Though the equipment was predominantly Cygnaran, bits of Khadoran gear had also been integrated into the mounds of salvage. The helmet from a suit of Man-o-War armor looked down at her from atop a blasting pike leaning against some ammunition crates. Abigail briefly wondered if some accountant in a Khadoran garrison somewhere was pulling his beard out trying to understand where all of his artillery casings were disappearing to.
“They have no idea what they’re taking,” Abigail said to herself.
Deceased soldiers, Khadoran and Cygnaran alike, were tied among their battlefield possessions. Though it was hard to tell—she could only see a limited portion of the heaps at any given time—she thought there had to be dozens of them. With the civil war in Cygnar and renewed hostilities over Llael, the grymkin had their pick of wounded soldiers left for dead on the battlefield. Certainly their number wouldn’t be noticed missing among all of the carnage.
Something small caught her eye among the debris at her feet. She crouched down and picked up a tiny stone figure from the floor. Like those on the windowsill of Y322, the figure had been given enlarged ears and lanky arms.
“He was here,” she said. She closed her fist around the figure. “He has to be here somewhere. Mr. Boden!”
There was the faint sound of movement ahead. For a moment, Abigail froze, straining to hear while watching the tops of the heaps for any sign of trapperkin.
“Kincaid? Where are you?”
“I’m coming,” Kincaid called in response behind her. “Just got turned around.”
Abigail pressed forward with caution, her pistol raised in one hand and the stone figure gripped tightly in the other. More than ever, the heaps of stolen items pressed in, causing her to slide sideways to clear the spaces between. She passed within inches of a Winter Guard missing her lower jaw; Abigail closed her eyes for a moment to avoid staring the dead woman in the face.
She stepped out of the narrow space and left the Winter Guard behind. Then she saw him. Cocooned in a collection of strangers’ hair and lashed to an arsenal of military hardware was a middle-aged man in hospital garb, his face sunken and pale. It was Nicholas Boden.
“Kincaid! Kincaid, I found him!” Abigail rushed to the patient’s side and began tearing at the hair that held him in place. Boden’s eyes fluttered open long enough for him to catch sight of his rescuer, then they closed and his body seemed to go limp, sagging in its prison. “He’s alive!”
“Hang in there,” she said to the unconscious Boden. “We’ve got you. We’re going to get you out of here.”
Tearing the wrappings of hair proved more difficult than she had anticipated. Individually, the strands were weak, but together they were as strong as a thick rope. Abigail cast about for something sharp to use, but despite the amassed military equipment, nothing presented itself.
“I need a knife. Has to be one here somewhere.”
There was a crash behind her. She turned, expecting to find a winded Kincaid offering some tool suited for the job at hand. Instead, a hunched form resembling the stone carvings on Boden’s windowsill slid down the side of an adjacent heap, helmets and ammunition crates toppling end over end in its wake. She had an instant to register its gaunt form, its teeth gnashing within its elongated snout, and then it charged her with surprising speed.
Instinct took over. She brought her pistol to bear and worked the trigger. Her aim was true, but the trapperkin was quick. The creature swerved but didn’t avoid the shot entirely. The bullet tore through its shoulder. A gut-wrenching howl filled Abigail’s ears, and then the trapperkin was upon her. One swipe of its claws knocked her pistol from her grip and sent it clattering over the mass of junk. A second cut through her coat and batted her aside and knocked her down, though the damage done to the creature’s shoulder robbed it of some of its force.
It came on, slashing and howling. On her back, Abigail scrambled to put distance between herself and her assailant. She could hear Kincaid shouting as he rushed to find her. A well-placed kick to the face turned the trapperkin aside, and then Abigail was climbing the nearest heap. She hurled a stray boot and then a soldier’s mess kit down the slope behind her. The trapperkin dodged and ascended on her heels. But it had spent its life among its collection; it had no difficulties scaling the piles it had made. Rather than following directly, it took another course. In an instant, it stood atop the heap and lashed out at Abigail as she neared the summit.
The two crashed down the side, the trapperkin’s claws fighting to find purchase as it grappled with Abigail and tore at her clothing. Something struck her sharply in the back as they fell. She heard the fragile lumitype crunch and felt the strap slip from around her neck. The air left her in a rush. They bounced, rolled, and were knocked apart as they hit the floor.
Out of breath, she watched helplessly as the grymkin recovered and prepared to pounce. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine its claws carving her to pieces. She could see herself bound to one of the heaps with strands of her own hair and the shredded remains of her clothing. The trapperkin shrieked and prepared to lunge.
A familiar hiss and yowl filled the air as a streak of grey-and-white fur launched itself from a munitions crate. Claws extended, Artis collided with the trapperkin and held tightly to the creature’s back. Fangs followed claw, and the trapperkin shrieked with the same tone of panic Abigail had heard when Artis had charged into cell Y322.
The trapperkin flailed, smashing its body into warjack parts and dead soldiers alike until it finally dislodged Artis. The cat hissed. Her hair stood on end, and her green eyes had gone wide in a way that made her appear fierce and unknowable. Instinct took over at the sight of the trapperkin, and Abigail knew Artis would fight to the death so long as the grymkin remained.
“Get down!”
Abigail turned to see Kincaid running toward them. Instead of the crowbar, he was holding a gun. Though she had limited first-hand experience with firearms, she could tell it was a carbine, like the ones she’d read trencher commandos used. Abigail dropped, and in the next instant the deafening blast of the carbine echoed off of the mounds of pilfered objects.
The shot went wide. Alerted to the new threat, the trapperkin broke into a run, scrambling over its hoard and keeping itself behind cover as it circled them.
Kincaid struggled with the carbine’s ammo wheel—it appeared to be stuck. When he finally got it working again, he snapped off the shot hurriedly and missed again. He was clearly having difficulties with the unfamiliar weapon, but Abigail expected she would have done no better.
The trapperkin disappeared amid the heaps, though she could hear it rushing onward, setting up a new angle of attack. Artis stood protectively at her side and let out another hiss. She looked about for her own weapon but found no sign of it amid the clutter. For all of the military equipment surrounding them, she spotted no guns, and she wondered if the grymkin hadn’t deliberately cast away any obvious weapons, not wanting them to be used against it in its lair. If so, it clearly didn’t know the risk of hoarding artillery shells.
A blur of movement signaled the reemergence of the trapperkin. It had flanked them and now careened down the side of a nearby heap, closing on Kincaid, who still struggled to reload his carbine. If his third shot was anything like the first two, Abigail knew a miss was all but guaranteed, and then the trapperkin would be on him.
In the second before Kincaid snapped the carbine up and prepared to fire, an idea occurred to Abigail. A suicidal, last-resort idea.
“The crates! Shoot the crates!”
Kincaid had brought the carbine to bear and was tracking the trapperkin, but he shifted his aim and fired without hesitation.
The side of the junk pile erupted in a concussive blast as the shell casings inside the munitions crate exploded. Kincaid was thrown into the air, crashing into the side of another heap. Abigail was likewise knocked from her feet. A piece of shrapnel nicked her cheek, and bits of debris rained down around them to clatter against the surrounding mess. F
or a time there was no sound but an incessant ringing in Abigail’s ears, and she lay still, waiting for the sense of disorientation to subside. When she recovered her bearings, she looked about for Kincaid and crawled toward his crumbled form. The carbine lay some feet away, the barrel bent beyond usefulness.
“Hey,” she said, shaking Kincaid by the shoulders. Her voice sounded far away in her ears. “Hey, you all right?”
Kincaid opened his eyes and flexed his jaw as though trying to get his ears to pop. He blinked twice then shook his head.
“I thought for a moment you’d gone and blown yourself up,” Abigail said.
“Two words. Hazard pay,” Kincaid said. “I’m adding demolitions expert to my list of qualifications.”
“You can put me down as a reference.”
“Did we kill it?”
Abigail looked over the smoldering crater blasted into the side of the junk pile. A clawed arm rested a few feet away, a black ooze weeping from its stump.
“Looks like it. Where did you find that carbine? It’s the only gun I’ve seen in this whole mess.” Abigail gestured to the masses surrounding them.
“I saw it when I was getting the tags off of that first trencher with the wounded leg. It was strapped under his stretcher. Must have been paranoid about some Khadoran getting him in his sleep.”
She hooked one of Kincaid’s arms about her shoulders and helped him to his feet. A trickle of blood ran from his lip, and a deep cut spanned his forehead, but he didn’t look so bad, considering he’d set off a case of artillery shells no more than a few yards from his feet. Abigail had sustained similar injuries, and although her body ached, nothing seemed broken.
Artis gave a soft cry and trotted over to weave herself between Abigail’s legs.
“Thanks, Artis,” Abigail said. “I’m buying you a fresh fish when we get out of here.”
• • •
USING A PIECE OF JAGGED METAL left from the blast, they cut Boden loose and hoisted him onto a recovered stretcher. Eight days wasting away in the cavern had left him emaciated; he looked more like a fragile husk than a man. They carried him out of the trapperkin’s lair and back into the Yellow Ward. His skin was taut and lined with bruises where the strands of hair had held his body aloft for so long. All of this was to be expected and would hopefully heal. It was the mark on Boden’s shoulder that most interested Abigail.
Branded into Boden’s flesh was a circle encompassing a series of crude shapes. She recognized the thumbnail of a moon and a pair of crosses encapsulated in their own small spheres. It took her a moment to recognize these smaller circles as the eyes of some lean and barren face, the forehead of which was branded with the crescent moon. It was a symbol she had no familiarity with, and so she replicated the design in her notebook before Boden was taken away by hospital staff to receive care in another part of the facility. The brand had appeared red with agitation, and it was her assumption Boden had received the mark after his abduction.
After emerging from the trapperkin’s lair, Kincaid had pushed the Yellow Ward’s panic switch, setting off a distant alarm. From there, things moved quickly. Collins arrived first, panting from his climb to the third floor. Upon seeing Boden and the hole in the floor of Y322, the head orderly nearly hyperventilated and left straight away to retrieve Dr. Howlett, even as other staff arrived.
Howlett looked into Boden’s cell with a disbelieving expression. He then took in the withered patient. His voice was strained as he asked, “How did you find him? Where was he?”
Abigail said, “Don’t ask. It wouldn’t make any sense to you. But I think the thing that took him is dead.”
Howlett sputtered something about his files, but she cut him off. “Get this man some medical attention immediately. He’s starving and dehydrated. If he dies, his family will never give you a moment’s peace.”
The man blinked at her for a moment then seemed to collect his senses. He barked commands at his orderlies, who obligingly took charge of the stretcher and took Boden away, headed to wherever their infirmary happened to be.
Howlett said, “I’ll have more questions for you, Professor.”
Then he followed after Boden, which was a relief to Abigail.
Eventually, Collins returned and offered to put them up in the staff quarters for the remainder of the evening, though the orderly would no longer look them in the eye when he spoke, and he left the moment he had shown them to their room.
At the room’s desk, Abigail sat with her notebook, examining the drawing she’d made of the symbols branded onto Boden’s arm. She traced the shapes with the tips of her fingers, eager to know the meaning behind them. Again she wished she had access to the Workshop’s library or even her own smaller but still formidable personal collection. She was eager to be off for home where she could give the brand the comprehensive research it deserved.
Once settled, she took time to jot down all the details that had occurred to her during her time in the trapperkin’s lair and a detailed account of the discovery and opening of the door in cell Y322. She then turned her thoughts to the investigation itself, her mind still buzzing with all she had experienced in a single evening. It was hard not to be excited—from what she had read, no one else had ever witnessed what she had and lived to tell about it. She wished there had been time to collect more evidence, more samples for examination. It all seemed a blur.
“I won’t soon forget this little jaunt,” Kincaid said to her. “Not every day someone like me travels through a magical door to fight a monster.”
He was reclining on one of the beds, his hands behind his head. One of the nurses had applied stitches to his forehead, though the gash from the explosion would likely leave a scar. Before lying down, he had spent time tinkering with the lumitype and examining the damage it had sustained. Several vital components had been broken, and it was clear they would need replacements parts and the expertise of the technicians at headquarters to get it working again. If nothing else, it would serve as a learning experience for Kincaid when they got back to Blackwell Hall.
“Not every day anyone goes through what we did. It was certainly an informative trip.” Abigail continued to leaf through her notebook. “I should have enough information here for several articles. It would be nice to have something published again, though only other people in the Workshop will see it.”
“You think there were more of them? Hard to imagine one creature caused all that trouble.”
“I’m virtually positive there was more than one,” Abigail said. “We got lucky not to run into the rest of its…brood or whatever.”
Abigail stopped when she reached the page where she had recorded the words of the patient named Karianna Rose. It had been such a strange, if brief, encounter, and she could almost hear the woman’s voice as she read the lines. Without thinking about, it she had written the exchange as a poem.
Just wipe your eyes,
say your goodbyes,
and follow me ever after.
There is a place where we will go
that only the defiers know.
They wait for us far, far below,
and we shall call them master.
There was something about the words Abigail found wholly unsettling. What should have been nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic held an odd attraction. Reading them sent a shiver down her spine in the same way that reading the letter from the Boden family had.
She closed her journal and opened Karianna’s file. For the second time, she read about the tragic loss of the woman’s children and her swift descent into madness, only this time Abigail gave the file more than a cursory glance. She read of not only the inciting incident but also the notes regarding the woman’s time in the institution, particularly her time in the Yellow Ward. Though the file made no reference to violent behavior, years of appointments and therapy sessions were recorded. It was Karianna’s admission date that drew Abigail’s attention: Glaceus 15, 607 AR. This date felt meaningful to her.
The incident report for Glaceus 15, 607 AR, detailed the actions of a young nurse who had doused herself with lantern oil and set herself afire in the middle of the Yellow Ward. By the time the staff had extinguished the flames, the majority of her body had suffered severe burns and she soon succumbed to these injuries. The death of the young nurse, while tragic, was not what directly interested Abigail. It was the before and after that caught her attention.
“Curious,” Abigail said.
“Hmm?” Kincaid looked on the verge of sleep, his chin resting on his chest.
“Never mind.”
“Now I’m curious. What’s curious?” Kincaid cleared his throat and sat up, rubbing his eyes with the back of one fist.
“The escalation of strange disturbances in the Yellow Ward have a definitive starting point,” Abigail said. “Before it, there were long stretches of time between major problems. After, there seems to have been a death or disappearance every month or more. The change is remarkable.”
“Huh.” Kincaid still looked tired, but Abigail could tell he was doing his best to pay attention. “Well, your beastie had to show up sometime. That must have been it.”
“Only in part. Many of these incidents bear no similarities to what we saw. It wasn’t just the disappearances in the Yellow Ward. Most of these other things don’t point to trapperkin. They don’t make people gouge their eyes out or burn themselves alive. Something else was going on.”
Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology Page 12