Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Her mouth fell open. “What? Are you serious ?”

“As serious,” he said as the carriage turned, “as the grave.”

Sancia laughed, incredulous. “Oh, as simple as that? Just like dropping off a package? ‘Here, friends — have some justice!’ That’s the dumbest damned thing I ever heard!”

“All great things must start somewhere,” he said. “I started with the waterfront. Which you burned down. By capturing you, I can continue.”

She kept laughing. “You know, I almost believe you, you and your holy-crusade talk. But if you really are as noble and honest as you sound, Captain Dandolo, you won’t live long. If there’s one thing this city can’t tolerate, it’s honesty.”

“Let them try,” he said. “Many already have. I nearly died once. I can afford to do so agai—”

But he never finished his statement. Because then the carriage went careening out of control.

Gregor Dandolo had piloted scrived carriages many times before, so he was well acquainted with how to maneuver such a vehicle — but he had never piloted one that suddenly had only one front wheel.

And that seemed to have been what had happened, in the blink of an eye: at first they’d been rolling along — and then, suddenly the driver’s front wheel had simply exploded.

He shoved down the deceleration lever while also spinning the pilot wheel away from the damaged carriage wheel — but this proved unwise, because then the carriage jumped a wooden walkway, which snapped the other front wheel — which meant he no longer had any control over the carriage’s direction at all as it hurtled across the muddy lanes.

The world was rattling and quaking around him, but Gregor had sense enough to decipher where the carriage was now headed — and he saw that that space was occupied by a tall, stone building. One that looked well built.

“Oh dear,” he said. He leapt through into the back of the carriage, where the girl was stuck to the floor.

“What did you do, you big idiot?” she cried at him.

Gregor grabbed his espringal and turned the density of her bonds down — otherwise they could fly around throughout the carriage and crush him, and certainly her. “Hold on, please,” he said. “We’re about t—”

Then the world leapt around them, and Gregor Dandolo remembered.

He remembered the carriage crash from long ago. The way the vehicle tipped, the way the world tumbled, the sprinkle of glass and the creak of wood.

And he remembered the whimpering in the dark and the glimmer of torchlight from outside. How the light caught the ruined form of Gregor’s father, crumpled in the seat, and the face of the young man beside him in the ruined carriage, weeping as his blood poured out of his body.

Domenico. He’d died terrified and whimpering in the dark for their mother. The way many young men in this world died, Gregor would later find.

Gregor heard whimpering again, and had to tell himself— No. No. That is the past. That all happened long ago.

Then his mother’s voice in his ear: Wake up, my love…

The muddy world congealed around him, and reality returned.

Gregor groaned and looked up. It seemed the carriage had flipped over, so one passenger window was now pointed at the sky while the other was stuck in the mud. The young woman lay in a heap next to him. “Are you alive?” he asked.

She coughed. “Why do you give a damn?”

“I am not in the business of killing captured people, even accidentally.”

“Are you so sure that was an accident?” she said, her voice rasping. “I told you. They followed you. They’re coming for me.”

Gregor glared at her, then pulled out Whip and climbed up through the cab of the carriage. He crawled out the window of the passenger door, which now looked out on the night sky.

He sat on the edge of the tipped-over carriage and looked at the front axle. A large, thick, metal espringal bolt was sticking out of it right where the wheel had been.

It must have gone right through the spokes of the wheel — and as the wheel spun around it, it shredded the damned thing…

It was an impressive shot. He looked around, but he could see no assailants. They were in one of the larger fairways in Foundryside, but the street was empty — after the building collapse and the shriekers last night, odds were the residents thought if they poked their heads out to see what the commotion was, they’d lose them.

The young woman cried: “Ah, shit. Shit! Hey, Captain!”

“What now?” sighed Gregor.

“I’m going to say something else you’re not going to believe. But I’m still going to say it.”

“You are, of course, free to say what you like, miss.”

She hesitated. “I…I can hear scrivings.”

“You…You what?”

“I can hear scrivings,” she said again. “That’s how I knew about the thing on your carriage.”

He tried to understand what she was implying. “That’s impossible!” he said. “No one can jus—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the young woman. “But listen — you need to know this because right now, right now , a number of very loud scrived rigs are converging on us. I know because I can hear them. And if they’re really loud, that means they must be really powerful.”

He scoffed. “I know you think I’m stupid — after all, you have said so both loudly and repeatedly — but it is biologically impossible that someone could be stupid enough to believe that .” He looked around. “I don’t see anyone walking down the street toward us carrying, say, a shrieker.”

“I don’t hear them on the street. Look up. They’re above us.”

Rolling his eyes, Gregor looked up. And then he froze.

On the side of the building façade above him, four stories up, was a masked person, dressed all in black. They were standing on the building façade as if it were not the side of a building but was actually the floor — in full defiance of all known laws of physics — and they were pointing an espringal at him.

Gregor dove down into the upended carriage. The next thing he knew there were a lot of loud thunks . He shook his head and looked up.

Five espringal bolts were now poking in through the side of the carriage. They had almost punched straight through — and since the walls and floors of this carriage were reinforced, that meant their attackers were using scrived weapons.

More than one of them , he thought. At least five.

“Impossible,” said Gregor. “That can’t be.”

“What?” said the young woman. “What’s out there?”

“There…there was a man standing on the building sides!” said Gregor. “Standing there like gravity doesn’t work at all!”

He looked up through the open window on the side of the carriage, and watched in shock as a figure in black appeared to gracefully float over the carriage like a bizarre cloud. Then he pointed an espringal down, and fired.