Chapter 52: We Olympians

I picked my spear up off the ground, then turned to Tomorrow Gives Her Hope and gave her a nod. They had ridden in through the large bay where the drainage spilled like the whole population vomiting at once. Tomorrow Gives Her Hope held my garron next to her, bobbing in the air as it waited. I hopped on and Tomorrow Gives Her Hope returned my nod, then we brought our mounts up slowly behind our leaders. Abdiel led for the Cataphracts, and our group was gathered near a hole in the sewage wall that opened into a steep and narrow ramp. Jadus's fighters, a wanton band of painted howlers, gathered behind Thunder Forever, oldest of the Ophidians. His raised fist silenced them, and I knew from their thirsty eyes that they were ready for the raid of their lives. Our combined number was three hundred and forty, with one hundred and seventy calling Turk their father. We dropped down the ramps into Typhon's gullet, the putrid spray of his bile greeting our horses' galloping hooves.

Had I not won against Gorgon, we would have met an army of V's zealots. But we had been able to kill off a dozen or so sleepy guards unseen, and used the control room to open bay doors large enough for our mounts to enter. And so instead of a crowd of huddled intruders sloshing through the muck, a cavalry was coming in the night to attack without alarm. I wanted to howl like the Thieves, but I refrained, smiling in the rushing of our wake in the ocean of sewage.

We did our best to ride over solid ground when we could, but it was rare to find such purchase, so our pursuit was mostly over bilge and filth, but we did not care. Deeper we rode, spiralling into a maze of purification filters and making our way through to the cisterns, then we scaled the service ramps in single file and entered the larger waterworks. My garron more than earned my gratitude, chugging along without complaint and losing no speed to the churning waves beneath her. Twice I found a shorter, more difficult path upward and she handled it untroubled, and without losing her rider. And the other riders did as well or better. In fact, I was proud of the company I was in, even Patches, though I hated him. His beefy mount bore him lightly over vortices and flotsam, around hairpin turns and even submerged a time or two, all without checking its gate. We came on as a thunderless storm, quiet and perfect until there was nothing our enemy could do, and until we came to the pegasus stable we encountered very little effective resistance.

Once there, I let my body go and watched as the dangling lights of infinity laced together the corporeal world, then returned behind our resistors and cut the ammo belts of their ballistas while my fellows sought cover with their weapons raised.

Quarrels and bolts rained sideways in a blaze of dancing stars, their intermittent tracers drawing lines between the two forces as if one would otherwise become confused as to who was fighting who. A few of us went down, but their losses were far more, and I will allow myself to boast here, for I wracked up an even greater tally than Patches, Abdiel and Thunder Forever combined. I was clumsy with my newly discovered ability, being virgin to its deliberate use, but my clumsiness seemed to make me all the more dangerous, and as I stumbled between planes I beheaded warriors with my spear as a child strikes mushroom caps off with a stick.

Then our drills came into play. Lord V stationed many guards in this stable, but the true defense came from altered beasts with little more than the faces of women, looking hatefully our way while they scurried down the wall with hooked hands and fingered bellies that spread wire nets as they crawled. As we had shot our crystal lizards back inside the hollow, we now shot V's elite guards, aiming our weapons high and not letting a single one of them touch the ground with open eyes. I had the iwitar I trained with before, but when my missiles ran out I took a windlass from a fallen foe and used it just as easily. I could hear Goro shouting over the din, sending a wall of bolts to our enemy with his gastraphetes, and near the end of the fight, Patches felt the joy of battle and climbed the wall with the sheer strength of his hands to meet the spider women head on. They crawled over him, desperately tieing his limbs, and when it seemed they had him he pressed away from the wall and came down with three of them in his arms, turning over and crushing them with the impact of his landing.

All was quiet as we quickly traversed the space between our ingress and the portion of the hangar set aside for the winged steeds, and when I saw them I paused and let my jaw hang loose. I had grown attached to my little garron, but I would not miss her, for in front of me were things of such beauty; destriers, and thoroughbreds only, large enough to sit within, their saddles covered by sleek windscreens that sat open like the gaping mouths of resting lizards. The bodies of the pegasi were all straddled by a pair of wind-up ballistas abreast an underslung cannon that spat scatter bombs and limpet mines, and they rested on lean legs bent and always ready to leap.

There was the one Jadus asked me to steal for him, in a lowered section of the floor all by itself. I had pictured something gaudy, but it was not. Its coating was matte, its blue lines desaturated to almost grey, its wings angled sharply with large turbines and a battery of javelins suspended from their undersides. It was death on wings, and it called to me. When the windscreen snapped shut I lost contact with the outside world, and the machine mind laid bare its inward parts so that I placed my fingers on its very nerves, making sense of all its complexities with the speed a wolf cub learns to eat flesh once weaned. The reigns of this beast were far more involved than any of the simple mounts I'd previously ridden, and I laughed when I thought how I had been expected to somehow discover their use on the fly. Had I not found Lord V's own mount, made to link somatically with the jinn-like mind of the Batch, would I have made it out of that cavern?

We all rose more or less at once, those who'd operated dactyls and weather fliers faring better than others. The irony of Abdiel riding a pegasus was not lost on me, and I smirked when I saw his, a great black monster with a second pair of stubby wings spread out from its tail, turn so he could watch and see when we were all ready to fly. Then a golden flare shot from his port battery and we rode, taking as spoils Lord V's entire complement of winged horses.

There were explosions on the ground, and, following Abdiel, we banked hard and rode down the soldiers Lord V had sent after Jadus and Turk. They and their troops were retreating out a postern; Jadus's at full tilt and ours with their faces (and weapons) to the enemy. The pursuers vanished in the flowering bursts of smoke made by our scatter bombs, while our ballistas mowed down any lucky enough to dodge the blasts. We followed our grounded fellows at a watchful pace until we made it to the hidden dock where our ground forces took to the sea, and from there we rode over the cold black water and the blasted lands of our home island, converging again victorious and glorious outside Thieve's Gate, and when I sprang from the saddle of my new mount, I saw amongst the cheering crowd Lafeyette shaking a tambourine, with Ouueeiauauou, Eieiooueioaua and Aioeauouauea dancing in circles around it and singing. For once in my entire life, I felt what heroes feel.

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