Beyond the Hell Cliffs (49 page)

Raegith lifted his hands to calm the crowd and bid them all to sit back down.

“Because I need the Tyrra Clan… because I need the strength you possess, I have extended an offer to your Elder that will not be extended to the others below.  I will allow you to volunteer into my army; the army that takes back the Greimere.  I will take men and women; as long as they are able to fight, they will be allowed to.  Any who join me will be expected to teach the Turning to others outside this Tribe and to give their all for me.  In return, the Tyrra Clan will remain unconquered and will be exempt from any conscription laws.  You will also receive immigrants from other Urufen tribes, sent by me to replenish your dwindling pool of suitable mates for your youth.  A village this small cannot survive free of inbreeding without fresh boys and girls from other areas.”

“What makes you think we need your help at all, stranger?” a young Urufen boy asked.  “Maybe you think your fire hands are enough to match all of us, but you don’t stand a chance here on our turf
.”

“I won’t make threats,” Raegith replied.  “I owe too much to you for the hospitality you’ve shown my allies and the assistance of your Elder.

“But know this: if you refuse me any volunteers… if you banish us from your village, I will isolate you.  You’ll receive no visitors from other villages and when the clans below begin to grow and encroach upon your hunting lands, I will side with them in any conflict.  The Empire will rise again, stronger than it has ever been before.  At some point you will either become a free ally or an unwanted enemy.”

“And what is your opinion of this, Elder?” another, older Urufen asked.  “What guidance do you have for us?”

“Adaptation is survival,” Thorin said.  “I will not stop any of my people from joining the Grass-hair and if that is all it takes to keep our people from making enemies of whatever he plans on creating, then that is fine.  I will not demand this sacrifice of any of my people, however.  If none choose to follow him, then we will endure as we have always done… but it will be more challenging once this empire is resurrected.  Grass-hair is the only man I have ever known to reach the Junrei’sha and return.”

Thorin turned a sober look towards Raegith.  “From what he tells me of his time among them, he probably should not have returned at all.”

Helkree could not stand it anymore.  She needed to know what had happened to Raegith and was seconds away from ending this meeting herself in order to get him away from everyone.  Then he spoke again.

“Think on it, Urufen of the Tyrra Clan.  I will spend the rest of the night among friends that I have not seen in far too long and in the morning I will descend the Alfhildr.  Those who are willing to be a part of this revolution…
who are willing to sacrifice themselves for something much greater than simple survival can meet me outside the mouth of the cave at dawn.  I’ll see you there.”

“Do you mind telling me what the fuck that was back there?” Helkree
asked as they exited the meeting room ahead of the crowd.  “And who the fuck this is?  Did you bring one of those Junies back with you?”

“Me… a Junrei’sha?
  Is she kidding?” Izanami asked.

“It talks?”

“Helkree, this is Izanami and she’s not a Junrei’sha,” Raegith said.  “She’s a Witch from the Old Order, before the Treaty destroyed them. She saved my life and was the reason I was able to get back to you in just two days instead of two weeks.  Now, where is the tavern?  I want a drink.”

“We’ll probably be the only ones there after what you just did,” Fenra said.  “Speaking of which…?”

“Yeah… that’s going to take a bit more explaining than I’m ready to do right now,” Raegith laughed.  “I’ll get to it, don’t worry, but… wait, is that Freya?”

“
Uh… hi…” she replied, bashfully.

“Holy shit, it’s the first time I’ve seen her speechless,” Helkree marveled.

“Shut up…”

“Seriously, who is this
Izanami chick and why is she attached to the back of your ass?” Helkree asked.

“I wanna hear what the fire shit you did back there was,” Fenra pressed.

“Hey, Grass-hair!” Brimgor yelled, approaching them.  “Are we ready to war, yet?”

“Nope, no and hell no!
  Not until I get a drink,” Raegith laughed.  “I’ll answer questions in order of who’s buying.”

Chapter 46

Smoke from the funeral pyre ro
se high above Gimlet City and the smell of burning flesh choked the few remaining inside the walls.  Among the frightened and weeping Gimlets only a handful of figures rose above their heads.  They all stood around the emerald inferno in the crisp morning, paying their respects and readying their spirits for the end that would surely find the rest of them that day.

In the past two years Greela’s paranoia and
desperation had worsened.  Convinced that the organized Gimlets in the Barren Wastes were engineering some kind of super weapon, the self-declared Emperor planned the destruction of Gimlet City and the assassination of its founder, the Infernal Beretta.

Kimura had stayed inside the walls of the Citadel long after the gates were shut and barricaded.  She had gathered incredibly beneficial information, but at the cost of most of her informant’s lives.  She barely escaped and went straight to Haruka Village without resting.  Greela had pooled his resources, absorbing the
other Rathgar dominions by force and arming every Rathgar male able to hold a spear.  Before the men from the north had destroyed the walls of the Citadel, a thousand Rathgar would have just been an expeditionary force.  The invasion decimated the most populated area in all of the Greimere and now a thousand armed Rathgar was all that remained of the Imperial Army.

Five
hundred Rathgar with spears and axes descended on Gimlet City.  Despite the advanced warning from Kimura and the brilliant strategies of Hitomi, the defenders that had assembled at the city were heavily outnumbered.  Hitomi’s militia numbered thirty, there were nineteen trained Naga with Kimura and close to a hundred Gimlets armed with crossbows.  Only a handful outside of the Helcats had any battle experience at all and none of them had ever fought an organized contingent of Rathgar before.

Two
weeks of fighting had reduced the number of guards by half.  The defenders got lucky on the first day.  Using the traditional strategy of pouring into a village with all of their might, the Rathgar charged right into an ambush.  Crossbow bolts rained down from every roof and tower, pushing the bewildered guards into a bottleneck with Hitomi’s militia and Beretta’s flames.

The surviving guards f
ell back and called for reinforcements.  Two hundred more guards, all with wide, iron shields and long pikes joined them in under a week and the city was surrounded.  The guards relaxed and took their time, able to tease the defense lines with attacks all day and throughout the night at their leisure.  Meanwhile the few defenders grew exhausted under the constant threats of attack.

Those inside the city were whittled down gradually, one or two losses at a time, until a full-scale attack the night before had taken their numbers down to only a few dozen.  Only Hitomi’s skirmishing strategy, utilizing the amazing endurance of her militia to strike and run, over and over
, had saved them from total defeat.  The entire milita, save her and two others, was annihilated.

“Those soulless motherfuckers,” Naoko growled between her teeth.  “I’ll kill every one of them.  Just give me a tower, plenty of arrows and destroy the stairs.”

“You’ll get your chance for vengeance, kid,” Kimura said.  “Hitomi’s crew bought us that chance.”

“They bought us only time,” Hitomi said flatly.  She stared into the pyre without blinking.  “The Gimlets are out of bolts and too fright
ened to fight even if they could make more.  There are only us Helcats, Ayane and Yumiko, and a few Naga assassins left.  Come daylight, we’ll make our stand against more than two hundred guards.”

“You’ve brought us this far, Hitomi,” Beretta said.  “Every preparation,
miraculous plan, every last second command… you have a mind for this.”

“That’s right,” Indie added.  “Who knew a blue-haired ex-prostitute would be so smart at killing guards.
”

“
Broosh!” Kimura cheered.  “You can’t give up now, sister.”

“Who said anything about giving up?”  Hitomi looked around at the others gathered before the fire.  She pulled the broadheaded spear fr
om the strap on her back and planted it in the ground before her.  “We’ll occupy a single building, one of the tall ones, at the edge of the city.  Naoko and one of the Gimlets that isn’t crawling into a hole will take the top floor with every last arrow we have.  The Gimlet will feed arrows, letting her fire as fast as possible.  The building has to have one door and no lower windows, but we’ll do the best we can if that’s not possible.  We’ll defend the opening, shifting fresh fighters for the injured, always keeping the least injured of us at the front.”

“
They won’t charge into the meat grinder forever,” Kimura said.  “And once we wedge ourselves in there, we’ll have no where to go once they overwhelm us or figure out how to smoke us out.”

“We have no where to go as it is. 
This isn’t a strategy for winning.  I just want to kill as many of them as possible before I die.”

“So this is really the end, then.” Yumiko was one of the two survivors of the militia.  Hitomi could remember a time when she almost booted the dark-haired girl for
being too emotionally fragile.  Now she stood, stone-faced and resigned to fate, next to the other survivor, Ayane.  How startlingly she had changed in a survival situation.

“We’ll set up in one of the buildings near the outside and wait for the attack.  I doubt they really know how few of us are left, else they wouldn’t have retreated last night.  They should come all at once.”

“Hey, just like your group discounts back
in the brothel!” Kimura joked.

“Wow… even at a time like this, Kimura?” Hitomi asked, shaking her head with a faint smile.

“I don’t care if we are about to die, I can’t resist when you set yourself up like that,” Kimura squealed with a grin.

The group took up their weapons and left the funeral pyre behind.  They managed to find one Gimlet willing to assist Naoko, a dim-witted worker named Giddix.  From a small building at the edge of the city,
the group prepared for their last stand.  Out before them, making no effort to form lines, were the guards from the Citadel.  They had cut down so many, surviving for two weeks off of luck and desperation, yet there were still so many enemies left. 

Yumiko was right,
Hitomi thought as she stared out the doorway at the guards. 
This is the end for all of us.

She was only fourteen years old when she came home to an empty house.  Her father had not left her any food or any letter saying why he left.  The house was empty except for a few toys she had found and a few drops of blood on the sink.  She had wanted to keep the house by working a job, but she had no special skills and no one was hiring young girls, especially ones cursed with blue-green hair.  She was tall, slender and her breasts had just come in the season before.  That was enough for Gurosuke, the owner of a specialty club in the northern ghettos of the Citadel.

Gurosuke was strictly a businessman and did not know how to ease anyone into the business, nor did he care.  Hitomi’s first client was a Rathgar captain who was so big she thought he was going to break her in half.  The captain had paid double for a pure girl and did not ask for particulars, like how old they were.  The extra cut Gurosuke gave her did not make the pain go away, but it did allow her to buy a big bottle of grog and get plastered.  It was a night of firsts for her.

She thought she was going to be executed three years later when she killed a customer who went too far with her.  She had not even realized she had done it until Gurosuke pulled her off of the corpse and beat her until she stopped moving.  At seventeen and completely addicted to grog, Hitomi was not worth paying off the guards
so Gurosuke had her arrested and thrown in the Pit.  If her client had been a Rathgar, she would have been hanged, but the one in charge of sentencing her was the guard captain that had initiated her into her life of whoring and he took pity on her… for a little nostalgic incentive on her part.  She had thought about killing him, too, as she writhed on top of him, but she was already starting to get sick from lack of alcohol and couldn’t think clearly enough to form a plan.

She could remember little from her first few weeks in the Pit, just a blur of faces as she was passed around to anyone who could give her a sip of some kitchen-brewed death juice.  She took drugs as well, if that was what was offered.  If she ever remembered all the shit she had done while high on Kafkel juice, she would probably kill herself.  When she could not screw her way into a fix, she would steal it and just as one angry Rathgar was about to answer her prayers and end her pitiful existence, there was Helkree and Grass-hair.

“Take her,” is what he said, pointing right at her.  She would never forget it or the confusion she felt when he did that.  Helkree, that crazy-ass Rathgar that more than one client had mentioned before, dragged her by the hair all the way to her cell.  Six months later, Hitomi had outlasted and outfought a dozen other females to stay close to Grass-hair.  She had not been with him yet, had only seen him a few times, but Helkree was fiercely loyal to him and because of that the others saw him as a god.  Helkree helped deify him in their eyes and never let any of the Helcats forget that Grass-hair was the reason they were there, above all the other floozies who could never stand on their own feet.

“I’ll do anything you want,” she had confessed, bleary eyed and sobbing the first time Grass-hair brought her to his cell.  “You just tell me and I can do it, I promise.  It’s what I’m good for!”

“You would not have made it this far if pleasing men was all you were good for, Hitomi,” he said, gently pushing her against the wall and caressing her cheek.  “You’re not just some whore; not anymore.  You’re a Helcat and I would have you by my side over anyone else in this world.  Remain at my side, always… that’s all I ask.”

She was his from that moment on and agreed to never leave him, but now she was going back on that promise.  She had not seen him in five years, but his last orders were to watch over the people
they had freed.  She prayed to the spirits that Grass-hair would understand why she and her sisters died there inside that building at the edge of Gimlet City and that he would forgive her.

“Spirits of War, I can’t believe I’m going to die in a city of Gimlets, all because that dumbass Greela thinks there’s a super weapon,” Indie mused. 
“How dumb.  Like Gimlets could build a super weapon.  Rathgar fall for anything.”

“
Hey, wait…” Hitomi said, pausing and staring into space.  Her eyes got big and she looked around.  “Holy shit, wait!  A super weapon!”

“It was a lie, Hitomi,” Beretta said.  “We helped feed it because it kept Greela from attacking the farming villages and focus on us.  The Gimlets build some strange things, but none are capable of building anything like what the men from the north have.”

“Do they have anything that looks like a super weapon?”

“I don’t know
, what does a super weapon look like?  I don’t think the guards even know.” Beretta said.  A look crossed over her face, as if an idea was forming in her head and she smiled at Hitomi.  “Oh, splendid!”

“What the hell is going on?” Kimura asked.

“It would be something like a tube… that magic could be funneled through, I think,” the Infernal continued.  “It would have to be spectacular-looking, not just a tube on the ground or anything.”

“It will be,” Hitomi said.  “You’ll be inside of it, making as much noise and light as possible
.  And it needs to be mobile!  Can you get it on a cart or something?”

“Of course!
  And I can line the entire thing with flames and coils of glowing heat!” The flames on Beretta’s head brightened with excitement.  “It won’t be the least bit lethal, you know.  Not unless any of them are dumb enough to crawl in there with me.”

“Hey, what are you two giggling about?” Kimura pressed.  “Have you two gone insane, finally?  You’re going to strip naked and dance around outside or something?”

“Magda and Indie, go with Beretta.  She needs muscle,” Hitomi commanded.  “Quickly, ladies!  The rest of you, we’re holding this fucking ground, at all costs!  Beretta needs enough time to get to the Scrapyard and back and we’re going to give it to her!”

The Infernal and the two Rathgar exited the house and sprinted for the Scrapyard while the remaining women braced for the attack.  Unlike what Hitomi had predicted, the entire force did not come at them all at once.  A group large enough to surround the building approached and fanned out.  Once they realized there were no other entrances, they clustered to push through the doorway.

Arrows came down into the group three at a time.  Naoko, keeping her cool, had waited to see what the attackers would do before revealing her presence.  Before the group realized what was happening, six of them were bleeding out on the ground and several others were running back to the formation with shafts sticking out of their bodies.  The few who had managed to charge the door were cut down quickly by Hitomi’s spear.

The group retreated and called for more reinforcements.  The surroundings were checked by shield-wearing guards and when it was clear that no others were there to ambush them, fifty men rushed the door at once.

Hitomi wished they still had Indie with her shield, to hold back the tide.  The two Naga men who had taken their place did not have the stature or strength to push back the assault.  Hitomi and her two remaining militia members pistoned their spears with practiced aim, felling the first few and slowing the others.