by Andrew Post
Anoushka’s gloves creaked as they tightened around the yoke handles.
Every sound hitting her ears was sharp. Namely that of DJ Cliffy Cohen’s selection, “If You Want Blood (You Got It).” Anoushka knew the song. Her squad knew the song. She called out for them to sing along. “Louder,” she yelled. “Keep cranking and sing.”
Lit faint by brazier light, Anoushka caught the stone words over New Kambleburg’s arched front doors.
INTEGRITY => BRAVERY => LOYALTY => PEACE
And beneath the etched coda, in red, the coda of orcs’ own.
OURS NOW
“Brace,” she shouted, running them right at those seven bloody letters.
The doors were first pierced by Joan’s cannon, then knocked off their hinges with her forward armor. As flimsy to Joan as Cherry Bomb’s fiberboard targets. Hailing their raucous entrance was the cacophony of 200 orcs simultaneously opening fire. Cannon low, Anoushka answered.
Through the smoke, crushing those waiting inside, Anoushka kept them moving, plunging them as far into the city as they could get. Joan tolled like a bell being violently beaten by a thousand simultaneous hammers. Anoushka could barely see anything moving as fast as they were, but each time she saw a building front coming up, she’d steer them right. And right again, moving them in a wide circle about the town square’s fringe.
“Primed!” Kylie-Nae shouted.
Zuther and Russell pedaled, doing their damnedest to keep them at a full wind.
The orcs smart enough to run free of Joan’s circle of destruction took hasty cover in the city fountain. From there, they set up a crank-operated gun that required a tripod to effectively wield. A second crouched next to the one triggering, feeding the connected belt of bullets into the gun. A few rotations of the crank and a spray of bullets came pounding against Joan’s right flank. Not clangs and thuds like before, but a deafening, nonstop clatter.
Anoushka watched in terror as the armor began to bulge in. The lumpy swell grew—the metal heating and beginning to glow and steam.
Peter rode safely on Joan’s left, keeping time to stay out of direct harm. Slowing to fire after Joan, his cannon-saddle grapeshot downed the greenie feeding the crank gun; now the one firing it would have to manage the bullet belt himself.
Anoushka heard a pitiful cry and a crash of armor—fleetingly, she thought about when they’d lost Matthew. In the rear view, she saw Peter abandoning his dead horse where it lay—getting chased by the unbroken beam of bullets—to take cover. Teetee followed, navigating around the dead orcs and dislodged cobblestones.
Before the rapidly growing dent in the metal next to her could tear and allow the gush of lead in, Anoushka spun the wheel next to her seat. Swinging the cannon to the right, aiming into the middle of the circle they were drawing, she waited until the orc with the crank gun fell in her crosshairs. Magnified to the point that she could count the boils on his flesh, he widened his eyes and abandoned the steaming crank gun.
“Firing!”
The fountain emptied itself in a column, skyward. The orc gunner was present, then not. Chunks of ice, broken fountain statue, and gore rained down.
Anoushka kept them moving in their circle, the drunk dervish maneuver having proved successful so far. After screaming out they were primed, Kylie-Nae asked if she could borrow back the six-gun she’d lent to Zuther. Out of breath—and not much he could do with it in here—he nodded. She snatched it from his holster, scrambled up the ladder, thunked open the topside hatch and, using it as a shield, fired over it in the style of Cherry Bomb—left gun, right gun, left gun.
These orcs didn’t scatter into toothpicks. One spun over the railing of a storefront’s balcony, a second behind him. Anoushka, on the next revolution, flattened both.
A trio of orcs stormed out the front doors of New Kambleburg’s bank, guns blazing.
Laying the X of her periscope over them, Anoushka loosed.
With the topside hatch open, the cannon’s thunder was free to pour in, shaking eyes and teeth. Kylie-Nae, above, received its brunt, wavering halfway out the hatch a moment, knocked silly. Zuther leaped from his pit to grab her legs before she tumbled out.
After cutting through the orcs on the front stairs, the cannonball passed deeper inside the bank, where it collided with something hard—the vault door, perhaps, or some tough piece of building structure—and ricocheted back out, through the second-story window. Careening in a high arc over the emptied fountain, it punched through another building’s wall, crashed, and boomed about within. Dust burst the windows out, shards flying. Losing some of its velocity in each caroming, the cannonball finally trundled out the front doors—dented, blood-splattered, and dusty with debris—and came to a stop.
Anoushka caught Peter in the rear view as the landscape slipped past behind them. He had his scattergun loaded and was lurching off down a side street. Teetee was already ahead of him. Anoushka hit the brakes.
Kylie-Nae called down from above. “Why’d we stop? Peter’s on the chase.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, please join us back down here, Miss Browne.”
Kylie-Nae dropped down and collapsed onto her stool in front. Joan’s blast had given her a bloody nose. She swept sooty hair out of her face. “Okay, what’s next?”
“Peter’s on the chase. Good for him. A perfect thing for a protagonist to be doing,” Anoushka said over the groan of the tension engine bleeding out its last. She didn’t say more until she’d seen the spiralphone’s wax stop rotating, deaf to what she had to say next. “But we still have our own chase.”
The three before her exchanged looks. Kylie-Nae, after taking a gulp from her canteen, said, “I don’t think I quite follow.” She wiped her chin. “We’re here to retake NK, I thought.”
“We are,” Anoushka said. “And we’ll get back to that in a second. But how much do we trust our patron?”
Russell cackled. “About as far as I could toss the prick, maybe.”
“Yeah,” Zuther agreed. “I kinda thought we were already on the same page there.”
Anoushka looked to Kylie-Nae. As did the pedalers. “Not at all,” Kyle-Nae said. “Not even from the moment I first laid eyes on him. But like Zee said, I figured we all felt the same way. Why?”
“While Peter’s busy hero-ing, we have our chance to get some answers. Everyone good with that?”
“Not our place to have an opinion, Cap’n Annie,” Russell said.
“Maybe not as my squaddies,” she said. She was whispering, though it wasn’t necessary with the side flanks closed. It just felt like something that should be whispered. “Do you think he’s working with Lyle? Because we either confirm it now or let him shoot us in the back the minute he has an opportunity.” She had wanted to mention this for the past two months. But this was the most distance they’d had from Ruprecht and Peter since Yarnigrad.
“Might be,” Zuther said.
Russell nodded. “No tellin’, truthfully. Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“I know I wouldn’t be,” Kylie-Nae added.
“Okay,” Anoushka said. “We’ll ask.”
They sat waiting within Joan’s metal belly for the better part of an hour. Gunfire, in the distance—Peter taking New Kambleburg on his own. Let him. If the gunfire continued, it meant he was still alive and the orcs, desperate to change the situation, had something to keep them busy.
“None of them are getting up,” Kylie-Nae said after cranking the wipers on the front viewport. “Do you think maybe he isn’t here?”
Anoushka said nothing. In the periscope, she watched a sole figure negotiate between the shattered, hanging-open gates. Once inside, bag hugged to his chest, Ruprecht looked about in dismay and unmasked disgust at the Joan-flattened orcs and carpeting of bullet casings everywhere. He was failing to avoid stepping on a corpse or in a puddle of blood. He noticed Joan and waved.
Anoushka shoved open the side armor and dropped out, splashing into the half inch of dark orc blood. In concentrate, it
took on a smell like stale vinegar.
“I see you’ve made a good start,” Ruprecht observed, crossing the square, pinching his nose. “Now for the rest. And Eichelberger, if he’s here. Speaking of our antagonist, where’s our—?” His face fell.
The berserker-made chaos down a few blocks echoed—cracking guns, booming scattergun, a bawling wolfhound.
“Yell for him and I’ll shoot you right here.”
Ruprecht searched each of the other three’s faces over Anoushka’s shoulder. She didn’t need to look behind her. Finding no one in his corner, the bard’s chapped lips pursed. Sighing, with a sarcastic flourish, he dropped his bag of ink and parchment to raise empty hands.
No One Is Innocent
“Pedal.”
Ruprecht took the handlebars and began moving the crankshafts. Anoushka sat backward on Kylie-Nae’s stool to face him, resting the mammoth-killer on her knee.
She’d sent Kylie-Nae and Zuther to scout out New Kambleburg to find any sign of where Lyle might be in the city, if he was ever here. She’d tasked Russell with keeping watch outside Joan, ready to bang on the old girl’s side the moment Peter returned or any orcs, flushed by the berserker, happened to circle back into the square.
“Did you murder the Buckleys to frame Peter?” she said when the spiralphone next to her began to turn, fueled by the bard’s own pedaling.
Ruprecht grumbled between huffs, “No. I didn’t have anyone killed. The Buckleys or anyone else. I knew of Ellis Buckley, but I’ve already admitted that.”
“Why were you at Peter’s sentencing?”
“I liked to watch the workings of the court. Criminals, and those who willingly defend them, I always found, were often a fount of quirks. I liked to study how they held themselves, how they spoke. It’s a public right to watch the proceedings of justice; it’s not a crime to—”
“Why didn’t you admit you were there, before?”
“Because how do you think it would look with you throwing your recurrent barrage of accusations at me? While I apologize for the fib, it was necessary, I feel. For everyone’s benefit. I knew we’d be going through the Scorch soon, and I’d heard that if a man ventures in even slightly ill at ease, he can only expect it to double, triple—”
“Faster.”
Ruprecht promised through gritted teeth, “When Peter returns and sees what you’re doing, if I can convince him not to kill you, I’m going to retrieve my deeter and get hooked to the first wire I can find and happily inform the tsarina about your—”
Anoushka sat forward on the stool, pressing the barrel against his forehead.
His legs began to shake. His momentum on the pedals faltered.
“Faster. I want all of this recorded.” Once he’d regained some speed: “Down goes the railroad, and so does the telegraph wire. We’re cut off. There’s no deeting anyone. Which hand do you use to write?”
“Why?”
“Which hand do you use to—?”
“The left. I’m left-handed.”
“Lay it here, on the floor between us.”
“No.”
The wax’s spin slowed.
“Keep pedaling and put your fucking hand on the floor,” she roared and stomped. “Right. Fucking. There.”
He cranked, glaring over his hand bracing his bleeding lip. Reluctantly, he put out his fist, laying it at the edge of the pedaler pit. Anoushka pressed her boot onto his wrist, grinding her heel until his fingers spread flat. When she raised the pistol by its barrel, ready to hammer his index finger with the grip, he squealed and tugged to withdraw. She didn’t let him.
“Are you working for Lyle Eichelberger?”
“You’re going to torture me?”
“Yes.”
“I recall you saying you loathe the orcs, but you’re not above employing one of their Contributions? What if torture doesn’t work? Cut out my tongue, sell me into slavery? Those are your options; I don’t think you’re built for performing their third Contribution. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you were hiding a secret apparatus between your legs.” He spat at her, the foamy blot dribbling down his chin. “You’re no better. No more civilized—”
She lowered the gun. His fingertip popped.
Boxed inside Joan, Ruprecht’s wail was deafening. Unable to push Anoushka’s foot off, he attempted climbing out of the pit sideways—looking like at any moment he might gnaw himself free. A backhand put him back into the seat.
“Keep pedaling and tell me the truth.”
“Think. Who else would want Peter put away?” Ruprecht shrieked. “Use your fucking head—who else would want him locked up? The islander, driven homicidal by lovesick jealousy?”
“Nope. Zee just found out for sure about Kylie-Nae and Peter.”
“What about Marianne’s parents? What if . . . what if when they found out their daughter’s killer—yes?—had been paroled instead of executed, they devised a way to make a new murder charge stick? In the end, their grief made them become like the man they sought to exact revenge upon?”
“Your plays got bad reviews?”
With a loose fist, he struck her leg pinning his arm—on her bullet wound. Though the hit was light, comets still clouded her vision. Before he could get a second blow in, she struck the milky crescent of his middle finger’s nail.
“Did you have anything to do with those bombs?” she shouted over his screams.
“I would’ve been risking killing myself—please, please stop!” Ruprecht’s pitch rose so high, and he spoke so fast he was almost unintelligible. “Why would I do that? Please think for a moment; why would I ever do that? Those men, those soldiers . . . they were coming to help us.
“You don’t care about the Ma’am. Or about serving your realm. You didn’t want this story so you could see your friends again. You may say that, but you do this”—he glanced at his flattened fingers—“to hurt. Any excuse to harm. But you hide it, because you know you shouldn’t want it. Because it should be duty, not sating some wicked part of your heart. So you costume it, under it saying it’s your obligation to your realm. But you love it. You love the violence and blood and killing.”
“You won’t guilt me into letting this slide, Ruprecht—”
“Peter’s parents were a schoolteacher and a pharmacist. Did you know that? Perfectly normal upbringing. Made friends, joined the wrestling team, and did well because of his size, played the tuba in band. He didn’t have any inkling whatsoever he was a berserker until after he was thirty-three and married, the night he walked in on his wife with her lover. And speaking of lovers, do you know what yours, Erik Redmondt, told me? He didn’t leave you because he’d fallen out of love or because he’d met someone else. He left you because he was scared of you. When I paid him for the story, he begged for me to never tell you, should you come asking.”
Two raps on Joan’s side. “Cap’n Annie? I think Peter’s headin’ thisaway . . .” Then: “They’re just conferrin’ in there, lad, on our next move. Might wanna give ’em a second to wrap things—oof.”
The side armor’s lock snapped, and the flank drew up, the chain spools spinning in reverse. Coated head to toe with scraps of torn green flesh and black blood, Peter lifted his scattergun at the hip. “Out, now.”
In Anoushka’s hand, Ruprecht’s cheek flexed and the bard sputtered a snorting laugh.
Kicking to knock Peter’s cannon off mark, Anoushka tried spinning her own gun around to aim, but it was slippery with Ruprecht’s blood. When she fumbled, Peter dropped his scattergun aside and plunged giant hands into Joan. Latching onto Anoushka, he ripped her out and raised her high. As he drove her toward the ground, orc blood and filthy snow splashed into her eyes, her mouth. On all fours, she scrambled away, wiping the blindfold of gore from her face, feeling for her mammoth-killer.
Peter lifted his scattergun. Anoushka threw a handful of blood-blackened snow at him, aiming for his gun’s flash pan. As he tugged the enormous flintlock’s trigger, its hammer snapped down but
didn’t fire. Growling, he threw it aside and gave her a kick that lifted her.
Pounded lungs emptying, she rolled onto her back, coughed and coughed. Above, a shadow darted—she rolled aside as Peter’s ax blade sank into the bricks.
Russell charged in, snatched up a piece of the fountain statue. He crashed it against the back of Peter’s knee, dropping the berserker. Peter cast down the ax to break his fall, now at Russell’s height. A second clang against the back of Peter’s helm crumbled the statue arm and laid Peter flat. Using only his fists, the dwarf pounded dents into Peter’s armored back—timed stomps for sound effects unnecessary.
“Ye had a chance.” Struggling with broken, bleeding knuckles, Russell tugged his six-gun from the holster, winced as he cocked. “I wanted to help ye; I really did. Ye dinnit belong there. I’m sorry, but this, I suppose, was how things were meant to be—”
A click of wolfhound nails on stone—pouncing, Teetee took the dwarf’s arm in his bite. The six-gun fell. Even though Russell beat the wolfhound across its head and snout and dug fingers at its eyes, Teetee wouldn’t release.
Peter stood. His helm screeched around, its grille facing Anoushka, who was wheezing, clutching her impacted side, stumbling to get away. One clanging footfall followed by another, he approached.
Tripping over an orc corpse, Anoushka searched for its weapon. Joan had run over its rifle—it lay in pieces. She moved on to the next, clicked an empty revolver at Peter, and tossed it aside.
The berserker followed, only stopping when he noticed the cannonball that had made the ricocheting tour of the town square. Hoisting it into his arms, he followed again with it raised in his arms. Anoushka readied to dodge—faked left, right, and when he threw, roaring from the effort, she hopped and let it clunk harmlessly by.
Leaping into him, he caught her, kicking and flailing, by the throat—and squeezed. Air refused her shallow gulps. Her pulse began pounding in her ears. As Peter gripped tighter, her throat hollowly popped and crackled, threatening to collapse.