Grave Voices

by Gail Z. Martin

  “I could blow up the whole tunnel from here,” she offered.

  “Negative. Mitch and the others are too close. Don’t worry, you’ll get your shot,” Jacob replied.

  “You’re going to take out the whole tunnel?” Drostan asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Jacob’s voice was choppy as they ran to catch up to the fighting. “Maybe. But if Kasmir really does have recordings of new ideas from dead inventors, that’s too valuable to bury in a hillside. We’ll get them out—and then blow things up.”

  Mitch was nowhere to be seen as Jacob and Drostan sprinted up. Renate Thalberg the absinthe witch was doing her best to hold off a dozen of the corpse dolls and clay golems that were part of the army streaming from the mouth of the tunnel. She stood inside a warded circle, and a shimmering green curtain of energy kept the creatures attacking her at bay as she struck at them with balls of conjured fire and emerald streaks of lightning. Every one of her strikes smashed a golem or incinerated a zombie-doll, but there were too many of the monsters, and it was clear Renate was likely to tire before the onslaught slowed.

  To one side, dozens of zombie-dolls advanced on three men with the black cassocks and long beards of Polish priests who were chanting in Latin. Jacob recognized Father Matija and his Logonje. The priests held up golden boxes, reliquaries that focused the power of the Divine. Blinding white light and a powerful force wave blasted from the relics, flattening rows of corpse-dolls as it freed their enslaved spirits, but there were still more of the creatures behind those that fell.

  On the other side, a short, bearded man in a dark suit stared down rows of golems. A yarmulke nestled in his dark hair. Rabbi Loew, the Kabbalist, Jacob thought. Welcome to the party. Loew’s low, steady voice recited the Psalms in Hebrew, and the rabbi paused now and again to spit three times, a warding against evil. As he spoke words of power from the Scriptures, the golems in the front row staggered and fell, but more of the unholy creatures emerged to take their place.

  “You go to the left; I’ll take the right,” Jacob shouted. Drostan took up a firing stance, blasting away at a row of golems emerging from the tunnel, smashing their heads like sharpshooting targets at the county fair. Jacob aimed at the corpse-dolls, putting bullet after bullet between their eyes, switching guns when he ran out of bullets. It was clear that there were more monsters than he had bullets. The Dollmaker had far more golems and doll-soldiers stockpiled than Jacob had seen in his workshop. Some were corpse-dolls, some the empty shells into which spirits were forced, and some were golems, but they surged from the tunnel faster than the allies could take them down.

  “Where the hell is Mitch?” Jacob muttered.

  The rumble of a steambike echoed from the hillsides. Mitch headed for the tunnel entrance bent like a racer over of the velocipede, with the addition of a long stout wooden pole lashed to the handlebars so that the pole extended a few feet on either side. Mitch had the Maxwell box clipped to his belt. Clare was behind him riding pillion, but the grin on her face was all Simon.

  “Move!” Mitch shouted above the roar of the steambike. He lowered his head and aimed the bike right into the thick of the advancing golems and corpse-dolls. “Now!” he yelled, and Clare threw something into the tunnel.

  A brilliant flash of light and a deafening bang stopped whatever soldier-dolls had not yet emerged from the tunnel. Mitch drove the bike into the midst of the doll army, mowing down the unwieldy golems and wooden-shelled corpses with enough force to knock them back like dominos.

  Mitch slewed to a stop, and Clare scrambled off. “Cover me!” she ordered in a voice very much like Simon’s. Jacob moved into position, and Clare raised her hands, closing her eyes and summoning her psychic abilities. Mitch said she was more than just a clairvoyant, Jacob thought. She accidentally raised the dead. That gives us a necromancer to counter Kasmir.

  “I thought you went with Hans?” Jacob said, worried that Clare was still in danger.

  “I made him let me out of the carriage. I can be more use to you here,” she replied, in a tone that dared him to argue with her. Jacob had the distinct feeling that it was Clare’s stubbornness and not Simon’s influence that brought her back to the fight.

  A third of the Dollmaker’s creations stopped in place, wobbled on their wooden legs, and then toppled to the ground. Jacob and Drostan cheered. Matija and his priests continued their chant. Rabbi Loew kept on reading, and Renate never hesitated in her magical assault.

  The steambike circled for another assault. This time, Mitch angled the bike away from his comrades and opened fire on the remaining corpse-dolls and golems with the built-in small Gatling gun that Adam Farber had added for emergencies. The rapid, staccato blast of the machine gun mowed down more of the attackers, though without the precision necessary to blast the golems in the head and stop them permanently. The shattered clay monsters struggled to rise, still animated until Rabbi Loew cancelled the magic that empowered them or one of the others put a bullet in their terra cotta heads.

  Matija’s priests worked more slowly than bullets, but the zombie-dolls they felled stayed down. Clare stepped up beside them, raising her hands once more and calling on her power, emboldened, no doubt, by Renate’s presence to use her magic openly without fear of censure. A dozen more of the dolls animated by enslaved ghosts or corpses collapsed as Clare wrested control from their master. It was clear to Jacob that Kasmir did not have the strength to fight for his creations against so many different levels of resistance, or to do more than send his doll-soldiers forth with more than the most basic instructions.

  With the others handling the last of the attacker-dolls and golems, Renate dropped her wardings and ran to join Mitch, Jacob and Drostan, who stood with their guns trained on the tunnel entrance.

  “He’s still in there,” Mitch said, watching the mouth of the tunnel warily. “I’d be happy to lob a few Ketchum grenades, but we need those Edison cylinders.”

  “I’ll bet you a pint at the pub it’s booby-trapped,” Drostan said. “He’s just waiting for us to rush in there and get slaughtered.”

  “Then let me shed some light on the subject,” Renate said. She murmured a word of power, and a brilliant glowing orb rose to the top of the tunnel’s arch, illuminating the entrance.

  Mitch grabbed the steambike, walking beside it as it idled on low. The same steam that powered the bike’s motor also ran a single electric headlamp. Together with Renate’s orb, the light drove back the shadows just as Kasmir’s last defenders opened fire.

  The whirr of wind-up metal dolls buzzed as the row of metal soldiers leveled their Gatling gun arms and laid down a barrage of gunfire. Renate had an instant’s notice, barely enough time to raise an iridescent, transparent wall of power to shield Jacob and the others from the lethal spray of bullets. Jacob could see the strain in her face as she struggled to hold the barrier, as sweat glistened on her forehead and she gritted her teeth.

  In a few, deadly moments the Gatling guns had spent their fury, and the wind-up soldiers managed a step or two before their springs and gears ground to a halt. Jacob pumped a shotgun shell into one of the metal dolls, blowing apart its steel cylinder body just to make certain the creatures were no longer a threat.

  “How do we know there aren’t more of those every few yards down the tunnel?” Drostan asked, eyeing the now-silent mechanical dolls warily.

  “This should help.” Renate looked tired, but determined as she motioned for the glowing ball of power to move along the tunnel’s roof, illuminating the way ahead of them. Mitch moved to the fore, still pushing the steambike with its electric headlamp, dispelling the last of the shadows.

  “What the hell is that?” Jacob swore. Row upon row of jointed wooden dolls blocked their way. Garishly painted, with wide clown features and staring, malevolent eyes, the dolls stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other, two rows deep.

  Yet as they approached, the dolls made no move to attack, swaying slowly in the draft of air that rushed from the back of t
he tunnel. “Marionettes,” Mitch said, adding a few curses under his breath. “They’re all just marionettes, strung up to slow us down.”

  Mitch went back to retrieve a piece of curved steel that was half of a downed wind-up soldier, steadying it on the handlebars of the steambike and holding it in front of him like a shield as he crouched low and moved through the first row of marionettes. The dolls bobbled and swung unsettlingly, like hanged men no one bothered to cut free of the gallows. Jacob and the others tensed, waiting for shots or worse.

  “I’m through it,” Mitch shouted. “Clear.”

  Jacob, Drostan, and Renate pushed their way through the creepy suspended dolls, and the jointed wooden arms and legs clacked like skeletons as they moved among them. Renate’s orb illuminated the back of the blocked tunnel. Jacob recognized the tables and doll parts he had seen in the Dollmaker’s downtown workshop. An open trunk lay to one side. None of the assembled dolls remained, spent as cannon fodder to defend Sandor Kasmir’s last stand. Tools and materials littered the area, but Kasmir himself was notably absent.

  “He got out,” Mitch said, and pointed to a small passageway that had been dug through the debris that blocked the tunnel passage. “He threw everything he had at us to slow us down, while he escaped. Damn!”

  Jacob stepped over to the open trunk. “We might have lost Kasmir, but he didn’t get the Edison cylinders out through that hole,” he said. “Looks like they’re in this trunk.”

  Drostan hauled one of the worktables over to one side and climbed on top. Pulling a knife from his belt, he sliced through the rope that suspended the wooden dolls across the tunnel. “I’ve got no desire to go back through them if we don’t have to.”

  Drostan kept watch as Mitch and Jacob gathered anything they considered valuable for the investigation. They carried the trunk between them while Renate maneuvered the ball of light and Drostan took point, gun ready, on the walk back to the tunnel mouth.

  The clatter of hooves made them draw their weapons as they reached the end of the tunnel. Jacob relaxed as he recognized Hans and their carriage. A crumpled figure slumped in the drivers’ seat next to him.

  “Missing someone?” Hans called out cheerily. He grabbed the bound and gagged figure by the scruff of its neck and shook the hair out of the man’s eyes so they others could get a look at his face. Unconscious and covered with dirt and rock grit, Sandor Kasmir hung limply in Han’s grip.

  “I dropped off the ladies at the safe house, and then circled back to pick up the Dollmaker,” Hans explained. “Found him trying to crawl away. Looks like he had some of the metal plates he used for those wind-up dolls under his shirt, so the bullet winded him but it didn’t kill him.” He grinned.

  “Rapped him solidly on the head with my gun, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.” Hans gestured with a jerk of his head. “Got him trussed up in the back. Then I remembered that I knew where the old tunnel came out, and I wondered if these two had worked up some mischief at the other end, so I went around back to check it out, and saw this one come out looking like a coal miner!”

  “Rapped him on the head with your gun too?” Mitch asked, looking like he was both pleased at the capture and slightly miffed he didn’t make the collar himself.

  “Seemed prudent,” Hans replied. His clockwork-repaired features made it difficult to tell whether he was hiding a smile.

  Clare walked over to join them. She looked exhausted, but from the way she moved and the look on her face, Jacob was sure Simon Markham was still sharing her consciousness. “Nice work,” Jacob said.

  Simon’s lopsided smile twisted Clare’s mouth. “Haven’t had this much fun since before I died,” he said. “It felt good to be back in action, even if I had to borrow a ride.”

  “Nice to have you back, even if it’s just for a little while,” Mitch said.

  “You know,” Simon observed, “you might want to recruit Clare and the other mediums. I’m not the only dead agent from the Department floating around. Maybe we could partner up, do some good. It’s worth a thought.” He gave Mitch a look. “And I’ve already told her she’s entitled to hazard pay at full agent rates for tonight, so don’t try to weasel out of it.” Mitch glared at him, then rolled his eyes and nodded in agreement.

  “Stay in touch, Simon,” Jacob said.

  “Try to get rid of me, now that I know I can come back!” Simon replied. “But she’s getting tired, and I need to go. Make sure Clare gets home okay. She’s scrappy. Might make a great agent someday.”

  With that, Clare shuddered, and when she looked up she was herself again. “That was amazing,” she said tiredly. “But I’m ready to call it a night.”

  Jacob and Mitch manhandled Kasmir into the back of the wagon with the Dollmaker, while Drostan helped Clare up to the seat beside the driver. Hans and the Logonje were busy chucking the remains of the doll-soldiers and corpse-dolls into the mouth of the tunnel. Rabbi Loew moved from one shattered golem to the next, removing the bits of parchment from their mouths. When he had gathered all the papers, he said something in Hebrew that Jacob guessed was a warding against evil, and then lit the stack of parchment with a match. The rabbi continued to recite until the last of the papers were burned to ashes, which he buried beneath handfuls of dirt.

  “Well, that’s done,” he said brightly, dusting off his hands. “Glad I could help. Like the dolls, the golems were ill-used. They’re supposed to be protectors, not monsters. Only a bad man would twist their natures. Now, they are at rest.” He made a sign of blessing over the ashes, and turned away. “Send for me if you need me but remember, I don’t work weekends.” With that, he headed toward the road where he had left his wagon.

  Father Matija walked over as the Logonje priests and Hans put the last of the dolls and corpses into the tunnel. “The spirits that were forced into those abominations have been freed,” he said. “They will go as the Almighty directs, but they are no longer torn from their sleep or bound to corpses.” He shook his head. “The problems in the cemeteries should be over. The dead won’t be restless any longer.”

  “Thank you,” Mitch said.

  Matija managed a rare smile. “We answer to an Authority even higher than your Department,” he said. “It’s incentive to do good work.”

  “We can give you a lift into town,” Mitch said to Renate as Jacob and Drostan made a last check to assure that nothing of the battle remained outside the tunnel.

  Renate raised an eyebrow and glanced toward the steambike. “On that thing? Not likely. But I’ll accept a ride in the wagon to the main road. Andreas is waiting for me with a carriage.”

  Jacob and Drostan climbed into the back of the wagon to keep an eye on the Dollmaker and Kasmir, who were still unconscious. Hans swung up to the driver’s seat, as Mitch walked the steambike back to the road. He waited until they were around the bend from the tunnel before he toggled his headset.

  “Give ‘em hell, Della,” he said.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” she replied.

  Rumor has it, the tunnel explosion could be heard all the way to downtown New Pittsburgh.

  Excerpt from IRON & BLOOD

  CHAPTER ONE

  “This would have been simpler if we’d done it my way.” The slender woman lifted her chin defiantly. Dark ringlets framed her face, and her violet eyes sparkled. Her black wool traveling suit was nipped in at the waist, making the bustle in the back more pronounced. Her voice was starting to rise.

  “Your way involved dynamite. We wanted to remain discreet.” Jake Desmet tugged at the collar of his suit coat and tried to look nonchalant.

  “We’d have been done by now.” Veronique LeClercq fixed Jake with a glare. “Rick’s taking forever to make the deal.”

  Jake took a deep breath and counted backward from five. His cousin’s impatience was nothing new, nor was her penchant for more adventure than he fancied. And the dynamite had been a joke—maybe. “Nicki, be patient! Rick’s good at this sort of thing. We’ve got to be delicate
about this.”

  Jake hoped that passersby would take them for spatting siblings. While their disagreement was real, it was no accident that they were standing where they could keep an eye on the corridor in each direction. Jake smoothed a wavy lock of brown hair out of his eyes. Much as he hated to admit it, Nicki was right. Rick was taking a long time, and the delay was likely to cause trouble.

  “Remind me again why you and Rick didn’t just steal the damn urn?” Nicki’s voice had dropped. “It would have been better than standing here like targets.”

  “One: I’ve got no desire to see the inside of Queen Victoria’s dungeons for theft.”

  “Oh, piffle. Queens don’t have dungeons anymore,” Nicki said with a dismissive gesture.

  “Two: The urn is very valuable to our client. It might be dangerous. We don’t need to take additional risks.” Jake could see Nicki’s faint smile, which meant she wasn’t really hearing a word he was saying.

  “Tsk. If the urn is that dangerous, why hasn’t it harmed the fellow who thinks he owns it? Eaten him, maybe, or sucked out his soul?” She was clearly relishing the argument, a pattern that hadn’t changed since childhood.

  “Andreas impressed on us that it could be dangerous, but he didn’t say how,” Jake responded. “Rick and I take him seriously when he says things like that.” Jake focused on keeping his breathing regular. He’d been awakened in the night by a nightmare, and had had a sickening feeling of impending doom ever since. He’d told Rick and Nicki, but couldn’t give them more details, just a gut feeling. Unfortunately, Jake’s gut feelings were right more often than not.

  “Just because your client is a centuries-old vampire-witch with a tendency for drama doesn’t mean he’s always right.”

  Andreas isn’t the only one with a fondness for drama, Jake thought. Just as he was about to respond, the door opened. Out stepped a good-looking, young blond man in an impeccably tailored Savile Row suit with a bulky bundle, wrapped in oil cloth and tied up with twine, under one arm. Rick Brand was smiling broadly, and shaking the hand of a man who was hidden to Jake by the door. Their pleasantries suggested a meeting gone well.