Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech (18 page)

Taryn’s blood turned to ice. She knew what this thing was. Henri had warned her of such creatures, and she’d once seen one herself, at a distance, haunting a forsaken patch of road outside Merywyn. It was a pistol wraith, the echo of a long-dead gunman, condemned by its own murderous misdeeds to rove the land of the living. They were said to eternally seek out other gunmen, pitting their ghostly skill against any mortal bold enough to accept their challenge.

It was a fool’s challenge, of course.

Taryn pressed herself closer against the pillar as another shot rang out. The pistol wraith holstered its weapon and crossed its bony arms. Fool’s challenge or no, it seemed the ghost was determined to match itself against Taryn.

A fear such as she had never known pounded in Taryn’s veins. She had grown up on stories of pistol wraiths, their eternal vendettas and ceaseless roving. She thought again of that distant glimpse of a spectral figure standing on a moonlit road, watching and waiting in silence for its prey. The idea of challenging such a fiend was more terrible than Taryn could have imagined.

Yet what choice did she have? The speed and accuracy the pistol wraith had already exhibited told Taryn that it could pick her off at its leisure. Only this obsession with its own gunmanship had restrained it. For the ghost, it wasn’t enough to simply kill her. It had to prove itself the better gunfighter.

Taryn eased out from behind the pillar, arms held out to her sides. The pistol wraith watched, and though there was no face left to it to betoken any expression, a profound satisfaction seemed to emanate from the creature. Taryn stepped into the middle of the hall, crossing her arms in the archaic fashion her spectral foe had adopted. Somehow she knew the ghost would wait for her to make the first move, give her the chance to outdraw the dead.

The opportunity never came. A shot rang out and the pistol wraith spun about as a bullet passed through its incorporeal shoulder. From further down the corridor, Taryn was stunned to see Kalder firing at the ghost with a brace of pistols. Unlike the wraith, her bounty hunter was all too alive.

Taryn seized the opening. The bounty hunter’s determination to take her back to Llael alive had proved fortuitous, sparing her a duel she didn’t think she could win. Drawing her magelocks, she added her fire to Kalder’s. Unlike his bullets, her rune shot smashed into the pistol wraith, ripping scraps of rotten cloth and bits of bleached bone from it. The fires in the fiend’s skull burned still more malignantly. Taryn’s empowered shots could hurt its ghostly form, but to hurt her it would have to become corporeal, making itself vulnerable to Kalder’s weapons as well. Caught between two accomplished marksmen, the pistol wraith shrieked in frustration. Its tattered coat fluttered around it. The ghost threw itself down the hallway, rushing past the pillars and into Vulger’s study. The ghost’s body passed through the wall as though it wasn’t even there. Only a phosphorescent ooze dripping down the stones remained to mark its escape.

“You must want your blood money pretty bad,” Taryn said.

“It’s more than the money now. You made it personal.”

Taryn almost laughed at the outrage in Kalder’s tone. “
I
made it personal? Forgive me if I take murdering my friends and dragging me off to a vindictive harpy who’s already dead
very
personally.” She closed the breech on her magelock, risked a glimpse around the corner of the pillar. It was too much to expect Kalder to stick his head out so she could shoot it off, but she was disappointed just the same.

“That story Rutger told me about you, I don’t think it’s true,” she said. If she could get him mad enough, perhaps he’d make a mistake. “I think your family didn’t die in any plague. They deserted you. Took the opportunity while you were locked up to find something better. Probably wasn’t hard to do, either.” She peeked down the hall again, but there was still no sign of the bounty hunter.

The thunderous tread of a charging warjack explained why her opponent didn’t answer. He’d followed the pistol wraith’s example and withdrawn. The ghost hadn’t enjoyed being caught between two enemies. Kalder, as a flesh and blood mortal, had even less reason to like such a situation.

“Taryn! Taryn!” Rutger’s shouts were almost drowned out by the rumble of Rex’s engine and the warjack’s footfalls as it split a half-dozen floor tiles with every step.

The gun mage shook her head and smiled. She’d been frantic to get back and help him. Instead, he’d come back to help her. She stepped out from behind the pillar and called to her partner.

“I really hope Vulger doesn’t dock our pay,” she said, pointing at the scarred floor.

Rutger’s face fairly glowed with joy when he saw Taryn alive and unhurt. “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he said. He looked at the hallway behind Taryn. “Where’s Vulger?”

“He’s all right,” she said. “He’s with Lorca.”

Volkenrath’s escape tunnel snaked its way down from the false back of a closet into the charred rubble upon which the Terraces had been erected. It was no great secret the gangster used the forgotten cellars and vaults for moving and storing contraband, but the existence of this route down from his mansion was a secret he’d protected with blood. The master mason, the craftsmen who worked under him, and even the supplier who provided the building materials were all sitting on the bottom of Bold Finger Channel now, their feet chained to stones left over from construction.

It was therefore with both anger and irritation that Vulger confronted his lieutenant as they descended through the darkness, only the whale-oil lamp Lorca carried lighting their way. “Why did you go smarting off to the gun mage?” Vulger said. “She didn’t need to know anything about my having a way out.” He jabbed his finger against Lorca’s chest. “And she didn’t need to know nothing about how I got out of the Scrapyard.”

Lorca’s eyes were like chips of stone as he stared back. “I didn’t know how you got out of the Scrapyard, but after finding this place, I guessed that you’d have something similar down on Hospice.”

Vulger’s face turned a shade of purple. “You knew about my tunnel! Nobody’s supposed to know!” The gangster sputtered angrily, then forced himself to calm down. He smiled at Lorca, nodding his head, making placating gestures with his hands. “That’s all right. You’re my right-hand man. Maybe you should know. But I can’t have that gunfighter knowing about it.”

Lorca sighed. “What do you want, Vulger? You want her killed, assuming the Cryxians didn’t already?”

“Just put the fear of Bolis into her. Her and her friend, just in case she blabs to him the way you blabbed to her! Keep them both quiet. Pay them if you have to, but make sure they shut up.”

“Sure, Vulger,” Lorca answered. He was barely listening, focused instead upon an eerie glow at the bottom of the steps. Lorca hesitated, his skin crawling as he recognized the unnatural luminance of Cryxlight. Vulger noted his lieutenant’s apprehension. He directed a puzzled look at Lorca, then followed his gaze to the tunnel below.

“What is that?” Vulger gasped, clutching at his lieutenant. The glow emanating from the creature’s soul furnaces revealed something like a gigantic squid cobbled together from black iron and bone. Metal tentacles snaked down from its base, and a trio of leering skulls stared out from its sides. Three clawed steel arms projected from its bulbous black-iron hull, while a long tail-like spine of fused bone dripped away from its base. Soul cages were chained to the abomination’s exposed ribs, lending their light to the infernal glow of the soul furnace locked behind those black-iron ribs. The creature didn’t crawl or slither. Instead, it floated along the ground, borne aloft by the supernatural forces boiling in its necrotite-powered core.

The monster looked up at the men. The fires shining in the eyes of the skulls flickered with a new intensity.

“Is this the one?” A dry wheeze issued from the leftmost skull.

“Perhaps,” a glottal intonation coughed across the fangs of the skull on the right. “Their flesh looks so similar. So clean and shiny, like a new coin just begging to be spent.”

The center skull simply moaned, a dry sound that rose and fell in pitch. The other skulls tittered in amusement at whatever observation the moan had conveyed to them.

“Bones of Bolis!” Vulger cried out again. “What is it?”

There was a complete absence of humanity in the glare Lorca directed at his boss. “I don’t know, Vulger. But it’s waiting for you.” Seizing the gangster by the arm, he spun him around and sent him tumbling down the stairs. Vulger’s shriek echoed through the tunnel, but it was nearly drowned out by the hungry, hateful hiss issued from the skeletal jaws of the thing at the base of the stairs. Tentacles whipped out, coiling around the man as his body flopped to the bottom.

“The little one says the fat one belongs to me,” the leftmost skull said. “Does that sound right? Did Moritat describe the flesh for me?”

“After so long they all look the same,” the right skull complained. “Same blood, same marrow, same slimy organs. Maybe if we took it apart from the inside out, it would seem new?”

Vulger’s shriek became a moan of mortal terror as the tentacles lifted him from the ground and brought him close to the triad of leering skulls. The tentacles lifted him before the sockets in the leftmost head. “Ah, but what if this isn’t the right one?” The monster’s left side shifted toward the stairs, one of its arms reaching out toward Lorca.

“Moritat will be angry if I kill too many,” the right skull said. A shudder passed through the metal monstrosity as it recalled the sort of discipline it might expect from the necrotech.

Again, the central skull moaned, the sepulchral note reverberating through the tunnel. The other skulls hissed with laughter.

“Yes,” the left head said. “Take this one.”

“If it isn’t the right one, Moritat can send me for the other one.” The fires in the right skull flickered menacingly as the creature pivoted toward Lorca.

The central skull’s eyes blazed still more brightly, then shifted and darkened. Vulger screamed as he felt spectral probes sink into his essence, profaning the very core of his being. The skeletal heads seemed to grin at him, savoring each wail that erupted from the man as the metal tentacles tightened about his body. Blood oozed from Vulger’s flesh as the coils ripped his skin, mercilessly constricting the plump little mortal caught in their grasp.

But it wasn’t the mutilation of his body that inflicted the most excruciating agony. The ethereal tendrils the monster had sent slithering into him were now drawing Vulger’s blackened soul from his obese body. The extracted spirit of Vulger Volkenrath was being sucked down into one of the soul cages dangling about the monster, where a new vibrancy began to shine.

“This is taking too long,” the left skull said.

“It’s going too quickly,” the right skull said as Vulger’s screams began to lessen.

The center skull simply moaned.

Retreating some distance back up the stairs, well away from any sudden lunge by the monster, Lorca watched the excruciating death of his boss with all the compassion of a man stepping on an ant.

“Nothing personal, Vulger,” he told the tortured meat screaming in the undead fiend’s coils. “You were just in my way.”

In the aftermath of the Cryxian attack on Volkenrath’s estate, the once-forbidden fortress became infested with militia and officers of the Five Fingers Watch. The panic the attack inspired in the wealthy inhabitants of Bellicose Island was so severe, even Watch Commander Darvis Middleton was present, prowling about the rubble, barking out orders and trying his best to look important and in control. The same could be said about Watch Captain Gervis Sculler, though there was at least an air of anxiety on his part, an urgency to get this unpleasantness cleaned up so that the status quo of graft and bribery could resume.