Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [176]
The soldier crouched down beside Ianthe and placed his knife gently into the hollow behind her knee. He gave the torturer a quick nod.
‘Mother,’ Mara said.
The cell door burst open with such force it flew off its hinges and slammed into the opposite wall. A man stood in the doorway, clad from head to foot in metal. Brine burns covered his naked scalp and face. His eyes were as red and wild as those of a berserker dragon. In one gauntleted fist he held a green alloy sword. He was as grotesque a figure as Ianthe had ever seen.
Mara and his assistant retreated as the man strode into the cell, his boots clanking on the concrete floor. He glanced at them and then looked down at Ianthe. The tiny metal plates and filaments in his armour seemed to whirr and chatter as he bent down and picked her up.
And then he carried her out of the door.
She was drifting in and out of consciousness by now, and she must have muddled her dreams with reality, for she saw two impossible things before the armoured man carried her away from that place.
In her first dream she imagined she saw multiples of her rescuer in the corridor outside the cell. Seven or eight of them, identical in every way. Each wore the same armour and carried the same green sword. They looked on as he walked between their ranks. And then they turned away and filed into the torturer’s cell. The last of them closed the door behind him.
She must have woken and blacked out again.
In her second dream he was carrying her through the main palace entrance hall. The sound of his boots rang out like a bell in that huge space. Dozens of bodies lay strewn across the black marble floor. Smoke drifted in through the open door, and she could smell fires burning outside. But before her rescuer reached the door, he halted at a sound behind him and turned around.
The young Unmer prince stood in the shadows, watching them. Ianthe’s vision was blurred and she couldn’t see his face clearly, but she thought that he was smiling. ‘Is she the last of them?’ he said.
‘She was never one of them,’ Ianthe’s rescuer replied. ‘But, no. Others survived.’
The prince nodded slowly. His gaze lingered on Ianthe for a long time, and then he turned away and walked back into the shadows.
EPILOGUE
Maskelyne spat out dust and rolled over on to his back. Above him, smoke boiled behind the shattered remains of a wooden roof. He raised his head and winced as pain shot through his neck. He was lying on the floor of what was left of the guards’ hut. Through the open doorway he could see fires burning around a lump of twisted metal half-buried in the ground.
The chariot?
Maskelyne got up. His limbs felt beaten and raw. He staggered over to the door and looked out.
Dust and smoke filled the air. The horses stood a short distance down the trail. The wagon they’d been hitched to had smashed through the compound barrier and broken an axle. Now it lay collapsed at the end of a long dirt furrow. He spotted Mellor and two of his men, sitting under the palisade wall behind the crashed Unmer vessel. They looked stunned. The body of a third man lay on the ground before them among fallen debris and burning scraps of wood. The gunnery sergeant and his girlfriend were nowhere to be seen.
Maskelyne eased himself down the steps outside the guard post and limped across the ground towards the stricken chariot. His ankle buckled whenever he put any weight on it. He reached the craft and peered inside the open hatchway.
Empty. Nothing remained but a mangled mass of metal and wire. He was about to turn away, when he spotted something glinting among the wreckage. Carefully, he climbed inside and retrieved the object.
It was a crystal, as large as a man’s head. Maskelyne turned it over in his hands, marvelling at the multitude of perfect facets. In each one he could see a reflection of his own bruised and dusty face. He tucked it under his arm and then ducked back outside.
‘Mellor,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’
Also by Alan Campbell
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