Bili the Axe

5

Erica’s announced reason for guiding the twenty-six Ganik bullies from the site of their defeat by the Kuhmbuhluhners to the place where the pack train had been crushed and buried was that she wished to secure more rifles with which to arm them. Of course, she also had a private reason. She hoped to get at and use the big, long-range transceiver to summon help from the Center, not wishing to spend any longer than necessary among the Ganiks—even these relatively civilized specimens of that degenerate race.

Arrived at the site of the tragedy, the Ganiks set to with a will at the spots Erica’s memory told her were the most likely locations and, during the first day, found two rifles, three sabers and a big pistol. The agent assumed that the collection of crushed, clean-picked and partially disjointed bones among which the handgun had been found were those of the late Sergeant Major Vance, for only senior noncoms and the three agents had originally carried the short-range, big-bore weapons.

Erica appropriated for herself the pistol and the three magazines of thick, stubby cartridges, awarding a rifle each to Merle Bowley and Counter Trimain, and leaving the finely balanced stainless-steel sabers to whoever fancied them.

Then she and the leaders set the rest again to the back-breaking job of shifting boulders and heaving at rocks. But long days went by without the uncovering of much more in the way of weapons or even equipment. There was a multitude of bones, all of them as cleanly picked as the first ones found, and Erica was puzzled as to how any predator or scavenger had managed to get between or under the rocks to strip off the rotted flesh and muscle tissue and even cartilage and tendon, leaving abundant toothmarks on the bones.

Nor were these toothmarks restricted solely to bones. Metal fittings and equipment too showed where businesslike attempts had been made to devour saddles, belts, slings, cartridge boxes, harness, anything made of leather. She found it all most odd and not a little sinister, for the waterproofing compound used on Center leather goods normally repelled vermin of all sorts.

They worked northward along the verges of the landslide, where the rocks and boulders were mostly smaller. Farther in, the chunks of the once-plateau were far too large for ten or twenty times her available force to handle without the use of explosives to fracture them.

Some usable items were garnered, including quite a bit of ammunition, but all of the rifles they came across were clearly damaged to one degree or another and Erica did not know enough about them to be certain that any repairs she might undertake were proper for safe operation, so she simply emptied them of magazines and ammunition and left them among the rocks. After those found on the first day, only one other undamaged rifle was found, and this one was presented to Horseface Charley.

It was while Erica was showing the huge, ugly man how to operate the weapon that she discovered him to be one of those rarities—a natural marksman. From his first shots until the day he died, she never saw him miss any stationary object on which he leveled his piece, usually firing one-handed, from the hip or waist, working the bolt left-handed for rapid fire. Not even the hellish recoil of the heavy-caliber arm seemed to bother him. He easily kept the rifle barrel level and steady.

When they arrived at the area that Erica figured to have been just beyond the tail of the train, she and her three lieutenants set the lower-ranking bullies to work higher up on the slide. This, of course, called for the shifting of far more stone and other debris before reaching whatever lay or did not lie beneath. It was backbreaking, frequently frustrating labor, and only the physical fear of Bowley, Horseface and Counter Trimain and the respect in which all held Erica kept them at it through three more days.

Then the horror began, violently.

Because more than a score of hardworking men required a goodly amount of food, the better hunters were out each day, and luck a’nd skill had both been good to them for as long as they had been in this area, which apparently had not been hunted since parts of it were burned over last spring. On this particular day, Horseface had taken the hunters out, leaving Merle Bowley, Counter Trimain and Erica to supervise the groups of sweating, grimy, loudly cursing Ganiks at work up on the scree.

Erica was closest when it began, and what she saw that day haunted her nightmares for months. A party of five men with a few yards of rope and a couple of pry poles—which poor, inadequate equipment was all that they had been able to make up from existing materials—plus much groaning, cursing and cracking of muscles, had shifted enough stone to get down to what had been ground level before the landslide. There they discovered the shattered leg bones of a mule.

The woman had known the bones to be those of a mule, for they were too long and thick to be those of a pony. Therefore, she had set the crew to work again, clearing the area just east of the space already cleared. As she watched the labors of the near-naked men, she had to rub her forearms hard to lay the gooseflesh, for as she recalled the transceiver had been packed on a big mule.

The workers had already sent some half ton of rock into the area they had earlier cleared when it became crystal-clear that they could do no more in this area. Indeed, not even the near-score of men nearby could have budged the irregularly shaped hunk of rock which immediately overlay the remains of that mule—over two meters long, almost that in width and more than a meter in thickness, Erica reckoned sadly.

It was cruelly frustrating to be so near and yet never know whether the precious transceiver really lay beneath that massive, unmovable chunk of rock or not. And therefore, she quickly agreed when one of the Ganiks—a short, wiry man, with Ahrmehnee features and skintone, called Big-nose Sheldon—opined that he thought he could squeeze his body into the space under the huge rock, where it partially rested on some smaller stones.

Slowly, first pushing out troublesome rocks, then shoving them far enough back to be kicked out, Big-nose inched his way under the monstrous slab of stone, perforce feeling his way into the inky blackness. Suddenly, the watchers heard a muffled shriek, so another of the men flopped onto his belly and managed to get himself far enough into the low space to grasp an ankle of Big-nose’s now-thrashing legs, but pull as hard as he might, he could not seem to budge the still-screaming little man. So he shouted back and the other three Ganiks laid hands to his own legs and heaved.

Gradually, by dint of much effort, the three drew the larger man—still clamping the ankle of the smaller in his crushing grip—from beneath the slab, then all four took the legs of Big-nose and heaved again. Once, twice, and his buttocks came into view. Three, four more pulls and whatever force was obstructing his removal was overcome and they were able to draw him out into the daylight.

Erica had assumed that the rocks within had shifted and injured the volunteer, but when the twitching body was out and turned onto its back, it was obvious that something else, something living and fearsome, had been the cause of the little man’s injuries and his resultant cries of fear and agony.

The big nose of Big-nose had been torn off completely; so too had his lips and portions of both cheeks. The remaining flesh of his face and forehead was in tatters, with white bone winking through the blood-dripping mess. One eye had been torn fully out and the other punctured; the lids were as shredded as what remained of the face.

Chunks of flesh and muscle were missing from shoulders and arms, and the hands and lower arms were coated with a slimy substance that looked to Erica like a thin mucus. But while all eyes were staring at the dying body of the mutilated Ganik, the real horror emerged to reclaim the meal so rudely torn from its jaws.

The other working parties of Ganiks, drawn by the disturbance and making their way over the uneven footing of the scree, saw the emerging monster before the preoccupied Erica and her reduced group.

‘ ‘Snake! Big oi snake, Ehrkah!” were the alarmed shouts that first drew her gaze to what had come from under the rock.

It was certainly no snake, she was certain of that, even as she stared in horrified fascination. For one thing, she knew that nowhere in these latitudes of the North American continent were there any snakes of this size—her trained mind said a length of about three meters and an almost uniform circumference of nearly forty centimeters. Nor had the agent in all her hundreds of years of life ever seen or read or even heard tales of a large, dirty-yellowish white snake that was annulated like a worm and left a slime trail like a snail or a slug. Nor did the creature’s dentition look at all snakelike.

The four Ganiks who had drawn out Big-nose’s body were backing in helpless horror from the arcane beast, having left all of their weapons along with most of their clothes in the camp. Erica, tired of carrying the heavy thing in the late-summer heat, had leaned her rifle against a rock some little distance down the slope of the scree, but the big pistol was tucked in her belt. She drew it, charged it and, after taking careful aim at the still-advancing creature, fired until she could be certain that she had hit the spine—if the monster had one—at least once.

Upon the first report of the pistol, Merle Bowley came running from the direction of the camp with rifle, sword and dirk. But even after two explosive rounds from the rifle, the successive impacts of the stones and small boulders flung by the assembled Ganiks and deep stabs in supposedly vital places by the blade of Bowley’s longsword, the beast kept up its silent writhing and snapping at anything that came within proximity to its tooth-studded jaws, all the while exuding quantities of the thin mucuslike secretion from all parts of its elongated body.

“Dammitawl, Ehrkah!” Bowley finally snapped in clear exasperation. “What the hell kinda critter is thishere, enyhow?”

She shook her head. “How should I know? I thought you Ganiks were supposed to know every plant and animal in these mountains.”

“Wai, I ain’t never seed nuthin lak thisun, Ehrkah. Big ol* shitpile worm ‘r snake ‘r whutevuh, I jest wants to know how to kill it!” Bowley snapped back.

But at length, as they all watched, the serpentine thing’s twitchings became more reflexive, weaker. Although the wicked jaws still snapped when the body was prodded with pry poles, they snapped at empty air, for the neckless head did not move. Nonetheless, when Horseface and his party of hunters rode back in with their day’s bag some hour or more later, the long body still could be seen to ripple convulsively, the shudders running from end to end.

With closer examination now possible, Erica found the creature to possess a double row of sharp teeth in its upper jaw, though but a single row in the lower. After a moment, she took the magazine out of a rifle and was easily able to fit some of the teeth in the slack jaws exactly into the set of scratches in the metal.

Well, at least now she knew what creature had so easily gotten about under the rockslide to devour the corpses of both men and animals. But, big as the wormlike beast was, there had been a good fifty men and a third again as many pack animals, plus the ones the men had been riding, in the trapped and killed group, so how many of these wormlike horrors had it taken to consume all of that flesh? How many more of them were coiled under those rocks right now? Were they all this size? Bigger, maybe?

“Good God,” she thought in horror. “Even with rifles and the pistol, twenty-seven—no, twenty-six, now—of us would be hard pressed to defend ourselves from one of these things, if it was larger, hard as they seem to be to kill. It might be best to move our camp a good bit farther out into the burned-over area. It’s still fairly open out there, so we might at least be able to see the hellish thing coming.”

But when she broached the idea, Bowley demurred. “Look, Ehrkah, iffen them thangs ‘uz gonna come outen the rocks aftuh us in camp, they’d of done ‘er by now. I reckon they lives in them rocks and don’t come out lessen they’s riled up.

“But tell y’ what, we’ll build us a big ol’ watchfire come dark, an’ me an’ Horseface an’ you an’ Counter, we c’n take turns a-watchin’ with the firesti—uh, rye-fulls, heahnh?”

After a subdued dinner of game and wild plants, the Ganiks flopped down around the cookfire, and soon most were snoring. Erica took first watch, being relieved by Bowley, he by Counter, and the last watch being that of Horseface. But there were no disturbances of any sort throughout the short summer night.

The next morning, however, all witnessed clear evidence that the loathy monsters had indeed been at work. Big-nose and the dead monster had been left where they had died. But the rising sun shone down upon only their well-picked bones, with several Broad trails of slimy mucus issuing from rocky crevices and crisscrossing the new boneyard.

Accurately gauging the temper of the lesser bullies, Merle Bowley took Erica a little apart and said, “Looky here, Ehrkah, them mens, they ain’ gonna work today, noway— lessen we kills two, three of ‘em, they ain’t. Sides, did you git you a good look at whatawl Horseface brought in yestiddy? Not one dang critter biggern a coon. We done jest ‘bout hunted thesehere parts clean. I thanks it’s time we moved awn. Mebbe nawth an’ wes’; it’s still some Ganiks up there.”

Erica knew better than to protest the decision of her lover and principal supporter. For one thing, she could see the clear sense in what he was recommending. For another, she was not herself especially anxious to confront another of those crawling, wormlike, abundantly toothed horrors and so could easily empathize with the lesser bullies on that score. Lastly, she was becoming discouraged about ever finding the transceiver now entombed under tons upon tons of rock in who knew what area of the quarter-mile-long expanse of tumbled scree.

So she simply nodded agreement. “Allright, Merle, let’s pack up and move on. I confess I’ll feel much better about sleeping if we can put a few miles between us and this place before dark. We have between the four of us over five hundred rounds for the rifles, so we should be well enough off for a long while.”

But Erica knew full well how very valuable the contents of the buried pack train were to the Center and so was dead certain that Sternheimer would eventually mount and dispatch an expedition to uncover and retrieve as much as still might be usable of the loot stripped from what had been the Hold of the Moon Maidens. Therefore, her last act before joining Merle Bowley to lead their followers away from the abode of the horrendous worms was to write a brief message with a stub of indelible pencil, enclose the missive in the flat case in which she had once carried her slender cigars and hang the case in an easily visible spot on the charred trunk of a dead tree near the former campsite. Not having found the transceiver, it was all she now could do.

Some century and more before, when the ancestors of the folk of New Kuhmbuhluhn had first ridden down from the northeast, the vast stretch of mountains, glens and valleys had been the sole preserve of scattered families of Ganiks and a single extended family of the hybrid Kleesahks. The newcome northerners had, however, proved to be most acquisitive and incredibly land-hungry, nor had they been at all tolerant of the customs and ancient religion of the Ganiks. Moreover, all of the male Kuhmbuhluhners were well armed and most were well versed in the use of said arms, and so their intolerance most often took the unpleasant form of armed harassment or open aggression.

Not that any of this was new or novel to the Ganik farmers, for almost from the beginning, their singular ways and outre” practices had brought down upon the heads of their ancestors the scorn and downright enmity of all the neighbors they had ever had, wherever they had lived. So most of them—those who chose to continue to cleave to their ages-old behavior and values—had emulated all of their progenitors and moved on into still-untenanted lands to the south and west.

Some few dozen families, however, in the northeast of what had by then become New Kuhmbuhluhn, chose to forsake many aspects of both ingrained religion and traditional customs, becoming more akin to the Kuhmbuhluhners with every succeeding generation. But not all of these turncoat Ganiks had adapted as fully or as fast as had others to the new, sinful, sacrilegious siren song of the pagan northerners. Even down to the present day, there still were a few families of Ganiks of this northern group who were—or so Merle Bowley and the other surviviors were convinced—secret adherents to the old-time religion and therefore covert enemies of the Crown and the alien folk of Kuhmbuhluhn. Perhaps they would prove hospitable and willing to help these few remaining members of the main bunch of the once large and powerful force of Ganik outlaw-raiders.

If such atavistic Ganiks really existed in the northwest quadrant of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—and Bowley and the rest maintained to the very death that they did—they were exceedingly well hidden, for the small band of survivors never managed to locate a single one of them; the only way that they ever secured any food, supplies or the like from these northerly descendants of Ganiks was to take it either by stealth or by raw force. And immediately on the heels of their one and only raid, it seemed to the harried group that the entire countryside arose and mounted and rode against them under arms.

Relentlessly pursued by the vengeful farmers, tracked like wild game by packs of vicious hunting dogs, Erica and Bowley and the rest fled far and fast and by the easiest route available, which was how they had come to winter in a low-ceilinged cave in the side of a hill above a brook which, when it was not frozen, rushed down to join the large river some miles to the north. Erica thought that the river was ” probably the Ohio.

Hard as the winter had been, with the rifles and the uncanny marksmanship of Horseface Charley there had been precious few occasions when any of them had gone to bed hungry. And although the bodily filth and accompanying infestation of parasitic vermin still was distressing to Erica, she had learned to almost ignore the gagging stenches of the uncured hides and pelts, for at least they helped to alleviate the cold on the long nights in the cave.

She knew not what the spring would bring, only that there was patently no safety for her group here, in the north; she surmised that only the onset of the long, hard winter had prevented stronger forces from Kuhmbuhluhn hunting this last tiny bunch of outlaw Ganiks to death, an oversight that would most likely be rectified with the oncoming warmer weather.

Erica now realized that she had erred in so readily assenting to Bowley’s suggestion that they ride northwest from the site of the landslide. They should have gone south, in the general direction of the Center. Not that she publicly disagreed with him, but she privately doubted that there were any of the old-fashioned Ganik lunatics still resident in any part of the Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn—north, west, south or east. And now, thanks to her misjudgment, they were deep in hostile territory, with an aroused and pugnacious people between them and the direction of possible safety.

Had there been but herself and the three senior bullies, they would probably have been able to get through and out of the more densely populated northerly portions of New Kuhmbuhluhn fairly easily—going to ground in forests or wastes by day and riding hard along seldom-traveled ways by night. But such a solution to her dilemma would, were they to try it with their present numbers, most likely end in discovery by the New Kuhmbuhluhners and either a running harassment or pitched battles against forces so vastly outnumbering them that the possession of the firearms would, in the end, count for naught.

Nor, on the few occasions she had dared to broach the matter, would Bowley hear a single word in regard to deserting the lesser bullies and thereby reaching safety in the south.

“Ehrkah, these here boys is done stuck by us th’ough thick ‘r thin, awl alowng. An’ I aims fer to stick by them, naow, evun if it comes fer to mean dyin with ‘em.”

So, as she lay wakeful in the low, smoky cave, under the stinking bearskin, with the bloodsucking insects acrawl up and down the length of her unwashed body, Dr. Erica Arenstein was anything but optimistic. She thought, as she endeavored once more to find sleep, that the discovery of the cave was most likely the last piece of good fortune that she and her present companions would have. Actually, she mused glumly, it might have been better had they not found the cave; for had they tried to winter in the open, they would all most probably have frozen to death, which was, she had been told, one of the easier ways to die, if die one must.

Somewhere, far off in the forested hills and vales, she heard the bass bellow of some large animal. Possibly, she guessed, a shaggy-bull; they now had come far enough north to expect to begin meeting specimens of the outsize bovines. She wondered yet again as she had wondered for centuries just where and why and how these and certain other improbably fauna had first developed.

These shaggy-bulls, for instance, bore a slight resemblance to bison—the general shape of the skull, the huge hump of muscle set atop the shoulders, the long, shaggy coats of hair from which their name derived—but that resemblance was no more than slight. When mature, both bulls and cows bore great spreads of horn—thick at the bases and tapering out to a murderous needle tip sometimes more than a meter from those bases—and the shaggy-bulls were much larger than bison, tall at the shoulder as a moose, though thicker of leg and heavier of body than that far-northern ruminant.

They differed from bison in other ways, too. Where most of the bisoti—which once almost-extinct species had increased vastly in many parts of the North American continent during the centuries since the near extirpation of the races of mart— were herd animals of plain and prairie, their huge, shaggy cousins seemed to prefer forests and mountainous areas and often were found as solitary male specimens. When they did form groups, there was never more than one mature bull with one to three mature cows, possibly a calf or two, maybe one or two heifers not yet of breeding age and, rarely, an immature young bull, not yet driven off by his sire.

Because they were far more common west of the Mississippi River, Erica assumed that that most likely was where they had originated, but over the centuries, they had slowly spread until now they ranged as far east as that part of Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya which once had been known as Maine. And for all that they bred and matured slowly, their natural enemies were few. Despite their size and bulk, the monstrous bovines were incredibly fast and agile and, consequently, such deadly opponents that only the huge packs of winter wolves ever attacked adult specimens, and then only if starving and desperate.

Although the shaggy-bull hides were the basis for a fine and exceptionally tough type of leather, most humans tried to avoid the vicious, short-tempered brutes, which could outrun a full-size horse for short distances and absorb an appalling amount of punishment. Only the plains nomads and the gentry of portions of the Middle Kingdoms hunted shaggy-bulls with any regularity—the nomads for hides and meat, the burkers mostly for highly dangerous sport.

The distant bull bellowed yet again, but Erica did not hear him. Sleep had finally claimed her.