Valkyrie, Chapter V: Hinterberg

Heike watched the countryside go by outside the window of her compartment while its other occupants — a pair of goblin workmen who’d got on at Talfarde and a snoring human barrister whose spectacles were slipping down his nose — dozed in their seats. Green farmland burgeoning. Tidy farmhouses, whitewashed and trim No salt blight here. No orc hordes to strip the soil bare. No bombers soaring overhead. The front was two hundred miles distant and here, if nowhere else, Alkost was at peace. 

A tower of black storm clouds churned over the mountain’s foothills. It rose up out of sight into the scudding white clouds above. Wind shook the compartment’s windows. Another tower rose up from the farmland a half mile or so distant. Land laid claim to by the stormlords, who gave a single day’s warning with a pillar of light joining heaven and earth. No one knew what they used the land for. The storm towers made Heike want to fuck. All that power tethered and restless, enough to level a city. 

If I were human, she thought bitterly, I could hire one of the red car’s women. I could tell her “hold my throat in your teeth” and she would hold me there like a mother cat holds her kitten and I would be completely safe.

Beside the magic of the stormlords her own frail talents paled. No landsider held a hundredth of their power, the hidden masters of the world who bartered their incredible engines to the lesser peoples of Alkost for great rafts of goods and produce. These negotiations took place only at Throne-of-the-Moon on the Northern coast, an island which in centuries past the stormlords had wrenched from the sea and set to hang in the sky over . The floating isle was one of Heike’s few memories of her life before Lundheim and the IMI. Sometimes at night she still dreamed of the black tower with its rain-slick eaves, of the airships gliding sharklike through the clouds and the cataracts of water pouring over the isle’s sheer cliff faces.

She couldn’t remember her parents’ faces, though, or the sounds or sights of the clanship where she’d been born. She knew the bare essentials about gnomish life, the kind of thing you found in Imperial encyclopedias. Anthropologists’ sketches of gnome children playing in the rigging of huge gas-powered craft more shanty town than airship, first-hand reports of skyfishing and less pleasant accounts of clanships passing through the Rastish border towns to entertain, mount plays, and then rob blind the farmers and frontier folk who’d been gullible enough to take them in. Some of it is lies, she told herself. Some of it is people like the Graybacks spreading slander about anyone who isn’t human. 

The train raced onward, passing between the swaying black towers of Alkost’s hidden masters. Heike leaned her cheek against the window. She watched the storms recede into the distance as they rounded the mountain’s foothills and passed over the northwestern tributary of the Lund, foaming white and savage in its canyon far below the bridge. Have I crossed this river before? she wondered. Did I look down at it from my parents’ arms?

Hinterberg. Steep roofs shedding tarpaper shingles in the late summer heat. Shacks clinging to the slope in jumbled rows, the boardwalks between them warped and splintering. A dig site gaped in the hillside past where the shanty town lay. Canvas sheets stretched between posts flapped in the wind. Loose earth lay heaped downhill from the site and work gangs ported more along rutted dirt tracks in handcarts and barrows. Then they were past, still climbing, and headed through the city’s outskirts under the ruin of an ancient Barkultish aqueduct and past tumbledown tenements piled four and five stories high. Light and shadow flickered like a code over the car. Heike blinked. She’d slept a few hours, to judge by the sun.

Into the city proper, still climbing with the incline of the hill, and past a breadline that stretched block after block between flurrying buildings. Packed-earth old elvish architecture rubbed shoulders with tall, slender-framed Rastish rowhouses with clapboard sides and the crumbling masonry of Verangian manors and pig runs from which foul rivulets of effluvia wormed downhill, as most things did in cities. Hinterberg, conquered and reconquered more times than Heike guessed any of its citizens cared to remember, was a heap of Alkost’s last eight hundred years of bloody compost. At its center bulked Kosach Station, once the seat of the changeling marquis Istvan Red-Eye, now a wreck half-gutted and the rest given over to what civil functions Rastlund cared to extend to its farthest-flung satellite. 

The train’s whistle moaned. The brakes screeched. Heike slid down from her seat as the barrister shook himself awake and the goblins slung their rucksacks over their backs and headed out into the car’s passageway where the other passengers were already streaming toward the exits. The shadows of the station swallowed them.

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The engineer, Ashmink, was waiting for her outside a tiny cafe a few minutes’ walk from Kosach station. A faded red awning overhung the tables and a few dwarven longbeards sat playing chess and drinking strong black coffee. Ashmink himself was a human somewhere in that species’ brief and sudden old age, his brown face seamed and sunken-mouthed, his black eyes cloudy behind a pair of tiny spectacles. 

This entire stupid job is walking into restaurants.

She spoke a quick cant as she approached Ashmink’s table, pricking her reflexes and fuzzing her peripheral vision with arcane static that would pulse a livid pink if someone spent too long moving straight toward her. She hadn’t slept well on the train and the arcana sputtered for a moment before taking hold, but take hold it did. She climbed into the chair opposite Ashmink’s and planted her hands on the table, nearly upsetting his coffee when it wobbled under even her slight weight. He seemed calm, which put him well ahead of most defectors that she’d known. 

“Hello.” He had a pronounced Verangian accent, light and lisping.

“You did as we said in Udarest?”

“Multiple tickets, giving my staff different destinations; everything you advised.” He took a sip of coffee, his manner collected. Professorial. “I claim no expertise, but I do not believe that I was followed.”

An elvish waiter deposited a second cup in front of Heike and withdrew with that seamless Verangian hospitality. Heike wrapped her hands around the little porcelain cup and let the warmth seep into her stiff knuckles. Much as she’d been loathe to let her work in Lundheim die on the vine after so long spent cultivating her contacts at the Barkultish embassy, she had to admit it was good to get out of the city. She always felt more comfortable in the field.

“My wife and grandson,” Ashmink prompted. “I received certain assurances.”

Heike drank deeply, then set her cup down. “A boat will meet them this Vinday at a cove a few miles south of St. Kossell. They’ll be taken to the naval installation at Kriegstrand and given asylum as allies of the Rastish state.”

They’ll be hostages to your good behavior, but you’re a clever boy. You must know.

Ashmink put a few coins on the table, reached under it for his valise, and pushed himself to his feet. His knees cracked audibly. “Then I’m ready.”

She waved him back to his seat. “Sit down. Let me finish my coffee. The trains aren’t secure and we’ve four hours before our pilot expects us.”

Ashmink sat, his valise in his lap. Heike noticed for the first time how tightly he was clutching it.

What exactly is he bringing over?

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The Verangian troops were spread out over the foothills of a mountain range Anok had heard lieutenant Dollanganger call the Aketals, the distant peaks of which loomed faint and purple far to the north of the fighting. Machine gun nests dotted the crumbling ridgelines. Snipers infested the copses of knotted pines that grew on the banks of the streams that wandered and diverged downhill like broken veins in a drunkard’s nose, and twice Rastish sorties up the slope had plowed into buried clutches of undead. Emaciated ghouls still feasted on the hillside where they’d dragged the fallen just out of mortar range.

Anok stared up the rugged hill from the dip in the valley below where Ivory Company stood waiting for orders. His blistered feet ached. The straps of his armor dug into his shoulders. He stank like an ice bear’s breath, his pelt matted with sweat, his skin sour and unwashed. He’d seen, as he and Ivory Company marched into the encampment, the twelve survivors of the hundred men sent up the hill that morning. Now it was near midday and a stiff wind was blowing in from the sea to the west. Susqut, who’d been made sergeant at Fort Ginzer where they’d debarked from the Indomitable for deployment, stood a little way off in conversation with the lieutenant and a squat, scar-faced major who’d flown in from Colonel Hoffstadt’s command post. 

“They’re going to put us up that hill,” said Big Mulli, who was cleaning the six-foot rifle he’d been issued. Narwhal Sword had the company’s other gun; he’d been reprimanded twice for shooting at game, which seemed to amuse him greatly. The others, Anok included, had their shields and their massive black iron mauls. They heard a great deal about their own invulnerability from the human officers who told them where to march. For his part, Anok had never been shot and didn’t relish finding out what it was like — no matter how fast the empire’s scientists thought he’d heal. The testing he’d endured at the academy was bad enough. Burns and scratches and endless pricking with syringes, all recorded in logbooks stamped with his name and tribal identification number. 

Anok cleared his throat, leaning one elbow on the handle of his maul as he’d seen human officers do with their walking sticks. Ivory Company hadn’t seen action yet but he enjoyed the way the human soldiers watched them warily in passing. There was respect in those looks. Respect, and fear. Inelu had been wrong about the Rastish. “How do you know?”

“Because there are a lot of dead men on it and all our air support is tied up to the west blowing Gilded Skull goblin mercenaries out of the sky around the Needles.”

Anok looked up the slope at where drifts of Rastish bodies lay shredded by machine gun fire in rough hemispheres among pulped saplings and in the dirt washes painting the loose hillside. “Good,” he said, and grinned.

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They charged shoulder to shoulder up the slope, shields raised against a thundering hail of machine gun fire. Mortars coughed and chunks of hillside went pinwheeling through the air. They’d lost someone somewhere along the way but through the eyeholes of his heavy crested helm Anok couldn’t tell who. A mortar hit, direct, and then they’d crashed together to close the gap it left in the line.

A lucky burst of gunfire scythed low under the rim of Anok’s shield and punched through his heavy greaves. His calves burned as though he’d been stung by a hundred biting flies at once and he nearly dropped his maul as reflex told him to double up and make himself small against the slope. Someone grabbed his elbow and pulled him on. The sensation of his shredded muscles knitting back together made his head spin. 

They came up the last sheer stretch of crumbling earth and over the sandbags into the Verangian position. Small arms fire pinged off of their shields and helms and breastplates. A goblin leapt onto Anok’s back, firing a pistol point-blank into the weaker armor of his gorget. One slug penetrated and Anok roared as it slashed a burning line along his throat. He could feel the edges of the wound puckering, reaching for each other. He dropped his maul and snatched the goblin by one arm. He smashed it against the ground. A uniformed orc of the kind he’d heard other soldiers call severed, flat-faced and gray, threw herself against his shield and he beat her down with one huge fist.

These little people. Their guns stung him and their bayonets burned where they slipped through the joints of his armor, but they broke like glass. He snapped a screaming man over his knee and tossed the rag doll wreck of him aside. He stepped on an orc crawling through the mud and felt the Verangian’s ribs break all at once under his weight. He dropped his shield and caught up two of the enemy at a time, dashing their heads together until his breastplate and gauntlets were slick with brains. Not far off Susqut was tearing the machine gun from its mountings. More Verangians were charging them along the ridge, abandoning their own useless positions to defend this one, but already the Rastish marines were on the move and rifle shots rang out through the clatter and stuttering submachinegun fire. Verangians fell from the ridge. 

Anok laughed, unable to believe that it was all so easy, that war made humans so afraid when it was no harder than gutting fish. He seized a wounded orc from behind stacked crates of ammunition and crushed the soldier’s head in one armored hand, watching in fascination as blood squirted out between his fingers. Susqut was shouting for some reason but he couldn’t make it out over the din. He let the dead orc fall. Its mangled skull stared up at him from the trampled dirt and he took a step back and saw near the entrance to the hillside storage dump behind the emplacement an elf fumbling with something, a heavy steel backpack with one webbed strap hanging loose and a rubberized hose tipped with an elaborate nozzle swinging from it. 

The rest of Ivory Company was closing in on the lone figure. Little Mulli on Anok’s left, Susqut charging up on his right. Past the machine gun Big Mulli and Narwhal Sword were firing into the advancing Verangians, their huge rifles booming. What is that? Anok wondered as he advanced. Susqut was still yelling

The elf raised the nozzle and did something with its stock-like grip. A little pilot flame at the end of the nozzle hissed to life. There was a sound like some great sheet of paper tearing and suddenly the air was white and full of fluttering tears of fire drifting on the wind. A burning serpent swept over the emplacement. Wounded Verangians screamed as they kindled into living torches. A rifle round — Narwhal Sword or Big Mulli — caught the elf in the throat and blew his entire chest out in a spray of gore. The burning serpent wavered, licking the hillside, pouring back into the storage dump. The elf fell.

The hillside blew apart.

For what felt like hours everything was ammunition popping like human teeth in the cold and clods of earth thumping against Anok’s armor. A piece of shrapnel went right through his shoulder like a lance and he tore at it with his armored hands, roaring, vomiting inside his helmet. He sobbed as it came free in agonizing jerks, tearing the wound worse on its way out. At last he flung it away from himself and staggered out of the blowing dust and smoke and the caustic vapors of whatever the elf’s machine had pumped onto the hillside and fell to his hands and knees in the clean air, heaving in deep lungfuls. The others were scrambling clear up and down the ridge.

And on the slope below Little Mulli danced, lurching in circles with flames pouring from the eyeholes of his helm and from the seams of his gorget. He leaped into the air and nearly brought his heels together in a funny kind of spasm, then crashed to the ground and lost his footing in the loose red soil. Anok watched, his stomach churning, as Little Mulli rolled for a while before fetching up against a tree with an appalling crack.

A scream finally tore itself thick and wet and bubbling from the other troll’s throat, and then he was silent, one gauntlet outstretched back up the hill toward the rest of Ivory Company, and fire slithered out from him in licking tongues. 

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Heike led the engineer along a meandering route down Pact Street and past the lichyard and the burned-out crypt where the city’s vampires had slept before the empire took it in the First Vulgar War. Now flowers grew from the rich grave dirt that spilled from its shattered doors. Moss furred its cracked and pitted walls. Dead Hill was a quiet neighborhood, mostly lizardfolk sunning themselves on rooftops and dwarves pulling up paving stones with little block and tackle rigs and arguing with one another over tattered blueprints. There were gnomes too, sad-eyed rag pickers and sneak thieves crouching in alleyways, watching the world go by.

What clanship left their mothers here to starve after a lean year in the clouds?

It wasn’t often she spent time with other gnomes. The service was majority human, moreso every year, and there was precious little merit to be gained in the eyes of her superiors by socializing outside of its viperous circles. Certainly not by taking her degenerate tastes across the river to Warren where the whores were just her size with their red doll mouths and hungry tongues. That sort of thing could get an agent into trouble. 

“Do you do this often?” Ashmink asked her as they walked along a line of rotting row houses with hammocks slung between the stanchions under their porches, where great crowds of elves drank tea and played chausa on boards sketched in charcoal on scrap paper. “Collect traitors, I mean.”

“They won’t like that at Central. You calling yourself a traitor. They’ll think you have doubts about defecting.”

He pursed his lips in thought as they left the row houses behind and went on through shantytowns where goblin travelers squatted in foul camps with the desperate look of temporary structures that had long ago slumped into unplanned permanence. Open sewers gaped like sores in the hillside. Beyond the shanties lay the city’s midden where great rivers of junk and refuse drooled downhill to collect in drifts. The day was hot and the stench of the place was more than Heike could bear. She choked out a brief cant to conjure a breeze, but even that hardly cut the stink. Her eyes watered so that she could hardly see the brownish-green shapes of the horde-orcs rooting through the hills of garbage in search of spoiled food and roaches and edible mold. A few of them lifted up their wicker-masked faces to watch as Heike and Ashmink passed by. Others appeared atop the spills and ridges of trash like prairie dogs peering out of their burrows. 

There could be five hundred of them in there, Heike thought, fishing a handkerchief from her coat and holding it over her mouth and nose. There could be a thousand. 

The road devolved into little more than a goat track as they passed out of the midden field, flies abandoning them for more interesting stenches, and into the broken, hilly countryside in the lee of the city. An orc trailed after them on all fours for a few minutes before turning around and loping away, curiosity satisfied. Heike wondered what it was like to be born in a whelping, to have a hundred thousand identical twins to kiss and hold and whisper to. She wondered what it was like to have a queen and not a mother, to suckle at her teats and bring her things you dug out of the dirt and lick the slime from her display wings when they regrew in time for dancing season.

The ground shook beneath her feet. Ashmink stumbled, crying out, and Heike saw as she looked back at the city a great tower of dust and fire rising up from the far side of the hill where the dig was located. She thought of Katz, who’d been afraid at their meeting at Habermann’s, and of the faces she’d seen since she disembarked from her train, and of Ashmink himself standing stricken at her side. No connections. No real information. The most likely explanation is unrelated terrorism, she told herself through the dry-mouthed haze of shock. The city’s still contested. Verangian partisans. Third Century cells. Lightning Rodders hoping to make enough trouble that the stormlords will call down the wind and sweep us all away. 

Another explosion. Smoke crawling skyward. The blast wave flattened the coarse grass that clung to the broken terrain and sent Heike staggering back a step, eyes slitted against flying dust. Something hurtled up into the air from the dig site, trailing shreds of smoke behind it. A figure, squat and solid, points of white light blazing in its low, blunt head. In the air ahead of it a triple ring of runes flashed silver in a concentric funnel like a wedding cake stood on its head, their meaning imperceptible at such a distance, and the thing arced through them, limbs flailing, and was simply...gone. 

The runes winked out. They stood together for a while, staring at the towers of dust. Heike cleared her throat and spoke a cant to magnify the vision in her left eye. She saw nothing of significance over the city. In the midden the orcs had all vanished into whatever warrens they inhabited. In the shantytown above people were boiling in the streets. She could see Rastish militia and Imperial marines in their peaked black helms and iron masks.

“We should go,” she said, her voice hoarse.

Ashmink raised no protest. They struck out across the hills, cutting over fences and through crumbling stone walls demarking pasturage where the grass was already starting to turn white with salt blight as the ocean crept into the water table underground, eating earth in tiny catlike licks. One day it would all be flooded, underwater, reeds hissing in a salt marsh where herons stalked eels in the silt-choked waterways.

It took most of the afternoon to reach the airstrip. They had to hike through a sparse pine forest where the rough, insistent knocking of woodpeckers echoed through the trees. The airfield was an hour’s hike uphill and by the time they reached it they were both sweaty and covered in dust. The field stood empty, a long strip of unmown grass lightly brushed by wind.

Heike sat down in the shade of an old pine. Ashmink stood nearby. They didn’t talk. Hours passed.

He should be here, thought Heike, not allowing herself to panic. Maybe he saw the explosions and circled to rubberneck.

Dusk began to gather. Cicadas sang in the shedding pines.

“Shit,” said Heike.