by Guy Haley
Then a howl as the dogs were set loose. They rushed across the plains, baying.
"Steady, Richards, steady," Richards told himself. The rush of fear his human facsimile provided him was powerful.
"Keep your spear up, Richards, don't lose your head. Should anything get through I'll shift to stone," said Tarquin urgently. "Just remember you won't be quite so nimble when I do. Keep that in mind, dear boy, and it'll all be tickety-boo. You'll see."
"I don't see why we can't just fuck off," Richards said.
The commander of the arbalesteers shouted, and the first rank readied themselves. Two hundred heavy crossbows clicked into place on their tripods. They waited, their arms steady, their gaze unwavering. The commander held his arm. The hounds came on.
"Company!" called Richards' sergeant. "Present pikes!" Richards cursed his quaking limbs as he fumbled his spear into place.
"This is where it all begins my friend," said the hare behind Richards. "Wish me luck."
The arbalesteer captain dropped his arm, and the world dissolved into violence.
Two hundred barbed quarrels sped unerringly. The yelps of two hundred dogs filled the air.
A shout went up from the morblins, and they broke into a run towards the allied lines, the trollmen beside them, the ground thundering as they came. The air crackled with electricity as the lancers of Pylon City discharged their weaponry into the front of the horde. Hundreds fell, burnt and writhing, but there were thousands behind. The lancemen parted ranks, and with a mighty squeak a horde of vole mercenaries, the vanguard of the League of Brave but Small Animals, hurled themselves through the gap towards the approaching morblins. There was a crash as the lines connected.
The lancemen reformed smoothly and pumped bolt after bolt of cerulean energy into the rear ranks of the horde, picking out the larger creatures as the valiant voles held back the enemy. By Richards the foreign crossbowmen fired by rank an endless rain of quarrels. The dead of the enemy tumbled in heaps.
The enemy artillery opened up. Shells whistled overhead from the tracked towers of Penumbra. Dozens of shells slammed into the packed lines of men and animals. Screams filled the air. Earth and blood fountained skywards and body parts rained down. Groups of the more timid animals looked close to dissolving into panic.
"Eyes front, soldier!" shouted the sergeant at Richards.
The allied guns replied. Heavy lightning burned through the air, leaving glowing after-images and a sharp smell. Iron towers burst into flame and stopped in their tracks. One carried on moving forward, a track blown clean off. It heeled over ponderously, and crashed down, crushing hundreds of its own side. The allied lightning cannon raked bloody furrows in the horde, but their numbers seemed inexhaustible.
The arbalesteers kept firing as the enemy closed, ignoring the desperate fights of their comrades with the surviving warhounds. The corpses of morblins and trollmen lay five deep. The enemy were so numerous that they kept on coming, fifty metres away, then thirty, then twenty. The arbalesteers shot until they were on top of them. Richards saw one go down screaming under a haemite, his body sucked dry. More haemites followed, and the sounds of blades on metal bodies rang out across the field as the arbalesteers abandoned their crossbows and drew their short swords.
"Steady, lads!" barked the sergeant. "Here they come!"
The earth shook under the weight of charging trollmen. The line of arbalesteers bent backwards, wavered and broke. The enemy surged through in one and twos and then by the dozen. They flung themselves at the line of men, flattening many. Richards' arm juddered as a bellowing creature impaled itself on his spear.
"Watch out!" roared the lion. Richards jumped back as another trollman swung at him, leaving his spear in the guts of his toppling foe. He ducked a hammer blow, narrowly keeping his footing. The trollman readied his weapon for another strike. Richards had nowhere to go, hemmed in by the dead and those desperate not to be. A blast of lightning felled the trollman, leaving Richards gasping. Limbs and blades whirled around him.
A morblin cannoned into him, clawing and biting. He wrestled with it a while, but it was as weak as its fat body suggested, and he managed to snatch out his sword and despatch it. Richards looked at his sword, slick and treacherous in his hands, then at the creatures from innumerable virt-games warring in deadly earnest all around him, the violent deaths of scores of talking animals and gaming clichés.
"This is fucking ridiculous!" shouted Richards.
The world disappeared behind a sheet of white. Richards stumbled, blood in his eyes, hearing gone. He blinked and found himself in a lull in the fighting.
Bodies lay all about. A ruddy crater garnished with the limbs of friend and foe occupied the space where the centre of his regiment had been. A lucky few stood blinking, covered in blood. They stared at one another, shocked, lost between surprise and relief.
Richards staggered in a rough circle, his head spinning. Shouting, loud and frantic, impinged on the ringing in his ears. Away to his right, a knot of surprised troops yelled as the weasels attacked them from behind.
Richards wiped the blood of his comrades from his face. His head cleared. "I've got to get out of here," he said, and cast about for a means of escape.
A paw grabbed him from behind, spinning him round. The lame hare, one of his ears a tatter.
"Where are you going? Fleeing is the blackest treason…"
"I…" said Richards.
The hare held up a hand to remonstrate. It was the last thing it ever did. A cannonball whistled by, a gust of hard wind stirring Richards' hair. It removed the hare's head neatly. Blood fountained from its neck, splattering Richards, and the hare folded onto its lame leg like a collapsible chair.
Richards stumbled back, caught sight of a stray thog and ran for it. He grabbed its reins and swung atop. It lowed angrily and stamped its six legs, but held fast. He tugged on its reins, dragging its head around, and the animal performed a tight circle.
Fighting raged all about. There was no way out.
"Dammit! What do we do now?"
"Let's get to the centre, tell the hedgehog. We'll better be able to be on our way if they win," said Tarquin.
Richards debated the lion's suggestion with himself. He spun the mount round again. There was little chance he'd get off the field intact, not with the weasels butchering their way through their own side all around him. "OK," he said, "OK." He kicked with his heels, and the thog took off.
Shells exploded to the left of Richards, to the right of him, reducing the battle to a series of violent tableaux, surging into view and then lost in veils of gunsmoke and sheets of earth.
Three half-naked anime heroines tackled a trollman, baiting it with spears. A band of otters in lab coats tackled a purple octopus covered in smilies. Men rolled in the dirt with morblins, dodging the thrusts of filthy knives. Haemites fed on friend and foe alike, their whistles an industrial dirge. Here and there disciplined pockets of men and beasts formed tight groups, spearpoint and blade keeping the Penumbra's minions at bay. But every enemy felled was replaced by four more. Gone were the proud ranks; the field writhed with small and personal wars, all thoughts of strategy obscured by blood and sweat and terror. Creatures came at Richards to fall to his sword or bounce from the flanks of the six-legged cow, their cries snatched away by speed and steel.
"Nearly there!" yelled Richards.
Tarquin turned to stone and saved Richards from a spearpoint. "We're not out of the woods yet."
Richards hammered toward the centre, where the disciplined corps of hedgehogs stood firm. Heavily armoured in burnished steel, they surrounded the Lord High Commander's command post, an enormous tortoise with "Roger" written in childish script on its shell.
Atop Roger was a howdah of metal. Telescopes and small lightning cannon were fixed to the rails. One gunner lay dead in the harness of his shattered weapon, but the others trained theirs still upon the enemy, spikes of electricity writhing periodically through the air. In front of the howda
h, on a seat on the lip of Roger's shell, sat another hedgehog holding a set of metal reins. It flicked a whip about the tortoise's head. Roger seemed unperturbed. Through his helm's eye-slits, he pondered the bloodbath with the slow bemusement with which tortoises regard the world.
"Lord High Commander Hedgehog!" yelled Richards, leaping off the thog. He bounded up the low steps to the howdah, and was promptly accosted by two burly hedgehogs.
"Who are you?" growled one.
"Some kind of assassin," said the other. Blades scraped as they drew out their daggers.
"I have urgent news for the Lord High Commander," insisted Richards.
"No one allowed up here but general staff," yelled the hedgehog over the noise of an exploding shell. "Push off!"
"Let him through, let him through," said the diffident voice of Hedgehog. "I will see him." The bodyguards stepped aside, and Richards was afforded a view of the Lord High Commander. His visor was up, since he had been conferring with his aides, and as Richards approached he snapped shut an elegant telescope. "Well?" said Hedgehog. "What is it, human? Speak, then be gone."
"The weasels, the weasels have turned!"
"I see," said Hedgehog, his voice several degrees cooler. "They are rolling up the right flank?"
"Right now."
"No doubt you think I should act. But I won't," said Lord High Commander Hedgehog. "The weasels, you see, work for me."
"Ah."
"'Ah' indeed. Those short-sighted fools in Pylon City could not see the advantage to be had from forming an alliance with Penumbra. Though we argued the case with them, they would not favour the idea. Penumbra was more than happy to entertain our unilateral offer. The Pylonites will die. Our aeons-long struggle with Pylon City will be over, and the Magic Wood will survive the Great Terror, forever free of the tyranny of men and their machines!"
"That's cold," said Richards. "Your people are dying in droves."
"Rather unfortunate, that. Still, means there won't be much opposition when I take over the Wood, will there? With Lord Penumbra's blessing, of course."
"You stupid rodent," said Richards. "He's tricked you into fighting his war for him."
Hedgehog smiled. "I have never lost a battle. As long as there has been an army of the Magic Wood there has been a Lord High Commander Hedgehog, and as long as that has been so, there have been no defeats. This battle tortoise, Roger, he was my father's mount, before that my grandfather's, my great great-grandfather's. He has never witnessed a battle in which he was not upon the winning side. How else do you think he can remain so phlegmatic, eh? I have two hundred years of victory at my back and you, some man, tell me I am wrong? Pfah! Let the whole of the Earth thunder to the tramping of iron-shod paws, for I will rule it all!" Hedgehog cackled maniacally. Two hedgehogs stepped forward. "Now I'm going to kill you. Make him kneel." The hedgehogs forced Richards down. The Lord High Commander stepped forward and loomed over Richards. "Any last words?" He unhitched his lightning-pistol.
"I'm not going to beg," said Richards.
"I am not so crass as to expect begging!" scoffed the hedgehog. "I was rather hoping for some brave witticism. Stiff upper lip and all, wot? Pity."
"You're making a terrible mistake."
"Yes, yes," said the hedgehog. "Goodbye."
Richards stared down the crystal at the end of the gun.
"Balls," he said, and screwed his eyes tight. No shot came. Roger let out a croak of fear like tearing paper and reared up. There was a sound of the snapping of chain and the wrenching of metal. The howdah broke into pieces as it came free of Roger's shell, scattering hedgehogs and pitching Richards to the blackened ground. He rolled to avoid the tortoise's foot as Roger ran at some speed away from the source of his horror, squashing two of Hedgehog's bodyguards flat and leaving them oozing in the dust. The rest of Hedgehog's guard picked themselves up, faltered and followed the tortoise.
Richards looked behind him, and his own heart froze. Over the prone body of Lord High Commander Hedgehog was Lord Penumbra.
Penumbra sat atop a beast that was half-horse, half-dragon. It pawed at the earth with clawed hoofs. Its skin was a coat of scales, its face a snarl of night-black violence, its eyes those of a cat, its tail a serpent's head. It radiated a deep chill, pinning Richards' breath to the air in clouds of frost. Black vapours curled around it, stealing the light away. Penumbra himself was nebulous and black, his form clad in shadow and armour of jet.
The battlefield grew quiet, sound stymied in Penumbra's presence. The sky roiled with the storm of the world-death.
"Hedgehog!" rang out a sepulchral voice. "Hedgehog! I come with your reward! Rule in my name! Death shall be thy kingdom!"
Richards could not look directly at Penumbra, try as he might. His bright darkness blinded him.
"N-no, my lord!" said Hedgehog. "We have an arrangement!" He shook. No longer the proud warlord, he was now just a big fat rodent in a complicated tin suit.
"Death!" bellowed Penumbra. His mount reared, its whinnying the end of flowers. "Death! Low field-beast, you would seek to deal with me? Where is your honour, where is your side of the bargain? Where is Queen Isabella?" He roared, a long sound of discordant ferocity. "Fool!"
"No, no!" squealed Hedgehog, falling to his knees. "Please! I looked, I tried!"
Penumbra drew a pillar of black flame as he would a sword. His arm extended, distorted like a shadow, the weapon stretching impossibly towards the hedgehog. A shaft of blackness struck out from it, piercing Hedgehog's chest.
Hedgehog ceased to be. Shadow became light and light shadow. He became a negative of sooty grains. Hedgehog dissipated, pulled into the sword, his thin scream remaining in the air, the scream all small animals make in pain, nothing more.
Richards felt his stomach turn to water as Penumbra's faceplate swivelled toward him. "And now you. You and your ilk are a blight on this land."
The shadow-blade extended out, its tip burning Richards with its cold. As it came, reality warped around it, and Richards was struck by a thought. Well, two thoughts.
The first was that reality was warping around the blade, turning glassy and spinning off sub-universes that popped like soap bubbles on the charred grass.
Secondly, Richards could not hear k52's Gridsignature at all.
His eyes narrowed.
Something came swiftly from the left. There was a roar, the sound of metal hitting metal. The ground heaved. Richards' chest went tight as Tarquin turned to stone. He fell up into the air, and came back down. He found himself lying in a smoking crater, soil pattering off him. His vision swam. An iron monster reached down with long claws to pluck the last of his life from him.
That was all his facsimiled mind could take.
CHAPTER 15
The Valley
A squeaking accompanied by a grinding penetrated the fog in Richards' mind. He decided he found it annoying, but his irritation was quickly forgotten as sensation returned to him. He hurt all over. His arm was a mass of painful throbbing. He lay there, not daring to move, eyes shut until a jolt through whatever he lay on brought more pain and caused them to jump open.
He pulled himself onto his elbows and tried not to whimper.
He was on a pump wagon. Bear stood at one end of the mechanism, methodically pushing it up and down with one paw, struggling out of his armour as he did so.
"He's awake," said Tarquin.
"You're back!" shouted Bear, his voice muffled by the armour. He wrenched it over his head, and tossed it overboard. "Damn uncomfortable that was. Who ever heard of a bear in armour? Ridiculous. But I'm keeping these." He held up a paw encased in a heavy gauntlet. There was a rasp of metal, and four blades popped out of the back of it. "Good, eh?" said Bear. "They're a lot sharper than my own, and now I need never worry about breaking a nail in a fight."
Richards tried to sit up.
"Steady, sunshine!" said Bear, and the squeaking slowed. "Don't do anything silly."
Richards looked over the side of the pu
mp wagon, which appeared to be flying through the air.
"We're on the bridge between the plateau and the Magic Wood. You don't want to fall," said Tarquin. There were clouds below them.
"Thought we'd lost you back there, sunshine," said Bear. "It all got a bit hairy. No one escaped. They were cut down to a squirrel."
"I don't believe this," said Richards and lay back down. "Why me?"
"Don't be like that. I got us out of there, didn't I?" said Bear.
Richards sat up properly. His chest hurt like hell.
"Shrapnel wound. A scratch, so don't worry," said Bear. It had been expertly stitched. "Like that? That's my work. As was finding this pump wagon at Last Station. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch this bear! I figured we'd head west. Did I do good?"