Pavi’s brother, Eava, said, “Brown.”
“Exactly. But do you know what color this mud was?”
Yara raised her hand, and Wonlar give her a wink. She’d heard this one before, so she launched right in. “It was green! Nasty snot green and it burned at the touch. The cobblestone streets turned into mud that might as well have been lava. People scrambled away from the burning mud, terrified.”
Wonlar stood, striking a heroic pose. “But then, Aegis arrived.” The children cheered. “He wore white and emerald, and he had with him the Aegis itself, a magical shield with incredible power. With it, he jumped in huge bounds, from windowsill to cart, staying off the street. He pulled people out of the mud, helped bandage the wounded, and led them to safety. And then, he went back in for more. The storm changed then, and everything went sideways.”
Wonlar picked up a toy ball from the floor and held it at shoulder level. “Normally, when we drop things,” he said, dropping the ball to the floor, “they fall down.” Wonlar picked up the ball and held it out again. “But things started falling sideways, slamming into walls.” Wonlar tossed the ball to the side, and it bounced off the bright orange wall leading to the kitchen.
“Aegis walked along the walls of buildings like they were floors, and rescued people hanging onto the roofs of their buildings. The sky opened up and it started raining purple cauliflower and spoiled milk.” Several children wrinkled their noses, and Wonlar continued.
Wonlar left out the truly terrifying parts, where the citizens had been transformed into boneless amoebas and spiked half-beasts, and most of all, he skipped the half-dozen that had just melted into the green mud, even though he remembered their cries as well as if it had been yesterday. A terrible thought rose up in his mind:
How many people have I seen die?
he pushed it back as he’d pushed back so many thoughts. Each time he went there to tell stories, he mastered his ghosts just a little more, but they did not yield easily.
“The last two people he rescued from the storm were a young Qava and her and Ikanollo friend. The Qava woman was doing her best to save them both, levitating out of the district, but she’d been hit on the head by a sideways-falling bicycle.
“[
Thank you
,] the Qava said, speaking in their minds.” Wonlar held both sides of his head to signal the Qava telepathy.
“Then the Ikanollo asked, ‘But who are you? Why do you carry that shield?’”
Wonlar aped the first Aegis’ voice as best he could, calm and confident. “‘call me Aegis. Will you help me tend to the injured?’ and so the Ikanollo and the Qava became First Sentinel and Ghost Hands, the first of the Shields of Audec-Hal.”
“Another!” Yara shouted, clapping.
Wonlar considered which story to tell next when the alarm bracelet vibrated on his wrist. When he was in public, he set it to shake rather than blare. Wonlar stood, gave a polite smile to the children, and then crossed the room. He looked to Rova, trying to catch her attention.
“Did yours go off?” he asked. She nodded. Pulling back his sleeve, Wonlar saw the emerald gem on his bracelet flash twice more, and then go dim. No direction indicated.
What would interfere with the locator but not the base alarm?
Without the locator, all he knew was that Aegis was in fact in trouble.
City Mother protect him.
Wonlar gritted his teeth and looked to Sapphire. She shrugged, a tense look on her lips.
Sapphire turned to the crowd and said, “Mister Wonlar has to go. Everyone say thank you.”
There were several groans, but after a few seconds, the children said in half-unison, “Thank you, Mister Wonlar,” prompted by siblings and parents. The younger ones waddled over for a round of hugs. Wonlar took a couple of precious moments to accept kisses on the cheek and give hugs to several of the older children, the ones who had been coming the whole time.
The farewells done, Wonlar leaned in to Rova, “I don’t have my raiment here. Meet me at the safehouse as soon as you can.” Rova nodded again and returned to the crowd, all smiles as Wonlar ducked out the back.
City Mother, let me find him in time. Please. I’d rather die than lose him.
The night air was still and cool as Wonlar stood on the balcony, trying to figure out how to find his son.
I remember changing his diapers, and now he’s working to rattle the cage wrought by men and women who could be his grandparents.
when Wonlar had adopted him, Selweh was a mass of crying and cooing, a challenge more harrying than any tyrant. Wonlar raised the boy as his own, taught him everything he could. He had his mother’s sharp mind and curiosity.
Wonlar never intended to raise a hero, but neither did he shelter the boy from the reality of his and the Shields’ lives, even as he tried to show the boy the city and its people at their best. Wonlar gave him all the training and preparation he could to keep his love’s only son safe.
Selweh had been a Shield in earnest since he was fifteen, when he made his own crude raiment and followed Wonlar on a mission. He’d claimed the moniker Second Sentinel, using Wonlar’s old artifacts and weapons.
If I’d forbade him from doing it again, it would have only make him try harder and might have gotten him killed.
Instead, he’d accepted it and started to train the boy formally as his apprentice.
Four years later, the Aegis found him. If he had been any other Shield, Wonlar would have expected it, welcomed its return. But he was Wonlar’s son and he had promised to protect the boy. And now Selweh was hurt, captured, or worse.
Wonlar heard Rova step onto the balcony, felt her hand on his shoulder.
“He told me he’d start in the corner, but he was going around the city for leads. And that was nearly a day ago. The most troubling thing is that the alarm bracelet never went off, which means the magic’s been cut off, or someone took it before he could activate it.”
The skyline outside the window started low, building taller towards the sides of the crater and towards the crown. Poorly-maintained buildings crumbled day by day, slatestone grey the dominant color of the city, offset with red clay, black soot, and the delightfully gaudy colors that covered the poverty of neighborhoods like Bluetown. The rich painted their homes in austere tones, showing their wealth in subtle golds and silvers. But the poor painted boldly, refusing to let their city be an aesthetic void.
From Viscera city, Wonlar could see down to hook’s hole and his abandoned apartment, over to Audec’s Bowels, and north all the way to Headtown and The Crown, towering spires that climbed above the lip of the crater towards the sky above. Above it all, Wonlar saw the tower temple of the City Mother, always in sight but out of reach. Wonlar had three cabinets full of rescue plans to free her, all delayed until they had the resources or the opportunity.
They needed a moment when the tyrants were distracted and their forces weak enough to effectively divert and divide. The moment had never presented itself.
Not yet.
For a moment, Wonlar let the weight of years pull him down, instead of straining to shrug them off. He flirted with despair, then pushed it away again. It was a gnat buzzing at the edge of his mind, waiting to be let back in to sing the same song they’d sung for years, recounting all his failings.
Wonlar felt Rova’s hand on his shoulder, bringing him back to the moment. “You’re too good at playing the worried parent. You trained him well, he can stay strong until we find him,” she said.
“He learned how to throw a punch before he learned to read,” said Wonlar. “And that was before I admitted to myself that I was raising him to fight, to lead. He wrote his first manifesto at five. Do you think he could have grown up to become a banker, a teacher? I never gave him a chance to have another life,”
“He was born to be one of us.”
“And he’ll die one of us, never knowing another life.” Wonlar shrugged her hand off. “He wasn’t even alive during the Republic. He just believes that things were better, can be better, without questioning it. Because I raised him to believe, never let him doubt.”
“Because you’re right.”
“We should discuss Fahra.” Wonlar prayed she would take the bait and let him put aside his worry once more.
Rova obliged. “What are we going to do with her? We can’t force Douk and Xera to look after her forever.”
“No. But once we know what Yema wants with her, we’ll have a better idea of what we can do to keep her safe.”Wonlar rattled off possibilities, the half-dozen ideas that they’d discussed after the storm. “I think it’s mostly likely to do with her Millrej heritage. I just don’t know how, or why.” where the Smiling King’s plans were hard to crack due to his instability, Yema’s were harder still to predict, as he was always working on twenty things at once, agendas buried under layers of plots and redundancy plans.
“So what do we do?”
Wonlar circled the balcony, thinking. “I can follow his trail, see what comes up.” Wonlar stopped, then leaned on the railing and looked up to Rova. “But first, I’m going to find my son.” The threads that connected Wonlar’s heart to that of his son were muted, lost. Someone had blocked the threads, hidden them from Wonlar. Otherwise, finding his son would be as simple as finding a dog hiding its head under a sofa.
Wonlar walked back into the safehouse and collected his things.
I need to feel the wind roll over rooftops, spend some time thinking with my fists.
“I’m going out. See what I can learn over in the Magister’s territory.”
Rova brightened up, happy to see him active. “I’ll come with you.”
“Another time. I need to think, move at my own pace. If I get a real lead, I’ll send out the call.” Wonlar held up his arm, pulling down the coat to show the alarm bracelet.
Wonlar saw her disappointment, but tried not to let it weigh on him. He’d make it up to her later. As powerful as she is, tonight he needed stealth more than power.
“I’ll show myself out,” she said. Once she was gone, Wonlar prepared his elixirs and donned his raiment. Checking the streets and alleys for spies, Wonlar hooked his grapple line to a roof across the street and swung out into the city, bearing east for Yema’s domain.
* * *
In the right neighborhoods, you could see families gathering for dinner. People lived their lives as if their freedom wasn’t an illusion. You could pretend that the city wasn’t ruled by madmen and monsters.
The corner was not one of those places. The corner wrapped around a broken-off shard from Audec’s Hip, which gave the neighborhood its name. The corner had always been dangerous, but since the fall of the Senate, the neighborhood had been split between the domains of Yema and COBALT-3, changing hands sometimes as often as several times a year. It was a ten-square-block rolling gang war, drug market, and everything-has-a-price bazaar.
First Sentinel stood on the stone wings of a gargoyle and watched the flows of movement during the small hours of the night, the dark neighborhood lit by his shimmercrab goggles, which painted the neighborhood in hues of red. The goggles differentiated the smallest variances in hue, and magnified even trace amounts of light, turning night into sharply-defined day. The first hotspot was the brothel alley, with men and women coming and going in jerky flows of lust. The bars were a steady stream of booze and bluster. From his perch, First Sentinel saw little outbreaks of low-level thievery, looting, mugging.
I could be here all night and barely make a dent.
But a dent was still a dent. First Sentinel hooked his grapple line to the lip of a rooftop a block away and dove from his perch, swinging down into an alley where a quartet of thugs was trying to break into a warehouse. Their threads to one another were dull green, a partnership of convenience, probably not long-woven, and certainly not strong enough to avoid ratting one another out. A corrugated metal awning gave them more cover, but one of them held an oil lamp, providing a convenient target.
First Sentinel swung feet-first into the lamp-holder and kicked him into the middle of the alley. Squaring off against the others, First Sentinel clicked the button at the pommel to recoil his grappling hook. The two other robbers turned from the heavy wooden door and its complicated lock. Yellow threads of fear snapped into existence, swarming toward him. They knew enough to be scared.
First Sentinel smiled. “Who’d like to tell me about Magister Yema’s latest plans?”
The woman at the door pulled the crowbar back and up, readying for an overhead swing.
Wonlar started thinking with his fists.
In the moment of fear granted by his reputation, First Sentinel landed a right hook on a Pronai with a goatee and slammed him into the door. The noise would attract more attention, but that just meant he’d get more sparring partners, more people to question.
The woman came in with a clumsy swing of the crowbar. First Sentinel took a diagonal step around her and pushed her into the lantern-bearer, separating the criminals into two groups.
The fourth thug, a Qava, extended a hand towards First Sentinel and sent him sliding across the alley with her telekinesis. The Shield braced himself with a leg against the far wall as the pressure held. The thug’s telekinesis wasn’t anywhere near as strong as Ghost Hands’.
Good thing, or I’d be a crater in the wall.
Wonlar pulled a thumb-sized coin from his belt and rubbed it three times clockwise with a finger, then pushed off of the wall to charge the Qava robber. The coin was one of his oldest artifacts, made when he was back in academy. It allowed him to overcome the momentum of Qava telekinesis. It was only good for a couple of uses per day, though.
First Sentinel tackled the woman and they rolled into the locked door. First Sentinel landed several blows to her kidneys and she went limp.
As he stood to face the others, the crowbar thug took a horizontal swing at his shoulders. First Sentinel lunged forward and slammed into her side. The crowbar skipped off of his coat, and for the hundredth time, he mentally thanked Professor Yensto for his lessons. His coat had absorbed at least a hundred killing blows and a thousand lesser strikes.
If only I could keep it clean.
First Sentinel swept the crowbar-wielding thug’s legs and stood back. “Start talking and the hurting stops.”
They kept coming, and beneath his mask, First Sentinel smiled. The Pronai rushed him with a flurry of punches, and First Sentinel stepped back, giving himself just a bit more time to respond, read the pattern. He tucked in and took the first two blows on the coat and hard bone beneath. The third caught his shoulder, and the fourth pushed him back off his balance. By the fifth punch, First Sentinel had the Pronai’s timing and grabbed the thug’s arm mid-swing. First Sentinel turned his fall into a throw, making the Pronai a mallet and their unopened door the gong.
First Sentinel played with the thugs for another thirty seconds, blowing off some steam. When they were all tied up, he questioned them about Magister Yema, Aegis, and the summit.
They didn’t know anything. They wanted into the warehouse to steal a printing press, use it for counterfeiting. He dragged them to their feet, and walked them a few blocks through the street, hands tied behind their backs. The tyrants’ police force in The corner would rather have First Sentinel in chains than a hundred robbers, so the embarrassment of being beaten was the best punishment he could mete out without inflicting permanent injury.
That and a couple of broken bones. They were criminals, after all.
First Sentinel’s night faded into a blur of fistfights, interrogations, and dead ends. Three disrupted muggings, two aborted arsons, and one rapist snatched out of window and hung upside-down from a ten-story apartment complex later, First Sentinel started to feel better. It was then that he found a lead.
* * *
Crouching on a gargoyle at the corner the roof of a warehouse, crammed up against the shard of the titan’s bone, First Sentinel stared down at a rapist. The criminal was just a kid, maybe a couple years younger than Selweh. In another world, they could have gone to school together. First Sentinel took a breath and stopped telling himself stories.
“What is Magister Yema planning?”
The boy craned his neck up, suspended upside down on a rope that First Sentinel had tied off to the gargoyle. The rapist’s voice broke. “I heard some warlocks talking. Some plan. Magister’s been sending them all over the city, snatching up kids, just random kids.”
“Why?” First Sentinel growled, pouring it on. The blood was seeping towards his head. He flushed and flailed.
“I don’t know! I just heard it, right? Please let me down. I’m afraid of heights.”
“That’s your problem. I’ll let you down when you give me something more. And if you do it quick, I might not break your arm for what you tried to do to that girl.”
Wind dropping off the edge of the titan’s bone buffeted the boy into the building beneath. First Sentinel held a knife to the rope as the boy looked up, eyes wide.
“That’s all I heard. I heard it, and then they left. Please let me down!”
Talk, boy. This is not the night to push me.
The boy’s threads supported his story. Bright yellow fear, grey frustration, and the remains of a dim coppery thread that bound him to his victim in the alley below. The only thread strong enough to indicate loyalty lead to a Qava woman who watched the whole scene from down the block, content to leave her pawn to swing on his own noose.
“I can let you down, but I don’t think that’s what you really want.” he brandished the knife, hoping the boy would crack soon. He needed to get out of the exposed position. Another minute or two and he was sure to be seen by someone who could pose a threat.
“Please!” he coughed, sobbing. First Sentinel sighed.
If he knew any more, he’d be talking by now.
The air moved above First Sentinel, and he tensed.
Spend fifty years at the top of the most-wanted list and you develop a pretty keen sense for ambushes.
But this time, the warning wasn’t enough. First Sentinel leapt off the gargoyle, reaching for his grapple gun, but something snatched him out of the air and tossed him ungracefully onto the roof.
First Sentinel rolled to his feet and scanned the roof, eyes darting back and forth, his shimmercrab goggles casting the dark night in red-scale. He looked up and saw Black wind, Yema’s right-hand-Qava.