by Myke Cole
Harlequin looked at his lap; he couldn’t deny the truth of the man’s words. ‘It’s worth a try.’ His voice rang hollow.
Hewitt scowled. ‘We should talk to Gatanas. He could . . .’
‘Gatanas will bomb the whole fucking city if he gets a whiff of Selfer gangs on the ground.’
Hewitt nodded. ‘This is . . .’
‘Sir, you agree with my call on Sergeant Major Knut?’
Hewitt nodded. ‘I do.’
‘Then please give me the benefit of the doubt here. This wi . . .’
He was cut off by Cormack on the radio. ‘Sir! You want to come out here right now.’
‘Once more unto the breach, my friend?’ Harlequin asked.
‘Or, we could go outside and see what the hell’s going on.’
Harlequin smiled. ‘That’ll work.’
Cormack intercepted them before they’d gone three steps, pointing toward the perimeter. ‘Novice Beamer is freaking out, sir. Up on the wall, swears something’s coming.’
‘I’ll cover for you,’ Hewitt said. ‘Go see what’s up.’
Harlequin nodded thanks and leapt into the air, following the direction of Cormack’s finger to the top of the barricade, where the Novice hunched, elbows on her knees.
Before he’d gone three feet, he knew she wasn’t mistaken. A powerful current whirled around them, growing stronger by the moment. Some magic was at work, and it was coming their way.
His boots touched down on the plywood catwalk, and he squatted alongside her. Her head was down, eyes closed. ‘Do you feel it, sir?’ she asked without looking up.
‘I feel it,’ he answered. ‘See anything?’
She shook her head, opened her eyes. The bags under them testified to the impact the endless hours on the wall were having on her. ‘Nothing. Quieter than ever.’
Too quiet. Harlequin looked at the broken, looted buildings just beyond the park’s perimeter. Nothing moved in them. The crowd of Gahe was gone.
He toggled the commlink and spoke into it. ‘Cormack, what’s the situation on the west wall?’
‘Normal, sir. Why?’
‘By normal, you mean you still have contact with the enemy?’
‘Yes, sir. They’re taking a break, but they’ll be at it again before you know it.’
‘Keep one Novice there and send everyone else to me. Pull a fire team as well. On the hop.’
‘Roger that, sir.’ Cormack sounded nervous, but knew better than to question Harlequin’s motives.
Harlequin felt the undisciplined currents of two Novices long before he saw them, almost drowned out by the powerful tide coming toward them. Three soldiers jogged along behind, unslinging their guns as they approached the ladders up to the catwalk.
Two Novices. That was what Cormack could spare.
Harlequin swallowed his disappointment and extended a hand as they crested the ladder. He recognized them. A broad-shouldered Terramancer named Drake and Unpronounceable himself, the mouse over his eye swollen golf-ball-sized and turned an angry shade of purple. Both looked exhausted, but suddenly alert and nervous as they sensed the magical tide bearing down on them.
‘What’s going on, sir?’ Unpronounceable asked.
‘Not sure, but I want to be ready. You see what I see?’ He pointed up Broadway.
‘There’s nothing there, sir,’ Drake said.
‘Exactly. That seem normal to you?’
No one answered.
‘All right, everyone stay here. I’m going to get some air cover and go . . .’
‘Shh!’ Unpronounceable brought his fingers to his lips, realized who he was talking to, then dropped his hand, shame-faced. ‘Sorry, sir. I hear something.’
‘It’s fine.’ Harlequin’s magical senses might be better honed, but he lacked the younger man’s better hearing. ‘What do you hear?’
Unpronounceable held his hand up, eyes closed, listening so hard he looked like he might pull a muscle. He needn’t have. After a moment, Harlequin could hear it, too.
A dull scratching riding over a squeaking, as if a thousand hands were being raked along as many chalkboards. It echoed along Broadway, the narrow confines of the street tunneling the sound straight toward them.
Harlequin squinted into the distance. Dust was rising down the avenue, billowing their way. The pulse of magic emanated from behind it.
‘Is that Aeromancy?’ Beamer asked.
‘Not Aeromancy,’ Harlequin answered. This wasn’t that sort of wind. Summoned wind tended to be clean, uniform. This looked haphazard, incidental.
The kind of dust kicked up by an army.
‘Cormack!’ he yelled into the commlink. ‘Get everyone to my position! Don’t worry about guns. We need explosives. I need every bird with rockets in the air! Fuel lines! Get the fuel lines!’
‘Fuel lines?’ Cormack’s voice came back. ‘For the motor pool?’
‘Just do it!’ Harlequin shouted as the first tiny shapes emerged from the dust and scampered down Broadway toward him.
Broadway was boiling, a torrent flowing from every manhole cover and alleyway.
Rats.
Rats in their aggregate millions. He had never known so many existed in all of New York. They flowed like a river down the avenue, a tide of brown, black, and gray fur dotted here and there by the occasional stray cat or dog.
Harlequin whirled on Drake, seized his shoulders. The big Novice stared out at the approaching horde. ‘Novice. Novice! Look at me!’
Drake looked, eyes pleading.
‘Did you ever experiment with Whispering?’
‘Sir, it’s ille . . .’
‘No time for that! I know most of you fuck around with it once or twice. Can you remember how to do it?’
‘I . . . I don’t think so, sir.’
‘Try anyway.’
Cormack and Hewitt came racing out of the castle and stood at the base of the ladders. Harlequin could hear shouting, the sound of helo rotors spinning up. Two soldiers came running to the base of the wall, thick black hoses over their shoulders.
‘Get those up here! I need them pumping down the other side!’
‘They won’t reach, sir,’ one of the soldiers said.
‘So, move the damn trucks closer! Do it now!’
He turned back to the street as the ladders began to rattle, several soldiers mounting the top of the T-walls, claymore mines tucked under their arms. They froze at the sight of the oncoming tide, then got moving again at a look from Harlequin. He jumped into the air.
‘Where are you going, sir?’ Drake asked.
‘Someone’s Whispering them. I’m going to find out who.’
He turned and flew out over the approaching mass. Above them, the noise was near deafening, a scrabbling, chittering cacophony. He let loose a gout of lightning, tearing a ragged gash in their ranks, but more of the rodents scrambled over the corpses of their fellows, the smoking patch refilled in moments. The rats picked up speed, the tide washing up against the store-fronts on either side of the avenue, sending ripples through the throng.
Harlequin heard sharp cracks as the claymores on the walls began to go off. More reports followed as soldiers reached the perimeter and began firing through the gaps and holes in the T-walls. Harlequin saw rats tossed in the air, cut in half, burned to a crisp.
There were always more. He could see Drake standing at the top of the wall, eyes shut, hands extended. A clump of rats in the middle of the throng had frozen, noses twitching in the air, bodies rigid, but their fellows flowed over them, driving on to the base of the wall.
Beamer and Unpronounceable let out blasts of flame, streaking down into the packed mass of vermin, sending up a shriek that hurt Harlequin’s ears. The rats poured through the fire, a living r
amp of furry bodies, rising higher and higher up the barricade walls.
Harlequin flew over the mass, dragging lightning as he went, tearing rents in the ocean of rats, gone as quickly as they were made. He focused on the current, desperately trying to locate it. He could hear screams behind him, both rodent and human, forced himself not to look. Their best hope to deal with this attack was to find the enemy Terramancer.
He sped out over the statue of the charging bull, Grace’s old stomping ground. The statue was nearly covered in rats now, the lowered head dipping below the tide. The magical current grew fainter. The Terramancer, wherever he was, was closer to the park’s perimeter.
Harlequin flew back toward the park, then stopped in midair, stomach sinking.
A small murder of crows had begun circling over the Bowling Green subway station, cawing loudly. As Harlequin watched, they were joined by hawks, pigeons, sparrows. The cloud of birds grew until it was a solid black mass, the chirping, cawing, and tweeting so loud that it nearly drowned out the gunfire.
A Kiowa had gotten airborne, its rocket pods already smoking as it fired into the mass of rats. Its miniguns tore into the cloud of birds, picking them off in ones and twos, barely making a dent in the growing cloud.
Harlequin shot back down Broadway. ‘Cormack! Get Downer down here!’
He couldn’t hear any response over the sound of the animals beneath him. Clods of dirt were flying as the rats dug at the base of one T-wall, tunneling so fast the concrete barrier had already begun to sag outward. He Drew, Bound, and funneled lightning with all his strength into the diggers, furry bodies jerking and exploding like gunshots. The ground smoked, the T-wall sagging farther into the crater he’d created.
He shot over the wall. ‘Where the hell are my fuel lines!?’
The rats were an ocean outside the walls. Inside, they were a river, as more and more animals squeezed between the gaps in the T-wall segments. Soldiers and refugees alike were screaming, disappearing under the murine flow. Harlequin could hear the crunching and tearing of thousands of little mouths and claws on flesh. The creatures coursed up the legs of their enemies, biting the entire way, then moved on, leaving twitching corpses in their wake. The remains were horrifying, a patchwork field of tiny, leaking rents exposing hints of white bone.
He saw one of the fuel trucks, pulled up to the wall, black hose snaking out from the fuel tanks to disappear under the carpet of animals.
He heard the Kiowa’s engine sputter, its guns go silent. He turned to see the helo spinning toward him, tail boom a whirling blade. Birds covered it, seething over the surface, a machine made of flapping wings and striking beaks. They dispersed as the spin became a tumble, and the Kiowa fell toward him.
Harlequin shunted his magic back instinctively. The lightning coiling around him winked out and he dropped like a stone.
He felt a brush of air as the helo shot past him, striking the ground and rolling into the motor pool, crunching against the Humvees, then exploding with a bang that forced Harlequin back out over the wall, squinting, his face showered with debris.
‘The truck!’ Harlequin shouted to Drake. ‘Move the damn truck!’
Drake nodded, turning from his failed Whispering. He focused, and a fist of earth lurched up from the ground beneath the fuel truck, launching the vehicle end over end, sending it crashing against the T-wall, toppling through. Harlequin could smell the pungent odor of gasoline as the fuel washed across the ground.
‘No!’ he shouted. He raised his hands, summoned a wind. It swept across the makeshift parapet, throwing the Novices and many of the soldiers off the plywood catwalk and clear of the blast area, sending them rolling on the ground below. He prayed they’d survive the fall. He turned and flew back up Broadway, getting only a few feet before hearing the sound that he dreaded.
A gunshot. An instant later, it was followed by a throaty boom so deep that Harlequin felt it before he heard it. His bones vibrated, a wall of heat slapping him out of the sky and sending him careening into a window. The glass gave, giving sharp-edged kisses along the way. He rolled, sliced and bleeding, along the floor of an office, slamming into a desk.
He shrugged off the pain, stood, limped to the window.
Broadway was a lake of fire.
The rats drowned in it, screaming out their lives as their bodies shriveled in the heat. Mad with pain, they shot out from the main body in ones and twos, fiery pseudopods streaming into sewer grates and open doorways.
One of the T-wall segments was down, leaving a hole in the barricade wall, a missing tooth that poured out burning rats.
The cloud of birds reconstituted, wheeled, dove back down into the encampment. Harlequin heard the roar of an antiaircraft gun, and a portion of the cloud dissolved in red mist, shredded by high-volume fire. The rounds were too big to catch them all, and Harlequin could hear screaming as he shook off the pain and flew out of the window, following the current. He had to fight against the urge to fly into the park, to lend his magic to the battle there, but the Terramancer had to be his priority.
The current grew stronger as he crossed the street. He could feel it eddying out from the low building in front of him, a stretch of offices looming over a ground-floor glass-fronted office displaying a scorched sign reading CITY OF NEW YORK – DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES.
With a roar, a Blackhawk shot free of the park, banking so steeply that Harlequin feared it would stall. It righted, mini-guns firing at a smaller cloud of birds that detached from the main flock and pursued it, screeching as their numbers dwindled under the steady fire.
The Blackhawk won free of the park, only to be caught in the updraft from the fire, which sent it wobbling out over Broadway, birds lighting on the tail boom, swooping into the cabin. Harlequin could see soldiers inside stomping and swatting at them, but for every pigeon they killed and threw out the door, two more replaced them. The birds dove at the spinning rotors, seeking the engines. The whirling blades scythed through them, sending up clouds of blood and feathers, but more of the things kept coming.
Harlequin banked and flew toward the helo, extending a hand and summoning a gale that cut through the birds, scattering them, overwhelming their wings and sending them spinning through the air, hollow bones snapping.
The Blackhawk righted, and Harlequin flew alongside the open cabin door to see three soldiers crouching inside, eyes wide with terror.
‘I need you to give me everything you . . .’
He felt a shift in the current beneath him, followed by a deafening screech from inside the park. There was a rumbling patter, a thousand golf claps at once, and a torrent of birds raced up from the park, straight for him.
Harlequin shouted a warning and moved sharply away from the helo, funneling lightning into the cloud of flapping wings. The helo banked the other way, vanished behind a wall of avian forms. They swept after Harlequin, repeating the dance the rats had done below: his lightning ripping rents in the mass that filled in just as quickly.
And then they were upon him.
Harlequin wreathed himself in crackling electricity as the cloud of birds enveloped him, filling his ears with screeching, cawing, cooing. The stink was overpowering, the rancid odor of mattress ticking gone sour.
The first birds to reach him danced in the lightning, smoking and falling away, but their fellows came behind them in droves, damp feathers insulating against the shock and driving the burned corpses into him, weighing him down.
Harlequin closed his eyes as the first beak pecked at them, the first set of tiny claws fixed onto his flight suit. He summoned a wind, sent it sweeping through the cloud, but he couldn’t see, and there were too many. The stink and screeching blotted out his senses. Talons dug at his scalp, feathers battered his lips, nostrils. He couldn’t breathe. Was he sinking toward the ground?
Something sharp jabbed his eyebrow, dug low
er, finding the soft indent where skull gave way to eyelid. It bored, pinching. He tried to raise his hand to swat it away, but his arm felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. He opened his mouth to scream, and it was instantly filled with feathers, cutting off his airway. A beak stabbed at the inside of his mouth.
He didn’t think it possible for the screeching to get louder, but it did, then, suddenly, the pressure lifted. He flailed, shaking his arms loose, spitting out feathers and flying straight up, opening his eyes as he finally won free of the cloud.
Below him, they were dispersing. No. Being swept aside. He could see funnels of air, man-sized, becoming more distinct as they filled with the broken bodies of crows, jays, and starlings.
Elementals.
Downer hovered over Broadway, an air elemental wrapped around her. He shot her a thumbs-up, but she was concentrating on the ground as more funnels touched down, shredding what rats had managed to escape the fire.
That same fire now raged hungrily among the buildings closest to the park. He still felt the current from the DMV building, but it was reeling in as its owner abandoned Whispering and sought to escape the rising heat.
Harlequin made to dive toward it, but Downer’s elementals beat him to the punch. They descended in a delta, whirling funnels of debris with just a hint of a human outline. They arrowed toward the burning building and split, one whipping around to the doors, the others moving for side windows. The fire parted, cooled instantly by the churning air of their tails.
Harlequin looked over his shoulder at Downer, suspended in the center of a larger elemental, eyes focused on the building below. The elemental’s outline had coalesced, spinning thighs crossed beneath her, folded arms of churning air wrapped protectively around her. A discarded plastic bag twirled madly inside what looked like a cocked head.
It looked like a protective father, cradling his child, head lovingly laid across hers.
Harlequin was surprised by the sudden spike of envy in his gut. He beat back the emotion, locked his focus back on the fight, but not before the thought came to him unbidden. She is always loved. This pariah, cut off from everyone, only newly out of detention, had more than he did.
