by Logan Jacobs
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah, you can let go of me now, I got it,” she said. “I just got startled and my foot slipped. Sorry.”
“Do you want to go back down?” I offered.
She cast me a green-eyed glare and said, “I ain’t a quitter.”
Then she kept climbing hand over hand. When she reached a less steep section, she transformed back into a wolf and leaped a few yards ahead of me. For the second half of the climb, we continued as we had been doing before, except that during the sketchiest sections, Lizzy made herself human so that she could have the use of her hands as well as paws.
Eventually, we reached the top, which had a sparse covering of shrubs and trees, and just breathed deep the scent of the plants and the night air and enjoyed the quiet gleam of the moon.
Then we turned our attention to searching the broad plateau for any sign of a ventilation shaft or other chink in the fortress where we could insert our makeshift fire bombs.
I tried to be strategic and sweep the ground in a geometric pattern so that I wouldn’t search the areas that I had already searched and so that I wouldn’t miss a single square foot. Lizzy, meanwhile, rampaged across the plateau wagging her tail with the moon gleaming in her fur and frantically sniffing the ground in seemingly random spots.
Naturally, the she-wolf was the first to find a ventilation shaft.
It was partially hidden by a bush. We could look down and see the square, clearly man made cut of the shaft, but the shaft was too long and too dark to see into the passageway beyond. I marked the spot with a stick stabbed into the ground so that it would be easy to find again, not that Lizzy in her wolf form would have had a problem recognizing it. Then we kept looking for another half hour or so and eventually found two more shafts that we also marked.
“When they’re about ready to attack down there, we’ll drop the bombs,” I said. “I don’t know how long it will take for them to notice, but once the fire or at least the smoke starts spreading, hopefully they’ll start rushing out, and we can cut them down.”
Lizzy morphed back into her distractingly curvaceous human form and purred, “Okay, well I guess it’ll be a few more hours before the humans can see that well, huh?”
“Yeah, probably about two hours till dawn breaks,” I agreed.
“Guess we’ll have to find some way to entertain ourselves till then, huh?” Lizzy twitched her pointed ears suggestively.
“Hmm, yeah,” I said with feigned obliviousness. “Should I teach you that gambling game that Willobee likes with the sticks and the stones--”
“I just want one stick and two stones,” Lizzy said impatiently.
“Hmm, okay, well I don’t see why you’d want to start off with a handicap like that, but if-- ” I began before the she-wolf tackled me to the ground.
She lay on top of me and kissed me while she ground her hips against mine. My erection struggled to burst through my pants until Lizzy paused briefly to remove them and my shirt. She flung them into a bush and then dropped her body back down on top of mine. She ground against me aggressively enough that the tip of my shaft was sliding partway into her wetness, but she refrained from fully inserting me, probably to tease me back for having teased her verbally.
I wrapped my arms around her and rolled her over. I placed my arm behind her head like a pillow to keep her head from hitting the stony ground while I guided my cock into the tight space between her thighs. I surged deep and slow for a while. Lizzy and I usually enjoyed fairly rough sex compared to what I did with my other lovers, but we were both in a kind of tender, quiet mood, partly because of her near fall earlier, and partly because of what we knew the next day would bring. So I kept it slow so that we could still kiss and caress each other’s bodies with our hands.
After a while Lizzy started arching her hips under me with more urgency, and I could tell she wanted to come, so I sped up and started slamming into her harder until she climaxed with a cry. The way her walls clenched around me pushed me over the edge, and my seed pumped into her as we both gasped.
After we detached ourselves I rested my head on her huge breasts, she flung one of her long athletic legs over me possessively, and we just held each other in silence until we started to drift off to sleep a bit.
When all was in readiness down at the camp, my other selves woke that self back up.
I gripped Lizzy’s arm and said, “It’s time.”
Her very faintly slanted bright green eyes opened wide. She nodded once and sprang to her feet. I had to pause for a moment to admire her improbably magnificent figure with its combination of excessive curves and athletic sleekness. But then we set to work. We scurried between each of the three ventilation shafts that we had marked out before, lit the improvised incendiary devices, and dropped them down into the fortress as little glowing orbs streaking through the darkness. I didn’t know whether there would be anything flammable below for them to catch on, but at the last, they were designed to produce enough acrid smoke to cause confusion and panic for those within.
“Okay, we gotta climb down fast so we don’t miss out on any of the fun,” I said. “But be careful. I’ll go first so that you’ll be above me again.”
Lizzy nodded, morphed, and scampered over to the edge of the cliff with such eagerness that it alarmed me.
“Be careful!” I repeated as I hurried over to join her. “I can’t afford to lose you.”
Lizzy’s long ears pricked up. She changed back into a human and looked at me over her shoulder from a crouched position as she replied, “Sure you can. You got plenty of other lovers, and you’ll have many times that in the future.” She didn’t say it with any kind of bitterness, it was just a matter-of-fact statement.
“But not like you,” I said emphatically.
The she-wolf grinned, winked, and morphed back. I swung myself over the edge and started working my way down, and Lizzy followed. She was still moving with a level of haste that I didn’t really approve of, but this time we reached the ground without incident.
“Thank you, mountain god,” I said only half-jokingly, in reference to the spirit that Willobee had been convinced inhabited Mount Ugga and controlled our fates while we were among its treacherous crags.
Lizzy barked her joyful agreement. Then she sprinted off in the direction of the camp. At the camp, we were all ready to go, but we were just waiting a few more minutes for the she-wolf and me to join us.
While Lizzy and I were on our way, three of my selves stood up in front of the assembled group of about fifty fighters, spaced out so that they could all hear me well from wherever they were, and proclaimed in unison,
“You didn’t have to be here. None of you had to be here. No one made you come. Your god didn’t tell you to come. No, that was an impulse that came from your own guts, a conviction that rose in your own hearts that told you that the narrow escape from destruction at the hands of Thorvinius that you experienced meant something more than breathing a sigh of relief and getting on with your ordinary lives. Your herb gardens, your laundry piles, your prayers and your books. Those things are valuable, and they will be there waiting for you when you get back. Or they will be passed on to others-- along with a safer, more just world with fewer Thorvinians in it-- if you don’t get back. But you decided that they could wait while you went off and used the opportunity of your salvation to make a difference, to fight for Ambria against The Devourer.”
“That’s fucking right,” Gavin yelled. Some of the other priests and vestals hollered, whooped, or just pumped their fists in the air.
“I can’t promise that you won’t regret that decision,” I continued. “Maybe some of you are regretting it right now, and I don’t blame you for that. But I respect you for making the decision and I respect you for sticking to it when others gave up and went home. This is going to be a defining moment in your lives, make no mistake about that. And for what it’s worth, I think you made the right decision.”
The priests and vest
als cheered again, both those who were outfitted in their gear and had their weapons strapped on, and those who hung back a little with the intention of remaining in camp, but had pressed in close enough to hear my speech too.
“Right at this moment, smoke is filling the halls of the fortress of Nadirizi,” I said. I sure as hell hoped that was the case, anyway. I wasn’t inside and couldn’t know for certain what had become of the fire bombs. “That’s going to drive some of The Devourer’s servants outside the safety of their home. Let’s be there to meet them!”
The cheers were deafening. Some of the priests that bore shields started clanging their spears or swords against them. At this point I didn’t care if the Thorvinians heard us, I wanted them to hear and come out to see what all the ruckus was about.
Then, a four hundred pound wolf came charging up, leapt in front of the assembled crowd, and unleashed a primal howl that did a more effective job of making the blood sizzle in everyone’s veins than any number of words ever could.
My fifth self running behind Lizzy trying in vain to keep up with her had to turn around really fast to avoid getting trampled as my own miniature army sprinted forward.
One of me stayed behind to guard everyone who was staying in camp, but my four other selves charged, three on foot since I would be entering the fortress and one mounted on Fury that would be wreaking havoc at Thorvinius’ front gates. I wore Polliver at that self’s belt and spurred Fury to try to keep up with Elodette.
Lizzy appeared next to me in her human form atop Slayer. Her magnificent howl seemed to have expended the last of the wolfishness that remained in her system for the night as the sun rose over the horizon. I didn’t know how she’d managed to get mounted up so fast and guessed that someone smart like Hester must have had the horse ready and waiting for her. Lizzy hadn’t paused for long enough to lace herself back into her red gown, which wasn’t really appropriate fighting garb anyway, but what she had done was flung Willobee’s rarely worn chainmail shirt over her naked curves. The garment’s effect was comical on the gnome and absolutely mesmerizing on the she-wolf. If the Thorvinians were half as distracted by the sight as any ordinary man would be, then our battle was already halfway won.
Elodette wasn’t exactly bad to look at in her short leather breastplate, either. The black centaur cast me a rare grin over her shoulder as she passed me, despite poor Fury’s best efforts.
When we reached the fortress, I had hoped at the best to see a bunch of panicked Thorvinians running around like headless chickens, and at the worst to see none of them at all but the standard sixteen sentries. What we got was something in between.
A gleaming black shield wall of about a hundred Thorvinians waiting for us, like some kind of giant, angry insect.
I knew that was only a fraction of their force, so we hadn’t instigated any kind of mass evacuation, but the fire balls must have been effective to some extent because they had recognized they had an enemy in the area.
As soon as we came within range, our archers started raining down arrows on the Thorvinians from horseback. Their shields swung up to form a roof. But, given how mismatched their body size and shapes were, they weren’t physically capable of holding a uniform shield formation, so their roof was uneven and had lots of gaps in it, and plenty of our arrows got through, which created even bigger gaps in their ranks.
Elodette was the fastest runner among all the equines, so she was the first to crash through their ranks, like a boulder smashing pottery. A graceful pale brunette boulder, that is. She had a sword, but usually her opponents didn’t survive first contact with her hooves long enough for it to become necessary.
I was close behind on Fury, and so was Lizzy on Slayer and Gavin on his horse.
The front row of Thorvinians were mostly roughly human-sized, or as near as could apparently be found, and they all wielded matching black shields that looked like they were made of obsidian and long jet black pikes. Behind them more Thorvinians were amassed, larger ones, spinier ones, quadruped ones, and ones without opposable thumbs with which to wield shield and pike, and they were brandishing motley weapons and waiting to pounce on anyone who broke through their front row.
My self that was mounted on Fury was the first of me to make contact. The powerful destrier planted his hooves squarely in the center of a Thorvinian shield, toppled the bearer over backward, and crushed him to death under his own shield while I lashed out with Polliver in one hand and another sword in the other and simultaneously decapitated the Thorvinians to either side of the squished one. On the left a spurting geyser of red went up, while on the right a sluggish trickle of some kind of foul-smelling gray substance oozed out.
Fury and I continued trampling through the pikemen, as did Elodette, Lizzy, and Gavin, to give the rest of my army that was on foot behind us a better opening. That included my three unmounted selves. But unlike the priests and vestals, my goal wasn’t to get close enough to inflict lethal damage on the vulnerable parts of Thorvinians without getting skewered by a pike first. My goal was to get inside the fortress behind them, which was filled with thousands more of their kind.
Lizzy trampled over two pikemen and then stood up in her stirrups, leaped, and flung herself onto the shoulders of a Thorvinian that resembled a toothy armored slug. If you could call them shoulders anyway, since his anatomy wasn’t very clearly defined. Then she sliced across his neck, if you could call it that anyway, with a dagger. As he flopped over, she disentangled herself, sprinted a few steps to catch up with Slayer, and got lifted off her feet by a beefy purple-skinned Thorvinian that could have killed her from behind, but seemed to have other ideas on his mind. I had no such competing considerations when it came to him and buried an axe in his back where it sliced clean through his spinal cord, since stabbing him through with a sword would have risked hurting Lizzy who was clutched to his chest.
As the purple-skinned hulk released her, Lizzy spun and kicked him in the chest which caused him to topple over onto me and crush me to the ground.
“Thanks Vander,” she yelled when she caught a glimpse of me. Then she swung back up onto Slayer and charged off as I heaved the massive muscle-corded purple corpse off me and got back on my feet.
At that point, with the help of the diversion caused by Lizzy, I was close enough to the nearest entrance and none of the Thorvinians were watching me, so I dove inside.
Another of my selves was already about fifty yards deep into the fortress.
My third unmounted self had about fifty feet to close between my self and the entrance, so I sprinted for it and wove around several otherwise engaged Thorvinians as I went. Just when I was about to dive inside something wrapped around my ankle and I found myself getting dragged across the ground on my belly.
I crunched up and twisted myself around to see that my captor was an octopus-like creature, although clearly able to breathe perfectly well on land, that was currently dragging me toward its circular maw. I chopped off the tentacle that was wrapped around my ankle, picked myself up, and sprinted back toward the same entrance. From the corner of my eye I saw another tentacle snake toward me.
“For fuck’s sake,” I sighed. The tentacle texture was rubbery and resilient enough that it would have been difficult to cut through while it was still moving, rather than stretched taut, and I didn’t want to let it wrap around one of my limbs again. So I grabbed the tentacle before it could grab me, ran with it until it was skinny as a noodle and the resistance started slowing me down too much, and then let go. The tentacle snapped back into place and whipped another Thorvinian across the face as it went, which distracted him enough to allow the vestal who was fighting him to plunge her sword into his gut.
My self that was wielding Polliver atop Fury was currently contending with three opponents at once and didn’t have a chance to get a wider perspective on how the battle was going, so I spared a last glance over my shoulder before I darted inside the fortress for the third time. Lizzy and Elodette were of course generating s
pectacular vortexes of carnage, and Gavin and Hester were acquitting themselves pretty well too. Most of the priests and vestals were kind of flailing from what I could tell, but they seemed to be relying on the tactic of piling onto one Thorvinian in groups of five or six, or huddling in defensive outward-facing formations, and that made the untrained fighters less vulnerable of targets than they otherwise would have been.
I entered the dimly lit fortress and left my army to the care of their captains and my mounted self.
Back at the camp a mile away, Ilandere, Florenia, and some of the vestals had set up bedsheet tents, boiled water, and were tending to some of the first wounded to be brought in.
I saw a groaning priest in blood-soaked robes bumpily levitating along through the air and nearly getting dropped several times. I rushed over to take him from the arms of the invisible god. “Thanks, Tarlinis,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Tarlinis said. “I’ll go get another one.”
That priest, as it turned out, actually only suffered from a superficial wound, and the blood that soaked his robes was mostly Thorvinian, a fact of which he was very proud.
Another order member, however, was carried in soon after that with some kind of venomous black-tinged wound that had already halfway severed his leg above the knee and would require an immediate full amputation to save his life.
He kept gibbering about the Thorvinian that had inflicted the wound as he was carried into a tent and seemed unaware of the inevitable operation. “Like, like a spider, a monstrous spider, but the face of a woman, and she was so beautiful,” he sobbed. “I don’t know what ha-- hap-- I don’t understand. She’s a demon. They need to know-- not to trust her-- I have to go back and tell them--”
“They know,” I said dryly, not loudly enough for the delirious priest to hear, not that he was paying any attention to me anyway. I was pretty sure he barely recognized any of us and that his mind’s eye was still just full of the beautiful spider woman that had cost him his leg. I hadn’t seen her my selves, but assumed she must be some kind of female variation of whatever kind of creature Alan the Eukalonian had been turned into.
