Specter Rising (Brimstone Network Trilogy)

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “These guys really don’t look like the treaty types,” Dez said. His monster father, who was still holding him beneath his arm, responded with a grunt.

  Emily turned her wolfy head in Johanna’s direction. “You all right?” she asked.

  Johanna nodded. “Sure, sure, everything is great.”

  “Welcome to the Brimstone Network,” Emily growled.

  Johanna was just about to offer up a sarcastic thanks when the Specter army attacked.

  Stitch kept his hands by his side.

  As he gazed at the wide open plains before him, covered in military tents, he wondered what exactly they had stumbled onto.

  But there was another more pressing matter at the moment.

  He was just about to say something incredibly stupid like We come in peace, when the archers opened fire.

  The arrows whizzed through the air like angry hornets, many of them plunging into his body with amazing precision.

  If he had been like everybody else, the attack would have killed him. But Mr. Stitch wasn’t like everybody else . . . not by a long shot.

  “So much for the treaty,” he growled, snapping the protruding shafts from his chest and preparing for battle.

  “Defend yourselves,” he bellowed over his shoulder. “And would one of you please try to wake the Mauthe Dhoog; we may need to get out of here in a hurry.”

  If he remembered right, the Specter tended to be overconfident, wading into battle with the belief that nothing could stand against their fighting prowess. He planned to show them the error of their ways. He plowed forward, using his superhuman strength to tear into the attacking warriors. The trick was to take as many down as possible in the initial attack—before they understood that this was a force to be reckoned with and resorted to using their spectral powers, making themselves unable to be touched.

  The patchwork man roared a cry of battle as he waded amongst his armored adversaries, taking them down one after another. He moved with speed that surprised them, avoiding thrusts of spears and descending sword blades meant to separate limbs from bodies. His mind was flooded with memories; the multiple parts that had been used to make his body sharing with him recollections of battles past.

  From the corner of one eye he saw a flash of black as Emily, in her wolf form, bounded from one fallen foe to the next. A cry of rage filled the air, and Stitch maneuvered around to see the monster that had attacked them in the Fthaggua dwelling join the battle, Specter soldiers scattering like toys before a petulant child.

  A sudden flash of pain exploded through Stitch’s shoulder as a battle-ax nearly severed his arm. The patchwork man sneered, reaching back to grab the blade and swing it at his attacker as he whirled to face him. The blade passed harmlessly through the air, the warrior before him suddenly becoming like so much smoke.

  This was the moment Stitch had worried about. They didn’t have a chance against the Specter soldiers if they started to use their ghostly traits.

  “Desmond!” he bellowed, turning to find the crippled youth.

  The boy had just sent a Specter archer flying with his mind as he turned his attention to Stitch.

  “Cloud their minds,” the patchwork man ordered. “Make it so that they’re unable to use their talents.”

  “There’s quite a few of ’em . . . but I’ll see what I can do,” the boy said, leaning on his crutches, his face screwing up in deep concentration.

  Stitch swung at his attacker again, and this time the ax severed his armored head from his body, proving that Dez was doing his job.

  More soldiers were joining the fray. This isn’t good, not good at all, Stitch thought lashing out at Specter soldiers that continued to attack him in what seemed to be a continuous wave.

  “Watch my back,” he ordered Emily as he stepped over the fallen bodies of their foes to reach Johanna, who was still trying to awaken Bogey.

  “It’s like he’s dead,” she said, shaking the Mauthe Dhoog and slapping his chubby gray cheeks. “Wake up!” she screamed.

  Her ghostly dogs were doing a fine job as well; any attacker that came too close was immediately set upon, their armor no match for the ghost dogs’ savage bites.

  Still, there wasn’t much time before the Specter would overwhelm them.

  “Bogey!” Stitch screamed, standing above the unconscious Mauthe Dhoog.

  At first there was nothing, but then he noticed that the creature’s closed eyes had begun to twitch.

  “If you can hear me, we need you to wake up,” Stitch said.

  A Specter soldier got past their defenses, running at them, screaming at the top of his lungs with a sword above his head. Stitch just avoided the blade as it fell, cleaving the dirt. The patchwork man drove his foot down onto the blade, trapping it there. As the Specter struggled to retrieve his weapon, Stitch reached out, gripping the man’s helmeted head in his powerful hands, and broke the soldier’s neck with a savage twist.

  “Bogey!” Stitch yelled again, dropping the dead Specter to the ground.

  The Mauthe Dhoog’s eyes suddenly fluttered open, a huge smile appearing on his gray features.

  “Did I miss anything?” Bogey asked, smacking his lips. “Hopefully it wasn’t lunch.”

  His question went unanswered as they all found themselves suddenly tumbling through the air in an attack of deadly magickal force.

  The world went to white, and Stitch repeatedly blinked his eyes to clear his head. His body smoldered from the energy strike, reeking with the scent of powerful magicks.

  He pushed himself up from the ground, but froze as his eyes finally cleared, and he glimpsed the scene in front of him. The ground was littered with the bodies of Specter soldiers—and his friends.

  “No,” he hissed, going to the nearest. Johanna lay limply upon the ground, Bogey not too far away. He could see Dez and Emily lying completely still in the distance, and the monster that had held Dez’s father had been burnt to a crisp, having been closest the magickal strike.

  “You’re losing your touch, Trinity,” said a voice nearby.

  Stitch raised his head, wiping at his still watering eyes.

  A large and quite powerful looking figure stood at the edge of where the blast of magickal energy had struck. By the way the bearded warrior carried himself, Stitch knew that this was the leader of the Specters that had attacked them.

  A strange, hooded shape floated in the air beside the leader, the air around the seemingly weightless figure distorted by the intensity of the magickal power it radiated.

  Stitch rose to his full and impressive height.

  “Murderers!” he roared, reaching down to the ground as he walked to retrieve a sword. His brain wasn’t functioning as it should; the sight of his teammates . . . his friends . . . driving him to the brink of madness.

  “Ha!” the leader scoffed as Stitch stalked closer, stepping over the bodies of the fallen on his way toward them. “If only there was time, I could teach you to properly respect your betters.”

  The leader casually glanced toward the floating form beside him.

  “Put him down,” the leader said with a wave of his metal-gloved hand.

  “As you command, Barnabas,” the ghostly figure agreed.

  Barnabas, Stitch thought, just before bolts of pure magickal force flew from the hooded one’s fingers, sending him on the way to oblivion.

  If he managed to survive this, at least he knew the name of the person he needed to kill.

  The creature called Trinity moved through the air towards those it had struck down.

  There was something about them.

  Something . . . familiar.

  “Are they dead?” Barnabas asked.

  “No,” Trinity answered, with recollections, jagged fragments of a past it almost recalled, hurtling through its mind. “I think they could be useful.”

  Barnabas came closer, gauntleted hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “Useful?” he asked. “How so?”

  Trinity gazed at the unconscious str
angers from within the darkness of its hood, wanting to understand the conflicting emotions it was experiencing while looking at them.

  “It’s obvious that they’re from behind the barrier,” Trinity stated. “With the proper incentives they could provide you with the information of who sent them, and why they have come.”

  Barnabas spat upon the ground. “It’s obvious why they’ve come,” the warlord growled. “They want to stop me . . . they want to stop me from invading their world.”

  The warrior leader drew his sword and let the blade hover over the neck of the last of the strangers to have fallen.

  “I should end their lives here and now and be done with it.”

  “But you know that it would be unwise,” Trinity said, floating in the air. “The potential information that these strangers might provide could be the difference between absolute victory and crushing defeat.”

  Trinity had no idea which way this would go, watching the warrior leader as he determined the strangers’ fates.

  A general from the camp came galloping toward them upon his reptilian charger, distracting Barnabas from his answer.

  “What is it?” the Warlord asked.

  “Sir, the representatives from the Circle have arrived for their debriefing,” the general informed his superior.

  Barnabas spat upon the ground again before returning his attentions to their fallen foes.

  “As always, your words of counsel entice me.” He let the edge of his blade rest upon the pale throat of one of the unconscious figures.

  “I shall let them live for now,” Barnabas said, turning from the fallen and walking back toward the encampment, and those who awaited his return.

  “Have them brought to camp for questioning,” he ordered a group of soldiers who stood just beyond the area of conflict.

  And as the Specter soldiers did as they were told, picking up the strangers that had been struck down by its magick, Trinity could only wonder.

  Were these the ones who would solve the mystery?

  The mystery of its existence?

  Bram awoke with a jolt.

  He hadn’t remembered falling asleep, but there was no doubting what had occurred. Still sitting on the damp floor of the hovel, he glanced over to see how his mother was doing.

  Bram gasped at the sight of her. Queen Ligeia’s already pale skin had become almost transparent, and she looked as though she were in the process of fading away.

  Her hand had slipped out from under the furs that covered her and he reached for it. His fingers passed through the ghostly state as if she weren’t even there.

  Panic had started to set in and he almost yelled for help, but something compelled him not to. Instinctually he willed his own hand immaterial, bringing it down to his mother’s, allowing the two ghostly states to come together.

  Like this he could actually feel her now—feel a connection that hadn’t been present before. Bram could feel her weakness and how she fought to maintain her solidity, but was failing.

  He lent her some of his strength, letting it flow through his ghostly limb into her own. Within moments he saw the effects of his actions, and smiled.

  Queen Ligeia had become solid again; more flesh and blood than apparition. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had done, but was more than pleased with the results.

  Bram didn’t want to leave her, but knew there was much that needed to be done if the queen’s rule was to be reestablished over the Spectral kingdom.

  He chanced a quick look, just to be sure that she hadn’t started to fade away again, and then climbed from the hovel up into the early morning light as it filtered through the thick forest trees.

  The encampment was quiet, Yosh and Stanis slouched in sleep by the fire. Lita lay outside the hovel, deep in sleep, wrapped in a blanket as if she had been waiting for him to return.

  He knelt down, reaching out to squeezing her shoulder.

  The girl moved with incredible speed—a knife appeared in her hand and was suddenly pressed to his throat.

  “You’re quick,” he said, reaching up push the blade down. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Sorry,” she apologized, the blade disappearing somewhere beneath the blanket. She stretched her arms above her head and yawned.

  The Specter sentries had awakened as well, looking around to make sure that everything was as they remembered before they had drifted off to sleep.

  “Did you have a nice nap?” Bram asked them.

  “There was no sleeping,” Stanis answered, insulted that Bram could even suggest such a thing.

  “We were just resting our eyes,” Yosh added.

  Bram didn’t bother to argue.

  “How is she?” Lita asked as she slithered from beneath the blanket like a snake shedding its skin.

  Bram looked back toward where he had just emerged.

  “She’s fighting to stay alive,” he answered his sister. “I’m not sure how much time Boffa’s medicine has given her, but I think we need to move quickly if we’re to find a cure for the poison.”

  “Where is Boffa?” Lita asked as she folded her blanket.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  They walked around their encampment, searching the woods surrounding them for any sign of the turtle.

  “You don’t think he would have left us, do you?” Bram asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lita answered. “Who knows how a Terrapene thinks.”

  The soldiers had left their place at the fire and were heading toward the entrance to the hovel.

  “I say good riddance,” Yosh said. “We’ll be better off when they’re finally all dead.”

  Bram felt his anger spike.

  “Excuse me, but that creature you’re wishing dead saved your life yesterday,” he said, moving to confront the old soldier.

  “And that’s where we differ, half-blood,” the solider responded. “If the boot had been on the other foot, I would have let the Shriekhounds take him. I owe the shelled one nothing.”

  Stanis grunted his agreement, both of them starting down the hole to attend to their queen’s needs.

  Bram was going to pursue them, to confront them with their ignorance, but he felt his sister’s hand reach out to take hold of his arm.

  “Their beliefs are built upon the foundation of old ways,” she said in explanation.

  “You’re making excuses for them?” he asked.

  “No,” she said with a shake of her head. “It’s just the simple fact of what they are. They’re the old ways that will soon come to pass unless our mother survives.”

  He was about to tell her that if the queen did not survive, then it would be up to her to bring about the ascension of the Spectral race, but he never got the chance.

  Something was coming at them through the woods—something moving with incredible speed, plowing through the trees and underbrush as if they weren’t even there.

  They were about to yell to the others that they were under attack, when they realized that it was Boffa who had returned to them.

  “We didn’t know where you were,” Bram said as the Terrapene came to a stop. The creature appeared out of breath, its thick, longish neck stretching out to gaze back from where it had come.

  “The forest spoke to Boffa of a great gathering,” the turtle said, capturing Bram’s attention.

  “So I go in search of what it spoke of, traveling from woods to wide Spectral plains that separate kingdom and wild places.

  “What did you find?”

  The Terrapene looked back, its dark eyes deadly serious.

  “Great army,” Boffa spoke.

  “Great army preparing for war.”

  10. BOGEY AWOKE. HIS HEAD POUNDED AS though someone were playing the top of his skull like a drum, and he was ridiculously hungry.

  “Anybody else starved?” he asked, opening his eyes.

  He’d been tossed in the corner of a large tent like a sack of dirty laundry, his hands tied behind his back. His friends lay a
round him, which he took as a good sign—what was the point in holding dead people captive?

  With a grunt, and some straining of muscles, he managed to sit up, and noticed another group of prisoners huddled in the far corner. They looked to be in the same situation as he, hands bound behind their backs.

  “Hey,” he said to them. He wiggled his hands and twisted his wrists in an attempt to loosen his bonds, but whatever was used to restrain him seemed to become even tighter, as if somehow sensing what he was trying to do.

  “It is useless, little beast,” one of the group, an older man with really bushy eyebrows and no hair on his head, spoke up.

  “Who’re you callin’ a little beast?” Bogey asked indignantly.

  “Whatever you are,” the old man continued. “You will not escape your bonds.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, Gramps,” Bogey said. “We’re full’a surprises.” He slid awkwardly across the ground toward his still-unconscious friends. “Hey,” he called out. “Guys. Time to get up.”

  Emily was the first to respond. She was still in her wolf shape, but the way she was strung up, she looked as helpless as Bogey.

  “Where are we?” she asked groggily.

  “I can tell you where we’re not,” Bogey answered quickly. “We’re not back at headquarters where I can get myself something to eat.”

  “What’s up with the ropes?” Emily asked, trying to break them with her animal strength. No dice.

  “Haven’t a clue,” Bogey replied. “Seems like they might be alive or something.”

  There was movement farther back in the tent.

  “It’s the alive part that concerns me,” Stitch said, managing to maneuver his body to a sitting position. “They seem to be sapping away strength as well.”

  “That’s probably why I’m so hungry,” Bogey said. “Without a full belly, I’m nothing.”

  “Is everybody all right?” Stitch asked.

  “I suppose,” Desmond chimed in. “Did you get the number of that bus that hit us by the way?”

  “Hey, Dez,” Bogey said with mock cheerfulness. “Welcome to our little discussion group. How’re your psychic powers holding up?”