Chapter 21 - The Last Stand

Corporal Higgins breathed in the smell of mildewy wood and sour wine in short, panicked breaths. He had picked a terrible place to hide. He realized that now, too little too late, as he peeked out over the empty barrel, staring helplessly over the wall at the figure towering above the trees.

No one was even supposed to be on this side of the fort. The fighting was all supposed to be by the ruined gates. This hiding spot had worked last night when the rest of his squad faced the giant. He’d heard only two survived, poor bastards… Better them than him, though.

Let the other soldiers do the fighting. If they wanted to be heroes, Vesenia let them. He had joined the army for the uniforms, not the glory. He could still remember seeing the Duke’s soldiers in their full-dress uniforms for the first time. Marching in a victory parade after the siege of DeGaullis. Not the knights on horseback in front with their shiny armor that stood out, it was the soldiers marching right behind them, dressed up in their navy blue uniforms with their shiny brass buttons. Just like the wooden toy he had clutched to his chest that day. Ever since then, he had wanted to come back home one day and march in one of those parades. Ladies loved a man in uniform.

It all seemed rather silly now though, as he sat there in the empty wine-barrel trying not to soil himself. He tried to work up the courage to peek over the edge again, to see if the giant was really there, hoping, praying, that it was just a dream. But he knew it was there. He knew he didn’t have to look. He could feel it in his bones, literally. With every shaking step that the horrible abomination took.

He forced himself to look anyway. The giant crashed through the last of the trees, pushing them over like they were no more than spindly reeds of grass by a riverbank. The tall pines cracked and hissed in protest as they snapped and fell to the ground.

The giant strode forward, standing in the open ground between the fort and the forest. The gray tower of sinew and muscle held the top half of a massive skull in one hand, that could have only belonged to a great dragon. It was a massive, horrible-looking thing, almost more terrifying than the giant itself. He carried it in one hand. The bottom went below his knee and the horns went well above his shoulder, like it was a colossal shield in the giant’s hand. Two great bone horns jutted out from the top of the skull, each one as thick as a tree. Metal was crudely but effectively bolted onto the tips, capping the ends. The bone was yellowed, the color of aged parchment, but all the dragon’s horrible teeth still shown a polished pearl white. Each as long as swords, each just as sharp.

The giant’s armor made a hollow rattle as it walked. It was covered in bones. The ribs, vertebrae and other shards of the massive wyrm’s skeleton had been lashed to the giant with leather straps or chains. It sounded like a hellish windchime as it moved. The giant was bad enough on its own, with the dragon bone armor, it looked as if it had stepped straight out of a nightmare.

That horrible wailing of the horn echoed from the woods again. Higgins peeked further over the wall, looking down, and saw the forest floor teeming in a moving carpet of gnolls, waiting just within the trees.

The giant answered the horn’s cry with a bellow of its own. It sounded like one thousand madmen howling at the moon. A shout, a yell, a challenge roared in defiance at the gods themselves. An earsplitting roar Higgins thought would tear the very sky asunder. He could feel it vibrating the wooden barrel, could feel it in his very bones. It went on for such a terribly long time, it felt like nearly an entire minute of yelling before the giant emptied its massive lungs. Then the giant stamped the ground, shaking the entire wall.

He wasn’t sure what the giant was about to do, but it didn’t look good. He wanted to run, but he was afraid if he got out of the barrel, the giant would see him. He took another second to consider his position, but it was too late. The giant surged forward, moving with incredible speed for something so large. The massive dragon skull held out in front of it. The huge horns, thicker than trees, pointed at the wall like it was a living siege engine. Higgins froze as tons of muscle, sinew, flesh, and bone charged right at him.

Chunks of stone bigger than a man broke off from the wall and flew over Higgins as his hiding place toppled over and shattered apart. Higgins smashed so hard into the wall, his teeth crunched together around the tip of his tongue. His eyes filled with tears as he spit out bits and pieces of his broken teeth. Uniform or not, what lady would love a man with a mouthful of broken teeth?

Higgins sobbed and tried to pick up the bits of his broken teeth. He didn’t even notice the fissure in the wall forming next to him or the giant’s massive face looking down at him. Not until it opened its mouth and let out a horrible laugh that rattled him to his very core. Blowing the hair from his face with a hot wind of fetid, rancid breath, deafening him until his ears rang.

The shadow of the giant’s hand appeared over Higgins. Higgins sat on his knees and sobbed, not wanting to look at the terrible monster. Higgins wished he had been content to just watch the parades from afar. Silly business trying to march in one. That was the last thought that ever crossed his mind.

************

The entire wall shook, and Morten had to grasp the side of the ramparts to steady himself. The entire wall shook from the impact of a massive force. In the distance, the eastern wall exploded in a rain of bricks as a massive section at the top of the wall broke off, falling inside the courtyard below.

Kaye turned to Morten and the other soldiers on the wall and pointed to four of them. “You lot stay here and finish off the ones in the pit. The rest of you, with me! C’mon!”

“You too, giant-killer.” Kaye gave Morten a push forward.

Morten swallowed, clutching his loaded crossbow as he followed behind the others, the shadow of his oversized helmet seeming to grow with every step.

Morten, Kaye, and fourteen others shifted down the wall, cranking their windlasses as they ran or clutching already loaded crossbows to their chests. Morten looked around at the ashen, scared faces, trying to push his own fear down into the growing pit in his stomach.

Morten could see it now, looming ahead. A massive shadow moving over by the wall in the darkness. Too far to see the details of it, just the horrible size, even taller than the wall. He couldn’t see the gnolls from this angle, but he knew they were out there. He could hear them. Hundreds of them. Cheering the on the giant’s destructive rampage.

Morten tried not to think about the giant ahead of them, tried to take everything just one step at a time. His little toe slipped out of his sock, and he let out a hollow laugh as he realized he hadn’t even had a chance to change his damn socks since last night.

There was another earth-shaking crash as the giant rammed the wall up ahead of them. Morten was thrown to his knees. His loaded crossbow almost firing into the crowd of soldiers. Bricks flew from the wall up ahead, raining down into the courtyard behind the crumbling wall.

Morten saw the giant now, in all of its horrible glory. Wearing its bone armor and carrying the giant dragon skull, it looked like a walking, breathing, living nightmare. It started backing up, getting ready to charge the wall again. His heart was racing, and his breathing was a ragged mess. In the back of his mind, all he could see was Sergeant Donovan’s kicking legs and meat smeared over the wall.

“Keep it together, lads! One more giant for us to kill tonight and we got the giant-slayer with us this time.”

The soldiers let out a forced cheer. Morten felt someone clap him on the back, at least he thought someone did. He wasn’t even completely sure, his entire body felt numb. Morten felt like he was going to hurl over the side of the wall at any second.

“Fire!” Kaye yelled.

The soldiers took up defensive positions against the wall, a healthy distance away from the giant, but still within crossbow range. The yells and shouts of the men next to Morten melted together into a porridge of incomprehensible racket that echoed unceasingly in his helmet. Then the air was filled with the ratcheting sound of crossbow windlasses, barks of snapping strings, and the hiss of bolts filling the air.

**********

“To the wall!” First Sergeant Goren bellowed to the remaining soldiers by the pit. They hesitated, staring at each other with scared, pale faces as they looked over at the huge crack forming in the wall. “Now, dammit! That’s an order!” The sound of clattering armor and muffled hush of worried whispers soon receded, leaving Malfus to his dark work. He didn’t even notice them leave, focusing only on the next corpse below his feet.

A few errant howls of pain still arose from the pit as the zombies continued their slaughter. A sudden burst of movement caught Malfus’s eye as two gnolls tried to scramble up the rock slope out of the pit. They didn’t even make it halfway up before bloody, clawed hands grabbed them by the legs and pulled them back down. One gnoll managed to grasp on to some of the rocks while the other got pulled down. It screamed and howled as it held on, its legs were flayed to a bloody mess of torn meat, clawed nearly to the bone by the zombies until they finally pulled it back down. It howled for a surprisingly long time after it was dragged under the mass of bodies.

Two zombies climbed out of the pit, dragging a gnoll’s limp corpse with them. They set the body on a small pile of other corpses next to Malfus before disappearing back into the pit.

Malfus concentrated, shutting out the extraneous noises around him, focusing on the gnoll’s corpse at his feet, staring up at him with glassy eyes. Arcane words filled his mouth with the taste of vinegar before a faint greenish light flickered, casting Malfus’s pale face in an eerie pallor.

The look of fear that was frozen on the gnoll’s face melted away as the rigor mortis of the muscles relaxed slacklining its jaw. It pushed itself up off the ground and then started running in the direction of the soldiers.

Malfus patted some sweat beading on his brow, then turned to the next corpse lying below him as zombies brought up still another for the pile. He felt exhausted, bone-tired, but knew he couldn’t stop. You can rest once you’re dead, get back to it. Malfus took a deep breath and then started on the next body.

There was so much negative energy here from all the dying that it bled into the physical plane like a weeping wound, like spilled wine seeping into a carpet. Negative energy often builds up around battlefields, graveyards, even hospices; anywhere there has been a lot of death. The energy usually dissipates gradually on its own but can build up enough to leave festering sores on the land behind that take generations to heal.

In places like these, wounds take longer to heal, the body’s natural resistances are weakened, making disease and contagion easier to spread. One book Malfus had read even mentioned the body aging faster if too much time is spent in places like these.

It was invisible energy to the uninitiated. They would perhaps feel an icy chill, or that feeling as if “someone stepped on your grave,” or of eyes burrowing in the back of your head when there was no one actually there. The most sensitive people may hear strange voices or whispers bleeding through from the plane of death. Still though, even the most sensitive individual couldn’t actually draw upon the negative energy stored there, at least not like a trained necromancer. Or a self-taught one.

Malfus pulled from the pool of deadly energy gingerly, siphoning off only what he needed to raise each corpse. The next gnoll stood up, the bottom half of its jaw barely hanging on. It ran off to the wall after the others.

Malfus allowed himself the smallest sliver of a smile. He was down to ten seconds to raise another zombie and send it to the front lines. With each cast, it was becoming more ingrained in his psyche, getting easier each time. He had probably cast more spells tonight than in a month of research and practice. He’d never felt so much raw power before, never felt so connected to the plane of death. He could feel every strand in his web connecting him to each of his thralls. A small army now.

Malfus closed his eyes, readying himself for the next spell, but then he heard shouts in the distance, followed by an earth-shaking crash, robbing him of his attention. He looked over his shoulder and saw a large section of the wall tumble down into the courtyard, reminding Malfus of the urgency of his task at hand. He finished his spell, quickly turning to the next corpse as his zombies brought up still more from the pit.

**********

Morten braced himself as the giant charged forward with the dragon’s skull, metal-tipped horns dipping down toward the damaged wall like a jousting knight. The entire ground shook as it bounded forward. Morten could see the trees swaying and chunks of turf ripped out of the ground with every step the giant took.

The giant plowed into the wall with the force of thunder. The dragon horn wedged itself in the crack, breaking off a massive section from the top of the wall that fell inside the fort. A ripple of force traveled through the stone wall, as if a rock were thrown into a placid lake. It threw Morten backward from the ramparts, knocking him flat on his back from the force.

“It’s going to take the bloody wall down if we don’t stop it!” Someone shouted, but it felt miles away to Morten. He tried to crank his crossbow, but his arms felt like jelly.

The others kept firing at the giant. Most of the bolts bounced harmlessly off the huge dragon skull shield. The few that found their target appeared to just bounce off its skin or armor as well. The giant looked over at them and let out a roaring laugh that sounded like distant thunder.

“We’re just wasting out bolts!” Someone shouted next to him.

“Dammit.” Kaye growled, then turned to the others on the wall, having to shout to be heard. “Alright, start shooting at the bloody gnolls instead! Take out as many of the bastards as you can before they get inside!”

Morten tried to yell a warning of some kind, but his voice froze in his throat, and he dropped his crossbow. He saw the giant take a few steps toward them and then extend its long arm, the dragon skull’s gap-toothed rictus grin reaching towards them.

Kaye looked down and saw the shadows appearing at his feet, too little too late.

The skull came down on top of the wall with a crunch, teeth first. Right where Kaye and several others had just been standing. Hot blood sprayed all over Morten’s face, dripping down his cheeks. The dragon’s empty eye socket stared at him, close enough for him to reach out and touch. He heard the soldiers on the other side of the skull shout and scream, but it sounded miles away from him. He kicked away, slipping in the blood and gore as he scrambled on the ground to get up.

Morten sprawled to one side as the dragon skull start turning suddenly, the horns dipping down until they were facing him. Then the skull rushed away from him in the opposite direction, back toward the giant and the rest of the soldiers trapped in between it.

The skull made a grating sound as it scraped across the stone. A dozen screams suddenly ended in wet, snapping, popping sounds. The air was filled with a fine mist of blood, the coppery smell and taste of it was everywhere.

The soldiers that had been in front of Morten were no longer there, just a red carpet of meat and blood. Some of the soldier’s faces stared back at him, open-mouthed. He could still hear the severed heads screaming at him, yelling in horror. No… It was him. He was the one screaming.

Morten’s feet kicked and slid in the bloody gore as he pushed himself up and started running. Only four others had survived, they ran in front of Morten. Morten felt like he was running in a nightmare, that his feet were moving, but he wasn’t going fast enough.

Morten ran down the wall, following behind the others. Their shouts and screams of panic were drowned out by the giant’s bellowing laughter. A horrible, grating sound that reverberated inside Morten’s ribcage.

The four in front of Morten started climbing down the wall from one of the ladders. The soldiers shoved and shouted at one another, trying to be the first down.

“That’s too many.” Morten mumbled to himself. Then he kept running down the wall. Seconds later, Morten heard shouts and then a crash as the ladder behind him fell to the ground. In the courtyard below, two soldiers screamed in pain. The other two, didn’t.

Morten tried not to think and kept running. He didn’t give a damn about his ripped sock, oversized helmet, or that he had no idea where his crossbow was anymore. He only stopped running once he made it all the way back to the ladder by the pit. Morten scrambled down it, almost slipping from all the blood on his hands and slick boots.

Morten’s boots touched solid ground, but before he could turn to keep running, he froze. A gnoll stood right in front of him. Morten raised his empty hands to cover his face, too afraid to even scream, but then the gnoll ran off towards the growing crack in the wall. Morten breathed a sigh of relief as he realized it was a zombie.

He turned and saw Malfus standing by the pit next to a pile of bodies. Two other zombies were carrying another gnoll’s corpse from the pit and laid it next to Malfus. He was covered in sweat and the air rippled with plumes of dark energy that didn’t do much to calm Morten’s nerves.

“What do we do?”

“Huh?” Green light faded as Malfus stopped his muttered chanting and turned to face Morten, a strained and distant look in his eyes. “Sorry… in two places at once.”

“What do we do? The giant…” Morten’s voice was drowned out by another stone-splitting crash against the wall.

“I need more bodies… I’m nearly done with all the usable ones here.” Malfus looked over his shoulder, talking as much to himself as he was to Morten. “I need to go raise the giant… it’s time. After that, I’ll still need more bodies. Go and find them.”

Morten only half-heard the words at first, but then nodded a few seconds later, his oversized helmet bobbing as he ran off to go find a shovel.

*******

Hunger. Rage. Those were the only thoughts that bubbled up to the surface of the mind of the zombie-gnoll Malfus controlled, everything else was a black void. Rows of zombies with the same two thoughts on their minds stood next to it. Malfus had raised nearly all the gnolls that had been slaughtered inside the pit now. Eighty of them stood there, waiting patiently. The soldiers formed ranks behind the zombies, clutching onto their weapons desperately as they stared up at the cracking wall.

There was a gut-wrenching crash as another massive section of the wall tumbled off and fell to the ground. The ground shook and splinters of stone exploded in shrapnel. A sharp fragment of stone sliced into the thigh meat of the zombie-gnoll, but it barely even flinched.

The wall had a huge gap in the top that ran down to the middle, with a smaller crack that ran all the way down to the bottom. It smashed the triangular skull down like a wedge into the crack. The giant hammered the skull down again and again, smashing the stone into rubble. The dragon’s powerful skull showed not a single sign of cracking or giving at all to the stone as it ground it into dust. The tip of the skull wedged down, making a narrow gap that nearly went to the bottom of the wall now.

Now!

The gnolls surged forward at the invisible command of their creator. Rushing forward like a swarm of locusts, crawling over each other to get to the wall. They raced up the wall, climbing over the crack and then jumping on the surprised giant, climbing its legs.

There was a second of surprised silence before the giant roared and swatted at the undead gnolls as they jumped on its feet and crawled up its legs like hungry rats, moving under a unified, singular will. They climbed the giant, swarming it, clawing on top of one another to climb higher. The giant howled and yelled as it fell back, swatting at the zombies, plucking them off like tiny pests and smashing them in its meaty fists or throwing them. But for every one he killed, another took its place. They were halfway up its chest now.

The giant roared stumbled backward, dropping the massive skull in favor of a second hand to claw away at the undead climbing it. Screams of panic filled the air as the giant took a teetering step backwards right on top of several ranks of gnolls right behind it. Smashing them flat. Some of the zombies that it swiped off fell on the gnolls below, then started attacking them, causing further chaos.

The albino gnoll blew on its warhorn again, then shouted commands, trying to bring some order to the chaos. The tide of gnolls rushed forward in front of the giant, pushing the undead back. The zombies managed to cut down several of the first gnolls, but they were quickly overrun and pushed back by their superior numbers.

Fall back!

The zombies fell back inside the wall to try to contain the gnolls, but there were so many. The inside of the wall quickly became a chaotic mess of gnolls, undead, and frightened soldiers clashing against one another.

Back outside the wall, one zombie-gnoll had nearly made it all the way to the giant’s throat before the giant grabbed it, plucking it off like a tiny insignificant insect. The giant crushed it in its fist and then threw it against the wall with a sickening splat.

Malfus put his hand to his throbbing head and groaned as his awareness was violently returned to his body. Once he regained his composure, he closed his eyes and concentrated, pulling from the pool of death energy from the charnel pit below, channeling it into the rod.

Time to go raise the giant.

********

“Shovel, where the fuck is a bloody shovel?”

Morten ran frantically, searching high and low. His ragged breath caught in his throat.

He heard the shouts of men and clash of steel fill the air, and the chittering cries of the gnolls as they poured into the fort from the hole in the wall. Rushing to fill it like the sea filling a hole in a sinking ship.

The spot in front of the breached wall was already a thick and chaotic melee. The battle lines were merging into one another like wax melting from a candle. Soldiers fighting gnolls, gnolls fighting soldiers, and undead versions of both fighting the gnolls. The giant let out a roar, distantly towering over the chaos as it ripped away at the wall, making the crack bigger as more gnolls flooded inside the keep.

Morten shouted and drew his sword as several undead ran past him to the gate. They gave him a start and jolted him back to the present.

Something crashed into Morten, nearly knocking him over. “No!” Morten shouted, fumbling with his sword as he drew it from the scabbard. He looked up to see it was a group of zombie-gnolls. They ignored him and continued to the gate. Morten breathed a sigh of relief then turned away from the growing battle across from him and kept running in the opposite direction, continuing his search.

Out of breath, he paused by the remains of a burnt down building, what was once the stables, and put his hand out to steady himself. He couldn’t believe his luck, searching the entire battlefield and can’t find a bloody shovel. They’re everywhere when you don’t need one, but as soon as you do…

After Morten caught his breath, he pushed his helmet off his brow and then looked up. His prize stood right in front of him, jutting up from a pile of manure. “Finally.” Morten set his sword down and breathed a sigh of relief as he grabbed the shovel. Then he doubled back, turning toward where he had first seen the scraggly prisoner last night, when he first arrived with the Inquisitor.