Last to Rise(40)
“What is it?” Pasha asked, and he sounded as disturbed as I felt. Genius machines though Lise’s contraptions were, they tended to be centred on one thing – our pain and how to use it.
Lise grinned like the kid she was only just starting to grow out of. Nice to see her smile again, and only this, these things, would do it for her. Since Dwarf had died, she’d retreated into her work until it was all she saw, all she thought about. It worried me, but we needed her to do just that too.
“This will take your pain, yes, sorry,” she said. “Magnify it like the generator. But it does something very specific with it. It’s…” She hesitated, and gave me one of her looks, the one that makes it very clear how dense she thinks I am about mechanicals. “It’s like your pulse pistol. Sort of. Only a lot bigger. I’ve even built in some directional controls, look. Should be able to pinpoint who you want, or spread it over an area. Like the front of the gates.” She pointed at a couple of dials like I was likely to understand.
I must have looked dubious – I certainly felt it – because she started to defend her contraption before I’d said a word.
“It’s like electricity. Magic is, I mean. We can’t seem to get a way to make enough electricity to be useful except this way, not in time anyway. It’s… Rojan, this is hard to explain when you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. We can use it as a shield. Sort of. You know how electricity arcs… No, I don’t suppose you do. Look, just, just believe it, all right? You could use this to spread a pulse right across the gates, or anywhere you can reach. Probably to the lip of the valley. Maybe further.”
“All right, I believe it. Does it work?”
That got me a pout and a glare. “Not yet, but soon. I think. Only…”
That didn’t sound good. “Only what?”
Lise threw her screwdriver into the toolbox at her feet. “Only, I don’t know! The theory is sound, I’m sure of it, but I don’t know what the effects might be. I can’t be sure.”
“Sure of what?” Perak asked quietly.
Lise turned away to stare at a picture that peeked out of the toolbox. A face that only a mother, and perhaps Lise, could love. Dwarf’s weird-ugly features stared up out of the picture, from beyond the grave. Lise’s mechanic hero, and perhaps more. “He’d have known. But I can’t be sure.”
“Lise, sure of what?”
“What it’ll do to the mage in the rig.”
Oh, fantastic. Three guesses who was going to end up in that rig. “I don’t think —”
That was as far as I got because an ominous crack sounded from what seemed like under our feet and the remaining faint boom-shudders stopped. The sudden, if relative, silence was like a razor down the spine.
Lise paled and ran to the main lab, to the telescope she’d set at the window where she studied the Storad and their machines as best she could. Perak shut his eyes and murmured what could only be a prayer under his breath before he followed her.
I followed more hesitantly and was rewarded with Lise’s “Oh shit, fuck and arse.”
The near gun was still out, thank crap. But the far gun, the one I couldn’t reach from inside Mahala, had stopped because the Storad had finally done what they set out to do. My little shenanigans down at the gates had bought us bugger-all extra time. A crack split the left-hand gate right down the middle and it hung from its great hinges like a leering drunk.
The Storad were no longer at the gates. They were on their way through them.
Chapter Eleven
We were back on that stupid rock again, high above what was left of the gates. I held on for grim death and Pasha and Allit looked out and told me what they could see and hear above what I could see for myself.
The left-hand gate was a mess of metal and stone, chunks of both strewn across the gap inside. Across the chaos came the Storad, a stream of dark-haired, pale-faced men who looked as hard as the mountains they came from. The far machine which had taken the gate down stood Outside in the distance, quiet now, looking smug.
Men dropped down on the path from the narrow valley, came through the ruined gates in a regimented flood, distinct groups heading for distinct areas. One group to the dead Glow machines that had been used to lift and carry all our wares, where they began to strip anything we’d left, which wasn’t much. Another group set up what looked like some kind of command centre just inside the gates, Dench in among them. Still others checked out the furthest reaches of the compound, or tested the inner gates that led inside. Not as strong as the outer gates, but it might take a day or two to get through them.