Twig

by wildbow

  I could barely see, given the angle of his face respective to the light sources mounted on the ceiling, but I liked to think his expression changed, a frown crossing his features.

  I liked to think it was the distraction that counted.

  Gorger loomed behind him, massive, bug-eyed, naked and pale.

  Gorger bit down on the Infante’s head.

  A hole opened in the Infante’s right hand, and tentacles reached out, seizing Gorger. His other hand twitched, another hole opening and he grabbed one of Gorger’s arms.

  “You finally showed,” I addressed Gorger.

  Helen’s friends seemed to know Gorger. They cooperated with him.

  I joined them, leaping onto the Infante, fully aware one swing of an arm could destroy me. I stabbed, over and over.

  The locust-crows swooped and tore at me, and I fell. Gorger’s arm was blistering around where the Infante grabbed it, and I recognized the nature of that particular rash as the red plague getting a foothold, though his skin was durable and virtually a quarantine suit unto itself.

  Mary had appeared, limping, one arm draped at her side. With her other, she began shooting the locust-crows out of the air. Lillian was right behind her, throwing something that produced a gas.

  That helped.

  Duncan and Ashton appeared, as well. With their appearance, the crows moved away, and Duncan and Lillian could check on Helen and Jessie.

  We all formed a loose circle around the Infante, who wasn’t losing the struggle, but who was taking his time winning. None of us were strong or effective enough to truly capitalize on what Gorger was doing for us.

  “We’ll be cornered if we take too long here,” Duncan said. “The others are coming. Infante’s forces, the primordial spawn.”

  “Primordial what?” I asked.

  “Spawn. The gold-helmed thing. Derived of primordial, by the looks of it.”

  Gorger strained against the tentacles and hand that gripped his hand. He turned his head back in the direction he’d come. The main hatch that led back underground.

  “Yeah, we need to go,” I said, hushed.

  Our enemy was now on his knees, arms occupied. His belly was exposed.

  Yet he was too strong for us to really stop. We didn’t have any blades that cut deep enough, nor any guns that would penetrate far enough. He was too big, too solid. Had Mary been in fighting shape, maybe. If the Tangle had been intact, we could have consumed him.

  If we’d been willing to give our complete and total attention to destroying the Infante, we could. Probably. But we weren’t and we couldn’t. It would mean giving up the rest of what we needed to accomplish and do.

  “Slow him down,” I said. “Then we run. We go for his weak point.”

  “The Professors?” Duncan asked.

  “Or the Duke,” Lillian said.

  I nodded.

  Lillian reached for her bag. Mary drew her knife. I already had my weapons in hand.

  We descended as a pack, doing as much damage as we could, with the time we had remaining.

  Previous Next

  Crown of Thorns—20.9

  My arms were drenched in blood, fingertip to elbow.

  The rain pounded down on the rooftop, it formed a waterfall at the edge of the building that was damaged. Wood creaked and groaned as the building shifted. All around us, the city itself stretched itself skyward, stone grating on stone, distant muscles as large as any street no doubt working to lift sections of the city up and away from the plains that had surrounded it.

  We made no sound. The Infante, too, was silent, but not because he was dead.

  You don’t like it when others see you bleed. It disturbs the illusion.

  His clothes had burned and melted away from the upper body, and it was clear where lifeforms squirmed and writhed within him, visible in and near the gouges and holes we had made in him.

  He could have used them, to slow us down, to distract, even to attack. He was holding back his strength.

  He was a pillar of strength, in many ways, tall, stout, indomitable. We could wound him, but killing him seemed almost impossible. Even serious attempts to disable were questionable at best.

  The noble’s blood streamed from my elbows to my fingertips, and the thick fluid formed tendrils that stretched from my fingertips to the ground.

  It felt like more time had passed than in reality.

  I reached into one of my pockets, aware I was getting it filthy with blood. I gestured—nothing fancy. It was a gesture anyone would have understood.

  Mary tugged on Gorger’s arm, hauling him back and away. His mouth yawned open, a second kind of mouth that was a wormlike, muscle-laden esophagus relaxed, loosening its hold on the Infante’s head.

  For an instant, it looked like the Infante wasn’t going to let Gorger go, even though Gorger had released him. His arms were extended to either side—an eruption of tentacles reaching from one palm to Gorger’s hand, arm, and shoulder. The other held Gorger’s wrist, with red veins spiderwebbing out and around from the point of contact.

  The Infante looked like he was crucified, one knee on the ground, arms out to either side, his head bowed. Wounds marked him.

  But he wasn’t a man. Like this, close up, clothes done away with, his inhumanity had been laid bare. The flesh, the fat, the muscle, the monstrous things that peeked out of his wounds before he flexed the muscle, flexing the wound closed a fraction, it marked him as something else.

  “Ask for help,” I said. “Beg. Call your underlings.”

  He raised his head. It was here that he would have seen the match.

  “I’m just making a suggestion. But I know you’re too cowardly to do it.”

  “Cowardly,” the Infante said. His voice was quieter than usual. His allies were close enough that anything else could have been construed as him doing as I’d suggested, seeking their assistance. “Begging? Pleading? Calling for assistance?”

  I smiled.

  “You’d be well advised to listen,” Lillian said, her voice distorted by her breathing mask. “Concede this battle, bow your head, admit defeat. Walk away, lick your wounds.”

  “Physician, you would do well to partake of your own prescription,” the Infante said, his voice low. “Can you conceive of any possible reality where I do as you suggest?”

  “No,” Lillian said.

  “Even if you did want to listen, we wouldn’t let you,” I said.

  “I thought I’d suggest it, and assuage my conscience, harming the helpless, using all of my Academic knowledge to try and disable your knees and hips,” Lillian said.

  “I can smell the chemicals,” the Infante said. “I can smell the pinewood and sulphur in your hand, Sylvester. I won’t bow, you won’t show mercy. Let’s be done with this discourse.”

  My hand was still so covered in blood that I could barely see any skin, beyond some of the knuckles and where it had scraped away from beside my thumb, when I’d reached into my pocket. I opened it, then thumbed open the matchbox.

  The others backed away, Gorger retreating toward the hatch, growls and other sounds suggesting that the Infante’s minions had seen him.

  I struck the match and threw it as a single motion.

  The chemical ignited with a whoosh, rolling into the air up and around the Infante in a way that suggested some of it was airborne, before it had caught the flame.

  The Infante, midway to working his way to a full standing position, burned. Things from further down the warehouse took notice of the light and sound. The primordial-spawn superweapon would be among them.

  I allowed myself a second to take in the scene, the Infante as a silhouette, surrounded and framed by flames. He didn’t scream or flinch.

  Then, collecting Jessie, Duncan and Ashton helping to get her into position, I turned to go.

  Only minutes had passed. We’d moved in waves, as coordinated a dance as any battlefield we’d navigated, but we’d been moving in and out of a space not much larger than a lady a
ristocrat’s walk-in-closet, some of us stepping back as others had stepped in.

  The ones who hadn’t been actively getting their hands dirty had been preparing for their own activities or checking the surroundings. I’d been checking.

  There was a path out. It wasn’t perfect, but it served. We went up, climbing one set of pipes and the framework that held one chimney to the wall, to reach a shattered window.

  Hoods up and jackets overhead, we went out the window, into the acid rain.

  Duncan was the last out. Not even a full second after he’d slipped past the spears and blades of glass, the first warbeast lunged after him, snapping. A weasel, writ large, with jaws like a bear trap of bone and muscle, the flesh peeled back and away, so grafts and augments could be added or modified to keep the jaws at their most effective.

  Duncan dropped down, and we caught him. The weasel-warbeast was scraping its neck and belly against glass as it fought its way out of the window, eviscerating itself. One of its kin was climbing on it to get through the window, but rear limbs had lost their grip, and it held on with foreclaws alone.

  Another lunged out, leaping onto the rooftop we occupied. Mary, one hand in her pocket, stabbed it with a short blade that she held in the other hand, before it could fully recover from the landing.

  There was noise at the side of the building, suggesting creatures were making their way outside. I could see only hints of it—some weren’t acid-proof, and they shied away from the rainwater, getting in the way of any that were.

  A weaker Tangle was draped across the street far below us, long, thin, not quite integrated, its pale silhouette being that of a snake. It was trying to fold itself together into something functional and strong, but it had been damaged, and its attempts to knit itself together were trying and failing to turn gaping wounds into something functional. Lying as it was in the puddles, the effect of the rain was far outweighing the harvesters’ ability to piece it together or make it functional. It looked like the flesh would slough from the bone soon enough.

  There were soldiers and experiments here and there, but the battle lines had shifted, moving to points further away, Radham’s forces retreating closer to the Academy, while the Infante’s forces had followed. The ones who remained were the ones who were hunkering down in places that were still dry and intact, licking their wounds and shooting the occasional Tangle that limped or crawled too close.

  None looked up enough to see us.

  We leaped over to the next rooftop, Mary first to land there, with Lillian close behind. They were there to reach out for me, keeping me steady. I appreciated it—not because my balance was bad, but because I had Jessie on my back and I didn’t want the coat I’d draped over Jessie and I to fall away, exposing us to rain.

  We circled around the building, pursuing the Infante’s soldiers and forces, which had pressed their advantage as Radham had retreated.

  I was all too aware of the rain, of the long seconds which seemed to pass in slow motion as we stepped out from under eaves and away from the sides of buildings that blocked the downpour when the wind blew it in the right directions.

  The building we’d met the Infante in was still in plain view. The chemical fire we’d started was blazing, catching on wood. The orange light of the flame was visible through the windows, even if the flames themselves weren’t.

  “How’s Helen?” I asked.

  “I haven’t had time to check,” Duncan said. “It looked like she got hit hard. She’s durable, but—”

  But.

  “Mary?”

  “Lillian put my arm back, but I don’t feel like I can use it for fighting.”

  A Jessie who can’t voice her memories. A Mary who can’t fight. Ashton is limited in what he can do since half our enemies are wearing quarantine suits with masks. Helen can’t get a grip on herself, let alone anyone else.

  Then there’s you, the voice said.

  How fitting, then, that we would find ourselves here, I thought.

  The Duke was standing in the rain, wearing a hooded cloak, the point of a sword sticking out from one side, the hand that gripped it shrouded. The rainwater ran down onto the cloak and around him, pooling on the ground. The front line of the battle was ahead of him.

  His doctors stood to the side, where they were out of the rain.

  I dropped to the street, dancing out of the way of harvesters that were writhing through the water. I ducked under the same eaves the doctors were hiding under, where they were safe from stray gunfire and the rain.

  One of them drew a weapon. He relaxed slightly when he recognized me, my face peeking out from beneath the jacket that covered my head, shoulders, and Jessie.

  A whisper I hadn’t caught, a subtle signal or enhanced senses let the Duke know we were here. The Lambs collected behind me, and we collectively shrank back into the shadows and the gloom. Still facing more or less forward, the Duke half-turned to glance our way, looking at us out of the corner of one eye.

  Were a distant observer to take in the scene, it was a coin toss if they would notice us.

  Berger pulled off his mask. He blinked a few times, then winced. He turned his attention to us.

  “Professor,” I said. “We meet again.”

  Our last meeting had been when we had turned him over to the other Lambs. He had been our hostage, and Lillian had wanted him as a bridge to contact the Duke with.

  We’d hoped to stop the Infante from seizing the Crown States.

  “He lives?” Berger asked.

  “The Infante lives,” I said. “But he bleeds. He burns.”

  Berger’s expression shifted. He seemed grimly satisfied with that.

  “The Golden Calf?”

  “The primordial spawn is out there,” Duncan said. “Either it’s giving chase, or it’s waiting for its masters orders.”

  Berger nodded. He glanced at the Duke.

  “Will you come with us?” Lillian asked. “We… the Lambs helped as much as we were able. Sylvester and Jessie made sacrifices, trying to help us help you. If you’re ever going to help us, we need the help now.”

  “If I may, my lord,” Berger said, bowing his head. “We’ve discussed this thoroughly. I’ll speak for you if you allow it, and you can correct me if I’ve misinterpreted your stance.”

  The Duke dipped his head into a slow nod. It was an eerily placid, calm gesture in the midst of a battlefield, where smoke was still thick in the air, the gas thankfully having dissipated, the rain pouring down, the soldiers firing their guns and shouting just fifty paces away.

  “Speaking for myself, the Infante has my loved ones,” Berger said. “Speaking for my Lord, I know that everything and everyone he’s invested his life into is held ransom. We’ve been asked to bow our heads, to sacrifice ourselves on this altar, and we’ve been assured they’ll be treated fairly.”

  “You really think they’ll be allowed to live?” I asked.

  Berger glanced at me. There was a dark expression on his face.

  “Stupid question.”

  “If he gets a prompt, quiet death, I’ll consider that fair,” Berger said. “I’ll consider it possible that he could live, shuffled off to live with a Doctor, a Professor, or an Aristocrat, to carry on something resembling an ordinary, modestly wealthy life. Possible but not likely.”

  “This is a fulcrum point,” Mary said. “Things teeter on a blade’s edge.”

  “To what ends?” Berger asked. “Do you want to stop the Infante? Salvage things? Our communications were discovered. The Crown States are doomed, written off. In a century or five, they’ll dust off the maps and the books, they’ll return to the Crown States, and they’ll reclaim it. Purged of all enemies and threats, free to be populated by the loyal.”

  “The loyal,” Lillian said.

  “Yes.”

  “The loyal won’t be created by manipulation or craft,” Lillian said. “They won’t be made by propaganda, misinformation, rewritten history or a steady removal of the Academy’s enemies.
They’ll be engineered. They’ll be grown in vats and pieced together from the dead.”

  “Most likely,” Berger said.

  “I don’t want that future,” Duncan said.

  “Are you offering an alternative?” Berger asked.

  I met the Duke’s eye. I saw him staring, rigid, his jaw set, water streaming off of his hood. His hair was disintegrating into sodden clumps where it tumbled out of the hood and over one shoulder, the rain dissolving it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do we have a place in this alternative?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re asking me, asking us to sacrifice ourselves, to give up everything we’ve worked toward, and allow it to be done away with in entirety, in the worst ways possible, even. You’re asking us to do it and to get nothing in return?”

  “Your son, the boy,” I said. “I don’t remember his name. But he might have a place.”

  “The Lord Duke took pride in the Crown States.”

  “There is no more Crown States,” I said. “Only plague and black wood.”

  “You’re asking for what little we have left. You’re offering nothing in return.”

  Mary spoke, “Sy’s offering you a chance to fight. A chance to take one last defiant action. A shot at removing the most dangerous man in the Crown States from the world.”

  “For chances and shots, I’m to condemn the boy?” Berger asked. “We’d try, we’d fail, and we’d be consigned to the Crown Capitol’s pits, with every person who we’ve worked with since coming to the Crown States, every family member, every loyal servant, and every other person we’ve stayed in touch with over the years.”

  “What makes them special?” I asked.

  “What makes your Lambs special?” Berger asked, his voice rising.

  The Duke shifted his cloak. Moving with slow carefulness, he reached out, hand slipping out from beneath the folds. It settled on Berger’s shoulder.

  The rain continued to pour down on top of us. Someone from the battle lines was turning back, calling out. Berger looked in the man’s direction.

  The battle was ongoing. The distant battlefield was eerie looking, almost a painting in the broad, vague strokes that painted it, the streets having blurred as harvesters had drawn out the materials, the hard shapes and openings of buildings smoothed out into funnels by the harvester’s work. Radham seemed to have the means to direct Tangles in small part, and they were using them to delay and hamper the attacking forces. I wondered if it was similar to Ashton’s mechanisms.