AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"More likely three."
"Yes, sir," Valentine said, wondering if he was in for a dressing down.
"I'll take it," Seng said. "Gamecock's Bears and the legworm outriders are hitting the support train now, and the Wolves are raising hell with some artillery tubes at the crossing they set up where you destroyed that bridge. A captured prisoner says their Kurian Lord's in a panic, disappeared into some secret area of his command car."
One of Valentine's company trotted up and presented him with his recovered gun. It now bore a nice set of scratches on the barrel just behind the foresight, a souvenir of the Reaper's power.
Valentine begged off from the questions and congratulations to check on the wounded.
Which reminded him: "I've got wounded, sir. Can we set up a field hospital here?"
"Of course. This ridge is good defensive ground. I'll establish brigade HQ here until all our, ahem, stray sheep and goats are rounded up."
The fight already had a name-Billy Goat Cut. Valentine heard one of his corporals relaying the details to a Guard sergeant deploying his men for a sweep of the battlefield to look for enemy wounded or hiding.
Duvalier wandered out of the hills with Ediyak trailing behind, his clerk looking like she'd just been through the longest night of her life. Duvalier carried a Reaper skull by its thin black hair.
"Found him lurking on the ridge, all dazed and confused," she said, sticking the skull on a rail grade marker with a wet squelch that sounded like a melon being opened. "I thought I'd solve his problem for him."
Just like a Cat. She did everything but leave it on the back step.
"Don't mess with that," a corporal warned a curious Guard. "You'll seize up and die if you get some of that black gunk in you."
"It's safe once it's dried," Duvalier said, rubbing some on her index finger and making a motion toward her mouth. Valentine slapped her hand down.
"Cut it out, Ali. What's the matter with you?"
"I wonder sometimes," she said.
* * * *
Valentine's holding action was just one-third of the story. The Bears, Wolves, and assorted legworm-mounted troops had fallen on the support trains like hyenas on a pair of sick cattle.
Gamecock had found a piece of tentacle that looked like it came from a Kurian in the wreckage. It was already sealed in a specimen jar for eventual delivery to the Miskatonic.
Of course, there was no way to identify the remains positively. Valentine imagined the Kurians weren't above sticking some unimportant former rival or inconvenient relative in an aquarium marked "In case of emergency, break glass," so to speak, should a body ever need to be left behind while the Kurian stuffed itself up a hollow tree somewhere, or in the rear engine that managed to decouple and escape at full speed.
Moytana's Wolves had their own triumph, tearing up the artillery support hurrying toward the railroad cut. They were already working on chain harnesses so the legworms could haul the tubes up and down Kentucky's hills.
Seng was wrong about the delay. It took four days to get everyone organized, the refugees and the two men too shot up to move to a local brand.
Miraculously, Valentine had no one killed in the fight; his only losses were wounded-and the jibes from the rest of the expedition.
* * * *
They crossed the Big Sandy into West Virginia. Special Executive Karas commemorated the occasion by having his legworm riders offer a banquet.
They sacrificed an egged-out legworm to feed the troops. For all their size, legworms didn't offer much in the way of edibles. The tenderest pieces were the claw-like legs themselves. They reminded Valentine of the shellfish he'd eaten in New Orleans and the Caribbean. The farther away you traveled from the legs, the worse they tasted. The riders assured him younger legworms were both tenderer and tastier, as were unfertilized eggs-"Kentucky caviar."
Legworm flesh barbecue was something of an acquired taste and depended greatly on the quality of the barbecue sauce. Southern Command's soldiery invited or shanghaied into attending chewed manfully.
Valentine ate his with a lot of cider vinegar.
They put Karas' chair on another stump, this one only a foot off the ground at the high end of the picnic field's slope, but it still gave him a commanding view and a sort of dais from which to command his legworm-riding knights-errant.
Seng tapped Valentine on the shoulder. "Major, our ally heard about Billy Goat Cut. He wants to see you."
Gamecock and Moytana were there as well, along with a Guard captain whose command had taken a whole platoon of railway security troops prisoner. A small crowd of legworm riders and soldiers had gathered to watch events, while sneaky dogs, including Valentine's company mutt, raided unattended plates. Valentine saw Duvalier's freckled eyes in the crowd.
