Free Fortress of Lost Worlds by T. C. Rypel

succumb to this place. What you need right now is what I need—a good fight.” Orozco triggered the wheel of a pistol, sparking the empty priming pan. “I can’t stand it here any longer, Hernando. I won’t waste another day in this living hell. I take the last few good lancers and mount a party. We fill the column at gunpoint, if need be. I load one pistol for the first pig who runs with loaded breeches. One for the enemy—whatever shape it takes this time. And a third…a third for myself. In case I need it.”
    They eyed each other tellingly.
    Salguero’s lips parted twice before he found words.
    “I can order you to stay.”
    “You can,” Orozco allowed hollowly.
    Anita hovered at the doorway. Without another word, Sergeant Orozco gathered up the pistols and strode from the chamber to depart into the snow. The captain listened to the receding drum of his hoofbeats.
    “Brave hombre,” Anita sneered.
    “What is it that you want of me?” Salguero demanded, turning on her sharply. “This town has destroyed my company as surely as any of the warlock’s foul magic.”
    “Just be nice to me,” she replied, sidling up to him.
    Salguero felt the heat in his loins, but there was no true passion in it. Just melancholy surrender. The admission of weakness before a superior force.
    He bent to kiss her, but she snatched his rapier from its scabbard and placed the needle point against his chest. She laughed, cold and derisive, to see his shock. Her voice was full of jeering accusation.
    “Go out and catch me a warlock. I’ll keep the bed warm for you here.”
    “Capitan!”
    The cries sprang from several throats near the house. The beating on the portico door came simultaneously with the keening wind and the sudden darkening of day that they’d come to know so well.
    The hideous harridan. The ghostly hag. The banshee.
    The door burst open and terrified faces confronted the captain. Among them was Orozco’s. Captain Salguero ran out onto the front steps to stare pop-eyed down the road to the west. The gray-green filmy apparition, her ethereal gowns flowing down over the housetops, swept toward them.
    The harbinger of death, whose charnel stench sometimes brought violent illness, whose burning touch inflicted on her victims’ flesh gray-mottled patches of infection that produced pustules and trembling paralysis, followed by rigidity and death.
    Salguero heard screams and the slamming of doors and shutters from all points in the town, though he could not tear his eyes from the strangely hypnotic death-shade who turned the west end of Barbaso sickly translucent.
    “Get inside, capitan— now!”
    Orozco and another lancer dragged Salguero into the house and bolted the door. They crouched with backs to the walls until the ghastly apparition passed, their eyes shut and lips trembling in silent prayer, as they had done many times before.
    It was long after the wailing wind had ceased, and the gloom that penetrated even the very walls had passed from the sky, that they tentatively went out to the silent street.
    In the wake of the banshee rode the corpse.
    It wore the uniform of the pistoleros, and its decapitated head was fixed in the crook of one rigidly tied-down arm. Its sightless eyes stared in empty, eternal horror. The other death-stiffened arm was twined about a slashed regimental pennon, its shreds flapping listlessly in the breeze.
    Salguero himself halted the lathered, wild-eyed steed. Steadying it, he gazed with lip-twitching disgust at the blood-drained, bearded head; the black, swollen lips and sickly-white boiled-egg eyes. A military pouch dangled from the corpse’s chest in grisly fashion, pinned there by the long thin blade of a misericord.
    “Oh, Jesus—” The lancer behind Salguero began to vomit.
    The captain tugged out the blade and gingerly grasped the pouch. Beneath it there was no heart, just a grisly hole in the corpse’s chest. His heart would turn up later, they knew, in some sick-joke