The Nine Read online

  Sagum smiled as he trudged on. “If you say so.”

  “Yeah, I do say so.” They marched on for another moment. Teran felt Sagum’s bemused attention still on her. She needed to deflect. “What about you? You think you got everyone else figured out, but why are you here?”

  “I’m a doubter,” he replied simply. “I doubt everything I hear. I doubt the Ortus Deorum. I doubt the word of Cato McGown. With that comes a certain…I don’t know…we’ll call it driving curiosity. I’m not content to sit back and doubt. I want to know. I need to know. I need to see it for myself.”

  “Curiosity is a helluva thing to risk your life for.”

  “Depends on how strong the curiosity is. Me, I can’t stand not knowing. I’d never be able to live with myself if I had an opportunity to see the truth with my own two eyes and passed it by. It would haunt me for the rest of my days. And I’m not willing to be haunted.”

  “Well, I hope you discover what you’re looking for.”

  Sagum smiled at her again. Winked. “I hope you do, too.”

  Teran thought she’d deflected his unwanted attention. When it came back onto her, she felt heat creep up her neck, and disliked everything that told her about herself.

  She shifted the shoulder straps of her pack and quickened her pace, leaving Sagum behind.

  ***

  The first sign Perry had of anything being wrong was when Whimsby halted.

  He raised his hand, and the others trundled to a stop in a single file line. Perry immediately behind Whimsby, and then Stuber, and then Teran, and lastly, Sagum, panting and looking both pale and flushed.

  Teran gave Sagum a frown. “You were always so good in the mountains.”

  “Not the same,” Sagum grunted. “The air here. It’s so wet. I can’t breathe. And I’m not used to hiking with a hundred pounds on my back.”

  “Teran seems fine,” Stuber commented without turning around.

  Whimsby wiggled his fingers. “Quiet, please. I’m listening.”

  Perry stepped to his side, careful not to crunch the leaves around him. So many leaves. So many trees. So much fucking life. It was outrageous. Perry peered through the forest, which he found to be disorienting. It was such a mess. Too many shapes, and lines, and colors, everything going every which way.

  Perry was used to sand, and rock, and flatness. He was used to being able to see to the horizon. These woods felt claustrophobic.

  “What are you listening for?” Perry whispered after a moment of silence.

  “Paws,” Whimsby answered. “The rustle of fur against leaves.” He turned his head slowly, from right to left. Then stopped. Pointed. “There.”

  Perry saw nothing but more trees. “I don’t see anything.”

  “No. I can’t see them either. But they’re there.” Whimsby drew his revolvers and nodded in the other direction. “We should go this way. Quietly.”

  They began to walk again, navigating to the right of their original course, and going much slower than before, picking their way along and trying to be stealthy.

  “What are they?” Perry asked.

  Whimsby shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure. But there’s six of them. Bipedal. Furry. Approximately two hundred pounds each.”

  Perry felt his skin prickle like he was being watched and looked again in the direction Whimsby had heard the sound, but again perceived nothing beyond the shadows and branches and tree trunks. “You can tell all that by listening to them?”

  Whimsby nodded. “And they’re predatory, I believe.”

  “Well, that’s fucking fantastic,” Perry hissed. “How do you know that?”

  “Because they’re trying to move downwind of us.”

  Perry looked to Stuber. “You catching all of this?”

  Stuber scanned, his rifle up, directing his attention to the left. He nodded. “I heard.”

  Perry snapped back to Whimsby. “How far away are they?”

  “One hundred yards or so. Spread out. Flanking.”

  “Should we run?”

  Whimsby shrugged. “Not sure how much good it would do.”

  “You’re very casual about all this.”

  “Well, they’re not going to eat me. I’m made of metal.”

  “Good. You can distract them then.”

  “Capital idea.” Whimsby stopped and turned. “They’re getting closer.”

  Sagum fixed Whimsby with wide eyes. “Then why are we stopping?”

  Whimsby stared into the trees. “I doubt we’ll outrun them. Might as well see what they want.”

  “Oh. Well. From what you said, it seems like they want to eat us.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps they want to talk.”

  Sagum wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Talk.”

  “Not everything in the Crooked Hills is a mindless eating machine. Just…most things. Perhaps these are intelligent. Perhaps they simply want to know why we are in their territory. It might be possible to converse with them somehow and…” Whimsby stopped and tilted his head. “No, they’re running now. I do believe you’re right, Sagum. They do want to eat you.”

  “Alright,” Perry snapped, abandoning any pretense of stealth. “Everyone get close to me!”

  They formed a tight circle with Perry at the center, dropping their packs as they did. Stuber to his right, his rifle snug against his cheek. Teran followed suit, looking infinitely more comfortable with the rifle than Sagum did. Whimsby stood at the front, revolvers held low.

  His head twitched upward. “Interesting. Four of them are in the trees now.”

  Perry heard it then. A rapid crashing through the underbrush.

  Dead ahead of them, movement. The swaying of a tree. A dark brown shape leaping through the air, and then disappearing behind leaves.

  “Oh, shit,” Sagum groaned. “What was that? Did you see that?”

  “Yes,” Whimsby said. “It appears to be at least partially primate.”

  Perry didn’t want to wait any longer. He activated his shield, encompassing the five of them in a shimmering dome of energy. The wet leaves around the perimeter sizzled and smoked and blackened.

  And Whimsby promptly pitched over onto the ground, convulsing.

  “What happened?” Sagum shouted.

  “I don’t know!” His attention was split, staring at how close Whimsby had fallen to the shield—a few inches to the right and he’d had have chopped the top of his head off—and a cluster of branches dead ahead that thrashed, a heavy weight bearing down on them.

  Something thudded to the ground just behind them and Perry spun, coming face-to-face with something he couldn’t quite describe in the moment. It was everything Whimsby had said it would be, and then some stranger parts. He caught sight of a cluster of black eyes, and a maw that stretched open, revealing a set of knife-like incisors.

  Then it vomited.

  The stream of yellowish bile struck the shield in a projectile jet, seeming to spread rapidly instead of dripping down. It sizzled and sparked, and as Perry stared at it he registered his shield draining. He couldn’t see the creature past the splatter, but then it leapt backward, hooking itself onto a tree trunk and shimmying up.

  Perry followed it with his longstaff’s muzzle. “It just puked on my shield!” he yelled in disbelief.

  “Perry!” Teran cried out. “Help us!”

  Perry whirled and found Teran and Sagum struggling to pull Whimsby back away from the shield. The convulsions that wracked his body had worked him even closer and the brim of his hat had singed. The mech’s eyes remained wide open, as though seeing something terrifying.

  Perry stooped and snatched an available foot and hauled backward, expecting Whimsby to move easily with the three people pulling him. Perry jerked and nearly fell over, like a dog running out of chain. Even without his pack, Whimsby was unbelievably heavy.

  “Stuber!” Perry called. “We need a hand!”

  Stuber snapped his eyes down to Whimsby and then bent, grabbing the mech by the arm. “O
n three! One-two-THREE!”

  The four of them pulled, and Whimsby slid across the ground a few feet.

  “Gods in the skies!” Stuber gaped. “He must be solid fucking steel!”

  “Behind you!” Perry yelped, pointing.

  Another dark-brown shape hit the ground just outside the shield and belched caustic bile across the surface of it, then leapt backwards, scuttling on all fours to the safety of a thick tree trunk.

  Stuber tracked it with his Roq-11. “The hell are they doing?”

  “That shit they’re spitting out,” Perry said. “It’s killing my shield!”

  Stuber rounded on him, his eyes wide and intense. “How long can you hold the shield up?”

  “I don’t know!” Perry found himself bearing down, as though on a terrible inner pain. He felt the depletion of his shield in an almost empathic connection to the clasp. Cold sweat beaded along his hairline. “Maybe another minute or two?”

  Sagum stood over Whimsby, slapping him in the face. “Wake up! Whimsby! Wake the fuck up!”

  To Perry’s surprise, Whimsby blinked and inclined his head. His eyes jerked in separate directions like he had no control over them. He opened his mouth and issued an eerie electronic warble, like a computerized groan.

  Within that strange, ear-aching noise, Perry detected a single word: “Shield!”

  Sagum snapped his head up to Perry. “You gotta extinguish your shield!”

  Perry goggled at him as another shape appeared at the corner of his vision—another polymorph running in at them, casting its juices all over the dome that protected them. “I’m not extinguishing the fucking shield!”

  Sagum thrust a hand at Whimsby. “It’s screwing him up!”

  Perry fought to think. He turned a rapid circle, now perceiving that the horde of beings had them surrounded, inching closer as their acidic spray spread across the dome, crackling and weakening it. Like they knew it was about to fail.

  Six. There were six.

  Can we take out six?

  But did they have a choice? The shield was going to fail any moment now, Perry sensed that like a part of him was dying. For a moment, he felt the panic rising, pulling at him, tearing his mind out of The Calm.

  “Don’t let it control you,” Perry whispered to himself as he continued to turn, counting creatures as they danced back and forth, seeing how agile they were, how quickly they moved, how strong the sinews looked, corded under matted brown fur. “Let the fear bore holes through you. You can do nothing about it. Death waits in the wings.”

  “Perry!” Sagum slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Alright!” Perry snapped, the tethers of fear breaking, allowing his mind to sink back into The Calm where he needed it to be.

  “Everyone back to back!” Stuber commanded. “Stand over Whimsby!”

  The four of them formed a tight square, with Whimsby’s jerking body in the center, their weapons up.

  “Pick a target,” Stuber barked. “Perry, give us a countdown!”

  Perry started to say “Three,” meaning to countdown, but then he felt the shield sputter, like a candle in the wind. “Now!” he bellowed.

  The shield disappeared. The remnants of the polymorph’s bile disintegrated into a mist of fine droplets that hung in the air.

  Perry let out a blast of energy from his longstaff as automatic gunfire erupted from behind him. The green bolt smashed into one of the polymorphs, ripping it in half vertically. The others surged forward with desperate hunger.

  Perry swung to the left, staring down his next target as it launched itself into the air, coming straight for him.

  Whimsby picked that moment to lurch to his feet, upending Perry and sending him sprawling into the dirt. He fired the longstaff by accident, straight into the dirt, creating an explosion of earth that scoured his face and blinded him.

  The polymorph sailed through the air that Perry had so recently inhabited, slamming into Whimsby with a dull sound of flesh on metal, like it had run into the side of a buggy.

  Perry rolled, blinking dirt out of his eyes. His vision was hazy and garbled. He saw the brown shape of the polymorph rebound off of Whimsby and tumble to the ground, not a yard from Perry’s feet. Whimsby whirled drunkenly, his eyes still going every which way. His dual revolvers searched for a target and fired haphazardly, the bullets lancing the ground just to the left of Perry’s head.

  Perry flinched away from it. “Whimsby! Stop shooting!”

  If Whimsby heard, he didn’t obey. He staggered out of the circle, his revolvers firing rapidly, but not hitting anything as he turned in the direction of the polymorph that had tried to tackle him. It scraped across the ground, clawed fingers and toes kicking up dirt and leaves as it got to its feet again.

  By pure chance, Whimsby’s whirling revolvers crossed its path and caved in its face.

  Next in line was Teran.

  “Teran! Duck!” Perry screamed.

  Whimsby’s revolvers went empty just before he slaughtered Teran. His feet didn’t seem able to keep up with the direction of his body and he slammed into the ground again, rolling and grunting as he pawed at his ammunition belt.

  Teran had ducked anyways, and now spun on her knee, bringing her rifle up as she did. Wide eyes affixed on something over Perry’s shoulder. “Perry! Lookout!”

  Perry had a slim second to simply look behind him—upward, as he lay on his back—and see the shape of the thing coming at him. It hit him with full momentum, its jaws clamping down on Perry’s shoulder. He screamed as he felt those long incisors penetrate down to the bone. He lashed out backwards with the blade of his longstaff and felt it connect in a hiss and splatter of dark red blood.

  The creature screamed, its mouth so close to Perry’s head that it seemed to pierce his ear drums, but it refused to let go. It began tearing its head back and forth. Perry felt his body leave the ground as he was jerked about like he weighed nothing.

  He caught a flash of movement in all the tumbling. Teran charged into him, ramming the muzzle of her rifle straight into the polymorph’s wide, flaring nostrils, and she fired a three-round burst.

  Perry felt the concussion of those rounds go through his entire body, hitting him in the face like a punch, and hammering in his wounded shoulder.

  The thrashing stopped. Perry, dazed, and barely able to think, just rammed the blade of his longstaff repeatedly against the vestiges of the thing’s head. It held him, the teeth still in him.

  “Perry!” Teran flinched back from his wild blows. “Hold still!”

  The command hit a small part of his brain still capable of reasoning, and he stopped striking at the jaws that held him. He registered, in a strange, distant sort of way, that he’d been completely jerked out of The Calm—his longstaff blade was dark, unenergized.

  Teran slipped her fingers under the creature’s jaw and pried upward.

  Perry watched with wide, horrified eyes, as six inches of blood-stained tooth was extracted from his flesh. Teran shoved whatever remained of the beast away from Perry, and the second he was freed he rolled away from it.

  He tried to get to his feet, leaning out on his wounded arm by instinct, and it collapsed under his weight, planting his face in the forest floor.

  “Easy, Shortstack,” a familiar rumble reached him, and he’d never before been so happy to get manhandled by Stuber, as the big man wrestled Perry to his feet and steadied him with two hands on his shoulder.

  Perry goggled about him, searching for more threats, trying to find The Calm again as his mind started to right its capsized self. “Did we get ‘em?” he stammered. “Where are they?”

  “Hey, whoa, easy,” Stuber shoved Perry’s searching longstaff down. “We got ‘em all. Stand down. Chill out.”

  Perry’s gaze fell on Whimsby, who was now seated on his ass, his legs sprawled out in front of him, thumbing a cartridge into his revolver. “Oh, gods,” Perry mumbled.

  Whimsby wore an uncharacteristic frown of concentration. He snapped the
revolver’s cylinder shut and started to bring up his revolvers, his wild eyes still zig-zagging about in his metal skull.

  Perry, Stuber, Teran, and Sagum all shouted in unison: “Stop!”

  Whimsby jerked the revolvers up at them, and for a brief moment, Stuber released Perry and snatched up his rifle, clearly intending to end the mech before he could end them.

  Just as Stuber’s rifle came to bear, Whimsby flicked his revolvers upwards, decocking the hammers. His eyes swirled in smaller and smaller circles and then finally came to rest on Perry, focused.

  He blinked. “Dreadfully sorry. Did I unintentionally shoot anyone?”

  Stuber lowered his rifle. “You just about capped Teran, but no, we’re all good here.”

  Sagum crossed to the mech, kneeling down in front of him. “What the hell happened?”

  Whimsby looked about him as though he didn’t recognize where he was. His eyes went from body to dead polymorph body, and Perry realized he was taking a quick tally. “Ah. I see you got all six. Excellent work.”

  “Whimsby,” Sagum pressed.

  Whimsby looked at him. “Yes?”

  “What happened?”

  Whimsby frowned. “Sorry. My core processor is in the middle of a diagnostic sequence. It will be a moment before I can access my short term memories. Please be patient.”

  Sagum looked back at the other three, flummoxed.

  Teran stepped up to Perry’s side, eyeing his mauled left shoulder. “We need to patch that up. Gods know what kind of shit is in those things’ mouths.”

  “Caustic vomit,” Stuber pointed out. “We know that one for sure.”

  Teran gave an evaluating gaze at all the human members of their crew. “Did anyone else get hurt?” Sagum and Stuber shook their heads. She turned back to Perry. “How about you sit down?”

  Perry nodded and tried to sit, then almost dropped. Stuber caught him by his good shoulder and eased him down to the ground.

  “Thanks,” Perry winced.

  Teran and Stuber took knees beside him.

  Teran pulled his shirt over his shoulder and pulled at the skin, exposing the deep bite marks. Perry watched with his teeth bared. “Those were long fangs,” she said. “I’m concerned about internal damage. How’s your breathing?”