The Heretic Kings

SIXTEEN

There was at once too much and too little to take in. Hawkwood was absurdly reminded of a festival he had attended once in southern Torunna, when the effigies of the old gods had been displayed to public ridicule: huge constructions of wicker and cloth and wood in every grotesque shape and form dancing madly with the teams of men who lurked inside their colourful carcasses, until it was impossible to tell one warped form from another and they had dissolved into a whirling confusion of monstrous faces and limbs.

Here, it was dark. There were no colours, simply a monochrome nightmare. Shadows with blazing eyes which seemed to shoot up out of the very ground, the heat from their raging darknesses a palpable thing even in the depths of the night. Forms rather than bodies. A picture here of an animal’s head set upon a bipedal frame, the warm splash of blood, the screaming. It passed with the vivid unreality of a dream. A dark mirage. But it was real.

The men at the rear screamed horribly, the chest they bore torn out of their hands. A crash, and then a shower of tinkling gold across the roadway. Shadows lifted the two men high in the air and then something happened too quickly to make out, and they were in pieces, their viscera ribboning out like flung streamers, their bodies become meat and shattered bone which were flung away.

As the shadows closed in, the men at the front fired their arquebuses, flashes and plumes of smoke. There were howls of pain, despairing wails from the approaching shapes.

The rest of the soldiers had dropped the other chest, and also their sick comrade, Gerrera. They bunched together and levelled their own weapons. Gerrera screamed as the shadows came upon him and he was engulfed, torn apart. A volley of arquebus fire, the iron bullets tearing into the ranks of the half-glimpsed foe and the night was clawed apart by their screams. Huge bodies could be seen decorating the roadway, immobile but at the same time subtly changing in bulk and shape.

The attackers drew off for a moment, and Murad’s soldiers reloaded their firearms feverishly.

“We must make a run for it,” the nobleman said, his narrow chest heaving and the sweat standing out on his face. “It’s not that far to the gorge: some of us might make it. We’ll all die here, else.”

“What about Bardolin?” Hawkwood asked.

“He’ll have to take his chances. We can’t carry him. Maybe the creatures will recognize him for one of their own sorcerous folk-who knows?”

“Bastard!” Hawkwood spat, but he was not sure who he was speaking of.

The things came roaring out of the night again. Seven arquebuses went off, felling about half a dozen of them, but the rest kept coming. They were amongst the surviving soldiers, biting and clawing and bellowing: apes and jaguars and wolves, and one snake with arms which Hawkwood slashed at viciously with his iron-bladed dirk so that it thrashed to the ground screaming thinly, its head becoming that of a beautiful woman even as its coils lashed in its death throes.

Cortona was smashed to the ground by a great were-ape and had his face ripped off with a twist of its fist. Murad seized the dead man’s arquebus, slid out the rammer and jammed it into the creature’s reeking maw. The iron of the rammer tore into the roof of its mouth and it fell. Something came at him from behind and raked his back with razor-sharp talons. He spun to find himself facing a huge black cat, and stabbed the rammer into its livid eye. He laughed as it shrieked and spun away, the gun tool protruding from its punctured pupil.

One of the soldiers was hoisted into the air by two of the beasts and torn asunder between them like a rotten sack, his innards exploding to shower the fray with stinking gore, the gold which he had stuffed in his shirt and pockets clinking out along with it. Another was pinioned whilst a werewolf bit through the back of his neck, his spine splintering in the tremendous jaws, his head lolling on a tenuous connection of windpipe and skin.

Mensurado had followed Murad’s example and was stabbing out left and right with an iron arquebus rammer. He was roaring in a kind of battle frenzy, shouting obscenities and blasphemies, and the beasts actually made way for him. All he had to do with his crude weapon was break the skin, and the sorcery which maintained the beast form of the shifter would be broken. The iron would poison its system as surely as if a bullet had pierced its vitals.

Hawkwood grabbed Masudi. “Take Bardolin. We’re going to run for it.”

“Captain!” the big helmsman cried despairingly.

“Do as I say! Mihal, help him.”

Masudi hoisted the unconscious mage on to his broad shoulders whilst around him the dwindling company fought for their lives. The three mariners had as secondary armament the cheaply made iron ship’s knives which were more tool than weapon, but which were more valuable than gold in the melee, more effective than a battery of culverins could be. They slashed a way forward, the iron blades snicking back and forth in their hands as though they were threshing wheat. The beasts retreated before them: they knew that one nick from the knives meant death to them.

Behind the trio of desperate sailors the soldiers fought on with rammers and gunstocks and knives. But they had too many assailants. One by one they were enveloped, brought down and torn to pieces. The road was littered with gold coins and the fragments of bodies puddled with gore and entrails. Murad, Mensurado and a couple of others made a last effort, a combined charge. Hawkwood risked a glance back at them, but he could only see a crowd of monsters huddled together as if feeding at the same trough. They broke apart as Murad, his shirt torn from his back and his skin in strips, burst through them, wielding a shard of an arquebus’s wheel-lock. The nobleman sprinted away at unbelievable speed, a dozen shifters in pursuit, and disappeared into the night.

Hawkwood’s group shuffled onwards, turning and spinning to keep their assailants at bay with lunges of their dirks. The wall of the volcano towered above them now and they were surrounded by trees and vegetation; they had left the main part of the city. The cleft in the crater wall could be seen as a wedge of stars ahead.

Mihal was too slow. As his arm snaked out to stab at a shifter it caught his wrist. He was yanked off into a scrum of snarling shadows and could not even scream before they had finished him. One knocked Masudi down from behind. Bardolin went sprawling and Hawkwood staggered, his dagger flying out of his hand.

He scrabbled off on hands and knees into the bushes, rolling and shoving himself forward into the vegetation like a fox intent on going to earth. Then he lay, utterly spent, the jungle teeming with howls, leaves brushing his face. He tried to summon a prayer, a last thought, something coherent out of the terror which washed across his brain, but his mind was blank. He lay there as dumb and senseless as a cornered animal, waiting for death to come ravening out of the darkness.

It came. He heard the bushes crackling, and there was a sensation of heat beside him, the impression of a hulking presence.

Nothing happened.

He opened his eyes, his heartbeat a red light that went on and off in his head, soughing through his throat like the ebb and flow of an unquiet sea. And he saw the yellow eyes of the beast that lay beside him, its breath stirring his sweat-soaked forelock.

“Sweet God, get it over with,” he croaked, fear swamping him, robbing him of any last defiance.

The beast, an enormous werewolf, chuckled.

The sound was human, rational despite its author.

“Would I harm you, Captain, the navigator, the steerer of ships? I think not. I think not.”

It was gone. The night was silent, the utter silence of the unquiet forest. Looking up, Hawkwood could see the stars shining in between the limbs of the trees.

He waited for the beast to return and finish him, but it did not. The night had become as peaceful as if the carnage had been imagined, a fever dream vivid on waking. He sat up cautiously, heard a groan nearby and struggled drunkenly to his feet.

Nothing was working. His mind was immobilized in shock, barely able to instruct the body which harboured it. He staggered out on to the roadway and the first thing he saw was the mocking sight of Masudi’s head planted on the paving like a fallen fruit, dark and shining.

Hawkwood gagged and threw up a thin soup of scalding bile. Other things lay on the road, but he did not care to look at them. He heard the groan again and tottered over to its source.

Bardolin, moving feebly in a pool of Masudi’s blood.

Hawkwood bent down to the mage and slapped the old man’s face, hard. As if he were somehow to blame for the night’s slaughter.

Bardolin opened his eyes.

“Captain.”

Hawkwood could not speak, and he was shaking as though bitterly cold. He tried to help Bardolin up and slipped in the slick blood so that they were both lying in it like twins spat forth from some ruptured womb.

They lay there. Hawkwood felt that he had somehow lived through the end of the world. He could not be alive; he was in some manner of subtle hell.

Bardolin sat up rubbing his face, then fell back again. It took some minutes before finally they were both on their feet, looking like two intoxicated revellers who had splashed through a slaughterhouse. Bardolin saw Masudi’s severed head and gaped.

“What is happening?”

But still Hawkwood could not speak. He dragged Bardolin away from the scene of the fighting, up the roadway to where the confining wall of the volcano reared up into the night cleft by its wedge of stars.

As he walked, Hawkwood’s strength returned and he was able to support the rubber-legged Bardolin. The mage was totally bewildered and did not seem to know where he was. He rambled on about pyramids and sea crossings and had philosophical arguments with himself about the Dweomer, reiterating its Seven Disciplines again and again until Hawkwood paused and shook him violently. That quietened him, but he seemed no less confused.

They reached the gorge which led outside the confining circle of the volcano’s crater. In the darkness it was like the entrance to a primitive tomb, a megalithic burial place. It was unguarded, deserted. In fact, the entire circle of the city was dead and lightless, as though everything they had seen there had been delusion, the hallucinations of tired minds.

The pair stumbled through the cleft like sleepwalkers, tripping and rebounding off stone. They did not speak to one another, not even when they had finally come through to the other side and found themselves outside the hollow cone of Undabane with the barren slopes of the volcano stretching away below them in the moonlight, and beyond them the midnight sea of the jungle.

A shade rose out of the rocks before them and crunched through the tufa and ash until it was close enough to touch.

Murad.

Raw flesh glimmered over his naked torso, and sluggish blood welled from his wounds, black as tar. He was half bald where something had ripped his scalp from forehead to ear.

“Murad?” Hawkwood managed to ask. He could not believe that this human flotsam was the man he knew and detested.

“The very same. So they let you loose, did they? The mariner and the mage.”

“We escaped,” Hawkwood said, but knew that was a lie as the words passed his lips. The three of them stood as if they had not a care in the world, as if there were not a kingdom of monsters within the hollow mountain thirsting after their blood.

“They let us go,” Murad said, his sneer still intact at least. “Or you, at any rate. Me I’m not so sure about. I may merely have been fortunate. How is the mage, anyway?”

“Alive.”

“Alive.” Suddenly Murad sagged. He had to squat down on his knees. “They killed them all,” he whispered, “every last one. And such gold! Such. . blood.”

Hawkwood dragged him upright. “Come. We can’t stay here. We’ve a long road ahead of us.”

“We’re walking dead men, Captain.”

“No-we’re alive. We were meant to stay alive, I believe, and at some point I want to find out why. Now take Bardolin’s other arm. Take it, Murad.”

The nobleman did as he was told. Together, the three of them stumbled down the slopes of the mountain, the ash burning in their wounds like salt.

By the time the dawn came lightening the sky they were almost at its foot, and the unchanging jungle whooped and wailed with weary familiarity before them. They plunged into it once more, becoming lost to the world of the dreaming trees, the shadowed twilight of the forest.

The hidden beast watched them as they disappeared, three wrecked pilgrims pursuing some cracked vision known only to themselves. Then it rose up out of its hiding place and followed them, as silent as a breath of air.