by Mike Truk
Hugh took out two more lookouts in similar manner. They reached the top, crested the ridge, and Luciv pointed out the trail that wove through scrubby bushes toward a hamlet of tents and improvised wooden structures. It was located in a shallow bowl, a small plateau that hugged the mountain’s peak. A stream trickled down one side to fill the very base with a small pond. Stumps of trees radiated out around it. Precious little activity at this early hour. A half dozen campfires lit, men gathered around them, cooking and talking quietly to each other.
There. That would be Katharzina’s home. The right size. The right angle to the roof. One of the grander buildings. But a grander yet stood flush against the pool. A solidly built log cabin. Smoke rising from the chimney. Three men lounged before it, sitting on stumps, sharpening knives.
No sign of his companions.
“Where would they keep my friends?” asked Hugh, lowering himself into a crouch behind a rock.
“I don’t know. I swear it. I avoid this place like the plague. I hate everything about the smugglers. I know you won’t believe me. But I wanted nothing more than to work the woods. Hunt for my family, help the people of Erro with whatever problems came up. This? This is poison. I only come when summoned and leave as quickly as I can.”
Hugh nodded, drew his dagger from his hip, and slammed it into Luciv’s neck. Lowered the gagging man into the dirt and held him down, one hand on his chest, waiting as the ranger gasped and spat blood. And finally went still.
Drew his dagger, cleaned it on Luciv’s pants, sheathed it.
The camp had grown complacent. Put too much stock in their lookouts. No patrols that he could see. There were several buildings that served as depots of some kind. Open windows, no chimneys. Guards placed before the doors. Salt stocks? Would the women be kept there?
Time to find out.
Hugh rose to his feet. Began walking down toward the camp calmly, openly. Furtive movements draw the eye. This way, he’d be ignored until the last moment.
Maybe thirty people here, all told. Hugh memorized details without bothering to mull over it. The maturity of the organization. The implications in terms of food and support.
A man came out from behind a tent, lacing up his breeches and whistling under his breath. Stopped, eyes going wide. “Hello.”
“Hi,” said Hugh, turning to march right into him. Before the pisser could react, Hugh seized him by the throat and stiff armed him back around the tent. The man’s cries as he choked were muted. Hugh drew his dagger and held it to his eye.
“One false word and this goes into your head as far as the hilt. Understood?”
The man went still. Nodded.
“Where are the women who were brought here last night?”
“Aleksandr has them in his cabin.” The man’s voice barely a whisper.
“Has he hurt them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Katharzina?”
“In her house, I reckon. She sleeps in late.”
Hugh slid the dagger into the man’s eye to the hilt. The man spasmed, went slack. Hugh let him fall. Cleaned the dagger out of habit, sheathed it, walked on around the back of the tent, angling toward Katharzina’s. Picked up a crate before he’d taken six steps, lowered his head.
Nobody challenged him. Everybody focused on rolling their smokes, taking a piss, edging closer to the campfires for a little more warmth.
Hugh reached the back of Katharzina’s house. The very sight of it looming before him gave him chills. Hit reflexive triggers of trauma, so that he shuddered, a primal part of his being recoiling from what had happened to him in there.
He shut that shit down, moved to the closest window.
Shuttered. No latch. A simple matter to crack it open an inch.
Dark inside, but he knew the layout. There was the bed. A figure lay in it, wreathed in black sheets, head outlined on a pale pillow.
Heart pounding, Hugh bent down, picked up a stone as large as a potato and pulled the shutter wide.
The figure on the bed muttered in annoyance as light streamed in, sat up.
Hugh hurled the rock with every ounce of strength in his being. The rock flew impacted the figure’s head. Shattered it, caved in the skull, blasted brain and blood across the wall behind it.
The figure keeled over to bleed out over the sheets.
Hugh closed the shutters, heart pounding yet.
Drew his blade.
With that taken care of, it was time for some base butchery.
Walked out from around the back of the house into view of the campfires. People turned at this, glancing over their shoulders only to turn away, then back in a double take.
Much different, seeing a man with a drawn blade instead of a crate.
“Hey, who the fuck are you?”
Four men who’d been warming their hands by the fire turned as one to confront him, drawing their blades as they did so.
Hard men. Faces seamed and weathered.
Hugh walked right at them. Alarm, confusion, and the quickest of their group fell into a combat stance, blade held before him in both hands.
Hugh slammed his sword as hard as he could into the man’s weapon, right above his hilt, and knocked it free of his grip with a clang. His return swing took the man’s head off.
The other three bellowed and leaped at him, their cries taken up by the others in the camp. Movement and excitement all around now.
Hugh focused on the three. They didn’t have time to spread out, but came at him like a trident, trying to rush him, overwhelm him.
He smacked a stab aside with the palm of his hand, cut the second man’s arm off, turned sideways so the third missed him by a quarter inch.
Hugh’s arms flickered. Their blades clattered into each other, a head came free, trailed by gore, a second man staggered back into their campfire, gutted, screamed as he caught fire. Hugh stabbed his thumb and forefinger into the eyes of the third, deep into the jellied mass of his eyes. Pinched his fingers together as if popping a grape, and shattered the bone between his eyes, causing the front of the man’s face to burst outward in a slurried mess of blood and sinuses.
Left the man behind as he strode toward the next group.
His hatred was vast. His fury unassuageable.
Footsteps coming down the hall. Slow. Unhurried. Echoing. The rusted rasp of a key being inserted into a lock.
Hugh felt his gorge rise as he slipped into a mass of men who charged at him. Some yet in their nightclothes, a few in chain, one bearing a shield. Longswords and short stabbing blades. Eyes wide, mouths great wet ragged holes as their shouts turned into screams. The give of their flesh. The way bone broke. Men falling, blood spattering, the shock of blade chopping through shield, through armor, through anything and everything that got in his way.
In his mind’s eye Hugh saw the brute’s fingers close around the bone of his upper leg. Grip the femur tight. Felt that terrific, overwhelming, sun-shattering pain again, and screamed his disgust and horror.
Ten men dead. Hugh turned, orienting himself. Others were spilling out of cabins, out of tents, buckling on armor, drawing weapons. Men shouting at each other, demanding answers, looking for more attackers.
Unable to believe it was just Hugh.
Clever ones nocking arrows, sighting at where Hugh stood.
Old Wladimir. Blind Igocha. Kevanir. Terey.
Colors smeared into each other. Hugh couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet. He inhaled and dreamed he need never breathe again.
Arrows came at him like turgid rocks tumbling down a hill.
He moved between them. Moved toward the next closest group of men.
Cut them down.
His blade shattered as he cleaved a shield in twain. Shards of metal flew, one opening a gash under his eye.
No matter. Hugh reached out, took the sword from the closest man, tearing fingers loose as he did so, crushing them to rank ooze under his iron grip against the blade’s hilt, and killed the man before h
e could scream.
More arrows. He cut them down, but too many had been loosed. Two hit him, one high in his shoulder, another in his lower back.
He barely felt the pain.
Bent, took up a handful of pebbles. In quick succession, even as other men charged at him, hurled the small rocks at the archers where they stood, some between tents, others on the far side of the pond, others before Aleksandr’s cabin.
Faces erupted in blood. Men staggered back, screaming, bows falling, hands going to eyes, to broken jaws, to shattered cheekbones.
Hugh leaped to meet the onslaught.
Felt as if his skin were iron, his eyes blazed fire, his heart an ever-revolving sphere of death-giving might.
Hacked his way toward Aleksandr’s cabin.
Twenty or more dead now.
Not all had gone down easy. Sheer weight of numbers had meant some cuts got through. Hugh ignored the wounds. His blood was indistinguishable from the gore that slicked him now from head to toe.
He thought of Luciv’s bloody footprints as he strode around the pool, his own now puddling behind him. Pushed the thought away and looked up to the cabin.
Whose door had opened. A man emerged. His face was broad, strong, bestial. There was something of the bull to his features, his brow muscled, his cheeks like anvils, his mouth a great slit. Where Hugh had expected some slender mastermind, he found himself confronting a beast of a man, shoulders massive, hair sleek and black like the pelt of an animal.
Eyes that glittered as they fixed on him, expression somewhere between avarice and amusement.
“Aleksandr,” said Hugh, pointing at the man with his blood-drenched blade. “Where are they?”
Aleksandr looked past Hugh at the trail of dead that he’d left in his wake. A lonesome wind blew over the plateau, setting tents to flapping, fires to streaming under the pots, bringing the sound of men groaning and weeping past them both.
Hugh’s breath was visible as puffs of fog. Steam rose from the gore that caked his frame.
“Hugh of Stasiek,” said Aleksandr, and his voice was a low, basso profundo rumble. “I thought you made mine. Where is Demian?”
“Dead.”
Aleksandr rubbed at his bare chin, gazed over to Katharzina’s cabin.
“Also dead,” said Hugh. “Just you and me, motherfucker.”
“So I see. Your power beguiles me. What are you?”
There was no fear in the man’s voice. Something more akin to idle curiosity. Hugh wiped at his brow as blood began to drip into his eye.
“Doesn’t matter what I am. Where are my companions?”
Aleksandr jerked his head over his shoulder. “Inside. Unharmed. Mostly. We were speaking. But our conversation will have to wait. Many surprises today, but I always welcome a good fight.”
Hugh felt his rage overwhelm his reason. No more room for talk. For conversation. He would cut this brutish man down and kick open that door. He spun his blade about once in his hand, thwipping blood across the ground and into the sky, and began to march toward his foe.
Who reached behind one of the supporting porch pillars and pulled his own weapon into view. A massive, broad-bladed weapon whose upper portion curved in a manner most strange, its inner curve serrated.
Should have been a two-handed weapon, from the size of it, but Aleksandr wielded it with but the one.
Hugh inhaled deeply, felt his ribs expand to creaking, and then, when he was close, drew on the power of the Lost Reavers he’d summoned, felt them swell his muscles with their might, felt their screams of rage and defiance echo within his own as he roared and leaped up the steps, faster than thought, his blade coming around like a meteor plunging down from the heavens, enough might behind its sweep to hew through rock.
Aleksandr flicked his blade up and blocked his attack cold.
Metal screeched, and his own blade would have bounced right off were it not for his double-handed grip. Hugh found himself stymied, his blade crossed with Aleksandr’s, their faces but a foot apart.
Hugh clenched his jaw, teeth grinding, and leaned into the parry, feeling so fell and unstoppable that he feared the hilt of his blade would bend, the tang of the sword give way.
Yet Aleksandr held his own blade forward with but the one hand, seeming without effort, studying Hugh with more avid curiosity now, his gaze dark and brooding, his broad mouth pulling into something of a smirk.
“Fearsome. An inhuman blow. I should by all rights be dead.” The man’s rumble was felt more in Hugh’s chest than heard by his ears. “However, I have tricks of my own.”
And with a heave Aleksandr took hold of his blade with both hands and swept it forward, sending Hugh staggering back down the steps, onto his heels, precariously off-balance just as the smuggler king leaped into the air, following through with his own blow, to come crashing down, blade screaming overhead.
Hugh had barely enough balance to hurl himself aside.
Aleksandar’s blow shattered the rock on which Hugh’d stood.
Faster than Hugh’d have thought possible, Aleksandr was upon him hammering blow after blow upon his defense, sending Hugh’s sword flying in different directions with each parry, impossibly fast, the man’s expression never changing from studied curiosity.
Outrage. Fury. Hugh’s fevered might was at odds with what was happening. Each blow launched by Aleksandr was powerful enough to cleave him in two. Each parry was just enough to stave off death for another second. He could sense Evassier’s mind-numbing speed, Blind Igocha’s indomitable might, all of the Reavers’ strengths flowing through him - and it wasn’t enough.
Instinct saved him. The intuitive urge to move his blade here just before the next blow came, then to retreat and parry to the left, then to duck, then to hurl himself into a roll. Each keeping him but one step ahead of the Hanged God, who seemed to ride the smuggler king’s attacks, grinning his death’s head grin as he strove to collect Hugh’s soul.
Hugh rolled back to his feet. Aleksandr was already pivoting, about to hurl himself into his next attack. Ten Lost Reavers already rode under his skin.
Not enough.
Yaros! Bolek! Mikita, Nevkha, Sidorko! A moment’s hesitation. Dragoslav!
The world darkened, his vision narrowing as if he gazed at everything from the depths of a tunnel. A rushing, roaring in his ears, as if he fell into a chasm without end. His body was distant, strange to him.
Aleksandr was descending upon him, falling like a scythe, blade glimmering with its own fell light.
Hugh raised his sword, hesitant, as if experimenting with the movement for the first time, and parried the blow.
It was his turn to stop the attack cold.
Aleksandr crashed down upon the upraised sword, failed to budge Hugh’s arm, and fell back, staggering.
His brutish eyes widened.
A dozen thoughts whirled in Hugh’s mind and fell apart. His mind was a chaotic jumble. He couldn’t focus. Aleksandr was the only object on which he could concentrate. The rest of the world was madness.
The smuggler king charged. A dozen blows, his scimitar flicking out like a flame, but Hugh parried them all. Such was the force behind the attacks that each parry sent a shiver up Hugh’s arms, but now he could see them coming with enough warning to move into the attacks, drive Aleksandr back.
“It’s over,” Hugh heard himself say, voice clotted and strange. “Time to die.”
Aleksandr snarled, backed away, then laughed. “Die? Me? That’s rich! We’re just… just getting… started…”
The man’s voice grew deeper. Husky, almost unintelligible. His whole frame shivered, his shoulders hunching, his head lowering.
Hugh stayed his attack, nonplussed.
Fascinated.
The man grew. Swelled up in size, and in a matter of moments went from being six feet tall to almost nine. Tendons popped. Bones groaned. Skin stretched over bulging muscle as Aleksandr’s physique became monstrous.
His face, when he raised it, was s
ufficiently horrifying to curdle the soul. His nose had flatted into non-existence, his jaw turned lantern-heavy, his maw now filled with triangular teeth. Skin had darkened to a crimson so black it was as if night and life’s blood were smeared across him wholesale. Fists as large as mattocks, chest deeper than a bull’s, and so corded in muscle that he made Hugh look like a waif in comparison.
“Oh yes,” laughed Aleksandr, stretching his arms wide, causing more joints to pop. His scimitar now looked a toy in his grip. “What pleasure to indulge in Arasim’s gift. My thanks, Hugh of Stasiek. I’ve cause for sport.”
Hugh gripped his blade in both hands, lowered himself into a combat crouch. Madness yet flickered through his mind as the souls and power of sixteen Lost Reavers swirled through him.
The minutest twitch of Aleksandr’s posture. The barest hint of an attack.
Hugh spun away, and barely avoided having his head cleaved from his neck.
Instinct once more. Hugh leaped up and back. An invisible blade swooshed past. A flurry of parries. The man’s strength had increased tenfold. Their blades were rapidly becoming notched and ruined, mangled and bent.
Hugh blocked six attacks in midair, landed, and despite all reason hurled himself forward, slamming his shoulder into Aleksandr’s chest.
Bone shattered. The demon smuggler flew back, crashed into the steps leading up to his cabin’s porch, shattered the steps, slammed back into the porch itself, shattered its boards, fetched up against the stone foundation of the cabin.
Hugh was upon him, blade descending like Fortuna’s own judgement.
Aleksandr reached up, caught the blade mid-swing.
Closed his fist, bent the metal to scrap.
Hugh released the blade a moment before it was torn from his grip and hurled away. Grabbed Aleksandr’s meaty wrist as the demon brought his own weapon to bear.
For a second they were poised there, each gripping the other’s wrist, struggling, striving.
