03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  Mattes dropped a third cannonball. It jounced as resonantly as before, but aroused less fury from the marauders, who now came into view. They broke across the room to engage the outnumbered soldiers. Saar’s torch fell to the floor, burning a fringe of tapestry. Popping flames ate rapidly through it, bathing the battle in a hot yellow glow.

  the tunnel ended in a flat piece of rock wall. From its well-worked surface, Jonas figured that it had to be a secret door, less clever and elaborate than the one Filch and Angelika had found. He placed his ear to the wall. Scratchy Kurgan voices muttered restlessly on the other side. Only these few inches of trick granite panel separated him from his final glory. There had to be a way to open it.

  The throbbing of his skull strained his thinking. This was the interior part, the side where you already knew it was a door. He felt the wall’s inner surface, painting a track of crimson smears across it. There—there was a seam down the middle. The trigger on the other side would be well hidden, but here there was no such need to conceal it. So where was it? Was it a handle? A lever? Obvious, obvious, it would have to be—

  Obvious. There it was, a small ring of green-patinated bronze, camouflaged only by a streak of mossy-coloured granite. It was not hidden at all. It was merely lower than he’d been looking—at dwarf height.

  Jonas yanked on the ring.

  Articulated brass stakes, hinged in the middle, shot out from recesses in the wall, breaking it in the middle, pushing the two halves open.

  Jonas stepped through into the daylight. He was in the midst of the Kurgan encampment. Less than a dozen yards away from him loitered a party of barbarians, shifting restlessly and croaking complaints at one another. A boar sizzled on a nearby spit, its fire stoked by a trio of gigantic marauders, improbably clad in sweating jet-black armour. Off to his left, a grubby boy, no more than eleven years old, tended the festering back wound of a white-bearded marauder, systematically spearing maggots from it with the tip of a long iron needle.

  None moved to molest him; instead, they stared at him, with his fine coating of blood and his mad expression, as if he were a grisly apparition treading into this world from the realm of ghosts. Sabre in one hand and knife in the other, he beamed and spread wide his arms. “I have come to kill you,” he announced. “Each and every one.”

  Now the barbarians drew their weapons, though cautiously. Only the mightiest of champions, or even an enemy god, would dare meet their army alone.

  “Ortak Nalgar,” he bawled. “Ortak Nalgar. I will fight Ortak Nalgar!”

  The Chaos troops exchanged dumbfounded glances. Their leader’s name was all they could make out amid his softlander babblings. Was he an agent of their chieftain? A spy against the Imperials? Such things were impossible not long ago, but under these strange new laws of war, was not anything possible?

  “Ortak Nalgar,” Jonas shouted. “Ortak Nalgar.”

  Ortak Nalgar stepped out from behind a bearhide tent.

  “Is he an ally?” asked his shieldbearer, a scuttling creature called Goragir.

  “No,” said Ortak Nalgar. “He is not an ally.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jonas, not comprehending the conversation of his foe, started taunting his enemies. “Ortak Nalgar,” he bellowed.

  Common marauders, sub-chiefs and clan heads formed a hubbub around Ortak Nalgar. They kept their distance from the rabid softlander.

  “I know this one,” said the chieftain. “He fought me before, and lived.” Slowly he drew his multi-bladed sword from the sheath on his back. “This time he will die.”

  Jonas ceased his gesticulating and braced himself for Nalgar’s onslaught.

  “You may come and watch,” said Ortak Nalgar to his followers, “but he is mine to slay.”

  He clattered at Jonas, gravel spraying behind him. He ploughed his greatsword down on Jonas’ upraised sabre. The force of the strike trembled Rassau back across the uneven ground. Jonas parried a second grunting hit, then a third. A barbarian mob gathered to shout out homicidal encouragements to their general.

  Jonas parried blow after blow. The chieftain fought with a relentless power, never giving him the chance for even a perfunctory attack. Jonas was forced back towards the rock wall. Nalgar’s hardest, best-aimed thrusts were always wide and sweeping.

  Rassau inched back towards the doorway. He let himself falter and seem uncertain. He lured the chieftain on toward the dwarf corridor, where there’d be less room for that scything weapon of his.

  A yard from the entryway, Nalgar hesitated, as if suspecting a trap. Jonas wished there was one. He landed his first hit, against Nalgar’s weapon-hand. Roaring, the chieftain elbowed in, smashing Jonas with a rattling body blow. Jonas let the momentum carry him into the corridor. Nalgar followed.

  Jonas lightened his step, bucking and weaving. He would fight as he’d seen Angelika do. Hers was a woman’s style, designed to wear out a bigger, stronger foe. Once inside the tunnel, Nalgar’s assurance seemed to ever-so-slightly slacken. Jonas had no lethal surprises to unveil, but the chieftain thought otherwise, and that was something.

  As Nalgar drove him farther into the dwarf complex, a glimmer of sanity returned to him. Behind this greatest of enemies a host of others jostled for the best view. His doom was certain. As he fought, he detached his mind to envision himself from a distance, becoming like a figure in a dream. Regret suffused him. His decisions had been foolish—clouded by the sin of vanity and its twin, the fear of failure. The men were right to distrust him.

  The insight came all too late, but at least it had come. He would not be granted a second chance, but if by some miracle it happened, he would do it all differently, transform into a wiser leader and better man.

  Ortak Nalgar was toying with him now. He reached the staircase and was forced onto it. Behind him, he heard the clang of clashing weapons and felt the heat of a consuming blaze.

  The tapestry blaze lit the corners of the dwarf armoury. Dark smoke poured up to the chamber’s high ceiling. Stone walls radiated the fire’s heat, intensifying it, aiming it at the contending men. Scorching sweat doused the brows of Stirlander and barbarian alike.

  Swordsmen pushed up around the stairwell mouth, to bottle up their foes, forming a protective ring around the archers and halflings. Stragglers with hand weapons ranked themselves beside the Gerolsbruchers. The Stir-land line slashed and prodded at the marauders, and, for the first moments of the engagement, gave them pause. Soon the barbarians switched tacks: rather than fight the black-and-yellows blade against blade, they shouldered their way into their line, shoving them back into the chamber. They widened the lines, making room for more of them to engage the defenders.

  Emil and Mattes found themselves fighting side-by-side. “Loyalist and malcontent go to the wall together, hah?” the drumsman shouted.

  The sergeant’s reply was a curt upthrust of his sabre, lacerating the throat of his hairy-backed opponent. “Shut up and fight,” he added.

  Mattes grinned, and, not to be outshone, stabbed deep into his attacker’s belly.

  The marauders fought with crazed abandon, and Kurgan bodies were the first to hit the floor. When one died, another steamed over him to usurp his place. Together the sergeant and drummer were confined against the armoury’s western wall, which was stacked with the disassembled parts of cannon. Long, forged firing tubes, inlaid with dwarf runes, comprised one pile. Their wheeled oak carriages loomed in a neat tower beside them. At their ankles stout barrels squatted.

  The two men glanced at them and knew right away: gunpowder.

  Across the room, flames licked onto a second tapestry.

  They shared a profane exclamation, then went back to hacking at the Kurg.

  To Angelika, the fire revealed an oak door across the room from the stairwell, and a catwalk fifteen feet above the armoury floor. This balcony level wrapped around the entire room, and was bounded by a solid stone wall incised with murder holes. It was from this impenetrable railing that the burning t
apestries hung. Angelika couldn’t see an entry point for the catwalk, but some kind of access to it had to lie behind the far door. She shouted to gather the archers to her side. If they could get onto the upper walkway, they could fire down into the enemy ranks. On the floor, they were useless.

  She tested the door. Locked. The mechanism was small yet blocky, in the dwarven manner. “Filch,” she yelled.

  The halfling floundered into view, his hair singed, pointing to the spot he’d emerged from, behind the tapestry. “Merwin’s back there,” he cried.

  “What?”

  “The fear’s got him. He thinks it’s safe there. It’s not.”

  “I’ll go coax him out,” Angelika shouted. She pointed to the lock. “I don’t suppose, with a name like Filch, you’re an experienced lockpick?”

  Filch beheld it gravely. “Depends on how you mean it,” he said. “Do years of mere practice count?” He stepped up and reached into a vest pocket for a set of delicate lockpicks. The tip of his tongue poking from the, side of his mouth, he got to work on it, as the archers ringed him. “My whole life I’ve yearned for such a moment.”

  Angelika moved beneath the catwalk, behind the encroaching fire. Merwin’s gaze was glassy, his posture rigid. Angelika slapped him. He sputtered a spray of saliva. “What? How dare—” Angelika hauled him by the collar. “Go mad on your own time, halfling. We’ve an escape to rig.” She ducked aside as a volley of arrows zoomed from the bulging semi-circle of archers to pelt a trio of barbarians breaking across the floor. They clutched their throats and sank as the swordsmen closed ranks to stop others from following.

  Angelika reached Filch with Merwin. “How goes it?”

  “This lock is much like one I acquired from a peddler, to practise—”

  A weird percussive chant bellowed from the lungs of the Kurgan horde. Something new had entered the room, from the stairwell. Marauder and Stirlander parted to make room. Jonas stepped backwards, his sabre desperately countering a rippling sequence of strikes from the pronged and spiky sword of Ortak Nalgar.

  * * *

  “That idiot,” cried Mattes. Behind the chieftain, he saw a new column of Enemy forces, most of them still grouped on the stairwell. Their exotic, flanged helmets and heavy armour identified them as high-ranking warriors. They had not yet seen fit to join the fray, but that was no source of cheer. The hardened opponents already ranked against the beleaguered Stirlanders were tough, but these newcomers would comprise the top of the heap. All the army’s leaders, their status won by right of combat. Against this force, there would be no survival. Jonas had found the forest’s fiercest wolves and led them to their prey.

  Mattes shouted in Emil’s ear and dropped his sabre. “Cover me,” he shouted, stooping to grab a powder barrel. He slipped free of the battle; Emil followed, pursued by barbarians, wildly swinging his blade to deter their nail-filled cudgels.

  Mattes pell-melled across the floor to the tapestry. The cutting flame had portioned it into dangling strips. Keeping the powder cradled out under his left arm, he reached up and yanked free a great length of burning cloth.

  He wrapped it around himself like a cloak and ran toward the stairs.

  Emil saw what he meant to do, but was too occupied with his pair of opponents to persuade him otherwise.

  “Make way. Make way!” Mattes cried. The Gerolsbrucher line parted for him. Flames leapt from the tapestry to his tunic. In instinctive fear of them, the barbarian line shrank back, too. Mattes’ skin seared as he ripped the lid from the barrel and leapt toward the stairwell packed with Kurgan war leaders. In midair, he touched his scarf of flame into the reservoir of black powder.

  The barrel exploded. It blew Mattes to bits. It tore through Ortak Nalgar’s subordinates, separating limbs from torsos, pulping organs, demolishing bone. The roof above the stairwell buckled and collapsed. Those not slain by the concussion were pulverised by blocks of tumbling stone.

  The explosion threw debris across the armoury floor, killing three Kurgan and a pair of Stirlanders. The battle line dissolved into a general melee.

  Emil felled one of his Kurgans, but the barbarian grabbed him on the way down, exposing the back of the sergeant’s neck to his partner’s club. Its rusty spikes jabbed deep into him, and he fell to the tiles, writhing.

  Franziskus, his scalp rent by flying debris, staggered through the room in search of a new target. He found the Kurg angling for a coup de grace against the sergeant, and crippled him with a bowling slash to the legs.

  Jonas and Ortak Nalgar circled in the centre of the room. He’d knocked the chieftain’s helmet off; the barbarian had torn a jagged hole in his breastplate. The chieftain’s face bore the typical marks of Kurgan physiognomy: it was a round burl of bone, its cheekbones wide, its nose upturned and flattish. Yet somehow he was reminded of his own face, or perhaps that of his father. Or, at least, the hard, unfeeling visage he wished he had. “I was born to kill you,” Jonas said to him.

  Ortak Nalgar did not comprehend the speech of the soft lands, but guessed at the meaning. “You are nothing to me,” he said.

  Jonas didn’t understand him, either.

  Filch finished monkeying with the lock and stepped back to fling the doors open. Angelika slipped through into a vertical shaft leading straight up. Staple-shaped metal rungs ran the length of the narrow, piping passageway. She jumped onto them and shinnied up to the height of the balcony level. There she found an exit onto the catwalk.

  Angelika shouted to the archers to follow her, but heard no response. The noise of the fight, she reckoned, had drowned her out. She rushed down the ladder to alert the archers to her find. As her feet hit the floor, she saw the real source of the delay. The fight between Jonas and the chieftain had moved into new territory. Ortak Nalgar threw Jonas into the wall beside the door. Jonas leaned against it, bleeding and panting, his sabre nearly dropping from his tired fingers. She edged out through the doorway and palmed a dagger.

  “No,” said Merwin, held rapt by the fight between Jonas and the barbarian chief. An involuntary step brought him closer to it.

  The movement caught Ortak Nalgar’s attention. A gauntleted hand left his greatsword and wrapped around a long iron dart, casually flinging it into the halfling’s chest.

  Filch howled in protest and belted at Nalgar. Franziskus, who’d wandered across the floor to help against the chieftain, encircled Filch in his arms and pulled him up off the ground. The chieftain took up a second dart, to aim at Filch.

  Jonas widened his mouth to scream, but only a choking noise issued from it. With renewed vigour he clouted Nalgar’s head, cutting into his ear. Then he fled through the doorway, luring the chieftain away from the others. He hustled up the rungs, into the shaft. Nalgar followed.

  Angelika’s sense of direction told her where the tube ended—it led to the sangar, of course. Jonas would have more than the chieftain on his hands when he got to the top. “Don’t follow me all the way,” she instructed the archers. “Turn onto the catwalk about fifteen feet on.”

  She climbed onto the rungs.

  Above her, Ortak Nalgar prodded skyward with his blade, while Jonas flung his feet out to miss it. When he could, he aimed a kick at Nalgar’s gashed head. He dropped a wad of spit into the chieftain’s eye. As Angelika climbed, red driblets spattered her; they could have come from either man. Below, she heard the archers mount the catwalk.

  The graceless, attenuated fight continued all the way to the end of the shaft. It terminated in a wooden trap door, which bore a thick wooden handle. The planks creaked, bowed by weight on its upper side.

  Jonas braced himself and ripped it open. A Kurgan, who’d been standing on the trap, fell partway through. The Kurg frothed belligerently at him, but Jonas held fast, grappling up the man’s body, using him as a climbing aid. He slithered up into the sangar, then kicked his unwilling accomplice down onto Ortak Nalgar.

  Nalgar cursed all the holy gods as his stinking underling landed on him. The impact wrenched his s
word-arm from its socket. He wrapped his other hand around the man’s chin and twisted until his neck was broken. Then he pushed himself tight against the rungs and let him fall. Angelika did the same, and the slain barbarian brushed rudely past her on his way to splat against the ground.

  The sangar’s inhabitants greeted Jonas’ arrival with stunned surprise; he clouted one with his sword on his way through it. Turning to receive Ortak Nalgar, he edged to the stone steps leading to the sangar’s exit point, leading to the flat-topped ridge between the two valleys.

  Nalgar cleared the trap door as Jonas backed out onto the ridge. Nalgar followed him. A lithe young barbarian absconded, leaving two others to defend the sangar against further intrusion.

  Angelika hauled herself into the sangar. The Kurgs launched themselves at her. The first took a dagger in his bare and knobby chest. She stepped aside for the second, tripping him into the shaft opening. His head pinged along the metal rungs on his way down.

  She retrieved her dagger from the heaving breastbone of the mortally wounded Kurg and slipped up the small flight of steps to the ridge. The last of the sangar guards had positioned himself on its brink, giving her his back to watch the duel between the softlander and his warlord. Angelika threw her knife into the space between his shoulders. It slumped him to the surface of the ridge.

  Jonas rocked on his heels, panting.

  Ortak Nalgar’s arm hung slackly at his side; his fingers dangled an inch or so lower than they should have been. He grabbed his forearm and replaced it in its socket. Agony billowed across his filthy face, revealing his clenched and mouldering teeth. He kinked his neck and held his sword.

  He charged at Jonas.

  They clashed. The chieftain thumped into Rassau, pushing him onto his back. Jonas’ sabre flew from his hand. The combatants rolled and grappled along the ridge line. Their flailings brought them steadily closer to the precipice, on the side of the ridge overlooking the Chaos encampment.