The False Martyr (129 page)

If Liandria hired the
Morgs, they could sweep into the Empire from the north and drive
all the way to Sal Danar before Nabim could recall his army from
Liandria. The fortress at Pada Por was the only thing that might
stop them, so Jaret had ordered Joal and Yatier to return there. He
wanted to make sure that nothing barred the Morgs from claiming the
Emperor’s head, that the gates of Pada Por were wide open when they
came to do it. Barring that, Commander Valien had taken a dozen
legionnaires south to Pindar in search of additional aid. That left
Jaret with just over sixty legionnaires, half of whom were still in
training. And though there was no reason for them to remain in the
forest, Jaret could not seem to order their departure, so they
stayed and they hunted.

A scream cut through
Jaret’s thoughts and made even the legionnaires around him jump.
They tensed, held out their weapons, drew their bows, and prepared
themselves for anything. Halfway around the rock fortress, the
scream had come not from it but from the opposite direction. If it
represented the creatures’ location, the other platoon was horribly
out of position, would likely not make it to them until the fight
was all but over.

There was another shriek,
closer now, more discernable. But it was not a cry of battle, but
rather a scream of fear, and it had come from a woman, here where
there should be no women within hundreds of miles.

The scream seemed to cut
through the men. Only Lieutenant Caspar remained unfazed. He caught
the eyes of the men to either side of him and silently motioned
them forward and to either side of the scream’s origin. The men
darted through the brush, but the call only sounded again, louder,
closer, higher pitched. Another voice joined it, this of a man, his
cries a series of curses that only a soldier would
appreciate.

Lieutenant Caspar
responded with another series of gestures that sent the entire
platoon running toward the sound. One way or another, it had to be
the creatures they hunted. The time had come. Still, Jaret
considered what they were running into. The voices could only have
been those of people, people who were in trouble, but why would
there be people here. They were in the far northern section of the
forest, almost to the mountains that loomed above the trees. There
was absolutely no place for other people to have come from nor
anywhere for them to go. But that logic clearly meant nothing to
whomever these people were, for at that moment, the woman screamed
again.

“
Careful,” Lieutenant
Caspar warned the men running ahead of them. “We’ve seen this trick
before. Be aware of your surroundings and don’t approach anyone no
matter how harmless they seem.”

Jaret suddenly remembered
a story from one of the first hunting trips his men had taken. They
had lost two of their company to a creature that wore the
countenance of a beautiful woman. The men had run to help her only
to see her transform into a demon before their very eyes. It had
been one of the legion’s costliest forays since the battle in the
Camp. Their caution showed that the men remembered it. But this
felt somehow different to Jaret, like he was being drawn to those
screams, like they were part of him.

“
Back!” a man’s voice
yelled from before them. “Whatever you are, get back!”

“
Help!” the woman wailed,
putting a word this time to her shrieks.

“
There are men following
us,” the man yelled again. “Morgs. They’ll cut you to pieces.
You’re only chance is to run.”

Morgs
, Jaret thought. He looked at the mountains looming before
them. Beyond those were the Fells, but the closest known lodge was
Inuvik on the other side of Cloud Lake. Why would Morgs be here?
Even if they meant to invade the Empire, they wouldn’t come this
way.

Black shapes appeared out
of the corner of Jaret’s eye. Two of the legionnaires pulled and
fired. The arrows might as well have been fired into the Maelstrom.
Two black flashes were on them almost before the arrows hit.
Looking most like enormous wolves, the creatures lunged from the
shadows of a boulder twenty paces to Jaret’s left. They ran on four
legs, crashing effortlessly through the brush with such speed that
they were a blur. “Bolves!” one of the men called.
Bear-wolves
, Jaret
realized. He had heard the men talk about them the night they’d
decided on the name. The name had been given with a reverence
reserved for only the most feared of the creatures, and Jaret had
known to mark it.

Ignoring the arrows that
struck them, the beasts went straight at the two closest
legionnaires. Luckily, those men were better prepared than Jaret.
They slashed at the things’ faces with swords then dodged behind
trees to escape the initial charge. It was not enough. With their
final bound, the bolves rose to two legs and swung clawed hands as
big as a man’s chest. The legionnaires had expected the creatures
to fly by them – nothing that big, moving that fast should be able
to stop that quickly – and barely ducked below the blows that would
have removed their heads. Great maws of slathering teeth followed.
Standing, the things were at least twice the size of a man – larger
and fiercer even than the mountain bears that were rumored to rove
the Fells. They had shaggy dark fur like bears, but their snouts
were longer and larger, like enormous wolves. Their teeth were
sharp and angular, a solid row of three-inch spikes on top and
bottom. And they had the legionnaires trapped.

One of those men was saved
by his fellows. He slipped to the side just before the jaws closed
on him. A blade caught the creature’s second arm as the claws
perfectly anticipated where the man would be. It slashed through
fur leaving a long, deep cut, sapping some of the power from the
blow but not enough. The claws hit the man full in the chest. The
chains and leather there helped, but the claws cut through, popping
the iron links and slicing through the leather like swords. Blood
sprayed from the slashes, and the man flew two paces from the force
of the blow, landing hard against a tree, ribs shattered, blood
pouring but alive. His fellows were on the creature before it could
finish the job. A legionnaire drove a sword between two of its ribs
from the side while another leapt onto its back and planted a long
knife in the base of its skull.

Closer to Jaret, the other
legionnaire was not so lucky. Pinned against the tree that was
supposed to protect him, his comrades, several paces away, had no
chance to help before the creature’s jaws caught his neck,
engulfing it and his shoulder all the way across his chest. A
sickening crunch and a jerk followed. The man was dead before he
hit the ground. Jaret and five legionnaires avenged him a hammering
heartbeat later. Four of the men attacked the thing from the front,
slashing and striking. The fifth came in behind, cut away the
tendons behind its knees, and Jaret, acting purely on instinct,
slashed his sword up through its neck as it fell. The blow opened
its throat, but the legionnaires took no chances. One of them
planted a knife in the back of its head and twisted to make sure
the thing would never kill again.

Only then did Jaret
realize that those were not the only creatures they’d been
tracking. Ten paces away, a half-dozen other shapes had emerged
from the trees to hit the four legionnaires, including Lieutenant
Caspar, who had not fought the bolves. Momentarily outnumbered,
those men used the trees to give ground, darting and slashing to
keep the creatures at bay until the platoon that had circled around
from the other side could arrive. The second platoon sprinted in
from behind at the same time that Jaret and the men who’d killed
the bolves arrived from the front.

It ended quickly after
that. A bare-breasted woman with eight arms and the lower body of a
snake fell as a half-dozen arrows hit her within the area defined
by those full breasts. A huge, bald man with three eyes and an
extra arm growing from his chest was hamstrung and stabbed
repeatedly as he fell. A silver thing with skin that shown like
armor and two thrashing tails failed when one of those tails became
lodged in a tree and a big legionnaire planted his sword in its
fleshy skull. Jaret knocked away the arm of an insectoid creature
who fought with four arms, each ending in sets of wicked pinchers.
A legionnaire at his side was less fortunate. He deflected one
pincher, but not the next. It caught his arm and cut through skin
and muscle all the way to the bone. If another legionnaire had not
taken the creature’s arm clean off, Jaret had no doubt that the man
would have lost his arm. At the same time, Jaret spun and punched
his dagger through the thing’s chest. He lost the knife as he
dodged the teeth that clacked together just above his shoulder, but
that was the end of the thing. Another of the crucifixion bugs, as
the men had called the creatures they’d faced in their first
encounter, trapped a man, but his fellows surrounded and killed the
thing before it could do anything more.

The final creature was the
one they had been looking for, a phuker. A rope closed over its
neck even as it fought to bite a man it had pinned. Two
legionnaires yanked on the rope, pulling the thing back, nearly
strangling it, as two others caught its arms and wrestled it to the
ground.

“
Quick!” Lieutenant Caspar
shouted when the thing was secured, “get the phuker to Marz. He’s
hurt bad. We’re going to lose him! Hurry! Hilaal’s balls, hurry!”
Jaret’s eyes went to the man who’d been ravaged by the bolves. He
was propped against a tree, spewing blood with each gasping breath,
eyes wide, body rigid, arms and legs thrashing. He was seconds from
death. His lung had been punctured when his chest was crushed. He
was drowning in his own blood, and Jaret was not even sure if the
phuker’s poison could save him.

“
By the fucking Order, get
that thing over here now!” the lieutenant yelled again. The
legionnaires responded. Six of them lifted the creature like a
battering ram and ran at full stride to the fallen man. They
lowered the thing to him, putting its mouth almost to his arm, but
it refused to bite. Meanwhile, the man, Marz, had gone limp. The
ground beneath him was covered in his blood. It pumped from his
chest and ran from the side of his mouth. His last breath was a
bloody bubble expanding from his slack mouth. He didn’t have the
time for the creature’s games.

“
Open its’ fuckin’ mouth,”
Lieutenant Caspar growled. Two men grabbed its head and chin and
forced its enormous mouth open. Lieutenant Caspar pushed Marz hand
into it and pressed the palm against the exposed teeth. Corporal
Marz set the new record for time until his first scream, but only
because it took that long for his lungs to heal enough to allow
screaming. Lieutenant Caspar forced his hand and arm into the
creature’s teeth again and again until he was thrashing with the
pain of the poison. And it did its job. His ribs slowly stitched,
the gashes in his side closed, and, finally, he
screamed.

Jaret was already walking
away when the scream sounded. It was followed closely by a chorus
of wails as the other wounded had their injuries “treated”. He
barely noticed. A force pulled him toward the rock where the
creatures had been, where the screams had originated. He found
their source before he was halfway there. At the highest point of a
white finger of rock rising twenty feet to the canopy of trees
around it were a man and woman. They were crouched, the man holding
the woman. Jaret could hear her desperate snuffles and gasps even
over the sound of his men vocalizing their pain behind. The man
brushed back her matted hair, curled his body protectively around
her, and whispered reassurances in her ear. They were both so dirty
and ragged as to be barely considered human – though no animal
would allow itself to fall to such levels of filth. Their clothes
were rags, muddy, torn, and tattered. Their bodies were wasted by
hunger. The man’s eyes were wide and staring. He had two weeks of a
scraggly beard and hair that stood in clumps from his head. The
girl was almost entirely concealed by streams of hair that might
have been golden before weeks of dirt had turned it into a brown
mat of clumps.

“
Who are you?” Jaret asked
as he approached, sword still out and up. “What are you doing
here?”

“
Please . . . please don’t
hurt us. We haven’t . . . .” the man answered. “Please, just let us
go. We didn’t do anything. We were set up. It wasn’t our fault.”
The girl in his arms cried and buried her face in his chest so hard
that she nearly sent them from their perch.

“
I’m not going to hurt
you, but I need to know who you are and why you’re here.” Jaret
tried to be strong and reassuring at the same time.

The words finally seemed
to penetrate the man’s madness. He looked up at Jaret and relaxed.
“You’re not Morgs?”

Jaret looked at himself
and tried not to laugh. That was the first time anyone had ever
mistaken him for a Morg. “We are the Legion of the Rising Sun. You
are in the Empire.”

The man seemed to deflate
as the tension seeped from him in a single great exhale. He spoke
softly to the woman, and she slowly raised the palest blue eyes
that Jaret had ever seen. “My name is Cary,” the man said. He held
out his hands to show that he had no weapons. “This is . . . .” He
hesitated and looked at the woman draped across him. She lifted her
head further, and Jaret saw that she was young, a girl really, but
with sharp, striking features that seemed somehow foreign. Stepping
closer, he noticed the fur that lined the top of her dress and at
the sleeves then another that had fallen from her shoulders to
dangle off her back like a tail. Though matted and stained, the fur
on those pelts was long and luxurious, soft and new. They were
worth a fortune.