In under a minute, all of the enemy troops were dead, and over a dozen of Dennon’s were lying on the floor, dead or wounded. No armor is perfect.
The dead and wounded were left behind them. Later, there would be time for them. Not now.
The survivors, led by Kren and Dennon, continued to push upward.
By this time, most of the members of the first, drugged company were either dead, wounded, or lost, with some of them wandering aimlessly through deserted corridors, looking for someone to kill.
The soldiers who followed Kren and Dennon were mostly from the second company through the tunnel.
Two dozen of Duke Tendi’s soldiers were armed and waiting for them in the narrow hallway, the staircase, and the landing leading to Tendi’s private chamber.
The narrowness of the hallway stopped the attackers from using their superior numbers to advantage, but the first fighter to get there was Kren, so their lack of effective numbers didn’t make much difference. It was one-on-one for the whole distance, and when one of them was Kren, the outcome was not in doubt.
Kren just plowed through, trusting that his armor would protect him, while killing an enemy soldier with almost every blow and thrust. The hardest part was watching his footing as he went over the bodies of those he had slaughtered.
One particularly aggressive guard, having been decapitated, managed to bite Kren’s ankle as he went by. The leg armor stopped Kren from being hurt, but the head was a serious encumbrance. With some regret, Kren stamped on it with his other foot, squashing the brain to pulp on the floor. A pity, since the warrior had been a very good fighter. Kren would have wanted him for his future army. He fought on.
The open-centered spiral staircase turned properly to the right, to give the advantage to the warrior at the top, the vast majority of Mitchegai being left handed. For the fun of it, with Dik, his fencing instructor, Kren had practiced with the épée right handed on occasion, and had become fairly ambidextrous. He switched hands and cut his way upward.
After almost tripping a few times over dead bodies, Kren made a point of always killing his opponents such that they went over the handrail and out of the way. Often, he had to take a moment and give them an extra shove.
Dennon and his soldiers got to loudly counting them as they fell to the floor below.
The four troops on the upper landing only lasted a few seconds before they went spinning, headless, downward.
During all of this, there wasn’t much for the soldiers behind Kren to do, so they simply watched him. When the last enemy soldier was killed, they took their swords into their right hands and applauded him, with their left hands beating their chest armor!
Kren turned and looked down at them, surprised. Then, as was his usual custom when the crowd applauded him on the playing field, he bowed.
The rest was anticlimactic. The sturdy door was barred from the inside, and it took two axe swingers six minutes to chop their way in, while Duke Dennon fretted about the possibility of Tendi having some sort of secret escape route.
He needn’t have worried. When they finally got into the large chamber, Duke Tendi was in a very deep stupor, along with three dozen of his top officials. Parts of children lay about, mostly dead. The duke had apparently decided to start celebrating Warrior’s Day a bit early this year.
Duke Dennon went over and chopped off his opponent’s head.
“I’ve been waiting to do that for over a thousand years, and when I finally got the chance, the bloody trash wasn’t even awake to watch me do it!”
“You could have waited for him to wake up,” Kren said.
“I’m not an absolute idiot, Kren. Stunts like that are for storybook fools! When you get a chance to kill an enemy, you do so right now! If you give them time, they will figure out a way to kill you instead! Okay. You wanted the rest of these nobles for your little experiment,” Dennon said, pointing with his sword. “Should we kill them as well?”
“I’d just as soon wait with that until we have the rest of the dead fed to their new bodies. I’m not sure how long it will take for Bronki to perform the operations, and I don’t want any of them to go stale.”
“As you wish. You’ve certainly earned many privileges this day. Your fighting prowess is amazing! But I find it hard to believe that Tendi would be foolish enough to let so many of his leaders go into a stupor at the same time. And these boxes! They are the same sort that you use to ship children in, aren’t they?”
“Yes, and I suppose that that’s the answer to your first question, too. It would appear that the Superior Food Corporation has had a sales promotion in which it gave Duke Tendi two thousand of their finest children for his dining enjoyment. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of his army is also in a stupor, somewhere around here.”
“Ha! He fell for a stunt like that? When he alone was given such a gift of such largess? What a fool!”
“Perhaps, but everybody else got the same gift. I sent two thousand kids to each of the ten other dukes in the area as well. And who knows? Maybe it will stimulate sales.”
“I almost feel jealous, since you didn’t do the same for me!”
“Oh, but I did! To do anything else would have pointed you out as the aggressor! Only, you weren’t home to receive your present, so my agent put them in storage, under your palace. By now, I expect that your dungeons are filled with refugees from your towns, and that my agent is selling the children to them at wartime rates. At least she’d better be, if she wants to keep her job. I really don’t like waste, you see.”
“Make all the profit you wish, Kren. But all of this means that I’m not likely to suffer a counterattack soon, doesn’t it?”
“That is my hope, Your Grace. Come, let’s make sure that the castle is secure, and that the proper individuals are all being properly resurrected. Captain,” Kren said to the commander of the second company, “make sure that this room is well guarded. I’ll be back for this bunch later.”
Dennon picked up the head of his former rival.
“We might need this to convince some of the enemy troops that there is nothing more to fight over. Captain Zem, three dozen warriors will be sufficient to guard this area. Send the rest of your soldiers out as runners to every part of the castle, telling everyone that Duke Tendi is dead, and that Duke Dennon now rules here! Every former enemy who wishes to die may continue fighting. Those who wish to live may surrender. Their lives will be spared, and they will be offered positions in my army. This duchy is now mine!”
Kren was working on his armor.
“Are you coming, Kren?”
“In a moment, Your Grace. First I want to take off this bloody be damned tail armor!”
“I wish we was allowed to do that,” one of Duke Dennon’s sergeants mumbled.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Drinking Buddies
New Yugoslavia, 2216 a.d.
I’m really not an alcoholic. I like my beer, but I only touch the hard stuff once every month or two. Yet those seem to be the times when things happen.
I was sitting in my den, enjoying my first glass of Jim Beam when Agnieshka said that Bellor had something that he wanted to show me, and could he please come up?
“Certainly,” I said. “What’s he got?”
“He has the first production model of the new Tellefontu Fighting Machine.”
“I want to see that! Tell him to hurry up!”
This thing had been talked about for years. It was supposed to be a marriage between human and Tellefontu technology, and something that they could use to help us fight the Mitchegai. It had been designed by all three races working on New Kashubia, and I had been out of the loop on it. Tellefontu help was vital to the defense of New Yugoslavia.
In a few minutes, the door dilated to allow in a small, flat black, sleek-looking ovoid . . . thing. It was about two meters long, a meter wide and twenty centimeters thick. Every cross section of it seemed to be a perfect ellipse. It had no projections of any sort, and it glided in about ten centimeters above the floor.
“Well, it’s pretty enough,” I said. “Are you in there, old friend?”
“Most assuredly, sir. But certainly you must understand that this vehicle was not created for aesthetic purposes.”
“That doesn’t stop it from being beautiful. Climb out of it, have a drink, and tell me all about it.”