Chapter 52

Whatever the Akelarre were up to, Angharad thought, was something of a mixed blessing.

The kobalos thrust its jagged spear at her, screaming and shedding spittle. It had wide animal eyes, overlarge black pupils that somehow seemed afraid even in the throes of fury. The lemure lacked strength: it was child’s play to catch the shaft with the side of her blade and edge it away, letting the spear tip pierce away at thin air while she drew back her blade in line and placed a thrust into the hollow of the beasts’ throat.

The saber’s point punched through until she felt bone, at which point she ripped out her blade with a twist of the wrist. The kobalos dropped its spear, hands to its throat as it staggered back, and began choking on its blood after but a step. She did not lower her guard until it was quite dead, nonetheless. The Acallar taught harsh lessons on the subject of the difference between dying and dead.

A look around revealed that Salvador had just shot another kobalos point blank, through its shoddy bronze helm, and Tupoc was ‘amusing’ himself by allowing another to crawl away after cutting through both its knees. It moaned in pain as it crawled through the dusty floor, leaving a trail of ichor behind, and though Angharad knew it would soon bleed out anyway the pointless cruelty of it sickened her.

She drew her pistol and put a shot in its back, putting it out of its misery to jeers from Tupoc.

“That seems to be the last of them,” Angharad said, ignoring said noise. “The way should be clear for the gunline.”

The mouth of the hallway was carpeted with sixteen dead kobaloi, a tally that sounded more impressive than it truly was. They’d not come in all at once, only in small packs, which had made them easy enough to handle. These were only a small part of the sixty some kobaloi that had been besieging the revenant position, anyhow, the rest having been recalled to deal with whatever ruckus the Akelarre were raising.

This was a boon, in the sense that a great many of the creatures were gone and unlikely to return. It was also a problem, because now the black-cloaked revenants on the heights only had students left to shoot at.

“All right, you useless miscreants,” Tupoc called out. “Now is your time to shine! Line up and forward, run to the gutter.”

The alleged useless miscreants, the handful of conscripts that had been waiting behind them – and also Tristan – looked hesitant.

“They’ll shoot us, Xical,” one of the second years from the student association objected. “They have muskets and they can-”

Tupoc, face still dappled with black ichor, stepped up to the dark-haired girl. She flinched, clearly expecting a hit, but instead he swung an arm over her shoulder in a way that might have passed for friendly coming from another man.

“Oh, Musket Fodder,” he gently said. “I will also shoot you. And I’m a lot closer, so are they really the ones you should be worried about?”

She grimaced, eyes cast down, and mutely shook her head. The Pereduri’s lips thinned even as Tupoc drew away. Angharad’s eyes flicked over the other four conscripts, gauging the mood: tightened jaws and shoulders, anger checked only by a precarious levee of fear. It was not all that attractive a prospect to trust them with guns at her back.

And if not for the knowledge that all the pitiful faces she now stared out had ganged together to brutally beat her friends with clubs and fists, Angharad was not sure she would have been able to stomach this.

“Besides, we’re not sending you out to die,” Tupoc continued. “As proof, you get Abrascal heading out with you.”

He gestured at Tristan while finishing his sentence, Angharad’s friend only raising an eyebrow as he checked his musket. He was hanging back, as he had ever since Song assigned him to this company. He’s not here to watch for monsters but for mutiny.

“I suppose it’s a little late to start objecting to conscription,” Tristan noted.

She caught his eyes, allowing him to find the question there, but he shook his head. No, he didn’t truly mind. Or not enough to pass on what she was now seeing as well: teeth no longer ground together, shoulders slumping. The conscripts were genuinely reassured by his addition to the gunline, as it was solid proof they weren’t just being sent in to soak up bullets. And they needed the conscripts reassured, given that they outnumbered the genuine volunteers among this company.

Of the fourteen original conscripts four had been sent to the First Brigade for severe or unwieldy wounds, the ten remaining then spread around to make a rising more difficult. One with Thando, one with Maryam, three with Song and the last five here to serve as a gunline. To match them in this hallway were Angharad herself, Salvador, Tupoc and Tristan.

While she did not doubt the four of them would win a conflict with the five conscripts – one was already wounded, another more scholar than fighter – the ensuing scuffle would almost certainly weaken them too much to be able to assault the fort afterwards. Besides, there were few ways to put down such an insurrection without harsh violence and Angharad was not sure she was willing to deal it out here.

Much as the student association and Nathi Morcant’s thugs deserved punishment, this was not that. It was Song spending her enemies in a way that walked close to the line of dishonor, kept only on the right side of it by the pains taken to keep them alive. Angharad was not willing to kill over this, not even for her friend.

“Get your guns out, my lovelies,” Tupoc called out. “Hole up in the gutter and keep them off us, we’ll crack the shell for you.”

Tupoc, casually cruel and callous as he was, had read the situation perfectly. Tristan’s addition to their numbers as they lined up at the mouth of the hallway saw much of the reluctance melt away. They had been reassured enough to head into the fight, and once they were it would be difficult for them to flee – and Tristan, being along, would be able to warn them should it happen. This was too smooth a decision to be unpracticed.

How many bands of conscripts had Tupoc Xical led into peril, Angharad wondered, for such wiles to come so easily to him?

Tristan and the five conscripts lingered for a moment, before her friend breathed out and broke into a sprint. After a single heartbeat a shot sounded, hitting the ground, and the others ran out after him. Stomach clenching, Angharad joined Tupoc and Salvador where the others had just stood. Weapons in hand, they waited for their moment.

Spread out before them was a broad clearing surrounded by tall walls of scrap, flat grounds of red dust and broken wood leading to debris that had fallen off the wall – the ‘fort’ the revenants had holed up in. It was a pile of upended brass crates on which an enormous iron cooking pot had been upended. There must be a hole in the bottom-turned-roof, as a handful of revenants were kneeling atop it and shooting from there while the rest clustered around the openings between the crates, having turned them into defensive chokeholds.

It was not a proper fort, but the metal make of its constituent parts made the position difficult to assault – as piles of kobaloi corpses strewn across the clearing and by the crates made all too clear.

“Only counted twelve,” Salvador rasped. “Five on roof.”

Even as he spoke one poked into sight, the faceless puppet firing his matchlock at the running students and hitting the girl who’d talked earlier in the leg. She dropped with a scream. Angharad had to force herself not to run out, knowing she would be wasting the very effort being made on their behalf. One of the other conscripts doubled back for her, taking a glancing shot that got lost in his cloak, and though it still looked chancy for them a pair of shots from Tristan and another conscript forced the revenants back into cover, allowing the shot-up pair to reach the gutter.

There was no telling what the deep furrow in the ground that ran across the clearing had been meant for once, but now its size – half the height of a man, just as broad – let it serve as fine cover for the blackcloaks, who settled in and quickly began trading shots with the revenants. For now the firefight seemed roughly even, though the flintlock muskets had a noticeable edge in how quickly they reloaded, but the nature of matchlocks meant that the students’ guns would eventually win out.

Matchlock muskets must keep their slow match burning, since they used the burning end to ignite priming powder the way the flint did in modern guns. During a drill was not too dangerous, but throughout a protracted shootout? It was only a matter of time until that lit cord caught onto loose powder and blew up in the face of a revenant.

Tupoc’s eyes were flickering across the roof, and Angharad could tell he was counting something. The shots, she realized.

“Now,” he suddenly said, and broke into a run.

She followed. Xical was many things, but unskilled at war was not one of them. The timing he’d picked let them cross half the distance to the gutter before the first shot billowed out. Angharad had glimpsed ahead the moment she saw the wick of the matchlock burn, so she smoothly veered to the right and let the shot go wide. She was not the favored target: Salvador had to dance between two and took a shoulder wound on the latter. But he’d been using his contract all the while, leaving behind that ghostly blue trail, and simply snapped back ten feet before resuming his run unharmed.

All three of them jumped into the gutter, pressing low, and waited for a heartbeat.

“Volley on my mark,” Tristan called out. “Five. Four. Three. Two-”

Angharad heard cloaks crease as the gunline popped out of cover.

“Mark!”

Smoke and thunder erupted, the three of them dragging themselves out of the gutter into a run under the cover of powder smoke and suppressive fire. Tupoc lengthened his stride to pull ahead, targeting the leftmost opening in the brass crates, and they hewed to him without a word. Angharad drew her pistol, as any moment now the revenants at the choke point would be leveling their guns through the opening, but once they were most of the way there when she caught sight of something arcing down from the roof.

Round, her mind categorized. Ceramic. Lit fuse.

It landed maybe half a dozen feet in front of them, and if it had been a modern grenade at least one of them would be dead. Instead it blew with more smoke than powder, Angharad pulling her cloak and coat tight to soak up the handful of ceramic shards she was sprayed with, and she released the black cloth to find herself in the center of a storm. There was thick, black smoke everywhere but twice as much of the thick and cloying red dust from the ground kicked up by the explosion.

Salvador had disappeared – used his contract again, she guessed – but she made out Tupoc for a moment before she saw him bring up his spear and tangle with two black-cloaked silhouettes. This had been planned too cleverly, to be the work of the revenants. They were hardly smarter than dogs. Which meant… Angharad glimpsed ahead, then again when she saw nothing.

Had she been wrong?

It was instinct that had her ducking out of the way when she caught an inkling of sound. The blow came out of the smoke without warning, a blade stirring red swirls as it carved through where her shoulder had just been. Angharad hid her dismay as she holstered her pistol and made distance through the bared floor, because she should have seen that in the glimpse. The blow had been within the glimpsed span.

“Good. Killing you on the first strike would have been boring,” Cai Wei said, striding out of the smoke.

Angharad glimpsed twice more in quick succession, and her fingers tightened on the grip of her saber. In those glimpses, she saw Cai Wei as she had when their souls were tethered. Yet while the one standing before her wore the black cloak, she also had a black jacket in the Tianxi style and long skirt hemmed in yellow-gold. None of it quite moved like cloth should. Her body is a construct, Angharad thought. A construct that did not appear in her glimpses. Her weapon must be the same, for it had not either. In the back of her mind, the Fisher stirred in displeasure.

Angharad barely remembered anything of Cai Wei before her death. She had been mostly sure the Tianxi used a jian straight sword, similar to Song’s, but the specter come back to haunt her now wielded another weapon entirely: it was a thick-bladed polearm, a heavy curved blade at the end of a pole ending in a large ring pommel bearing a red tassel. A guandao, she recalled it being named, though the drawings she had seen in books had more pole and less blade. Even with that heavy pommel to serve as a counterweight, it struck her as an unwieldy weapon.

For someone whose body was flesh, anyhow. When Wei struck out to open the dance, it was as if the weapon weighed as much as a feather.

It most definitely did not, as Angharad learned when she angled a parry to slide off and had to break it off or risk getting her wrist broken. It was like being struck with a bag full of bricks. She gave ground, guard low, and picked her distance. Wei moved leisurely after her, cloak trailing when she darted forward. Angharad took only half a step back, keeping the right amount of room. She had to keep at the edge of the swing, then push into the guard.

Only Wei’s back hand slid up the shaft as she closed the distance and Angharad’s lips thinned as she read the movement. A quick thrust at blade point forced her to pivot left, but Wei’s hand slid back down and she struck out with the bottom of the shaft – it caught in the mirror-dancer’s cloak, almost ripping off her, and as the brooch caught against her collar she was forced to backpedal by the side cut that Wei smoothly pivoted into, then half-step to the right to avoid the thrust that almost sliced into the side of her head.

Entirely throwing away her original plan, Angharad gave much ground as Cai Wei laughed. She ripped off her broach, allowing her cloak to fall, and rolled her shoulder. She’d underestimated the weapon, the shaft was almost as dangerous as the blade with that much strength behind it. A good blow on a bone would break it, and it was now quite clear that closing the distance when Wei was committed to a blow wouldn’t be enough to get her an opening.

Angharad breathed out, killed the woman who had thought victory was at hand and let a wiser one be born. She tapped the side of the blade against her shoulder, the duelist’s salute, and fell into a high guard: blade down, pommel at height with her head. She would have to treat it like cutting down a tree, on swing at a time until it toppled.

“Ooo, mirror-dancer, oooh,” Wei mocked, fake-fainting with a hand on her forehead. “Save me, gods!”

Angharad was watching the shoulders, not the lips, so she was not surprised when the specter thrust one-handed at her – almost throwing the guandao, letting it slip through her grasp and catching it only just before the ring pommel. It was fast enough to blow wind, but Angharad had already been moving. Half a step to the left, the blade passing by her. Cai Wei’s forged body allowed her to lie with her feet, but she still had to move the blade: her shoulders betrayed her.

Angharad read in how they flexed how Wei would swing, already slipping beneath the blade by the time her opponent’s second hand grasped the shaft to make the blade cut to the left. She emerged half a step forward and to the right, guard yet high. Shift of stance, Wei swung right – Angharad went under again, and this time when her enemy pulled the blow halfway to smash downwards she rolled forward and thrust.

Wei leaned back just in time, the tip of the saber only nicking her chin, and Angharad clicked her tongue. She’d misread the distance. As she pulled back Wei pushed in, and too fast for her to be able to reposition properly. Instead of pivoting left she was forced to backpedal away from a cut, which the specter turned into an onslaught. Thrust, cut, a graceful arc down turning into a twirl that had the butt of the shaft landing into Angharad’s shoulder.

She went down to her knee with it to pull the blow, but she still felt her bones creak. Ancestors. Wei pulled the shaft back to crack the side of her head, but Angharad smashed her pommel into the side of the specter’s knee and that unbalance her enough she was able to duck under the blow, rolling forward under a sweep that halfway cut through one of her braids and pivoting up just in time to narrowly slap aside a thrust that would have pierced right next to her spine.

Angharad gave ground again, her shoulder throbbing. That blow had ripped out some of the stitches in her side, she could feel blood dripping down her belly. If she gains momentum, she has me. I can handle her at the edge of her range, but if I get too close that shaft is a problem. Angharad needed to maintain middle distance, maybe half a step beyond the range of her blade, where she could leverage being better at reading her opponent than the other way around.

Which Wei clearly knew, by the way she immediately closed when Angharad to set that distance. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem without the forged body, which let Wei strike quicker than she should and without needing to get into a proper stance – all the while wielding that ridiculously heavy weapon.

“Has it sunk in yet?” Cai Wei smiled. “That there’s a gap skill cannot bridge?”

“The refrain,” Angharad replied, “of those lacking it.”

Wei only laughed, feinting another throw-thrust, but when Angharad moved to the side she caught the shaft early and swung. Angharad moved back out of the arc, and though she could read the thrust about to follow frustration mounted when she realized it wouldn’t change anything. Wei hadn’t thought that cut would land either, she was just seizing the pace. And, unlike living woman, she would never tire or lose strength. The cut swung back the other way, Angharad gave, and a distant part of her noted that the red dust was caking them both like powder.

She should pivot and- no. No. That was duelist thinking, and this was not truly a duel. It was a hunt. She breathed out, smoothed out her thoughts. The smoke and dust around them was beginning to clear, enough that she could now hear the shots and shouts. There was fighting behind her, and to the side. While she dueled Wei, her troops had assaulted the gutter.

Neither she nor Cai Wei looked away. Angharad rolled her shoulder.

“Again,” the mirror-dancer said, dropping her blade into a low guard.

“Wall beats head, Tredegar,” Cai Wei grinned, and moved to close the distance.

There was whisper of forged cloth against the floor as she ran, but Angharad did not shy away. Wei skipped ahead, cutting down in a sharp diagonal, and Angharad moved closer still – her foe pulled the blow to smack her with the shaft again, but Angharad pivoted around her, standing back-to-back for an instant as Wei began to spin the guandao over her shoulders. She ducked, rose to avoid being kicked in the belly when Wei moved to face her and then swung with all her strength at the specter’s neck.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Not quickly enough to avoid the guandao’s blade being pulled in, the edge of the polearm blade biting a hair’s breadth into the steel of her uncle’s finely wrought saber. She almost screamed, for the blade was now done.

But when Wei tried to push her away with brute force, she found she could not: greater strength or not, Angharad was positioned to exert all her strength while her enemy was working at a tortured side-angle. So, even as Wei shifted the angle to dig her guandao deeper into the saber – biting deeper into the steel – Angharad smoothly drew her pistol and pressed it against the specter’s throat.

“Not every head,” she said even as she pulled the trigger.

The shot tore into the throat, rocking Wei’s had back, but to her horror the bullet hit the ‘back’ of the throat and got stuck there. Inside Cai Wei’s body she caught a glimpse of the same shivering soul that had haunted her, wearing this forged shell like devils did corpses. The shot had not harmed it in the slightest. Angharad’s saber broke with a mighty crack and she risked it all, stabbing the lower half of the blade into the hole, but it did nothing but scrape at the insides before Wei tossed her away like a sack of flour.

She landed on her back with a grunt of pain, feeling some piece of wood tear up her cloak and slice into her belt as she rolled back to her feet. Grimacing at her spent pistol and broken saber, Angharad straightened her back and- and hastily backpedaled when a lit grenade landed between her and Wei, exploding with pale light.

“Back, Angharad, back,” Izel shouted,

She was the last one still out here, Angharad realized. Everyone else had retreated into the hallway or was running there, while she was out and exposed. The blind, furious skirmish over the clearing was over. Gritting her teeth, she drew back even as another grenade was tossed at Cai Wei – chasing her off, and the last of the revenants as well. There were only a few of the raised corpses remaining, but a few and Wei would be enough to make this a losing fight.

More important yet was the reminder that Angharad had not come here to put an end to Cai Wei, much as she would love to. She was here to cover the passage of her fellow delvers, and Izel’s arrival was proof that all but the rearguard had arrived: to stay here and linger would be going against Song’s plan. Reluctantly, she dipped back into the hallway.

Cai Wei, not all that eager to assault a narrow corridor filled with Watch guns and grenades, did not immediately pursue.

That was a small comfort, as in the hallway Angharad found the butcher’s bill waiting for her. Two dead, their bloody corpses dragged back to deny their use to Scholomance and the Machinist. Both were conscripts whose names she had never learned, in part because she had feared this very outcome. Salvador was limping and his face was bruised, Tupoc was pressing two of his three missing fingers against the stumps with a frown.

If not for the arrival of Thando’s company, Angharad thought, they would have a mutiny on their hands. Instead it was only simmering discontent that was fully put out when a pair of Akelarre – Alejandra and Bingwen – popped out of the hallway.

“The path ahead is clear,” Alejandra Torrero informed her captain, and so the rest of them as well. “Maryam and Shumise are keeping it that way. We should have a clear shot to the other side of the scrapyard now.”

“Good,” Tupoc smiled. “Abrascal, your turn.”

“So it is,” Tristan agreed.

Angharad moved closer to her friend, blade sheathed so it would not show it was broken. Izel should be carrying a spare, anyway, he was the one with the supplies.

“Dear guests, I’ve good news: you are being released,” Tristan told the conscripts. “You’ve been good sports, so we’ll escort you back to the entrance of the scrapyard and cut you loose, with an understanding that our score is settled so long as you leave the student association.”

He cleared his throat.

“Torrero, Angharad, Fenya, you’re with me,” he said. “The rest of you are folded under Tupoc and expected to dig in at Maryam’s position. We’ll return with the rearguard and set out for the exit together.”

And while the conscripts were open about their relief, some even cheering, Angharad’s face went blank. Because she was beginning to put a picture together from some of the tactical decisions made: the way the rearguard under Imani Langa had been left to hold the hallway just past the first yard, why Song had taken with her company a long path towards the south-east. This was not mercy, it was a plan.

And that meant the cheers were too early.

—

Song waited at the end of the tunnel, rifle up, until the revenant turned the corner.

She pulled the trigger and a heartbeat later corpse ash splattered the wall, the creature toppling as she began to withdraw. She caught a glimpse of a fluttering black cloak following after her just before she stepped out of the tunnel, already reaching for her powder horn. She passed by a nervous Ishanvi, who had her blunderbuss leveled at the corner, and past her found Captain Susana waiting besides Bait.

Not for the first time since they’d split off from the others, the first year’s hand twitched as she forced herself not to reach for her pistol. Song’s lack of visible reaction to the last few instances seemed to have left her under the impression she was being subtle. As if Song had not selected every member of her company according to Tristan’s report.

“Bait, how is our backline?” she asked.

The Someshwari licked his lips.

“Um, clear?” he said, then coughed and firmed up his tone. “Our scouts say the paths are empty, Captain Ren.”

Song suppressed a smile. Then they were nearly done. The long, oblique route they had begun at the crossroads room seized by the Akelarre would soon finish leading them back all they way across the scrapyard to where they had begun. She flicked up a glance, finding that Scholomance’s curling smoke was gathering in a storm nearby. Where the great yard near the entrance should be. That should be the Eighth Brigade.

Behind them, a grunt was followed by a burst of noise – Song turned just in time to see Ishanvi’s blunderbuss scything through a revenant, the Laurel then breaking into a run towards the rest of them. Another revenant peeked past the corner, face tanned but featureless. Captain Susana, whose turn it should be to get ready to fire, made no such move.

Song suppressed her irritation, leaving the ramrod in the mouth of her rifle and drawing her pistol to plug a shot in the shoulder of the revenant– it made the walking corpse withdraw, though it wouldn’t last. Not should it; her entire strategy relied on the revenants following after this company after she had thoroughly provoked the largest group of them she could find.

The creatures had not gathered in a large pack again after a grenade was first tossed into their midst, no doubt an order by Cai Wei, and the way they were now pursuing in groups of three and four made it easy to bleed them out in the rolling skirmish that Song’s company had fought across the scrapyard. The light and smell of the slow matches used by their matchlocks made it quite easy to tell when a gun was being brought to the front, so she was able to pick and choose when to engage.

“Back in firing order,” she told the others as she took the ramrod out of her rifle.

She began to head down the curving path, Ishanvi passing by her as the Someshwari began to reload her blunderbuss. A little too slowly, she noted. That would need drilling.

“We continue to withdraw,” Song finished.

And the revenants would continue to pursue. Only this time, the moment she passed Bait and Susana she heard the sound of pistol being cocked. Her brow rose.

“No,” Captain Susana said. “Now you explain yourself, Ren. What are we doing?”

Bait cursed.