Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech (24 page)

He started to frame an answer, then felt his blood go cold. He’d made a mistake. The Scavengers weren’t diving at the cables. They were diving at the car itself. He remembered the horrible impact the crippled bonejack had caused, how it had nearly thrown them all into the channel. That had been accidental, simply a product of the chaos of battle. This would be much worse.

“Hold tight!” Rutger shouted as he wrapped his arms and legs around the top of the mast.

When the Scavengers struck, it was as if the cable car had been struck by a battering ram. The car swung so far out that it was almost completely on its side before its momentum reversed and it came snapping back around. The entire side of the car was smashed in, the carriage reduced to a tangled mess of torn steel. It was a testament to the quality of its construction that it survived at all. The bonejacks had effectively disintegrated under the impact.

As the car came snapping back around, Rutger heard Taryn scream. His heart leaped into his throat as he saw the gun mage hurtling out into the open sky. The violent shift in the car’s momentum had broken her hold on the mast and flung her off.

Just as Taryn started to fall, the squid-like ghastliness of the iron lich came diving at her. She shrieked. The thing’s metal tentacles wrapped themselves about her, coiling her body in a crushing embrace.

“Such pretty flesh,” the left skull said.

“Much prettier once it’s decayed a bit,” the right skull said. “I must see what this coin looks like with a bit of tarnish.”

The central skull simply moaned, but there was an inhuman malignance in that wail, the sound of a fiend disgusted with its own existence and determined to make anything that crossed its path share in its pain.

Taryn’s screams faded as the skull-faced thing went flittering away through the air, undulating across the sky toward the south.

Rutger wasn’t certain how he maintained his hold on the swaying mast as he watched the iron lich carry off Taryn’s limp, motionless body. He only knew it was by no conscious decision of his own.

He’d been wrong. The witch hadn’t been guiding or controlling the monster. She’d been restraining it. With her gone, the fiendish machine was set loose to pursue its own murderous proclivities.

In that instant, he’d have liked nothing better than to fall to his death and make the pain go away.

“Withdraw!” Captain Parvolo shouted at the launch’s crew. Too many of them had come forward to help the watchmen board the enemy ship and been caught in the worst of the fighting. Those left didn’t seem possessed of the incentive to make decisions for themselves. He grabbed one man close by and pushed him toward the wheelhouse. “Get this barge moving!” he roared. The sailor nodded, but whether that meant he would carry out the order was more than Parvolo could tell.

The fighting still raged fiercely on deck. The swivel gun had been knocked out by one of the bonejacks that erupted from the channel’s bottom. Parvolo would have given much to know how the ghastly machines had contrived to follow the
Majestic
underwater, waiting until they were needed. To say that the sudden advent of the monsters had turned Parvolo’s operation into a shambles was an understatement.

Lieutenant Trask crouched down beside Parvolo, aiming the immense slug gun he’d somehow contrived to get hold of before the raid, which was more like a small cannon than a firearm. Its massive projectile was designed to crack a warjack’s hull. The havoc it inflicted upon the Cryxian machines was tremendous, when it could manage to hit them. Hideously, the easiest time to hit one of the creatures was when they stopped to butcher a man caught in their claws. Trask looked up at his captain, waiting for the signal. Parvolo pointed his finger at a clawed monster over near the aft rail. Parvolo nodded in understanding and fired.

The slug smashed into the bonejack, splitting its hull and sending a mix of foul oils streaming from ruptured pipes and hoses. The impact pushed the thing through the railing, sending its nightmarish bulk plummeting back into the water.

Parvolo was thankful that the macabre machines no longer moved with the terrifying unity of purpose and coordination they had displayed earlier. Before, the things would have made a concentrated attack against anyone who displayed the ability to harm them. The man who carried the other slug gun had been slaughtered when two of the bonejacks converged on him. No fewer than four of the things had settled on the swivel gun. It was a mercy the monsters had lost their cohesion. Now they were simply murderous beasts, killing and slaughtering without any thought for others of their kind. It was Parvolo’s first real break since the raid started.

No, that wasn’t quite true. He couldn’t forget his terror when a flock of flying bonejacks had erupted from the
Majestic
’s hold. Never in his life had he been more certain of death than as he watched that ghoulish flock circle above the launch.

But strangely, the threatened attack never came. The Scavengers peeled off suddenly and flew away to the east. It was difficult to be certain with the clamor of battle all around him, but Parvolo thought he’d heard gunshots off in that direction.

The launch finally got underway, chugging toward shore. The debased sailors on the
Majestic
continued to fire their weapons at the retreating boat, but at least there would be no more of the risen leaping down from their decks to assist the bonejacks.

Parvolo glared at the enemy ship. He’d wanted to take it intact, to capture one of the Cryxian leaders. There was a connection to Lorca, and he knew it was on that ship. He could feel it in his bones.

He shook his head. There was no use mourning things that were already lost. Leaning out from the corner of the wheelhouse, the captain cut the rotten arm from a risen charging forward to attack Trask while he reloaded the slug gun. The undead staggered back, worms and putrescence trickling from the stump of its arm. It started to reach down to recover its weapon with the hand still left to it, but a downward sweep of Parvolo’s blade sent its decayed head rolling across the deck.

The captain looked at the carnage. The deck was awash in gore, bodies piled everywhere. Many of his men were still alive somehow, but many more were strewn about the launch in mangled heaps. Parvolo reached down and grabbed Trask’s shoulder as he started to aim the slug gun at the last of the amphibian bonejacks.

“Let me do this,” Parvolo said. As he crouched down and aimed the cumbersome weapon, he added, “I need to do this.”

The roar of the slug gun as Parvolo fired into the bonejack was drowned out by a far more calamitous discharge. At the neck of the channel, the navy warship had loosed its broadside. As soon as Parvolo’s raid ran into trouble, the navy had signaled they were ready to demolish the ship with cannon fire. They’d only been waiting for Parvolo’s launch to break away.

Having spent the last fifteen minutes calculating the range, the warship was unerringly precise. The
Majestic
’s rigging was blasted into splinters, her hull pounded to ruins, and her deck smashed into kindling. The first volley reduced the ship to a ragged cripple. Before a second volley could be unleashed, however, the floating wreck was engulfed in a terrific explosion. Ghoulish green light blazed around the ship for an instant, eclipsing even the morning sun in brilliance, and then the
Majestic
was obliterated in an explosion heard even on the mainland.

In the aftermath, all that was left of the ship were burning splinters scattered between the shores of Chaser and Captain’s Islands.

Parvolo looked across the bonejack he’d shot down and gazed upon the annihilated merchantman. He shook his head. If Lorca was behind the Cryxian attack, any evidence of it had been sent to the bottom of the channel.

The windows in Lorca’s office above the gambling hall rattled in their casings as the detonation of the
Majestic
shook the island. He couldn’t see out past the Governor’s District to King’s Finger Channel, but the distinct sound of a naval broadside left no doubt what had happened. There was only one ship the navy could be shooting at this morning.

Lorca leaned back in his chair and raised a glass of wine to the window. “Farewell, Moritat,” he said. “Your inconvenience to me is over.” He laughed as he took a sip. “You should have remembered the old pirate adage: dead men tell no tales.”

“Dead men have quite a bit to say, if you know how to ask them.” The oozing voice came from behind Lorca. The gangster leaped from his chair, turning to stare in horror at the ghastly thing that had scuttled into his office.

The necrotech’s bloated body was spattered with blood, the mangled bodies of two of Lorca’s guards dangling from his claws. Moritat chuckled at the look of terror on the gangster’s face. His wide grin split the stitches holding his torn cheek together.

“No thank you,” Moritat said when he noticed the glass in Lorca’s hand. “I never drink wine. Perhaps these gentlemen?” The necrotech hefted the mutilated corpses, their broken limbs slapping obscenely against the floor. Moritat shrugged and let the bodies drop onto the rug. “Perhaps not,” he said with a tinge of regret.

“How . . . how . . .” Lorca stammered, backing away.

“How did I get here?” Moritat said. “Oh, I’ve been here for some time now. As you may have guessed, I decided not to leave on your ship.” He wagged a blood-coated finger. “Very treacherous of you to inform the authorities about that ship.”

Lorca dropped the glass. “I had nothing to do with that.”

Moritat’s answer was a slobbering cough. “Another nice thing about asking dead men questions. They never lie to you.” He folded his gore-stained hands across his belly. “But we will forget about that right now. It happens your betrayal has been extremely useful.”

“Useful?”

The necrotech nodded excitedly. “Oh yes. Because of you, everyone in Five Fingers thinks we’re dead. You see, that’s why I was so agreeable about being so open and dramatic in those attacks you wanted.” Moritat clapped his hands together. “Get everyone looking for me. Then, when they think they’ve found me they will stop looking. No enemy is so invisible as the one that everybody thinks has already been destroyed.”

“You can’t kill me,” Lorca said, circling around the desk as Moritat came scuttling toward him. “You still need me to get out of the city. It’ll be easier now that everyone thinks you’re dead. Just like you said.”

Moritat shook his head, more stitches snapping as he smiled. “I won’t kill you, Lorca. That would be such a waste.

“I abhor letting interesting subjects go to waste.”