Valkeryn 2: The Dark Lands (4 page)

Sorenson’s breathing became more rapid as he recognized one Panterran amongst the many tormentors – the Queen’s emissary, Orcalion. While Sorenson watched, he saw the Panterran questioning one of the Wolfen and then strike him when no answer was forthcoming. The Wolfen bared long white teeth and strained at his chains, causing the Panterran to step back. Even bound, the Wolfen struck fear into his tormentor.

Sorenson smiled grimly; he knew what the reward would be. A huge Lygon fist, encased in an iron glove came crashing down on the top of the resisting Wolfen’s skull from behind, smashing him to the ground. He didn’t move again, even when the Panterran kicked his body. The Slinker simply shrugged and moved to the next bound Wolfen in the line. And so the questioning began again.

Sorenson gritted his teeth, and tried to find a weapon… anything he could use to rush the gloating tormentors, and at least send a few more of the vile creatures back to Hellheim before he was surely brought down. He strained and then slumped back; there was nothing. In fact, he found he was also stripped of armor and weapons. Perhaps he had been taken for dead, and his body dumped with the other fallen.

Sorenson screwed his eyes shut, as the next Wolfen also refused to be bowed or answer Orcalion. There was no fear; he understood why. Valhalla awaited the battle fallen. The Valkeryies would descend and lift the brave to the golden halls, to sit before Odin, and await the call to the final battle. He wished he had his chance now. At the thought, he felt his heart sink. He had lost his beloved brother, Strom, and his king, and now the entire kingdom of Valkeryn was gone. He lay back and kept his eyes shut, willing the Valkeryies to descend to raise him up.

Orcalion lifted his voice, squealing threats into the face of the next Wolfen. Sorenson’s eyes flicked open; he finally heard the words – where was the son of Grimvaldr? And then: where was the Man-Kind?

So, they were still free. Sorenson felt his spirits soar. His will to live exploded within once again. He had a purpose, a mission – this is why Odin had not called his
sáál
to the heavens. If they were truly free, he knew they would need his help. If he could find them… if he could free himself.

Soon
, he thought.
Soon, I will have my opportunity.

The Panterran screamed into the face of the Wolfen again, and then pulled a curved blade from the scabbard at his waist, thrusting it into the chest of the kneeling warrior. He made a dismissive motion towards the remaining prisoners, and the fearsome Lygon fell upon them, hacking at them, or raining heavy cudgels down, until they were nothing but bloodied heaps on the ground. It was over quickly.

Sorenson lay back with his teeth bared, willing his rushing blood to slow, but it wouldn’t. Visions of axes cleaving Panterran skulls, long swords thrust into torsos and his own fangs ripping the throat from Lygon flesh flooded his mind and filled him up. His eyes burned and he only just caught the roar that wanted to burst from his lips.

Oh, he would live. He would gather his strength. Live to fight another day. He shut his eyes, praying silently to Odin.

Live to fight another day…. and by Odin’s oath, there will be another day.

*

Eilif hugged her knees and rocked back and forth by the stream. She stopped for a moment to stare into a calm shallow at its edge, seeing her ice-blue eyes reflected back at her. She remembered other eyes; those of the strange Man-Kind – dark, like fathomless pools. Her own eyes now looked sunken and miserable.

Bergborr, the dark Wolfen, sat a few paces away, preparing a small animal to eat and occasionally looking up at her, nodding and smiling his reassurance. She lifted her head and sniffed the air. She had sensed for a long time now that the war was lost. The ache in her heart also told her that her father and mother were no longer in Valkeryn, and by now were undoubtedly crossing the rainbow bridge to the golden halls of Asgard.

And what of the kingdom of Valkeryn, her home? She doubted it still stood. Eilif sniffed back some tears. Arn had left her and the kingdom before the battle. But she saw that now as only a good thing. If he had stayed then he might be lying cold among the fallen, and then what? She didn’t want to think what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it. She would follow him to the ends of the Earth, through time itself, if need be.

She sniffed again, continuing to stare at her reflection in the still water. From the moment she had regained consciousness, she had screamed out his name… much to the horror of Bergborr.  She couldn’t help it; she would never stop thinking about the strange creature from the past that had haunted her dreams even before he arrived.

He was something so different, so alien, that to some, her feelings for him were seen as either curious, or abhorrent. Perhaps that was why her father had tasked the strange Man-Kind with the mission to take her brother from the kingdom, to keep him safe. Maybe also to keep her and Arn far apart.

She looked hard at her image in the still pool. She knew Arn didn’t feel about her the way she felt about him. She had offered her heart, and he hadn’t refused it. But she wasn’t sure he understood what it meant to her. Perhaps she was too different, too ugly.

‘Ugly.’ She touched her face as she whispered the word to the water.

Eilif looked down at her forearm where a recent battle scar was healing. The fur had not yet grown back, and the skin on her arm was bare, pink and smooth. She ran her fingers over the skin.

‘Perhaps underneath we are more alike than he thinks.’ She rubbed the warm skin, closing her eyes for a moment, and thinking of Arn’s smooth brown hide. She sighed; there would be no other for her.

Eilif looked across to the smiling black Wolfen. She knew he still held out a vain hope of becoming her mate. When she had fallen in the great battle, he had rescued her, and though her memory of the events were hazy, she guessed she owed him her life. She smiled back sadly.
Thank you for saving me, but the competition for my affection is long over.

She turned away, raising her head into the breeze and sniffing again. In her
sáál
, or soul as Arn had called it, she could sense him. She would find him. She knew where he would go – he sought the Dark Lands and the buried caves of the Ancients. He was trying to find his way home. She would track him.

Eilif got unsteadily to her feet, feeling the bandages binding her back, which felt tight from where the dark Wolfen must have closed her wounds. He had saved her life, but she didn’t know yet if she could trust him. Still, he was a warrior of the Wolfen elite, and she was a princess. He was duty bound to help her, to get to the Dark Lands. She would tell him that they needed to seek out any clan remnants of the Far Wolfen, if they still existed. She didn’t think it would be judicious to tell him of her suspicions about Grimson and Arn heading there just yet.

He still needed to prove himself. If he were honorable, she would tell him everything. If he weren’t, then she would slay him without a second thought.

*

Sorenson kept his eyes tightly shut as the mound of bodies above him was pulled down. Next, his feet were roughly bound together. He heard the Panterran’s guttural talk as the hundreds of other bodies he had been collected up. Now they were all to be dragged back to the Lygon camp for a victory feast… with the meat of his dead kin the main fare.

He used every ounce of his will to appear lifeless as the stink of the Lygons enveloped him. They had felt his arms and thighs, squeezing the flesh, organizing the corpses into grades of ‘meat’ quality. He was to be in the inferior category – the flesh on his long, hard and muscled frame too stringy and tough.

Just as well, for he soon realized that making the grade meant he could have been broken up for a quick meal on the way back to the camp. He tried to shut out the sound of the splintering bones and of limbs being ripped from their sockets.

He gritted his teeth – he knew fighting a Lygon while unarmed and unarmored would be difficult. But trying to fight a small army of them would mean death. He would need to wait. He knew that the closest Lygon camp was nearly a day’s march – an opportunity would present itself. It must.

For now… he would lie still, and pray for strength.

The Lygons huddled and argued. It seemed that killing all the Wolfen had turned out to be a bad idea. Now, instead of making the prisoners march, the task of dragging all the fresh meat back to the camp would be the job of several of the Lygon… yet to be chosen.

The arguments quickly turned into physical confrontations and some of the giant beasts took to each other with hammer, club, tooth and claw, until a roar from one creature subdued them all.

This large brute pushed his way roughly to the front, slashing at the faces of the fighting Lygons. Sorenson lay still with his eyes half closed but easily recognized the beast – Goranx, the slayer of his king and his brother, and the leader of the Lygon army. Princess Eilif’s broken arrow shaft still protruded from his wrist.

Sorenson carefully worked his head below a corpse tied next to him. If Goranx found him, even if he believed he was dead, he’d probably take his head, or mutilate his body just for the amusement it would bring him. Swinging at the monster’s belt were the heads of some of the Man-Kind beings, and also his Wolfen brother, Strom. Sorenson turned away.

Another roar from the giant, and several dozen of the massive beasts shouldered the ropes, and started to drag the bodies, like bunches of bloody grapes. They bounced across all types of terrain, and Sorenson felt every rock and branch. Without armor, the travelling was harsh, and after several hours Sorenson knew that the fur and skin on his back was becoming raw. He couldn’t afford to begin bleeding again – dead bodies didn’t bleed.

They entered a deeper section of the forest, and now were dragged along overgrown paths and in amongst the bracken and fallen trees. Sorenson became alert – there was more shelter now, and it would only be a few more hours until they reached the Lygon camp. There, escape would be impossible. It would have to be soon. He tensed, alert for the opportunity.

Sorenson, like the rest of the corpses, had roughly a body length of rope tying him to the main bunch of dead Wolfen. He had observed that even if one of the corpses got itself snagged on something, the massive brutes simply pulled harder until it became free, worrying not if the body became torn, or a limb was ripped free.

Sorenson felt his heart leap. A chance approached – a tree stump up ahead, and to the side of the group where he was bound. He waited, praying that the brutes continued to face forward.

As he approached the stump, he quickly sat up, and jumped forward, giving himself some slack in his rope, which he then looped around the stump. He grabbed the length nearest his ankles and braced his feet, using the stump as a counter measure – either he’d be ripped over the top of the stump, the stump would be lifted from the ground, or…

The rope became taught, its fibers groaned for an instant, and the Lygons cursed. Sorenson strained to keep the rope in place, he ground his teeth, it was now or never, he thought as he silently prayed.

One of the Lygons began to turn, and Sorenson held his breath, but the others, too bored, or too dumb to care, simply bent their shoulders and pulled harder. The rope popped, and Sorenson rolled into the brush. He turned and waited, listening. Nothing stopped, no shouts came – just the low rumble of Lygon voices, receding, and the sound of his fallen Wolfen brothers and sisters as they were dragged away.

He quickly untied his feet, standing unsteadily, and rolling his stiff muscles. He balled his fists and raised his face to the darkening sky. Odin give me strength, he prayed, and then started to run.

Chapter 4

Time For a Little Payback

The line of matte-black SUVs with darkened windows powered towards the Fermilab facility. To anyone watching, they looked like a line of aggressive, armor-plated beetles in attack formation.

Inside the lead vehicle, Colonel Marion Briggs leaned forward to look at the sky above the facility. Bruise-colored clouds now hung there permanently, and had started a slow rotation above the acceleration chamber – an airborne whirlpool forming in an angry sky. Strangely, just a few miles further out was clear. It seemed the weird weather was confined to this area alone.

Briggs sat back and thought about the scientist, Harper, and his warning about the potential dangers of trying to force the anomaly closed. Even if they nuked the entire site, burning a few square miles down to nothing but slag, it might not fully close the breach. It might just mean the freaking hole Harper and his pencil-neck boffins had punched through time and space was just buried for a while. And then by the time it did re-emerge, it would be too large to do anything about, other than bend over and kiss our collective asses goodbye.

But, there was another option – an extremely dangerous and potentially suicidal option. They could enter the vortex and retrieve the red diamond initiator themselves. She had already lost one team, but Briggs knew that the sacrifice had been worthwhile. After all, what price good intel… and they had learned a lot.

She sat back and smiled. Thing
s would be done right this time. Because this time, she was going. Those freakish monsters were about to get some of their own lessons. Lesson-one: Earth has its own monsters, and she would make the introductions personally.

Briggs laughed softly. The US military had been working hard to move away from its image as an aggressor. Normally, entering foreign territory with any high-powered kit would be vetoed immediately, but this time the creatures had attacked their people first, and now they had a human as a hostage. That gave her mission full combat legitimacy – she was free to make war, under Presidential order. It was all too perfect.

She licked her lips and thought again of the image feeds that had been sent back to them by the probe. There was a whole world there – pristine and vast, and one she fully intended to appropriate on behalf of the United States of America. She snorted; how many soldiers got to make a righteous war, rescue their citizens, and potentially stake a claim on an entire world in the name of their country. She’d be famous. She’d be Christopher Columbus and General Patton rolled into one tough Special Forces kick-ass package.

This time she would not be unprepared. The giant creatures that had attacked her previous team had been enormously powerful, armored, and aggressive. Further they were non-human – no doe-eyed Eloi dancing around maypoles to tug at week-kneed, liberal heart-strings. You saw one of these big bastards up close, you wanted it dead… before it damn well ate you.

Briggs looked over her shoulder at the four hulking frames of her soldiers sitting silently in the rear of her speeding vehicle, with the rest in the other nine SUVs. She had forty Special Forces Delta Team – the best of the best – and she had something else… she had Samson. Her hand-picked Delta Ops captain, recommended multiple times for bravery awards, commendations, and also for immediate discharge on the basis of an aggressive psychopathic psychology. The man was a killing machine. But as a soldier he was fearless, hard to kill, and followed orders. He was perfect.

Those freaks got the jump on us last time. Time for a little payback
, she thought, as they slowed at the entrance gates.

*

At his desk, Albert Harper leaned forward on his knuckles and exhaled miserably as he watched the line of black vehicles slow at the security gate. The guard looked briefly at the documentation, saluted, and then stepped back to the booth to open the electronic fence. He hadn’t needed to salute; he wasn’t armed forces and didn’t work for them. Seems the military assuming control of the project had confused just about everyone.