Vulcan's Fury: The Dark Lands (11 page)

Waiting as long as he dared, giving the men nearest him time to get just a bit closer, Marcus ordered, “Repel cavalry.”

Looking at Marcus as if he’d gone mad, Septimus did as he was told, blowing the cornu yet again.
 

The centuries halted and turned about to face the approaching enemy. As the centurions and
optios
shouted orders, the men of each unit formed two lines. The first rank erected a shield wall with only their spears protruding, while the second rank held their spears up, ready to stab any of the creatures that managed to breach the shield wall. Marcus nodded in relief as the centurions leading the formations on the wings had the presence of mind to set their units at an angle to the main line to help protect each flank.

“Well done, centurion,” Pelonius said.
 

“For all the good it might do,” Marcus replied as the laughing, snapping mass of dark wolves, which weren’t really wolves at all, savaged the legion’s stragglers. Men went down by the dozens under the claws and teeth of the legendary predators, who were now proving themselves all too real.
 

“Inside the square,” Marcus ordered, and he followed Paulus and Septimus behind the shield wall of the men of Valeria’s guard.

“Come on,” Septimus whispered as the black tide approached the first defensive line. “Come on!”

The black beasts met the defenders in a deafening crash of flesh against wood and steel, and the battlefield was riven with the agonized shrieks of dark wolves that found themselves skewered on the legion’s spears. But the elation Marcus and the others felt was short-lived as the crisp formations of the centuries dissolved into swirling chaos.
 

But the men of
Invictus
were not going as lambs before the slaughter. The onslaught of the forest animals earlier had caught them totally unaware, like a freak force of nature, and many of the men had suffered at the hands of animals too small and swift to catch, let alone kill. The dark wolves, however, while deadly and fearsome opponents, could be stabbed with spear and sword. And the creatures, despite their ferocity, were accustomed to feasting upon helpless prey, not meat that fought back. As a soldier went down under the jaws of one of the beasts, his fellows stabbed at it with their swords in the savage, disciplined frenzy that had bent the entire known world to Roman rule. It was a slaughter, yes, but the Romans made the beasts pay dearly in blood.

“It’s going to be close,” Septimus said over the pandemonium as he watched the spectacle with grim fascination. He had seen a few gladiatorial games in the great Colosseum in Rome itself, and they paled in comparison to the ferocity of the battle being waged here.

“No, it’s not,” Pelonius countered, pointing his sword off to the right, where a group of forty or fifty animals were circling around the flanking century.
 

“Damn,” Marcus cursed. He then looked off to the left, and saw more animals moving around on that side. “Septimus, signal ‘refuse the flank.’”
 

Septimus blew the horn, and the centuries on the left and right wings began to angle back, trying to keep their shields between the animals and the legion’s vulnerable flank and rear. Despite their best efforts, the beasts were too fast, the signal too late.

“Bloody hell,” Septimus hissed as he whipped his head right and left as the animals, including the huge alpha, looped around the flanks while the rest of the huge pack continued to savage the main lines. “Those things are coming right for us!”

“Spears!” Marcus ordered, and the men put the tips of their spears over the shield wall, much like they would have done to repel cavalry. He looked up as Hercules went wild. “
Look out!
” Acting on instinct, Marcus dove to the ground, taking Valeria with him, as the hexatiger vaulted over the shield wall.
 

“
Hercules, no!
” Valeria’s cry was barely audible among the roars of the hexatiger, the ferocious barks of the approaching monstrosities, and the screaming of dying men and beasts on the battlefield. “Come back!”

“Leave him be,” Pelonius told her as he helped her and Marcus back to their feet. “Out there, he can be what the gods meant him to be, the world’s greatest predator. In here, with us, he would be nearly helpless.”

The dark wolves had by now surrounded their formation, with another ring forming around Hercules as he faced off against the alpha. The muscles in the hexatiger’s back and legs rippled, and he roared his challenge. The alpha stared at him with black, dead eyes, and responded in kind.
 

As if it were a signal, the animals surrounding the defensive square formation charged, diverting Hercules’ attention for just a split second. The alpha used it to good use, sprinting forward to nip at the hexatiger’s shoulder.
 

“
No!
” Valeria screamed as Hercules whirled in rage and pain to snap at the beast, which dodged away to one side while the others of its pack bore in with savage growls as they sought to sink their jaws into the big cat’s flesh.

But Valeria’s fear for her animal friend was eclipsed by an even more personal terror as the dark wolves attacked the soldiers protecting her. One exploded through the shield wall, sending two soldiers flying and seizing a third in its jaws before Pelonius and Marcus fell upon it, swords rising and falling as they stabbed it in the head and neck. Two more leaped over the wall. One took a spear through the belly, but managed to kill the soldier who held the weapon, its jaws crushing his helmet-covered skull before other soldiers stabbed and hacked it to death. The second beast streaked right toward her, its jaws open wide. Resolving to die with honor, she clamped her mouth shut, drew the dagger her father had insisted she always carry from the scabbard on her right thigh, and looked Death in the eye.
 

But Pluto, the God of the Underworld, was not ready for her yet. Something gold flashed past her and the beast shrieked in agony as Paulus drove the head of the legion’s eagle into one of its eyes like a spear. As the animal went down in a writhing heap, he rammed his sword into its throat, putting his entire weight behind the thrust. The sword’s tip pierced the thing’s brain, and it went still.

Paulus withdrew his weapon from the dead beast, then reached down to grab a sword from one of the fallen soldiers. “You might want to try something a bit bigger than that,” he gasped with a fragile smile, nodding at her dagger.
 

Tossing the smaller weapon to the ground, she took the sword in hand. It was larger than her tailored weapon, but it would do.
 

Hercules let out a howl like she had never before heard, and the sound turned her heart to ice. She turned just in time to see him go down under the weight of a dozen dark wolves in a writhing, snapping mass.

“
Hercules!
” Valeria had no time for more than that one angst-filled scream before more beasts crashed into the soldiers’ crumbling defenses. She was thrown to the ground as a beast latched onto Paulus’s cloak and drove him into her. The two of them would have been dead had not Pelonius suddenly appeared, driving his sword into the thing’s left eye. Marcus and Septimus were there, too, the three older men surrounding her and Paulus, their swords slashing and stabbing, her last defense as the shield wall gave way. Despite herself she began to weep. All was lost.

She looked up as another dark wolf charged, its eyes fixed on her. Marcus, Septimus, and Pelonius were driving another beast away, Paulus was still struggling to get up, and her own sword had been knocked from her hands.
 

Such was her surprise when the beast fell in mid-stride, its snout coming to rest nearly in her lap, an arrow protruding from one of its eyes. Another beast leaped on Marcus’s back, and an arrow sprouted from the base of its skull as the thing drove the centurion to the ground. With a grunt and look of astonishment, Marcus rolled out from under its dead weight.
 

Then
he
was there, standing right in front of her. The Ghost. He wore a hooded cloak of mottled greens and browns, and had a scarf of similar colors drawn over the lower half of his face. Black leather armor with inlaid silver forming an intricate vine covered his chest, and on his legs he wore cloth trousers of dark brown. His feet bore leather sandals not unlike those worn by Roman soldiers. He slung his bow over one shoulder and drew a sword from a scabbard at his waist. It was unlike any weapon she had seen before, about half the width of the typical
gladius
carried by Roman soldiers and perhaps half again as long, with the shining blade bearing a slight curve and having a handle large enough to wield the weapon with two hands.
 

She stared into his green eyes for a long moment before another of the dark wolves charged toward her. The Ghost’s blade moved in a blinding flash and the animal’s head parted from its body in a spray of blood. Before it collapsed to the ground, he killed another beast that had toppled a pair of soldiers and would doubtless have killed Pelonius, who was desperately trying to fend off yet another beast.
 

Kneeling, the stranger extended his free hand toward her.
 

“Go with him!”
 

She looked up at Marcus, who was panting with exhaustion and pain. Both of his arms and his face bore deep bite and claw marks, and he was bleeding badly.
 

“He may be your only chance now, girl,” he went on in a rush. “In the name of your father, do as I command.
Go!
”

Then a trio of dark wolves burst through. Marcus flung himself at them, wrapping one of his bloody arms around the neck of one of the beasts and wrestling it to the ground. She could no longer even see Septimus or Pelonius in the swirling mass of snarling animals, and she could only assume they had fallen.
 

She started as she felt a hand on her arm. It was Paulus, who himself was wounded, a long gash ripped down his right arm. He clutched his sword awkwardly in his left. “Let’s go,” he said.
 

The Ghost took her hand and helped her to her feet with a gentle but remarkably strong grip, and she and Paulus took off behind him.
 

The stranger moved with the grace of a dancer, but the practiced lethality of a gladiator. He would twirl to one side as a beast came for him, dodging its attack before killing it with a single stroke or stab of his sword. More than once he had stopped and dodged behind her and Paulus, once even shoving them to the ground to remove them from danger, before killing one or more of the animals that pursued them.
 

At last, they were clear of the battle proper, and he led them down the steep, sandy bank of a stream, the same one near which the legion had encamped the night before. Without a word, he shoved her and Paulus into a cleft in the bank.
 

Just then, a dark wolf leapt down upon him with a ferocious growl. The Ghost neatly sidestepped the attack and opened the beast’s belly with a slash of his sword. The dark wolf screamed, then went silent as the Ghost shoved his blade through its heart. Looking about to make sure no more animals were nearby, he drew a dagger that was much like a smaller version of his sword. Kneeling down, he cut deeper into the animal’s guts, then extracted some blood covered glands that he carried toward her and Paulus.

As he slit the glands open with his knife, Valeria gagged at the unholy stink that filled her nostrils, and fought not to throw up as the Ghost splashed the thick liquid over her and Paulus before discarding the remains.

Unable to help herself, she cried out in disgust and found the Ghosts’s hand — the one that had a moment before been holding the glands — over her mouth. She clamped her lips shut and again fought not to vomit. He removed his hand and held a finger to his lips, then held out his hand, open palm, to her and Paulus.

“He wants us to stay here, I think,” Paulus gasped through the stench.

The Ghost backed up a pace, then another, still holding his hand toward them. Offering them a single nod, he leaped over the carcass and dashed back up the bank, returning to the raging battle.

“He’s real,” Paulus breathed into her ear as he held her tight, both of them shivering with fear. “By all the gods, you were right.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hercules had never truly experienced pain. Since the girl had found him as a cub, human hands had only ever touched him with kindness and love. Even the old one who had taught Hercules to understand the girl, after a fashion, had never been anything but gentle, if firm and insistent. He had never struck him nor done him harm. The only time Hercules had even seen or smelled his own blood was once during a hunt, when a buck had faced him with great courage and wounded him slightly with his antlers before Hercules brought him down. Beyond that, his life had been nothing but games with the girl and the men, the soldiers, who accompanied her, and the time he spent hunting in the preserve that was set aside for his own pleasure. He knew nothing of other predators, of anything or anyone who might want to harm him.
 

That had changed when
they
had come, the dark things whose scent was unknown to him, but provoked a violent, instinctive reaction that he did not understand. But it was not in his nature to question the ancient imperatives. His hackles rose, his pulse and breathing quickened, and he roared his challenge to the interlopers, warning them away.

They did not heed his warnings. Instead, they fell upon the humans, who defended themselves with worthy ferocity, but the attacking beasts were too many, and too quick.

Like water hitting an obstacle, the great pack of attacking animals began to flow around the soldiers. Passing by both the left and right ends of the human formation, they streamed toward him and the girl he thought of as his cub. Deeper imperatives awakened, and his mind filled with a red rage as the creatures, led by one larger than the others, the alpha, ran toward him.

Without thinking, he leaped over the puny shield wall the humans surrounding the girl had erected and came to face the attacking alpha. The beast came near to striking range before stopping as its companions surrounded both Hercules and the humans with the girl. Hercules roared a challenge to the beast. The alpha stared at him, issuing a deep, shuddering growl of its own.