And at the perfect time.
It had taken several days’ journey, but the trip would be worth it. He looked out over the industrial site and smiled. Everything he would need for his trap was here. And the location was far more suited to his personal tastes than his own building in Bremen. I might just make this place the capital of my new empire, he thought.
In the distance, the sounds of sword against wood, and cudgel against skull resounded and carried on the wind. Borss smiled. They had found the area occupied, but soon it would all be his.
“What makes you smile, my lord?” Zeilly asked. She was ever at his side, like a loyal dog, and now calling him ‘my lord’ since her mistake on the bird tower. He had forgiven her impertinence, as he always did. Her charms were too much to resist. And she brought other, larger assets—a broad power base granted to Borss through her family. He could not dispose of her, or kill her. She was far too valuable for that.
“I like this place, witch. It suits me.”
“And is this place connected to your prize, my lord?”
It was amazing to Borss that this woman could sound both snarky and congenial with each utterance. Her defiance of spirit always aroused him. But he had no time for that now. Tonight, perhaps.
“The Northerners will come here next,” he told her.
“Oh?” she asked him, feigning surprise. “What of the Hangers?”
Borss laughed. He knew that news of the fall of the Floating City and Kinsker’s defeat had traveled to his men’s ears by bird. Then the story had spread through the camp like wildfire. His men had returned from the East, and Borss had immediately ordered them to march west with him, toward this place with its strange metal appendages soaring into the sky.
“Kinsker failed, but it matters not. My informant tells me they are on their way here. They have lost another man, but they still have the girl. That is all that matters.” Borss glanced at Zeilly and saw that conniving smile on her face. She was good at getting him to talk, especially concerning things about which he should stay silent. He thought about backhanding her, but just then three of his men ran up the road to him.
“How is the conquest?” Borss bellowed. “Are you done?”
“Not yet, Lord Borss,” one man answered. He had slick gray hair, and wore brown and tan clothes. There was a fresh cut near his eye, and he appeared to be limping. “There is a small band of fighters still giving us trouble. The rest of the people here were easy—even their leader. But this group of five are excellent fighters and they have us at an impasse.”
Borss scowled. “We shall see.”
He strode past the soldiers, Zeilly trailing behind him. The road was wide and had been cleared, because some of the buildings to either side had crumbled. But the ruins looked more like the result of skirmishes than earthquakes. Most of the place was intact. Buildings, staircases, stacks of metal boxes and the thing he prized most of all: transportation. The people living here had kept the location clean of debris, and had even put recent coats of paint on some of the industrial buildings. But the proximity to salt water had taken its toll in some structures, and he could see the tell-tale rust patches creeping up metal walls and along the towers’ skeletal frames.
As Borss strode forward, the sounds of battle increased—all from a centralized area. His men were right. It was just the one small clash left.
As he rounded a corner, a gust of sea breeze with the associated smell of rot that often filled harbors assaulted his nose. But he thought the smell was one of freedom. Of possibility. Beyond the corner he saw an open concrete courtyard, where five men armed with swords were standing in a wedge and fending off attacks Borss’s men made, thrusting ahead with their wooden clubs. The attacks looked half-hearted to Borss. If his men, who outnumbered the stalwart defenders, would just throw themselves into the fray, they would be victorious. They would also lose some numbers though, and he had told them not to risk their lives unnecessarily. No scolding needed then, he thought. Just a show of power. A reminder of why they follow me.
As soon as his men saw him approach, they backed off, allowing Borss to walk past, toward the five swordsmen.
They were not much to look at, these men. Their clothes were rags and mismatched. Their hair long and shaggy. Even the swords were different types and styles. One had a huge broadsword. Another had something closer to a machete. Two of the men had thinner blades closer to fencing foils. Those would snap easily in Borss’s metal-covered hands. The fifth had a curved Asian sword.
“Lay down your weapons and join me now,” Borss announced, his voice booming and echoing. “It’s your only chance to live.”
He had no intent of letting any of them live, but sometimes the glimmer of hope was all a man needed to drop his resistance. Other times that hope fueled the fight.
All five men started to raise their swords up, but Borss ran forward. A huge man, he nonetheless was fast. Had always been. And he wore the heavy metal chest and back plates with the spikes, as well as his heavy spiked gauntlets when he trained, so their extra weight did not slow him. At his side in a specially crafted leather holster was the huge, spiked metal ball of his flail, and seated next to that was the handle. As he ran at the men, the chain jangled, almost like a lover calling to him. His hand slipped down to the handle, then he snapped his arm out, his huge muscles tugging the deadly weapon from its resting place. The metal ball shot forward and mashed first through the top of an upraised sword—one of the feeble ones—and then through the face and skull of the man foolish enough to call that a weapon.
Blood and brain detonated from the man, showering all the combatants in gore.
Borss felt a sword clang into his back, finding its way between the metal spikes of the back plate, but stopped by the plate itself. He twisted his torso, and swung the flail back toward his attacker. He heard the satisfying clink of the spikes on his back breaking the attacker’s sword, just before the metal flail impacted the unarmored man’s side, drawing a high pitched shriek that faded in time with his life.
Borss raised his left hand as two more swords came for him. The first—the curved Asian blade—he simply caught in his metal coated fist. He wrenched his hand back, and the sword blade simply bent to the side under his strength.
At his front, the other man with a tiny sword rushed forward, thrusting. The pointed tip of the blade mashed against Borss’s chestplate and buckled, snapping and sending a shard of metal back to impale the sword’s owner.
The man started to fall, but didn’t make it far. Borss tugged the flail back in front of him, swinging hard. The deadly ball arced out on its chain, first grazing across the face of the man with the shattered blade, gouging flesh away. The spiked ball continued its course, burying itself in the Asian sword fighter’s chest. Ribs cracked and blood gushed from the wound. With a cough of viscous red, the man staggered back, freeing himself from the spikes, before collapsing dead.
Borss pulled the weapon again, and the ball travelled to his side.
Bodies fell all around him, and only the man with the large broadsword was left. He had backed away from the fight, perhaps with that niggling little glimmer of hope urging him on. Now he dropped the huge blade, and it clanged on the concrete ground. The man was crying and raised his hands in the air. “You said you would let us live if we surrendered,” he said.
Borss snapped his forearm forward, letting the flail rocket ahead. He released his massive grip on the wooden handle, and the weapon shot across the courtyard. The flail took the man’s head clean off, before embedding itself in a rusting metal wall at the back of the open space. The chain and handle banged against the wall, and then swung down like the pendulum of an old clock, dripping blood from the handle at each extent of the pendulum’s swing.
“I said it was your only chance to live. I didn’t say it was a good one.”
57
The soaring gray tower rose up out of the urban decay of what used to be a town called Charleroi, in Belgium. It was round and
flared up near its top, hundreds of feet in the air. As the only standing structure, Val walked the weary group through the rubble and ever present creeping vegetation to the base of the wide tower.
As they stood at the base of the round, conical tower, looking up at its ribbed surface, Heinrich said, “I have seen something like this in Germany. Before I was alone. It is a cooling tower from the old world.”
“Cooling what?” Val asked.
Heinrich shrugged. “They were used to generate electricity. I do not understand how it was accomplished. Only that it was.”
Val nodded. They had already seen some of the still lingering methods the old world had used to create power and light. All she really cared about was whether the towering structure would provide them with shelter for the night.
They found a set of ancient concrete stairs with a rusted metal rail and ascended to a hole in the side wall of the tower. There were holes near the base of the structure, behind tangled vines and pine shrubs, but the stairs seemed more inviting.
They were weary after the long walk.
The ATVs had run out of propane three days earlier—a full two weeks after Nils’s death. They had taken Nils’s body with them, away from the slime-coated and stinking field of death. Two miles up the road they had found a moss-coated church and graveyard. The church’s roof had fallen in, but the place had seemed a better one in which to cremate Nils than anything else they had seen in France.
When the ATVs had run out of propane, they towed them for two days, searching for fuel, but after the second day, Val had declared the vehicles useless. “They have become more burden than tool. Let us proceed on foot.”
Their three days on foot had been uneventful, but they were all sore, and short of patience. The tower was just what they needed to return some wonder to their worlds.
The open doorway provided entry to the strangest structure Val had ever seen. The interior was a massive, circular open space. The tower’s floor looked like a series of concrete islands—seven of them—arranged around the outside rim, connected by a starburst of concrete walkways and surrounded by dark water. At the center of it all was a moss coated hole, like a drain that had long ago been filled. She looked up and understood why. Rings of spiraling ribbed walls led up to a wide, roofless opening. They were standing inside the largest chimney she had ever seen, perhaps the largest built by mankind.
“This will not keep water off us, if it rains tonight,” Morten complained.
“It is one of the only structures standing,” Anders pointed out.
“I like it,” Oskar said, his voice full of wonder, and echoing loudly through the hollow tower.
The acoustic quality to the space was amazing, sending reverberations of sound back to them in a pleasing cascade of diminishing tones. Oskar picked up a small cracked chunk of concrete from the walkway and threw it toward the distant curved wall. The man-made rock pinged off the wall, and down through the slats surrounding the floating island to plunk in the water. The echo from the projectile rippled around the tower. Oskar smiled like a small boy, as Skjold fled up and out the top of the tower, the noise having startled the sensitive bird.
Val sat down on the concrete next to the raised funnel-like hole at the center of the chamber, trying to make sense of the faded letters painted on the walls by vandals long ago.
“It is not perfect, but I fear we will not find perfect tonight. We stay here,” Val announced.
Morten slumped to the ground next to her. Oskar wandered the far end of another raised catwalk, checking out the strange building. Heinrich went back out the way they had come, to collect firewood, and Anders dumped his pack before following the German.
Ulrik stood, and Agnes stood with him. Val had noticed that the girl was gravitating toward him after the attack in France. She suspected the girl was scared of her now, having seen the berserker in her set loose. She stayed close to Ulrik at all times now, and spoke rarely.
Val turned her eyes to him. He looked angry.
Seeing the larger man’s visage, Morten picked himself up and said, “I think I will go and help the others gather wood.”
When he had left, Val got to her feet, scraping dust off her clothes. “What is it?” she asked him, feeling frustrated that he was again questioning her decision. She knew this odd cooling tower was not the optimal place for them to spend the night, but they had seen nothing better in the miles they had covered during the day—and certainly not in the ruined town around them.
“Why did you not tell us about this machine part Halvard needs?” Ulrik dropped his sack, and leaned his ax against a metal railing, first pushing on it to make sure rust and age had not withered the metal to dust.
Val stepped closer to him. “Keep your voice down.” She pointed up at the sloped walls of the tower. “The echoes will carry your words like the wings of a bird.”
Ulrik’s scowl said he was not concerned whether the others heard him. Agnes took two steps behind him and set her pack down, but her eyes and ears never left the discussion.
With Oskar exploring the walls fifty feet away, and the others outside the building, Val lowered her goggles and looked into Ulrik’s face. He flinched as though he’d forgotten the startling green color of her eyes.
“I did not know who I could trust, Ulrik. Halvard advised caution.”
Ulrik’s features softened, and he ran his fingers through his long beard. “You could have been killed—at any time since we left the North. And then no one would know about this necessary piece of metal.”
She hung her head slightly, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Oskar was returning from his explorations. She suspected it was because the volume and echo of their voices had dropped, and he was hoping to eavesdrop a bit. She slid her goggles back onto her face, then looked back to Ulrik, hissing at him. “The thing is necessary. I do not know for what. But I tell you this—there were times at the beginning I thought of leaving you all behind. I did not know you, but I knew me.”
His eyes rose in shock, his thick bushy blonde eyebrows arching high on his sunburnt forehead. Before he could speak, she leaned in toward him.
“Now I know you. Now, I trust you. I trusted Nils and Erlend. Heinrich will forever be grateful to us that we fed him when he was out of food—as we should be to him, when he kept us from starving. And the others have been reliable, of course...”
“Then what is the issue?” Ulrik said, his voice low, as Oskar approached.
“I do not know...” she said.
“Know what?” Oskar said, stepping onto the concrete island, and walking around the deep funneled hole, peering into it.
“We were just wondering how this place was built,” Agnes said, not even looking at Oskar, as she rummaged through her pack for her blanket.
Val and Ulrik looked gratefully at the girl for her quick save, while Oskar continued across to the walkway that led out of the tower, oblivious to their facial expressions.
But as he went out, no doubt looking for his constant companion, Morten, Val became more and more certain from the man’s nonchalance that he had been spying, most likely at Morten’s behest.
58
Anders and Heinrich set up a fire outside the tower, at the base of the stairs. After they had cooked the rabbits Skjold had brought back that day, they would cover the fire with water and smother it long before dark. They didn’t know if anyone was nearby, but they had long since learned to extinguish fires before the sun fell.
Morten and Oskar had reclined on the ground by the fire, and Anders, his work for the day done, was fletching a new arrow, his avian partner having once more taken to the sky. Heinrich had taken to the task of cooking food for the group—and they were happy to let him do it. He could turn a dry burnt rabbit into a veritable delicacy with the unusual herbs and plants he gathered on their journeys. He had several small pouches in which he kept crushed and ground powders and tiny sprigs of crushed leaves. No one understood his cooking arts, but their mouths
all watered when he told them he was going to try something new.
Tonight, Val noticed Ulrik being more standoffish than usual. He had sat on a low concrete wall, after scraping it clear of a creeping red vine. It was a good position to keep an eye on everyone in the group. A shoeless Agnes sat next to him, rubbing her sore feet. The both of them were far enough removed from the others that Morten felt comfortable poking fun.
“So grandfather and his young protégé are on their own tonight,” he said.
The others laughed. Val said nothing. She didn’t like Morten’s way of denigrating everything and everyone, but she would tolerate it some, because she knew the men needed to unwind. She had been particularly wary of the looks Morten had cast at Agnes since they had collected her in Venice. It was a strange look. Val wasn’t sure what it meant. Was he looking at the young girl in lust, or with bemusement at her green eyes? Was it possibly resentment because of the loss of life that had been involved in collecting the girl? All Val knew for sure was that the man’s eyes lingered too long on the teenager.
“Oh, leave them alone,” Anders said, still chuckling. “She is probably just terrified of your stink, Morten.”
That got Oskar and Heinrich laughing harder, and Morten was always a good sport about good-natured ribbing, so he took the barb with a smile.
“I am serious when I say her eyes frighten me, though,” Morten said.
“I have never seen anything like them,” Anders agreed.
Val stayed quiet and forgot to breathe for just a moment, curious where this new tangent would lead.
“I have,” Morten admitted, his face lost in a long ago memory.
“Oh!” Oskar blurted. “Oh yeah! I almost forgot that.”
Heinrich left the rabbit he was preparing with a thick sauce. “You have actually seen green eyes before?” he asked, incredulous.
Viking Tomorrow Page 24