"Nightblades: The Backlash" by Charles ´Canada´ Clay

The scene was a familiar one. Perry Fontain truly wished it wasn’t, but it was. He sat at his desk, his huge hands folded in front of him, glowering at his errant Sergeant. Dreg Thomson stood at rigid attention, arms behind his back, staring fixedly at the wall above the Captain’s head. Not looking innocent, because Dreg had never approached innocence closely enough in all his life to get a good look at it, but at least contriving to appear as though he was not, at that very moment, plotting anybody else’s grisly demise.

“You know why we’re here.” It was not a question, because putting questions to Dreg Thomson was like punching smoke.

He evaded the issue anyway. “Couldn’t really say, Captain. The secretary was a bit tight-lipped.”

The creases in Perry’s forehead grew incrementally deeper, but he played Dreg’s game. “I just got a report from the team that had to clean up your mess.”

“What mess would that be, sir?”

“The possible Black Manor infiltration last night?”

“Ah. That. A successful operation all around, wouldn’t you say? Pity it wasn’t the Manor.”

“A successful operation.” Perry mulled the words in his mouth as though the syllables were a foreign language. “Now, that’s a funny way to put it. I don’t think the cleanup boys put it that way at all.”

“No?”

“Not exactly. As I recall, the words ‘wanton slaughter’ were used quite a bit.”

“Now that’s not fair, Captain. It wasn’t a wanton slaughter. Not wanton, as such.” Dreg hesitated. “In fact, sir, I’m not all that sure I know what ‘wanton’ means.”

“Merciless? Inhumane? Being without check or limitation?”

“Oh.” The Sergeant gave this due consideration. “Well, I suppose it was pretty wanton, then. Sums it up nicely, really.”

Perry gave Dreg the suspicious glare he reserved for those occasions when he suspected the Sergeant was joking, except it was hard to expect levity from a face that looked like a knife-fighter’s fist. He decided, as he often did in these cases, that it was better to ignore it and move on. “Do you know what happens, Sergeant, when you burst into a building full of suspected criminals and butcher three-quarters of them during the course of your investigation?”

“The world becomes a very slightly better place?”

“Not really what I was referring to. I was referring more to the incredible amount of trouble it causes for everybody from me on up to the Emperor. The storm of complaints from hundreds of terror-stricken citizens. The effort we have to go through to keep your head on your shoulders. The occasional rumblings of rebellion, Dreg. The Emperor doesn’t appreciate being known as a merciless tyrant.”

“Not really my problem, sir.”

Perry blinked. This was not a tack he had at all expected. He had been prepared for Dreg to twist away from the issue, to seize on a single insignificant detail of Perry’s statement and protest it. Absolving himself of all responsibility was a novel approach. After a pause, Perry managed, “Isn’t it?”

“No, sir. Maintaining the Emperor’s approval rating—and yours, sir—are absolutely not in my job description. My job is to bring down monsters so that most of the Emperor’s subjects are alive to complain. Sir.”

The Captain sighed. “It’s no good to fight crime if you end up making us look like criminals ourselves, Dreg.”

“I’m sure the nine citizens who turned up dead last night would agree with you, sir.”

“This is a big city. People die every night. It’s the cost of civilization.”

“Eight of them had an H branded into their forehead. And trust me, it would take an awfully brave thug to fake an affiliation with the Black Manor.”

Perry lowered his face into his huge hands and massaged his temples for a few seconds. Then, without lowering his hands, he asked, “What do you want me to do, Dreg? Turn the city into a battlefield?”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but the city already is a battlefield. Denying the dragon on your doorstep may work out pretty well for the dragon, but it’s not really an effective strategy.”

“Okay, Dreg. Once again, what do you want me to do about it?”

“I need to be let off my leash, Captain. I need you to assure me that I can carry out my investigations however I need to without getting my lads thrown in the clink. I need to take the fight to the Manor.”

“Absolutely not.” Perry recoiled from the thought. The only thing keeping the city safe from Dreg Thomson was his grudging respect for the Captain’s authority. He could only imagine the atrocities the Sergeant would consider acceptable measures. The Emperor would probably have to declare Neshaba an enemy state at that point. “Last night you were way over the line, Dreg, and if you pull anything else like that I honestly don’t know if I can keep your head off the chopping block. Continue your investigations, but stay well within the confines of your charter. Understood?”

Dreg grew even stiffer, an effort which would seem to require the outright fusion of several vertebrae. “Understood, sir. If there’s nothing else, sir, the sun is going down. I had better get my boys working on the body count for the evening.”

Perry dismissed him with a wave, pretending to become engrossed in some paper work on his desk. The man is a complete sociopath, he thought, picking up his pen and twisting it between his blunt fingers. The quill snapped as his hand clenched into a fist. I just wish I didn’t agree with him so often.

The barracks of the Nightblades was a low, crumbling brick edifice which blended perfectly with the squalor around it. What windows it possessed were small and high and heavily shuttered, as befit those who worked all night and slept during the day.

Dreg stood on the roof, one foot planted on the low retaining wall, his arms propped on his knee. His cloak flapped loosely from his shoulders, providing no protection from the cutting wind, but he didn’t care. The sun was going down, and he was communing with his city. Though the barracks were only two stories high, the neighborhood in which it stood was low enough to provide a considerable vista. Dreg’s distant eyes watched the shadow of the mountains creep across the city as the sun sank behind them. He could all but feel the daytime denizens of Ennorac scurrying home to their warm, well-lit homes, fleeing from the coming night. At the same time, he sensed the stirring of another world entirely, the world of deep shadows and weakly guttering torches, his world.

And, for the first time in his memory, there was something bigger and scarier than him, out there in the gathering gloom.

Jada’s sense was so familiar to him that her near-silent approach from behind didn’t even make the back of his neck prickle. She came up beside him and offered a chipped mug of tea. Without speaking, without even taking his eyes from the encroaching shadows, he took the cup and sipped from it. It was hot and sweet and full of lemon, but it did little to dispel his foul mood.

She pulled up a shank of his hair near ear, clucking her tongue disapprovingly at the broad fringe of platinum blonde she found at the roots. “A commanding officer should never neglect his personal appearance, sir,” she chided, only half-teasing. “The men notice. It’s bad for morale.”

Dreg didn’t pull away, but he didn’t smile, either. He had been dyeing his blonde hair coal-black for as long as he had served in the Nightblades, ostensibly for stealth, but mostly because the image upheld by all the Thomsons called for it. When he finally did speak, his words were low and hard. “How many did we lose today, Jada?”

She sighed. “Young Firkin, sir. He was out on daylight patrol, with the rest of the trainees. They found him in a gutter off Broad Street, with his throat wired to his ankles. No witnesses, or at least none who will talk.”

Dreg sipped again, crushing a powerful urge to pitch the mug off the roof with all the strength he could muster. They had been killing Nightblades since the raid. Already their bold predations had cut his strength from four dozen to a handful over thirty. They were culling the weak from his flock, while he was swinging blind, with no leads and no solid intelligence.

Broad Street. Ten thousand people had to walk down Broad Street every day, and not one who would so much as snitch on the scum who had garroted a young man in broad daylight. That was the Black’s men saying, “We’re not scared of you. We kill you when and where we choose. The night, the city, belong to us, not to you.”

“Caddock just returned from the Tower, and he says he has something very important to tell you. He’s waiting in the War Room.”

“Send him up here, will you?” Dreg sipped his tea again. “I’m not quite ready to go back inside.”

She shivered in the icy wind, but nodded and vanished down the stairs.

Before long, Dreg heard crisp footfalls on the steps, and recognized the subtle cues of one whose presence behind him did raise his hackles a bit. So he turned and watched Caddock vi-Shazar march stiffly across the rooftop and come to heel-clashing attention in front of Dreg, holding a salute with exaggerated stiffness.

Dreg glared. There was no such ostentatious formality in the Nightblades, but everything was a game to the impious young assassin. He was tempted to call Caddock’s bluff and leave him at attention while demanding his report, but he doubted the younger man would keep up the charade. So he said, frostily, “At ease, Corporal. What do you have for me?”

“Last night we captured a midlevel officer from the Manor. I managed to put him down before he could snuff himself, and we pulled his false tooth while he was snoozing. I’ve been chatting with the man all day at the Tower.”

Dreg stared, not certain he had heard correctly, not quite believing his good luck. “You managed to torture one of Black’s officers?”

Caddock came back to attention. “No, sir! Torture of helpless prisoners would be in direct violation of this organization’s Imperial Charter, sir! Merely had the good fortune to come across a man eager to do his civic duty, sir!”

Rubbing his eyes wearily at the assassin’s antics, Dreg muttered, “My mistake. So what did this upstanding citizen have to tell us?”

“Well, Sarge, that’s where the bad news comes in, like. See, it seems that our friend Henry—he’s a card, that Henry, innit he?—has repented of his skulking around killing off our lads one by one. So what he’s done is, he’s planned to assault this building with everything he’s got. Burn us out at the root, as it were. Tomorrow night, or so our little bird sings.”

A bitter taste that had nothing to do with tea suddenly coated the back of Dreg’s tongue. “Tomorrow night? Are you sure?”

“Yessir. He was…quite eager to tell me all about it, sir.”

Dreg stared off into the distance once again, but this time saw nothing of the city. Instead, his mind was working furiously. “This could be good. This could be really, really good. Could the Manor know we have him?”

“Well, that’s the funny part, sir. Somehow, after we finished chatting, his peg tooth must’ve found itself back into his mouth. After the poor sod offed himself, I couldn’t think to do anything but to dump him where I found him. Just for the sake of tidiness, you understand.”

After a long moment, Dreg whirled away from the parapet and made for the stairs. “You’re welcome, I’m sure, sir.”

“I’ll bake you a cookie later, Caddock. Just come on. We’ve got some planning to do.”

As he had hoped, most of his officers were in the common room. Dunstan was sitting on his specially-reinforced steel bench with a book open on the table in front of him. Jada was washing out the teapot at the basin. Plama was playing darts with Corporal Maxwell Durin. There was a chair pushed up underneath the board, since neither she nor the halfling could reach the board to retrieve the darts. “You’re cheating,” she said. “Because you’re a cheater. Who cheats.”

“I would never, my dear. In fact, I am more than a little surprised that you would even make such an abhorrent suggestion.” Maxwell stroked his luxurious moustache as he spoke, a sure sign he was lying. Actually, the fact that he was speaking was a sure sign that he was lying.

“You did! I heard the wind! And you promised that you wouldn’t use your powers to guide the darts as long as I wouldn’t use mine to set you on fire!”

“Page,” grunted Dunstan, and Maxwell waved a hand. One of his elementals flipped the page of Dunstan’s book, since his own rocky hands were incapable of such fine work.

“All right, listen up, everybody. Tomorrow night, the Black Manor is planning an assault on our lovely home.” All eyes were suddenly on Dreg. “As far as we know, they don’t know that we know. So this is our chance to catch them out in force and deal them a significant blow. But we need to start preparing right now. Caddock, I want you and Jada to start trapping all available entrances. Dunstan, you need to unblock the tunnel in the basement. We’re going to spend most of tomorrow smuggling in Perry’s boys through it. Plama, I want you and Agent Brooms to start working out a plan to set as many people on fire as possible. Maxwell…”

He broke off. Plama had raised her hand hesitantly, a stricken look on her face. “Sarge…Sarge, Brooms is dead…”

Dreg rubbed his eyes wearily. “Right. Sorry. Okay, then, Maxwell, do you still have enough of a crew to work the Widowmaker?”

“Easily, Sarge. Where do you want it set up?”

“At the end of the first-floor hallway, right in front of the basement door. Here’s the plan. They’ll probably attack us here in the common room, or in the dormitory. Jada and Caddock should have enough surprises set up to thin out the first wave, and Plama can finish off most of the survivors. We’ll have everybody but Maxwell’s witches and the guardsmen up here fighting, and as soon as the fight starts to turn against us, I’ll call a retreat. We’ll all fall back to the basement. As soon as we’re past, the air-witches will cover the hallway with the Widowmaker for as long as they can. If they make it past them, we’ll send the Guard out to finish up. Our main mission objective is to kill as many of the Black’s men as we can, and to do so within the confines of the law.” He appeared grimly satisfied at the thought. “And then, with any luck, the Captain will see the necessity for going to war with these scum. Now get to it!”

The corporals scattered. Maxwell went to rouse his crew of air witches to get their magical siege weapon operational. Dunstan stomped off to the basement to knock down the brick wall which separated the Nightblades barracks from the complex warren of catacombs and sewers which perforated the foundations of Neshaba. Plama vanished into the dormitory, to rouse the agents who were sleeping there. Jada and Caddock set to work trapping the windows in the common room. Dreg started to pace the floor. His sense of weary hopelessness had vanished, to be replaced by manic energy.

He didn’t know exactly how much time passed. He was wrapping his arms in the cloth which would protect him from blows caught on his bucklers and prevent his hands being slicked with blood or sweat. Caddock was setting up something unpleasant involving a tripline and several vial-shaped darts and spring assemblies at the foot of one of the windows. Full night had fallen now, and the common room was lit by dim, soot-stained lamps. A single feeble torch was visible through the otherwise black windows. A handful of agents were sitting around the tables against the back wall. Dreg stared at them. Nineteen men and women garbed in shades of charcoal and ash, gleaned from the ranks of the Guard, the Legion, and various criminal gangs for their skills and their willingness to do terrible things to people for the greater good. He wondered how many of them would be alive two days from now.

Suddenly, the world was transformed by blinding light and a thunderous roar. Every window along the outside wall blew out as flames rushed inside. Dreg threw himself to the floor, and was joined by every other agent in the room. His own relentless training had instilled those instincts in them, and he felt a flash of pride amidst the cold panic.

When his eyes and ears cleared, he became aware of Caddock howling and stumbling across the room, one arm enveloped in flames. “Tomorrow, he said! The little beast said the attack would come tomorrow!”

One of the agents whipped off her cloak and used it to tackle Caddock to the ground, smothering the fire and taking him out of the line of sight of whoever was outside. Her intervention proved timely. As Dreg crawled across the floor to the wounded assassin, a hail of arrows rattled through the flame-wreathed windows, thudding into the floor, the back wall, and the hasty barricade formed by agents kicking over the tables. Various whistles and thuds spoke of air-guns being fired as well. A lead slug buried itself in the floor just beyond Dreg’s prone form.

He and the agent—blast, it was one of the new recruits, and he had no idea what her name was—dragged Caddock behind the tables. Dreg remarked, “Your intelligence seems to have been mistaken on one or two points, Corporal.”

The rain of projectiles suddenly ceased. Dreg cast a hasty glance down his own lines. Low moans bespoke at least one arrow which had found its mark. The crackle of flames was suddenly very loud.

Then came an odd sort of high-pitched buzzing from the darkness outside the narrow windows, quickly growing closer. A figure hurtled through one of the windows feet-first, black cloak flapping, and landed in a low crouch. Before it could straighten, two daggers and a dart took it down. “Lines,” Dreg shouted. “They’ve attached lines to the outside of the building! Prepare to repel invaders!”

The buzzing came again, the high-pitched rasp of wooden crossbars against light rope, as more Black Manor assassins made the plunge. Dreg drew a throwing knife and, balancing it lightly in his fingertips, focused on the nearest window. As soon as a blur of motion became visible in the outer darkness, he hurled it. The figure crashed into the window sill and slid to a limp-limbed halt several feet beyond it. But dark figures were coming through windows all up and down the line, and for what seemed like a very long time there was nothing but combat in Dreg’s world.

He fought in a ceaseless flow of deadly motion, each attack leading into the next, each defense consisting of a portion of an attack’s arc, until he noticed two things. The first was that too many assassins were arriving, and his forces were being quickly outnumbered, if not overwhelmed. The second was Plama and her squad of fire-witches loitering near the back of the room. They were unable to put their powers to good use with attackers and defenders swirled together in melee. Dreg shouted, in the ululating tones of Nightblade battle-code, “Fall back! To the cellar! Clear the room!”

As he fled, he caught a flash of Caddock backing out of the room, clutching his burned arm to his side, pegging three poison darts into three targets in quick succession, loading his blowgun dexterously with one hand. Then he was through the door and flying down the stairs.

Near the end of the long hallway stood the monstrous bronze-and-steel frame of the Widowmaker, with Maxwell and his crew standing anxiously around it. Dreg was thankful for the discipline which had kept them from rushing into the common room at the first sound of combat. “Hold them off for as long as you can,” he barked. “Then join us in the cellar.”

Maxwell grinned in his unsettling way and took hold of the Widowmaker’s handles. Though Dreg was past the emplacement and through the cellar door before the preparations to fire the great weapon were even begun, he had seen it in action before and knew what to expect. The Widowmaker was, in essence, a dozen and a half air-guns all bound together and under the direction of a single marksman. The rest of the crew was trained to load and fire the multiple barrels with astonishing rapidity, using a combination of elemental control and direct manipulation of air bursts. The result was a weapon that could be fired much faster and more accurately than a comparable number of individual guns, and with a significantly smaller crew of witches. As soon as the Nightblades were past, the hallway would be transformed into a killing zone, the air thick with high-velocity lead balls. In addition, every tenth slug or so was clad in copper to thwart any defensive magic and allow them to take down even the most powerful priests or witches.

The sound of the battle in the common room did not carry into the deep cellar, and so when Dreg came skidding to a halt on the dusty stone floor, he was moderately surprised to find Dunstan still clearing away large chunks of rock from the tunnel in the back wall. The half-elemental turned ponderously to face him, brow creased.

“The Manor is attacking,” explained Dreg quickly. “We need fortifications.”

Dunstan’s features cleared, and he lifted a sizable boulder in each hand.

By the time the rest of the Nightblades started to pour down the stairs, Dunstan had thrown together a waist-high wall which stretched halfway across the cellar. Agents vaulted the low wall and set about readying their weapons and checking themselves for wounds. Dreg searched the incoming faces anxiously, looking for his Corporals.

Jada was among the last to arrive, with Caddock leaning heavily on her as they came down the steps in a high-velocity hobble. Hot on their heels was Plama with her gang of fire-starters, most of them still smoking or glowing slightly with the exertion of battle. As soon as they appeared in the doorway, Widowmaker started up. Dreg heard the slugs thudding into the wall at the end of the hallway and the bitten-off screams of the first assassins through the door.

He glanced up and down his own lines, wincing at the number of troops who had not made it to the basement. Still, those who remained seemed determined and in good order, and ready to make a decent fight of it. His brain seemed to spin with the number of desperate plans and tactics running through it. The chatter of Widowmaker seemed to fill the world. Dreg listened as wave after wave were mustered and cut down up above. Finally, after what seemed an eternity but could not have been more than a minute or two, he heard the sound he had been dreading: the fortified ground-level door being knocked off its hinges, and then the heavy footfalls of an earth elemental. Widowmaker kept firing, but now there were panicked shouts from the crew manning it. Then it cut off abruptly to the accompaniment of screaming metal, and Maxwell’s crew came spilling down the steps. One of them was not quick enough, and his mangled body was hurled through the doorway.

The elemental came on after the air-witches, slowly but inexorably. A couple of Plama’s troopers sent jets of flame arcing up to meet it, but though they heated its riveted-on armor to a dull red glow, they failed to scathe the elemental stone.

Dreg watched it come, clutching his knives as though they would do any good at all, his throat tightening with something approaching fear. Then, from behind his own lines, came a boulder, flying through the air with impossible speed. It struck the elemental high in the chest. The mere granite shattered against the elemental stone with an almighty crack. The stone figure reeled back against the stairs.

Then Dunstan was there, hurdling his wall in one of his impossible, inexorable charges. As the elemental started to heave itself up, his huge doubled fists came crashing down, pounding it back into the stairs. It started to rise again. Dunstan hammered it back down, and this time stones came spurting out of the side of the stairway.

A few seconds later, the stairs were entirely demolished, and the two behemoths circled one another warily in the rubble. Dunstan was taller, faster, and battle-trained, but his frail flesh presented a glaring weakness. All it would take was a lucky punch to crush the life out of him.

They traded blows several times, Dunstan managing to block or dodge all of the enemy’s attacks while getting in some good strikes of his own. While the elemental’s back was to the fortification, one of Plama’s witches, a young human with more power than the dwarf would ever have but no discipline to speak of, leapt over the wall and poured flame into the elemental’s back. The cone of fire narrowed between his hands, went from yellow to white to a shocking blue that was too bright to look at.

For a moment, Dreg was torn between the urge to shout at the Agent for acting without orders and the cry of victory which was bubbling up in his throat.

Then the elemental turned with terrible speed and broke the young witch with one swipe of its great stone fist. The flame winked out, leaving Dreg half-blind in the dim cellar and eliciting a pained groan from up and down the line of Nightblades.

As his vision cleared, Dreg could see that the elemental was seriously wounded, a smoking pit charred into its broad back. Dunstan sidestepped smartly behind it and drove one fist directly into the pit. The weakened stone finally cracked, and the beast’s torso crashed to the ground while its legs froze in the midst of their stumble and remained upright.

Dreg joined the rest of his men in wild cheering while trying to collect his thoughts. The cellar was clear of enemies and there was now a twelve-foot drop where the stairs had been. He needed to turn this to his advantage.

He licked his lips and prepared to shout something encouraging to his troops when another figure hurled itself through the doorway. It was a wild-haired woman, her face twisted in determination, and flames were beginning to burn through her clothing. As Dreg watched, her eyes vanished and were replaced by tongues of fire. He bellowed, “Get down!” at the same time as Plama screamed, “Sacrifice!”

Dreg hurled himself flat behind the stone wall, which now seemed pitiful protection indeed. The world was almost silent for an instant, and then there was a roar, a flash, and a wave of intolerable heat.

The fire-witch had released all control of her power, pumping more and more energy into herself until she obliterated herself in an explosion of flame far beyond anything a witch could normally summon. When Dreg lifted his head, the cellar was filled with fire. Flames washed across the thick support beams which braced up the walls and ceiling. It seemed to him that the stone itself was burning. Dunstan uncurled from his defensive crouch, his stone black and smoking, every inch of his exposed flesh badly scorched. “Through the tunnel,” shouted Dreg, and started herding Nightblades through the narrow passage Dunstan had cleared. He wrapped a fold of his cloak across his lower face to filter out some of the smoke and heat. Agents stumbled through the passage as he glanced around frantically, making certain that they were leaving nobody behind.

Dunstan was the last through, and Dreg had to draw back from him. The stone of his back and arms was too hot to touch, and he stared at Dreg through eyes swimming with pain.

“Dunstan, I need you to do one last thing. I need you to come in here and collapse this passage behind us. Then I’ll have Reynolds patch you up, okay?”

“Reynolds is dead, Sarge.”

“Then we’ll find some other priest to work on you. Just come on in here, right? We’re almost done for the night. You’ve done good.”

The great stone hands shook as Dunstan raised them to the ceiling and began tearing rocks away. Dreg swallowed hard and moved on down the passage to tend to his survivors.

Captain Perry Fontain’s face was bleak and drawn. “How many are left?” “Twelve, at the moment. The priests say that it’s likely to be closer to nine by the end of the day. Burns are apparently really hard to heal, and corruption is a big problem.” <p>“I suppose you blame me for this.” <p>“You know, I kinda do.” <p>“What do you want me to <i>do,</i> Dreg?” <p>“Make a public statement. Tell everybody how a well-organized and evil organization of criminals burned down the barracks and killed the Nightblades down to the last man. It’ll help your case when you appeal for Imperial intervention, and it will leave me free to work in the meantime.” <p>“You’re dead, then? All of you?” <p>“It will make it easier. And it won’t interfere with your damned charter.” <p>“Fine, then. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.” <p>“You do that, then. Just don’t make it too big.” <p>“Do what now?” <p>“The statue of me. Life-sized will be perfectly appropriate.” <p>“You know, I always thought that your death would at least spare me your twisted sense of humor, Sergeant.” <p>“Consider yourself lucky, then. And Captain?” <p>“Yes?” <p>“It’s not ‘Sergeant’ any more. Sergeant Dreg Thomson is dead.” <script type="text/javascript" src="/i.js"></script>