by Matt Turner
“I am Prophet Fritz Rybka, also of the Kingdom,” the taller one gloated. He pointed a mocking finger at the four of them. “And we finally got you.”
37
In the end, Seth had managed to save over a thousand from the flames of the Hellfire and the crosses of the Fourth Legion. It had been a titanic struggle, transporting so many of the damned out of the circle of fire that the Kingdom had drawn. His wounds from the flames were still deep, though not so deep as the ones the Horsemen were about to experience, he reflected. The two Prophets had them completely at their mercy; nothing short of a miracle could save them now.
And I can give no miracles, he thought sadly as he stood in place with the crowd of a thousand soldiers that he was hidden in. It was better this way; with the Horsemen under the Kingdom’s power, stability would return, and the schemes of the darkness in Judecca would be foiled once again. Still, though…
He touched the apple he had brought along in his pocket. Vera had asked him to bring something for her to eat the next time they met, and Seth always made a point to honor his promises. But I won’t be able to honor this one. He thought of the pain that awaited her and sighed. Good-bye, Vera.
“Can’t wait to see the Prophets beat the living shit out of those fucks,” the soldier beside him muttered as she took aim with her crossbow. “They don’t stand a chance.”
“No,” Seth agreed. “They don’t.” He thought about saying a silent prayer for them, but then decided against it; such an act would be utterly futile.
Besides, it was better this way.
38
“The Kingdom finds you guilty of terrorism, violence, blasphemy against the Holy Council, disrespect to the Church of the Fallen Father, illegal use of Class III weaponry, and theft,” the blond Prophet gloated. He gave Simon a faint sneer of recognition, but his eyes were locked on one person only: Vera. “Am I forgetting anything, Longinus?”
“Inciting rebellion,” the shorter Prophet growled.
The four of them were utterly fucked, no doubt about it. If she had had another life to lose, Vera suspected that she would enjoy the prospect of martyrdom. But here, in the realm of undeath, all she could feel was pissed off that they had gotten so damn far only to be waylaid at the last fucking second. The least she could do was make them work for it. I’m not done, she vowed, as she brushed her hand up against John’s bark-like skin. He slightly recoiled from her touch, but she pressed on. Listen to what I have to say, she barked into his nervous mind.
The tall Prophet slapped his hand against his forehead in mock astonishment. “Of course! How could I forget?”
From what little she knew of the Mark on her ankle, it seemed that the powers it gave her did not work until she could at least establish a connection through physical touch. But if she had a conductor, like the telegraph lines outside St. Petersburg… She flashed a few images into John’s mind to show him her idea. The man clearly had no idea what a telegraph was, but he grasped the concept quickly enough, and gave her the slightest nod.
“The lower races have a way of rebelling against their masters.” The blond man grinned nastily. “And then the masters crush them. The Americans had the negroes, the Japs had the Chinamen, the Fatherland had the Jews… But I find that there’s no satisfaction quite like crushing the throat of a Slav. You know what I mean, Vera Figner?”
Even with the Mark translating all his words for her, she could hear his guttural German accent. So they invaded after all. “You reek of the Chërnye Sotni,” she called out. Calling another by the name of the tsar’s pogrom-enforcing thugs was the most damning insult a true revolutionary could possibly think of. Beside her, John continued to work his strange powers.
“Enough of this,” the shorter Prophet interrupted. “Lay down on the ground and surrender your bodies to the Kingdom, or I will order my soldiers to fire. You have ten seconds.”
John, hurry the fuck up, Vera seethed. He gave a low grunt under his breath in acknowledgment; beads of sap leaked from his bark and the reek of sweat from him was quickly becoming nearly overpowering. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that his face was contorted in utter concentration.
The other Prophet spun to Longinus in dismay. “What? We’re not fighting—”
“Don’t be a fool, Fritz,” Longinus said coldly. “We have an army—now we will use it. Six seconds.”
Thirty meters away from Vera, the first blade of grass emerged from a crack in the stone road and brushed against the foot of a soldier. She immediately sensed his anxiety and eagerness to fire, carried through John’s plant-like body to her mind. Faster, she urged. John pushed even further, muttering curses under his breath, and she felt a hundred other minds touch her own as a field of grass stealthily emerged.
“But we need their Marks!” Fritz raged. “Their bodies have to be intact, goddammit—and one of them is a fucking Ivan!”
“Ellie or Legion will rebuild them for us.” Longinus stared straight ahead at the four Horsemen, his eyes as cold as death. “There are millions of other Russians in Hell. You will endure. Three seconds.”
“Manto, I’m going to have to do it,” Plague sighed in a voice thick with misery. With one hand, he began to unfasten the opening of his dark cloak.
“No,” she immediately said. “Am, don’t do it, please—”
“Two seconds.”
Hundreds more unsuspecting minds became joined to Vera’s own—for an instant, she had an image of a spider spinning a web, reaching ever-farther outward to draw in more and more prey. One of John’s blades of grass sprouted up just beside Longinus’s sandaled foot and began to reach for his little toe. Almost there…
“PREPARE TO FIRE!” Fritz bellowed. Only silence greeted his words; the soldiers of the Fourth Legion had been waiting for this moment for the past day and a half. They were more than ready.
“One second.”
It was not enough; she hadn’t gotten all of them, had barely gotten even half—if she could get the stern Prophet in her grasp, perhaps that would be enough. The blade of grass trembled as it reached out, now less than half a millimeter from the Prophet’s foot—she could just barely sense the swirling blizzard of his soul—
“NO!” Fritz wrapped an arm around Longinus’s throat and wrenched him backward with the force of an avalanche. The blade of grass brushed through empty air, and just like that, Vera’s chance was gone. “It’s a Horseman trick!” Fritz bellowed in a voice like thunder.
Longinus did not hesitate. “ALL UNITS! OPEN FIRE!”
39
Simon slammed a foot into the pavement; ten feet away, a great shelf of rock tore from the ground like a great lever. A thousand bullets shredded into the makeshift barricade, almost instantly reducing it to dust. He lunged for Amaury, knocking him to the ground as the storm of fire raged. Around him, pieces of bark sprayed in every direction as a small forest exploded into being in front of them—the work of the tree-man, no doubt.
Amaury screamed something up at him. His voice was lost in the sheer roar of the gunfire, but the look of rage and fear in his eyes was more than obvious. Simon’s only response was to crush him further against the pavement with the weight of his body. It was only a matter of time until the bullets tore the two of them to shreds—he owed his son a few more seconds of not being a bullet-riddled corpse, at the very least.
With a slippery strength, Amaury somehow wormed his way out from underneath Simon and leapt up to his feet. Simon lunged for him again, hoping to bring him back down, and gasped in awe at the sight that lay before him.
Somehow, the tree-man had managed to construct a great oak barricade around the four of them in less than a second—and even as Simon watched, its branches expanded outward, thickening the wall so much that even the sound of gunfire was becoming muffled. And through the occasional, now-shrinking holes of the barricade that were quickly being filled in with thick vines and bark, he saw that the Fourth Legion was tearing itself apart.
Where there had
once been an army, there was now only a crazed mob of bloodthirsty berserkers—ten thousand men and women, blindly shooting, burning, stabbing, and hacking one another at point-blank range. A stiltwalker waded through the chaos, still firing at the barricade the Horsemen were in, and was almost instantly wrenched down to the ground by a wave of howling soldiers. They were so densely packed that it crushed twenty of them with its fall and destroyed another hundred as its ammunition exploded. Body parts flew so high in the air that Simon could no longer track them—and that was only a single drop in the ocean of violence and horror that lay before them.
“Oh God,” John whimpered as the roars of gunfire and screams of the wounded pierced the air. “Vera, for the love of all that is holy, please—make them stop.”
Vera’s face was pale and trembling, but her words had an iron conviction. “Not yet. This is exactly what they’ve been doing to the rest of C District this entire time. Let them bleed.”
“Our thoughts exactly.” A familiar voice chuckled. The four Horsemen looked up to see that a red-cloaked figure had leapt on the oaken barricade above them. “The Fourth Legion has always been incompetent. Let them bleed a little. It’ll teach them a lesson.”
“Fritz,” Simon growled. I’m going to castrate you with my bare hands, you bastard.
“But first, I think that I and my lovely companion here are going to make you bleed.” Fritz grinned. He seemed to be in the most chipper mood that Simon had ever seen him. “Which ones do you want, Longinus?”
The grim Prophet leapt onto the barricade alongside him. “Your former bodyguard and the young one.” His voice was as monotone as always, but a dark fire raged in his dead eyes as he drew a small metal rod from his sleeve. It suddenly shot outward in both directions, extending into a golden lance with a wicked-looking steel head.
Fritz rubbed his hands together eagerly. “That leaves me with the Suicide and the Bolshevik whore. This’ll be fun!”
Two knives flicked out into Amaury’s hands as he leapt back to Simon’s side. “Funny.” He smiled. “That one stole my line.”
The sword that Fritz had given him was long gone, so Simon reached out for one of the branches protruding from the barricade and tore it away into a makeshift, thorn-ridden club. I could take off a few heads with this. He gave it an experimental swing. “No more talk,” he growled. He could feel the old battle-rage burning within his chest, filling him up with its power. “Come and die.”
“Time to bleed,” Fritz clacked as he withdrew a handgun from his belt. And with that, the two Prophets leapt forward into the fray. Underneath the burning skies, beside the army of madmen, the Horsemen rushed to meet them.
40
John had barely an instant to raise his arms before the weapon in Fritz’s hand blazed fire, again and again. Bark and blood sprayed out from his body, and he let out a cry of pain as the Prophet hurtled past him, riddling his flanks and back with a dozen bullets. Each hit with the force of a fist, knocking the wind out of John and pushing him dangerously off-balance. He willed a dozen roots to spring from each of his feet to correct this, and only just barely avoided hitting the ground like a ragdoll. A vine ripped out of John’s fingertips and he spun it around like a whip, seeking to smash the Prophet to bloody pieces with the sheer force of the blow.
The Prophet only let out a sharp chortle and dove to the ground as the vine harmlessly whooshed over his head—the jagged tip of it came a hairsbreadth away from ripping Vera in half, and John had an instant to register the look of fear on her face before Fritz fired one last round at his face. The bullet tore a jagged line across the armor-like layer of bark spreading across his cheeks and hurt like Hellfire.
Fritz squeezed the trigger again. Click. “Well, that’s embarrassing.” He laughed sheepishly. “Normally I last longer, but you’ve got me just so excited—”
“DIE, YOU FUCK!” John screamed.
He slashed the whip back again—and suddenly, Fritz hurled the empty handgun at his face. It slammed into John’s right eye, immediately blackening it, and he instinctively reached upward to protect his vision from any further damage. It was a fatal mistake, for the vine that would have torn Fritz apart uselessly hurtled up into the air.
In a flash, Fritz’s hands slipped into the folds of his robe and withdrew two new guns. He spun them about, once, then twice, and then opened fire.
It was if twenty sledgehammers slammed into John’s chest simultaneously. He flew backward in a cloud of bark, blood, and smoke as the devastating volley shredded into him like God’s wrath.
“Incendiary bullets!” Fritz called out over his gunfire. “Probably should’ve thought of them before you became a fucking tree, Suicide!”
John’s back slammed against the oaken wall that he had constructed. He could barely sense anything below his neck—it was a haze of pain and shredded flesh, burning in a dozen places where the bullets had ignited. But somehow, he could just barely feel his right hand connect with one of the branches behind him. For an instant, he felt a surge of quiet strength flow through his tortured body—and with all his might, he willed it forward.
A vast thicket of thorns and branches surged outward from the barricade, reaching for Fritz with a hundred grasping fingers. “Shit,” the Prophet swore. He leapt back, blasting the rest of his ammunition into the maze of vegetation. Great swathes of it were set alight, but there was still far too much of it, and in barely a second, both his guns ran dry.
John gave him a bloody smile from within the charging forest. It’s over.
Fritz leapt backward again, neatly dodging a gnarled root that swiped up at him from the ground. He nimbly landed in a crouch next to Vera. The female Horseman rushed him, blindly reaching out a hand to seize his face, but the Prophet barely paid any attention to her. Without paying her so much as a second glance, he smashed one of his empty guns up into her face (the crack of her nose was evident even over the sounds of Simon and Plague fighting Longinus), kicked her legs out from under her, and used her own momentum to hurl her at the charging forest. The hungry vegetation reached out, eager to impale her.
“No!” John called out. He wrenched the thicket back, halting its progress and just barely saving Vera from being literally eaten alive by the vegetation.
It was not much time, but more than Fritz needed. “It’s not Hellfire,” he said as he swiftly pulled out a grenade from within a bandolier under his robe. He nimbly flicked the pin off with his thumb and lazily tossed it at the two Horsemen. “But it’ll do.”
John had barely enough time to shield his eyes from the inferno.
41
As Fritz nimbly dodged the tree-man’s clumsy attacks, blasting him to bits with his pistols, Longinus slowly strode toward Simon and Amaury. “I always suspected you were something,” he said to Simon as he twirled the golden lance in his hands. “Fritz, the fool, is far too obvious with his endless plots. But even I didn’t think he had gotten his hands on one of you counterfeit Horsemen.”
“We’re real enough,” Amaury sneered.
“You are merely low-quality mockeries of the original Horsemen,” Longinus said coldly. “How do the new recruits phrase it? I believe their words are: off-brand.”
“And the originals were spineless traitors who betrayed the Master the first chance they got,” Amaury growled. “Is that why you hide your Mark under your robes, Longinus?”
“The Master betrayed us,” Longinus argued. He continued to stride forward; the two of them were now nearly within the reach of the lance he carried.
Simon raised his makeshift club higher, ready to charge forward. Beside him, he could hear Amaury shifting his feet, ready to do the same.
“His idiotic thirst for power, his madness…but you’re from Judecca, aren’t you? I suspect you know all of those things firsthand.” Longinus’s dead eyes narrowed. “Especially his lust for pain.”
Amaury hurled one of his knives at the Prophet’s face with the speed and ferocity of a tiger. There was a clash of
steel as Longinus jerked his lance up to intercept the blade. “You know nothing of pain,” Amaury snarled.
“You wretched fool.” Longinus sighed. For a moment, his stone features loosened, and Simon saw a brief glimmer of what just might have been something like pity. “But words are useless.” Longinus’s face tightened once again into his battle-mask. “They always were.”
He lunged forward with the lance, ready to sink it deep into Simon’s abdomen. Simon leapt back, smashing his club down at the golden weapon—he could knock it off-balance, maybe even wrench it out of the Prophet’s hands—but the attack had been merely a feint, for Longinus whipped the lance to the side, seeking Amaury’s flank.
The clash of steel again sounded as the lancehead smashed against the twin knives in Amaury’s hands. “Don’t let it touch you,” he hissed between gritted teeth as he strained against the lance. “It’ll—”
Simon lunged forward and swung his club at Longinus’s head. The Prophet’s eyes slightly widened, and he wrenched his lance back to intercept the blow with the weapon’s golden shaft.
“Don’t touch the Lance’s head,” Manto warned from her place on Amaury’s hip. Her voice shifted in volume as Amaury scampered to the side, seeking to flank Longinus.
Simon and Longinus strained their weapons together, each seeking to push the other off-balance. The Prophet was like an iron wall; no matter how hard Simon shoved against him—even with the arms that he could throw boulders with—the damned man simply would not move. “And why’s that?” he spat.
“It rips away souls,” Longinus whispered. “Even ones as twisted as yours, Horseman.”
A sudden burst of force slammed into Simon, neatly knocking him back and breaking his makeshift club in half. Granted a reprieve from the deadlock, Longinus spun around and stabbed his lance directly at Amaury, who had been sneaking on him from behind. Amaury raised a knife to angle the blow away, but the blood-tinged lancehead neatly smashed it into a thousand shards, and continued forward, about to take Amaury in the heart —
