But the Old Mother wasn’t like that witch at all. In fact, as far as leaders went, she wasn’t much of one. She was just their mother and she was about as lost as anyone in her situation would be. She knew her tribe needed help if it was to go on being a tribe.
Her whole plan for her people was basically just to trust in their deity. An entity they referred to as the Hidden King.
It quickly became apparent that Last of Autumn, tactfully, was their actual leader. She just had to do it passively out of respect for her elder.
Finally, the conversation ended with the captain stating that the Rangers had a mission to accomplish before they could be of assistance to anyone. Once that was done, they, according to the captain, would help the Shadow Elves in return for their kind hospitality. The meeting ended on an indefinite and anticlimactic note as both parties broke away, leaving the wizard Vandahar to stare into the fire, brooding about the state of affairs.
It was time to sleep now, and as the captain and the sergeant major and me left the firepit—Chief Rapp had gone off to check on his wounded—the captain turned to me and said, his voice weak, a cough to clear his throat first, “Sergeant Major gave me your intel on the fortress where the SEAL may have our Forge. Develop that with our indig. I need a location and a map ASAP. See if she knows the disposition of enemy forces within the fortress. We’re going to hit that location as soon as we’re rested, and I need to know what we’re getting into. Every detail. Got it, PFC?”
I did.
Then Captain Knife Hand said he needed some fresh air and left for the front of the temple.
The sergeant major and I stood there in the dim darkness between the red glowing firepits. Sleeping Rangers everywhere. And he told me exactly what I needed to find out from Last of Autumn regarding the mission the captain was about to plan. I listened, asked clarifying questions when I could, and then the sergeant major told me to rack out.
But before I went, I turned back to the sergeant major, who was heading for the front entrance to take watch for the rest of the night.
“All by yourself, Sergeant Major?” I asked. “All night long?”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “Boys’ve had enough, Talker. I suspect we’re pretty deep behind friendly lines as near as I can tell. Plus… don’t sleep much anyway nowadays.”
I offered to stay with him, but I really didn’t mean it.
Thankfully, he let me go.
But there was one last thing. I’d gone ten steps when I turned around again and whispered, “The captain looks either sick, or tired, Sergeant Major.”
The senior NCO stared at me through the shadows of the ancient temple as we both listened to the low snap and pop of the fragrant logs burning.
“He may be both, Talker. But don’t worry, son. He’s tougher than a two-dollar steak.”
Chapter Fifty
Operation Throat Punch, as Captain Knife Hand had designated our attempt to retake the Forge, went down at dawn a little over two weeks later.
The main body of the Rangers hit the gatehouse to King Triton’s fortress located on the northwestern edge of the central massif in what we’d once called France. The Auvergne, to be specific, although the topography had changed over the last ten thousand years thanks to a few major civ-killer meteor strikes.
We’d humped and riverined for close to a week and a half just to reach the objective. And by “we” I mean the Rangers cleared to participate in the assault. The Rangers wounded in the battle at Ranger Alamo remained back at Hidden Cave. If we took the fortress, which was the captain’s intention, then they would be sent for once we’d secured it for ourselves.
If was what I was thinking. I’ll be honest. Warts and all is what I promised.
We had three weapons squads, two assault platoons of three seven-man squads each, and the snipers. Close to seventy Rangers to attack Barad Nulla, as the crumbling old fortress was known in Elven High Speech. The Tower of Secrets.
Under Last of Autumn’s patient tutelage I was growing and constantly trying to improve my grasp of the Tolkien mix of languages they called High Speech. My Gray Speech and Shadow Cant were improving as well, and conversation between me and Autumn was growing easier. Which was a benefit well worth working toward even if I didn’t already appreciate the puzzle of languages for its own sake.
She had almost no interesting in learning English.
Once, long ago, according to Last of Autumn, the fortress had been an ancient watchtower for the Dragon Elves. They called it the Silver Eye. After the fall of the Dragon Elves it fell into long disrepair and disuse, little more than a forgotten hideout for the occasional group of bandits. But when the migrating Shadow Elves showed up in this area, they put things to rights, making a mercenary fortress out of the old place. In their waning heyday, they hired themselves out to the cities of men in the various wars along the Great Sea’s northern coasts to the south. The Great Sea was what we once knew as the Med.
But the Shadow Elves kept up their insane attempt to fulfill what they had begun calling the Prophecy. Their mission to restore their honor by slaying the dragon beneath the ruins of Tarragon with one of their best warriors. And of course, no one ever returned from the ruins of ancient Tarragon and the lair of said dragon.
By the way, Tarragon is basically Paris as near as I can tell.
And Tarragon is just another word for dragon, incidentally. Besides being an herb.
So, back at the Hidden Cave, once the Rangers had rested and been medically cleared by Chief Rapp, weapons and ammo were counted up and teams were organized as a plan formed to assault the fortress and retake possession of the Forge.
Operation Throat Punch.
Except the fortress was near impossible to assault. The Dark Spire, as it was now known among the locals, had been built long ago on the edge of a crag overlooking a sheer fall on three sides. Its front gate was accessible only by a narrow road along that crag, and if attackers chose not to assault head-on at the front gate, they faced a near-vertical five-hundred-foot ascent up the sides of steep cliffs—only to then reach the base of the impenetrable high fortress walls. Just below the crag lay the remains of a city burned to the ground in unknown ages past.
Naturally the stronghold’s defenses were all oriented toward that approaching road. These defenses consisted of two main fighting towers and a massive gatehouse along the first line of defense. The orcs who served King Triton on the towers and the gate were known for their incredible marksmanship. They wore black rags and served with an almost monastic devotion to the art of ranged warfare.
Normally, for the Rangers this would be no problem. Snipers and heavily armed assaulters with explosives could have breached the walls under supporting fire and made short work of the defenders once inside. The problem was—we were painfully low on both explosives and ammunition. Each of the supporting weapons sections had three belts of 7.62, but Last of Autumn had assured us the walls were heavy enough to withstand siege and most likely 7.62 fire.
In other words, tactically speaking, there was no way seventy Rangers, low on ammunition and explosives, were going to capture that citadel without taking heavy losses breaching the main gate, clearing the walled-off sections and overwatch towers within the fortress, all to reach the Dark Spire, or Barad Nulla itself, where our Forge was most likely being kept, and where Chief McCluskey, or King Triton as he probably was, located his headquarters.
And if the SEAL possessed our Forge… who knew what weapons he was producing.
Siege was not an option.
Throat Punch was a raid.
An assault to secure the objective. We had to sweep the defenses, kill everyone, and at the end of the day, own the fortress.
“And that’s our specialty,” said Captain Knife Hand as he walked the teams through the sand table of how our hit would go. He looked sick now. Weak, thin, and shaky like maybe he had malaria or so
mething. According to Chief Rapp there was something going through a few of the Rangers.
“Some strain of flu,” he guessed, and vowed to nuke it with as many of the retrovirals as he had on hand. “But I’m not too worried about it. Rangers are young and very healthy. The way I see it, it’s simply time to update our antivirus software to the current standards of the Ruin. That’s all, Talker.”
As I said, we humped for a week and a half, using rivers when we could to get there fast. France—it’s now called the Savage Lands by the kingdoms of men to the south along the Med—is a quiet and haunted place. Most of our days were spent on the move, hustling through vast silent wilderness and then hunkering down for nightfall when we assumed the enemy, or just monsters, were most active.
Some nights we got some horrific visuals of what this world has to offer now. But thanks to our augmented scouts section, we avoided contact and conserved ammo for the hit. We knew we’d get only one chance to take back the Perpetual Taco Machine that was our Forge, and all of us meant to do that. Getting into a fight along the way would only mean we had less ammo and resources to burn on the objective.
About that augmented scouts section. Supporting us now, in addition to Last of Autumn and the Wizard Vandahar, were the Lost Boys. And while they may have been young and little more than children within their clan, they were born trackers and hunters. Within a day’s march they were teaching Hard’s section how to move through this new and savage world without being seen and avoiding the most dangerous of creatures.
Like…
A hunting group of manticores that roamed a silent wooded hill far to the south along our route. Lions with leathery bat wings and almost human faces. Massive spiked tails that the Lost Boys and their leader, Carver as he would be called until his naming day on his eighteenth birthday, assure me are filled with poison that isn’t deadly but will make you wish it were. You won’t have to wait too long to actually be dead, though—the poison paralyzes its victim, and manticores like to eat their prey fairly quickly, chewing up the living victim who is helpless to do more than watch himself be torn apart and devoured.
Or…
A thing that hunted us until we got into the river. It was tall. Ferocious. An eight-foot-tall cross between an owl and a Grizzly. The Lost Boys warned us not to mess with it. Like that wasn’t obvious. I only caught sight of it once, but it scared the hell out of me, that was for sure. It made horribly unnatural screeching noises as its deadly claws tore apart giant trees like they were mere matchsticks.
And then there were the Spidaari. Large, gray, pulpy spiders… with human torsos and heads. Yeah. They were tribal and carried crude spears. We had to pass through their forest in the daylight, as according to the Lost Boys they wouldn’t come out of the swollen masses of webs that were their homes, way up high in the tops of dark and twisted trees in a wild and unkempt part of the forest, during the time the sun was up. Still, the air inside that wood felt itchy and hot, and you could swear there were spiders crawling through your hair and down along your back. Biting you and making you itch. But later when you tried to look for the bites… they were gone. Or never there in the first place.
Last of Autumn said that was the Spidaari’s cursing. They chanted during the daylight, in sleeping trances within their webby lairs, cursing anyone with the ghost bites of all their children. The hatchings the Spidaari had consumed to stay alive during their dark rituals. The bites were supposed to drive you mad in time if you stayed in the wood long enough.
And then, after nightfall, the Spidaari would come down out of the treetops to collect their night’s feast.
The Ruin is a dangerous world.
I was talking about the spider people to Tanner. Talking about all the ways this place was dangerous, ways we never trained for. Flying lions that poisoned you and then ate you alive. Grizzly owls. Spider people that summoned the ghosts of their dead children to make you go nuts so they could haul you up for a meal.
Tanner just spit dip and said, “Yeah, well we’re worse, Talker. Way worse.”
He’d been hanging around Brumm and Kurtz too much.
At dawn on the day of the hit, the two assault platoons and two weapons squads, one led by the captain, hit the main gate They had all done a twelve-hour night creep just to get in position. Recon by Hard’s scouts had determined that the southeast tower had to be hit hard if the assault teams were to get close enough to the gate to rush the breach that would soon appear. That tower was filled, according to their intel, with what Last of Autumn identified as Black Hawk Orcs. Excellent archers and snipers who specialized in poison arrows that, according to the Lost Boys, could kill within seconds. Chief Rapp suspected some kind of neurotoxin was in play. He had nothing for that.
But we did have a Carl Gustaf.
Two of our three remaining rounds were used in the initial assault. The first shattered the gate into a million pieces with a direct hit from an 84mm HEDP round. The second punched a nice-sized hole midway up the face of the southeast tower, no doubt killing a few of those Black Hawk archers manning their murder holes. But the dead orcs were just a bonus. The breach was the primary intent.
Vandahar’s fireball took it from there.
The wizard stood up in the middle of the battle once the 84mm round had done its work, having moved in close with the assault teams and Captain Knife Hand, and he sent a growing ball of expanding white-hot plasma right through the hole just formed in the wall of the tower. Underwhelming… at first. Then it expanded and detonated across, and through, all four levels of the squat southeastern battle tower. Roasting and choking every Black Hawk archer inside. Within seconds the entire tower was on fire and black smoke belched and bellowed out through its top and sides.
At the same moment the weapons squad with the two-forty, having taken up position on a rise that approached the gate, opened up on the gatehouse walls and the southwest tower. Any Black Hawk Orc who decided to use the parapets to get off a shot on the approaching Rangers was cut to shreds. The sergeant major led this team while the captain and Chief Rapp moved with the assault teams forward to exploit the breach in the gate.
The breach formed by the first Carl G round.
The second round was used on the southeast watchtower.
That left one final round.
The wizard threw glamours and powerful lights that danced and bobbed up against the tower walls to distract and blind the orcs who were raining down arrows from behind their firing slits, trying to target the Rangers in their assault teams who were already moving forward to breach the fortress, carrying their single-magazine MK18 carbines, SAWs, and other weapons. It was the other weapons the Rangers would use first, saving the limited ammo for the MK18s for when the hard work of room-clearing came. Led by Captain Knife Hand, who still did not look well, as morning light began to cross the features of the fortress, the Rangers led with tomahawks, fighting knives, axes, and swords taken from the last of the Shadow Elf armories as they waded into the surprised archer orcs rushing to man the defenses.
Uroo Uroo horns wailed out urgently. The fortress knew it was under attack now.
Dangerously exposed, engaged with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, the Rangers took the gatehouse using the last of their grenades. The few main rooms there were cleared quickly, and the supporting heavy weapons team was called forward to set up for the next line of defenses to be assaulted.
At this point, Throat Punch called for a momentary cessation of momentum on the part of the assaulters. This was not a thing Rangers naturally wanted to do. Once they had the advantage, they wanted to buy all the territory they could as fast as possible. The system of gates and walls would be near impossible to take without more explosives and more ammunition. Consolidating on the gatehouse allowed the Rangers to set up the squad-designated marksmen for engaging the enemy defenses and keeping said enemies very concerned about what was going on at the front gate.
And here’s where the one design error in Barad Nulla got exploited. Apparently, whoever had built the fortress thought that all defensive positions needed to be focused and strengthened forward. Not primarily. But only. The enemy could never come from the rear of the Dark Spire because of the sheer drop of the impressive crag.
Which meant the “towers” were really only half-built tall semicircles. Tower wall in front; completely exposed to the rear. The defenders in each tower were open to the Dark Spire behind them.
The largest of these towers, far smaller than the Dark Spire but taller than the defensive lines of half-towers forward, was, according to Last of Autumn, called the Lost Library. But the Old Mother had called it Tumna Haudh.
The Deep Tomb.
The old crumbling ruin of the Lost Library had been part of the fortress in better days, but according to the Old Mother, it was actually something else. Something older. Something much worse.
Now, as Captain Knife Hand organized his assault teams within the gatehouse under fire, linking up with the weapons squad and waiting for the signal to push forward to the next line, dodging incoming arrows and sudden counterattacks by the Black Hawk Orcs who were now starting to recover and get their act together, he keyed his mic and called out over the radio.
“Rogue, this is Warlord . We’re established on Doorstop. Waiting on you to proceed to Living Room.”
But he got nothing.
Team Rogue, which consisted of Kurtz’s weapons squad and the snipers, was busy far below in Tumna Haudh. We were supposed to be somewhere else by now. But we were busy. Real busy, in fact.
I say we because I was with them. Autumn and I. Everything that happened out at the gate and the towers with the Carl Gs and the Black Hawk Orcs and the wizard fireball, that stuff I heard about later.
While it was happening… well, like I said, I was busy.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 40