City Of Ruin (61 page)

He screamed an order. The Night Guard merged, locked shields above their heads and in front, utilizing the hoplon’s shape to form a phalanx formation. Arrows came crashing into them, an inexorable iron rain.

Under this metal shell, they nudged forwards.

*

Voland almost despaired at the sight of another delivery of casualties. Most of the time he felt like he was merely patching up the living dead.

Over the last two days he had slept for maybe eight hours in all. It was a job without gratitude, a life without motivation. As soon as one bed was cleared, another two bodies were waiting to use it. Time and time again, he had tentatively touched the detonator-collar round his neck, but it didn’t seem as if it could ever be removed.

A moment of peace, finally, as he seized a few minutes to take a sip of water and contemplate his surroundings. He was in a chamber of the temporary hospital, a lantern-lit hole with a few empty cups, a few bits of stale bread.

Where is she now?
he wondered.

The light suddenly blew out and he was left in darkness, uttering a weary sigh. Suddenly a wind caressed, one he was familiar with, like an old friend. Or friends.

‘Voland . . .’ they chimed.

‘. . . we’ve found you again.’

‘We want to help you, but we bring bad news.’

‘Bad.’

‘Sad.’

‘Oh, so sad.’

Voland stood up, discerning the faintest glimmer of their wraithlike wisps. The devil chorus had returned. ‘What is it?’

‘Nanzi has left us, Voland.’

‘Died.’

‘We felt it, so sad.’

‘Oh, so sad.’

Like an arrow in the heart, it struck home. He sat down, stunned. He tried to process what the Phonoi had just told him as they spun around his head. They were dizzying. He felt sick.

‘What happened?’

They told him all.

He crumpled to the floor. All meaning had petered out of his life, nothing making sense any more, and soon confusion turned to frustration turned to rage.

Nanzi. The woman he adored, the woman he had helped to save once already, the woman he had helped to craft: there was as much of him in her as there was in himself.

She’s gone
. . .

There was a void in his heart so sudden and terrifying, he did not know what to say. In this suffocating darkness he could barely breathe.
She died for those people up there, the riffraff. She had no business with their lives, and she was forced to it against her will because of a crime that should not have been thought a crime. It is their fault she isn’t with me any more . . . my Nanzi.

‘We’re so sorry, Voland.’

‘Please let us help you.’

‘You have been so kind to us.’

‘We want to make you feel better.’

Sobbing on his knees he managed a ‘Thank you’. He then wept openly in front of the Phonoi for some time – he couldn’t tell how long. Time had begun to lose any context, and slowly anger began to establish clarity in his thoughts.

When he had finally regained his composure he shuffled his way by touch towards the door. Opening it, he stood in the half-light, looking across a sea of the wounded, the dead-to-be.

It was
their
fault.

Dawn of the fifth morning, Malum was smoking a roll-up, standing at a smashed window, enjoying the contrast of the hot ash he occasionally flicked, and the cold wind. He was watching the Empire’s soldiers mount an offensive against the border between Althing and the Ancient Quarter, buffer zones lying just 0east of the city centre. The savage shouts of war seemed so remote, so unreal. Grey clouds whipped across the horizon, over violent white-tipped surf. Smoke from pyres on the outskirts formed horizontal trails blowing down across Villiren.

The floorboards whispered underfoot as JC came up to him. ‘Boss, someone to see you.’

On exiting, the man’s footsteps crunched over crumbled masonry.

After a silence came a voice: ‘Malum . . .’

Beami. He took another drag, exhaled calmly. She didn’t really bother him any more.

‘How did you find me?’

‘It’s not difficult for someone like me,’ she replied. ‘You leave enough of a trail wherever you go.’

‘Even with the city in a state like this?’ A half-hearted gesture towards the city, but she didn’t say anything. The silence provoked him, eventually, to ask, ‘Fuck do you want, Beami?’

‘I never realized just how much of this you lorded over. I mean, I knew you had all your business interests and the like, and the odd fight, but all these violent men—’

‘Fuck do you want?’ Didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to let her get the chance to affect him again.

‘Won’t you take off your mask?’

He considered his answer: ‘No.’

‘OK. Well, I tried to go back to our house – there was something I left behind, and it’s completely empty. Where did you put all our things?’

‘
My
things, mostly.’

‘Come on . . .’

‘The hell does anything I own got to do with you?’ Eventually he had to face her, a black hood revealing only the outer angles of her face. The rest of her clothing was dark-coloured and tight-fitting, and something about its condition suggested that she’d seen some action in the war. He didn’t know quite what to make of that.

Behind her, in the doorway, stood several of his men, but he motioned for them to go.

‘You’ve every right to hate me,’ Beami said.

He did and didn’t. Most of all he just didn’t care any more, and he told her so.

‘Well, that’s fine – and I don’t feel any anger towards you. I want you to know that.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t leave the city.’

‘I’ve been doing my bit for the Empire,’ Beami replied. ‘I took out several hundred Okun at the moment of invasion.’ Then, ‘That seems like forever ago now.’

‘Impressive,’ he mumbled, more jealous of that achievement than he was of her other man.

‘Look, Malum, I need a relic that I had to leave behind. Can you tell me where I’ll find it? I’ll understand if you don’t want to cooperate—’

‘Probably in the underground vault, where we keep all the gang’s hauls.’

‘So you didn’t destroy it then?’

Silence was all he offered. There was nothing to say other than of course he had fucking loved her, so wouldn’t simply get rid of her belongings just like that. But he couldn’t bring himself to actually let her know such things, preferring to leave the constructs of his ego intact. His mask . . . what was left of his sanity, intact.

‘Can you show me where that vault is?’ Beami asked. ‘I need to know, Malum. It’s urgent.’

‘No,’ he replied, and heard her gasp. ‘But someone else can show you.’

‘Thank you, Malum. Thank you so much.’

Such a pathetic tone now.
‘Whatever. Just don’t steal anything that’s not yours.’ His attempt at a joke.

She ran up to him and hugged him and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry for everything.’ Then she stepped away, but he could still feel her intense gaze.

‘You’re a different man now,’ she observed. ‘You don’t care even if you die, do you?’

‘Look after yourself, Beami.’ Malum chucked the remains of his roll-up out of the broken window. And as she left, she took all that was left of his being human. There was no need to hide from it any more.
Embrace what you are.

*

The kid couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, with blond hair slicked down in a modern style, his mask a parody of anger. Beami followed him through part of the underground over which Malum had ruled, cast-iron structures that she could barely see. Beami guessed that they now propped up the roof. Nothing human had designed these passageways, she suspected. Walking though elaborate designs, they kept veering off at odd angles, till she thought they must be heading back the way she came. Now and then they’d come to some subterranean settlement, a nexus of decayed shopfronts and bars, broken chairs littering the open spaces, though a few seemed just recently used. Given the war, they became, like the other quarters, mere ghosts of settlement.

This was how Malum genuinely existed. They had always been a spurious cover, his trading contracts, his networking, these important business operations that he couldn’t talk about. He had always consorted with devious men, but she’d never fully grasped the extent of his underlife existence.

The boy said little, just grunting occasionally to indicate a change of direction. He held up a torch, forcing shadows across her path. She asked him questions, to get a better understanding of Malum’s other life. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘How old are you?’

To the one ‘Where are your family?’ the kid eventually spoke: ‘Bloods is my family, woman.’

He carried a short blade in his other hand, clearly afraid at accompanying this cultist. With shifty glances, nervous steps, the boy led her towards the vault.

‘What are all these crates?’ Wooden boxes were piled haphazardly in the tunnel all around.

‘Drugs, sort of. Alcohol. Nothing fancy.’ It was the most he had said during their journey.

‘Is that a body?’ She gestured to one half-open crate that looked like a human arm was hanging out of it.

‘Just a golem – you know, for sex and stuff. This is the vault you want.’ A cave-like opening barred by a sturdy wooden door. The kid unlocked it and, with surprising strength, pushed it open.

As he stepped aside, he handed her the torch so she could go in first. It was an unremarkable chamber, filled with the contents of their past life together. She wasn’t even that old, so how was it possible to have accrued so much junk? Vases, rugs, brass figures, paintings, all these things were infused with memories, but she shoved them aside and searched for the better part of half an hour, while the kid stood sighing and tutting outside.

‘You gonna be much longer?’ he asked finally.

‘Nearly done.’

He had kept all her relics together in a box at the far end, untouched. She’d half expected them to be smashed up out of anger.

As soon as she found the
Brotna
relic, the cone she’d spent days working on, all her tension ebbed away. There was nothing else in the box she needed, so she grabbed it and exited the vault.

‘ ’Bout fucking time,’ the kid muttered.

*

Night, as Beami placed the relic in her small room at the Citadel. Due to the proximity of the military lines, she’d had to trek the long way around to get there. Everywhere she went, a figure from the Dragoons or Regiment of Foot would redirect her path. The invasion force had penetrated deep, had seized one half of the city, but it was still relatively safe on that side.

There were fewer than ten thousand Imperial soldiers left. A staggering number had died. Exhausted men and women, lined up time and time again to resist the incursion, their faces haunted and determined and frightened. The citizen units were now few and far between, and Beami wondered if most had been slaughtered or were stationed elsewhere. Some streets had become bloodbaths, lined with human and rumel remains, and in one road she came across the bodies of several Dragoons who had been lined up against a wall and decapitated. She forced herself to look upon this carnage, to remember what was happening here.

Safely in the Citadel, as she lay back in a chair by the fire, mentally exhausted, she forced herself to think that Lupus might still be alive somewhere on his secret mission. He was a Night Guard, for Bohr’s sake, and one of the best, but that didn’t alleviate her fears. She promised herself that the two of them would get out of this mess as soon as possible. For him the priority was his job as a soldier and, if he survived, they would leave together and find peace.

There was a knock at the door and a soldier entered.

Beami bolted up straight. ‘Have the Night Guard returned?’

‘No miss, not yet,’ the young man answered. ‘There’s a new cultist who’s just arrived, and she needs some help in finding someone. The others are all asleep, I’m afraid, so would you mind seeing to her?’

‘Who is it?’ Beami demanded, her heart sinking.

‘She said her name was Bellis, and she’s quite old.’

‘Tell her I’ll be out in a moment.’

*

Out in a dingy corridor, with soldiers rushing past them, Bellixplained carefully who she was and what she wanted. ‘I’m lookinor the boys, they’re called Ramon and Abaris, and it’s been so lonince I’ve seen either of them.’

‘I remember them.’ Beami’s voice was soothing. ‘They came to offeheir services, but I’m afraid they’re thought to have passed away in the fighting. They made an incredibly impressive golem of body parts which hampered the invasion . . . They really were very brave . . .’

‘The silly buggers,’ Bellis whispered, trying hard not to sob.

Beami came to her side and held her. ‘I’m sorry. Were you very close to them?’

‘How can I explain that bond of companionship in a world where no one regarded us of any use?’ Tears filled her eyes, and she closed them tight.