His first opponent came back in, her shield raised, sword probing toward his ribs. Gyre faded to his left, meeting her crosscut with his own blade, and the ghoul weapon shivered and whined as it scraped against the unmetal. The soldier disengaged and slashed high, bringing her shield around to block his counterstroke, but the shadows speeding ahead of her attack let Gyre duck neatly under the blow. He angled his sword up and thrust into her armpit, where the overlapping insectoid armor had a gap, and it sliced easily through the resilk and leather underneath. After a frozen moment of shock, Gyre stepped away, silver blade bloody to half its length, and the Legionary collapsed with a clatter of unmetal.
Gyre let his concentration slip, and the shadow-world fell away. Pain pounded in his temples and all around his new eye. He glanced down at the energy bottle—a simple metallic cylinder with a thin line of inlaid crystal around its circumference—and saw that its soft glow had dimmed considerably.
Kit hit him from behind, wrapping both arms around him and nearly lifting him off the ground in her excitement.
“That was amazing!” She bounced against him, staring down at the fallen Legionaries. “Chosen defend—well, I mean, obviously not—I’ve never seen anyone move like that. You were—and you just—”
“Kit!” Gyre tore free of her grip. “Did you find it?”
“Of course I found it!” Kit opened her pack to display the metallic gleam of the Core Analytica.
“Then, let’s get out of here.”
He glanced at the two soldiers—the woman lay unmoving, but the other one was feebly struggling to rise. Gyre sheathed his sword and reached for the trigger arcana, only to find Kit pressing against him again, rising to her toes to kiss him with desperate energy. It was a moment before Gyre found the presence to pull away.
“I thought we weren’t … whatever I thought we were,” he said. “What happened to a moment of weakness?”
“Fighting makes me horny,” Kit said. “So do explosions. Do it!”
Doomseeker. Gyre suppressed a sigh and flipped up the metal grille, pressing his finger against the second crystal. Moments later, another bomb went off with a crump and plume of smoke and dust. A section of the garden’s outer wall vanished in the haze.
“And there’s our exit.” Kit looked in the storehouse, then at the two Legionaries with their armor and blaster rifles, and heaved a sigh of her own. “If only we could carry more of this stuff.”
“We don’t need the money,” Gyre reminded her as they ran toward the billowing smoke.
“I know,” she said, giving him a bright grin. “But it’s the principle of the thing.”
Chapter 22
It had been the most frustrating two weeks of Maya’s life.
She’d known, from the moment she explained to Beq that Tanax would be coming with them, that his presence would make things difficult. While Tanax himself had been scrupulously correct in accepting Maya’s authority, Beq stiffened up automatically in his presence. Maya wasn’t able to find any time alone with her during the first day’s walk, and by evening they’d reached Uqaris, a dusty little city that had grown up around the Auxiliary garrison for this section of the border.
They’d been fortunate in their timing, and a caravan was leaving for Grace the following morning. The caravan master, an expansive, portly woman named Kerchwite with a magnificent thatch of green beard, was happy to accept Maya’s thalers and offer the three of them a place among her party. Maya had expected a string of small wagons, like the one she and Jaedia had traveled in, but Kerchwite’s were six-wheeled monsters pulled by four thickheads apiece, practically rolling houses. When night fell, she and her caravanners erected large, comfortable tents, in which she’d generously offered Maya and her companions a spot. Maya couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse, and so they spent every night among laughing, drinking merchants, listening to stories and bawdy songs and with no privacy whatsoever.
It would have been less frustrating if there had been anything to do. After all, Maya had reminded herself, they were out here to find Jaedia, not so Maya could sneak in time with her crush. But Kerchwite’s guards and their dogs had the plaguespawn threat well in hand, butchering the small monsters that were drawn to the caravan. They didn’t need her help, and in any event Maya wasn’t sure how much use she could be without revealing herself as a centarch.
In the evenings, Tanax stayed aloof from the rest of the merchants and guards. Maya tried to fit in—Jaedia had once told her a centarch ought to be able to make herself at home in any company—but the sight of Beq sitting in silence at the edge of the tent drew her away again. When she went to keep Beq company, though, neither of them seemed to have much to say among the shouting and dicing. And so two weeks passed in relative comfort but considerable awkwardness, as the caravan wound its slow way across the plain.
The land near the border with the Kingdom of Grace—called the Red Kingdom by the locals, after the colors worn by its soldiers—was flat and grassy, watered by small, meandering streams. It was grazing country, speckled with cows and dotted by small homesteads. These buildings were ringed by defensive walls, and the herds they passed were guarded by well-armed riders. Each watchman was another reminder that they were beyond the boundaries of the Republic and the cordon of safety that the Legions’ sweeps and watch posts provided. Out here plaguespawn attacks were as constant and unavoidable as the rain or the wind.
The city of Grace itself lay on the other side of a range of low hills, jutting up from the flat land like lumpy pillows shoved under a bedsheet. The caravan followed the old Chosen road, a perfectly flat stretch of spongy stone, crumbling at the edges. When it reached the hills, it deigned to divert from its straight-line path to swing through a narrow gap between two large prominences. They took some time to traverse an old cut, where a chunk of one hillside had been sliced back to make room for the road; four hundred years of rain and snow had brought falls of rock encroaching on the path, and they were forced to unhitch the thickheads and use them to clear a fresh spill out of the way. Nevertheless, on the thirteenth day out of Uqaris, they crossed the spine of the hills and found themselves descending a gentle slope, with a good view of the valley beyond.
Beq, on cresting the ridge, raced to the edge of the road with an excited squeak. She scrambled up a large rock and started clicking the dials on her spectacles. For a moment Maya, hurrying after her, couldn’t quite parse what she was seeing. There was a city, a loose grid of streets and buildings, closed off by a wall on three sides. On the fourth side, an enormous thing stretched out of the ground, a cliff face leaning dangerously outward over the city—
Then her mind sorted the dirt and trees from the smooth, clean lines of unmetal, and she knew what she was looking at. Even half-buried in the earth, the silhouette of a Chosen skyfortress was unmistakable. There were drawings of them in her copy of the Inheritance, floating amid fleets of lesser skyships like cloud-bound whales. A skyfortress looked like a flattened teardrop or the business end of a spade, rounded at the back and coming to a point at the bow. All the workings and weapons were inside the unmetal hull, leaving the outside a smooth, unbroken curve of brilliant white.