Swords of Waar (41 page)

I squeaked and grabbed Lhan and jumped back thirty feet in a single second, then took another bounce to get back behind the curve of the hallway out of the line of fire. There wasn’t gonna be any charging these guys, and no way to get in the middle of them so they couldn’t fire without hitting each other. There wasn’t any cover in these smooth-ass circular hallways either. All my usual tricks were useless.

Or were they?

I put Lhan down and turned to him as we kept backing up.

“You gotta slow ’em down. Back up, but keep firing every time you see one show even just a shoulder around the curve.”

“Aye, Mistress. You have a plan?”

“If you can call running around in circles a plan.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Stay alive.”

He fired past me, shaving a smoking slice out of the curve of the wall. “As long as you do the same, beloved. Luck be with you.”

I went.

I pounded down the hall away from Duru-Vau and his gunners as the crackle of wand fire echoed from behind me. I clenched my teeth, praying it was Lhan fanning back the guards, and not the guards lasering him to pieces. At least the firing kept going. That was a good sign, right?

It was easy going at first. I was taking twenty-foot strides and loving getting to stretch my legs to the limit, but halfway around the circumference of the circle, things got hairy. The fire was really spreading on this side, and the hall was filled with smoke and flame. There was burning junk all over the floor, the walls and ceiling were buckling and melting, and I was, you know, naked.

I tightened my strides and bunched up, then sprang long and low, leaping through it all like Evel Knievel jumping a bike through a hoop of flame. Only trouble was, this was more like a tube of flame, and I couldn’t see well enough to tell if I had a good landing place or not.

As it turned out, there
was
a spot to land, but I wasn’t heading for it. Some big air-conditioner looking thing had dropped through the ceiling, and was laying there like an island in a sea of flame, but I was angling away from it, right toward the burning wall. With a wild-ass swipe of my sword, I swerved sideways in mid-air and managed to catch the very edge of it with one foot. It was a sharp edge, though, and I could feel the ball of my foot slice open as I kicked off.

At least it got me clear of the fire. I landed on spongy carpet again and kept going, leaving bloody prints with my right foot at every step and bounding past priests carrying books and crates toward the stairs. They didn’t even have time to react before I was past ’em.

Another ten strides and I started hearing wand fire ahead of me instead of behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Lhan was still holding. Ten more strides and I saw the blue flashes ahead of me through the smoke. I poured it on, and the scene came into view around the curve of the hall—the four wand guys inching forward and firing ahead, Duru-Vau following behind, but keeping well back from Lhan’s return fire.

I took one last big stride, kicking high and raising my sword as I arced up behind them. My plan was to come down with my feet between Duru-Vau’s shoulder blades, then chop up the gunners while the little fucker was picking his teeth out of the carpet. It only half worked.

I don’t know if he had eyes in the back of his head or whether he was just naturally nervous, but Duru-Vau looked over his shoulder just as I was coming down and managed to scoot out from under me like a stepped-on bar of soap.

He screeched a warning to the wand guys, but it was way too late. They turned around just in time to catch my blade right where they needed it most. I caught the first guy between the teeth, came out the back of his head, chopped through the next guy’s neck, cut the third guy in two at the waist, and got jammed up halfway though the last guy’s pelvis.

I cleared the blade with a kick, and turned to grab Duru-Vau, but the slippery little bastard was already disappearing around the curve of the hall.

“Mistress!” Lhan was charging forward, wand at the ready.

“Good job, Lhan! Come on.”

I didn’t wait. If Duru-Vau knew how to operate the turbine controls, I needed him. I sprang after him, skimming close to the wall and cocking my sword back, ready to hit him with the flat, but just as my feet left the ground he spun and unloaded at me with his palm.

In a panic, I kicked at the wall and veered left, but not quite fast enough. The spell rippled past my legs and even though I only caught the very edge of it, it turned them to jelly. I hit the ground feet first, but my knees couldn’t hold me, and I crashed down tits first and slid into the wall.

Duru-Vau looked like he was going to stop and finish the job, but then a bolt of blue fire grazed his leg and he jumped back, screaming, and started limping away.

Lhan ran to me as the little priest vanished into the smoke. “Mistress, are you wounded? Can you—”

“Help me up. We can’t let that little fuck get away. But don’t kill him, Lhan. We need him.”

Lhan took my arm and pulled me up. My legs were all pins and needles, but my knees held, kinda. Lhan caught me as I tottered.

“Jae-En, perhaps you should—”

“Just gotta walk it off. Come on.”

We started down the hall, me wobbling, Lhan propping me up. Ahead of us I could see Duru-Vau’s silhouette limping away through the smoke, as slow as an arthritic turtle. Another of the world’s most exciting chase scenes.

Ten yards later, he angled for a pair of big double doors on the outer curve of the hall.

“Faster!”

Lhan and I picked up our pace as he reached the doors and held up his bracelet in front of the circle. I thought we were gonna be way too far away, but these doors didn’t whoosh open, they rumbled open, slowly. Even through the smoke I could see they were twice as thick as the other doors in the temple, with all kinds of deadbolts and meshing gears behind the smooth white plastic. Heavy duty security.

Duru-Vau stumbled through them as soon as the gap was wide enough, but the doors kept opening. I pulled Lhan ahead, my pins and needles starting to wear off. The doors thudded open, paused, then began closing again. We weren’t going to make it.

“Goddamn it!”

I whipped Lhan ahead of me, through the doors, then powered forward like a drunk fullback and fell through them just as they boomed closed behind me. I could feel the the rumble of gears and the jolt of bolts slamming home as I struggled to my feet. Wherever we were, it was dark and filled with smoke, with a weird sea-green glow coming from somewhere deeper in the haze. My ears were filled with the hum of electronic equipment.

I looked around, then stared. Curving off into the smoke to the left and right of me was a line of tall silver statues standing in narrow alcoves in the walls. They were as smooth and polished and bland as everything else in the temple, but they still made me uneasy. Either they were supposed to be deliberately arty, or whoever made them didn’t know shit about anatomy. They looked like 3D versions of some kid’s stick figure drawing of a deep sea diver—heads like snail shells sitting on top of skinny, stretched out bodies, Popeye arms, and legs that bent the wrong way.

And weirder than their looks was that they were there at all. The rest of the temple didn’t have any art. It had all been as bland as an airport lounge. Why suddenly go crazy with the ornamentation? Was this place some kind of chapel, like the one Ru-Zhera ran in Modgalu? If so, they needed to fire their sculptor. He made every single one of their gods look exactly the same.

Duru-Vau was backing away from us, hate all over his ratty little face. “You think you have me trapped now? It is you who are trapped. You will die here!”

He was pulling back for another palm strike. I stabbed my sword into the floor, trying to use it to pull myself up and feeling like I was made of tin cans tied together with string. He was gonna beat me to the punch.

“Priest.”

Duru-Vau turned. Lhan was raising his wand.

Duru-Vau was faster. He shot his palm out and the air flexed in front of it. Lhan slammed back against the wall, neck and shoulders first, and slumped to the ground, the wand slipping from his hands.

“Lhan! Are you alright?”

No answer. He didn’t even move.

I levered myself up and staggered forward, roaring and rage-blind, my sword dragging behind me. “You’re dead, motherfucker! Dead!”

Duru-Vau edged away, looking at his wrist like he was checking a watch. Was he late for a date? Did people on Waar even have watches? Why wasn’t he aiming another palm strike at me? He started backing up the stairs of a circular platform in the center of the room. Tall columns of light glowed though the smoke all around it.

“You cannot kill me here, demoness. This is my sanctuary. This is where
I
am the powerful one.”

“I thought you were the powerful one everywhere, big shot.” Anything to keep him talking and not shooting death spells at me.

“Soon enough, demoness. Soon enough.”

As I pushed through the smoke I started to see that the glowing columns around Duru-Vau weren’t actually columns. The platform he was on was in the middle of a ring of consoles covered in displays and flashing lights, and surrounding the consoles were six pedestals, on top of which were six see-through skyscraper shapes, each twelve feet high or more, and each with its guts exposed like a schematic. They were holograms, just like the one down in the jail, except these were the temples of the Seven, all glowing like ghosts in old movies!

Third from the left I recognized the stubby Temple of Modgalu, and there was a seventh one in the middle of the platform, bigger than all the rest—home sweet Temple of Ormolu. Little wisps of holographic smoke were trailing from its top floors like it was a guttering candle. I bet if I looked close enough, I’d be able to see myself up there, limping toward Duru-Vau with murder in my eyes.

I started up the stairs to the platform, stamping my feet to get the feeling back into my legs. Duru-Vau checked his wrist again, then cursed and started limping for the other side of the platform as fast as he could. I was grateful he wasn’t killing me and all, but what the fuck was he waiting for?

“Where’s all this power you were telling me about, jackass?”

“Doubt me at your peril, hellspawn!”

He dodged around the base of the Ormolu hologram’s pedestal, then kept going as I staggered onto the platform and started hop-running after him. I was gaining. My legs were coming back, but the burn he’d got from Lhan’s wand shot wasn’t gonna wear off. In fact he seemed to be limping worse now.

I snatched at him and missed as he threw himself at the furthest away console, slapping one of the glowing circles that covered its face. He spun to face me, a crazed smile on his face.

“Now you will understand!”

I rolled my eyes and raised my sword at him, but a metallic clicking stopped me. It sounded like a bunch of revolvers all being cocked at once all over the room. I looked around, waiting for secret doors to open and ninjas to come flooding out, or gun turrets to pop up out of nowhere. That didn’t happen. Actually, for a second it looked like nothing had happened, then I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head. It looked like one of the big silver statues was falling forward, but at the last second, it threw out one of its legs and caught itself, then stood straight and looked around. One by one, the rest of ’em did the same.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

ROBOTS!

“J
esus fuck. They’re robots!”

“They are the Servants of the Seven. And they are mine to command.” Duru-Vau pointed at me and raised his voice, shouting in a language the universal translator in my brain couldn’t make head nor tail of. That was okay. I translated it myself. He was saying, “Hey, robots! Kill the big redhead!”

There were seven of ’em, just like the seven temples, and they all turned their heads toward me at once, which was creepy, because they didn’t have any eyes that I could see, just the blank snail shell helmets, with little openings underneath where the snail’s head and neck woulda stuck out.

What actually stuck out was scarier. As they walked toward me with their weird backwards legs, black cables like electrical tape octopus tentacles snaked out and pointed at me, the tips of each tentacle glowing the same color as the wands of blue fire.

“Oh shit!”

You know, I thought my legs were all weak and wobbly. Turns out they were just fine. I jumped like a goddamn jackrabbit as those things shot at me. All the beams criss-crossed in the spot where I’d been a second ago and scorched the hell out of the platform and some of the consoles.

Duru-Vau shrieked again and threw himself in front of the machines. “No! Not the interface!” Then he repeated himself in robot lingo.

The robots paused and I kicked for the wall, trying to get behind one of ’em. It turned its head completely around and unloaded. Goddamn it! It didn’t have a behind! I dove between its legs, slashing at them backhanded as blue fire lit up the wall behind me. My blade shivered as I hit, and my hand stung like I’d swung a baseball bat at a fire hydrant, but my cut didn’t even leave a mark on those skinny metal legs.

Fuck!

I leapt for another one before it could turn and aimed for its head, hoping it would be more fragile than its legs.

Not so much.

The head rang like a bell and the robot staggered sideways as I bounced off and hit the ground, but just like before, the attack hadn’t done a damn thing. I’d cut through four guys at once with a swing like that. The robot didn’t have a scratch.

“Goddamn it.”

The other robots were turning toward me. I dove for the platform and saw for the first time that it was made of wood, and was just posts and crossbeams underneath. The priests musta built it so they could reach the controls of the consoles. All I cared about was it would give me a breather. I rolled under it as blue fire burned black marks into the floor behind me. Course I couldn’t stay down here for long. Fucking robots would smoke me out like a possum under the floorboards.

“Who the hell woke up my steel centurions? And what in tarnation is goin’ on down there? I got alarms going off all over the place!”