Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,180

AND RESOLUTE, WE STAND VIGILANT AND WATCHFUL, AWAITING THE MESSAGES, AWAITING THE SIGNS, AWAITING THE CALL TO BEGIN FULL PIVOT INWARDS, OUR HIDES AS HARD AND DENSE AS COLD IRON…>

She flinched at the enormous sound of it. The campo gates were undoubtedly the biggest thing she’d attempted to fool yet. Yet she persisted, and asked,

bellowed the gates.

said Sancia to the gates.

There was a long silence.

asked the gates.

said the gates.

She told it what to do. It listened, and agreed. And then she crept away, down the walls to the next set of gates.

And the next, and the next.

* * *

Giovanni and Claudia crouched in the alley and watched as the tiny dot of shadow silently slipped along the base of the Candiano walls.

“Did…did she do anything?” said Giovanni, baffled.

Claudia pulled out a spyglass and examined the gates. “I don’t see anything.”

“Did we just risk our necks for that damned girl to do nothing? I’ll be pissed as hell if that’s the case!”

“We didn’t risk our necks, Gio. We just shot a firework into the damned air. Sancia’s the one literally running along the watchtowers.” She peered along the walls as Sancia stopped at the next gates, paused, and continued on. “Though I honestly have no idea what she’s doing.”

Gio sighed. “To think of all the mad shit we’ve had to eat to get to here. We could have left Tevanne ages ago, Claudia! We could have been on board a ship right now, headed toward some remote island paradise! A ship full of sailors. Sailors, Claudia! Young, sun-darkened men with thick, rippling shoulders from heaving huge ropes around all da—”

Then there was a sharp, warbling scream.

Claudia took the spyglass away from her eye. “What the hell was that?” She looked around, but couldn’t see anything. “Gio, do you see any—”

Then another scream, one of pure, naked terror. The screams seemed to be coming from the Candiano gates just ahead of them.

“Is…is this part of Sancia’s doing?” asked Gio. He leaned forward. “Wait! Oh my God…Someone’s up there, Claudia…”

She lifted her spyglass and looked at the Candiano gates.

Her mouth fell open. “Holy shit.”

A man was standing atop the gate towers of the Candiano gates, his boots perched on the edge of the wall. He was wearing some kind of contraption, like a black suit of armor, except one arm had been modified to be a large, rounded shield, and the other arm had been modified to hold some kind of massive, retractable polearm…Yet it was difficult to see him clearly, for every movement he made was obscured in darkness. The only reason she could see him at all was because there was a bright scrived light hanging just below him on the wall.

It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. She’d only ever read about such things, a type of particularly notorious shock weapon deployed abroad in the wars.

“A lorica?” she said aloud, astonished.

“Who the shit is that?” Gio asked. “Did we tell him to be there?”

Claudia stared at the man, huge and gleaming in the dark metal contraption. She saw there was a dead body lying on the walls before him, horribly mangled—presumably this had been the screamer, whom she now thought had had plenty of reasons to scream.

It can’t be, she thought. What the hell is going on?

She watched as the man leapt forward, his body flying up five, ten, fifteen feet—Definitely a real lorica, Claudia thought—and then he crashed down, his polearm licking out like a glittering black whip…

She hadn’t even noticed that there were guards up on the gate towers with him. Yet then there was a massive splash of blood, and she realized that the man had used his polearm to almost completely vivisect a Candiano guard who’d been sprinting at him, rapier in hand.

Three more Candiano guards