And this time, the shot had spread wide to the right and torn out the chest and shoulder of the burly plowman standing next to the gnarled crone he had targeted. That happened sometimes; the loads were necessarily uneven, and the wind in the clearing had been freshening. But more often, there was another cause, as indeed there was in this case. From about a third of the way around the ring of witches came another hateful vulture gleam, this one in the eye of a woman who would be handsome but for her short-cropped hair; a prostitute from the river towns, most likely. That made this coven quite a haul, potentially: it had intercourse with foreigners, not merely wicked locals. Put to the question, they would give names of other cult members, and of cult members in a richer town than Monschau or even Aachen.
With such a diverting prospect at hand, Albert decided merely to cripple the whore, emptying the second barrel into her leg.
The second thunderclap crashed out, and Hulda saw a wave of gray smoke drift toward her. Now Margrethe was down, thrashing and clutching a leg turned to useless chopped meat. The coven wavered, on the edge of scattering into the forest. Suddenly, Hulda smelled a reeking stench she could barely place: burnt charcoal, perhaps, and sulfur? For a few nervous seconds, she wondered if the churchmen had managed to actually call up their own imaginary Devil to pursue her and hers, but then she recognized the smell from the musketeers’ camp eight years back when the wars of the League had touched Monschau: this was an arquebus, or some device similar.
Shamed by her own momentary fears, Hulda fixed her sight on the glittering amber eye of Arcturus, hanging above the tree-line. She raised her voice in the ululating call of the cult, a call that was old when the One later called Pan had revealed it to the first mystai: Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! And then, as the blackbirds cawed wildly, she croaked one of the True Names, the One that indwelt here and now: Lloigor Cf’ayak!
From eleven throats (even Margrethe gasped it out) came the return: Lloigor ’vulgtmm! Aï! Aï! New power cracked and bent Hulda’s limbs, and one of her few remaining teeth popped out of her writhing jaw in a freshet of pus. Her vision, normally clouded with cataracts, suddenly cleared even as it seemed to rotate up and to the side of her head, and suddenly the tree line glowed with bluish fire. She happened to be looking at the man in black when she stopped moving her head, and the fire crackled from his own eyes and his open mouth and then turned deep red and bright violet at once as his shrieking howl of agony at the same time pierced the sky like glass and dropped like lead into the stones of the earth.
The witches yowled their demonic cry and began to rush across the clearing toward Albert.
This is what happens when you let mercy distract you from your duty, Doktor Wiese would have said, chuckling as they spent their silver on hot wine or nutmeg-and-ale in Aachen. But Doktor Wiese was gone, torn to powder by demons and dragged to Hell in an eyeblink. No more would Albert hear that chuckle, or the confident bray as the Doktor explained to a new client that he had trained under both Paracelsus and Agrippa. The Doktor was dead, Albert fervently hoped, because after too much hot wine one night, the Doktor had hinted at the things besides death that could happen to a man who the witches caught unwitting at a time and place favorable to their arts.
This is why the Doktor brought him along, why he had recruited him five years ago: Albert Kohl was the best poacher in the Palatinate, and he was never caught unwitting at someone else’s favorable time and place. Albert always scouted their destination before the sabbat; by the time the moon was new and the witches showed up, he knew the ground around their monolith or their bald heath better than their own fathers did.
So now Albert turned and ran toward the slot in the woods around the clearing. He had noticed the dry spring two nights ago in the waning moonlight, breaking the sharp slopes of scree and twisted roots that heaved up against the clearing’s sides. Now he ran down it, skidding on the dirt clods and gravel, but gaining time and space on his pursuers. He needed enough of both to reload.
As he hoped, they began to split up as they got deeper into the woods: amateurs thinking they were the beaters and he was the fox. They were wrong. He was the hunter, and they were the birds. The forest was suddenly full of birds, he thought, hearing the twittering of chaffinches and the sobbing of wrens from all directions. Well enough. The noise would hide his passage. He shrugged out of the heavy leather hide, needing speed more than concealment or protection. Then he slung his gun and fell back toward where he had left the axe at moonrise.
Two of them were still moving vaguely toward him. Not close enough to offer them any real advantage, but it did mean Albert would have to kill both of them before either one got off a shout of alarm. If they actually managed to converge on him, he might have more in common with that fox than he liked. He shifted his grip on the axe again and waited for the first to pass him. He had left his gun hidden under a trailing bush, and was glad of the freedom of movement, much though he missed its comforting bulk. The second witch passed him; he erupted from behind a thick fir bole, swinging the axe in a perfect arc into her spinal cord. Instantly paralyzed, she couldn’t shout a warning. Albert ran down her partner (a squat man with a goiter) and smashed in his skull. Now, he had time to recover his gun and reload.
Albert poured black powder out of one end of his shot belt into the metal cup on the other end. One charge, into the first barrel. Then he fingered out a handful of lead from the belt’s middle packet. Like most hunters with a fowling-piece, he bought his lead from printers, who had lots of lead sheets they had run to almost paper thin-ness, smashing and pressing against the type. Stamp or cut those sheets, sometimes with the impress of the Bible or the treatise or the proclamation still on them, into squares, or close enough. Tumble the squares a bit in a churn to blunt the corners, and you had shot. Dump a fistful of shot on top of the measured powder, tamp it down with a rod, cover with a little piece of wadding, tamp that down. Do it again on the other barrel. Check both locks. Check the rotation of the barrels. Check the cover of the priming pan. Pour out primer. Check the flint on the hammer. Albert had practiced that little liturgy every day but Sunday for many years, now. He was devout.
He shot one in the head as they walked down parallel deer paths, waiting until a particularly thick and rustly hemlock blocked almost all the starlight and much of the noise. The birds drowned the rest of it.
He shot the young boy right in the chest, coming upon him by surprise as they both rounded a moss-covered plinth of limestone, jutting like a tooth from the soft ground where the trail looped around and met the ravine again. That shot echoed up and down the riverbed, raising only one or two plaintive caws in response. Albert’s advantage of surprise was as dead as the boy, for a while anyway.
He missed one, but it was a running shot at a running witch, back into the woods.
Albert briefly clutched the bag hanging from a thong around his neck and prayed to St. Eustace, patron of hunters, to guide his aim. Then he moved his hand from the bag to flip up the rear sight he’d had a tinker in Aachen put in. The bead-sight on the muzzle end was usually enough, but the rear sight helped with long shots like this one. The knucklebones in the bag must have been authentic relics, because the witch sprayed blood and toppled into the rocks she sheltered behind. It was almost a hundred yards down the ravine to where the witch had been crouching, certain that nobody could creep up on such an exposed, though strong, position. Now, Albert could move past that position as fast as he wished, to fall on the witches across the ravine, deeper into the woods.
He shot one in the back, an old man who wasn’t carrying a weapon.
He shot another one in the stomach, and chopped him in the face to finish the job.
Fewer birds called with every shot, it seemed. He hadn’t heard a wren in an hour.
He very much wished he hadn’t lost his axe. He had hacked open one witch’s shoulder, then spun around to chop the second only to find his hand empty. The blade had stuck in the witch’s arm, the thick chest muscle clamp
ing spastically down onto the steel. The witch fell, twisting and pulling the axe handle up out of Albert’s hand, and the second witch had a very long knife. Albert had to back up once, twice, three times before he could trade a long cut in the side (stopped from gutting him only by his second shot belt) for a straight-arm smash and a kidney punch. The second witch was down but far from out, and shouting for a third friend. Albert turned and loped away, once more trusting his knowledge of the woods.
In a small clearing between two beech trees, Albert stopped moving. He knew where they were, but he couldn’t do anything about them. They were keeping together, keeping each other alive and in sight so he couldn’t ambush them. He reached for his shot belt, and it felt lighter than it should. The second belt must have fallen off, cut nearly through by the knife as it was. He only had one shot belt, the one he’d already charged his gun from six, eight times. He was getting tired, the strain beginning to tell. He wished Doktor Wiese were here to tell him to forget about it and go home.
After checking the belt twice, Albert still had barely enough powder for one more charge, and no more shot at all. In truth? No more? He was always finding single stray squares of shot when he didn’t want them: in his bread bag, or in his pockets, or in his bedroll. Now he felt every stitch, every fold of his trews and tunic and coat. He opened up the shot belt completely, slitting its seams, unrolling the leather and picking through it for singletons.
He found eleven little lead squares, looking even more warped and uneven in their isolation. He dropped them in on top of his last charge of powder. He also had six silver pfennigs, small enough to fit inside the gun’s bore. If he didn’t get out of this forest, he couldn’t spend them; down they went. He still couldn’t chance three witches, even if he had crippled one already—not with one shot and only a paring knife for close quarters. But perhaps he could still kill the old witch who he had missed at the beginning of all this, the one with the Evil Eye. She couldn’t have gone far, and unlike her fellow witches, Albert knew exactly how to get back to the clearing.
But he’d missed her, from a prepared position with a full load and minutes of aim. He needed an edge if he was going to hit her when he was tired, from an angle he hadn’t sighted in, with this last chancy, underpowered charge. The knucklebones of St. Eustace—they were small enough to fit down the barrel. He opened his relic bag, saying a brief prayer for forgiveness. St. Eustace was a hunter, though; he would understand. The knucklebones were colored like honey, once incised with crosses but now worn almost smooth. Lying in their midst was a weird little talisman, inscribed with unreadable runes. Doktor Wiese must have slipped it in without telling him; some sort of extra philosophical protection. It was slim and rounded, and the gray-green stone slid easily down the steel bore. Albert tamped the uneven load home, and moved silently up the ravine, back toward the clearing.
Hulda knew when the hunter had circled around to her. Three of her fellows were still stumbling around in the woods, hopelessly lost and far from Hulda’s aid. Hulda was alone now—she had opened Margrethe’s torso at the end, aiming the ribs and long bones and other parts in the correct directions to prepare the Angles without the full coven. She started with a quickly murmured Iä sequence but soon lost herself in the Dhol chants, rhythms and formulae she had burned into her brain, but never until now uttered. As the blue flames began to flicker in her sight, she could see the trees and standing stones begin to refract and multiply, splintering like spilt sugar on a hot ladle. Her vision bounced and skittered from the smoothly shining trunks, mirrored from the lattice of branches and stones, and she could see the hunter standing where he thought he was hidden, holding his foolish weapon.
I’ll show him hidden, she thought with a sharp, personal viciousness that was very unlike her. I’ll show him hidden indeed. Hulda’s mouth fell open and as she began to intone the proper notes and tones in her throat, pieces of Margrethe’s liver spilled out over her numb, slack lips.
If Doktor Wiese—who, after all, could confidently state that he had trained under both Paracelsus and Agrippa—had survived to see what Hulda was doing, he would have similarly confidently stated that she was summoning a demon. If a physicist of the 21st century could be persuaded to opine on the matter, he would say, possibly less confidently, that she was rotating a superstring containing a separate universe into her local space. By the 50th century, the sages of Tsan-Chan can discuss the matter without superstitious referents.
Lloigor merely perceived, and it was so. This was/is/had been/will be true for longer than the Earth exists.
At first, he thought the trees themselves were moving to block his shot. The old witch couldn’t have moved; she barely looked like she could stand up. But suddenly, there were trees between him and the witch, between his last charge of shot and her Evil Eye. But they weren’t trees. They moved against the suddenly icy wind, and they melted in the suddenly blazing starlight, writhing like eels mating, and they towered above him and slid below him, and they had branches and limbs and planes and surfaces and oh yes eyes. So many eyes, and now the branches and other things were toppling and rippling toward him and the eyes burned into him and the wind pinched and pulled like talons and something reached for him from every angle, elongated and gaping and he was stumbling back and he couldn’t move back any more.
He had one shot left, and everything he could see was a smashed nightmare joined at angles that stabbed at his flesh. His ears roared with the piercing wind-call and his legs were numb or dislocated or not there any more. Everything smelled like burning tin, but Albert gripped the barrel of his gun with hands gone wet and salty.
Doktor Wiese had always been very clear that suicide was a mortal sin.
Albert raised his shotgun, hand over hand, moving his fists down to the stock and the lock. He let the barrel fall forward, leveled it at the many-angled Thing rising before him, and squeezed the trigger. He never felt the recoil.
Lloigor felt His first volcanic bolide approximately one and a half billion years after the Earth formed. He felt His first lightning strike 18 million years before that, and His first axe blade around 165 million years before humanity evolved. In all those cases, the term “first” is one of those superstitious referents that the sages of Tsan-Chan deplore, because He felt/feels/will feel all of those things simultaneously, for as long as they occurred, and for as often. And because He is the Many-Angled One, He simply transected/projected/assumed/extruded a surface that quenched bolides, grounded lightning, and splintered axe-blades as though turned by a shield of oiled diamond. And again/always/before for every other single thing in three dimensions intended to wound, burn, freeze, disintegrate, or sublime: He already solves/solved/will solve the precise configuration of Angle and Surface needed to dampen or deflect or counterbalance the attack, and so such a blow was/is/can only be a nullity to Him. Indeed, He even will/has/is obliquely refracted from the death of planets in a red star’s senile embrace, Arcturus and Sol and suns not named in this universe. Almost nothing is/will be/has been unknown to Him.
Except.
He felt His first round lead shot in 1294, fired by a Mongol warrior in northern Burma; He felt His first grouping of round lead pellets in the Snowdon Hills in Wales in 1597, aimed by a hunter freezing to death and mad with hunger. Hollow lead balls, pointed lead bullets, pointed silver bullets, steel shrapnel, depleted-uranium shells, titanium needles: He has/will/is resisting them all forever/now, because He already did/will/is.
But only once—only at 2:54 a.m. on April 19, 1534, in the cursed stand of woods just southwest of Monschau in the Duchy of Jülich—has He been hit with eleven irregular geometric lead rhomboids and six worn silver-and-pewter alloy discs tumbling on entirely chaotic approaches, combined with two human knuckles and two pieces of carefully dyed ivory, and a small ovoid of gray-green moldavite, most importantly all of them inscribed with polysemic and alphanumeric payloads, and all of them moving at just under 1,200 feet per second.
Lloigor shrieked. C
olorless blue fire enveloped the entire forest. Hulda died instantly as her bones and lungs suddenly lost all their directionality and expanded randomly for nine seconds; the three remaining witches lost, on average, forty percent of their skin and senses.
In front of that scream, Albert Kohl was like a leaf in a torrent, battered but intact, spreading himself over the pressure wave and tumbling along it bathed in the brilliant violet edges of the ice-blue rage of the god, stretched and pulped along His perceptions until He had to/had to/had to close them off, to stop them, to end the moment of pain and singularity and not knowing.
Lloigor blinked.
In an ultraviolet screech, Albert Kohl blinked out.
The forest was empty of sane life for miles. It no longer touched the Many-Angled One.
After three straight days of combat in the Hürtgen Forest, with about three hours of sleep all told, PFC Pete Larsen ignored the weird purple light suddenly flickering in his eyes. It was either a hallucination or the krauts throwing out something else to keep this godforsaken stand of woods Yank-free. Either way, the solution was the same: squint away the exhaustion and try and drive the balky Sherman tank forward another few yards.
It must have been a side-effect of sleep deprivation; Larsen must actually have nodded off for several seconds to have missed seeing the big blond guy with the gun come out of nowhere. Probably simple-minded, drafted into the Volkssturm at the Reich’s last gasp—he didn’t even have a uniform. He was dressed like a hayseed in a homespun shirt, and gaping like a man who’d just seen all the elephant he could handle.
Wherever he came from, he was going to Hell. Larsen reached down and squeezed the trigger on the M2 machine gun mounted on the turret. The .50 caliber stuttered out a few rounds, Larsen corrected the aim with a tug, and the big guy went down with four or five holes in him.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 20
