Vulcan's Fury: The Dark Lands (30 page)

At last the alpha himself could no longer hold back. His hunger and bloodlust overrode his fear of the predator whose territory he was invading and the humans who sought to kill one another. Throwing his head back, he let loose a
yip-yip-yipping
cry that was instantly answered by hundreds of his brothers and sisters before they bolted from the trees to add their own carnage to the melee.
 

***

Valeria ran beside her mother, their dresses fluttering behind them. Inspired by Octavia, who had snatched the dagger from the scabbard on her thigh, Valeria had grabbed a sword from a soldier who no longer needed it. Septimus ran beside Octavia, while Paulus ran beside Valeria. Behind them, Hercules moved with feral grace, his head whipping from side to side, his great eyes drawn by every noise.

Fortunately, they had encountered only a handful of enemy soldiers on this side of the praetorium, all of whom had been quickly dispatched by Septimus and Paulus. The battle taking place at the center of the fort was drawing everyone, friend and foe alike, into a whirlpool of blood.

“The sentries are gone!” Paulus shouted. The gate lay before them, the doors left wide open, the four men who normally stood guard absent.
 

“Just keep going,” Septimus told him.
 

They had nearly reached the gate when Valeria heard a sound that sent a chill down her spine: horses, lots of them, somewhere beyond the wall, drawing closer. Fast.

“Oh, balls,” Septimus hissed as a detachment of cavalry thundered through the gate, the soldiers wearing red strips of cloth on one arm. He grabbed Octavia and pushed her behind him, and Paulus followed suit with Valeria. There wasn’t time to do anything else.

With a laugh, the centurion leading the charge aimed straight for them, his sword raised high. “Take the women alive! Kill the others!”
 

Septimus turned to look at Octavia, who held his gaze evenly.
 

“You know what you must do,” she said.

The centurion’s laugh turned to a high-pitched shriek as Hercules burst from the shadows behind Valeria with an ear-splitting roar. With a swipe of a forepaw, the hexatiger sent the horse sprawling as he snatched the centurion in his jaws. After giving the man a vicious shake while his jaws crushed his armored chest, Hercules flung him aside.

The horses, the whites of their eyes gleaming, whinnied in terror and skidded to a stop. Dozens of riders were sent sailing into space before slamming into the hard street.
 

Hercules waded into the cavalrymen, just as he had done against the dark wolves, but with even more lethal effect. The horses bolted back the way they had come, trampling some of the men on the ground before colliding with yet more riders who were trying to force their way through the gate. The men who managed to survive being flung from their horses did not long enjoy their good fortune as Hercules slashed, bit, and crushed them in an orgy of killing.
 

“May the gods save us,” Octavia whispered as she stood in open-mouthed awe. She had never once in her life witnessed Hercules commit an act more violent than taking down a deer for food when he was a cub. But even then, Hercules had been almost gentle as he clamped his jaws on the deer’s neck to suffocate it before he dined.

“One of them already is,” Karan answered from behind them, a blood-covered Haakon by his side. “You now see why he is the greatest of our gods.”

Seeing Karan, Valeria almost wept with relief, and her smile warmed his heart.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Haakon growled as one of the thrown enemy soldiers rose to his feet and turned in their direction, sword in hand. A dagger whistled through the air, skewering him in the throat. Haakon went to retrieve his weapon, then gleefully stabbed the other men who’d been thrown, most of whom were only stunned, to make sure they would never again rise.

Before them, Hercules continued to wreak havoc on the disorganized cavalry, his roars countering the screams of the men and the almost human-sounding screams of the horses.

“I almost feel sorry for them,” Octavia said, wincing at the horrific noise.

“Don’t,” Septimus told her. “Let the big cat gut the lot of them, the traitorous bastards.”

After what seemed like forever, the surviving cavalrymen and riderless horses broke through the glut of horses pressing in behind them to flee. Those still beyond the gate, seeing what awaited them, reined their mounts around as fast as they could and retreated at a full run across the sandy beach in the direction from which they’d come.

Hercules roared after them, then stood there panting. As he paused to lick some blood (not his own) from his forepaws, one of his victims raised a hand toward Valeria and the others and begged for mercy. With a growl, Hercules slammed the forepaw down, crushing the life from his squealing prey.

With the way momentarily clear, Septimus ushered the women forward through the body strewn killing ground while he and the other men made quick work of the remaining survivors.

Octavia reached down with her dagger to slit the throat of a man who was whispering for forgiveness. “Rot in the afterlife,” she hissed.

Not to be outdone, Valeria found a man trying to rise to his knees. Much to her surprise, he was faking: as she drew close, he lunged at her, driving his sword toward her belly. Septimus’s training won through her surprise. She parried the man’s thrust and pivoted smoothly as he propelled himself forward, leaving himself off balance. Whirling around, she cut one of his calves, and with a cry of pain he collapsed to the ground.

She was about to finish him off when Hercules pounced, his mouth clamping around the man’s head.

“He was
mine!
” she shouted with what she knew must have sounded like childlike indignation as the man’s skull, even with the protection of his helmet, let go with a brittle crack.

Hercules looked up at her, licked his chops, then leaned forward and snuffled at her.

“I’m fine,” she told him, reaching out to scratch his blood-soaked muzzle. “Thank you, Hercules.”

The big cat’s nose twitched, and suddenly he stiffened and let out a low growl, his eyes staring toward the screaming melee at the center of the fort.

The others followed his gaze as the night was split by animal cries, hundreds of them.

“Oh, no,” Valeria whispered, her eyes widening with fear.

Octavia gripped her daughter’s hand. “What is it?”

“The Dark Wolves.”
 

Karan nodded. “At last have they come.” As a tide of terrified screams and animal snarls washed over the roar of battle at the fort’s center, Karan knelt before Hercules and offered his sword as his lips mouthed the words of a silent prayer. Getting to his feet, he gave Valeria a long, deep look. Shifting his gaze to Paulus, he said, “Keep her safe, my friend.”

Then he turned and sprinted back toward the heart of the battle that had just become one between man and beast.

Valeria tried to catch him. “Karan, no! Come back!” She struggled as Paulus took her in his arms. “Let me go!”

“No, Valeria!” Paulus said. “Where he must go, you cannot follow.”

“Come, my daughter,” Octavia said in the voice she used to calm Valeria when she had been an unruly child. “If you would honor Karan, you would do as he asked. Let us keep you safe.”

“No,” Valeria whispered, feeling utterly helpless.
 

“Come on,” Paulus said gently. He led her and Octavia toward the relative safety of The Wall. Hercules followed, stopping now and again to glance behind him and growl.

Septimus and Haakon paused, listening to the bedlam into which Karan was plunging.
 

“Bugger all,” Septimus whispered, “what a gods-damned mess.”

Haakon sighed. “I am missing out.” Then with a scheming grin, he looked at Septimus. “Twenty denarii says Karan lives to return to us.”

Squinting up at the taller man as if he had gone completely mad, Septimus said, “What, you take me for an idiot? That’s a fool’s bet if there ever was one.” He snorted. “Come on, you big oaf, we’ve got a job to do.”

***

Sergius fled down one of the alleyways between the outer wall and the first row of buildings of the castrum as the dark wolves poured through the main gate. He passed by several stacks of large amphora. After throwing a quick look over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being pursued, he reined his horse to a halt. Leaping to the ground, he leaned over one of the big clay containers and caught the smell of pitch. An idea sparked in his mind.

With a grim smile, he knocked it to the ground, then did the same to another. The dark, viscous liquid splashed out, covering the ground around the other amphorae and the base of the wall.
 

Remounting his horse, he rode toward the gate on the eastern side of the fort where
Legio Equistris
was pressing its attack, knocking over more of the amphorae as he went. He needed to borrow a few of Decius’s men for what he planned to do.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Marcus didn’t need to be told what to do when the dark wolves began to savage the rear of the enemy formation. “By rotation,” he bellowed, “retreat toward The Wall!”

The men of
Legio Hercules
were now formed into a dense rectangle at the center of the square before the praetorium. Each side of the rectangle had a depth of several men, and when Marcus blew a whistle, the man at the front, holding his shield up to ward off the enemy while he thrust his sword at his opponents over the top of the shield, would sidestep to the right and pull back as the man behind him rotated forward. It was a standard battlefield tactic. Every man in the legion had performed the maneuver countless times during training, and the veterans had used it in nearly every battle they had fought.

The movement that Marcus, who had tactical control over the men now while Pelonius and Tiberius managed the reserve, intended the men to make would add a slight but vital twist: as the men at the front rotated to the rear of their line at each blow of the whistle, the entire formation would continuously, if slowly, move along the Via Praetoria toward the gate that led to The Wall.
 

He blew his whistle, and the men reacted as if they were part of a giant machine with a thousand moving parts, rotating smoothly from outside to inside as the entire formation began to flow along the street toward the far gate like an enormous millipede. If anything, the most difficult part was to keep the men facing the bulk of the enemy from being trampled by their foes, who were now in a blind panic to flee from the dark wolves that were savaging the rear of their formation. The beasts leaped from the backs of their tightly packed kin attacking the men in the rearmost rows, hurling themselves as deep as they could into the mass of soldiers before diving in with snapping jaws.
 

Marcus felt a brief pang of pity for the legionaries being slaughtered, but only until he recalled that, if it had been in his power, he would have slaughtered them all himself.
 

The sands of time having run through his mental hourglass, Marcus blew the whistle again, sending fresh men to the front as
Legio Hercules
continued its slow retreat toward The Wall.

***

Karan moved like a shadow upon the wind through the castrum. He killed enemy soldiers when necessary, but avoided them when he could. He had every intention of joining the battle, but he had to first reach the officers’ barracks where Paulus had been quartered, for that was where Karan’s bow awaited him.

Every route to the building was blocked by the enemy, with more pouring down the alleyways between the buildings as they sought to escape the attacking beasts. With no other way open to him, Karan dashed toward an ox cart beside one of the barracks, leaped up, then used it as a springboard to reach the building’s roof. Treading with care so as not to fall through, he ran in short, light steps across its length before hurling himself to the roof of the next building.
 

After four such jumps, he reached the building that housed the officers’ quarters. Swinging down from the roof in a move he had learned from watching the monkeys in the jungle, he let go and sailed through the doorway, just above the heads of the soldiers fleeing past.

With a sigh of relief, he saw that the enemy had been too preoccupied to ransack the building. His bow and quiver, stuffed full of arrows with gleaming metal tips, were right where he had left them. Fastening the quiver to his back with its strap, he slung the bow over his shoulder by the string.
 

Looking at the human tide fleeing past the doorway, he knew he wouldn’t be able to force his way in the opposite direction, which was the direction he intended to go. Instead, he darted into the flow and let the enemy soldiers, who completely ignored him in their terrified flight, carry him to the end of the building, where Karan darted around the corner, dashing to the other side. There, the stream of soldiers sweeping past ended with sudden violence as the stragglers were pounced upon by four legged shapes with teeth that gleamed in the darkness.

Bringing up his sword, Karan moved forward and began to kill the things that had pursued him across the waters of the Haunted Sea.

***

“You’re insane,” Decius said as he stared at Sergius. The two men, both astride their horses, were close behind the mass of men who were simultaneously pressing forward against the men of
Hercules
while desperately fighting off the wave of Dark Wolves that had poured through the main gate. “Twenty-thousand men are packed into this butcher shop, with at least a fifth of them being mine. You may not care about your men, but I do.” He snorted. “And Placus has fallen, you say. How convenient.”

“Do you doubt me?” Sergius hissed. He would have drawn his sword, but unlike Placus, Decius had kept bodyguards within easy reach.

“I only doubt your honor, motives, and skill in battle. Now, if you want men, go back the way you came and find your own legion, or whatever’s left of it. You won’t be poaching any from mine.”