Power & Majesty (25 page)

V
elody watched the city melt. Every time a long silver dollop of ‘slow rain’ hit the cobbles or a building, it hissed and ate away at the stone. Metal was worse—when one silver drip hit a nearby gutter, it buckled and all but dissolved. The huge Basilica sagged under the weight of the rain. Several thin tiles fell from the dome’s roof to shatter below.

‘Does this happen often?’ Velody demanded.

She and Crane had found shelter under the overhang of the little church. Here, on the far crest of the Lucretine, they could see the whole north half of the city, from the Forum and the Lake of Follies all the way north-east to the rich residences that surrounded the Palazzo on the Balisquine hill.

‘A couple of times a month,’ said Crane, his eyes on the sky. ‘Shouldn’t last longer than half an hour, if we’re lucky.’

‘Half an hour? Half the city will be gone by then!’

‘It’s not as bad as you think.’

‘And that’s why we’re cowering up here, because it’s not as bad as I think? What would happen to us if we tried to walk through that stuff?’

‘You’re Court, so it would burn a hole in you. Most humans could walk right through it and not feel a thing.’

‘So, you’re not trapped here. You’re human, you could just…’ She waved her hand expectantly.

‘It’s not that simple. Sentinels have some Creature Court in them. Comes from hanging around you lot. That stuff out there—well, it wouldn’t kill us, but on a normal nox it would give us a nasty case of skyburn.’

‘Sounds painful. But if it’s not fatal, you can still save yourself.’

‘That’s the other thing,’ Crane said, shifting uncomfortably.

Velody couldn’t help wondering how old he was. He was so confident most of the time, like the rest of them, but his body language was downright boyish. ‘What’s the other thing?’

‘Ashiol shared his blood with me,’ he confessed in a rush. ‘Last nox, to help me heal. That means there’s more than a bit of Court in me right now, and the slow rain would comfortably slice me up like butter on a hot plate.’

‘Oh,’ said Velody. ‘So we’re both stuck here.’

‘Aye.’

She paused for a long moment, thinking over what he had just said. ‘When you say Ashiol shared his blood with you, what exactly do you mean?’

Crane opened his mouth, then closed it again. ‘Look at that! Riding to the rescue.’

Annoyed that he was avoiding the question, Velody only glanced briefly out into the nox. What she saw, though, captured her attention fully. The Creature Court. It was a mere idea, a concept she could just barely get her head around. But this was the Court in all its glory. It was quite a sight.

A flock of birds—pigeons, gulls, a host of other flying things she could not identify—burst out from somewhere near the Alexandrine hill, taking to the nox sky in a mad
spiral. They dodged and dived around the drips of slow rain, never allowing the acid to touch them.

Birds weren’t the only creatures in the air. Velody gasped as a series of dark shadows soared over the Avleurine—familiar shapes: hounds and cats and feraxes.

‘They can fly,’ she said in wonder. ‘They can all fly.’

Crane laughed. ‘A lot of use they’d be up there if they couldn’t.’

Somewhere, wolves were howling. There was a cloud of ravens in the air above the Forum, and something like bats. Cats, of course, leaping from rooftops into the sky.

‘But what are they doing?’ asked Velody. ‘If this slow rain can hurt them, why don’t they go to ground until it’s over?’

Crane looked at her strangely. ‘They’re the Creature Court. Their job is to stop the destruction that falls out of the sky. We’re at war here.’

‘But why? Why don’t they just leave? If it only affects the Court, why fight it?’

‘You have heard of the Silent Sleep, haven’t you?’ asked Crane. ‘Didn’t you ever think it was strange—a disease that doesn’t spread from person to person, or follow any known pattern, but flashes like lightning on random victims? Children mostly, or the elderly. The vulnerable and the weak.’

Velody had her mouth open. ‘That…it comes from the sky?’

Crane turned back to the battle. ‘If it wasn’t for the Court, half of Aufleur would be Silent by now.’ He inhaled, and looked troubled. ‘There’s something nasty in the air this nox. We shouldn’t have been due for another massacre for months after the show that took Garnet.’

‘What do you mean, massacre?’ The very word sent shivers through Velody’s body.

‘You’ll see.’

The sky cracked open. Thin streaks of violent pink and amber shot through the darkness in wild, random patterns.

‘Scratchlight,’ said Crane, his breath catching in his throat.

‘Is that bad?’

‘It can be, if it catches them by surprise. Let’s hope that the slow rain was enough of a warning.’

A thin bolt of light and fire slammed out of the sky, crashing into a house only a few streets below where Velody and Crane were standing. The roof exploded with the impact and the windows shattered.

Velody rocked back against the church wall, fear and horror pounding in her skull. ‘That house, those people! You say this happens
all the time
?’

Crane gripped her arm, squeezing reassurance. ‘Whoever is inside, they’ll probably be fine. Scratchlight’s pretty shallow stuff, it only kills one in fifty or so. They’ll wake up tomorrow morning as if nothing has happened. For them, nothing has happened. Now, if it was shadowstreak or gleamspray, that’s another matter. They’re rarer though.’

‘But the explosion, their house…’ Velody longed to understand, but it was so hard to put it together in her mind. ‘How could anyone survive that blast?’

‘The city will heal itself, like it always does. That house will be back to normal by the first light of day. Even if it wasn’t, the daylight folk wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Skybattle isn’t part of their world, Velody. It belongs to the nox.’

In the Gardens of Trajus Alysaundre below them, a rumbling bolt of scratchlight reduced several statues to rubble.

‘So the nox is the world of the Creature Court,’ said Velody.

‘Exactly. Scratchlight’s mild stuff for daylight folk—mostly survivable—but it’s like liquid fire to the flesh of one of our lot.’

‘Then what are they
doing
out here? Why does the first sign of a sky attack bring the Court out here where they
could get hurt or killed? How do they save the city, nox after nox?’

‘Don’t you get it?’ asked Crane. ‘They’re not helpless when they use their powers. Animor provides some defence, and seven hells of offence. They’re fighting the sky.’

Was that what they were doing? To Velody it looked like a series of mad dances, birds and mammals alike weaving in and out of the danger, a bizarre mixed menagerie putting themselves in the line of fire for no good reason.

As she watched, though, a huge black cat—a panther?—leaped directly at a stabbing thread of amber light, his jaws outstretched as if to bite it firmly between his sharp teeth. The impact hit him hard, flung him down near the Lake of Follies and out of sight, but a few minutes later he was in the sky again, and he had the wriggling amber thread caught firmly in his mouth.

Velody squeezed Crane’s arm as the panther spat the amber thread back into the sky. It struck close to the wide fissure that was the source of the threads, and there was a light so blinding that Velody had to close her eyes.

‘Excellent!’ crowed Crane. ‘They don’t call him Warlord for nothing!’

The sky seemed aware that this man was a particular danger and several bolts of pink and amber spat in his direction. The panther shaped himself into a glowing man and stretched out his hands in readiness.

By the time the bolts reached him, he had help. Nine or ten greymoon cats, a medley of flapping bats and several furry mammals Velody didn’t recognise gathered around their Lord, supporting him with their presence. They all hit out at the storm of scratchlight, batting the bolts back into the sky. There was a louder, brighter explosion than the first.

These little battles were happening all over the city skyline. Turning one way and then another, trying to see everything all at once, Velody was eventually able to tell
which were the Lords and which were their courtesi by the way they flocked together and the deference they showed each other. There were four Lords at work, in the centre of it all—panther, wolves, pigeons and feraxes. The rest were courtesi.

A new fissure opened, to the east above the Balisquine. Blue and green scratchbolts shimmered forth, fast and flickering. Before any of the Court could get there, a blazing white figure emerged from below, shooting upwards and into battle against the new threat. A fifth Lord.

‘The Orphan Princel,’ said Velody, somehow not surprised. ‘Poet. Where are his courtesi?’

‘Who knows? He’s in trouble without them though.’

The glowing white figure of Poet was buried in a wriggling, tangled mass of scratchlight.

‘Isn’t someone going to help him?’ Velody demanded.

Crane gave her a strange look. ‘Isn’t he the one who attacked you and your friends?’

Velody had half-forgotten, she was so wrapped up in watching this battle. ‘Someone should still help him,’ she muttered.

The Lord of Pigeons evidently agreed. He formed himself into Lord shape—a large, round Lord shape glowing with power—and flew to extract Poet from the scratchlight.

Another building crumbled—the Cathedral of Lucipher in the Portico Lattorio. Velody saw the outline of the Duchessa’s Palazzo on the Balisquine shudder as a bolt of scratchlight destroyed one of its ornamental towers, then a second.

Can they really sleep through all this?
she thought. Then,
How many noxes like this have I slept through?

Not everyone was sleeping. It was Aufleur, after all, the city of lanterns and late nox revels.

Below Velody, in the Gardens of Trajus Alysaundre, a small party made their lopsided way home from a nox on the town, led by a pair of lampboys. Several tipsy
demoiselles dressed in the latest fashions were lurching along with their bare arms hooked around each other. There were a few young men with them, staggeringly drunk. None of them seemed to notice the damage from the scratchlight—the broken statues and charred ground. A crackle of flaming green energy slashed the grass only a few feet from them and the party didn’t flinch. A bolt of scratchlight struck one of the demoiselles, exploding so fiercely that Velody expected her bobbed hair to burst into flames at the very least. The demme didn’t notice a thing. The group continued to giggle and flirt with each other, in their own little world.

What world am I in?
Velody couldn’t help wondering. Theirs made more sense than the one she currently inhabited.

Across the city, near the Balisquine, birds flocked to their Pigeon Lord. He and Poet were in trouble. The blue and green scratchlight poured harder and faster down onto them. One of the gulls was hit by a stray bolt and vaporised with a shriek. The other gulls fell back as if they felt its pain.

‘I should be out there,’ Velody whispered, only just realising that. ‘I should be fighting alongside them, shouldn’t I?’

‘You wouldn’t last a minute,’ said Crane.

A faint glow was coming from him. Velody realised that he was holding his skysilver knife at the ready. In the darkness, it shone as if it held its own source of light.

‘What’s that for?’ she asked.

‘Deflection, defence. Just in case we need it.’

‘We’re not the ones who need help,’ she said, staring at the battle between the Creature Court and the sky.

‘They already have a King who should be defending them,’ said Crane. ‘Ask yourself where he is.’

A howling, tearing sound came up from underneath the city. The church behind them trembled, as did every building in Aufleur.

‘He’s coming,’ said Velody, and didn’t even question how she knew.

Ashiol roared up out of the smashed towers on the Balisquine. He was in chimaera form, a black and deadly shape of fur and feathers and claws, and pure, blinding rage. A monster in the truest sense of the word.

Velody had never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

Ashiol tore through the scratchlight as if it were spun sugar. He bit and clawed and fought his way to the wriggling threads of light that had overwhelmed Poet and the Pigeon Lord. When he threw stray fragments at the blue fissure above the Balisquine, it shrieked with pain and began to seal closed.

Above the Lake of Follies, Warlord fought the first fissure with renewed energy. He was supported by the Ferax Lord and a female Wolf Lord, along with their combined mob of courtesi.

With a last gasp of an explosion, the first scratchlight fissure closed up, leaving the sky around it blank and clean. A moment or two later, Ashiol hurled the last of the flaming fragments into the Balisquine fissure and it, too, disappeared into the sky.

There was a long moment of silence. It was almost calm.

Velody turned her eyes up to the bleak nox sky. What further horrors were lurking up there? Did each of the twinkling stars conceal a new enemy, a terrible threat or burning weapon to bring danger down upon them?

She had never thought much about the sky before. Now she knew how much she had to fear from it.

Ashiol, Poet and the Pigeon Lord descended to the sloping gardens of the Balisquine. The bird courtesi followed, shaping themselves into young women. When the surviving gulls came together, the woman who emerged from them looked wan and sickly. She fell to the grass, her body heaving and shaking. After a moment, her body broke apart into gulls again.

‘She’s lost part of herself,’ said Velody. ‘What will happen to her?’

‘Usually if an animal is killed it can still be reabsorbed,’ said Crane. ‘Her gull was obliterated though. She has to reform her body with less mass than she’s used to—give up a hand, or some body weight, even some bone marrow. It will be a while before she recovers.’

Velody couldn’t help thinking of the thousands of mice she could transform herself into. It would be so easy to lose one or two. She shuddered as she imagined mouse-shaped holes punched into her human flesh. ‘Is it over then? For the nox?’