She should give them a few moments. She turned to find Erran rubbing the back of his neck oddly, as though he were guilty. Her hackles rose. “What?”
“I’m actually not so keen on going in there if we don’t have an escape plan. I don’t really want to die.”
“I thought you wanted to escape people hunting you.” She let her lip curl up a bit. “Elysium seems like a good refuge.”
“Very funny.” He shook his head. “Look, in the right circumstances I can find worlds that have different terrain than we do here, and use those to hide where they can’t reach - usually underground. I’ve been looking, though, and this place is… different. A lot of those worlds seem to have obstacles here. I’ve seen this before - there are places that are built to span all the thousand worlds so walkers can’t get in. This is one of them.”
“Can you open a portal to the thousand worlds at all?”
“Yeah, of course, but a lot of those worlds won’t help us.” His arms were crossed, his fingers tapping against his biceps nervously. “I haven’t traveled enough worlds to know the best way to do this. I’m going to ask Tevoria.”
“What? Wait a second, I -”
She was standing too close. Blue-green cubes devoured the world around them like smoke, and suddenly they were standing on a beach of pearly white sand, with long blades of emerald grasses waving in the wind. It was warmer here. She turned to glare at Erran and found Tevoria embracing him.
A chill went down her spine. “Has she been following us the entire time?”
Tevoria stepped closer to her, freakishly green eyes staring far too directly into Isavel’s. “I have. I’ve been very close. Does that bother you?”
“ Of course it bothers me.” She scowled at Erran. “How’s she supposed to help?”
“Look at the walls.”
She turned and looked to where the ruined walls had been, and saw… different walls. They were taller, and there was a walkway atop them where intricately-armored spirits patrolled with long-bladed spears. This looked even worse than where there were only watchers to deal with. “I’m not seeing how this helps.”
“This is what I was talking about.” Erran sighed. “Every other world has barriers here too. We can’t just walk through like I wanted.”
“Luckily, there are other ways to move in this world.” Tevoria smiled, a hungry, predatory smile Isavel would rather never see again.
“What ways? Why would those work, if this place is intended to be blocked off?”
Tevoria was watching the spirits on the walls, and they in turn were watching her. “I won’t pretend to know the minds of the ancients, but there is always a way in. I cannot move you very far, though. Erran, tell me when you are ready.”
He glanced at Isavel and shrugged. She was not happy at the idea of putting their plan in the hands of this spirit, but she got the sense that Tevoria at least had Erran’s interests at heart. Maybe that would be enough. She stepped a few steps back, out of the bubble, and glanced up through the real world at the ruins. Hail was standing watch, glancing between the coders hidden inside and Isavel on the shore. The walls were still a healthy stretch away from them, but they were close enough Isavel didn’t doubt Hail would be able to get a few good shots off. They exchanged glances, and Isavel stepped back into the bubble with the walker and his spirit.
“I don’t think they’re ready yet.”
Erran was stroking his chin. “If I run close to the walls, do you think you and Hail could pick off the spirits along the top?”
“How would that get us anywhere? If we’re just going to climb the walls anyway -”
“Right. Of course.”
“Do not worry about that.” Tevoria was binding her silver hair up against the back of her head. “I have a plan.”
Isavel stepped closer to the spirit. She was shorter but also bulkier and stronger than this lithe spirit, and she had to hope that would count for something. “Tell me.”
Tevoria stared at her, unimpressed, and responded with a sneering smile. “I will cast a magical spell to transport you to the other side of the wall.”
Isavel crossed her arms. “Erran, is she being serious?”
“I think so. I’ve seen her do it, over pretty short distances.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Magic?”
Erran nodded. “Remember that none of this is strictly real, except us and the things we bring with us.”
The phrase seemed to annoy Tevoria, who for once seemed unhappy with her walker, but she didn’t say anything. Isavel still didn’t get what he was saying. “If it isn’t real, how can she use magic to move us around?”
“Honestly, I wish I knew. There are a few worlds with this sort of thing. A few portals can cross huge distances at once, and the travel is real even if the portal isn’t. I don’t know how they work on real things that enter the walk, but they do.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Yes, I swear. At least twice.”
“Why didn’t she magic us here in the first place, then?”
Erran frowned. “I thought you wanted to travel slower, to get the weapons to the army after they arrived. This way we’ll actually manage that.”
She bit her lip; that made sense. Still, this whole magic concept was confusing. “If we can go anywhere, why can’t we go straight to the tanks and avoid riling up the walkers?”
Tevoria scowled at her. “I need to be under an open sky, and as I’ve said, I cannot go very far. Closed spaces are inaccessible, and in any case I don’t know exactly where you’re trying to go, and neither do you. Erran, does she need to come along?”
“She’s dangerous. It’ll be good to have her.”
Isavel smiled a bit at the thought that she was dangerous. Tevoria didn’t seem to take the comment seriously, but she kept quiet. Isavel stepped back out of the bubble, keeping it between her and Hail just to make sure it stayed in view. For a while she just watched, waiting for the coders to finish their work.
Then Hail looked down at her, said something to the coders, and nodded, pointing into the ruin. Then she raised her hand, tiny points of light pearling in her palm. It was time to go. Even as she stepped towards the bubble again, the sound of hunterfire made her jump. The drone of an angry beehive slowly rose over the ancient walls, then was swallowed away as she stepped into the walk.
She pointed. “Come on, go!”
Tevoria grinned. “As you wish.”
She grabbed Isavel and Erran by the wrists, her eyes suddenly aglow, and she started chanting something in a language Isavel didn’t recognize. Isavel stared at Erran, who looked apprehensive but not outright worried. Whatever this was, they needed to be ready to run once they got to the other side.
Then the whole world seemed to turn upside down and warp and invert itself, and Isavel felt her body snapping through space. Then she was standing, but all the world around them had changed, tall buildings and angry spirits everywhere.
Tevoria grabbed Erran’s head and kissed him. “Go! You mustn’t stay!”
He listened, apparently, because the walk around them suddenly dissolved again, and they were in the ruins. Still disoriented, Isavel spun around for a second to get her bearings - buildings everywhere, glowing lights and ancient metals. She called up broad shields on her forearms as watchers swarmed the walls and blasted out at the attackers. They had a few seconds - they had to run.
One of the spherical watchers spotted them almost instantly, apparently no fool to diversions. It split up into its component parts, a swirl of curved metal slates orbiting a blazing blue sun, and started thrumming. She shoved Erran forward.
“Go!”
They dove behind a nearby building as the first ray scorched the ground just behind them. The watcher whirred, approaching, closer and closer.
“Erran -”
His eyes were wide and panicked, his brain trying to keep up. “This way!”
Deeper into the ruins. Angry blue raked the ground, but she heard the whirr befo
re the blast and yanked Erran to the side. Blue fire splashed against concrete, scorching black into the ruins. Would her shields even hold up to that? They held up to dragonfire - she would have to hope. She’d hate to be wrong.
More shots lanced into the ruins from outside, zipping at nearby watchers as they blared back with fire. Isavel and Erran rounded a corner and found themselves face to face with another metallic spheroid already expanding and preparing to strike. Isavel flung one of her shields stretched and bent directly into its core, bringing up another between them.
The explosion thundered blinding, throwing them to the ground peppered with dirt. Metal fragments gouged the concrete and the soil around them, and one slammed into Isavel’s shield, knocking her back but not shattering it. Smoke and dust curled up from the ground all around the blast site.
“Holy shit -”
She hauled the ghost up and shoved him forward. “Keep going!”
The thousand worlds flickered around them, for just a second, to a bustling place of identical architecture, but the watchers and the overgrowth were replaced by spirits, hundreds of men and women wearing white-topped hats and dark uniforms. What was he doing?
Then it was gone again, and Erran pointed. “That way!”
They ran ahead, apparently free of watchers. Erran pointed to a blocky building near the waterfront, a heavy, board door dominating its side. “That building. In there.”
“So what -”
A watcher dropped down right in front of them, shell open and blue sun raging. Erran screamed. Isavel’s warrior instincts took over, a blade of light right to the heart.
Suddenly her nerves were on fire, every hair stood on end, every pore fumed. A roar built in her head, a roar to deafen and blind and crack. Out, out, she had to get it out, pouring it like dragonfire out her other hand into the air away from her.
Something crashed and exploded, someone screamed, but Isavel saw nothing but white. Heat and electricity coursed through every inch of her as she roared, forcing it out of her mouth and her arms and her back and her feet all at once, a thousand hexagonal shards of light beading from her skin. It didn’t stop, she couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, feel -
Suddenly it was over. Something hot and crumbly slammed into her knees, metal clattered by her ears. The white light faded to black. Before there had been grass, but now - only ash.
Was she dead?
Had she died, again?
She looked around. This was not Elysium. Ruins, crumbled and blackened; grass scorched away; shattered pieces of a watcher.
She looked at her hands and realized that her entire body was aglow, a still-fading white light. Where was she? Why didn’t anything look the same?
Suddenly Erran was hissing at her, hidden behind a wall.
“Walker.” She stared at him. “Am I… did I die?”
He blinked, his mouth hanging open for a long moment.
“Erran!”
His voice sounded muffled. “I - uh - no, you’re not dead. ”
She looked around. “Then what the hell happened?”
As her hearing returned to normal, she heard silence. Nobody was shooting near the front of the ruins. What had happened?
Erran glanced nervously at her. “You exploded.”
“But I’m still here.”
He shook his head. “I’m wondering about that myself. You glowed like the sun then everything around you got smashed. And not in the good way. I fucked right off as soon as the watcher hit, but… did you stab it? What the hell?”
She stood up, her pathfinder’s skin-changing gift finally calming down and letting her return to her normal olive-skinned hue. “Yes?”
“Well it was fucking spectacular. Also, you had wings that -”
Isavel felt a little dizzy, but she staggered towards him, and looked at the great ancient door across from them. Now that she could focus she saw it fairly clearly. There was an almost perfect circle of ash and destruction around where she had been standing, with deep grooves stabbed into the earth, but beyond the world was the same.
She let out a ragged breath, still feeling the electric tingling through her veins. “Let’s just get the damned things.”
“Right. Come on, I’ll see if I can walk us through the wall.”
She followed him, her sense of balance and energy returning to normal. Whatever had just happened, she hoped it hadn’t left some kind of mark.
They walked up to the massive ancient gate. The thick, pitted metal had been scarred before and apparently held fast. Erran briefly strode into a barren, dusty plain where the door didn’t seem to exist, and she followed him into the other world, emerging on the other side. Where i t was completely dark.
Erran coughed as the walk faded. “Well, I can’t see anything.”
“Hang on.” Isavel lit up her skin again, glowing as bright as she could, throwing light in all directions in the dusty-smelling old storage facility. Erran, highlighted oddly in the glow, froze.
“You know that’s scary-looking, Right? In an angelic sort of way, but still.”
Angelic? “If you’re trying to flatter me, stop.” She looked past him and saw enormous metal shapes that looked a bit like squat eggs. Each was almost twice as tall as her, and they were oddly segmented along the sides. “What are these?”
He turned around, grinning when he saw them. “Yes! There should be five of them. One, two - yeah, I see five. Nobody’s been here.”
“So, what now?”
“We get one, shoot the rest of the watchers, then get everyone else to drive the others.” She saw the silent addendum written in his face - he would slip away as soon as he could. She hoped he did so when nobody else was looking.
“Do you know how to pilot them?”
“It’s just like those haulers once you get inside. Your people can do it.”
Isavel didn’t like the sound of that. The hauler piloting mechanisms were too arcane for her. “Okay, you’r e piloting the first one.”
“For now.” He tried climbing up onto one of the tanks, but scrabbling up a smooth, hard exterior was a doomed endeavour. Isavel smirked.
“Do you need a lift?”
Erran groaned. “How did they do this? There must be another way.”
Isavel looked around, and her glow fell on a catwalk halfway up to the ceiling, with smaller walkways jutting out above the tops of the tanks. “Those.”
“Oh, gods, how do we get up there?”
She shook her head. “No need.”
Isavel called up her wings, filling them with the weightlessness of the dragon’s gift and some of that residual tingling from her encounter with the watcher, and grabbed Erran under the arms. He squirmed as she kicked off the ground and into the air. They went surprisingly high - high enough for him to grab onto the catwalk as they slowed, with a bit of leeway. Once she let go of him she was only gently falling, and it was easy to pull herself up after him.
Erran stared at her. “You can fly?”
She shrugged. She could jump higher, at best. “I’ve never tried flying, exactly. But dragons can fly, after all, so maybe someday.”
He looked awed. “Can I eat some dragon too? I’d love to be able to fly.”
“You’ll have to kill one first.”
He winced. “On second thought, being a coward has benefits too.”
She patted him on the head. “Oh, it’s not that hard.”
“You would say that, gods-chosen Saint Herald whatever your titles are.”
She grinned. It was true - if nothing else, that might explain why she kept spectacularly failing to die. She pointed to the tank. “So how do we get it moving?”
On the top of the egg-like shape was a flat surface with a few dark etchings and a large lattice-textured centre. Erran silently reached off the catwalk and prodded at them. After a moment the central piece split up and slit into the sides, and he slipped down into the vehicle, dropping down with a quiet huff. She called out to him.
“What�
�s in there?”
“Just a bunch of - ah, got it.” Suddenly the inside of the tank lit up, and the seams around the bottom half of the metal eggshell suddenly became more visible. “Oh, this is fun.”
Suddenly the bottom of the eggshell split open, six equal parts each connected to something inside the tank by heavy, smooth-jointed mechanical legs. Three of them extended outwards and slammed into the ground, the other three followed, and the centre of the tank dropped down a meter or so towards the ground, bobbing between the six legs, still a mostly solid-looking hemisphere.
“Hop on!”
Isavel frowned. “Hop on?”
“I’m going to blow the doors out.”
Her eyes widened and she eased off the catwalk, settling on the flat top above Erran’s head. She could see him inside the lit-up cockpit of the tank, lights flickering all around him.
“Ready Isavel?”
She brought up a shield and crouched behind it, holding onto a handle on the top of the tank, letting the dragon’s lightness fill her. She hoped this was stable. “I think so?”
“Okay, let’s try -”
Two of the six panels that formed the top of the tank split apart, flower petals abloom, and a huge pair of guns folded out from behind them. In a split second great blue hexagons of hard light were tearing through the door. The ancient metal screeched as fragments flew through the air and daylight poured into the storage facility. As the sound of dying metal dimmed, Isavel heard Erran whooping from within the tank.
She slapped on the top of the vehicle with her palm to get his attention. “Just go! We need to get those watchers out of the way.”
“On the way! Let’s see how this thing -”
Three of the tank’s legs immediately picked up and angled forwards, slamming into the ground again. The other three lifted up at the same moment as those on the ground balanced the machine forwards, and then the other three made contact. The process was confusing to look at, too many legs moving at once for Isavel to comprehend, so she looked forward instead. It moved; that was what mattered.
The jagged, broken top of the ancient door was heading straight for her. She slid down the top of the tank, gripping hard, and the twisted metal passed barely a meter above the tank’s roof.
Second Contact Page 21
