Twig

by wildbow

  “Get my doctors, then,” Leeds told me.

  Out of pain, or perhaps concern for how close the barbs of the expanding bullet were to something vital, Leeds looked down.

  We looked left, looked right, assessed the situation. That done, Gordon and I lunged forward, kicking with all of our strength.

  The core of his body weakened by the injury, the noble didn’t quite have what he needed to stay upright. He sprawled, falling to one side, his hand embedded in his wound, forcing him to catch himself with one elbow.

  “Brat!” he spat the word. He reached for his sword with his other hand.

  A bullet caught him at the base of the skull, expanding on impact, doing horrific damage in the process. His lips peeled back as tooth, tongue, and mangled flesh unfolded in front of his mouth, in the midst of a violent and very thick spray of blood.

  Gordon and I didn’t worry about staying under cover or the possibility of incoming fire. We looked in the direction the shot had come from, and saw it being overrun by the wall-crawling pincer wolves, a pack of them plunging into a single window to attack what lay within.

  Whoever it was, they’d waited, taken their time, and made their shot count.

  “Is that a noble sacrifice?” Gordon asked. He looked down at the ruined body, and shot me a mean smirk.

  “Something like that,” I said, mumbling.

  I checked the carriage, then skipped the next, because it was the carriage we’d been in. I didn’t worry about getting shot. The shooters weren’t being indiscriminate anymore. The ones who were still there, if there were any, were doing what Leeds’ killer had done, waiting and making sure, because they knew full well what price they were paying.

  I checked the third carriage, and found doctors huddled inside. Two were holding a carriage door that had torn free up against the wall, as an added barrier.

  “Would be nice if there was a way to set fire to the carriage and keep them from getting out,” Gordon observed. “Or something in that vein.”

  Would be nice, I thought.

  I left the group behind.

  The fourth carriage.

  Marcella was there, with one of the huge stitched. The other had been shot. Another noble I couldn’t name was lying on the ground, dead.

  Gordon and I ignored her, checking inside.

  Empty.

  She grabbed me by one shoulder, hauling me around. She pressed a very pretty little pistol against my forehead.

  Gordon and I didn’t flinch, and we spoke with confidence. “The Infante is expecting us. He won’t brook excuses.”

  It’s the only way to reunite with Shirley.

  “I actually almost believe you,” Marcella said. She double checked over her shoulder, then led me away.

  There were no more shots, nobody who had lasted this long and positioned themselves to put a bullet in her back. The attack had concluded. Three nobles dead out of four, for our little caravan.

  “Let’s go,” she told us.

  Previous Next

  Thicker than Water—14.5

  The carriages pulled into an enclosed space, and the light that was filtering in through the windows faded.

  This was another protected space. An area of the city the nobles had carved out, where raids like the one they had just weathered wouldn’t be possible. Guards, more thorough countermeasures, and fortifications would abound.

  Climbing out of the carriage, I was surprised by the surroundings. Calling the space a stable or a garage felt wrong. The ceiling arched, and there was space enough for twenty carriages and their stitched horses, with a wide path that a small parade could have passed down, running through the middle. Said path was paved with stones, and rose up in a series of stairs that led into the building proper. To the left and right of the stairs were arches, with stairs leading down into an unlit space.

  But the reinforcement of living flesh was prominent here. The walls had flesh-like growths, complete with circulatory systems, fatty tissue, and something respiratory. They kept time, with one pulse a second, for the parts that pulsed, but they also breathed, expanding over five seconds, then contracting. Whatever it was, it also served to hold the stones of the walls together. Artificial tubes as large around as my leg ran into spaces, feeding other fluids into the wall, and large arrangements of wires and metal rigging seemed to be set into the flesh, running down to the individual spaces where the stitched horses were.

  Jamie and I looked back at the carriage we’d just left, and we could see how the metal rigging was being connected to the horse by stitched with heavy, insulted gloves.

  “I like this place,” Helen said, admiring the walls.

  “Agreed,” Evette said.

  “Focus on the nobles, all of you,” Gordon urged, his voice quiet.

  “There’s no hurry,” Jamie said. “Let them mourn. They won’t be saying anything for a little while yet. We might as well assess our options and escape routes in the meantime.”

  “There could be clues you’re missing while we’re focused on a very neat station,” Gordon said.

  Station worked, as a word to describe the space.

  The doctors had all piled into the third most intact carriage. Now they were administrating stitched in handling the care of the three bodies they’d had collected before we departed.

  The nobles, with Marcella joining them, were standing on the other side of the path that divided the station. Shirley was with them.

  “People saw,” Gordon said. “In the heart of the city, people saw nobles die. The magnitude of that… even if a hundred of Mauer’s soldiers died to pull it off? I could see them saying it was worth it, for the sheer damage they just caused.”

  Marcella didn’t explain. The other nobles didn’t ask. The four of them watched, expressions as still as stone, as the three bodies were placed on stretchers, the stitched carrying them. Doctors stayed by their dead nobles as the stretchers were carried out to Monte, Moth, the other noble, and Marcella.

  The four nobles looked down at the bodies.

  Jamie was right. There was silence, and nobody talked, nobody moved.

  Some of the doctors turned their heads. They dropped to their knees, and the nobles in front of us did so a moment later. Jamie and I took their cue and set one knee on the ground.

  “There goes our chance to get away,” Gordon observed.

  “There was never going to be one,” Jamie said. “The moment we failed to get through the window and jump from the train, there was never going to be any getting away.”

  “Unless we’d used the ambush to abandon Shirley,” Helen said. “Which we can’t.”

  “That’s taking Duncan’s path,” Gordon said. “We destroy Sy, and it skews things in a bad way when it comes to the rest of us. I might have a role, but I’m imagining a scene where we’re left with Helen in full-on bloodlust, Evette, Duncan, and maybe Mary in play. I’d be so busy managing that nightmare I wouldn’t ever get a say.”

  Evette sighed.

  “We need Shirley,” Jamie said.

  “He needs Shirley,” Helen said.

  Shirley looked so scared. She was kneeling, trying to bow lower than the Lady Moth without being prostrate.

  Shirley had her gaps in education, but she knew how to act around nobles. I wondered if her madam had ever trained the members of the house in the nuances of how to act around nobles, knowing that Tynewear might one day play host to them.

  A bird took to the air above us. That added to what I was able to make out in my peripheral vision, allowing Jamie and I to place the new arrivals.

  The first was a young man, heavy, an ogre dressed up as a prince. He was six times as large as I was, sheer physicality, but with a beautiful face, and crisp clothing. His pants were tucked into socks, so they crumpled and puffed at the knee. Those socks, in turn, that came up to the top of utterly massive calves that looked like they might let him grind granite underfoot. He wore a dress shirt with suspenders and a belt. His hair was neatly parted to one s
ide and slicked down.

  The slender woman next to him… I didn’t like nobles, but I’d found something I liked about her when I’d first seen her. She did what the Lady Moth seemed so intent on doing, making herself into a physical and fashionable entity without going over the top, and she managed to sell herself as a Noble without being ostentatious. A lot of that was how she moved, and her focus. Her hair was black, swept over to one side, and her clothes were black silk, leather belts, and a shoulder ornamentation that looked like a roost for the falcon. her hand on that same side was clad in a stylized falconer’s glove.

  The raptor that was flying around the station would be hers, then.

  The pair made their way down the stairs, leaving us kneeling, and approached the stitched, who had knelt while maintaining their hold on the stretchers.

  A noble said something under his breath, and the stitched all remained on the ground, one foot and one knee planted on the stone path, but they lifted the stretchers up for a better view.

  “Thank you,” the Ogre said.

  The Doctors stood. Heads still bowed, they gave instructions to the stitched. As a group, they split up to enter the tunnels on either side of the stairwell, disappearing into an apparently unlit abyss.

  “Follow,” the Ogre said.

  The remaining doctors, nobles, Shirley and I all followed the Falconer and the Ogre into the building proper.

  Veins and flesh held panels of glass as part of a greater skylight in the main hall of the building. I could see the layout. A castle, sprawling, with three of the taller buildings in the city sprouting from it, spearing toward the sky. At the top of those towers, another castle was poised, suspended between them.

  “Who handles this?” Jamie asked. “I can do it, but…”

  “I could,” Evette said.

  “No,” Gordon said.

  “I wouldn’t be the best choice,” Helen said. “Sylvester likes the Falconer though. If he wants to pursue her at all, practice his wiles, I could sit in.”

  “No,” Gordon said, again, in a different tone. “And I think it’s left to me. Jamie’s too set in deep thought, introspection, and he’s not quick enough on the draw. No offense.”

  “None taken. I might rephrase that ‘not quick on the draw’ part, though. Not because it bothers me, but because it’s easily misunderstood.”

  “You’re right. Noted. Alright.”

  Jamie fell back, joining the other Lambs.

  We were faced with six nobles, their retinues, a great swathe of unfamiliar and hostile territory, and emotions were likely running high. Theirs and ours. Gordon had commented earlier on the situation, on the fact that they’d been hit in the heart of their territory.

  The problem was, as Gordon and I turned the situation over in my head, there weren’t any weak points we could target that weren’t also weak points for us. The insecurity of the nobles was just as likely to backfire on us and see us put to the sword. The presence of enemies in the city would make them more guarded, less likely to offer us a weak point.

  The Falconer’s bird, perched on her shoulder, watched us. It was half again as large as any bird of prey I’d seen, and Avis had once had some very large eagles. The bird of prey had a head of golden feathers, and a body of black ones. Its talons and beak were oil black, adding to the contrast. Modified. Possibly a chimera.

  Gordon and I assessed the thing, and judged that if we had to bolt, and if we couldn’t close a door behind us, that thing would probably win in a fight.

  The entire building was dark stone, lit by light from outside, and biological growth reinforcing it, all of the same fleshy nature. When the daylight faded, they would have light by other means, yet there were no torch sconces, no artificial lights.

  It went back to the biological growths, stylized stretches of flesh, running along walls. Veins twined their way between stones. In the castle proper, the growths were more elegant, less like tumors or unidentifiable masses of flesh, and more akin to pillars. The networks of veins and the beads of fatty tissue formed fractal patterns and geometric arrangements. When the lights went out, the biological growths would likely provide bioluminescence. The veins would light up.

  But the placement of them had another purpose. There was a strategy to it. Something that an intruding agent or group might miss, after a lifetime of acclimating to the wooden growths that supported buildings across the Crown empire. They were positioned at key junctions, and there was little doubt that they were loaded to the brim with biological weapons and agents.

  None of the nobles talked. It was as if the hierarchy left the Ogre with all of the power, here, and it was up to him to decide if conversation was permitted. Even if the mood had allowed for talk, we doubted he would have said much.

  The place was crowded. There were stitched servants everywhere, perhaps a third of the people we saw were stitched, but every last one of them was work on par with Fray’s stitched, whatever her name had been. Stitched without stitches, at least not in visible places, their nature only noticeable if one knew what to look for. They wore uniforms, and they moved with purpose, attending to tasks up until a noble came into sight, at which point they stopped, stepped to the side of the wide corridors, and bowed or curtsied, freezing in place until we were past them.

  Another third were alive. They were hard to place, more important than servants, but not in charge, either. Facilitators, if I had to guess. Administrators, aristocrats, suppliers. Political grease.

  The final third of the people present were doctors, and there wasn’t a white coat to be seen. It was like an Academy, almost, but the standard student or white coat had been replaced by a grey coat specialist, and the remainder wore black coats. Professors, top of the heap. The best at what they did.

  If they hadn’t been doing as the servants did and been stepping to one side, heads bowed, Gordon and I imagined we would have heard heated debates, strict orders, and calls to action.

  There was a power in surrounding oneself with smart people. The Lambs were an indicator of that. This place, this building, it was where the brightest minds gathered, one of the peaks from which the greatest ideas flowed down to the rest of the Crown States. Professors looked forward to the day they got an invitation to join a discussion here and then they burned with envy for those who got to lead the discussions.

  And, in exchange, the nobles could call on this collection of minds, name a task, and expect that the task would be seen to.

  We watched as lord Monte spotted one group of professors, broke from the group, and leaned close, to whisper a few words in the ear of a man who had had ten other professors trailing in his wake.

  Monte caught up with our group, returning to his prior position. The man he’d spoken to broke into a run, heading in the direction we’d just come from. His retinue followed.

  Gordon and I glanced back, and saw, halfway down the corridor, that the professor was recruiting others, and sending others running elsewhere. All business.

  All hands on deck.

  Leaving that isolated storm behind us, we reached the end of the main corridor. Large double doors were framed by an arch of stone and fleshy growths.

  The Ogre pushed the doors open. We entered the garden, where the Infante waited. The Falconer’s bird found its roost.

  The area was a space beneath a partial dome of glass that kept the rain at bay while allowing sun and wind through, all framed in growths of wood and flesh. The paths and the walls of the architecture at the boundary of the space looked to be cut obsidian, the plant life had been cultivated to grow in shades of red, magenta and violet. The space, all in all, took up roughly as much property as the grounds of the Lambsbridge orphanage had.

  The red plants were eerie and ominous, in light of the plague that was sweeping across the Crown States.

  The Infante, with sprightly eyes and a frame that dwarfed even the Ogre, wore only a ruffled collar and a simple black outfit.

  Sitting in a chair near him was the Duke of Fr
ancis. Intact, no damage, dressed as impressively as he’d ever been.

  But, as I looked, the sharpness was gone, the light absent. He moved his hands, placing one over the other in his lap, and the movement was slow.

  It hardly mattered at this stage. The concern was the Infante. The lie we’d told, and the danger we were in.

  Gordon and I raised up taller, confident, sure in ourselves. It had the added benefit of putting us in a slightly better position to run if we needed to run.

  “Lords Jeremy, Richard, and Edmund, then,” the Infante said, looking over the group. His voice was terribly deep, magnified by the acoustics of this open space, and it seemed even deeper because the plants and the surroundings should have dampened noise, instead of strengthening it.

  “Yes, father,” the Ogre said. The Falconer walked over to her bird.

  “Are their corpses salvageable?”

  “No, father. They’ll try, the bodies are only thirty minutes cold, but the damage is extensive. It’s the new guns.”

  “Go to the labs, August. Don’t interrupt the man, but talk to Jeremy’s lead,” the Infante said. “He’ll be upset, already thinking about leaving, if the revival isn’t possible. If we don’t catch him, he’ll convince himself to leave by the finish of the mandatory three tries. We want to keep him.”

  “Yes, father,” ‘August’ said.

  “Tell him that the Lady Charlotte needs an attending first. That’s a move up for him. A fresh start. She was only just born.”

  “London, uncle?” the Falconer asked.

  “My brother will owe me one,” the Infante said.

  Sent off by some signal Gordon and I didn’t see, August turned, striding past us and through the doors. We turned to look, and he gave us a nasty look with his small, dark eyes as he closed the doors behind him.

  “I heard about the attack as it happened,” the Infante said. “I had some information about who it was, but no confirmation until just now. An unfortunate end to your first proper outing, and to theirs.”

  “Yes, Lord Infante,” Monte said.

  My heart pounded. Every single one of the Lambs was present, fixated on the Infante and on the other nobles around us. A simple choice of phrasing could utterly destroy us.