He turned his head to look at her. “What are we doing?”
“Cuddling together on the first night of our visit to the old Imperial capital. Isn’t it a wonderful vacation?”
“You are making an illusion to place over that of this city?” Alain asked. “Perhaps I will make a Mage of you.”
“Not likely,” Mari said. “So, how do you like it in my illusion?”
“The accommodations leave something to be desired,” Alain said, “and the travel arrangements have been wanting. But I cannot fault having you along with me. The only thing that would make things better would be if this was our honeymoon.”
“Men!” Mari said with a snort. “Move your hands, Mage. No, not there. All right, that’s better. I thought you’d be too tired to be thinking about that kind of thing.”
“You have a way of bringing it to my mind, even here.”
“You’ll get over it,” Mari told him.
“It seems I must, for now,” Alain said. “Try to sleep. I can no longer sense any other Mage nearby, so I have set a small alarm spell on the entrance to this place which should sustain itself until close to morning, if not full daylight. It will reveal little trace of itself to anyone searching for signs of me.”
“Thanks.” She raised her head enough to kiss him. “I’m a lucky girl, even if I am in the middle of a dead city with two Great Guilds after my hide and now an Imperial death sentence added to the measure.” Mari closed her eyes again, wondering how long it would take to fall asleep in the middle of this dead city.
She was so tired she must have passed out quickly, but at some point in the night something caused Mari to jerk awake. The room lay in almost total darkness now, barely illuminated by the moonlight outside which revealed only the vague shape of the counter they were huddled behind. A heavy chill lay leaden in the air around them, making her glad for Alain’s warmth next to her. Mari lay still, breathing slowly, listening as carefully as she could, wondering what had awoken her, feeling incredibly grateful for the barrier between them and the broken front of the building that gave onto the street. Faint sounds came, the sort of noises insects or small rodents might make. The thud of Mari’s pulse pounding in her ears seemed almost deafening by contrast.
Every once in a while she could hear the far-off sound of debris shifting slightly, marking the movements of small creatures, or the slow centuries-long collapse of the city’s ruins, or possibly the progress of larger beings accustomed to negotiating the rubble. Possibly humans, though how human such persons would be after living all their lives in this awful place was an open question.
Glancing over at Alain required Mari to turn her head slightly, which she did with great care, afraid of making the slightest noise in the eerie quiet that enfolded the ruins of Marandur. Alain was sleeping peacefully, no sign of worry on his face. Surely if there was any immediate danger, Alain’s Mage alarm would provide warning.
Mari closed her eyes again, trying to calm herself. None of the noises appeared to be nearby. But if anything in this world was haunted, it was these ruins. Her imagination too easily conjured up images of vengeful spirits stalking the empty streets of the dead city. How many had died here? Not just the rebels who had chosen their fates and the legionaries following their orders, but the countless men, women, and children caught in the middle of the fight? There wasn’t any way to know how many victims there had been. “I’m sorry,” Mari whispered in the barest voice she could manage.
Alain stirred slightly and she leaned into him, willing Alain to be silent again but finding immense comfort in his presence. She imagined being alone in these ruins and almost shuddered at the thought. A night alone in Marandur could surely drive someone insane.
Would the ruins of the Mechanics Guild Hall feel haunted, too? What would those dead Mechanics think of her and what she wanted to do? Would they feel remorse for their actions when living, or would they seek to protect the secrets they had kept in life?
Jules herself might have walked these streets, centuries ago when Marandur had been a living city and the capital of the Empire. Mari had learned a little more about Jules in the last few weeks, curious about the woman. After all, if Alain and the old prophecy were right, that ancient hero had been her distant forbearer. Before heading west, Jules had been an officer in the Imperial fleet. Different accounts offered different reasons for her leaving Imperial service and becoming an explorer and a pirate. The truth was probably long lost, though Mari fantasized for a moment about finding some ancient records lying amid the rubble of the city. Am I doing the right thing, Jules? Should we have come here? Are you really my blood ancestor? Can anything about that blood help me know what to do and how to do it? It seems like total superstition, but is there any truth to it? I need all the help I can get.
Why am I doing this? Not because I’m supposed to, according to that prophecy. To stop the storm? Yes. But that’s like overthrowing the Great Guilds, just a step on the way to something else. For freedom? That’s a big thing. This city…this city is a monument to how the world works, the world controlled by the Great Guilds. The Great Guilds didn’t prevent this. All they could do was help destroy the city.
Freedom. But what if freedom caused this disaster in the first place? What if those who argue that the Great Guilds need to control the commons to prevent more dead cities are actually right? Something has to change. The world has to change. Otherwise there will be a lot more cities filled with the dead. If Alain is right about that storm he talks about, every city will end up like this within just a few more years, as the world the Great Guilds have wrapped in chain breaks out and breaks up. But is freedom the answer? Or will it just lead to the same outcome, as every place turns into Tiae anyway? How do I know?
The unnaturally quiet ruins offered no answers. Mari stared out into the darkness for a long time before her eyes drooped shut from exhaustion and she fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.
When she opened her eyes again, the pale light of dawn was visible over the counter. The sun had risen on their second day in the dead city.
* * * *
They waited until the light was good enough to illuminate any dangerous spots in the ruins, eating cold food and drinking sparingly for a cheerless breakfast, and then started out again.
Progress was better than the day before, though still not easy. They stumbled across one relatively clear street and were able to follow it for a little way before finding the wreck of an Imperial siege tower lying athwart the road. That forced them back into a warren of alleys and side streets choked with debris, further slowing their progress. They finally stopped before a small plaza, an open space with little wrack of battle littering it. Alain shook his head. “Must we cross this? It is open to easy sight of anyone in those buildings surrounding.”
Mari wiped sweat from her forehead, the moisture smearing the dust on her into a muddy streak on her forearm. “We can’t go back. And I am not going into any of those buildings.”
“No. That would be far too dangerous, even if nothing but the dangers of decay lurked within them.” Alain stared around the plaza. “My foresight reveals nothing at this time, but my instincts tell me we are being watched.”
“Me, too. We’re making plenty of noise getting through this mess. They could track us by that racket alone.” Mari checked her pistol. She needed both hands free while scrambling over the rubble, but wanted to be sure she could get the weapon out fast if needed. “Let’s go.”
They made it across the plaza without incident, even though the blank faces of the surrounding buildings watched Mari and Alain with silent menace. Mari breathed a sigh of relief as they entered the next street, where piles of debris formed an irregular series of barricades which needed to be climbed over. They were about halfway down that street and crossing a small open area between obstructions when a rock fell ahead of them, rolling down a long slope formed by the collapse of one side of a building. Alain froze. Mari yanked out her pistol and searched the wrecked
buildings rising in one or two crumbling stories around them. “What is it?” she asked him.
Alain pointed. A man was visible ahead, standing in shadow between two piles of debris. All three of them stood still, the man silent and motionless, Alain and Mari watching him and searching their surroundings for others.
Finally, the man moved, stepping into the light. Mari fought down a shudder of revulsion. It was impossible to tell how old he was because his body and hair were caked with filth. He wore a ragged strip of fabric as a sort of loincloth, crude-looking sandals on his feet, and on his chest the type of breastplate Imperial centurions had worn more than century ago. Looking every day of its age, the pitted and corroded breastplate also sported a large hole which could have been made by either an antique crossbow bolt or a Mechanic bullet.
Mari took in all that in a moment, focusing on the broken sword the man held in one hand. She pulled back the slide of her pistol to load a round, clicked off the safety, then leveled her pistol at him while steadying it with both hands, hoping that the process was sufficiently threatening to deter the man and any unseen companions he had. “Stop right there, unless you want that armor to get another hole in it.”
The man stopped, then opened his mouth in what could have been a smile but wasn’t, the gesture revealing that a lot of teeth were missing. “Give up or fight. Don’t matter to me. You fight, we kill you slower.” His accent was archaic, the words slurred from sloppy pronunciation.
“We?” Alain asked.
The man gave a low, shrill whistle. There was a stirring of the rubble on all sides, and others came into view, each wearing a combination of badly aged cast-off clothing and pieces of armor, and each carrying a weapon in various stages of corrosion or breakage.
Mari shook her head, hoping her voice would remain steady, her weapon staying fixed on the leader. “I’ve got enough bullets in this Mechanic weapon to kill every one of you. Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”
The man seemed amused, showing another gap-toothed smile, and Mari realized the expression was actually more like the snarl of a wolf. “We already dead, girl. Didn’t ya know? Dead born to the dead. Emperor say so.” He spat to one side. “What can you do?”
“Right now you may be officially dead, but you’re not really dead,” Mari replied. “I can change that.” The man took a step closer. Aiming carefully, her weapon steadied in both hands, Mari fired at the battered wall next to the man. The sound of the shot was amplified by the small hollow they were in, echoing repeatedly off the broken ruins to all sides. A chunk of the wall shattered, spraying the man with fragments. “I missed you on purpose. That was a warning. The next shot will blow your head off.”
The man bared what teeth he had, the snarl fiercer, looking up and to one side. Mari kept her eyes and her pistol sights on the leader as Alain followed the gesture. She felt a sense of warmth that told her Alain was building a ball of heat in one hand.
There was a crack of breaking masonry, then Alain spoke with a Mage’s total calmness. “A man in a broken window, with a short spear. Both man and window are now gone. You deal with a Mage, commons. Depart or die.”
Mari took a deep breath, keeping her weapon sighted on the leader. To her own surprise her voice remained firm. “You heard my Mage. Try anything else and I’ll kill you where you stand.”
The leader shook his head. “I already dead, woman.” He raised the broken sword and lunged forward. Mari could hear sounds all around as his followers also charged.
Her mind numb, Mari lowered her sights to make sure they were centered on the leader’s breastplate and fired. He staggered, swaying to one side, then got his feet under him again and tried to keep coming. Mari fired again, her shot this time cracking his ancient breastplate in half as he dropped to the dusty rubble. She could hear Alain hurling fire to her right, so she spun left, firing again as another man scrambled toward them. The shot missed but she got off another immediately, this one knocking him down. Pivoting again, Mari lined up on a third man and put a bullet in his belly. He was still screaming when she fired three times at a fourth enemy, a woman who was very close and diving with a rusty dagger at Alain’s back. The hits drove the woman back and to the side, to fall like a broken doll.
Mari couldn’t see any other targets to the left so she spun back to the right, checking each man she had already dropped. The wounded man seemed unable to get up, but picked up a broken brick and heaved it at her as she turned. Mari flinched as the brick hit her shoulder, then closed her mind to what she was doing and fired one more time.
Silence fell. Alain spoke into the quiet as he sheathed his long Mage’s knife under his coat. “All on this side are dead.”
“Here, too,” Mari gasped. “Are we safe?”
“For the moment.”
“Good.” With trembling hands she ejected the clip in her pistol, loaded a new one, set the safety, returned the pistol to its holster, then went to her knees and got sick, losing everything she had eaten that morning and what felt like some of last night’s meal in the bargain. Once that was done she knelt there, shaking like a leaf, until she felt Alain’s hand on her shoulder.
“It is hard,” he said. “These are the first you have killed?”
“Y-yes.” She was trying not to think about what had happened, to keep her mind blank, but revulsion still roiled through her.
“It is hard,” Alain repeated, his voice carrying compassion she could hear. “I have never forgotten the first time I had to kill others, and then I believed them to be but shadows.”
“We didn’t have any choice,” Mari muttered, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. “They didn’t give us any choice. Why didn’t they give us any choice?”
“That is right,” Alain said, his voice soft. “We had no choice. We did not seek the fight and we tried to avoid it.”
She clenched her teeth, then stood up, Alain steadying her. Mari’s mouth and throat were sour with her vomit but right now she felt like hurting, letting the pain distract her a little from the sight of the bodies about her, the memories of bodies falling as she fired her pistol. “We—we need to move. Get away from here before more of them come. The sound of this fight must’ve been heard all over the city.”
He didn’t argue, and had probably already reached the same conclusion, Mari thought, but had given her a few moments to cope with her reactions to the first time she had been forced to use the pistol to shoot other humans. “Stupid. Stupid people,” she gasped, half sobbing. “Maybe they didn’t have any reason to fear dying. But they didn’t have to make us kill them.” Fighting down another tremor in her arms and legs, Mari followed Alain, glancing back once to see the bodies sprawled on the rubble, a few small fires set in the ancient wood by Alain’s spells sending up thin columns of smoke.
A voice in her head nagged at Mari as she scrambled over the next pile of debris. She realized it was her old friend Alli, who had taught her to shoot and sprinkled the lessons with lots of advice. “Always reload any time you get a chance, Mari. You don’t want to get caught with an empty weapon.”
Alli, back then it was just fun, blowing holes in a paper target. It’s no fun at all when the target is another person. It’s just awful and frightening and terrible. But thank the stars above that you taught me how to use a pistol. I don’t even want to think about what those creatures would have done to me.
Mari tried to focus on the rubble they were climbing over to help block out the horror filling her, but took advantage of a level stretch to reload the clip she had ejected from the pistol, wondering whether the barbarians would be sensibly discouraged by the killing of their comrades, or would keep coming after her and Alain. “The legionaries must have heard those shots, too. They’ll report them. They won’t come inside the city, though.”
“No, they will not enter the city.” Alain thought, then shook his head. “Perhaps there will be no report, either. Declaring that they had heard the sounds of your weapon would mean admitting
someone had gotten into the city past them. I would not be surprised if the legionaries find another explanation for the noise, one which they would not be required to report to their superiors.”
“Something big collapsing, maybe? Beams of wood snapping?”
“Yes. Whatever illusion they need to convince themselves of in order to avoid placing themselves in serious trouble with their superiors. Mages are not the only ones who try to make the world illusion into a different form. Sometimes it is necessary for everyone.” Alain looked back at her for a moment. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll survive, Alain. Thanks for asking.” Mari drew in a long trembling breath as they crested the latest pile of wreckage and headed down the other side. “Let’s not talk unless we have to. More of those savages might hear. I’ll be all right. Because I have to be.”
They moved as quickly as possible for a while, not worrying much about the noise, trying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the place where they had fought. Alain seemed wearier than he should have given their pace, causing Mari to worry until she mentally kicked herself for forgetting that his spells tired him out. Another battle might leave him too exhausted to move for a while. That was something else to worry about.
Once Alain stopped in his tracks and gestured off to the side. Mari followed without question, assuming his foresight had this time warned of some danger ahead.
Because of the ruins blocking their view, they stumbled onto the banks of the Ospren River without warning and stood, trying to catch their breaths. Mari walked to the cracked edge of the river wall, looking each way down the river. “All of the bridges have collapsed. No surprise there, unfortunately.”
Alain nodded, gazing watchfully back the way they had come. “They were probably badly damaged during the fighting. Is your Guild Hall on the other side of the river?”