The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  On opposite sides of the valley, the habitations of the Cerae were no longer in phosphorescent blackout.

  A diversionary tactic or traps? Pliny wondered.

  He watched Scythians approach narrow entrances into the brightly lit structures before rejecting them for what they were—decoys, choke points. In total, Pliny estimated that these tactics had delayed the Scythian advance by no more than a quarter hour.

  On the ridges, elephants appeared, some of them with riders, others hauling wood-framed weapons.

  “They’ve brought their own bolt-throwers,” Pliny told Proculus.

  Even as they spoke, several of the ballistae were being set in place and aimed at the very tower on which they stood.

  Proculus held up one of the membranous, pomegranate-sized bags of worms that Severus and the Cerans had entrusted to them. The disgraced centurion himself had instructed that these needed only to be dropped upon the attackers, should they storm the tower.

  The cavalryman gestured toward the invading force. “I’d trade all of these creepers for one of their longbows.”

  “Get down!” Pliny shouted. The first of the ballista-launched projectiles were already arching high over the moonlit fog.

  The two men dove onto the floor of the terrace.

  Two rounded stones struck above and below their position, bouncing off the ice and fiber mixture. A third shook the wall behind which Pliny and Proculus had ducked, striking only a few arm lengths from Pliny. The material seemed to be holding together surprisingly well but a piece of shrapnel had torn open one of the worm-filled bags. Yet this too was of no consequence. Detecting nothing to attack, the writhing former contents of the weapon simply moved off in every direction, spreading like petals from a nightmare flower.

  Proculus pointed in the direction of the Scythian ballistae. “That way,” he told the creatures.

  “Let me know if they start listening to you,” Pliny said, risking a peek across the mayhem unfolding below. “This is not going according to plan,” he declared, moments later.

  Proculus managed a laugh. “For whose side?”

  “Either.”

  The war elephants were the last to descend with the Scythian horde. A hundred or more of the armored giants moved toward the mist-hidden catapults where Severus and a small team of Cerae worked feverishly to load and fire as many canisters as they could before being overrun. Projectiles landed in clusters along the shore of the false sea, among the densest concentrations of Scythians. The riders reined in their elephants, pausing to assess. The foot soldiers also hesitated, and some of them were already beginning to fall.

  Simultaneously, no fewer than a thousand Cerae boiled over the tops of the nearer ridges, whence the Scythians had come. They charged down from the hills at a dead run, some wielding Roman swords and lances, others firing bags of Scythian-seeking death from slings. They had appeared with amazing suddenness—as if most of their army, well fed and rested, had swarmed up from beneath the mountains themselves.

  The Scythians had no choice but to move deeper into the sea of fog.

  On the mist-bound valley floor, the white mammoths were first to sense the approach of the new danger. They were taller at the shoulder, more muscular, and less fleet-footed than their descendants. Their fur was longer, their cranial capacity smaller, and each possessed only a single trunk. Three of them had just helped Severus and two Ceran warriors to realign a catapult, its aiming point directed by spotters above the mist. Teacher was about to give one of them an appreciative pat on its trunk when all three turned toward a sound that neither human nor Ceran could hear. Spreading their ears, the mammoths stood very still for just a moment, then ran off into the mist. All along the catapult site, the rest of the mammoths did the same.

  “We don’t have much time!” Severus called out. Driving home a message that his words did not quite convey, he pantomimed a rapid-fire sequence to the Cerae. At Teacher’s signal, they launched what he feared would be their final volley of canisters.

  With no mammoths remaining behind to help realign and reload, and realizing with Severus that they could not possibly reload before being overrun, the Cerae broke open the remaining launch canisters and spread their contents over the ground. Then they gathered hastily into the defensive orbis position that Severus had taught them.

  The first direct encounter with the Scythian invasion force was with its foot soldiers. They stepped onto ground infested with two species of living weaponry that flowed like a liquid, up their legs and under their armor.

  Severus looked on with a combination of horror and admiration as the soldiers advanced, displaying no response to pain—at least at first. More than thirty Scythians came striding out of the snow fog. Though his own sword had been returned to him, Severus found that, surprisingly, there seemed no use for it. Only three of the invaders reached the perimeter of outward-projecting Ceran lances. The last of them pushed a stubby reed between his lips and blew a high-pitched whistle before he died.

  The whistle changed everything.

  It summoned monsters.

  Defensive formations no longer mattered.

  The first of the war elephants broke through the Ceran position only moments after emerging from the mist. Clad in thick leather and metal armor, the elephant’s headpiece was its most fearsome feature—at least initially—baring a huge, centrally located eye.

  Cyclops! Severus thought, scarcely noticing its rider at all. Though part of his brain recognized that this was the work of an artisan, there was no escaping the sensation that the eye was staring directly at him and through him. For an instant the image held him spellbound, an involuntary response that had worked exactly as intended by the designers of the headpiece.

  During that first instant, a Ceran warrior standing beside Severus, and similarly transfixed, was separated from his head by one of the twin blades affixed to the monster’s tusks.

  The Cerans who weren’t crushed or slashed by the creature during those first moments of contact scattered to either side. Severus sidestepped the behemoth but was knocked to the ground by a Ceran. As the centurion glanced up, the armor-clad Scythian rider reined his war elephant into a remarkably tight turn in preparation for a second charge. One of the Cerans used his sling to launch a tick-filled projectile at the giant. Impacting solidly against a sliver of exposed flesh between thick leather plates, the spidery creatures burst forth but soon fell away ineffectively, like beads of water shaken from the back of a dog. In a moment of pandemonium, the defender had forgotten that his weapon was “trained” to follow only the scent of Scythian flesh.

  “Aim for the rider!” Severus called out. Then, remembering the language barrier again, he pointed to the Scythian, who was howling and bellowing as if possessed.

  Teacher released her own projectile and struck the mounted attacker square on the faceplate. Others followed her lead, but the rider’s armor covered the body so well, and was so tight fitting, that it slowed the penetration of the weapon. During the few extra seconds required for the ticks to find seams and eye slits, the elephant gored a Ceran architect and two warriors with its tusk-mounted blades. A physician was stamped to death at Severus’s side, with a warrior simultaneously tusk-flung over his head.

  During the next instant Severus was airborne—thrown out of the way by Teacher, who immediately scrabbled up the animal’s flank with two other physicians, even more quickly than Severus had seen her kind ascend balconies and ice cliffs.

  The centurion pried a lance from the hands of a dead Ceran defender then, taking quick but careful aim to avoid Teacher and her companions, he hurled it at the elephant. Severus had contrived to blind the creature in one eye or at least distract it from the trio of Cerans but the projectile pierced the giant’s trunk instead.

  Teacher and her two companions drove three lances through the rider, flung him over the side, and began tearing openings in the elephant’s armor. Lances of Ceran steel pounded down between its ribs and into each of its huge lun
gs.

  At the moment the beast began to topple, it reached behind with its wounded trunk, grabbed one of the Cerae from its back, and pierced her all the way through on a blade-tipped tusk. As the dying monster fell onto its front knees, Teacher and the other Ceran sprang from its back.

  For all the death the elephant had wrought, Severus could see that, unlike the indigenous mammoths with their coverings of dense fur, this relatively hairless giant had been leaking heat from the entire surface of its body. Already dying before it ever entered the valley, he thought.

  The cries of bellowing monsters and mortally wounded Cerae could be heard from every direction, near and far. Drawn to the catapult emplacements by the sounds of battle and perhaps the scent of a sibling’s blood, a second giant roared out of the mist—a bull elephant, more massive than the first. But there was something beyond its size that distinguished the new arrival. It only took Severus a beat to realize that the cyclopean eye of its headgear was completely obscured by blood and flesh. One of the brute’s tusk blades had been snapped off near the base, the damage serving as a warning that this beast was even more hot-tempered than the one they had just slain.

  The creature’s Scythian rider was a monstrosity in her own right. She wore strange armor, more tightly fitting and oddly familiar. Apparently, the protective garments had already taken hits from tick- and worm-filled projectiles but this time the weapon was not only being slowed, it was being repelled. Now, with the rider having fully emerged out of the mist, the familiarity of the outfit became all too horribly clear.

  “My gods,” Severus whispered, realizing that the rider’s gauntlet gloves had been sewn together from the carefully refitted hands of a Ceran. The headgear and most every other covering were also fashioned from Ceran skin. The ticks and worms that had been flung at the rider had mistaken her for one of Teacher’s brethren, and now they were falling harmlessly from the armor, like dust.

  With a sickening snap, Severus saw one tusk-pierced warrior flying end over end into the fog. Another Ceran stood his ground with a lance of native steel, trying to blind the rampaging beast, but he was not fast enough to escape a blow from the huge trunk. Teacher tried to save him but not even she was fast enough—suffering a slash to her thigh—the tusk blade coming perilously close to severing a femoral artery.

  Severus moved in to assist, but Teacher violently flung him out of the fray, then spun back to face their attacker.

  The beast charged again, the monstrous rider darting forward over its back and mounting the head as if climbing atop the prow of a ship. Her armored breastplates clothed in real Ceran breasts, the Scythian stood like a figurehead from hell.

  Though Severus managed to avoid being stamped flat, a swipe from the creature’s trunk cracked several of his ribs. When he looked up, Teacher was already clinging to the giant’s sides, pulling away armor, slashing and stabbing.

  Struggling to regain his footing and his breath, the centurion coughed blood and picked up another lance, his mind stuck on a single question: How can I help tear a hole in this thing?

  Severus rose to his feet and staggered toward Teacher like a drunk, vowing to die for her with what little strength he had left.

  By the time he stood, Teacher had climbed atop the animal’s shoulder. The enraged Scythian repeatedly struck the Ceran in the face with its shield, finally dislodging her. But as the physician fell, she reached one elongated arm behind the Scythian’s shield. Locking her hand around a wrist, Teacher pulled the she-beast down with her.

  Severus was almost upon them and he knew that death was surely no more than a few heartbeats away when Pliny and Proculus arrived, accompanied by half a dozen Ceran warriors with lances of their own. By the time four lances went through Teacher’s torn-away segments of elephant armor and into the animal’s lungs and arteries, they were down to three warriors. Within those same seconds, the Scythian’s instincts alerted her to Teacher’s sudden and repeated glances toward the Roman. In response, the warrior drew a blade and made a dash for Severus.

  She never reached him. In a blur of blocking and swiping motions, Teacher disarmed the elephant rider. She tore away the weapon-repelling breastplate and mask of Ceran flesh, then drove the Scythian face-forward into the tick- and worm-covered ground.

  Observing that the weapon was still refusing to feed, Teacher ripped away what remained of the mask, then rent the woman’s face with teeth and nails—shredding skin and exposing unprotected muscle and bone.

  Severus was all tunnel vision now, watching as the enemy’s writhing body was driven into the weapon-infested ground.

  He watched the ground feed.

  Those left standing now saw that Teacher could easily have ended the Scythian’s misery with a single neck twist, but the physician had something more vengeance driven in mind. And so the ticks and worms ate their fill.

  At some point, Severus realized that Pliny was standing beside him. “If you survive this night,” Pliny said, over the eerily human death cries of the bull elephant, “I have one piece of advice for you.”

  “And what’s that?” the centurion replied, wearily.

  “Don’t ever get her mad at you!”

  South Tibet

  Beyond the Valley of the Morlocks

  August 3, 1946

  On a day when Mac came to believe the lost world had already produced so many extraordinary dangers that nothing could surprise him anymore, he was suitably surprised by the approach of two more Chinese helicopters.

  And thus ended what should have been a brief food and rest stop, near the ledge where Mac’s and, more recently, Wang’s party had landed. Bristling with guns, the new arrivals zeroed in and circled one of the downed craft as if it were a wounded queen bee.

  Mac had no time to appreciate that his insect metaphor was about to get stronger. In the distance, a black speck had been hovering over the Morlock valley, but soon it too was making a beeline for the shelf.

  “What the hell?” Mac muttered, watching as a third helicopter loomed quickly into view. And this one’s different from the first two. Instinctively, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Yanni was okay. As expected, she and her two woolly pals were already scrambling for cover.

  Jack, who had hunkered down beside him, gestured toward the third gunship. “You think somebody’s crashing their party?”

  “They’re Russians,” Mac replied. “And I definitely get the feeling they didn’t come to this dance together.”

  “Lucky thing our rifles and Johnny guns got thrown over the side, huh?”

  This time Mac said nothing, watching as his friend zigzagged away to find a more secure position. Though he had lost sight of the others, Mac did notice that Alpha was still maintaining his distance from the group. Uphill, and in open view, the Morlock simply pressed himself closer to a wall of rock and ice, quickly becoming all but impossible to see.

  Mac caught a flash of movement out of the corner of an eye. Seemingly ignoring the multiple threats from above, now it was the Chinese scientist who had run up to join him. “Those first helicopters, Nationalists!” Wang shouted over the din of blades and engines.

  “Yeah?” Mac replied, motioning for him to duck down. “What’s the difference?”

  “Third one not Chinese. Third one Russian.”

  “So?”

  “Communists and Nationalists no like each other.”

  Before he could reply, Mac saw that, incredibly, two of the Devil’s Brigaders had stepped out onto open ground.

  What the hell are they doing?

  Unarmed, the men waved their hands over their heads.

  MacCready recognized a whole new potential for catastrophe. America’s uneasy alliance with Kai-shek’s Nationalists had worsened the tension between President Truman and the Kremlin. No one knew for certain the new lows to which hatred between China’s Nationalists and Communists had sunk, but from the look on Wang’s face, at least two sides in this curious triangle were on the verge of a new war.

&nb
sp; With this in mind, Mac now realized that the brave men who had stepped out into the open were simply taking their best shot at deescalating the situation.

  The first flare of gunfire was therefore all the more shocking because it came from one of the Chinese helicopters, from Nationalist “allies.”

  The two Devil’s Brigaders were still holding up their hands when the back of one man’s head disappeared. The other soldier moved with such swift and practiced precision that nothing worse than shards of lead-splattered rock reached him before he was safely behind a mound of boulders.

  “So much for your side,” Mac told Wang, wondering in the back of his mind if the Nationalists had initially come in trying to learn what had happened to the three prior helicopter crews, or if Pliny’s secret codex was not quite a secret anymore. There was no time to examine the question. Mac began blazing a new trail uphill, behind the cover of limestone and ice. A quick glance told him the helicopter that had fired on the two men was now closing in on the survivor’s rock shelter—clearly trying to secure an optimal angle of attack, in order to finish him off.

  Next, they’ll seek out the rest of us, Mac told himself. Remove all witnesses and maybe no one will ever learn how badly you just screwed up your mission.

  Only now did Mac realize that Wang had decided to follow him.

  “So what the hell are your people doing up here?” Mac snapped at the scientist.

  “My captain was ordered to bring back Yeren bodies,” the man replied, his voice strangely calm, given the circumstances.

  Mac nodded in the direction of the choppers. “Looks like somebody changed the plan.”

  Indeed they had, and now, with the arrival of the Russians and the drawing of American blood, the plan continued to change—at a psychopathic rate. The Nationalist helicopter that had been pursuing the surviving Devil’s Brigader found its way blocked by the Russian craft. A hyperamplified speaker system blazed to life above the man’s position. In a Russian-English hybrid language that Jerry had once referred to as “Rushlish”—and even with most of the words distorted through the sweep of blades—it was easy to piece the message together. The Russians were ordering the Americans to come out and give themselves up. One word came through with particular clarity: “MacCready.”