Beyond the Hell Cliffs

by Case C. Capehart

  The surviving guards fell back and called for reinforcements. Two hundred more guards, all with wide, iron shields and long pikes joined them in under a week and the city was surrounded. The guards relaxed and took their time, able to tease the defense lines with attacks all day and throughout the night at their leisure. Meanwhile the few defenders grew exhausted under the constant threats of attack.

  Those inside the city were whittled down gradually, one or two losses at a time, until a full-scale attack the night before had taken their numbers down to only a few dozen. Only Hitomi’s skirmishing strategy, utilizing the amazing endurance of her militia to strike and run, over and over, had saved them from total defeat. The entire milita, save her and two others, was annihilated.

  “Those soulless motherfuckers,” Naoko growled between her teeth. “I’ll kill every one of them. Just give me a tower, plenty of arrows and destroy the stairs.”

  “You’ll get your chance for vengeance, kid,” Kimura said. “Hitomi’s crew bought us that chance.”

  “They bought us only time,” Hitomi said flatly. She stared into the pyre without blinking. “The Gimlets are out of bolts and too frightened to fight even if they could make more. There are only us Helcats, Ayane and Yumiko, and a few Naga assassins left. Come daylight, we’ll make our stand against more than two hundred guards.”

  “You’ve brought us this far, Hitomi,” Beretta said. “Every preparation, miraculous plan, every last second command… you have a mind for this.”

  “That’s right,” Indie added. “Who knew a blue-haired ex-prostitute would be so smart at killing guards.”

  “Broosh!” Kimura cheered. “You can’t give up now, sister.”

  “Who said anything about giving up?” Hitomi looked around at the others gathered before the fire. She pulled the broadheaded spear from the strap on her back and planted it in the ground before her. “We’ll occupy a single building, one of the tall ones, at the edge of the city. Naoko and one of the Gimlets that isn’t crawling into a hole will take the top floor with every last arrow we have. The Gimlet will feed arrows, letting her fire as fast as possible. The building has to have one door and no lower windows, but we’ll do the best we can if that’s not possible. We’ll defend the opening, shifting fresh fighters for the injured, always keeping the least injured of us at the front.”

  “They won’t charge into the meat grinder forever,” Kimura said. “And once we wedge ourselves in there, we’ll have no where to go once they overwhelm us or figure out how to smoke us out.”

  “We have no where to go as it is. This isn’t a strategy for winning. I just want to kill as many of them as possible before I die.”

  “So this is really the end, then.” Yumiko was one of the two survivors of the militia. Hitomi could remember a time when she almost booted the dark-haired girl for being too emotionally fragile. Now she stood, stone-faced and resigned to fate, next to the other survivor, Ayane. How startlingly she had changed in a survival situation.

  “We’ll set up in one of the buildings near the outside and wait for the attack. I doubt they really know how few of us are left, else they wouldn’t have retreated last night. They should come all at once.”

  “Hey, just like your group discounts back in the brothel!” Kimura joked.

  “Wow… even at a time like this, Kimura?” Hitomi asked, shaking her head with a faint smile.

  “I don’t care if we are about to die, I can’t resist when you set yourself up like that,” Kimura squealed with a grin.

  The group took up their weapons and left the funeral pyre behind. They managed to find one Gimlet willing to assist Naoko, a dim-witted worker named Giddix. From a small building at the edge of the city, the group prepared for their last stand. Out before them, making no effort to form lines, were the guards from the Citadel. They had cut down so many, surviving for two weeks off of luck and desperation, yet there were still so many enemies left.

  Yumiko was right, Hitomi thought as she stared out the doorway at the guards. This is the end for all of us.

  She was only fourteen years old when she came home to an empty house. Her father had not left her any food or any letter saying why he left. The house was empty except for a few toys she had found and a few drops of blood on the sink. She had wanted to keep the house by working a job, but she had no special skills and no one was hiring young girls, especially ones cursed with blue-green hair. She was tall, slender and her breasts had just come in the season before. That was enough for Gurosuke, the owner of a specialty club in the northern ghettos of the Citadel.

  Gurosuke was strictly a businessman and did not know how to ease anyone into the business, nor did he care. Hitomi’s first client was a Rathgar captain who was so big she thought he was going to break her in half. The captain had paid double for a pure girl and did not ask for particulars, like how old they were. The extra cut Gurosuke gave her did not make the pain go away, but it did allow her to buy a big bottle of grog and get plastered. It was a night of firsts for her.

  She thought she was going to be executed three years later when she killed a customer who went too far with her. She had not even realized she had done it until Gurosuke pulled her off of the corpse and beat her until she stopped moving. At seventeen and completely addicted to grog, Hitomi was not worth paying off the guards so Gurosuke had her arrested and thrown in the Pit. If her client had been a Rathgar, she would have been hanged, but the one in charge of sentencing her was the guard captain that had initiated her into her life of whoring and he took pity on her… for a little nostalgic incentive on her part. She had thought about killing him, too, as she writhed on top of him, but she was already starting to get sick from lack of alcohol and couldn’t think clearly enough to form a plan.

  She could remember little from her first few weeks in the Pit, just a blur of faces as she was passed around to anyone who could give her a sip of some kitchen-brewed death juice. She took drugs as well, if that was what was offered. If she ever remembered all the shit she had done while high on Kafkel juice, she would probably kill herself. When she could not screw her way into a fix, she would steal it and just as one angry Rathgar was about to answer her prayers and end her pitiful existence, there was Helkree and Grass-hair.

  “Take her,” is what he said, pointing right at her. She would never forget it or the confusion she felt when he did that. Helkree, that crazy-ass Rathgar that more than one client had mentioned before, dragged her by the hair all the way to her cell. Six months later, Hitomi had outlasted and outfought a dozen other females to stay close to Grass-hair. She had not been with him yet, had only seen him a few times, but Helkree was fiercely loyal to him and because of that the others saw him as a god. Helkree helped deify him in their eyes and never let any of the Helcats forget that Grass-hair was the reason they were there, above all the other floozies who could never stand on their own feet.

  “I’ll do anything you want,” she had confessed, bleary eyed and sobbing the first time Grass-hair brought her to his cell. “You just tell me and I can do it, I promise. It’s what I’m good for!”

  “You would not have made it this far if pleasing men was all you were good for, Hitomi,” he said, gently pushing her against the wall and caressing her cheek. “You’re not just some whore; not anymore. You’re a Helcat and I would have you by my side over anyone else in this world. Remain at my side, always… that’s all I ask.”

  She was his from that moment on and agreed to never leave him, but now she was going back on that promise. She had not seen him in five years, but his last orders were to watch over the people they had freed. She prayed to the spirits that Grass-hair would understand why she and her sisters died there inside that building at the edge of Gimlet City and that he would forgive her.

  “Spirits of War, I can’t believe I’m going to die in a city of Gimlets, all because that dumbass Greela thinks there’s a super weapon,” Indie mused. “How dumb. Like Gimlets could build a super weapon. Rathgar fall for anything.�
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  “Hey, wait…” Hitomi said, pausing and staring into space. Her eyes got big and she looked around. “Holy shit, wait! A super weapon!”

  “It was a lie, Hitomi,” Beretta said. “We helped feed it because it kept Greela from attacking the farming villages and focus on us. The Gimlets build some strange things, but none are capable of building anything like what the men from the north have.”

  “Do they have anything that looks like a super weapon?”

  “I don’t know, what does a super weapon look like? I don’t think the guards even know.” Beretta said. A look crossed over her face, as if an idea was forming in her head and she smiled at Hitomi. “Oh, splendid!”

  “What the hell is going on?” Kimura asked.

  “It would be something like a tube… that magic could be funneled through, I think,” the Infernal continued. “It would have to be spectacular-looking, not just a tube on the ground or anything.”

  “It will be,” Hitomi said. “You’ll be inside of it, making as much noise and light as possible. And it needs to be mobile! Can you get it on a cart or something?”

  “Of course! And I can line the entire thing with flames and coils of glowing heat!” The flames on Beretta’s head brightened with excitement. “It won’t be the least bit lethal, you know. Not unless any of them are dumb enough to crawl in there with me.”

  “Hey, what are you two giggling about?” Kimura pressed. “Have you two gone insane, finally? You’re going to strip naked and dance around outside or something?”

  “Magda and Indie, go with Beretta. She needs muscle,” Hitomi commanded. “Quickly, ladies! The rest of you, we’re holding this fucking ground, at all costs! Beretta needs enough time to get to the Scrapyard and back and we’re going to give it to her!”

  The Infernal and the two Rathgar exited the house and sprinted for the Scrapyard while the remaining women braced for the attack. Unlike what Hitomi had predicted, the entire force did not come at them all at once. A group large enough to surround the building approached and fanned out. Once they realized there were no other entrances, they clustered to push through the doorway.

  Arrows came down into the group three at a time. Naoko, keeping her cool, had waited to see what the attackers would do before revealing her presence. Before the group realized what was happening, six of them were bleeding out on the ground and several others were running back to the formation with shafts sticking out of their bodies. The few who had managed to charge the door were cut down quickly by Hitomi’s spear.

  The group retreated and called for more reinforcements. The surroundings were checked by shield-wearing guards and when it was clear that no others were there to ambush them, fifty men rushed the door at once.

  Hitomi wished they still had Indie with her shield, to hold back the tide. The two Naga men who had taken their place did not have the stature or strength to push back the assault. Hitomi and her two remaining militia members pistoned their spears with practiced aim, felling the first few and slowing the others.

  One guard managed to grab Yumiko’s spear and threatened to disarm her. Hitomi reached through the shields and snatched the Ratghar by the chest-plate. Hitomi was not as strong as Indie or Magda, but among Lokai she was still a brute. She set her feet and hauled the Rathgar through the shields and flung him past her, right at an awaiting Kimura.

  The Naga Helcat spun with his momentum and slammed him into the wall, her dagger slipping smoothly across his throat before he could counter.

  There was a cry and one of the Naga holding a shield started to fall back, blood spilling from his abdomen.

  “Right shield! Someone get on it now!” Hitomi cried.

  An axe got through the bottleneck and came right at her face. She brought her spear up just in time to catch the underside of it. A quick jerk backwards ripped it from the guard’s grip and she returned the blow with more success, jamming the fat blade of her spear right between his eyes.

  Finally the guards gave up and retreated, leaving a stack of bodies clogging the entrance of the building. Hitomi finished off a guard who was still writhing and turned back to the others. The Naga who had been holding the right shield was wounded deeply and would not last the hour. The others were scraped and bleeding slightly and she had failed to notice a gash across her shoulder.

  “We won’t survive another push like that,” Kimura said. “The next one will break through. Maybe if you wouldn’t have sent our two strongest fighters away on some chore…”

  “They’re forming up with shields,” Yumiko said. “Looks like they aren’t going to give us a chance to catch our breath.”

  “Magda and Indie are back!” Naoko yelled. “And they’re pushing a giant… thing!”

  “Stay here!” Hitomi yelled as she lept up the stairs to the second floor.

  There were more windows up above where Naoko and Giddix were. The Gimlet was hunkered down in the corner around only a dozen remaining arrows. Naoko had the fingers on her right hand wrapped up with a rag that was slick with blood. She saw Hitomi glance nervously at it.

  “Not wounded,” Naoko said. “A hundred arrows in two minutes takes a toll. I had to switch off to my left hand at the end.”

  “You’ve done good,” Hitomi said as she went to the window.

  Below, Indie and Magda were behind a cart, pushing a large metal cylinder that might have been the chimney of a giant stove. Through a spiderweb of cracks along the tube, green light seeped through. Beretta was crammed down inside of it, her flames making the piece of junk look as if it were emanating power.

  “To the front!” she yelled down at them. “Hurry! We’ll keep you covered!”

  Hitomi bolted back down the stairs.

  “Everyone outside! We’re providing cover for the super weapon, so act like it!”

  The guards were moving forward for the final assault and they slowed for a brief moment when they saw the defenders pour out of their tower to meet them. Then Indie and Magda rounded the corner of the building and the group of Rathgar guards screeched to a halt.

  In that moment, Beretta flared her flames, making the entire tube radiate with light. Green flames flickered out of the front of the tube and it shook and groaned from the sudden increase in heat. Indie roared and the two Rathgar pushed harder, moving the cart past the building and aiming the end right at the halted army.

  It took only a moment for their hesitation to break. They were under orders to go stop the production of a superweapon, but many of them probably remembered the massive destruction the men from the north were capable of with their weapons. Now, it looked as if the remaining defenders had a completed weapon and it was pointed right at them.

  The tight formation of guards scattered like gnats wafted from dung. Some dropped their weapons and ran screaming in the opposite direction. Leaders tried to maintain order, but there was instant chaos in the group of guards as they all tried to escape the power that was sure to be unleashed on them. In seconds the entire force was rapidly retreating away from the city.

  “Run, you silly bitches!” Hitomi screaming, pointing her spear at their backs. “Flee before the might of the Helcats!”

  The others burst into cheers. “Broosh!” they screamed, venting their wrecked nerves as the men scampering away from them.

  “I don’t fucking believe it…” Kimura said, dropping to her knees and shaking her head. She looked up at Hitomi, dumbfounded.

  “You did it. You routed an army of hundreds with a handful of worn-out girls and a piece of scrap on a cart.”

  “We’re alive!” Ayane yelled, running up and hugging Hitomi around the waist.

  “We kicked their asses!” Yumiko cheered.

  “Maybe…” Hitomi said. She kept her eyes on the group of guards and the others stopped cheering to follow her gaze.

  Far away from the city, well out of range of any conventional weapon, the guards had stopped retreating. The leaders had regained order and it looked as if they were forming back up.
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  “Naoko?”

  The Lokai archer poked her head out the window. “They’re sending runners off in the direction of the Citadel. It looks like the rest are trying to figure out if they should come back or not. Maybe... maybe they're just going to come get their gear.”

  “No.” Hitomi broke away from Ayane and stepped forward. “They’re sending for more reinforcements. Before they had suspected that we had a weapon, but now we’ve just given them proof. Greela will send everything he has at us now… and this group will stay here to make sure we don’t escape. We only bought ourselves more time.”

  “Maybe we have enough time to finish the super weapon?” Indie asked.

  The others looked at her with scowls.

  “No? That’s not… we can’t just build a super weapon real quick?”

  “Are you outta your mind, Indie?” Kimura asked.

  “Boss, I don’t have many arrows left,” Naoko called out. “What are we doing?”

  “We could go back through the city, to the west side,” Ayane said. “They might not investigate us leaving for hours. We could get a pretty good start towards the farms… maybe lose them in the desert.”

  “And desert all the ones still inside the city?” Beretta asked.

  “They’re just Gimlets,” Ayane scoffed.

  Beretta’s flames deepened and flared as she stared a hole through the girl. “They’re MY Gimlets.”

  Ayane shrunk backwards. “Sorry, I didn’t…”

  “We’re not fleeing,” Hitomi said. “Back inside the building, Helcats. Set a watch and get some sleep. We’ll need to be fresh if they decide to call our bluff.”

  Hitomi sat in the corner of the upstairs room by herself. She had relieved Kimura on watch and she could hear the others sleeping down below her. The remaining guards had not advanced on them and she was having trouble staying conscious after four days with only a few hours sleep.