03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Angelika scanned the slope. Had Jonas survived?

  Yes, he had: the lieutenant rose and signaled his men to charge. “On, men, on,” he cried. “Avenge your fallen brothers!”

  Emil, lived, too. He bolted up to repeat Jonas’ gesture. Blood coated the nearest side of his face though it did not seem to be his own. Arrayed around him were broken bodies, some writhing, some still.

  The able swordsmen lurched, uncertainly at first, toward the plateau. A helmeted Kurgan popped up immediately to point a bow into the main charge of onrushing men. Though Jonas’ archers were positioned behind his close-in fighters, the angle of the slope now worked in their favour: they could fire at the barbarians, certain their missiles would whiz over the heads of their comrades.

  A Gerolsbrucher caught a barbarian shaft in the flesh of his off-arm, but kept on clambering. The Kurgan archer slumped, a long, straight Imperial arrow piercing his helmet’s left eye-slit. Another rash marauder stood up, bellowing, and was promptly pin-cushioned by the men of Chelborg. The others waited until the swordsmen were nearly upon them. Then they had no choice but to surrender their prone positions, to stand and fight. They surged up as one, with axes aloft.

  “Down now, swordsmen. Down now,” Jonas called. “Let the archers do their work.”

  Some obeyed, falling back, allowing the archers behind them to pepper the exposed barbarians. Others seemed leery and instead clambered onto the lip to fight. Barbarian boots kicked them down. Kurgan leapt from the plateau onto the slope, and the swordsmen. There were less than a dozen of them. They fought crazily, downing three Gerolsbruchers before succumbing to the overwhelming numbers of their foes. Angelika was surprised to see Bodo the halfling among the grim-faced bladesmen who hacked them down. The swordsmen kept stabbing and slicing long after all life had ebbed from the ambushers’ corpses.

  Angelika’s knees belatedly shook. She crouched, pressing her hands against them, to hide her nerves. She surveyed the slope: bodies were strewn all along it. Well-accustomed to tallying the dead, she arrived at a quick count. At least twenty men dead or incapacitated. A third of Jonas’ men, wiped out in a few moments, by no more than a handful of ambushers.

  Franziskus came to her side. Filch and Merwin were with him. Bodo, still up at the plateau line, made no move to rejoin his fellow halflings. Instead, he basked in the grim acceptance of the human soldiers whose comrades’ death he’d helped avenge.

  “You’re unhurt?” Franziskus asked.

  She curtly nodded.

  “I thought you’d try to duck.”

  “So did the rock.” She attempted a smile.

  “How did you know to stand still?”

  “Haven’t you noticed, Franziskus? I’m always right.” Force of habit brought her closer to the corpses of the crushed soldiers. She was used to gore and decomposition, but never had she seen so many crushing victims. Angelika marvelled at the power of the giant stones, how they could in an instant of impact grind a man into so much pulverised and unrecognizable flesh. She ruled out as unduly risky the prospect of a little surreptitious looting. This did not stop her, as a mere exercise, from estimating the value of the dead soldiers’ property.

  A gold ring stared up at her from the knuckle of a crushed and bloodied hand. She checked, no one was watching. Jonas’ soldiers worked systematically through the fallen, starting at the foot of the slope. Most had gathered around the largest of the boulders: two men were still trapped beneath it. She saw Franziskus nearby, seeming stricken, as if he knew them.

  The trapped men were Rappe and Cassel. Cassel was pinned from the waist down. His chest moved tentatively up and down. All that could be seen of Rappe was a twitching pair of legs.

  From his position, relative to the stone, Angelika imagined that the stone had crushed an arm, and perhaps his shoulder as well. Their rescuers faced an unpleasant dilemma: if they attempted to roll the boulder off Cassel, they’d pulverise Rappe, and vice versa.

  A few placed palms against its granite surface, but dared not push. Others stood back, shifting from one spot to the next, hoping that a solution might be found in some mere change of angle. Angelika did not envy them. Soon they’d realise only one could be saved from severe harm, and would have to choose between them. She wondered how they’d decide. Was one more useful than the other? More congenial?

  Turning her thoughts back to the dead man at her feet, Angelika knelt deftly down. She wiped blood from his ring, to see it better. It was a thick, simple band, with only a few tiny chips of diamond recessed into it. Worth half a crown, perhaps. Over the past five years, she’d taken rings much like this from the fingers of innumerable dead men. If she failed to find her ruby, at least a half-decade of the same labour awaited her. She would not harvest this one, though; it would be like admitting defeat. She hauled herself up and stepped away from the body.

  She’d never thought it likely that one of the soldiers had her ring. If anyone here was the guilty party, it was Jonas himself. However, if there was even the slightest possibility that her ring was here, on the person of a dead man, she would have to punctiliously search each and every corpse. So much for getting back into the lieutenant’s good graces.

  A delicate negotiation was in order.

  She looked for Jonas, expecting to find him directing the effort to free the two trapped men. Instead, Emil had taken charge, showing the men precisely where to place their hands, and how to brace themselves. From the way they were arrayed, it seemed that the decision had been taken to sacrifice Cassel. As the older man, he had fewer years left to him. Bodo stretched out on his side, placing stones in small gaps between rock and earth. The idea, presumably, was to take pressure off the pinned men when the rock moved. Angelika did not think it would help much.

  Jonas strode alone over to the canyon’s edge and stood staring gloomily down into its shadowy recesses. Angelika permitted him a few minutes of this meditation, then crossed into the periphery of his vision. He beckoned her over.

  As she headed to his side, she reminded herself to speak diplomatically, as Franziskus would do. To see what Jonas desired, so she could offer it to him. To hold her tongue when undesirable truths danced on its tip.

  “Lieutenant,” she said.

  “Please,” he replied. “Call me Jonas.” He angled himself to steal a quick view of the funeral detail. None of the men were observing him. He lowered his head and pulled at his hair, punishing himself. “I should have listened to you. Shouldn’t I?”

  Angelika was not so foolish as to answer in words. His reversal in attitude was too sudden to trust.

  “I was worried about what the men would think. To turn back on that hill, after Sterr had died there. What will I tell them now?”

  “Misjudgements happen in war.”

  An anguished groan cut through the air. Their heads turned: Emil’s crew had moved the rock up onto one side, further crushing Cassel’s legs. Bodo and others pulled on Rappe, trying to haul him out from under the rock. They tugged and pulled on his hobbled body. Above them, the pushing swordsmen fell back, as the giant boulder resisted their efforts to move it. Rappe’s screams intermixed with his friend’s.

  Jonas paled and clapped a hand over his mouth. When the shrieks waned into sobs, he found his voice again. “Missteps are for the enemy. So my father always said.”

  “He was free of error?”

  “He never got twenty of his own men killed. Twenty-four if you count those who’re as good as dead.” For an instant it seemed like Jonas would launch himself at her and grab her pleadingly by the shoulders.

  Angelika girded herself, but the moment passed. “So you found out you’re—” She stopped herself before completing the thought.

  “Not the man I thought I was?”

  This Jonas was a damned mind-reader. It was already irksome, to be judged for the things she was impolitic enough to come out and say. To hold her very thoughts against her, too, was unfair in the extreme. “Let’s say your father was the greatest
officer to ever sit upon a saddle. Did he get that way by caring what his men thought about him?”

  “Those who served under him adored him. Any one of them would have laid down his life for him.”

  Angelika thoroughly doubted this, but reminded herself that her job was not to cure the fellow of his delusions. At least, not all at once, by frontal assault. “And how does an officer win the respect of his men?”

  “By keeping them alive.”

  “You brought me all the way here because I know these mountains. You’ll listen to me next time, won’t you?”

  He examined the toes of his boots. “I realise my error, Angelika.”

  “Then you’ll keep them breathing, as many of them as fortune allows, and the men will feel for you as your father’s men did for him. Yes?”

  “You won’t tell them how you warned me.”

  “I have a difficult favour to ask of you, Jonas.”

  “You can’t tell them.”

  “To undermine you is not in my interest. But I wouldn’t rest my command on deception if I were you.”

  “They cannot know. What is this favour you want?”

  “You remember why I’m here…”

  His expression was blank.

  “To get my ring back. One of your men might have it.”

  “How?”

  “He might have picked up the ring after that fight in Hochsmoor.”

  “The Kurgan chieftain has it.”

  “Possibly. Or possibly not. You said you weren’t sure.”

  “The more I think on it, the surer I get.”

  A new round of moans announced a fresh attempt to free the pinned men. Jonas could not bring himself to observe directly, he followed Angelika’s reactions instead. She shrank back as the rock was lifted, with half a dozen additional men pushing from below, hindered by loose ground cover and poor leverage. Rappe was now whisked out from under it, but the soldiers lost control of the rock, and it toppled over onto Cassel’s chest and face. His arms shook and then went slack. One of the pushing soldiers below yelled out, his hand stuck. He tore it loose, then opened and closed his fingers to be sure they still worked.

  The lieutenant still hadn’t looked. “Did they…”

  Angelika shook her head. Jonas staggered back. He caught Angelika’s slim, cool fingers in a hot, damp hand. She let him take them. In a movement so fast she barely saw it, he pulled her hand to his lips and fiercely kissed her fingers. Then, just as quick he’d released her, pushing himself away. Dislodged pebbles fell into the canyon’s depths. Angelika tensed; his boot-heels hit the canyon’s edge. He balanced himself forward, forestalling a deadly plunge. “Only you know how I feel, Angelika,” he said.

  She reached into the inside breast pocket of his officer’s coat and rooted around until she found a handkerchief. To mop his brow would be too much, so she balled it up and dropped it into his palm. He blotted it onto the sweat that pearled his face.

  “It’s only war-madness, Jonas. War is accident and disorder, and the deaths of good men, for no good reason. Steel yourself.”

  His spine straightened. “Yes. My father would have done so.”

  “I’ll help you, if you let me. But you must help me also.”

  “Yes, Angelika. Anything.”

  “I don’t want to see a rift between you and your men. But the dead—you must let me discreetly search them, before they’re buried under those rocks.”

  He thought for a while, his throat occasionally hobbling. “Is this blackmail?”

  “I’m not threatening to tell them anything.”

  “What are you threatening?”

  “I thought you were mad when you said you needed me out here, but it turns out you were right. You do need me. And I need that ring back. If you want me to continue along with you, you’ll do two things. You’ll heed me next time—”

  “That much is certain, Angelika.”

  “You’ll listen to me, and you’ll let me search those men.”

  Jonas turned a tight circle on his heels—the gesture of an overwhelmed child. He stopped, straightened his shoulders and back, inhaled a deep breath of air, and swept back toward the soldiers.

  He signalled to Emil, who called out to the regimental drummer, who rapped out a brief tattoo. Jonas stood on the largest of the boulders, which had landed on its side and presented a conveniently flat surface for him. The soldiers gathered round. Filch bobbed between the legs of taller men for a front-row vantage.

  Jonas held his arms out like an actor delivering the prologue at a mystery play. “My soldiers! My comrades!” He summoned a clear and unwavering voice that betrayed no hint of distress.

  The words echoed off the rocks. They’d have made Angelika nervous, if the sounds of the melee hadn’t already announced their location to every hostile ear for miles around.

  “Our brave comrades lay about us, awfully slain,” Jonas continued, his audience rapt. “The blood of the Empire seeps here, into these harsh and thirsty stones. It has not been spilt in vain. So while we mourn our dead, we also set our jaws in new determination, to avenge them. To persist in our mission, to take the fight to the Kurgan. To slit their every filthy throat. We will be resolute. We will not waver. We are men of Stir-land. We will win!”

  Some of the men feebly huzzahed.

  “We will win!” Jonas repeated.

  The huzzahs grew louder.

  “We will win!”

  Upturned fists punctured the mountain air.

  “Yes, the Kurg is a filthy trickster. Could we have known that he would attack us in this cowardly manner? To let the mountain stones do the fighting for him, when he is too weak and pusillanimous to do it himself? No, we could not.

  “Too long have we let fear govern our hearts, my men of Stirland. We have convinced ourselves that the barbarians are bigger, braver, more determined than we. What do we see here around us? The sure sign of his desperation. We thought too highly of our stinking foe. He dares not fight us man to man. He hides. He skulks. He cowers. His blackened soul is weak and scorched, damaged forever in his insane worship of the fell gods.

  “What you see around you is not defeat—it is evidence of our certain victory to come. Our hearts are the free hearts. Ours are certain, brave, and true. We are resolute. We’ll not waver. The gods on our side are the gods of good. The gods of life and virtue. What do their gods offer? Degradation and destruction, even for the twisted scum who bow before them.

  “The barbarian hates us. But why? Because he fears us. Our coming here was no folly. Now is when we cease to be defenders, and become attackers. As we bury now our courageous fellows, stop and ponder the inevitability of our triumph. Burn the faces of these men into your memories. Harden yourselves for the trail ahead. Our fight will not be easy. It will not be over soon. But when it is over, it is your boots that will press tightly to the throat of your fallen foes.

  “Do I speak truth?”

  The soldiers yowled: “Yes.”

  “Do I speak truth?”

  “Yes.”

  Swordsmen brandished their blades; archers shook their arrows. Bodo held aloft his half-sized sabre. Filch scurried on his outlandish feet, pounding his chest and hooting.

  Franziskus had sidled up to Angelika. “Do you hear that?” she asked him, nearly drowned out by the din. “We’ve made no mistakes today.”

  “The men need rousing,” Franziskus said. “He’s a skilled officer.”

  Angelika made no reply.

  “Gerolsbruchers,” Jonas cried. The men of his original company stabbed their swords toward the sky. “It is you who bravely bore the brunt today. You who were in front. You who charged. You who have suffered the gravest casualties at the distant hands of our frightened, stealthy foe. I am proud to be one of you. Rest assured, this day, both the living and dead among you have wreathed yourselves in glory.”

  The soldiers nodded in grunting assent, patting each other on the shoulders. They raised their water canteens to Lieutenant Rassau as if
giving him a toast.

  “Chelborg Archers,” Jonas called. “Only a few days have we marched together, but today you proved yourselves every bit the equal of my beloved Gerolsbruchers. Your fusillade held the foe like a vice. From your arrows, he could neither run nor hide. Our great triumph today, we owe to you. In my heart, I consider us to be but one company of warriors, forged together like iron. Today, Chelborgers have become Gerolsbruchers and Gerolsbruchers, Chelborgers. My friends, we are one.”

  Now the men of the two companies jostled and elbowed one another in a spirit of boisterous fellowship. An archer offered a swordsman his water skin to drink from and others echoed the gesture.

  Jonas stood over them, waiting for their maddened joy to peak. Then he turned, fixing his sights on Angelika and Franziskus, and the stragglers picked up from other units. His delivery thundered with sudden condemnation. “Yet not all with us today carried their burdens in equal measure. You, without companies. You, our scouts. Were you on that slope with us? Or did you hang back?”

  Franziskus’ slim frame tightened up with guilt. The stragglers muttered out their consternation. Angelika folded her arms and concealed a smile.

  “If you wish to be one with us, you must charge with us. Fight with us.”

  “What’s he talking about?” complained a stoop-shouldered pikesman. “I nearly got crushed.”

  Angelika shushed him.

  The pikesman’s dudgeon would not be mollified. “I came closer to getting killed than he did.”

  “As a lesson to you, to make you feel closer to us,” Jonas orated, “I assign you now to deal with the best of us—those who have courageously died today. It is you who’ll prepare their bodies for burial. As you do, gaze upon them, so next time, you can emulate their valour.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t emulate my way into a grave,” the stooped man muttered.

  Jonas pointed to Angelika. “And you, scout. As you are a woman, I charge you with a womanly duty—to assemble each man’s effects, for transport back to his family. To ensure that each slain man is properly shrouded in his cloak, before he’s laid to rest.”