Storm Thief (12 page)

It was crouching on the lip of a wall on an empty street, where expensive houses stood behind yards and tiny rockeries. Rail saw it far too late. It was a young woman, hair blonde and sodden, glowing aether leaking from its eyes and between its teeth. It was watching the road, surveying its territory, as they came round the corner and froze, discovered.

Its lips peeled back in a slow snarl, and Rail and Moa ran. Vago hesitated a moment, a memory surfacing in his mind –

enemy

– before he sprang away on all fours. The Taken lifted its head up and emitted a shriek that went high above the pitch of human hearing, a cloud of bright vapour pluming from its mouth. Then it dropped from the wall, hit the street with feral ease and sprinted after them.

Rail and Moa didn't even look back. The fear of the Taken had been drilled into them since birth. The Taken oozed aether, and aether was fatal to humans. One touch from this woman meant death.

They plunged down a narrow alleyway. Open doorways and dark windows blurred past them. The Taken was right behind, bare feet splashing on the wet flagstones. The coo and squall of the probability storm blended with the soft pulse of the Null Spire's alarm, filling the night.

The alley switched suddenly left and Rail took the turning. The rain slashed at him from the narrow slice of sky overhead. He burst out of the alley into another street, this one a sloping, winding road of cobbles. On either side were rows of dull metal dwellings, faceless and cold.

Two other Taken were here, both men dressed in battered factory-worker's overalls. He saw them emerge from a narrow slit of a doorway, alerted by their companion's cry. They spotted Rail immediately and came after him from upslope.

Rail didn't break stride, heading down the street with only a swift glance at Moa to check she was still with him. She was sodden and bedraggled, achingly thin. Vago was bringing up the rear, even though Rail suspected he was much faster than either of them. He was putting himself between the Taken and Moa. That suited Rail fine.

Freck, how did I get us into this?
he thought desperately.

From where they were on the flank of a hill, he could see a long way across the city. The overlapping veils of the storm were sweeping lazily through the streets of Orokos. At the bottom of the slope the district splintered into dockyards, with tall warehouses and cranes standing grim against the dark. Beyond was the canal, a thin stripe of glittering black.

Too far. They were not going to make it.

He cursed under his breath. There was no way Moa was going to be able to outrun three Taken. She didn't have the strength for a long sprint. There was only one other thing to do, then. He stopped, swung up the muzzle of the aether cannon that he carried and fired up the slope.

The cannon bucked against his arm with a metallic shriek as it spewed a glob of sizzling energy through the air. The shot flew wide of its mark by some way. The Taken didn't even pause in their headlong charge downhill. Moa ran past him, her breath rasping in her chest – he could hear that she wouldn't make it much further – and he fired again, missed again.

The Taken raced towards him, and his blood chilled. He realized with a dreadful certainty that he had made a mistake. He would never stop them in time.

Vago ripped the cannon off his forearm and snapped it on to his own. Rail was too shocked to even resist. He could only stare as the golem swung the weapon up, braced it like an expert, and began to shoot.

His first salvo cut the enemy to pieces. Two shots hit the female Taken in the stomach and chest, and before it had even collapsed he had taken down both of the men, one in the leg and one in the shoulder. They tripped over themselves, all strength gone from their muscles, and rolled to a halt, limp.

Rail wasted a few moments on surprise. Through the visor, he could already see the aether seeping from the fallen bodies, reforming, taking on shape. Ghosts of energy, Revenants in their natural form.

“Go,” Vago barked. Rail didn't need a second prompt.

He caught up with Moa easily. She was staggering to a halt, holding her ribs where a stitch was causing her agony. Somewhere nearby, more screams were echoing across the district, so high that he could barely hear them. They made his head ache. The Taken were coming, and they would come in their hundreds. They were far from safe yet.

He got his arm under Moa and supported her as they half-ran, half-stumbled down the steep road. She was shivering, though whether with cold or fright he couldn't tell. The aether cannon sounded again, and he looked over his shoulder. Vago was walking backwards, stepping delicately on his oddly jointed legs, like a cat standing upright. As he retreated, he fired at the ghosts that rose from the human bodies on the ground. The weapon seemed an entirely natural extension of him. He held it like he had been born to it, moving with military precision.

Look at him
, Rail thought suddenly.
This is what he was made for.

Rail didn't stop to watch Vago shooting down the Revenants. He could already see movement near the top of the slope. Other Taken were appearing. Energy ghosts swam through the air over their rabid human hosts, who were sprinting furiously down the street.

Hopefully they would go for Vago, he thought. He dragged Moa to the side of the road, his dreadlocks and respirator dripping. An alleyway beckoned, promising shelter and the hope of concealment. They had almost reached it when a great wave of scarlet lashed down from the sky. He clutched Moa as it swept towards them . . . and then past them, missing them by mere feet. It slipped through the faceless metal houses on the other side of the street, and as Rail watched several of the houses simply disappeared, fading like a dream upon waking. Their foundations lay open to the rain. Where the Storm Thief had taken them, he would never know.

The sound of Vago's cannon spurred him out of his gawping, and he propelled Moa into the alleyway.

 

Vago's lipless mouth had peeled back, exposing his metal teeth. It could have been called a grin, if his face was capable of humour. The targeter in his enhanced eye tracked this way and that, and his muscles moved to match it, aiming and firing with uncanny precision. For the first time since he could remember waking, he felt
right
. The exhilaration of combat, the recoil of the weapon, the sight of his enemies destroyed: it was joy to Vago. They raced at him, crazed with fury. He battered them back with cannon fire, and they dissipated into wisps of energy.

But even through the fierce joy of combat, he knew that he couldn't take them all on. Revenants were appearing faster and faster now, from all directions. He had backed up almost to the mouth of the alley where Moa and Rail had disappeared. With a final burst, he turned tail and ran, his wings tucked close to his body. The Revenants followed.

He bounded through the alleys on three of his four limbs; the other one was encumbered by the cannon. These alleys were all rusted iron and grillework, their arclights dead. Power was always cut off to Revenant districts. The glow from the clouds painted the scene in shades of nausea. Vago jumped down a set of steps, took a sharp corner, sprang off the wall and leaped along another passageway. He had lost sight of Moa and Rail, but he knew which way they were headed. Towards the canal, down the slope where the dockyards were. They couldn't be far ahead, not in the condition Moa was in.

The thought of Moa gave him new speed. The boy didn't have a hope of protecting her if the Revenants caught them. It was
him
that she needed. Her golem.

He could outpace the Taken with ease, but the energy ghosts were a different matter. They swept through walls, cutting corners, diving into and out of solid matter as if it was nothing at all. He darted and pounced through the pouring rain, always half a heartbeat ahead of the glowing things that chased him, their tentacles lashing the air as they dived.

He turned into an alleyway which ended in a balcony. Beyond it there were no more alleys, only a view across the canal to the buildings on the far side. Somehow he had taken a different route to Moa and Rail. Here the slope cut off as sharply as a cliff, and there was no apparent way down.

No way apart from gravity.

Vago raced towards the end of the alleyway, knowing that he couldn't stop with the Revenants behind him. He hoped only that if he jumped there would be something there for him to jump on to. But it was too late to change his mind now. He sailed over the balcony, the ground disappearing beneath him.

He saw his mistake a moment after he had made it. Below, the cliff face fell to an empty road, a fall that even he doubted he would survive. Ahead were a row of warehouses, roofs that he could land on. But his jump hadn't been strong enough. He knew that he was going to fall short, even without the assistance of his mechanical eye plotting his trajectory.

For a few terrible instants he felt the arc of his jump begin to dip; and then he spread his wings.

He didn't know how to do anything else with them. He certainly didn't know how to flap them. But he remembered how they had failed him when he had jumped off the bridge into the West Artery, so he held them as stiffly as he could against the pressure of the rushing air. And almost without noticing it, he picked up enough of a lift to glide the last dozen feet to his target.

He hit the flat roof of a warehouse, tucked his wings and rolled, sprang up aiming in the direction he had come from. The Revenant ghosts were caught out in the open as they boiled out of the alleyway, and he destroyed them with a screeching fan of cannon fire.

The echoes died away, leaving the golem standing on the rooftop, the rain beating at him. The cannon was drained now. He pulled it off his arm and tossed it aside. The wail and sigh of the storm swelled around him as it waved its colourful tendrils of change over Orokos. He looked at the fringe of dark buildings on top of the cliff, at the alleyway he had jumped from. The leap had been far beyond anything a human could have managed. He took a strange pleasure in that.

My wings,
he thought, uncurling them distrustfully. He studied them a moment. Had he really flown with them? No, not flown, not like the bird around his neck had flown. But he had glided. Only a little way, but still.

His maker had built him with wings. What did it mean? What did his
life
mean?

He was seized by an overwhelming feeling, a sensation strong as anger or fear. He needed to know who he was. He
needed
to know his place in this world. He had to have the answers. And for that, he had to find his maker. Only his maker could tell him why he had wings. Only his maker could tell him why he had been created at all.

At that moment, he made a decision. As soon as he had a chance, he would search for Tukor Kep. Vago would track him down. And like a father and son, they would be reunited. Perhaps there he would find a place that he belonged.

Then Moa screamed, somewhere below him, and he was moving again.

He crawled down the outside of the warehouse wall, scuttling like an insect, his powerful fingers and toes digging into the brick. Halfway to the bottom he launched himself into the air and fell the rest of the way, landing in a crouch. The metal tendons in his legs wheezed as they took the impact. He barely noticed, not even enough to marvel at the wonders of his construction. That scream had focused all his attention on one thing.

He had to get to her. The one person, the only person he could remember that had ever shown him kindness.

He bounded on all fours along the road that ran near the foot of the cliff. Somewhere ahead, he could hear Rail shouting. High-pitched cries were coming from the same direction. Taken. They would be swarming all over the docks now.

He dodged between the warehouses, where there lay a labyrinth of gantries and walkways, of sliding doors and distant cranes. Whether by luck or by instinct, his navigation was good. He skidded to a halt on a thin, rusty bridge of meshed metal. There below him, in an alleyway lined with pipes of black iron, were Rail and Moa.

Rail had the exhausted girl encircled with one arm, dragging her along with him as he ran. Three Taken were sprinting down the alley after him, and with Moa as a dead weight he had no hope of getting away. Rail looked up and spotted Vago crouching on the bridge, but between the glimmer visor and the respirator there was no expression visible on his face.

Vago squatted and reached down to them, his long arm stretched to its limit. “Lift her!” he said.

Rail didn't think twice. He picked up Moa by the hips and boosted her up. Vago caught her and hauled her on to the bridge like she was no heavier than paper.

Rail looked over his shoulder as Vago reached down again. The Taken were shrieking, pelting towards him with renewed fury as they saw their prey escaping. Rail felt his skin prickle with terror. They were too close, too close!

“Jump!” Vago snarled.

Rail jumped, as high as he could. It was just high enough. Vago caught him by the wrist and wrenched him upward as the howling Taken sprang for him, their fingertips missing his feet by millimetres. Rail was dumped on the bridge next to Moa. His shoulder blazed with pain where it had almost come out of its socket. Below them, the Taken jumped and swiped at the air.