Glorious Angels Read online

  TRALANE

  Tralane stood in the darkness at the top of the Diligent Stair and listened briefly to the sound of her breath and the blustering work of the storm. She felt sure that as she had been fighting the wind to land there had been a flash towards the left side of the collapsed flight tower. Lightning, had been her first thought, with a grab in the stomach and renewed strength as she muscled the ailerons into position. Flits didn’t react well to lightning. They were made of lacquered paper, bent wood and charms, and thus tended to burn up almost instantaneously – their one drawback – so landing had suddenly become even more imperative as if the wind was not enough. However, the lightning hypothesis did not hold as there was no thunder and when she looked again she’d seen nothing, it being too dark. She wondered if she’d imagined it, but when she closed her eyes after touching down in a moment of relief there had been a dot of dark blue behind her lids. Unlikely as it seemed, her limbs sank with the sensation of cold dismay at having been seen. Possibly. Maybe. One could drive oneself mad with it.

  This hesitation lasted only a moment and then she resumed her downward run, feet easily remembering the wide curve of the stair, the heavy bag and visor jogging at her back and her gear squeaking and creaking. She didn’t mind the dark. As a girl this vast ruin was her playground and none of it was strange to her. She kept her fingers on the wooden rail, counted its marks, joins, breaks, as she traced her way to one of the lower levels where an elevator waited for her, its small cabin glowing by the light of a single tiny lamp. The battery was going. She must remember to renew it, she thought, as she stepped inside.

  The outer cage doors were missing but the car doors were well oiled on their tracks and slid shut with a click as she turned the key. This connected the power cores and suddenly the whole car lit up brightly, soft apricot beams from the roof panes illuminating its rotted velvets and water-stained panelling. Tralane put her fingers to the drive plate and felt the judder of old machinery coming to life. There was the alarming whine of a wheel whirring up to speed on a rusty axle, the grinding of bearings that were long since powdered, and her rattling descent began. She wondered if she would be the last person to use this part of the tower. Her daughters had so far shown almost no interest in it whatsoever, so she wasn’t sure they even remembered it was there. She liked to imagine their faces, herself laughing with them, the delight they would feel in discovering an unimagined wealth in what was, to them, a huge and boring ruin. But another impulse also lit in her, one which clasped itself tightly around the higher tower, and everything it held. Later, it whispered, later, when they are older. And she didn’t want to share it. So she wiped a brief tear out of her eye on the unyielding toughness of her leather jacket and spent the minute of her journey brushing through and restoring the braid of her hair. It was hard to manage in only one minute and the task kept her from thinking of the other reasons why she had not passed on her legacy.

  ‘Axle grease,’ she thought, considering where to obtain it and what to say that it was for. Plus there was no denying that she must do something about the influx of mercenaries flooding the Terraces and filling the girls’ heads with speculations that must remain idle, unexplored and mysterious. She felt sad that the war had brought so many of them and glad at the same time. She approved of diversity and particularly an incursion of new men, but in spite of the city’s trenchant propaganda she didn’t expect many of them to be returning and the prospect of girlish broken hearts on top of what other horrors may come was enough to set her teeth grinding. Besides that, most of the recruits were from various misogynist regimes and tribal factions which would make them at best exhausting and at worst dangerous to inexperienced women who had spent their lives in the matriarchy of the Gleaming.

  ‘Maybe there will be Sircenes?’ Isabeau had already said several times, wistfully. No no, Tralane had assured her, the last of the Sircenes were all here, in the Gleaming, nodding their days away in the Academies. Of the remaining hundreds of named families most were mixed bloods, like themselves, who had yielded to the conquering triad of the Golden Empire in ages past. There were no Pureblood Sircenes on record, although there were possibly a few by accident or some who had deliberately forged their census documents. There would be no grand revival of the magi lines. But the notion, inspired by Huntingore’s rich and extensive history and, she recalled with a roll of her eyes, all the stories she had drilled into them as children for the sake of heritage as much as adventure, was much more alluring than anything a suddenly prescient mother could say.

  Minnabar had been contemptuous of both Tralane’s and Isabeau’s attitudes, but she was old enough not to have to care about the consequences of this, spending most of her time with a gaggle of late teen girls drifting from one house to another in a freefloating blur of study, application, conspiracy and partying which was a typical young Gleaming web at its most potent. Tralane knew they sneaked out of their Academics’ care and down into the Terraces several nights a week and her nerves on the subject were almost frayed to splitting. One second she felt proud of Minnabar for her hellcat manners and her fire, the next she was terrified of what might happen if any of the Terrace lowlife took her remotely seriously or even noticed her. This was before one considered what the Gleaming lowlife had already contemplated.

  The young men of Minnabar’s group to whom she had free access gave Tralane no cause for concern. That was probably deeply unwise of her but Sircene bias must come out somewhere and she didn’t reckon there was a handful of spit among them. With their pleasant, bland manners and overeducated tempers they were perfect foils for the all female web itself, or had been, until stranger meat had arrived, reeking of unlimited testosterone. Now Tralane rather hoped the Sircene youths would find some backbones and rise to the challenge but also dreaded the prospect. Tending black eyes and broken noses was the last thing she fancied and she could imagine much worse results. Somehow she must think of a project to stall the web and keep it bound to the Sircene citadel.

  The echoes of her own footfalls tapped her mind like impatient fingers trying to point out the obvious. She knew it would come to that eventually; only the treasures of a secret, ancient world might prove strong enough to lure the girls from disaster, or she’d got nothing. But not today. Then the car came to a slow, quaking halt. She heard the cables plinking their stress like a badly handled piano and stepped out, locking the doors behind her and secreting the key by jamming it backwards into the lock of the unused cage gate on the outside. The light went out as the cores were unhitched and a grim darkness returned. A faint pattering of what she thought must be rust falling down the shaft made a rainy sound.

  The return to her present was as unwelcome as the detour into maternal guilt. She undressed and redressed in the freezing anteroom of the lower tower without the luxury of distracting thoughts as the cold was distraction enough. She packed her gear away carefully, drying it all and checking her air cylinder, the connections and the hose before placing them in their velvet-lined cases and closing the lids. One at a time she stowed them in their fitted positions in one of the many pilot’s wardrobes that lined the walls. It was hard to imagine there had been a time when this room had buzzed with talk and the pungent smells of leather oil, engine grease and volatile ether as flyers came and went all day long. Before she had discovered the Flit plans no pilot had been here for forty years and the only craft abroad belonged to the Ministries’ official weather service. When she was satisfied that nothing seemed out of place she summoned a witchlight to run before her and passed through the remaining levels, halls, workshops and corridors at a brisk pace.

  The statues of the ancestors watched her from their plinths and recesses, their eyes coming alight as she passed in answering glow to the witchlight’s temporary power. Each one of them represented a lifetime of study, thought, research and mastery into their particular magic and its technologies. Tralane knew only a few of their number in any detail, and not even all of their names. Most of what they had
achieved was lost in time now, the library having been burned during the early years of the occupation when the Gleaming was a mage city of the Sircene and not simply the higher city of the academics floating above the vast, sprawling powerhouse of Glimshard, second city of the Golden Empire, Westernmost Outpost of Civilisation.

  Since then, knowledge had been restricted to what had been saved by the Huntingores and other families of the lines and in recent decades that had been kept rigorously secret, both from the Academy and each other. The Golden Empire was being pressed upon by the unholy forces of the Bitter Circle, a loose alliance of hundreds of outland nations, and in its distress it had become fanatical about the claiming of any useful power for exclusive Imperial military use. Tralane was not alone in understanding what that meant for ancient magi and potentially difficult lines of engineering. Firstblood mages of the Empire, halfbloods and lessers all struggled with Sircene work and it was often considered more of a tolerable indulgence than a true science. It did not take well to written transference by any methods and routinely failed to submit to standardisation when Firstblood mages attempted its works using their methods. It would not take too much trouble or prompting to finish what they had started a century earlier and wipe all Sircene knowledge from the records.

  Tralane had known all this for so long that most of a sense of urgency about it had passed until one of the Imperial scryers at the Ministry of Defence had discerned her skill with the crystallograph. Now she felt plenty of urgency, though she would not run. She descended until she reached the half-used rooms of the lower tower, on a height with the majority of the Arrays that made up the Gleaming. These had been the living quarters of the families of the Sircene sorceresses and their interiors provided modest rooms with excellent views whose furnishings were still reasonable, if thoroughly neglected in her case. In other, better populated Arrays, life went on at all levels, but Huntingore was threadbare and scanty. Tralane used her excess of space for storage now and tried not to notice that it was all falling apart.

  Old furniture, broken children’s toys, uninteresting tomes and crates of things that might have been alchemist’s bottles or kitchen equipment were stacked carelessly about. The dusty spokes of a spinning wheel mocked her efforts at serene domestication. She vowed to move it, as she had vowed to move it at least a hundred times, and darted past into the next hall.

  The doors locked themselves automatically, their sturdy magic as solid as it had been since the tower was built a thousand years before. Nobody that the head of the house deemed unfitting would be able to enter any opening in Huntingore regardless of their skills in any craft. Those were the days, Tralane thought, and longed to know the methods and the powers they used then, but the door and window seals were only a fragment of the things she didn’t know. At least they kept her family secure. She was grateful that they worked and that would have to be enough. Meanwhile she had returned via a roundabout route to a stair that bypassed their living areas close to the ground and would lead her into the gardens. From there she made her way unseen to the cab stand at the very edge of Marigold Park where puttering jalopies of various sizes were waiting.

  By now it was nearly dark and the rain was pounding down. Tralane’s heavy oilskin mage cloak completely concealed her. Water dripped off the cowl past her face. It was hanging so far forward she would have been blind without a charm on it to let her see through the cloth as if it were only a veil. One of the smaller cars was lit inside, the driver smoking a long pipe in his portion of the cab and looking unconcerned. She opened the door and found the occupant waiting, his pinched face hard with his own sense of self-importance in his work as he reached for the bag. He didn’t even attempt to look at her face.

  ‘I hope they all break,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Let’s hope for your sake they don’t,’ he replied, checking the contents with brusque efficiency and then stuffing bag and contents swiftly under his seat, sliding the panelling there back with practised speed. ‘Wouldn’t like your girls to find theyselves the wrong side of a draft, would we?’

  To this there was nothing Tralane could say. The sham of any kind of conversation with this man was something that made her gorge rise. She came close to ill-wishing him and only the sense that they were in public stalled the coil of power, a thin whip in her chest, trying to slither up to her eyes and find its target. She stepped back and slammed the door shut on him, making it seem as though she was simply glad to be sending him on his way when she would rather have used all her strength to stop his journey, his purpose, his smug superiority. But there was no use in her anger. The Ministry would have its weapons, and for that they needed her. The war needed her. All her efforts, daring, the glorious flight, was in the service of death and destruction.

  A black weight crept up her arms and into her shoulders, cold, its own kind of petrification spell. She stood on the rain-wet pavement, just another bystander lashed by the weather while around her the Gleaming went on with its complacent, luxury-ridden business, replete in the assurances of being a step away from trouble. The seat of true power sat on the High Terrace where the old palace had been part-converted to the offices of government. It was a time of administrators and the Empress presided over them without causing much turbulence.

  Tralane turned and walked back through the streets, herself and her previous path all tainted by the fulfilment of business. She took the public elevator at Deciment and watched the thriving, shining night lights of the Terrace sink away until the car was surrounded entirely by purple magelight that blocked out all views.

  She listened for conversation among the other passengers to distract herself from her miserable turn of mind and was strangely rewarded. A couple of older women, one in the crimson workaday robes of a Firstblood professor, the other gaily dressed in wet Array finery were talking about the influx of fighters to Lower Terrace where they had spent the afternoon selling for their guilds.

  ‘A Karoo, can you imagine!’ the Array woman said, shivering to add to the drama of her moment. ‘Talking animals they are.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said her friend. ‘I saw him and he looked quite humanoid. The rumours of beastmen are surely exaggerations. They are simply different.’ Her voice suggested otherwise.

  ‘Pff, a score of the Circle’s vile spawn couldn’t be any stranger. And looks are deceiving. There’s no man that colour in a natural creation, nor that scale either.’

  A pause ensued in which Tralane wished she could look at their faces but her hood and their relative position made it impossible.

  When the Firstblood spoke again her voice was rich with speculation, ‘He was huge.’

  Tralane found herself smiling. Then she thought of Isabeau with sharp alarm like a jolt of electricity in her nerves, and especially of Minnabar, with a cold certainty plunging in her midriff. Neither of them was equipped to deal with the devastation that such an opportunity presented; its potential for disastrous romanticism was beyond endurance. She doubted most of the Gleaming would escape it. Prior to the exciting drama of the new war they had slumped headlong into a decadent decline and this combination of renewed energy, a resurgent interest in the values of heroism and a vague awareness of their own jaded appetites had already given rise to an abysmal tide of musical and novelised twittery extolling various religiously inclined ideologies of virtue, nobility, sacrifice and tragic love. Farce had yet to raise its head – this surge was in its primal state yet – and Tralane found herself braced as if for a long fight as the momentary silence in the rising car spoke volumes about the activity going on inside the fervent imaginations of the occupants, herself included.

  Karoo. A race from so far away they were considered beyond civilisation, as elusive as the two-headed wolf of legend. Tales of them were as old and unlikely as the idea of a Sircene revival but in these days Tralane could only wish they’d had the sense to stay away from everything associated with the Golden Empire, which didn’t exactly have a pure record on its assimi
lation of outland tribes let alone its reputation for sport with those considered to belong to subspecie groupings. The Sircene had survived only by hiding in plain sight and by virtue of the fact that they were visually identical to any of the wide variety of human types that considered themselves bloodline Empire natives. If anyone in a position of enquiry had known there was a significant difference or two it was long since forgotten. They were meted out the regular treatment for conquered people who had some uses to the major lifelines of the Empire, no more and no less, and even for historians they were of only marginal interest, counting the exception of Tralane herself and this crystal business which was secret and therefore didn’t count, she fervently hoped. But a Karoo being alive in the city was enough to stir two dozen scholars from their rest. Corsets all over Glimshard were being hauled in extra inches all around her, she fancied, as it occurred to her that maybe she ought to be one of them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BORZE

  ‘And how is our friend from the north working out?’ Fadurant Borze, seated on his horse for what felt like the fiftieth hour in a row, rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle and took some weight off his aching seat bones. He couldn’t decide yet what to do about the Karoo and would have welcomed any news that would give him an excuse to make a decision to remove him, either to the front, or to some outpost, or into a grave – in fact anywhere other than keep him inside the city where his presence alone was sure to create trouble. But the Empress had granted the foreigner leave to stay under her own protective order and employing him where he was useful was at least good for keeping him under observation, not to mention favourable for Fadurant’s reputation with the Empress. Fadurant was grateful that he was experienced enough not to be overly anxious about foreigners, even subspecie ones of surpassing rarity, but he still didn’t like it. Thus, he cast this apparently lighthearted question out on to waters he was hoping would supply a nibble to feed either his hopes or his fears.