by Chris Braak
The riflemen among the gendarmes found their attention divided between the snipers in the Vault and the sharpsies with their incendiary grenades on the barricade. Unable to mount a concerted attack on the barricade, they found themselves pinned. Only a handful of men, among them Edgar Wyndham-Vie himself (who had chosen to lead from the rear) managed to escape the ambush that would eventually be known as the High Street Slaughter.
Of course, without Wyndham-Vie’s men laying down cover, there was nothing to keep the sharpsies off the top of the barricades at Old Wall Square. When the bulk of the gendarmerie approached, they found themselves faced with a hail of stones and broken glass and bottles of explosive phlogiston that detonated in their midst, showering them with fire and razor-sharp shrapnel. The gendarmes were forced to retreat.
After half an hour of fighting in Red Lanes, the indigeae faction retreated back across the river, leaving the remaining gendarmes to break down the radicals. The men were arrested and then, because the Vaults in Old Bank were presently a war-zone, summarily executed. The now-diminished force of gendarmes headed back towards Old Bank, only to meet the Dockside Boys halfway, and found themselves pinned down at Thurston Square.
The indigeae of Bluewater had mostly given up on their revenge, except for a small mob of about twenty that found its way to Indiga, broke into the home of Loren Hoge, who controlled most of the air-ship importation of phlogiston into Trowth, and dragged the man and his family out into the streets. Loren, his two wives, and his three oldest children were bludgeoned to death with paving stones. The two youngest children, both girls, had silver stars tattooed on their faces, and were left to wander homeless and anathema, according to indige tradition.
After the Committee’s disastrous assault on the sharpsie barricade, the Emperor stepped in. He ordered five hundred Lobstermen to an assault on the Rampling street barricade, accompanied by a small force of trolljrman artillery.
The Lobstermen, possessed of superhuman speed, raced beneath the hail of grenades towards the barricade, while the trolljrmen brought their cannons, bolted directly to the shells of their great, two-headed tortoises, into position. The Lobstermen drove the sharpsies down from the walls, and the trolljrmen began to demolish the barricade with the irregular thunder of their cannon-fire.
With the barricade breached, the Lobstermen pressed into the center of the sharpsie-controlled area, with the gendarmes pouring in behind. Despite their preparation, they still found themselves hard-pressed to deal with the knife-wielding sharpsies. The agility of the snaggle-toothed inhumans was astounding; they leapt from low windows and walls to land on the broad backs of the Lobstermen, slashing wherever they could find unarmored flesh, and then springing away again to catch overhanging eaves or downspouts before a return attack could be made. They dropped into the midst of rushing gendarmes, heavy cleaver-knives whirling, huge jaws snapping, severing the soft human limbs with ease.
The attack into Old Bank was slowed by the vicious assault, and a handful of sharpsies took the opportunity to attack the trolljrmen tarrasques that had been left behind after the initial rush. They ran along rooftops to catch the trolljrmen by surprise, and then hopped down directly onto the backs of the giant tortoises. The sharpsie ambushers managed to fire the cannons off of three of the tarrasques; one shell crashed harmless into a heavy, Gorgon-Vie style turret. A second exploded in the midst of the gendarmes. A third actually detonated among the Lobstermen, further slowing the marines’ assault.
The trolljrmen, who had been caught off-guard by the sharpsie attack, managed to bear the ambushers to the ground, hammering at them with heavy fists and relying on their thick, scaly skin to protect them from tooth and knife.
While the assault had slowed, it had not stopped. Lobstermen led the gendarmes through the narrow streets of Old Bank, while sharpsies abandoned their makeshift barricades to engage in half-hearted flanking assaults on the large force. They brought their incendiary grenades with them, but the riflemen, using their flux-ground greenglass lenses, could spot them with ease, and were generally able to pick them off before any of the phlogiston explosives could be thrown.
The Lobstermen pushed on against what appeared to be a flagging enemy force. Sharpsies were sniped at distance, ground down beneath the hammering of cudgels and tromping feet of the marines and gendarmes, or hacked to pieces by their swords. After the first initial attempt to hold the invaders, the sharpsies panicked and fled through the streets of Old Bank, while the Committee’s army pursued, roaring with victory.
The rout was another ambush. The sharpsies weren’t retreating; they were regrouping, leaping out of the street and scaling the complex, Gorgon-Vie architecture onto rooftops. They consolidated the bulk of their number on the roofs around Vlytze Plaza, where High Street met Corimander, and when the gendarmes and Lobstermen reached it, they fell on their attackers with the reckless abandon that only the knowledge of impending doom could bring.
Gendarmerie soon found themselves hemmed in on all sides by the towering buildings of the district, while slashing knives and sharp teeth dropped on them en masse from above, a wave of hundreds of sharpsies, furious and full of bloodlust. The gendarmes defended themselves with swords and cudgels, with rifles and pistols, but they found themselves trapped, packed in, unable to maneuver.
The sharpsies, with so much experience as butchers and herdsman, had turned Vlytze Plaza into a slaughterhouse. Their dexterous feet gripped heads and shoulders as they ran about on top of the flailing crowds, hurling themselves teeth-first at the most likely targets. The Lobstermen attempted to rally, but soon found themselves as equally disadvantaged as the gendarmes. Their own speed and strength was of little use when they had nowhere to move, and the nimble sharpsies had pegged them as targets immediately. They attempted to overwhelm the bone-armored men, using their own bodies to tangle up weapon arms while their fellows brought knives to bear on the joints between bleeding bone plates.
Still the sharpsies found it difficult to gain advantage, as more gendarmes appeared from every street, freed up from their battle with the Dockside Boys. The sharpsies were also unable to use their favorite weapon—their incendiary grenades—now that they were locked in close-combat with their adversaries. The battle had become a bloody, brutal stalemate; two opposing forces, equally matched and unable to retreat, attempting to simply grind each other down.
That was when the first shells landed. There was a whistling scream, and a deafening explosion as a house by the square collapsed, hurling rubble among the fighting men. Another scream, and another explosion, this time in the square itself, and men and sharpsies disappeared in an explosion of blood and limbs.
Edgar Wyndham-Vie had commandeered the Imperial frigate Revenge. He had maneuvered it up the Stark, and had turned the long guns on the ship’s deck towards Vlytze Square. His men had reluctantly begun to fire on their own city, chilled by the knowledge that Wyndham-Vie would surely murder as many humans as it took in order to kill all the sharpsies that he could. They primed the cannons and kept firing, while Edgar Wyndham-Vie stood at the helm, red-faced and mad-eyed, leering with ecstatic glee at the devastation he was causing.
It was after the first volleys from the Revenge fell on Vlytze Square that the unthinkable happened.
The men and sharpsies fighting in Vlytze Square, if they were not deafened by the cannon fire from the Revenge, all stopped as one and listened to an eerie, impossible sound that shrieked in their ears and reached down their throats to wrench at their stomachs. It was a supernormal wail that grew and grew, and imposed a silence over the combatants. The sound ended abruptly with a sudden, echoing crack.
For a long moment, nothing happened; men and trolljrmen and sharpsies all held their breaths in an extended, desperate pause.
Then, there was an explosion. A huge, deep, heart-stopping bone-rattling thunder spread in a wave across the square as a massive column of blinding, blue-white light tore shrieking into the sky. The north half of the square vanished
, collapsing into a sinkhole and dragging men and sharpsies with it to be vaporized in the blinding inferno. The rest of the square began to follow it, and, unmindful of their previous enmity, sharpsie, man, and trolljrman began running. A wash of dust, smoke and fire followed after them, claiming the slowest runners and hurling more to the ground. Three-quarters of Vlytze Square disappeared into the dark, and as much an area to the north. The center of Old Bank had become a bloody hole of devastation.
Later, after the dust had settled and someone had time to work out what happened, it would be assumed that the sharpsies were responsible; seeing their intended revolution fail, they’d done the only thing they could think of, and accepted a kind of mass-suicide.
Of course, this hypothesis left a number of disturbing questions unanswered. How did the sharpsies know about it? How did they know where to find it? How did they get in, and know how to use it? Was it really the sharpsies, preferring to kill themselves rather than lose to the humans? Or was it someone from the Committee, fearful that the Revenge might level even more of the city? Or was it someone else, with a purpose more devious?
Someone, deep beneath the house on Corimander Street, had activated the engines of the Excelsior.
Twenty-Eight: The Pilot, the Mastermind
To alien-adapted eyes, Castle Gotheray was a vast inverted labyrinth, a latticework of rooms stacked upon rooms, a strange pattern of outer walls beneath inner walls that could still be seen. Deep beneath the castle, and simultaneously in its center, always at the center, no matter what flowers of past and future bloomed before those eyes, was the beacon, the still glowing white-hot engine of the Montgomery.
The distorted shadow of its limbs, now only fractions of a greater whole, gripped the surface of the ice, and also under and within it, as it made its lurching way up the glacier. The blue-green moonlight was not light, but the shadow of something brighter, something that these new monstrous eyes had come to see. In shadows of the brighter-than-light lurked more and more shadows, strange forms that twisted into and out of space at every moment, and went all unnoticed by human vision. The ice reared up and sank down again, and every step brought it closer to the Castle.
The Castle. The doors were open, but now the thing did not need doors. It moved straight on towards the wall, revolving itself through material space and finding a place on the other side. The lattice-work, the dragonfly-eye collage of visions transformed to a view of a hundred thousand staircases, all leading down, down to the ship beneath the ice. It chose a stair at random; the near ones all led the same way, and most of the future stairs were crumbled and unusable.
Down the stairs and through the ice, to the great white gap in the cold, where only the barest flecks of the brighter-than-light could filter through, long since leaving its shadows behind, and where it could see dancing waves of electricity slithering in columns up and down.
There was breath down there, and voice, and the thing changed its perspective so that it was now at the bottom of the cave, and could stand comfortably on its ceiling. Voices spoke, but they were fractions of the sound its ears had come to hear, and so unintelligible. None of this mattered. It had come for its home, and no voice or breath would stand in its way.
The Pilot had returned for its ship.
“What are you smiling about?” Wolfgang demanded of Skinner, but she said nothing. He gestured to his men, and they raised their guns. “There’s no way out of this for you. You know that. I can’t let you stop me.”
Dust leapt up in small explosion at this feet, at the same time Alan heard an echoing crack from up the slope of the mountain. Wolfgang stared at the ground in disbelief for a moment, then he and his men all leapt to the sides, their eyes scanning the horizon.
Splinters exploded from the coach. The driver stood up, fumbling under his seat for a weapon. Too late; something hit him in the chest and he tumbled over the back.
While the guards were occupied looking for the sniper, Skinner leapt forward, her telerhythmia whirling around her in a circle, rapping fiercely on men and carriages alike. She snapped her cane down on one man’s revolver, sending it flying from his grasp, then pulled the cane apart…
A sword, Alan thought, she’s got a sword in there! The second guard had turned back towards Skinner as soon as sword was drawn, but it was too late. A flower of blood blossomed in his shirt and he fell back. Wolfgang immediately went for his gun.
Alan sighed, set his shoulder, and charged as hard as he could into the older man’s stomach. Alan was not a large boy, and he could not run fast, but he managed to catch Wolfgang low in the gut and unprepared. The older man gasped and fell back against the carriage, his gun slipping from stunned fingers and clattering away down the mountainside.
Skinner slashed with her sword at her opponent: two strokes, precisely aimed. The first was low, and caused the man to throw his hips back, pulling his stomach out of the way of the blade. The second was at his eyes, and he quickly snapped his head back out of range. The combination of movements—which Skinner must have learned by rote; it was impossible that her telerhythmia was that precise—threw him off balance, and Skinner’s third attack, a thrust directly at the center of his chest, landed home. Five inches of sharp, slender blade sank into his flesh, just below the sternum. The man shivered and convulsed, but the thrust had paralyzed his lungs, and he couldn’t scream.
Wolfgang threw Alan bodily aside; the young man cracked his head against the wheel of the coach, and the world swam for a moment before his eyes. The older man jumped towards Skinner and grabbed her sword-arm. In one smooth motion, he wrenched her around, arm locked up behind her back, and wrapped his free hand tight around her throat; she made a gagging sound, as he pushed her in between himself and where he suspected Harry was shooting from.
“No!” He screamed. “No! Tell him to back the fuck off! Tell him!” Skinner tried to speak, but Wolfgang’s iron grip on her throat choked off all the words. “I know you can communicate with him. Use whatever signal you have to tell him to stand the fuck down before I break your neck!”
No, no, no, thought Alan Charterhouse, as the scene swam back into view. His head throbbed, but his adrenaline was chasing the pain from his system. He crawled away, under the coach, desperately trying to think. He tried to shout at Wolfgang, but the words only came out as a harsh whisper. The older man didn’t hear him anyway; he was too busy whispering furiously in Skinner’s ear. Alan tried to work his voice back into his mouth, while he looked desperately around for something, some weapon that could be hurled against Rowan-Czarnecki’s broad back.
Harry appeared out of the dark. Alan thought he must have run directly from the coach as soon as he and Skinner had gotten out; now, the coachman had a long rifle held up over his head. “It’s all right,” he called. “It’s all right.”
“Put it down!” Wolfgang screamed at him, his hand tightening further around Skinner’s throat. Alan could not see her from his angle beneath the coach; he wondered if she was even still conscious.
“Here. I will, see?” Harry slowly began lowering the rifle to the ground.
Alan licked his lips. I have to do something… his eyes found one of the revolvers, lying on the ground. It must have spun away when one of the guards had fallen. Alan grabbed it with both hands, surprised by the weapon’s weight.
He found his voice, and shouted, “Let her go!” Even as he realized with a sinking feeling that if he fired, the bullet might go right through Wolfgang and into Skinner.
Rowan-Czarnecki half-turned. His eyes widened when he saw the gun. He opened his mouth to speak, then shouted as Skinner threw her head back into his jaw. In the same moment, she tore his hand from her throat and tried to twist away; Alan heard a sharp snap from her shoulder, but she managed to duck down.
Alan raised the gun and screwed his eyes shut. There was an explosion, a gunshot thundered in his ears, and he could smell burnt sulfur. There was, however, surprisingly little recoil. Alan opened his eyes; Wolfgang stood, a b
affled expression on his face, with his shirt-front soaked with blood. Alan looked down at his gun, horrified. There had been no recoil at all; it wasn’t even smoking, No, he thought, oh, no, I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him…
There was another gunshot, just like the first, and the air was filled with the smell of gunpowder again. Wolfgang’s head snapped to the side; he crashed against the coach and fell to the ground. Alan could only stare.
“You all right, boy?” Harry was shouting at him. He had his rifle raised, smoke curling from the tip. Alan could only nod, quiet and stunned. Harry immediately knelt next to Skinner, who had collapsed into the snow. “Are you all right, miss?”
Skinner’s face was pale, and she tried to speak, but only coughed instead. She indicated her shoulder, where her arm hung limply by her side.
“It’s dislocated,” Harry told her. He grabbed her upper arm and shoulder. “This is going to hurt, a lot.” The knocker nodded and gritted her teeth; Harry took a deep breath, and wrenched her shoulder back into place.
Skinner screamed, and half-collapsed into the snow again. Harry made to help her up, but she waved him off, breathing heavily. “I’m fine,” she managed to gasp. “Fine.”
Harry nodded and stood, then turned an appraising eye back on Alan. The boy was still beneath the coach, his face white, his eyes wide. “I killed him…” Alan said.
The coachman shook his head, and gently took the revolver from Alan’s hands. “You never did. Look. It’s not even hot. You never fired. It was just me.” He tossed the gun into the snow, and tousled Alan’s hair. “You did good, though. That was quick thinking that was, and it sure saved us all. What’s say we get you and the miss back into the coach and warmed up a little, right?”
He began to help Skinner to her feet, when a peal of thunder shook the ground beneath them. They all looked up and immediately turned their eyes towards Gotheray Castle. There was nothing to see.
