Rene pulled his spear out with a sickening squelch and strode on over to the last Leaper, who was trying his best to crawl up a tree despite missing most of his limbs.
“Mershhyy,” the man blubbered through a mouthful of blood, his chest riddled with shrapnel. But Rene had none left to give. He impaled the man through the hump and twisted the shaft, leaning his full weight on the spear to drive it deeper, ignoring the ugly sounds he was pushing out of the man’s collapsed lungs.
It was remarkable, really, how quickly he had adjusted to concept of killing people. Perhaps killing Amits had been good practice in that regard.
He had discovered long ago that there was a blank space somewhere behind his eyes where all the worst thoughts could be put for the time being. But as ever, coming fainter now but just as troubling as before, came the stifled cries within his being, singing their siren’s songs of right and wrong and all the familiar falsehoods which had ossified about the core of his personhood like a pearl in the mouth of an oyster. And like a pearl, they too were a lie, presenting an illusion of beauty and truth which upon closer examination turned out to be composed of nothing more than mucus, grit and the base ugliness which pervaded a strictly material and unsentimental existence.
My soul would feel lighter if I didn’t have to carry all that, he thought, looking over the rows of the dead. But all he felt was a heaviness in his mind and spirit. So he shed the weight into the place behind his eyes, just as Deschane had once taught him.
“Make a hole within your heart,” the lord navigator had told them, “A lime-lined pit where nothing of kindness or weakness can grow. Into this pit you may cast the broken bodies of our enemy, and over them raise a grey tomb which knows no sound. Make a hole within your heart, and fill it with them.”
Rene was not a cruel man, or at least he did not consider himself one. But in the absence of numerical, tactical and physical superiority, the only way he could even the odds was with overwhelming brutality. That was how the Fleet had claimed mound after mound in face of impregnable resistance. More than brain or brawn or bullets, the human heart carried the day when all else collapsed.
And Rene had learned to condition his. The dying Leaper groaned as he lifted it the spear and sank its butt into the hard clay.
Leaving it, he did the same to every single Leaper he found, hoisting their corpses along a line of stakes on the edge of the grassland. He didn’t think they used fear-death pheromones like the Amits did, but the sight of their dead would give the rest of them pause. When he was done he looked over his arrangement of grisly trophies and he dusted his hands like a carpenter who’d finished driving a row of nails into a fresh plank.
“Fill it with them,” he whispered aloud. He was still faraway in his meditations when Exar called out: “Fast movers on the right. Two-eighty meters and closing.”
The bastards had learned quickly not to try the grassy slope again after he’d blown up one of their scouts creeping on the edge of the tree line. They were going to attempt flying over the ravine. A frontal assault would surely follow, assuming they had not spotted the explosives he had hidden among the benguet pines.
“Zildiz! You’re up!” he barked. He looked over and saw the Gallivant sitting astride a dead Leaper and worrying at its exomorph with her teeth and swords. Was she really trying to crack it open for the meat? Rene opened his mouth to rebuke her for her savagery, then realized his own hypocrisy and closed it again.
He had just mounted seven men on sharpened stakes, and was hardly the gold standard of morality now. He and Zildiz were cut from the same cloth.
She finished her ghoulish business and ripped out a length of spinal column whose discs were fused to a series of chitinous plugs that looked like clothesline clips. Zildiz hopped back onto the bluff of stone and began carving into her own exomorph.
“What are you doing?” he said, frightened by the spontaneous act of self-mutilation.
“Fixing myself,” she said tartly, using a sword tip to dig out the plugs from the spinal discs, then sticking them into the deep holes she had cut into her back and neck. Her eyes rolled back into her head and twitched wildly under their lids as she went into a deep trance. Her wings gave a feeble flutter, and she opened her eyes, beaming. Zildiz reached down and broke a spur of basalt off the cliff face. She held the chunk of rock and closed her hand into a fist, crushing it into powder.
“You ‘ve repaired your exmorph,” Rene said in amazement, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Only its basic muscle fiber bundles. The immune system will reject these foreign grafts eventually. I would have done it sooner if you’d let me get at Kryptus last night.”
“I couldn’t let you do that back then.”
“And now?”
“Now we don’t have any other option.”
“See? The sooner you accept my way of doing things, the easier things will get. As easy as this will be, for instance,” she added, pointing her sword at the first of the Leapers who came soaring over the ravine, their silken gliders billowing wide. Rene stood in his ring and readied a spear, waiting until they were close enough for him to see the gleam of their eyes before hurling it like a javelin at the closest one. The stick fell woefully short of the target and disappeared into the brush. Rene swore and snatched up another spear, this one an older sapling whose branches he had left uncut on purpose so that they projected on either side of the shaft like forked barbs. The pack landed, the leading Leaper alighting right where the stakes were clustered thickest. Their kind had never encountered man-made defenses before, and perhaps the Leaper mistook them for a natural growth of leafless stalks. In any event, the man was skewered in six different places before he knew it.
“Yeaarrgghh!” the Leaper screamed as he tried to push himself clear of the fatal trap, his claws slipping on his own spilt guts as he clutched at the stakes which held him up.
Shouting in panic, the other Leapers made last-second flight adjustments to steer clear of the stakes, landing on the flat ground behind or in front of the deadly circle. All of them succeeded in avoiding the same fate as their leader, except for one young juvenile whose thigh snagged on the very edge of the stake line and stuck there, yelling his head off.
A trio glided inside the ring and Rene braced himself, angling the spear so that it caught one of the men in his tubby abdomen. The stricken Leaper hollered and vomited up a mouthful of black and green bile. Mortally wounded, it tried to pull itself up the shaft to get at Rene with its claws. But the forked barbs of the spear kept it at bay as Rene pushed with all his might, hurling his foe back onto the rows of points where he hung there, jerking and bleeding for the rest of the fight. Rene lost his grip on the spear right as the other two Leapers rushed him from the flank and rear. He drew the sword of the ancients, knowing he’d been too slow on the draw and expecting to feel their fangs burrowing into his back.
But then Zildiz took a running leap from the stony bluff, falling upon them like a thunderbolt loosed from the heavens. There was a flurry of contact as the creatures traded blows at whiplash speed. Zildiz laid open one Leaper’s head, slicing his armored helm clean off and revealing the stoved-in skull of the man beneath. She staggered back, the other Leaper ripping her breastplate to shreds with his claws and sinking its fangs into her shoulder. Here the semi-functional state of her exomorph became an advantage—though its stiffness slowed her movements and led to her taking more damage, she could not feel the pain in its deadened flesh.
She wrapped her arm around the Leaper and placed it in a tight headlock, twisting sharply and breaking its neck with a loud crackle of tearing cartilage. She let the body tumble limply into the bonfire, where it crashed into the woodpile and sent up a gout of whirling embers flying high into the air.
As she stood framed before the roaring tongues of flame, her reddened swords slick and shiny, Rene felt more afraid of her than the band of slavering Leapers who surrounded them. For in that moment, not a single one of them moved to enter the ring. They hovered uncertainly at the edge of the stakes, overawed by the rapid destruction of their comrades.
Comrades! The word took a new meaning for Rene. The Leapers were monstrous in form, but inside their dread suits of armor were mortal men like any other. Like Rene they too knew the contagion of fear, were vulnerable to the mass hysteria which gripped even the bravest of fighters when their line wavered and broke.
They could be beaten, and he knew just how to do it!
“Bayonets!” he yelled in a high and reedy voice, equally consumed by cowardice and a manic excitement, “Bayonets! Let em have it!”
With a lance tucked under one arm and the sword of the ancients held high in the other, Rene hurled himself over the stakes and into the thick of them.
