A.R.Yngve
DARC AGES:
City Of Masks
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Chapter 10
The captain of the palace guard and three of his men guarded the hostages' quarters, where the drugged servants Buchu and Jacob were being held.
The explosion shook the palace and the guards flinched as broken glass rained in on them.
"Stand your ground!" ordered the captain. "You know what happens if the outsiders are allowed to escape the city. All our families, doomed! I expect you to fight to the end."
The guards saluted him, with as much alertness as their masks allowed. Then, from the door behind them, came an ominous growl, and then a crash of furniture smashing against the wall.
"Did you remove all the outsiders' weapons?" the captain asked.
"All but the suit of armor, sir. And only the nobleman could use it, sir. He said so himself."
"Good. Shoot to kill if anyone breaks through the doors. I have posted another four guards in the great hall. Let them try and get inside." He moved for the staircase at the other end of the corridor. The sound of fighting had intensified downstairs, and smoke billowed up from the ground floor.
The smoke cleared in the hallway as the breeze blew in through smashed windowpanes; daylight played in the torn curtains and carpets. The four guards posted in the hallway were ready with their rifles, crouching behind columns and huge potted plants. The courtiers had fled the palace.
"Hold your fire!" cried the voice of Gradischa from the smoke-filled palace doorway. "It is I, the wife of Berluchos! Let me and my daughter inside!"
From the top of the wide central stairway, where he could overlook the great hall, the captain waved at his posted men and gave them order to hold their fire.
"Can I come in?" cried Gradischa, in a shrieking hysterical voice. "Is it safe?"
"All clear, my lady!" shouted the captain.
A plump figure emerged in the mist of smoke and peeked inside, then stepped forward and into the hall; the figure was wearing a torn silk robe and the wig and mask of Gradischa. After her came a shorter figure, wearing the unmistakable wide-sleeved robes of Bottichea, and the veil over her head. The head with the Gradischa mask nodded and waved, took a few tentative steps... and hurled herself behind a column. The veiled girl tossed a round ball which eerily resembled an eyeball, across the marble floor and followed the first figure into cover. A third figure rushed in from the entrance and out of sight: some four-legged short apparition the captain could barely make out.
He screamed "Fire!" just as the tossed ball rolled up to the posted guards - and vanished in another devastating explosion.
Plaster rained down from the painted ceiling, and guards flew through the hot air as if thrown by a giant's hand. The shockwave knocked the captain off his feet and he stumbled down the wide marble steps. The blast made him temporarily deaf, and he only felt his pulse race through his smarting ears. Smoke and the stench of death filled the hall; then came the screams of a wounded man, and the captain knew that the end must be near.
But he had to fight on; he knew what his other face looked like beneath the face of papier-maché, and was convinced that the outsiders would destroy his family if he let the world learn the truth. He crouched, aimed through the gaps in the white stairway banisters, and fired a steady volley of laser pulses toward the point where he had last seen the two intruders.
Outside the palace entrance, Awonso and Threo let go of the mouths of the unmasked women. Gradischa and Bottichea, stripped down to their petticoats, screamed for help. They covered their faces with their hands, and pleaded for their faces to be returned. Threo almost wanted to oblige the two women; Gradischa looked nothing like her mask.
Like the man he had seen captured by the current city lord, Gradischa suffered an abnormal form of acromegaly caused by the hereditary form of the Plague virus. Her teeth were larger than on a full-grown horse, and her lips stretched nearly all the way to her ears to house the enormous molars.
Bottichea had not been born much luckier: her eyes were twice the normal human size, and she actually reminded Threo of Okono's robot. You poor girl, he thought, watching her terrified yet grotesque eyes bulging halfway out of their sockets. If only the cure had come earlier, just one generation earlier...
Awonso shook Threo's shoulder. "Look alive! More soldiers are coming from the canal. We've got to get inside now!"
"You'd better hide," Threo said to the trembling Leper women, and followed Awonso toward the arched marble doorpost.
"Kiti-mo-fan!"
Okono, wearing Bottichea's veil, pointed to the stairway, and her robot scurried across to the foot of the stairs. The captain of the palace guard saw the robot's laser shoot straight at his masked face, and felt the hot point of light burn the mask away. He aimed his rifle-barrel down at the strange machine, in one last futile gesture...
And a volley of bullets from the robot's gun ended his life.
"Guns empty!" peeped the robot, smoke coming out of its empty eye sockets. "Need more bullets! All targets gone!"
Kensaburé tore off the dress he had borrowed from the noblewoman, and the mask of Gradischa. Okono wanted to advance, but he held her back with one arm. "Take off that thing. How do women stand wearing these dresses? I could barely move."
Okono removed the veil and bared her teeth at him, but she had no time for a witty reply. Awonso and Threo came to join them, and warned of the approaching reinforcements.
"I must find my armor," Kensaburé said. "Can you three hold this position while I go upstairs?"
Somewhere in the wrecked hallway, a wounded man moaned for help. More than ever, Threo wanted to be a doctor and nothing else.
"I have to go find Sarastos," he said. "He can help us. I talked to him this morning. He knows everything that goes on, and he let me vaccinate him."
Kensaburé nodded. "Fine. Go get him. Awonso, you grab all rifles you can get and hold this entrance. My lady, are you ready to prove your heritage one more time?"
Okono did the improbable - she smiled, and not in a pleasant way. "Let's go."
She rushed with him up the stairway, followed by Kiti-Mo. Threo ran in the other direction, toward the city lord's wing of the palace.
Awonso was left alone in the hallway. He could think of no clever ruse to get him out of this pinch. But he collected the rifles from the fallen guards with trembling hands, trying not to look at their dust-covered bodies on the floor... trying not to throw up.
Then he heard a chorus of screams and confused voices from outside. He took one rifle and peeked out through a corner of a broken window. And he saw Gradischa and Bottichea, unmasked, hiding their faces to the city troops that were lining up on the courtyard.
"Give us back our faces!" cried the women.
"Go away! Go home! You are not allowed here!" cried the masked soldiers. It sounded as if the men were uncomfortable with by the presence of two unmasked citizens. The two women tried to convince the men, in vain, that their home was the palace. Not one soldier seemed to believe them; without their masks, Gradischa and Bottichea could be anyone.
"And I thought people were crazy back home," Awonso muttered to himself. He placed the rifle-barrel against the windowsill, and waited for the two pleading women to get out his line of sight.
"Please be my friend!" cried the four-legged robot as it ran up the top of the stairs, bumped into the opposite wall, and bounced back and forth between the walls like some overgrown, frightened spider.
The three masked guards fired at the dancing robot from both ends of the corridor, missing several times. Pulses hit the walls with puffs of smoke; some curtains caught fire.
While the guards were distracted by the careening Kiti-Mo, Kensaburé and Okono pressed themselves flat against the top of the stairs and fired slow beams at the soldiers' feet.
The rifles snapped and hummed as lines of uninterrupted green light flickered through the smoke and burned the guards' boots. Smoke spouted from burning shoe-leather, and the guards screamed madly, stumbling and tripping as they struggled to pull off their burning boots.
Okono charged at the nearest guard, letting out a high-pitched shriek; her bayonet struck his shoulder and he dropped his rifle.
At the opposite end of the corridor, Kensaburé charged past another guard and threw his entire weight against the nearest door. It flew off its hinges and he tumbled inside. It was his own room. In a corner lay the metal chests containing the segments of his armor. He did not have time to assemble it just yet, though...
A barrage of laser fire flickered past the open doorway, passing down the length of the corridor. He took a deep breath, rolled out through the doorway and fired one last beam at the far end of the corridor. There were no screams, but a sickening stench of burnt flesh. He peered in the other direction, and saw Okono rise on unsteady legs, holding a rifle in each hand. All three soldiers lay dead or seriously injured.
"Come here," he shouted, breathing heavily. "Help me find Buchu and Jacob."
A blood-curdling roar from the adjacent wall, followed by a crash when the next door burst outward, told them that Buchu had awakened. The bald man stepped out in the hallway, holding a wooden beam under his arms - ripped from a piece of furniture, judging by the strips of couch upholstery which dangled from its edges. He cast one look at Okono, who was coming at him with two rifles, her hair flowing freely down her shoulders and back, her eyes alive with cold fury, and he turned meek.
Buchu bowed at her, and asked for orders.
"Help Kensaburé into his armor," she said. "I shall be downstairs if you need me."
She spun around and headed for the stairway before any of them could ask her to wait. Kiti-Mo came hurtling after her.
Meanwhile, in another wing of the palace, Threo knocked on the locked door to the dwarf's room.
"Sarastos! Are you there? We have to leave!"
Threo pounded on the door again but got no response. He stepped back and fired a high-temperature pulse with his rifle. The lock fizzled and melted, and he broke through the door with a single push.
Sarastos was not in his room. Threo stood catching his breath for a moment, and wondered where the little man could have gone in hiding when the shooting started. Then he saw the open closet door, and the robes and hat of the counselor. It struck him: under ordinary circumstances, the dwarf must never be seen leaving his room in the disguise of Sarastos... so there had to be a secret exit.
He opened all four closets and rapped on their walls until he found the hollow one, and kicked it in. It gave way like paper. And Threo fell through it, out of another closet on the other side of the false wall, and into an adjacent room. In a corner stood the dwarf, holding a single-shot laser pistol which seemed large in his small hands.
"I suppose you want me to follow you out of town," the dwarf said. "That would be suicide. I'd rather stay and take my chances. Whoever comes out on the winning side is going to need a counselor. Or a jester."
Threo was disappointed in the man's change of heart.
"And what if staying here means certain death?"
"Prove that, doctor."
"Lord Berluchos... I mean the other Berluchos..." He rubbed his aching head. "He fled to the harbor. You know him better than we do. Will he fight or flee? Who is he, anyway? A jealous relative of the ruling family?"
The dwarf sighed and lowered his gun.
"That is a long story... which I swear I will tell you, if we live through this day. No, he will not flee the city. Where could he go? Once rumor gets out that this is a city of Lepers, he is going to be a hunted man. I doubt that even the real Lepers, the tribes of the wilderness, would welcome him. He has Vanitia's army on his side, as long as they think he is defending the city. And they still think he is the city lord, don't you doubt it."
"The robots I saw guarding the old city lord, are they under Berluchos' command?"
The dwarf scoffed - a sound of resignation. "There haven't been any robots in this city for at least a generation. They are just another act, played by people with vested interests."
"And the guilds? The people who should maintain your machines, the robots, the power plant?"
"The guilds still exist, but I think the masks and all the pretense have gone to their heads. The arts and crafts do not prosper in a city of lies. Some of the guild-members are our trade emissaries, and pretend to be robots."
From the harbor came a faint rumble, and the dwarf was alarmed. "Oh no. I feared this would happen if he was pushed far enough. Berluchos is quite mad, you know. I tried to warn the old lord..."
They had to step outside to find a view. From a cracked, tall window, Threo could vaguely make out the harbor and the massive gun towers at the ends of the wave-breakers. The towers resembled lighthouses, except for the turrets at the top.
A bright light flashed from the top of the southern tower, and a bright red dot danced across the palace wall outside.
"What's that light? Is it a lighthouse beacon?" Then the answer dawned on him, and he dragged the dwarf with him to the exit. By the orders of Lord Berluchos, the turret was taking aim at the biggest sitting target in the whole city.
"Everybody take cover!" Threo's warning as he entered the great hall came one second before the turret fired its first shot.
Laser-beams make no noise except when they hit solid matter, and are only faintly visible through smoke or gas.
The clear air above the city's rooftops did not sizzle or burn when the first pulse, traveling at the speed of light, passed over them. But a trail of condensed water vapor appeared briefly where the passing beam had heated the air, and quickly faded away.
The first pulse struck the palace wall, and instantly turned a ten-inch section of stone fresco into a ball of superheated gas, which instantly became an explosion, which punched a much larger hole in the guest wing of the palace. The latrines at the far corner were blown sky high, and stinking waste rained down over the courtyard where the city's troops were posted. The troops retreated toward the canal, and waited for the turret's next shot.
Kensaburé felt the floor shudder beneath his metal-clad feet; glass and plaster rained down on his blond head, and he feared the floor might collapse under his weight. He had only just got into the cooling suit and the legs of his armor, and was trying to attach the tubes of coolant to the power pack. Buchu struggled to screw the suit's chest and back pieces together.
A man groaned and stirred behind them. He sat up, his face hidden by a mask.
"My head hurts... what's that infernal noise?"
"Jacob? Get up and help me get the suit in order. Quick! And take off that silly mask!"
"Yes, sire," mumbled the man, bared his scarred face, and staggered like a sleepwalker toward the two taller men on the floor. Jacob shook his head, and pried the screwdriver from Buchu's hand. "No no, that is not how we do it in Orbes City. This one goes here, that one goes there..."
In a few seconds, Jacob had screwed the pieces in place and attached the tubes. "There. Now lift the torso piece over his head. Good man." Kensaburé treaded his head and arms through the open sockets. Jacob lifted one arm segment, attached its power cable to the torso, and fitted the segment around the knight's arm like a glove.
A second shot from the gun-tower hit the palace wall, right above the main entrance, and glass shards flew through the air in another explosion. The shockwave tipped the heavy suit of armor over, and Buchu pushed it upright with his bulk.
Jacob coughed and blinked; the three men's faces were caked with dust, and no part of the room seemed untouched by the devastation. Blood seeped out of between his lips. "Bastards. I think they got me. Got me good." He looked calmly down at the sharp window-bar that stuck out through his right side. He had been in battle before. "Right. Now connect the left arm cable to the other socket, twist the arm-piece on, clockwise, into the socket, and the helmet goes on clockwise too. Give the backpack jet a kick if it doesn't start on the first try. Got that?"
Buchu nodded, staring at the squat man's calm, scarred face.
"Good man. Send my overdue wages to my family."
And with that last request, Jacob gently folded over and fell face down on the dusty floor. They looked at the rumpled corpse; Kensaburé felt a great emptiness inside and wanted to weep. Then he held out his left arm, and Buchu attached the last few pieces, exactly as Jacob had instructed.
With his toes, Kensaburé felt at the control buttons in his boots. Rows of tiny diode lights lit up inside his helmet, indicating that all parts had power: legs, arms, torso, jetpack, weapons. He was ready, one foot taller and ten times stronger.
He walked for the doorway and realized that it was too narrow for him get through. He reached out with the hydraulic power of his arms, punched his armored fists right through the bricks, grabbed the doorframe and tore it off the wall. A section of the wall came down as he walked through it, and the stone floor cracked under his metal feet.
Buchu followed close behind, hunching down, anticipating the next impact to hit the palace.
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DARC AGES (c)A.R.Yngve 1995, 2000, 2004, 2006. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.
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