makes all my hairs stand on end.

Then I step out from behind the podship, sheath my knife, and walk toward the warehouse doors with my hands open at my sides. Immediately I feel tracer lines settle across my body.

Conduits open. I hear the fire as it comes down at me. I think of all the things I know I will miss.

The sound of Sartosh’s voice, calling me to study.

The taste of
khar
leaf. Of single-barrel Solingi bourbon.

The rich, dry, loamy smell of a fresh dirt-nest.

The feel of the khytelwind as it races down from the jagged Ghibral peaks and moves through my underfur.

I don’t want to die. 

I am a coward, like my aunt has always known, and here it is proven true to me at the end. I’ll never measure up to the Hulgliev of old, now, who had no fear and no questions, who took action and changed worlds.

Then, I shake my head. By Lasser’s Prick
, 
I’m not going out like that.

I draw my knife and shake off the tracers. 

I charge them and as I run I open up my throat and roar back at all of them standing out there in their bright, polished armor. It’s a roar that shakes the warehouse, sends mages sprawling in the street, blows the heavy, glowing helms off those pompous Tel Kharan and shatters windows all across the Port. On the docks, sea lions leap for the safety of the water and birds are flung into the air, squawking in protest. Globes of magefire hanging in the riggings in the harbor explode and set ships on fire.

Then they lock on to me again. 

And then, I burn.

II: Nadrune’s Mercy

16: Kjatyrhna

I
t’s a memory. She knows it’s a memory, and then she forgets and she’s a girl again, living it in realtime, holding her mother’s sweaty hand tight as the big door swings open before them. It’s in a back alley somewhere, who knows where, but she remembers that door for the small red bird painted on it, low down, almost at her eye level.

Inside, the hall is filled with fragrant smoke. A man dressed in red leads them into a courtyard where there are more people in red—red cloaks, red hoods. She sees a fire in the center of the courtyard that’s making all the strange blue smoke, and that the people are in a loose circle around it, talking, but what she really notices is how nervous her mother is. She can feel her hand shaking, and that makes Kjat nervous, too. Her mother was the one who comforted
her
after the dreams—what could she possibly be scared of?

The man from the door has them wait. The people in the red circle are talking in a rhythmic kind of way, one of them chanting and the rest repeating. It goes on for awhile, and Kjat is tired and she has to pee. The smoke is making her nose itch. It’s very late, past the time when she’d normally be in bed, lying awake and staring at the ceiling and not wanting to sleep.

She starts to whine, but her mother jerks hard on her arm and hisses for her to be quiet, and Kjat is so shocked at this—her mother is usually so indulgent—that she quiets down and tries to watch.

The chanting goes on. They pass around glasses of wine and sip from them. Finally, the man from the door gestures them forward into the circle of people. (Twelve of them, she’ll learn later. Always twelve.) Her mother draws her forward. The circle opens, and they walk up to the man in the red hood who was chanting. Kjat thinks he looks weird with that red, pointed hood over his head. She tries to see him through the holes cut for the eyes, but all she can see are his dark eyes. They don’t look like nice eyes to her.

“The girl will show her gifts,” says the man loudly. He looks at her mother, who looks down at Kjat nervously. The man looks at her too, then. Kjat’s not sure what they want.

“Show them the bubbles, Kjati,” her mother hisses.

Kjat looks at the man, and then back at her mother. She shakes her head.

The man sighs from underneath his hood, and motions to someone else in the circle. One of the red robed figures comes over and takes off its hood, and there’s a woman inside, a pretty woman with long golden hair and violet eyes like Kjat's. She kneels down next to her.

“Hello, Kjatyrhna,” she says in that happy-happy voice some people without children use with them. “What a beautiful girl you are, just like your name. Did you know your name means Beauty? Clearly your name suits you!”

The woman holds out her hand, then. “Kjatyrhna, I can do something special. Can I show it to you?” Kjat nods. The woman closes her eyes, lets out her breath, and in her hand appears a tiny bubble. It’s small, no more than an inch across, and it rests there on her hand. Inside of it is some black stuff that’s all swirly, like smoke.

“I can make bubbles, Kjatyrhna. Your mohma says that you can make bubbles too. Can you?

Kjat nods, nervously.

“Can you show me?”

Kjat nods, let’s go of her mother and holds both of her hands out, palms up. She closes her eyes and
reaches.

Suddenly there’s a bubble there, floating above her hands, but it’s a much larger one than the woman made, larger than Kjat’s head even. 

It floats there for a minute. It’s filled with black things, too.

Kjat looks up at the woman’s face for approval, and the woman’s still smiling, but the smile looks kind of stretched, and her eyes have gone not-nice, like the man in the hood. There’s a gasp from somewhere in the circle behind her, and Kjat pulls her hands back, shy again. The bubble drops to the ground and bursts into a pile of sharp black feathers.