CADRIANNA YAWNED AS she watched the chaos happening in the streets of Drenth below.
The underbelly of Gargantua shaded the hardened glass of the airglider’s circular window, and it drowned out the moonlit clouds over the sand dunes, which left the desert city bathed in ominous neon aether and dust from their rebellion’s attack below.
She fingered the quillon of the Strix. A comfort. Killing Thestile had left a hole in her soul and she didn’t understand why. The elfirish woman had been a trainer, a teacher of Void Form, a hated personage in the Fallen’s coven. She had been one of the many who’d made Cadrianna the killer she was, and to date, was now the only one she’d made to pay for that trauma. But the woman’s last words perplexed her. ‘Never forget the truth of who you are.’ What did it mean? And why bring up her Nightingale lineage? She hadn’t the faintest of ideas. Should she be angry or sad, she didn’t know.
All she felt was her beloved Emre’s betrayal for putting her in this current state of never-ending regret. To her, but most importantly, to Brynn.
The knife was her strength, her singular obsession. It drove her, and ultimately, would sate her. Bound as they were, womanhood to daemonhood. Eager blood quickened at the thought of killing the Fallen one day and saving her daughter.
Emre, you forced me into this. Forced me into his arms.
“I’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND WHY THIS GUTTER KING ACTIVELY DESTROYS THE CITY HE CLAIMS TO WANT TO FREE,” the Strix said. For a blade that spent much of its existence inside a sheath or a person’s flesh, it was mighty observant of their surroundings. “SEEMS COUNTERINTUITIVE, TO BE FAIR. FOR HOW LITTLE YOU REGARD THIS PLACE, THAT IS. SOLANINE AND THE FALLEN SEEM TO PUT GREAT IMPORTANCE ON THIS DESERT CITY.”
To the daemon blade, she merely hissed under her breath to let it know she was in no mood to discuss the past.
“Mistress Cadrianna,” the soldier sitting next to her said. Her scowl stared back at her in the man’s reflective breather. “We’ll… be landing soon. Mistress,” he added when she didn’t respond affirmatively.
Annoyance rippled through her, or was that a thrill? A thrill, she decided. A thrill in the upcoming misery she intended to bring upon the Gutter King and his rebel forces. The Fallen hadn’t commanded it, but she was a scourge and a scourge brought death to the Fallen’s enemies without fail.
After leaving Thestile’s citadel, she saw, and felt, the explosions throughout the city. Street after street beyond Silk Circle, smoke rose skyward as she had taken flight in the airglider waiting for her just outside of the traitor’s keep. She knew what it meant: the Gutter King had struck. She didn’t need to see the waterfall of Imperium gliders dropping from Gargantua to know that her presence on the ground was necessary. Orders came shortly after, orders that she do what she was bred for.
To do what Emre had forced her into.
The soldier harrumphed and began to check the strappings of his firedrake scale body armor—bloodred to signify his rank of captain. There were seven other soldiers seated opposite the captain and Cadrianna, all armored and armed. She was the only scourge, and thus, this team was hers to command. As if she needed any help besides the Strix. She didn’t with Thestile and the Guilder and most certainly didn’t now.
But orders were orders.
“Captain Arhin,” one of the soldiers started, “sir, our orders?”
The captain’s helmed face turned toward Cadrianna, expecting her to answer, but she only nodded before looking away. Captain Arhin muttered something low, unheard behind his breather. “Our orders are clear. Bring to task any rebel, especially the Gutter King. Rumor has it the Gutter King and some of his top rebels were spotted in Stanktown with one of the local gangs. Our soldiers have apprehended the gang leader and one of the Gutter King’s own.”
One of the soldiers across the small aisle shifted in his stiff harness. “What of the rebellion spies, Captain Arhin? Can we trust their word? Drenth-born can’t be trusted. I don’t want to walk into a massacre.” The woman next to him gave him a hard elbow and flicked her helmeted head toward Cadrianna. Apparently, the dunce forgot where her husband had hailed from. “Forgive me, mistress,” the first soldier said. “I didn’t mean to offend.”
The man withered under her hardened gaze. Cadrianna was not Drenth-born but had adopted the city as her home after her marriage to Emre. Originally, she hailed from Oldport Basin in the southern nation of Thullyr.
The Strix laughed in the void, which sounded a lot like someone choking a bird of nocturnal prey to get it to stop hooting so they could sleep.
“The Fallen swears by the words of his spies,” Captain Arhin said. “Who are you to question?”
“Forgive me, mistress,” the man repeated to her, chastised by the captain fully. “Hail to the Imperium!”
Fools, Cadrianna thought. Fools all of them. They’ll only slow me down.
”WE CAN LEAVE THEM BEHIND.” That ethereal tone of a daemon more humirish than she figured possible. “WE NEVER HAD TO COME HERE. COULD HAVE…” the Strix trailed off before she had the chance to silence the daemon. Instead, “VERY WELL, CAD, IF IT’S FEAR YOU WANT, LET ME PLAY WITH ONE OF THEIR SOULS, THEN THEY’D ALL FEAR YOU.”
Later, Strix.
“I want all weapons locked and loaded,” Captain Arhin continued. “Once on the ground, we’ll be under heavy fire. I’ve word the rebels are rousing full assaults on our garrisons near the tethers. We are headed to Bar Stock to assist in culling this attack. Mistress Cadrianna is in charge. What she says goes. Understood?”
There was a resounding clap as fists smacked drake scale.
Cadrianna glanced out the porthole. The moon’s circumference remained hidden behind Gargantua. Absently, her mind wandered to a time early in her marriage to Emre, a time when they would stand atop the Regent’s Tower and watch the moon linger over the horizon in a full blaze of desert glory. Those days had been short and sweet in her memory, of a time when her life hadn’t become glazed in blood.
Now, the moon’s rays were but a tendril of deathly shadows as the airglider dipped in between the buildings of Drenth.
The airglider touched concrete amid the multitude of manufacturing warehouses of Bar Stock and rocked viciously as intense aetheric gunfire railed into the heavy-duty steel of its hull. Cadrianna cursed as she shoved Captain Arhin off her lap. Though she couldn’t see his face nor hear his voice over the blasts of Ignis, by his open palms, she knew he was apologizing.
She had bitten her tongue in the landing and copper coated the inside of her mouth. An apt taste for the death she was about to bring.
The gunner atop returned fire into the lowborn sector, glass breaking as the warehouses took damage from a hand-cranked rotating cannon. Bullet casings the size of her thumb rained down on the steel hull with sharp clangs, dribbling past the portholes. Short Ignis bursts struck the airglider, but those were quick, almost as if the gunner’s fire made the rebels hunker down. Her team unclipped from their safety harnesses and readied their wheellock rifles. The soldier closest to the exit gave a grunt as he spun the massive valve to open the hatch. In well-drilled fashion, her team jumped out and took defensive positions. A series of pang-pang-pangs riddled the outer shell of the transport, and a curdled gasp was followed by wheellock gunfire from her team. Then silence.
“All clear, mistress,” one stuck his helmeted head back into the transport. “Penite’s down, though.”
Captain Arhin pulled the dog back on his wheellock pistol, the aethecite ore in the pan ready for firing, and sighed before he hopped out of the aircraft with a multi-barrel wheellock rifle slung across his back. Cadrianna was hot on his heels, sheathing the Strix and pulling her own multi-barrel pistol. Aetheurgy and her daemon blade were a last resort here, even though she preferred the power of the void over that of machine.
Boots striking pavement, she examined her surroundings with a meticulous eye.
The third sector known as Bar Stock was a string of roads all connected by iron and steel trusses, like gates penning in a prisoner. This sector was the lifeblood of machinery in Drenth. Gone were the sky-risen apartment complexes, replaced with squat warehouses that chugged aethecite plumage at all hours of the day, manufacturing everything from airships to gliders, from train cars to mining trucks. Those who didn’t work the mines worked the assembly lines.
Smoke rose near where the giant eastern tether held one of the four chains anchoring Gargantua. The enormous links swayed by the force of the blasts, but it didn’t appear as if they were greatly affected. Subtle tremors quaked underfoot. A gaping series of fourth-floor windows all down the avenue were smashed, making Cadrianna assume this was a meticulously planned attack to get the Imperium to believe all-out war was happening. She spied a handful of bloodied bodies along the bases of the warehouses, probably in flight when they realized the Imperium wouldn’t surrender so easily. Dead rebels. The only kind she liked.
“I GUESS THIS IS PRETTY. A NICE PLACE IF YOU ENJOY SMOLDERING ARCHITECTURE FALLING FROM OVERHEAD.”
An aerescreen across the destroyed street showed Solanine. “People of Drenth,” the camera panned away from Solaine’s face and projected scenes of Drenth’s explosions, people in flight. “I’m praying for all the innocents of our fair city, for your unharmed safety. Our soldiers have been deployed in all sectors to weed out the lowbrow traitors who’ve caused this harm. You are in my thoughts, every one of you. Stay safe, friends of Drenth.” Camera returning to Solanine’s grim visage. “People…”
One of Cadrianna’s team was crouched over the corpse of another, the woman apparently named Penite. The soldier who’d questioned her earlier was pulling the identification tags from the deceased’s neck and handed them to Captain Arhin. The others had their wheellock rifles pointed in the distance as they sought other potential threats. Pocketing the identification tags, Captain Arhin slapped a palm to the transport to indicate that it was safe to take off. The aethecite engine roared to life. A gust of dust mixed with the low level of mist that swarmed around their ankles as the transport rose.
Cadrianna clicked her tongue. “The Bar Stock tether is this way.”
