Last First Snow (31 page)

She could not fight them in the air, not while holding her son. Her opteran was hungry, burrowing deeper into her soul. It sucked and drained and writhed. She had to lose them, and find help, fast. Grace and Mercy Hospital was too far east; she'd have to get past the pursuers first.

She remembered Elayne Kevarian's voice. If you need help. A business card for the Monicola Hotel. Not far—closer than the hospital. Chel didn't trust the woman. Didn't trust anyone, now. But Elayne had made the offer, and she seemed, if not kind, at least effective.

How to reach her? Mina couldn't keep dodging much longer. She had to fly fast. She had to be invisible.

Ah. Yes.

She climbed, hoping—not praying, not now—her pursuers' weapons were still building charge. A few more seconds, that was all she needed. Up, into the mother-of-pearl underbelly of Craftwork clouds. Arms of wet cotton held her close.

She could not see, could not even tell which way was north. Vast shapes moved about her in the artificial cloud. But the opteran knew the way. Its multifaceted eyes peered through the dark.

Go, she told it. Take me to the Monicola Hotel.

*   *   *

The tents burst apart into shredded fabric and broken wood. Long furrows opened in flagstones, two sets of three trenches each. Chel hit the stone hard, and the Major clanged down beside her, both toppled by the wind of something massive overhead. A roar on the low edge of human hearing scraped her bones and knotted her stomach. Groaning, weak, she pushed herself off the stone, turned, and saw … nothing.

An immense, towering nothing, a writhing space where her eyes would not focus. Again she heard the roar. Wing-wind battered her face. More tents broke. A red-arm ran toward the wreckage, and a distortion in the air, a not-thing with no color, no texture, no features her mind could hold, struck him in his stomach and he flew back to land amid the wreckage of the tents. Thudding impacts from above, more splintered wood, more roars without throats to voice them.

She forced herself to her feet, pulled the Major up after her. He drew the lead pipe at his hip, held it like a storybook sword, but his eyes sought his enemy in vain among the wrecked tents. He bellowed a challenge, and ran toward the nothing with pipe-sword raised. Then a great wind struck him and he flew ten feet to the left, landed, skidded, lurched to one knee. Blood seeped from the torn armor of his chest.

A fallen brazier's coals caught on canvas. Oily smoke parted to wreathe the form Chel could not see: a snakelike body and feathered wings, huge claws and sharp teeth bared. “Couatl!” she shouted, and grabbed a broken tentpole to use as a weapon. “In the smoke!”

The Major heard her, and turned, seeking. What must have been a claw tore an invisible arc through fire, and he swept his pipe around to block. The force of the blow still thrust him onto his back, but the Couatl screamed and reared, and its frustration gave the Major time to stand.

Screams rose around them: the hostage tent, the armory, torn apart. “Couatl!” she screamed again.

No way to tell if the others heard her. The Major swung for what he thought was the creature's body and missed. Damn damn damn. Other red-arms running. They'd never make it in time. Other screams and eruptions of bodies near the medical tent, the kitchens. Each Warden team had come with a purpose in mind, and this one's was to kill the Major. And maybe kill her, too.

Not if she could stop it.

Couldn't see the body, couldn't focus with her eyes. But if it could strike her she could strike back. The body writhed, the claws danced a killing dance. The wings, furled, swept burning cloth and wood away, leaving trails amid dust and splinters. Those were as good a target as any. And if she could climb the wings, she could reach the rider.

She ran, and jumped, and caught one wing as it swept up. Torn through the air, buffeted by wind, she flew and fell and landed on unseen feathers. Muscles surged beneath her, and taut skin over steely bone.

The Craft that clad the Couatl did not warp light, or else the beast's rider could not see. Chel was being ordered blind: enchantment pressed against her, commanded her to look away. But she could still feel, and felt down the Couatl's wing until feathers gave way to taut scales.

The head was that way, following the wings' leading edge. She felt leather straps—a saddle.

She still held the shattered tent spar. She swung it in a blind arc, screaming. Wood struck bone—the rider's skull. The Couatl reared. She clutched its sides with her legs and swung again, connected. The world veered. She drew back her arm for the third strike.

A human hand caught her wrist and twisted. She gasped in pain. The makeshift club tumbled from her fingers, and the Warden—had to be a Warden—threw her. She tumbled off the Couatl's back. Paving stones struck her like a hammer.

Above, outlined by smoke, a serpent's jaws yawned wide.

*   *   *

Mina flew blind in a sorcerous cloud. Buzzing luminous shapes zipped through the haze and away: other optera, riderless, circling above the city as they waited for someone to need them. Once her opteran veered sharply right, and she wondered why until a faceted crystal the size of a building pierced through the cloud: a skyspire rising through artificial haze for a clear view of the night sky. Blurred figures moved behind glass walls, or bent over desks, ignorant of her and of the insectile darkness alike.

Caleb shivered. The wind, she thought, or their speed, or blood loss setting in.

She was losing it. The opteran drained her soul, and she had only so much to give. Her arms tired.

Get me to the Monicola Hotel. I can do the rest. A few miles more. Her students told stories about optera abductions when they thought professors weren't listening: dumb tales in which a person, generally female, someone's sister's cousin's friend, lost herself in flight, never to return, dead husks flying forever in an insects' grip. She did not believe the stories. Too many traditional forms embedded there: the god-ox that stole the Queen of the Old World, the buffalo-bride, even downtown horror plays, everyday tools twisted to implements of liberation. This high up, she felt the stories' seed. Eternal freedom from gravity and ground, from knives and gods. Tempting.

No. She'd lost so much soul already. Even fear faded, incipient mortality giving way to the kind of drawn-out academic detachment that rendered “certain death” as “incipient mortality.” But Caleb needed her.

Monicola Hotel, she thought, through the link she shared with the creature, not so much psychic as gustatory, the connection of diner with dinner, no, dammit. Stay concrete. Be here. Your son's arms cold around your neck. The pain where you hold him. The proboscis burns against your skin. The cloud smells of dirt, charcoal, sulfur. The Monicola Hotel. Where?

Here.

She fell.

They fell, the three of them, together.

The ocean of clouds swept past and they broke through. Like a diver surfacing from deep water at night only in reverse, sweeping from darkness down toward jewel-carpet city, Dresediel Lex perfect only seen from overhead—by day the back of a giant basking lizard, a vast cracked scab, a cancer, but paradise by night. It grew. Gods, the fear a coal in her stomach. She'd never moved this fast before, the opteran's wings buzzing to speed their fall, as if gravity needed any help.

And still the city swelled. A postage-stamp scrap of stone with a black pool at its center no larger than the pupil of an eye, ringed by blinding light, larger now, the size of a book and then no longer a mockup of a real place but the place itself, they fell toward a real thing that would break them both, so fast, pull up pull up pull up up
up
the fountain a fist rushing toward her
—

The opteran spread its wings and the dive broke, slowing, slowing, still too fast.

Then it let them go.

She tumbled five feet maybe through the air, Caleb clutched in her arms, to land with an enormous splash in the Monicola Hotel fountain.

Ten blind flailing seconds later she found her footing, stood, chest-deep in water, bare feet slipping on slivers of thrown copper. Her arms free. Spinning, searching. There—Caleb, floating face-up spread-eagled. The scars on his legs burned green. His nostrils flared.

“Caleb?”

“Mom?”

She would not cry. Pulled him into a hug. Everything felt so distant, their embrace a mere pressure on her chest, a vague heat. Colors faded. His hair not deep blue-black, his skin not the color of rosewood—only wavelengths of light. Time ticked by in seconds, not heartbeats.

So little soul left.

“Come on. We have to go.” Climbing out of the fountain: application of so many units of force against the fountain lip, contraction of near-exhausted arms and back to lift herself up and the boy after. Her son. So hard to form that thought. So much harder than she expected to remember which muscles moved in what order to walk. Left calf first, then right? Apparently not. Left quadricep first, then right calf, but tighten the core for balance, and keep the boy by your side. Toward the glass doors beneath the angular art deco script that read:
MONICOLA HOTEL
. Forward. People staring, for some reason.

She needed soulstuff. Staggered, with Caleb, still dripping fountain water, through the revolving door into a vault-ceilinged lobby perhaps thirty feet tall at apex. Chandeliers, fake crystal. Gold leaf everywhere. Marble floors. Temperature perhaps fifteen degrees cooler than outside. She shivered.

Had to be a banking circle here. She scanned the room. Suited men wearing metal nametags moved toward her, faces professionally concerned. The one on the left, twenty-five pounds heavier, had cut himself shaving. A bit of white clay under the chin. She turned from them, pulled the boy with her. There: a small booth by the door. One person in line, an old man in a short-sleeve shirt covered with orange flowers, who took a step back and raised his hands, spread, when she approached.

She slid into the booth, pressed her thumb to the center of the silver circle. Static charge built, thin hairs on the back of her arms and neck rising to attention. She shivered again, losing core temperature. The prick of a needle into her thumb, the drop of blood, the answering whir of counterweights behind the wall, and then her skin and flesh and mind jammed open at once by a rush of soul from her savings account.

She gasped, and gulping air stumbled back into the ostentatious lobby, her son by her side, his hair black once more, black as his eyes and set in a face the colors of which she knew. Eyes, rolling back in his head as he slumped into her. “Caleb! Come on, Caleb, stay with me.”

The suits had reached her now, the big man with the shaving cut in front. Brass buttons flashed from his coat. “Excuse me, ma'am. Can I help you?”

“I'm a guest of Elayne Kevarian. Room four-oh-four.”

“Are you.”

“Call her room. Check. She knows me. This is important.”

“Ma'am, calm down.”

“I'm calm.” She growled that word because fuck calm and fuck him. “I need to see her.” She sounded desperate. She was desperate. So good to feel again after the fading of her soul, but if she didn't pull herself together they'd throw her out.

The man opened his mouth.

At that moment, her pursuers landed in the courtyard.

She felt their impact: no slow descent for these, no, they fell lock-kneed from the sky to strike beside the valet station, shattering stone underfoot. A horse spooked and danced away. The valet fell. In the instant before a cloud of dust rose to obscure them, she saw her hunters wore black suits. One was pinching his lapels. They had no lips, but many teeth.

She didn't wait for the dust to fade, for the hunters to emerge. The impact, the sudden screams, distracted the guards. She lifted Caleb and ran to the stairs.

Behind, she heard glass break.

 

50

Temoc took out the Wardens' sentry in silence, the woman's throat cradled in the crook of his elbow. Above, Couatl beat their wings for altitude, circled up and slickened, there was no other word for it. Their shapes smoothed, and they vanished. His scars burned, and pierced the Craft that hid them. As he lowered the unconscious sentry, he saw the Couatl dive.

Then he heard the screams.

The rear of the Warden camp was a mess of stretchers and prison wagons, one full, protesters straining at its iron bars. This too was guarded, by a pair of Wardens, one man and one woman. Risky, and he did not relish fighting women, but he needed to sow confusion, and anyway the enemy was the one who sent women to war.

He struck the man on the collarbone. It snapped, and he went down. The woman did not hesitate at the sight of Temoc, for all his shadow and flame. She swung her truncheon. He dodged. She swung it again, and once more he dodged, but this time his hand followed hers, clung to it, and bent her momentum against her, twisting the wrist toward and past her elbow, slicing down as if her arm were a sword. She fell. Something snapped in her. The male Warden tried to stand despite his broken collarbone. Temoc choked him out. He'd stay down fifteen seconds. Maybe. Ten seconds left on average before the first sentry would wake.

The cage lock was made of iron. He shattered it with his palm and swung the door wide. The protesters within gaped. Bloody, some. Injured. Awed. Still, they could be useful.

“Cause trouble. Distract them so I can reach the Square. “

“Temoc,” one said, before he swept away into the night.

The prisoners burst from the cage and roared their freedom. One kicked the male Warden in the face. The female Warden regained her feet, ignoring the escapees, and ran after Temoc. He hit her in the ribs, hard. She flew a little before she struck a stack of sandbags, and did not rise again.

He dove behind a wagon as Wardens rushed past, drawn by the escapees. When the path was clear, Temoc ran toward the barricade, toward Chakal Square where the people—his people, the people for whom he'd given up his life—where his people were dying. Where Couatl fell among them, ravening and invisible, warded from sight to increase the horror they spread.