Chapter 16 #2
“You have plenty of time to think out loud to me now,” I said, teasing as I leapt up nearly three meters in a bound, and when Jesamin settled against me again, her arms and legs as tight as iron bands, I pushed my hips against her, startling a back-arching reflex out of her.
Jesamin sucked in a breath. “Oh, you naughty fiend, you.”
Then she made the mistake of looking down. We’d only covered twelve meters or so. Her tan skin faded to a ghostly paleness so quickly I thought she might faint, but she jerked her eyes back to my face, lips pressed tight.
“Perhaps,” she said tightly, “It was worth compromising my dignity for this.”
I nuzzled her hair, taking a deep breath of her sweet, subtle scent, aware of a growing burn in my throat.
When next we stopped, I would have to glut on bloodpowder tea. Not only for my sake, but Jesamin’s as well; I’d reserved as much energy as possible on our descent, drinking the tea even when I lacked thirst, but I’d expended most of it on finding her and bringing her back.
The thirst was creeping up on me quicker than I’d anticipated.
Her offer last night had nearly undone me; only the fear that my primal hunger would override my caution had kept me from leaving my marks in her throat.
Even a full cauldron of reconstituted bloodpowder could hardly match the nourishment of blood from the vein.
I cleared my throat and kept climbing.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you.” Jesamin’s words were muffled, her face buried in my mane and arms tight around my neck.
“Yes, but it’ll keep.” My thighs bunched and burned, and I leapt another few meters, bypassing a section of the rock face that had sheared off into impassable smoothness.
Jesamin exhaled slowly, her limbs wrapped so tightly I felt her muscles quivering.
“Funny, how I can look over the edge of a steep drop, and as long as my feet are firmly planted, I’m fine.
But put me on a wall, and…well, I’m trying very hard not to pass out.
Ha, to think I was so confident in myself. ”
“You couldn’t have made this climb, no matter how hard you tried.”
“Is that a jab about puny human limbs?”
“It wasn’t, but it could be.” I flashed her a grin, claws scrabbling at the slick stone. “No, parts of this are like trying to climb a pane of glass. Even my claws find no purchase.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she muttered, not looking at the wall itself.
I silently thanked the ancestors as I found a grip. Jesamin didn’t need to hear my prayers spoken aloud while she was already wracked with nerves.
And perhaps if I had spoken, we wouldn’t have heard the faint sounds of screaming from overhead, the shrill noises bouncing from the glass-smooth cavern walls above us.
She lifted her head from my mane, peering up into the darkness. “Wroth?”
“I heard it,” I said grimly, and we clung there in determined silence for a long minute.
More screams. An enraged shout. And the faintest clicking and whirring, overlaid with heavy thumps, like footsteps if a giant were walking about on a hollow floor.
Jesamin met my eyes. “That’s Talos,” she whispered.
I sucked my teeth. “Marrion will hold the line. Don’t worry.”
“Let’s go,” she said urgently, her legs shifting and trembling. “We have to help them!”
“They may still be quite a way from us,” I said, but I moved swiftly as I spoke.
The only care I took was for keeping Jesamin’s back from scraping the wall; I felt sharp pains in my fingers, my claws cracking as I dug into the stone, but we ate the distance quickly.
“Sound carries oddly in these caverns. I once heard a man whispering from half a league away.”
Jesamin seemed to have forgotten the sheer drop beneath us entirely; she was twisting her head, trying to catch more noises, her eyes wide though she couldn’t see a thing.
“But they’re screaming,” she said, grimacing as her tailbone knocked into the wall. “Someone’s attacking them.”
“Or something,” I warned, lunging upwards. “Plenty of relics were left behind. Be ready.”
I sacrificed safety for speed, allowing the strength of my body to carry us upwards.
Most times, my brothers and I were careful around humans and vampires, aware that our strength was an order of magnitude beyond them; now I let Jesamin feel the full force of it, if only because she would ask me to do so if it meant we found our people sooner.
And I would do it because Marrion was up there, and if there was the slightest chance they were losing their battle, I would never forgive myself for letting my niece die alone.
The speed rattled Jesamin’s teeth. She said nothing, clinging to me with determination, but I knew every leap was bone-jarring for her, heard every breath huffed out of her lungs when she slammed into me.
But she didn’t unleash a single complaint, even encouraging me as we reached the dark edge of a massive chthonium plate, hanging over the side of the cliff.
When I made the final leap, clearing the edge of the plate and landing on the dark ground of Liuridar, she exhaled in relief and squinted beyond us.
We were in the city itself. If this were a human place, it would be the slums, the outskirts where the forgotten masses teemed; here, it was where the human chattel had moved in and out of the city, out of sight so as not to offend their masters.
But the buildings were still of Fae-make, all smooth edges and narrow windows, held together by those disturbingly organic lattices of metal laced with veins of fulmen-rich crystal.
They rose above us, high into the dark dome invisible overhead, where the will o’ the wisps winked in and out of sight like malevolent stars.
“By the Lady,” Jesamin said hoarsely, already scrabbling at the rope.
I untied it, catching her before she could slither to the ground, which she did anyway.
I imagined her legs must feel like jelly, but she still crawled on her hands and knees to the nearest building, reaching out to touch it with a shaking hand. “My gods. Wroth, it’s chthonium.”
She stroked the cold, smooth, iridescent black wall, fingers trembling.
“It’s…all chthonium. The entire city is one solid piece.” Her hand trailed downward, touching where wall and road seamlessly fused together. “How? I could study this for a lifetime, and never understand how they did this.”
A fresh burst of screams echoed down the road, and Jesamin got to her feet, wobbly but cautious.
“Stay behind me,” I warned her, holding out an arm, and for once, Jesamin didn’t even respond with a sarcastic quip. She only nodded, magnified eyes intense and focused, and pulled her pistol from its holster.
Slivers of the city ahead were visible, the faint bluish glow emanating between the buildings. Here and there, a brilliant pale light flashed and burned—the magnified fulmen of Jesamin’s golem.
Every corner was nerve-wracking. Each time we passed a blind alley, I expected something to leap from it; hungry relics and leftover creations would have sensed the pulse of living creatures long before we knew they were stalking us.
And when my vindication came, it was a terrible thing.
I immediately knew which building Marrion had chosen as a fortification for our expedition; it was windowless, spiraling upwards like a pointed seashell, nubbed with tiny protrusions.
The sigils she’d painted on its striated walls glowed brilliant crimson; she’d been working quickly, spattering blood everywhere as she painted, which may have called relics that much faster.
The blood barrier she’d formed was a sheer scarlet veil wavering over the closed door.
The booming footsteps returned, and around the side came Talos, his arms raised, a milky, viscous fluid dripping from his hands.
As soon as that austere face turned towards Jesamin, the golem stiffened, as though recognizing his mistress, and he ran for us.
He was ungainly, a behemoth of metal, but he whirled with a strange grace less than five feet from Jesamin, narrowly missing her with his spined arms and positioning himself between her and whatever he’d been bashing with his fists.
The gears in his chest spun faster, his light illuminating what prowled the edges of the building.
“Gods, is that…one of them? The Fae?” Jesamin shifted in place, raising the pistol. Her voice was shocked.
“No. That’s merely a relic. Maybe a human once, maybe an animal. Maybe something else altogether.” I flexed my fingers, sore from the climb, feeling the burgeoning weakness in a body that hadn’t fed in days.
The relic carried a man with it. A dead man, as broken and flopping as a rag doll. Jesamin gasped quietly, but from the tufts of brown hair I could see that weren’t stained with blood, it was not Rasmus lai Orros. A shame.
The Fae-made thing itself—gods only knew what it had been made from—was a biological confusion of pale flesh and raw pink sores.
It was not so large, perhaps the size of one of the mutts wandering the villages of the Rivers.
Hunched on all fours, stretched long and lean, puffing translucent sacs inflating on its back with every breath.
Three long, thick fingers graced each hand and foot; there were no nails on them.
Its head made me think that it had been human once, or bred from one: its skull was shaped roughly like a teardrop, smooth and featureless, with a gaping round hole where a human nose and mouth should be.
It chattered at us through that hole, leaking that pale, sticky liquid from long gouges in its side, and Talos raised his fists threateningly.
I made to move past him, but Jesamin touched my arm. “Save your energy, Wroth.”
“I’m going to kill that thing before it gets a lucky shot at your golem. We can’t let it live.”
“Let him shield us,” she hissed, her eyes wide with fear as the relic let out another lunatic chitter. “Let him fight. It’s what I designed him to do.”
She reached out to Talos, laying her hand flat on his shoulder. “Talos. Activate Knight Protocol.”
He jerked, hard clicks emanating from his interior, and then slumped over, looking too much like an exhausted human for comfort.
And then he straightened. The mechanical noises emanating from him filled the air, forming an almost musical pattern.
Slender steel spikes emerged from his body, from every point where there was no solid metal or glass to block their extrusion.
His hands bent backwards, folding against his forearms to form shields, and long, gleaming iron swords emerged from his wrists.
The blades began to rotate, slowly at first, picking up speed until the whirring sound was a constant buzz in the air that made my fangs ache in their sockets.
The golem strode forward, and the Fae-thing arched its back like an angry cat, chattering wildly. It picked up its human victim, swinging the entire corpse’s dead weight at Talos with astonishing strength.
I did not flinch as the body practically disintegrated on one of Talos’s spinning swords. Jesamin did, a small sound caught in her throat. But she looked over her shoulder, pistol at the ready, so entirely confident in her golem that she turned her back to watch ours.
And I knew why, once I understood what Jesamin had made. What she had meant by ‘designed’.
Talos was, from top to bottom, a walking weapon.
I watched him hunt the leftover, cornering the screeching thing and bearing down on it.
I watched him tear it to pieces, the air sacs popping under his blades, cutting through bones like a hot knife through butter.
Nothing but scraps were left when the golem turned to us, silvery lights gleaming in the dark eye sockets of his mask.
I imagined him on a battlefield. Nothing short of a cannon would stop him; even a fiend would take heavy wounds if we had to fight him.
He was, perhaps, our mechanical equal. He would scythe through men like death itself, unstoppable, blinding them with reflected lightning before those blades took them apart.
I tried to imagine how much gold King Radomil would have poured into Jesamin’s hands for a weapon like this during the Forian War, and found I could not.
I tried to imagine how many more men were out there who would tempt her with such riches if they ever knew of her talent, and found I could.
Talos lowered his arms. He was splattered from head to toe with milky blood, chin raised with smug triumph.
Jesamin sighed, so quietly even my sharp ears almost didn’t hear it.
“Weapons were always what I was best at making,” she said sadly.