Steamborn (29 page)

Jacob pulled as hard as he could, struggling against the river. He finally pulled his head above the water, a fraction of an inch, and gasped for air. He was almost in the center of the stream, and very close to the wall where the underground river disappeared.

“I see him!” Samuel shouted, and then he cursed. “Can’t reach him.”

“Jacob!” Charles said. “Hold your breath and ride the current.” He said more, but Jacob’s head dipped below the water, and all he heard was death rushing all around him. He caught part of what Charles had said when he resurfaced, “… empties into a …” and then his grip failed. Jacob heard Alice scream his name before he vanished into the river rapids. He wanted to shout, to warn his friends. They weren’t looking up, and there were a thousand black eyes descending upon them.

Charles knew there was a chance that Jacob could survive. Even if it was a slim chance, it was still a chance. The wail from Alice cut him to the bone, and he fought against the burning in his eyes.

“Come on, girl,” Charles said as he wrapped his arm around Alice’s shoulder. “We’ll meet him at the bottom.”

“That’s a long way,” Samuel said, raising his lantern from the crest of the bridge. Something gleamed at the edge of the light, black and thin and sinister.

“Run!” Charles yelled, sprinting at Samuel. He pushed Alice toward the doorway in the far wall, sending her lantern light swinging around the room and up toward the ceiling. Charles swore as he tightened the mesh of a heavy nail glove around his right hand.

Samuel looked up, following the path of the lantern light. The Spider Knight didn’t speak. He took two steps and leapt off the top of the bridge. Samuel grunted and grabbed his knee as he landed. Charles could tell it was awkward, and he silently prayed Samuel hadn’t broken anything. A Widow Maker slammed into the bridge where Samuel had been standing. It crouched before leaping at the Spider Knight.

Charles bellowed and slid behind Samuel, his old knees protesting the sudden movement. His fist caught the side of the spider’s head, and the heavy springs fired a bolt through its black carapace. Inertia carried the spider over Charles, where it smashed into Samuel before tumbling to a stop by Alice.

“Samuel!” Charles said as he glanced up at the ceiling of Widow Makers descending on them. “Get up and run!”

Samuel hopped up onto his feet and shouted as his ankle tried to give out.

“Run!” Charles grabbed the Spider Knight by his backpack and pushed him toward Alice before scooping up his lantern. The pair stumbled a few feet and then Samuel found his footing. The way Samuel was running, his ankle couldn’t have been broken. It would probably be a swollen mess, but he could still run.

“Get down the stairs, Alice!” Charles looked behind them to see what Alice was staring at. He couldn’t see the bridge anymore. A sea of gleaming eyes and black bodies shone in the darkness as they descended onto the soldiers that had caught up to them. “Go, now!
Goddammit, run!”

Alice blinked and turned her attention to Charles. She spun and dashed through the doorway ahead of them.

“There’s a gate at the bottom,” Charles said as he let Samuel hobble down the stairs ahead of him. “Find the emblem of the Spider Knights and push it. It’s the gate release. Hurry!”

Charles heard the screams of the soldiers and the unholy cries of the Widow Makers echoing down the staircase. He didn’t have to see the chaos to know the two forces had crashed against one another above that river of death.

“Where are we going!” The panic in Alice’s voice was gut wrenching, but Charles knew he had to push her harder.

“If you ever want to see your blasted family again,
run!”

He swallowed the guilt as he shoved her forward, and she sped down the stairs faster than he or Samuel could have hoped to run. She slammed her palm onto the emblem of the Spider Knights over and over until the rusted gate finally began to lift into the air.

“Crawl under!” Samuel shouted.

Charles glanced over his shoulder and saw the smaller Widow Makers come pouring into the stairwell behind them. Samuel turned to face them. Charles cursed and grabbed the Spider Knight by the collar.

“We’re not dying today, boy!” He twisted and threw Samuel down the stairs.

Samuel didn’t even get a chance to protest. There was still strength left in the old man’s body, and adrenaline took care of the rest. Samuel bounced off the last step and rolled to a stop near the gate. He scrambled under it on his hands and knees as Charles ran toward them, fishing around in a leather pouch at his waist.

“Hit the gate!” Charles shouted as he dove beneath the rusted metal.

“There’s no button!” Panic turned Alice’s voice into a screech as she began slamming her palm across the stone walls.

“It’s the outer gate,” Samuel shouted. There isn’t one!”

Charles pressed the igniter on a Burner as he pulled it out of his pouch and dropped it onto the floor with a crack before he dove forward, sliding beneath the stalled gate. “Then we pull it down!” He hopped to his feet and leapt onto the gate. The mechanism in the wall squealed, and it added to the bone-chilling cries of the young Widow Makers.

Samuel didn’t need to be told anything else. He jumped up beside Charles and began jerking the gate as hard as he could, while the Widow Makers bore down on them. It only took a second before something shattered above them, and the heavy metalwork clanged against the stone below.

“Back!” Charles shouted as he dove away from the gate, hands over his head. Samuel followed.

The Burner detonated, slamming a fireball full of screaming Widow Makers up into the ceiling where it billowed out in gray and orange shadows.

Samuel dragged Charles to his feet and they half ran, half stumbled toward the light of Alice’s lantern farther down the hall.

Charles could see the tears on her face, but said nothing as they turned a corner, leaving the Widow Makers to burn and throw themselves against the gate in their death throes.

“What was that?” Samuel asked once they started down another stone staircase.

“It’s a Burner with a Banger at its center,” Charles said. “One of Jacob’s concoctions. Made it after he saw me building the real bombs.”

“That was real enough for me,” Samuel said.

Charles nodded as he wrapped his arm around Alice. His heavy nail glove still dripped with the blood of a Widow Maker, but it didn’t stop her from wrapping her fingers around it. Charles sighed and squinted into the darkness below them. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Jacob had heard soldiers talk about the certainty of death. He’d sat with them in inns and taverns as the old men regaled their audience with tales of glory and war and loss. Jacob had never understood what they’d meant by the certainty of death. He’d thought he understood, but he knew nothing.

As the air in his lungs escaped in a rush of bubbles and his chest began to burn with the need to take a breath, he came to understand the certainty of death. Lights and patterns shot across his eyes in the darkness, strange forms he knew should not be there. He squeezed his eyes shut as the current slammed him into a wall, and then he fell, wishing only to see his parents, his friends, and Alice one last time.

He felt something hard and unforgiving scrape the side of his face before the pressure of the water seemed to loosen around him, and it was finally too much. He opened his mouth and screamed, and the sound of his own voice in the void shocked him. Jacob gasped for breath, and it was immediately stolen away as his fall stopped abruptly. It felt as though he’d done a belly flop off the side of a mountain.

Jacob stopped moving and let his body rise. He’d always been a good swimmer, and as soon as he could tell which way was up, he lunged for the surface.

Relief was first on his mind when his lungs took a full breath. The air was thick with a spray of water, and it didn’t take him long to realize he’d gone over a fall.

How far down am I?

No light reached his eyes. He knew the Burners in his vest were soaked and wouldn’t work for hours. Maybe the glowworms? He slid his backpack off and fumbled for the jar. He was surprised it wasn’t broken, but it was heavier than it should have been. No light shone when it cleared the top of his bag. He shook the jar and heard the water sloshing around inside. The glowworms were long dead.

Jacob cursed and popped the wire clamp off the top, starting to dump out the water and his only hope for light, when something Miss Penny had told him in class clicked in his head. He righted the jar, turned it over, and carefully drained most of the water.

“Ugh, this better work,” Jacob said as he put his hand around one of the fat worms and smashed it against the side of the jar. It popped like a rotten fruit, and a dim light swelled around him. He washed his hand in the pool at his feet and snapped the top back on the jar.

Jacob swirled the water around inside and took a deep breath when the light from the dead worm brightened. He set the jar down and threw his backpack over his shoulders before picking it back up again.

“Right then.” He looked around the room. The closest wall he could reach out and touch. It was a dead end to the right, but a thin trail followed the river to the left. Jacob took a deep breath and set off along the water.

He held the jar out as far as he could, but it started getting heavy very quickly. Jacob tucked the jar up against his chest and kept his right shoulder scraping along the stone. It was smooth for the most part, but it still caught at his shirt once and again.

Jacob counted the turns for a while, but they started to become gradual and steeper, and eventually all he could concentrate on was not falling down. He reached the bottom of the steepest slope he’d seen so far when the light faded from the second glowworm. The slope was steep enough that the river thundered over the edge like a waterfall. Jacob sat down when he reached the bottom and finished chewing up a piece of dried, salted meat before he reached into the jar.

Something caught his eye in the distance. Something had moved, but it wasn’t the river. How had he seen it without light? He leaned forward and choked back an excited yell. The cavern off to his left had a dim, greenish glow. It had to be worms, but what else was down there?

He left his last glowworm intact and began creeping around the edge of the cave until he was at the mouth where he’d seen the lights. There was no mistaking it. The worms farther in were fat, scrunching themselves up and surging forward along the walls and ceiling. But what had he seen moving in the darkness?

Jacob wasn’t sure if it was worth the risk to go deeper into the glowworm cave. There were a lot of nasty critters that made a meal off of the worms. He didn’t have anything to fight off a Widow Maker. His thoughts trailed back to that sea of the awful things descending on his friends before he was lost to the river. Did they escape? Was he the only one left in the underbelly of the mountain now?

He shivered, glanced over his shoulder at the dark tunnel behind him, and forged ahead. The roar of the waterfall faded behind him. His eyes adjusted to the light from the worms, and he could see the path beside the river quite clearly. The path widened more than he’d expected, and the footing felt far better away from the spray of the small waterfall.

The river didn’t seem so threatening here. It moved slowly and made a peaceful echo in the cave. Jacob could see clearly when he stood beside a cluster of fat worms. He pulled the jar out of his backpack and rinsed it off in the river, leaving the last of the dead worms to ride the waters.

Jacob reached up and wrapped his hand around one of the fattest worms. It resisted briefly, clinging to the damp stone before relinquishing its hold. Something splashed in the water behind him. He didn’t make any quick movements. He slowly turned his head while his heart hammered away in his chest.

A swirl of ripples vanished down the river, but nothing else moved. “It’s only a worm. Must have been a worm.” Jacob’s motions became hurried. He grabbed two more worms before scraping algae off the walls and dropping it into the jar for the worms to eat. He returned the jar to his backpack. There were enough worms lining the tunnel that he didn’t need the jar to see.

Samuel’s lamp flickered and went out. “That’s it. I didn’t bring extra fuel.”

“Don’t worry,” Charles said as he raised the lantern in his hand. “Unless my memory’s gone to hell, we’re almost at the end of the line.”

“We haven’t seen Jacob,” Alice said.

“I know.” Charles almost whispered it. He thought they’d see Jacob at the second river crossing by the smaller waterfall, but he wasn’t there. Only the body of the invader Samuel had killed and a dozen Widow Makers had washed up at the inlet.

And the knights.

Charles knew it was either them or the knights who would survive their escape, but those men hadn’t deserved to die so horribly. The fact Alice had seen their shriveled, poisoned faces hadn’t helped matters either. Charles suspected the heavily armored knights were either at the bottom of the river, or they had lived long enough to run away.

It was the younger knights they found with the Widow Makers. Just boys following orders.

“Charles,” Samuel said.

When Charles looked up, Samuel’s eyes flashed down to Alice and back up. He was asking a question. Charles shook his head. Even if Jacob hadn’t made it, Alice didn’t need that kind of news. She’d seen enough horrible things that day.

“Light!” Alice said when they turned a corner, and it was the first time she’d sounded something like herself since they’d lost Jacob.

“Watch yourself,” Charles said. He put a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “Bugs tend to gather in the entryways.”

Samuel cursed and pointed at the path they were walking. Wet footprints led the way to the exit, following the chill in the mountain winds.

“Is it Jacob?” Alice asked as she leaned down. She deflated and said, “No, the footprints are too big.”

“That means we have company,” Samuel said. He raised his sword. “Be ready, and watch the shadows. Men can hide as well as any bug.”