Carpathian Devils

by Alex Oliver

  Atlantean Devices

  Carpathian Devils

  ~

  Alex Oliver

  Chapter One:

  In which the Student life proves Perilous.

  Wallachia 1742

  ∞∞∞

  Stebbins was the first to die.

  Frank had grown to loathe the boat, his posterior aching from endless hours perched on his own traveling bag as the mountains grew closer and chill winds blew down the valley of the Olt. Stebbins was crowded so close on one side he could not move his elbows. Protheroe, on the other, continually joggled him as he tested the ever increasing vril saturation with an etherometer of brass and crism.

  Recently, Protheroe had begun to squeak in surprise and delight every time this happened. “We must be getting close now, lads. We're already at a concentration twice as high as Glastonbury Tor. I don't see how it can go up much higher without buckling the nature of reality wholesale.”

  Protheroe's obvious excitement went a long way towards soothing Frank's guilt. Neither of his friends would be out here in the Wallachian wilderness but for loyalty to him. They had turned the escape of a criminal into a respectable theurgic expedition. Though they had done their best not to grumble about discomfort, he still felt terrible if they so much as frowned, and unfortunately, there had been a great deal to frown about. Not only cold nights on cold stones, strange food and stranger customs, but also a terrible run of bizarre accidents that had approached life-threatening at one point. Misfortune had dogged their heels like a hunter.

  This morning however, had started well. Stebbins – the naturalist – was smiling as he sketched the approaching mountains, and Protheroe was all but bouncing on his seat. “We should see it today. You have to be a member of the Royal Society to be permitted to study the vril accumulator in England. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to see one active. I can't wait.”

  Frank grinned back at him, unwilling to dampen his enthusiasm, but the prospect of reaching their goal was not as appealing to him as it was to his friends. They would go home afterward. He, who faced only a noose in England, would be left alone, revealed as the fugitive from justice that he was. He didn't relish the prospect.

  So Frank was leaning his chin into his hand, reclining awkwardly sideways out of the way of Protheroe's contraption and trying to sleep when it happened. They rounded a bend in the river between two sugar-loaf shaped hills, there came a crack and a flash, sharp as lightning, and Stebbins shouted something unmannerly and flung himself into Frank's lap.

  "What on Earth?" Frank shoved him in the shoulder. His hand slid in something warm and red. The scent of black powder reached his brain, blessedly chemical in contrast with the slippery organic reek he could smell from Stebbins. As he was bending over to try to catch his friend's shoulders, Stebbins convulsed on Frank's knees twice. His mouth filled with blood and overflowed.

  “Stebbins?” Frank cried. Stebbin's chest was unmoving against his own, his torn waistcoat turning crimson, beginning to drip. “William!”

  Nicu's hand came down between Frank's shoulder blades and pushed him off the seat. "Lie down. Lie in the boat. Do not get up."

  Frank laid Stebbins in a position of as much dignity as he could manage, as a second shot splintered the gunwale next to him, peppering him with splinters. In the bows, Apostol, one of their bearers, unslung his own rifle and took aim back. At the stern, silent Mihai bent double to the boat's pole, trying to speed past the attacker.

  "Bandits, young sir." Nicu gave a fierce and chilling grin. "The mountains are full of them. Stay down."

  Frank caught Protheroe's matching expression of terrified determination. Oh God, let me not bring ruin on these, the best of all friends. "We can help!"

  "You have rifles? You can shoot?"

  Protheroe dropped his notepad and pulled the long bag out from beneath the heaps of luggage. "An English gentleman is always proficient in firearms."

  Nicu flinched out of the way of another bullet. "Good. Then you will lie flat and return fire, and I will take up the second pole, so that we may be through the ambush faster. Do not let them shoot me."

  Protheroe passed the first rifle to Frank, followed it up with a box of shot, a rammer and a powder horn. As Frank wriggled to get the gun loaded, Nicu joined Mihai at the stern. The boat speeded a little, though a trotting horse could still have outpaced it.

  With the rifle primed, Frank propped himself on his elbows, stock pressed to his shoulder. He swarmed cautiously up until he could raise his head above the gunwale. Nothing to see but pinkish-brown rocks against a clear blue sky.

  One of the ledges of the foothills sprouted a dark blur as a hidden bandit stood up to shoot. Frank's world twisted and chilled as he got a good look at the man's face. Surely that wasn't ... Lewis? No. No, my father would not...?

  A flash of fire, a puff of white smoke and then the bang of a report, and Frank had aimed and squeezed the trigger in return before he took a second thought.

  The distant figure recoiled and dropped. A cry came down the wind, harsh and sharp as the cry of some strange bird. Apostol, ahead of Frank, gave an approving laugh. "The scholars are not such children as we thought."

  Something froze solid in the pit of Frank's stomach, leaving him feeling as though his viscera had turned to stone. He didn't have time to consider the feeling. On the contrary, as the rock-sides abruptly swarmed with motion, his mind felt clearer than it had ever done before. He could not return fire against a whole pack of bandits. What could he do instead? What did they need? To spoil their aim. We need cover. Darkness.

  Letting go of the rifle, he spread his hands and pulled at the shadows, as he had pulled at the sunlight in Gervaise's room. The wild, instinctive ability that lived at the back of his head had come out once and saved his life. Perhaps it would do so again.

  Obedient to his summons, darkness flowed across the water and wrapped the boat in a thick smoke. Within it, the light turned to tar and the bright sky became dim as if seen through dark spectacles. But it did nothing to stop the thunder of a dozen carbines firing so close together one could not distinguish the shots. All he had achieved was to spoil any aiming at individuals – he could not prevent the bandits from simply blanketing the area with shot.

  If that was Lewis, it meant they'd come for Frank alone. It meant they should be aiming at him only, that if they slew him, they might perhaps allow Protheroe and the boatmen to live. By concealing them all he had put his friends at greater risk. Damn it.

  Changing his mind about the need for cover, he struggled with his talent. He didn't know, on an intellectual level, how he'd summoned the darkness, didn't know how to get rid of it. A small, cowardly part of him didn't want to stand up and die in the hopes that that would make things better for others. Indeed, if he'd wanted that he could have just stayed in England to be hanged.

  Pushing the cowardice aside, he pictured himself letting go, letting the shadows bounce back into place as though on springs. It didn't work. He tried again, mentally pushing them away. This time they went, slowly, reluctantly, leaving him visible and exposed. Leaving Protheroe and the bearers equally so. What the hell was he doing? What was he doing? What could he do to make this right? Please don't punish Protheroe for my sins. Please spare him from my curse. Please!

  Around the boat, the river spiked up in spatters, and the timbers shivered and smashed. A swarm of sharp bladed splinters slammed into Frank's cheek, but he scarcely felt it, because one of the bullets had struck Protheroe's gun, dinting the barrel just as Protheroe was returning fire.

  Blocked, Protheroe's rifle exploded, taking off half of his face and utterly destroying both of his hands. At the same time Mihai gave a soft 'huh' that was almost laughter. With blood trickling f
rom his back, he fell slowly outward from the stern of the boat, still clinging to his pole. The river current caught him and washed both away. Numbed by his friends' death, Frank could not grasp the magnitude of this disaster for a moment. But the loss of one pole meant that now it would take twice as long to get away.

  Only three of them left: Frank and Apostol on their bellies in a boat filling up with blood, Nicu boldly upright in the stern, laboring with all his might at his own pole. Both Apostol and Nicu had begun to sing beneath their breath, the heathenish, eerie music of the orthodox liturgy, asking God for strength and protection and, if He didn't feel inclined to answer that one, for forgiveness in the instant of death.

  Frank had long been told that it was his fault his mother had died in childbirth. His fault his father had grown cold and bitter. His fault that his elder brother had died at sea. He was indisputably responsible for Gervaise's death. When Nicu fell, shot through the temple, just as they passed under the deepest shade of the hemming boulders, the responsibility of that fell on him too. His fault, all of this.

  Leaping up, he grabbed Nicu's pole. Apostol came running from the bows, his almost skeletal face flapped about by long hair the color of crow wings. "We must stop trying to get through! We must go back."

  "Yes," Frank agreed. "Yes, absolutely." He twisted the pole to push them into a curve that would eventually end with them heading downstream.

  "You go to the..." Apostol indicated the sheltered spot where he had lain amongst the baggage, and he was shot twice as he gestured. A third shot grazed along Frank's bicep like the press of a hot poker, but did not do him the courtesy of killing him too.

  "No!" Frank protested as the last of his companions dropped and left him alone. He might have stood there longer, stupidly gaping, if the boat had not obeyed his last push and driven its nose into the rocks at the river's edge. The grating shudder woke him up, forced him to take stock.

  Seeing their victory all but complete, the bandits had begun to come down out of the cracks and crannies of the rocks to line the shore. They were so close on his right he could read the intent in their grins, and everything in him revolted from the thought of letting such grimy, greasy looking creatures get the better of him.

  Frank jammed the pole into the riverbed and pushed with all the strength in him. The boat was a brutal heavy thing, but it turned. If he could just get it facing into the current, let it be swept away downstream, he could outrace them, get away, get back to somewhere more civilized, where he would be safe.

  Then his right arm stopped working. His grip weakened and his hand fell limp to his side. He looked down and found he had been shot in the juncture of chest and shoulder. The blood that welled out was making his shirt feel chill and damp. There was, for the moment, no pain at all.

  He wrapped his left arm around the pole, pushed again and felt the blood come rushing up and grating past the embedded bullet to pulse out, burning now, from his wound. His mouth was full of saliva, and he couldn't swallow.

  Then the current caught the boat, lifted it and ground it again into the shore, smacking the bow hard on the rocks, making him lurch forward and stumble into the ankle deep gore beneath the many corpses of his companions.

  Jeering laughter broke out along the banks. Frank hauled his aching, ton-weighted head up to see hands clutching at the gunwales, pulling him in closer to the ugly, grinning crowd. Women stood behind the men, and the thought gave him a moment's relief until he saw that their hands grasped sickles. There were blood stains all down their aprons and a matching red glint in their eyes.

  Panicking, Frank dropped the pole and scrabbled for his rifle. Unloaded, and no time to prime it, the bayonet still tucked away in its bag. Reversing it, he smashed it down on the grappling hands as if it was an ax.

  The shoulder wound made him cold, shaky and nauseous. He was grateful for it because it was that much harder to feel terror. He swiped at a dirty face as, with a roar, the man leaped from the bank into the punt, swatted him with the tines of a rake, tearing the coat over his ribs and leaving long, shallow scores, as though from the nails of a giant.

  Frank doubled over the pain of it just as two more men jumped aboard. Outside, other bandits seized the boat's sides and pulled the whole thing out of the water, grounding it. A hand curled around Frank's shoulder wound and squeezed. His own scream choked him as he was lifted out by many hands and thrown into a ring of thin, hungry looking outlaws.

  He had just time to close his eyes, to think that finally, finally he was doing something that would please his father, and then all thought fled in favor of instinct, of curling in to keep his stomach and his face from the boots. Here too, the wound was a mercy. He flapped in agony like a dying fish, but didn't have the strength to fight back. They beat him with with reaping flails. The first man kicked him in the ribs - a burst of heat in his ribcage, as though he'd swallowed coals - and he looked up, mouth open, eyes streaming, in time to see his own rifle butt poised above his forehead.

  A grim expression above it. He tried to say "No!" but could only spit blood, and then someone laughed and the steel capped rosewood came down. He thought very clearly So this is it then and had time to regret that his last thoughts had not been more profound, before a giant hand tore the world in two, and him with it, and nothing else remained.

  Pain. For a long time, pain was everything. Then gradually other sensations joined it - cold all down one side, a moving cold that stroked him steadily, in contrast with the dry and burning cold of his other side. He became slowly aware that he was shaped like a man, that both sides had arms and legs, some of the bones of which were probably not broken.

  There was a pinkness in front of him, and once he had identified eyelids, he opened them to find the sun shining on his face. Other things came quicker now: the cold slide was water flowing over his right arm and leg, which hung off the riverbank and waved like water-weed in the shingle-bottomed pools at the stream's edge.

  Words flooded into his head, welcome and reviving, proving to him that he was man, not animal. That pain in his chest? Broken ribs, perhaps. That taste in his mouth, and the thick fluid that clogged it? Blood.

  He spat it out and with infinite pains drew both his arms and legs under him. Tried twice to push up to hands and knees and failed both times. The first time, he slumped down after and agony exploded under his ribs like a... like a... blocked gun bursting in someone's hands. He lay whining and weeping while his slowly healing mind picked at the thought that he ought to know who that someone was.

  The third time he went slower, every part of him shaking. He got his knees under him, was able to lever his torso upright, though all it did was make his head split again and the brains run out of his ears. His stomach rebelled, but fortunately he only had to turn his head a little to vomit cleanly in the stream and wipe his face after with a wet hand.

  Now that he was upright, blood dripped into his eyes. He couldn't raise his left hand at all, but he felt the wound above his eye with his right hand, and his clumsy touch grayed out the world around him for what seemed hours. There was something he should remember about head injuries...

  Something he should remember about himself. What was it?

  When he looked down, he found he had been stripped naked. The ground around him was scuffed with the marks of many feet, but nothing else. He had expected...

  What had he expected? Bearers, perhaps. Equipment. People who would help him. A way home.

  Around him were foothills and mountains beyond. Pine forest on the other side of the bank, on his side scrubland. An eagle in the sky above. The sounds of water and stone, and the shapes of strange clouds that flowed from the mountains along the river.

  He recognized none of it. He was utterly lost in a country he could not remember. And he didn't even know his own name.

  Turning downriver, he limped along the bank through tussocks of coarse grasses and purple mallow. Dimly, he felt that help must be available downstream rather than up. He disliked t
he shapes of the hills, yet the thought of going back where he had come from awoke a kind of sick hopelessness too, and he didn't know why.

  But as the day went on, the question of hope became unimportant beside the more pressing urgency of having the strength to put one foot before the other. Agony coiled about his chest, making his knees shake. Though he stopped, early on, to drink from the river, later he found it so hard to get up again he dared not try it again, just stumbled forward with his tongue drying in his mouth and hunger adding to the gnawing he carried under his ribs.

  He had begun to have periods where darkness bloomed behind his eyes even while he was walking, When they cleared he found he had staggered four or five steps blind and insensible. It could only be a matter of hours before he fell and could not get up again, and by that time the night would have fallen, and the wolves come out from beneath the wood, and he would not live to see the morning.

  A hedgerow covered in small white flowers stopped him. He leaned on it with his eyes closed, sucking in air and luxuriating in not having to hold himself upright. It was only when he had picked up a stick that lay under it, something to prop his ailing limbs with, that his mind caught up with what he was seeing:

  The branches had been cut, bent and interlaced to form a sturdier barrier. This was the work of human hands, meant to keep the flocks inside and the predators out. He had finally come to somewhere inhabited.

  Trying not to let his heart race or his breath pick up - it hurt too much - he scanned his world from horizon to horizon. And yes! There, streaky against the paling sky, a trail of gray-white smoke rose from a distant coppice. "Ah!" he said, and was startled by the sound of his own voice - he had forgotten what it sounded like.

  The goal gave him strength to find a dead patch in the hedge and scramble through, to go haltingly but unfailingly in the direction of the fire. He wanted to shout for help, but couldn't bring himself to breathe in enough.