4-8
It happened like this.
Galanan Mac Cináeda, the Lord Ruthven, in the one thousand and fourteenth year of his life, in his regular sweeps through Leeds, the soot-stained jewel of his empire, found a woman so beautiful that he could not bear to have her gone from him after only one night of pleasure. She lay in a gutter, dying of whatever it is that whores die of, but even in her final days her sunken cheeks nonetheless made for the frame of a portrait of beauty.
So he appeared before her, and learned to his delight that not only was she gorgeous, but she was foreign. Vilena’s English had been downright shoddy back then, clunky verbiage learned out of pure necessity, without the refinement that Ruthven’s teachings would one day bring her. Marry him, he explained, and Vilena would never have to suffer again: she would live in plenty, inhabiting an un-aging and all-powerful body and knowing that no being in Scrapyard could dispute her.
Except for Ruthven, of course. Vilena shouldn’t have said yes. But she was afraid, and she hadn’t eaten anything in days, and she just wanted her suffering to come to an end. So she agreed. Ruthven, for his part, bared his fangs and promptly vanished. Vilena believed it to have been a hallucination, a vision brought on by hunger and extremity: not the first one she’d experienced in those days.
She persisted in that belief until the moment Ruthven returned, this time with their marriage-coach in tow. Vilena did not resist him, not when he lifted her up off the street with his own cold hands, not when the doors shut behind the two of them and plunged them both into darkness.
They went to the traditional place for a marriage: a church. Not any one of the stately CoE chapels scattered throughout Leeds, not even one of its handful of baroque Catholic churches, neither would have fit the mood anyways. The wedding of Lord and Lady Ruthven—the fourth such wedding—took place on top of a country parish’s bones. The runes visible through the ribcage of its roof were somehow even denser than usual. They, more than Ruthven, was what Vilena was looking at as he carried her down the aisle and placed her supine upon the altar.
Vilena had thought that the audience of ghouls and necromancers who stood silently amidst the rubble were there to watch Ruthven penetrate her like the feral lead of a bodice-ripper romance. Such an act was both too uncouth and too safe for him. He mounted her, yes, and tore open her dress, but there was no removal of his own clothing. Instead, after a moment to survey the perfect body before him, Ruthven pushed his fingers into her flesh and opened up Vilena’s ribcage like an unruly oyster at an afternoon luncheon.
When Vilena regained consciousness, it was already done. The residue of Ruthven’s heart-meat still stained his hands from where he’d gouged Vilena’s portion out of himself, and her own chest had already slipped closed. She would never know how much of himself he’d given her. Considering he’d done it six times, it couldn’t be all that much.
She was about to learn. At least she would assuming that she could remain conscious for long enough as Ruthven pushed into her flesh once more, ready to take back his gift. It hurt more than words could convey, all the worse because of how Vilena’s immortal flesh fought Ruthven’s fingers at every turn, sticking to his fingers as though all of her was just some thick liquid. Vilena should have been thrashing, struggling, gouging out his eyes with her nails, but something held her paralyzed, the same something that was making the shadows around Ruthven’s feet congeal into black ink.
It was a hell of a way to go out, at least. And from the look of it, Vilena’s death was also buying time for Sara to escape with her sister, which qualified it as a noble act of sacrifice instead of a suicide-by-husband. Her choice to wait this long had proven justified after all. Vilena tipped her head back, let her eyes fall half-shut, and waited for the end.
“Aha! I have now studied your nature, fiend of shadow, and now you shall be destroyed!”
When Qi Zhen, so silent for so long, finally decided to speak up and join the fight, it was with the tone of someone telling an adventure story to a group of fascinated children. Vilena might have been rather offended if she wasn’t in the process of watching her life flash before her eyes. Ruthven didn’t hear them at all.
“Very well then, deathless demon,” said Qi Zhen. “You have chosen to spite me as well as attack my friends. Face a thousand years of torment!”
Qi Zhen dropped into a crouch, and with stiffened fingers traced out a rapid, liquid looping pattern, as though giving shape to something invisible and intangible merely by implying its presence. That thing never materialized; but as they moved, golden sparkling light began to spill out of Qi Zhen’s fingertips, tracing out intricate patterns. Vilena was too badly drowned in shadow and the numbness of imminent death to feel the wonder of exposure to a new kind of magic, but a faint confusion stirred in her chest nonetheless.
“I call upon the spirits of the ancient masters for guidance,” Qi Zhen intoned. “Tenfold Harmony of Spectral Gongs!”
As the machine completed its incantation, the golden lights winked out all at once. Qi Zhen charged, screaming loudly enough that its own internal speakers began to clip and distort. Ruthven relinquished his grip on Vilena’s throat, preferring to keep in place the fingers that were past the second knuckle in her chest, and prepared to bat them aside.
He never got the chance. Well before Qi Zhen was inside his reach, their charge slowed, turning, twisting into a sidelong flying kick. The instant their foot touched Ruthven’s intercepting hand, everything went white as the entire penthouse was filled with a single all-encompassing note: the sound of a gong louder than a life’s worth of words spoken all at once.
Ruthven was gone, and without him holding her up, Vilena went to the floor. She caught herself on her elbows, though, which was significantly better than Qi Zhen managed to do as they crumpled. From out of their speakers emanated a shrill, rhythmic beeping, interrupted by a formal woman’s voice that was not their own.
“电池电量过低了百分之二十。请尽快充电。”
“Qi Zhen? Are you alright?”
Vilena had met this person—or machine, or whatever was correct—five minutes earlier and spoken to them never, but they had just saved her life, which gave her an innate concern for theirs. She crawled over, shaking their shoulder.
The moment her fingers touched Qi Zhen’s dented carapace, a spasm passed through them and their eyes re-focused. The first thing they did was start laughing maniacally, shouting more Chinese at nobody in particular.
Vilena nudged them again. “What was that? Are you alright?”
“No,” said the machine. “My reserves are almost drained, and if they run down to zero I’ll die. But I fucking did it, did you see that, I actually pulled it off!”
Qi Zhen continued cackling and yelling, all the while Vilena started thinking about how to save their life. “Your reserves? Do you need… batteries? Gasoline?”
“Experimental qi cell,” they said. “I can replenish myself, but that takes time and focus.”
“And moving around will drain those reserves of yours?”
“Yes, exactly.”
The extreme calm of Vilena’s near-death experience hadn’t worn off yet, leaving her with a few seconds of preternatural focus and clarity. She was going to save the person who had just saved her, even if they were a stranger. Falling backward onto her knees, Vilena grabbed Qi Zhen by the midsection and, over their incensed babbling about it being undignified, threw them over her shoulder. She still had a vampire’s strength, after all; Qi Zhen’s metal body was barely an inconvenience.
But as she stood, she saw Ruthven, and it all came crashing back. Qi Zhen had not, despite her hopes, completely vaporized him in a single apocalyptic blow. Instead, he was pinned to the wall, held in place by flows of golden energy that coiled around his body. Vilena’s knees went weak until she noticed his expression: twisted and strained. He was in pain, and that knowledge bolstered her resolve.
“It was an old technique for binding demons and spirits using the persevering life force of the xia,” Qi Zhen explained. “I found it in the sect’s library and taught it to myself as more of a challenge than for any practical purpose. This is the first time I’ve ever made it work.”
“How long will he be stuck there?” Vilena asked.
“I can’t say for certain, it depends on how much force he can bring to bear. I would estimate… an hour, within a factor of three in either direction.”
“Then we need to go.”
Even with one arm holding Qi Zhen steady, it was still an easy thing to pull Elaine back onto her feet.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sore thrashed and head-shaken,” said the knight, averting their gaze. “I encountered with that table-edge and lost.”
But why was Elaine averting her eyes, though? It took Vilena a moment to realize how much of herself had been left exposed when Ruthven had gone directly for her heart. Vilena grimaced.
“Stop being so immature, they’re just breasts. Now then, did you all have an exit plan? The robot says we have twenty minutes.”
Sara was already standing by the staircase down, but shouted back, “Our getaway vehicle is in the park, so if we have twenty minutes then we need to get moving.”
With one hand for Qi Zhen and one hand to hold her top closed, Vilena made slow progress across the room. If she’d been any faster, she wouldn’t have been there to see it when one of the windows of Ruthven’s apartment exploded inwards, shattered by the top of a steel ladder.
For a second, Vilena was completely stunned by the new arrival. She was already operating near her psychological limits, caught by dark memories on the one side and present-day stress on the other. When she did react, it was without grace.
“Who the fuck are you?” she shouted out at the broken window.
From somewhere below (about three-quarters of the way up the side of the palace wall, a precarious position to say the least), a muffled voice shouted, “Shit, shit, retract it, retract it, someone saw us!”
Elaine recognized that voice, and was stirred from her daze by the concentrated force of fury. She stomped up to the windowsill and, leaning out of it, said, “Juniper? Get thyself here in haste! Where hast thou been, thou two-face?”
“Stop retracting it, stop retracting it!”
A few more seconds later, the ladder returned, this time bearing at its top a whirlwind of rainbow-colored cloth with a person inside of it. This, then, was the Juniper that Vilena had heard so much about. “Well, after Sara decided to tell the stealth part of the mission to suck her bomb-dick, I realized that the best way to go loud was to crank up the speakers. So I brought—GILEAD BEHIND YOU VAMPIRE!”
Elaine failed to so much as flinch. “She has chosen her fellowship, and it is ours,” she said. “By her fault is the outer curtain cleared of machine guns.”
“Oh. That would explain all the carnage, yes.” Juniper leaned precariously over the windowsill. “I’m Juniper. What’s your name? And who’s that you’re carrying?”
“I am Vilena, and this is Qi Zhen. We’re your allies now.”
“Hello!” said Qi Zhen, limply waving at Juniper.
For a moment, Juniper’s wide-eyed expression made Vilena paranoid that she was about to start a fight. But it was simply garden-variety surprise. Her gaze flicked over to Elaine, then back to Vilena, then back to Elaine.
“Alright then. You’re lucky that Shati is equipped for a large number of passengers.”
“Shati? What’s Shati?”
“It is the ‘getaway vehicle’ of which Sara spoke,” Elaine said as she pulled out of Vilena’s grasp. “Meanwise, I shall go fetch her.”
While Elaine went down the stairwell to inform Sara of what had happened, Vilena approached the window.
“First Pretense: Piece of Cake,” said Juniper, shrinking into a floating mote of golden light. Her voice was shrill in a way that a less-exhausted Vilena would have found extremely humorous. “Wes’s got every kind of gadget in that thing. A hundred-foot retractible ladder is the least of it!”
When she leaned out of the window, Vilena at first didn’t see the vehicle everyone else spoke of. The ladder was coming out of a hatch in the plate-metal roof of an attached shed at the foot of Ruthven’s palace. Except that she’d lived here for years, and knew that there was no such shed. That was Shati, then, which meant that it was absolutely massive, and looked like no other vehicle Vilena had ever seen on land, all smooth-sided steel with a beaked nose.
Vilena took a few seconds to plan out her movements. Then, letting go of her top so that she could brace herself on the windowsill–Juniper made a squeak–she threw her leg over and onto the top rung of the ladder.
“Are you going to let me down any time soon?” Qi Zhen asked.
“Not if it’s going to drain your reserves without need,” she replied. “I can climb a ladder with one hand.”
Juniper stayed behind up above, guiding first Elaine, then Sara, then Zahra herself down the ladder. Vilena found herself struck by how much she had become used to her own strength. Sure, she was never weak—farm labor would do that to a girl—but she definitely hadn’t been strong enough to casually carry grown adults, or to hold up her entire weight with the grip of one hand without feeling even an ounce of fatigue. Perhaps being free from Ruthven’s control, if such a thing were possible, would mean being able to look on the bright side of vampirism like that.
All of her strength was defeated by the hatch leading into Shati. It simply wasn’t big enough to fit Qi Zhen through it sideways, and Vilena herself at the same time. She was forced to relent, and allow them to step off onto the roof of the vehicle so that she could pass through, being the first of the team to get inside.
The inside of Shati was a lot like a basement in the summer: hot, damp, and with the ugly yellow cast of incandescent lighting. Would have been unpleasantly sweaty if Vilena hadn’t had her blouse torn in half, and if she was still capable of sweating. The only thing it really had going for it was spaciousness: the main body of the vehicle was large enough to stand up and walk in, maybe even enough for two people to pass each other. Sets of long, strangely-tinted windows provided visibility in every direction, showing off the chaos Vilena had left behind during her earlier rampage.
“AND WHO, FAIR MISS, MIGHT YOU BE?”
The doorway connecting to the piloting compartment was thrown open, a bombastic voice emitting through it. The voice’s owner nearly defied description.
From the neck down, he was dressed like a factory worker, if factory workers wore overalls and shirts painted bright purple and crimson red. At his belt, instead of a wrench or the like, was a holster containing an absurdly oversized pistol bolted together out of slabs of boilerplate. He wore a pair of huge goggles, their lenses glowing white, attached by no means Vilena could see; there was no band around the back to interfere with his long, silky black hair.
And the rest of his face… nothing. He had a nose, a mouth, cheeks, a jaw, but no features could be defined, nothing to set him apart from every other man in existence. Despite putting no effort into it, the man was completely anonymous.
But he’d asked a question. “I am Vilena R—Krasnova. I’ve decided to defect to your group. Erm. Who might you be?”
“HA-HA! INDEED, THAT IS THE PROPER QUESTION TO ASK,” he said, propping his foot on one of the nearby seats while drawing the massive pistol. “YOU SPEAK TO NONE OTHER THAN… THE CONDUCTOR OF JUSTICE!”