Maelstrom (The Infinity Engines Book 2) by Andrew Hastie

Author:Andrew Hastie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrew Hastie
Published: 2018-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

46

Kaffa

[London. Date: 11.664]

The abandoned church loomed over them, shrouded by a sombre grey sky. Ravens perched on the roof, cawing at the uninvited guests. They stood in the cold, cloying mud watching the rain turn the gravestones slick and black, and in the dim light of pre-dawn they looked like rows of broken teeth.

The graveyard was somewhere near London in 11.664. It had taken them two days of dead-ends and false starts to find it, and when they did, they all wished they hadn’t.

Signs of plague were everywhere. Inverted white crosses had been painted on all the houses they’d passed. The stench of disease permeated everything, and nothing could stop the smell, not even the ridiculous bird masks they wore — whose beaks were stuffed full of herbs.

‘Yersinia pestis: the Black Death,’ cursed Darkling, sitting down on a nearby grave and pulling off his mask. ‘Only Draconians could have sent us on a mission into the worst bloody pandemic in history! Do we know how many died in this time?’

‘Fifty million,’ Josh answered, unstrapping his mask. His mother’s TV game show addiction was nothing if not educational.

Caitlin pulled her own plague mask off and took a long slow breath. ‘I’m impressed. I never had you down as a historian.’

Josh winced as the wind picked up, blowing a smokey miasma of funeral pyres in their direction. It smelled just as bad as Kaffa — the city they had just escaped from 11.347.

Two days ago, they’d found themselves in the middle of a siege. The Golden Horde was trying to conquer an Italian trading city on the Crimean peninsula known as Kaffa. Caitlin, as usual, gave them all a quick history lesson on the place: The Horde was the Northwestern arm of the Mongol Empire and sold the city to the Genoese in the late thirteenth century. The city flourished under the Italian administration, becoming a powerful trading port, and controlling access to the Black Sea while prospering off the back of the slave trade.

At some point, the Mongols decided they’d made a terrible mistake and tried to take the city back. The ensuing siege was a long and protracted affair, not helped by a terrible disease that was withering their army.

‘It was the first ever use of biological warfare,’ Caitlin explained as they watched another body fly over the outer wall and disappear into the city.

Another, less successful shot, rebounded off the high stone parapet they were standing on and landed in the street below them. ‘They’re using their dead?’

‘Not just dead — infected. The horde is riddled with the bubonic plague.’

Everyone stopped talking and followed the next body as it arced across the blue sky and exploded against a stone tower.

‘Shouldn’t we be taking precautions?’ Bentley asked in Italian — they’d all been allowed to intuit the basic dialect.

‘Don’t you know anything, Red?’ Darkling scoffed, ‘The moment you’re contaminated the medics pull you out. One of the benefits of non-linear medicine. I’ll give three-to-one it will be you.’ He turned to the twins who shook on the wager.

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