by A. L. Knorr
Outside, the leaden clouds were making good on their brooding promise, spitting heavy drops. Over Greenwich, the storm was thicker. The clouds congealed into a deep, weeping bruise.
Dary’s voice drew my gaze back.
“Kezsarak returned and spoke to the tools of men, made them instruments of destruction unlike anything man had seen. Workmen were maimed, buildings fell and battles became slaughters where none survived. The people asked for help, and though Ninurta was gone, his descendants, who’d written the ancient voice of metals into their bones, came forwards to correct their ancestors’ mistake.”
Inconquo, I thought. It always comes back to family.
“Because Kezsarak had been betrayed by Ninurta, the Inconquo resolved not to kill him, but to bind him. That is why they made the rings. Rings bind things, physically as well as metaphorically. The rings of the Inconquo were made to bind Kezsarak. It is only with them that he can be unbound. Thousands of years ago, the Inconquo took on the mantle of guardians when they first bound Kezsarak. You get to start the same way.”
“Why would they want to free something as destructive and uncontrollable as Kezsarak?”
Dary gazed out the window at the passing landscape. “Mortals long for power, to shape the world to suit them. They’ll do terrible things to get that power. It falls to those like us to tell them, forcefully, when they are being fools.”
I smiled at that, but it was mostly to hide the churning I felt in my stomach. A voice signalled we were minutes out from Greenwich. I was going to be out in that pelting rain, racing towards an abandoned industrial complex, meeting with a monster of a man who had a plan to unleash a real monster.
I closed my eyes and felt the car around me — the rail beneath me, the lines above me and the brush of metallic songs against my mind. Each tingled psychically as they flew by, each offering a passing oath of fealty. Ready to serve, ready to fight.
It was a power inherited by my family from long ago, but it was more than that.
I possessed a gift now that was more frightening and powerful than anything I could have imagined. With that ability came an implicit purpose. Now, I had the chance to honour that purpose, not just by stopping those who would abuse it, but by protecting a friend who was now in danger.
Family is about responsibility, and responsibility flows both ways.
I knew what I had to do.
When I opened my eyes and met Daria’s gaze, she straightened. The gleam sprang back into her eyes, and she nodded slowly.
The automated voice came on again as the train slowed.
I found a grim smile that felt dangerous. I was an Inconquo, and I was going to war.
21
I didn’t end up needing my phone to find the meeting place, which was just as well, because manipulating a touch screen in pelting rain was a challenge.
I’d left Dary at Greenwich Pier, giving her a squeeze before heading out into the rain. Cold drops struck my face as I trotted along, though my pilfered leather jacket took the brunt of the abuse. By the time I reached the foundry, I’d be soaked.
I trotted down King William Walk, trainers slapping in the rain until I reached Greenwich Theatre and the Statue of William the Fourth on his grey plinth. Passing beneath the venerable king’s gaze, I looked for the break in the hedge that would let me slip under the line of trees leading into Greenwich Park. It was south by southeast from there through the forest to the foundry fence.
The going was mostly flat, and even when moving over the slick carpet of heaven-watered grass, my steps were steady and unfaltering. The storm gave a low growl, and the sound sparked a heady rush of adrenaline.
My chest heaving and every limb twitching with energy, I passed through a dense line of trees to emerge on a scruffy field. In the centre of this barren expanse was a collection of rusty buildings, which were wrapped in a sagging chain link fence.
It struck me as strange to find an establishment of heavy industry squatting at the base of a park, but much of this area — once connected to the Thames by rail — had been used for this purpose. Only after the blitz when so much was already demolished, the industrial area was cleared and the slow transformation into a park began. The foundry had been a last holdout. Fears of heavy metals released into the burgeoning park complicated its demolition, and so it remained an ugly reminder of what all these acres of land had once been.
I slowed to a walk, letting my metallic sense stretch wide. Every hair felt stiff in anticipation. Dillon had called me here to make a trade. If he wanted to, he could have a sharpshooter strike me where I stood.
Why was I thinking about snipers? I needed to keep my nerve. Jackie needed me.
There was a gate set into the fence, or what was left of one. One hinged panel hung haphazardly while the other was lying flat on the gravelly ground. Beyond that stood a small guard house, which was now little more than disintegrating planks. The last sentries watched over a wide crushed-rock path that stretched between low rectangular buildings, their paint long stripped away to reveal vast sheets of corroded tin. Past these flanking buildings stood the foundry itself. A swollen, many-storeyed hulk of concrete, whose rusting steel bones were beginning to show through its grey hide. One of the three-storey-tall bay doors yawned open like a toothless mouth.
“Into the belly of the beast,” I muttered as I eased my way through the broken gate, mindful of the barbed wire that hung in snarled-up clumps.
My feet crunched on the gravel as I walked down the lane between the paired garage bays, the sound of rain on the roof terribly loud. I felt a peculiar itch between my shoulder blades as I went between the two buildings. My subconscious was determined to use my body to tell me things I already knew. I knew I was being watched, and more than likely, they had a gun trained on me as I was walking up to the gate. I fought to keep from hunching down because the next step would be rushing for cover, and a sudden move like that could mean not only my death but Jackie’s as well.
“They want you alive,” Dary had explained back at the Pier. “But they’re not going to risk losing the rings. Better a dead you and half the rings than no rings — is how they’ll see it.”
I was gunning for a live me and no rings for them, but I also needed Jackie alive, so right now, it was a high wire act. One foot in front of the other.
The walls of the building were vast, crumbling and pockmarked expanses of grey, darkened by the rain with dangling stretches of moss.
I moved up the stairway, letting my metallic sense tell me where the rusty metal could still bear my weight. My eyes remained fixed on the double doors with their cracked, wired windows as my mind’s eye guided my every step up the stairs.
The stair groaned, and I could feel the strain stretching all the way to the decrepit bolts and down the metal shafts set in the ground.
I stepped to the doors, and now standing level with them, I saw they were not only unlocked but also ajar. I cautiously drew one open. Inside was a tiled hallway. Debris lay in cast-off drifts, and the walls were a leprous expanse of flaking paint. Impossibly, at the far end of the hallway, a single lightbulb burned over a sign set above double doors.
“They left the light on for me,” I said, chuckling and immediately regretted it as my voice echoed down the corridor. I cast one look over my shoulder, hoping I’d be walking or perhaps running back this way soon. The alternative wasn’t worth contemplating.
Inside, the air seemed to thicken in my lungs, and the smell and taste of iron in the air — deadened by the rain outside — was invasively ever present. Avoiding the piles of rubbish, I tried not to look too hard down the dark side passages.
I stopped under that lightbulb and read the sign over the doors, my hair and clothes dripping.
WARNING
MOLTEN METAL AND POISONOUS GAS
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Beneath the sign, one of the doors had been worked over by a graffiti artist of considerably more skill than the others who had decorated the loc
ale. A stylised depiction of a man in a gas mask took up the window, a sinister industrial ghoul keeping watch. Beneath the blind sentry were scrawled lyrics, whose style mimicked the lines and shapes of the picture above. I read them as my fingers slowly came to rest on the opposite door:
She's from Birmingham! BAM-BA-LAM
Up there in Anglo-lan! BAM-BA-LAM
Well, she's bangin’ that thing! BAM-BA-LAM
Boy, makes me ears ring! BAM-BA-LAM
Can’t feel me bones roast! BAM-BA-LAM
Don’t know I’m a ghost! BAM-BA-LAM
Not as ominous as ‘Abandon all hope …’ but it certainly didn’t fill a soul with confidence.
Just beyond the doors, I thought I could hear the sounds of low voices.
I quieted my last doubts and stilled the tremble in my hand.
The doors led onto the foundry floor and there — lined with rails and beneath the looming weight of huge buckets — stood a man next to a kneeling woman. They were backlit by a pair of tripod-mounted work lights. Behind them, the rails and buckets stretched out into the dark. No one else was in sight, but an army complete with armoured vehicles could have fit in the expanse of dark space behind them.
I stretched my sense of the metallic out and found myself slammed with resonance. Everything was metal. Floor, walls, rails, buckets, the ceiling high above, even traces of the stuff were in the air. Panic quickened my breath as I fought to reorient myself.
I took a few faltering steps, pushing the auras into categories in rapid succession.
“Jackie, you okay?” I called. I needed to buy time.
My vision blurred from the assault on my mind, but it cleared enough for me to watch Jackie struggle to rise up off her knees. Her hands were bound, and her movements were stiff. The man next to her sent her to the ground with a shove, and a sob of pain echoed through the cavernous space.
I hissed, anger giving me greater focus and the momentum to rush forwards several steps. “Leave her alone.”
“Do you have the rings?” the man shouted. It was Dillon.
I held up the two ring-bearing fingers in a rude gesture. “What do you think, tosspot!”
Something tickled at the back of my mind. Metals different than the amalgams I was sensing from the static foundry shifted behind me.
“I think I win,” Dillon laughed.
I whipped around swinging the rings in a wide, looping punch. My vision caught up as one wiry man collided into another. Both held cattle prods, which sparked and crackled as they floundered on the ground. It might have been hilarious if I wasn’t given a first-hand introduction to what they were feeling.
There was a third cattle prod. I hadn’t distinguished it from the cloud of metallic auras, and it took me squarely in the back.
Pain, brilliant and mind blasting, danced along my nerves, forcing muscles to clench violently. My world became a senseless white glare, except that I hurt everywhere, inside and out. Even after the current left me, my body shook and nerves sizzled.
The first thing that came back to any semblance of order was my metallic sense, and I realised with desperate urgency that the pronged pain-stick still hovered over me. Faster than rational thought, I sent it reeling away. It moved at the speed of a blink, taking the clenching hand with it. The man followed after with a cry. A dull wet thunk, like a branch popping free of a tree, and then screaming.
I hadn’t realised I was on all fours and scrambled to my feet. Tottering on cramping legs, I felt the other two cattle prods, and threw my will at them, twisting until their casings cracked and handles shivered. I had a moment of grim satisfaction before I realised with horror that the two men had cast aside their weapons and were circling me now with nothing but clenched fists and hate-filled eyes.
My mind swept over them, but I couldn’t sense any metal. They were learning.
As the first one closed, I thought to use the aluminium panelling of the floor, but the aftershock of the cattle prod made focusing difficult. I managed to crumple it up enough to trip the man coming for me. If my legs had worked properly, I might’ve gotten out of his way. Instead, he barrelled into me, shoulder down like a junior rugby star, knocking me clean off my feet.
Air erupted from my lungs as his driving shoulder slammed me into the floor. There was a squelch of wet clothing and my bruised ribs threw up a chorus of agonised protests. The tackler’s feet were still pumping, scuffing at the floor, driving me down and back even as I tried to worm away.
My lungs fought to re-inflate, but his crushing weight smothered me as my mouth gaped like a suffocating fish.
I felt the tension in his muscles just before he threw his weight to one side, trying to pin me down. In a flash of inspiration, I twisted my hips and shoved against the ground with my hands and feet, using his momentum and repelling against the metal panels beneath me to send him flying. His shoulder struck the floor like a gong, and he staggered long enough for me to climb to my feet.
I drew in my first full breath of air as I straightened, making it two steps before I was grabbed from behind, my arms pinned behind my back. I screamed and tried to throw my head back to head-butt him, but he used my imbalance to drive me to the floor. My shoulder and one cheek took the impact, but his tight grip actually stabilised me enough that I kept my teeth.
One hand pinched my wrists together, hard enough to draw a hiss, and a second later, I felt him trying to loop something over my wrists. I thrashed and bucked, but his grip was vicelike, and he was leveraging his greater weight. I tried to rise up, but he drove me down, harder this time. My jaw bounced off the floor and my teeth clacked together.
The thought of teeth struck me. My scrambled metallic perception filtered through waves of fatigue and warbling metal auras until I found what I’d hoped for.
Inside his mouth.
With ferocious glee, I pulled hard at the metal filling in his jaw. I heard as well as felt the telltale zip of a plastic cable tie tightening. The edge of the restraint bit into my wrists a second before the man fell off me with a muffled scream. My hands bound together behind my back, it was a chore to get to my knees, where I could see his face in the glare of the work lights. Jaw clenching, I twisted the filling viciously.
His hands pawed at his mouth, and with a cry of pain from him, the filling came free.
I was about to drive the little kernel of metal down his throat, but my world rocked under a blunt impact across the back of my skull. My desperate fight seemed a paltry distraction to the need to lie down, and thankfully the earth rose up to greet me.
I lay there for a time, seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing, feeling but not feeling as the world rolled by. I heard voices, but the words warbled as though under water, as waves pounded against my eardrums. Only once my brain registered the thudding in my ears was my own heart, I realised that something might be wrong.
Should it really be that loud? I thought, and after hearing another beat, the absurd thought bubbled up. Maybe I should ask someone for help.
I recalled that hands had been moving me, dragging me around and someone tugged something from my fingers. I had the briefest feeling of deep anxiety and terrible anger at the separation, but it was gone before I could understand why I was so upset.
An ugly smile split the handsome face hovering just in front of me.
Maybe he can help me, I thought, but another look at his face provoked a deep distrust and sense of outrage.
Dillon’s leering countenance materialised from the face in front of me. I was coming to my senses, and my senses hurt. My head, back, shoulder, and most awfully, my ribs demanded I acknowledge their pain. NOW.
My concussion-addled brain wasn’t having any of that, so instead I took stock of the mess I’d wakened to find myself in.
At some point, I’d been dragged closer to the light, and now sat, my arms behind me, next to a form I recognised as Jackie’s. She was gagged, bound and hobbled, and lay on the stained filing-flecked floor where Dillon had left
her. Her doe eyes were huge with terror as she looked at me and everything else at once. For all her feminine beauty, she reminded me of a twitching rabbit caught in a snare. My heart ached for her.
Dillon grabbed my hair, pushing my head back and forcing me to look at his face.
“I suppose I should’ve expected something so brave and stupid from the likes of you, but you are always impressive to watch. I don’t imagine you’ll be nearly so sporting without these,” he said, chuckling, as he held up something in front of my face.
My stomach twisted, and my heart spasmed. I recognised the diamond-shaped pattern of pale ore set in cuneiformed copper. With my hands bound together behind my back, I realised it was true: Dillon had all four of the rings now!
But he still needed me to open Kezsarak’s prison. That thought kept me from collapsing, and as I looked up into Dillon’s smug face, I knew I’d die before I did that. That realisation dragged my eyes down to Jackie. Even for her sake, I wouldn’t open that prison. I didn’t know how to communicate that to her, but I caught her eye and I gave her an encouraging nod. Just because we were both unlikely to make it out of here in one piece didn’t mean that she had to go out feeling alone, scared and helpless.
A hard hand pinched my cheeks and twisted my face up and around.
“I want to make sure you don’t miss this,” Dillon said.
I growled and snapped my teeth, but his hand retreated and then backhanded me across the cheek. I felt skin split under the hard blow, and I realised he already had two of the rings on his hand.
“That’s not very nice,” he chided and rose from his crouch. “Behave yourself, or I’ll have to get creative.”
As a point of emphasis, he planted his heel on Jackie’s fingers when he stood and ground down as he rose. Jackie barely stirred from her frightened stupor enough to give a mewling sob until the foot came away.
