City Of Ruin

by Mark Charan Newton

  The young soldier eyed him cautiously, noted his details, said very little.

  ‘Something wrong with us rumel, sergeant?’ Jeryd enquired. ‘I’ve noticed there’s a bad attitude towards us in this city.’

  The young soldier regarded him coolly, unspoken narrative racing behind his human eyes. ‘There appear to be a lot of rumel soldiers fighting among the enemy forces. So we have to be cautious, is all – security checks and the likes. I’m afraid I’ll need to ask you some questions about your background—’

  Fuming, Jeryd pulled out his medallion. ‘This thing may convince you I’m fighting on your side, just like I’ve been doing for the last hundred and eighty fucking years.’ Jeryd was aware that an expectant crowd had begun to form around them.

  ‘All right.’ The man palmed the air dismissively. ‘We just have to follow rules.’

  If things were this bad now, how much worse would they get as this invasion progressed? The rumel were a minority group here, and he could do without being considered sinister. As his indignation abated, he realized this young soldier was merely following orders. Perhaps a quiet word with Commander Lathraea was called for.

  His instructions directed him to a different line from the others. Apparently his position in the Inquisition had made him a valuable asset: he would be rewarded with command of his own unit. Very quickly he discovered he was joining a group of other rumel, and they nodded an acknowledgement as he greeted them. There were maybe fifty in all, moving forward to an armament point. On finally arriving where he was supposed to be, Jeryd found a Night Guard officer calling out instructions in a vast chamber piled high with weapons.

  Jeryd showed him his medallion, for what it was worth any more, and this time was shown no discourtesy for being a rumel.

  Investigator Jeryd now Lieutenant Jeryd – platoon leader of Rumel Irregulars One. Three of the others he recognized from the Inquisition headquarters in Villiren, but there were at least thirty other men and women under his command. All were armed with basic crossbows and cultist-developed munitions, and he learned that because of their tough skins, they would be required for sniping and guerrilla operations in exposed positions, or for holding blockades after nightfall. They were fitted out with crude uniforms and white sashes featuring the seven-pointed star of the Jamur Empire, then Jeryd was briefed on what was required of him.

  It all happened so quickly, this business of going to war – Commander Lathraea suddenly appeared, the crowd peeling back to let him through as if they were frightened of this pale-skinned ghostly vision.

  ‘Investigator, a word please.’

  ‘Surely I’m lieutenant now,’ Jeryd joked. ‘What can I do for you?’

  *

  They took two stout horses and rode back towards the Inquisition headquarters, thankful that the snow had momentarily ceased.

  Jeryd asked the question of why the troops were giving the rumel a hard time. But the commander coolly stated that the enemy consisted of a number of rumel troops, albeit of a different nature, and that they must check none infiltrated the Imperial lines by stealth. Once they arrived, Jeryd led him to the arch-inquisitor of Villiren, an ancient grey-skinned rumel who seemed barely able to stand. In a dust-polluted, wood-panelled chamber, littered with legal texts, two assistants helped the antiquated rumel into his chair, then left them alone. They sat down facing the desk.

  Brynd didn’t waste any time: ‘Sir, as you may know, we have now imposed military law over much of the city.’

  The arch-inquisitor wheezed softly and nodded. ‘You wish to make a point of it, so as to make matters easier. I quite understand.’

  Brynd offered a rare smile. ‘Indeed. I believe you have two prisoners in custody, awaiting trial for execution – the Doctor Voland case.’

  ‘Investigator Jeryd was truly assiduous in that matter and has done this institution proud.’

  Compliments did not sit well with Jeryd, but he gave a coy smile anyway.

  ‘I don’t doubt that, sir,’ Brynd continued. ‘But I come to you with a strange request, and it’s possibly one you may not like.’

  ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘I am led to believe that these two individuals are rather unique. But given the nature of our current military engagements, I may have a use for them.’

  ‘A use?’ Jeryd spluttered incredulously. ‘They’re fit for nothing.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Brynd declared. ‘I wish them to be released immediately.’

  Jeryd almost spat his tea across the table. ‘Are you insane? Why the hell would you want to release that serial killer and . . . that monster?’

  FORTY-FIVE

  Nanzi, in her spider form, lumbered awkwardly over the rubble, deep into the city and deeper into the night.

  With the clear sky, a chill set in, calm and suffocating. Fighting had come to a halt as the sun faded, and there were now only swift conversations in the dark, strategies being passed mouth to mouth. Or on papers carried via messengers, as their horses bolted into the distance. Swords remained unsheathed. Bows remained in position, rumel archers sniping from their high vantage points, waiting it out in the cold. Men and women of the Dragoons or Regiments of Foot stood alert by crude blockades.

  Yet none of them would have been able to stop her.

  And she had to do what she was ordered now – because otherwise Voland would die and she couldn’t let that happen. How could these people not appreciate the good work they’d done together?

  The first location: just behind Port Nostalgia. A heap of the dead lined the landscape, and she could sense the chemical secretions of human and rumel and alien corpses. Mounds of unidentifiable flesh littered street corners and alleys, armour and weapons lay shattered and idle. Buildings, too, had become corpses, crippled by whatever technology these new beings had brought with them.

  But in between all this morbid mess there were fallen soldiers still alive, who still breathed this foul and rank air. Centring her vision, she crawled tentatively around a smear of decayed matter towards them. They screamed, either because of their wounds or the pain of seeing her, she didn’t know which, but she had received her instructions and she sought out their wounds and dribbled silk into them, sealing the wider abrasions. Some fainted at the sheer sight of her, others regarded her with a total absence of emotion. Nanzi picked them up two at a time, in custom-woven slings, and hauled them back towards the fiacres waiting on standby a hundred yards beyond the front line. Two women on horseback were posted beside the vehicles, and they watched Nanzi warily as she crept towards them, absolutely terrified she might do something to harm them.

  ‘We know what you are,’ said one of them, waving a dagger in her direction. ‘We’ve heard what you’ve done. Don’t care if you’re helping us now, you’re still a bloody monster. Just hurry up so we don’t have to look at you for too long.’

  From there, the newly recovered injured were sped towards a makeshift military hospital underneath the Citadel, leaving Nanzi alone in the darkness.

  *

  Voland sighed as yet another consignment came in. Cries of anguish echoed in his head. A small team of men and women lifted the casualties gently from the fiacres. When another delivery appeared, Voland wondered if it would ever end.

  How can I repair so many of them?

  He rolled up his shirtsleeves further and tried to adjust the detonator-collar he wore, which Brynd had commissioned from a cultist. At first, Voland was livid at the indignity of having to wear such an object, but was warned if he did not do as instructed, the device would explode and shatter his neck, killing him instantly.

  Staying alive, for now, seemed the preferable option.

  Voland had been offered something near freedom in exchange for the benefit of his skills. He would have done almost anything to get out of the darkness of his cell, to get Nanzi out too. It was not an opportunity to refuse.

  He had taken only two hours’ sleep, meanwhile, while other doctors came and took over, eyeing him with
caution, and noting the device on his neck. Occasionally a soldier would come to check on him as he worked. Some of the other nursing staff whispered behind his back, more than once he heard the word ‘butcher’ being uttered, and all the time he wondered if this was how the great Doctor Voland would spend his final days.

  Eight rows of bedrolls were lined up before him, spreading far into the cavernous darkness. Lanterns hung from the ceiling and cressets threw light from the walls. Two other medical professionals, both female, and neither as proficient as himself, attended to the patients, their shadows falling across the injured like some stark premonition of death. A dozen or so volunteers also moved back and forth between the lines, seeing to their basic needs or following the doctor’s direct commands.

  Casualties were laid out according to the severity of their injuries. From broken or dislocated limbs, lacerations, abrasions, punctured lungs, up to severe haemorrhaging, the wounded soldiers were admitted and distributed according to probability of their survival. Minor injuries were confined to the far end of the chamber, while Voland’s duties involved the almost-dead. It seemed futile at first, temporarily patching up wounds that were simply too severe, too brutal; they continued to arrive at a steady rate. He smiled at the sweet thought of Nanzi whenever he came across one whose wounds had been treated with her silk.

  Nanzi herself would stagger back into the makeshift hospital in between her missions. In her human form, of course, she came to check on how effective the silk was at sealing wounds. The substance acted as a coagulant, was quite inert with regards to the human body, and she had undoubtedly saved many lives.

  ‘But they look at me and say vile things,’ she mumbled into his shoulder, trying not to cry. ‘They really hate us. They hate me, the things they say . . .’

  He knew it must be worse for her, being so rare and precious a design, and people always feared what they did not understand.

  FORTY-SIX

  The invasion force ate further into the city, and Brynd despaired. Four hundred yards deep, huge enclaves of Villiren were being thieved from them. All the way from the seemingly distant rubble of Port Nostalgia, right into the heart of the city, and they now occupied streets in the Shanties and way down the western flank of the Wastelands.

  In a few hours, Brynd estimated that over a thousand lives would vanish.

  The Seventh Dragoons were now a shattered force, and the remnants filtered in among the troops of the Second and Fourth. The Regiments of Foot had felt the brunt of the attacks, losing ten thousand warriors so far. Garudas reported simply that more of the enemy were coming, via ship, but ultimately through the gates.

  As night settled across the city, a strange calm could be felt. It seemed as if this new race and their red-skinned rumel allies did not want to operate without daylight. He knew already how the captive Okun had been sensitive to changes in light, so perhaps they were somehow dependent upon the sun.

  Reports from the city:

  Soldiers stood now in silence, under a cold, star-filled sky, waiting and watching the edges of buildings for movement, just in case. But darkness also meant respite, a chance to rebuild on both sides. It was also a chance to release the souls of the dead, and pyres sprouted everywhere, bright and morose blossoms, offering the stench of burning flesh to the sky.

  But at some point in the night Brynd accepted that the Imperial front line would fall back further the next day. More of the invasion fleet would arrive – they seemed endless – and of the garudas dispatched with relics, only a few might return. He still knew so little about the enemy, about their strategies and their weaknesses.

  And people were whispering throughout the city that the elite force was needed.

  He summoned Nelum to the obsidian room, where they conversed in the half-light. ‘Lieutenant Valore, I believe we require a second level of augmentation,’ Brynd suggested. ‘The cultists believe it will enable us to be an indestructible force. Your thoughts on the risk?’

  ‘Would we simply become stronger, with greater prowess, or would such a level of artificial enhancement kill us?’ the lieutenant enquired. ‘I argue that we fight initially without this second reinforcement, to see how we fare, but for the cultists to prepare the enhancements just in case. Power isn’t everything. Integrity and good morality goes a long way.’

  *

  A clear day for once, and the fighting resumed as the first red rays of the sun hit the city. More warships came, breaking a path through the sea, bringing with them the same kind of hell. Brynd issued tactical briefings to the Night Guard as noise spilled up from below the Citadel, which shuddered as they looked down from their crenellated sanctuary. Within a few minutes of the recommencement of combat, two key defence positions were lost near Scarhouse. Scouts later told him how rumel had poured into the district in great numbers, slaughtering every soldier in their path. Then they trampled over the dead to kill yet more.

  In instant retaliation, Brynd summoned the garudas.

  *

  Erupting out of the morning sky, they soared over the northern streets of the city, then showered their replenished munitions on the main advancing units of the invaders, exploding flesh and rubble with equal intensity.

  Enemy forces staggered back under the flash-flames that ripped through the narrow lanes till only a few Okun survived. Had there been an endless supply of Brenna relics to deploy in this way, Brynd might have had some cause for optimism. But the reality left him as morose in spirit as ever. And worse still, the mute bombs launched from the ships cramming into the harbour kept picking off the garudas in mid-flight, so that they tumbled towards the streets, exploding in a shower of feathers and flesh across the rooftops.

  *

  More industrious weapons were released. There was enough sheer bulk of the enemy now that the Empire’s forces deemed it appropriate to utilize catapults. Normally reserved for sieges, the Ninth and Tenth Regiments of Foot deployed trebuchets and mangonels from behind their front lines. On the Citadel Brynd watched these great constructs, the length of five horses, being wheeled into position, like slow-moving beasts, their tops breaching the rooftops.

  Soon they were busy launching colossal chunks of broken masonry at the mass of invaders. Boulder-sized debris also shattered the surrounding buildings, disabling the progress of the enemy and making their ability to reinforce key positions more difficult. They were fast destroying much of the city, Brynd realized, but this had to be done to save the rest of it.

  The last sight that Brynd witnessed, before he departed the Citadel, was of rumel and Okun corpses being slung back towards the enemy.

  But he then gave an order for these machines of war to hold fire.

  Now was the hour of the Night Guard.

  *

  They lined up, twenty elite fighters, garbed in shadowy darkness. All were mounted on black horses that stood motionless despite the commotion going on around them. Brynd withdrew his sabre and watched faint flickers of cultist technology skim and shimmer across its metal surface. Well armed, and well protected by contoured body armour, they headed east along the wide boulevards, past onlookers from the civilian militia. Brynd felt the heavy weight of expectation, as smoke began to blow back from the Brenna bombs.

  Only minutes from the front line.

  He was disturbed by the numbers of civilians that had stayed put here – refusing to abandon their homes right in the warzone – and had not evacuated themselves through the tunnels as instructed. A woman in rags ran screaming towards the soldiers, and gripped Nelum’s feet. She screamed for them to stop the fighting, shrieked that four of her sons had died in the first wave of attacks. Brynd nodded to his lieutenant, who pushed her gently away, and she collapsed to the floor sobbing, as the Night Guard continued past.

  This war would be an endless, thankless task.

  He took a deep breath and felt the thunder in his heart. To Brynd, these minutes seemed like the longest in his life.

  Some missile collapsed the corner of a bui
lding about fifty yards away, and rubble clattered across the plaza. Frustratingly, at any given point, Brynd couldn’t see what was firing the mute bombs.

  Suddenly, another one connected with a nearby store, but the expected explosion didn’t follow. And stranger still was how it fell to the ground – so slowly, and almost changing shape.

  A nearby Dragoon moved his horse over to investigate. Brynd ordered for Lupus to ride with him in pursuit of the soldier.

  The terrain was littered with minor debris and large chunks of masonry, so they dismounted, and hitched their horses to a railing outside a decimated tavern, then marched across the plaza. Old men and women, unable to fight, were loitering in doorways, and some residents prised apart their boarded-up windows to see what was going on outside.

  Brynd and Lupus halted next to the bomb.

  ‘What do you think it is, sir?’ The young Dragoon stepped back, clearly nervous at the presence of the commander.

  The fallen object was writhing back and forth in the snow, with tiny arms flailing. About the size of a human baby, its skin was grey and blighted with scale, and its grim, gargoyle-like face was peering back up at them.

  It was a living creature.

  Suddenly its legs fizzed into flame and it emitted a high-pitched, manic laugh.

  ‘Get away!’ Brynd shouted.

  The other two soldiers dived instinctively to one side, while Brynd managed to cover his mouth with his cloak. Just then there was a scream and the ground trembled under a deep explosion, and fragments of stone rattled across the plaza.

  Brynd looked up to assess the damage, and felt a small shard of glass had cut his knee. He brushed aside the injury and realized Lupus was standing right next to him, looking stunned. They went back to where the creature had detonated, and saw that the Dragoon was dead. His arms and much of his upper torso had been blown away, and his face was unrecognizable – a consequence, perhaps, of possessing no augmentations.