by M. C. Planck
The goblins did not even blink at the first fireball. They did not flinch at the second. They did not quail at the third. But when the twenty-fifth grenade went off outside the walls, shaking the air with its concussion, hurtling lead shot in every direction, they had had enough.
“Hold fire,” Karl yelled as the creatures fled. “Hold the grenades, you idiots, keep shooting!” he bawled when men looked at him in confusion. But they couldn’t see anything to shoot at, because acrid white smoke hung over the wall like a blanket.
By the time it cleared, the enemy army had withdrawn two hundred yards down the slope.
“Give them something to think about,” Christopher told a cannon crew, and they sent an exploding round into the midst of the creatures. Limbs and parts flew into the air, and the boys cheered madly. The enemy fell back to three hundred yards.
Karl sent a team out front to harvest these heads, Charles and Kennet with them in case any of the trolls were faking it. They had got only two of the foul creatures and a handful of ogres because the goblins had broken discipline at the last and charged ahead.
There were goblin parts everywhere. The boys found it gross and amusing, as boys will. Karl merely complained that he couldn’t get an accurate count because of the disorder.
“Another problem with your magic,” Bondi said, “is that sometimes it blows the brains to smithereens. We can’t be sweeping the battlefield with a mop to get your tael, Pater.”
They plunked the bags of heads down by the boiling iron kettles. Christopher was sickened by the smell, but it had to be done.
“We did little damage to the giants,” Karl said, “but we’ve slain perhaps a third of their foot and a quarter of their cavalry.”
Karl was flushed with excitement. Their own losses had been light, relatively speaking. The last assault had resulted in seven men struck by javelins. Christopher patched up the least with cloth and the worst with magic. Even this trivial effort left him depleted, with only a single spell left. He bit his lip to stop himself from cursing Stephram’s cowardice.
The enemy army withdrew to the bottom of the slope.
“Damn,” Christopher said. “Now they’ve gotten smart.”
The day passed slowly. The officers tried to get the boys to sleep in shifts, but without much success. Between excitement, fear, and cold, sleep didn’t come easy.
The monsters were obviously waiting for nightfall. Under the cover of darkness, they could approach the fort much more closely before the rifles could find them. Christopher wished he’d invented parachute flares.
“This one will be bad,” Karl told him. “The giants will reach the wall and sweep it clean. Our only hope is that the men underneath will bring them down.”
“Well,” Christopher said, “I can think of one surprise we can give them.”
“Do it.” Karl went to check on something else.
Christopher went out to survey the south wall and saw a squad picking over the dead.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Prospecting for gold,” their sergeant said, cutting off a ringed finger and tossing it into a sack.
“Forget that.” Christopher looked around at all the javelins. “Bring in as many of those as you can. And any spears or swords you find.”
There was a time they would have asked him why, but now they just did it, trusting he had some good reason.
“It’s not much,” he said, after he demonstrated their use. He’d lashed a javelin to the top of the wall, pointing outward. “But it might slow them coming over the top.”
It wouldn’t hinder a man climbing up, since he could go between the bars, but Christopher was thinking of all those giants just hopping over. Once he got a few crews going, cutting strips from the thick leather armor of the goblins and lashing up their impromptu spikes, he went back to his first plan, finding six young men and arming them with hooded lanterns.
Twilight was brief in the mountains, a moment of fading light and then sudden darkness. The sun crept to the horizon, prepared for its final dash from the sky, and Christopher was as sorry to see it go as he had ever been.
“Remember,” Karl told the army, “if you see a troll moving, throw a grenade at it. If you don’t have a grenade, shoot it, and shout for Kennet.”
They nailed half the light-stones to the outside of the wall so the light projected outward without blinding the men on the inside, but the dim illumination reached only twenty or thirty feet. At least they did not have to hope for a full moon, merely for brilliant starlit clear skies.
“Marcius smiles on us,” Karl said in the pale dark.
Visibility was still low compared to daylight, but they could pick out human-sized figures at fifty yards easily enough. This was proved by the crack of a rifle.
“They’ve sent out their spies,” a sergeant yelled, reloading.
Christopher stood next to Royal, stroking the horse’s nose. Of all the horses, he was the only one untied. The stallion could smell the coming battle and insisted on being free to fight.
Another rifle cracked.
Christopher thought about telling them to conserve ammunition, but there wasn’t any point. If it turned into a siege, they would run out of food before they ran out of bullets.
From the south came the sound of drums, dolorous echoes of doom. In the starlight he glimpsed flittering shapes, the shrikes flying high above their camp.
“This is going to go on for a while,” Christopher guessed. “Those of you not on watch, try to rest as much as you can.”
He went to lie down in his tent, but Karl stopped him.
“You’ll need a guard,” the veteran said. “We can’t let you out of our sight. Assassins.”
So Christopher pulled his cot out into the camp, a few yards away from the south wall.
“Shut the hell up,” he told the boys, and lay down under the stars and the watchful eyes of his soldiers to take a nap.
Royal stood over him, napping as well. Somehow they slept through occasional gunshots and drums and a little construction work, waking only when Bondi shook Christopher gently by the shoulder.
“They come, Pater,” the sergeant said, and Christopher stood.
He stretched, checked his sword, cleared his mind, and petted his horse. Then he was ready.
“Magic, Karl,” Christopher said to the young veteran. “Where is their magic?”
“They usually don’t have much. Goblins rely on cleverness, not magery. Besides, they have trolls. What’s that, if not magic? Still, Christopher, you are right. We must expect some kind of arcane assault tonight.”
“Like what?” Christopher hoped D’Arcy had given Karl some warning.
“Sleep spells, at the least. Perhaps invisibility or fireballs. We should have built the walls with partitions, so that one blast could not kill many, but we did not have time.”
“What other tricks do they have?”
Karl shrugged helplessly. “I am hoping their spells were depleted healing their wounded. They should wait until they can renew, or for cloudy weather, but they are still in a hurry.” A pity; Christopher would have had a chance to renew his spells as well.
“Steady,” called a wall sergeant. “Hold, boys, hold.” Then, belying his own command, he aimed and shot into the darkness.
The darkness worked against the enemy in a curious way. The only figures the boys could see at long range were the big ones, the ogres and trolls. The trolls swatted at the bullets, annoyed but not terribly bothered by a few stray shots. The ogres, however, were made of ordinary flesh and bone. Nine feet and six hundred pounds of it, but still mundane creatures. After two or three bullets, they fell down and stopped moving.
And of course, what the riflemen could see, the cannons could too. The boys were mostly using grapeshot, but every so often they would aim at a troll and use an explosive round. In the flare of the shells Christopher could see the unreal advance, the terror of unleashed violence redoubled by figures of nightmare.
They moved
quickly, dispensing with shields or protection, counting on speed. They had learned from the first battle. The hundred riflemen on the south wall loaded and fired steadily, but they didn’t get off more than a few shots before the enemy was at the wall.
“They flank,” screamed the west wall sergeant, and the boys on that side began to fire too. They had no cannons up, and only fifty rifles, but it was just the dogs again, trying to get past the fort.
A dozen boys slumped at the wall, unmoving. Christopher gasped in horror, grabbed a stick and ran over to them, walloping around like mad, waking them up with his blows.
“Now!” he screamed, “now now now!”
His lantern crew began to respond as the wall groaned under the weight of the trolls and ogres pushing at it, pulling at it, snapping javelins off like toothpicks and clearing wide swaths of the wall with each swipe of their clubs. The ogres, that is. The trolls grabbed men and pulled them over the top, biting necks in half, tearing off limbs, cackling gleefully. The ogres you could at least duck, but the trolls were fearless, exposing themselves to rifle fire without concern.
Then the boys put flame to powder, and the shaped charges Christopher had hung on the wall, their bowls filled with rocks and pebbles, went off. The wall shook with every blast, but the buttresses held, and many of the ugly heads leering over the wall abruptly disappeared.
Now grenades began to go over the top. An ogre batted one back like a badminton serve, and men scattered, some falling under the blast. But reserves rushed forward, took their place. The ogres were suffering terribly as the men on the ground shot at them whenever they stuck their heads above the wall.
Then green humanoids began to appear on top of the wall and got shot at, too. And of course the grenades never stopped.
A troll pulled down a cannon, squealing and spitting, and the exposed gun crew fell back. Kennet appeared, pushed the box of cardboard-encased cannon rounds over the wall, held a stick of dynamite behind his back, and threw it over as soon as Charles had it lit.
Christopher didn’t think that was a very good idea, but the wall held under the massive blast. In the lull the gun crew rushed back to the wall and started firing their rifles.
Screams from everywhere: the chaos was unbearable. Only by sheer chance was Christopher looking to the north, at the very spot where a troll appeared from literally nowhere. One minute there was nothing, and then there was a troll, snatching up a man and biting at his spine, tearing him in half, his guts spilling out like jelly from a doughnut. The horses squealed in terror, Royal stomping in front of his herd, defending it, but the troll was not that stupid. He ignored the animals and loped for the south wall and the exposed backs of the men, all but ignoring the scattered rifle fire from the few guards on the north.
Not good, Christopher thought, not good at all.
He tried to get the boys to turn around and face the danger, but they had their hands full already and could not hear him over the constant explosions. It was only one troll, but it could do terrible damage. It could clear a section of wall, and then more would come over that. Christopher sprinted for the cannons facing the gate, shouting for their crews to attend him.
As he struggled with a gun, turning it around alone, wondering where its crew was, he saw an unlikely figure running to intercept the troll. Rifle in hand, little Charles advanced to the side of the troll like he was going to poke it with his bayonet. Christopher raged silently at the foolishness of boys and the stubborn cannon that fought him, but his words were impotent. The troll saw Charles, stopped and reached for him with gibbering madness, and the boy stuck out his rife and fired at point-blank range.
Not into the troll, but into the ground. Into the ammunition store the troll happened to be standing over. The blast blinded Christopher for a brief instant, but his sight came back in time to see the troll’s head still going up, fifty feet high, and then blood and parts rained down on the camp like a spring shower. He could not see Charles anymore, but in the fading sparks of paper and powder he saw a terrifying man-shaped figure hovering in the smoke over the south wall.
It was huge, twelve feet tall, but it was invisible. Christopher only saw it because of the absence of smoke, an empty shape cut out of the solid air, floating twenty feet above the ground and inside the wall. Horrified, he yelled and yelled, but Karl could not hear him, so far away, manning a cannon that had lost its loader. Christopher pounded on the barrel of his own cannon as its crew finally arrived, helping him wheel it around to face the new threat.
There was a laugh, an evil and dark chuckle, that somehow could be heard under all the noise. The creature became visible at the same instant something awful and awe-inspiring happened. A miniature blizzard formed in a conic section stretching out from the monster, tiny ice particles falling from the suddenly frozen air. Even so far away, Christopher could feel the wash of cold.
Karl and all the men around him, up and down the wall for thirty feet, turned white and stopped moving. A thin layer of frost covered the area, comically peaceful and clean in the midst of the bloody, fiery carnage.
The monster laughed, his fat belly shaking and spittle dripping from twisted yellow fangs, but not for long. Bullets flew at him, gouts of blood spouting when they struck. He promptly disappeared again.
But the bullets kept coming, and little splashes of blood plopped out of the empty air carved out of the wall of smoke. The monster flickered, wavering between visibility and invisibility, and then stopped at the halfway point, transparent. Now the bullets winged through him without effect, and he laughed some more. Rendered insubstantial, he could no longer do damage, but he called encouragement to his soldiers, ordering them to the attack in a brutal, grunting language.
Behind Christopher came shrieks as the wolves simply leaped the walls in a single bound, their maneuver to bypass the fort exposed as a feint. Some got stuck on the impromptu spikes, but others slipped through, falling amongst the men with vicious savagery. The west end of the main wall was still and quiet, covered in ice, and figures began to crawl over it unopposed. The gate behind him shook under the weight of wolves and hobgoblins, from both sides. And Karl was dead, an ice sculpture, a piece of frozen meat.
The possibility that this might be the end began to wander around the empty places in Christopher’s mind, small and distant, a well-behaved child humming to itself patiently.
The cannon was finally ready, the gunner aiming at the hovering apparition, acting from training and not rational thought. As the gunner reached for the chain that would release the hammer and fire the cannon futilely into the insubstantial horror, Christopher leaned down and kissed the barrel of the gun.
Instinctively, without thinking, he whispered in Celestial, “If this be your blade, Marcius, then bless it.”
The cannon fired, the recoil tapping Christopher in the mouth and bringing the taste of blood. Rays of light streaked out from the cannon, tracing the path of the grapeshot. Where they intersected the ghostly figure, ghostly blood sprayed out, turning into solid liquid in the air and falling in a bright-red shower.
The creature wavered between illusion and reality, and then, of flesh and blood once again, fell heavily onto the ground like a sack of potatoes gone bad.
Beside him the other cannon fired, shredding wolves and hobgoblins and men against the wall. Royal reared and squealed, beset by wolves, battling to save his herd, and men rushed to his aid. The wolves were losing, too many of them trapped by the wall spikes. The assault on the south wall seemed stalled, somehow, though the frozen part of the wall was still unmanned.
And then the giant creature twitched, an absurd horror film, the villain simply unkillable. The cannon was not even done reloading, yet the monster sat up, bellowing in uncontrollable rage. With one hand it grabbed a man and crushed his skull like an egg, blood and gray matter spurting out either end of its huge fist, gushing between its grotesque fingers.
From the wall Kennet came running, his arms open, his satchel slung forgotten
at his chest. Moved by incomprehensible insanity, by mindless bravery, he leaped onto the monster, a child tackling a football linesman. The monster laughed in appreciation of the absurdity, opened his arms to accept this farcical challenge, and the two grappled, hugged for a brief instant before the monster crushed Kennet’s body like a rag doll.
And then the satchel went off.
Even from halfway across the camp the blast knocked Christopher off his feet. He found himself wrestling with a white-eyed hobgoblin that stabbed blindly at him with a dagger. Grabbing it by the throat, Christopher banged its head against the carriage tongue of the cannon until the creature stopped moving. He climbed to his feet amid snarling dogs and shouting men, a forest of gunfire around him. The men had fallen off the wall from the blast, and for some reason they were not getting back on it. He screamed at them, his voice lost in the noise, or maybe he was still deaf from a dozen sticks of dynamite exploding all at once. They ignored him, abandoning the wall to its own fate, shooting and stabbing at the howling wolves.
A hobgoblin leaped onto his back, grabbed at his throat, waving a short sword clumsily around in the tight quarters of the grapple. Before Christopher could react, it shrieked, and something dragged it off his back. He turned to see Royal drop the creature to the ground and stomp on it like a rat. Christopher drew his sword, pointed to the wall, and forced more sound through his raw and burning throat.
But the wall remained empty and still. The sudden quiet was deafening, the occasional rifle shot almost comforting.
“They flee,” said a sergeant, his face bloody, his helmet and an ear missing. “Their master is slain, and they flee.”
“Command the defense,” Christopher told the man. He turned to the wounded and was lost in bandaging until the sun crept back over the horizon, its wan light small comfort in the cold.
He ran out of bandages.
They had lost eighty-four men. Charles he found, cold and dead, his entire arm gone to join his missing fingers. Bondi lay amongst the corpses, his throat torn out. And Karl, whose body had not thawed in the night, still stood frozen in place, his face unmoving for the last time.
