“Stop, Brother!” Namter shouted again.
Lacius started to scream out Truewords, grasping at his orb. He smashed it together between his two hands and winced as the glass cut his flesh, hesitating a moment with the pain. Namter took the chance, thrusting his already bloody hand into his Brother’s, his blood mixing with the Oathblood coated on the embedded shards.
Namter shouted out his own command and the Oathblood responded. Lacius’s arm burst into red, skin flying back in ribbons, flesh melting away into a pulsating mass of seething blood. The man screamed as this arm, not his anymore, swung back and forth from his shoulder, before plunging, suddenly, into his chest, cutting through skin and bone as it dug towards his heart. His shriek was intense and momentary, a last echo of pain as his body slumped over. The arm dissolved, leaving a caustic mark on the concrete floor.
Namter stumbled, panting, and caught himself on the table, unable to comprehend his brother’s madness. He spared one look at the splayed form on the floor. It was a shame to use the power of the Truegods such, but Lacius’s insanity gave him no choice. What could have driven him to attack his own Watcher so?
“What happened?” A guard stepped into the room, rifle in his hand. He glanced down at the corpse and retched. “Inferno’s pits!” he spat.
Namter steadied himself to speak when a shot went off. The window blew in with a wave of glass and the guard was flung back, head burst open. Namter ducked the window as more gunshots screamed.
An attack, he realized, though the who and why escaped him. He crawled out to the guard’s corpse, grabbing a pistol from his holster, before sneaking over to the main foyer. A single guard stood there with his rifle aimed towards the front door, a bewildered look under his helmet. With a bang the lock on the door was shot off from outside, and men in Lazacorp gear stormed in. They peppered the single guard, who missed his lone shot, before turning toward Namter.
He didn’t waste time, tossing out his hand and shouting. Drops of burning blood flew out, summoning up a wall of black fire that blocked off the entrance, and covered the room in a sudden gale of smoke. Men screamed, stumbling back as they were caught in flames that swung at them with needle-nailed hands and amorphous mouths, tearing and biting as much as burning.
A voice droned outside. Roache’s. All workers remain calm… Someone had set off the alarm, mutants were causing trouble, but that gave no explanation for the attack. Namter didn’t have time to make sense of it all, he kept low and tried to make his way to the main stairwell. Bullets flew above him, and he tried to make sense out of the many shouts. They were a mix of screamed orders and panicked pleas, but one stood out:
“Get Roache!” he heard, clear as anything.
The world shook, a great boom reverberated throughout the building, glass shattering and people shouting. Just as suddenly, the lights went out.
Namter blinked, reorienting himself as he crawled forward. He squinted out a far window. Shapes moved through crackling gunfire, but the buildings behind them were black, the moon the only source of constant light. Lazarus’s voice had been silenced.
He crept up to the main stairway. Footsteps clanged upwards. Had the assailants found another entrance already? Namter glanced in, back against the wall. The only light was muzzle flashes, but in those brief moments he saw them, mutants, wielding cudgels and blades, and at their head:
The monk.
Accursed blade unfurled, gaze forward, leading the charge, the damnable monk.
Namter slowed his breath and tried to think. The back stairwell! He dashed, through a narrow hallway, keeping his head low. The door to the stairwell was locked. He had a key ring in his pocket, but no time to cycle through them. With his hand on the knob he demanded it be open.
The door flung back, hinges smashed, as centuries worth of rust overtook it. It folded in on itself as hand of metal formed from its edges, pulling it into its center with a violent rage, until it was nothing more than crumpled ball of pained metal.
A scream from above.
“Stop, stop, I command you to stay back!”
Lazarus Roache rushed down the scaffold of stairs, a mutant right on his heels, swinging a sledgehammer.
“Stay, sit!” Roache shouted, but the mutant made no reaction. The pursuer’s ears were bandaged, and Namter understood immediately.
“He’s deafened himself,” Namter shouted, as he raised his pistol and fired. Two missed bullets clanged up the stairwell, before the third hit its mark. The mutant fell to the ground, choking on blood and agonized moans.
“Namter, dearest Namter, you haven’t betrayed me?” Lazarus asked, as he grabbed his butler.
“Of course not!”
Lazarus held him with both arms tight. Namter stiffened under the unprecedented display. “Oh, my precious Namter,” he said. “My gentle, loyal friend.”
Namter felt wetness on the side of his arm. Was Roache crying? He stepped back to see it was blood, a great gash on Lazarus’s side, through his coat, undershirt, skin, open flesh oozing.
“The mutant did this?” Namter said. “Or… the monk?”
“The monk?” Roache said. “Yes... I saw him, in the madness. But no, no, it was Verus. He has betrayed us!”
Namter mouthed the name but couldn’t speak it. The accusation was impossible, but then, who else could had the power to plunge Blackwood Row into chaos?
“Verus has betrayed us,” Roache repeated, “betrayed our cause.”
He moaned and limped forward. “Where are we going?” he said.
Namter hadn’t a plan until that moment, but as the gunshots echoed down the hallways, and shouts from above, he realized the only option.
“Down the Underway,” he said. “There’s a garage only three blocks from here. Can you walk?”
As he said this, he noticed that his master’s wounds had already healed halfway, the blood moving like grasping tendrils, and interweaving among themselves, skin stitching itself back together like a clasp locker. The Oathblood within Lazarus, his gift. Sometimes even Namter could forget its power.
Without a further word they descended down to the basement of the building. With slow groping Namter was able to find a pair of handtorches in a supply closet. Carefully following the beam of light, they searched out a service tunnel Namter had ordered built some years ago but never visited. He remembered the project having gone faster than he expected, and, as he had suspected, shortcuts had been taken, old Underway passages repurposed in lieu of, but still billed as, completely new structures.
A few dozen metres down the light hit a hole in the unpainted stone. The new passageway was cleanly cut. There was only one blade he knew of which could slice through stone, but there was no time to dwell on that, nor on the horrors above, which he could hear even down there. With a nod he led his master forward.
The route was meandering and foul-smelling, but they made good speed, Namter using the piping as a guideline. Normal sewage for the guard’s apartment complexes, fat and silent pipes for the old pumps. He desperately triangulated the direction in his head, and pointed the way of his best guess. Roache shuddered as they waded through muck of indeterminate origin, but he held his tongue well enough.
They came up through some narrow stairwell, Namter hoping his math was correct. No, the situation was beyond him now, he could only pray that through this destruction he still held the favor of the Truegods, that they would lead him on his path.
His piety was rewarded as he turned a corner to see several rows of autotrucks. The garage doors were wide open and beyond them, pandemonium. Mutants and Lazacorp guards fought each other, bayonets stabbing desperately against mobs of red bodies, who fought with a mad frenzy. Madder still was that it appeared several of the guards were brawling amongst themselves, or else shooting indiscriminately. If this was a coup, Namter could see no sense in it. Verus was burning the whole of Blackwood Row to the ground!
He gestured for Lazarus to stay back, then
snuck to the key hanger and grabbed several. There were a few autocars parked, all too small, and a large multi-armed tread-driller, which was far too slow and conspicuous. He set his gaze on a large autotruck near the front, which looked like it had the horsepower to trample over some bodies if need be. He stepped close and waved Lazarus over, when a shout cut over the chaos.
“Roache!”
One of the mutants by the gate was pointing, and several more turned, with both fear and rage in their gazes.
“Stand in place!” Lazarus shouted. The nearby mutants froze up en mass, though some immediately started to twitch, desperately trying to break away from the chains of Lazarus’s voice.
Namter jumped into the driver seat and pushed opened the passenger door, before twisting the key and spurring the autotruck into life.
“Look at the mutants next to you. Kill them. Now!” Roache shouted and then ran.
The slaves did as they were commanded. Some struggled fruitlessly, their movement slowed, but unyielding. One bludgeoned the woman next to him, another drove her sharpened, rust-shard spear into another slave’s stomach, and one unarmed mutant took to strangling his comrade. By the time Lazarus made it to the autotruck all were dead or dying, aside from one woman, who, task completed, dropped her blade in horror. She screeched and clutched at the decrepit old mutant who bled out beneath her, trying to mend the wound she had a moment before opened.
“Drive, drive!” Roache commanded, but Namter didn’t need the instruction. He plowed through the dead and dying, crashing into the street. He turned and put his foot to the pedal, swerving between or just driving over the combatants, both mutant and man. Gunshots perforated brick walls, and bodies lay in their dozens, but after a few blocks the intense melee cleared some, and they were able to turn onto one of the main roads.
It was here Namter noticed the smoke, first from his rear mirror, the plume billowing up and blocking the stars behind him. The realization hit him at once: why the power had gone out, what the earth-shaking blast had been. He could imagine Verus turning against Roache, even Verus encouraging such bloodshed, but that… that was their Enterprise, their holy goal, the realization of seven years. To destroy that was not to betray mere men.
Namter drove, Roache panting in the seat next to him, out from the chaos, from the carnage and screams, from the deaths and that smoking pile of rubble that had once stood as a beacon of true, agonizing redemption. He drove away from Blackwood Row.
Chapter 40
The world shook. The monolith burst out in flame. Walls crumbled and the roof fell into a billowing cloud of smoke that burst out in every direction. Thousands of lights blinked out to black, and with them Roache’s voice cut off suddenly.
Sylvaine sighed, holding her watch close, as the fire escape she stood on shook from the reverberations. The voice was gone, the horrible clawing words had crackled out into nothing. She was shivering, nauseous, hair drenched in cold sweat, but she was herself again, in control.
The silence of the dictaphones was now filled by jubilant cheers, mutants running out from every structure, thousands of footsteps charging towards the office complex, or else up into guards’ apartment buildings. The mutants on the fire escape, who had been watching alongside Sylvaine and Marcel, now rushed down the stairway, with the sole exclusion of Nozka. Some whooped with excitement, jumping steps at a leap, others said nothing, their expressions grim. Within a minute the whole structure was vacated, the mutant silhouettes below illuminated by moonlight. Gunshots rang out, but now their sounds were combined with the shouts of the mutants’ assault. The muzzle fire revealed glimpses of chaos, panicked visages of Lazacorp guards as they were hit by a wave of red flesh.
“It’s like the Battle of Huile Field,” Marcel mumbled after a minute.
“What? Sylvaine asked.
“We can see it all from up here. Close, but so distant, like a cinegraph show.”
Then a gunshot echoed close and glass shattered few metres above. Marcel leapt back to avoid the falling shards.
“Not that distant,” Sylvaine said, as she started to descend the stairs.
* * *
The streets had made themselves suddenly bare. Whatever sickly, slave-fueled life this neighborhood had once contained was all gone now. The dark streets and empty husks of buildings reminded Sylvaine of her brief time out in the Wastes.
Of course, this illusion of deathly calm did not trick Sylvaine’s ears. The cacophony of the nearby combat was lively enough, and even this far she could smell the blood. Marcel moved with clear agitation as they snuck through the streets, following their mutant guide.
“Perhaps we should stay,” Marcel said, glancing back. “It’s not fair to the mutants that I’m fleeing right as the fighting begins.”
“Now don’t you start,” Sylvaine snapped. “Gears-grit, as if you were going to be any use. You’ll be more helpful in Huile, anyway.”
“Right.” Marcel nodded. “Of course, I was just… Never mind.” Her tone had been harsh, but now wasn’t the time to let idiotic fancies grow.
“This way, quickly,” Nozka said, leading them down an alleyway. They cut aside an empty growth of shanties and through the guts of a silent refinery structure, into an open boulevard.
“Back!” Sylvaine said suddenly, ears perked from the sound of rapid footstep.
As they stepped back several Lazacorp guards dashed out from an adjoining street. Sylvaine hadn’t a clue if they were Roache’s men or Verus’s, or if that distinction even mattered anymore. As the guards turned the corner, out rushed a dozen mutants. One guard turned and fired, killing two of the mutants, but the rest of them charged onward, launching themselves onto the panicked guards, swinging down cudgels and blades. They moved swiftly, grabbing the rifles out of the dying guards’ hands. One even took a helmet, which he struggled to fit over his horns. A woman at the back turned and squinted, unsure, in Sylvaine’s and Marcel’s direction.
“Revolution!” Marcel shouted, fist to chest, with Nozka quickly joining his cry.
The mutants cheered and rushed back towards the fray, newly armed.
After this their travel was almost easygoing. They moved further and further from the center of the fighting, even as it seemed, from the distant sounds, that the battle itself had spread. Finally they reached a large Underway grate, sitting below and stained by an interlocked mess of pipework extruding from several nearby buildings. Sylvaine focused and lifted the heavy grate with a spark from her glove.
“It’s a clear path from here,” Nozka said, before turning. “Just follow the abandoned pipeline, then take a right at the first underrail station you find.”
“You’re going back to fight?” Sylvaine asked, looking at the man’s stiff leg.
The mutant simply nodded and walked off into the darkness.
The engineer shook her head and leaned her back onto one of the dried sections of piping.
“I’ll just be glad to be done with this,” she said. “This place is misery incarnate.”
“At least we’re finally tearing it down,” Marcel said.
“Sure,” she said, staring down the block, listening for footsteps. Kayip had promised his attack would be quick, that he would strike, and then retreat to meet them here. Yet she could make out no sounds of approaching footsteps, nor smell the man over the wafting sewage and the chaotic odors of battle.
Marcel followed her gaze. “Part of me wishes I could see the look on Roache’s face, once he realizes that all his lies, all his brutality, are going up in smoke.” He paused, a pain rising up clear, first from a twitch in the side of his mouth, then obvious in his gaze. “It would have been better if we could help somehow,” he said. “Just escaping while others can’t…”
“Marcel!” Sylvaine hissed.
“I know,” he said. “I just…” Marcel shook his head. “No, we need to be planning for the future.”
“Yeah,” Sylvaine said, thinking on that empty
space, that unplanned void that lived beyond the sunrise, the world where her vengeance was complete, and yet, she was still alone, still without a home or hope. “The future.”
Marcel glanced around. “Where is Kayip anyway?”
“Coming,” Sylvaine said.
“Sure, but if he’s caught up… or worse.” He must have caught her expression, because he quickly mumbled, “I’m sure he’s fine. Just if he’s taking a while it might be best to go on ahead. He’s knows the way,” Marcel said.
“He’s coming,” Sylvaine repeated, softly.
Suddenly she heard footsteps. Her ears perked up, first with excitement, then with fear.
“Well, hopefully he should…” Marcel started.
“Shh!” Sylvaine held up her finger. Marcel glanced hopefully, but she shook her head.
The two snuck backwards, waiting and listening. The footsteps were quick, panicked, far too light to be Kayip’s. She listened for the boot smack of a guard, but no, it sounded more like feet on the pavement, feet perhaps covered with thin socks or wrapped rags. The footsteps slowed as they approached, and Sylvaine relaxed some when she recognized the smell.
Marcel had lifted up a solid chunk of concrete in the meanwhile, clearly aiming for the approaching figure’s head.
“Stop!” Sylvaine shouted, running up and grabbing Marcel’s arm.
“What?” he said.
“Ahh!” screamed Gileon, who staggered back, panting.
Marcel sheepishly lowered his bludgeon and muttered an apology. The mutant’s face was a pale pink, and he stuttered and panted for the greater part of a minute before he was calm enough to speak.
“How’s the battle?” Marcel asked.
“I don’t know,” Gileon said, “I’ve just been trying to find you.”
“Why?” Marcel asked.
“Where’s Kayip?” Sylvaine added.
“Yes!” he said. “I mean, he sent me. Sent me with a message.” The mutant closed his eyes, supporting himself on the piping, his breathing slowing to a mere race. “He said. Um. Said. Sorry. To Sylvaine. He cannot leave this fight, could, uh, could never have. Was going to continue his, uh, righteous… something, to fight until the battle was won, or, uh he.” The mutant paused. “Until he fell. Until he redeemed himself with a honorable death.”
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