Half Discovered Wings (56 page)

‘
That’s a plague warning,’ Isaac said. ‘Maybe we should
stop.’

‘
We go on,’ said Gabel.

The city was huge and circular, filling the bowl of the
crater. The streets were arranged like spokes in a wheel and met at
a central hub; from there came the beam of light, leaping into the
night’s sky.

‘
This light has a heat to it unlike fire,’ said Teague. ‘It is
chemical.’

‘
Radioactive,’ said the magus. ‘But it has been focused into a
beam. It was originally intended to act as a wave.’

‘
Why would Cleric do that?’ Isaac asked.

‘
He’s not using this as a weapon. He’s using it as a signal.’
The magus pointed up at the tiny black dots that were spiralling
around it.

‘
They are monsters,’ said Teague. ‘Made from other monsters.
They smell like sanguisuga. I have smelt creatures like those by an
ancient facility I passed not far from here.’

‘
Those animals!’ Isaac said. ‘I was held at that same facility.
He has two great animals there, like beasts, like sanguisuga, but
not so.’

‘
Your mother told us of those,’ Gabel said. ‘They were
formidable, she said.’

‘
Will they attack us?’ asked Rowan.

‘
Almost certainly,’ replied Isaac.

‘
Let’s hurry,’ said Gabel. ‘All this can’t be good. More and
more of those things are coming.’

They moved
their horses down over the rocky lip of the crater, along a small
path that meandered down the steep incline. They passed by empty
buildings that lined streets littered with bodies.

‘
The plague has claimed many lives,’ murmured
Teague.

The smell was
awful. Rowan asked what was happening, what the others were seeing.
Gabel told her no lies. She began to cry, silently.

They came to a crossroads, intending to keep on going, but a
line of strangely dressed men ran by. They wore long, thick cloaks
with hoods, which were pulled up over faces wrapped in torn cloth.
They had odd beak-like masks over their mouths and noses, and
goggles over their eyes, gloves on their hands.

‘Who are these?’ Isaac
cried, taken aback.

‘
Plague doctors,’ said the magus, as the last of them hurried
by. ‘Their cones are filled with protective herbs. Don’t let them
worry you.’

After crossing half the radius of the city they came across a
scene. A small group of people was backed up against a wall on one
side of the street; on the other side a man dressed in black
struggled to lift a convulsing heavy-set male.

‘
Help me!’ he cried. ‘He’ll die!’

The people watching
did nothing. The magus looked at Gabel, who said, ‘We keep
moving.’

As they cantered by, Gabel saw that the man in black was a
priest. Gabel didn’t stop, and the others didn’t question him. They
all knew that to help would only expose themselves to the
sickness.

A sudden explosion shook the city, and almost instantly thick
black smoke poured up from their right. A second explosion went off
to the left, and then another almost directly in front of them;
fire leapt up out of the side of a building. Several other
buildings began to burn. The horses all snorted, but didn’t jump or
rear. They were well trained.

~

Rowan was entirely blind, but she could hear: she had heard
the man calling for assistance, but her horse was tied to Gabel’s,
and even if she had wanted to dismount, she could not have. This
talk of plague frightened her, and she wouldn’t have halted for any
reason.

Her blindness enhanced her distrust and fear of Gabel. She
had heard fragments of his discussion with the magus, and all of
the minor altercation with Teague. She didn’t want to be close to
either of them. But what choice did she have, now that she couldn’t
see?

She tried to focus her thoughts. They were in Hermeticia, the
city the people there called Shianti. They had reached their
destination and soon, perhaps, she might be cured of her
sickness.

But I am not sick
, she thought
dismally.
I am “shutting down”.

Explosions
shook her into the present. She heard Teague yell: ‘Something’s
happening!’

But the explosions stopped, and though she felt the
terrifying heat of fire all around her, the commotion seemed to
have added little to the chaos throughout the city.

She felt the
heat intensify, and knew that they were passing down a street lined
with burning buildings. The heat lessened, and she knew that they
had passed them. She heard the sound of hoof beats, and wooden
wheels on cobblestones. She couldn’t tell, but a rider-less cart
had been pulled by a frightened horse across another junction and
had disappeared down a side road.

To her left
she could sense a presence. Knowing it instantly, she cried out
before realising.

~

Gabel heard
her speak – had she said Caeles’ name? – but his attention had been
on the runaway horse and cart. It had spilled large bundles of
something, wrapped in thick carpet. They were bodies. Two of them
unrolled and lifeless corpses stared up at them.

‘
They don’t have faces!’ Isaac burst out.

‘
No illness I know of does that,’ Teague said quietly, sick to
his stomach.

Gabel said,
‘Move on. We don’t have time for this.’

He turned when he saw
Rowan looking this way and that, her eyes open but unseeing. She
was talking to herself.

‘
Come on!’ he said. ‘Rowan, pay attention. Hold onto the
horse’s reins.’

She muttered
more words to herself, and shook her head. She was crying again,
and Gabel’s heart bled for her.

‘
Joseph.’

He turned, and saw Teague pointing ahead. Following Teague’s
gestures, he saw – as he looked down into the very bottom of the
crater – a huge excavation site, like a massive quarry. There was a
single path, cut in jagged lines through the rock and mud. Its
edges were blurred and drained of colour by the massive beam of
light discharged from its centre.

Teague yelled, but his voice was drowned the noise of more
explosions. The light seemed to be pulsing, something changing in
its beam that made it look like some dial had been turned, or a
switch flicked. It began to dim; it faded, but didn’t
disappear.

A second
carriage shot past them, this time without the horse but full of
people. The man at the reins seemed to be at a loss; it was out of
control. It crashed into the side of a building, caving in its
wooden walls.

Five figures
piled out of it, two of whom were young women, dressed in brown and
cream dresses. They had blood streaming from their scalps.

One looked up and spotted the magus. ‘
Atropos!
’ she cried, and caught his
attention.

‘
Maeia!’ he said, startled. ‘And Taeia! Girls, what are you
doing here?’

The two women
staggered over, drawing the attention of the others. Gabel
recognised them as the pair they’d met on the path to Pirene all
those months ago, the violinists. He saw their instruments in their
hands. The younger of the two, Maeia, gave him a nod of
recognition. What was it she had called the magus? Rowan thought.
“Atropos”? How many names did the old errant go by?

‘
Atropos,’ Taeia was saying to the magus, ‘is this what you
warned us about?
Alames tala mu,
magis
.’

‘
I’m afraid so. However … I don’t see how to end it. What do
you know?’

‘
A man performs rites underneath the pillar of light,’ she
replied. ‘He’s activated a machine. And there is bedlam on the
streets: a plague threatens the people here.’

‘
Do you know how long until he finishes his rites?’

‘
I don’t. It was Maeia who saw him enter. I was
elsewhere.’

‘
I did see,’ Maeia said, drawing her eyes from Gabel, who she
apparently found suddenly interesting. ‘He carried books and rolls
of paper. He carried machines and incunabula.’

‘What
else?’

‘
Nothing that I saw.
Homcana,
magis
, some of them were
atro Vulgate
.’

The magus
turned to Gabel. ‘We must stop this.’

‘
What is Cleric planning?’ He glared at the two musicians.
‘What are they talking about?’

‘
Forget your suspicions, Joseph. They
are allies, and know much. As much as I do,’ he added. ‘They say
Cleric carried religious books – occult books. He is planning
something abominable and extraordinary.’

‘
So what can we do to stop him?’

‘
Look!’ called Isaac.

Two hundred
feet below them, the excavation site was visible through the
glaring light. Converging upon it were three large groups of
people; there was a sprawling group of men who looked like the
residents of Shianti, carrying various weapons. Some had crude
pistols, and the rest had mechanical or agrarian tools.

There was a second group: the
Caballeros de la Muerte
. The legion
of black-armoured knights advanced on horseback, led by a tall,
square-shouldered man without a helmet, but the most ornate and
elaborate of armour. He had long grey hair, and a great streak of a
beard. He carried a shining sword that should have taken two men to
lift.

‘
Is this Captain Alvaros?’ Isaac yelled, looking down. He
seemed terrified by the knights, as Sarai had been. People of dark
skin had as much to fear from the discriminating
Caballeros
as they did
from the Luxers.

Teague recognised the third group. They were dressed in robes
of ochre, and carried flaming torches. Many had swords, but the
number of this final group was small, and they looked exhausted and
not at all intimidating. They were the remainders of the H’ouando
Sects that had journeyed from across the continent. Leading them,
Teague saw Brother Elkin, one of the Four of the Ministrati who had
governed the Goyan Sect. He seemed one of the worst injured,
walking with a crooked back. Teague caught himself looking for
Sister Verlaine, hoping that perhaps Brother Elkin or one of the
other Ministrati had somehow cured the lethal wounds inflicted upon
her by the sanguilac at the edge of the desert. He caught himself
hoping, and quelled the useless emotion as best he
could.

‘
Some of the robed ones are the people I travelled with,’ he
said to Gabel. ‘They know of you, Joseph. They also know that
something will happen here. They think Erebis has plans – that this
was ordained.’

‘
What would they know of the Daemon’s plans?’ Gabel
asked.

Teague shook
his head; he didn’t say that he had also seen what the ruler of
Hadentes had in store for the world. He had closed off that portion
of his mind since his nightmare in the meditation pool in the San
Bueto monastery.

Rowan had done
her best to move her horse beside Gabel’s. He took her reins and
pulled her close.

‘
What is it?’ he asked.

‘
Joseph, what goes on?’

‘
There are three groups of people converging upon the centre of
the crater. This man we chase, Tan Cleric, has activated the
machine you saw. These people want to shut it down before it does
damage.’

‘
Are we close to it?’

‘
Quite close.’

‘
Joseph … Are there any people left in this city?’

‘
Of course. But there are fires.’

‘
I mean is there any one left who … Are there any
doctors?’

‘
Rowan, we’ll see. Don’t worry. It would take far more than
these iniquitous dealings for me to forget you.’

The two violinists were talking hurriedly to the magus in a
language Gabel couldn’t understand. Just as he looked over, the old
man said, ‘
Mu allakh urier, mon cheriets.
Zu lacca burne riseth.
’

They nodded,
and each leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Then they hurried
away, giving a short nod to Gabel as they passed.

‘
If you wish to learn your true strength,’ one of them said to
him, ‘you must listen to what your insides tell you. That is what
your new friend does.’

He looked over
to Teague, who was staring back. When Gabel tried to say something
in return to he was interrupted by a piercing cry from further up
the street.

Three people were dragging a woman across the stone, who
managed to kick herself free of them and resumed her screaming. The
others were left looking dumbly at each other as she writhed in
pain on the rain-drenched cobbles. The screaming was suddenly cut
short when blood spurted from the young woman’s eyes and mouth.
Suddenly there was the snap of crunching bones, and her face broke
open. A terrible blood-soaked creature crawled free of the
fragments of skull, winged and as large as a fist. It gave a hollow
shriek and took to the air, buzzing around the startled three men
and then straight toward Gabel and the others, before turning
toward the light, flying upward in a spiral to join the other
circling black creatures.

Isaac jumped from his horse to examine the body. Just like
the bodies that had fallen from the carriage, the corpse was
faceless. The hysterical men confirmed that this plague was
sweeping through the city. A clairvoyant had said that the man in
the excavation site had released a menace into the water. It had
killed half the Shiantis and each one had given birth to one of the
flying creatures upon their death. This was why Shianti was in such
tumult: the authorities had allowed this man to enter the
city.