Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech by C. L. Werner Read Free Book Online Page A

the islands that made up the city of Five Fingers, Hospice was a labyrinth of filthy slums, a quagmire of human misery and despair. It was to Hospice that the poorest of the poor were discarded, condemned to a starveling existence in a place the rest of the city did its best to pretend didn’t even exist. For those who wanted to disappear, Beggar’s Isle offered a dismal anonymity, provided one could tolerate the obscene broth of poverty and disease.
    Even Lorca had been forced to use caution, a threadbare coat concealing the expensive cut of his clothes. The half-dozen brutes who escorted him down Rat Run were from a local gang with loyalties to Lorca’s syndicate and ultimately to High Captain Kilbride. The thugs kept their clubs and knives at the ready, and any sign of movement brought a wary glance from at least one of them. Kilbride had been fighting High Captain Waernuk for control of the Beggar’s Maze area for several years, but it wasn’t the rival syndicate that most worried Lorca. Elsewhere in Five Fingers, even the independent criminals were leery of angering one of the big syndicates. On Hospice, there were many too desperate to care whom they crossed. It was hard to worry about consequences when you hadn’t eaten for a week.
    From the Beggar’s Maze, Rat Run led into the dilapidated Southhold Prow. Once a bustling industrial area, the district had since fallen into the same squalor as the rest of the island. Full of abandoned warehouses, dilapidated mills, and run-down tenements that had once housed thousands of factory workers, the district was a wilderness of rust and decay.
    Lorca’s escort led him toward a rotting warehouse on the area’s periphery. The brick walls were gradually crumbling away, the tile roof had been stripped bare by storms to expose rusted iron beams, and the windows were boarded, the doors chained together. As they approached, Lorca felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. There was an indefinable atmosphere here, something more depressing than mere abandonment, something more elemental in its wrongness. The feel of the place was more than simply doomed. It was forsaken, even damned.
    He could see that his guards felt the same. Their vigilance took on an almost frantic quality. Even the rats were repelled, straying no nearer the warehouse than a few hundred yards. Lorca frowned at his own uneasiness. He dismissed his escort, unwilling that they should see his timidity. He waited until the gang had withdrawn into the broken hulk of an old steel mill before forcing himself onward.
    Unlike the rats and thugs, Lorca knew the reason for the dread that chilled his heart. That knowledge gave him the courage to press on alone. Indeed, the ordeal emboldened him with each step. The source of his fear was no mystery because it was something under his control.
    It took three keys to open the lock that bound the chains across the warehouse doors. By the time Lorca had finished turning the last key, his pride had dulled the last tremor in his hands. There was no fear in his step when he slid one of the iron-banded doors along its corroded runners and stepped into the darkness.
    Fear returned when the gangster’s eyes adjusted. Laid out along the dusty floor of the warehouse, close to the door, was a row of bodies. A dozen or more, each in a different state of decay and putrefaction. The sight of corpses, even in such profusion, wouldn’t have bothered Lorca. It was what had been done to them that made his gorge rise, certain mutilations that were as unspeakable as they were profane.
    “Feeling squeamish?” Azaam’s brittle voice sounded from the darkness. Lorca looked away from the row of corpses, stared as the blood hag came stalking out of the darkness. She had discarded the affectations of an elderly dowager, adorning herself in the savage splendor of a Satyxis sorceress. A kilt of tanned leather was wrapped about her waist, the dried fingers of the men whose flayed skins had provided