by Angus Watson
“Fuck a duck,” muttered Sassa.
Another goblin crumbled open. Then another, and another. More worms fell from some but different creatures tumbled from others. These second beasts were the size and colour of large green iguanas, but each had a snapping claw in place of a head, and eight multi-kneed, spider-like legs.
All the creatures, black worms and green spider-lizards, headed for the group by the pond. They made no sound other than their slithering and scuttling. It was sound enough.
Sitsi shot one of the spider-lizards. It flew back, skewered. So they were easy enough to kill, but it was pointless. There were hundreds of them. Thousands.
Calnians and Wootah struck at the advancing beasts, but had to dance backwards before the seething tide. More and more rock goblins cracked open, more and more creatures tumbled out. There were more than thousands, there were tens of thousands, all with jaws that looked like they’d give a vicious bite. Perhaps they were venomous.
There were so many now that new arrivals fell onto the already advancing surge and there was a sea of creatures several animals deep flowing towards them. The rock goblins were cracking open all over the basin. They were surrounded.
“Up here!” called Wulf. He was standing on the little mesa next to the pond with Sassa and Freydis. Sitsi and everyone else scrambled up to join him.
Their perch was maybe five paces across and two paces high. The sea of black and green monsters flowed against its base. A couple of the spider-lizards climbed its sides, but Finn and Thyri whacked them back with their blades. Sitsi unstrung her bow. It would be more useful as a staff. She held it up to Sassa, who nodded and copied her.
Only Keef’s Arse Splitter could reach the beasts below and he was spearing them like a madman, but he wasn’t even denting their numbers.
They were in trouble.
Yoki Choppa was sitting cross-legged, nursing a smoking concoction to life in his alchemical bowl. Sitsi hoped he was cooking up something amazing. Nobody else seemed to have any answers.
More goblin towers were crumbling. The sea of creatures was deeper and deeper. By the way both spider-lizards and worms were driving towards them and snapping at them, some urge was compelling them to attack the humans. There were so many that it wouldn’t be long before the writhing sea reached the top of their mesa. Then, as far as Sitsi could see, they would die.
Chogolisa leapt backwards as the edge of their little mesa fell away, spilling a new mass of worms. Their very refuge was made out of a cluster of the creature’s nests. Surely it wouldn’t be long before the rest of it fell away and plunged them into the writhing mass of monsters.
The black and green snapping horde lapped at them in waves, higher and higher.
Then Yoki Choppa stood and flung the contents of his bowl down onto their attackers. Weird screams rang out as perhaps fifty animals convulsed then fell away. The gap they left was filled in a couple of heartbeats.
The warlock shrugged.
Not great, thought Sitsi.
“Paloma, could you run across them carrying Ottar?” asked Sofi.
“I don’t want to.”
“In theory?”
“I don’t think so. They’re too small to get purchase. And if I was carrying the boy I—”
She was interrupted by a rumbling roar.
The cliff to the east, the one that looked like a wall of melted goblins, burst outwards in a cloud of red sand. A giant, red-black crab emerged from the dust, broken rock cascading from its humongous carapace. It was ten paces high and twice that across. Black eyes on stalks were the size of bighorns and pincers were bigger than buffalos. Clacking those great grippers above its head, it charged.
“Eyes, Sitsi,” said Sofi.
Sitsi restrung her bow, aimed and loosed in a trice. The arrow flew true, hit the crab’s eye–and glanced off it. The crab did not appear to notice. She tried the other eye with the same result.
Meanwhile, the sea of spider-lizards and worms was rising around them. It was a toss-up as to whether the crab would get to them first or whether they’d sink under the tide of biting creatures.
“Paloma,” said Sofi. “Pick up Ottar. Chogolisa, pick them both up and throw them as far as you can. Then throw the coffin after them.”
“Really?” asked Paloma.
“Got anything else?”
“Ride the crab?”
They all looked at the giant beast. It had covered half the ground between the cliff and their perch. As if it had heard their plans, it lowered its claws towards the Calnians and Wootah and snapped them all the faster.
“Nope,” said Sofi.
Sofi’s plan was desperate and Sitsi didn’t see how it could work, but she had no other suggestions.
“All right then,” Paloma agreed. “Just don’t hit me with the coffin, Chogolisa. Come here, Ottar.”
“Nah!” Ottar shook his head and backed away.
“Sorry, kid, we’ve got to go.”
Sofi strode around Finn, who was curled in a ball on the ground, hands clamped over his ears (that kind of cowardice is unacceptable, thought Sitsi) and made a grab for the boy.
Ottar dodged. The edge of the little mesa below him crumbled. He fell backwards into the mass of monsters.
Sofi dropped onto her chest and stretched her hand axe out to the boy. He got fingers to it, but the creatures shifted and he sank. Sofi leant further, but Ottar disappeared into the teeming mass.
Sofi tensed to leap after him, but Yoki Choppa crossed the mesa in two strides, shoved her back and flung himself off, arms stretched out like a cliff diver.
He brought his hands together, plunged into the monsters and disappeared.
Sitsi held her breath. There was no sign that anything was happening below the pulsing, teeming sea of monsters.
She nocked an arrow and drew, then loosened the string. She hated this impotence! She wanted to jump in after him, but what could she do?
Suddenly Yoki Choppa surfaced, gripping Ottar by the armpits. There was a black worm clamped to the warlock’s cheek, blood pouring. A spider-lizard had its teeth in his neck.
He hurled Ottar towards the mesa. Sofi grabbed the boy’s hand, yanked him out of immediate danger and plonked him onto the rock.
Yoki Choppa tried to leap, too, but the worms and spider-lizards surged, pushing him out and away, further from their sanctuary.
The Calnian warlock, co-creator of the Owsla, gave one final shrug, then vanished under the turbulent sea of beasts.
Sitsi very nearly jumped in after him. But it would have been suicide.
Sofi Tornado didn’t think so.
She tied a rope around her waist in the blink of an eye, handed the end to Chogolisa and leapt. She disappeared, too, but sprang up immediately in a fountain of creatures.
Hand axe swinging and knife slashing faster than even Sitsi’s eyes could follow, Sofi worked her way towards Yoki Choppa.
Freydis ran to leap after her, but Erik plucked her back. “Sofi’s better at this sort of thing than you are,” he said as she whacked at his arm.
Out in the lake of creatures Yoki Choppa resurfaced. He was much further away now, his face a mask of blood.
“Go back, Sofi!” he called. “Take Ottar to The Meadows.”
Sofi was having none of it. She grunted and waded on, but there were half a dozen spider-lizards and black worms hanging by their teeth from each arm now. She could hardly move. Other beasts seemed to sense their chance and surged towards her like waves converging towards a stricken boat in a black sea.
Sofi went under. Sitsi expected her to spring back up, but she didn’t.
Chogolisa heaved on the rope.
Way out in the sea of monsters now, bloodied Yoki Choppa regarded them serenely. He lifted his head, shouted “Wootah!” then fell under the tide.
Chogolisa heaved on the rope. Suddenly she fell back, the frayed end of the rope flying up into the air.
Sitsi and several other gasped. Then Sofi emerged from the pi
le of beasts with a scream of rage. Paloma and Sitsi dived in, grabbed a hand each and pulled her to safety. Sofi stood while Sitsi and Paloma plucked the worms and spider-lizards from her blood-slickened limbs and torso, crushing the beasts in their strong hands and throwing them back into the maelstrom. Despite all the cuts and blood Sofi didn’t seem badly injured, but Sitsi had never seen such a look of pain on her captain’s face as she stared out to where Yoki Choppa had gone down.
A scream rang out. Sitsi spun round to see Thyri beheading a spider-lizard whose teeth were clamped onto her calf.
Now more and more of the spider-lizards were clambering onto their ever-shrinking perch. The sea of creatures would soon be level with their refuge and the biting worms would follow. The giant crab advanced.
Sitsi whacked away with her unstrung bow, then jumped back as more of the little mesa crumbled under her. She almost fell over the balled-up Finn, then turned and kicked him. This was no time for him to lose his nerve. He stayed in his cowardly crouch and she kicked him again.
“Leave him!” shouted Erik. Neither was it the time for a father to be protective of useless offspring, but Sitsi desisted from kicking Finn and got back to whacking beasts.
She leapt back again as more rock crumbled. The worms were clambering onto the mesa now. She kicked five of them away but fifty more filled their places. She glanced left and saw Freydis shooting arrows uselessly into the mass.
The crab was five paces away.
“Paloma, grab Ottar. Chogolisa, throw them. Now!” Sofi shouted.
“Wait!” shouted Erik.
“What for?!” shouted Chogolisa.
The crab raised a giant claw, blocking the sun, ready to slam it down and crush them all. Sitsi had an almost overwhelming urge to dive out of the way, but the only place to dive was into the sea of worms and spider-lizards.
She closed her eyes, readying herself.
Nothing happened.
She opened her eyes.
The gigantic crab was beating itself with its mighty pincer. No, it wasn’t beating itself, she realised. There were spider-lizards all over it, climbing through the gaps in its armour, through the plates that covered its mouth and into its maw.
The huge crustacean snapped at its own front legs, then collapsed sideways. The spider-lizards flowed over it.
Sitsi returned her attention to the immediate attackers and jabbed her bow at a spider-lizard, but it squeaked and fell back before she struck it. Two worms were clamped onto its back. More and more squeaks rang out all around. Beasts began to fall from the mesa. The lake of animals stirred and writhed, now more like choppy waters than the swell that had been rolling towards them.
The worms were attacking the spider-lizards.
The spider-lizards struck back, biting into black bodies and shaking their heads to sever the creatures.
“They’re falling back!” shouted Wulf, sweeping Thunderbolt, scattering worms and spider-lizards.
The slithering sea of beasts ebbed as the creatures destroyed each other. The spider-lizards were the more powerful animals, but the worms outnumbered them fifty to one.
Wootah and Calnians watched the battle, apart from Finn, balled up and shaking on the ground. Paloma and Erik squatted next to him, each with a hand on his back. Sitsi finally understood. Finn hadn’t been cowering in terror, he’d been trying to control the animals. And he’d succeeded.
“That’s enough now, Finn,” said Erik. “That’s enough.”
“Has it worked? Did I stop them?” Finn lifted his head. Before anybody could reply he coughed and heaved. Paloma and Erik hurried him to the side of the mesa, where he jetted watery vomit onto the dead creatures piled below.
Do not drink too quickly, thought Sitsi. The young Wootah man who’d just saved all their lives was puking because he hadn’t listened to Sofi. Hero to idiot in a couple of heartbeats. He was good at that.
Sofi Tornado leapt off the mesa and ran to where they’d last seen Yoki Choppa, tossing aside creatures, living and dead. The others jumped down and helped her, apart from Erik who stayed with Finn and Sitsi who grabbed Freydis and Ottar and stopped them leaving the safety of the mesa–because nobody else had thought of the children.
The others cleared a space all around where Yoki Choppa had fallen. Not a hair, nor a scrap of his breechcloth was left–just a blood-dark stain on the soft rock.
The screaming of the beasts fell away. All the spider-lizards were dead. Some surviving worms wriggled to the crumbled goblin towers and burrowed into the earth.
The desert all around was a morass of green and black corpses, with a giant dead crab rising out of it.
Picking their way through the dead animals was gritty work, but soon they were walking south-west again with full water skins. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing left of Yoki Choppa for them to burn.
Sitsi fell in with Keef, bringing up the rear, scanning the scrubby desert for danger.
“I’m sorry about Yoki Choppa,” he said.
“Me, too.”
Chapter 10
Stung
Sofi Tornado walked ahead. Already, just a few dozen paces from the valley of the goblins where Yoki Choppa had died, the desert looked normal: low scrub, cactuses, jackrabbits and lizards. She could hear a coyote skulking in a nearby gulch.
Yet just behind them was a scene of carnage, where a giant crab lay dead amidst the corpses of thousands, maybe millions, of creatures unlike any she’d heard of before.
That was life. The banal shoulder-to-shoulder with the terrifying, freakish and tragic. Get on with your mundane life, experience shocking tragedy and horror, then return to your mundane life. So she walked on, back to the task of saving the world. Nothing was going to get in her way. She would take Ottar the Moaner to the Warlock Queen. He was their sacrifice. Sacrifices were necessary.
Yoki Choppa, along with the warlock Pakanda, had made the Owsla. While Pakanda had been like an abusive father, Yoki Choppa had been like a protective mother. After Pakanda’s exile, Yoki Choppa had been both parents to the growing girls of the Owsla. He was restricted–certain things were expected of the Owsla and it would have been impossible to refuse them–but he’d protected them as much as possible.
When he’d finally got the Owsla away from Calnia, he’d removed rattlesnake from their diets and they’d regained much of the character that alchemical twisting had stripped away. He was the only person who’d ever cared for the Owsla, who hadn’t used them for his own ends. In short, he was the only one who’d ever loved them.
And now he was dead because Ottar the Moaner was an idiot.
That was unfair. She’d frightened the boy and he’d reacted. Then she’d intended to go after Ottar but she’d hesitated when Yoki Choppa hadn’t.
The warlock had flung himself so quickly down into the mass of deadly beasts, it was like he’d been waiting for the opportunity to die. She remembered his last moments. Had he tried to save himself at all? She pictured him as he’d gone under. Had that been a look of grim satisfaction on his face or was her memory playing tricks on her?
The Owsla that Yoki Choppa had helped to create had caused so much misery. They’d killed hundreds in battle and probably more for the titillation of the crowds in the Calnian arena. If this were a legend, the Calnian Owsla would not be the heroes, unless you started the tale the day after they met the Wootah.
She liked to blame the Wootah for their uselessness, for the deaths of their own–Bjarni Chickenhead and Gunnhild Kristlover–as well as hers–Talisa White-tail, Morningstar, Luby Zephyr, Ayanna and now Yoki Choppa. She was fairly sure she intended to kill them when the quest was done because Empress Ayanna had ordered it. But maybe the Wootah were the Owsla’s atonement? She couldn’t blame her women for their victims. They’d been conditioned mentally and physically from a young age to kill. They’d had no choice. Sofi, however, could blame herself. She’d been their captain, but it was more than that. She hadn’t needed the alchemy to make her a killer
. She’d killed animals often and enthusiastically before she’d even heard of Calnia. She still felt an urge to kill, while Paloma, Sitsi and Chogolisa all seemed to have lost their love of it.
Maybe Yoki Choppa had been destroyed by his guilt? He could have walked away. The moment Zaltan had announced he was gathering attractive girls to form an alchemically powered magic squad, Yoki Choppa could have packed up and made his life elsewhere.
Had he been looking for a chance to sacrifice himself?
And was she looking for the same thing?
It wasn’t just the guilt for the past. Only she knew that they were taking the boy, the lovely little boy, to his death. And then she was meant to kill the rest of them. Oh, how she envied Yoki Choppa.
She spotted a rattlesnake skin lying on the ground. The snake had wriggled free of its skin and carried on.
She sighed. Perhaps the reason she hadn’t killed herself already was the possibility that life continued after death. Not a great state of mind, she realised.
She stopped next to a heat-shattered red boulder.
“Wulf, can I talk to you?” she asked when he caught up.
They waited while the others came past. Last were Chogolisa and Erik, pulling the coffin on the sled.
Sofi shuddered as it passed. “Make sure everyone else gets a turn pulling the box,” she called after them.
“It’s not a bother,” said Chogolisa.
“Oh, yes it is,” Erik countered. “You know we don’t like it. It’s a great idea to get someone else to tow if for a while. PALOMA!”
“Shush! We don’t need to burden others. If you don’t like it, walk ahead.”
“Well, I’m sorry I want to help, but you told me yesterday…”
When they could no longer hear Chogolisa and Erik’s bickering, Sofi turned to Wulf. “What happened when you were dead?”
Wulf nodded as if he’d been expecting the question. “It was like being asleep but not as interesting. One moment I was standing on a rock bridge. The next Sassa was waking me up next to Nether Barr’s dead body.”
“Nothing else?”
Wulf looked up and sighed melodiously through his nose.