“Cultist,” he said. “Demon worshiper.”
The girl placed her own hand inside the glove, feeling her way around the finger blades. “But there haven’t been demons in hundreds of years!” Never mind that such history had seemed irrelevant a moment before.
On the other side of the fire, the cultist who’d taken a round in the chest was still struggling to breathe. Jacob moved to his side and knelt over him, removing his mask.
“Who are you?”
The man’s voice was a whisper, air whistling through the new mouth in his chest. “Praise Belial, Lord of the Bleeding Host, for he—”
“Wrong,” Jacob said. With one hand he reached inside the man’s armoured costume and found the entry wound. He plugged it with his finger.
The man screamed, limbs convulsing weakly.
“Let’s try a different one,” Jacob said. “Why did you attack us?”
This time the cultist’s voice was stronger. “Guns,” he gasped. “The salvager got away. His idiot partner couldn’t tell us where they found them, so we followed.”
“How many of you are there?” Jacob demanded.
But the man was already gone. Jacob swore and stood. On the other side of the fire, Olivia was running her fingers over her attacker’s features.
“Why do they do it?” she asked. “Worship demons, I mean.”
Jacob holstered his gun. “Why does anyone do anything? Power. Scare people into service. Or maybe they thought they could summon the demons again with sacrifices.”
“But that’s crazy!”
“Crazier than any other priests?” Jacob bent and began collecting their gear. “Get moving and douse that fire. I want to put some distance between us and the smoke. From now on, we stay off the tracks.”
*
They slept that night in the woods, and were glad they did so. Less than an hour after they started walking the following morning, the forest thinned and they caught their first glimpse of the column rising in the distance.
Centred directly on the tracks, the funnel cloud whirled and slashed at an otherwise blue sky. Iron-rich dirt from the surrounding plain gave the whole thing a blood-red hue.
“What is it?” Olivia asked.
Jacob squinted. “A tornado. Except it’s not moving.”
It was true. Though it wavered like any such storm, the twister’s base remained firmly in one spot, as if tethered.
“Is it magic?”
Jacob shrugged. There were bubbles of strangeness all over—regions where landscapes shifted and time slowed, or babies were born speaking, or people sickened from walking through certain fields—but there was no way to know whether it was the legacy of the demons or the ancients. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll go around.”
Curiosity kept them from swinging too wide, however. Before long Jacob could see not just the tornado, but the ramshackle town that straddled the tracks beyond it. Scrub hills provided plenty of cover, and Jacob couldn’t resist a look. Olivia refused to be left alone—a reasonable position—and Jacob settled for leaving girl and horse at the base of the last hill while he lay flat on the crest and peered out from the bushes.
This had to be Salban, yet there was nobody in it. Instead, a mob of perhaps fifty people stood on the tracks between town and tornado, gusts whipping at their clothes. The wind carried their voices to Jacob, but not enough to make out the words. Then several familiar figures stepped forward and began to address the crowd.
All three wore the same costume as the men who’d attacked them. In a group, the illusion was even more impressive. Arms rose and fell in rhythm, and the crowd moved with them in eerie synchronization.
One figure broke the choreography. Twisting and flailing, a man was dragged forward. He was small and misshapen, with a bulging skull and wide-set eyes. Though his mouth stretched wide, no sound emerged.
He couldn’t even scream. Jacob knew he was looking at Clyde’s mute partner, Tommy.
The man’s arms were tied behind his back at wrists and elbows, a length of rope connecting them to hobbles on his shins. As two burly townsfolk held the prisoner still, the foremost cultist reached out a bladed finger and carved a mark into the man’s broad forehead.
Then the whole crowd split to reveal a new oddity in their midst—a wheeled metal cart. The prisoner’s captors jerked his bonds tighter, hogtying him into helplessness. Reverently, they laid him on the cart’s flat front. Behind it, townsfolk formed into two lines, taking up heavy ropes.
Jacob understood even before the two largest men began pushing the cart toward the funnel. The contraption moved slowly at first, then picked up speed as the winds began to take it. The men jumped back out of the way and joined the lines of people hauling on now-taut ropes, playing out slack and slowly feeding the cart into the tornado.
A chant began. Wind slapped at the man on the cart, and only a slim tether kept him from being rolled off the apparatus entirely.
The chant grew louder, and now Jacob could make out two words.
“Red Whirling! Red Whirling! Red Whirling!”
The cart was shaking, straining at its ropes. Jacob could see where the thing had been clamped onto the rails. Above, the man thrashed violently back and forth, caught in the storm’s rush, his helpless body slamming into the cart over and over until his face was a mass of red.
With a jerk, the cart plunged full-on into the funnel. Through the spinning dust, the prisoner levitated, straining against his restraints like a kite.
The tether snapped. The man vanished, thrown upward into the tornado’s depths. The townsfolk broke into a cheer as they began to haul the cart back out of the hungry winds.
Jacob had seen enough. He climbed back down the hill, placed the girl on the horse, and got them moving. It wasn’t until they were on the tracks again, well out of sight of the town and its pet storm-god, that the girl spoke.
“So that’s why nobody’s heard from Salban.”
Of course she’d been able to pull images of the sacrifice from Jacob’s memory.
“Do you think they planned the same for us?”
Jacob said nothing.
“At least now we know why our man rode his horse to death.”
It made sense. Yet less than a mile later, they came upon a muddy break in the railway ties and found hoofprints, deep and wide-spaced. There was no mistaking the pattern.
Clyde and his partner had already been running.
*
They were another day north when they saw the pursuit.
At first it was just a thread of smoke, a thin trail in the sky behind them. Then the tracks climbed a hill, and Jacob scaled a tree. Two minutes later, he was back on the ground.
“About twenty men,” he said. “Five dressed like demons, and all on horses.”
“Twenty!” Olivia paled. “Do you think they found the ones you killed?”
Jacob shook his head. They’d rolled the bodies into the river. “More likely they found our tracks, or Clyde’s. Maybe they’re making an educated guess that the guns come from the hellroad. It doesn’t matter.” He grabbed the horse’s reins and ushered Olivia off the tracks. When they were a hundred yards into the trees, he stopped and tied the lead to a branch. He shrugged off his pack.
“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t come out unless you hear me call your name.”
“What? No!” Olivia grabbed at his arm. Jacob gently unclenched her fingers.
“They have horses,” he said. “Which means they’re going to catch us unless we slow them down.”
“Can’t we just stay off the tracks?”
Jacob squeezed her hand. “We’re all going to the same place now. Even if they don’t catch us, they’ll get there first. Think about what that lot could do to Kennet with guns.”
Olivia said nothing, but she let go and settled down beneath the horse’s tree.
“Be careful,” she said.
Jacob touched her hair.
“Always.”
*<
br />
The cultists may have dressed like demons, but they slept like men. They camped on the tracks, their fire a beacon visible from miles away. With so many men, they clearly thought themselves invulnerable.
Their lone sentinel sat with his back against a tree just outside the firelight, eyelids drooping. For a moment, those eyes grew wide. Then they glassed over and quit seeing altogether. Hand over the man’s mouth, Jacob carefully lowered him the rest of the way to the ground, then withdrew his knife.
The horses were well away from the fire, tied to a single line running between two trees. That made Jacob’s job easier, and he quickly sawed through the rope, pulling it through the horse’s leads until all stood free. The nearest horse was a fine mare—still saddled, he noted reproachfully—and Jacob slid easily onto her back.
Still the men didn’t wake. Jacob drew his revolver.
The first shot split the night and sent the startled horses breaking for the trees. Jacob kicked his new mount into the centre of the herd, scattering it. He sent a second shot back into the huddled figures by the fire, then a third.
Men woke, shouting and scrambling for weapons. There was the twang of a bowstring, and a whine as a bolt sailed past Jacob’s ear.
Time to go. Jacob made one last circuit, slapping the haunches of those horses who hadn’t already disappeared into the forest, then leaned low over the mare’s neck and sent her thundering north down the tracks.
Behind him, the shouts continued—and then became something worse. As one, a score of throats opened in howls. The baying of human wolves.
Jacob dug his heels into the mare’s flanks. He’d done what he could to slow the cultists, and gained a second horse. Now he could only hope that he and Olivia could maintain their lead.
Behind him, the hunting cries continued.
*
Jacob’s first glimpse of the hellroad was of stone structures squatting like mountains on the horizon, a bunching of the parched and cracking earth. The bunkers stood shoulder to shoulder, bereft of decoration.
“Siege castles.” Jacob looked to each in turn, letting Olivia piece together the image. Beside him, the girl leaned down, stroking the neck of her exhausted horse.
Jacob stood in his stirrups and looked back the way they’d come. Far down the tracks, where the forest had given way to bare earth, Jacob could see the plume of dust, no more than half an hour behind them.
They were out of time.
As the railroad guided them in, the gaps between castles became more visible, revealing the parallel line of structures just beyond. At the switching station where the tracks divided into tributaries leading to each fortress, Jacob lost several minutes searching for hoofprints, finally finding them beside the line leading toward a middle castle, its three-story keep studded with turrets and empty gun emplacements. Instead of following the rails straight to the great steel gate, the prints circled around to the side, into the gap between fortresses.
Now they could see the hellroad in earnest. Here the two lines of fortifications created a shooting gallery a thousand feet apart. In front of each lay a buffer of ashen dust. And beyond that…
The air above the hellroad shimmered and distorted with a heat that was more than physical. The road itself was unpaved, yet the ground within its boundaries twisted and wavered, undulating in strange directions. At one end, clearly visible down the narrow avenue, the illusion of movement faded and gave out onto normal ground. At the other, where the fortresses were largest, the road bulged and pressed until it seemed to burrow through reality itself, tearing the air in two and opening onto—elsewhere.
Figures walked the road. Indistinct even where the heat-wavering was weakest, they marched in jerky marionette motions. Their bodies were featureless, little more than oily smudges, with the grotesquely thin limbs of stick men. Silent, seemingly unaware of the humans or each other, they appeared at the narrow end of the road and marched in solemn procession toward the pulsating rip of the portal’s mouth.
Olivia’s hand found Jacob’s. “What are they?”
“Shades. Souls of the dead.” Jacob squeezed once and pulled her away from the macabre parade. “Spirits marching down to Hell.”
The hoofprints ended at a sally gate in the castle’s curtain wall. Beyond it was a paved courtyard, empty save for a week-old pile of horse dung next to a door leading into the keep proper. Jacob tied the horses’ leads to a hinge, then led the girl inside, drawing his revolver.
It wasn’t hard to see where their quarry had gone. The place appeared to have been sealed until recently, and clear trails cut through the dust. The hallways beyond the doorway were dark, and Jacob lit a lantern, instructing Olivia to hold onto his belt so that he could hold the light with one hand and his gun with the other. Together, they advanced into the keep.
Once, the fortress would have been full of soldiers pouring fire down onto the hellroad, trying to kill as many demons as possible before they reached the end and manifested. Now there were only a few bent shell casings, some crumbling scraps of garbage. Whatever hadn’t been removed following the demons’ withdrawal had almost certainly been stripped by generations of looters. The larger chambers echoed with their footfalls.
The trail led straight and unerringly down passage after passage, up one staircase and then another. At last, on the top floor, they came to an open doorway overflowing with light.
The room was not an armoury. Jacob would have expected that to be a vault, a sealed place. This was a turret, its tall firing slits admitting bright shafts of sunset.
The guns lay in a heap where the sunbeams converged, a pile of black and blued steel. There was no order—military rifles lay jumbled at all angles with holstered pistols and tattered boxes of ammunition. Bronze glinted from the tops of crescent-shaped clips, and cloth bandoleers tied the whole mess into a great knot. Some pieces were stained the rust-brown of old blood. Others looked brand new.
Olivia spoke for both of them, voice tense.
“This isn’t right.”
Jacob grunted agreement.
“Could it be bandits? Raiders?”
It wasn’t unheard-of for outlaws to set up camp around hellroads. That made more sense than a pile of guns lying untouched in an open room for centuries. And yet they hadn’t seen any signs of habitation.
Jacob reached down and picked up one of the pistols.
honour the fallen we are you are the fallen you are we
“Jacob?”
Jacob’s arm was stiff, muscles tightening of their own accord. The rush of voices was a cold wind inside his skull.
carry us carry the blood avenge defend your brothers fathers mothers sisters children
“Jacob? What’s wrong?”
He struggled to speak, but his jaw was clenched too tightly. In his hand, the pistol pulsed, throbbing in his fingers like a living thing.
the road the maw the road war to the warmakers smoke them out burn them in their holes
His vision narrowed. The throbbing was coursing up his arm, through his chest, out into his brain, his balls, his legs.
bring others find brothers form ranks bringfindcallmake—
The leather-bound drawing pad swung in a perfect arc, connecting edge-on and knocking the pistol from his hand. Jacob staggered back as the tide of words cut off. A leg gave out, and he sank to one knee.
Olivia was at his side, one hand on the wall, staying safely clear of the pile of guns. She touched his shoulder.
“Jacob? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” His head felt like it was packed with sawdust, and his limbs were water. He coughed. “I think we know what Clyde was running from.”
“What happened?”
Jacob closed his eyes. The images accompanying the voices still burned brightly behind his lids, the hellroad streaming with armed men and women, warriors charging through the portal at its end.
“They’re a press gang,” Jacob said. “The spirits of those who fought here. They want a new
army, to march to Hell and take the fight to the demons.”
“And they want you to lead it?”
Jacob gripped her hand. “I think they’d be just as happy with you. They’re not picky.”
Grunting, he pushed himself upright and tottered over to a window. Outside, the dust of the pursuing cultists drew steadily closer.
Jacob smiled.
*
In the predawn light, Kennet was a tiny huddle of boxes against a featureless plain. White smoke drifted from chimneys, creating a lightness in the sky.
“Are you sure you won’t come?”
Jacob finished adjusting his new saddlebags and looked to the girl.
“I don’t think it would be wise. You can give Alvarez the drawings if he insists. But I doubt he’ll be pleased.”
“But your money!”
Jacob patted her leg. “Money’s only good if you’re free to spend it. If Alvarez is still feeling generous once he learns about the guns, you’re welcome to the other half. But I’d rather not wait around and see.” He turned his horse.
“Jacob, wait.”
He expected a plea to come with him. Instead, Olivia’s voice was thoughtful.
“If the hellroads are still open, why haven’t the demons come back and taken us all to Hell?”
Jacob thought of the cultists. From the casement of a neighbouring castle, he and Olivia had watched as the pursuing demon-worshipers stormed past their horses and into the building—then came streaming out again, weapons high. For long minutes, the cultists had flickered silently as they scrambled in slow motion down the twisting earth of the hellroad, toward its invisible maw. And then they were gone.
Afterward, Jacob and the girl had carefully bagged up what guns remained—never touching them directly—and dropped them at the edge of Salban. If all went as planned, the remaining demon-worshipers were already carrying the last of the possessed weapons down to Hell, where both belonged.
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 23