The Winter Guard opened fire on the beast, their bullets punching holes in its pale skin or ringing off its mantle of chain. It was hard to miss something so large, but it didn’t seem the gunfire had any effect on the thing.
The kapitan made no effort to attack the creature. He turned and sprinted after Abigail and Elliot, weaving among the craters in the field. The beast made to follow them when another volley from the soldiers struck it, and it angrily charged into them instead. When it reached the panicked Winter Guard, its metal claws scythed through the first man, lopping off an arm and a leg. Its momentum carried it into another soldier who it cut in half at the waist. The others tried to fall back as they fired at it, but the beast just roared and kept attacking.
Kincaid used the momentary distraction to run to Mel’s body. When he reached her, he worked quickly to unbuckle the capacitor bank and pull the Strangelight projector from her fingers. He had to fight to keep his hands from shaking; he swallowed hard against a lump in his throat. Her hair had fallen over her face to conceal that wound, but the hole in her chest was impossible not to see. His numb fingers fumbled with the harness of the capacitors as he clipped them to his back.
“Sorry, Mel,” he said as he heaved up the projector and checked its beam. “Let’s hope you were right.”
He scanned the battlefield for the fleeing kapitan. He saw the man just south of the farmhouse, dodging through a thicket of barbed wire snarls on Abigail and Elliot’s heels.
Grimes was still near, watching in shock as the creature slaughtered the Winter Guard. Kincaid ran to him, weighed down by the gear. “Grimes! We need Mel’s device back from the kapitan.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Grimes said. His voice was low and betrayed his shock. He hadn’t heard a word Kincaid said. “It used her death to come through like a grymkin…”
“Come on. I need your help.”
As Kincaid spoke this time, Grimes snapped out of his trance. His face hardened. He was once again the veteran Kincaid needed him to be. “All right. Let’s go.”
They sprinted after the others, weaving two meandering paths through the obstacles scattered on the battlefield. As they ran, Kincaid hazarded a look back at the creature. It was slick with gore as it crouched over the last of the Winter Guard, hacking at the body with its blades. When it was finished, it rose and silently tracked them like a hunting dog before bounding forward after them.
“It’s so damn fast,” Grimes shouted. The encounter suit was ungainly for a prolonged run, so Kincaid had no trouble keeping pace with him despite the burden of the heavy projector. The nightmare of flesh and chains chasing them acted as a good motivator. The two of them sprinted on. They closed the distance with the other three.
Kincaid overtook the others and tackled the kapitan, pitching them both into the mud. For a heartbeat, he considered beating the man’s skull in with Mel’s projector. “I need that device!” he shouted instead. “It may be our only chance!”
The Khadoran didn’t understand him, or panic made him deaf to Kincaid’s words. He backhanded Kincaid and kicked the bouncer off. He then staggered to his feet and ran again. As Andreiko rushed toward the farmhouse, he leapt over a low snag of barbed wire that blocked the only open path between craters, leaving Kincaid behind in the mud.
Abigail and Elliot moved to jump it, too. Their flight had jostled the knot holding Elliot’s satchel, however, and it hung too low to the ground. It caught on the nest of wire, yanking the young man back into a thicket of sharp steel barbs. Abigail screamed his name and grabbed him, trying to pull him free. Elliot wailed in pain as the barbs bit into his skin. The beast closed in.
“Go!” Grimes said, hauling Kincaid to his feet. The jammer then turned to face the oncoming nightmare. Grimes squared his shoulders like a boxer and held his gauntlets at the ready as they crackled with lightning.
Kincaid grabbed Abigail and ran after the kapitan. The rattling thing rushed Grimes, ducking low and bringing its claws over its head. Grimes roared at it and swung.
The creature swatted Grimes aside with one great claw. The jammer spun in the air, crashing to the ground a dozen feet away. Elliot screamed in fear as the beast loomed over him. Then, before it skewered the caller on its steel fingers, it stopped. Its head tracked the kapitan instead.
“It’s after you,” Kincaid said to himself.
The beast chased down the fleeing Andreiko and pounced, landing on him before he could reach the cover of the farmhouse. Its talons made a grisly tearing noise as they chopped at the man’s body. Kincaid couldn’t help feeling a moment of satisfaction.
“What do we do? We have to help Elliot!” Abigail screamed. As if to prove her point, the bloody thing rose again, holding the kapitan’s corpse in one dripping hand. It shook him once, like a cat testing the body of a mouse, and threw the body aside. The beast turned back to look at them and bellowed, its raw throat making a hideous sound.
Kincaid unslung the projector and gave it to Abigail. “Keep the light on that thing. Tell Elliot to find a soul and send it across.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have no idea. It was Mel’s plan. I’m just seeing it through.”
Then, Kincaid, former thief, part-time mechanik, and newest member of the Strangelight Workshop, ran toward a monster that had clawed its way out of the land of the dead. As he did, it turned to confront him face on, its ugly talons twitching. The thing cocked its head as if someone charging it was a new and unexpected experience.
First and last time for everything, Kincaid thought. He saw where the kapitan’s remains had ended as a heap of bloody meat. He veered toward the corpse as the creature moved to cut him down. The ground trembled as it picked up speed.
A shaky beam of Strangelight stabbed into the thing’s tiny eyes. It bellowed again and swatted at the air with its talons, but it stopped moving toward Kincaid. He rushed around it and fell to the ground next to the kapitan’s corpse, shoving the ruined body onto its back. He dug in the pockets of its great coat, finding a handful of loose ammunition and a pocket watch.
The creature turned toward the source of the light. Abigail shielded Elliot and held the projector. She screamed for Kincaid to hurry as the creature stalked toward them, picking up speed.
“Where the hell are you?” he muttered. He tore open the pouches on the corpse’s belt, digging out their contents as the creature advanced on his friends.
When he opened a long leather pouch, he finally found it jammed inside. Wrenching the device free, Kincaid lurched to his feet and sprinted back toward Abigail and Elliot. An unsteady Grimes had recovered and was standing behind them, holding his ribs with one hand while trying to shield the caller with the other.
“Grimes, get ready!” Kincaid shouted. He saw a swirling mote of light in the Strangelight beam as Elliot coaxed a soul to pass on to the other side.
The creature splayed the swords that were the fingers on each of its hands and shrieked. Its chains rattled as it charged the last few yards, trails of barbed wire tangling around its clawed feet.
Kincaid took the mine and jerked open the metal housing. As he fumbled with the device, he repeated what Mel said she intended to do. “Charge limiter. Then crank up the… dammit, crank up the what?”
There was a tiny tension-screw set in the housing. Failing to find anything else and quickly running out of time, Kincaid gave the screw a clockwise twist with his thumbnail and activated the device. The thing emitted a high-pitched noise and began to vibrate in his hand. He hurled it like a grenade in front of the creature. It landed in the full wash of Strangelight, just below the soul and its path to Urcaen.
Before the thing could cut down his friends, Kincaid snapped out his holdout pistol and shot it in the back. “You’re going the wrong way!” he shouted. “I’m the one you want!”
The creature turned back, the chains on its body rattling. If seemed to consider attacking Kincaid for a second before turning back to his friends.
/> Before it could reach them, the ghostbomb exploded. A brilliant blast washed the battlefield white with light. The creature flinched back from the intense glare as the soul Elliot guided entered the a vortex to Urcaen.
Howling winds ripped at the air, flowing toward the new hole in reality. Despite the screaming of the gale, Kincaid could hear an angry throng of strange voices on the other side.
“Grimes, hit it! Hit it now!” he shouted. He prayed the jammer could make the thing out better than he could.
The jammer rushed the beast and brought both gauntleted hands up to its vulnerable flank. There was a crack of electricity as his blow struck home. The thing reeled sideways, straight at the swirling pool of light. One of its legs touched the vortex and was ripped in with the cracking of bones and ringing of chains, yanking the beast off its feet.
The thing shrieked and clawed at the earth, leaving deep furrows in the wet soil. Its claws caught on some of the strands of wire on the battlefield, ripping the wooden stakes holding them out of the ground. The snaking cables of barbed wire hummed as the beast dug for purchase. Elliot screamed in panic and pain as the barbed wire nest he was tangled in began to trail after the creature as the gate to Urcaen took hold of it. Abigail and Grimes held his hands, trying to hold the caller back from oblivion.
Kincaid watched as the beast was forcefully pulled out of the world and sent back to hell. When it vanished into the light, it was followed by a loud thump of air. The brilliant light vanished. Where the creature had been was nothing but a bare patch of mud. The wire that had entangled it had been cut clean at the edge where the light had been.
Kincaid stood for a moment, gasping for air. It was quiet. His friends looked at him with disbelief, and he thought each one of them felt as lucky as he did to be alive.
None of them spoke for a long time. Abigail, Grimes, and Kincaid silently helped unravel the wire that snared Elliot. They helped him to his feet, and Grimes carefully inspected the deep scratches on the young caller’s arms and legs. When Elliot’s wounds were cleaned, the jammer broke the silence.
“Was that thing a grymkin?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Abigail said. “It’s like no kind of grymkin I’ve ever even heard of. They say Urcaen is filled with horrors.”
“I don’t think it was one of them, but I think it was with them,” Elliot said. He looked at Abigail. “I’m so sorry, Abigail. I dropped Artis. When they shot at us.”
She brushed his hair away from his face. “It’s okay. It’s okay. She’s a smart cat. She’ll find us.”
They kept talking, but Kincaid had stopped listening. He approached the place where the creature had vanished and looked at the array of slashes its claws had left in the ground. If the plan hadn’t worked, those gouges would have been in the bodies of all four of them. Tipping his head up, he looked to the school of souls still visible in the Strangelight beam overhead, each one of them a person who had lost their lives, and thought how grateful he was to not be among their ranks.
He didn’t know if she could hear him. He hoped not, hoped that her spirit was the one Elliot had guided to on to find its deserved rest in Morrow’s domain.
He said one last thing to his missing friend. “Thanks, Mel. It worked.”
• • •
IT WAS ALMOST SUNRISE when they returned to her body. Grimes and Kincaid made her a burial shroud from the sacks in the wagon. They set Mel into one of the graves the Khadorans had dug and stood by her grave as dawn broke over Glynam. Elliot said a prayer for her, and Grimes jammed her favorite wrench into the soil as a grave marker.
“I always thought she’d live through everything. I thought she’d outlast me for sure,” Grimes said, his voice thick as he looked down at the grave.
Kincaid didn’t say anything at all. He left the grave, letting his friends grieve in their way. He had to grieve in his own.
While Abigail, Elliot, and Grimes stood by Mel’s side, Kincaid hefted the large case of gear and slung the strap over his shoulder. He’d gathered what possessions he could from the farmhouse, including Mel’s bulky equipment case. He was picking up the scattered bits of gear they left behind. He scoured the area for things dropped during their escape, even pieces of the broken projectors, and placed what he could back in the case with great care. He hoped to repair as much as he could on the way to Elsinberg. Everything too heavy to carry had to be left behind.
He looked back for a moment to where the others had gathered, watching as Grimes consoled Elliot. Abigail’s face was still streaked from the tears that had cut clean lines through the battlefield dust on her cheeks, but her expression was set now. Harder. She was a leader, and they were her team. She needed to be strong for them. If she was going to mourn, Kincaid thought she would wait until she was alone to do it.
She watched him assessing and stowing the pieces of their scattered gear. True to form as predicated, Artis had come back to sit by her mistress. The other cats had vanished, hopefully to feast on gremlins for generations to come.
Elliot called out to him. “Wh- what are you doing?”
There was a moment of silence as he picked up another piece of odd Strangelight mechanika and turned it over in his hands. “You never taught me this one’s name,” he said to himself and added it to the heavy case.
“Kincaid? Are you all right?” Abigail asked.
He didn’t know how to answer her. Even he wasn’t fully sure what he was hoping to accomplish. Maybe by performing the mundane task of seeing to the gear, he hoped to keep from thinking of losing Mel. If he kept doing her job, maybe it would be as if she hadn’t died at all.
It was a childish idea, but it was the only one he had.
“We should go,” Kincaid finally replied. “We have a case, and it’s not like we’re getting paid by the hour.”
— CASE 5 —
SHADOWS OVER ELSINBERG
By Aeryn Rudel
Elsinberg, Khadoran Llael, late autumn
THE DULL THUD OF GUNFIRE sounded ahead as Jana Goodman hurried down Ether Street toward Brookside Tavern. She broke into a run, her heavy kit all but forgotten as panic seized her. She was no stranger to gunfire—no one who had lived through the war in Llael could be—but this was different. Some of the gunshots were strangely muffled, almost as if the rifles were being discharged under water. That wasn’t too far off actually; they were being fired by beings more ectoplasmic than corporeal.
She knew most of the firing came from spectral soldiers torn from the March of the Dead. What she didn’t know was why.
She turned onto Cherydwyn Lane and nearly ran into the crowd gathered outside the three-story building housing one of the more popular drinking and gambling halls in the city. The crowd was made up primarily of wealthy men and women—the Brookside catered to Elsinberg’s elite, both Khadoran and Llaelese.
Alistair Dunsbury, the Brookside’s owner, spotted her straight away, and the tall, angular man pushed through the crowd of wide-eyed spectators to reach her. Another volley of gunfire roared from within the tavern, drawing gasps from the people outside, which, she now noticed, included not a few members of the city watch.
“You have to get them out,” Dunsbury said when he reached her. “They’re destroying the place!”
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. Dunsbury,” she said.
Jana was still trying to catch her breath. In the last few weeks what had previously been a rather sedate academic research project for the Strangelight Workshop had become all too exciting. She’d been running from one haunting to another, watching her formerly mysterious but peaceful ghosts become deranged and now terrifying. She was still trying to mentally reconcile the difference, but every day now brought new surprises. She desperately hoped the team sent from Blackwell Hall would arrive soon.
Elsinberg had a long and largely positive relationship with its famous ghosts. Being taken over by the Khadorans during the Llaelese War had put a damper on tourist visits to observe the annual March of the Dead
but had not entirely halted it. The march remained a draw, a subject of particular fascination to the Llaelese people. The arrival and passage of the spirits had made them as reliable as clockwork, a great parade of soldiers from centuries ago that marched through in autumn. They had been locked in a perpetual reenactment of a piece of their last days, passing through the region as they had in life while marching to their deaths against the Orgoth. Their predictable nature had made these spirits perfect for extended study by the Strangelight Workshop, a complex and involved project that had become Jana’s life’s work for nearly a decade, kept up even when war gripped the city and its government became Khadoran.
By now, she could recognize most of the ghosts on sight, though it was jarring to see them in any context other than the familiar soldiers’ march. Looking out at them now, where they hunkered for cover and took shots with their rifles, their faces called their names to mind. But in all those years, the March of the Dead had never before deviated from the parade of apparitions that started at Elsinberg’s eastern gate. Now things were shifting quickly and inexplicably.
The last three weeks had seen her once-predictable subjects change dramatically—the ghosts had broken from their routine and began behaving erratically. The March had stopped, and its spirits now seemed inclined to stay, though showing themselves in brief and unpredictable intervals she referred to as echoes. They still seemed locked in some sort of shadow play but not the familiar one. They reacted to unseen sights, shouted silently at people who were not there, and ignored those who were. More recently, they had become swept up in conflicts only they could see—ghosts fell to apparent violence while others sought to retaliate with rifle and sword. Their rifles had been silent until yesterday, and she worried the sound meant they were manifesting more tangibly. Rather than showing any sign of dispersing, they were getting increasingly agitated.
She had seen that their attacks, although perhaps not directed intentionally at the living, could still cause harm. Whatever agitated the ghosts had them manifesting more strongly than had been the case in the past. Now when they passed through a living creature, it left a terrible chill that could cause something akin to frostbite on exposed skin or, in the worst cases, damage to internal organs.
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