Blood and Bone (31 page)

The priest led them on, scampering over fallen rigging and splintered timber. The light of the day waned, but slowly, lingering in a long twilight tinged by green from the arc of the lurid glowing Banner, the Visitor, foretelling whatever apocalypse one preferred. Considering the nature of their own errands, it was now hard for her to continue to dismiss these dire predictions as nonsense.

As she climbed over the ruins of the Meckros city – just the first of
many
calamities to come? – she wondered whether it was their own actions that were in fact calling the Banner down upon them. After all, it was said that the Shattered God had fallen from the sky ages ago, drawn down by humanity’s hubris and blindness. Could they not be somehow contributing to a second Great Destruction and the annihilation that was said to have followed?

She paused on a canted platform of decking.
In fact, why should I believe I would even survive such a world-shattering impact and conflagration? Disavowed or no?

Petal arrived at her side, panting, his shirt stained dark with sweat. ‘You are troubled?’ he asked, studying her.

‘Yes. I am quite troubled …’

‘I feel it too. Many eyes upon us. But I cannot get a grip upon them – their minds are strange.’

‘Tell Skinner.’

‘Very good.’ The big fellow moved on awkwardly, using handholds to steady himself.

Mara watched him go without really seeing him. Could their actions be ensuring this Banner’s impact? Could she be complicit in a second Great Fall?

And why by all the gods had she not considered this before?

She realized she’d fallen behind and hurried to catch up.

She found Skinner confronting a cringing anxious priest: the man was wringing his hands and peering about for escape like a cornered dog. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked Petal.

Skinner raised an armoured finger. ‘This man has been leading us in circles for hours.’

‘It’s moved, I tell you!’ the priest shrieked. ‘It’s moving.’ He thrust out a hand. ‘It’s behind us now!’

‘Moving …’ Skinner mused within his helm. He swung a gauntleted hand, smashing the priest to the decking. ‘You fool! You’ve allowed it to lead us exactly where it wants us!’ The priest lay mewling, wiping at the blood streaming from his squashed nose. Skinner’s blade slid soundlessly from its wood sheath.

Mara and Petal put their backs to his, forming a rough triangle.

‘How many?’ Skinner asked Petal.

‘Many.’

‘Mara?’

‘What can I do on this unsure footing? Everything’s split already!’

Their commander growled his displeasure. ‘Well … let us see what we’ve walked into.’

Mara eyed the surrounding canted huts, heaps of fallen equipment,
and
platforms and decks all of differing levels and angles. From among this maze shapes emerged. The deepening purple of twilight lent them an even greater horror. Malformed humans they were; shambling, so distorted as to be near caricatures of the human form. Many possessed huge curving crab-like claws as long as swords and now she understood the many cracked bones scattered across the wreckage. ‘What
are
they …?’ she breathed, speaking her thoughts aloud.

‘The influence of the shard, no doubt,’ Petal answered, as literal-minded as ever.

‘Can you affect them?’

‘Barely, I suspect.’

Damn. I dare not let loose myself – this wreckage would fly apart beneath us
.

The creatures shambled forward and she saw now that she was wrong in her first suspicion that these were the poor unfortunates of the Meckros city now transformed by the Crippled God’s contamination into monstrosities of claw and shell carapace. No human form could endure such fundamental deformities. Six limbs? Backward-bending joints? Gaping mouths full of worm-like appendages? Surely these must be local denizens of the reef, crab, lobster, prawn and other crustaceans, warped now into mockeries of the human form. Such a conceit must have amused the Shattered God – what mattered the shape of the flesh when all was alien and strange?

It also explained why Petal’s Mockra-based magics would have so little effect: these minds were not human to be clouded, confused or broken.

The creatures were however still flesh and blood, and Mara gestured, drawing as lightly as she could upon D’riss. A bare few of them staggered backwards. The priest, she noted peripherally, was nowhere to be seen.

Skinner stepped up. His mottled black and magenta blade blurred. Limbs fell away in gushes of clear fluids. Carapaces sheared off, cut through entirely. The mob of anatomical impossibilities swerved before him and she and Petal ducked away to give him room to lay about himself fully. She climbed up what might have once been a deckhouse while Petal heaved himself into the rigging of a tilted mast.

Skinner wrought havoc among the creatures but more and more came dragging themselves up, many still wet from the lagoon. Enormous crab claws grated across his glistening scaled coat, unable to catch any purchase or penetrate its invested metal. A great pincer
as
hefty as a bastard sword closed on the man’s thigh and he snarled his agony, slicing through the shell exoskeleton. The jagged-toothed pincer fell away as it too was not powerful enough to break through Ardata’s sorceries. Yet Skinner limped now, the leg perhaps numb.

A sharp whistle sounded, cracking like a whip across the decking. It was followed by a strange series of poppings and cracklings. The creatures all backed away. Some new figure came pushing its way through the monstrosities. So strange was this thing that it took some time for Mara to understand just what she was looking at. It was a jerking, walking mechanism of rusted metal bands and wire. Its creaking and whirring reached her like the sounds water clocks and other such automata make as they run and turn. Yet this was not the most eerie thing about this manifestation: what was ghastly was the fact that it wore over its metal torso, like a cape or a robe, the flayed skin of a human being. And stuck on a metal rod jutting above the body lolled a rotting severed head.

‘Greetings!’ boomed a hollow metallic voice.

Now Mara knew they faced magery as well, for the creature seemed to have spoken in Dal Hon, which she knew was a virtual impossibility.
So, not
just
an automaton wearing a cloak of flayed human skin
…

‘I sense the one I name Kasminod has sent you. I believe I saw one of his rats!’

‘Who are you?’ Skinner called. He still held his blade ready – though Mara wondered what the weapon could possibly do to a creature without flesh.

Iron and bronze screeched and grated as the thing described a shallow bow. Through gaps in the tattered skin Mara glimpsed within its torso coils of rusted metal tightening then expanding like the workings of a showpiece clock she saw once in Tali. ‘I am Veng. King Veng. Welcome to my kingdom.’

Skinner made a show of peering about. ‘Your kingdom, Veng, is sinking.’

More high-pitched scraping of metal as Veng shrugged the rods and wire and bent straps that made up its arms – arms that ended in jagged rusted iron blades. ‘What of it? A mere change in the weather. One must make the best of change.’

‘What are you?’ Petal shouted from the rigging, and Mara almost smiled, thinking how the man would let no circumstance interfere with his curiosity.

‘Excellent question!’ the thing boomed once more. ‘What am I indeed … I have been hailed as a masterpiece of the venerated
Meckros
mechanicians. For generations I guarded this floating city – Ambajenad, it was called.’ Veng bowed again, yet jerkily, as if miming a marionette. ‘Ahh … but then the Meckros smiths sought to perfect their creation. Their deep sea nets brought up an item from the ocean’s floor. A unique item of inexhaustible power. This they placed within me and – by the gods! – I lived! No more winding or moments of darkness during which I sensed nothing. I lived … no differently from you creatures of flesh. Yet I will not die. Being of metal I am immortal and am thus far superior to you.’

Skinner motioned with his blade. ‘Why then the skin and the head?’

‘Ah, yes. Well, since I live among you I thought I ought to look the part. Convincing, yes?’

‘Extraordinarily.’ This from Petal.

Skinner nodded his helmed head as if in understanding and then he shouted, pointing: ‘I order you to stand down! Your job is finished.’

A spine-grating screech of metal scraping sounded then from the creature and Mara realized this was its laughter. The head rocked obscenely as Veng edged closer. ‘Too late for orders – but a worthy gambit. No. No more orders for Veng now. Veng is king and King Veng gives the orders now. And Veng’s order is …’ it raised its two jagged blades, ‘death.’

The creature charged. Yet so too did Skinner. They met in a blacksmith’s ring of clashing metal. The automaton’s blades of toothed and notched iron caught and snagged at Skinner’s weapon. The guardian swung with inhuman power, his blows like battering rams that Skinner slipped or barely edged aside. Their commander thrust through the creature’s guard easily. His blade pierced the workings of the torso and Mara heard wires pinging like plucked instruments and metal bands grating. None of these strikes appeared to trouble the automaton.

One thrust from the monster, as deadly quick as a released crossbow, struck her commander only to rebound from the black scales of the man’s coat. Such a blow would have penetrated any other armour but this unique scale seemed true to its reputation: utterly impenetrable.

Yet the power of the thrust had been immense – like the release of a siege engine – and Skinner now clutched his side, parrying one-handed. Ribs broken, probably.

Veng pressed its advantage. Its weirdly articulated limbs spun and lashed with even greater speed. It appeared to Mara that no swordsman could hope to continue to deflect such a storm of blows. No
doubt
Skinner understood this too as at that instant he closed, dropping his blade, to hug the creature.

The two slid and scraped together in a grating of iron as the creature’s metalwork scoured Skinner’s coat of scale. Veng’s blades slashed his back in blows like the hammering of mattocks.

Skinner thrust a gauntleted hand into the innards of Veng’s torso. Wire popped and rang, metal screeched. The creature let out a shriek like iron pushed past its endurance. Skinner twisted bands and wires and cylinders of wound metal strips. What sounded like a panicked shriek of tearing bronze escaped Veng. It lurched as if attempting to escape, dragging Skinner with it. The two fell in a tangle of limbs and rolled to a break in the fractured decking to slip from sight. Mara heard a great splash as they struck the surf below.

At first she could not believe what she’d just witnessed. Never had Skinner been bested. The surrounding monstrosities, however, did not take heart from what they saw; they squealed and chattered and clicked in what appeared to be a wave of panic. It seemed that Veng – or the thing within it – might have held some sort of compelling control over them. Summoning her Warren, Mara cast a wave of pressure in a swath across the decking, sending them and all the wrack of loose abandoned equipment tumbling backwards. This broke the creatures and they scattered in a lurching rush for the sides. In moments the deck was clear of them. Mara climbed down to cross to the break in the timbers.

Waves surged below, crashing among the black rocks of the reef. It seemed to her that the force of those breakers might simply dash Skinner to pieces.

Petal joined her. ‘I do not see him,’ he murmured. ‘What should we do? Lower a rope?’

She peered around. ‘Where’s the damned priest?’

‘Fled. Perhaps eaten.’

‘Let’s hope he poisons them.’

Petal heaved a sigh. ‘So? What now? Shall we search?’

‘No. If he’s alive he’ll make for shore. If he’s dead – he’s dead.’

‘And the fragment?’

Rising, she brushed off her robe. ‘I really do not give a damn.’

Petal released his lower lip. ‘Very good. We return to shore then.’

They found the raft unmolested where they’d left it. Veng seemed to have been quite certain of itself. Heaving off they made little progress towards shore until Mara tapped her Warren to provide a force that allowed the raft to push through the breakers and advance to the distant line of surf that marked the strand.

On the beach they found the priest awaiting them, bouncing and twitching, his hair a dripping greasy mass of tangles. ‘Well?’ the man demanded. ‘Do you have it? Give it to me.’

Mara brushed him aside but he would not be put off. He hopped from foot to foot before her. ‘Ha! You do not fool me. You would keep it. Use it. Fool! Go ahead – it will consume you!’

‘Shut up.’

‘I will start a fire,’ Petal said.

‘And find us something to eat.’

The big man nodded ponderously. ‘Yes, yes. Always it is me sent to lure in a hare or two. Or …’ he raised a thick sausage-like finger, ‘lobster, perhaps?’

Mara stared at the man. ‘Enchantress forgive us, Petal. Did you just try a joke?’

‘I judged it potentially amusing – given the recent unappetizing display of—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mara interrupted before he could go on and describe the entire spectacle. She waved him off. ‘And a fire.’