The thresh was confused by the thought. It had been taught to think of men only as meat for the blood pot, and that only as a legend. When had it formed the idea that the calflings were anything as notable as ienamicae? The thresh worried that some madness had claimed its mind to dignify the creatures with the ancient and noble crown of dar ienamic. But then, the powerful magicks it had encountered on its last visit here were . . . powerful.
It recognised the field into which it had emerged, an open wasteland on the edge of the village in which small fires and candle lamps burned. There was no sign of the minion in the ruins to the left, but the source of the heady aroma of man meat was immediately obvious. A small clutch of the creatures stood around their strange beastless chariots where the thresh had fallen upon the filthy minion just before its nest mate had been slain by some trickster’s wizardry. The thresh stuck close to Urspite Scaroth as much for protection as anything. The Queen’s Vengeance, cloaked in sweet darkness, arrayed themselves in a loose scythe formation. Fangr acolytes leashed to their Hunn dominants growled and snarled, eager to get to the kill. The Hunn growled in turn, quieting their inferiors but eyeing the cyclopean Drakon suspiciously, sniffing the air, and detecting the scent of sweet, sweet meat.
The thresh could not long gaze in the direction of the foe.
Its thoughts were confusing. Were they foe now? Not food? Its waving forest of eyestalks cringed away. There burned a great number of lights in that direction, as though the men had established a large war camp in the red-roofed building with all of the fires. As eager as Fangr and Hunn were to have at them, all shied away from the light and the promise of fire and pain that came with it. Lieutenants Grymm stomped and stalked, exchanging quiet thinkings on how best to put out the lights. Reaching a talon up, the thresh attempted to gain the attention of the BattleMaster by tugging at its armour.
‘What?’ growled Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn, busy attempting to brute his forces into a formation resembling something from the war scrolls.
‘The light, sir. The eyestalks water and squint from it, but it does not burn. Not if it is as it was before.’
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn reached down and picked the tiny daemon up by its throat, all but choking it.
‘Shall I throw you into the fire light and test that thinking, thresh?’
Struggling to choke out an apology for bothering the BattleMaster, the thresh begged not to be sacrificed so. It had much to offer in the way of thinkings. Urspite Scaroth opened his massive claws and dropped the thresh into the mud. It was thankful for the mud. The soft ooze broke its fall from such a prodigious height.
‘If . . . if . . . I might . . . my lord. Your host is not yet used to the thinkings I have thought here about the harmless nature of such lights. And not having my lord’s vast intelligence or fortitude, they might yet be misled by poor thinkings. Perhaps if we were to head into the darkness of the village, where just a few fires burn?’
Scaroth appeared to consider the advice. There was a reason he was one of Her Majesty’s Chosen. Not simply a great unthinking mass of talon and fang, he obviously had the gift of slower thinking than one normally found in a feeding frenzy. He barked and snarled directions to the Hunn beneath him to dress the scythe moonward.
The amulets of the men flashed with some inexplicable magick, as if pleased by the spectacle.
The thresh had to concede that the sacrifice had been well made. It did return a good measure of discipline to the thrall. Thresh blinked into the terrible light where individual calflings appeared to be pointing toward them. It was difficult to make out what lay beyond the great river of coloured lights in which the men appeared to bathe without a thought. Chariots and covered wagons without beasts to draw them raced back and forth along the shining way, some of them even screeching to a halt. Thresh tried to identify the source of that loud, piercing screech, thinking that it must be the hidden beast that drew along the chariots, but nothing could it discern. And how did these wagons move about, lacking a visible beast to pull them? Well, that had to be the most arcane of magicks and so far beyond its meagre thinkings that nothing was to be gained by pondering the matter.
*
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn was glad that the weak link in the chains binding his host had been broken so quickly. It served his purposes to lay a hard example upon the assembled warriors before they met the . . .
Enemy?
He still had difficulties accepting the idea of mere men as a foe. As a meal, certainly. But certainly not anything as storied and worthy of respect as ienamic. And yet . . . Her Majesty had been quite specific about the dangers of sorcery he might encounter Above. She still wondered at the role of magick in her long banishment beneath the capstone that had been sealed atop the UnderRealms.
‘The Sky Lords surely sealed us beneath our rightful place, Hunn,’ she had said to him in the privacy of her chambers. ‘But how did the Sky Lords come to intervene? Were they summoned by sorcery? Have men been perfecting this sorcery while we have remained trapped beneath their feet? This truth you shall seek out for me.’
Standing in the realm of the Above, reining in his unruly thoughts at the unexpected sights and smells, Scaroth knew it would not be as simple a task as raiding some piss puddle of a village and slowly eating the inhabitants’ smallest nestlings until they gave up the secret. As entertaining as that would be. He kept his eyes on the war party for the most part, beasting them into submission, but when he turned toward the lights where ever more men were gathered he could not help wondering what had happened up here in the long eons since the banishment of his kind, of all daemonum. Nothing of this place recalled the teachings of the scrolls. Why did the men not flee?
‘What are those things, thresh?’ he demanded to know, raising one massive arm and pointing at the bobbing points of light that seemed to attend each and every one of the calflings. ‘Are they the amulets of power? The ones of which you spoke? Are they all wizards in this village?’
The thresh poked its head around the giant trunk of Scaroth’s haunches. Grudgingly, the BattleMaster had to admit that the tiny thresh, nowhere near full grown, did not shrink away from the light as some of his warriors did. (He noted which ones; have no fear of that. They would thicken up the regimental blood pots if they proved themselves cowards on this quest.)
‘I think so, my lord,’ it confessed. ‘But again, I do not know that we must fear this light. Surely if so many talismans were invoked against us and were to have any power, we should have felt that power by now.’
Scaroth growled. It was a fair point for one so small and feeble.
The Vengeance now was fully deployed in a double scythe formation, oriented for the most part toward the dark lines of the village rather than the river of light and its immediate promise of slaughter (although the promise of immolation in human fire probably had something to do with that, too, he thought darkly). The Queen’s Vengeance, a dread company of two reinforced Talon of Hunn and their leashes of Fangr, and of course the Lieutenants Grymm – there was no avoiding the arrogant scum – shifted and growled. The gutted carcass of the disgraced Hunn still had them in its power, but Scaroth knew he must act now: either attack the village as planned or make an opportunistic lunge at these curious calfling wizards with the glowing amulets. He would never admit it, for to do so was a terrible weakness, but part of him wished to consult with the thresh and even the Grymm to seek their counsel. The daemon inferiorae was the only one of his host with any experience in this realm, and the Grymm, he could not deny, were learned in the sacred war scrolls.
But a BattleMaster of the Grande Horde did not keep his chariot with counsel. He maintained his grip on the reins by riding down on his enemies and driving them before him.
And Scaroth had enemies at hand.
‘Turn dagger-wise,’ he roared, and the war party wheeled in the direction of the light, finishing the manoeuvre with a great single s
tomp and a clattering clash of blades on shields.
‘HUNN UR HORDE,’ they roared in unison, even the Fangr and Grymm.
That evoked a response in the calflings at last. Some even jumped in fear. Excellent. Others began to back away. This was how it should be. Things were finally making sense.
It was a gamble, but he could scent the musky fever of his dominants to be among the meat and blood, and for the moment that meant over there. In the light.
He bent down to hiss softly at the thresh.
‘You are certain this unnatural bright glow is harmless, thresh?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ it replied, although it didn’t seem all that certain.
‘That is good. You shall lead us into it.’
*
At that moment, one of the Drakon dropped out of the sky. It smashed against the ground, flailing and shattering its wings, the bones of which flew into the assembled ranks of the Queen’s Vengeance, cutting down Hunn and Fangr and even a Lieutenant Grymm. The thresh cringed behind its BattleMaster, but even as it soiled itself with its own pastes, its quickthinkings admonished it.
It had been wrong.
The flying creatures were not creatures at all.
The thresh turned its eyestalks on the fallen Drakon, and the thinking came upon it that . . . that what had dropped from Above was not beast but . . . but chariot.
Some form of chariot, the thresh was certain, and from which even now an injured and bloodied calfling crawled.
Around it, the revengers’ thrall strained and thrashed on the very edge of disintegration. The discipline of the war party was near breaking point and might have failed if Urspite Scaroth had not whipped out his great blade and decapitated another of his less reliable Hunn as a lesson.
‘HOLD!’ he roared. ‘The Hunn ur Horde will HOLD!’
‘Hunn,’ a few of the warriors barked with unthinking obedience. ‘Hunn . . . Hunn . . .’
‘Hunn ur Horde,’ roared the surviving Lieutenants Grymm, which was very generous of them, and soon enough the entirety of the Dread Company had taken up the chant, calming themselves with it.
The BattleMaster turned his baleful glare on the thresh.
‘Did you witness these before?’ Scaroth demanded to know in a low rumbling growl.
‘No, my lord,’ the thresh replied, shouting over the death screams of the chariot beast. Inside the thing, yet another rider struggled to free itself.
‘Then pray the Sky Lords send no more down upon us, thresh. Now. Move.’
The thresh stumbled forward. It could not untangle its many thinkings and feelings.
It knew the fear of the unknown, of the uncertainty about the bright, hot light into which it would take the revengers. It knew pride that one so inferior might lead such a mighty force into battle. The thresh also knew that the war party was actually quite tiny by the standards of the Horde, especially the Grande Horde, but it had rarely seen the Hunn clan assembled in greater numbers than this, and never with the intent to have at a foe. It felt anxiety that it might falter and bring shame upon its nest like the Hunn that had lost control of its leash. And as it slowly began to lope toward the light, stretching out its gait, accelerating toward the enemy lines, there was the savage exultation of which it had dreamed so many times. The blood frenzy was rising.
The muddy ground, broken and uneven, dried out and became flat, slipping away beneath the thresh in a blur. The men, its prey, reacted to the charge, some fleeing, some climbing aboard their chariots, others holding the glowing amulets to their faces as if to hide behind the strange candle. As it closed with the calflings, the thresh heard more screeching as human riders reined in their chariots. It smelled a strange, alien miasma of scents, most of them completely unidentifiable. And it heard the most confounding sound.
A deep, thudding roar that filled the skies.
It searched in the direction of the sound.
Skyward. And what it saw froze the ichor in its carcass.
There was more than one skyborne chariot.
26
An NOPD command unit rolled up while Heath and his men were rushing to establish some sort of forward post in the po’boy shop. Dave wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing there. Building a little fort? Constructing a blind, like hunters, from which to observe the Hunn? Maybe just setting up a bolt-hole into which they could flee if necessary. The shop was a solid brick structure that offered more cover than the shacks and shanties around it, but that didn’t fill him with confidence.
They weren’t facing a human enemy. The Horde wouldn’t stand off and throw stones or even spears at this place. They’d swarm it.
He already felt as though he was just baggage to these guys, and apart from telling them which orc was which, he didn’t seem much good for anything besides getting in the way. He stepped out of the store just as the NOPD truck arrived. It looked like a mobile home to Dave, and he found it all too easy to imagine a couple of Hunn carving it up with cleavers and war axes. Professor Ashbury, wearing police body armour she had picked up somewhere, jumped down out of the rear cabin door before the vehicle stopped moving. Heath managed to look both pissed and relieved at their arrival.
‘I hope this is not precipitate, Emmeline,’ he said. ‘I do hope I have an OP to fall back to.’
‘Your guys took over the café at the hospital,’ she said. ‘It’s defensible. Compton even offered to stay and defend it –’ She smirked, all ham and wry. ‘– but they didn’t need his help.’
Dave could pick out the sallow face, fiery neckbeard and bald head of the anthropologist in the rear of the command unit. He was fiddling around with a bank of screens while taking notes on a stack of tablets and a block of paper. Jostled by the police and ignored by the SEALs, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth. When he wasn’t busy, he looked at his cell phone as if expecting it to ring.
His problem is he never gets laid, Dave thought.
Ashbury’s eyes met Dave’s. Was there something there? Dave thought there might be something there. And he wasn’t even drunk.
‘Hello, Hooper. I see you’re still hanging around like a fart in a telephone booth.’
Okay, maybe not.
‘For now,’ he said. ‘What’s on TV?’
He nodded at the banks of monitors inside the big van.
Heath didn’t wait for an answer, climbing the two small metal steps into the cabin. Ashbury followed him back inside, and Dave followed her, still carrying Marty Grbac’s splitting maul. There were half a dozen men and women seated at consoles in the command unit, all of them uniformed officers of the New Orleans Police Department. Compton and Ashbury were the only civilians besides Dave. For the first time in what felt like a long while, nobody paid him any attention. They were all transfixed by the scenes playing out on the two largest wide-screen displays. Both ran monochrome low-light vision from news choppers.
Dave could see the leader of the war party on at least two monitors. There was no missing the ugly prick. The Hunn was noticeably larger than any other creature in its . . . in its thrall, he thought. A war party assigned to a Master of Hunn is known as a thrall, a word from the Olde Scrolls that could mean everything from a small raiding party of half a dozen Hunn and their leash of Fangr up to a Grande Horde. This thrall ran to roughly a couple of hundred strong and faced the marines, who were taking up position in and around an abandoned McDonald’s. On another screen, an injured reporter screamed and pleaded for someone to come and save him. One of the uniforms turned down the volume on that.
For a moment Dave found himself searching for signs of a physical leash, a chain or a long thick rope of treated hide that could bind a Fangr to its master, but that was his rational twenty-first-century mind attempting to impose a preferred meaning on a much older form of understanding. The leash was not physical. It was like . . . the authority of a squad leader
, he thought, satisfied with that. The BattleMaster held all in his thrall. A Hunn dominant merely controlled a leash of Fangr.
Chief Allen appeared at the door of the truck.
‘All set up inside, Captain,’ he reported to Heath before following Dave’s gaze. The Hunn leader was festooned with fangs, scalps, and skulls with a headdress of Drakon scales forming a sort of Mohawk on his boiled leather helmet.
‘Nasty,’ said the CPO.
‘Yeah. That ugly-ass monster could really use some wardrobe advice,’ Igor said from the door.
‘A little Queer Eye for the Straight Orc?’ smirked Allen.
‘Just sayin’.’
Dave’s skin itched with the need to get moving, as though something inside him wanted to burst out and fly to the scene of the battle. A dumbass move for sure. No way was he leaving the protective circle of these heavily armed professional killers. Even the lady professor was probably better suited to this than he was. She had her Asperger’s thing to make her a little scary. She was rocking it. He was a freak with a magic hammer, so far out of his depth that just remembering to draw breath was an effort.
So Dave Hooper just stared at the screens. There were banks of them up and down the interior of the command unit. The SEALs and NOPD had pulled in a lot of coverage. Or rather, Ashbury had. A lot of the video was from the news channels, but at least half came from feeds he didn’t recognise. Drones, maybe? Or even satellites. Perhaps the CIA was stealing the video from the phones of those idiots who hadn’t run away yet. There were plenty of them still hanging around. Compton pushed the occasional button or stroked a touch pad to pull in close on an image, but to Dave he looked about as useless . . . well, as Dave felt.
Dave vs. the Monsters 1: Emergence Page 27