The Nightmare Stacks
Page 20
10.
INTERLUDE: MALHAM
Agent First’s description of the terminal of the shadow road proves accurate. The geomancers wait beside the cold iron spike that anchors it to the not-ground of the blue-glowing void between the worlds as First Liege and her escort approach.
Although she rides a cavalry mount for the time being, First Liege wears the silver-and-ivory fluted light steel plate of a rider of firewyrms, as befits her command. Instead of a crest her helmet is crowned by a golden circlet, jade power gems blazing balefully. As she stares coolly down at First of Geomancy, they flare so brightly that they cast the shadow of her mount’s head and neck across the magus’s face.
“Why the delay?” she asks, her tone deceptively light. “Is the road not yet re-anchored?”
“High Lady.” Magus First of Geomancy bows deeply, but does not fully prostrate himself before her: court etiquette is onerous and time-consuming, and is therefore abbreviated in the field. “The road is indeed open, but the gate is not yet re-anchored. I desired to complete the move before Your Excellency ventures across its threshold.”
“Not yet re-anchored?” First Liege’s ear flaps hinge subtly backwards in response, a reflexive expression of anger and scorn. Magus Second cringes visibly, having felt the wrath of First of Airborne Strike Command’s mercurial rage in the past, but her superior is made of sterner stuff and stands his ground, even as the All-Highest’s wife hisses: “Pray explain.”
“High Lady. The gate was anchored by Agent First of Spies and Liars when that one came this way. If she was plotting treachery even then”—it is clear to all present that First Liege bears Agent First no love, and obvious that the sentiment must be reciprocated—“she might well have sought to booby-trap the exit. And the failure of Agent Second to return hither evinces the plausibility of this supposition. Also, she used excessive mana in the process of securing its far end in Urükheim. Pray grant this one the gift of a tenth-day to re-anchor the gate with care, moving it from this end, and not only will you be guaranteed a safe transport; the treacherous one will be unable to find it and sneak behind your back.”
The magus’s case is unassailable, and although First Liege is deeply annoyed by the delay, she yields to his logic. “Yes, then make it so. We shall wait while you proceed.”
The magus clears his throat delicately. “There is one thing.” He gestures at the glowing oval of the gate. “We will expend considerable mana of our own in this operation. I and my Second require sacrifice, lest we are left exhausted when you need us subsequently.”
First Liege stares silently from atop her mount for so long that First of Geomancy suspects he has made a fatal misjudgment, and composes himself accordingly. But he is mistaken. First Liege bottles up her anger and frustration and beckons one of her troopers closer. His mount sidesteps, snorting angrily as her own mount hisses and lowers its horn, challenging the intruder until First Liege yanks on its reins. “Do we have any sacrifices in train?” First Liege demands of her lancer. “My magi hunger.”
“My Liege!” The knight dips his head, peacock-feathered plume bobbing: “We brought none such, anticipating forage beyond the road.” The unspoken, unspeakable truth hovers in the starry void: the Host is already desperately short of serfs, having left so many behind when they entered hibernation. They expected to find the road already re-anchored in underpopulated wilderness, a hub from which they could harvest bodies at will. “The useless urük mouth can be spared.” He means the prisoner, manacled and blindfolded, who shuffles along with their tail of slave-technicians and body servants. He pauses delicately. “Or if my Liege requires it, I or any of my lance stand ready for the ultimate sacrifice—”
First Liege raises her chin, dismissing the offer. “The urük will do,” she says. “Bring it hither.” To First of Geomancers, she explains: “We have but one blood offering. Use it wisely. Your first duty once the road is re-anchored and secure is to find provender for your second.”
First of Geomancers bows deeply, while his Second prostrates herself before First Liege. “Your will shall be made stone,” says the first magus, as two dismounted lancers step forward, frog-marching the stunned urük prisoner. She’s shaking her head dizzily, as if trying to wake from a dream: geas-bound, of course. The soldiers force her to her knees, remove her blindfold, and pull her head back. She looks up to see First of Geomancers smile at her.
First Liege makes a complex gesture, unbinding the fog that wraps the urük woman’s mind.
Awareness dawns almost instantly. The urük woman looks away from the magus and instead stares angrily at First Liege. She hisses, in Agent First’s voice: “Your life will be mine!”
“I don’t think so.” First Liege’s ears go up in satisfaction as she gives First of Geomancers the signal. He steps forward. The sacrifice struggles, but with two lancers holding her and her arms manacled her resistance is ineffectual. First of Geomancers bends towards her, as if to kiss her exposed throat: then he bares his teeth.
Cassiopeia Brewer’s body screams for a long time. Then the blooded geomancers go to work.
* * *
With the road lifted and re-anchored in a flare of false lightning, the scouts of the First Lady of the Host trot forward onto ley lines less well traveled, a branching network that stretches beyond the newly moved gate. First of Geomancy tiredly conjures up a map of the network and points at the widest path, signed as being anchored to the node on which they stand: “Hither lies the abandoned enemy bunker and the path adjacent to their palace.” He breathes deeply, almost panting with effort. “We came through it. Forward scouts would . . . would . . .”
First of Geomancy fed deeply, consuming the life-energy and mana of the urük prisoner barely an hour earlier, but he is gray-faced and tired from the effort of moving the shadow road anchor-point and binding it to the ley lines. His Second is even worse, lying supine, his stretcher borne by two apprehensive servants (neither of whom wishes to become the object of a mage’s bloody thirst). As the soldiers move forward, another two servants ease First of Geomancy onto a palanquin, draw blackout curtains, and shuffle forward beneath his weight.
Highest Liege of Airborne Strike nods at her Second: “Send scouts to secure that ley line,” she tells him. “Now let’s see what we have here.” She rides forward between her escort of knights, straight and proud, and as her steed snorts and steps off the ley line onto solid rock she looks around at the marshaling area in her new demesne for the first time.
It is early evening in the Yorkshire Dales. Grass and scattered rocky debris render the surface treacherous for her mount, but the war-steeds of the Host have excellent night vision. Scrubby trees grow here, spaced well apart, their bark gnarled and twisted from the winds that blow over the low mountains to the west. Highest Liege inhales deeply: the night air smells of grass and moisture. Turning her head—her helm and gorget make this tricky—she sees a horseshoe-shaped waterfall of pale stone frozen in flight behind her. Plants grow from its surface, their outlines indistinct in the moonlight shed by the dwarf planet floating overhead.
This world is alive. Highest Liege smiles. If her idiot stepchild spoke truth in her report—and she has yet to catch Agent First lying—there is little mana here. There are no priests of darkness to shatter moons or invite in the undead horrors from beyond the walls of the universe. There are pitifully few magi, too, and those that exist are in hiding for some reason. Overhead an owl hoots, and in the bushes below small things quiver for cover. Her smile tightens. There is little sign of habitation here. The Second Lance scatters swiftly, hooves pounding on grass as they spread out to secure the perimeter. The horseshoe-shaped valley will do nicely, she decides, once they secure the crest of the cliff. She turns and looks at her First of Lancers. “Inform my staff that we have a defensible area and they are to bring Strikers One and Two forward. If your scouts find nothing untoward, then Air Defense will deploy on the cliff
top yonder, accompanied by Third and Fourth Lances for security. I want them dug in before the daystar rises. Prepare shelter from daylight for our magi at the foot of the cliff—there are caves, I can feel them below us.”
She pauses. “If you find any urük here, take two alive; kill the rest. Our magi need to feed.”
Her mount snarls softly beneath her, and she feels it tense and flex the great hinged scythe-claws that fold alongside its hooves. Its head dips towards the horizon. She sights along the fluted spiral of its horn towards the distant light-glow on the horizon. That must be the urük-hive Agent First tried to describe, she realizes. “Tomorrow, all this belongs to my Lord,” she observes, and her knight salutes, fist raised to forehead. “You have your orders.” He wheels and rides back towards the troops who guard the gate, already waving hand signals. And the day after that, all that is his will be mine, Highest Liege resolves. Then she raises a hand to pull down the crystal visor of her helm and prepares to dismount her ground steed, because there is a commotion near the ley line and if she is not mistaken that means that her servants are about to bring through her real mount: Striker One.
* * *
As the huge moon sets and the sky darkens towards true night, the ground crews in Malham Cove prepare the first two firewyrms for flight.
Strikers One and Two are fettered, quiescent, upon the cracked limestone and grass below the cliff face. The dragons’ barrel-shaped thoraxes rise and fall slowly, air pumping through their air sacs. Their legs, weak and hollow-boned, are splinted with a filigree of titanium trusses to stop them shattering under the weight of riders and weapons payloads. Woven copper wire hoses vanish into mouth and rectum, driven by moaning ventilator boxes to keep the corrosive fumes away from anyone who might approach them. Once airborne the deadly fluoritic acid (a decomposition product of wyrmspit) will diffuse away naturally, but close to the ground it can dissolve the bones inside the ground crew before anybody notices.
The dragons’ necks stretch forward from their bodies, eyeless heads twitching from time to time. The anesthetists stand to either side of the lipless, circular maws, chanting softly as they cautiously raise the creatures from their thaumaturgic slumber. The firewyrms’ lumbar ruffs, folded masses of tentacles as fine as any jellyfish’s, pulse slowly within the safety sacks that the ground crew use to avoid accidental contact with the lethal stingers. Huge bat-wings are hobbled carefully in bags of spider-silk to prevent the creatures from momentarily unfurling their control surfaces and sending the ground crew flying. And the slender counterweight spikes of their barbed tails rest between V-shaped safety brackets, lest the dragons lash out and slice an unfortunate in half. Even the cavalry mounts of the Host—with their blue-glowing eyes and fangs and horns, slobbering bloodstained drool and snarling for flesh—step lightly around the sleeping firewyrms of Airborne Strike Command.
The armorers are busy strapping the riders’ thrones and their payloads to the monsters. The dragons’ shiny skin, color-shifting chromatophore scales coated with a slippery fluorinated wax that can resist the effects of wyrmspit, makes it difficult to secure anything to them. It takes bonds of dull metal alloy, locked tight around legs and neck and tail, to hold weapons and riders in place. When the harness has been adjusted and stores hung from either flank, the pilot and battle magus’s howdah is bolted to the creature’s back. Tandem saddles sit within a cage of steel and transparent crystal, warded to resist not only the wyrm’s own fire but the arrows and death spells of an evenly matched enemy. Not that they are likely to encounter magic countermeasures in this backwards and unsophisticated land.
A thin frost rimes the blades of grass beneath their boots as First Liege and her back-seater approach Striker One. Their eyes are wide and dark, pupils fully dilated. They move with confidence because the night vision of the People far exceeds that of the urük of this world. Behind her, the crew of Striker Two follows suit. The pilots wear light armor, but the magi are only robed and hooded against the light. They lack the protection of cold iron, for the metal that might absorb and disperse the mana of an attack can also prevent a practitioner from delivering a blow. Slaves scurry to position mounting blocks beside the howdah, then abase themselves before their lords and ladies.
Highest Liege turns and looks up the crest of the cliff. For all her keenness of eye she sees no sign of the dug-in perimeter guards, or of the earthworks they are preparing for the arrival of the air defense basilisks. She raises her chin in satisfaction, then climbs the short ladder and raises her arms while servants strap her to the saddle. At last she waves at her crew chief. The woman waits by Striker One’s head, holding a heavy jar sealed with occult symbols at arm’s reach. Now the crew chief dips her head, then turns the jar towards the back of Striker One’s neck and taps sharply on the bottom with a silver wand.
The brain leech emerges, blindly seeking shelter from the chilly air. Highest Liege closes her eyes and smiles rapturously, feeling the smooth power of the leech’s muscles as if they are an extension of her own body. It’s eager to bond with her mount, for the dragon’s blood is heady and satisfying and the familiar ulcers are barely scabbed over from their last flight, even though many years have passed in stasis. The leech squirms home behind the firewyrm’s skull and Highest Liege takes up the mental reins with a sense of relief. Yes, everything is as it should be. She raises her hands again, makes a corkscrewing gesture. Ground crew rush to pull the drain hoses from the dragon’s mouth and anus, then remove the tentacle bags and release the wing leashes as she urges her mount to lumber to its feet and begin to turn, dragging its tail away from the safety cleft.
“Magus, your status if you please.”
She feels her back-seater shift his balance through the frame of the protective howdah. “I am ready and my wards are prepared, Highest.”
Highest Liege opens her eyes and looks at the landscape around her, then at her mount’s scaly neck. She frowns, then wills it to shift color. Chameleon-like, the dragon responds, fading into the scenery. This is only the first of its defenses; before the People found and domesticated them the ancestors of firewyrms were prey to basilisks (likewise domesticated and turned to martial use). If you can be seen, you are dead is the watchword of dragonriders everywhere. As the blood-drinking sorcerer in the seat behind her begins his chant, Highest Liege finds herself increasingly unable to detect her mount, her seat, or indeed her own hands. She seems to be made of glass, and this amuses her enough to draw a brief, delighted chuckle, for she knows it to be a symptom not of psychosis but of the power of her back-seater’s defensive countermeasures. She takes a step forward, then another, driving her mount’s body via the brain parasite entangled with her own will: and she becomes huge and powerful and lighter than feathers. The breeze tickles her naked skin, an unbearable provocation, and she stifles the urge to draw breath and bellow a roar of challenge at the sky.
“Striker Two, prepare to follow.”
Her helm takes her words instantly to the ears of her Second, who acknowledges, promptly: “I obey and follow, my lady.”
Highest Liege drives her awareness deep into the senses of her mount, and it seems as if it is her wings with which she catches the breeze, and her will by which she begins to fall into the sky—for dragons are far too heavy to fly like birds or bats or coatl: it takes much mana to lift a ten-ton monster and its cargo of death. The sunken valley drops away below, the world spreading its apron, shadows crossed by strings of amber lights stretching into the distance in all directions.
Striker One spreads its wings and soars, spiraling up and out from the marshaling zone beneath the frozen limestone waterfall, while Striker Two rises to take up position astern and to port. Then the two dragons commence their night patrol, while beneath them the first light cavalry battalion rides out of the shadow road.
PART 3
MANEUVERS IN THE DARK
11.
WHAT TO WEAR TO THE END OF THE WORLD
So he goes downstairs to the back room, where Pinky is fiddling with a compact milling machine and a chunk of wood, and clears his throat. “Uh, do you think it’d be possible for me to borrow the van tomorrow evening?”
“Nope.” Pinky doesn’t even look up.
“Oh.” Alex rethinks his approach and tries again. “I, um, it’s because I have a date tomorrow and I need to pick her up and get her home afterwards. A taxi will cost an arm and a leg, the busses don’t go there, and my bike’s no good. Any suggestions?”
Pinky straightens up and turns away from the workbench. “Coffee,” he grunts, and goes through into the kitchen. Alex trails behind. Coffee isn’t yes but it isn’t no either. Pinky picks up an elderly aluminum stovetop kettle, fills it from the tap, and puts in on the gas ring. “Decaf for you, I think,” he says thoughtfully, then begins to rummage in the cupboard. Bits of caffeine-related detritus rain down on the counter: an AeroPress, two chipped mugs, and something that looks like a prototype artificial heart with a trailing mains lead. “The van’s a works motor, and the contents of the back office—you didn’t say she’s staff, did you?”
“No.” Alex shakes his head. “Civilian.”
“Then you can’t drive the van.” Two more mugs appear on the worktop. “You’re on decaf, but the Vicar’s on full-fat, isn’t he?”
“What, Pete? He takes his coffee regular—” Alex looks around. “Where is he?”
“Out with Brains, fetching the tank from the MOT test center down the hill.”