Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech

by Werner, C. L.

  “I am happy that our deal is to your satisfaction,” Lorca said, trying to hide the quiver in his voice.

  Moritat shrugged at Lorca’s lack of appreciation, his inability to see the genius of this discovery. He stroked the necrotite nugget as though it were a favored pet. “I shall need much more for my purposes. My experiments are most exhaustive.” The morbid flesh floating inside the glass spheres emerged from the liquid depths. “You have the amount you promised?”

  “You’ll get what we agreed on,” Lorca said. He glanced away from Moritat as he caught motion from the corner of his eye. One of the bodies lying on the floor had started to twitch, its mouth contorting in a silent moan. Despite the thing’s obvious agony, there was no chance it could still be alive, not with the organs that had been cut from its mutilated flesh. Azaam stalked over to the moaning thing. There was a look of pleasure on her face as she started to work on the body with her knife.

  It only took a moment of watching Azaam for Lorca to look away in disgust. “I brought you here to do a job, not . . .”

  “So you did and so we will,” Moritat said. “But it would have been impractical for us to bring everything we need all the way from Cryx. We felt it would be more efficient to improvise some of the more mundane elements from . . . shall we say, local materials?” The necrotech’s spidery legs scratched at the floor as he came scuttling closer. “You must want this man dead very badly.”

  Lorca squirmed under Moritat’s gaze.

  “What is so special about one death, when there is so much all around us? Everything that thinks itself alive is already dying. Only the Dragonfather is eternal.” Moritat pulled another sliver of rotten tissue from the slash-like vent. “So much trouble just to kill one man. You should have asked for a few dozen, bought your murders wholesale.”

  Lorca stared back at the monster. Ambition dulled the horror coursing through his veins. He was a man with an insatiable appetite for power. On his own, he’d risen through the ranks of High Captain Kilbride’s syndicate, eliminating anything and anyone in his way. But he’d reached a plateau. To climb any higher he would have to stand on the corpse of a murdered man. Not just any man, but his own boss within the syndicate, Vulger Volkenrath, first mate to Low Captain Haggise, Kilbride’s second-in-command. Lorca didn’t have any qualms about murder, but killing his own boss—if the crime could be traced back to him—would be like slitting his own throat.

  If Volkenrath were slaughtered by horrors from Cryx, however, not even his fiercest rival would suspect Lorca’s involvement.

  “He’s the only one I need dead,” Lorca said. He forced himself to look back at Azaam and her gory adjustments to the recalcitrant corpse. “Do whatever you need to do to get ready, but I want you to act soon.”

  Azaam stepped away from the mangled carcass. She stretched her blood-soaked hand toward it and arcane runes glowed in the air around her fingers. The same runes flickered briefly where they had been carved into the corpse’s flesh. Slowly, the thing sat upright, then clumsily pulled itself to its feet. The blood hag had invested it with the foulest echo of life, the obscene vitality of the undead. The corpse was now one of the risen.

  “We will step up our preparations,” Azaam said. “We will be ready. See that you can say the same.”

  “I’m already making the arrangements to ship the necrotite out of Five Fingers. Don’t worry—with me working it, you’ll be able to get your necrotite safely out of the city,” Lorca said. “And I’ve already figured out where you can hit Vulger. He has a hobby. He likes to watch steamjacks beat each other into scrap. Once a week he operates a fighting arena called the Scrapyard here on Hospice. That’s one of the reasons I chose this place to hide you, so you’d be close to the hunting ground.”

  Moritat gave the nugget of necrotite one final caress, then slipped it back into his satchel. “My creations are not known for their restraint,” he said. “They are liable to kill everything in the arena.”

  Lorca watched as Azaam used her magic to animate a second corpse. He’d come too far to reconsider now. “Just as long as you get Vulger, I don’t care how many you kill.” The racketeer shuddered as the second risen lurched to its feet. He tried not to think about where his ghastly allies had come by so many corpses, or the nearness of Blocklathe Orphanage to their hideout.

  A giggle bubbled from the necrotech’s lips. “When my creations are through with it, you may start calling the Scrapyard the Boneyard.”

  CHAPTER III

  “Over my dead body,” Taryn growled, both hands closing a little tighter around the grips of her magelocks. The idea seemed to hold a lot of attraction for the hatchet-faced Thurian and the two ogrun bruisers behind him. After five minutes of arguing with the gun mage about her weapons, the ogrun looked like they were ready to tear out the nearest support column and beat her with it.

  “I don’t like it either,” Rutger said, “but if we’re going to do this, we have to play by the rules.” He’d already taken off his own weapon belt and was only waiting for Taryn to be reasonable before handing his arms over to the Scrapyard’s enforcers.

  “I’d sooner go naked than hand over my guns.” She glared at the Thurian.

  Marko adopted his oiliest smile and hurried between Taryn and the enforcer. “Now, now, let’s all keep things civil.” With a dramatic flourish he started removing knives from under his vest, handing them to the Thurian one after the other. “See, I’m not worried about getting my weapons back,” he said, looking at Taryn.

  “We can still go back,” Rutger said, laying his hand on her shoulder. He knew how important the magelocks were to Taryn. They’d been a gift from her mentor, Henri, the closest thing to a father she’d ever had. Henri had died many years ago defending Taryn’s honor. The magelocks were the only tangible thing she had to remember him by.

  Taryn turned away. They were standing in what had once been a shipmonger’s dry dock. The rusted hulk of a never completed ship had corroded into the far wall, where it lay like some mammoth carcass. Pools of stagnant water and jumbles of broken masonry littered the open ground leading back to the squalid Southhold Prow.

  She glanced over at Rex. The warjack’s optics stared down at her. Somehow there seemed to be an accusing quality in the ’jack’s gaze. She knew it was foolishness, but somehow she couldn’t shake the impression that Rex was judging her.

  The ’jack meant a lot to Rutger, perhaps as much to him as her magelocks meant to her. Yet he’d agreed to risk Rex, allowed her to talk him into a venture he felt was wrong. Only now did she really understand how hard that decision must have been.

  “In or out?” the Thurian enforcer asked, clearly impatient to retreat back behind his steel door and blot out the stench wafting from Broken Finger Channel.

  Taryn unbuckled her gun belt and handed it to the enforcer. “In,” she said. Before she could breathe another word, Marko was relieving Rutger of his weapons and almost flinging them at the enforcer.

  “Good. That’s settled,” Marko said. He waved his hand at the enforcer. “If we hurry there’ll still be time to make some last-minute bets . . . I mean arrangements.” He corrected himself, noticing the ugly looks his companions gave him.

  The Thurian made a gesture with his fist, and the two ogrun stepped back toward the door, grunting as they slid the massive portal open. This service entrance to the arena was big enough to admit all but the heaviest steamjacks, yet the ogrun managed to move the door by sheer strength. Beyond the door was a long corridor down which the shouts and cheers of a large crowd were conveyed to the dry dock.

  “Your weapons will be waiting for you at the front cage,” the enforcer said, making a point of handing a bronze claim chit to Taryn. “You can get them when you leave.” He nodded at Rex. “The ’jack and its operator take the left turn at the end of the corridor. You other two go right.

  “Welcome to the Scrapyard.”

  As they neared the end of the corridor, Rutger felt increasingly disturbed. The shout
s and cheers became steadily more savage and animalistic the closer they moved toward their source. The corridor walls were lined with arms, legs, pistons, boilers, chassis plates, coal hoppers, furnace grates, and almost every other steamjack component Rutger could put a name to. He saw the ugly gnaw marks of scrap saws, the deep gashes inflicted by battle blades, the gouges left behind by drill rigs, the hideous crumpling caused by a cargo claw. Some pieces were scorched and melted, evidence of boiler explosions.

  “Vulger needs to get some scrappers in here,” Marko said as they marched past the debris. “Any of the good salvage makes its way back into circulation pretty quick, but he’s bad about having the junk hauled away.”

  Taryn grabbed the thief by the scruff of his neck. “What’s that about salvage?”

  “Just . . . just the standard agreement,” Marko said. “Any ’jack that can’t walk away after a fight becomes the property of the house.”

  “And I’ll just bet they don’t call the fights until they’re dead sure one of the ’jacks won’t be walking away!” Taryn shook the Midlunder like a rag doll.

  “Usually, usually,” Marko said. “But we won’t have that problem. Vulger’s not going to pit Rex against anything it can’t beat. He’ll want to build up interest first. Give Rutger and Rex a chance to gain a reputation.”

  Taryn shoved Marko against the wall. She turned toward Rutger. “If you’d rather call the whole thing off . . .”

  Rutger barely heard her. The end of the corridor was close now, the passage branching off to left and right. The brick half wall afforded a view out across the arena. At one time it must have been the main workshop. Now it was given over to a ring of tiered platforms that surrounded a sunken pit some hundreds of yards across. The torsos of two steamjacks rose above the lip of the pit, lunging and pitching from one side to the other. The ’jacks pounded at each other with their massive metal fists, battering one another into dented hulks.

  A set of iron cages swung above the pit, suspended from the roof by steel cables. There was a man locked inside each cage, face pressed close to the bars, a tin funnel pressed to his lips as he tried to make his shouts heard above the roaring engines and driving fists of the steamjacks below. Rutger immediately guessed who the caged men were.

  Taryn did too. This time her hand was around Marko’s throat rather than his scruff. “They’re not locking Rutger in a cage!”

  “Easy,” Rutger said. “A ’jack’s operator has to be close to the action. Up in a cage is better than down in the pit.”

  Taryn still looked dubious. “This rat didn’t say anything about handing over weapons or salvage or putting you in a cage! What else did he forget to mention?”

  “If you decided to let him breathe, he might tell us.”

  Taryn frowned. She quite liked Marko’s purple complexion. Reluctantly, she let the thief gulp air back into his lungs.

  “There . . . there may be . . . one . . . other thing,” Marko said. He pointed up at the cages. Taryn was first to spot what the thief was trying to show them.

  She shuddered. “Look at their hands.”

  A chill crawled down Rutger’s back. He could see one of the men’s hands where he held onto the bars. It only had three fingers. That might have been simply coincidence, but the man in the opposite cage was pressing the tin funnel to his lips with a grotesque nub of flesh that only had a thumb left.

  “Vulger wants to make sure every fight is on the up and up,” Marko said. “A lot of people bet on the fights and he doesn’t want anybody to think they’re rigged. So . . . so the loser, the guy whose ’jack gets beaten, well, he kind of has one of his fingers cut off.”

  “We’re leaving,” Taryn said.

  Marko caught at her cloak before she could start back down the corridor. “It’s too late for that. Vulger’s expecting a fight. Try to back out now and you’ll wish he only cut off a finger!” Marko turned a sheepish look at Rutger. “I’m sorry, but you have to go through with it.”

  Rutger was staring down into the fighting pit. It was an eight-foot-deep crater in the center of the floor, either end of its ovoid shape rising in a gradual slope. The ’jacks, one a Bulldog with a crude armor plating welded to its forearms, the other a Forager with anchor chains wrapped about its fists, were starting to break apart. A brutal strike from the Bulldog’s fist crumpled the Forager’s shoulder, impacting against the pistons of its left arm and rendering it unable to rise more than a quarter of the way. The Forager’s chain-wrapped fist returned the favor by pummeling its adversary’s midsection with such force that the Bulldog found itself incapable of rotating its waist.

  The spectators’ cheers rose to a deafening fury as the Bulldog brought both its hands smashing down on the Forager’s chassis, exploiting the inability of its left arm to raise high enough to block it. There was a ghastly sound of crumpling metal and seizing gears. The Forager staggered back, reeling like a punch-drunk flesh-and-blood fighter. Black smoke boiled from the dent in its hull; the light in its optics flickered and faded. The crowd fell silent.

  The men suspended in cages shrieked and yelled, pleading to be lowered back to the floor.

  Everyone waited to see if the Forager’s boiler would explode. A groan of profound disappointment and jeers of derision rose from the crowd when the crippled ’jack simply pitched over and crashed against the side of the pit. Rutger imagined he was the only person in the whole arena who felt any pity for the mangled Forager. Except, of course, for its operator in the cage that still hung over the pit. The man was going to find it awfully hard to hold his tin funnel without even a thumb.

  Rutger turned away as a crew of scrappers rushed into the pit to clear the wreckage. He tried to give Taryn a reassuring smile, but the effort was beyond him. Instead he simply nodded. “Let’s see it through,” he said. Raising his voice, he shouted at the massive warjack that had followed them obediently into the lion’s den.

  “Rex, come!”

  A low growl hissed through the vent at the front of Rex’s face. Rutger shook his head. His ’jack seemed more eager to fight than he did.

  As he led Rex down the left-hand corridor, Rutger prayed the Scrapyard wouldn’t offer them any more surprises.

  Taryn followed Marko down the right-hand passage. A set of stairs conducted them up to the main floor of the arena. She could see the iron gate at the front of the building, the entrance for the Scrapyard’s audience. With the fights in progress, the gates had been closed and barred, and a group of vicious-looking trollkin ensured they stayed that way. Vulger took no chances that one of the rival syndicates might try to interrupt his prosperous pastime. Near the gates stood the steel-barred cell where the arena’s guards stored the crowd’s weaponry. In a district as forlorn and decayed as Southhold Prow, it was only natural that the patrons came armed. It was equally natural that Vulger didn’t want them to stay that way, not in a venue that catered to and indeed encouraged the violent instincts of its audience.

  The gun mage cast a longing look at the lockup. Somewhere in there, just past the bored-looking ogrun minding the arsenal, were her magelocks. She’d feel a lot more confident with those in hand.

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Marko said as they reached the top of the stairs and the arcade that ran along one wall before climbing up into the tiers of seats overlooking the fighting pit. A crush of spectators hurried to secure victuals from the food stalls scattered about the walkway before the next fight commenced.

  “Your mouth got Rutger into this,” she hissed in his ear. “Now we’re going to see if your mouth can get him out of it.”

  Marko cast a doleful look toward the barred window where Vulger’s bookmakers were taking down bets. “Just a quick jog over to the window,” he said. “We can put down a bet and still see Vulger before the fight starts.”

  Taryn took hold of the thief’s ear and gave it a twist. “You do understand that I will kill you,” she said.

  The thief whined in pain, standing on his toe
s to try and relieve some of the violence being done to his ear. Suddenly, however, he forgot all about his pain. “That lying, cheating mongrel!” Marko cursed. “He told me he was going to build Rutger and Rex up first! That deceitful scum!”

  Taryn spun Marko around. Before she could demand an explanation from him, the thief pointed at a slate slab bolted to the wall beside the window. Scrawled across it in chalk was a roster of the night’s combats and the odds for each fighter. Taryn saw that Rex was matched against something called Bruno. Whatever Bruno was, it had four to one odds against Rex!

  “We have to warn him!” Taryn cried. She let go of Marko and ran back toward the stairs.

  “We have to get my money off of Rex!” Marko shrieked, racing toward the window.

  Taryn had just reached the stairs when she found her path blocked by a man wearing a long black greatcoat. She started to dodge around him, then felt the barrel of a gun press against her ribs.

  “Do stay for a bit,” the man said in a steely tone. He had a Cygnaran accent. There was just a suggestion of Caspian about the hard, weathered eyes that studied her from beneath the broad brim of a leather hat. The man kept his gun hidden beneath his coat as he nudged Taryn back up the stairs.

  “You can’t be one of Vulger’s men,” Taryn said, “or you wouldn’t need to play sneaky. So you must be Kalder.” Without turning her head, she glanced toward the arena. She felt sick when she saw Rex march down into the pit and Rutger step into one of the lowered cages. If Kalder saw him now, her partner would be a sitting duck. “If you’re looking for Rutger, he left already. I was just leaving to join him.”