“A name shared by the inventor of the thermoplasmic engine,” Tinkerer said. She detected a rare animation to his voice, a slight upturn in tone that could indicate he was actually impressed. “A relative of yours, perhaps?”
“My father, though he let my grandfather take the credit. It’s a long and tedious story, best saved for another time.” She turned to him, seeing the paleness of his complexion beneath the pall of dust. He’s terrified. She almost laughed at the realisation, having thought such base emotion beyond him. “Do you have a name?” she asked. “A real one.”
“‘Boy’ when I was small. ‘Tinkerer’ when I grew.”
“I’m afraid that simply won’t do in civilised company. We’ll need to think of something else when time allows.” She turned back towards the Citadel, removing the stoppers from the vials. “When you’re ready,” she said, putting all three vials to her lips.
Tinkerer tightened a screw on the bomb’s carapace and held it out it to her. “Three-second fuse.”
She swallowed about half the vials’ contents in a single gulp, fighting down the resultant wave of nausea at the acrid taste and the instant ache the substandard dilutions birthed in her skull. Despite the product’s lack of refinement, its potency couldn’t be denied, her body seeming to thrum as the Green flooded through muscle and sinew, bringing a much-missed focus to her eyes. She took the bomb from Tinkerer’s outstretched hand, primed the fuse and hurled it at the barricade, the Green providing sufficient range to ensure it fell just beyond the barrier.
She heard a few shouts of alarm from the constables as the bomb landed in their midst, accompanied by some panicked firing in expectation of an imminent assault. The firing intensified when the bomb detonated, not with a blinding explosion but a dull boom. The smoke blossomed immediately, the result of a chemical concoction Tinkerer had derived from a mix of sulphur, salt and steamed milk. The yellow cloud soon covered about half the barricade’s length, proving sufficiently dense to obscure the barrier from view, though Lizanne knew it would last only a few seconds.
“Remember, stay close to the Electress,” she repeated before drawing her knife and vaulting over the ruined wall. She covered the distance to the barricade in the space of a few heart-beats. The smoke would have blinded her but for the Green in her veins, and the constables were not so fortunate. Some were coughing and stumbling about in confusion, others firing wildly into the haze. She leapt the barricade, killed the nearest constable with a single slash of her knife, the force of the blow sending him spinning like a top, blood spraying from the gaping rent in his neck. A rifle-bullet snapped the air an inch from Lizanne’s ear and she whirled, lashing out with a round-house kick that sent the rifleman reeling.
She paused to finish him with the knife then took up his rifle, holding it by the barrel as she moved through the swirling yellow mist, clubbing down four more constables in quick succession until the weapon broke in two and she tossed it aside. The smoke had begun to thin now, revealing the breach and the walls on either side. The gun-crews were busily readying their pieces, Lizanne recognising the cylindrical shells being double-loaded into the barrels.
She chose the gun on the right and sprinted for the wall, leaping high and latching onto the brickwork before scaling the remaining distance in a rapid scramble that denuded much of her Green. A gunner appeared at the top of the wall just as she reached it, eyes wide with terror as he levelled a revolver at her chest. He was just out of arm’s reach so she resorted to Black, plucking the revolver from his grip before unleashing a pulse that sent him flying backwards into the rest of the crew. She opened her hand to receive the stolen revolver and exhausted her remaining Green in eliminating the gun-crew, enhanced reflexes and vision combining to put a bullet in each gunner’s forehead in less than four seconds.
She ducked at the sound of a barked command to her rear, bullets whining over her head to smack into the walls and the bodies of the fallen constables. Lizanne turned to see four gunners on the other side of the breach reloading their rifles. Beyond them a sergeant and two others were desperately manoeuvring their gun towards her. Lizanne turned her gaze to the gun standing a few feet to her right, an aged but serviceable six-pounder freshly loaded with two canister shells and a fuse already pressed into the firing port. She used her Black to push it around, raising the trail of the carriage to depress the barrel before unleashing a thin stream of Red to light the fuse.
The recoil sent the gun careening backwards with sufficient force to buckle its carriage and leave it lying on its side, but not before it had fired its payload directly at the other gun-crew. Lizanne got to her feet as the smoke cleared, finding that the other gun was intact, whilst what remained of its crew had been decorated onto the surrounding brickwork.
A great roar drew her gaze to the city in time to see what appeared to be its entire population rushing from the ruins. The Electress was in the lead with Anatol at her side and the surviving Furies at their backs. They were flanked by the Verdigris and the Wise Fools, clubs and makeshift spears waving and every throat voicing a cry so rich in blood-lust Lizanne found it pained her ears. Behind the three main gangs came the Scuttlers, their ranks swollen by the minor gangs plus those midden-pickers and mud-slingers who retained sufficient vitality to run.
The horde swept across the open ground like a dark tide, apparently immune to the bullets cast at it by the surviving constables, overwhelming the barricade in an unstoppable frenzy of rage and desperation. Those constables not killed instantly tried to run but were soon swallowed by the mob and torn to pieces. Within a few moments the barricade had disappeared, Lizanne seeing the impaled heads of several constables held aloft in jubilation as the river of unwashed criminality flowed through the breach and on towards the gate.