For an instant, Morgan thought it was a machine. Then, a heartbeat later, he realized it was alive.
“Demon’s blood!” Steff cried in recognition, his gruff voice angry and frightened. “They’ve brought a Creeper!”
Hunching its way slowly through the ranks of the Federation army, the Creeper came for them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Morgan Leah remembered the stories then.
It seemed as if there had always been stories of the Creepers, tales that had been handed down from grandfather to father, from father to son, from generation to generation. They were told in the Highlands and in most parts of the Southland he had visited. Men whispered of the Creepers over glasses of ale around late night fires and sent shivers of excitement and horror down the spines of boys like Morgan, who listened at the circle’s edge. No one put much stock in the stories, though; after all, they were told in the same breath as those wild imaginings of Skull Bearers and Mord Wraiths and other monsters out of a time that was all but forgotten. Yet no one was quite ready to dismiss them out-of-hand, either. Because whatever the men of the Southland might believe, there were Dwarves in the Eastland who swore by them.
Steff was one of those Dwarves. He had repeated the stories to Morgan—long after Morgan had already heard them—not as legend but as truth. They had happened, he insisted. They were real.
It was the Federation, he told Morgan, who made the Creepers. A hundred years ago, when the war against the Dwarves had bogged down deep in the wilderness of the Anar, when the armies of the Southland were thwarted by the jungle and the mountains and by the tangle of brush and the walls of rock that prevented them from engaging and trapping their elusive quarry, the Federation had called the Creepers to life. The Dwarves had taken the offensive away from the Federation by then, a sizeable resistance force that was determined to avoid capture and to harass the invaders until they were driven from their homeland. From their fortress lairs within the maze of canyons and defiles of the Ravenshorn and the cavelike hollows of the surrounding forests, the Dwarves counterattacked the heavier and more cumbersome Federation armies almost at will and slipped away with the ease of night’s shadows. The months dragged on as the Federation effort stalled, and it was then that the Creepers appeared.
No one knew for certain where they came from. There were some who claimed they were simply machines constructed by the Federation builders, juggernauts without capacity to think, whose only function was to bring down the Dwarf fortifications and the Dwarves with them. There were others who said that no machine could have done what the Creepers did, that such things possessed cunning and instinct. A few whispered that they were formed of magic. Whatever their origin, the Creepers materialized within the wilderness of the central Anar and began to hunt. They were unstoppable. They tracked the Dwarves relentlessly and, when they caught up to them, destroyed them all. The war ended in a little more than a month, the Dwarf armies annihilated, the backbone of the resistance shattered.
After that, the Creepers vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared, as if the earth might have swallowed them whole. Only the stories remained, growing more lurid and at the same time less accurate with each telling, losing the force of truth as time passed, until only the Dwarves themselves remained certain of what had happened.
Morgan Leah stared downward for a moment longer as the stories of his childhood came to life, then wrenched his eyes away from the drop, away from the nightmare below, and looked frantically at Steff. The Dwarf was staring back at him, half-turned as if to bolt from the fortifications, his scarred face stricken.
“A Creeper, Morgan. A Creeper—after all these years. Do you know what that means?”
Morgan didn’t have time to speculate. Padishar Creel was suddenly beside them, having heard the Dwarf speak. His hands gripped Steff’s shoulders and he pulled the other about to face him. “Tell me now, quickly! What do you know of this thing?”
“It’s a Creeper,” Steff repeated, his voice stiff and unnatural, as if naming it said everything.
“Yes, yes, fine and well!” Padishar snapped impatiently. “I don’t care what it is! I want to know how to stop it!”
Steff shook his head slowly, as if trying to clear it, as if dazed and unable to think. “You can’t stop it. There isn’t any way to stop it. No one has ever found a way.”
There were mutterings from the men closest to them as they heard the Dwarf’s words, and a sense of restless misgiving began to ripple through the lines of defenders. Morgan was stunned; he had never heard Steff sound so defeated. He glanced quickly at Teel. She had moved Steff away from Padishar protectively, her eyes bits of hard, glistening rock within her mask.
Padishar ignored them, turning instead to face his own men. “Stand where you are!” he roared angrily at those who had begun to whisper and move back. The whispers and the movement stopped immediately. “I’ll skin the first rabbit who does otherwise!”
He gave Steff a withering glance. “No way, is there? Not for you, perhaps—though I would have thought it otherwise and you a better man, Steff.” His voice was low, controlled. “No way? There’s always a way!”
There was a scraping sound from below, and they all pushed back to the breastworks. The Creeper had reached the base of the cliff wall and was beginning to work its way up, finding its grip in cracks and crevices where human hands and feet could not hope to find purchase. Sunlight glinted off patches of armor-plating and bits of iron rod, and the muscles of its wormlike body rippled. The marching drums of the Federation had begun to sound, pounding a steady cadence to mark the monster’s approach.
Padishar leaped recklessly atop the defenses. “Chandos! A dozen archers to me—now!”
The archers appeared immediately and as rapidly as they could manage sent a rain of arrows into the Creeper. It never slowed. The arrows bounced off its armor or buried themselves in its thick hide without effect. Even its eyes, those hideous black orbs that shifted and turned lazily with the movement of its body, seemed impervious.
Padishar withdrew the archers. A cheer went up from the ranks of the Federation army and a chanting began, matching the throb of the drums. The outlaw chief called for spearmen, but even the heavy wooden shafts and iron heads could not slow the monster’s approach. They broke off or shattered on the rocks, and the Creeper came on.
Massive boulders were brought forward and sent rolling over the cliff edge. Several crashed into the Creeper. They grazed it or struck it full on, and the result was the same. It kept coming. The mutterings resumed, born of fear and frustration. Padishar shouted angrily to quiet them, but the task was growing harder. He called for brush to be brought forward, had it fired and sent tumbling into the Creeper—to no effect. Furious, he had a cask of cooking oil brought up, broken open and spilled down the cliff wall, then ignited. It burned ferociously against the barren rock, engulfing the approaching Creeper in a haze of black smoke and flames. Cries rose from the ranks of the Federation and the drums went still. Heat lifted into the morning air in waves so suffocating that the defenders were forced back. Morgan retreated with the rest, Steff and Teel next to him. Steff’s face was drawn and pale, and he seemed strangely disoriented. Morgan helped him step away, unable to fathom what had happened to his friend.
“Are you sick?” he asked, whispering to the other as he eased him to a sitting position. “Steff, what’s wrong?”
But the other didn’t appear to have an answer. He simply shook his head. Then with an effort he said, “Fire won’t stop it. It’s been tried, Morgan. It doesn’t work.”
He was right. When the flames and the heat died away enough to permit the defenders to return to the walls, the Creeper was still there, working its way steadily upward, almost halfway up by now, as scorched and blackened as the rock to which it clung but otherwise unchanged. The drumming and the chanting from the Federation soldiers below resumed, an eager, confident swell of sound that engulfed the whole of the Jut.