Steamborn (18 page)

Bessie shifted quickly from one side to the other, smacking Samuel in the head with an unfastened buckle.

“Well,” Samuel said as he snatched the loose buckle and fastened it, “I think Bessie’s okay with that. Give me a minute to talk to my captain. He’s not going to be happy about it.”

It wasn’t long before Samuel returned from the eastern gatehouse, an odd expression on his face. Jacob wasn’t exactly sure what it meant.

“You look flabbergasted,” Charles said.

“I … he … he said it’s fine,” Samuel said. “Apparently … you made an arm.” Samuel shrugged.

A tall man with dark hair and a thick mustache walked out of the gatehouse. All the eyes in the courtyard shifted to him. He wore a gold-lined uniform set with more medals than Jacob had seen in his entire life. The man held the attention of all those around him without words, only an undeniable presence.

“This is the boy?” the captain asked. His voice rang in deep, basso tones as he leaned down slightly to look at Jacob. Jacob wasn’t short—he was actually tall for his age—but this man was a mountain.

“Sir?” Jacob said, barely squeaking the words out.

The captain extended his hand and almost crushed Jacob’s with a firm handshake. “Thank you.”

It was about then that a little boy walked out from behind the mountain. He was small with brown hair and an arm made of metal.

“Peter!” Jacob said. “Shouldn’t you be at the hospital still?”

“I have to go back, but they let me leave for a little bit.”

“How are you doing?”

“Good. The arm you made me is the next best thing to having my own. The other kids want one.”

The captain ruffled Peter’s hair. “He’s my boy, Jacob. I can’t thank you enough.” He turned and looked down at his son. “You should get back to your mother. She’s waiting at the hospital.”

“Bye, Jacob!” Peter said.

Jacob waved as the boy walked away, escorted by one of the knights.

“I was afraid he’d be teased for the loss of his arm,” the captain said, bringing everyone’s attention back to him. “People can be cruel creatures.” He rubbed his hands together and looked at Jacob. “And some people can be selfless, generous souls.”

Charles squeezed Jacob’s shoulder. “He is.” Charles glanced between Jacob and the captain. “Usually.”

The captain smiled. “Samuel tells me you’re going into the Lowlands today. The sentries on the towers tell us it’s mostly clear, but there are occasional signs of movement. Be on your guard, and stay with the knights. If I didn’t know of your intentions to build more arms, I would never allow this.”

Charles ran a hand over his beard. “The horde of invaders that broke into the city—I want to see them too, and I want to see where they ended up.”

The captain gave Charles a thoughtful look. “Most of my knights will be guarding the wall repairmen. I’ll keep a small detachment with you, but that’s all we will risk.”

“Sir,” Charles said, before he gave the captain a perfectly formed salute.

The captain eyed Charles for a moment, and then returned the salute. “Call me Lewis. Best of luck.” He turned to leave and clapped Samuel on the shoulder. “Take care of them.”

“Sir.”

Samuel turned back around and grimaced. “Looks like I’m not getting rid of either one of you.”

“Not unless you’re a terrible Spider Knight and let us get eaten,” Charles said with a broad smile.

Samuel narrowed his eyes and slammed his facemask down.

Charles leaned closer to Samuel and spoke quietly. “The conversation Jacob and Alice overheard … it could mean trouble.”

“Bat thinks so too,” Samuel said. His voice sounded muffled slightly by his armored facemask, but the mesh slits on the front made it easy enough to hear.

“If …” Charles started to say, but then stopped to think. He looked at the townsfolk milling around them. “If people
decide
to move back to the Lowlands soon, we need to know what’s waiting out there.”

Someone began barking orders up near the gate. A line of knights formed with the Spider Knights behind them. In the middle were the wall repairmen with carriages filled to bursting with pulleys and scaffolding.

“Stay with the repairmen for now,” Samuel said. The gates creaked open and he led them into the formation.

The city gates opened, and the full devastation of the Fall sprawled across the Lowlands before them.

“Gods in heaven,” Charles said. He pushed the steambike outside the city wall. “Get your gloves on.”

The forward movement of the entire party slowed to a crawl. The beetles pulling the repairmen’s carriages jostled and shifted, unaware of why they were suddenly stopping. Jacob reached out toward the ruins of the Lowlands, and slowly let his arm fall back to his side.

“It’s … it’s gone.”

He stared at the ruins of what had once been the lower wall. A few connected bricks still stood, jagged shadows against a calm, cloudy sky. Black carapaces and gleaming blue legs were cut, dismembered, and shattered among the ruins of the buildings.

Jacob felt a pressure behind his eyes before he realized there were tears running down his cheeks.

“Jacob,” Charles’s voice grew firm, drawing his attention. “Get your gloves on.”

Jacob nodded as he unbuttoned his thigh pocket and slid the metal-scaled gloves out. He stared at the mesh web as he pulled it over his fingers one at a time. The metal looked dull in the cloudy sunlight when it snapped into his armored sleeves.

“We’ll see worse before this is over,” Samuel said. He sidled up beside them on Bessie. “I’m glad so many of the homes survived. There’s a lot of debris for the bugs to hide in. Be on your guard.”

Jacob watched Bessie stalk toward the fallen wall with Samuel on her back. Jacob’s eyes trailed from the Spider Knight to the ruined buildings around him. A few homes had survived, yes, but it seemed like there were just as many left on the ground in so much rubble.

The group of repairmen started moving quicker, their wheels rumbling across the cobblestones and crunching up bits of debris and pieces of invaders. Charles and Jacob followed. They made it down the gradual incline, into the courtyard with the fountain, before Jacob saw the first man.

He didn’t look so different, lifeless in his armor and face down as he was. The body was too thin, his flesh already taken by the scavengers that ruled over the dead in Ancora.

Beyond that nameless soldier, past the fountain, lay a crater littered with the bodies of Red Death. The remnants and shells of the invaders that had almost caught them on the steambike sent a shiver down his spine.

Charles whistled. “You took out a horde of those things with that mine you dropped.”

One of the repairmen glanced back. “The boy did that?”

Charles let out a humorless chuckle. “That he did.”

“Damn.”

The winds shifted, and the thick, gagging scent of decay filled Jacob’s mouth until he almost wretched.

“Easy,” Charles said. “You’ll get used to it after a time.”

Jacob wanted to scrape his tongue and rinse his mouth out with Charles’s firewater.

Bessie wandered back over to them. The spider seemed twitchy, rotating quickly from one angle to the next, and Samuel grimaced as he patted her head. “Did you want to check any of those Reds?” he asked when they weren’t within earshot of the others.

“Not enough left,” Charles said. “If I’m right, there will be more of the blasted things.”

Samuel nodded, his silver faceplate glimmering in a ray of sun while he urged Bessie toward the front of the line. He exchanged words with a knight near the front before scampering ahead, down the hill that eventually would lead them to the Square.

The road took them close to one of the collapsed buildings. The legs of a dead Widow Maker curled around what looked like the heavy black crown of a chimney. Jacob choked and turned away when he saw the scattered skeleton of a woman beside it, parts still settled inside a pale blue dress. His eyes started to burn again when he felt Charles put an arm around him.

“It’s okay. Nothing can hurt her now. Do you need to go back? No one here would think any less of you.”

One of the repairman stood by the skeleton for a moment, hunched over, and lost his lunch. He coughed and choked and hacked before wiping his mouth and cursing.

“No,” Jacob said. “I want to help.”

Charles squeezed him, and the reassuring gesture almost made Jacob cry again. The rubble across the road shifted. The spear slung across Jacob’s back almost sprang into his hand. He faced the cascade of falling wood and bricks that clattered and bounced into the street.

Something moved. A glint of black. A hint of red. It moved again, and enough of the building fell away to reveal a Red Death. It was injured, and when it saw the group of knights, it screamed in that shrill, terrifying wail.

One of the knights started toward it.

“No!” Charles said. He slammed the metal wedge beneath the steambike and unholstered the air cannon on his back. “Don’t step on the bricks. It’s not stable.” He racked the slide three times. The Red Death had worked itself out far enough to raise one of its wings.

Charles pulled the trigger.

A deaf silence followed the boom.

All that remained of the Red Death was a smear of yellow blood and chunks of its black carapace.

“What the hell did you shoot that with?” one of the knights asked.

“Science.” Charles spat on the ground and holstered the air cannon.

Jacob stayed close to Charles as they rounded the bend. He occasionally glanced up to watch the Spider Knights prowling over the buildings and debris. Jacob always found it fascinating how the knights moved, leaning and standing in their saddles so their mounts could climb or descend a sheer wall without losing them.

“A lot of the wall is still intact here,” one of the repairmen said from the top of his carriage. He pointed to the west. “Wouldn’t take much to reinforce it, but that won’t do much good with the higher walls gone. I think we could—”

“Hold!” one of the knights at the front of the line shouted.

Jacob stared. There was a pile—a mountain—of Red Death and Widow Makers and those weird Walker-looking invaders where the bank used to be. His eyes traced the scythe-like arms of the Mantises. They were impaled in the invaders, and some were in their own kind. Widow Makers had died with their fangs in Walkers and Red Death, and … people.

Clothes and skeletal limbs lay strewn among the carnage. Bright fabrics and old blood mixed with the dead invaders, all encased in a rancid stench.

One of the repairmen fell to the ground and put his head in his hands. “Gods … so many.”

“This is it,” Charles said before he cursed so loudly and at such length that every knight turned to look at him. “This is one of the frenzies. Samuel!”

The Spider Knight nodded and said something to the knights closest to him. Jacob could see them making hand gestures, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying until Samuel shouted back from across the Square.

“Let us check the dead. We’ll clear it for you.”

Charles nodded.

Jacob hadn’t realized just how high the mountain of dead bugs was until Samuel stood beside it.

“Stay by me,” Charles said. “If too many of those things are still alive, we’ll need to make a fast escape.”

Jacob didn’t get a chance to so much as nod before the first Widow Maker scrambled over the hill of corpses. Its obsidian legs gleamed as it shifted in the sunlight. The Widow Maker could have been mistaken for a sculpture of black gemstones if it weren’t moving.

The knights recoiled and circled the mound of dead. The Widow Maker raised its front legs and crouched.

“Prepare yourselves!” one of the Spider Knights shouted.

Bessie and the other Jumpers began beating their legs on the ground in a steady rhythm—one two, pause, one two, pause. Jacob had seen small Jumpers tap out warnings with their feet, but he’d never seen the Spider Knight’s mounts do it.

The Widow Maker shifted, following the Spider Knight beneath it. It never saw Samuel and Bessie climbing the building behind it. Bessie leapt. Samuel’s halberd pierced the Widow Maker’s head with a crack and then Bessie returned to the earth in two quick hops off the mountain of carcasses. The rhythmic tapping of the Spider Knight’s mounts subsided.

“Come on,” Charles said, pushing the steambike forward. “It’s clear.”

A few moments later, two of the knights shouted “Clear!”

Samuel lowered his faceplate and dangled a Sweet-Fly in front of Bessie’s eyes. She delicately plucked it from his grip and began grinding it up. “Looks like the rest are dead.”

Charles wedged the stand under the steambike again and looked over the mound of dead. “I want to be wrong about this, Samuel.”

“We’re going to check the wall,” Ambrose said. “This section looks mostly intact to the southwest. If it is, we may just need to worry about the walls closer to the city wall.”

“Split the knights?” Samuel asked Captain Lewis.

The captain nodded and began shouting orders. By the time he was done, over half the Spider Knights and the city knights had gone to the west wall with the repairmen. Samuel and a handful of others stayed behind with Charles and Jacob.

“I know those men are the priority,” Charles said, stepping up beside the mountain of invaders. “Thank you for leaving us a guard.”

“Samuel would be a pain in my neck for a year if I left you two out here to die,” Captain Lewis said. “I distinctly remember having to listen to his complaints for a month after we had to abandon a cat to a nest of Walkers. How long do you need?”

Charles looked back to the pile of carcasses and death. “As long as it takes.”

Captain Lewis chuckled and nodded. “Scream if you need us, tinker.”

Charles watched Lewis saunter away on his mount before looking up at Samuel. “I rather like your captain.”

“He’s alright. Most days.” Samuel winked at Jacob and hopped down off Bessie. “Now, what exactly are we looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it, I’m afraid. It’ll be attached to some of the bugs’ heads.”