The False Martyr (95 page)

“
And the next set of boys
will see this and lose all stomach to fight.” Jaret tried to
rationalize the massacre, but it rang hollow even to his own
ears.

“
These barely had any
fight to start with,” Yatier returned as he eased himself from the
saddle, armor clanking and creaking. “Kill the sergeants holding
them, and they’d run to their mothers as fast as their legs would
carry them.” He looked down at a pile of bodies where the boys had
clumped together in their fear and shook his head. These boys, like
almost all their fellows, had not even tried to fight. It was all
the proof Yatier needed. These boys had no side, wanted no part of
this, could probably not have even said who or what they were
fighting for. Their only crime had been to not hide well enough the
day the recruiter came.

“
War’s an ugly business,”
Jaret said, though he longed to agree whole-heartedly with
Commander an’ Pmalatir. “It rare that the ones responsible for it
pay its price. We’ll have to kill a lot more of these before we get
a chance at the man who sent them to die.”

Yatier looked at his
commander sideways then back across the trampled boys behind him.
He took a deep breath pulled a long sword from the scabbard mounted
along the side of his horse and walked away. He drove the sword
into a dying boy a moment later, but his eyes were on Jaret. The
look was not kind.

Over the previous week,
Yatier had proven himself to be an effective commander but also a
surprisingly naïve and sensitive one. Jaret had never met a noble
who cared about the lives of those outside the palace, but Yatier
was almost too much the exception. He seemed to have a glamorized
view of command, of nobility, and most of all of war. He seemed to
think that war should be like gentlemen in a duel, swinging at one
another until one has been sufficiently humiliated to surrender,
that it should in no way affect those outside the combatants, that
it should be fair and honorable and – the Order forbid – merciful.
The past week had gone a long way to showing him the folly of such
thinking, but Jaret still feared that he did not have the stomach
for what needed to be done, that he would fail when the days got
darkest, that what they had done today would end him.

With that thought, Jaret
watched the big man walk through the bodies, searching for those
still living, giving them the mercy that death had now become.
Jaret wanted desperately to say something to him, to provide him
some wisdom or comfort even here where wisdom and comfort were so
very far away.

A shadow covered Jaret.
Seeking its source, all attempts to rationalize were lost. He
stared at the black shape above, trying to understand it even as
the sun behind burned its image into his eyes. Even when it fell
finally below the early morning sun, it was no more recognizable.
As long as a galleon, it was enormous. Nothing that big should be
able to fly, but it slithered through the air like a snake through
water.
Not a snake
, Jaret realized,
a
centipede
. The thing was composed of
segments, at least thirty, that seemed to move of their own
volition. As long as a man, the segments were topped by the
transparent wings of a dragonfly. Slender legs were curved back
toward the body below, holding balls nearly as big as the body
segment above. It had no head or tail that Jaret could see, simply
the same segments, the same wings, the same balls, repeated across
the length of its body.

As it drew closer, the
buzz of its wings like a swarm of angry bees pulled every eye to
the sky. Knights – universally dismounted now – and legionnaires
alike stood and stared at the thing as it squirmed through the sky
growing closer with every second. Lulled by their victory all the
more for its appalling ease, they had expended their violence and
felt now the guilt of its release. So it was that they simply
gawked – as stunned as the boys they’d just massacred – as this
thing from a nightmares descended upon them with the increasing
speed of a falcon diving to break a rabbit’s back.

And for the first time
since before his rescue, Jaret did not know what to do. He felt
nothing compelling him, no force guiding, no compulsion or
coercion. There was only emotionless awe as even the Order seemed
to abandon him. He froze, paralyzed as much by the loss of the
force that controlled him as by the sight of the creature above.
Untethered, his mind struggled to do anything at all as the seconds
ticked and the creature drew closer.

It was in its final
descent before Jaret could find words. “To the horses,” he yelled.
“Retreat to the forest.” But it was too late. The creature was on
top of them. The force of its wings, of its massive body cutting
through the air, buffeted them, staggered them long enough for the
thing to cover the final distance and pull up into the sky, but not
before each of its sixty legs released the ball it was
holding.

The balls uncurled as they
fell. Long, slender legs spread. A head rose. Shining black eyes
opened. The things hit the ground running. Seeming to not even feel
the force of the fall, they sprinted on six legs toward whatever
man was closest. The luckiest of those were ready, had overcome
their shock and prepared themselves. They dodged as the creatures
tried to bowl them over, then parried as the things rose and struck
with the barbed talons at the ends of their legs. A few of the men
moved quickly enough to strike at the creatures, but their swords
slid off of hard exoskeletons with hardly a scratch as the
creatures rose to two legs and turned the other four on the men
before them.

In an area of relative
calm, Jaret scanned the field. His men were scattered across it,
surrounded by bodies that made it difficult to move. As big as the
men they faced, the creatures were fast and sure, switching
effortlessly between two and four legs as required to navigate the
field, but they seemed not to use the advantage their mobility
provided. They remained in front of the men they fought, did not
try to get around them or gang up on them. There were more men than
creatures, but the men were isolated and could not move easily to
assist one another. The best strategy for the creatures would be to
gang up on stranded individuals and quickly kill as many as
possible before the advantage of numbers could come into play.
Instead, the creatures each chose a single man and sought to fight
him face-to-face.

A cry of frustration from
behind showed Jaret why. He spun in time to see a knight lose his
balance as his foot tangled with the limp arm of a boy. The
creature struck. It rose to two legs and lunged with all four of
its others at once. Yet the long, barbed spikes on the end of those
legs did not go for the knight’s heart or head or guts. Two went
high, finding his wrists, punching easily through his armor. The
other two dove to his feet. The knight screamed, yelling curses as
the spikes impaled him. The screams only rose as the creature
planted its back legs, lowered itself to the ground and lifted the
armored man from the ground. The legs spread the man out as if he
were on the rack until he was wailing with pain, begging the thing
to stop. And it did stop. It simply held him in place, stretched
out, unable to move, unable to do anything but scream.

And Jaret flashed back to
his time with Thagas’kuila. He remembered how that creature had
reveled in his pain and fear, how it had wanted only to torture
him, how it had been perfectly designed to deliver that torture
day-after-day. These were no different. They struck only at wrists,
hands, feet, lower legs. Often they caught only one limb at a time,
but they did not stop until they had secured all four and used them
to lift their victims screaming into the air. Only then did a
double-set of mandibles seem to grow from where the creatures’
mouths should be. Those cruel, snapping jaws lunged toward the men
every time their screams seemed to ease. The men could not help but
howl in fear of this new torture, but the jaws always came up
short.

They have no intention of
killing, Jaret realized. They are just like Thagas’kuila. They want
pain and fear. They will leave my men hanging there for days, will
torture them until they die of thirst then move to another. Rage
pounded against the barrier in his mind. He ground his teeth and
acted.

Holding his blade with two
hands, dirk tucked in his belt, he leapt off the back of a boy and
hit the thin, black arm of the closest creature with all the force
he could muster. The sword nearly rattled from his hand as it slid
off the black surface leaving little more than a scratch. The
wailing of the man held by the creature only seemed to intensify as
Jaret tumbled between him and the creature. A glimpse of his face
showed the fear and pain that Jaret knew far too well. He would
not, could not allow his men to experience that.

The creature’s mandible
barely missed Jaret’s neck as he flew by, splitting the skin and
muscle of his arm instead. He felt the arm go limp, but the pain
was far away, and Thagas’kuila’s poison was healing it even as he
hit the ground beyond the creature and tumbled over a body that
caught his toe. Sprawling, he thought the miscalculation would be
his last, but the creature paid him no more mind. It stretched the
legionnaire it held and lunged at him until his hoarse screams were
the only thing Jaret could hear.

The Maelstrom take me, I
barely touched it
, Jaret thought as he
struggled to his feet. He scanned the field as he rose. In only a
matter of a few minutes, nearly all of the creatures had claimed a
victim. Knights and legionnaires hung in the air screaming as their
fellows struck impotently at the arms that held them. The creatures
paid those men no mind as long as they remained outside the range
of their mandibles. They seemed perfectly content with the victims
they had, confident that their armor would outlast the strongest
man, the sharpest sword. And in the sky, the flying centipede that
had delivered them was just bringing its massive body around for
another pass. Jaret could only imagine what horrors it would bring
this time. They only had a few minutes before they found
out.

Rising to his feet, Jaret
studied the creature he had just struck.
No armor is impenetrable
, he told
himself.
Even the best has gaps,
weaknesses. You just have to find them.
He
had told his men that more times than he could count. Now, he
needed to do it. A glance showed a series of scratches across the
creature’s abdomen where the legionnaire had hit it. There was no
opening there. The arms were as tough as iron rods. An even heavier
shell like that of a beetle covered the thing’s back. But the
creature’s arms moved. Its head pivoted and lunged.
Where there is movement, there is a joint. Where
there is a joint, there is a weakness,
Jaret heard himself saying. He looked down at his arm,
covered now in drying blood, and watched the skin stitch
together.

A second later, he was
back inside the cage created by the creature’s outstretched arms.
He dodged the mandibles as they came down, falling back against the
thing’s hard abdomen, and brought the point of his sword up as the
jaws snapped past his shoulder. The blade penetrated. It didn’t go
far, but that was all Jaret needed. Bending his knees, he coiled
and launched himself up, bracing the sword against his shoulder so
that it would receive all the power his legs could provide. Blood,
so dark as to be almost black, poured down the blade over his hands
and head as he pushed, but he just kept pushing until the blade
stopped. He had hit the other side of the throat where the plates
were stronger, so he pivoted and pulled the blade forward nearly
decapitating the thing as he opened its throat from one end to the
other.

It dropped. The man it
held fell with it. His screams turned to pants and whimpered pleas.
Jaret wiped blood from his eyes, forced it back from his head and
felt it flow down his back. “Can you free yourself?” he asked the
legionnaire. The man nodded almost imperceptibly but immediately
started pulling his hands away from the serrated spikes that held
them. His screams were lost behind Jaret as he sprinted toward
another of the creatures and saw that it held Yatier.

“
The throats!” he screamed
over and over as he ran. “Get inside and strike their throats!” A
glance at the sky showed the flying creature starting its descent.
It held no more balls, but its legs looked remarkably like those
that held his men. Jaret could only imagine they had a similar
purpose.

“
Yatier, I’m here,” Jaret
called as he brushed past the big knight to face the beast that
held him. Screams of pain answered. And Jaret was dodging down
again away from flashing mandibles. One of them brushed the back of
his shoulder, adding what would, in a few seconds, be another scar.
Jaret rewarded it by jamming his dirk into the base of its throat.
He spun, caught the top of its head with both of his hands, and
slammed it down into the abdomen, driving the knife through past
the handle. The thing fell just as its predecessor, and Yatier came
with it, but this time the man fell on top of Jaret, covered him in
three hundred pounds of steel-encased man.

“
Hilaal’s balls, man, can
you free yourself?” Jaret yelled from under Yatier.

“
Arghhh!” he yelled in
pain. He panted then squirmed, digging the plates of his armor into
Jaret’s ribs until they threatened to crack. And Jaret could only
stare at the sky as the flying thing came down. The wind from its
descent buffeted him, covering him in the foul odor of death as its
great body passed mere feet from the ground across the length of
the field. And when it rose, Jaret saw a half-dozen men held
against it, impaled not nearly so cleanly as those held by its
brothers but trapped nonetheless and screaming in pain and
fear.