Up the twisting boulder-laden ravine far beneath the top of the black crag, we followed silent pools of water and crossed the murmuring stream back and forth, moving tactically up toward the rumored entrance to the tomb of the Ilner.
Tanner was on point with his suppressed MK18. We, as opposed to the assault teams that would hit the gate in just over twelve hours, had the luxury of surplus ammunition. We would be breaching and clearing our way through a labyrinth filled with traps and enemies. So we got five mags. Each. The snipers had all the ammunition they could do. The two-forty had one and a half belts. Sergeant Kurtz followed carrying the three-twenty holstered on his gear. His Rampage shotgun stowed on his back, off his ruck. As team leader he would act as the grenadier and be responsible for any explosive breaching that might need to happen. The two gunners, Specialist Rico and Private Soprano acting as the AG, followed along carrying the beast of a light machine gun. Brumm brought up the rear of the whole team carrying the SAW on rear security. He cleared our backtrail, working dip and watching the swirling mist which had come up that evening as we made our terminal approach to the caves beneath the fortress.
The Lost Boys had said the woods and mountains were filled with orc and goblin tribes in service to King Triton. Alias, Chief McCluskey. Or at least that was our guess.
Between the lead breaching element under Kurtz at the front and Specialist Brumm in the rear, came the snipers and their spotters humping all the tools of their trade. Then Last of Autumn and myself. Kennedy was with the snipers, carrying his staff like it was one of their high-speed sniper rifles, and keeping to himself. Mumbling silent wordless phrases the wizard Vandahar had taught him. Over and over again. Practicing.
“Those like magic spells or somethin’?” Tanner asked during one of the halts on our approach to the target entrance.
Kennedy shook his head. “More like directions to keep my focus on the stuff he taught me. Apparently it can get out of hand if I don’t stay on top of it.”
I knew what Kennedy meant. The situation he was talking about
reminded me of a common Army phrase that I first heard in Basic. Ironically, considering, that phrase is “meet the wizard.” It describes that moment when a combination of physical and/or mental stress makes one break and get all wacky. PT’ll do it, but cognitive stress does it pretty well also. “The wizard” is the person you have to meet and shake hands with, metaphorically, in order to break barriers—mental or physical. Kennedy was practicing his focus so that when it came time for him to act as a wizard, incoming and all hell breaking loose down there, he’d be ready to meet the wizard, too.
“How’s that?” Tanner asked PFC Kennedy as everyone else sat there in the fog and rock, adjusting their gear and getting ready for the next and last move to our target. “Like… do this and that and then you’ll be able make a giant turkey dinner appear? Thanksgivin’ with all the fixins? I could go for something besides elf chow, know what I mean?”
Kennedy smiled wanly.
“No,” he said softly, his watery eyes distant behind his birth control glasses. “More like stuff drill sergeants used to say to you back in Basic. Y’know… motivational sayings. Keeps you focused when you’re riding the lightning.”
Tanner laughed. One of the snipers told him to “shut it” and reminded him they were actually on patrol. Tanner bobbed his head but gave a look that said, You know how the snipers are. He leaned over to me and whispered, “They’re just all giddy about playing Oswald for the high score once we get up into that fortress. Don’t want anything to ruin that do they, Talk?”
I guessed they didn’t.
“Did the old guy actually call it that?” asked Specialist Brumm from nearby as he sat studying his M249. Brumm hated snipers. That was a known fact. He thought there was something inherently chicken about shooting people in any way other than face to face, up close and personal. Anyone who didn’t want to do what needed to be done in a confined space skating across the Occam’s razor of the fatal funnel the entire time was a cop-out and not worthy of his fellowship.
Brumm was lovingly cleaning bits of his weapon here and there. He wanted to be ready when it was time to go live with the two drums he had left. After that he’d probably lose all will to live. There would be no
tomahawks and adventures in the great white Dire Frost for him. Getting that Forge back online and feeding his two-four-nine was the most important thing in the world. As far as he was concerned.
“’Cause that’s what they used to call gettin’ executed down south,” he continued. “Read it in a Stephen King book. Ridin’ the lightnin’. Death chair and all.”
Kennedy looked up and made a face.
“Nah,” he said after a moment. “He didn’t say it like that. He used words you’d think a wizard would use. Power and Pillars of the Earth and Great Deeps of Morlon. Wherever Morlon is. Anyway, I gotta take it seriously. When I bottomed out last time it was… pretty scary. But… that is what it feels like when you do it. It feels like you’re riding a giant lightning bolt you don’t want to get off. Y’know?”
Two things.
Most of the Rangers didn’t give PFC Kennedy such a hard time anymore. Except for Kurtz, of course. He would never not give PFC Kennedy a hard time. Even if Kennedy earned the Medal of Honor and became a four-star general, Kurtz would find a way to heap contempt on him. The sergeant was currently off checking the route ahead, otherwise he would have yelled at Kennedy for talking and put him in the front leaning rest position during the halt. Kurtz was that guy. The sergeant never stopped, never needed rest, and wanted nothing from anyone except for them to do their job to his impossible standards. Tanner once told me that Rangers sometimes called guys like Kurtz a “cyborg.” Living human flesh over metal endoskeleton.
But regardless of the sergeant’s most likely eternal contempt, Kennedy had acquired a new kind of quiet respect in the detachment. The Rangers weren’t sure what to do with him, exactly, but everyone knew what he’d done to the massive giant back at the attack on Sniper Hill at Ranger Alamo. So he was being given a small measure of respect among the Rangers. The question was whether he could hang on to it or not.
And the other thing of the two things was that, as you’ve noted above, Vandahar could speak with Kennedy without me needing to be involved to translate back and forth. And with everyone else too. Within three days the old wizard had understood English and by the end of the week he was using it kind of fluently, if grandiloquently. He used big, high-powered, almost
antique words that we’d never taught him. Or at least I had a hard time imagining which Ranger would have used words like fulminate or sorcerous. Or pusillanimous. Vitriolic. Obfuscate. Vivificate. Sycophantic. Where he got these words from, I honestly had no idea. The linguist in me found it utterly fascinating.
It was like the venerable wizard had absorbed our language mentally, without having to learn it word by word like some chump. Like me, actually. He tapped directly into the universal understanding of concepts within the language and just found the right word he needed in ours and then used it.
It was bizarre. But I had a feeling I’d see things far stranger in the Ruin if we survived long enough to get a look.
Hours later, we’d been moving through the last of the foggy day and our time to enter the cave at the base of the crag was just after dark. We’d have the entire night to get into position on the tower at the top of the crag high above, then check in with the captain as the main force made their attack on the front gate. We put the war paint on. The last of the cammie sticks were used on any exposed skin, and to effect a ghoulish look on our faces. Who knew, maybe these undead losers would go running in fear at the sight of us. Or accept us as distant relatives. It certainly couldn’t hurt— plus, the psychological effect of putting it on under these conditions was not lost.
We were gonna do the undead like they hadn’t been done the first time. Comms were spotty. Batteries, what few had charge left, were being used. But we couldn’t chance a miscommunication. So once we heard the attack, we were to take the tower from the basement below, and the snipers would go for the high score. The two-forty team would be on hand to keep
the tower clear for the snipers to work.
But that was later. Now, in the misty gloom and creeping fog of the last of the day as we approached the cave, the landscape all around us was completely silent. Deathly silent.
“The mist is… good,” whispered Last of Autumn, close to me. “It makes… quiet.”
Kurtz shot her a look as his team came up on the last set of boulders before the sheer rock wall that rose up into the swirling fog. High above was the fortress, we knew, but it was as silent as a graveyard, and we
couldn’t see any of the walls or structures up there.
The quiet did nothing to make me feel better, by the way. Forget the fact we’re about to violate a tomb of the supposed living dead just to pop out and surprise everyone right in the middle of a battle. Forget that. We were walking into a place that by all accounts no one had ever survived. Even the SEAL McCluskey had opted for another way to attack the fortress besides the route we were taking.
But we didn’t have many options. In fact, we just had the one.
We avoided the small waterfall and worked our way behind the drizzle of water across the wet rocks. Beyond that we found the front door to the tomb, and the back door to the fortress above. All we had to do now was survive the ascent through its trap-littered passages and make it to the top in twelve hours. Hopefully under that.
Kurtz ordered us to shuck all our unnecessary gear. Or at least the assault team consisting of Kurtz, Tanner, Brumm, and Sergeant Thor. The rest of us would be carrying the extra gear and ammo in support of the breaching team. It was a good thing we had Jabba with us.
Oh yeah. I didn’t mention him earlier. He’d become like more of a friendly dog than anything else. And he could carry an incredible amount of gear. Which he didn’t seem to mind as long as treats found their way into his fanged mouth. I still had two Cokes left but I was saving them. Generally he’d take the candy or the cookie in any MRE, or whatever anyone else had managed to sneak along. Which really wasn’t a lot for Rangers. They preferred their own weapons and dip over candy in the priority of stuff smuggled Oscar Mike. On Mission. But there always seemed to be something for him.
We’d stripped down a lot of our gear before departing the main element, but now the assaulters got even leaner. We had no NVGs. Their batteries were long dead. But Last of Autumn had assured us she would use her special Hunters’ Fellowship trick. Which she did once we were inside the cave entrance that led into the tomb. We disappeared as the last of the wan daylight faded from the sky and we slithered in between large black rocks to reach the front door of the crypt. Again I watched Sergeant Kurtz suffer through having translucent blue fairy dust sparkle and rain down over him.
Even now, with every incredible thing he’d witnessed, he still did not
want to be part of this fantastical world in any way, shape, or form. It was like his mind screamed and raged against believing that these impossible impossibilities were actually made real and true. He was the kind of guy who would’ve been happier on deployment to some third world hellhole where everyone was trying to kill him with modern weapons and a whole lot of bad intentions. That he could understand. Fairy dust and manticores… not so much. If Tanner was right, his cybernetic programming just couldn’t accept it.
A moment after the ceremony ended and we could hear each other’s thoughts and see things in the dark, Tanner spoke. “Fellowship up, Sar’nt. Good to go.”
I saw, in that brief moment where we could read each other’s thoughts, two things. Kurtz wanting to murder Tanner for crossing the stream of this unbelievable world with that of the black-and-white military he so believed in and wanted everything to be. Forever.
And what Last of Autumn was… thinking… dreaming… of.
What I saw grabbed me. Grabbed me like that first time we touched. That wild electricity that was a magic all its own far more magical than Kennedy’s lightning train.
I saw what she was thinking.
Her and I. Somewhere in a small boat. Sailing into the southern waters of this world. To the cities of men. In the distance, ahead over the water we were crossing, I saw a city. Not like the kind we’d left behind. Not like New York or LA. Paris or London. One like something out of the Middle Ages. Fortresses and squat towers. Smoke and sailing ships riding in the harbor and heading out to sea. Shining in the golden morning light of first day. I could hear the slap of the waves against the side of the old boat. The creak of the tackle. The wind was from off the quarter and the gulls were starting to come in from the port to circle our threadbare patchwork sail. I was at the tiller. I was there. And I could feel the wind, smell the salt, and hear the water all around us. Just the two of us.
Sitting forward, near the sail, Autumn wore a silvery dress and her green cloak. No armor now. No weapons. She sat watching the city we were sailing toward. The wind whipped her hair, tossing it in her face, and she reached up and brushed it away. Then she pointed at the fantastic city and turned to smile at me. A smile that was nothing but hope for all the good
things life must offer. The opposite of the look in her eyes when she told me of the dragon.
It was just us there. In her dream. And… we were free.
When I opened my eyes to see the luminescent world the Hunters’ Fellowship Moon Vision had revealed, lighting the inside of the dark cave in an almost night-vision starlight blue that was better than anything the US Army could ever dream up, I saw Autumn sitting on her knees in the circle we had formed. Pale hands in her lap. Eyes still closed. She was just smiling. Smiling at the thought of a dream that had nothing to do with dragons or what we were about to do.
Like that was some kind of possible future.
I would just be Autumn then, I heard her say in her mind. And… it would just be us.
