City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [201]
That’s when the ceiling collapsed.
FIFTY-ONE
Beami was back at the Citadel by the time the news reached her. Bellis was snoring triumphantly in Beami’s bed, while she herself waited anxiously for news of where Lupus and the Night Guard had gone. The more she fretted about it, the more she was convinced something terrible had happened.
A senior commander of the Dragoons began giving orders to a squad of soldiers out in the main quadrangle and it was then she heard something of what happened. The Night Guard were delayed . . . perhaps their mission had gone seriously wrong . . . although the hostages had been released, every member of the elite unit was still missing in action.
Beami’s felt her heart thumping in her throat. Please, not Lupus . . .
*
After his briefing was completed, Beami stalked some lieutenant of the Eleventh Dragoons, a blond, athletic man with a beard, and tattoos spiralling across his neck. She pursued him for some distance through the corridors before she managed to stop him.
‘I need to know where the Night Guard have been sent,’ she demanded.
‘I’m afraid, miss, that’s classified information.’ He nonchalantly turned to continue on his way, but Beami grabbed his arm.
‘Tell me where the fuck they are, all right, or I’ll hit you with an energy so hard . . .’
The soldier snatched his arm back, laughing, so she slapped him with a Tong relic, a metal device that clamped itself into his arm like teeth and brought him gasping to his knees. ‘Tell me where they were sent.’
As he scrambled about on the floor, half trying to maintain his dignity, half convinced he would die, he spat out the location of the warehouse and what they were supposed to be doing there.
‘So much for classified information,’ she sneered. ‘Thought you guys were trained to withstand torture?’
After she removed the device he said nothing, merely rubbed at his arm and breathed heavily through his nose. His mouth was now clenched tight, but it was too late. She had the information and was on her way to wake up Bellis.
*
With their bags of relics slung across their shoulders, the two women headed back across the warscape. In daylight now, the ruins were clear to see and ordinary and depressing. Beami’s heart sank when she realized just how much damage her city had suffered because of the war – war with some enemy she knew nothing about, a conflict that seemed so distant from her previous existence. Her life had little context in all of this.
In the Imperial zones, the citizens did not seem willing to leave. Babies shrieked from doorless buildings and distraught women sobbed openly in the streets. In one plaza, at a table propped up against a whitewashed wall, two old tramps still stubbornly played their game of dice. This was their home, after all, this was all that many people had ever known – their reluctance to abandon it was understandable.
In the contended zones, corpses lay in the snow, in decrepit armour, amid isolated limbs, bloodstains and rotting flesh, and the streets reeked with the taint of death. Where windows once glimmered, black holes seemed like gateways into hell. Red mist was sprayed across the banks of snow, where people had been slaughtered. Without the street cleaners’ regular attention, there was little to stop the weather from reclaiming the city, and it almost seemed the kindest thing to do would be to bury Villiren, to let it suffocate under the elements.
A warehouse, that’s what she’d been told. With street locations, and grid references discovered from a map, Beami and Bellis crept past the blockades, using relics to bend light around them, to create invisible stairways over ruined buildings. Every trick they knew of, they used.