03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  The archers shrank from him.

  “Understood, Hoven?”

  “Yessir, Lieutenant Weibe.”

  “The next man I hear griping gets a lashing when we get back,” he threatened—convincingly, he hoped. The prospect of such a punishment, necessary as it might be, sickened him.

  Hoven slipped on the wet rock; a man behind him propped him up. The archers’ speed increased, and soon they’d caught up to the rest of the party.

  As they neared the top of the flatted ridge, half a mile roughly south of the sangar, the slope grew shallower. Clouds, small and diffuse, slipped across the ridge’s opposite edge and nosed along its surface. For a moment, the party stood in bright sunlight, while clouds scoured the rocky surface to their left and right.

  “What a sight,” said Filch.

  “Gawp quieter,” Bodo commanded.

  “Never thought I’d see anything like this,” Filch said, less emphatically. A low rumble, like thunder, but continuous, filled their ears.

  “What’s that sound?”

  At the column’s head, Angelika sniffed the air. “Waterfall, somewhere. Distant but big.” She stopped, but not because of the sound. She’d sniffed a trace of an ominous and familiar smell.

  “There’s death nearby,” she told Jonas.

  “What?”

  “I smell death. Better turn around.”

  “We’re not returning empty-handed.”

  “Then wait here while I get a closer look.” Angelika headed off further south, away from their destination.

  “Catch up with us,” commanded Jonas. “If it’s off that way, it’s of no consequence to us.”

  Jonas led the group along the rock ribbon. Aside from the occasional patch of scrub weeds, holding with perverse determination to thin mats of soil, the ridge itself offered no cover. The drifting clouds, however, created a shifting zone of lowered visibility. Rassau beckoned his followers into their enveloping fog.

  Angelika traced a provident route along the width of the plain of rock, the smell growing stronger with every step. It was the high stench of bodily decomposition. The back of her throat closed and acrid tears bulleted from her eyes. With practiced technique, she fought the gagging sensation. She called to mind other, fresher odours: lilacs, brandy, fresh-scythed wheat. Reminding herself that she’d encountered it dozens of times before, she subdued the natural urge to flee in the face of death.

  Two or three hundred feet along, she came to a crevasse in the rock. It began in the middle of the ridge and ran all the way to its far side. Clouds of humming, feasting flies billowed up from it. These included the familiar metallic blue bottle flies Angelika knew from the battlefields of the Blackfire, intermingled with a variety she had not encountered before. These larger, brown-jacketed carrion flies flew sluggishly, bumping stupidly into one other. Occasionally one of these bigger insects would leap onto another, engaging in frenzied congress with it or ripping off a wing or mandible.

  Angelika stepped into the cloud, prepared for the carrion flies to bite at her. They left her alone. Peering down into the crevasse, she saw why: they had plenty of easier meat to sup on. The fissure was six feet across at its widest point, and extended down into the rock for nearly a dozen yards. It was stacked nearly to the top with corpses, of both dwarfs and barbarians. They were heaped in layers, with the freshest dead on top. These, a few dwarfs and twice as many Chaos troops, crawled with flies, their complexions greyed.

  In Angelika’s expert estimation, taking into account the cooling winds that coursed across the ridge face, these would have been slain less than thirty-six hours ago. Beneath them another layer of mingled corpses writhed with maggots, and were in a few places stripped bare to the bone; these would be three to four days dead. Yet another stratum of cadavers lay beneath it, reduced almost entirely to skeletons.

  Though it brought the reek even closer to her nostrils, Angelika dropped straight away to the ridge. Trouble had to be near. There was only one reason to hide corpses after a battle, and that was to conceal one’s presence from the enemy. It was not the sort of thing dwarfs would do, not in territory they saw as their own. They’d haul their enemies into a pyre and burn them immediately. So the corpse-hole had to be the work of the Chaos troops. Each layer recorded a clash with a dwarf patrol. Even though they’d lost two men for each one they’d slain, they had nonetheless won all three engagements.

  There were Kurgan nearby, probably a good number of them. And not only in the sangar—the dead piled here far outstripped its capacity. Chances were good they’d spotted Jonas’ men on the ridge. Yet they had not attacked. Why?

  They were waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  For the right moment.

  Which would be…?

  When Jonas reached the sangar.

  Why would that be the perfect moment?

  Because then they’d surround him. And he and Franziskus and the halflings and others would become the fourth layer of corpses to fill the fissure.

  She crawled along the ridge to the precipice. Right below her, the cliff dropped suddenly. Less than a hundred feet to her left, though, the ridge formed a rough but lowly graded natural ramp, leading easily down to a second valley floor, much like their own. In the far distance, she saw the waterfall they’d heard earlier: a crashing font of white water, falling nearly two hundred feet from a horseshoe-shaped ridge into a deep, pooling lake.

  A multitude of half-naked figures calmly moved about its pebbled shore. This new valley sheltered a Kurgan war camp. The waterfall’s clamour muffled whatever sounds its inhabitants made.

  Angelika counted a hundred tents, calculating five to seven men per tent. This was no remnant force, it was an entire army. One with the patience and guile to bivouac here, escaping their notice the whole time. For this many warriors to remain so quiet and inactive was a feat of restraint even Imperial soldiers would be hard pressed to duplicate. That these marauders were capable of it was chilling. A disciplined barbarian was supposed to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Yet here they were.

  Lashed to the tops of tall trees Angelika saw crude platforms, manned by barbarian sentries. Anyone moving along the flatted ridge could easily be seen from them. War horns dangled from the watch-posts.

  Angelika turned back towards Jonas’ position. For (he moment, clouds hid them from view. As soon as the air cleared, those alarms would sound.

  If they came for Jonas, they’d find the rest of the company, too. There was only one way out of this. She had to stop him before he attacked the sangar.

  Jonas led the men deeper into the cloud.

  Its fog surrounded them and Franziskus could not tell who stood to the left or right of him. He saw the blurry shapes of bows in their arms, and so they had to be the Chelborgers—his men.

  “Why in hell’s name did he bring archers here?” one voice muttered.

  “We won’t be able to hit an inch in front of our faces in this soup,” another affirmed.

  “Stupid idiot will get us all murdered.”

  “Officers are present,” Franziskus warned. The men shut up.

  The cloud blew away.

  Jonas stood face to face with a sallow-cheeked Kurgan.

  Jonas jumped back.

  The Kurgan jumped back then reached for his axe. Jonas swung his sabre. It bit deep into the barbarian’s sinewy neck. Blood fluxed from the wound. Jonas screamed and charged for the sangar. Bodo, Franziskus, and the swordsmen followed. The archers dropped to their knees, ready for any targets that might appear. Filch ran sideways. Merwin hit the ground, covering his head with interlaced hands.

  Barbarians emerged from the sangar entrance, a hole in the rock ringed by yard-high rune-carved menhirs. With Franziskus and Bodo close behind him, Jonas ran at them, sword swung above his head. Their blades whacked into the axes and clubs of their foes.

  Kurgan sentry-horns wailed from the opposite valley. Neither attackers nor defenders much heard them, above the din.

/>   Jonas’ blade cut through the axe-hand of a bareheaded marauder. A brother-in-arms, who might have been the other’s twin, swept into Franziskus, meeting his heavy blade with the haft of a spiked hammer.

  When the sentry horns groaned, Angelika made a quick decision and changed direction. Jonas and Franziskus would have to look out for themselves. They had at least a chance to hear the horns. The same could not be said for the remainder of the company, sitting unawares in Jonas’ camp by the stream. There were more soldiers down in the valley than by the sangar. She could not warn both; so she would warn those most in need of it. She beetled to the zigzagging rock formation leading back to camp, skittering along it, jumping chancily from one terrace to the next.

  A cloud floated toward the sangar. The archers aimed at it, as if it were the vanguard of an opposing force. Filch stooped from spot to spot, gathering up a store of fist-sized rocks. Each swordsman had a Kurgan to fight. Bodo ran behind the uneven barbarian line, busying his knife at them, searching for tendons to slit. Jonas’ foe ducked his wild swings, laughing and waggling out his tongue. Franziskus’ adversary hammered him into a defensive posture, flurrying blows into his sabre, bending it out of shape.

  The cloud blew off, flying over the mound valley. The archers wauled in dismay as a new line of Kurgans surged at them from the other side of the ridge. They fired. A few foes fell, tripping others, but most kept on, unruffled by their volley.

  Franziskus’ hammerer executed a gleeful shimmy at the arrival of his mates. Franziskus seized the moment to slash him, carving a steak’s worth of thigh muscle off the bone. The hammer-man sank and Franziskus wheeled to face the new wave of foes. “Fighting retreat,” he shouted. “Fighting retreat!” It was Jonas who should have been shouting those orders, but to blazes with it. Franziskus was an officer now and it was the only way. The archers jumped from their kneeling positions, loosing an unaimed round at the oncoming Kurgan. None of their arrows won places in the flesh of their foes.

  A seven-foot Kurgan came like a battering ram at the archers as they jogged tentatively backwards along the ridge. He raised a caber-like cudgel to dash out Hoven’s brains. A stone sailed neatly through the air to thump into the centre of his wide, indented forehead. He growled, raised his weapon in search of his new tormentor, fell over backwards, and expired, a red trickle running from his ear.

  “Keep ’em comin’,” Filch shouted to Merwin, whom he’d parked beside his cairn of throwing rocks. Merwin handed him another stone. He pitched it expertly into the jaw of a weedy, hirsute barbarian.

  “Grab ’em up,” he yelled, as the rest of the squad fled. More barbarians dashed up over the opposite slope and onto the ribbon of stone. Clouds followed after them.

  A marauder moaned as Bodo hamstrung him. He turned and, ruined leg and all, seized the halfman by the neck and groin, dashing him into a dwarf marker, Jonas saw this and pelted his way. The Kurgan tossed Bodo into the sangar hole and the last Jonas saw of him were the soles of his callused feet.

  “Bodo,” he shouted. Clouds surrounded him. An axe shot from the mist, clouting him in the shoulder. Stunned, he tripped sideways. A punch caught him in the ribs. He spun around. A third unblinking orb, tattooed between a Kurgan’s brows, stared into him. He flung his sabre out and felt the gratifying squish of contact as it cut into his enemy’s gut. Then another marauder was on him, and another.

  Pain shivered through his head. His sight blurred, and he couldn’t hear anything. He swung his sword and kept swinging; sometimes he hit something. A body crashed into him, knocking him down, pinning his sword-arm. With his free fist he smashed viciously into the man’s skull. Then he realised the enemy was dead, or at least unconscious, and rolled him off.

  Franziskus and his archers ran from cloud to cloud along the ridge. Franziskus cried for them to stop:

  they’d run too far, bypassing the stepped path leading back to their camp.

  Jonas stood, dazed, his vision blurred. The battle-din had ended, but he could not tell if that meant his enemy had gone, or only that his hearing was not right. Feeling something amiss beneath his feet, he realised he’d stepped onto the cliffs edge. Instinct told him to leap, but the swift move sent him slipping on the rock’s damp surface. His legs flailed; he bounced down, hitting his chin on the stony precipice. He clung to the rock, forcing all the strength he could summon into the muscles of his chest and arms. Reaching out blindly, he grabbed onto something. At first he thought it was a root or branch, then, as he got a better grip on it, he realised he’d wrapped his fingers around a man’s belt. He’d saved himself by holding fast to the barbarian he’d just slain.

  Booted feet came his way: they belonged to one of his own soldiers, in black and yellow leggings.

  “Help me,” he moaned. He pushed his neck back to see who it was. It was Egerer. Good, old gaunt-faced Egerer, all vinegar and gristle and impossible to kill as always.

  Jonas reached a hand up, the free one that wasn’t pressed desperately into the rough-edged belt of a dead barbarian. “Give me a hand there, Egerer.”

  Egerer loomed over him, mouth drawn into a thin, withholding line.

  “Egerer!”

  Egerer placed gnarled, pensive hands on his sharpened hips. “I ought to let you dangle.”

  “What?” Jonas cried.

  “Puffing yourself up with foolish lies. What kind of commander needs to do that, except a useless one?” Then he bent down and thrust out his hand.

  Trembling, limbs like damp cloth, Jonas struggled off the cliff’s edge and to his knees.

  Egerer aimed a disgusted look at him and walked into a swift-swung axe. A rubber-limbed barbarian sheared his throat open, then kicked him to the ground. Egerer clutched his throat with one hand and reached up at his slayer with the other. He grappled it around the Kurgan’s leg and bent his knee, bringing him down. The barbarian struggled to disengage; they sprawled on the edge of the precipice. Jonas ducked down to kick at the enemy, but it was too late. With a last reserve of energy, Egerer rolled himself off the cliff, taking the marauder with him. Jonas staggered to the edge and saw their shattered bodies tangled in the trees dozens of yards below.

  He found his sabre on the rock and picked it up. Clouds brushed by him. His head throbbed. He saw the sangar entrance and considered a dash at it. There was some small chance Bodo was yet alive inside it. He inched toward his goal, but his aching body rebelled.

  New war horns sounded from the valley opposite. Fresh adrenaline jolted in his veins. He bumbled to the other side of the cliff, and saw what Angelika had seen: the waterfall and the Kurgan camp.

  Another column of barbarians, clanking weapons into their shields and chest-guards, had mounted the slope and was headed his way.

  He staggered to its head. Egerer was right. Why did he tell all those stories anyway? He ought to die—but gloriously, redemptively. He would stand and ward off an entire marauder platoon.

  “Jonas,” a voice hissed, to his right.

  He scanned the ridge, and saw no one.

  “Over here.”

  A red cloth fluttered up from the surface of the rock, Jonas shook his muzzy head and the scene came into focus. There was a fissure in the rock, and someone down inside it. He shuddered toward it. A horrible stench repelled him, like he’d struck a wall.

  “Quick.”

  He placed the voice as Franziskus’. He ran toward the crevasse. Flies assailed him; one zipped into his mouth. Sickened, he swallowed it. He reached the fissure and Franziskus and one of the halflings pulled him down into it.

  He landed on a dwarf corpse, its cold skin slippery with gore. Desperate hands pulled him down further into the charnel stink. Along with Franziskus, both halflings had hidden themselves here, and the archers, and two of the swordsmen.

  They waited, listening, as the boots of the barbarians thudded by.

  Though he had his tiny hand clamped over his mouth Merwin vomited, overcome by the reek and the horror. The others felt ready to do the same, b
ut overcame their rising nausea.

  Finally it sounded as if the overrunning army had cleared the ridge.

  “Oh sweet Sigmar,” gasped Jonas.

  “Indeed,” said Franziskus.

  “In this, our hour of wretchedness, oh divine champion of wrath,” continued Jonas, “preserve us, please.”

  Angelika ran, lungs burning, to the camp by the rocky stream. The soldiers had already heard the distorted, echoing bleat of Kurgan war horns, and had gathered themselves into a square, set to receive a charge. Emil waited, sword in hand, in the front line. Alongside him stood the unit’s stragglers, whose specialties were more useful in a defensive formation: the gunners, a couple of pikemen.

  Angelika hadn’t the breath to speak. She waved her arms, signalling them to flee.

  Emil stayed steadfast, and the battle square held its place.

  “Run,” Angelika gasped. She’d reached them, but marched lightly in place, to ward off the cramps and dizziness of a sudden stop.

  Emil shook his head.

  “Don’t be daft. There’s a legion of them, and all they’re all coming—now.”

  “You are not a soldier and need not stand with us,” Emil said.

  “Run, I tell you. There’s a hundred places to hide in these hills—you found them on patrol. Go to them now, and hide. Now.”

  Roughly half of the soldiers, including all of the stragglers bunched up around Emil, heeded her advice and sprinted from the square, jostling past the men who stood their ground. “Jonas sent me,” she shouted. “Hide yourselves, he says.”

  At this even Emil broke formation, his stocky legs banging gracelessly under him. Angelika beckoned to him; he had not been out on patrol and would not know where to hide. She steered him with her to Mount Eel as an excellent redoubt waited for them there.

  The war horn’s ululation deepened. Angelika glanced momentarily back to see the first of the Chaos legion appearing on the rocky rise. At this remove, they seemed no larger than swarming ants. To their eyes, the Gerolsbruchers would appear similarly minute. The marauders would see them flee, but, Angelika fervently hoped, were too far off to accurately follow their specific movements and track them to their manifold destinations in the hills.