by R. Cooper
“Perhaps his plan worked,” Trenne said, soft and orderly, then turned to the two Imperial Guards. “Taji shehzha will be alive when he leaves this place,” he said, still too quiet for a moment like this.
Ears up, expressions like stone, both Guards pressed closer to Taji before turning outward to face unseen threats. They pulled their knives in tandem.
Another explosion roared above them, closer or at least louder, and Taji jerked his head up in time to see a large, heavy shape crash into one of the skylights. The material the skylight was made of fractured, but held. Trenne grabbed a fistful of Taji’s soria a second before a larger explosion followed the first.
Taji flinched and crouched to the ground when he heard the unmistakable sound of something cracking. Particles of dust or dirt drifted downward, tiny and terrible portents of disaster. He looked up helplessly to see part of the domed ceiling shiver. He sucked in a breath but no warning came out.
He was yanked up and shoved against the wall as a chunk of the ceiling began to slip. The tension holding the dome in place was gone. It was only a matter of time now.
Something jostled loose from his soria, and Taji barely recognized what before he dropped down to grab the fallen data device. His DD held everything—his language studies, the Sha histories he’d been permitted to read, his notes about the earlier civilization. The next translator would need them. Someday, Trenne might want to know about those who existed before the Sha.
“Taji!” Trenne shouted. Taji had never heard him that loud, almost furious.
He startled and turned back. Then a flash of gray moved in front of him and Taji flew backward.
He hit the ground hard. Hit stone hard, and the air wheezed out of him. He flailed as he struggled to breathe again, to see where he was other than in one of the servant tunnels, and then there was nothing but deafening, overwhelming noise and powerful quaking that made him curl into a ball and squeeze his eyes shut.
When it stopped—when it finally stopped—he opened his eyes again.
The entrance was gone. Blocked off or collapsed, Taji couldn’t tell.
He scrambled to get on his hands and knees, blinking as though that would help his eyes adjust faster to the dark. The tunnel lights were functional, but dim. He tucked his data device back into his soria before he crawled upward to what should have been the entrance. He reached out to pat the pile of stones blocking his escape, but then didn’t touch it.
The playground of the Olea, he thought semi-hysterically, and then said, “Fuck,” because he couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing. Not screams or more shivering, sliding rock. Not Trenne.
“Trenne?” he called softly anyway, too scared to raise his voice. He hoped Trenne could hear him. Hoped Trenne was… “Okay.” He was panting but thankfully, too pumped full of adrenaline at the moment to feel much pain. “Trenne? Trenne! I’m okay. I hope you’re…I hope you’re there.”
Taji had to go. The mission was to protect Tsomyal. Trenne and the team were going to get the ambassador and leave. Trenne had told Taji to stay with the ambassador, he warned him quite clearly that the ambassador was IPTC’s main concern, but Taji had only thought about Trenne and being his shehzha and forgotten all of that. He’d taken Trenne far from Tsomyal and now Trenne had to get back to them and the rest of the team. Before leaving. Because that was the next step. They were going to go. No time to waste waiting on a translator who might already be dead as far as they knew.
“I’m going!” He raised his voice as much as he dared, shuddering when soundwaves bounced off the rock around him. “I’ll get out! Don’t…please don’t—” He shut himself up, breathing hard.
Trenne couldn’t wait. Taji knew that. Asking wasn’t fair.
He forced himself to move. At least he would be heading down. He pulled himself slowly to his feet, palms sliding over the wall until he found a smooth patch, a place servants touched out of superstition. That meant this tunnel was in use and that it went somewhere.
He kept his hand to the wall even when nerves had him trembling and new pains began to make themselves known. It wasn’t a great distance, probably, although each step seemed too slow. Taji made his way through bored stone until the tunnel seemed to curve, and then abruptly there was light, an artificial glow drawing him out of the tunnel and into a place he hadn’t been to before.
A service area, maybe storage; he didn’t care. It was empty of people and had a lower ceiling than the upper level. Taji stopped to lean against a wall and catch his breath, but he didn’t have a lot of time. Maybe not any time, but if the others were already gone, he didn’t want to think about it.
He walked until he found another tunnel, this one leading up. He had no time to rest, so he braced himself before the first shaky step. He could have sent messages on his DD, but no one would be checking theirs now. The team would be around Tsomyal. If the situation was dangerous enough—and a collapsed palace fucking well counted—they would take Tsomyal back to the capital. Tsomyal was the priority.
“Larin Emperor, the bastard,” Taji grunted. He might think getting rid of Tsomyal would get rid of IPTC, but he could not be more wrong. “Larin Emperor, the downfall of his planet.”
Sounds began to trickle through the tunnel to him. Taji bit his lip, adding a little sting to a dozen, larger pains, and tripped in his haste, landing hard on his knee. The jolt carried through his prosthetic to send alarmed signals to his brain. He fell to his hands and knees again, abandoning his pathetic dignity just to get out of this fucking tunnel.
The air rushing in from the entrance was warm, which startled Taji into slowing down. The roar in his ears wasn’t only his racing pulse. That was fire.
He vaguely wondered if he’d hit his head. Clothes and plants were combustible, not stone. But he reached the end of the tunnel and left those panicked questions to join all the others making his head spin because he crawled out onto the surface level but had no idea where he was.
The sky was purple and dark with clouds—no, smoke. Black smoke, hot and stinking of burning plastics and metals. Directly in front of him were two bodies.
He knew they were bodies and no longer people. They were too still, exquisite sorias stained purplish-red and stirring in the rising winds. He went to them anyway. A Tir, possibly, a Shyril, blades clean in their hands. They hadn’t gotten a hit in.
Taji started shaking again, or hadn’t stopped.
He was supposed to be making working lexicons, not stumbling into coups in a country where every single person but him was armed. He didn’t know who had struck first, Larin or one of the families. He didn’t care. He pushed himself up, panting so hard his chest hurt, and turned toward the sound of blaster fire.
Like a fool. Like a child who didn’t know the sound of danger. But action would have answers. Blaster fire might mean IPTC. Might mean Trenne.
Taji rounded one of the white dome structures the Olea were so fond of only to stop dead at the massive hole in the ground, edges jagged where the rocks had given way. Beyond that, a field of fire where all the fliers had once been.
The fliers had been the cause of the explosions, he realized faintly. Overloaded fuel packs were unstable, easily triggered to explode if someone knew how to override safety measures. It was the kind of thing bored, clever kids did with old energy packs back home. Shavian tech tended to be solar-powered but anything from IPTC might not be, which had probably made the fires worse, intentionally or unintentionally. Whole fliers might have been flung around like shrapnel, crashing into structures that could have been millennia-old. All they’d had to do was hit one weak point.
“I guess it was time for Laviias to fall,” Taji whispered without amusement, then bent over and put his hands on his knees to throw up.
He didn’t want to go to the edge of the crater. He didn’t want to see what was below.
He coughed and cramped until there was nothing left in him to vomit, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He stayed hunched over, air
rasping in and out of his throat, and barely reacted to the sound of a voice other than to look over.
“Taji shehzha?”
Mos’s half-unraveled braid hung over her shoulder, drawing Taji’s eye to the dark stains spreading through her soria, the scorched fabric of her skirts. Blood dripped down her arm. More had sprayed across her face. She kept her hold on her knife, but listed to one side before she steadied herself.
“Taji shehzha, why are you here?” she demanded as though the world weren’t on fire behind him. “You should be with your eshe,” she insisted, then swayed backwards.
Taji hurried to her side, too late to keep her from falling, although she got up again without his assistance. Weakened and bleeding, she took the time to stare at him in shock for nearly touching her.
“What happened?” Taji wrapped his arms around himself to ask the question, then flung them outward impatiently. “No. I don’t need to know that right now. I need to find Trenne and the others before they go. Do you know where they are? Where they were?”
Mos swept a look over him that clearly said Taji was in no shape to go anywhere. “Go?” she repeated, confused. She spoke loudly, like someone who had been deafened, and Taji suddenly realized the effect a series of explosions might have on Shavians who were too close to them. “Why would they go, if you are here?” She studied him again, frowning openly. “You wore it. You went to the feast. What was said? Where is—” She stopped herself, then pressed on, trying to lower her voice. “Where is Olea Rinnah?”
“How the fuck would I know?” Taji answered in a mix of two languages. “When I left, everyone was pissed—angry—with Larin but eating their food. And terrified. They were furious and terrified. I—I need to go. I’m just a translator.”
Mos raised her head, inhaled, then scanned the area around them. “If your soldiers are leaving, they will need to get back to the beach,” she said, voice dropping even lower. “I do not think they will use a flier.” Right. Because those were destroyed or surrounded by flames. “They must leave on foot.” She paused. “A fast run, for one of us. Not for you.”
They might still be on their way down. That was all Taji heard. He spun around, first trying to place himself and then trying to imagine a way around the cliffs.
His knees wobbled as he remembered the size of those cliffs. “I won’t make it. Not in time.” He might not make it at all. He was barely upright now.
“What?” Mos asked from her careful distance away from him. Maybe her translator was still working or maybe she knew basic Anglisky but the phrase hadn’t made sense. Won’t made Lin and Trenne stumble sometimes too.
It didn’t matter. Taji hadn’t been talking to her. “You live alone, you talk to yourself,” he mumbled, more and more aware of the burning in his lungs from trying to run up all those stairs and now from the smoke. He shook his head. “Sha do not like out-of-control bodies. No lifts. Only stairs.” He was too sick to laugh and too shaken to keep from crumpling to the ground.
He pulled out his DD, made the screen light up. There wasn’t really anything to say. Wait for me was foolish. Come back for me was impossible.
With Mos, Taji sent at last, so Trenne would worry less whenever he found the message. Then Taji put the device away.
“You will wait here for your Trenne?” Mos asked. It felt as if she had asked it before, several times maybe.
“I do not even know if…” Taji was not ending that thought today. “Why are you here?” He turned on her instead. “Whose blood is that on your face?”
Mos smeared a line across her cheek, then considered her finger and the blood now on it. “A Guard’s,” she offered. “I was not prepared to be arrested if I had not yet committed a crime.”
Taji nodded, because he had no idea what else to do. “So he’s arresting people. Someone must have taken the bait.” It didn’t explain everything, but that hardly mattered. “I will guess you were not the only one to resist the Guard. Of course. Sha honor and everything.”
He pushed against the ground to stand up again, said, “I think a Guard may have saved my life,” then remembered all the ever-watchful Imperial Guards standing between tables at the feast, all those half-wild Shavian nobles drinking midye. Tiny Tsomyal in the middle of it all, with two humans and Lin to protect them.
“This was Larin’s plan. This is what he wanted. Well, maybe not that.” Taji waved toward the gaping crater that had once been elegant domes. The explosions probably had not been Larin’s doing, but someone desperately trying to stop him. Although sabotage did not sound very Sha. “Sha honor gave Larin exactly what he wanted! Fuck. This isn’t…I need to go before I pass out,” Taji informed her quietly, and put one foot in front of the other in the direction of parts of Laviias that were not on fire. “Good luck looking for Rinnah.”
“I suspect she will be with Larin.” Mos’s voice came from not far behind him.
“Are you going to free her?” That caught Taji’s attention. He waited until he passed the two bodies he’d found before, then paused to look at Mos. “She might be dead already. Everyone might be dead already.”
Oh. He’d said it.
He pushed on. “You’re injured. Do you need help? Nev could help you, if…if the ship is there. Or will you go to Rinnah?”
“Rinnah is dead, you say, or with Larin.” Mos turned the knife in her hand, agitated.
“So just us, with Larin on one hand, cliffs on the other.” Taji pulled in a long breath that did nothing for his strength or his nerves. He was probably confusing Mos. He didn’t have the energy to care. “How do I get to the beach?”
“There are tunnels through the cliffs.” Mos was practical. “Again, faster than the paths around and down the hills, but ancient and not suited for you and your difficulties, Taji shehzha.”
“I figured.” Taji wouldn’t have been surprised even if he’d had the energy for it. “Will they take me? The Guards, if they see me? I do not trust Larin but I am not certain about them.”
“I saw them take Koel Eriat. He did not go easily. I am not certain he will…when more Guards come, with more fliers, they will take him to the capital. It will be finished there.”
That answer was more helpful than it should have been. Dungeons sprang to mind. Treason and failed emperors and missing feet. “How do I get there without being rounded up or harassed by Larin’s enforcers?”
“Your words…I do not understand them.”
“Just point in the direction I need to go!” Taji snarled. “I do not have time to explain words to you!”
Mos’s ears twitched restlessly, but she raised a hand and pointed. “You will not get there on your own.”
“You going to touch me to help me?” Taji kept walking, though each step was growing heavier and heavier and the uneven ground made him stumble. “You would touch Rinnah if she was someone’s shehzha,” he added viciously.
“To save her life, I would—”
“Sure. To save her life.” Sarcasm probably didn’t translate. Taji spared Mos one final glance and was about to turn when he noticed her arrested posture and alert ears.
Then he heard what she did—blaster fire, pure, deadly concussive waves and smashing stone, followed by another sound, a human voice shouting in Anglisky. He knew that voice, although he’d never heard it hoarse and breathless.
The blaster fire stopped.
Mos grabbed Taji by the soria and yanked him backwards before Taji could call out. He squirmed then went still, unresisting when Mos pulled him toward a wall and held him there.
The wind changed direction. Black smoke stung his eyes and made him choke. Taji put a hand over his mouth to stifle the sound because he realized what had frightened Mos.
Six Imperial Guards, gray uniforms dirty and some splattered purple, with cuts across their faces or arms or legs, emerged from another tunnel. On the ground, dragged between the first two, was Nadir.
Nadir was limp but not dead, and loud, as if he didn’t trust his communicator. �
�I’m good!” He gasped harshly between each breath, and didn’t fully muffle a scream when the Guards let go and he hit the ground. Taji couldn’t see any damage from where he was, but for a moment, Nadir’s moaning seemed to be the only sound. Then Nadir panted and pulled a knife, from where Taji didn’t see. “This is nothing,” Nadir was still talking, wet rattles in his voice that became more agonized gasps when one of the Guards disarmed him then pinned him down with a foot on his bicep. “Go.” Nadir lurched up with sudden strength when two of the Guards pulled their knives from their belts, although he couldn’t get far off the ground. “I said go!”
Something pressed over Taji’s mouth. Taji realized it was Mos’s hand, not his own, that she was touching him. Then he realized it was because he was screaming.
The Guard poised to kill Nadir raised his head. So did Nadir.
