by Ed Greenwood
Inside which, if one could go by the gunfire, a battle royal was now raging.
“We may be mere tentacles,” Grimstone murmured, smiling up into the moonlight, “but if you anger us enough…”
* * *
The din made Rose wince more than once. The Iron Assassin had come down from the upper floor into the far wing of Foxden and was now trudging through beagle after beagle, still on his feet despite being shot dozens of times. According to the constable who’d just come running up to his on-duty superiors, white-faced and breathless, Steelforce was splintering down locked doors, breaking necks, and crashing through improvised furniture barricades. Seemingly unstoppable.
Those senior beagles looked at each other, then turned with one accord to Tempest and the others.
“That settles it!” said Commander Adams, the highest-ranking member of the Constabulary at Foxden since the departure of Assistant Commissioner Drake. “We get the Prince out of this house while we still can!”
Hardcastle and Malmerston both nodded, but Jack Straker shook his head violently.
“No. To do so now would be rank treason—you’d be committing regicide!”
The commander frowned. “How so, man?”
“Steelforce is no marksman. Nor can he be in two places at once. All that firing into the house from outside proves that more killers—or kidnappers—are waiting out there in the night for any attempt to escape. Unless you have secret tunnels up your sleeve that I’ve never heard of, waiting here for reinforcements is safer than stepping outside into a firing squad.”
“Hear, hear!” Lil and Rose piped up, together.
The commander gave them a dismissive “And what do women know of warfare?” look, but Malmerston and Hardcastle were nodding in support of Tempest now.
“If we play for time,” the butler ventured, “and those reinforcements get here…”
“The lurkers outside will butcher them!” one of the senior beagles snapped.
Tempest pounced on this. “Ah, but what price the royal neck? That’s always the hard choice, isn’t it? How many commoners does one sacrifice to keep alive the prince who’s running the Empire? And whose death will almost certainly touch off dozens of skirmishes, perhaps even a dozen wars? How many graves will have to be dug then?”
Another beagle cursed, under his breath.
The commander looked at Tempest. “Can’t you turn your killer off? Stop him in his tracks? I don’t pretend to know how Steelforce, ah, works, but surely, man, you built in something that gave you overriding command?”
“I did, but he’s someone else’s killer now. That’s the problem, at the sharp and ever-advancing steam-driven edge of things. You do something, and someone improves on it, and you watch it race ahead, out of your control.”
“Like an empire,” Rose murmured.
They all turned to look at her. It was Malmerston who nodded first.
“Like an empire, Lady Harminster,” he agreed quietly. “Very well put.”
The silence that followed was broken by a distant, splintering crash.
It wasn’t nearly as far away as the previous ones had been.
Tempest turned to Lil. “Bedchamber!”
The rouged prostitute nodded, turned, put her head down, and ran.
“What’s ‘bedchamber’?” Commander Adams snapped, frowning.
“The room you and your men have to keep the Iron Assassin from reaching,” Tempest told him crisply, “at all costs.”
Then he sprinted after Lil, Hardcastle at his heels. Malmerston and Lady Rose ran after them.
The beagle commander clenched his fists, stared at the ceiling, and cursed loud and long.
“Why,” he implored the painted roses on the plaster above him, “are the lawful constabulary of this Empire always the last to be told things? Why?”
* * *
With all the beagles and soldiers and staff inside Foxden, the stables were deserted, so Whipsnade and Grimstone could move freely. Wherefore it took them no more than a few minutes to use straw and ladders from the stables to build a fire against the front doors of Foxden.
The church bell was still tolling, but reinforcements, if any were coming, were still on the way. Well back among the topiary, Grimstone and Whipsnade watched the front doors burn.
“You didn’t think to bring any chestnuts?” Whipsnade joked in a whisper, just before the first shouts arose from inside the house.
The two Tentacles men drifted closer, the better to listen, taking care to keep well to one side of the graveled turning circle.
They could hear faint coughing and choking from inside Foxden now, coming through the shutters. With so many of the windows shot out, sound traveled more than adequately.
One of the three windows above the doors burst open, but Whipsnade had been waiting for that. He let the beagle with the bucket lean out to try to pour accurately into the flames and shot the man through the head.
For a moment, it seemed as if the dying man would plunge down into the flames, but there was someone behind him who hauled him back and reached out to haul the shutters closed; Grimstone did the honors, this time, and the man fell back with a gurgle, leaving the shutters swinging open.
There was more choking—“More enthusiastic choking,” as Whipsnade put it fondly—coming from the hall inside the front doors. The defenders of Foxden obviously feared the house would burn down if they didn’t fight the growing conflagration, for they suddenly thrust open the doors as far as the carefully entangled burning ladders would allow. Sparks swirled, and Whipsnade and Grimstone stepped out of concealment side by side and fired carefully, felling beagle after beagle after soldier, until everyone was down or had fled, leaving the doors ajar and the disarranged fire dying.
The two men of the Order exchanged glances. Aside from a few single-shot derringers both had hidden on their persons and hadn’t preferred to reveal to each other yet, they were both almost out of ammunition. However, some of the men at the door had been holding pistols, and presumably all had been armed.
They slipped along the front wall to where they could plunder the fallen and eventually found themselves the new owners of no less than seven loaded pistols. They left the truncheons and knives on the bodies, except for one billy that Whipsnade tossed into the house.
There was no reaction from within. The two exchanged glances, shrugged, and slipped through the open doors, keeping low.
The front hall was deserted.
Though they had no idea just which bedroom the Prince Royal might be using, or where His Highness was just now, both men knew as much of the layout of Foxden as builders’ plans revealed. They chose the most likely passage and set off along it, darting along with pistols ready.
It took them quite some time to kill their way to the Prince’s bedroom, and by then the crashings and shooting had ended—was the Iron Assassin down, or had he succeeded and departed?—and their pistols were no more than clubs.
Fireplace pokers served better, and Whipsnade and Grimstone went back from room to room until they each had a good hefty one in hand.
Being out of bullets seemed to be a common affliction; the servants and beagles standing desperate guard in front of the doors of this last room didn’t aim or fire anything at the two advancing men of the Order, just clutched pistols like clubs, and in one case raised a pitchfork that looked like it had come from the stables quite recently.
Grimstone chose a beagle at one end of the row and took a hearty swing. The man shouted in pain as the poker shattered his thumb and sent his empty pistol flying; when the man beside him rushed to his aid, Whipsnade met that second beagle with a vicious swing of his poker, splitting the man’s head. Blood and brains splattered, men screamed and spewed, and the two Order men murderously battered the first beagle, caught between them, to the floor.
That still left three frightened men and a lad in front of the doors, wavering uncertainly. Whipsnade gave them a cheerful grin as he stalked forward, and the boy let
out a moan and bolted. Or, no, took two steps and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Whipsnade promptly kicked the body into the ankles of the men behind it, toppling them forward to where he and Grimstone could smash in their skulls, swinging their pokers freely.
They had a little fun with the last man, stabbing him with their pokers as if they were fencing masters, while he was busily, desperately holding up his pitchfork to defend his head. He stared at them in disbelief as he went down, fighting to breathe and spitting blood with every wheeze, so they silenced him with blows to the head, then served the senseless lad the same way.
“Now,” Whipsnade told Grimstone, “let’s see if royal blood really does flow blue.”
Grimstone stood cautiously to one side of the door, tried it, discovered it was locked, and said with a sigh, “They do make things as difficult as they can, don’t they?”
* * *
“I refuse,” the Lord Lion of the Empire said obstinately, “to cower inside this room while others face death on my behalf. I must insist you open that door.”
Pistol in one hand and drawn sword in the other, he gave Tempest a stern look and added, “That, my lord, is a royal command! Open that door!”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Lord Tempest said wearily and set aside the fireplace poker he’d taken up to head for the door.
Just as Malmerston whirled around and landed a magnificent roundhouse swing to the point of the royal jaw.
Tempest spun around and rushed—and was just in time to help lower the senseless Prince Royal onto the edge of the bed.
“There’s an old priest’s hole,” the butler panted. “Help me—”
Tempest and Rose helped hold the Lord Lion in place, draped along the edge of the bed. Lil was busy on the far side of the bed, or rather in an open closet there, struggling with something huge and metallic and trailing a steam hose, dragging it out into the bedchamber.
Malmerston did something to a carving in the polished wooden moldings that sheathed the wall behind the head of the bed, and a secret door swung open. There was just room enough around the headboard—which proved to be backed by thick new metal plates—for he and Tempest to lift the limp and unconscious Lord Lion and bundle him into the darkness beyond.
They more or less fell through the secret door together, kicking it closed—just as two doors into the room crashed open.
Rose shrieked and ducked under the bed—just as the Iron Assassin lurched in through one door, and Whipsnade and Grimstone burst into the bedroom from the other.
All three then came to a sudden halt to gape at what they saw on the canopied four-poster bed.
There was no Prince Royal in the room. No men at all, in fact.
However, there was a woman.
Lying on the bed, from which arose the insistent wheezing of a steam piston. She was lushly beautiful, her magnificent bosom was bared, and there was a wanton smile on her rouged face. She beckoned them, writhing on the silks.
“My, my,” said Whipsnade. Just as Lil chose her target, rolled off the large steam mitrailleuse she’d dragged out of the closet and hidden under herself, and emptied the volley gun into the Iron Assassin, opening up visible holes in his torso and hammering him back through the door he’d come in by, right out of the room.
She tried to horse the gun around, but its head of steam was dying, and Whipsnade and Grimstone pounced on her before she could even put her hand on the crank.
Even as she bit his hand, Whipsnade snarled to Grimstone, pointing with his other hand, “There’s a secret door behind the head of the bed, yonder! They were all gathered to guard it; he must be in there! The Prince is ours!”
OCTEMBER 15
Whipsnade’s pointing shout became an agonized “eeeep!” as Lil drove a very hard knee into his most tender of places.
“Count not your unhatched chickens,” she gasped in his ear in the instant before she bit it—hard. He shrieked like a young lass.
Grimstone abandoned him to his fate and turned, slipping on the silks, to dive off the bed and head for the secret door.
Just as the closet door on the other side of the headboard banged open—and Whipsnade, Grimstone, and the struggling Lil beneath them were buried under the sudden fist-swinging onslaught of Hardcastle, Standish, and four brawny beagles.
A lesser bed would have collapsed under the weight of so many punching, clawing bodies, but the royal four-poster had been built by the same shipwrights who’d crafted ships of the line in the era of sail, and it could have supported ten times as many combatants. Even its canopy was as sturdy as a deck—which was a very good thing for Rose, who slipped out from under the ominously creaking bed during the fray, amid the grunts and snarls and smacks of fists on flesh, and tried to get through the secret door.
No matter what she did, it wouldn’t open, so she turned and, in desperation, climbed one of the bedposts—unnoticed by the brawlers—and disappeared up onto the canopy. Which proved to have its own floor, low brass rails all around, and a collection of lingerie, whips, and leather paraphernalia that she would have found intriguing indeed at another time.
Down below, one of the beagles bellowed in pain as he rolled over the hard volley gun and the jutting handle of its crank, under the onslaught of some hard knees. Another growled like a bear for a moment, then fell abruptly silent as Grimstone’s hard kick to the side of his jaw slammed his head hard into a very solid bedpost.
Whipsnade had bitten Hardcastle’s knuckles, causing Bleys pain enough that he’d forgotten all decency for an instant and was now trying his damnedest to punch Whipsnade’s throat into a flattened ruin of flesh and bone—attacks that would have been fatal if Whipsnade hadn’t been wearing a metal gorget against this very peril.
Grimstone found himself pinned under Chief Inspector Standish and two decidedly heavy beagles, all of whom seemed to be masters of the solid punch to the kidneys, and he, too, might have expired had he not managed to slide back the sheath on his finger ring, which had tiny metal fangs tipped with potent paralytic snake venom. Something he’d repeatedly dosed himself with so as to gain partial immunity to its effects—effects that the beagles, by their swift descents into limp immobility, were enjoying to the proverbial hilt.
He rolled himself out from under them, slapping Lil across the face with his ring for good measure and enjoying her startled look of openmouthed horror as she toppled back onto the silks, and retrieved his poker.
Which he promptly swung viciously at the back of Hardcastle’s head, felling the man right out of the bed on a chute of helplessly slithering silks.
Whipsnade drove his fist into the throat of the last beagle atop him, and Grimstone served the reeling constable a generous helping of fireplace poker, then shoved the senseless man aside so Whipsnade could get up.
“Nice fight,” he commented with an unlovely grin, retrieving his own poker. He and Grimstone looked around the room—bodies, bodies everywhere, and no foe standing—and then approached the secret door.
“Batter or pry?”
“Pry first. The more we damage it, the harder it’ll be to pry with success.”
So they thrust the tips of their pokers under the top corner of the door and set about prying. Metal shrieked, then groaned, and then tried shrieking again.
And the no-longer-secret door started to give way.
* * *
It had been a long time since Bentley Steelforce had been anything akin to a “silent man.” He wasn’t being anything close to silent right now. He might no longer need to breathe or eat, but he could still feel pain.
God, he could still feel pain!
The stream of bullets that had slammed him had shot holes right through him, grisly gaps from his belt to halfway up his shattered ribs. Every step was agony, and when he made the mistake of twisting …
He just wanted to get away. Stumbling along the passage the bullets had driven him down, putting more and more distance between himself and that terrible weapon, he … he was done with this.
You will turn around, creature! Marlshrike’s voice, in his head, was rising in fury and fear. You will go back and fight through every obstacle until you reach Tempest and kill him! Tear him apart, so that there can be no doubt that he is dead! Bring me back his head as proof—yes, tear it from his body! NOW!
Steelforce smote his own head with a fist, trying to silence that railing. He started to run, sickening pain jolting him at every footfall, as he got farther and blessedly farther away …
Bodies underfoot. Door. Smash open, out into the night, cooler and darker and … trees, run into the trees …
You will turn around! Turn around now! I command it!
Lights—headlamps, and the roar of hurrying steam carriages. Men shouting and pointing, the crack of shots.
Through the panting, the sobbing, the groans, he managed to say, “I—”
Beagles and soldiers, carriage after carriage, roaring and screeching. More gunfire.
Turn around, Steelforce, or I’ll—
He tried again, more loudly. “I am—”
Into the trees, footfalls crashing on gravel behind him, men bellowing at him to stop. On into the trees, not slowing, bashing head into branches to see if he could make the voice in his—
“I am the Iron Assassin!” That shout echoed through the forest.
Trees and darkness and running, running, running; the voice in his head braying unheeded; the pain his shield against his commands …
Darkness deepening, the pain a waiting pit.
Bentley Steelforce flung himself into it and fell forever.
* * *
“That’s got it,” said Whipsnade, with some satisfaction. “Back behind it, now, and we’ll haul together…”
Back beyond the hinges of the door where gunfire shouldn’t reach them, Whipsnade and Grimstone hauled hard with their pokers, peeling back the steel door. It was rather like opening one of the new tins of sardines. So, would the Prince Royal weep and cower or burst forth like the lion all the stirring tales from the Palace made him out to be?
