Cloud Castles (28 page)

Alison, mouth open to shout, grabbing for her sword hilt – which at that angle, even if she had Mall’s bullet-splitting speed, she could never hope to draw.

Dragovic’s hand half-way from his holster, thumb still resting on the safety catch he’d flicked, not realizing how loud it’d sound in that breathless instant. He’d alerted us both and he knew it. There’d be no stagey preliminaries; he was going to shoot, at once. He had to.

I froze, one hand hovering in
mid-air, the other on the edge of the terminal. I thrust out those fingers and clamped down hard. I felt a function button in the top row give and click, but it seemed an eternity before anything happened, while the gun swung up to face us. Then an alarm shrieked, a red light flashed, and the conveyor lurched into life. In the same instant I threw myself forward, vaulting the case, cannoned into Alison and knocked her sprawling from her perch, right over the conveyor. I caught one topsy-turvy glimpse of Dragovic, mouth agape; then we were rolling entangled across the floor. He loosed off an echoing fusillade just as a high packing case chugged into his path; the bullets thudded hollowly, and kicked up a cloud of chips and splinters. The guards came running to his side, tugging out their heavy revolvers. Hardly a surprise: he’d chosen them.

We staggered to our feet, ducking from side to side, keeping behind the boxes as they bumped past, playing peek-a-boo with the guards. They snapped off a couple of shots which hit nothing but the merchandise and the frame of the conveyor. One, realizing he’d get nowhere, leaped up onto the side ledge to see over. I reached between packages and lunged at his foot, almost slashing the toe off his boot. He staggered, loosing a shot at the roof, and fell back with a heavy thud, triggering another wild shot. The other emptied his gun into the general area of the cases, and I scurried away with wood and shredded cardboard packaging flying around my ears.

The guards were yelling at Dragovic, demanding he finish us and fast; they sounded suitably rattled. He kept some semblance of brains and ordered them to jump across the belt further along, while he kept us pinned down. He glimpsed us and loosed another burst; we ducked down behind a tall heavy machinery case, while the guards scrambled noisily up onto the ledge and through a gap in the loads. One reached an arm round and fired twice, at random, to give them a clear moment to jump down. We weren’t there. Without a word spoken – a look had been enough – we were both of us scrabbling up on top of the tall packing case, tipping it forward. The captain barely hopped away in time as it loomed over him, and we sprang free; it hit the floor with a booming thunderclap, he skidded back, collided with the first row of racking and dropped both the case with the Spear and his gun, which skidded away under the racks. He ducked after it. We went for him, only to jump back as a laden pallet slid innocently into our path, resuming its old preoccupations. A bullet bounced off it; the guard was firing from behind the conveyor. Then he threw down the empty pistol and they all jumped back across, drawing their sabres. We turned, and they were on us.

It was me they both went for, parrying
Alison’s swift lunge and ducking by, aiming a furious rain of cuts and slashes at me. They thought I was the weaker one, they meant to fell me fast by main force and leave themselves free to take her on. She didn’t buy it; instead she was suddenly back to back with me, a supple, twisting presence, as they circled around us like snapping dogs. They were tough nuts, and fast, one of them almost as good as the captain. Evidently Alison thought I was the weak link too, because she wheeled us around after him, which wasn’t getting us anywhere.

‘Sod that!’ I yelled – as good a battle cry as any, probably – and went for him, leaping forward into his attack with a swift stabbing lunge. He took my blade deftly and launched a hissing swipe at my face, I stopped it with a parry
quarte
and disengaged with what seemed to me deadly slowness; yet somehow my blade was on the other side of his, still across his body, and he was just bunching his arm for the riposte. I threw all my weight into a thrust that went right across his sword and drove down under his breastbone, pinning him to a neat pile of plastic sacks. I yanked loose and he folded with a groan as the heap collapsed on him. I whirled just in time to see why they’d been scared of Alison. She danced forward with a flickering attack that made her sabre look light as a foil, lanced past her opponent’s guard and stabbed once and twice into his chest. He roared and lunged at her, she skipped away and abruptly parried with a circling, irresistible swing whose sheer strength flung his sword wide and wild, leaving him open to a leaping strike, a classic
fleche
that ran her blade deep under his armpit and killed him where he stood.

But even as she pulled free of the falling body a shot plucked at her sleeve, and another smacked off the shelving. The captain had got his gun back. I meant to haul her back behind the racks, but she hauled me. ‘Pinning us down—’ she panted. ‘Going for door! We jump him – wide apart! You take the left. Ready?’ I nodded. ‘One – two –
go!’

We dashed out together, but I jumped across the wide
trackway, while she sprinted down the right flank. If the captain had delayed an instant longer he might never have got out; but he was already at the door, his hand on the handle, his gun levelled – and the metal case under his arm. It was Alison’s turn to launch herself at me; I fell, and the spray of fire splattered into stacked packages where I’d been that half heartbeat before. Then abruptly it stopped with a clicking snap. The Mauser had jammed; either that fall on the floor had done it no good, or he’d misloaded a clip in his haste. Complex machinery is hard to maintain on the Spiral, where industrial societies can’t flourish. We were up and after him in the instant; but the door slammed behind him.

He might have been waiting outside to snipe at
us as we emerged, but somehow I didn’t think he’d risk lingering to clear the jam. We rushed out into the bleak white lighting of the yard, and saw the fence wire still vibrating where it had been scaled, the shreds of black material on the razor-wire along the top. Footsteps rattled away into the distance with frantic haste. Unlike the inner door, the gate needed a key from both sides, and that cost us a few more seconds. We rushed out; but whichever way we looked, there were only the bare brick and aluminium flanks of the buildings, smoothly sterile, and the empty rain-puddled streets between.

Alison ground her teeth, audibly.

‘Well, it’s got to be one way or the other,’ I began, peering at the pavement where he’d jumped down. The rain-slicked tarmac was scuffed and slithered over, but one print stood out clearly in little streaks of muddy water. Suddenly Alison yelped and pointed to a smear of mud on the edge of the pavement further along. ‘So? Mud’s not exactly in short supply in this weather.’

‘Maybe – but with grass and flowers in it?’

I glanced around at the arid industrial desert, new enough that nature hadn’t started to reassert herself through cracks in the concrete façade. ‘It’s better than nothing – come on!’

But she was running already. The road was a short one, dog-legging left past a really impassable-looking fence and out into the main parking lot of the estate, empty now except for a few parked trucks. Beyond it was a main road into town, busy even at this time. Again we stared around wildly. ‘He can’t have gone out there!’

‘Why not?’ she said, and ran on. But she sheathed her sword, and I mine. The chances were that nobody would even notice them if we didn’t draw attention to them; the Core is like that. But in the glare of headlights, say, a naked blade, highly reflective, might be another story. I’d had cop trouble before now. We reached the roadside and leaped the low fence onto the cycle track alongside, still peering ahead.

‘He’ll be out of sight by now,’ said Alison bitterly. ‘Out of town, probably, into the dark—’

I caught her shoulder. ‘No, by God! Look!’

Her eyes glittered under the street
lights. ‘
Yes!
Tally-ho!’

She didn’t strike me as the fox-hunting type, so I guessed she knew that old joke too. And there the bastard went, right enough. A hefty figure in black, with one sleeve showing white and a gleam of metal under his arm, was running hell for leather along the cycle track towards town. Even as we saw him he vanished down into an underpass. We ran again, our feet slapping on the harder surface. ‘He should’ve been long gone!’ I panted. ‘I would have, and I think he’s in better shape! Did we hurt him?’

‘Never touched him!’ gasped Alison. Then without stopping she twisted and looked back at the glowing callbox we’d just passed. ‘You don’t think—’

‘What – the Brocken’s on the phone?’

‘No, idiot!’ she spat. ‘But the Baron is!’

‘Oh. Right. A hundred miles away, mind. Better keep our eyes open, all the same.’

We ran down through the underpass and up, and suddenly we were out of the industrial wilderness and into a world of neon signs and shop windows and streets still quite full. A ripple of turning heads, a flash of metal, a flicker of black led our eyes straight to the dark figure zigzagging through the crowds, and we went pounding after him, soft-drink cans and discarded pizza boxes whizzing across the pavement from under our feet, the usual debris of an urban evening. We attracted less attention than the captain; my black piratical gear and gaudy sweatband could be mistaken for expensively sleek athletics kit, Alison’s uniform for a grey shell-suit. Most people probably just saw a pair of tall thirty-somethings out for their evening run, and anybody who noticed the swords had more sense than to say anything about it. We didn’t speak, for we needed all our breath for running; but one flashing glance from Alison confirmed what I thought. We were gaining on the captain, strong though he was. We were close enough to see the occasional glint of the metal case, his tattered sleeve trailing free, the whites of his bulging eyes as he darted frantic looks back. Instant death ran at his heels, minutes behind, and he knew it. But then everything changed.

I felt it seconds before I saw it, and more
seconds still before I could believe I saw it. I thought it was just exhaustion at first, the limits of my strength – much the way I’d felt on the last stretches of the Boston marathon. But I hadn’t even run a half-marathon yet, and here was this leaden-limbed, suffocating sensation clamping down on me, pushing against my chest like the resistance on a cross-country ski simulator. I didn’t say anything, I just pressed on, but I noticed Alison was looking tight-lipped and grey as well. But then, as the captain rounded a street corner, I did see something – something I remembered all too well. Hanging in the air like the ghost of a mist, tenuous, insubstantial, it filled the broad avenue from side to side; but it settled around me as I appeared, and the pressure grew worse. It clung as I ran, spreading out in streams from side to side like a wake. Now heads turned as we passed, and among some of those the mist seemed to settle, and the faces changed, struck by a sudden spasm, a flicker of sudden bestial anger. Not only a couple of skinheads, neo-Nazis probably, and a big hairy character in over-studded leathers, but also an ordinary young woman,
Hausfrau
type, a teenage girl with an ice-cream cone and a plump horn-rimmed
Burgerlicher
, an unlikely threat to anything except a second helping of
Kalbsfleisch.
Some of them only looked; but others moved out as if to follow. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination, but when I shot another look at Alison I got a glance of horrified alertness in return, and a confirming nod. My lungs were labouring, but I was about to say something sensible back when I saw the faint hazy streamers drift out among the traffic, and worm their way into the path of a police car passing on the far side.

The reaction was instant: the driver stood on his brakes, the siren came on and the car pulled around in a screeching U-turn across the
Strassenbahn
tracks, straight towards us. Alison yelled in anger and clutched my arm, hauling me with her across the pavement to the shelter of a darker side-street. I didn’t need any persuading; we ducked around the next corner, vaulted a barrier into an underground car park and clattered between the petrol-scented rows to the exit opposite.

‘That – should – break our trail!’ she wheezed as we staggered up into another shadowy side-street. She hung onto the gatepost and gasped for breath.

I doubled over to ease a developing
stitch. ‘Right … got to get back … pick up captain’s …’ Then I hauled her back into the shadow of the wall and hissed, ‘
Look!’

The exit was near the corner of a wider street, more poorly lit than the main streets and completely empty. But from an alley two blocks down a man tottered into it, a man in worse shape than we were, reeling like a drunk. That far ahead of us it wasn’t easy to be sure; but somehow I was. He leaned against a lamppost for a moment, hugging something large to his chest; I didn’t need to see what. Our involuntary short-cut had second-guessed his escape route; we only had to move in quietly, keep in the shadows and we’d have him.

But moving quietly is slow, especially when you’re as blown as we were; even limping and gasping he was gaining on us. It was beginning to look like a geriatric speed trial, and there was a T-junction ahead, beyond it a building site with a towering crane as skeletal sentinel over its high wire fence – too many opportunities to ditch us. ‘Sod this!’ I whispered, stalking out of a doorway. ‘Let’s rush him! With any luck he’ll trip and break his bloody—’

She grabbed my arm. ‘Wait! He’s crossing the road! Get back in the shadow!’

Too late, because he wasn’t crossing. He walked
straight up to that forbidding fence, thrust the case into his jacket and began to climb. Only, as one does, he looked around first, and, of course, he saw us. Limping he might have been, but he was up that fence like a scared cat; still, he was only just at the top when we clattered up to the foot. I sprang up and slashed at him, but the blade passed a foot short as he swung himself off the top, over the razor-wire and onto one of the irregular heaps beyond, landing with a metallic clatter that seemed to go cascading away into the darkness. Alison was already clambering after him. I grabbed her heel and boosted her up to within reach of the top, she reached down an impatient hand and swung me up after her, then she sprang for the same heap, drawing her sword as she leaped. She landed with the same din and scrambled down the heap like a stair. I left my sword where it was, skidded as I landed and fell down onto metal that gave beneath me with a tinny thump. It was the bonnet of a rusty old car, and it slid me down onto another one beneath. I jumped, expecting solid ground; but I landed on a slope, a steep unstable slope that gave beneath my heels like shale or scree. I clung to the car and scrabbled for a foothold; below me darkness pooled like a lake in Hell. Something touched my leg, and I lashed out in alarm.