When Sara and her sister had stopped in Leeds not long after crossing the suture, they had spoken briefly to an old man who had rambled about how everything had gotten ugly since being brought to Scrapyard. Blackpool, he said, had used to be a charming resort town, prettily decorated and inhabited by well-mannered folk. Now, having replaced the vanished Liverpool as the region’s port, its skyline was dominated by brick warehouses and construction cranes, and its people were all of the worst sort.
He’d had less to say about Carlisle, all of it equally negative. Carlisle was a damnable eyesore, somehow even worse than the mill town it’d been previously. An evil place, wretched and contemptible to the spirit. Sara could have told him that, well, it was rather necessary, considering Carlisle was a mere five miles distant from the edge of the fucking outlet, the greatest source of bloodfiends in all of Scrapyard. But she simply thanked him for the information he’d given, and moved on.
There was something of a pleasing quality to Carlisle’s aesthetics, though the old man had been right that it was far from beautiful. The entirety of the city proper was encircled by a colossal wall, built out of packed earth and sided with iron plates like battleship armor. All along the wall’s upper edge was gun after gun, rifles in mounted slits and maxim gun emplacements every hundred yards. And those were only the lesser defenses: the parts of the city north of the river Eden were either abandoned, or else had been transformed into a single colossal fortress.
As such, the only way through into the city itself was through one of nine gates, each with its own gatehouse. Unless you were the right kind of Pretender, for whom walls are merely a suggestion. But Sara was not that kind, and if Zahra was that kind then the effort would kill her. So they stood in line, declared their intentions—bloodfiend hunting, more or less the truth—and passed under the Maxim’s watchful eye.
Carlisle was… typical, as Leedsrealmer cities went. The air was thick with coal-soot that stank and made Sara’s eyes water. The largest buildings around were the textile mills, turning imported cotton and synthetic fiber from Topeka county, Furat, and the distant Qinglong mountains into… well, basically all of the clothes in Scrapyard.
Those were half of the jobs in Carlisle; the other half were military. Soldiers were visible on every street corner, set apart by their red jackets and helmets, drinking and smoking and causing trouble for everyone around them. Sara made sure to steer clear; she didn’t want to imagine what they–men who might have originally been conscripted to go on tour in India for all she knew–would do if they saw someone who looked like her.
The plan, as it was, was fairly simple: Sara had enough money on her to guarantee at least a night or two of rest. Every garrison that dealt with bloodfiends would have use for a Pretender who was willing to blunt the next attack in exchange for coin, so Sara could get paid that way. As for how long they would stay in Carlisle, Sara had no idea; someday another Pretender would come along and start something, and if Sara wasn’t absolutely sure that she could win that fight, that would mean the end of it. They’d probably have to retreat to the islands this time.
But Sara never made it that far.
When she was entering the town, she’d asked one of the soldiers where a wandering bloodfiend-hunter with a baby sister could stay for a couple of nights. He’d recommended to her a place by the riverside, more expensive but not too much so. He’d also recommended that they take the sinew bus there, even naming a line that rarely made you wait. But Sara wasn’t going to be riding a sinew bus; they were called that for a reason.
Stout, squat things they were, half as long as a normal city bus, and proportionately twice as crowded on the inside. The style was clearly modeled on a horse-drawn carriage, complete with the driver being mounted on the outside. Except that the whole front of the construction was dominated by flesh, a huge angular shape of meat, like a starburst or a many-limbed sea creature, decorated with the skulls of bulls and secured to the wooden body of the bus by belts of woven-together tendon. Arcs of static electricity zapped to light-posts as it went by, the only clue as to how that macabre insult to the very dignity of life could allow a wheeled vehicle to move without so much as the burning of fuel.
Sara, despite everything she had seen, still held to some modicum of faith. Whenever she saw one of those things trundling by, she would rub the cross hidden under her shirt, just to be sure.
So it was that instead of stepping off the sinew bus at the stop on the very same block as the hotel they’d been directed to, Sara and Zahra had to make their way down a small pedestrian street from the sea-ward gate they’d arrived at to Castle Way, the major thoroughfare that traced along the riverside. It was a bustling street, not quite as busy as in the heart of the urban agglomeration, though it smelled fiercely of fish. All kinds of market stalls tried to hawk their wares to passers-by, pleas that Sara firmly avoided.
She did have to promise Zahra that they would go back for the candied almond stand once their cash stream was established, though. Certain compromises had to be made.
The two of them were a little ways from their destination, four or five blocks, when they came across an ongoing commotion. Two large blocks of people had formed up by a storefront, yelling and posturing. Whatever it may have been about, Sara didn’t care, and she didn’t want to know. If they all started a fight and killed each other, that would be just fine, especially if it meant less total attention on her. She took Zahra across the street.
Despite her firm indifference, Sara’s whole life had been one extended training exercise in the importance of situational awareness, so she was forced to learn some things about what was happening entirely against her will. One group, the less numerous one, consisted entirely of men, mostly in shabby workmen’s clothes, ill-fitting tweed jackets, flat caps, suspenders. The other group was more varied: men, women, ranging in class from homeless beggars to well-kept members of the shopkeeper class. They were all furious, though.
There was a “her” involved. Where have you taken her, what have you done with her, she didn’t do nothing wrong–shouts to that effect. The group that was all men had… kidnapped a woman? And the normal people were mad as hell about that. But they weren’t going to do anything about it, because there wasn’t a single member of the group that was all men who didn’t have a weapon of some kind. No guns, thank God, but meathooks, table legs with lead weights tied to the end, cleavers, hammers, long knives.
“You there! Indian girl!”
Sara turned around in place, giving Zahra the hand-squeeze that meant to get behind her. There was a careful calculation to be made; if this was a guy who meant harm, Sara was always ready to throw down. But if it was just some dipshit being racist, then the violence wasn’t worth it, not yet anyways.
The man in question looked like a caricature of a racist Brit. Unique out of all his lackeys in the all-male heavily-armed group, he dressed well, black business attire complete with a top hat. He was round-faced, stockily built—or perhaps sturdily, it was impossible to tell—with a thick beard clipped to maybe two inches in length.
“I’m not involved in this,” Sara said. “Whatever this is.”
“Have you,” the man said, “Had any contact or involvement with the Sublime Titanium Sect?”
It took a second for Sara to process, partially because of how absurd the phrase “Sublime Titanium Sect” sounded coming out of his mouth. His accent pinged as Australian to her ears, not that she knew shit about accents.
“What?”
“The Sublime Titanium Sect. Big collective of orientals out of the mountaintops, with all that woo-woo fancy—”
“I know what the Sublime Titanium Sect is,” Sara hissed. She couldn’t exactly survive in the circles she travelled through if she didn’t know about Sublime Titanium; mostly that meant knowing how to stay the hell out of their way.
The boss’s nostrils flared at the gall of the one who would interrupt him. “Well, a Sublime Titanium Marshal has been prowling around Carlisle of late, looking for a black-haired woman from your part of the world. A sect informant, if we had to guess.”
“Keep looking. I don’t work with Sublime Titanium, that’s not my business.” Sara bit back a comment about how there were probably thousands of brown-skinned women with black hair; but then, that was probably what had gotten that angry mob together in the first place.
“And I’m sure that’s the case, but unfortunately we here in Carlisle can’t just believe every story we hear. You’re going to come with me now.”
Sara took a step back, the balance of the calculation tipping rapidly. “Like hell we are. Who even are you?”
“Bruce Rutter, the Viscount of the riverside, loyal servant to my lord the Marquess of Carlisle.”
Sara raised an eyebrow. “You’re joking, right? This is some affectation you put on to make your gutter trash followers laugh?”
Sara glanced around. The other crowd had rapidly dispersed, apparently realizing that Rutter’s attention was going to be elsewhere. Whether or not this man was telling the truth about being some kind of government official, it didn’t really matter; he was going to act like he was an official, and nobody was going to stop him. He was going to try to take her in.
“Zahra. Run. Hide.”
Zahra didn’t need to be told twice. She ran. Thankfully, Rutter didn’t seem to care much about her.
“It’ll just be a day or two and we’ll have it all sorted out. Once we’re sure you’re not who the sect Marshal is looking for.”
Sara drew the Glock from under her shirt, not at quick-draw speed, but with enough emphasis to make a statement. She wasn’t quite ready to kill Rutter, not yet, not until he refused to back down.
“If you knew anything about the Sublime Titanium Sect, you would know they don’t have ‘marshals’. Look. Somewhere. Else.”
“Is that one of those fancy little pistols they bring in from the other scraps?” Rutter chuckled. “That’s not gonna do you any help here.”
“I’m not afraid to use it,” Sara said. “And I’m not going to go with you over a case of mistaken identity. I’m a Pretender. Your boys don’t scare me.”
That changed the calculus immediately, and if Sara had been thinking clearly, she probably wouldn’t have given away that she was a Pretender. Rutter’s jaw clenched.
“First Pretense: They—”
First rule of being a Pretender is: don’t let the other guy make their Pretension statement. In this case, Sara brought her gun up to firing position, aiming directly at Rutter’s chest, an easy target from a handful of meters out. He saw the move, though, and promptly hit the deck, Sara’s bullets soaring over his head.
To their credit, Rutter’s goons must have had at least some experience with guns, because they did the right thing, spreading out and trying to attack Sara from every angle at once. Sara had no choice but to pick a direction and start firing. She used up another five shots, hitting two men and sending another dozen running for their lives. Unfortunately, another one managed to get her from behind, focusing on wrestling with her gun arm.
He was bigger and stronger, and for a half-second he was able to keep her gun pointed firmly at the ground. Then Sara’s bomb-sense located one of her defensive charges that she kept in her back pocket and set it off.
That poor thug’s chest cavity got reduced to a sack full of jelly, and Sara was hurled onto her face by the sheer recoil. By the time she got to her feet, the situation had evolved; if she waited another second she’d be surrounded. Her only chance was to make a break for it. There was a narrow alleyway behind her that provided the perfect cover, and her small size made it simple to weave between all of Rutter’s minions to slip inside.
They followed her, of course, and therein arose the problem. Sara was tough, but she wasn’t exactly a marathon runner; chances were good that at least some of Rutter’s followers had better endurance than her. What she needed was a way to escape without needing to outrun them all, a hiding spot or an angle she could take that they couldn’t.
Sara had a trick she could pull with her bombs, but that required too much set-up; they’d surely catch her before she could pull it off. She tried to duck around a corner that they wouldn’t see, to plunge into a crowd, but her pursuers were too close on her tail for such simple tricks. By the time the network of alleyways opened back up into a major thoroughfare, this one in Carlisle’s small commercial district, Sara was almost running on fumes.
But that thoroughfare provided just the opportunity that Sara needed. Damn the sinew buses for their disgraceful construction, but they could move faster than any one of Rutter’s followers. It just so happened that one of them was forced, briefly, to slow to a crawl as a horse-drawn carriage crossed its path; Sara took that opportunity to sprint up and leap onto the running board.
While it was still stopped, one of Rutter’s men ran up alongside the sinew bus, reaching to drag Sara off. She responded by kicking him fully in the face, taking advantage of the high ground. Before the second-fastest could get to her, the bus had started moving again, leaving them all in the dust. Sara let out a sigh of relief.
“First Pretense: They Might Be.”
Instantly, Sara realized two things. Firstly, Rutter must have circled around, using his home-field advantage to figure out exactly where the alleyways Sara had run into would lead out. Secondly, he had his Pretension form up, which meant that she was screwed. Before her thought process could advance far enough to un-screw herself, the sinew bus came to an extremely sudden halt, and Sara was thrown violently to the ground, leaving bloody scrapes along her hands.
Even then, she didn’t give up. There was no time to turn around, no time to see what Rutter had done. Sara hadn’t been afraid since escaping the cowboy, and without a plan, there was nothing to do but run. She made it two steps, and then Rutter was right in front of her. One second he wasn’t, the next he was, his body simply appearing in the perfect place to block Sara’s forward progress. Specifically, by sticking out a leg and letting her trip over it. Except that it wasn’t like running into an ordinary person’s leg; it was more like Sara had just run at full-tilt into a steel strut.
Sara fell again, and this time she didn’t get back up. Her leg was in agony, knee radiating pain. With one arm and one leg, Sara shuffled backwards along the ground away from Rutter, and with the other hand she drew her gun and started firing. Zahra was still hidden somewhere, after all, counting on Sara to come and find her.
For someone in their first Pretension, Rutter looked almost normal. Not that it was impossible to tell, of course. He looked blown-out, oversaturated, like someone had gone over him with a camera filter to turn all of his colors up to the maximum possible degree, rendering him distinctly uncomfortable to look at. Even the points of blood that appeared on his chest, neck, and face as bullet after bullet struck his body were like laser lights pointed directly into Sara’s eyes.
Rutter grimaced with each shot, but didn’t collapse, or even weaken. It was only when Sara had emptied her magazine that she realized the bullets were barely doing more than breaking the skin: it was like she’d tried stabbing him to death with a safety pin.
“Stings like hell,” Rutter said. “But that ought to teach you an object lesson about not bloody doing that again. You’re real damn lucky that the Marquess wants you alive, you know that?”
“Fuck you.”
“Mm.” Rutter looked around. His men, those who hadn’t been shot or exploded by Sara’s traps, were starting to gather. There were a little less than twenty of them. “Maybe I’ll let the boys rough you up a little. Make damn sure she stays alive though, you got that?!”
There were a few mumblings of assent, and Rutter’s men started to move in. Sara frantically searched her pockets for another magazine, hoping to take down as many of them as possible. But before she could even find one, a very familiar voice broke into the middle of the fight.
“Unhand that woman! If you have any ado with her, settle them chivalrously, else I shall have ado with you!”
It was, of course, Sir Gilead. Like a knight in shining armor.