Broken Hero (27 page)

Another roar echoes around us. They’ve been coming more and more frequently, slowly growing more distinct but still defying identification. It is something like a ripping noise. An almost mechanical tearing. A sound out of place in this world of rock and moss.

“You know,” Hannah says, “at some point that’s going to get pretty bloody disturbing.”

We keep on walking. We make the first left, then the other. A tunnel leads ahead, revealing nothing but shadow and darkness.

Hannah pipes up again. “You sure this is the way?”

“Just following the directions,” I say, and for Felicity’s sake leave my comments at that.

“You fuck up the instructions?” Tabitha asks, taking a slightly more direct route to this conversation’s end point.

“Feel free to go back and double check,” I snap.

“You know, I don’t really think that’s totally appropriate, Arthur,” Clyde says, slightly apologetic. “I mean, considering Tabby’s condition.”

The sound of Tabitha grinding her teeth almost drowns out the next roar.

“Is it me or does it seem like we’re walking toward that noise?” Felicity asks. Potentially attempting to change the subject.

But then abruptly the tunnel widens. The pool of our torches’ light is no longer abutted by walls, but fades off into darkness.

“Maybe,” I say, turning to Hermann, “a little more light.”

He hawks massively, and with a degree of ostentation that probably isn’t necessary. And a thick wad of flaming oil sails across the room to splatter against a far wall.

It is indeed another cavern, smaller than the one where we made camp, but distinctly more endowed in the large bronze door department.

The door is a large oval set into one wall, broader on the horizontal than the vertical. Swirling lines cover it, twisting and tangling, as if the metalworker who wrought this great thing had a pretty substantial hard-on for paisley. The world takes all sorts, I suppose.

“Seems a little lacking in handles,” Hannah comments, bringing her usual level of optimism to proceedings.

“Seems like this place is a little feckin’ lacking in Minotaurs to battle,” Kayla comments, bring her usual level of unnecessary violence to proceedings.

As if in response to her call, another roar booms into the cavern. The loudest yet. I swear I feel the air pulse with the noise. Kayla’s head snaps to a shadowed corner of the cavern. She stalks toward it.

At the same time Clyde and Tabitha are moving toward the door. I can’t argue with Kayla’s instincts, but we definitely need someone covering that pair as well. That’s the direction the magic-imbued death cult is in.

“Another tunnel over here,” Kayla calls. She cocks her head. “Think I can hear something.”

“Getting closer or further away?” I ask.

“Which do you feckin’ think?”

Shit and balls. I turn back to Clyde and Tabitha. “What sort of time frame are we looking at with that door?”

“More you talk, slower we go,” Tabitha barks back. Clyde gives me a slightly reproving look. I assume for having bothered Tabby. I need to tell him not to do that. If I’m getting tired of Clyde’s mother-hen act, then Tabby is almost certainly going to throttle him with his own urethra within a week.

On the plus side, there’s a decent chance of the universe ending before then, but still…

“Can you help?” I ask Volk. Just rip the door open or something.

“The cultists would hear,” Volk points out, a degree of apology to his voice. And he’s right: they would, and we are seriously outgunned.

“Just so you know,” Hannah says picking up on the theme, “I have, like, three-quarters of a clip and then I’m bollocksed.”

“Just so you know,” I say, “you have my gun.” I wanted to bring my wooden sword but apparently wood doesn’t hold an edge the same way as steel. And when Kayla tried to trim all the bone bits and hair off the edges a few fairly fundamental cracks reduced the thing to three short sticks of no conceivable use in a fight.

Hannah looks down at the gun, with at least a sliver of panic on her face. I should probably take less satisfaction in it. “But—” she starts.

“Don’t worry,” Felicity cuts in. “You keep the gun.” She tosses hers my way. “I have some hand-to-hand combat training that should help. And Arthur will have six shots at his disposal with which he can secure a new weapon.”

It’s my turn to look slightly panicked. I don’t want to give Hannah a chance to see it, so I try to mask it with officiousness. “Any sense for what’s coming?” I say, approaching Kayla.

“Yeah, a feckin’ carnival with fourteen clowns and a troupe of pygmy jugglers. Who do I look like, feckin’ Tonto?”

I look at the still-closed door and decide it’s probably not worth asking how that’s going.

Felicity sidles up to me, slips an arm around my waist. “Stop worrying,” she whispers, “I once saw you kill a giant mutant dog with a pointy stick.”

It’s true enough. Except, “I don’t have a stick,” I say.

The moment stretches out. Nervous shuffling feet. A growing rumble from the corridor Kayla is watching, one that even I can hear now. Another roar tears through the space. And Hermann and Volk definitely share a look on that.

Just like they did the last time the sound came. Back in the cave with the butterflies. It wasn’t the map that they recognized. It was that noise.

“What?” I ask them. “What is it?”

And then at the same time, Clyde says, quite loudly, “Oh, I see,” and Kayla says, “Incoming!”

Behind me, the door starts to rumble open.

From the shadowy corridor before me, I hear the distinct sound of metal striking rock.

“Oh crap sticks.” Clyde’s voice is leaden behind me.

“Oh feck in a handcart.” Before me, Kayla blurs into motion.

The moment is frozen. A tableau in cold, unmoving marble to illustrate to wayward children the exact meaning of the phrase “between a rock and a hard place.”

Behind me: the door is half open, rolling back into rock, blue light shining out of the swirling lines that decorated the bronze surface. Beyond it, a group of thirty or so death cultists look up in our direction.

Before me—Friedrich emerges, hulking, filling the tunnel mouth, for a moment resembling some monstrous child being birthed into the cave. His head scrapes the tunnel ceiling. Sparks scrape, rock complains, metal screams. An ugly booming, roaring sound. A terribly familiar one.

My eyes fly to Volk and Hermann. And they knew. They knew. I knew that they knew something. That moment, that look. It was a decision to not tell us. To not bring us to this moment in full awareness.

But why? Are they the traitors Hannah suspects, or just the desperate people I want to believe they are?

But then there is no time for why. Because far too many people are trying to kill us at once.

Well, I’m certainly not going to pick a fight with Friedrich when I only have six pistol rounds to my name. And short of shooting Hannah in the back, that leaves me with the cultists.

They are jerking to their feet, scrabbling up from the moments of repose they apparently enjoy while in the company of their ridiculous, prodigious swords. I sprint toward them. Within seconds they are sprinting toward me.

In the breach, Tabitha stands behind Clyde, not cowering exactly, but hardly offering resistance. Clyde’s arm is outstretched, his mouth moving. His arm bucks, as if absorbing recoil. A cultist’s forward charge is abruptly reversed. He flies backwards, body snapping against architecture. Clyde lets the spell fly again, again.

He can’t get them all, they swarm past him. One closes on Felicity, swinging his sword in a flat horizontal arc aimed directly at her midriff. She ducks, rolls beneath the blade, closes the distance. And, again, up close the cultist’s absurd swords are more a hindrance than a help.

Felicity rises out of the roll. The heel of her palm strikes the cultist’s Adam’s apple. He drops the sword, staggers back. She catches him a quick blow to the side of the temple with her left hand, and as he staggers right, she pivots on one heel, spins, and slams a foot into the opposite side of the man’s head.

She’s had some hand-to-hand combat training
. I shake my head. Felicity makes Chuck Norris look like an amateur. And she does it in hiking boots.

I charge into the fight, pistol up. As soon as a target looks big enough, I fire. I need to clear a space, a moment’s breathing room.

One cultist drops, a ragged wound where his jaw was. I catch another in the shoulder. He drops his sword but keeps running at me. Right up until Clyde’s spell catches him in his midriff and sends him jagging sideways across the floor, head and heels clattering over the rock. We come together, forming a tight knot.

A cultist lunges and I fire yet again, the bullet smashing into his chest, sending him reeling back.

Another comes, I aim, fire.

Nothing.

Six bullets. No weapon secured. And to make matters worse, I’ve just proven that Hannah was right when she said I should count my shots.

The cultist’s sword lances toward me, a searing blow aimed low, aimed to gut me, to be hard to avoid. My weight is off from the firing stance. All I can do is go with momentum, falling toward the blade, desperately trying to twist as I do.

I smack against the flat of the blade as it passes me, feel the upper edge, slice into the underside of my flailing arm. The wound is hot and bright and threatens to eclipse everything. I hit the floor. More pain. I grit my teeth. Close the distance. That’s what Felicity did. That’s how to survive without a weapon. And I have to survive.

But I’m too slow, too dazed from my impact with the cave’s stone floor. The distance is not small enough, and my attacker too quick. I’m on my hands and knees when the next sweep comes. He pivots like Felicity, letting the weight of the sword carry him around. I drop to the ground again, smack my chin, blink lights from my eyes. The cultist has his back to me, still spinning, is bringing the sword up to bring it down in a heavy two-handed arc.

I don’t bother getting up, I roll, twisting my body.
Close the distance.

The sword is above the cultist’s head when I hit his ankles. It’s not a hard blow, but his balance is precarious, and he doesn’t need much of a push.

With a yell he trips over me, carried by the weight of his sword, feet actually leaving the ground as he’s whipped up by the momentum. The tip of the sword smashes into the ground six inches from me. Desperately hanging onto the handle, the cultist is cartwheeled around, a blur of flailing legs and naked flesh.

And then he completes his three hundred and sixty degree circuit, smashes back-first into the vertical edge of his own blade.

The two halves of the cultist go sailing over my head, land in separate bloody heaps.

Gingerly I pick myself up. The sword is leaning at a slight angle after the impact of its former owner. The handle points toward me.

I reach out and grab the hilt. Weapon secured.

The back of the cave is filling with Uhrwerkmänner in a way that I tend to associate with imminent death. Hermann and Volk fall back.

Friedrich dwarfs them. Before him, they are a child’s action figures. He smashes a fist at Volk. The Uhrwerkmänner dances back, surprisingly light on his feet, but comes up against the edge of the cave. He barely ducks Friedrich’s follow-up blow. The monstrous Uhrwerkmänn’s fist plows into the rock, sending shrapnel shards flying. They dent and pit Volk’s armor plating.

In the moment while Friedrich recovers his balance, Volk is on him. He delivers a flurry of blows to Friedrich’s midriff. Gears whistle, his fists blur, metal screams.

Friedrich backhands Volk halfway across the room.

The noise is deafening. Like a car crash. Volk rolls, comes up on his feet. Like a badass. Apparently he went to the same hand-to-hand combat training course as Felicity. Still, one of his shoulder guards is mostly scrap, hanging uselessly off his shoulder.

The spot on Friedrich that Volk was whaling on looks like it’s been lightly buffed. This fight just doesn’t seem fair.

Friedrich starts advancing on Volk.

A gunshot joins the cacophony of battle. A ricochet sparks off Friedrich’s sleek head. Another shot, just as ineffective.

Friedrich turns and looks at Hannah, standing puny before him, pistol gripped uselessly in her hands.

She fires again. The bullet pings off Friedrich’s skull. He keeps staring at her. The sort of stare that precedes very bad things.

I stumble toward her, dragging the massive sword after me. It clatters and jumps over the rocks, like an anchor weighing me back. But it’s the only weapon I’ve got.

Hannah gets off three more shots before I get to her. Friedrich is on the move. She’s lining up the fourth. I slap her hands away.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yell above the sound of the battle. “You said you have three-quarters of a clip. You might as well be spitting paper wads at him!”

She turns to me, eyes blazing. “I am buying bloody time for Hermann.”

My brows crease. I glance back at Friedrich. He is ten yards away, closing fast.

And then I see Hermann, in the air, leaping, up above Friedrich, then coming down toward him. Like a basketball player going for the slam dunk.

As he comes down Hermann delivers a hammer blow to Friedrich’s chin. I almost expect to see Friedrich’s head spin and his eyes roll back to reveal dollar signs.

As it is, Friedrich is mostly stoic about the experience.

One of his hands fires out too fast for me to track, smashes into Hermann’s gut. Metal screams. Hermann’s body jack-knifes around Friedrich’s fist. Then, with a flex of pistons, he flings Hermann away.

“You buy Hermann any more time and he’s going to get killed,” I snap. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

The skin around Hannah’s eyes tightens as she stares at Hermann dragging himself to his feet. One of his legs trails badly as he limps a retreat.

Volk has another Uhrwerkmänn caught by the throat and is ripping streams of cogs and rubber piping from a gash in its midriff, but two other robots are circling to his left and right.