“No meat, girl not right inside!” Queenie said. “Girl hurt, girl scream! Bastards laugh, they like girl to hurt! All them bastards!”
“Ah,” said Froggie as he understood. Not that he hadn’t known soldiers who liked their girls to scream; pretty good soldiers, some of them, and it wasn’t something he figured he’d need to interfere with if they’d been his men.
But these weren’t his men. And it wasn’t one or two of them, it was the whole troop. And truth to tell, when Froggie’d had a guy like that in his squad, the fellow’d got all the dirty jobs there were till he transferred to another cohort.
“I hear you, Queenie,” he said. “We no chop-chop yet. Right now, you slip other girls meat, yes? Me tell boys this all right.”
He slapped his armored breast with the flat of his hand.
Queenie clucked happily. “Me fix!” she said. “Later you chop-chop, all right?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Froggie said. “Not one little bit.”
* * ** * *
The trail was as dark as the inside of a grave. A piece of quartz clicked under Froggie’s hobnails. The barefoot Glabrio turned and glared, but Froggie met the trooper’s gaze with cold unconcern. He knew it was important to follow as quietly as possible, but he also knew the pair of axemen ahead were talking in normal voices and occasionally clearing branches from the trail with a swipe of their weapons. He gestured Glabrio on with a flick of his finger.
Some of the trees here had thorns. Glabrio might be able to avoid stepping on one as he trotted down the shadowy track, but Froggie wasn’t that confident. He wouldn’t make near the racket with his heavy bootsoles as he might if a thorn drove into the ball of his foot and jolted loose a curse.
Glabrio grimaced and went on. Froggie kept Glabrio in sight. He could’ve followed the barbs by ear alone if he’d had to, as nonchalant as they were, but Glabrio was the real expert.
Froggie wasn’t as good a tracker as Glabrio. He wasn’t the best swordsman in the century, he didn’t have the best range with a javelin, and there were three or four of the troopers who could take him apart in a barehanded fight.
But Froggie could do every job in the unit nearly as well as his best man; and there was nobody the Third of the Fourth trusted more to bring them alive out of the sort of ratfuck they were surely in the middle of now.
They’d come nearly a mile from the village. The barbs had left at midnight, same as the night before; as soon as they reached the woods, they’d started acting like there was nothing to worry about except maybe tearing their clothes on a prickly branch. As a veteran, Froggie was pleased to see how badly the enemy was underestimating him; but he was human enough to feel insulted, too.
Glabrio started around a tree with six trunks braided together like a horsehair rope. He stopped and flashed his hand toward Froggie, palm out and fingers spread. Froggie stopped dead, then hunched forward to a curtain of tasseled vegetation on the other side of the trail. He extended his left arm carefully to make an opening so he could watch the pair of barbs.
The axemen stood at the base of a thirty-foot basalt thumb poking through the weathered shale. Only a few sprays of vegetation blotched the hard rock, but trees growing nearby shaded all but the very peak of the intrusion. The barb leader took something from a pouch on his harness and pointed it at the basalt.
There was a clicking sound like a treefrog winding up for its mating call. A circle of rock dissolved.
Glabrio had the point of his dagger clear of the sheath before his mind got control of his instincts. The barbs could’ve heard his blurted curse if they been paying attention to anything but what was in front of them.
Froggie didn’t move. He hadn’t expected this, exactly, but he’d expected something.
The rock opened into a tunnel ten feet in diameter; the walls were of glowing blue ice. A Commander waited behind a waist-high screen of the same translucent blue, guarded by a pair of armored apes wearing metal gloves with knives welded onto the knuckles. Those were good weapons for the tunnel’s close quarters.