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Chapter Twenty-Two
Commander of Fifty Halesak reminded himself that he was going to need the use of his hands soon.
Which would be a bit of the problem if he insisted on clinging to the rope so tightly that the hands in question were numb.
He forced himself to loosen his grip—a little—and pressed his face against the side of the transport dragon's freight platform. Even with the Air Force-style face shield on his helmet, the wind of the mighty beast's passage threatened to suck the breath right out of his lungs. He felt every prodigious sweep of the dragon's pinions, the pounding of its vast heart, and the night wind battering past him was cold even through his heavy clothing and thick gloves, also Air Force-supplied, at an altitude of almost six thousand feet.
All of that was true—and none of it mattered at all. Not tonight. Tonight was even more important than silencing the relays in the Voice chain. Tonight they brought some of their people home again, and no one—no one—was going to do that without the Second Andarans.
The dragon slowed abruptly, and Halesak's nerves tightened as the cargo-master slapped him on the shoulder in warning. The commander of fifty pulled his head back as the slipstream weakened. He looked down, and saw their objective.
Timing for this operation had been tricky. Halesak wasn't sure exactly where the other side of this portal was located, but it had to be at least seven or eight thousand miles further east in its own universe, given the obvious ten-hour or so time difference between the two aspects of the portal. Personally, he suspected that was one reason the Sharonians had located their portal fort in the lee of a steep ridgeline.
The last thing someone needed in the middle of his night was to have a miles-wide half-disk of noonday brightness streaming in through the window. To be sure, it was undoubtedly a spectacular sight when that flaming sun and hot, bright sky carved themselves out of a sky dusted with winter constellations.
Halesak had watched the same sort of thing himself, with an unfailing sense of awe ... and knew how fervently he and his fellow troopers would have bitched if it had been shining in through their windows.
From all the reports, the far side of the portal also had to be substantially lower in altitude. There'd been ample signs of the kind of damage that sort of differential produced, although it had obviously happened a long, long time ago. That damage had complicated things a bit when it came to picking the path for the ground element, too. In the end, they'd had to take a chance on sending in a high-altitude recon gryphon and generating detailed topographic maps from the imagery its crystal had captured.
Fortunately, no one on the ground seemed to have noticed the unusually large eagle circling over their fort.
Ideally, the pla
The cargo-master slapped his shoulder again, harder this time, and Halesak nodded vigorously. Then the dragon swept over the parapet of the fort, clearing it by barely fifty feet, and braked into an abrupt hover as the Gifted cargo-master activated the levitation spell.
The spell wouldn't support the dragon's heavy bulk for more than a very few minutes, but that was all the time in this universe—or any other—Iftar Halesak and his men needed.
Under-Armsman Lyntail chan Turkan hated the dawn watch.
Chan Turkan was what was technically known in the PAAF as "a screwup." Actually, Master-Armsman Karuk, Fort Ghartoun's senior noncom, was prone to use a rather more pithy and less polite term in his own native Arpathian on the many occasions when he ... counseled chan Turkan. Which was one reason chan Turkan tended to draw the dawn watch as often as he did, given that Karuk was a great believer in using unpleasant duty as a gentle spur to encourage better performance. And when Regiment- Captain Velvelig decided to double the sentries on each watch for reasons best known only to himself, chan Turkan had been the inevitable candidate for his present duty.
After almost eight months of attempting to encourage better performance, however, even someone as formidable as Master-Armsman Karuk might be excused for begi
The master-armsman might not have despaired, but he was showing clear signs of deciding the time had come for more drastic measures. Chan Turkan had no idea what those "more drastic measures" might be, but as he stood on Fort Ghartoun's eastern parapet, gazing out at the portal and the dawn slowly strengthening beyond it, he was glumly certain he'd be finding out shortly.
As it happened, he was wrong.
Something made him turn around. It might have been a sound, it might have been something else. Either way, he didn't have time to figure out what it was.
His jaw dropped in total disbelief as something the size of a very large wolf or a small pony came hurtling over the fort's western parapet. Whatever it was, chan Turkan had never seen anything like it before. It was an impossible fusion of improbable creatures—something with the head of a huge bird of prey, the hindquarters of a lion, feathered forelegs that ended in monstrous talons, and wings.
It came over the wall, bursting out of the predawn darkness of the western sky without a sound, and the PAAF trooper on the northwestern tower never had a chance to scream. The terrifying apparition swooped down upon him. The clawed talons snatched him up by the shoulders; the clawed rear feet ripped out, raking him from chest to abdomen in a dreadful disemboweling stroke; and the terrible, metallically glinting beak snapped once. The severed head flew in one direction and the discarded, mutilated body tumbled to the parade ground in a shower of blood and other body fluids as the impossible killer rocketed back upwards.
Chan Turkan was frozen, unable to believe—to comprehend—what was happening as more and more of the murderous creatures came streaking over the fort's walls.
Some of the sentries had time to scream as the fresh wave of death swept over them. Someone actually even had time and the presence of mind to start ringing the alarm bell, but it tolled only twice before one of the monstrosities pounced on whoever it was. Chan Turkan heard the screams, heard the high, wailing hunting shrieks of the no-longer-silent killers. Somewhere a rifle or pistol cracked as one of the sentries somehow got a shot off, and chan Turkan found his own hands suddenly scrabbling frantically at the leather rifle sling on his own shoulder.
He was still scrabbling at it when one of the second-wave gryphons struck him from behind, like a falcon striking a hare, and snapped his neck instantly.
As the transport dragon came over the palisade and went into its hover, Halesak watched the opening gryphon strike swarm over the defenders.
He'd always hated the strike gryphons. The recon gryphons were something quite different. First, they were almost always female, whereas every strike gryphon was a male, although that was less important than their other differences. The recon gryphons were also bigger, stronger, less maneuverable, smarter ... and much, much more biddable. Some of them were actually affectionate, and became quite devoted to their handlers.
So far as Halesak was aware, no strike gryphon had ever been devoted to anyone. Their designers had built them around an almost insane territoriality, a vicious temper, and a voracious hunger. They had one and only one function: to kill anything in their programmed area of attack. Strike gryphons were never trained for their missions, the way recon gryphons often were. Instead, their handlers relied completely on the compulsion spells laid into the creatures' hate-filled brains through the sarkolis chips surgically implanted in the young no more than four or five days after hatching. That was one reason Halesak hated them. There was always the possibility that those compulsion spells might fail, and the last thing any semi-sane soldier wanted was to have a theoretically "friendly" rogue gryphon rampaging through his formation in a killing frenzy.
At least this time the spells seemed to be holding, and it was obvious the Sharonian sentries had never had a clue the attack was coming. Most of them were caught with their shoulder weapons still slung, and very few of them had time to do anything about that.
In fact, very few of them had time to do anything but die.
Namir Velvelig's bare feet hit the floor as the cacophony of screams, shots, and a strange, high-pitched wailing sound yanked him brutally up out of dreamless sleep. He seized his pistol belt, slung it about his waist without even considering trousers or blouses, and raced out of his quarters to the office window which overlooked the parade ground.
At the moment, that parade ground was a scene of barely predawn nightmare.
He saw the hawk-headed monsters ripping and tearing at his sentries, saw the mutilated bodies of his men strewn across the interior of the fort where their killers had dropped them like so much garbage.
And he saw those same killers sweeping back, circling above the barracks where most of the rest of his men were quartered.
Velvelig was an Arpathian. Despite his thoroughly modern education, despite his years as a professional soldier in a modern army, the shamans' tales had prepared him for devils and demons in a way most Sharonians would no longer have understood. His forebrain could only stare in disbelief at the slaughter outside his window. Deep down inside, though, those shamans' tales took over. He didn't have to think to know what a man did about demons, and that part of him instantly determined that his revolver was not the best possible tool for his requirements.
He whirled away from the window. He didn't have the key which was still in the pocket of the trousers he wasn't wearing, and there was no time to worry about niceties. A single shot from his H&W blew the lock off the chain through the trigger guards of the racked shotguns.