Chapter 23

“You ever worry these days are going to trigger the nightmares again,” Alomar asked.

“No, for me it’s the opposite,” North answered. “When my days are idle and I have no projects to occupy my thoughts, then the nightmares creep in to fill the void. Dame Minogue claims that I have the right of it; if I create new memories that honor the nightmares and what they stand for, I can transform them from crippling to benign.”

Alomar grumped, “Easier said than done. Like everything else at the Court, easy to prescribe a cure but too damn difficult to swallow.” He readjusted his mask, which he had upgraded by dipping some moss in camphor oil before adding it to the contents of the mask.

When the main path heading upwards split, North went left and Alomar went right, each with three men, one a mage warrior, a second an archer and the third with a sword and spear. Three other groups spread out to cover the rest of the mountain paths. The feared bloated bodies were spread like a pictorial history of the final battle for the mountain. Contact between the two armies began far down the mountain, but the pitched battles between waves of soldiers had been further up the mountain. Within an hour of ascending, North could already determine where more concentrated contact between the armies occurred and where one side or the other took a stand. If anyone cared, a historian could map out a detailed timeline of the specific clashes, the lines formed and reformed, and the ultimate push to the flat top of the mountain.

“Where are we heading?” the archer asked.

“We will follow the path of the left flank until the regiment was split to pursue a back action. We’ll swing behind the mountain and climb to the top from there.”

The archer considered the described path. “Do you think the traitor is on the backside?”

“My best guess is that the backside is a good place to rest from our men below,” North said, reviewing his own thoughts. “The idea is five groups taking three of the four directions will chase the traitor to the top, where whoever sees his back can put him down. I don’t want to get close unless we’re forced. A good arrow shot will finish this mission quickly.”

“Aye,” the others said.

They came across a particularly noxious pile of alien bodies. The enemy had been climbing over their dead comrades as they attempted to thwart a forward assault. North had met several of those crazed defenses that day, remembering the horror of another head popping up on top of a wall of bodies that kept growing, even though the bodies below were not necessarily dead. The enemy was singular in their attacks, neither ducking nor evading their weapons.

In this pile, bodies in the middle had already exploded from the heat of the sun and the pressure of the bodies above. Black viscous goo slowly dripped from protruding parts of bodies, forming evil looking puddles on the ground. The enemy dead did not act like organic flesh, either animal or vegetable.

“Hell’s blood,” someone murmured. The comment was weighing upon their thoughts as they picked their way up the mountain.

“I recognize this spot,” the pikeman announced. “We had slogged up the mountain to this point, taking casualties at a consistent pace until we reached here. Just above that overhang of rock, one can see the top plateau of the mountain. Here is where their army threw their last defense at us.”

“I see bodies spread out, but not stacked close together like further down,” Nebbe, the other mage warrior said.

“Nah, they were launching themselves at us from above,” the pikeman explained. “I was using my spear like a butcher’s meat hook tossing carcasses down the processing line. I handed off my spear to the archer next to me and used my shorter pike, which was easier on my back. They were like mindless creatures jumping off a cliff; it made no sense.”