Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

  Dungot stepped up closer behind him, waving a hand to get his attention. Takal watched him with a frown. He whispered to Grimes as he extended a thin journal in one hand and a writing implement in the other. “Can you describe the script you saw? Or draw it?”

  “I didn’t get a clear look,” Grimes said, waving the book and pen off, still trying to keep his attention on Elliot, who might have started to initiate contact. It was always the most perilous moment. “Never seen writing like that before. Curvy and complicated. Elegant.”

  “Fascinating,” Dungot said, jotting down his some notes. He stepped back to ask something of Takal, who set down her rucksack and opened it to rummage inside amid the books.

  Grimes put the dwarf out of his mind. He looked down and saw Artis was pressed against Abigail’s leg and was visibly shivering, her ears folded back. She gave a hissing noise, staring at nothing. Cats didn’t need Strangelight to see unnatural things. Still, Artis was ordinarily a brave little creature. Abigail gave a yelp as the cat jumped on her leg and climbed straight up, her ears flattened back. She reached the satchel and clung there, making a strange noise in the back of her throat. Abigail struggled to keep her lumitype steady with one hand, reaching back to deal with the cat with the other. “Get down.”

  “Darkness comes,” Elliot said, his voice slow and strange, even given he was wearing his hood. “It rises and calls to us.”

  Grimes opened his mouth to warn Elliot and Abigail to get back, but the words didn’t come. The sky went black, and not from the clouds that had been rolling in. It was as though day had been exchanged for night in the blink of an eye. He peered up in fearful disbelief to see stars shining through those few gaps not filled with heavy clouds. The sun was gone, as were the moons.

  His shadow lengthened in front of him where he blocked the Strangelight, becoming long and wide. From its darkness, something black and inky emerged and took form. It was indistinct, though it had the vague shape of a man. In the murky darkness that might have been its head were two gleaming points, and wisps of darkness rose like smoke from them.

  Grimes was terrified, but his fear compelled him to step forward, charging his gauntlets. His only thought was to get between this thing and the others. In doing so he was blocking one of the lumitypes. Mel predictably yelled, “Grimes, get out of the way!”

  “Not bloody likely,” he said in a growl. They were so focused on their investigative routine that they couldn’t see that things had already gone very wrong. This thing resembled a specter, but he knew it wasn’t.

  “Let Elliot try to make contact,” Abigail hissed, still adjusting her lumitype. Kincaid and Mel were occupied removing the first exposed spectragraph plates from their machines and loading another.

  “Open your eyes and look at it,” Grimes snarled. “This is no ghost.”

  The shadowy figure raised one limb and pointed at Elliot. Amid the shadows, something brighter flickered, orange like fire, in a pattern that resembled runes around its hand. They began to brighten and move in a configuration that was almost hypnotic.

  “I will be the doorway,” Elliot said. His voice was not his, and these were not the phrases he should be saying. A caller might try to address a manifested spirit, to draw its attention, to greet it and negotiate with it, to find out whatever it was that troubled it and bound it to a given place. Elliot was not the sort to begin muttering strange gibberish for no reason.

  “It’s got his mind,” Grimes warned.

  He swallowed his fear and rushed the thing, sparks flying from his closed fist. His suit was built to allow him to interact with insubstantial beings, but his punch encountered no resistance. Shadows shredded and scattered where his fist passed, making him stumble. There was a sound like shrieking wind, and he looked back to see the shadows converging on Elliot, who let loose an incoherent noise and fell to his knees, clasping both hands to his head. Shreds of darkness swirled around him faster and faster.

  Grimes felt as though a glass of icy water had been thrown down his back. He was taken back to when his last caller went down and the scream he had heard then. A caller was always the most vulnerable member of the team—the hood and their training were intended to open their minds to contact with the other. It was up to Grimes—as jammer—to keep him safe. He moved closer and tried to seize the swirling darkness. This time his hands closed on something that felt like a wriggling serpent beneath his grip. He pulled at it desperately, but it didn’t budge.

  Dungot stepped forward. Arcane runes sprang into being around his own hand as he attempted something with his magic—no doubt to banish the darkness. There was a flash of greenish light and a sound like a pistol shot. Then Dungot went flying backward with great force. He cracked into the wooden bannister behind the walkway and broke through. Takal went to him in an instant, moving quite fast despite her size. She grabbed his arm and kept him from falling to the courtyard far below.

  Grimes yanked again at the cords of darkness around Elliot and something gave way. The shadows tore apart, but the myriad pieces soon reassembled into the manlike form several feet away. The spiteful points of light that were its eyes glared at Grimes. Still on his knees, Elliot hissed in that wrong voice, “This one is mine!”

  “Get Elliot back!” Grimes shouted to the others. “We need to get him inside! Take the hood off. Takal, carry him if you must!”

  He moved to stand between the entity and the team. Mel was already to Elliot; she unclasped the straps securing his hood, tearing it off his head. Takal glanced at Dungot in case he wanted to countermand the order, but the dwarf nodded consent. She scooped up Elliot and ran in long strides back the way they had come. Abigail drew her pistol and Kincaid his club, but they were backing more slowly away. Lestingway had rushed over to the Strangelight projectors and was deactivating them. Grimes knew why—the Strangelight allowed them to see invisible things, but doing so granted some beings a greater ability to affect the world than if they had remained unseen and intangible.

  Mel did not immediately follow. She unhitched one of her devices from the straps on her chest, a small metal box with a crank handle on one side like a children’s toy. She took hold of this and cranked it. The box emitted a terrible noise, a discordant and headache-inducing racket like fingernails on a blackboard. The entity had been staring fiercely at Elliot, but at this sound it turned to face her, sufficiently distracted. It raised a hand toward her and the machine blazed with greenish white flames. She dropped it, and it shattered into pieces on the pavement stones.

  Dungot stepped up to Mel and took her arm. “Let’s go! Quickly!”

  “Get the lumitypes!” she yelled, pulling free. Kincaid gritted his teeth but then rushed forward to seize the nearest tripod while Mel got the other one. At last, they backed away.

  Grimes stood his ground, staring at the creature, thinking he should fight it, but his legs had locked up. It did not attack, just staring coldly at him before it began to fade. The darkness and stars vanished as the sky returned to daylight, bringing with it the sun, as though it had never been gone. Finally, Grimes could move again, and he fell back to rejoin the others, wondering all the while if the unholy thing felt smug satisfaction at their retreat.

  • • •

  THEY LEFT THE BATTLEMENTS COMPLETELY before they stopped to catch their breath. Takal soon put Elliot back on his feet. The caller seemed dazed but not hurt. Grimes took charge of him, putting one of Elliot’s thin arms over his own shoulders to steady him. Abigail told Kincaid to carefully recover the rest of their abandoned gear while they checked on Elliot. Dungot snapped his fingers a couple of times in front of Elliot’s eyes, then moved them back and forth, checking to see that his eyes tracked.

  “I think he’s back to himself,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” Elliot insisted in a quiet tone. Despite the protest, he was unsteady on his feet, and he blinked as if confused. They waited to speak about what had transpired. When Kincaid returned and their gear was secured, they took the
lift down, the silence between them heavy and oppressive. It seemed like a shared decision to wait until they were alone again before they started to talk about what had happened. They learned from Sergeant Webster that the sky hadn’t changed from his perspective, nor had he seen the manifestation. His only warning that something was going wrong was by their shouts and actions.

  “Well, that was all pretty damned peculiar,” Grimes said after another long quiet moment of mutual introspection. They were back in their borrowed quarters and behind closed doors. “A close call. Never seen a manifestation go bad so quickly.” Not even that last time, when I lost my old team, he thought, but he did not say it aloud. He released some of the pressure from his suit with a hiss of escaping air. It smelled vaguely of ozone, making him feel a little queasy. He sat down on one of the chairs near Elliot. He put a hand on the caller’s shoulder. “Glad you’re all right, lad.”

  Dungot asked him, “What did it say to you? Do you remember anything?”

  Elliot shook his head. “I heard a sound first, like the whispering of many voices. It was confusing. I was distracted trying to sort them out. But once I sealed the hood, it all came rushing in. I felt like that thing was right in my hood with me, pressing into my skull. It was inside my head before I could stop it. Never had the chance to so much as try a greeting. It had a very powerful will. I tried to fight off the possession, but I don’t think I’d have managed if Grimes hadn’t distracted it. I don’t remember anything specific like words or sentences, just malice and glee. I’m not sure what it intended.”

  “Nothing good,” Grimes said. “Still, why possess you and not those two guards? Makes no sense.”

  “I’m not sure this was the same entity responsible for the deaths,” Lestingway said, leaning against one of the walls, his arms crossed in front of him. When the others looked at him in surprise he added, “I’m sure they’re connected, don’t get me wrong. But it gave no sign of being able to attack physically. Possession was its goal, as Elliot said.”

  “I don’t think it had fully manifested,” Dungot said. “Though given what was described of the casualties, I’m inclined to agree with your conclusion. If the guards were torn limb from limb, that suggests something more tangible, more frenetic. I wonder if it might be helpful to examine the remains. Forensics can be a useful tool.”

  Both Abigail and Lestingway made vaguely affirmative noises, though neither seemed enthusiastic.

  Mel and Abigail had taken over one side of the room, and they worked with Kincaid to unpack their alchemical equipment and the wide variety of substances required for them to develop their spectragraph exposures.

  “I think we can manage without,” Mel said with a grimace.

  Abigail passed her lumitype to Mel and then pulled up a chair to the table where the others were seated. “Let’s take this one step at a time. What provoked it? Certainly there had to have been other people in the vicinity since the killings. They had to recover the bodies, put up barricades, and I presume there were still patrols in the vicinity. Yet no one else was attacked. Why manifest right when we arrived? Elliot, are you sure you didn’t call to it?”

  “No, I didn’t get the chance.”

  “The Strangelight, then,” Lestingway said. “It was feeding on the light. I’ve seen it before, though never as dramatically as that.”

  “It hasn’t ever been conclusively proven that malevolent spirits become stronger by exposure to the Strangelight,” Abigail countered. She seemed to find the idea personally offensive. “Strangelight is a passive energy.”

  “There’s no such thing as passive energy,” Lestingway returned. The two investigators began to argue about that, but Grimes was watching the dwarf. Dungot wore a deep frown and was having a whispering exchange with Takal. He began thumbing through one of his books, perhaps the one he had been trying to find up on the battlements. Finally, he shoved the book in front of Grimes, tapping a finger on a diagram.

  “Is this like the script you saw?” the dwarf asked. “Before the manifestation?”

  The pages were mostly filled with dense script written in a language Grimes couldn’t read, though the right-hand page was dominated by several distinctive glyphs. Each was highly curved and featured elaborate ornamentation. “Might have been,” he answered. “Didn’t get a long look at it, but it did resemble what you have there.”

  Dungot cleared his throat to interrupt the debate. “Gentlemen! And ladies, of course. Listen. I don’t think we’re dealing with a spirit at all.” He paused dramatically. “I am willing to predict and speculate that this is in fact an infernal matter. An umbral reaver, specifically—a shadow infernal. They are relatively easy to summon, but they can be quite powerful.”

  This declaration was met with shocked silence for the space of several long seconds until everyone tried to talk at once, except for Kincaid, who just looked skeptical and confused. The pounding in Grimes’ head worsened. He was aware of the rapid beating of his heart and felt an icy trickle of sweat going down his spine. The word infernal sent a shiver of fear straight through him. He smashed a hand down on the table violently, prompting them to stare in his direction.

  “All right, are we listening now?” He was not quite shouting, but his voice was intense. “Before any of you get too excited about what’s what and how to proceed and whether can we test this or that, let’s take a moment to check ourselves. This changes things. We can’t do this job. We should get the hell out of here and be on the next train back to Ceryl. Let’s summon Midwinter and tell him to find someone else, preferably someone from the gods-be-damned Order of Illumination. They should be called over as quickly as they can get their pointy boots and pointy hats on.”

  “Excuse me for not being knee-deep in understanding the differences between every ghost, haunt, or spirit,” Kincaid said, “but what’s an infernal? You don’t mean like in the stories?”

  “Exactly like that, yes,” Grimes said. “And worse. They’re horrible. Far worse than ghosts.”

  “Hold on a minute, Grimes,” Abigail said, facing him squarely. “Even if this is an infernal, and we’re not certain about that—”

  “I feel confident I am correct,” Dungot said.

  “Regardless,” she continued, “infernals are still very much part of our purview, and an area where there is much we could still learn. I agreed to take this job, and I will not shirk from it at the first sign of peril. Midwinter is paying a hefty sum for our expertise, and this might represent an ongoing relationship that could be of great significance to the Workshop in the long term. More important, he is relying on us to resolve this situation to ensure the safety of the royals and the government itself. This is too important to walk away from because we had a bit of a scare on the battlements.”

  “A bit of a scare?” Grimes said hotly. “That thing almost took over Elliot’s mind. It nearly sent Dungot to his death in the courtyard. Infernals are serious. Deadly serious. None of the rest of you has dealt with them before, but I have. You don’t mess around with infernals. This isn’t some mischievous grymkin or angry ghost.” He saw the face of his old caller screaming in pain, his eyes entirely black and filled with smoke before his soul was ripped from him

  “Now, Grimey,” Mel said, leaning over to pat his arm, “you’re always talking like that. We’ve had risky encounters before, you and I. We can handle this, now that we know what we’re dealing with. I can narrow the scope of our gear. I have several pieces of equipment I think will be helpful.”

  “This is a bad idea,” He insisted flatly. “When it comes to infernals, we’re amateurs.”

  Abigail calmed her voice. “We have the entire team. Plus experts and additional manpower. An infernal is dangerous, yes. But so are many of the other things we deal with. We didn’t get into this line of work to avoid risks. We explore the boundaries of what is known. We’ll be cautious and use every precaution. Strathmoore wouldn’t want us to give up.”

  Grimes made a noise in his throat. “You don
’t even know if Strathmoore is still alive. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

  “Okay, Commander Keller then. Keller wouldn’t want us to give up either. He trusted this job to us.”

  This silenced Grimes, as he had a great deal of respect for Keller. While everyone who interacted with the Workshop saw Strathmoore as its leader—and certainly he was its founder—day-to-day decisions fell to his right-hand man, Keller. He was the one who kept tabs on all the investigators and supervised assigning cases. No one really knew how involved Strathmoore was in reviewing any of their discoveries, though rumors suggested he was preoccupied with a special project.

  Kincaid spoke into the tense silence. “Nobody answered me, but based on the group histrionics, I’m going to assume infernals are, in fact, real. Nightmare creatures that bargain with people for their souls—those kinds of infernals, right?”

  Lestingway said, “Yes, they’re very real. Fortunately, they can’t come to Caen easily. They require an invitation. Often from people—well, arcanists primarily—who desire power or knowledge. Whatever they offer in exchange for their services, there is only one thing they want—souls. It’s like gold to them.”

  Dungot cleared his throat. “There are infernals, and then there are infernals. Not all are the same. The most formidable ones are the dealmakers—they’re the ones who write the contracts and seal the bargains. If what we saw was an umbral reaver, it’s not one of those. It’s dangerous, make no mistake. But it would be of a lesser caste, like a foot soldier. Called conscriptus, for that reason. Umbrals are cunning, but they are warrior-slaves in their society, bound to do the bidding of greater masters. We can handle one. If we’re careful.”