Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

  “Oh, you bastard,” Mel said.

  The grymkin shrieked with glee and rushed at her, far faster than she expected. She jumped behind the wagon as its lance shot forward, impaling the wall behind where she had stood. The grymkin waggled the flopping severed head in the air and mimicked a horse’s whinny with its revolting voice. Some of Bastard’s cold blood spattered on Mel as she tried to back away.

  She threw her wrench at the thing’s round, pink head, hitting its skull with a satisfying crack. The thing pitched over and twitched on the ground. She yanked its lance out of the wall and slammed it down into its chest with all her strength, pinning its convulsing body to the stable floor.

  “Sweet Morrow,” Elliot said.

  Mel looked up to see him standing in the door of the stable. She blew a strand of stray hair out of her face. “No horses. Are you okay to run?”

  The young man swallowed, clearly unnerved, but he agreed.

  When they returned to the farmhouse, Kincaid and Grimes were there. They were both panting, and Kincaid had a long cut on his forehead.

  “At least they’re not in a hurry to get us,” Kincaid said. “They were damn leisurely as they followed—”

  “The horses are dead,” Mel said, cutting Kincaid off.

  “Dammit,” Abigail said. Her satchel bulged with spectragraph plates and her lumitype. “What do we do?”

  “We run back to Glynam.” Grimes’ voice made it clear he wasn’t fond of the idea.

  “And then what?”

  “For crying out loud, I don’t know, Abby, now do I? But I know that if we stay here, we die.” As if to prove Grimes’ point, a chorus of tittering laughter echoed in the night. It sounded close.

  “We need Strangelight, or we won’t get far,” Mel said. “We can see those soldiers, but some of the other grymkin are invisible without it.”

  “My lumitype’s array—”

  Mel shook her head. “Won’t be enough. Grimes, Kincaid, do you think you could get me back to our gear? There was still one projector left. Maybe we can grab it.”

  The two men looked at each other. Grimes scowled in displeasure. Kincaid ran a hand through his hair and looked at the ground wide-eyed. “Mel, I have no idea. I’ve only got a few bullets left, and I can’t even be sure I was even doing any damage to the ones I hit.”

  “Look, I’m going with or without you.” She put her hands on her hips.

  “Then, we’re all going,” Elliot said. His voice was stronger and firmer than Mel was used to hearing it. “We’re better as a team than just a few of us. If we work together then we have a chance. Alone, who knows?”

  Mel smiled at him. “Thanks, kid.”

  Grimes didn’t look happy, but he relented. “If we’re going out, we’re going smart. I’m in front. Kincaid, you’re with me. We break through whatever’s out there and make a line for the projector.”

  “I’ll light the way,” Abigail said, hefting her lumitype. “Mel, you be ready to get that projector running the instant it’s in our hands.”

  “What about me?” Everyone looked at Elliot.

  “Hold my cat.” Abigail handed him Artis. “Point her at anything trying to sneak up on us.”

  • • •

  THE EMITTER ON ABIGAIL’S LUMITYPE was a pathetic substitute for one of the full-sized projectors.

  In its narrow cone of Strangelight, Mel could see flashes of impish grymkin darting around the field. When one came too close, Grimes or Kincaid moved to intercept it. Grimes was better equipped to damage the creatures thanks to his shock gauntlets, but Kincaid had found a pitchfork in the stables that made an adequate substitute for his missing truncheon.

  Behind her, Artis yowled and spat at invisible things in the darkness. Elliot kept hold of it and thrust it forward when the giggling voices of gremlins drew too close, eliciting cries of alarm. Some of the tiny gremlins threw small stones and debris at them from a safe distance, but their aim was poor, so their missiles often missed the mark.

  “Where the hell are the soldiers?” Kincaid asked as he slashed his pitchfork in the air like a man trying to navigate a darkened room. Mel couldn’t see them, either.

  “Thank Morrow for small favors,” Grimes answered. He threw a sparking punch at an imp as it approached. It jabbered nonsense at him and backed out of the beam of Strangelight, becoming invisible again. “Don’t be in such a hurry to find them.”

  They moved in this awkward huddle toward their abandoned gear. The whole way, Mel tried not to jump at the strange, threatening noises filling the air. More than once she felt something small tug at her pant leg. When she felt this, she thrashed and kicked the air around her, sometimes feeling the small bodies of grymkin snapping beneath her mechanik’s boots. She and everyone else had acquired numerous small injuries from their invisible assailants. Tiny cuts on their legs bled freely where needle-fine pieces of metal had been jabbed into them. Sharp pain lanced from Mel’s left foot as she stepped on a gremlin’s upturned spear.

  “How much farther?” she asked, yanking the shard of metal out of her foot.

  “Almost there,” Kincaid said.

  She focused on the task in front of her. Her projector was a bullet-riddled mess, and the grymkin had knocked Kincaid’s onto its side and stomped into a ruin. The third had also gone dark, but at a glance there seemed to be no damage to it.

  When they reached it, Mel tried to put everything else out of her mind and went to work. She was quick to diagnose the projector. The large capacitor they’d used to power all three had been wrecked by the gremlin swarm that attacked it, so she’d have to rely on a smaller alchemical capacitor. One of the little tricksters had smeared something wet and greasy on the outer lens—she didn’t want to think about what it might be—but after swiping it clean, she estimated the inner array was intact. She opened the hatch to check on the runeplate and swore. One of the gremlins must have stolen it.

  Despairing, she looked at the other projectors. The bullets would have destroyed the runeplate in hers, and she doubted the one in Kincaid’s was still functional. With no other option, she yanked the scratched runeplate out of her pouch and examined it. If the runes were too damaged, activating them would be disastrous, but not having a working projector might be worse.

  “How much longer, Mel?” Abigail asked. Grimes and Kincaid had taken up positions on either side of the group as the investigator flicked her lumitype’s light back and forth.

  “Just a minute.”

  “We don’t have a minute,” Grimes said as he and Kincaid scanned for threats.

  “Badgering me isn’t going to help, Duncan!” She jammed the damaged plate into the socket and hooked the projector’s conduit to a heavy array of capacitors bodged together into a larger one that she wore on her back. Activating the bank of capacitors made her back hot in seconds. She threw the activator switch on the projector. “Work, you rotten piece of—”

  A wide flood of Strangelight blazed in front of them. In its light, she could see dozens and dozens of grymkin flinching to cover their eyes with their hands.

  Mel shouted in victory and swept the light around the field as if she were a lighthouse. Wherever the brilliant illumination fell, swaths of grymkin shrank away.

  “That’s the way!” she cried. “Abby, get that lumitype behind us. I’ll keep them back.”

  With the flood of Strangelight, her companions could see what was approaching and fight on even footing. Most of the grymkin staggered in retreat, blinded by the sudden flare of intense violet light. Grimes grabbed a trapperkin as it leapt at them from the shadows and let his gauntlets fry its skull until smoke boiled from its head. Kincaid stabbed with his pitchfork like he was baling hay. Mel felt as if she were holding a burning brand that held back the darkness, as if she wielded a flamethrower of light that left the grymkin vulnerable.

  That’s when she saw the glowing lantern again. It rose like a moon from a crater to her right. The thin grymkin holding it slowly emerged with its attendant
soldiers arrayed about it.

  They marched out of the crater with jerky, irregular steps. The one holding the lantern aloft pointed it at them, and its soft eerie glow washed over them. It was…

  …it was the warm glow of the furnace in her workshop as she heated the tie rod of a Mule’s left leg. It had been bent out of shape in a dust-up with some Steelheads out of Armandor. She normally didn’t take contracts from mercenary companies, but the captain of the Rusty Fallen had deep pockets and was fun to drink with. She wondered if the mercenary would be interested in joining her for a round of cards and a bottle of uiske before heading off again…

  “Mel, where the hell are you going?” Kincaid’s hand was tight on her shoulder. He was trying to pull her back, away from something. Looking around, her head still fuzzy with memories of the workshop, she realized where she was. Back on the battlefield, staring at the gaunt grymkin soldiers approaching them.

  “They can get into your head. That was a rotten trick, you bastard!” Furious that the things had invaded her thoughts to use a fond memory against her, Mel pointed her projector straight at them, hoping to make them flinch away from its radiance. The light washed over them, but it did nothing to slow their methodical advance.

  “They don’t have any eyes!” Abigail put into words what Mel had just realized herself. The projector could blind the other grymkin like any light shone into one’s eyes, but the hollow pits in the soldiers’ faces had nothing in them to dazzle.

  The soldier grymkin fanned out to form a wide firing line with the lantern bearer at its center. There were no orders spoken as, in a halting simultaneity, the grymkin brought their rifles up and aimed at the group.

  No one had time to say a word or seek escape before the sound of rifle fire filled the air.

  Two of the grymkin soldiers jerked as bullets tore through their bodies.

  The grymkin shifted their attention away from the Strangelight team and back toward the ruins of Glynam. A line of ragged Khadoran soldiers emerged from the darkness, firing their rifles as they charged for cover at the broken edge of town.

  As angry as Mel was with Kapitan Andreiko, she could have kissed his sour face. He was with his troops, shouting orders at the Winter Guard and firing his repeating pistol at the grymkin before dropping back into cover.

  The grymkin were not fazed by the sudden appearance of the Khadorans. They simply turned to face their new foes. The lantern bearer hefted his light again, and a swirling mist seemed to bleed out of it, concealing the grymkin within its shifting clouds.

  The two groups traded shots back and forth. Soldiers fell on either side of the field. The Winter Guard emerged from cover to shoot at the nearest targets as within the unnatural mist, each grymkin seemed to vanish from one place and re-emerge nearby to loose another volley.

  “Move!” Grimes said as he shoved Elliot out of the line of fire. Everyone scrambled low after him to avoid the bullets cracking through the air around them. Errant shots punched into the soil in front of Mel and spattered her with wet soil as she moved for the cover of the craters in the farm’s pockmarked fields. One of the bullets caromed off her Strangelight projector, creasing the metal case. They all took cover in a deep crater with a puddle of water standing in it.

  “Was anyone hit?” Abigail asked. Her glasses were askew on her face. She panted.

  “Almost.” Mel pointed out the dent on her projector. “Looks like the grymkin don’t like this thing.”

  “What the hell are the Khadorans doing here?” Grimes asked.

  “They probably saw the damn lights you lot kept shining everywhere!” Kincaid growled.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Abigail said. “They’re fighting the grymkin. Mel, shine some light up top. Maybe you can give the reds a hand.”

  Mel partially hooded her projector to reduce its glare and then flashed its light around the team’s unexpected saviors. The beam illuminated a handful of glowing souls near the Winter Guard, causing one of the soldiers to stop and gape at the floating silvery orbs. The Strangelight also revealed a crowd of grymkin moving to flank the Khadorans, mostly the smaller gremlins but a few of the larger imps as well.

  Mel shouted a warning from cover. Without wearing goggles like hers, most of the grymkin would look like strange smudges in the air, but she hoped the Khadorans would react to the blurry shapes. That hope was validated when a Winter Guard turned on one of the closest gremlins, the little man in a frock coat wielding a spoon like a dagger. The soldier used her rifle’s stock like a cudgel to smash the little man’s chest as he moved to pounce on her. Its chest collapsed. The other grymkin dashed away, likely realizing the Winter Guard could now see them.

  One by one, the grymkin’s hollow soldiers fell beneath rifle fire, their bodies crumbling like dry leaves when they died. The last one to fall was the lantern bearer. Its body broke up and was whipped away on an unnatural wind. The lantern it carried fell to the ground, shattering with a flare of light that was nauseating to look upon.

  When the battle was ended, Mel and the others cautiously poked their heads out of their wet patch of cover.

  The kapitan barreled toward them. He had a gash on his cheek, where a grymkin bullet had likely grazed his face. His eyes bulged, and his stubbled face was crimson with anger.

  “Lemme talk to him. I can show him the grymkin with this,” Mel said hefting the projector. “Besides, I need that ghostbomb. After this, maybe he’ll listen to reason.”

  “Be careful, Mel,” Abigail said.

  “Hey, it’s what I do,” Mel said with a grin. She hauled herself out of the crater and moved to intercept the oncoming Khadoran.

  “Kapitan Andreiko, we’re obliged for your help.” She didn’t bother using her stilted Khadoran.

  Lines of confusion and anger creased the man’s red face. He pointed an accusing finger at Mel’s chest. “You are no spies. You—you are necromancers!”

  Mel froze. The idea seemed absurd until she remembered the floating souls her projector had revealed and how such a thing must look to someone unfamiliar with the Strangelight Workshop’s work. “No, it’s not like that. We were here to help them.”

  He kept moving toward her. “Taking our lives was not enough? You southern witches covet our souls?”

  When he was a few feet away, Mel pointed down to the Strangelight projector, which still illuminated the floating souls of the fallen and the few scattered grymkin retreating back to the farmhouse. “I promise, we are on the same side. I know how this must look, but I swear to you things here aren’t what they—”

  Kapitan Andreiko drew his pistol and pointed it directly at her face. Before she could react, he squeezed the trigger.

  • • •

  JOHN KINCAID’S BLOOD THUDDED IN HIS EARS as he watched Mel’s body fall. It muted Abigail’s horrified cry and the primal, animal roar of rage and disbelief from Grimes.

  Kincaid just stood there, his whole body numb. He watched as the Khadoran kapitan lowered his pistol and shot her again to be sure Mel was dead. He saw the man wave to his soldiers and point at Kincaid down in his muddy hole. He saw the northerners raise their weapons like a firing squad. But he couldn’t feel anything.

  When his scream died to a hoarse noise, Grimes surged forward with his fists clenched. Kincaid was sure the Khadorans would gun him down before he reached the kapitan, there was no way Grimes couldn’t know that, too, but the jammer didn’t seem to care.

  Kincaid moved to restrain Grimes, but his arms felt heavy and thick. He couldn’t grab onto the man’s shoulder before he rushed to his execution. Abigail sank to her knees and wept, shaking her head as if she could disbelieve hard enough to take the killing back.

  “Oh no,” Elliot said. His voice was how Kincaid felt: small, frail, and powerless. The young man tugged on Kincaid’s sleeve. “Something… else is coming.”

  Before Kincaid could ask what he meant, a howling wind burst into life. Just above Mel’s body, the askew beam of her Strangelight projector ill
uminated a vortex in the air. But the swirls Kincaid had seen earlier were pinpricks next to this. It was like an unnatural whirlpool in the air that spat blinding light. Softly at first but growing louder and louder, the sound of rattling chains filled the air.

  With a sound like steel scraping on stone, a huge hand emerged from the vortex. Its fingers were notched and curling blades linked by taut wire and bronze hasps to a pale, emaciated limb. Another limb followed, and a massive, ugly creature clawed its way into the world. Its form was shrouded by loops of rusting chains and dark iron spikes, as if railroad spikes forged three feet long had been pounded into its flesh all over. Its face was hidden in shadows, but the creature’s eyes were two angry points of purple light that pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat above a skeletal set of pale white teeth.

  The thing stretched itself out as it came fully into the world and shook itself like a dog trying to dry off, causing its shroud of chains to rattle and whip in the air. At its full height, it was over ten feet tall.

  Kincaid’s numbness washed away on a wave of cold panic.

  Both Grimes and the kapitan backed away from the creature. The kapitan’s mouth was slack and his eyes wide in disbelief. Grimes held his hands up defensively, as if his gauntlets could hope to do something to a creature this size.

  The thing took a thudding step toward them, then another, its bladed fingers eagerly cutting the air. It looked between the two like a man in the butcher shop selecting the best cut of meat. Then, it focused on the kapitan, and its glowing purple eyes flashed. It had made its choice.

  With a rattle, the creature pitched forward, swiping at the kapitan with its right claw. The blades missed him but not by much.

  Meanwhile, Kincaid hauled Abigail to her feet and pointed back at the farmhouse. “Take Elliot. Try to hide.” He considered his feeble pistol and rejected it. There was no way it could hurt something that size.