Calvin’s eyes drifted to the stairs. He couldn’t take it anymore, being this close to Amelia, unable to reach her. Even if he had a voice there was no way she’d hear him down here. He’d blown it, blown his chance, after all that had happened. He should have stayed in the woods and waited for Amelia to do her chores out on the grounds. He’d had time. Why hadn’t he waited?
He sniffed. Brian put down his stick and leaned in. “Oh man, are you crying? Ha! You’re crying! Damn, but you’re weak. And here I thought you might have been a half-decent warrior, beating me in a fight. Everyone will remember that as an accident now. Not that people will remember you—”
Two hands exploded out of the dirt wall behind him, clawing at the air and very nearly seizing the shoulders of Brian’s field jacket. His battle-fast reflexes had him up on his feet, yelping in alarm. More arms emerged out of the soil all down the length of the wall, snaking out like tree roots. Hands, wrists, elbows . . . the wall bowed outward and entire sections of it broke away onto the stone floor. Then the skeletons came out.
Five, ten, a dozen of them, some taller than Calvin or Brian, others the size of children, tugged themselves loose, their jaws clicking hungrily, snapping all about. They were almost entirely reduced to bone, and threadbare clothing hung from their frames, all of it stained brown like dirt. Each of the undead had a glowing red light in its eye sockets, adding to their ghoulish appearance. In seconds the brig was nearly filled with them.
Brian’s whittling knife flew from his hand and skittered between the bars. Fearing for his life, he drew his pistol and emptied the cylinder at the nearest skeleton with minimal success; though he shattered a few bones, the skeletons didn’t seem to care. His final shot went straight through a skull, and that skeleton’s red-ember eyes extinguished. It collapsed in a heap on the floor. The others seemed not to notice or care.
“Call them off!” Brian shrieked.
Coughing through the roughness in his throat, Calvin’s immediate terror gave way to incredulity, and he managed a grim laugh. “You think they’re with me? I have no idea—”
Brian didn’t stick around to hear the rest. He flew up the stairs, and a second later the heavy brig door slammed shut behind him. The skeletons seemed inclined to let him go; all of their attention was on Calvin. They threw themselves viciously at the cell, reaching between the bars, desperate to grab him. He hung there, watching them struggle, and found that he was actually . . . unsurprised.
“This is not even the worst thing that’s happened this week,” he muttered.
The brig wall was dirt, but the cell was solid stone. As long as Calvin didn’t go over to the bars, the skeletons couldn’t touch him. He took a deep breath and considered his options. They were scant, but there was one way out of here.
The whittling knife.
Eyeing it like a coveted treasure, Calvin reached out with his leg and touched his toe to the handle, slowly dragging it closer. If only his hands weren’t tied overhead . . . he craned his neck to see his wrists, trying to envision his next move. He sandwiched the knife between his heels, pressed them together, and tested the tenuous hold. It would have to do.
“Only one way this is going to work.” He’d have to endure severe pain, have to dig deep to find the strength to pull it off, but what other option was there? Taking the ropes in his hands, he bit down hard, squeezed with all of his strength, hoisting himself a few inches off of the ground. He breathed out through his nose and pulled with his shoulders and sides, rolling backward in a controlled movement. As he went, he tucked his knees to his chest, hoping that he wouldn’t drop the knife onto his stomach.
The hardest part was keeping enough pressure on it between his shoes as he extended his feet to where he could grab the knife with one hand. It took him three attempts, and when he finally got it, the effort had pulled two more hooks out of his chest, sending trickles of fresh blood down his front. This only made the skeletons more frantic. They grew in number, leaving Calvin to wonder just how many of them there were that he couldn’t see.
He returned to the starting position and caught his breath. Then, holding his hand at an awkward angle, he sawed through the rope. His forearms burned, and he had to stop repeatedly lest he cramp up and drop the knife. Panting, he resumed the effort until finally the last strand parted, and his hand fell to his side.
Freedom. He’d have screamed with joy if he had the strength for it. He cut his other hand loose, rubbed the feeling back into it, and assessed his situation as the tingling faded away.
It was sloppy, but the skeletons had dug a quick tunnel to the brig from the front lawn. A lot of it had caved, yet behind the snapping throng he could see a glimmer of sunlight, and if he held his breath, he could catch faint echoes of . . . noise.
There was noise up top, the sounds of battle.
“What are you doing here?” he muttered to the skeletons. Who had sent them? And why had they let Brian go and instead focused only on . . .
No way.
The skeletons were the product of magic, and Calvin only knew of one mage who was after him. One mage who’d already survived something that should have killed him.
That was a grenade that missed. This time I knifed him right in the heart!
That damned Godfrey. Could it really be?
He had to get out of this cell.
Calvin stood back and studied the skeletons. The lights in their skulls were the most abnormal thing about them. Brian’s words kept coming to mind, something about how the human body was a machine? Calvin had gotten pretty good at machines in a few weeks. Machines had weak spots . . . and Brian had supplied the secret to that as well.
“Here goes nothing.” Calvin grabbed a skeleton’s wrist and pulled it tight against the bars. The red light actually came from a glowing orb set in the hollow of its throat, which then shone out of its empty eye sockets. Aiming carefully with the knife, he stabbed at the red orb. It faded, flickered, and died. The skeleton collapsed just like the one Brian shot.
Got it. Calvin went to work.
*
With an army of animated thralls three hundred strong, Godfrey had marched to Virginia all night and all day, hopping through small teleportals to trim the distance. The advantage of the thralls was that they were all powered by Godfrey’s life force, so anyone monitoring the portals would only sense one person inside.
And even if they could tell what was really going on . . . what could they do to him?
He came upon Mount Vernon in the late afternoon, a place Fitz’s badge knew very little about. Godfrey couldn’t be sure who lived here, only that Calvin Adler was on the grounds. There was so much frosted iron in the place that it was hard to get a feel, so he sent out thralls in groups of thirty to turn the whole estate on its head. Some had even burrowed into the ground at his suggestion that the building might have a basement.
Things were going swimmingly until a few dozen duffers
showed up and opened fire with black-powder weapons. Godfrey had completely failed to predict this turn of events. Technomancers? Right here, in Virginia? The nerve! He could think of four Corps outposts within a hundred miles in any direction, and the duffers had set up camp in the middle of them. Oh, these rebels had it coming.
Godfrey sent a necromantic command to his thralls: kill the technomancers. Stop their hearts from beating, and he could convert them into new thralls. That would turn the tide rather quickly. Go forth and conquer!
The skeletons obeyed. Though their primitive firearms had corroded, their blades and bayonets could still part flesh, and they used them to great effect while the technomancers reloaded. For their part, the duffers’ weapons proved devastating: when their aim was good, they could cut down a thrall rather quickly, shredding his frail bones in a hail of bullets. Already, Godfrey counted nine thralls that had lost the use of their legs, and were dragging themselves bodily across the lawn to the duffers’ various hiding places.
Then came something unexpected: somewhere
in the melee, one of the duffers landed a shot on a thrall’s neck. A critical hit! And it hurt almost as bad as if it had hit Godfrey himself. A wave of nausea shook him, and he no longer sensed that thrall. Where had it been?
Another shot rang out, this time close by, and Godfrey saw a second thrall stagger under the force of the weapon. Deprived of the power that had animated it, the skeleton fell to pieces, and Godfrey had to grit his teeth against the pain that shot up his own spine. Pawing at his throat as he drew breath, it occurred to him that even this new, powerful magic had its limits. A foreign sense warned him that he’d lose too much of his own life force if he wasn’t careful.
He’d have to be more judicious with the thralls.
Godfrey drew his wand and aimed it at the fallen skeleton. “Asprungnes cyme!” This was the animator charm that he’d used in the first place; he figured it would work again, and in this he was disappointed. It seemed a corpse would only take his magic once.
“Bugger,” he muttered.
Calling out to the others, he urged them to spread out and make harder targets of themselves. At the same time, he retreated from the frontlines to get a distant perspective on the battlefield, the better to redirect his thralls. He mentally steered them around obstacles so they could surround and isolate technomancers on the fringe, then pull them aside and kill them brutally. As soon as the duffers were down, he’d reanimate them with a flick of his wand; those recently turned were more resilient than their skeletal counterparts, and as Godfrey deployed them, he noticed that the living duffers were hesitant to open fire on their dead comrades.
Good! Now to get a better idea of the lay of the land. He singled out one of the duffers, a balding man who was dishing out orders to the rest, and sent the thralls after him. The thralls swarmed the man, killing him in seconds but carefully leaving his skull intact. Godfrey turned him. The duffer’s knowledge pooled into Godfrey’s mind, and from it he formed a map.
“Where are you hiding, Calvin?” Godfrey wondered aloud.
Stab.
His throat again! Godfrey coughed. Somewhere, a thrall fell. Then another. Then another. All in the same spot as the very first, somewhere underground, under the main mansion. Godfrey spat up blood. Consulting his map, he turned his attention to the basement. He had a feeling he knew who was down there.
We meet again!
*
With the last skeleton down, Calvin could focus on escaping. The knife was worthless as a lock pick, but one of the skeletons had brought a rusted rifle with a bayonet affixed to the end, which Calvin snatched up. Once he had popped the lock open, he swung the gate out and made his way to the stairs on shaky legs. It hadn’t taken too long to down the skeletons; they’d seemed eager to get within stabbing range. By the time he was done, they’d actually blockaded the hole they’d dug to get in there. He was hesitant to consider himself fortunate by any means, but he was grateful for that development.
Of course, the door at the top of the stairs was locked. Having no other recourse, Calvin pounded his fists on it.
“Help! Somebody open the brig!”
Could anyone hear him? He was about to knock again when a jolt of electricity surged through his chest, driving him to his knees. The device! It shocked him—a deep pain that he could neither abide nor ignore, more crippling than anything he’d endured on his run. This was horrendous. The shock came and went in the blink of an eye, yet a instinct warned him that there would be more to come. Burying his chin in his chest, he tried to read the dials in the low light; the “days” and “hours” had run out, and the markings on the “minutes” dial had been scratched and washed off in his travels.
Today is November the fifth. The tenth day, he thought.
He pounded the door for all he was worth, screaming until his throat could no longer make a sound. Down below, he heard the clacking and scraping of more skeletons digging through the collapsed tunnel.
Terrified, Calvin struck at the door again. It opened before he made contact, and he almost punched the person who had come to answer his call.
His eyes seized upon her face, daring his heart to confirm it.
There she was. Inches away.
Amelia.
He must have looked quite a mess, for she didn’t immediately recognize him. Of course! He’d been in the sun for days, frozen and wind-whipped by night, cut, scratched, cursed, bludgeoned twice in the face—both recently and a ways back—and to top it off, he was wearing clothes that had never been his.
Even so, her beautiful eyes blossomed like sunflowers.
“It’s . . . oh, it’s you! Calvin!”
He threw himself at her. She leapt into his arms with equal fervor and they squeezed with everything they had, giving into that precious release, saying through touch what they could never have said through words. For the first time in ten days, he didn’t care about the thing in his chest, not even as she crushed it harder against his heart.
“They said you ran off!” she sobbed.
“They lied. Amelia, I—” He meant to warn her about the skeletons, but the device cut his words off mid-sentence. His scream startled her out of his embrace, and she pulled back as he fell to the floor. His senses failed him, save for his hearing, which keenly detected the thralls as they clamored up the stairs. Amelia, bless her, had the presence of mind to crouch down, hook her arms under Calvin’s, and pull him out of the way while he pawed helplessly at the dial, attempting to breathe. Once she had him clear, Amelia shouldered the door closed and threw the bar across it.
The device calmed down again. Calvin spat blood onto the tile floor. With tears streaming down her face, Amelia helped him up. “What happened to you?”
“Later,” he wheezed. “Those skeletons, are there more outside?”
“Yes, they’re swarming the grounds! I’ve never seen anything like it. The others are holding them off and Dad has the house on lockdown. We have to go help him,” she said.
Calvin grabbed her wrist. “No! Amelia, he . . . aaargh!” The
intermission didn’t last nearly as long this time. The device struck again, sending Calvin sprawling onto the floor.
CHAPTER 18
From within the cupola at the top of the mansion, Commodore McCracken took a quick survey of the incursion. The defenses were failing; whatever these creatures were, they cared not for bullets or grenades. The only thing that seemed to deter them was fire, a weapon the technomancers had in precious little supply. Worse, they had the power to turn their victims to their side; half of the recruits were now fighting against their fellows, bearing that hellish red light in their eyes. What new devilry was this? He’d probably read about this brand of magic before, but in the heat of battle he struggled to recall the nomenclature.
It wasn’t important. McCracken had no intention of
surrendering his home, the war room of the revolution—not this afternoon, not ever. Despite his age and his handicap, he wasn’t just a spectator in this fight.
The cupola, a domed room lined with windows on all sides, secretly doubled as a gun turret. He had a fully automatic fifty-caliber deck gun hidden under the floor, along with three crates of belt-fed ammunition and half a dozen grenades. He planted the tip of his cane against a button in the floorboard and watched as the planks slid away to reveal the machine. It rose up smoothly and locked into place, primed and ready for use. In sync with the floor panels, all of the windows slid down into the walls, leaving him with a mostly open panorama for picking targets.
McCracken took a moment to slip on a pair of asbestos gloves and some earmuffs—the fifty-cal could deafen a man permanently before too long. Then he started a full belt of bullets into the feed tray, pulled the handle, disengaged the safety levers, and stepped up under the shoulder harness. Down on the lawn, a cluster of hostiles advanced on a pair of recruits hiding behind a boulder. The recruits, occupied with reloading, would be ambushed in seconds.
“There comes a time when might makes right,” McCracken sa
id. Years had passed since he’d uttered those words; it was his battle cry. Pointing the muzzle through an open window, he lined up the sights and fired.
Bones and old flesh exploded out the backs of the attackers—skeletons, he realized. Walking skeletons? Some of their eyes dimmed too, or at least he thought so. He couldn’t be sure, gazing
through the pungent smoke that belched out of the rotating chambers as the gun spat out empty cartridges.
The two recruits looked up at the cupola and saluted their Commodore, then shouldered their weapons and rejoined the fight. McCracken swept laterally and kept firing, maintaining a cadence of three to six shots per burst. As he spread the gunfire around the new targets, he spotted one walker among the rest who looked noticeably different: he was of whole flesh, though not a technomancer, and he moved with great agility. McCracken stopped firing long enough to realize that this one was giving orders. The skeletons obeyed him like a field commander. And for whatever reason, he didn’t have that red light glowing in his face.
McCracken remembered now.
“Necromancer,” he spat. It had been a long time since he’d even heard rumor of one of those. Death magic was one of maybe four disciplines that the Crown didn’t openly cultivate—something about side effects on the user? This mage obviously didn’t care.
That doesn’t make him invincible.
McCracken lined up the crosshairs on the necromancer’s chest—he was skinny, and he looked remarkably young. Age didn’t necessarily matter in war; if the kid didn’t want to get shot at, he shouldn’t have attacked Mount Vernon. McCracken squeezed both triggers and lit him up.
A barrage of bullets ripped into the necromancer’s ribs and stomach, shredding him instantly. The boy staggered and fell onto his back, his torso a ruined, bloody mess, and his skeletons—thralls, McCracken recalled the term—likewise staggered, their movements unsteady. There. Now the recruits could easily finish up the job! All in a day’s . . .
Suicide Run (Engines of Liberty Book 2) Page 14
