She screamed. She wheezed. The texture of the warehouse subtly changed.
As she settled herself down amidst her torture, a horizontal wave of purple light burst from her body and spread across the room.
A deep explosion knocked everyone to the floor, blew the upraised shield from Brynd's arm. He sprawled across the flagstones to retrieve it.
The battle regained momentum as the civilians scrambled to safety, and eventually the Night Guard managed to get themselves into position of forming a wall between the enemy and the hostages. By now about seventy enemy soldiers had arrived, and dozens more were soon filing into the room, many more than Brynd had anticipated, but he didn't reckon they would be too much to handle.
He screamed an order. The Night Guard merged, locked shields above their heads and in front, utilizing the hoplon's shape to form a phalanx formation. Arrows came crashing into them, an inexorable iron rain.
Under this metal shell, they nudged forwards.
*
Voland almost despaired at the sight of another delivery of casualties. Most of the time he felt like he was merely patching up the living dead.
Over the last two days he had slept for maybe eight hours in all. It was a job without gratitude, a life without motivation. As soon as one bed was cleared, another two bodies were waiting to use it. Time and time again, he had tentatively touched the detonator-collar round his neck, but it didn't seem as if it could ever be removed.
A moment of peace, finally, as he seized a few minutes to take a sip of water and contemplate his surroundings. He was in a chamber of the temporary hospital, a lantern-lit hole with a few empty cups, a few bits of stale bread.
Where is she now? he wondered.
The light suddenly blew out and he was left in darkness, uttering a weary sigh. Suddenly a wind caressed, one he was familiar with, like an old friend. Or friends.
'Voland…' they chimed.
'… we've found you again.'
'We want to help you, but we bring bad news.'
'Bad.'
'Sad.'
'Oh, so sad.'
Voland stood up, discerning the faintest glimmer of their wraithlike wisps. The devil chorus had returned. 'What is it?'
'Nanzi has left us, Voland.'
'Died.'
'We felt it, so sad.'
'Oh, so sad.'
Like an arrow in the heart, it struck home. He sat down, stunned. He tried to process what the Phonoi had just told him as they spun around his head. They were dizzying. He felt sick.
'What happened?'
They told him all.
He crumpled to the floor. All meaning had petered out of his life, nothing making sense any more, and soon confusion turned to frustration turned to rage.
Nanzi. The woman he adored, the woman he had helped to save once already, the woman he had helped to craft: there was as much of him in her as there was in himself.
She's gone…
There was a void in his heart so sudden and terrifying, he did not know what to say. In this suffocating darkness he could barely breathe. She died for those people up there, the riffraff. She had no business with their lives, and she was forced to it against her will because of a crime that should not have been thought a crime. It is their fault she isn't with me any more… my Nanzi.
'We're so sorry, Voland.'
'Please let us help you.'
'You have been so kind to us.'
'We want to make you feel better.'
Sobbing on his knees he managed a 'Thank you'. He then wept openly in front of the Phonoi for some time – he couldn't tell how long. Time had begun to lose any context, and slowly anger began to establish clarity in his thoughts.
When he had finally regained his composure he shuffled his way by touch towards the door. Opening it, he stood in the half-light, looking across a sea of the wounded, the dead-to-be.
It was their fault.
FIFTY
Dawn of the fifth morning, Malum was smoking a roll-up, standing at a smashed window, enjoying the contrast of the hot ash he occasionally flicked, and the cold wind. He was watching the Empire's soldiers mount an offensive against the border between Althing and the Ancient Quarter, buffer zones lying just 0east of the city centre. The savage shouts of war seemed so remote, so unreal. Grey clouds whipped across the horizon, over violent white-tipped surf. Smoke from pyres on the outskirts formed horizontal trails blowing down across Villiren.
The floorboards whispered underfoot as JC came up to him. 'Boss, someone to see you.'
On exiting, the man's footsteps crunched over crumbled masonry.
After a silence came a voice: 'Malum…'
Beami. He took another drag, exhaled calmly. She didn't really bother him any more.
'How did you find me?'
'It's not difficult for someone like me,' she replied. 'You leave enough of a trail wherever you go.'
'Even with the city in a state like this?' A half-hearted gesture towards the city, but she didn't say anything. The silence provoked him, eventually, to ask, 'Fuck do you want, Beami?'
'I never realized just how much of this you lorded over. I mean, I knew you had all your business interests and the like, and the odd fight, but all these violent men-'
'Fuck do you want?' Didn't want to look at her, didn't want to let her get the chance to affect him again.
'Won't you take off your mask?'
He considered his answer: 'No.'
'OK. Well, I tried to go back to our house – there was something I left behind, and it's completely empty. Where did you put all our things?'
'My things, mostly.'
'Come on…'
'The hell does anything I own got to do with you?' Eventually he had to face her, a black hood revealing only the outer angles of her face. The rest of her clothing was dark-coloured and tight-fitting, and something about its condition suggested that she'd seen some action in the war. He didn't know quite what to make of that.
Behind her, in the doorway, stood several of his men, but he motioned for them to go.
'You've every right to hate me,' Beami said.
He did and didn't. Most of all he just didn't care any more, and he told her so.
'Well, that's fine – and I don't feel any anger towards you. I want you to know that.'
'I'm surprised you didn't leave the city.'
'I've been doing my bit for the Empire,' Beami replied. 'I took out several hundred Okun at the moment of invasion.' Then, 'That seems like forever ago now.'
'Impressive,' he mumbled, more jealous of that achievement than he was of her other man.
'Look, Malum, I need a relic that I had to leave behind. Can you tell me where I'll find it? I'll understand if you don't want to cooperate-'
'Probably in the underground vault, where we keep all the gang's hauls.'
'So you didn't destroy it then?'
Silence was all he offered. There was nothing to say other than of course he had fucking loved her, so wouldn't simply get rid of her belongings just like that. But he couldn't bring himself to actually let her know such things, preferring to leave the constructs of his ego intact. His mask… what was left of his sanity, intact.
'Can you show me where that vault is?' Beami asked. 'I need to know, Malum. It's urgent.'
'No,' he replied, and heard her gasp. 'But someone else can show you.'
'Thank you, Malum. Thank you so much.'
Such a pathetic tone now. 'Whatever. Just don't steal anything that's not yours.' His attempt at a joke.
She ran up to him and hugged him and whispered, 'I'm so sorry for everything.' Then she stepped away, but he could still feel her intense gaze.
'You're a different man now,' she observed. 'You don't care even if you die, do you?'
'Look after yourself, Beami.' Malum chucked the remains of his roll-up out of the broken window. And as she left, she took all that was left of his being human. There was no need to hide from it any more. Embrace what you are.
The kid couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen, with blond hair slicked down in a modern style, his mask a parody of anger. Beami followed him through part of the underground over which Malum had ruled, cast-iron structures that she could barely see. Beami guessed that they now propped up the roof. Nothing human had designed these passageways, she suspected. Walking though elaborate designs, they kept veering off at odd angles, till she thought they must be heading back the way she came. Now and then they'd come to some subterranean settlement, a nexus of decayed shopfronts and bars, broken chairs littering the open spaces, though a few seemed just recently used. Given the war, they became, like the other quarters, mere ghosts of settlement.
This was how Malum genuinely existed. They had always been a spurious cover, his trading contracts, his networking, these important business operations that he couldn't talk about. He had always consorted with devious men, but she'd never fully grasped the extent of his underlife existence.
The boy said little, just grunting occasionally to indicate a change of direction. He held up a torch, forcing shadows across her path. She asked him questions, to get a better understanding of Malum's other life. 'Who are you?' 'Where are you from?' 'How old are you?'
To the one 'Where are your family?' the kid eventually spoke: 'Bloods is my family, woman.'
He carried a short blade in his other hand, clearly afraid at accompanying this cultist. With shifty glances, nervous steps, the boy led her towards the vault.
'What are all these crates?' Wooden boxes were piled haphazardly in the tunnel all around.
'Drugs, sort of. Alcohol. Nothing fancy.' It was the most he had said during their journey.
'Is that a body?' She gestured to one half-open crate that looked like a human arm was hanging out of it.
'Just a golem – you know, for sex and stuff. This is the vault you want.' A cave-like opening barred by a sturdy wooden door. The kid unlocked it and, with surprising strength, pushed it open.
As he stepped aside, he handed her the torch so she could go in first. It was an unremarkable chamber, filled with the contents of their past life together. She wasn't even that old, so how was it possible to have accrued so much junk? Vases, rugs, brass figures, paintings, all these things were infused with memories, but she shoved them aside and searched for the better part of half an hour, while the kid stood sighing and tutting outside.
'You gonna be much longer?' he asked finally.
'Nearly done.'
He had kept all her relics together in a box at the far end, untouched. She'd half expected them to be smashed up out of anger.
As soon as she found the Brotna relic, the cone she'd spent days working on, all her tension ebbed away. There was nothing else in the box she needed, so she grabbed it and exited the vault.
' 'Bout fucking time,' the kid muttered.
*
Night, as Beami placed the relic in her small room at the Citadel. Due to the proximity of the military lines, she'd had to trek the long way around to get there. Everywhere she went, a figure from the Dragoons or Regiment of Foot would redirect her path. The invasion force had penetrated deep, had seized one half of the city, but it was still relatively safe on that side.
There were fewer than ten thousand Imperial soldiers left. A staggering number had died. Exhausted men and women, lined up time and time again to resist the incursion, their faces haunted and determined and frightened. The citizen units were now few and far between, and Beami wondered if most had been slaughtered or were stationed elsewhere. Some streets had become bloodbaths, lined with human and rumel remains, and in one road she came across the bodies of several Dragoons who had been lined up against a wall and decapitated. She forced herself to look upon this carnage, to remember what was happening here.
Safely in the Citadel, as she lay back in a chair by the fire, mentally exhausted, she forced herself to think that Lupus might still be alive somewhere on his secret mission. He was a Night Guard, for Bohr's sake, and one of the best, but that didn't alleviate her fears. She promised herself that the two of them would get out of this mess as soon as possible. For him the priority was his job as a soldier and, if he survived, they would leave together and find peace.
There was a knock at the door and a soldier entered.
Beami bolted up straight. 'Have the Night Guard returned?'
'No miss, not yet,' the young man answered. 'There's a new cultist who's just arrived, and she needs some help in finding someone. The others are all asleep, I'm afraid, so would you mind seeing to her?'
'Who is it?' Beami demanded, her heart sinking.
'She said her name was Bellis, and she's quite old.'
'Tell her I'll be out in a moment.'
*
Out in a dingy corridor, with soldiers rushing past them, Bellixplained carefully who she was and what she wanted. 'I'm lookinor the boys, they're called Ramon and Abaris, and it's been so lonince I've seen either of them.'
'I remember them.' Beami's voice was soothing. 'They came to offeheir services, but I'm afraid they're thought to have passed away in the fighting. They made an incredibly impressive golem of body parts which hampered the invasion… They really were very brave…'
'The silly buggers,' Bellis whispered, trying hard not to sob.
Beami came to her side and held her. 'I'm sorry. Were you very close to them?'
'How can I explain that bond of companionship in a world where no one regarded us of any use?' Tears filled her eyes, and she closed them tight.
'Come on,' Beami soothed. 'Let's get you somewhere warm.'
They went back to Beami's room, where Beami poured them each a whisky. 'This might not solve the trauma, but it'll ease the pain. So, tell me, what were you doing here?'
Bellis carefully explained what she and the Grey Hairs were doing in Villiren all this time, what they had been seeking, and how she needed someone's help to raise it. Intrigued, and without hesitation, Beami found herself volunteering her services.
'You do realize that this will be big?' Bellis warned. 'There may well be widespread destruction.'
'If you think it will help sway things in our favour – then it will ultimately save many lives. Though I'm not sure I quite comprehend the scale of it.'
Bellis nodded. 'Then, my dear, I will show you.'
*
Across the city, across the night, the two female cultists slippeuietly past soldiers and blockades and mourners gathered at pyres.
They cloaked themselves in darkness as they approached the firsocation.
There, Bellis produced a crowbar and turned to Beami. 'My back isn't what it used to be. Could you help me with this flagstone.'
She indicated one in particular that had an unusual symbol painted on it, one that Beami wasn't familiar with. Possibly a hex sign? Together they prised it open and shifted the stone to one side… and underneath, embedded in the soil, lay a relic. Only the top of the orb was visible.
'A Hefja,' Bellis explained.
By the way Bellis looked at her, Beami felt that she was expected to understand. She thought the antique word meant 'lift' or 'raise', and suggested this.
'That's absolutely right, in the most literal sense. Pretty and bright – how wondrous!'
Beami understood then how it would work, how they would all work. Bellis had already explained there were a number of such symbols painted around the city, which the Grey Hairs had assiduously identified according to ley lines. 'These locations are precise to within an inch,' Bellis added. 'All of them, once primed, should be enough.'
'How will you know if they're successful,' Beami asked, 'if you're going to be somewhere else by the time they're all activated?'
'Ten in total, and all we can do is hope for the best. You see, this isn't my first time…' As Bellis smiled her face wrinkled up in delight.
Beami felt inspired by the woman's confidence, and she had to admit it had taken her mind off things, to have this little assignment drag her ou
t into the middle of the city, to prevent her from sitting alone and brooding over Lupus.
She watched Bellis set the device, turning the dials then placing her palm against its exterior surface. As the old woman withdrew it, the ghost of her hand remained visible under the surface of the orb.
'This one is set,' Bellis announced with a sigh of satisfaction. 'Right, let's get right to the next one.'
*
They shifted across several districts of the darkened city, througesolate lanes, stepping over corpse-thick passageways, while somewhere in the distance there were explosions and, shortly after, garudas arced back overhead.
Luckily eight of the ten devices were to be found in what was still Jamur territory, or no-man's-land. Beami helped in lifting the stones, or in shifting corpses away first. To reach the two devices located in enemy-occupied territory, they had to use relics to shift between degrees of time. They shunted back and forth, vibrating between seconds, in order to reach them in real time, at a point just before they'd activated the first ones. It was all about synchronizing, of course.
Beami felt increasingly in awe of Bellis's skills. The old woman possessed more wisdom and talent and imagination than she would have thought possible, and was surprisingly fit and agile. Now and then they'd stop to rest, and the old woman would whip out a hip flask of sherry, a grin appearing on her face as if the burdens of life had been lifted.
Dawn threatened on the horizon, and Beami felt a renewed sense of urgency because, once light arrived, the war would resume in full.
'Don't worry, my dear,' Bellis said. 'We're just about set.'
The final device was back in Deeping, far across the city and safely behind Jamur lines.
'Do you have any idea,' Beami asked, 'what it will do once it's up and active?'
'One can never be quite sure,' Bellis replied, not really answering her question. They scrambled up to a flat roof that offered a perspective across towards the Shanties. The Onyx Wing rose behind them, and behind that the Citadel, allowing them a perfect view of what was about to happen.
'Do the Jamur military know what you're doing?' Beami asked.
'Not one iota.'
'But what if there are citizens out there, getting in the way?'
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