Pain.
That was the only word Ryke could assign to the muffled roaring that came from within the holding cell. The huge Scraegan was in a fury. Ringing impacts like a claps of thunder echoed from inside and he could feel the vibrations beneath his feet with each blow. Not for the first time did he find himself wondering if entering that room was a good idea.
Someone has to try, he reminded himself. You have to do something.
"You sure you want to go in there?" Ivy asked quietly, standing beside him and staring wide-eyed at the holding cell. "That thing sounds pretty mad."
Ryke shrugged. "Wouldn't you be?"
"I guess."
"I'll be okay."
"You better be." With a sharp tug on one arm she turned him to face her and he saw the fear etched on her normally mischievous features. She managed a smile, but he could feel its hollowness. "I don't wanna spend the rest of this war on my own, Ryke Vannigan."
"Let the Riverlords drown me if I'm lying." Ryke stepped close, a hand cupping the back of her neck as he touched his forehead to hers. They stood there for a moment before Ivy tilted her head up quickly, forcing their lips together one more time.
They parted, her grip on his arm lingering for a few pleading seconds before she finally stepped aside, turning her eyes to the ground. He exhaled a deep, shuddering breath and shook himself from head to toe, as though exercising some invisible demon from his skin.
"You ready, Sergeant?" Colonel Hackley asked, inclining her head to the formidable armoured bulkhead that provided entry to the chamber.
"Yes, ma'am." He stepped forward, gave her a quick salute. "You know, it's already angry. If it..."
"We'll be ready." The grizzled scout placed a hand on his shoulder. "You're a brave bastard, Sergeant. We need more like you." Then she handed him a data slate and stood aside. "Everything you asked for is loaded into that slate, as well as every piece of the language with think we've translated. Good luck."
Then it was time. The last person standing between him and the Scraegan was gone. He stepped up to the airlock, memories of his last encounter with the beast thundering through his head like the torrents of a raging river.
"Open it," he said hoarsely.
Mechanisms hissed and bolts grinded as they withdrew. The blast door swung open beckoning him to his doom.
Shoving that thought out of his mind, he stepped forward through the narrow aperture before he could second guess himself. The raw, earthy, animal smell of the Scraegan passed over him as he crossed the threshold, mixed with the scorched tang of shorted wires and burnt fur. He entered the holding cell and the blast door boomed shut right on his heels, the security personal taking absolutely no chances with their berserk captive.
For the second time Ryke stepped into a room alone with a Scraegan.
The interior of the cell made his skin tingle with shock as he took in the enormous dents in the outer plating, flickering lights and smashed, sparking control panels. An impact from the far end of the room echoed like a thunderclap in the confined space, stinging his eardrums with the sheer volume.
He grimaced and paused, just a couple of steps over the threshold. A judder of fear shot up his spine. Invisible fingers clawed him desperately backwards, voices screaming in the back of his mind to get back to the bulkhead; out into the safety of the base and hang the consequences.
Instead, he squared his shoulders and took a deliberate step forward his eyes fixed on the enormous shape at the far end of the room.
The Scraegan still had its cliff-like back to him, gigantic shoulders rising and falling with heavy, rumbling breaths. The second set of arms protruding from further down the torso thrashed around as though they had a mind of their own, smashing great dents in the armour plates of the cell.
He took another step forward.
It stiffened, head jerking up as it caught his scent and Ryke stopped dead. Like a rotating piece of the planet the Scraegan priest turned to face him, and when he saw the twist of malevolent rage on its enormous, scarred head he swore he felt his blood stop flowing. A bellow of primeval anger erupted across the space between them before it launched into a pounding lope towards him. A clenched fist bigger than Ryke's torso swept back with murderous intent.
It took every scrap of his courage not to move. If the thing wanted to kill him he was already dead, but he needed to give it a chance to see him – to recognise him, Riverlords willing. His muscles trembled with each deafening step and the Scraegan's trunk-like right arm began arcing towards him.
It'll be quick.
The monster's fist thrummed as it swept through the air, swinging down on him like a meteor, bringing a blow would shatter every bone in his body. In the final instant he could stand it no longer and flinched, his head jerking to the side and his eyes screwing shut as he made his peace with the world.
To Ryke's immense surprise, however, he was not smashed to a pulp.
Instead, a veritable gust of wind shook his body before something heavy smashed against the wall of the room, creating a bang that stunned him for a moment. His knees wobbled and he shifted his footing unsteadily, his heart slamming into his throat in shock.
As slowly as he dared, Ryke coaxed one eye open.
The Scraegan loomed over him, nostrils flaring and eyes burning down from on high, its colossal fist almost fully embedded in the thick armour of the cell wall. Circuits sparked and died and he could see the crackling tips of stun poles waiting to be deployed from their slots at any second.
At that moment he realised he needed to act. Trying to calm his racing heartbeat, he fumbled with the data slate, his hands trembling violently with the adrenaline of surviving a brush with instant death. After a few seconds of struggling with the interface he managed to trigger the series of growls that formed the Scraegan equivalent of 'hello'.
Like a piece of heavy machinery the shaman dragged its bloodied fist from the wall and straightened up, glowering down at Ryke. Its dark, accusing eyes flickered to the data slate and it let out a snort of breath. Lowering the pad, he took a deep breath and tapped himself on the chest.
"Ryke."
For a moment it just stood there staring at him. Trying to steady both his body and his voice, he tried again.
"Ryke."
This time the vast head dipped in recognition. Then, to his utter amazement it rumbled a grating, mangled version of the word from its own lips.
Despite everything, right then Ryke could have hugged the creature. It remembered. That wasn't much, but it was a start. With the initial shock and panic of the encounter beginning to subside he tried to think back to the oh-so-well-formed plan that had been in his mind before he walked into the room.
He couldn't actually talk to the Scraegan, not in the complexity required to stop the bloodletting beyond the walls of the cell. The language they'd compiled was simply too rudimentary, the equivalent of trying to hold a conversation with a three-year-old. Instead Ryke had asked for some more direct modes of communication to be loaded onto this data slate.
Inhaling deeply to steady his nerves, he scrolled through the slate's directory until he found a video capture from the front lines beyond the wall. It was from the fateful day many Hunter-Killers had willingly sacrificed themselves to detonate the atomic mines, a day that had also claimed hundred if not thousands of Scraegan lives.
Not sure how the Scraegan priest would react, Ryke keyed the play button on the capture, placed the data slate on the ground and took a precautionary step backwards. From the machine a holographic display sprang up, causing the Scraegan to snort, jerking its head back briefly. A two meter square of light cut through the space between them and on it was a picture that captured the carnage in every excruciating pixel.
Ryke felt his heart lurch as he looked at the scene, memories of the blast that erased Amelia from existence searing across his mind. All around the massive craters dark forms smouldered, some made from molten metal, others from scorched fur. The Scraegan fires lingered beyond the partially cleared smoke.
The priest stared at the display for a moment then lowered its head. Its nostrils flared with a snorting breath, the inky pupils of those dark eyes swivelling as they focused. After a moment of examination a low, undulating growl rumbled from the back of its throat, so low in the spectrum that Ryke felt a tremor in his ribcage.
The eyes flickered to him.
Standing his ground Ryke pointed to the display, then back over his shoulder. He repeated the gesture three times before the Scraegan straightened up, its lips drawing back briefly to reveal blunt, rock-like canines.
A ponderous nod.
"Okay..." Ryke breathed, more to himself than the creature in front of him. Slowly easing down to one knee beside the data slate and began to work his way through the grim slideshow he had assembled for the occasion. Speech would take to long – what this situation required was visual, and visceral.
Capture after capture showed the unfolding battle for Brekka well beyond the walls of the Forge. Street by bloody street showed the piling corpses of Scraegan and human alike, flames of war obliterating both sides as the Scraegan packs fought their way towards the Forge. With each frame he let it linger for perhaps ten seconds before moving on, letting the beast build up a picture of just how brutal the fighting was, and more importantly just how many of its kin had lost their lives.
He could see its muzzle crunching with anger, and audible grind of gigantic molars sending goosebumps crackling across his skin. The growl faded away, replaced by intermittent, mournful groans. Clearly both of them found the images hard to look at.
When he reached the end of the slides Ryke picked up the data slate again and took a deep breath, looking up at the priest. He pointed to his chest. Then he pointed to the Scraegan. Then back out towards the city.
And then he pointed down at the data slate, looking the towering beast in the eye and praying for it to grasp the connection. At first there was no reaction so he repeated the gestures a second time.
The Scraegan snorted gently and nodded again. Then it took a step towards him, sinking down to its knees and looming over him. It started to speak in the strange guttural dialect of its people and he discerned the mysterious 'All-Na' more than once in its speech. But he couldn't understand enough.
With a helpless expression on his face he shrugged and shook his head. The Scraegan growled with enough volume to make him jerk back, still half-expecting the thing to smash him into a bloody pulp any second. It did not, however. Instead it started pacing back and forth with great thumping steps, grumbling away as it went, looking for all the world like any stressed human being talking to themselves.
They were close – Riverlords they might be able to do this. The message that this war was killing everyone seemed to have gotten through, and the Scraegan priest reacted just as he'd hoped, clearly distressed by the wholesale slaughter of its kin. Now they needed the next step. Ryke wracked his brains, trying to think of how he could communicate exactly what he was proposing.
Swallowing hard and hoping this wouldn't look as ridiculous as it was sure to feel, he dragged the Scraegan's attention back to him with a nervous wave. Still looking it in the eye he pointed at it, then brought his wrists together in front of him. He held them there for a few seconds then made a gesture to their surroundings with a roll of his head. The canines bared again at that and Ryke realised with a jolt that the Scraegan might well think he was taunting it.
"Colonel Hackley?" he said quietly. "Open the blast door, ma'am."
"It doesn't seem to be making any hostile moves. Are you sure you want to bail out?"
"I'm not bailing out. Open the blast door and keep it open."
"Excuse me?"
"Colonel, you trusted me enough to let me in here. I need you to trust me a little more."
A moment of silence crackled in his earpiece. "Riverlords... alright – copy that. Opening now."
After a few seconds he heard the clang of the mechanisms. The Scraegan's head jerked towards the noise, eyes narrowing in suspicion but Ryke stayed where he was. When its attention returned back to him he pointed at the Scraegan again, pointed back at the open doorway and then mimed pulling his wrists open, trying to communicate that he wanted to set it free. The blast door open right now was built for humans, far too small for any Scraegan to use – let alone this behemoth – but he hoped the symbol would be sufficient.
It tilted its head to one side and he could have sworn it looked surprised.
Feeling a tremble of excitement in his bones Ryke didn't take any chances, performing the odd little mime twice more and nodding vigorously. The Scraegan growled something, peering down at him. Then one of its secondary arms reached out with surprising gentleness to point at the data slate.
Ryke understood – at least he hoped he did. Placing the slate back on the ground he queued up the slideshow again and let it run on automatic. This was the home stretch and he knew how he could push them over the final hurdle of understanding. He let the brutal picture show run half its course and then paused it.
Straightening up, he once again mimed the motion of freeing the Scraegan, before dropping back down to the slate and scrolling through the language directory. He found the vocalisation he was looking for – the Scraegan command for 'halt'. The synthesised bestial voice ground from the speakers, generating a kind of coughing bark following by a heavy tongue click.
The priest looked down at the slate; snorted. Fixing its eyes back on Ryke it inclined its head to him.
Swallowing down the nerves and licking dry lips, Ryke cleared his throat and did his very best to imitate that noise. He did it again, feeling like the biggest imbecile on the planet as he tried to awkwardly mimic the Scraegan sounds. Ignoring the flush in his cheeks he then pointed to the frozen image of battle.
The Scraegan's massive shoulders seemed to sag and a rattling exhalation of breath passed between its teeth. It stumped forwards until it stood just a couple of meters away and Ryke did his best to suppress the tremble in his limbs as its shadow fell across him.
It brought the huge, thick wrists of its primary set of arms together and he almost couldn't believe it. The Scraegan was copying him! It held the pose for a moment before nodding towards the open blast door. Then it opened its wrists and pointed down at the data slate.
A nod.
Then it barked out the command for 'halt'.