The main head turns to us, eyes filled with fire, and howls in fury. Teeth made of shattered femurs jut from its jaw. A stream of signifiers fall into the runes of death which drive it forward.
What a silly move from Mr. Thomas.
My companions do me proud. Emmet is already ambling forward, accelerating as he switches from the consideration of philosophy and the protection of ponies to the more martial arts at which he excels by virtue of mass and practice.
He has momentum on his side and an endless imperative to protect those under his care. One that does not rely on clumsy blood magic reanimations however advanced they might appear to a neophyte. And my witch friend is summoning up a storm of hexes grasped between her palms that buzz like hornets ready to be hurled at Mr. Thomas himself.
Why strike the wall when you can undermine the foundation?
Hemlock is… fluffier of tail and hissing angrily. I’ll count him out of the fight for now. His spirit is noted.
The key consideration for me is whether I should attempt to take down the creature of bone and sinew, splashing towards us through the mulch, or concentrate my attention on the treacherous Mr. Thomas as with the estimable Ariadne. I am edging towards the first option given that Mr. Thomas’s sole means of transport is the “adorable pony” waiting behind us, meaning that once we have addressed his monster we could ‘address’ the fellow at length and under some duress on his motivations.
This ‘Cult’ merits investigation.
I check the pony is still there and hasn’t snuck up on us or something, but when Mr. Thomas sees my glance he does something unexpected.
“Keep the pony,” he laughs through the thickening sleet-storm. “it was here when I arrived.”
His vermiform fingers twitch and the red letters held within spread upwards in a miniature typhoon.
And down from the clouds snakes a thick scaled tendril, lightning fast and monstrous, time seems to stand still for a moment with the individual snowflakes frozen in place and time, as the tentacle wraps itself around Mr. Thomas’ waist.
Then the ice in the air is moving again and he is pulled upwards at a speed beyond even my capacity to process and the curse I was preparing to honour him with, dies on my lips. Ariadne is faster and releases her well-crafted hex with a snarl but the bright vortex of power strikes nothing, the snow and mud where the increasingly interesting Mr. Thomas had been standing boiling away in a puff of flames steam and colour.
There is a crunch from the castle gate where Emmet’s steam engine charge has intersected with Thomas' creature of bone. The battle is equally balanced. Emmet has smashed one of the creature’s legs in his charge but it has a lot more limbs with which to play and they are working to grip and push poor Emmet down into the writhing mud. Grasping and clawing at his exterior and cracking the enamel casing that unknown hands have provided.
The creature’s three heads howl at the sky as Emmet fights back, breaking each of the limbs gripping him in turn with impactful swings of his own. I recognise one of the heads as the dead Russian closest to Emmet from the room where he was stored. I hope there’s nothing left of the man in there, as Mr. Thomas has created something of an abomination and it would be terrible for his last experience on this Earth to be seeing through dead eyes, his head disarticulated from all it has known.
So whose is the pony?
Maybe the Russian’s? That would explain a lot. Assumedly there would be more than one such animal and maybe we are looking at the last survivor of a veritable pony-train. The wolves returning at regular intervals to consume the helpless tied animals.
That will mean it will need to be fed. There is scant forage for an animal that size other than the sharp grass which seems to thrive in these conditions.
“Pay attention Master Lumpy!”
Ariadne may have a point. Emmet is caught up with the first bone monster and it appears to have brought friends. A second and then a third clamber over the high castle walls. Or rather, scuttle. They are less human than the first of the monsters, maybe Thomas (he no longer merits a Mr.) had less time to bind them. Anyway they are twenty feet tall and as wide, insect like, if insects had a dozen limbs and four or five heads apiece.
No. Like a crab. Wide of body, a surfeit of limbs and sharp mandibles clacking together.
Another hex from Ariadne removes several of the legs and half a rib cage from the first over the wall, but its friend leaps forward from a crouching position towards us, bone arms tipped with sharp shards raised to strike at the witch who is leaping to the side holding her hat on for dear life.
The ground is uneven, icy. She slips.
With a gesture I catch the monster around a dozen feet from the ground and crush it back, fragments of bone shattering against the walls as it comes apart. Then I smash its friend against the wall and hold it there until it stops moving. It crumbles against the hard flint and bonded cement.
Couldn’t do that with a wooden wall, that truly is progress. Mud? Wouldn’t risk it. Takes a long time to repair damage if you’ve broken the structural integrity.
By now Emmet has pulled apart the first of the monsters. Methodically reversing the articulation of its sad mockery of the human form and pulling each piece apart. Stoically ignoring its limited attempts to gnaw into his stony head with its all too puny human teeth and bone shards. What a complete waste of time.
Though Thomas did manage to go, up?
Emmet keeps hold of the last limb, a femur, for me to examine, but being the gentleman golem he is, first he helps Ariadne to her feet.
I look at the pony. Those saddlebags could prove a welcome relief from carrying the cat for poor Emmet.
“Having missed out on one potential travelling companion for entirely sensible reasons, I believe, for entirely less sensible reasons, we shall have a new and superior companion on our travels, Mistress Witch!”
She brushes snow from her hat. It does no good given the thick haze of white and grey flakes falling in it. “You are an odd bastard, Master Lumpy. You weren’t bothered about the house. You aren’t bothered that we just saw a man disappear of his own choice into the clouds, and you don’t seem in the slightest worried that we just got attacked by three of those…”
“Constructs?”
“Yeah. Those. Instead you’re bothered about the Pony?”
“I thought you liked ponies, Ariadne.”
“I do. Please. A little more concentration Alb… I mean Lumpy.”
I wonder if ponies still eat grass and oats and similar. “I will try and focus more Mistress Witch. But you do note that we were rather successful in that fracas?”
She nods. “Long as you focus Lumpy. I have a nasty feeling that if you don’t, things could get very bad very quickly if this is the sort of shit we’re up against.”
The leg bone in Emmets hand is trying to twitch its way free. Emmet looks at it quizzically.
“We should probably be going.” Some of the other bones and splinters next to the wall are trying to re-articulate themselves, making use of a growing carpet of mixed sinews and icy rotten flesh that is snaking out of the castle gatehouse. A little uniform green in there too. Very interesting. “That’s a fascinating charm. Can’t think I’ve come across anything even similar.”
“Not sure if you heard me the first time so just going to repeat it for effect. Man goes up to clouds.” She looks at the reconstituting monstrosities. “What the hell do you think that Mr. Thomas was doing with that tentacle?”
“I’d rather not know. He was a very unpleasant man and I think the clouds are most welcome to him.”
Ariadne adjusts her hat with a stubborn tug. “Yeah. He was a wanker.”
I tie the bags we have been carrying on to the pony, and mutter a warming charm to help the poor fellow with the weather. It stares back at me with intelligent eyes. “Lead on Emmet. To the tree line!”
Emmet leads, Ariadne follows. I take a moment to flatten the recombinant monster behind us into the ground and leave t
he flindered bones to freeze in the icy mud. “Can hardly have that escaping.”
We are descending the road back to the plains when Ariadne bursts into a self-recriminatory exclamation. It is most unexpected and coincides with the appearance of some black and witch like dots on the horizon that indicate our flying friends are back.
“Stupid stupid stupid. Too long around you Lumpy.”
I pull a face. “Rude and uninformative even for you dear lady. Who is stupid?”
“Me.” She looks glum, pretty eyes wide. “We should have brought that arse with us. How could I be so dumb?”
“Revelation still lacking.”
“The trees. We ended up fighting a fecking culty and his bone monsters. We could have just brought him along and watched him disappear in our rear-view mirror. No fuss. No fight with gribblies or any of his mates who might be around.”
“Our what now? Mirror looking backwards. I can see the...”
“Not the point. He has no contract. He’d have been lucky not to end up in fecking Cloud loving Siberia if he had tried to travel without one. Aunty sure as hell didn’t add him to the list when she set this up and the trees hate the smell of ‘em.”
“You would have thought he’d have known that” grinds out Emmet.
I repeat Emmet’s point as an errant gust of wind and her realisation that her distaff cousins are riding the winds again have distracted Ariadne from the gentle giant’s rumble
“Maybe he didn’t know how we got here. Maybe he wasn’t planning on us getting to the woods, need to really keep an eye out for the bastards on the way back. He definitely had some nasty tricks up his skanky old sleeves.” She shakes her head. “Maybe, maybe a thousand things. That lot are difficult to understand even if you know what they’re really after, but it’s always something bad and we’re well shot of him.”
“You said something about the Union having a history with his organisation?”
Ariadne chews the side if her cheek. “Yeah, I mean no one knows outside the Union high ups exactly what at was but they either have been enemies since before everything happened and they could have had something to do with the Pacific falling into the sea, or the stuff in the clouds or...”
“Or what?”
“We had one of our lasses in one of the Ministries that formed the Union back on the day,” her voice catches on that. A story is hidden there. “And she ah, she said that the Culties are actually the people who formed the Union in the first place, bunch of spooks, old agents from their anti-magic mafia and security guys who knew enough to keep everything together when the world went to hell, but who got thrown out when the rest of them found out how they did it.”
“Oh?”
“She was never too specific about it and she disappeared years back. Lovely old banshee.” She grimaces. Is that a tear in her eye? “Hope they didn’t get her. They’re horrible people Lumps. Fanatics.”
“Want to talk about it, dear heart?”
“Nope. Not now. I’ll tell you if that changes Lumps.” She snuffles into her sleeve. “Appreciate it if you’d leave it.”
“Your wish is my command, and, well” I say, looking at our new travel companions. “Despite all the nonsense we have been through I would say that this has been another successful outing. Time to go and pick over the corpse of Paris.”
“I thought you hated Paris.” Emmet mutters.
“I do. All of France in fact. Worst decision the Council ever made. And that’s precisely why I’m looking forward to picking over its corpse.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing, dear girl. A Paris! As the Tsar said, not far from here, in the good old days.”
The next leg of our journey should be shorter and relatively uneventful. All we have to do is get back to the forest line and enjoy the journey.
20
Mr Pole’s Lonely Vigil
Pole has been watching the ruins of Paris from the open side of his command crawler for the best part of the week, give or take a few meals in a can and toilet breaks. No sign of the lost Master and no follow up on his message back to MDR command. It takes a lot of discipline not to feel cheated give he had Albrecht in hand days before.
He has maintained a twenty-four hour surveillance package of short range, low flying drones and three man patrols with sensor mines. They’ve detected nothing but wild vampires staging out of the Paris nexus and ghouls haunting the ruins of Out-Paris, the abandoned ring of settlements that fell nearly a decade before.
He’s had three injuries from vampire attacks and one from frostbite due to a badly adjusted set of thermal gloves and he’s only keeping the drones going by repairing them himself during his brief periods of downtime.
Still better than his last visit here. He’d lost friends, and the Union had lost a Protectorate. Thinking about it reminds him how lonely he’s been since they stopped assigning him juniors. Iceland had been a tough pill to swallow but he had done the right thing. And he was the last Agent still working on his line of enquiry after the untimely deaths of Czech and Milan at the Ashen Biblioteca.
A buzz. One of the crawler commanders is waiting to update him on another little wrinkle in his plans. Even when there are big wheels turning, Pole always has an eye on the smaller cogs. It’s why the Union is the good guys.
“Is the gentleman at the Memorial still there?”
“Sir.” That passes for an affirmation in the MDR’s military arm.
“Any sign he’s thinking about evacuation?”
“No, Sir. He’s dug in like a tick and refuses to talk to us. The old entry codes have been changed and he claims to be armed.”
A wild card in the pack. A simple decision to make, there’s a vent in those old bunkers that you can use to flush out unwanted occupants. They were designed for civilians hence the built-in vulnerability, the Union has never really trusted the former citizens of the Vampire Families.
Waste of effort. No gas bar the lethal sort in the suit reservoirs. He could come out shooting.
Decision made.
“Not mission critical. Leave him.” The last thing he needs is another Guard with a hole through him from a loopy old German with a leftover assault rifle. “We’ve done our best. I’ll have him written down as a hold-out.”
Outdated regulations dating back to the Paris debacle say that it’s a priority to evacuate any remaining civilians of the former North French Protectorate and properly secure Union property. He tasks two of his drones with watching over the old gent and covering the Memorial until he’s far enough away for the regulations to stop applying.
He remembers how the local children used to play there amongst the stone statues up at the Memorial back when the Protectorate had been thriving. There is something nagging at the edge of that memory. Something that Stanley had mentioned all those years ago about…
Poor old Stanley. Dead in Iceland amongst his collection of Catastrophe posters. Andrews…
Anyway.
It doesn’t matter. The drones can wait for the old gent to leave the emergency bunker and if he does, they can nab him and give him a spray and clean before shipping him up to Ruin for resettlement. Given how atrocious the weather is and the sheer number of discarded supply drop crates in the area Pole’s assumption is that the hold out will still be there long after he’s in front of a tribunal charged with wasting Union resources again.
“You can go, Corporal. Shift main search to the area just outside of the woods around the southern Vexin. If there’s any world-wood gates they have to be around there.”
“Sir.”
Pole is feeling discouraged. It is not just the lack of success in tracking down the escaped Master, there is also the fact that the old Paris Protectorate is crawling with the dead and they’re a lot more organised than he would have expected. The drones report dozens of columns back and forth to the Rhine, dinner one way, new vampires the other.
The Rhine harmonies have been outside the purview of Union command for long eno
ugh to fall into some bad habits. Can’t blame them, caught between the Vamps on one side and the Russian and German Baronies on the other. Everyone does what they have to to survive.
He checks his tablet-map. It’s updating in realtime from the drone data and every twelve minutes like clockwork one of them passes over the old Family HQ with its hidden cache of secrets. Some of the less charitable members of the MDR fraternity of agents had suggested it had been his attempt to access the library hidden within that had led to the attacks on Out-Paris.
Timelines said otherwise, he had used the attacks as cover for his incursion and had got close enough for his fingertips to itch before the whole edifice behind him had begun to fall and the evacuation had become unanswerably urgent. It had been that failure that had thrown him back on the alternative approach. Use the last Master to get the information in there for him.
So close to success. Now all he can do is wait.
His finger tips are itching again. He checks them to confirm it’s not frostbite and wriggles his fingers to restore blood flow. Vamps have it easy.
“Turret control?”
“Reporting.”
“How’s it up there?”
“Cold, sir.”
“When does your shift end?”
“Two hours, Sir.”
He checks the power cells, calculates flow rates, and then turns down the heater in the cabin diverting the feed to warm the men in the turrets running the drone searches before he settles down in the back of his crawler pulling a thick polymer heat tent around him.
He taps away at the console and pulls up the latest feeds from the East. If the Master sneaks in with one of those columns, he’ll have to catch him on the way out. There’s too many variables to cover with the resources he has but he is not going to give up. Surveillance is a question of luck.
He’ll show up like the first star in the night sky. Have to notice it before it’s swamped by the others. The thought makes Pole chuckle deep in his soul. That simile shows his age.
Master In His Tomb Page 18
