“I’m no doin’ this again,” Aesir said quietly. His hands trembled where they rested on the wheel.
I didn’t blame him in the least. Frankly, I was surprised he’d stuck it through so long already.
Miss Hawkins closed her eyes. A series of emotions flickered across her face in short order: Disappointment. Frustration. Shameful relief.
I felt them all with her. But if anyone had the right to call this off, it was certainly Aesir MacLeod.
“All right,” I said. “Turn us around, then—”
“Did ah say ah was turnin’ back?” Aesir asked sharply. He turned in his seat, looking between me and Hawkins. “Ah said ah wasn’t doin’ this again. We’re doin’ it the night. Ah’ll stay wae the lady. Am ah bringin’ the rest ae ye back tae the front gate?”
“No,” Strahl and I said.
“Yes, please,” Mr Finch said, nearly at the same time.
Several people turned to look at him. After a moment, Mr Finch gave a groan and slumped in the passenger’s seat. “No,” he corrected himself mournfully.
The sun had already plunged nearly to the horizon. Long shadows stretched hungrily across the slopes of the mountain. The dark corners of the ruins deepened. Slowly but surely, lights winked into existence in New Pelaeia, below us. For just a moment, I imagined I was looking down at a second sky, full of twinkling stars.
That was the land of the living, far below us. But we had chosen to walk among the dead, in the underworld above.
“We don’t want to stay any longer than necessary,” I said. “Let’s choose the right place the first time. Something with a big enough signal to get this done.”
Aesir nodded grimly. “I’m guessin’... more echoes means a bigger fetter?” he asked.
“Yes,” Miss Hawkins replied, in a tremulous voice. “We’ll want… more than half a dozen echoes. Preferably less than a score. Anything more than that would be exceptionally dangerous. I don’t yet know how they’ll react to the use of aether in their presence, but I expect… something.”
Mr Finch squinted down at his notes through fogged glasses. “We had some potential signals,” he said. “There was that collapsed lighthouse. Or perhaps that large building we found, about an hour ago.”
“The front gates,” Strahl said.
I swivelled to look at him. I wasn’t the only one.
“The moment that lighthouse toppled, it was no longer of interest,” Strahl said flatly. “Imperial forces would have ignored it. That means we’d only be dealing with echoes from the initial bombardment.” He paused, as though to fortify himself for the next statement. “The building we passed was burned down by Imperial pyroclasts.”
“Aethermancers with fire-projecting foci—” Mr Finch began to clarify.
“I know that,” I interrupted him, with a hint of exasperation. I’d served in the Imperial Navy, after all.
Strahl nodded grimly. “That’s what caused those melted bubbles in the stone. I guarantee, we don’t want to deal with that.”
The bleak confidence in his voice made my stomach churn.
“The front gates,” Strahl repeated grimly.
“Ye gettin’ enough air in that helmet?” Aesir asked incredulously. “You saw that place when we came in, didn’t ye?”
“Aye,” Strahl replied patiently. “There might be too many echoes there. But most of them will be inside the walls. And this way, we can have an open escape route right behind us.”
Miss Hawkins was the closest thing we had to an expert on the matter—dubious though her credentials might have been. I looked at her questioningly. She weighed the risks silently… and nodded, very slowly.
“We’ve mostly dealt with shades so far,” Hawkins said softly. “They’re less substantial—made of aether, and little else. They can be dangerous in their own way if you let one touch you, but they’re fairly easy to avoid. I’m sure the front gates will have what we dubbed tatterdemalions, especially once the sun goes down. They’ll have bodies, of a sort; made up of whatever debris is closest. They’ll be exceedingly dangerous, even if they don’t intend to hurt us. But Mr Strahl is correct. We need the escape route.”
“Then I guess we’re headed back to the gatehouse,” I said. “Can we get back there before dark, Aesir?”
“Can we get there before dark,” Aesir repeated with a scoff. “Hold onto yer bonnets. We’ll be there in nae time.”
We turned back in silence, as twilight crept in around us. Soon enough, my keen eyes adjusted to the dim light. The aether that still burned upon the mountain grew more and more visible in the darkness, casting stark blue shadows upon the snow. Slowly—before our eyes—Old Pelaeia began to burn again.
As that light strengthened, so too did the echoes. Their wispy outlines steadied into vaguely humanoid shapes.
The whispering grew louder.
Aesir had promised to pick up the pace—but he had to swerve sharply as echoes manifested out of thin air, dancing with fresh agony. Frantic, breathless curses spilled from his lips as he veered away from the aether-ghosts, searching for a clear path. More than once, I thought he’d overturn our cumbersome vehicle entirely—but Aesir had learned more about piloting from Dougal than he probably cared to admit. Somehow, he kept us upright and in one piece.
Ruins whipped past us at breakneck speed, kindling with eerie light. Agonised voices whipped into a frenzy around us. Some small, detached part of me couldn’t help but wonder at the ephemeral display, even as the rest of me quailed in horror.
Aesir made good on his promise. Just as the last of our daylight disappeared, we reached the twisted front gates of Old Pelaeia. But even the humans on that boat no longer required daylight in order to see—because the thoroughfare that led down to those broken gates was burning with phantom aether-light, too.
We skimmed to a halt just outside the gatehouse, in an area with slightly less disturbed snow than the rest. I pulled down my goggles, staring up at the broiling city. Aesir and Strahl pulled crates of equipment from the flatbed with urgency, while Miss Hawkins and Mr Finch began to assemble a squat, sturdy-looking tripod on the ground.
Partway through their work, the first screams ripped through the night, high up on the slopes above. They cascaded through the city in a rolling wave of sound. That concussive wave of shrieking was deafening here, and unnaturally real. Aetheric lights bloomed in countless silent detonations, as the phantom battle for Old Pelaeia’s top tier joined in earnest.
Miss Hawkins’ curious contraption came together behind me, constructed upon the tripod. It consisted mostly of a tall spire, as thick as my wrist, with several adjustable antennae and a control panel. It looked an awful lot like a portable longhorn, with its multitude of dials and switches—but it also had a slotted opening at its base, which I knew to be exactly large enough for the small canister of Unseelie aether that Hawkins had brought with her to Old Pelaeia.
“Ah’ll keep the boat runnin’,” Aesir shouted at the two of them. He had to work to make himself heard over the nightmarish din, as he hopped back into the boat and into the driver’s seat. Even as he did, a movement caught the corner of my eye.
The ambient, burning aether that had risen upon the mountain now swirled into a humanoid form, only ten feet to my right. But this was no weak, half-manifested shade, like the ones we’d encountered earlier that day. It was far more solid.
And far more real.
Clumps of scrap, dirt, and snow pulled themselves together around the aether to form a rough body, with eyes like ragged, burning pits. The being made of rubble stumbled to its feet. It looked as though it should have been clumsy and bulky, but I was shocked by how naturally it moved. This, I realised, was the thing that Hawkins had termed a tatterdemalion.
“Strahl!” I shouted in warning, gesturing wildly towards the fresh echo.
The tatterdemalion turned to face me, as though it had heard me. Its mouth opened, spilling forth licks of blue aether; it spoke to me directly, in a strange and resonating voice.
“Brace yersels, lads!” it shouted at me. “Get to cover!”
The words were distressingly clear and coherent, compared to the whispers we’d heard earlier.
The echo rushed for the ruined stairs that lead up to the top of the wall. More of them soon swirled to life around us, coalescing in fits of clattering wreckage and snow. They moved with far more purpose than the drifting wisps of aetheric light had done. Soon, a host of tatters and glowing shades formed fighting ranks on the wall, to wage the same hopeless battle they had fought and lost for more than two decades now.
Strahl stared at them, reaching for the aether-charged sword over his shoulder. “What in rot and ruin…” he managed.
Miss Hawkins stood among the burning, restless dead, with her right arm outstretched. Threads of tenuous aether drifted towards the glove she wore, feeding the meters on her forearm. She’d lowered the goggles over her eyes; they lit her pale face with their ambient light, so that she almost seemed like a ghost herself. The sight set a chill into my bones.
“Incoming!” one of the echoes called out.
The warning shout was so universally known among soldiers that Strahl and I immediately ducked for cover.
Artillery blasted apart several of the gathered echoes on the wall… or rather, it seemed as though it had. I had to squint to realise that the section of the wall in question had already been missing, and that the only thing that had burst was the echoes themselves. Brief, horrifyingly realistic shrieks of pain came and went. Chunks of scrap and dirt from the vanquished tatterdemalions rained down, pelting us from above. Other echoes remained on the wall, just out of sight, screaming in agony.
“Man down! Someone help!”
“Open fire!”
“Hold! Hold fast!”
We already knew that the defenders of Pelaeia were doomed. Every echo we could see had died, by definition. It occurred to me, though, that there were odd gaps in the echoes where more people should have been. Something other than aether had killed the defenders who should have filled those gaps.
The answer to that mystery dawned on me, just as the sounds of the battle took a sudden shift.
Raw fear rippled through the apparitions.
“Wargear!” someone called out. The word came with a hysterical edge.
Echoes turned their attention to the twisted front gates. Some of them took shots at the empty air in front of the gatehouse. Scrap shot like bullets through the night, and I was suddenly very glad that we’d set ourselves up at an angle to the gates, rather than at the centre of the action. Even in our less central position, dangerous shrapnel hissed past our heads, such that we had to duck for cover behind the rubble.
Miss Hawkins and Mr Finch continued their work, through it all.
It was curious and horrifying how few the echoes were, directly near the gates. Most of the scene was so visceral and clear—but everywhere that the wargear Verdigris had passed, there were only large swaths of silence and stillness. The towering wargear’s pilot had not used aether, after all, to tear open those gates; they would have simply wedged the wargear’s great hands between the doors and torn them open from the outside. Such was the strength of the Tuath Dé’s other gifts to Avalon.
We didn’t see the defenders that Verdigris tossed aside like dolls. But beyond the gates, the ground churned, and more than a score of tatterdemalions coalesced. Their hands rose from the dirt and snow; even as they clambered to their feet, I caught sight of their real bodies, twisted and broken beneath the disturbed ground. I barely had time to wonder which source of aether had killed so many people, before the next scream went up.
“Aethermancer!”
It was an awful word; the sort that presaged plenty of death. The woman who screamed it knew what it meant. I heard in her tone the certain knowledge of her own impending doom.
“Legionnaire!” another voice cried hoarsely.
“It’s Wraithwood!”
My blood ran cold.
The large throng of echoes fell, one by one—cut down with chilling grace and speed. Stone limbs clattered to the ground, carved away by the memory of an invisible silver sword. Silver light flashed within the aether that bound those tattered bodies, like lightning bursts in a storm cloud. Snow, dirt, and aether spewed every which way, and it sickened me that I didn’t know how much of that was meant to be blood.
This, I thought, was the dream I had once had; I imagined myself now in place of that phantom Wraithwood, wielding a bright and deadly silver sword. The horror of it nearly made me empty my stomach—but I caught myself against the debris where I’d sheltered from the shrapnel, steeling my resolve.
That wasn’t who I was anymore. I wasn’t here to join in Wraithwood’s atrocities—I was here to undo some small part of them.
“Hawkins!” I yelled. “Aren’t we here to stop this?”
Somewhere during the chaos, Miss Hawkins had fallen to her knees. She clutched at the machine in front of her, staring at the destruction with such soul-deep horror that I knew the eyes behind her goggles were wide with tears. I knew then, with utmost certainty, that the aethermancer we had brought with us was no Silver Legionnaire. She might have had the sword; she might have had the training. But Miss Hawkins was missing the merciless instinct required to perpetuate the slaughter before us.
I knew then why it was that she had cut off Barsby’s hand. As terrifying as she was with that sword, Miss Hawkins couldn’t bring herself to kill with it. She was no Jonathan Silver, nor was she a Wraithwood in the making.
The knowledge steadied me in a way that nothing else had done so far. I risked the open ground between us, sprinting towards the machine where Mr Finch had thrown himself to the ground and where Miss Hawkins stared ahead.
I lunged forward, dodging shrapnel to grasp at her shoulders. “Hawkins!” I repeated. “You can end this! You can stop him! You have everything you need! You just have to turn on your machine!”
It was more complicated than that, of course; I knew that it was. But the sentiment cut through the haze that had held Hawkins spellbound. She sucked in a shuddering sob, straightening in my grip. Her iron will snapped into place once again, and she lifted her right arm. Strands of visible aether wafted towards her fingertips. The meters on her forearm leapt wildly. As alarming as the sight was, it seemed to be exactly what she was looking for.
Hawkins turned her goggles upon the battlefield. Azure light burned behind that visor, fixing upon a single spot among the chaos.
“It’s there,” Miss Hawkins breathed. Wonder tinted her voice, despite the tears that still lingered there. “We were right. There is a fetter.”
“There is?” Mr Finch gasped. He peered up at us from the place where he lay prone on the ground. “That’s wonderful! Your theories were all correct, then—”
“Yes, wonderful!” I cut him off urgently. “Now what do we do, Miss Hawkins?”
Hawkins snapped her eyes towards the machine, upon its tripod. “We have to move it,” she said. “I need to be next to the fetter.”
“Lead the way,” I told her. “Mr Strahl—I need you with us!” I glanced down at Mr Finch. “Coming, Walther?”
Mr Finch made a small noise of distress, somewhere in his throat. But he climbed back up to his knees, straightening his bulky coat with bizarre dignity.
I eyed the tatterdemalions that still fought near the gates. “What would a blunderbuster do to one of those things, Miss Hawkins?” I asked her. “Would it… hurt them?”
Miss Hawkins swallowed. “Technically,” she rasped, “it… it would simply disrupt the aetheric bonds that hold its body together.”
“You might temporarily turn it back into a shade,” Mr Finch supplied helpfully. “It would become weaker, like the echoes we saw earlier today.”
I nodded grimly. Absolutely no part of me enjoyed the idea of attacking one of these echoes. But Miss Hawkins needed protection if she was going to operate that contraption in the middle of that battlefield.
“Aesir!” I called back. “We’re going in! We need cover—can you bring the salvage-boat around in front of us?”
Aesir was looking even more pallid than before; but the stress of the situation had kept him on his toes, at least, and he nodded grimly. The boat’s engine roared, and he swung the vehicle around, just in front of the machine. Clods of dirt pinged against the side, even as Hawkins and Mr Finch hoisted the tripod between them to carry it.
Strahl settled in on the other side of them, as I pulled my blunderbuster. I gave Aesir a grim look. “Hawkins says guns won’t really hurt these things,” I yelled at him, over the din. “But it won’t be pretty. You might want to look away.”
Aesir shook his head at me. “Blind pilots aren’t useful, Blair!” he hollered back. “Do what ye ‘ave tae!”
My stomach dropped. I had already hated almost everything about this afternoon. But the prospect of blowing apart Pelaeian tatterdemalions in front of Aesir was easily the worst thing I could think of.
There was nothing for it. Hawkins needed room to work. And we’d all committed to this, one way or another.
We moved forward, closer to the chaos. Aesir led the way with the salvage-boat, hunched behind the wheel for cover. Our advance was painfully slow, as Hawkins and Mr Finch carried the tripod between them and Strahl and I covered their flanks. Freshly churned snow and debris made the path even more treacherous. I tried not to think about what else might lie beneath our feet as we stumbled along.
If there were any small mercies to be had, it was that the fetter Miss Hawkins had identified did not lay fully beyond the gates. A few feet in front of them, she signalled Mr Finch to help her set down the machine.
Perhaps I was imagining it, but I thought there was a subtle eddy in the air. The screams of Pelaeia distorted unnervingly around us—faintly muffled, as though we’d stepped into the eye of a phantasmal storm.
A single body lay there, beneath our feet—the first northerner to die by Wraithwood’s silver sword. A tatterdemalion had crumbled atop it, blanketing its outline with snow and stone.
Miss Hawkins consulted the readings on her forearm one more time; but then, she reached around to unclip her harness in several spots. The aether battery packs on her belt and harness came free, and she held them out to me.
I goggled at her in disbelief. It hardly seemed like an appropriate time for our aethermancer to disarm herself.
“Put these on the boat!” Miss Hawkins urged me. “I learned my lesson on the pier in New Havenshire. I can’t mix any of this with the Unseelie aether; I was lucky to have survived the first time.” Her foci hissed all at once, venting a cloud of prismatic aether into the air around us. Some of it caught on my skin, tingling with an electric high. The fabric of her coat bleached grey before the wind picked up the aether, carrying it away.
I remembered the unfortunate way the Unseelie aether at the docks had interacted with Miss Hawkins, and I winced. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me until now that she would need to touch that stuff again.
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked.
The question came out before I really had the time to think about it. I was concerned for Hawkins, I realised. I had walked onto this mountain still worried that I might have to kill her… but I no longer entertained any notion of asking Strahl to end her life. Hawkins, I thought, had truly come to Old Pelaeia in order to do something good. Perhaps she had other motivations as well—certainly, I was under no illusions that she’d told me everything. But I had seen the evidence of her humanity and her empathy, and I had begun to suspect that she was indeed possessed of a certain amount of altruism.
Miss Hawkins attached a small tube to the glove on her hand, fixing its other end to another slot in the machine. She shook her head at me. “It won’t be pleasant,” she said. “But I’m not carrying any other Seelie aether this time—and the device should act as a buffering foci. I don’t think it will kill me.”
I noticed, of course, the lack of utter certainty in that statement. But we had come too far for me to question things now.
“You’re a Fool’s fool, Miss Hawkins,” I informed her. I reached over to clap a hand onto her shoulder. “But at least you’re in good company!”
I clambered partway up the side of the salvage-boat, carefully setting the batteries down into the passenger’s seat. Even Seelie aether was volatile stuff; there was no point in being careless with it.
Before I could turn around, I felt the device activate. The air around us hummed with a prickling feeling; the ambient, burning aether around us swayed oddly, as though drawn in by a new source of gravity.
The echoes around us halted in their tracks. Their voices lifted as one in a single, keening howl that made my hair stand on end.
Floating shades and writhing tatters turned in unison towards Hawkins and her device, and I remembered then that she had said the echoes would react to aethermancy.
Miss Hawkins had retained the glove on her hand; as I watched, she lifted it into the air. Before, Hawkins had drawn power from her aether batteries—but now, having discarded them, she exerted her will directly upon the ambient aether surrounding us, spooling it around her fingers. Though her goggles had gone dead and dark, her eyes glimmered iridescent within them. Those tethers of shining light threaded across her gauntleted hand like cobwebs… and I saw that each one was connected to a different echo.
Beneath the sound of the screaming echoes, the device gave a high-pitched whine that left my ears ringing. Mr Finch doubled over the machine’s console, calling out readings, but I couldn’t hear them.
The web of aether in Miss Hawkins’ hand sparked, flashing with silent lightning. The aether that burned around us rippled, coruscating with opalescent colours. A few of the tatterdemalions twitched violently; their corporeal forms stuttered uncertainly. One of the echoes on the ground reconstituted its missing legs, pushing itself back to its feet to stumble towards her. Another tatterdemalion slammed the stump of its arm into a nearby pile of wreckage, forming the gnarled limb from sharp, rusted steel.
“Aethermancer!” one of the echoes cried.
“Legionnaire!” another one repeated.
“It’s Wraithwood!”
I widened my eyes in sudden understanding. The echoes had mistaken Hawkins for their killer.
I was perched unsteadily upon the salvage-boat—but Strahl still stood next to Miss Hawkins, and he had realised the woman’s danger at the same moment I did. He stepped out from behind the salvage-boat and drew the sword from the scabbard on his back, activating its aether-charge. The blade’s edges blossomed with golden light; the super-heated metal steamed against the frigid evening air.
Strahl didn’t attack with that sword, though. Rather, he stood in place, holding it before him like a beacon.
The tatterdemalions turned towards him, as the sword’s minor stores of aether flared and bled off into the night.
“Strahl!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”
Echoes turned towards Strahl, staring at him with their empty gazes. Between Strahl and Miss Hawkins, it was clear which figure better approximated a Silver Legionnaire. Strahl’s tall, imposing figure cut a frightening picture against the night—even as the sword in his hand bled white-hot aether.
Strahl knew exactly what he had done by drawing the echoes’ attention. But he stayed where he was, even as they howled towards him in a wave of fear and agony and twisted debris.
I leapt from the salvage-boat, pulling my blunderbuster. Despite my earlier reservations, I didn’t hesitate: I squeezed off a shot at one of the charging tatterdemalions.
A crack split the air; dirt and scrap showered onto the snow. The tatterdemalion didn’t even seem to notice I’d blown a fist-sized hole in its chest; it continued staggering forward, now somewhat more ungainly. Part of its torso crumbled as it moved, revealing the roiling aetheric form beneath. I’d managed only to inconvenience it.
I changed tactics, turning my blunderbuster upon the tatterdemalion’s knee. Another burst of the firearm caught its leg. The limb crumbled back into dirt and snow. The echo pitched forward into another tatterdemalion, forcing it to stumble. I fired my third shot at the second tatterdemalion, clipping off its jagged, rusty arm at the elbow.
The tatterdemalions pressed forward, utterly ignoring me.
I cracked open my blunderbuster, forcing its smoking shells from the chamber. I fumbled for shells in my coat pocket with numb fingers, far clumsier than I would have liked.
As the first echo reached Strahl, he brought that aether-charged sword down upon its arm. The searing blade sizzled as it carved through snow and aether—but worse by far was the way the tatterdemalion screamed.
The violent reaction made Strahl stumble back in surprise. The echoes hadn’t even flinched as I shot away at their limbs—but this particular assault, so similar to the one that had murdered them the first time, seemed to trigger their death throes all over again.
The tatterdemalion clattered to its knees before Strahl, clutching at its missing arm.
“Mercy!” it sobbed. “Please, have mercy!”
Strahl froze. The sword trembled in his hands.
The other echoes didn’t hesitate, however. One of the tatterdemalions tackled Strahl from behind. The sheer force of the collision knocked the sword from his grasp; the burning aether along the blade snuffed abruptly as he released the activator on the hilt. The two figures, living and dead, rolled through the snow, and I saw the tatterdemalion deal Strahl several vicious blows. I prayed that his armour would absorb the worst of them.
More hands burst from the snow to grapple at Strahl, burning with aether. Several echoes piled onto Strahl’s armoured form, screaming in desperation. Pelaeia’s dead fought for their lives all over again—but this time, I realised, they had a very good chance of killing the man they believed to be their murderer.
“Strahl!” I tried to shout. But my voice barely managed to cut through the screams. I finished reloading my blunderbuster, snapping it closed over the fresh shells. But I couldn’t get a clear shot—not without hitting Strahl himself.
“Finish it!” Strahl bellowed. “Hurry!” His booming voice overtook the screaming din for a moment, before the echoes drowned it out again.
Hawkins pulled on the web of strands that twined around her fingers. I saw the struggle in her movements; her face strained with effort as the aether-tethers pulled upon her, both physically and mentally. But she planted her feet and exercised that iron aethermancer’s will, hissing something to Mr Finch just behind her.
Mr Finch fumbled with a small, rusted iron canister of Unseelie aether—and slotted it into the device.
It occurred to me, in the moment just afterwards, that Hawkins was currently surrounded by ambient Seelie aether. With it, she had spun around herself an entire web of bright aetheric lines. Even with the aether batteries safely stowed in the salvage-boat, she was about to have a very bad night.
The unified wail of the echoes grew louder. The tethered lines of aether writhed upon her fingers. Ugly reddish black smudges of Unseelie aether crawled along that bright web, bruising it with darkness. Echoes writhed and staggered in strange, violent fits. Shadows pooled within the aether that constructed their bodies.
In that moment, Hawkins and the echoes screamed as one.
One of the tatterdemalions fell apart. The bright blue fires of its shade flickered madly… and then, it winked out, with a silent sort of sigh.
I felt its absence—a lessening of the awful psychic weight that surrounded us. It hadn’t been merely discorporated. It was gone.
“By the Winds of Fortune,” I breathed. “It’s working.”
The machine whined again, high-pitched, as Mr Finch worked the controls, tuning them to different frequencies. Echoes twitched and warped in random fits; the pile of tatterdemalions that still clawed at Strahl rippled unsteadily.
Abruptly, the machine found the right pitch; it rang a note of sudden harmony, clear and beautiful. Miss Hawkins lifted her hand in triumph, gritting her teeth through the pain. Her eyes darkened into black pools, drawing in the light around her.
But a harsh silver light burned against her glove, wavering oddly. Unseelie aether hissed against her right hand, like butter on a hot skillet. Hawkins hadn’t summoned her silver sword—but it was still there all the same, fighting with the Unseelie aether. Her hand jerked violently, as though fighting an unseen force.
Several of the ghostly strands snapped, destabilised by the sword’s struggles. Hawkins staggered in place as her control wavered dangerously.
One of the freed echoes turned its inhuman gaze upon Miss Hawkins and abandoned Strahl. It let out a cry of blind rage, stumbling towards her.
I stepped into the way, levelling my blunderbuster. The gun roared, kicking back against my shoulder; it blew apart one of the tatterdemalion’s legs at the knee. The echo lurched and lost its balance, clattering against the ground.
Silver light and writhing darkness both flared behind me. Hawkins redoubled her focus, forcing new threads of midnight power into existence, despite the silver sword’s protests. One of those tethers caught at the downed tatterdemalion, holding it where it was.
The other strands of aether-light began to unravel, burning like lit wicks. Reddish black aether hissed along the bindings. As it reached the echoes, it tore at the blue light within them, making it gutter. Clumps of debris fell from tatterdemalions as their forms began to collapse. Shades dissipated into the mountain winds.
Then—all at once—the echoes around us gave a collective sigh.
And the burning aether at the gates to Old Pelaeia guttered out.
Hawkins doubled over, retching on the ground next to her. She clawed at her goggles with her left hand, holding her right arm close to her chest. Argent light still flickered angrily along that arm, steaming against the night—but slowly, that too began to calm itself. Mr Finch hurriedly switched off the device, cutting off its flow to her glove.
Everywhere above us, the echoes of Old Pelaeia still screamed and died… but the gates, at least, were silent and empty, except for our presence.
I rushed for the broken pile of debris that had collapsed upon my bosun. My heart hammered in my chest; I was vividly reminded of Dougal’s downed outflyer, and the body I had found within it.
Snow and rubble shifted, however… and Strahl’s form burst through the surface. His armour was pitted; there were whole pieces of it missing, where it had been clawed away. As my sensitive eyes adjusted to the lack of aether-light, I noted dark stains on the clothing beneath, where blood had soaked through it.
I dropped my blunderbuster to tear at the remaining detritus, grasping at his gauntleted hand. Strahl hauled himself up, nearly bowling me over in the process.
“What were you thinking?” I demanded, with a hint of hysteria.
Strahl groaned painfully—but he turned away from me, even so, to fish through the rubble. Shortly, he found the sword he had lost there, and stashed it back across his back.
“With all due respect, Captain,” Strahl told me, “now you know what the rest of us feel like when you get one of your so-called brilliant ideas.”
I worked my mouth soundlessly for a moment. I wanted to argue with that statement… but I couldn’t.
Somewhere behind me, Aesir had leapt from the salvage-boat to rush for Miss Hawkins. I turned and saw that he had pulled her arm around his shoulder, hauling her to her feet. He said something to her that I couldn’t hear—soft, and gently reassuring. Hawkins nodded dimly, using him as a crutch to stumble her way towards the salvage-boat.
I turned to Mr Finch, feeling torn and ragged.
“Mr Finch,” I said, “please tell me you know how to disassemble this contraption.”
“Naturally,” my engineer scoffed. His face was drawn, and his hands trembled as he worked at the tower. As he set one of the antennae down in the snow, however, he paused and turned to look at me. “Captain,” he said hesitantly. “About… about that money, for the tea…”
I sighed, and started rummaging through my pockets.