The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack - Mark Hodder [167]
Burton slapped the material and lunged at the man, caught him around the waist, and sent him crashing down. He knocked him senseless with a left hook and snatched up the weapon. There was some sort of heating element beneath the grip. Four thin pipes passed from it into a cylinder positioned over the barrel. He pulled back the lever at the side of the crossbow as he'd seen the man do. The next bolt slotted into place.
Sheathing his blade, Burton took aim at one of the slavering werewolves. With the steam from the rotorship above, and the swaying lights from the circling rotorchairs, the scene of the battle crawled with dark and distorting shadows, making it difficult to focus on the target; nevertheless, his aim was true, and the bolt tunnelled through the beast's brain. The wolf-man fell, twitched, and lay still.
Burton reloaded and looked around in time to see three Rakes hoisting Spring Heeled Jack above their heads and running with him up the slope toward the western end of the field. He lifted the crossbow and shot one of the three in the leg. The man fell with a cry of pain and lay jerking spasmodically while the other two dropped the struggling time traveller. One of them caught the next bolt in his shoulder and went down with a screech. The remaining man began to spin bolas, his eyes fixed on Burton. The king's agent shot him in the arm before he could let fly.
"Trounce! Honesty!" bellowed Burton, spotting the two men fighting nearby. "Jack is here! Help me!"
Detective Inspector Honesty was engaged in fisticuffs with a huge brute of a man, a Technologist who, by the state of his clothes and skin, was evidentially employed to stoke the boilers of the gargantuan ship hovering above. The svelte Yard man was dwarfed by him, yet, miraculously, seemed to avoid every swipe of the mammoth fists while planting his own again and again on the blocklike jaw above him. Even as Burton watched, the Technologist's knees wobbled and gave way. The big man dropped to a sitting position, and-bane-his head snapped to the left as Honesty's fist met the solid jawbone. Bang!-it was smacked to the right. The Technologist lay down and slept.
The slim detective shook his hands, flexed his fingers, and ran over to Burton with a smile on his face.
Detective Inspector Trounce, meanwhile, was displaying a much more basic form of combat. Truncheon in hand, he was moving from Technologist to Technologist, Rake to Rake, walloping them over the head.
He, too, paced over to Burton.
"The fight is moving up the field!" he shouted. "They have more men than us! We're losing constables fast, Captain!"
"Where's your jumping Jack character?" asked Honesty, wiping a spot of blood from his goggles.
"There!" said Burton, but as he pointed to where Edward Oxford had fallen, the stilt-man suddenly bounded up and sprang away, a shower of sparks and blue flame trailing behind him.
"After him! Don't let him escape!"
Oxford took two mighty strides, plucked a shovel out of a villager's hand, whacked the man on the head with it, then started laying about himself indiscriminately.
Trounce and Honesty sprinted toward him.
Burton raised the crossbow and took aim at Spring Heeled Jack's left leg. He began to apply pressure to the trigger.
A blade slid out of his upper right arm, then withdrew.
With a cry of pain, Burton dropped the Technologist weapon, its bolt sizzling into the air.
He turned and faced Laurence Oliphant.
"From behind, Oliphant?" he asked, stepping back and drawing his blade left-handed.