Fear still at bay from veneine intoxication-and, in a situation such as this, Beckett found himself hard-pressed to say whether fear or intoxication would be worse-the old coroner surveyed the scene. The Lobstermen’s car had suffered the worst of the vines. Beckett could see men struggling, wrapped in thorny green, tiny red flowers blooming where the tendrils had found the gaps in their bone armor. The vines crushed bones and drove out breath and stabbed into veins like hypodermic needles. None of those men would survive; their lives were blooming red along the length of tangled vine.
Miraculously, the Emperor’s car had managed to survive the…event. It was in place and firmly on the tracks, but caught by the vines and the weight of the Lobstermen’s car. The forward engine shrieked and squealed and pumped blood-smelling phlogiston into the air, but the vines held fast. What happened? The vines…Beckett knew those vines from Kaarcag. They were a chimerstric weapon-a living entity transformed into a vehicle for destruction. The Sarkany Rend bred them, or grew them, or created them, somehow. The Sarkany Rend…are they involved in this? It was tempting to believe, but Beckett wasn’t sure. With the explosion of heretical sciences in the last year, it seemed just as likely that some would-be assassin had gotten their hands on a chimerstry primer.
I have to…have to do something…his brain felt like it was mired in mud. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t get his thoughts together. What am I supposed to do? The Emperor was alive, the plan had failed. Unless…
Beckett stared at the car with mounting horror. What if the plan had been to isolate the Emperor? The chimerstric weapon had been intended to neutralize the guard, while the assassin waited with the Emperor himself? Beckett tried to run down a list of the men and women that might be in the foremost car, while he scrabbled around, looking for a way to cross the gap. There was a girder, a few feet below him, that had been undamaged by the train’s destruction. He tried to lower himself down a hanging railroad tie.
Gradith Vie-Gorgon the Prime Minister. Minister of the Exchequer, something Rowan-Czarnecki. There’s another Rowan-Czarnecki-under-minister of Health and Safety? The Emperor’s personal physician. The two women…Beckett had, in the past, insisted that all of the William II’s mistresses be subject to background checks. The Emperor had conceded the need for it, and then promptly refused to ever supply the names of anyone he dallied with.
Beckett succeeded in easing himself out onto the girder-there was fully ten feet of length before he’d be able to reach a vertical handhold on the opposite side. The wind whipped at his coat. He was a very long way up, Beckett knew, and not a healthy man. Crawling across narrow metal girders, hundreds of feet below a stone valley floor was unlikely, to say the least. He had just taken it in his mind to turn back, perhaps find someone that could help him, maybe find someone who knew where there was a rope, when he saw tiny green tendrils wriggling from the steel by his hand. The tendrils flexed and grew, became thicker, blacker, began to extrude sharp thorns. They reached out for him, and he saw Sergeant Garret again, his face hacked together from whorls in the metal, vines climbing from his nose…
Beckett pushed off from the railroad tie and tried to run along the horizontal girder. He took one step, two-the vines were behind him now, crawling along after him, clutching-three steps-his balance was off, he could feel himself leaning to one side about to go over-four-the vines flexed again, tearing the girder from its place in the bridge, rocking it beneath his feet…
He fell forward, crashing chest-first into the vertical girder across from him, wrapping his arms around it like a drowning lover, his feet swinging in the open air as the rose-bedecked vines fell with his narrow bridge into the valley. Beckett stayed there for a moment, gasping with breath, squeezing the iron truss so tight that it would have been little surprise if he’d snapped a rib because of it.
Back across the now-impassable gap, a well-heeled man in a high-quality but disheveled suit leaned out of the car’s rear door and shouted out. Beckett couldn’t hear what the man said; blood was pounding so furiously in his ears, and this, combined with the illusory sound of machinery and the scraping, wrenching, shrieking sound that the malicious vines made as they continued to crush anything they lighted on, would make communication impossible.
“Get back!” Beckett screamed at him. “Get back! The vines live on blood! Get…get everyone to the end of the train, and get them off! Don’t touch-”
A thin grin tendril whipped at the man’s hand; he swore and snatched it away. An expression of horror occupied his face as he saw that the thin green vines with their bright red flowers were all around him, pulsing and writhing, and lashing out at him. He nodded to Beckett in curt acknowledgement of the warning, and then slipped back inside the car.
There was a groan of bending metal and then a series of high-pitched snaps as the vines that held the fallen car finally snapped. The coach swung, crashing into the supporting bridge; the entire structure shuddered, nearly shaking Beckett from his place, then it spiraled off into the gorge, cracking open and spilling forth its bloody, broken contents. It crashed like thunder when it hit, and the sound reverberated throughout the valley.
Almost at once, the engine and the Emperor’s carriage began to sluggishly roll forward; the dead vines wrapped around their axels, deprived of sustenance, had begun to wither almost immediately, and were being shredded by the force of the train. Beckett spat, and began to climb up the iron rail.
It was not far, and there were evenly-spaced supporting rails at weird angles to the main one, and so should not have been too difficult. Nonetheless, Beckett could feel his shoulders burning, his hands cramping up, his legs turning to a weak jelly by the time he flopped up onto the railroad ties. The train car was still hindered by the vegetation, and only slowly picking up speed. The old coroner struggled to his feet, gasping at the sharp pains in his knees-pains that he had forgotten about almost entirely in the haze of his intoxication-and staggered towards the Emperor’s coach.
He paused briefly to grab at a hefty stick of splintered wood-all that remained of a railroad tie that had been destroyed when the center of the bridge was lost. He jogged to keep up with the train, wincing at the persistent pain in his limbs, and trying to imagine the precise scenario that would need to exist inside the car in order for a foot-long splinter to be of much use. He did not succeed.
Lacking anything that resembled a strategy-and having been well-served by a lifetime of rash behavior-once Beckett had attained the platform on the rear of the coach, he just set his shoulder against the door and burst in. Perhaps he expected the element of surprise to give him some advantage that he lacked, or perhaps he considered it at least remotely plausible that William II’s would-be assassin was standing directly behind the door. Of the many scenarios he considered-including an especially unlikely one that involved him knocking the assailant directly unconscious before he’d had time to harm anyone-none resembled the sight that lay before him.
The lush interior of the coach was in complete disarray. The heavy satin draperies, all in the deep purples and dark greens of the Gorgon-Vies and ordinarily hung about the windows to keep the car comfortably claustrophobic, were a shambles-torn from their rods and strewn about in mounds of lush fabric, along with paintings shaken loose from their moorings and shredded by their fall, chairs tumbled and broken, and a generous scattering of the razor-sharp remains of the Emperor’s personal dry-bar. Glass crunched beneath Beckett’s feet as he staggered into the room.