The Incorruptibles (26 page)

Reeve led us farther into the interior of the cave, past heaps of bones, most gone grey. A fine powder dusted the ground, and I realized it was the grinds of a millennium of bones stored in this horrible place.

We came around a bend and there stood Fisk, the
daemon
hand glowing red at his neck, and in his own hand, a skull. He stared into its empty eyes. The integument of flesh had been stripped away, but there were still long locks of dark lustrous hair affixed to the skull in patches.

And the Crimson Man was there, too, in him, eyes smoking.

He laughed, and it wasn’t the hate-filled, mocking laugh we’d grown used to. It was a softer, self-loathing laugh, full of anger and despair.

‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Too fucking late.’

‘Isabelle,’ Livia gasped, hands going to her mouth.

Samantha bent over, scrabbling for the knife in her boot that was no longer there. Her face widened further in shock, and part of me felt regret at taking it from her. The Crimson Man was terrible to behold, and the only thing to improve his appearance would be a silver knife in his chest.

Fisk’s hair caught flame in a burning circlet around his brow. Gone forever was my friend, my partner. Gone forever was Livia’s lover, the pistolero out of New Damnation. Gone was the Centurion of Rume, son of an exile, once destined to be a senator of the Empire.

He looked upon us as the Crimson Man, the Fiend, Belial, King of Hell. Blood dripped from his skull, covering his face.

‘Bound!’ He spat, and streaks of flame lanced from his brow like the first rays of the morning sun shooting through the treeline. ‘Bound in this sack of meat!’

‘Out!’ I yelled, grabbing Livia and Reeve and pushing them back. ‘Out!
Now!’

I seem to remember shouting, ‘
There’s no holding him back now!
’ But the words may have never left my throat. Perhaps it was just an errant thought caroming around my skull.

The Crimson Man ignited like a pile of logs steeped in pitch. We fled back, but the heat pulsed from his body like the blowback from a blast furnace, tremendous and intense. I pushed Samantha ahead and hoped that Titus was keeping up. But when I looked back I saw the legionary hanging in midair, locked in an invisible grip, his back arched and his mouth open in a terrible O of agony, flames licking up his frame. His hair caught and he screamed, a high-pitched skittering sound like a pig being slaughtered.

The bones around us, brittle from the centuries left to dry inside this barrow, combusted like kindling.

We fled. Behind us the Crimson Man laughed.

‘No more
fucking around
!’ he bellowed. ‘No more silly games!’

We ran, stumbling over the uneven cavern floor, struggling with our terror and the overwhelming heat.

Livia and Reeve spilled out of the cavern and ran toward the centre of the standing-stones and the fire pit and the horses. Samantha and I followed close behind. The air, even with the fog, felt icy-cold and fresh. I took in great draughts of it and drew the Hellfire from the gunbelt.

‘I come for thee, humans!’

The maw of the cavern looked like the gullet of Hell, full of flame and the scent of burning bones. Oily black smoke poured from the opening and clung to the face of the stone wall, rising upward.

‘Get in the fire pit!’ Samantha said. She huffed like a mare coming off a long gallop, yet was strangely calm. I felt a sudden overwhelming admiration for the homely woman.

She glared at me. ‘A knife! I need one! Mine is missing.’

I whipped out my longknife and put it in her hand. As slick as a mink’s prick, she’d drawn it across her palm and now gripped it in her bloody hand. With the point of the dagger, she began scratching wards into the hard stone. The blade screeched on the earth, and her blood spattered over the wards.

Reeve seemed ready to vomit, but had his gun out. Livia looked crazed, her hair in a tangled spill over her face, but she gripped her sawn-off in her hand. Samantha scratched and bled on the stone, moving in a circle around the fire pit.

‘Subsisto. Vos non obduco,’ Samantha said, hushed and urgent. But the sound travelled clean and clear through the air. ‘Ego prohibeo vos ut ultra progredi, Belial, ego prohibeo vos ut ultra progredi,
daemonis.
’

The air brightened and streamers of steam rose from the ground and pushed away from the mouth of the cavern as the Crimson Man came forth, riding the boiling air, crowned in fire and robed in flame and bearing the sword and sceptre of the King of Hell.

The Crimson Man floated over the black rock of the caldera toward us. Livia raised her sawn-off, and Reeve did similarly with his six-gun. Samantha still scratched at the stone, speaking the words faintly, under her breath.

As the Crimson Man advanced on them, the horses screamed in human voices, rearing and pulling at their tethers, maddened by the heat and the burning figure. Even steadfast Bess was hawing and kicking at the air. Fisk’s black reared mightily. The halter rope threading the horses together snapped and whipped out through the many tie-rings. The horses wheeled and ran with a great clatter of hooves on rock up and out of the caldera, back through the pass.

The Crimson Man came forward and touched down on the black rock of the caldera floor. Around him the fog burned away. There was only blazing hot air shimmering with heat.

I took hold of the pistol at my waist and pulled it free from its holster. It felt dead and dull as some stone I might have plucked from the ground. I thumbed back the hammer. But I couldn’t fire on Fisk. Try as I might, I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Reeve wasn’t so finicky. He raised his six-gun, sighting down the barrel.

But the Crimson Man’s own hand shot up, palm-up and fingers splayed, and the gun did not fire. The Fiend smiled.

Reeve threw his pistol aside and yanked his longknife from its sheath, leaping over the bloody ward etched into stone, flying at the creature that was once Fisk.

‘Stay behind the ward!’ Samantha cried. But Reeve, his movement smooth and deadly as a mountain lion, was already past. His hand whipping around, he slashed viciously at the Crimson Man’s neck. But the Fiend was fast as flame and pulled back, out of reach.

The
daemon
twisted unmercifully and brought his sceptre of smoke down hard on Reeve, smashing into his torso and tossing the sheriff backward, where he collapsed in a crumpled heap.

Then it was just Livia and Samantha and me standing inside the warding, looking at a burning mockery of man. He grinned at us and dark flames ran up and down his frame, mottling his skin. His eyes smoked like furnaces. The
daemon
hand burned and glowed white hot and seethed at the air. But the grin was the worst.

‘It’s been a pleasure, but now our time has ended,’ he said in a terrible voice, looking down at the warding spattered in blood. ‘Ah ha! We know our glyphwork, do we? You’ve a fine hand. But it is hardly enough to keep me out.’

His sword sprung from his hand like an eruption of flame, and he held it high over his crowned head.

In a cold, calm voice, Livia said, ‘Stop! I offer myself!’

‘No!’ Samantha and I screamed together. ‘Livia, no!’

‘
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
!’

The Fiend found this infinitely amusing, and he laughed, throwing back his head. ‘You have nothing to bind me, little mortal! Unless you offer the life growing in your belly?’

Livia’s hands went to her stomach, and her mouth opened in an O of surprise. Tears streamed down her sooty face.

He laughed again, a cruel mocking sound.

‘No matter. I shall soon have all of you, every scrap and bloody ribbon.’

With the flaming sword he smote the earth, a blur on the living rock. The black stone cracked with a sound as enormous as the sky and as massive as a thunderclap. The earth shook, and Livia and Samantha fell to the ground. Standing stones split and fell into ruin with thunderous crashes.

The circle was broken. The Crimson Man came forward.

And then, with a high-pitched screech, a blur came from above like some massive bird of prey descending from the heavens, falling almost too fast for my poor tear-swollen eyes to track, and hit the Crimson Man with the force of a hammer falling on an anvil.

Agrippina.

The momentum of her leap knocked the Fiend’s human form to the ground and they grappled like drunken fighters brawling in the street. The Crimson Man’s flames died and his hellish accoutrements – the sword and sceptre – disappeared, back to whatever infernal limbo they were called from.

Black smoke hung near the ground, this
daemonic
cloud wreathing their forms and obscuring them from view.

Then there came a strange yelp of pure joy, and a scream of pain, and Fisk’s body flew from out of the oily smoke and landed half upon a collapsed stone pillar.

The
daemon
hand was gone.

Laughter came again, this time thicker, wetter, from an alien throat.

She rose.

All her jagged teeth exposed, she smiled – she too breaking into flame, the crown searing the air. She lifted her arm, the one Fisk had so cruelly shortened, and there was a black hand. The
daemon
hand. Fused to her incorruptible flesh.

She had become whole once again.

‘Run!’ I yelled to Livia and Samantha, still motionless in the ashes of the fire pit. ‘Flee!’

I moved to stand in front of the massive thing. The monster. The Queen of Hell.

The black hand lanced out to grip the air, and I felt my ribs crunch.

The thing that was once a
vaettir
turned her black smoking eyes toward me, and all my resolve failed. I wished then that I too had run.

My feet left the ground and I was lifted in the air to hang in front of her face, wracked with pain from the crushing pressure of her invisible grip. Heat poured off her like the blast from a smelter, and her overlarge eyes, at this close vantage, looked like two holes into the deepest abyss, boiling out streamers of thick black smoke.

She grinned and said in
dvergar
, ‘Lover,’ flicking her tongue in her mouth. ‘You, I will let live.’

I yelled again, ‘Run! Get to the horses!’

From the corner of my eye I saw Samantha try to tug Livia away, but she would not move.

‘Ah, my little vermin, so selfless, so brave.’ She drew me in closer, so close I could barely stay conscious in the withering heat. The stink of sulphur and brimstone was overpowering.

‘I have a message for the world. And you will be my emissary.’ Her grin grew, wicked and lascivious. ‘You are mine. For the lust you bore for this creature. This flesh. You will tell them I am coming.’

Turning her head she looked to the western rim of the caldera, to the peaks of the highest of the White Mountains. ‘This vessel is so much more commodious than the other meatsack. Her millennium of knowledge is now mine.’

Her head snapped back to face me. ‘Go. Tell the world I am coming, and when I do, I will be at the head of an army of these children of fire. These deathless ones. I shall gather them to me from the lands beyond these mountains.’

She laughed and I could see down her black gullet, her dark tongue. ‘I will drown the world in blood. I will roast your infants on spits and feast on their flesh. I will slaughter you all. I shall bathe the land in fire.’ The lascivious smile appeared again. ‘And you, my messenger, shall be consecrated with a kiss.’

Her face filled my vision and her searing flesh pressed against mine, her lips pressing hard to my mouth, her tongue worming in. In all my years, it is the one thing that still haunts me, in the depths of night when I am alone and sleep will not come. I’ll never be able to forget it. Such torments and pleasures were contained in that kiss, such cruelty and lust, that I nearly lost my wits.

Nearly.

I twisted my hand, and the silver blade sprouted from my fist. I jerked my arm up and planted the knife in the underside of her chin, driving it up through her mouth and into her brain.

Then I was falling, flung away as the body of Agrippina fell to the caldera floor and thrashed, convulsing as the flames died and the blackness of the
daemon
coalesced and condensed down back into a lifeless hand threaded on a silver chain.

And I knew no more.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It was a long ride back to the
Cornelian
.

Titus was beyond dead; he had returned to ash. Reeve’s body was badly broken, and he was coughing blood. Fisk, though bruised, seemed otherwise unharmed – whatever Hellish power that preserved his flesh as he burned, I couldn’t understand. He only seemed singed, but remained in an unconscious stupor.

I had pulled something in my shoulder after being flung away by the dying Agrippina, so digging graves for both the legionary and the
vaettir
would be a long, painful experience. Samantha was for leaving the one-handed stretcher as a warning to other
vaettir
, but it did not seem right to me. So, alone, I marched back up the pass and recollected the horses and Bess. They had fled back along our trail far enough to feel safe, and there they had stayed. I had no doubt this was due to the sense and calm demeanour of my girl, Bess. I tethered the other horses, but took the draft and Bess out of the dark pass and back down to the nearest stand of gambels, where I found and cut four long saplings suitable to make two travois for our injured. I spent the rest of the day digging and laying to rest the body of Agrippina and such ashes of Titus I could find.

In the morning, after a wretched sleepless night jumping at sounds and staring at the dull, dark walls of the caldera, Samantha and Livia sat close together, ministering to Fisk and Reeve. Reeve moaned softly, weakly thrashing his head with the pain. I had made the last of the coffee and handed out hardtack rations.

‘Poor Isabelle,’ said Livia.

‘Damned shame, that. She was a true beauty and a fine rider. I curse the day Banty took to wooing.’

Livia waved off my words. ‘They loved each other. At least she knew love in her short life.’

I could not refrain from asking. ‘Will there be war?’

Livia looked unbearably sad and utterly frustrated. ‘I believe so. King Diegal is unlikely to wave an olive branch after his daughter was abducted and devoured by stretchers because of Ruman negligence.’ She had been gazing into space but now looked up . ‘Do you think what the thing said is true?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘That there are more
vaettir
beyond the Whites.’

I tossed the cold dregs of my coffee on the small fire I had made with the last of the charcoal from Hot Springs and – I am somewhat ashamed to admit – an armful of bones I’d collected from the cavern. I don’t think any of the bones were human.

‘I reckon so,’ I said. ‘It was cruel and loved to torture us – with the truth.’

I walked over to the
daemon
hand lying upon the ground.

‘What are we gonna do with this?’

Samantha came over. ‘We can’t touch it. I’ll get it into a sack and keep it safe until we reach the
Cornelian
. I’ll see if I can convince or coerce Beleth to send its resident back to Hell.’

I nodded. We couldn’t leave it lying there for the
vaettir
to find.

That made me think.

‘Where do you think the other stretcher went? The one who started the fire? The one Fisk calls Berith.’

Livia knitted her brows and said, ‘They have focused on us for a while, but now I fear they have gone to harry the
Cornelian
.’

Samantha, lashing a tarp to two gambel saplings, said nothing. Her face looked grim.

‘Damnation, I about had enough of them fucking elves.’ I lifted up the travois and set to lashing it to the draft’s backstrap.

When the travois were ready and both men firmly lying in their beds, Samantha took some time to choose the better fragments of the flame-inscribed stones to bring back to Cornelius.

On the ride out we stopped at the mouth of the pass and looked back at the ruin of the caldera.

Low, but with intensity, Livia said, ‘Ia damn this place. I would destroy it, had I the power.’

‘Don’t bother calling on Ia to damn it,’ I said, and the words felt strange upon my tongue. But there it was. For some reason, I truly did believe what Samantha had told me. I felt ashamed and stupid and angry all at once for having spent so much of my life trying to keep faith with what turned out to be a tall tale spun for a reason lost in the mists of history. There was Hellfire sweeping the world, and now a war was imminent too. Battle cruisers would soon be filling the seas, and legions would be on the march. Rume and all its petty lords – so far removed from the rest of the world and its concerns, the concerns of real folk – reached out its long arm to play another cruel jape at my expense. It had wiped clean the slate of my heart, my faith. I was empty inside now, without that centre, the well of strength, I’d drawn from. I felt as barren and devastated as the shattered rock that we looked down upon.

‘Ia can’t help,’ I said. ‘This place is already damned.’

We rode through fields asleep under blankets of snow. The travois carved great ruts in the ground cover. Game was few and far between, and the handful of small villages we passed on the journey back to the
Cornelian
were terrified of any strangers, having discovered the ruin of Hot Springs. Rumours differed regarding its destruction. Some thought it was the work of a secret Ruman force dispensed by the governor to destroy untaxed trade in the region and claim the silver mine for Rume. Others said that Croesus’ wickedness and silverlust finally cracked the bowels of Hell and Mammon himself, the great greedy
daemon
, came up through one of the smoking pools to claim Croesus’ soul and lay waste to the town.

But the most common rumour was that the
vaettir
had committed the horrendous act.

Fisk was still unconscious, even after days, and Reeve had settled into a silent drunken sulk – the results of a bottle of shine we had bought from a farmer who had let us camp in his barn. Reeve was outraged that his broken body might have betrayed him so heinously. But he would live.

Fisk was more troublesome.

Sometimes he cried out strange words in a language no one could understand. Other times he chuckled. It was not the all-encompassing evil mirth of the Crimson Man, but the sound reminded me enough that it made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and my skin go cold.

One village claimed the
vaettir
had raided in the night and taken a young woman and her lover and devoured them on the nearby mountain top where the elders had found a spatter of blood and some scraps of flesh and clothes in the snow.

Before, we might have doubted them. Not now.

Five days after the confrontation with the Crimson Man, we were riding through the shoal plains under the wide-open frozen sky when a rider appeared over a far hill. A single soul, on a lone horse, galloping as though all the devils of Hell followed him.

We reined in and waved, but when he saw us, he changed course and rode away.

‘That horse is gonna die right under him, way he’s going,’ I said.

‘What could he be fleeing?’ Samantha asked.

‘
Vaettir
, maybe,’ said Livia.

We watched him go. Two days later, we reached the
Cornelian
. Or what was left of it.

The
Cornelian
, still locked in the ice of the Big Rill, had seen fire gut its upper half from the roof of the boiler deck to just before the prow. It still smoked.

But somehow the fire had not devoured the whole boat, and as we rode into sight of it we saw a large camp, now on the shores of the river. Many campfires sent columns of smoke into the air to be whisked away by the wind whipping off the Whites. A veritable tent city, it looked very much like an army on the march.

‘Oh my,’ Samantha said. ‘That could have been very bad.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Gooseberry. If the fire had burned hot and high enough to melt silver—’

‘Big angry
daemon
loosed upon the world,’ Livia said. But even though the sentiment was dark, there was lightness to her voice. She grinned at me. ‘But, blessed twins, how I’m glad to be back.’

Secundus greeted us as we rode into camp. His face fell as he counted riders and saw that we did not have Isabelle with us. Legionaries took the horses, and the Cornelian heir himself helped us move Fisk and Reeve into a tent and under blankets. All the staterooms had been gutted by fire, including Cornelius’.

Livia told him the state of things, the ruin of Hot Springs, the sad end of poor Isabelle. The confrontation in the caldera. Samantha produced some of the flame-inscribed stone. He ran his hands over the face of it.

‘This does not bode well. King Diegal will see this as an outrage.’

War was inevitable.

‘And the
daemon
hand?’

‘Not destroyed,’ Samantha said. ‘I have it here. I need Beleth’s assistance to destroy it and send its occupant back to Hell. Its power is too much for this world, I fear, and beyond me to banish.’

Secundus looked very troubled.

‘Brother, what happened here?’ Livia asked gently.

‘The
vaettir
came. Attacked in force.’ He shook his head. ‘We fought them off, and then they returned the next night. That was when the fire started.’ As though remembering something, he said, ‘Father’s absolutely livid that his marvellous riverboat has been so damaged.’

‘How did it start? Why didn’t the whole boat catch fire?’ Livia asked.

Secundus shrugged and said, ‘Cimbri had a good idea. With the boat locked in ice, the
daemon
-fired pumps used for replenishing the
Cornelian’
s water supply could be used to fight the fire. We lost a couple of men dousing the flames, and most of the interior of the boat is sodden now.’

I asked, ‘How did it start?’

He grimaced. ‘We don’t know, really. But they had come. They scalped a handful of our shore guards; staved in their skulls, too. So we sounded the alarm and pulled the men back from the shore. Some of them never made it, hauled off to god knows where.’

Samantha, Livia, and I exchanged glances.

‘But the fire?’

‘I’m of the opinion it was Beleth. He must have managed to start a fire when the alarm sounded. When the legionaries guarding him smelled the smoke and released him from the room, he escaped in the confusion.’

‘The rider,’ I said.

‘What’s this?’

‘We saw a lone man riding Hell for leather. Looked like he was gonna kill his horse. When did this all happen?’

‘Five days ago.’

‘He’s heading toward Passasuego. I imagine to the Medieran stronghold there to ask for sanctuary.’

Secundus said, ‘I never liked that Ia-damned engineer.’

I flinched at his choice of words.

‘But I have some good news for you, Miss Decius.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s that?’

‘You have now been promoted to engineer. Congratulations.’

We all laughed, except for Samantha. Her expression was pained, and I could tell that the
daemon
hand was foremost in her thoughts. It was hers to deal with now.

‘Oh, and I have more good news,’ said Secundus. ‘Follow me.’

He led us through the camp, past legionaries at cook fires, lascars oiling weapons. The ground by the shore was frozen hard, and it crunched beneath our feet. He brought us to a large military command tent, guarded by two burly legionaries. Smoke came from a chimney that peeked from the roof.

‘Father! Livia has returned.’

The flaps of the tent were thrown back, and standing there was Cornelius, still using that damned bear-leg. He beckoned us inside.

A tent that could have held twenty men was now filled with the furniture and accessories of his quarters.

Cornelius hobbled in circles around the tent’s small cast-iron stove as we relayed the events of the last days. He cursed mightily in more than one language when he learned of the carnivorous nature of the
vaettir
and Isabelle’s end.

When we had finished, he looked grim. ‘Ia-dammit all to Hell. Summon Sharbo and that Silenus fellow. We must send word to Marcellus in New Damnation to secure the mines at Hot Springs and ready the army for war. I must write missives to the senate and the Emperor.’ He stopped his lopsided pacing and rubbed his chin. ‘By Ia’s beard, I’m in a pickle. I’ll be lucky if they don’t send a replacement for me on the next ship over here once they get this damnable news.’

‘Poor Isabelle. Such a dear girl,’ Secundus said, shaking his head.

‘We have until winter ends before Diegal will realize something is wrong and begin to marshal his forces. He expects us to arrive in Passasuego, or some other Medieran embassy, by spring, with Isabelle.’

‘Do you have to tell Diegal what actually happened? It’s a big, hard land here. We can say she was abducted by indigenes, which is true.’

‘Yes. That’s the way. When the Emperor gets the news – with luck months before Diegal begins to suspect – he’ll start shipping legions over to keep the colonies. We cannot hope to stand against the Medieran navy – they are too strong. But they can never match the might of the Ruman legions in any land battle. So, it will be a race to get enough men over here before Diegal locks down all sea routes.’ He cursed again, this time in Gallish.

Exhausted, he sat down and called for Lupina to bring him wine. She entered from the tent’s back flap with a large decanter and many glasses. ‘Well, at least we can remain civilized here in the provinces,’ he said as he waited for her to pour. He grabbed his glass and gulped. Then she poured for us all.

‘Father,’ said Secundus, ‘would you like to show them your trophy?’

Cornelius’ eyes lit up, and his whiskers quivered with his excitement. ‘Of course! The best thing to come from this whole sorry mess. How could I have forgotten? Back here.’ He hopped up and stomped to the back of the tent, leading us outside and a fair distance away from camp.

There was a long wooden table, on top of which was a tarp-shrouded object.

‘I bagged this whore’s son at fifty yards while he was a-leaping and prancing about, coming at the retreating shore guards. Haven’t figured out how I’m to mount him. I’ve sent for a taxidermist from New Damnation.’