The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  But he was beginning to understand: this was the tool men used to make themselves feel powerful. He and every other blackhand alive knew it was a poor substitute. There was nothing like being ignited, like feeling the surge of true power running through you. Power with sacrifice. Only a blackhand could understand the significance of that. By the time the last of his rounds had left the chamber and the last of the soldiers had fallen, he’d decided he would never use a firearm again. But he did like the weight of it, as superficial a thing as that was. The firearm had shown him what it meant to pretend.

  The cell block was a ruin of twisted steel and crumbled stone. The men were stripping dead soldiers and putting on their uniforms, erecting a mound of naked bodies in the middle of the room. Jiren’s uniform was a decent fit, though there was a gaping bloodsoaked hole through the thigh and it smelled like it hadn’t been washed in months. He still couldn’t come to grips with the fact that a healer had been hidden among this city’s rabble.

  Jiren had been eight years old when Myriad left Decylum. It had been a week after her thirty-fifth birthday, but she’d looked no older than a woman of nineteen or twenty. Jiren had heard the tales Rostand’s granddad told of his exploits in the above-world. But unlike Hastle Beige, Myriad had never returned to Decylum. It was no wonder Raith had been so determined to bring the healer home with them.

  But the healer was dead now. It had been a messy thing, but the healer was no man Jiren wanted in amongst his people. He quit too easily and complained too much. There was that bit about the healer having tried to kill him, too.

  A heartless healer with an anger problem wouldn’t have done us any good, Jiren assured himself. “Look sharp, fellows. Finish gathering all the uniforms, gear and weapons you can get your hands on. We’ve got to find Raith before we go.”

  Jiren knew Raith would sooner see them escape the city than stage his rescue. He could picture the old man now, insisting they leave without him, his piercing blue eyes resolute beneath a hedge of gray. But if Raith had to fight his way through a horde of the bastards who’d murdered so many of their friends and brothers unprovoked, Jiren Oliver had a mind to join him. Besides, he was having the most fun he’d had since the hall patrols had nearly caught him and Tesya sneaking into the hangar for a late-night rendezvous, and he wasn’t keen on stopping now. We’ll go back for Raith, or we’ll die in the attempt.

  Jiren and the others had killed about twenty Scarred soldiers during the scuffle. By contrast, seventeen of Decylum’s sons were alive now that the dust had settled. Two had died in their cells: Owan Carbide, a skilled mechanic; and Tare Halloway, an infrastructure repairman. Several others were barely clinging to life.

  While searching the cells, Jiren had found and released several prisoners native to Belmond. They’d run off with the gate keys and left them locked in. Two strangers had stayed behind, however; they were Salt Nomads, dark-skinned and black-haired, who had introduced themselves as Sig and Tally, and insisted that they’d have a better chance of escape if they stayed together.

  Jiren had encountered nomads on hunting trips in the past. Those encounters had resulted in everything from friendly trade to all-out battle, so he was loath to turn his back to these tribesmen until they’d proven themselves trustworthy. In this instance, he felt he had little choice. Raith would make the twentieth in their company, when they found him.

  “Anyone know where the Hull Tower is?” Jiren shouted above the commotion.

  Derrow Leonard pointed at the pile of bodies. “Ask one of them.”

  “Anyone besides Derrow have anything helpful to say?”

  Derrow scratched his head. “Wait… we left someone alive for questioning, didn’t we? Oh no. What were we thinking?” Derrow slapped himself on the forehead, then finished pantsing one of the corpses.

  “I’ve never seen this many naked men in a room before,” said Rostand Beige.

  “Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Derrow said, winking.

  A voice came from outside the jailhouse, projected through the barred windows. “Attention, prisoners. This is Captain Malvid Curran of the Scarred Comrades, Division Commander of Mobile Operations. You’re completely surrounded. You have five minutes to exit the building before we come inside to retrieve you. Be warned: if you do not go peacefully, we have been authorized to use force. Your countdown begins now.”

  “Don’t trust them. They’ll shoot us whether we come out willingly or not,” said Rostand Beige.

  “So much for the disguises,” said Derrow.

  “Don’t take off the uniforms yet,” Jiren said. “When we get past them, we’ll need to blend in.”

  “Get past them?” said Derrow. “That would be more heroic than I believe we have the capacity to be right now. Look at us.”

  He has a point. Jiren studied the ragged bunch, a motley assortment if ever there was one. Nine regulars from Decylum, eight blackhands including himself, and the two nomads who were offering their help. They were exhausted and starved; half had grievous wounds to boot. Theodar Urial had tended to them however he could, but without medical supplies his abilities were limited. On top of all that, now they were under a time crunch as well. Jiren waved his hands, and the men gathered around him.

  “At a time like this, a rousing speech is in order. Unfortunately, I don’t know any rousing speeches. I have heard half a dozen terrible ones, so I’ll summarize, since we’re short on time. There are a bunch of dways out there who want to kill us. We surrender, and we might as well let them. I know you’re hurt. I know you’re tired and you want to go home. Well, I do too. I want to see my mother again. I want to see Derrow’s mother again.”

  Derrow shoved him hard, smiling. Scattered laughter echoed in the cell block, but it was the laughter of tired, frightened men.

  “So… either we rot in here, or you summon your strength. You scrounge up everything you’ve got left and we give this a go. They hit us with a real cheap shot when we came into town, didn’t they? They took us by surprise. They didn’t even look us in the eye before they started shooting. If it’s cheap shots they want, they’ll get no such treatment from us. We’re better than that. It’s toe-to-toe, or it’s nothing. Let’s see how well these comrades do in a fair fight.”

  The men sent up a shout.

  Jiren and Derrow led the way down the hall, shredding the steel gates like tin foil as they went. Rostand Beige had a rifle in hand and two more slung across his back, an assortment of half-full magazines shoved into his pockets. Behind them was Frasier Dent, Laagon’s nephew, along with Sombit Quentin and Theodar Urial. The rest followed after, among them Hewell Rice, whose long bronze-colored hair matched his brother Sebastian’s; Edrie Thronson, the architect who had prepared the master schematics for Decylum’s expansion and presented them to the council the day before the convoy departed; Cragg Walsash, the slender, muscled smithy; and Bon Menerey, Kraw Joseph’s grandson.

  There was no need for Jiren to console them or offer false hope; he could feel the sense of foreboding settling in their midst. Sons of Decylum all, sent to war with vengeance in their eyes and grief in their hearts. Whether the day ended in victory or calamity, not one man among them was naive enough to think this couldn’t be his final day on the Aionach.

  The guards had left the lobby in decent order. The men spent a minute rifling through drawers and cracking into the filing cabinets, but they found little of use apart from a spare handgun beneath the desk. A set of steps descended to the double doors at the entrance. Jiren was careful not to walk past any of the large windows as he crossed the room and lifted himself up for a look out the narrow glass pane above one of the doors.

  “What does it look like out there?” Rostand Beige asked as he finished flipping through a pile of papers.

  “There must be close to a hundred of them out front. Probably at least that many around the other sides, too.” It’s going to be a miracle if we survive this, Jiren almost added.

  “One day in the big city and we’
ve already got a reputation,” said Derrow, “despite the fact that we’ve been very careful not to leave any survivors.”

  “You’re forgetting about the other prisoners,” said Rostand Beige. “The soldiers must have seen them leaving.”

  “Or else they caught them and those sons of bitches gave us up,” said Frasier Dent.

  Jiren knew Frasier had come to Belmond under duress. Though his father Erach had supported his decision to come, his Uncle Laagon had given him a browbeating for it. Since the outset of their journey, Frasier had been eager to cast a negative light on every problem that arose.

  “You would rather we left the other prisoners behind bars, Frasier?” Jiren said, staring him down.

  Frasier gestured toward the door. “If it spared us this. They were criminals, and we let them go free. Why shouldn’t we have expected them to turn on us as soon as it was convenient?”

  “Those men don’t owe us anything. We set them free without condition. Besides, I don’t think it was them. This place should’ve been swarming with soldiers an hour ago, and for some reason it wasn’t. I think there’s something bigger going on.”

  “Jiren, let me interrupt you for a second,” said Rostand. “I just found this. It was in one of the drawers.” Rostand handed him a piece of laminated paper. The corners of the plastic were peeling and curled inward.

  Jiren studied it for a moment before realizing it was a floor plan of the building. “There’s a basement. A whole second level underground. It’s small, but we can get to it.”

  “Is there another way out from down there?” asked Frasier Dent.

  “It’s a prison,” said Derrow. “What do you want, two back doors and a fire escape?”

  Jiren held the floor plan in front of Derrow’s face and tapped the page. The label next to his finger read EXT. DOOR. “What do you suppose this is?”

  Derrow gave him a wry smile. “A back door.”

  Jiren nodded. “The service entrance.”

  “They did specifically use the word surrounded,” Frasier Dent reminded them. “I’m sure they know about every door and they’ve got them all covered.”

  Jiren mulled it over. “You’re right. This is a good find, Ros, but I doubt they’d overlook something like a back entrance. Chances are it’s just as heavily guarded. Back to Plan A, then. We fight it out, here and now.”

  The thought of what he and his friends were about to go through sent Jiren’s bowels into a tumult. The odds were hopeless, and there was nothing he could do to avoid putting them in the way of further harm.

  The projected voice came once more from outside. “This is your final warning. You have one minute to exit the building.”

  “You heard the man,” Jiren said, loud above the murmur. “Blackhands, with me. The rest of you, arm yourselves and find a window, a hole in the wall—anything. No one leaves this building until after the eight of us have cleared a path. Oh, and one more thing. I don’t want anybody shooting unless the soldiers shoot first. Make those bullets last. Now, let’s send up their souls.”

  “Send up their souls,” said Rostand, clapping him on the back. “See you after.”

  When Jiren looked at Ros, there was something trusting in the younger man’s eyes, a vicarious confidence Jiren wished wasn’t there. It reminded him of the way he trusted Raith. But in Ros there was an innocence, too, the way a child looks to a parent to provide comfort in a dire situation.

  Jiren was the only councilor left now. His vow was to protect the people of Decylum. But in a situation like this, how could he? He had already surrendered once in the interest of preventing further bloodshed. He’d given these Scarred men a chance to treat them fairly, and they’d locked them up instead. If his gut told him true, the Scarred would never let them leave the city alive. Better to die fighting for our freedom than to live in the bonds of merciless men. “If it goes badly, fall back and get inside,” Jiren said.

  With nods of understanding, the blackhands followed him down the steps while Rostand and the others scurried into place behind desks and armchairs and shelving units. The metal clap bars cha-chunked as Jiren shouldered through the doors and stepped into Infernal’s blinding whitewash. Descending the remaining stairs, they stepped off the curb and halted. Soldiers were everywhere, standing poised to fire, laid up behind the long shadows of adjacent buildings, in and around rusted vehicle chassis, and perched in second- and third-story window bays across the street.

  “Keep it coming,” said one of the soldiers. He waved them on, the plastic orange road cone he’d been using as a megaphone dangling from his other hand.

  Jiren couldn’t see the man’s face beyond the glare of daylight, but he suspected it was the one who’d addressed them: Captain something-or-other, head of something important-sounding. I’ll save this Captain for last, Jiren decided. Let him watch his troops die on the pavement the same way I had to watch my brothers die in the sand. Jiren took a step forward, ready to ignite. “This is as far as we go until your men lower their firearms.”

  The Captain chewed his lip and spat. “Our firearms stay right where they are until the rest of you come outside. Drop whatever trick you’re trying to play here, son. Time to give up.”

  “Not gonna happen, commando. We’re not criminals, and you’re not locking us up again. Tell your dways to point those things at the ground, and we’ll walk out of here without anybody having to get hurt.”

  The Captain stretched out his palms in display of his troops. “What is it about this situation that makes you think you have any room to negotiate?”

  “You’re treating us as criminals when we haven’t done anything to justify it.”

  The Captain lifted his eyebrows. “You haven’t? Tell that to my Fourth Platoon, and all the families who’ve had to bury their sons today.”

  “And what should I tell my brothers before we die? What will you tell your men while they’re chipping the gold from our teeth and turning out our pockets? Will you tell them we deserved our deaths, or that we earned them?”

  “You wish for death? Fine. It is, after all, one of the two options available to you. The day’s getting long, and I’m tired of waiting.”

  “Death is no threat at all to a man facing worse, and we’re all facing worse. Before you do something you’ll regret, Captain, consider that we’ve got nothing to lose. You look like you have plenty to lose. Let us go, and save yourself the trouble of having to pay that price.”

  “I’ve already explained to you that going free isn’t one of your options. Now, do as I ask, and you’ll keep your lives. You’ve stretched my patience thin already.”

  The Captain raised his arm and held it aloft, two fingers pointing toward the sky. The soldiers shifted their grips on their weapons and sighted in. The blackhands flexed their fingers. The Captain froze there and waited, giving them another long moment to reconsider.

  Jiren sighed. “We’ve made our choice, Captain.”

  “Death it is, then.”

  The Captain’s wrist twitched forward.

  Jiren had time to take half a breath before the world exploded.

  Lead shattered around him, pelting his shield so hard he had to step back to stay on his feet. The impacts sent a flood so strong coursing through him that he felt bloated from the rush of energy. Heat swelled inside his chest and built there, aching to be let out. A friendly volley came from behind, and the enemy began to fall.

  Everything slowed.

  The soldiers vibrated, heads bobbing, firearms jumping in their grip, creasing the shoulder fabric on their jackets. Four soldiers crowded around the Captain and threw their arms over him, pulling him back behind a low wall.

  Jiren and the other blackhands dispersed, zipping across the parking lot like roman candles. In an instant he was tearing limbs asunder, painting the sky in sanguine trails. Firearm barrels twisted in his grip, housings snapped, spyglasses shattered. He flowed from one enemy to the next, not one of his movements wasted. Wails and screams of agony came
to his ears well after he’d dismantled the soldiers who spoke them. Heat radiated from him until each body he touched turned to sopping wet mud in his hands.

  Soon segments of bone had begun to poke through along his fingers like meat chewed off a prime rib, the eggshell phalanges glossy beneath smoldering black flesh. He was across the street, leaping between windows to silence the snipers who remained. He ejected a soldier from a room on the third floor of an old brick-front office building and turned back toward the prison to check on it. He was breathing hard, panting like an animal, feral and savage.

  The jailhouse surrounds were littered in flesh, the city’s neutral palette doused in uncanny bursts of red. The Captain was still crouching behind the low wall with two of his original four bodyguards flanking him. They were popping up to take occasional shots toward the prison, but this seemed more in the interest of deterring would-be attackers than actually hitting anyone. Their ammunition must be running low by now, Jiren thought. He shifted his gaze toward the jailhouse. Everyone’s ammunition must be running low.

  Before long, the bursts of machine gun fire had dwindled to single shots, leaving large swathes of dead air between them. The sounds of gunfire faded to fleeing footsteps and moans of suffering. The Captain sees the error of his decision now. He knows the terror of defeat. Soon he’ll know the horrors of a slow death. Still, something feels strange. I couldn’t have predicted our victory would be so decisive. Did I overestimate their numbers? When he noticed the crowd of soldiers marching around the far side of the building at a jog, Jiren’s heart sank. He hadn’t overestimated them. The fleeing soldiers hadn’t been fleeing at all; they had been summoning reinforcements.

  He studied his hands, raw and charred, almost beyond bleeding. Igniting was like holding your hands over an open flame and seeing how long you could keep them there. The gifted had tougher skin than most, but the longer they held one continuous ignition, the harder it became for those natural resistances to remain protective.