“That shithead bastard,” Sylvaine swore. “That stubborn, eager to die, piece of….” She couldn’t decide what he was a piece of, instead, releasing a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream.
“Where is he?” she asked after gathering herself for a second
“I don’t know, he didn’t tell me much else,” Gileon said. “No one tells me much.”
“Well… Probably somewhere near Verus or Desct,” Marcel offered.
“Great deduction,” Sylvaine said dryly. “So at the very center of it all.” She started to walk.
“Wait!” Marcel started to say.
“I’m going,” Sylvaine interrupted, and she was. “Whatever you do, that’s your choice, Marcel, but I’m finding Kayip.” She stormed off down the street, her stiff, furious strides tolerating no argument.
That bastard, the lying, eager to die, manipulative, unbearably noble bastard. Sylvaine knew that in the literally riotous and death-filled circumstances she could little afford such fuming thoughts, but she couldn’t escape them. That man had lifted her up, had given her the closest to kind words she had been offered since her life fell apart, and now had the gall to try to throw his life away. She would find him, grab him by the collar, and pull him back, even if it would be the death of her, which some rational voice in the back of her head screamed out it would be.
“Hey,” Marcel said, as he ran up behind her.
“Don’t try to stop me,” she said.
“Here,” Marcel thrust something into her hand. It was an arm’s-length pole, and at the end of it was a shard of scrap metal, tied on.
“I found it on a… well I found it,” Marcel said. “It’s not much, but it’s marginally better than nothing.” The man himself held a large hammer.
Sylvaine took the weapon. “You don’t have to come with me.”
“We won’t leave a friend behind,” Marcel said. “Let’s stick to the shadows. Grab him and get out of this mess in one piece, alright?”
Sylvaine nodded and even smiled. Maybe the man was a tad quixotic, but she could use the optimism.
Gileon followed a few metres behind, holding a small knife he had gotten from somewhere. She wasn’t sure why the mutant was following them, but then again, perhaps he had nowhere else to go. It was not a night to be wandering alone.
They turned down a street. Several guards ran past, half-dressed. One stopped, staring in Sylvaine’s direction. He seemed more confused than anything, and after a moment, spent perhaps deciding whether he should shoot, he just ran onward. Gunshots fired down the street a few second later, and Gileon pointed them down a back route through a refinery complex.
Blackwood Row had changed significantly in the brief time they had waited for Kayip. More fires, for one. The city was alight in several places, and by the flames’ flickering illumination she could see bodies. Mutants, guards, and some other men as well, wearing wasteland garb or strange robes, lay together in random patterns along the sidewalks. The smell of blood was dense and inescapable.
“Inferno,” Marcel said.
A blast went off suddenly, echoing down the street, a sizeable sibling to their own demolition earlier.
“What was that?” Gileon asked.
“Maybe a sangleum depot caught flame?” Sylvaine ventured, and kept walking. In truth the explosion didn’t sound right for that, but she couldn’t determine much about it, besides that it had happened somewhere east. There were too many disconcerting noises to focus on any one. Her ears twitched for the sound of Kayip, but she was overwhelmed by the screams, shouts, gunshots, rumbling blasts, autocar engines, footsteps, clanging, and even, in the distance, police sirens. She couldn’t seem to find—
“Wait.” She held up her glove suddenly, and then pointed. “That way.”
Yes, she had heard him, most definitely, possibly. Maybe. She kept her ears tuned as she dashed, Marcel and Gileon barely keeping pace. It was his shout, it had to have been, might have been, maybe wasn’t— no there, again, she heard it, deep and fervent, a sundering war cry that split through the chaos, that seemed, even at this distance, to vibrate in her bones.
They scrambled through a now trampled shantytown, guards and mutants fighting it out nearby, scavenged rifles replacing scavenged cudgels in the mutants’ hands. The three approached a wide boulevard. It was open with little cover. At its end roiled a massive melee, seemingly the bulk of the fighting from the office, which now appeared to be engulfed in flames a few blocks down. Sylvaine caught a whiff of Kayip’s odor, but it was suffocated by the smoke.
Her ears fared no better here, a great grinding roared over the battle, the sounds of metal against metal, and metal against flesh.
“Sounds like some maniac’s trying to use a tread-driller,” she said.
“What?” Marcel shouted his whisper.
She waved him on, pointing towards an alleyway that opened just behind a line of mutants, who were pushing their way forward, swinging whatever they had. A refinery tower loomed at the alley’s far end. With any luck she could find a ladder and a better angle to scout out.
They kept low and moved up close. As she turned the corner a bullet shattered the pavement behind her. She ducked back. Several Lazacorp guards had barricaded the width of the alley, mutant corpses in a pile at its base.
She turned around and started to lead them down back the way they came, when the engine groan of the tread-driller burst into a shriek. The machine drove forward, turning a bend and into sight, barreling through all in its path. The twirling mass of drills drove its desperate push forward, with no care to distinguish between friend and foe.
“Shit!” Marcel yelled as they tried to run.
The tread-driller drove forward, bodies flying from it or crushed underneath its treads. The machine flew up toward them in mere seconds, and behind its cracked and bloodstained windshield, stared a crazed, one-eyed face.
Sylvaine lifted up her glove, without time to think, and with little to act. She grabbed whatever she could find inside her. A spark grew and shot out in an arc, her focus on the rapidly approaching engine. It burst into flames, the treads unraveling, the drills melting, but the machine didn’t slow. It plowed down the streets pushing up waves of asphalt as Sylvaine aimed her glove again. Her life started to flash before her eyes, but she hadn’t made it past primary school before the wall of metal was upon her.
Chapter 41
There was the scent of smoke, the taste of blood in his mouth, an ache throbbing inside his head like a mad prisoner pounding on jail cell walls. Marcel tried to blink, his lids heavy, his vision blurred. Two questions formed slowly in the morass of his mind: where was he, and why did everything hurt?
He leaned on his shoulder. It protested in pain, but it held. He was able to push forward with one leg. His other was limp and heavy, like it was made of metal.
It took Marcel a second to remember that was indeed the reason why. Unfortunately the cogleg refused to move, and as Marcel’s vision cleared he could see the issue. A burnt metal shaft stuck out of his artificial shin, æther-oil dripping down its length.
He noticed a wet spot on his left arm and felt around to discover a small gash. It was painful to touch, but he could still move his arm well enough. He pushed himself a few paces, glancing around, suddenly aware of the smoke, the gunshots, the screams. Nearby lay a large smoldering wreck, some sort of large, treaded vehicle, giant drill bits melted into the asphalt. Beyond the smoking aura, shadowed forms ran to and fro, slashing and firing.
As the world was just starting to coalescence, his memories suddenly crashed in on him.
The charging machine. Verus’s face behind the windshield. Sylvaine jumping out in front. The explosion.
A figure crawled out of the wreckage, knocking back the smoke around him, snarling. It was Verus, though he looked taller than Marcel remembered, fiercer.
The foreman’s one good eye met Marcel’s.
“Talwar,” he s
narled. “You rat! You traitorous, taur-fucking… you lying sack of… you shit-brained…” He sputtered, seemingly unable to summon a proper insult, instead starting one, then another, before shaking his head in a confused rage.
Marcel disattached his broken limb and pushed himself over. He patted the floor around him looking for a dropped rifle, or pistol, or his hammer, or anything.
Nothing.
A sudden movement caught Marcel’s gaze. Verus reached up towards his eyepatch, grabbed it in a fist, and tore it off.
Marcel had seen many injuries during his brief military career, amputated limbs, bullet wounds, blade gashes, and even missing eyes. What Verus had resembled none of these. There was no eye behind the patch, nor a glass eye to fill the hole, no healed flesh for where an eye should have been, nor even an open wound.
Verus stared out with an eye socket of nothingness, an empty void where an eye should rightly have been.
The world around him seemed to freeze still as Marcel stared into that abyss. It was massive, too large to fit in the man’s head, a hole open to a darkness wide as the night sky. No, much, much larger than the sky. It was a tenebrous, sprawling cavern of a material that was clearly nothing, yet just as it clearly was gas and liquid simultaneously. It was a bright crimson and a dark black and possessed no color, cold and motionless, as it swirled in frantic burning spirals, shuddering and slithering and perfectly still. Verus’s eye was a window to elsewhere, the furthest elsewhere Marcel could ever have imagined, an empty world of dread. All that Marcel hated, all that he feared, seemed to lie beyond that eye, not distinctly, but as an infinite potentiality, a haze of unbounded malevolence. Everything was lost in that void, whatever might exist beyond that marble sized hole melted away, was too insignificant to consider. He stared at it for seconds and years, a lifetime of no time at all, an endless instant. Some voice, in some distant and lost world that he had once called his mind cried out for him to move, to run, to find a gun, to do something.
But there was no Marcel left to hear it, just an endless nothing.
“Down!”
A bulk smashed into Marcel’s side, and the void snapped away. Marcel blinked, unused to colors and depth.
“Do not look into his eye,” Kayip yelled, from on top of him. “It is demoncraft.” The monk’s face was bruised and bloodied, mask dented slightly. He held Marcel down with one arm, and lifted his sword up with another.
“Monk!” Verus screeched. “Are you so eager to throw more bodies on the pyre? More corpses for your crusade? If your honor demands death, I can give it to you.”
Kayip did not answer, did not flinch. He instead rose with a scream and charged Verus.
The foreman, though Marcel was now quite sure he was something else entirely, focused his empty “eye” at the monk, who hid behind his sword as he ran, avoiding the gaze.
Verus screamed out horrid words from that strange language, their meanings’ alien, but each syllable was damp with hate. A ball of black fire formed around the man’s fingertips, growing in an instant. He flung the flame towards Kayip with a shout. The monk slashed and the black fire split around him, staining twin lines of melted asphalt along the sidewalk.
Marcel glanced around the ground again, frantic for a weapon. Flames behind Verus’s wreck lit a glint, a rifle’s bayonet, several metres away, which Marcel started to crawl towards.
Kayip dodged in zigzags as he charged, balls of black flame streaking by him. A well-aimed shot knocked Kayip to his side, but the monk rolled, and was immediately back on his feet, embers raining off his smoldering jacket sleeve. Verus screeched out some new loathsome sentence and flung his hand out, a whip of shadowy something extending beyond his reach, slashing at the ground in front of Kayip. Each strike burst forth pillars of fire metres up from the cracked asphalt.
Marcel grabbed the rifle, only for his hands to crack through the charcoalized wood. Up close he could see the rifle had been heavily burnt, the back of the barrel melted, the stock smashed. He glanced back to see Verus whipping this way and that, Kayip jumping back and forth with frantic footwork to match. Marcel chucked a hunk of wood. It flew over and hit Verus in the arm.
The man grunted and staggered back, glaring at Marcel. The monk charged forward in the brief reprieve. Verus leapt up with surprising alacrity, onto the hull of the tread-driller, and swung his whip towards Marcel.
The heat was intense, Marcel rolled himself back, and felt the blast of asphalt a few metres in front of him.
“Back, Marcel!” Kayip shouted and he didn’t need the encouragement. He crawled in haste, it was obvious enough that he was useless in the monk’s fight, and lay as an easy target. Even the engineer would be better suited for…
Sylvaine. Demiurge, where was Sylvaine?
He panicked, glancing around for the woman. He dragged himself back, and while frantically searching the street, spied feet poking out from a collapsed sheet-metal hut.
Marcel could hear her breathe as he pulled himself close. He was surprised, but grateful, that the woman was alive. Were all Ferrals able to survive a blast like that, he wondered, or was Sylvaine unusually tough? He tried to ignore the battle scream of Kayip and the devilish curses of Verus as he checked the woman’s vitals. Unfortunately, a battle between a screaming monk and whatever-in-the-Demiurge’s-name Verus was could not be so easily ignored.
With a quick glance he saw that Verus had retreated some, up the burning pile of metal that had been the tread-driller. Kayip danced back and forth with an agility that seemed unnatural for a man his size, dodging Verus’s whip and occasional blasts of flames. Every time he managed to get a step in, to come almost within sword range, a black ball of flame would knock him back.
Sylvaine coughed back to life, her eyes blinking open one after the other. She held her head.
“Ohh, that hurts. I feel like I was hit by…” She paused as she noticed the smoldering wreck down the street.
“Well… that,” she finished.
“Burn!” Verus screeched. “Burn with your false idol!”
Storms of fire flew from Verus’s arms, the air around him shimmered, the void of his eyes seemed to leak out into the world around him. Marcel turned towards Kayip to avoid the foreman’s gaze. The monk shook as if grabbed by invisible hands, stumbling and struggling to remain on his feet. He closed his eyes and screamed, charging blindly. Red smoke billowed as Verus’s whip flew out to wrap around Kayip’s sword. The monk grunted and pulled it toward his chest. Verus spat something in his discordant language, and tore the whip back, flinging the blade across the road.
The whip snapped with a snake-like celerity and struck at the unarmed monk, who jumped to the ground to avoid its bite. Verus muttered hate as a new blackness grew in his grip. On his face grew a smirk of sadism to match it. The black fire formed into great ball that he raised in the direction of Kayip. The monk shielded himself with his arm, waiting for the flame to strike.
It didn’t.
Verus’s smile shuddered halfway through his guttural incantation. Blood oozed out his mouth, and his look of triumph collapsed into confused pain. His eye moved downwards, and Marcel’s gaze followed, to a bloody shard of metal sticking of his chest.
The black ball dissipated into smoke, Verus’s false eye faded to reveal mere scarred flesh. The foreman fell, sliding down the side of the car, hitting the asphalt with a sickly crack.
Standing where Verus had stood was Gileon, looking just about as shocked as everyone else.
“I killed him,” he said. It half-sounded like a question.
Sylvaine got up and, noticing Marcel’s leg, helped the man to his feet. They shuffled over and caught up with Kayip, who now stood beside Gileon, staring down at the corpse.
“It is done then,” the monk said, face of stone.
Below, Verus lay limp and curled, his expression, so often sharp and hard, now loose, sagging and worn, his hand hung over his chest wound, covered in crimson. In all,
Verus’s corpse looked like any other Marcel had seen.
Marcel lightly patted Gileon on the back, who flinched only a little “Good… Good job. Thank you.”
The mutant tried to smile.
“It is done,” the monk said again, blinking slowly. “I thought I would be… It should not matter the hand, I suppose…” He bent down to pick up his blade off the ground.
“It is good that you are well,” Kayip said quickly to Sylvaine, before turning and walking off.
“Hey. Hey!” Sylvaine yelled, her injuries forgotten in her sudden fury. “Where are you going?”
“Roache was… driving towards the… south gate.” Kayip said, steps slow and uneven, voice losing its energy.
“Wait,” Sylvaine said, fury replaced by fear.
She dashed, and Marcel limped after her. Kayip was stumbling, keeping himself up with his sword. Sylvaine grabbed the shoulder of the man. Marcel patted his torso and felt the wet sticky sensation of blood. He pulled back and tore off some of the cloth. There was a gash marring the side of the man.
“Demiurge,” Marcel said.
“Not him,” Kayip muttered. “Bayonet. Roache is still running. My oath is unfinished, Roache is stillllll…” he slurred the L as his bulk fell onto Marcel.
Chapter 42
“Hand me the rag, please.”
Sylvaine watched as Marcel took the steaming ball of cloth from Gualter and, with one hand still holding closed the stained red linen around Kayip’s wound, dabbed and cleaned the blood which leaked at its base.
The monk did not flinch, leaning back on an empty sangleum barrel. His shirt lay on the floor, revealing his wide, muscular, and deeply scarred torso. Sylvaine mused that this was far from first time the man had been cut, or stabbed, or by the look of it, shot, but she worried all the same.
The Sightless City Page 38
