Chapter 33
A slow clapping turning Mikeos round, unsteady, as if his legs were too long for him. The kin brought his small grey hands together one more time. "Bravo. Bravo. You humans never cease to amaze me. That's why I brought you here in the first place, years ago, to shake things up, to give Lilliana and our brother something to think about. And here you are tricking me! Forcing my hand! Incredible. Did you see it, Mikeos? Did you?"
Mikeos shook his head, dumb with pain. He'd never heard a quarter as many words from all the true kin he'd met put together. Woodkin would yatter on, especially if drunk, but the true kin, the train kin, those who hadn't bonded with the world, they kept their mouths shut. And this one had gone from silent guardian to jabbering fool in the time it took to pull a trigger.
"Jenna appealed to balance and of course I had to consider the matter, weigh it in the scales. Without rules within which to frame our disagreements we three old ones would lay waste to worlds. And so she watched me all hex-eyed with her little spells to hand, looking to see how I worked my judgement. Like watching the engine driver at his job, watching to see which levers he pulls, which dials he spins. You know the trick. Ask someone where they've hidden their money then watch where their eyes twitch to.
"I judged the situation fair of course. James Purbright suffered his injury and it cost him plenty. He paid the price years ago to be sure, but the balance was satisfied. Your Jenna though, Mikeos, she tries to grab my levers, tries to push and pull them. She thought she'd been losing her strength – did you know that, Mikeos? She's been thinking her own thoughts of late, choosing her own direction, and Ansos has always been an enterprise built around a singularity of will and of purpose. Well, in letting go of one thing she's taken hold of something else. That's often the way, Mikeos. You'd do well to remember it. And Jenna's got a hold of something peculiarly hers and surprisingly strong. I won't say I had to struggle to stop her misbehaviour, but it distracted me. That's when Eben stepped in, so's to speak, and threw all the levers that needed throwing. Eben's had hold of what's his all his life, and he's been studying me for nearly as long. So yes, I admit it, for a second there the small part of me that is here and paying attention to you was overwhelmed! Eben pushed the balance just enough to bring back the wound James got when Hemar bit him back in Sweet Water. Very impressive."
A faint buzz could be heard now, seeming to come from all directions. From cracks in the dustpan ants began to boil forth, a black profusion of them, so many they ran like liquid. Trapdoor spiders threw open their hatches and emerged into the sunlight with jerky steps, front legs raised and questing. Scorpions jittered from every crevice of the standing rock, claws lifted, tails curled and ready to strike.
"They're coming." Hemar said. "We've got to go!"
"Where?" Jenna kicked away the largest trap-door spider Mikeos had ever seen.
"The horse!" Hemar scooped Eben from the ground, threw him over one shoulder, a stiff and awkward burden. He started to run.
"Come on!" Jenna shouted at Mikeos and made to follow.
For a moment he held his ground, too weak to move. The ants crawling across Jim Bright's face, exploring the gory mess of his mouth, that's what gave Mikeos the strength to stagger away, after Jenna.
Reaching the foot of the ridge Mikeos turned and saw the first of the bugs. Back past the standing rock, on the far edge of the bowl-shaped depression he could see two starting to descend. Others appeared on the skyline, black against the pale heavens, all long thin limbs and hooked appendages. Mikeos turned again, fell, vomited up awatery mess and started to crawl up, crushing insects beneath his hands as he went. Hemar crested the rise with Eben rigid and unweildy across his shoulder, like a corpse with rigor mortis set in. They both vanished from view.
"Damnit." Mikeos spat the sourness from his mouth and climbed on, dragging one leg, his back wet as if poison were flooding from his wound. He moved mechanically, shredding his knees on the rock, thinking every snag and tug was the hook of a bug warrior catching hold. When at last he reached the top his pain had closed him off to the world and he carried on crawling without seeing the slope. For the last twenty yards he tumbled head over heels, a rag-doll rolling down the incline.
"Get up 'slinger!" Jenna brought him to his senses, splashing water into his face. The terror in her voice did more to get his attention than the soaking though.
A large brown mare stood tethered to the water tower, a nervy look to her. Jenna must have brought her over from where Bright had her waiting. Not a desert ride but a big thirsty beast that was more about show than practicality. Hemar had bound Eben across the mare's neck. It looked very uncomfortable but he wouldn't come loose in a hurry.
"Up!" Jenna hauled him to his feet. "Get up!"
Mikeos bit down on his pain and kept to a whimper the scream that wanted out of him. Immediately he could see the problem. Three bugs had crested the ridge, two more were racing toward the tower along the west side of the tracks, leaping over the bumps and falls of the valley mouths and never coming closer than thirty yards to the rails.
Mikeos drew and fired at the leftmost bug on the ridge. He missed. "Fucksake!" Steadying the trembling gun with both hands he fired once, twice, three times. The bugs jerked back one after the other.
"Mikey!" Jenna pointed to the running pair.
He sunk to one knee and shot them too, taking his time. Even so he hit the second in the leg rather than the head, smashing the joint of its inverted knee. As the bug sprawled two flickers unwound from its outstretched arms and snaked forwards, racing on many tiny legs. Mikeos pulled his second gun and waited for a good target.
"More!" Jenna pointed back at the ridge. Half a dozen more bugs tumbled over, a mantis warrior advancing behind them.
"Go!" Mikeos shouted at Hemar. He shot at the first flicker, missed, shot again and shattered its midsection. The second of them dipped its head, digging mouthparts into the ground and launching itself into the air, turning head over tail. His shot cut it in two and the pieces fell short. "Go!"
"Who'll do the shooting if we leave you?" Jenna demanded. "Hemar! Help me get him on the horse." Together Jenna and the dogman manhandled him into the saddle. Bugs showed on the valley ridges all along the west side of the tracks now. Doubtless the briar-choked valleys seethed with flickers. A mantis warrior led a contingent of a dozen and more bugs along the trackside, though keeping a good distance, and far off Mikeos saw the bulk of a scarab hefting into view.
Hemar led the way, holding the mare's reins. Mikeos and Eben jolted painfully on her back. Jenna walked alongside. Mikeos tried to reload but spilled a bullet to the ground for each he chambered, his shaking fingers at once numb and tingling. Before they'd gone a hundred yards they had bugs on all sides, thirty of them, maybe fifty, flickers snaking around their foot claws, a pair of mantis warriors overseeing, eyes green and lambent and fixed on their prey.
"Why don't they finish us?" Hemar growled.
"It's the rails," Jenna said. The sect wouldn't come closer than twenty yards, as if any closer and an invisible hand pushed them aside.
"The mantis at Station Rock came right up to the train," Hemar said.
Jenna shrugged. "Kin must have let him. Part of the price for getting us there."
Another hundred yards and sect thronged on all sides. The slopes were black with new arrivals. A minute later and the first scarab arrived in the front ranks, the bug warriors parting before it like wheat in the wind. The scarab came right on without pause and sect flowed in behind it. Mikeos lifted both revolvers and squeezed the triggers. He squeezed again and again, cursing into the thunder of the guns, "Die you whoreborn bastard!" Some shots caromed away, scoring deep marks into the scarab's chitin armour, others tore in, blasting out jagged chunks and reaching whatever counted as meat beneath. When the guns fell silent and the smoke cleared, the scarab remained standing. "Whoreson!" Mikeos muttered. But as he fumbled for his ammunition the great sect toppled forward and crunched to the ground. "Yes!"
"More!" Jenna pointed left, right. Six more huge forms surging through the mass of bugs, a sea now, hundreds strong.
The bugs that had advanced with the scarab came no closer but neither did they retreat, following Mikeos' party along the tracks, bracketing both sides at a distance of ten yards. Twice flickers sprang from the sect mass with whip-like cracks. Mikeos shot one, the other he missed and it landed just ahead of them. Fortunately the horse stepped on the thing before having a chance to get spooked. The flicker crunched, sharp legs scratching at the hoof. They left its remains twitching between the tracks.
"When the death scarabs get here we're dead," Hemar said. He reached up and set a hand to Eben's side. "I'm sorry. I didn't think it would end like this. Or so soon."
Mikeos put his hand to the horse's neck. Warm firm flesh. He'd never figured to die on horseback, but he'd been right about having his guns in hand. He loaded both chambers, fingers steadier now that the end had come. He checked his single action revolver, the silver handled one Remos Jax gave him all those years ago. Jax had died well. He would too. Guns loaded he looked up, out across the dark and glossy sea of sect, then back to Jenna. She met his eyes and offered a half smile.
"We should have met in different times, Jenna. Should have lived peaceful lives. Had more fun." He held the barrel of his revolver vertically across his brow. The free-fighters' salute.
The sect army extended back five hundred yards to the track terminus now, and further in the other direction, coating the slopes and valleys through which the tracks cut. The noise of them on the move was a thunderous clicking and scraping, shot through with dry rustling and the occasional cricket's chirp. The stink of them, the smell of wrongness, made Mikeos's eyes water and clawed at his throat.
Three scarab reached the front ranks together, their heavy carapaces strangely reminiscent of a train's enamelled surface, a sheen of metallic green refracting from the black armour as they moved. The scarabs seemed able to penetrate whatever shield the rails radiated. Bugs and mantis warriors pressed forward toward the tracks as the scarabs advanced, like a bow-wave before a barge. Mikeos raised his guns and began to fire. Somewhere down the line a deeper throated thunder approached, as if half a dozen scarabs weren't problem enough. He tried to aim for the scarabs' eyes but with the horse jittering between his legs, and his arms shaking with fever, and the rails pinging away, any kind of aiming came hard.
"Get off the line!" Hemar hollered it, throwing himself to the east side and hauling on the mare's reins.
Mikeos kept on firing, though the lurching horse sent some of his shots high. The crashing of his guns overwrote all other sound until he started squeezing on empty chambers. Even then a continuous rolling thunder kept rising, threatening to drown out the clatter of sect. Mikeos dropped one gun and pulled his last loaded weapon from his belt. A scarab loomed through the gun smoke, leaking ichor from wounds in its thorax and head. Two great curved blades rose from close to the ground and—
Something vaster than the sect rushed past, squealing, clattering, booming, exhaling hot wet breath. Adding smoke and steam to the fog of Mikeos's own gun smoke. It interposed its bulk between him and the scarabs.
"A train!" Jenna yelled it just below his ear but he could hardly hear her for the stuttering bark of gunfire. As the train slowed and then shuddered to a halt a flatcar drew level with them, bracketed by two carriages fore and aft. On the flatcar a single large cage of the sort showmen use to hold their exotics. Inside it two mounted weapons, gleaming multi-barrelled cylinders longer and thicker than a man's arm, larger than any gun Mikeos had imagined existed, mounted on tripods and rotating as the fiends that manned them cranked their handles. The huge guns sucked in belts of ammunition from open crates and spat brass shell casing in a tinkling rain ricocheting off the fine mesh of the bars or passing through to fall besides the tracks.
"Corpsers..." Two corpsers, clothes torn and caked with dried filth, skin and flesh so rotted that their wild grins were more skull than lips and skin. One laid down a withering field of fire to the west, the other to the east, above their heads, but only by inches. Mikeos turned in the saddle ducking as low as the agony along his spine allowed. The effect of the mechanised guns on the sect horde left him speechless. The creatures were literally torn apart, bug warrior cut in two by the hail of bullets. Tumbling fragments of chitin armour filled the air. A black rain of sect pieces fell, backed by a grey-green mist of atomised ichor. The sect pushed forward, an incredible weight of numbers met by an implacable wall of flying lead. The corpsers' wild laughter pulsed beneath the roar of their guns as they scythed the sect down, swinging their heavy guns back and forth on their tripod mounts.
"Down!" Hemar's howl barely audible amid the chatter of the guns. He dragged Eben from the mare's neck, slicing what ropes he needed to with the knife he pulled from Mikeos's boot. Jenna hauled on Mikeos's arm toppling him and they both fell to the banked ground beside the wheels of the flatcar. The impact sent only a dull ache through Mikeos. Grateful as he was he knew it for a bad sign.
Dozens, scores, hundreds of flickers spat from the sect ranks, tumbling through the air. The guns shredded many of them, others passed overhead, hitting the cage wire and clinging there. A few landed short a light rain of them pattering around the embankment. The mare reared, screaming, a flicker coiling up around her neck and another squirming across her haunches. Both cut ragged crimson lines through her hide as they angled towards the nearest orifice. The horse screamed, kicking out with her forelegs legs, eyes rolling. The flicker on her neck darted into the open mouth, legs scratching against tooth enamel and shredding the mare's cheek. Mikeos shot her just behind the eye and she fell, oblivious as the flicker vanished down her throat.
The legions of sect pushed forward as overhead the guns uttered their unending staccato denials. Sect shattered, heads exploded, limbs flew away. A scarab continue forward after the bullets raked across it, so the mechanised gun returned to focus on it for a second longer, amputating both heavy claws, perforating the thick armour over the thorax and drenching the bugs behind in pale guts, grey ichor, and flying lead.
"Mikeos!" Jenna pointed down the train. It comprised the engine, a passenger carriage flatcar, and one more passenger carriage. Bugs and mantis warriors were starting to leap up onto the carriages, presumably to approach the flatcar from their roofs.
With effort Mikeos slid one of his revolvers to the hex witch. "Load it." He aimed along the train and started to pick off the mantis warriors as Jenna unbuckled his ammunition bandolier. Overhead one of the guns fell silent. "New belt! Fucksake, need a new belt." The dead dry voice of a corpser.
Hemar danced behind Mikeos, knifing flickers as the gunman shot bugs from the carriage sides. For a moment the second gun went quiet and the hissing clicking surge of the sect re-established itself. Heartbeats later both guns opened up again, mounding the dead at the feet of the embankment.
Mikeos emptied his gun and took the reloaded weapon that Jenna had just finished with. A flicker rushed up the bank quick as thinking, aimed for his trouser leg. He lifted his heel and with exquisite timing brought it down hard just behind the flicker's head before kicking it away. Another of the things caught Hemar, wrapping around his leg. He fell howling, cutting at the thing with his knife and claws. Jenna went to help. Mikeos shot more bugs from the engine roof.
The horse's corpse jerked and bulged as the flickers gorging within writhed across each other. Perhaps a score of them had been distracted by the remains but soon the thing would split open and disgorge them.
"Gotta get up on the car!" He lunged toward the short iron ladder that helped folk climb onto the flatcar. Two more scarabs burst through the bank of sect corpses and the mechanised gun played across them, reducing both to ruin. Mikeos managed to haul himself on the flatcar. Jenna followed, robes spattered with blood, then Hemar on a leg from which skin hung in furry strips, Eben Lostchild in his arms. A flicker whirled out of the sect mass toward the back of the dogman's neck and Mikeos shot it in two, the pieces skittering across the flatcar's deck.
The mechanised guns fired through two slots roughly cut into the cage mesh. Occasionally a flicker would find the way in and the corpsers would brush it back with the scorchingly hot barrels of the guns. The weapons devoured bullet belts from open crates at an astonishing rate, the yards of belt unfolding as the guns pulled on them, disintegrating into showers of casings and clips on the far side of the guns.
Mikeos looked out across the badlands. The sect lay in heaps, yards deep. Fresh warriors crawled up over the mounded dead only to be blown apart. More came, and more.
"Hemar!" One of the corpsers yelled. "Water for the guns!"
Several large barrels stood against the foreward carriage with leather buckets on hooks beside them. Hemar stood bewildered, blood running down his leg, Eben on the deck at his feet. Several flickers detached from the cage and started toward the pair. Mikeos shot them. A mantis warrior dropped from the carriage roof above them. Mikeos shot it through the head before it hit the deck between him and Jenna. Hooks snagged witch's robes, tearing flesh beneath. Mikeos kicked out at the convulsing sect but the strength had left his legs. Jenna swung around, somehow hauling the mantis with her. It reached the edge of the deck and toppled over. Jenna dived for the carriage door handle, grabbing hold and preventing herself from being dragged off the flatcar with the half of her robes the mantis' hooks ripped away.
"Water!" the corpser hollered.
"Throw water over the guns." Mikeos could barely make himself heard, his voice little more than a whisper. "They'll get too hot and seize up."
Hemar understood. He flipped the barrel lid, dunked a leather bucket and went to drench the first gun.
More sect rushed forward in yet another wave, the corpser having to depress the gun and scythe off their heads just as they mounted the embankment.
"There aren't enough bullets." Mikeos muttered it to himself, remembering Lilliana's words from a lifetime ago.
Jenna leaned back from the handle, shaking, her robes shredded and blood running down from thigh to ankle. The door came open. "Holy crap!" She stood straight, the shaking gone. The whole space beyond, from floor to ceiling, lay stacked with ammunition crates.
A cloud of steam from the hissing bullet-spitting guns blew across Mikeos. His pain had gone, leaked from him leaving him feather-light, insubstantial. He caught sight of Jenna's face once more through the mist, focused, pale, beautiful, then gone. The fog enfolded him, wrapped him, sealed away sound, bore him up.
As he rose above a white landscape wreathed in mist he saw only one other figure. A gunslinger, tall, proud, hard-eyed.
"Good-bye, Eben." Mikeos waved.
And Eben Lostchild waved back. Just once before the mists swirled him away too.
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One more part to go!
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