Chapter 75

“-ire! Sire!”

The world was a blur of sound and fury.

Marcus’s eyes opened to reveal the bloody form of Deekius above him, his hood long since singed and discarded, revealing a face scarred by the remnants of the explosion.

Around him was a field of burning ratman corpses – the ratguard. Those who had not been caught in the immediate radius of the Kobold’s suicidal explosions had suffered the most. They lay, screeching in infinite pain, as their fur burned down to their bones and their skin peeled away. They would have been easy pickings for the Kobolds who had charged them in the aftermath of the detonations if Skeever had not led the small forces that still held firm against them.

“INTO THEM!’ Marcus could hear the ratman scream in the eternal night of the North Warrens. “BE GIVING NO QUARTER!”

Marcus rose without taking Deekius’ waiting paw. He swayed, slowly taking his eyes away from the dying rats around him in the craters that would now serve as their graves. He watched Skeever cleave clean through the lines of Kobolds that had tried to break through his vanguard force – the ratman was practically holding the entire army together. Beyond even them, the Kobolds on their side were right at the frontlines. It seemed Skeever had even managed to wrangle up enough of them to strike back against the loyalists in the time Marcus was out. No matter what anyone said, that rat was a commander worthy of the title of First-Talon.

Worthier than I am, anyway…

“Sire,” Deekius said. “Skeever is taking command. We – we are thinking that you are –“

The look Marcus gave Deekius stopped the ratman’s voice in his throat.

“Ix…” Marcus said in an almost dream-like daze. “Ix – where is he?”

Deekius avoided his gaze. He dropped his snout to the ground and clenched his staff with a firmness that might have indicated that he was about to produce another one of his Unclean-blessed miracles.

“Deekius,” Marcus said firmly. “Tell me where he is.”

It was a command, this time, and the rat-priest obeyed.

“Be following,” he said.

Both of them climbed the last stretch of the blackened, blasted hill, stepping over the bodies that littered the floor of the cavern until there was no free ground left to step on. In the distance, Skeever and the remaining ratguard and Kobold units were pushing the meagre forces of Kobold loyalists back. It looked like they had expended their suicide troops in the last attack – banking everything on a last-ditch effort to achieve victory.

No, Marcus caught himself thinking. No – not victory. There is no victory here. For anyone.

A kamikaze run…an assault so debased, so desperate…how could he have predicted it? He had never been able to understand the fanatical faith that compelled soldiers and civilians to strap explosives to their chests and run into the field of battle knowing, to a certainty, that death would follow them. Knowing that they would walk a pathway to heaven…be reborn from the ashes of their demise.

Is that what this butcher Skegga’s ‘Kleansing’ really is? He thought, walking like a limping zombie up the hill, his eyes hazy, focusing on only the shambling form of Deekius before him. Is that what I failed to see? To understand? Were these Kobolds really so indoctrinated as to believe that, in death, they would finally have the power they dreamed of?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Not for sure…

That, he knew, was the tragedy of this whole sorry affair. Not that he had failed – but why. His failure had not been one of strategy. It had not been one of hot-headed egoism or impractical decision making born from inexperience. In the end, whatever ‘victory’ he could claim here was tainted by a failure greater than any wartime blunder: a failure to understand just how far his enemy was willing to go. A failure of hypothesizing that, even with the fair terms he brought to the table, there were still at least a thousand Kobolds who would never see life his way. And there was a toad who would never surrender, even if there was no way he could truly ever win the war he had started.

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In the end, Marcus’s failure had been born from a lack of imagination.

Deekius finally paused at the apex of the hill overlooking Grindlefecht’s eastern perimeter. Here and there on the ridge, the remainder of the Sharpshots were discharging what meagre ammunition they still had into the enemy below, their eyes possessed with animalistic focus – birds of prey sending their sweeping claws at their foes.

It took Deekius a few strained attempts to actually get the ratman that was issuing orders to them men to listen to him. Only when Marcus stepped forwards, grabbed the rat’s arquebus out of his hand, and threatened to snap the thing upon his head did he finally relent in his firing and address the Shai-Alud.

“Your commander,” Marcus said wearily, through eyes burning with rage. “Where is he?”

The ratman’s voice caught in his throat. He looked from Marcus to Deekius, who bowed his head again, before nodding once as though in understanding and bidding Marcus to follow him.

Amidst the death-throes of the Kobolds of Grindlefecht, Marcus stopped at a small collection of rocks that had been piled up at the end of the blackened hilltop, behind the Sharpshot’s firing line.

The rocks were piled just above the head of a Kobold that lay in a dark crater formed in the earth, his arquebus just out of reach of his still flexing fingers.

The Kobold’s body had been sliced clean in half, his tiny intestines still weeping blood under his waist.

Marcus staggered forward, tripping and falling over himself as he stumbled down the crater and didn’t even hear when Deekius shouted for him to stay away.

He didn’t care. His eyes were glued to the Kobold at the center of the crater, the Kobold who’s heavy breathing consumed his attention. In this moment, the world narrowed to the tunnel-vision of death that struck at the heart of his being, and when the twitching eyes of Ix finally found his in the dark, Marcus did everything he could to not allow the creature to see the despair that possessed his features.

“S-Sire-Sire,” Ix coughed.

“…don’t, Ix,” Marcus said. “Don’t say anything.”

He dropped to his knees before the fallen warrior and took his tiny claw in his hand, feeling the Kobold’s sharp fingers grip him tightly, drawing blood without really trying to.

“You were always strong…” Marcus murmured. “Even now…”

“Y-you,” Ix sniffed, blood and snot spewing down his snout that Marcus wiped away with his handkerchief. “You are…strong-strong, Sire…strongest man-man…in the Under…”

“Not without you, Ix,” Marcus replied, ignoring the screams that echoed overhead. “You – you were the backbone. The ranger specialist. You learned everything you had to faster than anyone else. And your commander is ordering you to hold on. You understand?”

“I-ngh,” the tiny creature bleated. “I…I am done-done…Si-“

“That’s an order, you understand?” Marcus practically shouted in the fading eyes of the Kobold. “You’re not going anywhere without my say-so. Deekius!”

The rat-priest was already at Marcus’s back. He hadn’t even heard him approach, so gentle was the rat’s shuffling.

“Fix him, now,” he said.

“Sire, he is being –“

“I SAID FIX HIM!” Marcus spat, turning and leveling the arquebus in his hand at his Gloomraava’s snout. “You’ve worked miracles before in the name of your damned God. WORK ANOTHER ONE, NOW!”

He watched Deekius stare blankly up at him down the barrel of his gun, the ratman’s eyes unblinking and unphased as he gave his answer.

“Sire….he is being gone.”

“Bullshit!” Marcus spat right back. “BULLSHIT! Your Shai-Alud just gave you a command. If you value your life, you’ll –“

“I should have…kill-killed…them.”

Marcus’s rage was abated by the feeling of Ix’s firm claw on his leg.

“I…was…weak-weak…”

“No,” Marcus said, dropping to one knee again and clasping a firm arm around his fallen lieutenant. “Never, Ix. Never you.”

He expected this moment to be like in the war-films he’d seen as a kid. Either that, or dry and detached like his textbooks presented battlefield deaths. Somehow, neither of them could relate the truth. The truth of the matter wasn’t even somewhere in the middle. Because he’d been here already, he realized with a sickening, tiring heart. Gatskeek, Festicus, more Kobolds and ratmen than he could count…

Because of me…

So, when he looked through the grief he was trying his hardest to swallow, what surprised him most in this moment was the bloody smile that stretched across Ix’s face.

“Sire Marcus,” he said, hand gripping his General’s mud-drenched coat ever tighter. “Be…strong!..strong…”

Then, like a light being snuffed from a flickering candle, he was gone.

***

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