Swords of Waar (40 page)

Lhan shook his head as he clambered to me through the struts. “Mistress, you are terrible in your wrath.”

I swallowed. “More terrible than I meant to be. Fuck.”

Lhan and I dropped down to the catwalk, then hunted through the mangled meat. Lhan found a captain—or most of one—and pulled the bracelet off his wrist. I doubted it would work, and I was right. Nothing happened when I waved the bracelet in front of the circle by the door. Ru-Vas’s didn’t work either. The whole place was on total lock-down now.

Lhan hefted his gun. “Can we cut through it, as we did those downstairs?”

I frowned. “These doors look a lot tougher than that. I don’t think it’ll work. But you’re giving me an idea. Look for more wands.”

There were two more among the bodies, partially melted but still whole. I took ’em and laid ’em against the door like wood in a fireplace, then added the one I had slung across my back.

“There. Now back to where we were.”

We climbed back into the scaffolding and took cover behind the turbine before I gave him the nod.

“You shoot better than I do. Go for it.”

Lhan braced himself between two beams, raised the wand, and squeezed off a shot. Nothing. I could see it hit the guns, but it didn’t do shit.

“Try again.”

He took another shot. Again he hit the guns, and again, nothing.

“Goddamn it. Just pour it on. Let ’em have it.”

Lhan took a third shot and leaned on the trigger button so that it shot a long stream of energy at the guns.

For a second I thought all he was going to do was melt them into a puddle, and I started to curse, but then there was a pop, and a flash, and an arc of blue like a spark jumping the gap of a spark-plug.

“Back! Back!”

I grabbed Lhan around the waist and dragged him behind the turbine just as the turbine chamber went from black as night to bright as day in a split second. The sound was like a couple of sledgehammers to the ears, and the shock wave knocked us sideways, even behind the turbine. I had to grab a cable to keep from falling, and I could barely hold it. My brain was spinning so hard inside my head I didn’t know where my hands were.

Bits of hot plastic flew past, glowing, on either side of us, and the echo of the explosion bounced up and down the shaft like a ball bearing in a paint mixer. We stayed where we were for a while, coughing out smoke that smelled like a car-fire and getting our balance back, then looked around the curve of the turbine. The door wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the platform. The catwalk was just hanging in space at the top of the stairs, its severed end twisted like a tin foil gum wrapper. Part of the wall near where the door had been was on fire. I didn’t know steel could burn.

“Holy shit.”

Lhan looked aghast. “Holy indeed. What horrible power the Seven wielded.”

“At least it worked.”

We picked our way back across the superstructure. The part above the door was bent and almost too hot to step on or touch—not so good for a couple of naked people. Down below was even worse. The hallway beyond the obliterated door was filled with smoke and I saw that the walls were on fire, and sparks were spitting out of the fixtures.

From somewhere below a new alarm started going off. This one went, YEEN YEEN YEEN YEEN!

Lhan pointed. “There. A safe landing.”

I looked down. The floor just inside the door was all scraped up, but not on fire. We jumped down one after the other, then looked into the smoking corridor.

The broken door lay halfway down the hall, all crumpled up like a used Kleenex, and bits and pieces of smoking rubble and circuitry were strewn all over. The worst part, though, was the fire, which was climbing up both walls to the ceiling and melting all that smooth white plastic like it was wax.

I could hear things shorting and popping behind the panels, and a second later, weird doohickies that looked like tiny chrome pineapples popped out of holes in the ceiling and started spinning. A few of ’em started spraying water around, but most of them didn’t.

I hissed through my teeth. “What the hell? Why aren’t they working? This shit’s going to get out of control.”

“What are they, Mistress?”

“A sprinkler system, I think. It goes off automatically when there’s a fire. At least its supposed to.”

Lhan stared. “Truly, the wonders of the Seven are limitless.”

And there was my answer. The sprinkler system didn’t work because these backwards nimrods didn’t know what it was, and it hadn’t been serviced in a thousand years. Doors, security systems, water collection systems—those were things the priests woulda had to figure out early. Fire prevention? They wouldn’t even have known to look, and neither had Jack Wainwright. The last time he was on Earth, fire prevention was an axe and a bucket of sand. I might have just fucked this place up way worse than I meant to, and I had no idea how to fix it.

I hissed, uneasy. “All that water in the tank, and who knows how to get it to the fire? This might get serious.”

Lhan started ahead. “Then we had best act quickly.”

“Right.”

I followed after him, and we walked into the flames.

***

Twenty yards on and the fire was behind us, except for the smoke, which followed us down the hall, making everything hazy and red. This area felt fancier and more enclosed than the other levels, more like an office than an airport. The floor was carpeted with some kind of orange spongey stuff, and the walls were closer together.

A few priests were hurrying in our direction, I guess to check on what had happened, but when they saw us coming, they turned and ran like the devil was after them. I jumped ahead, trying to stop them before they told anybody we were coming, but the smoke was so thick I only managed to grab one. I shook him.

“Where is the control room? Where does the Wargod control the temples?”

“Kill me, demoness! I care not! Though you burn us alive, I will never betray Ormolu to the devils of the One!”

Goddamn fanatics. “Fine, I’ll find it myself.”

I shoved him head first into the wall and we kept going as he slumped to the floor.

A few seconds later footsteps thudded in a corridor off to our left and we whipped around, peering through the smoke and ready to fight, but it was some guy running away from us, shouting into a side room. “Summon the guards from below! Have them bring water! Hurry!”

Twenty feet more, and another intersection appeared out of the haze. A line of priests was forming up to block the left arm of it and peering around like nervous rabbits. Two of ’em had wands of blue fire.

Lhan edged back. “It appears the others raised the alarm. Should we see if we might avoid them by going right?”

I chewed my lip. “I wish, but I’m guessing whichever way they’re trying to stop us from going, that’s the way we need to go.”

“Astutely reasoned, Mistress.” Lhan coughed and raised the wand toward the priests’ line. “The same as before?”

I coughed too. The fucking smoke was going to kill us before the priests did. At least it gave us some cover. “Yeah. Just remember not to hit me when I drop—”

Lhan turned and looked back the way we’d come. “More.”

I looked around. Priest-shaped shadows were coming through the smoke. Around ten of ’em, all armed.

“Fuck.” My plan of having Lhan fire from cover while I went in like a weed whacker stuck its legs up in the air and died. The reinforcements would overrun him in a hot second.

I looked back and forth, heart thudding. There was a way, but… I cleared my throat. “I think we can make this, Lhan, but… but I’m gonna have to pick you up.”

His jaw tightened. “You may not.”

“Aw, come on, Lhan. You’d rather die?”

“I value my honor more than my life.”

I was starting to see red. “Okay, then. How ’bout your people? How ’bout your country? If we don’t make it upstairs, they’re screwed! Seems kinda selfish to let a whole world die of thirst so you can save your goddamn dignity!”

Lhan’s eyes blazed, and he opened his mouth, then shut it again, his jaw flexing. I looked over my shoulder. I was seeing faces through the smoke now, and they were seeing us. They started to shout and run forward.

Lhan closed his eyes and spread his arms. “Once again, Mistress, you show me where true honor lies—and true shame. Do as you will.”

“Halle-fucking-lujah.”

I scooped him up and threw him over my shoulder, then ran for the intersection. Just as the line of priests saw us coming, I jumped over their heads, then landed behind them and sprinted down the hall as they shouted and turned and fired. There was a stairwell on the left-hand wall. I dodged into it as blue fire scorched the walls behind me, then bounded up the stairs five at a time.

There was an archway at the top. I stumbled through, then stared as I put Lhan down. Had I gone the wrong way? This was no control room. It was a hangar—high-roofed and shaped like a bundt cake pan like the turbine chamber—with strange flying-car looking thingies like the one Ru-Sul had flown off on back at Toaga parked all over, and big submarine-hatch doors going around the outside wall. It was also filling with smoke.

“Goddamn it! How did the fire get up here?”

Lhan pointed to some kind of junction box on the inner wall of the bundt pan. It was smoking like an orange grove smudge pot, and all the pipes and ducts around it were leaking smoke too. The fire must be traveling from floor to floor through the air conditioning system. Bet they hadn’t cleaned that out in centuries either.

I turned back to the stairs, wondering if we should go down again and look for the control room down there, but it was booming with running footsteps. The guys we’d blown past were coming up fast.

“Damn it. Onward and upward.”

I looked around and saw the opening to another stairwell at the base of the central column.

“There.”

We sprinted for it, dodging around the parked vehicles. Some of ’em were the same model as I’d seen before, flat-bottomed ski-doos, but others looked like futuristic city buses, long and sleek and shaped like a bar of soap, and some were the size of yachts, but with guns sticking out all over the place and what looked like bombs slung underneath. Man, if I coulda figured out how to fly one of those we woulda really evened the odds. But there was no time. The priests were spilling out of the stairwell behind and started blasting at us with everything they had.

We dodged behind one of the bus thingies and made it to the stairwell before they could get line of sight again. Unfortunately there were more priests waiting for us at the top of the steps. Two blue bolts lanced down at us as we came around the last curve, melting the walls.

I shoved Lhan back and launched straight at the shooters, screaming like a death-metal singer. Crazy, yeah. But with more guys coming up behind us, there wasn’t any time to come up with some kind of fancy strategy.

Fortunately, being big, pink and loud worked its usual magic, and they freaked, flinching back instead of zapping me, with their beams zig-zagging all over the place. That wasn’t much better. I nearly got diced into bite-sized pieces as they wrote lite-brite hieroglyphics into the air, but I flinched too—fortunately in the right direction—and only got an inch of hair singed off as I smashed, slashing and shouting, into their line.

“Blood! Death! Kill!”

Yes. I really said that.

What I’d meant to say was something scary about being a demon of the One who had come to kill them and use their blood as a sacrament for my unholy rites, but “Blood! Death! Kill!” is what actually came out of my mouth.

Anyway, it worked. Or maybe it was the giant blade cutting everybody to pieces, or Lhan shooting past me with his wand and torching guys left and right. Whichever, they turned and ran, and Lhan and I ran after ’em, cutting down the slow ones as we went, and the priests behind us pounding up after.

We came out into another curving hallway, as high as the other inner circles, but with a much tighter curve, like it was closer to the center of the temple. It was also hazy with smoke, just like below, and there were flames in the distance—lots of flames.

“Fuck. This is really getting out of hand.”

The priests we’d chased outta the stairwell were falling back to a bigger group who were surging up the curved hall from the left, and the ones behind us on the stairs were coming up fast. We backed to the right of the door so we wouldn’t be caught in the middle, then pulled ourselves together as the priests from the stairs spilled out and merged with the rest. Like before, since they were guarding that direction, I figured that direction was where we wanted to go.

I swallowed and shook out my arms. “Come on. We gotta hit ’em now before they get themselves set.”

Lhan lifted the wand. “I am ready.”

But just as I was psyching myself up to go all viking on their asses, a little robed figure pushed through them, backed up by four temple guards, all with blue wands.

“Do not fight, brothers! Rescue the holy artifacts and sacred texts and escape! I will deal with these heretics!”

Even shouting, that voice was as limp and wet as a used rubber, and I knew it as soon as I heard it.

I smiled. “Chinless. Just the man I wanted to see.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

DURU-VAU!

T
he priests looked relieved to be let off the hook and ran off like frightened chickens as Duru-Vau strode toward us with his escort. The hall behind him was deserted in seconds.

“I know what you want, demoness. You want my death. Come forward, and you may try to take it.”

I sneered and shouted back. “Actually, I could give a rat’s ass if you live or die, punk. All I want is to stop you from stealing everybody’s water.”

“One cannot steal what one already owns, but if you wish to stop the turbines, their controls are behind me. I wish you luck learning their use.”

“I got a better idea. I’m gonna make you use ’em. Right after I slap the living shit out of—”

Before I could finish, the guards with the wands started firing, and these guys knew what they were doing. Two of them shot directly at us, while the other two started sweeping theirs back and forth like machine gunners, trying to cover the whole hall.