Carcharoth flexed his shoulders, as if under the weight of the flame thrower. In fact, though, he half expected to spread vast black capelike wings. He could not feel them. That did not mean they were not there. "Carcharoth is the Balrog, and the Balrog is Carcharoth," he whispered. "The cattle of the steppe shall learn this to their sorrow. Oh, they shall."
He didn't know how far up the tunnel he'd come. He was beyond caring about things like that. All he knew was that he had yet to reach the perfect ambush point or to encounter the cattle—no, they sounded like muskylopes drunk on fermented tennis fruit—coming his way. A single red imperative ruled him now: to slaughter as many of those who sought to come up the Citadel's back passage as he could. In some small way, he might yet redeem himself for the blunders he had committed.
Awareness of those blunders still ate at him poisonously. Increasingly, as he strode through what would have been darkness illimitable for any ordinary man, himself as Battlemaster faded and himself as Balrog, creature of fire and smoke and dread, grew. The Balrog too had been the last of its kind, fighting against those who disturbed it in its ancient home and refuge from overpowering foes.
He skipped lightly over a two-meter crevasse, landing on the balls of his feet, flexing his knees to take the shock of coming down with the heavy flame thrower strapped onto him. The metal tank rattled against a buckle as he came down. He scowled. Some of the cattle ahead were not quite cattle, were men with Soldiers' senses . . . like Dagor. Some of them, if myth were indeed fact, were Dagor's closest kin. He frowned. It would have been a telling show of weakness in the Battlemaster, but who could say whether Balrogs showed what they felt?
He should have flamed Dagor after all. He was sure of it now: either flamed him or forced him to come along. Too late, too late. The wild Sauron would betray him, as he'd already betrayed his own kin. He was sure of it. But what was his certainty worth these days? He'd made mistakes on large matters, so why not on small as well?
Then all such worries left him. Some earthquake, not so long ago, had torn a great rift in the heart of the mountain—twenty meters across, easily, and deep beyond any reckoning. The Soldiers had bridged it with an arch of stone no more than half a meter wide—plenty for those of their blood to walk on surefootedly, but little enough, over that chasm, to take the heart out of most cattlefolk. His mental image of the tunnel showed no such bridge, which meant only that it had been made after record-keeping began to look unimportant when set against the day-to-day struggle for survival. The Race had grown sloppy since the days when it came to Haven.
"A redeemer, I shall be," Carcharoth murmured.
In their quest for day-to-day survival, though, the Soldiers had been thorough. By the bridge, on the side nearer the heart of the Citadel, they'd built a breast-high bulwark of fitted stones, to give defenders a perfect firing point against their foes.
"A firing point indeed," Carcharoth said. He smiled. That wide grin was a more telling sign of his decay than the earlier frown had been—a madman's smile, pure and simple.
Dagor almost sobbed with relief as he came up to inhabited levels once more. Had he been out on the steppe, he would have screamed his news to everyone he saw. Since he had been in the Citadel, he'd learned Soldiers went about things differently. He looked this way and that for a person in authority. If I don't find one soon, I'll start screaming anyway, he thought. Let them make of it, and of me, what they will.
Luck, for once, was with him. Here came Titus, escaping for a moment his closeting with the TAC to fuel his body. "Great lord!" Dagor said, and then, again remembering where he was, "Breedmaster, sir!"
Titus looked at him, looked through him. As always with the Cyborgs, he had the sense of being weighed and found wanting. Here it was doubled, for he was Carcharoth's pet, and he had seen Breedmaster and Battlemaster were uncertain allies and certain rivals. But Titus seemed as perfectly controlled as ever as he said, "What is it you wish of me?"
Now Dagor spoke urgently, his words tumbling over one another as he gasped out the Battlemaster's discovery. "Not cattle. Bandari warriors, coming through the tunnel. We need to send a force into the tunnel right away, come to Carcharoth's aid," he gasped.
"No," Titus answered, and Dagor gaped at him. For a moment, behind those cold, gray-blue eyes, he saw the wheels and gears spinning. They spun very fast. After what could have been only a heartbeat, the Breedmaster went on, "The Battlemaster commands until dismissed. It is entirely possible that the Battlemaster will be able to dispose of this entire raiding party single-handed. And if he does not—" If Carcharoth couldn't handle the raiders by himself, Titus would be rid of his rival.
Titus resumed: "If he does not, then it is to our advantage to have the raiders come out of the tunnel and into less restrictive quarters. The more open the field, the more the Soldiers enjoy the advantages of speed and maneuverability. In the tunnel, the raiders would inevitably fire straight ahead, and would as inevitably inflict casualties. We are better adapted to a game with more options."
"Soldiers?" Dagor said. "You have—we have—no Soldiers here, only women and children."
"They are of the Blood. They shall suffice," Titus said. The upward curl to his lips was entirely artificial.
Dagor knew as much. Somehow that made it only the more frightening.
"You've been hearing water as long as we've been climbing," Sannie said to Barak.
"Quiet! I tell you, there's something out there . . . . You saw the map—pull the plug, proceed along this corridor, tunnel, whatever, and then there's the chute down into the innermost Citadel. Yewehdammit, quiet! Something's coming up!"
He drew his sidearm—Sauron issue, awarded after the first battle—and edged forward in the line, moving as fast as he could.
Hammer-of-God signaled people into readiness. This is what he had helped train the boy for, independent command. His stomach clenched as it always did before a fight. He usually relaxed into a sense of freedom where mind and body meshed more smoothly than at any other time. Not this time, though. Not with old enemies as allies, not with Saurons to be fought.
"Hold up! Hold up!" The urgent call came from ahead.
"Bring more torches. Yeweh, there's a cursed chasm here, looks to go down all the way to Eblis."
"Ropes? Grappling hooks?" The question came in Turkic. Hammer-of-God blinked. A bliddy hotnot, starting to think like an engineer? If that sort of thing happened more often, it might end up being more dangerous to the Pale than the stinking Saurons were.
The first voice spoke again: "No. There's a bridge here, though one fit to make your stones crawl up into your belly. One step wrong and you find out how deep the pit is."
"What's that on the far side? Fetch up another torch, somebody." A pause. "Looks like a cairn, maybe. Can't really see, not in this stinking light."
Barak spoke: "I know whom to send to find out. Let Strong Sven lead." He spoke with grim satisfaction. Hammer-of-God nodded. The wretch had outlived any need for him, but if anything across there was dangerous—and in Sauron country, the bet to make was that everything was dangerous—he could still be useful one last time.
Strong Sven might have been part Sauron in blood, but not in spirit. He began to blubber: "No, great lord, not me!"
"Pass him up to the front."
"No!" Strong Sven cried.
"Shut up," Hammer-of-God said implacably.
Up Strong Sven went, passed from one hand to another like a sheep to the bracking house, bleating at every step. "I've got it!" a voice said at the very edge of the chasm. The accent was Edenite: Be-Courteous. Hammer-of-God's lip curled scornfully. If Strong Sven had a gram of whey in him, he'd fight for his life, but no—
But yes. Strong Sven grabbed at the leash and tugged. It snapped, and he lashed Be-Courteous across the face with it once, then again. Be-Courteous tried to dodge, overbalanced, and then, with a scream, he plummeted . . . . Bliddyful heart, Hammer-of-God thought. Dear God, anyone but him. Maybe there'd be a miracle. No chance. They found out one thing about the chasm: it was too deep to hear the thud of a body when it hit bottom.
Beside Hammer-of-God, Barak was cursing, practically weeping. "You couldn't have stopped him," Jackson snapped. "Now get back down!"
The younger man stretched out close at his shoulder. He wasn't breathing fast, and his heartbeat didn't pick up, not even when they looked out.
Dear God, they'd come out into a Godrotted cavern. The path they must take—couldn't be more than fifty centimeters wide, if that much, and they'd have to cross it single file. Miss their step, overbalance, duck, Hell, do anything but go forward, and there was only a sheer drop into endless blackness. His eyes watered, and he blinked furiously.
Strong Sven dashed across the bridge toward the cairn, babbling, pleading, begging . . . . He was part Sauron, too; maybe his ears spoke to him of what Barak's had also sensed: that they were not alone in the tunnel. "I brought them to you, Great Lord, noble Soldier, the Jews, the tribes, the cursed wild men . . ."
A tongue of flame lashed out and enfolded Strong Sven. Screaming, burning, he fell into the abyss. You couldn't hear his body hit, either.
From behind the cairn, a voice spoke in the Sauron dialect of Americ. "Is that the latest story? Not good enough. I heard them. So confident Titus was that the Citadel was safe. I gave the orders to satisfy him, but I knew that only I could check on its safety . . . . I . . . Carcharoth, the Balrog, the Redeemer of the Race."
Jesus wept. Carcharoth. Not just a Sauron, but a Cyborg Battlemaster. He sounded old. He sounded, when you thought about it, more than a little meshuggeh. An aging Sauron whose mind was going, Hammer-of-God thought, matching his voice with that of . . . I'm going to fry, and I left my army to . . . Oh God. God!
However old the Sauron was, though, and however crazy, he had all the cover in the world and a weapon Satan would have been proud to use. How were they going to winkle him out?
"It throws flame," whispered Smite-Sin, stating the obvious, the horrific.
"Little man, it burns disobedient cattle. It will burn you. I will burn you, I, Carcharoth, Balrog of the Citadel." Age had not blunted the creature's supernal hearing.
"It throws flame," Smite-Sin repeated. His voice had stopped shaking as he applied his skills to the problem at hand—staying alive against a Cyborg. "But it's got a limited supply of whatever fuels it."
"There is no end to my power!" Carcharoth shouted. "Come to me! Come one, come all! You shall learn the truth."
The trouble was, they had to do it. If they were going to enter the Citadel, they had to pass the Battlemaster. "Here's what we do," Barak said, his voice eerily, inhumanly calm. And why not? Jackson's mind gibbered. Barak was Sauron, too. He went on, "The ones with automatic rifles open up, make the Cyborg keep his head down. While they're doing that, we rush a part across. Yeweh willing, some of them will make it, force him out of his hole there—"
"It's the best chance," Hammer-of-God agreed. "But it's not what you'd call a good one. And you're a shooter, not a charger, you hear me?" He put his arm over the younger man's shoulders. Time had been when his voice alone would have restrained Barak.
"Ja,, Oom Hammer," Barak said. "We'll do it your way—for a while." A pause. Then Barak shouted, "Who here is brave?" It nearly started a riot but he shortly had his death chargers. It took only a few minutes to complete his rudimentary dispositions.
"Come on!" Hammer screamed. "Riflemen—fire! Fedaykin, forward! For vengeance! Am Bandari Hai!" There was no point in silence now and the hope, at least, that a howling mad charge might get at least a few of them across the bridge.
War cries shrieked up—"Alahu Akbar!" and "Am Bandari Hai!" and God knew what all else. The commandos sprinted single file out onto the narrow strip of stone. Behind them, assault rifles snapped viciously. When the first to charge was nearly across, Carcharoth rose, just a little, just for an instant. A hissing roar like a land gator's, but magnified a thousandfold, sounded even through the gunfire. A great shaft of fire engulfed the men. They were burning, up and down the length of the bridge, leathers and furs and hair, oh God, their very skin was crisping. Well back in the tunnel, the heat beat against Hammer-of-God's face.
The mouth-watering, appalling smell of roasting meat filled the air as, in their writhing agony, the living torches tumbled from the bridge, one by one. Bare seconds after they had begun the charge, it stood empty, inviting.
"Come to me," Carcharoth crooned.
They hadn't gotten him. And how many swept away? Twenty-five had charged. And for nothing.
No, not quite, Hammer-of-God thought. As Smite-Sin had said, the flame thrower could carry only so much fuel. But how much was so much? The only way to find out was to keep throwing bodies at it—literally, putting out a fire by leaping into it.
"Will they go forward again?" Barak whispered.
Beside him, Jackson shrugged. The flame thrower tested his courage, too, which angered him. But he knew the difference between dying for a purpose and throwing his life away. He tightened his grip on Barak's shoulder, not sure the younger man had learned that lesson.
They took more time readying the next assault, forming the attackers well behind the tunnel, positioning the riflemen to better advantage. Again the assault rifles crackled forth, again the attackers made the best speed they could across the bridge, this time well spaced, forcing the Cyborg to spend a burst of flame for each victim. Their war cries ringing, some sure of Paradise and houris, some of seeing Yeweh face to face, some of a happy rebirth, they charged madly.
Carcharoth incinerated them, one and all. "I am the Balrog, flame of Udûn!"
Hammer-of-God wouldn't have bet more than a jug of piss that the Sauron wasn't the demon he thought he was. Bullets didn't seem to want to bite on him, that was certain.
The third group formed. "If this one fails, I will be with the next," Barak said. He shrugged away from Hammer-of-God with effortless strength to show the old war leader he meant what he said and could not be stopped.
God, are You listening to me? Jackson asked silently. He'd spent a lot of time talking to God, and a lot of time listening to Him, too. Now, for the first time, he wondered if his deity was listening. Did God and His angels sleep?
What did it take to go forward, knowing you were going into sure and hideous death? Whatever it was, the fedaykin had it. The third group, spaced a little more tightly as they learned through bitter experience the limits of the Balrog's flame, advanced over the bridge. As before, Carcharoth let the leader get nearly across, then crisped with individual bursts. How many gone? Near a hundred now. "I am the Redeemer!" Carcharoth shouted. "Through me, the Citadel lives!"
He was crazy, but that didn't make him wrong.