Swords of the Imperium (Dark Fantasy Novel) (The Polaris Chronicles Book 2) (34 page)

“She bleeds, does she not?”

“She
doesn’t.
I’ve come to the conclusion that she’s basically untouchable, at least to mortals like us. The surest way to kill her is to sink this boat in the middle of the ocean with her inside. Seal her forever beneath the waves.”

“What will happen to us, then?”

“We’ll die, of course.”

Ringo sighed, collapsed on a nearby bench, and rubbed at his eyes. “Fuck my life. Fuck everything!”

“There’s another way, though. At some point, she needs to get off the boat. I suspect she wanted the
Ooss
not for its power but solely as a means of transport. She has a destination to get to, and it’s on land. When she’s off the boat, we can use the God Hand to burn her off the surface of the earth.”

“That’ll never work.”

“No, it’s possible. We just need to bide our time. We’ll wait, and only when the moment is right will we strike. Now, where does she want Juan to pilot this thing, anyway?”

Ringo looked up, too sore to jape. “Due east, to some blasted heathen shithole I’ve never heard of. The coordinates are real, though, and we should be able to get there within a season.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

“The Blue Sky Land.”

Taki’s eyes weakly fluttered open under white light. His body ached, and he felt thirsty although he was pretty sure he’d drunk his fill earlier. He tried to lift his head from a down-stuffed pillow but found that he could not.
Down?
He could have sworn that he’d spent the last few days on a grimy piece of slate.

Enilna stared back at him. Taki opened his mouth to speak, only for her to shush him.
Wait,
he thought, fighting the haze brought on by her touch.
Didn’t I send you into a blizzard? Aren’t you dead?
It was becoming an effort to stay awake.
Damn that Jibriil! I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him.
He tried to rise up out of bed, and Enilna pushed his head back down onto the pillow.

“No, wait,” Taki said, rolling away. “We need to tell Lotte. Warn her about Jibriil, that we’ve been had.” With titanic effort, he managed to sit partway up.

“There’s no need, Natalis,” Lotte said. Taki looked up to see his captain’s face mere fingerbreadths away from his. She straddled his hips. Her fingertips gently pushed him supine, and the strength evaporated from his core.

“Captain, he’s a traitor!”

“My poor, loyal soldier. Rest now. Let me reward you.”

“Wait,” he moaned.

Lotte seemed not to heed him but instead, buried her face against his neck. He felt her breasts press against him and her flesh touching his loins. Teeth ripped into the meat of his chest, and he gasped in pain. Warmth covered his torso, and he sank into contented, glassy stupor. But he could not sleep, as something continued to nag at him.

“Rest,” Lotte said, and kissed him. Her breath tasted of iron.

But you smelt of cordite.
Taki’s eyes widened as the floor rumbled. He could have sworn that at the edge of his fraying consciousness, he heard gunfire and shouts. “Captain, something’s wrong.”

Lotte looked up, and her expression changed to annoyance. Her irises went from brown to red. Her features changed now, to elongate in certain areas and soften in others. The woman who stared back at him now had the perfect proportions for beauty and yet seemed incredibly cruel. She had the face of a princess.

Taki tried to push her away. “You’re not my captain.”

“And you are becoming troublesome,” the princess said. She drew back, and her jaw seemed to dislocate to accommodate an expanding maw full of spiked teeth.

Taki tried to scramble away but found his limbs too weak to move. The princess wrapped her spindly, clawed fingers around his throat. Her teeth started to close on his face. He screamed.

A sharp crack interrupted Taki’s death, and the princess’s body suddenly went limp and fell by the wayside. Her head flopped at an unnatural angle and sprayed crimson into Taki’s face. A booted foot crashed into the dead monster’s side and punted her off the bed. Taki wiped the blood away from his eyes and saw Jibriil standing over him.

“Uh…hey,” the archangel said.

Taki blinked. “You killed her.”

“Well,
yeah
. I’ve never liked Ursalan royalty, and she was about to bite your face off.” Jibriil knelt and pressed a hand to Taki’s chest.

Taki instinctively flinched but soon felt the familiar warmth of prana suffusing his core. Sensation returned to his limbs, and his fingers and toes tingled, almost painfully so. He hungered for more, so much that it embarrassed him to remember the source. But in the state he was in, Jibriil’s touch was pure succor. Before Taki was satisfied, Jibriil lifted his hand away.

“I can’t give more, sorry. Spent a lot getting here,” Jibriil said.

Taki slowly sat upright. He scanned his surroundings and grimaced to see the princess’s monstrous corpse laid out nearby. Though her face had possessed a chilling cruelty, it had been comely.
Well, before the teeth and claws came out.

The room he’d woken up in was a far cry from the miserable, rat-infested cells on the rest of the block. It was cavernous and appointed with silks and goosedown pillows strewn over the marble-tiled floor. Taki sat in a four-poster bed with a gossamer canopy hung over a mattress of ermine and sealskin throws. It was the very picture of a princess’s inner chamber, and it reeked of lavender and dried blood.

“What the hell happened to me?” Taki looked down and blushed as he realized he was naked. “What is this place?”

“It’s what it looks like,” Jibriil said. “A princess’s chambers.”

“Why the hell would there be a princess here?”

“The Rex has a daughter in every city and keep,” Jibriil said. “Helps him keep all of his castellans, barons, and counts under watch. The Teufelsbrucke is no exception. The bitch here has been draining your blood for a week. I’m not sure how you managed to wake up. Thought I’d find you more…husk-like.”

Taki patted his chest where the false Lotte had bitten him. He winced to palpate a pair of wounds similar to holes left by fangs. “How did you get here?”

“Snuck in, killed some chevaliers, and then killed her.” Jibriil fished around in an open chest and pulled out a tunic, which he tossed into Taki’s lap. “Here, get dressed. If these aren’t your size, I’m sure there are plenty more to choose from. There’s also boots and tabards, too. Goddamned man-eater, this one was. Can you walk?”

Taki slowly eased off the fur mattress and found his footing on the chilly floor. “I think so. Give me a minute.” He pulled on the tunic and noted with some distaste that it was indeed property of a former Ursalan squire. He stumbled over to where Jibriil had pointed and gritted his teeth as he beheld a pile of discarded outerwear. How many others like him had fallen victim to the monster?
She collected their clothing.
The thought made him want to retch.

“Try to be quick about it,” Jibriil said, tapping a foot. “Won’t be long till they discover the bodies. I don’t want to be here when they do.”

Taki grunted and obliged. He threw on a richly embroidered, padded tabard and secured it with a thick leather belt. After he tried on a few ill-sized boots, he found a pair that seemed to fit. As he rummaged further, a glint caught his eye. It was a small dagger in a leather sheath, and the only weapon he’d seen in these chambers.

Jibriil seemed busy poking at the corpse. Taki silently reached into the pile, took the sheath, and secreted it under his tabard and out of sight. They made no sense, Jibriil’s actions.
First he gains my trust, then he sells me out, and now he’s come to rescue me? For what purpose?
The dagger’s weight reassured him. When the moment was right, he’d use it to kill the archangel and be done with everything.
But right now, I need to get out of here, and he seems to know the way.
Just to be sure, he patted the weapon’s hilt under his clothing. “I think I’m good,” Taki said. “What now?”

Jibriil nodded in approval. “Now, we get the hell away from here, sneak outside the walls, and hope that your friends don’t blast us on sight.”

“Wait! What about my friends?”

“Ah, you can’t hear it down here because we’re so deep in. Sir Taki, the Teufelsbrucke is under attack. The Imperial Army’s at the gates.”

High above the Devil’s Bridge, blazing jars of pitch arced from catapults, leaving smoky contrails in the air. The missiles smashed against the Teufelsbrucke and sprayed liquid flame
through its gunports. The men hiding behind were turned into a screaming mass of melting limbs.

On the ramparts above, a Templar swiveled an ancient relic around on a pintle, aimed at an advancing column of Imperials, and pulled the trigger. On the ground, troops wavered, fell to their knees, and burst into flames. Others rolled on the ground, screaming and choking as their vestments smoked and their blood boiled. The Templar swiveled the contraption and took aim at another group; before it could fire again, the back of its head exploded in a cloud of spall and brain matter.

Hadassah whooped in triumph at the hard-won kill. She worked the bolt on her rifle, and a smoking, hand-length cartridge plinked onto the rubble nearby.

“Direct hit, enemy helmet!” Irulan shouted, and swept the crenelations with her spyglass.

“Helmet?” Hadassah sniffed. “I turned his brains to baba friggin’ ganoush!”

“That’s what you
should
be doing, anyway!”

“Did we scare ’em off the death ray?”

“Aye. We’ve got to move, though. Their muskets are taking shots at us, and it’s only a matter of time until the cannonballs follow.”

The women turned around and skidded down the gravel rampart and into the trench behind it. They trudged past battered pavisiers and dusty laddermen, all lined up for a turn at the grog trough. It had only been a day since the siege began in earnest, but the strain of fighting in the thin mountain air was already taking its toll. Hadassah stopped, took a swig of cold tea from her skin, and spat.

“Doesn’t feel like we’ve got a thirty-thousand-strong army with us,” she said. “Damned bridge is no closer to the taking.”

“It’s because we’re bottlenecked,” Irulan said. “Only a few hundred can squeeze into the front lines.”

“What a shithole. I bet the entire castle’s full of traps and no naked maidens to save, either.”

“Well, there
is
Natalis.”

Hadassah spat again. “I swear, if we take this thing and some cock-puncher tells me my princess is in another castle…” She hefted her behemoth of a gun over her shoulders, almost knocking down a pair of fighters. They cursed at her, but she silenced them with a glare. “To the breastworks, spotter. We’ve got shitlords to remove.”

Nearby, Lotte crouched with Aslatiel and two leutnants behind a battered mantlet. Bullets smashed into its pockmarked face in chaotic rhythm, and the men flinched to hear it. Lotte peered around its side and quickly pulled herself back to avoid garnering attention.

“Just as before, there’s no end to them,” she said. “Can we use the mortars yet?”

“Aye,
effendi,
” one of the officers, a janissary, said. “But they are too far back. We would hit our own men while we bombarded the fortress.”

“I won’t allow that. At least not without a good trade in Ursalan lives. Von Halcon, how fares the engine?”

Aslatiel seemed to disregard her at first. He knelt with his eyes closed and his palm splayed out on the ground. Before he could be accused of rudeness, he emerged from out of his trance and nodded to her. “It’s ready. It will be coming up the road to the bridge within minutes!”

True to his word, the ground started to rumble, and gravel danced in place. As the siege engine came into view, a roar of approval rippled through the entrenched mass of Imperials. Standing twenty meters tall, it was clad in thick metal scales and boasted carronades to spray a castle’s defenders with grapeshot. A tower that heavy would have been impossible for men or horses to propel, but this one was powered by fuel and the knowledge of the ancients.

“A fine and terrible beast! If only I’d had one the first time,” Lotte said, shaking her head.

“Infantry Commander,” Aslatiel said. “Withdraw the ladders but keep up your fire. Draw the enemy’s wrath away from the tower.”

“Effendi,” the man replied.

“Are you ready, Satou?”

“Aye,” Lotte said. “I’ve waited for this day for years. Now I’ll show you the wrath of an archangel.”

Aslatiel clapped her on the pauldron. “For the glory of the padishah. And, for your revenge.”

“I’d best not keep my date waiting.”

As the siege tower rolled past, Lotte emerged from behind the mantlet and hopped up to the lower deck. Berserkers in plate twiddled axes and halberds and shifted restlessly in anticipation of the fight to come. As she strode through the mass of fighters, they wordlessly parted to allow her passage.