“Got enough Red here to burn down the whole fucking Sanctum,” one of the men commented. He spoke in coarse Varsal rich in the accent of the slums and wore a cavalryman’s coat, dark with dried blood and marked by several poorly stitched bullet-holes.
“This is Kraz,” Hyran introduced the man. “Besides me, the only surviving Brotherhood Blood-blessed in the city.”
“Luckily, burning down the Sanctum in its entirety shouldn’t be necessary,” Lizanne told Kraz. She reached into the satchel and extracted the two additional Spiders she had taken from the fallen Blood Cadre agents at the Battle of the Road. She handed one to Jelna and the other to Kraz before spending a few minutes educating them in the correct operation of the devices.
“Do you have any more of those?” Zakaeus asked, peering into the satchel.
“No,” Lizanne replied. “They’re only for fighters.”
She extracted her timepiece and did a rough mental calculation of how long it would take to get to the outer walls of the Sanctum. “We need an unobstructed route,” she said, realising they would be unlikely to reach their objective if required to traverse more barricade-ridden streets.
“Could try the sewers,” Kraz suggested.
“Most have been flooded,” Jelna said. “The Cadre learned a lot of lessons after the last revolution.”
“If we can’t go down,” Lizanne said, slotting a fresh vial of Green into her Spider, “we’ll have to go up.”
? ? ?
The roof-tops of Corvus were fortuitously rich in tiled slopes and broad ledges, which made traversing them at Green-enhanced speeds a relatively simple matter. Lizanne led the way, the others following her route as she sprinted and leapt from one roof-top to another. A few snipers, both rebel and loyalist, had taken to the upper levels of the city. Most just stood and gaped at the momentary intrusion into their domain, but a few possessed sufficient reflex and resolve to cast some shots in their direction.
“We’re on your side, you silly fucker!” Kraz admonished one unfortunate marksman whose bullet had added another hole to his already ragged garment. Fortunately it had passed through the Blood-blessed’s sleeve without finding any flesh, not that this cooled his anger any. Having injected a burst of Black he seized the sniper, marked out as a rebel by the Brotherhood symbol stitched onto his jacket. The fellow struggled vainly as he was lifted, legs dancing in thin air.
“Thought . . . you was . . . Cadre,” the man rasped out through a rapidly constricting throat.
“Leave the poor sod alone, Kraz,” Hyran said. “We ain’t got the time.”
Kraz’s face bunched in frustrated malice and he cast the sniper aside, tossing him end over end to land on the opposite roof-top amidst a cloud of shattered tiles.
“We’re just about there,” Jelna said, pointing to where the rows of streets came to an abrupt end. Beyond them lay the band of green fields surrounding the Sanctum. Lizanne went to the edge of the roof-top, eyes tracking over the expanse of well-maintained grass and shrubbery she remembered from her coach ride with the unpleasantly aromatic Chamberlain Yervantis. It was much the same but for the numerous bodies lying in a line of blackened, dismembered clusters all the way to the outer walls of the Sanctum.
“It would’ve fallen on the first day but for the Blood Cadre,” Jelna said, face dark as she stared at the piled bodies below.
Lizanne checked her timepiece once more and turned to the south, her boosted vision making out the dark mass of people streaming into the Corvus suburbs. The progress of the People’s Freedom Army was swift but not unopposed. Cannon shells exploded here and there along with frantic flurries of small-arms fire, but the loyalists were far too few in number to successfully contest the advance. Within minutes the rebel throng had reached the dense streets of the slums where their numbers swelled amidst an upsurge of cheering.
“Four minutes,” she told the others before injecting more Green and commencing a swift descent to ground level.
She had them form a line then led them across the fields in a sprint, raising a cloud of churned earth and shredded grass in their wake in an unmistakable sign of their nature. Lizanne brought them to a halt some four hundred paces from the wall, extreme range for a rifle-shot but not a cannon. A salvo of shells was launched almost as soon as they came to a halt.
“Remember,” Lizanne said to Hyran. “Just like I showed you.”
She injected a second long burst of Black and raised her gaze, finding the plummeting shells easily thanks to the Green in her veins. A concentrated burst of force was enough to explode three of the shells in mid air, Hyran taking care of the remaining two a split-second later. After that the cannon fell silent.
“We’re just going to stand here?” Zakaeus demanded. Lizanne turned to see he and his wife had edged back a little, faces slick with sweat.
“If you run,” Lizanne told Zakaeus in a flat, sincere tone, “I’ll break your spine and make you watch whilst I disembowel your wife. Now stand still and shut up.”
She turned back to the wall, eyes scanning the battlements as she felt the timepiece tick away in her pocket. Where are you, you old bastard?
It took perhaps a minute for the first Blood Cadre agent to appear, a man of slight build but with the age and bearing of a veteran. Lizanne’s unnatural vision picked out the gleam of the Imperial crest against the dark fabric of the man’s tunic. He was soon joined by more agents, dark-suited figures shoving soldiers aside as they crowded onto the battlements to view their enemy. Seeing the animosity on their faces, Lizanne was reminded of something the Blood Imperial had said in Azireh’s tomb: Many of my children want justice for their murdered brothers and sisters. Whatever the truth of that, it appeared he hadn’t deigned to join them in administering justice, for she couldn’t find any sign of him.
“This is . . .” Sofiya managed before choking into a terrorised silence.
“Madness,” her husband finished. “We can’t possibly fight so many.”
“I told you,” Lizanne said, raising her gaze to the sky as her ears detected a familiar, droning whine, “I do not require you to fight.”
The Profitable Venture’s captain had assured her that the required precision was well within the capabilities of his gun-crews. “A large static target,” he sniffed. “Just a matter of trigonometry, miss.”