Storm Thief (27 page)

Rail and Moa felt the first of the explosions all the way up in the room near the top of the Fulcrum.

“Oh freck, we're too late,” said Moa.

“You're so right,” Vago growled, stepping out of the elevator. “Your time has run out.”

Rail was looking around the room for an escape route, but there were only two exits from the chamber. One was past Vago and into the elevator. The other was over the edge of the terrible drop at their backs, where one wall had folded away and left them with a panorama of the city. Neither of them were really an option.

“You can't run,” said the golem. He was hunched low, his wings kinked sharply and to either side like a cloak, their thin metal framework catching the sunlight. His yellow eye skittered from Rail to Moa, and his fingers flexed with a scrape of jointed rods. The Fade-Science projector, the bizarre sculpture of rods and spheres, stood between them, but it was silent now. Benejes Frine had left them to their fate.

“Vago, listen!” Rail said, holding his hands up as if to ward him off. “Can't you hear it? Bane has destroyed the Chaos Engine.”

Vago's approach was slow and relentless. “Then the Protectorate has triumphed. As it always will.”

“It's not what you think. Destroying the Chaos Engine is going to unleash the probability storm to end all storms. It's going to remake Orokos! And it'll remake
us
if we're still here when it happens!” There was another explosion, dull and heavy, and the room shivered. “Can't you hear? The Fulcrum is destroying itself.”

Vago paused then, and suddenly laughed. It was a horrible sound. They had never heard the golem laugh before, and it was like the wheezing of a sick dog. “Then let it. Let it remake us all. Do you think I
want
to remain like this? The Protectorate will rise again, and this time there will be no Revenants to stop us!”

Moa shook her head. Vago was a different person since he had gone to the Null Spire, since he had met Bane. He didn't cringe any longer, and when he spoke he was more eloquent than he had been before. Something had changed inside him, something that made him like the Protectorate, something that made him hate Moa's kind.

“Vago, this isn't you,” she said.

“This
is
me,” the golem snapped. “That fawning, idiot creature that you knew before,
that
wasn't me.”

The golem had advanced enough that Moa and Rail had retreated to the edge of the drop now. Rail was calculating the chances of making a break for the elevator, but the golem would be too fast for them. Besides, he had no idea how he had activated it the first time. Even if they got past Vago, they couldn't escape.

“Yes it was, Vago. That
was
you, before they got hold of you and filled your head with all their beliefs. You weren't Protectorate when we found you. Were you? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you were, that you were a spy all this time?”

There was an edge of desperation in Moa's voice, but Rail was frankly amazed at how calm she was being. At that moment he was struck by a fierce blaze of love for her, for the way she was, the way that she still fought to find the good in someone even when it was a maniacal golem bent on killing them. Her faith in people was perhaps the only weapon they had left now. Rail was all out of ideas.

“Tell me!” she demanded. “Tell me that you intended to betray us all that time!”

Vago didn't reply, and that was answer enough.

“What did they do to you?” she asked, softer now. “Don't you remember your friends?”

“We were never friends!” Vago spat.

“Yes we were,” she said. “And you saved my life once. That was the Vago that kept a dead bird with him because he thought it was beautiful. That was the Vago that was with me when I woke up after a Revenant almost killed me. We
were
friends. And it didn't matter that you were a golem and I was from the ghetto. We—”

“I used to be a person!” Vago cried. “A murderer! That's who I am! I
deserve
to look like this. I might not remember a thing, but what difference does that make to those people? They're still dead. And I killed them.”

Moa was shocked into silence by the cruelty of his tone. She began to tremble, tears welling in her eyes.

“I don't care,” Moa whispered.

Vago looked up at her, sunlight falling across the flesh half of his face. “What?”

Moa sniffed and wiped her eyes with her fingers. “I don't care. That wasn't you.”

“Yes, it was,” Vago said firmly. “You can't forgive me for that, Moa.”

“Don't tell me who I can and can't forgive,” she replied, and she seemed so frail and broken that she might have been blown away in the slightest wind. “I've seen what you were when you were like a child. You started again when you were remade. You're not evil, Vago. You just think you should be.”

“
Enough!
”
Vago shrieked, and he pounced suddenly. Rail was ready for it, but it did him no good; the golem was simply too fast. He leaped at Moa, sideswiping Rail as he did so. His forearm smashed across Rail's face like an iron bar. If not for his respirator muzzle, he would had lost some teeth; but as it was, he fell backwards, spun, and tipped off the edge of the drop with a cry.

Vago cannoned into Moa, bearing her to the ground and landing on her with one hand wrapped around her pale throat. She cracked her head on the floor as she fell, and the impact almost knocked her cold; but instead of unconsciousness, an almost unbearable pain flooded through her skull. She began to weep in fear and agony, her eyeshadow running down on to her cheeks in black rivulets.

“Do you forgive me now, Moa?” Vago hissed, his face close to hers. His fingers began to tighten on her throat.

“Rail. . .” she sobbed. “What did you do?”

“I think I might have killed him,” the golem said.

There was another explosion, this one much louder. A monolithic groaning and creaking came from all around them. Vago looked up, then back at Moa.

“And now I'm going to kill you,” he finished.

Moa was trying to shake her head, but she couldn't move it within his grip. “I don't want to die,” she whispered. “Don't do this. Please don't do this. I want to live.”

I want to live
. It was the naked simplicity of that which broke Vago's heart, and cracked open the incomplete Protectorate conditioning that had fogged his mind. Suddenly the girl he was looking down on wasn't some filthy ghetto rat but
Moa
, a girl with a name, and she
had
been his friend once. She had been the only person in the world who had shown him kindness, when everyone else treated him with hatred and mistrust. She had believed in him until the very end. And for all that, he had rewarded her with only suffering.

Perhaps he wanted to be punished. Perhaps that was why he had made himself into this monstrosity. Perhaps that was why Moa's relentless faith in him made him angry.

He didn't know. But he couldn't hurt her any more.

He loosened his grip on her and stood up. She curled into a ball, holding the back of her head, crying. He walked to the edge of the drop, and looked down at where Rail hung by his fingertips. Rail glared at him, eyes swimming with hatred.

“I thought I didn't hear you fall,” he said. He squatted and reached down, and pulled Rail up by the arms before dumping him on the floor. Rail scrambled over to Moa, and she hugged him in desperate relief and terror.

The next explosion rocked the room enough to make Vago stagger. It was followed by another, and another. There was the sound of tearing metal from somewhere in the elevator shaft, and smoke began to seep through the door. Outside, clouds were boiling, black thunderheads that spread from the centre of the city, forming out of nothing. A storm was coming.

Vago looked at the elevator door, then out at the horizon.

I want to live
, he heard Moa say again in his mind.

He strode over to where Rail and Moa were huddled, and with irresistible strength he picked them both up and bundled them each under one arm. They thrashed and cursed, and Moa pleaded, but he paid no attention. With both of them securely held to his flanks, he took two steps of a run-up and then jumped out into the sky.

And then they were flying.

It took both Rail and Moa a short while to stop their screams, to realize that they were not falling as they should have been. Though the wind tore at them and blasted their hair about and rippled their clothes, they were somehow still aloft.

After the screams came a strange quiet, a time of raw disbelief, when they looked at the scene before and around them and couldn't quite credit what they saw. Vago's huge, leathery wings were spread above them like a canopy, held stiffly outward, unmoving. The golem dared not flap them, for fear of going into a plunge that he would not recover from; but he fixed them horizontally, though the strain on the muscles and mechanisms in his back was terrible, and they
glided
.

The city was laid out beneath them in all of its shabby magnificence, a colossal mishmash of old and new, beauty and squalor, order and chaos. Far to the south they could see the Coil, rising from its surroundings like two snakes entwined. They could see mighty buildings, towers and alleys and bridges, cranes and derricks and canals. The West Artery went straight ahead of them to the edge of the world, tiny barges and gunboats plying the water; and Vago was following it to its end. He wasn't sure he could have turned if he wanted to.

Behind them, the dark red Fulcrum was flaking to pieces, a bruised heart of scabs falling apart in the violence of the Chaos Engine's death throes. Flame billowed out from it in great jets that flared and died in the gathering darkness. Overhead, the sun was being swallowed as the black clouds above the Fulcrum churned and spread. A shadow was creeping across the city from the inside out. At its core could be seen the insidious colours of a probability storm.

Soldiers were fleeing from the Fulcrum as it fell around them, and somewhere in that mass Vago caught sight of a familiar figure. He was too far away for the others to spot, but Vago saw him. Finch was running across the plaza at the base of the Fulcrum, heading for the alleys and streets which he thought would shelter him. But he, like everyone else in Orokos, would have to face the storm to come. Perhaps it would make this lonely island a paradise, perhaps it would ruin it entirely. Perhaps the entire plateau would sink into the sea.

Orokos, the Random City, would have one last throw of the dice; and this time paid for all.

Rail and Moa clung to Vago's flanks of metal and flesh, and they didn't say a word. They didn't dare to ask him why he had decided not to kill them. If they questioned him, he might change his mind and drop them. So they were silent, stuck between the glorious sensation of flight and the fear of falling that squeezed their chests.

And in truth, had they asked, Vago would not have been able to give them an answer. His feelings had always been an alien place, even to himself. He could sense the tatters of the Protectorate conditioning peeling away from him, leaving him raw and bruised. All he wanted was to begin again, to be the child he once was. But there was too much, too much he had done, too much guilt on his shoulders. He couldn't save himself. But he could save Moa. And for Moa's sake, he could save Rail.

They glided west, along the Artery, while the dark canopy of clouds chased them close behind. Above the Fulcrum now was a rolling ball of probability energy, a dim sun of coloured veils in which bolts of aether flickered and crackled. A terrible force was gathering.

It was some time before Moa realized that they were losing height fast.

She had been watching the jagbats that wheeled above the city, concerned that they might attack; but they were fleeing for shelter, sensing the oncoming storm. The pain in Moa's head had receded to a persistent ache now, and she managed to ignore it in the face of all that was happening. She had just begun to believe that they were not going to plummet out of the sky when she noticed the spires and rooftops were getting closer. She could make out details on the barges below when she hadn't been able to before.

“Vago. . .” she murmured.

“I know,” he said. “We're too heavy.”

Moa felt a lurch in her chest. Vago didn't look at them; he was staring rigidly ahead.

“I'm not going to drop you,” he said. After a moment, he added: “Either of you.”

“Where are we going?” Moa asked.

“Out,” he said, and that was all.

Ahead and below them, the West Artery came to an end at the enormous intakes which were set in Orokos' perimeter wall. They were sinking towards it as the thermals that they had been riding lessened. Vago wasn't aerodynamic and was carrying too much weight. The rooftops of the city seemed huge now, a patchwork of uneven surfaces that skimmed by to either side of the wide blue canal. It was only as they got closer to the ground that Moa realized how fast they were going. The water was a blur; boats sped past beneath them.

And looming up ahead, dozens of feet high, was the great grey wall that protected the city. Immovable. And they were going to hit it.

“We're dropping too fast!” Rail cried. The rim of the wall, blistered with guard posts that nobody manned any more, was rising up before them.

Moa screamed, and she clutched herself to Vago's body. Then the wall was beneath, so close that Moa could feel the stone and metal thundering by inches from her, and she screamed again. . .

. . .and then suddenly there was air, and space, and below them were the black cliffs and the dizzying drop to the sea. They had cleared the perimeter wall of Orokos by a hair's breadth.

Moa was panting, tears running from her eyes, while on the other side of Vago Rail was clinging grimly on. Moa clasped Rail's arm across the golem's chest.

“Look,” said Vago.

On the sea, there were ships. Dozens of them, junks and steamers and craft that could barely keep afloat at all. They were sailing from a great hole that had been ripped in the cliffs, next to one of the massive waterfalls that plunged from the lip of Orokos. Kilatas had set sail.

Moa felt her heart swell with a pride and joy so great that she burst into fresh tears. Here, the shadow of the oncoming storm hadn't yet choked the light, and the green-blue waves were limned in sun-glimmer. But the ships were sailing, far out from Orokos now, and the Skimmers were nowhere to be seen. The city had let them go at last.

“Hold on,” muttered Vago uncertainly, and he tilted his wings a fraction. They began to drop faster, down towards the sea, down towards the ships that Kittiwake was leading out to the horizon.

Kittiwake's timing, it seemed, was excellent. Though Vago hadn't really known where he was going when he jumped from the Fulcrum, he had decided on the way that he would try and get his cargo down to Kilatas somehow. There they might have a chance of escaping the probability storm. But Kittiwake had set off early – for what reason, he didn't know – and now he could angle himself towards them without attempting to turn, which would have been necessary if he had intended to put Rail and Moa anywhere near the entrance to the hidden town. The simple fact was: he couldn't fly, and he could barely glide. But it just might be enough.

The sea was coming up towards them, filling their vision. The ships' engines could be heard, clattering and clanking. Those that had sails were displaying bright colours. But Vago was overshooting them, and making no attempt to correct his course.

“Aren't you. . .” Moa began, stopped, then decided she had to know. “Aren't you going to land on the ships?”

Vago laughed, but this time it wasn't malicious. “I can't land, Moa,” he said. “This is going to be a little rough.”

“You're going to land in the
sea
?” she cried. “Vago! I can't swim!”

The sea was suddenly too close now, and they soared over the ships full of upturned faces gazing in wonder. The constant whisper of the water was loud, louder, and a wall of blue was rushing up to crush them.

“Nor can I,” Vago said quietly. “Rail will take care of you. Goodbye, Moa.”

And with that, he tipped his wings to vertical, and the braking of the air against them was so sudden that it almost tore them from his back. He clutched Rail and Moa, using his arms to stop them being flung away from him. For a few instants he could do nothing but hold on as the savage deceleration wrenched at his body. Then he lost control and flipped over, his wings tangling around him. He let go of Rail and Moa. The three of them spun apart like a meteorite breaking up, and they smashed into the ocean.

Moa had wanted to scream, but at the last moment she had wit enough to snatch a breath before she was flung from Vago. The impact of the water almost drove it from her lungs, but she held on somehow. A muffling hand had closed around her senses, wet and cold and dampening all sound to a dull roar. She was too stunned to move, not knowing which way was up, not knowing where she was, only that the air wasn't there any more, that she
mustn't breathe
.

Then reality collapsed on her, and she panicked. She thrashed wildly, but her uncoordinated flailing seemed to make no difference. She twisted until she could see the light and she struggled for it, knowing that light meant life. But she was sinking, sinking no matter what she did. Below her was an abyss deeper than eternity, blue shading into fathomless black, and it was sucking her down, down to where her lungs wouldn't work. Down to where it would all be over.

Her head went light. Suddenly, the idea of fighting seemed foolish. It was so much easier just to relax and go with it. After all, wasn't that what she'd done all her life? Wasn't that how things were?

No. Not any more. And she would not die here, not with her dream so close to reality. She would not give up now.

I want to live
.

And with that thought, she began to struggle anew, striking up for the surface. But though her efforts were useless, though she was doomed here, she held on to every precious second even though her lungs felt like they were aflame and her pulse was thudding in her head. And she would not stop struggling. There was nobody to make the decision for her now but herself. She would not let herself go.

She held on longer than she would have thought possible, but she couldn't hold the air in her burning chest for ever. She exhaled, and emptied herself.

A shadow in her dimming vision, swimming closer. Rail. Rail, grabbing her, and she was too weak to even panic now so she clung to him. She could barely see him any more, and though she tried to hold on, a part of her knew that it was already too late. She found a last ounce of defiance, but it couldn't save her.

Then Rail's lips were pressing against hers, his respirator hanging loose, and suddenly there was air, thin and unsatisfying but it was
air
, expanding her lungs, blown in from his. Their mouths came apart and her vision cleared a little, so that she could see him again. She felt him kicking upwards and she clung to him like a baby to its mother. Suddenly, she wasn't afraid any more. She trusted him utterly. For a time, she had forgotten that; but she knew now that her life was safe in his hands.

They broke the surface of the water together. Moa sucked in great lungfuls of air, while Rail slipped his respirator back in his mouth and did the same. Her dark hair was plastered across her eyes, and her eyeshadow was all over her cheeks; but she was still breathing, and she held herself to him while he trod water. After a moment she began to cry.

“Where's Vago?” she asked.

Rail looked around, but there was only the ocean. “He's gone, Moa. He's gone.”

The ships caught them up a short while later, and ropes were thrown down to haul them on board. They emerged, dripping, on the deck of a battered old hulk, and there, with the broadest of grins, was Kittiwake.

“You two are the luckiest kids I've ever had the misfortune to meet,” she declared.

“You make your own luck,” said Rail, smiling with his eyes. “Nobody ever tell you that?”

Kittiwake cackled, and blankets were brought, and they were led to the prow of the ship. Behind them was Orokos, massive and dour, and above it black clouds thickened and spread like an omen of doom. Ahead of them was the horizon, and whatever lay beyond it.

Rail put his arm around Moa, and she leaned into him.

“You know what, Moa?” he said. “I think I've changed my mind. Maybe I will come with you to look for this new land after all.”

Moa, wearied by grief and exhaustion, batted him on the arm. “As if you ever had a choice,” she said.

He smiled behind his respirator and pulled her to him again. “No, I don't think I ever did,” he murmured.