The Aeronaut's Windlass (63 page)

And then there was a horrible slap against her body, and with a roar of sound and smoke, the entire world flew sideways.

Chapter 53

Spire Albion, Habble Landing, Ventilation Tunnels

T
he blasting charges blew a wide hole in the mound of broken masonry that had been used to plug the tunnel. The sound of the explosion was an invisible wall that swept through the corridor, sucking the wind from Grimm’s lungs despite his protected position around the nearest corner.

Grimm forced himself to stagger out into the tunnel before he’d managed to draw a breath. He was running toward the breach in the masonry barricade before the flying bits of stone had stopped rattling to the floor, sword in hand and gauntlet primed, and he heard the clatter of boots behind him as Kettle sent the men running in his wake.

The air was thick with dust and stinking, sulfurous smoke. Bits of stone of various sizes twisted beneath his boots, threatening his balance, and his imagination treated him to an image of himself sprinting straight into a wall in the bad visibility and stabbing himself with his own sword.

God in Heaven knew, if he’d chosen the wrong tunnel, the one where the Cavendish woman had been keeping her prisoners, he’d deserve it.

The direction of his thoughts distracted him and he nearly stumbled over a block of masonry the size of a slab of fresh meat. A hand with a grip like copper-clad steel locked onto his upper arm, and Sir Benedict helped him keep his balance and continue moving forward. The young warriorborn was tense, his feline eyes bright, and Grimm knew that they were lucky to have such a resource entering the battle with them.

Grimm plunged out of the dark and smoke into an area lit with scattered lumin crystals. The dust and grit in the air gave everything an odd, flat quality, as if his depth perception had suddenly been blurred. The occupants of the chamber were still reeling, stunned by the explosion and flying debris, and Grimm had what seemed an eternity to take it all in.

Miss Tagwynn was down, lying sprawled on the floor as if she had been struck a stunning blow, her wide eyes unfocused. Not five feet away from her lay Sark, the warriorborn who had accompanied Madame Cavendish. The large man was already rolling to regain his feet, and copper-clad steel gleamed in his hand. Several yards beyond Sark, Madame Cavendish had fallen to one knee, her expensive dress and bolero covered in dust. Her teeth were clenched, and she shook her head even as Grimm dismissed the priming charge from his gauntlet and drew his pistol into his left hand instead.

His mind was still cataloging details as he strode forward, bringing the pistol to bear. Very few men could afford the expense it took to operate a pistol until they were experts in the weapon’s use—and of those, a measurable percentage lost their fingers, eyes, or lives when the weapons burst from the inside, rather than propelling their loads toward the target. Any given pistol could fire only fifty or sixty rounds before the corrosive firepowder began to eat through the copper plating within the barrel, at which point iron rot would set into the steel, weakening the gun until an inevitable misfire occurred.

Grimm had dutifully gone through half a dozen barrels while learning to fire the weapon with a modicum of proficiency, but he was by no means an expert—so he strode toward Cavendish as rapidly as he could, to fire from a distance that would preclude a miss due to his dubious competence. Once she was dispatched, he could discard the pistol and bring his gauntlet to bear on the silkweavers rushing up behind her—

Silkweavers?
God in Heaven, there were dozens of the deadly, fully grown adult surface creatures pouring out of one of the tunnels, rushing toward his men.

With the arrival of sudden terror, the timeless moment of detached observation ended.

“Bridget!” Benedict shouted.

Sark came to his feet, his blade darting toward the downed girl, but Benedict let out a lion’s roar of pure fury, a sound that shocked Grimm’s senses, and hit Sark in a flying tackle. Both warriorborn went down, struggling against each other.

The roar seemed to galvanize Madame Cavendish. She looked up, blinking her eyes, and they widened when they locked onto Grimm. She began to rise to her feet.

He wished he were closer to the etherealist, but this distance, seven or eight yards, would have to be close enough. Her hand was already rising toward him, and he had only a single instant to act. Grimm corrected his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger.

The pistol sparked and then spoke, a flash of bright light in the dim chamber.

Madame Cavendish let out a sudden, breathless cry and spun violently in place, hurled back to the ground again as though struck with a club.

The first of the silkweavers flung itself through the air toward Grimm, letting out a shrieking cry that sent another bolt of terror through him, for he had heard it before—only days ago, in the dark ventilation tunnels of Habble Morning, when he had fought back-to-back with Alex Bayard.

There was no time to prime the gauntlet. Instead he flipped the pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and brought the handle of the heavy, primitive weapon down upon the head of the silkweaver with every ounce of strength he could muster.

His arm screamed with pain, muscles and tendons protesting the abuse, but they functioned. The blow clubbed the silkweaver to the floor, and Grimm wasted no time in driving his short shipboard blade down into the silkweaver’s body, where its head met its neck. He barely managed to jerk the blade clear before the beast went into wild spasms, all its legs flailing with no semblance of cohesion, its three-jawed muzzle snapping wildly, bubbling with venomous foam.

The aeronauts of
Predator
let loose a battle cry of their own, screaming, “Albion!”

And then the battle was joined. There was no time to think, to issue orders, or to do anything but survive. Gauntlets discharged. Silkweavers shrieked. Grimm dodged the pounce of another silkweaver by the barest margin, and he caught a glimpse of Madame Cavendish on the floor, her face deathly pale, pointing a finger at Grimm and wailing in primal outrage.

And half a dozen of the monsters darted toward him, following her command.

Grimm would have died where he stood if Kettle, Creedy, Stern, and half a dozen other aeronauts hadn’t reached his side, their gauntlets howling. They blew two of the silkweavers into bloody, stinking meat, but a third darted beneath the blasts, seized the wiry Stern by one leg, and hauled him from his feet with abrupt violence, fangs sinking, tearing, and bubbling with poison.

Stern screamed.

Grimm struggled to get to the downed man, but it was all he could do to fend off another monster and prevent himself from joining Stern on the ground. He slashed and scored a pair of solid strokes—but the silkweaver’s leathery hide was tough, and the blows drew little blood.

Stern’s leg broke with an audible crack, and blood began streaming from the wound.

The scent of the blood washed over the silkweavers like a sudden wind born of primal, insane violence. Their shrieks rose up again, deafening, and Grimm felt his legs go watery. Their movements became quicker, more erratic, and the venom practically frothed from their jaws, pattering onto the spirestone floor.

With the silkweavers maddened by blood, there were now only two outcomes possible in the current situation: Either Grimm and the men of
Predator
would destroy every single silkweaver present—or else they would fall to the jaws and venom of the surface creatures.

Stern screamed again, drawing a belt knife and stabbing down at the silkweaver holding on to his leg, but the creature shook him like a cat shaking a tunnel mouse, too strong for its size, slamming the young man left and right and sending the knife tumbling.

On Grimm’s other side, Creedy drove the heel of his boot into a silkweaver’s mouth, only to have the thing lock its jaws onto Creedy’s foot and wrench at the XO’s leg. Its teeth sliced through the leather of Creedy’s boot, and he shouted in rage and pain. Kettle’s boarding ax came sweeping down on the silkweaver and split the thing in half in the middle of its body—but the dying front half kept wrenching and rending Creedy’s foot nonetheless.

More of the damned creatures were coming, scuttling over the walls and the ceiling, using their superior mobility to surround Grimm and his men. Grimm’s ground combat experience was limited—but it was not difficult to deduce that they had only moments to live.

And then Felix and the verminocitors entered the fray.

They uttered no battle cry and made no sound as they came rushing in from each of the open tunnels leading to the Auroran encampment. But as they closed the distance to the nearest silkweavers, their scalelashes began to whirl, building momentum and emitting soft, hissing whistles as they spun.

The scalelash was a deadly instrument, made of small rings of metal knitted into a tapered tube, each ring hung with a pointed, edged metal scale. The bloody things weighed as much as an ax and hit with nearly as much force—and then the scales ripped away chunks of flesh as they tore free. A strike with a scalelash could saw its way through the toughest hide, inflicting deep, horribly painful, bleeding wounds. What they did to soft human flesh was indescribable.

A dozen of the weapons whipped toward the rearmost rank of silkweavers in a unified chorus of violence.

Verminocitors prowled the darkness of the tunnels of every habble in the Spire. On a daily basis they faced the possibility that they might find themselves face-to-face with a nightmare from the surface world. It was a necessary duty. Without verminocitors, horrors from the surface could and would emerge from the ventilation and service tunnels and begin preying upon citizens of the habble—and their first victims were very nearly always children.

Men and women who took up that responsibility were by definition confident, skilled, fearless, and mildly insane. And, Grimm thought, this particular pack of madmen had a score to settle.

Scalelashes hammered and tore. Silkweavers screamed. Some of Felix’s people had exchanged short, heavy spears for their lashes, and when one of their compatriots wounded or stunned a silkweaver, a spear carrier would rush in and deliver the death stroke from the relative safety of the longer weapon’s reach.

Felix himself whirled a scalelash in either hand, striking left and right, smashing armor, ripping flesh, and severing the beasts’ legs with a kind of dreadfully workaday practicality. With a quick motion, he struck the silkweaver attacking Grimm a savage blow that drove it flat to the ground, stunned. Then he dropped one lash, flicked the other around the neck of the silkweaver wrenching at Stern’s leg, and twisted the metal weapon with professional expertise, tightening it around the creature’s head.

The silkweaver began to thrash wildly, but Felix simply settled his weight onto it more firmly and held on, leaning into the strength of the pull until the creature’s triple jaws snapped open and it let out a shriek of pain.

Grimm dispatched the silkweaver Felix had stunned, then stepped around behind the verminocitor. He murmured, “Excuse me,” set his weapon carefully, and drove his sword into the same spot at the base of the silkweaver’s skull. The thing went mad for a few seconds, thrashing wildly—and then simply sagged, like a bladder being drained of its liquid.

Felix unwound his lash from the dead silkweaver. “You boys aren’t bad. For a bunch of rubbernecks, I mean.”

“Thank you,” Grimm said hesitantly. “Mister Creedy?”

“Sir.”

“Get Stern and yourself to Doctor Bagen.” Grimm turned back to Felix. “What, sir, is a rubberneck?”

Felix flashed Grimm a quick grin. “We’ll get this work done and I’ll tell—”

The verminocitor turned abruptly, his eyes widening, and Grimm followed the man’s gaze to one of the other tunnels leading into the intersection the Aurorans had claimed. There was a chorus of shrieks and a
second
group of silkweavers, as large as the first, poured into the intersection.

Grimm watched helplessly, shouting a warning that went unheard as half a dozen of the verminocitors were buried under a wave of ripping jaws and poisoned fangs, overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught. Their screams of terror swiftly became gargling sounds of despair—and then fell silent.