“IT’S CALLED DEVIL’S GASP,” Versh said to Kincaid and Abigail. “A potent gas, a poison that reduces the lungs to bleeding ruin in minutes. There’s no cure once exposed, just a slow, painful death.”
They were seated in Father Murdoch’s former quarters. The room was sparsely furnished, with a small writing desk, a simple bed, and a pair of wicker chairs. Versh was seated at the desk, and Abigail and Kincaid, both haggard from the chaos of the nave, sat in the room’s two chairs. Grimes, Elliot, and Eilish stood behind them. For a moment Elliot, thought he saw Mel in the corner of his eye, there, just behind Abigail. But it was just his imagination. Still, it felt like the whole team was here, at least in spirit.
Elliot felt Mel’s absence more than ever. His mind was still reeling from the miraculous experience he had been through. He wasn’t sure when he’d be able to put it into words. But in its aftermath, he had felt sudden uncertainty and fear. He had seen Doctor Goodman’s soul ushered into Urcaen, taken to safety. What had happened to Mel’s spirit? She had died so terribly. There had been no one there for proper last rites. Was she safe? He didn’t know. He might never know.
Morrow and Angellia, protect her, and us, he prayed. If you can still hear me.
“Not only would all those people have died, their souls given to the Sounder at the Gates, their suffering would have increased his power,” Versh said. “I have seen the evil of men for many years, and you would think I was incapable of surprise at such monstrousness.” He wiped his mouth. “I am not. This would have been one of the worst unholy atrocities since the Orgoth.”
“What happened to Father Murdoch?” Elliot asked.
“His wounds have been tended, and he will survive. He will be sent to the Sancteum to be interrogated by the Order of Illumination there. I fear what we uncovered here in Elsinberg is only the beginning. Given the nature of that monolith, I am certain he was working with others.”
“Will he talk?” Eilish asked.
Versh looked at the arcanist, eyes narrowed. “The Order can be very persuasive. But it depends on how strongly tied to his infernal patrons he might be. They may hold his tongue. I may need to find another way to root out his allies. But that is my task, not yours.”
“What can we do?” Abigail asked.
Versh smiled sadly. “You can bury Doctor Goodman. I have arranged for her to be given a place in the crypt. I believe her sacrifice deserves such an honor.”
Elliot swallowed, trying to find comfort in that. It was hard not to think of the crypt with some degree of horror after what they had seen, though the evil had been swept from the place. “Of course. She deserves at least that.”
Versh continued, “I will see that Father Murdoch arrives in Caspia, but I will be in touch after. I may have need of your organization’s methods for the investigation ahead.”
“We’ll be returning with our reports to Ceryl,” Abigail said. She turned to Eilish. “You’re welcome to come with us, Mr. Garrity, if you so choose. I believe I can convince our superiors to reimburse you for your efforts.”
The arcanist shook his head. “I’ll take the payment, if you can send it, but I’ve got my own problems in Corvis.” He turned to Versh. “Now that you know I’m not an infernalist, do you think we could discuss getting some help from the Order of Illumination for my own dilemma?”
“I no longer have much influence with them,” Versh said. “But I can give you advice in seeking their aid. Some names. Corvis is on the way to Caspia, so we can travel together that far and discuss your issues on the road.”
“Good enough,” Eilish said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find a bottle of uiske and fall into it. A pleasure to meet you all.” He rose from the chair and left the room.
“First sensible thing that man has said,” Grimes muttered. “I could murder a drink.”
“I must take my leave as well,” Versh said. Both of them left, closing the door behind them.
Elliot sank down in the chair Eilish had vacated and weariness washed over him.
Grimes came and stood next to him, a look of concern on his face. “You okay?” he asked.
Elliot smiled up at him. “Just had enough horror and death to last a lifetime,” he said, his voice shaking a bit.
Grimes put a hand on his shoulder, the strength of his grip reassuring and solid, but the jammer wore a look Elliot seldom saw. He was worried, even afraid. “That makes two of us.” He watched Harlan Versh leave the room, and Elliot felt a shudder pass through Grimes. “But I don’t think we’re done with either by a long shot.”
“Agreed,” Kincaid said. He stood next to them. “I’ll join you for that drink, if you’re serious.”
When Grimes nodded, Kincaid turned. “How about you, Elliot?”
Elliot blinked at the sound of his own name. Then, slowly, like a man unshuttering a lantern to send a beam of light into the darkness, he allowed himself to smile.
— EPILOGUE —
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
By Matthew D. Wilson
THE THREE MOONS OF CAEN, each full, were arranged in the southern sky in a perfect, inverted, equilateral triangle. Pale-blue Artis flickered shyly in the eastern corner while Calder’s lordly brilliance lit the night from the west. And Laris, positioned at the nadir, seethed red with malicious portent.
After decades of occult study, Jacob Strathmoore was intimately familiar with this particular celestial formation, a cosmic phenomenon that occurred only once every 99 years and 66 days. Called the Oblivion Knot, it was believed that when the moons were so ordered, the Devourer Wurm attacked the walls of the City of Man in Urcaen with the greatest ferocity. It was a time when the Creator of Man was the most distracted from events on Caen. Legend said that if the world did not end within 66 days of the confluence of moons, then it would endure for another 99 years.
This year, the Oblivion Knot just happened to coincide with The Longest Night, an extra day added to the calendar at the end of every third year, a celebration in remembrance of the dead observed across the Iron Kingdoms. In occult circles, it was widely held as a time when the barrier between the realms of the living and the dead was at its thinnest. Strathmoore had little doubt that the time for his meeting with the old hag, the one he called Click-Clack, had been carefully chosen.
The journey from Ceryl had been excruciating. An early onset of winter had turned riverboat travel up the Dragon’s Tongue unpleasant enough to make Strathmoore miss the cold, dank corridors of Blackwell Hall. But it wasn’t the chilly air or the choppy water that played on Strathmoore’s nerves; it was the wait. He had spent months voyaging to and from the distant continent of Zu, but that had felt like a quick jaunt compared to the five days by boat to Corvis. Never before had he been so eager to arrive at his destination nor so anxious about being on time. The old crone had been very specific about the hour and the place of their meeting, and she was explicit about what was at stake should he fail to be there on time.
Now, Strathmoore stood in the clearing of a murky forest to the southeast of Corvis, an infamous region called Widower’s Wood. Were it not for the gathering crows that always seemed to herald her arrival, he would have been worried he was in the wrong place. He fished a small brass pocket watch from his vest pocket and flipped it open, grimacing at the time. She should be here by now, he thought. He did not have 99 years to wait for another opportunity.
Keller, Strathmoore’s right-hand man, sat atop the driver’s box of the coach they had taken from the city. He had both hands on the double-barreled scattergun resting across his knees as he surveyed the shadows moving in the moonlit thicket. He was a big man, barrel-chested, looking even sturdier beneath the high-collared greatcoat he wore to guard against the chill. He showed no sign of uneasiness, but Strathmoore knew the man suffered anxiety whenever he was away from his duties managing Blackwell Hall. Still, “Commander” Banning Keller had refused to let Strathmoore come alone. His duty to Blackwell was nothing, he had said, before his duty
to its lord.
If Keller wasn’t nervous, the team of horses that had hauled the coach through the marsh certainly was. A pair of white draft horses, taller at the shoulder than Strathmoore, pawed at the ground and snorted anxiously at the crack of every twig and the hoot of every whippoorwill that punctuated the otherwise silent darkness.
Strathmoore raised a pair of complex-looking goggles hanging around his neck and fitted them over his eyes. They were special goggles, custom crafted, the kind worn by the Strangelight investigators. He looked up at Keller and tapped the side of the goggles with a finger, indicating that Keller should don his as well. Then he stooped to pick up the heavy lantern from atop a large trunk at his feet.
Strathmoore could hear his spine creak as he stood up, and his right hand shot to his lower back to suppress the hot, stabbing sensation that occurred every time he lifted anything heavier than a cup of tea. He coughed once as he primed the lantern and pushed the sparker. It was an older model and was both dimmer and less reliable than the modern projectors field investigators used, but it was one of the first Strangelight lanterns Strathmoore had managed to make operate reliably. He never traveled without it.
Cool, violet light seeped through the seams and vents of the hourglass-shaped canister. Strathmoore flipped back the cover of the bull’s-eye lens and passed the cone of light over the ground around him, taking care not to shine it into the eyes of the horses. Though they waited in the middle of a seemingly untamed wilderness, Strathmoore stood upon a circular platform of timeworn stone blocks, nearly covered by moss and muck. On either side of the sunken dais was a thick stanchion, hewn from the same stone beneath his feet. A heavy iron ring was affixed to each stanchion, and from each ring dangled a broken length of rusted chain.
Where the Strangelight played across the stone surfaces, Strathmoore could see undulations in the violet illumination, like heat ripples across a desert plain in the middle of summer. Holding the lantern steady, he twisted a knob on the side of his goggles, adjusting the protective lenses to bring the light frequency into focus. Terrible things had happened here, cruel and unjust things carried out by hands as evil as any that had ever spilt blood on Caen. Visible echoes of the pain inflicted at this site oozed out of the stones soaked with century after century of bloodshed and torment. Shadows of countless victims flitted around the edge of the dais, shrinking from the light but powerless to sever the memory of the chains that had bound them in this place in their last moments of life. Like Blackwell Hall, there was more beneath the surface than could be seen, even with the Strangelight. This was an ancient place, a nexus between worlds with a power over the human soul that even the gods could not defy.
“Like moths to the flame, yes?” a voice crackled in the shadows beyond the reach of Strathmoore’s light.
Keller leaped to his feet and flung back his goggles, aiming his scattergun into the darkness. Strathmoore raised a hand to calm him. He covered the lantern and raised his goggles, stepping toward the voice.
Branches cracked under something massive, and the sound of a steam engine surged toward Strathmoore and his man. A towering shadow, as tall as the trees around them, loomed up from the edge of the clearing, blotting out the glow of the three moons that hung in formation in the sky. It closed on them, breaking through the brush with heavy footfalls that shook the ground beneath them, spooking the horses such that Keller was forced to jam the brakes of the coach and wrestle the two beasts back under control by their reins. How something so large had gotten so close without detection, Strathmoore could not fathom.
The blaze of a warjack’s heartfire glowed from numerous vents and exhaust ports, arrayed across the machine that strode into the clearing. By all appearances, it looked like a colossal mechanikal ostrich with its two great inverted legs and a head that protruded forward from the enormous steam engine comprising its body. On its back was a small house, like the captain’s quarters on a galleon, and above that seemed to be a turret topped with an armillary sphere and a telescope, like some sort of super-compact observatory.
From a platform jutting out over the head of the construct like the prow of a ship hung a large lantern around which fluttered a swarm of moths. Perched at the railing, awash in the orange glow of the lantern, was a haggard mass of patchwork canvas and animal skins from which a cluster of smoking stove pipes thrust skyward. In the center of the mass was the face of woman, shriveled and cracked and as ancient as the stones Strathmoore stood upon. One eye was covered in a dirty rag tied around the old woman’s head while the other twinkled with an impish quality that was at odds with her indefinite but considerable age. Her hands looked like bundles of knives, each finger ending in a black, metal talon. In her right hand, she gripped a gnarled staff with a mob of anguished faces carved into it; the blades of her left hand tapped against the railing with a rhythmic clicking and clacking.
“Did you know this ground was once part of the Khardic Empire? It’s true. A conqueror rested here but died from his many cuts. He stained the ground with his blood, making this northern soil. His name is forgotten. Now, this ground belongs to no one but the dead. It draws them here.” Her voice sounded like gravel and dry leaves and held an accent that was vaguely Khadoran. “It tempts them, yes. So hungry they are. So hungry, they ache.”
Strathmoore started and looked over his shoulder as a dozen crows among the trees behind him cawed and cackled in unison.
“Hungry for what?” Strathmoore said. But when he looked back up to the balcony, the crone was gone.
“Sin.” Her voice came from behind him. Strathmoore wheeled to find the old woman staring straight at him.
Keller had not lowered his scattergun. He spun to aim it at her. The giant steam-powered construct took a menacing step toward him and leered at him with fiery eyes. Again, Strathmoore gestured for the man to relax. Reluctantly, Keller dropped his aim and sat down on the bench of the coach. The construct chuffed at him mockingly through the grill that formed the lower half of its face.
Strathmoore glanced impatiently at the trio of moons. “It’s late.”
The crone clicked her talons together and chortled. “So restless are you to leave the land of the living?”
“You said you found them,” Strathmoore said. “You can tell me where they are.”
“Yes. Yes,” she rasped, grinning to reveal two rows of jagged, yellow teeth. “You are so eager.” The hag tapped the butt of her staff against the trunk next to Strathmoore. “Let us see vhat you have made, first.”
Strathmoore had forgotten all about the trunk. “Of course, of course!”
He knelt down and unfastened a pair of latches then raised the lid back. “To make it work required some deviation from what you specified. But it should work. In theory, that is… It should work in theory.” He reached into the trunk and withdrew a silver metal globe, polished to a mirror finish. Within its unseen innards were complex workings, the height of the Workshop’s art, a piece of advanced mechanika fused with arcane elements integrating certain relics acquired by his agents at no small risk. This included recently collected fragments of rune-inscribed stone brought back from Elsinberg; these radiated energies from beyond Caen.
The work that had gone into this sphere was considerable, stretching back decades. The final pieces had fallen into place recently. His investigators had taken a series of spectragraphs showing grymkin entering the world through a two-way portal near the Llaelese town of Glynam. Close examination of the energy imprints on these plates had helped him deduce how to stabilize the fields produced by his sphere. Even those craftsmen involved in the sphere’s fabrication did not understand its purpose or how it worked. Those were secrets kept to Strathmoore himself.
He said, “I don’t know where you’ll ever find a power source strong enough to operate it.”
The old crone clicked her talons in anticipation and thrust one forward to trace a circle seemingly etched into the globe. Six sets of concentric circles covered the sphere, creating a series
of rings across its surface. “The power, yes. It is not a problem,” she said, her grin widening. “Not here. Not now.”
“The prototypes, they burned out too quickly. Overheated and melted the field conductors. Even with my improvements, I cannot be certain this one will sustain its field more than an instant,” Strathmoore went on.
“So much can happen in an instant,” she said as she spread her talons wide and snatched the globe from Strathmoore’s hands.
Strathmoore walked alongside the peculiar woman as she shuffled toward her mechanikal walking observatory. “The others were smaller. This has been scaled up. I managed to reshape the compressor design so the intercooler—”
“You are ready, yes?” the crone asked.
“You mean, right now?” Strathmoore stopped in his tracks.
“You came to seek your destiny or to yap about your machines?” she replied, her talons clicking against the globe.
Strathmoore turned toward the coach. “Keller, my things, please.”
Keller nodded and put down the gun. When Strathmoore turned back toward the crone, she was back up on the platform and headed for the door in her little house. “I’ll just need a moment, if you please,” he called after her.
The crone didn’t answer; instead, the door closed behind her. A few seconds later, the massive construct stoked its steam engine and shuffled its feet to rotate its entire mass to face the opposite direction, directly toward the moons. As he strode to the coach, Strathmoore could hear the sounds of banging metal and grinding gears coming from the observatory.
Keller hauled a heavy suit of coated canvas from the rear boot of the coach and held it up for Strathmoore to see. “You’re sure this is going to protect you, Mr. Strathmoore?” Keller asked. He pulled at the suit as if to test its strength, and he frowned, visibly worried.
“If it doesn’t, I shan’t have far to go to get where I’m going, shall I now?” Strathmoore laughed through a short bust of coughing. Keller’s expression remained grave.
Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology Page 33