“How would I be sure of that?”
Clopping sounds emanated from above. They froze. It was just a quartet of
mountain goats—real ones this time, not Chaos hybrids. The animals, which
Angelika knew were called chamois, gazed curiously down at them from a small
ledge that bore the only decent patch of grass. The three adults went back to
their grazing, but there was a kid, too, and its dark, wet eyes followed their
progress until they wended out of its sight.
When the upper reach of the path doubled past them, they stopped to breathe
and rest. Angelika checked for likely handholds as she considered the
possibility of scaling the vertical rock that separated the bends in the trail.
At the very least, they’d be in for twenty-five feet of clambering. The time they would
gain wasn’t worth the risk of a fall. Though she felt ready to take on a dozen
Chaos creatures, her sense of exuberance had not made her stupid, or hungry for
unnecessary danger.
Half an hour later, they reached a point of heavy going, where the steep
groove gave way to a narrow ledge that curled around the mountainside. There
were several places, she could see, where they would have to press their backs
to the rock and inch along sideways. But first they would have to leap a
five-foot gap, and there was no space to get a run at it. Without alerting
Franziskus, she took her standing jump. She landed a bit too close to the edge.
She tottered, but regained her balance. Her heart thumped. She tried to compose
herself as she slid along the ledge to give Franziskus room for his own jump. He
took a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly in prayer. When he opened them, he
made the leap perfectly. She suppressed the urge to mock his superstitious
devotion to gods. Though she doubted his pious murmurings would do them any
good, she found herself, at her present elevation, readier than usual to believe
in the benevolence of gods. On the off-chance that they did pay kind attention
to the laughable doings of the ant-like mortals they surveyed from above, it
would serve no purpose to antagonise them.
The two of them made slow progress along the ledge. With each step,
Angelika’s elation ebbed away from her. By the time they had embarked on the
final circuit around the peak, she found her senses returning to her. Franziskus
was right. This was madness. They would find nothing of Lukas von Kopf except
bones, cracked open and stripped of marrow. And if they did succeed in finding
him and getting him down, there was no guarantee of securing a reward
commensurate with the hazards of the task. What had possessed her? Perhaps the
Chaos minions had burrowed their way into her mind, luring her onwards to become
their snack. Or maybe she had only wanted to play the contrarian, to do whatever
would most shock Franziskus. He was clearly a dangerous person to have around.
She swore she would lose him for good, as soon as they got down off this
damnable mountain.
But…
To admit she was wrong and reverse course—that she couldn’t do.
She pressed on.
Rock gave way under her front foot. It crashed down the mountainside.
Franziskus had her, his arms wrapped around her ribcage. He pulled her up. Her
legs swung in mid-air. He staggered back. The foot closest to the ledge was
edging off it, but he corrected himself. He backed up enough to set her down.
She planted her feet, and recaptured her balance.
He still had his arms around her. His hands crossed at her breastbone.
“So this is what you’ve been waiting for all this time,” she said.
“What?”
“An opportunity to grasp me by the bosom.”
Now he let go, twitching his hands as if to shake off any residue of lustful
thinking. “I got hold of you below the—below the—area in question. I was most
careful of that.”
She tried to get eye contact, but he wouldn’t cooperate. “Are you telling
me,” she asked, “that you paused, in that crucial moment—where the smallest
slice of a second could make the difference between my survival or my falling
hundreds of feet to find myself squashed flatter than a griddlecake—that you
frittered away a precious instant to make sure your hands did not graze on an
inch of teat?”
“Stop it!” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Your unseemly teasing.” He put a hand up before her face. “If we are to
succeed together as soldiers of fortune, I must put aside any notion that you
belong to the fairer sex.”
“Ah, I see,” she said, leaping the gap made by the collapsing ledge. She
landed, and reminded herself to breathe again. “You are saying that I am no woman
at all.”
He leapt the gap abruptly, recklessly. Rocks fell under his heels. Angelika
grabbed his forearms and yanked him in her direction. He found his footing.
Through no design of hers, his face was pressed into her chest.
“Such a statement would be insupportable,” his muffled voice said, “in the
face of contrary evidence.”
She pushed him off her. Another good reason to get rid of him: he was
beginning to get the last word in.
They inched their way up the narrow pathway. Over the course of two slow and
anxious hours, they circumnavigated the peak one final time. As they made the
final turn, back to the face where the cave would be found, Angelika noticed
that Franziskus’ teeth chattered. She composed a jibe on the subject, but
abandoned it when she realised that hers were doing the same.
The final stretch of trail was the least forgiving of all. Angelika and
Franziskus had long since left the stream system behind. Now they faced thirty
feet of downward-sloping ledge that ended in front of the cave. Its mouth hung
about fifteen feet lower than where they were now. The incline would make it
easier to stumble and slip off into nothingness. They studied the narrow ledge
for a long time. Angelika steeled herself and wiped sweat from her palms.
A rumble erupted from the cave. To Angelika’s ears, it sounded like a
rockfall at first, but as it went on, growing loud enough to vibrate in her
chest, it took on an animal quality that reminded her of disturbed bowels. Any
creature that could make a noise like that would have to be very large.
Intertwined with this sound was another: higher in pitch, and more
intermittent. It was a human sound, one of distress. There was someone still
alive in there.
“Just kill me and be done with it!” the voice cried. Despite its airy pitch,
the voice was definitely a man’s. Even in its anguish, the precision of its
consonants and the lofty lilt of its vowels were unmistakable. It screamed in
the accent of an Imperial noble.
Angelika edged ahead. The ledge groaned under her feet, threatening to give
way. The sound of cracking rock would have been loud enough to hear inside the
cave, if it had not been drowned out by the guttural yammering. There seemed to
be words in the jibbering. Angelika could not make out what the creature was
saying, but supposed it must be replying to its prisoner’s complaints. She
thought she detected amusement, or even laughter, in the noise, but did not feel
qualified to make judgments where Chaos minions were concerned. Who knew if they had emotions as the mortal races understood them?
She halted her advance. A tripwire of thin, cured animal gut had been strung
across the cave mouth. It was stretched taut between two iron pegs, which had
been pounded into the stone itself. The line of gut ran from the peg furthest
from her into the depths of the cave. Angelika inched close enough to peer
inside. She felt Franziskus signalling her to stay back, but she had no time to
bother with his objections.
It was dark, unsurprisingly, but she could make out a large object that hung
from the ceiling in some kind of net. Angelika saw the creature, but it took her
a while to understand what she was seeing. The creature was big—perhaps ten
feet tall—and round, with an enormous, scaly belly. The beast stood on stubby
legs and waved long, ropy arms that were covered with coarse, dung-matted hair.
Its back was also covered in the same hair. Long, black, curving claws extended
from each of its foreshortened fingers. Luckily for Angelika, the creature’s
face pointed away from her. Its shadow fell on the cave wall, in profile; she
made out a pronounced forehead ridge and a bearish snout. Long, pointy fangs
protruded from the snout—or perhaps it was just a trick of the light. At any
rate, the thing held a large section of pine trunk that had its limbs gnawed off
and was bleeding resin. The creature was using it to poke roughly at the hanging
bundle. Another cry arose, and Angelika realised that it came from the net. The
creature had its prisoner suspended from the cave roof and was jabbing at him
with the uprooted tree. Based on the size of the arm—and now she saw a stunted
foot, with warty yellow skin, like a rooster’s, but belonging to some far-off
branch of the animal kingdom—based on what she saw, she figured that the
creature might well be fifteen feet tall, and weigh what? A ton? Two tons?
Three?
By comparison, the goat-thing had been an opponent for novices.
She turned to Franziskus. They were in no position to plan; the creature
would hear them.
And they couldn’t just rush in and attack it. All she had was a knife. If she
survived this, she would learn to use a weapon with a longer reach.
She became conscious of a need to empty her bladder.
Dots of snow dusted down from further up the peak; they did nothing to cool
her blazing forehead.
She reached out and grabbed the tripwire, twanging it like the string of a
lute. Then she held it taut. As she’d suspected, there was the sound of a
squeaky pulley spinning. This was followed by a crash. The cave mouth billowed
dust and sand, as the creature came lunging out of it. It was as large as she’d
figured. Its head was halfway between that of a bear and a pike or other toothy
fish, with a huge and gaping mouth. Angelika, gut cord still in hand, jerked it
outward. It pulled against one of the behemoth’s rooster-skinned legs, knocking
it off balance. The creature, expecting foes to be in front of its snapping jaws
but not to its side, turned, wrapping the cord around its ankle. Angelika gave
it a final tug, increasing her leverage by letting herself fall backwards,
trusting Franziskus to catch her. The creature rolled from the ledge.
It bounced like an enormous ball down the side of the mountain. It hit an
out-jutting rock, and exploded in a shower of slime and dark blood. As it
smashed into a lower level of the trail, it broke a new gap in it, and splashed
ichor down the mountainside. The ball of gore, fur and hide continued to roll
until it was out of sight.
Franziskus held Angelika under the arms. He had caught her without
hesitation. “I will remark wittily on this at a later time,” he said.
She muttered and freed herself from his grip, though not so carelessly as to
follow the monster off the side of the mountain. She moved to the edge of the
cave. “You in there! Are there any more beastmen?”
“Who calls me?”
“Answer my question!”
“Is this a trick?”
“Are there more beastmen in there?”
“Did my father send you?”
She looked back to address Franziskus. “How do they manage to raise you all
to be so stupid?”
Angelika dropped down into the cave. She kept her knife out, ready to receive
an attacker. Her eyes adjusted. The cave was smaller than she’d anticipated.
Looking for other ways in, she saw only a narrow fissure at the back of the
cave, through which she was not sure if it was possible to squeeze. Nothing else
moved, except for the individual bundled up and gently swinging in the net above
her head. She squinted to see how he was fastened there. The creature had used
more gut string to create an elaborate lattice between several iron pegs that
were spiked into the chamber’s flattish ceiling. The net hung from the centre of
this web of gut. On tiptoes, Angelika contemplated how exactly it could be cut
down. She called Franziskus in. He entered the cave preceded by his drawn sword.
“Are there any more of them?” he asked her.
“Good question,” Angelika said. “Are there more Chaos spawn?” she asked the
prisoner in the net, in a low, hissing voice. The presumed Lukas von Kopf did
not answer. “Hey!” she said. Still no reply. She squinted at him. “I can see
you’re awake. I saw you blink, just now.” She jumped up to paw at the net, sending it gently swinging. It was a difficult thing to do; the
lowest part of Lukas dangled about nine feet from the stone floor of the small
cavern. “Don’t make me find a rock to pitch at you,” she whispered.
“Do not presume to touch me!” said Lukas, paying no special heed to the
volume of his voice. “I have been poked and prodded quite enough!”
“Then answer my questions! There’s no one else in here, is there?”
“I have not seen anyone but the beast for weeks—unless you count Thomas,
there.”
“Thomas?” Franziskus peered into the shadows. His foot bumped against
something. He knelt to feel what it was. He scudded back into the sunlight, his
face wrinkled in revulsion.
“I take it you’ve found Thomas,” Angelika said.
“What remains of him.”
Angelika spoke up at Lukas: “Was Thomas one of the men you fled with?”
“He disappointed me bitterly. He was supposed to be an experienced soldier.
Yet he couldn’t protect me from the beast, could he?”
“He’s addled,” Angelika said to Franziskus.
“I heard that!” An inappropriate giggle worked its way through the prisoner’s
tone of outrage.
Franziskus looked up and spoke in a low and soothing voice. “If you could
hear yourself, Lukas, you would agree that reason has abandoned you. This Thomas
person had no chance of protecting you from a thing such as that. In addition,
you direct misplaced umbrage at us, we are your rescuers.”
Angelika moved Franziskus aside. “This is foolish. We’ll sweet-talk him back
to sanity later. Lukas, we’re getting you down from there.”