The helljack’s optics flashed as its cortex recovered, but it was far too late. Rex’s hand was closed about its skull-like head, twisting it, wrenching it from its fastenings. With a metallic shriek, the tusked head popped free of its socket. Rex threw it through the window with an almost contemptuous flourish.
The headless Reaper staggered, trying vainly to work its crippled piston arm. Wisps of Cryxlight bled from the gash in its chest where the drill bits had punctured the soul furnace. Necrotite-infused oil spurted from the severed hoses in its neck. At last, with a final shudder, the helljack crashed to the floor.
Rutger looked down at the obscene hybrid of necromancy and mechanika. He looked up at Rex and said, “Let’s go settle with that thing’s master before it finds a replacement.”
Man and machine rushed back to the parlor. They found only dead gangsters waiting for them. Necrotech, blood hag, risen, even most of the wreckage of the Helldivers were gone. They’d retreated back into their tunnels, probably the moment the necrotech lost control over its helljack. Even as Rutger contemplated the idea of going down into the tunnel after them, the mansion shook and a thick plume of dust erupted from the pit. The Cryxian forces had collapsed the passage behind them.
“So much for that idea,” Rutger said as he stared at the hole.
The sound of shots booming out elsewhere in the mansion brought him whipping around. He stared down the hallway where Taryn had led Vulger.
Shouting her name, Rutger ran into the corridor. He prayed it wasn’t already too late.
Hurrying back to help Rutger, Taryn’s first indication of peril was the bullet shattering the tile at her feet. A second shot sent her diving behind a pillar. Peering from behind the column, she saw a grisly figure striding down the hall in a long ragged greatcoat at least two generations out of fashion and tall boots with wide cuffs and enormous buckles that were older still. Above the collar rested the bony cranium of a fleshless skull, only a few grey wisps of hair clinging to its head. A tricorn hat, tattered and threadbare, was pushed down about the apparition’s head.
In each of the apparition’s gloved hands it held an archaic horse pistol such as those favored by highwaymen and duelists of two centuries past. The ghost pointed one of the pistols at her and fired. Bits of marble flew from the side of the column.
Taryn’s blood turned to ice. She knew what this thing was. Henri had warned her of such creatures, and she’d once seen one herself, at a distance, haunting a forsaken patch of road outside Merywyn. It was a pistol wraith, the echo of a long-dead gunman, condemned by its own murderous misdeeds to rove the land of the living. They were said to eternally seek out other gunmen, pitting their ghostly skill against any mortal bold enough to accept their challenge.
It was a fool’s challenge, of course.
Taryn pressed herself closer against the pillar as another shot rang out. The pistol wraith holstered its weapon and crossed its bony arms. Fool’s challenge or no, it seemed the ghost was determined to match itself against Taryn.
A fear such as she had never known pounded in Taryn’s veins. She had grown up on stories of pistol wraiths, their eternal vendettas and ceaseless roving. She thought again of that distant glimpse of a spectral figure standing on a moonlit road, watching and waiting in silence for its prey. The idea of challenging such a fiend was more terrible than Taryn could have imagined.
Yet what choice did she have? The speed and accuracy the pistol wraith had already exhibited told Taryn that it could pick her off at its leisure. Only this obsession with its own gunmanship had restrained it. For the ghost, it wasn’t enough to simply kill her. It had to prove itself the better gunfighter.
Taryn eased out from behind the pillar, arms held out to her sides. The pistol wraith watched, and though there was no face left to it to betoken any expression, a profound satisfaction seemed to emanate from the creature. Taryn stepped into the middle of the hall, crossing her arms in the archaic fashion her spectral foe had adopted. Somehow she knew the ghost would wait for her to make the first move, give her the chance to outdraw the dead.
The opportunity never came. A shot rang out and the pistol wraith spun about as a bullet passed through its incorporeal shoulder. From further down the corridor, Taryn was stunned to see Kalder firing at the ghost with a brace of pistols. Unlike the wraith, her bounty hunter was all too alive.
Taryn seized the opening. The bounty hunter’s determination to take her back to Llael alive had proved fortuitous, sparing her a duel she didn’t think she could win. Drawing her magelocks, she added her fire to Kalder’s. Unlike his bullets, her rune shot smashed into the pistol wraith, ripping scraps of rotten cloth and bits of bleached bone from it. The fires in the fiend’s skull burned still more malignantly. Taryn’s empowered shots could hurt its ghostly form, but to hurt her it would have to become corporeal, making itself vulnerable to Kalder’s weapons as well. Caught between two accomplished marksmen, the pistol wraith shrieked in frustration. Its tattered coat fluttered around it. The ghost threw itself down the hallway, rushing past the pillars and into Vulger’s study. The ghost’s body passed through the wall as though it wasn’t even there. Only a phosphorescent ooze dripping down the stones remained to mark its escape.
“You must want your blood money pretty bad,” Taryn said.
“It’s more than the money now. You made it personal.”
Taryn almost laughed at the outrage in Kalder’s tone. “I made it personal? Forgive me if I take murdering my friends and dragging me off to a vindictive harpy who’s already dead very personally.” She closed the breech on her magelock, risked a glimpse around the corner of the pillar. It was too much to expect Kalder to stick his head out so she could shoot it off, but she was disappointed just the same.
“That story Rutger told me about you, I don’t think it’s true,” she said. If she could get him mad enough, perhaps he’d make a mistake. “I think your family didn’t die in any plague. They deserted you. Took the opportunity while you were locked up to find something better. Probably wasn’t hard to do, either.” She peeked down the hall again, but there was still no sign of the bounty hunter.
The thunderous tread of a charging warjack explained why her opponent didn’t answer. He’d followed the pistol wraith’s example and withdrawn. The ghost hadn’t enjoyed being caught between two enemies. Kalder, as a flesh and blood mortal, had even less reason to like such a situation.
“Taryn! Taryn!” Rutger’s shouts were almost drowned out by the rumble of Rex’s engine and the warjack’s footfalls as it split a half-dozen floor tiles with every step.
The gun mage shook her head and smiled. She’d been frantic to get back and help him. Instead, he’d come back to help her. She stepped out from behind the pillar and called to her partner.
“I really hope Vulger doesn’t dock our pay,” she said, pointing at the scarred floor.
Rutger’s face fairly glowed with joy when he saw Taryn alive and unhurt. “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he said. He looked at the hallway behind Taryn. “Where’s Vulger?”
“He’s all right,” she said. “He’s with Lorca.”
Volkenrath’s escape tunnel snaked its way down from the false back of a closet into the charred rubble upon which the Terraces had been erected. It was no great secret the gangster used the forgotten cellars and vaults for moving and storing contraband, but the existence of this route down from his mansion was a secret he’d protected with blood. The master mason, the craftsmen who worked under him, and even the supplier who provided the building materials were all sitting on the bottom of Bold Finger Channel now, their feet chained to stones left over from construction.
It was therefore with both anger and irritation that Vulger confronted his lieutenant as they descended through the darkness, only the whale-oil lamp Lorca carried lighting their way. “Why did you go smarting off to the gun mage?” Vulger said. “She didn’t need to know anything about my having a way out.” He jabbed his finger against Lorca’s che
st. “And she didn’t need to know nothing about how I got out of the Scrapyard.”
Lorca’s eyes were like chips of stone as he stared back. “I didn’t know how you got out of the Scrapyard, but after finding this place, I guessed that you’d have something similar down on Hospice.”
Vulger’s face turned a shade of purple. “You knew about my tunnel! Nobody’s supposed to know!” The gangster sputtered angrily, then forced himself to calm down. He smiled at Lorca, nodding his head, making placating gestures with his hands. “That’s all right. You’re my right-hand man. Maybe you should know. But I can’t have that gunfighter knowing about it.”
Lorca sighed. “What do you want, Vulger? You want her killed, assuming the Cryxians didn’t already?”
“Just put the fear of Bolis into her. Her and her friend, just in case she blabs to him the way you blabbed to her! Keep them both quiet. Pay them if you have to, but make sure they shut up.”
“Sure, Vulger,” Lorca answered. He was barely listening, focused instead upon an eerie glow at the bottom of the steps. Lorca hesitated, his skin crawling as he recognized the unnatural luminance of Cryxlight. Vulger noted his lieutenant’s apprehension. He directed a puzzled look at Lorca, then followed his gaze to the tunnel below.
“What is that?” Vulger gasped, clutching at his lieutenant. The glow emanating from the creature’s soul furnaces revealed something like a gigantic squid cobbled together from black iron and bone. Metal tentacles snaked down from its base, and a trio of leering skulls stared out from its sides. Three clawed steel arms projected from its bulbous black-iron hull, while a long tail-like spine of fused bone dripped away from its base. Soul cages were chained to the abomination’s exposed ribs, lending their light to the infernal glow of the soul furnace locked behind those black-iron ribs. The creature didn’t crawl or slither. Instead, it floated along the ground, borne aloft by the supernatural forces boiling in its necrotite-powered core.
The monster looked up at the men. The fires shining in the eyes of the skulls flickered with a new intensity.
“Is this the one?” A dry wheeze issued from the leftmost skull.
“Perhaps,” a glottal intonation coughed across the fangs of the skull on the right. “Their flesh looks so similar. So clean and shiny, like a new coin just begging to be spent.”
The center skull simply moaned, a dry sound that rose and fell in pitch. The other skulls tittered in amusement at whatever observation the moan had conveyed to them.
“Bones of Bolis!” Vulger cried out again. “What is it?”
There was a complete absence of humanity in the glare Lorca directed at his boss. “I don’t know, Vulger. But it’s waiting for you.” Seizing the gangster by the arm, he spun him around and sent him tumbling down the stairs. Vulger’s shriek echoed through the tunnel, but it was nearly drowned out by the hungry, hateful hiss issued from the skeletal jaws of the thing at the base of the stairs. Tentacles whipped out, coiling around the man as his body flopped to the bottom.
“The little one says the fat one belongs to me,” the leftmost skull said. “Does that sound right? Did Moritat describe the flesh for me?”
“After so long they all look the same,” the right skull complained. “Same blood, same marrow, same slimy organs. Maybe if we took it apart from the inside out, it would seem new?”
Vulger’s shriek became a moan of mortal terror as the tentacles lifted him from the ground and brought him close to the triad of leering skulls. The tentacles lifted him before the sockets in the leftmost head. “Ah, but what if this isn’t the right one?” The monster’s left side shifted toward the stairs, one of its arms reaching out toward Lorca.
“Moritat will be angry if I kill too many,” the right skull said. A shudder passed through the metal monstrosity as it recalled the sort of discipline it might expect from the necrotech.
Again, the central skull moaned, the sepulchral note reverberating through the tunnel. The other skulls hissed with laughter.
“Yes,” the left head said. “Take this one.”
“If it isn’t the right one, Moritat can send me for the other one.” The fires in the right skull flickered menacingly as the creature pivoted toward Lorca.
The central skull’s eyes blazed still more brightly, then shifted and darkened. Vulger screamed as he felt spectral probes sink into his essence, profaning the very core of his being. The skeletal heads seemed to grin at him, savoring each wail that erupted from the man as the metal tentacles tightened about his body. Blood oozed from Vulger’s flesh as the coils ripped his skin, mercilessly constricting the plump little mortal caught in their grasp.
But it wasn’t the mutilation of his body that inflicted the most excruciating agony. The ethereal tendrils the monster had sent slithering into him were now drawing Vulger’s blackened soul from his obese body. The extracted spirit of Vulger Volkenrath was being sucked down into one of the soul cages dangling about the monster, where a new vibrancy began to shine.
“This is taking too long,” the left skull said.
“It’s going too quickly,” the right skull said as Vulger’s screams began to lessen.
The center skull simply moaned.
Retreating some distance back up the stairs, well away from any sudden lunge by the monster, Lorca watched the excruciating death of his boss with all the compassion of a man stepping on an ant.
“Nothing personal, Vulger,” he told the tortured meat screaming in the undead fiend’s coils. “You were just in my way.”
In the aftermath of the Cryxian attack on Volkenrath’s estate, the once-forbidden fortress became infested with militia and officers of the Five Fingers Watch. The panic the attack inspired in the wealthy inhabitants of Bellicose Island was so severe, even Watch Commander Darvis Middleton was present, prowling about the rubble, barking out orders and trying his best to look important and in control. The same could be said about Watch Captain Gervis Sculler, though there was at least an air of anxiety on his part, an urgency to get this unpleasantness cleaned up so that the status quo of graft and bribery could resume.
Sculler treated Captain Nestor Parvolo and the men he brought with him from Captain’s Isle like interlopers, and the other captain did his best to marginalize their contribution to what he adamantly insisted was his investigation. If not for the presence of Middleton and his unswerving demand that the matter be resolved as quickly as possible, Sculler would probably have had Parvolo thrown off the estate.
As it was, Sculler had condescended to allow Parvolo to interrogate a few of the survivors. Among the scraps Sculler threw his way, Parvolo was careful to take charge of Rutger and Taryn.
“You were right, Captain,” Rutger told Parvolo once they were all out in the garden. “The Cryx were after Vulger.”
“Any idea why? Did Vulger drop any hint about a connection between himself and—”
“Nothing,” Rutger said. “If you ask me, he was as much at a loss to explain their interest in him as you are.”
Taryn took up the theme. “A man as paranoid as Vulger, who turned his home into a fortress the moment he found himself answering to a new high captain, wouldn’t have endangered himself by colluding with the Nightmare Empire—not without taking more precautions than we saw. I think if Vulger had been working with the Cryx he would have had a regiment of priests and sorcerers making sure nothing happened to him.” Her expression darkened. Now that the crisis was past, her mind returned to the image of the pistol wraith waiting for her to reach for her guns, goading her. To be spared such an experience, she would have welcomed Thamar herself as a comrade-in-arms.
Parvolo shook his head and waved his hand back at the mansion where Middleton and Sculler were conducting their investigation. “They haven’t found Vulger yet. And except for a few stray parts and what was left of that helljack you turned into scrap, damn little solid evidence that the Cryxians were here.”
“They took away their dead,” Rutger said. “As for Vulger, the last Taryn saw of
him, he was being led to some escape route by Lorca.” He turned toward his partner. “Isn’t that right?” He had to repeat the question. Ever since the attack, the gun mage had been strangely distracted, almost brooding. Whatever was troubling her, Rutger sensed it went deeper than the horror evoked by the creations of the Nightmare Empire. It pained him that she didn’t want to share whatever it was with him.
“Yes, Lorca took Vulger away,” Taryn said, uneasiness making her words clipped and terse. “That was the last I saw of him.”
A bitter laugh rose from the watch captain. “If I know Lorca, that’s the last anybody will see of his boss.” His expression darkened as a new suspicion came to him. “Did you ever hear Lorca mention anything about Cryx?”
“We barely saw the man,” Taryn said. “He didn’t seem to like us much.”
Parvolo nodded. “He might have good reason,” he said, but didn’t explain further. Reaching into his coat, the captain drew out a sealskin pouch that jangled with the sound of coins.
Rutger smiled wryly at the captain as he took the bag. “I thought you said there’d be no money.”
“There isn’t,” Parvolo said. “You did a good job for me and I might want to use you again.” He pointed at the bag in Rutger’s hand. “That is for Captain Sculler, to make sure you don’t end up locked away somewhere as either suspects or material witnesses. It’ll also ensure he doesn’t impound your warjack.”
Rutger hefted the bag in his hand, frowning at its weight. “Sculler must sell himself cheap,” he said.
Parvolo chuckled. “Give him every coin in that bag. It’s the exact amount he owes at one of Kilbride’s gambling dens. Give him that, and he’ll think you’re from Kilbride. Once he starts thinking that, trust me, he won’t be able to turn you loose fast enough.”
CHAPTER VII
Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech Page 12