Demontech: Onslaught

by David Sherman

  The sergeant shouted a question as he reached the gate. The guard who’d made the excited shout pointed down the road and gave an equally excited reply.

  The sergeant rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he looked at where the man pointed.

  “What’s happening?” Haft called out as he and Spinner approached the gate.

  “Two Jokaps stayed at the gate,” the giant told him. “When they saw their side was beaten, they mounted their horses and took off. These guards got one. The other one got away.”

  The two Marines reached the gate and were able to see for themselves. Three-quarters of the way to the bend in the road, a Jokapcul soldier lay on his face in the grass between the ruts, an arrow protruding from his back. Closer to the bend, a horse stood calmly chomping at the grass between the ruts in the road.

  The Skragish sergeant talked quietly for a moment, as though to himself, then issued a series of orders. Four of the guards took up positions guarding the gate and stood sharp, like a ceremonial guard. The others relaxed and headed toward the cottages.

  “Why don’t they go and fetch the body?” Axe asked.

  “Sergeant Pilco”—the giant indicated the Skragish sergeant—“considered that. But his orders are still, ‘Don’t cross the border.’ If his men had gotten both of those Jokaps, then I suspect he’d send someone to get them and the horses.” He paused and looked around. “If all the Jokaps were dead, he could just bury the bodies somewhere and claim they had never been here. Or say they came and went away. But one got away, so the Jokaps are going to know they had men killed here and they’ll come for the bodies. If the bodies aren’t there, they’ll know the guards crossed the border, and there’ll be trouble.” He paused again and looked someplace only he could see. After a moment his eyes refocused on the dead man laying on the ox cart road. He said quietly, “Probably be trouble anyway.”

  At that moment, Spinner collapsed.

  Haft checked Spinner’s wound; the flow had slowed to a trickle, but the flesh of his lower leg was an unhealthy-looking gray and was cold to the touch.

  Sergeant Pilco immediately took charge. He called back the men whom he’d just released from duty, he and the giant quickly prepared a litter, then he directed his men to carry the litter to one of the cottages. He wouldn’t let Haft help with the carrying.

  “You carry his weapons and pack,” the giant translated for Sergeant Pilco.

  The cottage Sergeant Pilco led them to was home to a healing witch. She scolded the sergeant for taking so long to fetch the wounded man, then shooed everyone out, including Haft. The giant refused to translate what she said.

  “I don’t talk that way myself, and I won’t repeat it when someone else says it either,” the giant explained. “Especially not when a woman says it.” He cast a quick look at the healing witch’s cottage as though wondering if she really was a woman, and if so, what kind.

  Outside, Sergeant Pilco wanted to inspect the site of the fight. Haft and the giant accompanied him, and meanwhile talked. But they didn’t talk about the one thing that was bothering Haft: What had the giant meant about the rampant eagle? The old man in New Bally had also made a point of the eagle on his axe. Now that he thought about it, some Marines had looked at the axe oddly, and a few acted deferentially toward him after noticing it, but nobody had ever commented about it except the old man in New Bally. But then, in the Frangerian Marines, no one asked anyone anything about his past—that was a hard and fast rule. And what did the giant mean about Spinner being a staffmaster?

  “I’m called Haft. What do they call you?”

  “They call me Silent.”

  “With your voice?”

  “I’m of the Tangonine people of the Northern Steppes. When one of us goes wandering alone in the world, he takes a vow of silence about the People. You said you are a Frangerian Marine. I know enough about you to know that you are also wanderers in the world, and that you adopt names not your own. You do it, I understand, because it is tradition that Frangerian Marines have no past, no history. For us, it’s because names are magic things. If someone knows our true names, he can have power over us. I named myself after my vow.”

  “For someone who has taken a vow of silence, you’re not very quiet.”

  “The vow doesn’t mean I don’t talk, merely that there are things I don’t talk about.”

  Haft nodded. Then he said, “Even for a nomad, you’re wandering far. Do your people wander much?”

  Silent shrugged. “No. But I kept seeing signs of a world beyond the one I knew and got curious about it. Besides, there were people who said the steppes weren’t big enough to hold me.” He paused and grinned widely, then added, “Or maybe they said the steppes weren’t big enough for both of us.” He laughed. As big as his voice was, his laugh was oddly pleasing. “If I’d taken all those challenges, I might have found myself the only remaining man of the Tangonine people.” He rolled his eyes. “The only man left in a tribe of beautiful women. Hmm. Maybe I should have stayed at home.” He laughed again, less loudly.

  They reached the fence and stopped talking while they looked at the bodies. The big cat was covered with buzzing flies. Beetles already crawled about on it and burrowed under its skin. Ants scurried back and forth in long columns. The seven Jokapcul were likewise swarming with attendant insects.

  “We must do something about the bodies,” Haft said after a moment. “Bury them, burn them. Whatever it is the Jokapcul do with their dead.”

  Silent slowly shook his massive head. “The Skraglanders can’t cross the border. Anyway, more Jokaps will be here in three or four days. Maybe sooner. They’ll take care of the bodies. Maybe they’ll even get here before the bodies start to stink too much.”

  Haft didn’t find that an acceptable response. In Ewsarcan, where he was from, bodies were never left on the ground—not even the corpses of enemies slain in battle.

  Silent and Sergeant Pilco exchanged a few quiet words. The Skraglander seemed disturbed at the sight of the dead men. Silent also looked unhappy. Then Sergeant Pilco’s face turned stern and he said a few harsh, strained words. Silent nodded and turned to Haft.

  “It’s the rules,” the giant said. “If the Skraglanders cross the border it will cause a war. Sergeant Pilco doesn’t want to leave the bodies there either, but he has his orders. His orders say any man here who crosses the border will be hanged—and their sergeant along with him.” He looked away, toward the interior of Skragland. “If the king had his keep here, and had to see and smell these bodies, he’d probably change his mind. But the king never comes to the border, not unless he intends to cross it with an army.”

  “But . . .” Something on the ground beyond the gate caught Haft’s eye. “We’ve got to get that.” He stepped briskly toward the gate.

  A shout from Sergeant Pilco stopped him.

  He looked back and pointed. “That’s a demon spitter! We have to get it.”

  Sergeant Pilco gave Haft the same kind of look he would give any of his own men he was about to reprimand. He spoke, and his anger was clear.

  “He said if you go through the gate,” Silent translated when the sergeant was through talking, “or manage to get over the fence without the imps killing you, to get that thing, he will personally hang you. He said there is going to be serious trouble over the deaths of these men, even though his men never set foot into the Duchy of Bostia and had nothing to do with the fighting. He can even blame the dead man on the road on you. But the trouble may be short of war if the bodies are left undisturbed.”

  Sergeant Pilco spoke again.

  “Do you understand?” Silent asked.

  Haft nodded. He would do nothing for the dead men. He wondered why none of them had used the demon spitter.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  The sleepy border post had been manned for many years by rotations of three guards keeping watch on the gate during the daylight hours and attending to other border post details. It was easy though boring duty. The
guards were allowed to bring their families, if they had any, and each was assigned one of the nearby cottages. The king rented the other cottages out to farmers, who could enlarge their farm plots if they did not have houses on their land.

  Within the last few weeks, however, because of rumors of an approaching Jokapcul army, the post’s garrison had been enlarged to a full squad. The incoming guards displaced the resident farmers, who were sent as refugees toward Oskul, the Skragish capital. Given the compensation offered by the king—farm plots near the capital—the farmers weren’t reluctant to leave.

  Because a full squad had never before been bivouacked at the border post, it took longer than Sergeant Pilco thought necessary to get his small garrison into proper shape. The shaping-up was further delayed by the arrival of the Jokapcul cavalry squad they had faced over the gate the previous day—and that squad did nothing to establish a proper camp of its own on the Bostian side of the gate, so there was more than the usual amount of stench of human waste about the border post. The border post fairly bustled, and the Skraglander guards who weren’t manning the gate worked at preparing defensive positions and rearranging the living quarters to their liking.

  The witch tending Spinner knew her healing well. The day after his leg was torn open, Spinner was on his feet, walking around for short periods of time. He limped, but the sewn wound no longer bled and it was obviously mending. On the second day after the fight, he limped less. The healing witch told them through Silent that he’d be able to travel in a few days—so long as he didn’t try to walk too far at one time.

  Late on that second afternoon, as the border post’s evening meal was being prepared, Sergeant Pilco rushed out of one of the smaller buildings. He gathered his men into a group and talked quietly with them for a moment. Silent stood just outside the huddle and listened. When Sergeant Pilco dismissed his men, they resumed washing up or otherwise getting ready for their dinner, but there was a tension in them that hadn’t been there before. Silent went to Spinner and Haft.

  “A large Jokap patrol will be here before nightfall,” Silent told them. “Forty men, maybe fifty. Word is they want this post to hand over the men who killed their soldiers. That’s you and me.”

  Haft looked around the small post. He didn’t see anyone he didn’t recognize, anyone who might have come as a messenger. “How does he know that?”

  “The Jokaps sent an imbaluris with the message, and those demons are fast.”

  “Then we better get ready to fight,” Haft said. “Either that or run away. And I want no part of running away.” The way he and Spinner left their shipmates in New Bally still haunted him, and he felt leaving the Skraglander guards to face the Jokapcul would be another abandonment. Still, a part of him knew that Spinner was still too weak for a battle and needed to be taken care of. He turned toward his and Spinner’s meager store of possessions, wondering if he should start packing or start preparing his weapons.

  “You’ve got time to eat before you have to go,” Silent said.

  “We can stay and help fight the Jokapcul,” Haft said to him.

  Silent shook his head. “Sergeant Pilco said you have to leave. If you stay here, there will be a fight. If you leave, he doesn’t think there will be. So you have to go.”

  Haft looked at him quizzically. “You keep saying ‘you.’ Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

  Silent shook his head. “You two have to go. Spinner is still too weak to fight properly, and he needs you. I stay here.”

  “But if we’re going so Sergeant Pilco can avoid a fight, you have to go too. You killed more of those Jokapcul than Spinner or I did. They’ll see you and demand that you be turned over to them. Then what’s Sergeant Pilco going to do? He’ll have a choice, hand you over or fight an overwhelming force.”

  Silent slowly shook his head. “They won’t see me, I’ll stay out of sight. I’ve been a guest at this border crossing for too long. If I hadn’t gone over the fence to help you, you would have been killed and this patrol wouldn’t be coming to find those who killed their men. If the Jokaps cross the border to fight—and we don’t know that they will if you’re gone—I owe it to these guards to help them. You and Spinner don’t owe them anything, except maybe for a few meals.” He grinned wryly. “One could even say that because you’re the cause of these Jokaps coming, you owe them your absence. I can stay. You have to go.”

  Haft looked at the giant of the steppes, measured his size. “How can anyone as big as you hide in a small place like this post?”

  Silent grinned widely. “When you came to the fence, you didn’t see me, did you? Not until I reached the fence and spoke to you.”

  “We were thinking about the cat following us and didn’t see everything. Anyway, if you can find a place to hide here, so can we.”

  “You are brave and skilled fighters, but your training is for duty at sea and in port, you have no training in how to hide on land. I spent my childhood and youth learning how to fight on the steppes. And I know how to hide in an open area. You have to go.”

  Sergeant Pilco joined them. His mind was also made up. Everyone was better off if they were gone.

  “But the man who escaped, he saw Silent here and must think he’s one of your men,” Haft said to Sergeant Pilco through the giant. “He must have told his officers that Silent crossed the fence and helped us kill the others.” Haft looked at the sergeant while he spoke, even though he was using Silent as a translator and was talking about him. It was the proper way to speak through a translator. Not looking at Silent also made it possible for him to say what he had to say about the giant.

  “I’m not sure he could see the fight from where he stood,” Silent translated for Sergeant Pilco. “Maybe he didn’t know.”

  “That’s not very likely. Not the way Silent gave his war cry.”

  Sergeant Pilco also did not look at Silent during the conversation. “Silent will stay out of sight. If I tell them you are gone, I won’t be lying about the men who killed the Jokapcul being gone. Anyway, that’s a chance we will have to take.”

  There was silence between the two men for a long moment. Even Silent’s breathing was almost too soft to hear.

  Haft looked at Spinner. His friend was much stronger but he was far from full strength. “Spinner can’t walk very far yet.”

  “There’s a better way for you to travel than by foot,” Sergeant Pilco said.

  Then Silent stopped being merely a translator and became an active participant in the conversation. “Right over there,” he said, and pointed.

  Haft looked to where the nomad pointed. Beyond the fence four Jokapcul horses still grazed not far from the gatehouse. The horses were hobbled so they couldn’t stray while their riders were on foot, and during the two days they’d been unattended, only three had wandered out of sight.

  “But we’re Marines, not cavalry,” Haft said as soon as he realized that Silent and Sergeant Pilco meant they should take two of the horses. “We don’t know anything about riding horses.”

  Silent said something to Sergeant Pilco and the two of them roared with laughter. They thumped each other on the back and shoulders and doubled over with mirth. After a moment they regained enough control to speak, though their faces were red and laughter bubbled through their voices.

  “Riding a horse is easier than walking.” Silent repeated in Ewsarcan what he’d said in Skragish.

  Sergeant Pilco whooped again, then added something of his own.

  “He says I say that only because the steppe nomads are born riding horses,” Silent told them, “but that’s not really true. It’s our mothers who are riding when we are born.” He laughed again.

  Spinner was looking at the horses beyond the fence, his brow furrowed. He tapped Haft on the shoulder. “We should take the horses,” he said. “I know how to ride. It’s not as easy as Silent says, but it’s not hard either.”

  Uncertain, Haft looked at him.

  Spinner started toward the gate and Haft followed, still uncer
tain. A few steps more and Silent and Sergeant Pilco started to follow.

  The guards standing at the gate looked at their sergeant, saw him signal to allow the two Marines through, and let them pass.

  Spinner paused to examine the abandoned demon spitter. He was surprised when the door opened when he picked it up. The demon, looking distinctly unhappy, craned its head up at him.

  “Veed ee,” it croaked piteously.

  “Ooh,” Spinner said, feeling sorry for the small creature. “I don’t have any food for you.” He didn’t know whether the spitter demon could eat the salamander’s food; anyway, he needed what he had for the fire-maker.

  “Veed ee!” the demon croaked again. It sounded more like a demand. It struggled out of the door and stood precariously balanced on the tube.

  Spinner shook his head. “But I don’t know what you eat.”

  “Oo no veed ee?”

  Spinner shook his head.

  Faster than its weakened condition seemed to allow, the demon pounced on Spinner’s hand and it chomped on the base of his thumb.

  Spinner yelped and dropped the tube. The demon glared up at him, bit his hand again, jumped to the ground then scampered into the trees.

  Haft barked out a laugh. “I don’t think the demon likes you.”

  Spinner sucked at the bites and glared at him. Then he returned to the reason they had crossed the border to begin with and cautiously approached the nearest horse. The Jokapcul had left their horses saddled and bridled; after so long without being unsaddled and rubbed down, the horses had to be uncomfortable and irritable. He spoke softly to the horse and held out a hand. The horse tensed and rolled its eyes at him, but allowed Spinner to put his hand on its neck. When Spinner rubbed the horse’s neck, first gently, then briskly, the horse relaxed and nuzzled him. Spinner continued talking quietly to the horse. He took the reins in one hand and, rubbing its shoulder and leg as he went, lowered himself to a squat to look at the hobbles. They were broad leather straps around each fetlock, tied with thongs so they were snug enough to stay above the fetlock. A slender but strong chain connected them. Without letting go of the reins, Spinner undid the thongs securing the hobbles. The hobbles off, he stood and placed them across the saddle, then led the horse to Haft.