The Iron Wolves (35 page)

Dek ran and bolted the door, with three heavy sliders of iron. Then they turned on King Yoon and advanced slowly across the chamber, the five of them spreading out.

“Tell me what happened to Vorokrim,” said Kiki.

“I told you! He disobeyed a direct order from his king!”

“Was the order to open the gate?”

King Yoon remained silent.

“WAS IT TO OPEN THE FUCKING GATE?” screamed Kiki.

“Yes, yes, yes. Please, don’t kill me! I implore thee!”

“Narnok?”

“Yes, Kiki?” He was grinning broadly.

“Put a bag over this fucker’s head, take him down, and lock him in a faraway dungeon.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and reached forward, grabbing Yoon. Yoon struggled, and Narnok head-butted him, breaking his nose. Blood flowed down his chest and Yoon howled. Yoon pulled a hidden dagger from his sleeve and Narnok took it from him like sweetcakes from a child. He waggled the dagger before Yoon’s eye. “You try any more tricks, sunshine, and I’ll pluck out your eyeball. Then you’ll look like me.” He grinned through his scars. “Only a damn sight less pretty.”

“Dek. You and Zastarte gather together a few captains, get down to the gates. I’ve got a feeling Yoon’s elite guards are in the process of opening the tunnel. Stop them. Kill them, if you have to, but I’d prefer a surrender. It’s bad for morale, men killing fellow countrymen when there’s tens of thousands of mud-orcs needing a blade in the skull.”

Dek saluted her. “Yes, Lady. And, Lady? I really am glad to have you back.”

“Good to be back,” smiled Kiki. “Meet back here as soon as possible. We need to take out Orlana. And we need to do it tonight.”

“Er,” said Narnok, suddenly. “We have a problem.”

“What?”

“Look!” he snapped, pointing…

As below, the mud-orc horde advanced... led by the splice.

Led by
all
the splice.

“They’ve opened the gate,” hissed Dek.

“Get down there!” yelled Kiki.

“You’re too late, honey-leaf whore,” said Yoon through his mask of blood, grinning, as Narnok found a hood and slammed it over his head. He punched Yoon three times through the cloth, and the King of Vagandrak went silent. Silent and limp.

“Change of plan,” said Kiki. “Get him to the fucking dungeons; the rest of you come with me.”

The splice poured through the open tunnel, and the King’s elite guard stood to one side as hooves and paws and claws gouged the earth and stone and the beasts invaded Desekra Fortress. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty... the Iron Wolves, backed by a thousand Vagandrak men arrived, fifty bearing heavy crossbows, and shafts hissed and snarled through the air, punching splice from their feet, bending them over double and slamming them back into their comrades. With battle cries, King Yoon’s elite guards drew swords and charged the Iron Wolves, but more heavy crossbows smashed them in half, three hundred thick yew shafts cutting through the enemy and breaking them against the stone. Splice snarled and screamed and crawled over their comrades, as more bows were loaded and archers peppered them with arrows. Kiki led the charge alongside Narnok and Dek, and they hit the front splice in a blur of aggression and hacking violence, swords and axes cleaving skulls and brains and limbs, skewering eyes and sending blood flowing into the soil.

“We need to seal the tunnel!” screamed Kiki.

“I can do that,” bellowed Narnok. “Just get me deep inside.”

They fought their way through splice, the brave soldiers of Vagandrak covering their backs, and hacked and hewed their way through walls of splice flesh until they stood within the narrow confines. Narnok put his axe through the skull of a wolf splice, then another, and the bodies blocked the narrow portal. He turned to Kiki.

“Get back!”

“What are you going to do?”

“GET BACK!”

Kiki retreated, and Narnok looked up. “Come on, you tender little whore, open your legs for me,” he said, and spat into the palms of his hands, one by one. He hammered his axe upwards, chipping stone. Then again, and again, and again, and again. A splice made from horse, man and wolf, snarling and drooling, crawled over its felled comrades and as it was about to leap, received an axe head between the eyes. Brain, skull and blood splashed up the stone.

“Come on,” said Narnok. Ten more times he hammered the axe at the roof of the tunnel, and dust trickled down, then tiny stones. Outside Sanderlek the splice were massed, the defenders stood on the parapets, archers firing down into their milling ranks. But they took the arrows. They took hundreds of arrows, and their ferocity and dark magick carried them on.

Again and again Narnok hammered his trusty axe upwards and he knew it, could
feel
it, could feel Iron Wolf magick coursing through his veins, vibrating through his boots, surging through the very soul of the fortress. Desekra was built for the men and women and children of Vagandrak. And Narnok was a portal for that magick. His legacy. His curse. His pride. His sacrifice…

He screamed, and the axe rammed upwards, the blades buckling, folding down into a hammer.

“COME DOWN ON US YOU FUCKING WHORE!” he screamed, blow after blow after blow echoing through Desekra, iron smashing stone, metal beckoning the fortress itself to collapse, to help them, to aid the defenders in their desperate hour of need…

And Desekra responded, and groaned, and stone blocks shifted, and more splice forced their way through the tunnel opened by King Yoon and crawled over dead and dying comrades as Narnok, like a man possessed, muscles bunched and curling like writhing snakes, his lips moving in silent incantation, bludgeoned the weapon he could no longer call an axe into the roof of the tunnel… and splice snarling with bared fangs and razor claws scrambled like cats over their fallen comrades and leapt at Narnok to tear off his face…

As the fortress rumbled.

The Pass of Splintered Bones
groaned.

And the roof caved in.

Narnok turned to flee, sprinting with all his might. Stones fell down, huge blocks of granite booming and tumbling, and he managed a few more strides then felt himself go under. The whole of the Desekra Fortress rumbled and groaned, as if some great earthquake was taking it in gauntleted fist and shaking it. As a warning. To the future.

Outside, Kiki watched the wall shudder, trembling and groaning, the whole tunnel collapsing with great bellows of grinding screaming stone. Dust pumped out as if from some natural explosion, and Kiki was hit in the face by a hundred chips of stone.

Slowly, the wall groaned, and sagged just a little; like a man’s mouth after a stroke.

Dek stepped forward and went to move again. Kiki blocked him with the flat of her sword.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“But… he’s Narnok! He can’t fucking die!”

“He’s gone,” she repeated, and the sorrow in her voice was that of a thousand mourners chanting the loss of a hero.

She turned, and grabbed Dek’s jerkin. “Focus! I need you! We have to travel the tunnels. We need to reach Orlana!”

“You really think we can kill her?”

“I am beginning to understand,” said Kiki.

“The curse?”

“The fortress. Desekra. The curse of the Iron Wolves does not lie within us; it lies within Desekra. We are not trying to free ourselves, we are trying to separate ourselves from the legacy of the king who built this tomb. Esekra. Esekra, the Lost.”

She did not know why she said it. But it sounded right. It sounded…
true.

“What next?” panted Trista.

“We head for the mines,” said Kiki, voice grim.

Each carried a brand which sputtered through different colours as they descended into the lower dungeons. They had confided only in Sergeant Dunda, who had grabbed two of his most trusted men to help, Reegez and Jagan, both hardened by the last few days fighting on the first Desekra wall, with blades drawn and faces grim, as if the whole sanctity of the nation depended on their actions. Which, maybe, it did. They approached Dalgoran’s old living chambers in Zula Keep warily, and inside found everything preserved as the old general had left it. Kiki headed for the chest at the back of the room, under the polished oak desk. Inside the chest, she found the thick bunch of keys for the gates in the mines. Without them, they would never negotiate the vast portals known as the Gates of Iron.

Now, as they descended into the dungeons, into the mine labyrinth, flames burned yellow, then on another level blue, another green, another red. As if each subterranean level beneath the Desekra Fortress was composed of different air, different chemicals, different atoms, different
magick
. The levels went down and down and down and down. Eventually the steps stopped, and became corridors, and halls, and caverns, and sometimes arched walkways over vast bottomless chasms. Darkness flooded in, so that even the brands seemed to illuminate little, providing only small circles of light in a vast unending darkness that surrounded the Iron Wolves. Flames sputtered and spat. The cold increased, not the cold of a savage winter containing snow and ice, but the cold of the deep; the cold of the grave; the cold of a bottomless tombworld.

“I hate it down here,” said Trista. “Where is the sunlight? Where is the world? Where is life?”

“We’ll be out soon enough,” said Kiki.

“These mines are unnatural. The internal magick of the mountain drawing on the weak, of mind and spirit and flesh. They were not a place designed for human presence. There is a great evil down here.” Trista shivered.

Kiki nodded, and they pushed on, finding the first huge portal. It was a gate of iron, intricately carved, maybe ten feet high and over a foot thick. It must have weighed a hundred tons. Within the ornate ironwork was the intricately formed shape of a howling wolf, head lifted to a full moon. The key turned easily, with a heavy clunk. As Kiki touched the metal, tiny sparks ran along the aged black iron and discharged against her skin. She felt this power pulsing inside her. She felt like it was exploring her. She felt magick tingling in her veins.

Desekra Fortress knew she was there, she, Kiki, Captain of the Iron Wolves. Finally, the Great Fortress seemed to come awake and it
knew
; knew all the Iron Wolves were alive and wriggling in Her belly, in Her womb; like tiny embryos. Her unborn. And She, Desekra, started to feed them; an intravenous delivery of energy, strength, power,
magick
. She fed the Curse inside them all.

They moved into the corridor beyond the massive iron portal, and the tunnel narrowed here so it could be defended, if discovered. Following protocol, Kiki turned and locked the gate behind them. They all exchanged a solemn glance. There would be no quick retreat when this thing was done; or not done. And if the splice were hot on their heels following a failure, they would be trapped, quite literally, between a rock and a hard place.

They followed the narrow winding tunnel, which sometimes sloped steeply down, sometimes climbed until their leg muscles were burning. All sense of direction and depth were soon lost and gone, drifted away like smoke. The Iron Wolves forced themselves to trust the winding tunnel, and when they came to hubs where tunnels spun away like complex spider webs, they then relied on Kiki’s memory.

They came to another gate, then another, and another. Each portal ten feet high, over a foot thick and carved with a different representation of a wolf every time; on one, a pack hunting; on another, two wolves fighting for supremacy; on yet another, a wolf standing above a man, fangs tearing into his throat. The black iron gleamed and the workmanship was intricate and incredibly detailed and showed no rust, despite the cold and damp atmosphere in which they existed.

Finally, after passing through twelve gates, the ground rose up steeply, and Zastarte muttered through his sweat and lank hair, until they reached the final gate; the thirteenth. Through this they passed, Kiki solemnly locking the portal, and then they climbed again, feeling a cool breeze drifting down to meet them. They stepped into a cave with a soft sand floor, itself burrowed deep within a giant standing stone. Carefully, they edged around a series of vertical pillars that hid the tunnel from the cave mouth and that, Kiki knew, gave an optical illusion of a solid wall when viewed from the entrance.

Warily the group stepped free and drew weapons. Night had fallen during their journey, and they could hear a rumble of drums, smell fire and woodsmoke and roasting meat. They moved to the entrance to the cave, and stared out at the other huge standing stones – as they had twenty years earlier.

The mud-orcs were camped in a vast arc stretching away into the night. In the distance, they could see Desekra Fortress, fires burning on the walls, the slick granite glowing under the pale light of a full moon.

“This is where we see if it was a good idea,” muttered Kiki, and pulled a large flash from her pack. The others did the same and, grimacing, especially Zastarte who started making retching noises, they began to smear mud-orc blood on their faces, hands, arms, clothing, armour, and rubbing the foul-stinking liquor into their hair, massaging it down to the roots.

“This is the worst thing I have ever done for King and Country,” murmured Zastarte.

“Even worse than the secret mission where you had to make love to a syphilitic whore down by the docks?” queried Trista.

“At least there was a little pleasure to be gained from such an activity; this, my love, hardly climaxes with joyous ejaculation.”

“There’ll be a joyous ejaculation of your head from your shoulders if you carry on talking,” hissed Kiki. “Now keep your mouths shut. We all know what we have to do.”

They stepped within the lee of the huge standing stones, and a cold wind snapped at them like a dog. They watched for long, dragging minutes. The mud-orc camp was a bustle of activity. They were indeed, as intelligence gathered by Vagandrak scouts suggested, getting ready for a night attack – the first of its kind, and the first time Orlana had tried such a tactic.

The Iron Wolves waited, until with a roar the lines of mud-orcs flowed out across the plains and hundreds of arrows arced into the sky from the Sanderlek battlements, a dark hail against the moonlit heavens, thudding home and taking down a huge swathe of the enemy. Growling and howling the mud-orcs flowed on, a green sea of bile and hate, and grappling irons sailed over the battlements and ladders thudded against parapets as the enemy swarmed up Sanderlek and the brave defenders of Vagandrak met them with sword and axe and spear.

The remainder of the army was reorganising into units, huge leader mud-orcs snarling and spitting in their grotesque language. Kiki set her eyes on the white tents of Orlana and, taking a deep breath, led the Iron Wolves from the protection of the standing stones.

They skirted the rear of the camp, moving slowly, the energy of Desekra Fortress flowing in their veins, the might of the magick, of the curse, filling all four up to the brim with a bubbling power that threatened to spill out, to overflow at any moment...

There was a central tent, larger than the others and fashioned from white Zakoran silk. There were guards outside the front but they seemed excessively relaxed; after all,
they
were the ones attacking the enemy.

Kiki signalled in military sign.
That one.

Advance,
came Dek’s reply. Zastarte and Trista brought up the rear.

Reaching the rear of the tent and hunkering down, Kiki produced a dagger, and glancing left and right, cut into the silk a short distance from the ground. Silently, she opened the silk with a razor edge.

Inside the tent was dark, with just a single brazier burning, allowing soft golden shadows to flicker inside the silk walls. The sounds of battle were close here, screams, cries, the clash of iron on iron, all echoing back from the battle on and below Sanderlek, and rushing across the Zakora plains like an ocean of misery.

Kiki unfolded, delicately, like a rose opening its petals.

There, lounging naked under silk sheets, was a tall woman with short white hair, and a powerful man with a forked black beard and thick, bushy black hair, whom she recognised with a start; it was King Zorkai of Zakora. There was considerable trade between Vagandrak and Zakora – or there had been, before the attack of the mud-orc army. Kiki had travelled to the capital city of Zak-Tan on several occasions during the last decade, and on her previous visit had seen him address his people of the desert.

Kiki’s fist clenched around her sword pommel, and with Dek to her left, and Trista and Zastarte to her right, the Iron Wolves moved carefully, silently, across thick rugs and between piles of gold-embroidered cushions towards Orlana, the Changer, the creature known as the Horse Lady…