by wildbow
The pain in my hand was fading. Whatever it was, it didn’t last forever.
But that had only been a trace contact. Getting shot by one of these, it would be more than a trace contact.
Agony the dead would feel, apparently.
We were losing the cover of smoke and gas, and even with the less affected eye, the one that I had kept closed, I couldn’t make out the enemy as more than smudgy abstracts. I doubted they were suffering in the same way.
I put the black crystal on the ground, then grabbed a stone from the pile.
I smacked it, aiming for only the tip. The motion got Gordon and Mary’s attention.
Lifting the rock, I saw that the crystal had broken up.
Which suggested that getting shot by one didn’t mean having to extract one shard, but possibly dozens.
I grabbed the longest, narrowest one, and bent it until it snapped in two.
“What—” Mary said, before gunfire drowned her out. They were exorcising the third warbeast. “—ng?”
“Knife,” I told her.
She had a knife in her hand in less than a second. She looked at it, then at me, as if only now questioning it.
“Cut my stitches,” I said, lifting up my shirt.
“Can’t see, Sy,” she said. Well, I was pretty sure it was what she’d said.
“Cut,” I told her, again.
“—Idea?” Gordon asked.
The exorcist’s fire had died out, and the third warbeast was dead. Scary to realize the plague men had dispatched three of the things, and I wasn’t sure they’d lost more than a half-dozen of their own.
It was more alarming to realize that the primary source of gunfire was in the other direction from the gate. A little ways down the road. Hopefully it was because our side had pulled back to regroup, and not because the plague men were crushing us underfoot as they advanced.
“Idea,” I confirmed for Gordon, lowering my voice now that the gunfire was further away.
“Try to cut,” Gordon told Mary.
I saw her head bob.
Her vision was bad enough that she had to lean close to use the knife. Her nose touched my stomach, making one muscle twitch in a ticklish reaction. Her hot breath swept over my cold, wet skin.
She had steady hands. I flinched as she cut one suture, then another.
“Stop,” I said.
She did, without moving her head away. She turned her face upward, to look at me.
“How sure are you?” Gordon asked.
“Make the wound bleed,” I said, then, barely able to hear even my own words, I admitted, “Not very, but there’s not much room for cleverness here.”
“Yeah,” Gordon said.
Mary cut. My stomach moved of its own accord.
Too much of this plan depended on factors I couldn’t control or wholly predict. Educated guesses.
“Lose the weapons,” I said. Rather than try to work my holster off of my belt, I simply undid my belt entirely, hauling it off. I jammed it into a gap between stone and wood.
“All the weapons?”
“Keep your knives.”
“Okay.”
There were shouts and calls. More people at the gate. The enemy was moving up. I couldn’t tell if it was ten or fifty. My vision was suffering too much.
I judged distance, took the broken black crystal and poked a hole in my shirt, so it stuck through. I did it with more of the shards, spreading them out.
I looked at the black crystals. If they were poison, and I was resistant to poison, were they worse for someone else? Or were they not poison at all, their design a detour of sorts? A way to simulate pain without using the regular channels?
Either way, this was going to suck.
Fingers placed alongside the fabric, spikes of black crystal poking through and pointed inward, I slapped the fabric against my own stomach, the biggest shard touching the wound Mary had opened up.
The pain was immediate and mind-altering.
I screamed without even meaning to, keeling over, landing in mud. I might have drove shards deeper as I landed on the ones at my side.
I’d experienced agony before, on a monthly schedule. I knew how to deal, in a way. This blew that out of the water, made it impossible to turn my mind to reach for any of the tools. I’d stabbed my side, and I felt it in my bones and in my brain, in the nerves of my teeth.
I was glad I’d fallen forward, because I screamed until something changed in my throat and I heaved up my stomach contents.
I was dimly aware of an enemy soldier standing over us. One of the plague men.
Mary was screaming. About being blind, unable to see what was happening to me.
The plague man stared down, expression unchanging.
Variables I couldn’t predict or control.
Educated guesses alone.
Failing any other variables, anything at all, human beings tended to favor the simplest, clearest options. The easiest thing for him to do, without emotion or orders saying otherwise, was to shoot and end us.
That was only one of a half-dozen things that could go wrong.
But he had to have a reason to fight. A reason to change himself so drastically. There was an answer to that question that could see us through.
An iota of mercy?
He grabbed me by the arm, dragging me, weapon in one hand. As my body stretched out, the shards making contact with me touched me areas of my gut. They weren’t deep, except for the big one, but all the same, it renewed the pain twice over.
It was almost transcendant, taking me out of myself. I was wide-eyed, incapable of moving. Processing the little I could see and hear and storing almost none of it.
Dim light and noise, darkness.
Mary.
Gordon.
A flickering light so bright I couldn’t look at it. My head lolled to one side, and I focused on the darkness there, and the square of faint orange-purple light.
Mary’s voice, again.
The pain was getting easier to bear.
A man’s voice. Soothing. I was trying to scream, I hadn’t stopped, but the energy wasn’t there. My chest jerked, and only small sounds came out.
I closed my eyes. The pain was receding more.
I could process. I was in a tent. The wall to one side was stone. The exterior wall of Westmore. By the gate.
I was on a table. A doctor was extracting shards from my side. One of the rebellion doctors.
My head turned. On the other side of the room, Gordon and Mary sat in chairs. Their hands were bound in front of them.
A plague man with a gun was standing beside the pair, weapon in hand. I still couldn’t really see. Nothing had fixed things from before. The only improvement was that there was light and we were out of the rain.
Cynthia had to have told them to watch out for children. My educated guess had been right, however. These were men who’d undergone changes for a reason. There was a rationale, partially driven by fear, but partially driven by a desire to oppose the Academy. They were almost an incarnation of that.
Opposing the Academies meant opposing the way the Academy operated. There had to be a sense of conscience in there. A child wounded with a weapon meant for monsters, even if they had orders to kill children on sight? I’d gambled on them showing mercy.
This one had a parasite living under his skin on one side of his face. It kept moving, making his facial features change each time. One of his eyes didn’t close properly.
Parasites that would prey on other parasites? Chemicals to counteract other poisons or stave off disease, all with their severe side effects?
“You’re more alert?” the doctor that was working on me asked. “One big one, then we take off your shirt and see if there’s more to dig out.”
“Is he okay?” Mary asked. “Please. I can’t see. I can only see your shape, kind of, because the window is behind you, but I can’t see Simon, and he’s not screaming any more and—”
“Hush,” the doctor s
aid. “He’ll be fine. The shards never penetrate too deep. They’re a nonlethal measure.”
When the victims don’t commit suicide to end the pain, I imagine, I thought.
Mary hadn’t been saying what she’d said for the doctor’s benefit, but for mine.
Already thinking about how we might find our way out.
My back arched, the pain searing me as the shard was pulled free of the wound, making a sucking sound.
“There we go, hold on, wait,” the doctor said. He pressed something to the wound to absorb the welling blood. I would have lost more blood and had it welling around the site of injury, thanks to the extra damage Mary had inflicted. Part of my attempt to draw pity.
All of it calculated, in a way. If Mary had been the one injured, then we would have been two scraggly boys. This way, there was one hurt child on the table, and one girl in the chair.
There were more factors, but this was the ideal combination.
“Okay?” the doctor asked.
I opened my mouth to respond, but my words didn’t come out. I’d lost the ability to speak.
I nodded.
“Any pain, still?”
I made a face and nodded.
A lie.
“Let’s take a look, then.”
He peeled my bloody shirt away from my stomach.
I turned my head away, and met Mary’s eyes.
I reached out to the pair of them. And I gestured.
“You’re going to be okay, Sy,” Mary said.
“Yeah,” Gordon said.
Two affirmatives. We were good to go.
I blinked, very deliberately.
On the other side, the doctor said, “What the hell? You’re already—”
Her bound hands went over her head. She brought them forward together, simultaneously. A two-handed throw for a lone knife.
“—injured?”
The knife caught the doctor in the throat.
I tried to move, and realized I was bound with cord—enough I couldn’t move freely, but loose enough I could be repositioned.
Gordon brought his knees to his chest. Rope that had bound his ankles to the chair was loose enough to fall to the floor. He was up and out of the chair, hands still bound, moving past Mary to where reference books sat on a military travel chest. He grabbed a book and threw it like he was thrusting it into the air more than anything.
The plague man only managed a short sound of alarm before the book caught him in the lower face. I was betting Gordon was aiming for the throat, but a smack to the mouth served for a moment.
Gordon threw his whole weight against the man’s knee. He hit the ground, and the plague man fell over top of him. Gordon used the rope that bound his wrists to choke the plague man.
Nobody had responded to the yell of alarm. I wondered if there had been enough screaming from this tent to desensitize.
Three seconds passed, the doctor gurgling, the plague man choking, trying to throw Gordon loose and failing, and Mary—I couldn’t make out what Mary was doing.
The ropes were severed, I realized. She was free. She bent down over the plague man and cut his throat.
Gordon’s hands were freed. He extricated himself.
I was next to be freed. I held the bandage to the thrice-opened wound as I lowered my feet to the ground.
“Sometimes I think you do that to yourself on purpose,” Gordon murmured.
I opened my mouth. No words came out.
“I like you like this,” he said.
I gestured.
“We need to get out of here,” Mary said.
I nodded. I gestured again. This time it was something less obscene.
“Don’t know what you mean by that one,” Gordon said. “War, battle?”
“Fighting our way out?” Mary asked. She’d bent down over the plague man.
I sighed, shaking my head.
Bending down, wincing, I picked up the book. I tore out a page and balled it up. I held thumb and one finger together under it. Not a gesture, but I hoped the idea was clear.
“Fire,” Gordon said.
I nodded.
“We can’t do too much damage. Westmore needs to be able to use the location.”
I shook my head.
“No?”
I shook my head again. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision and failing.
“We’ve lost this one,” Mary said. “Plague men, black bullets, they have answers to what the Academy can bring to bear. Best we can do is cut our losses.”
I could have hugged her. I nodded.
“Okay,” she said.
“Yeah,” Gordon said. “We should try that way, if I remember right.”
The three of us, with probably one set of working eyes between us, moved to the other end of the tent. It was getting brighter outside. The orange and purple light I’d seen was the sunrise.
We ducked under the bottom of the canvas flap, peeked into the adjoining tent, and then moved through there.
The enemy’s focus was on the front lines of the battle, from the sounds of it. There were barely any figures in the makeshift camp they’d set up at the gate.
But they’d brought some supplies and they’d left some behind. The incendiary weapons they’d used to dispose of the warbeasts were among them.
Any building we passed that had a window was on fire moments after we’d left it behind us. Nearly blind, we passed through the freezing rain, heading straight for their back lines and for the other Lambs.
Previous Next
Esprit de Corpse—5.14
Our fires raged at one end of Westmore. A full quarter of the city aflame. Though the wood used to grow portions of buildings and plant matter grown to seal the gaps between stones had been treated to make it less combustible, it was still wood.
Stitched, buildings, chemicals, it took so little for the Academy’s work to go up in flames.
The smoke billowed, but the walls meant it didn’t have many places to go. We were boxed in with mountains, cliffs, and walls, and that concentrated the smoke that hung lower to the ground. The rain pounded down on the burning buildings, creating a dull roar.
It was attention-grabbing. Enough to concern the forces at the battlefront.
We couldn’t see, but with the smoke, our enemy couldn’t see either.
We found the best hiding place we were able, listening as best as we could for the tramp of boots, then moved as soon as we heard the noise receding.
I wanted to communicate, reach out to the others and make sure we were on the same page, when it came to strategy and more. I hadn’t counted on being struck dumb. I’d wanted to make sure that I was the one who was stuck in the bed, while Gordon and Mary were free to act. Being injured wasn’t necessary, but I’d needed to sell it, and that meant blood and making my performance as real as possible. Opening an old injury was better than making another.
If I’d known I would have lost the ability to communicate, I would have gone another route.
I was scared in a way I usually wasn’t. I wasn’t able to use my senses to their fullest. With my eyes as screwed up as they were, and the chaos of noise in the background, the only things I could be sure about were things within thirty feet of me. The smoke hampered our enemy, but that didn’t do much good if we took the wrong turn or path between buildings and ended up face to face with a plague man and his exorcist.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure how the other Lambs were doing. Had I been able to take in more of the situation, I might have been able to reassure myself that the enemy lines hadn’t advanced far enough, or that there were avenues for them to escape. As it was, we scurried here and there, keeping our heads down, straining every sense, hoping that the combined senses of the three of us were enough to alert us to possible danger.
We stopped for breath, and to get our bearings. Gordon was doing the listening for trouble. I stayed beside him, while Mary stood a short distance away.
She knocked on the wall once. Not
entirely necessary, given the broken window, but I imagined she was looking for her own unique sorts of reassurance.
Gordon and I listened, hard. There were no footsteps, no boots. Nothing close enough to be differentiated from the roar of background noise, of guns firing and rain pouring down on a spreading sea of fire that was stubbornly refusing to go out.
He knocked.
Mary’s foot splashed in a puddle as she rejoined us. Her hand fumbled for and touched my shoulder. I squeezed Gordon’s upper arm.
We bolted. There was a soft ‘woof’ sound as the incendiary weapon went off.
A shout, directly ahead. Footsteps.
Gordon didn’t slow. I knew he had to have heard.
We made it another ten feet before he jerked us in one direction. We ducked in behind a solid metal object. I kept my head down, shoulders hunched, providing as small of a profile as was possible.
The men who ran past us weren’t plague men, but they wore the darker colors of rebellion members. They made their way into the opaque wall of rain and smoke, feet splashing.
We remained still until we couldn’t hear them. Mary coughed lightly.
The smoke was catching up to us. Soon it would drown us out. My world shrank from thirty feet to twenty, or perhaps fifteen. Anything beyond was indecipherable.
I wanted to tell them we needed to move faster. We had to get to a point that we could observe the situation, so we could find and reunite with the others, or get a grasp of any obstacles in our way. If we took too long and the city was drowned in smoke and fire, we might have to chance running across a warzone and risk taking a bullet, to get to the lodge where the others were.
At least the distraction was diverting enemy forces. The sound of gunfire had abated. They would have probably planned to get further into Westmore before their advance slowed and stopped. They didn’t have a place to retreat to, and they no longer had any certainty that they would have shelter if this dragged out. The tent with the doctor and the stitched had no doubt been intended to be such a waypoint.