The convoy was about a league upstream from Bloody Ford; Rome tried to stay out of the way of the river men as they prepared the craft for a possible engagement. A muzzle-loading cannon of dubious workmanship was mounted on a wooden pose at the bow and loaded with cannister. A brand-new machine gun, handled with a reverence that was completely at odds with its slapdash construction, was set upon its tripod atop the fighting castle. While the fearsome aspect of these rare contrivances inspired some confidence in his heart, Rome was too well acquainted with contemporary standards of design and execution to be really at ease. He felt a little better when several of the crew went below and emerged with Pythian crossbows and metal-tipped arrows.
Gradually the Tyne widened until it was almost a mile across and little more than three feet deep. The line of yellow buoys placed by the preceding expedition ended abruptly just as they were approaching the Ford. The River-master, sitting in the fighting castle, scanned the area with a crude telescope. Rome was on the second boat in line and he heard an indistinct cry from the lead ship. The Master swung his glass around, stared for a moment and then called to the Captain, "Wreckage to the south, sir."
The men stiffened at their stations; hide bow strings were tested, the seating of shot in the cannon adjusted, and the machine gun was briefly checked by the Master. Rome stopped a man running aft to ask him exactly what was the matter. Instead of answering, he handed Rome a second-rate shirt of mail, a leather helmet, and a sword that must have journeyed into the Vale with Miolnor—and had not been polished since. Rome immediately protested about the quality of his weapon. "Gives the bastards blood pisinin', sah," rumbled the man as he continued aft.
They were now getting close to the Ford itself and Rome could easily make out the gutted hulks of two small river galleys some distance beyond it.
The Ford was essentially a ridge of crushed rock stretching the width of the river. Some say that it is all that remains of a gigantic dam that once provided the entire region for a thousand miles around with power; the Berota Wall was to have been its name, and it might have been built by the same race that had built the Yards.
Rome put on his rusty mail and helmet. He turned up to the Rivermaster, who was adjusting the sight on his gun; it broke off in his hand. "What do they have?" asked Rome, becoming aware that his voice had taken on the texture of broken glass.
"They?" said the Master.
"The half-men."
The Master shrugged and tried to refit the sight. "The usual lot: clubs, spears, bows . . . that sort." The man eyed the surrounding cliffs uneasily; a bird-like object was riding the thermals just to the west of the convoy. "And themselves, of course, sir. They've fangs and teeth and bleeding venom pouches. Think of any weapon had by any animal in the World and you can be fairly sure that one of them'll have it."
"Anything else?" Rome's voice had grown even rougher.
The Master leaned over the top of the fighting castle and whispered conspiratorially, "There's the bleeding mind muties, sir, the ones that directs the others. My Dad said that they have the Dark Powers on their side."
"The Powers? Sorcery? Surely you can't expect me . . . "
"I don't expect you to do a thing, sir. You asked me a question and I answered it straight as I could. Maybe in other times they would call some of their acts science or something like that, but now . . . My great, great grand-sire was a drummer boy and one of the two thousand that made it out of this hellhole with Miolnor, and by my hand, sir, the tales that he left to the family were unholy, that's the only word you could use—unholy."
Rome was about to question the man about the possible insanity of his ancestors but was cut short by a sharp rattling from the lead boat.
They were almost directly over the Ford now, the rocky bottom sometimes visible when the mud swirled the right way. Rome jumped from the cabin top and crouched low on the starboard deck; he had never heard a machine gun before. The lead boat, which had two automatic weapons, the extra one being mounted on its bow in place of a cannon, was blazing away at something above them. Rome looked up and saw that the flier he had noticed earlier had moved closer and had been joined by several companions.
Shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun, the engineer tried to see what manner of bird it was. The most readily apparent feature was its sheer size: its body was about five feet long but the membranous wings must have stretched almost twenty-five feet across. The sun shone through them, outlining the thin bone structure and lending a ghastly yellow tinge to their surface. There were no feathers or any other sort of covering on the wings so Rome surmised that it must be some form of bat, grown to monstrous proportions with the help of a gene-radiation bomb; with a shock he noticed that the head was that of a human, twisted, drawn out into an almost reptilian cast, with horribly prominent fangs. The parody was furthered by the dull corselet of mail that the creature was wearing; the sun glinted on a double-edged battle-ax clutched in a spindly claw at the joint of the right wing.
Even as Rome watched, terrified and sickened, the thing descended with an ear-splitting scream. Above him the Rivermaster opened up with the machine gun. Other boats joined in and soon the sky was richly embroidered with thermite tracers. The animal evaded the shells for a moment and then a fine network of holes was stitched along one wing; the chain mail buckled and flew into a thousand glittering fragments. The torn body fell into the river not five feet from Rome's boat, its blood mingling with the scum of the river.
"Shrieks, bloody flaming Shrieks," hissed a man at Rome's side. "They fight a battle like a damned ritual. All the time a goddamned ritual: first a sacrifice and then they fight." The man turned away and viciously braced his crossbow against his shoulder.
A shout arose from the afterdeck and all hands looked skyward. Where once not more than five Shrieks had been hovering, there were now well over three hundred. Down they fell, tucking their parchment wings close in.
The Ford began to fill with yelling and the smell of gunpowder. The cannon was touched off, ripping the bodies of two fliers away from their wings. Burning, lidless eyes came driving down from out of the sun. Steel striking out from a yellow cloud descended over Rome, and the man who had damned the Shrieks fell to the deck, his liberated head rolling overboard. Rome struck out, his eyes screwed shut, and drew back his sword dripping with scarlet blood; little bits of yellow skin and mail clung to its pitted surface.
Rome looked hurriedly about him; the boat in front of them had been set afire and was drifting ashore. Halfway back the flagship, engulfed in a swarm of pale bodies, was sending up a continuous stream of signal rockets. The line was breaking up and many ships, not knowing the way through the Ford, were drifting aground.
The bow cannon fired again, shoreward this time, where a force of rafts drawn by half-men was putting out. They were men, that was horribly apparent, but their bodies were torn and brutalized into shapes more nightmarish than the Shrieks. Claws, talon and fang; armored torso and faceted eye; hands arranged along three planes instead of merely one. The water glistened on their weapons and grotesque bodies, the two often indistinguishable.
The boats were now bunching up in a pack, apparently with the idea that their best defense would lie in a concentration of firepower.
On the rafts, Rome could make out small groups of men that actually looked like men. Cloaked and hooded, they were like mourners at a warlock's funeral. One of the figures raised a gnarled staff and pointed it at a straggling ship about two hundred yards off; a ball of blue light bulleted from the staff and struck the ship in the bow. A yell from above Rome: "Did I not tell you, sir? Did I not?" The rest of the Master's speech was cut off as he swung his weapon around and started peppering the waters around the raft. Another flash and the already burning craft exploded. There were four other rafts, each with its own small band of mind mutants, and soon the Ford was a cauldron of fire. Swords flashed and sliced through the heavy air to the accompaniment of machine gun and cannon shot.
More half-men waded in from the shore. Wild curses in a score of different languages and dialects damned the enemies' souls to a thousand different hells. Dark flags and banners of nations whose only heritage was one of hate were unfurled by reptilian hands to rise over the black and silver of the Caroline. Ancestors and gods were called upon; bullets tipped with maldreque from distant Telth roared off into the smoky haze to topple the fire-wizards. Hell was raging in the Vale and its sulfurous fumes rose to hide it from the sight of Heaven.
Rome had lapsed into a state of near insanity; a quiet man whose last battle was in a school's play yard, he alternately hewed arms and necks and then fell, retching into puddles of blood and shredded organs.
Gradually the gunfire ceased; quietly when the actions jammed or with a crash when they misfired. The Rivermaster above Rome had been pointing and training his gun for a full minute before he realized that its mechanism had disintegrated. The Master hit the gun in his fury, hit it again, and then wrenched it from its mount. He grasped the glowing barrel in his hands and leaped down to the deck, the war cry of a mountain clan of Enom rising from his foaming mouth. Swinging the broken gun over his head, the Master jumped into the boiling water. A dragon-man fell to the Tyne's bottom, his helm driven into his brain. The man moved further into the struggle, shattered armor and torn flesh flying from him; black feathered arrows sank through his quilted shirt and buried themselves in a body that refused to acknowledge their presence. A flaming sphere streamed in from one of the rafts and turned the man into a burning wraith; he collapsed into the filthy water, the gun barrel steaming.
Rome fell again, utterly exhausted. He lay immobile while the battle surged about him; blood and water flowed around his mouth and he began choking. He lurched to his feet, trying to clear his throat, the insane fury of a moment ago replaced by a void; he could feel nothing but weariness. Then a voice bellowed in his ear, "Dropped your blade, lad." His sword was thrust back into his hand and he turned to see the aged giant who had done it. The fellow was enormous, dressed in a short corselet of golden mail and leather breeches studded with silver. His tan hobnailed boots were tipped with vicious shards of steel; his meat-hook hands were wrapped in gray leather gauntlets banded with polished metal; he held a colossal broadsword in his right hand, its shining blade and hilt inscribed with many strange words and devices; a crest with a winged horse and armored fist was engraved on the guard and surrounded with brilliants.
"You all right, lad?" The man asked, his voice curiously distinct over the din. Rome looked into his deep-set eyes and scarred face and could do nothing but nod, yes.
Rome tottered down the deck a few paces and then heard a groan rise from the half-men. He saw the old man moving like a scythe-wielder through the half-men, their dismembered parts literally sailing off through the air. The giant turned into a dervish, a whirling Death, his sword everywhere; and through it all he said not a word, uttered not a cry of fury. The Shrieks seemed to simply fall apart while the blade was still thirty feet below them. The man started to move toward the rafts, casually murdering the half-men that stood in his way.
The cloaked figures stirred nervously and pointed their staffs at him. Fires ten times more brilliant than those directed at the ships screamed at the man. Rome gaped in astonishment as the spheres hit the giant and then burst like soap bubbles. An unusually bright and large flame-sphere flew at the man, its yellow-white core burning with a fire so hot it appeared, in its center, to be black. The man halted and then raised his sword before him. He caught the ball as it burst around him, the fire attaching itself to his weapon. He regarded it for a second and then hurled the burning shaft at the largest raft.
The cloaked mutants saw the missile coming and gestured frantically to the half-men pulling them. The sword hit the barge squarely in the middle, and a flash of light erupted, it seemed, from the river bottom. Temporarily blinded, Rome buried his eyes in his hands; titanic explosions assaulted his ears and five successive shock waves battered his tired body.
Fragments of wood and torn robes floated down, burning, from the smoke filled sky. The whole battle was frozen with amazement and awe; then the man turned, his broadsword suddenly returned to his hand. "For the Ship, my lad! Kill the bloody bastards! For the Caroline and the
Victory!
" And he rushed back through the steaming water to the renewed battle.
Rome grasped the hilt of his sword and felt power flowing through him. Then he felt as if he had fallen into a kind of grim ecstasy; he knew exactly what was to be done and he saw that the other men had the same look in their eyes as did the sword-hurler. He found a stooped half-man scuttling along the deck; he brought his boot down heavily upon its neck and plunged his blade deep into the cancerous hide. Rome sensed a maniacal grin distorting his face.
Then he enjoyed killing the half-men; he liked shoving his sword deep into their corrupted bodies; the soft squishing crunch as a mace pushed a lizard head into an insect body became an almost musical sound. Cut, slash, rip, tear their bodies to pieces, mates! See the flow of the rich blood, how beautiful its color, how rich its feel and lovely its taste. Death to the bastards, mates, death to them all so that the Ship may live.
Rome kept on swinging his ragged sword until a man tapped him on the shoulder. "You can stop now, sir." Completely drained, Rome fell heavily to the beslimed deck. He tried to retch again, but all that came up was a little green bile.
The gray haired man was nowhere to be seen. Who had he been, then? Rome was later told that the Caroline, in its infinite wisdom, had seen fit to send men versed in certain rare arts along with the expedition. The man had been the ghost of Miolnor IV, raised from the dead to once again defeat the Vale's ghastly hordes. True enough, thought Rome, for in this land all the preconceptions one had about what should, or should not be, must be discarded. Miolnor IV! And indeed it must have been he, for had not Rome seen with his own eyes the ancient crest of the great house of Mourne on the spirit's sword hilt?