Free The Angelus Guns by Max Gladstone Page A

its builders made for it, in the time they’d manufactured beyond time. They built the sails first, a vast and shimmering petal-globe around the naked singularity at the city’s heart. Between those sails they wove a diamond lattice, and from the lattice their palaces and chapels hung, and their dance halls and shipyards, schools and factories and museums harboring trophies from wars fought across many worlds in all the many histories.
    The city shone, and also burned. Flames melted glass arches. One of the shield-sails wilted: breached, deflating. Continent-thick strands of diamond severed, arteries of transit and commerce broken. Stains spread from the wound, a tarnish, a sickness at the center of the world.
    Battleships the size of moons hung by the millions outside the shield-sails. Veins in their hulls glimmered with power they harvested from the singularity sun, here at the built heart of everything. Between them, living starfields swarmed: the myriad hosts of all the many heavens. Home again. Called back from their missions to put this revolution to rest.
    Any other target would have been warped and torn by the sheer weight of so much force, shivered to component atoms by the strength of their song. But the Crystal City did not shiver.
    Thea’s wings had borne her here, along the shifting paths between the worlds. As soon as she arrived, she was grateful for her old mother’s gift. Even when the Crystal City was a thumbnail-sized sphere in the marbled distance, she felt the fleet’s eyes settle on her. She drew her sword and held it before her like a torch. The soldiers knew it, as did the ships, and the immense minds that united both. Some notes of their million-chorus chord changed.
    Zeke’s voice entered her ear as she approached the city. She’d served with him in her new-forged days, and when she left, he stayed on. Reenlisted. Some were like that—lifers. She had hoped he might have found a new calling. “Thea. You shouldn’t be here.”
    â€œIs that you, Zeke? Or is the fleet borrowing your voice?”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    She did not answer that question. “I’m looking for my brother.”
    â€œA rebel?”
    â€œDoes it matter?” she echoed.
    â€œYes,” he said.
    â€œA scholar. Come to observe. Stuck in this madness. Let me through.”
    â€œYou would say that even if he came to fight.”
    â€œMaybe. Will you let me pass?”
    A pause. In their silence her wings bore her miles closer to the city. Targeting systems danced across her skin, faint as a lover’s feathers. The sword might be able to protect her, if they fired. For a moment. “We respect your mother’s blade.”
    We. Not I.
    â€œDo you remember the little world with the dragonflies that sang?”
    â€œYes,” he said. So swift, they’d been, and beautiful.
    â€œDo you remember what we did to them?”
    That had not been beautiful at all. Business: a few millennia after gaining sentience, some of those dragonflies’ descendants broke free of time and reshaped their own history. They built a grand empire. Spread their wings over a supercluster. The city fought them through the ages, and broke them. But in the furthest echoes of prehistory, their ancestors sang songs, and the songs they sang were glorious.
    â€œI remember.” He sounded as if he wished he did not.
    â€œThank you,” she said. And she flew on, and in.
    A million miles was a long way to fly, even with her wings. She drank a cup of tea, and read from her book as she neared the armada. Battleships watched her pass. Sleeping guns strained against their bonds. Stored radiance seeped out through seams in their armor.
    Flying beside those ships, those guns, was hard enough. Flying in front of them crisped her nerves with panic. Might as well press the point of her mother’s sword to her chest and slide it home. The guns’ mouths gaped black, but she