Blightcross: A Novel (45 page)

She rolled off her charred wing and staggered upright. A giant iron leg was right next to her, and she dug her claws into it and began to climb, panting and wincing through a tide of pain.

It was a paradox. A supernatural body that was also flesh and vulnerable. A desire to destroy divorced of any meaning. Vasi was right—this creature they had become was a synthesis of the two forces. A reconciliation.

Like she had scaled the clock tower, she scaled the armoured beast, only this time with raw power and claws rather than finesse. Every reach with her right arm became a symphony of hurt. Her hands vibrated, left a trail of blue blood behind. A few more pulls and she would be able to crawl along its hip joint.

A shadow seeped out of the metal. She grabbed it with her free hand and tore into its neck with her mouth, drank its dark substance.

And when she arrived at the hip area, she went straight to the broken section. Her hand darted to the cavity, but just before it touched the mechanisms within, a film of the shadow men's orange form blocked her. She clawed at the cavity frantically with the same result—the shadow men had reinforced the armour with the very stuff of their existence.

Faced with such an impasse, and her own depleted energy, she was at a loss. She shrieked in frustration—an act that felt strange and foreign.

She attacked the metal with her teeth. The gnashing and snapping pierced the membrane of shadow, and there was a deep groan from within the contraption. Sharp metal raked her face as she went further, tearing the remaining armour with her claws and continuing to rip at the machine's entrails with her teeth.

In answer, it began to shake and whine. Her claws pierced it enough for her to hang on. More sparks rained down from the arms, which now dropped and twitched. Torn hoses threw oil and fuel into her face, and broken pipes shot scalding steam.

She was almost too distracted to notice the giants encircling the machine. One enemy at a time, and this one was still standing. Where was its gunpowder and flame essence?

It veered awkwardly, sending Capra's legs swinging as she tore into it. Sparks and iron grindings showered her.

Then its torso shuddered with volleys of cannon fire. The shots exploded into the sand and enveloped the area in a dust storm. It fired salvo after salvo into the desert, and its aim seemed completely random now.

The gash in the metal beast was such that she could kick into it, and she used the last of her strength to bust rods and linkages. Each blow jarred her with the shock of kicking a stone wall. An explosion sounded in the distance—secondary to the cannon shots themselves. An oil well?

And the guns fell silent. The engines idled, creaks and screaming metal dwindled to squeaking.

But there was still a profound shaking. The thing swayed and stumbled. Below, the sand began to shift into a stone-dry whirlpool. The sound of a river cutting through a valley. A sense of something very wrong—

or is this right
?

—and she leaped off the machine, despite that she could barely fly with a half-scorched wing. She sailed for a few seconds, skimmed over the writhing ground, and could not help skidding across the sand when her momentum died.

In the distance, the ground coughed gasps of black smoke. The burning oil wells, ignited by the machine's haphazard cannon fire, seemed to belch in concert with the spasms Capra felt underneath her.

The sand flowed against her, towards where the sinking had begun at the feet of the war engine. She pawed at the mountain of sand pushing her back the way she had come.

Her wings beat madly, but the rush knocked her over before she could fly. The wave carried her into the widening hole.

The damned cannons and well explosions must have caused earthquakes.

And the entire desert seemed littered with sinkholes.

Pipelines buckled, and the black blood of Blightcross spurted into the air, until the sand devoured and silenced the geysers.

Capra clenched her jaw and jammed shut her eyes against the onslaught. It was only an attempt to make her end more comfortable. Even Vasi's conscience did not try to convince her that survival was likely.

There was plenty of company—this hole was the size of a small village, and swallowed equipment, roughneck camps, and of course, the shadows and their commandeered war machine. At least she had succeeded in that...

There was a drop. No longer did she roll and suffocate. Below was pure black, and the world was collapsing into this abyss. She twisted and flailed, her thoughts bouncing between joy and utter horror. The size of the hole struck her like a mace to the head—she couldn't comprehend the blackness swallowing the desert, as though the world were imploding into the infinity of the night sky.

She was resigned. That is, until the war machine fell past her, flailing and chugging as though it might affect its own fate. Rovan still hung on, and for the first time, Capra knew that he was genuinely scared.

You have to!

She came out of her daze and spread her wings. At first, she careened to the left, but remembered to compensate for the damaged right wing. She scooped Rovan from the falling machine and pulled into a nearly vertical climb, face broad against the moonlight. During her ascent, she passed two fire giants falling to their inevitable deaths in the pit. The earth's rumbling still echoed in the great hole.

Once she passed through the opening, back into the smoky desert air, she beat her wings in a frenzy. The screams of giants permeated the skies, chilling cries that pierced through Capra's exhaustion and pain, made her shudder with revulsion.

Already, the form made of both herself and Vasi began to disintegrate—Capra felt a strange rending sensation, as though from a torture apparatus. In her wings, back, legs, it was too much to continue. She tumbled to the ground, Rovan still in her arms.

Just before they hit the dust-lined street on the outskirts of the city, Capra fell into her own black abyss.

It couldn't be, yet Dannac knew that the two women bleeding on deserted paving stones were his companions. He relaxed his grip on the cannon, bent to check Capra's injuries. Whatever she had done, it had worked: he had watched with his own enhanced eye the explosions in the well, the sinkhole that swallowed both the shadow men and their war engine and the remaining fire giants.

What had she done? What had the strange, silvery light been that he had glimpsed shooting from the hole?

He listened for her breath, felt her pulse. Both were strong. He checked Vasi, and she was also alive.

Now it hit him why exactly he had come to find them.

There was no escaping Yaz or his successors. He should have let himself die on the battlefield, never have gotten involved with the Republic's spies. Sure, they helped his people when convenient, but it was all manipulation.

And now, he had no choice.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

There were two colours: the blue of sky unstained by industry or the smoky breath of war, and the reddish-brown of the land. When Capra looked at her hand, it appeared drained of any colour, as though she were an apparition. The tents stood as still as boulders, despite the wind that tossed dirt into Capra's face and whipped around her hair.

“Hello?” There had to be an Ehzeri around. “Hello? Anyone?”

Only when nobody answered did she realize that the wind lashing her made no sound either. As she walked, the experience became a series of disjointed flashes, like the sparks of visibility in a thunderstorm.

In the next instant, she clutched a crossbow. In the other hand sat the deceptive weight of a phosphorus grenade.

She wandered among the empty tents. Inside one she found a charred corpse. In the next, a steaming bowl of rice, and vacant place-settings on the rug. And in another, she saw herself.

A version of herself in twin braids and a cropped cotton top. Around her navel were traditional Ehzeri tattoos. On her neck was... nothing. No military brand.

Capra stared at this version of herself, watched her write on a scroll. She crept closer, the other continuing to write away without a single break in her motions. Her scratching made no sound. Only Capra's own heart drummed, the rest of the world going on in this dead silence.

She wanted to touch her double's face. She dropped to her knees in front of the girl. Still, no sound, no indication of noticing Capra's presence.

A wave of grief overcame her, and she tried to blink away the stinging in her eyes. She wept, and the phosphorus grenade flipped from her hand, rolled on the carpet as silently as a Valoii assassin's knife drawn across an Ehzeri militant's throat.

The grenade's detonation made no sound, either.

A muffled voice demanded something, but she couldn't make out what. She winced and hauled herself upright. The sky was red, and the air slightly cooler. There was an eerie quiet about the city.

A black form darkened the sky in front of her. Her eyes focused and she saw that it was one of Sevari's men, fitted with a strange mask and outfit.

“I said, are you capable of walking, Valoii?”

She took his extended hand and stood. “What... happened?”

“Temblors. All across the oilfields. They've been known to be unstable, and it seems they cracked at just the right time. Saved the city, they did.”

She vaguely remembered tearing out the war machine's guts of metal cable and cogs, and the ensuing explosions. “But how... how did I do it?”

The soldier ignored her strange question and led her into the street. There were groups of bruised and burned people huddling around carriages. People sprinted across the square to meet the open arms of friends once thought to be among the dead.

Something didn't make sense.

A bulge in her tattered leather. She reached into the pocket and grasped a hard object. She nearly dropped it when she realized that the object was Dannac's eye.

A heaviness pounded her chest, and she ran away from the soldier, screaming Dannac's name. She screamed at every group of the reunited, and the only responses were the kind of tolerant stares meant for raving trauma victims.

But it was no use. Dannac had left. That was why she now held his eye in her palm. It was clear to her why he had planted his eye on her person and left. She was his insurance—the keeper of the images his Republic allies wanted.

So he had chosen to run, rather than hand it over. Why did he care? Ruining an ally of Tamarck and Mizkov was his reason for living, yet he had withheld the eye from them. It made no sense.

There was no use in trying to understand. Clearly she didn't know Dannac as well as she had assumed. There would be time to sort it out, after the aches healed and things made sense again.

She hopped into one of the Corps wagons, despite that only days earlier, these same soldiers were under orders to kill her. It didn't matter now. Sevari could jail her forever, for all she cared at the moment. One of the haggard citizens passed around a gunnysack of rations, but Capra waved them away. Fatigued, yes, but without any appetite whatsoever.

Even the rumbling of this wagon's engine stirred blurry impressions of the war machine. The strange existence as an angel made flesh. Vasi.

She, or they, or
it
, had slammed into the ground. That much she remembered.

It wasn't enough. A missing piece gnawed at her. Where was Vasi?

Just thinking of Vasi kicked her into a hazy recollection.

The shock of splitting into her own body. Vasi lying in the street. Rovan on the ground, chest rising and falling, eyes glaring with the collective madness of the defeated shadows.

They couldn't still think they had a chance, could they? There he had been, gleaming with a maniacal grin, reaching towards Capra with his bloodied hand.

She had barely been able to stand. She crawled over to him, clutched his bloody head in her arms.

It was automatic. The pressure across his throat, the locking position of her arms—the economy of death as outlined by Valoii training doctrine. The shadows would only return if she let this last one remain in their world.

“Vasi, I'm sorry.” She used the last of her strength to clench harder, to hopefully put him out of his misery quickly.

And that was all she could remember.

“They say that almost half of the population followed those damned things into the hole,” one of the passengers said.

“Did you see the silver light pass out of the hole?” asked another.

Thus began a round of speculation. Capra wasn't interested. It could have been her, it could have been an exploding machine component.

She knew she was no angel, and nothing could convince her otherwise. Not even if God himself fitted her with the commonplace golden pike and wings of the archons.

The wagon passed a tent painted with a rudimentary blue emblem displayed by surgeons. There were mostly Ehzeri standing around it. The wagon stopped for a few passengers who wanted medical attention.

Just below the wagon, a young woman bent over a boy. His face was bruised and black, and—

Rovan.

The girl looked up at the morning sun with glistening eyes and a look of abject guilt. Vasi.

A surgeon, or at least a young man who acted like one, came to Rovan's side. Capra wanted to jump off the wagon and explain or apologize or console—anything—but she did not.

“He won't wake,” Vasi told the surgeon.

Oh, Vasi, he's dead
.

The surgeon performed a quick examination. Why would he bother?

“I'm sorry. All of his functions seem to be intact, but he must have suffered a profound damage to his mind.”

Alive? She hadn't even killed him properly?

The surgeon stood, and scanned the crowd. “I am afraid he may not recover. If you mean to keep him alive, he will need constant treatment.” He appeared to be hiding a scowl, likely at the prospect of an Ehzeri having to deal with the financial burden of such a patient. He shuffled to the next casualty, went on as though the previous one had never existed.