Reason One was we were low on ammo and heading into the unknown. Pretty sure we’d be forced to fight again at some point. There would be no parley if we got surrounded on open ground by the hunting forces trying to cut us off ahead on the other side of the windswept ridge we were trying to cross. So if we had a chance, an opportunity to talk our way through something, then it was probably at least a good idea to try. Save some rounds at the minimum.
Reason Number Two was a little bit harder to articulate at the time. But now, on the other side of what was about to happen, I understand it better. So I can at least give it a try. There was something dangerous about the old woman. Either it was the way Last of Autumn had treated her with an almost dangerous respect, or just the whole scene there in the lopsided shack among the dead vineyards going on close to the witching hour of three a.m. Oh three hundred. Between midnight and dawn. Halfway between Heaven and Hell. The feeling of loose power live and in the gloom… it was there and you could almost reach out and touch it. We all sensed it. Sensed this was something to measure twice because you’d only get one cut to try and get to the other side where you might get to go on living for a few more hours until you had to burn the last of your ammo on orcs or werewolves in some dead end.
It’s just… some of us were planning a different response, a different cut altogether, than what the captain was capable of in order to save his men. Us. Me. I was still in talk it out mode.
But there are some people, things, that can’t be reasoned with. She knew she had us in a tight spot.
“Ask her what she wants,” growled the captain in the dark, eyes shining like two pieces of coal on blue fire. Like a tiger out in the night and hunting. Like he was in a trance. Calm and meditative. Before the storm. The kind prizefighters go into before a big bout. Stone Cold Killer serenity.
I did as I was told and asked the witch what she wanted.
“Ah got three… Talker.”
Talker. She knows my name. My nickname.
That’s completely crazy. But I soldier on ’cause I’m pro that way.
“Three’s what I always got and none of them are easy,” she continues. Ol’ Sarita, she called herself. “But all are true. You and yours do one and you can walk on by no harm come to ye and yours. Never mind now big boy a-comin’. Ah ’spect ah’ll be dealin’ with him directly in time ’fore long.”
She mumbled and laughed to herself when I told her to go ahead and tell us what our options were.
“Well…” she said after a long draw on the stubby foul cigar. “Ah’ll take the services of yo’ best killah for a year. He’ll be slave to me and ah’ll send him into the east to deliver a message to the Witch Queens o’ Caspia. But really, know this, soldier ’fore the ruin, I’m a-sendin’ him to kill one o’ them beauties for an old wrong done ta me. Sheeah the Silent, she must die I say true. He may not return, the one ya give for the quest, but if he do… he’ll have no mem’ry o’ the time he spent under my sway. And ta end a year ah’ll return him to ye and you’ll be free o’ ta debt an passage cross’t my ol’ vineyard. The old hut won’t never hurt your trespass none.”
Okay, I thought to myself. There’s a lot to unpack there. But I got to translating and tried to block out the fact that the giant out across the valley was indeed getting closer. Dead leaves in the twisted vines dropped in clusters now with each thunderous ground strike.
And also the part about the hut won’t never hurt. That struck me as odd. And it bothered me. But I didn’t say anything.
“Okay. I’ve told my captain,” I told her. “What’s our next choice?”
She coughed a wet phlegmy glop and spat off into the darkness, inhaling once again from her ghastly-smelling cigar when she’d finished clearing the ragged trench that was her throat.
“Out back and down ta pool is a ol’ pond. Tell you somethin’ true… It’s deep, Talker. Deeper than anyone ever know. Way down ta the roots there’s an underground cavern down there, and a race that ain’t never been a-discovered. Got themselves a king right-like. Around his neck he wears ta old black pearl that was lost to me long year’n ago. More powerful than that ring you got hidden where no one can see, Soldier Boy. It’s a Pearl of Annihilation from the Ol’ Ones o’ Tarragon-y all gone now. You and your men swim down inta there and wipe ’em all out and bring me back ta black pearl… why then you can pass and keep all ta gold that’s down there and ye and your’n manage ta find. The old elves used t’ come here a-long ’fore the hut made its home here. Before the time o’ Elmyra who was my mother inta the Darkest Arts which is my fearful powers. She rode the hut then. But ’fore all that, that old deep dark pond was a lucky place to the firsts. Elves o’ Tarragon came here ta make their wishy-wishes and some went down ta there and found they an ol’ cavern and stayed like hermits going blind. Become a new race that breathes waters like the Kro-Ma-Taugh frog-mans o’ ta southern waste swamps. They worship a dark and angry god they-uns do, you be sure. Won’t be easy, even for ye and your’n killahs… Talker. But ye make the slaughter down there in the lightless depths and ye can pass on. Hut will have it so.”
I translated.
Again I noticed her speaking of the hut as a kind of living thing that had some say in this transaction. There was something about that that tickled a memory of a myth I’d heard once back in my scholarly other life. But the giant’s steps, louder by the second, were distracting me from total recall of all the useless knowledge I’d ever accumulated.
I finished her insane offer for us to swim down into a dark pool and kill our way through some aquatic race with home ground advantage. So far, sending Sergeant Thor off to be a zombie killer of some sort sounded like the most rational of options. And even that sounded seriously crazy.
I doubted Captain Knife Hand would go…
The captain keyed his radio mic and spoke. “Sergeant Major. Get moving down the road and to the other side of the ridge. We don’t make it out of this… keep moving. Get the wounded clear now. We’ll link on Rally Three. Warlord out.”
The witch cooed like a pigeon at this in the silence that followed.
“Ahhhh… well well well… ah see yo cap’n’s made his choice then… Talker. Foolish o’ him ta want t’ fight it out with the likes o’ me. But my vines hath needed a good drink o’ fresh warm blood for some time ere the ages o’ Sut… and they’ll have it tonight I ’spect.”
All around us the sound of dry crackles and sharp snaps began to rise and echo out of the dead vineyard. Vines, the horns of planted demons, twisted and moved forward, reaching out for us, slithering in, sealing us off from the trail that led back to the main road that would take us over the ridge.
The witch was cackling. Of course.
The captain shouted from the yard like he was directing fire on an enemy heavy machine gun nest. “Talker, tell her we pass, or she dies in the next thirty seconds.”
Captain Knife Hand wasn’t interested in playing any of her occult games.
But the witch was right back like this was some poker game, calling the captain’s bluff from the darkness of the porch with her ancient-screen-door whine.
She cackled with delight and pointed a crooked finger at one of the Rangers. A green ray shot forth and knocked that Ranger to the ground.
“Ah’ll turn ya all into creatures o’ the darkest darkness and ye’ll serve me well before I send ya off to the Black Prince…” she screamed with delight.
Then the captain popped the safety pin on the M14 thermite grenade he’d brought and concealed, stepped forward, and tossed it right through the open door of the ancient shack. Her… hut. Thermite kind of explodes, but not really. What it does do, is burn real hot for a long time. An old wooden shack like that was going to go up in seconds.
The witch screamed suddenly like a stuck pig and a banshee. She was out of her rocking chair and running for the black void of the door that led back into the hut. Wher
e the captain had tossed the thermite.
At the same time the captain pulled his sidearm gunfighter fast and started putting rounds into her as she ran. She never reached the void door and instead collapsed in a pile of old gray rags near the threshold and on the warped boards of the porch, moaning softly as the flames began to rise within the… twisting hut?
Inside the shack, the flames from the intense and unrelenting fire of the detonated thermite grenade spread quickly. Greedily licking up the wooden slats and catching old curtains with strange symbols sewn into them. As the entire place began to heave and convulse.
She was moaning on the porch. Over and over saying the same words.
“Ma’ hut. Ma’ poor hut. Ma’ beautiful hut.”
We pulled back, the Rangers hacking at the flanking vines as PFC Kennedy invoked the dragon staff and blasted a flaming path through the main tendrils and clusters leading back to the road through the vineyards. By the time we’d cut our way back to the teams hauling the wounded element along the road over the ridge and down the other side, the hut was fully engulfed in leaping flames.
And it was twisting. Writhing. Writhing like it was in agony from the flames consuming it. Writhing in pain I believe are the right words. The hut was. An inanimate object… suffering.
File that under things you thought you’d never see. A building tormented like a living thing on fire and engulfed in spreading flames.
We were over the ridge and we could hear the witch screaming from back there in the burning ruins. Her shrieks and moans floating over the smoldering vineyards. Inside my head I could hear her whispering in that cold cruel croak she’d spoken to me with. “Ye have no idea what yer man just burnt up, Talker. There were worlds in there. Worlds inside ma’ hut.”
And then, heading down through the dark trees on the other side of the ridge, getting ahead of the walking giant and finding the beginning of the stream that would take us down to the edge of Charwood Forest, her voice stopped and all I heard was the echo of it fading across the last of the night.
“You’ve no idea. Talker. There were other worlds in there.”
Worlds inside the hut.
Chapter Forty-Two
By the time we got down the hill and onto the other side of the ridge, the Rangers were in full flight but in no way disorganized. Rangers know how to move farther, faster, harder than any other soldier. It’s hard-coded in during the selection process. The vineyards and the shack behind us were on fire and the dying screams of the witch were fading with the last of the night. Orcs had been spotted trying to cut us off from the east. The giant’s feet thundered. NCOs were pushing everyone hard to keep moving as fast as they could.
Even the wounded.
I heard Kurtz barking, “Keep your people tight and line of sight. No one gets left, Brumm!”
Chatter on the comm was coming in from the captain, who was putting a new plan into action. We were stopping beyond the pond where the stream began to turn into a tributary that fed a larger waterway to the north at the entrance to the Charwood. We were going to make bramble rafts to get the wounded downriver faster. The water was pretty swift up here, but it would put some distance between us and the enemy. Mainly the giant.
Some of the heavier supplies were being floated via strapped rucks and watertight bags filled with air. The security team and scouts were being sent forward at the double to stay ahead of the floating main element.
I was busy working to get a bramble raft assembled and help the wounded “onto” it, which just meant they’d be hanging on to it as it floated downstream. Ambulatory wounded who could manage were using their rucks as flotation devices and lashing them together. Like I said, the current was swift and who knew if it got dangerous. But we didn’t have any other choice, and the Rangers were pros at water obstacles and navigation.
Dawn wasn’t far off now and the unseen giant howled relentlessly as it climbed up out of the valley on the other side of the ridge. The scouts had also spotted fast-moving swarms of orcs coming down out of passes nearby. Autumn told me something new had our scent; she could sense their presence coming for us now but whatever these newcomers were called, I didn’t get a sense of what they were. If we didn’t move, we’d be in a fight with whatever they were very soon and there was no reason to think it would be an easy one.
Autumn stared off upslope as though in a trance. “They’re in the vineyards now.” She told me the smoke had confused them for the moment, but once they got through it and found the river… they’d be on us.
I relayed all that to the sergeant major, and he just told me to take one of the wounded Rangers, Sergeant McGuire, and get into the river. It would be my job to hold on to him. I used some 550 and a carabiner to make sure he stayed really close.
After that I saw Last of Autumn mounting her horse and riding off ahead to assist the scouts who were clearing the sides of the river as the first orcs began to get ahead of us.
It was like a noose was slipping about our neck again.
I went into the cold current, assisting the Ranger named McGuire who’d been hit by a ballista bolt during the final night of the battle on the hill. His plate carrier had absorbed the brunt of the blow, but it had broken every rib in his chest, and he was having trouble just breathing. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he’d kept walking for most of the exfil. But now it was time for him to float, and it was my job to keep him breathing with his head above the surface. Chief Rapp organized the float and paired us up with a team of Rangers. The Special Forces medic told me to watch for bloody sputum as a sign of a possible tension pneumothorax. As in air filling the lungs and pushing on the heart, strangling the patient. So we had that going for us. We got him entangled in the bramble raft and pushed us off into the current with four other Rangers.
Behind us, just over the ridgeline with dawn in the east, the giant howled forlornly.
This was going to be really close.
The water was cold and fast and the looming rocks looked pretty dangerous to me. They were blue and gray and jagged in the first soft light of the new day. The current was dark and cold and there were whirlpools beneath the surface that sucked at your boots, and you knew if your boots got caught on a rock or an underground branch and you got stuck, you’d get pulled out of the raft and left behind. Regardless of what the Rangers thought or said, if you got sucked down you were staying down.
I knew things were getting serious when we hit the first set of rapids and our bramble raft went out of control and slammed into a large rock so hard it felt like it was going to disintegrate with all of us hanging on. The Rangers held it together, but we were clearly out of control. I held on to the hissing and gasping McGuire, just trying to keep his head above the rushing water.
As we came out of that first set of rapids, arrows began to whistle from the dark woods all around. In the moments of foam and fury along the rapids the sun had risen and while the air was still cold and we were soaked to the bone, the day was promising to be golden.
It would be nice if we lived to see much of it.
One of the Rangers blazed away with his sidearm at a misshapen orc who’d come down to the bank to throw a barbed spear at us.
Then one of the Rangers took an arrow right through his arm and another Ranger pushed himself up on the out-of-control raft and grabbed the wounded man before he slipped away and under the water. There had been no time to make our weapons watertight for river crossing. Someone on another raft opened fire on the shadowy trees the dark-feathered arrows were screaming out of. Whether anything hit or not was hard to say as we were being swiftly carried off down the river and knocked into rocks and drowned all at the same time. I was sure I was losing gear. There were firefights going off in the woods all around us and we had no comm. So who knew what was going on? The scouts were obviously engaging the outliers, who had to be as tired as we were. They’d had to travel a much longer distance
to even attempt to cut us off here.
But what about magic? I asked myself.
I didn’t know the answer.
In time the river slowed to a crawl and we caught sight of Autumn and the scouts near a bend in the river along a small sandy beach. They were signaling us to disembark there as the rear security teams pulled out of the river course under heavy arrow fire. The Rangers on my raft pulled hard for the beach, and to my credit I’d kept McGuire alive even though he looked half-drowned and like he wanted to die right there. He tried to stand on the sand, but his legs gave out. He stayed conscious. The man was tough. He coughed and then said it felt worse than when, “I got shot over in the Sandbox.” We gave him a moment to catch his breath as he knelt there silently fighting back tears and spitting up blood. Other rafts floated onto the beach.
One of the Rangers got down to examine Sergeant McGuire and asked, “You got the tat, Sar’nt?”
“What tat?” I asked, completely in the dark. The Ranger worked fast but decided against the next step. We were losing time. We needed to move.
“Some guys get a tat between the fourth and fifth rib that says Puncture Here,” said the Ranger as he got up and got ready to move. “If it gets bad he’ll start to strangle, and you’ll need to do a needle D. Ever do one?”
Needle decompression.
I had not.
The Rangers had established a perimeter and were holding the orcs off with ranged fire. Some arrows managed to get close and land in the dirt and the sand along the shore with sudden soft hisses. Occasionally one hit driftwood with a loud thunk.
I took a moment to scan our immediate surroundings as the Rangers and their NCOs organized for the next phase of the move. The small stream was a bad hold and we were about to be encircled. It was time to get out of the noose before it closed around our necks. We were between the ridge and the forest in open field. The river curved off toward the east and the rising sun, a tributary that fed the main body of the waterway that ran through that area off to the north. Above the river course was a large prairie of grass and wildflowers of every color.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 34
