Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (44 page)

She went down under Warlord’s weight and the weight of the demon’s pounding limbs. They grappled together, Warlord and the golden queen, but their efforts at each other were confounded by the blind rage and blood thirst of the demon, who continued to hammer upon them both for a time, mashing and stomping with all its heavy feet. Gromf feared both might die in that.

Then came a roaring from above and a hot blast of wind. Gromf thought the dragon he had seen earlier had returned and begun to breathe on him. He looked up and saw, briefly, something large, bulky and angular, spinning over his head. It pitched and turned as it came overhead, with strange fire shooting out of round openings on its underside, and then, like a bird that’s been shot down, it whirled awkwardly and smashed into the city wall with a loud crash and a blast from one of the large fiery openings. The heat and shock from the blast sent everyone nearby, orc, human and demon alike, tumbling away like leaves in a wind, and even Gromf, farther from the impact than others had been, rolled backward twice from the force of it. He was a moment in getting his bearings again.

The strange metallic object lay against the city wall, bent and looking broken, though he could not be sure, for he knew not what it was. It was made from a substance he’d never seen before, not quite white and not quite gray, seemingly of metal, but not in any form he knew. It had symbols painted on its side. Symbols he did not recognize. It was human writing, he thought, the two largest symbols in red: a vertical line with a shorter horizontal line at its top set beside a second vertical line with a squat circle attached near its top and jutting out to the left. Gromf stared at the symbols, searching his memory. But they did not match any of those symbols he’d seen in the human book, though he knew he hadn’t studied it very carefully. For a moment he wished Kazuk-Hal-Mandik were there to interpret the message, to read what it might tell them about the new god. But only for a moment. For as he looked on, he saw that there were beams of metal thrusting out from the twisted structure that had crashed there, bent and twisted, pushed through its metallic outer skin at strange angles like broken ribs thrusting through the dead flesh of a defeated warrior.

For a moment he feared that this was some unanticipated trick, a weapon of the new god, but the smoke and fire that came from the protruding ribs of metal convinced him that whatever it was, it was a broken thing. And as evidence of that, at the very moment he realized it, a piece of it fell away, a square section at the narrowest end of the broken thing, revealing as it fell that the object was hollow inside.

Out from this opening came first a handful of humans on horses. Gromf had never seen cavalry emerge from such a vehicle before, a thing that seemed to have fallen out of the sky. But right behind them came several of the steel-clad humans Gromf had seen at the beginning of the fight. They came out, and already their whining metallic arms were shooting the fire that was too short. From this much-closer proximity, Gromf could see that whenever the humans pointed the too-short fire at a demon or an orc, that demon or orc burst apart in chunks. Not so powerfully as when struck by the red lights from the sky, but still, the metallic whine coming from the fire must have emitted something else, for despite the flames never reaching the bodies of God’s forces, they fell open just the same.

Gromf watched in horror as more and more of these armored humans came out. He counted thirty-five.

He looked back to where Warlord and the golden queen had been grappling beneath the demon’s feet. Both leaders were just then struggling to their feet. The human queen shook herself and clearly had been dazed, her sword hanging limply for a moment in her hands. Gromf thought about hitting her with an ice lance but remembered what had happened with the last one. She was like the demons in that, worse even, not simply resistant but actually reflecting magic back. He would have to leave it to Warlord to strike her down.

And the great orc was in a position now to do it, too, for he saw the golden queen’s sword drooping as it was. He raised himself up out of the mud, steam rising from him, made by the heat of the blast, and quickly retrieved his axe. He roared as he started for the queen.

The humans in the strange steel armor were moving that way. Gromf worried what they might do to Warlord if they saw what he was about to do to the golden queen.

Gromf knew what he had to do. He summoned his mightiest ice bolt, made it twice as thick around as Warlord himself, and five times as long, letting the full power of the God Stones fill the object with colossal mass. He sent it hurtling at the last one in the line of the armored humans with their whining spits of fire. The ice struck the human like a landslide and carried it, armor and all, into the wall where it was crushed like a bug. Gromf laughed. The magic of the new god was not so great. And better, none of the others had seen him do it. He moved closer and repeated what he’d done, once again picking off the one at the rear of their formation. That ice beam had the same effect, and another human died.

Exultant, Gromf did it four more times, running closer with each cast and chanting the spell more violently.

Then someone shouted at him from the open place at the back of the broken thing that had crashed into the wall, a human voice, an obvious challenge for a fight.

He spun to face the fool, expecting another human in the steel armor like the rest. But it was not. It was a male human, shorter than most, bulky in the chest and with darker skin than the flesh of the golden queen’s kind. This man wore no armor, though his clothing was still unlike any human garment Gromf had ever seen, black and gray, with a strange glittering button near his neck. He carried in his hand a strange weapon, similar in ways to the shape of the small crossbows humans used, but this one had no bow at the end, nor did it seem loaded with a bolt. It glowed in places along its shiny black length with a type of fire Gromf had never seen before either, in all, its use beyond reckoning. But Gromf knew it was a weapon by the way the human leveled it at him. The human said something, wiping as he did at a trickle of blood on his forehead. The human’s finger moved on the weapon and, for a moment at least, Gromf saw a thin red beam of light.

Chapter 36

A
ltin and Orli arrived at the Temple of Anvilwrath in Crown City only moments after the smoke-lettered summons from High Priestess Maul had appeared. Altin’s teleport placed them behind a huge column at the top of the front steps, a vantage of such altitude that it granted them a view of the city stretching away to the east, west and south. From that lofty locale, they could see that fires burned in many locations along the southern wall, and in places, the smoke rose from neighborhoods much closer to the temple than the wall, as much as a half measure into the city, the black plumes blowing eastward in jagged smears, marking the path of the demon disease as it began to encroach. Around the city they could see the red streaks of laser fire coming through the cloud layer above, the starships in orbit doing their part to burn back the attackers around the city. That was heartening, as were the small mushroom clouds in the distance, bright flashes that had Altin gawking for a time.

“It is as if the nine levels of hell truly have opened,” he said. “These are the things of myth, the things of gods.”

“No, these are the things of human history,” Orli replied. “This is what’s wrong with us.”

That was true, and Altin nodded. It was all he could do to suppress the urge to get back to the wall and help them. Orli saw it in the look that came across his face, the way his lips rolled in and the inclination of his posture toward the stairs. She touched his arm, turning him to look at her. She shook her head.

The tension bending him toward the fight released as he saw the truth of the situation in her eyes. It wouldn’t be enough. He faced back toward the temple interior again. “All right, let’s go.”

If the Temple of Anvilwrath in Leekant could be said to be immense, grandiose and spectacular, then the temple in Crown City was nothing less than the absolute manifestation of architectural strength and power. Nothing in the city besides the Palace competed with it in terms of scope, scale or awe. Where the Palace was audacious, ambitious and elegant with its spires climbing a half measure into the sky, the house of Anvilwrath was vast, stalwart and brutal. Though he had been there before, Altin couldn’t help wonder as the two of them ran inside, moving deeper and deeper into the maze of its thick colonnades, if either demon or “tactical nuke” could do such a place any harm. It seemed to possess a solidity that must be invincible. The sheer scale was hard to comprehend, not in height but in endlessness. They ran and ran and ran, and yet the rows and rows of massive columns seemed never to stop. No end appeared, no change in the sameness of all those trunks of stone, every one thirty spans high and at least half that in diameter. The carvings changed, the runes changed, but never the scale or density. It was as if they had come into the realm of squat colonnades, some strange place where there existed only cylindrical stone and the space between them.

So run they did, on and on, winding through what seemed at least a full measure before coming into the “outer courtyard,” which was a term, given the distance they’d come, that might have made them both laugh at some other time, some less dire place in history.

The young priestess Klovis was there to greet them as they emerged into the open air of this expanse. Her rust-hued robes were torn, a long rent straight down the front of them, gaping and revealing a red line of dried blood running down between her breasts clear to her navel.

She saw both Altin’s and Orli’s eyes go to the wound and gave a grim smile as she too looked down at it. “That one was close,” she said, nodding as she did. “Yet Anvilwrath seems to have further use for me.”

The two of them nodded at the priestess, glad to see her spirits were still high. “I got the Maul’s summons. Where is she?” Altin asked.

“She is with the Grand Maul below. We’ve just come back from the field. Anvilwrath has shown us where you must go. Come.” She turned then and took off at a run, leading them across the courtyard and deeper into the heart of the temple. They ran for a long while, longer than before. Orli was in exquisite shape, but Altin began to tire. His was not a runner’s heart, which forced the two women to slow their pace.

“Don’t you people recruit any teleporters?” he asked after a time, panting with the effort of going on.

“We are here,” said Klovis nearly as the words had left his lips. She stopped at the end of a corridor down which they’d been running for what seemed to Altin at least a hundred years. It ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac, around the edge of which were twenty-five candles burning in fluted glass of cobalt blue. In the center of this ring, inlaid into the mottled brown stone of the floor, was the image of a pair of crossed war hammers in polished steel.

Klovis hoisted her robe up as she stepped between two candles and motioned for them to stand with her inside the ring. They did, and a moment after they were far below.

Huge braziers lined the walls at intervals around the chamber into which they appeared, each alight and filled with burning orange flames that licked up the walls like dragon’s breath. The space into which they had come was enormous, and looking up, Altin could see stalactites sparkling in the lofty darkness. The natural vault, the glimmering work of nature, gave way to the work of men as Altin’s gaze traced its surface around from high above, its angles and seeming imperfection flattening closer to the floor, the coarse stone transformed to polished smoothness which, farther down, was hung with tapestries. The whole of it, the transformation from the wild to the worked, gave the room an unfinished feeling, as if the priests had only been allowed to work up the first twenty spans and then left the rest alone, a compromise between man and gods taking place up there. He supposed there was probably some mystical reasoning for such things but had no time to seek the story behind it all.

Gathered at the center of the vast chamber, some hundred paces at least beyond where the three of them had just appeared, was a small crowd, most in the rusty robes of Anvilwrath, but a few figures that were not. Altin recognized High Priestess Maul right off, as well as two other figures, a young woman in the gray robes of a teleporter and a skinny young man in brown trousers and a tunic of homespun: two of his former students, Tribbey Redquill and Caulfin Sunderhusk. That gave him pause. He looked the question of their presence to Klovis, but she was already moving off the crossed hammers upon which they now stood, stepping through the ring of cobalt-housed candles and heading toward the assembly deeper in the room.

The group, almost as one, turned to face them at the moment of their arrival, and High Priestess Maul stepped forward out of the group right away. “Good, you came quickly,” she said to Altin. “There may still be time.”

From the center of the crowd emerged a tiny figure, a man so old and frail he seemed on the very edge of turning straight to dust. He sat upon a wicker chair which had been set upon a plank with wheels attached. A young acolyte pushed him toward Altin and Orli, and High Priestess Maul, in deference, gave way.

The little man slowly thrust his head forward like some gristly tortoise emerging from its shell, and he stared first at Altin, then the Earth woman standing nearby, his eyes glittering in the firelight as he considered them in turn. The arm he raised to point at them was little more than a pair of sticks wrapped in the splotchy velum of his skin, and the mangle of his old fingers shook as he marked the two new arrivals with what served as a pointing motion in the air. “They have come,” he said in a dusty croaking voice. A proclamation for the room. “The Seven and the Alien. Come to beg the mercy of Anvilwrath.”