The Iron Wyrm Affair: Bannon and Clare: Book 1

by Lilith Saintcrow

  A final Word broke free of the Rider’s throat. It was feathered with diamond ice, a weightless sound, and the dead flowed forward, streaming around the Khloros. The Rider shimmered as if under cold heavy oil, fog flash-freezing and scattering sparks of foxfire sorcery. The Pale Horse’s hooves hit a billowing cushion of vapour, and its bulk heaved up with a gasping-fish leap.

  Khloros and Rider flew, on a white-billowing cloud of the dead. Their melting shadow touched the earth below, terribly black and crisp though there was precious little light to cast it. A withering stole through the dark hole of that shadow, and as they flew, the living in houses underneath cowered without knowing quite why.

  It was over two hundred miles to Dinas Emrys, and the Rider had to reach it by dawn. As long as the strength holding the ætheric conduit open held, the Khloros would bear her.

  Following a gryphon-borne traitor, Death flew from Londinium.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Man Only Dies Once

  Ears ringing, blood slicking his face, Clare staggered upright. That is precisely the problem with cannon. Difficult to aim, especially when firing from a suspended carriage. He shook his head, and Valentinelli was suddenly before him, crouching and bloody. The man’s thin-lipped mouth moved, his dark hair half singed and wildly disarranged. Clare blinked, realising he was deaf.

  Temporarily, or …

  As if in response, the world poured into his ears once more. A sudden overwhelming welter of noise scored through his tender skull, threatening to turn his brain into thin gargling soup. His knees hit the smoking dirt, and Sigmund appeared, a thread of bright blood sliding down his filthy, soot-stained face.

  Clare strained to deduce, but his faculties would not obey. The coja, false friend, had turned on him. Whatever bolt the immense arachnid mecha had fired at them was no help either.

  The bolt. Electrical in some fashion? The mecha was swimming in electrical force; the capacitors are maintaining at a high rate. The core! Masters’s core!

  The thought was driftwood to a drowning man. He clung to it, his mental grasp tightening with the strength of desperation.

  A shifting stream of values! That’s it!

  For a blinding moment he saw it all – the Blackwerks, where every difference was a range, not an orderly single value. The trouble was not irrationality. Rather, it was rationality not wide enough to contain what it saw.

  The world is wider, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your philosophy.

  The pressure in his skull eased all at once. Marvellous relief, sensory information behaving as it should now, and he opened his eyes to find the Neapolitan’s pox-scarred face above his. He had fallen; the assassin had caught him, and even now held him. The ground was charred, soot rising in fine dancing black flakes, the hedges blackened and crisped, peeled back in a perfect circle that had just missed them. Had Valentinelli not knocked them aside and held Sigmund down, all three of them might have been caught in the blast, instead of on its smoke-crisped margin.

  The earth was quiet now, settling itself after a violation. The only hint of thunder was far in the distance, and one could not be sure it was not merely one’s nerves echoing after a sustained assault.

  Calculate the stride length. The arachnid will have to pace slowly for the smaller mecha, but they will not grow tired. Sub-equations in the core will take care of that – how is it speaking to the receivers? An invisible signal, bringing it into range – pure electricity? No, and not magnetism either. Perhaps some blend of the two? How? Is it sorcery? No, the logic engine will not allow for that; the brains in the casks atop it must not be Altered then. I must have more data.

  Valentinelli’s mouth was still moving. Sigmund nodded, leaned down –

  – and slapped Clare. Not lightly, either, his work-hardened palm cracking against Clare’s cheek.

  The shock snapped Clare’s head aside, and he thudded back into his body with a sound akin to a carriage wheel jolting through a pothole. “Thank you,” he gasped. “Dear heavens, that was uncomfortable.”

  The Neapolitan relaxed slightly. He swore in Italian, more as a means of expressing his happiness than anything else. Clare blinked and found his body would obey him, gained his feet with Valentinelli’s help, and spotted his hat among some smoking shrubbery.

  “Spinne!” Sigmund crowed. “Did you see that, Archie? Bastards built a Spinne! And what a beautiful beast. We hunt them down, ja? Hunt them and see how they made the fräulein Spinne!”

  Bending over to retrieve his hat was problematic, but Clare managed it, and turned to survey the smoking pile of rubbish that had once been a reasonably nice, if somewhat decrepit, manor house. “Indubitably.”

  “La strega do not pay enough for this,” the assassin muttered darkly. “That thing. Diavolo.” And, of all things, the assassin crossed himself in the manner of the Papists.

  “Twenty guineas,” Clare reminded him, a trifle more jollily than he felt. “And you said you’d take on the Devil himself, my princely friend.”

  “Twenty guinea is not enough.” The man’s accent had settled into what Clare suspected might be his true voice – clipped and cultured, but with the song of his native tongue rubbing under unmusical Queen’s Britannic. “That was not a cannonball, signor.”

  “Nor was it a kiss on the cheek.” Clare jammed his hat atop his head. The reek of singed hair, singed greenery, boiled rock, and dust was immense. If Valentinelli knew he was missing his eyebrows, he gave no sign of it – and Clare wondered if he might be missing his own. “Come, gentlemen. We must find the horses, if they have not bolted. We have work to do.”

  “Wait. That – that thing.” Valentinelli’s hands were tense and his clothing still steamed. His coat was sadly the worse for wear, and his dark hair was scorched as well. All in all, they were a rather sorry and raffish bunch by now. “How you plan on stopping it? What it doing, eh, signor? And what you propose we do?”

  Sig stared in the direction the vast mecha had gone, his broad rough hands working on empty air as if he had the builder of such a contraption by the throat.

  Clare took stock of himself, patting his pockets. His pistol had not discharged, thank goodness. His watch was still in its accustomed place, and he drew it forth, noted the time, and wound it, a soothingly habitual set of motions. “First we find the horses.” He replaced the watch and pulled his cuffs down, brushed at his frock coat. He stamped, doing what he could to rid his boots of dust and char. Miss Bannon’s money was still secure. “Then we visit the quarry three miles from here. If luck is on our side, there will be a mecha there we can steal, for the range of values will no doubt have excluded some of those built.” He paused. “If not, we shall think of something. Then we hie ourselves to Londinium and do our best to nip a rebellion in the bud.”

  There were Altered guards at the quarry’s mouth, but Valentinelli left Clare and Sig in a shaded dell and disappeared around the bend in the cart track. He reappeared a few minutes later, wiping one of his dark-bladed knives on a torn rag he dropped without further ado in the dust. Clare did not overly examine the traces of crimson on it; it was enough to deduce the provenance – the shirt the Neapolitan had torn it from as soon as the owner had ceased breathing.

  Mercifully, the corpses lay with their faces turned away from the entrance, their necks crooked oddly. Their Alterations were only hinted at – deformed ribs and too-thick legs insinuating changes to the human body that might sicken Clare, did he not have other things to focus on.

  “Kielstone,” he murmured. It was an underground quarry. Kiel could be cut in any direction, unlike slate, and it ran in odd veins, twisting and looping underground. It also was mildly resistant to sorcery, meaning it had to be extracted by hand. Even traces of kiel would camouflage the mechas nicely, before their logic engines turned on.

  The entry was a cavern of pitch black, even under the strengthening daylight. The clouds were thinning, and it might turn into a beautiful Kentish spring day before long. The mecha would glitte
r under the sun as they strode toward Londinium.

  Were there other quarries in the districts around the ancient city just waiting to birth a stream of metal monsters? Very likely. How many?

  More than will be comfortable, Clare. Concern yourself with the task at hand.

  “Archie.” Sigmund had gone rather pale under his mask of soot. “In there?”

  “Come now, Sig. You’re a lion for Miss Bannon, aren’t you? See there.” Clare pointed. “We shall find lanthorns, no doubt. Or glowrock. Signor Valentinelli, if you would be so kind.”

  In short order they had glowrocks caged in steel, the surfaces of the stones dark and oil-slick as they absorbed sunlight. They seemed well charged, but just to be safe Valentinelli also found a lanthorn with a trimmed wick and plenty of oil. Clare thought to ask if the man had lucifers about him, but the gleam in the Neapolitan’s dark eyes told him such a question was foolish.

  They penetrated the cavern’s black mouth. Twenty paces in it was dim enough that the glowrocks began to shimmer. The floor was stone, scarred and worn smooth, implements stacked against the walls – picks and shovels, rope, kegs of various sizes, scrap lumber, a small pile of miner’s hats, candleholders. Fifty paces, and they walked in tiny spheres of silver glow, blackness pressing down all around. A hundred paces brought them to a junction. The main passageway continued down, terminating in what had to be some sort of caged hoist-lift; a much narrower passage veered sharply off to the right.

  Valentinelli was a scarred caricature, glowrock light disappearing into his pupils and the pits on his soot-streaked face. “Signor?”

  Clare swallowed drily, pointed at the smaller passage. “That one.”

  “How would they …” Sig coughed. “No, of course. That is for supplies. This is for people.”

  Pleased, Clare made a noise of assent. Valentinelli handed his glowrock cage over and edged into the small passageway. If there were more guards below, he did not wish to be blinded. It was a good idea. But they did not have to go far. The narrower passageway terminated at a wooden platform. Two frail guardrails over a pitch-black pit, with the wooden struts of a ladder showing.

  “Oh, Scheisse.” Sig’s voice struck the edges of the pit, and a faint echo drifted back up.

  “Cheer up, Sig. Man only dies once, you know.”

  Valentinelli’s humourless snigger echoed as well. “In that case, signor, you go first.” But he shouldered the mentath aside with a small spitting sound of annoyance, grabbing the third glowrock cage and producing a handkerchief. In a trice the cage was tied to his torn waistcoat, and he tested the ladder with commendable aplomb. “Safe enough. Twenty guinea, definitely not enough.”

  The climb down was more arduous mentally than physically. Sig, sweating and muttering awful imprecations under his breath, nearly wrenched one of the ladders free, he trembled so violently. Every twenty feet or so the ladder would end, resting on a trigged platform of warped wood. The glowrocks’ shimmer intensified as they descended, and Clare was seeking to calculate just what sort of foul air they might encounter in the depths when Valentinelli hopped off the ladder and on to solid ground. The Neapolitan sighed, a not-quite-whistle, and lifted his glow-rock cage.

  A vast chamber tunnelled out of rock greeted them. It was mostly empty, but the scuffs on the dusty, dirt-grimed floor were fresh. To Clare’s left, the other half of the large hoist-lift rested in a carven hollow. The sides and floor of the cavern were unnaturally smooth, almost glassy. The cavern’s roof was ribbed like a cathedral’s vault, but the ribs were odd. Almost … organic.

  Where did the workers who built this all vanish to? For a moment he had an odd mental vision of them seeping through the cracks in the floor, metal become liquid and returning to earth’s embrace. He shook it away, annoyed at the fancy.

  Sig let out a bark of relief when his boots touched firm ground. Great pearls of sweat cut tracks through the ash on his face. “Archie. I hate you.”

  “Ha!” Clare’s cry of triumph shattered the stillness.

  Scattered on the floor of the cavern were a few bipedal mecha of the sort they had seen in the warehouse near the Tower. They slumped, curiously lonely, and from the way they all faced toward the deepest darkness at the back of the cavern, Clare could imagine the serried ranks that must have stood here before awakening to the invisible call.

  “Ha!” he repeated, and actually bounced up on his toes. “As I suspected! Some of them did not receive that call, Sig. You and I are going to mechanister them, and then we will take them to Londinium.” The only response his revelation garnered was frank, open-mouthed stares from his companions. “Don’t you see? We will have mecha of our own!”

  “Mad,” Valentinelli muttered. “You are mad.”

  Sigmund, on the other hand, stared for a few more moments. Then a smile spread over his broad face. “Du prächtiger Bastard!” He clapped Clare on the shoulder hard enough to stagger the mentath. “Only if I take it to workshop after. Ja?”

  “Sig, old man, if we make this work, you will have a multiplicity of mecha carcasses to pick over at your leisure. We haven’t much time; let us see what they have left us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Always the Bloody Way

  The first thread of grey on the eastern horizon was a silver ribbon under a heavy door of ink. It whipped the Khloros into a frenzy of speed, the countryside below running like a sheet of black oil on a wet plate. The Rider leaned forward, spiked helm nodding and armoured shoulders shaking with effort. The door of her Discipline was closing, and she could not stop it.

  The tide of the dead who rode with her foamed in the dark-clouded sky, a crystal tracery of flung sea-waves. Under the shadow of Khloros and Rider they rose like smoke from graveyards and ditches, fields and rivers, and joined the procession. The things they rode were vaguely horselike, or they ran in empty air, spirits whole as they had been while living or terribly disfigured as they had been at life’s ending. The drowned and the murdered, the beaten and the lost, the starved and the gluttonous, they ran in the Khloros’s wake.

  This was why Endor was held in caution. Who could trust a man or woman who held congress with such a crowd? Or a Prime who could bring the Khloros to a night’s unlife?

  The Pale Horse arrowed down. The silvery ribbon in the east became fringes of grey. It lashed sensitive flanks, scored smoking weals in piebald, stitched-together horseflesh. The armoured barding sought to protect the sorcerous skin underneath.

  It does not matter. The journey is at an end.

  With the thought, consciousness returned to the Rider. For a moment she hesitated, trembling, on the threshold, nameless and irresolute. It seemed an eternity she had been riding, following the scentless trail of treachery borne on gryphon wings. Did he know she followed? Quite possibly; she was loud enough to be heard counties away.

  Between one heartbeat and the next she was through the door, the memory of being merely a cup to pour meaning into mercifully evaporating. Even a sorcerer’s finely tuned mind could not stand such a violation. Best it were forgotten, and soon.

  A white sword coalesced at the eastern horizon. The grey light intensified, and the sound of waves crashed back and forth. Khloros, understanding her human need, intensified its speed again. It was graceful even in its desperate shambling, its armour and barding and flesh, bones and metal unravelling into pure æther. It burst into colour – the page written upon, the pallid light broken into its constituent parts.

  The crystal wave clustered around the Rider, dead hands outstretched and fingers turned to vapour.

  She fell.

  Sunlight. Warm as oil against her cheeks, striking her sensitised eyes even through protective lids. She lay on chill dampness, various bits digging into her back and hair and skirts. She did not dare open her eyes, simply lay where she was for a few breaths, taking in everything she could of the space around her.

  Morning chill, a damp saltbreath of the sea a distance away, flat metal tang of riverwater close
r. The sunshine came in dappled patterns – she was under leaves. A faint breeze rattled them. What was that sound? It was not waves or the groaning crash of rent earth. It was not the hoofbeats of Khloros, and it was most definitely not her own voice.

  Cries. The clacking of razor beaks, a voice raised high and furious in sonorous chant. A shuddering ran through the damp, hard ground underneath her.

  What?

  Sense returned. Every inch and particle of her savagely abused body hurt. To open the door to Discipline was never undertaken lightly. Things could happen to those whose will was not honed, and Discipline took a hard toll on the body as well as the mind. Emma Bannon sat up, blinking furiously, and found herself in a ragged ruin of a dress, her corset stays snapped and dark curls knocked loose, the morning dew gilding bracken and bramble. To her left a rocky hill rose, choked with vines. It was from the top of that hill that the sounds were pouring, screeches and nasty grindings.

  She staggered upright, tearing herself free of clutching greenery. Her knees threatened to give; she silently cursed at them. That gave them some starch, but only some. Her rings ran with sparkling light – Tideturn had come while she lay senseless, and she carried a full charge of sorcerous force. It stung, like the touch of sun on already reddened skin.

  She took stock. All in all, she was reasonably whole. The black stone at her throat was ice cold, her rings on numb fingers sparked with charter symbols, and her earrings quivered against her neck, brushing dew-damp skin. If she did not take pneumonia from lying on the cold ground for however long, it would be a miracle.

  That’s Llewellyn up there. She shook herself, cast about for a path. None was apparent.

  Oh, isn’t that always the bloody way. Where am I? God alone knows where, with a mad Prime above and the fate of Britannia at stake, and not even a goat track in sight.