Aleksi led his scores of devout zealots through the forest to where they heard the screeching grind of the locomotive’s rebirth. The sound of metal on metal and hissing steam echoed through the trees, bouncing off the tall stone edifices of the valley, sounding huge and monstrous. His mind filled with disbelief against the idea that these four heretics could summon knowledge and power enough to bring the rusted hulk back to life, but his keen undead ears and the plume of white steam rising into the rain over the tree tops far ahead told him different.
“Quick!” he hissed as they ran. “Kill them on the train. They mustn’t leave the gorge or the village.”
A hundred vampires chortled, gurgled and yelped out in hunger and glee, picking up even more speed as they leapt over fallen trees and charged through briar and thicket. Their nature had overcome their own love for Elmoryn, and now all they wanted was vengeance, and to slake the eternal thirst they had accepted as their burden to bear.
Aleksi burst out into the gap between the trees where the railroad line was, and came to an abrupt halt. Just ahead of where they exited the forest the train moved away.
Umaryn saw him, and they locked eyes.
The train had been chugging along at a reasonable pace of seven miles per hour, mowing down the overgrown grass with a methodical satisfaction. It felt to Umaryn that the engine was pleased to take back a bit of the modern Elmoryn from the ancient and old forest, one blade of grass at a time.
When Aleksi burst out of the line of trees beside the rail line she happened to be leaning out of the window of the engine and looking back towards the plunging ground of the mine. His head snapped to the side at her, and even through his squint against the drab and dreary overcast sky, she could see the raw animosity in his stare. A moment later a dozen more undead the same as he erupted from the trees and, like their leader, they turned and looked straight at the Everwalk sister.
“They’re here!” she screamed. Not willing to risk James’ deep sleep holding him unconscious she stuck a boot out and kicked his calf, rousing him from his ten minute nap. “James, the vampires! I need your help, quick!”
James opened his eyes so wide they look like they were about to fall out. They darted around until they found Umaryn’s face, and some coherence appeared. “What do we need?” He stood.
“Get wood in the firebox from the tender. Quick. We need to outrun them and I need a bigger fire to do that,” she pointed to the wood and to the hatch to the furnace so James knew exactly what to do. He nodded, and she leaned out the window of the engine. “Mal! Chelsea!” as she yelled, she pointed at the now running vampires on the heels of the passenger car.
“I know!” Mal said from his knees.
“Mal get the bow out,” Chelsea said as she drew her sword and started towards the end of the car. The vampires would be at the ladder at the back within seconds, and they had to meet them there, where they had the elevation advantage.
He shook his head and undid a strap on the small case he’d been carrying the whole trip. “I need to get this ready. Grab my bow; keep them off the top of the train.”
“What is in that bag that’s so important?” Chelsea asked as she sheathed her blade and moved to Mal’s back, grabbing his bow and pulling an arrow out of the quiver slung across his back. Behind them the grassy path of the rail line filled with more and more slavering undead running to catch up to the train. It wouldn’t be long before they did.
“An artifact. It helped us in Graben. It might help us now,” Mal said as he undid another strap. Chelsea drew the bow and launched an arrow at the vampire pulling itself on top of the back of the car. Her arrow went high, and slashed a furrow into the hair and scalp of the female vampire. The impact of the arrow knocked her backwards, and she fell off the train.
“It might help us?” Chelsea asked with a laugh as she grabbed another arrow and sent it to the back of the rail car. This arrow went lower, and embedded itself into the gut of a tall and powerful male vampire. He had long black hair stuck together with clumps of blood and gore that swung around his head like alien tendrils. He hissed at her, baring a maw with too many teeth and with his free hand snapped the arrow off, leaving a sharp barb of wood protruding from his stomach. “It better.” She dropped the bow beside Mal and picked up her shield. “Hurry,” she said, and drew her sword. A second later the big vampire stood atop the car, and he charged her with a bellow.
Mal fought the tide of rising panic inside him. He pulled his dagger and slashed open the bag, no longer able to be patient with the straps. His secret fell to the roof of the car with a clang and began to roll towards the edge of the roof.
The Illuminator of Truth, the enchanted lantern that Dram Sorber had lent them in their darkest hours in Graben gleamed in the dull light of the late day as if a sun came down to shine only on it. The platinum, silver and gold weave rolled like a dropped log on a hill towards the side of the car, and Mal launched his entire body at it. If it fell...
He dove. His outreached hand grabbed the lantern but his body kept sliding on the roof, heading perilously to the edge. His free hand scrambled around, trying to find something, anything that he could get purchase on. A lip, a crease, a piece of something to stop his slide, but there was nothing. Below on the ground running to keep up were half a dozen vampires who saw him moving helplessly towards the ten foot drop. They laughed at his plight, and moved closer to the side of the train to catch him, and feast on his misfortune.
With nothing to grab a hold of and his life about to slip off the side of the car, Mal shut his eyes and reached out with The Way, harnessing the raw power of the sea of undead all around him. He felt energized by their presence, as if he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, and somehow managed to keep every bit of that energy inside his body without exploding. With a wild smile on his face, Mal used The Way to grab his own foot.
A neomantic trick typically used to open and shut doors, or carry heavy things, telekinesis was a forgotten trick but now it was serving to save his life. His eyes fused shut, he manipulated the energy of The Way as if it were his own flesh and blood. He gripped immaterial fingers around his ankles and imagined that he stood above his own prone body, pulling it up from certain death. He grunted, gritted his teeth and cried out from exertion, though this endurance was a measure of his mental fortitude, not of Malwynn’s physical strength.
The hungry vampires running alongside the train, eager for an easy meal realized that their prey no longer descended into their ready laps. Their anger grew, and they leapt at the side of the car, scratching and slashing, trying to grab a small steel pipe that ran along the tops of the windows. Their first few jumps were unsuccessful, but soon enough one would grab hold and Mal would be buried under that new threat.
Safe again on the flat top of the car he opened his eyes and looked at the lantern. It had a beauty to it that transcended the physicality of the thing. His sister could see it, and just now, after channeling The Way into a spell while holding it, he could see it. He could see only a tiny fraction of it, and it made him tremble. This item—this thing—had power in it still.
But only a bit of oil. Mal snapped out of his momentary obsession with the strange artifact and assessed Chelsea’s situation. Somehow she’d managed to kill the tall vampire. His headless corpse slid slowly towards the edge of the train car roof as she stood at the top of the ladder, hacking back and forth with her sword. He could hear the blade hitting flesh over the chugging locomotive and the screams of the undead all around. She was as safe as one could be doing battle with the undead, but only for a few more seconds.
How did she light it? Mal looked through the fine metallic weaves as the train shook and tried to see where it would open. He had to get to the wick somehow but couldn’t find a seam, or a hinge. I bet she prayed. An artificer would pray to this. Shit I’m no artificer. Okay. The Way it is. Mal looked through the largest gap in the sculpted metal and saw the tiny white fabric wick. He gave the lantern a little shake and felt th
e few drops of oil slosh around inside. Let it burn for a few minutes. All we need is to reach the consecrated grounds in New Falun.
Mal imagined a tiny flame appearing inside the glass housing as he reached into a pouch at his waist. Inside he fingered a small piece of flint and steel. He shut out the sounds of the world. He shut out the vibration of the train. He shut out the thoughts of fear and love, and shut out everything but the flint, the steel, the wick, and the word he had to speak. The raging sea of undead around him fueled their own demise. Let this work.
“Sprack,” he whispered to The Way.
A flare of orange-white light appeared at the top of the oil impregnated wick, and he desperately hoped the small spark would be enough to set the flame. He focused all his willpower on the tiny flame, as if it were his first born taking its first step. He willed the fire to burn.
The wick took, and the magic inside the lamp fired with it.
Mal felt a concussive thump move through the air like a ring of power emanating from the tiny flame inside. A million specks of light appeared inside his skull, blinding him. He’d been looking right at the wick, and now he suffered the penalty of such foolishness.
In the white haze of blindness Malwynn couldn’t see what happened to the screaming vampires, but the fact that they were screaming out as if they had been thrown into a blacksmith’s furnace told him the small lantern was working.
But for how long?
Twenty feet away, James’ body was withering and failing from the minutes of intense, frantic labor. He had thrown a hundred logs from the tender into the open firebox, each five pounds or more, and he’d done it all with Umaryn standing at his side, smashing her hammer into the open window frames of the engineer’s compartment. She’d put her helm on, and was encased in her crimson artifact armor and even in the cramped space, she looked fluid and deadly to the apostle. Blow after blow, matching each log James threw into the fire she struck out at vampires. She broke fang after fang, jaw after jaw and skull after skull with her gleaming hammer, now covered in wet gore. She’d been hit a few times, but it seemed that her armor held.
From outside their den of quasi-safety a resounding boom came, and stark light threw black shadows where there were gray smudges a moment before. A blink of the eye later the undead began wailing in misery, the sounds of their presence fading into the trees.
James stopped, log in hand. “What happened? A spell?”
Umaryn cackled with wild triumphant abandon. “Mal lit the lantern!”
“Lantern? That’s one hell of a light,” James said and threw the log in his hands into the firebox. He went to grab another, but Umaryn stopped him.
“Allow me to stoke the flame. I can triple our speed if I can get something to work. There isn’t much oil left in the lantern and we can’t afford for it to go out,” the woman said as she took off her helm and dropped to her knees in front of the open flame. “I don’t know if this will work, but it’s all I got. Cover me if those things try and get in here.”
“Of course,” James said, and he leaned out the window of the engineer’s cabin. The white light coming from the lantern Malwynn held atop the passenger car truly was spectacular. It cut the rain from fat drops to vaporized mist and somehow simultaneously managed to heat the damp stormy air to a humid, almost midsummer temperature. It felt welcome like the first break from the winter cold in the spring. James looked around at the passing grass in the narrow cut of the forest where the tracks lay, trying to get a bead on where the undead were, but they had vanished. He could see depressions in the grass that could’ve been human sized where one might’ve dropped to the ground, but he couldn’t see for certain. The lantern had instantaneously evaporated not only the rain, but the vampiric threat. They weren’t killed, but they were scattered and scared. James couldn’t help but grin.
Over his shoulder he watched as Umaryn cobbled together an invention. She took a small leather bag and emptied it on the floor. A shirt, a bar of soap, and more all scattered on the industrial diamond patterned steel. She then took out her dagger and cut two holes in the bag opposite one another. A candle was placed on the floor with intent beside two flat pieces of log from the bottom of the tender. A carefully lined up dagger placement and hammer whack later; she had cut the end of the dagger sheath off, and had created the world’s least reliable looking bellows.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m a professional. Give me a second,” she said, and then began to speak in a hushed tone, tracing long secret sigils in the air. Where her fingers passed a tiny trail of light could be seen, almost creating a hypnotic effect that James stared at with wonder. He’d never seen this done before.
The bag, the candle and the broken sheathes lifted into the air as if brought aloft by The Way. They swirled around, assembling themselves into a very reliable looking bellows, the candle melting and forming a tight seal around the gap where the leather met the wood. After a few moments of the bag reforming and reshaping, the contraption settled to the steel floor, and she picked it up. A few squeezes of the now polished and finished looking slats of wood later, she handed it to him, complete, and near perfect.
“That’s astounding,” James said, testing the action of the bellows. Hot air puffed into his face as it ought to.
“That’s The Way. The artificer way, specifically. Can you stoke the fire using that port hole in the door? The hotter we get the flames, the faster we go. The faster we go, the quicker we get back to your consecrated ground.”
“On it.”
“I’ll pray to the spirit of the engine. I’m sure that’ll help us.”
—Chapter Twenty-One—
THE LAST STOP OF THE LINE
The train moved ever faster.
“Are you alright?” Mal asked Chelsea as he held the lantern aloft, allowing more of its light to penetrate down to the ground level. A plume of white issued out of the smokestack and slid over his head like a penumbral snake. The white light of the lantern lit it up with an otherworldly radiance.
“I’m not a flower Mal. I’m a soldier. I’m fine,” Chelsea said, sounding irritated.
“I’m sorry. I just—It got tight back there. I didn’t mean anything,” Mal said back to her.
Chelsea whipped the blade of her sword downward sharply, slinging some of the red and black blood off the steel. Unhappy with the result, she produced a small rag from her belt and wiped the blade cleaner before sheathing it. It felt like forever to Mal before she said anything back to him. “You can’t always protect me,” she said in a far less offended way.
“I know.”
“I don’t always need protection either. I came here to fight. Not to stand by your side while you do all the fighting for me. I’m a big girl, Mal. I’m not afraid. Please understand that,” she said as she faced him.
Mal saw an expression on her face that he’d never seen before. A look that contradicted her words. One of fear. “Are you okay? You look... worried or something.”
She looked down at her feet and then to the forest that slid by. To Mal she didn’t seem to be searching for the undead so close. She searched for words in the woods. “I don’t know how you’re going to handle me and what I do for a living. I don’t want you to fret and worry every moment that I’m in danger. I chose this life, Mal. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I love to do, and I’m damn good at it. If I think you’re worrying about me every time we get into a fight, I’m going to think about that, and if I’m thinking about that, then I’m not focusing on the fight. That’s when people get hurt.”
Mal had a creeping dread move into his mind and belly. This felt like... coldness. Loneliness again. “Chelsea, I feel the same way about my sister—who, by the way, is tougher and meaner than I am by a long shot—and I don’t feel that way because I’m afraid she’s going to die. I feel that way because I love her, and I want to support her. I need to. I couldn’t have done all I did without her, and I wouldn’t have met you if it weren’t for her. Believe me,
I understand what you’re saying, but you also need to understand that being loved and accepting that love means allowing someone else to worry about you, and that’s okay. I know you’ll be alright. I know you’ll cut down whatever stands in your way, and I know you’ll watch my back and my sister’s too, but when the dead stop bleeding, I want to hear you’re okay. I want to see the smile on your face again. I want all of that because I love you.” Mal’s eyes were overflowing with tears he had no idea were coming. As they ran down his face he wiped them away with his free hand and saw that she did the same.
“I didn’t sign up with you to sit here and cry,” Chelsea said, her tears mixed with embarrassed laughter.
“Yeah I know. We Everwalks are heartbreakers. You can get off the train now if you want out. I’ll understand,” Mal said, gesturing around to the faster passing wilderness.
Chelsea shook her head and stepped close to Mal for a kiss. When their lips parted, she shook her head. “I already got the ticket for this ride. I’ll get off when we get home. Together.”
“Well, home is the old church foundation for tonight, and it’s going to be one hell of a night. I don’t think we’re going to have time for cuddling or other more naughty activities.”
Chelsea whacked him on the upper arm hard. “Malwynn Everwalk. How dare you think that I would consider naughty activities at a time like this? I am a prudent lady with morals.”
Mal rubbed his shoulder where she hit him. “Right. Sure. Yes dear.”
“Hey you two!” Umaryn hollered back to them over the grind and thrum of the steam engine.
The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3) Page 26