“A pity, even Zenith couldn’t protect this useless creature,” said a voice from behind. “A vile thing, these rebels.”
Cadrianna glanced up and found a scourge standing beside her, a man she loathed almost as much as the Fallen. A man who’d taken his pleasure in breaking her while Thestile watched on. A man who’d done things to her under the Divines’ whims. A man she would one day flay alive. His name was Ratko.
“Good for bleeding,” Ratko continued as he ran a finger through the blood along his short sword, leaving a streak of polished steel peeping through the river of red. A furrow of thick eyebrows over all-onyx eyes of Void Form and a beard braided down to his waist, slick with blood. “Are they not?”
The Fallen’s scourges were the best within the Imperium, the fiercest of killers. But not all possessed Void Form. In fact, most were just brutes with an axe to grind. Ratko could wield aetheurgy, and he wasn’t even proficient at that. She knew him to be a formidable killer, but she didn’t care for him in the slightest. He had a sick predilection for killing, taking pleasure in the deaths of lowborn and noble alike, savoring each kill before the final strike of steel.
But the scourges were the prized fighters of the Fallen’s coven, his inferno. She amongst them.
Cadrianna stood, ignoring the scourge as he stared at her. Gods, she hated this man. When he didn’t move out of her way, she faced him. “Problem?”
The bearded scourge gave her a sickening grin. “My cock quickens when you kill, Cadrianna. Ever since you were given to me, I’ve watched you grow, watched you delight in the void. What say you we take a naked gander over yonder? I’m certain the master won’t give a mind.”
“YOU PROBABLY COULD TAKE HIS TONGUE,” the Strix offered. “DOUBT LU HAR WOULD WORRY SO ABOUT IT. HE’S GOT MORE IMPORTANT THINGS ON HIS MIND.”
“What say you, sweetling?” Ratko pressed, coming closer, his hand to his groin. “For old time’s sake? You might even enjoy it this time. I promise I won’t hurt you… much.”
Cadrianna briefly considered slitting Ratko’s throat right then and there like the Strix said, but instead marched off into the gloom of the shellshocked city. One day, she would repay Ratko for what he’d done to her.
Today was not that day, but that reckoning was coming.
VII
Ashe
ASHE SWORE AS her slippers splashed in a murky puddle and the stink-water deluged between her toes.
Unlike six of the nine sectors in Drenth where all the freedmen, dregs, and cons ready to slice a throat at the drop of a quadran crammed into sky-high apartment complexes, Silk Circle was where the upper crust Houses lived. With their wide-open spaces and their fancy abodes, their lavish parties and their little care for anyone below them.
With the vicars hounding her, Ashe wished for the cramped, scummy sectors because the myriad of twists and turns made her a less conspicuous target.
From the sound of the explosions that rocked the city, she figured the rebellion had other thoughts. It was just like the Gutter King to make his war while she was fleeing for her life. Selfish jerk.
Extravagant villas grew like wayward shoots of stone grass as Ashe raced through the paved streets of the Silk Circle. Raised mezzanines with stunning architecture, roads lined by cypress trees basking in the starlight, not bent or cracked from living within the mist. Terraces of white marble peristyles, fluted columns, three stories of balconies with stone awnings. A harmony of flowers along the rooftop trellises.
Ashe blazed ahead as she ignored the surprised looks of the many nobleborn out on the roads. Every drag of mist in Silk Circle clung to her like a fly to a pile of manure, enhancing her body through her Shard Form. She ran toward the gate between the Silk Circle and the eighth sector next, hoping to lose the vicars. The jangle of their breathing apparatuses told her she wasn’t too far ahead. City guards at the gates yelled for her to stop, but on she ran into Bell End.
As she burst into Bell End—a middling sector known for the more artistic endeavors of the flesh—thousands of people stormed the streets as the bombs exploded throughout the mega-city.
It was anarchy.
The egress near Silk Circle was on the verge of being overrun by scores of miners, families, and soldiers alike. The inner set of gates groaned as a tidal wave of flesh pushed for flight. The soldiers of the Imperium tried to quell the crowd, but they were unsuccessful, and some were pulled to their deaths. The crush of people was alarming. Fires erupted along the city streets. Gunshots drowned the tenor of the frightened people.
The mist whorled within the crowd at a rate never seen in the mega-cities, somehow the Sea had breached the outer walls. Nearly black, the mist rose as high as shoulders, was as dense as the VVyrm Ocean. Its anger parallel to that of the city.
Ashe elbowed her way through the masses, throwing shoulders and fists as needed, cursing the entire way. Her anger a constant vim. She pummeled through the wave of faces. People floundered and clambered over one another as she slowed to a crawl, the mass too great even for her aetheurgy.
She punched a swarthy man as he fell upon her, his hot breath putrid, eyes crazed with fear. He grabbed her by the arms, and she nearly threw all her aetheurgy at him, but thought better of it. A woman pulled at her stola, begging her for help, but she was yanked away by the flowing tide of humanity.
A high-pitched hiss echoed behind; the vicars had released their canisters, their Shard Form aetheurgy.
Shit! Her Shard Form filled her with energy anew, so Ashe glumly plowed through the people.
Ashe raced down an alleyway between soaring apartment complexes. The press of flesh behind her now. But she was beyond tired.
A whistle in the air, and Ashe reflexively changed directions. “Shit, shit, shit!”
Chunks of rock blasted at her feet as the shrapnel tore into her thighs, leaving bloody gashes in her stola, motes of dark emerald flaring hurt about the wound. Another projectile landed on her side, exploding in hardened earth. But Ashe pressed on, despite the searing pain in her legs.
Drab, overly crowded concrete apartment complexes rose around her as she passed out of Bell End into the poorer sectors of Marketside. Most were at least sixty stories tall, if not more. One room homes with balconies, clothing draping from lines between buildings. Aethecite pipes wainscoted the walls. A handful of children, who didn’t appear worried about the explosions, lounged upon the metal ladders like caged animals yelling at her while she ran below as if they were spectators and she the sport.
The bowels of Drenth were a warren of dead ends unless one knew where they were going. Blessedly, she did.
Ashe barged through the shadowed streets in no discernable pattern, and she ducked, squeezed, wiggled, or jumped over the detritus, broken carts, overturned refuse bins, and the occasional sleeping vagrant blocking her path. The vicars barreled straight through any roadblock as mercilessly as a predator. They didn’t speak, didn’t yell for her to stop. They only ran. Relentless.
By the Pentax, she had forgotten how frustratingly undeterred a vicar could be. What was she thinking, running from three of them? Foolish girl. O wait a minute now, is that… yes!
As she banked around an alley corner, Ashe sought out an anchor she’d memorized from previous flights from the city’s numpty guards—a dried-up well that oozed Terris aether. She burned the inked rune of Terris on her left wrist and sent the aetheric mist toward the well. The earthen spell came alive within the horizontal zigzagged rune that resembled a volcano as the void flickered as inhumir howls moaned in her eardrums. Her body shot toward the well as if she’d been thrown like a spear.
Fortuitous because a massive truck wheel whizzed overhead.
She shifted in midair, and flung out her left arm, commanding the mist to rise in a shield-like spell of Aere. The fog caught the wheel, held in place by unseen threads from wind aetheurgy, mere inches from her head. Her slippers struck the street as she cut off the Terris anchor and she hurtled the suspended wheel back at the vicars using more Aere. It collided into the untainted warriors and they tumbled into a heap.
Ashe gave the vicars a very unsavory finger gesture and ran to put distance between them. Mist churned in quick vortexes, tired and drained, like she. The wails within the void grew so loud, she thought her ears would bleed. Her legs churned acid within. Her body was near the breaking point, and mist-enhancements started to fade as her tissue became weak under the flames of aether. She could already hear the vicars following. Coughing, blood dribbled down her open mouth, tongue dry as she pulled in ragged breath after ragged breath.
But she kept running, burning aetheurgy the entire way, the explosions singing her company.
