When its left leg was nearly twisted out of whatever passed for its hip socket, the second of the attacking alumen went down hard. Its face slammed into the surface of the pitted street with a sound of crumpling metal. It made a noise like a groan. It tried to push itself up. But the left leg was useless and refused to cooperate.
It saw Bela and Tew still hiding in the doorway of the ruined building beside the street and tried to push and pull itself to them with its remaining limbs.
It didn’t get far. When it was ten feet from them, the third aluman—the one that could talk—leaped up onto its back. The fallen thing made a sound like a scratching of bark on burlap canvas.
A whimper, Bela thought. That’s what it was.
The aluman standing on its back had picked up the sword that had been knocked from its hands in the fight. The edges of the blade sparked with blue power. It lifted the humming blade, pushed the tip between plates on the fallen thing’s back. Leaning its weight forward, it shoved the point down, through the metal man, to the stone below.
The fallen aluman shuddered. It seemed to sigh. Then it looked up at Bela, and the blue light of its eyes went out.
“Mother’s mercy,” Tew whispered.
The remaining aluman yanked the blade out, then turned its enemy onto its back. It stood to one side, lifted its blade, and removed the metal head in a single terrifying stroke. Then, quick and easy as a fisherman cleaning his catch, it stabbed its strange blade down the monster’s neck and cut open the plates of its chest. In less than a minute, it was pulling free the soulglass at its heart. It tossed the crystal into the satchel at its hip. Just as efficiently, it did the same to the other metal man it had killed. When it was done, the blue lightning along the edge of its blade vanished, and the aluman sheathed the quieted weapon into the scabbard at its back.
Then, at last, the remaining aluman turned toward the broken doorway where Bela and Tew had cowered during the violent struggle of metal monsters. “You hid well,” it said.
“You can speak,” Tew said.
The aluman’s torso made a sound of grinding metal plates as its upper body flexed slightly to the side, and Bela imagined that the neckless creature was effectively cocking its head to the side. “I spoke before this,” it said.
The slats below its blue-glowing eyes didn’t move, but Bela nevertheless saw them as the hulking thing’s mouth. She could discern no visible movement causing it, but the sound of its deep voice clearly rumbled up from there.
“Yes, I know,” Tew stammered. “I just didn’t—”
“No time. Must go. Follow Kolum.”
“Kolum?” Tew blurted the word in his shock, then turned to Bela with surprise.
She, too, couldn’t believe it. For all that they’d talked of him—the man, according to the stories, who’d opened the first portal and brought about so much destruction, who’d become an aluman himself—neither of them expected him to still be alive … if what an aluman had might be called life. And certainly neither of them thought they might meet him, might talk with him. That he was real, that he was here in this city of ghosts, was just one more shock.
But Bela was, she thought, becoming numb to shocks. They had a mission. That was what mattered. Find the portal. Close it. And Kolum would know where that was.
For his part, Kolum ignored their reactions. His hips turned, and he took a giant step away from them. “More approach,” he said. “Come with me now.”
He didn’t wait for their response. He was already moving away. The two destroyed alumen on the paving stones rocked slightly as each step landed beside them.
Though she knew enough to understand that having a mutual enemy didn’t make an ally a friend, Bela also knew that they’d be helpless if more alumen came. She stood and slipped out of the doorway, Tew in her wake. “Come on,” she said. “If he wanted, I think we’d be dead already.”
Kolum had nearly rounded the corner to the south, heading west, and they had to hurry to keep up with the strides of his long legs.
He led them through streets of disaster, and Bela began to see them not just as monuments to past horrors, but as testaments to a present fight. What they’d seen hadn’t been Kolum’s first fight against his fellow alumen. He’d destroyed others. She hadn’t understood this before. Perhaps she’d been too in awe of the extraordinary size of the city or the magnificence of its architecture—or even just the impossibility that it existed and that she’d found it. Whatever had kept her blind, she saw now what she’d been missing. The metal arm caught in a pile of rubble. The lifeless aluman crumpled in a hole in a building, its chest splayed open. The line of metal heads on a wall, set up like some kind of mocking decoration.
But no human bodies. For all the destruction, for all the death that had been dealt in the stories, there were no piles of bones.
If it wasn’t for the size of the doorways and the rooms and the chairs and everything that was in them—all much too small for the lumbering metal men—she could almost have thought that no women or men had ever lived in the city at all.
Kolum said nothing. His only acknowledgment of their presence was to hold up a clawed hand, now and again, causing them to stop in place while he listened. Bela tried to listen too. The most she heard was the echo of falling stones, clattering down onto some distant street. Whether it was caused by another aluman’s footsteps or was just one more sign of the city’s slow decay, Bela didn’t know. Kolum only waited a minute before dropping his hand and walking on.
It was a meandering path, but she could tell they were headed west. Now and again, she’d see, between the canyon walls of buildings, a glimpse of the mighty tower and its single strange airship. It was getting closer.
At last, Kolum turned them off the street, down a kind of path between shops, so narrow that he had to step sideways to pass through. He had no neck. Neither had the others. So Bela watched him walk—step by step, facing the wall just a foot in front of his blue eyes—unable to turn to see where he was going or how far he had to go.
Blind faith, she thought.
The path opened into a square space big enough for the aluman to step out and turn around. Just before she stepped out to join Kolum in the openness, Bela saw that there were claw marks all along the walls of the narrow path near its exit. The buckled bricks of angry impacts. Places where the walls were cracked and bent. Another fight that Kolum must have won.
Did they feel anything being killed? Did he feel anything as he killed them? Could he?
Kolum turned to an adjacent side of the square. There was a sheet of metal leaned up there, the size of the aluman himself. His own metal parts creaking, Kolum lifted it away, revealed a hole that had once been a doorway but had been broken out—tall and wide enough for him to hunch over and pass through. He set the metal against the side of the house and turned to them.
“Inside,” he said.
They entered what must have once been a communal area for a family. A table and chairs. A long chest. Everything had been pushed aside to give space for Kolum to step inside, but none of it had been thrown out of the way. It had all been very carefully moved, as if to be ready at a moment’s notice for the former occupants to return.
There was a half-wall along the other side of the room, with cooking spaces beyond it. Plates. Cups. Utensils. Everything sat there still, untouched but for the dust and the spidering lines of frost upon them. Stairs and hallways whispered of ghosts.
Kolum stepped inside behind them, turning away to pull the metal sheet back into its place.
When the aluman’s back was turned, Tew nudged Bela to look up. The ceiling had been pulled away, broken down, but only in a single, careful line through the middle of this living room. Through the hole, she could see other rooms. Beds. A child’s room.
“Safe here,” Kolum said.
Startled, Bela turned. Kolum was able to stand upright with his head and shoulders through the hole in the ceiling, but he was nonetheless squatting down to face them. His every movement was controlled, as if he didn’t want to disturb even the dust. As if this was a sacred place.
“This was your home,” she said. “Before you became …”
Her voice trailed off as she couldn’t think of how to speak of what he was. Tew gave her a look that she wanted to understand. Was he surprised that this had once been Kolum’s home? Or surprised she’d said it out loud? But she kept her focus on the metal man. He creaked again, and his torso once more moved to the side. “My home it remains. And you are guests in it.” He raised a clawed hand and swung it toward the chairs that had been pushed to the side of the room. “Sit.”
Tew nodded, pulled a chair from the wall to give to Bela. They sat.
Kolum brought his weight gently to the ground in front of the door. His arms moved up to rest upon his knees. For a moment, Bela thought, he looked like the Throne of Bones on the Pale Dawn—a memory from what seemed a lifetime ago. Ghosts of her own.
Kolum’s eyes didn’t change. They glowed steadily, bathing everything in a pale-blue light that made the air seem even colder than it was. “You watch for signs,” the aluman said.
“Signs of what?” Tew asked.
“Of humanity,” Kolum replied.
Bela at last looked away, to nod at the reader. “He can talk. He brought us to his home. We were told they were monsters. The others were. Or seemed so. And he destroyed them like they were. But now, here—” She looked up at Kolum’s face again. “Are you … alive?”
Kolum’s clawed fingers flexed and fell. “I think that word has no meaning here.”
“Do you feel pain?” Bela asked.
“I think this, too, has no meaning here. But I feel loss. I look into these rooms. I see what once was here. A family. I recognize the absence.”
“Your wife’s name was Asryth,” Tew said.
One of Kolum’s fingers scraped across his knee. It felt like an angry sound. “It is her name.”
“I’m sorry,” Bela said. She tried to smile, tried to restart their conversation. “We didn’t thank you for saving us. Those others out there would have killed us. So thank you. My name is Bela. This is Tewrick.”
“Bela.” Kolum’s finger lifted and fell upon his knee. “Yes. It is as I heard.”
Tew cocked his head. “Heard?”
“Why you are here, I know,” Kolum said. “Whispers on the wind. You would destroy the portal. You would destroy me.”
“Does that make you afraid?” Bela asked.
“I think it has no meaning here.”
“And what about death?”
“We were dead in the beginning,” he replied. “And we are dead even now.”