The centaurs were just heading up the final few meters of the ridge when they spotted Last of Autumn but not me riding away hard and fast. They saw Last of Autumn on her horse, the dappled gray, racing away under the moonlight, heading back down into the dark forest along the river valley. They missed that I was behind her, invisible and hanging on for dear life.
I’d ridden a horse once. One time.
Now we were going at perilously breakneck speed down the side of what I considered a very dangerous hill on an unsafe grade. As in, if the galloping horse hit one rabbit hole it would be our necks that were broken.
I would have told her to slow down, but… weak.
So I just held on and tried not to fall off. In the dark and the wind, I cranked my head around to see the centaurs rearing up, as if to get a better look at Autumn, their fleeing prey, and then turning around in flurries of dirt to race back down the hill after her. The goat men had already turned and were loping with bandy-legged strides, braying into the air, and making for us as fast as they could.
You could tell that each faction within the enemy hunting force wanted to be the first to get the elf, but not just that—each creature wanted to beat even their own kind to reach her before anyone else as she galloped madly away downslope, heading back into the dark forest below.
The first arrows flew, and none were aimed too well. The centaurs had those powerful ranged marksmen recurved bows. The kind of bows Mongolian horse-mounted archers had once used to ruin half the known world. But in this case, quality didn’t lead to accuracy. Though, given the vision Autumn had shown us, I wasn’t counting on them missing again. The horny goat men, on the other hand, whirled crude slings about their heads as they bounded and leapt down the hill, then let small deadly stones fly at us with fairly good accuracy.
One whistled just past my invisible face as we raced away.
Our plan worked. The hunting force that would have run smack dab into the Ranger scouts at the top of the ridge was now tearing off in pursuit of this prized prey. And bonus: they weren’t signaling other enemy
elements with their Uroo Uroo horns. They wanted her for themselves.
Coupled with the memory she had shown us in Moon Vision, that sent cold shivers down my spine.
They were what I thought evil should look like.
Two minutes later we were heading into the thick stands of trees that signaled the outer edges of the woods along the slopes that led down to the twisting river. No doubt Sergeant Hardt was updating command with our plan. If no one engaged, the best the Rangers could hope for was that the enemy continued its outward fragmentation in every direction, losing the ability to bring forces to bear against our main body before we reached the climb up the narrow canyon to Phase Line Domino. If by midnight we reached the rally at Fox, the bottom of the canyon, and started our ascent, then to me, that was a win for us. The enemy would have to follow Rangers up a dangerous pass. Rangers would make that very difficult for them. Whereas right now, crossing the night under the fading crescent moon along the open and rising foothills, any elements caught out in the open, with wounded and overloaded on equipment, faced a pretty tough fight. Surrounded of course.
No Ranger likes to fight that kind of battle.
But there would be hell to pay whatever the outcome. The enemy would pay dearly whether they liked it or not. Caught, the Rangers would go honey badger in a heartbeat. There would be much regret on the part of the enemy even if they did manage to pick and win that fight.
We had a head start, Last of Autumn and I on horseback, but it was clear the centaurs were faster. After all, they were horses without riders. They came forward quickly, getting ahead of the goat men who were kicking, punching and tripping one another to try and get to us first, lustily baying like goats do.
Now arrows were falling into the trees around us and soon our forward motion was slowed as Last of Autumn and her horse wove through the dense forest and down onto a trail that ran deeper into the late-night woods. It was an old trail that hadn’t seemed used in a long time. Shadows loomed up at us—giant trees that reminded me too much of the glowering trolls we’d faced the night before. Deadfall and dead growth had fallen across the track, and rains had collapsed the way in places. I wondered who had made
this path. And then I looked up and toward our left at the edge of the forest. Some of the centaurs had taken intercept routes, and they were gaining on us by using the open ground outside the forest to get ahead of our escape.
And of course, my weight and what gear I hadn’t left with the scouts was added to Last of Autumn’s horse’s burden. Still the big beast thundered ahead into the gloom of the forest, heaving to get ahead of our desperate pursuers.
The first centaur, a big mean brute with an almost prissy face, roared down through the trees of the upper forest, spear out and no bow in hand. He made an incredible and fantastic leap over a fallen log up there above the trail and came flying down onto the path ahead of us. But his momentum carried him farther downslope, and when I looked back, he was scrambling around like a fallen horse trying to get up, get his hooves under him, and get back along our trail as fast as he could.
An arrow from out of nowhere whistled past my ear and off into the wind and the night as we raced further into the dark.
A massive tree lay across the old ruined trail ahead, and Autumn drove her horse off and into the forest to get around it. We slowed and followed a draw off the trail that led deeper down toward the bottom of the river valley. “Great,” I said above the wind and thunder of hooves beating out a
staccato tempo. “We’ve lost ’em. What next?”
She said nothing for a long moment and then she reined in the horse and we literally started sliding down an impossibly steep slope covered by dead leaves. Steeper than anything I’d ever thought it was possible for a horse to go down. Much less in the dark. Chased by horse-man-beasts. With spears and bad intentions.
Everything was dust and moonlight and we slammed into not just a outstretched branches. I held on to her and my weapon at the same time. If it came to a fight, I’d need it.
We made the bottom of the slope and she slid off the horse and said, “Come with me now!”
The meaning was clear. We were going to try and lose them on foot while the horse used his unburdened speed to get away in another direction. She had her bow out and an arrow nocked. She patted the dappled gray, murmured Tolkien words I couldn’t understand, and sent him disappearing into the night gloom of the forest like some undersea monster swimming off
into the shadowy depths never to be seen again.
We were running through the trees, and I could hear myself. Hear my battle rattle even though I’d gotten it quieter than I’d ever thought possible to work with the scouts. But compared to me she made no sound at all. At least I was invisible. Still had the ring on. But I knew she could hear me, and she kept telling me to follow her this way or that. Or to watch this branch, or this step. It was clear she knew where she was going.
I didn’t.
“Where are we going?” I gasped as my cardio started to get under control.
“To a place where we can ambush them,” she replied inside my head.
Then she shouted back at me in Shadow Cant Korean. Suddenly. A warning.
“Watch out!”
Another centaur came from out of nowhere in the darkness all around us. I was so busy following her, I was only dimly aware of the four-legged thunder of his sudden onslaught through the forest press. He came out of the woods to our right and she turned and fired her bow on the fly. Twice. Fast. One arrow after the other. Both silver-feathered shafts slammed into the muscled gut of the horse-man, just below the plates of the centaur’s torso armor. The thing tumbled, its front legs going out from under it as it crashed headfirst into a tree.
I’m pretty sure I heard its skull break when it hit.
“Come now,” whispered Autumn in my head. “So close. We don’t want to be caught out here.”
Further off I could hear more pursuers. And the sounds of the braying goat men racing bandy-legged down through the deadfall into the area she was leading us through. In my mind I could see their lecherous leers and toothy smiles, horns down and about no good business as they fought to be the first to find us.
Then what?
I don’t think I wanted to know.
I made up my mind they wouldn’t get her.
Mess with her, and get the full blur. The blur being how many rounds I could mag dump on them. I promised them that and got ready to engage these jerks. I was definitely strapped, and they were about to get clapped.
Autumn had slowed to a jog and now we were leaping down a twisty set of carved steppingstones. They were covered in dead, red leaves and looked to have been so for some time. My Moon Vision saw all this whereas my regular eyes could not. And I doubt the Army’s latest night vision would have seen a thing. There wasn’t enough light here for them to do their job.
The steppingstones twisted down the side of the hill, and in a few minutes I could hear the distant river. The question was… would we run into any other enemies besides the ones chasing us out here tonight? If we did, things would get messy and out of hand real fast.
A hustle of goat men spotted us and came leaping down along the top of the trail. Calling out like crying goats come to feed. She turned and fired at one, putting the arrow straight through the beer-bellied thing’s gut.
I sighted and squeezed off a suppressed burst on another. He went rolling down through the dead leaves on the hill.
All around us I could see them moving. They’d fanned out into a hunting semicircle. My fire hadn’t slowed them in the least. If anything, it drove them on to get to us even faster and close this end of the noose on us.
On her, anyway. They couldn’t see me. Perhaps I was lucky they didn’t react to the sound of my boom stick by sending up a smoke signal of the Uroo Uroo variety. Boom-stickers here. Come get some. But I doubt they knew what suppressed fire sounded like and expect they were confused to hear that sound coming from, as far as they could see, an elf.
And they wanted her for themselves. Bad.
She grabbed my hand even though I was invisible and pulled me off through a high wall of shrubs we’d been heading straight toward. Like someone had once grown the giant wild hedge here and long ago they’d left it to its own will. And though it had grown wild and tangled, the hedge had never given up that memory of the wall it had once been trained to be.
She could see me regardless of the ring. I slipped it off of my finger and back into my cargo pocket, sealing the flap to make sure the ring stayed in there good and tight.
She sliced through thick tendrils as we pushed through the hedge. Razor-sharp ninja sword out and in one hand. Hacking up and down to clear a path forward and through the tangle of twisting branches and cutting
leaves. Her breath coming in delicate little heaves. The bow in her other hand. Whistling stones flew into the wall of shrubs all about us, the goat men hooting and calling to one another as they sensed their prey run to ground.
And then we forced our way through to the other side and came face to face with a dazzling ancient ruin bathed in the bare moonlight from above.
True, the Moon Vision no doubt played the primary role in making its white marble a thing of beauty. Even so, it was unlike anything I’d ever beheld in my life before this moment. It was like a building, or a tower, that had collapsed, and its fragments had become the ruins of a king’s crown. There could be no doubt the place was ancient, hinting at past glories of some epic age we’d never know.
“What is this…” I mumbled stupidly as I followed her into it. In awe of its mystery and dark splendor. Forgetting the stabby little goat men scrabbling about through the underbrush behind us. “It’s incredible,” I added. Helpfully.
In my comm I was getting traffic from the sergeant major. It was coming in distorted and broken. But he was definitely trying to get ahold of me. And that probably meant it was important.
“This…” she began breathlessly, striding forward fast to get inside the circle of bone-white moonlit stone that formed the broken crown of the fantastic once-ago tower that had fallen in on itself in the distant past. I hustled after her, MK18 up and scanning the access points through the hedge. Waiting for little goat men to drop through. “This is the Temple of… Hidden King. Elves who once lived… worshipped here… by the river’s edge.”
We walked through the remains of a fabulous collapsed arch. Like something out of an ornate cathedral. It was covered in scrawled runes worked delicately over the stone. Faint and beyond anything I would have ever thought possible without some kind of advanced industrial carving or etching machine. And I didn’t even know if such a thing existed in our times. I mean, did people back in our time, even then, could they do this level of fantastic detail stuff by hand?
I’d seen these kinds of markings before. I didn’t know it at the time, but later as I thought about it, I figured it out. Now I can tell you it was Tolkien Elvish. From long ago. The made-up language my more obsessive
linguistics colleagues had hobbied in. And yet here were walls and walls of chiseled tablets of text in this ancient and made-up language like it was a real thing. The real medium of informational exchange in some vast culture that had once ruled these lands. Not a hobby from a fusty old book. Inside the circumference of the primeval temple, almost all of what remained of the old walls was covered in rows upon rows of the script. It was everywhere and it was endless.
And meaningless to me. But not meaningless.
Some forever-language-learning background app in my mind came to the conclusion I would have to figure this language out if I was to uncover the secrets of this world.
I might have sighed out loud. But truth be told… I like challenges. I love the puzzle of languages. So it wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be. I was just tired, and there, hunted in the middle of the night by goat men, there was no end I could see that wasn’t real bad for all of us.
“Come with me,” she said once more. Then almost as fast as Chief McCluskey had moved with the sword in Chief Rapp’s hands, taking it away and placing the razor-sharp edge against the special operator’s neck that day back in the C-17, she stuck her sword in the bare dirt where a missing flagstone had long ago been pulled up, and almost at the same time she pulled and fired an arrow in one fluid motion at a goat man assassin who’d crept in through the hedge and whom I had not seen.
The shot whistled away and spitted him through the throat. The goat man started gagging and spouting blood. It died seconds later, blood seeping out through its dirty fingers and black nails, the whites of its eyes rolling up into its horny skull.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
I was scanning every sector, following the sights on my MK18 which interfaced beautifully with Moon Vision in ways no one had probably ever imagined. Using NVGs and sights was horrible. At best. You had to be a nerd-level shooter to enjoy that particular experience. But with Moon Vision and its strange telescoping awareness, it was like my eyes became the sights. Our senses had definitely been augmented.
I could hear the hooves of the goat men scuffing about beyond the wall of shrubs. They whispered like demons in horror movies do when they’re
driving someone mad without being seen. It was half hiss and half malevolent giggle.
“Down here,” Autumn whispered at me.
I turned and saw she was at the lip of a central well. A giant hole. A giant gaping hole, in which ancient and cracked marble steps led down into dark depths.
“What’s down there?” I asked.
She turned back, her face beautiful and frightened at the same time in the dark. I could see every detail of her, and she was fascinating. Her eyes endless silver starry universes you could stare into and maybe get lost in forever. But she was frightened, and that had me concerned. Maybe this hadn’t been such a great plan after all. Maybe she knew that.
The Rangers were now free to make it to the first en route rally point, and as far as that was concerned… good to go. We’d done it. We’d drawn the enemy off. Or at least we’d bought our side a little more time to get a little closer to escaping this haunted river valley. And right now, the way things looked, every step closer to the objective was a win. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other until you got somewhere. Straight out of the Drill Sergeant Ward playbook.
Good enough, I told myself, and asked her what was down there in the well beneath the ruined temple. It was clear we were going down. Fine. Let’s do this. It might as well be this.
“A demon,” she said up at me.
And then we started down into the darkness.
