Knife in hand, I scan the rest of the camp. Sentries, guards, two mages, music. It’s a little too quiet, and that bothers me. If it had been me, I’d be digging through the night to get a ship like this out.
I shrug and gesture to the guys. They’re ready—Pirrosh is bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. The three of them crawl toward the mages, while I creep forward to the edge of the dig.
I count to ten, and then I dip my knife into the energy holding up the dig, and I pull control of it from the other two mages. It’s pretty easy. Their eyes go wide, their mouths start to open, but Josik and Pirrosh catch them from behind, and with the help of the girl they gag them and tie their hands and feet. I nod to the Buhr. It slides down the side of the pit on its three legs.
I watch it closely. If I need to, I can clip it from here with a quick bolt from my knife. I haven’t come this far to leave empty-clawed. But it approaches the podship with two arms extended, three-fingered hands spread wide. A low buzzing crawls out of its breathing tubes that raises the hair on my neck ridges.
The Buhr places both palms flat against the hull of the ship, near the hatch. Its chant increases in volume.
The podship doesn’t react, though the wind dies down and across the camp and the flapping of the Retriever ship’s tarps grows silent.
The Buhr increases its chant yet again. I can almost here strange, twisted words under the buzzing. Nothing.
It steps away from the hull of the ship and studies it.
SOMETHING IS WRONG,
it tells me.
Lasser’s Glorious Prick,
I think.
And then all of the glyphs across the ship’s hull go a brilliant white all at once, and a jagged finger of energy from somewhere near the bow reaches out and lights up the Buhr in a halo of white and red fire that sends it jerking and dancing across the floor of the dig. I can smell it burning. It’s dead for sure. I drop the construction web. The sides of the dig cave in, covering up both the Buhr and the podship, but in my mind, through the knife, I can still see the ship.
It’s fully awake down there, thrumming with strength, glowing like a great white whale.
Something is wrong, all right. On the Retriever ship, alarms fire up and all the perimeter wards go off. There is shouting, and onboard, men scrambling up through hatches, coats flapping and hats askew.
Beneath me, the ground pitches and rumbles. “Get back!” I shout. We dive for cover behind a fallen statue as tracers skim over our heads from the Retriever ship. Knives up, we link up in a quick matrix, and I catch the next tracer on the edge of my blade. I hold it for a minute, feeling out the minds of the Retriever drones at the other end of it. No clear family, no particular school—just some ragtag bunch of mercenaries. Their group leader was Akarii trained, but not especially deeply.
I’m sure I’ll get time to tell you later about all the different traditions of magework. How each school is loosely linked with a family, how the Akarii are mathematical and abstract while the Kerul are subtle and obtuse, like poetry. How the Solingi use a lot of talismans they carry with them on their backs, and the Berylan focus on memorization, vocalization, and complex body postures (like anyone has time for that anymore).
Sartosh trained me Bakarh, and say what you will about it, it’s still the tradition I know best. On the plus side, we’re egalitarian and freewheeling—every mage is encouraged to construct his own glyphs and memory palaces, and to focus in where your natural abilities take you. On the downside, it can take many years of one-on-one training before you’re close to emulating what other mages can do in their early days with the toss of a wrist. And some Bakarh practices aren’t always the most tasteful, which has given us kind of a bad reputation.
But the discipline pays off. Josik, Pirrosh, and I each trained with our own masters to earn our brands. Since meeting as mercenaries ourselves, deep in the bowels of the Warrens, we've trained together for years now. We’d stood together at the ford of Amontar and faced down an assault of Talovian mercenaries more than three times their number for the Chancellor of Tamaranth, the free city. We held our own against a matrix of Krukkruk assassins, deep in the marshes south of the Tamaranth lagoon.
(Well, mostly held our own. But that’s another story.)
So when the Akarii on the ship fill out the conduit between us and send a blast of energies down at me, I catch it, spinning on the edge of my knife, and then I shunt it back to the group, knowing how they'll react. It hangs in the center of our matrix. Each of the team adds their own energy to it. I weave it all together, and then I throw it back down the conduit at the Retrievers. It burns down at them in a flaming arc, crackling back across the collapsed dig.
The Retriever team isn’t strong enough. We hear screams, an explosion—their matrix collapses. The conduit drops and Josik cheers. Pirrosh coughs out a laugh. Even the tattooed girl cracks a smile.
But there are more men climbing into the rigging of the Retriever ship, coats flapping. The long, powered keel of the Retriever ship sparks to life. They’re bringing the big ship about, I realize. Bringing it about to fire on us.
“We have to move!” the girl says. She’s right. But where? We toss a few more volleys back and forth with other matrices. Two of them are teams of other men and don’t worry me, but the third and fourth matrices each hold a Grohm.
Dekheret’s shitpot.
Grohmn are a battlefield trick, mostly used off-lei. The fat herd creature unleashes deep reserves of energy when you kill it. A mage brings it into the matrix, cuts its throat, and the group shoves the blast in the right direction. A cheap and deadly cannon, if you can tolerate the smell.
Two fat balls of fire loft across the dig now like fast new moons. They grow brighter as they come, as other Retriever mages put their own energy behind them.
It occurs to me, now, that our plan could have been better thought out. From their expressions, I can see the same thought occurring to the rest of the group, too.
“Well,” Pirrosh says, “it still be better than gettin’ cut up for a piece of fruit.”
We break our matrix and dive for cover. Josik and Pirrosh go one way, the girl and I another. I grab another tracer as I go, pull the energy from the Retriever matrix to me and throw a backblast up at the big ball of fire, hoping to take it out. It works, mostly—it blows into several parts, which rain down around us. Rubble explodes, a building behind us collapses, a random piece of flying metal takes a chunk out of my ear.
Josik and Pirrosh try the same thing. I see the stolen power flow down to them from the Retriever ship, see them spin it into a Bakarh glyph, burning in the air between them. They throw that up at the other ball of flame.
I watch the glyph hit the Grohm sphere with a sinking feeling.
They’re too late. And it’s not enough.
We all know it—I can see it in the way they look at each other.
Instead of blowing the ball apart, the glyph is sucked into the rest of the sphere. The ball grows larger, crackles like fireworks. And then it settles slowly down on top of the two men.
It’s a horrible sight, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop it. Josik and Pirrosh burn from the inside out. Their backs arch, their skin blackens and chars. Their faces are shocked, disbelieving as blood boils out of their mouths. Their hair burns.
I want to yell, cry, scream—all things that will make no difference for these two men that I’ve grown to care about, but then the ball of aether detonates, and the girl and I are thrown into the air, tossed across the dig and slammed into the side of a broken building.
The ground rumbles and shakes, and for a minute it seems like the world is burning.
Then, the flames clear. The light is different. The wards overhead have fallen, and the moons are all shining through.
Parts of the Retriever ship are on fire—mechs are rushing around with extinguishing foam. Another building collapses just to the right of us, and we have to throw ourselves out of the way to avoid the rubble.
I turn to the tattooed girl. The woman, I correct myself, studying her face. She must be in her late teens now, though it’s still hard for me to read a human’s age.
I take her shoulder. “We’ll get through this,” I say, even though I’m not sure I believe that now. “We’re going to make it.” Am I convincing her or myself?
She’s lean and muscled, dark-skinned, her dark hair cut close. Her wide eyes are pale violet and startling among all of those strange, dark tattoos that cover her face and arms. Like the eyes of some animal, surprised in the underbrush, only she’s not spooked. She’s confident, behind those tattoos. I get the sense she’s seen a lot of things in a short life. She puts her hand on my arm. “You're full of shit," she says. "But I’m still with you."
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m struggling to remember her name.
Kjat, I realize. Her name is Kjat. And that’s pretty much all I know about her.
Then she points over my shoulder. “Isn’t that our ride home?
The ground of the dig bulges up and then the spine of the podship breaks through the rubble. It pushes stone and dirt aside, lifts into the air with a scream of engines, and hangs there between us and the Retriever ship.
It rocks in the smoke and wind, as unfamiliar glyphs flicker one by one at random across its surface.
I see the shot from the Retriever ship before I hear the explosion. A cannonball arcs over the podship, over our head, and into the buildings beyond us. I can feel the impact up through my feet.
Another shot hits the podship squarely and ricochets off the hull.
What’s going on? The podship rocks from the impact. The engines engage again and it turns to face the Retriever ship. The cannonball has left a huge indentation behind—the glyphs there stay dark.
A huge, white figure is on the deck of the Retriever ship now, shouting orders. It’s one of the Tel Kharan, the order of marines that served the Akarii family. It's wearing that steam- and lei-powered armor that makes them half-man, half-mech, and a major pain in the ass to deal with. Men with long, tattered coats and bowler hats askew are forming new matrices. Other men are priming cannons, and at the rail of the foredeck, I can see a line of Grohmn, silhouetted for a moment against a low moon, placidly waiting their turn to die.
A third shot falls short, a fourth glances off the podship and goes spinning out into the city. Tracer-lines are now converging on the
podship
instead of us.
I’m slow sometimes. It takes me another whole minute to really understand what’s going on.
But then I get it.
Someone else
is
stupid enough to try and steal from the Akarii family.
And they are taking our ship.
4.
H
ere’s another memory, one from before the hunters came.
I ride on the fender of a tractor, the one my secondfather used to cultivate the fields around the northern lake where our tribe had settled. It’s a big tractor, old and rusty, and it smells of oil and gas—it was probably the first vehicle I’d seen that was designed to run off-lei.
I’m no more than four years old. The tires are taller than I am. The red fenders could hold four of me on each side. We’re harvesting the carvenger wheat, planted that spring. It’s so tall and the puff-balls on the top of the stalks so dense together, that it looks like we’re half-submerged into the earth, and only our torsos and heads stick out.
My secondfather keeps insisting he’s lost the tractor beneath us. I, the ever-gullible kid, point out to him that we’re sitting on it.
“No,” he says evenly. “That’s a rock, Blackwell.”
“But the rock is moving, Sha.”
“It’s rolling down the hill, Blackwell. Can’t you see that? Hold on!”
“But it’s plowing the wheat, Sha,” I say, trying not to grin. If I grin, I lose this game. “See the rows behind us? They’re too neat for a rock.”
“You’re mistaken, little one. Those aren’t rows, those are the tracks of the rock’s children! They’ve run away because they’re scared of how fierce you are!”
I growl my tiny, four-year-old growl, and my secondfather pigments his face white and opens his eyes wide in shock. “By Dekheret’s knife!” he grins. “You grow fiercer every sunrise!”
My secondfather was my favorite father. He always seemed relaxed, was always quick with a smile or a joke when I would appear outside his kiva every morning, and was patient with me when I’d follow him on his rounds. He was the handyman for our village, and in charge of the farming, and as a young boy there was nothing I’d rather be doing than following him around. I’d watch him tinker with the generators, fix a leaky roof, tinker inside the electronic innards of an old radio. In the afternoons he would chase me around the village playing Hide from the Hunters.
He was older than my firstfather, who I also loved, but had a very different relationship with. He was larger, and much calmer, than my dark thirdfather, who was always mocking and full of sarcasm, and who I did my best to avoid.
Once I had "convinced" him we actually were on top of the tractor, that he was driving, and that we did need to get on with it, he told me the trick about carvenger wheat—how it was so dense, and so strong, he claimed, that if I spread myself wide enough, to distribute my weight, the stalks would hold me up.
He stops the tractor, and tells me to crouch low on the fender, and then to push myself out over the tops of them. “If you do it just right, Blackwell, and hold perfectly still, you will see.”
I look at him sideways, trying to read his perfectly blank expression. If it had been my thirdfather, I wouldn’t have given it another thought. I’d learned the hard way.
I crouch and look back at him. He nods, and shoos me with his hands, the way he would a fly.
I push off, and slide myself out along the tops of the wheat. It works! The tops of the wheat are soft and resilient, and they spread across my chest and limbs. My face is pressed down between them, and I can see a long way down to the ground. The light beneath the puff-balls is a pale green, and it has that thick smell of loam and that dusty, nutty aroma of the dry wheat. I sway there, moving slowly back and forth with my own inertia. I’m floating.