Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

  Grimes had the most gear, and he began laying out the bulky Deflective Encounter Suit and voltaic gauntlets that both protected him from incorporeal foes and allowed him to interact with them. Kincaid selected one of the Strangelight projectors from their equipment to check its functionality. Elliot watched him and resisted the melancholy he could feel looming. Kincaid had taken to the equipment well, but he was still getting used to the gear and lacked that ready familiarity Mel had developed. He’d seen her open up, disassemble, and reassemble a Strangelight projector in record speed, all while carrying on a conversation. Kincaid glanced up at him, noticed his expression, and nodded with his head bowed.

  Eilish watched all of this from a distance, occasionally asking a question about the function of this piece of gear or that one. His questions were intelligent and perceptive, and it was clear a keen mind lurked beneath all that charm and polish. Elliot could not decide if that merited more or less trust.

  “Here you go,” Grimes said, holding out the hood. He hadn’t put on his skullcap or goggles, but he’d inflated the suit its specially charged air while the machinery attached to his chest hummed and churned.

  Elliot took the hood. It was heavy leather with thick shaded lenses and a small opening for breathing. On either side were switches allowing him to govern how much he heard and how much light was let into the goggles. When set to its highest level, it could block out almost all sound and light. When so isolated, it was far easier for him to hear the sometimes ethereal and plaintive cries of spirits. But that darkness also reminded him of his close brush with death as a child. There were times when he felt eager to shut out the world, but this wasn’t one of them.

  “We will be in the same chamber as the Ascendant Angellia’s remains,” he said softly to Grimes. “We will stand at the tomb of Alexei Tzentesci, the knight who was the first of nine to take the title ‘Husband of Angellia’ after guarding the iron box with her remains for—”

  “Dead people,” Grimes said. “What you’re saying is we get to stand in a tomb with some dead people. What I like to call, another day on the job.”

  Versh, Abigail, and Doctor Goodman returned shortly after they finished gearing up. “That was strange,” Abigail said once they were all together. “Father Murdoch wasn’t exactly keen on letting us into the crypts; I expected some hesitancy but not that much resistance.”

  “This happens to be a very sacred place,” Versh said. “His reticence is understandable. Besides, he acquiesced, did he not?”

  “Without Illuminated One Versh with us, we would never have been given leave to enter,” Doctor Goodman said.

  “Proving the Order of Illumination is good for something,” Abigail said. Versh ignored her.

  Elliot noticed that a pair of Knights of the Order of Keeping had accompanied them back into the antechamber. He raised an eyebrow at Abigail, but Versh intercepted the look.

  “Brothers Orlan and Dane will escort us to the crypts,” the Illuminated One said, gesturing to the two knights. He scowled at Eilish; Elliot was surprised he was going to let the arcanist accompany them.

  “The more, the messier,” Eilish chimed in.

  The knights led them through a bewildering array of halls and chambers, but Elliot could only tell they were headed west. They finally reached a white stone room empty save for a prayer altar dedicated to Morrow and Ascendant Angellia and a sturdy door flanked by a pair of sconces bearing guttering torches. The knights opened the door, revealing a gloom-enshrouded set of stairs leading down.

  One of the knights removed a torch from the wall sconce and handed it to Versh. “There are more torches below. Light them as you go,” he said, his voice tinny and distant behind his close-faced helm.

  Versh nodded and started down the steps. Abigail followed next, then Doctor Goodman, then Grimes. Kincaid came next, and Elliot and Eilish took up the rear.

  The stairs descended some thirty feet and ended in a wide passageway. Interment niches lined the walls of the passageway, each holding a simple stone coffin.

  Abigail and Goodman switched on their portable lumitypes, their attached projectors casting a weird purple glow through the gloom. Kincaid did the same with his larger dedicated projector, and the combined light cast strange shadows on the walls. They didn’t really need the torches now, but Versh dutifully lit each sconce as they pushed into the crypt.

  They moved slowly, casting about with lumitype and projector. After they revealed nothing, the group pressed on. The main passageway began to branch off, left and right.

  “We should not deviate from our present course,” Versh said. “We could get lost down here easily.”

  No one disagreed.

  They moved in silence for a few more minutes, then Abigail held up her hand signaling them to stop.

  “There are traces of spectral residue on some of the walls ahead,” she said. Elliot adjusted his goggles and was able to pick up the faint glow along the walls, what might have been evidence of a recent manifestation. It was thus far the first such sign they had seen. The two investigators took exposures with their lumitypes.

  “There’s something different about it, though,” Doctor Goodman said. “It seems degraded.”

  Elliot didn’t know what to make of that, but they were pressing on. The passageway ahead opened into a good-sized chamber with a stone sarcophagus in the middle of it. The glow of the Strangelight showed additional residue, which Elliot could see seemed to be coming apart, dissipating into the air. He’d never seen this before; usually, it faded over time, but here, it simply winked out of existence. It didn’t give way to particulate.

  “This is the tomb of Alexei Tzentesci,” Versh said, reading an inscription on the sarcophagus.

  Elliot moved close to Versh and put his hand on the sarcophagus. He trembled with awe and smiled. “My priest back in Ceryl used to tell me stories of the knight to give me strength. Tzentesci was the first great guardian of Angellia’s remains.”

  To his surprise, Versh returned the smile. “He was a paragon of devotion. I, too, draw strength from his endeavors.”

  “What did he do?” Abigail asked. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Don’t get him started,” Grimes lamented.

  Elliot ignored him and said, “When the Orgoth took over this region, the Church worried they would defile this holy place. Some servants of the Church took away the books from the library, but a knight named Alexei Tzentesci was entrusted with the remains of the ascendant. Her bones and the dust of what had been her body were sealed in an ironbound reliquary. Alexei took a vow of celibacy and the title ‘Husband of Angellia.’ He carried the box into the wilderness and guarded it for thirty years in isolation. The reliquary was passed down to others who felt the calling to inherit his work, each a knight sworn to Angellia, nine in total, all called her husbands. They are all buried here in places of honor. They kept her remains safe until they could be returned to her holy resting place.”

  “This seems a good place to try,” Abigail said. “Put your hood on, and see if you can’t lure our wayward spirit in. The spectral marks suggest something was here.”

  Elliot nodded and put his hood over his head, adjusting the switches to completely darken the goggles and so the cups inside the hood around his ears tightened snug, completely blocking out the outside world. He was effectively blinded and deafened. The lack of sensory input made it easier to enter the trance-like state he required to communicate with the spirits.

  “I’m here,” he said aloud, though not loudly, just putting the thought out there as he became receptive. The others would not hear him, and there was always a moment when he began the calling when he felt slightly foolish, as though he were talking to himself. “Step forward, make yourself known.”

  There was a great deal of debate among others who took up this task as to whether spoken words even mattered at all. In many respects, his role was the least scientific of the team, the least well defined and understood. Efforts were ongo
ing to try to narrow down cause and effect, to try various methods and test their efficacy, though spirits were so varied this had proven difficult to do. Elliot believed it was more a matter of thought than sound, but that sound was a tool to help shape thought—both for the spirits as well as himself. They had been living things that had spoken with voices, and sometimes they needed to hear one to jar them back toward what they used to be. But throughout his career, he had experimented with other methods of making sounds. He found them useful, though whether they made a significant difference was still a matter of debate. Abigail continued to submit her reports, and the quartermaster back at Blackwell continued to harass him about it.

  This time, he pulled from his pocket a small silver bell, one the Workshop engineers had made to his exacting specifications. Elliot drew in a deep breath and let the darkness envelope him. He rang the bell, distantly hearing it tinkling, as if from a long distance away. He slowed his breathing and concentrated, blocking out his physical senses to let his other senses take over.

  He rang the bell again…and felt something, like the furthest ripple from a stone thrown into a still lake. In his mind he reached out, and said again both as a whisper but more strongly in his mind, “Come to us. Tell me of your suffering. Make yourself known.”

  He could feel that Grimes had moved nearby, protectively, as he often did when Elliot was trying to communicate with a spirit. He existed as nothing more than a barely perceived looming presence but one Elliot found reassuring. He adjusted his goggles, now that he had entered the trance, allowing the filtered Strangelight through the lenses. The room around him was still dim, as were the other members of the team. With another switch he allowed more sound to penetrate as well though doing so carefully, preserving the calm and welcoming ease in his mind.

  A queer yellowish light was moving down the passageway, clashing with the Strangelight and creating an eerie glow.

  “Good Morrow,” Abigail whispered, fear clear in her voice.

  The spirit arrived.

  A cold terror gripped him, but Elliot had dealt with fear before. He had a job to do, by Morrow. Here in the tomb of an ascendant and surrounded by monuments to those who had suffered to protect her, he would find greater strength. He let his senses expand, let them flow beyond the meager confines of his flesh and out into the room. He felt the ghost’s presence immediately, and it was like falling into stormy waters next to a drowning man, someone thrashing and terrified. It seemed for the moment unable to answer his call in words.

  The spirit’s mind was a roiling maelstrom of fear and hatred, and Elliot fought to maintain his own calm, not allowing this outside torrent to infect him. It was like trying to smother a bonfire with a handkerchief. The ghost railed against him, its mind gaping open to envelop his own. Once he’d breached all that rage and pain, something worse awaited. The spirit’s mind was virtually empty, like the hollowed core of a worm-eaten apple. Some greater impetus of will had driven it to come here, to seek either help or oblivion, but Elliot feared it was too late for it.

  He could hear Grimes shouting again and other voices, too. He felt hands on his shoulders, pulling him back, and he resisted. He had to see, had to know what had happened to this ghost. Speak to me, he said to it with his mind. Pass on your message. Tell me what you have seen.

  Something came to him, mumbling words and faltering thoughts and fragmented sentences. They were raw and primal, and language didn’t matter so much as emotion to comprehend them. Amid these scattered thoughts, he felt he was starting to see the beginnings of patterns, of a thread he could follow. Soldiers on the march, the smoke of gunfire, swords wielded by men in armor made of screaming faces. All of it intensified the terror he felt until he thought he heard something like a song. Some strangely hopeful and uplifting sound, at odds with all else.

  Something like a wind tore his mind from that, and he tumbled away until he fixated on a dark, ugly, malignant shard of the spirit’s final memories. He saw a great stone gateway in the darkness, crimson runes flaming like fiery serpents along black basalt. Around it he saw a trio of entities, little more than darkness given form, and a name came to him like whisper in a nightmare: Teldoquorin. The name seemed possessed of its own power, and as it emerged from the spirit’s ghostly mouth, he could feel another alien mind reaching toward him, questing like black tentacles for his soul.

  He let loose a wrenching scream and ripped the hood from his face. What was happening in the real world wasn’t much better.

  The specter no longer resembled anything human. Its translucent spiritual form had become almost shapeless and liquid, shot through with yellow streaks that erupted into pulsing sores on its outer surface. As Dr. Goodman had described, it almost looked as if the ghost were infected with some disease that was devouring it from within. Its mouth was open in a silent scream, and the Strangelight only amplified the fell yellow light that poured from it.

  Grimes had the ghost cornered, having seized its form with the crackling power of his gauntlets. The spirit was fighting to get out of his grasp, and lattices of frost were forming on Grimes’ suit. Harlan Versh had drawn his pistol, Eilish his sword, and Kincaid his leather-wrapped club. Goodman and Abigail seemed busy with their lumitypes, taking and replacing spectragraph exposures as quickly as they could manage.

  Grimes looked back to him, obviously waiting for him to tell them what happened. There was something far more important to do first. They needed to release this spirit from what it had become. He could not guarantee it would ever find passage to Urcaen, but perhaps he could prevent the far darker fate that awaited it. Better nothingness than eternal enslavement.

  “Destroy it,” he called out, his voice croaking and strained. “Release it! It’s beyond redemption.”

  Grimes and Eilish looked back to the thing and hesitated. Elliot opened his mouth to beg them, to plead, but the thunder of Harlan Versh’s quad-iron drowned out everything.

  The blessed bullet struck the ghost’s chest and ripped a ragged hole in its ethereal body. Another shot went through the region that might once have been the ghost’s head. Its cohesive integrity had already been failing, and this damage unraveled it completely. It tore apart in a burst of sickly yellowish light as Grimes stepped back from it, shaking his gauntlets to release a spray of ectoplasmic slime to splatter onto the floor before this too began to fade. Elliot felt certain its soul had been obliterated. He reminded himself the ghost had been trapped in a loop of echoes for hundreds of years. That was ended at least.

  “Thank you,” he said and sank to his knees. The strength left his body, and the stone floor rushed up to meet him.

  • • •

  “COME ON, LAD,” Elliot heard someone say. He recognized Duncan Grimes’ voice. The jammer’s strong arms were around him, holding him up off the floor. He opened his eyes, and saw the team gathered near him.

  “I’m all right,” he said and climbed to his feet. Grimes steadied him—Elliot knew his past illness had left him frail and that his endurance was never something he could rely upon. But even when he felt his best, he was grateful for his friend’s presence. He blinked and looked around. They were still in the chamber of the sarcophagus, and it was lit only by torches in sconces on the walls. All the Strangelight equipment had been switched off.

  “You made contact?” Abigail asked.

  He shuddered but nodded. “With what was left of it. It was bad.”

  “What had happened to the spirit?” Versh asked.

  “It was one of the ghosts from the March,” Elliot said, leaning against the sarcophagus to steady himself. “But something had been done to it. Something was…consuming it, taking it away. I felt like its very being was being stolen. Not like with a soul cage, where a soul is intact but captured. This was like something far away was eating it alive. Well, not alive, but you know what I mean.”

  He was greeted with looks of fear and disgust. They’d all encountered horrible things in their time as Strangelight members, but
the destruction of the soul was one of the worst possible fates they could conceive. The only thing possibly worse was what Elliot was now convinced was happening here.

  Versh stepped forward and put his hands on Elliot’s shoulder. The man’s grip was strong but not ungentle. “Tell me what you saw, Elliot.”

  “A stone structure, like a doorway, built of black rock—basalt, I think. There were runes on the structure. I couldn’t read them, but I knew they meant something terrible. Some sort of gateway.”

  “A gateway… Figurative or real? Was it in the past or here now?” Versh asked the questions intently.

  Elliot shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw three entities around the gate. Then I heard a name. Teldoquorin? I think that’s right.”

  Versh stepped away from him as if he’d been struck. His eyes were huge, the whites gleaming in the torch-lit gloom. Elliot realized he was seeing something he hadn’t thought possible. Harlan Versh, a rogue Illuminated One, was afraid.

  “You recognize the name?” Eilish asked.

  Versh reached up and grasped the sunburst of Morrow around his neck. “Do not say it again. That word has power. That being is likely an executor infernal. Or perhaps even whatever echelon is above them in power. He is also referred to as the Sounder at the Gates, a being so evil and vast it defies description. The Sounder is suspected of playing a role in empowering the ancient Lords of Morrdh. Ekris’ writings suggested Thamar looked into the lore of that being not too long before her own dark ascension.”

  “Hold on. What’s happening here?” Abigail asked. Her face was pale and drawn.

  “I think he’s talking about doom and destruction,” Grimes said flatly. “We’re out of our depth. Again.”

  “What is happening here is something the Order of Illumination hadn’t thought possible.” Versh looked up at them. His steel-grey eyes found each of theirs and held them for a moment. “If this gateway is real and not just some remnant of the past, it might represent a way for the infernals to act with greater liberty here on Caen. Their hunger for souls is insatiable. The one thing that has kept them in check is the difficulty they have in reaching here, the requirement to work through mortal intermediaries. This one may have found a way to feast on souls from a distance, to spread a soul plague.”