Thresholder

Perry flew in a straight line, hoping that he’d minimize how much motion the men on the roof could see. They were high up, five stories, on top of a tower, and while they were surely keeping a lookout, flight wasn’t an ability that people had outside of airships. If they were enemy soldiers or loyalists planning something, then they almost certainly had the stairwell to the tower well-guarded, and they had probably thought that would be enough.

“Marchand is having me set up the laser,” said Mette in Perry’s ear as he crossed the square. “I have the helmet on, but we’re trying to do it from the window of the hotel room, and this seems —”

“I’ve cut communication for the time being, sir,” said Marchand. “I will instruct her. We will engage at a distance as best we’re able when you have given the signal.”

“What’s the signal?” asked Perry as he flew to just under the lip of the tower’s parapets.

“When you start the killing, sir,” said Marchand.

When Perry got to the tower he was just below the roof, and he took a moment to steel himself, gathering energy, making a plan.

When he rose up, he got a good view of the device for the first time. It looked a hell of a lot like a rocket launcher, with two long metal barrels and enough heft to it that Perry was surprised they’d been able to lug it up the staircase inside the tower. They had a tripod set up and were manhandling the device up onto it, and beside one of them were small packets of something that might have been fuel for the weapon. There were six men, two of them guarding the door and the other four dealing with lifting the device up. They saw Perry only belatedly. Their look wasn’t quite like that of the soldiers that Perry had seen on the airship. They could have fit in perfectly with the crowd below, aside from their swift movements. No one had masks, but the two that Perry had pegged as guards had some other kind of weapon, a much thinner metal barrel with a wooden stock and a hefty trigger.

“Alright,” said Perry as he landed on the roof with his sword held gently at his side. “I suppose you gents have a permit for all this?”

Perry watched to see who they looked to as the leader, suspecting it was one of the two men holding what looked very much like guns. It might have been more prudent to go in and kill them all right away, with no hesitation or chance for them to do anything about it, but there was a small chance that they were here for some reason that didn’t involve war crimes.

Perry was going to have a lot of egg on his face if they did have a permit.

One of the two men who was holding the thing that looked like a gun raised it marginally and yanked on the trigger, and Perry just barely had time to push himself to the side with a foot planted on the ground. He had no idea what it was going to shoot, or even what it really was, given that he knew of nothing like it across the entire world of Markat.

It turned out that the gun shot bullets. The slug hit Perry on his left side, through and through. He grunted in pain, then stepped forward and grabbed the barrel of the other gun before it could be fired. He was hoping that the guns were single-shot weapons, because he wasn’t bulletproof, especially against higher calibers.

“Alright,” said Perry as he wielded the rifle like a club. He was wheezing, though the slug hadn’t actually hit him in the lung. He was pretty sure he was going to be fine, so long as he didn’t get hit again, and from the way the other gunman had dropped his rifle after firing it, it seemed as though they were single use, or maybe just extremely slow to reload. “Let’s talk about this like adults, shall we?” He willed the blood to stop gushing from the wound and tried his best to look intimidating. From the looks on the faces of the men on the rooftop, there was no particular issue there.

Perry moved to the door that led up to the tower’s rooftop, and no one moved to stop him. The wound in his side was hurting badly, and he thought that the bullet had gone through his liver, based mostly on his Liver Meridian feeling like it was struggling. Once he had the door covered, there was nowhere for them to go except off the side, and he was feeling pretty good about himself, injury aside. It looked like he was going to stop this without having all that much in the way of violence, except for the violence against himself.

“Anyone want to tell me what you boys were up to?” asked Perry. He swung the sword around to point at them. “Are you Berusian royalists, or with Thirlwell?” They had the same swarthy skin as most people in Berus had, but that was something the two island nations had in common. Most likely they could have told the difference from some subtle clues he was missing.

He was still watching to see where they looked, and that let him peg one of the men loading the mortar as their leader, or at least the guy calling the shots. He saw Perry’s gaze and stepped forward.

Down below, there was a commotion. They had heard the sound of the gunshot, and while they weren’t a society accustomed to the sound, it must have been loud and startling above the silence.

The guy in charge was tall and wiry, with barely any muscle to him. He looked gaunt and half-starved.

“We can’t let it fall into their hands,” he said.

“Oh come on,” said Perry. “You’re really going to make me fight you?”

In response, the man leaned down to grab one of the satchels that was sitting near the base of the mortar. Perry took a quick step forward and flicked his sword across the man’s wrist, cutting into the flesh and bone but leaving the hand attached. It was a casual act of violence, delivered swiftly, and Perry was hoping that it was enough to stop them from blowing up the tower with all of them on it. The man whose arm had been cut collapsed to the ground and gripped at the stump.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” said Perry. “You’re all going to lay face down while we wait for the police to get here. If you don’t do that, I’m going to cut you down one by one.” He dropped the gun he was holding in his left hand and reached down to touch the bullet wound. It was incredibly painful, worse than being raked across the chest by the mask laser, but it was getting better. None of the pain was showing in his movements or on his face. He kicked the gun off the roof with a casual motion, then brought up his bloody fingers to show them. “This is about the best you’re going to do against me.”

The man cradling his wrist was whimpering and hissing through his teeth, doing better than Perry had thought he’d do with such an injury. “If they take us in, they’ll make us see the lantern’s light, just like down there.”

One by one, the men began to raise their hands, not in defense or with weapons, but with a symbol. It looked to Perry like a peace sign pressed against their chest, two fingers splayed wide. It was different from the sign he’d seen at the museum, the one that was supposed to call in a higher authority for the purposes of defense. He growled at them, but unless he was willing to move through them like a scythe through wheat, he didn’t think there was anything he could actually do about it. He didn’t know the details of the defense system they used in Kerry Coast City, but they shouldn’t have had it here, and it definitely shouldn’t have been used by the enemy. Perry had seen the tall suits of heavy armor standing still in the aftermath of the bombing of the city, but he hadn’t seen one of them in action yet. If that’s what they were calling down on him, he wasn’t sure that he was up for it.

There was a spark of light above the tower, which enlarged into a portal, only barely three feet wide, leading to a dark room with stonework. It was visible for only a moment before a woman in armor dropped down, whereupon the portal snapped shut with a burst of violet light where the edges hit each other.

The woman’s copper-colored armor was all-concealing but still incredibly provocative, sculpted to show the shape of her body beneath the metal. The boots had heels built into them for some godforsaken reason, and they weren’t subtle heels either — the steel spikes had to be at least six inches, giving her some height but looking ungodly to walk in. The chest was the most egregious part of the armor, with the shape of the breasts molded into the metal, a wildly impractical design that Perry couldn’t fathom any woman actually choosing to wear for any other reason than aesthetics. She was holding a metal spear that was considerably taller than she was, one with an obsidian tip, and she regarded Perry, though her face wasn’t visible beneath her armor. Her gauntlets ended with clawed metal fingers, and she tightened her grip on the spear.

“I hope you have a permit for that portal,” said Perry. He said it because it was the first thing he had thought of, and realized only after he’d said it that he was reusing the joke he’d used earlier. He felt a bit of embarrassment, and decided that the only option was to keep going with it until it was a running joke.

The armored woman turned to the man whose wrist Perry had cut. The wound was still bleeding, and Perry wondered whether he was going to bleed to death. It seemed likely unless a tourniquet was applied sometime soon.

“Do I need to do everything myself?” she asked. Her voice was high-pitched and surprisingly feminine, with none of the growl or rasp that Perry had expected.

“He has a sword,” said the man on the ground with a gasp of pain as he spoke. “He flew up here.”

The woman jammed her spear against the stones of the roof, propelling herself forward, and once she was in the air, she jabbed the spear straight for Perry’s heart. He barely managed to parry it away, but she moved in close to him as she passed and slashed his upper arm with a blade on the outside of the gauntlet. She landed deftly on the roof, showing no strain or discomfort with the high heels of the armor.

“Who are you?” she asked, which Perry really thought was the sort of thing you should ask before you try to kill someone.

“Permit inspector,” said Perry. “Sorry to say, this is going to be a lot of paperwork.”

“Shall I fire, sir?” asked Marchand. “Or do you have this under control?”

Perry was glad that Marchand hadn’t intervened before now, and wasn’t entirely sure that intervention at this stage would be a good thing. “Only fire if it looks like I’m losing,” Perry said under his breath. Marchand was in the hotel with Mette, and far enough away that Perry wasn’t sure how much good the laser was going to do, nor how well it could actually be aimed. The distance seemed formidable.

“You’re not with Berus,” the woman said. The tip of her spear twitched.

“I am, technically,” said Perry. “And you’re with Thirlwell?”

In response, she came at him again, moving even faster this time. Perry brought his sword up to parry, but she spun the spear at the last second, cracking him across the face. Perry took a step back and worked his jaw as she came to a rest. She was testing him. That hit would probably have killed a lesser man.

“I can’t tell if that was a yes or a no,” said Perry.

“Who are you?” she asked again, this time more insistent.

“If you want to do formal introductions, maybe this isn’t the best place,” said Perry. “We could have a sit down chat, somewhere a little more pleasant. But of course I’d need these chucklefucks to stop trying to bomb the civilians. We could set our weapons down and talk things over, maybe do something that was a little more —”

She came at him a third time, moving low with the tip of the spear held high, and Perry stepped back, easily pushing the spear to the side with his sword. She was far, far stronger than her short, slender frame suggested, but he didn’t think she could match him if it came to that. They were testing each other, and he was going to have to give that armor a smack to see whether he could gouge it.

But she wasn’t just testing him, because the tips of her fingers grazed the stone by his feet and a portal opened up wide to a heavy metal cage. Perry fell for half a second, then gripped his sword tight and leveraged himself against it, making his whole body rigid so it looked like he was standing on air. It was something that he’d previously only been able to do with the armor, but he was strong enough now to tense his whole body and stay firm.

“Neat,” Perry said, looking down. The cage was in a warehouse, he was pretty sure. He wondered what the range of that ability was, but he had a strong suspicion that it wasn’t a power that came from this world.

“Who are you?” asked the woman for a third time. There was something in her voice now that hadn’t been there before.

“You can call me Perry,” he said. “And I take it you’re from another world?”

It was difficult to tell with her armor on, but from the minute movements she made, he was pretty sure that she had flinched.

“I am Third Fervor, a daughter of Thirlwell, blessed with Implements of divinity,” she said. She was watching him, still sizing him up. She waved her hand, and the portal beneath him collapsed, that tactic abandoned as quickly as it had been embarked upon.

“Lies,” said Perry. “You’re a world hopper, a thresholder, no need to pretend otherwise.” Perry let himself land back on the stone roof of the tower. The men around them still hadn’t moved. Down below, it seemed as though the crowds were still ignorant of what was going on, and the gunshot had been ignored, because the emcee was still talking, readying the crowd for the next execution. “You’ve aligned yourself with Thirlwell though? Seems like a bad move to me. The Last King, the Last Kingdom, right on the verge of destruction? What’s the plan there, arm them with guns and rocket launchers?”

“The Last Kingdom will not fall,” said Third Fervor, if that was her name and not a title. “You’ve seen only a fraction of its power, of my power.”

Perry looked at the men around them. They were a distraction, but if she managed to drive him off, they would resume their preparations to fire on the crowd. Meanwhile, if Moss was trying to get the crowd to move, he was doing a shit job of it.

“Evacuate,” said Third Fervor. She crouched low, in a defensive position, spear pointed at Perry’s crotch, and placed a hand against the ground, opening up a portal. The men hesitated only briefly, then moved as though this was something they had planned.

Perry moved on them, not willing to let them get away. “Fire!” he shouted.

Third Fervor brought her spear up to block him, and when she did, he grabbed it at the point just past the obsidian head. They struggled against each other, and Perry was momentarily lifted off his feet by her superior positioning, but it was difficult for her to keep him raised, and when he touched back down he got the better of her, bringing his sword down against her armor — to absolutely no effect. The sword deflected off the copper plates without so much as making a dent. Third Fervor seemed just as surprised as Perry did, and they had a nice moment where they stopped and took that in together.

Then one of the men on the roof began screaming because his head had lit on fire.

Third Fervor was first to move, and she went at Perry without any fear of his sword. She punched him in the chest, which lifted him up off the ground, then stabbed at him with the full force of her spear, trying to catch him in mid-air. He caught the spear just below the head, but she was ready for that this time, and yanked the spear back. It slipped from his hands and the obsidian tip sliced across his fingers and palms, immediately soaking them with blood and making him practically useless.

Another of the men was screaming as he tried to clamber down the portal, his head melting from the distant laser that couldn’t be seen by any of them.

“Run,” said Marchand in Perry’s ear.

Perry ran, calling the sword after him. He leapt from the tower and grabbed the sword in his bloody hands to slow his fall. He landed on the street just as the tower exploded above him, sending rock raining down onto the street. He was hit along his left arm and growled in pain, then looked up to where the smoke was still rising.

“The hell was that?” asked Perry. His ears were ringing.

“I took the liberty of detonating the satchels next to the mortar,” said Marchand. “It’s difficult to say whether there are survivors.”

Perry was looking up, waiting for Third Fervor to reappear, but there was no sign of her. She hadn’t seemed interested in fighting him, only in escaping with her people. Either she had jumped through a portal or was laying dead up there, and Perry didn’t think there was any inbetween.

If the unfamiliar sound of the gunshot hadn’t fazed the crowd, the exploding building had gotten them riled up. Maybe they had some awareness that this was an attack, or had heard about what had happened in Kerry Coast City, but they were fleeing now, a crush of people that might have been just as dangerous as the explosion that Perry had stopped from landing in their midst. They screamed and scrambled to the exits of the square, pushing over and past each other, and Perry stayed out of their way, watching for Third Fervor, who seemed to have vanished as though she was only a dream.

There were still people up on the stage. They seemed to have been left there without guards, and many of them were calling for help that wasn’t coming. Perry walked forward.

“Marchand, we’ve got nanites, let me know if you hear her,” said Perry.

“Hear whom, sir?” asked Marchand.

“The woman, dammit,” said Perry. “Third Fervor, you were paying attention.”

“Ah, yes,” said Marchand. “I’ve updated my priorities, sir, I hadn’t realized that she held much importance.”

“She’s a thresholder,” said Perry as he strode toward the center of the emptying plaza. “Or if she’s not, then she’s someone we need on our radar.”

“You believe her to be the woman responsible for killing the kings?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “She’s a monarchist. It —”

A woman in armor was also walking across the plaza, toward the cathedral where the men and women in stocks were having their stay of execution. It wasn’t Third Fervor; her armor was copper and this was more silver with hues of silvery blue. Perry had only seen her in armor once, but it was Nima. The metal ears were quite distinctive.

“Nima!” he called to her as he stepped quickly over the flagstones.

She stopped and startled. “Perry?” she asked.

“You missed the fight,” he said. “They’re gone now, we’re going to have to get information later, when they sift through the wreckage. You should lose the armor unless you want to unmask yourself — pun not intended.” He was fairly sure that she had a mask on beneath her armor, something very thin, but when she looked at him he couldn’t feel the effects. “You can get in the shelf.” Despite the panic and the noise around the plaza as people ran, there were still eyes on them, stragglers and a few who had other ideas of the best course of action. Moss was nowhere to be seen.

“The fight?” she asked. “The explosion, that was you?” She was holding a long knife in her hand, one that he was pretty sure had been pulled from a kitchen library.

“Wait,” said Perry. “What are you doing here?”

Nima looked at the row of people who’d been strung up. “I’m stopping this,” she said. “It’s cruel, inhumane, and they know it.” She turned back to him. “What were you doing here? Just watching?”

Perry tightened. “It’s not our fight,” he said. “This isn’t about us. And even if it were, what are you going to do? Free them from their shackles and then protect them from the mob?”

“That’s exactly what I’ll do, if I must,” said Nima. “I’ll … I’ll commandeer a ship over to Thirlwell and take them there.”

“I agree it’s not what I’d like to see happen,” said Perry. “But you can’t do this. You’d be making yourself an enemy of these people. You’re not invincible, you need food, water, a place to sleep, you won’t be able to protect them, it’s —”

Nima strode away from him and bounded up onto the stage with the lithe grace of an elf. She went to the first woman in line and stood with her knife in hand, looking at the manacles. The lantern on wheels was just behind Nima, but she paid it no mind.

“Nima,” said Perry.

“You’re as good as pulling the lever on that lantern if you don’t help me,” said Nima.

“Nima, there’s a thresholder out there,” said Perry. “She’s working with Thirlwell. I think if she’d been trying to, she would have been able to take me, at least like this. That’s the fight, not … this.”

Nima turned to him. “Perry, help me or get out of the way.”

“I’m not in the way,” said Perry. “I’m just talking. If you want to do this, it’s on your head, not mine, but there’s a larger conflict here, and this is just … it’s the law here, it’s what they’ve decided to do, and if you try to subvert that, you’re only making yourself a criminal.”

“And we’ve seen how they treat criminals, have we?” asked Nima. She tugged at the manacle. The woman turned her head to the side and winced, but said nothing. She had already seen three of the people up there die, and the lantern was pointed squarely at her, ready to burn through her.

“You can’t just decide for people how it’s going to be,” said Perry.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned from what you’ve been telling me, it’s that we can,” said Nima. “If you’re strong enough, you can bend the world to your whims.” She tugged at the manacle again, but it wouldn’t give. It needed a key, not brute force, or at least not the level of brute force that Nima could bring to bear. She had only the armor, a single gift from a single world.

“Nima, I’m sorry, but you’re not strong enough,” said Perry. “Not yet.”

She turned to him, knife in hand, and she was brandishing it, which Perry thought was mostly out of frustration or anger. He was faster and stronger than her. He could have taken her one-handed if he wanted to, and could have stuffed her in the shelf if he wanted to, rather than having this conversation in the open. People were listening to them, not least of all the ones awaiting execution.

“If you don’t help me with this, I’ll —” she faltered, trying to think of a threat, some consequence. “I won’t work with you,” said Nima. “I’ll abandon you to do this on your own. You won’t have a companion, a team in this world. You won’t have an engineer.”

“If you do this, you’re going to jeopardize our place in this world,” said Perry. “We have allies here, people who will help us, who we can help to make things better, but we can’t just do it solely on our own terms.”

Nima stared at Perry, then turned to look at the woman.

“Please,” the woman said.

Nima lowered the knife slightly. Maybe she was thinking that the only way she was actually going to get the woman out was with a key or Perry’s help. She turned her head, looking at the long line of people, and how it wasn’t just an issue of this one woman, it was all of them.

“Marchand,” Perry subvocalized. “You heard what this woman was accused of?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “She was involved in a widely publicized murder, for which she was found guilty and sentenced to six months of house arrest. This was seen among the people of Berus as being a gross miscarriage of justice and a symbol of a two-tiered nature of their society. The victim was a young girl who had been taken off the streets to be cleaned, pampered, and played with as though she were a living doll.”

Perry pursed his lips. He had to remind himself that this was only what the emcee had said to the crowd, or maybe what Marchand had overheard in conversations, not what the actual truth was … though it immediately called to mind a dozen parallels to stories that Perry had read on Earth. A slap on the wrist for people who had money, a judge who thought that certain people were too delicate or cultured or whatever else to be sent to prison — these were stories that were familiar, and yes, it was another object lesson in the evils of their society.

“Do you think this woman is innocent?” asked Perry.

“I think no one deserves this,” said Nima. “And when we were in Kerry Coast, they would have said that no one deserves this. But everyone we came over with, they’re doing nothing about it, they’re just letting it go on.”

The panic in the plaza was abating, partly because there had been no more exploding towers or gunshots or anything like that, and partly because most of those who had been trying to leave had left. Some of the guards were returning to the stage, and Perry saw Moss coming over. Too much of the conversation had taken place out in the open. Their secrets were very likely to be out of the bag, including the fact that Nima was wearing armor of a sort that really didn’t seem to exist in this world — aside from Third Fervor, maybe.

“If you want to free these people, you’re going to have to fight,” said Perry. “That fight is maybe five minutes away. You’re going to have to use a kitchen knife to kill people who are still people, who also don’t deserve to be killed, and there’s a good chance that they find a chink in your armor and murder you on the spot.”

Nima paused, then let out a growl. “No,” she said. “I’m standing my ground. I can’t free them — physically can’t — but I can stand in their way, stop this from happening.”

“Fine,” Perry sighed. “But if anyone asks, we don’t know each other.”

He stepped backward and walked over to Moss, who was lumbering toward him.

“Evacuation didn’t go as planned?” asked Perry.

“There was an explosion,” said Moss. “That was you?”

“Sort of,” said Perry. “They were planning to kill a bunch of people in the crowd. There was a woman who opened up a portal and attacked me, she claimed to be from Thirlwell. I’d like a consultation with Dirk Gibbons about it, he was supposed to be getting more information on Implements, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” said Moss. He looked over at Nima. “Is that … Nima?”

“It is, yeah,” said Perry. “She objects to the executions and I guess she’s going to force them to take her away in handcuffs.”

“It’s over for today,” said Moss, shaking his head. “There’s no way they would continue, it’s far too dangerous.”

“There’s a weapon I need you to see,” said Perry. “I threw it off the roof, but I’m hoping it’s still intact enough for you to look at.”

“We’ll gather what evidence we can,” said Moss with a nod. “It’s become clear that Thirlwell has tools we’re ignorant of.”

“Really would have been nice to have all these people cleared out before shit went down,” said Perry. “Especially given some of those tools can kill a hundred people in a single shot.”

Moss gritted his teeth. “I’m a dwarf, Perry. They don’t listen to me. It’s one thing to stick out, but when I stick out and I’m trying to get attention, yelling to clear the plaza, I look insane to them. All they see is the oddity.”

“Oh,” said Perry. He looked around the plaza. Most of the people who were coming back were guards. If Moss was right and the public execution was on hold, then this was all going to wind down.

What Perry needed was time to process, as well as to go through some of the data that Marchand had been collecting. He needed the armor on, to see it all again through the HUD, a reconstruction. Third Fervor had denied being a thresholder, but that was clearly what she was, and if Thirlwell had gunpowder weapons, mortars and missiles and who knew what else, that had to come from somewhere.

But there were other powers out there that he didn’t have grip on yet, and he was worried that the next time he got blindsided, the outcome was going to be far worse.