Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

“We’re Cygnaran. You put hate in, you get hate out,” Grimes said. The jammer had been leading the way to keep watch for danger along the torn-up cobblestones of the road leading through Glynam. He had to shift in his saddle to face his companions. “We and Khador have been beating each other silly for hundreds of years. That doesn’t lead to a lot of mutual trust.”

  “Yeah, but it isn’t like we’re a trencher company storming the Empress’ palace,” Kincaid said.

  “I don’t think it matters. We could be spies, as he said. They look at us, and they see the guy who shot their buddy before breakfast.”

  “I’d never shoot a man before breakfast,” Kincaid clarified.

  “Given the way they treated us, they might think we were smuggling for the Resistance,” Elliot said.

  Grimes chuckled. “That’s us. The fiercest cat smugglers in western Immoren.”

  The three kept talking as they made slow progress through the town ruins. Mel’s attention shifted back to her work. She broke down the two damaged projectors, pulling apart the lens wheel from one and the dented housing of the other. Both the alchemical capacitors were good, so she set one of them aside for later use. She’d lost a limestone element when the Khadorans had knocked a projector around, but they were easy enough to replace. Her biggest concern was the delicate runeplate of the more damaged projector. It had been knocked out of place and scratched deeply. Runeplates were one of the few things she couldn’t fix in the field—Cronan Bailey was sure to give her no end of grief for it—so, she pocketed it and made a mental note to get an arcane mechanik to sort it out when they got back to Ceryl.

  She was so engrossed in her work that she almost didn’t hear Elliot when he spoke up several minutes later. The young caller stopped guiding the horses and said in a soft, small voice, “There’s something very wrong.”

  He had to repeat himself twice, louder each time, before Grimes and Kincaid heard him and stopped their conversation. Even Abigail hadn’t noticed. Everyone but the caller had been so engrossed in what they were doing they’d failed to notice they’d passed into what used to be the heart of Glynam.

  The few standing buildings were no more than broken pieces of wall with glinting shards of glass in the window-frames. The proud statue of some local lord that stood in the village square was now just a chipped column of pale stone in the rough shape of a man. They could see a few bodies stuck in the rubble around them, but all of that paled in comparison to the field of dead to the north, where the road stretched out of town down a long and gradual slope of grassland broken only by a dozen outlying farms.

  The nearest farms were smoldering wrecks, their fields reduced to a blasted landscape that looked like the skin of the moon Calder. Nearly a hundred bodies had been left where they fell to become food for the crows. Flocks of the black birds perched on looping nests of barbed wire that formed ugly hedges in the fields. Among them Mel saw scraps of red and patches of blue, but the predominant color before them was the brown-black of churned mud and soot.

  “No wonder they were so pissed,” Kincaid said.

  “Too right,” Grimes said. “Looks like a couple of companies fought it out here. Our Winter Guard friends must be the only ones left.”

  “Why are they still here if the battle’s over?”

  “Waiting for someone to relieve them, maybe, or to come help bury the bodies.” As Grimes said it, Mel noticed a paltry few fresh graves had been dug at the fringe of town. At least how dirty the Winter Guard had been now made sense.

  Before she could say as much, Elliot’s shoulders began to shake, though she couldn’t tell if he was overcome by the cold or by emotion. She was sure it had to be the most death he had ever seen in one place. On instinct, Mel placed a hand between his shoulder blades and tried to calm him, gesturing for Grimes, who knew him best.

  “They’re stuck here,” Elliot said softly to himself. “They’re all stuck here.”

  “What do you mean?” Mel tried to sound soothing.

  “Everyone’s stuck. Caught.” His voice seemed distant, as when he was communicating with spirits, though he hadn’t put on his hood yet.

  Mel would have pressed for more, but she caught Grimes’ eye as he shook his head sharply. He stepped closer to the young caller and spoke to him in low tones.

  Resolving to let Grimes handle him, she yanked the goggles on her forehead down over her eyes. With her other hand, she grabbed the Strangelight projector she’d cobbled together, screwed the capacitor in place, and powered it on. It began to hum and warmed up in her hands as the array of lenses spun up to speed and heat transferred to the chip of limestone within. Mel looked at Abigail, and the investigator gave a sharp nod.

  “Eyes, everyone,” Abigail said. Elliot stopped talking to Grimes long enough to pull on his hood while the rest pulled on their own goggles. She gave them a moment before she opened the aperture on the projector and shone it around them.

  The purplish glow of Strangelight cast the ruins in a strange, shimmering glow. Everywhere the light touched, gauzy, transparent forms of silvery white began to emerge from the wreckage of the buildings. They were long, ephemeral tails of spiritual energy trailing behind visages that melted between those of skeletons and the uncomprehending faces of the dead. Whole groups of them swirled through the silent streets like schools of fish in the sea, gliding on the invisible currents of a breeze no living thing could feel.

  For a long time, none of team members said anything, each taken aback by what the Strangelight revealed. Mel had never seen so many souls in one place. Her grip on the projector was so tight, it caused her palms to sweat. As she passed the beam of light back and forth, the cats began to yowl and hiss in their carriers. Abigail made soft cooing noises and reached back so Artis could sniff her through the bars, but the cats didn’t quiet down. As Abigail comforted her cat, Mel saw something moving within one of the buildings. In the glow of Strangelight, it was hard to make out, but it almost looked as if one of the spirits dipped down to a point of light in the air and was rebuffed. A small, blurry shape pressed up from where it tried to touch down. Mel reached a finger under her left lens and rubbed at one watering eye.

  “There are too many of them,” Abigail said as she pulled out and cradled Artis, looking at each new patch of souls Mel revealed as she swept the area with her light. Nearly every direction she pointed it illuminated another swirling group of spirits. “Surely some of them should have passed to Urcaen by now.”

  “Souls’ll linger after a violent death,” Mel said. “I’ve never been to a battlefield like this before. Maybe this is normal.”

  Abigail tapped her fingers as if counting and shook her head. “The kapitan said four days. Even with the delays that violent death can cause, this is abnormal. Far more of them should have passed on.”

  “Too right. Not everyone passes in the same timeframe, but this is uncanny.” Grimes kept a reassuring hand on Elliot as he spoke, but Mel could tell that even as the senior-most member of their team, Grimes was baffled.

  “There’s something…stopping them,” whispered Elliot. His head was tilted, and he strained as if listening to a distant voice.

  Kincaid shooed away one of the spirits as it drew close to his horse. “Damn, is this whole place haunted, then?”

  Mel answered, “These aren’t ghosts, Kincaid. Not yet. This is what ordinary souls look like before they pass to Urcaen.”

  “Not yet, you say. So, maybe they’re going to go bad on us?” Kincaid ducked another one of the souls slipping through the air overhead.

  “Possibly,” Grimes said. He sounded resigned. “Probably, even. This kind of violence is what makes ghosts and shades.”

  Mel nodded and added, “Especially if no one performed last rites. Still, for most people, Urcaen has a pull, like iron to a lodestone. To stick around, you need to have unfinished business left on Caen, like our friend back in Ceryl. Look at how—” Before she could make her observation, Abigail clapped her hands sharply together to get
their attention. She grabbed the reins Elliot had dropped.

  “All right, listen. This is clearly abnormal and worthy of study. But we’re not going to get anywhere by sitting around conjecturing. Mel, keep your projector running, and I’ll take notes as we move north.” She pointed down to where the main battle had occurred. “We can stop in that farmhouse on the edge of town. It still has enough of a roof to cover us for the night, and we can set up our equipment there to get some spectragraphs. Until then, everyone, keep your goggles on and your eyes open.”

  They agreed, and Abigail guided the wagon forward. As they rode through the town’s ruins, Mel thought she saw another one of the spirits moving toward a point of light, only to whisk away at the last moment, followed by yet another blurry shape in the air appearing where the spirit had tried to travel. Artis yowled again, and Mel’s projector began to blink erratically. She had to give it a few good thumps before the light came back strong.

  When they reached the farmhouse, Grimes and the investigators searched for survivors while Mel and Kincaid put their horses in the sagging stable and offloaded the equipment. Before long, she and the bouncer had laid out a ring of bedrolls and an array of the esoteric gear that would, theoretically, help them unravel this unusual phenomenon.

  As the two of them pulled the heavy iron lighting frames out of the wagon, Kincaid paused and looked out at the field of corpses. “I wonder why no one’s come to deal with the dead.”

  “Probably the people in charge wanted to run off and make a few more.” Mel wasn’t a fan of the wars her country had been waging off and on over the last six years. While each one had a rational, even reasonable, explanation, she couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the people responsible were so good at war and at so little else that they wanted to keep themselves in business.

  Kincaid chewed on that for a moment. “Do you think they’re still split up? The souls I mean. Like, reds stay to the east, swans to the west?”

  “Let’s hope not.” She nudged her end of the light stand to get Kincaid walking again. She liked the man, but she hoped that with time his wide-eyed wonder at the job would be replaced with a desire to simply see things through. They weren’t priests, and they weren’t philosophers. Let people like Strathmoore wonder about the why; she was only interested in the how. Specifically, the how to get it done.

  When the last of the gear was inside, Abigail and Grimes returned to report no survivors in the vicinity. Grimes and Elliott set out to make a simple meal of tinned meat and strong coffee while Kincaid and Mel set up the equipment. Mel had to coach the bouncer through the arrangement of several pieces, carefully naming them and explaining why this condenser coil needed to be placed in line before that projector array and a dozen other similar foibles of the gear. Strangely, a number of undamaged items weren’t functioning and required the two of them to strip them apart and carefully reassemble the pieces before they would work again. Even the alchemical capacitor she’d set aside earlier was oddly discharged. Fortunately, Kincaid was a fast study and Mel a patient tutor.

  As they worked, Abigail captured spectragraph plates from the farmhouse door with her lumitype, stacking the thin metal sheets atop the charred table in the common room to process later. While she did, Elliot sat in the center of the room wearing his helmet. The soft murmur of his attempt to communicate with the spirits around them was the only conversation in the house.

  When they sat down to eat, the farmhouse creaked around them as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the dilapidated building bled off its heat to settle into its bones.

  After they ate, Abigail laid out the situation, stroking Artis as she purred on the investigator’s lap. “Okay, everyone. We know there’s something very wrong going on in Glynam involving the souls of the people who died here. We know that at least some of them should have moved on, but observation indicates this isn’t the case. Theories are welcome.”

  Mel didn’t want to bring up what she thought she’d seen back in town without confirmation first. Instead, she prodded the caller. “Elliot, did you reach any of them?”

  “Some. The spirits are confused. They say that something is in their way,” Elliot said.

  “Something in the way. What do we think that is?” Abigail said, frowning.

  “Infernals?” Grimes asked. “Maybe an infernalist like that one in Caspia was here and wanted to reap a crop of souls.”

  “I don’t think so. This doesn’t feel like what we faced in Caspia. Plus infernals would be collecting the souls, not leaving them lying around.”

  “Maybe souls just do this sometimes?” asked Kincaid. “All the stuff you lot had me read about Elsinberg talks about a military parade of ghosts. Maybe this is similar.”

  Abigail shook her head. “Elsinberg is an unusual case, and those are definitely full-on ghosts. We suspect the involvement of the Orgoth in whatever caused the March of the Dead. Next?”

  Mel scratched her ear and swallowed before answering. “Grymkin?”

  Kincaid and Abigail shared a look. After a pause, Abigail said, “Why would you think grymkin?”

  “Well, the cats have been going crazy, for one. And my gear. The reds knocked it around, sure, but nothing like what would cause the kind of failures Kincaid and I saw when we put everything together.”

  “What do grymkin have to do with the restless dead?” Elliot asked.

  Mel shrugged. “No idea. But I saw something back in town before my projector started to get all blinkered. I had my goggles down for spirits and didn’t think much of it then, but now I’m wondering if it wasn’t gremlins.”

  “Wouldn’t the cats have driven them off?” asked Kincaid.

  “Normally yes, but when the Winter Guard were going through our things, they spread them out all over the place. We hauled the cats into the farmhouse before we brought in the gear. Maybe some of the little bastards slipped in when our backs were turned.”

  Abigail pulled down one of the spectragraph plates and tapped it against her palm. “It’s a theory. I don’t think gremlins explain what we’re seeing, but maybe they have friends. There’s a lot we don’t know about grymkin. If they’re mixed up in this, what’s our best approach?”

  “Keep riding,” Grimes suggested. “This isn’t our case. It’s in Elsinberg.”

  “I agree,” Kincaid said. “That Khadoran hothead made it clear that he didn’t want us messing around out here. I’ve spent enough time in Cygnaran prisons. I’d rather not become acquainted with the Khadoran variety.”

  “But if we find out what’s going on here, then maybe we can help these people,” Elliot said. “The souls are confused and getting agitated. If we don’t help them, it’ll get worse. They will turn into specters or shades, guaranteed.”

  “And that can’t happen.” Abigail looked around at the group over the top of her glasses. “I understand this is not an ideal situation, but if this isn’t what the Strangelight Workshop was made to do, I can’t fathom what is.”

  Grimes said, “This is a bad idea.”

  “Agreed.” Kincaid and the jammer shared a look of solidarity.

  “Noted. Elliot, Mel, what do you think?”

  The mechanik and the caller looked at each other. Mel grinned and said, “Let’s do what we do.” Elliot smiled gratefully and nodded agreement.

  • • •

  THEY MOVED THE GEAR INTO THE FIELDS behind the farmhouse while Kincaid kept watch on the town. If the Khadorans spotted them off the road here, there’d be hell to pay.

  Mel was excited; she’d heard Abigail’s stories about the grymkin she and Kincaid had faced at Ramarck, and she was jealous. In her several years with the Workshop, the only grymkin Mel had ever seen were the common gremlins. Getting the opportunity to see one of the other varieties like trapperkin or glimmer imps in the flesh would be another box checked on the long list of strange and supernatural things she had seen with her own eyes.

  Grimes had donned the encounter suit as a precaution and had Elliot
stay close by his side. The young caller groused about the broken satchel containing his own gear as the pair got into position. The knot he’d tied to keep it together kept slipping loose to spill the contents into the mud. Elliot wiped the muck off his hood and then pulled it on. Mel promised she would bang together a better solution for him before they set out again. Placated, he and Grimes set up in the flat space between a half-dozen blast craters north of the farmhouse. It looked like it had been a field before, perhaps of wheat or barley, but the tramping of boots and warjack feet left the field a sticky ruin. Mel even thought she saw the blast rings of Minuteman warjacks’ heartfire jets scorched on the ground.

  Around Grimes and Elliot, Mel placed three Strangelight projectors—one fewer than she could have, she noted, cursing the clumsy Khadorans again—facing out into the battlefield. Conduit cables ran from each projector to a large central capacitor, its impressive output boosted further by condenser modules socketed along the main lines.

  While Mel worked, Abigail pulled out her compass, a fine metal instrument inscribed with a ring of arcane runes. It was one of the more occult pieces of gear they carried and made Mel a bit uncomfortable: she had a habit of not trusting things she couldn’t pull apart and put back together.

  Abigail whistled as the compass’ central indicator twitched from one point to the next with a metallic snap. She grinned at Mel as she walked back to the capacitor to let Artis out of her carrier. “This is definitely the place to be.”

  Grimes grunted and tried to be casual as he inspected Mel’s work. “You check your surge overflow circuits?”

  “Stop it, you lunatic. You don’t have to check my work every time.”

  He made a little nonverbal noise in his defense and stepped in front of Elliot, putting his hands up in a ready position. “Do we have anything associated with a plan, then?”

  “Test the theory, record evidence, and refine,” Abigail answered.

  He shook his head and braced himself. “So, okay, then. No plan. Ready when you are, Mel.”

  Mel tripped several switches on the capacitor, and its low arcane hum filled the air. In a moment, the noise was matched by a chorus of soft whines from the projectors as their lenses spun up to speed. “Apertures opening in five. Eyes.”