03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  “Attack now,” Jonas yelled.

  A pair of swordsmen marshalled their courage and speared their swords out at the creature’s neck. It reared on them, fragments of meat spilling from its mouth. Before they could reach it, it bulled its head down. A vast paw came squashing down on an attacker, pinning him to the floor. The hound rolled its weight down onto the immobilising foot. Cracking noises issued from the swordsman’s body as his bones were reduced to paste.

  “In the name of all the gods,” said Jonas, “I will find the man who sent this horror against us, and I will strike him dead.”

  Ducking its head down, the beast caught the ankle of its latest victim between its jaws, then achingly withdrew from the tunnel. It bounded to the slope of a hill overlooking the tunnel entrance and sat there, methodically tearing its prey apart, devouring him piece by piece.

  The soldiers eased apart. Angelika and Jonas squeezed to the tunnel opening.

  “What now?” he asked her.

  “We run.”

  “Where to?”

  “Good point.”

  “Well then?”

  “I guess we have to kill it.”

  As she said this, a swordsman pushed out from behind her, forcing her sideways. He tripped free of his jostling comrades and out of the tunnel mouth. Drunk with panic, he sprinted off to the left. He hugged the rock wall for a dozen feet or so, then scurried for the fractured trail between two hill mounds. The hound’s snout quivered skywards then it roused its ungainly body and thumped after the fleeing soldier. It propelled itself like a catapult on its muscular haunches, landing on its target with all of its several tons of weight. The swordsman’s spine cracked like the report of a blunderbuss.

  A sickened flinch rippled through the trapped tunnel inhabitants.

  “I have to think,” Angelika muttered. “Got to be a way.”

  Seeing that the hound was occupied with the dismemberment of his latest catch, another swordsman, a double-chinned fellow who had kept his black-and-yellows surprisingly clean through all the hardships of the journey, chose his moment to bolt from the front rank. He darted to the right; the unearthly mastiff wheeled and galloped at him, flinging great shovelfuls of mud behind his mammoth back paws. The swordsman might have made it a few yards further, but slowed to commit the classic blunder of the terrified: he turned to see how close his pursuer had come. The beast pounced, snapping him into its gatelike mouth, then shaking him to death.

  It flipped the double-chinned swordsman’s slack-limbed corpse up above its head, playing with it.

  “Who here,” Angelika asked, “was in the squad that booby-trapped that hill, there?”

  Filch squeezed in beside her and raised his hand. “Me, Fraulein Angelika.”

  “Any pit traps up there?”

  “Like you instructed, ma’am.”

  “With stakes?”

  “Without them, a pit trap’s pointless.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, at a time like this. Show me the spot.”

  He jabbed out a compassing finger, to little avail. “It’s hard to see. We hid it well.”

  “Then congratulations, halfling, you’re coming with us.”

  “And by the way, after we both survive,” he said, “there’s something I’ve got to show you.”

  “It can’t eat more than one of us at a time,” said Angelika. “Franziskus, you come with me. We’ll run to the right of it. Jonas, you make like you’re escaping in the opposite direction. Take someone with you.”

  “I’ll go,” said Emil.

  “No,” said Angelika, “I need you here to lead the men.”

  “Me, then,” said Mattes.

  “Good. You and Jonas, then. Filch, you feeling fast?”

  “Fleet and hearty, milady.”

  “Whichever pair of us it decides to follow, you’ve got to run and join. They run interference for you while you lead it up the hill and into the pit. The pit will contain him, yes?”

  “His toothy end, at least,” said Filch.

  The great mastiff plied the soldier’s head free of his body and snouted it around until it got lodged between two boulders. It tried to retrieve its plaything, applying a slapping forepaw to the task.

  Angelika shuddered. She’d never been gladder of an empty stomach. “The second pair then comes at it from the flank and helps us herd it. But don’t get too close. We don’t want it to change direction and chase you instead.”

  “And then?” asked Mattes.

  “Then we steer it into the pit, get it stuck, and kill it while it’s helpless. Meanwhile, Emil, if at any moment it seems like there’s a clear break, take it, and get the men out of here. Watch for missiles from above, though.”

  “Or Kurgs out there before us, in the hills.”

  Angelika nodded. The beast likely came with handlers, though it seemed the type of pet from which even its masters kept a cautious distance.

  The Chaos hound grew bored with its latest plaything and nosed its bulk back toward the tunnel. It licked its floppy chops in anticipation.

  “Now,” cried Angelika. She and Franziskus ran to the right; Jonas and Mattes scooted left. The dog’s head stupidly roamed from the first pair of runners to the second. One foreleg suspended in front of it, it feinted first to Angelika, then to Jonas, then paused in confused hesitation.

  “Follow us, you brainless mutt,” called Angelika.

  “Face my slashing sword,” taunted Jonas, his blade already drawn.

  Their shouts served only to cement the monster’s indecision. It snarled its yellowed, gore-flecked teeth at both in turn.

  Emil readied the company for flight.

  From the precipice above, throaty Kurgan jeers urged the beast on.

  Emil signalled the men to stand down. A swordsman behind him suppressed sobs of frustration.

  Filch sailed a rock at the beast, bonking it squarely on the crown of its skull. It shook and stamped the ground as a bull would do, then flung itself at him. He ran to Franziskus and Angelika, and further up the hill. It surged behind them, corrupt breath heating their skin.

  “This way,” Filch called. Angelika saw the spot where the trap had been laid. If she fell back a few paces, she could induce the beast to follow her. She charted a route from stone to ledge to flat, plotting her way up the slope. If she hit every footfall just right, this ludicrous plan of hers would, in fact, work.

  Behind her, the beast yowled. No longer feeling or smelling its breath on her neck, she glanced back: it reared up on its haunches, facing down-slope, batting its paws at Jonas. He’d cut a lengthy but superficial tear into the hide of the dog’s flank.

  The idiot. He’d ruined it all. Done precisely what she’d warned him against.

  “I said, face my slashing sword, misbegotten hound of hell!” he cried.

  The beast thumped down on its forepaws and snapped at him. Ably, he dodged its clamping jaws. He hit the thing a glancing blow with his sabre, to no apparent effect.

  “Jonas,” yelled Angelika, “get him up here.”

  Instead Jonas hacked at the monster’s front legs. It reared again. He attempted to roll under it, presumably to jab up into its underbelly, but the creature bumped him with its shoulder, sending him sprawling. Mattes, grimacing in unsurprised disgust, came in from its other side, feinting his sabre in the monster’s face. It shrieked at him, leaving Jonas time to recover his footing. Jonas jigged back; the creature snapped at him, leaving stripes of froth to drip down his breastplate.

  “Angelika.” It was Filch, he’d skipped up above her on the hill. His toes held a prehensile grip on a gently overhanging shelf of rock. “Crouch down,” he shouted, waving for her to turn around.

  She doubtfully complied, anchoring her hands as best she could against the moistened earth. Filch leapt from the rock and onto her back. She rolled up and sent him flying on his way, to land on the creature. Loose folds of hide served as his handholds as he inched his way up its squirming back and onto it
s neck. Jonas wobbled, dumbfounded, as the halfling stirruped his legs around the beast’s head. It lurched and screamed, but could not buck him off.

  Filch gathered up the mastiffs jiggling wattles and pulled them tight, using them as reins. The monster pitifully barked and crashed along the hillside, struggling to dislodge him. The halfling steered him up the slope in an unpredictable zig-zag. Angelika dived out of the way as his behemoth of a head flew by. Reaching his destination, Filch jumped uncontrollably off the creature’s crown. A dull, smothered impact followed, shaking the mound, dislodging miniature mudslides.

  The hound’s back legs cycled haplessly in the air: its head had been swallowed by the pitfall. Judging from its doleful whine, it seemed a good bet that at least one of the trap’s impaling stakes had badly pierced it.

  Filch lay on the hillside with little more dignity; his upended body resembled a bundle of discarded laundry. He slumped down.

  Angelika and Franziskus cautiously approached the floundering beast from opposite sides, steering clear of its wheeling back legs. She saw little point in stabbing it with her dagger; the hide was too thick for such a short blade to do the necessary damage.

  Franziskus readied his sabre to butcher it, but then Jonas ran in. He slid his sabre between the beast’s ribs and its torso accepted the weapon all the way to its hilt. He withdrew the sword, moved it up a rib, and plunged it in again, pushing with his shoulder to overcome resistance. After five such terrible strikes, the hellhound ceased its convulsions and died.

  At the bottom of the hill waited a quartet of axe-brandishing Kurgans, their postures expressing varying quantities of awe and outrage. Jonas clanged his sabre-hilt to his streaky cuirass and charged down at them. Mattes ran in from the side to engage the barbarian closest to him, who was also the smallest. The two of them stepped warily around one another.

  As his three companions readied themselves to move in, Jonas arrived, swimming among them, diligently hewing their limbs and torsos. Within a minute all three were dead, and the fourth, left facing Mattes, had Jonas’ sabre plunged into his back. He glanced down to see its exit point, just below his sternum. His dying hiss was less than defiant. Jonas kicked him off his blade, and he crumbled to the grass.

  Swordsmen and archers gushed from the tunnel mouth, holding their weapons aloft in tribute. Emil shouted them into orderly ranks, for a proper march out of the valley.

  A rain of stones, none smaller than an anvil, spilled from the ridgeline. They fell onto the exposed ranks of Gerolsbruchers. Their impacts threw men to the ground. The formation broke as the men escaped back to the shelter of the tunnel. Some succumbed to panic wholeheartedly; others stayed to drag felled comrades. Primitive arrows sang around them, though the few that found their targets did scant harm: the distance from ridge to valley floor exhausted the range of the barbarian bows.

  Jonas braced himself for a run through the hail of boulders. Angelika wanted to hold until all the rocks were spent. Logically speaking, they’d only have so many of them to drop. But then she let him go, and followed after him besides. Franziskus and Mattes obeyed her cue. Filch piped up beside her, puffed with exhilaration.

  “Wasn’t that impressive?” he asked. “How I landed on the beast, and steered it?”

  “Yes,” replied Angelika, preferring to save her air for running.

  “Who’d have thought?” Filch continued. “Before this began, I’d never seriously picked up a stone to throw. Yet it turns out I’m a splendid rock-tosser. And now also it seems I’m a first-class leaper on, and tamer of, beasts.”

  To be precise, Angelika thought, it was not so much a taming as a slaughtering, but now they neared the zone of dropped boulders. They bounded through, passing the bodies of three men who’d sustained fatal stonings: two swordsmen and an archer.

  Including those killed by the monster, the entire incident had claimed the lives of seven men.

  A smallish chunk of granite, no bigger than a croquet ball, bounced between Angelika’s legs as she pelted for the tunnel. This was as close as she, or any of the other monster-hunters, came to injury.

  Inside the tunnel, the momentary exuberance of imminent escape had reversed itself. The men pitched against the smooth-hewn walls, wordless and bereft. Everyone understood: the Chaos troops knew where they were, and would be down soon to finish them off.

  Merwin drifted numbly to greet Filch. “Bodo,” he said. “Bodo is dead.”

  The two halflings miserably embraced. A shame, thought Angelika, that Filch hadn’t been given a few more minutes to savour his new status as splendid rock-tosser, first-class leaper, and tamer of beasts.

  Emil stood at the tunnel mouth, gazing intently into the surrounding hills. He gesticulated to Jonas, who waved him off, gulping from his water flask.

  “You go,” he said to Angelika. “You’re in charge here, now, aren’t you?”

  Angelika sped to Emil’s side. He glowered at both his commander and at her. Angelika twitched uncomfortably.

  “I am an officer,” said Franziskus. “Tell it to me.”

  Emil pointed to a black bobbing shape on the crest of a nearby hill. “They’re already here.”

  The barbarians were attempting to conceal themselves, but, unaccustomed to stealth, they fared miserably. In a quarter of an hour, Angelika counted at least a dozen separate marauders. For each whose helmet or elbow peeked up, there had to be two or three others, at the very least, who’d successfully hidden themselves.

  “What are they waiting for?” asked Emil.

  “Deferred violence is hardly a barbarian watchword,” said Angelika. “But somehow this lot have learned the art of patience. Next thing you know, they’ll be dining on scones and dancing the gavotte.”

  “It’s that terrifying chieftain of theirs,” said Franziskus, “keeping them to the master plan, against their natures. But why wait to attack us?”

  “Maybe they overestimate our numbers?” suggested Emil.

  “There’s an army of them on the other side of this ridge,” said Franziskus. “Perhaps it is because they saw us slay their monster, and think we have great champions among us.”

  Angelika crossed her arms. “No, you were right before, Franziskus.”

  “I was?”

  “Their chieftain wants his restive hordes to wait quietly. So he’s given them some toys to play with. So long as we’re nicely trapped here, they’re going to draw this out as long as they can.”

  “We must escape, then,” said Franziskus.

  “That valley will be crawling with them. We’ll be fighting an entire army.”

  “We are already,” said Emil. “If we stay here, they’ll pick us off one at a time. If we go out and fight them, a few of us might break through their lines and make it to safety.”

  “You’re right,” said Angelika. “Given a choice between the nearly and completely hopeless, one has to go with the former.”

  “You’ve got a cheerful way with words,” said Emil.

  “An all-out assault on enemy lines exceeds my expertise,” she said. “That’s a matter for military minds.”

  “What about you?” Emil asked Franziskus. “Can you create a battle plan?”

  “I was a junior officer. I entered one engagement, and, by good fortune alone, was its sole survivor. Without Angelika, I wouldn’t even have been that.”

  “But did you attend a college of war?”

  “I did, but confess to little mastery of the subject. It’s up to you, Emil.”

  “I’ve seen many a battle from the filth and the muck. I transmit orders; I don’t conceive of them.”

  “You underestimate yourself.”

  “No,” said Emil. “I’m a sergeant, no less, no more.”

  They looked back to Jonas. To the dismay of Filch and Merwin, he’d dragged Bodo’s body into his lap, where he cradled it like a child. His men regarded him with appalled pity, but he took no notice of anyone except the tortured halfling.

  “Then you’ve left you
rself no option,” said Angelika, “but to snap him back to his senses.”

  Emil scratched his bald spot and eased his way towards his lieutenant.

  “And good luck to you,” she said, so only Franziskus could hear.

  “How can they trust him?” Franziskus asked.

  “He’s the best swordsman here, by far,” she said. “We need him in fighting spirit.”

  “He wouldn’t do as you required, just now.”

  “Even when he’s ignoring the strategy he can still sickle his way through four Kurgs a minute.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Who knows? Maybe, if he makes the plan, he’ll go so far as to follow it.”

  Emil stopped, reconsidering, and returned to Angelika and Franziskus. “I know what must be done. You go to him, woman, and say what ought to be said.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Indulge me, fraulein.” A new, though no less stoic, demeanour had settled on him. Angelika wondered what it meant.

  She knelt beside Jonas and talked quietly. “If there was ever a time for a man to get ahold of himself, Jonas, that time is now.”

  “I should have done as you said, I know it.” He spoke without emotion, as if noting a change in the weather or a good place to stop and feed the horses. “All I could think was, if I could slay the beast, you would all forgive me.”

  “If it’s escaped your notice, we’ve a new battle on our hands. You can flagellate yourself over the previous one when you write your war memoirs.”

  “Who would read such a chronicle of defeat and folly?” He saw Emil, hanging back. “Ah,” he said, “I see. You send in the woman, to prick my guilt, and then you step in. With your hard-bitten sergeant’s wisdom. Let me guess. You intended to invoke the deeds of my father, to stir me from this tarry despair.”

  Emil’s expression fell.

  “No, Emil? Have I not accurately sussed your intent?”

  “She’s right, sir. You must compose yourself.”

  Pasty soldiers blanched and fretted. They pointed their faces at anything but the squabble between lieutenant and sergeant.

  “Yes, I must, mustn’t I?” Jonas allowed himself a despairing chuckle. “You, Emil, who served under my father, must burn with a special shame. To watch me as I so utterly besmirch his legacy.”