“This is most certainly a fixed system,” he kept reiterating. “Most certainly. It’s possible for us to mount it on a tracked vehicle, and we’re researching that currently, but for now, it’s best to consider this a fixed system, because of the unusual mounting issues.”
“What mounting issues?” Mulaghesh asked.
“Well, General…This is a half-ton gun. So the weight of the weapon system itself—especially its barrel motor, fuel tank, and optimal ammunition feed—is extraordinary. We’re working to reduce that—engineering makes leaps all the time—but it’s not easy. But there’s also the issue of propulsion and recoil. The PK features state-of-the-art reduced recoil designs, but we’re still talking about six rotating barrels firing about 2,500 rounds a minute. That puts a lot of pressure on its mounting system. We tried one demonstration integrating what we believed to be a heavy enough vehicle to handle the sudden burst of force, but…Well. It started tipping over, and nearly crushed the gunner.” The officer scratched his chin. “In other words, think of this weapon system as an engine that essentially creates a column of lead in the air, moving at speeds up to two hundred feet per second. That should give you an idea of the physics of this weapon.”
The instant Mulaghesh pulls the trigger on the PK-512, her understanding of the weapon’s physics grows immensely.
The gun whines softly at first, the barrels rotating up to speed—she sees Saint Zhurgut look up at her, surprised—and then the “column of lead” the officer talked about comes into play.
The barrels flare a bright, blinding white, the air is split with a deafening chatter, and Saint Zhurgut is slammed into the ground like he’s had a stack of bricks dropped on him, his body racked with what look like spasms as around fifty bullets strike him every second. But at the same time, the watchtower—which is mostly made out of wood—begins to creak and croak and drift back, like a reed bending in the wind, pushed by the sudden explosion of force from this weapon; which means that Mulaghesh has to raise the aim of the massive gun to keep it trained on the spiky bastard probably now wishing he’d stayed dormant.
This setup, she realizes, has some serious mounting issues. The heat from the gun scorches the floor and rails of the watchtower, licking at the wood and turning it a deep black. Every second threatens to tear the whole watchtower apart.
But Mulaghesh doesn’t care. She hears herself screaming, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”
She keeps the massive gun trained on Saint Zhurgut, who is slowly, defiantly trying to stand. It’s like his own personal gravity has tripled. His body rattles and shakes and quivers, and she can see myriad dents appearing in his face, his shoulders, his thighs. Yet still he tries to stand.
The train tracks around him are being shredded. The very ground under his feet turns to pulp. An enormous cloud of dust rises up as the PK-512 continues putting hundreds and hundreds of rounds into the skin of the earth, like it’s a pressurized water sprayer sawing through limestone. She’s aware of the rounds ricocheting off of Zhurgut’s Divine armor: a window shatters across the street, a hanging sign is flapping wildly, struck by countless stray rounds. Hot, smoking casings are raining down around her, the legs of the watchtower lost in a pile of broiling brass. The wooden rails of the tower are smoking and, in some places, even on fire. She feels like she’s dangling over the lip of a broiling volcano.
But Mulaghesh still doesn’t care. She’s screaming, shrieking, howling as this terrific, beautiful, monstrous engine of destruction sings, its own low, guttural buzz the perfect countermeasure to Zhurgut’s serene om. For a moment Mulaghesh delights in this savage victory, and she wishes to scream, We’re better at this than you are! We figured war out in ways you stupid bastards never could!
But she is very, very aware of Zhurgut’s right hand, which is slowly, slowly raising his sword.
She swivels the stream of fire, very slightly, to focus on his sword hand. The PK is about as far from a surgical device as one could ever imagine, but she watches with dismay as even this doesn’t stop the sword’s slow ascent.
She hears the sword begin to sing—a low, defiant note breaking through the rage of the PK-512’s buzz: a quiet om….
There is a rumbling to Mulaghesh’s left. Zhurgut’s focus breaks, and he shifts his head…
…and watches, helpless, as the eighty-ton supply locomotive comes thundering down the track toward him at top speed.
She can tell he wants to leap out of the way. But Mulaghesh positions her never-ending column of lead so that he doesn’t have a chance, pinning him to the ground
Mulaghesh howls in triumph. “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”
She halts the stream of fire as the locomotive slams into Zhurgut like he’s a toy soldier. She doesn’t even hear the sound of the impact.
But that might be because the instant that the locomotive hits Zhurgut it suddenly derails, slowly tilting off the shredded, pulped train tracks around Saint Zhurgut and sliding across the muddy harbor yard with a terrific, deafening grinding and screeching. Somehow it manages to miss grazing the watchtower and instead goes sliding into a stack of steel beams and wire coils, which all tumble onto its roof and boiler with a tremendous clanging. Then the locomotive tilts to the left very slightly, threatening to tip over, but instead it hangs there, its right set of wheels suspended in the air, churning to an arrhythmic beat, like a half-squashed beetle pumping its legs, unaware it’s dead.
Mulaghesh watches and realizes the destruction seems somewhat distant to her, and she slowly understands that she’s quite deaf from firing the PK-512.
She lets out a breath. She has to force her hand to release the gun’s right handle, then undoes Signe’s brace holding her false hand to the left handle. She steps back from the weapon. Her whole body is shaking, vibrating, like she’s been put in a can and rattled by a giant, and her skin feels like it’s cracked and sizzling, furious from being exposed to so much heat.
She tries to tell herself, “Stop. Stop. It’s over,” but she can’t find the voice for it.
I’m in shock, she thinks. You know this. You’ve been here before.
She looks at the locomotive, lying across the harbor yards like a beached whale. If Zhurgut had happened to stand just a little closer to the tower, and she’d damaged the rails here instead of there, it would have likely pounded through the supports of the watchtower as it derailed like a bullet through a matchstick—a close shave, in other words.
She slowly climbs down the watchtower ladder, then wanders over to the wreckage. The locomotive’s firebox door has fallen open, and a handful of embers have spilled across its metal floor. The whole contraption glows with a cheery yet hellish red light.
She stops, twists her finger in one ear, and then listens. Despite the blaring “eeeee” in her ears, it doesn’t take her long at all to locate Saint Zhurgut—she just has to follow the sputtering om sound, which now sounds like it’s coming through a bad radio.
He’s been cut in two, she sees, vivisected by one of the train’s wheels. His intestines have unspooled like rice noodles, and though his arm is obviously broken in several places, it’s still reaching for his giant sword, which lies on the ground several feet away.
She cocks her head: the sword is still singing, murmuring, I am Her brightest blade. I am the distant star of war. I am conquest everlasting….
“I sure wish you would shut the fuck up,” she says.
There’s a splash of water from the shore. Sigrud staggers up, one arm folded in close to his chest. He limps over, and his mouth moves.
“What?” shouts Mulaghesh.
“Did we get him?” shouts Sigrud back.
“Kind of,” says Mulaghesh. She points to the twitching body on the ground. “But that’s not Saint Zhurgut.” Her finger moves to the giant sword lying on the ground. “That’s Saint Zhurgut.”
Sigrud frowns. She can’t hear him, but sh
e can tell he says, “What?”
“He said he was Voortya’s blade. I think he meant it both metaphorically and literally. His heart and soul and mind are bound up in that metal.”
She takes off her coat, walks to the sword, and—pausing as she realizes this might kill her, as it was likely intended to—picks the sword up with it, making sure not one piece of metal touches her skin. To her relief, nothing happens, but the sword is terrifically, burningly cold. She sees the blade is cracked, the barest hairline running from its base to its point.
She begins dragging the sword back toward the locomotive. “Come on. Help me get this big fucking thing up in the train. But don’t touch your skin to it. Use your coat or something.”
The two of them lift the sword up into the locomotive door. It takes Sigrud a minute to find the right position, as he’s favoring his left side.
“Broken rib?” asks Mulaghesh.
He nods. “Not a bad one, though.”
“There are good broken ribs?”
“Sometimes. Also a sprained shoulder, I think. I was lucky. Pull harder on your end.”
Once they get it in the locomotive they stand before the firebox, and then—with Mulaghesh muttering, “Ah-one, ah-two, and ah-three”—they hurl the giant sword inside.
Instantly the sword’s om begins to sputter, scream, rise and fall, like a radio frequency oscillating wildly. They watch through the hatch as the cracks in the sword’s blade grow, like thin ice under too much pressure, until it finally dissolves, falling away to nothing but the hilt, which slowly begins to melt, like a wax candle set too close to the fireplace.
“Not normal metal,” says Sigrud.
“No. Definitely not. I’ve got to hand it to your daughter. She got this fucking thing hot.” She watches as the sword appears to disintegrate, dissolving not into bubbling metal but clumps of something soft and powdery, almost like graphite.
She stares into the boiler, leaning in until it’s so hot that her skin can’t bear it anymore.
“Holy shit,” she says. “Holy shit! It’s…It’s damned thinadeskite, isn’t it!”
“What?” says Sigrud.
“Thinadeskite!” shouts Mulaghesh. “His fucking sword is made out of thinadeskite! That means that…” She jumps out of the locomotive and runs to where Saint Zhurgut lay.
But Zhurgut is gone. In his place is a young Dreyling man’s body, thickset and red-haired and very dead. His corpse, however, is maimed just as Zhurgut’s was, vivisected at the waist.
Sigrud walks to stand beside her. She sees him mouth the words, What happened to him?
“That’s what happened in the countryside!” shouts Mulaghesh. She’s no longer sure if she’s shouting because she’s deaf or because she’s excited. “At the farmhouses, at the charcoal kilns! There were the butchered bodies, but nearby, on the same property, was a man’s corpse, dead but uninjured! That’s what must have happened!”
“I…do not understand,” says Sigrud.
“Listen—someone came to these families, gave them a present—a sword—then hid nearby and watched! Then, when the man of the house picked up the sword—”
“He transformed into a sentinel,” he says slowly. “And killed his own family, just as Zhurgut tried to kill all of us.”
“Butchered them just as a sentinel would Saypuris,” says Mulaghesh. “Because it was a sentinel! A man made of thorns, just as Gozha said!”
“Wasn’t the thinadeskite found at only one of the murder scenes?”
“Yeah, the one that didn’t go right,” says Mulaghesh. “Back when they were sloppy, whoever they are. On this last one, at the farmhouse, they must’ve been smart enough to clean up after themselves.”
“Then why did the sentinels stop?” says Sigrud. “Why did they die? Why did they not keep killing?”
“I don’t know! It must have failed somehow. The swords couldn’t keep them here, I guess, and their—hell, I don’t know, their hosts—died from the sheer stress of it. I said it seemed like the killer was testing something—maybe some swords work, and others don’t.” She looks up at the devastation of Voortyashtan. “But it sure fucking worked tonight. They’ve figured out how to do this right.”
“But where are they getting the swords from? How could they have persisted after Voortya died?”
“I don’t know that, either. But…But thinadeskite must be what the Voortyashtanis made their swords out of! A special ore, just for them to use. We need to tell someone at the fo—”
She looks up to see one of the cannons of Fort Thinadeshi slowly rotating to point at their very location.
“Shit!” she says. “I forgot!” She sprints off toward the watchtower, which is now on fire around the PK-512.
“Where are you going?” Sigrud calls after her.
“I’m keeping us from getting blown to pieces!” she shouts over her shoulder.
She runs up to the radio box, sits, and holds its receiver up to her head. “He’s down!” she shouts. “Hold your fire, he’s down!”
There’s a tinny voice on the other end, but she can’t hear it.
“What?” she says into it. “I’m nearly fucking deaf, speak up!”
“Can you confirm, General?” says the tinny voice, much louder. “Can you confirm that the threat is eliminated?”
“Confirmed!” shouts Mulaghesh back. “Confirmed! The threat is…” She pauses as a piece of flaming timber falls to the ground near her. “Shit! Anyway, yeah, the threat is eliminated!”
There’s static. She hears the voice say: “—econdary assault?”
“What?” says Mulaghesh.
More static. Then: “—ssault in progr—”
Then the static dies. Mulaghesh kicks the big metal box, but the receiver is silent. However gigantic the lead-acid battery in this thing is, it was never meant to last so long.
She sits on the ground, fumbling for a cigarillo. She settles for a half-crushed one found in her inside coat pocket, but she can’t find her lighter.
A pigeon alights on a nearby shop rooftop. It coos twice, then sits and watches her with one bemused eye, as if to say, What was that all about?
* * *
—
Lennart Björck has been hiding in a hole in the ground for nearly two agonizing hours when he hears the crash. It’s an enormous, skull-rattling sound, loud enough to knock him down even while standing in a hole, and it makes him wonder if there’s some new Divine monstrosity now causing havoc in the city.
He pokes his head up and sees a tremendous column of steam and dust pouring up near the train tracks…and just to the west, he can see the very tip of the number three locomotive pointing up past the top of a house, though it seems to be on its side, like a beached whale.
“What in the hells…?” Björck climbs out and begins to run to the crash, wondering what could have caused this new headache. Yet as he runs by the test assembly yard he stops and slowly turns around.
He saw something out of the corner of his eye—a flash of light.
The door to the test assembly yard stands open—something that should normally never, ever happen—and someone is lying in the mud before it.
Another victim of that monstrosity? It seems unlikely, as this body is in one piece.
Björck slowly walks toward the test assembly yard. Then there’s another flash, illuminating the dark interior of the yard….
Involuntarily, he shouts, “Hey!”
A figure darts from the door of the yard and sprints up the street. Björck gives chase, but finds he’s unwilling to go too far into Voortyashtan, much of which is on fire or falling apart.
He looks at the body lying in the mud. It’s one of the higher-ranking SDC guards…Karl, he thinks the man’s name was. A bolt is sticking out of his neck.
Björck walks into the yard. He knows what’s in her
e, and knows not to turn on the light. Yet there’s an aroma in the air, a pungent, sulfurous smell he actually finds familiar—he smelled it once, long ago, when he went to a carnival in Jukoshtan with his then-sweetheart, and a man on the pier produced this strange device and said he could capture their images for them for only a few drekels.
“A camera?” says Björck aloud. He scratches his head.
* * *
—
After a while the watchtower, still ablaze, begins creaking in a very disturbing fashion. Mulaghesh imagines the PK-512 plummeting to the ground, all of its ammunition spilling into open flame, and decides to seek refuge in the locomotive. Walking, she finds, hurts tremendously. She can’t remember where she got all these injuries from.
Sigrud is sitting on the edge of the locomotive door, smoking his pipe, arm held close to his body. “Is this victory?” he asks.
“Harbor’s still intact,” she says, groaning as she sits beside him.
“Harbor, yes. But…” He gestures toward Voortyashtan with the bowl of his pipe. He doesn’t need to say anything more. It looks like some impossibly large piece of farming equipment has mown great swaths through the city’s crude architecture.
“Where the hells are Biswal’s troops?” asks Mulaghesh. “I thought they were sending a whole battalion.”
“I don’t know. I thought that…Wait.” He cocks his head. “Do you hear that?”
“I can’t hear much, period. I should have worn ear protection, using that thing. What are you hearing?”
“Gunfire. And…screaming.”
“What? Where?”
He points up the cliffs, at the passage to Fort Thinadeshi.
“But that’s outside the city,” says Mulaghesh. “What could be happening there?”
The two stare up at the cliffs.
Mulaghesh realizes what the voice on the radio said: Secondary assault.
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 80
