A Fire in the North
Page 50
Terrible noises rose towards them through the dense fog of incense. Though they could still see little, the confrontation was merely seconds away.
‘Brace yourselves!’ Nibulus exhorted. ‘Brace yourselves!’
The muffled noise of battle engaged broke out from the far side of the ziggurat – a terrible squawking accompanied by the screaming of Vetters and Cervulice.
‘Brace yourselves!’ Nibulus roared, took one last swig of sloe gin, then slammed his visor down.
And then the Dead emerged.
The smog had now risen almost to where the front line of the company stood waiting, and thus they had only an instant in which to glimpse their enemy. But it was sufficient to freeze that image permanently upon their souls.
Out of the black pall surged the spawn of hell’s lowest ditch, rising to feed upon the living. Ruined hide, gas-bloated guts, flaps of peeling skin hanging loose off filthy bones, up the steps they dragged their blasphemous carcasses. Some looked relatively fresh, spry even, compared with the oldest among them. Others, though, were so ancient that their brittle bones had to be held together within an external framework of metal splints, whose rusted joints squealed with each movement. There were those who had perished while hunting, their faces gouged by antler, tooth or horn, or their chests crushed under three-toed hooves. There were others who had fallen in battle or died under the executioner’s instruments, their heads or limbs now crudely stitched back on and held in place with rods, nails and clamps. Many had suffered terribly before death finally took them, as could be seen from the contorted masks forever frozen upon their faces. But there were also those who had died in their beds, for though they advanced with twitching fingers, their eyes remained closed as though in a peaceful sleep.
In the fore were the most physically degraded, no more than lumps of sundry bodies sewn together as one – part flesh, part metal – legs where arms should be, external pipes and organs swinging free. Some even had animal parts grafted on where not enough human could be salvaged.
Among them walked children, their slick pale skin pocked with old sores of some ravaging pestilence, others wrapped around with the filth-caked remnants of bandages. Charms had been lovingly pinned to their shrouds to see them on their way, but now, slack-jawed and with unseeing eyes rimmed with a yellow crust, they approached with nets and sharp little knives, propelled onward by the unseen captain behind them.
The first wave, the cannon fodder, driven ahead to soften up the enemy.
All around the ziggurat the quartz-tipped darts of the Vetterym sang repeatedly through the air. Hundreds of arrow-sized projectiles, volley after volley, thudded into the oncoming ranks of the Dead. Some fell, as the connection between heart and brain severed, but mostly they still came on, skewered but basically unharmed. Not for nothing had Scathur sent the Dead in first.
Then with a sigh like a thousand death rattles – the first utterance heard from them that day – they were upon their waiting prey. Nets were thrown, screams of terror went up. Reaching out with split and blackened talons the Dead sought to rip, to rend, to grapple, grasp and gouge.
Hell had come to them at last.
They gasped for breath. They stumbled and fell, picked themselves up in an instant. They knocked themselves almost senseless against low lintels or winded themselves colliding with stone balustrades. But most of all they ran.
Down narrow stairs, along galleries and triforia, over pits and through tunnels, the thieves of Tyvenborg sprinted. The terrible priest was still close behind them, and the nightmare creatures he had evoked were alongside him. The mission to the Maw had turned to ruin and disaster, and nothing short of death would keep them here longer.
Down towards the Chamber of Drauglir they stumbled. It was their only exit now, their sole hope of salvation.
Mauglad ran with them, among them, in them. Or in one of them at least.
Asdtaga, how this new body could run! So much better than that slimy bag of flesh he had been forced to make do with until recently. This new host of his moved along at such a pace that the necromancer felt as if he were being bounced about in the back of a runaway wagon.
It irked him, however, to have to run like this. He did not fear the Lightbearer nor his amateurish sound and light show. He might have laughed in scorn, in fact, had it not been for the very real chance that the wretched priest might actually succeed in his mission. The silly man may not have been evil, but that did not make him any less dangerous.
Mauglad had now existed for over six hundred years, for most of that time as a fleshless spirit keening around the dank grey passages of Sluagh. The human feelings in him had dried up, withered and turned to dust. All that was left of him, all that he was, after all the centuries of Sluagh, was awareness. And as he approached, after aeons of banishment, the hall of that devil which had caused him such damnation, Mauglad Yrkeshta became very aware indeed.
And what Mauglad was aware of, what was uppermost in his thoughts, was the necessity for extreme haste. Not to evade the pursuing Finwald, but because he simply must not – could not – be beaten to that chamber by Bolldhe and the terrible weapon he so blithely wore strapped upon his back.
But running just below the surface of this dread were currents of self-opprobrium that would not go away. Why had he not acted earlier, when he had had the opportunity? Back there in the pillared hall, when he had first appropriated this new host, he had been so near! For a matter of mere yards had separated him from his goal. Yards!
But in truth he knew he had taken the right decision in heading off the other way to join up with the thieves. For how close could he have got to Bolldhe while wearing the body of one of the Tyvenborgers, now their bitterest enemies, who had just struck down several of their number? He would have been cut down in a second, silenced before having the chance to reason with them.
Then there persisted the nagging thought that he could have revealed the crucial truth to his present companions, could have told them of the sword. Told them everything. But why would the thieves believe the word of a ghost, especially one that had just stolen the body of one of their own companions?
So on he pounded beside them, drawing great draughts of familiar sickly air into his capacious new lungs, revelling in the strength and fluidity of this powerful meat-chariot. For, bizarrely, these brigands with their superior skill, muscle, firepower and sheer viciousness were probably Mauglad’s best remaining chance now – his one and final hope.
‘Now!’ Nibulus thundered, and at long last did what he had come here to do: he led his men into battle.
The Dead were slow and the Peladane was a captain through and through; there was no gainsaying the command in that voice. Rather than cower away from their foes, the besieged – man and beast alike – now lashed out at the enemy with every last ounce of ferocity their fear had inspired in them. In the forefront of the defence the dragon-crested boar-faced Lord of Metal fought: with a sweep of his massive Greatsword, Nibulus swept the heads off three Dead, buried his iron-shod boot into the throat of a fourth as he swung round with the momentum, then brought his sword back in a return swing. The first four had not even fallen before Unferth had sliced clean through the necks of the next three.
Machete held high, Gapp shouted a shrill challenge then he and Shlepp plunged headlong into the melee in an animal frenzy of tooth and blade. While Gapp lunged, hacked and stabbed in a berserk fury, Shlepp flung the broken carcasses of the enemy about him with the ease of a terrier in a barrel of rats. As a team they worked, the forest hound’s speed, power and savagery impossible to counter, the boy picking off those that sought to swarm over the dog from the sides.
Wodeman rediscovered his courage at that hour. Refusing to let his recent guilt drain his vigour any longer, he now used it to stoke the furnace of his rage. For a moment he gripped the hilt of the alien iron tulwar he carried, fingers searching for its soul, then he threw back his head in a howl and launched himself into the pack that faced him.
‘Siall Nurr Auoist!’ Englarielle shrieked and brought his ancient Polgrim gyag-axe down upon his assailant in a blow that cleaved through bone and rotten meat from skull to breastbone. An accord of warbling howls united with the Cynen’s war cry as his folk followed him into battle. Swift as the blood-eyed weasel and inflamed by a wrath begotten of centuries of persecution, the Vetters descended on their opponents. The swords they had fashioned from the scapulae of the hated Jordiske cut deep into soft flesh and through brittle bone, and under this onslaught the Dead flew apart.
The Cervulice too at last brought their weapons into action. They were forty-six strong, each armed with a pair of long glass-sharp amber-wood sabres and terrible black ivory horns jutting from their forehead. They had every advantage of height, weight and sheer belligerence, and the loss of the four comrades taken from them by the brigands still brought angry tears to their eyes. Blow after blow they rained down upon the stinking pestilence below them.
But it was by Hwald and Finan that the greatest number fell. Side by side they stood, proudest of the Treegard, and before this pair of threshing machines the Dead could only fall, and fall in their dozens. Deep into their ranks the Paranduzes waded, tossing the burst remains of corpses high into the air with their antlers, entirely obliterating skulls beneath their mace-like tail-spikes and building a dyke of carnage around them with every scything sweep of their flint-headed moonspears.
It was a sight that rekindled some of that dark fire in Bolldhe, as yet holding back, and stirred the murky waters of the madness inside him. With a calmness that seemed entirely inappropriate to the situation, he turned and handed his precious lantern to one of the Cervulice on the tier above. Then, with Paulus’s sword still grasped in his right hand, with his left he reached behind his back and drew out Flametongue.
A germ of giddy excitement tingled somewhere inside him, and he brought the flamberge up to gaze in wonder at its acerbic sharpness.
The shade of a laugh flickered across his soul, and an instant later he was hauling the Vetters out of his way and revelling in the glory of ‘the slice’.
At the first sight of the onslaught of hell’s legion, many – even those of the hardest mettle – had cried out in dread. Some shook violently and hardly had the fortitude to grasp their weapons, while others simply loosed their bladders. Paulus had lain curled up in a terrified ball on one of the uppermost steps, rocking back and forth and wailing uncontrollably.
Even Kuthy, on the other side of the ziggurat, had not remained entirely unaffected. For he had raised his eyebrows, not one but both of them.
‘Lot of them,’ he observed.
‘But three of us,’ Elfswith pointed out encouragingly.
‘Three against hundreds, though,’ Kuthy remarked. ‘Thousands, maybe.’
‘That many?’ Elfswith exclaimed, clearly perturbed by this news. Then he shook his head. ‘Wherever are we going to bury them all?’
Kuthy glanced briefly at his strange friend then rolled his head around to loosen up his neck muscles. ‘Might need something a bit special for this one,’ he suggested, noticing that the bard had not yet drawn a weapon.
Elfswith could only agree: ‘I think I’ve got just the thing.’ From one of his inside pockets he extracted something highly unusual. Quickly disentangling it from the comb and the piece of old string it had got caught up in, Elfswith shook out the most amazing weapon anyone there had ever beheld.
Its haft, the length of his arm, was carved from fluted ivory, inlaid with swirls of gold, and glowed from inside with the pale fire of enchantment. From each end of this instrument sprang a fabulous blade in the shape of a peacock feather. The rachis, or spine, was of the most slender and flexible spring-steel, and from both edges of these two blades extended a thousand webbed vanes of Tengriite razors that sang with a clear sharpness and shimmered with a scintillating effulgence. Whether this weapon was a spear, a flail or a sword was impossible to say, but it appeared to combine the best features of all three: the reach of the spear, the flexibility of the flail and the cutting quality of the sharpest of sabres. Xem-pu he had named it – ‘the peacock’ – and it was the proudest treasure of Elfswith’s mysterious arsenal.
Even with the blue wisps of pocket lint that still clung to it.
‘Respect.’ Kuthy grinned in consummate approval.
‘Respect,’ Elfswith agreed. Then he hefted Xem-pu and turned to face the approaching masses. ‘Time to get those pennies back on your eyelids, boys,’ he called out and, with a deep breath, he, Kuthy and Ceawlin stormed into battle like a miniature tempest.
Ceawlin spread her wings before the enemy in deadly invitation: less of a Wyvern now than an angel of death, the winged corpse-chooser came finally to the battlefield to take her spoils. Pinions down, she came at them silently, a slithering engine of destruction driving full into their midst. While her claws ripped long-dead matter asunder and that terrible beak set about its murderous work, her snake-like tail flailed all that dared come within reach behind her.
Off to one side fought Elfswith, just beyond her wingtips, but his was an altogether different battle. Exactly what manner of combat ensued between him and the groping cadavers could hardly be understood, let alone described, by the unfey. It looked less like a battle than a frenetic day at a meat-processing plant. With the sound of a whirlwind, he moved through them at an impossible speed in a seemingly chaotic vortex of slashing razors as the singing blades of the peacock twisted to a tune no human could compose. The pupils of his eyes had narrowed to cat-like slits. His coat had turned a hellish pygmy-shrew black. His hair rose about him, crackling with power like a living thing, animated by the heat of his inhuman ardour, dancing and writhing along with the searing choir of the Xem-pu’s thousand lethal vanes. Limbs, heads and entire torsos went spinning away from this frenzied grass-cutter that whirled among them.
Dispensing the ultimate cure for their mortal woes, Elfswith finished the job death itself had not been able to.
But it was Kuthy, the lagger behind, the canny survivor, the scorner of his own numerous legends, the ‘holder-of-coats’ for those he sent into battle, who was the first of the three to draw grey matter that day. Appa, by now near the top of the ziggurat, gasping for breath and wild-eyed at his unending ordeal, stared down to where these three fought side by side. At first he believed he must be witnessing a suicide charge of the despairing, but as the moments went by and still they had not fallen – instead, appeared to be cutting a swathe through the enemy – he began to realize what was happening.
The legend comes to life before my eyes, here at the very end.
Bit by bit, the mage-priest’s fear-madness lifted, and he felt his heart strangely becalmed. Had he witnessed Kuthy’s sword draw blood – even be unsheathed – in all the time they had known him? But unsheathed it was now, and the beauty and elegance of its action continued to write the legend of the Tivor in characters that flowed like the finest most exquisitely penned calligraphy.
Though beset by a multitude, Kuthy’s martial skills flowed without effort. Feint forward to draw enemy on – skip back – blur of metal: two Dead left standing without heads. Slash – backward somersault over other Dead that swarm in behind him from all sides – another slash – another backward somersault: two more down. Leg-sweep to fell three – continue in same movement to a spin that brings him to face other way – half-second triple stab: six more tallied. Backward somersault to land on one’s shoulders – triple slash from there – twist thighs to snap neck – and off into the melee again.
Economy of movement, nothing wasted; it was as if he had rehearsed his every move, and those of his enemies, beforehand. There was nothing around him that Kuthy’s senses did not pick up.
To all those fighting alongside this legendary trio, new hope and courage were brought, till they fought with a madness that in itself was worthy of a legend.
It was a desperate battle, a lightning counter-strike that finally opened the floodgates and purged the company of so much damned-up fear. It was as insane as it was valiant, and had the heart of a dragon. But inevitably it was no more than the final skirmish before the end. For though they were slow, of awkward gait and climbed a steep slope, the Dead were many, so very many, pressing in in a thick crush and driven by a single will. They broke continually upon the ranks of the beleaguered defenders, like a great slow harbour wave, and no amount of bravery or insanity could ultimately hold them back. There were no words of encouragement – vehement orders, valiant oration or vicious oaths – that Nibulus or Englarielle could use to help stem the force of such overwhelming numbers.
For a time neither side could do much but waver back and forth. There was no room to swing the larger weapons that might have held the enemy for a time, yet nowhere for the defenders to retreat to. Eventually both sides were pressed so tightly together that all they could do was shove. There were no cries of pain or anger even, just grunting and gasping. But slowly the enemy’s weight of numbers pushed their adversaries further in on themselves. They were being squeezed upward from every side so tightly now that it seemed they must surely explode like an enormous pustule. It was only the mounting dyke of their slain that had slowed the advance of the Dead thus far.
Then one voice was raised that all could hear: a feeble sobbing born of despair. ‘Oh, sweet Lord Cuna,’ Appa mewled, ‘where are you now?’
As if the old priest’s cry was some kind of invitation the wire-faces finally arrived. Through the pall of smoke rolling up from the thuribles below they appeared as gaunt and monstrous shadows, spawned of the smoke itself, their only discernible features eyes that burned as red as the torch-fire they mirrored.