by Del Law
I can hear the rattle of the tommy guns from where we are, and the sounds of mage fire in return. Before long, the truck is speeding back past us, chased closely by a group of stomping, steaming Tel Kharan in full armor and mages in formation behind them.
When we've lured them in between us, we burst from the alleys and open fire.
It’s a fierce fight. The Tel Kharan are caught completely by surprise. They're good, but it’s clear they’re not at all used to fighting an organized force that’s not using aether. Capone’s men are tough. Most of the bullets pass right through the Akarii warding, too—they’re just too small and moving too fast for the wards to catch them. They cut through the Tel Kharan armor, too, bursting steam pipes and aether conduits, shattering helmets, and making short work of the people inside.
Capone’s beside me, firing bursts from the gun. I expect him to be yelling something like “Yaaaa! Yaaaaa! Take that you dirty yellow-belly rats you!” like he’s right out of an old Cagney movie.
But no—he’s focused and silent, shooting precisely, and when he’s out bullets he picks up another gun and keeps firing. When he’s done with that one, he darts into the street and grabs a pistol from one of his fallen men, and a knife from the hand of the of the Akarii mages. I see him heft it in his hands, thoughtfully, as bullets whiz around him. And then he darts back behind the engine of the truck.
“How do you use this thing,” he says, holding up the knife.
“Long story,” I say. I duck as a blast from the Akarii hits the wall behind us, and throw one of my own back. But Capone looks up over the hood of the truck, points the knife at a mage in the street, and a burst of white sparks leap from the point of it. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the mage, but it’s pretty good for someone with no training.
He looks back at me and grins. “When in Rome,” he says. I have no idea what he’s talking about. “I think I’m gonna like it here.”
Within minutes many of the Tel Kharan are down. The few who make it out turn and run back toward the Residence, as fast as they can, calling out for more support on their knives. One of Capone’s trucks speeds off in pursuit, a mage hanging onto the roof and men with guns leaning out the sides.
Capone’s men load up into the trucks. Capone turns to me. “We got this, Beast,” he says, wiping sweat out of his eyes. “You go do what you gotta do.”
“What I’ve got to do?”
“It’s a dame, isn’t it. I’m not stupid. You got the look.”
I nod. “Keep hitting them, but keep moving. You can’t stay in one place long—those mages can’t hold off…”
“I said we got this,” he says, swinging up into the cab. “Don’t fucking worry. When I say something, I mean it."
“Ok,” I nod. “Drop me on the way.” I swing up next to the driver, the truck takes off, and I jump off close to the Residence and duck down a side street. There’s an explosion, tommy gun fire, and another podship whips over us. I keep my head low. A few turns into the back alleys here, and I find a sewer cover that I can lift off. The tide is still going out, and the street here is on a little bit of a rise, but down in the sewer the water is rushing fast, like a river. I lower myself down, carefully, and swing over to where the walkway should be, on the far edge.
Fortunately, I’m right. It’s only waist deep here, but I still have to hold on carefully against the current.
Have I mentioned this before? I can’t stand being wet. The way water gets in under my fur, up against my skin is unnerving, and I hate the way all my fur turns into a big wet mat. Plus, there’s the issue of air—even deep in a dirtnest you can still breathe, all right?
Though I can vividly remember my mother swimming.
She was the only Hulgliev I’ve ever known who took happily to the water. I can remember watching her from shore while she swam elegantly back and forth across the lake. The whole tribe looked on, shaking their heads in amazement.
But that's another story. I make my way through the sewer into the tunnels, and using a map I got from Ghat’s people I wade in the direction of the Residence. The tunnel walls here are lined with old cobblestones. They’re polished smooth from the passage of countless hands, feet, and various other appendages from the last four centuries. Tamaranth had always been the one place that major families will come to talk to each other, when they were in a mood to do so (which isn’t often). It stretches back to when Dekheret set up the Lunar Council here, and ten families actually sat down to cooperate. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. They’ve come together a few more times since then, but it’s always been tense, and people generally end up dead.
But with the families come politics, with politics comes intrigue, and with intrigue comes, apparently, Tamaranth’s worst-kept secret. Tunnels. They stretch from District to District, from the Old City all the way out through the Fan, and you can get from the Stellar Downs all the way out to the Northern Gates and be entirely unseen if you want to. I know—I’ve done it. When I did some guard work in the Residence, it was the tunnels we worried about most. People—assassins, petitioners, anarchists—could pop up anywhere, and they did. Filled with caverns, ancient graffiti, statues of old gods and family leaders long since fallen out of favor, there’s no better place to dump a body. No one knows how deep they go, either—if you keep going down, you find the remains of the city that was here before Tamaranth was built. I’ve heard there’s even another ruined city underneath that one, too.
At this level, though, there are lights at regular intervals shaped like the famous sentient plants in the Chancellor’s Residence, each holding a small globe in its leaves. The lights are dark now, with the grid being down, so I use Semper’s knife to see. Several side passageways branch off into the gloom; trash spins slowly in eddies in some of these. In one of them floats the bloated carcass of a Buhr.
I’m thinking of Mircada as I walk, of course, but also of Kjat, too, realizing I entirely failed her. I sign her on to an expedition that nearly gets her killed several times over. Her friends die. We’re held captive on some Akarii warship and when we finally get what we went for back to Tamaranth, do we turn it in and get paid? No, we get caught up in yet another family war. While I have no idea what happened between her and Fehris, and I can't really understand or condone it, I can’t blame her for being pissed off, for heading out on her own. Maybe I would have made the same decision?
Three turns later and I come up to a dead end, with a small landing here just above the level of the water. The Akarii warding is pulsing regularly on the other side of it, like a heartbeat. I know the tunnels are deep, but in here the water is rising pretty quickly and I’ll have to move quickly—the water could fill this whole little chamber in, and then I’d be smashed up against that warding, gasping for air. Not a great way to go out.
But there’s a dog on the landing. A big one, nearly my size.
I sigh. I really don’t have time for this.
The dog is sleeping on her back with her legs in the air. She has a thick head like a bear and its eyes are partially open—they roll back and forth beneath the half-closed lids and one of its back legs twitches erratically, scraping against the cobblestone wall. Her short fur is a brindle of blue, white, and brown.
The dog is wet all the way through. She must have swum here, or been washed up by the tides.
I step up to it with my knife ready. I might as well get it over with. I clear my throat, but the dog continues to lay there. I touch her gingerly with a foot.
The dog coughs, rolls over and climbs to her feet. A ridge of fur runs down the length of its spine in an opposite direction from the rest of her coat. She blinks and looks in my direction, smelling the air.
In the light of the knife, I can see that her eyes are white and frosted over. I realize she probably can’t see me. That might help.
She huffs and sniffs the air.
I tense, waiting for the crazy snarl. The leap. The gnashing teeth.
But there’s nothing. In
stead, the dog turns away from me and walks over to the warding. She steps up to it and rests her thick head against it. Then she sits back, panting, and lets out a quiet whine.
I step up beside her, cautiously. I’ve been fooled before, but the dog whines again and thumps its tail on the landing a few times. It stretches out a paw to scratch at the wards.
I shrug, and step up to the warding. It’s much more sophisticated than Retriever work—dense and watertight. On the other side of it, the tunnel is completely dry.
It looks like we’re both going in the same direction. Keeping one eye on the dog, I dip Semper’s knife in, and slowly re-weave a hole in the wards, just large enough to get through. It’s nowhere near as elegant as what Josik could have done, but it’ll do.
I push apart the edges of the last layer, and set them to hang in place with just enough room to slide through. Then I quickly pick up the dog and push it through. She kicks and squirms in alarm, but when her feet touch the dry ground on the other side she stands and sniffs the air, and then turns and sets off at a trot. I come through too, and then fold the ward closed behind me to keep the water out.
I wonder if Kjat is somewhere dry. Maybe she was somewhere out of the city entirely by now, heading north with other refugees. I’m guessing I’ll never see her again, and frankly she’s probably better off for it.
Despite its lack of sight, the dog seems to know where she’s going and since I don’t, I follow her. She navigates through a maze of passages and empty storage rooms until it comes to a thick metal door. She scratches at it, looks in my direction again and whines again, loudly. I try the latch, a silver one in the shape of a grohver’s head. It’s not locked. I try to open it slowly, but the dog gets her head into the gap, pushes her way through and takes off.
The room beyond the door is large and cavernous, and there are large wood-fired ovens at the far end. Long tables stretch down the center, and a series of metal sinks line one wall. Overhead the ceiling curves up to a high arch. There are figures painted up there, but they’re blackened over from smoke and impossible to make out. The air smells close and smoky, and there’s thick dust on everything.
Here’s what I know about the Residence: tall and chaotic, people think it predates even Dekheret, and no one knows for sure who started building it. But every Chancellor in the last few hundred years has made it a point to add a tower, an aerial bridge, a dome or something to the structure until its become nearly a city all its own. It’s forged from rock and steel, from glass and metals and woods from different worlds. Most of it is falling apart, and it’s almost impossible to find your way around inside it. Since the wars got pretty bad in the last fifty years, most of has been empty, even before Nadrune got here.
This all doesn’t help me much. I have no idea where I am, and no idea where I’m going. I follow the dog’s tracks in the dust—up a stair case, through an arch, down a hallway, around a corner. I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking here.
When I turn the corner, I see mages at the far end. Three of them, and the dog is standing with them now. When I round the corner, the dog turns and starts barking at me and the mages eyes go wide. One of them sends an alarm off through the general channel on her knife.
Ungrateful mutt. Next time I find a dog sleeping in the sewers I’m going to leave it there.
I douse my light and take my fur dark, duck back around the corner, but I can hear running feet coming my way. One of the mages calls out, tells me to drop my knife and to come with them.
I open a door at random, and duck into a long and narrow room, filled up with old furniture. There’s a window into an airshaft at the other end, though, and I push my way out into it and start to climb. Overhead, but pretty far away, I can see a small square of sky, with the Akarii warding shimmering between me and the Assassin’s moon.
I climb fast. The walls are jagged but with my claws out it’s not hard to find a good grip. I hear someone stick their head out of the window below me and I press into the wall, doing my best to approximate the color and the patterns of the rust there.
When I get to the top, I pull myself up into the jungle of the Residence’s Gardens. I’m surrounded by tall, flowing plans that are stretching up toward the pulsing warding. There’s no breeze, the night is completely still.
The plants look agitated, swaying back and forth. That’s not a good sign.
I recognize Hadran’s Bane, and Hadran’s Lie from guard duty, these two immense sections of the residence that wrap around to either side of me. I forget which building is which, and I guess it doesn’t really matter for now. It was said that the Lie was where the infamous Chancellor Hadran had kept one thousand concubines, and the Bane had been for the use of Family councilors when in Tamaranth. It was also where one of the concubines had jealously had Hadran assassinated. All of their windows are dark. At the far end, I can see the lit-up Alabaster Tower, like a shining finger pointed up at where the Lover’s Moon and the Dancer’s Moon hang.
The warding gives everything a shimmering, blue-green cast that makes the plants look as if they’re underwater. If I had more time to think about it, I’d realize that it was all very beautiful, a riot of colors and shapes and patterns that all jump out at me as I run past. Giant thistles and orchids and flowering vines sprout seven stories tall. Great tall pitcher plants in crimson and gold and thorny blue cactus intertwine, and bright thorny flowers of so many different types that I can’t put a name to any of them burst forth from the undergrowth and stretch toward the sky.
I sprint to a nearby grove of tall plants, and climb the tallest one I see. It’s a sentient plant of some kind, all of its tendrils holding up a single dome each of spiny leaves, and I can feel it tremble beneath me as I go higher. I move carefully between thick thorns the size of my forearms. I’m careful not to use claws, and I speak with a calming voice as I climb—nonsense words, a monologue of rhymes and curses in Fhirlo and Dolah and Kro. I have no idea if it’ll work, but it seems to. The plant swivels some blossoms around to watch me but otherwise seems to tolerate my presence.
When I reach the top, I push my head out through a canopy of thick, yellow blooms. I’m looking for the main entrance to the gardens. I can see now that the Bane and the Lie stand on the north and south ends of the main Residence, and the whole of the Gardens stretches east toward the Alabaster Tower. Beyond that is the lagoon and the open ocean.
Overhead, out beyond the wards, something like a great black bird is circling. I wonder what that’s about.
I’m closest to the Lie, I decide. If I follow the line of the building there, to the left, that should take me where I need to go. I’ll get into the Residence, and then hopefully the transport system will still be working. I’ll take that to the Chancellor’s Suite. If Nadrune is there, I’ll deal with her. If she’s not, I’ll wait—or I’ll go looking for Mircada on my own.
A tracer shoots over my head, though, and I duck back within the tree. I slide down the stalk to the larger, central trunk. The plant trembles nervously, probably from the tracer, and I balance out on a thick stem and leap over to the next plant. Another tracer cuts through the leaves, and winds slowly through the stems above, searching for me, but I’m already leaping from that second plant to a third, mumbling my nursery rhymes as I go. I make it to the end of the row, and then drop to the ground in a crouch.
If I’m lucky, I think, they’ll spend hours looking for me in those branches and blossoms.
I’m not lucky.
There’s shouting from behind me, and a blast of energy throws me off the plant and out onto my face in the dirt. I scramble to my feet and take off. There’s a podship in the air, tracking me now from just outside of the wards. The mages on the netting there are working to open a hole in the wards to let it through. Two magesare closing in on foot, behind me, through the trees, and off to the right I hear the hissing and clanking of more Tel Kharan armor.
Someone throws a tracer that sticks, and the conduit opens. Aether crackles down
the length of it.
Shouldn’t they at least want to take me alive? I think, disappointed.
I shake my head, spin around and use Semper’s knife to catch the energy coming at me.
But before it can get here, the plants react.
Swiftly, silently, they strike.
They grab first one mage and then another marine in their large blossoms and lift them into the air.
The Akarii’s conduits rupture as they lose their concentration and the aether in them blows backward, crawling across their armor and setting the plant limbs that hold them on fire.
A Talovian croaks and screams. Suddenly I can hear the crunching of metal and bone.
The heat and the fire sends others plants into a rage that makes me flatten my ears back and duck, instinctively, going the color of the ground. A grove of them steps over me and closes in on the other marines, ripping and tearing at them with their branches and thorns.
It doesn’t take long.
When they’re done with the Akarii they swivel their blossoms toward me, pull up their roots from the soil again and lumbered at me, moving much faster than you’d ever expect a plant to move.
I turn to run toward the Residence.
But the podship is there, hovering right before him. It's the same ship that had carried me to the recovered Sister—I recognize the pilot. I nod at her, and she mouths ‘sorry’ at me but then doesn’t meet my eyes.
The netting of the ship is filled up with armored Tel Kharan. They have matrix up and they throw a tracer at me.
I leap and roll beneath the ship, spinning up warding as I go and the tracer slides off.
I run for the entrance to the garden and the podship spins around to give chase. The marine at the head of the matrix throws a huge bolt of aether at me that detonates in the air, and it picks me up and slams me into the ground and knocks the wind out of me.
The marines jump down from the netting, fan out in a semi-circle and close in, their white armor glowing fierce and brilliant.
