“Too much theater!” he snapped at her. “Sit down!”
Behind them, deadlings shrieked. Oil blazed. The second powder keg went up, then third. Fragments of bone and thorny vine went ricocheting off the castle walls and raining down out of the smoke-filled air. By the time the sixth and final keg blew, the entire length of the castle wall had been engulfed in smoke and flames.
The horses ran for all they were worth, taking full advantage of the one lit avenue out of town that Evadne had left them, but just before they rounded the corner that would take them out of sight of their little inferno, Keely caught sight of a solitary figure standing tall as it stepped from the flame, cape billowing around it.
“Well, that’s…what? A couple hundred deadlings we won’t have to beat with hatchets?” Keely asked.
“Something like that,” Ulric agreed. “If she’d just keep lining them up for us like that and we just had a few hundred kegs of gunpowder and time to place them all, we’d be set.”
Once they passed the last streetlamp and found themselves reduced to the light of Nolan’s one lantern to guide them, the horses were forced to slow down. After the initial mad dash, they’d needed to, anyway. The streetlamps had done their job, too, buying the cart a substantial head start and leaving an unmistakable trail for Scarlet to follow.
The galloping of a lone horse coming up fast behind them heralded Minda’s return. “That was pretty,” she beamed, slowing her horse to match their pace. “Everyone all right?”
“So far,” Ulric assured her. “Go do what you have to do. We’ll catch up.”
“That’ll be bloody nose number two,” Ulric reflected as Minda rode ahead. “Scarlet ought to be getting fairly annoyed by now.”
“I hope so,” Keely said. “I’d hate think of her hunting us down with a clear head. And speaking of clear heads…what did Minda mean, she wouldn’t let the pontifine have it?”
Ulric opened his mouth to answer, stopped halfway, started again, then finally just shrugged.
The cart rattled on down the road as quickly as it dared by lantern light—and while that was quicker than they’d seen Scarlet or the deadlings travel, the road didn’t follow a straight line, and their pursuers very well might. Keely and Ulric kept peering nervously into the dark behind them and kept watching the hedges for any sign that they were being overtaken.
They heard the signs before they saw any, though. In the aftermath of the explosions, the deadlings had remained quiet, but now they resumed their baying, sounding more than ever like a pack of pursuing hounds, and unmistakably drawing closer. Then came the hoofbeats.
“Isn’t Minda supposed to be in front of us?” Evadne asked.
“Oh, bloody—” Keely pounded the heel of her hand into her forehead. “Scarlet’s got a horse! I saw her on a horse in the forest. Oh, go’ss, I forgot.”
“Scarlet!” Nolan shouted in a panic.
“Yes!” Keely said. “She’s riding up behind us!”
“No!” Nolan insisted. “Scarlet!”
Keely, Ulric, and Evadne spun just in time to see the billowing red cloak flash in the lantern light as a figure standing in the middle of the road appeared out of the darkness.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Best-Laid Plans
In a split second, the consequences of the horses colliding with a firmly braced Bloody Scarlet played out in Nolan’s head, and he pulled hard on the reins in an attempt to veer around her. The cart bucked and tilted dangerously, forcing all of its occupants to grab whatever they could hang onto to keep from being thrown out.
In a moment, the figure in red was blurring past just inches off the left side of the cart. Keely had time to catch the fleeting impression of a skull grinning at her from under the hood of the cloak just before the deadling’s thorny vines lashed out, wrapping around her throat. Their speed yanked the deadling free of the cloak and of the post it had been resting on, both to disappear behind in the darkness, but the deadling itself clung tenaciously to Keely and to the side of the cart.
The cart righted itself enough for Ulric to free up one hand, and then he was there, hacking away at the thorny vines. “I will never…trust…a scarecrow…again!” he managed between swings and fending off vines.
Keely wasn’t able to manage a hatchet herself while clinging to the cart and trying to avoid a face full of thorns, but she finally managed to grab the skull and slam it down to the floor of the cart, where Evadne finished it with a blunt-side blow.
“Were they all hers all along?” Ulric asked as Keely carefully unwrapped the limp vine from around her throat, thankful beyond words for the gorget. The metal collar had certainly done its job. She actually seemed to have emerged from the whole episode without a scratch. The next episode, coming up fast, however, didn’t look so promising.
While they’d been busy with the scarecrow, she’d appeared out of the darkness behind—at first just that fiery red cape, almost glowing with a light of its own. They still heard the horse rather than saw it, a black silhouette against the night, obscuring parts of the cape.
“We should have brought the guns. We should have brought the guns,” Keely said in a panic, scrambling to press herself as far as she could toward the front of the cart, away from the pursuit that was closing much too quickly.
Ulric pulled a pistol from his belt and leveled it at their pursuer. “I said ‘think twice’. I didn’t say ‘don’t bring them’.” The pistol cracked. Nothing changed. Presumably, firing in the dark from the jostling cart, the shot had gone wide. “Reload!” he ordered Keely, tossing her the gun as he reached for a second pistol.
“With what?!” she demanded.
Ulric ignored her, bracing himself and taking more time to aim.
“Deadling!” Nolan shouted from the front of the cart.
The second pistol cracked.
The cart jolted. The horses screamed. Thorny vines flailed wildly all around the cart for a moment, then vanished behind them into the darkness, along with the broken wooden cross-piece and tattered red cloak of a scarecrow where they’d been trampled into the dirt. The last they saw of the deadling was a fragment of its skull being crushed under a hoof of Scarlet’s great black horse, fully illuminated for a moment by the crackling lightning.
In that moment, Scarlet too could be properly seen, her flesh torn and blackened by the explosion and flames, but any more serious damage she might have suffered seemed to already have repaired itself. Neither horse nor rider showed any more signs of being troubled by the second shot than they had by the first.
The first drops of rain started falling, almost unnoticed in the chaos.
Keely passed the pistol to Evadne, pulled a hatchet, and started hacking at the nearest barrel. Striking in the same location twice wasn’t easy under these conditions, but wood began to splinter and securing ropes began to fray.
“What are you doing?!” Evadne shouted.
“Improvising!”
“Rifle!” Nolan shouted. “Behind the barrels on the left!”
Ulric shoved the expended second pistol back into his belt and dove to dig behind the barrels while Keely kept hacking, and he came up with the rifle. He dropped low in the cart—if not to steady the rifle, at least to synchronize its shaking with the jostling of the cart—and took careful aim. The rifle cracked. Scarlet’s horse stumbled. The securing ropes on the barrels parted.
Free to bounce and jostle along with the cart, the barrels began to roll off the back. The first slammed into the legs of the already-stumbling horse. The beast went down, taking bloody Scarlet with it, straight into the path of the second barrel.
“Lantern!” Keely screamed to Evadne, pointing at the barrel just now bouncing off the back of the wagon. “That one’s been breached!”
Evadne waited for a moment to gauge her throw and to let that barrel join the bone-shattering pile-up. The lantern flew true. The glass shattered. Flaming oil spattered. The force of the initial blast threw Ulric, Keely, and Evadne into
a jumble up against the front of the cart, and nearly flung Nolan from the driver’s seat. Several secondary blasts followed as later powder kegs bounced into the flaming wreckage.
“Well, there goes your rockslide,” Ulric said, watching the flames retreat behind them.
“Don’t you military men have a saying about plans and contact with the enemy?” Keely asked. “I’m honestly surprised it took that long for things to start unraveling. Anyway, we lost that rockslide as soon as she brought in the horse. We’d never have wrestled the kegs into position with her so close on our heels.”
The rain began to pour in earnest. Thunder sounded so close that it rattled the cart. “This storm’s only going to get worse,” Nolan shouted as he urged the horses to a halt. They’d begun to slow as they winded themselves, anyway. “And we’re nearly blind as it is. What’s left of the cargo isn’t worth it.”
Ulric nodded his assent. “Cut the horses loose. We’re on foot from here.”
“Is it too much to hope that the second explosion was too much for her?” Evadne asked.
“The storm’s still growing,” Ulric responded. “The deadlings are still howling. We assume she’s alive.”
They each grabbed a lantern, though Nolan had the only lit one, and the wind and rain put aside all question of pausing to try to light the others. They simply made a dash through the cold rain toward the looming spire of the Wolf’s Tooth.
Mud and ashes squelched around their boots as they picked their way through the charred remnant of the copse in front of Skull Crevice. A little torrent was already pouring out of the crevice, and water cascaded down the walls as they made their way inward.
Clambering over the barricade of fallen rocks while it was an active waterfall proved an adventure in itself, and a trio of deadlings caught up to them before they could descend the other side. A brief, slippery battle ensued, with Ulric and Nolan making efficient use of their hatchets and full armor of steel and leather, while Keely and Evadne scrambled on down to the floor of the inner crevice.
Then the women stood ready to respond with a hatchet in each hand while the men took their turns climbing down, but no more pursuit showed itself, and they hurried on down the crevice.
Soon they were climbing the stone staircase while water poured around their ankles. The realistic skull carvings had seemed macabre enough to Keely in the full daylight and her previous, blissful ignorance. Now, they appeared nothing short of sinister, verging on diabolic, yet seemed almost welcoming compared to the prospect of turning back toward the baying of deadlings that had started to echo cacophonously up the crevice.
It hadn’t dawned on Keely until this very moment, but this had all been a temple once, long ago, to the Skull Collector, Bloody Scarlet. Then the empire had come, and…and, what? What powers had that first emperor had under his command that could have driven this monster back to spend centuries skulking in the shadows of her forest? Was this how Miraculata Antonia Grimm had really died, in the miracle of binding Bloody Scarlet to her forest? Had those enchantments been wearing off?
Honestly, Keely decided, she could live without knowing the answers—just so she actually lived.
They burst through the waterfall at the top of the stair and stumbled at last out of the rain and into the tunnel that led to the heart of the Wolf’s Tooth. Nolan stood, blocking the entrance with hatchets at the ready, while the others took the time to light the remaining lanterns. Two deadlings came howling into the tunnel while they were at it, but Nolan smashed one against a stone wall the moment it appeared. Spinning on the other, he severed a vine that had wrapped harmlessly around his leather-clad arm, cracked its skull into the opposite wall with the wooden haft of a hatchet, then finished the thing with a clean smash from the metal head.
The waterfall blocking the tunnel entrance behind them drowned out what howling of the deadlings wasn’t already being lost to the wind and rain, but somehow the relative silence seemed worse. They still knew the deadlings were out there. They were just blind now to how close the pursuit might be getting.
“This is the bit of the plan where we seal the tunnel behind us with the explosives we no longer have, right?” Evadne asked.
“Pretty much,” Keely agreed.
“What do you suggest instead?”
“Run.”
With the four lanterns lit now, they did run, splashing through the half-inch of standing water already accumulated on the floor of the tunnel, until at last they burst through the waterfall cascading over the exit into the central shaft.
Leading the way, Keely had a split second to see the gleam of the axe descending toward her head. Her first instinct—to become a small feline with its head several feet below where it was now—only managed to evoke a sensation akin to putting weight on a torn muscle. She screamed a scream that was only saved from dying in her throat by the sudden appearance of Evadne, hurtling through the waterfall behind her and tackling Sir Riordan with all her considerable mass. Evadne had seen the man’s silhouette through the waterfall just in time to throw him off his feet, causing the axe to miss Keely’s head by a hand’s width.
What Evadne hadn’t seen at all was the sudden drop-off just a few paces past the opening of the tunnel. She and Riordan went over it together, vanishing through yet another sheet of falling water as they did. The only trace of their passing by the time Ulric and Nolan burst through was Evadne’s lantern, rocking on the floor where it had somehow managed to survive being dropped without smashing.
“You know,” Jane Carver shouted over the thundering water cascading from the summit of the Wolf’s Tooth into the pool behind her, “when it’s overused, even cunning misdirection becomes predictable.” The numerous figures around her in black and red didn’t even wait for a signal. They just began to close in with their blades drawn.
“All right,” Keely said. Taking a careful step forward, she set down her lantern and slung her hatchet on her belt. “Hench One, Hench Two?” She turned to make eye contact with Ulric and Nolan. “Follow my lead. Put away your blades.”
“I really don’t know that I’m feeling merciful enough to accept a surrender,” Jane said.
“That’s okay.” Keely turned back to her. “I’m not really feeling stupid enough to offer.” She took two steps and leapt with a shout through the inner cascade. Ulric and Nolan hesitated for a heartbeat, but only just, seeing no alternative. They leapt after Keely before the knights and footmen of the Inquisition could close the remaining distance.
Keely hung in the air for a dizzying moment, blind to everything but the glow of a few flickering lights just visible through the rain and sheeting runoff. The roar of the cascade filled her ears. She just had time to reflect that the woman she’d been only the night before would have done anything to avoid leaping back into the dark pool waiting below to embrace her.
Then the pool did. Still submerged, Keely hurriedly doffed her metal helmet as the easiest weight to divest herself of, then she stroked for the surface, imagined decaying hands reaching out of the depths to drag her down with them. Then a hand really did grab her ankle, and she freaked out. She grabbed for a hatchet, floundered futilely to use it beneath the surface of the pool, bobbled it, and felt it tumble away into the blackness. All the while she could feel the iron grip and feel herself being dragged down, other bodies closing in around her.
Then abruptly the grip released and she found herself kicking again for the surface. When she came to her senses, Evadne was there, helping her stay afloat while rain poured down around them.
“Are you all right?” Evadne gasped once she was sure Keely could keep her own head up. “If that fool man doesn’t stop struggling and unbuckle that metal breastplate, he’s going to be no more concern of ours.”
“Oh, go’ss,” Keely gasped. “Ulric and Nolan!” Panic surged again as she tried to peer through the dark and the rain, but she could barely even pick out a hint of Evadne right there in the water beside her. “I forgot they had on that metal armor.�
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“Had,” Ulric’s voice assured her from nearby. “We went into the water a bit less disoriented than Riordan. Still can’t tread water like this for long. We need to find the stairs.”
“Over there!” None of them could see Nolan pointing, but they did all look around and spied the lanterns of the Inquisition starting to wind their way down toward the surface of the pool. Using the lights to orient, they made their best guess to where the stairway entered the pool and struck out for it with a sort of terrified relief at the prospect of what constituted less danger at this moment. “I don’t see how we’re better off, though,” Nolan added.
From up above, someone screamed. Then the laughter of the deadlings made itself heard again over the storm.
“Oh.” Nolan said. “Forgot for a moment.”
“Stay close, follow me, and be ready,” Ulric said, dragging himself up onto the steps. Even without a torrent pouring directly down from above, there was no dry here. Rainfall still cascaded down the stairs. “There’ll be no getting out of here without some sort of fight.” He readied his sword in one hand and a hatchet in the other.
All too soon, the lead lantern drew clearly into sight around the curve of the staircase, illuminating the knight of the Inquisition holding it.
“This one’s mine,” Nolan said.
Ulric fell back to let his fellow guardsman through, and Nolan stood for a moment, silhouetted against the lantern glow while he hefted a hatchet, testing its weight as the well illuminated target drew nearer. Then the little axe flew, tumbling gracefully end over end, and came impressively close to striking the man in an unprotected eye—but in the end, it bounced off the nose-guard of his helm, even the clang of the impact drowned out by all the other noise going on.
The force of the blow was enough to shift the man’s weight, though, which turned his step into a stumble. The slick stairs then turned that stumble into a slip, a fall, and a slide right off the open edge and into the pool below.
“That’ll do,” Ulric observed as he resumed his lead to charge at the next man, who’d been coming close behind the first.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 48
