Chương 36: A loss

A burst of gunfire, so rapid that it morphs into one buzzing shriek. A chunk of the cart the size of a watermelon is sheared clean off. Each bullet hole flowers to the size of a fist. Secondary explosions spit the smell of sulfur into the close-cropped tunnel. Jordan abandons the controls to dive for cover. The air becomes 50% lead by volume as four autoguns and two twin-linked autocannons light the cavern as if it were day. Caspar's head burns. His ears ring. His hands tremble. His stomach—oh, he's been shot.

When did that happen? With a flare of concentration, he ejects the bullet. Skin forms over the open wound. Chitin flows over the skin.

"Cover me!" That's Jordan, screaming over the next volley, and Caspar unleashes a chattering fusillade of his own. When he fires his Saur, he usually feels the world quaking in its resonance, as though he's channeling some tool of horrible primordial creation. But it's nothing more than a polite cough against the force that opposes them. A cry of agony rises from one gunman. His face is melting off. The dollops of sloughing flesh become flower petals as they drop from his skull.

Peat Moss bounds to a nearby metal riser seat and huddles behind it, the acid he spat beading off his chin. I love this deer. That's one down. Jordan breaks cover and provokes another screaming burst from the dominion's guns. It rents the control cabin asunder and sends whirligig secondary explosions popping through the air. She skids to a halt next to Caspar, holding up behind the central column of the cart's main cabin.

"Our armor will not do shit against that dominion gun." She has to yell it in Caspar's ear over the crack and crackle of their enemies' arsenal.

"AP bullets, tipped with explosives. Made to kill warlocks." The engine's gone now. Nothing but smoke and fire. They're coasting solely on momentum.

"He's conserving his shots," Jordan says.

"Or he'd have torn us apart by now. Few bullets, slow on the trigger."

"What do we do?" Jordan slides onto her stomach and glances between the carts, as far out as she dares.

"You think you can jump that gap? Between us?" Caspar slides to the other side. It's a considerable space, ten feet at least, but his legs are bolstered by his mistress's fell strength.

"Yes."

"Peat!" Jordan loads a new mag into her pistol.

"On three, we're out of cover, armor up. That dominion's the only one that can get through. He's the target. All three of us, three vectors. I shoot, Peat spits, Cas rushes. One of us gets him." Caspar hands her the Saur. She holds it in her right, her pistol in the left. Her eyes squeeze shut for a moment.

"Faith and strength," she says.

"Faith and strength," Caspar repeats.

"Fucking shit." Peat coughs a bullet out of his esophagus as the meat of his stomach reforms. Jordan counts it out on her lips and her fingers. Three. Two. One. They break from cover. Caspar sprinting on the right, Jordan diving on the left, Peat Moss leaping over the top of his seat. The spinning autocannons bloom once more, with that terrible buzzing wail. Caspar is surrounded by fire. He vaults. His spiked claws slam forth from his knuckles as he flies.

Caspar's landing is a shoulder tackle into a warlock whose autogun goes rubber-banding from his hands as my husband connects. Eight favors quantity over quality for her warlocks. I wondered why for a long time, until I saw her eating them. This button-man is typical fodder; his cuirass isn't even fully formed. Caspar's claws shove through its segmented gap and come out gleaming and spattered. He delivers a cruel twist to kill or debilitate, springs to his feet, and charges down the dominion.

An autogun swivels to bear and Caspar gazes into three dozen portals to the afterlife as its gatling mouth yawns forth. Then it flashes and fizzles and misfires. Peat Moss's acid eats into its chrome. Caspar football-slides to avoid the dominion's clubbing swing and comes up in a snarling flurry of sorcerous blackbone claws. He scrambles across the surface of the dominion suit like a wildcat, hewing tight joints into gory rents. My revised design. I feel a spike of pride in myself and my warlock.

The brainpan of another black-clad foe pops. The dominion suit's hydraulics hiss and spit and the man within the metal strains. My witchcraft strength meets the unyielding technology designed to counter it. The dominion locks Caspar's arm around his waist, breaking it with a sharp twist. Caspar sprawls with the motion and weaves himself out of the line of fire. Another fizzing globule of acid, another kick of sparks from an unloaded mag.

The dominion vomits forth a rebuke in flame from his one remaining autocannon; it's cut off and thrown wide by a repaired Caspar, whose charge catches the suit in the midsection. The tracer fire rakes a wide line across the cart and the wall beyond, sending bone fragments powderizing across the pursuing cart as warlock and dominion skid to its lip.

"Caspar!" Caspar locks his arms around the dominion's middle. He roars as his hamstrings fire, and his arms bulge, and his hips twist into a flawless suplex. He tilts backward and pulls the dominion off his feet, releasing midway through the arc of his fall and sending the faceless suit hurtling. The dominion tumbles and crushes beneath the back wheel for an eyeblink before fire flowers forth from its insides. The rest of the explosive ammunition cooks off, all at once.

The blast sends the cart bucking forward onto its front wheels, its rear cabin peeling apart, its back wheels barging up into the air and then coming down twisted and off-course and geysering twin tsunamis of sparks as they squeal along the rending track. Eight's final living warlock is bailed from the metal platform and disappears into the catacomb umbra." Caspar!" Peat Moss screams it. Caspar hears the dying gearbox of their leading cart howl its terminal grind; someone's thrown the handbrake.

He clings to the pursuing cart as it gains on their original ride and shudders into a low-impact collision. By the time he's leapt back across, they can't be going faster than a sprint. Peat is pacing fretfully in front of Jordan. And Jordan— Jordan's legs sprawl in front of her. Her chest, what's left of it, trembles as it rises and falls. Gore dyes the garish fabric. If she wasn't a warlock, she'd surely be gone already. She's been torn open.

"Told you," she mumbles.

"Knew we could take a dominion. Not so tough." Caspar crouches by his friend.

"Can you evoke? Is it healing?"

"I did." Her rueful grin is stained bright red.

"And it didn't." Caspar lands a hand on Peat's back to stop him pacing.

"Peat, I need you to find anything that looks like a first aid kit on here. It's going to have a cross on it."

"Caspar." Jordan's shaking her head.

"No, man."

"If we can stabilize you." Caspar recognizes the dumbfool desperation in his words.

"Maybe if we can stabilize you, until the system strain drops and you can—" If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"No. Cas." She grips his arm. Her drowning cough splashes a dot matrix of crimson across his face.

"It's too much," she says.

"I'm off the ride." And he knows. Right as she says it. This is something he learned on the front—there's a knowledge the dying have that transcends fortune and training. When your buddy tells you they're going, they're going.

"Give me my gun." Jordan reaches a shaking hand out. Her fingers are already going ashy.

"Put me in cover and leave me here. They're gonna be coming up the left side. Maybe I can get one." Caspar presses her. 45 into her hand. There's a shallow ache in him, deepening by the second. Jordan pulls the slide back. Blood smears the chrome.

"They came for us, they're gonna come for Tilliam and Adaire. Find them. On foot to the next station, right?" Caspar doesn't trust himself to speak. He nods.

"We can't—" Peat's ears are trembling.

"We can't just leave her here."

"Fuck are you crying about, kid?" A wet laugh.

"Gonna see me in a few hours." Caspar closes Jordan's fist around the stock of her pistol.

"I love you, sister," he says.

"I love you, brother." She pulls away from his hand.

"Get the fuck out of here. Go." Caspar lifts Peat Moss around the middle like he's a keg. He turns from his dying friend. A hitch in his movement—there is so much he's leaving unsaid—and he has to scream at his quaking mortal soul: no, there isn't. That he'll see the broken, bleeding woman again, whole and happy. He sprints with Peat down the ossuary hall. He hears the final roar of Jordan Darius' handgun, and a sawing chatter of autofire, and then nothing, nothing at all, and they'll meet again. They will.

But the tears spring from his eyes, anyway. ₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪" Fuck!" Jordan Darius's frustrated kick still bears the warlock strength she had in life. The headstone it connects with topples to the ground.

"I'm sorry. Sorry, Bina. I didn't—" She bends down and tries fruitlessly to right it." FUCK," she repeats, on the teetering edge of hysteria.

"It's okay. It's so okay." Bina hastily stands from her stone seat.

"Come here, doll." Jordan makes no sign of having heard her.

"Stupid fucking explosive bullets. Fucking dominions. Taken down by a goddamn mook in a tin costume." She presses her palms to her face. Her breathing is rapid.

"Stupid fucking mistake."

"Jordy. Hey." Bina reaches out and cups Jordan's wrist.

"Hey, you're here. I'm so glad you're here. You're home."

"Yep. Full-time, now, right?" Jordan's laugh has a crazed, raw-nerve edge to it.

"No more trips back to Diamante. Good news, right?"

"Sure." Bina's hesitant.

"It is. You're here, you're okay."

"Of course. I'm here, I'm okay. I'm not—" Jordan's voice tears like flimsy tissue.

"I'm dead." The dam breaks.

"I'm dead," she wails." I died I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead forever""Oh, darling." Bina kneels and closes her arms and pseudopods around Jordan. She holds her warlock until the weeping peters off into shaking breath. She runs a gentle claw along Jordan's back.

"I'm sorry." Jordan's throat is scratchy and raw.

"I'm sorry, Irene."

"There's nothing to apologize for," I say.

"You were a warrior down there, Jordan Darius."

"What am I now, then?" Her composure cracks again.

"What am I supposed to be forever?"

"Safe." Bina lifts her into a bridal carry.

"We'll figure out the rest later." Jordan buries her face in the ruff of fur at my sister's neck, shoulders shaking again. She nods.

"I'll leave you two alone." I stand up.

"As soon as Caspar's back, you'll know." Jordan's visible eye, blue-on-red, glances down at me.

"Can you tell him—""You can tell him whatever you need to yourself," I say.

"This isn't goodbye to anything, okay? Not anything important."

"I know. I'm being so stupid. You can put me down, Bean." Bina shakes her head and sits on a stone bench, keeping Jordan in her lap.

"I don't wanna."

"I'm getting snot on your fur."

"That's okay. My gross little human. I like it." Bina nuzzles Jordan. Jordan sputters a laugh." You're gross."

"We are gonna have so much time now." Bina cradles her.

"I know it feels just awful, but it's going to be so nice, so soon. And we'll do that redecorating I promised."

"Zebra print?" Jordan's voice is tiny and weak.

"Anything." Bina's ribs expand as she takes a deep inhale of her warlock's hair.

"Mirror balls, zebra print. Whatever wild shit you want. Whatever makes this place home." And despite the tears in both their eyes, and the ruined body they left in the dark, I feel a needle-sting of envy as I depart. ₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪ The cart grinds to a halt back in the station. Caspar Cartwright comes sprinting off of it, covered in blood and bone dust. There is no time to clean up, no time to find Adaire and pass her a message. He needs the basilica cleared out before Eight's warlocks can reach it.

He needs enough pandemonium to get himself and his people out. In the long hallway next to the nave, he unslings his autogun.

"I'm dropping you, Peat," he says.

"You ready to run?"

"They fucking killed Jordan." Peat's face is wet.

"What the fuck."

"I know, Peaty. I know. I need your focus." Caspar puts the fawn on the floor and clicks the gun's safety off.

"We're gonna move."

"Cas, c'mon—" Caspar holds the trigger and empties the autogun into the ceiling, then hurls it aside. A docent with a shaky grip on his service pistol sees my warlock sprinting down the hallway like a crazed wraith and has time for a "Sir—" before Caspar cold-cocks him to the floor. The nave's double doors have opened. People stream out in well-heeled panic. Caspar joins the stampede, shedding the most ostentatious parts of his ridiculous outfit as he goes.

He glimpses Adaire, in full Rebecca guise, tugging an apoplectic Paul Tilliam through the crowd. No use. The shout rings out.

"You! With the uniform! Stop!" Caspar ignores it." Freeze!" He shoves a squalling minister aside and breaks into a sprint. Another chorus of screams and ducking heads as a templar opens fire into the air. A bullet tears through his shoulder. He curses loud and manifests his armor over his chest and head." Warlock!" comes a howling cry behind him, as he tears into the street. Peat Moss skitters after him. Cars skid. Civilians flee.

He slides across the hood of an elegant town car and swipes round the bend it was taking, breaking out into a row of jewel-tone condominium towers. He chooses one, more or less at random, and collides into the front door with such violence that it splinters.

"Where are we going?" Peat Moss bounds over the wooden wreckage.

"Off the streets," Caspar says.

"We get to the rooftops, we can hide. They haven't gotten an airship up yet." Through the atrium and up the stairs. No roof access—he needs to duck into an apartment, find a fire escape to climb. The gunning of engines outside tells him they've got vehicles on the scene now. He looks for unadorned doors. Most of these luxury apartments only exist as investments and write-offs. If he's lucky, he'll find one with no residents. His claw punches through a deadbolt and yanks it whole cloth out from the door.

He thunders inside and, thank the Sisters, something's finally gone right. Nobody in this one. A yell from outside. They've seen him through the window. This fucking bozo outfit. That terrible, familiar humming roar sounds and a chunk of the outer wall is blown to plaster dust and rubble. This dominion probably doesn't have a warlock inside it. Cold comfort. Caspar gets a glimpse of the street through the new picture window his pursuers have installed. They've got the building cordoned by cars.

Temple cruisers, just like the one Jordan was driving when Caspar barged into her life and destroyed it. Destroyed it twice, now. The glint of light on armor. There's the dominion, taking a running start. The power suit's capable of a two-story vertical, easily. It's about to leap into the hole it's made and kill everything inside. Caspar seizes Peat Moss once more. He dashes to the apartment's marble-and-chrome kitchenette. He yanks the fridge open and shoves the fawn inside.

"What's—" Peat Moss squawks, and then the door's slammed shut in his face, muffling the rest. Caspar flattens himself by the ragged gap in the apartment. He takes a deep, fortifying breath. Hydraulics hiss and snap below. The dominion leaps upward onto the second floor, its gauntlets gleaming. Caspar opens his mouth and casts his new spell. The syllable he utters isn't even a word, not really. It's an expletive, an Old One interjection of frustration.

Last time I said it was when I got a pseudopod stuck in a crevasse. It fires from my warlock's throat with such force that it cracks his jaw and blows his teeth out. He's instantaneously concussed. Every surviving windowpane, every piece of glassware in the apartment shatters. Every eardrum in the building gives a pressurized pop; at ground zero, Caspar's simply explode, casting blood and lymph out of his ears. Every electric bulb sparks and breaks with a chorus of crisp pings.

The dominion and the warlock are sent hurtling in opposite directions. Caspar slams into the kitchenette wall. His silver foe blows back out of the hole in the apartment like he's been walloped by an invisible semi-truck. Caspar staggers away from the crack his flying spine knocked into the tile. He evokes away the hellacious burn in his head. Bones grind and bloody gums realign while his teeth flicker back into his mouth. A molar knicks his lip as it clicks into place.

My lovely husband is, I reflect, a very long way away from conversational void tongue. He throws the fridge open and pulls his dazed deer out of it. Peat's indignant pronouncement comes out like a muffled foghorn. He tosses Peat Moss over his shoulder like a bag of flour as he flees the scene of devastation behind him. Out the broken garden window, up the rickety fire escape. A crackle sounds in his brainpan as his eardrums rehouse themselves.

"—carrying me all the fucking time," Peat finishes.

"Sorry," Caspar says. As he climbs, the cold air stings across his torn knuckles and he's barely saying it to Peat. He's saying it to everyone, to the world, to me, to Jordan's corpse stiffening somewhere in the silent and still air of the catacombs. Sorry. Sorry.