Engines & Demons - The Undestined

Chapter 44ii

He then laid the chamber-pen down and picked up another, finely enamelled in metallic green. As he unscrewed its top, Lance-master Tzarren picked up his sword from the table and placed its keen point under the merchant's chin.

"If you pick up one more pen, Merchant, then the next thing it signs will be in your blood."

Merchant Dres' lips twitched in a smile.

"The time and manner of my death is not something you are at liberty to decide, Lance-master."

"Sir!" said Karek urgently.

He had seen the way the merchant was holding the green cylinder in his hand, and it was not the way a pen would normally be held.

He was gripping it like a sword.

"And besides," said the merchant. "This is the last pen I shall need."

The smile remained on his face as he swung the pen upwards, and buried its point deep in his neck.

* * * * *

Vlambra took a step towards Tahlia and reached out to grab the front of her tattered dress. She stepped back out of his reach, but stopped when she heard Dak give a frightened whimper. Cravit had his knife at her throat again.

"Play nice, girl," said Vlambra.

He took another step forward, and as he reached towards her, the chamber was filled again with the lusty sounds of Kralmir's crying.

"Damn that brat!" spat Vlambra. He spun on his heal and stamped back across the platform. "I swear that if I was not having my ghat shit orders, I would happily cave in your brother's skull. Watch them!"

He stamped back across the walkway, sending the platform bouncing once more. Sabstan, after first waiting for the man's bulk to disappear into the doorway on the walkway's far side, left the platform's edge, and still holding Tahlia's bow, went to where her quiver and her mother's knife lay, and picked them up.

"Vlambra is a fool, Cravit," he said as he held up the knife to take a closer look. "Even you have more sense than that oaf, and I am sure you will appreciate the quality of this blade."

"That blade was made especially for my mother," said Tahlia, raising her voice above the noise of her brother's cries. "There is no other like it, and the bow was made for me. Any Engineer will be able to place the work. Do you want to be sentenced to the Pride?"

Sabstan continued his study of the knife.

"Oh, Vlambra is right about the implications of their sale, but I am not fool enough to sell them where they might be recognised. There are plenty of places outside the provinces where good blades are in demand."

"You will never leave this fortress alive," said Grifford.

Sabstan just sneered.

"Brave words from a dead boy. Once Vlambra gets back from silencing your brat of a brother, it is you who will soon be..."

"Sabstan!" hissed Cravit from behind them.

Sabstan spun around to where Cravit was standing, grip still tight on Dak's arm. He had pulled her around and was staring at the walkway behind him. Something was crawling across its metal surface, making a scratching sound as it came.

* * *

Dak gave a sharp indrawn breath of recognition. The thing was a metal crousk, much bigger than the one she had seen on that long ago day with her father. Its sharp legs scraped at the walkway's edge as it came. The two long feelers protruding from the front of its head were both over a metre long, and its oily sheened segmented body was twice that size again. Even in her fear, a glimmer of logic in her brain surmised that it must have come to investigate Kralmir's screaming, though the noise of the child's cries had abruptly stopped again.

"What, by Fortak's arse, is that!"

Dak turned at the man, Sabstan's shout, and saw him drop Tahlia's bow. He transferred her knife to his left hand and drew his sword.

The answer to the man's question formed on Dak's lips. She did not have time to give it, though because Cravit pulled her savagely, stepping backwards away from the beast as its feelers started tapping at the platform's edge.

"Kill it!" he called to Sabstan. The metal crousk had stopped, the feelers at its front, and the twin sets protruding from its back, waving back and forth as though trying to find the source of the noise. "You have a sword. Kill it!"

With Cravit's second panicked cry, the feelers stopped their waving, and the creature started its slow scratching crawl towards him. He backed away, pulling Dak with him. His knife was no longer at her throat. He had it pointing at the advancing crousk.

"Be silent!" came Vlambra's hard voice from the doorway across the tower. It was not a shout, and was barely loud enough to be heard over the other noise in the chamber. "And be still."

"What is it!" shouted Cravit over his shoulder.

"I said be silent, fool!" said Vlambra. "It is one of the tunnel's vermin hunters."

"What does it want?" Cravit whispered.

Only Dak heard him, and she recognised the fear in his voice.

The crousk was getting closer, its feelers tapping at the metal at Cravit's feet. She held her breath. If she did not move and remained silent, then all would be well. It would not attack if it did not feel threatened, but the answer to her plight did not lie in doing nothing.

After all that long morning, Dak was more scared than she had ever thought it possible to be, but the man holding her, who had threatened her throat with a knife, was now just as scared as her. That knowledge helped to give her a solution, and just as her fear had been quelled in the tunnels above, when she had to make her own decision in finding a route down, the answer to what she must do calmed her. It was like one of Engineer Drasneval's number puzzles, which the brain could not solve if it were in turmoil, but once you saw the logic of it the answer became as clear as glass, and the turmoil ended.

"What does it want!" said Cravit again, terror keen in his whisper.

"It is wanting you," said Dak. "It has a desire to eat your heart."

Cravit's fear broke.

"Get away from me!" he shrieked, and kicked the creature on the side of its armoured head. The crousk screeched, and the sound was like the tearing of strained metal. In a movement, which Dak would not have thought possible of such a ponderous looking thing, it leapt. Its segmented body snapped rigid, propelling it up at Cravit. As she glanced under the carapace of its head, she got an impression of a hundred sharp blades, wound in a circle that suddenly sprang open, before the crousk hit the man in the chest and knocked him to the floor.

His hand was still tight on her arm, and she was pulled down with him.

"Fool!" spat Vlambra.

Cravit screamed, and the scream ended in a gurgle as blood filled his mouth and flowed over his face. There was a wet crunching sound from where the crousk had its head clamped to the man's chest, and Dak closed her eyes and turned her head away, unable to move with the dying man's hand still clasped around her wrist.

"Kill them!" she heard Vlambra shout. "Kill them now!"

Dak felt the platform begin to shake as Vlambra advanced across the walkway.

'Yeltov preserve us,' she thought, as she squeezed her eyes tighter shut.