City Of Ruin (62 page)

‘Come on,’ Beami soothed. ‘Let’s get you somewhere warm.’

They went back to Beami’s room, where Beami poured them each a whisky. ‘This might not solve the trauma, but it’ll ease the pain. So, tell me, what were you doing here?’

Bellis carefully explained what she and the Grey Hairs were doing in Villiren all this time, what they had been seeking, and how she needed someone’s help to raise it. Intrigued, and without hesitation, Beami found herself volunteering her services.

‘You do realize that this will be big?’ Bellis warned. ‘There may well be widespread destruction.’

‘If you think it will help sway things in our favour – then it will ultimately save many lives. Though I’m not sure I quite comprehend the scale of it.’

Bellis nodded. ‘Then, my dear, I will show you.’

*

Across the city, across the night, the two female cultists slippeuietly past soldiers and blockades and mourners gathered at pyres.

They cloaked themselves in darkness as they approached the firsocation.

There, Bellis produced a crowbar and turned to Beami. ‘My back isn’t what it used to be. Could you help me with this flagstone.’

She indicated one in particular that had an unusual symbol painted on it, one that Beami wasn’t familiar with. Possibly a hex sign? Together they prised it open and shifted the stone to one side . . . and underneath, embedded in the soil, lay a relic. Only the top of the orb was visible.

‘A
Hefja
,’ Bellis explained.

By the way Bellis looked at her, Beami felt that she was expected to understand. She thought the antique word meant ‘lift’ or ‘raise’, and suggested this.

‘That’s absolutely right, in the most literal sense. Pretty and bright – how wondrous!’

Beami understood then how it would work, how they would all work. Bellis had already explained there were a number of such symbols painted around the city, which the Grey Hairs had assiduously identified according to ley lines. ‘These locations are precise to within an inch,’ Bellis added. ‘All of them, once primed, should be enough.’

‘How will you know if they’re successful,’ Beami asked, ‘if you’re going to be somewhere else by the time they’re all activated?’

‘Ten in total, and all we can do is hope for the best. You see, this isn’t my first time . . .’ As Bellis smiled her face wrinkled up in delight.

Beami felt inspired by the woman’s confidence, and she had to admit it had taken her mind off things, to have this little assignment drag her out into the middle of the city, to prevent her from sitting alone and brooding over Lupus.

She watched Bellis set the device, turning the dials then placing her palm against its exterior surface. As the old woman withdrew it, the ghost of her hand remained visible under the surface of the orb.

‘This one is set,’ Bellis announced with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Right, let’s get right to the next one.’

*

They shifted across several districts of the darkened city, througesolate lanes, stepping over corpse-thick passageways, while somewhere in the distance there were explosions and, shortly after, garudas arced back overhead.

Luckily eight of the ten devices were to be found in what was still Jamur territory, or no-man’s-land. Beami helped in lifting the stones, or in shifting corpses away first. To reach the two devices located in enemy-occupied territory, they had to use relics to shift between degrees of time. They shunted back and forth, vibrating between seconds, in order to reach them in real time, at a point just before they’d activated the first ones. It was all about synchronizing, of course.

Beami felt increasingly in awe of Bellis’s skills. The old woman possessed more wisdom and talent and imagination than she would have thought possible, and was surprisingly fit and agile. Now and then they’d stop to rest, and the old woman would whip out a hip flask of sherry, a grin appearing on her face as if the burdens of life had been lifted.

Dawn threatened on the horizon, and Beami felt a renewed sense of urgency because, once light arrived, the war would resume in full.

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ Bellis said. ‘We’re just about set.’

The final device was back in Deeping, far across the city and safely behind Jamur lines.

‘Do you have any idea,’ Beami asked, ‘what it will do once it’s up and active?’

‘One can never be quite sure,’ Bellis replied, not really answering her question. They scrambled up to a flat roof that offered a perspective across towards the Shanties. The Onyx Wing rose behind them, and behind that the Citadel, allowing them a perfect view of what was about to happen.

‘Do the Jamur military know what you’re doing?’ Beami asked.

‘Not one iota.’

‘But what if there are citizens out there, getting in the way?’

Bellis’s gaze softened, and she sighed audibly. ‘Perhaps there’s no one there by now. We can only hope that, can’t we?’

Before Beami had a chance to say anything more, Bellis produced a smaller orb, the size of an apple, and began to tamper with it, muttering something to herself. ‘A-ha! And here we are. Three . . . two . . .’

Villiren groaned.

‘. . . one.’

Some of its thoroughfares glowed a pale violet, began vibrating and shuddering back and forth, and further out, towards the Shanties, there was a sudden haze of bright light.

Bellis grabbed Beami’s arm and said excitedly, ‘Let’s just hope it heads the right way!’

The noises of troop movements became more distinct for a moment, then buildings in the distance began to veer and teeter sideways. Dawn birds scattered manically. People surged out on to the streets in hysteria.

Cobbles spat up in a fluid line in three locations. Then something possessing an electrical outline breached the rooftops, and rose till it gained immense height, thirty, forty, seventy, a hundred feet and then doubled again and again in size until it took clearer form. Tentacles swirled around, crashing through the war-battered architecture.

A giant squid, made entirely from light.

Beami was shocked, truly shocked. Despite having been told, despite having known what was coming from Bellis’s explanations, this was far beyond anything she could have contemplated.

As the city delivered itself of this light-formed ghost, the streets themselves giving birth to the monstrosity, Bellis clapped her hands with glee, jumping up and down on the rooftop.

‘That
thing
, that cephalopod,’ Bellis explained loudly, ‘has been trapped beneath Villiren for millennia. The Archipelago is littered with such electrical ghosts, waiting for re-activation so, after some detailed research into electrical teuthology, all I had to do was put the right relics in the right place.’

These charged corpses were just waiting there to be unlocked.

Vast and garish, the squid’s tentacles flailed through the air, swirling in the dawn light. It pushed outwards, dragging buildings apart, trampling everything in its hundred-foot-wide path. Screams rose in the distance and, as a cloud dust accrued in its wake, it ploughed right through the enemy-occupied sectors of the city.

And through countless enemy soldiers.

As it slunk into the sea, probably trashing what was left of Port Nostalgia, it would, Bellis hoped, also eradicate the invasion fleet, those grey vessels in which the Okun and the redskin rumel had arrived. Water sloshed to huge heights as the harbour waters banked and surged far inland, and even the larger boats were cast around like toys.

And all the time Beami kept praying that as few of the Imperial forces as possible would be harmed.

*

Brynd glimpsed Lupus releasing an arrow which imploded a skulomewhere in the darkness. He fired again through a gap between the shields as the Night Guard maintained their protective structure despite the onslaught of redskins and Okun. Brynd was breathless and his legs seemed about to buckle because of maintaining this cramped position. Caked in sweat and blood and severed flesh, he rested his hands on his knees and tried desperately to draw in air.

With limited visibility he could not see clearly where the next attacks might come from, so had to remain ultra-alert. Attacked from the front and sides, simultaneously they broke position only briefly to launch savage assaults on their assailants.

Their recent enhancements had so far kept them alive.

Suddenly the entire building began to shake, causing another pause in the combat. It continued to shudder like it had a fever, before a sound like a
Brenna
device exploding. Stone spat inwards at every human and rumel and Okun alike, and then there were shouts of a different and more desperate kind. Holes appeared in the structure, revealing strange lines of bright light outside.

That’s when the ceiling collapsed.

Beami was back at the Citadel by the time the news reached her. Bellis was snoring triumphantly in Beami’s bed, while she herself waited anxiously for news of where Lupus and the Night Guard had gone. The more she fretted about it, the more she was convinced something terrible had happened.

A senior commander of the Dragoons began giving orders to a squad of soldiers out in the main quadrangle and it was then she heard something of what happened. The Night Guard were delayed . . . perhaps their mission had gone seriously wrong . . . although the hostages had been released, every member of the elite unit was still missing in action.

Beami’s felt her heart thumping in her throat.
Please, not Lupus
. . .

*

After his briefing was completed, Beami stalked some lieutenant of the Eleventh Dragoons, a blond, athletic man with a beard, and tattoos spiralling across his neck. She pursued him for some distance through the corridors before she managed to stop him.

‘I need to know where the Night Guard have been sent,’ she demanded.

‘I’m afraid, miss, that’s classified information.’ He nonchalantly turned to continue on his way, but Beami grabbed his arm.

‘Tell me where the fuck they are, all right, or I’ll hit you with an energy so hard . . .’

The soldier snatched his arm back, laughing, so she slapped him with a
Tong
relic, a metal device that clamped itself into his arm like teeth and brought him gasping to his knees. ‘Tell me where they were sent.’

As he scrambled about on the floor, half trying to maintain his dignity, half convinced he would die, he spat out the location of the warehouse and what they were supposed to be doing there.

‘So much for classified information,’ she sneered. ‘Thought you guys were trained to withstand torture?’

After she removed the device he said nothing, merely rubbed at his arm and breathed heavily through his nose. His mouth was now clenched tight, but it was too late. She had the information and was on her way to wake up Bellis.

*

With their bags of relics slung across their shoulders, the two women headed back across the warscape. In daylight now, the ruins were clear to see and ordinary and depressing. Beami’s heart sank when she realized just how much damage her city had suffered because of the war – war with some enemy she knew nothing about, a conflict that seemed so distant from her previous existence. Her life had little context in all of this.

In the Imperial zones, the citizens did not seem willing to leave. Babies shrieked from doorless buildings and distraught women sobbed openly in the streets. In one plaza, at a table propped up against a whitewashed wall, two old tramps still stubbornly played their game of dice. This was their home, after all, this was all that many people had ever known – their reluctance to abandon it was understandable.

In the contended zones, corpses lay in the snow, in decrepit armour, amid isolated limbs, bloodstains and rotting flesh, and the streets reeked with the taint of death. Where windows once glimmered, black holes seemed like gateways into hell. Red mist was sprayed across the banks of snow, where people had been slaughtered. Without the street cleaners’ regular attention, there was little to stop the weather from reclaiming the city, and it almost seemed the kindest thing to do would be to bury Villiren, to let it suffocate under the elements.

A warehouse, that’s what she’d been told. With street locations, and grid references discovered from a map, Beami and Bellis crept past the blockades, using relics to bend light around them, to create invisible stairways over ruined buildings. Every trick they knew of, they used. Every step was weighed down with a sense of dread that Lupus had been crushed.

At one point, she defended them both against a couple of Okun who skittered across the rubble so clumsily that she wondered how they could have inflicted so much damage in the first place. She employed whips made of light that fizzed and sizzled across the Okuns’ shells, flinging the vile creatures across the desolate street.

‘Oh, well done,’ Bellis trilled. ‘Very good use of energy.’

*

The two women had been walking for miles now, their feet aching and legs growing weary. Fast-moving clouds brought sleet but nothing worse. They’d been moving slowly for at least three hours now, taking occasional stops to sip from bottles of water.