Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “A square that magically drew itself in a pile of talcum powder? Sorry, no.”

  “Not a square,” Abigail said. “A door.”

  • • •

  “WHAT WE MIGHT BE DEALING WITH HERE is something called a trapperkin,” Abigail said.

  She had moved back into the hall and was flipping through several of the books she had insisted on bringing even while silently cursing herself for bringing inadequate reference materials. She could think of several titles back in her study that might have been more useful. Still, she could remember most of what she had read on the subject of insubstantial doorways and supernatural portals, especially given that the Strangelight Workshop had a keen interest in the topic. None of what she could recall seemed directly applicable.

  “And this thing, this trapperkin, you think it came through the floor and took Nicholas Boden?” Kincaid asked.

  “Precisely. Trapperkin have existed within the folklore of various cultures for generations. While traditionally associated with the theft of young children, there are tales that reference the abduction of adults. In some stories, the trapperkin is said to emerge from something like a dark trapdoor that vanishes when they do. A trapperkin steal its victims in the night, usually leaving some sort of token or bauble behind, either as payment or for some other inscrutable reason.”

  “The totem,” Kincaid said.

  “Exactly. I couldn’t be sure when we first found it because there are similar totems associated with all manner of occult rituals. It was Artis that narrowed it down.”

  “Because whatever she attacked couldn’t have been a ghost.”

  “Not only that, but the fact that the creature fled when Artis went after it. Trapperkin are what you call grymkin.”

  “Aren’t those just superstition? Folktales? I guess not, given your expression.”

  “Most folktales have a grain of truth. Grymkin exist. As a general rule, grymkin and cats have a natural animosity toward one another. Cats can see them even when people can’t and can kill the smallest ones. Especially gremlins, which are grymkin that muck up machines. They’re the reason the Workshop keeps a lot of cats around. They love to wreck our gear.”

  “Got it. Mel talked about gremlins when I first came on, and I’ve run into other mechaniks in the past who’ve kept cats around for the same reason. So, maybe Artis saw a trapperkin and chased it through this door.”

  “That’s my theory. No idea why it came back. Maybe it had another totem to drop off.”

  “And the people the trapperkin takes? What happens to them?”

  Abigail hesitated. “Nothing good. You heard what Dr. Howlett said about the body parts? In some folktales, children are taken back to the trapperkin’s lair, where they’re toyed with until the trapperkin gets bored and eats them. So, if such a lair is real, and these doors go to someplace that’s not Caen, the tunnels could lead anywhere. But based on the contents used to make the totem we found, I think this trapperkin comes from somewhere in the forests of Khador, likely the Scarsfell. Probably one of its tunnels and doors leads there, or else its lair is there. In the end, no one knows where trapperkin live.”

  “Hang on. The Scarsfell is over a thousand miles from here.”

  “I know. These tunnels don’t have to obey normal laws of distance, especially if they aren’t on Caen. It’s not conventional travel. Maybe each step in its tunnels is a mile here.” She saw him chewing on that and added, “That’s why it’s important we get this door open. It’s our only chance to find Artis and maybe Boden as well.”

  “And you can open the door?”

  “Maybe,” Abigail said. She tucked a book under her arm and palmed yet another vial. “I have a few ideas we can try, but we’ll have to be quick about it. The door wasn’t here when we first arrived, so I don’t think it will stick around for long.”

  The truth was, she had no sure means to open such a door. Everything she’d read on the subject were children’s stories or the ravings of the deranged. But if the door were spectral, maybe it obeyed some of the same rules as spiritual entities, and she had tools to make ectoplasm tangible, tools she used to collect samples for study back in a lab. Returning to the cell, Abigail unstopped the vial and emptied the contents over the outline of the door and gave it a moment. Aside from some fizzling when the substance made contact with the talcum powder that still coated the floor, her efforts seemed to have no effect.

  “Maybe a different agent is required.” She took a moment to consider. “Perhaps I should analyze the particulates of the floor and determine the best mixture. It will take time, but that might be key.”

  “How long will that take?” Kincaid asked.

  “An hour. Maybe more. But I don’t know if the door will wait for me.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Kincaid left the cell and when he came back a moment later he had a crowbar in hand. “Step aside.”

  “Don’t bother. This door isn’t even really here. Muscle is of no use.”

  Ignoring her words, Kincaid planted his feet apart and drove the crowbar downward. There was a splintering sound like that of wood giving way, and a thin crack appeared along the lines where the talcum powder had disappeared through the floor.

  “I don’t believe it,” Abigail said.

  Kincaid wedged the end of the crowbar farther into the gap, used the leverage provided by the tool to gain a handhold, gripped the lip of the door, and threw it open. The talcum powder atop the door slid away to reveal not concrete but weathered boards and rusted hinges. Where the door had been, a dirt tunnel stretched down into a dimly lit lair, an unidentifiable glow filtering up from its depths.

  Looking at the tunnel digging into the concrete on what was the third floor of the institution’s west wing, Abigail felt something like vertigo. Her knees threatened to buckle for a brief moment. Though she had known the door wouldn’t simply open onto the floor below them, her mind had trouble grasping the idea that she was likely looking into a tunnel leading to somewhere far from where she actually stood, perhaps not on Caen at all.

  “Let me see that,” Abigail said, reaching for the crowbar. She hefted the tool in her hands. “Of course. I should have thought of this.”

  “Sometimes all you need is a little brute force,” Kincaid said. He, too, was looking through the door and down into the tunnel beyond.

  “Brute force had nothing to do with it. The crowbar is made of iron. Some grymkin have an aversion to it. Contact with it likely weakened the trapperkin’s magic. The liquid I poured may have made the door more tangible, as I had hoped, and allowed you to pry it open. If I hadn’t done that, you’d have accomplished nothing but looking foolish.”

  “Great. Well, you’re welcome,” Kincaid said. He stepped out of the chamber and came back a moment later with a length of rope, one end of which he tied to the barred window on the cell door.

  Abigail removed the pistol from her holster and checked it once again. She hated the idea of resolving problems with such a crude method, but she couldn’t deny that the current situation called for something beyond books and specialized equipment.

  “All set,” Kincaid said. He gave the rope a tug and tossed the slack through the hole in the floor.

  “You should stay here,” Abigail said. She holstered her pistol.

  “Having been hired as extra muscle, I won’t be able to do that. Have to earn my keep.” Kincaid gave the crowbar a practice swing. “Besides, you might need some more of my beginner’s luck.”

  “There are no records of a living individual willingly entering a trapperkin lair. This is a scientific matter and as such should be handled by a member of the scientific community.”

  “All the more reason for me to come along. Someone has to be there to pull the scientific community’s ass out of the fire.”

  • • •

  WHEN THEY DESCENDED THROUGH THE DOOR and into the tunnel, Abigail expected to experience some sort of sensation to mark he
r transition from Yellow Ward to wherever the trapperkin lair existed, but there was nothing, and she found the seamless nature of this transition unnerving. It was as though the grymkin had effortlessly bent the trappings of time and space to create its lair. In fact, grymkin weren’t even supposed to be very intelligent, which meant this one did all of this by instinct.

  Abigail activated the Strangelight projector on her lumitype, sending a beam of purple light over the scope of the tunnel. The purple glow of the Strangelight melded with the luminescence of strange, unfamiliar mushrooms to cast flickering shadows across the walls.

  Though the entrance of the lair was nothing more than slick dirt walls, the interior was another matter. Beyond the entrance, the tunnel leveled off and widened. The bluish mushrooms grew over most of the tunnel’s surfaces and gave off a faint bioluminescence bright enough to see by. A collection of odds and ends filled the space and left only the narrowest path through which to navigate. Pots and pans, clothing, broken furniture, scrap metal, jewelry. There seemed an endless variety of items stored here. In places, the horde of possessions was stacked to the ceiling and looked on the verge of tumbling over and blocking the passage.

  Abigail flicked the switch on the side of her lumitype, and the projector atop the device spun up to speed until a beam of purple light shone over the tunnel’s contents.

  “What a bunch of junk,” Kincaid said, keeping his voice low.

  “Keepsakes,” Abigail said, “from the trapperkin’s victims. It leaves the totems, but it takes other items. Of course, given how many there are, I wonder if we’re dealing with more than one trapperkin. Could be a whole nest of them. What’s a group of trapperkin called, I wonder?”

  “A kidnapping,” Kincaid said wryly. “Let’s be sure not to stick around.”

  The tunnel emptied into a massive chamber with entrances to a dozen other tunnels. The soil of the tunnel gave way to stone, and several stalagmites taller than Abigail herself rose from the floor and reached upward toward their equally massive stalactite cousins suspended from the ceiling. The glowing mushrooms grew here by the hundreds, if not thousands, their faint light casting a strange and unsettling aura over their surroundings. Like the tunnel, this chamber was also packed with odds and ends. The sheer volume of possessions was overwhelming, like some grand treasure vault filled with people’s trinkets rather than gold and jewels. A collection of stringed instruments was piled in a wooden tub. Stacks of moldering books rose here and there, their pages swollen with moisture. A child’s doll stared up at them with its one remaining button eye. Everywhere they looked was another new oddity. Except for where a trickle of water ran down the cave wall to collect in a shallow pool, the walls were also covered in a tangled mess of objects held in place by what might have been webbing or a thin net of some kind. The stalagmites were likewise used as anchor points to string together a layer of clutter.

  “These other tunnels must lead to other doors,” Kincaid said.

  Abigail nodded—the reasoning was solid. The collection of items had clearly been amassed from several different countries over the course of what could have been centuries. Khadoran military uniforms were heaped alongside family crests of prominent Cygnaran lines and handfuls of coins stamped with the emblems once associated with a free Llael.

  “Maybe some doors are more enduring than others,” she said, her mind abuzz with theories. She imagined the strange creatures creeping between here and Caen, crossing hundreds of miles in an instant. It was extremely unnerving. “How many people do you think they’ve taken?”

  “So you’re asking me questions now?” Kincaid said. “I don’t know. Hundreds? One person at a time, maybe, so no one notices.”

  “Picking people that won’t be missed, and then stealing its trophies, leaving totems behind.” Abigail nodded and looked down at her supplies. “I should have brought more spectragraphs.”

  “I should have brought something deadlier than a crowbar.”

  Abigail ran her finger over the spines of a stack of books, taking note of their titles and, more important, their languages. Like the other items that filled the cave, the books appeared to have been taken from different regions and eras. She slipped one of the uppermost books out of the stack and opened it. Time and moisture had all but ruined the pages, but she could tell that the text was written in Khurzic, just like the inscription on the ring they had found. However, it had become clear the trapperkin didn’t limit itself to Khador. The rest of the books in the stack represented authors’ writing in multiple languages. Some books were old and moldy, and she had to wonder how long this lair had been in use. Generations of trapperkin? Or one especially ancient one?

  “Abigail,” Kincaid said. His voice was strained, and she heard him clear his throat before he said her name a second time with no more conviction. She looked up to see him standing close to one of the many stalagmites that occupied the chamber. His face had lost much of his color.

  “What is it?” Abigail asked. She needed only take a step forward to realize what had caught his attention. Amid the baubles and stolen possessions affixed to the stalagmite were the unmistakable remains of a corpse.

  Much of the flesh had been stripped from the body, and what flesh remained had begun to rot some time ago. Yellowed bone showed through in places. The remains were held aloft not by netting or by the web of some beast but by human hair. As with the totem Abigail had found in Boden’s room, threads of all colors enveloped the corpse and the other possessions to keep them in place. Here and there traces of thread had been added for support, likely from the clothing of other victims.

  Abigail turned and for the first time closely examined the chamber walls. They were everywhere: dozens of bodies in various states of decay, their faces frozen in horror, each bound tightly with a dense weave of thread and human hair. Small mounds of bones were heaped at the base of each wall, all that remained of those victims who had come before. Abigail let the lumitype hang by its strap and drew her pistol. As she did so, the purple light died, leaving them with only the blue glow of the cavern’s vegetation.

  “This was a bad idea,” Kincaid said. “This was a really bad idea.”

  “We find Boden and Artis, and then we go,” Abigail said. She walked around the nearest stalagmite, examining the other victims. “He has to be here somewhere. Look for someone with clothing from the institution. Should be in his thirties. About six feet tall.”

  She wound her way around the mountains of junk, paying extra attention to her footing, as most of the floor was likewise covered with things the trapperkin had collected. It didn’t take long for her to notice there were remains here, too—the occasional skull or femur protruded from amid the mess. Their owners had been devoured, cast aside, and subsequently buried under the constant influx of new possessions. Now and then she spotted a fresh corpse fastened to the junk piles rather than to the walls. A woman in a thick wool coat was bound to an armoire. A small corpse, possibly that of a child, had been fixed to one end of a steel pipe protruding from a junk pile. As all the bodies at the edges of the cavern appeared to have died some time ago, it was within these heaps that Abigail placed her hope of finding Boden.

  “Mr. Boden!” Abigail called out. She shuddered as her voice reverberated off of the stone. A chill ran down her spine.

  “Not sure we should make a racket,” Kincaid said. He was following closely behind her, looking more worried by the minute.

  “If trapperkin were here, we would have seen one by now. They must be out somewhere, and I plan to be gone before they return. If Boden is alive, we need to let him know someone is looking for him. Mr. Boden!”

  “Boden!” Kincaid called. “Nicholas Boden!”

  The stacks grew taller as they neared the center of the cavern—at times they blocked their view on all sides, robbing them of their sense of direction. It was like trying to navigate a maze of derelict objects. Some such piles had collapsed under their own weight, their spilled contents requiring Abigail
and Kincaid to clamor over them or to change direction entirely.

  “This one here has to be the freshest we’ve seen yet,” Kincaid said. He pointed down one of the disheveled aisles to a corpse lashed to one of the heaps. The man wore a Cygnaran trencher uniform, and a small puddle of blood had accumulated beneath his feet. His right pant leg and boot were slick with blood.

  “It’s still wet,” Abigail said. “The trapperkin couldn’t have put him here more than a few hours ago.”

  She looked about the heaps of junk surrounding them, half-expecting the trapperkin to emerge at that exact moment, its snare triggered.

  Kincaid tore at some of the hair binding the trencher in place and checked his pulse. “He’s dead, but he likely died recently. He must have been injured before it even brought him here. Look at this.”

  Abigail leaned in to see the man had been bound to a medical stretcher before he had been fastened to the heap.

  “Leg’s bandaged, too,” Kincaid said. “I think he was wounded in battle, and this creature of yours nabbed him out of a medical tent when no one was looking. Probably bled out here.”

  “We must be close,” Abigail said. “If this is where the trapperkin keeps its most recent victims, Boden can’t be far.”

  Abigail continued down the narrow aisle, moving more slowly now as she looked for any hints of the missing patient. Here and there, drops of blood marked where the soldier had been dragged to his final resting place. When she didn’t hear Kincaid following immediately behind her, she looked over her shoulder to see him still standing before the trencher, his hands tearing away at the strands of hair and thread that wrapped the man’s throat.

  “I’ll catch up with you in a minute,” Kincaid called. “I just want to grab his identification tags. It’s the least we can do. Maybe we can find out where he came from.”

  “Hurry,” Abigail called back. “Trapperkin could come back at any moment and I don’t want to be here when they do.”

  She rounded a corner, stepping over a shattered grandfather clock and a collection of wooden crates stamped with the Cygnus. The lid of one of the crates was slightly ajar, revealing the contents to be artillery casings packed in a bed of straw. Similar crates were nestled in the towering heaps, and she wondered just how much explosives a trapperkin had taken from whatever battlefield it had been pillaging. Spools of barbed wire protruded from stacks of helmets and rucksacks, many of which held shovels commonly employed by trenchers.