Darien, page 22
The gold mask still awaited her in his brother’s shop, which had the benefit of being some way clear of the palace. Nancy kept her head well down as she walked back to the city road, still half-expecting to be stopped or accused at any moment. Daw’s brother’s shop was full of magical things, Daw had been quite clear about that. Just walking into it would give her enough power to make him hand over the mask, if he chose to be difficult. It was not a pleasant thought, but she would not allow a stranger to cheat her of the only valuable thing she owned. She had earned her share of it, no one could deny that.
Around her on the great drive, Nancy could hear a dozen worried conversations. Men and women moved from group to group, passing on what they knew and gathering more. It might have been amusing for her to hear rumours of a dozen assassins sent into the palace by one of the Twelve Families, but she had killed men that night and it was not. She had not killed King Johannes at least. That part was a mystery, though she thought it had to have been the men she’d heard while she hid on the balcony.
She felt no especial guilt about the death of Lord Albus, which surprised her. The expression of disdain on his face had helped to burn away any last chance of forgiveness. That was something she clung to, now that the magic had all been used, leaving her hollowed. She had gone a little ragged for a time, it was true. Yet she’d found the man she wanted to see punished and she had ended his life. Perhaps it changed nothing. Perhaps there would even be remorse later on, she couldn’t know. For the moment, it felt good that she had made her own justice.
As Nancy came closer to the road outside the royal estate, she heard other snatches of gossip: that the western gate had been taken, that the Twelve Families were out in force, that Darien itself was under attack. It made sense, when added to her knowledge that the king had been murdered. Something big was happening in the city. She found herself hoping that others would sort it out, a child’s desire, dismissed as soon as she recognised it. She would walk and see, with all the others doing the same.
Nancy made her plans as she passed guards lining the great drive, watching everyone with suspicion and bare blades ready in their hands. She had been a part of something that night, right at the beating heart of it. Yet someone else had shot the king. Until she knew more, she was not quite ready to slip away to Basker’s or Daw’s brother.
As she came to the royal gates, she knew she was walking clumsily, like someone who had temporarily forgotten how to be natural. It was still dark, and of course she was lit from behind by the burning palace, but surely they would see the scorch marks on her clothes, the blood drops in her hair? She waited for the yell and the clatter of feet, but they did not come.
She slipped out into the city, turning west into the flow of people like a fish plopping back into a river. As she walked, she still kept her head low, though she wanted to run and breathe hard and fling her arms wide. She was alive and she had escaped.
She felt tears come suddenly for Daw then, and for those she had killed, an erupting sense of grief and sickness. Faces flashed at her and without warning, without pausing even to bend at the waist, she felt vomit rising. She pressed a hand to her lips in horror and watched as a thinner stream poured through her clenched fingers, spattering down the coat of a man in front so that he recoiled with a cry of outrage and disgust.
She was drifting to one side of the road with her hand still over her mouth when she saw the Sallet estate doors pulled open. The great enamelled family crest broke along its length and the two gates creaked apart to reveal what looked like an army led by monsters in dark green glass. Nancy choked slightly and then coughed until she was red in the face, hanging limply from a post on the Sallet wall. On any other night, she would have been told to move on.
Ahead of her, Lady Sallet came out with an old man at her side, surrounded by the huge figures in green armour, like beetles. They stopped the crowd with the sheer size and threat of them, so that a bottleneck was created right back down the road. Behind that spearhead marched rank after rank of house soldiers, following their mistress out into the city.
‘What is happening?’ Nancy called to the people around her.
Many of them were coming back from the city gate. They pointed behind them as they walked or ran, shouting warnings in answer to her question, shaking their heads in fear. She saw some were wounded, with one young man cradling his wife with an arm that ran with blood and stained her white dress.
Nancy had no idea who General Justan was, nor the Immortal legion. She had lived in Darien all her life but stayed away from soldiers, just as her mother had always warned her to. The legion hadn’t saved her father from the king’s guard. She probed the source of her anger and found it had been drained. She had boiled enough blood that night to repay that old pain – and it was all gone anyway, the sea, the ocean of power that had filled her up and made her able to take or spare lives at a whim. It was not pleasant to feel so vulnerable once more.
She looked down the street to the west, where the green glow of the Sallet ranks could still be seen, dwindling as they marched away. Nancy smiled, showing sharp teeth. Perhaps it was worth a look. If she chose to, she would act. She just wanted to see what could possibly bring Sallet Greens out onto the streets. She’d thought they were a legend, not real.
Nancy understood as well that she wanted to remain at the heart, rather than to sleep and hear about it all over breakfast. Her city was alive around her, the crowds like blood moving faster and faster in its veins. She made her decision, setting out after the Sallet forces. Dawn was still a long way off, after all.
Tellius was fascinated at the insight into the way the Twelve Families worked in Darien. Lady Sallet must have been sixty, but she ruled there, with the guards and Sallet Greens about her. Like a spear thrust, she and her ranks of soldiers marched along the western road. It was no more than a quarter of a mile to the great wall, and yet in that time he saw three messengers in different house liveries come to her. None of them were allowed to approach close enough to raise a knife. Instead, they fell in with Sallet guard officers, bowing as they walked and handing over sealed boxes. Those were broken open and tossed back, with the guards checking for poison and running a polished stone over the papers within. Tellius assumed the thing would glow or chime at the presence of hostile magic, but he could only guess. The process took no more than a dozen paces to complete and then the message was passed to Lady Sallet. She read each one without expression, then tucked them away in a pocket in her skirts as Tellius watched. He knew his gaze could be affecting and he kept it on her with raised eyebrows until the trace of a smile appeared on her lips.
‘The other houses are sending men, Meneer Tellius. All over the city. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘I am relieved, my lady, if the legion of Immortals has breached the city wall.’
‘With the help of traitors, I do not doubt. If that gate had stayed shut, they could have howled for an age and never gained entrance. Yet my nephew was murdered and the gate was held open.’ Tellius watched with interest as she waved her hand across her face, almost as if wiping the past away. ‘Well, here we are. I suppose he is after the great pieces – like my Sallet Greens. There is a reason we are jealous of our magic, meneer – a reason why they are held in the city except in time of war. It is for this, to defend Darien. General Justan will not find it as easy as he thinks.’
‘I hope that is true,’ Tellius said. ‘Though, my lady, if I were planning such an assault on this city …’
‘Yes?’ she asked, tilting her head.
For a moment, he had her entire attention, though another messenger had arrived to go through his ritual.
‘My lady, if I had thought far enough ahead to have men keep the gate open, as you said, perhaps I would also have placed men inside the city. You should keep an eye to the rear, my lady. General Justan is not a fool, as I’ve heard it.’
‘The Twelve Families can match his legion in force,’ she said sternly, though Tellius could hear the crack in her confidence, just as she could.
‘Acting together, perhaps, if you can guarantee they will do so,’ Tellius said gently. ‘If they understand the threat is absolute and implacable, that their survival is truly threatened. If they do not understand it quickly, if they remain in splintered groups, acting alone, a ruthless enemy could take them one at a time.’
He saw her mouth tighten, refusing to accept it.
‘Even so. He cannot match artefacts like my Greens. Each one is worth a hundred soldiers, more.’
‘Oh, I do not doubt that, my lady,’ Tellius said.
One of them was looking down at him as it … as he marched. Tellius had grown used to the sheer size of them, but the thought of one of those massive warriors plunging into a battle line was almost obscene. They carried swords, he saw, green blades made on such a scale that no ordinary soldier could have swung the weight. Tellius shuddered at the thought of seeing them used.
‘Do the other great families command similar … artefacts then, my lady?’
‘Never you mind, meneer! Though I will say there are things in this city that could destroy a dozen Immortal legions and their general.’
The road narrowed ahead and for the first time Tellius could see the great western gate itself, standing open and lit by torches. He heard Lady Sallet gasp at what awaited them. General Justan was there, barely inside the city and yet halted. His men had come a little further so that armed and stationary ranks blocked the road.
Tellius looked at Lady Sallet and she smiled at him, acknowledging his interest and welcoming it. She did not halt her men, nor hesitate.
‘Destroy the invading force,’ she snapped out. ‘Execute all traitors – anyone in Immortal armour or bearing their surcoats. Make a path through to close that gate.’
Her Greens bounded ahead, almost blurring to Tellius’ eyes, so that he could only gape at their speed. Around Lady Sallet, the ranks of her traditional guards surged. She was able to halt with her hand on Tellius’ arm, letting her soldiers flow past to do their duty.
The first of the giant green warriors struck the ranks of Immortals as if they were scything grass. They had drawn the greatswords and swung them with such speed and power that they swept through three men at a time. Each kick and blow from those green figures slammed soldiers into the air or crushed them underfoot. It lasted a dozen heartbeats and the carnage was terrible.
None of them had seen the young woman in scorched and torn clothing standing at the side of the road, her back to the houses there. When Nancy darted forward, it was to run straight at the Sallet Greens, slapping her hands against the flanks of two of them as she passed.
The green gleam filling the street winked out, leaving them grey and sagging, all signs of life snatched away. In moments, all six of the huge armoured warriors had frozen and were still. One had been off-balance as Nancy passed him, so fell slowly, crushing screaming Immortals under his weight. From inside the rest, the confused cries of living men sounded, deep within each frozen carapace. They were alive but trapped in their armour, as unable to move as if they were held in a coffin.
The young woman left them behind as she went to defend her city – and her eyes were filled with red and gold.
Nancy felt clammy and overbrimmed with the raw power she had slapped out of the green warriors. She could hardly hold it in and she felt physical sparks fly from her as she rejoiced at its return. This was better than being an observer. The city was her home. For all its faults, she had no other. She was a citizen of Darien and perhaps on that night, it meant something.
She would be damned before she’d let an invading army into the streets. King Johannes may have represented everything she had hated about her city, but he’d been their king even so, not some bastard military usurper. She had seen Johannes dead, that most intimate of meetings. She had seen him when he could not turn from her gaze, when all his royal dignity was in her hands. The king had looked innocent then, just a young man who would never grow any older. He deserved better.
She showed her teeth as she stood there. The closest ranks of Immortals were cringing away, a ring developing around her as they sensed the raw heat coming off the woman grinning at them.
Nancy laughed, suspecting she was risking madness again even as it overwhelmed her. Perhaps one person wasn’t meant to hold so much. Daw had been hinting at something like that back in the desert, she recalled. She raised her hands and, though they were empty, the closest Immortals flinched. They were right to.
It took no effort at all. She did not need to point or clench her jaw, or even twirl and leap. Nancy simply let go of the fires raging in her – and the street went white with a great crack of sound and heat. When she blinked and could see once more, she had made a fused mass of entire ranks a dozen deep. The general was on his litter, jabbing the air in her direction. Was he too far off? She aimed a thread at him and found that it burned the air in a line that would not reach. Her lips tightened, an expression of rage. If this was madness, it was a good kind, she thought.
Behind her, she heard the tramp of marching men. Nancy moved quickly aside then, having seen too much of guns and spears and every other sort of weapon. Her best chance was to keep moving, she remembered, so they could not aim as well.
She stepped through the burned ranks of invaders, men who would have stormed across her city but had been reduced to smoking, flickering figures, their flesh made char. If she touched them, they broke into ash and twisted pieces of metal, while ahead, still-living men cowered from her approach. Further off, Immortal officers roared orders to take her down.
Shots sounded and arrows flew, so that she was in the middle of hornets and flies, all whining past her ears. Nancy frowned at that, recalling how much it had hurt the last time. She concentrated, raising the temperature around her until the air itself crackled with heat in a sphere. She did not know if it would protect her from bullets and shafts, but she exulted at it even so. As she moved forward, soldiers threw themselves aside or burned where they stood in columns of flame. She had been filled with a deep well of power, the six grey statues her testament. The air ignited white hot around her and yet she felt no discomfort, beyond the slightest of breezes. She walked through Immortal ranks as if through the street on a spring day, leaving them twisting and dark behind.
Elias saw the patterns change around him. Bright lines began to shift, small gaps appearing amongst the golden strings only he could see. The men aiming guns and swords at him were disciplined, but not inhuman. From over on his right came a huge crack of light and sound, then a slowly building wave of heat that dried the air and rolled over everyone by the gate. Elias did not turn his head. He stood, waiting.
In that unnatural stillness, he did not look like a threat. He certainly did not look like a man more dangerous than anything else on that part of the street. As Elias waited, time seemed to slow. He saw the general’s gaze shift from him over to the road into the city. In that moment of inattention by their commander, some of the men assigned to kill Elias also allowed their focus to falter, just a fraction. One of them lifted his pistol to resettle his aim, no doubt exactly as he had been trained to do.
Elias had not stopped reaching since he’d first drawn the general’s attention. He saw the passage of bullets as lines or threads, criss-crossing the air in front of him if he made a sharp move. He could not duck or dodge past a single one, they were too fast for that. All he could do was not be there as they passed. The pictures flickered and blurred, constantly shifting.
He pushed his knack to the limits – and the limits began to crumble. Elias could see blurring futures spreading out from every soldier there, as if they had grown new dark arms and shadow selves. It was frightening in its complexity. As he watched, a larger gap opened in the moments ahead, just large enough for him to stand in it. Almost. He winced, knowing that it would hurt, then closed his eyes. He moved, stepping into a barrage of gunfire.
He was deaf after the first moment and he kept his eyes shut, relying only on his knack to see where he had to turn and step and pause to stay alive. All the time he dreaded the lines closing, so that the general would have his way and every step, every possible outcome, would lead only to death.
On the great ox-drawn flatbed, General Justan jerked back as he saw Elias close his eyes and walk forward, twisting and turning as he went so that somehow the bullets missed him. The gunmen poured in fire and a number of them fell, shot through by their own. General Justan saw a bullet rip a stripe in the hunter’s side, revealing white skin that was quickly stained red. Yet the hunter still moved, wreathed in smoke and smiling, though his eyes were closed.
General Justan felt himself tremble. From the moment Deeds had brought him into the field tent, Justan had seen the terrible potential in such a man, such a weapon. There was no one else alive who could walk through bullets and bolts and swordmasters virtually unscathed – and General Justan had taken the man’s children to make him obey. He had not exaggerated before about holding a tiger’s tail.
Justan had risked it all to send the hunter against King Johannes, then his own legion against the open gates. The king may have been just a figurehead for the Twelve Families, but that was why it would work – a figurehead could be cut off and when the smoke cleared, when the streets were quiet once more, there he would be as the new ruler of Darien. Life would go on as if it had never happened. The Families needed order and peace. In a year or two, it would not matter if one of the Aeris sons ruled Darien instead of the Sallets. They would be forced to accept what they could not change.
Justan had planned it like the conquest of any foreign city, and even though plans failed and had to be remade on the hoof, it had gone about as smoothly as he had hoped. The king was dead, the city was in chaos – and only he had the strength of will and ruthlessness to snatch up the reins as they fell loose. Justan had been delighted with the evening to that point, right up to the moment he sighted his own assassin staring up at him through the ranks of marching soldiers.
