City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [148]
‘Well, I’m not too stuck in my ways, despite being an old-timer. But I notice Ramon never says anything,’ Jeryd added.
‘No. The old fellow received some kind of energy overdose once from a relic. Robbed him of his voice and, oddly, his hair. But Abaris adores him and speaks for him often, since they know each other so well. I’ve seen Ramon only need to look at Abaris in a particular way and Abaris can instantly interpret it.’
They both looked up at the sound of an explosion outside – somewhere deep in the city. The floor shook just moments before a second explosion.
‘What the hell was that?’ Jeryd exclaimed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Exmachina was a city ship, Artemisia had declared proudly, powered by two immense metal plates reacting to the Earth’s hidden forces. Artemisia further described it as a ‘magnetic barge’, although this made things little clearer. Randur had no comprehension of much of what Artemisia explained, or the true functions of the ship.
He remained simply in awe.
There were city decks below, situated where would have been the hold and bulkhead of a normal ship, three levels containing streets and eclectic wooden buildings impossibly crammed in. And they were all empty. No people wandering in and out of the darkness, a ghost city of lanterns remaining unlit, passageways crowded by dust. Bold and intricate arches adorned many of the buildings down there, some billeted and others possessing fine interlacing motifs but in designs that were beautiful, completely alien to the new arrivals. Small and ragged rips in the hull permitted sunlight, although these gaps were being repaired at a constant rate by the Hanuman – the term Artemisia used to describe the winged monkeys. For the time being, this warrior woman was living alone on here, she told them, with only the Hanuman for company, moving through the skies in search of the travellers. She spoke philosophically about her lonely quest.
They were all now seated on the main deck – there were no benches to be found anywhere. There was no mast, no sails rippling tightly, just raised wooden platforms that stretched endlessly, and isolated cabins scattered across the ship’s width seemingly without thought or purpose. There were shrubs and plants and vines sprouting everywhere, and lichen swarmed around the rim of the ship, clinging on the few vertical planes where nothing else could exist. It might just have seemed possible that this vegetation was holding the entire structure together.
Randur enquired about the ship’s origins.
‘It is able to slice through from my own world to any other dimension,’ Artemisia revealed. ‘That is a word you use, is it not? My terminology may well exceed your range.’
‘You mean from your world to ours?’ Eir suggested. ‘Then, yes, I suppose that’s still the word we might choose, although it has other uses in our language. Come to mention it, how is it that you can speak our language, if you do not come from our dimension?’
‘I speak most known languages, give or take a few dialects. Your own is enforced within your Empire, which certainly makes things easier for me.’
‘Artemisia,’ Rika breathed the name as if she felt honoured to be in her company, ‘tell us why you’re here. Are you . . . Jorsalir? Are you even one of the Dawnir? I feel I already know you, perhaps from a description in some text I’ve studied. There was someone in Villjamur who was said to be that ancient, but he looked nothing like you.’
‘I know nothing about this fraud you mention. He could have been one of any number of types. Where I come from, there is no shortage of variants.’ Artemisia gave a macabre chuckle, removed her swords and placed them on the deck. She sat down cross-legged next to them, and almost instinctively Rika moved closer to the bulky figure.
Randur kept wondering why the former Empress was behaving in so strangely intimate a manner.
The expression on Artemisia’s face