Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Coya

  Coya was sitting in the back of a small carriage, en route from the Broken Wheel to the siege front, when another massive explosion rumbled across the city from the northern wall, its shockwave rippling through his belly with the heaviness of dread.

  He was too late, he knew, seeing the thick columns of smoke rising into the brightening sky. His suspicions had been right after all. The trap was sprung already, and somehow this was part of it, some terrible Mannian scheme unfolding before his eyes.

  ‘Faster!’ Coya shouted to the driver of the carriage with a double thump of his cane.

  The fellow whipped the lathered zel onwards. But as they turned into the Avenue of Lies the zel clattered to a sudden stop right in the middle of the crossroads, confronted by a crowd of panicked citizens pouring all around them, faces whitened with fear.

  ‘Erēs Preserve Us,’ Coya recited aloud as he gazed north along the Avenue of Lies, seeing how one of the pillars of smoke was rising from the ruins of the main gates in the wall. ‘They’ve breached the gates.’

  ‘Can’t go any further than this,’ said the driver quickly, nervously, stubbornly.

  ‘I need to get closer,’ Coya said to his bodyguard. ‘Find out what’s happening with Creed.’

  ‘What we need to do is get as far from here as we can.’

  The carriage rocked as Coya stepped down onto the cobbles amongst the flow of people. It rocked again as his bodyguard Lynx jumped down lightly from the other side. ‘Stay here!’ Coya told the driver. ‘I doubt we’ll be long.’

  But Coya had only taken a few steps when he heard the driver whipping the zel into a run, and saw him taking off along a side street away from the danger.

  ‘Fool didn’t even ask to be paid,’ spat Lynx in disgust.

  Coya Zeziké stood crookedly in the middle of the crossroads with both hands resting on the grip of his cane, listening to the horns as they sounded their Call to Arms to soldiers and citizens alike. The sounds of battle were loud here, crashing like a wave along the parapets of the wall just beyond the rooftops of the district, where figures struggled in combat through smoke and fire. Right ahead of him, at the end of the Avenue of Lies where the fog of war shrouded the blasted gates, rose the greatest din of all.

  Coya wondered if this was it, impossibly – the downfall of Bar-Khos happening right before his eyes.

  Past him trotted a hundred Red Guards headed for the wall. From the opposite direction a courier zipped by, wide-eyed and kicking her zel for all it was worth.

  Still Coya stayed in the middle of the road, wanting to see what was happening at the gates before proceeding. Like an island of stubborn resistance he stood there peering ahead as people rushed around him, citizens either fleeing from the action or running towards it with whatever weapons had come to hand – hammers and axes, pitchforks and bows.

  What a way to start a new year, he thought, scowling.

  He nearly leaped from his skin as another startling explosion blasted from the distant gateway. Glass shattered all along the Avenue. People ducked their heads and ran onwards in panicked, bouncing strides.

  It was a bomb going off, Coya realized with a taste of bile in his throat. Somehow the enemy had set off a bomb in the vicinity of the ruined gates, catching out those who ran in to reinforce the defending forces there. Screams of the wounded filled the air.

  ‘Come on,’ said his Khosian bodyguard beside him, her voice strained. ‘We need to get out of here before this gets even worse.’

  He had forgotten she was standing there, this replacement to Marsh, this stranger in her skintight suit that kept drawing his eye. Coya ignored her, straining to see what was happening at the far end of the thoroughfare. It was so odd to witness the Avenue of Lies like this, the main commercial artery through the city becoming a siege front in the battle.

  A wall of smoke and grit was rolling down the street towards them.

  ‘Master Zeziké,’ tried his bodyguard again.

  ‘Call me Coya. I’ve asked you that already.’

  ‘Master Coya. We need to leave now.’

  Figures were running back along the street. Armed citizens fleeing from the blasts, waving back those still coming towards them. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting.

  A hand gripped his arm. It was his bodyguard, trying to pull him away, but Coya snarled and yanked his arm free. Frowning fiercely, Coya peered along the Avenue towards the approaching bank of smoke.

  He squinted, spotting the flash of a white cloak in the rolling haze. And then he saw others too, figures clad in white armour and masks, running full tilt along the street and cutting down anyone within reach.

  The hairs rose on the back of his neck.

  Acolytes. The fanatical warriors of the Empire howling in their drug-induced frenzies, come to enforce the Mannian promise of order and prosperity with the points of their blades.

  ‘We need to leave now!’

  His bodyguard was pulling at him again. It almost annoyed Coya, the obvious way in which she handled him with care, knowing all too well that Marsh would have picked him up roughly by now and bundled him to safety. But then Coya glimpsed the fear in the Khosian woman’s expression, and his wits came back to him at last.

  ‘Of course,’ he said to her. ‘Lead the way.’

  The street to the south of them was choked with people suddenly flocking from the buildings, along with Red Guards trying to get through from the opposite direction. Seeing the bottleneck, Lynx led him into a side street where others were filtering too, holding a pistol in her hand now. With the heels of her boots rapping against the cobbles, she hurried in her long-legged stride towards the far end with Coya shambling along as fast as he could.

  He gasped, spotting more flashes of white in the junction ahead. Already some Acolytes were charging into the side street, hacking and cutting at anyone that moved. A few ran at Lynx, howling like wild animals as they came. Lynx stopped and turned side-on with her pistol raised. She shot the first masked Acolyte through the forehead, then drew a stubby machete from her belt and hefted it into the side of a second attacker as she ducked from his swing.

  She was even faster than Marsh, Coya saw with surprise.

  ‘We’re trapped,’ Coya panted.

  Ahead of them though, the Acolytes spreading out from the junction were coming under sudden attack. A plant pot burst against one of their heads, showering those around him with a rain of dirt and breaking his neck with an audible crack. Jeers rose from the nearby rooftop of a corner taverna, where men staggered half-drunk as they started heaving what they could down at the enemy forces below.

  ‘This way,’ said Lynx, and she darted through the side door of a shop with Coya right behind her.

  Through the dim and reeking space of an animal emporium, Lynx led him towards the light of the open front door, past cages of trilling paradise birds and craning desert tortoises. A mug of hot chee still sat steaming on the front counter, and Lynx snapped it up and drained the whole lot before she reached the doorway.

  ‘Hello hello!’ someone croaked out, and they both jerked around to see the big green parrot sitting on a perch in the front window, flapping its wings.

  Lynx flung the empty mug to the floor and stepped outside, looking left and right. ‘Come again! Come again!’ the parrot squawked after them.

  Out in the daylight again, Coya saw the enemy figures closer than he’d ever wanted to see them, battering the door of the taverna while a flaming bottle of alcohol crashed down into their midst in a splash of fire. The drunken Khosians roared from the rooftop.

  Red Guards were clashing with a line of Acolytes in an opposite side street. Lynx led him south away from the scene, her thin shoulders hunched low as she reloaded her gun, plaits swinging as she looked about her.

  In another side street people were being attacked by enemy forces as they fled from a Temple of the Grove, crowding out of its forest of living, leafy pillars in a collec
tive panic. Swords flashed in the daylight. Men and women spilled to the ground and did not get up again. Coya wanted to cry out from the pain of what he witnessed, from the sick horror boiling in his stomach. He was barely looking at where he was going when he shoved into the back of his bodyguard.

  ‘Shit!’

  More Acolytes were flooding from the east into the next crossroads ahead, so close he could see the whites of their eyes behind their masks. Citizens yelled in fright and scattered from their way, fleeing in every direction. Lynx shouldered one of them aside before he could floor her, but then Coya took a shove from another desperate man and crashed down onto the cobbles hard.

  Winded and shocked, Coya groped for his cane while he wondered if this was the end of him, here in the Shield of Khos on the very day of its downfall, so far away from his wife and home. A gunshot cracked out. A figure leapt right over his head. It was madness, too much to take in at once. Everything seemed to be slowing down. Odd, how life grew more unreal in equal measure to how intense it became; as though this dreamy hyper-state was closer to reality than anything else. Coya could hear the rasp of his own breathing like a panicking stranger panting down his ear. Something came to his hand and he grasped it, knowing it was his cane. At last he managed to suck down a lungful of air.

  Struggling up, Coya caught a glimpse of a boy spilling from his feet on the other side of the street. In the next moment, through the passing legs of running figures, he saw the boot of an Acolyte stamping down on the youth’s skull as though it was a ripe melon.

  Fear propelled Coya onto one knee.

  Past his face snapped a white cloak reeking of gunsmoke – another Acolyte, cutting off the screams of a grey-haired matron fleeing for her life, right there in front of him. Lynx was spinning in mid-air to cut through an enemy’s leg below his knee. She turned towards Coya but another Acolyte was on her instantly, screaming the insanities of the fanatic. They were all over the place, white cloaks flapping with splashes of blood. A man took a sword from behind right through his abdomen. Another fell at the chop of an axe through his neck. It was all Coya could do but wheeze for air while giving witness to the butchery, his heart perched mid-beat in his chest, each image searing itself in his mind right down to the living tissue.

  An Acolyte reared over him, bloody sword in hand, and Coya knew right then that he was dead.

  He wished he could muster some bravado in his last moments, spitting into the bastard’s face like Marsh would have managed. But instead, Coya found himself thinking of Rechelle and how she would be broken when she heard of his death, for she adored Coya as he adored her; they were completed by each other, lessened when apart.

  I’m sorry, he said to his wife with all the regret in the world.

  Yet as so often happened in Coya’s life, good fortune struck right when he needed it the most. Maybe it was true what people had always said of Coya’s lucky touch, that he’d had all his bad luck when he was born a cripple, and only had the good to make up for ever since – because suddenly a runaway zel crashed into the howling Acolyte, bowling him off his feet as the animal reared up in the harness of a driverless carriage.

  Suddenly there was Lynx by his side, hauling him bodily up over her shoulder just like Marsh would have done.

  Lynx staggered for the carriage with Coya’s head hanging from her back. He heard her fire her pistol and then she stumbled, almost dropping him, but she stayed on her feet and stepped over a dead Acolyte to the carriage, and tossed Coya into it.

  When he looked up he saw his bodyguard reloading her gun, face pinched with concentration. She seemed to be paying no mind to the hilt of the knife sticking from her side.

  For an instant Lynx looked right at Coya, this woman of whom he barely knew anything, save that she was dying. Over her shoulder a white-masked figure was rushing at her back.

  With a teary grin, Lynx lifted the pistol high and fired it over her head, scaring the skittery zel into flight. Coya rolled back as the carriage bounced off along the cobbles. People flashed by the open flapping door, their screams fading only slowly in his ears though lingering on in his mind, imprinting themselves for as long as he lived.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Nico

  Nico’s eyes were closed, though he felt the skyship shuddering and swaying as it dropped height, and heard the main thrusters roaring as loud as a flood following in their wake. Through whips and crackles of the wind, a great many voices muttered prayers to the World Mother, to Mercy, to Luck, to the Way of All Things.

  ‘You all right?’ said a voice over his head.

  ‘I’ll live,’ he heard his mother reply. ‘I just needed some water. How about you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. You can hardly look me in the eye, Cole.’

  ‘Knocks you on your ass, watching your brother die like that.’

  ‘You sure that’s it?’

  ‘What, I need more?’

  Nico managed to open his eyes by the slimmest of cracks. His head was throbbing and his vision swam, but he could make out his father crouched over him where he lay, and his mother too, awake and talking now; both parents together once again like something from his dreams.

  In the fierce winds his mother’s red hair danced as vibrantly as a flame, captivating his delirious mind. She had a hand cupped to Nico’s skull where a hard lump was pulsing, and she looked down at her son with a battered, grimy expression of concern.

  ‘You think he’s concussed?’

  ‘Maybe. He took a good crack to the head.’

  Nico recalled Bahn dying in his father’s arms while soldiers grabbed at the fallen man; then being knocked out by a kick from someone’s boot.

  ‘I can hardly believe it’s really him. All this time I thought he was dead.’

  ‘Yeah, what was your thinking there, letting him run off like that to train as a Rōshun?’

  ‘Oh, that’s rich. If we want to start passing around some blame here . . .’

  Cole sighed like a man regretting his words.

  ‘Please, I brought him back to you, didn’t I? That has to count for something.’

  ‘You think I’d be talking to you otherwise?’

  Nico blinked to clear his vision, clouded by a sickening wash of colours that resonated with his throbbing skull. He seemed to be lying in the hold of a skyship with his head propped against something soft. The hull door on this side of the ship was missing, which explained all the air blasting in and threatening to freeze them to death – along with the fact that his head was perched right next to the edge. Other figures were sitting with their legs dangling right over the side. It was the only place for them in the crammed space of the hold, where fighters swayed on their feet against each other.

  Cole and Reese stared at each other over his still form.

  ‘How was it, back there?’ he asked her.

  ‘Like a nightmare I never want to talk about,’ she said. ‘Thank you, for getting me out.’

  His father dropped his head with his eyes closed, and Reese lay a comforting hand on his shoulder. A cold tear splashed the back of Nico’s hand from her welling eyes.

  ‘Reese,’ said Cole in a strangled voice, then he shook his head suddenly lost for words.

  ‘I know, husband. I know.’

  He was weeping silently, clamping a hand over his face while his body shook hard. She squeezed his shoulder like she used to all those years ago.

  An explosion rocked the ship, causing everyone standing to stagger from side to side. Hail seemed to scatter against the hull, and then Nico realized what it was – enemy guns firing up at them.

  His head lolled further to one side, so that from the corner of his eye he could see the northern wall of Bar-Khos sweeping past below. Figures were swarming all over its facing slope of earth, clambering up ladders, launching themselves onto the parapet and into the fierce fighting. A gate was lying in smoking pieces and more enemy forces were flooding through the breach, spreading
out into the city beyond.

  People crowded towards the open doorway for a better look, muttering in dismay.

  Fires were raging down there in the northern city streets, their rising pillars of smoke whipped up by the passing of the ship. Citizens could be seen fleeing ahead of imperial forces, who were hacking down everyone in sight. Screams rose up on the wafting hot air of the flames. Guns fired from rooftops, people hurling what projectiles they could at the enemy below.

  ‘Sweet Mercy on them all,’ he heard his mother say.

  Nico could only stare in wonder.

  The ship tilted as the nose levelled off. Rooftops rushed by not far below. They were passing over scenes of gathering resistance now, roadblocks being built across the streets while defenders formed up behind them. Khosian cavalry swept eastwards towards the Avenue of Lies, scattering civilians from their way.

  And then everything was replaced by the white stones of the Stadium of Arms, and Nico saw that the ship was landing inside the great stadium even as another ship was taking off.

  ‘Hold on,’ his mother said down to him, seeing the flicker of his eyes. ‘Just hold on.’

  Nico looked up at her brilliant green eyes and at his father’s worried frown, and knew that no matter what happened now, for good or bad, at least he was home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Coya

  These things have happened before, Coya Zeziké recited in his head while he held a long breath then released it. These things will happen again.

  It was a mental calming exercise, taught to him by one of his childhood mentors of the Way. An aid for restoring context to a frightened mind. Yet Coya felt soothed not at all by the cold stoicism of the words.

  Another skyship was settling on the sandy floor of the amphitheatre that was the Stadium of Arms, its great loft almost filling the space.

  At once, dozens of figures were staggering out of the vessel’s hold, carrying or supporting the wounded towards medicos already desperately at work down there – more survivors from General Creed’s doomed raid against the enemy encampment.