Death's Head (2 page)

T
HE FIRST I
know of a raid is when an explosion shocks the air. Our gate guard goes down with a spear in his throat. A short spear, thrown using a sinew wrapped around its notched shaft. There’s a good chance that sinew came from a human leg; most of them do.

“To arms,” shouts the lieutenant.

Sergeant Fitz is more pragmatic. “Free fire,” he yells, my execution already forgotten.

The skull above me says nothing. It merely grins.

Able to move at speed and deadly with bow, blade, or throwing spears, the ferox fight silently and to a preagreed plan. Speed and silence are a deadly mix in the desert, where sounds can carry for miles and a guard with good hearing is more valuable than one with good eyes.

The ferox pour through our gate in a wave.

And we get slaughtered, that’s the only way to describe it. Most of the legion are new and barely know one end of a pulse rifle from another.

I watch a boy, little older than me when I first joined, drop to his knees and raise his gun to take careful aim. He even takes a breath and lets it out slowly, holding his fire until his heartbeat is steady. His first shot should blow a bull ferox apart and kill the beast behind, but he’s forgotten to flick his precharge lever to load the coil.

The kid pulls his trigger repeatedly, shaking his head. Safety catches were abolished because new recruits kept forgetting to toggle them, but there’s no future for a recruit so raw he forgets to precharge his weapon.

He dies with irritation on his face. Still unsure why his rifle won’t fire. I’d tell him, but the gag in my mouth prevents it.

“Fall back,” cries a voice.

It’s our lieutenant, aged all of seventeen and still so new that few of us have bothered to learn his name. There’s no need now. As a ferox drops from a roof behind him, the boy turns and the ferox flicks out one claw, opening a second mouth in the lieutenant’s throat.

He dies in silence.

“Riddle’s down!” someone screams.

And so I learn the boy’s name after all.

“Fall back, fall back.”

Stand,
I want to shout.
Hold steady and die well.

The ferox are cruel to soldiers who run, as unforgiving as our own dear leader, and troopers are dying around me in the dozens as they try to fall back toward an inner wall, which simply provides a backdrop for their slaughter. The air is hot with shit and guts, the stink of angry ferox and human blood on boiling sand. Flies settle quickly on the broken bodies.

Eggs will be laid, larvae hatched, and the desert will take back what should never have been here in the first place.
The XVth Brigade, Legion Etranger.
A ferox goes down, a youngster, half its armor burned away.

The only beast to be wounded so far.

It feels like hours before the last boy dies. In reality it’s probably a handful of minutes and the ferox are kind, in a way rumor says is not in their nature. They kill quickly and cleanly, forcing each cadet to his knees, dragging back his head, and cutting his throat before moving on.

Anyone who says these beasts are mindless knows nothing.

Seven years ago when we first built Fort Libidad the beasts would no more have cut a man’s throat than open his belly; ferox have plating across their throats and over their guts and believed we must have the same.

They’ve obviously discovered this is untrue, because I’m looking at the proof. A hundred dead teenagers with their throats and bellies ripped open.

Their chieftain is huge.

A bull standing nine feet tall, four feet across the shoulders, his mottled armor is chipped and cracked, and age has grayed his fur and dimmed his eyes, but when he moves toward me the others fall back to give him space.

Claws grip my jaw and turn me to face him.

This is it,
I think, but his claws never close.

Instead dark eyes glare into mine and my head is twisted farther, to allow him a better view. Releasing my jaw, he taps my metal arm, considering the sound it makes. The prosthetic is crude, all pistons and rewelds and braided steel hoses that are past their safety date, but it looks better than the broken stump beneath.

“You did that,” I mumble.

Dark eyes watch me.

“Well, not you exactly.” I nod to the trophy above me. “Him.”

The ferox follows my glance. Then his other hand moves to the broken flesh of my back as he dips his fingers into my blood and carries it to his mouth.

Seconds later, he spits and keeps spitting.

I could have told him.

Bad blood,
my father always said.

As the others watch, the old bull considers his options. I have no doubt my death is at the top of that list. Every other human in Fort Libidad is dead, their blood staining the sand of the parade ground, the stink of their voided bowels so strong it fights with the scent of my executioner.

I wait, keeping my eyes on his.

This is my only vow.

Everyone makes and breaks promises and we all carry our share of those. Vows are different. Well, they are where I come from, which is a backwater so distant our dear leader barely bothers to include it in his list of glorious conquests.

My vow is simple.

However it comes, I will look death in the eyes. I will forgive myself every broken promise and debt still to be repaid, but if I break this vow, God will never forgive me.

So we lock eyes, a tribal chief standing over nine feet tall, and me, an ex-Etranger-sergeant, aged twenty-eight, standing as upright as pain allows.

What?
it asks.

I blink, despite myself.

My world suddenly reduced to a pair of dark eyes and a voice in my head.
Maybe it’s the pain,
I tell myself.

As I said, fifteen lashes can kill.

If not for my unnatural ability to heal, my corpse could have been waiting to greet the ferox when they arrived. The pain is extreme, so extreme I have trouble concentrating on the beast’s question.

What?
Its demand is louder this time.

The gag used for a whipping post is crude. It’s the victim’s own belt, fastened tight enough to make speech impossible, but not so tight that groans are stifled, because that defeats the object of the exercise.

Free me,
I think.

After a moment’s consideration the beast cuts my gag with a single flick of one claw. It is an object lesson in precision and reinforces why a hundred boys barely old enough to leave home lie dead in the dirt behind me.

“Soldier,” I say, wanting to answer its question while the beast is still interested.

The beast looks blank.

“Human.”

It thinks about this, head turned slightly to one side. When it grins, the beast reminds me of the trophy nailed above me. And once again I see the bull ferox flick its gaze upward. I have no idea how much of my thoughts it can read, but it obviously catches enough.

Not human,
it says.

I shrug, which is stupid.

Catching my wince, it grins some more.

“Ugly bastard,” I say.

Claws tighten around my jaw, closing slowly. Too much of that and something will break; in a man less thick-boned it would probably have broken already.

What?
it demands.

Lashed to a post, surrounded by bodies, and in the grip of a beast that wants to ask existential questions is not a great place to be. As the claws keep closing, I feel the bones in my jaw stress to cracking point, and think
What have I got to lose…?

“I don’t understand your question.” When in doubt, fall back on stupidity, because it works every time.

As its grip loosens and gaze becomes less fierce, the bull turns to another ferox, younger and half its size. I’d think it female but for its skull ridge and a row of tribal markings daubed onto its breastplate.

The two beasts stare at each other.

And then the chieftain steps back, waving one hand as if to say,
All yours.

Terrific,
I think,
slaughtered by the tribal runt.

But the youngster doesn’t strike. Instead it grips my face and twists my head from side to side, and then up and down, as if checking the articulation. Finally, the beast turns my skull beyond what the bones can stand and I wince. At which the beast steps back, obviously puzzled.

“My neck doesn’t bend that far,” I say. “You dumb fuck.”

Grinning, the youngster bares its fangs in obvious amusement.

What?
it says.

“Human.”

The amusement vanishes and into my mind comes the picture of a creature bound naked to a post, blood drying like a cloak across his back and buttocks. Splintered bone is already mending, and the gashes on his back have begun to close. He’s shat himself, which I don’t remember, and he looks smaller than I would expect, less than significant among the half a dozen ferox who…

Two thoughts stop me in my tracks.

One, that fewer than a dozen beasts can destroy a whole fort and, two, that for the first time ever, I’m thinking of the beasts as…

“
Who,
” I say.

The youngster looks at me.

Into my mind it replays its picture of the bound soldier.

“Me,” I say, then remember the ferox have no sense of personal identity. Apparently the beasts think of themselves in the third person, as
him.
Although how any man can claim to have discovered this or had time to write it down before being ripped to bloody shreds, God knows.

“Sven,” I say. “I’m Sven.”

The beast appears to taste the word in its head. After a moment it nods, and the others nod also. As one, they turn and lope away toward a break in the wall I’ve barely noticed before.

“Come back.

“Don’t go…”

When pleading fails I fall back on curses, calling the brutes everything from fuckwits to freaks and gutless cowards. And still they amble away from me and the slaughter they’ve left behind. A silent file of shambling ferox, already beginning to blend perfectly with the sands beyond the breach in the fort wall.

“Kill me,” I shout.

The beast at the back turns and for a second my heart stops, but then my heartbeat kicks in again and the smallest of the beasts turns and hurries after the others.

CHAPTER 3

T
HE FEROX COME
back before midnight. Well, the smallest one does. He slouches into the fort through that hole in the wall and moves like a shadow across the parade ground, picking his way almost daintily among the piles of dead. Ignoring me, he reaches for the skull on the post above my head and tries to pry it free.

“I can help.”

My words startle the youngster and that tells me ferox can hear, unless he’s simply surprised to find me still alive. Twisting my head to the double moon, he stares deep into my eyes.

After a second he lets his claws drop, obviously disappointed.

A question has been asked and I’ve failed to answer. More worryingly, I’ve failed even to hear his question.

Why?
I ask myself.
Why could you hear last time?

Because fear provided a key? Possible, but fear is controlled by the limbic system and my body is now too frozen with cold to feel much more than resignation.

Glaring at the ferox, I see he’s gone back to ignoring me. Without the others to be matched against, he looks huge, his teeth recently formed and razor-sharp, his armor shiny with the bloom of youth. And his claws are cruel but clumsy as he struggles with the trophy still nailed to the pole.

He can kill you,
I remind myself.
Gut you and strew your insides across the sand.
But they’re just words, insufficient to create the fear their truth demands.

“Free me,” I say.

Again that flicker of interest. Only this time it vanishes as quickly as it arrives. I need a way to remake the bridge between us.

If not fear…then pain?

As he reaches for the skull, I stretch up with my hands, not to help him but to snag the base of my thumb on his lower claw. Before the beast can react, I drag down my wrist and feel flesh tear and a single word comes into my mind.

Why?

“Must talk,” I tell him. “Only way.”

He looks at me with interest.
What?
he asks.

I try not to sigh.

“Sven,” I say.

The beast jerks his head at the bodies strewn across the parade ground around us. Ugly in the moonlight, they’re already beginning to freeze as the night strips what little heat they have left.
Sven?

I shake my own head, realize how ridiculous that is, and say
No,
loudly, inside my own skull.

Not Sven?

“No,” I say. “Not Sven.”

He considers this for a moment and says nothing when I reach up again and snag my wrist, harder this time. The thought of words vanishing before this conversation is finished is more than I can bear.

Captive,
he says.

Am I? Does that mean he’s taking me prisoner?

Enemies capture Sven.
He says this as a statement, one allowing no argument. And as soon as I realize what he means I laugh.