Swords of Waar

by Nathan Long

  Lhan stared. “Truly, the wonders of the Seven are limitless.”

  And there was my answer. The sprinkler system didn’t work because these backwards nimrods didn’t know what it was, and it hadn’t been serviced in a thousand years. Doors, security systems, water collection systems—those were things the priests woulda had to figure out early. Fire prevention? They wouldn’t even have known to look, and neither had Jack Wainwright. The last time he was on Earth, fire prevention was an axe and a bucket of sand. I might have just fucked this place up way worse than I meant to, and I had no idea how to fix it.

  I hissed, uneasy. “All that water in the tank, and who knows how to get it to the fire? This might get serious.”

  Lhan started ahead. “Then we had best act quickly.”

  “Right.”

  I followed after him, and we walked into the flames.

  ***

  Twenty yards on and the fire was behind us, except for the smoke, which followed us down the hall, making everything hazy and red. This area felt fancier and more enclosed than the other levels, more like an office than an airport. The floor was carpeted with some kind of orange spongey stuff, and the walls were closer together.

  A few priests were hurrying in our direction, I guess to check on what had happened, but when they saw us coming, they turned and ran like the devil was after them. I jumped ahead, trying to stop them before they told anybody we were coming, but the smoke was so thick I only managed to grab one. I shook him.

  “Where is the control room? Where does the Wargod control the temples?”

  “Kill me, demoness! I care not! Though you burn us alive, I will never betray Ormolu to the devils of the One!”

  Goddamn fanatics. “Fine, I’ll find it myself.”

  I shoved him head first into the wall and we kept going as he slumped to the floor.

  A few seconds later footsteps thudded in a corridor off to our left and we whipped around, peering through the smoke and ready to fight, but it was some guy running away from us, shouting into a side room. “Summon the guards from below! Have them bring water! Hurry!”

  Twenty feet more, and another intersection appeared out of the haze. A line of priests was forming up to block the left arm of it and peering around like nervous rabbits. Two of ’em had wands of blue fire.

  Lhan edged back. “It appears the others raised the alarm. Should we see if we might avoid them by going right?”

  I chewed my lip. “I wish, but I’m guessing whichever way they’re trying to stop us from going, that’s the way we need to go.”

  “Astutely reasoned, Mistress.” Lhan coughed and raised the wand toward the priests’ line. “The same as before?”

  I coughed too. The fucking smoke was going to kill us before the priests did. At least it gave us some cover. “Yeah. Just remember not to hit me when I drop—”

  Lhan turned and looked back the way we’d come. “More.”

  I looked around. Priest-shaped shadows were coming through the smoke. Around ten of ’em, all armed.

  “Fuck.” My plan of having Lhan fire from cover while I went in like a weed whacker stuck its legs up in the air and died. The reinforcements would overrun him in a hot second.

  I looked back and forth, heart thudding. There was a way, but… I cleared my throat. “I think we can make this, Lhan, but… but I’m gonna have to pick you up.”

  His jaw tightened. “You may not.”

  “Aw, come on, Lhan. You’d rather die?”

  “I value my honor more than my life.”

  I was starting to see red. “Okay, then. How ’bout your people? How ’bout your country? If we don’t make it upstairs, they’re screwed! Seems kinda selfish to let a whole world die of thirst so you can save your goddamn dignity!”

  Lhan’s eyes blazed, and he opened his mouth, then shut it again, his jaw flexing. I looked over my shoulder. I was seeing faces through the smoke now, and they were seeing us. They started to shout and run forward.

  Lhan closed his eyes and spread his arms. “Once again, Mistress, you show me where true honor lies—and true shame. Do as you will.”

  “Halle-fucking-lujah.”

  I scooped him up and threw him over my shoulder, then ran for the intersection. Just as the line of priests saw us coming, I jumped over their heads, then landed behind them and sprinted down the hall as they shouted and turned and fired. There was a stairwell on the left-hand wall. I dodged into it as blue fire scorched the walls behind me, then bounded up the stairs five at a time.

  There was an archway at the top. I stumbled through, then stared as I put Lhan down. Had I gone the wrong way? This was no control room. It was a hangar—high-roofed and shaped like a bundt cake pan like the turbine chamber—with strange flying-car looking thingies like the one Ru-Sul had flown off on back at Toaga parked all over, and big submarine-hatch doors going around the outside wall. It was also filling with smoke.

  “Goddamn it! How did the fire get up here?”

  Lhan pointed to some kind of junction box on the inner wall of the bundt pan. It was smoking like an orange grove smudge pot, and all the pipes and ducts around it were leaking smoke too. The fire must be traveling from floor to floor through the air conditioning system. Bet they hadn’t cleaned that out in centuries either.

  I turned back to the stairs, wondering if we should go down again and look for the control room down there, but it was booming with running footsteps. The guys we’d blown past were coming up fast.

  “Damn it. Onward and upward.”

  I looked around and saw the opening to another stairwell at the base of the central column.

  “There.”

  We sprinted for it, dodging around the parked vehicles. Some of ’em were the same model as I’d seen before, flat-bottomed ski-doos, but others looked like futuristic city buses, long and sleek and shaped like a bar of soap, and some were the size of yachts, but with guns sticking out all over the place and what looked like bombs slung underneath. Man, if I coulda figured out how to fly one of those we woulda really evened the odds. But there was no time. The priests were spilling out of the stairwell behind and started blasting at us with everything they had.

  We dodged behind one of the bus thingies and made it to the stairwell before they could get line of sight again. Unfortunately there were more priests waiting for us at the top of the steps. Two blue bolts lanced down at us as we came around the last curve, melting the walls.

  I shoved Lhan back and launched straight at the shooters, screaming like a death-metal singer. Crazy, yeah. But with more guys coming up behind us, there wasn’t any time to come up with some kind of fancy strategy.

  Fortunately, being big, pink and loud worked its usual magic, and they freaked, flinching back instead of zapping me, with their beams zig-zagging all over the place. That wasn’t much better. I nearly got diced into bite-sized pieces as they wrote lite-brite hieroglyphics into the air, but I flinched too—fortunately in the right direction—and only got an inch of hair singed off as I smashed, slashing and shouting, into their line.

  “Blood! Death! Kill!”

  Yes. I really said that.

  What I’d meant to say was something scary about being a demon of the One who had come to kill them and use their blood as a sacrament for my unholy rites, but “Blood! Death! Kill!” is what actually came out of my mouth.

  Anyway, it worked. Or maybe it was the giant blade cutting everybody to pieces, or Lhan shooting past me with his wand and torching guys left and right. Whichever, they turned and ran, and Lhan and I ran after ’em, cutting down the slow ones as we went, and the priests behind us pounding up after.

  We came out into another curving hallway, as high as the other inner circles, but with a much tighter curve, like it was closer to the center of the temple. It was also hazy with smoke, just like below, and there were flames in the distance—lots of flames.

  “Fuck. This is really getting out of hand.”

  The priests we’d chased outta the st
airwell were falling back to a bigger group who were surging up the curved hall from the left, and the ones behind us on the stairs were coming up fast. We backed to the right of the door so we wouldn’t be caught in the middle, then pulled ourselves together as the priests from the stairs spilled out and merged with the rest. Like before, since they were guarding that direction, I figured that direction was where we wanted to go.

  I swallowed and shook out my arms. “Come on. We gotta hit ’em now before they get themselves set.”

  Lhan lifted the wand. “I am ready.”

  But just as I was psyching myself up to go all viking on their asses, a little robed figure pushed through them, backed up by four temple guards, all with blue wands.

  “Do not fight, brothers! Rescue the holy artifacts and sacred texts and escape! I will deal with these heretics!”

  Even shouting, that voice was as limp and wet as a used rubber, and I knew it as soon as I heard it.

  I smiled. “Chinless. Just the man I wanted to see.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  DURU-VAU!

  The priests looked relieved to be let off the hook and ran off like frightened chickens as Duru-Vau strode toward us with his escort. The hall behind him was deserted in seconds.

  “I know what you want, demoness. You want my death. Come forward, and you may try to take it.”

  I sneered and shouted back. “Actually, I could give a rat’s ass if you live or die, punk. All I want is to stop you from stealing everybody’s water.”

  “One cannot steal what one already owns, but if you wish to stop the turbines, their controls are behind me. I wish you luck learning their use.”

  “I got a better idea. I’m gonna make you use ’em. Right after I slap the living shit out of—”

  Before I could finish, the guards with the wands started firing, and these guys knew what they were doing. Two of them shot directly at us, while the other two started sweeping theirs back and forth like machine gunners, trying to cover the whole hall.

  I squeaked and grabbed Lhan and jumped back thirty feet in a single second, then took another bounce to get back behind the curve of the hallway out of the line of fire. There wasn’t gonna be any charging these guys, and no way to get in the middle of them so they couldn’t fire without hitting each other. There wasn’t any cover in these smooth-ass circular hallways either. All my usual tricks were useless.

  Or were they?

  I put Lhan down and turned to him as we kept backing up.

  “You gotta slow ’em down. Back up, but keep firing every time you see one show even just a shoulder around the curve.”

  “Aye, Mistress. You have a plan?”

  “If you can call running around in circles a plan.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Stay alive.”

  He fired past me, shaving a smoking slice out of the curve of the wall. “As long as you do the same, beloved. Luck be with you.”

  I went.

  I pounded down the hall away from Duru-Vau and his gunners as the crackle of wand fire echoed from behind me. I clenched my teeth, praying it was Lhan fanning back the guards, and not the guards lasering him to pieces. At least the firing kept going. That was a good sign, right?

  It was easy going at first. I was taking twenty-foot strides and loving getting to stretch my legs to the limit, but halfway around the circumference of the circle, things got hairy. The fire was really spreading on this side, and the hall was filled with smoke and flame. There was burning junk all over the floor, the walls and ceiling were buckling and melting, and I was, you know, naked.

  I tightened my strides and bunched up, then sprang long and low, leaping through it all like Evel Knievel jumping a bike through a hoop of flame. Only trouble was, this was more like a tube of flame, and I couldn’t see well enough to tell if I had a good landing place or not.

  As it turned out, there was a spot to land, but I wasn’t heading for it. Some big air-conditioner looking thing had dropped through the ceiling, and was laying there like an island in a sea of flame, but I was angling away from it, right toward the burning wall. With a wild-ass swipe of my sword, I swerved sideways in mid-air and managed to catch the very edge of it with one foot. It was a sharp edge, though, and I could feel the ball of my foot slice open as I kicked off.

  At least it got me clear of the fire. I landed on spongy carpet again and kept going, leaving bloody prints with my right foot at every step and bounding past priests carrying books and crates toward the stairs. They didn’t even have time to react before I was past ’em.

  Another ten strides and I started hearing wand fire ahead of me instead of behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Lhan was still holding. Ten more strides and I saw the blue flashes ahead of me through the smoke. I poured it on, and the scene came into view around the curve of the hall—the four wand guys inching forward and firing ahead, Duru-Vau following behind, but keeping well back from Lhan’s return fire.

  I took one last big stride, kicking high and raising my sword as I arced up behind them. My plan was to come down with my feet between Duru-Vau’s shoulder blades, then chop up the gunners while the little fucker was picking his teeth out of the carpet. It only half worked.

  I don’t know if he had eyes in the back of his head or whether he was just naturally nervous, but Duru-Vau looked over his shoulder just as I was coming down and managed to scoot out from under me like a stepped-on bar of soap.

  He screeched a warning to the wand guys, but it was way too late. They turned around just in time to catch my blade right where they needed it most. I caught the first guy between the teeth, came out the back of his head, chopped through the next guy’s neck, cut the third guy in two at the waist, and got jammed up halfway though the last guy’s pelvis.

  I cleared the blade with a kick, and turned to grab Duru-Vau, but the slippery little bastard was already disappearing around the curve of the hall.

  “Mistress!” Lhan was charging forward, wand at the ready.

  “Good job, Lhan! Come on.”

  I didn’t wait. If Duru-Vau knew how to operate the turbine controls, I needed him. I sprang after him, skimming close to the wall and cocking my sword back, ready to hit him with the flat, but just as my feet left the ground he spun and unloaded at me with his palm.

  In a panic, I kicked at the wall and veered left, but not quite fast enough. The spell rippled past my legs and even though I only caught the very edge of it, it turned them to jelly. I hit the ground feet first, but my knees couldn’t hold me, and I crashed down tits first and slid into the wall.

  Duru-Vau looked like he was going to stop and finish the job, but then a bolt of blue fire grazed his leg and he jumped back, screaming, and started limping away.

  Lhan ran to me as the little priest vanished into the smoke. “Mistress, are you wounded? Can you—”

  “Help me up. We can’t let that little fuck get away. But don’t kill him, Lhan. We need him.”

  Lhan took my arm and pulled me up. My legs were all pins and needles, but my knees held, kinda. Lhan caught me as I tottered.

  “Jae-En, perhaps you should—”

  “Just gotta walk it off. Come on.”

  We started down the hall, me wobbling, Lhan propping me up. Ahead of us I could see Duru-Vau’s silhouette limping away through the smoke, as slow as an arthritic turtle. Another of the world’s most exciting chase scenes.

  Ten yards later, he angled for a pair of big double doors on the outer curve of the hall.

  “Faster!”

  Lhan and I picked up our pace as he reached the doors and held up his bracelet in front of the circle. I thought we were gonna be way too far away, but these doors didn’t whoosh open, they rumbled open, slowly. Even through the smoke I could see they were twice as thick as the other doors in the temple, with all kinds of deadbolts and meshing gears behind the smooth white plastic. Heavy duty security.

  Duru-Vau stumbled through them as soon as the gap was wide enough, but the doors kept opening. I pulled Lha
n ahead, my pins and needles starting to wear off. The doors thudded open, paused, then began closing again. We weren’t going to make it.

  “Goddamn it!”

  I whipped Lhan ahead of me, through the doors, then powered forward like a drunk fullback and fell through them just as they boomed closed behind me. I could feel the the rumble of gears and the jolt of bolts slamming home as I struggled to my feet. Wherever we were, it was dark and filled with smoke, with a weird sea-green glow coming from somewhere deeper in the haze. My ears were filled with the hum of electronic equipment.

  I looked around, then stared. Curving off into the smoke to the left and right of me was a line of tall silver statues standing in narrow alcoves in the walls. They were as smooth and polished and bland as everything else in the temple, but they still made me uneasy. Either they were supposed to be deliberately arty, or whoever made them didn’t know shit about anatomy. They looked like 3D versions of some kid’s stick figure drawing of a deep sea diver—heads like snail shells sitting on top of skinny, stretched out bodies, Popeye arms, and legs that bent the wrong way.

  And weirder than their looks was that they were there at all. The rest of the temple didn’t have any art. It had all been as bland as an airport lounge. Why suddenly go crazy with the ornamentation? Was this place some kind of chapel, like the one Ru-Zhera ran in Modgalu? If so, they needed to fire their sculptor. He made every single one of their gods look exactly the same.

  Duru-Vau was backing away from us, hate all over his ratty little face. “You think you have me trapped now? It is you who are trapped. You will die here!”

  He was pulling back for another palm strike. I stabbed my sword into the floor, trying to use it to pull myself up and feeling like I was made of tin cans tied together with string. He was gonna beat me to the punch.

  “Priest.”

  Duru-Vau turned. Lhan was raising his wand.

  Duru-Vau was faster. He shot his palm out and the air flexed in front of it. Lhan slammed back against the wall, neck and shoulders first, and slumped to the ground, the wand slipping from his hands.