Stranger of Tempest: Book One of The God Fragments (46 page)

‘Couple more shots won’t hurt,’ Toil muttered, loading an icer into her gun.

Lynx and Teshen did the same, while Anatin slipped a burner into each of his pistols in case they missed and were charged. The three with mage-guns lined up their shots together, Lynx picking out the further of the two maspids and settling it in his sights.

‘Ready on the rear one,’ he said softly.

‘Yes,’ added Teshen a moment later.

‘Good,’ Toil said and pulled the trigger. The ear-splitting roar of three guns firing together hammered at Lynx’s ears as he watched the icer trails cut a path through the air. Lynx’s shot took the injured maspid just above the tail while Teshen and Toil both hit the other in the back. The creatures thrashed and beat at the ground, one faltering and collapsing a few moments later while Lynx’s abandoned its prize and began to drag itself round behind the great stair.

‘It’s getting away,’ Sitain gasped as Lynx calmly slid the spent cartridge bolt from his gun and replaced it.

‘No it ain’t,’ he said, not bothering to line up another shot. ‘Not dragging its back legs like that.’

‘You’re not going to finish it off?’

‘It’ll find some dark hole to die in,’ Toil confirmed with a nod. ‘No point wasting the ammunition.’

‘What now?’

Anatin patted her on the shoulder and stood up. ‘Now we honour the finest traditions of warfare.’

‘Eh?’

‘We go loot the bodies, lass. Say one thing about the Militant Orders controlling the continent’s weaponry, it makes the bastards rich enough to pay well.’

‘And they’ve standardised the size of cartridges,’ Toil added, stepping over the rise so she could make her way down to the cavern floor, ‘so once you kill ’em, you can use their own ammunition to kill their friends. Keeps it in the family and saves you money, so my daddy used to say.’

‘No wonder you’re so screwed up, then,’ Sitain muttered. Before she could blink Toil had turned and grabbed her by the jacket, hauling her forward so their faces were almost touching.

‘Keep a civil tongue in your head,’ Toil said softly, ‘there’s a good girl now.’

Before Sitain could reply Toil released her and continued on down the uneven rocks, towards the corpses. Lynx watched her go for a moment then clapped a hand on Sitain’s shoulder.

‘Reckon you touched a nerve there,’ he said. ‘Best you keep as quiet as a temple mouse until your magic’s stronger, eh?’

Sitain shrugged him off and made to follow Toil. ‘I’m not the one scared of the bloody dark,’ she said, scowling.

Lynx hauled her back and shook her hard enough to make her teeth rattle. The force would have pitched her down the slope of broken rocks if he’d not kept a hold of her arm, and left Sitain looking dazed as she tried to regain her balance.

‘Enough from you, girl,’ Lynx snapped. ‘I ain’t here to take your shit.’

Sitain fought to break his grip for a moment then realised how much stronger he was and gave up. Instead she pulled her pistol with her free hand and held it up to Lynx’s face.

‘Get your bloody hands off me,’ she yelled.

Lynx looked down at the muzzle wavering beneath his nose. ‘Put it away,’ he said. ‘You’ll only get hurt.’

‘Get fucked. You’re not my da, you don’t get to tell me what to do.’

He sighed. ‘First off,’ he said with as much patience as he could muster, ‘I’m your superior in the company, so I can break your teeth for waving a gun in my face. Secondly—’ He flickered his eyes slightly to the side, looking past her and Sitain instinctively turned that way.

Before she could realise Toil hadn’t sneaked back up again Lynx had snatched the pistol out of her hand, two fingers wedged under the hammer in case she pulled the trigger. He clicked the hammer back to a safe position and tossed it behind him, trusting someone to catch it, then grabbed Sitain’s arm again and shook her once more to make his point.

‘Secondly,’ he growled, fingers tightening on her biceps enough to make her squeak, ‘I’m bigger and nastier than you – and so’s the rest of us. You want to pick a fight, go for it. Just remember a veteran’s someone who kills before they get killed. Don’t come whining if they cut your throat without even thinking.’

With that he released her and stalked past, heading for the gruesome scene on the cavern floor.

‘Kitty’s got claws,’ Toil whispered as he passed her, too quiet for anyone else to hear. ‘I was wondering when I’d see those.’

She wore a small smile and despite everything the coquettish look Toil gave him made the breath catch in Lynx’s throat. He kept his mouth shut, not trusting himself to speak any more, but still he felt his nostrils flare as he passed her, seeking the heady scent of her. Heart already pumping hard with anger, his blood seemed to jolt with renewed energy as he filled his lungs. If she noticed, she made no sign, but he felt her gaze on his back all the way to the first of the corpses.

They stripped the bodies of valuables in silence, ignoring the Charnelers caught in the tanglethorns, and soon they were on their way. No more soldiers came down the great stairway to investigate the gunshots. Either their commander had assumed a maspid ambush and left them to their fate, or the squad had been sent down to try and flank the mercenaries as the rest went on ahead. Fearing that it might be the latter, the mercenaries didn’t linger longer than a minute or so – just enough time to help themselves to food, cartridges, a few meagre coin purses and a couple of spare mage-guns.

Lynx ignored the rest of the group as he went about his task. Once he’d taken the icers from the first dead soldier, Anatin had told him to ascend the stair a little way and keep a watch. Lynx obeyed without a word, glad for the space it afforded him. While it was darker on the stair, slightly away from the diffuse glow of the light-garden, there was enough illumination. As he squinted up the stair, he thought he could detect a faint shine from far above. Whether it was the Skyriver, moon, or another light-garden Lynx couldn’t tell, but there was no sound or movement the whole while so he found a precious few moments of peace. By the time they moved on his blood had cooled somewhat and as they entered the darkness of the tunnels beyond, Lynx was focused on the task at hand again.

They passed through a dozen more chambers of stone houses before the landscape of the ruin changed again. Larger tunnels appeared before them, ones that branched off towards grand facades built into the rock face. Ornate colonnades screened the shells of palaces or temples – strangely no statues, Lynx realised, nothing that might show the face of the long-dead Duegar race.

‘Hey, Toil, you know what they looked like?’ he called.

She glanced back then saw him nod towards the empty shells and shook her head. ‘Nope. I’ve seen a few guesses – some educated, others not so much. Most reckon it was a religious thing, what statues they did carve were animals or plants. Enough of those survived that the lack of Duegar people is obvious. All we know is they weren’t Wisps and the Wisps don’t seem to know any more than us, but they give less of a damn about gods and the like.’

‘What’s wrong with a person statue?’ Ashis asked.

‘Ah well, there you’ve got me, but then I ain’t some shit-brained priest with too much time on my hands and a towering sense of superiority.’ Toil shrugged. ‘Well, maybe that last bit, but I can prove most of it. If anyone knows what they looked like, it’d be the Militant Orders, but they’re not the sort to encourage questions. Still a bit touchy on the subject of whether the gods were once Duegar.’

‘They have statues, though, of the gods I mean.’

‘Aye, but they all look different, don’t they, and mostly are just human with some small addition. Each one’s some symbolic aspect of the god, not the god’s face itself. That’s forbidden, folk like us aren’t meant to see that.’

‘How does that make sense?’

Toil laughed. ‘A priest won’t help you make sense of the world, only where they want you to fit into it. If anyone knows what the gods or Duegar look like it’d be the Charnelers. It’s said they possess more god-fragments than any other Order – so either they don’t want to tell us because it’s hard to pray to something shit-ugly or they’re too busy using the pieces to build an arsenal.’

‘Enough o’ that talk,’ Anatin growled. ‘I may not be the most gods-fearing o’ men, but you’re tiptoeing around blasphemy there, girl, an’ we could use a little divine favour right now.’

If Toil had a response to that, she bit it back and they continued in silence. The ornate stonework continued, becoming more fluid and intricate in parts while even the high roofs of the caverns were smoothed over and often bore decoration. Lynx tried to imagine the number of stone mages that must have been required for all this work. Even if the construction had taken place over hundreds of years, the skill had to have been far more prevalent among the Duegar race than magery was in humans.

A while later they came to a huge chamber of worked stone, as big as any they’d come across underground thus far except for the natural caverns. Toil stopped them well short and the mercenaries hunkered down in the deep shadows as the distant, distinctive sound of metal on stone rang out ahead. Past Toil’s shoulder, Lynx could see a huge, dimly lit space with what looked like tiers of steps on the far side and a double bank of pillars behind them, some larger than redwoods with a smaller set further up the stepped side of the huge hall. The source of light was hard to work out, a pale flicker weaker than the light-gardens – and those were gloomy by any normal standard.

‘I think we’re there,’ Toil whispered to the rest. ‘I’m going to have a look around.’

‘You want us to wait here?’ Anatin hissed. ‘Think we’re stupid?’

Her face tightened. ‘Don’t worry, old man. If I screw you over, you won’t have time to see it coming.’

‘That supposed to reassure me?’

‘Fine, Teshen or Kas can come with me. Happy now?’

‘Ecstatic. Teshen, go on. You’ll be hardest for her to get a jump on without making a lot of noise.’

Toil nodded towards the hall. ‘If it’s all of them, there might be patrols too. If you’re not here when we get back, we’ll backtrack the way we’ve just come to find you, okay? Sitain, swap me your lamp, it’s smaller than this.’

The woman shrugged off her pack too and slung her gun across her back, hanging Sitain’s lamp from her belt. The pair set off without another word, walking almost silently until they were in the lee of a pillar and could check their surroundings a little more carefully. After a long, slow inspection Toil set off again and disappeared from view, whereupon they were forced to just watch the sliver of empty hall they could see and listen out for danger.

‘Reckon she’ll ditch us?’ Sitain asked.

Lynx glanced her way but couldn’t make out her expression. ‘Doubt it’ll be her first choice,’ he hazarded.

‘Lovely.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ve got her lantern. She won’t want to leave that behind – even if we’re expendable.’

They fell to silence again, knowing even whispering would carry in the echoing tunnels. The wait seemed interminable to Lynx as the minutes ground past, the shadows deepened around him, slowly tightening their elusive threads around his chest. He tried to put his mind elsewhere, to recall the places he’d seen and others he’d read about, but his thoughts drifted inexorably back to To Lort prison and the mines it serviced. The days of back-breaking labour in almost total darkness, the violence and abuse meted out by prisoners and guards alike, the sleepless nights because of hunger and fear.

It seemed more like a dream now; a nightmare he’d woken from but could never quite shake off and knew would be waiting when he slept again. The man he’d been then was both hardly recognisable and all too familiar. An ache began to build in his head, a sense of pressure. It was something he recognised well enough, the topography of fractures in his mind, as though a light could be shone through the fissures.

It had been a long time after Governor Lorfen had released him that Lynx had finally been able to recognise he’d been broken by the prison – that some fractures never healed. He could bandage and glue parts back together, create a whole again, but that wasn’t the same as intact and perfect. There was no going back to that time, not after the things he’d seen during the war and after it, there was only struggling on with life.

He’d known men to lose limbs in battle. Some railed against the loss their whole life, others learned to live without the missing part of them, the bit that no longer existed. Lynx had learned from their example how to salvage what remained, to accept that some things he’d never be able to do again and set aside what was lost. It was why he wandered the Riven Kingdom so determinedly, never staying for long in any one place. So long as he knew and embraced his impulses and fears, he could control them.

Down here in the dark, those fears were starting to claw at the shell of his mind. The scratching he’d been able to ignore, but he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before the demons started tumbling out.

After far too long, Toil and Teshen returned. Lynx felt a jolt in his gut as they suddenly appeared round the corner, so lost to his thoughts he had to blink several times before he could focus on their shadowed faces.

‘It’s the rift,’ Toil announced quietly. ‘But they got here first.’

‘All of them?’ Anatin asked.

‘Looks like it, I never got a proper count. From the guard positions though, I reckon so.’

‘So they outnumber us and are dug in? Any good news? Can we bypass them?’

‘I don’t think so. There’s two bridges here, about two hundred yards apart and one a level lower. The Wisps said there are more below that but we’d be dead before we crossed. As for others, we’d need to work our way a mile in either direction.’

‘We can’t take either one; they could just drop grenades on us.’

‘And fighting our way across won’t be so easy anyway.’

‘So we strike out for one of the others?’

‘Ah, well, it never just rains, eh?’ Toil said, chewing on a fingernail.

‘What?’

‘On the far side we’ve not many options to leave the city. We take a more southern bridge and we’d have to head back this way or take some real sketchy tunnels. Ones the Wisps reckon will fall on us if they’re not already blocked. We go further north and we’ve got a long time underground, nearer the maspid dens.’