The Blood Debt (52 page)

‘Get out of my way!’ he bellowed, flailing with his free hand for the thong he had used to whip Skender into submission.

‘They’re afraid of the Homunculus,’ said Marmion, following him, ‘and with good reason. You have to listen to me.’

‘I don’t
have
to do anything.’

‘Kill it or we’ll all die!’

‘No!’ The twins’ mingled voices rose up over the argument between the two men. ‘You must let us go! We still have work to do!’

Pirelius shifted his grip on the knife and plunged it deep into the Homunculus’s shoulder. The twins howled and fell to their knees. Pirelius removed the blade and wiped it on his leather pants.

‘I’m tired of this game,’ he said to Marmion. ‘Tell the Magister that if she’s serious, she needs to come down here now and talk face to face, or —’

Pirelius stopped. It looked to Skender as though he had finally noticed that his main bargaining chip was worthless. The man’kin weren’t attacking the city. They were standing around him and his captive, waiting for something.

His gaze took in the tunnel mouth for the first time. His eyes widened, then narrowed as he turned to Marmion.

‘You lied to me, you dirt-faced, blue-coat bastard.’

‘I told you the truth, every word. The Magister is afraid because you can hurt her. You can use that to your advantage, if you’re quick.’

Pirelius stiffened as he looked over Marmion’s shoulder, along the Divide. His mouth opened in shock, but no words came out.

Skender followed the direction of his stare. Over the heads of the man’kin, a foaming, dirty-white wall had appeared.

‘Goddess,’ he breathed. The rising wind took the word from his lips and swept it away.

Shilly stared at the approaching flood, not quite able to comprehend the scale of it. She had happened to be staring up the Divide as it came into view, rounding the bend to the east. It looked like a giant wave rushing in from the sea, but there was no chance of it slowing and retreating, as normal waves did. This was growing nearer with the speed and power of a tsunami, sweeping up everything in its path.

‘What’s going on down there?’ she asked Sal, barely able to tear her eyes away from the sight. ‘Why are they taking so long?’ The view over the edge wasn’t encouraging. No one had moved, and every second was precious.

‘Pirelius has just worked it out,’ came her lover’s distant reply. Sal’s fingers clenched the rail as the Wall shook and rumbled beneath them. ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do.’

‘How long until the tunnel is closed?’ she asked the giant man’kin. ‘Are we still in danger?’

The man’kin nodded.

A prolonged shudder forced them to their knees. Shilly resisted the urge to instruct the man’kin to haul Skender up to safety. Wishing with every breath Skender would hurry up, she peered over the edge and waited for the red flag.

* * * *

Kail was as still as one of the man’kin caught in the wake. He hadn’t moved throughout the entire confrontation. Sal could feel the ache in the tracker’s legs and back and the patience with which he endured it. The older man was exhausted but his poise was perfectly intact. Waiting was an integral part of being a hunter. It was all about seizing the right moment to strike, no matter how long it took to come.

It was strange, Sal thought. The longer he dipped into the tracker’s thoughts, the more he picked up. Not just fatigue and philosophy, either. There were glimpses of people and places he’d never been
—
from Kail’s memories, he assumed
—
and emotions that triggered faint echoes in him. The most surprising was a surge of affection for someone he recognised instantly: Shilly, as she had looked on the edge of the Divide, shortly after he and Skender had flown away. Her expression was concerned and determined at once. He felt Kail looking at her with pride and sadness.

The mixed emotion was snatched away as Kail focused on events in front of him. Pirelius was a man who had never been particularly stable. Kail had watched him long enough to know that for certain now. Pirelius was backed into a corner, feeling betrayed and operating on the very limits of his resources, but he was far from stupid.

Kail could practically see Pirelius’s mind working: in a moment the tunnel into the city would be closed, while something vast and terrible bore down on them from the east
—
a flash flood of stupendous proportions
—
that he would be caught up in if he didn’t act soon.

The bandit was desperate and had never been more dangerous.

‘The time for thinking is over,’ declared Marmion in exasperation. ‘If you won’t kill it, I will.’

The Sky Warden produced a slender blade from beneath his robes. It gleamed like ice in his hand.

He lunged forward, and the deadly tip stabbed squarely at the Homunculus’s chest. The Homunculus looked up from its daze and swayed away, too slowly. Its many eyes triangulated on death’s bright, metallic sting, hypnotised by its inevitability.

Light flashed from Kail’s left. Something bright and fierce left a sharp blue trail across his vision. It looked like a tiny ball of lightning, and discharged into the knife Marmion held. With a thunderclap the blade exploded, sending the warden flying backwards in a spray of metal and blood.

Pirelius staggered and fell to one knee. The look of surprise on his face was almost comical, but it didn’t last long. He moved more quickly than Sal could credit, shoving the Homunculus with a roar, his sights set on the tunnel.

‘He’s worked it out!’
said Sal, teasing his mind from Kail’s with difficulty. ‘
We
can’t let him use the Homunculus to stop the tunnel closing!’

‘I know,’
said the tracker calmly.

Kail was already moving, coming out from cover and reaching with practised hands for the weighted cord dangling at his waist.

Pirelius travelled no more than three steps before coming face to face with a frozen man’kin. He sidestepped to his right and found another in his path.

‘Get out of my way!’

The roar of water was almost so loud as to drown out his words completely. Kail caught sight of Skender struggling through the forest of living statues with rope and harness trailing from him. The stick in his hand was expended, useless, shrivelled and black like charcoal. Kail waved him away.

Pirelius wrenched the Homunculus from side to side, finding man’kin frozen before him every way he tried to run. Kail felt the man’s desperation rising in time with the roar of the flood. The leather thong dangling from his left hand cracked to no avail.

‘You!’ he roared. ‘You have destroyed me!’

The words were directed upwards, to where the heavy lifter had been. The sky was greying over; the dirigible had fled the gale preceding the flood.

The bola in Kail’s hand spun as Pirelius backed away from a snarling stone visage with wide, despairing eyes. He had no hope left for himself. That much was clear. All he wanted to do was hurt the Magister before he died
—
and the Homunculus would be the instrument of his vengeance.

‘No!’
Sal heard himself cry aloud as Kail let the bola fly.

He could feel Kail’s determination to do the right thing. Kail had made a promise
—
but Sal had promised too, to rescue the Homunculus, to come back for it later. What could he possibly do now to stop the inevitable? Killing the Homunculus would solve everything: the city would be safe if the tunnel was allowed to close, and the world would be saved from the threat it presaged. That was what Marmion wanted.

The bola flew with deadly force and aim. With a sickening sound, it wrapped itself around Pirelius’s neck and snapped it in two. The bandit dropped like a sack of stones, and the Homunculus fell free.

The roar of the stones and the water was deafening. Skender, caught between the two, felt squeezed and shaken by two competing sonic Shockwaves. He gaped as Pirelius fell and blood sprayed from his mouth. The bola had seemed to come from nowhere.

‘Quickly!’
shouted a voice over the double roar. The man’kin were moving again, running to add their weight to the gradually closing gap in the Wall. It didn’t sound like one of their voices.

A blur passed in front of his face and resolved into a giant man with a long, gaunt face and violet eyes. Skender jumped, then recognised him as Habryn Kail.

‘You are needed,’
said the tracker through the Change.
‘Isn’t that what the man’kin said?’

Skender spurred himself forward to help the twins. A strong-fingered hand grabbed his arm.

‘No. You get Marmion. He needs you most.’

Skender looked at where the Sky Warden lay in a pool of bright red blood on the ground. He hadn’t spared a thought for Marmion since loosing the energy in Shilly’s walking stick at him, halting the unjustified slaughter of the twins. But there was no denying that Marmion was helpless in the face of the flood. If he was still alive, Skender couldn’t in good conscience leave him to die.

Why not?
part of him asked.
That’s exactly what you did to Rattails!

There wasn’t time to argue about ethics. He was already moving. Kail and the twins had at least a chance to save themselves, even if the Homunculus was wounded and Kail was hunched over like a man with no reserves left at all. His face was haggard. His chest rose and fell in rapid gasps.

Skender crouched by Marmion and felt for a pulse. Weak but present. He rolled the Sky Warden over onto his back and flinched at the ruin of his hand.

Deal with that later,
he scolded himself.
Get out of this alive first.

He pulled at the rope so he could reach the second harness. Putting it onto an unconscious person proved to be more difficult than he had expected. Marmion was a dead weight wrapped in robes slick with blood. While Skender worked, Kail and the twins exchanged words, heads pressed close so they could hear each other over the booming roar. The tracker appeared to be cutting its bonds.

Skender’s heart raced as he fastened the last tie on the harness. He reached for the red flag, and hesitated.

A strange stillness fell. The air was shocked, compressed beyond wind into a solid thing. It caught the moment and held it. Through a thickening haze, the light turned yellow-brown — a herald of destruction, not night. The man’kin stood splayed against the Wall as though holding it upright. Kail and the Homunculus faced each other like wrestlers about to engage. Even the blood pulsing from Marmion’s ragged wrist appeared to have ceased.

Kail looked at him, and his lips moved. ‘Go!’ he seemed to yell, although Skender couldn’t hear a sound. ‘Get out of here!’

The flag came up and waved without his volition. The twins looked around them, dazed.

Kail’s lips moved soundlessly again. Skender thought he recognised Shilly’s name on the tracker’s lips —

Tell her what?
he wanted to ask.

— then the rope wrenched him upwards so hard his head snapped back and the world went dark. He didn’t feel the spray of water that soaked him to the skin, but he did retain enough partial awareness to wonder how it had come to be raining.

* * * *

Shilly caught a flash of red at the bottom of the Wall. This wasn’t blood, as it had been during the false alarm a moment ago. It was moving,
waving.

‘Turn the winch!’ she shouted at the man’kin, not daring to take her eyes from the speck that was Skender far below. The wall of water rushing towards them was unbelievably high and moving at a speed that seemed impossible for something so
big.
‘Reel in the rope!’

‘TURN!’
The big man’kin wrenched the winch’s handle so hard sparks flew.
‘TURN BACK!’

‘Dear Goddess,’ she breathed, backing away from the edge of the Wall with her hands clenched before her. The stones shook beneath her. ‘Are we in time? Will he make it?’