by wildbow
Gordon. Helen.
I spun around.
I saw nothing beyond the two Lambs. The pair were still hunched over. Helen was crouched over like she was prepared to pounce at any second.
These ghosts follow rules. Move away from danger. Capitalize on the weak.
There was no easy passage between the offices that were set against the external walls of the building. There was passage between the library, conference room and the tea room.
“Lil! Jamie!” I shouted. “Play me a song!”
“What?” Lillian asked me. “And don’t call me Lil!”
But Jamie was already showing her how he was using the knife on the glass.
I was halfway to Gordon and Helen when the stitched began rubbing glass against bayonet blades, the edges of the broken shards of glass cutting into fingers. A cacophony of discordant sound.
Where are they? How are they moving?
As I got closer to the tea room, I could see through the window and make out where furniture was.
I raised a hand, warning, not looking at Gordon and Helen.
Then gestured. Stop.
“Stop!” Lillian called out.
The stitched obeyed.
My footsteps slapped against wood. One step, two steps, three steps.
Another signal. Go!
“No! Start! Use the glass!” Lillian gave the order.
Another step, as the sound resumed, audible even to me, scratching and screeching.
I took one more step, then dropped, sliding on the floor as I reversed direction, my shoulder, side and hip touching the wall beneath the window.
I headed for a door I’d already passed, grabbing the frame as I slipped into the tea room.
A full six of them were there, crouched, poised, waiting, using furniture and the low wall beneath the window to hide, each of them in the position a sprinter maintained pre-run. All amid chairs and round tables, each table furnished with kettles and little bowls of tea bags. There were pastries and baked goods here and there on plates.
With the cacophony of noise affecting their clarity of echolocation, it took them a full second to register my approach, as I threw myself at the full group of them.
Knife in hand, blade pointing down, I swung down and at an angle. I nearly lost the knife as it caught on the front of one of the ghost’s throats.
I’m shit in a fight, but that’s all the more reason to keep it from being one.
As fast as I’d been to get close to them, I reversed direction, heading for the door. I threw the knife, and this time, I was pleased to note, the person I was throwing at had to move to avoid getting hit.
I was in such a hurry to get out of the tea room that I fell over on passing through the threshold of the door. I watched the ghost I’d cut gurgle. She clutched at the wound on her throat and she wasn’t able to stop the blood from flowing out.
They rose up as if they were buoyed by some force I couldn’t see, puppets on strings, or stitched in the first moment they were given power, all as one, a collective. Each and every one bristled with hostility, the stress of the glass noises clear in their faces.
I rolled to one side, so they could no longer see me through the doorway, expecting them to come lunging out, swarming atop me.
They didn’t.
I met Gordon and Helen’s eyes. I grinned. “Got one. Using their own damn tactics against them.”
No congratulations seemed to be in order. Gordon’s expression was tight, and Helen’s expression was dead.
“What?” I asked.
She gestured, and it was a signal I hadn’t seen before, though the meaning was clear. Fingers crossed, she touched her heart.
Dog had mentioned it. Gordon had gone ahead.
I nearly snarled with the emotions that hit me then. Instead, I made a face, turning away, reaching for another knife.
“Sorry,” Gordon said. “I’m sucking right now.”
“You always suck, Gordon,” I said. “At least you have an excuse this time.”
“You’re an ass, Sy,” he said.
“And you’re broken. But tomorrow you’ll be fixed and I’ll still be an ass, so there.”
“That’s not how that goes, Sy,” Gordon said.
The ghosts still hadn’t attacked. I had to judge what they were doing.
“…And I don’t know how fixable this is,” he said. “They implied this was my last heart. Adding another is going to tax my body too much. I—”
“Enough of that,” I cut him off. My voice was tense. “No. Job to do.”
“Alright.”
Figuring out where the ghosts were went hand in hand with figuring out why they hadn’t retaliated. I figured both out as I looked back to check on Lillian and Jamie.
The Duke. He’d emerged at the top of the stairs.
Everyone else, stitched included, was crouched over, keeping low to the ground. It made us all harder to see, and it meant the enemy couldn’t reach through a broken window to attack or grab. The Duke didn’t care about either. He stood tall, surveying the situation.
“You’ve stopped,” he said, his voice carrying down the hall.
“Fire in the way, and we’re kind of busy killing these guys and trying not to die,” I said, the words escaping my lips.
“Sy,” Gordon said, voice soft.
But I saw the change in the Duke’s expression. He approached, footsteps heavy and swift, coat moving behind him. I had the impression of an onrushing train, and I was stuck on the tracks.
It was a ghost that saved me. She approached from the room with the table, leaping through the shattered window, straight for the Duke.
He saw her and he turned, one hand reaching out. She contorted in the air, twisting just out of his reach, before landing on the wooden floorboards with both hands and both feet.
The Duke drew his sword and cut in the same motion. She slipped out of the way of that strike as well.
His pistol fired without even leaving the holster. His hand had come down, he’d pressed the hammer down and adjusted the angle, while touching the trigger in the same motion. She’d already danced to one side. He fired twice more from the hip, before drawing the pistol and firing three more times. At the end of the hall, Jamie and Lillian threw themselves flat to the ground to avoid getting hit by one of the stray bullets. Lillian shrieked.
“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound. He sheathed his sword, then reached to his belt before sliding bullets into his pistol. The ghost took the opportunity to duck through a doorway, running through the conference room with its long table and many chairs.
“You see what we’re up against, my lord,” I said.
“I do see,” he said. He drew closer, and put one finger under my chin. He offered only the lightest touch, but I still rose to my feet. He spoke, “I also heard the insolence in your tone. I’ll remember it.”
My heart skipped a beat in time with the click of his pistol, as he closed it up and cocked the hammer, just a foot from my head. He tossed it into the air and caught it with his other hand.
Then, so suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d processed it right, he grabbed one of the sections of window frame with only scant glass shards remaining, and carried through on the movement to hurl it violently across the tea room. It crashed through the window there.
I only barely saw the ghost move, abandoning her cover where she’d been standing. The Duke’s arm was already extended, pistol pointing. In the eyeblink the ghost’s head was visible, he put a bullet through it.
“Hm,” he made that amused sound again.
He walked past me, and he did it in a roundabout way that had the pistol in his hand touch my face. It traced along cheekbone, catching on the ridge of my nose, and then stopping there, between my eyes, before he moved on. He was tall enough he didn’t even need to move his arm or change the angle of his wrist to do it. His arm hanging down at his side put his hand at eye level for me.
“I heard you say that you killed the one,” he
said, as he walked away, “Lying on the floor, throat cut?”
“Sy isn’t normally—” Gordon started.
“You’re not the one I asked.”
“I am, lord,” I said. I figured formalities couldn’t hurt, given circumstances.
There was no response, nor any explanation over the question. Or perhaps the question was the response.
“The fire is barring your way?” he asked. He wasn’t asking me, Gordon, or Helen. He was talking to Jamie and Lillian.
“Yes, my lord,” Jamie said.
“I see,” the man said. He stepped into the conference room.
Helen and I gave Gordon a hand in standing, and I was a little surprised at how much help he needed. He was sweating a little.
As a trio, we approached. I could see Mary at the center of the group, with Jamie and Lillian. She looked better than Gordon did.
Wood scraped against wood, a haunting, awful sound. The long table looked like it could sit eighteen, the wood of the tabletop two inches thick and very probably dense. Rather than legs, it had boards of the same thickness at two ends, poised diagonally. The Duke pushed it across the floor, out the double doors on the far end of the conference room, until it sat beside the fire that stood between us and the stairs.
Broad shoulders strained as he tilted it. The table fell on its side. Another turn, and it landed upside-down. The heavy table’s top squashed the fire and sent licks of the flaming chemical dancing over hardwood.
He raised his pistol and fired down the length of the hall, toward the tea room.
“Gordon,” I said. “Stay with Mary.”
“Yeah,” he said.
The Duke turned to set his eyes on us.
We wasted no time. The herd of stitched followed, with Lillian at the fore of the group with two handlers and Gordon and Mary at the rear.
As I passed the Duke, stepping on the underside of the table, he moved. He didn’t remain with Mary, this time, but fell into step, just behind me, with Helen to our left and Jamie to our right.
I looked back at the others, for feedback, or clarity. As if someone could provide some sanity to this mad situation. Instead, I saw the shadow of a ghost moving across the hall, in the direction of the opposite stairwell.
There was no firebomb waiting for us this time. A good thing, considering Jamie and I were doused in flammable chemicals. We reached the third floor of the building, and came face to face with stitched. None of the four were armed. None even appeared hostile.
But each one had a conspicuous hole in its midsection. Intestines scooped out, they had empty cavities within, large enough to hide a human head inside. Some cavities had different shapes to them, as if they’d settled around whatever they’d been holding.
That was a bad thing, as things went.
We’d been assuming she had something small, for her countermeasure.
“The Duke,” Avis’ voice carried. “Should I be honored?”
“This will go easier if you’ll turn yourself in,” the Duke said.
“I sincerely doubt that. I’m doomed.”
“You are,” the man said. “But your extended family doesn’t need to be. I know you have a sister.”
“I already sent the bird out. Whoever you send, whatever message you try to get to your subordinates, it’ll be too late. She’ll be gone.”
“I’ll have to get creative, it seems.”
“So it seems,” Avis said.
Her voice sounded sad.
“You know you can’t kill me,” the Duke said, as he stepped into the hallway. He very casually put a sword through the throat of one stitched, then swiped it to one side, beheading the other three.
“I can try.”
“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound.
I replayed her voice in my head, those last three words, and I couldn’t say why, but I suspected she didn’t believe she had a chance.
“I’ve been preparing for this eventuality for years,” Avis said.
“I’ve been prepared for any eventuality since birth,” the Duke said, very quietly. “You’re building something.”
“Built. It’s done.”
“No it’s not. You’re biding your time,” he said. He advanced further into the third floor.
The Lambs, too, climbed a little higher. I could see across the floor, now. A lot of open space. There were few walls, and the floor sat in a depression, the staggered steps down doubling as seats or benches, with pillows here and there.
A social area.
“I’m done building,” she said. “I’m just having a drink. It’s taking a few goes to get all of it down.”
“A combat drug,” Lillian whispered.
“Whatever you need to do,” the Duke said. He smiled, as he picked his way around the staggered steps. He leaned his head one way, to try and look beyond the wall that only extended partway down the room. “I’m hoping for a good contest.”
“Contest?” Avis asked, and her voice sounded different. “Never.”
It was an echo of a thought that had passed through my head as I’d cut the ghost’s throat.
I didn’t even see the catalyst. The depression in the floor ignited, the deepest part filling up with fire, clearly filled with an odorless accelerant of some kind. Stripes of flame swept up the stairs to each corner of the room, separating it into four quadrants, the Duke cut off from us.
The sound of glass shattering and the roar of flame below us suggested our retreat was being cut off.
I fought to keep my breathing under control, my thoughts in focus, and the sound didn’t help in the slightest. The Duke was chuckling, and the chuckle became a laugh. He stood with flames within feet of him, arms spread, weapons in hand.
We didn’t even matter. This fight, this scenario, it was all for him.
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Lamb to the Slaughter—6.12
The room had been built and grown in such a way that the furniture was an extension of the room, rather than an addition to it. The only walls that weren’t exterior walls were standalone, decorative more than anything, with benches built into them, facing tables. Nothing we could lift up to copy the Duke’s trick and form a bridge over fire.
Not that I necessarily felt confident, with the sparks flying around.
None of the walls were connected to any others. They might have been once, with walls removed as this part of the building was repurposed; an octagon with the diagonals removed.
Two of the walls separated the staircases on either side of the floor from the main area; I was looking past one to see the sea of fire in the center of the room. The other two walls did much the same thing for rooms on the north and south faces of the building, with balconies extending those rooms. The two rooms served for private conversation, and one of them was a hiding spot for our quarry.
All that said, we were the cornered ones.
I pulled off my shirt, backing away from the scene until my back was to a wall. I balled my shirt up in my hands, my eyes fixed on the Duke.
“Lillian,” I said, my voice only loud enough to be heard over crackling flames, “Do you have anything that will make me not flammable?”
“What?”
“Focus! I’ve got stuff on me. Chemical, right? How do I make it so I don’t burst into flame the second a spark touches me?”
“I don’t know! That’s not exactly part of what we study!”
“Stitched overseer guys. You don’t have any junk you can pour on any of your soldiers that go up in flames?”
“It exists,” one of the men in charge of the stitched said. “We don’t carry it all the time. Cans are heavy.”
I scowled, irritated.
“But if it’s chemical,” Lillian said. “We can try a dry soap. I can’t promise, but—”
“Do it!” I barked. “Me and Jamie. Before this gets worse.”
“Those floorboards,” Gordon commented. His face looked drawn, especially in the light of the fire. “They’re burning.”
My eyes moved to the area he was looking at. Sure enough, the floorboards were catching fire.
Every second floorboard.
“She modified the room,” I spoke the realization aloud. “Maybe the building.”
The Duke turned his head, noting our presence, and I saw a smile on his face. He was cast in hues of orange and crimson, tall enough that the top of his head touched the smoke that was concentrating at the center of the ceiling and slowly creeping out toward the edges.
He leaped from a standing position, and the wall in front of us broke my line of sight.
He’d crossed the pool of fire. Approaching the other end of the building.
I saw figures in the shadows.
“Ghosts!” Jamie called out.
“I know,” the Duke said. But he ignored them, approaching the northernmost wall.
Ghosts crept nearer. The room didn’t offer much cover, and they didn’t seem to know how to use the fire or smoke for cover. It wasn’t physical enough for their senses to process.
Still, there were five ghosts there, and possibly two more we couldn’t see, if I was keeping count right. I probably wasn’t keeping count right.
The Duke stepped around the wall, pistol going out, and fired four times. A large, dark shape darted out, passing around the far end of that wall, leaping well over the wall of flame that cut across her path.
Fast, agile. That would be the combat drug.
“Okay,” Lillian said. She approached me, bottle in hand. She was shaking it. “Who’s first?”
“Sy,” Jamie said, at the same time I said, “Jamie.”
He gave me an annoyed look.
“Me, then,” I said. Jamie was impossible to get through to when he got stubborn, and with him being in a strange way of thinking, I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be worse than usual.
With my shirt already off, Lillian was able to rub the ‘dry soap’ on me. It had a consistency like clay, it burned a little, and it had gritty bits that made it scratch as much as anything.
I clenched my teeth and endured, watching, trying to figure out what Avis was doing.
As she rounded the end of the wall that was furthest from us, I could get a better view of her.
She’d altered herself to the point that she looked more experiment than human. Four white-feathered wings framed her.