He hunched over the steering console, his feverish eyes darting to and fro as he used one brine-scarred hand to spin the controls erratically in order to keep the craft on an unpredictable course. In his other hand he clutched the grip of the Replicating Sword he’d taken from the transmitting station. He wore a suit of mechanical nerve armour that clicked and whirred softly whenever he moved. His belt held an assortment of small blades, pistols and other small artefacts. And he wore a blood-red crystal shield strapped across his back.
A series of concussions battered the chariot’s hull, knocking it momentarily off course. Smoke blotted the view screens and wafted in through the open hatchway. The engines howled and began to judder violently. Sparks erupted from the console. Granger shut down systems and readjusted the controls with lightning speed, the metal nerves in his mechanical suit compensating for the limits of his own tortured body. The shield on his back started to glow with alternating colours as it absorbed the smoke, using the sudden rise in entropy to energize its sorcerous portals.
As the fumes cleared, Granger spied the artillery position once again, now less than two hundred yards below him. Maskelyne’s man was frantically spinning the gun carriage wheel, trying to bring the cannon’s barrel round to bear on the rapidly approaching craft. But where was Maskelyne himself? Granger grinned. There. He spotted the metaphysicist fleeing for his life across the compound. Granger was going too fast to stop now, so he threw the craft sideways to intercept him.
The rock outcrop filled the view screens.
The chariot struck the ground like a meteor, exploding into a cloud of pulverized rock and metal.
Granger watched the impact from a spot several hundred yards above the compound. The seven simulacrums who stood in the forest around him watched it, too, but none of their positions offered him a better view of the events that had just occurred. It had all happened too quickly. He couldn’t see Maskelyne. But had he actually hit the man? He felt a sudden vibration in the grip of his sword, and his eighth simulacrum appeared. This copy of himself cricked his neck and flexed his shoulders. Good.
That made nine of him again.
He turned away and headed for the palace at a run.
Ianthe’s pain returned the moment she slipped back into her own body. She was lying on the floor. Her chest convulsed and she retched up blood. Every nerve felt shredded. Tears streaked her face. One of her eyes had swollen shut behind its lens, and through the other she saw Mara and his accomplice leaning over her.
‘I thought I’d lost you for a moment there,’ the torturer said. ‘My assistant was a little too eager.’ He scraped the chair through the blood on the floor and sat down. ‘Step one was less successful than I’d hoped,’ he said. ‘But I think we’ll see more results with step two.’
Ianthe tried to speak, but no words came out. Instead, she threw herself into the torturer’s mind.
The sight of her own ruined body lying on the floor sent a pang of despair through her heart. They had been beating her in her absence. Her legs and buttocks were dark with purple bruises. Her robe lay in bloody tatters around her. One of her arms was clearly broken, and lay at an odd angle against her chest. From the torturer’s perspective, she watched herself start to weep.
‘That’s much better,’ he said.
Ianthe reached out, as she had reached out into the Haurstaf minds, trying to embrace the whole of the torturer’s thoughts and emotions. But there was nothing there for her to sense. His human mind would not allow her inside.
‘We’re going to try something different now,’ Mara said. ‘I want to try to associate certain words I say to the particular sensation my assistant makes you feel when I say them. It’s like a game. The idea is to break down any previous associations you have already made with the words, so we can start anew.’ He sniffed and rubbed his hand under his nose, then glanced up at the soldier. ‘The first word will be mother.’
The soldier crouched down beside Ianthe and placed his knife gently into the hollow behind her knee. He gave the torturer a quick nod.
‘Mother,’ Mara said.
The cell door burst open with such force it flew off its hinges and slammed into the opposite wall. A man stood in the doorway, clad from head to foot in metal. Brine burns covered his naked scalp and face. His eyes were as red and wild as those of a berserker dragon. In one gauntleted fist he held a green alloy sword. He was as grotesque a figure as Ianthe had ever seen.
Mara and his assistant retreated as the man strode into the cell, his boots clanking on the concrete floor. He glanced at them and then looked down at Ianthe. The tiny metal plates and filaments in his armour seemed to whirr and chatter as he bent down and picked her up.
And then he carried her out of the door.
She was drifting in and out of consciousness by now, and she must have muddled her dreams with reality, for she saw two impossible things before the armoured man carried her away from that place.
In her first dream she imagined she saw multiples of her rescuer in the corridor outside the cell. Seven or eight of them, identical in every way. Each wore the same armour and carried the same green sword. They looked on as he walked between their ranks. And then they turned away and filed into the torturer’s cell. The last of them closed the door behind him.
She must have woken and blacked out again.
In her second dream he was carrying her through the main palace entrance hall. The sound of his boots rang out like a bell in that huge space. Dozens of bodies lay strewn across the black marble floor. Smoke drifted in through the open door, and she could smell fires burning outside. But before her rescuer reached the door, he halted at a sound behind him and turned around.
The young Unmer prince stood in the shadows, watching them. Ianthe’s vision was blurred and she couldn’t see his face clearly, but she thought that he was smiling. ‘Is she the last of them?’ he said.
‘She was never one of them,’ Ianthe’s rescuer replied. ‘But, no. Others survived.’
The prince nodded slowly. His gaze lingered on Ianthe for a long time, and then he turned away and walked back into the shadows.
EPILOGUE
Maskelyne spat out dust and rolled over on to his back. Above him, smoke boiled behind the shattered remains of a wooden roof. He raised his head and winced as pain shot through his neck. He was lying on the floor of what was left of the guards’ hut. Through the open doorway he could see fires burning around a lump of twisted metal half-buried in the ground.
The chariot?
Maskelyne got up. His limbs felt beaten and raw. He staggered over to the door and looked out.
Dust and smoke filled the air. The horses stood a short distance down the trail. The wagon they’d been hitched to had smashed through the compound barrier and broken an axle. Now it lay collapsed at the end of a long dirt furrow. He spotted Mellor and two of his men, sitting under the palisade wall behind the crashed Unmer vessel. They looked stunned. The body of a third man lay on the ground before them among fallen debris and burning scraps of wood. The gunnery sergeant and his girlfriend were nowhere to be seen.
Maskelyne eased himself down the steps outside the guard post and limped across the ground towards the stricken chariot. His ankle buckled whenever he put any weight on it. He reached the craft and peered inside the open hatchway.
Empty. Nothing remained but a mangled mass of metal and wire. He was about to turn away, when he spotted something glinting among the wreckage. Carefully, he climbed inside and retrieved the object.
It was a crystal, as large as a man’s head. Maskelyne turned it over in his hands, marvelling at the multitude of perfect facets. In each one he could see a reflection of his own bruised and dusty face. He tucked it under his arm and then ducked back outside.