The Ironclad Prophecy (31 page)

A maddened hell hound careered round the traverse, confused and panic-stricken, cornered like a boar in a run. Men leapt onto fire steps and scrambled up the parapets out of its way. Several Tommies skidded to a halt behind it in the traverse and levelled their rifles. It slewed to a halt, snarling and snapping, cornered between the traverse and Sergeant Hobson.

Hobson aimed his bayoneted rifle and pulled the trigger. The rifle jammed. Stoppage. He cursed silently but didn’t back down. He gripped his rifle more firmly and dropped it into a low defensive guard. The bayonet was his weapon now.

Its way blocked, the hell hound attempted to turn in the tight space, but couldn’t. Frustrated and enraged, it snapped at a man’s legs on the fire step, sinking its teeth into his calf and dragging him down off the step, as the man clawed at the revetment, stretching hands that reached down, but not far enough.

It tossed its head, shaking him. Even over the man’s scream, Hobson heard the man’s leg snap.

Hobson let out a roar, and the beast turned its head to look at him. It opened its jaws and let the man drop. Hobson lunged forward with his fixed bayonet; the hell hound shook its head in challenge and sprung forwards to meet him. With a blood-curdling cry, Hobson thrust his rifle, plunging the bayonet deep into the creature’s chest. The hell hound’s attack faltered. Stuck on the bayonet, it snapped at Hobson, who held it at bay with the length of the rifle.

He glanced up at the scared men on the parapets, who looked unsure of what to do. “Well don’t just bloody stand there taking bets. Fire, damn you or I’ll have your names!”

Shaken from their fear, the men took aim and a fusillade of bullets slammed into the creature. Amid the cordite smoke, Hobson felt the rifle take the full weight of the hell hound as it died, and withdrew his bayonet.

Hobson looked at the firing squad on the parapet, glaring up at them from under the lip of his steel helmet. “If I find out any of you bet against me,” he said. “I’ll have your bloody guts for garters.”

E
VERSON TENTATIVELY RAISED
a look-stick over the collapsing parapet and squinted through the aperture. The dust was still settling, caught as it was by wind eddies.

The bodies of beasts littered the ground: the sick, the old, the young, the unlucky, lay twisted and broken, dead or injured. The living squealed and whinnied in pain.

Satisfied that the stampede had run its course, he climbed out of the trench to survey the encampment. Around the fire trench, others climbed out, too, pushing back their helmets in bewilderment and disbelief at the devastation wreaked by the stampede.

Everson’s heart sank as he turned around. Animal bodies hung from the wire entanglements, trenches had collapsed, tents had been trampled, and hutments razed. It might as well have been a bloody Hun artillery barrage.

Hobson walked up and joined him.

“All that work and we’re back where we started,” said Everson with a sigh.

Hobson stuck out his chest and rocked on his feet. “It’ll give the men something to do, sir.”

“We’re going to have to strengthen the trenches, relay the entanglements, repitch the tents, rebuild the hutments...”

“Still,” said Hobson, brightly. “Plenty of dung for the gunpowder experiments now, I’d say.”

Everson sighed. “Thank you, Sergeant, I hadn’t realised there was such a silver lining.”

Hobson glanced down modestly, and shrugged. “You just have to look for it. Or in your case, sir, tread in it.”

T
HE STAMPEDE OVER,
the gas gong sounded the all-clear. Edith and Sister Fenton climbed out of the dugout. Together the nurses looked out towards the approaching storm.

Edith didn’t relish the prospect of the quagmire the trenches would become under a torrential rain, and she suspected the men wouldn’t either. They had grown used to the comfort of dry trenches and dugouts.

As she watched the storm shadows slide across the veldt towards them, she squinted at the voluminous roiling grey mass in the distance and shivered.

T
ULLIVER CIRCLED THE
trenches in his Sopwith, looking for somewhere to land. The hooves of thousands of bloody animals had churned up his carefully kept strip. They’d trampled the whole landscape to buggery. There had to be somewhere to land.

His attention turned to the oncoming weather, to the great grey-blue mass rolling towards them, blotting out the achingly blue sky as it came.

Only they weren’t clouds. From up here, that much was clear now. Tulliver could see what those on the ground couldn’t. The danger wasn’t yet over because the stampede was never the threat. It was what
caused
it that was the real threat.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Into Your Dugout and Say Your Prayers...”

E
VERSON FOCUSED HIS
binoculars on the storm front and felt a hoarfrost of fear creep down his spine. He adjusted the focus and blurred shadows sharpened into a moment of confusing detail. He lowered the field glasses to get context and quickly raised them again, panning across the rapidly advancing cloud front. He passed the glasses to Hobson, soliciting the Platoon Sergeant’s opinion. “What do you make of it?”

With no other hint, Hobson took the glasses. “Bloody hell!” he spat, adding a hasty, “sir.”

It could have been a great armada of blimps, dirigibles of enormous size, driven along by the wind. There seemed to be no source of motive power. Was this the cause of the stampede? Some kind of air force? If it was a fleet, it threatened to fill the sky.

“What are they, some kind of Zeppelins? Some sort of foreign airship?”

“Maybe, sir. No, wait, they’re...”

“They are the Kreothe,” said a voice, filled with horror and realisation. It was Poilus. “The great drifting sky shoals of Kreothe. Huge airborne creatures that live on the winds, never coming to earth.”

“Thank God,” said Everson with relief. “You had me worried there for a minute.”

“And so you should be,” said Poilus, looking at the approaching things in wonder. “The Kreothe may live in the air, but they feed on the ground. They come, blown by the winds, by the breath of GarSuleth. They have not passed this way in generations. I have only known them exist in tales the elders tell of older times. The last time they passed this way, our clan were still Khungarrii urmen, safe in Khungarr.”

“Sir?” Hobson knocked Everson on the upper arm with the back of his hand as he held out the binoculars. “I think he’s right. It’s not over yet. You’d better take another look...”

Everson did.

What they had mistaken for a cloud front or a zeppelin fleet was, in fact, thousands of individual creatures, of varying sizes, floating from gas sacs, hundreds of feet in the air. Their progress was calm and measured, and above all silent. It was impossible not to be impressed by the things as they crowded the wide sky in their slow stately progress above the veldt. Air sac followed air sac in a mass of varying sizes; from huge towering majestic creatures that appeared, to Everson’s imagination, like the old bulls of the shoal, to skittish flimsy little things, like younglings.

Great long thick tendrils, hundreds of feet long, hung from the creatures, dragging along the veldt, dredging for food.

Everson watched, almost spellbound, as tentacles caught animals up, lifting their catches into the air, before handing them over to the shorter fronds that clustered around the bodies protruding below the great air sacs. These, it seemed, were great prehensile tongues, that seemed to taste the creature’s food before it ingested it. Everson knew many creatures on this planet were inedible or, perhaps, had defences against such predation. This was obviously the Kreothe way of countering that, testing it perhaps, before drawing it up into pulsing mouth tubes and into the belly of yet another swelling.

Everson watched, in horrified fascination, the great bull Kreothe at the head of the shoal grazing languidly, as they drifted inexorably towards the encampment. He was reminded of seeing an elephant at feeding time or, perhaps, a Portuguese Man-o’-war, as he once did as a young boy, preserved for display in a newly opened museum wing donated by his father.

He had seen enough. “So this is why the Khungarrii vanished. They didn’t want to be caught out in the open under these things.” He looked at Hobson. “How long have we got, do you reckon?”

Hobson pursed his lips and squinted. “Judging by the wind speed, maybe ten to fifteen minutes?”

“Here we go again,” muttered Everson as he started to give orders.

There was a roar as Tulliver flew low over the trenches, waggling his wings to attract their attention. Everson looked up and saw Maddocks, the observer, pointing back towards the approaching Kreothe. A warning.

The plane circled. Everson waved to show he understood. Tulliver pointed to his machine gun, and then at the Kreothe, and headed out to meet them.

Everson grunted an acknowledgement as he turned his attention to the various runners who were now appearing, ordering all but a small defensive force into the deep dugouts. “We can’t fight these things. I’ve no idea how. All we can do is try and warn them off. Keep any more damage to a minimum.”

The translucent gas sacs of the oncoming Kreothe cast a peculiar light as the sunlight filtered through them, and the sky began to darken.

I
N THE
B
IRD
Cage, Townsend, Miller and the other shell-shock victims stumbled out of the dugout, determined, like Jones before them, to escape their confinement again at any cost. Everson said he couldn’t spare extra men to guard them. Nurse Bell, Sister Fenton and Padre Rand found themselves unequal to the task.

“What’s got into them, sister?” asked the Padre, his arms wide, trying to block one man from reaching the fence, as if he were playing British Bulldogs.

“I don’t know, Padre,” said Sister Fenton, as she struggled to keep hold of one man. “They seemed docile and compliant until the wind changed and now, I don’t know, they seem
compelled
to escape their confinement. Oh!” Flailing about, the man smacked the Sister across the face with the back of his hand, barely aware that he had done so. She recoiled in shock and he broke free and joined the surge for the fence.

The padre watched those escaping patients, already out of the compound, dash over the trench bridges towards a section of trampled barbed wire entanglement beyond.

Townsend and the others stumbled out past the mangled bodies of tripodgiraffes and gurduin.

Edith darted back past the Padre after the straying men.

“Nurse, No!” he yelled.

“Nurse Bell!” cried Sister Fenton.

“They don’t know what they’re doing!” she called back. “Somebody has to help them!”

Q
UICKLY REALISING THAT
she was right, Padre Rand let out a brief growl of frustration. He could not, should not, leave them while there was still a chance. The parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep and all that.

For years, he’d told that allegory from his cold pulpit in St Chad’s. They were words meant to mollify and soothe, one of many platitudes he issued daily to his congregation. The words lulled him as well, and there, in his parish, he slept. There were no great hardships for him to face, no great tests of faith. The shepherd slept as his flock wandered blithely into a new century and towards the precipice.

It was the Great War that awoke him, to find his flock in jeopardy, physically and morally, and awoke him to the meaning of the words. The true meaning. Having to live by those words he had stood by for so many years, to put himself to the test. Armed with only the small black leather-bound bible that enshrined those words, and the conviction in his heart that they must be true, he set out to steer his flock through the valley of darkness.

There, in the dark fastness of that valley, he came across evil. And there the words failed him. And he had been afraid. In Khungarr, with Jeffries, the Khungarrii put him through a ritual. It had felt like a personal test: his faith, and that of Jeffries’ obscene beliefs, versus theirs. His God against theirs, and his had proved wanting. No, not his God, his faith. His faith, for one brief instance, had failed him and he was almost lost. There, he had suffered tormenting visions that challenged and tested him and found him wanting, while Jeffries had shrugged it off. Memory of the visions faded, like a bad dream he could not recall. He struggled to put it behind him, convincing himself that it was nothing more than a drug-induced delirium. Recently, the visions had tried to surface again, haunting his nights and clawing at his mind, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Every day became a battle to keep it at bay because he didn’t have the courage to face it.