by R J Theodore
Sophie pat the broken lock mechanism, then waved Tisker to turn around so she could stow the auto-torquing lock hammer in his bag. “Wrong side of the city. Sure would be nice if this place had rooftops we could cross instead of all these rabbit warren tunnels, all cut off from each other.”
Talis nodded. They needed to get out of Lippen and the fastest way to the docks was via the main entrance and gate. Having left the tenant building on the deeper end, though, they now had most of the city between them and the exit. Unless.
“We’ll use the grapples.”
Tisker caught on. “Up the vents?”
The grapple cannons were meant for the take from the mines, a slapdash dumbwaiter to get their load topside rather than try to walk it out the front door. That part of their plan was now beyond saving. Skip to the end. Get out in one piece, without being caught or cornered. Get off Heddard Bay. Always the plan. Always.
And now a new element: show Eneil what it meant to mess with the lives of Talis’s family.
“Captain, what?” Sophie had paled. “I didn’t rig them for that.”
“You saying I weigh more than a duffel bag full of uncut gems? I resent that.”
Sophie’s freckles even paled. “I didn’t . . . But I . . . It’s not tested!”
“We didn’t get to test any of this, remember?”
“Yeah, but if the wire snapped, it would have been a bag of rocks falling through the ventilation shafts, not us. I brought thicker wire cartridges, but I need somewhere to swap them out.”
“Assuming we need to. Do the math while we move.” Talis was looking through the crowd. No telling if the assassin was still in the building or had come outside ahead of them.
Dug frowned as Ra-Kaz sounded the time. Last of the evening. “That will put us in the jungle when the tocks are hunting.”
“The weight of our bags, plus us, and someone’s going to have to share theirs with Dug—”
“I said, ‘while we move,’ Soph. Come on, everyone.”
The door handle jiggled behind them, again. That startled everyone into motion where Talis’s words apparently couldn’t override their need to catch their breath. They could catch their breath when they were safe again. Which might not be for a while.
They were covered in blood, out of breath, and weighed down with strange, lumpy bags, but tugging her ’locks before must have had some effect—or perhaps the dirtier, seedier side of Lippen just didn’t have time for anyone else’s business—because no one stopped them before they got to the ventilation chambers. The room smelled of sulfur and ash.
“Well, Sophie? Verdict?”
She stooped down to unpack one of the grapple cannons and swap out the wire cartridge. “Tisker and I will be fine. You two need the heavier wire, if you’re sharing. I just hope it doesn’t snag or get too hot as it winds and unwinds.”
“Likelihood of that?”
Sophie frowned at the ceiling above them. “No way to know without a practice run, Captain.”
Talis looked at Dug. “Okay, Dug, you’re riding out of here on my back.”
His lips were pale and parted as he caught his breath from their marching. He only nodded.
Not a good sign.
She braced herself against the wall as Tisker and Sophie settled him over her shoulder and the cannon over her right arm. Tisker buckled her into the net meant to support the sacks of stone and managed to get part of the strap around Dug’s legs. Sophie rigged elbow straps and attached them to the grips of all three cannons.
“I’ll try to make the ride as gentle as possible, my friend.” He only grunted in reply. No one had ever accused Talis of being ‘gentle.’
Tisker rigged himself in next, and then Sophie paused to look at the last cannon. “Shame to leave it behind.”
“Can’t.” Talis was already getting tired with the weight piled on her, even with the wall for support. “Someone could follow. Take it, or destroy it.”
Sophie’s face told Talis all she needed to know about those options. She quickly repacked the duffel bags so that they had one fewer to shoulder. Tisker took their supplies while Sophie strapped the remaining cannon across her back. They all tied bandannas over their noses and mouths for whatever filtering of the hell-scented air they could provide.
“On your mark, then.”
Tisker looked from the vent above to the floor. “Where’s the mark?”
Sophie closed one eye and took a few tentative steps beneath one of the vents, first forward, then sideways, then back a half step. She gripped the release handle on her cannon, holding the side of the arm support with her other hand. When she fired, the cannon exploded with an ear-ringing blast. Her involuntary flinch threw off the trajectory a touch, but it still threaded straight up through the shaft, the metal cording unwinding with a whine that made Talis wish she’d tied her hair out of the way. Finally, there was a clunk as the projectile hit a bend in the tunnel and the sound of metal on rock as it started to slide backward. The wire grew slack for a moment as they held their collective breaths, then stopped, hanging straight from above.
Sophie made a few tentative tugs. The wire didn’t give. “Looks like the tines held.”
Talis could barely hear Sophie over the ringing in her ears. She eyed the city-ward end of the tunnel. “Someone will have heard that. Time to get out of here.”
Tisker stepped forward and aimed his own, bracing against the sound before he fired, prepared for the percussive blast this time.
When the cannon’s thunk and scrape quieted, he repeated the tug. The wire slackened, and the scraping resumed as Tisker’s face paled. Then it stopped again, and the wire hung plumb.
“Um, I guess it’s secure?” He gave it a couple more tugs, in case. Now he was flinching.
Talis stepped up between them. “That’s me, then.”
They each had to climb a different shaft and hope the vents all broke the surface in the same proximity to each other as they began. Knowing the Rakkar affinity for mazes, Talis tugged her ’locks for luck.
There was a shout from down the tunnel. A scuffle of surprise. A cry of pain.
Talis fired her cannon. There was no preparing herself for the sound. She flinched, blinked, and swore. The ringing in her ears was like being buffeted by a gale. She worked her jaw as if to clear the deadened sound around it, watching the angle of the projectile as it arced up and missed the tunnel shaft overhead, bouncing off the ceiling and dropping back to the ground. Talis danced away from it, slowed by the weight of Dug.
“Rotting winds! How do I reset it again?”
Sophie looked toward the noise at the end of the tunnel as she answered. “Flip the toggle on the side of the winch. It’ll wind it back. Watch out, everyone. It might snake around a bunch before it reels back.”
It did. Like a lizard with its head in a bag, the metal-pronged cord whipped around the floor as the cable loops straightened themselves out. Talis held her arm to angle it for the best reception possible, turning her body to keep Dug from the worst of it should it snap up at them.
“Tisker, watch!” But he risked the injury to keep it pinned under a foot until the wire was near taut again. It whacked him hard in the thigh for his trouble, and he showed her how to curse properly. He paled and took a shaky step back on that leg while the grapple finally reeled back into place in Talis’s cannon.
Sophie checked it, loaded a fresh canister of powder shot into its chamber, and helped Talis aim it. She stepped back, squinting in preparation for Talis to fire again.
They had to get this right. The devices had earned the “cannon” half of their name. What was the point of exiting halfway up the mountain if everyone knew where they’d gone?
Talis took a breath, reminded herself what was at stake, and braced herself. Fired again. She was sure her ear would bleed from the blast, but she managed not to flin
ch, and the grapple sailed straight up the shaft.
A few moments later, she was anchored to some unseen point above, as securely as the other two.
They all exchanged worried glances. A shadow moved in the tunnel, darting from one side to the other. Too close now.
“Be safe,” said Talis. “Slow and safe is better than fast and falling. I’ll meet you on the other end.”
They nodded, their lips thin lines of consternation. Talis nodded back, trying to put some confidence into it. She flipped the winch catch again. The cannon ate through the slack, and then her feet left the ground.
She couldn’t look down to see the others reel themselves up, or to see if their pursuer had reached them. Her view was blocked over one shoulder by Dug and over the other by the cannon. The winch and her percussively punished ears kept her from hearing anything but the whine of tinnitus, but she could see the other two lines tremble, same as hers. Then she reached the mouth of the vent shaft, and she couldn’t see anything but stone.
If she thought the tunnels of Lippen were tight, there were no words to describe the ventilation system. They had been bored through the rock with only the barest accommodations made for the maintenance crews, narrow stapled rungs to allow servicing when blockages occurred thanks to dead wildlife or vegetative overgrowth from above.
The winch pulled them up past several measures of metal foot holds. As she ascended, though, their edges grew discolored, then shiny. When the winch came to a jarring stop, she reached out and found them to be wet with moisture and slippery with moss.
Her breath, which had been admirably even and under control up to this point, shuddered into short panting spasms. The grapple blocked the path above. She had to get it free of the walls, sling it over her shoulder, climb the ladder’s slippery surfaces, and keep from dropping Dug.
“Relax, Talis. Untie me, I can climb.” The strain in Dug’s voice made it very clear he was being optimistic to dangerous degrees.
“Shh, I’m listening.” She wasn’t. She was fighting back panic.
For a moment, all she could do was remain there, dangling from the grapple, held up by the safety harness as her heart seized and her mind went blank. Her worst fears had found her in this tight shaft, and they played with her like a fork-tongued cloud whipper played with bait on a line.
Her arms burned with the effort of gripping the cannon’s brace and her fingers hurt from gripping Dug in his bundle. His hip bone was pressing hard into her shoulder, his bodyweight pulling her at a strange angle. Her neck was tight from the strain and, between that and the ringing from the cannon fire, she could feel things working toward a migraine. The myriad discomforts worked together to overwhelm her.
So she focused on one. Focused on the pinch of the safety belt in the crook beneath her arm. It was the sharpest pain, as most of her weight and Dug’s bore down against a metal clip. The pain was a single light she could aim her thoughts toward through the darkness of her anxiety. She saw the point pulsing slowly and matched her breathing to it.
Nowhere to go but up. Nothing to do but not fall. She wasn’t afraid of heights. Never had been. What she feared was failing her friends. Failing Dug, who needed to get off this island, not get stuck in the middle of it.
Inch by inch, she shifted herself, avoiding a free spin in the shaft. She got her boot and the hand under Dug’s legs onto rungs. She considered his weight. She’d pulled him up aboard ships before, helped him scale walls, and there was even that time she’d had to carry him, sitting on her shoulders, for several blocks. In each of those cases, though, he’d been in better shape to help her.
And, strangely enough, none of those times had been in a ventilation shaft.
“Okay, Dug. If you really want to try climbing, I’m going to try and get you off my shoulder.”
Her voice sounded loud, even against the silence in her right ear.
“Ready.”
They were at least five stories up, with nothing between them and the tunnel floor but gravity. And if they didn’t fall, Dug could still hurt himself if he overdid it and tore his stitches.
She repositioned her grip on the bar to a stronger underhand, then let go of the grappling cannon long enough to unbuckle the straps around Dug’s legs. The harness did not get more comfortable for bearing more of her weight, but it did let her work Dug off her shoulder.
“I can’t tell how close your feet are to the rungs in this gods-rotted squeeze.”
“It’s all right, Talis. I have this.”
He grunted, pushing off her shoulder until he could reach the ladder. His foot had found a rung a little lower than her own, and he rolled the remaining pressure off her shoulder. She was finally able to get a grip on her half of the ladder. They were nose-to-nose in the ridiculously narrow space.
“Hello.” He looked entirely uncomfortable. She was shocked he was in such good spirits.
“What’re you smiling about?”
“We are leaving.”
Her hearing was still a mess, but the words struck like a hammer on clean steel. It was true. With everything that had happened, she hadn’t stopped to think about it. Now that she did, her muscles began to quiver with the relief of it. Poor timing. At least her breathing was even, and some of the pain was starting to release from her fingers, with her legs and back doing the hard work.
“Yes, it looks like it’s going to be a process.” She leaned forward and let her forehead bump his. “Shall we get out first, then celebrate?”
“First round is on me, Captain.”
“Second one, too. You’ve been nothing but trouble today. You go first. If you pass out again, I’ll try to catch you.”
“I did not pass out.”
“Damned right you did. And you owe me for that strain on my heart too. Now move. But don’t overexert yourself, you hear?”
He frowned, nodding, and began to climb past her.
“Careful now. I can see those ridiculous ab muscles flexing. Can’t be good for your sutures.”
“Aye, Captain.” He sounded in no mood to argue. She had been able to see a thin line of daylight coming around some corner above them, but now Dug’s shape eclipsed it, and she was covered in his shadow.
She leaned her forehead against the cold, wet stone for a moment. Even though her breathing had returned to normal in face of a problem to solve, she had to shut her eyes and count to five, five times, before her hands would release their grip so she could move up the slick ladder.
“Okay. I’m starting up behind you.”
She heard the scrape of Dug’s boot toes against the walls, but he did not climb.
“Dug?”
“Collecting the grapple so I can return it to Sophie.”
Talis looked back between her feet but couldn’t see the Lippen tunnel below around a slight curve in the angle of the shaft. She snorted with wry humor. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that. Not sure I ever want to see the things again.”
“Or hear them.”
“That’s the right of it.” She looked forward to laughing about this from the other end of the climb.
Above her, the grapple tines released with a metallic sproing, and then the cannon itself moved upward, past her head.
They reached an elbow in the shaft, which is what had stopped the grapple end from reaching any higher. The rungs turned to footholds as they climbed over the change in direction and along the forty-five-degree slope.
“Pause for a moment, would you?” She laid back, begging her arms to stop trembling, and closed her eyes. Mostly she tried to ignore that the opposite side of the shaft was less than an arm’s span away.
“I do not think that is a good idea, Talis.” His voice sounded very far away, though Talis would have sworn her hearing was starting to return to normal. All noises sounded as though she were listening to them with her ear against a full lift
balloon, but at least her auditory world had begun to expand again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I am getting tired. Not the sort of tired that resting for a moment will improve.”
“All right. Let’s keep going then. I don’t see how I’d rig you back into that net to drag you out the rest of the way. And you wouldn’t be able to afford the favors you’d owe me if I did.”
“I can see Nexuslight coming in past the next turn.”
Talis let out a ragged lungful of air she hadn’t realized she was holding. “What are we waiting for, then?”
Chapter 16
When her fingers reached for the next footholds and found only vines and soil, Talis nearly wept with relief. But she saved that energy for pulling herself free of the shaft and crawling to where Dug had collapsed against a nearby tree trunk.
He opened one eye as she approached. “We made it.”
“We really did.” She checked his stitches again, along with his pulse. There was fresh blood on his bandages, but given everything they’d just been through, it looked like a reasonable amount. He was shivering, though it was warm in the jungle, and coated in a light sheen of perspiration. There wasn’t much she could do for him in the moment, with a bag of gearwork gadgets designed more for breaking things than fixing them. She collapsed in a trembling, exhausted slump by his side, pulled the scarf off her face, and repacked the grapple cannon into the bag, then closed her eyes to listen for signs of Tisker and Sophie. A light breeze wicked away her own sweat. She was still covered in blood, and she stank of panic and sulfur.
Around them, the jungle had recovered from its startled silence, and peeps, chirps, and trills picked up where they must have left off. It was so peaceful, and she realized she’d lost almost the whole night’s sleep.
As if to punctuate that point, the tocks began their predawn caterwaul. A cacophony of squeaks, growls, and keening cries signaled the start of a new day’s hunt.
