No. Hundreds.
“Who are they?” whispered Looks Away.
Grey shook his head because the men were too far away to see clearly. He gestured to a spill of rocks to their right, and they moved off, keeping low and being careful to make no sound. The rocks were the debris from a fallen natural pillar, and they offered excellent cover as the two men drew close. Then Grey pulled his companion down again as the first rank of marching men went past them at no more than a stone’s easy throw away.
The men wore uniforms. They were soldiers. That much had been clear from a distance. But up close it was evident that they were not Americans.
The men in the front ranks wore dark blue jackets set with red trim and brass buttons. Dark trousers were tucked into gleaming black boots, and on their heads they wore tapered leather helmets topped with spikes.
Looks Away grunted in surprise, then very quietly observed, “Dunkelblau waffenrock.”
“What?”
“Those are the uniforms of Prussian infantry.”
“But…,” Grey let the rest hang as more of the soldiers passed by. He estimated that there were at least a hundred of the Prussians. Behind them came other soldiers, and as they passed, Looks Away identified them.
“Polish… French… Italian… Swedish…”
The men marched in precise lines, with resplendent officers riding horses and sergeants barking out commands. On the chest of each officer were medals and ribbons from the many wars of their several nations. Grey had seen pictures of some, but most were unknown to him.
When the foreign soldiers had all marched out, a different group followed them. They were hard-faced men dressed in a uniform unlike any Grey had ever seen. Black trousers and jackets, with bloodred sashes embroidered with some kind of strange magical symbols — swirling stars and planets, mathematical notations, and the stylized gears like those inside a clock. Deray’s bodyguard, perhaps, mused Grey. Or… his private army?
Most had Winchester ’73s laid against their shoulders. The sergeants, however, carried guns of a kind Grey had only recently come to know. Weapons he did not expect to encounter down here. These were exotic-looking long guns with wide-barrels made from brass and mirrored steel, with gemstones set into frameworks from which coils of copper seemed to loop and feed back into themselves. Strange guns.
And strangely familiar.
Grey turned to face Looks Away, to accuse him, to demand answers, but from the look of shocked horror on Looks Away’s face it was evident that his friend was as startled as he was.
“Those are…,” began Looks Away, then tripped over the words. “Those are… Kingdom rifles.”
Grey nodded, feeling a hollow space open up in his chest. He grabbed a fistful of Looks Away’s shirt and pulled him close. In a fierce, tight whisper he hissed, “How?”
But all Looks Away could do was shake his head.
They crouched there and watched as the soldiers marched past. The strange blue light of the fungi gleamed on the polished brass and rare jewels of those deadly guns.
Then Grey noticed something and he looked closer still. The guns were very similar to the Kingdom Rifles, but they were not exactly the same. He glanced back and forth from them to the weapon slung over his companion’s shoulder. The same materials and a decidedly familiar design. And yet… the gun designed by Doctor Saint had a cylinder for the compressed ghost rock gas and a magazine for the oversized bullets, but the guns carried by the sergeants did not. Instead they had ratcheted dials on the sides of slightly longer magazines. And the glowing jewels set into the frames were of different sizes and cuts.
Grey bent close and said all this to Looks Away, and somehow that helped the Sioux shake off his shock. He narrowed his eyes and bent closer to study the weapons as Grey had.
“Are they Doctor Saint’s stolen weapons?”
“No. There are too many of them. And I’ve never seen this design. There’s no gas capsule. Besides, it would make no sense for Deray to arm his people with weapons that could destroy the souls of his own undead servants. Mind you, he may have used ghost rock’s energetic properties for some other purpose, perhaps to increase rate of fire or perhaps to achieve greater range but—”
He didn’t finish because a sound made them both start and then turn.
It was the cry of a man in terror.
Not one man.
Many. A dozen at least.
They came running and staggering through the gates, their hands bound before them, their shirts torn away to reveal bodies crisscrossed by the red marks of the whip. The men stumbled into each other, they fell and staggered, and crawled away from the gate, fleeing in mad, blind terror.
As they ran onto the broad plain, the ranks of soldiers — Confederate and foreign — split apart and at the bellowed orders of sergeants, they trotted left and right to form a large ring around the prisoners. In perfect unison the soldiers drew bayonets and fitted them to the ends of their rifles and within minutes had formed a ring of needlepoint blades and the black mouths of gun barrels. The prisoners wailed and collapsed into a huddle, most of them begging and weeping. One man buried his face in the dirt and cried out for his mother to come and rescue him.
The soldiers stood their line, faces hard, mouths hard, eyes harder yet. Even from a distance Grey could tell that there was no trace of mercy on any face that wasn’t holding a gun.
Not a trace.
Then there was a great rumbling and for a moment Grey thought that he was hearing the sound of a locomotive. But it was something far stranger. From the shadows beyond the gate came a machine that Grey had once seen demonstrated on a military base in upstate New York. It was a carriage made entirely of metal but it was not pulled by horses, nor did it have wheels. Instead it rumbled forward on bands of linked metal plates that squeaked and clanked. Steam rose from twin pipes mounted aft of a kind of crow’s nest, and from the center of this structure sprouted a long cannon barrel.
It was what his old commanders had called a “tank,” and it thundered across the plain. Grey saw that the flag of Prussia was painted on the side of the cannon turret.
A second machine followed that one out through the gates, this one marked with the flag of Denmark. A third came. A fourth. For each ground of foreign military there was one of these monstrous tanks. The stink of their engines filled the air and beneath the weight of their clanking treads and grinding gears Grey could hear the tormented shriek of ghost rock.
“Are you seeing this?” whispered Looks Away.
“Yes,” answered Grey.
“Deray is arming them for war. Good lord, Grey, Deray isn’t merely experimenting with these forces, he’s selling his goods to the madmen of this world. He’s an arms dealer on a level I’ve never seen before.”
When the last of the tanks was in position, a sergeant in the livery of Deray’s private army raised his saber, let it stand glittering above him, and then swept it down. The engine roars and their accompanying screams died away.
Then the sergeant nodded to his colleagues among the various armies, and the foot soldiers stepped forward and raised their rifles to their shoulders, all barrels facing the prisoners.
Looks Away muttered, “Damn poor positioning for a firing squad. They’ll bloody well shoot each other.”
But Grey shook his head. “No… I think they’re going to—.”
His theory died on his tongue as another sound made them turn once more toward the gate.
A man walked slowly out of the shadows, and his feet made no sound. However behind him, still cloaked in darkness, something else moved. There was the hiss of a steam engine and the clank of metal, but whatever it was did not yet follow the man out onto the plain.