Tzaban sat at the edges of these discussions, impassive, as though it didn’t matter what they decided. When they were ready he led the way into the dark regions where none of them had gone before. He wouldn’t answer questions concerning the whereabouts of the other Karoo and paused at every junction to listen and sniff before progressing. Sometimes they heard sounds in the distance but although these frightened them most he seemed to pay no attention to them. The hike took a while and Tralane had unpleasant time in which to wonder about Minna’s fate, and Isabeau with the city. She rather thought about this than what they were doing in the enforced silence of the move.
They stopped and she looked up to find Tzaban holding his hand up at the head of the group. They had come through a series of rooms which led from one to another without many side routes or corridors but now ahead of them lay a long, curved strip about three people wide without doors leading from it. He turned and looked at the eight of them, calculating something.
‘Is this where he sells us out?’ someone murmured ahead of Tralane, who was taking the back of the group with Carlyn.
He glanced at them and then at Tralane. ‘Engineer Huntingore, draw your weapon and defend the back of the line. This corridor runs fifty metres. You can expect something to appear at about thirty to forty. It’ll come straight along after or drop out of the missing roof panel at thirty-one. The other one will come at the front. I’ll take care of that.’
‘But, what?’ Carlyn said and turned to look at Tralane.
Tralane felt her mouth drop open, cold horror stealing up her back and rooting her feet to the ground. ‘But I can’t,’ she said, her hand already on the gun grip. ‘I mean, I’ve never. I don’t really…’
‘I cannot defend both ends of the line. This is an ambush,’ he said, as though explaining to a stupid person.
‘Are you crazy – why did you lead us into this? He’s mad I tell you! We must go back at once!’ Engineer Tefa, the power expert said, but not too loudly. He was shaking and sweat was running down both sides of his face. Beside him others huddled close, back to back.
‘Noo…’ Engineer Shiran moaned softly, trying to look up and down as if she could run out of it. ‘This is your fault. You knew they were there and you didn’t warn us…’ Her voice trailed off into a gasp of panic.
‘It was inevitable,’ Tzaban said, his gaze flat and certain, so solid that they clung to it as if it was a tangible thing like a wall between them and death. ‘I just made sure it happened here and not somewhere else where it would be unpredictable. We go in here, we kill them, we split up and reach our destinations. There will be one left at that point and while you are doing whatever you do he and I will be busy with each other. This way you get what you want and you probably get out.’
‘We have to turn back! Ohhh! We have to. Make him, Tralane. Make him do it!’ Carlyn clung to Tralane’s arm suddenly, dragging her sideways with the force of her terror. She froze as Tzaban’s acid gaze turned on her. Someone was crying in the middle of the group.
Tzaban shook his head ‘Let’s go. If we miss this chance they’ll get back upside and have as many free shots as they want later and you’ll lose a lot more. Has to be now, here. Tralane, you have the back. Carlyn you keep a hand on her and lead her so she can face that way. We’re moving now, stay tight, look at the back of the person in front.’ He hauled the sobbing woman to him by the front of her overalls and made her hold a short line attached to his belt which she gripped compulsively, looking at the scrap of rope as if she was losing her mind. Then he turned and set off, grumbling as he had to tow her. She tripped over her own feet until she was moving steadily and the others went mutely along after her as Tralane watched. She knew they had to, because they weren’t for fighting and whatever they were good at this was not it and this situation had nothing for them but to follow. More than one was whimpering. She resented the notion of dying here like this. It made her furious. She was as far from tears as she’d ever been.
Carlyn hesitated and Tralane shoved at her firmly. ‘Move out. I’ve got it. It’s fine.’ The strength of her own voice lifted her and as she felt Carlyn stumble about, hand on her shoulder, she focused on the gun – remove safety, power on, setting maximum. Hm, she thought, it would have made sense to put a safety chain on these things so you can’t drop them when you’re shitting yourself walking backwards down a narrow corridor waiting for a monster to drop on your head. Had her face not been fixed in position with raw mortal dread that would have made her smile. Then she heard the sound of a rapid patter coming from the direction she faced.
A brindle coloured mass abruptly filled the corridor, yellow-eyed, low and lithe, streaking towards her so fast she didn’t have time to draw a breath to scream ‘This isn’t the thirty mark! This is more like fucking fifteen, you shit!’ Though someone said that as her finger turned to a white hot agony and everything in front of her was abruptly blotted out by a grey red fog.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MINNABAR
Minna forgot her fear after a couple of hours had passed. There was no room for it to exist and no energy to fuel it. All she could do was place one foot in front of another and feel the burn of the blisters inside her boots. All she saw was Dahn’s back in its muddied white flightsuit with the black harness belt of woven fibre marching ahead of her. The grassland had given way to scrub forest, but here it was on richer ground, squelchy with water. The trees had mangrove roots big enough to trip and slide on even underwater where her feet hit them in shallow mud, and green patches of apparently solid earth were no more than films or mats of grass floating on top of knee-deep holes. She was drenched in water, mud and sweat. Everything rubbed her raw. She had never been more miserable in her life but it paled in comparison to the compulsion she felt to follow Dahn without complaining, no matter how many times she fell. Flies crawled on her like cold, ticklish curiosities and only sometimes bit. She had to blow them off her lips as she breathed so she didn’t get them in her mouth but sometimes she still did and then would cough and spit in a panic while Dahn just walked, occasionally pausing to let her catch up or to haul her back to her feet.
The journey seemed to have no effect on the pilot. She gazed around her with ease and made the going seem light. Occasionally, the creature that Minna had come to think of as ‘the dog’ simply to give it a name that made it seem less terrifying, came back to her and circled around, then continued ahead. She longed to rest, to ask when it would be over but something about Dahn’s ease made her want to appear less pathetic than she already was, not more, and so she didn’t. She wasn’t some stupid little girl who was going to cry and give in. Again. But there came a point when she slumped into a pothole and stuck there, no matter how she tried to climb out. She was aware of herself screaming and hitting the puddle-black water, then Dahn coming back to her and crouching down, crushing some strange plant leaves under her nose and pushing them into her mouth.
After that her awareness was blank, marked by flashes that were curious and seemed to happen to someone else. Dahn walked them to drier land and Minna’s footfalls moved exactly where Dahn’s did so that she didn’t fall. Dahn was reaching up to the trees and fruit fell into her hands from the distant canopy. Minna was eating the fruit, pulpy and juicy, it was sweet and delicious. Her hands shone with a mantle of black flies on the drying residue after. Dahn stopped and let her wash them at a small waterfall. They drank there, cold water, from underground. Minna rode the dog, balanced on its narrow back behind its shoulderblades, smiling because she loved horse-rides. Under her hands the dog’s skin was warm and tough, stubbly bits of hair sticking out of it. It was wearing something around its neck and shoulder like a collar, or a trophy. Minna should have known what it was but the knowledge seeped out of her head with the heat. Dahn moved and the forest moved to make way for her. She was a goddess there and Minna was both fearful and adoring of her. Then they stopped and Minna slept in a shaded nook.
The whining of the dog woke her
. Dahn was nowhere to be seen. A strange sound was in the air, and a curious dryness like the powdery smell of the most powerful magic. Minna unwound from the tight ball she was in with small cries of dismay as burning pains returned to her. The dog glanced at her and she thought it looked nervous. The sound was a steady hum and it made all the leaves vibrate at a tiny frequency. She saw water droplets bounce off and sparkle in the air. It was nearly sundown but the flies that had bothered and bit her all day were nowhere to be seen. Her head was oddly clear. She stayed away from the dog but it ignored her anyway and went bolting off suddenly. She took a little look about, adjusted the stiff belt and checked the heavy clip of the signal blocker, unclipped it and studied it in a shaft of light coming through from far above.
After a few moments she worked out how to activate it and opened the charm mandala. She saw that it was what Dahn had told her, a signal disruptor. Now that she had moved out of range of the Spire crew the belt should have exploded but the trip-trigger failure was suspended by the closeness of the disruption field. It prevented the belt signalling itself. Then her eyes fell on a set of numbers in the lower section of the mandala and her heart plummeted. The battery was nearly out of power. She calculated quickly how long it had been running, if it had begun at the crash or earlier, likely earlier, if Dahn was prepared – and figured she had only a few hours left before it would run out. She searched her pockets but all she had were a few small tools, the rest were back at the crash site, along with any spare power cells of any kind.
She bit her lips together to prevent herself crying and put the disruptor firmly clipped into her inside pocket. Then she tried to access the belt lock, but it was cued to the trigger switch. Her own spells charmed it closed. They would accept only an access by the master key and she had no idea what that was other than an eight-symbol sequence. Someone else had programmed that. The forest was quiet, aside from the hum which seemed to have settled into her now, almost subdermal in its pervasiveness. She looked down and began to follow Dahn’s boot tracks, going slowly, measured, eyes and ears alert. She had gone about twenty metres when she found the white flight suit, the boots and the fabric belt discarded on a tree. Underclothes were left on the ground. The tracks stopped at the boots. Minna looked around, slowly, carefully, silently. Nothing moved in the canopy except water dripping down from earlier rain. In every direction the forest was motionless in itself. She began to wish Dahn back again, even the dog. No, not the dog.
She made herself study the ground. The soft earth was giving way to leaf-covered dirt and harder pack but there were still prints. She saw the dog’s marks, and a few barefoot tracks, both pointing in the direction of the hum. She went that way, figuring they could not be angry for her following them – she wasn’t trying to escape. The notion tugged at her mind but she knew she would be lost in this forest long before she found the digsite, if that’s even where they were. Her only chance was to reach something that could power the disruptor or remove the belt and the only lead she had on that was with Dahn. Fail at that and the forest and the dog or whatever didn’t matter.
She had to pause to relieve herself, then she went on, moving only when she was sure of the way. It was so slow. When she looked back in ten minutes she could see the white suit hanging on the tree. A few minutes later she looked again, to check her line and progress and saw nothing. She stopped, holding on to a branch to steady herself, and looked again, certain that the pattern of the trunks and the green against brown markings of the ground pointed her directly at the correct spot. No foliage barred the sightline.
She had decided to retrace her steps and move back to be sure when she heard Dahn’s voice from a short distance away to her left, ‘Ahoy, Engineer!’ She sounded hoarse and breathless.
Minna couldn’t bring herself to speak but she moved in the direction of the sound, making a lot of noise. A few moments later the white suit and the pilot inside it came through two bushes and smiled at her with relief. ‘There you are. I told you to stick put.’
‘I…’ Minna began, afraid of Dahn and more afraid of the forest. She clenched her right hand around her belt, feeling the slim packages of explosive compound snugly anchored there. Resentment and anger gave her the fuel to continue. ‘The battery on the disruptor is low. I thought it would make more sense to follow you.’
‘What?’
She saw immediate concern on Dahn’s face as the woman came forward quickly, looking for the item. Minna took it out to show it to her, and at the last moment in a show of perversity, cued the wrong display mandala – the one that showed signal strengths, instead of power life. The sigils on the casing glowed obediently, wavering and flickering as digits altered inside them. She saw Dahn stare at it, her brown eyes at this distance visibly flecked with amber, rather pretty, as the numbers reflected off the surface of her eyeball. Minna saw immediately that Dahn could read it, but she did not know what it meant.
‘There’s only a few hours left,’ she said, the fear in her voice quite real. She didn’t want Dahn to know she’d caught her out so she added, to prevent questions, ‘At best six hours.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Dahn looked pensive and Minna took the moment to notice that she seemed tired. ‘When we reach the site I am sure there will be more batteries.’
Minna nodded. ‘Are we there yet?’
‘It is just a quarterstride off. But the city has arrived. It is making a descent.’
That explained the humming sound then, Minna imagined. A flicker of hope rose in her chest.
Dahn looked agitated and for the first time, undecided. ‘There are many Karoo very close,’ she explained as she saw Minna’s gaze on her. ‘They are ready to fight. I must think how to pass them.’
Minna glanced about but there was no sign of the dog. ‘Isn’t the, um, that… thing – a Karoo? The one that was with you?’ She played it stupid, knowing she had that look perfected at least. Hundreds of days of playing the same game in Glimshard for social reasons paid off.
‘It is a male,’ Dahn said, as if it really was no more remarkable than a dog. ‘They are easily controlled once you know how.’ She frowned. ‘The Spire biomages have captured and studied them.’
A lie if ever Minna had heard one. She knew that too from years of watching other girls blag and brag in efforts to save face or make others lose theirs. She nodded dumbly. ‘So, where is it? Won’t we need it?’
Dahn had her hand to her head and for a minute she ignored Minna. Then she looked up and drew herself tall. ‘Now we go. You come quickly and we will be joining your team and getting you that battery.’
She turned and set off at a deceptively fast pace. Minna followed her, sick to her stomach as if she had eaten lead, not believing a word of it. But she had to find a battery somehow. Regardless of what Dahn was or wanted that was something she clung to as her own personal focus. Your team, she thought. Not our team. Your team.
The war of hope and despair inside her was nauseating but she had nothing to throw up. In any case, the distance passed quickly. They stopped within sight of a large timber barrier, spiked raw ends of posts reaching up into the air at twice Minna’s height.
Dahn crouched down, hidden in foliage, and pulled Minna to do the same, unnecessarily as Minna collapsed on to her butt as soon as they had halted. The hum was loud, penetrating enough that she could feel it in her teeth. Over the timbers the sky was visible for a patch where the wood had been cleared and half of that was covered by an immense silhouette with geometrically precise hexagonal edges. It hovered about thirty metres up and Minna did not see it move. She considered that height to be its minimum unless they were going to ground it out. It must be at sky anchor.
She was studying it and just becoming sure it was not descending when there was a second and very sudden sound from behind the barrier itself. After a few seconds Minna determined that it was a kind of warning siren. There was a voice within it speaking words that she knew were not Imperial, although they rather sounded like old Imperial
, though she hadn’t paid attention enough in those classes to be sure. To her astonishment, however, she found that she did understand some of what it was saying, at least enough to figure out that Dahn had led them true. This was the digsite and the sound was coming from the artefact, whatever it was. She saw Dahn’s face screwed up as the woman concentrated, listening with all her being in an effort to understand.
‘…main power start.’ Minna heard, along with some kind of warnings. ‘…supply twenty-one per cent… basic functions only… ensure all propulsion systems are disconnected.’ There was more, then a pause, then a countdown began. As it was only five seconds she didn’t bother saying anything, just crouched down and curled up into a ball again waiting for she didn’t know what.
She felt Dahn’s grasp on her arms, trying to prise them open. ‘What is it?’
Then the ground shook. Minna knew with certainty that her mother was in there, doing this. This was so very much a Tralane kind of thing. She formed herself up into a core around that knowledge as several violent tremors shook them and the trees into a juddering rush of creaking and swishing. Without pause, it was answered by a chorus of enraged hoots, whistles and screams and then she huddled tighter, closer as she heard movement everywhere and the forest itself surged up and over the barricade, all around her. The only constant was Dahn’s iron grip on her upper arm.
She was dragged, screaming, through whipping bushes and heavy, sodden ground, moving only because of the pain in her arm as it threatened to break. Green, brown, streaks of crimson, orange, white – the world was a mess of colours in blurred motion that meant nothing to her but most of them seemed to scream and shout with her in all the voices imaginable, some of them human.
She saw Glimshard tabards, fleeing, falling, heard the clash of swords, shields, a roar of fire and the blart of some odd beast in flight that shouldn’t fly. Snarls and growls, shrieks, described death in different ways. She saw the dog again, rushing by them, blood streaming out of it like a banner. She was thrown against a heavy, smooth wall and the impact hammered through her skeleton and ended still in the pincer hold on her arm, an undeniable proof of life that made her want to laugh, except it hurt too much and she was crazy, beyond fear, in a place where the whole world was unstitched.
Glorious Angels Page 45
