The Angelus Guns by Max Gladstone Read Free Book Online Page B

knew the holocaust stored within. She remembered what those weapons did to diamond and to flesh. She remembered what she’d done with them. What the many choirs would do, when the order came to fire.
    The guns did not speak yet.
    She flew into the city to find her brother.
    Within its shield-sails, the city was giant, old, and wise. Light raced down diamond channels. Walls sang the glory of the world transformed. Tapestries fluttered from towering arches. But the streets were empty, and few builders moved through the skies where Thea flew. Cafes and music halls stood vacant. Fountains gushed in deserted parks. Delicate harp trills thrilled no ears.
    Those who lived here knew the fleet had come, and took shelter in their homes, or outside the shield wall, or in the deep recesses of ordinary time. They did not need to see the future to know what would happen soon.
    She perched on one of the many balconies of a five-tipped diamond spire, on the edge of the spreading taint. Smoke rose from occupied intersections of the world-web. She asked her book to find her brother, and when she turned the page it told her it could not. She’d feared and expected that answer. He was beyond the web.
    He stood with the rebels after all.
    She returned the book to her bag, and flew along the city’s vast diamond arteries until she reached a break. Shimmering fiber optics ran dark. Snapped and frayed edges of carbon nanotubes sparked rainbow in the singularity radiance. Smoke hung heavy in the air. Several miles of cable had been severed, and dead builders floated in the gap, wings limp, bodies broken, open eyes still watching for a last-minute savior who had not come. Husks, she hoped, minds stored safe somewhere. She did not know for certain.
    The bodies’ wings were red.
    Though the virus-taint extended for light-seconds around, the rebels had only cordoned off this neighborhood, barely a few hundred miles in diameter. Severed most of the strands that bound it to the city. Hence the darkness beyond, and the smell.
    The gap was easy to cross. She flew from one end of the severed cord to the other. Bodies spun around her in free fall. She rolled past them, through them. A floating drop of rainbow blood splashed her arm, left a long sticky trail, then burned off.
    She felt no mind within the drop.
    Landing on the opposite road, she waited for a challenge, but received none. She made her cup fill itself with blood—the old, red kind—and dipped her wing tips one after another in it. Capillary action spread the blood through translucent crystal, and soon her wings were crimson as the rebels’.
    Satisfied, she flew into the darkness of occupied territory. The city broken was dull and dim. Its walls did not guide her. She followed the smell of smoke past dark houses and empty courtyards.
    After several miles’ flight she heard music—with her ears. No chords of transcendent bliss, no mechanical beauty, no choir calling her to dissolve into its massed, conducted will. Only vibrations in air, caused by a stringed instrument. A fiddle, she thought. She opened her book to check, but its pages lay blank. A fiddle, played with feeling, though some notes skewed sharp and others flat, and the player lacked rhythm.
    She flew toward the music. Fire danced within darkened houses. The fiddler sat on a windowsill, silhouetted by flame. She rose to him, wings spread wide. He seemed sick, skin sallow, face lined and dim, feathers drooping. Only his fingers lived, dancing on the fiddle’s neck. Beneath the music she heard fingertips strike the ebon board, and horsehair dragged over strings.
    Where he found the horse, she didn’t know.
    He played his song three times more. Behind him the fire burned, a wood fire in a glass chamber with no chimneys, and in the shadows and smoke others tumbled making love. When the fiddler finished, he looked up, saw her, and tottered back off the windowsill in surprise. Thea grabbed his bow