Twenty-Two #2
The buildings around us are mostly commercial, closed and dark and more importantly locked up for the night.
I look up and down the street as we turn and turn again, following a narrowing spiral as the hunters close the net.
We’re down to barely a block’s worth of freedom when I spot something and point.
“There.”
“What?” Ky glances away from our pursuers. “Waste collection?”
“Best shot.” And the door stands half-open. Why lock up a bunch of trash?
“They’re going to corner us in there.” But the thugs are already closing in. “Fuck it. Go!”
We run for it, and I slam the door closed behind us. It’s not very sturdy; even barricaded, it wouldn’t buy us more than a minute. Instead we head deeper into the darkened facility.
“Taj!” Ky shouts as the door shudders.
“Working on it! Give me a minute!”
The door opens, and the crimson light outside silhouettes a tall man, elegantly dressed. Ky backs up, hand dropping to her sword.
“Hello, Gestian.”
Gestian is a sleek figure in a gray suit with a dark overcoat hanging from his shoulders.
There’s a sword at his side in a long curving sheath.
He’s handsome and clean-shaven, with a mop of brown hair and bright blue eyes.
Behind him I can see some Cavcante thugs, but at a gesture from him they hold back outside the entrance.
“Kycilea,” he says, his cultured Hod accent thick enough to chew.
“You’re looking well,” Ky says. “For a traitor.”
“And you,” he says calmly, “have looked better.”
The room is big and empty, the floor scattered with miscellaneous debris left behind when the trash was last swept out.
It’s an obstacle course in the semi-darkness.
I nearly trip twice and step in something soft and pungent.
I fish Star’s sigil out of my pocket, using its faint red glow to light the way.
Gestian begins walking sideways. Ky mirrors him, the two pacing out the perimeter of an imaginary circle. His hand rests on the hilt of his sword, but he makes no move to draw.
“I have a little speech,” he says conversationally.
“About how you should come back with me and everything will really be fine. You’ll just have to marry some brainless idiot, bear a son or two, and then we can pack you off somewhere to live out your days in comfort.
I put it in nicer terms than that, obviously; it’s really quite touching.
” He pats his breast pocket. “Any point to my breaking it out?”
“I’m going to kill you,” Ky says.
“No,” Gestian says with a heavy sigh. “I thought not.”
He shrugs, and his coat comes off his shoulders and flutters to the ground behind him. He stretches one arm, then the other, limbering up.
Ky whips her sword open, the segments flipping into place, snik snik snik. Gestian chuckles.
“Still using that silly thing? No sigwork is as good as honest metal, you know. A weapon like that will give out on you just when you need it most.”
“It was good enough for Father,” Ky says, still circling.
“And look where he ended up, eh?”
Ky snarls and darts forward. Gestian draws and strikes in the same motion, impossibly fast, and the weapons meet with a spray of sparks.
In the next instant Ky is rolling across the floor.
She slides to a halt not far from me, and my heart stops in my chest. Then, slowly, she pulls herself up to one knee.
“You find what you were looking for?” she says quietly.
“Yeah.” I stomp on the floor. The tile beneath me has the right marking, barely visible by the sigil’s glow—if I lever it up, there’s a sewer entrance underneath. But Gestian is stalking toward us. “We’ll need a minute to use it.”
“He’s not going to give us a minute.”
“Can you beat him?”
“On a good day? Maybe.” She raises her arm; there’s already a shallow cut there, weeping blood. “I’m not having a very good day.”
“Kycilea?” Gestian calls. “Have you changed your mind? I’d hate to have to call in my low-class associates.”
“I’ll keep him busy as long as I can,” Ky hisses. “Think of something. Preferably while I still have all my limbs.”
Then she’s gone, striding back toward the light and the smiling Gestian. I drop to my knees and empty out my pack on the filthy floor.
Item: Star’s thief body. No chance for an ambush, but maybe good for a distraction? But if Gestian disables it, Star will be left behind.
Item: a knife. Throw it at him, maybe?
Item: a few red sigil blanks, empty clay circles for emergency repairs. Worse than useless.
Item: my climbing gloves, still damaged. Not much help there.
Item: a small sack of fried mash balls. I don’t remember packing that. Somi must have slipped it in while I wasn’t looking.
So… what?
“Really?” Gestian says as Ky drops into a fighting stance across from him. “Do we need to play this out? I taught you everything you know.”
“I guess we’ll see if I was a good student,” Ky growls.
This time she waits, sword up. After a moment Gestian sighs.
He comes forward so smoothly he looks like he’s gliding on air, sword whipping around so fast it leaves an arc of light behind it.
Ky sways back, just out of range, then counterattacks.
Gestian parries once, twice, launches a riposte she barely evades, steps up behind it and forces her back.
The blades tangle again and again, gleaming like lines of blood in the dim red light.
There are sigils in Star’s inert body, sigils in the gloves. I don’t have my tools, but I can wrap wire by hand. But what does that get me? MOVE won’t help, RESIST, PERCEIVE—I know how to build runics, not weapons. If I had an EXPLODE, that would be something—
Ky gives a pained grunt and drops to one knee. Gestian slips past her, whipping blood off the tip of his blade. He could spin and take her head off from behind, but he doesn’t. Not yet.
“First rule of being a sword instructor,” he says brightly, “is that I never teach someone everything I know, in case I have to kill them someday. Wise, wouldn’t you say?” He clicks his tongue as Ky slowly regains her feet. “Oh dear. Still?”
“I’m going to kill you,” she rasps, her voice thick with pain. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Stubbornness was always your least attractive quality,” Gestian says. “Ah, well. I hope your future husband has a thing for scars.”
Fuck. I could—
I could open the way, drop down, and escape without her. What does Gestian care about me?
She must have known it was a possibility. But she left me to work without a second thought. Trust? Or just the acknowledgment of the way it had to be?
Some of that must have leaked through, because Star’s voice echoes in my mind.
[Query: would you have abandoned me?]
Never.
I need an EXPLODE. Since I haven’t got one, I’ll have to make one. I grab the knife and a sigil blank and start to carve.
Making sigils isn’t hard, exactly, although EXPLODE is one of the more complicated characters.
It’s not just a matter of cutting the word into the clay, though.
It pulls at the spirit, far more than activating a device.
In the workhouses, the laborers churn them out, day after day, burning their souls black until they drop dead. I try to avoid it, for obvious reasons.
Even EXPLODE isn’t exactly what I want—it burns out whatever device it’s attached to for a spike of power, which is good, but I need something that throws that power out into the world. Like EXPLODE but… more physical. No sigil I’ve ever heard of does that. I’m not even sure where to start, but—
Somehow I feel it. The knife moves easily. Something tugs at my spirit, drawing pieces of me into the clay, but it doesn’t hurt like I’d expected. It feels… right. In a moment my hand stops moving. The sigil under the blade feels primed and ready. It says EXPLODE, almost, but not quite.
That’s only half the work. I move as though in a trance, opening Star’s thief body and my climbing gloves, yanking out pieces.
STRONG and FAST, and a LIGHT noun from the optics, wired in backward in a way that makes sense only in my fevered imagination.
The thing that takes shape is a dense ball of sigils and threading wire, not a proper device at all.
I turn back to the fight just in time to see Ky throw herself flat to avoid a horizontal sweep of Gestian’s blade.
Her own sword skitters away across the floor, fetching up nearly at my feet.
“There,” Gestian says, putting a foot on her back. “Have we expressed our feelings sufficiently for today?”
Ky twists to look up at him, her eyes bright with hatred.
I hurl the… thing and put my arm across my face.
My spirit tugs at it, and the EXPLODE-but-not triggers.
Light blooms, very bright and very fast, not running down the channels of the threading wire but bursting forth into the world.
For a brief moment, it’s as though the great sunlamps of Hod have opened at full blast; I can see the outline of my bones through my flesh.
Then it’s gone, as quickly as it grew. Gestian is staggering back, sword slashing dangerously in front of him, one hand clawing at his eyes.
Ky scrabbles blindly across the floor until I reach her and take her hand.
I grab her sword and Star’s body and lever up the floor tile, exposing a black hole in the surface of Malkuth.
We both slide through and I shut it behind us as the booted feet of Gestian’s thugs clatter in.