Twig

by wildbow

Jamie and I opened our doors.

  I saw something move, fast, out of the corner of my eye, and I slammed my door shut. Jamie was a second behind me.

  It crashed rather than explode. A kind of artillery shell, but made of something closer to glass than to metal.

  There were other impacts. One struck the carriage itself.

  Each splash of liquid from the containers billowed smoke on contact from air.

  “They’re coming,” I said. “A moment ago, I would’ve said seventy five percent chance it’s Mauer, twenty five percent chance it’s them, but—”

  “Fifty-fifty?” Jamie asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The smoke was expanding to the point that some of it was leaking in through gaps in the carriage. Shirley still had the gas mask I’d given her in the lab, and she pulled it on.

  I leaned over, as the gas came in through a crack in the door, and I wafted it to my nose with one hand, like I’d seen scientists do.

  Slightly acrid, but I couldn’t smell much in the way of chemicals. Nothing too medicinal. Subtle.

  I’d spent my life around labs, both hostile and questionably friendly.

  I opened my door and stepped outside, breathing deeper.

  Even with my emotions running high, I couldn’t sense any shifts, major or miniscule, in how my body reacted. My capillaries didn’t suddenly draw up more blood or vent it. My breathing was fine. The taste on my tongue was mostly neutral.

  “Safe?” Jamie asked from within the carriage.

  “No idea. But it doesn’t seem unsafe,” I said.

  With the smoke and rain being what they were, the visibility had been reduced. I could make out large details within fifteen feet or so, and the general shape of things out to thirty feet, maybe. But beyond that, things were a blur.

  Very likely the intention.

  Jamie opened and closed his door, venturing outside to stand in the smoke, on the other side of the carriage.

  Could we run? Not out of the question. The cover was as helpful to us as it was to anyone else.

  I felt rather than heard the heavy footsteps of the two stitched giants.

  Two nobles, new to the world, much in the same way Jamie is.

  The world is your oyster. Expectations for you both are so very high. You were tasked with handling this situation. You have something to prove.

  I wasn’t sure if that qualified as a weakness, when they were fully capable of providing that proof in spades. Now here they were, on the doorstep of a noble-killing rebel leader, facing down two Lambs, one of whom had killed several nobles, and they were using the cover provided by some kind of smoke weapon to deal with one enemy while ignoring the second.

  I twirled the pistol in my hand, finger in the trigger-guard. I caught it by the handle.

  I made out the general shape of the giants, looming through the cloud, as visible by the rain that formed a mist as it bounced off of their heads and shoulders as they were by the silhouettes they cast.

  Jamie and I moved away from the giants, circling around the carriage, until we stood almost back to back, each of us with one pistol and a blade in hand.

  I put a hand back, close to the side of Jamie’s face, and, knife still in my left hand, gestured.

  Empty. Eye. Alert.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  The giants were flanking us. One in front of the carriage, one behind.

  The empty, inviting space was one that was sure to have nobles lurking within it.

  “Shirley,” I said, just loud enough to be heard.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ll make a run for it soon,” I said.

  The Falconer stepped out of the smoke. It flowed off and around her, as if she was eminently at home in it. Her bird wasn’t with her.

  She moved easily, with no suggestion of the injuries we’d inflicted with the rolling explosion. Her head was angled in such a way that she could watch the both of us with one eye. She maintained a set distance from us, walking sideways across our field of view, emerging from and disappearing into smoke.

  “My lady,” I said.

  I hadn’t really meant to speak.

  Jamie’s hand moved, reminding me.

  Empty eye. What we couldn’t see was more dangerous. Where we weren’t looking was more dangerous.

  Giant to the front of us. Giant to the back of us. A Falconer without her bird to the right of us, and Augustus…

  Augustus appeared, a lesser giant in his own right, very near the Falconer, to the right of us.

  Leaving the left entirely open. It would mean moving further from Mauer, but it was inviting. Safe emptiness.

  I knew who or what it was that was guarding that emptiness, laying in wait to strike at us.

  “Just saying,” I murmured. “I really hate that damn bird.”

  “I hear you,” Jamie said.

  “And I really hope you didn’t pay that carriage driver in advance.”

  “I didn’t,” Jamie said.

  The Falconer kept moving, back and forth, taunting. Augustus was very still. Our ability to see him was entirely dependent on the vagaries of the wind. The rain came down hard.

  The giants only loomed.

  Come on, Mauer. I know you can’t see us to open fire, but even blind fire might give Jamie and I a better chance than what we had.

  One of the giants moved. Again, the glass or clay or ceramic or whatever it was broke.

  Replenishing the smoke. They’d been the source of it.

  “What you plotted,” Augustus said, in his Crown accent. “The explosion was your doing. But did you intend for it to hurt Mauer too?”

  “Not so much,” I responded.

  “Father will be disappointed.”

  I kept my eye out for the bird. Even flightless, it was far too dangerous, and it was the hardest opponent to see in the thick of the smokescreen.

  “He probably will,” I said. “But I imagine that when you’re as grand a figure as the Lord Infante is, us lesser mortals are nothing but fonts of disappointment.”

  “You would be surprised,” Augustus said, in that cultured accent. “Many rise to the occasion.”

  “Thing is, I’m not a riser,” I said. “That’s not how I do things. I wallow. I get dirty and scraped and bloody, and I come close to drowning in the shallows of the muck.”

  “So it seems,” Augustus said. “And your dead friend? Is he the same?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” Jamie said. “I’m not a riser. I’m not a wallower. But maybe, when it comes to Sy and the people close to me, I can raise them up when and where even the Infante failed.”

  “I like that,” Augustus said. “It would be nice if it was true.”

  “Thank you,” Jamie said.

  With where Augustus stood, and where the Falconer was pacing, it seemed like Jamie’s eye was more on the Falconer than on the fat noble.

  I looked, my eyes searching the smoke for the bird. An irregular shape, low to the ground, with even less body mass than me, but it was a body mass that was all blade, beak, and talon.

  In the doing, I was looking away from the Falconer and from Augustus. I followed the conversation with my ears.

  “I don’t think it’s true, though,” Augustus said. “Not if it ends with you both dead.”

  My ears.

  Right. Without my eyes to go by…

  I closed my eyes, and I stepped back, until my shoulderblades touched Jamie’s.

  Let him be my eyes. If he moved, I’d feel it, and I could move accordingly.

  I pushed my brain, which was only slightly less receptive to me nudging it this way and that, with Wyvern a couple of days old, and I focused on my ears. Listening past the rain.

  There had been a time, once, when I’d almost been able to hear the Ghosts. When Percy’s creations communicated in noises too high pitched for humans to hear, I’d caught a glimmer of something.

  I was listening for the scra
tch of talon on road, or the first movement of the giants, or the scuff of August’s shoes as he brought his weight to bear and charged in a moment when the direction of the wind and the thickness of the cloud of smoke made him hardest to see, or as the giant lobbed the next jar to spread more smoke cover.

  But, while listening for those things, placing my enemies and visualizing the battlefield, I thought perhaps I caught a glimmer of that sound.

  I’d stood with my back to Jamie’s to use him as a warning system, but as I threw myself to one side, he matched my movement.

  I heard rather than saw the talons scratching the wood of the back of the carriage, as the Falconer’s raptor threw itself at us and hit the carriage instead.

  Jamie and I opened fire, emptying our guns at the thing, putting bullets into the back of the same carriage Shirley was inside.

  Because there was no other option than to kill that thing.

  It made a terrible sound as it crumpled to the ground.

  “Shirley!” Jamie called out. He and I were on exactly the same page as we ran. Shirley burst out of the door, none of our bullets in her, thankfully, and followed us.

  I was looking back at her as I saw the Falconer jump up and onto the wagon, as if she was as light as air. Graceful.

  If she cared about her beast dying or having been shot, she didn’t show it.

  I fired my gun backward and in her general direction, and I saw a hint of a reaction.

  I doubted it would kill her.

  We had to flee from the direction of the tall hotel building Mauer was inside to seek shelter elsewhere. It was very possibly what the nobles had intended, herding us lambs away from possible help and reinforcements.

  We were able to cross the streets before they drew close.

  As we did, leaving the smoke behind and entering the comparatively light alley, we saw the very reinforcements we were supposed to be getting steered away from.

  Mauer was in the alley, along with a small regiment of his soldiers. There were two rows of the men, some kneeling, others standing behind them. The guns they held were special. Exorcist rifles, and then the new ones. The noble-slaying ones. What had he called them? Guillotines? Something else?

  With all the guns pointed our way, Jamie and I balked momentarily. But when Mauer didn’t give the order to fire, and when the soldiers didn’t take their own initiative on the matter, we started forward again, weaving between the soldiers to reach the other side.

  “Not wholly what I had in mind,” I told Mauer, “But this will do.”

  His face was stone, his expression dark.

  I could hear the stomps of the giant, and for an instant, I thought I knew what we would see—the giant appearing, holding his shield before him, ready to plow through our ranks like a runaway carriage.

  But it was Augustus. Only Augustus.

  “Fire,” Mauer said.

  The soldiers did. One clean shot from each of them, the Exorcist rifles first. Then the special noble-slaying rifles. Augustus raised his arm, blocking his eyes with one forearm.

  I saw the blood, and the flecks of flesh tearing away, and the explosions of gore as the special noble-killing rifles did their work.

  The shots fired, the soldiers broke rank, backing away swiftly, the ones with the exorcists reloading quickly.

  Augustus lowered his arm. All over his body, in places, I could see that the damage was less than a centimeter deep. It stopped at a layer of fat beneath the skin, and where whole chunks had been peeled away, I could see strange patterns.

  “I thought those special rifles were supposed to be able to penetrate the plates of a warbeast’s armor,” I told Mauer.

  Mauer was silent.

  “You’ve shot him before, and it didn’t work.”

  He didn’t answer me. Instead, he said, “Flame.”

  Two of the men pulled the pins out of containers, lobbing them. They erupted with what looked like flaming oil, fiery droplets and dribblings falling as they arced in the air.

  Augustus moved to one side, in the same moment it made contact with the ground, he knocked it back with the side of one foot. Flames licked against his boot.

  With the other, the noble grabbed it with one bare hand, and he cast it back and behind him. Open flame licked his hand, front and back, and he ignored it.

  Ogre indeed.

  “Retreat!” Mauer called out.

  He wasn’t talking to Jamie and I, but we sure as all damn listened.

  Previous Next

  Thicker than Water—14.16

  Augustus charged after us, while Mauer’s contingent aimed backwards, shooting in his general direction. One arm remained raised, protecting his face, his other arm reaching forward.

  Without losing momentum, he put a hand out and pushed one of the men, a hand on the back of the man’s head.

  Augustus’ weight, heft, strength and momentum were enough that when he shoved the man’s head to one side, he could grind it against the nearest building. Brick, branch, and stone tore and chipped at the man’s face, and the man’s feet stumbled, then dragged uselessly against the ground.

  Something more significant shattered as the fellow’s face was driven into a bit of trim at the outside corner of the building.

  He caught up to the stragglers, seized one, and hurled him into another, before stepping more to one side, to step where the two men’s legs overlapped.

  A moment later, switching the arm he covered his face with while reaching out with the other, he’d seized a fourth man. The motion he used to toss him aside was a sharper one—one that I suspected left the victim dead before he even smashed into the nearest surface.

  We passed through a wrought-iron arch and gate that was fixed to the walls on either side of the alley and a moment later, Mauer was through, standing by it, ready to close it as the stragglers came through.

  Augustus caught up to some of those stragglers, grabbed one of them, a woman in a shirt and pants, not a uniform.

  —And held her, without killing her outright. He advanced, moving quickly, dragging her with him. He knew what Mauer was doing, and he was making the decision has hard as possible.

  Mauer slammed the gate, then turned the heavy key that was in the lock.

  Augustus drew back, and kicked out as he drew near enough. His foot slammed into the bars of the gate, bending them outward.

  Guns cocked, aiming at the spaces between the bars. Mauer raised his good arm, telling them to stop.

  Augustus leaned forward, fingers interlocked with the horizontal and vertical grille of the wrought iron, his forearm across his forehead and eyes. Metal creaked.

  I wondered if he was strong enough to tear metal. I really wasn’t sure.

  Shirley was clutching Jamie’s hand.

  “Mauer,” Augustus said, not moving. “We finally meet.”

  “First Augustus, my lord,” Mauer said, injecting a venomous sort of sarcasm into the final two words.

  “I mark this as the fourth time you’ve shot at me,” Augustus said. “Each time, I live, and people who serve you suffer…”

  The woman he held screamed, scratching at his hand with her hands, kicking with her legs. He held her lower face by one hand, arm limp at one side, and his white-knuckled fingers were pushing into her mouth. From the looks of it, the pressure of the fingers was pushing teeth out of place or breaking them outright.

  “…And die,” Augustus finished the statement. He glanced down at the woman. “Eventually.”

  “Judging by the shield-bearing stitched you brought this time around, you seem to have some concerns.”

  “Time spent getting new flesh put back on is time I’m not spending on hobbies and studies,” Augustus said. He smiled, his cheeks dimpling. “But I don’t think it’s worth throwing these lives away to cost me an afternoon of my time. Not unless you hate me beyond all measure and reason.”

  “No, it isn’t worth throwing away lives for that…” Mauer said.

  Liar, I thought. I coul
d read things into the cadence of his reply, the way he crafted his voice, and I knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth. He was closer to that line beyond measure and reason than he might pretend to be in front of others.

  “…But you protect your eyes, little noble. I know you have some reason to worry. And that’s reason enough to keep trying.”

  “Until you exterminate us all?” Augustus asked. “And then the others, who come to replace us? The line of succession in coming generations will certainly be interesting, then. I’d say you could even earn your place as a footnote in history books, but we write those.”

  “The knowledge that any noble can die will linger,” Mauer said.

  “I’m alive,” Augustus said. “You’re an orator, Mauer, or so I hear. You know that what matters most in a statement is how it begins and how it ends. Your statement began with failure, courtesy of the youths who just recently found their way to your side—”

  He looked at me and Jamie.

  “—and adjustments are already underway. Life always finds a way, and the pace of our engineering will always outpace your trinkets. Your statement will end with the nobility proving that we cannot die, not even in the face of your special bullets.”

  Mauer spoke, “All the same, any statement has to be mindful of its punctuation, or it starts to fall to pieces. The importance of a full stop here and there shouldn’t be underestimated.”

  He mimed shooting a gun with his fingers, as he articulated ‘punctuation’. The action or the wit made Augustus laugh, loud.

  Not quite as refined as the Infante. The laugh gave him away. But there were hints of the Infante there. A different sort of focus. He knew full well what he was, and he was eminently comfortable here. He was confident.

  I gestured at Jamie. Flank. Bird woman. Big.

  Yes, Jamie signaled, before gesturing a direction.

  He was guessing where. Was she going over rooftops? Attacking from on high?

  Mauer had to know. He wouldn’t ignore the other enemies on this battlefield he’d prepared. He’d had the sense to set up in a place where he knew he could retreat, where the gate was ready and waiting, to bar the noble’s path.

  But… Augustus was smiling. One dimple, a lopsided smile.

  I knew, in the instant that I had that realization, that Augustus was going to try something.