For a long moment van Joss hung in the darkness surrounded by a cloud of pain. A cloud that slowly drew away from him as he felt life slipping away, almost as if it were draining from his body. As the draining sensation became stronger and stronger, van Joss focused on it with the same amount of grim intensity that drove him through life, examining the sensation from all angles in an effort to determine what it meant to him. In doing so, he came to an inescapable conclusion.
He was dying.
Instantly a wave of denial swept through him. He couldn't die, not yet. The mission wasn't over. Besides, there was the matter with General Eben.
Thinking of her sent a wave of rage and hatred sweeping through him. A wave that instantly pulled the cloud of pain back towards his senses. Then it was sweeping over him, dominating every sense in a surge of fiery agony. A surge that burned life back into his weakening flesh, granting him enough strength to hold death at bay, if only for another day.
"You alive in there, human?" Darkfyre's gruff voice asked from what sounded like a great distance. Then a hard jerk pulled van Joss out of the darkness and his eyes fluttered open to find themselves looking into the Moonrunner captain's face.
"Incredible," the Lupus said with a shake of his head. In doing so, van Joss could see a myriad of cuts and contusions on the big Fisted's face, along with the extended arm that had the Lupus' hand gripping van Joss by the collar.
"Buried in a veritable mountain of monkey bodies and you're somehow still alive. How is that possible? You should have suffocated, or been crushed. By the Burn, you are cut enough to bleed to death!"
Another hard pull freed the wiry human from the mound of bodies he had been buried beneath. Then he was being thrown over Darkfyre's shoulder before the big Lupus scrambled down the ragged pile and onto the ground.
As soon as the Moonrunner captain's feet were on the ground, he was pulling van Joss off his shoulder to drop him somewhat untidily onto the ground. Rolling painfully, the human managed to come to a rest on his knees, leaving Darkfyre staring at him.
"How is it possible, human? How are you still alive after not having air, and bleeding to death?" the big Lupus hoarsely repeated.
Van Joss slowly came to his feet, carefully stretching his body while checking the deepest of his wounds to make sure they had stopped bleeding profusely.
"When your purpose is great enough ..." Van Joss made a final stretch before looking around at the ragged half-circle of Moonrunners that now stood close to he and Darkfyre. To the individual, they looked like they had taken the beating of their lives. But none had fallen.
Oddly enough that pleased the normally dour agent and a slight smile touched the corners of his mouth before it abruptly vanished. He then took a quick look at the mounds of dead Primiad that sprawled on the frozen ground all around them.
"You find a way," he finished, letting his eyes come back to Darkfyre. "The battle has moved past us?"
Darkfyre nodded.
"Once we blocked the defile with their bodies, the Primiad moved around with their great beasts," the Moonrunner commander reported with a tightening of his features. "They are using their power to smash a second passage through the hills for their primary force." He paused to glance at a couple of his soldiers.
"My scouts report these beasts were equipped with metal spikes and curved shields fixed to their heads for digging as if they anticipated an effort to block the defile."
"More likely that they had prior intentions of widening the defile with those self-same beasts," van Joss replied, nodding in thanks as one of the other Moonrunners handed him his retrieved weapons. "There was no way a force that size could've safely passed through." Even as he spoke, the ground beneath their feet shuddered from multiple strikes against it and low, grinding explosions could be heard from somewhere nearby.
Van Joss' lips thinned at the sensation and sound. It didn't take a tactical genius to figure out what they came from: the Primiad.
"Did they try coming through the bodies?" he quietly asked, looking over at Darkfyre. The battered Lupus officer quickly nodded.
"Several times. In fact, the monkeys even tried to get their beasts to eat their way through the mounds of bodies," Darkfyre reported with a curl of his lip. "Apparently the beasts have a taste for monkey flesh and took the task with a will." His expression became thoughtful. "But after gorging two of the beasts on the dead, the monkeys discovered that filling their beasts' bellies with flesh only made them lethargic and uncooperative. So they stopped that, and tried to simply ram their way through the wall of bodies."
"That obviously failed," van Joss observed and again Darkfyre nodded.
"Loosely packed in shifting masses, the bodies absorbed whatever force the beasts used to try and bull them aside. All they succeeded in doing was crush the bodies on the leading edge and turn the ground into a quagmire from the blood and fluids spilled. A quagmire that stole the beasts' footing and made it impossible for them to get a grip with their massive feet, no matter how much they dug in."
"I'm guessing that's when they switched to making a new passage," van Joss said before tipping his battered water skin into his mouth to let a stream of cool water squirt into his mouth. He swirled it around briefly before spitting it out onto the churned up ground, the water red with his blood.
"Indeed," Darkfyre confirmed. "After much capering and screaming from the officers warding the beasts, they abandoned the effort and moved a kilometre to the east to begin boring out a new passage through the hill line."
The big Moonrunner fixed van Joss with his eyes.
"Your plan succeeded exactly as you outlined it, human," he said. Van Joss quickly shook his head.
"No, captain, it was your plan to block the defile ..." he began to insist before a cutting gesture by the powerful Lupus stopped him speaking further.
"Do not take me for a fool, human," Blacklock's eldest growled. "I may be only a soldier and not given to much cleverness, but I do know when I'm being manipulated. You maneuvered me into suggesting we blockage the defile by killing as many monkeys as possible and using their bodies. Don't bother denying it."
As abruptly as the Lupus' hard look had appeared, it was gone.
"Yet I cannot curse you for it," Darkfyre said in a low voice, turning to gesture at the mounds of dead. "It succeeded. Seeing you triggered a frenzy that saw the monkeys fighting each other for the honor of killing you, as you said they would. A battle that swiftly filled the entire defile with their madness as monkey fought monkey to the bitter death."
Darkfyre paused to look back over at van Joss.
"A battle that destroyed nearly half of their vanguard by their own hand and forced the horde to make a second route through the hills with their beasts. An effort that will take time; enough to give our defenses time to make their final preparations." His dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
"Which was your purpose all along, wasn't it?" Darkfyre asked.
"Did I want to reconnoitre the hill line in the hopes of discovering a way to delay the horde's approach and buy the alliance defense time?" van Joss paused to take another mouthful of water, this time swallowing it, the sensation of the cool water swirling into his gut making him wince as it highlighted his body's many bruises and insults. That done, he returned Darkfyre's questioning gaze and nodded.
"Yes," he confirmed. "How, exactly, I didn't know until we began moving down the defile." He tied the water skin back to his belt. "Now I need to find out as much as I can about these beasts the Primiad are using as weapons and carry that information back to the alliance, if possible. Our soldiers need to be prepared to face the same creatures that crushed the Imperium, stampeded over the Protectorate and cracked the hard shell that was the Den."
"Agreed," Darkfyre said, gestures already gathering the battered Moonrunner squad around them. "My scouts have already found a way up to the top of the eastern ridge. Come. Let us go and take a look at these beasts first hand!"
It was late afternoon by the time their small company scaled the cleft's side up onto the eastern ridge and made their way to where the Primiad were busy cutting a new route through the hill line. Gathering his tattered cloak around him against a chill wind that had picked up out of the north, van Joss eased close to the crumbling cliff that now marked the new pass the Primiad were making.
"There," one of Darkfyre's scouts, a scarred individual with a flash of white around his dark eyes, said in a hoarse whisper as he pointed to several massive shapes using their heads to scoop out earth and rock at the growing passage's leading edge. Behind them ran continuous lines of Primiad troops in a bucket brigade to carry the freed soil and gravel back to a dumping point to the side of the passage's entry.
"Four beasts work in unison to widen the passage!"
Frowning, van Joss lifted Kelly's miraculously undamaged binoculars to his eyes to take a closer look. He immediately grimaced at what the new details told him.
At first they appeared like Old World rhinoceroses, an image that van Joss had seen in one of the books he had read in the Vault. Rhinoceroses that were somehow crossed with Old World crocodilians then grown to twice the size of Old World elephants, that is. With horned heads that were easily a full quarter of the body's size, powerful necks and shoulders, thick legs and squat torsos thickly covered in armored scutes, the beasts were living battering rams.
Not only that, they were also extremely efficient diggers, each swing of their spike and shield-equipped heads throwing dozens of square metres of dirt in the air. In the few hours they had been working on the passage, they had already dug nearly two hundred metres straight forward, creating a pass that was nearly a hundred metres across and stomped flat by their elephantine feet.
Van Joss' eyes narrowed when he saw that, turning the binoculars to focus on the crushed ground the beasts were leaving in their wake. Stomped flat and virtually level, making it easier for the beasts to move their bulk over the passage without straining their legs with climbing.
"My grand sire spoke of such beasts north of the Massani River decades ago," another one of Darkfyre's scouts whispered, "remains of the Great Burn that had to be destroyed before they trambled the packs in their northward push for territory in the early days."
An eyebrow climbed over van Joss' eye. Burn beasts? Of course! For whatever reason the Primiad didn't destroy the ones that had plagued Suudama, as had the other Fisted in their lands. Instead they captured them and broke them to a master's rod, turning them into trained creatures of war that they now used to great effect against their enemies.
"Tell me," he began in a low voice without taking his eyes off the binoculars. "Did either of you fight at the Den against the Primiad and its beasts?"
"We both had that honor," the scout who had pointed the beasts out, replied. "Why?"
"Did either of you see the beasts the horde used there?"
"I did," the second scout, who's grand sire had spoke of the beasts to the north, confirmed.
"Are these the same creatures?"
"They are."
"And did they advance against the walls that were built on a slope?"
The scout's mouth opened to answer. Only to close it again as he dug in his memory for an answer with greater detail than the one he was about to offer. It took a moment's thought before he once more opened his mouth to answer.
"From what I can recall, they did not," he said, his tone clearly thoughtful. "They were only deployed against the fortress walls that had relatively level ground leading up to their base."
"Do you think these beasts are too heavy to walk on anything but level ground, van Joss?" the first scout asked, swiftly coming to the same conclusion as the wiry human had.
Before the human operative could answer, the second scout was shaking his head.
"It doesn't matter," he said with a growl. "The ground that surrounds the alliance fortifications are completely level. There isn't even an anthill to break the line!"
"Not yet, there isn't," van Joss said, taking one last scan of the beasts before rolling as smoothly to his feet as his injuries would allow. Then he was making his way back to where Darkfyre and the rest of the company crouched.
"Did I not tell you they were the same as those used against the Den?" Darkfyre rumbled when van Joss stepped close. Dropping down beside the Moonrunner captain, van Joss nodded.
"You did indeed, captain," he said, packing away the binoculars with care before turning back to the big Lupus. "They are monsters, likely Burn beasts that have somehow been tamed to do the Primiad's bidding."
"Burn beasts!" another one of the Moonrunners spat even as a colleague beside him hissed: "Tamed?? How is that possible?"
"That doesn't matter," Darkfyre rumbled with a tight gesture. "What matters is finding a way to stop them." He then looked at van Joss. "Did your reconnoitre discover anything, van Joss?"
"It did," van Joss said before quickly explaining his observation of how the massive beasts seemed to require relatively level ground to move and be effective.
"Level ground is something that isn't in short supply near our fortifications," one of the Moonrunners pointed out in echo of what the second scout had said moments' earlier. "There isn't even a rodent hole out there that they could stumble over as they lift those big feet of theirs."
"Not yet, there isn't," van Joss said, thinking furiously. Then he was grabbing a sharp-edged stone from the ground before hurriedly sketching a few rough shapes and jotting down a few numbers in some loose dirt. Peering over the human's shoulder, the Moonrunners watched with rapt attention when they saw van Joss' sketches resembled siege plans.
Then the human was pausing to pull out a scrap of parchment onto which went a copy of his diagrams and calculations, scribed with a charcoal stick that van Joss kept in a pouch along with more scraps of parchment. He then turned to Darkfyre, holding up the scrap.
"I've jotted down a number of things onto this parchment, including the length of the beast's stride, their approximate size and possible weight as well as our observations about level ground and a possible way to stop them." He gave the scrap a shake. "We now need to get it to our forces back at the fortification as quickly as possible."
He paused to give the small group of Lupus a quick look over.
"Any of you feeling up to a bit of a run?"
Kelly was studying the new cloud of dust that had lifted into the late afternoon sky nearly a kilometre east of the original dust cloud Longspear had spotted when he caught sight of something moving fairly quickly across the open ground towards them. Snapping the mini-binoculars down to focus on it, he felt his face tighten to see that it was a Lupus warrior, looking battered and injured but still managing to run at nearly top speed.
"Incoming scout!" he shouted in the Tigris language, the only other Fisted tongue he had passing familiarity with. Thankfully there were a handful of the powerful Tigris standing gate duty and they all looked up at his cry.
"What is it?" one of them shouted back.
"Lupus!" was his reply, triggering a flurry of motion down in the courtyard. Then Blacklock himself was striding forward in full battle armor, his massive sword slung over his back.
"Open the sally port!" the powerful Lupus leader commanded in a rough, booming shout. Then he was stepping through the side door along with a handful of his personal guard, Kelly and several Tigris.
Just in time to catch the stumbling Lupus as he staggered over the last few metres to the gates. As the warrior fell into his arms, Blacklock could see the remains of a Moonrunner uniform under the dust and blood. Stifling the urge to ask after his son, he helped the obviously exhausted warrior back to his feet, handing him his own water skin.
"Report, soldier," he rumbled only after the Moonrunner managed to take a drink from the skin with hands twitching with fatigue.
"Master of the Hunt," the warrior formally said despite being barely able to stand, letting the skin drop to salute. "I bring word that your son, Captain Darkfyre and a squad of Moonrunners accompanied by the human van Joss, have fought a delaying action against the Primiad vanguard in the hill line defile ten kilometres south of the alliance encampment."
That sent ripples of motion and murmuring through the assembled Fisted which Blacklock ignored as he leaned forward.
"Result?" the big Lupus leader pressed, a muscle in his jaw flexing with growing tension.
"The Primiad attempt to penetrate the defile was thwarted by blocking several choke points with Primiad casualties, a plan initiated by Captain Darkfyre and the human van Joss," the battered Moonrunner reported, swaying slightly. But he waved off Blacklock's personal guard, also Moonrunners, when they moved to help their comrade. That earned him a nod of respect from the powerful Master of the Hunt.
"The Primiad have now moved to a secondary location where they are using their siege beasts to cut a new channel through the hills." The Moonrunner continued, only pausing to pull a piece of parchment from inside his tunic, which he then handed to Blacklock. "We regrouped then moved to reconnoitre this action. When van Joss discovered a weakness, he put it onto this parchment and Captain Darkfyre commanded I bring it to you, sir."
Only then did the valiant warrior slowly begin to topple, having pushed his mortal flesh far beyond what any Fisted could've withstood. And only then did Blacklock let the other Moonrunners dart forward to catch their colleague even as he stared at the parchment, mind working furiously as he scanned over van Joss' diagram and calculations. Diagrams and calculations that had been confirmed by his son's personal mark on the scrap's corner.
Knowing that his son lived after such a tremendous battle sent a surge of pride through the powerful Lupus. Then he was roughly pushing that aside to focus on the task at hand: stopping the Primiad from destroying them all!
"Lord Blacklock," one of the Tigris rumbled in the trade tongue, a thick-chested warrior with the knot of major on his tunic sleeve. "What word has your scout brought of the Primiad?"
"They have been delayed by my son and the human van Joss," Blacklock replied. "By their flesh and blood have my Moonrunners and the human bought us time to prepare."
"How shall we prepare, my lord?" asked one of the Moonrunners tending to the exhausted scout.
Blacklock hesitated just long enough to glance once more at the parchment and its curious drawings. Then he was turning to run full speed back towards the gates.
"We dig" he roared as he ran. "Shovels! Every able hand, find yourselves shovels!"
"We have rodent holes to dig!"