Blightcross: A Novel (44 page)

An instinct drove her to leap into the air, and she unfurled a set of wings, began to beat them as though she had always known them. The feeling of hot wind rushing at her face, the thrill of gliding across the city... and a deep burning, almost painful. A death drive.

She twisted and twirled, laughed with a strange glee. Any anxiety about the world had been destroyed; she was no longer capable of it. She descended on the machine—her only desire, her only goal.

The machine twitched as soon as she landed on one of its arms. The panels became a fountain of orange—the new, true appearance of the shadows, and they slithered out from the metal to block her. She grabbed the first one and bit into its neck. It shrieked and fell into a heap, dripping down the war engine's arm. Evidently, this form was capable of physically interacting with the shadows.

And it worked both ways. One shadow wrapped its limbs around her back. She clawed and bit at the strange substance. Three more joined in and began to snap and flail their limbs like whips, and each lash bit into her new body—
their
new body—with the bite of a flaming razor.

“What are you?” asked one of the shadow men. “This is not right.”

She kicked out at the one, knocked it over the edge, but another moved into his place. “It reeks of humanity, but it fights. It sees and touches us...”

Another slash across her chest, ripping what remained of her leather. She wanted to talk with the creatures, yet a strange urge choked her. It was Vasi.

There is no reasoning with them.

Kill them.

Kill them all.

One of the shadow men turned its limb into a spear and lunged at her. She tossed the shadow from her back, but cannon fire shook the machine, and she stumbled. The spear pierced her shoulder. It drew no blood, and she felt a foreign, shocking sensation. It was not rending muscle and breaking bone, but a deeper hurt, as though they had stabbed into the centre of her mind.

She snapped the shadow man's limb over her knee, then tackled him. During the struggle, the machine's arm swivelled again, causing her to slide towards the elbow joint. With the shadow under her, she slammed against the machine's upper arm. She bit into the thing's neck. Despite that the act horrified her, she let the shadow's substance flow into her mouth and into her, and in seconds it ceased its shrieking.

Standing on the machine's shoulders was a familiar figure. Rovan. All around him shadows skulked and darted, and his eyes glowed as if the departed Blightcross sun had taken refuge inside the boy's head.

Now she spoke: “Rovan? It's me.”

“Another of Sevari's tricks?”

He won't recognize us, Vasi. He is too far gone...

“Rovan, please. We want to help you.”

“I have all the help I need.” Rovan then gave a rude gesture and stepped behind his cohorts.

She tensed her long, clawed fingers and leaped into the air, wings unfurled. The district was a giant oven filled with plenty of currents, and she soared towards the machine's head. Whether Vasi approved or not, her new instinct urged her to attack Rovan.

She met two shadows in mid-air, and ravaged both in quick succession. Once she landed on the shoulder, Rovan stared back at her from the opposite end. She ignored the lingering pain from her wound and loped across the machine's back. A shadow tried to spear her with a sharp limb, but she caught it, stared into its nonexistent face. Her mouth watered, and she shivered from a thrill that horrified and excited her.

After drinking this one, Capra's appetite deepened, and only Rovan would satisfy it. After that, she would feed on the giants, which now surrounded the war machine. Their flames licked the machine, though the only thing that seemed vulnerable to their attacks were the shadows hiding within the thing's panels.

One of the fire giants must have understood this: it held back its fire and instead rushed the machine head-on, tough head-armour bristling with spines. Its collision sent the machine reeling. The shock made her lose her footing, and her clawed feet screeched against iron as she tried to keep from falling. But she couldn't stop, and sailed over the edge to the ground. Two shadow men took the opportunity to pounce while she was dazed and falling.

But her wings launched her up again, high above the city. She dove straight for Rovan. The shadows pursuing her no longer mattered—already her appetite was bored with the commonplace, and Rovan was something new.

The machine shook and bucked, both from the giants' attacks and its constant cannon fire. Capra left her wings unfurled, and bared the teeth she now understood to be far longer than usual.

Rovan glanced behind him, then widened his stance, as if finally accepting that he could not escape. “Some kind of animal? A freak?”

“We are neither. Please, I don't know if I can stop this... you have to surrender.”

Capra sensed Vasi's unwillingness to let Rovan die.

But she had said to kill them all.

She didn't wait for Rovan to babble, and leaped at him. The boy would fall easily—

Except that he caught her in mid-air with a single hand, and grinned maniacally as he slammed her into the machine's head. She snapped at him with her teeth, but he dodged and forced her as though she were a sack of flour.

“The shadows tell me you are all of us combined. That explains how weak you really are. You have the fire giants' weakness. We are perfection.” Rovan smashed her with several punches. The boy's blows pounded twice as much rending pain through her as the shadows had, and she scared herself with otherworldly outcries of pain—a shriek not unlike the shadows' own death screams.

Three shadow men joined in and flayed her with their almost liquid limbs. Before long, she realized the futility of struggling. Instead, she reached around the machine's head, blindly as she had before, to search for some control to upset.

You cannot kill him, Capra.

I must.

There has to be another way.

There is no time.

It was easy for Vasi to protest—she didn't seem to possess the physical connection to the body that included feeling its strange version of pain.

Rovan ceased his attack. “Just like last time, only now the world will see how weak you really are. Akhli was a trickster, a fool, and it was only dumb luck that made him succeed. He was not the apex of life.”

A strange change in vocal tone and vocabulary—it must be the shadows speaking.

With her claws she tore open the head panels and plunged her claws inside. The machine jolted again, and Rovan's grip loosened.

A grating sound rose above the din of engines and fighting. Gears grinding, a chain reaction of fouling. She hoped.

Rovan pulled back his hand dramatically. Capra fought against the things holding her, while still clawing at the metal innards at her back. Even in this strange, winged form, Capra couldn't avoid Rovan's savage attack—he nailed his fist into her with such force that his hand lodged inside her chest.

The un-assimilated aspect in her mind was horrified. As his hand pulled at her very being with a surgeon's precision, she saw no blood. But her movements and fighting slowed, and her once-hard limbs softened and dangled in her captors' hands, and more inhuman screeches came from within and horrified her.

All she could do was allow Vasi to come through and try reasoning with the boy. “Rovan, it's me—your sister.”

“Lies. My sister must be dead, and all thanks to you and everyone else who can't accept my rule.”

“She is not dead, she is here, inside this being! You have to listen to me. Stop this.”

Rovan pulled out his hand, and Capra cried out against the savage pain. Her strength poured from the wound in the colour of the Sparkling Sea, staining her leather blue and leaving bright tracks down her leg.

There was a clunk behind her, and the metal under their feet jolted and groaned. Engines bellowed, and everyone standing on the thing's shoulders slipped and stumbled. With little strength left, Capra knew she was headed for a fall. On her way towards the edge of the machine's back, she grabbed Rovan's leg.

As they fell together, she twisted to dominate him. Shadows darted around but kept clear of them, likely after having realized that Capra could destroy them.

A heartbeat later, they hit the ground.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When Capra opened her eyes, her mind overflowed with images from her time unconscious—how long had it been? The air still thrummed with clattering metal and inhuman screams.

The images—pits in the ground, a violent clash underground, smoke and steam, blue sky above.

Winged people, catastrophic thunderstorms shaking the earth.

“It's awake.”

Capra slammed back into the world of ruin and blackness. People gathered around her—Ehzeri, Naartlanders, even a few men sporting the silly flat-top hairstyle of Tamarck. Something told her they were not exactly normal. It could have been their bulging, unblinking eyes. Or it could have been a kind of filth that went beyond the unavoidable grit in Blightcross.

They were hunched like animals and they moved with abruptness and caution.

“What is it?” asked one of them.

“It's human.”

“No, it isn't.”

Someone prodded her with a stick. She gnashed her teeth and brought herself to her knees, slipping on the pile of rocks. Now the memories became clearer, and she realized that yes, she was an archon at the moment, along with Vasi buried somewhere within the strange form.

“Is it one of us?”

A wizened woman clambered onto the pile, stared Capra straight in the eye. “It is not. But they want us to recuperate it. It must be changed or killed. It is dangerous.”

These people acted much different to those who were taken by the shadows. They appeared fearful and base, while the shadows' corruption was more depraved and sophisticated. The shadow-infested people worked for a kind of gratification, while these people, the disciples of the fire giants, almost seemed subservient to some unseen power.

The old woman reached into her rags and brought out a glass jar. It held a thick, clear liquid. “Drink it, demon!”

Capra shook her head.

“The venom of our masters is an elixir. It will heal you.”

She reached out to accept it, but a spike of instinct paralysed her arm. “It will kill me.”

With that, the woman splashed the liquid at her. It burned across Capra's chest, made a white steam that reeked of sulphur. She hissed at the dumbstruck crowd and clawed at them.

Leave them, they cannot harm us. We must find Rovan.

Rovan, of course. She leaped into the air, still reeling from the burn and the great fall, and she could not reconcile her not-quite flesh body with the fact that it still was material, substantial, and subject to injury.

Once in the air, she saw Rovan gliding above the sand, a shadow at either side holding him. They flew towards the desert beyond the refinery. The war machine was retreating away from the city.

The giants lumbered on in pursuit. Behind Capra, at the heart of the city where they once concentrated like schools of fish, there were no shadows. They must be following the war machine. At the very least, the town might be spared more damage. The machine fired incessantly from every flame gun and cannon still working. Sparks gushed from its arm joints when they moved, and many of its engines coughed as it tried to correct its aim.

If the machine is destroyed, Rovan will have no more shadows to surround him.

Capra knew what Vasi was thinking, and she hoped it was true. She also hoped that at the end of this, she would not be left with any of these killing instincts. This archon she had become was capable of being controlled, but she couldn't bear to think of what carnage would come if this force were set free without a mind to tame it.

And what about the giants? Was she in any position to fight them, assuming she could destroy the shadows and their machine?

It could have been her reservations about ripping Rovan's heart from his chest, but she now decided that with all of the shadows concentrated in the machine, she'd best leave the boy for now and attack it.

She dived at the war engine. Its panels may be resistant to attack, but up close, rivets could be broken and screws undone. She had already come close to disabling it twice.

This would be the last time.

Cripple the thing once and for all. Set off what remained of its ammunition. The ensuing explosion would destroy the shadow men.

A voice sounded near her head. Next to her, in mid air, was a man in black. A shadow in human form.

“You are a catastrophe, Capra. Look at you. A contradiction.”

“That is how you see it. You are out of date, Sir. Obsolete.”

“Opposites cannot reconcile.”

“They are the same thing, shadow.”

“Join us.”

“I already have, in the most profound way possible.”

She did not recognize the words or thoughts as her own. Only Vasi could dialogue with a ghost.

She folded back her wings and slashed a streak across the sky on her dive towards her target. Wind and strange joy, this freedom coupled with a drive she couldn't escape.

There it was, so close, and there, at its midsection—a scorched patch of armour. All she needed to do was reach in and pull out some cog or wheel or cable.

The flame gun spat just as she came in to land. The fire caught her right side, and her wing became a torch. She spiralled downward. The pain reminded her of the phosphorus burn she had suffered, only this time, it might kill her.

She slammed into the sand at the thing's feet. Numbness overcame her body—
their
body.

The deep drive to destroy both sides continued to gnaw at her, to nag and push, but could she continue?

Cold metal touched her leg. A section of buried pipeline, and it ran for who knows how far. If the shadows' war engine fired and missed the giants it aimed to kill, and it likely would, the whole city might explode when the attacks ignited the pipeline.