Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech

by Werner, C. L.

  Moritat scurried away from the helljack, his eyes glittering as he stared at Taryn’s sprawled figure. There was no vindictiveness or anger in the necrotech’s gaze. He was above malice or any other pettiness of emotion. He’d left that behind with his mortality. Still, as he looked at the woman he tried to estimate her dimensions. The tendons in her legs might be just about right for his purposes.

  Reluctantly, the necrotech shook his head. He waved a claw at the gruesome shade of the pistol wraith. The phantom was standing directly opposite the cell door, the ghostly embers of its eyes fixed on Taryn. Stuffed beneath the wraith’s gun belt were her magelocks. The ghost had maintained its vigil ever since Azaam and Caracalla brought Taryn into the dungeon, waiting for her to recover from the ordeal of her capture.

  “I fear there is a prior claim on that one,” Moritat said. He scratched at his chin, scraping a furrow in the rotten flesh. “Still, perhaps when he is finished . . .”

  The necrotech smiled and looked again to Azaam. The witch felt like a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop under that ghoulish stare.

  Caracalla’s sudden agitation drew Moritat’s attention away from her. Ever since he brought his laboratory up into the dungeon, the necrotech’s creations had been behaving oddly. The bonejacks had proved so troublesome that he’d disassembled two of them and sent the others into the grotto below. Now the overseer was acting up, its arms and tentacles shifting and weaving madly about. The thing faded slowly into shadow as it drew upon its reserves of arcane energy, then gradually faded back into view as it dissipated those energies.

  “The light burns with such fiery sound,” the leftmost skull clattered.

  The right skull champed its jaws together. “It fills me with the cold chill of old tombs. Such delights to be found and savored, such treasures to be unearthed. Mortals are such fools to bury away all that is beauteous and sweet.”

  The central skull continued what had become an unceasing moan, a wail that adopted a certain cadence and rhythm. Only a creature as ancient as Moritat recognized in that undulating groan the echoes of lute and mandolin, the shadows of songs long forgotten.

  Moritat made no move to subdue Caracalla. He scurried over to the overseer, sank down on his spidery legs, and simply watched the machine’s antics like a child fascinated by a new puzzle.

  Azaam backed away from the necrotech, leaving him to this new study. As she withdrew, Lorca called out to her.

  “Your friend is insane. He won’t hear reason, but you’re not mad. Listen to me, you still need me. You’ll never get all this necrotite out of Five Fingers without my ships!”

  The witch’s cold, mocking laugh was like a slap across Lorca’s face. “Who said we want to take it out?” she asked. “It serves us right where it is. Moritat has no intention of taking it anywhere.”

  Azaam’s smile became demonic as she savored Lorca’s mounting horror. “Moritat will conduct his experiments right here in Five Fingers. He’s going to build a necrofactorium in these old dungeons, right above the mine and right below the graveyard. Between all the materials he could ever need!”

  Terror coursed through Lorca’s veins. Now he appreciated how completely his monstrous allies had deceived him. All the activity by the authorities, all the investigation and inspection by the navy and the watch, even the searches made by the high captains and their gangs, all of it would be wasted effort. There’d be no more ships from the Nightmare Empire. Moritat was simply digging in. With the inexhaustible patience of the undead, he could stay right where he was, conducting his experiments and assembling a ghastly arsenal for the lich lords. What did it matter if he had to wait a few years, even a few decades, for things to settle down and the authorities to be lulled back into complacency?

  For the first time, Lorca understood the kind of creatures he’d been foolish enough to think he could exploit. And with that knowledge came a horror more profound than anything he’d believed possible.

  CHAPTER X

  A cold wind blew across Hospice from the Bay of Stone, moaning through the disarray of grave markers and crypts that formed the Chatterstones. Even by day, there was a disquieting air of desolation about the place that went far beyond the solemnity of death. It was the clammy, uncanny touch of the unknown and the unknowable, of malignant forces that could never be propitiated, merely contained.

  Rutger felt that eerie sense of wrongness as a prickling of the hairs on his neck, an indefinable uneasiness that plucked at his mind. Even the hulking might of Rex striding beside him did little to comfort his agitation, much less the unpleasant companionship of Kalder.

  Their guide, a scruffy-looking Radiz with the crust of his last meal ground into his beard, stopped a hundred yards from a tall arch of black stone topped by a leering gargoyle. He pointed to the archway and the darkness beyond it. Without another word, the man hurried away, almost falling over himself in his eagerness to be quit of the graveyard. Rutger noted the man’s terror and felt a chill run down his own spine.

  “I thought the Blackguard were old hands at this sort of thing,” Rutger said, more to break the oppressive silence than anything else.

  “They try to put ghosts to rest and contain the risen who stray out from their graves,” Kalder said. “Fighting the horrors of Cryx is more than a little out of their line. We’re lucky he brought us this far.”

  Rutger shrugged. The guide, Kalder’s informant, was the one who’d seen the iron lich go to ground. He’d watched it creep down among these tombs with Taryn still in its clutches. On their way to the Chatterstones, the Blackguard had made the place sound incredibly vast, but from what he could see, it was only a moderately sized graveyard, certainly much smaller than would be expected for a city the size of Five Fingers. He told Kalder as much.

  “Real estate is too valuable even in Coveward Bourg to squander on graves,” Kalder said. “Anybody who can afford it sends their dead out on mortuary ships to be dumped in the bay. Still, there’s a lot who can’t. Especially on Hospice. For them, it’s the Chatterstones.” The bounty hunter jabbed his thumb at the ground beneath them. “They expanded it after the Beggar’s Plague. Miles of catacombs snaking away beneath Hospice. Crypts dug out from the rock, old caves used by the Orgoth, tombs hollowed out by the river. Make no mistake, a man gets lost in the Chatterstones, he’s apt to stay lost.” Kalder nodded toward the archway. “You can be thankful my man showed us which entrance the lich machine used. Our chances of tracking it down are slim enough, but without that advantage, they’d be none at all.” He looked from the archway to Rex. “You figure the ’jack can fit down there?”

  “If the iron lich could navigate those tunnels, Rex can do it too,” Rutger said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. He’d heard too many stories about the unnatural powers Cryx endowed its ’jacks with to be absolutely sure of anything.

  Kalder took Rutger at his word. The bounty hunter checked each of his pistols to be certain they were primed and ready. “When we get down there, keep up with me and have the ’jack follow behind.”

  “How far behind?”

  “At about two hundred yards,” Kalder said. “We want him close, but not so close the noise of his engine warns the Cryxians that we’re there.”

  Rutger nodded. It was Kalder’s plan that they should scout ahead of Rex and reconnoiter the monsters’ lair. Once they saw how things were situated, they would decide how best to proceed. If Taryn was alive, neither of them wanted to risk getting her killed by charging in blind.

  Rutger let Kalder lead the way, watching as the bounty hunter passed beneath the arch and started his descent into the darkness below. Rutger turned to Rex, gave the Toro its commands, and plunged into the stygian gloom.

  For what seemed like hours, Rutger followed Kalder through the musty catacombs, with Rex in the rear. The darkness was like a living thing, wrapping itself about them in a clammy, serpentine embrace. The only light they risked came from a whale-oil lantern Kalder carried. A special hood confined its
rays to a single beam. The bounty hunter worked the light carefully when they first descended the steps, soon discovering the scrapes the iron lich left behind as it drifted down the halls. Once he knew what to look for, Kalder was more judicious in his use of the light, employing it only when they reached a turn or a crossroads.

  Against his better judgment, Rutger had to admit that Kalder’s presence was a blessing. Without the hunter’s skill for following a trail—his experience stalking prey—Rutger would have become hopelessly lost, condemned to wander the morbid darkness of the Chatterstones.

  Several times, as they crept through the catacombs, the two heard strange rustlings and furtive stirrings, even above the low roar of Rex’s boiler. There was a sense that they were far from alone among the graves, that eyes, hostile and horrible, watched them from the shadows. Somehow, that these malignant watchers never stirred from the darkness or confronted them made Rutger still more uneasy. After all, the abominations they hunted were of such a terrible nature that even the ghostly denizens of the catacombs hesitated to cross their trail.

  Eventually, after numberless twists and turns, Kalder motioned for a stop. They stood in the tunnel, Kalder’s head tilted to one side to listen. Rutger strained to hear over the sound of his warjack; when he finally heard the noise that had compelled Kalder to greater caution, he was impressed by the bounty hunter’s keen senses. It was faint, muffled, but distinctly the sound of voices. One seemed human; the other was a slobbering, necrotic sound. Rutger immediately thought of the horrendous necrotech, the creature he believed to be a warcaster as well as an undead monster. Behind both voices there sounded an eerie groan, a ghoulish cadence that seemed to whisper its way into their bones.

  Kalder closed the latch on the lantern. Touching Rutger on the arm, he signaled the mercenary to wait. As their eyes adjusted to the perfect darkness, they became aware of a glow in the distance, a sickly green luminance far ahead that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the balefire of the Nightmare Empire. The two men headed toward the light, following it through what looked to be a newly excavated cave and into a short tunnel. Soon, the tunnel opened into a much larger chamber, a place that exuded an atmosphere of ancient atrocity. Rutger didn’t need to be told that the vault-like room had once been employed by the barbaric Orgoth or that its function had been far from wholesome.

  Rutger crept closer, following Kalder as he moved between the octagonal pillars supporting the roof of the vault. The decayed corpses heaped throughout the chamber had turned the air into a macabre fug. Loathsome candles crafted from corpse fat smoldered away among the bodies. The flickering flames cast their eerie shadows across the cadavers, endowing them with a gruesome semblance of motion that he prayed was mere illusion. The eerie groaning continued, but its source remained indeterminate.

  Near one of the pillars, the source of the green glow stood. Rutger’s breath caught in his throat as he gazed on the thing. It was another Reaper, the same style of helljack as the one Rex had fought in Volkenrath’s mansion. This one, however, looked considerably bigger, at once both cruder in construction and more refined in design. He could recognize pieces from several steamjacks worked into its grisly mass. The harpoon fitted to its left arm seemed to have started out as the smokestack of a steam engine, while the immense chain fitted to it must have once been attached to an anchor. Instead of a spool of fused bone, the chain was coiled around a massive metal spike. The head was a cluster of bony horns, like some skeletal thornbush with blazing eyes.

  At the helljack’s feet, a sorry specimen groaned in misery. It took Rutger a moment to understand that the bloody, mutilated thing lying on the floor was Lorca, Volkenrath’s ambitious lieutenant. It seemed Parvolo was right. There was a connection between the gangster and the Cryxian incursion. If Lorca had been allied to the monsters and then tried to betray them, the fiends had certainly exacted retribution in horrific fashion. It looked as though something had opened the middle of Lorca’s arms from wrist to shoulder and then scooped out everything inside until only the bones were left.

  The helljack, towering above the mangled gangster, was utterly oblivious to the man’s presence. The Reaper was rocking back and forth on its immense legs, swaying from side to side in an almost organic attitude of impatience. The blaze of its soul furnace tainted the air around it, causing it to ripple and shimmer like heat vapor.

  “There she is,” Kalder whispered.

  Rutger turned away from the helljack, staring in the direction the bounty hunter pointed. What he saw sent his heart into his throat. Taryn was standing there in the middle of the dungeon, bloody and battered, her arms tied behind her back, but most important of all, alive. Such was Rutger’s joy at this, it took him a few seconds to appreciate exactly how precarious her life was at the moment.

  Taryn was far from alone. Arrayed around her in a semicircle were at least a dozen risen, their foreheads gouged with gory runes, their dead eyes looking like pools of blood. Near the animated corpses stood the blood hag. Her knives lay tucked beneath the sash about her waist. Instead, she held what Rutger instantly recognized as one of Taryn’s magelocks. The witch was slowly loading the weapon, sometimes hesitating in the task to direct a worried glance over her shoulder.

  The necrotech squatted on its mechanikal legs, an expression of profound interest stretched across its decayed face. The creature’s hands were folded across its bloated belly, fingertips tapping against one another as it contemplated the situation.

  “What if she attacks you?” the witch said. She closed the breech of Taryn’s magelock.

  The necrotech frowned slightly, as though the possibility hadn’t occurred to it. After a brief pause, it shrugged. “One must accept some measure of risk in any experiment. But I don’t think the subject will cheat our friend. There’s no mistake about what he will be shooting at,” it added with a slobbering laugh.

  Rutger’s blood turned to ice when he saw the thing Moritat was referring to. Standing about two dozen yards from Taryn, arms folded across its skeletal chest, was a fleshless apparition dressed in antiquated costume. The light burning deep in the sockets of the ghost’s skull held a dreadful sense of purpose and malignance, something more willful than the glow in the rotten eyes of the risen or the smoldering optics of the helljack. The huge pistols holstered at the phantom’s sides left no question in Rutger’s mind what the thing was: a pistol wraith, one of the undead gunfighters that haunted the back roads of Llael searching for living pistoleers to test their murderous ability.

  The tableau was explained in an instant. Taryn was going to be forced to duel the pistol wraith. That was the “experiment” that had excited the necrotech’s fascination.

  “We have to get her out of there,” Rutger hissed to Kalder. “She’s good, but nobody can outdraw a ghost.”

  Kalder nodded in agreement. “Slip back and send Rex up. We’ll use the ’jack as a distraction.”

  Rutger had just begun to turn back toward the tunnel when disaster struck. A patch of darkness near the two men, a shadowy blot that seemed devoid of solidity and substance, suddenly disgorged the necromechanikal horror that had captured Taryn. The metal tentacles of the iron lich flailed against the floor, its three arms clawed at the air around it, and the tip of its metal spine stabbed again and again at the ground. The leering skulls set into the thing’s side, the fleshless faces of the men fused into the machine’s unholy construction, glared banefully at the mortals it had discovered.

  “What interesting flesh,” the left skull said. “Distilling souls from meat is always such unique entertainment.”

  “They walk right to me, like flies into the spider’s web,” the right skull cackled. “Yes, I must be careful not to kill these too quickly.”

  The ceaseless groan of the central skull ended in a shriek of alarm that scratched its way through the dungeon.

  Rutger leveled his hand cannon and fired. His shot obliterated one of the skulls. Gunfire barked from beside him as Kalder added to the barr
age, striking the other two skulls. Shards of bone and fiery ichor dripped from the iron lich’s injuries. For a moment, it surged toward them. Then the ruined skulls collapsed in upon themselves, disintegrating as the forces maintaining their animation deserted the machine, fleeing in a shimmering stream of shrieking energy. The iron lich’s body drifted back, directionless. It crashed into one of the pillars, then settled against the floor where it writhed and shuddered like some huge metal snake.

  The combined arms of mercenary and bounty killer had ended the direct malignance of the iron lich, but its warning wail had alerted everything in the dungeon to their presence. The hag’s bloodthirsty snarls as she ordered her risen to attack echoed through the ancient Orgoth prison. Rutger felt himself grow cold all over as the necrotech reared up on its spidery claws and turned toward the ghastly helljack. Arcane runes erupted around the warcaster and its machine. The necrotech had set its mind into communion with the Reaper.

  The warcaster laughed and pointed a wizened claw at Rutger, then ordered the helljack to attack.

  Beset from all sides, the two men prepared to meet the overwhelming might of their foes. Neither had any delusions about their chances. Their only aim was to inflict as much damage as they could before the Cryxians dragged them down.

  For Rutger, there was one other hope, a desperate prayer that Taryn would be able to escape in the confusion.

  Dragging Jackknife from its sheath, Rutger cleaved the first of the risen charging at him, bisecting it at the waist and casting its mangled carcass across the floor. The undead rushing behind the thing stumbled over the ruin of their companion. But before Rutger could close upon them, the Reaper’s harpoon came shrieking across the dungeon. The black-iron spear tore the back of the mercenary’s coat as it passed him. The chain unreeling behind it whipped across his legs, spilling him to the ground. There was a metallic groan as the chain retracted, dragging the harpoon back across the floor toward the monstrous helljack.