They rocketed across the Virgodan countryside with the fury of charging bull. Cities and towns thickened as they swam past, a sea of colour and life and normality that they could not touch, forever cursed by the vicissitudes, forever cursed by Nereth...

  Danyil steered them around the major stations, though he could not go too far from the main rail-lines, for they needed to cross the Tezadan Divide. Once, they were delayed by an Engine in front of them. They had to slow to what was, for The Warmaster, a crawl, until the Engine in front took another bifurcating line, and they could once more accelerate to their full power.

  They spent the time mostly resting. The carriages were not exactly comfortable—they were built for war. Three of the carriages housed massive gun-platforms, hideous cannons that emerged from the ceiling of the carriages and could fire upon enemies. Many carriages were simply empty, clearly meant for the storage of weapons, supplies, and munitions. But a few contained bunkbeds and rudimentary living quarters. They deposited themselves there and tried to get what sleep they could.

  And then they felt The Warmaster slowing a second time, but more so than before, slowing almost to a walking speed. They roused themselves from their uncomfortable beds. The door to the carriage opened and Danyil stood in the archway, framed. His eyes were dark stars.

  “They have set up a blockade. Come.”

  They were located in the third carriage, so they followed him past one of the huge gun-emplacements and an empty carriage, eventually reaching the driver’s cab. The room was sweltering, the air fuzzy, as though it were possible to curl it like paper with the infernal heat. Through the large viewing window—the eyes of the horrific monster that adorned the front of the Engine—they saw the blockade ahead. An Engine had been arranged on the track with a spiked cowcatcher on the front. Metal barricades had been laid down either side of it, spreading out across a barren stretch of land that banded between two cities. Telos could see the now familiar figures of Virgodan guards there, their gleaming armour, their spears and crossbows.

  “I can’t see anything,” Ylia said, squinting.

  He’d forgotten about his god-sight. Only he and Danyil could make them out for the moment.

  “It is quite the welcome party,” Telos said.

  “There’s more,” Danyil said. “As we just passed through Daihaven, I saw military Engines rallying. They will not be far behind us.”

  “Surely this monster is more than a match for them?” Xheng said, striking his fist against the metal wall with a clang.

  “Indeed. But it will involve the ending of human life.”

  Danyil’s words rang as though he had declaimed them through the mouth of a trumpet. The Engine screamed, gurgled, roared. The flames looked like they wished to escape from their esoteric fireboxes, greedily licking at the super-hardened metal. Telos felt as though he had received a blow from a hammer on his chest. He nearly staggered.

  He had killed several people, by this point. The guard in the Governor’s manse had been an accident. Though he still felt a dreadful guilt, he had been partly able to assuage himself that it was not intentional.

  Gorm, however, was another story. He had killed the Wagemaster and the dwarf engineer intentionally. Yes, they were both despicable. But still. He had ended a life deliberately. What did that make him?

  Danyil was watching him closely, as though sensing his thoughts.

  “These are not ordinary circumstances, Telos Daggeron. And so we cannot look to ordinary morality. I despise loss of life and bloodshed, but I do not see another way through this blockade. And if we fail to break through, there will be far more loss of life. The disasters you have witnessed will be as nothing as the planet is purged.”

  “We kill people to save people,” Ylia said, bitterly.

  “I just don’t understand how the whole country has mobilised against us so quickly,” Telos said. He knew he should be making a decision—they had little time before they struck the blockade despise slowing down. Yet, his heart simply could not commit to such a course of action without first thinking it through, without solving the terrible moral enigma. “It does not seem possible.”

  Danyil was looking at him again with that burning intensity.

  “You do know, Telos, how such a thing is possible. Her name is on your tongue.”

  Telos sighed.

  “Nereth? Such manipulations seem beneath her.”

  “Nothing is beneath her,” Danyil said, darkly. “Fate has no morality, for it is entirely concerned with the ends of things.”

  “Clearly she fears you, Telos,” Jubal said. “If she will expend so much effort to rallying these deluded men and women to oppose us, then she must fear what you can do, and that you might succeed.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Danyil smiled at Jubal and nodded.

  “Indeed. It also means that she, herself, knows not the location of The Nergal. If she did, she would not need to act against us—all would already be in hand.”

  “We’re running out of time,” Xheng said, nodding toward the blockade. Clearly, they were close enough now that mortal eyes could see it. “That is quite the array.”

  “Do it,” Telos said, gritting his teeth. “And may the gods have mercy on my soul. Well, the good gods, anyway.”

  Danyil smiled grimly and nodded. He walked over to a panel on the wall and depressed a button. They heard the hideous grinding of vast mechanisms. Telos leant his head out of the side of the cab and saw the tops of the three gun-carriages opening, like flowerheads greeting the sun. With a drone-like whine, the colossal cannons rose from the shadowed depths of the carriages and began to pivot. He heard another whine, this one similar to the hum of Beltanus’s sky-ship, a hum that made him think of lightning running down a metal rod. Light glowed from within the mouth of the cannons.

  “I can’t bear to watch,” Telos said, pulling his head back within.

  “Cover your ears,” Danyil warned.

  The cannons boomed.

  ***

  The first three shots, one from each cannon, reduced the entire blockade to ashes. The rupture of the explosions shook the ground and nearly derailed them. The Engine cab the guards had parked on the track was obliterated, shrapnel spinning through the air, cutting down the few men with reactions swift enough to flee. Flames erupted and spread like wildfire, devouring ground, barricade, armour, and flesh with equal avidity.

  In seconds, all was screaming, dust, and dying flame. No second barrage was needed. Danyil accelerated The Warmaster and they smashed through the few, still-burning hunks of Engine that remained. The cowcatcher at the front of The Warmaster, shaped like the lower half of a nightmarish jaw, cast aside the wreckage as though it were made of hollow wood. He realised that even if they had not fired, and The Warmaster had simply charged the enemy fortification, they would likely have been able to cut through. The Warmaster was made of substances not of Erethia, hardened in the fires of Nilldoranian invention. Much like his Hydra Scale armour, it would take much more than mortal might to perforate such a defence.

  They were silent as they rode over the remains of the barricades. Each tried to avoid eye-contact with the others. Telos resisted the urge to count the dead; it was difficult, anyway, to determine how many bodies there were anyway, as most had been blasted to pieces. He felt his guts squirming, nausea rising up. He leaned out of the window and tried to vomit but it simply wouldn’t come. He cursed his hardened constitution. He wanted to feel as a man, as a mortal, but he was too strong within as well as without.

  Qala alone seemed sanguine, or perhaps she simply hid her revulsion better than the rest. He supposed that the bid for the Qi’shathian throne, with all its betrayals and plotting, had probably caused her to witness many horrors, and on greater scale than this.

  “I commend their souls to The Way. They were mislead, but still their deaths will be honoured. They did not die in vain.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Telos replied. “We have not yet succeeded.”

  “What we’ve just done will now be considered an outright act of war,” Ylia whispered. “Wylhome, we might have explained away. But this… Aurelia is our enemy, now.”

  He detected the note of sadness, and felt a pang of renewed guilt. She had left Aurelia in difficult circumstances and probably been glad to see the back of it, but that was different to having no choice to return, to being wanted in one’s home country. In that way, they were bonded, for he doubted he could ever return to Yarruk. Then again, she was only in this position because of him. I have to find a way to make this all right. I have to remember everything they haver given and sacrificed, and pay them back double, triple, quadruple fold. Whatever power lies in me from the Godseed.

  The rest of the journey passed in a grim mood. They were aware of being pursued, but The Warmaster was too fast, and they did not meet another blockade on Virgodan soil. They passed through barren lands until they saw, gleaming redly in the distance liker a false horizon, the great Tezadan Divide. A bridge of iron spanned it.

  Or rather, might have done—had it not been destroyed.

  Even Danyil’s eyes went wide. He pulled the brakes, slowing the great hulking Engine. Sparks near-blinded them as the wheels eviscerated the rails beneath them, the metal too strong for the tracks that should hold them.

  “Men did not do this,” he said.

  “No,” Ylia said, in agreement. “No Aurelian would desecrate such a landmark. This…”

  “...is the work of Nereth,” Telos said, simply. “Her sky-ship, in fact.”

  “Then we have only one choice,” Danyil said, grimly.

  The Sumyrian doused the fires, pulled the brakes harder, and redirected the flow of steam and oil so that it diffused in open air like the breath of a wild animal in winter’s chill. Soon, The Warmaster slowed to a halt some four-hundred feet from the broken edge of the bridge.

  Gingerly, they stepped down from the huge Engine. It seemed wrong that such a thing should ever be still. The snarling machine-monster looked like it had a soul of its own, that it should leap to life at any moment.

  “It seems criminal to abandon it,” Telos said.

  Danyil nodded.

  “It is. But our quest is more important than a relic. Besides, it was a gift to humankind, and so it should be returned to them now we have had our use from it.”

  Danyil approached the edge of the canyon. Six-hundred feet across, and deeper than any cliff Telos had ever stood upon. The bottom glowed crimson and scarlet, with odd flashes of light that made the structure look as though it were wrought from one colossal ruby.

  “You do realise no one has ever made it to the bottom,” Ylia said. “They gave up trying a hundred years ago. And we have no climbing equipment whatsoever.”

  “Yes. But did any of your explorers have a Sumyrian with them?” Danyil said.

  “Point taken,” Ylia replied. “So how do we get down? Or across, rather?”

  Danyil smiled.

  “It is simple: we jump.”