The Artifact broke, exploding in a burst of light. Its black glass shell shattered, its delicate mechanisms, all brass gears and wires and arcane widgets, spilling across the floor.
Betsy reflexively fired her pistol,
twice.
Huge clouds of thick, bluish-black
smoke poured from the shattered Artifact and filled the room.
The Artifact and the wights began
to make a long, high-pitched keening noise.
The wights fired their rifles
randomly, with no rhyme or reason, spinning around and shooting at nothing in
particular.
Betsy, Helen, and the Resistance guys all started coughing uncontrollably when they inhaled the noxious smoke.
In the midst of the commotion, there was the noise of stone grinding on stone.
Betsy,
still coughing, seized a chair and threw it through the nearest window. The
window shattered, and the chair fell fifteen stories to the ground in a cloud
of glass shards. Smoke boiled out into the drizzling night through the broken
window.
After several seconds, the wights stopped shooting, stopped keening, and clattered to the ground, inert.
Julian
had not expected the Artifact’s destruction to be such a good distraction. He
had expected it to shatter without ceremony or fuss. But, in the flash and
smoke, he had taken the opportunity to duck through a secret passage.
Julian briefly considered trying to
find the architect who designed the palace, in the unlikely event that he was
still alive, and pay him twice for the brilliant idea to include so many secret
passageways. They were certainly coming in handy.
The wall and bookcase[1] rotated back into place after he passed through.
Julian,
staggering against a wall, managed to resist the need to cough after having
inhaled a lungful of the terrible bluish smoke. The taste of the smoke was
indescribably awful, like burning laboratory chemicals.
His thigh felt funny. He touched it curiously, and his fingers came away bloody. Great: a brand-new bullet wound to add to his collection.
He
limped away, down the secret corridor.
Betsy and her Resistance fighters managed to open all the library’s big windows, which eventually reduced the smoke to a thin haze.
It
gradually became clear that Julian was no longer present. So Betsy ordered two
Resistance guys, “Find Julian Malachi and bring him back here. Or kill him,
that would be fine too.” The indicated Resistance guys departed through the
open door.
The others looked on as Betsy
walked over to the shattered remains of the Artifact and nudged it with her
foot.
It had been reduced to a pile of
shattered glass, congealing bluish goo, brass gears and cogs, and miscellaneous
unidentifiable widgets. Betsy was a little disappointed, but was still inclined
to call this a victory. “Let’s see if we can’t find the wine cellar in this
bloody place. We’ve won; I say it’s party time.”
The Resistance guys cheered
tiredly, and ambled happily out the door with their leader.
Helen sat by Kate’s body, cradling
her head in her lap. She had run out of words, and neither spoke nor wept. She could
only sit, utterly defeated.
The bodies in the marketplace were
perfectly, naturally still. Several wights lay among the other bodies, having
collapsed where they stood.
The rain had stopped, leaving the
world feeling clear, scrubbed clean.
Julian emerged from the palace’s
side door. He limped silently to one of the abandoned vendor stalls: a clothing
seller.
He took some time to select a heavy
travelling cloak from the stall’s wares, and shrugged it over his shoulders,
wincing at the pain.
He pulled the cloak’s hood up to
obscure his face.
Then he walked slowly away, picking
his way carefully over the bodies, towards the rising sun.
[1] Of
course there was a secret rotating door behind a bookcase in the library. And
of course it was activated by pulling a specific rarely-consulted tome – in
this case, Accounting and Insurance
Adjustment Practices of Iskazka. Which Julian had a second copy of, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment