Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech (29 page)

Midway through reloading his weapon, Kalder stood up. The pistol wraith wagged its gun at him angrily, silently demanding that he finish loading it. The bounty hunter made a show of reaching to his belt for a cartridge, watching to see if the ghost appeared more solid, more tangible than it had been, preparing itself in case he made a play for his gun. In a blur of motion, he thrust his left arm toward the ghost. The spring holster hidden in Kalder’s sleeve sent a small holdout pistol leaping into his hand. The instant it slid across his palm, he tightened his finger around the trigger.

The pistol wraith’s skull exploded as the bounty hunter’s bullet crashed through one of its eye sockets. The skeletal body buried beneath the creature’s archaic clothes crumbled in upon itself, collapsing where it stood. The wraithlocks clattered to the floor, their wooden stocks fragmenting, their metal barrels corroding now that the phantom’s essence no longer sustained them.

Kalder smiled coldly at the vanquished ghost. “You’re a victim of your time,” he told the pile of grave dust and moldering rags. “These days, the only honor in a gunfight is being the one that walks away.”

Through the haze of pain wracking his body, it dimly impressed itself upon Lorca’s brain that someone was attacking his Cryxian tormentors. The gangster would have laughed if Moritat had left more than a stub of tongue inside his mouth. The necrotech had been carving off bits and pieces of his onetime ally, fusing them into the morbid engine of his helljack. Tendons, muscles, even entire organs had been cut from his body, examined for their compatibility with the grisly machine. Many of the parts Moritat cut away hadn’t measured up to his inspection. These the necrotech had tossed aside like so much trash; they lay there now, strewn about Lorca.

That any spark of life remained in Lorca was owed to the necrotech’s magic. When he’d watched Moritat vivisect his other victims, Lorca assumed it was some perverse sadism that motivated him to keep them alive. Now he understood that Moritat’s own amusement had nothing to do with it. The necrotech used his magic to extend the lives of his victims for the pragmatic purpose of ensuring he had fresh, vital materials.

Lorca glared up as the spidery necrotech scurried near, watching as Moritat set his helljack against the intruders who had dared to attack him in his lair. The monster didn’t even deign to notice the tortured pile of meat writhing on the ground beside him. Drawing upon his sorcery, Moritat sent his mind leaping into the black-iron body of the Reaper, stirring its cortex.

Lorca struggled to maintain some coherence, enough unity of thought to retain a toehold in the realm of sanity. He saw Rex charge at the Reaper, delighting in the warjack’s attack, remembering that this same ’jack had destroyed one of Moritat’s other Reapers. His excitement turned bitter when he saw Rex stumble in the torture pit. He sickened when he saw the Reaper’s harpoon impale the Toro and start to drag it across the floor. His spirits lifted again when Rex tore the harpoon from its body, leaving the immense spear to be dragged back to the helljack without him.

Now the Reaper was angling for a fresh attack, some ghastly enchantment glowing about the helljack’s harpoon. He could see Rutger shouting commands to his ’jack, trying to maneuver it so that it could avoid or slip past the coming attack. Both machines were designed for close-in fighting, but the Reaper depended upon inflicting the first blow, using the combination of its harpoon and spike to cripple an enemy before they could strike back. Under the strict command of an experienced operator, such tactics would serve the helljack well. Manipulated by the mind of a warcaster, it could adapt its tactics to meet the changing situation. Just now, Moritat had the thing falling back before Rex’s approach, angling around so it could strike from the Toro’s flank. Rutger was trying to match Moritat’s maneuvers, but without the fluidity of control enjoyed by a warcaster, it was a hopeless effort.

Lorca’s gaze focused on Moritat, watching the bloated necrotech as he made arcane gestures with his hands and uttered incantations with his decayed lips. Vengeance upon his tormentor was the only thought that kept the gangster from embracing the oblivion of madness. His arms and legs stripped raw by Azaam’s knives and Moritat’s tools, all he could do was flop and flail along the floor, undulating like some obscene worm. The spastic, frantic efforts inflicted their toll. Every foot he managed to crawl sent pain searing through the nerves Moritat had left inside him. His brain felt like an open wound by the time he’d crossed the few dozen feet between himself and the necrotech.

By a supreme effort, Lorca managed to lunge at Moritat. He thought he could sink his teeth into one of the hoses in the necrotech’s gut, harm him by biting through the line. Instead, his teeth clamped shut around the base of one of the soul cages hanging from Moritat’s belt. The dead weight of the gangster’s falling body snapped the chain fastening the spectral energy casing to the belt. It crashed to the floor and rolled away across the dungeon, still aglow with the grisly luminance of the souls trapped inside.

Moritat’s control over the Reaper was interrupted as the necrotech reacted to Lorca’s pathetic attack. Reaching down, he seized the mutilated gangster in his withered claws. Moritat pressed his talons into the man’s head and began to squeeze, clenching his hideous fingers until they punctured the bones of Lorca’s skull. The necrotech chuckled as blood and brain matter bubbled up from beneath his fingers.

Indeed, Moritat thought it was such a pleasurable sensation that he considered reanimating Lorca once he had some spare time so he could repeat the experience.

Almost absently, Moritat looked away from his victim to see what had become of the soul cage Lorca ripped free. A sharp gasp of alarm whistled through the necrotech’s decayed fangs. The glowing soul cage had rolled toward the helljack. Before he could reassert his control over the Reaper, the machine’s clawed foot came smashing down.

There was a spectral explosion as the loose soul cage was crushed flat beneath the helljack’s foot. The unleashed spiritual energies became a phantom tempest, wailing and shrieking as they boiled up around the Reaper. Armor plates, ridges of bone, iron spikes, and copper pipes were torn free, sent scything across the dungeon in a storm of shrapnel and debris. The disembodied screams took on a more vicious and hateful quality as they were sucked through the helljack’s scarred hull, drawn into the raging fires of its ghoulish cortex. As each enraged wisp and orb was drawn into its cortex, the Reaper seemed to swell and pulsate with new power, its damaged frame bristling with fierce potentialities. On top of the enhanced necrotite fueling it and the eerie harmonics of the Orgoth dungeon, the infusion of so much arcane power sent the helljack completely wild. Smoke still rising from where the spirits had savaged its body, it threw back its spiked head and howled like a beast unleashed. Its piston-driven spike gouged into a pillar beside it. The monster shuffled from side to side, eyes blazing with an unholy bloodlust, a primal need to kill.

As the creature closest to the berserk Reaper, Moritat became its first victim. The machine shifted around and sprang at the necrotech, transfixing him upon the end of the spike. Like some fattened tick, Moritat hung from his own creation’s arm, blood and oil streaming from his pierced body. The helljack shook its arm, finally dislodging Moritat and tossing him across the chamber. The necrotech’s body struck the floor and then rolled for a few dozen feet before plummeting into one of the torture pits.

There was a sickening sound of crunching bone and ripped flesh as Moritat’s bulk was impaled on the stakes that lined the bottom.

The moment the attack started, Taryn threw herself flat on the dungeon floor. The instincts she’d honed on the battlefields of Llael rose to the fore. When thrust into the middle of any fight, the first thing to do was get out of the way and take stock of the situation.

She felt sick when she saw Rutger turning away from the wreckage of the iron lich, bracing himself to receive the attack of the hag and her risen. She had thought her friend safely out of trouble; instead he’d thrust his head right into the hornet’s nest. What was more, he’d brought Kalder with him. Taryn didn’t know what lies or threats had made Rutger ally himself with the vicious bounty killer, but whatever the agreement between them, she was at its center, and whatever the terms of their alliance, Kalder would breach them as soon as he didn’t need Rutger anymore. Even if by some miracle the mercenary fended off the Cryxians, he’d only earn himself a knife in the back.

Rolling across the floor, Taryn tried to find something, anything that might allow her to cut the leathery thongs binding her hands behind her back. A heap of splintered bone, debris from the necrotech’s morbid tinkering, offered the best prospect. She wriggled her body along the floor, pressed close against the wall, and used it to brace herself as she struggled onto her knees.

It was then that Rex came charging into the dungeon. The Toro barreled through risen, swatting them aside like so many corpse flies. It kicked the witch, hurling her through the air. The hag crashed to the floor near Taryn, and suddenly the gun mage saw a much better prospect than a piece of splintered bone to saw through her bindings. She knew only too well how sharp the Satyxis kept the blades.

Taryn tried to ignore the battle raging around her. Trussed as she was, she couldn’t help Rutger. She had to be free to do him any good. She crawled over to the witch. A broken rib protruded from her side, one arm wrenched beneath her. The knives were still thrust under the sash of her robe, and along with them Taryn’s confiscated magelocks. She smiled. She’d be able to help Rutger better than she’d imagined. But first she had to cut herself free.

She watched the witch for a moment, studying her for any trace of life. Then Taryn turned her back to the hag and started feeling along the sash for a knife hilt. Just as her fingers touched one of the blades, she felt a merciless pull at her hair. Her head jerked back so that her body was forced to arch at an agonizing angle. The witch’s bruised face glowered at her, her eyes blazing with violence.

“Your blood,” she cackled. “Your blood to restore my strength!”

Taryn pushed against the floor with her feet, thrusting the back of her head into the crone’s nose. The witch shrieked. The clutching fingers released their grip on her hair as the witch wilted back to the floor, groaning in pain. She flailed blindly at the air around her with one of the knives.

Then a chorus of piercing, unearthly shrieks roared through the dungeon. Taryn whipped about just in time to see the Reaper soaking up the spectral energies released from the smashed soul cage. Shrapnel from the helljack cut through the air, gouging across the floor and stabbing into walls and pillars. Taryn cringed as a jagged piece of debris came whistling past her nose and embedded itself in the pillar beside her.

She scrambled over to the piece of iron, pressing her bound wrists against it. She tried not to think about the gruesome cords as she worked them across the sharp edge, tried to ignore what—or whom—they had once been a part of. Bit by bit, she sawed through the bindings.

“I will drain every drop from your veins and twist the dregs from your beating heart,” the witch snarled as she came hobbling toward Taryn. Her right arm hung limp at her side, and she dragged her left leg behind her. Blood oozed from the wound her shattered rib made. Her face was a gory ruin, the nose nothing but bleeding pulp. Yet for all her injuries, the hag still stalked forward, confident she had the upper hand. She held a crooked knife between her fingers, after all, and Taryn was still bound.

The witch realized her mistake when she drove the knife down toward Taryn’s face. The gun mage sprang, her bindings severed. She caught the hag’s wrist with one hand, arresting the descent of her knife. With her other, she grabbed the hag by her bony shoulder and slammed her face-first into the pillar. There was a meaty crunch as the sharp piece of iron embedded in the wall split the witch’s skull.