“Need me to carry you, humir girl?”
“Bah, go fu… nevermind. Just go. I’m right behind you.” Ashe wheezed and coughed the entire way as the pulmo raged inside of her. Her wounded knee throbbed with every agonizing step. She had to stop and collect herself more than once.
The mist appeared from above.
It poured down the stairs, seeking her out. A relief washed through. She’d missed the fog. It was like seeing an old friend you haven’t seen in ages. A friend that took you out for the time of your life, but then stabbed you on the way home to steal your coinpurse.
Ruane reached the top of the stairs and there were gasps, grunts, and clashes of steel. Ashe took the remaining stairs and found the drakken battling with a pair of Imperium soldiers, two big brutes laden with muscle and weapons.
“Go!” Ruane sliced across one’s hamstring with her longknife, the blade piercing drake scale armor. “I’ll catch up.” The other grabbed at the drakken and she jabbed at him with a quick thrust of steel.
She limped past the fighting. Beyond was a long walkway of stone arched above the cavern of engines. Gunfire from below exploded all around her, threatening to jostle her from the walk, the waist-high rail wouldn’t support her if she went tumbling off the edge.
Ashe entered into a domed observatory; bodies crisscrossing the ground in a bloodbath. The stones were slick with gore, dozens of soulless corpses blocking her path to Ruane’s supposed hangar ahead. She glimpsed a strange hulking shape moving through the hangar. It was larger than some of the buildings and wide. A fog of darkened grey swirled around it. A daemon of frightening size, its giant head was staring up at her, pinprick of red in the eyes.
Seeking her, she felt.
“Going somewhere, girl?”
Ashe turned and found Elian and Red Tulio marching up from behind, a pair of blades in Elian’s fleshy fists. Somehow, someway, the green-fleshed orcir was still alive. The anger came and the mist darkened with the need for spilling this murderer’s innards. A pressure she hadn’t felt since the moments after killing that servant the got her into this mess in the first place.
“I see you’ve done a pretty job escaping, once again,” the fleshy Elian said. “Red Tulio says you twisted Quick Fingers right up. A loss for me, no doubt.”
“Guess I’m just going to have to kill my way off this godsdamned fortress,” Ashe breathed, “and I’m taking a strong liking to gutting street rats like you.”
“Foolish girl. Get her.”
Ashe drew the mist around her, cloaking her body in an angry haze of black. Anger rolled off her tongue as she screamed. Aether scathed across the observatory in her fury. The bodies of the dead turned to dust from the Ignis burning within her aetheric call, blood pouring down her chin, fire in her throat. The walls of the observatory shook fiercely, cracked mortar fell. The mist surged and struck the hefty gangleader and his muscled orcirish brute.
She had expected them to be torn asunder limb from limb, yet there they stood. Unharmed. Unaffected.
“Impressive. But your aetheurgy won’t do slag on me, girl. I’ve been given pardon by Solanine and the Fallen.” He lifted a golden chain with a black pendant from around his pudgy scruff. His aura a putrid moss of greed. “Protected, I am. And those around me.” Which explained why Red Tulio hadn’t been affected either. “The Fallen can always use a man like me. I won’t kill you outright, but the Fallen never said you had to be in one piece.”
Elian moved toward her menacingly, albeit wasn’t all that menacing since the man was a behemoth of flab. Red Tulio, though, was far more menacing. That gave her pause. But the Pentax had other designs as the drakken speared the barbarous orcir. The pair went tumbling, perhaps an even fight.
“Just you and me, girl.”
“Even better.”
She attacked.
Elian brought up one of his blades, blocking her flimsy dagger stolen from Quick Fingers’ dead fingers. The obese man was surprisingly spry on his feet, bringing his second blade in for a quick end with a slash toward her hamstring. Luckily, she was able to squirm away mere moments before she was crippled. But her victory was exceptionally short lived as Elian’s boot came down upon her balky knee and she shrieked.
Ashe backed away, holding her leg. Elian’s scraggly beard was parted in a vile grin. “I thought you’d be better, girl.”
A flicker of gold caught her eye from under the mountain of Elian’s flesh at his waistband that was still remarkably holding strong. Filigree. It was her flask. “I’m just warming up, you smarmy bastard.”
“Daddy isn’t here to save you now. The Fallen is going to raze this city to the studs. The Gutter King will lose everything.”
“Spare me the villainous monologue. Why don’t you ask Evander what he’s been up to? The Fallen chose the better brother.”
The man’s aura turned a fiery crimson. “I’m going to enjoy removing that tongue of yours, girl.”
Sensing her chance, her runic tattoos radiated as she called upon the power of the Pentax. The world stopped as she pulled upon the veil of the Meadows, the very fabric of the world tearing as wails grew strong from beyond. A similar spell to the one back in Soabin’s villa that started this mess. To where an old, crumbling well had been her memorized anchor between both worlds.
In the here and now, she had found her new anchor and pulled.
Ashe shot forward toward Elian, stolen dagger from that cursed shrewkin gripped in white knuckles. She struck him full brunt, dagger driven deep into his fleshy gullet, leaving a gaping hole a foot in diameter as she let go, flying past. The blade went straight through his innards and snapped his spine in twain as she cut the aetheric tether to the flask, flipping over him as she did, sliding, unwounded leg out, hand to the ground, the dagger left in his cold dead corpse.
“Wrong,” she said to Elian’s dead body.
“Now that’s impressive,” Ruane said, who had green blood all over her exoscales, clearly from Red Tulio. “Cut the second sector’s leader in two. Wish I could’ve seen that.”
Ashe’s knee tweaked as she guffawed. “And I’m the one with bad puns? That’s horseshit and you know it!”
“I don’t get it.”
Ashe barked a laugh/grunt as she limped toward Elian’s corpse and took her flask from his belt. She thanked Zenith and His cock for making Elian take it from her. Pocketing it, “Let’s get off this rock.”
The hangar door was open but the outer shell was dented as if something had tried to squeeze through and got stuck. The entire place was a hotbed of activity.
A row of airgliders lined up on a cable opposite the broken door. The first appeared to be missing and the rest looked like a bunch of scrap metal used for target practice. Dozens of Imperium soldiers milled about the hangar, boarding other airgliders and giant trucks of war. Larger airship transports waited while the trucks filed into their backsides. Other transports waited while pilot-driven mechs tromped aboard. Another portal yawned open as yet another row of airgliders began to speed off their cables and into the nightturn sky.
“Hurry,” Ruane said.
“To where? All those airships are laden with soldiers. All we have between the two of us is an angry drakken and my undeniable wit. Won’t get far with that against a full force of Imperium soldiers.”
“There’s another,” Ruane said confidently, dragging Ashe after, who then proceeded to wallop her knee on a railing, causing her to bleat like a sheep.
