Clara,
Vee, George, and I caught a ride with Kimble. He had spent the
evening drafting a new shape for it, and the flying fortress he put
together was pretty impressive. While he'd been drafting that, Gina
had been sitting with Vee and George talking about fighter jets and
other airborne death machines. I was watching them conjure up
different versions of these in a hangar bay Kimble had opened up for
them. As we made that trip, Ray, Gina, and Joy were roaring
point-to-point among the people we'd visited a few days earlier; Ray
was picking up a payload to be delivered into Laurent's head.
Gina
got back to us just in time for us to see Laurent's fortress rising
above the horizon. We called them down, and Ray started transferring
his borrowed load of terrible memories to me. It was painful stuff
to hold onto, but I'd volunteered. Ray still wasn't all the way
healed up in the waking world, and couldn't risk something going
wrong in delivery. Clara and I were the best bets for actually going
into Laurent's space, and she'd never carried anything tricky before.
She might lose track of it and not be able to drag it back out, or
any number of other ugly possibilities. I at least had Ulla to help
me sort it out if it went bad, though I didn't mention that.
From
my starting position in the hangar bay, the start of the fight went
very well indeed. Gina, George, and Vee shot out, and went circling
arount the fort, hammering at the hives; fires broke out almost
immediately, and huge pieces of hive calved away in that first
assault. The swarms that had already been moving lazily above,
seemingly trying to make sense of our appearance, were caught off
guard just as thoroughly. Some of those turned to give chase to the
fighters. Others came at the flying fortress.
The
ones that came for the fortress came under fire from the phantom
squad. I don't know where Kimble got the idea for his guns; they
looked like B-Movie science fiction material from the 50s, and they
shot bolts of purple lightning. Still, they worked. Kimble himself,
and Clara, were working guns of their own – there was one I could
potentially have gone to, but I was fiddling with the parachute Clara
had made me, looking for my jump. I wanted to hit Laurent's fortress
unnoticed in the chaos, if possible.
Look
there.
Ulla,
on the edge beside me, was looking at one of the walkways linking the
hives to Laurent's fortress, where a figure with a trailing cloak and
long hair was striding, moving toward the fortress.
Quickly,
now.
Ulla
jumped up on my shoulders, shrinking down, and I went for it.
I'd
never tried skydiving in the waking world; I very much doubt I ever
will. I doubt it would be able to measure up to jumping off a
floating island in the sky, plummeting down past flocks of diabolical
bat-winged humanoids being struck at with bolts of purple lightning,
opening my chute, and slowing just enough to tear loose and hit that
walkway rolling. Ulla had jumped free as I tore the harness, and hit
the walkway at panther size; I had landed with claws and tail all
manifest. We sprinted down the walkway, and ahead of us, the figure
turned and paused in apparent shock.
It
was a version of Laurent – though I couldn't tell if he was lucid
or not, and the shock didn't last long. He gestured in the air,
drawing one hand around in a crescent arc. Where his hand passed,
the air split open like a flap, revealing a space behind the air,
flooded with pressing nightkind.
They
did not leap out so much as they were forced out by the sheer
pressure of bodies in whatever place it was Laurent had opened up a
hole to. They caught themselves in the air or against the walkway,
and spun to come at me. By the time they turned, Ulla and I were
among them, moving and tearing. They tore back. The last twenty
feet of the walkway were a gauntlet of cuts, scrapes, and tears.
Thought Ulla and I dodged and twisted fairly magnificently, we still
shed a good deal of blood. My left leg, especially; a nightkind dug
into the back of my thigh and left furrows almost the whole way down
to my ankle.
Still,
I tackled the version of Laurent just as he was registering that I'd
made it through and was opening the little balcony door into his
fortress; we tumbled through together. The other side of that door
was a rough stone-carved staircase, leading down into some stinking
darkness. I recovered my orientation as I tumbled, caught hold of
Laurent, and rode his body all the way down, kneeling on his chest.
Ulla hit my shoulder, kitten-sized, as we went.
Down
at the bottom of the stairs, we crashed through some rotted wood, and
into a ruined attic. I could hear his tribe raising an alarm in the
house below. As I lay bleeding, listening to them combing the house
so that they could cave in my skull, I hurried to empty my pockets of
the payload I'd been given. Toys, photographs, a funeral
announcement, and other oddments all sent flying. Never mind trying
to find good spots to conceal them, at this point; I just didn't want
them on me when I died. Everything out, I crawled a little ways
away, and began to tie up my wounds. My chances of making it out
alive struck me as nonexistent, but at least I could patch up some of
the damage so far, maybe give a good account of myself.
As
I tied off the banadges I'd wrapped around my leg, something hit the
fortress hard enough to shake it. I hoped it wasn't one of us, even
as I heard the searchers shouting at each other. The shouts were
incoherent, not from distance, but in the same sense that if you
listen closely to a 'crowd' onstage during a stage play, you can
often hear one of the actors saying 'rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb'. They
were the right kinds of noise, but meaningless.
He can
only attend to so many things at once. Something is distracting him.
Probably
the dead version of himself, and the crash, I considered, as I
scanned the ceiling for our point of entry.
There.
Ulla
jumped first. I followed, jumping high but not gracefully. It was
enough to catch hold of a grubby stone surface, and pull myself up.
I heaved myself up onto a flat surface, rolled a little away, and sat
up.
To
my left, I could make out the shape of the hole I'd climbed up from,
and just past that, the stairs I'd rolled down to arrive. On my
right, a steep drop-off; I was on a balcony overlooking a cavern. On
the cavern floor, a hooded assembly chanted - "Ia! Ia! Ia!",
as they scraped in front of a huge bas-relief icon of a nightkind.
This has
the marks of a remembered place.
Which
meant it was real, in the waking world. The winding stairway and
other details might be exagerrated, but the cavern and icon existed.
The thought was grotesque, panic-inducing. Mangled leg or no, I
crossed the hole with a leap, and fled up the stairs with more speed
than I would have guessed I had available to me.
I
burst out the door at the top of those stairs and onto the walkway
just in time to see the hive at the far end of the walk collapse in
flames. The tear in space Laurent had made was sealed over, and the
nightkind that had spilled from it were already gone.
I
walked down the walkway with a limp, and sat on the rail about
halfway down, until Vee spotted me and made pickup. There were still
enemies, hives; a fight we could keep going. The job was done,
though; I yelled at her to signal a withdrawal.
