Jubal Van Zandt & the Revenge of the Bloodslinger Page 15

  According to the nav app, we’d made it less than ten miles, but we were both exhausted.

  “That leaves us just three or four miles to go tomorrow,” Carina said, handing over my reconstituted gruel pack. “We can find their village, spend some time scouting, then come in after dark.”

  I eyed my gruel, then upended the package and swallowed it all in one gulp before I could taste it. The hot goop traced a burning trail down my esophagus into my stomach. Because that’s what this trip needed, more heat.

  “Now you’re thinking like somebody with some common sense,” I said. “Stealth is hot. Just look at me.”

  She snorted and scooped a bite out of her package with the little wooden spoon that had come glued to the side. “How was the food, creature of luxury?”

  “Don’t quit your day job.”

  She laughed.

  I stood and stretched, then went off a ways to take a leak. When I came back, I climbed into my hammock tent.

  “Whoever set up the tents, now,” I said, wiggling my shoulders and butt to get comfortable, “That guy’s some kind of genius. He didn’t have much to work with, but he really pulled it off.”

  Through the window netting, I could see Carina shaking her head, trying to hold back a grin as she ate.

  I shut my eyes and tried to hold onto that image. Even without the white noise of an air conditioner, I was asleep in no time.

  ***

  It was pitch black when I opened my eyes again, and rain was pouring onto my tent. Our fire must have been doused. I strained my ears, trying to hear past the downpour and jungle night noises for what had woken me up.

  “Van Zandt!” Carina hissed.

  By the sound of her voice, she was right outside my hammock tent.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Don’t move, okay?”

  “What? Why not?”

  “There’s something big circling us.”

  I listened to the constant crackling and popping of rain on leaves, trying to hear what she heard. Guild knights came standard with hyperaural upgrades, possibly even noise-filtration nowadays. There was no way my unmodified eardrums could compete with hers.

  “Are you sure?” I whispered.

  “Yeah. You didn’t hear it growl?”

  “I was asleep until just a second ago.”

  “Are you serious? It was close by.”

  The story Carina’s mother had told her about the woman and kids being eaten by black oncas loomed in my brain. “What do you think it is?”

  “Shh.”

  I focused as hard as I could, but still couldn’t make anything out. The rain was too loud.

  If something bad was going to happen, my flame kigao should have been warning me. Maybe whatever animal Carina had heard had already moved on.

  “Do you still hear—”

  “Shh!”

  Undergrowth crashed, and Carina’s knuckgun went off twice. Carina grunted as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Something huge smashed onto my tent, caving it in and pinning me to the ground. I thrashed and shoved, on the edge of blind panic. I needed a knife. I couldn’t find the tent zipper. I couldn’t get the thing off of me. It was dead weight, hotter even than the soupy night air. But it wasn’t moving.

  Maybe one of Carina’s shots had killed it. I tried kicking and elbowing, but I couldn’t get free. The thing shuddered.

  I froze.

  It shuddered in rhythm.

  It was laughing.

  Out of all the creatures in the Soami rainforest that can laugh or mimic laughter, only one had promised to get me back twice now.

  That was why the kigao hadn’t woken me up. I wrenched one hand out from between the dead weight of the thing and my chest, then dug my fingers into the ribs of the thing.

  Carina wasn’t even bothering to silence the giggles now.

  “Slime whore!” I yelled, smacking her through the tent with my free hand. “Evil, siltbrained, parasite-fucker!”

  She rolled off the tent, still laughing like some sort of insane holostar villain.

  I ripped open my tent’s zipper. Rain dripped onto my head and shoulders, surprisingly cold for such a hot night. Water was already pooling in the spot she’d vacated.

  Carina was sitting cross-legged in front of my tent door, still laughing, seemingly oblivious to the water and mud that was probably soaking into the ass of her cammies.

  I reached out and shoved her. She rolled gracefully feet over head until she was kneeling a body length away, probably in the wet ashes that had been our fire.

  “Careful, Jubal,” she said, a grinning upward lilt to her voice. “Knuckgun’s still loaded.”

  “What kind of psycho uses live rounds for a practical joke?” I yelled. I still sounded angry, but inside I was laughing hysterically as a little girl with a wide pink scar on her cheek chased me through the trees.

  Another round of giggles bubbled out of her throat at my question. “What kind of psycho would bring blanks on a revenge mission?”

  “And you ruined my tent!” I jerked the nano-endoskeleton. It popped back into shape.

  “Your tent’s fine. You should’ve heard your voice. ‘What?! What was it?!’”

  “You’re a child,” I said.

  I crawled back into my hammock and zipped the tent shut. It was a poor substitute for a door slam, an undignified two-part zip, but it made Carina laugh harder, so I think she got the intent.

  In the darkness of my tent, I held my stomach and laughed until my throat hurt from the effort it took to stay silent. Being friends with a psycho was fun. And my skin was still warm where she’d been pressed against me.

  SEVENTEEN

  In spite of her middle-of-the-night prank, Carina was up before dawn and back to focusing single-mindedly on the revenge at hand. In the stormy gray-blue light, I could see that her tactical shirt and pants were covered in mud, but she didn’t seem to mind. The rain was still pouring down, so she probably figured the mud would either be washed away or lend her extra concealment.

  We packed everything we might possibly need during the day into our pockets, left the tents and our bags behind, then headed out.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the jungle had brightened to overcast when we set foot on the banks of the first dark pond an hour later. We crouched in the vegetation for a few minutes, watching the muddy area surrounding the pond for anything that might betray it as the water source for a magically locked-down brujah village. Corpse candles danced across the surface of the black water, and dead faces stared back out of the depths, their hair billowing out around them, but nothing else moved, and neither Carina nor I felt it like a sodee pop, so we moved on.

  The farther into the dark ponds area we traveled, the more the undergrowth thinned out, until finally Carina was able to put her machete away. We stopped to surveil six more dark ponds along the way, none of which caused any sodee pop sensations or showed signs of regular human usage.

  The ambient light grew brighter and brighter until the drizzle broke off. The sun peeked through the trees for a few seconds before disappearing again, but the black water of the dark ponds never changed hue.

  It was well after noon when we came to the eighth pond. It was significantly larger than the rest of the ponds we’d come across so far, and runoff from a huge carrion cypress was pouring into it like a waterfall, vomiting up black mist and distorting the corpse candles on the surface and the dead faces’ hair under the surface.

  Carina settled into a squat a few yards back from the tree line. I hunkered down beside her.

  Time passed.

  Nothing moved.

  Carina looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. This had to be it. Look at the mist, for crying out loud. And the tree? A coven of aguas brujahs couldn’t pick a more thematically consistent place to set up shop.

  I mouthed Closer? and shrugged.

  She nodded.

  We crawled to the sweeping cover of a willow on the pond bank. I went to
pull myself up into a crouch again, but something cold poured down my nose and into my eyes, tiny bubbles fizzing and popping. I blinked and scrubbed at my eyes as water welled up in them, my tear ducts trying to flush the acidic foreign substance out before it did any damage.

  When I looked up, Carina was doing the same thing.

  And over her shoulder, I saw it.

  The aguas brujahs’ village was primitive and tribal-looking, even compared to a puddle like Courten. The only structures were lean-tos made of mud, leaves, and the long bones of prehistoric or still-undiscovered creatures, with woven mats strewn across the mud floors for sitting and sleeping on. Altars were set up in the center of each hut with a clay bowl of black water as the lynchpin. The huts—and therefore the altars at each one’s epicenter—were set up in a semicircle around the far bank of the dark pond to most effectively harness its energy.

  Brujahs were going about their day, lying, sitting, walking around, talking, eating, or cooking over the big village bonfire whose smoke we could now see rising up toward the jungle canopy. I counted at least a dozen adults, maybe three or four kids. If not for the extra mud and their out-of-date but immaculate Guild Ministries to Soam clothing, I could have mistaken any one of them for the standard dirty homeless person or mutie.

  I turned to Carina to see what she wanted to do next, but our silent confab was interrupted. My wristpiece vibrated four times in quick succession. A local emergency alert signal. Carina’s must have been vibrating, too, because she frowned down at it.

  I grinned. That could’ve been bad. I hadn’t even thought to remind her to silence hers this morning before we left camp.

  Across the pond, all over the brujahs’ village, wristpieces were beeping the four-tone emergency alert.

  My wristpiece vibrated again, demanding I check the alert right now. I relented just to shut it up.

  Carina’s Guild file photo popped up on my screen followed by scrolling text.

  Emdoni Guild Knight Carina Xiao, daughter of Emdoni Guild Knight Cormac Xiao, Child Butcher. Wanted for multiple murders. Believed to be in the Giku area. ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. Any information or sightings respond immediately to this message.

  Beside me, Carina was glaring down at her wristpiece. She raised her head, looking across the dark pond to the brujahs, most of whom were in the process of reading the same emergency alert.

  Then she looked at me. Her eyes were a lighter green than I’d ever seen them, the color of glacial swamp ice.

  Before, going in under the cover of night would have given her the upper hand. Now, every minute that passed would allow the brujahs to dig in and protect themselves that much more effectively. She had to utilize her advantage while she still had one.

  All of this she told me with a look.

  I couldn’t see any alternative. I nodded.

  Across the pond, a brujah jumped to her feet and opened her mouth as if she were about to address the coven.

  Carina pulled her knuckgun and shot the brujah in the back of the head.

  The Bloodslinger had come to town.

  ***

  Sir Carina Xiao, the Bloodslinger, had received her name in a ceremony that followed her second active rotation on Emden’s eastern front—what Guild knights lovingly call “over east”—and preceded her seventeenth birthday.

  Shortly after she’d arrived over east, her patrol company had been ambushed by pagan raiders. Two of her company were killed outright. But Carina fucking Xiao and the remaining members of her company didn’t just unhorse and kill the raiders who had ambushed them. They unhorsed and killed the raiders, and then Carina fucking Xiao led her company in tracking the raiders back to their village of origin, slaying everything breathing, and burning the place to the ground.

  The record keeper of her patrol company had set his wristpiece to record as soon as they were ambushed, so if you’ve got an untraceable infoserve app and the time to dig through the Guild’s files, you can watch the whole thing. I did after making it back to Emden because Carina had never gotten around to telling me how she got her name.

  By the time she had finished leveling the raiders’ village, Carina was soaked in what was probably equal parts blood and sweat. It was running freely down her arms and face, dripping off her shortsword like water, and the chain-driven saw on the edge of her knuckgun’s guard threw red mist up into the air.

  At the very end, just before the record keeper stops the recording, he takes a visual head count of the remaining knights in his company to send in ahead of their return. When those last few seconds of footage get to Carina, you can see very clearly as she raises her sword arm, swipes her wrist across her face, then slings it out to the side, shedding bright red droplets of blood against the backdrop of a pale sunrise.

  Which is all to say that, when it comes to laying waste to a village, Sir Carina Xiao, the Bloodslinger, has a history of not messing around.

  ***

  Only a few of the aguas brujahs in the village panicked when Carina shot that first one. The rest remained calm, which made that first couple seconds of bloodshed eerily quiet.

  Carina picked off three more of the brujahs from her spot beside me. She was going for the ones who looked as if they were mounting a defense.

  While she did that, a pair of brujahs ran for opposite ends of the semicircle hut setup. They swept their arms out wide, still running, then brought them together and dove into the black water of the pond, perfectly synchronized. Their dives didn’t even make a splash.

  “The electricity is about to go out,” my flame kigao said, crouching beside me.

  “Shit.” I looked at Carina to see if she’d noticed.

  “Get down,” she said.

  She flipped the safety on a shrapgrenade, hit the button, and winged it over the pond into the village. She dropped to a crouch and covered her head with her arms.

  The surface of the black water rippled. Nothing had exploded yet.

  “Carina.”

  “The electricity is about to go out.”

  The shrapgrenade detonated with a plinging sound like metal hail. Bits of shrapnel ripped through lean-tos and brujah flesh alike. Now they were screaming.

  Carina sprang out of the crouch and sprinted for the village.

  Waves in the dark pond flowed toward the explosion.

  “The electricity—”

  “Carina, the pond!”

  Carina skidded to a stop, her boots making trails in the sandy mud of the bank.

  The mist coming off of the carrion cypress’s waterfall shifted, rolling toward her. The black waves of the pond crashed against the shore, then folded back in on themselves, stacking and boiling until a water monster as tall as the cypress stood in the wet mud of the pond floor. Dead faces twisted and screamed with rage inside the creature’s foamy black skin.

  Carina covered the brujahs in the village with her knuckgun and whipped out her machete with her free hand.

  The water monster flowed onto the bank. Carina whirled away. The monster crashed its fist down where she’d been standing. Carina chopped through its arm. Oily black water soaked into the dirt.

  The monster howled with the furious voices of the restless dead. In place of the arm Carina had chopped, the monster grew a huge morning star of spiked black ice. It swung at her. She rolled away. It swung again. She rolled again, this time up to one knee, and squeezed off three shots at the monster’s head. The bullets punched through, then sheared off at odd angles, leaving spikes of black ice in their wake.

  In the village, seemingly forgotten by the monster and Carina, four of the remaining aguas brujahs were at their altars, gulping down the liquid from their clay bowls.

  “Now, what are the odds that they’re just very thirsty?” I asked my kigao.

  She looked at me with those burning blood eyes. “The electricity is—”

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  The drinking brujahs returned their clay bowls carefully to their altars, the
n dropped to their knees, arms lifted to the sky.

  Thunder boomed overhead, and the rain clouds all shot their load at the same time. As one, the four kneeling brujahs flowed to their feet, shouting in a dialect I couldn’t understand. Their arms shook with strain.

  The water monster swelled as the rain added to its volume. It had two ice arms now. Carina must’ve chopped the other one off while I was watching the brujahs.

  Bedrock cracked as the water monster slammed its twin black ice morning stars into the ground where Carina had been standing. I lost sight of her for a second, then she somersaulted out from between the monster’s legs. Dark pond water splashed, and the monster tipped off balance. She’d sliced through one of its legs.

  An ice pillar covered in razor spikes sprouted in the leg’s place. Carina darted back in before the monster could turn around. The last liquid leg collapsed and streamed across the saturated bank. An ice pillar took its place.

  Carina jerked another shrapgrenade from her cammies. She came in from the side this time, ducking under a powerful morning star swing. She used the spikes on one of the monster’s ice pillar legs to run up its side. Her fist and forearm disappeared into its chest. She leapt free and hit the ground running.

  A second later, one of the synchrodiving brujahs hurled herself from the center of the monster’s chest. The left half of the monster’s body dropped, limp without its animator.

  The other synchrodiving brujah got her head and arm free of the water monster, but that was it.

  The water monster exploded from the inside out, firing shrapnel, brujah meat, and ice shards as big as scythes in all directions.

  I hit the ground behind the willow. Splintered wood and bits of ice fell on my back and shoulders. When I looked up again, the willow’s whips were tattered and scraggly.

  Black mist swirled around the pond and village, a howling whirlpool of the revenants the brujahs had been syphoning their magical energy from. There was no more water in the dark pond to hold them in check.

  A shot cut through the revenant mist and took the remaining synchrodiving brujah down. Carina spun, trying to get the next brujah in her knuckgun’s sights.