A Brotherhood of Crows.
Chapter 25

They had been waiting for her on the gantry.

Bullets flew over her head as she upturned a desk and threw herself behind it. Zularna locked her back against the meagre cover, and checked her ammo. They’d been tailing her, keeping out of range, whittling down her bolts. She had three left. There were at least four of them behind her. Ahead of her was a dead end. She was trapped.

“Shit,” she whispered.

They opened fire again, and debris rained down on her as bullets began to tear through the desk. Three bolts, four men. If she made each shot count, she had her hatchet, if nothing else. If that didn’t work, then…

Over the gunfire, someone roared: “Enough!”

Tentatively, Zularna peeked out of cover. The gunmen were maybe twenty feet away, weapons still raised, but no longer trained on her. They were aiming, instead, at Dr Crucius.

Crucius stood, very still, arms against his side, watching the gunman balefully. “Gentleman,” he said, softly, but with force. “Gentlemen. Please. Enough of this. Lower your weapons, and let us put an end to this nonsense.”

One of the gunmen tapped at his wrist unit. “Unidentified target in the archives. Orders?”

“Come now,” said Crucius, “There is no need for that.”

Three laser sights painted themselves across Crucius’ body. He sighed, wearily.

A voice came through the fourth man’s wrist unit. “Primary target acquired. Eliminate secondary. Ignore others.”

The fourth man brought his weapon to bear on Crucius. “Stand aside. We’re here for the woman. Comply or we will shoot you.”

Crucius sighed again. “No, I’m afraid you won’t.”

And he lazily raised a hand.

The fourth gunman exploded, disintegrating into a cloud of blood and viscera. He didn’t even have time to scream.

There was a moment of silence. The three remaining gunmen gazed at Crucius, weapons still raised, their body armour spattered with what remained of their late comrade. And Zularna watched, in a mix of horror and disgust at Crucius, who slowly lowered his hand. “Now then, gentlemen,” he said, businesslike, “Perhaps we can now settle this like -?”

“SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM!” one of the gumen screamed.

They opened fire, and Crucius, with another small sigh, raised his hand. The bullets fell short, slamming to a halt just in front of Crucius’s outstretched palm, a spinning clot of fire and metal. They kept firing, and the mass of fury continued to build, before the sudden hollow click of empty weapons echoed around the gantry.

In a languid move, Crucius glanced from the men to the pulsating bullets frozen at his palm. “Now, now, gentlemen. That was a very poor decision. Such a shame.”

He dropped his hand. The bullets spun in the air and flew backwards, back at the men who fired them. They didn’t have a chance. Their own ammunition ripped them to shreds.

And then Crucius was at Zularna’s side. He seized her by the arm. There were shouts, and the sound of running men, more approaching their position. Crucius hoisted Zularna to her feet, pulled a slim, chrome device from his pocket, and hissed at her: “Don’t breathe.”

His thumb pressed into a button on the devices and suddenly the world fall apart. A great hook seemed to plunge through Zularna’s chest, and yank her up, and away, and then she was falling, falling away into nothingness. Immense pressure pummeled her body and she was sure she would be crushed as if caught in the first of a giant.

She hit something soft, very hard. She rolled and fell onto a hard, wooden floor. Her vision blurred in and out, and she began to see again: battered leather sofas, a high mezzanine with heavily packed bookcases.

She was lying on Elijah’s living room floor.

A hand reached out and she was being pulled to her feet. Into her seasick vision, Dr Crucius’s impassive, inscrutable face swam. “Miss Munro. I trust you are well?”

“What,...” Zularna’s mouth didn’t feel like it was part of her body. “What did you do?”

There was the sound of a door opening, cheerful whistling, and a sudden intake of breath. Tobias was standing in a doorway onto the living room, wrapped in a towel. He looked, mouth open, from Crucius to Zularna and then back to Crucius. “What...the fuck?” he hesitated, “Actually, since you’re here, does anyone know how to wash a cat? Fucking thing got in the shower with me.”

“My apologies for the intrusion; there was a rather desperate matter in the Archives,” said Crucius stiffly, “And in answer to your question,” he opened his palm, and held out the slim, chrome device, “This is a personal Shockstream drive, something of my own invention. Highly experimental. Less so, perhaps, since I have now actually tested it. I think it works rather well, don’t you?”

Zularna collapsed onto the sofa, her world still wobbling. “What did you,” she said shakily, “To those men?”

Crucius restored the device to his jacket pocket. “It is customary,” he sniffed, “To thank a man when he saves your life.”

“I saw what you did,” she snapped. “You held out your hands and you...you killed all of them. How did you do that?”

“Nonsense, Miss Munro,” said Crucius smoothly, “I’m not a violent man. I am a scientist. I do not carry weapons.”

“I saw you -”

“Wait,” Tobias interrupted them, advancing on the sofas. “Where is Elijah?”

Crucius glanced down, and adjusted his spectacles in a delicate gesture. “I arrived too late. I fear he has been taken. By the Brotherhood of Crows,”

“What? You saw this?”

“I observed a masked man leaving the archives, flanked by guards. He appeared to be carrying a body. There was nothing I could do, beyond saving Miss Munro, a matter for which she does not seem grateful,”

“Hooray for you,” snapped Zularna.

Tobias was pacing, swearing quietly under his breath. “I need my wrist unit…” he broke off from his pacing, and began to jog for the door, as quickly as he could with his towel held secure, “I put a tracking device in Eli last time we did a medical - knew the stupid bastard might get himself into trouble -”

Crucius watched Tobias’s retreating figure, and sniffed again. “What did you replace in the archives?”

“A book. Written in aramaic.”

“Do you have it?”

She reached into the pocket of her coat, and drew out the feather bound volume. “Here.”

Crucius examined the book dismissively. “A pity. I had hoped for more substantial information. I must return to my experiments,”

Zularna bristled at him. “You can’t go! The Brotherhood has Elijah. You can’t abandon him! He was working for you!”

“Indeed,” said Crucius, softly, “And evidently doing a poor job of it, if he has been taken. I am afraid I have more pressing matters to attend to.”

“He could die!”

“And if I do not complete my research, many more will die,” replied Crucius.

He withdrew the Shockstream devices from his pocket, and tapped a few buttons on it. His eye met Zularna’s baleful gaze. “Oh, come now, Miss Munro. I am sure you and Mr Rainer are more than capable of replaceing Mr Avaron. You really must believe in yourself. I’m sure someone does. If you’ll excuse me.”

His thumb hit the trigger. There was a sudden crack, and Dr Crucius seemed to implode into himself.

“Arsehole,” muttered Zularna.

She sat with her head in her hands, and felt the terrible weight of everything wash over her. She shouldn’t have listened to Elijah in the Archives. If only she’d stayed, maybe he would have escaped. Maybe he had sent her up onto the gantry out of some absurd desire to protect her. Either way, it didn’t matter. He was gone, taken by the Brotherhood of Crows.

Something nudged itself against her ankle. Zularna looked down; a damp, scruffy face looked back up at her.

“Prrt,” said the cat.

“I am really not in the mood,” Zularna shooed it away with her foot. It grimaced at her, and then came back and began nuzzling against her again.

“Prrt?” it asked, somewhat insistently.

A phrase, something Elijah had said to her the previous evening, came back to her mind. If anything happens to me, close your eyes, and follow a cat.

She glanced back at the cat. It looked the result of an orgy at an animal hospital. Yet in its mismatched face, was a meaningful look.

“Okay then,” Zularna sighed. “Where do I need to go?”

The cat put its head on one side and began to lick its paw.

Zularna moistened her lips. “Seriously. Where do I need to go?”

The cat returned her gaze, and then blinked, very slowly, and deliberately. It turned, and wandered over to a wall, and then sat there waiting.

Close your eyes and follow a cat.

She closed her eyes. Nothing. When she opened them, the cat was still watching her from his place by the wall. She bit her lip, closed her eyes again, and began to walk.

The darkness began to fade away. She saw grey, as if she was suddenly wondering down a foggy street. Shapes seemed to emerge from the miasmic gloom; the outline of the dining table, the vague outline of the walls. She took tentative steps on grey wooden floors, arms out, like a blind woman, she tried to replace the cat.

(Somewhere, in that grey place, she swore she heard a voice, a voice she had never heard before but that spoke with a rich, Dublin accent, say “That’s my girl,”)

It too was here, still watching her. Here it seemed sleeker, younger, its eyes very very bright in the fog. It looked from her to the wall, and she realised there was no wall, not anymore. Instead, what lay before was a great expansive plain; in the distance, jagged mountains erupted from a desert, like the broken teeth of broken gods. Before them was a valley, kilometres wide, the land scorched, gouged and rent by a giant, and its great claws had raked into it and drawn blood. As she looked, she saw wrecks; airships, thousands of them, shattered by a long forgotten war, their skeletons lying upon the ground where they had fallen.

And in the centre of the boneyard of broken ships, a domed structure, like the central dial of a gargantuan clock face.

(Somewhere in that gray place, a voice like the whispering of snakes said “Give us eyes.”)

Zularna’s eyes snapped open. She was staring at the blank wall, but something was off. Her breath was frosting, as if she was inhaling the crisp air of a December morning. She realised she was shivering from an unseen breeze. At her feet, the cat continued to gaze at her, but in its eye was concern, and something akin to fear.

She heard movement behind her, and Tobis re-entered the living room, dressed now, tapping away at his wrist-unit. “Goddammit, can’t get a read, which means either he’s way out of range or -” he stopped, and took in Zularna, standing blankly before the wall, and the cat at her feet. “Are you okay?”

“I saw...something…”

“Something in the past?”

“No, like a vision...last night, Elijah told me to do something if he was ever in trouble. I did it and I saw..” she trailed off, trying to wrap her thoughts around what it was she had seen.

Tobias wandered over to her, hesitantly. “What did you see?”

“There was a canyon...and a desert, and...wreckage. Thousands of airship wrecks, all over the place, like they’d all just fallen out of the sky…”

“Airship wrecks in a desert…” Tobias flicked his hair out of his eyes, thoughtfully. “Wait a minute, I think I know that place!” his finger flew across the screen of his wrist unit, and then he pressed a button on the side. The in built projector on the side of the unit glowed into life, and projected onto the wall a colour image from the holo; a great mass of dry, yellowing desert, littered with the bones of uncountable shipwrecks.

“That’s it! That’s the place I saw...where is it?”

“It used to part of Kazakhstan, in a place called Karakum Desert. Early in the war, there was a huge battle there, between the Commonwealth and the Severance. It didn’t especially well for either side…” he looked at her, grimly, “It turned most of the country into a dead zone. And that, that right there...is called the Graveyard of Giants. I have a feeling that’s where Elijah might be.”

“How do you know?”

Tobias shrugged, and shut off his wrist unit. “I’ve known Elijah for a long time. And if there’s one thing I’ll tell you about him is that he is guarded as hell. He keeps himself to himself and that’s fine with me. There are things...about the way he lives his life that I don’t pretend to understand. But I’m not stupid. I’ve seen what happens to him when he closes his eyes. Whatever it is, its powerful, and it doesn’t quite make sense. One day, maybe, he’ll tell me what happens, but for now, all I know is that if Elijah told you to do something when he was in trouble, it means something.” he smirked, mirthlessly. “Besides, if we want Eli back, it’s not like we have a hell of a lot else to go on. Also, what happened to Crucius?”

Zularna’s lip curled. “He left. To go back to his experiments. It’s you and me now. Unless the cat’s in?”

They both glanced down at the cat, who hesitated in the middle of licking its anus, and hissed.

“Guess not. How long would it take to get to Kazakhstan?”

“Three maybe four shocks, by my guess.”

“Is your Skyskimmer shock-ready?”

Tobias grinned, wolfishly. “Gimme an hour and it will be. We gonna go get Eli back?”

Zularna smiled, thinly. “Do you even need to ask?”

“Amen. Okay, I’ll get the Shockstream drive online. Meantime, you might want to hit up the armory. I have a feeling we’re gonna need to go in, hot.” the wolfish smile blossomed into a full blown grin, “Let’s go hunt some Crows.”