The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

  We fell.

  Titus and Reeve appeared in the smoke and helped Livia to her feet. It seemed the whole world was aflame, and I couldn’t stop myself from coughing. It was as though some imp billowing soot and flame had lodged itself in my chest and would not let me stop hacking.

  I felt a soothing hand on my arm and was surprised when Samantha lifted me to my feet with strong hands.

  ‘We must get to the horses now!’ she cried. ‘Before the stables catch flame!’

  She dragged me across the street to where the air was clear. I gained my breath long enough to look around.

  There was no one left alive in Hot Springs save our small group.

  I shuddered.

  ‘Come,’ Titus said. ‘We must hurry.’

  Fisk lay unconscious on the ground. Gone were the crowning flames, the robe of smoke, the sword and sceptre of fire. Fisk looked very small lying there in the muck of the main street.

  Reeve picked up Fisk as easy as hefting a sack of potatoes and slung him over his shoulder. He trotted off, and we followed after. A merry little party we made, half-running through the remains of a burning town.

  When we arrived at the stables, Samantha stopped. I looked from her to the puzzled faces of Titus and Reeve.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘The doors. They’re wide open. We closed them before the hanging.’ Reeve pulled his pistol. ‘We were going to shoot down Croesus and his guard on the gallows but the guns wouldn’t fire.’ He spat on the ground. ‘That thing didn’t want ’em to.’

  Livia said, ‘You all would have died.’

  Reeve grunted. ‘Aye, ma’am. That we would have. But I weren’t going to let them take a Ruman centurion without a fight.’

  ‘Fools,’ Livia said, but her smile belied her words.

  ‘But this ain’t right,’ Titus said, and he withdrew his six-gun and peered into the stable.

  The horses were fully tacked and agitated, nickering in their stalls. Something was wrong.

  When we approached the wagon, the trouble became plain.

  The bodies of the stable boys lay upon the ground. They’d been torn asunder. The hay around their bodies had soaked up their blood.

  The wagon was empty.

  Agrippina had found her freedom.

  TWENTY-SIX

  We put the burning ruin of Hot Springs behind us and followed the trail up Brujateton. Samantha had wanted to bury the dead, but Titus said, ‘Ma’am, you’re a kind soul, but that would take weeks. You think he will give us that time?’ He jerked a thumb at the wagon where Fisk was being carried, unconscious.

  Fisk had been unconscious since Livia had threatened him with the shotgun and he’d let us fall.

  ‘When do you think he’ll wake up?’ Titus asked.

  Livia, looking very weary, gritted her teeth and said, ‘Let us be happy he’s not awake now. And that he still breathes.’

  Samantha frowned and said, ‘It takes enormous energy to do what he did.’ A worried look crossed her plain, wide features, and I drew Bess alongside her. We were in the shadow of Brujateton’s peak, and it was cold. It would be night soon but none of us had wanted to camp among the corpse fires of Hot Springs.

  ‘What is it, Samantha?’

  ‘No minor daemon could do what Fisk did. I think Beleth might have—’

  ‘He loaded the deck, didn’t he?’ I said.

  She nodded, very slowly. ‘I fear so.’

  ‘This is just getting better and better,’ I said. ‘And Fisk?’

  ‘The Crimson Man, as you call him, expended a lot of his power in the … the event. He won’t disappear, but it will be a while before he’s back to full strength.’

  ‘So, we’ll get Fisk back for a little while?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Reeve whistled. ‘Be one doozy of a hangover our man will have.’ He turned his horse and rode on, up the slope.

  That night we found a flat promontory rimmed in firs and made camp. Wind had whipped the ground clean of snow, and brushwood was plentiful. It was agreed that one of the five of us would keep watch at all times – that we’d sleep in turns – and we found a break in the firs where we could find some relief from the biting gusts coming down from the peak of Brujateton.

  Agrippina was out there, somewhere.

  I don’t know how I felt about her then. Part of me thought of Agrippina and her brethren like intelligent animals – bears or cougars, even – having been trapped by man and tortured. Maybe driven mad. There’s just no telling with the stretchers. Their minds work differently. Without the influence of silver or holly their incorruptible flesh never dies, so they assume the immortal aspect of nature and the land itself, as tall and unknowable as the mountain, as swift as the river, as deadly as hoarfrost. They make me feel young, by comparison, the elves. They’re the teeth of the earth, come to eat the living, and they’re as hungry and pure as fire.

  From somewhere out there, she watched us.

  Fisk awoke in the darkest hours of night.

  I was on watch, and a thin, high layer of clouds wreathed the moon and obscured the stars. The firs whined and thrashed in the wind coming off Brujateton. He coughed a few times and rolled the blankets and tarp covering him away from his head and sat up.

  I must say I’d seen him looking better. He rubbed his face and ran a tongue over cracked lips.

  ‘Water.’

  I gave him a canteen and he drank until it was empty and then threw it back to me.

  He sucked in a sharp pained breath, put a hand to the back of his head where his hair was matted with dried blood.

  ‘You remember anything?’

  He nodded. ‘All of it.’ He scooted down the wagon’s bed until his legs dangled off the end. ‘Except for after the fall – when he let me go.’

  Fisk sniffed and looked at the wagon bed, then glanced at me questioningly.

  ‘While we were in jail and the others were trying to figure out some way to prevent your death, the stable boys decided to take a peek under the tarp.’

  Fisk cursed and wrapped his arms around his body.

  ‘They think they were rescuing a princess or something?’ He spat again and shivered. ‘It’s cold as shit on a shingle, Shoe.’

  He sat that way for a long while, staring into the darkness, his arms wrapped around his chest, covering the daemon hand resting above his heart.

  ‘Oh, damn, pard. I’m in over my head,’ he said at last.

  ‘He pushing on you now?’

  ‘Some. I can feel him.’ He uncrossed his arms and took up the daemon hand in his own. He was quiet for so long I thought he’d fallen back asleep or passed into a trance. He looked up and said, ‘He’s tugging on me, Shoe, ready to go. North. North and west.’

  He pointed into the black firs ringing in the camp. ‘That way. She’s that way,’ he said and dropped his arm.

  I sat by him on the wagon bed. It was cold, and the wind didn’t help anything.

  ‘Listen, pard. Come first light, we head out. Leave this wagon, take the horses and ride hard as we can.’ I patted his knee. ‘We’ll get to Isabelle and do what we need to do.’

  He cocked his head back at the empty wagon. ‘You don’t have your girlfriend no more.’

  ‘Right. Not much we can do about that now.’

  He looked around. ‘Livia? How is she?’

  ‘She’s had it bad, fearing for you, truth be told. You two never really had it easy, did you?’

  From inside his jacket, he withdrew a tobacco pouch and a paper and began to roll a smoke. But his hands shook so badly, I took the pouch from him and twisted the tabac for us both.

  ‘I’ll get Livia,’ I said. I moved to the embers of the fire, pulled a burning branch, and lit my cigarette. ‘I think she’s got some heavier clothes
for you.’

  He nodded.

  When I scratched at the tent Livia was instantly awake. She rolled upright, and I heard Reeve and Samantha shift in their bedding. She appeared in the flap and said, ‘He’s up?’

  A few moments later she reappeared in full winter garb, holding a large heavily furred coat and gloves.

  ‘He’s over there.’

  I smoked my cigarette near the fire and couldn’t help but see their wordless reunion. She went to him, coat in hand. He sat on the wagon bed, his head down. She stopped and stood before him and waited like that until his face came up, streaming with tears. I was amazed at that – seeing tears on Fisk. He was a killer, born and bred. But whether he wept, for himself, or what he’d done, or where he found himself, I didn’t know.

  She placed the heavy coat in his lap and put her hand to his face and he latched onto it like a drowning man to a line. He put it to his cheek and kissed the palm.

  She pressed in, kissed him, and the look on her face was as inscrutable as I’ve ever seen.

  My cigarette was down to the butt, so I flicked it away into the night, and went into the tent to get what sleep I could before the break of dawn.

  We scuttled the wagon the next morning and packed the tent and the rest of the oats and ammo on Bess. I took a pony, even though I didn’t want to, and we rode hard north for the next three days.

  It was overcast and had began to snow again. In the day, Fisk was back to normal, calm – silent, even. But at night the Crimson Man would turn the screws on him, and Fisk would become restless and antsy, prone to cursing, or worse – laughter. None of us wanted to be reminded of the events in Hot Springs.

  Finally, we came into a shallow valley before ascending the other side up and up into a forest of gambels, and I spied what looked like smoke tracing a faint path through the air, coming from high up in the V where two peaks met.

  ‘Look there,’ I said to Fisk, pointing. ‘That pass.’

  His eye rolled and began to smoke, as though matching whatever fire burned on the heights. ‘We must go. She is there,’ he said, his voice not human.

  I was frightened to see how fast he had changed. He was gone, and the Crimson Man seethed and burned.

  Fisk rode ahead, and Livia kicked her horse to catch up.

  I waited for Samantha. With the events of Hot Springs and the rigours of the trail, I had remembered something that I needed to ask. ‘You were saying Beleth duped us,’ I said once she pulled next to my horse.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then if it ain’t some minor daemon kicking around in there, who is it?’

  Samantha scowled the majority of her time in the saddle, but the look on her face this moment was different. Thoughtful. Maybe a little preoccupied.

  ‘There’s a whole miserable cast of devils and daemons that we, as engineers, can draw up.’ She sighed. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  We rode on for a while, following the path in the snow that Fisk and the black had carved out for us.

  ‘Everything has a counterpart. Many counterparts.’ She waved one gloved hand at the mountains. ‘All of what you know is seen as if through a veil that’s been drawn over your eyes, and if you could just go a little … sideways … you could see everything, all of nature and mankind – you could see it differently. There are infinite worlds stacked like parchment upon one another.’

  I nodded even if I might not have understood.

  ‘But things cross over,’ she said.

  ‘Devils. Imps.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not originally. Think bigger.’

  ‘What? Elephants? Shoal aurochs?’

  She laughed, but it was short and bitter. ‘You are dvergar and have lived for countless years, right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say countless. But I am older than anyone here.’

  ‘When your mother was young, had she heard of Hellfire and raising devils?’

  I thought about it for a long while. Shaking my head, I said, ‘No. That came with the Rumans, she always told me. Mam used to talk about when the world was new and there were no guns – no way for any man nor beast to force a dvergar from our mountain. She always kept with the old gods, the gods of tree and stone.’

  Samantha looked toward the mountaintop for a long while, as though thinking, choosing her words. Finally she said, ‘Not here, but very far away on the other side of the world, the first engineer came into the world by piercing the veil.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Before then there were the old gods – Mithras, the Pater Dis, Veneris, the twins. The others. And even older spirits, the numem that drove life, the gods of the house. The gods of rock and stone.’

  I was having a hard time following. I tugged on the pony’s reins, drawing myself to a stop. After a bit of trouble, Samantha reined in her horse.

  ‘What are you telling me here, miss?’

  ‘You need to know the truth, at least. Of the daemons. Because they have your friend in thrall.’

  ‘You know about all this? How it came about?’

  She nodded. ‘I was schooled at the College of Engineers and Augurs in Rume. I have much knowledge.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I said nothing and waited for her to continue.

  ‘His name was Emrys and not much is known about him, but he managed to marshal the numen and put a pinprick in the fabric of worlds. And something came through.’

  ‘What came through, Samantha?’

  ‘Ia, the Stranger.’

  ‘No.’

  It was lies she told.

  ‘There’s no doubt. Emrys had apprentices. I’ve read their journals. They went insane, to a man, but their accounting was thorough, if garbled and crazed. Ia came through, a creature of darkness.’

  ‘No.’ I slapped my leg. ‘Ia is light. Ia is the good lord who welcomes us into the afterlife and judges our souls with the Pater Dis at his side. He might be hard but he is fair.’

  She looked at me sadly. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ilys. But that is not true. Ia came through and scourged the land, caused a century of disease and despair and darkness.’

  ‘Scourged?’ I laughed. ‘Then where is he? Why isn’t he known? Where is this scourge?’

  She sighed again. ‘This happened nearly two thousand years ago. And on the other side of the world.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He came through and laid all the countries of the world to waste for ten years. No army could stand before him, no weapon hurt him. By all accounts, Ia was a creature of unbelievable scale. He caused the interregnum mundus. The dark age.’

  Shit, was all I could think then. Shitfire. Ia damn this heifer straight to Hell. I felt like I rose and sank all at once. I wanted to punch the woman’s fat moon-face. I wanted to knock her to the ground and have my horse prance upon her bones until she breathed no more.

  But I didn’t. I breathed deep and tried to take it all in.

  ‘And then, after deaths innumerable and corpse-fires as high as the sun, he withdrew upon himself, becoming smaller and smaller. Some said to sleep. Others said to wait like a fisherman with a net, between mankind and the stars, fishing for our souls when we die.’ She shivered. ‘East, far east, in a blasted land called Ombra Terra, he lies sleeping. That is Ia.’

  ‘It don’t make sense, woman. None at all. Why do the Rumans bring temples to him from overseas? They come from Latinum with their priests and temples and preach goodness. Good deeds and kindness.’

  ‘Somewhere in history, it all got mixed up. Once engineers learned how to summon daemons through the fabric of worlds through the pinprick Emrys created, it was easy to recast Ia into a benevolent force, if only for political reasons. And to set all the daemons in opposition to Ia.’

  ‘Don’t make sense, woman. None.’

  ‘It’s hard to come to grips with, a
nd it’s knowledge the College of Augurs and Engineers are privy to and not many others. Maybe the royal family.’

  ‘Okay, say it’s true. You’re telling me that the Ruman royals would get into bed with something that damned evil?’

  She threw back her head and laughed, a rich throaty sound. I could see Sam’s back teeth in her wide mouth.

  When she got a hold of herself, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Shoestring, but you obviously have never been to Rume. Your opinion of patricians is influenced by Cornelius, who is among the best of them. Rumans getting in bed with evil?’ She chuckled again. ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Consider the westward expansion.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s dependent on Hellfire.’

  She had a point, but I couldn’t leave it there. ‘If Hellfire is so bad, how come you’re training to be an engineer? If Rume is so corrupt, why are you working with the Rumans?’

  Her jaw tightened, and she turned away to look at the other riders, who had now stopped and were looking at us.

  When she turned back, her face was hard, tight. Unforgiving.

  ‘It’s a fallen world we live in, Mr Ilys, full of evil men and people wanting to take what you have and kill the people you love.’ She shook her head as though fending off something terrible. ‘I’ve taken the path best suited to me. And there’s no Ia waiting to judge me at the end of it, so …’

  It was all nonsense, I thought. Godless, amoral nonsense. The events at Hot Springs had driven all reason from her. I wouldn’t listen to any more of it.

  ‘Why in Ia’s name—’ I stopped. ‘Why the Hell are you telling me this?’

  She tugged at her scarf, her breath white and whipping away on the air. ‘Emrys, beyond all imaginings, survived Ia’s crossing. He managed to close the pinhole between worlds, but imperfectly. Or so it is said, and I have to believe that it has been closed, otherwise this whole world would be ruin.’ She removed her glove, and then blew on her fingers. ‘But there were other worlds beyond the one that brought Ia through. And Emrys spent his remaining days learning – and teaching others – how to summon and bind the creatures of what we call Hell into our world.’