Bellis's gaze softened, and she sighed audibly. 'Perhaps there's no one there by now. We can only hope that, can't we?'
Before Beami had a chance to say anything more, Bellis produced a smaller orb, the size of an apple, and began to tamper with it, muttering something to herself. 'A-ha! And here we are. Three… two…'
Villiren groaned.
'… one.'
Some of its thoroughfares glowed a pale violet, began vibrating and shuddering back and forth, and further out, towards the Shanties, there was a sudden haze of bright light.
Bellis grabbed Beami's arm and said excitedly, 'Let's just hope it heads the right way!'
The noises of troop movements became more distinct for a moment, then buildings in the distance began to veer and teeter sideways. Dawn birds scattered manically. People surged out on to the streets in hysteria.
Cobbles spat up in a fluid line in three locations. Then something possessing an electrical outline breached the rooftops, and rose till it gained immense height, thirty, forty, seventy, a hundred feet and then doubled again and again in size until it took clearer form. Tentacles swirled around, crashing through the war-battered architecture.
A giant squid, made entirely from light.
Beami was shocked, truly shocked. Despite having been told, despite having known what was coming from Bellis's explanations, this was far beyond anything she could have contemplated.
As the city delivered itself of this light-formed ghost, the streets themselves giving birth to the monstrosity, Bellis clapped her hands with glee, jumping up and down on the rooftop.
'That thing, that cephalopod,' Bellis explained loudly, 'has been trapped beneath Villiren for millennia. The Archipelago is littered with such electrical ghosts, waiting for re-activation so, after some detailed research into electrical teuthology, all I had to do was put the right relics in the right place.'
These charged corpses were just waiting there to be unlocked.
Vast and garish, the squid's tentacles flailed through the air, swirling in the dawn light. It pushed outwards, dragging buildings apart, trampling everything in its hundred-foot-wide path. Screams rose in the distance and, as a cloud dust accrued in its wake, it ploughed right through the enemy-occupied sectors of the city.
And through countless enemy soldiers.
As it slunk into the sea, probably trashing what was left of Port Nostalgia, it would, Bellis hoped, also eradicate the invasion fleet, those grey vessels in which the Okun and the redskin rumel had arrived. Water sloshed to huge heights as the harbour waters banked and surged far inland, and even the larger boats were cast around like toys.
And all the time Beami kept praying that as few of the Imperial forces as possible would be harmed.
*
Brynd glimpsed Lupus releasing an arrow which imploded a skulomewhere in the darkness. He fired again through a gap between the shields as the Night Guard maintained their protective structure despite the onslaught of redskins and Okun. Brynd was breathless and his legs seemed about to buckle because of maintaining this cramped position. Caked in sweat and blood and severed flesh, he rested his hands on his knees and tried desperately to draw in air.
With limited visibility he could not see clearly where the next attacks might come from, so had to remain ultra-alert. Attacked from the front and sides, simultaneously they broke position only briefly to launch savage assaults on their assailants.
Their recent enhancements had so far kept them alive.
Suddenly the entire building began to shake, causing another pause in the combat. It continued to shudder like it had a fever, before a sound like a Brenna device exploding. Stone spat inwards at every human and rumel and Okun alike, and then there were shouts of a different and more desperate kind. Holes appeared in the structure, revealing strange lines of bright light outside.
That's when the ceiling collapsed.
FIFTY-ONE
Beami was back at the Citadel by the time the news reached her. Bellis was snoring triumphantly in Beami's bed, while she herself waited anxiously for news of where Lupus and the Night Guard had gone. The more she fretted about it, the more she was convinced something terrible had happened.
A senior commander of the Dragoons began giving orders to a squad of soldiers out in the main quadrangle and it was then she heard something of what happened. The Night Guard were delayed… perhaps their mission had gone seriously wrong… although the hostages had been released, every member of the elite unit was still missing in action.
Beami's felt her heart thumping in her throat. Please, not Lupus…
*
After his briefing was completed, Beami stalked some lieutenant of the Eleventh Dragoons, a blond, athletic man with a beard, and tattoos spiralling across his neck. She pursued him for some distance through the corridors before she managed to stop him.
'I need to know where the Night Guard have been sent,' she demanded.
'I'm afraid, miss, that's classified information.' He nonchalantly turned to continue on his way, but Beami grabbed his arm.
'Tell me where the fuck they are, all right, or I'll hit you with an energy so hard…'
The soldier snatched his arm back, laughing, so she slapped him with a Tong relic, a metal device that clamped itself into his arm like teeth and brought him gasping to his knees. 'Tell me where they were sent.'
As he scrambled about on the floor, half trying to maintain his dignity, half convinced he would die, he spat out the location of the warehouse and what they were supposed to be doing there.
'So much for classified information,' she sneered. 'Thought you guys were trained to withstand torture?'
After she removed the device he said nothing, merely rubbed at his arm and breathed heavily through his nose. His mouth was now clenched tight, but it was too late. She had the information and was on her way to wake up Bellis.
*
With their bags of relics slung across their shoulders, the two women headed back across the warscape. In daylight now, the ruins were clear to see and ordinary and depressing. Beami's heart sank when she realized just how much damage her city had suffered because of the war – war with some enemy she knew nothing about, a conflict that seemed so distant from her previous existence. Her life had little context in all of this.
In the Imperial zones, the citizens did not seem willing to leave. Babies shrieked from doorless buildings and distraught women sobbed openly in the streets. In one plaza, at a table propped up against a whitewashed wall, two old tramps still stubbornly played their game of dice. This was their home, after all, this was all that many people had ever known – their reluctance to abandon it was understandable.
In the contended zones, corpses lay in the snow, in decrepit armour, amid isolated limbs, bloodstains and rotting flesh, and the streets reeked with the taint of death. Where windows once glimmered, black holes seemed like gateways into hell. Red mist was sprayed across the banks of snow, where people had been slaughtered. Without the street cleaners' regular attention, there was little to stop the weather from reclaiming the city, and it almost seemed the kindest thing to do would be to bury Villiren, to let it suffocate under the elements.
A warehouse, that's what she'd been told. With street locations, and grid references discovered from a map, Beami and Bellis crept past the blockades, using relics to bend light around them, to create invisible stairways over ruined buildings. Every trick they knew of, they used. Every step was weighed down with a sense of dread that Lupus had been crushed.
At one point, she defended them both against a couple of Okun who skittered across the rubble so clumsily that she wondered how they could have inflicted so much damage in the first place. She employed whips made of light that fizzed and sizzled across the Okuns' shells, flinging the vile creatures across the desolate street.
'Oh, well done,' Bellis trilled. 'Very good use of energy.'
*
The two women had been walking for miles now, their feet aching and legs
growing weary. Fast-moving clouds brought sleet but nothing worse. They'd been moving slowly for at least three hours now, taking occasional stops to sip from bottles of water.
Beami checked the map again, but the further west they moved, the more meaningless the lines on it became. Former streets had reorganized themselves into intermittent chaos. In places navigation became guesswork. Luckily Bellis had been studying the topography of this city for years, and soon felt confident that they were heading in the right direction.
An hour later, they were approaching the area where the warehouse should have been.
'Where is it then?' Beami asked. 'I can't see anything that looks likely.'
'It's just possible that our cephalopod friend managed to destabilize some of the buildings.'
'You mean your fucking squid flattened the warehouse,' Beami snapped.
'Oi!' The voice echoed across the street. A unit of rumel – citizen militia by the look of them – came trotting across the snow-strewn rubble. Two black-skinned men and a brown-skin arrived, a troop behind them, all equipped with cheap armour and swords. 'Ladies, get off the street.' They ushered the women behind a broken terrace of housing, then explained to them who they were and what they were doing.
Beami turned to the Rumel Irregulars. 'What happened to the Night Guard?'
There was an awkwardness to their expressions, a tentativeness about their manner, and Beami had her worst fears confirmed. One of the citizen-soldiers, a young brown-skin by the name of Bags, explained, 'Roof came down, miss, when they were all in there. They'd been clearing the place of civilian hostages – over a thousand – then fuck-knows-what comes flying across the city and heads out to sea. Wasn't the thing itself what knocked it down, more the rumblings, if you see what I mean.'
Swallowing, Beami suppressed her concerns for the moment. 'I need to go inside there.'
'Impossible, miss. We've been looking all around there, but there ain't nothing but rubble.'
'They're Night Guard. They're enhanced soldiers. The collapse may not have killed them all. That means some of our best soldiers might still be alive.'
There followed a swift discussion amongst the Irregulars, whispers and nods. Bags then said, 'We can lead you up to the building, and pick off any of the enemy that are still around while you go in.'
*
As they approached the wreckage of the warehouse, her heart sank. How could even Lupus survive this? Rubble was strewn far and wide, where the structure once stood, chunks of masonry of varying sizes, brick and slate and tile scattered haphazardly. Jagged knuckles of stone jutted skyward.
In this corpse of a building, its broken pieces scattered over hundreds of yards, where could they possibly begin?
'Watch out for any Okun, miss,' Bags called out as his troop disappeared behind the ruins.
'Let's get started,' Beami sighed.
She first deployed the Brotna, intending to break up all the stone around them so they could more easily scour the site. She unravelled the tendrils of the large metal cone, then aimed the top of it across the first cluster of rock. As she charged the device, a humming sound could be heard, before a bolt of energy disintegrated the entire mass. Bellis assisted with some extraordinary fork-like implement that expanded to lever up larger segments.
Presently, citizen soldiers began to gather and, once they realized what they were doing, even offered assistance. Where they came from, Beami didn't know, but soon other tools miraculously appeared: lengths of rope, spades, crude pulleys and even a bucket of biolumes for searching under the darker crevices. An uplifting mood descended on the scene: these people wanted to see their best soldiers get out alive, a repayment for their efforts in coming to this city to defend them.
An hour passed. Then another.
Finally, Beami led the way into the centre of the now revealed structure. Everywhere they found broken bodies, and she sighed with relief each time she realized one was not clothed in the familiar black uniform.
*
Everyone took a break, apart from Beami. Exhausted though she was, her body seemed beyond pain. Snow came and went, a brisk wind blew dust into her eyes and mouth. She merely wiped it away and continued. There was only one thing she could focus on. She shamed everyone into working almost as hard.
Dusk approached and Bellis came to tug at Beami's sleeve. 'My dear, you've got to get some rest.'
'Not yet, there's still light enough. Then there's the biolumes to help. You go back to the Citadel if you want to.'
Another hour, a step closer to pitch darkness. She clambered over towards where one of the inner walls jutted up through the rubble, and continued her work there, shredding stone and moving on, shredding stone moving on…
A groan? Was that a groan?
'Over here,' Beami called out, her heart racing. She scrambled closer to the source of the sound and, with her bare hands, began hauling smaller hunks of masonry out of the way. Once that was done, she used her relic again.
A Night Guard shield was suddenly exposed.
'Hello,' she called. 'Hello, can you hear me? How badly are you hurt?' Others arrived behind her, excitement rippling around the group.
A voice called back, its Jamur accent precise and clear. 'I think… I think some of us… Some of us, we're OK.'
She didn't recognize the voice – it certainly wasn't Lupus – but a rush of adrenalin spurred her on. With the help of others, large chunks of stone were lugged away, biolumes were brought forwards. They laboured under night conditions now, ten of them, little conversation except brief instructions. Stretchers were fetched by the Rumel Irregulars, who lined them up close by.
'Keep your eyes closed, all of you who can hear me,' Beami said, before disintegrating more of the masonry with her relic.
A big enough gap now, and she climbed down to reach the trapped soldiers, immediately looking for Lupus, but she couldn't see him.
Beami lifted one of their shields and handed it to a rumel loitering above her. 'Biolumes,' she ordered, and the bucket was passed down. She tipped its contents on the ground where the luminous creatures gave off their eerie light.
Beami called up, 'Someone give me a hand getting this man out.'
A bulky rumel stepped down and took the weight of the soldier. Together they carefully pulled him out by his arms and, as Beami guided his body, she winced at the stump of his ruined leg, too severe for the augmentations to have much effect.
One by one the Night Guard were lifted out of the rubble, their faces bloodied, and there were smashed arms and scars that had begun to heal. One had been hit in the eye with an arrow, one was a female, one was dead – but he was not Lupus. One was the albino, but still no sign of Lupus.
There he is! Lupus lay on his back, his shield half covering his face. His leg was bloodied, and his face was blackened with dust. She moved to his side and peered to see if he was all right.
'So you leave me till last then,' he rasped weakly.
Beami sobbed with relief, and rested her head on his chest. He tried to say more, but clearly could not.
*
Beami had found a surprising new point beyond exhaustion where she felt she could carry on. For nearly three hours she walked by his stretcher as it was carried through the safer streets leading to the Citadel, an arduous route in this pitch-blackness.
The commander of the Night Guard was now reasonably fit enough to guide the line of stretchers down towards the underground hospital, offering to carry his own men where possible. The line headed through the sanctuary of those passageways, and a sense of calm returned to her. Lupus even managed to smile at her now and then.
As they shuffled into the main ward everyone stopped and gawked at the scene in disbelief.
'Dear, Bohr no!' someone exclaimed.
Rows after row of the makeshift beds had been toppled over. Lying on the floor, or in whatever postures they could manage, were hideously deformed patients. No, it was worse than deformed – they had had things grafted on to th
em, appendages that were from… other creatures.
'Fucking hell,' another voice gasped.
'Bring some torches so we can see what's going on in here,' Brynd ordered.
Light arrived. Hundreds of men and women were revealed to possess furred or scaly replacement appendages, limbs ripped from reptiles, or legs transplanted from horses, or heads grafted and grown from invertebrates. The rumel patients had been similarly deformed, grafted with human heads and hands, amassed in stockpiles. They groaned and wept with shock and depression, for as far as you could see. To one side lay the dismembered corpses of the doctors and nurses who had been tending to them, their entrails strewn across their bodies.
And up near the ceiling hovered something like wraiths or ghosts. A trick of the light perhaps?
A soldier came running towards them clutching a note, which he thrust towards Brynd. 'Found it on that guy at the far end of the ward. Hanged himself by his shirt – think he's been dead for some time.'
Brynd read it, shaking his head: 'It's from Doctor Voland and it says simply: "If you manage to survive this war, here's to your happy ending. May it be as happy as mine was. Fuck you all. Sincerely, Voland."'
The noises being transmitted from these people-monsters were alarming. Many of these things tried to lumber towards them, but collapsed almost as soon as they moved, being unused to having spurious limbs. An elderly female, with giant dog-legs for arms, pawed at a soldier before someone pushed her over. One man with a lizard head managed to get close before someone shot the thing with a crossbow.
Brynd ordered everyone to get out of there, and they firmly bolted the door.
Was there no end to the horrors?
FIFTY-TWO
The Exmachina droned across the skies. It seemed to be taking forever to reach Villiren. In the distance, the columns of smoke did not provide a good omen.
They must be funeral pyres, he thought. Bloody hell, how many people can have died?
The city looked flat – either by design or from war damage, he couldn't tell. It wasn't at all like Villjamur. The sea lay beyond, a darker expanse of grey that merged indiscernibly with the sky.
City of Ruin lotrs-2 Page 45
