by C. L. Werner
The green tendrils faded into nothingness, releasing the warjack from their corrosive grip. Likewise, the stifling heat began to dissipate, the normal chill of a fading autumn creeping back into the air.
The bokor bellowed once, a deep booming growl. In a panicked scurry, the reptile scrambled to the side of the steamer and threw itself over the side, vanishing into the murky waters of the channel. The other gatormen hastened to follow their chief.
The warjack caught the last of the gatormen near it, cutting the brute in half with its scrapsaw before scooping up the gory remains with its claw and tossing them into the water. With no other living reptiles on deck, the machine lumbered over to each saurian carcass, pitching them one after another into the channel. Rutger ordered it to desist before it could damage the steamer trying to get at some of the harder to reach corpses.
Rutger patted the steel leg of the ’jack as he left it standing idle on the promenade. “After this, I think the crew is going to treat you a lot better,” he told the machine as he walked away. It might have been a trick of his imagination, but he fancied the burn in the optics gleamed a bit brighter after the cortex processed his words.
Leaving the idle warjack behind, Rutger hastened to the top of the steamboat. When he reached the hurricane deck, he felt the weight of fear drop from him. A very healthy Taryn was standing over a pair of dead gatormen, their heads pulped by her rune shots. A third was lying a short distance away, its throat slit and its face a mass of oozing holes.
“A kill to your credit, Earl,” Rutger congratulated Alessandro. The nobleman was sitting on the deck, running his hands through his hair, an expression of dumb horror on his face.
“Miss di la Rovissi had to finish it,” the earl confessed. He kicked his boot at the discharged pepperbox pistol lying beside him. “My weapon didn’t have enough force to kill it. But for Miss di la Rovissi, it would have taken me.”
Rutger didn’t like the demoralized quality in the earl’s manner. “I almost ended up as dinner for one of them myself,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing that could shake anyone’s courage.”
Earl Alessandro looked up, fixing Rutger with haunted eyes. “It wasn’t going to kill me. It was going to take me. Take me to him.”
“The earl believes the gatormen deliberately attacked this ship,” Taryn explained.
“Of course they did,” Rutger laughed. “That’s what gatormen do.”
Taryn shook her head and stepped towards Rutger. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper, barely carrying to her partner’s ears. “No,” she said. “He believes they attacked this ship. They wanted the Spectre. He thinks they came to get him.”
Rutger thought about the slaughter he had witnessed on the promenade, the monsters raging among the refugees. He thought of the scar-faced man in the bumboat, guiding the gatormen to the attack, setting the reptilian horrors against a refugee ship just to get one man. Anger flared through him, as he considered such raw evil.
“So much death, so much horror,” Earl Alessandro moaned. “All because of me. To get me, Olt would slaughter everyone on this boat!”
“We have to get him back to his stateroom,” Taryn said, waving one of her magelocks for emphasis. “That kind of thing is exactly the stuff we don’t want anyone on this boat hearing.”
Rutger nodded his agreement. In a few strides he was standing over his employer, lifting the shaken man from the deck. “Come along, sir. You will feel much better down below.”
The earl struggled in the mercenary’s grip. “You don’t understand!” he railed. “Arisztid Olt will kill everyone to get at me!”
“No one is going to kill you while you are under our protection,” Taryn tried to reassure him.
“We’ll disembark near Deepwood Tower,” Rutger told the earl, taking up the reassuring tone. “There are sure to be wagons, maybe even horses there. We can head overland to Fellig and take the train.” He smiled at the nobleman. “No gatormen on a train,” he promised.
Earl Alessandro smiled back. It was a cold smile, filled with mirthless mockery. “Olt will find me. You know nothi…” he began. Immediately his mouth snapped shut, choking off whatever words had been on his tongue. Pulling away from Rutger, the nobleman made a show of brushing the dirt and blood from his coat, then, with a stiff back and bold steps he made his way to the ladder.
“Bring my pepperbox and meet me in my stateroom,” the earl ordered before making his descent.
Taryn and Rutger stared at one another. “What have we gotten ourselves into?” Taryn asked.
Reaching down and retrieving the pepperbox from the deck, Rutger could only shake his head. “I don’t know,” he answered. “But whatever it is, we’re committed until we reach Five Fingers.”
“If we make it that far,” Taryn added, almost too softly for him to hear.
Before the Khadoran invasion of the Thornwood, the wealthy citizens of Ord were disdainful of their northern railway. The nobles, particularly those of Armandor, saw it as a blight upon the natural beauty of the Arman moors. The cost-conscious merchants and nobles regarded such an enterprise as a poor return on investment. There was far greater profit and hazard in the seatrade, they felt. Good business was the best argument against a railway in the north.
That was before the forces of the Empire had started to expand, before Khardoran troops had conquered Llael and threatened the Thornwood. The violent realities of these conflicts transformed the idea of such a railway from financial folly to necessity.
Now that railway served as a vital lifeline between the city of Fellig and the rest of Ord. Troops and materiel could be dispatched north in a matter of days to reinforce the border while a steady trickle of refugees from the fighting was sent southward along the line. For many fleeing the occupation in Llael, the railway was the last leg in their bid for freedom.
One of those Llaelese refugees, a young girl whose blue frock and satin shoes had yet to lose the veneer of displaced aristocracy, scampered excitedly down the aisles of the improvised passenger cars. Designed with the sparse requirements of northbound soldiers rather than the comforts of civilian travelers in mind, an effort was made to render the barracks cars more comfortable on the southward journey, chiefly through the removing of benches and providing extra leg room for the passengers. The arrangements were still rough, but compared to the hazards of crossing the Khadoran frontier, they were almost luxurious.
Bouncing a brilliant red ball, the young exile sped through the cars, her childish giggles bringing smiles to some, frowns of annoyance to others. Sometimes she would stop and stare in curiosity at some traveler. But youth is inconstant and the attraction would swiftly pass, leaving the child free to chase her ball once more.
In one car, the girl spent a particularly long time watching a group of travelers. One was a man, what her mother would have called a “gentleman.” Though his rough clothes made it seem otherwise, the child could see through the veneer. She could tell from his pale complexion, his soft skin, and his aquiline face that he wasn’t one of “them,” what her father called “peasants.”
The two people with him were. The child could see that at once. Their skins were tough like leather and baked dark from being out in the sun. They had a crude way of speaking, not precise and careful with their words the way proper people were. One of them was a man, handsome in the rough fashion of peasants. The other was a woman, and the girl had trouble deciding if she was pretty or not. She finally decided that she was, but not in the way proper ladies were. Her mother had discharged several of their maids over the years for being that kind of pretty.
When the pretty-but-not-pretty woman looked at her and smiled, the little girl waved her fingers at her. Then she tucked her ball under her arm and retreated down the aisle. Through one car and down another she ran, dodging around passengers and ducking under stewards. It wasn’t until she was almost at the back of the train that she stopped.
“I saw them, Prelate Corofax,” the little girl anno
unced.
The man she addressed was sitting at the farthest end of the bench, right beside the window. There were three other men sitting between her and him, but the girl did her best to ignore them. They were ugly, nasty-looking brutes and they smelled ugly too. Her mother had always taught her that ladies do not dally with peasants.
The man at the window turned around. He was dressed all in black, from boots to gloves to the long coat that was folded around his gaunt frame. At the sound of her voice, an easy smile spread across his thin face, the depths of his icy blue eyes thawed with burgeoning warmth. Leaning forward and lowering his head so that he might be at eye-level with his young conversant, Corofax folded his hands together and waited for the child’s report.
“A gentleman and a peasant man and peasant lady,” the girl said, her excitement causing the words to run together. “The gentleman was wearing peasant clothes, but I saw he was a gentleman,” the child added proudly.
Corofax reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out a shiny silver coin. “And what else can you tell me about them?” he asked, waving the coin so that the light from the window played across it.
At the end of the girl’s report, Corofax laid the coin in her palm. “You are a good and clever girl,” he told her. “Now go to your mommy and stay with her.” He watched as the child raced back up the aisle to find her parents. Corofax smiled as he watched her go, then slowly reached beneath the breast of his coat, producing a fold of yellow cloth.
“She might be mistaken,” the burly man seated beside Corofax suggested.
“You are much too suspicious,” Corofax reprimanded him. “Innocence can be found in people and when it is, you should trust it.” He began to unfold the yellow cloth, exposing the crude skull embroidered upon it. The sight of the death’s head caused his companion to look away, casting his gaze down the aisle where the little girl could be seen disappearing into the next car.
“We could wait, Arisztid,” the man suggested, a tremor in his voice. “Get them after they leave the train.”
The easy smile was gone from Arisztid Olt’s thin face, his blue eyes fading into arctic pits. “I said to trust innocence, Janos, not to become overly attached to it.” Olt reached to the window, drawing open the sash and tying the edge of the cloth to it. With a flick of his hand, he sent the rest of the cloth whipping out to flutter against the side of the train.
“We will be passing the Scrapwater soon,” Olt told his associate. “When we do, Delt and his reptilian friends will see our signal. Let us hope they prove more capable than they were in the marsh.”
“But the casualties Arisztid!” Janos objected. “Do you know how many will die if those monsters attack the train?”
Olt’s cold eyes bored into his henchman. “You are far too sentimental, my friend. Of course I know how many will die.” Olt leaned back in his seat. “Total massacre. No survivors.”
PART TWO
In the cramped confines of the Fellig train there was no consideration given for wealth or breeding. Utilitarian to the extreme, the barracks cars lacked the luxury or seclusion of even the Spectre’s dingy stateroom. The best that Earl Alessandro’s gold could procure for him was a bench situated at the fore of the car facing rearward so that the nobleman’s back might be to the wall and his eyes turned towards his fellow passengers – a motley admixture of Llaelese refugees and Ordic camp followers from all walks of life. Whores wealthy from a season servicing the garrison sat beside penniless aristocrat exiles, boisterous sellswords keeping company with dour Morrowan clerics. Young children bawled, ragged elders wept silent tears, and a dispossessed baron defamed the parentage of the Khadoran Empress in a loud and colorful voice. Running beneath the babble of the passengers, the steady susurrus of wheel against rail lulled the consciousness into apathy, a rhythmic melody to accompany the continual sway and rock of the carriage.
Taryn shook her head. After everything they’d been through, she was surprised these people still had any energy left to complain. Even if they’d been packed into the cars like cattle, this was by far the most luxurious leg of their exodus. Certainly it was better than the twenty-five mile overland slog from Deepwood Tower to Fellig, dodging Khadoran patrols every step of the way. The few horses and wagons available at the tower had been priced at rates even Boss Yatsek would have found criminal. Earl Alessandro had been reluctant to pay the extortionate fees demanded by the profiteering Cygnaran quartermaster, but in the end expediency had won out over economy. He was still more afraid of Olt than he was of any empty purse.
Sitting across from Earl Alessandro, Taryn found herself studying the nobleman’s haunted expression, the fear of impending doom lurking behind his aristocratic eyes. She had been on intimate terms with a good many noblemen before the Khadorans had decided to add Llael to their ambitions of empire. Their troubles were seldom of such a nature as to be easily understood by a commoner. The disgrace of wearing an out-of-fashion coat to Duchess Highandmighty’s Golven Eve ball, or the abominable slight suffered to his prestige by some chance remark made by Palantine Suchandsuch at the Archduke’s annual farrow cull. The bluebloods truly moved in a world all their own, so far above the problems of everyday existence that they found themselves compelled to invent new ones in the shape of courtly courtesies and royal propriety. Often they would take such foolishness to tragic extremes. How many duels had Taryn witnessed that had their beginning in some petty and absurd incident? How many feuds had been handed down from one generation to the next because of something as ridiculous as a vassal lord riding a horse taller than that of his liege? It might be laughable if the coin of such affairs wasn’t the paid in the blood of those the nobles ruled.
As she scrutinized Earl Alessandro, Taryn was at an equal loss to understand the trouble weighing him down. The difference was, she knew his wasn’t a simple matter of injured pride and outraged honor. If a fiend like Arisztid Olt had taken an interest in the earl, then there was a good reason.
Try as she might, Taryn couldn’t figure out what that reason was. From the earl’s insistence that they reach Five Fingers before the 17th of Katesh, it was clear there was someone or something he was going to meet there. Who or what that was, however, she was still completely in the dark. After the attack by the gatormen on the Spectre, the earl had closed up tighter than a steam valve.
There was something the earl knew that he wasn’t telling. What might that secret be? Did it relate to something back in Llael or was it something ahead of them in Ord? Was it some legacy from the past or some possibility of the future? Visions of everything from the lost crown jewels of the Martyns to evidence of Prime Minister Deyar Glabryn’s collusion with the Khadorans before the invasion teased at Taryn’s imagination and toyed with her more avaricious hopes. One thing was clear: whatever the secret was, it could make someone rich, or dead.
Taryn shook her head, disgusted with the turn her thoughts had taken. Avarice was a quality she’d tried hard to purge herself of. She considered it an unwanted legacy from her mother and father, if the thuggish weasel had indeed belonged to that title. Before she’d escaped them for the shelter of an orphanage, Taryn had seen the depravity unbridled greed could lead to. For all of that, she still knew there was a stubbornly selfish streak in her that defied every effort at exorcism. She always had to be on her guard against it, for she knew only too well the awful places it could lead and the terrible cost it could demand.
Thoughts of the past sent Taryn’s gaze straying from the brooding earl to the man seated beside him. Girded in his mail, his sword resting across his lap and his pistol holstered at his belt, Rutger looked like he should have been headed towards the garrison in Fellig rather than away from it. He had the weary, resigned presence of a soldier on campaign, of a man who has been so accustomed to the nearness of death that he becomes indifferent to it. Taryn wondered if she had that same jaded, indifferent look – something else she’d rather not contemplate. It was her first time aboard a train and she was finding i
t unpleasant, leading her mind into pastures she’d rather not tarry in.
“A few hours should put us in Armandor,” Rutger told her. “From there we can find a steamer to get us down the Dragon’s Tongue.” The mercenary turned his head to consider his employer. “Unless you’ve made other arrangements.” The earl looked out the window, watching the bleak expanse of moor turn to swamp as they passed by. The train had started to slow as it trundled across a timber trellis, negotiating the narrow causeway across the foggy morass of scummy pools and mire.
Earl Alessandro was slow to stir from his troubled reverie. “No,” he said. “I think it is better not to plan ahead too much. Plans can be discovered and present the enemy with opportunity.”
Taryn arched an eyebrow at the nobleman’s reasoning. “Playing things off the cuff hasn’t made it any safer,” she pointed out. “You’ve lost your retainers at Aliston Yard. It was only by mere chance you found us to replace them. Where would you have been if we hadn’t been there to fend off the gatormen?” Taryn paused, waiting for her words to sink in. “If you want to keep ahead of the enemy, you need to start trusting the people helping you.”
The earl looked from Taryn to Rutger, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “What friends don’t know, the enemy won’t know.”
Rutger’s expression became almost as grave as the earl’s. “We can’t protect you if we don’t know what lies ahead,” he stated. “You said before that Olt doesn’t want you killed. That must mean he intends to get the information he wants from you – one way or another.”
