Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

“ What! ” she screamed. “Then…then what’ll happen to Sancia?”

“Well, if she’s still flying…then she will stop flying,” he said. He saw her outraged stare. “Well, the girl’s obviously going to make it there in way less than ten minutes! I mean, look at her, she’s hauling ass! It was just a gamble I had to make!”

“ You could have scrumming told us this! ” shouted Berenice.

“And what would that have done?” said Orso. “Probably made everyone yell a bunch, just as you’re doing now. Now, come on, Berenice, let’s go!” He turned and sprinted down the street, back to the gates.

“Captain Riggo!” shouted Estelle.

Again — the footsteps, the door, the salute. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Have we encountered anything in the campo?” she asked.

“I’ve not heard back yet, ma’am,” he said. “But from my vantage point…I’ve yet to see much in the way of conflict.”

She shook her head. “It’s a diversion. A goddamn diversion. They’re coming here, here ! I know it in my bones. How many soldiers do we have in the Mountain, Riggo?”

“At least four dozen, ma’am.”

“I want three dozen up here,” said Estelle. “Two dozen in the hallways, and a dozen in here with me. I’m the target — me, or the antiquities.” She pointed at the desk, upon which sat the box, the imperiat, and the key, along with dozens and dozens of books and other artifacts. “And we can’t move all those now. So we have to be ready.”

“I see, ma’am,” said Riggo. “I’ll deploy your orders immediately.”

Above the campo, Sancia screamed.

Screaming was all she could do, really. So many of her higher levels of thought had just been abruptly obliterated by the sudden acceleration, the raging press of the wind and the reek of smoke, that she could only react to her situation in the dumbest and most instinctual of ways — which meant screaming.

She was rising so fast, so damned fast . She blinked tears out of her eyes, and saw she was already far, far, far above the city. Too far, really — and she also wasn’t going anywhere close to the Mountain.

If I don’t stop this thing, she thought, I’m going to sail past the damn clouds!

Sancia placed both hands on the plate and tried to tell it to slow down.

squealed the rig.

Sancia screamed at it.

She mentally directed the rig at the Mountain.

chirped the plates.

said Sancia.

Their ascent slowed, but not much.

she said.

Their ascent slowed more.

she said.

Then her ascent stopped…and she slowly started being redirected toward the Mountain, lightly drifting down to the huge black dome.

She’d have to make more adjustments to make it there, she knew. But she was getting the hang of this. The gravity rig was incomprehensibly powerful — probably more powerful than Estelle’s version, since Berenice had left out all the calibrated controls. If Sancia screwed up the directions or the power too much, the thing would basically be a devastating weapon.

But then, she had been counting on that.

Quietly, gently, she sailed toward the Mountain.

“Ma’am!” called a soldier. “Something’s coming!”

Surrounded by a dozen soldiers, Estelle Candiano peered through the gaps in their shoulders at the office windows. “Something?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am! I…I think I saw something flying through the sky?”

Estelle glanced at the clock on the wall — twenty minutes to go. She’d need only one minute to do this, the lost minute between one day and the next. That was what her research had indicated — you made yourself powerful while the world had its back turned on you.

“That might be them,” she said. “Get ready.”

The soldiers prepared themselves, checking their weapons, unsheathing their swords. Estelle looked down at her father, lying in the bed beside her. Her fingers gripped the golden dagger, sweat running down her temples. She was so close. Soon her knife would pierce the breast of this wretched, thoughtless man, and start a chain reaction that would…

She cringed. She knew what would happen — it would kill most of the people on the Candiano campo. All the scrivers, all the merchants, all the workers who’d labored under Tomas, and, before him, her father…

They could have stopped this , she thought angrily. They knew what Tomas was, what my father was. They knew what these men had done to me, to the world. And yet they did nothing.

She looked up through the round window in the roof of her father’s office, and then she saw it — a tiny black dot, sailing across the face of the moon

“That’s it!” she cried. “There it is! I’ve no idea what it is, but it’s got to be them!”

The soldiers looked up and took positions around her.

“Come on,” said Estelle, staring up. “Come on! We’re ready for you, Orso. We’re ready for y—”

Then the doors to the office exploded behind them, and all hell broke loose.

Estelle did not initially understand what was happening. She just heard a scream, and then droplets of something warm rained down on her. She blinked, looked down at herself, and saw she was covered in blood — apparently blood from someone on the other side of the room.

She dumbly turned, and saw something had erupted into the office…maybe. It was hard to see in all the darkness, which seemed to cling to the thing like moss to a tree branch. But she thought she saw a man-form in there — and she definitely saw a huge black polearm snap out from the depths of that darkness and slash one of her soldiers from shoulder to chest, sending another wave of blood splashing over her.

Her soldiers shouted in rage and charged the shadow-man. The shadow-man leapt toward them with terrifying speed and grace — and as he did, Estelle saw the hallways beyond. She saw they were covered in blood, and the headless corpse of Captain Riggo lay ravaged and mutilated on the floor.

“Oh hell,” said Estelle. She dropped to the floor and crawled to the desk with the artifacts.

Gregor Dandolo did not think. He could not think. He did not need to think. He only moved.

He moved within the lorica, directing its momentum, its gravity, allowing it to hurtle him through the huge office. He flicked his right arm out, the telescoping polearm extending with a liquid grace, like the tongue of a frog stretching for a dragonfly in midflight. Its huge, thick blade cut through a soldier’s raised arm and the top half of his head like they were made of grass, and the man collapsed.