The Kingdoms of Evil (24 page)

With his musket's butt on the ground, all Kendrick had to do was plant his knee and his foot, and angle the bayonet
so
. Now to reach for the wheel
stone amulet that hung around his neck without dropping to bayonet or taking his eyes off the battle above. Someone nearby had the same idea; the basso-profundo peal of a Blessing rebounded off the trees, and
Kendrick smiled as he heard something howl in inhuman agony.
Even closer-by, a spinning circle of runes shot weak spurts of flame at the trees. A gray shape leapt and a lizard-man's nearly human arms and legs hung silhouetted against the rune light, before a lucky musket ball slapped a hole into the thing's neck.

Was that the spray of its corrupted blood Kendrick could feel on his upturned face?
Were they winning? Who could tell? Kendrick tracked movements between the trees, but knew better than the fire at them. With no partner to pass him a fresh musket or reload, he would be at the mercy of anything he didn't kill with the first shot. And who knew where his re-loader was. Gerhanis had been right next to him.

Kendrick's duty was to stay by the equipment and kill anything that got in bayonet range. Another warm splash of sound, and a Blessing ripped a goblin from a tree and broke it, shrieking, against the ground. A musket went off. Kendrick winced away from the noise, and the movement saved him.

As Kendrick twisted his head around, he felt wind brush the hair on his temple. The breeze was lighter than a dove's wing-beat, but there was a shadow cast across him and a sudden stink like piss and rotten meat. The
lizard-man's
arm swung round, the claws that would have ripped his eye from his face splayed against the air.

There was a thud as the creature's feet struck the ground, and a spring-like flex of muscles under glittering gray-green scales. The killing claws slapped against the ground, and then the
lizard-man
was turning, pivoting on those crooked legs, its other hand stiff with black talons. Kendrick tried to bring his bayonet to bear, but it was moving so slowly. The musket's barrel was like a tree, impossibly heavy and long and useless against the whirlwind of the monster's attack.
And it knew that.

The mouth split in a gaping smile, impossibly, hideously wide. A purple tongue flexed behind rows of jagged, fish-hook teeth. Tiny perfect scales squeezed around eyes like volcanic glass. Kendrick could see his face in those eyes. He could see his own eyes, mirroring the
lizard-man
, his face and the monster's alternating into diminishing infinity.

The sword struck with the bell-like boom of a Blessing, and a powerful voice rang clear and cold. "Be gone monster! Be dust!"

The
lizard-man
surged forward as the sword took it from behind. Its legs pistoned out and it tore itself loose from the blade before its face rammed into the earth. Its scream of rage rose, became a shriek, became a hiss, and passed out of the range of hearing. A shudder passed up its long, lithe body. A hand, taloned and hideously elongated, clenched, squeezed, then relaxed against the riverbed stones.

Kendrick looked up in wonder, but the Paladin had turned back to the fight.

"Na-o-
belll
!" The Paladin
, Chosen one of Angel's Keep
bellowed, and the god filled him with fire so holy that the warrior's very skin glowed with it. He did not move like a normal man, but pounced like a cougar, leapt like a buck, stooped from the air like a hawk. His sword sighed through the air, and sang like a temple bell when it struck flesh. The hand's-breadth of rippled steel shone in brilliant arcs as it swung through the darkness under the trees. And the monsters fell before it as wheat falls before the scythe, to slicken the pine needles with their evil blood.

"Move on!" The Paladin cried as he cut through the monsters that surrounded them. "Move on, damn you! Hie! Down the road! Hie!"

Kendrick used the butt of his musket to lever himself to his feet and stumbled forward. Now the Paladin's cries were joined by others: "
Forward!
Forward!"

And the soldiers were moving again. Raggedly, yes, in a panic, with half the equipment abandoned behind them, but moving. The gully was becoming wider and shallower, the roots of the trees now level with their waists, then their feet. The ground was better for defense, but the Rationalist forces looked much smaller than before. Had so many soldiers been killed?

Levanick's hand was on his shoulder. "You all right, boy?"

Kendrick turned and grinned at the Ranger. Levanick grinned back. "Damn right. You
are
a Betweener." His eyes flickered through the forest around them as he rubbed the wheel-stone built into the sight of his musket. "But get inside the circle. Got to keep these corrupted machines safe, right?"

The
forest-colored Rangers' cloaks alternated with the
tan-and-blue Rationalist soldiers that remained spread across the wider battle-ground, forming into protective circles. Rune-light flared up around them, but so high up the mountain, the
word-magic
was unreliable and underpowered. More useful were the bayoneted tips of their muskets, which formed a spiked wall around each circle. And once the soldiers inside the circle unpacked their ammunition, they could begin the re-loading cycle that could fire off a musket volley every six seconds. If they got the chance to set up the cycle, and if nothing larger than
lizard-men
and goblins came out of the woods.

The men in the circle around him tensed. Someone screamed beyond the circle. Then they fired. They fired all at once, and a sulfurous cloud rose from them so Kendrick could not see the hand of the man he was supposed to pass his fire-ready musket to.

Why had they all fired at once? Where was the precise, six-second staggering of their training runs? Kendrick looked up
as something like a shaggy, horizontal tree trunk swept into one of the protective circles. What had appeared to be the root bole of a felled black oak unfolded and stood, one enormous fist closed about the torso of another Rationalist officer. The ogre's bellow rolled across the battle like an avalanche, a nearly physical pain. Then the beast
came at them again
.

Muskets blew puffs of fur and leaf mold from its hide, but the Rationalist
fusillade
did not slow the monster's other hand as it swung round and snatched up another soldier. The ogre lifted its screaming captives up, up…

Timber crashed behind him, and Kendrick turned to see another ogre reach out toward him. He did not even have time to swing his bayonet around before canoe-sized fingers pinned his arm against his body and he was jolted upward.

Kendrick kicked, but there was nothing under his feet any more, just rushing air, immense fingers, and what seemed like acres of bark-colored fur, rushing down as Kendrick was hoisted up. Then, the face of the ogre was before his,
an
island of wrinkled, tea-colored skin set into a hump of muscle and fur between the creature's shoulders. Heavy brows drew together, and furious eyes flicked across Kendrick's trapped, struggling body. A massive pointer finger uncurled, unwrapping Kendrick's shoulders and chest.

He
had a chance, now. Kendrick wrenched his right arm free from the fingers that still bound it, grabbed the chain around his neck, pulled out his spinning wheel stone amulet and…

"Naobel!"

Fur burst into flame. Beady eyes boiled. The ogre screamed like a derailing locomotive.

Kendrick's stomach leapt into his throat and the world flipped over. The ogre's hand receded as Kendrick tumbled through the air. Something struck him in the small of the back and he flipped over again, somersaulting around a tree-trunk before another branch caught his leg, held him, then dropped him onto the
forest floor.

Again! And it could no longer scream. And again and again and Kendrick stabbed it through the eye socket with his bayonet until the monster died.

Kendrick was aware his teeth were
still
grinding together, and he let them.
For once, he could let the anger come. The hot, destructive joy of it.

Something screamed behind him. Kendrick unlimbered his musket and then ran as fast as he dared over the root-knobbled ground, dodging between trees, eyes scanning ahead, to the sides, above. Looking for something to kill.

There, in the branches of an onrushing pine, a cluster of creatures that might be raccoons, but weren't.
No, they were an infestation. "Naobel!" Kendrick shouted, and his wheel-stone burst into phosphorous flame.
There was a sound like the tolling of a bell, and the goblins dropped from the tree like rotted fruit.
Kendrick laughed.

The sounds of battle were growing closer, gunshots, shouts, monstrous bellows, and the ringing of Blessings.
Yes, there between those trees was the edge of the stream bed.
There were figures standing there, too tall and slender to be human.

Kendrick bellowed the name of his god, and rushed forward into the embrace of the sweet madness.

***

They found the Soon-to-be-Ultimate Fiend hiding behind a statue of a snarling octopus.

"Ah, there you are, my lord," Freetrick looked up to see DeMacabre poke his head around the statue's corner. "I have found the Soon-to-be-Ultimate Fiend!" DeMacabre called to the monsters and murderers presumably arrayed just out of sight. "Come, come I say, immediately, that we may with rapture feast upon his---"

"DeMacabre," hissed Freetrick. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

DeMacabre ratcheted his head back around. "Why, whatever does my lord
mean
?"

Freetrick tried to draw himself up into a more imposing stance. "This!" Freetrick's furious gesture took in the cyclopean halls, the monsters skittering across the stonework, the amassed and fearsomely costumed dark nobility, and his own ridiculous and uncomfortable spiky armor. "This insanity! This freak show!"

"Thank you, my lord. We do our best."

Freetrick tried not to groan. His head throbbed, his shoulders were trying to unscrew themselves, and his mouth felt like most of Skrea
looked
. He had tried to ask for a drink, but his courtiers kept offering him their necks.

"Come out now," DeMacabre sidled closer, lowering his voice. "There are still quite a number of people who wish to meet you."

"Oh, yes, 'people'." Freetrick finger-quoted bitterly. "They're a bunch of striking
lunatics
. Who keep trying to
murder me
!" Freetrick closed his mouth before his voice could become any shriller.

"Oh pshaw, my lord," said DeMacabre. "His Fiendishness Dark Lord Strakhblargle was only engaging in a joke."

"He tried to put out my eye with a hot poker."

"An iron staff, my lord. And he allowed my lord to duck, did he not? Come now, my lord," DeMacabre put a hand like a shaved tarantula on Freetrick's shoulder and pulled him upright. "And her Vileness the young lady Kht'driivah was only trying to seduce you."

"I wasn't flattered." Freetrick tried to muster the energy to glare, but it was all he could do just to remain vertical. "I'm sick of this insanity. I'm sick of all this striking
evil
nonsense."

There was a gasp from the people assembled beyond Skystarke and his ogres.

DeMacabre squinted at Freetrick. "My lord is overwrought. And a stranger to these lands!" His voice rose over the swelling murmuring from the crowd, his face turned a little away from Freetrick so his words would carry. "He does not know the customs of this, the Land of the Shadow. He has yet to experience the full power of our," his teeth flashed in the lava-light, the whites around his orange eyes glistened. A taloned hand came up to grasp the air before his face, "our
ancient culture
!"

There was scattered applause.

There was nothing Freetrick wanted to do more than retire…
retreat
to his rooms. And maybe never come out. But cowering behind his desk would just make the assassins' jobs that much easier. "All right." He closed his eyes, trying to banish his headache. "I suppose there is a lot I need to learn about life in Skrea."

"Indeed, my lord," DeMacabre looked over his shoulder at movement in the crowd behind him. "And, aha, here comes and excellent opportunity for a lesson."

"What do you mean?" Freetrick said.