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Velvelig's hands moved with flashing speed as he scooped up one of the weapons. The Model 7 combat shotgun was a purely military weapon, a slide-action weapon with a five-round detachable box magazine and a bayonet lug, and designed to fire brass-cased ammunition which was much more powerful than the standard civilian loads. It was heavy, ugly, and a brute to fire, but it was as lethal as it was unlovely, and there were twenty-four preloaded magazines of double ought buckshot on the shelf across the bottom of the weapons rack. Each cartridge contained tenpellets, each of them the size of a Polshana .36-caliber bullet, and Velvelig racked the action open, slid a loose round into the chamber and closed it, then slapped in a magazine. He had few illusions about what was about to happen, but he took long enough to sweep half a dozen more magazines into a canvas ammunition carrier and slung it over his shoulder.
Then he stepped out onto the planked walkway in front of his office.
Halesak grunted as he fast-roped down from the transport and his heels thumped on the firing step inside the fort wall. He started to bark the order for his men to assemble on him, then ducked as another gryphon came slicing in just above his head.
Something exploded down below him. His ears classified it instantly as the sound of one of the Sharonian weapons, but this one sounded slightly different, somehow. He whirled towards the noise and saw a single man, naked but for a loose white pair of skivvies and a weapons belt, standing on the veranda across the front of what Neshok's sketch map called the office block. He had what looked like one of the standard shoulder weapons, but as Halesak watched the man fired again, and a second gryphon shrieked and collapsed in midair as if it had just flown headlong into a wall. It slammed into the ground in a broken ball of fur and feathers, and the single defender's left hand stroked back under his weapon's barrel and he fired again.
A third gryphon went down, and the man who'd killed it cycled his weapon once more and tracked smoothly, almost unhurriedly, onto a fourth target.
Velvelig had a vague impression of something huge and dark hovering just above the wall. Whatever it was, there wasn't anything he could do about it at the moment, and he was totally focused on the task he could do something about. The veranda roof gave him overhead cover, and he had an excellent view of the monster-besieged barracks. He'd always been a superior wing shot, and these things—whatever the hells they were—were bigger than deer, not doves. He squeezed the trigger, the shotgun's buttplate hammered his shoulder, and a fourth monster smashed into the barracks wall like two hundred pounds of dead meat.
He swung onto a fifth creature and fired. Then a sixth.
Half a dozen of the murderous beasts were down, and he pressed the magazine release. The empty magazine thumped to the veranda floor, and he slammed in another, worked the slide, and brought down a seventh target.
Nothing could ever let Iftar Halesak forget that the Sharonian butchers had murdered one of the greatest men in Arcana's history in cold blood. The hatred that had kindled in his heart was something perhaps only another garthan could truly have understood. Yet as he saw that single defender, standing his ground, firing with such cool, steady precision, he felt an unwilling surge of admiration. It wasn't just the other man's courage, though gods alone knew how much raw nerve it must take for someone who'd never even suspected that gryphons existed to face them with such steadiness. No, it was the other's obvious sense of duty ... and his effectiveness.
Even as Halesak watched, that single Sharonian brought down a seventh and an eighth gryphon. The fact that the attacking predators were so focused on the targets designated by the combination of their controlling spellware and their own natural viciousness meant they paid the man killing them almost no attention at all. They were so totally committed to neutralizing the barracks, keeping anyone from getting out of them, as their pre-attack command programming required, that they never noticed the single man outside the office block.
"Yirman!" the commander of fifty barked. "Get the gates open! The rest of you, on me!"
Lance Yirman Farl and the two other man assigned to help him went thundering down the nearest stair to the parade ground below. The rest followed Halesak as he went scurrying along the firing step, looking for a clear fiiring angle.
Velvelig brought down yet another gryphon, and his second magazine was empty. He dropped it out of the magazine well and reached into the carrier at his side for a third.
That was when the crossbow bolt hit him.
It slammed into his right hip like an incandescent spike, and he grunted explosively at the raw, brutal stab of agony. The sheer sledgehammer impact was enough to knock him backward, off his feet, and he went down, losing his shotgun as he landed. His left hand went to the stubby, thumb-thick steel shaft driven deep into his pelvis, but his right swept down to his holster and the heavy, familiar weight of his H&W revolver fell into his palm.
The monsters swarming around the barracks had noticed him at last, and one of them came straight at him. He brought the revolver up, tracking the incoming nightmare with a rock-steady muzzle, and fired.
The hollow-nosed .46-caliber slug hit the gryphon in the left eye at a range of little more than fifteen feet. The creature's head snapped up under the brutal impact, but momentum kept it coming, and Namir Velvelig's world went black as the plummeting body smashed into him.
Iftar Halesak stood in the center of the captured fort's parade ground, looking about him at the litter of bodies—and body parts—sprawled across the gore-splashed dirt. In some ways, the carnage was even worse than he'd seen at Fort Shaylar and Fort Brithik. The bodies there hadn't been this mangled.
This ... shredded. True, many of them had been so burned and shriveled as to no longer look human, but in some ways that had actually lessened the impact. It was hard to think of them as anything which had ever been human, while those killed by the yellows had at least been intact. These bodies were not.
In fact, they looked exactly like what they were—the brutally mutilated corpses of men who had been literally torn to pieces by vicious, ravening predators bigger than most of them had been.
So what? he demanded of himself harshly. Dead is dead, however you get that way. Besides, at least it's pretty quick when a gryphon gets hold of you! And none of these bastards was an old, gentle civilian who got murdered after he'd surrendered.
A stubborn little voice buried deep in the back of his brain stirred uneasily at that last statement. He felt it there, but he crushed it ruthlessly back into silence. Whatever might be happening to surrendered Sharonian POWs, he and his men hadn't had anything to do with it. And none of it could change what the butchers had done to Magister Halathyn.
He watched the dismounted unicorn cavalry troopers spreading out to relieve the initial infantry assault force. He and the other air-dropped infantry had opened the gates and held them until the cavalry could arrive against the disjointed efforts of the dozen or so Sharonians who'd been outside the barracks and somehow evaded destruction by the gryphons. He'd lost three of his own men, but the defenders had been so stu
Most of those who'd tried to retake the gate were just as dead as the ones the gryphons had ripped apart, and—
"Sir! Fifty Halesak!"
Halesak turned and found Yirman Farl pelting across the parade ground towards him.
"What is it?" the officer asked sharply.
"We've found the POWs!" Farl a
"For me?" Halesak blinked.
"Yes, Sir!" Farl's smile looked like it was about to split his face in half. "It's Fifty Ulthar!"
"Ulthar?" Halesak repeated sharply. "Where?"
"Over here, Sir!"
Halesak followed the lance quickly through the carnage to what was obviously the fort's brig. There were perhaps a dozen men locked into its cells. The early morning light pouring in through the outer barred windows showed that the cells weren't particularly crowded, and that they'd been provided with ample bedding. That registered peripherally with Halesak, but his attention was locked on the tallish, wiry, red-haired Andaran who had a cell entirely to himself.
"Therman!" Halesak seized his brother-in-law's good hand as Fifty Ulthar reached it through the bars to him. "Gods, man! We thought you were dead!"
"Not quite." Ulthar was paler than ever, Halesak thought, and noticed the awkward way the other man stood, with his left arm in a sling. The shoulder on that side was oddly hunched and swollen, as if there might be multiple layers of bandage under his blouse, and his face was grooved with pain lines which hadn't been there the last time Halesak had seen him.
"I took a hit through the shoulder," Ulthar explained as he saw the direction of Halesak's gaze. "Tore the hell out of it, actually, and these people don't have healers. Not like ours, anyway. They did their best, but ..."
He shrugged his good shoulder, and Halesak's jaw tightened.
"If they did, it's the only time they did," he grated, and Ulthar's eyebrows rose.
"What's that mean?" he asked. Halesak looked at him in surprise, and Ulthar smiled crookedly. "I know you better than that, Iftar. It's not like you to leap to conclusions, and I'm a bit at a loss to understand how you'd know anything about how they've been treating us since they captured us."
"I don't have to know about that to know what sort of butchers these people are," Halesak said harshly.
Ulthar's surprise was obvious, and Halesak's lips drew back in a snarl. "The fact that they shot Magister Halathyn down like a dog after he surrendered is all I need to know, Therman!"
"Shot Magister Halathyn?" Ulthar's surprise had segued into confusion. "What're you talking about?
They didn't kill Magister Halathyn!"
"What?!" Halesak stared at him in disbelief. For an instant or two, the ex-garthan's brain simply refused to process information. Then he shook himself violently. "But the Intelligence reports ... the briefings