Acosta pointed a glaive at Sayre’s chest. Both men were bleeding badly and breathing hard, but only one was dying—the other had gained valuable experience.
“A most excellent duel! You nearly had me.”
The gun mage knelt before him, stunned, defeated, and close to death. He raised his quivering hand and stared at the stump of his finger in disbelief. “You know, if I’d had my other gun, I would’ve won.”
“Perhaps,” Acosta said. “Be proud just the same. When you get to Urcaen, be sure to tell the others I’ve faced that you did better than most of them.”
Ashen, the dying gun mage nodded. “I’ll do that.”
“Thank you.”
Then Acosta swept Lambert Sayre’s head from his shoulders.
Howls on the mountain. The skinwalkers were coming. And there was another noise, like the barking of giant hounds. Likely they had heard the duel and were coming for him. Having been shot twice, Acosta supposed they might even catch him. But no matter what happened next, Savio Montero Acosta was having a wonderful day.
“Lieutenant! Smoke.” Bevy was pointing with his good arm. He had used up two whole words to indicate the black plume rising below them. They’d moved into the foothills, and as they descended, everyone had kept an eye open for any signs that they were closing in on the tracks. If they didn’t anything soon, Cleasby thought, the skinwalkers might catch them out in the open. Then he followed Bevy’s gesture and saw what they’d bee hoping for.
“Train. We’ve got a train!” he shouted. The Malcontents let up a cheer, everyone except for Cleasby himself.
One glance at the smoke while considering the train’s rate of approach and the distance they still had to cover, and Cleasby knew it was going to be very close. If they descended in a safe manner, they’d never make it in time. If they rushed in like fools, they might make it, but only the ones who didn’t break their necks. And if they missed this train entirely, they had to survive until the next one came. By the time the others figured out what Cleasby had already realized, he had already picked out the best route he could find under the circumstances.
“There. Go! As fast as you can.” A clatter of dislodged rocks fell behind them. Cleasby glanced up and saw skinwalkers churning down the steep face after them. It pained him to be so callous, but there was no other option. “If someone falls, keep going,” he ordered. “One of you has to flag down that train. Move!”
The Malcontents rushed down the incline, sliding and scrambling, armor banging against trees, none of them looking back at their pursuers. Cleasby could only pray the skinwalkers didn’t reach them during this headlong rush—a fight on this steep of a grade would be a losing proposition for the lower ground.
Headhunter began stomping down the incline, still holding Private Younger in one arm. A ’jack could only go so fast through rough terrain—no matter how dire things got—and Pangborn had to stick close to him. “We’ll bring up the rear, lieutenant. Just save us a seat on that train.”
Cleasby heard the baying of hounds. What now? He turned back to see a gigantic dog’s head peek over a log a few hundred yards behind Headhunter. It was hard to tell from his position, but the size of the thing’s head suggested it had to be nearly as big as a horse. He couldn’t figure out what the animal was doing there, but then another dog appeared. It wasn’t until it ran up a rock to get a better look at them that Cleasby realized it wasn’t two dogs, but a two-headed dog.
“Argus!” Horner called as she saw it as well.
“Great. The skinwalkers’ got pets,” Pangborn muttered.
Another massive, two-headed beast appeared, leapt over the log, and disappeared into the forest. It was coming for them.
“Keep running,” Cleasby shouted as he went back to haphazardly flinging his body down the incline. He had done the required readings from the Department of Extraordinary Zoology, so he knew the argus was a naturally occurring predator, relatively common in the wild—there were even records of Khadorans taming them—but reading about something in a book wasn’t nearly the same as being chased by one down a mountain. And the book hadn’t made them sound that big.
Branches tore at him. Roots entangled his boot, but he managed to catch himself on a tree before hurling his body farther down the mountainside. Ahead, one of the men—he couldn’t tell who—wasn’t so lucky; the man tripped and went crashing headfirst through the dirt.
Cleasby could hear the train. The thrum of metal wheels seemed unnatural in the wilderness. He could have sworn he felt the vibrations through the ground before he went crashing heedlessly through brush so thick that he thought it might entangle him and drag him to a halt. Leaves filled his open visor and slapped him in the eyes, half-blinding him as he stumbled out into the grassy open. Some of his men were already there. He glanced around. The train hadn’t arrived yet. They’d done it!
Allsop was the unlucky one who had fallen on the way down, but finally he, too, came crashing out onto the grass. He groaned and shook his head as he sat up, but then he realized the train wasn’t here yet. “We’re going to be okay! We’re—” And then an argus sprang from the brush and landed on him.
Allsop cried out as one of its heads bit down on his leg. It shook him, dragging him violently back and forth. Cleasby rushed forward, but the other head came around, snapping at him. Its fangs clamped shut against his buckler, but Cleasby slammed the little shield forward and smashed the beast in the snout. An overpowering stink of wet dog assaulted his nostrils and nearly gagged him.
Suddenly Headhunter came out of the woods and with one metal foot violently kicked the argus across the clearing. Cleasby hadn’t known a warjack could even do that. The argus let out a shrill yelp when it hit the ground.
“Good shot, boy,” Pangborn said as he fell out of the woods.
Allsop was on the ground, screaming bloody murder about the holes in his leg. The insulated fabric was torn and blood spattered out. Horner rushed up to him and began tending the wound. “It’s not too deep,” she assured him.
The second two-headed animal emerged from the woods, which meant the skinwalkers couldn’t be far behind. Cleasby looked around for anything he could use to their advantage. The train was just coming around the bend, roaring obliviously toward Ironhead Station. He looked the other way to where the tracks went through the mountainside and into the great tunnel necessary to traverse this rugged terrain.
“That way, go! Head for the tunnel. Move.” Cleasby reached down, grabbed hold of Allsop, and yanked him up.
The Storm Knight bellowed as he put his considerable weight on his wounded leg, but he hopped in the right direction anyway. “We can’t go in there. The train will squish us.”
“Trust me.”
Thankfully, they did. All of them.
Pangborn fired his storm thrower at one of the circling argus to provide some cover as the others ran for the tunnel. Cleasby stepped on the wooden railroad ties, and now he knew for sure he could feel the vibration of the oncoming train. Headhunter appeared to hesitate at the entrance as if it were unsure why the little humans would tell it to go into the narrow confines just to get smashed. Only a couple feet of space stood between the tracks and the unyielding stone walls.
“Do it, Headhunter. Go in,” Pangborn said as he ran up behind his warjack. “I don’t like it either, but Cleasby knows what he’s doing.”
Headhunter swiveled its head, which seemed far too small for the warjack’s intimidating size, toward Cleasby, and the yellow slits glowed angrily, as if to warn, you’d better know what you’re doing. They were past the point of changing their minds anyway; there wasn’t anywhere else to go. As a team, they entered the darkness, guided only by the blue glow of their swords.
If they’d stayed in the open, the skinwalkers would be all over them before the train could stop. So now, Cleasby was basing their hope of survival on something he’d read while bored on the ride here—something that could easily be outdated, misinformed, or just flat-out wrong. If
any of those were the case, he figured no one would be alive to criticize him for it anyway. “There should be an alcove off to the side for us to hide in soon,” he called, “big enough for a work crew and a laborjack.”
As they ran deeper into the narrow confines of the tunnel, the train appeared around the nearest trees; it was huge and heading their way fast.
“I don’t see an alcove,” Thorny shouted.
“Keep going. They’re supposed to dig one every hundred yards according to the manual.”
“The manual? What bloody manual?”
There was a brilliant yellow light on the front of the train, and the beam filled the tunnel. This was bad because it meant they were about to be run over, but also good because it illuminated the shadows of an alcove off to the right. “There! Right there!”
Suddenly something blocked most of the train’s light. Cleasby turned back to see that an argus had entered the tunnel, regardless of the danger, to chase after them. It barreled toward them as if it didn’t sense its own demise closing on it from behind.
It turned out that the manual had drastically overstated the comfortable size of the alcoves or else Steelwater Rail’s laborjacks were far smaller than a Stormclad. “Headhunter first, then squeeze in around him,” Pangborn said. Cleasby knew this was a good idea because their warjack was liable to step on anybody who got in his way. Headhunter crouched and backed in—its boiler scraping the roof—until its back hit the wall. It barely fit. The ’jack hoisted poor Private Younger nearly all the way against the top and held him there, out of the way.
“Crowd in under his arms,” Pangborn cried. “No time to be bashful.”
The Storm Knights pushed themselves in all around Headhunter. The only one not in armor, Horner swore fiercely as she was clubbed and battered by steel-clad limbs. Cleasby and Allsop were the last ones in line, so Cleasby shoved the wounded man on top of Headhunter’s bent knee and then tried to back himself in as well. It was too tight.
The argus was almost to them. The thickly muscled beast was remarkably fast, but apparently it was too stupid to realize it couldn’t outrun a train. The engineer must have seen either their glowing swords or the beast running down the tunnel ahead of the train—he pulled the brakes. Sparks flew from the metal wheels and a horrible screech filled the air, but it took a long while to stop something so incredibly heavy going so notably fast.
The beast had meant to run the men down, not get run down. Too late, it realized the danger, and it had no choice but to run right past the packed-in Malcontents. One head turned their way and gave Cleasby a save glare right before its body bounced off the cattle guard and hurtled sideways down the tunnel. It didn’t make a sound—unless its death cry was drowned out by the screaming brakes. Cleasby didn’t see what happened to the argus after that because the train kept going, and going, and going.
The train was passing just inches from Cleasby’s visor, and there was nowhere to back up any farther into the alcove. He strained to push his neck as far back as he could and hoped that there wasn’t anything hanging off the side of the train that might catch and rip his head off.
The space was filled with sparks and noise as the train struggled to stop. The coal smoke from Headhunter’s stacks quickly choked them in the narrow confines. Thinking they were likely to survive, Cleasby started to give orders about what they should do once boarded, but he gave up once he realized it was impossible for anyone to hear him over the cacophony. Lighted windows rushed past with surprised passengers gawking at the glowing Storm Knights crammed into the alcove. After that, the train was comprised mostly of cargo cars and flatbeds. Cleasby thought that was too bad; he had silently been hoping for a troop transport.
The train finally ground to a halt, hissing steam. The car that stopped directly in front of their alcove was a flatbed.
“All aboard,” Rains ordered. The Malcontents began pulling themselves up, turning back to help the more severely wounded while those still on the ground pushed those from behind.
Cleasby started down narrow gap between stone wall and the metal train.
“Where are you going?” Rains called after him.
“To find an engineer. We’ve got to get moving before the skinwalkers board.”
“Good thinking. I’ll take a crew and secure the back car. I’ll send any civilians forward. As long as we’re in the tunnel they can only attack from one direction,” Rains noted, “and they’ll have to go through us.”
“There were passenger cars ahead. Get the wounded up there. They’ll at least have first aid supplies.” He and Rains went their separate ways.
Cleasby ran until he reached one of the occupied cars. People stared down at him from the windows, but he saw no one in uniform. A few of the passengers thought to open their windows and call out to see if he needed help.
“If you’ve got weapons, prepare them,” Cleasby shouted as he passed. “If any of you has medical training, there are wounded men inbound.”
The train engine was a huge, heavy-duty iron machine. He clambered up the stairs to find the door locked. He pounded on it with his gauntlet until a rather irate-looking engineer finally opened it. The young man seemed a little surprised at seeing a blood-soaked Storm Knight standing on his platform.
“The army? What’s the army doing here? What’s the meaning of this?”
Cleasby pointed back inside the cabin. “Get this train moving again. Fast as you can get us to Ironhead.”
Another engineer appeared behind the first; this one was older and even angrier. “You can’t just block the tracks. This is an unscheduled stop. And you can’t board without a ticket. Steelwater Rail can fine you for—”
Cleasby reached out and grabbed the young engineer by the coveralls and dragged him over until they were eye-to-bloodshot-eye. “Train. Move. Now.”
That seemed to stress the seriousness of the situation, but the young man was still too befuddled to act. “Why?”
“Monsters are coming to eat us.”
The fear and urgency in Cleasby’s voice was not lost. “Moving out.” The terrified engineer ran off to work the controls, almost as if he believed Cleasby himself was the monster coming to eat him.
“You.” Cleasby pointed at the next engineer. “Have you any military on board?”
The fire seemed to have gone out of the older man’s belly. “No, just seventy passengers and cargo to the rear.”
“Drat.” Cleasby had never intended to put more people in danger. “Weapons?”
“Light. We’re mostly bringing back pilgrims from Orven. There’s a couple Rail Wardens to protect the cargo, and we’ve a few rifles for the crew.” After a moment’s thought, the engineer said, “I’m sure some of the passengers have guns.”
“Spread the word and prepare to use them. I’m sorry to have brought this down on you, but you need to run for Ironhead Station as if your life depends on it—because it truly does.”
Cleasby rushed back through the cars, as the train started moving. As it gradually picked up speed, he wished it could accelerate even faster. He went down the aisle of each car, ignoring the confused passengers shouting questions at him; He couldn’t spare the time to calm them down and just repeated the same basic warning as he went along. By the time he reached the last passenger car, they’d already laid Private Younger down in the middle of the floor, pulled off his breast plate, and were tending to his wounds. Cleasby was shocked to see that once they got his bracers off, Bevy had a bone sticking out of his arm, an injury he’d not complained about even once. It made the lieutenant proud to see the passengers, Cygnarans from every class and walk of life, had already pitched in to help.
Allsop was sitting by the back door, glaive across his lap, while Horner put pressure on his bite wound with a towel borrowed from a passenger.
“He’ll be all right, Cleasby.” Horner was drenched with blood up to her elbows, but she was still seemed reassuring. “Younger’s the worst off, but I’ve got his bleeding stopped.”
“I’m in your debt.” The archeologist’s skills had been an invaluable help beyond the dig site.
“Once we get help and rescue my friends, we’ll call it even.”
“Keep these civilians safe, corporal.”
“Will do, lieutenant,” Allsop told him grimly.
“And don’t let Bevy try to explain to anyone what’s going on. He’ll just terrify them more.”
Cleasby kept moving, crossing from car to car, and the farther back he went, the faster the train seemed to go. The engineers had followed his orders to the letter and must have been burning record amounts of coal to get the train up to speed so quickly. As he moved out of passenger compartments, he had to climb or crawl across stacks of crates and boxes. It seemed like most of their supplies were ordinary dry goods, but he still hoped to come across something more useful than sacks of feed.
Most of his men were three quarters of the way back, clustered around Headhunter. They’d shoved cargo over the sides to clear space. If the civilian owners complained about the property damage, it would probably come out of Cleasby’s pay, but he could live with that. Headhunter was crouched on its stubby legs, hunched over on a flatbed. If it stood upright, it would probably bang its stacks on the top of the tunnel. Cleasby knew that warjacks couldn’t technically feel discomfort, but he was sure Headhunter still wasn’t happy to be here.
“We had some last -minute boarders.” Rains had to shout to be heard over the train noise.
“Skinwalkers?”
“No. One is much angrier than any skinwalker I’ve seen, but the other seems nice enough.”
Cleasby squinted through the near darkness. Two figures were making their way across the last flatcar: one woman in a ranger’s cloak and a man in painted storm armor. Novak and Acosta. Cleasby had heard gunfire and a few glaive discharges before his Malcontents had begun their mad dash down the mountain, so he’d assumed these two had been overrun. “Praise Morrow.”
Into the Wild Page 26