“Hell no,” she said.
“Then let’s get inside. We better be gone before anyone notices.”
Drailey nodded and pulled a bandana from her satchel as they walked to the door.
“At least they weren’t much trouble,” he said.
She made a face. “Those were just their lookouts. Even the other Skivers probably didn’t like them. All the real threats are inside.
She wet the bandana from a flask and handed it to him. “Here.”
“What’s this?” he asked.
“You have your road mask?”
He shook his head.
“Then you’re going to want it.”
Ryle frowned, but took the damp cloth and tied it around his nose and mouth. It smelled pleasantly of cedar. Drailey produced a leather mask from her jacket and strapped it into place over her nose and mouth.
After a couple deep breaths, she preceded him into the Skiver’s building. Within two steps he wished he either had a much thicker cloth or could stop breathing.
CHAPTER 25
The stench of the Skiver’s breath had been but a refreshing breeze to the miasma that assaulted Ryle’s senses as they entered the Skiver’s lair. Piss, shit, vomit, spoiled food, damp mold, and coal smoke all rose up in a unified front that struck him across the face. He gagged and stumbled into the wall. Only Drailey’s bandana kept him from retching down the front of his cloak. Not that anyone would’ve noticed.
Drailey’s eyes gave him a heartbeat of sympathy before she waved him on. He staggered after her, his eyes itching like campfires had been lit inside his eyelids. Whatever fumes filled the hallway burned as bad as they stank.
Blinking through the pain, he made out a hallway lined with rotted plaster. A couple sagging, crooked doorframes stood on either side. His boots scuffed through assorted refuse as they moved deeper into the building. Glass crunched with one step, and something wet squished with the next.
At the first doorway, Drailey paused and motioned for him to be quiet as they passed. He glanced inside to see two men and a woman, all with painted faces and ragged clothing, lying against the far wall. Both men’s eyes were rolled back in their heads, but the woman stared fixedly at her lap. A knife stuck out from her bloody thigh.
Ryle didn’t want to know what any of that was about and crept past as quickly as he could.
The next room was empty save for tall piles of trash heaped in the corners, one of which emitted a rustling noise. A small, smoky fire burned in the next room. Not in a fireplace, but simply in a mound at the center of the room. A half dozen figures crouched around it while another turned a spit over the tiny flames. Whatever they cooked was small and had a distinctly vermin-like appearance. He considered the rustling in the last room as they snuck past.
At the end of the hallway, a rickety wooden staircase twisted back upon itself as it rose to the next story. Drailey gripped her satchel and started up, placing each foot carefully, trying to avoid the loud creaks from the neglected boards.
Halfway to the next floor, a thin girl, no older than ten or eleven, sat slumped on the landing. Her dark hair hung lank and ratty across her cheeks. Her blackened lips were peeled back in a smile, but her eyes were vacant.
Ryle paused as a gleam caught his eye. She held a makeshift knife in one hand, a sharp bit of scrap metal with a cloth-wrapped handle. Her fingers clenched it so tightly the tendons stood out along her tiny wrist. His blood heated.
Drailey winced at the sight, but continued up the stairs. He knew exactly how she felt. What a muck sucking place. With wary steps, he followed her the rest of the way up. The girl didn’t so much as blink as they passed.
At the top, beyond a small landing, a single doorway led to one large room where broken couches, stained mattresses, and piles of blankets were heaped about in puddles of flickering candlelight. Skivers, at least two dozen of them, in various states of consciousness, sprawled upon them. Each of them wore enough knives to run their own private butchery. Ryle cursed silently, and sweat broke out along his neck.
Against the far wall, a couch and some chairs sat between boarded windows at the front of the building. The three men and two women there looked more alert, and just as heavily armed. A thin man with a narrow face occupied the center of the couch. His pale chest was bare but for a pair of suspenders. A slim knife adorned each. A couple men and women sat to either side. They took turns sipping from a glass bottle full of some dark substance. Ryle could guess what it contained.
After one such sip one of the women burst out laughing, and a chorus of hoots and chuckles filled the air before they returned to muttered, broken words, and softer incomprehensible noises.
The way Drailey watched the man seated at the center of the couch made it clear they would have to approach him. Ryle guessed this was Chel.
Tactically, the situation was terrible. He saw no other exits, no walls to put at their backs. A hundred Skivers might’ve been an exaggeration, but it didn’t matter. He saw enough blades in that room to whip up a stiff breeze as the Skivers started chopping them up.
“Now what?” he whispered, his voice muffled by the bandana.
Drailey looked like she might get sick at any moment. “We walk in and hope they don’t fillet our spines?”
“Good plan.”
“Have a better one?” she growled.
There was no better one. Not unless she had a personal army waiting outside. Even if she did, he doubted they’d come in here willingly.
He adjusted the hunk of steel at his hip. “Let’s go then.”
Drailey pulled Ogrif’s crumpled note from her pocket, squeezed it hard, and stepped through the doorway. Ryle pulled his center close and followed.
Crossing the floor took an eternity, while each rotting, damp board, groaned. Each loose, rusting nail squealed. And their footfalls, however soft, still added to the general din.
The aroma of unwashed bodies, and soiled bedsheets, left to molder for long, sweaty nights saturated the air. Ryle had to fight the urge to gag with every breath.
The first head came up two paces from the landing. A woman sprawled across a broken chair wearing only a dirty shift. Her eyes stared unfocused, but interested. Her head turned, tracking their progress, then she elbowed the scarecrow of a man beside her.
His eyes were not as vacant. “Who’s that?”
His words cut through the jumbled noise of the room. Heads came up, eyes focused.
“Keep moving,” Ryle snapped and increased his pace.
By the time they reached Chel and his circle of lunatic friends, the gazes of every conscious addict pressed in upon them. A few of them staggered to their feet. A few others fingered their knives. Ryle resisted the urge to grip his sword as Drailey stopped before the couch.
Chel gave her an indolent smile, the white make-up crackling along the corners of his mouth, and cocked his head, but didn’t rise. He looked tense, dangerous, but the man seated to his right worried Ryle more. A scruffy beard smeared with makeup coated his cheeks, and his hands clenched and unclenched in his lap. He wore knives like the rest, but it was the wild light in his eyes that sucked Ryle’s stomach up against his spine.
“We have—” Drailey started, voice flat through her mask, but the man beside Chel cut her off.
“You’re pretty,” he said to her.
That was all the warning Ryle got. He shouldered Drailey out of the way as the Skiver lunged off the couch. The man’s grasping hands found Ryle’s cloak instead of Drailey’s throat. He smashed an elbow into the Skiver’s face and shoved him away.
The stinking man spilled over one of the chairs, taking the woman seated there with him to the floor. Drailey cursed.
Ryle grabbed his kenten and whipped the cloak away from his sword. For a serene moment he hung in the calm of his center. His palm pressed against the sword’s leather grip. The humid air coated his skin.
Harsh laughter erupted on all sides. A dozen voices wanting to join in on the fun. Men a
nd women with paint smeared faces reached for weapons. Their hands twitched for blood and their eyes cried for the pleasure of spilling it.
Rotting chaff.
Chel kept his smile. He hadn’t moved, he didn’t need to, his friends were taking care of that.
Ryle drew his sword in harmony with the whisper of knives sliding into the air.
Drailey screamed. A Skiver woman had a handful of her hair and was dragging her across the remains of a padded chair. Before he could step in, Drailey punched the woman across the jaw and jerked free.
This drew another laugh, then all Ryle heard were pounding feet. “Get back!” he said to Drailey.
The ongine scrambled away as a wave Skivers rushed them. Ryle kicked the chair into their path and turned back. Beardy had found his feet and clutched a jagged knife in each hand. As Ryle turned, he threw himself forward.
Ryle’s center gave him time to see the trajectory of the Skiver’s path, and he stepped aside, but just barely. The bearded man’s knife ripped across his cloak and dug at the right shoulder of his jacket beneath it. Another finger’s width closer, and he would’ve felt the bite of steel.
Ryle shoved his blade up through the man’s guts. The Skiver wheezed and tumbled to the floor, giggling. His hand went to the gaping wound in his stomach. His fingers slid inside, and he shuddered, smiling.
Sucking sauce. The women beside Chel shot Ryle manic smiles, their teeth gleaming wet and black in their mouths, but Ryle saw no knives, so he ignored them.
Drailey gasped behind him. He spun.
Two nearly naked men scrambled for her through light and shadow as if eager to reach her before anyone else. Paint covered more skin than the rags about their hips. The long knives in their hands were no less deadly for their undress.
Ryle cut the first man across the wrist, disarming him, and dodged a lunging strike from the other. Before the Skiver could try again, Ryle slashed him across the temple and kicked the lunatic into a trio of women. Another Skiver with a scab-pocked face, hurtled the tangled mass of limbs, slashing with a knife in each fist. Ryle ducked, and stabbed him through the thigh. The man gasped and stumbled. Ryle dropped him with a fist up under the Skiver’s jaw then spun just in time to whip his sword across chest of another attacker.
The wounded men laughed as blood poured across their skin. One dipped a finger into his cut and stared at it with fascination.
He’d at least bought Drailey and himself a couple seconds.
“We have a letter from Ogrif!” Drailey shouted as best she could through her mask. She frantically waved the crumpled note in Chel’s direction.
The Skiver leader tilted his head to one side. “Ogrif the Tiny?” He tilted his head the other way. “Tiny man should’ve brought his own note.” He smiled wider, drew a knife from his left suspender, and thrust the blade overhead so it caught the candlelight. His men and women howled their agreement and started forward as one.
Despite his kenten, fear burned through Ryle’s veins. He back peddled as the circle of mad men and women constricted around them. “The stairs—” He glanced back and the words died in his throat.
The Skivers might be insane, but they’d played this game before. A handful of them clustered before the doorway where he and Drailey had entered. The gang members bounced from foot to foot, fingering their knives and wildly gesturing for them to make an attempt.
Drailey’s eyes shone huge in her face. She swept her gaze back and forth, then gasped. “There!”
Ryle followed her eyes to the corner of the room. Tucked against the wall beside the landing where they’d entered was a narrow, rickety stairway rising to the next floor.
It was too far away. Two dozen maniacs would pounce upon them long before they got halfway there.
“We need—”
“Get your cloak ready,” Drailey snapped and raised her left hand.
A metal pyramid stood inverted in her palm, somehow holding itself upright on its tip. Of all the things Ryle might’ve expected to see, a child’s top was not one of them.
Drailey’s eyes flashed, and Ryle’s skin prickled as the top started spinning.
She flung it to the floor in the midst the Skivers. The device wobbled, but righted itself and kept on spinning. Faster. Faster.
The Skivers leapt back, then edged forward again, attention now torn between them and this new development. They soon blocked Ryle’s view of the top. But he could hear it. A keening sound plucked at his ears. A breeze rushed across his lips.
“How shiny!” Chel said.
Drailey dragged Ryle to the floor. “Under your cloak! Now!”
A strong wind buffeted the room. Between the Skivers’ legs the top was a gray blur. What the hex is that thing? Drailey pulled the edge of Ryle’s cloak down over them as Ryle crouched and yanked his hood over his head.
A sudden, roaring wind bearing a thousand stinging impacts slammed into his back. He gasped and fell into Drailey. A roomful of lunatics screamed in unison.
His skull rang. His ears hurt.
Drailey shook him. “Get up!”
Ryle blinked, and opened his eyes. Drailey was already back on her feet. He supposed she had the advantage of knowing what the hex was going to happen. He threw his hood back and staggered up after her.
The walls and ceiling glittered like a night sky. A twirling, expanding pattern of metallic pinpricks originating where the top had once spun coated everything. Including the Skivers. They howled in pain and grabbed their faces.
Ryle couldn’t imagine how muck sucking bad that must hurt. His back itched as if pricked by a hundred needles at the same time and that was through layers of clothing. He flicked his cloak, and tiny impacts, like slivers of glass, tinkled across the floor. His back itched a tad less. “What in a cold hex was that?”
“A Whirltop. I make ‘em,” Drailey said. She looked unharmed by whatever her contraption had done. “Now come on.”
He stumbled after her, trying to find his balance and wondering again about this ongine, then he realized she was heading for the stairs up to the next floor.
“We have to get out of here!” He said and discovered he was shouting. He shook his head, trying to clear what felt like cotton wadding from his ears.
“Not without my nag.” She was already ascending the staircase. Ryle cursed but followed her, his sword ready.
They emerged under the sloping rafters of the building. A series of narrow tables ran down the center of the room. A single lantern hung above one table provided the only illumination. Its bright light gleamed on glass bottles, beakers, tubes, and other unidentifiable pieces of equipment.
Ryle gasped, not at the sight, but the smell. It was as if a mixture of tar, shit, and human hair had been lit on fire and left to burn for a very long time. Even through the bandana his lungs felt seared and his eyes burned so badly he could barely see through the tears.
Drailey cursed and rushed forward. A moment later the lantern blinked out.
“Drailey!” he shouted. He wanted to bring his sword up but dared not for risk of hitting the items on the table.
“Hold on!” A breath later, the now familiar blue glow of Drailey’s light filled the room. “Only shit for brains Skivers would burn an open flame around these substances.” She peered down at the nearest beaker in disgust.
Ryle couldn’t imagine drinking this stuff. He fought the urge to vomit, and busied himself with finding a way out as Drailey poked through the clutter on the tables. Their options were slim at best. There was just the one stairway in. The large window at the far end of the room might provide an exit, but a mishmash of boards were nailed tightly across it. None came free no matter how hard he pried. Now what?
Drailey peered at a series of unlabeled bottles and Ryle hurried back to the stairs. The noises below offered no comfort. The screams of pain were shifting to shouts of anger punctuated by more pounding feet. It wouldn’t be long before the Skivers figured out where they’d gone.
He circle
d back to Drailey. She leaned over the farthest table. “Well?” he asked through the bandana.
She raised one finger for silence. Ryle quieted, but didn’t have to wait long. “Ah, here.” She snatched a jug from the table and pumped her fist in the air. “Score!”
The glass cylinder contained a dark emerald fluid, sealed in with a wax stopper.
“Nag?”
“Just enough too.” She eased the jug into her satchel and laid Ogrif’s note on the table.
The stairs creaked at the far end of the room.
“I’m happy for you, but we’ve got a new problem.” Ryle brought his sword up knowing it wouldn’t do a hex of a lot of good, the Skivers would be more than pissed. They’d attacked like lunatics before, what the hex would they do now?
“Problem?” She eyed a few dark vials on the table then scooped them up.
The fumes must’ve gone to her head. “Don’t you hear them?” He pointed back to the stairs. “How the hex are we getting out of here?”
She waved the blue light in her hand up toward the ceiling where a battered copper ventilation hood the size of a wagon wheel hung among the rafters. A black hole gaped at its center. “Fumes have to go somewhere.”
Ryle suppressed a groan. Not another muck sucking ventilation shaft. “You knew this would be up here?”
“Not even Skivers are crazy enough to not have one.”
As if their name had summoned them, curses and footsteps swelled in the stairwell.
“Here,” Drailey said and shoved the vials into Ryle’s free hand.
“What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Throw them down the stairs.” She swept bottles and equipment from the table, apparently unconcerned with whatever they held, and clambered up on the table.
Ryle sheathed his sword and held the vials up in the dim light. “What is it?”
“Sauce.”
Of course it was. He rushed back toward the stairwell.
He reached the top of the stairs at the same time that the Skivers reached the bottom. Knives filled every hand, rage every eye. They howled and surged toward him.
Panic struck Ryle hard, but he maintained enough composure to throw one of the vials down the stairs. It struck the floor with the slightest tinkle of breaking glass.
Gearspire: Advent Page 22