Blackhand (22 page)

“Then stay with us, little brother. If your divine aspect will not let you fight, just try to die well.”

Quintel thought of the Demonthane in the far away distance. He thought of Huk. He thought of Siyer. He wanted blood.

“Let the god in me scream for mercy,” he said. “My rage is greater than its sorrow.”

The roar of the approaching Thogs gained clarity. Individual war cries could be heard. Even the voices of their human masters found his ears. Aul heard them, too.

“The time is upon us. I will see you on the battlefield, mad prince!” Aul nudged the mare and galloped back to her cavalry line.

The catapults were still crawling into position when the shadow of the first Thog stretched onto the rocky plain. Behind it, an orgy of thrusting swords and tree-sized spears stabbed the sky. The Thogs roared and shouted in almost human voices as they stampeded onto the field.

The Abanshi strategy had already failed, and he felt that realization rise among Aul's troops. The Thogs were moving too quickly, spreading out from the choke point without formation. By the time the archers and batteries were in place, the Thogs would be dispersed too widely to be contained.

When they saw Quintel, the human leaders called out orders to halt, and the Thogs begrudgingly obeyed.  Quintel, standing alone in the middle of the battlefield, looked like a trap to them. Why else would he be there?

The Thogs continued to pour into the open space even though the front line had stopped. Already flush with blood lust, the beasts piled over each other. They bellowed at Quintel, baring their tusk-like fangs and slashing the air with their iron weapons.

One of the human masters realized the entire advance had stopped because of a lone Abanshi soldier and shouted a command to one of the larger beasts, who wielded a blood-streaked sword. Broken arrows sprouted from the creature's back, but it showed no sign of pain or weakness. Answering the command, the Thog turned toward Quintel and charged.

It came at him like an enraged bear, muscles rippling, fangs bared, dirt and stone flying beneath its feet. Moving fast, it raised its sword. Halfway to Quintel, its battle cry seemed to shake the landscape.

Quintel tried to reach for his sword, but his arm would not move. The god looked through his eyes and became paralyzed by the sight of the charging Thog. It did not want to be there. It did not want to die or kill or have anything to do with death. It could not move for fear of what might happen if it did.

But Quintel could. As the Thog dropped its blade to meet his skull, Quintel's Abanshi instincts awoke and broke the god's grip of fear. His hand shot for the sword on his belt.

There was a sound.

The Abanshi soldiers who stood in formation and watched the exchange heard the sound in various ways. Many believed it resembled the roar of swarming hornets, their wings shredding the air with countless revolutions. Others thought the sound seemed more like a rising bass note from some titanic stringed instrument.

The charging Thog disappeared. A black, fan-shaped stain exploded across the hard ground in front of Quintel and two objects fell at his feet. One was the Thog's sword. The second was a black sphere. The sphere rolled in a half circle before stopping at his boot. These were all that remained of the attacking Thog.

Silence fell upon both the armies. The Thogs had enough intelligence to know something was wrong. The Abanshi army knew they had just observed the hand of a god.

The rising tone that made the two armies freeze was the sound of Quintel's blade slicing through the air faster than a hummingbird's wings. No one saw him move. His sword was suddenly in his hand and the Thog was gone.

Aul dismounted her horse and stepped forward, a mixture of emotions swirling from her mind.

“What did I just see?” She shouted to her generals. “What did I just see?”

No one answered. Now they knew. Quintel was exactly who he claimed to be.

As soon as the first blow fell, something happened between him and his god half. They intertwined. Their spirits braided together like two serpents. It only took the god a fraction of a second to realize killing the Thog did not hurt like killing a human. In fact, it felt good.

Before Quintel's sword had fully passed through the neck of the beast, the god had jumped in, dicing the creature's flying body parts down to bone chips and black liquid. No longer was the god a sobbing child. It was with him. They moved together.

He felt the reaction of the humans behind him. A fountain of collective awe splashed over him. They had come in despair. Now divine hope had cut its way into the fight.

The enraged Thogs sensed fear among their human masters, who could not accept what they had just witnessed. The humans paused for too long and a dozen Thogs broke ranks and charged.

Quintel disappeared from one spot and reappeared in the center of the attacking pack. Again the humming sound rose and the charging Thogs vanished, but not in so fine a mist as the first. This lot disintegrated into a pile of torsos, heads, arms and legs, still moving, still biting, not knowing they were dead. A rain of gray flesh and black blood splattered over the Thogs that were holding back. The gesture was too strong and the horde went insane, coming at him with all they had. The human masters lost all control.

Quintel again vanished and an explosion of Thog limbs and entrails flew into the sky. One second, twenty Thogs would be raising their axes; the next, they would fly into pieces, as if disassembled by some invisible force. Only the geyser of body parts moving through the throngs revealed his location.

With the bottle uncorked, the thousands of beasts still in the narrow canyon came flooding in. All of them charged toward Quintel. Soon there was nothing but a dense gray circle of Thogs a half-mile thick surrounding him, pushing their numbers into the whirl of his blade from all directions.

A mound of body parts began to grow. Quintel wasn't just dismembering the Thogs, he was stacking their trunks and limbs into heaps.

He would stop sometimes, as if standing back to assess his work. That was the only time he was visible and not a smudge of movement in the middle of the abattoir.

Black blood covered him, dripping from his head and body like oil. Only his eyes and teeth were visible. His sword glowed red hot from the taste of iron Thog armor. He was not consumed in battle lust or even particularly enraged. His face bore no emotion.

Sending his mind outward while his body continued its task, he touched Aul’s thoughts with a message. “Burn the stacks,” he said without words.

“Did you hear that?” Aul asked her generals, but she knew they had not. She mounted her horse.

“He wants us to burn the stacks. Get the incendiary ammunition for the catapults. We'll ride in on horseback.”

By the time they moved the flammable munitions to the cavalry, the mound of carnage at the center of the circle had risen fifty feet with Quintel on top. When the beasts struggled to climb the growing stack of their own dead, he jumped from the pile and began another, feeding it with more butchered meat.

Quintel felt as if he floated across the battlefield. Conjoined with the god, his strength had no limits. The world around him moved lethargically as if time itself had slowed down. He had learned to drop the Thogs with two cuts. Armpit to opposite shoulder, then back from rib to hip. If he just cut off the heads, the senseless bodies kept running around the battlefield striking out at anything. If the sphere and the head remained together, the beasts would keep fighting without legs. The two cuts left the head, torso and legs in three harmless pieces.

He did not always kill the Thogs with such efficiency. Sometimes the god had to play for a while. During those times the Thogs turned into a mist of gristle and blood, pureed from a thousand strokes of his blade.

A rain of gigantic arrows fell into the center of the millwheel of death. The Thog archers were firing on their own forces trying to hit Quintel. The tactic did not work. He was never where the arrows landed.

Quintel's stolen sword shattered during one of the vivisections. The Thog weapons were too primitive and cumbersome to use so he began ripping out the black spheres with his bare hands. To Quintel the action felt like plunging his hand into warm mud. The technique was not as fast as a sword, so he left the fray and visited the human Thogmasters who still lingered at the back of the fight.

Quintel saw Taln among them. Taln was the general who almost killed him the night of Huk's triumphant banquet. Quintel could tell by Taln's ornate armor he was Huk's replacement, Sirian Ru's new warlord.

Quintel leaped on the back of Taln's steed with the default warlord still in the saddle.

“Do you remember me, Warlord?” He whispered into Taln's ear. “You had a blade to my throat but months ago. Now I need to borrow it.”

Quintel confiscated Taln's sword before the general could even twitch and jumped back into the frenzy like a grasshopper. He wasn't going to kill Taln or any of the other humans. There was no need. The human fighters couldn't have gotten close to Quintel. They would have been crushed by the mindless stampede of Thogs in the attempt. Quintel's intrusion upon Taln was a warning. He was letting the human attackers think he could take them down at will. They didn't know about his weakness.

The cascade of Thog parts continued to rain with mechanical precision. The beasts did not know how to retreat. There was no such command embedded in their limited brains. They kept entering the fight despite the fact the Thogmasters shouted orders for them to run away.

The rising and falling hum of Quintel's blade mixed with the rhythmic thuds of its impact to create a strange music that carried over the battlefield. All the sounds synchronized into a tribal melody that celebrated slaughter. The splash of body parts joining the stacks punctuated the song.

Aul rode to the growing mound of carnage with ten horsemen bearing clay casks of flammable oil, sawdust and pitch. The casks were intended to be flaming projectiles for the catapults, but the situation required more precise placement than the mangonels could allow. They approached with pikes, in case the Thogs turned on them, but the effort was not necessary. The Thogs never even noticed them. The beasts were too focused on stepping into Quintel's blade.

Avoiding the few still-moving torsos of the disassembled Thogs, the horsemen climbed the mountain of amputations and emptied the viscous contents of the casks. When finished, they threw a lit torch at the base of the stack and watched as the conflagration consumed its fuel. The fire soon reached high into the sky, a mountain of red flame and dense black smoke. Quintel keep feeding the flames with more of Ru's constructions.

Hours passed. Ru's human warriors had run away. A few of the Thogs had the intelligence to follow their masters, although they would have been happy to line up for the slaughter.

Several pyres now blazed like gigantic bonfires as night descended upon the scene. A zealous warpack pursued the remnants of Ru's retreating army. The rest of the Abanshi forces eventually meandered up to the edge of Quintel's fight. There was not much for them to do. They had come to die and now they were merely bored. They chopped at the torsos that still showed life, cutting out the black spheres that animated them.

After a few more hours, the sound of Quintel's sword stopped. The fires had consumed most of the fuel and only mounds of ash and unblemished spheres remained. The battle was over.

Caked in dried black blood and smelling of burnt Thog flesh, Quintel tossed his twelfth ruined sword aside and approached Aul and her generals, who had pitched large tents beyond the stench of the fires and were well into their second cask of wine. They had made a picnic out of the battle.

“I'm going to join the pursuing forces,” Quintel said. “If the Thogs turn to fight they will kill the warpack.”

“By all means, Thog Stacker,” Aul said, referring to him by the name her troops had circulated. “But you should join us in a chalice of wine before you go. It is not often we get to share a drink with a god.”

He could tell Aul was drunk. Although her outward composure was controlled, if not overly measured, her lifelight was fuzzy at the edges.

“I will join you when I return,” he said. “For now, there is a part of me that feels euphoria by spilling Thog blood. And it is not done celebrating.”

“Very well, I will not stop you from enjoying your craft. When you get back, we will have a celebration beyond equal. A banquet fit for your achievement. You have saved the Abanshi kingdom and earned a name in our history. Perhaps the greatest of all names.”

Quintel looked over the battlefield. Seven hills of Thog ashes, hundreds of feet high, had been added to the flat landscape. There was one more thing that needed to be done before the Abanshi could relax.

“While I am gone, collect the black spheres from the ashes. They will not have been harmed by the fire. It is important we possess them all. If Ru retrieves them, he will be able to build more Thogs.”

He knew Aul was not accustomed to taking orders, but had become a firm believer in his claims of divinity. He sensed her main concern was how to appease him without handing over her kingdom.

“As you wish, brother,” she said and turned to her generals. “Gather what supply wagons we have. Fill them with the black globes. Not a single one should be forgotten.”