“Ah, leave it to a scout to have a keen eye.”
“You’ve got that old stone record in there, don’t you?”
Curious. “What do you know of such things?”
Novak was putting on friendly airs. “The word around the Ironhead barracks is that there are some important folks in town who would pay a lot of gold crowns for items like that. You know, should one of our patrols happen across some trinket and forget to note it in our reports.”
“I know nothing of such rumors.” This was technically true, as he’d simply spoken to Baron Rathleagh directly about the matter. “As your Professor Wynn says, this artifact belongs in a museum.”
“Uh-huh. Well, be careful it doesn’t fall out of your pack once we get to the train. And just in case it does get ‘lost,’ I’d be willing to make some introductions for a percentage. Call it a finder’s fee.”
Acosta laughed. “Have you met Thornbury yet? I think you two would get along splendidly.”
Novak frowned. “Don’t think you know me, Ordsman. This isn’t about greed. I lost my whole squad to monsters. You have any idea how small the death benefit is the army sends to those families? It’s a pittance. It isn’t near enough to make up for losing a parent. My friends shouldn’t have had to die for nothing. I’m just looking out for their people.”
“A fine sentiment. I will think about it,” Acosta lied. Cleasby had almost reached them, and the archeologist was next in line behind him. The redheaded woman was giving Acosta a suspicious look. He did not think she trusted him to carry their precious historical trinket. She was wise. He said, “You’d best continue, ranger.”
“Yes. Think about it.” Cloak billowing around her, Novak turned and set out at a run.
A moment later, Cleasby came to a clanking, red-faced, panting halt. He put his hands on his knees and bowed his head. “There’s no bloody air up here.”
“You should train more at altitude. It makes you fight like a champion closer to the sea.” Acosta took out his canteen, unscrewed the cap, and then held out the canteen to Cleasby. “So, which of your men did you leave behind?”
“Hellogand can hardly walk, and Langston broke his leg back in Caspia and can’t run distances worth a damn since.” Cleasby took that canteen and had a long drink. He coughed when he realized it wasn’t water. “What is this toxic swill?”
“Grog. Don’t make that face. This is Five Fingers’ finest. The lime juice in the beer and rum prevents scurvy.”
Cleasby coughed as it set his chest on fire, then spit. “Refreshing.”
“You would not be so tired right now if you were not carrying twenty pounds of coal.”
Cleasby handed the canteen back. “When the skinwalkers realize what we’re doing, you’ll be glad we brought Headhunter.”
A whistle from above reached them; Novak was trying to get their attention. Normally the rangers communicated by imitating various bird calls, but the Storm Knights didn’t know what to listen for, and most of them were half-deaf from using galvanic weapons anyway. Acosta waved up the mountainside. “The ranger wants you.”
“You think so?” Cleasby seemed intrigued. “Well, I don’t know about that. She seems nice and all. Rather pretty too. Not to mention competent and confident. But I’m an officer, and she’s enlisted, so that would technically be a violation of regulations. Either way, now is hardly the time to be thinking about—”
Acosta sighed. “No, my friend. I mean she is trying to get your attention. I think she’s spotted something.”
“Oh.” Cleasby signaled for those behind him to slow down, and then he began to climb the rise without meeting Acosta’s eye. “Pay no attention to what I said about her. It was the head wound talking.”
Novak had stopped at the crest of the path and concealed herself. The ranger’s cloak blended in perfectly with the ground and broke up her silhouette. She was next to a tree trunk, hood up to hide her hair, rifle braced over a rock, and looking down at something on the other side. Cleasby moved up behind her as quietly as possible, which for someone in storm armor, wasn’t saying much. Acosta followed.
She nodded downhill and passed her spyglass to Cleasby. Far below them was a grey, rocky valley. Something moved out in the open. From here, all he could see was a campfire, but because the wind favored them, he could smell smoke and cooking pork. Poles had been driven into the ground, like hunters would use to hang game, and skinned carcasses hung from them. Cleasby watched for a moment and stiffened in surprise. He passed the spyglass to Acosta.
It wasn’t pork cooking.
There were three people—an adult and two young men, barely more than children—crouched by the fire eating. They were wearing nothing but filthy loincloths and were more than likely skinwalkers in human form. All but one of the bodies hanging from the poles had been stripped and skinned; Acosta could see the bones. He’d known before that they’d eaten human flesh, but he’d assumed that was only in their transformed state. Very few things offended Acosta; it turned out cannibalism was among them.
“Is that your patrol?” Cleasby whispered.
Novak shook her head. No.
“Who are they, then?”
Acosta had a pretty good guess. He twisted the spyglass to focus on the body that was still in one piece and confirmed that it was the gun mage, Lambert Sayre. “It does not matter. We should go around.”
“That one is still alive,” Novak reported. “I saw him move.”
Curses. Acosta already knew what Cleasby would say.
“We’ve got to rescue him. They’re out of glaive range.” He looked back to see the others had nearly caught up. “Can you take them?”
“That’s one hell of a long shot for this rifle,” she muttered, never lifting her cheek from the stock. “I can try. Walk me in.”
There was a terrible crash from below as Headhunter pushed a tree out of his path.
The skinwalkers’ heads snapped around, scanning the tree line concealing the Malcontents.
Novak fired. There was a puff of white dust as her bullet struck a rock immediately next to the adult. They all instantly bolted in different directions. Novak broke open the rifle, swore, and pulled another round from her bandoleer.
Acosta still had the spyglass. “You were one foot low and one foot left.”
“Wind.” She got the rifle reloaded in record time, braced the stock, and exhaled as she tracked the running targets. They were heading down a ravine and were almost out of sight. She fired again. It seemed to take forever for the bullet to reach them, but the eldest skinwalker threw his hands into the air and pitched forward, landing on his face and sliding down the rocks to disappear over the edge.
The gunshot echoed across the canyon walls. “If they didn’t know we were on the move before, they do now,” Cleasby said as he stood up. He began waving his arms toward the rest of the Malcontents. “Come on!”
“I will go and rescue that poor man,” Acosta said as he vaulted over the rock and ran down the hill before anyone could protest. Knowing he had a narrow window, he recklessly slid down the mountainside in a shower of gravel and dirt, as fast as he dared without breaking a limb. It was a long, treacherous slide to the bottom, and then a long sprint across the open.
Sayre had come to when he’d heard the gunfire. “Over here!” he shouted, his voice hoarse. He was dangling a foot off the ground, arms stretched over his head, and his body slowly rotated on the creaking rope as he kicked his legs. From the look of him, he’d taken a beating. “Help me!”
But then the rope brought him around enough that he saw it was Acosta. “Oh, no.”
Acosta smiled as he spun a storm glaive around and approached the helpless gun mage.
“Oh, come on! You can’t possibly count this as crossing your path,” Sayre exclaimed, eyes wide, as Acosta hoisted the glaive.
“Hurry and cut him down,” Novak shouted. “I’ll cover you.”
Acosta was surprised to hear how close she was. Despite his mad dash down
the mountain, she was now only twenty yards behind him. And to think, a few minutes before he had been praising the quality of ranger physical conditioning. A witness certainly limited his options for dealing with Rathleagh’s man.
“It’s your lucky day, friend,” Acosta whispered. He swung his blade, cleaving through the wood. Sayre fell, landed on numb legs, and collapsed. Acosta crouched next to him, shoved the tip of the glaive between Sayre’s rope burned wrists and paused for effect. “We’ve never met.”
He nodded vigorously. “Complete strangers.”
Acosta pulled back, and the glaive’s razor edge effortlessly split the rope’s fibers. It was tempting to cut the gun mage’s thumb off and say it had been an accident, but Sayre might actually prove useful getting off this mountain.
“Did you get it?” Sayre whispered.
Acosta glared at him, regretting his decision on the thumb.
Novak called out as she scanned for threats. “Are there any more of them?”.
“Just the three. The rest ran off during the night.” Sayre’s voice was hoarse. “You got any water?”
“No.” Acosta said. And he wasn’t going to waste good Five Fingers’ grog on a man who’d become such a nuisance to him. Still, Novak came over and gave him her canteen. Sayre drank greedily.
Cleasby reached them next. “It’ll take a few minutes for Headhunter to make it down the hill.”
“He does look kind of top-heavy,” Novak said.
“Don’t say that in front of the warjack. He might take offense.” Cleasby looked at the dead men hanging and blanched. “Savages.”
“They cut up my men and made me watch.” Sayre was staring into the distance, looking anywhere but at the dead. His pockmarked cheeks were quivering. It was almost enough to make Acosta pity him.
“Who are you?” Cleasby asked.
“Lambert Sayre, Grey Fox mercenary company. We were on our way to Ironhead Station looking for work when these things ambushed us on the road.” Acosta was glad that Sayre was keeping his wits about him despite how he appeared to be, but Cleasby kept a suspicious look on his face—after all, the young lieutenant was sharp. The gun mage rubbed his abraded wrists, trying to get feeling back into his hands. “Some of us got away, ran, got lost, but they took us one by one. They dragged us up here and left their youngsters to amuse themselves. The grown one was trying to get the youngsters to not be so squeamish about tormenting folks. They were learning on us.”
“Can you walk?” Cleasby asked.
“If you help me up, Storm Knight. Yeah, I recognize the armor. I was in the Arcane Tempest.”
“I’m Lieutenant Cleasby. Arcane Tempest? You’re a gun mage.” Cleasby pulled Sayre to his feet. “That’s excellent news.”
“I’d say so.” Sayre stood on wobbly legs for a moment and then hobbled over to the bloody pile of discarded clothing, hats, and boots left by the fire. He began tossing things aside until he found a pistol belt. One holster held a magelock in it, but the other was empty. Half of the loops were loaded with the expensive brass cartridges that gun mages preferred. Sayre eyed the gun for a moment. Acosta tensed a bit, but then Sayre threw the belt around his waist and buckled it. “You folks look like you’re in a hurry. Mind if I come with you?”
Cleasby nodded. “Truthfully, we could use all the help we can get.”
To accentuate the point, a terrible howl echoed through the valley. Novak turned her rifle in the direction of the sound, but the skinwalker was hidden somewhere deep in the rocky ravine, shrouded in mist.
Several other howls answered the first one. It was difficult to tell from the echoes, but it was apparent there were a lot of them, and they came from seemingly every direction.
“That infernal sound is going to haunt my nightmares,” Sayre muttered as he kept picking through the belongings, looking for something.
The other Malcontents joined them. Cleasby began shouting orders. “Top off Headhunter’s coal.” Pangborn immediately began gathering an equal amount of coal from each man’s pack to feed their hungry ’jack. “From here on out, don’t get more than a few paces away from the man ahead of you. Keep your heads up. If you see anything that could possibly be a skinwalker, call out.”
Rains moved to the dangling bodies. He took off his helmet, dark face dripping with sweat, and let it drop to the ground as he slowly walked around them. Even though they’d been stripped, one of the bodies still had a chain around his neck. Rains slowly lifted it up until he could see it clearly. Hanging from the end was a cheap Morrowan trinket, the kind of gaudy thing peddlers hocked to the superstitious looking for luck.
Sayre saw Rains looking at it. “Glen was devout. He begged for divine help but didn’t get none, obviously. So, the savages laughed about young gods and thought it was amusing to leave it on him while they peeled him like a grape, Glen crying to Morrow the whole time. Fat lot of good it did him.”
Disgusted, Rains broke down the poles and lowered the mutilated corpses to the ground. “The fact we’ve not got time to give these men a decent burial angers me even more.” Then he surprised all of them by kneeling, violently driving the edge of Wilkin’s shield into the ground, and bowing his head. “Hear my prayer, Markus, Ascendant of Soldiers. Help us off this wretched mountain, so we can save the others. Strengthen our arms, so we can hack these skinwalker bastards into bloody chunks. Guide our lightning, so we may burn their skin and boil their blood. In return, I vow that I will return here and put your loyal servants into the ground as they deserve.”
When the promising young soldier had forsaken his old and jealous god, Acosta had seen the angry, selfish potential in Rains. He’d been disappointed to see him end up favoring such a boring and safe god as Morrow, but maybe Rains had made a bolder choice than Acosta had given him credit for. Much could be said in praise of righteous vengeance.
Cleasby turned to the gun mage. “We’re going to be moving fast. Do you think you can keep up, Mr. Sayre?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about me. I’ll bring up the rear. One second. Ah, here’s my hat.” Sayre bent down and picked up a battered tricorn. He stuck the ugly thing on his head. “There. Now I can go.”
As they moved out, the gun mage gave Acosta a small nod. The two of them still had unfinished business.
The next few hours were hell. Cleasby’s head felt like it was about to explode. Some of the stitches Horner had given him had worked loose, and the inside of his helmet was once again sticky with his blood. Despite the cool weather, the inside of his armor was soaked. His constant perspiration kept the wound from drying, and the path his sweat followed along the ridges of the cut was punctuated by a sharp stinging. All he could do was furrow and ruffle his brow to keep the sweat dripping, deterring its attempt to pool. His feet were throbbing to the point where he was convinced they were now double their original size; his knees felt like they had ground through their cartilage; his lungs were burned by each breath and groan; and the weight on his shoulders seemed to get heavier with each step. Every long stride was announced by the creaking of metal joints, followed by the crescendo of an insulated boot banging against the rocks, repeated thousands of times. Knowing each tedious footfall ate up a bit more distance across the misty slope of this godforsaken mountain was all that kept him going.
There was no hiding a cacophonous squad of jogging Storm Knights and a six-ton warjack, so Novak stuck to open ground, grassy valleys, and rocky slopes, avoiding tall brush and evergreen copses wherever possible. As a result, cover favored their pursuers.
Cleasby hadn’t seen one yet, but he’d heard them. The skinwalkers were above them, below them, behind them, and probably waiting somewhere ahead of them. At least those waiting in ambush weren’t taunting them by letting out terrifying howls every few minutes.
Novak had stopped and was looking through the spyglass at the canyon wall to their side. “Cleasby!”
He reached her a moment later, but he was too out of breath to form words.
Even the
ranger was starting to look weary. She might not be encased in armor, but she was still recovering from wounds and a fever, and it showed. She pointed at the rocks above. “Movement. There and there.”
“Skinwalkers?”.
“Dark, hairy, and hiding—if it isn’t skinwalkers, it’s a pack of something else stalking us. We’ve been heading down, and we’ll be dropping steep in the next quarter-mile. The canyon walls will block most of the sunlight. It looks like lots of ferns and moss ahead, so I’m guessing with this weather it’ll be misty down there. Bad visibility will let them get close before you can get off too many lightning bolts.”
“So you think ambush.”
“That’s where I’d hit us. Or we can backtrack a mile, take that east fork, and move across the top of the canyon, but I don’t know that route or how good the trail is.”
Cleasby was beginning to catch his breath. “And that’ll take several more hours, which puts us at the tracks after dark.”
“Good to know you can read a map.”
“Better than my rank indicates, yes.” Cleasby thought about the train schedule. The last one he recalled would be passing through before sundown. They would not survive the night out here in the open. “No. We keep pushing. We’ll fight our way through.” He banged the flat of his glaive against his buckler as hard as he could, a distinct sound that would carry. That got the Storm Knights’ attention. “Charge glaives and form up!”
“I’ll get back on point,” Novak said.
“One more thing, ranger. If things go bad, we’re a distraction. The important thing is getting help. If we start to lose, you’re the fastest one here. You need to make it without us. ”
“Yes, sir.” There was no hesitation in her answer, but Novak looked grim just the same. “Remember, I already had to abandon one squad to these things, lieutenant. Please don’t make me have to live with two.”
Their single-file line turned into a rough circle. They slowed from a jog to a fast march as they descended into the misty valley. The visibility was even worse than Novak had predicted. A handful of humans and a warjack against an unknown number of skinwalkers, and who knew what else was lurking in there, seemed fated to end badly. Through the exhausted haze, he could feel the squad’s excitement and dread. Cleasby looked to Acosta. “You think this is the fight you came here for?”
Into the Wild Page 23
