Before Kale could make any sense of the situation, he heard a shout. He raced back outside to stand on the front porch, eyes searching for the source.
“Over here!” Gavin shouted. Kale located the older knight a few hundred yards to the west, standing next to one of the burned-out shells. Kale leapt onto his mount and heeled the charger into a gallop. The creature’s metal hooves threw up sparks against the pavestones as it sped down the street. An overturned wagon blocked his path, but Kale pulled on the reins and drove his heels into the accelerator panels. With a bit of deft maneuvering, he activated the five different controls at once required for a jump. The charger reared, clearing the wagon in a single leap.
The landing on the other side was a bit rough. The jolt nearly threw Kale out of the saddle, and he had to cling to the horn to right himself. Doing so caused a slight jerk on the reins, which made the charger veer to the left. The momentum threatened to throw him from the horse, but Kale held on. Somehow, he managed to tighten the reins. The speed came down to a healthy trot.
Kale guided the mount over to Gavin, and the elder knight watched him with a serious look as Kale dismounted. It wasn’t like Gavin to miss an opportunity to poke fun at Kale’s riding skills. As he touched down, the charger snorted and blew a few rings of steam out through its nostrils. This was how the horse cooled its internal mechanisms to avoid overheating. The steed had numerous such behaviors. While modeled after the movements and actions of real horses, they served the important purpose of maintaining the machine’s complex inner workings. At times, their complexity reminded him of Socrates -although Socrates wasn’t just a sophisticated piece of technology, but in fact a thinking, sentient being.
Sir Gavin led Kale around a burned-down cottage. There, on the ground by an old well, they saw the writhing body of a man with no arms. He was moaning and twisting helplessly, and a sense of compassion overwhelmed Kale. The warrior rushed in to help, but Gavin caught him by the shoulder.
“Stay back!” he warned. “That thing isn’t human.”
The noise of Gavin’s voice attracted the creature’s attention. It twisted, turning its head so it could see them. The creature’s eyes were dead, a glazed-over powdered blue color. Most of the flesh was gone from its skull, revealing a grinning skeletal face and a hollow opening where its nose should have been.
“Devils,” said a voice behind them. Kale glanced over his shoulder and realized the other knights had arrived. Young Sir Flynn looked as pale as a sheet.
“I know what this is,” Kale said. “These people have been exposed to starfall. After they die, it activates something in their brains so that they seem alive, but they’re not.”
“It looks alive to me,” said Sir Hector.
“Not alive or dead,” Kale said. “Somewhere between: un-dead.”
“I’ve heard stories of this,” said Gavin. “But I’ve never seen it before.”
“I don’t understand,” said Hector. “We’ve lived with starfall all our lives, but I’ve never seen this happen in Dragonwall.”
“You haven’t been exposed to it,” said Kale. “Not like him. You locked yourselves inside when the dragon’s breath came. You capped your wells, and covered your gardens. These people… I guess they didn’t know.”
“They knew,” said Gavin. “This is why the people of the outer villages always burn the bodies of the dead.”
“They knew this would happen?”
Gavin tilted his head. “There are stories… legends. I think most people don’t really believe them anymore, but they continue to burn the bodies of their dead for religious purposes. They believe a corpse must be burned at sunset, in order to expedite the journey into the afterlife.”
“The practice began as a way to prevent this from happening?” Kale said. “And it became a religion?”
Gavin shrugged. “Religion and tradition are intertwined for these people. Men do many things they don’t truly understand; things that are passed down to them from their forefathers. Children are taught to do things a certain way. They grow up and teach those things to their children, and so on for generations. Eventually, something that was once done out of common sense becomes an unquestionable creed, even if the practice has outlived its usefulness.”
“Or, in this case, the reason is forgotten, but the practice is still necessary.”
“Exactly.”
“So what happened to him?” Hector said, nodding at the undead creature slavering on the ground before them. “Why didn’t they burn him?”
“I think I understand,” said Kale. “When the raiders attacked the village, they left the dead lying in the streets. There will be more like him nearby.”
“I doubt it,” said Gavin.
Kale frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The heads, remember? Someone took their heads. Whoever did it must’ve missed this one.”
Kale drew one of his swords. He decapitated the creature in one swift stroke. The movement instantly ceased. He sheathed his sword and stepped around the others, heading back to his horse.
“Where are you going?” said Gavin.
“To find a safe place for a fire. There’s nothing else we can do tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll find out what happened here and report back to the queen.”
Chapter 5
In Kale’s absence, Shayla found Dragonwall ominously quiet. Leaning over the balcony rail, she saw a handful of men working down in the forge, their lean muscular forms glistening in the orange glow of the volcanic lava. They swung their hammers in smooth, controlled motions, and the anvils rang like so many bells, but the sound was stifled, compressed, like a pillow-covered scream.
The skies had darkened shortly after the commander’s departure, and now a drizzle had begun falling into the cone of the mountain. The rain evaporated into steam long before it reached the bottom. The humidity coalesced into a vaporous fog that drifted cloud-like through the center of the mountain, spilling out across the balconies and walkways, intensifying the already palpable gloom.
She turned, walking along the long, sweeping road that curved around the inside of the mountain. Perhaps it was the fog, Shayla thought, that had driven everyone into their private chambers for the evening. Or perhaps it was the somber mood that had permeated the place since the death of King Dane, or the death of yet another fine laborer; the man whose body had been found that very morning, dosed by a poison no doubt administered by someone who once had loved him but could no longer tolerate his unrestrained cruelty.
Barbarians, Shayla thought with a grimace. Every single one of them…
So what if she had taught the women the use of poisons? That didn’t mean the blood was on her hands, did it? After all, these men didn’t have to continue forcing themselves on these poor women, beating them, mistreating them in a thousand different ways… Somehow, they had to learn.
Eventually, they would have to stop making excuses and start taking responsibility for their behavior. They would have to start behaving like civilized human beings, rather than animals incapable of controlling their own behavior.
Unlikely, she thought with a sigh. If there was one thing Shayla had learned from the men of Dragonwall, it was that they had an unlimited capacity to excuse their own sins. It wasn’t unique to this place, of course. Narcissism was a remarkably persistent human condition, and Shayla had found that nearly everyone was capable of this type of self-validation. She was no exception. She had made mistakes, betrayed trusts. Now, she had even taken action that had led to numerous deaths.
But it was one sort of crime to kill a man, and something else entirely to murder a man. Yes, there was a difference, and it played a crucial role in determining the difference between a hero and a criminal, between a soldier and a psychopath. Shayla considered herself the former, and her victims the latter. Even that was taking too much credit. After all, it wasn’t Shayla killing these men, it was their own wives. That in itself had to say something about the relative morality of the situation.
>
“Hey, girlie.”
Shayla froze mid-step. The raspy voice had come out of the shadows to her right. She focused her attention there, her right hand instinctively retrieving the bladed fan from her sleeve. A face appeared. It was a long face, pale, almost skeletal, with deep sunken eyes that glared at her, and close-cropped hair that fell in a straight line across the broad forehead.
“What do you want?” she said, taking a step back.
The man who emerged from the tunnel wasn’t familiar to her, but he shared the look of many of the others inside Dragonwall. Short, broad, pale… too pale. Unhealthy in the way that a man can become when he spends too much time in the dark, and begins to forget where to draw the line between the shadows of the mountain and the darkness in the recesses of his own mind.
“I’ve been meanin’ to talk to you, girlie,” he said. His voice was sharp, strangely high. A sure sign of an unhinged mind. Shayla brought the fan up, but before she could open it to expose the blades, someone grabbed her from behind.
Shayla struggled, tried to pull away, but the attacker held her in a vice-like grip. He squeezed her wrists until she cried out, and the fan slid from her fingers.
One by one, seven more men appeared out of the shadows. Some emerged from the tunnel. Some came walking up the balcony from below, or from behind her. She didn’t know who they were, but one thing was clear: they had planned this. They had been lying in wait for her.
“Hurry,” said the man with the skeleton face. “Bring her this way!”
They pushed a bag over her head, and Shayla felt herself lifted from the ground. They carried her down the slope a ways, and then turned into one of the many tunnels branching off to the sides. They wormed their way through the mountain for a few minutes, leaving Shayla no sense whatsoever of where they had gone.
At last, they descended a short flight of stairs and entered some sort of small stone chamber. She could tell that much from the sound of their boots and their low voices echoing around her. She could also hear water: a slow drip, drip, drip somewhere nearby.
They pulled off the hood. Shayla blinked. It was dark, the entire room lit only by one torch in the hands of one of her captors. The room, it seemed, was not so much a chamber as a subterranean cavern. The ceiling was ten feet high, and the room was approximately twenty feet in diameter. At the center stood a fountain carved out of stone. The steady drip she had heard was a milky substance running out of the limestone overhead to land in the center of the pond. The water there was milky, too, and it cast a pale green luminescence about the room.
“Starfall,” she said in a whisper.
“That’s right,” said the man.
“What are you doing? Why did you bring me here?”
“We know what’s been going on,” he said. “Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”
“Find out what? You’re insane!”
There was a shuffling noise across the room, and Shayla realized that a woman had joined them. She was young, no more than seventeen, dressed in the simple garments of a laborer. But she was pretty. Too pretty for her own good. Shayla’s eyebrows narrowed. She recognized the widow of the latest murder victim.
“Dinah?”
Dinah threw her gaze to the floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell… They were going to hurt me.”
Shayla pressed her lips together, fighting back the curses. It’s not her fault. She’s just a frightened child…
“That’s right,” said the man. “She told us everything. We know who they got the poisons from. We know what you’ve been up to.”
“Then you know every one of you is going to die.”
He struck her with the back of his hand, and Shayla cried out as stars filled her vision. A hot, throbbing pain swelled across her cheek. She could feel her lips going numb. She shook the pain off, blinking to clear her vision.
“When Kale gets back-”
“He’s got a surprise comin’, too.”
They locked eyes, and he grinned from ear to ear. “Put her over there, boys. Time to teach her a lesson.”
They dragged Shayla to the center of the room. She fought them every step of the way. They exclaimed at her strength, but against all of them Shayla was helpless. They forced her onto her back, bent uncomfortably over the rim of the fountain, facing the ceiling. Shayla’s hair dangled down into the starfall, and the milky water dripped from the ceiling onto her face. The skeleton man appeared in front of her.
“Now it’s our turn to poison you,” he said. He put his hand over her face and forced Shayla’s head down into the water. She fought with every ounce of strength she had. She jerked her arms, kicked her legs, twisted her hands, trying to break free. One of the men lost his grip on her and in a flash, Shayla had a stiletto in her hand. She swung it wildly, unable to see her target. She felt the tip penetrate soft flesh. Her victim ran screaming from the room.
They caught her wrist, squeezing it painfully until Shayla dropped the knife. Instantly, they shoved her head back into the water. The starfall felt strange against her skin, slightly warm, and it burned the soft tissue in her nose and her eyes. Just when it seemed she had run out of air and couldn’t fight it any longer, her head came up out of the water. Shayla gasped.
The moment she opened her mouth, someone began to pour water over her face. Shayla coughed, gagging as she struggled to keep the water out of her lungs. It coursed through her sinuses, burning like acid. Her eyes ached from the pressure. Her heart drummed in her chest. When she could fight no more, Shayla’s body took over, and she sucked in a breath. The oxygen gurgled through the moisture trapped in her throat. Her lungs filled with air, but it hurt in a way that she had never imagined.
She coughed and sputtered, her limbs convulsing, eyes rolling back in her head. Before she could draw another breath, they shoved her back under. At some level, Shayla knew she wasn’t drowning -not yet, anyway- but her body refused to believe.
This went on for some time, until Shayla began to lose consciousness. At last, her body went limp and she lost all strength to resist. The sound of their wicked laughter rang in her ears. A numb warmth spread through her limbs. Her captors released her, and Shayla fell to the floor, coughing, whimpering, her body shivering violently.
The men were silhouettes in the flickering torchlight. They faded into the tunnel, the echoes of their shuffling feet diminishing in the distance. The blue-green glow of the starfall barely illuminated the chamber. The ceiling went in and out of focus. The sound of her heartbeat filled Shayla’s ears.
She rolled onto her side and her arm fell across a piece of fur. One of the men had lost his cloak. Shayla pulled it over herself, a low whimper escaping her lips. The room spun, and she lost consciousness.
Chapter 6
River wasn’t sure how long she had been dangling over the edge of the cliff. It could have been minutes, or just a few frantic seconds. With her adrenaline up and her heart thudding like a steamhammer, time lost all meaning. A familiar fear was churning up inside her, working its way into her consciousness.
River had been forced to confront her acrophobia on multiple occasions, and each time she gained a bit more control. But it was never easy, and at moments like this, it was almost too much to face. It was all she could do to fight down the rising panic in her chest. She closed her eyes, tried not to think about the four hundred foot drop below.
In her mind’s eye, River saw the whitewater rapids crashing against sharp rocks, the spray of water over the swirling eddies waiting to swallow her whole. The sound of the river filled her ears, echoing up and down the ravine, a deep endless rumble that she could feel as much as hear.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. A misty breeze whipped up in her face, sprinkling her skin and eyelashes with tiny droplets of moisture. In her hand, the inch-thick vine was wet and slick. Her grip was tenuous at best, and she knew all too well how dangerous it would be to let go for even a second. Then again, she had to let go, if she wanted to c
limb out of there. One hand would have to move. Then the other…
Ultimately, it wasn’t self-discipline or willpower that won the battle for her. It was the sudden jerk of the vine as something gave way up above. River dropped a few inches, and came to a sudden stop. The vine slipped in her grip, and she slid a bit farther before tightening her grip. The pit of her stomach dropped all the way to the bottom.
In a rising panic, River slid her hand up and closed it around the vine. It was a quick, erratic movement; the result of sheer terror more than anything else, but it was a success. River strained her muscles, pulling herself up a few inches. She summoned her courage and repeated the movement. This time, she reached farther, hoping to close the gap.
In short time, River found herself approaching the embankment at the top of the cliff. It jutted outward in a way that seemed impossible to surmount, but she eventually found a foothold in the rocks. She gave herself a little push, swinging her legs outward over the ravine, and then pulled herself over the outcropping.
She grunted, digging up handfuls of soft earth as she clambered over the ledge. Her legs kicked, swinging left and right, feet searching for a foothold. Then, suddenly, she was up and over and back on solid ground. River rolled onto her back, panting, staring at a crack of blue sky peeking through the canopy of green. The scent of rich earth and jungle filled her nostrils, and the forest seemed to come to life around her. Brightly colored birds flitted back and forth among the trees. Tiny simian creatures rested on the branches overhead, shrieking, glaring at her. Somewhere across the river, something large thudded through the underbrush.
River pushed to her feet as she took in her surroundings. The abandoned railroad tracks led up the hill and into the jungle behind her. The whip that had saved her life still hung from the overhead branch, some twenty feet away. Next to her, at the bottom of the ravine…
River couldn’t help herself. She walked up to the ledge and leaned over, scanning the rapids below for a sign of her beloved boneshaker. She didn’t see so much as a fender or a glimmer of brass in the river below.
Clockwork Legion (Aboard the Great Iron Horse Book 4) Page 5