Twelfth Krampus Night

by Matt Manochio

  The woman flicked blood from her blades and walked into the fray. Six guards, Franco and Otto remained. The humans stood with their backs to the gatehouse, the inhuman walking toward them like they didn’t exist.

  “Don’t cower! This is why you’re here!” Otto yelled to his nervous guards. Arrows flew from atop the interior castle wall walks. Otto exhaled, buoyed by the sight of archers trying to take down the monsters.

  Dozens of arrows poked from Krampus, who appeared a hairy, lumbering pin cushion—behind which Perchta hid for protection, but only momentarily. She sheathed her daggers and drew her remaining throwing knives and hopped to Krampus’s side, aiming and releasing at lightning speed.

  She smiled as three guards fell backward, causing the remaining archers to cower behind the battlements.

  “Stand and you die!” she screeched.

  An archer ignored her and spun from a battlement to line up a shot. He hit the floor a second later, a throwing knife jutting from his left eye.

  “See? I’ve got more!” she screamed, and then quietly to Krampus, “I’m out.”

  Krampus roared at the wall, keeping the scared men shaking where they stooped.

  Franco stood next to Otto. Each of the men walked backward, in time with each of the monsters’ forward steps.

  “We’ll be in greater numbers inside,” Franco said.

  The old woman slowly unsheathed her daggers from her back belt and grinned at Otto. Two guards standing to the knight’s sides saw this and retreated to the gatehouse.

  “I can’t blame them.” Franco’s voice trembled. “That thing should be dead.”

  “I told that thing I’d die before I’d let it breach the castle,” Otto said. “It’s mine.”

  Krampus casually plucked the arrows from its body as it walked, and then reached into its barrel and pulled another stretch of chain, its links smaller in size, and brought it back like a whip. Perchta hopped behind Krampus.

  Instinct told Franco and Otto to drop. Krampus swiped the chain sideways and ensnared the remaining guards in its links, bunching them together like bananas. Krampus jerked the chain backward and released it, sending the four screaming men over the bastion rubble and out of the castle.

  “And then there were two,” it snarled at Otto and Franco.

  “Get into the bergfried with the lords,” Otto said. Franco bolted but fell within a foot of the semi-obstructed gatehouse opening, a dagger through his back.

  “After you,” Krampus said, and with that Perchta bounded by Franco, retrieving her blade as she ran, and scuttled under the stone.

  “Bravery. I appreciate that in my prey.” The monster stopped ten feet from Otto. “But you’re not my prey and no longer a child. So you now have the opportunity not afforded to your compatriots. Step aside and you live.”

  Otto held out his broadsword. “I pledged to the baron that I would protect his castle.”

  “And where is this baron of yours? Cowering in that big tower with his boys? I know a bit about the baron. He is a much better man than his children. But that is not saying much.”

  “Be that as it may.” Otto stepped forward, his broadsword tip touching the monster’s breastbone. “I pledged myself.”

  Krampus tsk-tsked. “A brave fool is still a fool.”

  Otto rammed the blade forward, but it snapped in half against this thing’s stony chest. The knight, his mouth agape, looked at his broken blade. Krampus rammed the ruten against Otto’s unarmored head, knocking the big knight sideways into the distant curtain wall.

  Krampus scrunched under stone, mumbling, “I have a feeling my prey will not be as brave.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The boulder’s impact to obstruct the gatehouse’s portcullis sent Heinrich and Beate stumbling forward onto a frigid cobblestone walkway. They both looked up to see Mumfred, Wilhelm and three sword-wielding guards waiting for them.

  “Karl’s making his way up the churn tower now.” Wilhelm pointed a dagger at the pair and then tilted it upward. “I trust there won’t be any shenanigans while you accompany us?”

  “Get up!” Mumfred kicked Heinrich’s ribs, causing Beate to lean over her man and slap at the steward’s feet.

  “Such feistiness,” Wilhelm said. “But I’d do as the good Mumfred says and get up. Or we can kill you both here. You decide. But I’m wagering my father would like to meet the peasants responsible for torching his stables, followed by a public execution to keep the rest of your filth in line.” He nodded to the guards, two of whom rousted Heinrich to stand while the other yanked up Beate by her arm.

  “Search Heinrich,” Mumfred ordered the guards. The steward smiled at Beate and walked to her. “Perhaps there were some sharp things in that barn we should be aware of?” He cupped and massaged her breast. She closed her eyes and shivered. Mumfred drew his dagger and held it sideways, anticipating Heinrich’s move. The blacksmith stopped, the blade tip tickling his throat. “Very good, boy. Now step back. And be searched like a man.”

  Two guards held Heinrich steady while the third patted him down. Mumfred inhaled Beate’s scent while caressing her for weapons. “Nothing tucked in the waist, strapped to the thighs. Mmm. Delicious.” The guards made Heinrich watch while Mumfred’s tongue lingered up Beate’s neck.

  “He’s unarmed,” said the guard who had searched Heinrich.

  “As is his woman,” Mumfred said.

  “Come, Beate,” Wilhelm said. “I’ll be sure to wash you in preparation for Lord Karl. My brother might not be prepared for intercourse, but I’m thinking he’s eager to fuck with you all the same.”

  Two guards tumbled backward over the wall walk, one landing on cobblestone, the other flat on Beate. She screamed as arterial blood gushed onto her face and chest, such was the knife wound to the guard’s throat. She frantically pushed the guard off of her and sprang up, shrieking and wiping blood from her eyes.

  “We’ll definitely have to bathe her now.” Wilhelm chuckled and then, realizing the severity of the situation, said, “Let’s go.”

  The guards pushed the pair to walk behind Wilhelm. Mumfred, dagger still drawn, prodded the chagrined lovebirds through a sea of panic. Castle workers rushed for whatever protection they could find within the great hall and its surrounding rooms. Guards, their swords, axes and pikes ready, stood behind the boulder, waiting for—they hoped—the knights to slip through with welcome news of smitten enemies.

  The party walked through the great hall and exited through the building’s rear to see, by its lonesome, the bergfried. Beate, her face still smeared in red, gawked at occasionally lighted windows leading to the churn tower—the spired top surrounded by four bartizans.

  A dozen guards swarmed the group and then backed off when they realized Wilhelm was leading it.

  “Lord Karl’s up there, escorted by two men,” one of the guards said, and yelled to those behind him. “Bring the steps!”

  Beate looked for the entrance but couldn’t find it. Then, upon seeing a tall wooden stairwell built on a rolling platform, it dawned on her that the entrance was deliberately designed to be inaccessible. The guards aligned the steps with a closed door built thirty feet above ground.

  “Open it!” Mumfred called to the guard peeking through the iron-barred, circular window framed next to the door, constructed from two wooden planks fastened as one by iron studs and crisscrossed with iron bars—making it harder for enemies to chop down. The door opened and the guards finished pushing the stairs to the entrance. Wilhelm ascended first, followed by a guard, then Beate and Heinrich, who were prodded by the remaining two guards, with Mumfred bringing up the rear.

  Beate entered a gloomily lit stone stairwell that wound clockwise upward. She didn’t see Mumfred, but heard him call to the exterior guards, “Destroy the stairwell.”

  “How will we get out?” Beate didn’t realize she’d blurted i
t until Wilhelm poked his head from behind the guard in front of her.

  “My dear, the only way you’re leaving this tower is by being thrown from it. Whether it’s from thirty feet up and possibly surviving, or one hundred feet up and assuredly dying is up to you.”

  Dimly glowing lanterns hung from wall hooks. Beate and Heinrich breathed stale and dirty air as they climbed. They occasionally passed small rooms with closed doors. Beate remembered, prior to entering, seeing windows in the tower and figured guards—likely armed with bows and arrows—had sequestered themselves within to watch the action.

  She yearned for a sword to slice off Wilhelm’s head and mimed swinging a blade with her right hand, which smacked against the spiraling stone interior.

  Clever, she thought. Unless the attackers are all left-handed, fighting while climbing the stairs won’t be easy. She then envisioned Wilhelm, gripping a sword, turning toward her and slicing downward—his right hand relatively unobstructed by the outer wall.

  What else have they thought of? Thick walls? Fortified rooms? That thing destroyed an entire curtain wall, so I don’t think it’ll be discouraged by a locked door.

  The stairwell wound into a closed door. Wilhelm pounded on it.

  “It’s us! Open it!”

  A wooden slat at eye level slid sideways and revealed a squinting guard illuminated by lantern flame. He nodded and closed the peephole.

  Beate heard people laboring opposite the door, moving heavy things, setting them to the floor. The door swung open and revealed an octagonal room with closed doors on every wall. Four guards greeted the party and then hurried them inside.

  “That thing’s on the move,” a crossbow-toting defender said to Wilhelm. “It made its way through the second gatehouse and killed whoever was down there.”

  Wilhelm gulped. Beate saw him sweating under the glow of numerous lanterns.

  “We’ve not seen it approach the bergfried—if that’s any consolation,” the guard said.

  Beate grinned when she saw how tightly the guard gripped his crossbow, to the point where the weapon shook. Then she recalled the monster chiding her for sticking something where it didn’t belong. Karl deserved worse, she thought. I can’t believe it’s angry at me for doing that—unless it has a penis and imagined what it must’ve felt like to have a needle jammed…

  She turned pensive and held Heinrich’s hand.

  “Karl?” Wilhelm said.

  The guard glanced above to a closed ceiling door built into the stone, twelve feet from the floor.

  “Took a little bit for him to get up there, but he’s all right.”

  Wilhelm glanced over his shoulder. “Let’s get cozy.”

  The guards moved everyone to clear the stairwell entrance and closed the door. Two guards grabbed a thick metal plank and placed it into horizontal iron grooves at the entrance’s base. They repeated the process with two more beams—one placed at the door’s midsection, the other up top—to practically conceal the door, making it near impossible for someone to ram through.

  “Karl!” Wilhelm looked at the ceiling. “I know you can hear us. It’s safe.”

  The younger lord fumbled with metal, and then Beate heard him strain while lifting the small, square door inward. A wooden ladder slid from the darkened interior and thudded to the floor. Two of the guards that accompanied Wilhelm’s party scaled the ladder first.

  “After you, Heinrich.” Wilhelm extended his arm. “Try anything when you get up there and my men will kill you on the spot.

  Heinrich looked at Beate, who nodded, indicating It’ll be all right.

  He climbed the rungs and Beate went to follow, but Wilhelm held her back. “Not just yet.” Wilhelm looked at the guard with the crossbow. “How are we on water?”

  “We have enough buckets for a few days if it comes to that. I’m assuming the baron will return with a small army to get us out of here if that thing’s not defeated first.”

  “Find some rags, as clean as possible, and use them one by one to wash this young woman.” Wilhelm grabbed a lantern hanging from a wall and held it to Beate’s face. The guard grimaced.

  “It’s not her blood,” Wilhelm said.

  “I’ll take care of it, my lord.” Mumfred appeared before Beate, holding a long white bandage, which he proceeded to cut into squares with his dagger.

  “I had some extra on me just in case my head started to bleed again.” Mumfred scowled at Beate. “I’ll take the chance that it won’t.”

  “Just don’t taint the drinking water,” Wilhelm said. “Send her up when you’re done.” The lord climbed up and left Beate surrounded by Mumfred and the guards. One opened the door opposite the one to the stairwell and returned with a carafe of water.

  “Yes, this will do.” Mumfred smiled as he dipped in the first square and then brought the cold water to Beate’s chest, washing her neck but deliberately sliding his fingers under her bloody garments to fondle her nipples.

  “Just pretend that I’m Heinrich and it’ll go quicker.” Mumfred finished with her face by the fourth square and stepped back to admire her. “Not pristine, but nice enough to be kissed, I think.” He looked up the ladder, seeing nobody looking down. “Perhaps I’ll try first.”

  Mumfred seized her shoulders and advanced, but halted when a roar—a noise he now knew well—wound its way up the stairwell and pummeled the iron-slatted door. The guards in the room turned to the entrance, and for several minutes all was quiet. But soon frantic footfalls ascended from behind the door, followed by fists pounding against it, and numerous male voices. “Open it! For God’s sake, open it!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Anyone brave enough to heft a weapon surrounded the bergfried, a square tower that touched no other building or wall. Ladders—if they were tall enough to reach an opening—could be propped against it from the ground. But the lower windows were no wider than a man’s face, and no ladders were long enough to be leaned from a wall walk and settled against one of the bergfried’s upper sections.

  The tower’s designers had cut machicolations into each of the four bartizans’ overhanging floors, allowing for guards to see the bergfried’s base, and the ability shoot arrows down at enemies or pour boiling, putrid liquid onto them.

  “The windows near the ground are too small for us to sneak into—especially you.” Perchta elbowed the monster while eyeing the bergfried from a crenel built atop the solar’s roof. Anyone who was really looking could see Krampus’s two horns poking from behind the battlement next to her. The great hall and its adjoining rooms reached halfway up the bergfried’s base. No man could run and leap from the hall’s roof to grab any part of the bergfried without falling and dying. She edged her eyes over the crenel just enough to see scores of guards, five deep, wreathing the base.

  Krampus peeked above the battlement. “But not the windows higher up.”

  Perchta looked. “True. Big enough for a man to lean out and fire at the masses. But do you honestly think you can jump up there?”

  He mulled it, assessing the hall roof’s length. “Not enough space for a running jump.” He rose to watch the guards circling the tower below and spotted the bergfried’s elevated entrance. “It would be easier for me to jump through that doorway after you climb down the tower’s stairs to open it—after I throw you through one of those upper windows.” He pointed to an illuminated window framing a guard resting his elbows on the stone edge.

  “That’s a possibility.” She nodded and then furrowed her brow. “Wait, what?”

  He practically wrapped his entire hand around her waist and yanked her backward, her feet dangling above the roof.

  “Don’t scream,” Krampus said. “We can surprise them.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply but threw her like a javelin toward a window built three-quarters of the way up the tower.

  Krampus figured any guard worth hi
s salt at some point might expect to see Perchta—just not the crown of her skull appearing out of nowhere and smashing his face.

  The guard fell backward as Perchta speared through the open frame.

  The room’s firelight shimmered violently and then resumed its calm waver.

  Perchta’s silhouette filled the frame. She held a dagger out the window and pointed to the entrance below. Krampus never took his eyes off it and began knee-bending, preparing to jump down, waiting for the right moment.

  The guards immediately in front of the entrance didn’t think anything amiss when they heard the door clank to unlock.

  “Coming out!” Simon, a pike-wielding guard directly under the entrance, called. “Be ready!”

  The man next to him leaned in. “We broke the stairs, remember?”

  “We’ve got the ladder. Don’t worry. Chances are they want to lower buckets for water.”

  The heavy door creaked open. No lantern light. No noble or guard popping out to demand or request. Only darkness.

  “My lord? Wilhelm? Mumfred? Who goes there?” Simon smiled when Marco, the guard who regularly manned the entrance, appeared in the frame. Enough men below held torches to illuminate Marco’s face.

  “Marco! What’s the matter?” Simon tilted his head all the way up. “You look—” Warm water splashed into his eyes, and he grunted as he wiped it away with his free hand. Only water isn’t supposed to be dark. Simon looked at his fingers and then up to see Marco a moment before impact.

  Simon crumpled to the ground, Marco’s midsection covering his face. Simon released his pike and spastically waved his arms for help. Two guards lifted Marco and gagged as his entrails spooled around Simon’s face. The horrified guards dropped the body, allowing the corpse to resplatter Simon, who at that point took matters into his own hands and pushed Marco off of him.

  He screamed as he jumped to stand, frantically wiping offal out of his eyes. Everyone watched the beleaguered guard and almost at the same moment realized that whoever killed Marco likely was hovering thirty feet above them.