Ignatio’s soldiers wailed with repugnant glee, a monstrous call to carnage. The captive villagers peered up from their pickaxes and shovels, a collective fear leaping onto their faces. Many of them tried to flee into the honeycomb tunnels, but thralls blocked their way.
“Keech, we have to do something!” Duck cried.
Keech struggled to rise, but Cutter shoved him back down with his boot. “Stop fighting. It’s over.”
Pushing the fog out of his vision, Keech rummaged through Pa Abner’s rules of survival—Hesitation means death; if trouble stirs, move away from immediate danger; win yourself distance, win time to think—but none of Pa’s lessons seemed to be helpful for the predicament.
There was, however, one effective way for Keech to foil Ignatio.
He could use the Black Verse, speak the Invocation to Disrupt Concentrated Energies. He could point his finger at Ignatio and speak one dark spell—No-ge-phal-ul’-shogg—and the sorcerer would perish under a full blast of Prime.
Keech lifted a shaking hand, aiming past Cutter and toward Ignatio. He opened his mouth to release the invocation.
But he hesitated.
To use the Black Verse was to touch the malicious energy of the truest darkness. Each time he’d gone down that path, depravity had corrupted his plans. Keech lowered his hand.
There had to be another way.
Ignatio’s thralls shoved the prisoners into the center of the camp. The monsters gathered in a tight semicircle, standing shoulder to shoulder, fencing in the people of Wisdom. The sight of the captives huddled in a panic-stricken mass filled Keech with horror.
“Ready yer aim, men!” the bearded thrall yelled.
Moving with incredible speed, Duck hopped to her feet, stepped to a nearby rubble pile, and scooped up a boulder nearly twice her size. “All of you stop and back away, or I’ll flatten every last one of you mangy curs!” To prove her point, she lifted the stone above her head.
The soldiers hesitated, their eyes widening at the sight of the boulder.
“You truly are the daughter of Bennett Coal,” Ignatio said, smiling.
“You’re danged right I am,” Duck spat. “Now get up, Keech.” When Cutter refused to let him up, she growled, “Back off, Cut, or I’ll flatten you, too. Don’t test me!”
With a disoriented sort of snarl, Cutter lifted his boot off Keech and stepped away.
“This is quite entertaining!” Ignatio sang. “Let’s see how this plays out.”
As Keech rose, he saw a curious thing. Two of the thralls at the far end of the rank dropped to the cavern floor as if their legs had been chopped out from beneath them. Then one after the next, their chattering neighbors started tumbling off their boots as well. Clouds of black smoke spouted from their mouths.
One confused thrall bawled, “What’s happenin’?”
The entire brigade erupted in a chaos of movement.
The mirth on Ignatio’s face disappeared. “Stand firm!” he shouted.
An ear-rattling bark echoed across the cavern, and Keech spotted a patch of gray fur charging low among the black smoke. A luminous yellow glow floated with the fur.
“Achilles!” Duck yelled.
The hound dashed through the legs of the resurrected men, an amulet shard clutched between his teeth. He bounded through the armed ranks and smacked the shard against the exposed flesh of a panicked thrall. The soldier dropped his musket and keeled over in the dirt. Thralls swiped the air with their weapons, but Achilles moved too swiftly. Before Keech could lock on the hound’s movement, two more thralls went shuddering to the cavern floor.
“Stop that dog!” Ignatio bellowed as a maelstrom of movement filled the cavern.
Achilles wove in and out of the horde, stilling thralls as the people of Wisdom scampered to their freedom. A few of the thralls gave pursuit into the surrounding tunnels, but most of them appeared confused by the roving hound.
Keech glanced toward Ignatio in time to see the lightning-quick shaft of an arrow hiss down from high above. The projectile shattered against the sorcerer’s skull upon impact, as if Ignatio’s skin were made of marble. The fiend shouted, “Who did that?”
A second arrow whizzed down and struck Ignatio’s chest, but rather than sinking into his flesh, the projectile shattered into splinters.
Keech searched the cavern’s upper levels and spotted a figure on the scaffolding. Strong Heart peeked over the ledge and nocked a third arrow.
Ignatio pointed up at the girl. “I see you!”
Still clutching the boulder, Duck murmured at Keech, “Now’s our chance! Strong Heart’s distracted him!” With a vigorous grunt, she lobbed her cargo at the approaching thralls. The heavy slab bowled into the monsters, knocking them asunder.
“Time to take this fight to them.”
A reverberating cry roared through the cavern as a new group of men and women emerged from the tunnels. Dozens of prisoners from the outside camp, freshly armed with muskets and shovels, charged at the dumbfounded thralls. Leading this company was the silver-haired woman they had spotted earlier—Quinn’s aunt Ruth. She directed the rebellion, bellowing orders while swinging a hammer at ambushing thralls. The soldiers tried to raise their weapons as the townsfolk collided into them, but they couldn’t withstand the wave of angry prisoners.
“Take ’em down, every last one!” a familiar voice shouted.
Keech hollered in delight as Quinn Revels leaped down from a scaffold, gripping the war ax he’d built on the Santa Fe Trail. Quinn crashed into an unsuspecting thrall, knocking the fiend backward. Then he put two fingers to his mouth and loosed a shrill whistle. Achilles loped to his side, still clenching the amulet shard in his mouth. “Good dog!” Quinn said, and took the radiant silver.
“Quinn had a plan after all!” Duck hollered at Keech.
A bedlam of gunfire boomed across the cavern as the outnumbered soldiers began targeting the captives. A soldier near Quinn dropped to one knee and fired upon a charging prisoner. The musket ball grazed the man’s shoulder, but the brave fellow kept swinging his fists at attackers. Rushing over, Quinn slapped his silver against the soldier’s neck. The thrall’s face erupted in a spiderweb of black veins, and he perished with a feeble curse. Pressing a hand against his wounded shoulder, the prisoner said to Quinn, “Much obliged!”
“Get back to the surface,” Quinn said to the fellow. “Help as many as you can.”
The skirmish spilled into every corner of the cavern. A rotted monster approached Keech with a rusty sword. Keech crouched low and kicked, snapping the creature’s knee. The thrall dropped onto his face and the sword skittered out of his hand. “Yer gonna pay for that,” the dead man muttered.
“Heads up, partner,” Keech said to the thrall.
Suddenly Duck appeared and dropped another boulder onto the thrall’s back, pinning him to the ground. She laughed as the trapped creature squealed in rage. “We needed a miracle, and we got one. Quinn and Strong Heart started a revolt!”
Standing amid the carnage, Ignatio screamed in fury as another arrow snapped against him. “You waste your time!” he bellowed up at Strong Heart, still perched atop her scaffold. “I will end you!”
“Mah-theen thi-eh!” came the girl’s reply.
Dodging another thrall’s bayonet, Keech spotted a terrified Coward hunching pathetically near Ignatio’s side.
“The prisoners are surrounding us!” Coward bleated, tugging at the sorcerer’s coat. He was still wearing the Key of Enoch like a belt, and the Wisdom fighters had cut off his passage to the outside camp. He shoved Cutter in front of him. “Protect me, Miguel!”
Without a word of protest, Cutter elbowed an attacking prisoner. Another fellow slammed the flat head of a shovel against Cutter’s back, knocking the boy to his knees. Bellowing in rage, Cutter launched himself at the man and whacked the shovel loose.
Keech grimaced at Duck. “We need to get Cut away from Coward. That monster’s gonna get him killed.”
“How, though? Cutter’s got the Devil’s mark.”
“Follow me, but stay back a ways. If I get pinned down, I’ll need your muscles.”
Tightening down his hat, Keech rushed toward Cutter, keeping low to avoid Ignatio’s watchful eye. Duck followed a few feet behind.
Suddenly Quinn’s aunt Ruth appeared in front of him, swinging her hammer at a thrall’s chomping mouth. When the dead man dropped, Keech lunged to still the monster with his shard, then glanced up at the woman with a grin.
“Hi, Miss Ruth. I’m Keech, a friend of your nephew’s,” he said.
“Pleasure to meet ya!” Spinning, Ruth swiped her weapon at another encroaching monster.
Before Keech could take another step, a muttering thrall jumped in front of him and tackled him to the ground. “Time to die, kid!” the thing screeched.
“I don’t think so,” Duck’s voice called out. A heavy brown timber swung into view, and with a loud thwock! the creature went sailing. When Keech hopped back up, he saw that Duck was clutching a wooden beam twice her height. She had used the long post like a club.
“If Nat could see me now!” Duck sang.
They resumed their advance on Cutter, but they didn’t get five paces before Coward turned and spotted them. The fiend tugged on Ignatio’s coat, trying to get the sorcerer’s attention. Swiveling, Ignatio swatted the man with the back of his hand. Releasing a pitiful wail, Coward crumbled to the floor. Animosity teemed in his tearstained eyes. Sputtering indiscernible words, he drove his thumb down upon the magical brand on his opposite palm.
Slapping his hands to his forehead, Cutter screamed.
Pressing the Devil’s mark, Coward pointed sharply at Ignatio. “Now, Miguel! Do it now!”
Unsheathing his bone-handled blade, Cutter raised the steel to attack.
“Keech!” Duck shouted. “He’s gonna—”
But Keech was already kicking off into a sprint. He bounded across the chamber, leaping over rock and debris, hoping to tackle the boy and wake him from his stupor. “Cut, don’t do it!”
He was too late.
Cold surprise splashed across Ignatio’s face as Cutter lunged. Though every other attack had bounced off the monster’s stone-hard skin, Cutter’s blade stabbed through the eye tattoo, sinking deep into the sorcerer’s chest.
The world seemed to freeze as Ignatio fixed his stare on the bone handle sticking out of his body.
Releasing the knife, Cutter stepped back. His face twisted with shock.
A mangled series of expressions crossed Ignatio’s face. First, confusion, as if he couldn’t understand how the blade had pierced him, then surprise that he’d been mortally wounded. “Imposible,” he hissed, then turned his bewildered eyes toward Coward. “Traitor!”
Coward’s lips pulled back into a sneer. “Now the Reverend will see my strength!”
Grimacing with a rage as dark as midnight, Ignatio dug at a tattoo on his stomach and peeled it free. “This demon is for you, Coward. A demon for your betrayal.” Then, turning his agonized gaze toward Cutter, he said, “Destroy him, Miguel. Hold nothing back.”
Shuddering, the sorcerer pitched backward in the dirt.
Within a heartbeat, every thrall in the cavern stiffened and screeched in fear. Cries of triumph rose from the people of Wisdom as the soldiers crumbled where they stood. Keech recalled the moment Bad Whiskey had perished in Bone Ridge, how the rejuvenated dead of the graveyard had tumbled back to their true deaths upon Whiskey’s demise.
Keech hooted his own victorious cry—but stopped when Ignatio’s fist fell open and a strange puddle of darkness poured off his palm. It was the tattoo Ignatio had peeled from his stomach in his final gesture of rebellion. The black liquid rippled along the ground, flowed over Cutter’s boots, and climbed his leg with blinding speed.
Cutter dropped to his knees and shrieked as the substance seeped around his neck.
Keech recognized the spell. It was the curse of fury, the same curse that Ignatio had placed on Pa Abner in 1845. Though Ignatio was gone, his final affliction still lived.
With eyes drenched in terrible darkness, Cutter leaped to his boots and howled. He spun toward Coward, his tormentor. Panicked whimpers escaped Coward’s throat, and he backpedaled on his hands and knees. “Stop, Miguel! I command you to stop!” Once again he shoved his finger into the brand on his palm, but this time to no avail.
Cutter surged forward, slamming into the man, and his fists crashed down like a storm. Coward’s shouts and curses seemed incapable of penetrating the boy’s fury. Opening his mouth, Coward released a vicious hacking noise, and Keech couldn’t understand, at first, why the fellow would cough into Cut’s face. Then he remembered how the man had knocked Quinn unconscious in Wisdom with a strange cough.
But Coward’s magic didn’t seem to work against Ignatio’s curse. Cutter continued his frenzied assault. Frantic, Coward reached into his frock coat and pulled out a bone blade.
Abruptly, the blows stopped and Cutter jerked back, staggering away a few steps, hands clutching his stomach. Then he collapsed, unmoving.