Peter watched eagerly from underneath the drain as Owen worked a large stone loose from the top rung of his ladder. With a splash, the fist-sized rock dropped into the water, prompting Peter to step back.
After closing every side hatch and blocking alternate routes as best they could, the water surged past them at three feet high. The current was surprisingly strong, so they all held onto the ladder or the raft, hoping their combined weight and effort would keep them in place. The makeshift raft bobbed against the current as it was anchored to the walls with a rope.
The raft worked for now, but Peter was concerned about how the weight of the tiles would affect the craft. Owen agreed and set a few small charges on the spillway door, which was only opened about one-third of the way. Peter worried they wouldn’t have enough charges, but when he said as much to Owen, the operations officer just nodded and went back to work, as if the simple tilt of the chin was supposed to ease Peter’s mind.
Another large stone dropped and nearly hit Peter on the head.
“Hey!” he cried in surprise.
“Might not want to stand there,” Owen said, offering nothing more by way of apology. He had to work around an actual sewage duct in the ceiling that crossed near the reinforced drain, and he muttered a few choice words in frustration as he navigated the obstacle.
Owen pried another stone out and stuck his arm up and into the hole up to his shoulder. He smiled. “Just as I thought. The charges.”
The rest of the team perked up at the exclamation. Watching the man work in gas torchlight had been cold and frankly boring. It didn’t help that everyone was on high alert and jumped at every rat that turned the corner.
Van Dijk and Isabella held the brown paper-wrapped charges above water to keep them from getting wet. The two privates handed them up with great relief.
Owen set the charges around the inside of the drainpipe, working with speed and precision.
“Are we ready?” he asked, as he fed wires back out through the hole.
Captain Tobias Visser called everyone to attention.
“We’re going in blind, so we must move fast and clear out any enemies who might stand in our way. Owen will blow the stairs, and Van Dijk and Vandersteen will get the tiles out.”
“What about me?” Peter asked.
“You’re on point with Van Den Hoek and me,” Captain Tobias Visser said. “Give Owen the cover he needs and hold them off until we’ve cleared the room.”
Peter nodded as his hands instinctively gripped the pistols at his side.
“Vandersteen, you’re on top. Van Dijk, you’re down here, got it?”
Each grim-faced soldier nodded in turn.
The captain grunted with a nod to Owen. “Well then … Let’s desecrate this estate.”
The final cell moved the ladder away, and everyone gave the drain a proper blasting berth.
“Nyamar, forgive us,” Owen muttered as he hit the spark plug.
The drain shot down into the sewer like snot discharged from a pent-up sneeze and slammed into the ground. The displaced icy water rushed out in a ring and slapped Peter. Peter gasped and staggered back but recovered first, having the most experience acclimating to unpleasant circumstances.
A chunk of metal almost destroyed the ladder, and the drain nearly crushed the raft. Either outcome would have ended the Final Cell's precariously impromptu mission. To Peter's great relief, neither projectile made contact.
Owen ran forward and set the ladder under the new hole in the ceiling. Peter, being the most proficient at adapting to uncomfortable situations, got to it and started climbing first.
Spikes of fuzzy adrenalin shocked Peter’s nerves as he climbed the rungs. This was the first time he was going into battle vulnerable. He still felt a degree of his reckless confidence. Going head first into enemy territory so readily was probably a result of his former immortality, but the captain was right. They had to move quickly.
Peter stood on the top rung of the ladder and pulled himself up through scourged, hot stone to find himself in a dimly lit, expansive cave-like chamber. He gasped. Deposits of small glowing green crystal protruded from the ground and walls, illuminating the room.
A stacked pile of black glass chips towered near a stone staircase, counter-illuminating the chamber with an alien contrast of purple light. The purple and green light didn’t mix but contested to illuminate the room in an aberrant contest.
Peter pushed on despite not having a clear view of the dimly lit room. He scanned the shadows for movement but didn’t see anything.
[ Image: Ch 27.png ]
He approached the column of tiles and stopped when he saw it standing in the center of a black glass ring with interlacing tracks creating some arcane sigil. Glowing court script pulsed from the seal, and Peter hesitated to step past it. He couldn’t hope to understand Court technology, and the ring could be a trap. Peter heard the others climbing up behind him, and he stepped past the seal’s border, prepared for an abruptly violent death, but nothing happened.
Peter glanced back and saw the captain pulling himself up behind him. Peter didn’t offer a helping hand but moved ahead to clear the room of any threats. Peter blinked as his eyes adjusted, and he moved forward with quick, determined steps and a pistol gripped firmly in each hand. Captain Tobias and Van Den Hoek fell in step behind him as they scanned each side of the room.
Small pockets of fire flashed on the tower of tiles, and a dozen or so of the tiles disappeared from the stack with each flare. “What’s happening to the tiles?” Peter asked. His eyes flickered to the top of the stairs, where a heavy metal gate didn’t match its surroundings. It was probably a security addition that Rahashel commissioned in light of their last raid.
“Tiles are being pulled to the battlefield,” Captain Visser guessed.
So the battle at Julleck had started?
“And this seal?” Peter asked about the black glass sigil inlaid into the ground.
“Do I look like a lich?” the captain asked. “I don’t know.”
Something banged on the bars at the top of the stairs, and Peter saw several ghouls force the door open. It brought him great satisfaction that he could almost see their confusion as to how they had intruders behind their post.
Five silent ghouls rushed into the vault, brandishing their weapons.
“Incoming!” the captain cried as he dove for cover. He squeezed off a shot which hit a ghoul in the eye.
Van Den Hoek cursed as he also scrambled for cover.
Peter faced the oncoming enemy with a pounding heart. His head twitched once, and then he walked forward. He didn’t run or scream as he might have, but he kept a steady, consistent pace as he walked into the charge.
“The blight are you doing, Van Seur?” the captain barked as he fumbled to reload. “Take cover!”
The lead ghoul seemed to recognize Peter, and they all moved on him. At least, that’s what he thought. Either he was the easiest target, or he had made his way up to Rahashel’s most wanted. Either way, his face now seemed to act as a trigger to the stagnant sentinels.
The ghoul in front threw his spear at Peter’s face like a javelin.
Everything seemed to line up in his mind’s eye. The spear was going to hit him directly between the eyes. Peter frowned as he saw the missile speed at him and cocked his head to the side. He felt the air being split by the blade as the spear whistled past his neck, missing it by mere inches. The spear impacted the block of tiles behind him and sent a wave of the tiles cascading to the ground.
Peter raised both pistols. He fired the one in his left hand and hit the front ghoul in the chest, but it didn’t drop. Handling the weapon while down one finger was surprisingly challenging. Peter fired his right pistol, and smoke billowed from its shoulders as it died.
Peter continued his unbroken pace as he dropped the right pistol and pulled the old casing out of the gun on the left. The icy shell burned his fingers. He was used to the flash burn of frozen brass, but it didn’t go away suddenly as it used to. With burned fingers, he fed a fresh slug into the Slagter.
Gunshots hissed from behind, but he didn’t see who shot or if they hit. His only concern was the ghoul swinging at his neck with a short sword.
Peter brought up his left pistol to block, and the blade skipped against the Slagter, flickering sparks from the barrel. Peter drew his bayonet and plunged the weapon into the ghoul’s chest.
The court light flashed from its eyes, and it dropped.
Peter didn’t miss a beat or slow for anything. He understood the importance of pace and calm in a fight. Mistakes now were irrevocable, but you had to counter a ghoul’s momentum by cutting them down, not hiding. He advanced at a steady march. Not a blind charge like the ghouls, but a consistent, determined step, ready to prune anything that got too close.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The third ghoul in line tried to challenge his advance and struck at Peter with one of the exotic swords, with a blade that was first straight and then curved. Owen had explained to Peter that it was called a khopesh, though the blade was not anything Peter had a frame of reference for before the courts had come.
Peter stepped into the ghoul’s attack and slashed at the monster’s wrist.
Ghouls were powerful, but they were also dry and brittle. The ghoul’s momentum caused Peter’s blade to shear through its wrist. The top curve of the ghoul’s khopesh bit into Peter’s coat and sampled his flesh.
Peter filed the pain to a back recess of his mind. He would deal with the damage later. He slashed the ghoul across the eyes, without much by way of technique. With a snarl of his own, he dragged the monster to the ground in a bear hug. The ghoul fell and fumbled for a short sword with its offhand. Peter jumped on it and stabbed in the chest but missed the heart. Seeing it grab its short sword, he stabbed down, pinning its bicep to the ground. He smacked it across the face, backhand, and forehand, clobbering it with the bulky pistol.
The ghouls showed no sign of feeling pain, but the jarring blows seemed to disorient it.
Peter saw a hand sickle streak at him from the corner of his vision, and he gasped. He looked up as it rebounded off Captain Visser’s Officer’s blade. The other two had abandoned their cover and joined the melee.
Peter put his pistol against the thrashing ghoul’s chest and pulled the trigger, sinking the slug into the right place and killing the ghoul. He loaded his pistol and was on his feet by the time the captain and the Director had finished the other two.
“What kind of reckless fighting was that, Van Seur?” Captain Visser demanded. “Might I remind you, you’re not immortal anymore!”
Captain Visser didn’t need to remind him. His smarting shoulder did that on its own.
Van Seur raised his gun and shot down an enforcer who was sprinting down the stairs, sending the man tumbling to the bottom. He surprised himself with the shot. He usually waited for a point-blank target to fire. But becoming more comfortable around guns, he could tell his aim was improving.
“I don’t have a lot of self-preservation training,” he justified as he strode forward and reloaded his pistol, turning it upside down and shaking out the hot shell. “Let’s go.”
The three men in point escorted Owen to the stairs. Owen frowned as he examined them.
“I can’t blow the stairs,” he decided.
“Then we’ll just have to hold them off,” the captain said as he readied his sword and pistol.
Owen dug deep into his operations bag and produced a strange device. It looked like two rolls of coins encased in paper with several wires sticking out. Above the estate, an alarm bell rang, and they heard the running of many feet and the shout of enforcers.
Owen slammed the metal barred gate shut, and it clicked as the lock fell into place; then, he twisted the wire of the strange package around the lock and tapped an ignition spark plug. The paper sputtered and spat, then flickered and flared with bright white light. The searing glare grew so bright that Peter had to look away.
Unseen men shouted from the other side and shot blindly at the light and the men behind it. Owen let out a park of pain as a bullet found his forearm.
“Get back!” Captain Visser barked, and all the men ran back to the block of tiles.
Owen looked pale as he twisted a windlass on a tourniquet. Several more enforcers fired blindly, bullets and slugs scattering glass chips and shattering green crystals on the wall.
“That heat charge should fuse the lock,” Owen said through clenched teeth.
The sputtering light of the heat charge was blinding. Peter couldn’t look at the gate and suddenly realized he was still breathing hard. The fight’s exhaustion, combined with his all-nighter, had left him completely drained.
His hand with a loaded gun twitched involuntarily. His stomach dropped nauseatingly as he inwardly and deliberately reminded himself that resetting himself was not an option.
“Van Seur. Help load up the tiles!”
Peter nodded and holstered his pistol before retrieving his other dropped firearm and joining Isabella at the tile pile. She hastily raked tiles into sacks with her hand and handed them down the hole to Van Dijk.
Peter looked at the stack, hit by the foreboding realization that it would take them hours to extricate them all. He snatched a bag and reached to shovel the tiles when the tiles he reached for coincidentally disappeared in a puff of heatless fire. He hesitated. Rahashel’s forces could call the tiles directly from the vault. How?
He looked down at the seal he stood on. The lighting in the class circle pulsed every so slightly every time a pocket of tiles disappeared. He felt like a monkey trying to understand a train engine. Court technology may have been too sophisticated for him to understand. Still, one didn’t need to understand an engine to know that jamming a wrench in the gears would be disruptive.
Peter drew his pistol and shot an element of the glass sigil at his feet. Spall and glass sprayed his boots painfully but didn’t penetrate the leather. When the black glass shattered, the court script sputtered and died as the seal went down.
“What was that?” the captain asked as he remained at the ready, facing the firing heat charge.
“I think we just took their transportation means away,” Peter said, noting that no additional tiles vanished in a puff of fire. The only purple light came from the tiles themselves.
The room was somehow more ominous without the eerie purple writing lighting up the glass ring under their feet, but Peter didn’t have time to gawk. He holstered his pistol and began to shovel tiles into his bag.
It was the first time he had seen a time tile up close aside from the tracking tile Anubis had planted on him. It looked just like Anubis’ tile, except the glyph on it was decidedly more simple. As he filled his sack, Peter realized the fuel cell tiles writing was identical. They were made of the familiar semi-clear black glass with white specs illuminated by the glyphs’ violet glow.
They made progress faster with two people, but it wasn’t going to be soon enough.
“Come on, guys!” Peter cried. “Help us out!”
Captain Visser and Director Van Den Hoek momentarily looked at him before abandoning their guard position.
“The sooner we can get out of here, the less likely we’ll need to hold the position.”
Owen agreed and tried his best to help with his one good arm.
“Get below, Owen,” the captain commanded.
The operations officer nodded and headed for the hole.
Bag after bag, Peter shoveled tiles away.
On the iron gate, the flickering heat charge dimmed, and Peter saw the dark figures of enforcers and ghouls as they tried to contend with the gate. Several of them started to take blind shots through the bars.
“Vandersteen, get down below!” the captain cried, and Isabella took a shot at the gate before slipping into the hole. They hadn’t taken even a quarter of the tiles.
Their only cover was the slowly shrinking stack of tiles; as they got away with more tiles, their cover would shrink.
Peter looked around at the inner seal on the floor and raised his pistol as he began to shoot and shatter random points of the nexus.
“Van Seur, shoot at the enemy, not the floor,” the captain barked.
“Captain, this ring is some form of displacement matrix,” Peter said. “We don’t need to get all of the tiles; if we keep it offline, it should give the people of Julleck a chance!”
“It’s already down,” he said. “It’s not glowing.”
“But if they get it up —”
“If you two are done talking,” Director Van Den Hoek bellowed as he pointed at the gate. “Let’s go!”
The metal gate with the fused lock was engulfed in purple fire, and the bars rusted and rotted away in seconds as if exposed to a thousand years of neglect condensed within seconds. The heat charge died, and standing at the gate was a very angry-looking ram-headed man.
Khnum was dressed in his regular scholarly robes and looked like a king who had been asked to empty a chamber pot. He grabbed a small round clay jar from his belt and hurled it at the three of them.
Director Van Den Hoek, aware of the approaching lich, shot the pottery just as it left his hands. The clay jar exploded in purple flame, engulfing the lich.
Khnum’s usual bored, polite expression was shattered by his horrendous screaming as his clothing and flesh caught fire.
“Let’s go!” The three remaining Nine Fingers Agents spun for the hole. They were not equipped or prepared to face a lich.
They left many thousands of tiles behind but had managed to stuff away dozens of bags for themselves. Peter was the last to reach the drain hole. He slid for the pit, and took a final shot at Khnum. His shot went wide, setting free a wide spray of green chips from a mineral deposit.
“I know Anubis has your girl, Van Seur!” Khnum hissed. “In coming here, you’ve killed her!”
The blood left Peter’s face. He had been seen, and now he doomed Iris; he spared a look at the lich who was trying to beat flames from his thick robes. “I’m still coming for her!” he cried before dropping down.
Peter missed proper footing on the way down and fell into the water. It hurt, but the water softened the blow.
“All here?” Owen asked. “Hold on.”
The operations officer hit a spark trigger with a wire running down the tunnel. Further down, they heard a roar and felt a tremble. Owen had blasted the spillway doors.
Peter absently looked behind him, and a few moments later, a surging white wall of water came pounding down the sewer.
Peter gasped and held onto the raft as Isabella and Van Dijk cut the ropes holding the craft.
“There they are!”
Peter looked up at the hole and found himself staring into the barrels of at least five rifles. Peter held his breath. The water swell picked him up past his chest and lifted him off his feet.
Water crashed, rifles fired, and people screamed; the sounds all mixed as the Final Cell was shot down the tunnel.
Peter almost lost his grip as the raft was jerked down the sewers.
Peter screamed an uncharacteristically shrill cry — or was that Van Dijk? Their shouts mixed together as they flew, surging this way and jerking that way. Everyone held on and used their legs to push away if they got too near a wall. The raft spun, and everyone with it.
Peter’s gut lurched and fell with every rise and fall of the rushing water. It had taken them hours to get under the estate; they got out much faster. After rushing down the sewer and swallowing so much water, which had unfortunately been cross-contaminated by ruptured sewage pipes, Peter began to seriously fear he’d drown; Peter saw the pinprick opening of light ahead.
The craft started to turn, and Peter saw the jagged metal remains where they had sawn off the first sewage grate. They didn’t cut that one very close to the wall in haste, so the jagged barbs protruded dangerously.
The craft began to spin pushing Peter towards the mangled metal.
Peter cried as he kicked off the wall, hoping to send it the other way, but Captain Visser was faced with the same problem, so he kicked the opposite wall at the same time.
Seeing the metal fly at him at an alarming rate, Peter let go of the raft and was thrown and plunged underwater, head under feet and back again. It wasn’t enough; his upper thigh slammed against the metal, and Peter screamed, getting a mouth full of water as he was ejected out of the sewer behind all of the others.
The outlet poured water into what was a more natural stream.
The atmostorm was bright on the horizon, and the sun actually shone at its apex, but Peter saw them only briefly before he was rolled again. He coughed and gasped as he came up and clawed at the water without kicking. His right leg was getting cold quickly. It had snagged on the barb, and nerves buzzed numbly as it bled.
Peter saw the net suspended between the banks of the river. Doctor Aarts waved them down, motioning for them to bring the craft ashore. Several bags of tiles had been lost in the escape, only to be caught in the net that spanned the river.
The others coughed and gasped as they dragged the sled up to the shore, but Peter caught hold of a dead bush and cried out unintelligibly.
He couldn’t bring himself to pull his leg out of the numbingly cold water.
“Van Seur!” Isabella cried, being the first to sense something was wrong.
Peter recognized that he was going into shock. It wasn’t something he had experienced when his wounds seemed to disappear, but now that he was losing blood that wouldn’t replenish itself, his body began to shut down non-vital functions.
Peter allowed a look, but the four-inch, deep gash sent his stomach rolling.
“Owen!” he cried. “I’m hurt!”
Doctor Aarts huffed. “You know we have a real doctor among us, right?”
The captain, Van Dijk, and Van Den Hoek ran to pull Peter out of the water. Gone was the frustration that had burned in the captain’s eyes, replaced only by concern for the well-being of one of his men. Despite the chilling cold of the water and the air, inwardly, that warmed Peter.
The men carried him to the wagon, and he bit his lip as his wound began to sting. Peter decided that initial and lingering wounds’ pain were very different. He wasn’t used to this.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” He muttered through shivering teeth.
“Don’t talk like that,” the young captain chided. “You did well, soldier.”
Then the captain turned to the doctor. “What do you think?”
“He’ll be fine, but I’ll need to act quickly,” he said academically. “And I’ll need to operate on the move. I can’t imagine they’ll let us escape with this without a chase.” Aarts shot a meaningful glance at Stalpia.
“No,” the captain agreed. “I can’t imagine they will.”