Bone lord 2, p.11
Bone Lord 2, page 11
They stormed through the camp on their horses. Like the skeletal cavalrymen, the women wheeled about to form a wedge behind me once more and repeated the charge, going in the opposite direction now.
“Finish them!” I spurred Fang into another furious charge.
Again he tore through the camp, trampling or smashing soldiers out of his way. I drew on the strength of my skeletal troops, channeling it into my weapon. Left and right, right and left, leaning off Fang as he ran, I lashed out with the chain end of the kusarigama as if it were a flail, swinging it in deadly sweeping arcs. When my attacks connected with a soldier, they hit with devastating impacts that buckled armor, pulverized bones, demolished internal organs, and generally sending the unfortunate chumps flying a good 20 yards through the air.
By drawing upon the physical strength of my undead troops, I had to sacrifice one or two of them, who promptly exploded into showers of bone fragments. I could always raise more skeletons, and it was incredible being able to smash someone with the force of a titan’s fist.
A soldier jumped out from behind a tree as Fang and I thundered past, lunging for my face with a spear. He was a quick and sneaky bastard, but I dodged the attack, although the blade end of it nicked my cheek and drew blood.
As Fang raced onward, I whipped the kusarigama’s chain end around behind me, using it like a lasso to ensnare the soldier. Watching over my shoulder, I yanked hard on the chain with both arms as the loop caught the soldier around his torso. He was lifted off his feet, and he yelped as Fang’s power and momentum ripped him along through the air. His scream was cut abruptly short when his body slammed into a tree trunk. The impact of hitting the tree at that speed killed him instantly, and Grave Oath buzzed in its sheath as the soldier’s soul was sucked into it.
As I slowed down and wheeled about, my harpy came crashing through the treetops to join the battle. Two soldiers looked up at Talon as she dropped out of the sky like a lightning bolt, huge claws outstretched and tits flapping in the wind—a bizarre but entertaining sight—and their eyes almost popped out of their sockets.
They were so rooted to the spot that they didn’t even bother trying to fight or flee. Talon smashed into them, grabbing one man in each of her eagle-like feet. With her powerful wings beating like the pulsing of a deep, booming drum, she let out a triumphant shriek and carried them up through the treetops, the pair of soldiers screaming.
I watched through a gap in the treetops as Talon flew up, higher and higher, until she was at least a mile and a half above ground, a mere speck in the sky. Then, she dropped them.
They plummeted, screaming, and disappeared into the forest a few miles away. Grave Oath buzzed twice more as I took their souls. There were now only a handful of soldiers left in the camp.
“Halt!” I shouted to my troops. “I’ll handle these fuckers.”
I jumped off Fang and walked slowly into the center of the camp, where the last five soldiers huddled together, back to back, weapons facing outward and faces haggard with fear. The barbarian prisoner, still chained to the tree, watched keenly.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them gasped.
“You may have heard of me,” I answered casually. “Some call me Soultaker.”
The soldiers murmured, their voices shrill and they’re eyes bulging. They knew who I was, all right. My reputation had been growing by leaps and bounds, it seemed.
One soldier simply dropped his sword and put up his hands.
“I didn’t sign up for this shit,” he muttered. “Take me prisoner, Soultaker. Sell me as a slave. Just don’t use that hell-cursed dagger.”
“You said things would get better once we deserted Rollar’s army and struck out on our own, you lying bastard!” another soldier growled at the largest man. He was arrayed in the finest armor of the group, and his sword actually looked sharp enough to cut something. I figured he was their leader.
“And they did.” The leader prodded the other man in the chest. “Until we stumbled upon Soultaker and his demons.”
The other men huddled around the first who’d spoken.
The first man prodded the leader back. “You said there’d be plenty of towns to raid, pretty women to fuck, men to enslave, and gold to steal. But everything’s gotten worse since we deserted. You led us into this, you rotten piece of goat shit. I should’ve just stayed with Rollar and put up with the stupid rules and shitty pay.”
“Yeah!” another soldier yelled at the leader. “I’d rather get the lash for being a cunt and put up with Rollar’s miserly bullshit than this. Fuck you!”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my soul get sucked out before I’ve had my revenge on you, you lying, stinking beggar’s testicle!” another soldier yelled at the leader, who was now starting to look pretty damn alarmed as his soldiers began to mutiny against him.
“You idiots,” he hissed. “We would’ve been rich men by now, with our cocks still wet from all the young peasant pussy, if we’d have turned east when I told you to! There were villages ripe for raiding there, but you numbskulls wanted more. We should have gone raiding in the east like I said. This isn’t my fault, it’s yours. Your greed led us this way, not mine.”
“I’ve had enough of your fucking whining, you diseased whore’s discharge!” roared the last soldier.
All I could do was watch, amused, as the men turned on each other. Four surrounded the leader, and they started going at it with their weapons. To the leader’s credit, he didn’t try to run or beg for his life, and he was a half-decent swordsman. Two of the mutineers were dead before they’d even completed their attacks, and he faced the next two with steely eyes and a grim-set jaw.
“Come on, you traitorous pig-fuckers,” he snarled. “Try me, just try me!”
“Their souls should be yours,” Isu whispered to me as the men fought.
I shrugged. “I figure five souls is a fair price to pay for watching something so entertaining.”
The remaining two soldiers charged at the leader with a roar. With a flurry of cuts, lunges, parries, and slashes, he fought them off. Eventually, he lopped one’s head off before running the other through. Then, panting and leaning on his sword, he turned to face me.
“Now that those clowns are taken care of,” he gasped, “you and I can dance, Soultaker. You’ll probably kill me, but fuck it, I’ll see if I can at least take off one of your arms on the way out.”
“I like your attitude,” I said as he and I began to circle each other, “and from what I’ve just seen, you actually know how to handle a sword. Let’s make this contest a little more even.”
I tossed my weapons to the ground and prepared to fight him bare-handed.
“I can respect that,” the leader growled. “Maybe you’re not as much of an asshole as the rumors make you out to be.”
“Oh, I’m much more of an asshole than you can imagine.”
He charged at me with a roar, his guard low, and attempted a rapid stab at my belly, which I figured was just a feint. It was, and had I jumped back to avoid it, the upswing he followed with would have opened my throat from ear to ear. Instead, I merely swiveled my hips and leaned back, the upswing whistling past my throat, missing it by only an inch or two. He followed with a downward diagonal cut aimed at my collarbone, which, if it had connected, probably would have passed through my entire torso and diced me like a carrot.
It didn’t connect because I dived forward, grabbed him around the waist with my left arm and under the inner thigh of his left leg with my right, and hurled him over my shoulder. He flipped through the air and crashed hard to the ground, grunting. Somehow, he retained a grip on his sword and struggled to his feet, breathing hard and keeping the point aimed at me so that I couldn’t close in and finish him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rami watching me intently. As an enjarta, she was a master of unarmed combat, so I figured she’d be interested in what moves I could pull off.
“Don’t worry, Rami,” I whispered to myself. “I’ve got a whole bag of tricks I can pull moves from.”
At the Assassin’s Guild in Targon, we’d spent countless hours training in the arts of unarmed combat under the direction a grandmaster. Combined with all the unarmed combat training I’d done in my knightly training as a youngun, I could hold my own in bare-handed combat.
The leader took a quick horizontal swipe at my head, but I ducked under the cut, dropped down onto my left hand with my left arm totally straight and vertical, keeping my body horizontal. In this position, I delivered a lightning-fast double-footed kick to the leader’s midriff, sending him staggering back.
He charged at me again, but his technique was getting sloppy now that desperation was kicking in. He aimed a wild downward chop at my head, but I dropped to the ground and rolled to the side. At the end of this maneuver, I hooked my legs through his ankles and brought him crashing to the ground.
This time, he dropped his sword, and I sprang to my feet and kicked it away from him. He managed to stagger to his feet and was about to attack me with his fists when a huge shape came flying out of the corner of my vision. I jumped back just as the massive barbarian smashed into the leader, taking him down with a flying tackle.
Chapter Eleven
The barbarian roared gutturally and positioned himself on top of the last surviving soldier, pinning the man’s arms down. The pinned man struggled futilely as the barbarian proceeded to turn his head into pulp with his huge fists, raining down blow after hammer-like blow onto the man’s skull until it popped like an overripe pumpkin.
“You want to sell Drok?” the barbarian yelled. “Nobody sell Drok. Nobody make Drok slave. Now Drok eat your brain!”
Then, sure enough, the barbarian shoved his meaty paws into the gruesome crimson and white mess that used to be the leader’s head, dug out a fistful of slimy gray brain, and shoved it into his mouth, making slurping sounds as he ate it.
“By the Lord of Light, I think I’m going to be sick,” Elyse gasped, running off to the bushes with one hand covering her mouth and the other holding her stomach.
“Which one of you women let this big bastard loose?” I yelled.
“I thought it might be amusing to see what he was capable of,” Isu answered.
I turned and saw her standing next to the tree where the barbarian had been chained up, a wicked smile on her full lips and a mischievous sparkle in her beguiling eyes.
“It wouldn’t have been very amusing if I’d been the one that ape decided to tackle and then do the old ground and pound to,” I said.
In response, she simply laughed and folded her arms across her chest. Rami kept her distance, but not so far that she couldn’t plunge a sai into the barbarian if he made any offensive movements. From the sounds of retching coming from the bushes, though, Elsye wasn’t quite finished emptying her stomach.
The huge barbarian stood, his hands covered in gore, brains, and skull fragments. More blood and viscera caked his lips, which peeled back in an idiot’s grin. He offered me one of his hands to shake, which I took and gripped tightly, before I discreetly wiped the gore off on a dead soldier’s tabard.
“Me Drok,” he rumbled. “You Soultaker? You truly Soultaker?”
“I am. My real name, though, is Vance Chauzec, Lord of Brakith, and now God of Death. But you can just call me Vance, Drok.”
“Vance Drok? But me Drok, you Vance! Why I call you Vance Drok? Me Drok!”
I rolled my eyes. He was about as intelligent as he looked.
I slowed down my speech so that he could understand me more clearly. “You, Drok.” I pointed at him. Then, I pointed at myself. “Me, Vance. Understand?”
“Mm. Vance. You save me. These soldiers, they want to sell me. Make me slave.”
“I guessed as much. But how did they come to capture you in the first place?”
“I drink too much,” he answered, massive shoulders slumping. “And sleep too deep. Soldiers find me sleeping in forest. Put chains on me while I sleep. Then, I wake up and not only have bad headache, but also have chains on me. Soldiers beat me every day, and I very angry, ‘cause I can’t beat them back! Until now. I tell that cock-wart I eat his brains one day. And today… is one day. Hahaha!”
“Well you certainly did a good job of eating his brains, Drok. Tell me, though, what were you doing this far from the Wastes? Your people do not usually venture so far from your home.”
The goofy smile on Drok’s face broadened, revealing a mouth filled with rotten, crooked teeth. Whoever said that smiling made someone more attractive needed to have a look at this guy and rethink that opinion.
“You.”
His answer took me by surprise. This oaf traveled all the way from the Wastes and almost got himself sold into slavery on my account? This was intriguing, to say the least.
“Wise woman of my tribe have dream,” he continued. “Dream of new god in world: God of Death. She tell Drok, because Drok is tribe’s mightiest warrior, Drok must go find new god, bring him to her. She have weapon of power for God of Death, something only he can use.”
“Intriguing,” I said. “Did she say anything else?”
He nodded his huge head. “She also dream about Blood God. Say Blood God becoming very strong… too strong. Only God of Death can fight Blood God. But God of Death can only kill Blood God if he have this weapon of power. Drok must fetch God of Death so wise woman can give him it. And now, I find Soultaker. I find God of Death. Drok good, Drok happy! Come, we go to my home now.”
He didn’t wait for me to reply. Instead, he simply turned around and started walking, assuming that I’d come running after him.
“Whoa, hold on a second! Come back here. I’m not done asking you questions yet. And I don’t want to trek all the way to the Wastes to speak to a woman who probably reeks of piss and elderberries.”
“Wise woman of Drok’s tribe not crazy,” Drok said as he stopped and turned around. “And she not smell like piss and elderberries.”
“Well, all the same, Drok, I’m already on a quest. Two quests, actually. I can’t just drop everything and march off to the Wastes with you. I have shit to do here. A lot of shit. Important shit.”
While I didn’t exactly doubt that the wise woman had dreamt these things, I also couldn’t take yet another detour from Brakith.
Rami came a little closer to me and wrinkled her nose. Drok smelled… pungent, to put it mildly. He obviously hadn’t taken a bath in months. Perhaps years, actually. In fact, his reek was so potent that he may never have bathed in his entire life. This wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew anything about the northern barbarian tribes. The warriors bathed infrequently and never cut their hair because they believed doing so would weaken themselves. It was said that they won half their battles before the fighting even began. The enemy often broke ranks and fled at the potency of the combined stench of thousands of warriors who hadn’t bathed in years.
“It’s interesting that this man claims that the wise woman dreamed about you, though,” Rami remarked, doing her best to mask the expression of disgust twisting her face. “His mention of the Blood God makes his story even more remarkable. Perhaps he has some part to play in your future, Vance?”
“I don’t doubt it. But the Wastes are very far from here. And there’s nothing but ice and snow and blizzards for weeks. Along with yetis and ice trolls to contend with. Eternal light in the summer, and eternal dark in the winter.” I sighed. “We might have to add the Wastes to the list.”
“Most certainly,” Rami said with a nod.
I turned to Isu. “Do you know what this ‘weapon of power’ might be? Is there some sort of rivalry between the Death God and the Blood God I should know about?”
“Many ancient weapons of great power have been lost,” she answered. “Weapons that only gods could wield. Perhaps the hag found one… perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she’s completely insane, and her dreams are nothing but a coincidence. Who can say?”
“You,” I stated plainly. “You were the God of Death once.”
She shrugged. “I’m nothing but a necromancer now.”
“And the Blood God?”
“He’s an ancient entity, one my fellow deities—excuse me, former fellow deities—thought they had defeated. But now, it seems that he is rising from the ashes of the past and gathering more followers, growing in power. Perhaps you will grow strong enough to defeat him before he grows too powerful. Or perhaps he will crush you and the rest of the gods and hurl this world into an abyss of darkness. Who knows? Not me, not a mere necromancer.”
Drok watched her leave, scratching his chin and furrowing his brow. “That one, she crazy,” he said. “She talks in riddles, answers question with question. Crazy. And why she have horns on her head?”
“It’s a long story, Drok,” I said with a sigh. “Maybe I’ll tell you the whole thing some time.”
“On the journey to Wastes?”
“I can’t drop everything and travel there with you. Not just yet. Not until I’ve killed Rollar and got his map. Certainly not until I’ve taken the lordship of Brakith back from my cock-sucking uncle. I’ll have to kill him, too.”
“You say you must kill people?” Drok asked.
“Those two I mentioned, yes, and likely many more. I am the God of Death, after all.”
“I like to kill people! I help you kill people faster, help you finish your quests. Then, you go with Drok to Drok’s home and meet wise woman.”
I grinned. “I could use a hulking brute like yourself. No offense, of course.”
“Drok be Vance’s hulking brute!” He raised his hand, and I lifted my own. When he clapped my hand, I staggered back a few steps.
“Very good,” I said as I wiped yet more gore onto a dead soldier’s tabard.
Drok beamed another one of his crooked-toothed smiles, and a waft of his breath hit me almost as hard as his meaty fists could have. I wanted to double over and spew the contents of my stomach all over his bear fur boots, but I managed to overcome this urge.
