Champion of Mars Read Online Free PDF Page B

killing web through the main street. Civilians do not know which way to run. They are killed by weapons from both sides. I see a woman clutching at two children, weeping on her knees by the body of a third. Shapes writhe across the blood pooling around the corpse. It could be more fire, more reflections, but I know better: it is secret writing, scribing the hard eleutheremic truths of life.
    Yoechakenon reaches the gate. He uses his glaive sparingly, felling only the men who are in his way or who offer active resistance. One has his rifle cleaved in two; his sword is a finger’s width from its scabbard when his armour’s broad helmet is rent open and he dies. Another begs, and dies. Then Yoechakenon is in the gateway. A soldier on the other side reaches for a mechanism by the door. Yoechakenon throws the glaive, and it spins as it flies, killing three men before it takes the soldier’s fingers. Belatedly, a spirit somewhere observes what is happening, and the soapy sheen of an energy shield springs taut across the gateway. Yoechakenon places his hands together and, like a man diving into a vertical pool, pierces the energy shield, the exotic alloys of his armour disrupting the shield’s patterns and allowing him to slip through. He is on the other side and rolling. I look back, see the terrified face of an Olmish soldier through the gap, his eyes just visible behind his glass faceplate.
    Behind him, in the distance and smoke, the crying woman.
    The gates clang shut.
    I will never forget the face of the woman.
    Yoechakenon comes to his feet, the glaive in his hand singing with joy at their reunion. He sprints through manicured gardens twined into the fabric of the citadel. Fountains splash. Ornamental birds strut across perfect turf. Here, there is little sign of war.
    And then I lose him. The energy field holding the dust of my body together is being interfered with by the castellan spirit of the citadel. Only when I have asserted my credentials as a tallyman for the Quinarchy does it relent. I can sense the anger of the systems here, and the fear. They obey the writ of the law nevertheless.
    When my perceptions have returned to the citadel, Yoechakenon has penetrated the inner doors of the main spire. I glance behind and see the bodies of elite Olmish guards. He runs on and down, into the very heart of the spire. The ribbed tunnel down which he paces opens up, and he is within the wide space at the heart of the palace, parkland at its centre, windows of cut mineral breaking the sunlight into a jewelled mosaic. Rich apartments cluster the walls. Their occupants have gone, fled before the city was invested. A handful of soldiers see Yoechakenon on the other side of the lake; they fire at him, but do not approach. One beckons to the others, ordered to withdraw. All those who can are now fleeing the city by air. I switch my perceptions outside. A cloud of flitters are departing, able to fly now the energy shield has been brought down. The Kemmean army let them go. The Decarch has ordered them shot down, but the commanders of the artillery and Kemmean air marshal defy him. Word of the carnage within the walls has filtered out. I make note of their names, for mercy is as valid an entertainment to the Quinarchs as death, and one I hold in far greater esteem. I will intervene should those men be executed and sent to the stacks.
    Yoechakenon has reached the entryway to the First Spirefather’s antechamber, where the city spirit would appear to the human prince of the city in a form of matter. But this is not where he resides, not truly, and Yoechakenon runs on.
    The spire is shaking. The rumble of sun cannon shot vibrates through the structure.
    Yoechakenon descends further, deep into the roots of the spire, where men seldom tread.
    Then he is there, by the great bolus attached to the taproot of the spire, where the Spirefather’s consciousness is housed. Such places are as close to true bodies as we spirits possess.
    The