Title: The Tank: Chapter Five, Part Two
***
Chapter Five, Part
Two
The change happened so fast, Anton didn’t have a chance to
stop himself from falling. One moment the train was chugging along, heading southwest
on a decline as it passed through a narrow valley in the Bernese Oberland, and
the next…
The noise was bad enough, a sharp crack followed by a
rattling boom that penetrated Anton’s teeth, but it was accompanied by a
sudden lift that sent everyone in their car, for a moment, into the air.
Anton hung for a breathless second, with just enough time to turn his eyes away
from the window he was hurtling toward before he impacted it.
Glass shattered against his cheekbone, and he felt something
in his face crack along with it before his shoulder took on the burden of preparing
the path for the rest of him. Even as the window vanished, the train rolled. That
shouldn’t be possible, Anton thought to himself before he realized that he
was airborne yet again. Only this time, he was outside the train. He’d passed
right through the window frame, and flew through the air until he hit—a tree? A
needle-covered rock? Something that broke his fall and nearly broke his spine
as well.
Anton crashed to the ground, the air gone from his lungs,
and watched as the train, all eight passenger cars, completed a second roll to
the left. The engine was a smoldering mess, completely destroyed—but by what?
Magic? An explosive? Anton struggled to push up onto
his hands and knees. The way his back screamed at him for it was slightly
reassuring—at least he could still feel things, and his vital organs didn’t
seem compromised. He tried to get to his feet and failed. Or maybe it’s too
soon to know that. It didn’t matter—he could wallow in his own pain later.
Caroline was on that train. Camille was on that train!
Anton staggered a few steps forward, one hand cradling his
ribcage, then stopped. There was a shadow ahead of him that shouldn’t be there.
It was an odd thing to notice, but ever since he began
deciphering truth from pictures that were little better than smoke and spirit,
he had learned to pay attention to the way light moved. Things might get
muddled in a building, with artificial light to confuse things, but out here
there was nothing but the setting sun to cast a shadow, and all of those should
be facing the other way. So it wasn’t a shadow, then. It was a…
“Look at you.”
A person. The man peeled away from the tree he squatted
behind, taking a few small steps toward Anton. He was swathed in dark clothes,
baggy and indistinct, and his face was covered in ash. “Never seen a fellow fly
like that before,” he said. His French was oddly accented—an Alsatian dialect,
perhaps? “The fact that you can even stand, much less move, is proof that God
loves you.” He pulled a knife out from beneath his shirt. “But not enough to
save you from my eyes, or my blade.” He took another two steps forward, his
knife glinting menacingly in the red light of the sunset. “Now you—”
Anton pulled out the tiny Deringer he’d taken to wearing in
his jacket after his last talk with Camille, cocked the hammer, and fired his
shot dead into the man’s face. It was a small caliber bullet, and if his
attacker was wearing armor of some sort beneath his camouflage the round might
not penetrate, but there was no shield protecting his gaping mouth, now dripping
blood like a faucet. Brains spattered the trees behind him, and after a moment
he slumped to the ground.
“Apparently God’s still on my side,” Anton muttered. He took
a deep breath, winced, and tried not to look at the ruin of the back of the man’s
head as he stumbled past the body, desperate to make it to the train. Was it an
ambush by the Dévoué? Were there more grey-garbed men stalking the wreckage of
the train for passengers to murder even now? Anton had some of his spell
equipment on him, but none of them would be much good offensively, unless he
counted the wooden ball in his left vest pocket…but honestly, how useful would
that be up here, in a fairly remote mountain pass with no villages? He needed
to—
A second explosion rocked the ground, only this one sounded
more like a swarm of metallic bees being released at high speed. Glinting
orange sparks shot high above the train before crashing down again, trailing
their light like spears of fire. As soon as they hit the ground, they shot straight
out in all directions. Anton heard screams, expected to scream himself—he was
standing, he was moving toward the train, how would the magic distinguish him
from an attacker?—but the light passed right through him, harmless.
That amount of deadly precision had to be the work of Dr.
Grable. He, at least, was still functioning. It was a tremendous relief to
Anton—he wouldn’t yet be called to use his talents to kill. He gulped and
thought of the man behind him. To kill again, at least, and that hadn’t
been talent, that was pure luck.
He pressed on over the rocks, past small shrubs and straight
toward the smell of gunpowder. Orsini bombs, perhaps? Whatever had managed to roll
the train, it had been powerful. He stumbled toward the private car, now a
broken wreck. “Caroline!” he shouted, his anxiety bursting out of his chest.
She had to be all right. “Caroline!”
It wasn’t until he saw her crawl out of another broken
window, coughing but managing to get herself to her feet, that Anton realized
he’d just given himself away. Why should he care about her in particular, other
than because she was one of the only women in their party? Why should he be so
forward as to address her by her first name? Idiot, idiot…
The odds were good that no one had even heard him, so
surrounded were they with cries and tears and shouts. Caroline heard, though.
She met his eyes for a moment, and her free hand clenched over her heart as she
saw him, her eyes closing briefly. Thank God, he saw her mouth. Perhaps
she and his attacker had a point after all.
“Fucking hell,” a familiar voice groused from above. Anton
saw Dr. Grable standing on the toppled train, a silver wand glowing like a
brand in one hand, the other one clutching the wooden leg of an elongated
cocktail table. It seemed to be all that was keeping him on his feet—he was
listing heavily to one side, like his left leg couldn’t support him. How had he
even gotten up there?
“Sheer bloody-mindedness,” Dr. Grable said, and Anton
realized he’d spoken the last part out loud. “You survived, then. Excellent.
Get into the cabin of our car and check on the others while the young lady and
I do a little protective thaumaturgy on what’s left of this rubble.”
“It will be all right,” Caroline chimed in. “I’ve got plenty
of materials for the basics.” She had her holdall with her—smart.
“I—yes, I can do that.” It helped to have an order to follow,
now that he knew Caroline was unhurt. It was the tether he needed to keep from
running off to the other passenger cars, searching for Camille. There were
plenty of people in a muddle over there right now already, and Anton was no
healer—he would only get in the way. He crawled in through the same window
Caroline had exited from and looked around, marking where their company lay,
then moved to each of them in turn.
Cardinal Proulx was unconscious, and judging from the size
of the knot on his skull, likely to have a terrible headache when he awoke, but
he was breathing freely and no limbs looked to be contorted. Monsieur Deschamps
was similarly unconscious, although he seemed to be coming around. His wrist was
likely broken, or at least very badly sprained, but Anton could detect no other
obvious maladies. He moved to the second half of the car, where the news was
less good.
Caroline’s companion was dead, her neck very clearly broken.
She’d probably died in the initial explosion, as the twist of the train had
thrown them all about the cabin. And Voclain…
Well. He was dead, that was evident. But it probably wasn’t
the crash that had killed him.
It was far more likely the bullet lodged in his chest that
had done that.
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