Beasts of the Walking City (3 page)

Important people go to Tilhtinora if they want to get rich. They generally have a lot of backing from some big Family behind them, and they’ve likely pissed someone important off politically and they need to make amends. You'd want a big ship to tap the lei, some primitive weapons to fight off the natives and not set off any chain reactions. And you'd want a decent guide.

Even then, the odds are twenty-to-one at best that you’ll make it back alive.

Otherwise, you go if you’ve got a deathwish. Something very wrong in your head. Your lover has left you and has gone off with five of the worst creatures to ever have loped the ground. Your creditors are about to lock you in irons. Your landlord is shopping for weaponry. Your mother spits at the mention of your name.

Or you go if you’re broke and starving, you have no real hope of any sort of income and no other choice left, and someone named Al Capone you met in some earth place called Alcatraz (while you were very,
very
drunk) says you should go, gives you some money, and tells you bring him back something expensive. Or else.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out which category I fall into.

• • •

The drop is fast, all right. The pilot accelerates in close to where I think the Akarii excavation site will be, hovers low over a tall domed building and pulls something that opens the rusty cargo doors. The gunner hits our net releases, all the straps cut loose, and all of us are dumped out onto the roof. We hit and roll as best we can, grabbing onto the broken stone to keep from falling. 

The gunner swings himself out onto the combat platform, welded near the front of the hull, and grins at me. The bright white of his false teeth flash in the moonslight, and something glints off those dark circles he’s got over his eyes. He gives me an ironic wave, that’s both a farewell and a question—am I sure about this? If we fail, or have made a mistake with the map, if the Buhr has lied to us, we now have no way home. 

I wave back. We’re here. We’re going forward. He nods.

Then the pilot banks away, gains altitude, rolls the ship once in farewell and with a flash and a burst of blue lei and smoke, the podship is gone.

• • •

I stand up and shake myself, and try to get most of whatever Josik had for breakfast out of my fur. I might die here, but I’m already happier with something solid beneath my feet. I am a Hulgliev, after all. I’m tall and thick-shouldered and muscled in a way that makes humans take three steps backwards, if they come on me by surprise. Some earth humans tell me I look vaguely like a snow leopard, though I've never actually seen one. I’m covered in pigmented hair that changes color depending on my moods, and I can change that color, too. Sometimes that’s helpful. I have a face full of fangs and retractable claws, eyes that can see in more spectrums than some species (but not all).

But I’m not exactly built for flight. And in water? I flail about like an epileptic wurf for awhile, and then  I sink like a rock.

No, I don’t have a tail. But thanks for checking.

The humans on the team are getting to their feet, too, and brushing themselves off. Josik looks sheepish. Pirrosh pulls a beat-up metal flask out of somewhere and takes a shot, and then offers it around. The girl with tattoos declines. The rest of us are not so fastidious—Pirrosh makes his own bourbon, and it’s wonderfully awful. The spindly, barrel-shaped Buhr unfolds itself from a ball and stretches its feeding tube high for seconds.

The air smells of sulfur, of smoke and something dead. The Assassin’s Moon and the Merchant’s Moon hang low in the sky. The black towers of Tilhtinora cast their long shadows to the west like jagged teeth. The city isn’t endless, but with the podship gone it sure feels that way now. It’s ready to swallow us whole.

The Buhr points. I nod to Pirrosh, and he and the girl spread out. They draw their knives and write some simple wards that shimmer in the air around us. Tilhtinora is right at the intersection of several major leilines, so power isn’t any problem. But given the instability of the whole area, we need to be careful, and I know Pirrosh knows that. Josik and I pick our way across the roof, careful to avoid the places where it has collapsed. We scale a crooked tower on the far end of it to get a look around.

I take out a small eyeglass, something I’d picked up in a junk shop in San Francisco. Up the north, I can see that storm the pilot had been talking about. A mass of bright, roiling clouds lit up from within by lightning and fire, moving low to the ground. For the moment it was moving in our direction, but it was far enough off now that I’d worry about it later. I scan slowly across the surrounding buildings. All of them  are slanted, charred, crumbling onto each other—it’s clear that when the city fell out of the sky, it fell hard. A herd of something, sandcats maybe, leaps across rooftops chasing what will soon be dinner. Something large and oblong, with way too many legs, moves away to the northwest. It’s taller than the buildings around it, and it glows bright green.

And then I see the ship.  

Off to the east, no more than a mile or two, right about where the Buhr told me it might be. The tall masts of an Akarii family Retriever, stretching up like a clawed hand against the night sky. It’s lit up from below, a mix of fire and magefire, which means they’re digging there, and if my information is right then they are digging up what I hope to take back for Capone. 

The realization goes through me like a shock of cold water.

There they are. 

We can hit them tonight.

I shiver. There are reasons people don’t steal from the Akarii family. Good reasons, and if I had any real sense, I’d turn back now. Josik and Pirrosh are pretty good. If we were careful, given time, we could ditch the Buhr, make our way to the coast somehow. Catch a ship back.  Some of us would probably make it back alive. Sure, Capone had other agents here, in this world. Yes, they’d be looking for me. But would they find me? Could I deal with them if I had to?

I take a deep breath. I look at Josik. We’ve worked together long enough, I know he knows what I’m thinking. Underneath that shock of red hair, his pale face has a wide grin.

“There’s no going back from this,” I say.

He laughs. “Come on. Since when do we let a couple of wurfin’ Akarii get in our way? You know this is why we’re here.”

I nod. He's right.  We drop back down to Pirrosh and the girl. “Game on,” I say.

Pirrosh tilts his head and looks sideways at me. “What does this mean? What ‘game’?”

“He means it’s time to stomp some Akarii ass,” Josik says.

“Ahhhh,” says Pirrosh. He grins at us with his double row of teeth. “This expression, I
like
.”

3.

W
e rappel down the side of the building. It’s some immense theater hall, with cracked stone columns, frescos across the walls showing masked players on stage, men and women with swords, dragons and chimera with many heads. It’s surrounded by other tall buildings that might have been offices or warehouses or apartments—it’s hard to tell. They’re all collapsed into one another, canted at angles.

Knives drawn, we make our way through the dark streets. I lead, with the light from my knife stretching ahead of us. The Buhr rides in a harness on my back, humming and buzzing to itself. Josik and the girl watch the sides, and Pirrosh brings up the rear. We move carefully, but fast, and we cover half the distance in less than an hour, over rubble, through alleys. Two moons rise. Another sets. Rodents are everywhere, with glowing eyes, and we can hear them high up on ledges, or moving behind us, as our light falls away. We startle something large and bear-like on a cross street. It rears up on hind legs and sniffs at us, feeling the air with its long, speckled tongue, before it runs off in the other direction. 

The light here is weird, and shifting. Lights in buildings flicker. Ashes blow in the wind, and we smell smoke and ozone, mold and rotting meat.

It’s another half an hour before we run into their wards. If you haven’t seen Akarii warding before, imagine complex sketches in the air made with pale blue lines of energy. Pictures and diagrams, strange letters and numbers and glyphs, all shimmering in thin, gossamer layers that lie one on top of another, until the air is thick with them like fat, electric spider webs. Other Families use wards, but I’ve always found that the Akarii glyphs looks sharp and choppy, carved out with quick, impatient strokes.

A group of mages spent more than a week putting these together, I bet, and even now I’m guessing they’re off in that Retriever ship, tucked into their niches, eyes rolled back into their heads and connected to them like the glyphs are alive, monitoring the power that pulses through the wards. These were built for defense as well as warning—anything that blunders into them will be badly burned, and won't be able to get much farther than a foot or two before the wards throw them back. 

It takes a careful hand to move through warding like this, and Josik is one of the best I’ve ever seen. He learned it as a thief (though he doesn't know I know this), stealing old paintings from some of the big residences in Tamaranth.  It came in handy for him later, too, as an Akarii prisoner of war. 

He takes another shot from Pirrosh’s flask and dons a pair of dark goggles that makes the wards stand out more clearly. Then, delicately, he dips his knife into the edge of the ward and starts making small, careful cuts. He peels each layer aside, like the thin skins of a marsh onion. He goes slowly, pushing and curving the wards back onto themselves, rewriting patterns and fusing symbols together, reconnecting severed ends to each other in a way that maintains something of the inherent logic of the writing while making just enough space for us to pass through.

It’s hard work. If he cuts too much, pushes too hard, the mages at the other end will know we’re here. But if he’s careful, there’s a lot of warding to manage and only so much space in those mages' brains to keep track. 

Sweat drips down the sides of his head, soaks into the straps of the goggles. Gradually, he’s opening up a passage. He steps into the wards, going deeper.

“Nice work,” the girl whispers. Pirrosh grins with his two rows of teeth and nods. We pick up our packs and follow Josik, and in minutes we’re on the other side.  

We hug the shadows of the buildings.  We move like ghosts.  The Retriever is a long and wide platform, with multiple layers of exposed decking, and a powered keel that arches up in the bow with the carved head of a demon-bird. The Akarii have clearly spared no expense getting into Tilhtinora—the demon’s head is covered in gold feathers, and gold embellishments trace down the sides of the hull. Cannons line its fat sides. The decks are covered over with dense, flickering wards, and shiny mechs are working to tie down tarps in anticipation of the Dead storm, I guess. (I can smell the ozone growing stronger, and feel a thudding and rumbling up through my gut as the storm gets nearer.) The stern curls up into a tail that branches into three carved, golden spikes. Sentries stare out over the city from each of them. Guards are positioned up and down the decks. A faint sound of music drifts out from the hold, all pipes and flutes and woodwinds.

“At least there aren’t any dogs,” Josik says, cracking a grin. “No dogs that we can see, anyway.”

“Thanks. Thanks, that makes me feel better.” There’s a reason why the Tamaranth city guard used to call me ‘Dogbite.’ We’ll get to that later.

Between us and the Retriever ship, there's a huge hole that’s been carved out of the city’s substrate and braced up by shimmering walls of force. At the base of it, in what must have been some sort of underground hangar when the city came down, is what we’re after.

It's a long and slim podship, teardrop-shaped, with an unusually sleek look and a size that I’ve only seen a couple of times before and then only briefly, in combat, from the losing side of the battle. From what I can see of it, it looks completely intact.

I can’t tell you how much something like this is worth now. As far as I know, no one knows how to make ships like this anymore. Even the most advanced First Family labs seem to struggle just to figure out how to keep what they have running. It really is a tremendous find. If it's original and untouched, and it looks like it, then there will be no end of buyers. Or Capone could hire it out for mercenary work. Sages and generals would come from the sky-cities of Tilkasnioc and Tilhtinon and even as far away as Xu to hire a ship like this.

In the light of the wards that stretch over our head in a great blue dome, tiny, intricate glyphs flicker across the podship’s hull. Not one of the glyphs is familiar. 

“Are they inside already?” Josik asks. The hatch is uncovered, but not open. I can’t tell. Could be a problem, but having that hatch exposed does make the job a little easier.

Two Akarii mages or guards stand beside the dig; a man and a woman. The woman is tall and thin, with long, dark hair tied back. The man is short and very round. They both wear those dark coats and the bowler hats that are in vogue in Tamaranth. Thin lines of energy tie them into the wards that hold back the rubble from around the ship.

I swap looks with Josik and Pirrosh. They both nod.  The Buhr unfolds iteslf from the harness and rises up beside me, looking like a big barrel, with its three legs and three arms tucked around it like that. It looks back at me with one of those double-irised goat eyes. The eye blinks, slowly.
WE ARE READY
,
it shouts into my head. I hate it when they do that: it’s very different from knife-speak, like a bullhorn right into your mind. It makes ripples in my brain and leaves behind the scent of ginger in my nose and an image of small, blue lake fish drawn from my own memory—the first fish I’d ever seen. 

It’s my firstfather who’s holding it. My firstfather, dead now these twenty-five years.

I shake my head. The plan, if we made it this far, was for the Buhr to unlock any three-hundred year old snares before we go in. But you can’t really trust these guides. Many expeditions that had a Buhr for a guide never return, and yet the Buhr always seem awfully well supplied with rare Tilhtinoran artifacts when you meet them on the street.