Iron and Blood

by Gail Z. Martin

  Rick heard more footsteps headed up the passageway behind the mine car, but had no desire to wait around. He grabbed another set of shackles, ignoring the pain in his left hand, and took the pickax with him as he headed for the elevator tunnel.

  Sounds of battle echoed down the corridor. Jacob’s shotgun sounded and Rick winced, wondering whether a stray spark or shot would blow them sky high.

  He rejoined the others to find Hans and Jacob fighting three more of the clockwork zombies that had emerged from one of the side tunnels, while Kovach fought off a battered werkman. Hans’s extra strength from his own mechanical enhancements made him an even match for the zombie he battled, though as a living man, Hans could still be injured, while the zombie wouldn’t slow down until he was destroyed. Jacob fired the force gun and took the second zombie through the knees, then brought the butt of his gun down hard on the creature’s skull, smashing it open like a rotten pumpkin.

  Rick took the third zombie, wheeling the manacles overhead and sending them in a tangle around the legs of the monster, which fell with a dull thud. The pickax finished him off. Kovach leveled his next shot at the werkman’s ankles, blowing him off his feet and onto his back where the metal man struggled like an overturned turtle. Kovach leveled the force gun at each of the machine’s hinged joints, until all that remained were smoking bits of severed metal and a metallic torso that finally lay still.

  Two more zombies clawed their way up over the lip of the abyss. Out of the corner of his eye, Rick saw shadows flowing along the tunnel’s walls as dark shapes skittered across the rock. Eban Hodekin and two more creatures like him dropped from the ceiling, planting themselves between Rick and the zombies.

  Hodekin was fast. He and the other kobolds launched themselves at the clockwork zombies. Rick had thought the mechanical monstrosities were strong, but they were no match for the kobolds. Hodekin ripped one zombie’s head from its shoulders with his bare hands, and made it look easy. In seconds, the kobolds had torn the zombies limb from limb with their bony fingers and razor-sharp teeth. Then without a word, Hodekin and the others dragged the mangled zombies into a narrow crack in the rock wall. The sound of smacking lips and crunching bones gave Rick no doubt as to what had befallen the clockwork cadavers. With effort, he kept his gorge from rising.

  Only then did Rick realize why Matija and the Logonje priests had not come to their rescue. What looked like thick black smoke roiled up from the depths of the shaft. It was the same inky, unnatural darkness that had followed their carriage, stinking like an old tomb, and Rick knew that these were the gessyan, come to feast on their souls.

  Matija and his priests raised their relics as they chanted, casting an iridescent curtain of light between them and the gessyan.

  “We’ve got to get back up that shaft!” Jacob said. He looked at Rick. “Can’t you use your box? Isn’t it supposed to call the gessyan down to where it is?”

  Rick met his gaze levelly. “Not until we’re out. Not unless you want to meet the Night Hag on your way up.”

  “Get into the elevator,” Matija yelled over his shoulder as the priests continued to chant.

  “No offense, Father, but I’m not sure my faith is that strong,” Jacob replied, eying the billowing darkness.

  “Then you’ll have to make do,” Matija replied. “There’s only one way out of here.”

  “And we’d better hurry,” Rick replied. “The detonators have been set.”

  According to the plan, Matija and the Logonje were not supposed to unleash the full power of their magic against the gessyan until right before the explosions, when they and the others were out of the mine. Rick had no desire to see whether or not the consuming white light that the priests could summon would set off the tourmaquartz early.

  Matija’s voice rose to a sharp command, and the iridescent light flared. The glare was painful after the near-darkness of the mine, and Rick was blinded for a few seconds. When his vision returned, he saw that the curtain of light had become a floor, forcing the angry shadows down below the elevator, temporarily capping the deep shaft.

  “Go!” Matija commanded.

  Jacob had brought the elevator down so that the top tier was level with the ground. Rick dove in head first, sliding across the metal floor. Hans followed, then Matija and the priests, still chanting, relics limned with a golden glow. Kovach squeezed in next, and Jacob came last, slamming the door behind him.

  “Hang on,” Jacob said. “We’re taking the express.” He jammed the lever forward, and the elevator moved at its top speed, ballast rattling past. The cage suddenly jerked as something grabbed it from below.

  Jacob pressed close to the wire screen and let out a tirade in Croatian that Rick didn’t need translation to understand. “Damn zombie,” Jacob finished. He turned to Kovach. “Anchor me.”

  Kovach barely had a chance to grab Jacob’s belt before the cage door slid open and Jacob leaned out, his head only inches from the sides of the shaft. He shot three times, and Rick glimpsed something falling away beneath them. Kovach hauled Jacob back in and the door slammed shut.

  “I hope we’re close,” Matija said, and his voice sounded like he was straining against a heavy weight.

  “Ground level, coming right up,” Jacob replied.

  As soon as the car came level with the ground, Jacob had the door open. He and Kovach stood guard as Matija and the priests scrambled out, followed by Rick and Hans. “Coming out, don’t shoot!” Rick yelled into the transmitter to Jake. “And make damned sure our patron is ready, because all hell’s about to break loose.” And with that, he activated the trigger on the Maxwell box.

  “YOU MADE IT!” Jake said, relief rushing over him as he saw Rick and the others emerge, covered in coal dust and spattered with blood and ichor.

  “The charges are planted,” Rick said wearily. “Enough dynamite to blow a hole through to China as soon as Father Matija gives the signal.” Jacob set down a locked metal box. Rick caught Jake’s gaze and patted the bulging pockets of his coat. Jake gave a slight smile and nodded.

  Tourmaquartz, Jake thought. A king’s ransom in a coal hod.

  Before anyone could answer, a bone-chilling howl came from inside the mine entrance. The temperature plummeted until Jake could see his breath. Dozens of ghosts rose from the depths of the mine. Behind them came the same huge, black, dog-like gessyan that had pursued Jake’s carriage in the city; Veles’s hell hounds, summoned to do their master’s bidding.

  “Here we go again,” Kovach sighed, shouldering his shotgun and taking aim as the men behind him scrambled to ready the Gatling gun.

  Terrified screams rose from the crowd of rioters and guards at the front gate. Men climbed the metal fence, bringing it down with their weight and the pressure of the surging mob behind them, and those that did not move quickly enough were trampled underfoot. Miners and Pinkertons ran away as fast as they could, stumbling into each other in their panic.

  Gunfire echoed as Kovach and the others turned their weapons on the ghosts and demon dogs bounding toward them. The ghosts were the mine dead, raised by malevolent magic to serve those whose negligence had caused their deaths. Crushed in cave-ins, suffocated in tunnels by bad air, or lost to their deaths down near-bottomless mine shafts, their bodies had never been recovered. Bullets did nothing to stop the ghosts, but the hell hounds stumbled and fell when they were hit, though they got back up and renewed their charge. One of the hounds came at Jake, claws and teeth bared. Jake dove to the side as Rick locked and loaded, blowing the hell hound’s head away.

  “Thanks!” Jake said, then wheeled and fired as another hound launched itself at Rick. In and around the hell hounds, the malevolent spirits howled and keened, with long fingers that ripped cloth and left deep, bloody scratches.

  “Do something!” Rick shouted, dodging the hell hound, which moved unnaturally fast. The demon dog had him in one leap, grasping him by the shirt, and Rick wrestled with the creature to keep its large, sharp teeth away from his throat. />
  Jake raised his gun and aimed.

  “It’s too close! You’ll hit me—”

  Bang. A bullet grazed Rick’s ear and hit the hound in the head, splitting open its skull and covering Rick with stinking goo. Jake grinned. “Got him!” he cried before turning to pick off another hell hound. Amid the hounds, Jake saw a new threat: pale dead figures moving almost faster than he could follow.

  “Hold your fire!” Andreas shouted. “They’re my men.”

  Vampires, Jake thought. These newcomers were as pale as the ghosts they attacked. Moving with supernatural speed, Andreas’s brood launched themselves at the hell hounds.

  One of the demon dogs leapt into the air, lunging toward Jake. Before he could throw himself out of the way, a vampire tackled the hound, and by the time the two hit the ground, the hell hound’s head had been torn from its neck. Mitch stood his ground, taking his shots as if the hell hounds were targets on a firing range, hitting more than he missed.

  Jake and Rick stood back to back, conserving their fast-dwindling ammunition until they were certain of a killing shot. Andreas and his brood never gave them the opportunity. The battle was over as suddenly as it had begun, and the vampires sauntered away from a ground strewn with the dismembered bodies of the hell hounds as the ghosts drew back, no longer keen to attack.

  “Shouldn’t your Maxwell box have gone off by now?” Jake shouted. “I thought it was supposed to be pulling the gessyan back into the mine, not letting them out to fight us!”

  “I activated it a few minutes ago; I think it just kicked in,” Rick said. “Look behind you!” Jake turned to see shadows sweeping toward them, blotting out the streetlamps as they passed.

  “We’ve got gessyan!” Drostan shouted, knowing from experience his gun was no match for the cold darkness, wondering what the vampires could do against the new threat.

  “Get out of the way!” Jake ordered. “Let them pass! They’re being called by the Maxwell box.” Rick and the others were happy to comply, though Andreas remained beside the Russian stones, and Renate drew back with the other mortals.

  Summoned by the Maxwell box, the many gessyan that had escaped the depths of Vesta Nine streaked across the night sky, an ice-cold maelstrom of dark energy and malevolence. Wraiths and hell hounds followed the call. Revenants small and large followed in their wake and Jake realized that he had underestimated just what Veles had unleashed on New Pittsburgh. ‘Hell with the lid off’, someone had once called New Pittsburgh, and tonight it was truer than ever before.

  “What’s going on down there?” Nicki’s voice was loud in Jake’s earpiece. “The clouds rolled in and we can’t see!”

  “Not now!” he hissed.

  “Don’t you ‘not now’ me! We’re up here to pull your chestnuts out of the fire!”

  “Gessyan. Ghosts. Hell hounds. Feel better?” Jake ignored the response as he and the others retreated behind Andreas and the mages. Andreas and Renate were ready to finish the night’s work. As Jake stared at them, both witches were limned in faint light, their power made visible. In the moment before Andreas and Renate loosed their magic, it occurred to Jake that he had never seen exactly what they could really do.

  Renate and Andreas had erected the Alekanovo stone between them, and the runes carved into its smooth, black surface had begun to glow with power. As Andreas stepped forward to hold the gessyan at bay, Renate and the Logonje priests held up the small carved stones Nicki had taken from Jasinski’s apartment, while Matija readied Marcin of Krakow’s book, the tome for which so many people had died.

  Cold blue energy flared from Andreas’s open palms, rushing toward the shadows like a storm surge. His power swept out in an arc, rolling back the darkness, and as the energy touched the wraiths, they shrieked and writhed, fleeing before the consuming wave of power, vanishing into the blackness that spawned them.

  “Pretty impressive,” Rick murmured.

  An unnatural silence settled over the area, and the street lamps overhead dimmed. Drogo Veles stood at the mine entrance.

  “Go home.” Veles’s voice carried above the howl of the gessyan.

  “Not until we’re done,” Andreas replied as Jake and the others stood their ground.

  “You are meddling in my business.”

  “Like Thomas Desmet? Is that why you had him killed?” Andreas said. “Your ‘business’ set monsters loose on the city and abominations loose in the mine. It ends now.”

  “The gessyan were a fortunate accident,” Veles replied with a cold, terrifying half-smile. “We hadn’t planned to free them, but once they were loose, it helped to keep attention… elsewhere.”

  “So you could mine the tourmaquartz,” Andreas supplied.

  Veles nodded. He regarded Andreas coldly. “You have overstepped the mark. I am not a patient man.”

  “Neither am I,” Andreas replied, and a wave of the same blue energy that had driven back the gessyan blasted toward Veles.

  Veles brought his hands up and around in a gesture of warding, and the blue arc flared away without touching him. A second fluid gesture shot a torrent of fire back at Andreas as Renate and Father Matija stepped up beside him. Jake and the others fell back, and Jake and Kovach held their force guns impatiently, unable to get off a clear shot.

  The three mages moved in concert. Andreas threw his hands up, palms open, and a translucent wall of energy blocked the fire, which spread out along the barrier in a golden glow.

  The instant the fire was spent, Andreas dropped the shield. Renate was limned in a green haze, and she gestured, sending a milky cloud of sparkling particles toward Veles as he summoned more fire. The cloud absorbed the fire, breaking it into glowing embers that flickered and winked out.

  The seconds of delay Renate bought them were all Father Matija needed as he lifted a golden reliquary from the folds of his cassock and held it aloft in one hand, holding Marcin of Krakow’s book in the other. A bolt of blue lightning crackled from the relic as Matija began to chant. The lightning forked once, then twice, then again, sending eight streams of blue energy that sizzled all around Veles, striking his shield in multiple places. The energy shield wavered and flared as Veles fought against the onslaught. Abruptly, the shield vanished. Six of the lightning bolts had been absorbed by the shield. The other two touched down near enough to Veles to singe the hem of his well-pressed trousers and char the dirt around his boots.

  “To hell with this,” Jake muttered. He and Kovach already had Adam’s force guns shouldered. They squeezed the triggers just as the last of the lightning spent itself, and a cone of iridescent power caught Veles by surprise, knocking him backwards. Mitch lobbed a Ketchum grenade toward Veles, just for good measure. It exploded with a bright flash. When they could see again, Veles had vanished.

  “Huh. Science,” Kovach said with an approving nod, patting the gun for a job well done.

  “Don’t be too sure,” Renate replied. “Veles left because it suited him.” Her eyes widened as she looked over Jake’s shoulder, toward the mine entrance. “And I think I know why.”

  Rick was looking in the opposite direction, toward the river, his eyes wide with terror. “Trouble!” he yelled.

  Jake felt a cold shiver run down his back—his sixth sense was serving him well tonight—and turned to see a sight out of a nightmare. A hunched figure in a tattered, shroud-like dress descended from the sky. Gnarled, bony hands outstretched to grasp and rend, she plummeted toward them, eyes glowing a hellish red. Behind her swirled a black cloud of distorted, nightmare figures.

  Nocnitsa. The Night Hag. And with her, more gessyan. Between Adam’s Maxwell box and the spells Andreas and Renate wove, the gessyan were returning, and with them, the most fearsome monster of them all. A bone-chilling cry, somewhere between a raptor’s shriek and a deranged keening, drowned out even the gunfire.

  “Andreas! Renate! Incoming!” Jake shouted.

  “She’s fighting the power of the Maxwell box,” Father Matija shouted.

  “
I was afraid of that,” Rick said.

  “Get that thing into the mine!” Jake shouted to Andreas and the mages.

  “More trouble,” Rick yelled. “Guards—headed this way.”

  Kovach and Jake blasted the biggest, baddest gessyan of them all with their force guns. The iridescent wall of energy passed right through the specter. The Night Hag’s form wavered, but did not dissipate. The Night Hag gave a predator’s howl that made Jake’s skin crawl.

  Matija’s priests stepped away from where they had shielded the Alekanovo stone from Veles’s attack. Matija had handed off Marcin of Krakow’s book to Renate and Andreas and now held his relic aloft, bathed in the golden glow of its power. Renate held Marcin’s book, and as she and Andreas read aloud from its pages, the runes of the Alekanovo stone began to glow brighter and brighter. The two of them held up two of the small, carved rune stones, as did Matija and his priests. The priests murmured a chant as they lifted the stones and their golden relics. The four relics were lit by an inner light, surrounded by an otherworldly nimbus, and the stones’ carvings glowed with uncanny energy.

  The roiling cloud of gessyan screeched and roared, fighting the call to return to the depths of the mine. Bony fingers, tooth-filled maws and long, sharp claws reached out from the dark miasma of spirits. The Night Hag darted forward. She grew more solid with every passing second, her long, muscular arms, tearing at whatever she could reach with her bony fingers and vicious claws. A swipe of her sharp talons ripped at Rick’s jacket and he gave a cry of utter terror as he struggled to get loose.

  Mitch dove to grab Rick by the wrist, hauling him out of the way. Jake shoved the force gun into the Night Hag’s maw. “Eat this,” he said, pulling the trigger.

  The force gun that had no effect when Nocnitsa was a disembodied spirit now sent its expanding energy into the physical form of theNight Hag. Andreas and Renate followed up with a blast of greenish-blue lightning aimed at the Night Hag and the rest of the gessyan spirits, as Mitch and Rick fell to the ground, trying to get out of the way.