by Tim Akers
“This is the plan? We’re going to climb in?”
“They’re watching every door, Wilson,” I grunted, then crawled a little bit further. “Every window. Just stay close.”
He had no trouble keeping up, obviously. He kept a couple protective spider arms hovering behind my back, another over my head. Halfway across the wind picked up, and the storm hit us. We were out of the Academy’s lee, and I cursed and hunched close to the bridge. The iron was slick. Below us the Dunje was a foggy smear, the tiny lights of barges winking up at us like reflected stars. I paused to secure myself.
“Jacob, I’m not sure—” Wilson said, then I fell.
My lead foot skittered off the metal and I stepped into open air. Wilson’s arms wrapped around me, too quickly, and I overbalanced and slammed against the structure of the bridge. My hands fell off their holds. I slapped at the bars, missed, slapped and ended up on Wilson. He swore in the tearing, shrieking language of the anansi. The wind pulled at us. I was kicking at the bridge, trying to find purchase. Wilson’s arm came free, then his foot. I sagged against his body, completely away from the bridge now. Both his lapels in my fists, I dropped, he dropped, and the wind took us. Screaming, we cartwheeled out into sky, into the storm, and we were falling.
The rope caught about ten feet down. I thought it was going to tear me in half. I barely held on to Wilson and his clambering arms. The rope snapped taut, the movement of our fall arcing us back down under the bridge. I slapped at the dry understructure, felt it slip out from under my fingers. Wilson grabbed on and dragged me in. We climbed on to one of the supports, nestled against the stone and lay there, panting and breathing and staring at the rain.
“Think they were watching?” I asked.
“You fuck. You could have fucking told me.”
“I wanted your reaction to be authentic.” I held the rope up and pulled a section of it tight. “Cut me off this thing, will you?”
He squinted angrily at me, then worked his knife free of his belt and sliced through the rope.
“That’s not even climbing rope,” he said. “It’s just a fucking rope.”
“All I could get.”
“We could have died.”
“Yeah, well. If I kept track of all the times I could have died the last couple weeks, Wilson, I’d get bored.”
He shook his head, then leaned back and rested against the stone.
“Is there some kind of secret entrance under here?” He craned his neck around to look at the craggy stone. “A hidden door that leads to the wine cellar or something?”
“Nah. We’re going to have to climb.”
“That’s what I figured you’d say.” He ran a wide, thin hand over the stone, picking at the cracks with his sharp little talons. “Could we at least look for a secret entrance, please?”
“There’s no secret entrance, Wilson. Stop being such a whiner.”
There were feet on the bridge above us, and soon rifles were poking down over the railing. Voices yelled all up and down the road. I pointed, then led Wilson around the edge of the tower’s wall to the next bridge. Not long after we made the second bridge the guards were hooking up climbing harnesses and throwing down belay lines.
“They’re going to find your rope,” Wilson whispered.
“Then we better get moving,” I said, and clambered off into the rain.
THE GUARDS WERE slow and careful, and the climbing harnesses were difficult to use in the rain. We were almost to the Academy before they found the rope. We were inside before they figured out what had happened.
We ended up in the wine cellar, as Wilson had hoped. There was a service winch with corresponding iron door. The lock had rusted away years ago. I wrenched it open then collapsed inside. Wilson crawled over to the near wall and started poking around behind the casks. Looking for his damn secret passage.
“Stop fucking around, Wilson.”
“Just hoping. I was going to laugh if I found it.”
“You’re not going to find it,” I said. I lay the shotgun and pistol out on the ground, then took off my coat and shook it off. Water sheeted out onto the floor. Once it was as dry as it was going to get, I put it back on and rearranged my arsenal. “Can we get on with this?”
We pulled the service door closed and secured it as well as could be expected. There was food by the door, I saw, and a dozen cigarette butts. There had been a guard here, probably pulled away to conduct the search up on the bridge. We had to get moving.
“They’re going to be putting people on every door and window again,” Wilson said, nodding to the guard’s leavings. “We’d do well to get to the girl.”
“Not yet. They’ll see we were here. We left water everywhere, and the door’s obviously been forced.” I hurried up the narrow stairwell to the kitchens. Those clean white rooms were empty. “Once they figure that out, they’re going to post guards around the girl. Probably already have.”
“So let’s get there. Hit ‘em before they’re ready.”
“They’re ready, Wilson. They’ve been waiting. We need to go somewhere they don’t expect.”
We left the kitchens and moved horizontally. The locked hallways where I expected to find Emily were on the south end of the base, near the center of the civilian part of the Torchlight District. We went north and up, gaining levels, going away from the buried, secret chambers of the Council’s hidden experiments.
We heard guards patrolling in hallways beneath us, chasing the routes they expected us to take. I wondered how much they knew we knew, if they had planted the seed of the Council’s laboratories in my father’s ear, confident that he would pass that on to me? They had overplayed their hand, then. I knew I couldn’t trust anyone, except maybe Wilson, though I trusted him more to act in Emily’s interests than in mine or his own. I was comfortable with that.
Wilson and I busied ourselves with mischief. We set a fire in the barracks, tripped auto-alarms in the weapon guildhall. We avoided the zep docks. I had them in mind for our escape.
“Are we just having fun?” Wilson asked. We were destroying the escapements in all the frictionlamps we passed, ruining them in a sudden flash of illumination. It was slow work, and taking us no closer to Emily.
“We couldn’t get to her before they closed their noose,” I said. “We can’t get to her now. Too many guards in too small an area. We could try, but that would just be shooting and heroism, and then we’d both be dead.”
“I’m glad you’ve thought this all out.”
“I have. Just listen. So we cause trouble. We fill their halls with smoke, we poke their eyes out.” I shut my eyes and loosened the final bolt on the ‘lamp I was working on. The room went sun-bright, then black. We shuffled to the next room. “Sloane only has so many men. He’ll have to come for us.”
“And then?”
“Then we go for Emily. Evacuating the cadets was a mistake. While they’re searching the Academy, we take the girl.”
“And if she dies in the meantime?”
“They won’t kill her,” I said. “Soon as she dies, they lose us.”
“You’re putting a lot of trust in that,” Wilson said.
“They want me pretty badly, friend. They’ll be careful.”
He snorted, then continued with our campaign of trouble. It wasn’t long before we ran in to our first patrol. Four Badgemen, poking carefully through a wardrobe hall like hunters in a haunted forest. Wilson bellied the first one with his knife, and I shot the rest. After they were dead I stood in the middle of the room and emptied each of their weapons wildly into the walls, to make the ambush look more frantic and horrifying than it had been. We cut away from our goal, and took the next two patrols that came to investigate, then put many chambers and halls between ourselves and the carnage. Not long after, the Academy was bristling with small patrols of very excitable Badgemen, talking loudly to one another and jumping at every sound.
“There, see,” I whispered from my alcove above the grand fireplace in
the feeding hall. “Pinch hard enough and the monster stirs. Should just be a matter of finding our girl.”
We clambered down into the darkened hall. I had just reached the ground floor when a voxorator in the wall clapped open and started screaming. Emily.
“They’re killing her,” Wilson gasped. “They’re done waiting, lad.”
I coughed and wiped my mouth. They wouldn’t dare, not until they had me. A lure with no bait is just string. The screams continued, clear and honest.
“Okay, we need… we need to get organized. We can go in together and—”
“Like hell, son. You said they’re waiting.” He unsheathed his knife and buckled another round into his shortrifle. “I’ll make for the front gates, near where we got in. I’ll make noise, like we’re trying to get out. You get Emily, get her out.”
“Make for the zepliner docks. That’s where I’ll be headed, once I have her. You’ll never get out the front door.”
“Probably,” he said, then ran down the hall. I waited until I heard sporadic gunfire. I took the grand spiral to the main level, and started working my way quietly to the locked corridors of the basement.
THE HALLS WERE as I remembered them. Some childish part of my brain felt like a schoolboy again, in the halls between classes without permission. It was a ridiculous feeling. The roving patrols had thinned out, now that Wilson was making such a racket above me. My passage was undisturbed.
The locked hallways were still locked, but unguarded. I forced the door. The corridor beyond was dark and quiet. I slipped inside, secured the door behind me, then ventured out with my revolver in my hand.
When I was a cadet, my fellow students and I had spent a good deal of our recreational time discussing these locked spaces. The common mythology was that they were prisons, or held some entombed secret that the Academy could not suffer the light of day. We never saw anyone enter or leave these doors. If it was a laboratory, as my father insisted, then there must be other entrances, entrances that I did not know.
The walls here were stone, not unlike the rest of the Academy. Fewer wall sconces, too. How did the researchers do their work in such dreadful gloom? It wasn’t long before I had to set down my revolver and assemble the tiny hand lamp I brought. Once it spun up, the lamp’s soft amber light was the only illumination in the place.
The air smelled like crushed bugs. It was a familiar scent, but I couldn’t place it. I descended a stairwell, then went through an oak door that opened smoothly on oiled hinges. Beyond the door was a room like a small dome. There were shelves all the way up most of the walls, irregularly spaced and heaped with piles of books, glass tubes, broken equipment and even stranger detritus. There were openings that looked like arched windows near the top of the dome; they seemed to lead to tunnels, or deep shelves, but I could see no good way up there.
The center of the room was clear and the floor was smooth and free of dust. Closer inspection of the walls revealed scattered handholds, too widely spaced and irregularly arranged to let me climb up the walls.
I set my lamp on a shelf and began to search through the junk. It didn’t seem that Emily or Sloane were here. The piles on the shelves were interesting, probably arcane, but not what I was looking for. I took one quick pass through the dome, marveling at the odd handholds, the seemingly inaccessible upper shelves and tunnels.
They weren’t here. But where, then? Wilson and I had been through most of the rest of the Academy, sowing distraction and drawing the guards off. I thought we were drawing them away from this place, but clearly not. We’d been everywhere, except…
The docks. The zepliner docks, at the very top of the Academy, where the old signal flame stood unlit and the airships came and went. Where Wilson had gone, to draw them away. He was headed right at them, right where they were waiting.
I hurried out the door. I thought I caught sight of something, a long pale face, wide eyes the same albino white as the skin, staring down at me from one of the tunnels. A second look revealed nothing, just books, a glass jar and cobwebs. The room was empty, and Wilson was in trouble. I ran up the stairs.
THE CAVERNOUS HANGARS of the docks take up the highest level of the Academy, great wooden structures that perch on the ancient stone of that place like an ersatz crown. They form a rough semi-circle around the launching derricks at their center. Rising above the derricks on a gentle dome of rock stands the structure that gives the district its name: The Torchlight.
In the early days of Veridon, a garrison lived on the rock to watch for mountain raiders as they crossed the plains to the east, or river pirates forging their way downriver from the principalities further upstream. They would burn the Torch to warn the soldiers below, so that everyone could make for the fortified parts of the city.
With the gift of flight, our sentry has grown lax. The original iron and stone building was replaced with a circle of hammered brass, a low wall whose lines were reminiscent of fire and smoke. The pyre is no longer kept dry and packed, and the honor guard no longer stands by with dry wicks and flints to sound the alarm. No armies approach Veridon, no raiders ply the Reine.
They were up there, a double handful of Badgemen, plus a couple other figures huddling away from the rain. I could only see them when the storm provided lightning. Sloane was there, and Wilson, tied up and bloody. There was something else, too, squatting where the Torch should be, filling the brass circle with a dark and complicated presence.
I snuck as close as I could. I kept to the hangars. Each building contained a single airship, lashed down for storm-running, the crews nowhere to be seen. The winds beat against the thin wooden walls, and the zeps lurched in their moorings.
The guards kept near Wilson, berating his crumpled form in the lee of the old Torch. Sloane circled, wary of the sky. Everyone kept looking up, then peering down the hill at the buildings where I was hidden. They were expecting something. The Angel, perhaps. And where was Emily?
Something yelped, and a spark jumped from the site of the Torch. The lurking darkness there was lit up, for a second, and I saw a brief, still image. A body, hung spread eagle, and a machine of brass and coiled wire. Emily. Their attention was to the center, to the Torch. I took a deep breath, counted the distance. I checked my revolver, and clutched Emily’s shotgun in my off-hand. Sloane reappeared, yelling angrily at the men standing guard around Wilson. They jumped, then ran down the hill towards the barracks. Sloane watched them go, then turned back to the Torch. His back was to me.
I clambered forward, keeping low, keeping the declination of the hill in my favor. He was yelling towards the Torch again, strolling casually back to it. Now. Now or not at all. I stood and ran. The rain beat a tattoo across my face, and the storm roared around me. Not a noise from the Torch. Wilson saw me, nodded, then bowed his head.
I raised my pistol and ran.
I RAN AT him, my feet hammering the ground, the storm driving me forward. I was as quiet as I could be at a full sprint. Easy to get lost in this storm. Someone saw me. A cry went up, then shots. A bullet whizzed past me, ripping through the air; another snapped at my jacket. Sloane turned and yelled, then lurched towards the Torch. I raised my pistol and fired. Five shots, five bullets. They all missed.
I barreled into the man. I fell, and my revolver skittered away. The firing had stopped, everyone too afraid of hitting the boss. I rolled over him and put my fist into his throat. Sudden pain, and I realized he had a knife in my shoulder. I slapped it aside and punched him again.
A guard grabbed me around the shoulders. I threw him off, but Sloane slithered out from under me. I grabbed his leg, then the steel butt of a shortrifle cracked against my head. Next thing I knew I was face first against the rain-slick stone. Sloane stood up and faced me.
“You have no patience, Jacob,” he said. “That is your failing. No patience and—”
I leapt at him. One of the guards yelled and tried to intercept me. Together we bowled into Sloane. The three of us started sliding down the hill, arms a
nd legs banging against the stone, fingers bloody as we sought some purchase on the old rock. I ended up with my arms around the guard, my fingers around Sloane’s throat. The Badgeman was trying to beat me around the head, but the leverage was bad. I squeezed closer to him, to keep him off balance. Sloane was kicking pathetically at me. We came to a stop among some coiled wires. Sloane’s struggles were slowing down.
More Badgemen came to help. A crowd of arms descending on me, punching and grabbing, wrestling me off the dying Sloane. I dragged at his clothes, felt something tear away in my hand. They had me upright in a moment, and two of them were taking turns slamming their fists into my midsection. Sloane was on one knee, watching, a hand to his throat and the other steadying himself on the ground. I was yelling, but I don’t know what I was getting at. Just a lot of yelling. Sloane stepped forward, weaved on his feet, then slapped me across the face. One of the Badgemen behind me dropped. Another yelped and spun away. Sloane looked startled.
Wilson stepped forward, the blade of his knife smeared in blood. The ropes that hung loosely around his chest were frayed, gnawed through. I picked up one of the shortrifles. Sloane was running.
“Good of you to show up,” I gasped.
“Same,” Wilson said. “I take it they weren’t downstairs.”
“No.”
“Figured. You see anyone, down there?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I did. Sloane have the Cog?”
“Yeah. In a pouch around his neck.”
I squinted at him, then picked up the fabric I’d torn off Sloane a minute earlier. The Cog slid out into my hand.
“Huh,” Wilson said. “Good for us. Maybe we should try to run?”
“No. They’ve still got Emily.” I gripped the Cog, watching the tiny wheels spin free against my palm. “Maybe we can make a trade. Or pretend to, at least.”
“That sounds like it could get us killed,” he said. We looked around. The guards had fled, though a cluster of them was organizing their courage down near the entrance to the Chapel of the Air, near the foot of the Torch. Sloane had disappeared into the hangars. “Let’s clean up.”
