From: bradkwillis@aol.com (BKWillis)

Date: 20 Mar 2003 21:05:14 GMT

Subject: Desert of Fear, Part 37



DESERT OF FEAR

Part 37


Copyright Notes:

'Doctor Who' belongs to the BBC.

'Desert of Fear' and the original characters therein created by Brad
Filippone, Clive May, Ken Young, and BKWillis.

Caution: This chapter contains scenes of extreme violence and some profanity.
If such is not to your taste, please read no further.


----

Apes howled and bellowed their rage, hurling spears and half- articulate
curses at their foes as they swarmed out of the trees.  Ghorlok and Shizaan
stood back-to-back in the very eye of this bestial tempest, the ground around
their feet soaked in blood and littered with torn furry corpses.  Ghorlok's
saber had broken while splitting an ape's thick skull, but the old War Chief
fought on with the stump of the blade.  A spear drove in at him, but with the
deft skill of a life spent in combat, he caught it by the shaft and jerked it
to the side, pulling its wielder off-balance.  A quick lunge, and the broken
end of his sword was dragged through the ape's guts.  Two more rushed over
their dying comrade, weapons raised.  Snarling an oath, Ghorlok backhanded
the one on the right, his sword pommel smashing its mouth to a broken, bloody
froth.  The other ape slashed downwards with a stone knife, the point finding
the gap between breastplate and gorget.  Ghorlok staggered, blood seeping
through the joints in his armor, then his left hand shot out and locked
around the ape's throat.

He was wounded, nearly exhausted, surrounded by a horde of berserk enemies,
and out of ammunition.  His thick lips parted in a smile of purest savagery
as he doggedly strangled the flailing, desperate ape while hacking away at
the others.  The Sacred Land might claim his heart and Chieftainship his
mind, but this...

By all the Gods, _this_ was what a Servii lived for!

"Take them, fools!" screamed the priest over the wild roar of battle.  He
lashed about with his whip, driving the apes on with blows and curses.  "Take
them!  Slay the heathens!"

"Aye, come and take us, an ye dare!" Shizaan taunted back as he ran an
assailant through.

"Aye!" spat Ghorlok.  "Servii die, but not alone, scum!" The ape's windpipe
caved in under his fingers and as the beast went limp he flung it among its
fellows, who tripped and stumbled over the body.

"At them, vermin!" shrieked the priest, redoubling his strokes with the whip.
"I'll have the hearts of any who falter!" But even as the Golden Apes pressed
in again, a series of shattering reports crashed from the jungle.  Ghorlok,
sparing a glance in Jaskah's direction, saw the apes attacking their Mascot
going down in ragged heaps under that fire, the handful of survivors
immediately breaking and running.

There was a tiny pause, a lull perhaps a heartbeat long, in which all the
combatants -- apes, priest, Servii, and Skyborn -- stopped and turned to see
what this new development portended.

The moment was shattered into smoke and thunder by a crashing volley of
musketry.  A half-dozen apes went down under that blast and the rest turned
to face the wild, screaming charge that came storming down upon them.

Ghorlok gave a mad, wordless yell of joy as he spotted his trusted War
Captain, Rahaaz, barrelling down the gentle slope, revolvers blazing away and
mowing down apes like ripened grain.  And at his back came warriors of the
Red Blade, no more than a handful, but charging home like an army of devils.

Caught in the flank and by surprise, the Golden Apes yet did their best to
recover the situation.  A frantic countercharge by a detachment of the beasts
broke against the blades and armor of the oncoming Servii and a moment later
Rahaaz's group slammed into the wavering center of the ape horde.  The apes
flinched back in the face of those madly slashing blades, daunted by the
sheer violence of the onslaught.  But even as they reeled, the will of their
Lord stiffened them, urging them on again, into the teeth of the Servii
maelstrom.

But then Babydoll, having reached a good firing angle, opened up on the apes'
main body with her auto-shotgun.  She was firing shredders, solid slugs
tipped with explosives, and the effect on the tightly-packed group was
devastating.  The slugs blew off limbs and shattered bodies, blasting great
hunks from the trees that some sought shelter behind.

It was too much for flesh and blood to stand, Divine Will or no.  What began
as a shrinking back from those deadly Servii swords became a full retreat,
then a rout as the apish horde came apart entirely, the beasts throwing down
their weapons as they broke and fled wailing into the jungle.

----

"Come back, you vermin!  Halt this at once!" The priest plied his whip
ruthlessly, laying open the back of any ape that came within reach, but it
was no use.  Stark terror had seized the brutes' minds and it would take more
than threats and psychic reinforcement to loose it.  His harvuk, still
panting from its exertions, was swept along by the press of the fugitives,
carrying him away from his heathen foes.

Which was just as well, he quickly surmised as the harvuk plodded along.
Greater force would be needed to stop these infidels from their desecration
of Holy Ground.  He closed his eyes, focussing his mind on the Great Temple,
where reinforcements awaited.  Once contact was made with the Initiates, a
stout force of Trinnians could be dispatched to...

A hand reached out of the fading twilight and dragged him from his mount,
breaking his concentration and and the tenuous psychic connection to the
Great Temple.

Groaning on his back, the priest looked up to see a huge one-eyed man
standing over him, ignored by the fleeing apes in their terror.

"You!" the priest gasped in recognition as the man smiled evilly and set a
boot on his stomach, pinning him where he lay.  A long sword gleamed in the
man's hand.  "Cain the sorceror!"

"Yup, that's me," the Time Lord replied easily.  He very deliberately set the
point of his katana against the priest's cheek.  "And you get to be my very
special helper."

The priest twitched away from the steel, but glared defiantly up at his
captor just the same.  "You'll get nothing from me, heathen scum!" he
frothed.  "I serve the Lord, and shall never betray Him!  You can't make me
talk!"

"I know," Cain shrugged.  "Don't aim to make you talk.  I aim to make you
scream."

The sword flashed downward.

----

"Gods damn you to torment, Marskaterit!  Keep that thrice-damned lantern away
from the powder!" Gun Master Pajatino would have smacked the young soldier a
good one on the ear, had there been room in the corridor.  As it was, he
couldn't get around the culverin's long barrel and so had to settle for
merely adding a few choice comments regarding Marskaterit's parentage and
likely intrafamilial mating practices.

"Sorry, Gun Master!" the lad peeped, wilting as he fairly jumped back away
from the others.

"'Sorry', he says!" Pajatino spat.  "A lovely song that'd be after you've
blown us all back to our ancestors.  I know you're just a recent dribble from
the womb, Marskaterit, but if you haven't figured out by now that flames and
powder bags don't mix, maybe I should just hack off your head and use it for
a chamberpot, because it's obviously not being used for aught else!"

The gun crew had reached what was thankfully the last corner on the way to
the tunnel mouth, the last but by no means the least obstacle.  For four
hours now they'd wrestled the long-barrelled cannon through dark, damp
corridors, down two flights of stairs and up another.  In the open, the field
gun could move quickly with a team of harvuks hitched to its trail and two
more pulling the ammunition cart.  Here, though, there was no space for the
draft animals -- barely enough for the gun -- and so the crew was shifting it
by hand and rope, a process not helped at all by the culverin's length and
bulk, nor by the darkness that necessitated the use of lanterns like the one
that Marskaterit was once again edging too near the ammunition cart.

"Marskaterit!"

"Sorry, Gun Master!  I thought I saw something!"

Pajatino ground his teeth as his men levered the great bronze muzzle a few
more inches around the turn.  "Marskaterit," he barked, "hand the bloody
lantern to Fedranit!"

The youngster sheepishly passed the lantern to the Gun Mate, both of them
safely back from the cart full of powder and shot.

"Now pop him one, Fedranit."

The burly Gun Mate nodded once and cuffed Marskaterit upside the head,
sending his brass helmet clattering off the wall.  Fedranit waited for the
smaller Trinnian to retrieve his headgear, then jammed the lantern back into
his hand and jabbed a finger at a spot near his feet.  "Here," he rasped.
"Any closer and I'll kick your bollocks up into your brisket."

"Y-Yes, Gun Mate."

This time the youngster stayed put as Fedranit and the others levered the gun
trail up and managed to swivel their fieldpiece around the corner, followed
by the four soldiers dragging the ammunition cart.

"All right, Marskaterit you bleedin' whelp, bring that light along,
CAREFUL-like!"

Having worked their weapon into the final straightaway, more of the gun crew
could get their hands on it and the moving was easier.  One lantern bearer
kept a few paces ahead of the culverin's muzzle, while Marskaterit followed
along behind the cart, the flickering light seeming to define the darkness
more than banish it.  But the work went ahead regardless, the rumble of
iron-rimmed wheels and the murmur of short-winded curses adding a reassuring
liveliness to the gloom.

Pajatino peered at the blob of pale grayness up ahead that marked the doorway
they were sent to defend.  The sun had gone down since they'd begun their
move, but one of the moons was full and another nearly so, so they should
still have plenty of light to see and, if necessary, shoot by.  He'd heard
that there was a Servii raiding party running loose in the area.  If that was
so, he had just the thing here to ruin their evening.  He grinned and patted
the culverin's long, tapered muzzle.

"Jantatheriol!" he called to the lead lantern-bearer.  "Run on up ahead and
let the Centurion know we're here.  See if he's got any special orders for
us."

"At once, Gun Master." The shadows thickened around the sweating, swearing
crew as the soft oil-glow moved off up the corridor at a brisk trot.

Pajatino was paying more attention to supervising his crew than to what was
going on up ahead, so he didn't see exactly what happened.  All he knew was
that the distant glow of Jantatheriol's lantern suddenly went out about
halfway to the tunnel mouth.

"Jantatheriol!  You all right up there?!" The Gun Master squinted into the
gloom, trying to pick out his trooper's silhouette against the doorway.  He
saw nothing.  "Jantatheriol!  Answer me!"

No sound came back.

Pajatino's hand crept to his sword hilt.  "Marskaterit!  Get up here with
that light!"

"But, Gun Master, you said--"

"Get that light up here before I strangle you with your own liver," Pajatino
snarled.  The young trooper yelped as he hastened to comply, carefully
holding the lantern up and away from the powder cart as he edged around it.

Pajatino's eyes remained fixed on the murky darkness ahead.  "Swords out,
lads," he muttered to his crew.  "Stand to arms."

The rasp of metal on leather punctuated the darkness as Trinnian steel was
drawn forth.  Those short stabbing swords would be at their best in these
confined quarters, if there were Servii ahead.  The desert-dwellers' long
sabers would have scant swinging room in this narrow passage and their
massive bodies would be more a liability than advantage.

"What is it, Gun Master?" Marskaterit whispered nervously.

"I don't know.  But stand ready to defend your gun." Where other soldiers
considered the loss of a battle standard to be the ultimate dishonor and
would willingly die to save their banners, Trinnian artillerymen held their
cannons sacred.  The loss of a gun, even if the crew died defending it, would
stain a legion's reputation for decades.  Pajatino would do his damnedest to
see that his legion's honor remained intact and that no Servii paws should
touch his precious culverin.  If he had to, he silently vowed, he'd snatch
the lantern from Marskaterit and throw it in the powder cart himself to keep
the beast-men from taking his piece.  That was Trinnian tradition, too.

But it wasn't a Servii that finally came out of the looming dark.  It was a
girl, a mere slip of a human girl, fair of skin and with hair like a nighted
river.  She walked slowly but resolutely into the puddle of light around the
Trinnians, stopping to offer them a short, polite bow.  She wore no armor,
just a dark, heavy dress of the sort a noble might wear, and bore no weapon
that the Gun Master could see.

A drop of blood fell from her fingers.

"I apologize, gentlemen," she said in a soft, regretful voice, "but I fear
it's necessary that I slay you all..."

----

With the last of the apes fled and Ghorlok and Rahaaz having the Servii
equivalent of a group hug (lots of 'this day of glory' and 'thy honor
restored' and 'thy father's ghost looks with pride' and other stuff like
that), Babydoll set out to find where that one-eyed old son-of-a-rabid-bitch
had gotten off to.  She'd seen him skirt the far flank of the Ape formation
when they'd ripped into them.  Probably headed for that priest who looked
like something from a cheap horror flick; Cain always preferred to go for the
enemy's 'command and control'.

She followed the line of the apes' retreat in the darkness, barely making out
the occasional stubby clawprints of a harvuk in the churned detritus of the
jungle floor.  As she proceeded, the moonlight slowly waxing, she could hear
an odd croaking noise ahead of her.  Probably one of the wounded apes dying
in the bushes.  She kept a hand on her auto-shotgun, just in case.

The further she followed the tracks, the louder the croaking became.  Her
footsteps came a little faster now, not because she was worried about the
lying, cold-hearted Time Bastard or anything, of course, but because she was
concerned about the source of that noise.

It was therefore definitely not relief that she felt when she finally caught
sight of Cain crouching over something at the base of a tree.  No, not relief
at all, since that would have meant she'd been worried, which she most
certainly wasn't.

"Hey, babe," he grunted without looking up.  "Be done here in a sec."

The croaking sound was coming from whatever it was that Cain was working on.
Warily, Babydoll came up and took a look over his shoulder.

"Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed, partly as an oath and partly an appeal to a
religion she thought she'd long since forgotten.  Her gorge rose.  "What the
crukking Hells are you _doing_?!"

"Just making a distraction," he answered placidly.

What he was doing was tying the bleeding, mewling priest to the tree trunk
with scraps of his own foul robe.  As the bound man wallowed in the dirt, she
could make out the bloody, oozing holes where the man's eyes had been cut out
and a pair of slashes across his ankles where he'd been hamstrung.  Other
cuts on his body showed where tendons had been carefully severed to
immobilize him.  The man let out another agonized croak, the sound making her
shiver.

"Why don't you just kill the poor bastard?" she asked, shaken.

"'Cause he's our distraction.  He's still got a slender psychic link to his
buddies in the Temple.  The pain'll keep him from sending a coherent message,
but they'll sense him out here and come looking.  That'll buy us some time
and add a little confusion to things." He put the last knot in the man's
bindings and stood up.

Babydoll couldn't stop looking at the priest.  "Yeah, but still..."

Cain arched his eyebrow at her, waiting.

She fumbled for a moment, finally coming out with, "I mean, torturing someone
like this.  Killing somebody is one thing, but this...  I can't..."

"You ain't," Cain replied easily.  "_I_ am."

"But still," she repeated thickly as the priest let out another animal croak,
writhing against his bindings.  Like a woman in a trance, she shifted her
shotgun to shoot the man and put him out of his misery.

Cain's hand shot out, grabbing the gun by the muzzle and pushing it aside.
"Don't," he warned.

The longer she looked at the bleeding man, the paler and sicker she felt.
"But..." she managed.

"But nothing.  This is necessary.  'Sides, I've done a lot worse, and so have
you, for that matter.  Lots of times."

"Yeah," she whispered, "but...  but...  I don't want to do those things any
more."

The expression on his face, which she didn't see, passed through puzzlement
to comprehension to a sort of sad sympathy in the space of a couple of
seconds.  When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, but firm.  "Babe, do you
know what this guy is?  Really is?"

She shook her head, eyes still on the bloody image before her.

"He's an acolyte of the Lord of the Vale.  Among the many quaint religious
customs his cult practices are human sacrifice, skinning people alive, rape,
and cannibalism." He pointed to a ritual scar on the man's chest, the twisted
flesh in the form of an oddly-forked rune.  "See that?  That means he's an
Initiate of the Third Degree.  He didn't get that by selling cookies and
helping old ladies across the street.  He got that rank by slicing people's
skins off an inch at a time for his master's amusement.  By carving up kids
and eating them alive.  By throwing little girls into the fire.  These
bastards worship pain and terror." He turned and kicked the man hard in the
side, the wet-stick crackle of breaking ribs audible over the hoarse scream
that accompanied it.  "He likes pain, so I'm giving him his heart's desire.
If anything, I'm being too easy on him, considering what he's done."

"But..."

"A conscience is a fine thing to have, babe," he went on, overriding her.  "A
good and necessary thing, even if it comes to us late in life.  But save your
pity for them that deserve it.  What I've done to this trash, what I've done
to the Regulators, what I'm gonna go on doing to 'em 'til the day I die, none
of that's a cause for guilt, not from me and especially not from you.  It's
_justice_, babe.  It's justice, and they've brought it on themselves.  Think
of it like physics, if you want.  For every action, there's an equal and
opposite reaction.  Their evil was the action.  We're just the agents of the
reaction, bringing it back to 'em."

His voice was soft, mesmerizing, insistent.  Cain could be incredibly
persuasive when he put his mind to it.  He knew exactly which emotional
buttons to push, precisely what appeals would reach through and bypass her
burgeoning sense of shame and guilt.  He had the words to smooth over all her
doubts.  And the fact that she knew he was doing it did not truly lessen its
effectiveness.  She _wanted_ to believe in the rightness of what they were
doing, something that had never really bothered her before.  And just as
much, she found herself wanting to believe that _he_ believed it.

"I know you think I'm in this for revenge, babe," he was saying, "but that
ain't the case.  I hate scum like the Lord of the Vale and the Regulators,
but I don't kill 'em for that reason.  I kill 'em because it's the right
thing to do.  The guilty have to pay.  They have to pay for their sins with
blood.  That's the only way to set things back to rights."

She looked him square in the eye now, seeing only sincerity there.  But she
knew he could fake that well enough when he cared to.  "So...  we're the good
guys?  Even with..." She gestured vaguely at the groaning, bleeding captive.

"Yes," he said with total conviction.  "If I didn't believe that, I'd still
be serving Nergal instead of doing my damnedest to destroy him."

----

The coming of darkness brought a temporary cessation to the fighting at the
World's Edge fortress as the Trinnians pulled the survivors of their third
counterattack back to their towers.

Green-skinned bodies covered the parapets and the killing zones beyond,
Servii and Trinnian heaped together in pools of cooling blood.  Three times
the Trinnian garrison legions had hammered at the Servii foothold and three
times they'd been driven back with heavy loss.  They'd tried shifting some of
their artillery to support the assaults, but had quickly learned to their
dismay that the new rifled muskets borne by many of the Servii elite had a
reach that equalled or surpassed that of their culverins and bombards.
Casualties among gun crews had been heavy and the weapons were hastily
withdrawn after providing only minimal assistance to their infantry.

Now things stood at stalemate.  The Trinnians lacked sufficient force to
dislodge the Servii from their position, but were strong enough to hold them
there.  But messages had been sent and more legions were already on the
march, pulled from their positions along the Wall, as well as another army of
Golden Apes, who would be used as shock troops.  The counterattack was
planned for noon the next day and was expected to be decisive.

But the Servii were not sitting idle, either.

While their sentries traded fire with Trinnian crossbowmen through the night,
warriors were dispatched back to the High Desert and all the lands around,
each with the green truce banner affixed to his lance, each pushing his
gurvuk to its hardest gallop, and each bearing the same message to the
warbands of the Sacred Land:

'The path to the Vale lieth open.  The Red Blades and their allies hold the
pass, though none can say for how long.  The time of reckoning be upon us.
Come now, or come not.'

And come they did.

From Serviion the warbands came, the Two Pikes and the Burning Hearts and the
Bloods and the Broken Fangs and all the rest, even some of the Stormriders
under Murgonj's replacement, War Chief Janagar.

In the Great Dunes, a rider happened upon a night skirmish between rival
Skull and Black Howler raiding parties.  By the time he'd ridden on again,
messengers had been sent to both warbands' main camps and the two groups of
erstwhile enemies were riding stirrup-to-stirrup for the Vale.

The Star Breakers marched out of their fastness in the Skyjag Hills, tough
footmen who disdained the sword, fighting instead with twenty-pound hammers
of meteoric iron.

From the steppelands of the Low Desert poured the fast-moving light
cavalrymen of the Shortclaws and the Tramplers and the Black Lances.

The Jagged Scars rode down from the northlands, spoiling for a fight.

The warrior-engineers of the Iron Hand came from their great slave- worked
mines beneath Mount Durengar, arrayed in steel, straining teams of gurvuks
hauling their enormous siege-cannons.

The messengers reached the camps of the zealots of the Eye of War warband,
who calmly completed their devotions to the Third Moon before taking up their
muskets and riding off in utter silence.

And so on through the night, as each alerted warband dispatched its own
messengers to call up its neighbors in a ripple effect that spread all across
the Sacred Land.

The Servii race was on the march.  Two hundred generations of waiting had
finally come to its prophesied end.  Two hundred generations of wrath and
hate was about to be unleashed.

----

Though it was little-known except among the Temple Guard and perhaps the
Rimmers, who had a way of finding things out, the Skyborn maintained a
handful of small outposts outside of Avis City itself.  For the most part,
these were small, bunker-like stations atop some of the less-accessible
mountain peaks and hill crests.  None were heavily fortified or manned,
though some had been in the ancient days of the Skyborn's glory.  Now they
functioned primarily as surveillance posts, remount depots, and search-and-
rescue stations.  About a third of them still had functioning communications
links to Avis City.

It was to one of these outposts that an exhausted bird came gliding down in
the moonlight, its rider sagging in the saddle.

"Hold there!" cried the Temple Guard sentry on duty as the great wings beat
at the air over his head.  "Give the password!" He kept his blaster aimed at
the bird, in case it turned out to be a North Rim bandit.  The damned
groundhogs had raided another post to the far east several days before,
wiping out its six-man garrison.

"Put that away, curse you!" yelled the bird-rider.  "It's Kierthund, leader
of the mid-watch patrol!  Let me land!"

"What's the password?!" the sentry repeated, unwilling to be anybody's fool.

But the bird was already coming in.  "To perdition with your password!"
Kierthund spat.  As soon as the bird had settled, he slid out of the saddle,
gasping out a curse as his leg buckled under him.

"Advance and be recognized!" the sentry called.

Kierthund rose, staggered, and rose again, ignoring the blaster levelled at
his chest.  "Curse it!  My leg's broken!  Come fetch a hand, you
ground-pounder.  I've got vital news."

Glancing around and seeing nothing else suspicious, the sentry decided to
give the intruder the benefit of the doubt.

Sure enough, a closer look revealed the man to indeed be a Temple Guard
lesser officer.  His face was pale and haggard and one hand was clutched to a
bloody patch on his left leg.

"You're wounded, sir!" the sentry exclaimed as he holstered his gun and put
an arm around the injured flier.

"No shit.  Get me to your communicator, quickly.  The Servii are on the move,
and they're not looking for new grazing land."

The sentry's face registered only mild alarm.  The wanderings of those green
beasts was of little concern to a Skyborn.  "Did you see how many, sir?
Could you tell which warband?"

Kierthund barked out a short, pained laugh.  "Never got to see their
standards.  They opened up on us when we dropped down to have a better look.
Say what you like about those dirt-scuffers, the bastards can shoot.  I was
lucky to get out with just a musket ball in my leg.  As for Trezia and
Gorlin..." He shook his head and shuddered, though not with the pain of his
wound, then stopped and fixed the sentry with a deadly serious look.  "But
you want to know how many?  It looked like bloody all of them.  It looked
like every Servii in this whole damned world..."


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