Twig

by wildbow

  I reached down to my pocket. I retrieved the whistle I’d taken from the soldier who handled the stitched.

  Ducking behind a trough of water, I blew, hard.

  I was telling the twins where I was, I knew. But we didn’t have a lot of options. Not moving would just leave us stuck in place.

  Another gunshot. I heard the bullet sink into a bit of wood to my right.

  I blew.

  Another shot. This one hit the trough.

  Another shot.

  “Sy.”

  I stood straight, hurdling over the trough, stumbling a bit on the landing—moving around with a straight, inflexible rod at my back wasn’t helping, and the rifle I held was meant for someone two and a half times my height—it was unwieldy.

  Jamie had approached while the shooter was focusing on me, and managed a clean shot.With my own rifle, which matched what the man held, I aimed, and I fired again, off to one side.Let the enemy think we were still embroiled in the fight. If the Twins had hearing as keen as we suspected, maybe they could hear the difference in the direction of the shots, the distant ‘pok’ of impact. Would they extrapolate, and think the shooter was aiming at someone further away?

  I paused, and fired again, looking at Jamie.

  No need for gestures. He got what I meant.

  I ran, as fast as my tired legs would allow.

  If we were going to make this work, we needed to be fast. The twins were approaching, and we had opened up roughly a third of the circle that had been drawn around the seven. By moving out through that opening and toward Mauer, we stood a small chance of coming out of this with our hides intact.

  Jamie remained behind, periodically firing. He was painting a picture through sound, much like the one I’d been observing since I’d had my dose of wyvern. Hopefully it was one that misled, that made the twins make certain movements.

  I kept to paths and roads that wouldn’t expose me to fire from anyone with a vantage point and eyes on the building. When it came to the building, I exposed myself to gunfire from friendly forces and approached directly, heading straight for the nearest window, praying they wouldn’t take me for one of the younger twins.

  There were safer ways to approach, ways that involved coming in at an angle, knocking, and negotiating.

  Instead, I turned my rifle around and smashed the glass with the butt-end. I could see the people on the other side backing away.

  “Move! Out! Now!” I called through the break in the glass. “Only chance!”

  The seven—now the five—opened a door. Bat-nose, with her grave shoulder wound, was no longer with them. Tattoo Belly was absent as well. Adam, surprisingly, had bandaged the wound at his stomach, and was still mobile. I’d taken him for disemboweled.

  “Go,” I said. “Move!”

  They asked questions, some about the spike at my back, but my mind was racing, my focus wholly on the environment. Possible avenues of approach or attack by enemies.

  It crossed my mind that I hadn’t heard Jamie shoot recently.I could only hope he’d escaped.

  Toward the perimeter, then through. To Mauer, then we could turn his forces back on the twins. It wasn’t perfect, there were countless problems at play, but in terms of immediate survival, it was the only way we might live through this.

  I was cutting corners, now. Moving fast and taking risks to move even faster, in hopes of staying ahead of them I was praying that with their sisters absent and their structural integrity suffering just a bit for the lack of their other halves, that the elder sisters might be a little slower. That they would lag behind and rely more on their soldiers. The proceedings thus far didn’t contradict that fact.

  Faster. To the perimeter, to Jamie.

  A horse that had been ridden like I’d been running would collapse and a merciful owner would put it down. Small mercies, that humans had evolved as long-distance runners. Sweat and precipitation clung to my face and ran through my hair. My ears were freezing.

  Ahead of me, one of the Richmond Twins stepped out of the shadows, putting herself directly in our path. Her eyes were wide, and they were wild.

  Without wasting a moment, I raised my rifle, aiming and firing. Gordon might have approved the minimal hesitation in the action. Mary would have shaken her head at the miserable aim. What would have been a glancing blow became a miss as the woman took one step to the side, a slower, lazier version of what her smaller counterpart had done, swaying out of the way of my rifle’s point.

  In the next moment, I pivoted on my toes and ran for cover. The others had skipped the shooting part and gone right for the cover, and some of those people, wounded, were slower than I was in getting there.

  The Twin held a rifle in one hand. She raised it, aimed, and fired at the mass of our group. Salt, the boy with sailor’s clothes, toppled, shrieking in a high voice, reminiscent of a woman’s.

  “You killed my sister. Two of them,” she said, her voice higher than it had been before, imperious, and dangerously unsteady. She was reloading her weapon, walking toward us at a lazy pace.

  This was one Twin. The other-I turned on the spot, looking behind the group. I turned again, looking to the side of the street for alleys, then the other side.

  “She’s not here, Lamb,” she said. Her voice still had that note to it, like the quaver of someone who was on the verge of tears, but very dangerous.

  The glassblower looked over cover, aimed, and fired. Hit home.

  Yet the Twin didn’t seem to care. Blood welled out of the wound. She’d finished reloading, aimed, and fired.

  The cover the glassblower was behind wasn’t quite good enough. The woman shrieked, splinters and a bullet catching her upper arm.

  The Twin raised her fingers to her mouth. She whistled, tremolo, like a bird’s song.

  The whistle reminded me of the noise the younger twins had made. A twin language, shared among the four.

  I heard the answer, distant. A different sort of song.

  “She found your friend. He’s secured,” the twin said.

  No. I well and truly believed her.

  “Now I’m going to break you. I want you to be aware as I take your fellow Lamb to pieces, the Duke’s orders be damned. He played a part in this, and nobody that hurts a proper noble can be suffered to live,” she told me. Her voice was getting unsteadier by the moment, as if the breaking point would be within the next few words, only it didn’t break. She sounded positively unhinged, now.

  I seriously contemplated raising the question of whether she was a proper noble. If I called her a bastard now, what would she do? Would she break?

  If she would, I didn’t want to see it.

  “…Then I’m going to take your remaining eye, and I’m going to send you to the Richmond home. Every moment of pain and heartbreak we feel for our little sisters will be returned to you tenfold.”

  I closed my eyes.

  There were slim few ways out of this, and all the ones that sprung to mind involved sacrificial pawns. Sacrificing one of the surviving five members of our group of ten.

  “One of them is alive,” I said. “We left her back there, dying.”

  “Cry wolf one more time, Lamb, try it.”

  I hadn’t expected that would work. It was hard to steer someone like her off course, when all she wanted was revenge.

  She was drawing closer. I would have to run for it, and I doubted I would get away.

  “If the rest of you would like a life in prison instead of a lifetime of being experimented on in the Academies, then grab that boy.”

  My eye widened. “Wait—”

  Hands grabbed me. Glasses and the Lookout.

  I struggled, but it was futile to begin with, and even if I’d been able to break free, I would have been slower than she was. Casually, the Twin reached past Glasses and the Lookout to seize me.

  She didn’t lift me up into the air. Her hand gripped me, fingers digging in deep, and with one hand, she held me with her arm extended down at her side, my hea
d at her mid-thigh, my body slightly bent forward.

  She dropped her rifle. One hand seized my arm. She gripped it, and she pulled it back behind my back.

  With virtually no effort at all, she lifted it back and up beyond its tolerance. I felt a flare of pain, blinding agony, and felt bone grind against bone, muscle wrenching with a weird springing sensation, too hot, then too cold.

  When she let go of my arm, it dangled, shoulder disconnected from everything else. Attached by some yet-untorn muscle, some connective tissue, and by skin.

  I found it in me not to scream, somehow. My breath being caught in my throat played a part in it.

  “This is kindness compared to what we’re going to do to you once you’re back at the House of Richmond,” she said.

  “Thank you for your kindness, milady,” I managed, and my voice was somehow as raw as if I’d been howling at the top of my lungs for a long time. I might have sounded sarcastic.

  All around us, the others were watching, defeated, not even willing to put up a fight.

  “Hm. I don’t suppose you need that mouth for anything,” she said, reaching up to my face. She touched my cheek, and looked down to meet my eye with her own eyes.

  There was a wildness in her eyes that belied the seeming calm with which she moved. The pupil vibrated with fractional activity, darting back from detail to detail, and her fingers trembled with emotion as she touched my cheek. I wasn’t sure any of the other bystanders would have noticed, removed by a few feet.

  Her fingers went to my mouth, half of the fingers composed of black bone, the other half of white flesh. Before they could be in far enough to get a proper grip on my jaw, I bit, hard. Nothing to lose, at this point.

  “Foolish,” she said.

  Something metal clinked. Unable to move my head, I rolled my eye to see.

  Before I could see the source of the clink, I saw the a white mist unfold from what must have been a metal canister or glass jar. The twin, seeing it, lifted me bodily, nearly breaking my neck as she swung out, using my body as a kind of fan to push the smoke away, backing away in the same movement.

  She released me with a snap motion that suggested she’d been trying to break my jaw or neck in the course that she tossed me aside.

  Both of her hands went to her face. A trickle of blood flowed out of her nose.

  All of the emotion she’d been barely repressing gave way. She howled, ragged and mad, glaring at me in abject hatred. Glaring past me, to Jamie, and at Lillian, who was walking with Jamie’s support. There were soldiers behind them. Lillian’s escort.

  Then she fled, one hand still to her face. She ran with power, not the sheer speed of her younger sisters. Bounding movements, each one powerful enough to carry her twice as far as an ordinary human stride might.

  The Lillian I looked at was fully the Lillian I had seen at the Fishmonger’s. A Lillian who could use wyvern to push away pain. To have worked this fast ad recruit that kind of help while receiving medical assistance, she would have had to forego anesthetic, to work tirelessly from the moment she was conscious.

  Trust the other Lambs, I thought.

  “Mauer needs help,” she said.

  I barked out a laugh, then winced.

  “So do you,” she said. She seemed fully disconnected from the Lillian I had known. Focused on the job. “So do these people.”

  Was she gone?

  She bent down over me, touching my shoulder.

  “Damn it,” she said, under her breath. And in those words, I heard a glimmer of the real Lillian. I reached up with my good hand to touch the side of her face, and I saw a smile, and I knew that the real Lillian was there.

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “You or—”

  “Mauer. The situation. Is Mauer winning, or is the Crown? Because both could—”

  “Both,” Lillian said. “Both are winning, in a way that puts everything in the worst possible position. Mauer’s only winning because of the primordials, and the Duke isn’t backing down enough to let Mauer’s forces recover and let Mauer to solve his own problem. A game of chicken, with everyone in Lugh set to lose.”

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  Counting Sheep—9.15

  “The other one?” I asked. I watched the surroundings, making sure that the Twins’ soldiers weren’t about to converge on us. Had to focus, to keep from blacking out. The allure of the darkness was that all the pain would stop. I wasn’t one to take the easy road.

  Not when there was retaliation to be served.

  “If she’s not dead, she will be soon,” Lillian said. “Maybe. Probably.”

  “Direct hit,” Jamie said. “From Lillian’s stuff.”

  He looked back at the soldiers they’d brought with them. “Can you steady her? I need to help Sy.”

  We were surrounded by the scattered remnants of what had been a group of ten. Now only five lived. Two of them, Lookout and Glasses, looked utterly defeated. Others were hurt. Glassblower had Adam working to keep pressure on her wound. Salt was lying on the ground, passed out. There was a chance he was dead, but I wasn’t about to put money on it. The way he’d screamed hadn’t been a dying man’s scream. I’d heard enough of those to know.

  The shriek of a badly hurt child? I’d heard those too, if far less.

  The soldiers arrived at Jamie and Lillian’s side, and took custody of Lillian. Jamie helped me to my feet.

  “My fault,” I said. “This situation, the one you faced. I almost got us killed. Didn’t estimate where they were. Focusing too much on these sorry bastards.”

  Four of the five who remained were watching me, staring.

  “I think we both did the best we could,” Jamie said.

  “All three of us did,” I said, looking at Lillian. I looked at the five members of the handpicked group. Glassblower, Lookout, Glasses, Adam, and Salt. Lookout and Glasses averted their eyes. I could see fear in their expressions. “These guys too. Even put bullets in her, for all the good it did.”

  Lookout tensed, as if he was waiting for me to drop the guillotine. Glasses, however, looked up, meeting my eye, wary confusion on her face.

  “Come on,” I said. “Mauer needs our help?”

  “He needs something,” Jamie said.

  I nodded.

  Once we started moving, hobbling as much as we walked, more than half of our group injured, we were able to cover a fair bit of ground.

  The noise of the front line of battle was almost too much. The explosions, the gunshots that would have individually been able to make my ears ring were occurring by the hundred. Through it all, people were shouting.

  A building a hundred meters down the road took one last explosion, too much for it to bear, and it folded, tipping into the building next to it and into the street. I couldn’t even hear the rumble or the cracking of the timber over everything else.

  Someone jostled me, and the pain of my ruined shoulder nearly blinded me.

  Jamie was gesturing, and I couldn’t focus enough to make out the signs.

  I caught some of Lillian’s response, and I was able to put the pieces together.

  Primordial.

  I looked, and I saw it.

  Three Crown warbeasts were engaged in what looked like a savage dogfight with the primordial. The primordial was twice the size it had been when I had seen it last, its form even more disorganized, and it fought on despite gaping wounds from explosions and horrific burns from flame.

  Its primary mouth extended from one side of its head, around the other side, and along one shoulder. It managed to open that mouth and seize hold of one of the warbeasts’ paws. With a disturbing strength, it clamped down, teeth locking it in place.

  Then, like a bear-trap snapping closed, configurations above and below that mouth snapped shut on part of the warbeast’s head, its shoulder, and part of its chest, the first mouth now serving to draw the paw in, to tear and to enable the larger, new configuration of a mouth to take in even more of the warbeast it was fighting.
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  Bullets sank into it, fired whenever there was an opportunity, an exposed part of the primordial that the warbeasts weren’t savaging. Explosives sailed into the fray, sent by the Crown, aimed at the primordial beast rather than the creatures that were busy attacking it.

  The beast lurched, putting one of the warbeasts that was gnawing on it in the way of one explosive. The other detonated behind it. I saw the chunks of meat fly.

  It was strong enough to move with what had to be a Crown ton of meat hanging off of it, and it seemed to have a basic understanding of the battlefield and what the dangers were. More problematic was where it was. Behind the Crown’s front line. As it moved, trying to get away, the Crown delivered more explosives.

  Mauer’s forces could only shoot it, and shooting it was proving ineffective. It didn’t seem to bleed, and if it had vital organs, the bullets didn’t seem to be impairing those organs. The manifestation of the new mouth seemed to suggest that it could move parts of itself around at will.

  I gestured. Big. Question.

  Beast. Experiment. Eat. Brother. Eat. Lillian gestured. She started to do more gestures, but someone bumped into her. She winced.

  Not wholly immune to pain, it seemed.

  Hands on each of our shoulders, Jamie urged us away from the front line.

  It had eaten warbeasts. And it had eaten a brother?

  I had a mental picture, very distinct, of one of the larger of the four primordials seizing one of the lesser ones in its jaws. Had the lesser one fought and lost, or had it gone willingly?

  Both ideas were very spooky.

  Taking in a brother, every part of the primordial’s body a hard-coded set of lessons and adaptations, communicating with every other part. Having eaten its brother, it would take in all of that information.

  I was starting to get a glimmer of why Mauer might have been getting concerned.

  When I thought about the warbeasts it had eaten, then I started to get a little concerned, myself.

  The Crown’s forces were capable of committing a hell of a lot more explosives and firepower than they had. But in feeding the damn thing, and in holding back firepower, I was starting to see what was really at work.