Infernal Machines

by Jacobs, John Hornor

  At times, Carnelia joins me on deck, under the stars, with her jian, and she makes the arcane moments, the tracery of air, the turnings and jumpings of Sun Huáng’s swordplay until she is slathered in sweat and panting. Once Tenebrae appeared on deck, a wooden gladius in hand, as if to join Carnelia, but the look she gave him was so frightful he paused and then went back below decks.

  We both have our armatura of grief.

  THREE

  Time Enough And Bullets

  THE DAY GREW long, and we found a vantage at the peak of the Long Slide, where Beleth, the Medierans, and the daemon-gripped thralls they had in tow would have to approach. The Long Slide is a curious tilt of solid rock, and has been so for aeons; a stone raft two miles long, tilting up in the dirt waters of the Hardscrabble’s eastern reaches and bordered by mapless leagues of impassable and impenetrable gulleys. Even the most agile of vaettir would have trouble making their way through the scrawls of deep fissures and eroded passageways, choked with bramblewrack and ruin. At the peak of the Long Slide, a slurry of boulders and a worn, thousand-year-old switchback trail threads its way down and away from the tilted rock plane. There was nowhere to hide on the face of it, and it was in full view of the summit for a mile or more.

  The perfect spot for an ambush.

  ‘They’ll wait until night,’ Fisk said, leaning against a rock and pulling the dusty brim of his grey hat over his grey eyes. I watched the Long Slide, searching the far end where stone met dust. ‘And you won’t have any trouble seeing them, with your—’ He waggled two fingers in a V at my eyes. ‘Dvergar nighteyes, or dim sight, or whatever you want to call it. But I should make sure I nap beforehand. When I open my eyes it will be dark and I might not have your vision, but it’ll be good enough to kill the engineer and his Ia-damned followers,’ he said and then, with no more fuss or talk of it, he gave his hat a second tug, settled back further into the rock and sand, and promptly fell asleep.

  You take rest when and where you can find it, in the Hardscrabble.

  Shadows grew long, drawing east as the sun fell across the western vault of sky. I kept watch on the foot of the Long Slide, letting my mind drift off, trying to stay away from brooding about recent events and the current situation, with no success, and found myself considering Gynth, the vaettir who saved me. He’d been a strange one, and it niggled at me that I knew not if he were alive, or dead. It takes an enormous amount of damage – traumatic bodily damage – to kill a vaettir, and while he’d been deep in the shite, torn to bloody ribbons when I last saw him, I never saw him cease to breathe or give up whatever spirit that propelled him, be it fierce will or some other inscrutable working of the stretcher heart.

  But I’d be lying if I said I hoped he was dead.

  And from there my mind emptied, finally, and I found that un-fettered ease that comes with staring for long periods, mindlessly, at the big wide world underneath the big unbroken Hardscrabble sky, bruising now pink to purple to the deepest blue, the billions of pinpricks of stars spraying across the heavens. In the distance, coyotes yipped and called. Fisk snored with light chuffing sounds under his hat.

  And there, in the distance, smoke. I marked it, imagined I smelled it, though that was near impossible since it was miles away. There lay the ruinous husk of Harbour Town; the charred bodies of thousands of men, women, children, dvergar and human alike. Countless tonnes of goods, timber, wickerwares, fish, goat, shoal auroch, sage and gambelnut, honeycomb and garum. All gone, all blown to vapour – the integument of their corpus destroyed, rendered to char, reduced to ash and now that carbonite stuff spread to the winds of the Illvatch to spread over the Hardscrabble as a caul. Weeping would not do. Nor remorse. No emotion seated in the heart but lust for vengeance would suffice.

  I kept watch, closely, waiting until it was full dark before nudging Fisk with my boot.

  His head came up, and he pushed his hat back, as if he’d been waiting for that touch all along. And perhaps he had been.

  ‘They’ve set a camp and built a fire,’ I said, pointing in the direction of a new sliver of smoke. They were burning bramblewrack, or some other thin combustible. Charcoal, maybe, which they’d toted along with them inside saddlebags or rucksacks.

  ‘They’ll not stay at it. It’s a ruse to draw our eyes away, and they’ll be coming,’ he said, and spat downwind toward where the smoke rose. ‘They won’t wait until dawn.’

  ‘No,’ I said, considering. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘They might have a native with them who could’ve anticipated our use of the Long Slide,’ he said. ‘Someone that knows this country. Or, maybe one of the daemon-gripped could answer questions, if that’s the way the engineer’s summoning works. If so, they’ll know this is an ambush.’ He put his hand on the carbine, worked the action, and checked the chamber.

  ‘Let’s hope they lack foresight.’

  Fisk nodded. ‘Shoe, we’ve got to be patient, and wait. We have to let their Hellborn pets get as close to us as possible and make sure they’re dead, and hope they show themselves on horseback.’

  ‘We’ve been over this, pard,’ I said. ‘I know the plan. I drop the stretchers, then whatever daemon-gripped men are on us, you’ll kill their horses.’

  Fisk nodded, once more, and pursed his lips and turned to face the Long Slide.

  It was in the small hours of the morning when they made their move. Two shadows, creeping up over either edge of the Long Slide, up from the gulleys. They remained low, crouched and walking on all fours like a lizard or other creature – but faster, moving with a speed born of infernal desire. The big one, the vaettir, scurried up the face of the Long Slide in the weak illumination, its head turning on gimbaled pivot, scenting the air like a hunting hound. Some sort of ichor oozed from its jagged mouth, blood maybe, the wet stuff catching starlight, my dvergar vision catching its glint. The smaller one – a daemon-gripped man – followed, tracing the northern edge of the Slide.

  Fisk patted my arm to draw my attention and inclined his head toward the possessed man. Plans change with the situation. No horses in sight. It took just his nod to indicate intention. I was to take the possessed man, and he would meet the stretcher. I nodded my agreement and eased down from the view we had and softly made my way around the boulders and up a higher path, until I was perched upon a pile of stones high enough to regain vantage. After a moment I found the man again, and he was much closer and had picked up devilish speed.

  The daemon-gripped stretcher was almost upon Fisk. He’d reached the base of the boulder slurry that capped the Long Slide and had craned his leering face upwards, toward where my partner waited, eyes sharp glints of broken glass. The thing was dressed in frontiersmen clothing, new, short at the sleeves and the cuffs. The undersized human garb gave it a strange, otherworldly appearance, like a lanky man dressed in children’s clothes, and the half-light of stars washed it clean of all colour. He looked as if he smelled like corpseflowers, but I guessed Fisk – and maybe I – would know soon enough.

  The stretcher scrabbled up the boulder, vaulting higher than a steamboat’s top stack, and found purchase on another slab of rock some fifty feet shy of the crest of the Long Slide where we waited. From the corner of my eye I noticed movement from Fisk; he stooped, snatched up a large rock and threw it toward me, but down-slope. It fell with a short, sharp clatter, and the stretcher’s head whipped about, gaze fixing on the area where the sound came from, while the daemon-gripped man scuttled like a crab toward it.

  My breath caught. Down-slope, horses with riders stepped into the open and onto the Long Slide. There were three, moving slowly.

  Fisk held up his hand to me, gesturing to hold.

  The riders walked onto the Slope, leisurely. It occurred to me that they might not, after all, know we were there and were simply following our trail.

  All the better.

  The possessed man and vaettir came together where the rock had fallen and turned to look toward us, again reminding me of Hellish dogs of war.
Fisk snatched up another rock and let it fly, beyond and behind them, but they only turned their heads to glance down-slope and then gazed back up at us. They began to move.

  Motion congealed to slowness, my breath came short and fast in my chest. Screams. From the possessed stretcher, or the daemon-gripped man, or from me, I could not tell you with any veracity now. The creatures moved like wind over the shoal grasses, up and over the lip of the crest and were suddenly between Fisk and myself, and moving fast.

  But, in some vagary of fate, neither of the creatures noticed Fisk; their cold, fervent gazes fell upon me and they raced forward.

  I sighted the vaettir’s chest with my carbine and fired, filling the air with a booming report, despair, and brimstone. I whipped the carbine around, levering another round into the chamber, then fired again. The stretcher pitched forward and then the daemon-gripped man was upon me.

  He hit me like a bull auroch, bellowing. I fell backward with him on top of me, slamming me into the ground. All the breath whooshed out of me in a great heave, and I could not find air.

  The man’s hands ripped at my chest and I felt the carbine spin away, then there was a hot explosion of pain as black gnashing teeth bit where my neck met my shoulder, furrowing toward the vital sanguiducts below my skin. Reflexively I pulled in my chin, like a turtle ducking its head into its shell, but the infernal man’s teeth tore through my shirt and into the meat of my shoulder.

  The pain was excruciating and I cannot recall now what desperate sounds I might have made, but I can recall clearly the Hellish grunting the daemon-gripped man made, whipping and fretting his head, fast and vicious. There was a separation and his face pulled away, mouth full of a gob of my flesh, a spray of blood in the air.

  I fumbled toward his face with my hands, catching his stubbled cheek and following the contour to sink my thumb into the socket of his eye. Dvergar are many things, but our hands are made for industry and rough work. I was knuckle-deep in the man’s face before he gathered whatever infernal wits he had – I know not what a man with such a rider upon his soul has in the way of reasoning. Was he a creature purely of instinct, divorced from higher thought, except for what impetus that Beleth gave him?

  With my thumb sunk in the socket, I jerked the possessed head to the side, slamming it into a boulder – once, twice – impacting with deep meaty sounds. My other hand fumbled to my gunbelt and drew Hellfire. The mind splits, awareness separates: the sound of distant drums, the reports of a carbine, echoing away into the night; the tug and fret of my hand, knuckled deep in a man’s eye socket, smashing skull to rock; the trigger, cold, the pistol unsteady in my hand.

  I stilled. The barrel came to rest on the man’s chest. I pulled the trigger. The six-gun jerked in my hand in an eruption of smoke and noise and his body fell away.

  I lay there breathing for longer than I care to admit.

  Pulling myself up, I saw Fisk at the crest of the Long Slide, his attention down-slope.

  I wiped the gore on my trouser leg and looked down at my spattered clothes. Fastidiousness is as useless in gunplay as it is in the Hardscrabble. As I joined Fisk, he said, ‘Put a couple more notches on that gunbelt, friend.’

  He glanced at me when I said nothing.

  ‘There’s three dead horses halfway down the Slide. The idiots rode Hellbent for leather up-slope when they heard the gunshots.’ He shook his head and allowed a grim smile to flash across his features. ‘They’re hiding behind the carcasses.’

  I made my way over to Bess, who chuffed and stood nervously, agitated by the scent of Hellfire and blood hanging about me in stinking streamers. I dug out a clean handkerchief from her saddlebag. Having no cacique, I wadded the cloth into my freely-flowing wound in my shoulder, collected my carbine, and went to rejoin Fisk.

  We stood breathing in the pre-morning light, waiting for the sun to rise. I peeked my head over the boulder to look where the dead horses lay, and the bright sound of a rifle came skittering across the stony distance between us and the fallen horses as a whistling sounded overhead, the bullet passing inches from my skull.

  ‘Not a bad shot, that one,’ Fisk said.

  ‘He didn’t get me,’ I said.

  ‘Nor did those daemon-gripped. You’re fearsome, Shoestring.’

  I checked the bleeding of my shoulder. ‘Don’t feel so fearsome.’

  ‘Neither does the bear or badger,’ he said, dipping his fingers into his shirt pocket and fishing out a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘Real easy to be fearsome when you’re toting Hellfire,’ I said, and peered over the crest again, then ducked my head before the rifle report could sound. A little explosion of rock and debris came from overhead where the bullet hit a boulder.

  We waited, watching, checking over the crest in turns. Right at dawn, one of the fallen riders, the one closest to the southern edge of the Long Slide, stood and ran in a stooped, lumbering fashion toward the falloff where the gulley began.

  Fisk shot him and he fell. He moaned once and then remained still.

  The sun peeked over the rim of the world and the gunmetal grey peaks of the Eldvatch, the Smokeys. Colour rose up from the dirt like a fog, first tawny, then ochre, the ferric dirt streaked with light yellow and red.

  ‘Let’s heat it up a bit,’ Fisk said, once the sun was fully risen and the visibility had improved. He popped up, sighted his carbine, fired, and ducked back, underneath the lip of rock. He began counting down from twenty, before doing it again.

  On his sixth or seventh shot, I glanced over with him, and saw the blood spattering the rock face of the Long Slide. He was shooting the corpse of one of their horses, over and over again. Whoever was hiding behind it was due for a wet, sticky morning.

  When Fisk’s gunbelt was half empty, he cupped his hand to his mouth and yelled, ‘We got your pets, Beleth! But you probably already know that!’ The sound floated out over the sun-baked Hardscrabble. The temperature was rising. ‘Throw out your Hellfire and stand up with your hands on your head and we’ll have a nice chat.’

  Silence far below, but my ears pricked and I swore there was some discussion going on down there.

  ‘We’ve got water for days and I can just keep shooting your dead horse,’ Fisk hollered. He sent an unsmiling wink my way with the lie. ‘At some point, one of my bullets will find you. Come out!’

  ‘If we do, what assurances do we have that we’ll go unharmed?’

  ‘You have my word!’ Fisk bellowed.

  ‘Would you swear on the life of your wife? Your child?’

  Fisk’s face contorted, and his mouth pursed as if he tasted something sour. He waited too long. So I yelled, ‘Yes!’

  There was another long silence while the trapped men conversed down-slope.

  Beleth’s voice rang out. ‘I think not, Mister Ilys! And look there, on the horizon.’

  I lifted my gaze past the dead horses where the loathed engineer hid. Across the now bright and burning Hardscrabble an ochre plume of dust billowed up from hooves.

  ‘We are the vanguard, Mister Fisk. More horsemen follow behind,’ Beleth called. As he did, his companion popped up and fired, making us duck.

  ‘Is he speaking truth, Shoe? My eyes cannot see that far in the glare.’

  ‘There are riders approaching,’ I said.

  Fisk rose again and levered and fired, his cloud of brimstone mirroring the one in the distance. One, two, three shots, each one slapping into the downed horse. Even from this distance, I could tell the rounds were making a gory mess of the horse’s innards. The men hiding there would be painted red.

  ‘I think maybe I’ll keep making soup of that horsemeat, Mister Beleth!’ Fisk cried. ‘One of my shots will find you.’

  He fired again.

  ‘We got to run, partner,’ I said. ‘Nothing for it.’

  ‘I can kill that man, now,’ Fisk said, face tight and angry.

  ‘Had you time enough and bullets, you could,’ I said, soft. ‘But we’ve got to go. They’re two, ma
ybe three hours off, if we’re lucky. We can reach the Bitter Spring before them, and plan another ambush, maybe. But if we stay here, we’ll be outgunned.’

  His eyes narrowed and he rose, fired at the horse once more. The viscous gore oozed from the creature in a slick that curled around the mound of its great belly – it had fallen backward when it died, leaving its underside facing us. The mess of it made me cringe. Shame that such noble creatures had to die, and in such an ignominious fashion, to preserve our meagre lives.

  ‘Save your bullets,’ I said, then turned and went to Bess and pulled myself into the saddle.

  After a moment, Fisk followed to his own horse.

  FOUR

  Comfort In Blued-steel And Wood

  FATHER WAS DRUNK and wearing his silver bear leg when he greeted us at the Ostia wharf. It was an inebriation he’d been developing, working at it like a man at a labour he loved dearly, I could tell: wine in the morning, beers at lunch, and onto the harder stuff by nightfall for days, if not weeks. His belly was drum-head taut, his hair a clotted, greasy mess, his eyes rheumy. He wore his toga minima, the black one, the loose fabric drawn over his head in mourning for our brother and his son, Secundus. It seemed Tamberlaine, Juvenus, Tenebrae – or another of the Emperor’s agents – had filled him in on the details of our journey and its sorry end.

  ‘Let me see him! Let me see my grandson!’ he cried as we appeared on the deck of the Malphas.

  To each side of him were praetorians holding carbines and gladii in their sheaths, war-aprons unbloodied and neat, their blue uniforms and phalerae immaculate. The day was cold, and bare, and everything was brown – the pier, the muddy water pouring down from the Ruman hills out of the mouth of the filthy Tever River. A misty rain fell upon us and Fiscelion cried as the cold air and dampness infested his bedclothes. A mechanised swing-stage unfurled itself from the Malphas and we disembarked as a flurry of stevedores, shoremen, and porters replaced us on board to gather our belongings and trundle them down to waiting wagons.