Maugrim was dead. Throttled, broken. She should feel relief, she should be celebrating, kicking his swollen-faced corpse and spitting on his memory.
But the creature he – they – had set in motion was rising like the sun.
She watched as the lean, dark-mottled figure unclipped something from a strange belt.
“Guys?” he said. “Remember this?”
“What...?”
The question was drowned out by Triqueta’s “Oh shit...!”
And he threw the pouch on the fire.
* * *
The initial detonation tore through the building.
Walls rocked, masonry tumbled and smashed. The first ranks of the stone warriors were blasted backwards and shattered, scattering their followers with dust.
“With me,” Redlock roared. “Run!”
The pomegranate grenades blasted open in every direction, one after another, each one filling the Sical’s form with sparks and scattering pottery shards and hot coals to the bloodied, spiral floor.
But then the brazier started to rumble, the pillars of the stalagmite shook.
The floor quivered. The light in the cavern walls flickered and dimmed. From overhead, a loose stalactite smashed to the floor, then a second.
The writhing of the pillar stopped.
And the Sical shrieked, crystalline and furious – they heard it in the bones behind their ears, in their skin and in their thoughts.
“Yeah,” Ecko shouted, “and fuck you, too!”
The walls about them trembled, dust billowed. The axeman was coughing, coughing, wiping his lips as he ran. Triqueta was half carrying the injured teacher. Ecko, running with them, turned back to see what was happening to the Sical.
It was screaming in his head, livid and shining, brighter, brighter.
Over it, stones were tumbling from the cavern roof. Water was starting to hiss through the gaps, spraying wide like an office failsafe.
“Run, dammit!” Redlock’s hand closed around Ecko’s ripped, skin-shredded arm and dragged him away from the spectacle. “The char path will take us out! That way!”
Ecko stumbled on his cloak hem, but kept moving.
Amethea said, “What did you do? What did you throw...?”
“I was tryin’ to make gunpowder,” he said. “Made a helluva bang.”
The cavern roof juddered, rocks fell and smashed, stone shrapnel slashed outwards.
The great, black capacitor stone cracked from end to end, its lightning shivered and faded.
And the elemental screamed.
Then the brazier under it collapsed.
The last thing they heard as they fled into the crazed garden was the piercing, mind-shredding shriek of its detonation.
* * *
Dust settled, drifting across a faint breeze.
Water dripped slowly from the cavern roof, a slow rainfall onto devastation – the destroyed remnants of the garden, the shell of the cathedral, now a scattering of low walls, mud and rubble.
The brazier had been drowned, destroyed, fallen stones cracking as they cooled. The Sical was gone.
In the quiet, Maugrim’s first breath was a rip of noise – a rasp of harshness and debris on his ruined throat. His face hurt, his tongue was swollen against his teeth. He swallowed, rubbing a ringed hand over the bruise across his neck.
Then he began to cough, eyes watering, clearing himself of pain and dust. He inhaled another rasping breath, tried to sit up.
“What a waste.”
The voice was male, as familiar to him as his dreams. It was calm, almost scholarly, but the threat was naked and razor-sharp, its edge under his chin.
There was no point even pleading for mercy.
“Please...”
“Get up now.”
Maugrim rubbed his throat again – strangled with his own chain, indeed – and clambered slowly to his feet.
He’d lost. Meddling kids.
Something was bugging him, needling at the back of his mind – when his head stopped spinning, he’d place the rasp, the stylised imagery. The accent was familiar... Had he used the word “program”?
The scholarly voice repeated, “I said, Get up.”
Beneath the slash in his t-shirt, the axe wound in his belly had gone, a scar in its place where he’d seared it closed, just as he’d once healed Amethea. Maugrim felt drained, looking out across the mess, the bloody bombsite they’d left behind them. He had no idea where to go.
Ash.
Then he felt his mentor’s hand on his shoulder, soft, lethal.
“Finish this.”
He could say only, “Yes.”
There was nothing else left for him.
28: GUILT
ROVIARATH, THE CENTRAL VARCHINDE
Evening. The shadows of the Kartiah stretched long across the sunset grass.
In the glowing, dusty air, a green-and-white banner flapped like a live thing, seeking to escape from CityWarden Larred Jade’s spear tip.
The last of the sunlight glittered from the weapon’s terhnwood point.
The creatures came fast, lumbering semi-mindless, stone and fire and destruction. Flame flickered about them, smoke and ash rose in their wake. They’d fanned out into a ragged line, an oncoming storm front for the swathe of devastation they brought: blasted soil, blackened grass.
Behind them, abandoned farm buildings guttered with flame – blossoming flowers of light in the fading evening.
Jade watched them, white-knuckled, fear in his merchant’s throat.
I am no warrior.
I don’t have a choice.
Around him, horses stamped. His foot patrols stood silent, dread coming from them in waves.
As the creatures came closer, he could see the red of their eyes, the heat that rose from their stone shoulders.
From the wall behind him, he heard the tan commander.
“Nock... draw... loose!”
The volley arced over his head, shafts slashing though the sky. Arrows fell with a hiss, shattered on stone, clattering into ash and failure.
“Second rank!”
Jade’s hands tightened on his rein. His breathing was shallow, panic settled on his armoured shoulders, goading him.
A second arcing hiss of arrows shattered terhnwood heads on faceless rock.
And the creatures came on.
“Flat-fire!” called the archer commander. His voice was confident but faint, wind snatched – the deserted wooden expanse of the Great Fayre separated him from Jade’s nervousness. “First rank! Eyes and joints! Nock... draw...!”
Their shots were random – the setting sun was behind them and they were shooting into the city’s long shadow.
Tense, almost nauseous, Jade held his riders. The spear was unfamiliar in his hand, his resin-and-fibre armour uncomfortable, heavy. It chafed his neck. The horses were jumpy, the approaching smoke was spooking them. Beneath him, his own mare jittered, shaking her head, clattering the terhnwood fixtures of her bridle. To his left, he had six tan of spearmen, sixty fighters in all. They stood two-deep behind a wall of shiny-new shields. They were anxious, wary, anticipating the impact.
Jade’s grasp of logistics was solid – the overnight evacuation of the market had been flawlessly smooth. His muster and deployment was as his tutors had once shown him, markers on a map. He knew the theory.
But out here, his clinical tactics were coming apart like rotted fabric.
They hadn’t warned him about the fear. It was all around him, he could taste it.
This isn’t strategy any more.