We did not, in fact, leave immediately. I stopped to grab the explosives. Now the nightmares cut through the snow-encrusted boughs and frosty glades alongside the tracks, which we spot sometimes when the path takes us closer.
At first, the mortals were terrified, but soon the peculiar gait of those tireless mounts got to them. I used to ride a lot when I was a mortal, and so I can tell the difference between even the stoutest destrier and Metis. Nightmares are smoother despite preferring forests, as if roots and branches propelled rather than hindered them. With nearly endless stamina and a sure step, the humans have grown more exhilarated. It is then that the third major difference makes itself manifest. Horses are prey animals. They ride in herds. Nightmares are predators.
They ride in packs.
We hunt.
Sometimes, Metis leads us through a shortcut when the line would bend around a particularly dense stretch of wood. Sometimes, we all jump over small chasms and frozen brooks. On rarer occasions, we rejoin a human road and race through sleepy hamlets, sending screaming humans back into their watering holes. The nightmares know where the quarry is, somehow, and we are as fast as we are relentless. The pack thins into a line when it rides through a gully, expands as a wing when we cross a plain. I honestly expected us to need several hours to catch up with the train by sheer virtue of its consistent speed, but I was mistaken.
We are already here.
In front of us, the tracks cross a flat field and the metal beast puffs away, laden with our gold. It is not quite as defended as the previous one, yet I still count two armored cars, one behind the locomotive and one at the back. A man stands near the last door and frowns, looking out.
Vampires are quiet but nightmares are not. They were never meant to be. Stomping hooves alert him of the pursuit.
“Incoming! We have pursuers!” he bellows.
An alarm rings inside, soon followed by shouts. A window at the top of the back carriage opens in a strange cylinder I see there. I notice the glint of a muzzle. So does Bingle.
“They have a machine gun! What do we do!”
“What else?” I hiss. “We close in. Chaaaarge!”
Whoops and roars spur the nightmares on. We close the distance with the last carriage. I take out my rifle and line a shot, intentionally missing the sentry by a hair and forcing him to get back in with a yelp. Felicia lines a shot with the machine gun’s turret, pulling the trigger at the last moment. A cry of pain grants us an extra few seconds.
The machine gun opens just as the train enters a forest. Our nightmares weave effortlessly between the frozen trunks while it spits bullet after bullet to shatter bark and branches. Nevertheless, it will make the approach difficult. Or so I believe until I see Whistles-At-Dawn tie a stick of dynamite to one of his arrows. He lights it and nocks his bow, drawing it in a smooth motion, his upper body incredibly stable despite the hard terrain.
I know enough about archery to be certain this will never land. Any additional weight will make shots extremely inaccurate and this is quite heavy, yet the man seems very confident.
So confident he closes his eyes.
“Waokiye Sungmanito.”
The words hang in the air for a fraction of a moment, the time it takes for them to take effect. The rush of the hunt seizes my heart until I can almost taste the sweet blood behind the cold metal of the man-made beetle shell. A howl echoes in the distance.
Whistles releases his arrow. It impossibly flies between two oaks, right into the tiny opening where the gun is.
I distinctly hear a very loud, very short and very, very incredulous curse before the entire turret explodes.
“Wow,” I ruefully say.
I worked so hard to become a sharpshooter and I could not manage that with a bow. Cursed cheating shamans and their godling-powered violations of physics.
“Jealous, boss?” Urchin asks from my side.
“Hush you.”
“Excellent shot, Whistles! Gentlemen! And ladies! Forwaaaaard!”
With a collective yell, the hunt reaches its paroxysm, the nightmares flying like the wind. We leave the forest into a larger plain. The clouds part to reveal the form of the moon. We move so quickly that the wind sends my hair flying. So close now. I lift my legs to kneel on Metis’ back, then when I am ready, I jump, smoothly landing on the tiny platform at the back of the armored car. A door leads within but I ignore it for now.
Urchin and John are quick to follow. The sentry returns just as they land. I turn and smile at him. He swears and slams the door behind him then frantically attempts to lock it. This is when John places a boot against the handle and slams the frame into his jaw.
“Urchin, cover us. John, help me get the mortals on board.
One by one, the mortals either jump or grab the guard railing and let themselves fall off their nightmares. John is everywhere, picking them up before gravity can win the wrestling match. Only Felicia remains.
“I can’t do it! I’ll just stay behind!” she screams despite our encouragement.
“Come on Felicia, you can do it!” Bingle roars.
“I can’t!” she sobs back “It’s too fa —”
I can tell the exact moment her Nightmare loses patience from the equine snigger. It jumps and bucks at the same time.
Felicia is too surprised to react. She is also late to realize that she rode without saddles and therefore without stirrups. Her mouth twists into a beautiful ‘o’ of surprise while we prepare to receive her before she can plant herself face first into the platform.
We only need five seconds to stop her screaming, mostly because I decide to slap her.
“I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m fine!”
“You really are,” I observe.
“I will stand up now.”
“That would be best.”
“Boss!” Urchin interrupts. “We have guards coming in!”
“TO ARMS!” Alexander roars.
The godling team leads the way into the entrails of the fortified car. I realize it was not meant to be defended once breached because the interior is designed for ease of use, crates of supply and racks lining its lengths. Our mortals dive behind cover with practice ease while the coming guards do the same and a fierce firefight ensues.
Honore and Whistles form the background around the pivot of Alexander Bingle’s devilish marksmanship with potshots and the occasional repositioning. Bill provides bursts of coach gun fire while Felicia covers the far door, her accurate shots felling and discouraging anyone who dares enter. Us three vampires find ourselves redundant in front of this well-oiled machine. I admit to being impressed. Slowly, the guards are taken down until the last of them retreats through the door. A few surrender when they realize they are cut off, quickly bound with ropes fortuitously found around the place. The squad moves up to the front of the carriage where Alexander takes a quick peek through the door. Sustained fire pings against the steel wall.
“We have to push through!” he exclaims.
“That seems unwise, monsieur,” Honore placidly replies as more bullets impact the car.
“An armored car is built to defend itself against all directions,” I lie. “Look for murder holes.”
It does not defend upwards but mortals almost never look upwards. Downwards as well, but I dislike digging.
“She’s right! Here,” Bill says.
He pushes a lever, muscles bulging under the effort. Thin slits open towards the exterior. The return fire from the squad is immediate and violent. I peer through the opening as well to find that the next car is merely a platform upon which strapped containers await, covered in tarps. It offers precious little cover and, just as importantly, the biting wind makes protracted battles untenable. The guards immediately retreat to the next car, a few of them disabled as they run. One theatrically grabs for his heart before falling to the abyss, which I would score as a passable performance if he were pretending. Truly, the Bingle aura affects the strangest things.
“Forward! We must not give them time to regroup!”
We race ahead, jumping boldly over obstacles. Honore slips at some point but Bingle grabs him as he falls, setting him back on his feet.
“Merci, monsieur. When this is over, let us please head south, hmm?”
The next carriage soon comes into view. This one is a standard passenger car with seats, two on each side of an alley, except for the middle where they have been torn off to form a barricade. Heavy fire rains at us and we are forced to duck as some find their way through the wood planks.
“I don’t suppose this one has levers?” Bill asks with little hope.
“I’m afraid not, old chap,” Bingle replies, his native accent slipping in more heavily. “That leaves us only one direction.”
“Up,” Bill sighs.
“I am coming as well,” John states.
No one objects as the two climb up. I take a quick glance inside. Someone fires. Honore unloads his revolver in their general direction with little result.
“We should get their attention on ourselves or we put Bill and John at risk,” I say.
“Yes, but how?”
“I will get in using a diversion.”
I use a knife to gut a dynamite stick, letting the nitroglycerin-soaked dust blow in the wind, then I light the fuse and toss it in.
The result is immediate.
“BOMB! A BOMB!”
I use the confusion to slip in and hide behind a seat. There should be enough backrests in the way to block incoming gunfire but I remain concerned, doubly so when Alexander joins me.
“Hah, it fouled,” someone observes.
Which is when we shoot them, or rather, at them. A firefight ensues during which I grit my teeth in annoyance at the fact I have to miss. I find it especially jarring that one of them just stands there, most of his torso uncovered while he calmly fires shot after shot in my general direction, and I have to stay in cover or it would be strange and the bloody humans keep missing him. He is such an obvious target! And he is shooting at me! Why can they not just take him out? Ugh!
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I cannot take this anymore and stand up as well. Our eyes meet. He smirks, and shoots.
And misses.
“How can you fail that shot? I am barely six yards away!” I exclaim with disbelief, “I am not even moving!”
I shoot him in the shoulder, eliciting a string of insults.
“Now that is entirely uncalled for!”
“Twat!”
“You are being quite rude,” I reproach.
Honestly, I have exercised great restraint in giving them a fighting chance rather than shredding them into conveniently-sized pieces, and this is how they repay my generosity? They could even survive the operation to be hanged instead of mangled. Scandalous. Back in my days… no Ariane, embrace the binglery. All is well.
We exchange more shots until a twin roar interrupts the proceeding. Bill and John ram the defenders from behind with the fury of a cavalry charge. The goons find themselves thoroughly outnumbered since they face not one but two unstoppable forces of nature. Molars fly left and right. Surrender follows quickly.
Once more, we find ourselves flushed with ropes, apparently the second most important supply aboard a train after goons of middling intellect. Tying the prisoners down barely stops our elan. There are only two more cars before the locomotive, and I presume most of the gold would be in the front car. We carefully cross the gap leading to the next wagon and find a hybrid storage and passenger space where a significant number of men awaits us, almost two dozen spread behind barricades in columns, their heads poking above the red upholstery under the light of a few lanterns. Alexander gets a heroic scratch across the cheek just for looking. We boost Felicia over just for her to lose her hat to a shot.
“I think they won’t fall for the same trick twice!” Bingle says.
The wagon is silent, but ahead, we can hear voices rising above the howling winds.
“They are uncoupling the wagons,” I say.
“What?” Bingle says and the squad’s attention falls on me.
“I can hear them from here. They are busy uncoupling the wagons but the mechanism is frozen. If they manage to break it open, the locomotive will move on ahead and it will be quite light. I am not sure if we will manage to catch it again.”
“Curses. What should we do? Move to the sides?”
“This would be suicide,” Bill says, and I would agree for a mortal. Not without pitons and certainly not in an environment when one can easily catch a mouthful of tree.
“I believe the time has come for the three of us to make a difference,” I tell the squad.
“How?” Honore asks with suspicion.
“Thanks to our curse, we can see in the dark.”
Bingle frowns, then —
“Ooooh. Go ahead then. I trust you, Ariane.”
As well he should. I take a furtive glance at my first target and fire.
Naturally, I do not shoot at the glass casing of the lantern because our purpose is to cross the wagon, and that would be extremely difficult if said wagon were on fire. I use my rifle to snap the supporting handle and watch the lantern fall behind a crate, the light now suffuse and intimate. A peppering of shots answers while I wait behind cover, until the man in charge roars at them to stop. I pick that moment to disable the second and third lanterns in quick succession.
Urchin, John and I crawl through the open door under the cover of the ensuing chaos. A few shots come off but we are close to the ground and have no need to dodge. The herd of mortals stinks of fear, of confusion, of distrust, a rare cocktail that the Courtiers will have to resist for now. We are close. We slip among them.
“Enough of this!” a man with more control than the rest screams. He lights a match, his face an island of light in an ocean of darkness.
“Focus! You, go find that lantern that just fell. And the rest of you lot, look forward, even if you can’t see much! With the yabbering of those they could already…”
The man finally notices the main sail posturing as a coat to his side. The hand carrying the match travels up, and up and up, towards the ceiling, until it meets John’s impassive mug. My minion has raised quiet intimidation to an artform. He slowly bends forward with the ponderousness of a toppling, centennial tree. His cheeks puff up. He blows on the match.
The flickering flame dies.
All hell breaks loose.
We move through the crowd with ease, delivering punches and throwing people against the walls, barrels, and each other. On a whim, I quietly signal that they may feed while I finish disabling the louts. A quick check on the squad shows them near the door, staring in owlishly to what must be indistinct shapes wiggling in the shadows to their mortal eyes. I finish the mop up with a bit more speed before crossing the threshold to the space between the first and second car, where a bunch of semi-competent men try to pry open the coupling mechanism. They attempt to pull up a pair of pins from their links by using a bar, but the car is moving fast and the half-frozen mechanism resists their efforts. They work under the supervision of Mr Adler who stands in complete horror when I appear into view. I use this opportunity to kneel by the closest team and release my Magna Arqa. As expected, the next wagon contains the gold. I make no particular efforts to veil my eyes with illusions, so when the guards look up, they find two dark, slitted pupils surrounded by purple light.
“Boo.”
They scream and jump out, which I admit is not just expedient but represents their best chance at life. The second pair stands up just for John’s trunk-like arms to grab them and pull them back into the darkness where their cries are quickly silenced.
In reality he walked back five steps and muzzled them because we are playing nice, but Addler does not know better.
“You! You! The safecracker! It is all your fault!” he screams, finger pointed in accusation.
I shrug.
“Truly unfair accusations.”
“Only some devilish happenings could have led to this! I did not dream the flying skeletons! There is evil at bay and I know you have something to do with it. A young woman as a safecracker who pierced through the vault in record time? Horseshit. I do not know how you did it, but I know you are a devil-worshiper! A witch! Something of the sort. I should have known that Bingle man was a degenerate when I realized he surrounded himself with negroes, savages, catholics, and women!”
“A dreadful list,” I comment while inspecting my fingers. “I am sure you find the situation very unfair.”
“How dare you…”
“And yet I cannot help but notice you were ready to abuse a kind soul’s naivete for profit. Your scheme to make away rich as Midas failed and now you search for a culprit. Even your religious outrage reeks of hypocrisy. Did you perhaps forget the commandments? Which ones have you violated recently?”
“I have not come here to exchange barbs with a woman.”
I shrug again.
“You may save them for Mr Bingle. I am sure he will be curious. After all, it is not my story.”
“Indeed not,” Adler hisses.
He removes a revolver from a thick pocket and opens fire.
The first three shots go wild because the train turns at that moment. The fourth as well when the light of the moon falters for an instant, masked by a thick cloud. I notice the fifth will land and so I take a step to the side, dodging it, then step back. Adler overcompensates and that sixth one misses as well. He should have aimed for the center mass instead of for my head. Amateur.
I drink in the expression of sheer panic on his face as he turns and runs, the door soon slamming behind him. The last bastion. I assume the judge and his most loyal followers will be there.
The rest of the squad is quick to join me on the small platform. They eye the fortified door and its current lack of defenses with suspicion. A wise defender would have opened the murderholes and laid down suppressive fire, I suppose, but the car remains silent.
Meanwhile, I hear a strange noise above, a low hum under the flap of fabric. It sounds strangely familiar. Too familiar. Wait… oh.
I should have seen that one coming.
“Only this last obstacle and we can reclaim our honor!” Bingle roars.
Ah, to invite misfortune upon one’s head with such wanton abandon. If I had not heard said misfortune approaching, I would have been tempted to slap him now.
Suddenly, top-of-the-line floodlights powered by an onboard electric generator of revolutionary make bathe the area in a pale, unforgiving radiance. So intense is the glare that the humans raise their hands in reflex, their night vision ruined. The hum is so loud now that it can be heard over the chug of the nearby locomotive. An expert helmsman keeps the light centered on us despite the train’s speed. We do not have to wait for long for the newcomer to present himself.
“This is Captain Gilder of the USAN Independence. You are hereby ordered to stop the train immediately and submit yourselves to inspection or we will resort to immediate and lethal force. Any survivors will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You have ten seconds to comply. Ten!”
“Oh my,” Urchin loudly says for all to hear as we rush back into the carriage. “If it is not the flagship of the United States’ brand new air navy, the Independence, a flying vessel designed for war from the ground up!”
We take cover among the piled crates while the mortals wait for the inevitable onslaught.
“Designed and built by Illinois Guns of Liberties in collaboration with Skoragg Heavy Industries, a warship the size of a large brig with two armored bottom towers carrying state-of-the-art machine guns under an experimental bulletproof glass, a top speed of sixty-five miles per hour and an autonomy of eight hundred miles. Two main guns on the top deck lets the crew of sixty-four rival a warship in terms of destructive firepower, bringing the thunder wherever it is needed then climbing up before retaliation can hit. The most versatile force in the arsenal of our glorious nation.”
“Will you stop that? The irony has not failed to escape me, yes.”
“What irony?” Felicia asks.
Before I can reply, the countdown reaches its end.
“Zero. Open fire!”
Bullets sweep over the train, breaking the windows of our current place of hiding. Shards of glass and wood rain down on us. The din is infernal. Thankfully, most of the attention remains on the lead carriage. The sound of metal hitting metal at muzzle velocity precludes any discussion and for a while, we can only hunker down and wait for that storm to pass.
Eventually, it does. The ship takes some elevation and accelerates away from us to the right. I admire its predatory hull with the retractable turrets as it flies away on stretched sails, enchanted rods singing with aura. A good sight.
“Curse that ship. Can we take it down? With dynamite, perhaps?” Bill yells.
“Certainly not!” I scoff.
“Ariane is right, Bill, those are the army. Good guys. If we do destroy the ship, how many of them would die? Do not lose sight of our goal,” Alexander says reproachfully.
“Oh. Right.”
“We must get to Adler before it returns! Quickly, forward!” the godling continues.
All of us have miraculously made it through the ordeal by virtue of the gunner aiming too high. We rush ahead to the fortified door to find it locked.
“How do we open this?” Bill asks. “Dynamite?”
I want to complain that dynamite is not the answer to everything. I would know because I tried. Just then, the train leaves a patch of forest. The ground falls to our right, revealing a large plain with the lights of a small city in the distance and, beyond that, wilderness as far as the eye can see. It also lets us watch the path the rails will follow before heading back to the left, including a bridge over a small chasm. This happens just in time to reveal the Independence lining with said bridge. A powerful detonation shakes the very air, a plume of smoke wafting from its floating form. Next to it, the bridge turns to shrapnel.
We enter another patch of wood.
“We are on a schedule, monsieur!” Honore says.
“We cannot force the door!” Bingle replies.
“Use the sword,” I hiss in his ears.
He hesitantly reaches for the handle on his side.
“Now, or we all perish!” I lie.
In one smooth motion, Alexander draws and slices the lock and part of the frame. We immediately pile on to see a crowded interior much like the back carriage, this time much less crowded. Four guards stand awkwardly with their hands on rifles they seem unwilling to use. The judge Bingle meant to stop stands to the side with a defeated air, mustache dropping and eyes filled with tears. He is a portly man with the affable appearance of an old, meek gentleman. We find Adler hiding behind a slab of steel, only parts of his face visible.
“It is over, Adler. Surrender!” Bingle yells with righteous anger.
“Never!”
“He is right, old boy, the game is up,” the judge adds.
Adler turns and shoots him in the heart with his revolver. The judge falls, a red-tinged hand clutched to the chest.
“I know this! I KNOW THIS! And you shall all come with me, you demon spawns! We will all laugh with the devil together!”
“You are mad.”
“And you are dead! This is about vengeance now!”
Adler huddles behind his steel slab and waves his gun at us. Sadly, there are no easy covers in range but I need not worry. As the traitor lifts his weapons, so does Bingle. The insufferable Godling switches guard and wields the dragon claw like a harpoon.
“It is not, and you are missing the point.”
He throws as the first shot misses him by a hair. The sword beautifully arcs through the car’s interior, landing square in the middle of the slab. It goes through the reinforced steel like a hot knife through butter. A dreadful gurgle spells the end of our foe.
“But I won’t — “
“No time for this!” I yell to spare us yet another abominable pun, “the brakes!”
We race to the locomotive, finding it empty. Bill pulls the lever and the train lurches. In front of us and slightly to our right, the demolished bridge and its guardian airship await our compliance or our fall.
We slow down.
I run a quick calculation, realizing we cannot possibly stop in time. A brief examination of the chasm shows that there will be no secret cave of conveniently placed garden-sized pillows and I take the immediate decision to apply a corrective course to the plot before it ends the arc with my head planted in the landscape.
“John,” I whisper, “get behind and slow us down. Do not stop us immediately,”
“Understood.”
We all watch the cliff approach with trepidation. Despite a curiously unexpected speed drop, it becomes clear we will still fall. I also realize that the bridge being fragilized, we might destroy what is left of it with our presence. At the last moment, I call upon my Magna Arqa and grab the rear compartment with roots, staying close to the ground to avoid detection. The mortals almost fall when the increased pull destabilizes the locomotive, yet the result speaks for itself. The locomotive stops at the edge of the bridge, the front wheel already hanging over the void.
The bridge takes this moment to dramatically collapse. It causes us to fall by a foot reaching a balance. The bridge’s heavy structure disappears into the gorge below in a great cascade. Truly, that Captain Gilder is so reckless! Does he not know how expensive a bridge is? Not to mention we almost died!
I harbor the thought for a fragment of an instant before realizing the extent of my hypocrisy. I cannot exactly criticize anyone for airborne recklessness. Or ship-based destruction for that matter.
We all wait above the abyss, silent but for the sounds of panicked breaths.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, the day is saved! Hurray!” Alexander says.
“Come out with your hands in the air slowly or we will open fire again!” Captain Gilder yells from his megaphone.
“I think the night is not quite over yet,” I suggest.
“Not to worry, Ariane! As soon as I show them my marshal badge of office and explain the situation, I am certain all will be clear!”
I do not know if I should be relieved or frustrated by the fact he is most likely right.
***
“How fast did you say they were going?”
Captain Gilder watched the investigator pass a gloved hand over the thick white beard that escaped from below his scarf. The man had knelt by two strange furrows by the track in the dim light of this winter’s morning. At their bottom, the white of crusted ice gave way to leaves, then the black of a healthy soil. If he didn’t know better, he’d say they looked like someone had dug their feet in and let themselves be carried over a distance. Of course, that was impossible. The person would have to be harder than steel.
“Fifty miles per hour, sir, maybe more?” he replied.
“And they started slowing down here?”
“Around those parts, sir. Yes. I think I recognize that rock over there, even though…”
“It was night and you didn’t have a good look.”
“Yes sir, sorry sir.”
“That was for the best.”
“Sir?”
The investigator stood up slowly, knees creaking in the unforgiving cold. Captain Gilder thought he might be a bit too long in the tooth to be trudging around in the snow like that, but his intellect was keen, that was for sure.
“Captain, the distance between this point and the broken bridge is less than eight hundred yards and I estimate a train of that size with two armored cars would have needed at least a mile and a half of track before coming to a full stop. At the very least.”
“That’s… impossible.”
“So it is,” the man said, “so it is, just like nothing we know of could have deformed and partly shredded the rear armored wagon. And yet, here we are.”
He smiled a little bitterly.
“You did not happen to see a peculiar man or woman among the passengers? Someone aloof and confident despite their age, perhaps? Someone who never showed much concern.”
The captain searched his memories. It did not take long.
“Hmm, yes. Three of them, in fact.”
“Three you say? Oh dear. Well, all is well that ends well. We have recovered the gold. The criminals have been captured. The last word remains with the law.”
“You do not want to know what happened?” Captain Gilder asked, somewhat scandalized that an investigator would not seek the truth.
“I know enough. As for you, young man, let me give you a piece of advice. If someone can, on a whim, stop a train in eight hundred yards instead of a mile and a half without anyone on board noticing, the last thing you want is their undivided attention. Now let’s go back to the ship. It’s cold as an old grave out here.”
***
“I’ll be brief, Mr Bingle. We want you to keep the sword.”
The man behind the desk crossed his hands over the desk, a pleasant expression on his elegant face. Not a hair, not a strand of fabric was out of place.
“Are you sure? It seems precious. Such a blade…”
“Could accomplish great deeds in the right hands and horrible crimes in the wrong ones, yes. I believe it would benefit… all of mankind more if you used it rather than us letting it languish in storage. After all, a good tool is to be used, would you not agree?”
“I don’t know, sir. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have it. But what if I lose it?”
“Oh, we are confident it will find its way back into your hands, somehow. Call it intuition.”
“If you say so, sir. Then I accept.”
“Excellent. We dared not hope you would join our initiative to make the world a better place. Welcome to the true war, Mr Bingle. Fate has guided all of us this day.”