Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (17 page)

“You’re not gonna need that, fellas,” Angel said. “I have stamped papers in my saddlebags. With me are Uriah Zane and Alpheus Hathaway, and I’ll vouch for both.”

The guards lowered their rifles only slightly, glancing at one another nervously, and came skipping down the rock piles, leaping onto the trail. One was tall and skinny, a quirley smoldering between his lips. The other was medium tall, paunchy, with curly orange hair puffing out from beneath his tan kepi.

He waved the group over, and Angel took the lead as she, Zane, and Hathaway rode up to the young guards. Angel slowly reached back to dig around in a saddlebag pouch, and showed the guard her papers encased in a small leather portfolio.

When the guard seemed satisfied with the documents, he
gestured to the others to stand down. Zane rode up to the cave mouth, where the other soldiers were slowly, almost reluctantly lowering their rifles. They were all young and bright-eyed, and their muscles seemed to jerk under their ill-fitting uniforms.

Zane turned to the soldier manning the Gatling gun. “How in the hell did those ghouls bust through the tunnel?”

“Didn’t bust through it,” said the guard in a faintly sulking tone, turning toward the tunnel mouth. “That flyin’ devil melted the door.”

Zane swung down from General Lee’s back and, ground-reining the palomino, walked over to the tunnel mouth, gazing at the ground. His heart skipped a beat.

When he’d first seen it, he’d thought that the material littering the cave mouth was a large mud puddle from a nearby spring. But now he saw that the hardened, twisted sheets of melted steel were all that remained of the door that the government had promised was absolutely indestructible to any and all forces, be they men or beasts. It had been built of the stoutest grade of steel found anywhere in the world. Stronger even than its own density in stone.

Hathaway and Angel rode up behind Zane and looked down at the mass of melted minerals.

“Holy hob,” said Hathaway, removing his floppy-brimmed black hat and scratching his head slowly. “I guess we know what kind o’ flyin’ critters done that—don’t we, pards?”

“I reckon we do,” Angel said, casting an anxious glance at the sky.

Chapter 16
    

THE COVEN

Lieutenant Andrew Jackson McAlpine, assistant warden of Hellsgarde Penitentiary, scratched a match to life on the surface of the late Warden Mondrick’s broad desk and, with fingers shaking as badly as if he were aboard a train traversing a stretch of bad track, touched the fire to his long, black cigar.

Leaning forward in the late warden’s leather-upholstered swivel chair, he planted his elbows on the desk and blew smoke out his nostrils as he tossed the stove match into an ashtray carved in the form of a bear’s open paw, and thumbed his spectacles up his long, slender nose.

“You have any idea what it’s like here now?” he said, his voice quaking as badly as his hands. “I have just barely enough men to run this place, let alone keep the two hundred and fifty ghouls housed here under lock and key.”

“I’m sure you’re under a lot of stress,” said Angel.

“Stress?” Warden McAlpine chuckled without mirth and lifted a brandy snifter to his lips. He swallowed, making a pained expression. “No, it’s far from stressful wondering when one of the bastards is going to get loose and suck your blood and turn you into one of them. ‘Horrifying’ is a better word. I just hope, when it happens, and it will surely happen if I don’t get some
fucking support out here, goddamnit
!”—he punched the top of the warden’s desk so hard his spectacles slid down his nose and the Tiffany lamp rattled—“that they just tear my throat out and let me die!”

“Easy, partner,” Uriah said from where he stood at a casement window, one elbow propped atop the coping as he smoked a tightly rolled quirley of strong Mexican tobacco and sipped the late warden’s whiskey from a water glass. “Givin’ yourself a heart stroke ain’t gonna make the situation any easier.”

“Sorry the soldiers didn’t make it, Lieutenant,” said Hathaway. “Sounds like we ran into the same winged devils that attacked the castle.” The black scout sat in an overstuffed leather couch near the oak door at the back of the large room outfitted with game trophies, maps, and heavy, exotic wooden furniture acquired during Warden Mondrick’s hunting adventures throughout the world. He’d been a prominent member of Lincoln’s and then Sherman’s cabinets and, since he had no wife or family and didn’t mind living beyond society’s fringe, had volunteered for the warden position at Hellsgarde.

Zane doubted that that was the case with McAlpine. The young assistant warden looked ready to resign and gallop back East just as soon as he could.

A fire danced and crackled in a fieldstone hearth. Mondrick had tried to make the office as homey and familiar as he could in an attempt, most likely, to assuage the fact that he was
surrounded by screaming devils, any one of whom who would send him to Hell if they ever got their talons or claws into him.

And one eventually had…. Hondo had even taken the man’s clothes.

“If the courier gets through,” Angel said, sitting in the visitor’s chair angled in front of the desk and turning her own brandy snifter in her fingers, “Major Dean will send more men. I’m sure more will be coming from Fort Reynolds, as well. We’ll find a way to handle those dragons, just like we’ve found ways to handle everything else.”

“Yes, everything else.” McAlpine curled his upper lip and, drawing a deep, calming breath, sagged back in his chair. “I know this isn’t the ascribed view, but why the hell not kill them all? Kill them all now before they all get away!” He threw back the last of his brandy and, fumbling with the cut-glass decanter on his desk, refilled it.

“Don’t want to make the situation any worse than it already is,” Hathaway reminded the man. He sucked on a fat stogie from the warden’s humidor, blowing a large smoke ring. “Part of me wants to agree with you, though, Lieutenant. Especially after what happened to my detail. Sooner or later, somethin’ real bad’s gonna happen because we got so damn many o’ ’em all over the West. And now we got some we didn’t even know we had.”

His heavy, rounded shoulders jerked as he chuckled fatefully, shaking his head. He was thinking, of course, about the dragon.

“Look, we can discuss politics all we want,” Zane said, blowing a lungful of cigarette smoke out the open casement window, looking out over the scorched yard that had only recently been cleared of charred, dead soldiers, “but what we really need is to haul ass out of here and try to cut Charlie’s sign.”

“It’s too late in the day, Uriah,” Angel said wearily, showing her own frustration. “We’re gonna have to hole up here for the night whether we like it or not. The sun’ll be down soon.”

Zane blew a smoke plume out the window over the darkening yard. Angel was right. It was too late in the day to start out. They and their horses needed food and a good night’s sleep.

But he had a dark feeling, whether due to his recently acquired and troubling condition or not, that something bad was going to happen, and the chance of that occurring grew by leaps and bounds with every minute Charlie Hondo and his men were running off their leashes. If he’d had hackles at that moment, they’d have been raised.

“You have somewhere we can bunk?” Angel asked the lieutenant.

“Sure, sure. We have an entire wing for visitors, if you’ll pardon the ghouls’ screams, which tend to pick up after midnight but begin to fade slightly after three.” McAlpine blinked slowly. “I’ll send someone to make sure the beds are made. You can dine with me, if you like, in the warden’s quarters. Thank heavens none of the cooks were burned to ashes. Little good they’d do if we were under siege again—most being women.”

“You’d be surprised what a woman can do with the right weapons, Lieutenant,” Angel said crisply, throwing back her brandy.

McAlpine, a pale, light-skinned man with large ears and pomaded hair, looked chagrined.

Zane took another puff of the pungent Mexican tobacco he liked so well for the peppery tang it left in his throat, and blew the smoke into the room as he said, “Does the name Elaina Baranova ring a bell with you, Lieutenant?”

McAlpine looked at him, the lines of weariness in his forehead cutting deeper. “Of course. Our resident black sorceress, one of three we have imprisoned here. We call her ‘the queen’ because she acts like one and seems to carry the respect of nobility among the other ghouls. Oh, God, why bring her up now?”

“I’d like to speak with her privately.”

Angel threw back the last of her brandy. “Why? Who is she?”

“Oh, that won’t be possible, I’m afraid, Mr. Zane. No one speaks privately with any of the prisoners here. All conversations must be overheard by second and third non-ghoul parties out of fear, of course, of spells being exchanged or imparted.” He spoke that last as though reading the words out of a regulation manual.

“All right, you can join us. But I would like to speak to her.”

“Uriah…” Angel said.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“If you’re to speak with ‘the queen,’ Mr. Zane, we’ll need a third party in addition to a couple official jailers. I’ll summon them in the morning.”

Zane flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “We’re pullin’ out first thing in the morning. I’d like to speak to her now.”

Angel hiked a shoulder. “I’ll be that third party, Lieutenant. If Zane thinks it’s important to talk to the witch, I’d like to hear what she has to say.”

“You don’t want to go in there,” Zane said.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Look, look,” said McAlpine, looking pained. “I would rather do this tomorrow, Mr. Zane. My nerves are all leaping up and down my spine, and—”

“I need to talk to her tonight, Lieutenant.”

“Good God, man,
why
?”

“She could save us a whole lot of time and make a big difference to whether we catch up with old Charlie Hondo or not.”

They all stared at him.

Hathaway broke the silence after blowing another smoke ring. “Well, hell.” He stubbed his stogie out in an ashtray on the sofa beside him. “I reckon I’ll trail along, too. Me, I’m partial to witches myself. Had one put a hex on all three of my ex‑wives.”

Half-drunk, he grinned.

McAlpine summoned a couple of jailers armed with carbines and stone talismans draped around their necks, which some believed would ward off spells and incantations of doom founded in the darker forms of known magic.

They were a burly pair, tough-nut soldiers who’d survived the War and who obviously prided themselves on having the courage it took to guard the ghouls at Hellsgarde. They wore sweat-stained sombreros with the brims turned up in front and fastened to the crowns, cavalry-fashion. Each carried a Model ’67 Winchester carbine, and in addition to the talismans, they wore bandoliers of both brass and silver, though there were no werebeasts of any stripe in the Witches’ Wing of Hellsgarde.

Crossbows dangled from their hips. Several knives of different shapes and sizes bristled about their uniforms.

The wing was on the opposite side of the castle, and the two gravely silent guards, holding flaming torches aloft, led Lieutenant McAlpine, Zane, Angel, and Hathaway down endless stone cavern-like corridors lit with flickering torches. Their boots
clacked and chinged on the cracked, heaving stones. The warden shamelessly cradled the cut-glass brandy decanter to his chest, as though it were a suckling baby, and took occasional pulls directly from the bottle.

No cells opened onto this main, circuitous artery through the bowels of the castle, but eerie sounds of all pitches emanated from the thick stone walls, almost as though the walls themselves were making them. Occasionally, Zane could feel a vibration in the floor beneath his boots.

Once, he put his hand on the wall and felt the shudder there, as well. He remembered the cave in which he and Junius Webb had found the high-brow swillers, and the hair on the back of his neck pricked. He almost wished he’d fortified himself with one more shot of whiskey. Odd, he vaguely thought, that as a ghoul himself he’d be so squeamish.

He gently closed his fist, shutting away the thought as he believed he’d closed off that dark side of himself, forever able to keep it from reaching the light of a full moon as it had but only once in the year since he’d been bitten.

When they came to intersecting corridors, they stopped in front of two broad, timbered, iron-banded doors. Overhead lay a wood sign on which WITCHES COVEN had been burned. While one of the guards fumbled with a key ring, Zane glanced to his left and saw several barred doors opening off both sides of the corridor. Cells, most likely.

What else could they be? He looked down the right corridor and saw the same thing—more doors.

Ghouls of some sort must lurk inside, though there were no sounds here but the murmurings in the rock walls and the clatter of the keys on the heavy iron ring. There was also the gurgle
of liquid as Lieutenant McAlpine threw back another slug of the brandy. Chairs on either side of the door the guard was unlocking said that guards were customarily posted here, but due to the sudden lack of manpower at Hellsgarde, they were probably all out guarding the canyon to make sure no spooks got out.