4-9
Zahra had something wrong with her, that much was obvious. There had always been an energy to the girl, ever since Sara had first met her, even her moments of mortal terror were accompanied by mobility, the trembling and whimpering that showed there was life in her. Now, though, even with Ruthven bound at the far end of the room, she was empty.
It would have been better if she was comatose. That would imply that the wounds were physical, that she was suffering from blood loss or some kind of curse. This catatonia, though, suggested only one obvious cause: he’d done something to her, something awful enough that the only way for Zahra to cope was to retreat inside of herself. Ruthven had protested that he hadn’t molested her, though the way he touched her hair said that he was speaking the truth only on a technicality, if that.
Sara’s heart was breaking, and she kept having to put it back together just to keep moving long enough for it to break again. She wanted to wallow in the pain, to hold Zahra tight and let the girl’s suffering flow into her, the way physical pain flowed the other direction, but there was no time for that. They needed to escape.
There was a brief concern over whether Zahra would be able to make it down the ladder leading onto Shati, but Juniper was able to help. The exact physics of her little-ball-of-light form were something of a mystery—there was no actual fairy inside of it, not that Sara had ever seen—but she could exert force, enough to help in keeping Zahra stable as she made her way down. Ruthven had been taking care of her physically, at least; though lack of sun exposure left her skin looking unwholesomely pale, Zahra was, if anything, stronger than usual.
But even still, anxiety had a light yet firm grip on Sara’s internal organs all the way down from the sixth floor window to the moment that her sister stepped off into the hull of Shati. Juniper flitted in, flickered back to her Zeroth, and hinged the hatch shut behind herself.
“Alrighty there Conductor, all passengers are on board and this train needs to shed some sparks!”
Juniper had a flawless impression of a helpful, go-getting sidekick from a cartoon, and loved to pull it out whenever “the Conductor of Justice” was doing his thing. Sara didn’t understand it. With Wes himself it was at least possible that acting like a superhero was a compulsion, some side effect of the Pretension state; when Sara had asked him about it, he’d acted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. But Juniper had no such excuse.
Wes, meanwhile, had been giving a tour of the vehicle, his pride and joy, to an extremely uncomfortable-looking Vilena. There was some pleasure to be had in seeing that tight, confused expression on her face.
“RIGHT YOU ARE, MISS SUMMERS, RIGHT YOU ARE! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, STRAP YOURSELVES IN: THINGS MIGHT BE ABOUT TO GET BUMPY!”
Wes and Juniper, the ones with experience operating Shati, slipped into the front compartment, while Sara set to work buckling in her sister, and Vilena did the same helping Gilead. It was a faintly absurd sight, the four-point fabric harness bent over top of the rounded, smooth shapes of his steel-plate armor.
“Are you certain,” Sara said as she secured herself in place, “that you don’t want to get out of that armor for now?”
Gilead raised one perfectly-plucked eyebrow. “Thinkest thou mine other clothing might be more suited for this riding? I think not.”
Qi Zhen, though completely unfamiliar with Shati, needed no assistance whatsoever in securing themself in place. In a further display of dexterity, the machine waited until after being strapped down to fold into a rigid lotus position from which they could regenerate their qi batteries. How a machine with no functioning respiratory system could circulate qi was a fascinating question, one answered when several of the plates on their shoulders and back opened up like flower petals and began to pulsate.
Before Sara could be drawn any further into watching that enticingly beautiful sight, Vilena distracted her with a half-whispered question. “Who is Shati? That is, I know it is the name of this machine, but who is it named for?”
Wes, who could hear them despite the crescendoing noise of his ride’s powerful steam turbine, answered with typical bombacity.
“THE NAMESAKE OF THE FIRST LAND STEAMER IS NOT A WHO, BUT A WHAT! IT MEANS ‘BULLET’! AS FOR WHY IT HAS THAT NAME: OBSERVE!”
The Conductor’s gloved hand took hold of the prime lever, and with a theatrical grunt threw it all the way forwards. Shati took off, indeed, like a bullet. The entire hull rattled and thrummed with immense power sending dirt cascading past the windows as her iron treads bit into the loam of Ruthven’s courtyard. In a matter of seconds she was careening down the way, heading in a straight line towards the curtain wall guarding the palace.
Gilead, who had never experienced Shati at full speed, and Vilena, who had not experienced it at all, both screamed.
“Turn, turn, turn, you need to turn!” Vilena shouted, her voice becoming more shrill as her panic increased.
Wes wasn’t going to turn. Shati’s beaked prow wasn’t for show, and neither was the armor. She was going maybe fifty miles per hour when she slammed into the curtain wall, and although the impact threw everyone inside the land steamer forcefully against their restraints, it wasn’t enough to stop her. She burst through in a shower of rubble, leaving the wall to collapse behind her as she continued to pick up speed. Wes had said that he would be making engine improvements that would let her hit ninety, and by God he was going to show those improvements off.
Normally, Sara would have classed travel at ninety miles per hour down a city street in a sixteen-ton steel-frame steam engine with a battering ram on the front as a mixture of homicidal and suicidal. Given that Wes’s driving skills were probably supernatural, she could give him a pass, but that didn’t stop it from making her grit her teeth. Neither did the fact that they were being chased by the police, pursuing Shati in a small fleet of those creepy flesh-cars that Leedsrealm was so damnably proud of.
None of them could keep up with the world’s first land steamer. As the shouting and gunshots faded into the distance, she first went counterclockwise, (that is, counterclockwise on the map of Scrapyard, as measured by an observer looking down on it from above) which was the fastest route out of the urban agglomeration and into the surrounding wilderness, then started circling the edge of the city. Their objective was the same crossing they had taken to cross from Topeka County into Leedsrealm to begin with. It would be guarded, sure, but Shati had an armored frame that made her far more resilient against bullets than against the horrors of the suture.
It was a short journey, barely more than ten minutes. The countryside was rolling, making everyone inside faintly sick from the constant rattling motion, forcing Sara to play the plan on a loop in her head to maintain control. It would be a straight shot, a mad dash from one end of the checkpoint to the other, not slowing for anything. A minute or two of terror, and then they would be free.
Just as the time approached, Shati suddenly came to a screeching halt; not part of the plan. Juniper and Wes had a hushed argument in the front compartment while Sara unbuckled herself to find out what was going on. When she burst into the front, getting her first view out of the forward windows, the problem became obvious.
On the first entry, the crossing had been a fairly standard 19th-century outpost, lots of barbed wire and machine guns surrounding a central throughway. What had not been there was a pair of colossal artillery cannons, each about four meters in length and facing inwards, towards Leeds.
“What the fuck? Where did those come from?”
Sara’s question was met by prolonged silence. The Conductor leaned forward until the glass in his goggles almost met that in the window.
“BLAST AND DAMN! DO YOU SEE THOSE PILLBOXES? THEY MUST HAVE BEEN CONCEALED WITHIN, ONLY TO BE DEPLOYED AT MOMENT OF NEED!”
“Where did they even get those cannons,” Juniper moaned.
Vilena, whose presence took the forward compartment from crowded to overstuffed, provided the answer. “They’re from the Ajax. It was docked at Blackpool when this place was brought to Scrapyard, and Ruthven had it disassembled. I didn’t know the cannons had been brought here…”
“But considering the threat from Kingdom forces in Topeka County, it would be logical,” Sara said, filling in the gaps. “Ruthven, or someone else, must have sent the word by telegraph to deploy them.” She tapped Wes on the shoulder, forcing him to look into her eyes as she asked the all-important question. “Can we still make it through?”
“PAST THOSE GRAND CANNONS? IT WILL BE…”
He stopped. The Conductor of Justice flickered away, replaced with the mere man Wesley Wall, his clothing stained with sweat. He swallowed, then swallowed again, then looked at the cannons.
“The thermal alloy making up Shati’s armored shell is optimized against energy weapons, lasers and flame and the like. You know, what the angels use.”
“But it did just fine against machine guns?” Juniper asked.
Wesley gestured vaguely out the front windows. “And those ain’t machine guns. They’re, uh… from the look of them, six-inch bore, semi-armor piercing… probably still using gunpowder, but maybe something stronger, TNT or picric acid. Shati can take indirect hits, fragmentation, but one shot hits us directly and it’ll go right through the armor, detonate inside, and kill all of us. Well, maybe the vampire survives.”
Sara didn’t need to think in order to start doing the math; years of guerrilla warfare had drilled it into her. Shati was fast, and she was agile, but she was still a land vehicle. The biggest problem was the location: with the suture on either side, they were channeled into a straight-line trajectory right through the middle.
“So,” Wes said. “Do we want to try risking it anyways?”
There was a percentile chance that they would still be able to make it through, especially with Wesley at the wheel. There was no way to calculate that percentage, and there never would be. But Sara didn’t need to know her times tables in order to know the answer.
“No. We need to find another way.”
“But where?” Juniper asked. “The other crossing’s not going to be any less well-guarded!”
“We could go through the suture directly. Shati’s built to be air-tight, at least for a few hours. I deactivate the turning system and there goes our chances of getting lost.”
Sara looked back over her shoulder at Zahra, morose and listless. Going through an unshielded portion of a suture meant facing more than just physical threats.
“No, we can’t risk that either.”
Juniper gave Sara a venomous look. “Then what do you want us to do? We can’t stay in Leedsrealm after everything we’ve done.”
“The coast,” Vilena said. “There are ships that can take heavy machinery like this, I know where to find them in Blackpool. There are ports in the Kingdom we could go to.”
There was one person who had the most reason to object to that particular plan, and Sara looked at him at once. She didn’t need to say anything to ask the question, but she did regardless.
“Wes?”
He bit his lower lip, muttering something to himself. A risk calculation, most likely. “Hell, if I cared about this hunk of steel more than I did your sister, I’d have never agreed to this. First Pretense: I Don’t Know Anything. WE GO FOR THE COAST!”
With the pressing of a few levers, Shati roared back into motion, executing a turn far tighter than it had any right to be capable of given its overall mass. Sara and Vilena rushed to return to their seats. The race was on.
It was a forty minute journey from the border to Blackpool, and worse yet, much of that distance was in a direction that wasn’t taking them further away from their enemy’s stronghold in Leeds. They were about halfway there, sprinting across dozens of miles of rolling countryside, when it happened.
(Far away, sinuous flows of golden light finally snapped before the might of a creature of absolute shadow. His fangs were bared, and darkness poured from his skin like sweat. He let loose a howl of rage enough to make babies suffocate in their cribs, and) an impossible feeling of hideous hopelessness overtook those who dwelt within Shati’s hull. Vilena screamed, then collapsed into miserable sobs. Sara looked up at the roof, sure that something had just landed on top of the vehicle. Even Wes was alarmed, the moment of the shadow’s arrival marked by a slight swerve as the muscles in his wrists tensed.
Gilead was the least affected out of all of them. His hand fell naturally to the golden belt of braided human hair around his waist, holding onto it as a lifeline. His eyes narrowed as he looked carefully around the compartment.
“What is this?” Sara asked.
“Black magic,” said the knight in shining armor. “Sorcery, but like unto no sorcery I have felt before. The devil’s own wroth has fallen upon us!”
That was certainly what it felt like. There was something behind Sara, glaring at her with evil intention from mere centimeters behind her. Something was invading her flesh, making her cold. There was a creature larger than a continent and made out of hatred, and its eyes were on Sara Ajami alone.
“What can we do about it?”
“Naught but be wary and pray.”
Sara chose prayer. She folded her hands against her chest, where her cross was hidden beneath the layers of her now-disheveled manservant disguise, and wished that she could lower her eyes as well. Instead, she kept her eyes on Zahra as she mumbled prayers, Arabic with a smattering of Aramaic, slipping from psalms to folk-prayers to whatever passages of the Bible she could remember.
They brought no succor, aside from what little succor could be earned by simply distracting oneself from the all-encompassing feeling of impending doom. Something very bad was going to happen, and it was going to happen very soon. Sara’s skin continued to crawl until she wished she could just scratch it all off.
Meanwhile Vilena, still weeping, leaned over and pulled herself up against Gilead’s shoulder, letting her tears paint tracks across the plates of his armor. His expression said that he was rather uncomfortable with this arrangement, but he wasn’t going to push her away.
Shati, pushing ahead at her absolute maximum speed, found its way onto a path through a stand of trees, the closest approximation Leedsrealm had to a truly wild place. The rows of trees rising up on either side of her should have been perceived as a threat; but with the curse whispering nightmares into everyone’s ears, trees were no danger at all. That idea was dispelled very rapidly when something heavy slammed against Shati’s flank.
A ghoul had been waiting in the trees and leapt onto her roof as she passed. It was impossible, of course, that such creatures could have outraced the land steamer; they had known she was coming this way, somehow.
All of the tension, the need to act that Sara had built up, all of it exploded out in a moment. She threw off the buckles, barely stable even as Wes swerved Shati from side to side by way of evasive maneuvers, and grabbed a Lee-Enfield from a rack on the wall.
“Unlock the roof hatch,” she said, loading it full of shells. “I’m going to shoot them off!”
“AS YOU WISH!”
There was a heavy thunk as the locks came undone. It took Sara effort and time to turn the valve holding the hatch shut, so that by the time she heaved it open, the first of the ghouls to land on Shati’s back was staring right back down at her. Bracing herself against the floor, Sara thrust the barrel of the rifle directly into its chest as the ghoul prepared to lunge. Her arms screamed in pain, but that defense held just long enough. All she had to do was get her finger on the trigger.
Boom. Point-blank. The ghoul fell limp and rolled away with the next evasive maneuver.
Gilead, who had been fumbling with his buckles, finally escaped, and just in time for Sara to realize that she wasn’t tall enough to actually stick her head out of the hatch. Without a word exchanged, he went to his knees, picked up Sara by the legs, and planted her firmly on his shoulder.
With a stable platform to shoot from, Sara set to work clearing Shati’s roof. Only a few members of the massive ghoul pack had managed to land on top of her, but they were quite resilient, some even taking a second shot to dispatch. The edge of that small patch of forest, the end of any possibility of further ambush, was already in sight. One by one the ghouls took the tumble, shot in the heart or head or legs.
They burst out of the woods, free at last. Only one ghoul remained on the roof, and Sara pivoted around, ready to finish it like all the others. Except, she had made one fatal miscalculation: she was out of bullets. She pressed down on the trigger of the rifle and heard only a click, not a bang. She tried to drop, let the ghoul overshoot her, but Sara’s reflexes simply couldn’t match that of a wild predator, and though its jaws missed her by a handsbreath, the same could not be said for the claws that seized around her scalp. Sara screamed.
BLAM BLAM BLAM
Three shots, magnified to deafening volume by the fact they were fired from inside of Shati. The ghoul was still alive, but one of the bullets had blown through its arm, and with its grip interrupted, the ghoul slipped, shoved off of the roof by wind and the unevenness of the journey.
Sara looked down to see who had done it, only to discover to her mild horror that Gilead was pointing a handgun up at her. He must have grabbed it when he’d first stood up, then decided it was better to let Sara handle the shooting until such time as she couldn’t any longer. She grinned at him, chuckling softly to herself, and he grinned right back.
Then there was a horrible grinding sound from somewhere down below in Shati’s mechanicals. The machine began to twist left and right, suddenly impossible to control.
“BRACE FOR EMERGENCY STOP!” shouted the Conductor.
Gilead grabbed hold of Sara’s ankles and pulled her into the compartment, just as Shati tipped over onto one side.