“Pigsucking Hounds!” Wolf shouted, voicing their shared frustration. Like Gutcrusher, Wolf wasn’t afraid to turn and face Skullbuster’s band. That was just a matter of striking down the leader, and the rest would follow the bloodsoaked winner of that contest. The Hounds had changed the game, for their leader was far away, and they didn’t give a stinking crap who won or lost here, they wanted to hunt and kill for fun.
And there was a lot of them fornicators, Gutcrusher mused.
The soft carpet of the forest gradually gave way to a stonier, more hilly terrain as the day wore on, both clouds and the trees thinned above them, letting the sun bake their already sweat drenched bodies. Charcoal colored dust coated them in grime. Somehow Balls managed to keep going, in obvious agony, and the miles grew long behind them with their shadows as they continued to flee westward into a stony, empty country of bare and rocky hills and grass-filled valleys.
“Gutcrusher!”
Wolf was yelling and Gutcrusher turned to look at him. The hard eyes of the Wolf were looking ahead and to the left, and Gutcrusher followed his gaze. The broken and leafless trunk of an oak loomed ahead, and scattered about its base were the skulls of half a dozen ogres, long picked clean by birds. Shattered stone axes and the rusted remnants of iron knives and armor lay heaped here and there among other bones. It was a posted warning, designed to instill terror in the heart even of Gutcrusher’s savage kindred.
Without a signal the weary band halted. Although they could not yet hear their pursuers, they knew they had but a few minutes, maybe half an hour before they would be overtaken.
“What is it, Wolf?” Gutcrusher asked, but Wolf shook his head.
“Forbidden land.” Balls gasped, drawing from his deeper well of memory. “We can’t go this way.” The old ogre was barely standing, hands on his knees, his words coming in ragged bits and pieces.
One-eye walked close to the oak. “Hounds died here.” He said. “Bloodhands and Corpse-Stealers, too.” He indicated the trappings of the various bands. “This is a bad fucking place.”
“Aye.” Wolf said. “Zeeks maybe.”
“Not Zeeks.” Balls said, slowly catching his breath. “This place is called the Wraith Pit. The Hellbitch of Black Mountain lives here. A witch-woman from the olden times. She’s death to trespassers.”
“Death’s behind us for sure.” Gutcrusher replied thoughtfully, which was hard for him. “Listen, dogrobbers. We got a choice here between dead and dead, right? Only we know what’s behind us is death for sure. Those bloody stinking Hounds will crack our bones for us, even if we can handle Skullbuster, ya?”
“Aye.” Replied Wolf grimly. “We’re dead either way.”
“Then I say we go on.” Gutcrusher replied. “By now the Hounds will be spread out to both sides of us, circling in like. There’s no going backward, no going sideways. We’re dead boyos if we do.”
Balls nodded. “No point running, though. That shitgobbler Skullbuster won’t follow us past that marker, or if he does, no way he talks them dungsniffers with him into it.”
“Good.” Replied Wolf. “I was tired of running like a damn slag anyways.” One-eye nodded in agreement, his hands resting on his weary knees.
Together the four ogres, walking two-by-two, crossed into a weird and blasted country. The Hellbitch of Black Mountain awaited them, aware of their coming.
There might have once been a forest around the Black Mountain, but now it was a blasted country, with only broken stumps and scattered, listless shrubs and thorn remaining. Fire had swept over the country not too long ago, and the grass was sparse and brown. No sign of deer, wolf or even small creatures could they see. The ogres walked warily, some inner sense warning them that there was peril in this devastation, and some menace lay hidden in the forlorn and broken land.
Twice they came upon the ruins of ruins, scattered square stones of tremendous size lying discarded about flat and strange regular structures that were neither hill nor house. To the extent that Gutcrusher’s imagination could grasp it, the land gave the impression of having been the scene of multiple devastations; calamities that drove away the builders again and again, until finally the land was abandoned altogether and for good.
In the distance behind the devastated land loomed the black mountain, a steep sided and lonely structure so named because even in the dead of winter, when all else was white, no snow would stick to it, and upon its bitter black-slate surface no tree or shrub took the slightest hold. It wasn’t really a mountain, but more a large hill, with sides much too steep to climb. Had the ogres known it, it wasn’t a natural formation at all, but the remains of a citadel and fortress so old and so large that calling it a mountain seemed right somehow.
The stump with the skulls piled about its feet was not the only sign they found of their own kind. From time to time, they espied other large, thick boned skeletons lying bleached in the sun or half-hidden under thorny bushes. As the long shadows deepened into twilight they grew uneasy, and they spoke little. Ogres had died here they knew. A shit-ton of them.
When full dark came, they fell to the ground, exhausted, and slept on a patch of thin grass, afraid to make a fire. Their night was dark with ugly dreams.
At the first light Gutcrusher awoke, and looking around him found that all of his companions were still alive and breathing. He took that as a good sign, and he was almost cheerful while he kicked them awake.
“Get up you sheepstealers.” He grunted. The others rose yawning and cursing. A thin drizzle was haphazardly making its patient way to the ground, and the soil was wet beneath their feet.
“What now, Crusher?” One-eye asked. “Where’s breakfast?”
“No stinking breakfast.” Gutcrusher replied. “Unless you want crack open some bones from that poor bastard.” He indicated an ogre’s skeleton lying close by.
Ogres did not eat their own kind, and One-eye grimaced. Wolf spoke up. “There’s no game around here. Not a fragging deer for miles.”
“Assbutt!” Balls grunted. “Ain’t seen naught to eat since we came across them bones yesterday.”
“No, but we got away, aye?” Gutcrusher grinned. “Them pigsucking Hounds is afraid to come here.”
“Aye, Crusher.” Said Wolf. “But if they’s afraid, mebbe we should be, too. I say we get out of this place. It’s witchy.”
“It is.” Agreed the Crusher. “And the sooner we get shut of it, the better. But we can’t go traipsing back the way we come. Them dunghill Hounds will be camped out, just waiting fer us. We gotta find a way to go they can’t follow. Mebbe the other side of this here mountain.” He nodded toward the grim-looking peak, and there was something obscene in the way it never seemed to reflect any light, like a jagged black hole in the sky.
“Aye.” Wolf agreed. “But let’s don’t get any closer to the fornicating thing. It has a witchy look.” The other three ogres nodded in agreement.
They set out without saying anything else, keeping an easy pace, for they were in no hurry. They carried no gear but their weapons, having abandoned their few possessions when Skullbuster’s nine showed up unexpectedly at their camp the day before. They were unshod, although their feet were horny and tough as boots. Four plodding grim shapes, gray in the light of early morning.
The going was not difficult, for although the ground was torn and broken in many places, there seemed to be many paths, odd curving thoroughfares that lay beneath the level of the ground, so that hills and walls seemed to hem in the walker on all sides. Not even Wolf, tracker that he was, seemed to notice that all of the paths curved inward toward the very feet of the Black Mountain, the mountain of the Hell Bitch, as they called her.
She was the mountain. She was the blasted land. She felt them walking in slow, heavy strides, like so many of their strange and broken kind. Of all of the creations of her time, a time so distant that it seemed but a memory of a memory, that these things alone should have survived did not surprise her.
They had been created for th
e war, and they had become the war. When in ancient days they had been defeated, driven back behind what they now aptly called the Bone River, full as it was of their bones, it had been the breaking of their masters; their final defeat. She was of that kindred. Many such as she had been killed in those ancient days, but some few had been imprisoned as she had. Entombed and bound to the soil and rock of this lonely, devastated country.
Each time, and there had been so many times, she felt them come to the Black Mountain, hope welled up within her. It had been many years, at least ten summers, since last she had felt them come. But there was a difference now. Something in the magic that bound her here had changed, and she felt the difference with a kind of wonder. It was ten summers now or more since she had felt things change, and she waited now with a kind of tense expectation, almost she would call it hope.
She exerted her will upon them, calling them to her. She would know soon if she could be free. If they could not free her they would die, as the others had died; hundreds of them down the long march of years.
“Black God’s Offal!” Cursed Gutcrusher at last, when all of their walking since morning seemed to only bring them closer to the mountain. “I don’t want to get no closer to that goatsuckling mountain, but every time I look up the blasted thing is on top of us.”
“It’s something witchy.” Insisted One-eye. “Whatever kilt them other boyos is calling us in.”
“Bah! Copulate that kind of talk. My luck will take us through, and no fornicating mountain is going to stop me.” The Crusher replied. Each hour that had passed walking in the Wraithpit without being attacked had increased his confidence. Now, for the first time since awakening yesterday to find Skullbuster’s boyos and Fleshripper attacking his camp, he’d begun to believe he might survive another day.
The path they were on took a turning to the right, a low passage between two small hillocks or perhaps a ridge. They followed it, expecting to see the mountain now behind them, but somehow they had inexplicably moved closer, and they emerged from the sunken lane to find the mountain now looming straight ahead, and less than a mile distant.
“Assbutt!” Crusher exclaimed. “Enough of this shite. If the mountain wants me, by the accursed blood of my mother I’ll go to the snake-blinded mountain.” Simple frustration and anger lent vigor to his steps as he increased his pace, nearly trotting with the long, space-eating strides of his kind. He moved his hand on his mace, gripping it like a carpenter’s hammer, as if determined to smash his way through the mountain itself.
Wolf looked on nervously. If there was one place he knew certain sure that he did not want to be, it was any closer to the light-devouring mountain of slate and onyx that rose before them, and Gutcrusher was walking straight at it. Balls was following the Crusher closely, while Wolf and One-eye hung back. And damned right Balls should follow Gutcrusher close, thought Wolf. If it hadn’t been for the Crusher pacing him, they would have left the old toothless relic behind yesterday to the Hounds.
Before the Black Mountain was a wide, flat space. Perhaps once, in a distant age, there had been some mighty building there, for it was a regular rectangle in shape. The air was cool and the sun dim behind a thin veneer of cloud. As Gutcrusher approached the open space, he saw that heaped around it on all sides lay the bones, broken weapons and other warlike jetsam of his kind. The stones of the square, cut from native gray rock, were gigantic blocks, stained black in many places with old blood and battle. At the far end of the rectangle loomed a large dark door, carved from black stone or perhaps cast of iron, set in a frame of obsidian and shut fast.
“By Hell and blood,” Exclaimed Gutcrusher, seething at having been decieved by the mountain paths. “I’ll have that door down and this bloody mountain, too!”
Boldly he strode onto the guardian field, blacksteel mace in hand, and as he’d half expected, death sprang from the dust and stones beneath his feet.
The Wraith in the Square
As Gutcrusher stepped onto the wide rectangle before the door in the side of the Black Mountain, a hot and dusty wind breathed up from the stones beneath his feet. Where the dust gathered, it seemed to swiftly coalesce into a large, vaguely female shape, but thin and obscenely nude, like the animated near-corpse of a starving giantess. It carried one-handed an enormous weapon, like a sword, but as thick and wide as an axe, and as long as the ogre was tall. When the creature swung the weapon toward him, it burst into flame. He heard Balls curse behind him.
Neither Wolf nor One-eye had dared to follow the Crusher onto the killing square, and now they hung back, frozen in superstitious awe and terror. The ogres were unafraid to face any natural foe, but fear of the uncanny is a weakness of their kind.
Gutcrusher might have been afraid, too, had he not been so completely enraged by his experience with the twisty witch-road. He crouched and rolled, narrowly avoiding a life-ending cut from the gigantic flaming sword. “Ha!” He shouted defiantly. “You missed me, you soulless old whore!” The wraith spun impossibly fast, turning the blade from the horizontal sweep the ogre had just avoided into a vertical slash designed to cut him in twain. Desperately the ogre raised his blacksteel mace to block the blow, and with a ringing sound like the dinner bell in Hell, the impact of the flaming sword on the head of the mace nearly drove him to his knees.
The wraith seemed to hesitate, as if shocked that her blow had not finished the battle.
“So!” Gutcrusher gloated. “Blacksteel puts you on your ass, does it?” He knew instinctively that no weapon of stone or common iron would have survived the blow. Even as he spoke, he was leaping backward to avoid another sweeping blow from the flaming sword. “Circle her Balls, we’ll take this hell bitch thing to pieces.”
Although the wraith moved with impossible speed, it had but the one weapon, and a gigantic and somewhat unwieldy one at that. Against it were arrayed two ogres that had fought together a host of foes, armed with weapons forged millennia ago and designed to crush the enemies of the dark lords who made them. Despite the myriad of bones scattered about the square, it was far from an unequal contest.
The hell bitch made a slash at Balls, who leaped backward even as the wraithlike head turned toward him, and then it reached a clawed hand toward Gutcrusher, who had moved in closer. Even as the eldritch claws raked the air inches from the ogre’s face, Balls stabbed into the wraith’s back with his spear, leaving a line of fire that seemed to drip flaming blood.
“First blood you ugly old whore!” Yelled Gutcrusher, taunting the skeletal form while rolling away from it.
And down a long corridor behind the iron door, in a room coated with the dust of ten-thousand years, she sensed the wound. It was the first time in over ten-thousand years that her jailer had been so much as scratched by its prey.
The wraith turned toward Balls, striding swiftly toward the old ogre. Gutcrusher had been waiting for just such an opening, and he leaped behind the creature, ripping the back of its left knee with the blacksteel mace. Then, before the creature could even think to return the blow, he leapt and rolled out of its range.
This was the magic of fighting with such an ogre as Balls, and this was the reason he would never abandon the old bastard. They did not need to tell each other what to do in a fight, they each just did it, and they won. They had always won, or neither would still be alive.
The thing was hurt, Gutcrusher could tell. It stopped trying to pursue Balls and spun toward Gutcrusher, limping as it swung the great sword. Gutcrusher felt the heat of the weapon, and drops of flaming something spattered across his chest, stinging and burning. Then Balls forced it to turn again, the old ogre using the reach of the spear to get close. He stabbed it, leaving another line of fire along the back of the thing’s shoulder.
And so it went. First one ogre, then the other would score. The guardian of the door had been designed to kill anything that approached the mountain, equipped with a magical blade and ensorcelled with deep enchantments that survived even the death of magic in Mortentia, but
never in all of her history had she faced two such antagonists, experienced over many bloody years of battle together and both armed with such terrible weapons. And she was weak. Some terrible change in the powers that knit her together had weakened her. She was not the terror she had been.
Within the mountain, the other she exulted in each cut, each slash, as the two ogres painstakingly took apart the spirit golem. Slash and parry, block and cut, bit by flaming bit they disabled it, first the legs, to slow it, then the elbow, the shoulder, the sword arm.
By the end of it, Gutcrusher was blistered and burned across his body, for the blood of the creature was flame, and it burned where it spattered. Balls, too, suffered injuries. His arms and hands were bleeding and cut, and there was a deep slash in his leg, cauterized by the flaming brand even as it struck him, but he remained able to outmaneuver one last time, dancing out of the way of the hell bitch’s last slash, giving Gutcrusher the space and time to put an end to the thing with a high smashing blow to the head.
The wraith burst into flames, spreading liquid fire across the square, but it was finally dead, if indeed it had ever been alive.
Gutcrusher leaped from the flames, turned, and taunted it, even after it was dead. “Ha! Filthy dogrobber! Sniveling whore! Old bones! Die you filthy piece of flaming excrement!” Then he raised his head, pointed his mouth to the sky and roared his defiance at the world. Balls joined him, and like two wolves, they howled their battle cry at the Black Mountain and the sky beyond.
After a moment, Wolf and One-eye joined in, and the four ogres howled a discordant and wordless song of death and victory at the unseeing and uncaring world.
She could feel her freedom approaching at last.
Chapter 31: Aelfric with the Red Tigers
Aelfric ran his fingers through his hair, a long and unkempt mane that lay well past his collar. Together with four weeks’ worth of beard, he was hardly recognizable as the same man who had left Root’s Bridge, and that was intentional. Gone was the nobleman’s haircut and the clean face, replaced by this Blackhill disguise, as he called it.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 29
