by RW Krpoun
Derek was firing his Spencer as the Shootist replaced the four spent rounds from the second Colt and Jeff was applying charms to Fred’s left arm, which had caught a load of buckshot. Leaning around the doorway as the Alienist reloaded, he shot a Long Sun warrior who was charging with a hatchet at the ready, hitting him four times in rapid succession. He emptied both his weapons and ducked back to reload as Derek and Fred opened fire.
The chamber they were firing into was a long rectangle, more of a broad hallway than a room, with rows of terra cotta statutes of Teks flanking the central walkway A closed door was in the opposite wall. The Celts in the room were using the statues as cover to good effect, but their muzzle-loaders left them at a severe disadvantage.
“We need a plan,” Shad yelled as he finished reloading.
“Yeah, I’m down to what’s in my Spencer,” Derek nodded. “Still got my Le Mat, though.”
“Forty-six rounds total,” Fred reported.
“Twelve .44-40s which I’ll give to Fred, and plenty for my Bulldogs,” Jeff announced, dealing out charms. “These are the last of my armor charms, still have plenty of healing. Well, not plenty, but quite a few.”
“Damn, we used up a lot of charms,” Fred shook his head.
“Derek, hit ‘em with mist,” Shad ordered. “We’ll smoke the place up, you guys draw their fire, and I’ll go right and flank ‘em. Close-in is my class strong suit. Fred, you’ll go to the first statue on the left and secure my rear.”
“Fix ‘em, flank ‘em, finish ‘em,” Jeff nodded absently as Derek expended hex sheets. “The door is the end zone, I believe.”
“Good. I’m sick of this trip.”
When the room was thoroughly filled with mist Derek and Jeff opened fire and Celt muskets flared in return, buckshot and .60 lead balls knocking splinters off the stone lintel and walls. Shad counted the enemy’s gunshots which were louder and clearer than the Talons’ fire, and darted through the doorway after five muskets had fired.
Visibility was five feet at best, although the mist itself was odorless; the reek of black powder smoke, however, was oppressive. Edging forward the Shootist smelled blood and violent death, and two shuffled steps further revealed a Long Sun warrior sprawled at the foot of a bullet-marked statue, brain matter leaking from his sundered skull, a trade musket with the ramrod still in the barrel across his legs.
A musket’s muzzle flash made a flaming strobe of dirty yellow light in the mist ahead and Shad crept forward to see a Celt biting a paper cartridge preparatory to reloading while a second leaned into the central walkway to aim a musket in the direction of the doorway.
Shad shot the Long Sun aiming the musket in the back of the head; the other Celt dropped his musket and lunged at the Shootist, only to take three .45 Long Colts in the center torso and crash to the floor. Shad shot him in the head, put his last round into the first Celt for good measure, and then swore as a musket bellowed across the walkway to his left and buckshot scored across his chest. Fred’s Remington revolver barked flatly in response and a man shrieked in pain.
Pressing himself against the statue Shad surveyed the damage; he was bleeding profusely and his chest felt like it was on fire, but Jeff’s charms had diverted the worst of it. He doubted he had any charms still active, but he wasn’t in too bad of shape. Reloading the Colt he ran a finger around his cartridge belt and shook his head at the number of empty loops.
Across the way the Celt’s cries had quieted to moans of agony until a shot from Fred turned them into a death rattle.
“Three down,” the Shootist muttered. “Medic,” he called in a louder tone, and in a few seconds Jeff, a Bulldog at the ready, loomed out of the mist.
“You know I can’t replace lost blood,” the Jinxman warned as he tended the wound. “You’re down quite a bit this fight.”
“I’m getting a bit weak,” Shad admitted. “But there’s only two left by my count, and we’re halfway to the door.”
A shadow in the mist ahead caused both men to fire instinctively; a Celt warrior spun, his musket discharging into the ceiling. Jeff shot him twice more to be sure as Shad replaced the expended cartridge. “Four down.”
“You hold position, I’ll move forward.” As Shad started forward a low whistle from his left indicated that Fred had moved up on line with Jeff’s position.
Step by step he eased forward through the thinning mist, heart thumping hard within his chest. Combat performance was less courage and more learning to handle sensory overload; what bravery there was, was drawn from the comrades around him. Alone he would not been half as bold, but the presence of tested and trusted team mates made him far more capable than he ever could have imagined becoming.
A musket fired from his left, missing him by at least five feet; Shad threw himself to the floor as he emptied his Colt in that direction, hearing Fred and Derek firing as well. Crawling behind the next statue he reloaded, listening carefully, grateful for the hexes that reduced the noise of his weapons. After a minute he resumed crawling forward, only to encounter the wall after crossing ten more feet. Taking cover behind a statue, he called out “Clear right.”
After a long minute he heard Fred fire a shot. “Clear left.”
“Derek, get to the door,” Shad called. “We’re in business.”
As the sweating Alienist struggled to disarm an explosive trap the other three Black Talons stood a safe distance away and took stock. “The important thing now is a clean getaway,” Shad absently rubbed his left forearm. “There’s plenty of ammunition in our packs; once we get there we’ll be fine. The real challenge will be getting out of this rock pile without using much ammunition.”
“The big question is how far we can trust Sour Gut,” Jeff said gloomily, counting his remaining charms.
“With full cartridge belts he’s trustworthy,” Fred mumbled. “Without, not so much.”
“Once we re-arm and rest, the big question is whether Cecil’s men and the Death Lords will be guarding the pass,” Shad said thoughtfully. “If they abandon their guard duty we won’t need the Bloody Sashes anymore.”
Derek tried to whistle to get their attention but only managed to spit a little. Shaking his head he repacked his tools and walked over to the three. “Its unlocked and trap-free.”
“You’re sure?’ Jeff asked suspiciously.
“I have complete confidence.”
Shad sighed and drew a Colt. “OK, standard entry. Me, Fred, Derek. Jeff, stay in cover.”
“Keep shooting down to a minimum,” Derek warned. “He’s doing some sort of major occult undertaking in there. A bullet hits the wrong thing and we could end up as piles of ash.”
“Now you mention this. Why didn’t you mention this before?” Shad snapped.
“I figured you knew,” Derek shrugged.
“I’ll lead,” Fred drew his Bowie and tomahawk.
“Loan me your knife,” Shad held out his hand to Derek.
“Take one off the dead guys-I like my knife.”
“Derek, you’re getting on my last freakin’ nerve.”
Fred booted open the door and lunged through, breaking right, and found himself in a large well-lit room filled with myriad objects, the air heavy with the scent of blood and sour, bitter incense. Before he could take in much of his surroundings he found himself staring at Amid, Cecil’s representative who had greeted them months ago upon their arrival to the Realm.
The dapper man was distinctly disheveled now, hat-less and in his shirt-sleeves, and frozen in the very act of hurling a bundle of books tied together with red cord at a tapestry. Roaring a wordless cry the Scout sprang forward as Amid dropped the bundle and yanked a derringer from his waistline.
The hatchet edge caught Amid’s arm at the elbow, shattering the joint; the derringer barked and the big man felt his left calf explode into a ball of searing agony, but he staggered into his follow-through, ramming the blade of his Bowie up under the dark man’s sternum. The two men were chest to chest for a moment, loo
king into each other’s eyes.
“You should have found another boss,” Fred grunted as the life faded from Amid’s face.
“Well, hell,” Shad turned slowly in a circle, trying to get a grip on the room as Jeff rushed to treat Fred. “No Cecil. Derek, find the Staff.”
“Man, look at this place,” Derek marveled.
“Yeah,” the Shootist dismissed it with a wave. “Find the Staff.”
“There must be…I don’t know how many power-focusing points here….”
“DEREK! Find the freaking Staff!”
“I’m looking!”
While Jeff attended Fred’s leg, which apparently had taken a very hard hit, and Derek poked around two work tables littered with open scrolls covered with diagrams and strange symbols, Shad wandered around the small amount of clear floor space trying to get a rudimentary understanding of what was going on.
About half the floor space was taken up by rough plank benches covered with a wide variety of seemingly purposeless items, except that all were too finely crafted and tended to be mere art. None were a staff so Shad paid them little mind. A slightly tilted plank table supported the fresh, bloodless corpse of a young woman in a simple dress whose throat had been cut with surgical precision. The Shootist covered her face and moved on, noting that the blood was nowhere to be seen. A pile of blackened and crumbling objects had been tossed into a corner, and he realized that these were the other items stolen with the Staff, now drained of their arcane power.
In one corner a battered wood ladder lead to a solid trap door in the ceiling which had obviously been spiked shut from below.
Besides the bundle of books there were three cases of scrolls tied up with red cord and stacked near the tapestry. The tapestry itself was not, now that he had a chance to examine it, really a tapestry; it was a sheet of incredibly fine chain mail hung like a tapestry, which was in turn covered by a multi-colored something that seemed to be a mating of liquid, light, and mist.
Shad watched the display for quite a while, long enough for Jeff to finish healing Fred’s leg and the two to slump against a bare patch of wall to catch their breath.
Finally turning to the others, he jerked a thumb towards the ‘tapestry’. “Cecil’s gone, and I bet the Staff is, too. What the hell, Derek?”
“Looks like I was off a little in my calculations,” The Alienist didn’t look up from his examination of the tables’ contents.
Jeff heaved himself to his feet. “He wasn’t too far off-Amid was still here. What was he doing with the books?”
Derek shuffled through the paperwork. “The red cord should let the bundles make the trip.”
“Wait,” Jeff turned to look at the ‘tapestry’. “You mean that…thing…is still functional? A road?”
“Yeah,” the Alienist said absently as he studied a scroll. “They call it a portal. It’ll stay open for a few hours or until the power fueling it is consumed by people or stuff going through. Yeah, here it is: Cecil moved the date up more than I expected by shifting the focus primaries so that the portal would only be open half the usual time. We probably missed him by minutes.”
“How could that be?” Shad snapped. “We’re outlanders, and we’ve been here more than a lunar cycle, so tracking us is impossible. We came by raft so even with Mister Samuel giving him a heads-up we were ahead of schedule.”
Derek held up a strip of paper. “Carrier pigeon message. Sammi followed the current down to the pass and tipped them off that we were coming over the mountains with Bloody Sash mercs. With that news it wasn’t hard to calculate our arrival based on distance and terrain.”
“That ungrateful bastard,” Jeff snarled. “We liberated his village.”
“He was scared of what the Death Lords would do,” Fred observed tiredly from where he was sitting.
“He should be scared of what we’ll do,” the Jinxman shook his head. “That’s another item for our ‘to-do’ list.”
“On our way back to Bloodseep,” Shad agreed. “He’ll wish he never saw a river.”
“He cost us the reward,” Derek sighed.
“Yeah, its going to be a lean winter-we signed away the loot rights for everything else except written material,” Jeff kicked Amid’s corpse. “This sucks.”
“Check Amid for money,” Shad told Jeff. “I’ll check the Celts for cash and jewelry, anything we can hide in our pockets. Derek, see what you can smuggle out. Fred, how long until you’re fit to move?”
“A half hour.”
“OK, just rest.”
Shad returned twenty minutes later. “That wasn’t bad-they must have just gotten paid or a bonus or something. I left a little on ‘em so it wouldn’t look suspicious. How did you do, Jeff?”
“Eighty duro, a good watch and chain, and a ring with a sizeable diamond. Looks like old Amid was planning on getting hitched when all this was over.”
“He should be grateful that we saved him from a grim future. Derek?”
“Huh?” the Alienist looked up from a scroll, startled.
“Did you find anything we can pocket?”
“I haven’t looked yet.”
“What do I always have to repeat myself with you?” Shad shook his head disgustedly.
“You do not. But get this: Cecil has gone to the Isle.”
“Yeah, I got that. Using Death Lord arcane knowledge, the power of this pyramid, and all that. Trouble is, he took the Staff with him, so there’s no payoff. We damn near got killed for nothing.”
“Do you know why?’
“Why what?”
“Why Cecil went to the Isle?”
“Because he’s with the Death Lords,” the Shootist shrugged. “Probably a true believer of whatever they believe. Or hold dear. It doesn’t matter now: it’s a one-way trip for him so we need to focus on getting back to our gear and rearming.”
“He’s going there to do something terrible.”
Shad glanced at the corpse on the table. “Yeah, that stands to reason.”
“No, I mean something specific. With the Staff.” Derek held up a scroll. “That’s what his mission is. See, the Death Lord method of travelling between spheres is just a form of internal banishment-they banish themselves to another sphere. They don’t need wards because they are already banished overall. But it’s a one-way trip because they cannot un-banish themselves. That’s why they needed a local.”
"That’s not really news: we knew he was a mole whose job was to steal the Staff. This is just his getaway plan.”
“No, I mean, yes, in part. But that was just half. The Death Lords needed a non-necromancer to banish himself to the Isle, bringing the Staff with him. The non-necromancer also needed to be a powerful magic-user.”
“Oh, crap,” Jeff said quietly.
“What?” Shad turned to the Jinxman.
“The rules: Cecil will come through at or very near his Realm level when he enters the Isle. Outlanders get to choose a class, but a local would get the nearest local class to what he had in his original sphere,” Jeff explained. “I found that out helping Derek do research. So a Death Lord changing spheres would stay a necromancer. Cecil will remain a high-level magic-user.”
“Only the Isle’s magic is ‘normal’, not weakened by proximity to our world,” Derek agreed. “He isn’t just bringing the Staff, he is bringing an entire suite of skills and abilities the Death Lords lack.”
“What’s with the books and scrolls, then?” Shad nudged one bundle with his foot.
“The Death Lords have been searching for something, the Staff or something similar. The books and scrolls are research they and Cecil and others have done towards that end,” Derek rubbed his jaw. “They must figure they have all their ducks in a row, and are moving the focus of their operation back to the Isle.”
“Well, it sucks to be on the Isle,” Shad shrugged. “We’ll torch these bundles on our way out; that ought to help. Right now we’ve got more important things to be worried about than Cecil and his buddies.”
/>
“I don’t think we do,” Derek persisted. “I don’t have a clear picture, but I have some of Cecil’s notes. He left in a hurry and Amid didn’t have time to clean up the place. Clean up as getting rid of evidence,” he hastily added, seeing Shad’s expression. “Cecil and the Staff have business at the Rift. He’s going to do something there.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not sure,” Derek threw up his hands. “But it’s the Death Lords so it won’t be good. Cecil is going to the Rift with the Staff, and beyond that all I have is a phrase.”
“A phrase?”
“Yeah,” Derek nodded shakily. “Something called ‘the Wind of Souls’.”
Chapter Nineteen
“So you guys are serious?” Shad threw up his arms.
“Look, we should check it out,” Jeff shrugged. “If Derek’s wrong, no big deal. But if he’s right, well, we sort of have a responsibility. Besides being the only ones outside the Death Lords who know what is going on, we also kind of caused it by banishing ourselves.”
“That is clearly Fred’s fault,” Shad countered. “I have always said it was a bad idea for him to reproduce.”
“That’s true,” the Scout conceded.
“Plus here we are in an enemy stronghold, low on ammo, low on charms, with allies of very dubious loyalty, and a very long winter walk back to civilization. Not to mention money problems,” Derek pointed out. “Odds are we’ll be in a much better situation if we cross over to the Isle.”
“What about getting stuck in the Isle?” Fred asked.
“No danger,” Shad shook his head. “I know that one. The worst problem is that it could burn off one or more of our wards if this thing,” he waved at the ‘tapestry’. “Isn’t properly done. The Isle is the home of the Death Lords, so finding three more won’t be hard. What about appearing right on top of Cecil?” he asked Derek. “We’ll be adjusting to new skills and classes, and very vulnerable.”
“The arrival point changes with each rotation of the sun, and there’s a time difference: about three days there to an hour here. By now it has been close to an hour since Cecil crossed-that’s why there is this string of beads on each bundle: so he can track down his books when they come through. I can detach them before we go. We’ll have to be careful, but we won’t be near Cecil unless he’s amazingly lucky. Like winning the lottery lucky.”