Reign of Beasts (34 page)

A
shiol had never seen the use of Delphine before this. An army of sentinels, brought into being because no one had told her it was impossible. There was no time to stop and admire her now. The sentinels were under attack from the steam angels, and there were fracture lines cracking across the sky, glowing in fierce shades of orange, red and gold.

‘Let me go,' Garnet yelled from where he was still chained to the statue of Iustitia, surrounded by salamanders. A glowing skybolt crashed into the tiled portico behind him, and the groove it made in the ground bubbled with molten skysilver. ‘For the love of Aufleur. Let me fight.'

‘How are we supposed to know what side you would fight on?' Poet snapped back.

Another skybolt arced over their heads and Ashiol threw animor at it, forcing it to explode before it got too close.

‘You expect us to have mercy on you, Garnet?' he said. ‘You picked the wrong people to ask.'

The steam angels swarmed towards them. The salamanders skittered forward and burst into bright flame, which kept the angels away for a little while at least. But they circled around, darting this way and that, actively looking for a break in the salamander fire.

‘Seems it's you they want,' Ashiol said to Garnet.

‘All the more reason to let me go,' Garnet replied.

It turned out as Ashiol had known it would, with him standing at the foot of the statue of Iustitia, protecting Garnet from the angels. They smelled like animor and rain, and there were other scents in there too, of familiar skin that made his head muzzy.

One of them cried out as he slashed at her — her, of course it was a woman — with his chimaera claws, and for a moment her steam blurred thin and he saw a familiar face within. No, not that. No hallucinations of lovers past, not today.

Ashiol lost focus for just long enough to enable the second angel to climb onto the statue of Iustitia, her wings of steam wrapping around Garnet's body. Now he was the one crying out, struggling to breathe. Ashiol went to him, but the first angel held him back, surrounding him in heat and cloud. His body sagged, losing strength.

‘That's the way, cub,' a voice whispered in his ear. ‘Stand down.'

The angel that had Garnet was growing more solid as her hands closed around the skysilver chains that bound him to the statue. She seemed to breathe, and the chains rotted from his wrists, breaking into tiny pieces that the angel took inside herself. She was forming colours now. A long golden dress. Skin more pink than white. Razor-sharp fingernails. Short, blonde hair.

‘Tasha,' Garnet gasped, and the angel kissed him, tipping his head back and all but swallowing him whole.

‘Hello, my cub,' she said, and then changed in an instant to chimaera form, dark and fanged and clawed, before shaping herself into Tasha again, or something very like Tasha. ‘Look what I can do.'

‘You're a King,' Garnet said drowsily. ‘You finally made it. Welcome to the party.'

Ashiol wanted to fight, to shout, to insist that it wasn't Tasha, she was dead and gone, it was a trick. But his own senses were dimming, and the air was full of the scent of lioness. Tasha. Not Tasha. Not Tasha. He could not form words.

‘We're both Kings,' Tasha said alluringly, her mostly solid hands stroking Garnet lovingly. ‘You don't need Ashiol or Velody now. You have me. We can make the sacred marriage and repair what was broken long ago. We can bring the skywar back into the daylight.'

Ashiol opened his mouth to protest, because Garnet was going to doom them all, but the steam angel turned to look at him and he felt a wave of agonising heat burn through his veins. As he writhed on the ground, struggling through the pain, he heard Garnet agree, and looked up just in time to see Garnet and Tasha wrapped around each other in a kiss.

Stupid, so stupid. How could Garnet fall for the trick he himself had used on Ashiol five years ago?

It wasn't just a kiss. It was the fucking sacred marriage. Garnet's animor was streaming out of him, light pouring from his mouth into the body of the angel, who was far beyond a semblance of Tasha now. She glowed white and gold, light pouring from between every sculpted feather of her wings. She pulled back from the kiss, leaving Garnet empty on the statue, and screamed with triumph.

 

The sky was falling in pieces — stone and sinew, bricks and pillars. Velody took shelter in the broken remains of the Basilica, and caught Crane's sleeve as he hurried past her.

‘Where did all those sentinels come from?' she demanded.

He glanced at her, a brief check for injury, then looked out at the whirling storm in the Forum. ‘Delphine's idea. She figured out that it's the skysilver that makes
sentinels — and the Smith had a whole lot of spare swords. She's brainwashed a bunch of her old friends into becoming an army.'

‘And you let her do something that crazy?'

Crane almost laughed. ‘Ever tried to stop Delphine doing something?'

She couldn't argue with that. ‘If the creatures from the sky get hold of that many skysilver weapons, we're doomed,' she said desperately.

‘At least this way we can fight.' Crane looked out again. ‘There she is.'

Delphine was a blur of light and silver in the darkness, surrounded by her new soldiers and a host of flashing blades. They were fighting creatures made of cloud and steam.

Velody felt rather than heard Ashiol scream elsewhere in the Forum.

‘Crane …' She wanted to wish him luck, or tell him to be careful, or say something that wasn't entirely meaningless right now, with the world coming down around them.

‘Go on,' he said, wielding his sword again, ready to run out into the thick of it. ‘Call a sentinel if you need us. We've plenty to spare!'

The temple burst into stone and dust as they both ran out of its shelter into the thick of battle.

 

The Palazzo shook. Isangell looked with alarm at Kelpie. ‘What is happening out there?'

‘I don't know,' Kelpie said, then gave her a sharp look. ‘You can feel that?'

‘Of course I can feel it,' said Isangell. She went to the window, but there was nothing there but blurred shadow against the glass. ‘I need to see out. What is happening to my city?'

‘We're under attack, but that's nothing new,' said Kelpie. ‘You didn't hear or feel anything the nox Heliora was killed,' she added.

Isangell pressed her hands against the glass, willing herself to see beyond this cocoon Kelpie had built for them. ‘Ashiol says I am one of you now. I remember Bazeppe. As if I don't have more important things to worry about.'

‘I think I'm supposed to give you this,' said Kelpie, coming close. She unfolded her hand. A small, perfectly round diamond lay in the crease of her palm. ‘Ashiol didn't send me. I wouldn't miss out on the battle for him.'

Isangell reached out with one finger and touched the jewel. Kelpie's hand was warm, but the diamond was very cold. ‘What is it?'

‘A tear. A seed. I don't know. Something. When Heliora died, she wasn't supposed to pass her gift on to Rhian. She got confused. Someone else was supposed to be our Seer — and, by the way, can I mention how much I hate that I know this without having been told? My orders fell into my head the second Rhian gave me that stone for you.' Kelpie lifted one shoulder miserably. ‘Hate all that mystic shit. If it doesn't involve swords, I don't know what to do with it. There were only a few of you there when Heliora died: Delphine, Crane and you. I don't think our Crane's cut out to be a Seer. He can't even work out how to fancy a demme who might like him back. And don't get me started on that cow Delphine.'

‘I don't want to be a Seer,' said Isangell.

A tear. A seed. She lifted the diamond slowly, not knowing why, and held it to her lips. It tasted like metal and sadness.

Pain seared through her suddenly, pain and words and light, and she fell like a stone, gasping as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Kelpie was there, steadying her, preventing her from falling with her strong hands.

It's about time,
said a sharp female voice directly into Isangell's head.
So you're the one who's going to fix my mistake, are you? I suppose we could do worse.

Isangell pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Who are you?'

You mean it's not obvious? I'm Heliora, the Seer of the Creature Court. Prepare yourself for a bumpy ride, high and brightness. I'm not the only one in here.

A
shiol screamed as an angel dragged him to the ground, its mouth burning his neck. He could see Garnet twisting in agony as his animor flooded the air around him, fattening the Tasha angel that held him down. Lightning struck, plunging straight into Garnet's body and pinning him to the statue of Iustitia.

The angel holding Ashiol reared up and burst into motes of light as it was blasted by animor. Velody threw herself down beside Ashiol, her hair tangled madly around her face, her clothes all torn and charred.

‘What are they doing to him?' she demanded.

‘Stealing his animor.' Ashiol's voice sounded grim even to himself. He would not wish that on anyone, even Garnet. He had not realised he was so forgiving. ‘Putting something else inside him. I don't know what.'

But he knew.

Garnet yelled and bucked and laughed, and it wasn't his own laugh. As the chains fell away and he pulled free of them, bright colours shone out of his eye sockets.

‘Conquest!' he shrieked in a voice nothing like his own.

‘The sky,' Ashiol said, sickened by the thought of it. ‘They put the sky inside him.'

Garnet howled, flinging his limbs around with abandon. Lightning and thunder crackled around him, coming from him, not from above. He blasted the statue of Iustitia into fragments.

‘So,' said Velody softly. ‘Do we fight, or do we run?'

She took his breath away. How could she be so calm? She was a frigging dressmaker and she put Ashiol to shame with what a coldhearted warrior she could be.

‘Fight,' he said, though he meant ‘run'. He wanted to run with every fibre of his being, every drop of animor in his body. But where could they run to?

Velody nodded, and he saw her preparing herself to do it, to attack whatever Garnet had become, no matter what the cost was. Ashiol had never loved or hated her more than in that moment.

 

Half the Forum was on fire and Macready couldn't see a damned thing. Smoke and steam filled his eyes, and a smear of blood he couldn't get rid of no matter how many times he wiped his face clear.

The devils kept coming, and the angels were worse.

Macready was using Ilsa's sword, because his had vanished into the lake back when Garnet killed Livilla, and it felt wrong in his hand, but what did that matter, anyway? His real sword had been eaten by devils months ago.

There had never been a battle like this. The Lords and Court hadn't even managed to get into the sky. It was dirty and vicious and fought entirely on the ground.

You wanted this, feckwit that you are.

He saw the Smith, massive figure that he was, beating back angels with a hammer and gleaming broadaxe, surrounded by Delphine's fops and flappers. A fireball burst out from behind the black clouds and obliterated them all. The air was full of acrid, choking smoke and it felt as if the city itself was screaming.

Macready slashed his way through three devils, and was on his hands and knees near the arch at the mouth of the Forum, wheezing for breath and readying himself for the next assault, when he saw the body. There had been bodies aplenty in this battle — dozens of Delphine's false sentinels had been sliced down in the first few minutes, choking on dust or steam. But this one was different.

This one was Crane.

The lad lay still, his torn brown cloak covering half of his body. His blood pooled on the grey paving stones and that pretty face of his looked nothing but surprised. No one was home.

A dust devil swooped down, smiling with grainy yellow teeth as it reached for Crane's fallen skysilver sword. Macready roared at the saints-forsaken monster, hurling himself towards it. He scooped up Crane's sword as he ran, so that he had a long skysilver blade in each hand, and fecking hells, this was more like it.

He wasn't thinking straight, his head full of blood and war and his dead lad, and instead of just cutting the fecker to pieces, he ran it down, chasing it out of the Forum and down the wide Duchessa's Avenue, away from the screams of battle and flashes of flame.

The devil was ahead of him, mocking him, right up to the moment that he chased it into the wet mud the drained Lake of Follies, which was decorated with strings of Saturnalia lanterns, bright red and green and gold. The devil screamed as it touched the mud and exploded into a spray of fine wet droplets.

Macready choked back a sob, and then another. One more devil down. Only one. So many left to go.

Too exhausted to properly lift both swords, he turned to go back to the battle, but a sound stopped him. A ripple ran across the floor of the lake, and then another. The mud shuddered and began to swirl, slowly, and then with intent, forming a whirlpool.

Macready stepped back, gripping the hilts of both swords. ‘Whatever the feck you devils have to throw at us now, bring it on!' he yelled at the lake.

The mud swirled and spun and shrank into itself until it was a column of darkness twisting in the centre of an empty lake bed. As Macready watched, the column spun hard into the slender figure of a demoiselle holding a sword. She stood there for a moment, then walked across the lake bed towards him. She wore a short red flapper frock, which danced with lights that matched the Saturnalia lanterns.

As she came closer, he recognised that the sword she held was his own, the one that had fallen into the waters on the Neptunalia. He didn't recognise the demme at first. She had brown, tangled hair and a fresh-scrubbed face, and both of those things were wrong.

‘You seem to have your hands full,' she said, when she was only a few feet from him. ‘I'll hang on to this one, if you don't mind. Things to stab. You know how it is.'

‘Livilla,' he breathed. What the hells kind of world was it that let this demme survive when so many had died? ‘No,' he added. ‘The wench is dead. They quenched her. No coming back from that.'

She gave him a distant smile, as if he was completely unimportant. ‘They quenched me, all right. But do you know the really funny thing about the Creature Court?'

She leaned into him and he could taste the animor pounding through her veins. She didn't smell like Livilla — no perfumed smoke, no wolf — but she was real, not a creature of dust or steam. She was pure animor.

‘What?' Macready said, struggling not to show his fear. If this was Livilla, whatever she had come back as was far more powerful than a Lord.

‘The rules mean nothing,' she said, and kissed him on the forehead so he could feel how solid she was. Then she turned and walked up the avenue, holding his sword by its cloth-wrapped hilt.

Her dress shimmered like water, and he wasn't entirely sure that her skin didn't do the same thing. She looked more real than Livilla ever had — no cosmetick or shiny dyed hair, no beads or baubles. But shadows followed her, fluttering like a wide pair of wings.

‘You're one of them,' he accused again. ‘A steam angel.'

‘You have no fucking idea what I am,' she called. ‘Try to keep up, sentinel.'

The fight had gone out of Macready. He followed this new Livilla back through the arch and into the Forum. Though his swords were at the ready, no one attacked him as he trailed her into the thick of the action.

They found Garnet. He was laughing, spurting colours and light out of his mouth and hands, dazzled with his own power. A steam angel wrapped her arms around him, basking in triumph. Tasha. Feck it all, she looked exactly like Tasha.

‘Oh, I don't think so,' breathed Livilla, rising up behind the steam-angel version of her former Lord. Her shadow wings spread wide, and it wasn't an angel she resembled, but the vengeful spirit of Justice, as she drew back Macready's sword and slashed the angel into pieces.

Garnet saw her, and for a brief moment seemed to recognise who she was. He smiled, as if this was another victory. ‘You came back in time to watch Aufleur burn.'

‘You think I'm going to sit back and let the city fall after all the work it took to get back here?' Livilla said in disbelief. ‘Oh,
lover
. You never did pay enough attention to my wants and needs.'

She slashed again with Macready's sword and this time she caught Garnet in the chest. He fell, light streaming out from the wound, still laughing.

‘It doesn't count as a sacrifice if it's someone you hate, Livilla.'

‘This isn't a sacrifice,' she yelled at him. ‘It's a mercy. Now lie down and die!'

 

Ashiol stared at the scene unfolding before the backdrop of lights and explosions the smell of death and shattered stone. He knew it was Livilla, although he hadn't seen her without bright cosmetick on her face since she was fourteen. She radiated power beyond anything he recognised, and yet he had no doubt that it was her.

She looked older than the demme he had known, but without her usual mask, she looked less like a caricature of a musette femme fatale, and more like a real person.

‘Livilla!' he yelled. ‘We can't fight each other, or the sky will win!'

It didn't sound like something he would say. They were Velody's words. But Garnet was lying bleeding on the ground, damn it, and Ashiol would do anything to make her take it back.

Livilla turned on him, power and confidence bright in her eyes. ‘Haven't you been paying attention, Ashiol? Garnet
is
the sky. They took him long ago. If you want to save Aufleur, if that is what really matters to you after all these years, then I have just one piece of advice.' She was glowing, the lights on her gown shining brighter and the darkness of her wings spreading out behind her body. ‘Run.'

In that instant, she burst apart into water, a storm of rain and ice that swept the Forum from one end to the other.

Ashiol felt Velody's hand slip into his. ‘Run!' she shouted at him, and together they went chimaera and took to the sky, fighting a path through the devils and angels, leading the others out of the Forum.

 

Topaz fell out of her salamander shape; the cold and ice of the storm was too much for it. She still had fire deep inside her body, and she used it to light a path through the darkness.

The other salamanders had scattered. She could sense them. Some had followed the Kings, and others were hiding or wounded. She couldn't feel Poet anywhere. Had he left them again?

She came to the empty plinth that had held the statue of Iustitia and climbed it slowly, slipping a few times, until she was on her feet, the rain drumming around her. The sky was still falling. The devils and angels were still attacking the city. The rain felt like an assault against her skin.

‘You were supposed to run with the others,' said a soft voice above her.

Topaz looked up, and felt a comforting warmth wrap around her, like wings protecting her from the storm. ‘Don't want to leave you again,' she muttered.

‘Sweet child. You always had more faith than I deserved.'

It was Livilla. Of course it was. She felt different, like the fire inside her had been replaced by something else: cool water and the crackle of an electric storm. But it was still Livilla.

‘You're my Lord,' said Topaz. ‘Isn't that how it's supposed to be?'

They had quite a view from up here. The rain was falling upwards, and when it struck the devils and angels, they screamed in pain.

‘I don't think I'm a Lord any more, dearling,' said Livilla.

It was getting lighter. That wasn't Topaz's imagination. She could see the outline of Livilla now, and her real face beneath the mop of wet, tangled hair. She looked younger than Topaz had thought. More like an older sister than a mother figure.

‘Are you a King?' Topaz asked.

‘Not that, either. I don't know what I am. But I'm myself now.' Livilla smiled a beautiful, sunny smile. ‘I'm not pretending to be less than I am. And I'm not afraid.'

Topaz shivered, the salamander inside her not liking the icy bite of the rain.

‘Dawn is coming,' she said. ‘So everything's going to be all right. Isn't it?'

‘Dawn is coming,' Livilla agreed, and she leaned down and kissed Topaz's cheek. ‘Let's see if we can make it there in one piece.'