Twig

by wildbow

  I glanced at the ship.

  “I thought you weren’t planning to run, Lambs?” the Infante asked.

  Lillian started to move right, and the Infante moved, ready to lunge to cut her off. His limb struck the cobblestone street, again as a singular limb, hitting with a strength sufficient to crack the stone.

  She started to move the other direction, and he struck the ground over there, cutting her off.

  I stood on the rooftop above her, but I didn’t have the means of reaching down to her. Or if I did—it was a task.

  The rain was pouring down on top of me, every second I was up here. The long jacket I had draped over Jessie and I was insufficient to cover everything. The rain was touching my ankles.

  In the background, Berger was hunkered down, not moving. The other doctors were with him.

  I dearly wished they would do something.

  The Infante struck at the building near Lillian. He shattered stone and he upset my footing. I dropped to all fours. Jessie’s grip threatened to slip, and I reached up to grab her, securing her, made her hold on tighter.

  The white powder had created a milky texture on the Infante’s face and arm. He barely seemed to care that Duncan and Helen were gingerly picking themselves up, or that Mary was flanking him, moving into position.

  He repeated the action, striking the building. Lillian ducked low. No shriek, no wail, no tears that I could see. Grim silence.

  Those impacts—the tentacles that sprouted from his hand weren’t indestructible. Stone was… well, it was hard. He was doing more damage to himself than to Lillian.

  I realized why, seeing the white stuff, seeing the pattern, that he kept on using the arm like a club.

  Glue. It was glue, or something that became like glue, when exposed to the water. It bound the tentacles together, it hampered his movement, and it blinded him in one eye. Mary’s movements to flank were taking advantage of the fact that he had a limited field of view.

  “You could go, Sylvester,” he said. “Run. Go after my doctors, after the people on that ship you think you could leverage.”

  “And miss seeing you go to pieces?” I asked.

  “It would mean you didn’t have to watch her die,” he said, indicating Lillian.

  I glanced down at Lillian.

  I saw her, and I saw the Lillian of years ago. Wide-eyed, terrified of everything and still somehow finding the courage to plunge into it. Guileless in so many ways, with countless openings for me to exploit.

  He approached, footsteps plodding. I tensed.

  He swung, once again, and Lillian once again leaped clear of it. The limb had bent in the air, it hit her or something she was wearing and made her stagger, left her defenseless to the follow-up. In that same strike, however, the Infante had managed to kill the symbiote that was clinging to him. It slithered out of his hand and the wounds in his arm, a morass of worms that were glued together at one end, a hydra’s mane of worms at the other, groping and grasping.

  Lillian made a break for it. The Infante, arm still extended from the swing, simply kept walking in her direction. Things fluttered out of the opening in his hand.

  Mary lashed out, closing in, cutting, using thread, trying to hamper his hand by hurling a knife and having the attached razor wire encircle the hand and opening several times.

  It wasn’t enough. Slices and cuts didn’t mean anything when the Infante had been meant to weather bullets and wrestle warbeasts to the ground with his hands. She had stemmed the flow of the Infante’s creatures from his hand, but they were gnashing at the wire, and there wasn’t any leverage keeping it in place—it was falling away from his hand, if I went by the dangling knife that drooped closer and closer to the ground.

  I rose up, shifting my footing.

  Lillian had run to the left, away from the direction we wanted to go. The Infante had his right eye glued shut.

  The eye closest to me was glued shut.

  I gestured in the same instant I jumped.

  My jump up to the rooftop had been weak, faltering. Now I jumped from the peak of a bungalow house, with the Infante as my landing point. One of my feet touched his shoulder, where the powder had settled, and it stuck enough I worried I’d lose my shoe.

  My hand reached for the noble’s head, knife stabbing in, seeking a grip. The other hand reached up, striking at Jessie’s hands.

  I divested myself of Jessie and the coat that protected me, and let her fall.

  Mary caught her, both her and Jessie falling to the ground in the process.

  The Infante ignored me, turning toward Mary and Jessie, the pair crouched down on the ground.

  “Trust the Lambs,” I murmured. I ignored them. I ignored everything, trying to secure my footing, perching on the Infante’s shoulders, my knife at his head.

  His eye was apparently made of something that wouldn’t be touched by blade or bullet. It was possible the eyes in the sockets weren’t even real. Eyes elsewhere on the face, where the glue still covered some? At the shoulder? The hands?

  No, blinding him wouldn’t work, in any event.

  I cut his scalp, dragging the knife along it, adding to wounds we’d already made. His flesh was hard to cut, requiring that I drag the knife through it with both hands, even for the thin skin that sat next to skull.

  The Infante raised the hand that hadn’t gotten glue on it, the one that hadn’t had the tentacles, or the swarm. I saw him form a fist.

  Veins bulged along his arm. The veins turned dark, then broke, blistering. The vine-veins that were so characteristic of the plague were visible there.

  He was going to infect the pair. Jessie and Mary both.

  Scales of burns mingled with the eruption of the plague that his body had been keeping contained, all red and angry. I liked to imagine it was all of the pent up anger from within him finding its way out.

  I wanted to think we were the cause of that anger.

  The rain was soaking my clothing, touching my flesh. If I looked skyward, I risked getting it in my eyes. Lillian had said that if any of us got the water in our eyes, our vision would go foggy and wouldn’t get better until the eyes were replaced outright.

  She’d backed away as the Infante turned his focus to Mary and Jessie.

  I dragged the knife toward the base of the Infante’s skull, where it met his spine. The skin became thicker as I reached that point.

  “Nuisances, nothing more,” he said.

  He swiped a hand at me. I had to grab his head to keep from falling. I put the point of my knife near his ear and kicked it, hard with my heel, kicking myself away from the Infante and toward the road below as I did it.

  I screwed my eyes shut, twisting my face away from the rain.

  It was a bad moment. A moment where I realized I’d been focused on what I had to do moment to moment, but I’d allowed myself to be cornered, thinking too shallowly, only about the current move, then the current move again. I’d spared too much thought for the instant and for the ten-minutes-from-now.

  Trust the Lambs, I thought.

  A whistle. From Lillian’s direction.

  Only a distraction—and not an effective one. It was one of the tools that Academy Doctors carried with them for directing Stitched on the battlefield. I could see why she had it.

  I could see why the Infante could ignore it, his focus on Mary and Jessie.

  Duncan fired his rifle, aiming for the Infante. He was kneeling by Helen and Ashton was near them. He fired again, then again.

  It might as well have been the shrill whistle.

  It wasn’t a Lamb that stepped to the fore. The Duke pulled away from his fight with the Golden Calf. With long strides, he charged at the Infante, sword leveled for the higher noble’s throat.

  The Infante grabbed for the sword, and the blade dipped, danced around, then returned to course, aimed for the jugular.

  With a quarter-turn away, the Infante had shoulder and arm catch the blade instead. His flesh suffered what looked to be a shallo
w cut as he turned his back to our Duke of Francis.

  He swung his fist in a backhand, not even looking at his attacker. The Duke stepped back and away, turning and bringing his sword up to catch the Calf’s claw. He was disarmed.

  “Syylvester,” the Duke said, his vowel hitching, as if he was a stitched with a faulty wire, movements replicating.

  In the next moment, the Calf had gouged him three times, digging deep furrows into his chest and stomach. I could have laid my arm into those furrows and covered them with skin, with no bulge to be seen. From the look of the slices of black, there were dark gaps hinting at cavities beneath.

  It was a modest distraction, but the attack had bought us a chance to retreat. Mary had found her feet, dragging Jessie with her. I climbed to my own feet and backed away, stepping into the shelter of a shop. Duncan and Ashton dragged Helen into shadow.

  “You’re mad,” the Duke said, drawing a pair of blades to defend himself with—scaled down to my size, they might have been daggers, but the Duke was tall and his idea of a ‘dagger’ would have been a short sword in my hands.

  “You say that like you’re surprised,” I said. “You know this, you know what I am.”

  “Nno,” the Duke said.

  The Calf attacked again. It was fast, it was strong, and it sat askew in my mind’s eye, too hard to calculate and predict. It didn’t stop to breathe, it didn’t slow, it only seemed to stop to think, to work out how best to dismantle its enemy. The Duke stopped both claws from striking him by parrying with his blades. The Calf headbutted him.

  The Duke of Francis’ head was a weak point. He tried to adopt a fighting stance, and the blade fell from his right hand.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Wanted—” the Duke said. He looked at the Infante.

  I filled in the gap. I wanted to stop him.

  “We will,” I said. Somehow.

  Lillian approached me, throwing an arm over me, her hand gripping the armpit of the sleeve as she shared her coat with me. Berger and the other doctors following her. We were all at either side of the street now, with the Duke, Infante and the Calf in the center of the road.

  The Calf moved to finish off the Duke. The Infante stopped it.

  “Was it—worth it?” the Duke asked.

  “None of you survive the day,” the Infante said. “‘Worth’ is irrelevant.”

  “Absolutely worth it,” I said.

  The Infante reached out for the Duke, using his plague-ridden hand to seize the man by the face. There was almost surrender on the Duke’s face as he was seized. No fight, no effort to defend himself. He’d spent all he had.

  No. Not quite. He reached out and grabbed the Infante’s arm, brought a leg around and hooked the Infante’s. He was holding on, burdening the High Noble, hampering him so we could run.

  That didn’t stop the Infante for telling the Calf to come after us. It barely hampered the Infante from turning, walking as if there was barely any obstruction.

  But he wasn’t running. That counted for something.

  Duncan couldn’t throw anything while he held Helen, so he handed off what he could to Ashton. Lillian threw what she could as I held her bag and kept the coat in place over us. it was three to five seconds of rummaging for every second she spent deploying a pouch of something she could empty into the air behind her.

  It was Berger and the other Professors that served the most effective role. Berger had his puppeteer-insects, hidden within his coat. Others had canisters and pistols. They’d been ordered to this battlefield and they’d come with some ability to fight.

  The puppeteer bugs latched on, trying to find some physiology they understood. One or two paralyzed an arm or a leg for a second or two as the Calf raced forward on all fours, making it stumble or veer to one side. It shook its head violently for a moment as it charged into a cloud of powder Lillian had tossed into the rain.

  It barely slowed.

  We were charging straight into a morass of experiments and soldiers.

  We needed—

  The Calf caught us. It tore into Berger and one of his colleagues with enough violence that the collateral violence sent Duncan and Ashton sprawling, Helen with them.

  “Clear the way!” the remaining Professor shouted. “The Calf has gone mad and attacked the Infante!”

  There was commotion. How much had they seen of the fight? Enough to know we’d been fighting the Infante?

  The Infante was approaching, marching through the rain.

  Could they see?

  “Obey!” the Professor shouted.

  The soldiers obeyed. The Doctors gave orders to warbeasts.

  “Stop it!” the Professor said, leading the way into the enemy ranks. “Leave the children be!”

  There was hesitation at that.

  In less than a minute, the Infante would be close enough to give his own orders. He would reverse these instructions, and we would be among the enemy.

  I tried to hurry, getting ahead and away from the bulk of these defending forces. I glanced over the ship, looking for and failing to see any guns. It looked like the ones that would have worked had been removed and carried to the front lines, where they could act as turrets.

  Lillian and I stopped at the railing, taking in the scene. Mary caught up with us a second later. The warbeasts and experiments were attacking the Calf, now. Rain streamed down on parts of the deck. Other parts were covered by tiled canopy. The ramp itself had some canopy too, no doubt to protect individuals getting off the ship from gunfire.

  And Duncan—Ashton? They were still on the street, at the edge of the group of soldiers that stood amid the rubble where the prow of this land-ship had crashed through the exterior wall.

  Duncan moved his hand away from Helen’s throat. His head hung. He turned to look at the Infante, then at me.

  Ashton didn’t budge until Duncan tugged him a second time, practically dragging Ashton after him.

  Lillian clutched my hand, hard.

  As a group, while Duncan and Ashton ascended the rubble and the ramp to the deck of the ship, we retreated into the cover of the roof that protected the rooms and structures above the deck.

  Guns cocked, to greet us.

  “The Duke is dead,” the Professor with us said. “Berger, Adams.”

  The others were professors. I recognized the decoration.

  The Infante’s men.

  “He’s mad,” the Duke’s Professor said.

  “And you’re a traitor.”

  “He’s mad,” the Duke’s Professor said. “He’ll never come back from this. He’s tasted… this.”

  “Abandon,” Mary said. “He’s tasted total abandon.”

  “We’ll manage,” the Infante’s Professor said.

  “Lawrence—”

  “We’ll manage. We have to.”

  “You can’t steer him any longer,” the Duke’s Professor said. “Not even in the small ways. We’ll say the plague took him.”

  The Infante approached the crowd. He’d torn the glue away from his eye, taking flesh and eyelids with it. He didn’t seem to care that he bled anymore.

  I heard Lawrence sigh. “Nothing we could do, if we wanted to.”

  “Harpoon gun?” I asked.

  “Harpoon gun?”

  “Or anything sufficient for catching a rogue warbeast.”

  “That’s what it’s come down to, is it?” Lawrence asked.

  I looked at the Lambs. Mary had Jessie, and the burden seemed unduly heavy. Lillian looked harrowed, her breath fogging around the mask at her lower face, her eyes wide. Duncan held Ashton like Helen had, before.

  The Infante looked up at us. His expression was one of grim satisfaction.

  With a few words, he had the crowd turn.

  But he would lead this army.

  “Harpoon gun, or anything,” I said. “Now.”

  “It’d be suicide. You’ll fail, and he’d punish us. He’d take everything we care about,” Lawrence said. He still held a gun,
raised and aimed at us.

  “He’s power,” I said. “Devoid of control. Him and his pet both. We orchestrated this siege, and we did it because the Academy is control, devoid of power.”

  “I think you’re underestimating our resources,” Lawrence said.

  “I think the fact that we’re all standing here and facing down this reality suggests we have a very good idea of what your resources are and what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I felt my heart pound as the Infante worked his way through the crowd, getting past the rubble to the ramp. His pet was devouring bodies, mask parted. He called it, and it leaped to the side of the ship, crawling up to the railing, stopping there.

  Decorum had to be observed apparently. It wouldn’t go ahead of its master any more than a properly trained dog by a shepherd’s side, or one of the organic pieces of art that ladies of quality liked to have trotting at their sides.

  “He’s slipped the leash, you know,” I said. “The break in the balance of power and control, it started with the Duke being shot, the Baron’s weakness. You failed to account for the missing component, the glue that holds it all together.”

  “The people.”

  “Their faith. Their belief in the order of things. It elevates the Infante and his ilk. Change that elevation, reverse it even, the nobles get insecure and the balance—” not truly a balance, “It goes askew, and everything falls apart.”

  Lawrence spoke, watching the Infante, “What would upset or reverse this supposed faith? Hm? Not mere deaths in wartime. Not when the Duke lived, to continue to make appearances. Not when we covered things up as we did for the Baron’s death.”

  I let the silence hang, sinking in.

  Let his question become rhetorical.

  “Harpoon,” I said. “Please.”

  He hesitated, then glanced at his peers.

  He seemed to come to a decision, and ran for the stairs.

  The Infante slowed. The rain pattered against the deck, the sounds of battle were distant, less persistent than they had been. The battles had largely been decided, now. There were a few final doors to batter down, but…

  But I needed to focus.

  I watched as the Infante’s expression shifted. He turned, looking over one shoulder at the crowd.