Blightcross: A Novel (32 page)

This brought her two steps away from the wall, until the creature slammed her again, apparently unfazed by her sand-attack.

She still had her little satchel. Her thoughts scrambled to think of what she carried that could help. All the while, the thing sniffed at her and brought its head in close.

Damn, nothing useful. A few bricks of explosives, but they wouldn't help now.

“Dannac?” Now her voice wavered. What she wouldn't give for a crossbow, or a suicide tablet. That horrible doggiant-man-thing's blunt teeth and meaty hands could only offer a carnival of hurt.

The maw edged closer. She squinted, tried not to look. Nervous hands searched the ground for a rock. She flung a stone into its face. It bounced off the thing's skull, eliciting a short grunt and nothing else.

It couldn't end like this. Not in this hole, this awful island full of bad air and bad food and bad attitudes... she cringed and felt humiliated.

And the uncomfortable silence shattered with the crack of a cannon. Her heart clenched for a second, then she opened her eyes. The creature sniffed the air and seemed more interested in the noise than in her.

She crawled on hands and knees until she felt enough confidence to run. Standing in the middle of the path was Dannac, and he held the cannon awkwardly while trying to reload it quickly.

Damned ankle. Her usual sprint had been slowed to a jog by the jarred ankle.

“It's just going to catch us, Dannac.”

He closed the breech and rested the barrel on his elbow to aim. “Not if I can help it.” He breathed calmly. The creature approached at a trot, and when it came within spitting distance, Dannac fired.

The shot blew a chunk of skin from the thing's head, but it roared and pumped its legs still faster. Dannac took Capra's arm and they fled.

“You won't get enough shots in to matter,” she told him. “Damn, if only I had rigged these damned explosives into something useful.”

“You have explosives?”

“Yes, but no way to detonate them.”

“I could arrange something, but there's no time.”

She winced at the ache in her ankle, tried to speed her gait. The creature was almost at their heels.

Dannac reloaded as they ran, whipped around and shot once more. The creature slowed for a few steps.

Capra searched the rock for offshoots of this passage. It was solid—no way out. They rounded a corner, and ahead she found Vasi and Alim.

Standing still.

“What's the matter with you two?” she screamed.

Then she saw why. A dead end. The rock wall spanning the path did have a shallow cave, but even at a distance, she could see that it offered no escape from the creature.

Damn...

Alim drew his sword as they reached the end of the path. She gave him a grim nod and glanced at the little cave.

“I have explosives. Any ideas?”

Dannac fired again, and the round bit into the thing's neck. It slowed its bounding and roared.

She brought out the charges and showed them to Vasi and Alim. “Any takers?”

Vasi bit her lip. “Give me those.”

She handed them over, though if it were any other situation, she would have thought twice about giving explosives to an Ehzeri.

“How powerful are these?”

“I... I can't think right now. Powerful enough.”

“Will they blow this wall?”

“Well, yes, that should be enough. The rock isn't that hard.”

“Good. Now go.”

With that, Vasi stepped forward and made a strange crooning sound. The monster reared and squinted its knowing eyes. What was Vasi going to do?

If she knew anything about this bizarre scenario, it was that watching would just get them killed. She collected Alim and Dannac, then darted around the path, behind the creature.

A few seconds later, there came a roar. Then a crack, and a rumble. Earth moving; landslide muttering.

Back towards the wall, all she found was a cloud of dust and a pulverized pile of rock. No Vasi.

“What did she do?” She gasped and pushed a strand of hair from her eyes.

Alim tugged off his gloves and shook his head. “Ehzeri are known to enjoy martyrdom.”

“Typical Valoii ignorance,” Dannac said, voice gravelly.

Capra ignored them and stepped towards the rock pile. She waved away the dust, saw one of the creature's legs poking from the rocks. It twitched and gushed red onto the surrounding rock like a fountainhead.

Not only did the blast kill the beast, but now the way was clear. And when Capra stepped to the top of the rubble, she saw open desert. They had reached the end of the rock valley.

Damn you, Vasi. There had to have been a better way.

Now she vowed more than ever to find Rovan, if only to tell him the news.

Alim and Dannac scrambled to the top of the pile.

“We've already wasted too much time in here,” Alim said. “We'd best move on, or risk contracting the Hex.”

It was true, but Capra wished she could at least find Vasi's body, bring back her amulet for Rovan. It pained her to think about the boy. “I can't believe she did that...”

She knelt and poked at the rocks. What kind of person could decide to destroy themselves with a split-second decision?

But wait—something odd in the rocks. A fragment of uniform ridges. Curved, tooled. She picked up a rock fragment, stood. “These formations weren't all natural. Look at this.” She turned over the rock and revealed a deep, chiseled symbol. Three circles, each touching the other.

A voice said, from behind, “I noticed just before the explosion.”

She whipped around. Vasi stood among the rocks, arms crossed. Capra's jaw dropped.

“What?”

“You're not dead.”

“No, I am not.” Vasi flashed a hint of a grin. “Sleight of hand. The creature was easily distracted by illusions. I caught some fragments in my back when I ran from the explosion, but nothing I can't deal with.”

Capra wanted to embrace Vasi, but didn't. “Well, that was some trick.”

“There was very little magic involved. Just enough to set off your charges. There is more to me than
vihs
, you know. Now, I have seen that symbol on dozens of Koratian artifacts, but I don't know what they mean. Three is a strange number to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Duality is nature. The third is out of place. And these ruins predate the colonists, yet they show the same symbol. There was religious imagery here. Archons... the true archons... and the sacred demiurge. ”

Capra gazed at the symbols. “True archons?”

Dannac shook his head, and she took this as one of his cues to drop the subject.

Alim cleared his throat and gestured to the open desert. “I hate to break up the lecture, but the shadows are still destroying the city and blocking our escape.”

With that, they resumed their trek through the Hex.

A few hours later, Capra slowed and clutched her abdomen. Something was wrong, and she had the feeling that they were reaching a point which if they passed, the sickness would kill them. She looked to Vasi and winced. With Dannac's strange mood ever since they had split up days earlier, Vasi seemed more of a friend than he did.

“Something wrong?” Vasi asked.

“I'm starting to feel it. The Hex, I mean. Aren't you?”

“A little.”

“Why would I feel it so much more than everyone else?”

Vasi looked deep in thought. “The men are larger and stronger, despite that you could fight them both at the same time if you needed to. And me... well...” She appeared to struggle with something. “Let me show you something. Just a little trick to strengthen your resistance to illness.”

“Oh, come on. Are you kidding me?”

“No, why?”

“Ehzeri don't just reveal their secrets to ex-soldiers. And I'm the last person who should be attempting these tricks. I don't really believe in it.” This despite that her adult life had been spent snuffing out this power and dodging its attempts to kill her, but the rest of the world was abandoning
vihs
, and she thought humanity couldn't do this fast enough.

“Do you want to survive or not?”

“I'm starting to think none of us are going to survive if we don't find those tunnels you mentioned. Alim is an idiot.”

Vasi ignored the comment and began to direct Capra into a series of guided thoughts. The odd part was that she asked that Capra focus on the amulet she wore.

“It is just an aid to focus. I have one too, under my shirt. It helps to... it just helps to ground the practitioner.”

More nonsense. About the only good thing about it was the way it broke the monotony of the desert and distracted her from thinking of the Hex. When she finally cast aside her cynicism and made a concerted effort to focus on her amulet and visualize it as a quilting point for the
vihs
that flowed behind the invisible structure of reality, an odd sensation buzzed beneath her skin.

“There's so much of it,” Capra said, after glimpsing mentally this vast network of energy, like rivers of lightning.

“It is deceptive. Not all of it will flow through your point, you see. There is a network, and if you...”

“Family connection?”

“Yes.”

“But I am not Ehzeri.”

“Well, everyone's place in the structure comes with a small amount of individual power... anyone can learn to use it.”

She would not pretend to understand it. The grids and webs of
vihs
formed a structure too awesome for Capra's sharp disbelief to shatter. Not only could she see them in the immediate area if she really focused, she could also follow them beyond the physical space and trace them back to even more convoluted knots.

Her own web joined with another. This one glowed less brightly than the others she had seen, and compared to the cords extending from herself, they were dull, barely glowing.

“Vasi, am I draining someone else? I don't think this belongs to me.” She didn't know why she asked the question, but it was the first thing that came to her.

“You need to do this, Capra. Draw it into you, envision it flowing through your blood and protecting your flesh from harm. Repeat these thoughts as much as you can.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

Vasi skipped away, down the crest of a dune. “I must concentrate to find the nearest entrance to the vaults. I think if Alim actually sees them, he'll change his mind about going underground instead.”

What was going on here? So far, Alim had been the most straightforward with her. It was almost easier to deal with him knowing that he would be after her as soon as it was convenient than trying to understand Dannac and Vasi's strange behaviour.

Dannac knew what the stupid girl was doing. He watched them walk with their closed eyes and foreheads lined with concentration.

That could have been him, accessing the power. How different would life have been if he had been born into a more responsible family? Imagine wielding the
vihs
, and what an Ehzeri who refused to be subjugated could do with it.

He screwed his face into a bitter frown while he watched Vasi guide Capra through the procedures he had never been taught. Anyone could learn how to connect to the power— this didn't mean Capra was one of them. She would see it as a toy and use up whatever was available to her in a short time, just like most non-Ehzeri who took the time to learn. What made an Ehzeri was the way in which they could act collectively and multiply their power to near infinity, not the mere ability to call upon it. An individualist like Capra would never be able to join with another in such a way.

Let the girl convince Capra of the lie. She would see soon enough that it was just nonsense, and that a simple protection working was not proof of anything but that Capra had the aptitude to access the power for a short time.

There was a reason the Ehzeri called it “work-skills”. To everyone else, it was just wish fulfilment.

He guzzled some water from his canteen and gazed towards the refinery. His vision wavered and he could barely see through the haze of fuzzy specks that had plagued his sight since stepping into the Hex. There was something in the air, but was he seeing it?

“Look,” Alim said. The Valoii had scarcely said anything to him since they met, and Dannac was thankful for this. “Whatever is making the engine noise is moving.”

Dannac looked back to the armoury. Now, the temporary structure was gone, and he saw what lay beneath: a giant.

He watched it take its first steps, engines blaring with each movement of its gigantic legs and arms. “Impossible.”

“I wouldn't believe it if you told me, but there it is. I had heard of plans for such things, but never anything this large. How did they solve the problem of brittle metal, I wonder?”

“Yes, well, whether or not this is a good thing depends on who it aims to attack.”

It didn't take any special communique from Yaz to know that the Republic would be extremely interested in captured images of the machine. It was the kind of thing they would view as a threat, and they would immediately scramble to build their own version.

And they would want to know how such a backward colony like Blightcross could devise such a thing, and they would assume that it was a Tamish plot, and they would assume that every Valoii in existence knew about the plan.

In some ways, he hoped that Capra would die an honourable death before he had to make the decision to hand her to Yaz.

“Here, I found it.” It was Vasi, and she was kneeling in the sand, scooping it with her hands. “The vaults are shielded from the Hex. This is our way to the refinery.”

“They are also connected to the armoury, as you said.” Dannac bent to help her. Capra seemed in a daze, standing there with her hands wrapped round her war-trophy amulet. “Do we want to risk an encounter with Sevari's men?”

“Sevari's men will be too busy with the chaos in the streets.”