25 For 25

by Various

  ‘The next gallery’s clear.’ Mab, their Mallaxian guide, appeared in the light from Brael’s lantern. On the long ride down the shaft, huddled close in a metal cage hung from an ancient chain whose links were bigger than a man’s fist, Brael had been surprised to learn that their guide didn’t come from a mining family.

  ‘I’m a historian,’ she had told him, smiling at the absurdity of the notion. ‘Mining ended in Mallax so long ago, we’re the only people still interested in the mines. I’ve only been down a couple of times, but have made careful studies of the plans.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to feel reassured,’ Fellick said with a smile that was swallowed by the utter blackness through which they fell.

  Brael was surprised by the size of the man-made cavern he stepped into. The uneven roof rose over them in a shallow dome almost two man-heights high and wide enough for twenty men to stand side-by-side. It was virtually featureless, just a vast cave drilled into the earth – the very idea set Brael’s mind spinning. To be down here, away from the sunshine, the wind and the seasons seemed an awful way to live, no matter how impressive it was to think that men had once been able to do so.

  Ancient timbers, thicker than a man, supported the roof and were themselves supported by a lattice of smaller timbers wedged diagonally between them. Several of Brael’s men eyed them warily.

  ‘If they’ve stayed up this long, I doubt we’ve got anything to worry about,’ said Lollak.

  ‘We should be worrying about what’s down the next tunnel,’ muttered Tombek, morosely.

  ‘Oh, I’m worrying about that, too,’ Distek replied as he gingerly placed a hand on one of the timbers as if to reassure himself of its stability.

  Niches had been carved into the curving walls by the men who had dug out this gallery long ago. Presumably they had been to accommodate more lanterns of the kind Mab was carrying. Mab’s lantern – more powerful than those handed out to Brael and his men – illuminated the entire space when she opened its shutter to the fullest.

  ‘So men used to dig metal out of the ground here?’ asked Kobar. He ran a hand over the rock, mentally comparing it to the raw salt deposits he used to blow out of the cliff faces in his homeland.

  ‘Not here,’ Mab replied. ‘Further on. The next tunnel branches out towards the work faces. This was where they collected the unrefined metal that they had mined. They would load it into wheeled wagons and tow it back along the way we came, then up to the surface.’

  ‘This is where all the tunnels come together?’ asked Brael.

  Mab nodded. She ran a hand over her close-cropped hair. Brael caught sight of the additional digit that grew out of the knuckle joint of her little finger. There was one on her other hand, too; Mab made no attempt to hide them. Brael had first seen them on the surface, in the daylight that seemed only a fantasy in the utter blackness of the mine – he had experienced the same sudden shiver he had felt years ago, in the Temple of the Holy Varks.

  ‘Charges here, then,’ Brael said to Kobar, who nodded and dipped a hand into the canvas bag that was slung across his chest. He withdrew the first of several cylindrical objects he had brought down from above: a kind of compact explosive, more powerful than twice the same amount of black powder. Mallax had preserved through the generations the secrets to its costly manufacture. Also in the bag was a coiled length of a fast-burning fuse, more reliable than the greased twists of cloth Kobar was used to.

  ‘Charges?’ Mab echoed Brael’s word with concern.

  ‘Here’s where we’ll stop them,’ Brael replied. ‘One way or another.’

  In a low-ceilinged space beyond the gallery intersection, the remains of the first and second companies were gathered behind the bodies of their comrades, losing a desperate attempt to defend the main tunnel that led towards the surface. That they had succeeded in holding back the greenskins for so long was testament to their courage. Courage, however, would only last so long.

  Brael’s men emerged from a slit-narrow tunnel that had been practically invisible, appearing to be little more than a shadow, even in the powerful light of the greenskins’ lanterns. Mab, refusing to return to the surface after guiding them along one of the tunnels that led from the intersection at which Kobar had been left to work on the charges, led them along the crevice. Historians believed it to have been constructed to provide ventilation to the furthest work faces, perhaps even a means of escape in the event of a cave-in.

  Whatever the intentions of those who had created it, the tunnel allowed Brael’s men to strike at the flank of the greenskins, driving a wedge through the centre of their force as the bulky invaders struggled to turn and meet the surprise attack in a co-ordinated manner.

  They emerged into a scene painted in shadows and light. The long, low space had once been a work face from which Mallaxian miners tore unrefined metal from the rocks. Most of the light came from the invaders’ torches, strapped to foreheads or breastplates, which appeared to use some power source other than animal fat to produce beams of powerful yellow brilliance. Brael had been all but blinded when the first of the creatures turned to meet his attack. Luckily Fellick, directly behind Brael and therefore shielded by his shadow, was able to thrust a pike – its shaft cut to half-length before the descent into the mines – into the animal’s face.

  One of the greenskins had fallen before the rest of them began to realise that they were under attack from another direction.

  A shot from the heavy pistol Brael had taken from the dead greenskin in Grellax blew out the back of another’s head. The recoil kicked up Brael’s arm to his shoulder and the report in the confined space set his ears ringing. Cracking the barrel open along a hinge in its stock, he removed the smoking shell case and inserted another from his belt.

  Brael and his men discovered shortly after their arrival that Mallax had become a marketplace for stolen greenskin weaponry. Along with tales of long, hard retreats from the invaders, many of those who had gathered behind Mallax’s walls had brought with them all manner of alien artefacts: engine-driven swords, whose blades were made up of countless fast-moving teeth; machine-rifles like the one Costes and Perror had made their own; all manner and size of ammunition.

  Brael stepped over the green corpse, snapping the pistol shut as he did so. His next target saw him coming and brought its rifle to bear.

  Instinctively, Brael dropped to the floor the moment he saw the rifle barrel swinging in his direction. He shouted a warning to those behind him and, through the ringing in his ears, he heard answering shouts and cries of alarm.

  Then the greenskin fired.

  The ringing in Brael’s ears suddenly became a high buzzing, then nothing. Silence settled round him like a blanket while sharp, hot fragments of rock scored his forehead and cheek, carved from the wall and ceiling by the wildly ricocheting shells.

  To his right, a body hit the floor. By the light from the torch fixed to its breastplate, Brael was shocked to see that it was one of the invaders, half its face a smoke-edged crater. In the tunnels and galleries beneath the last human city, at least some of the greenskins’ unholy weapons were as much of a threat to their users as their targets.

  With no way of knowing if the fusillade had ceased, Brael lifted his head. The greenskin with the machine-rifle had released its trigger. Perhaps the expression on its shadow-splashed face was one of appalled surprise at what it had just done. Perhaps orders had been issued forbidding the use of machine-rifles until the surface was reached.

  Brael pushed himself to his feet. A glance to one side located another corpse. A lantern lay a short way from it, the shutter wide. It was Mab, her face pale and upturned, eyes open, the rest of her dark with shadows and blood.

  A beam of light stabbed across Brael’s eyes. Raising his damaged hand to shade them, he aimed his pistol and fired directly into the light. He didn’t hear the sound of his gun, but the light swung upwards, slashing its beam across the uneven ceiling and he moved away, not waiting to see how much damage his shot
had caused.

  His men were pressing towards the defenders at the end of the gallery. The greenskins had already adjusted to the new situation and were beginning to push back.

  Distek fell, torso bisected by a machine-sword, the only engine-driven weapon it was safe to use in the confined space. Tylor, fighting at Fellick’s back, took a crushing backhanded blow to the throat. While Fellick spun, short pike still in hand, to counter and return the attack, the young man from Erewell choked and died as his shattered, swollen larynx closed off his windpipe.

  ‘Forward!’ Brael shouted at the top of his lungs. He hoped that at least some of his men could hear him, even it he could not hear himself; his voice was a low, muffled thing confined within his skull. He could see that his men were faltering, their attack slowing as they lost the advantage of surprise. They had to drive on, to reach the small group of shattered-looking survivors from the first two companies, and then sweep them along the tunnel towards the gallery in which Kobar waited with his charges.

  Without the time or even the space to reload his looted gun, Brael had re-holstered it in his belt at the small of his back and unhooked his greenskin cleaver. The press of bodies at the tunnel mouth had become so tight it was barely possible to swing the weapon. The sweat, anger and fear of the invaders mingled with that of the defenders. The body of every combatant was smeared with a mixture of Agran blood and the sickly ichor that ran beneath the greenskins’ hide.

  He kept shouting as he pushed and hacked, as he used the pommel end of the cleaver to put out a glowering red eye then reversed the weapon to slash it across the exposed vein that throbbed between the cords of the creature’s neck. A second slash severed the fingers that the beast pressed against the spouting wound. And still he shouted, urging his men on and the defenders to hold out for one heartbeat longer, one–

  With a start, Brael realised that he was staring into the exhausted, almost dead eyes of another human being. A man from one of the first two companies, his clothing hung in tatters and he was covered in the blood of two species.

  Brael shouted instructions. The stranger nodded and turned away. At that moment, Brael was hit by the kind of certainty that he had become used to being accompanied by a drumming inside his head and a bilious display of lights before his eyes. Whether it was the utter confusion of the battle or his deafness, those accompanying sensations did not materialise. All Brael knew was that something awful was about to enter the gallery. Something that could spell the end for them all.

  Still shouting, he grabbed the nearest of his men – Kleeve, as it turned out, wearing the same half-crazed expression Brael was sure was also on his own face – and all but threw him into the tunnel. Brael turned, grabbed another of the defenders – this time a man he didn’t recognise – all the while shouting that despite the risks, they must get out of this gallery now.

  Where possible, the defenders ducked away from the conflict, heading for the tunnel mouth – which was only two or three steps behind any of them, so close had the press become. Several were cut down by the greenskins, who were in turn forced to retreat by Brael and Fellick, each standing to one side of the tunnel, stabbing and slashing with cleaver and cut-down pike.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Brael and turned to run down the tunnel, slapping Fellick on the shoulder as he did so. And at that moment, the greenskins paused. Several cocked their heads as if they had heard something, though Brael could still hear nothing. That gave the last two living Agrans the chance to sprint down the tunnel, heedless of the uneven floor, stumbling and righting themselves as they ran.

  Someone had left a lantern on the tunnel floor, without whose light to warn them, Brael and Fellick would have run at full speed into the rock wall as the tunnel made a sharp left turn. As they made the turn, the first shells impacted the wall that they would have hit, punching craters into the rock and filling the air with razor-sharp splinters.

  Fellick stumbled, uttering a sharp cry that Brael was unable to hear. Catching his balance he continued to run, hand pressed to his side.

  ‘Reinforcements!’ Fellick gasped out after he and Brael had burst from the tunnel and all but fell into Kleeve’s arms. Though unable to hear Fellick’s voice, Brael saw that others were already working to staunch a wound in his side. Fellick winced, his back arching involuntarily, as Tombek eased a long sliver of rock from his back, just below the curve of his ribs.

  ‘Damn greenskins sent reinforcements!’ Fellick gasped out as his wound was bound in a length of filthy cloth torn from the remains of someone’s shirt. ‘Either they got impatient or always planned to send them, but they’re on their way.’

  ‘We’d have still been in the gallery when they arrived,’ realised one of the survivors from the second company to enter the mine. ‘If we hadn’t moved before they arrived, they’d have cut us down like grass.’ He was staring at Brael as he spoke.

  ‘Coincidence,’ said another from his company.

  ‘I said that,’ added Tombek, looking up from fastening the makeshift bandage around Fellick’s torso. ‘Once.’

  ‘If they’re on their way, then we haven’t got time to chatter,’ Kobar cut in. He was standing at the entrance to the tunnel that led to the metal cage and the shaft to the surface. With an almost inhuman detachment, Brael watched Kobar’s mouth work frantically as he beckoned to the others and pointed at the tunnel. At his feet were bunched the ends of the fuses he had run the length of the gallery, leading to charges placed around the tunnel mouth and in natural nooks and crannies around the walls.

  ‘Kobar’s right!’ Brael shouted unintentionally, causing everyone to start. ‘Let’s move. We have no time!’

  Kleeve looped Fellick’s arm over his shoulder and led the way along the tunnel, followed by those of the first two companies that had sustained wounds. There were only three or four, Brael noted. Greenskin weapons were not intended to wound, but to annihilate, on the scale of the individual or of cities, lands, perhaps whole worlds. Vika’s stories of distant worlds and creatures that might bestride the gulfs between them seemed far less fanciful now.

  Brael made sure he was the last to enter the tunnel. He paused as he passed Kobar, who crouched by the bunch of fuses, striking the tinderbox he had brought with him from his home in the shadow of a distant range of mountains.

  ‘Go,’ Kobar said, then waved along the tunnel. ‘I’ll be directly behind you.’ The tinderbox caught and he lowered it gently to the fuse-ends, which began to fizz and burn away towards the charges.

  Kobar rose and Brael turned to take a step along the tunnel. With a start he realised that he could see his own shadow, clearly defined by a light far stronger than an oil lantern’s, stretching along the tunnel floor.

  Alien gunfire erupted from the far side of the gallery. Though unable to hear it, Brael could feel the machine-rifles’ drum-like concussions in his guts and bones. Ducking instinctively, he glanced behind him.

  Kobar had been hit. A glancing blow, the shell had still managed to tear an appalling, ragged hole in his side. The impact had spun him round and deposited him against the slightly-curved wall of the tunnel, a stride or so from the opening to the gallery.

  Brael turned and took a crouching step towards Kobar. Seeing him coming, Kobar held up a shaking hand, then jabbed a finger at something on the floor between them. At first Brael could see nothing, then he spotted it: the tinderbox. By the time he looked back up at Kobar, the former quarryman had slipped one of the cylindrical charges and a length of fuse from his canvas bag.

  Another burst of gunfire almost forced Brael to his knees. Ducking flying splinters, he scooped up the tinderbox, then darted forward and handed it to Kobar. Kobar nodded his thanks through a rictus of pain, then nodded away along the tunnel. He had bitten off a tiny length of fuse and inserted it into the charge. The last Brael saw of him, before sprinting away along the tunnel, racing to get out of the powerful light of the greenskins’ lanterns and into the sheltering dark, Kobar was striking his tinderbox alight
for one last time.

  Brael was running in darkness, head bowed to avoid any dangerous protrusions from the ceiling, when the sound wave of the explosion reached him. The dry, burnt scent of the explosive reached him on the air that was forced along the tunnel. Up ahead, Brael saw a pale, weak light: the rear of the survivors’ column, heading for the up-shaft. He ran on.

  It must have been Kobar’s intention all along, Brael realised as he ran, to close the tunnel entrance, to make sure as many of the greenskins as possible were bottle-necked in the gallery, working to clear the fallen rock when the main charges blew.

  ‘Where’s Kobar?’

  Brael had caught up with the others and Tombek had noticed that he was alone. Brael pointed at his ears and shook his head. Tombek pointed back down the tunnel and furrowed his brow to indicate a question.

  Realising what Tombek wanted to know, Brael just shook his head.

  At that moment, the tunnel floor shifted beneath their feet. Brael felt a rising pressure, rolling through his chest. Tombek and several of the others looked anxiously upwards as dust and small fragments of rock fell from the ceiling.

  The main charges. Brael couldn’t resist a smile at the thought of what was happening in the gallery they had just left: the weight of the earth, the weight of the city above them, pressing down upon the greenskins, crushing them beneath it. Brael wondered briefly whether a greenskin could feel fear as a man could, the absolute terror that comes with the knowledge that one’s life is of no account in the events one is caught up in – the abject knowledge that your life is over. He hoped so.

  The storm of dust and rock fragments rushed along the tunnel and enveloped them, extinguishing most of the lanterns. The survivors were forced to cough and gasp, to feel their way towards the shaft. Beneath their feet, above and around them, the earth continued to move, to creak and moan as if in protest at the acts that had been committed within its depths.