Even now, with every incredible thing he’d witnessed, he still did not want to be part of this fantastical world in any way, shape, or form. It was like his mind screamed and raged against believing that these impossible impossibilities were actually made real and true. He was the kind of guy who would’ve been happier on deployment to some third world hellhole where everyone was trying to kill him with modern weapons and a whole lot of bad intentions. That he could understand. Fairy dust and manticores… not so much. If Tanner was right, his cybernetic programming just couldn’t accept it.
A moment after the ceremony ended and we could hear each other’s thoughts and see things in the dark, Tanner spoke. “Fellowship up, Sar’nt. Good to go.”
I saw, in that brief moment where we could read each other’s thoughts, two things. Kurtz wanting to murder Tanner for crossing the stream of this unbelievable world with that of the black-and-white military he so believed in and wanted everything to be. Forever.
And what Last of Autumn was… thinking… dreaming… of.
What I saw grabbed me. Grabbed me like that first time we touched. That wild electricity that was a magic all its own far more magical than Kennedy’s lightning train.
I saw what she was thinking.
Her and I. Somewhere in a small boat. Sailing into the southern waters of this world. To the cities of men. In the distance, ahead over the water we were crossing, I saw a city. Not like the kind we’d left behind. Not like New York or LA. Paris or London. One like something out of the Middle Ages. Fortresses and squat towers. Smoke and sailing ships riding in the harbor and heading out to sea. Shining in the golden morning light of first day. I could hear the slap of the waves against the side of the old boat. The creak of the tackle. The wind was from off the quarter and the gulls were starting to come in from the port to circle our threadbare patchwork sail. I was at the tiller. I was there. And I could feel the wind, smell the salt, and hear the water all around us. Just the two of us.
Sitting forward, near the sail, Autumn wore a silvery dress and her green cloak. No armor now. No weapons. She sat watching the city we were sailing toward. The wind whipped her hair, tossing it in her face, and she reached up and brushed it away. Then she pointed at the fantastic city and turned to smile at me. A smile that was nothing but hope for all the good things life must offer. The opposite of the look in her eyes when she told me of the dragon.
It was just us there. In her dream. And… we were free.
When I opened my eyes to see the luminescent world the Hunters’ Fellowship Moon Vision had revealed, lighting the inside of the dark cave in an almost night-vision starlight blue that was better than anything the US Army could ever dream up, I saw Autumn sitting on her knees in the circle we had formed. Pale hands in her lap. Eyes still closed. She was just smiling. Smiling at the thought of a dream that had nothing to do with dragons or what we were about to do.
Like that was some kind of possible future.
I would just be Autumn then, I heard her say in her mind. And… it would just be us.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Where there had been darkness, now we saw everything. And what we saw was that even beyond the runes Autumn had read to us, the front door was one giant warning to just stay away. Bones littered the ground. That was the first thing you saw as Moon Vision allowed you to take in exactly where you were. Bones. White and bleached. They were everywhere. Every one of them broken, fractured, crushed to powder in some instances. Among all that, and it took time to understand what exactly you were seeing, but among all the broken and bashed-in skulls and fractured tibias and femurs, lay ancient weapons of every kind.
These too were broken and smashed. Broken and smashed weapons among broken and smashed bones of what might once have been humans… and sometimes definitely were not humans.
Swords and axes. Some rusting, others shining brightly in the luminescent blue of our Moon Vision. But nothing was whole. Everything had been destroyed at some prior date, to some extent.
“What in the ever…”
It was Brumm. His voice dry and low. I turned away from Autumn, still smiling in her dream of our escape, and followed the gunner’s gaze upward as he spat out a stream of dip, splashing it across the skull of a horned and fanged humanoid that lay cracked and forgotten on the cavern floor.
Carved into the living rock above was something like a sphinx. Except its head was a grinning human skull. The carving absorbed most of the rock ceiling and looked as though it had been fashioned out of the stone up there long ago. But there was more.
Behind the skull of the looming sphinx were two crossed arrows. Massive and crossing the whole ceiling. And jutting up through the skull was a sword. The hilt reached the floor of the cave below, and in the hilt was the fractured remains of a door. The entrance to the tomb. A giant bronze door that had turned green with age and lay broken in the frame.
All of us, even the snipers to the rear, stared up at the incredible carving above our heads. We’d literally need to walk under the skull and step through an opening in the hilt of the sword to enter the tomb.
“Huh,” said Kurtz.
No one said anything after that. We all waited for Kurtz to expound. He didn’t. It was as silent as a graveyard in that cave and only the sound of the waterfall back at the entrance could be heard.
Silent as a grave was ironic. Because it was a tomb after all.
“What, Sar’nt?” asked Tanner.
Again, the sergeant said nothing for a long moment. Then, “Don’t know,” he almost whispered to himself. “But… that seems familiar somehow.”
I knew what he meant. It was almost like, and maybe this was because of the Hunters’ Fellowship and that momentary ability to read each other’s minds, but it was almost like I could see his mind working the problem of trying to decipher the image of the skeleton sphinx looming above us. See him paging through files in his mental office, trying to find the information the image of the statue in the cavern had evoked on his hard drive.
Or maybe this was that thing Vandahar had hinted at. My talent. My revealing. Maybe my peek in his mind was that. Because I didn’t feel anyone else in Kurtz’s mental file room looking around for a clue. Just me. I was there.
I saw, or felt, I don’t know exactly, him toss aside a 4187. Which is a form you fill out in the Army when you want to go to a specialized training school. You can fill it out for other things. But for some reason this one was about a request for specialized training. He’d picked it up for a second because it was interesting, and then mentally flipped it aside thinking it wasn’t what he was looking for. I could practically see all that. Maybe this was because my supply of instant coffee was down to just three packets. Maybe rationing, the lower levels of caffeine that came from not having my usual excessive amounts as often as possible was unlocking some kind of incredible new mental powers. If so… I still choose coffee. You bend metal beams with your mind, Magneto. I’ll take a solid pour-over from Costa Rica any day of the week. Nice try, Devil.
I crossed and picked up the 4187 that lay on the floor of Kurtz’s mind.
Studied it.
Applicant Requests Q-Course Selection Phase. SF.
It almost glared up from the page into my eyes. Like it was forcing me to read it.
I still had no idea what it was about though. Why the image of a skeleton with two arrows and a sword sticking up through its jaw had anything to do with Special Forces, the Green Berets, what Chief Rapp was. But I knew this was the thing out of all the images his tired brain was trying to find, that would put it together for him. He’d just discarded it. My mind saw it was what he needed to solve the puzzle.
This place is weird.
“SF,” I said to Sergeant Kurtz in the glowing darkness as he studied the fascinating structure above us.
Kurtz turned toward me. The look on his face was pure murder. Which was a
good thing. Kurtz had two looks. Murder and contempt. Murder meant he was dealing with you as something important. Murder meant I’d scored a direct hit and sunk his battleship. Or in this case, connected the dots for him.
He nodded slowly as it all came together.
Then he looked back at the statue.
“This ain’t totally the logo for SF. But it’s… weirdly similar. I’ve even seen somewhere they put a skull between the arrows. Usually with a green beanie. Unofficial. But… yeah… it’s kinda like the SF unit insignia.”
The rest of the Rangers began to agree once they saw it.
Thanks to me.
Even Kennedy piped up. “The Latin… De Oppresso Liber… that’s missing though. But it’s almost spot on if you take out the big weird skull. Maybe another detachment got here before us from Fifty-One?”
“Well,” said Tanner. “Then they would have to have gone through the QST and been on scene a long time ago. They didn’t make this overnight. Or even within the last two weeks. This has been here for a while.”
The SEAL had said twenty years. Had others arrived before that? Centuries before?
I remembered Last of Autumn, maybe just Autumn now after the dream of the boat and the city. More specifically, I remembered her and Vandahar telling the stories of the Ruin’s ancient past. The old wizard saying the Ilner had come onto the scene before the Dragon Elves. And as far as my knowledge of history since we’d gone through the QST was going, that would be over eight thousand years ago.
They’d sought eternal life. They’d made a deal with the Saur. Someone named Sût the Undying.
“C’mon… time to do this. Night’s burning,” said Kurtz. And it was.
The assault team moved up to the broken bronze door within the hilt that came down through the leering skull. The door was open, technically, but the Rangers stacked and went in just like you learn to do in the shoot house. A moment later we got the “all clear” and the rest of Team Rogue entered the tomb.
We had all of thirty seconds before the first trap sprang. Inside we saw along the walls the image of about ten or so six-armed skeletons. Maybe carved into the stone, maybe free-standing statues. They were tall. Each bony arm carried a curved sword like a scimitar. Their black eye sockets, deep-set in the stone, glared sightlessly out as their bony smiles seemed to await our next step.
That’s what I saw in the seconds before they came to life. Or un-life. Or whatever.
“Creepy, Sar’nt,” I heard Tanner say in the stillness of the place of the dead.
That’s when the things simply stepped away from their places in the wall, all six arms apiece waving swords. The skeletons didn’t wave them and dance around, circling to attack like they might in some movie. Giving the heroes the opportunity to take them one at a time. No. They rushed all of us at once. Straight at us, swinging all six swords. Sixty swords in total. It was like an unexpected flash flood of killer skeletons.
I heard Jabba yip and scramble away while carrying ammo drums and an impossibly overloaded ruck Soprano had set up for him.
SOP for the team was not to use the two-forty or any of the un-suppressed weapons while we made our creep toward the objective atop the Lost Library. We wanted to keep this quiet. If McCluskey heard gunfire coming out of the tombs, even five hundred feet below through solid rock, he’d know he was under attack. Then most likely the Rangers hitting the front gate would be walking into an enemy force fully expecting something to be up.
No surprise advantage for us. We had to be the epitome of Quiet Professionals on this one. Everyone on the team had fashioned a garrote back at the elf camp, with many being genuinely excited about their potential use during this op. Several talked about the hope of crossing a strangle off their bucket list.
Rangers. Literally your worst nightmare. One of the top reasons why if you’re a third world bad guy, you’d best not piss off the United States of America.
We didn’t have the ammo for anything but surprise. And just one shot to do it in.
The assault team engaged immediately with reflexive suppressed fire. Their weapons were already up in the low and ready position, and they immediately moved into aimed quick-kill shooting. Shoot house SOP. No praying and spraying. These guys hadn’t only trained on breaching and clearing operations, they’d done them for the real deal in situations where everyone inside the building was filled with nothing but bad breath, worse intentions and ill-will. Plus AK-47s and suicide vests.
Wild waving, weaving, running skeletons exploded in sudden dull, dusty smaffs of bone as the shooters engaged in the few seconds they had before the skeletons got into “melee range.”
PFC Kennedy’s words.
The room was wide, maybe thirty meters, meaning the skeletons had to cover fifteen meters to the center of the room where we were. On the far wall ahead of us stood a pair of bronze doors like the first, except that these were whole whereas the first door had been fractured.
No one needed to tell the Rangers not to work standard controlled pairs in their shooting. Two to the chest and then two to the head. The skeletons had no chests. They just had bony rib cages. But they did have skulls.
I picked up a running skeleton with my sights. I was next to Autumn. She raised her hand, and in it was a small silver cross. She held it straight out at the three skeletons running right at us as I fired.
I had to slow it down and confirm my sight pictures before I broke the trigger on those shots. A moving object running and weaving slightly side to side is tough on any given day. Inside a tomb, and that running, weaving thing happens to be a skeletal warrior with six bony arms waving shiny pirate cutlasses when just seconds before you thought they were carved reliefs along the wall… that makes it a little more difficult.
Just a bit.
But Chief Rapp had next-leveled our shooting skills on the way down. Running small ranges and dry-fire exercises when he could. Giving us tips and showing us techniques that make SF some of the best shooters in the world. There are reasons why the rest of the Army refer to them as the Super Friends. One of the most important reasons is that they’re pro-level shooters in extremely tense situations.
This was tense. Max pucker factor. I won’t lie to you.
I pulled the trigger and watched dusty explosions smash ribs and sternum. I may have winged the thing’s clavicle, bone fragments flying away in every direction, never mind the carnage all around as the Rangers unloaded on the skeletal ambush with their suppressed weapons.
Then all three skeletons Autumn had pointed her silver cross at started burning up like old paper. Catching fire at the edges and then working in from there. I remember doing something like that once when I was a kid and I was trying to make a pirate map for my yearly visit out to my dad’s ranch. Had to make it look old, you know? But instead of the skeletons just burning up around the edges, they went all the way and turned to nothing but dusty gray ash.
In seconds, the skeletons were dead. Again.
One of the spotters had taken a pretty serious slash across the cheek and scalp when one of the skeletons and its six sabers got too close. Lots of blood.
“Secure the room,” Kurtz growled at Brumm. “Watch to see if any more come out of the walls.”
Then he was on the wounded spotter with Sergeant Thor, evaluating the injury.
“Ain’t bad,” Kurtz said after a few seconds. “We’ll superglue it and it’ll be fine.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
The bronze doors leading into the inner chambers of the tomb were a tough nut to crack. In the end, after much inspecting, and caution concerning traps, which we were just bluntly calling IEDs now, the decision was made to use one of the three breaching charges we’d brought along for the intrusion. Which had been all the Ranger detachment had left.
Truth was, we either took back the Forge or we were gonna have to learn to go Bronze Age in order t
o go Roman. And we already had, to some extent. Most of the Rangers were either now carrying found weapons or the tomahawks a few of the truly Rogers’ Rangers types loved to sport. Guys like Kurtz and Thor for sure. I had a flick knife. I’d tossed that smelly old short sword after a while. It couldn’t even take an edge and it was notched to hell. Probably some low totem pole gob like Jabba had carried it until the Rangers shot him to death atop Sniper Hill.
“What’ll we face on the other side of the door once we breach, Kennedy?” hissed Kurtz as we got ready to storm the inner sanctums of the tomb by blasting the bronze double doors. I could feel the pain of him having to ask this of Kennedy.
Kennedy made a face at me that basically said, How am I supposed to know?
But our “wizard” was a lot smarter than that. He knew Kurtz was running on edge here. A ragged, dangerous, edge. Best not to provoke him.
“Well, Sar’nt,” began Kennedy softly, which was his manner of speaking and probably another reason the Rangers had not found him one of their own. “This is what Dungeons & Dragons calls a dungeon, technically. But specifically… it’s actually a type of dungeon, Sar’nt.”
Kennedy, for all his power and obvious intelligence, failed to notice the murder look in Kurtz’s eye.
“And what kind of dungeon is it, Captain Obvious?” asked Kurtz. Exasperated emphasis on kind.
“It’s a tomb, Sar’nt,” answered PFC Kennedy quickly.
Murder look intensifies.
“Yeah. We got that part. What does it mean, PFC, besides dead people buried down here in the dirt for a thousand years?”
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 43
