Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (14 page)

I don’t think so,” grunted Abigail as they
heaved up Drish’s limp body together.

Realizing they just weren’t going to leave
him alone, and would instead continue manhandling his bruised body,
Drish surrendered to their will and stood up on his own. “Fine,” he
grumbled, wobbling on unsteady legs, “lead the way.”

Drish let himself be pulled from the mangled
skiff into the crisp, cool breeze of the outside world. At some
point snow had started to fall, to hiss and sizzle to steam over
the smoldering wreckage around him, and the weary noble tilted back
his head to let the cool flakes gather over his face. He might have
laid down right then and there on the cold streets, had the deep
bellow of a powerful horn not brought his eyes snapping open
instead. With awe, he watched as an imperial dreadnaught parted
down through the low-laying clouds, staining everything red with
its blood-eyed atmium core. It dwarfed the buildings it floated
over, and from the bow and stern, floodlights lanced out between
its bristling armaments, probing the skiff’s carnage in search of
survivors.

From the side streets to the south and east,
the wail of sirens rose up on the wind, screaming in on
approach.

Along the newly abandoned roadway, the
pirates gathering at the smashed bow of their escape craft,
collecting their wits and inventorying their injuries as the shock
of the crash began to give away to the awareness of an airship
tracking them from above. Within their midst, Drish already stood
agape, shielding his eyes from the glare of the searchlights as
they fell over them.

The groan of parting metal blasted down,
revealing a hatch opening up in the airship’s belly, within which,
a host of tread-rovers could be seen poised for lowering via
cranes.

“
By order of the Iron Empire you are to
lay down arms and surrender! Failure to do so will result in
immediate death!”

The dreadnaughts horn issued another
challenging bellow that rattled the surrounding windows. Suddenly
scores of lines came tumbling down from the hatch, landing in
amongst the street rubble surrounding the pirates. Immediately
after, Iron soldiers could be seen lining the bay’s edge, readying
themselves to repel down in mass.

The pirates, for their part, met the
Empire’s challenge by hightailing it out of there.

Beyond exhausted and nearly crippled with
pain, Drish was loath to follow after them, but when he heard
Abigail’s voice screaming to him over the boots clomping on
pavement, he turned, finding her saffron eyes locked on him and
pleadingly for him to follow. The gaze drew him forward, until he
was running after her.

This is the Healthcare District
, the
fugitive realized, laboring for breath and feeling a stitch of pain
growing in his side. One after another, they passed various
specialty clinical buildings.
We’re heading for Glenside
Hospital
, and he spotted the modern structure of glass, steel,
and concrete, standing at the end of the avenue. Behind Drish, the
streets rumbled beneath the heavy impact of landing tread-rovers,
and soon after rifle fire shadowed their course.

They fled down the street under a barrage of
bullets, Bar diverting at the last second towards an ambulance
landing pad adjacent to the medical facility, before a lower wall
segment of the building itself exploded beside them beneath the
thunderous report of a tread-rover’s artillery salvo. Smoky debris
crashed down into the gardens and walkways, just as a second
bombardment clapped violently between the buildings. Glass
shattered, and concrete was pulverized into dust. Drish slowed,
horrified by the wanton destruction, and yet the pirates didn’t
stop running; no matter the futility of their escape at this point.
It had become impossible. The pirates were hemmed in. The airship
overhead had them sighted, the tread-rovers were zeroing them in,
troopers were on foot in pursuit, and Drish could see quadrupedal
assault machines hammering down the various side streets in an
effort to block any alternate escape routes.

All that was left to them was a small
utility shed behind the hospital’s airstrip, and that’s precisely
where Bar lead his merry band of ne’er-do-wells. They skidded to a
halt at the threshold of this innocuous looking out-building, and
Bar wasted no time kicking in the doorway to the repellant stench
of raw sewage. The pirate captain stepped aside and drew his gun.
“In,” he demanded.

Drish looking past Bar, into the gloom. “All
of us,” countered the leery noble, plugging his nose to the offense
odor. The building was no bigger than an outhouse, smelled like one
too, and held but a single manhole cover in its floor. The noble
turned away in abject disgust until he heard the cover being slid
away. Curiosity snapped his gaze back, where he found a head
sticking up through the opening.

“You certainly know how to make a ruckus,
Bazzon,” this sewer-dwelling creature hollered up at them, “The
airwaves are blowing up with imperial chatter concerning you guys.”
The man’s heavily-boned face, and boxer’s nose, made him look like
an ogre straight out of a fairytale. Fitting given his
position.

“You know me,” said Bar with a shrug, “I’ve
never been one to pass up an opportunity to make a statement.”

“I can definitely see that,” the sewer ogre
nodded past the gathered pirates, out to a street rapidly filling
with imperial hardware.

“Come on, come on. In, in.” The disembodied
head popped back down to whatever hell it crawled out of, and the
pirates scrambled to follow, one after the other. When it came down
to just Fen, Drish, Abigail, and Bar, the young Hierarch went
first, and then Bar ordered Drish to follow. About halfway in, the
noble realized neither Abby nor Bar had motioned to join his
escape.

“You better not be planning to make a stand
like that Admiral Lockney of yours, Bar,” Drish heard Abigail say
sternly, and watching closely, that’s exactly what is seemed like
Captain Bazzon intended to do. He’d planted himself behind the open
doorframe, with his revolver at the ready. On the other side,
Abigail planted herself and pulled a pistol from her waistband. The
captain’s devil-be-damned eyes looked tired beyond measure, and he
opened his mouth as if to protest, when someone grabbed Drish by
his loafs and tugged him down in to the rancid abyss. He never
heard Bar’s response, but instead came crashing to the hard ground
on his tailbone, entering into a world of torchlight and heavy
shadows.

“Hope you didn’t mind,” Fen’s face appeared
inches away from his. Drish could see the adolescent’s whiteheads
glowing sour in the murky light, and it made him feel sick. “But we
don’t got time for you to sightsee.”

Rook and O’Dylan were there to haul the
noble to his feet, while someone spoke nearby in a deep and
melodious voice. “…was a good friend,” he was saying, “and a good
leader to the Resistance, and it’s my pleasure to help his son
wherever I can.”

It took a moment for Drish to realize the
voice was directed at him, but as he patted the dirt from his knees
and his elbows, he eventually noted the anticipatory silence
surrounding him, and when Drish looked up he found a host of man
lining the sewer. They’d parted to either wall, leaving a single
man standing out in the tunnel’s center. It was the ogre that had
directed them down here in the first place. With no neck to speak
of, and an unruly black beard of curly hair, he looked like some
wilderness beast, and yet his words were spoken with elegance.

“Oh yes, well…thank you,” responded the
noble.

“Please, know that he’ll be sorely missed,”
the beast added with a firm candor. “You have my deepest
condolences, sir.”

Up on the surface, artillery shells pounded
the streets, sending dirt tumbling down from the ceiling in
cascades.

“Yes, yes, yes,” dismissed Drish in sudden
distraction. Abigail had yet to appear, and the fact this brute was
still jabbering on annoyed him to no end; even more so, he begun to
worry.

“Indeed.” The Candaran insurgent cocked an
eyebrow.

When Abigail appeared beside Drish at that
moment he was beyond relieved, and he might have reached out and
embraced her except that Bar had also appeared, squeezing in
between them on course for the ranks of his pirate crew. “All
present and accounted for,” he growled in somnolent brevity, to
which he was treated back to a grumbling wave of
acknowledgement.

“Come along,” ordered the ogre, while the
rest of his men disappeared into the gloom. “We’ll regroup further
down,” he hollered over his shoulder, and when viewed from behind
he looked as broad and imposing as a hairy, Ushakaron gargorul.
“Once we’re beyond the range of those pounders to can talk.”

Under a shuffling of boots, the beleaguered
fugitives, and their insurgency escort, marched in single file,
using a lone torch held far ahead to guide their way; while back on
the streets of Throne, the Empire continued its voracious shelling.
In time though, each impact seemed to grow more distant, and the
debris it sent tumbling down slackened to a trickle, until none
fell at all.

“Who is that man,” Drish eventually dared to
ask, but Abigail was unhelpful.

She shrugged back. “Dunno.”

“You don’t know…? But this is
your
Resistance.”

“Different cell.”

“It’s Mace Portman,” whispered Fen as though
it was supposed to mean something to Drish (which it didn’t). But
it did capture Abigail’s attention.

“
Portman
?
The
Mace Portman…?
Leader of the Smuggler’s Redoubt—that Mace Portman?”

“The one and only,” said Fen with an eager
grin; one that looked a little too eager for Drish’s liking. And he
didn’t particularly care how close the Hierarch was walking next to
Abigail either. And if he didn’t know better, he thought the gangly
youth might be trying to peek down the woman’s loose halter-top; as
despicable a notion as that was.

“It’s just a little further to the service
junctions,” the man Fen had called Mace crooned back to those who
followed. But where they were didn’t particularly matter to Drish,
unless it was a way out in this hell of unimaginable stench,
otherwise a service junction was no more interesting or relevant
than the tube they were currently shuffling down. However, it did
hasten the pirates’ marching, and that set their swaying equipment
into a jangling din.

“Did you hear that?” whispered Abigail; her
voice just audible over the clamor.

But Drish hadn’t heard a thing beyond the
pirates’ racket, and he shook his head.

From there they continued into a
labyrinthine underworld of moldering brick, at times parting
through curtains of hanging slime, or drudging across layers of
mold and fungus, and Drish soured at the sight of his ruined
clothing. Though already soiled from his ordeal in Port Armageddon
and the skiff, his expensive velvet jacket, and suede boots might
have been salvageable, if not for the putrescent scum that had
soaked them through and through. Things would prove only to get
worse from there. Not until they’d reached the main line did Drish
experience what true revulsion was. Walking along the fetid shores
of a burbling river of sewage, the once pampered noble didn’t think
he had the fortitude to physically make himself go on any further.
The crushing reek of excrement was beyond anything he could
tolerate, and he readily vomited into the muck coursing beside
him.

Drish had hardly wiped the drool off his
chin before Mace Portman was hollering orders to move faster, when
Abigail suddenly grabbed Drish by the arm and stopped them both in
place entirely. “You had to have heard that,” she whispered, while
in the twilight her glistening eyes sought confirmation from
his.

Drish wanted to say she was right; out of
some sense of propriety; but when he stopped and strained his ears
all he could hear was the ringing in his eardrums from being in the
middle of too many gunfights.

“Come one,” she urged, “you must…I can’t be
crazy.”

Then he caught it, something faint and
distant…like the pattering of metal boots marching across stone,
and he turned back to Abby and nodded in excited confirmation. “I
do hear it.”

“You two, stop dallying and keep up,” barked
Bar.

It was hardly more than a quarter-hour later
that the noble thought he heard something which caused the blood in
his veins to freeze.
“Drish…”
it seemed to come echoing out
from the gloom behind him.
“Drish…”
He had to stop again; to
perk his ears and find out.

“
Drish, I know you don’t want this!”
It sounded like Graye, as impossible as that seemed. Last time he’d
seen the imperial officer was back on Port Armageddon. He couldn’t
be in the sewers of Junction now…could he? Would Graye have chased
him this far?
“The life of a fugitive isn’t for you.”

“Do you hear
that
?”

Abigail rested a hand on his forearm and
pulled him along. “Just some propaganda nonsense that I can’t make
out. Ignore it and come on,” she urged. “The sewers of King’s Isle
are said to be ancient and expansive. We can probably lose them,
but only if we can get far enough ahead. If what the tales say
about Portman is true, then he
will
get us out of here. He’s
something of a legend, you know…They call him the Vapor Wraith…
he’s said to have a secret base that’s filled with warriors and is
nearly impossible to find.”

“
Drish!”
The voice sounded closer
still, and even Abigail couldn’t deny she understood what it was
saying now. She even looked at the fugitive aristocrat in
confusion. “Why is it calling out to you?”

Somewhere in the tunnels, not that far back,
came a clattering, but it didn’t sound like anything Drish had ever
heard. He dropped back to search the darkness, but only the
darkness stared back.