Jonas levered his legs to pitch Ortak Nalgar off him. Nalgar rolled to the side and jutted his thumbs into the lieutenant’s windpipe. Jonas choked and gurgled. Nalgar banged Rassau’s head against the stone. He cursed out a Kurgan imprecation.
Exactingly judging the ever-changing location of the chieftain’s blind spot, Angelika traced a geometrically precise route along the rock. At the height of his distraction, she slipped up behind him, straddling Jonas’ lurching legs. Calmly she took hold of the chieftain’s slimy hair and yanked it back to expose his neck. With her free hand, she coolly gashed his throat. He swatted her with a reflexively threshing arm; she smoothly untangled herself from him.
He rose, hand clamped over his fast-leaking wound.
Jonas got up, grasping for his sword and leaning on it like it was a cane. He shuffled up, slapped the staunching hand from the chieftain’s neck, and laid into him with a decapitating blow. Ortak Nalgar’s severed head bounced along the ridge and came to a stop, face up, where it wore an expression of indignant disbelief.
Jonas teetered to the precipice above the enemy camp. He held the head up for its gathered army to behold. Ortak Nalgar, the fearsome one, the chieftain only Vardek Crom could defeat, the overbearing general who kept them to the chafing and foreign rules of discipline, was vanquished, and could impose on them no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Confusion buzzed from the valley floor. The faceplates of countless antlered helmets pointed mutely to the ridge top. The ant-like thousands of the Chaos legion were momentarily stilled.
Angelika held her breath; this would not last for long.
Jonas panted great, ragged gasps into his emptied lungs.
She grabbed him by the collar and hauled him into the sangar. Recovering his wits, he threw himself through the open trap door and into the shaft that led to the armoury. From the sounds of it, the clash inside the dwarf chambers had ended, too. Jonas sighed in relief: the voices he heard were not in Kurgan, but in Reikspiel. It was his men who had won the fight.
Angelika lowered herself into the tube below the sangar, bringing with her a long-handled barbarian axe. She jammed it down into the staple-shaped ladder rungs, bracing it against the trap door leading from the lookout above. It would not hold for long, but it would warn them when the Kurgs came to exact their revenge.
But the Kurgs did not come. Hungry days passed inside the armoury. Twice on the first day, once on the third day, and again on a fourth, banging noises resonated down the shaft. The trap had been reinforced by then with plates of barbarian armour, flattened and fixed into place with nails scavenged from the dwarf cannon carriages. Angelika did not think it would withstand a determined attempt to breach it, but each time the marauders assaulted it in a merely desultory manner.
The company subsisted on what little scraps of food they’d had on them when the Chaos hound attacked. On the bodies of the barbarians they’d slain, they found skins of water and the odd morsel of horrid, desiccated meat. They stacked the corpses on the catwalk. The cool air of the underground complex retarded their decomposition, so that it was the fourth day before they began to stink.
All in all, the Stirlanders had killed two and a half dozen Kurg, not counting the numberless war leaders claimed by the staircase collapse. Against these were weighed five Gerolsbruchers, two Chelborgers and two of the stragglers. Among the slain was Second Lieutenant Glauer. One swordsman lay badly wounded, as did Merwin, who passed in and out of wakefulness, sweating and tossing his head. Filch sat by his side, clasping his hand, crying frequent and shameless tears.
Emil, a thick swaddling bandage around his punctured neck, spent much of his time gazing at the demolished staircase, where Mattes was interred.
Periodically Jonas would stand, as if to embark on yet another speech. Each time the resentful glares of his men halted him before he uttered so much as a preamble. When there was a question to ask, they approached Emil, Franziskus, or Angelika.
Jonas withdrew into a sulky gloom, sitting and sleeping beside the cannon barrels.
The archers said to Franziskus: “You’ll come with us, back to Stirland?”
Franziskus had not decided. Now that Angelika’s ring was definitively lost, she would surely return to her old ways. If so, he’d have to go with her. His first loyalty was to Angelika.
On the fifth day the last of their water was gone. Angelika ventured up to the sangar, removed their improvised barrier, and saw that the valley was deserted. The Chaos horde had dispersed.
“Time to go,” she told Emil.
“Where have the Kurgs gone?”
She shrugged. “We killed not only their leader, but most of their officers, too. I bet they thrashed off in a dozen directions, or even fell to fighting each other.” Later, they would learn that she was right. A segment of the horde had swept on to attack the Empire, but they did so as isolated bands of raiders, not as the disciplined army of Vardek Crom. Their victims numbered only in the thousands. The combined Gerolsbruch Swordsmen and Chelborg Archers had not won the war alone, but when the war was ended, few companies could claim a greater victory.
Led by Angelika, the men exited up the shaft. The wounded were bundled and ferried with all the ginger care their comrades could summon.
Shortly after the company had assembled on the ridge, Merwin coughed, mumbled his mother’s name, and expired. Filch knelt beside him, weeping.
A wind whipped up, softly moaning across the empty valley.
“Very well, then,” said Jonas. “The halfling’s name will be well remembered when our time here is chronicled. Yet now we must move on.”
“Lieutenant…” said Emil.
It was a warning, but Jonas ignored it. His chest expanded, and he readied himself for another speech. “I realise that certain actions have cost me the reliance you once gave so freely. As I fought the Enemy chief, I thought this revelation had been granted to me too late, but now I see I’ve been granted the chance to win you back. Has my judgement occasionally been in error? Yes. Error is war’s handmaiden. Is it a good result, that we comprise a third of the force that left for these dark mountains? No, surely not. But we knew the mission was daunting when we departed.
“Plainly we must count it a divine gift that so many of us have, in truth, survived. Should we have instead retreated to our homes, and let the Kurgan swarm over and burn them? No, none of us would say that.
“Thus, upon our return home, when we turn our exploits into a tale for the edification of the common man, we must endeavour to speak only of that which mattered here. We must burnish away any flaws that would obscure our glory. And although we must thank Angelika and Franziskus for stepping into the breach when I was robbed of my rightful senses, now I must reassert good order, and insist on the obedience you owe me as ranking officer of—”
Filch pitched a rock at him.
It bounced off Jonas’ forehead. Shocked, he touched his fingers to the rising red bump the missile left behind.
Filch stood, another rock in hand. “Liar,” he cried. “Mattes is not here to say it, so I will say it for him—liar!”
“You’re a brave little fellow and you just now lost your friend, but don’t press your luck with me, half-man.”
“Liar,” Filch repeated.
“What warning did I just give you?”
Tears drenched the halfling’s cheeks. “Deceiver. Even when what you say is right, your mouth is so full of lies the truth is smothered.”
“Silence.”
Filch tore an object from his pocket and showed it to the men, who’d subtly clustered together. “You want proof? I don’t think you need it, but here it is. I slipped this from his pocket, before—”
“Thief,” accused Jonas.
“I overheard certain things, and wanted to return it to its owner. And Angelika, I started to tell you once, but that was in the middle of the fight, and after that—after that—” He faltered, then seemed sheepish. “After that, I admit I forgot about
it for a while. But here it is.”
Between his stubby fingers he displayed Angelika’s ruby ring.
“I thought your name would prove significant,” she said. “But how could you forget—”
“I’ll tell it from the beginning,” began Filch. He reached out to hand Angelika the ring.
“Don’t listen to him,” Jonas shouted. He dived for Angelika, pushing her down, and tackled the halfling. Seizing the arm that held the ring, Jonas bent it back behind Filch’s back. An awful snapping marked the breaking of the bone. Filch shrilled in pain.
Angelika was up already, her knife out. She faced Jonas, shepherding him back towards the precipice. His tangle with Filch had disarranged the scabbard of his sabre, wrenching it around his waist and between his legs.
He held the ring, as if to toss it over his shoulder, down the cliff. “Don’t take another step, Angelika.”
“Give me the ring.”
Jonas popped it into his mouth, smiled and swallowed.
Angelika yowled a strangled curse and leapt on him. He punched her in the face and knocked her over. She tried to rise but sank back down. He got ready to give her a kicking. “This is what happens,” he paused, “to the disloyal.” Dissatisfied by his positioning, he backed up to take a run at her.
Ortak Nalgar’s head, pecked fleshless by crows, still rested on the edge of the precipice.
Jonas tripped over it. He lurched onto the precipice’s edge, his heels suspended over empty air. Windmilling his arms, he fought desperately for balance.
The rock Filch was clutching dropped from his fingers and Emil knelt to take it from him.
The sergeant cocked his head, resigning himself, and overhanded the stone into Jonas’ chest.
It was more the surprise than the force of it that balanced Lieutenant Rassau off the cliff. He fell abruptly from view, his body smashing against an outcrop fifty feet down, lodging itself between two folds of vertical rock.
Led by Emil, his men peered down at him. “That was contrary to regulations,” he said, “and if you want to report it when we get back, you’ll be complying fully with the laws of military justice.”
“Terrible how he tripped and fell like that,” said Saar.
“Yes, terrible,” the men agreed.
“Ironic how it was the skull of the foe he’d killed what did him in.” They patted Emil on the shoulder.
“A hell of a warrior,” said Emil, and turned away. “A dung-awful commander, but a hell of a warrior.” He tore up a length of cloth as a sling for Filch’s arm.
Angelika recommended that they head down to the stream to replenish their water skins. “We’ll be down soon,” she said.
The soldiers departed, leaving her and Franziskus on the lip of the precipice.
“Will you be staying as their lieutenant?” she asked him.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Crows were already investigating Jonas’ crumpled body.
“I’m very sorry,” said Franziskus.
“About what?”
“That you’ll have to return to the trail. Seeing as there’s no way to recover your ring from the lieutenant, now.”
She showed him her knife. “What are you talking about?” she said, and dangled herself off the edge, beginning the hard climb down to the vessel containing her property.
Scanning by Flandrel,
formatting and basic
proofing by Undead.
03 - Liar's Peak Page 31
