Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Sancia saw them coming. She pointed the big espringal at one of the attackers just as they passed through the windows, and fired. But the shot went wide, and the density cords tangled around a rafter — which was, of course, already at rest, so that didn’t do much.

“Shit!” she cried. She leapt forward as a scrived bolt hurtled toward her. As she fell she reached into her pocket, grabbed a stun bomb, pressed its plate, and tossed it into the rafters.

She knew, of course, that in this terribly dark place it would blind her as well, along with whichever vagrants were still in there with her. But Sancia was pretty good at getting around without seeing.

The flash of the bomb was tremendous, as was the pop from its charge. For a moment she just lay there on the walkway, her head ringing and her eyes aching. Clef’s voice cut through all her sensory overload.

he said.

Sancia was keenly aware that wouldn’t last forever — though the effects might likely last unusually long, given the dark environment. Yet she found she could hear her attackers, or at least their rigs — there was a faint chanting in the blistering, flashing darkness, from their gravity rigs. I guess I don’t hear scrivings with my ears, she thought, which was a curious revelation. She also realized that these rigs must be terribly powerful for her to be able to hear them from so far away.

That gave her an idea. She slipped out her bamboo pipe, which was loaded with a single dolorspina dart.

Clef seemed to not understand this was disturbing, since it suggested his method of seeing things was different from human eyes. She lifted the pipe to her lips.

Sancia took a deep breath in through her nose and blew as hard as she could.

She had no idea what happened — she still couldn’t see or hear much. It was like firing the dart into the blackest of nights in here. But then Clef said,

She could see blurs in the darkness — her vision was coming back, but only slightly. she said.

She touched her bare hand to the wall beside her, then the rafter above her, and she listened to both of them. She let all the rafters and the supports and the beams overhead pour into her.

It was too much, far, far, too much. Her head felt like it was going to break open. I’m going to pay for this later , she thought. But she kept going until every inch of the ceiling had made an impression in her thoughts, every beam of wood and every brick fixed in her mind.

Then, still mostly blind and deaf, Sancia leapt up, grabbed a rafter, lifted herself up, and started crawling through the rafters of the Zorzi Building with her eyes closed.

She couldn’t see any of the dangers underneath her, but Clef could. he said.

she said as she blindly leapt from one rafter to another,

She kept going, hopping from rafter to rafter, beam to beam, until she felt like she was getting close. she asked.

She did so, and found he was right. And as she touched the wall, she felt him.

A tight, warm bundle of a person, pressed up in the crevice between the wall and the ceiling, like a bat in its roost. Waiting for his vision to return, probably. But the second she felt him…

He moved. Fast. Speeding down.

He must have felt me coming! she thought. I hit the damned rafter too hard!

But she still felt what the wall felt — and the wall had felt him push off, including how hard and which direction he was going.

Sancia gauged his likely position and blindly jumped into open space.

For a moment she just fell, and she was sure she’d cocked it up, sure she’d missed him, sure she would just plummet three stories down into the vagrants’ nest, where she’d break a leg, or her skull, and then she’d just die there.

But then she hit him. Hard.

Sancia instinctively threw her arms around the man and clung tightly to him. Her hearing was coming back, and she heard him scream in surprise and anger. They were still falling, but as someone who was somewhat used to falling in space, the way they were falling was so strange : they suddenly, rapidly decelerated to a curiously steady rate, like they were trapped in a floating bubble, twisting through the air.

Until they hit the ground. Then the man shoved off, hard, and they went rocketing throughout the old paper mill.

The man smashed Sancia into walls, into rafters, and, once, into what she guessed was his floating, unconscious comrade. He hurtled back and forth throughout the building, trying to shake her off and struggling with her grasp.

But Sancia was strong, and she held fast. The world was tumbling and twirling about them, the vagrants were screaming and shrieking, and her sight was slowly, slowly coming back to her…

She saw the fourth-floor windows flying at them, and realized what was going to happen.

“Ah, shit!” she cried.

They crashed through a pair of shutters, and then they were outside, flying through the open night air, still tumbling over and over and over. Now he could fly up a mile and dump her off, or have one of his comrades pry her off and slit her throat, or…

Clef shouted at her.

Sancia clung tighter to him, gritted her teeth, and started swatting at the man’s stomach with her hand, clawing and tearing at anything she could find there.

Then her hand felt a small wheel — which she managed to turn.

They froze, hanging in midair.

“ No! ” screamed the man.

And then he seemed to explode.

It was as if someone had filled a huge water skin with hot blood and jumped on it. The spray of gore was unspeakably tremendous, and totally shocking to Sancia.

More concerning, though, was that the man she’d leapt on was no longer…well, there . It was as if he’d simply disappeared, leaving only the scrived gravity device behind.

Which meant Sancia was now falling.

She tried to grab at something, anything. The only thing to hold on to was the dead man’s device, which was covered in blood. She grabbed it purely out of instinct, yet this did nothing. Everything seemed to slow down as she fell to the fairway below.

cried Clef.

Sancia had no mind to answer. The world was sliding by her, every ripple of the bedsheets and twist of the undergarments frozen in space…

And then Gregor Dandolo was there, beneath her.

He cried out in pain as Sancia landed in his arms. Sancia herself was still dumbfounded, her mind reeling as she tried to understand what had just happened. Then he dumped her in the mud, cursing and rubbing his lower vertebrae.

“You…you caught me?” she said aloud, still stunned.

He groaned and fell to his knees. “My scrumming back…Consider my debt repaid,” he snarled.

She looked at herself. She was trembling, absolutely covered in blood, and she still clutched the gravity device in her hands. It looked like two plates connected with cloth bands — one for your belly, one for your back — and one plate had a series of little dials on it.

She stammered out, “I…I…”

“You must have sabotaged the device he was using to float,” said Gregor. He looked up at the bedsheets above, which were all spattered with gore. “Causing his gravity to collapse, crushing him. Somewhere in the street is probably a fleshy marble that was once the whole of that man’s body.” He looked around. “Help me up. Now!”