The Past's Skybound Bane (The War Eternal's Ashes Book 2), page 46
“Should I break it?” Yol indicated the door.
“Yes.”
Yol raised a gauntleted fist and charged. Opening his hand with a violent gesture, he braced himself as the Res-carrying channels in the armoured Relic glowed blue. The gauntlet knocked him sprawling backward and sent forth a shockwave, rending a hand-shaped hole four metres tall in the metal.
Leaving the other three to guard the entryway, Ayda and Yol entered the Mechanist’s Guild warehouse, which lay deserted… as had every other place they’d passed through. It appeared the capital city had been placed under curfew the night prior, citing an investigation into ‘suspicious activity’ in the Mechanists’ Guild. Even getting through the gates of Pyral had required some judicious use of combat magic.
Ayda snorted. These Syndicate lediiosh were making hypocrites of them all: the Risker collective had been founded in opposition to the weaponization of Relics. She suspected Vino Allseer was turning in his grave at the present day’s abandonment of his principles… but their foe had no such compunctions, and now wasn’t the time to shrink away from conflict.
“Yol, if I know Relic-attachments— and I do— I’ll need you to find a way to smash the top of this tower.” Ayda indicated a cargo lift in a giant metal cage, and a stairwell near it. “I’m headed to the basement: if Sanen’s right about this ‘Leash of Suns’ Relic, that’s where it’ll be.”
“Got it, Ayda. Stay safe.”
Ayda adjusted the embroidered glove on her right hand. “You, too.”
Sanen, a little out of breath, hopped onto the buried roof of the ancient building. Casting about with his gaze, he spotted a narrow swath of recently disturbed earth. “Stand back.”
Yarna, arriving close behind him, drew a long blade. “I ain’t—“
Sanen drew a Relic shaped like a miniature metal whip from where it was coiled in his Antiquarian’s cloak. Linking it to his Res, he lashed the air with it.
A deep, narrow trench gouged itself in the earth below, showering him and Yarna with dirt and tiny stones. The soldier swore and stumbled back, but Sanen didn’t hesitate, striking thrice more with the Relic. His fourth lash revealed a wooden trap-door, set into the bedrock a metre below ground level. His fifth smashed the door and its lock to smithereens.
Sanen turned to Yarna, ignoring the blade she held defensively in his direction. “We have to get underground, before—“
The arcing light above opened into a funnel, and Sanen screamed as his entire world became a struggle to hold onto his Res. Distantly, he heard Yarna’s pained yell, and a distant howl which told him the rest of the Sixth Legion and Void’s Rim had joined them.
Too late. The agonized, mocking dirge all around Sanen and in his own voice drew a nauseous plummeting feeling into his gut, and filled his mind with one despairing thought. I’m too late!
Alina, standing atop a metal scaffold in a brightly lit cavern beneath the Last Spellbound House, gasped and fell to one knee.
Merana, standing beside her, didn’t pause in relaying instructions to the team of Jennites who laboured in the mazelike innards of the slowly churning machine which sprawled outward from this point. The matriarch braced herself on her cane and placed a hand on Alina’s wrist just above a wooden bracelet the Dead wanderer wore.
Alina shrugged off the gentle touch. “It is too late. The harvest begins, and the Manse-Heart is unready. Our enemy has won.” Her tone was dull, devoid of any emotion aside from a creeping weariness.
“Don’t lose heart,” Merana whispered, kneeling. “We won’t give up. Not even when all is lost: that’s the way of Jenna’s kin.”
Ivyn huddled on the landing outside the basement chamber, hidden in the deep shadow cast by lurid white light emanating therefrom.
“Yes… Yes!!”
The Emperor’s voice trembled and broke with euphoria. When Ivyn dared to peer around the corner, he found the underground room’s every detail in sharp relief: the radiance poured from the metal of the far wall where the Emperor stood with both hands on the fist-sized orb.
The pile of bodies and the corpses of the four Knights cast starkly contrasting shadows on the floor and walls. The Flame-Anointed Speaker stood with his hands together under his gold-trimmed red sleeves, eyes closed and chanting a prayer… or, more likely, instructions for the Relic in Old Ancient.
A pulse of energy raced through the chamber, one more sensed than seen, and Ivyn found himself the most awake, the most alive, he had ever felt. His body jittered with the need to run, to jump, to do anything he could to get this energy out.
Yenni said to use the disruptor when the Amplifier is activated. Now is the time, if any time ever was.
Ivyn leapt around the corner, the branching stalk of the device held out in front of him. An incredible pressure like a gale-force wind nearly ripped it from his grasp, and he seized the handle with his other hand to steady it. One of the crystal orbs at the end of the device glowed green. A shielding bubble of light appeared around Ivyn.
The bubble faltered, and the orb shattered.
As though in response, the Relic-pieces on the ends of the other branches— prisms, concave dishes, and arrangements of pins or clasps— whirred into various forms of motion. A horrible noise filled the air, a discordant buzzing Ivyn detected through his mind and his bones. It intensified to an unbearable degree, enough so that Ivyn feared his skeleton would shake its way out of his flesh and flee in terror from the searing agony…
Then the discordant jangling vanished along with the overwhelming light, leaving only the tiny lantern in the centre of the room. Its flame was too weak to see by… or perhaps that was due to the black tunnel swiftly closing in on Ivyn’s sight.
The last things he heard were the Emperor cursing foully under his breath, and the Flame-Anointed Speaker sighing. “A setback of minutes, an hour at most. I suppose I must intervene after all. This one will be of use…”
Alina’s head snapped upward, and she shot upright on a current of magic without bothering to use her legs.
The worried creases across Merana’s aged features lessened, and she replaced them with a smile. “I take it something has changed.”
The Dead wanderer flashed across the space between herself and the simple two-button terminal at one end of the metal platform. “Someone interrupted our foes. I sensed the change from here: the disturbance in the Weave has vanished for now.” Pausing to hum a low, throaty pitch, she touched a hidden drawer which sprung open to reveal a much more intricate set of controls.
“I take it this buys us some time?”
“Correct.” Alina began adjusting the dials and throttles on the panel, and all around her the building-sized machinery’s movements began to increase in pace. “Thanks to your continued work, the repairs are now adequate for my purposes. Have the Jennites finish their current tasks and withdraw.”
“I will see to the safety of the house.” Merana curtsied deeply and turned to a hovering metal platform which carried six of her kin. Over her shoulder, she whispered, “Good luck, dear friend of ours.”
Sanen groaned and came to his knees. Everything felt brittle: his bones, his joints, his skin. His thoughts were thinner than paper, as though they might crumble should he pursue them with too much vigour.
“Ex… plain.” Yarna, who had remained standing, stumbled close enough to land a hand on Sanen’s shoulder.
“I’m’n Ant’quarian,” Sanen mumbled, trying to get his tongue working properly. “That was a magic attack on us. On all of Void’s Rim.”
“A fiend?”
“No.” Sanen gave a terse shake of his head. “Someone who knew you’d be here. Someone who ordered you here.”
“You’re crazy.” Yarna’s grip tightened. “This must be some heretic plot.”
“If so, they cooked it up in the past day, since no one here knew you were coming until this time yesterday morning.” Sanen struggled to his feet, and Yarna lost her grasp on his shoulder. “The population of Void’s Rim isn’t enough for their purposes. They needed the Sixth Legion— four thousand strong and hardy men and women— to ensure their plans could proceed.”
When Sanen stumbled for the ruined trapdoor, Yarna followed. “What is this place?”
“It’s a hideout where a pair of criminals— soldiers at the Imperial garrison in Void’s Rim— have been trafficking human beings for the same kind of harvest we almost fell victim to.”
“You lie.”
Sanen shot a sardonic half-smile over his shoulder. “We’ll see, won’t we?”
At the bottom of a staircase of hewn rock was a room the size of a small tavern, but with none of the charm. Sanen lit an oil lantern hanging from the ceiling, illuminating a miserable gaol which between its five cells held a full score of grimy, frightened-looking men and women.
“Help us!” shouted a man in a local accent. “Phoenix above, please, don’ leave us here! Them two, they said when they come back, we’ll get what’s comin’ to us fer supposed heresy!”
“Please, I did nothin’ wrong!” a woman wailed. “They took me from my babes, an’ my husband is a good Phoenix-fearin’ man! I swear I’m no heretic!”
“Firebrand’s tears, is tha’ an Imperial uniform? They’re here ta take us!”
It was difficult to tell in the dim light, but Yarna looked to have paled significantly. Sanen tried not to let his sympathy show. She seemed a decent person who had believed in the wrong organization. Sanen supposed he wasn’t much different, if it came down to it.
“We’re here to save you. Are any too injured to walk?”
The captives shook their heads. One, an older teenager cradling a broken arm and nursing two black eyes, even grinned. “Gave the whoresons a good fight, I did,” he said proudly.
“We need to report this to your commander,” Sanen told Yarna, snapping the locks on the cells with careful flips of the whip-Relic. “And unless I’m much mistaken, we need the Legion to leave Void’s Rim with all speed: it could be mere minutes before the next attack.”
Ayda locked her short sword’s blade with the dirk wielded by one of the guards in the dimly lit workshop room. The man struggled and failed to gain the upper hand against her, so he kicked out in an attempt to knock her back.
Ayda responded by pinning his ankle to the ground with one foot, then stomping on his knee with the other. The violent motion caused the second guard’s crossbow bolt, aimed at her chest, to lodge in her shoulder instead. She screamed and toppled onto her face alongside the howling man with the broken knee.
Rolling across him, she sustained a nasty slice along her bicep from his dirk before pinning him down and hacking her blade into his throat. As he expired, she looked up to see her other foe’s reloaded crossbow pointing straight at her face.
“Any last words?” the Syndicate agent shouted.
Clunk.
Her assailant’s eyes rolled back in his head, and a wrench the size of Ayda’s forearm clanged to the floor behind him. He crumpled, revealing a diminutive woman in her forties who wore a heavy leather apron, a jeweller’s goggles, and a satisfied expression.
“Yenni Springheart, at your service,” she piped.
“A… a pleasure,” Ayda panted, delivering a coup de grȃce to the unconscious man and wiping her blade on his grey cloak. She held up her right hand, from which her fine white glove hung in tatters, the victim of a scuffle with several more guards on the main floor. “You don’t happen to have a spare Relic?”
“Afraid not. But you’re not alone. Somebody named Ivyn headed downstairs to try and stop Project Amplitude from being misused. I made him a composite Relic that I think could disrupt the Amplifier.”
Ayda’s heart leapt. “Then there’s hope.”
Ivyn’s mind was shrouded in a bank of fog. Thoughts approached him through the murk, but they were as shadowy silhouettes which vanished before they fully took shape. The core of him felt cold. There was something indescribable lodged in the back of his mind, and its icy emptiness fed him and spurred him onward in equal measure.
What time was it? He went to check his timepiece, but couldn’t seem to find his hands. It was dark, not just to his eyes but also to his body. None of his parts were talking to each other.
That’s not right. Hmm.
He tried to remember where he’d been before this. Where he was going.
Nothing. Even the concepts of ‘past’ and ‘future’ seemed barely within reach.
The darkness to his eyes grew less, and he came to understand that he was in a dim room: the empty entrance hall of the Machinists’ Guild. Someone was shouting.
“Ivyn! Ashen hells, it’s good to see you.” A woman with red hair approached at a swift jog. She slowed as she drew closer. “…Ivyn? It’s me, Ayda—“
Ivyn’s hand moved without his telling it to, and Ayda vanished from his awareness.
Up. The insistent command set Ivyn’s feet to moving again, and his gaze flicked to the ceiling, then to a nearby stairwell. Up, and brook no impediment.
Yol snorted to clear his nose, and blood spattered the fine marble floors of the Mechanists’ Guild. Ahead of him were three men guarding a ladder leading into the topmost tip of the spire. Heavy iron girders set into the walls and the centre of this room protected the structure from earthquakes and from even his Relic’s might: he needed to gain entry and destroy the crucial mechanism from within.
Crumpled forms were strewn about the floor and the stairway behind him. The three grey-cloaked men fanned out, glancing fearfully at one another as though wondering which of them he would strike out at next.
No sense in overthinking it. Yol swiped at the rightmost of the three, and the man’s back folded the wrong way. The trickle of blood from Yol’s left nostril became a runnel.
The other two closed in, one wielding a spear and the other a curved sword. Yol let them come. When the spearwielder struck, Yol staggered aside in a way that placed the two men in a line before him. The one with the sword met Yol’s eyes and launched himself forward in desperation.
Yol gestured, and the two men hurtled across the room to flatten like an oatcake against the wall. Raising his free hand to pinch his nose, which was now bleeding freely from both nostrils, he took a laboured step toward the ladder. Then another. He might not have more than one blast left in him, but damned if he wasn’t going to make it count.
A footfall behind Yol drew a groan from him. He turned, and to his relief and surprise he saw a familiar face.
“Ivyn. Bless. Glad to see you.”
Ivyn’s face twitched. He raised a hand, and Yol’s world spun around and turned black.
Alina stood at the entrance to the vast black ovoid at the centre of the Manse-Heart mechanism. The darkness within the Engine beckoned her like a long-neglected pet demanding play from its master.
Your power is nearly spent, Alina thought at it. And despite my supposedly perfect recall, I do not remember how I created you. Why, then, do you seem so eager to serve?
Alina shook her head, dismissing such foolishness. This was a machine: if she personified it, that was her own failing. This was no more than her psyche telling her what she already knew: she must assume control of the manse from within the Manse-Heart. Its external controls were too simple to adapt in real time to what Alina intended. Even a device as powerful and broadly capable as the Last Spellbound House needed some babysitting when faced with a task so tenuously tangential to its original design.
She strode into the darkness, and the Engine sealed itself behind her.
Sanen followed Yarna across the Sixth Legion’s campground at a dead run. The army’s medics, as shaken as everybody else following the brutal tug on their Res less than half an hour prior, had nevertheless promised the civilians would be well looked after… but Sanen knew that wouldn’t matter as long as the population of Void’s Rim remained above ten thousand souls.
“You’re certain this supposed Syndicate are the ones as did for Tiller’s Green an’ Laventon?“ Yarna shouted over the thump of her feet against the dry earth. “An’ that they’ve been workin’ for the Emperor all along?”
“Dead certain,” Sanen panted. “I was as surprised as you when I encountered proof for the first time, barely two days ago.”
“We’ll speak wit’ the Legate. As commander of the Legion, I’m hopin’ he’ll have the authority to turn us around—“
The early morning sky lit up blue, and Sanen and Yarna both flinched. Another arc of cyan light descended toward Void’s Rim.
Then a second, shorter lance of golden brightness shot across the skies from the northeast. It struck the opening mouth of the light-tornado and, like a spindle catching raw wool, wove it into a strand and drew it back up into the heavens, completing a curved line of blue and gold from horizon to horizon.
There was only one rumoured device powerful enough to gainsay the Leash of Suns, and its remains were said to rest to the northeast of Void’s Rim. Sanen’s jaw dropped.
The Last Spellbound House. It’s no rumour, and it was never destroyed as we were told. Firebrand’s tears, what’s going on above us is a tug-of-war in deadly earnest… and the prize is twelve thousand lives’ worth of Res.
Alina’s will stretched and bent, but did not break under the vast weight of the Leash’s pull. The Res-link exerted tension like a rope grasped by a mighty celestial beast— the Leash itself— and whose centre point bore a thousand-tonne weight of Res… but the Last Spellbound House was designed for a struggle against a thousand thousand Fae and an unknown number of crafty and elusive Dead. It would hold… and with its help, so would Alina.
Whatever device the Leash’s wielder was using to amplify its range had also increased the strength of its pull: the two were evenly matched. In the darkness of the Engine’s depths, beads of sweat broke out on Alina’s brow. She strained desperately to wrest control of the captured Res from her opponent, but it was all she could do to maintain the stalemate. The Leash’s ruthless force dragged at her thoughts, smearing them into a blending chaos like paint on a canvas, and the iron pillars of her mind groaned under its horrendous weight.
