Onslaught

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE TRUEST FOE

Have a look, all of you!" Braids shouted ecstatically. She gripped the sides of her head and yelled, "Clay warriors, crab men, jellyfish, and now living nightmares!" Shrieking her delight, Braids leaped from roof to roof atop the long curve of the caravan.

The wagons formed a broad semicircle on one flank of the battlefield. Nobles within watched avidly, feasting on appetizers and atrocities, drinking wine and drinking in blood. Their appetites had been only whetted by the sudden appearance of monsters among them. Though a few nobles had been killed, the beasts were quickly dispatched, and the other nobles considered it all a thrilling show. Why worry about death when it was someone else's-and when the amenities were so stellar? Attendants saw to their every want.

Braids saw to their entertainment. "The death toll stands near to six thousand in our armies alone. Ten thousand of the foe have died! For those who have placed bets on individual deaths, hold your tickets. The lucky winners will be toted up when every body is tagged!"

Braids paused, staring at the battlefield. Something big was on its way, something boiling out of Phage. It gathered above her, churning in a black cloud, and ate away the air wherever it spread. Already, Braids had made mention of it, but until the horror was fully formed, she needed a more immediate attraction.

"All eyes, turn to Kamahl! He's easy to spot. There are two of him. Many of you will recognize the old Kamahl, tawny of skin and bloody of eye, a barbarian in the Pardic tradition-killer of thousands, of Chainer, of Jeska!"

An impromptu ovation answered her call, and Braids turned an eager flip.

"Others know Kamahl of Krosan, druid in the forest tradition-creator of thousands, of giant serpents and Stonebrow."

More applause answered.

"Place your bets. Who is the more powerful? The old Kamahl or the new? We all wish to escape our past, but now Kamahl will kill it or be killed by it. Place your bets!"

Kamahl circled warily, keeping the stone axe before him. His truest foe-he, himself-crouched on the other side of that blade.

It had been one thing to slay dozens of false selves. It was quite another to face down this one true one.

The man was tall and muscular, with not an inch of fat anywhere and skin that gleamed like polished bronze. His shaved head seemed a battering ram and his red armor the carapace of a rangy spider. Never had Kamahl faced so brutal and bloodthirsty an opponent. Never before had he faced the man he once had been.

Kamahl breathed. His soul sought the perfect forest within.

With a ferocious growl, the red barbarian hurled himself forward and brought his huge sword roaring down. He drew power from that blade. No weapon in the world could stop the blow, no armor could turn it.

Kamahl sidestepped. He had learned much finesse since he had been this rangy bastard.

The Mirari sword flashed past and embedded its end in the ground. The weight of it dragged its bearer forward.

Kamahl's axe was in the wrong position to strike but not his boot. Lifting it, he kicked the barbarian brutally in the belly. The warrior reeled back, yanking his sword with him. Kamahl merely set his foot again on the ground and stood ready.

A blood-swollen scowl filled his former face. "I am ashamed of you, of what I became. I would never have received an attack with my own blade in the wrong position to defend."

Kamahl's brow lifted. "I am ashamed of you, of what I once was. I would never invest all in a single, terrible attack."

"Isn't that what you have done with your army?" goaded the red man. He charged suddenly. His enormous sword swung up in a wide stroke, too low to duck, too high to jump.

Kamahl used his boot again, smashing it on the flat of the blade and shoving it ground-ward. The arm of the barbarian was too strong, though. The blade swept on. Putting all his weight on the boot, Kamahl stepped up into the air. Even as the sword swung where his body had been, Kamahl stood on it and kicked his other foot into the barbarian's throat. He continued the motion, flipping backward and landing out of reach, among piles of the dead.

Staggering, the red barbarian hawked and spat. Blood and spittle smacked the face of a dead elf. "I am your worst nightmare."

"Every evil thing I once was," agreed Kamahl.

"No, I am every good thing you once were. I am your worst nightmare not because I am less than you but because I am greater."

The words had the sting of truth. Had Kamahl transcended his former depravity or descended from his former glory? In uncertainty, he lost his center. He winced too late.

The sword-that massive, vicious sword-carved the air and bit into Kamahl's shield arm. It cut to the bone and would have taken the whole limb had Kamahl not leaped back. He did so again, tumbling over a rhino carcass. His shoulder crashed on the ground, and blood streamed from the wound. His arm would be useless until the axe could work its healing.

There was no time for healing in the midst of battle. Kamahl rolled to his good side and scrabbled backward on elbow and foot.

The barbarian towered on the other side of the dead rhino. Gore crazed his broad blade, and the Mirari below looked like a bloodshot eye. The man laughed. "Look at you. You haven't landed a single blow, and there you lie, cut open by me and-" his eye shifted to the gangrenous wound across Kamahl's belly "-the one given you by little sister."

Kamahl struggled to sit. He cradled his axe in his wounded arm.

The red warrior climbed atop the rhino and laughed again. "Only a fool tries to right old wrongs. Only a madman takes responsibility in an irresponsible world. Nature has pitted mouth against mouth to see who eats whom. Predators have no time to weep."

Kamahl climbed to his feet. He was hemmed in by more bodies. In his good hand, he held the axe propped on the wound, hoping against hope for healing. There was no escape. Still, he stalled.

"Look at you. You stand tall on your victims."

"Yes," said his former self, lifting the Mirari sword overhead for the killing stroke. "And you will be a poor podium." He swung the sword toward Kamahl's head.

Kamahl jabbed with his axe. It was a weak blow. It could never have pierced the man's armor, but it did pierce the rhino's hide. Blood gushed beneath the feet of his foe.

The man slipped. The Mirari sword sliced just shy of Kamahl's brow and buried itself in the broad belly of the rhino. Sliding on gore, the red warrior fell back. He lost his grip on the sword.

Kamahl dropped his axe and lurched forward. His good hand grabbed the hilt of the Mirari sword and used it to lever himself over the impaled beast. Feet came sloppily to the ground, and he yanked on the blade. It slid free in a red arc. Kamahl roared, and the Mirari sword surged down toward his former heart.

The blade stove armor, bit through body, and plunged into the ground. The nightmare lay pinned.

In a sudden flash, Kamahl was back in the Krosan Forest, standing above Laquatus. That moment was tied to this. Ever since Kamahl had chosen to kill Laquatus instead of saving Jeska, he had struggled to revoke that single, lethal moment. Now, standing above his own slain self, hand on the Mirari sword, Kamahl at last had done so.

The Mirari sword trembled and disintegrated, returning to the dream that had spawned it. So too the corpse vanished, but the wound it had struck remained.

Clamping his hand on the spot, Kamahl looked beyond himself and saw a horrible sight.

Jeska knelt beneath a plague of black beetles.

He had almost let her die again. Clutching his wounded arm in a bloody fist, Kamahl strode toward her. "Jeska!"

She lifted her eyes-haunted eyes-and saw him. It was the first time since Krosan that she had really seen him. Jeska was herself once more. "Kama-" she pleaded, but the name was cut off by a black lump that forced its way out of her mouth and flew into the churning cloud.

Trudging through a labyrinth of the dead and dying, Kamahl reached his sister. She was on her knees, vomiting forth the blackness of her soul. With each beast that scuttled from her teeth and took wing, Jeska's face lost some of its deathly pallor. Unsure how to help or what to do, Kamahl fell to his knees beside her and wrapped his good arm around her.

"You're back," he said heavily. "I knew you were in there, alive despite all the death."

She nodded wretchedly and, between the bugs, blurted, "It has been… a prison… Phage is the worst part of me… holding the best part captive."

Kamahl watched the swarm emerge, insect by insect. "Where did all this come from, all this blackness?"

She couldn't answer, so choked on roaches. The awful cascade eventually slowed and ceased. The last of the evil scuttled from Jeska's mouth, and she hunched on the ground like a sick dog.

"Sister…" Shaking his head, Kamahl lifted Jeska in a gentle embrace.

"Stonebrow was here… He went to find you…" She began to sob. "My stomach… The old wound."

Drawing back, Kamahl saw it-the jagged laceration. Though once stitched together by Braids's dark magic, the wound had broken open again. Jeska was as near death now as on the day that Kamahl had abandoned her. "We have to find a healer." Kamahl scanned his troops, hoping to see a druid. "Perhaps my axe…" His hand strayed to his belt, but then he remembered dropping the axe to pick up the Mirari sword.

"Where is your axe?" Jeska asked wearily.

"I don't know," Kamahl muttered. He glanced around the battlefield. A rebel impulse cried out for him to go find it. "It doesn't matter. I'm not leaving you."

"We need your axe," Jeska said. "Not just to heal me. To fight those." She pointed toward the spinning cloud.

"Fight beetles with an axe?"

"Not beetles. Not any longer."

From the convulsing swarm, individual bugs were dropping. They thwacked the ground, one after another, like hunks of meat. Their shells split and oozed, and the flesh within expanded. Beetles stretched into long pills of muscle. They riled, becoming pupae, as if the adult beasts were reverting to more primitive forms. Pupae in turn elongated into black worms, and they too grew. The length of a man, then a sapling, then a tree, soon they were not just worms, but wurms, dwarfing even the giant serpents.

Each of those black things became as wide around as a house and a league long. Their heads were masses of fleshy spikes, and their mouths were wide, fangy things for eating away the world. Already two score such creatures filled the nightmare lands, and every moment, more beetles crashed to the ground and began to transform.

"What are they?" cried Kamahl in astonishment.

Jeska's eyes, so briefly bright with hope, reflected the dark tangle of monsters. "They are my worst nightmare. They are the folk that Phage-that I-have killed: one wurm for each murder. Deathwurms."

The first such beast lifted its head above the fields of the dead. The green army quailed before it. Like a cobra stretching before it struck, the deathwurm bobbed for a moment, then lunged, mouth gaping.

It grabbed the head of a giant serpent. Teeth crunched, piercing the brain pan.

The snake writhed, its body lashing and crushing nearby warriors.

The deathwurm gulped, peristalsis dragging the serpent deeper into its throat. The creature did not die. Its spasms continued as it descended. The sides of the wurm bulged, showing the blind contours of the snake's head. With a final lurching gulp, the wurm swallowed the shuddering tail.

Another wurm lunged. It caught a rhino in its vicious mouth, and the pachyderm disappeared. The wurm withdrew, swallowing, and more of its kind reared up to feast.

The allied legions withdrew. They had stood in the face of shape shifters, crabmen, jellyfish, and even their worst nightmares, but these wurms…

Kamahl bowed, scooping Jeska in his one good arm. His wounded arm hung useless at his side, but he had the strength to lift his sister. She was as light as a fallen sparrow. Cradling her to his chest, Kamahl staggered up.

The motion caught the eye of a deathwurm. It rose, swaying hypnotically. Its mouth edged open, and saliva the color of ink slipped from between its teeth.

Kamahl turned and ran across the killing field. Clambering over the corpse of a gigantipithicus, Kamahl rushed amid the still jittering parts of a zombie platoon.

Air whistled. The wurm was lunging for them.

"Hang on!" Kamahl shouted. He pulled Jeska all the tighter to him, and she clung to his neck. His eyes were pinned to the corpse of a giant centaur just ahead. If only he could reach it A blast of grave breath plumed over them.

Kamahl leapt. He and Jeska barely cleared the massive corpse, tumbling over it. They landed in a sprawl on the ground just beyond.

The deathwurm's mouth smashed down around the giant centaur. Its teeth bit like shovels into the ground. A snout of rubbery black flesh impacted beside Kamahl's leg. The thing's bubble eyes stared hungrily at him. Jaw muscles flexed, and teeth descended through the ground, scooping up tons of soil. A strange hiss began around the massive head, and dust fled in under it. As the wurm lifted its head, the suction only grew stronger. Winds raced into the hole it had bitten.

The wurm had chomped through the very fabric of the nightmare lands. It had left a sucking pit. Within lay nothingness.

Kamahl hunkered down, holding himself against the ravenous winds. Jeska clung to him though her hands were growing weak. Clutching the ground, Kamahl waited for the wind to abate.

A rising shadow told him he could wait no longer. Another wurm rose.

Still holding his sister, Kamahl crawled away from the sucking hole. Once he had gotten beyond the worst winds, he clambered to his feet and ran.

Kamahl dodged beside a shorn rhino just before a deathwurm struck and ate it. A gaping hole opened where it had been, and air sucked down through it. Kamahl kept his feet, running ahead.

The whistling sound came again. It rose in pitch, and Kamahl leaped the other way. With a profound concussion, the deathwurm smashed against the corpses just beside Kamahl.

He only ran. Holes opened across the ground, dragging bodies into them. Another wurm struck, and another, and Kamahl evaded each by a narrower margin.

A hundred more running steps and he would be beyond the nightmare lands, where perhaps he could fall and rest… But even then, Jeska would die.

He couldn't think of that now. He could only run.

All around him, deathwurms crashed.

Braids crowed in mad delight. "Death! Carnage! Destruction!" She turned a back flip atop the caravan. "Amazing! Incredible! Inescapable!"

She was right. A deathwurm crashed down atop a nearby wagon, gobbling up the conveyance and the noble within.

"Who wants to take odds on survival?" Braids shouted, bounding down onto the sands. She leaped along the curve of caravans as more deathwurms snatched up her patrons. "I'll give any of you fifty to one against. If you survive, you'll be rich. If not, it won't matter!"

It was an excellent wager, but no one seemed interested. The nobles were scampering everywhere. Folk who had not taken a single step this whole trip now took hundreds. No longer did they cower in their wagons.

They ran.

They fell.

They died.

Braids shook her head in a paroxysm of sadness. All that money lost. If only they had taken the bet!

"Where are you going? This is the payoff! This is what you came for! You wanted death! I give you death!" Braids grew angrier and angrier as she ran beside the wagons, overturned and half-chewed, spilling bodies both living and dead. Didn't they understand? This had ceased to be mere entertainment. This was art. "So few people appreciate art."

Braids did. She gave up on her patrons-after all, she'd gotten enough money out of them. Instead, she turned to the wurms and watched as they ate.

"Beautiful!"

Their flesh was like hers, their appetites-these were friends, things she understood. Surely, they understood her.

One of the huge beasts lunged down to snatched a man beside her. Braids took the opportunity to leap onto its head. While the wurm munched, she settled in, grasping its fleshy spikes. She would ride the wurm right through this war. She only hoped its appetite would hold.

"Come one, come all! Death calls everyone! Experience the thrill of a lifetime-the end of a lifetime!" cried Braids as she rode the darting wurm.

Zagorka lashed Chester, though the mule needed no encouragement to run.

A deathwurm thudded to ground behind them. The monster rose, leaving a pit that sucked wind like the moaning of the damned. Another wurm crashed down nearby, sinking its teeth into a platoon of goblins.

"Death bites!" shrieked Zagorka.

Chester snorted his agreement.

The wurm yanked its head free, opening a roaring pit.

"Death sucks!"

Chester shook his head bitterly.

"I thought we'd already faced down our worst nightmare!"

They had. Chester's worst nightmare was an enormously fat man who kept trying to mount him. Zagorka's was, interestingly, the same man trying to do the same thing to her. They double-teamed him. The mule's hooves pummeled the man's backside while Zagorka's boots pummeled his front. In short order, he pleaded for mercy, fell dead, and disappeared entirely.

It would be an absolute irony to have survived that atrocity only to die now.

A deathwurm surged down, mouth agape, and slammed over the rushing pair. The hot, bright battlefield was swallowed in cold blackness.

"We've been ate!" Zagorka shouted, glancing around at the jaws. She stared up the gullet of doom and saw a big flap of blackness. "A uvula!"

The pendulous thing struck Chester's backside, and he kicked. A pair of giant hooves struck the dangling flesh.

The wurm gagged. Its sinews convulsed. From its cold, cavernous gullet came a deep gurgle. Things flooded down-living vomit. A mass of struggling limbs and gaping mouths came tumbling out the wurm's throat. The glutinous tide struck Zagorka and Chester, flinging them to the ground. The wurm recoiled and left them there.

For a shocked moment, the creatures in that oozy mound looked around, stunned. Then they struggled up and began to run.

Somehow, Zagorka had remained atop Chester. The huge mule bolted full-out toward the desert.

Another hoofed creature thundered up to run beside them. Only when Zagorka flung the muck out of her eyes did she recognize the centaur. "General Stonebrow! You were one of those in the belly of the beast?"

The horse-man didn't answer, keeping his famous pate turned toward the open spaces beyond.

Zagorka let out a barking laugh. "Even the mighty Stonebrow runs!"

The general grunted irritably.

"Don't be ashamed. Nobody can blame you for running from death."

"I'm not ashamed," rumbled the gigantic centaur.

Nothing remained to be said. The crone, the mule, and the horseman ran for their lives in companionable silence.

Kamahl stumbled out of the nightmare lands. He took ten staggering steps in the sand before he could go no farther. Falling to his knees, Kamahl lowered Jeska gently to the ground. He crouched above her, spreading his good arm protectively. It was a futile gesture, for if a rhino wanted to run over them, it would.

The allied legions were in full rout, stampeding back toward the desert. Goblins, slaves, serpents, squirrels, elves, dwarves, and every other creature fled past Kamahl and Jeska. Feet and hooves beat the ground, their clamor punctuated by the profound boom of deathwurms. They rose, snapped, and advanced. No one could stand against them. Every living thing fled and hoped that Ixidor's nightmares could not escape the dreamlands.

Kamahl clung to his sister and said, "We'll be fine. We'll be fine."

Jeska shook her head weakly. "You go. Go. You shouldn't die."

Heaving a sigh, Kamahl said, "The brother who would have left you is dead already. I'll not leave you this time, even if we must die together. I came back to save you."

Jeska's eyes brimmed. "You have saved me. I used to think that dying in Krosan would be the worst fate I could suffer. Now I know there are worse things. Much worse."

Nodding, Kamahl glanced over his shoulder. The battlefield was emptying. Only a few hundred souls remained between them and the ravenous wurms. "Do you think you could run?"

Jeska shook her head sadly.

"Walk."

"I don't think so."

He smiled tightly. "At least we will be together." He looked down into her eyes and saw there affection and something else-a bright presence that looked like hope. "What is it?"

She pointed. "Look."

There, above the riling mound of deathwurms, a vision floated-a marvelous creature in white, bearing a great and shining lance.

Together, brother and sister said, "Akroma!"