The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1) (34 page)

The Captain chewed his lip and spat. “Our firearms stay right
where they are until the rest of you come outside. Drop whatever trick you’re
trying to play here, son. Time to give up.”

“Not gonna happen, commando. We’re not criminals, and you’re
not locking us up again. Tell your dways to point those things at the ground,
and we’ll walk out of here without anybody having to get hurt.”

The Captain stretched out his palms in display of his troops.
“What is it about this situation that makes you think you have any room to
negotiate?”

“You’re treating us as criminals when we haven’t done
anything to justify it.”

The Captain lifted his eyebrows. “You haven’t? Tell that to
my Fourth Platoon, and all the families who’ve had to bury their sons today.”

“And what should I tell my brothers before we die? What will
you tell your men while they’re chipping the gold from our teeth and turning
out our pockets? Will you tell them we deserved our deaths, or that we earned
them?”

“You wish for death? Fine. It is, after all, one of the two
options available to you. The day’s getting long, and I’m tired of waiting.”

“Death is no threat at all to a man facing worse, and we’re
all facing worse. Before you do something you’ll regret, Captain, consider that
we’ve got nothing to lose. You look like you have plenty to lose. Let us go,
and save yourself the trouble of having to pay that price.”

“I’ve already explained to you that going free isn’t one of
your options. Now, do as I ask, and you’ll keep your lives. You’ve stretched
my patience thin already.”

The Captain raised his arm and held it aloft, two fingers
pointing toward the sky. The soldiers shifted their grips on their weapons and
sighted in. The blackhands flexed their fingers. The Captain froze there and
waited, giving them another long moment to reconsider.

Jiren sighed. “We’ve made our choice, Captain.”

“Death it is, then.”

The Captain’s wrist twitched forward.

Jiren had time to take half a breath before the world
exploded.

Lead shattered around him, pelting his shield so hard he
had to step back to stay on his feet. The impacts sent a flood so strong
coursing through him that he felt bloated from the rush of energy. Heat swelled
inside his chest and built there, aching to be let out. A friendly volley came
from behind, and the enemy began to fall.

Everything slowed.

The soldiers vibrated, heads bobbing, firearms jumping in
their grip, creasing the shoulder fabric on their jackets. Four soldiers
crowded around the Captain and threw their arms over him, pulling him back
behind a low wall.

Jiren and the other blackhands dispersed, zipping across the
parking lot like roman candles. In an instant he was tearing limbs asunder,
painting the sky in sanguine trails. Firearm barrels twisted in his grip,
housings snapped, spyglasses shattered. He flowed from one enemy to the next,
not one of his movements wasted. Wails and screams of agony came to his ears
well after he’d dismantled the soldiers who spoke them. Heat radiated from him
until each body he touched turned to sopping wet mud in his hands.

Soon segments of bone had begun to poke through along his
fingers like meat chewed off a prime rib, the eggshell phalanges glossy beneath
smoldering black flesh. He was across the street, leaping between windows to
silence the snipers who remained. He ejected a soldier from a room on the third
floor of an old brick-front office building and turned back toward the prison
to check on it. He was breathing hard, panting like an animal, feral and
savage.

The jailhouse surrounds were littered in flesh, the city’s
neutral palette doused in uncanny bursts of red. The Captain was still
crouching behind the low wall with two of his original four bodyguards flanking
him. They were popping up to take occasional shots toward the prison, but this
seemed more in the interest of deterring would-be attackers than actually
hitting anyone.
Their ammunition must be running low by now
, Jiren
thought. He shifted his gaze toward the jailhouse.
Everyone’s ammunition
must be running low
.

Before long, the bursts of machine gun fire had dwindled to
single shots, leaving large swathes of dead air between them. The sounds of
gunfire faded to fleeing footsteps and moans of suffering.
The Captain sees
the error of his decision now. He knows the terror of defeat. Soon he’ll know
the horrors of a slow death. Still, something feels strange. I couldn’t have
predicted our victory would be so decisive. Did I overestimate their numbers?
When he noticed the crowd of soldiers marching around the far side of the
building at a jog, Jiren’s heart sank. He hadn’t overestimated them. The
fleeing soldiers hadn’t been fleeing at all; they had been summoning
reinforcements.

He studied his hands, raw and charred, almost beyond
bleeding. Igniting was like holding your hands over an open flame and seeing
how long you could keep them there. The gifted had tougher skin than most, but
the longer they held one continuous ignition, the harder it became for those
natural resistances to remain protective.

Jiren was already beginning to feel drowsy as the sleep came
on. There was only one way out of this now: the rear entrance. If he and the
other blackhands could get back inside before the reinforcements set up, maybe
there would be fewer guards around back.

Instead of igniting again, Jiren took the crumbling stairwell
through the building’s interior until he was back at ground level. The
reinforcements were leaving tiny deposits of men behind at every barricade as
they swept along the surrounds in a wide arc. Soon they would cut him off,
leaving him without a path back to the door.

His feet felt like lead weights as he sprinted toward the
prison. Everything around him was happening so much faster now. Each time his
boots slapped the pavement, the sound seemed to ring like a radar hit, and he
imagined every soldier in the lot detecting him. There wasn’t much gunfire
coming from within the prison, despite vast stretches of time where the
marching reinforcements were in the open. He didn’t see any of the other
blackhands, so he hoped they had already fallen back inside or found safe
places to hide and rest until they could make a break for it.

An eternity seemed to pass before Jiren could get across the
street and dive behind a battered vehicle. He heard several gunshots as he ran,
but he couldn’t tell whether they were directed at him. He was amazed to have
been so fortunate thus far, but with the mass of troops orbiting the lot, he
doubted his luck would last.
One final ignition is all I need to make it
from here to the front door
.
But is it locked?
Getting through a
locked door would consume precious seconds. Seconds the soldiers could use to
set him in their sights.
Live or die, I have a promise to keep
, Jiren
reminded himself.
The Captain goes down with me
.

He ignited and shot toward the door, the world slowing around
him as he cut a slanting path across the pavement. On the way there, he took
the Captain by the neck and plucked him from between his bodyguards like a
tablecloth under a dinner setting. A burst of machinegun fire rang out from
somewhere to his left, and a hail of bullets buzzed around him, striking the
ground and thumping the Captain’s body like rocks in a bucket. With one
forceful jerk of his wrist, Jiren snapped the Captain’s neck. The body
twitched and went limp. Jiren didn’t have time to make a show of the officer’s
death, so he discarded the dead weight as he reached the door.

Rostand Beige was the most welcome sight Jiren had ever seen,
cracking it open and beckoning him inside. Jiren took the outside stairs
in one leap and crashed through the doorway, slamming into the wall and falling
in a heap inside the stairwell. He extinguished himself as Rostand pulled him
to his feet and embraced him. It took him a moment to gauge whether he’d been
shot.
The Captain’s body may have saved me that trouble
.

“Good work out there,” Rostand said. When the younger man
pulled away from his embrace, there were tears in his eyes.

“What’s wrong? Everyone make it back?”

“You and Frasier are the only ones.”

The news shook him. “What? Where’s everybody else?”

“Cragg and Hewell went down as soon as they started shooting.
Didn’t look like they ignited in time. We took down our fair share from in
here, and you made pretty quick work of the rest. Frasier came back in and
helped us with the guns. The others didn’t make it across the street like you
did, though. They went out much quicker. Derrow’s the only one who didn’t go
down after that. See him? He’s there, behind the dumpster.” Rostand pointed
across the lot to a withered old garbage receptacle, splotched green and half
gone to rust, where Derrow Leonard was crouched and trembling, his face
stricken with fear.

What’s that fool doing?
Jiren almost said.
Every
second he waits, the soldiers gain the advantage. He’ll never make it once they
fill the gaps in their line.
“Someone lay down some cover fire,” he
shouted. “I’m going out there to get him.”

Rostand shook his head, tapping one of the empty magazines on
the floor with his toe. “We’re out, Jiren.”

Jiren lurched toward the door, but Rostand put himself in the
way and held him back. A sudden wave of drowsiness and confusion washed over
him, and he slumped against the wall. Rostand put out a hand to steady him.
Jiren wanted to call out to Derrow, give him the encouragement he needed to
bolt for the door, but his breaths were coming so shallow and quick that he
could do nothing but concentrate on staying upright. The sleep was coming over
him like a heavy load, and he had to open his eyes wide to keep them from
drooping. It felt as though his body was trying to make him forget where he
was. “Tell me again what you said about Frasier.”

Rostand’s hand was still at Jiren’s side, holding him up. “He
helped us with the guns?”

“You said he came inside.”

“Yeah. He did. Right away, almost.”

Jiren gritted his teeth, filling his lungs with air. “Where
is he?”

Even as he said it, he noticed Frasier Dent standing at the
top of the stairwell, droplets of sweat dangling from his thick earrings.

Rostand pressed Jiren’s shoulders to the wall. “Jiren. Listen
to me. There isn’t time for this now. We need to figure out what we’re going to
do.”

“Frasier.” Jiren pushed Rostand away, clinging to the
handrail and laboring up the steps despite every part of his body screaming at
him for sleep. “Coward. You were supposed to be out there with us. That was the
plan.”

Frasier sneered. “I didn’t like your plan, so I changed it. I
grabbed a gun and helped out in here. What are you complaining about? You’re
alive, aren’t you?”

“How many others would still be alive if you hadn’t run?”

“We would all be alive if you’d agreed to their terms. We
went out there knowing they would offer us the opportunity to surrender. I’ve
always known you were an idiot, Jiren. I never thought you were stupid enough to
pick a fight we couldn’t hope to win. Uncle Laagon was right about you. I never
should’ve come on this fool’s errand, chaperoned by incompetents like you and Councilor
Entradi. Not a whit of sense between you. Had we gone peacefully as they asked,
we would be in a position to negotiate our release right now, instead of being starved,
half-dead, and staring down the horde of riflemen waiting outside that door.”

Jiren was swaying where he stood. He couldn’t take another
step, and talking was an effort. Somehow he managed to form the words, and
said, “Negotiate? You just saw how they negotiated.”

“I saw how
you
negotiated: without tact; without
equanimity. You try to put on airs, fancying yourself some high councilor now
that you’ve been elected. But being elected doesn’t turn you into something
you’re not. It just makes you a pretender. You’re a hunter, like me. You should
know when you’re intellectually outmatched. You bungled through that exchange
with all the grace of a three-legged dog.”

Jiren tried to stare at Frasier, but his eyelids were working
against him. “They offered us only death. You saw it in the Captain’s eyes,
just like I did. They would’ve slaughtered us, no matter what we did. There was
nothing to haggle over.”

“Because
you
put us in the position to lose the
bargaining power we
did
have. I didn’t ask to be released from my cell,
Jiren. You did that on my behalf, and you did it in spite of my repeated
requests that you leave me alone. I asked you to leave me there. Don’t you
remember? I was content to wait for my chance to meet with this Commissar of
theirs, given the very likely possibility that Councilor Entradi might exhibit
your self-same cavalier attitude and ruin
his
chance. We have plenty to
offer these people as restitution for our crimes, as unjust as their
accusations might be. All it would’ve taken was someone with the acumen to make
them see it. Now I’ll never get that chance, thanks to you and your brazen
escape attempt. An attempt that, as I’m more than a little late in pointing
out, has failed.”

“You’re not late, Frasier. You’re wrong.” The voice came from
the far end of the room. When Jiren leaned to look past Frasier, Raith Entradi
was standing at the edge of the long hallway to the cell block. His synthtex
tunic was damp and tight over his massive frame.

Jiren wasn’t sure whether he was hallucinating at first.
“Raith. How did you—”

“What are you all doing wearing their uniforms?”

Frasier scoffed. “Disguises, apparently.”

“Well, bring your disguises and follow me. There’ll be no
more negotiating with these murderers.”

“Derrow’s still outside,” Jiren said.