He jerked his claw away. No, I can’t. Not yet.
“Well?”
Wick turned, his shredded ears flopped, a stern grimace marring the lapin’s face. His elongated front teeth glinted aethecite glow. “It’s—”
Gunfire cut the lapin off, spurts of flashing light from wheellock barrels in the tunnel behind them. Lojen dove to the ground, Wick growling as bullets struck stone.
The lapin grabbed Lojen’s claw, pulling him forward with such surprising strength that Lojen nearly tripped. “Buggers! Lojen, run!”
They took off, bent over, darting down the corridor as bullets flew overhead. Thud-thud-thud against stone, dust and shrapnel raining. Lojen blinked away the grit as the tunnel opened into a cavern, doming overhead with stalactites hanging down. The cavern was filled to the brim with technology. Airgliders by the dozens hung on steel cables like light fixtures, swaying near the domed roof. Other aethecite-generated mobiles lined the ground level with rotating guns strapped to the top. Single person drones where a driver could fit within the chassis and steer. Unused automatons hunched over in giant heaps, furnaces black and empty, lights dead in glass heads.
“Wick!”
Lojen glanced up to see a second lapin waving at them from a steel plankway up near the airgliders. A doe by the look of it.
Bullets blasting all around, they weaved through the rows of mobiles, clank-clank-clank of gunfire puncturing their path. Wick raced for a metal staircase at the far end of the cavern, Lojen overtaking the poor lapin, his legs pumping at breakneck speed.
“Ancantha, get it started!” Wick yelled as he hopped up the stairs behind Lojen.
The female lapin bounded toward the front of the queue. A quick hum of an aethecite engine roared to life, drowning out the gunfire.
“What about the others?” Lojen called back to Wick as he made the apex of the stair, stopping as he waited for the smaller lapin to reach him. Gunfire from the tunnel entrance caused Lojen to duck. He saw dozens of Imperium soldiers careening into the room, their weapons all pointed at them.
“No time. We gotta go now!” Wick didn’t stop like an idiot, like Lojen had, running past. He was like a sitting duck asking to be hunted and gunned down.
An airglider swung dramatically as bullets battered into the hull. It squealed on the cable, disengaging as heavier rounds—presumably metal piercing laced with multiple Terris-runed spells—hit the glider. One of the wings practically took Lojen’s head clean off his shoulders as the fluctuating craft nearly fell from its holding anchor.
The female lapin leaned out the window of the first airglider, waving her dainty paw frantically. “Run!”
As Lojen ducked under the bucking airglider wing, he felt the blinding sting of an aethecite-wrought bullet upon his calf, forcing him to stumble. The aetheric round shattered his exoscales like they were paper, driving through the meat of his leg. He yelled out. Another hit his thigh, the corrupted magical ore grinding into his muscle. Pain flared; his leg gave out, and he pitched forward.
The pack holding the horns, Hammer, and Seal flew from his grip and opened upon the plankway, scattering the sacred contents. Lojen watched in horror as the Seal bounced once, twice, and finally smacked the railing baluster. It clanged, the steel onyx braid wrapping the four gemstone circles striking the metal rail. He dove for the Seal, swiping nothing but air as the disc toppled off the plankway down into the aethecite-powered vehicles below.
“Lojen!” Wick screamed, button-sized eyes going wide as he noticed the dropped cargo.
Lojen crawled to his feet, blood flowing down his trouser, into his boot. “Go!” He held the horns close, ensuring he didn’t lose them in the flight. He hefted the Hammer of Mother Marrow, a surge of aetheric power growing within. He glanced over the rail, but the continued gunfire gave him no choice but to flee.
The lapin reached the end of the plankway, to a control panel. Bullets ripped through the row of airgliders, at the panel, all around them. Aether sizzled as the spells struck metal, releasing Terris, making holey cheese out of the well-crafted airgliders, penetrating the hulls as if they were nothing. The lapin rebel slapped at buttons upon the control panel. Lojen dragged himself all the way to the glider and fell into the open hatch.
Wick must have pressed the correct button as the wall in front of them groaned. “Ancantha, go!”
The airglider shuddered on the cable. Engine raging. It moved forward, the wall opening. Lojen sat crumpled against the hull of the airglider, clasping claws to his gushing wounds. The Hammer of Mother Marrow pulsed beside his good leg, the runes upon the haft glowing. The hull rattled in a thunk-thunk-thunk as the Terris-infused artillery slammed into it.
Failure filled him as he bemoaned the loss of the Seal. Worthy of his father’s horns, he was not. Would never be now. He had failed in the task assigned to him by his ward. That failure, that shame raged within him worse than the bullets piercing the world around him.
Lojen peeked back through the hatch. “Wick!”
The lapin held down a button on the panel as a portal along gears slid open to reveal the darkness of nightturn over Drenth. Wick ducked as a burst of bullets hit the control panel, the thing exploding in circuits and electrical fizzles. The doorway ground to a halt, not open enough for the airglider to safely pass through. The lapin slammed the few remaining buttons again, but the door didn’t move.
“Wick!” the female lapin screamed from the cockpit. “No more time!”
Wick dodged through the streaks of projectiles, a graze along his shoulder knocking him aside. Lojen released the wound in his thigh and hung out of the hatch, reaching for the rebel. Wick dove for his outstretched claw, fur meeting leathery palm. With his last remaining strength, Lojen dragged the wounded lapin into the airglider as it rolled off the cable, taking flight just before the portal. The glider’s wings skimmed the doors, bullets hammering the hull, the engine thrumming, the lapin pilot screaming. Grinding of metal, squealing pitch high.
And then they were free of Gargantua.
Plummeting.
XLI
Cyan the Defiant
CONSCIOUSNESS CAME TO Cyan after being kneed from behind into a chair.
His eyes fluttered open as he struggled to rub them, only to find his arms were bound behind his back. He tried to issue a complaint but found he couldn’t as a leather and metal muzzle was strapped to his face, his breather long since removed. By the feel of it against his jaw and cheeks, he knew the muzzle was laced with aetheric runes. And that meant he was cut off from his Shard Form.
A figure, petite and curvy in all the right manner most men would enjoy—hip and bosom—stood off to his periphery. Face was covered in a sheen of red film, and if Cyan the Defiant was any judge, it was most likely blood. Hair was coated in the crimson ichor, falling in thick locks of drenched waves. Almost as if bathed in it.
“Watch and learn what happens to those who question the Fallen’s authority in Drenth,” the figure said to a massive man bulging with muscles, his bald head drenched in sweat as if he’d just run up the highest peak of the Forgemistress’ Blades.
A threat and a demand borne by the mouth of Solanine.
Cyan took stock of his situation. They were in a simple room, one with sterile white walls, most likely within the main compound aboard Gargantua. There was a slight unnatural sway underneath, probably still trying to control the fortress without two of the tethers to anchor it. He was seated behind a worn and battered table, one that appeared to be perpetually stained with blood and lacerated with cuts and gouges from a blade. His arms were corded by chains linked to thick iron rings bolted to the ground, a pair of Imperium soldiers stood behind him, one with a hand gripping his manacled wrists.
Beside him, similarly bound and waking, were Amaranth and Harlequin.
Solanine pulled a chair up to the table. Cyan shot the short aetheurgist daggers, squirming in his bindings, aching to call forth his aetheurgy. “We got off to a poor start,” Solanine said smoothly, sitting, the words dubious, but also macabre in the reddish-tint of the blood speckling the heart-shaped face. “Let’s start anew, shall we? I want to know how you were able to get aboard Gargantua. No vicar has dared such a thing.”
