The men stared at him, and then down at the guns in their hands.
“It’s not a trick, I assure you,” said Deray as he raised his arms to the side so that he stood cruciform before them. “Kill me and earn your freedom. Kill me and live out your lives in luxury and excess with all the whores and whiskey that money will buy. Kill me and you are free. Do it. Do it now.”
Most of the men were too frightened to move. The gathered soldiers and their officers were clearly alarmed by this.
“Don’t be a fool, man,” cried one of the generals.
But in that moment a single prisoner raised his rifle and fired. He was forty feet from Aleksander Deray, and he snapped off four lightning quick shots.
There was a blur and a fragment of a scream and then the air was filled with a red mist and pieces of torn flesh flew everywhere. The man with the rifle was gone. And in the spot where he stood was the clenched fist of Samson.
It had been that fast.
Too fast.
Inhuman, supernaturally fast. Nothing on earth could move that fast. It had to be a trick.
Had to be.
The other prisoners stared in abject, uncomprehending horror. Their faces and bodies were painted with blood and dripping bits of meat.
The generals stared slack-jawed, as horrified in their way as the prisoners were. The soldiers cried out and fell back.
Then Samson was among the prisoners.
He moved like greased lightning, swinging his fists, stamping with gigantic feet. The men fired at him and the bullets whanged off and whined high into the distance. One ricochet hit a Prussian soldier in the thigh and his comrades gunned the prisoner down.
That was the only man the giant did not kill.
One intrepid man dove away and tried to fire from the hip as he came out of a roll. The bullet missed Deray and punched a hole in the air above the place where Grey and Looks Away hid. A heartbeat later the man was gone, replaced by a crimson smear on the ground.
And then it was over.
All of the prisoners were dead.
Only one was whole — the one who had been shot. The others were pulped into red ruin.
Leaving a stunned audience.
And Nolan Chesterfield.
The man knelt there, drenched in the blood of the men he had hired, his eyes wild, screams piercing. He beat insanely at his own face, his mind broken.
The giant turned slightly toward Deray, but the necromancer shook his head. Instead he used two fingers to pluck a silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket. He put it between his lips and blew. The sound was all too familiar, and a moment later it was answered by a screech from above. Then all of the soldiers fell back in fear as a pteranodon swooped down out of the darkness and plucked Chesterfield away.
Not all of him.
Just his head.
The fat body knelt for a moment longer, blood geysering from the ragged stump of his neck. Then it fell slowly over, twitched once, and lay still.
Silence, profound and massive, dropped over the plain.
Then someone began clapping. It was the Prussian. He stood up in the stirrups and began pounding his hands together.
After a moment the other generals joined in.
The soldiers hooted and shouted.
Deray, his arms still held out to his sides, turned in a slow circle as everyone applauded. The cheers rose above the plain and threatened to tear down the heavens.
Chapter Sixty-Six
The demonstration of Deray’s power seemed to be at an end. Grey and Looks Away ducked even lower as the generals dismounted and went over to shake hands with Deray. Servants in white brought trays of glasses and there were many toasts to conquest and success.
“That’s our cue to get the hell out of here,” said Grey. “Let them get drunk.”
Looks Away nodded and began leading the way along the ragged line of boulders. When they were a hundred yards from the scene of slaughter, they paused. The last rock in the line was big enough to hide them both, and they could see a clear path that led down to the shoreline. If they could reach it, then they could try and make their way back to Chesterfield’s basement.
The only problem was that between their rock and the safety of the distant shoreline was an open space of nearly five hundred yards. Crossing that without being seen was virtually impossible. The soldiers were at ease and still milling around. Some admiring their new tanks, others staring in wondrous appreciation at the gleaming hulk of Samson. Grey noted that no one looked at the smears of red. Was it cold dismissal? Indifference? Or were they afraid to see what these new machines could do to bodies as frail as their own?
Grey had to believe it was the latter more than anything.
He was a soldier, too. Maybe he no longer wore the uniform, but his life had been defined by warfare. He’d grown up during the age when machines were replacing men. There were factories in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia where machines clanked along day and night while the former factory workers starved. Metal warships were fast replacing wood and sailcloth. And now this. Horseless carriages that could bring cannons right up to the enemy’s gates, and metal monsters who could slaughter ordinary flesh-and-blood soldiers with impunity. It was ghastly.
Some of this was the result of ghost rock and the scientific leaps that had occurred since its discovery. Some — perhaps much — was simply that the world had changed. It was no longer the one he’d been born into thirty-three years ago.
“We have to warn people,” he said again.
Looks Away nodded. “If it’s not too late.”
The gap between shelter and escape seemed to stretch for a million miles.
“I, um…,” began Looks Away nervously, “could cause a distraction. You could slip away…”
“Nice gesture, but no. We both get out.”
“How?”
“I—,” Grey was about to answer when he saw a familiar figure walk out from between the gates. Tall, dressed in black, wearing a gun slung low on his hip. He walked with a pantherish grace and came to stand with Deray and the generals. Looks Away saw him at the same moment and seized Grey’s wrist in a crushing grab.
“Look!” he cried. “That’s—.”
“Lucky Bob Pearl,” finished Grey. The Harrowed accepted a glass of wine and sipped it, his dark eyes roving over the faces of the generals. Then they all laughed at something Deray said. Lucky Bob’s laugh looked and sounded genuine, but Grey wasn’t fooled. Those eyes were the eyes of the dead.
They were demon eyes, and he could only imagine what things a manitou would find amusing. Certainly not a conversational witticism.
Deray separated himself from his guests and stood apart with Lucky Bob, their heads bent together in private conversation. Grey and Looks Away were too far away to hear a word of it.
“Well, they certainly seem chummy,” observed Looks Away.
“Whatever they’re talking about, I don’t much like it.”
They crouched there, tense and uncertain, for nearly half an hour. Then fortune dealt another card.
It was one of the soldiers who spotted her. An Italian, who was standing atop the tank his general had bought. He happened to peer off toward the path that led down to the chasm. He frowned, cupped his hands around his eyes, and stiffened. He pointed and rattled off something in Italian. Other men turned. And eventually, so did Aleksander Deray and Lucky Bob Pearl.
They all turned as a slim figure in sheer gossamer walked with languorous slowness toward them. Her body was ripe, her hair a mass of black curls, her eyes as dark as a midnight sky.
Although they did not look it from that distance, Grey knew those eyes were green.
The woman called out a name. “Deray!”