Authors: John Hornor Jacobs
6 Nones, Quintilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis
The next night Cornelius uncrated cases of whiskey, rum, and claret. He had Lupina, as quickly as she might, pilfer the last stores of sugar and create what sweet dainties she might while Cornelius plied us all with booze and speech-making in the praetorium tent. On the next day we’d reach the Dvergar Spur and, the senator assured us, the
Valdrossos
– a
daemon-
fired steam engine – would be waiting there to take Livia and the rest of the Cornelian clan to Fort Brust and further points east, away from us, if not forever, then for a long while. Carnelia wept and embraced Fisk, calling him brother, not through any overt sentimentality on her part, but because, I imagine, she thought she should. Cornelius gave gifts.
‘As I mentioned, you will collect these as you rise through life,’ he said to Livia and Fisk, motioning for Rubus to come forward from where he stood awkwardly holding a pair of heavy wooden boxes identical to the one that held the Quotidian. ‘You’ll need to blood them together and have Rubus show you the way to
send
a message. It’s much less pleasant than receiving one, I can assure you, and even if you have a dwarf –’ He winked at me ‘– or slave present, it will do you absolutely no good because it must be the sender’s blood to activate the damned thing. So there’s that,’ Cornelius said, his voice thick with alcohol and slightly unsteady on his one good leg. ‘At least this way you’ll be able to correspond with each other. “Fill’d her ears with sweeten’d words, dripping from the infernal tongue,” or something like that.’
‘Bless?’ Secundus asked.
‘No, a new poet I picked up in the printer’s shop in New Damnation. Vintus Mauthew, his name is. I have his folio around here somewhere.
The Teats of Fortuna
. I shall gift you with it.’
Livia rose and approached her father. He had the honesty to look surprised when she kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you, Father. This will make it bearable.’
‘A brave face, my sweet. A brave face.’
Fisk thanked him solemnly as well and, after Rubus explained to them the workings of the Quotidians, they retired to spend what time they had left together.
The next day, camp was struck quickly – even the legionnaires and lictors were eager to end the long march through the hardscrabble – and we came within an echo’s distance of the Smokeys before turning north. A great plume of dust was cast against the liquid blue of sky and only when we drew nearer did we see that it was a great horde of workers laying the railway line. As we drew near enough to the terminus – the point at which a flurry of labourers wielding shovels levelled the earth and set massive iron bars with spikes, filling the air with the ringing report of sledgehammers on iron – we heard the call and response chants of the men;
be my woman, girl, I’ll – be your man – put that silver money – in your hand –
chanted over and over again with one dusky-skinned man leading the chorus, to be answered by the rest of the men, establishing a kind of inexorable, inescapable rhythm that I couldn’t shake until long after we had passed them.
Secundus and Fisk, both mounted and in Imperial blues, rode over to the nearest optio, stationed at the spur-head, to inquire about the
Valdrossos.
From where I sat atop Bess, I could see the ranker pull aside the bandana covering his mouth – the dust kicked up from the earth-levelling spiced the air something fierce – and pointed north.
By late afternoon, we’d come within sight of the steaming iron behemoth that was the
Valdrossos.
It stood black as midnight and thirty feet tall and was easily the width of eight horses riding abreast, a massive column of black smoke pluming skyward. Looking at that panting black machine, fuelled by malice, I was reminded that war was coming unless we could prevent it.
I bid my farewells, and even Cornelius was kind enough to shake my hand – though it remained bandaged from when he took my blood. ‘You’re quite an acceptable little fellow. Your society has given me hope for the rest of your kind,’ he said, slipping a silver denarius into my palm.
My first inclination was to say that I wish I could say the same and throw the coin as far as I could into the hardscrabble, but it
was
a silver denarius. And that impotent gesture might’ve seen me crucified. So I nodded and thanked the senator, silently praising the old gods that it would be a very long time before I’d have to endure his company again.
Secundus was more cordial. He gripped Fisk’s and my forearms in turn and, smiling, said, ‘And I was so looking forward to a life out on the shoal plains.’
‘Never can tell, young master,’ I said, answering his grin. ‘You could find yourself on the plains again. And if you do, you’ll always be welcome to outride with us.’
‘There would be far worse things than that,’ he laughed.
‘Let’s not go borrowing trouble, Mr Cornelius,’ I said.
He turned to Fisk. ‘Good luck, brother,’ he said.
‘And luck to you …’ Fisk said, glancing at Livia who stood watching. He swallowed. ‘She can look out for herself. But an extra pair of eyes watching her back couldn’t hurt.’
Secundus smiled. ‘Of course.’
Livia came to me and said, ‘I would be absolutely distraught if not for the Quotidian and the knowledge that you will be with my Fisk. I couldn’t ask for a better companion for him, save myself.’ Then she kissed me on my brow. When she was done, she stood back, one thumb hooked in her gunbelt and the other on the grip of her sawn-off and laughed at my surprise. ‘Dear Shoestring,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever change.’
‘Don’t think that’s possible, ma’am,’ I said.
Silence then except for the bellowed orders of legionnaires and the steaming anger of the
Valdrossos
. No tears fell from Livia or Fisk. That they loved each other fiercely I have no doubt. Does that incorruptible part of us have to writhe and fret publicly to prove it exists? It’s not something that has to be proven to exist except to the one to whom it matters most.
In the slanting, late afternoon light, they stood near each other for a long while, hand in hand, watching as legionnaires, lictors, and porters manhandled the vardos and wagons up rough pine planks onto flat beds and led nickering horses into the livestock pens. Slaves and servants trucked crates and luggage into the ornate passenger car. The whole world seemed wreathed in dust.
Finally, Fisk turned to Livia and took her hands in his raw, big ones, and softly kissed her. Then he fell to his knees, placed his head on her stomach and wrapped his arms around her. When he rose, she turned and with quick steps boarded the train, which had begun to smoke and hiss with dramatic vehemence. We watched from our saddles as the massive locomotive began to move, chuffing and steaming, and we continued to watch as it diminished in our vision, the sound fading and the smell of brimstone dissipating on the air until it was lost with one piercing scream from its whistle, a diminution into an infinitesimal speck on the horizon. Then it was gone.
‘Well, Shoe,’ Fisk said, when the whole expanse of hardscrabble around us was empty and silent. ‘Let’s go find Beleth.’
3 Nones, Quintilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis
The silence that fell upon us at the Dvergar Spur lasted for five days as we pushed west, back across the hardscrabble, travelling much faster than we had with Cornelius’ baggage train. We took on water and feed from the optios commanding the spur’s polyglot workforce and at night we bunked down near our horses and silently ate hardtack and jerky, rolled cigarettes on our knees, and spent our time contemplating the number of stars and the number of coyotes yipping and singing in the distance.
‘You got the Quotidian. You could write her,’ I said.
‘Kalends and Ides,’ he responded, and fell silent again. That was all I could get from him.
Back on horseback, well watered and fed, we pushed past the hardscrabble plains and into the shoal grasses of the Big Rill watershed quickly, and soon had game enough for meat and wood enough for roasting.
He took it out that night from its lavish box and turned it over in his hands. It caught the light of the fire and shimmered along its intaglios of silver warding. A soft glow came from it. A
daemon
churned and fretted inside it, slavering for blood.
‘We’ll make for New Damnation, see what Marcellus knows about Beleth,’ Fisk said.
‘Would he be keeping tabs on the engineer? Seems a small job for a general.’
‘He won’t, but his spymaster would. And Cornelius has made this a priority.’ He spat into the fire and sat there thinking. ‘Beleth’s an important piece on the Knightboard, that’s for damn sure.’
‘You wouldn’t remember, since we were hauling you back, but I think we saw him fleeing the
Cornelian
when—’
‘The
vaettir
and the Crimson Man, right?’
‘That’s right. He was trucking north and west. And we were north of here.’
‘So, heading to Passasuego, then. Or Hot Springs.’
‘Hot Springs is doubtful, since there ain’t much left of it after that infernal
shit
burnt it down,’ I said.
He nodded, silent for a while. The coyotes yipped and screeched in the distance. With our fire, they wouldn’t get close. He turned the Quotidian over in his hands.
‘Always something, isn’t it?’ he said, glancing at me where I was mending a shirt. ‘If it’s not some damned thing hanging around my neck, it’s one lusting for my blood.’
I patted the Hellfire pistol I now carried, given to me by Secundus himself. A nice piece with a gunbelt full of ammunition. While the legion will defray some of the cost of getting Imp rounds replaced by an engineer, it won’t cover all of it, and so, when my gunbelt ran empty, it was empty for good. Unless I stumbled upon a silverlode.
‘Or these pieces of damnation,’ I said.
‘You really think that?’
‘What?’
‘Damnation. That when we die we’ll go to the same Hell these infernal creatures come from?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Then what do you believe?’
‘Most folks carry Hell with them.’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ he said.
I stilled in my darning. Looked at Fisk close. ‘We get to where we are by the choices we make. Everybody’s the same in that, right?’
‘That sounds about right,’ he said.
‘Then it stands to reason, if you’re in your own little Hell, it’s one of your own making.’
He looked at me, grinding his teeth. It was not me he was mad at, I knew this. But he was angry all the same. ‘Innocents die, Shoe. Children. Those settlers we came upon before all this—’ He waved his hand to indicate the night. ‘They didn’t get dead by poor choices.’
‘Didn’t they?’
‘So, is there some Hell waiting for us?’
‘No. Way I understand it is the “Hell” these things come from is just some—’ I thought a moment, trying to remember what Samantha had told me as we climbed to the caldera in the Whites to find the Medieran lass. Or what was left of her. ‘Other place. And these
things
have found their way here, summoned. Crawled through some breach between worlds.’
‘But with every shot, I feel it. The despair. I feel dirtied. Marked with soot.’ He held the Quotidian in his big, calloused hands and looked into it as if trying to divine some answer.
‘Don’t know, really, why that is, partner,’ I said in a soft voice. ‘They
are
devils and possibly full of evil. Or maybe they just
are,
like fire. I just don’t think they have any claim upon our souls.’
He remained quiet for a long while and then placed the strange device back in its box.
‘You see him?’ I asked, casting a glance over my shoulder. We were heading south, now, toward New Damnation, following the curve of the river. It was still rocky here, near the Big Rill, and we were on the eastern shore, away from the Whites. On the whole, the stretchers tended to stay on the western shore. But there’s no reckoning stretchers.
Fisk gave the barest inclination of his head and said, ‘Our little stretcher shadow.’
‘Not much little about him,’ I said. ‘He’s fast and knows how to stay out of sight.’
‘Why don’t we lead him on a snipe hunt, then, one whose ending he might not like.’ He looked about. ‘We’re maybe three miles shy of that brambled gulley we camped in two years ago during the blizzard. Remember?’
I nodded. ‘You thinking ambush?’
‘Yep.’ Now we were away from the Cornelians and back on the trail, the formality in his speech fell away, leaving the Fisk I knew of old. But it was disconcerting that he was so mutable. ‘There’s that offshoot of the gulley where we kept the horses. Almost grown over. You make your way up and out, I’ll duck in there and wait until he passes.’
‘That sounds like a plan.’
‘You don’t sound too keen on it.’
‘Tight spaces. Stretchers. Not my favourite things in the world, that’s for damn sure.’
He looked at me. At this point, most men would make some crack about my size, my heritage, indigenous as I am. I might run from it, but unlike the Rumans, I am
of
this place. Just like the stretchers.
Fisk remained quiet for a bit. Then, he said, as if considering it, ‘You not up for it, pard?’
‘No, Ia dammit. I am game.’ Something in me twisted. I wasn’t for it and calling on Ia – even though it was my own mouth that uttered the words – felt wrong. But we have old habits. My mouth remembers the words of faith when my heart doesn’t. I touched the grips of the Hellfire six guns and Bess chuffed her head and snorted her derision. It still felt wrong, the guns, but we live in a fallen world.
We rode hard for an hour, and Bess’ flanks foamed when we drew near the gulley and entered. When we reached the offshoot, where we’d kept the horses that week we were snowed in, Bess began to nose her way back to her old spot, among the bramblewrack and brush, where she’d huddle against the cold, but I tugged her away.
Fisk dismounted, pulled his carbine, and levered one into the warded chamber. He swung the carbine into the crook of his arm and then thumbed the six-guns and the Hellfire cartridges on his belt. He tossed his horse’s reins to me and I snatched them out of the air before the black could get up to any mischief.
‘Lead ’em up and out. He’ll be on our trail, close. When he passes …’
He left it unsaid. Boom. No more stretcher.
I nodded. We’d worked this sort of ambush before on the
vaettir
, to various results. The thing about
vaettir
, they are old, and know all the wiles of man. Like
dvergar
. We are kin, of a sort. Both natives of this big, fierce land.
I led the horses up and through the gulley. Fisk backed into the offshoot, rifle held loosely in his big, raw-boned hands.
The sides pressed in, as we made our way through, and bramblewrack scratched at the sky, and snagged on Bess and the black’s flanks.
Everything hushed. My heart continued to beat, and I could feel the surge of the sanguine stuff through my body with each pump of that desperate muscle.
Stillness except for the movement of horses. Silence except for the falling of hooves.
Then I was up and out of the gulley. No gunfire. The land opened up around us, no trees, just shoal grass, bramble, and wrack and ruin. The sky, unbroken and vast. The wind, cold though the sun beat down.
And
vaettir
. He was standing there, a hundred feet away, grinning, a sword held in his clawed hand, long hair whipping in the wind. A legionnaire’s gladius, by the looks of it. Our ambush was his ambush. There was a moment’s shock of recognition – a moment it seemed he’d waited for – and then he raced forward.
Bess whipped around, despite my startled yell, putting her haunches between us and the oncoming
vaettir
. I fumbled for my six-guns. I tugged at them, desperate, the back of my neck itching, already feeling the impending blow from the stretcher’s sword. I toppled sideways, out of the saddle, onto the hard-baked earth, guns in hand, rolling onto my back.
There was a high-pitched screech and a shadow like a carrion fowl filled the sky and descended. The
vaettir
.
Bess hawed and kicked out, wheeling and bucking. But too slow. The stretcher was on top of us. He raised his sword.
From my left, a blur crossed my vision. Another fierce bird, another screech.
The stretcher fell away, howling. Bess hawed and kicked in a cacophonous ruckus. Pushing myself up on my elbows, through the hardscrabble dust I saw two figures rolling and tearing each other with clawed hands and sharp teeth.
Another stretcher.
They wailed and thrashed about almost too fast to see. And then they parted, hissing, like scrapping cats. The first
vaettir
rose, hands outstretched but empty. The other lashed forward and there was a glint of light on metal. The first stretcher’s head fell away with a gout of blood. He toppled and pumped his life into the dirt.
This new stretcher stood tall and was dressed in mouldering garment and furs, but with a look I’d never seen on a
vaettir
face. A series of expressions chased on another across his features – first relief, then outrage, then sadness. He turned to me, red blade held loosely.
Both pistols raised and centred on its chest, I said in
dvergar
, ‘I slew your kin, not so long ago. I will kill you.’
The massive creature – a big bull elf – cocked his head, slowly, as if he were remembering. Raising one dirty, clawed hand, he touched his chest.
‘Gynth?’ it said, the sound thick and oddly pronounced through the forest of teeth in its mouth. Its voice was deep, very deep, yet clear as a massive bell tolling on the heights. ‘Gynth’ is the
dvergar
word for ‘kindred’ or ‘kin’ but can also mean ‘brother’ or even ‘blood.’ My native tongue has layers upon layers of meaning.
‘Pierced through the brain,’ I said. There is no shame in admitting fear and I can admit that I was terribly afraid. But I forced myself to take three steps toward the
vaettir
, both Hellfire pistols levelled on its chest. I would plug him before he took me, all the old gods and new as my witness.
Then the elf did a strange thing. It shook its head, looking puzzled. It acted as if it had been awoken from some long, all-consuming dream. I looked at its clothing again. Maybe it was a shroud and the thing had been buried – though all the whys and hows of that question quickly swarmed and clamoured for my attention. I brushed away the distraction. Being distracted near a stretcher is a quick visit to the undertaker.
The
vaettir
raised its hand and extended a long, clawed finger at me and repeated, ‘
Gynth. Yan gynth.’
We are kin. We are blood.
The
vaettir
looked at his gore-streaked hand holding the sword as if he’d found a serpent there. He dropped the blade, held his hands up to me in what seemed like supplication.
A moment passed between us, our gazes locked, and the
vaettir
nodded to me almost imperceptibly.
A clatter of loose rock was the only thing that alerted him. He leapt into the air and dashed away – as fast as only
vaettir
can – as Fisk came out of the gulley, his face a storm cloud and gripping his carbine tight.
He approached where I stood, looking down at the headless body of the stretcher that trailed us.
‘What in Ia’s name happened here?’ he said. ‘You do this?’ He nudged the gladius with his foot.
‘You’re not gonna believe this, partner.’
When I had told Fisk what happened, he remained silent for a long while. Finally, he said, ‘Bullshit,’ and huddled into himself, becoming smaller. Something in him calcified. He would rather think me a liar or a fool than countenance a
vaettir
not a villain.
‘So, I chopped off the stretchers head with a sword I pulled from the air?’ I said, nudging the gladius with my foot.
‘Bears fight other bears. The mountain lion will eat another lion’s cubs,’ Fisk said, as if that finished it.
I opened my mouth to retort, to describe the
vaettir’s
face after the altercation. But seeing Fisk’s expression I stopped. It would be wasted breath.
We collected the body, the sword, and rode on.