The Iron Wyrm Affair: Bannon and Clare: Book 1

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The thought of Britannia incapacitated, or Queen Victrix somehow under duress, gave him a queer feeling in the region of his stomach. It could not have been his last meal, for that had been Miss Bannon’s excellent dinner.

  Well, if it was the last, at least it was a fine one. And in good company.

  “Hmm.” Valentinelli grinned, white teeth flashing in his dark face. “I tell you what. I kill mercenaries, you kill the other mentale. Simple.”

  “I cannot kill him until I know more of the plan.”

  The Neapolitan jerked his head in Sigmund’s direction. “Is he any good at the torture, then?”

  Sig piped up. “The bastards who broke my Spinne, yes, I torture them. Baerbarth shall invent new tortures!”

  “I should think not, Sig old chap.” Clare suppressed a sigh. “Dear heavens. A mentath does not respond to such things as a mercenary would.”

  Valentinelli’s snort was a masterpiece of disdain. “A man feel pain, he answer questions. Especially when Ludo is asking, mentale. Never mind. We see when we arrive.”

  “If you would cease speaking like a bad imitation of a Punchinjude puppet, signor, we would deal much more easily with each other.” For a moment Clare regretted saying it. His irritation had mounted to a considerable degree. Neither Sig nor the assassin was logical. Not like Miss Bannon. Of course, she was not logical either, so—

  Wait. His attention snagged on the thought, but he was not given leave to follow it.

  “So I should speak the Queen’s tongue, should I?” The same clipped, cultured schoolboy tone as before. He sounded thoroughly nettled, and had ceased slumping atop his clockhorse. “If I was not blood-bound, sir, you and I would have an accounting.”

  “I am your man, signor,” Clare returned rather stiffly. “As soon as this damnable affair is finished. In the meantime, can you please not insult me by speaking as if you are a dolt? I have rather a sizeable respect for your intelligence, and I wish not to waste time arguing you into acting as if you possess said intelligence.”

  Silence, broken only by the thumping of hooves. Clare blinked.

  I am very uncomfortable with the idea of Miss Bannon in peril. It is not logical, but … oh, good heavens, she is a sorceress! You are becoming ridiculous, Archibald!

  Valentinelli finally spoke. “It is a habit, sir. I wish everyone, without exception, to underestimate me. It makes my life much easier.”

  “Everyone? Including Miss Bannon?”

  “I think she is the only one who never has.” The soft, cultured tone was chilling. “And I hate her for it.”

  Well. “Ah.” What could one say in response? “I should think it would be a comfort.”

  “A man does not like a woman he cannot surprise, mentale.”

  Much about you becomes clearer. “I see.”

  Valentinelli kneed his horse into a canter, and Clare hastened to follow suit. Sigmund groaned, and their destination grew ever closer.

  And Clare still had no pattern for the equations.

  “There is no one here,” Sigmund announced. He was flushed and sweating, his broad face shiny.

  Clare hushed him, gazing at the crumbling manor from the shelter of an overgrown hedge.

  It was of the flat chateau style, a box with a sadly punctured clay-tile roof, the gardens crumbling and overgrown, its windows lackadaisically boarded with worm-eaten wood. Weeds had forced their way up between flagstones, and the whole place had such an obvious aura of disrepair that he was half tempted to agree with Sig’s assessment.

  But only half.

  Valentinelli merely pointed. The weeds were crushed where heavy cart wheels had rolled over them. The trail pointed directly to the three stairs leading to the chateau’s fire-scarred front door.

  The fire was recent. And chemical in origin, from what I can observe. Which does not bode well.

  The Neapolitan cocked his head, his dark eyes taking on a peculiar flat shine.

  Clare was suddenly cold, and very glad they had left the horses in a small copse outside the estate’s fallen gates. The greenery hiding them seemed a very thin screen indeed.

  For there was the sound of scraping metal, gears catching, and fizzing sparks. The manor house shuddered, its stone façade zigzagging with cracks. The earth rumbled, vibrating as if a gigantic beast slumbering in its depths turned over in its sleep.

  In a blinding flash, Clare thought of the quarry down the road. Yes. They would not need to dig far to stay hidden; and no wonder there were cart tracks. Building underground; now why did I not account for such a notion?

  The manor shuddered again, and masonry fell. A cavern tore itself in the front wall, belching steam, smoke, and blue-white arcing electricity. Clare’s faculties supplied him with an observation he did not fancy or trust. He questioned it from every angle, and it became indisputable. He was not going mad.

  A gigantic mechanisterum homunculus had been built into the house.

  Sigmund’s disbelieving laugh was lost in the thundering noise. “Spinne!” he yelled. “Bastards! Schweine!”

  The mecha rose out of the manse, shedding bits of masonry like rainwater from a duck’s back. Clare’s busy faculties swallowed every detail they could reach while the thing’s legs unfolded, a mad dream of a mechanical spider taking shape before him on a lovely sunny afternoon. The appendages thudded down one at a time, while the cephalothorax and abdomen lifted, gleaming. Prussian capacitors winked in orderly rows along the bottom of its body, a constant whining hum rattling every tooth in Clare’s head. The pattern behind the deadlights trembled on the edge of his comprehension. Steel-banded glass jars bubbled with green fluid atop the mecha’s back, and in each one floated—

  So that is what they needed the brains and spinal cords for. His limbs refused to move, his busy brain straining. A mentath attempting some form of Alterative sorcery? But how? How is it possible?

  The ground would not cease its rumbling, and Clare’s imagination served him a picture of other mecha, built in the depths of an abandoned quarry, golden discs on their chests sparking into life as the workers who built them – and he was suddenly quite sure they had been assembled by things very like the metal scarecrows in the Blackwerks’ depths – capered with furious mechanical glee, their eyes glowing crimson with mad intelligence.

  If a dragon could run the stink and clamour and hellish heat of the Blackwerks, one could easily induce its unsleeping metal minions to build in the dank darkness underground. Another thought turned Clare even colder: perhaps there was more than one of the beasts cooperating in this terrible mockery of the mechanisterum’s art.

  “Get down!” Ludovico yelled, shoving him into Sigmund. They fell in a rattling heap, Clare’s hat disappearing into the overgrown shrubbery. The juicy green stink of broken sap-filled branches rose, struggling with the odours of ozone, heated machine oil, scorched metal, and stone dust.

  The mecha was immense. No wonder the equations are so complex. This rather changes things.

  Valentinelli crouched, his hip knocking Sig’s shoulder. The Bavarian was pressed into the dirt, and Clare thought perhaps the Neapolitan enjoyed the chance to do so … but it did not work. For the gigantic mecha lifting its way up out of the ruins of the manse had some means of detecting them. The eyes on its arachnoid head dripped with diseased golden electricity, and the thing squatted over smoking ruins. Massive clicking noises assaulted the shivering air, and apertures slid open where a living arachnid would have spinnarets. Cannon shapes whirred down into place, and Clare’s stomach gave a decidedly uneasy message to the rest of him.

  The cannons swivelled, pointing unerringly at Clare and his companions. The Neapolitan cursed –

  – and there was a booming so immense it robbed every other sound of consequence as the mecha fired.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Bannon’s Ride

  White bone, red muscle, dark metal. Stink-steaming hides of several colours twitching, shaking free of offal and straw. The hooves coalesced, me
tal shards bending as sorcery crackled, sliding up splinters of bone as they fused together to become legs.

  Emma Bannon stood, her eyes open but sightless, black from lid to lid. Her outstretched hands were loose and cupped; she leaned forward as if into a heavy wind, but her curls only riffled slightly. Her ragged skirts fluttered, and her pale flesh marked itself with charter charms. The spiked glyphs did not glow.

  Not completely. The symbols sliding against the texture of her skin were black as well, their sharp edges fluorescing with traces of eerie green foxfire.

  The chant came from her slack mouth, but she was not voicing it. Her lips parted, her tongue still; the words swelled whole from her passive throat. The Language was not Mending or Breaking, not Naming or Binding or Bonding. It was not a Language of the White or the Grey. It was the deepest Black, that tongue, and it was given free rein.

  Discipline was not entirely inborn, but it was not entirely chosen, either. Rather, the predisposition and character of witch, charmer, mancer or sorcerer narrowed choices until, in the last year of Collegia schooling, the practitioner arrived at the Discipline that in retrospect seemed a foregone conclusion.

  The non-sorcerous feared the Grey and despised the Black, thinking the names meant things they did not. The White was often capable of causing the most harm as it sought to cure, and the Black was the restfulness of night after a hard day’s labour – or so its practitioners said.

  The White disagreed, vehemently. The Grey kept their own counsel.

  And yet, even among the Black, the Endor were … well, not feared. But held in caution. Once, one of their kind had brought a shade back to flesh to answer a king, a feat still whispered of with awe.

  The haunches built themselves, massive, meat rearranged and muscles attaching to re-fused bone. Clockhorse metal filigreed each bone, ran threadlike through the muscles, and crackled with the same rot-green foxfire as the charter symbols on Emma’s skin.

  A figure appeared behind her, indistinct through plaster dust and the smokegloss of sorcery. Two figures, one leaning heavily on the other, both tall, well-muscled men, picking their way through scattered bricks and the destruction of a sorcerer’s passage. One man was dark-eyed. The other’s irises burned yellow in the gloom.

  Emma’s delicate fingers tensed. The chant took on sonorous striking depth. The withers appeared, and the thing was unmistakably a horse, but too big. The stitched-together pieces of horsehide flowed obscenely up its legs, hugging naked iron-filigreed musculature. The neck lifted in a proud curve, the vertebrae knobs of glassy polished bone, lengthening to fine thin short spikes of mane. The tail was a fall of metal-chased hair, and its head was two clockhorse skulls melded together to create a larger, subtly changed thing. For it had sharp teeth no horse, Altered or pureflesh, would have, and its bone eyesockets were emptily, terribly dark.

  The steed stood very still. A ripple went through it as the hide finished its patchwork. More metal quivered and flung itself from the floor, sorcerously magnetised into plates of armour. A saddle appeared, shaping itself from shredded leather tack.

  The amalgamation of flesh, metal, bone, and sorcery became a massive destrier, its shoulders straining as ætherial force struggled to violate Nature. Armoured in metal barding and caparisoned in green and black, a gossamer fabric made of dust and foxfire cloaking the hurtful edges, it stood slump-shouldered and obscene.

  The sorceress’s fingers flicked. The chant halted, turned on itself inside her throat, and birthed a Word.

  “X––v!”

  It did not echo, but it continued for a long time, a hole torn in the world’s fabric, a curtain pulled aside. And something … descended.

  The Khloros lifted its massive head. Leaf-green sparks flamed in its eyesockets. A clashing ran along its length as the armour shifted, settling, under the fabric of dust and æther cloaking it.

  Crackling silence. But the Work was not finished, for as the sorceress strode forward, the black gem at her throat gave a burst of radiant spring-green flame as well, scorching eye and mind alike. She leapt, caught the pommel, and her foot found one huge silver-chased stirrup. Light as a leaf she vaulted into the saddle, and as she did, spurs jingled, oddly musical. Her own armour appeared, metal striking her Black-charmed skin and spreading as if liquid, flowing up her legs to make greaves, rising to encase her thighs and torso. Her head tipped back, dark curls tumbling feather-free before the helm grew from spiked shoulders. The green became patterns of charter and charm, flowing through sorcery-blackened metal, and the sharp-scaled gauntlets creaked as her fingers flexed again, their paleness disappearing like birch twigs under a flood of ink.

  From the helm’s shadowed depths, the Word came again.

  “X––v!”

  The Khloros, the Pale Horse, neighed. The sound shattered what little of the stable’s interior remained intact, and both onlookers flinched.

  “X––v!” A final time, the Word resounded, full of the rush and crackle of conflagration.

  The Khloros shook its spiked mane, and its front hooves lifted. It reared, its rider moving with fluid hurtful grace, melded to its sudden poisonous loveliness. By the time the Word’s thunder died, the Khloros was an unholy, beautiful thing cloaked in twisting pale green fire. At the heart of every flame was the black between stars, a thin thread of utter negation.

  The helm’s triple spikes nodded among firefly flickers of stray sorcery. The Khloros wheeled, a caracole of exquisite, diseased elegance. Its hooves left frost-scorch on the shivering, unwilling ground. From the darkness under the three spikes came the sorceress’s voice, and yet it was not hers. It was the lipless sigh of Life’s oldest companion.

  “Death,” she whispered.

  The Khloros unleashed itself with a musical clatter of metal against stone, another shattering neigh blowing a hole in the only remaining untouched wall in the stable. It leapt forward in a foaming wave, and the two men had gone to their knees in the ruins. The roof creaked dangerously, but neither moved. The Shields clutched each other like children wakened from a nightmare. One was paper-pale, trembling as if with palsy, and he leaned aside to retch uselessly.

  The yellow-eyed Shield swayed. His face was alight.

  “Beautiful,” Mikal whispered.

  In the distance, the screams began.

  They rode.

  The earth itself repelled the Khloros, so its hooves struck ash-green sparks from a cushion of screaming air. Its gait flowed, its neck arched and its metallic tail sparking on the wind of its passing. The Rider moved with the massive beast as one, and the breathless screams of Londinium were as music over the drumming hoofbeats.

  For the Rider did not merely call forth the pale horse. The sorcery flowing through her had not reached its high tide yet. With every hoof-fall, the city quaked like a plucked string.

  And the dead answered.

  They rose from their graves, gossamer shades with wide-stretched rictus grins. The Khloros could not step above ground uncontaminated by Death; few places were closed to it. Sanctified ground was no bar to it, for the dead were part and parcel of the hallowing.

  This was what caused the screaming. As the Pale Horse cantered, its Rider staring straight ahead under her triple-peaked helm, the dead within sound of their passing rose like veils. The stronger among the deceased, newly woken or newly buried, ran like dogs or rode horses of their own, spectral rotting things with soft pads instead of hooves.

  For as long as there was Londinium, there were equines to serve, to labour … and to die.

  The living cowered and fled, though the dead shied away from their warm breathing fear. Some few claimed to have seen the face of the Rider, but they all agreed it was a man. Those whose gaze did pierce the deep shadows of the helm stayed silent, for they recognised the white-cheeked, burning-eyed woman they glimpsed. The silent ones were those whose candles were already flickering, and within a week those few had been laid to rest in cold earth.

  To the west the Dead Hunt rode, a f
reezing wind tearing shutters from stone houses, shattering windows, bursting chimneys and grinding cobblestones and brick facing in weird lattice patterns. The West End, the homes of the rich and influential, cowered under the lash of the Eternal. There were those on Picksdowne who claimed to see the insubstantial dead rising from the street itself, and the clapperless, immense Black Bell hung in the Tower tolled once, sharply, the Shadow lifting its malformed head and staring with eyes like two flat silver coins. The dome of ætheric protection cupping the Palace of St Jemes lit like a white-hot bonfire, sensing something dreadful afoot.

  The Rider cut through one corner of Hidepark, and for months afterward there was a black scar in the lush greenery near the Cumber Gate, one the quality affected not to see as they drove past on their daily promenades.

  Then she turned, sharply, to the north, wheeling as a giant bird will. None but the tide of half-seen crystalline shades following her witnessed the helmed head lift, as if she studied the heavens, searching for … what? What could such a being be chasing, on such a night?

  Whatever it was, she found it. For sudden tension bloomed in the Rider’s figure, and her scaled gauntlets tightened on the reins. The Khloros’s massive head rose, too, as if it could taste the spectral traces of a traitor’s passage against the velvet-yellow clouds reflecting Londinium’s nightly glow. The pale horse champed, and its hoofbeats took on new urgency.