The Eagle's Vengeance (34 page)

The faint sound of footsteps came from the corridor, two or three hunters at a guess, and he waited and listened as they approached the office, hearing one of them step into the small room and stop barely three paces from him. The pause stretched out until he tensed himself to leap forward and fight, certain that at any second the unseen searcher would realise that there was a blind spot in the room and take the single step forward that would reveal his presence. A stealthy footstep sounded, but the German stopped himself from springing out of the cupboard’s concealment by a hair’s breadth as he realised that the hunter had stepped out of the office, rather than further into it. Soft, cautious voices sounded in the corridor, the women clearly advancing further into the building, and Arminius poked his head warily round the cupboard’s edge to find the office empty.

Taking a long slow breath he stepped warily into the room and flattened himself against the wall alongside the door, peeking up the corridor’s length through its opening. Three women were advancing cautiously up the narrow building’s length, and as he watched two of them stepped into the wards to either side of the corridor, leaving the third protecting their backs against any threat from the rooms ahead of them. Without conscious thought he stepped into the corridor behind her, drawing his hunting knife and reaching over her shoulder to ram the blade up into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. The hunter’s body stiffened, the sharp iron jammed through her tongue preventing her from making any sound as Arminius dragged her back against him, ripping the knife free and sweeping it across her throat to finish her. Lowering the spasming body to the floor, he put the knife down beside her rather than waste time re-sheathing it, drawing his sword and taking a two-handed grip of its hilt as he advanced back to the doorways through which the other two hunters had stepped a moment before, glancing from one to the other and back with the deadly intent of a predator.

A movement to his left had the blade in motion without the effort of conscious thought, a savage blow that caught the hunter as she stepped out of the ward she had just searched and hacked clean through her neck, burying the sword deep in the sodden wood of the door’s frame while the woman’s headless corpse tottered and slumped to the floor, her head thudding onto the flagstones. A screech behind him was barely enough warning that the last of the them was upon him, and with the sword still buried in the door’s frame he stepped over the headless corpse and into the empty ward behind her to avoid whatever attack was upon him, tearing the blade loose and turning to face the threat. The hunter came through the door behind him with her sword’s blade ringing on the stone as she threw it aside and pulled a pair of matched hunting knives from her belt, dropping into a fighting crouch facing the German and staying beyond the reach of his long blade as she weighed him up.

They faced each other in silence for a moment, Arminius easing his sword up to point at her face and sliding his feet a little further apart while the woman, her face a swirl of blue ink in which her green eyes burned angrily, lifted the twin knife blades to match the long blade’s threat. Bellowing his challenge the German lunged forward, intent on putting the weapon’s point through her throat and ending the fight, but the woman stepped neatly aside and pushed his blade away from her with her right-hand knife while the left flickered out and slashed at his belly, forcing him to step hurriedly backwards. Jumping forward to attack him she advanced two swift paces, keeping the right-hand blade against his sword while she cocked her left to stab sideways at his chest. Stepping into her lunge the German smashed an elbow into her face before she could sink the knife into him, sending her reeling back against the wall, but as he gathered himself to hack the sword into her body in a horizontal cut she came back off the stone with an ear-rending howl, her knives flashing as she cut at his arms and slashed a pair of long cuts into their flesh.

Snarling at the pain, and realising that he was in a fight that would probably end in defeat, given his inability to land a killing blow with the longer blade at such close quarters, the German stepped back a pace before snapping his wrists to throw the sword at his opponent, forcing her to duck away from its lethal arc and allowing him a momentary respite from her assault. Bursting through the ward’s door he made to sprint down the corridor with the Vixen at his heels, his toe snagging on the body of the headless woman he had killed a moment before and sending him sprawling full length alongside his first victim. Rolling onto his back he tensed to spring back onto his feet only to see his opponent leap through the doorway, diving onto him with her knives poised to strike like the claws of a pouncing hawk.

Marcus found himself in the shell of the headquarters’ first main room, the area where soldiers were allowed to come and go more or less freely with messages or making deliveries. A once proud mosaic of Mars was part hidden by the dank fire debris that was strewn across the floor, hundreds of its thumbnail-sized tiles having been torn up during the fort’s destruction in an aimless act of vandalism that he supposed characterised the Venicones’ urge to remove all trace of the invaders from the south once the legions had withdrawn from the wall twenty years before. On an impulse he bent and picked up a handful of the ceramic squares, retreating back into the inner sanctum where, when the fort was occupied, only the cohort’s centurions and its commander would have been admitted under normal circumstances. On the room’s far side were the two strongrooms where the cohort’s pay and standards would have been stored, and for a moment he considered hiding in their dark recesses before realising that no concealment was going to be adequate to protect him from the searching Vixens. Easing the heavy cloak to the fog-moistened stone floor he sheathed the spatha and drew his shorter gladius, the blade’s length better suited to the room’s close confines, tensing himself to fight as the almost inaudible sounds of slow, tentative footsteps reached him through the doorway between the two rooms. When the sounds were so close that he was sure that whoever was stalking him was only feet away, on the other side of the wall against which his back was planted, he tossed a single tile into the corner of the room to his front and right, raising the short sword so that the last few inches of its blade were within a hand’s span of his face. In the distorted picture of the doorway that he saw reflected in the mirror finish an indistinct white shape emerged from the gloom behind it, a face, and before it came a gleaming shard of iron, either spearhead or arrow, and both equally deadly if the woman hunting him was allowed to strike first.

Swivelling his eyes to watch the entrance, he tossed another tile onto the wall in front of him, and the sudden rattle drew the hunter into the room in a rush, her spear raised to kill. As she came through the doorway, her attention fixed to her left, he sank the blade deep into the space between her shoulder and neck and then twisted the sword as he wrenched it free. Grunting, the woman staggered, half turned to bring the spear to bear and then pitched forward onto her face and lay still, apart from a slight twitching of her hands and feet. Stepping forward Marcus threw the remaining tiles aside, tossed the sword into his left hand and snatched up the spear, pivoting swiftly as he spun it lengthways in his hand and then stamped forward, stabbing the black iron head forward into the open doorway as another woman came screaming through the opening. The spear’s blade sank deep into the Vixen’s chest, and as she tottered with the wound’s pain and shock Marcus tore it free and slashed the edge across her throat to open the artery beneath the surface, sending a spray of blood across the room. He kicked her back into the outer room, wincing as something moved in the shadows behind the dying woman and spinning away to take up a fresh position to one side of the door with the spear raised ready to strike again. With a scrabble of feet another one of them was through the door, but his savage spear thrust found only empty air, and before he could pull the blade back to strike again his ankle was seized in a powerful grip that upended him, teeth sinking into his calf as the dog Monstrum savaged his leg with a succession of lightning-swift bites. Stabbing out frantically with his spear he saw the iron head go wide of its mark by no more than an inch, the enormous dog snarling and springing forward to clamp its jaws around his swordhand before he could strike with the gladius, a savage bite sinking the brute’s teeth deep into its delicate bones and tendons and spilling the sword from his grasp. The beast sprang forward again, and suddenly the Roman was face-to-face with the dog’s muzzle, staring up helplessly as Monstrum opened his jaws wide and reared back, ready to tear into his victim’s defenceless face.

A shape flitted across the doorway and Arabus loosed his arrows, knowing even as his fingers released them that he had wasted his last attack on a ruse. Their iron heads clattered off the wall behind the open door frame and fell uselessly to the floor, and in the moment of silence that followed he drew his long hunting knife and readied himself for death. A single hunter came through the door in a sinuous motion, her spear raised to strike until she realised that her prey had loosed his last shot. They regarded each other for a moment as two more of them followed her into the room, one armed with a long sword, the other with an arrow strung to her bow. The first woman had features which were virtually undistinguishable beneath the tattoos that swirled across her face, but her eyes were twin oases of brown, surrounded on all sides by angry white as she advanced towards the helpless scout, baring her teeth in a snarl that communicated far more clearly than the choppy flow of her own language that she was spitting down at him. Prodding at him with the spear, she gestured for him to put down the hunting knife that was his only remaining defence, and when he shook his head in refusal she stabbed the blade into his calf close to the arrow that still transfixed his leg, smiling down at him as he convulsed with the pain before kicking the knife from his hand. Grimacing up at her as she pulled the spear free, the Tungrian spat at her feet in the only form of resistance he had left.

‘Bitch!’

Grinning broadly, the hunter passed the spear to the bow-armed woman and reached to her belt, a wide strap decorated with lumps of leather that had been sewn onto its surface, pulling a short skinning knife with a broad blade from its sheath and motioning her comrades forward while she sized up her victim. Arabus laughed incredulously, forcing a note of bravado into his voice.

‘Trying to work out where to start, are you? I’d send the three of you to meet your gods if I didn’t have this arrow through—’

She slapped him, hard enough to put stars in his vision for a moment, and her companions pounced while he was still part stunned, taking an arm apiece and pinning his legs with their own while she knelt between them, his vulnerability filling the scout with sudden dread that death was far from the worst thing he faced. Smiling at him smugly, the hunter reached out and gripped the arrow, snapping off the iron head and then pulling its length from the wound while Arabus grunted at the renewed pain, and while the wound bled freely she tore off his leggings to reveal his naked lower body, putting the skinning knife’s wide point against the entry wound.

‘No,
don’t
…’

She smirked, pushing her hand forward to sink the blade into the hole, broadening it from one finger’s width to three in an instant and tearing another, longer, teeth-gritted snarl of pain from the tracker, who stared in horror at the wooden handle apparently sprouting from his calf. After a moment the woman reached forward and tore the knife free, putting it to her nose and sniffing at the blood that coated the blade with a sigh of pleasure. Leaning forward, she took his penis between her thumb and forefinger, looking up at him and shaking her head in mock sympathy, waggling the flaccid member and saying something to the women restraining him which had them both laughing, their faces hard as they stared down at the helpless man. She spoke to him again, tapping a finger to one of the belt decorations before pointing to his penis with a savage grin, then put the bloody knife’s edge to the organ’s root and stretched out the terrified scout’s member as if to make the act of severing it easier to achieve while Arabus stared at her aghast, the pain in his leg all but forgotten as he lost control of his bladder. Dropping his penis with a shout of disgust, she slapped his testicles hard enough to wrench a scream of pain from him, allowing one to fall from her hand as she pulled the other clear of his body, staring at it for a moment and then back at the terrified scout, baring her teeth in a rictus of hate as she sliced through his scrotum and cut away the testicle with a single savage swipe of her knife.

Somewhere in the derelict fortress a man screamed in agony, the full-throated howl too lost in pain to even know that he was giving voice to it, and the dog paused for an instant at the sound, cocking an ear at the shriek. Summoning all of his strength, Marcus dropped the spear and clenched his unbitten hand into a fist, smashing it into the animal’s jaw hard enough to cut the knuckles on its teeth. With a snarl of rage Monstrum darted his head forward and sank his teeth into the bicep of the arm that was attacking him, stiffening the Roman’s body with the pain as the dog worried at the muscle with its powerful jaw. Searching across the stone floor for the hilt of his sword with the other hand, ignoring the pain of the damage the animal had inflicted on it a moment before, he found the thief’s cloak beneath his fingers. Thrusting the hand into the garment’s folds with a desperate lunge, his fingers found the lip of the heavy gold bowl still hidden in the pocket. Pulling it free he swung his arm to smash the heavy dish into Monstrum’s temple with a thud. The dog yelped in surprise and released its grip on his other arm, shaking its head in surprise at the crunching impact. Raising the bowl again the Roman repeated the blow with fresh purpose, turning it in his hand to bring the rim’s heavy edge down on the same point of the beast’s skull he had struck a moment before, and with as much force as his damaged hand would allow. The animal’s skull broke with an audible click, and, as it tottered astride him, Marcus swung the improvised weapon a third time, feeling the rim sink into the dog’s shattered temple as he hammered it home in the same spot. Rolling off his body, the dog staggered disjointedly to its feet, allowing the Roman to regain his own footing. Snatching up the spear he punched it through the beast’s side, feeling a moment of resistance before the wicked iron head burst through the dog’s ribcage and found its heart. Monstrum let out a final baying howl of pain and died, slumping onto the stone floor with its eyes rolled up to show only the whites.