Beasts of the Walking City (13 page)

“It very likely does,” Fehris says. “And I can get it. Ercan, I don’t think I have to tell you what this could mean.”

Ercan looks at all of us. I can almost see his thoughts spinning in his head. “Fehris, every pawnshop in Tamaranth has a map to Te’loria in the window for the tourists.”

Another bolt of fire whistles low over the warehouse. Everyone but Fehris ducks. Debris clatters onto the roof and down into the street.

“This is what I do, remember?” Fehris leans on his makeshift cane and draws himself up to his full four feet. “This is why you keep me around! At least it should be. The ship’s age, it’s characteristics, the crew, the context all line up, Ercan. I really think so. It’s going to take me more time to translate the glyphs, time to set the ship up to the right amplitude. We’ll need to rebuild some of the damaged parts of the data storage, and to find the right location…” He trails off. “Ercan, there’s no way we can leave this ship here.”

Ercan puts his face in his hands. His wig falls off, and when it hits the floor it starts crawling slowly behind a crate. 

I think the wig might have the right idea.

Ercan raises his head. He looks at Mircada, and then both of them look at me.

“What do you think?” Mircada asks.

“I don’t think we really have a choice,” I say. “At least I don't. Fehris, have you been able to repair any of the ship?”

“In all of the free time I’ve had available to me?” Fehris frowns. “I’m a scholar, not an engineer—that was Mishna. Some conduits are functional, but not many. I  reset the power reserves, but since there’s really no power so that won’t do much. I haven’t brought anything online and I really don’t want to without someone who is much better at this sort of thing than I am. There’s too much risk that we’ll damage something critical.”

“So it can hold power? If we were able to get some?”

“It might.” Fehris frowns at the thought. “Or you might blow out everything that means anything. We need a lab to know for sure."

"What are you thinking?” Mircada asks.

“We lay low. Try and siphon some aether off whatever network the Akarii set up when they get here.”

“And melt down the rest of the conduits?” Fehris says.

“I don’t think the ship is going anywhere,” Ercan says.

“Ercan, Blackwell, come here.” Mircada has moved over to the door. “Look.” She points. On the docks, Akarii soldiers have removed any semblance of disguise, and are already moving in formations, knives out and ready. They’re corralling people into a few of the Framarc buildings on the docks, and boarding the few ships that are still docked.

Out in the harbor, large Akarii transports have set up a blockade and are stopping ships that are trying to get out. As we watch, two ships run with the wind, heading for the largest gap between two of the hovering transports. Mages in the matrix platforms on the transports fire across their path. One of them lets its blue sails go limp, and slows to a stop. The other keeps on running, make it through the break in the ships and into the wider part of the bay. But then it’s lit up with magefire and starts to burn. Off toward the horizon, we can see the looming specter of what has to be a huge Akarii warship, coming in under power.

“Lasser’s Prick, they’re fast,” I say.

“We can’t run,” Mircada said. “Our best bet is to lay low. The ship is pretty beat up. They’re just soldiers—they’re not Retrievers or scholars, right? It’s just an old, abandoned ship that doesn’t work. A piece of junk to them. Why would they bother with it, when they’re on their way to war? When it calms down here we find a way out.”

“It’s not a goddamn piece of junk,” Fehris says, hotly.

Ercan watches the burning ship slide beneath the waves.

“You’re right,” he said to Mircada. “As usual.”

I nod, too, even though I know she’s either fooling herself or naïve. If I were going to war? I’d take everything along that might help.

Ercan walks over, picks up the wig up from where it lies cowering, shakes it out and stuffs it in a pocket. Then he turns and looks at Mircada and I. “How should we do this?”

I look up into the rough rafters supporting the roof of the warehouse—some boards are laid out across them for additional storage. There’s ladder on the back wall, and a winch for hauling up cargo. “I’ll be up there, somewhere,” he said. “If it gets bad, I can hold them for awhile while you four get out.”

Mircada frowns. “You’d sacrifice yourselves for us?”

“You did buy me food,” Blackwell said. “So by my people’s tradition I’m bound to defend you.”

“You’re making that up.”

I grin. “Completely. Look, you seem to be playing straight with me. I’ll be honest. I’ve got nothing to go back for. That ship is all I have, and I’m not letting it go. And if Fehris is right…”

“I’m fucking right!” shouts Fehris, a little too loudly.

Ercan looks over up at him. “Were you the same sage who told me that the podship didn’t have any snares?”

Fehris frowned, and his face reddened. “Wrong once. But right about this.”

“If he’s right, then I have even more reason to make a stand here.” I think for a second. “You don’t want to get out now? You might be able to while they’re locking down the docks. Get out into the mountains with the supplies and stay there. Kjat, you too. Come back in a week—I’m not likely to steal this thing out on my own.”

Mircada shakes her head. “You don’t know them. They’ll already be patrolling the edges of the town, too—encircle and snare. It’s the way the Akarii work. In a few days, maybe? When they feel like they’ve gotten most of the town under control? Maybe tonight?”

“If we’re taken, the three of us do have Akarii identities that got us on the Retriever ship in the first place.” Ercan says. “We might be able to bluff our way onto that warship. But that doesn’t give the two of you much help, though.”

“Let’s hope we won’t need it.”

A droplet of sweat drips off the end of Ercan’s large nose. “OK. So we hide and hope they’re passing through too quickly to care about one old ship. But we should be ready.”

“I’ll be in the rafters, then. You four stay back behind those crates, near the rear door.”

Kjat shakes her head, and steps next to me. “If you’re climbing, I’m climbing.”

I can tell there’s no arguing with her. “Thanks,” I say. She nods, blushing, and looks away.

Ercan takes a dusty bottle out of one of his sacks and studies it for a minute. “Here,” he says. “This is two hundred years old. It was one of a few bottles found intact in an old distillery in the eastern end of Tilhtinora. I think I just paid a small fortune for it, so I’ll be damned if some Akarii is going to drink it before I get a chance to.”

He cracks it open, offers it first to Mircada. She takes a long drink, and then we all pass it around. It’s a clear, harsh liquid with a fierce taste of black fennel, and it burns all the way down my throat and sets my insides on fire.

15.

I
t’s been dark for about an hour, and the cold night fog has crept back in and wrapped the Port in haze, when the Buhr rouses itself from a corner of the warehouse attic, buzzing and humming. I think it’s been sucking up rats back there.

THEY COME
, it shouts into our heads, as the sound of heavy, mechanical footfalls approach. Like we couldn’t hear them ourselves.

There’s a rumbling as the large warehouse door slides open, and the bright light of magefire lights up the interior and the ship. From where I’m laying, in the rafters, the harsh light makes the ship look even worse, pitted and scarred, blackened by the Dead storm like a charred fish.

“And what’s this one supposed to be?” asks a Talovian’s bored, croaking voice, over the sound of the machinery.

“A cargo ship in from Tamaranth, khalee.”

“A cargo ship in from Tamaranth. And just what type of cargo was it carrying?”

The two figures enter the warehouse below my feet. One of them is tall and wide and glowing, a Talovian wrapped in the glowing Tel Kharan armor that sputters and hisses, inner mechanics working to move the tremendous limbs across the floor without much aether to back it up. Steam hisses from crevices at the shoulders, elbows and knees. The other figure is thin and slumps in the first one’s wake, a tired man wrapped in a tattered coat and topped with an even more ragged bowler hat. The second squints, ducks his head. “The manifest was not filed.”

“Not filed.” The Talovian woman frowns and licks her eyes with a broad pink tongue. “How do you Framarc run an operation, anyway? This is the sixth piece of City trash we’ve found stashed away here. No owners, no manifests, no records of any sort. Are you
all
smugglers, then?”

“It’s registered as Akarii,” says the Framarc. “Maybe if you all were a little more forthcoming…?”

“Remember your place, clerk. Check the podship. If that tracking signal I’m reading is correct, Bakron will be very interested in this vessel.”

“As you like, khalee,” the Framarc mage sighs, straightens his bowler hat, and with his knife sends a wash of stored aether slowly across the surface of the ship. The ship’s conduits resonate quietly, a low hum, and several glyphs light up, shimmer for a moment and then fade. 

The knives that Kjat and I have pick up the vibration and set back a quiet echo that the mage will hear, but there’s no help for it. The Kerul knives will probably do the same. 

The clerk frowns, and looks around the warehouse, squinting again against the shadows cast by the white light of the marine’s armor. Another wash of energy, more focused this time, causes our knives to shudder and spark. The mage raises his eyebrows.

I shake my head. We’re not getting of this easily now. If we get out of this at all.

Kjat and I draw our knives. There’s an instinctual rumbling deep in my throat, but I don’t let it out.

“What is it?” says the Tel Kharan.

“It’s…I think nothing, khalee. Echoes, maybe, from the fallen city? Sometimes artifacts like this pick up a residual charge that…”

“Lasser’s Glorious Prick,” curses the woman. “Shut up, if you can’t be useful.” She sniffs, draws her own white knife, pulls in more power from somewhere and sends a burst across the ship. She’s using a lot of energy, so she must have a tracer that I can’t see, stretching back to that warship in the harbor. And somehow that ship must have either big reserves, or some sort of ship-to-ship network stretching back to a distant leiline.

The podship glows and hums, and our knives pick up the resonance and thrum in our hands.

The Tel Kharan speaks, and her croaky, Talovian voice fills the warehouse and comes through our knives on an override channel. “This town and all contents are now the property of the Akarii. This craft is now forfeit to the Tel Kharan. You will emerge and come with us, or you will be dragged forth and imprisoned as the smugglers and thieves you are.”

We say nothing. The Buhr hums and clicks quietly. Somewhere out in the street, a small dog barks and then goes quiet.

The marine sighs, closes the thick, clear visor down over her head, and then holds her knife out before her. She calls more aether and it begins to burn with a harsh white fire. The Framarc mage backs out to the street and wards himself as the warehouse fills with heat and light. The Talovian throws out a tracer that hovers over her head, and then shoots down through the air. It settles first on the ship, tracing out a glyph. It pulls back, but it creeps through the warehouse, then, like it’s a dog sniffing out currents of power, turning and seeking.

I have to admit it’s not bad work. Akarii magework (and the Tel Kharan are the best of the Akarii, but they’re still Akarii at their heart) is generally a blunt, direct thing—raw force some say is meant to compensate for a lack of skill. But this woman knows what she’s doing.

The tracer twists back on itself, darting first back at the Framarc mage, who ducks reflexively, and then it circles, reorients and make an unerring line straight for the tip of my knife. It settles there, and it tries to reach its tendrils into me.

The Talovian fills out the conduit with a golden glow. 

I cloud parts of my mind, the way Sartosh taught me. 

I let her see I’m a renegade drone, a year in the port, a small time thief. I act frightened and desperate. At the same time, I’m secretly pulling more and more power from her conduit, funneling it back to Kjat, who spins it on the end of her knife.

Yield to the Tel Kharan,
the Talovian says, through the connection. I can tell both her knife and her armor are working to focus and amplify the energies available to her.
You are lost. We will bring you home
.
You have skills we can use. Do not stand against me.

I look back at Kjat, who nods—she’s doing ok with the energy coming through.

I fake a small attack—a little burst of energy down the line that the Talovian easily catches, adds her own energies to, and sends back at me, pulsing down the glowing conduit. It would have been enough stun an average drone, but I catch that too, and shunt it back to Kjat. More for us to work with.

She’s got her eyes closed now, concentrating, but she’s still got it covered.
Use the ship if you need to,
I tell her, and she nods. She sends a nearly invisible tracer down to the podship, and starts pushing some of the energy that way, using the ship something like a battery.

The Talovian is confused. She sends a larger burst of aether down the line, and then another to follow it. Kjat drains it all down to the ship.

You have good skills,
says the Tel Kharan, seductively.
Come down to me. I will train you myself. You would contribute well to the Akarii. Come have a home with us. 

She follows it with another large burst of golden light that crackles up the conduit. As it hits my knife I catch it, parcel part of it back to Kjat, and together the two of us spin it into a tight  matrix, the focused light jumping back and forth from the points and the hilts of each our knives. It looks like a spiderweb of light, stretching between us.

Kjat pulls energy back up from the ship, and we build out a Bakarh construct there in the matrix. It’s basically a glyph, but one that sparks and shimmers in that web, growing like something alive. This is something we alone do, the Bakarh, when we work together. We build these golems of aether, and give them something like a short, vicious life. They’re not alive, really. They’re creatures of purpose that act under our direction, and without a supply of aether they’ll die out. They’re not sentient. They don’t feel pain.