“Take him,” a voice whispered, one Emre knew all too well.
“Val? You?” A soldier slammed the butt of his rifle into Finn’s temple, knocking the elfir to the ground. His head struck hard, and Finn’s handsome eyes rolled back into his head as his sister marched into the room.
Emre turned and found Val surrounded by a gaggle of Imperium soldiers, not bound but leading them. The bikrome stared at him with a look he couldn’t decipher. Was it hatred? Or was it compassion? He couldn’t tell. In the end, it didn’t matter, this was his tithe for his betrayal to his family.
Justice, he supposed.
XXXIX
Ashe
AS ASHE FELL to the rough brick of the mezzanine, Solanine went sprawling headlong into the crowd.
She scrambled to her feet as the guests fought one another in their attempts to flee, which, truth told, was somewhat amusing to her considering they were trapped upon an island in the sky two thousand feet above the ground.
Another quake shook Gargantua, throwing her from her feet once more. Her hands were rubbed raw as her body uncontrollably careened one direction, then abruptly rolled viciously the opposite as explosions blew through the core of the fortress in the sky. Finally, her body came to a desperate stop as she picked her gaze up in time to see a massive chain whip through the nightturn air, blotting stars and moon. It was the godsdamned anchors!
Her father had certainly gone big in his fight with the Fallen.
A firedrake extricated itself from the great tree near the compound with a roar of fury. The magnificent beast flapped its wings and took to the air, sending waves of gale down upon the already flustered crowd, not to mention raining broken branches and aethecite light fixtures. The drake dove toward Lu Har, grabbed the Fallen about the waist with a taloned claw, lifting him to safety, disappearing into the starlit nightturn, like a coward.
Solanine—surrounded now by scourges and a tall man she didn’t recognize—sought calm amongst the guests, but more tremors unloaded on Gargantua from deep within the innards. Aethecite engines exploding pierced any gap or hole within the stone and metal carcass, drowning out the crowd’s shrieks with tea kettle whines. Solanine fell again and was pulled up by the muscular bald man, who began to drag the smaller aetheurgist away from the destruction. The bald man punched a partygoer, dropping the poor sot in a spray of blood. His face turned in Ashe’s direction and caused her to gasp as recognition seeped in.
Evander? What is he doing here? With Solanine of all people…
Her mind instantly went to Wren, the betraying scourge, before returning to all those dead at The Colosseum. Olaf. All the rest of Slag’s End. Their bodies flayed and tortured. Remembering their faces in life, only to recall their misery in death forever etched in agony.
With the chaos all around her, she surprisingly only thought of them. Tears flowed down her cheeks. Evander had to have been the one to do it, to turn them over to Solanine and the Imperium. He had to have been working with Wren all this time.
Evander, why?
A faint touch, the mist. It hovered about her legs, it consoled, it allayed. Regardless, she was growing angrier, so she thrust it from her, and it fled, afraid.
It was then she screamed.
The bellow was deep, harsh, and full of fire. Primal and raw. The panicked crowd stopped dead in their tracks, masked and veiled faces turning towards her as one. Her runic tattoos along her left arm synapsed all at once in a brilliant gleam of iridescence. The frightened mist had come back to her, darkened and full of vigor. Her fists balled and she threw her head back, yelling upward into the nightturn sky. She could feel the anger of the mist.
But she could also feel the terror, the fear. It permeated the crowd of Drenth-born. Dismay, dread, panic all washed over her as she screamed. Fright and revulsion. Abhorrence and distress. Agony and misery. Injury and strain. Wound and affliction. From humir and creature alike. Down to the very grains of stone and ores of metal constructing Gargantua. The mist rose around her, drawing all this emotion toward her. The entirety of Gargantua was bathed in honeyed shadows, its yellowish hue damning.
O Zenith…
Her bangled left hand came up on its own accord and pointed toward the building opposite. It tugged at her, the bangle did. Begging her to follow where it would lead. The Seal, she realized. That’s what Lu Har had said, wasn’t it? She’d be drawn toward the Seals. The diamond burned against her palm.
The scream cut off as she coughed so hard, she retched. Blood, fresh and bright red, splashed across the broken dance floor. Her back arched, the poison in her lungs scalding every piece of her, cauterizing every vessel. She slumped forward, catching her breath as it came in ragged flushes. Her brow dripped sweat; her mouth trickled sanguine as she forced herself upright on wobbly legs.
The crowd who hadn’t yet escaped the veranda, some thousands it seemed, stared at her. She smiled cruor-coated rictus. Their pervious panic resettled into even greater frenzy, their collective desire to extricate themselves from this floating prison all the more apparent.
Ashe plunged into the fleeing crowd, elbowing and jostling along with them, albeit half-heartedly as she was beyond tired. Her pulmo and aetheurgy had drained her dry, her throat raw as if she’d been eating mounds of sand for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three straight days. She wanted to fight the urge inside her, the one her soul demanded, but she found her feet moving in the direction of the Seal regardless of her brain wishing it otherwise.
She needed to find a way into the cursed fortress that didn’t involve going through Solanine. To find that blasted Seal to Eminence. To her supposed destiny she apparently couldn’t avoid. She swore without abandon, her hair plastered to her skull, her anger a constant vim. Cornered, she felt. Trapped with no choice.
It felt like civil war atop the floating fortress. Skirmishes between unarmed guests and Imperium soldiers blown to epic proportions as the mezzanine holding the dance floor and the self-effacing accoutrement became a ghost town as the fighting and fleeing moved outwards from the veranda onto grass-lined walkways. Explosions attacked the buildings now, the stately architecture taking a beating. Stained glass mosaics rattled in sills before shattering and raining down crystal death. The flowers and willowy trees were trampled or pushed over. Gunshot bursts, much closer than she godsdamned wished. Pandemonium as people clawed and fought across the upper level of Gargantua, seeking any sort of refuge they could find. Be it in building or atop the low walls.
A great gout of flames sprouted from the mezzanine. A blackened mist accompanied the flames. Ashe knew aetheurgy when she saw it. It had to be Solanine.
“Girl!” A woman pulled on Ashe’s dress, begging her for help. “You must protect me. With… with your aetheurgy. Please? I want to see Demrae again.” It was Isla Soabin, the Guilder’s attractive wife. Her sickening bastard of a husband was nowhere to be seen, probably smashed to a pulp in the melee. Isla’s face was covered in grit, and blood oozed from a cut on her forehead.
Ashe felt the urge to grab her and hold her tight, but Isla was yanked away in the flowing tide of humanity before she even had the chance to respond. “Sorry,” she called after.
The doors that were meant to house the party toppled and were pulled from their hinges by the frightened people as the nobleborn pressed onward toward the docking bays, toward the gondolas of the two remaining tethers. They obliterated steel, Imperium soldiers, and statues alike.
Ashe thought she spied Neenah LeFleur in the crowd, a big man in a mask next to her, who could only be Roland. But try as she might, the pair were swept away like the remains of a boat crashing upon the shoals.
Gunshots rang out from Imperium soldiers. Scourges cut through the people with little care to their safety, especially one bearing a long, braided beard and thick, unruly eyebrows over hard eyes. The fleeing tide of flesh became a killing field. Blood slicked underfoot, making the flight even more difficult. The air smelt of death.
A second conquest of Drenth, she thought grimly.
Ashe tried to cut opposite the scourges, feeling that infernal tugging in her heart toward the compound every step she made in the other direction. She made it about ten feet closer in the tight press when she spotted the vicars charging into the ocean of flesh, Cyan the Defiant at the lead.
How the fuck did Cyan get aboard?
The guest tide reeled as bodies flew into the air away from the untainted warriors of the Scattered Shards. Aetheric strength flinging thousands of pounds of body weight in a single shove. The unsuspecting guests unfortunate to be in the way were mercilessly thrown aside, tossed back into the crowd, bodies crushing others. The vicars moved so fast, even Ashe had a hard time following their movements. It was if they were wisps, or ghosts phasing from place to place. One heartbeat they were in front of the double doors, the next, closer to the dance floor, followed by thin tendrils of bottled mist. It was a dance, they did. A dance with the Pentax. Ashe ducked her head as Cyan and his two companions waded through the crowd, their midnight blue cassocks flowing, their canisters of mist releasing in spurts.
“Take thy blood, the blood of man!” Cyan bellowed the prayer to the Pentax, his companions also belting the prayer, drawing their axes. “Take thy heart, the heart of man! The fire in the soul, the forge it bequeaths! Show thy soul, let it burn in the pyre! Molded when white hot! In thy name, the vicars are yours! My soul is yours!”
Ashe always hated that prayer.
