Alaba

Valer request, spring of 245:

One garrison-force of Ordian craft armaments, assorted varieties. Three dozen scanning goggle apparatuses. Three dozen sets of Ordian craft boots. Three dozens sets of ceramic armor. One measure of plastic explosives. One thousand rapid-growth ColdCorn packets, wrapped.

245 YT, Late Spring: Outside Besieged Kivv

Despite the positive reports of the scouts ahead of her caravan’s arrival, it was a genuine – and welcome – surprise to Alaba that the city was not burning when she first came close enough to get it in sight. All around the city walls were arrayed the army of the Invictans – though they carried few banners, and the ones they held on their tall poles were tattered by the fire of point defense cannons, their emblems and their colors were unmistakable. The armies moved like undulating waves of the sea, but Alaba had little fear – she recalled the intricate instructions received from the city to get through that crashing ocean of bodies.

She crested a hill across from the ancient Rust Gates, marveling at the old-world construction. It was not like the winding pathways of her home – cobbled stone, fresh leather – these pillars could once have been solid gold, for all that Alaba knew. What wealth might have been here in the time before the Desert’s Passing?

Ah, but that time was done, long gone. And perhaps the world was better for it. It was best not to lament things already long inscribed in stone. Alaba reached for the spyglasses her attendant carried, and before she put them to her eyes, she graced the younger girl with a smile. Then she peered into the distant city.

Alaba Oluwasegun never knew war in Corod. Oh, there was fighting – the feuding in the streets, often bloody feuds, between guilds and families. Games of cloak and dagger and assassin’s poison slipping between the old places and the new, the steel and glass and the stone and iron. But Alaba, having only enough ambition to make herself wealthy - not enough to put the whole city or indeed the world in the palm of her hand – did not involve herself in such games of death. When her sister decided to involve herself in the game, and ended up with a slit throat on the landing in front of the family home, Alaba only became more secure in her decision.

Yet even from this distance Alaba could feel the difference. There were entire buildings – entire parts of the city – bombed out. Among the shifting army Alaba could see machines meant to carry explosives through the air and drop them in on unsuspecting city folk. And the distant echoes of gunshots occasionally came to her when the wind turned her way, rustling the stray strands of hair out of her face with the updraft.

“My radio,” Alaba said, and her attendant nodded, shifting the strap of a large bag so that the bulk of it rested against the attendant’s hip, closer to Alaba. The merchant took a step forward, and smiled, and pushed aside the flap of the bag, reaching inside for the radio receiver. Her hand brushed against the apparatus itself – a massive, heavy machine. She could see the glistening beaded sweat on her attendant’s brow from the effort of the carrying the thing up this hill on foot.

When the connection was made, Alaba waited – still watching the Invictan army from her seat atop the hill – and waited for the static on the other end to be replaced by a voice, while she listened to the reflected sound of her own breathing cutting through the static like streams of thick, grainy, heavydust flowing into the static’s sand.

And then there was a voice. A familiar one, even.

“Identify yourself.”

“Alaba Oluwasegun.”

“And did you bring the cannon?”

Alaba blinked, and glanced at her attendant. Aleks said it almost casually, without a trace of rote recitation, so it took Alaba a moment to realize what this was. A test. She recalled the phrase they’d agreed upon the last time they spoke.

“If all the cannons in the world meant a thing against the ocean, I would bring them here.”

There was a pause. Alaba held her breath. Though she was confident in her own memory, this was an unusual circumstance, and if she’d remembered wrong –

Then Aleks’ voice cut through the static and the background noise resolved into near-silence. “What’s the plan, then? Have you taken stock of the situation on the ground?”

“Yes,” Alaba said. “And the situation with your own agents –“

“hasn’t changed.” There was a brief pause, but before Alaba got the chance to cut in and begin explaining her assessment of the situation, Aleks continued. “Well, some of them are a little bit tired, certainly, but – thankfully – it’s been quiet inside the walls. We are starting to run low on our rations, but…”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for.”

“Among other things.”

Alaba nodded – a tic she couldn’t help, even though she knew that the person she was talking to would never see it. Only the attendant standing next to her could even have acknowledged the gesture, but Alaba would have done it even if she were completely alone – indeed, she had to remind herself to acknowledge the attendant’s presence too.

“The human blockade has openings and appears to be moving slowly. This is… consistent with what I know about historic cases of siege warfare. Sometimes soldiers, when there is no action, become bored and complacent. Once they’re riled they’ll be a threat again, but at the moment it’s like a camp of sleepwalking men. This is a perfect opportunity.” She felt a cramp coming on in the hand with which she clutched the radio receiver. When she finished talking, she swapped her grip over to the other hand, shaking out the now-free one.

There was little delay between when she stopped talking and when Aleks spoke again – no delay to account for the distance between her and her target. She was no longer in Corod – and the distance would not create a noticeable delay between speaking and the sound being received by the other operator. Aleks must have been taking a moment to think – but only a moment. “We’ve got inside information too, so we know about their patrol patterns and supply lines.”

“That’s… a new development,” Alaba said, squeezing the radio button again.

“It was unexpected – but doesn’t go unappreciated by our defense efforts. Things could be a lot worse, even if the way we came by that information was… well. Regardless.” There was an uncomfortable pause, followed by a shuffling – like the rustling of papers – on the other end of the line. “But you still have a part to play. Are your people ready to move quickly?”

“All our porters are loaded up, and our animals are calmed,” Alaba said. “Barring any direct attacks from their forces… we should be completely fine.”

“Barring any?” Aleks’ voice shot up in pitch, surprise and concern. “You know they’re absolutely going to try to attack you. The most important part is that your bodyguards –“

“No,” Alaba said, and was surprised to hear how quickly Aleks ceased talking on the other line – but only for a moment. No distance-time-delay, after all. “Our bodyguards are ready, but it’s most important that the porters are quick. They’re the ones carrying your supplies, dragging carts. And if the animals get spooked, the whole plan falls apart. My bodyguards are ready, but we take it as a given that they can move quickly – of course they can, they’re fighters! I need your agents to get ready to break through the human blockade, though.” Alaba glanced back down the hill, at the rest of her caravan – they all waited, some shifting a little in their places, some pacing around the area and peering toward the city, but all ultimately waiting where they needed to be. “You mentioned your sisters among the agents you employ. I assume you have contact with both of them and can –“

“- get it easily enough. They’re in place.” Aleks didn’t wait for Alaba to finish. “All we have to do is give the word and you can start moving. I’ll give my signal with the gates and – well – you’ll know it when you see it.”

“Right. Exactly as agreed.” Alaba nodded. “I hope you’re ready for this, Aleks Zelenko. If this plan fails, our company is going to be devastated – and your city will starve to death. Your lives and ours are in one another’s hands.”

“Isn’t that the way it always is?” Aleks said, in that smart-aleck tone Alaba had come to dread after many years of dealing with difficult clients on the far roads from Corod. “The lives of the few people on earth willing to really help one another, always in each other’s hands…”

“Right.” Alaba sighed. “Then let’s do it.”

“Get your people moving,” Aleks said. “And when you see the signals…”

“Then we run.”

Alaba dropped the radio back to its back, and leaned away from her attendant. “It’s the moment of the test,” she said quietly. She glanced over her shoulder and toward the assembled porters, and their vehicles and their animals, and the bodyguards with their guns and blades – all waiting at the bottom of the hill, waiting for Alaba to give the order that would set them moving into what was expected to be at least a skirmish. Each porter wore medium-weight, highly maneuverable ceramic armor whose plates shifted with the wearer’s weight in order to provide maximum protection to those parts of the body likely to be exposed to enemy fire. A single plate would block a bullet in most circumstances, but would be likely to shatter instantly, leaving that spot vulnerable to fire. The porters were well trained to operate under pressure, but this situation was unprecedented, even for Alaba’s company.

And every single one of those porters was valuable, not only because Alaba cared about their lives and about the continued success of her company. Each single one of them had on his or her back tightly-packed shipments of supplies for the city. Some carried nothing but food – specific food products chosen especially for their calorie-to-mass ratio. Others had weapons, locked in crates with clasps and the like so that they would not rattle around dangerously even in the midst of a fight such as this.

In battle, there are always losses – Alaba, though not a soldier, had seen much of the world and spoken to enough people to understand this. But every porter lost was going to be a bunch of supplies lost as well, which she knew that the city could not afford any more than Alaba could afford the reduced pay her company would be sure to get when all was said and done. And then there were the necessary payouts to the families of those who died on the journey… the hazard bonuses for all the porters who agreed to this admittedly very dangerous mission… logistics was not the safest of professions in the best of times but there was no denying that this…

It made Alaba’s blood boil with fear. Though she scarcely considered the possibility, she herself might be dead within the next hour, for all that she could truly know.

As the bodyguards assembled and the porters moved into place behind her – ready to charge down the hill – Alaba bowed her head and muttered a paean to the Angels: “Without the fear of loss there is no honor in the giving up. Thank you for this chance to prove my worth. To ever renew, each day, the world you usher in by your gifts of alchemy and engineering. And by love, and by –“

And then two things happened at once.

Alaba’s attendant screamed in pain and fell to the ground, her body spinning in the air for a bare moment with her feet lifted off the ground. She twisted and fell hard onto her remaining arm – for the sniper’s bullet had taken off her left forearm at the elbow. The crunch of radio mechanisms and of small bones grated on Alaba’s ears and set her into motion. She drew the sword from her side and activated the switch upon it, stepping forward over her attendant and thrusting the sword-blade down into the ground as it expanded out into a shield. Behind this shield Alaba crouched, and she drew her pistol, twisted the sights onto it. Gunfire resounded from every direction. The animals began to panic – a little – but they were disciplined enough to follow their porters down the hill, and the rhythm of the porters grew, and the bodyguards – with the exception of one who found quick shelter behind the same shield, next to Alaba – followed as well, their weapons brandished to face the Invictans. “I’m okay,” the attendant said through her tears, and Alaba shook her head. “No you’re not,” she said. “Stay still, stay still.” She took one of the healing hypos – Invictan technology, but any resource was good from her perspective so long as it still fetched money – and jammed the end up against her attendant’s arm, pressed the plunger, and watched as the young girl went limp. She continued to breathe – shallowly, slowly – as she lay behind the shield.

At the same moment that Alaba began to duck behind the shield, the rush of adrenaline to her head and her limbs gave her a moment of incredible clarity. Despite the panic rising in her, she saw the great Rust Gates of Kivv – that marvel of the old world – begin to twist from their places, posts tearing out of the ground and sending shockwaves through the muck and the dirt. Grassy iron tendrils wrapped around one another and formed braids and shot out toward the enemy – one tapered, thin, like an index finger pointed toward the sky and growing and growing in an instant, bullet-fast, aiming at a target Alaba could not see.

After the initial flurry of gunfire, there was quiet – but for the thunderous footsteps of the porters running for the relative safety of the gates. And the rushing of wind and the shouting of a young woman – when Alaba dared to peek around the edge of her shield, she saw the Mirshalite Reaper she’d heard so much about, a young girl in a coat and a hat with a gleaming red glaive spinning around her body each time she moved, and the wind fast about her. She rushed toward the Invictan lines, and before her, they fled. Next to her was a taller woman with a single braid in her hair, flying out behind her like the tail of a running bloodhound. And blood she sought, leading with her sword. Alaba glanced at the bodyguard beside her, who was just starting to rise – clutching his rifle. He peered around the corner, looked down the sights, and then gave a sharp nod. “Let’s go. Bring your attendant if you think she can survive, but we have to make it to the city with the others, or the Invictans will…

Alaba nodded. “The countryside won’t be safe either, not for a little while.” And she threw the young girl – with the healing drugs coursing through her veins fast enough to stem the bleeding and alter her very body – and shouldered her shield, and with her forearm turned toward the enemy, Alaba began to run down the hill and into her first real battle.

At the bottom of the hill, the girl with the glowing red glaive stepped between caravan and soldier’s-squad. A stray grain of sand stung Alaba’s eye as she ran past. The Invictan lines were not in place to intercept the Reaper whose power was like a hot desert wind, nor the swordswoman who walked beside her, cloaked in protective air, unslinging the crossbow from her back and releasing her fingers from shifting-plate metal gauntlets so that she could squeeze the trigger.

Invictan soldiers, their armor half-donned, scrambled to get out of the way of the Valers and their sudden assault. They dove toward the ground and scratched through the dirt to avoid rusty metal arms that reached out from the city itself, skewering them and tossing them aside, where the thick air brought them just into the path of Hilda’s glaive. Each time she nudged the pole, the blade sliced through the air with the force of six feet of leverage. Bodies fell, blood spilling out of them and merging with the air and the Aether. Copper and iron and acrid red spattered the Veil.

With the weight of her attendant on her back, each step was a labor for Alaba. She wished she were as strong as one of her porters – as steady, more importantly, as her whole trunk turned to the side and she felt that her spine might break from the strain if she did not fall over. She stumbled – forcing her right shoulder back, trying to turn her body so that the shield was still between herself and the hail of gunfire beyond. The bodyguard beside her kept pace, most of him concealed behind the shield except in those moments when he leaned out to fire into the crowd of Invictan soldiers. The bulk of the army was already in retreat, toward their camp – where the tanklike armor and finely-honed weapons training of the special forces might protect them. Surely the cavalry was already moving into place. Most of the porters were approaching the gates now – giving a wide berth to the stone towers attached to metal pincers that struck out like mantis arms from the city and into the crowd.

Alaba finally managed to right herself, stumbling to the left and almost dropping her shield in the process. she felt the weight on her back pitch forward – and caught herself with the edge of the shield against the ground. The grass under her feet shriveled and withered, and she felt her own skin dry out, as the Mirshalite Reaper shot past her. On the girl’s shoulder, Alaba realized from this distance, was a bird of prey of some kind. Its head was bent toward the girl’s ear, as though it were whispering to her – the possibility would not have struck Alaba as serious, but if this girl could perform such violent feats, then why not –

And the Rust Gates – iron and oxygen twisted together in harmony, in violent harmony!

Her world narrowed – the gates were so close, and she had to get her shield back up, or she might not have a chance to reach the refuge no matter how fast she ran. Not for the first time, Alaba found herself wishing she’d purchased a kinetic repulsor in Dresh. Her shoulders and her back burned as she lifted the weight up and tried to secure it against her lower back. The girl was limp – not doing Alaba any favors, still unconscious from the medicine coursing in her veins. The stump of her left arm had stopped bleeding through that miracle of science – though the blood she’d already shed was soaking through Alaba’s shirt. She’d have to wash off the stink of it later – already it filled her nostrils.

Next to her, the Desert personified rushed past and away, red spinning and striking all around her. Alaba did not bother trying to track the Reaper’s movements. The city was so close now – those gates were all that mattered to her. The whole scene struck her eyes, traveled through her optic nerve, and was promptly discarded by the back of her brain. Only one thing in the world – only one thing matters. Get to safety. The porters are all entering. The bodyguards close behind. They form ranks, gathered protectively around their charges. The stone begins to shift again, to form an arch as the rusty iron, shaking off gore and flecks of oxidation, rejoin at the top – welded by Cultivation but never quite joined as new again, never quite the same with countless molecules of their material now resting in the bodies of Invictans on the field.

She stumbled as she entered the gate, and collapsed onto the ground, breathing too fast, the weight on her back too much to carry, and when she fell her chest struck the shield. She felt the rib crack, felt the pain-echo of it resound through her body. Stumbled and scrambled for another few steps, and then collapsed.

A man in a green robe with voluminous sleeves stepped over her, running past Alaba and the gathered, hyperventilating porters without paying them any mind. Instead he ran to the gate – to the stone which was still rippling and shifting – and he placed his hand right against it. The stone shaped over his hand, and back away from it again, as he shouted, “Aleks! I will take care of this! Don’t worry about them! There’s a saboteur – reinforce the gates! And then find them!”

And the wind howled loud and the ground shook as Antonin Voloshko stepped into the field and showed the Invictans a taste of what truly waited behind the Veil.

The earth itself bent before him as he walked, and when he parted the Veil’s weave to withdraw his sword, only a single glistening-green grain of sand fell out onto the earth along with it. He swept the shortsword across the space in front of his body – and smiled grimly.

Already most of the soldiers had backed toward the Invictan lines. But a single juggernaut approached from the edge of their lines. Now rows of Invictans were gathered, their wall of bodies bristling with weapons, facing the lone Reaper Voloshko. They dared not rush the gates – for even now the Kivv Militia would be preparing to defend those gates, with artillery and on foot. Antonin turned toward the tall soldier – clad head to foot in red-black-gold ceramic plating and bearing an enormous axe from which shotgun slugs fired as he whirled the weapon. He took a single step forward, settling into a fighting stance, clenched his free fist, and held his sword low.