Well, the area is theoretically part of the Empire, he thought, with the part of his mind trained at Sandhurst, the Imperial military academy in the Himalayan foothills. It’s naturally rich, has plenty of unexploited resources, and it could become populous. When we finally get around to developing it, we’ll probably rely on the Seven Tribes—make them an autonomous federation, and give them backing.
That was one of the standard methods, far cheaper and more productive than outright conquest, if you could find suitable natives.
If the Czar can weaken them and strengthen their enemies—and Krishna, we’ll never give the swamp-devils anything but the receiving end of a punitive expedition—it’ll make this region less of a source of strength to the Empire. Which means, he realized dismally, that this ceases to be an adventure that I could back out of, and becomes a duty that has to be seen through to the end. Oh, well.
“Let’s go,” he said aloud.
Robre Hunter hopped out of the canoe. Slasher disappeared into the blackness ahead, silent as a ghost; Sonjuh followed him, nearly as quiet. King and he pushed together, running the dugout into the soft mud under an overhang; the current had cut into a bluff, exposing the root-ball of a big live oak tree and making what was almost a cave. They arranged bushes and reeds to hide the vessel and waited until Sonjuh returned. It was very dark here, with the rustling leaf-canopy above cutting out most of the starlight, and the moon wouldn’t be up for a while. The smell of silt-heavy water and decay was strong, but he found himself sniffing deeply to catch the unmistakable man-eater stink.
Now, don’t get yourself worked up into a lather, he told himself sternly. No more dangerous than those there wild pigs.
Although there was something about the prospect of being eaten by things that walked on two legs and could talk that made his scrotum draw itself up the way no pack of wolves or wild dogs or stalking big cat could do. He was relieved when Sonjuh stuck her head over the tangle of roots and gave a slight hiss.
The Imperial made a stirrup of his hands to boost Robre up, and a flash of a grin with it; the unexpected resentment he had felt over her walking out with the Imperial faded a little more. There was a faint path on the natural levee above, more of a deer-track than anything else. Traveling on a beaten way was dangerous, but it saved time—and the noise you made in the underbrush was dangerous, too, in hostile country. He took the lead, with King in the middle and Sonjuh on rear guard; Slasher was weaving in and out ahead of them, dropping back for contact with his mistress every now and then.
Even then, he felt a tinge of envy toward Sonjuh for the well-trained beast. Quite a girl in every damn way, he thought, then, Keep your mind on business, idjeet.
Eyes were little good in dark this deep. He kept his ears working as he walked, nose, the feeling you got from air on your skin. Once he held up a clenched fist, and the others paused. Slasher had his nose pointed in the same direction, quivering. They went to their bellies in the trailside growth, eeling their way along, until the glimmer of firelight came through. More cautious still, moving with infinite care, he came closer and parted a final screen of tall grass with his fingers, making just enough space to see out.
Oh, shee-it on faahr, he thought.
There were the canoes they’d seen, and as many again, drawn up on the beach. A campfire burned higher, and something seethed in a big iron pot hung; knowing swamp-devils, his stomach twisted at what might be cooking, from the pork-smell of it. Every troop or family of them had one such pot, heirloom and symbol…A clump of them sat around the fire, at least half a dozen, reaching in to pull gobbets out or dip up hot broth in wooden ladle-spoons, talking in their gobbling, grunting tongue, snarling and snapping at each other occasionally. One sank his teeth into another’s ear, hanging on until three or four of the others kicked him loose.
King came up beside him, whispered in his ear: “We could make our retreat a little safer, don’t you think? I wouldn’t like to come running back and meet those chappies.” He went on for a few soft sentences.
“Good idea, Jefe,” Robre said; it was a risk, but it would give them an added margin of safety on their return if it worked. If it didn’t and the sentries were able to rouse their fellows deeper in the woods, the three of them could just high-tail it.
He drew an arrow from his quiver, stuck its point in the earth, drew more and set them ready to hand. Sonjuh settled in behind branches, down on belly and elbows—that was one advantage of a crossbow, you could shoot it lying down. When—if—he came back from this trip, he’d have an Imperial rifle that could do that and more besides. Still, the bow had some advantages. King turned to take rear guard, with the firepower of his rifle.
I’d have done the same in his place, Robre thought. But I’d have argued about it. The Imperial was a good man in a tight place, and not the least shy—no doubt about it. But he was disturbingly…cold-blooded, that’s the word. Though not too cold-blooded to attract the attentions of a very attractive girl—
He thrust everything from his mind save the bow as he came erect. It was a hundred long paces from here to the fire, a long shot in the night. The sinew and horn and wood of the Kumanch weapon creaked as he drew, a full 120 pounds of draw. Back to the angle of the jaw, sighting over the arrowhead and then up…he loosed, and the string snapped against the black buffalo-hide bracer on his left wrist.
One of the grisly figures around the fire looked up suddenly, perhaps alerted by the whisper of cloven air; half-animal they might be, but the savages were survivors of generation upon generation of survivors in a game where losers went into the stewpot. He began to spring erect, but that merely put the arrow through his gut rather than into his chest. With a muffled howl he dropped backwards into the flames and lay there, screeching and sprattling, the iron pot falling on him and its contents gushing out to three-quarters smother the fire. His second shot was on its way before the first hit, and the third three seconds after that, and then he was firing as steadily as a machine. Sonjuh fired her crossbow—and then had to take a third of a minute to reload it, bracing her foot in the stirrup at its head and hauling back on the jointed, curved lever that bent the heavy bow and forced the thick string into the catch.
By that time his quiver was about empty. The cannibals had churned about for a moment, eyes blinded by the fire they’d been grouped around, until more of them fell. Then they turned and ran howling at the woods from where the deadly shafts came; Robre answered, firing smooth and quick, oblivious of the shafts that were whickering around him from the swamp-devil’s bows. One had a better idea; he turned and ran yelling up the trail that led away from the riverbank. Robre drew, drew until his arms and chest felt as if the muscle would rip loose from the bone. He loosed, watched—and four seconds later that last shaft dropped out of the night into the fleeing cannibal’s back, sending him pitching forward limp at the edge of sight.
“Let’s go,” King said, his voice stark. He slapped Robre on the shoulder as he passed. “Well done, man. Well shot indeed.”
Sonjuh touched his arm, as well. “Better ’n well. That shot was three hundred paces, in the night—it’ll be told around the fires for a hundred year ’n’ more.”
“If anyone gets back to tell,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
The men spent a few hectic minutes pushing the dugouts into the current, sending them on their long journey down to the Gulf—the Black River reached the sea to the northeast of Galveston Bay. The log canoes were heavy, but none of them so heavy two strong men couldn’t shift them; they glided away silently into the darkness, turning slowly as they glided empty into the night. While they worked Sonjuh went from one body to the next with her tomahawk and knife in hand, recovering Robre’s arrows and making sure the enemy dead were unlikely to twitch. King looked up and winced slightly; the clansman blinked in surprise. The only good swamp-devil was a dead one…and for that matter, even if they deserved a favor you weren’t doing a man one leaving him with an arrow through the gut and burns over half
his body.
“Let’s leave one canoe,” Robre gasped, as they finished their work. “We might be coming back faster than we go—rather not have to dog-leg a half a mile north, if that’s so.”
King nodded. “And now, let’s see what’s going on.”
Ten, Sonjuh dawtra Pehte thought exultantly as she eeled forward on her belly. Ten scalps! Ma, you can rest quiet. Mahlu, Mahjani, Bittilu, soon you can rest, my sisters.
It was not quite so dark as it had been earlier, with the moon huge on the northeastern horizon, hanging over the swamp-forest ahead. The land sloped down here, away from the section of natural levee along the river behind them. It grew thicker and ranker, laced with impenetrable vine and thicket along the trail, then opened out into cypress-swamp, glowing ghostly as the lights of many fires on islets and mounds in the muddy shallow water filtered through the thick curtains of Spanish moss. They stopped there, at the border where the trail opened out, and stared.
“Shiva Bhuteswara,” King muttered, in the odd other language he sometimes fell into. “Shiva, Lord of Goblins.”
They pullulated over the swamp, squatting in mud and on beaten-down reeds, swarming, erupting in screaming throat-rending fights that ended when others appointed to the task clubbed them down again. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. On the patches of higher ground crude altars of logs stood, with figures strapped across them—swamp-devils, and others that looked like normal men and women. Those were mostly hundreds of yards away, and she was thankful for it. What she could see brought memories back and the taste of vomit at the base of her throat. In the center stood an altar taller than the others, built on a platform of cypress logs. Standing upon it was a figure in black, silhouetted against a roaring fire. He raised his arms and silence fell, save for the screams—then a chanting, discordant at first, growing into unison.
“Tchernobog! Tchernobog! Tchernobog!”
Drums joined it, war-drums of human hide stretched over bone, thuttering to the beat of calloused palms. The beat walked in her blood, shivered in her tight-clenched teeth.
“What does that mean?” Robre asked.
“Tchernobog,” King whispered back. “Black God. Peacock Angel; the Eater of Worlds. That’s the one who taught them.” He hesitated, looked at both of them. “If I kill him, there’s a chance they’ll be demoralized and run. On the other hand, there’s a chance they’ll come straight for us. At the very least, they’ll be short of leadership beyond the kill-and-eat level. Shall I?”
Robre nodded. Sonjuh did, as well. “He’s the cause of our hurts,” she said. “Kill him!”
King nodded in the gloom, the shadow of his turban making his outline monstrous. He unslung the heavy double rifle, lay behind a fallen log, waited a long second. A silence seemed to fall about him, drinking in sound. He could be more still than any man she’d ever met, and it was a bit disconcerting—like his habit of crossing his legs in an impossible-looking position and doing what he called meditating.
Now there was a slight, almost imperceptible hiss of exhaling breath, and his finger stroked the trigger.
Crack. The sound was thunder-loud, and she’d never seen the weapon fired at night. The great bottle-shaped blade of red-orange fire almost blinded her, and left her eyes smarting and watering. She looked away to get her night vision back, blinking rapidly. The foreigner who’d taught the wild men how to act together—the Russki—was staggering in a circle. At six hundred paces, Eric’s weapon had torn an arm off at the shoulder; the swamp-devils were throwing themselves flat in terror, their voices a chorus of shrieking like evil ghosts.
Crack. The distant figure fell.
“Dead as mutton,” King said. “And now, let’s go.”
Scarred chinless faces were turning their way now, the huge goblin eyes staring. The moonlight would be enough for them; legend said that they saw better by night than true men did. Sonjuh came to her feet and ran, with Slasher trotting at her heel. Behind her the sound of the others’ feet came, and behind them more of the squealing, shrieking horde. There must be hundreds of hundreds of them….
The gun roared again, and again. Below it she could hear Robre’s bow snapping; they must be discouraging the foremost pursuers. Sonjuh kept her head down and ran, the cool wet air of the riverbottom night was good for it. She blinked in surprise as the riverside came into sight, moonlight making a long rippling highway on it. There was no time to waste; she tossed her crossbow into the last of the big dugouts and dug her heels into the mud, putting her back to the wood and pushing.
Nothing happened, nothing save that stars and glimmers danced across her vision as she strained. It did give her a good look at what was going on behind. Eric came out first, panting so that she could hear him across fifty paces, turned, knelt, breaking open his weapon and reloading. Behind him Robre came, turned, drew, shot, drew, shot—incredibly graceful and swift for so large a man. Sonjuh abandoned her efforts at the canoe, scurried over the sand, grabbed the quivers of the dead swamp-devils, pitched them into the canoe, went back to shoving. Was that a slight movement, a sucking sound in the mud? Her feet churned through slickness.
“Lord o’ Sky burn you, you stupid log, move!” she shrieked in frustration; her own sweat was stinging her chewed lips like fire.
Another crack—crack as Eric fired his rifle. Two cannibals almost to spearcast of Robre pitched backwards, one with most of the top of his head disappearing in a spray of blood that looked black in the moonlight. Robre came pelting back past the Imperial, threw his bow into the canoe, bent to put his shoulder beside hers.
A spray of swamp-devils came out of the trailhead into the open, howling like wolves with every step, their tomahawks and knives glittering like cold silver fire in moonlight and starlight. Eric had slung his rifle; now he drew the revolver from his side. He stood erect, shoulder turned to his enemies, his feet at right angles to each other and his left hand tucked into the small of his back, weapon extended. It seemed a curiously formal pose….
Crack. Much lighter than the boom of the hunting rifle; more like a spiteful snap, with a dagger of red flame in the night. The foremost swamp-devil stopped as if he’d run into an invisible wall, arms flying out to right and left, weapons turning and glinting as they flew, then collapsed; the next tripped over him and never rose. The Imperial’s long arm moved, leisurely and sure, and the pistol snapped. Again and again, six times, and there were six bodies lying still or writhing on the sandy mud. The seventh came leaping over the pile of them, screeching and swinging a mace of polished rock lashed to a handle with human tendons. Eric’s sword flashed out, a clean burnished-steel blur in the moonlight, cut again backhand. The cannibal staggered, gaping at a forearm severed and spouting blood in pulsing-fountain spurts, then collapsed as his guts spilled out through his rent belly. An eighth lay silent as Slasher rose from his body, jaws wet. The Imperial turned and ran.
The canoe was moving, finally moving. King was nearly to them; Slasher soared by him, hit the ground and leapt again, flashing over the two clansfolks’ heads like a gray arrow. Dark figures moved behind King’s back, more of the swamp-devils come from their sabbat, loosing as they ran in a chorus of wolf-howls, pig-squeals, catamount screeches. Black arrows began to flicker past Sonjuh in a whispering hiss of cloven air, invisible until they were almost there; some of them went thunk into the canoe and stood quivering with a malignant hum like evil bees.
The heavy craft was in the water now, river up to her knees, then her thighs, soaking into her leggings and chill against flesh heated by running and the pounding of her heart. She rolled over the side; Robre was pushing hard, his greater height letting him wade out. Sonjuh stuck her head up enough to see over the upcurved stern-end of the dugout, and saw Eric splash into the water at speed, lunging forward to grasp the wood. She also saw more arrows heading toward her like streaming horizontal rain, and ducked down again. King landed atop her, driving the breath out of her with an oof! and grinding her back into the inch or two of water that swil
led around in the middle of the hollowed-out cypress log.
The man gave a sharp cry and then spoke fast in that other, utterly unfamiliar language he had—she could tell the difference when he was speaking the one that sounded almost-but-not-quite like Seven Tribes talk. From the sound of it, he was swearing with venomous sincerity. Robre was in the hull now, digging his paddle into the water and looking back to find out why King wasn’t.
Sonjuh had a good idea why, even if it was a little too dark to be sure. She wiggled out from under King and felt down along his legs.
“Arrow,” she said—more were falling into the water about them. “Nearly through the calf slantwise—missed the bone—head’s just under the skin here.”
“Push it through and break it off,” Eric King wheezed. At her hesitation—“Do it, there’s no time!”
She drew her tomahawk, drew a deep breath, as well, and hammered the arrow through with the flat of the hatchet against the nock. The long body beside hers went rigid for an instant, with a snarling exhalation, his hands clamping on the wood. She used the sharp edge of the weapon to cut the shaft off to stubs on either side, moving his leg so that wood rested on wood for a quick strong flick of the hatchet-blade.
“Give me a hand,” he said tightly; she helped him to a sitting position, and he seized a paddle and set to work.
So did she, in the more conventional kneeling manner; the canoe was long and heavy, made for ten or fifteen men. They managed to drive it out past midpoint, and the rain of arrows ceased. Glancing over her shoulder, Sonjuh gave a harsh chuckle at the screams of rage, as hundreds of the swamp-devils poured onto the riverbank and found their canoes gone.
“That—won’t—hold—’em—long,” Robre panted between strokes. “They’ll—have—more—close by.”
“Or swim, or use logs and rafts,” Sonjuh said unhappily.
We are screwed up, she thought.
Oh, the wound wasn’t all that serious—unless it mortified, which was always a danger and doubly so with something a swamp-devil had handled. It wasn’t even bleeding seriously; arrow wounds often didn’t, while the shaft was plugging them up. But with his leg injured, there was no way the Imperial could run, or fight beyond sitting and shooting. King reached for his rifle, fired again, reloaded and fired before he put it down and resumed paddling. “That’ll keep them cautious for a bit,” he said.
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