Last Life

THE OPEN DOOR OF THE GATE swung back into place, much more quickly this time. Besides the massive jambs, my soldiers were already busy propping some huge beams up against the gates to bolster them even further.

The fort sprang into action immediately. Shouts from the commanders started echoing out all across the grounds. Bundles of arrows, spears, and shields soon appeared from inside the wagons. We had brought a pretty good stock of such ammunition with us.

Our archers were already moving into predetermined positions atop the wall. Strykers and shapeshifters were fanning out into their own positions at the same time. Besides their personal armament, each of the “Savages” had a long spear crafted from Shadow materials. Each of them had a good supply of lilac bruts as well.

As the fort prepared for an attack, my men brought the prospectors in to see me. One of them was still unconscious, so a Glenn healer and his assistant were taking care of him in their wagon. I intended to stop in and see him later on. You never know — maybe they would end up needing my help.

Both of the prospectors were swarthy men with long, bushy beards. There was still blood caked on both their faces. Their clothing so shredded that it looked like they had just forced their way through a huge, overgrown bramble patch.

The one who had shouted out the warning seemed to have regained his composure a little bit. He kept turning his head this way and that as he looked around. It seemed like he was starting to realize that these new people in the fort weren’t simple prospectors like himself.

“You know them?” I asked Jacob, who was standing two steps away from me.

“This,” the headman said as he nodded at the man who had screamed out the warning, “is Skuba, and that’s Borka. The other one’s Vikra. They used to work as a group of four. Where’s Old Vlasta? Where’s everybody else?”

Jacob had already turned to address Skuba.

“How many were there?” I asked. “When will they be here?”

“Hundreds, Your Worship,” the bearded prospector replied with a gulp. “A huge pack! They were right on our heels the whole time!”

“This is His Lordship the Margrave de Valier you’re talking to,” Jacob corrected him immediately. “Now out with it! And keep it short and sweet! You were scared out of your mind, you sure you didn’t see twenty of the rats and mistake them for two hundred?”

“I’d...!” Skuba obviously wanted to jump up and defend himself, but my people were holding him tight. “I saw a white scrogg with my own eyes! It was a huge, ancient beast! They came from Sleepy Gorge when the flow hit... There’s nowhere else they could have come from... They attacked our camp at night. It was like a gray tidal wave! I’m telling you! There are hundreds of them!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Chevalier and his strykers perked up at the mention of a white scrogg. The peasants who had come with Jacob started exchanging nervous glances and whispering among themselves.

The bearded prospector’s eyes were darting around frantically. A thick, viscous stream of saliva began to drip out into his shaggy beard.

“We have to run while there’s still time! You have lots of horses! A lot of us could survive! Quick!”

The prospector’s hysterics were cut short by Jacob, who delivered a heavy slap to the side of the man’s head.

“What a bunch of scoundrels,” the old man snarled at Skuba, who had suddenly gone completely silent. “Run, he says. I’m sure you’d probably bring this pack straight to the village, wouldn’t you?”

The slap seemed to take all the fight out of Skuba; with a pitiful groan, he went limp in the hands of the two soldiers who were holding him.

The second prospector had watched it all happen with a detached look of determined silence on his face. It was obvious that the man wasn’t even there in the room with us; he was off in some other dimension inside his mind.

“Take them both to the healers,” I commanded, whereupon my soldiers dragged them off to the wagon with the white circle painted on its side.

In addition to their exhaustion and shock, both men were wounded, albeit not seriously. A couple superficial ripping lacerations and avulsions. Besides, a quick scan had revealed that none of the three prospectors were gifted. Most likely, they had simply gotten lucky — they were probably right next to the horses, which enabled them to escape from the epicenter of the massacre.

As I headed for one of the staircases that led up onto the wall, I turned to Duval, who was walking alongside me, and asked:

“Your thoughts, Monsieur?”

“If this man’s telling the truth, and it really was scroggs, they’ll definitely be heading this way in pursuit of the three escapees,” the Chevalier replied with total confidence. “Like Jacob, though, I think the poor bastard’s exaggerating the danger. You know what they say: fear has big eyes.”

“And what about the white scrogg?” I asked.

As we talked, I trudged up the staircase and stopped at the edge of the wall. Sigurd and Georg von Linz were standing to my right, and Chevalier Duval was to my left with his strykers. I quickly glanced back over my shoulder. Jacob and his companions had stayed down below. They were headed for the healers’ wagon.

“The white scrogg is a legend,” Duval snickered. “But it’s a real one. The leader of leaders. A half-sentient beast. Cunning, and very powerful. Personally, I think that this white rat is basically a full-on chimera that’s been altered by the Barrier. The beast and its pack were last seen up north, about ten years ago. They slaughtered an entire small settlement of mountain men on the frontier. Only a few of the luckier ones managed to make it out alive. That said, the idea that a white scrogg and its pack would show up in these depopulated parts is pretty unlikely. Most likely, we’re dealing with a big family of rats — maybe twenty or thirty head, led by a gray scrogg. Come to hunt with the flow.”

“What should we expect from these beasts?” I asked.

“Scroggs are very clever,” said Duval, who suddenly sounded like he had launched into a full-on lecture. “They’re very fast and maneuverable, especially when their magical reservoirs are full. Even without mana, though, they’re still pretty fast. When it comes to defense, though, they’re pretty miserable. And thank the gods for that. Their hides are thin, and they can be pierced with even the most basic arrows. True, you’d actually have to HIT the bastards for that to work...”

While the Chevalier was sharing his experience with me, I looked out across the huge sea of grass that stretched across the entire extent of the plateau country in front of us. The long, wild grass was shimmering in the setting sun, and from time to time a gust of wind would whip up small sections of it and send waves rippling out, so that it looked for all the world as if it were a huge body of water.

I didn’t see a single beast, either in true vision or normal vision. And yet the feeling of tension was growing stronger with every passing minute.

“All this applies to the simple hunting scroggs,” Duval continued. “At the next level in the hierarchy, the beasts get bigger and more dangerous. These animals form the inner circle around the leader, who uses them to coordinate the movements of the smaller scroggs. These beasts are just as fast, but they also have much better protection than the normal scroggs, as well as the ability to protect themselves with a magical shield.

“What are the chances that the pack will try an all-out assault on the fort?” I asked.

“I’d say it’s vanishingly unlikely, Your Lordship,” replied Chevalier Duval. He sounded pretty confident. “This fort is way too much for a small pack to take out. That said, it’d be a good chance to hunt. Every dead rat means at least one lilac brut about the size of a pigeon’s egg. And that’s not to mention other important components like fangs, claws, hides, and organs.”

“Agreed,” I replied immediately.

Whether or not this pack ends up attacking us, I thought, we’re going to have to make a sortie into the foothills to find out more about what happened to the rest of the prospectors. Besides, we still have to make the journey to Bone Grotto. So if there IS a pack of overgrown rats prowling the area, we’re going to need to take it out.

In the end, however, we didn’t have to go anywhere... The scroggs came to us.

Once the sun set beyond the horizon, the cold wind that had been blowing suddenly intensified. I was standing on top of the fortress wall, staring out at the foothills in the distance. Darkness was rapidly enveloping everything around us, leaving only the faint light of the moon to provide some meager illumination to the waves of grass.

The first scroggs emerged quietly, without any superfluous noise whatsoever. Which was especially impressive considering that the wind was blowing toward the fort, and it would have carried any such noise straight to our ears. There were five of them. They were moving slowly, but with such remarkable coordination that they almost seemed to be parts of one single creature.

The scroggs looked exactly as Duval had described them. They were short, wiry beasts with a thick layer of smooth fur lying tightly across their bodies. It was a dirty gray color that made their unnaturally-thin bodies look even more unhealthy. They had long snouts and sharp, prominent fangs. And there was a malicious lilac glow in their eyes.

They made their way to the fort slowly, using the grass as cover. From time to time, one of the beasts would stop, listen, and raise its snout to catch the scent in the air. The scroggs weren’t rushing into their attack. Every step was precise and purposeful. The beasts really did seem to be partially sentient. Having tracked down the fugitives, they were carefully feeling out the situation in front of them. It was obvious that there would be no suicidal frontal assault.

The same sharp-eyed Glenn who had spotted the riders was also the first to spot the rats, and he passed the word quietly down the wall.

Most of the people in our unit were gifted, so darkness wasn’t really an obstacle. In fact, torches were more of a hindrance than a help for the vast majority of us. So we didn’t light any fires, either on the wall or inside the inner grounds of the fort. As such, the fort was completely shrouded in darkness after sunset. The silence was broken only by the occasional huff from our horses or chance gust of wind.

I was silent, too, as I watched the five scroggs approach and waited for them to finally come close enough for me to get a glimpse of them in true vision.

Finally, the overgrown rats seemed to decide something for themselves, and they continued their advance until one of them came into the range of my scan. Hm, I thought... Sure enough. A brut about the size of a pigeon’s egg. And the others had similar bruts inside them too.

Once the long-tailed scouts reached the edge of the grass, they froze. Then, one of them rose up onto its hind legs and stretched its long snout out toward the fort. It waved its nose from side to side, then dove abruptly back into the grass. A few moments later, I heard a prolonged hiss, and the beasts turned around to face the foothills from whence they had come.

“Now!” I said quietly. No sooner did I speak than a flurry of Glenn arrows hissed through the air toward the spot where the scroggs were preparing to scurry away.

“Damn, they’re quick!” Georg von Linz shouted with a note of admiration in his voice.

I was pretty impressed with their speed myself. They managed to dodge several of the arrows pretty easily. And that despite the fact that the attack was sudden and utterly unexpected. Had there been normal archers manning the walls instead of our Glenns, the rats probably could have escaped. Unfortunately for them, though, they were up against some of the very best archers in the world.

The five scroggs were turned into pincushions in a matter of one or two seconds; they died before they could even start moving away from the fort. As soon as this happened, we heard a hiss of outrage and a muffled shriek. The only thing I managed to spot was a small shadow, quickly scurrying away beneath the grass. Apparently, there were six of the little scouts, not five...

Surprisingly, the rest of the night passed quietly. As did the following day. The pack didn’t make any appearance at all. Unfortunately, the wind kept blowing toward the foothills, so even our werewolves and their keen noses couldn’t tell whether the Shadow beasts were anywhere nearby.

The shapeshifters came to see me several times, itching to go out and scout the area. But I decided I didn’t want to risk them. These rats were obviously much more agile than the shapeshifters. If my mountain men found themselves in a tight spot, they wouldn’t be able to escape. And if the beasts came at them in large numbers, they wouldn’t be able to fight them off either.

We brought the rats’ carcasses into the fort, where we finally had a chance to examine them at our leisure.

The scroggs’ fangs and claws were impressively long. Any one of the beasts, who were all about the size of a large wolf, would be able to wreak absolute havoc in a close-quarters fight, even if they ended up dying. Furthermore, according to the locals, these rats weren’t even relatively big ones.

Once all our soldiers had satisfied their curiosity, Chevalier Duval and his people started cutting up the carcasses. After watching them work for a little while, I realized that there probably wouldn’t be anything left of the rats but bloodstains on the ground when it was all over. Bones, meat, hide, organs — the local strykers were expertly smearing them with various liquids and powders before distributing them carefully into a number of specially-prepared containers. As they worked, Duval’s eyes shone with excitement.

Despite the fact that according to local law, any Shadow goods were supposed to go straight into my personal stocks, the Chevalier had probably already realized that I made a habit of sharing my spoils generously with my people.

That evening, I convened a small council, where we decided that if the beasts didn’t show up soon, we would make a sortie in the direction from which the prospectors had originally come riding into our fort.

Those three, by the way, were still lying in the healers’ wagon. Vikra, by the way, was still lying unconscious inside it. Borka was staring blankly up at the ceiling of the wagon, while Skuba kept whimpering to himself about the gigantic white beast that would undoubtedly come and devour us all.

“Pack’s here!” A sentry shouted down from the observation deck about two hours after sunset. “Forty head, maybe more!”

“Just as I said,” Chevalier Duval concluded with a smile as I encountered him at the entrance to the keep. “These peasants mistook a big pack for a huge horde. Luckily, the leader decided that they can take us. Now we won’t have to go running all over the foothills looking for them.”

It took us just a few seconds to get up to the top of the wall. I walked over to the edge and stared out into the darkness.

Little shadows were flitting around in the grass before my eyes, and sure enough, most of them were quite a bit bigger than the scouts we had killed. The Glenn sentry had underestimated their numbers a little bit — there were definitely more than fifty of them. An especially-large gray shadow stood out conspicuously against the rest of the rats. It was moving confidently, but without hurrying.

When the scroggs got close enough, I finally had a chance to get a good look at the big gray bastard. It was clearly the leader of the pack, and compared to the others it was simply massive. Its gray fur glistened in the moonlight, and its eyes shone with a lilac-colored fire that was almost literally soul-chilling.

Two other large rats were moving along on either side of their leader. These were smaller, and their fur was a little bit darker. As the trio came within range of my scanner, I saw that they had two-colored energy systems of a type I had already seen before: lilac and scarlet. The Shadow of Strix had given its children the twinned gifts of increased regeneration and attack power.

Finally, a loud, hissing sound somewhere between a shriek and a sob burst out into the darkness, and the whole pack charged forward at once. The leader and its entourage were running in the center, allowing the smaller beasts to rush toward the walls first. Protecting itself from arrows, I thought... Smart beast.

The scroggs moved with mind-boggling speed, and practically merged into a single unified whole as they did so. Their backs were arched, their sharp fangs and claws bared. Spurred on by the force of their leader’s will, they prepared to give their lives in pursuit of their common goal.

As soon as the scroggs attacked, our archers swung into action. Almost all of them were stationed on the north wall. To the tune of quiet, but confident orders from their commanders, they filled the sky with score after score of murderous arrows. In the space of a few heartbeats, the deadly hail started hurtling toward the ground. An instant later, the first messengers of death slammed down into the first wave of beasts.

Several of the scroggs fell immediately; their thin hides were no match for the Glenns’ arrows. The arrows buried themselves in the ground right through the beasts’ bodies, leaving them shrieking in convulsions. Some wounded beasts seemed to forget about the attack entirely as they started hobbling around from side to side, in a vain attempt to rip the arrows out of their sides.

Overall, though, the pack continued to surge forward as a unified mass, as most of the bigger rats managed to dodge the deadly rain of arrows — they were moving so quickly that even the experienced Glenns were having trouble hitting them. In true vision, I could see that this was the result of the lilac mana in the beasts’ energy systems.

The leader and its entourage were still totally unharmed. These were the cleverest and fastest rats: flattening themselves against the ground, they used their smaller minions as living shields, and thereby avoided being stuck full of arrows. This had the added benefit of expending only a very minimal amount of mana.

Despite another murderous volley that cut down almost the entire front line of attackers, the scroggs’ assault wasn’t losing any steam at all. None of them seemed like they were about to retreat. The black wave of long-fanged killers reached the moat, and then the wall, in a frighteningly short span of time.

Without wasting a second, the scroggs hopped up onto the palisade and started clambering up its wooden beams. Their sharp claws sank into the wood and kept them firmly dug in to even the smallest foothold. Agile as insects, they flew up the side of the palisade almost as quickly as they had moved across the ground. The smaller beasts ran up first, acting as scouts and sniffing out safe routes for the rats behind them. Every movement was abrupt, but also deliberate — the scroggs seemed to know exactly where to place their paws so as not to lose any momentum.

The two larger rats around the leader started climbing up the wall a little behind the others, using their bodies as a shield for the leader, who was the last to start the ascent. Our strykers and werewolves, who had already assumed their combat forms, were already positioned at the sections of the wall where the first few scroggs were set to reach the top.

The ascent was coming at a very heavy price for the rats. The Glenns kept firing arrow after arrow, knocking the smaller scroggs off the wall like cockroaches. Still, though, several of the rats managed to make it to the top of the wall so quickly that the archers didn’t even have time to stop them. And right behind them, shuffling its clawed paws with almost unnatural speed, came the leader and its bodyguards.

The arrows weren’t doing anything to them. Any time an arrow would have stricken one of them, the beast’s magical shield would emit a deep purple flash that briefly illuminated the darkness all around their bodies. Just as Duval had said.

As the first surviving beasts clambered across the edge of the wall, they landed with a thud on the wooden platform where, without wasting a single second, they threw themselves into a furious attack on the nearest defenders.

One of the smaller scroggs jumped onto a werewolf who was fighting at the edge of the palisade. The shapeshifter tried to slap the beast away with a lightning-quick swipe of his clawed paw, but the rat was too quick for him. The scrogg dodged the blow, then jumped onto the shapeshifter. The rodent’s teeth and claws sank into the fur-covered skin on the back of the werewolf’s neck, and the combatants collapsed to the ground in a snarling, hissing heap.

A little to the right, two strykers were teaming up against one of the larger scroggs, which had just leapt up onto the platform next to them. The beast let out a menacing hiss as its purple eyes flashed in the moonlight. One of the combat mages hit the monster with a thrust of his sword, which ended up grazing the beast and cutting a long, shallow hole in its abdomen, but even that didn’t stop it.

The scrogg jumped to the side, then slid deftly between the two strykers. With one long jump, it tore into an archer who was firing arrow after arrow into the enormous rat leader. One swift blow of its clawed paw tore the Glenn’s apart, and he tumbled backward into the darkness behind the wall.

As soon as they were within easy striking distance of the top of the wall, the leader and its entourage suddenly sped up. Their massive bodies were practically flying upward along the surface of the wall. The leader was concentrated and silent as it continued its ascent, paying no attention to the arrows that kept slamming into its magical shield. Just a little farther, and the three massive rats would be ready to enter the fray.

“Take the leader,” I commanded Sigurd. With a wry, bloodthirsty grin, he rushed forward.

Everyone’s attention was riveted on the battle for this section of the wall. And this ended up being a real shame...

Almost as if fate itself were mocking us, we heard a shout of warning from the sentry on the section of wall off to our right:

“I see another pack! About fifty head!”

No sooner did he finish his warning than we heard similar shouts from the left and from the opposite wall across the fort behind us. A moment later, a hideous hissing shriek erupted out of the darkness from a huge number of throats. The sound turned my blood to ice in my veins.

Duval was standing next to me, and as I glanced at him I saw his eyes widen until they were practically up onto his forehead. His mouth had dropped slightly open in an expression of horror.

Whoever was in charge of these scroggs hadn’t wasted any time. The fort was surrounded on all sides. I had been outwitted by a half-sentient beast...