about the Mountain God you saw when you first landed at the LZ?”
Britton nodded.
“Well, you just keep an eye out for anything like that.”
“What do you mean, sir? What am I supposed to be looking for?”
Fitzy frowned. “Anything like that, I said. Anything big and black or anyone who looks like they might be buddies with anything big and black. Sharp teeth, booga-booga, whatever.” He flapped his hands, irritated, and Britton decided not to press the matter.
“We don’t normally come in this low or this quiet,” Fitzy said, “so we should have a minute or so before all hell breaks loose. If that’s enough time, we’ll try to stay on the hop over the fastness. You keep looking until you have a good fix on the area.”
The helos swept low over the trees, their rotors still thudding loudly to Britton’s ears. The sharpened stakes of a palisade wall came into view. The rough bark had been scraped off felled trees, their sharpened points adorned with wooden turrets at regular intervals. Small watch fires burned in some of them. Britton could make out squat Goblin silhouettes, cradling spears. The central keep rose on a grassy hill behind them. Huge turrets thrust into the sky, peaked towers roofed with spiraling patterns of slate. An enormous gate, at least four stories high, split the palisade. Larger turrets rose to either side, each hanging a long triangular banner down the wall’s face, shrouded in darkness.
The helicopters put on speed, close enough that stealth was no longer a concern. Britton could see figures scrambling in the turrets. A horn sounded from one of them, deep and haunting, intensely loud even over the sound of the rotors.
One of the Apaches opened up with a rocket, and there was a short pop before the turret exploded, sending flaming shards of wood spinning. The helicopters raced over the wall and out over the swath of ground outside the keep. Britton could see scores of Goblins racing to and fro. A few fired ineffectual arrows. Some of the Goblins wheeled on the backs of huge, snarling wolves, shaking gleaming swords skyward. Small buildings dotted the ground, most with thatched or slate roofs. A pen teemed with some kind of livestock, squat and hairy, bleating in terror.
At the base of one of the towers, a smaller pen was built, its railing higher and topped with sharpened stakes. Colored paint gleamed from the posts, clustered thick with guards, big by Goblin standards. Banners flapped from the corners, showing the same winged wheel that Britton had seen on the banner where the Apache Selfers had kept their hostages. The center of the pen was empty, but Britton squinted as he looked at it. The air shimmered, as if a heat haze dwelt there in spite of the cold weather. The helicopter moved too fast for him to focus on it. He turned to Fitzy to mention it but was cut off by sharp reports from the ground.
Gunfire sounded as the few Goblins with stolen guns opened fire. The big guns on the helos held their peace, but the soldiers returned fire with their carbines, far better shots. Britton saw a few of the creatures plummet, screaming, from the parapet walk.
He turned to Fitzy, ready to tell him that he had a good fix on the keep. Anything to stop the slaughter and get them out of there. He saw a streak of white issue from the base of the keep. “They’ve got a sorcerer down there!” he called to Fitzy, pointing. One of the Apache pilots had seen him and the cannon glowed on the undercarriage, the rounds churning the ground to mud. The white figure flung up its hands and vanished in the rain of lead.
“All right! All right! I’ve got it! I’ve fixed it!” Britton shouted. The ground was a blurry nightmare of shouting Goblins. The air stank of cordite. His ears rang from churning rotors and gunfire. He had no idea if he could gate back to the place. “Let’s get out of here!”
The flight officer nodded and shouted to the pilots. The Apaches fell into formation as the Blackhawk turned toward the palisade wall, gaining elevation.
And stopped in midair, wrenching so hard that Britton pitched forward.
His arms pinwheeled as he stumbled toward the open bay, the ground, hundreds of feet below, spinning under him. The soldiers cursed as they were thrown forward. A carbine went spinning through the air, tumbling to the ground below.
The carabiner, fixed firmly to the floor ring, yanked hard on his belt, checking his slide. Britton landed hard on his shoulder, one arm dangling out of the helicopter. Down the length of the bird, he could see the tail fixed firmly in a wooden grip. One tower burned brightly where the rocket had struck it. The other had grown outward, its wooden form budding, the planks sprouting leaves and branches. Fresh bark covered its gnarled surface, forming a massive fist that held the helo fast. A white-painted Goblin stood at the fist’s base, a leather cape sewn with metal discs slung around his neck. He gestured, and the fist moved inward, hauling the Blackhawk down to the parapet walk beside a post with a giant bird skull, striped red and orange, affixed to the top, whence it glared balefully at the helo that shuddered against the wood.
Britton stared at the skull. He had seen it before. “Sir, …”
But there was no time. Goblin warriors raced along the walls toward them, brandishing weapons, shrieking.
Fitzy rose to a knee, reaching out toward the Goblin Terramancer, but an arrow shot out of the crowd, forcing him to break his concentration and duck away.
Fitzy cursed. The Goblins closed fast. The Terramancer walked along the branch, surrounded by five Goblins, big for their race, wearing long hauberks of metal rings with extended drapes that covered their faces. Their long ears pointed out from beneath conical steel helmets, pierced through with golden rings. Three brandished curved, broad-bladed swords. The other two held pistols.
One pilot shouted into the radio while the other spun up the rotors, straining against the magic that held them fast.
“Shut her down!” Britton called to him. “You’ll tear us apart!”
Britton turned to the soldiers, leaning out of the bay with their carbines leveled. “Keep the parapet clear, and I can get us out of here!”
The Apaches wheeled above, opening fire, raining bullets on the ground. The throng on the parapet was too close to the Blackhawk for them to risk firing on them.
A bullet whined off the helicopter’s side as the soldiers opened up, the rhythm of their fire slow as they took careful aim. In moments, Britton began to hear the drumroll of three-round bursts as the crowd of Goblins swelled on the parapet, a group so large that even indiscriminate fire would find a target.
Britton called to the pilots, “Get your butts out on the parapet where I can gate you to safety! And wave the damned Apaches off! They can’t do anything here!”
The flight officer began shouting into his headset as one of the pilots struggled with his harness. Fitzy ran to assist him, his face pale. “Stay in the damned bird!” he called to Britton. “We can’t lose you!”
Britton ignored him, stepping out onto the parapet walk as the first of the soldiers began crying for ammo. One of them was firing one-handed, the gas tube on his carbine so hot that the plastic dripped from burned fingers.
They would be overwhelmed in moments.
The Goblins thronged the parapet, climbing over their dead as they scrambled for the helo. A few more rounds cracked from stolen weapons. Britton felt a hiss of air pass his head. He threw open a gate on Portcullis’s loading bay and grabbed the soldier with the burned hand by his body armor, hauling him through.
“Leave it!” he shouted to the rest. “Get in the damned gate!”
The air gusted violently. The hair on Britton’s neck stood up as the smell of ozone filled the air. Another Goblin, painted white and wreathed in crackling lightning, looped over the helo’s rotors, slowly spinning down. He shouted at the Goblins thronging the parapet in their own language, waving his arms, motioning them to move aside.
The Apaches hovered impotently, jerking higher into the air as the Goblin Aeromancer appeared.
Two of the soldiers turned and dove through the gate. The last one looked up at Britton just as an arrow hissed out of the advancing mass, catching him below his neck. He rose and stumbled, falling against Britton’s thigh, tracking blood down his trousers.
Britton hauled him upright as Fitzy appeared out of the helo’s open bay, firing his pistol just as the Goblins reached the helo’s nose, swarming over it, stabbing at the windscreen with their spears. The plastic exploded as the pilots fired their pistols through it.
