Shots flew down from a few windows, and the shape that ducked into the windows and out again, with terrifying precision, was fairly human-like. If not humans, though, then what else? Golems, perhaps, ancient constructs that resembled humans as unnervingly as they didn’t. They might be exceedingly strong and precise, but they didn’t have what she had - the favour of the gods.
She reached a door and pressed up against it, safe from weapons fire. She raised a hand, called up a short hot blade on her fist, and started jabbing at the door’s edges. It was no great automated portal, just a flimsy metal sheet on ancient steel hinges. She tore through it and was immediately greeted by weaponfire from inside the dark hall. One shot nicked her shoulder before she brought her shield up, and she wasted no time letting that shield loose and watching it sweep through the hallway, casting aside dust and debris and danger as it went, exploding far down the hall with an electric crash.
Isavel called another shield up and charged in. It was dark, but her thrice-gifted eyes had no trouble seeing heat, motion, faint drops of light splashing across the surface of the world. She could hear exactly where the golems were. She ducked into the nearest room she found; an ancient toilet under a remarkably low ceiling. She almost grinned; build what they may, the ancients were still human, still a rung below the gods.
A golem rounded the corner and Isavel lunged, double-bladed, cutting off both its arms and catching it in an embrace as it fell at the same time. She cast it down onto the floor, stepped on its chest, and kneeled down to look into its inhuman face, lights blinking where eyes should be, code shimmering across its metal-plated skull. “Who controls you?”
“Access to this facility is strictly forbidden.” The golem’s voice wobbled on a tightrope between solemn and prissy, its accent old and creaky and hard to follow. “Use of force is authorized to remove you from the facility.”
“Where is the shrine?”
“Vacate the premises immediately. This is private property.”
She stabbed down into the chest area, where a heart might be, but it didn’t stop struggling. The legs and stump arms continued flailing around, a sad turtle unable to right itself. She smashed its head in, and this time it quieted.
This was going to be tedious. She snapped out of the hallway, ready to shoot back and duck if necessary, but nothing threatened her. Not yet. How was she supposed to find the shrine?
Isavel glanced at the minor devastation she had caused just moments earlier, and saw how walls had been cracked and torn. While unleashing a warrior’s shield like a hunter’s shot was powerful, these walls also just seemed remarkably weak. Now that she really looked, she saw damage in other rooms too, scars that long preceded her arrival. She tilted her head slightly, in curiosity, and summoned a tiny shield atop her fist. She slammed her first into the wall, right through the outer layer and into something hard a few inches deeper.
She extended a palm towards the rest of the hallway and fired blindly into the walls, chipping off chunks of the crumbling, chalk-like material. If she wanted to destroy the shrine, perhaps she should just destroy the entire building. The further she walked, though, the more she saw more rooms and more branching halls. This place was huge. Destroying it all might take a while and, perhaps more concerningly, might trap the shrine intact under the debris.
Isavel took a deep breath, and clenched her jaw.
Another golem rounded a dark corner as she explored, grappled with her. They were incredibly strong, and she saw its weapon was, in fact, its arm - not unlike a hunter’s. As it tried to bring its arm to bear she fired her own shots to cut through its shoulders, blasting off chunks of metal as she did, disabling this golem just like the last one.
“Where is the shrine?!”
The golem responded with the same meaningless platitudes. “We are legally entitled to remove you with force. Please vacate the facility immediately.”
She dug a grave for the golem in its own skull and it fell silent. She had to think, to plan. From what she knew, the building was at least four floors tall, and could have any number of basement levels. It didn’t have any distinguishing features. Where should she look? Where might her predecessors have looked, five hundred years ago?
The shrine must be either in the basement or the top floor. She couldn’t imagine why it would be anywhere else; those were the two furthest options from the entrance, the most absolute and clearly-defined points. And if the ancients had been building shrines to the gods, they would have placed them skyward, as close to the gods as possible. That made sense, so top floor. She started looking for stairs.
As she explored the ground floor, opening or breaking down frail old doors, she stumbled across a closet filled with old, dusty skulls. These gave her only a moment’s pause before she returned to the hallway. She was immediately caught in a crossfire, and even as she twinned shields on both arms, a shot grazed her calf. She hissed at the sting, but it wasn’t any worse than the one on her shoulder. These golems, though, were clearly good shots.
She returned to the skull closet, slamming the door shut behind her, ignoring the crunch of bones as hard as she could. She turned right around and started tearing into the weak walls with her swords, bringing up a shield across her back in case they broke in.
To her great pleasure, she emerged into a stairwell on the other side of the wall, even as the golems calmly opened the door to the closet. They seemed intent on causing minimal damage, but Isavel had no such compunctions.
She darted up the stairs, and as the golems followed she aimed shots down the stairwell, knocking them down and blasting bits off of them. She ran head-first into another golem at the top floor, though, and slammed it up against a wall even as it was blasting her shield with its own energy weapons. She slipped, and it started raising its weapon.
Isavel was starting to tire.
She reached around the shield, stabbing the golem sideways through the head. It crumpled and she threw it into the stairwell, taking deep panting breaths as she listened to it tumble down the stairs.
Unfortunately, the top floor didn’t look much different from the others, except that there were skylights all over. It was much brighter here, though the gaps between the golems’ inhuman skin were still just as dark. She made it her mission to illuminate those, too, flinging more and more bundles of hexagonal light through the air as she ran into more and more golems, filling them with fire and light and destruction.
Where were the ghosts? Where was the shrine? What was this place?
Something struck her back shield with a heavy thud, and there was heat behind her. She turned around and blasted the golem, wondering how long it would be before one of them actually hit her. She rounded a corner, and there was an atrium that way, brightly lit and wide open. She started moving towards it, but more weapons peppered her from behind. She jumped into the atrium, ducked a corner, the soft white seats and a central black obelisk barely registering in her mind as something cracked underfoot.
Then a ray of fire and light swept past her from the atrium, cutting down the golems in the hall with a roaring hum. It left complete and utter silence in its wake, except… breathing. Isavel swiveled around.
That wasn’t an obelisk in the centre of the atrium. It was Ada Liu, clad in a snug black suit, loosely aiming an orange-etched, dull-grey gun down the hall. Glass was shattered all around her, like she had fallen from the heavens straight through the skylight. She was staring wide-eyed at Isavel, and Isavel returned the favour for a second or two before she could react.
“You.” That was all she managed to say.
Ada took a few steps forward, stopping just out of arm’s reach and smiling weakly. “Hey you.”
Isavel said nothing at first, trying to understand just what was going on. The gods must have sent Ada here. The coders insisted she was not to be trusted… but these coincidences could not be random chance. There was no such thing. The gods had a hand in this, and Isavel’s instincts told her this was what the gods wa
nted.
That was what those instincts were telling her, right? Deep breaths.
“Ada, we need to move. I haven’t found anything yet.”
Ada was looking her up and down, as though scanning her for weapons. “It’s in the basement. How many golems are there?”
“Less than when I started.” How Ada knew what they were looking for… of course she knew.
“Hm.” Ada’s eyes, bright and sly under her flat eyelids, flicked down to Isavel’s deadly hands with some measure of approval; it seemed she appreciated a boast. Then she pointed at the golems she had gunned down. “Still too many. They won’t listen to the gods, or obey the zeroth law. They’re protected, somehow. I think we’ll have to do this the hard way.”
Isavel nodded. Whatever the zeroth law was, she understood the sentiment. “I know. They attacked me without warning.”
“You’re hurt.” Ada reached for her shoulder wounds, but they were minor, and Isavel waved them off. Like everyone else, Ada was likely here to help the Saint Herald, not her.
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing is nothing. Let’s be careful.”
An unexpectedly warm sentiment. Of all the things since Isavel had woken up earlier in the night... What in the name of the gods was going on here? Isavel’s faith had led her to the atrium, where the gods had delivered Ada unto her from the sky. The gods must have wanted this - or so spoke the whispers in the glass crackling underfoot as they left the atrium. There was no other explanation.
Isavel dragged her mind back to the task at hand. “There’s a stairwell. The one I climbed to get here. There might be more golems, though.”
“I don’t doubt it. There were almost a hundred of them in here. Have you seen anything of interest yet?”
How Ada she possibly know how many golems there were? “The walls are flimsy, and there are skeletons in the closets.”
Ada laughed. “I guess there are. I didn’t take you for a comedian, Isavel.”
It took Isavel a second to realize she had made a joke by accident, and yet she caught her own mouth already trying on a grin. “It’s not a joke. I crushed actual skulls.”
Ada’s wide-eyed stare held only a moment before being broken by an amused snort. “You’re terrifying.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m here.”
Ada’s eyes flicked away, to the ground, as though seeking refuge in the cracks and ancient halls. There was none to be had. “Maybe. I -”
A golem crossed into the hallway ahead of them and raised its arms. Isavel called up her shield at the same time and caught two shots, while Ada reached around it with her gun and fired off a devastating ray of hot orange destruction that charred the golem and knocked it into the ground, leaving a streak of ash and hot embers in the walls near where it had stood.
“Nice shot.”
Ada smirked. “You like my gun?”
“I’ve seen bigger. I won’t be impressed unless it can shoot through a dragon’s shield.”
Ada was thoughtful for a moment as they headed towards the stairwell, eyes scanning Isavel as though looking for clues. “Sorry to disappoint, but I doubt this gun can manage that.”
“Be lucky you’ve never had to try.”
“And you have?”
Isavel shrugged. “I didn’t use guns.”
“Right. Warrior.” Ada’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute, are you saying you went head-to-head with a dragon within biting range? ”
Isavel shrugged and said nothing, but a smile slipped out of her mind and fell in Ada’s direction. She wondered if she could allow herself that.
Ada grinned back, briefly looking to the sky. “Well, this stairwell doesn’t go down to the lower basement, but it gets us close enough. Let’s go.”
Isavel looked up at the ceiling, but she saw nothing. Were the gods speaking to Ada directly, in that moment, or was it perhaps just a tic that she kept looking up? Isavel felt a sudden pang of… something like embarrassment.
She sucked it up, held it, and let out a quiet breathe as they descended the stairs. “Do the gods speak to you?”
Ada laughed. “Not unless I’m lucky. Things would be a lot easier if they were always available and willing to chat.”
She breathed a sigh of relief, even as she felt selfish for doing so. What did she know of Ada’s relationship to the gods? What did she even know of her own such relationship? “I can sympathize.”
Something was off here, though. Isavel couldn’t tell what it was, but there was something both of them were not talking about. Something just over the horizon. Something living in the dark corners of Isavel’s mind, scurrying briefly into the light before darting back into the shadows.
She reached out and put her hand on Ada’s shoulder. She pulled her close, out of the firing line of the golems at the bottom of the stairwell, and brought her shield to bear. Their shots plinked off it harmlessly, although she was starting to feel how each impact sapped a little of her strength. She really ought to rest.
Isavel drew up a sword and jumped down the stairwell to the golems across from them, tearing into them and shattering their metal bodies. It was simple. Cut, slice, slam, shred. Ada blasted something further down the stairwell, and together they made their spiralling way down the stairwell. When they got to the second-lowest flight of stairs, Isavel found that the bottom flight had not done well under the fighting, and had collapsed entirely.
She glanced at Ada and shrugged. “It’s just one floor. We can jump.” She did immediately, and the impact was fairly minor - it wasn’t all that much further than she was tall. Ada looked more hesitant, and they locked eyes for a moment before she sat down on the ledge. After a moment, Isavel extended her arms, ready to catch the coder, but Ada shooed her away with a gesture and shoved off the ledge a meter in the other direction, landing a bit more awkwardly and with a grunt.
“I’m fine.” She stood up, wiggling her legs as though to make sure they still worked. She seemed to have done well enough.
“You do look fine, especially for a coder.”
“I am fine.” She smiled in a puzzled sort of way, though she looked hurt at the same time.
What was going on here? What secret were they both in on? Isavel wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. The scurrying in her mind continued as they scurried down the halls.
Had Ada not known that Isavel knew that Ada was a coder? Isavel knew she could easily drown in that flow of thought, though, so she hauled back out onto the shore.
“What are we looking for?”
Ada drew something boxy in the air with her fingers. “Some kind of fancy, armed, locked door. I can handle it. Well… I can open it. I might need you to cover me while I do. It’s what the golems are protecting.”
“We can’t break through?”
Ada laughed. “No. Are you really that much of a warrior? We can’t just smash everything to pieces.”
Isavel bristled. “That’s not my solution to everything . Just walls and doors.”
“And skulls, apparently. I think - look out!”
Ada raised an arm and lit up one of the side corridors with fire and violence. Blue lightning struck out from the clouds of dust and ash, and Isavel was on hand to greet it with her shield. The golems were wearing on her, but she stood and held her ground. Something in her was scared of revealing her other gifts to Ada, and she didn’t shoot back. She would play the warrior, unless that nagging feeling went away. The gods’ mission was the core of her being, and so she could trust her instincts on this. Trust Ada, but not with everything.
Besides, Ada could shoot fine. For a coder.
They crossed through the dark corridors, and Ada did something to her gun that turned it into a giant flashlight, illuminating the dark. Isavel heard something behind them, spun around to catch shards of light on her shield, and Ada fired back after a moment’s fiddling with the gun again, knocking down the two golems that had moved in on them.
“Good ears.” Ada nodded approvingly, but I
savel shrugged it off.
They stalked the corridors, keeping in cover as much as they could, until they found what Ada said they were looking for. It was a great, silvery-white door that looked quite out of place in the fairly square architecture of the rest of the building. Ada approached it and ran her hands along its edges, looking for code.
Red lights and blaring alarms flooded the air around them. Isavel spun around, looking for danger. The sounds were so loud she winced and raised her hands to her ears. It hurt .
“I’ve got this!” Ada was shouted over the alarms. “But it’s going to take me a bit. I need to convince it that I’m allowed to be here.”
“You figured that out after looking at it for two seconds?”
“Well… I’m a quick thinker.”
“You’d better be a quick worker, too!” Isavel looked around. There was a single hallway that cut through the small antechamber, two avenues of approach. She turned around to see Ada doing… something to the door. Ada appeared to have grown black spider legs on her fingertips, and they were frantically tracing tiny, incredibly fine code into the doorframe. Whatever was going on was utterly incomprehensible to Isavel, so she turned away again, only to see shapes appear down both halls.
“Incoming!”
Ada bumped her with something. “Take my gun.” Isavel grabbed it. She had never really used a gun, but she knew the idea. There was a trigger, and -
Fire exploded out the end of the weapon, an inferno corralled into an arm’s width. The gun itself hummed, barely audible under the roar of fire, and Isavel aimed it down the hallway. Her hunter’s gift seemed to work on this just as well, and she knew exactly where to aim, knowing instinctively how to adjust her arms.
The shield on her left forearm thrummed with impacts. She turned to look, and she saw something different down there, something less like a golem and more like a drone, buzzing red with rage. Isavel aimed the gun down the hall, and while it cut down the golems, it splashed off an invisible shield around the drone.
The geometry of the room wasn’t kind to them. If the machines got too close while she wasn’t looking, they might be able to hit Ada. Isavel backed away from the centre of room, the depths of the corridors disappearing but Ada now within shielding range.
First Angels Page 20
