She leapt into the empty streambed. Only a thin layer of sand, interspersed with sharp pebbles, covered its naked rock. Embedded in the stone beside her, Angelika saw the shell of an ancient scallop, turned to stone by unknown magic. The trail was far from straight. It zigzagged, as the spring flood-waters did each year, following the route of least resistance, and seeking out the weakest veins of rock to slowly buff. It was steep at first, but then it evened out, as it curved around to the other side of the peak. Angelika and Franziskus had lost sight of both their original vantage point, and their destination.
“Are you sure this is all part of the same trail?” he asked her.
“How would I be sure of that?”
Clopping sounds emanated from above. They froze. It was just a quartet of mountain goats—real ones this time, not Chaos hybrids. The animals, which Angelika knew were called chamois, gazed curiously down at them from a small ledge that bore the only decent patch of grass. The three adults went back to their grazing, but there was a kid, too, and its dark, wet eyes followed their progress until they wended out of its sight.
When the upper reach of the path doubled past them, they stopped to breathe and rest. Angelika checked for likely handholds as she considered the possibility of scaling the vertical rock that separated the bends in the trail. At the very least, they’d be in for twenty-five feet of clambering. The time they would gain wasn’t worth the risk of a fall. Though she felt ready to take on a dozen Chaos creatures, her sense of exuberance had not made her stupid, or hungry for unnecessary danger.
Half an hour later, they reached a point of heavy going, where the steep groove gave way to a narrow ledge that curled around the mountainside. There were several places, she could see, where they would have to press their backs to the rock and inch along sideways. But first they would have to leap a five-foot gap, and there was no space to get a run at it. Without alerting Franziskus, she took her standing jump. She landed a bit too close to the edge. She tottered, but regained her balance. Her heart thumped. She tried to compose herself as she slid along the ledge to give Franziskus room for his own jump. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly in prayer. When he opened them, he made the leap perfectly. She suppressed the urge to mock his superstitious devotion to gods. Though she doubted his pious murmurings would do them any good, she found herself, at her present elevation, readier than usual to believe in the benevolence of gods. On the off-chance that they did pay kind attention to the laughable doings of the ant-like mortals they surveyed from above, it would serve no purpose to antagonise them.
The two of them made slow progress along the ledge. With each step, Angelika’s elation ebbed away from her. By the time they had embarked on the final circuit around the peak, she found her senses returning to her. Franziskus was right. This was madness. They would find nothing of Lukas von Kopf except bones, cracked open and stripped of marrow. And if they did succeed in finding him and getting him down, there was no guarantee of securing a reward commensurate with the hazards of the task. What had possessed her? Perhaps the Chaos minions had burrowed their way into her mind, luring her onwards to become their snack. Or maybe she had only wanted to play the contrarian, to do whatever would most shock Franziskus. He was clearly a dangerous person to have around. She swore she would lose him for good, as soon as they got down off this damnable mountain.
But…
To admit she was wrong and reverse course—that she couldn’t do.
She pressed on.
Rock gave way under her front foot. It crashed down the mountainside. Franziskus had her, his arms wrapped around her ribcage. He pulled her up. Her legs swung in mid-air. He staggered back. The foot closest to the ledge was edging off it, but he corrected himself. He backed up enough to set her down. She planted her feet, and recaptured her balance.
He still had his arms around her. His hands crossed at her breastbone.
“So this is what you’ve been waiting for all this time,” she said.
“What?”
“An opportunity to grasp me by the bosom.”
Now he let go, twitching his hands as if to shake off any residue of lustful thinking. “I got hold of you below the—below the—area in question. I was most careful of that.”
She tried to get eye contact, but he wouldn’t cooperate. “Are you telling me,” she asked, “that you paused, in that crucial moment—where the smallest slice of a second could make the difference between my survival or my falling hundreds of feet to find myself squashed flatter than a griddlecake—that you frittered away a precious instant to make sure your hands did not graze on an inch of teat?”
“Stop it!” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Your unseemly teasing.” He put a hand up before her face. “If we are to succeed together as soldiers of fortune, I must put aside any notion that you belong to the fairer sex.”
“Ah, I see,” she said, leaping the gap made by the collapsing ledge. She landed, and reminded herself to breathe again. “You are saying that I am no woman at all.”
He leapt the gap abruptly, recklessly. Rocks fell under his heels. Angelika grabbed his forearms and yanked him in her direction. He found his footing. Through no design of hers, his face was pressed into her chest.
“Such a statement would be insupportable,” his muffled voice said, “in the face of contrary evidence.”
She pushed him off her. Another good reason to get rid of him: he was beginning to get the last word in.
They inched their way up the narrow pathway. Over the course of two slow and anxious hours, they circumnavigated the peak one final time. As they made the final turn, back to the face where the cave would be found, Angelika noticed that Franziskus’ teeth chattered. She composed a jibe on the subject, but abandoned it when she realised that hers were doing the same.
The final stretch of trail was the least forgiving of all. Angelika and Franziskus had long since left the stream system behind. Now they faced thirty feet of downward-sloping ledge that ended in front of the cave. Its mouth hung about fifteen feet lower than where they were now. The incline would make it easier to stumble and slip off into nothingness. They studied the narrow ledge for a long time. Angelika steeled herself and wiped sweat from her palms.
A rumble erupted from the cave. To Angelika’s ears, it sounded like a rockfall at first, but as it went on, growing loud enough to vibrate in her chest, it took on an animal quality that reminded her of disturbed bowels. Any creature that could make a noise like that would have to be very large.
Intertwined with this sound was another: higher in pitch, and more intermittent. It was a human sound, one of distress. There was someone still alive in there.
“Just kill me and be done with it!” the voice cried. Despite its airy pitch, the voice was definitely a man’s. Even in its anguish, the precision of its consonants and the lofty lilt of its vowels were unmistakable. It screamed in the accent of an Imperial noble.
Angelika edged ahead. The ledge groaned under her feet, threatening to give way. The sound of cracking rock would have been loud enough to hear inside the cave, if it had not been drowned out by the guttural yammering. There seemed to be words in the jibbering. Angelika could not make out what the creature was saying, but supposed it must be replying to its prisoner’s complaints. She thought she detected amusement, or even laughter, in the noise, but did not feel qualified to make judgments where Chaos minions were concerned. Who knew if they had emotions as the mortal races understood them?
She halted her advance. A tripwire of thin, cured animal gut had been strung across the cave mouth. It was stretched taut between two iron pegs, which had been pounded into the stone itself. The line of gut ran from the peg furthest from her into the depths of the cave. Angelika inched close enough to peer inside. She felt Franziskus signalling her to stay back, but she had no time to bother with his objections.
It was dark, unsurprisingly, but she could make out a large object that hung from the ceiling in some kind of net. Ange
lika saw the creature, but it took her a while to understand what she was seeing. The creature was big—perhaps ten feet tall—and round, with an enormous, scaly belly. The beast stood on stubby legs and waved long, ropy arms that were covered with coarse, dung-matted hair. Its back was also covered in the same hair. Long, black, curving claws extended from each of its foreshortened fingers. Luckily for Angelika, the creature’s face pointed away from her. Its shadow fell on the cave wall, in profile; she made out a pronounced forehead ridge and a bearish snout. Long, pointy fangs protruded from the snout—or perhaps it was just a trick of the light. At any rate, the thing held a large section of pine trunk that had its limbs gnawed off and was bleeding resin. The creature was using it to poke roughly at the hanging bundle. Another cry arose, and Angelika realised that it came from the net. The creature had its prisoner suspended from the cave roof and was jabbing at him with the uprooted tree. Based on the size of the arm—and now she saw a stunted foot, with warty yellow skin, like a rooster’s, but belonging to some far-off branch of the animal kingdom—based on what she saw, she figured that the creature might well be fifteen feet tall, and weigh what? A ton? Two tons? Three?
By comparison, the goat-thing had been an opponent for novices.
She turned to Franziskus. They were in no position to plan; the creature would hear them.
And they couldn’t just rush in and attack it. All she had was a knife. If she survived this, she would learn to use a weapon with a longer reach.
She became conscious of a need to empty her bladder.
Dots of snow dusted down from further up the peak; they did nothing to cool her blazing forehead.
She reached out and grabbed the tripwire, twanging it like the string of a lute. Then she held it taut. As she’d suspected, there was the sound of a squeaky pulley spinning. This was followed by a crash. The cave mouth billowed dust and sand, as the creature came lunging out of it. It was as large as she’d figured. Its head was halfway between that of a bear and a pike or other toothy fish, with a huge and gaping mouth. Angelika, gut cord still in hand, jerked it outward. It pulled against one of the behemoth’s rooster-skinned legs, knocking it off balance. The creature, expecting foes to be in front of its snapping jaws but not to its side, turned, wrapping the cord around its ankle. Angelika gave it a final tug, increasing her leverage by letting herself fall backwards, trusting Franziskus to catch her. The creature rolled from the ledge.
It bounced like an enormous ball down the side of the mountain. It hit an out-jutting rock, and exploded in a shower of slime and dark blood. As it smashed into a lower level of the trail, it broke a new gap in it, and splashed ichor down the mountainside. The ball of gore, fur and hide continued to roll until it was out of sight.
Franziskus held Angelika under the arms. He had caught her without hesitation. “I will remark wittily on this at a later time,” he said.
She muttered and freed herself from his grip, though not so carelessly as to follow the monster off the side of the mountain. She moved to the edge of the cave. “You in there! Are there any more beastmen?”
“Who calls me?”
“Answer my question!”
“Is this a trick?”
“Are there more beastmen in there?”
“Did my father send you?”
She looked back to address Franziskus. “How do they manage to raise you all to be so stupid?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Angelika dropped down into the cave. She kept her knife out, ready to receive an attacker. Her eyes adjusted. The cave was smaller than she’d anticipated. Looking for other ways in, she saw only a narrow fissure at the back of the cave, through which she was not sure if it was possible to squeeze. Nothing else moved, except for the individual bundled up and gently swinging in the net above her head. She squinted to see how he was fastened there. The creature had used more gut string to create an elaborate lattice between several iron pegs that were spiked into the chamber’s flattish ceiling. The net hung from the centre of this web of gut. On tiptoes, Angelika contemplated how exactly it could be cut down. She called Franziskus in. He entered the cave preceded by his drawn sword.
“Are there any more of them?” he asked her.
“Good question,” Angelika said. “Are there more Chaos spawn?” she asked the prisoner in the net, in a low, hissing voice. The presumed Lukas von Kopf did not answer. “Hey!” she said. Still no reply. She squinted at him. “I can see you’re awake. I saw you blink, just now.” She jumped up to paw at the net, sending it gently swinging. It was a difficult thing to do; the lowest part of Lukas dangled about nine feet from the stone floor of the small cavern. “Don’t make me find a rock to pitch at you,” she whispered.
“Do not presume to touch me!” said Lukas, paying no special heed to the volume of his voice. “I have been poked and prodded quite enough!”
“Then answer my questions! There’s no one else in here, is there?”
“I have not seen anyone but the beast for weeks—unless you count Thomas, there.”
“Thomas?” Franziskus peered into the shadows. His foot bumped against something. He knelt to feel what it was. He scudded back into the sunlight, his face wrinkled in revulsion.
“I take it you’ve found Thomas,” Angelika said.
“What remains of him.”
Angelika spoke up at Lukas: “Was Thomas one of the men you fled with?”
“He disappointed me bitterly. He was supposed to be an experienced soldier. Yet he couldn’t protect me from the beast, could he?”
“He’s addled,” Angelika said to Franziskus.
“I heard that!” An inappropriate giggle worked its way through the prisoner’s tone of outrage.
Franziskus looked up and spoke in a low and soothing voice. “If you could hear yourself, Lukas, you would agree that reason has abandoned you. This Thomas person had no chance of protecting you from a thing such as that. In addition, you direct misplaced umbrage at us, we are your rescuers.”
Angelika moved Franziskus aside. “This is foolish. We’ll sweet-talk him back to sanity later. Lukas, we’re getting you down from there.”
The prisoner pitched around in the net, increasing the violence of its swings back and forth. “Not until you identify yourselves!”
“We don’t need your permission; all we need to do is cut that rope.” Angelika moved back for a better look at the lattice of cords. She inspected the cavern for something to stand on. As part of her search, she kicked aside Thomas’ meatless ribs. She found nothing, save for the tree trunk the creature had used as a poker. She thought for a moment that they might stick a blade on the end of it, but when she tried to lift it, she realised that it was much too heavy for that. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, “that a monster fifteen-feet tall would keep a lair without stepladders. Well then,” she called up at Lukas, “you’re just going to have to get yourself down. I’m going to pass you a knife. Use it to hack that main cord. We’ll make sure we catch you. Here.” She held the knife up as far as she could reach. But it still wasn’t close enough. “Franziskus, boost me.” He stuck his knee out for her to stand on, like a man pledging his troth. She stepped up onto the proffered leg, balancing herself by placing her empty hand on top of Franziskus’ blond-tressed head. She poked the hilt of the dagger up through the net, where Lukas’ pink hand was curled. Lukas did not respond. “Take the knife!” she shouted, losing her balance. She leapt down from Franziskus’ knee, then got back up on it again. She stuck the knife up. “Have your muscles atrophied, Lukas?”
“As I said, I’ll not assist you until you tell me who you are,” he said, his conviction noticeably faltering. He lapsed into a frantic pant, then spoke from the side of his mouth. “It’s all a trick, isn’t it? You haven’t really fallen off the mountain, have you?” He seemed to be addressing the beast. “It’s another of your illusions!”
Angelika jumped off Franziskus’ leg; he got up. “I assure you,” she said, “neither of us is r
emotely illusionary.”
Lukas swung silently.
“And what do you think will happen to you if we leave?” yelled Angelika. “The creature must have fed you, or you’d have starved by now.”
“He nourished me on a hideous mush of berries, goat fat, and fermented leaves.”
“Fattening you up like a liver-goose, I reckon.”
“I wanted to die! Yet I could not resist even that damnable food!”
“How long do you think he can dangle there, Franziskus, without food or water?”
“To speculate precisely would be gruesome,” Franziskus said. “But it’s a fate I wouldn’t envy.”
“Even if I faced the blackest of villains, I would want down from that net. I’d think I’d have a better chance out of it than in it.”
Lukas breathed for a while. “This isn’t a trick?”
“No, it is not.”
“Then I suppose it’s safe to pass me the knife.”
She hoisted herself up on Franziskus’ knee once again, and this time Lukas poked his fingers out through the netting to take the knife. Angelika fought a smirk off her face, as Lukas bounced around like a ham in a sack, struggling to stand inside the net.
“Perhaps you should steady him,” Franziskus said, offering his knee once more. She balanced awkwardly on him, grabbing Lukas’ feet with her outstretched hand. Now we all look equally foolish, she thought. Her muscles ached by the time Lukas had the tough cord even halfway sawed through, and Franziskus was shaking from the strain. So she hoisted herself up, grabbing onto Lukas’ foot with her other hand. Then she stepped away from Franziskus and into thin air. With her weight added to Lukas’, the half-sawn cord snapped, sending the net and young nobleman plummeting to the ground. She tried to roll, but he landed on her stomach anyway. She grunted in pain and doubled over. Lukas attempted to stand, but his feet were still on the net. He had the knife in his hand, as if poised for attack. Franziskus moved behind him, to help free him from the mesh, but he spun, jabbing the knife point out. The net twisted around his ankles and he fell. Franziskus moved to let him fall face-first. The knife skidded across the cave floor. Franziskus retrieved it and sat on Lukas’ netted back, as if he were a bench.
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