The Empire's Ruin Read online

  Fire—the universal solution.

  The soldiers occupying the Baths had made a start on the destruction. All the buildings within a hundred paces had been torn down, wooden frames hacked into firewood, that firewood fed into the huge iron braziers that burned on every side of the massive building. It wasn’t the worst defensive position Gwenna had ever seen. Lots of light, even at night. Lots of sentries. Of course, the sentries were all standing inside the ring of fires, destroying what little night vision they had. It was stupid, but then, most people were stupid.

  Jak circled the bird around the whole place once, twice, three times. Gwenna studied the soldiers below. If the Greenshirts had captured two of the Kettral, the men and women would have been tense, excited, frightened. Instead, they looked half-asleep at their posts, most of them gazing blankly out into the middle distance, dulled by the long night’s watch, too fire-blind to notice the huge, manslaughtering hawk turning lazy gyres above them.

  “Hold the position, Jak,” she said. “We’ll loop here a little while longer, make sure these assholes don’t show up with our friends, then head for the ship.”

  Slowly, as the bird banked, she relaxed back into her harness. After more than a decade flying, she’d come to enjoy the motion—the gentle rocking, the slow, smooth beat of the wings. The streets of Dombâng were sticky, hot, miserable, but a hundred paces up the warm breeze feathering her hair felt good. It felt good, too, to be wrong. Talal would rib her about it back at the ship, of course. I appreciate the thought, he’d say, but you worry too much. She’d tell him the next time he got lost he could go fuck himself. They’d drink a beer, shoot the shit awhile, and that would be that. Another death dodged, another day to wake up and keep fighting.

  “All right,” she called up finally. “Get us out of here. I want to have time to close my eyes before coming back to pick up these two idiots.”

  “Sure thing,” the flier replied.

  Even as he spoke the words, however, the warm southern air turned cold over Gwenna’s skin. Her flesh prickled.

  “Hold on,” she said, then glanced over at the sniper. “Annick, do you…” Then trailed off.

  Annick raised an eyebrow, but didn’t respond.

  Gwenna leashed her suddenly pounding heart, marshaled her attention. She recognized this feeling—half readiness, half dread. She’d had it hundreds of times since she drank from Hull’s egg. It was a way of knowing, an apprehension bred in the body itself, independent of all the mind’s clever methods.

  “Hold the position.”

  She closed her eyes, tried to disentangle the webs of scent and sound, the uncountable strands that made up the world. There was the stench of the outhouses draining straight into the canals, the odor of unwashed bodies, the moldy reek of cloth too long wet, the clean smell of fresh-sawn wood, bright and resinous. She could half follow individual conversations, the voices murmuring in their hundreds and thousands—two men arguing about a fire, a woman hissing something vicious, a commander upbraiding the sentries, and there, teetering on the very edge of her hearing: cursing. Furious, cat-angry, murderous cursing.

  “… will cut open your cock and roast it like a ’Shael-spawned sausage, you stupid, skinny, buck-toothed fuck…”

  Qora.

  Gwenna’s body went tight, then loose, the way it always did in the moments before a fight.

  “They’re east,” she said grimly. “East-northeast. And captured.”

  Annick didn’t debate the question. She knew that Gwenna’s senses were slightly keener than her own. “How do you want to handle it?”

  “Jak,” Gwenna said, “loop us around half a mile. I want to come in behind them, and fast. Annick, when the time comes, take down whoever’s guarding Qora and Talal.”

  “You sure it’s both of them?”

  Gwenna breathed in deep through her nose. She wasn’t certain, but she didn’t need to be certain.

  “Just kill whoever needs killing.”

  She slid the long, smooth cylinder of a smoker free of the holster at her waist.

  “We’ll hit them in the open area in front of the Baths. Jak, smash and grab. Don’t even set the bird down. The smoker will cover our retreat.”

  “They don’t have harnesses,” the flier pointed out. “If they’re bound, they won’t be able to mount up.”

  “They don’t need to mount up. I’ve got two hands, one for each of them.”

  “A lot of weight,” Annick said, voice flat, factual. “Especially Talal.”

  Gwenna nodded, rolled her shoulder in its socket, tried to ignore the little click it always did.

  Unlike some of the leaches back on the Islands, Talal didn’t rely on his arcane power to keep him safe in a fight. He was half a head taller than Gwenna, thick through the shoulders and chest, strong in the legs. On a mission in the Blood Cities two years earlier, she’d watched him seize the tongue of a wagon—a wagon loaded past the boards with bricks—then drag the thing fifty paces to block off the end of a bridge. The bastard was all muscle and scar. Lifting him would be like lifting a sack packed with wet sand, never mind dragging Qora along in her other hand.

  She set her boots more firmly on the talon.

  “We just need to get clear. I can hold them for a quarter mile, long enough for Jak to land on a rooftop.”

  “I can carry Qora,” Annick said.

  Gwenna shook her head. “I need you on that bow.”

  As plans went, it wasn’t the worst one Gwenna had ever cooked up. On the other hand, she’d been the genius behind some pretty piss-poor plans. In this case, at least, they had the advantages of height, surprise, darkness, explosives, and a huge fucking bird.

  Everything ought to go all right.

  The thought just set her more on edge; ought was a word she’d long ago learned to distrust.

  Jak brought the bird around, coming in low and hard over the sloping roofs. They were a few hundred paces out when the patrol stepped from the darkness of an alleyway into the ruddy torchlight of the cleared land around the Baths. Ten men—they were all men—moving in a tight knot. Some were looking outward, but most were focused on the two prisoners in their midst. How Qora and Talal had been captured, Gwenna had no idea, but both seemed to have escaped serious injury. They were walking, at least, and while Qora favored her right leg, she was still furiously cursing the soldiers surrounding her.

  “… And you, you nutless, gutless fuck, I’m gonna put this hand up your ass, reach all the way up, and rip out your ’Kent-kissing tongue.…”

  The soldiers outnumbered their prisoners five to one, had them disarmed and bound at the elbows and wrists, but instead of triumph, they smelled of fury and puke-sweet fear. Obviously, the two Kettral had opened some throats on the way to being taken. One of the men prodded Qora with the tip of his spear. Instead of flinching, the woman leaned into the sharp steel. It had to hurt, but Qora was even more pigheaded than Gwenna, which, she had to admit, was saying something.

  “You limp-dick piece of shit,” the woman snarled. “You don’t have the stones to finish it.”

  It was a stupid gibe. Despite their sun-bleached uniforms, the Dombângans weren’t professional soldiers. Most of them were barely more than kids. Probably they’d kicked in a few doors, dragged some terrified families before the high priests. Maybe some of them had a little training with a spear, but they were afraid, and fear made people dangerous, unreliable. It would be easy for one of them to twitch and put that spear right through Qora’s ribs. Gwenna willed them to remember that blood was precious in Dombâng, that their gods demanded living sacrifices.

  Jak trimmed the angle of attack.

  “Talal,” Gwenna said. “Qora.” She spoke at a normal volume; the guards wouldn’t hear her, but the Kettral would. “Stand by for extract.”

  Qora was too busy shouting, but the leach started to turn, then stopped himself—no reason to give the guards warning—listened a moment, then nodded.

  “Qora,” he said. “Smash and grab.”

  One of the soldiers shoved him forward with the butt of a spear. Talal stumbled, but he had the other woman’s attention.

  “When?” she demanded.

  “In eight,” Gwenna replied, pitching her voice over the wind screaming in her ears. “Seven. Six.”

  Rooftops scraped past just beneath the bird’s talons. Alleys, verandas, causeways, docks …

  “Annick,” Gwenna said.

  The sniper’s blue eyes were black in the darkness. She loosed the first arrow, then two more in quick succession, hands flicking between the quiver and the string, too fast for Gwenna to follow.

  “Five,” Gwenna said.

  The first Greenshirt fell—the group’s commander, judging from his uniform—holding his hands to his chest as though in prayer.

  Blood sprayed from the throat of a second.

  Gwenna lit the smoker. The long fuse hissed, spat sparks.

  Another soldier sat down abruptly, reached for the arrow in his eye, then slumped to the side.

  “Four.”

  Panic tore through the Greenshirts like a great wave crashing. Men whirled, brandishing their spears, staring wide-eyed but blind into the night’s gulf. Garbled exclamations spilled from half a dozen throats—… attack … under cover … behind us … no!—the language too broken, too trampled to serve any purpose. One of the soldiers had seized his fallen comrade, was trying to haul him to safety, not realizing the man was already dead. Another broke away, racing for the safety of the Baths. A third stood paralyzed, dark eyes glazed with fire.

  “Three.”

  Talal and Qora, by contrast, stepped into the madness as though it were a dance. The leach lashed out with a foot at the nearest guard, taking him in the side of the knee, buckling the leg. Qor
a rammed her forehead into another man’s nose, smashing it halfway back into his skull. Blood drenched her face when she pulled away, black against her brown skin, but she was grinning as she turned.

  “Two,” Gwenna said.

  The bird’s huge wings shifted, beat backward in a great wash of wind. The talons started to swing forward. Gwenna hurled the smoker over the heads of the two Kettral, toward the cordon of sentries posted outside the Baths.

  “Starshatter!” Talal bellowed.

  She shook her head. “It’s just a smoker. Prepare for…”

  Talal, however, was already moving, hurling himself at Qora. His hands remained tied, but his shoulder took her in the gut, knocking her into a low depression with his own body on top.

  The explosion hit Gwenna like a brick wall.

  The world blossomed into hard darkness scribbled with fire. Curses and screams slashed the night. Pain flayed her with a thousand blades. For a heartbeat she didn’t know where she was, whether standing or swimming or falling. Underwater? No, she could breathe. Back on the Islands? Her trainers were going to be pissed if she’d fucked up some exercise. The vets could be unforgiving.…

  And then, as though in conversation with that first thought, the grim realization: We are the vets now. And this isn’t training.

  The rest of the facts came back like a slap as she struggled to right herself, to find some purchase on the empty air. Her hands were empty. Where were her swords? Had she dropped her swords? A moment later, white-hot pain—brighter than the general agony—lanced her shoulder, sliced her across the leg. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel of flame. She gritted her teeth, took oblivion by the throat, forced it back.

  Slowly, she growled to herself. Slowly.

  With blistering hands, she felt for her harness. It was taut around her waist, the tether stretching up and away, still linking her to the bird. She squinted, and the talon came into focus, and there, dangling from her own tether, Annick, also upside down, also struggling to right herself. Grimacing against the pain, Gwenna took hold of the harness strap, dragged herself up, managed to plant her boots on the talon.

  The Dawn King was screaming, but they hadn’t crashed. Gwenna blinked the haze from her vision. They seemed to be flying rather than falling.

  The bird’s cry trailed off, and she made out Jak’s voice: “… hit us.”

  Presumably that sentence had had a beginning.

  “Say again,” Gwenna managed.

  Something soaked the front of her blacks. She put a hand to it. Oh, right—blood.

  “A starshatter,” the flier said. “That’s what hit us.”

  “I didn’t throw a starshatter.”

  “Not you, them. The insurgents.”

  Understanding punched her in the gut.

  She’d spent the last month supplying Annurian loyalists with Kettral munitions. The point was for them to use the bombs against the bad guys, but people got captured, people switched sides, people panicked and dropped their packs. It wasn’t surprising that the Greenshirts had ended up with a starshatter. Shitty, but not surprising.

  Her right shoulder blazed. She lifted a hand to the wound, found something hot and jagged lodged in the muscle. Again she almost blacked out, again clamped down on the dizziness and nausea. She could raise her arm, rotate it forward and back. So the muscle wasn’t severed, though something was binding in the joint. More carefully, she checked the wound once more.

  She couldn’t get a good look, but she could feel it well enough—a jagged length of metal about the size of her finger.

  “You should leave that in.”

  Annick had regained her footing over on the other talon. Given the blacks and the lack of light it was impossible to tell if she was wounded, but she looked ready to fight. Which was good, because there was a lot of fighting coming.

  Gwenna wrapped her hand around the metal shard.

  “Gwenna—”

  She didn’t hear the rest of Annick’s objection because this time, as she ripped the thing from her shoulder, she really did pass out.

  For a moment she was floating. Warm salt water buoyed her up. Waves lapped her bare skin, washing her hair against her face. The weightlessness felt good, better than good, as though her land-bound body had been a burden she’d never realized she was carrying, something that had been crushing her little by little, day after day.

  I could just stay here, she murmured.

  Even as the words left her lips, though, she was waking once more to the horrors of the night, heavy in her harness all over again, spinning like dead weight as the bird hurtled forward through the dark.

  “Well, fuck,” she muttered to herself, the words chafing over chapped lips.

  She dragged in a ragged breath—her lungs felt seared—got a foot on the talon, stopped the spin, hauled herself in once more, checked the puncture in her shoulder. It was bleeding, but she’d spent a lot of her life bleeding. She was conscious. None of her limbs had folded the wrong way. Her heart was getting on with things, banging out the same old angry rhythm, which meant there were no excuses.

  “Jak,” she asked. “How’s the King?”

  “Seems all right,” the flier replied. He didn’t sound hurt, which made sense. He sat on the Dawn King’s back. The bird’s massive body would have protected him from the blast. “I won’t know for sure until we dismount, but he’s moving smoothly.”

  That too made sense. The starshatter hadn’t shattered Gwenna or Annick. Whoever detonated the explosive had fucked up—lit it too early or botched the throw. The blast might have enraged the bird, but it wouldn’t have knocked him out of the sky. Lucky.

  Of course, it wasn’t fucking lucky that the Greenshirts had a starshatter in the first place. Someone, one of the bastards Gwenna and the rest had come all this ’Kent-kissing way to help, had made a mistake, and now her Wing was paying the price. She let her rage run for a few heartbeats. There was strength in the anger, strength that she badly needed. Then, as she felt her breathing hot and eager between her teeth, she dragged her attention back to the moment. The Dawn King was gliding out over a stretch of dark lagoon. She could hear, somewhere behind them, the kicked hive of the Purple Baths buzzing with shouted orders, questions, cries of pain.

  “Take us back around.”

  She steadied herself against the bird’s leg as the flier hauled them into a steep bank. The bathhouse swung back into view, huge as a castle keep, illuminated by the watch fires. Talal and Qora would be on the far side, the eastern side. Or what was left of them. They’d been on the ground, much closer to the point of detonation. Talal had seen the starshatter, tried to get them clear, but the cover had been for shit. How deep was the depression that he’d knocked them into? Gwenna’s head throbbed as she tried to remember. She tightened her grip on the harness tether.

  “Faster,” she called up. Her own voice sounded tight, like a bowstring too short for its straining stave.

  “What’s the plan?” Jak asked.

  “Second verse, same as the first.”

  “If they have another starshatter…”

  “We’ll be ready this time. Annick, you see someone lighting a fuse—shoot them. Jak, pull up hard if you notice anything—don’t wait on my command. Otherwise we’re going back in.”

  She tested her hands. They hurt, but they worked. If the two Kettral were injured or unconscious, she’d need to unclip, dismount, get them to the bird, hold them during takeoff. Her shoulder felt like someone had been going at it with a hatchet for the better part of the night, but that was just too fucking bad. The arm could fall off after.

  Quick Jak knew his work. He came in low and fast, using the bulk of the bathhouse to hide them until, at the last moment, he pulled the bird up over the roof—so low they skimmed the carved, gilded figures on the eaves. Gwenna caught a glimpse of the serpents and crocs, jaguars and fish with gems for eyes and teeth like knives. The Dombângans set them on their ridge lines to ward off evil spirits. Too bad for them that she and her Wing were a little more solid than spirits. They burst over the roof’s peak like the shadow of death itself, and Gwenna got her first view of the chaos in the open space beyond.