Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech (7 page)

Even Lorca had been forced to use caution, a threadbare coat concealing the expensive cut of his clothes. The half-dozen brutes who escorted him down Rat Run were from a local gang with loyalties to Lorca’s syndicate and ultimately to High Captain Kilbride. The thugs kept their clubs and knives at the ready, and any sign of movement brought a wary glance from at least one of them. Kilbride had been fighting High Captain Waernuk for control of the Beggar’s Maze area for several years, but it wasn’t the rival syndicate that most worried Lorca. Elsewhere in Five Fingers, even the independent criminals were leery of angering one of the big syndicates. On Hospice, there were many too desperate to care whom they crossed. It was hard to worry about consequences when you hadn’t eaten for a week.

From the Beggar’s Maze, Rat Run led into the dilapidated Southhold Prow. Once a bustling industrial area, the district had since fallen into the same squalor as the rest of the island. Full of abandoned warehouses, dilapidated mills, and run-down tenements that had once housed thousands of factory workers, the district was a wilderness of rust and decay.

Lorca’s escort led him toward a rotting warehouse on the area’s periphery. The brick walls were gradually crumbling away, the tile roof had been stripped bare by storms to expose rusted iron beams, and the windows were boarded, the doors chained together. As they approached, Lorca felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. There was an indefinable atmosphere here, something more depressing than mere abandonment, something more elemental in its wrongness. The feel of the place was more than simply doomed. It was forsaken, even damned.

He could see that his guards felt the same. Their vigilance took on an almost frantic quality. Even the rats were repelled, straying no nearer the warehouse than a few hundred yards. Lorca frowned at his own uneasiness. He dismissed his escort, unwilling that they should see his timidity. He waited until the gang had withdrawn into the broken hulk of an old steel mill before forcing himself onward.

Unlike the rats and thugs, Lorca knew the reason for the dread that chilled his heart. That knowledge gave him the courage to press on alone. Indeed, the ordeal emboldened him with each step. The source of his fear was no mystery because it was something under his control.

It took three keys to open the lock that bound the chains across the warehouse doors. By the time Lorca had finished turning the last key, his pride had dulled the last tremor in his hands. There was no fear in his step when he slid one of the iron-banded doors along its corroded runners and stepped into the darkness.

Fear returned when the gangster’s eyes adjusted. Laid out along the dusty floor of the warehouse, close to the door, was a row of bodies. A dozen or more, each in a different state of decay and putrefaction. The sight of corpses, even in such profusion, wouldn’t have bothered Lorca. It was what had been done to them that made his gorge rise, certain mutilations that were as unspeakable as they were profane.

“Feeling squeamish?” Azaam’s brittle voice sounded from the darkness. Lorca looked away from the row of corpses, stared as the blood hag came stalking out of the darkness. She had discarded the affectations of an elderly dowager, adorning herself in the savage splendor of a Satyxis sorceress. A kilt of tanned leather was wrapped about her waist, the dried fingers of the men whose flayed skins had provided the garment flapping against the hem with each step she took. A bustier of bleached bones circled her chest, grisly charms and talismans entwined with the skeletal framework. A headpiece of malachite and adamantine coiled about her brow, writhing like a serpent between the grotesque horns jutting from her forehead. It was the knife in her wizened hand that arrested Lorca’s attention, however. The knife and the fresh blood coating the grey arm that held it.

“You were told to hide until I needed you,” Lorca said, pointing at the witch’s bloody arm and the row of corpses.

“Who will notice if the forgotten disappear?” Azaam said. “Is that not why you chose this place for us? A place that has been forgotten?” She gazed almost wistfully at the mutilated corpses. “I must keep busy while we bide our time. And these had already wasted their lives. Why should they be permitted to waste their deaths?”

“Because too much is at stake,” Lorca said. “Or do I need to remind you about the terms of our agreement?”

A glottal, slobbering voice oozed from the blackened depths of the warehouse. “We remember the arrangement. Both what is expected and what has been promised.” The sound of metal scraping against stone echoed through the abandoned building. The eerie glow of Cryxlight shone in the shadows and drew nearer. Lorca shuddered as the ghastly brilliance briefly illuminated a file of bonejacks. The monstrous machines stood in stony silence while the light swept past them.

The gibbous light and gruesome sound drew closer. Lorca could see now that the glow came from a clutch of metal lanterns chained to a troll-skin belt. The belt, in turn, circled a distended belly, shapeless and bloated with corruption. Beneath the belt, the source of the harsh metallic scraping was exposed, for there was no waist, only a barrel-like plug of metal from which four steel claws protruded, flitting across the floor like the legs of some abominable spider.

Above the lanterns’ glow, the horror’s body became an emaciated, almost skeletal shell. Coils of rubber tubing slithered from between exposed ribs; cables of copper undulated from heart to neck. At the base of the throat, a silver disc protruded, slash-like vents shivering as breath was sucked into the decayed lungs below. A bowl-like headpiece of black silk embroidered with cabalistic sigils shrouded a squat, toad-like skull. The leprous face that peered from beneath bore only a hole where its nose had rotted away. Two spheres of glass stared from its sockets, their tinted surfaces not quite concealing the macabre objects floating within.

Azaam smiled at Lorca’s alarm. “You have heard of, but have not met my associate. This is Moritat, one of our most ingenious necrotechs.”

Moritat’s face contorted with ghoulish amusement at the blood hag’s compliment. One of his skeletal hands reached into the satchel looped over his shoulder. From the bag, he removed a nugget of glistening black stone. He held the rock toward Lorca, his expression taking on a tinge of offense when the gangster recoiled.

“I have examined the sample you gave our agents,” the necrotech said. “It is an unusually fine grade of necrotite. Great must have been the suffering that soaked into the vein. The potentialities for such a fuel are . . . enticing.” He waited, favoring Lorca with an expectant, indulgent smile, like a lecturer waiting for a student to understand the lesson he has just been taught. When the desired reaction wasn’t forthcoming, Moritat stuck a finger into the vent above his lungs and poked about until he pulled a bit of tissue free. He inspected it a moment, then stared back at the gangster.

“I am happy that our deal is to your satisfaction,” Lorca said, trying to hide the quiver in his voice.

Moritat shrugged at Lorca’s lack of appreciation, his inability to see the genius of this discovery. He stroked the necrotite nugget as though it were a favored pet. “I shall need much more for my purposes. My experiments are most exhaustive.” The morbid flesh floating inside the glass spheres emerged from the liquid depths. “You have the amount you promised?”

“You’ll get what we agreed on,” Lorca said. He glanced away from Moritat as he caught motion from the corner of his eye. One of the bodies lying on the floor had started to twitch, its mouth contorting in a silent moan. Despite the thing’s obvious agony, there was no chance it could still be alive, not with the organs that had been cut from its mutilated flesh. Azaam stalked over to the moaning thing. There was a look of pleasure on her face as she started to work on the body with her knife.

It only took a moment of watching Azaam for Lorca to look away in disgust. “I brought you here to do a job, not . . .”

“So you did and so we will,” Moritat said. “But it would have been impractical for us to bring everything we need all the way from Cryx. We felt it would be more efficient to improvise some of the more mundane elements from . . . shall we say, local materials?” The necrotech’s spidery legs scratched at the floor as he came scuttling closer. “You must want this man dead very badly.”

Lorca squirmed under Moritat’s gaze.

“What is so special about one death, when there is so much all around us? Everything that thinks itself alive is already dying. Only the Dragonfather is eternal.” Moritat pulled another sliver of rotten tissue from the slash-like vent. “So much trouble just to kill one man. You should have asked for a few dozen, bought your murders wholesale.”

Lorca stared back at the monster. Ambition dulled the horror coursing through his veins. He was a man with an insatiable appetite for power. On his own, he’d risen through the ranks of High Captain Kilbride’s syndicate, eliminating anything and anyone in his way. But he’d reached a plateau. To climb any higher he would have to stand on the corpse of a murdered man. Not just any man, but his own boss within the syndicate, Vulger Volkenrath, first mate to Low Captain Haggise, Kilbride’s second-in-command. Lorca didn’t have any qualms about murder, but killing his own boss—if the crime could be traced back to him—would be like slitting his own throat.

If Volkenrath were slaughtered by horrors from Cryx, however, not even his fiercest rival would suspect Lorca’s involvement.

“He’s the only one I need dead,” Lorca said. He forced himself to look back at Azaam and her gory adjustments to the recalcitrant corpse. “Do whatever you need to do to get ready, but I want you to act soon.”

Azaam stepped away from the mangled carcass. She stretched her blood-soaked hand toward it and arcane runes glowed in the air around her fingers. The same runes flickered briefly where they had been carved into the corpse’s flesh. Slowly, the thing sat upright, then clumsily pulled itself to its feet. The blood hag had invested it with the foulest echo of life, the obscene vitality of the undead. The corpse was now one of the risen.

“We will step up our preparations,” Azaam said. “We will be ready. See that you can say the same.”

“I’m already making the arrangements to ship the necrotite out of Five Fingers. Don’t worry—with me working it, you’ll be able to get your necrotite safely out of the city,” Lorca said. “And I’ve already figured out where you can hit Vulger. He has a hobby. He likes to watch steamjacks beat each other into scrap. Once a week he operates a fighting arena called the Scrapyard here on Hospice. That’s one of the reasons I chose this place to hide you, so you’d be close to the hunting ground.”

Moritat gave the nugget of necrotite one final caress, then slipped it back into his satchel. “My creations are not known for their restraint,” he said. “They are liable to kill everything in the arena.”

Lorca watched as Azaam used her magic to animate a second corpse. He’d come too far to reconsider now. “Just as long as you get Vulger, I don’t care how many you kill.” The racketeer shuddered as the second risen lurched to its feet. He tried not to think about where his ghastly allies had come by so many corpses, or the nearness of Blocklathe Orphanage to their hideout.

A giggle bubbled from the necrotech’s lips. “When my creations are through with it, you may start calling the Scrapyard the Boneyard.”

CHAPTER III

“
O
ver my dead body,” Taryn growled, both hands closing a little tighter around the grips of her magelocks. The idea seemed to hold a lot of attraction for the hatchet-faced Thurian and the two ogrun bruisers behind him. After five minutes of arguing with the gun mage about her weapons, the ogrun looked like they were ready to tear out the nearest support column and beat her with it.

“I don’t like it either,” Rutger said, “but if we’re going to do this, we have to play by the rules.” He’d already taken off his own weapon belt and was only waiting for Taryn to be reasonable before handing his arms over to the Scrapyard’s enforcers.

“I’d sooner go naked than hand over my guns.” She glared at the Thurian.

Marko adopted his oiliest smile and hurried between Taryn and the enforcer. “Now, now, let’s all keep things civil.” With a dramatic flourish he started removing knives from under his vest, handing them to the Thurian one after the other. “See, I’m not worried about getting my weapons back,” he said, looking at Taryn.

“We can still go back,” Rutger said, laying his hand on her shoulder. He knew how important the magelocks were to Taryn. They’d been a gift from her mentor, Henri, the closest thing to a father she’d ever had. Henri had died many years ago defending Taryn’s honor. The magelocks were the only tangible thing she had to remember him by.