Blood Harvest (23 page)

Nando yanked the cord and three hundred nails blew out in a bee swarm into Sylvano's stalled charge. Sec men screamed and flailed. Islanders slang. Those who had run out of stones shook their spears. Doc pulled his swordstick from the sand and drew the rapier, thrusting the steel point skyward. “They are unmanned! Their formation is broken!

“Sons of the Sun!” Doc shouted. He turned and stalked down out of the dunes, pointing his blade ever forward, daring his men to follow.

“Sons of the Sun!” tore from every islander's throat left, right and center. The right flank came rumbling out of the dunes like an avalanche in Doc's wake. The left and the center followed within heartbeats. The islanders charged the invaders' blasters in a human wave. “Sons of the Sun!”

 

“O
H…MY
…G
OD
.” Mildred hunkered down behind her rifle. For good or ill, a broken-minded man from the nineteenth century had bet the entire battle on a single roll of the dice. Not that it was ever going to come down to anything but this, but Mildred would have been a lot more confident if it had been J.B., Jak or, better, Ryan who had called the charge. Still, Mildred had to admit that Doc was cutting quite an impressive figure marching down upon the beach, pointing his blade like a judging finger from God on High.

A short series of whistle blasts stopped Sylvano's men in their tracks. As a unit they took to a knee, aimed
and fired en masse into the charging left flank. The wave of islanders rippled like sea grass. Untold scores of islanders fell. Mildred couldn't see what became of Doc through the powder smoke. The sec men had no time to reload. Instead sec whistles shrieked the battle order and the ragged wedge of black cloaks formed themselves into a square. Howls, shouts and screams lifted to the sky as the lines met and the battle went hand-to-hand.

Mildred cut loose.

She ignored the beach bash and concentrated on the gun crews along the steamer's rails. For some reason the ville men had been husbanding their cannons. Her first shot sparked as it caromed off the black iron cannon barrel. Her second took one of the loaders. The gun crew noticed the flash of her blaster and suddenly took a very dim view of her activities. They raised their aim slightly and traversed the gun a degree in its wooden track. Mildred shot the man cranking it and the man who took up the task. The other three cannons all began traversing her way. Mildred began to feel panic as the gaping black muzzles looked her way. She fired three more times and one of the gun crew twisted and fell. The gun captains yanked their cannon lanyards and the iron guns belched smoke and fire.

“Bastard!” Mildred yelped. She rolled down the back of dune as the crest exploded like a volcano. The slings had been a surprise, but the mission of the enemy artillery remained the same. Sylvano's men would deal with the pointed sticks. The gunners would pound any snipers in the dunes with explosive shells. Mildred found herself drowning in sand as the dune was violently rearranged and a great deal of it fell on top of her.
She did a push-up and shook her plaits, spitting and blinking at the grit invading every exposed orifice. She hacked and coughed in the burning, brimstone fog of black powder smoke enveloping her. She scrabbled blindly for her rifle.

“Shit!” Mildred clawed about in the sand but it was nowhere to be found. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She found the bolt-action rifle, but the spare ammo was lost in the sand slide. Mildred had five rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. She crawled back up the sundered dune. The beach was one big brawl. Mildred lay in a firing position. She took aim at the steamer once more, and despite his disguise she made out Jak climbing up the invasion netting draping the side of the steamer. It looked like he was hurt. Mildred settled in and kept her sights on him.

Jak's one-man boarding party now had a guardian angel.

 

R
OCKS FELL OUT
of the sky like rain, and now that the battle was engaged Jak was just one more black-cloaked and hated sec man. Two stones had struck him. One had grazed his face and it was swelling magnificently. He no longer had to fake the limp he had adopted as he retreated toward the ships. Stones clanged off the side of the steamer's steel hull and rattled down on the decks. Sec men swarmed down the nets as the invaders deployed their reserve into the battle. Jak splashed through the surf and began climbing up the side. A sec man stopped in midclimb and pointed at him and his auto-blaster and began to shout. Jak didn't see any way around it. He had to get on deck. Jak nodded and handed the man the weapon and kept climbing up the net. The
climb was difficult. No bone was broken, but Jak felt like someone had hit him in the thigh with a hammer.

Jak looked up as he reached the top and found himself staring up the barrels of a double blaster. He doubted this one was loaded with salt. The sec man shouted and shoved out his hand. Jak's long platinum hair was tied back and shoved up under his hat. All the sec man saw was a face as pale as his own, half swollen out of all recognition behind smoked lenses and struggling up the net with an injured leg. The sec man grabbed Jak's arm and hauled him aboard. He shouted something encouraging and rejoined his gun crew.

For a moment Jak had freedom of the deck.

Almost every sec man without an artillery task was deploying down the netting. Two men stood in the steamer's wheelhouse, but their eyes were on the battle. The cannon men kept their weapons trained on the dunes. A team of four men had reloaded two of the rocket batteries and were swiftly stuffing rocket arrows down the smoking racks of the third. Jak considered his options. He limped over to the rocketeers. He picked up a rocket arrow and helpfully began to assist in loading. The rocket captain nodded and said something. Jak responded by shoving the barbed arrowhead into the sec man's throat. The other three gaped in shock at the sudden violence. Jak took the opportunity to put a throwing knife into the throats of two more. The fourth rocketeer shouted, and his sword rasped from its sheath.

The man flew backward as though he'd taken a huge invisible fist to the chest.

Jak smiled. Someone out there liked him.

The albino youth went to one of the loaded rocket racks. Ignition was fairly simple. Each row of rockets
rested against a wooden tray with a runnel carved in it. Each runnel was laid with fuse cording. A coil of slow cord smoldered in a bucket on the deck. Jak considered the possibilities. The entire device was basically a wheelbarrow loaded with arrows. Jak lifted the handles and found it surprisingly light. He lifted the handles to maximum declination and kicked the wooden elevation stop so that the rocket rack was level with the deck. Jak aimed the rocket battery at the cannon crews. He took the burning slow cord and touched it to the master fuse hole and prudently stepped out of the way. The lines of fusing hissed down each row of rockets, igniting their motors. The rocket arrows hissed out of the racks in a rippling, random swarm. The weapon was hopelessly inaccurate, but it made for quite a deck sweeper. Gun crewmen fell pin-cushioned across their cannons or flopped to the deck. The arrows slammed against the cannons and even the explosive iron shells, but lacked the velocity to detonate anything. The far gun crew escaped most of the carnage. Jak put the cord in his teeth and took his Colt Python in both hands. The remaining gun crewmen died beneath Jak's blaster as they went for their swords. Jak ran to the partially loaded rocket rack.

The wheelhouse door slammed open and the captain and his mate came out with swords and short blasters in hand. Jak aimed the rack at the wheelhouse stair. The captain and mate screamed and ran back up. Jak took the slow cord from between his teeth and lit up. Only seventy-five arrows had been loaded, but they shrieked satisfactorily against the wheelhouse landing. The captain dived through the door. The mate took a dozen arrows in the back and ate stairs. Jak quickly reloaded his blaster.

The captain stood in the arrow-studded wheelhouse and yanked a handle in the roof. His foghorn boomed three times. He staggered backward and half flopped out the window as Jak's guardian angel smote him. Jak looked around. There had to be more crewmen below, at least in the engine room, but for the moment he owned the deck. Jak ran to the side. The battle was still raging. The sec men square had taken a horrific toll. The sand was a sea of dead islanders, but the numbers game had told the tale. The sec men square was down to one-third its number. The reserve from the middle was completely deployed. The crews of the feluccas and whalers were rushing to reinforce them, but sling stones rained down among them and Jak could tell they wouldn't be enough. The square was crumbling and inexorably being pushed toward the sea.

Jak wondered what the captain's horn signal had meant.

He got his answer as the ramp of the second barge slammed into the surf. The belly of the barge gave birth to abominations. The nightwalkers came screaming out of the hold. They were half naked or naked, and their fish-white flesh gleamed like ivory in the dying light. Most carried clubs or spears of astounding size, often inset with sharpened pieces of iron or nails. Others carried stolen picks and axes, and they wielded them in their huge hands like a norm would hold a hammer or a hatchet. The leader was smaller, and still had a veneer of human proportion in comparison to the screaming grotesques he led. He carried a great whaling harpoon in one hand and a crude wooden shield in the other. A net was wrapped over one shoulder.

Jak estimated there were fifty of them.

He ran to the last loaded rocket battery and rolled it forward to the rail.

“Gaia!” Krysty's men were surging past her to join the battle. Keeping a reserve had gone straight out the window. So had covering fire. Krysty shouted as Ago began to run forward waving the flag. “Ago!”

Ago looked back and then eagerly snapped his head around as more men ran forward shouting the war cry. “Sons of the Sun!” The spirit of the all-out attack was infectious. The islanders sensed victory was within their grasp. “Sons of the Sun!” was the clarion call to battle. Ago started to drift forward with attack.

“Ago!” Krysty shouted. She pointed at the flag and waved her hand back and forth. “Tell them to hold!”

Ago turned to face the rush. He waved the flag back and forth in the face of what remained of the surging center. Krysty stood in front of them whirling a sling around her head. She pointed at the enemy fleet. “Sling! Sling! Sling!”

Krysty had already lost over half the center, but J.B. and Doc were probably just as glad to have the reinforcements. The remaining men skidded to a halt in front of the flag and dropped their spears and clubs. They scrambled back to their depots of stones and got back to slinging at the men running up from the boats. Krysty could see fire and rocket trails on the deck of the steamer and knew that Jak had made it and was at his
task. “Sling!” Krysty cried, and the islanders who still had stones left slang with a will.

Krysty's blood froze in her veins as the hunting screams of the nightwalkers rent the sunset.

The islanders literally froze in place. Slings went limp. The men holding them almost did, as well. On the battlefield the attacking islanders recoiled from the sec men square. Every islander's worst fear came boiling up onto the beach. Men of both J.B.'s and Doc's regiments threw down their weapons and flat-out fled the scene of the battle in stark terror. The sec men were playing mutant power as their trump card.

Two could play that game.

“Gaia…Earth Mother, give me aid,” Krysty intoned, her breathing deepening as she began her trance of power. With each breath, power began to flow from her deepest core. “Give me all the power…let me strive for life…” The power centers within Krysty's body gave bloom. It started in her loins but the sensuality gave way to something bigger, moving into her belly, rising through her solar plexus, her throat, to between her eyes and the top of her head. Power flowed up her legs from the earth. Power flowed into her from the sky with her every breath. Time seemed to dilate and everyone slowed down as her senses became hyperacute.

“Kreesty!” Ago shouted. Krysty drew her sword and picked up a fallen blade from one of the rocket-arrowed islanders. With a sword in either hand, she felt unbearably light as her feet skimmed across the sand. “Sons of the Sun!” Ago shouted, and charged with the battle flag in Krysty's wake. The last hundred or so islanders followed the warrior woman and the war flag. Krysty arrowed straight for the nightwalkers. It was
suicide. She knew she could take one or two, and felt the killing lust to make it happen, but even with her help the islanders couldn't beat half a hundred. Krysty saw it with terrible clarity. Each nightwalker would be an individual siege that would take a half-dozen islanders or more to finish. The islander losses would be horrific, and they would break and run. Sylvano's sec men would regroup, retreat to their boats and wait out the night of rape, cannibalism and horror that the nightwalkers would inflict. Come the dawn the nightwalkers would seek refuge from the sun in the church. The shattered Sister Islanders would seek refuge from the nightwalkers by surrendering to the sec men. Nothing short of a miracle would stop it.

The miracle was a sizzling, rippling salvo of rocket arrows from the rail of the sec men flagship.

The hunting screams of the nightwalkers turned to roars and agonized shrieks as the rocket-driven shafts drilled deep into their gigantic bodies. Half their number fell beneath the point-blank barrage. Krysty beelined for their leader. He raised his harpoon in rage and flung it with horrific force. Krysty twisted with the grace of a dancer and the huge, barbed head skimmed inches from her collarbones. The nightwalker bellowed and took his huge wooden shield in both hands to swat Krysty down like a bug. Krysty's body moved almost of its own accord. She threw herself into a slide beneath the blow and slid between the nightwalker's legs. Krysty rolled up to one knee, and her swords crossed as she whipped their points across the back of the nightwalker's knees. He screamed and fell hamstrung to his knees. Krysty rose and slashed her swords like scissors across the nightwalker's neck.

The nightwalker's head fell from his shoulders.

“Sons of the Sun!” Krysty's remaining one-hundred-man reserve chorused as they followed the flag into battle.

Krysty limboed beneath a sapling studded with nails. Jagged iron drew a pair of bloody furrows across her chest instead of smashing her skull. She snapped erect as the club passed, and slashed with her swords. The nightwalker howled as its hand came off at the wrist. It screamed as her second sword flashed and removed the lower section of its arm at the elbow. All it could do was gasp as she took the rest of the limb off at the shoulder. Krysty's killing blow was interrupted as two islanders screamed in and shoved their spears into the mortally wounded nightwalker's chest and stomach. The islanders crashed into the mob of nightwalkers like a wave upon the rocks. Their bones broke like kindling and their spears snapped like sticks, but the nightwalkers were beset on all sides. Every death they dealt out was rewarded by fire-hardened spear thrusts from all directions. Many had rocket arrows piercing their flesh already, and Krysty stalked among them.

The beach churned into a morass of red and purple blood.

Krysty killed and killed.

She left a sword in one body and broke the other deflecting the swing of another gigantic studded club. Krysty ducked in, leaving ten inches of broken sword blade under a nightwalker's sternum. Another nightwalker woman howled forward. Krysty skittered backward and snatched up the harpoon of the fallen nightwalker leader and rammed it between the nightwalker's breasts. Purple blood burst from its mouth and
nose. Krysty ripped the cruel barb out of the she-creature's chest and shreds of its hooked heart came with it. She whirled and threw the harpoon like a thunderbolt at a nightwalker menacing Ago and the flag. The whaling weapon punched through its chest and burst out its back.

Suddenly there were almost no nightwalkers left.

One of the remaining charged her. It was pushing nine feet tall, and half a dozen spear shafts and rocket arrows protruded from its freakishly muscled body. It had no weapon and came at Krysty with its huge hands open to tear her limb from limb. Krysty ran forward and leaped into the giant's embrace. Its hands closed around Krysty's arms and raised her high, but she didn't care. She lashed one foot into the nightwalker's throat and it choked on broken chunks of its esophagus. Her legs scissored and her second kick drove the giant's septum into his brain.

Krysty dropped lightly to the sand as the titan fell, her body swathed in purple blood. The last living nightwalkers were on their backs being stabbed again and again. What remained of the sec men square was ankle deep in the surf and surrounded on three sides. They could retreat no farther because Jak had adjusted one of the cannons to maximum declination and had his hand on the lanyard.

They had won.

Krysty tottered as the power abruptly left her. The strength, speed and crystal clarity fell from her like water from a bucket that had burst its bottom, returning to the earth she had borrowed it from. All that remained of her was a bruised, empty and nearly broken vessel.

Ago caught her as she fell.

 

“W
ILL YOU
Y
IELD
?” Doc bellowed. He pointed his sword at the forlorn and collapsed sec men square standing in the cold surf as twilight fell. The surviving islanders gripped their spears with grim determination. Nearly half of the 750 who had marched out to the dunes beneath the banner lay dead in the sand. The toll on the invading sec men had been even more terrible. The wounded moaned among the mounds of the dead. The annihilation of the nightwalkers was total. Not one had been left alive. The islanders and the sec men stared at one another over their weapons. The sec men dared not raise their bayonets to reload for fear of another all-out charge. They awaited the cannon above to send its high-explosive shell into their huddled ranks. Nearly every man of each side bore a wound or mark. All were exhausted. No one wanted to start the final engagement.

J.B. leaned heavily on a spear. His blasters were empty, and he had been bayoneted through the leg when it had gone hand-to-hand. Doc looked over at him. J.B. shrugged.

“Will you yield?” Doc repeated.

He was surprised to see Sylvano Barat rise from among his men, though it took a pair of them to prop him up. His face was a mask of purple blood in the gloaming. “We yield.”

Doc sheathed his blade and stepped into the no-man's-land between the lines. “Then come forth and let us parley.”

Sylvano limped forward with his great sword once more across his shoulder and his hat upon his head. His men had washed his face with seawater, but purple blood still leaked down between his brows.

Doc bowed. “I am pleased you live, Senhor Barat, but I do wonder how.”

Sylvano doffed his hat and tossed it to the sand. It thudded with far more weight than mere felt. “We feared there might be something of a hand-to-hand battle before the Sister Islanders broke. I wore a steel cap beneath my hat.” He winced as he shook his head. “I will admit we did not expect massed slingers. What are your terms?”

“Simple.” Doc leaned heavily on his cane. Exhaustion often exacerbated his mental illness and he struggled to focus. “You and your men will lay down all arms, powder and shot.”

“I will not have my men tortured or humiliated.”

“As you planned to do to the islanders?” Doc asked archly. He regretted it immediately as Sylvano stiffened.

“Be that as it may.” Sylvano's voice was ragged with exhaustion, as well, but he spoke through clenched teeth. “My men are willing to die. You must also realize that though it will take time, my father will launch a second invasion, and beneath his banner there will be no mercy. Only I can stay his hand.”

“Be that as it may, we will have your ships, your cannons and your rifled muskets. We will train the islanders in their use and with the steamer in our hands you will face the threat of counterinvasion.”

Sylvano glanced at Doc's sword. “We could resume our duel.”

“A battle between champions would save lives, and you and your men might honor it, but we both know your father never would. He would avenge your death no matter how honorable the circumstances, and these people will never willingly go back to being slaves.”

“Then we are at an impasse.”

“We are at nothing of the sort, Sylvano. You have fought with every honor in the name of your father the baron, but now, I pray you listen to the entreaty of humanity. Yield, and fear no reprisal. Simply lay down your arms, see to your wounded, and take three of the motorized boats to bring you and your brave soldiers home.”

Sylvano gazed upon Doc warily. “And then?”

“And then a new relationship between these two islands will have to be negotiated in good faith.” Doc shrugged. “Failing that, the slaughter of total war will still be available to you and yours, and ours.”

Sylvano nodded. “I believe you are an honorable man, Dr. Tanner.”

“By your lights I find honor in you, as well. I implore you to accept our terms.”

Sylvano looked at J.B. “You agree?”

“Yeah,” J.B. said. “Take your wounded. Leave your weapons. Go. Come back when you're willing to talk.”

Sylvano saluted Doc with his sword and thrust it into the sand in surrender. “Very well, Dr. Tanner, I accept your terms and—”

“J.B.!” Jak shouted from the deck of the steamer. “Doc!” He pointed furiously out over the water. Night was falling. The sky had turned purple and across the strait the main island was little more than a dark mass. Except for the ville. It was lit by a yellow and orange glow. Black smoke lifted up into the night.

The ville was burning.

Doc looked to J.B. again. “Ryan?”

“No.” Sylvano Barat pulled his sword from the sand. His eyes were terrible in the fading light. “Raul.”

 

R
YAN HAD AWOKEN
to thunder, screaming and blasterfire in the distance. He and Moni watched the ville burn. Ryan received word from refugees who had escaped the slaughter and up into the hills. Most were headed for the fortified farms. The mill foreman, Honore, and one of his men were among them. By all accounts the situation in the ville was grim. Honore said that at dusk explosions had rocked the ville proper. Long ago the men of the ville had walled off the preskydark sewer entrances, but the nightwalkers had been filching sulfur from the ville mine in the hills. Combined with potassium nitrate deposits scraped from their caves and the charcoal from their cook fires, they had been manufacturing their own very crude black powder for some time. They had blown the sewers open and emerged from the smoking holes like devils emerging from hell right in the middle of the ville. Baron Barat had left only a token force of sec men behind and they had been swiftly overwhelmed.

“The baron?” Ryan asked.

Honore sat on a stump. His ghostly, bald head was nearly black with bruising. His leather apron was caked with blood and a sledgehammer lay across his knees. “Raul crucified him, or so I am told. I know not whether he is alive or dead.”

Ryan eased his arm out of its sling. He felt a sick ache in his elbow where the needle had been ripped free, but at the moment he wasn't bleeding through the bandage. “How many?”

“A hundred? Two hundred. It was hard to tell. They were everywhere at once. They took the sec station first. I heard the families of the shore battery crews were taken hostage. The artillerymen have run out the weapons and are manning them under duress in the eventu
ality of Sylvano or your friends returning. Though I hear many people are holed up in the church. Raul was a pious young man before he turned, and it seems so far he has been unwilling to blow it up.”