by Scott Lynch
Russ gave another moment’s thought to retreat, but he still found little point in just holing up and waiting. He steeled himself against the thick miasma of blood and other bodily fluids—he was no stranger to death, having dealt enough of it, but he’d never seen a death quite this ugly—and bulled on ahead. Light in one hand, pistol in the other, he carefully took one step at a time, staying between the grinding steel forests while keeping one careful eye on the ceiling above. It’d be just like the madman who designed this place to put another swinging blade or the like in the middle of the only “clear” path.
Still, despite all his caution, he barely escaped it when it finally came.
Without so much as a single moving part to offer warning, a burst of scalding steam erupted from an overhead pipe, aimed with brutal accuracy down the stretch of open floor. Russ allowed himself to fall straight back, beneath the hissing vapors, and even that was enough to redden the skin of his face and neck to match his nickname. His hands slapped out to either side as his back struck the floor, and one of the spikes smacked the double-six from his fist, missing his flesh by little more than the width of his favorite girl’s navel.
For long minutes he lay there, listening to the steam whistling overhead, and pondered Mitch’s death. The jet of steam, obviously, was intended to startle anyone passing through into leaping aside—and into the path of the spikes. So then why leave the clear path in the first place?
“Hope,” he muttered to himself in answer. “So we could see what was coming, and think that just maybe we’d escaped it…” Once more he shuddered, this time at the thought of the diseased brain that could have built such things.
Finally, Russ cast carefully about until he’d recovered his pistol and glanced back over his head. Sure enough, the door through which he’d entered was now hidden behind another steel panel. No going back. And since he couldn’t exactly brave the spikes…
Russ returned the double-six to his holster, raised both arms in front of his face, took a few deep breaths, and rolled to his feet. As swiftly as he could manage without stumbling off course and into the juddering spikes, his face turned toward his feet, he pushed his way through the billowing steam.
He vowed to himself that he wouldn’t cry out as the skin on his arms, his hands, and his face begin to burn—even, in spots, to peel away from the glistening flesh beneath in sodden ribbons. He’d almost reached the door before he broke that vow.
A door that, thank all the gods of the Celestial Court, was neither locked nor booby-trapped. Russ collapsed into a tiny ball on the platform between this car and the next, stared out at the passing terrain through the gaps in the chain mesh, and sobbed for long minutes. Tears and snot traced pathways down cheeks and chin, but any humiliation he might normally feel for such craven conduct was well and truly buried by frustration and fear.
But not for too long. “Ruddy” Russ Gandry wasn’t nobody’s pansy, gods dammit! Teeth clenched until they ached, he forced himself back under control. From the same leather pouch where he’d kept his tube of glow juice, he removed a small roll of bandages, pre-soaked in some sticky, foul-smelling sludge supposed to keep a wound from festering. He didn’t have nearly enough of it, wasn’t supposed to have to treat more than the occasional bad gash or bullet graze out in the field, but he could at least wrap the worst of the burns. As for the others? Russ tore strips from the hem and collar of his shirt, now surprisingly clean thanks to the blasts of steam, and bandaged his remaining injuries as best he could. Not much he could do for the burns on his face, though.
Russ stood, groaning in pain, and moved on.
He knew the train couldn’t actually go on for miles, that he couldn’t actually have wandered its cars for hours without end, but still he’d have sworn that he had. Each car was worse than the last, the length of the train measuring out a steady descent into the Infernal Judges’ most fearsome Hells.
Several of the cars were divided into multiple, claustrophobically narrow passageways, forcing Russ to choose his path and squeeze through with his gut sucked in. Halfway through the walls grew scalding and bear traps waited beneath weakened planks in the floor. The hallway smelled of roast beef; a peculiar mystery that Russ only solved when he rounded a corner and found Werrick caught in a trap and cooked to death against a wall.
Russ didn’t even take the time to mourn. He just stripped Werrick’s singed duster off the body and used it as extra padding of his own, saving himself from the worst of the burns.
Another contained a veritable maze of spinning, spring-loaded arms that threatened to break bones, to tear skin, to catch limbs in an inhuman grip and never let go. Someone had died here, too, but Russ couldn’t even say who; all he had left to judge was a heap of torn, bloody clothes. It took everything he had, all of his training, every duck and doge and leap he could muster, to avoid joining the poor, anonymous soul.
Floor panels rose, threatening to crush him against the ceiling. Gears and spikes shot from walls to rend flesh and bone. Bizarre engines, unlike any he’d ever heard of, sucked the vitality from the air until he very nearly suffocated in a wide open chamber. Static electricity, generated by the wheels, discharged through copper wires dangling from above. At one point, where the designer had apparently gotten bored with “convoluted,” a panel dropped open and a series of gun barrels fired at him from multiple angles.
But through it all, thanks to his own skill, to the warnings offered by the bodies of his dead friends, and to no small bit of blessed fortune, he passed—not unscathed, perhaps, but without severe hurt.
Until the last.
Not that Russ knew it was the last, of course. He’d long since lost track of how far along the train he’d passed, and he certainly had no way of knowing what the vehicle’s mad inventor had planned. He knew only that he’d just wended his way through a blizzard of barbed arrows and come to another in the seemingly endless line of doors.
Doors—absolutely none of which had, themselves, been traps or parts of traps. He’d grown accustomed to that, grown careless in his agony and his exhaustion. He’d stopped checking.
It was a lapse he regretted the instant he felt something spongy on the underside of the latch give way beneath his grip.
He tried to pull away, and nearly lost another patch of skin in the process. Two of his fingers came loose before the viscous substance had fully set, but the others—the last two fingers of his left hand—were stuck fast.
“Well. That’s obnoxious.”
He frowned even as he muttered. It was obnoxious, and nothing more. His fingers didn’t burn; he wasn’t feeling sickly or poisoned. Whatever else you might say about every gizmo and contraption he’d come across, they were all pretty well lethal.
The keening wail of metal on metal made him jump, twisting his arm painfully so he could look behind him. A crescent-shaped blade arced from one wall, reaching to within inches of the other, barely visible as a flicker before it was gone. Steel lightning, flashing across the railroad car. It was at the far end of the room, but each time it emerged from its previously hidden slot, it came a few feet nearer.
Russ stared in horror, his face covered in a fresh sheen of sweat. He had a minute or two, maybe, before that thing would open him up like a sausage. He couldn’t duck beneath it, not with his hand stuck to the latch. Couldn’t jump over it for the same reason; its distance from the floor had been calculated with a diabolic precision.
He tugged desperately, willing now to sacrifice as much skin as necessary, but the sticky sludge had fused around those two fingers, holding them in a grip so firm that Russ knew he could never yank them free in time.
And with every second, the bloodthirsty scream of the blade drew nearer.
Russ allowed himself a frustrated, furious scream of his own, in answer, before he drew the double-six, placed the barrels against the bottom knuckles of the imprisoned digits, and pulled the trigger.
Again, Russ had woken up on the floor. Agony raced along his arm, a se
aring, throbbing pain like he’d never known. He must have swooned from the shock, which—thankfully—had laid him out beneath the path of the scything blade. The warm, crimson puddle in which he lay was evidence enough that he hadn’t been out for long. Groaning and sobbing, he tore yet another strip from his shirt (not nearly so clean now as it had been) and forced himself to wrap his mangled hand tight. His head swam, and he knew he was on the verge of passing out once more. He bit his lip until it, too, bled, holding himself awake through willpower alone.
Above him, the blade reached the end of its track, retracted once more into the wall, and did not emerge again.
When minutes had passed and the agony in his hand had faded at least a touch—or perhaps he’d just begun to grow numb to it—Russ rose. Now that he knew where to look, it was easy enough to grip the latch without grabbing the gunk smeared over it. His breath hitching in his throat, wondering what sort of nightmare he might encounter next, he pulled upon first the inner door and then (after a thorough examination), the one to the next car.
What he found was more startling than any convoluted death trap.
The chamber was laid out like someone’s hotel room. The bed, though narrow, boasted a thick mattress and quilts that were, if far from luxurious, at least without obvious holes or patches. A counter with a basin of (mostly) clean water sat across from it, beside a wardrobe with a number of shirts and pants hanging in neat rows. The room was well lit by the late afternoon sun, pouring in through a barred but broad window. It even had curtains, currently tied open.
In fact, the only peculiar detail of the room at all was the wall above the bed. There, almost two dozen boots of different styles and sizes hung from pegs. Some had spurs; most appeared worn, or torn, or singed.
Russ leaned over the bed, staring, and caught a faceful of an acrid scent. Tanning fluids.
Like he’d smelled before in a leatherworker’s, or a taxidermist.
Swallowing, he stepped away, determined not to look inside those boots.
“Might as well come on through, son!” It was a pleasant voice, older, almost grandfatherly, shouting from beyond the bedchamber. “I can hear you clompin’ around in there!”
Double-six raised and ready to fire, Russ limped across the room and hurled open the final door.
Had it not already been getting on toward evening, and had he not been partly acclimated by the bedroom windows, Russ would have been practically blinded by his sudden exposure to the sun, after so many hours in the gloom. The wind whipping past his face smelled better than a bouquet of roses on prostitute’s bedside table. No chain mesh, no bars, no walls, separated him from the open air.
He was standing at the rear of the engine itself, a behemoth of iron and steel and coal-smelling smoke. A narrow corridor to the left led, no doubt, to the boiler room itself, but Russ’s eyes—and gun—were trained unerringly up and to the right, at the engineer’s compartment.
The fellow inside, peering back down at Russ, looked pretty much the average, everyday engineer. Cap, striped shirt, an old, friendly face liberally strewn with wrinkles and rough white whiskers in equal measure. It was only as he shuffled out onto the steps, beyond the shadows of his tiny box, that Russ could see the single abnormal trait about the man: His left leg, from the knee down, was a framework of brass, exposing the occasional ticking gear within.
“Well, Hells, son,” the geezer said, voice raised just enough to be heard above the rushing wind. “I’m impressed. You know, you’re only the sixth fella to actually make it all the way through.”
“Sixth… What?” Russ shook his head, trying to blink away the dull throbbing throughout his body while keeping the pistol aloft. “How long you been doing this, old man?!”
“Oh, couple years, now. Maybe three?”
“You fuckin’ lunatic, I oughta—!” The double-six was quivering, Russ’s finger tensing on the trigger.
“Really don’t wanna do that, son.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
The engineer smiled and lowered himself—with the occasional grunt and the pop of old joints—to sit on the steps. “You heard of ‘Five Dog’ Creighton?”
“What?” Russ, still vaguely light-headed, wondered if he’d missed part of the conversation. “What are you—?”
“Have you,” the old man repeated, “ever heard of ‘Five Dog’ Creighton?”
“Course I have! Shit, everyone’s heard of—”
“You hear about what happened on the Pedroyo line?”
“Uh… Something about Creighton and his boys derailing a train after they robbed it, right? Why are we talking about—”
“I built the engine on that train, son. Supposed to be a new machine, cheaper’n anything House Marghul has on the market, but almost as fast and reliable. Guess Creighton, being a train robber’n all, didn’t cotton to that much. After he took my passengers for everything they had, he and his boys beat me bad and left me lying where I couldn’t reach the throttle. Nothing I could do to stop us…”
His voice trailed away for an instant. Russ wondered if the man was totally gone, until he blinked, hard, and spoke once more.
“That’s where I lost my leg, you see. And I was lucky. Most of the passengers died. My boy, who was helping me out on my test run… Died. Molly, she couldn’t live with that. She’d left me before I was even back on my feet. Well, foot.” He tapped the brass prosthetic with a fingertip. “Course, a lot of my railroad backers weren’t happy ‘bout what’d happened. Couldn’t do much formally, but a few of ‘em slipped me some funding under the table, so I could build myself a new train. It ain’t as fancy or as comfortable as the last one, but I’d say it’s got its charms, right?”
“You got something seriously not right with you, old man. I ain’t Five Dog, ain’t even ever rode with him! I—”
“I know that, son. But someday it will be. And until then… Well, Hells, you’re a bandit, boy. Sure you done more than enough bad to deserve this.”
Russ’s hand steadied, his lips turned up in a sneer. “Well, I survived your traps, you bastard, and now it’s your turn to—”
“Traps? Those devices weren’t traps, son. Those were just meant to weed out the dross, make sure I’m only left with the strong ones, the ones who really wanted to live. The train, that’s the trap.
“The train, and the air you been breathin’ since you climbed aboard.”
“What?” Not quite a whisper, not quite a squeak. “What are you talking about? What did you do?!”
“Nifty odorless gas of my own devising. Ugliest death you can imagine, son. Like the worst case of Digger’s Lung you ever saw. Weeks, maybe months, of coughin’ blood and shittin’ bile. Open sores, big as gold Talons and angry as Night Wolf’s face. No cure, no relief…
“Except the gas itself. You take a good couple deep breaths of that, every couple days, it keeps the symptoms from appearin’. Course, nobody but me knows the formula, and I only make a few days’ worth at a time. So yeah, son, the train is the trap—‘cause you ain’t leaving anytime soon. And you’ll be wanting to point that gun somewhere else; wouldn’t want to shoot me by accident now, would you?”
He was bluffing. He had to be bluffing!
Except that Russ had seen enough, in the past hours, to know better. His shoulders sagged and his fingers opened. The double-six fell to the platform with a dull clatter.
“Why?” He heard the begging in his voice, and was ashamed. “Why would you do that?”
“You don’t think I can manage a train like this by my lonesome, do you?” The engineer struggled to his feet and limped back up into the compartment. “Running the engine, feeding the boiler, maintaining the devices. Gotta have some help. I got myself five assistants. Well, six, now.”
Levers clattered and the train lurched. Segmented legs sprouted from the sides and lifted it up off the tracks. Ponderously it swayed to the left and began to march.
“You’re in a bad way, son,” the old engineer said. “I’ll
introduce you to the rest of the workers tomorrow, and they can show you where to get started. Why don’t you go and get some sleep until then, regain your strength?
“We got us a long, long road ahead.”
_________________________________________________
Ari Marmell would love to tell you all about the various esoteric jobs he
held and the wacky adventures he had on the way to becoming an author, since
that’s what other authors seem to do in these blurbs. Unfortunately, he
doesn’t actually have any, as the most exciting thing about his professional
life, besides his novel writing, is the work he’s done for Dungeons &
Dragons and other role-playing games. His published fiction includes both
The Goblin Corps and Thief’s Covenant, from Pyr Books; The Conqueror’s
Shadow and The Warlord’s Legacy, from Spectra (Random House); and tie-in
novels for multiple gaming properties. You can find Ari online at
http://www.mouseferatu.com and http://twitter.com/mouseferatu.
THE FURY PACT
By Matt Forbeck
Shen’s joy at flying through the sky on his father’s Fury pack evaporated the moment he spied the smoke from the fire consuming his family’s farm from a full league away. He’d been busy putting his father’s latest invention through its pace, and the stark beauty of the High Plains rolling out between the unseen towns of Eldaire and Prosperity had entranced him so much that he’d not looked back until the alarm his father had set began pinging. That meant he had depleted half his fuel, and he would need to go straight home.
Shen had once been forced to land the Fury pack more than a mile away from the farm, and he’d waited there for hours before he realized his father wasn’t coming to rescue him. He’d considered abandoning the contraption there and going to ask his father for help, but he knew what the man’s answer would be. Instead, he hauled the heavy machinery through the tall grass, cutting a path toward his home.