“So go talk to them and see if they give you some challenge? That’s not a rescue plan. That’s a sideshow. You play an instrument? Because I don’t.”
“No, but I used to be able to win Guitar Hero on hard .” He didn’t find that funny. I shrugged apologetically. Too bad Mosh wasn’t here. Even with his reattached fingers he could play the hell out of anything. “I’m not saying we can play a lullaby and get them to take a nap or anything like that, but if they’re willing to deal at all, that gives us a chance to get inside their walls and close to our guys.”
“Then what?”
“I’d hate to carry this C4 all this way and not blow something up with it.”
“How much you got?”
I thought about the monstrous hunt we’d seen. Used intelligently, five pounds of plastic explosive went a long way, but there were limits to my creativity. “Not nearly enough.”
“And your other plan?”
I finished another bite of processed meat noodle in beige sauce, then handed Lococo the rest of the pack. “We get as close as we can without being seen, wait for them to go off on another hunt like we saw, then we strike. I don’t know how many Fey they leave behind, but fighting X minus that scary bunch is better than fighting X.”
Lococo pondered on those options for a bit as he chewed. “So basically both of your plans are garbage.”
“Heh.” His optimism made me laugh. “The suggestion box is always open and MHI’s corporate staff loves employee feedback.”
“There’s a third option…Realize we’re hopelessly outmatched, tuck tail, and go home. But we both know that’s not an option.”
“Of course not,” I said automatically.
“Why isn’t it?”
“Huh?” I looked up from my food. I didn’t get the feeling he was fishing to quit. Lococo didn’t seem like the kind of give up, but everybody had their limits. Maybe he’d finally had enough. “I don’t know. It just isn’t. What’re you getting at?”
Lococo just sat there, unreadable. “When I first ran into you, and I said I didn’t want to leave without the others, you agreed. But I figured after you got to see just how bad this place was, or just how dangerous the Fey were, you’d change your mind. A reasonable man would look at the risks and say, ‘screw it, I’m going home. I’m going to go back and comfort my mom the grieving widow, and be with my smoking hot wife, and be there to see my baby get born.’ But not you, Pitt. I don’t think that stuff ever even crosses your mind.”
I thought about how to answer that. Of course I thought of that stuff all the time. Whenever I was too tired to take one more step, I thought of Julie waiting for me, and I went a little further. “Sure, I’d rather be there. But this needed to be done, and apparently those of us who can do it are few and far between. My dad used to say when something’s coming at you, pick a direction and run. The ones who hesitate are the ones who get run over.”
“Your dad was a smart man. I’m not sure you are, but, hey, that’s the direction you picked, you’re going to run right at this Asag. What was it you said…a demon so scary he boils the fish in the rivers? He who ends all things, just run right at him and say, ‘Come at me, bro.’ That’s it?”
“Someone has to.”
“Provided you ever make it back.”
“Then the rest of the Hunters will have to handle him without me. I’m just one guy.”
Lococo shook his head and laughed. “With all the bullshit you’ve told me over the last little while about Chosen and prophecies and cosmic forces steering your whole life to back before you were ever born, and you’re going to look at me with a straight face and tell me you’re just one guy. My ass. One guy. Asag’s a god—”
“Wannabe poser god. Man has beaten him before.”
“Whatever. Close to a god then. And something out there, some big cosmic fruit loop, has pinned all their hopes and dreams on you beating a god. And that don’t strike you as weird?”
“Well, I did do it once before.” Technically, it had been me and Franks—and Isaac Newton—but close enough.
“Oh yeah.” Lococo chuckled. “I forgot, you’re the God Slayer. This Asag had better watch out. We got us a certified badass up in here. The world is saved!”
I had to laugh. Earl had told me about working with Lococo, but they must not have been together long enough for Earl to learn he had a smartass streak. Either that, or living in the Nightmare Realm forced you to develop a dark sense of humor. “Look, man, serious answer. I don’t care how scary he’s supposed to be. I don’t know what he wants, but he’s building an army of monsters, and arranging all these little attacks for no discernible reason—”
“I’m sure he’s got a reason.”
“He’s killing innocent people all over the world in the process.”
Lococo shrugged. “Maybe that‘s reason enough.”
“I can’t let that stand. We’ll find a way to beat Asag, because we have to.”
“That, I’ll have to see that with my own eye to believe.”
“Well, yeah. I didn’t come here to rescue you guys because I’m nice. I figured at the end of the world I’m going to need all the bodies to hide behind I can get. You’re like the tallest guy I know. You’d make an awesome meat shield.”
“Don’t worry, Pitt. It’s the end of the world, I promise I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it.”
Since we didn’t know if there were any predators in the area, or if the Hunt had scouts, we buried our garbage and tried to disguise any sign that we’d camped here. Equipment checked, we moved out.
We’d only gone about half a mile through the fog and sickly trees when Lococo turned around with a very malicious look on his ugly mug. He’d had an idea. “We need to cause maximum disruption and confuse the Fey as much as possible. You’ve got two plans.”
“Yeah. So?”
“How about we do both? ”
CHAPTER 22
We had found the fortress and spent the last two “days” observing it.
Lococo hadn’t been joking when he’d said he was literal with the landmark names. From our vantage point, the structure really did look like it was built out of bones. And it was, no kidding, on an island in the sky. Sadly, Lococo just wasn’t imaginative enough to have made that part up.
If I thought this place had been messing with my head before, it had really started screwing with me once we got to the Fey lands. The swamp was like a messed-up Tim Burton movie on acid. There were streams through the forest, but made out of congealed fog goo rather than water. Poke one with a stick, and it didn’t seem to have a bottom. Fall through one of those and you were probably gone forever. I was either going insane, or the trees kept whispering to me. You can only say out loud ‘Shut up, stupid trees,’ so many times before you really begin to doubt your grasp on reality.
The worst part was the chunks of land floating above us. I had no explanation for what was keeping them there. It’s like gravity just didn’t give a damn. From beneath one, all I could see was black dirt and hanging roots, like the whole thing had just been violently yanked out of the ground, and then tacked to the sky. Every now and then, the angle was right and I could see a bit of what was on top of one, and it looked like exactly the same kind of terrain we were walking through. Even the smallest chunks were still big enough you could build a house on top, provided you didn’t mind living in the shittiest neighborhood ever.
Some of the islands were way up there, barely visible in the perpetual twilight. Others were right above the ground, and if I had been brave enough to climb the whisper trees, I probably could have climbed onboard. Most seemed frozen in place, but others floated along peacefully at a few miles an hour. I really didn’t like walking beneath those, because I was certain that was when gravity would start giving a damn again and I’d get buried beneath thousands of tons of dirt. My corpse would get digested by the roots of a whisper tree, and it would probably be my screaming face etched in the bark.
Unlike the pine
forest dredged from Lococo’s mind, there were sounds here besides rain. We were treated to the constant croaking of frogs, insects chirping, and weird things crying. There seemed to be the occasional word mixed in there too, which was fun. I only ever saw one of the croakers. The “frog” turned out to be a six-inch-tall biped waddling along on two legs, like a tiny baby Vodyanoy , but it had leapt into one of the fog streams when it saw me, probably worried I was going to eat it.
Occasionally, something screamed. It sounded like a woman in distress. It probably wasn’t.
Bigger things tailed us in the fog, but none of them ever showed themselves. I caught glimpses of gleaming eyes a few times, but when they became aware I was watching, they would drift away. Pale lights would occasionally appear in the woods, sometimes white, sometimes blue, but I was never stupid enough to go chasing after them.
Lococo had only been here once before, but I had to hand it to him, because he managed to find the place again. That was a pretty remarkable achievement. When I’d remarked on that, he said it was just luck. Either that or everything in this particular reality was drawn to the fortress eventually.
We camped on the same hill that he’d used to spy on the Fey last time. It was about six hundred yards away, but there was no cover anywhere closer, just low grass and mud. The island was floating just off the ground, but since the fortress was built—or imagined into existence—on a hill, we could see most of it. The last time Lococo had been here, he had watched for a while, but couldn’t see much and couldn’t figure out a viable way in. Not even knowing if his compatriots were still alive and not feeling like committing suicide, eventually he had given up and gone back to the slightly less evil realm, where all he had to worry about was rain and cannibal mutants. Once I got a look at the place, I couldn’t say I blamed him.
However, Lococo hadn’t had Poly the Cyclops to let him know his guys were still alive, or a powerful scope to spy with. I was able to observe a lot more than he could, and I spent every waking minute glassing the place and making notes. While I had tunnel vision, Lococo kept a lookout to make sure the trees, frogs, or glowy things didn’t come from behind to devour us.
The Fey’s fortification was smaller than I’d expected. I was no expert on castles, but if it had been built for humans, you could maybe house two hundred people in there, tops. And that would be really crowded. It had been hard to tell hiding in the bushes while they had flown by, but the Fey knights I’d seen had looked a bit bigger than humans, and their mounts had been way bigger than horses. I didn’t see any pastures around here, though those things had looked more like meat eaters than grazers, but they had to live somewhere, which meant there was probably a stable in there taking up a bunch of space too. If they were in the habit of taking prisoners, that would take up even more area. So at most there could only be about a hundred Fey living here.
Of course, that was assuming the interior of that place didn’t laugh at the laws of physics and my concept of space, which considering they rode horse things across the friggin’ sky probably wasn’t that farfetched. But hopefully we were only outnumbered fifty to one.
However, making up for that cheery news, the walls did appear to be made out of stacked bones, like the catacombs of Paris, only from creatures that had to have been the size of whales. It didn’t look like they were cemented together so much as slightly melted and then solidified. Magic weirds me out.
Something told me that this wasn’t actual Fey architecture, as much as it was from one of their memories. It just didn’t look that solid or sensible as a fortification. All those big scary-ass walls, but the doors weren’t impressive enough to stop a battering ram. When the doors were occasionally opened, I could see right into the interior. There was no secondary defense. No portcullis. No murder holes. This fortress was for show.
There were four walls, about thirty feet tall, surrounding one central tower. Because of the jagged, haphazard nature of the building materials, they looked climbable. And probably would have been easy to get over, except I could always see guards patrolling along the top.
The guards looked like the Fey knights I’d seen before. They were vaguely man-shaped, but the proportions were off somehow. They were far too lean and spindly. I never saw one without armor, and for that, I was thankful. For a group of creatures who were lousy with shapeshifters and illusion makers, who throughout history had often appeared as creatures of ethereal beauty, word was that the royal Fey in their natural guise were hideous.
I learned these Fey liked to play a musical instrument that sounded like a cross between bagpipes and a tortured goat. It made me miss the croaking and mysterious screaming, but I learned that the guards changed at every shriek of the bagpipe goat. Like Lococo had said, there was a wide stair leading to the swamp floor. At the top was a great big wooden double door, wide enough to drive a pair of their superhorses through. On the wall above that gate a guard was always posted.
Were they here by choice, or were they trapped? Were they a conquering force or was this a criminal hideout? I didn’t know what this small contingent of Fey were doing out here in the Nightmare Realm all by themselves, outpost or outcasts, but they seemed wary. The guards’ movements were crisp and alert. If Fey took smoke breaks or snuck naps on the job, I never caught one. Every so often they would open the gate and a pair of them would patrol the exterior, but they never ventured past the base of the stairs. Either they didn’t want to get their boots muddy, or there was something dangerous out here in the swamp. And I don’t mean us.
The weapons I saw seemed to consist of swords and weirdly designed spears, but for how little I knew about these things, those spears might shoot fireballs. And their black metal armor might or might not stop a round from my .308. We were dealing with too many unknowns. There’s the old saying about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, but Fey had a laugh about that, used magic to grow walls out of whale bone, and rode sky horses, so screw your science.
So for two of the long periods that I’d come to think of as days, we watched. We ate the last of our food and waited for the magic hunger to set in. I prayed the Fey would go hunting soon, because we were only going to grow weaker. We went over our plan repeatedly, and then we whispered about everything else, because that’s what you do when you’re killing time, waiting for the signal to go do something stupidly dangerous.
I awoke from my nightmares, still lying behind my rifle, to the sound of a horn. Through my scope, the castle was a flurry of activity. Drums beat. Hounds howled. Black banners unfurled down the walls. The gates opened and the Fey paraded out. Each monster horse had a steel-clad killer saddled on its back. Their beasts ran to the edge of the island and kept on running right into the sky. I counted as they went by, tapping out a rhythm on the cold metal forearm of my rifle. Eighty alien killers were embarking on a quest to go put the hurt on somebody. This was our chance.
The hunt was on.
* * *
Once I was sure the Wild Hunt was far away, I took the long, lonely walk across the muck to the base of the stairs. They were sunken into the muck, and up close appeared to be made of the same yellowed bones as the fort. Aggressive vines were growing all over them, spiraling upward for a few stories. With everything to lose, but no better choice, I started climbing.
Of course the Fey saw me walking up their stairs. There was really no way to avoid that. I could hear the warning shouts high atop the wall. Their language was surprisingly melodic. If I could hear them, then they were close enough to hear me, so I shouted at the top of my lungs, “I’ve come to talk. I demand that you release your prisoners!”
I wasn’t expecting these guys to speak English, but in previous dealings with Hunters, the more powerful Fey were always able to transcend language barriers and communicate somehow. Either they understood me, or they were curious enough to see what a lone human was doing way out here, because they didn’t immediately roll a boulder down the stairs.
A black
helmet appeared over the wall. The visor was shaped into an eagle’s beak. That Fey said something incomprehensible, then hoisted a spear and prepared to hurl it down at me.
Okay, that kind of communication worked too.
I lifted Cazador and snapped a shot into the wall directly below him. Bone chunks flew off as he ducked. I hoped that got my point across. I could have brained him if I’d felt like it, and I hoped the Fey was smart enough to realize it.
As their emissary pulled back behind cover, I bellowed, “I’ve come to parley, but if you screw with me I’ll blow your head off!” We’d put a lot of thought into the plan itself, but I hadn’t really considered what I was going to say when I got here. “I demand to speak with your supervisor!”
While the Fey were probably deciding what was the most amusing way to murder me, I kept going up the stairs. Each step was carved from a single rib. They made an almost musical thunk when my boots struck them. Fey were supposed to take the verbal contest thing seriously, so just in case they were about to drop a cauldron of boiling oil on me, I doubled down.
“Come out and face me. Warrior against warrior! Man versus Fey! Come on. Do Fey only fight humans when we’re lost and starving and you outnumber us? Your best warrior against me. I win, you set my friends free! Let’s go! Show me you aren’t cowards!”
If I was lucky, there were only a handful of them inside, and they’d be stupid enough to let me get close. That’s all we needed, because I was merely the distraction.
Through my scope, I’d spotted thick roots that hung clear to the valley floor. We’d never be able to scale those without being seen by the guards, but if I could get all eyes on me, Lococo could climb up the other side, get over the wall, free our guys, and get out before the Wild Hunt got back. It was a really shitty plan, but considering what we had to work with, it would have to do.
Fey have a very scary laugh, like a hyena. The noise made the hair on my arms stand up. There was suddenly a strange warmth in the air. It might not have been noticeable except I’d been chilled for so long. I figured they were channeling magic of some sort. The voice that came over the wall was deep, yet almost musical, vaguely Irish sounding, and obnoxiously confident. “Can your weak mind understand my words now, human?”
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 33