Palace of glass, p.16
Palace of Glass, page 16
“I’ll take that as a no, then.” Cris stood and folded her arms in front of her chest, a focused expression on her face. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“Moving stuff?” Leil guessed. “Computers? Guns? Furniture?”
“I don’t think it’s furniture,” Ivern said.
The screen blurred for a second—a drop of rain on the lens, by the way it moved. When it cleared, Amerand was in sight again, waving for someone to come out of the back of the truck.
A second later, everyone in the room sucked in a breath.
Allish had seen the machine before—a crystal-powered robot in the shape of a giant, saber-toothed cat—and the memories it brought weren’t good. She shivered as it stepped into view, stretching up to its full height when it came down out of the truck, its mechanical head lifted as if to sniff its surroundings.
It had almost killed Ivern the last time she’d seen it. Amerand had been there, too, half defeated in the wings. And the cat had come crashing through the ceiling like some kind of vengeful Elemental god—which, if she believed everything she’d heard about it, it kind of was.
Spirits like the cat had been worshiped. Probably still were, by some people. She knew at least one witch who still honored old, polytheistic deities. The cat was, if she remembered correctly, a very old spirit.
And, based on her last experience with it, largely immune to command.
When Amerand had set it loose in Kjaran, it had hunted down more Mageguard than any of the Mages actually attacking the building. And now, he had introduced it to the modern streets of Mersetzdeitz.
What was he thinking?
“Has he figured out how to control it?” Cris’ lip had twisted into a sneer. Having been one of the attackers at Kjaran, she had also witnessed the cat’s indiscriminate destruction.
“Perhaps,” Ivern said. “I can’t imagine how, though. It didn’t look much interested in making deals last time.”
“Maybe he found a way to feed it?” Allish suggested. “It was killing because it was hungry, right? With the energy drain?”
Cris swore. “He should have left it inside the crystal.”
“He should have, yes,” Ivern said. “But I’m guessing he has plans for it now.”
Amerand lifted a hand as the cat dipped its head toward him, holding it up as if for it to sniff. Everyone else in the video, she noticed, kept a healthy distance from it.
When the cat was finished, it put its shoulder to him and turned its nose back into the air. Green light flared along its body—tiny, symmetrical lines that criss-crossed its back like neon—and opened its mouth, stretching to its full height and buckling the ground beneath its great paws as magic shifted through its Element.
In the next second, it leaped off, apparently scaling the brick wall of the building across the alley.
“Oh, heras.” The color drained from Cris’ face. “He’s sent it hunting.”
Ivern pulled his phone out and started dialing. “Who do we know in that area?”
“Wes, Drydein, and Janine live there, on the edge,” Cris said. “Oh, god, she has a small daughter.”
“I’ve got her number. Cris, find whoever you can. We need to be on the ground for this.”
“I’ll go,” Allish said. “I know that district. I can find it.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You’re too valuable.”
Anger slammed into her bloodstream. “I’m the only one who has hurt that thing before.”
“She’s right,” Cris said. “The rest of us can’t even get close. It’s too strong.”
“No. I—” Ivern jerked his head as a woman’s voice answered his call, her voice small and tinny through his cell phone speakers. “Janine? Tienie l’ia prenna. Racta sier…”
While he was distracted, Allish met Cris’ eyes. “I’m going.”
As the edges of the world blurred her into a teleport, the Earth Mage didn’t do a single thing to stop her.
Chapter 19
North-East Mersetzdeitz was a neighborhood punctuated by rows of varyingly-styled townhouses and apartment buildings, most at least twenty years old. It wasn’t the first neighborhood that she’d have thought a Mage to live in—at least, not the sorts of Mages that Ivern and Cris knew. Mages, with all of their powers, seemed to always have a boost up in the world that a regular person didn’t have.
But then, she’d forgotten that all Mages were refugees, too.
She appeared atop a small office building—one of the few taller structures to linger in the areas away from Mersetzdeitz’s four central Cores—and the Sylph slammed into her blood like an ice flow. Cold spread through her body, chilling the human parts of her away into the spirit’s calculating, efficient mind.
Worry and panic did not affect the Sylph. She was an entity that ran on different emotions—on anger, on aggression, on the more complicated, cutting bias of revenge.
She was an entity far more suited for killing than Ivern would ever care to admit.
Allish scanned the area, whispering to the next rooftop over as easily as taking a step. The wind was up, cuffing her loose hair around her shoulders, making her clothes snap and flap, whistling around the sides of the building. She listened to it, listened for the sounds the Sylph had been raised to bear.
Death. Panic. Chaos.
The spirit hadn’t always been like that. Not in folklore, anyway. Most classic stories played Sylphs as wholly benign and largely harmless, with the naivety of a child and the sweet, dedicated, whole-hearted love that ancient playwrights favored in their moralistic stories.
But her Sylph was different. She was a spirit born out of betrayal, a spirit designed to subvert that old, sugar-glazed trope. She was cold, calculating, and utterly ruthless—Elemental in the most literal sense of the word, and so completely primal as to be a hard, determined match for the ancient cat that now prowled through the streets of the North-East.
A soft call came to her on the wind, a warble so warped and tinny that it tasted like metal on her tongue.
Her head snapped to the side, honing in on a spot beyond the rooftops and sloped turrets.
There.
She threw herself into the wind and let it carry her, felt the shift in corporealism as she drifted through an eddy, parts of her body slipping and vanishing. In truth, she wasn’t entirely sure if she was human anymore, not since she’d struck that bargain with the Sylph—perhaps even a little before that, when her body, soul, and Element had been ripped apart and she’d been left drifting, a scattered consciousness trying desperately to string the thoughts and form of herself, her being, into a coherent form.
Perhaps then, she had ceased being wholly human.
She landed in a crouch on the steeply-slanting roof of another set of town homes, caught her balance on the shingles, and peeked over the edge.
A dull shock went through her.
The street had been pulverized. Great scores of concrete chunks had been ripped away, some of them smashing into front yards and windows. Fissures criss-crossed the road, digging deep enough into the underlayers that she caught glimpses of metal amid the wreckage—part of Mersetzdeitz’s buried infrastructure. Further on, the road buckled into itself, concrete and asphalt running together like folds in an accordion.
When she caught sight of the first body, the scent of bile rose to the back of her throat.
The woman was not young—an adult, at least, judging by her clothes and the length of her body. She lay still on the sidewalk, folded up into a position that, had she been conscious, would have been deeply uncomfortable. Her long black skirt had ridden up, exposing a shock of white skin from her calf.
Even from this far, Allish knew she wasn’t breathing.
She stood slowly and scanned the rest of the area. Nothing moved. From above, the first few drops of rain splashed against her skin.
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed Cris.
“It went through the intersection of Powell and Kartani North. One dead.”
There was a pause on the other line. Static crackled across the connection, sounding like rain.
“Got it. We’ll be there soon.”
The Mage hung up.
Allish pushed the phone into her pants pocket and climbed one step to the apex of the roof, scanning the area.
Now wasn’t the time for conversation.
Now was the time to hunt.
The Sylph pushed across her thoughts, darkly analytical. Together, they found another body—an older man, lungs crushed, barely visible behind a raised garden on the opposite side of the street—but, by now, she had compartmentalized her mind behind the Sylph’s ruthless indifference. She could feel for them later. Now, she had to stop the cat from killing anyone else.
She stayed on the rooftops, following the lines of damage up the street below. Strangely, it tapered down to an ending point rather than grew stronger. She paused as she scanned the street again. Although her last experience with the cat had been altogether brief, it had been memorable—the cat hadn’t struck her as a calculating creature. It had moved on instinct, chased her through a building because the Sylph’s energy made her both an interesting thing and a larger meal to consume than the Mages who had surrounded her.
Plus, she had run.
Any predator would have chased her.
But the marks on the street were different—as was the body that had been left behind.
It almost looked like the cat had fought something.
Had that woman been a Mage? Or, and this was a longer shot, one of the few basic Elementals that her home planet had birthed? She hadn’t recognized her from any of her remedial magic-learning classes, but that certainly didn’t exclude her.
She turned her attention back to the ruined street and asked herself the question she should have asked at the very beginning:
What was the cat doing here?
Metal crunched to her left, and she spun around—but it was only an old weather vane, creaking in the wind. A few drops of rain splashed across her hand and cheek.
On the inside, the Sylph twitched in anticipation. Her fingers tensed into claws, itching for a fight.
Allish slipped to the next building and followed the street onward, searching for more signs of where it had gone.
She wasn’t sure where she was going—without a damage trail to follow, the cat was much harder to track, and it hadn’t been inclined to make any more noise since the cry that had led her to the scene.
Just how fast was it moving, anyway? Allish had seen it clear twenty meters in a single jump, but that didn’t mean it was. Especially with damage like what she’d seen on the street.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Cris.
“Have you found it?” the Mage asked.
“No. Where are you?”
“We just found the body.”
“Was she a Mage?”
“I think so. We’re checking her ID right now. Any idea where the cat went?”
“I’m working on it. The trail ends pretty quickly. Can you sense anything? Through your Element?”
“No. There’s too much noise here.”
Allish swore. “Any ideas?”
“Some. You keep doing your thing. I’ve got some other people on the ground. We’ll find it. I… did you hear that?”
A low rumble sounded in the distance, slow and rolling like a thunderclap.
Or an explosion.
“I’m on it.”
She shoved the phone back into her pocket and shifted into a teleport.
A half-second later, she found herself on another rooftop, guided by the Sylph’s instinctual homing system.
The street was a line of townhouses—each side filled with cookie-cutter brickwork homes that had severe, sloped rooflines and a trim on their eaves that was so white, it looked nearly new. Front lawns and gardens were kept from the street by a set of decorative brick walls topped with wrought iron stakes. The scent of lavender came up from the nearest garden, mixing with the grit and tar of the roof.
A complex near the end of the street stood out, not only because its semi-brutalist, modern façade with gray walls and square sides mixed badly with the rest of the street’s quaint charm, but also because its front half had collapsed into a heap of rubble.
People were filtering onto the street from their homes, gawking at the sudden destruction. At least one person was on their phone, no doubt calling the authorities.
She didn’t have much time.
With barely a whisper, the Sylph teleported her inside.
A slab of concrete had fallen across the main entrance, its corner smashed deep into the house’s sleek, bamboo flooring. A second slab—part of what used to be a decorative half-wall, she guessed—lay in two pieces across the path. The hallway light buzzed from the ceiling, providing an insubstantial, dim yellow glare in the growing darkness.
She climbed over the ruin, following the hallway deeper into the house. Hundreds of tiny cracks spread across the walls, starting like scratches on ice and quickly changing to deeper, heavier gouges that reminded her of the broken and crumbling sidewalks in one of her old neighborhoods.
A single, jagged rend tore into the one on her left, widening and jerking toward the floor at its other end, as if it had been deflected. A singe of smoke clouded the base of the wall in the recognizable curved shape of a Mage’s shield. Below, great chunks of the floor heaved up, forming several sharp spikes. On the wall, a picture hung at a rakish angle on its back wire, having been shaken.
Farther on, as she passed a crooked doorframe leading to the kitchen, broken china caught her eye against the slate flooring, and all the pots and pans had fallen from the overhead rack on the kitchen island. A chill slipped across her forearm, raising goosebumps. Everything about the house was quiet. Still. Dead.
She paused at the bottom of a stairway, considering the upstairs. There was more light up there, but she had a feeling it came more from the streetlamp outside than any electric source within the house—and she didn’t detect anyone up there. No one breathing, anyway.
She shuddered, her mind flashing back to the folded up body from earlier. A cold, slithering sensation slipped up her spine.
Allish bypassed the stairwell and wandered down the hall instead.
The light dimmed as she moved farther in. More glass crunched underfoot, belonging to the broken bulb in the ceiling.
The hallway ended in a dim, abrupt crush of broken wall.
Squinting, and holding her breath as she strained to hear, she took out her phone, found the flashlight app, and shone it into the dark.
A jumble of broken concrete blocked her path, packed in so tight it melded into an effective, fused wall. Bent rebar stood out like broken spines, some of it twisted back into the wall.
There were no holes going directly through, but she probed it with her Element and found a space of air behind it.
She braced herself. Then, with a thought to the Sylph, she teleported in.
A man lay slumped over a table, his face turned away from her, short brown hair looking dull in the light from her phone. She stared at him, uncomprehending, a part of her wondering why he wasn’t moving even as the rest of her registered the slick spread of blood on the desk and the misshapen, concave curve of his head, and the smell of the room assaulted her—pungent, sharp, overpowering.
It hit her senses hard, overpowering the stoicism of the Sylph. Shock split her in two, and an audible buzz hummed across her mind, drowning out the room’s insidious quiet. There were other bodies, too. A woman just behind him, crushed to the floor, one of her legs shredded. Two more men beside her, only half-visible around the rim of the table. Blood spread in a smear up the wall, as if something solid had nudged it there. In the gap beneath the table, she caught sight of lumps on the floor that had spilled from the closest victim’s abdomen.
Cold threaded back across her mind like an icy current. The Sylph steadied her, but she couldn’t stop the bile that rose to the back of her throat. She forced it back with a whimper and looked up, trying to ground herself. A set of computer monitors, a much more sophisticated version of the ones they had back at the apartment, stood on the back wall, almost parallel to where they had theirs. The left-hand one was on, playing static. She tried to ignore the way the light reflected wetly around the room.
Her head reeled as she spotted the blood smears at the bottom and the lump of a person on the floor. The room blurred, spun.
Then, between one second and the next, she was not alone.
She whirled with shock, arms raising, then stopped when she recognized Cris.
The Earth Mage stood next to the wall behind her, runes of green magic sparking across her skin. Her expression twisted as she took in the room, flickering with the same emotions that Allish felt rising inside her.
Disbelief. Sickness. Grief. Anger.
“Dear gods.” Her voice broke, and she appeared to struggle to take another breath, to push her emotions down.
Allish swallowed hard. “Did you know them?”
“Some.” Cris shook her head and stepped forward, face hardening as she surveyed the dead. “How many? Fifteen?”
She hadn’t counted. In the dark, Cris could do that better with her Earth Element.
“Fifteen,” the Mage confirmed, almost to herself. A small, desperate noise strangled her throat. “Hieln.”
As Allish returned her gaze to the bodies, there wasn’t much else to say. Silence filled the room, punctuated by a slow, dripping sound that she didn’t want to think too hard about. The smell of blood was overpowering, a wet mix of copper and rust, combining with the headier scent of meat and viscera.
The room blurred a second time. Hot tears slipped down her face.
But another emotion had been building for a long time. One that she and the Sylph had a lot of experience with. It rose within her, made her muscles shake, her breath come short. She sputtered out a savage, guttural swear from her home language and bared her teeth at the room.
A second later, she whirled on Cris.
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