Mellor switched off his gas torch. "That"s us, sir."
"Good. Now hitch up the horses."
The men brought the two horses round and used the wagon hitch to secure them to one side of the cannon. Mellor grabbed the reins and pulled, urging the heavy beasts forward. Nothing happened at first, but then a low sc.r.a.ping sound came from the base of the gun. Slowly, the whole cannon revolved on its vertical axis. When it was more or less facing in the opposite direction, Maskelyne walked around the weapon, checking the new trajectory with a compa.s.s.
"That will do nicely, Mr Mellor," he said. From his jacket pocket he took out a map, heavily marked with pencilled circles, lines and crosses. He studied it while the men unhitched the horses and steered them away. Then he made an adjustment to the cannon"s elevation by turning a bra.s.s wheel in the side of the gun carriage. The barrel dropped gradually lower.
"How do you intend to get her out?" the telepath said.
"Brute force," Maskelyne admitted. "It"s the only way to deal with the Haurstaf, present company excluded."
"But what if you hurt her?"
"That"s a risk I"m prepared to take."
The captain held his girlfriend closer. "He knows exactly where they"re keeping her, Regina."
She didn"t seem convinced.
Mellor handed one of the gem lanterns to Maskelyne, who opened it up and made a small adjustment to the mechanism inside. Then he pulled out his pocket watch and noted the time. Mellor loaded the lantern into the cannon.
"You know the demands?" Maskelyne said to the girl.
She nodded.
"Word for word?"
"Word for word."
Maskelyne covered his ears. "Fire."
Mellor pulled the lanyard, and the cannon barrel retracted with a sudden, violent boom boom. A flare of light shot skywards, arced over the trees covering the hillside above them and disappeared from sight. Maskelyne turned to Mellor"s men and nodded. They set off at once in the direction of the road.
"I was expecting more of a bang," the gunnery captain said.
At that moment, the skies above them erupted with fire. The ensuing blast wave ripped the tops from hundreds of trees, blowing tons of debris far over their heads as a thunderous concussion shook the valley. Maskelyne, Mellor and the young couple dived for the ground. The whole mountain continued to shake for several heartbeats, and then finally settled. Sc.r.a.ps of burning forest drifted down past them.
"Send the demands, please," Maskelyne said to the girl.
She got to her feet shakily, then took a deep breath. After a moment, she said, "It"s done."
"Any response?"
"Give them a minute."
They waited.
The telepath suddenly blew through her teeth. "They say . . ." She paused and shook her head. "They say no, they say . . ."
"Word for word."
"There"s a lot of it. A lot of argument, hold on . . ." She raised her hand. "They want you to stop . . ."
"Word for word."
"You will halt your attack immediately. The Haurstaf do not negotiate with terrorists. They"re . . . They"re bombarding me with questions, about you, about our location."
"That"s to be expected."
"They don"t know where the sh.e.l.l came from."
Maskelyne turned to Mellor, who began to reload the cannon immediately. "Tell them the next sh.e.l.l destroys the mountain above the palace," he said to the girl.
"But what about Ianthe?"
"Do as I say."
She paused a moment. "Wait. They"re willing to talk. They"ve offered to meet you." She shook her head again. "There"s a lot of confusion. Something strange is going on in there. I"m losing contact everywhere."
Maskelyne snarled, "They"re shutting me out."
"No . . ."
He picked up another gem lantern, set the feedback mechanism and tossed it over to Mellor. "Five degrees lower. They"ve had their warning."
"What are you doing?" the telepath cried.
The captain grabbed his arm. "This isn"t what we arranged."
"It"s in the tube now," Maskelyne said. "Tick, tock."
Mellor pulled the lanyard, and the second sh.e.l.l blasted into the air, tracing a fiery arc across the blue sky. This time gunfire crackled on the hillside to the south.
"They"re on to our position, sir," Mellor said.
A second concussion tore across the roof of the world, its flash illuminating the snow-clad mountain peaks. The sound of impact was much heavier than before. The ground shuddered under their feet.
"That was rock," Maskelyne said.
A great grey cloud of ash rose over the forest ridge. Moments later, a hail of small stones pinged against the outcrop all around them. Maskelyne stood where he was, listening intently. "They"re still firing," he said. "Why are they still firing?"
He could hear it more clearly now that the echo of the gem lantern explosion had diminished the constant rat-a-rat rat-a-rat of small-arms fire, accompanied now and then by the distant booming of cannons. of small-arms fire, accompanied now and then by the distant booming of cannons.
He turned and looked out across the valley. And there he spotted a tiny craft glinting in the sunshine high above the valley floor. It dodged and weaved between puffs of smoke. The Guild military were trying to bring it down. It was an Unmer chariot, and it was heading this way.
Ianthe drifted through the dark s.p.a.ces of the palace, no longer as a lost and frightened ghost, but as a harbinger of death. While her body lay broken in the torturer"s cell, her mind remained free to travel wherever she wished. And she used it now to wreak destruction. She moved from room to room, possessing Haurstaf minds and shattering them. Their perceptions vanished in her wake, leaving only swathes of darkness.
From the kitchens to the banquet hall she flitted, through floors and walls, snuffing out lives like candle flames. She watched girls fleeing, screaming as their companions fell around them. Hundreds of them fought to get out of the palace. But they were as slow as they were vulnerable and she tore through them like a gale. Their minds were windows they couldn"t close. They could not keep her out and they could not hide.
The palace grew darker as its corridors filled with the dead. Soon the only lights came from the dungeons where the Unmer dwelt, and the scattered human servants who still wandered among their masters" corpses. Ianthe became weary. She allowed the survivors to leave unimpeded. And then her attention returned to the torturer"s cell.
The torturer"s accomplice was sharpening a knife.
Blasts shook the flying machine as Granger tried to steer it past another Guild compound. The view screens flickered and then settled down again, still focused on a single artillery position at the northern end of a long ridge. Maskelyne had rotated the cannon 180 degrees, so that it now aimed towards the Haurstaf stronghold. Its last shot had brought down half the mountainside. If he lowered the barrel again, his next shot would obliterate the palace itself.
He hunched over the steering console, his feverish eyes darting to and fro as he used one brine-scarred hand to spin the controls erratically in order to keep the craft on an unpredictable course. In his other hand he clutched the grip of the Replicating Sword he"d taken from the transmitting station. He wore a suit of mechanical nerve armour that clicked and whirred softly whenever he moved. His belt held an a.s.sortment of small blades, pistols and other small artefacts. And he wore a blood-red crystal shield strapped across his back.
A series of concussions battered the chariot"s hull, knocking it momentarily off course. Smoke blotted the view screens and wafted in through the open hatchway. The engines howled and began to judder violently. Sparks erupted from the console. Granger shut down systems and readjusted the controls with lightning speed, the metal nerves in his mechanical suit compensating for the limits of his own tortured body. The shield on his back started to glow with alternating colours as it absorbed the smoke, using the sudden rise in entropy to energize its sorcerous portals.
As the fumes cleared, Granger spied the artillery position once again, now less than two hundred yards below him. Maskelyne"s man was frantically spinning the gun carriage wheel, trying to bring the cannon"s barrel round to bear on the rapidly approaching craft. But where was Maskelyne himself? Granger grinned. There There. He spotted the metaphysicist fleeing for his life across the compound. Granger was going too fast to stop now, so he threw the craft sideways to intercept him.
The rock outcrop filled the view screens.
The chariot struck the ground like a meteor, exploding into a cloud of pulverized rock and metal.
Granger watched the impact from a spot several hundred yards above the compound. The seven simulacrums who stood in the forest around him watched it, too, but none of their positions offered him a better view of the events that had just occurred. It had all happened too quickly. He couldn"t see Maskelyne. But had he actually hit the man? He felt a sudden vibration in the grip of his sword, and his eighth simulacrum appeared. This copy of himself cricked his neck and flexed his shoulders. Good. Good.
That made nine of him again.
He turned away and headed for the palace at a run.
Ianthe"s pain returned the moment she slipped back into her own body. She was lying on the floor. Her chest convulsed and she retched up blood. Every nerve felt shredded. Tears streaked her face. One of her eyes had swollen shut behind its lens, and through the other she saw Mara and his accomplice leaning over her.
"I thought I"d lost you for a moment there," the torturer said. "My a.s.sistant was a little too eager." He sc.r.a.ped the chair through the blood on the floor and sat down. "Step one was less successful than I"d hoped," he said. "But I think we"ll see more results with step two."
Ianthe tried to speak, but no words came out. Instead, she threw herself into the torturer"s mind.
The sight of her own ruined body lying on the floor sent a pang of despair through her heart. They had been beating her in her absence. Her legs and b.u.t.tocks were dark with purple bruises. Her robe lay in b.l.o.o.d.y tatters around her. One of her arms was clearly broken, and lay at an odd angle against her chest. From the torturer"s perspective, she watched herself start to weep.
"That"s much better," he said.
Ianthe reached out, as she had reached out into the Haurstaf minds, trying to embrace the whole of the torturer"s thoughts and emotions. But there was nothing there for her to sense. His human mind would not allow her inside.
"We"re going to try something different now," Mara said. "I want to try to a.s.sociate certain words I say to the particular sensation my a.s.sistant makes you feel when I say them. It"s like a game. The idea is to break down any previous a.s.sociations you have already made with the words, so we can start anew." He sniffed and rubbed his hand under his nose, then glanced up at the soldier. "The first word will be mother mother."
The soldier crouched down beside Ianthe and placed his knife gently into the hollow behind her knee. He gave the torturer a quick nod.
"Mother," Mara said.
The cell door burst open with such force it flew off its hinges and slammed into the opposite wall. A man stood in the doorway, clad from head to foot in metal. Brine burns covered his naked scalp and face. His eyes were as red and wild as those of a berserker dragon. In one gauntleted fist he held a green alloy sword. He was as grotesque a figure as Ianthe had ever seen.
Mara and his a.s.sistant retreated as the man strode into the cell, his boots clanking on the concrete floor. He glanced at them and then looked down at Ianthe. The tiny metal plates and filaments in his armour seemed to whirr and chatter as he bent down and picked her up.
And then he carried her out of the door.
She was drifting in and out of consciousness by now, and she must have muddled her dreams with reality, for she saw two impossible things before the armoured man carried her away from that place.
In her first dream she imagined she saw multiples of her rescuer in the corridor outside the cell. Seven or eight of them, identical in every way. Each wore the same armour and carried the same green sword. They looked on as he walked between their ranks. And then they turned away and filed into the torturer"s cell. The last of them closed the door behind him.
She must have woken and blacked out again.
In her second dream he was carrying her through the main palace entrance hall. The sound of his boots rang out like a bell in that huge s.p.a.ce. Dozens of bodies lay strewn across the black marble floor. Smoke drifted in through the open door, and she could smell fires burning outside. But before her rescuer reached the door, he halted at a sound behind him and turned around.
The young Unmer prince stood in the shadows, watching them. Ianthe"s vision was blurred and she couldn"t see his face clearly, but she thought that he was smiling. "Is she the last of them?" he said.
"She was never one of them," Ianthe"s rescuer replied. "But, no. Others survived."
The prince nodded slowly. His gaze lingered on Ianthe for a long time, and then he turned away and walked back into the shadows.
EPILOGUE.
Maskelyne spat out dust and rolled over on to his back. Above him, smoke boiled behind the shattered remains of a wooden roof. He raised his head and winced as pain shot through his neck. He was lying on the floor of what was left of the guards" hut. Through the open doorway he could see fires burning around a lump of twisted metal half-buried in the ground.
The chariot?
Maskelyne got up. His limbs felt beaten and raw. He staggered over to the door and looked out.
Dust and smoke filled the air. The horses stood a short distance down the trail. The wagon they"d been hitched to had smashed through the compound barrier and broken an axle. Now it lay collapsed at the end of a long dirt furrow. He spotted Mellor and two of his men, sitting under the palisade wall behind the crashed Unmer vessel. They looked stunned. The body of a third man lay on the ground before them among fallen debris and burning sc.r.a.ps of wood. The gunnery sergeant and his girlfriend were nowhere to be seen.
Maskelyne eased himself down the steps outside the guard post and limped across the ground towards the stricken chariot. His ankle buckled whenever he put any weight on it. He reached the craft and peered inside the open hatchway.
Empty. Nothing remained but a mangled ma.s.s of metal and wire. He was about to turn away, when he spotted something glinting among the wreckage. Carefully, he climbed inside and retrieved the object.
It was a crystal, as large as a man"s head. Maskelyne turned it over in his hands, marvelling at the mult.i.tude of perfect facets. In each one he could see a reflection of his own bruised and dusty face. He tucked it under his arm and then ducked back outside.
"Mellor," he said. "We"re leaving."
Also by Alan Campbell
The Deepgate Codex
SCAR NIGHT.
IRON ANGEL.