Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Gregor lay on the ground, stunned. How is this happening? How do they have shriekers?

The Tevanni military had always used altered weaponry to terrific results. There were the swords, certainly, but its bolts and arrows were also scrived, much like Whip, to believe that they were not being flung forward but were instead falling down, obeying gravity. Thus they were able to fly perfectly straight, reach a high velocity, and go much farther than conventional ranged weapons could.

There were some downsides, however. The military had to lug around miniature lexicons specifically built to power such scrivings, and once the projectiles reached the limit of that lexicon’s range, the scrivings failed and the bolts began to descend as any normal projectile would.

So the Tevanni scrivers experimented. Their eventual inspiration came from the release scrivings on common bolts — for Tevanni bolts were not just scrived to believe that they were falling, since a bolt traveling the distance of, say, fifty feet at the constant acceleration of a free-falling object would not do much damage at all.

Instead, the release scrivings on the bolts worked so that the instant the bolts were released, they suddenly believed that they had been falling straight down for around seven thousand feet, give or take. This produced an initial release velocity of over six hundred feet per second, which everyone found satisfyingly lethal.

So, when pressed to develop an armament with a longer range, the scrivers had simply upped the distance. A lot. They’d developed a projectile that, when released from its caster, did not simply believe it’d been falling for a few thousand feet, but rather that it’d been plummeting toward the earth for thousands and thousands of miles . The second you released it, it’d suddenly roar forward, plunging through the air at a phenomenal speed like a black bolt of lightning. Usually the projectile would get so hot from sheer friction that it would abruptly explode in midair. Even if it didn’t, the damage it did was nothing short of catastrophic.

The name for this projectile had been easy to choose. Because as the projectile gained heat and boiled the air around it, it tended to create a high-pitched, terrifying roaring sound.

Gasping, Gregor started crawling toward the living room. He blinked blood out of his eyes. A stone or piece of wood had struck him on the head, and the room was now so smoky it was hard to breathe.

He tried not to think of Dantua, with its tattered walls and smoke, its streets echoing with moans, and the sound of the army laying waste to the countryside beyond…

Stay here , he pleaded with his mind. Stay with me…

Another shrieker ripped through the walls of the living room as Gregor crawled forward. Hot ash and smoking debris rained over him once more. He knew now that there was a third man in the hallway, armed with a shrieker, and he must have decided to use it when he heard the fight and his two compatriots did not emerge.

But this should have been impossible. For a shrieker to work, you had to have a nearby lexicon that would permit it. And that was strictly outlawed in Tevanne. A shrieker brought within Tevanne should have been just another piece of dumb metal.

What is going on? How is any of this happening right now?

Gregor finally made it into the living room, exhausted and battered, still crawling forward with Whip in one hand. He crawled to the center and looked out the front door.

At first, the way out was clear. But then a man stepped into the doorway, dressed in black. Balanced on one of his arms was a huge device made of metal and wood, like a monstrous, handheld ballista. Nestled in the pocket of the ballista was a long, slender iron arrow. It seemed to be quivering slightly, like a furious animal on a leash.

The man pointed the shrieker at Gregor. Gregor, coughing and disoriented, stared at him.

In a low, growling voice, the man asked, “Is the thief here?”

Gregor stared back, unsure what to say.

But then something flew in through the open balcony door. It was small and round, and it flew over Gregor’s head and landed just before the man with the shrieker.

Then the world lit up.

It was like someone had turned on a thousand lights at once, a sort of brightness Gregor had not known was even possible — and then there was a tremendous, earsplitting, earth-shattering bang .

Gregor almost lost consciousness from sheer oversensation — or perhaps that was due to the blow to the head he’d taken.

The light and sound faded. Gregor’s ears were still ringing, but his eyesight returned. He could see the man with the shrieker was still in the hallway, but he’d dropped his weapon and was rubbing his eyes, evidently as blinded as Gregor had been.

Gregor rolled over and looked at the balcony door, just in time to see a very short girl dressed in black drop in out of nowhere, stand on the balcony, lift a pipe to her lips, and blow.

A dart flew out of the pipe, zipped across the room, and hit the man with the shrieker in the neck. His eyes went wide. He pawed at his throat, trying to pull it out, but then he turned a dull shade of green and toppled over.

Gregor’s savior put away the pipe and ran over to him. She looked at his Waterwatch sash, sighed, grabbed him by the arm, and hauled him up. Even though his hearing was still scrambled, he could hear what she said: “Come on, asshole! Run! Run! ”

Gregor staggered through the alleys of the Greens, one arm thrown on the shoulders of his small but surprisingly strong rescuer. If anyone saw them they’d have assumed it was a friend helping a drunk get home.

Once they were safe, she stopped and shoved him to the ground. Gregor tumbled over and crashed into the mud.

“You,” said the girl, “are scrumming lucky I happened to be watching! What the hell is the matter with you? You and those other fools practically blew up the whole building!”

Gregor blinked and rubbed the side of his head. “Whu…What’s going on? What was that back there?”

“It was a stun bomb,” said the girl. “And it was damned valuable. I’d barely had it for more than an hour too. And a fat lot of good it’s done for me, after you’ve scrummed everything up!” She began pacing around the alley. “Now where am I going to get money? Now how am I going to get out of the city? Now what do I do!”

“Who…Who are you?” asked Gregor. “Why did you save me?”

“I wasn’t even sure I was going to,” she said. “I saw those three bastards watching the room and decided to hold off. Then I see you come and jump from balcony to balcony like a damned fool and break in. And then they see you and try to blow you to smithereens! I think I mostly did it so that one mad bastard would stop shooting up the Greens!”

Gregor frowned. “Wait. What was it you said? Where are you going to get money? You…You mean you came to Sark’s for…”

He stared at the young woman in black, and slowly realized that this person, despite having saved him, was likely one of Sark’s thieves.