03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  He told her about the offer.

  “Take it,” she said.

  “On one hand, he believes each word he says, as he says it. On the other, he intends to drive a wedge between us.”

  “His motives don’t matter. Take the commission.”

  “I knew that’s exactly what you’d say.”

  She stood. “Stop saving me, Franziskus, and start saving your own damn hide.”

  She wandered across the bed of rounded, fist-sized granites and quartzes until she reached Jonas. Two of his swordsmen struck a smallish tent for him. Angelika swallowed, despising the necessity of this next gambit. She’d taken Jonas deep into the mountains, but she was no closer to searching his kit and getting back her ring. She stretched, twisting her body into a girlish posture.

  “That fog portends a cold night,” she observed.

  She got the hungry look she wanted from him. “You spoke to him?” he asked.

  She edged closer. “Give him some time. He has a heavy load of guilt to wrestle into submission.”

  He moved back. “He can’t wait long. It would be best if he performed some great deed of valour after I commission him. The sooner that happens, the likelier it is he’ll get his chance.”

  Angelika brushed his fingers with the back of her hand. In different circumstances she’d prefer to break them.

  Jonas leaned in. He kissed the back of her ear. Despite herself, she shuddered. Why couldn’t she prefer the reliable, mousy ones, like Franziskus?

  Filch was standing a dozen yards away, cheerfully staring at them.

  Jonas pushed away from her. “I have yearnings, too, Angelika,” he said, under his breath, his lips barely moving. “But we must restrain ourselves. We must not only have discipline, but be seen to have it.” He headed over to Franziskus’ log, presumably to further press his case.

  Yearnings. What Angelika yearned for was to shove him off a cliff.

  Angelika chose Franziskus’ fallen pine as their sleeping spot. Sentries from the company stationed themselves around the floor of the ravine; Angelika counted eight of them. She wrapped herself in her bedroll and set her back against the log. Franziskus settled in to sleep; by sitting up, she’d claimed first watch. Neither she nor Franziskus trusted the soldiers enough to leave watch duties entirely in their hands. They would swap sleeping hours, two on, two off, until morning, as they did when they were alone. This protocol had been arrived at without discussion. It went without saying, now that they were in the mountains, that they would trust their safety only to themselves.

  Filch, with Merwin in tow, skirted his way toward their spot, craning his neck for Franziskus. Angelika scowled at him. They wandered circuitously across the rocks, finally settling in with the stragglers, who’d arranged their bedding out in the open.

  The exhausted soldiers fell asleep swiftly. Snores erupted from their unmoving bedrolls. Fog rose up from the valley floor to obscure their bodies from view. The sun had already set; the indigo sky turned black. Angelika scanned the forested slopes until the last light was gone, then waited in darkness, aware only of sound, and temperature, and the hard contact between her bony posterior and the rocks she sat on. There was no wind to rustle the pine branches above, so every noise stood out: the flapping of bat wings overhead. The strangled chirps they used to locate their insect prey. The muffled stirrings of unconscious men. The moist rumbling of her own innards, as they digested the night’s meal of biscuit and jerky.

  When she’d first embarked on this life, it had been difficult to stay awake like this, in absolute darkness, after a day of enervating travel. Now there was no question that her body would obey her; she would not doze off until Franziskus relieved her. Then she’d fall under immediately, slumbering deeper than a Sigmarite war-priest after a three-day ale binge. She wondered how it would be to sleep in a bed, under a roof, every night of the year. She’d had that kind of life once, but it had been so long ago, she’d forgotten what it was like.

  Until then, she’d keep listening for wrong noises in the blackness.

  Franziskus took over two hours later, pupating out of his bedroll without her having to wake him. They exchanged shifts twice again.

  He shook her awake.

  There was pre-dawn light. Her right hand gripped her knife, as it was trained to do.

  “What?” she mouthed.

  Franziskus pointed to a spot, dense with spruce and low bushes, about halfway up the western slope. A baby spruce wavered and shook, while the trees around it were still.

  Someone or something was up there.

  Franziskus pointed to the sentries, standing in a bunch on the rocky ravine floor, about twenty yards away. Several were archers; they had arrows already notched and aimed, at the position Franziskus had shown her.

  Angelika took off in a crouching sprint toward the archers. Across the way, a sentry poked his head into Jonas’ tent.

  If those were Kurgan, Angelika thought, they hadn’t attacked yet. It would take only a minute for anyone hidden up there to come crashing down on the camp. The archers would only get a few shots off before the melee was joined. For maximum effect, the archers should wait for the lurkers to reveal themselves. If they fired and missed, they’d waste an entire fusillade.

  Jonas came running, strapping on his sword-belt, nearly getting his scabbard stuck between his legs. Anxious, grunting men poured from their bedrolls.

  Idiots, Angelika thought. If they have bows, too, you’re running into range. She detoured off into the ravine, to put some trees between herself and a hypothetical line of fire.

  Grotesque faces rose up behind the spruces. They called out in an alien tongue.

  The archers fired off a volley. An arrow seemed to find its mark; a body fell.

  “Stop,” Angelika shouted. “Dwarfs. It’s dwarfs.”

  A dozen stocky figures boiled from the trees, like hornets from a broken nest. Each was about four and a half feet tall, wide-shouldered, and bow-legged. Long beards streamed from broad, shovel-flat faces. The tops of their heads were bald, or they wore bowl-shaped helmets that made them look that way. Rings and studs dotted their notched and circular ears. A few wore heavy plate armour, criss-crossed by raised designs and runic letters. Scales and vambraces of hardened leather protected others. A few lofted shields overhead though most went without, preferring instead the reassurance of a long-hafted, double-bladed axe. These, too, were deeply notched and rune-carved.

  The dwarfs pelted down the slope in a weirdly graceful, half-tumbling run. Their speed at navigating a treacherous slope put even the halflings to shame. Another quartet of dwarfs rose up behind them, firing crossbows.

  The archers stood their ground to fire another round. Jonas and his fellow swordsmen hurried into battle formation, forming a rough wedge against flanking. An archer fell, a bolt penetrating his lower leg. A dwarf rolled down the slope, an arrow stuck in his throat.

  “No,” Angelika yelled, first to the humans, then to the dwarfs. “We’re on the same side. We’re not enemies.”

  Franziskus crouched behind her. “What do we do?”

  She dived behind an ivy-covered rock, then reached back to tug on his arm. He flattened himself behind her. “It’s too late,” she said. “Too late.”

  It was all too common, even for forces of the same nation. In the confusion of warfare, especially in the dark or fog, soldiers on the same side often attacked in error, cutting down allies as if they were foes. Once, down in the Blackfire, she had scoured a battlefield where every combatant had been a member of the same mercenary company, out patrolling against orcs. There’d been no way of telling what fatal miscue had set them to destroying one another.

  Franziskus stood. “Stop, stop. It’s a mistake.”

  A dwarf crossbow bolt whizzed past his ear. He ducked.

  Angelika swore. “We may not have been enemies a minute ago, but we are now.” The grudge-bearing capacity of the average dwarf was legendary. The prosecution of feuds and vendettas was the c
entral feature of dwarf society. If any of those fallen dwarfs were dead, the wider war, any sense of joint solidarity against the Kurgan horde, now meant nothing. They would exact a blood debt, or die in the attempt.

  “Maybe these are Chaos dwarfs?” ventured Franziskus.

  “Always the wishful thinker.”

  The first of the dwarfs reached the valley floor, sliding down onto his backside and bowling into the line of swordsmen. The back of his hand struck a sharp, upturned stone and his axe flew from it and skidded off. Gerolsbruchers raised their sabres to hack down at his prone, wriggling frame.

  Jonas held out his arm to halt them. He leaned over the dwarf, shouting into his face: “Stand down! We are your friends.” The dwarf reached up, grabbed at Jonas’ ears, and tried to pull him down to bite at his nose. Stirland swords pierced him, digging in through gaps in his armour left well exposed by his splayed-out position. He gurgled indignantly as he died.

  The archers kept steady as more enraged dwarfs bore down on them. Arrows cut into them, but they thumped onwards. A dwarf axe shattered a Chelborger’s bow, then cut through the cuff of his sleeve to slash the arm beneath. The sabres tore up to meet the dwarfs. Their line enveloped the attackers, leaving each of them outnumbered by at least a man, if not two.

  As Filch and Merwin dashed for the cover of the trees on the opposite slope, crossbow bolts thunked around their feet. Bodo charged for a dwarf who’d just reached the valley bottom. The dwarf laughed without smiling and grunted out a threat in his native tongue. Bodo ran at him, at the last minute dropping down to sail between the dwarf’s bandy legs. The dwarf spun, but not before the halfling butcher had slashed the tendon of his right heel. The dwarf’s foot flew out from under him and he landed on his back as Bodo rolled out of the way. The halfling clambered onto his plated chest to stab him in the face and neck. Spitting blood, the dwarf lifted his axe but his strength abandoned him, and the weapon dropped from a claw-like hand.

  More dwarfs joined the fray; these had crossbows slung across their backs, and were presumably the last of their unit. One charged at Bodo, whose back was turned to him. Jonas bellowed a warning. The halfling ducked the blow without turning, only to be kicked to the ground. His chin smacked into stony ground, and he lay stunned. The dwarf, who had a red tattoo incised on each temple, readied a death blow.

  Jonas tackled him from the side but the thickset dwarf did not budge. The Gerolsbrucher grappled his arms around the dwarf’s ample girth and fought to topple him. The dwarf threw him off and paused to decide which foe he most wanted dead. Bodo staggered, dazed. Jonas taunted the dwarf, calling him a fatherless son of a motherless ape. The dwarf hurtled at him, his features twisted with rage. Jonas had time to draw his sabre before the dwarf axe clanged down on it but the force of the strike brought him to one knee.

  Franziskus bolted from his position of safety, toward the fight. Angelika grabbed at him, but caught only a handful of fog. “Don’t!” she called. “Get dwarf blood on your hands, and they’ll hunt you forever.” This was an understatement: wronged dwarfs would chase your descendants, to the seventh generation.

  As Franziskus ran, he saw that the tattooed dwarf had somehow acquired a solid grip on Jonas’ hair. At their feet lay the helmets and weapons of both combatants. The dwarf slammed Jonas’ face down onto his armour-plated knee. Jonas rolled and fell, his forehead scraped. His snorting, wheezing opponent stomped him in the throat. Franziskus shouted, to distract him. Startled, the dwarf scrabbled back and stooped to recover his axe. Surprised by his own speed, Franziskus reached his quarry and slashed upwards with his blade. Its swipe parted the dwarf’s beard. He tested his chin with gloved fingers; they came up bloody.

  He charged at Franziskus, who clouted his back with a glancing blow and then went down. The dwarf butted him above the nose with his exaggerated ridge of a brow. Nimbuses of silvery pain jigged hazily in Franziskus’ vision. The dwarf shuddered; Jonas had recovered his feet and stood above him, chopping his neck and skull with the sharp surface of his sabre. The stocky warrior shook in outraged disbelief, half-heartedly attempted to bite off Franziskus’ ear, and expired.

  Franziskus crawled out from under the stunted hulk of a corpse. The fighting had stopped. Around them were strewn eleven fresh-killed dwarfs. Four more members of the company—an archer, two swordsmen, and a stray, lifelessly bled onto the rocks. Jonas struggled for breath. A red stream gushed from his nose. He reached into his jacket for a rag to staunch it.

  “Shallya have mercy,” he gasped.

  The first yellow rays of dawn haloed the trees on the eastern ridgeline. Angelika moved cautiously into view. “We’ll need more than the mercy goddess if their kinfolk ever find out about this.”

  The remark appeared to confuse some of the nearby soldiers, so she acquainted them with the basic facts concerning dwarfs, and their propensity for vengeance.

  “This wasn’t our fault,” said Jonas.

  Angelika moved to the slope, where a dead dwarf lay staring on his back. “Tell that to their sons and brothers, when they come to even the score.”

  “They were supposed to be up north, fighting the orcs.”

  “You didn’t expect every single able-bodied dwarf to be gone from these mountains, did you?”

  “It’s their fault for not revealing themselves.”

  “They might say the same about you.” She knelt over the body.

  “You mean to loot them?” Jonas asked.

  Angelika blurted out a horrified laugh. “By no means.” She addressed the men as a group. “I don’t know how you feel about souvenirs, fellows, but you’d better take not a scrap from any of these dwarfs here. See those runes all over their armour and clothing? Dwarfs mark their possessions well, for precisely this eventuality. You don’t want to get caught with dear old Uncle Guthnir’s heirloom dagger hanging from your belt.” The words seemed to sink in, but it was hard to tell.

  From the dwarf’s throat she plucked the fatal arrow and examined its feathering. “This pattern, with the alternating red and gold fletching—how distinctive is it?”

  An archer stepped forward, rubbing the wrenched muscles of his pulling arm. “That’s Chelborg fletching.”

  Angelika’s shoulders sank. “Here’s what we have to do—and quick, in case this is only part of a patrol, and the rest is headed this way. First, comb the bodies and get these arrows out of them. Every single one. Then we need to make this look like they were killed by Chaos troops. So you’ll need to take those axes of theirs and hack those bodies apart like you’re the most frenzied crop of drool-spattered barbarians who ever slaughtered a foe. Then we have to get ourselves out of here as fast as our feet will carry us. And never, ever, as long as any of you live, breathe a hint of what we’ve just done to anyone. Do you all understand?”

  “She’s right,” Jonas said. The bleeding from his nose had stopped, at least momentarily. “Get to it.”

  Few of the men broke to it, and even they traced stunned, aimless steps around the dwarven dead. “Get to it,” Jonas shouted, shocking them into action. “And get our dead onto pallets. We can’t leave them here, to be found among the dwarfs.”

  The soldiers shuffled like sleepwalkers. They picked up dwarf axes but were reluctant to use them. Angelika wrenched one from a nearby swordsman’s hand, stalked over to a dwarf who lay on his back, and hacked at his neck until she broke through the vertebrae and severed it from the body. She closed her eyes, placed her foot on top of it like it was a croquet ball, and sent it rolling.

  This action stopped in his tracks any soldier who had been working. “He said, get to it,” Emil bawled.

  Jonas came to her as if wanting to talk, but Angelika hiked up the slope. There were more dead up there, and they’d all have arrows in them. Franziskus came with her. She parted stunted spruces and circuited around spiny gorse bushes, Inking diagonally up the gorge to the spot where the dwarfs had fallen. The ground cover was surprisingly thick; to find them, she’d rely on her sense
of distance and feel for terrain.

  “I know what he’s going to say,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Before I told him to be honest with his men, and now he’s going to rub this in my face and tell me how eager I am to deceive, when need be.”

  “And what would you say to him, if he said that?”

  “I’d say that certain scenarios nullify all general moral considerations. Chief among these is finding yourself knee-deep in dead dwarfs.”

  From below, in counterpoint to their words, played the repeated sound of axes whacking into tissue and bone.

  “If we’re on the same side,” asked Franziskus. “Why did they not stand and greet us?”

  “They’re a distrustful people. I imagine they wanted to be sure we weren’t yammering cultists of Chaos before they offered us stout and sandwiches.”

  Angelika reached the approximate point she was looking for. A ledge, about four yards long and six to seven feet wide, stuck out from the ravine wall. Tall pines extended up in front of it, providing cover. A trail led down to it from higher up on the slope. It would have been the perfect place to wait and observe the humans. Angelika clambered up onto it. A dead dwarf lay face-first on the slab. She rolled him and plucked an arrow from his throat.

  “Damnably accurate archers Jonas has with him.”

  “Perhaps we’ll later have cause to cheer that fact.”

  To make him an easier bundle to haul down the slope, she bound his ankles with his belt and wrapped him up in his own cloak. “Was there a second one?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  There were no other bodies on the shelf. At one point, it offered a natural jumping-off point, to a mound of dirt below. Heavy footprints cratered its surface. To its left was a reasonably surmountable patch of slope; to the left, a collection of rough and peaky boulders. The body of a second dwarf lay flat out on them, as if slumbering in a bed of granite.