The Aeronaut's Windlass (64 page)

Next in the path of the second group of horrors were the two warriorborn. Benedict had gained the upper hand on Sark as the two wrestled, and was more or less on top, his arms and hands moving so quickly that Grimm could hardly see them, while Sark matched him motion for motion, countering every move the younger man attempted. As the fresh tide of silkweavers rushed toward them, the two warriorborn snapped their gazes up toward the oncoming wave.

Benedict’s eyes widened and he began to hurl himself away from Sark. But the evil-looking warriorborn locked a leg around Benedict’s legs and fastened his hands on Benedict’s jacket. With an ugly smile, he twisted, rolling Benedict toward the silkweavers.

Benedict reversed his direction almost instantly, and instead of trying to escape Sark, he went with his opponent, twisting his own body in the same direction. He hit the ground on his back and rolled Sark over him, hurling the larger warriorborn a couple of feet clear of him and into the first rank of silkweavers. The creatures flowed over Sark like some kind of horrible, living blanket, and he vanished from sight.

Benedict barely regained his feet before the first half dozen silkweavers reached him. Had Grimm been standing in the young man’s shoes, he felt sure he would not have survived—but then, he was not warriorborn.

Benedict let out a leonine roar, dodged the first silkweaver, and swept his sword from its sheath to cut another one cleanly in half as it flew toward him. One hit his arm and clamped its tripartite jaws down on his biceps. Benedict staggered, converted the momentum of the creature’s leap into a spin, and slammed it into two of its fellows as if the silkweaver had been a shield strapped to his arm, knocking them aside.

The sixth silkweaver hit Benedict at the knees and sank its teeth into his thigh, knocking him down violently.

“Back-to-back!” Grimm bellowed to his men. “Group up! Kettle, on me!” He strode toward Benedict, priming his gauntlet as he went, unleashing blast after blast into the oncoming mass of silkweavers, smashing two of them to flaming pulp, and buying Benedict a few precious seconds.

The warriorborn managed to kick free of the silkweaver latched onto his leg and, with a scream of fury and pain, lifted his arm and smashed the silkweaver holding on to it into the spirestone floor repeatedly, until purplish ichor splattered and the thing fell off, body curling, legs twitching spasmodically.

Grimm and Kettle reached Benedict’s side. Kettle laid about with his ax, keeping the silkweavers at bay. Grimm hauled Benedict to his feet by main force, fending off another silkweaver with his sword as he did.

“Bridget and Folly!” Benedict cried. He was bleeding freely from both his arm and his leg, but there was no time to dress the wounds—the enemy was already struggling to overwhelm them. “We have to get them out!”

“Stay together!” Grimm replied. “Follow me!”

He raised his gauntlet and began blasting the spirestone floor in the general direction of where he’d last seen Bridget lying on the ground. He hit nothing, but a handful of silkweavers that had begun approaching from that direction skittered back several feet. Grimm walked into the cleared space and blasted the floor again, sweeping more silkweavers from his path, and continued walking. He heard Kettle doing the same behind him, blasting away with his gauntlet to keep the main body of silkweavers back. He had a severe fright when a silkweaver dropped from the ceiling overhead toward his skull, but Benedict jerked Grimm aside with one hand, and with the other neatly skewered the silkweaver on his sword, holding the creature aloft for a moment as it thrashed, his arm steady, before he flung it off of his blade, twisting it as it came free of the silkweaver’s body. The creature gushed foul-smelling blood as it tumbled away.

Grimm continued, and only barely stopped himself from unleashing a blast from his rapidly heating gauntlet that would have struck the prone form of Bridget Tagwynn.

“Form a circle around her!” he barked. He sheathed his sword as the men closed around them, and bent down to pick her up. She was a tall young woman, and heavier than she looked. Grimm got one of his shoulders beneath one of her arms and leveraged her to her feet. She blinked several times, her eyes not quite focused, but though her legs wobbled she was able to support most of her own weight.

“Miss Tagwynn!” Grimm shouted over the howl of discharging gauntlets. “Where is Miss Folly?”

Bridget stared at him, blinking several times. Then she said, “Tunnel. In the tunnel. Lying on the floor.”

Grimm’s stomach twisted in sickened horror. “Which one?”

Bridget stared around her for a moment and then nodded down the tunnel Grimm hadn’t ordered blown halfway to hell.

“Captain!” Kettle screamed, his voice a warning.

Grimm’s head snapped around, and his belly tightened and writhed still more as he realized the depth of their predicament.

The surprise assault of the verminocitors had been itself taken by surprise by the second wave of silkweavers. Men and women lay dying or dead, and more were being killed in front of Grimm’s eyes. The stench of blood and entrails had already filled the air, mixing with the foulness of silkweaver blood. Several members of his crew were down, and others were fighting a desperate retreat back the way they had come—and he could see what had made the sudden reversal possible.

Sark was among them.

The large warriorborn moved with terrible speed, darting here and there, never predictable, moving among the silkweavers as if he were one of their number. As Grimm watched, Sark crushed a woman’s throat with a casual squeeze of his hand, and hamstrung another verminocitor, dropping him to the ground, where the silkweavers could finish him. His hand moved, and a knife flickered through the air and plunged into the leg of Henderson, Kettle’s apprentice pilot. The young man screamed and clutched at his leg as he fell.

Grimm tried to shout, to order Henderson not to remove the knife—but the young man jerked it clear in a small spray of blood—and every silkweaver within thirty feet flung itself upon him until he was buried under a mound of ripping, worrying bodies, and more blood scattered through the air.

Michaels, a gunner’s mate on the number five gun, raised a gauntlet and discharged it twice, aiming at Sark. The first blast missed.

The second whipped out and around Sark in a tight orbit, then flew back into Michaels’s head, slamming home with explosive violence, hurling a nearly faceless corpse to the spirestone floor.

Grimm’s eyes darted to one side, where Madame Cavendish stood, one hand pressed against her ribs over a fresh, wet bloodstain on her dress. The other was extended toward Sark, and her eyes were gleaming.

The crew was being driven back down the breach they’d made with the blasting charges—and the silkweavers that had been finishing the last of the disabled verminocitors began to gather, darting toward Grimm and his little band in swift, agitated motions.

They were cut off.

“Fall back!” Grimm shouted. “Back down the tunnel! Keep them off with gauntlet fire until we get a defensive position!”

They retreated step by step. The copper cages of their gauntlets were smoking and smoldering with heat. Creedy’s teeth were clenched over a rising, screaming sound, but the tall young XO kept blasting away with his gauntlet in steady rhythm.

They made it to the tunnel, and Bridget slid off of Grimm’s shoulder and half fell down beside Miss Folly, who lay on the floor, curled up into a fetal position, quivering as though her muscles were trying to curl up even tighter. Grimm looked around. The tunnel had been blocked with more masonry, just as had the one they’d entered through. There was no way out of it, and no time to build even a meager defense out of the mound of stone.

A voice suddenly called from the tunnel beyond—Madame Cavendish. “This is the third time you’ve interfered with my business, Captain,” she said, her words hard-edged, cold. “And as you have spilled my blood, it shall be the last.”

“Madame, call off your pets!” Grimm called at once. “Guarantee the safe conduct of those with me, and I’ll surrender. You can kill me however you like.”

“I can do that without your cooperation, thank you,” Madame Cavendish replied, her tone amused. “Good-bye, Captain.”

And with that, a horde of silkweavers poured through the mouth of the tunnel—too many of the things. They were running along the walls and ceilings, spread out, moving too fast, in numbers too many to be countered.

Grimm and his people were about to be overwhelmed—and there was not a thing he could do to stop it.

Chapter 54

Elsewhere

F
olly had time to see Madame Puppet point a finger at her, and to feel a geyser of etheric energy smash into her body. Then an entire Spire full of pain crashed down upon her.

Folly thought she must surely have screamed. She knew nothing except agony, and every sensation only seemed to magnify it more. She felt herself fall, curling up into a ball, felt her eyes squeezing shut as every muscle in her body convulsed at once. She couldn’t hear anything through the discordant howling sound in her head, and her throat didn’t hurt—not with this new definition of pain—but it tickled a little: It seemed reasonable to assume that she must have been screaming.

That thought triggered another—how odd it was that she should have the wherewithal to process such a thought when her nervous system was so utterly overwhelmed. And that thought led to still another: How odd that she should be aware enough to notice her thought process at all.

She was still aware of the pain, pain so great that she would have welcomed the dubious relief of emptying her stomach onto the floor, if only for a change of pace. Simultaneously she could feel her thoughts drifting free of her body’s limits, like a length of ethersilk snapped from a ship’s web floating away upon the etheric currents.

Her body, her senses, all remained upon the floor of the blockaded tunnel, but her thoughts weren’t there with them. Her mind was somewhere else entirely.

She was Elsewhere.

For a moment she floated in an empty void. And then she became conscious of solid ground beneath her feet. She looked down at it curiously and found it strange. She knelt to examine it more closely. The ground was not spirestone. It was loose earth, pale and granular. She pinched a bit up in her fingers and examined it. The earth was heavily mixed with sand.

Earth.

Sand.

Was she standing upon the surface?

The thrill of sudden terror that went through her was entirely unnecessary, unfair, and impolite, Folly felt. She knew, after all, that her body was being torn apart with pain back in Spire Albion. But nonetheless, she had spent her entire lifetime in curiosity and utter dread about the true nature of the surface world outside the Spires, the land of nightmares made flesh. In all of written history, the surface world had been a hell braved only by the mad, the desperate, and the madly, desperately greedy. Though her mind contradicted her fear, it seemed her body had an opinion of its own, and her heart raced.

She rose and turned in a slow circle. The mists were thin here, and she could see at least a hundred feet, but her cursory survey revealed nothing but more flat, dry earth and a few scattered stones.

Then the ground shook. It rumbled and quivered, and she could feel an impact through the soles of her feet. The sound came again, and then again, louder each time.

Footsteps. Enormous footsteps.

Coming closer.

The mists stirred and something vast and slow and seething with hate stopped just out of sight, so that all Folly could see was a great, dark blur. She froze in place and covered her mouth with her hands to hide the sound of her breathing.

Then a great Voice filled the air, resonant and mellifluous, like that of a particularly eloquent, poised, mature man, a professional speaker. “REPORT.”

Folly hesitated. Whatever was happening to her, it seemed likely that it had not placed her in a position of leverage and power. But at the same time, her body was dying in any case. She could feel her straining heart racing so fast that she could not count individual beats. There seemed little enough point in prudence.