Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

A young, sweating Sword suddenly crashed through the undergrowth before her, falling to his knees on the forest floor. He spotted Kali and stared at her imploringly, shouting "Help me! Help me!" but it was already too late. The tendrils coiled about his ankles snapped him back in an instant. The sounds of his thrashing struggle — and screams — continued for several seconds before they were abruptly silenced by a gelatinous gloop .

Kali kept moving, not even looking back, and chose another tree.

Once more she lashed vines about its trunk, stretching their length in a tense line to another opposite, where she climbed and lashed them tightly again. She repeated the procedure two more times, with trees further ahead and hundreds of yards apart, and at last seemed satisfied that all she could do with the vines had been done.

Girl, she thought, you've taken risks before but this time you've got to be mad.

Kali negotiated her way further into the forest, fighting a growing sense of isolation and wishing she had Horse by her side. The area she was entering was where she and the first Horse had almost given up on their search for the Spiral. Yes, there was the acrid stench of the Spiral's ruins and there was the mix of odours — metallic, biological, faecal — that meant the juggennath was still nearby. She had successfully made her way back to its stomping ground.

Stomping ground. Never was a phrase more appropriate, because Kali felt her prey before she saw it, vibrations in the forest floor that resonated in her bones.

Kali moved forward cautiously, weaving her way through the undergrowth. The trees thrashed and snapped back and forth, as if caught in the throes of a violent storm, but the sky above was clear of clouds. Abruptly, the air was split by a series of angry, deafening roars.

She eased her way to a clearing ahead.

Kali had been presuming that the creature that had attacked their party had been a juggennath, she had been calling it a juggennath, and it certainly smelt like she imagined a juggennath should smell, but it was only now, setting eyes fully upon on it that she really appreciated what a juggennath was.

Legend had it that the elves had grown six of these creatures in huge vats. They were unnatural, undying behemoths nurtured of thousands of gallons of offal, sinew, hide and bone, the mashings of huge creatures, individually terrifying, who roamed the peninsula long ago. Elven alchemists had grown them with one purpose — to empty the battlefields of the dwarves they had fought in the oldest of the wars. It was said that the six could reduce a line of ten thousand men to a bloody smear. Armoured in spiked metal plates, shaped over vast anvils, and armed with stone hammers hewn in blocks higher than a man, they were said to be unstoppable, and only by choosing their battlefield cleverly — in a place known as the Hollow Fields — had the dwarves eventually rid the world of their destructive blight. The abyssal caverns of the Fields, lying beneath thin layers of topsoil and roots, had swallowed even the juggennaths whole, and the dwarves had given those caverns a name, too — in dwarven, Yan'Tuk — which in human speak meant something roughly along the lines of 'Up Yours'.

Okay, Kali had never been sure about that last bit. But she liked it.

Clearly, though, one juggennath had survived. The thick, heavy mass that blocked her view was its legs . She craned her neck as far back as it would go, past legs the width of redwood trunks and a torso the size of a small hill, to a head and shoulders as high as the treeline, if not above.

The only thing that Kali could think was, no wonder the dwarves wanted rid of them .

Well, that was precisely why she was here, wasn't it? But before she made a move she needed to work out a route.

Kali studied the juggennath further. On a colossal scale, the creature resembled the primates of the higher World's Ridge Mountains — the ogur, for example — and was covered almost entirely in hair, muscular arms and legs concealed by the thick and straggly coat. In places jagged sections of rusted and tarnished metal clung to its body, some pieces still bearing the remains of the spikes that had once covered it. They would come in handy. The remains of some of her party were strung and slung about its massive frame, at least thirty men and women bounced lifelessly against the juggennath as it shifted, and whether they were worn for decoration or for food, Kali almost turned away seeing the state they were in.

She had seen what she needed, and was ready. All she had to wait for now was for the juggennath to move again.

It did so, the trees and branches about it thrashing and breaking as a wave of shrikes and razorbeaks circled its head, at least twenty of them taking it in turns to dart at the giant figure as it flailed against their attacks. The giant batted them out of the air but there was no way it could stop them all, and they dived for its flesh, returning with chunks of bloody flesh and matted hair held in their beaks. The juggennath roared in irritation and frustration, the wounds insignificant, but the attacks had clearly been going on for some time — and the reason that they had commenced them was, she believed, the same reason that the rest of the wildlife had emerged from its cover in the forest. For the first time in its impossibly long life, the juggennath had been injured — slashed by Gabriella DeZantez and the Deathclaws — and the great beast that had so far held dominion over them had seemed weak, as they had smelled its blood.

Kali almost felt sorry for the ancient creature, the bemused beast once king of its domain, but there was little she could do to help it. Wouldn't have helped if she could, in fact. She was banking on the distraction to make the next part of her plan easier.

She had to act quickly.

If the juggennath decided to flee its tormentors, went pounding off deeper into the Sardenne, she might never catch it again.

It was time to hitch a ride.

Kali burst from the treeline and raced across the glade. She made it with only a couple of minor scratches into the shadow of the juggennath itself. Only one, particularly persistent brackan tried to take a slice out of her, but with a running twist she managed to manoeuvre it into the path of a hackfire toad and, with a cheery wave, it was goodnight stickface. This done, she threw herself upwards with a grunt, grabbing two fistfuls of the matted hair on the giant's legs. She hauled herself up onto the limb proper and took as firm a purchase as she could, the giant pounding about the glade in its efforts to defend itself, and was flung to the left and the right like a small doll, but she gradually scaled the phenomenal creature. Kali doubted that the giant even recognised her presence.

Kali rose higher and higher, aiding her climb with a couple of somersaults from spike to spike, and at last she found herself on its shoulder, headed for the neck and clung onto the nape as she might cling to an exposed rockface. There, she took a breath.

Before she could move further, Kali found herself snatched from the juggennath's neck by one of its giant hands, swung around to the front of the creature and held before its face. If, that was, it could be called a face. She had never actually considered what a juggennath saw if it shaved in a morning. There was no nose or mouth as such, only a twitching orifice where both should be, and above that a single, bar-shaped eye that stretched almost across its forehead from left to right, giving it a perpetual frown.

"Gods, you're ugly."

Kali struggled in the giant's grip as she stared into its looming eye, and wondered why everything had gone suddenly quiet, the attacking shrikes and razorbeaks gone. Then she realised that the eye, previously a feral brown, had become as white and dull as those of the soul-stripped, so that she felt as if she were held before a cold, snow-filled sky. Whatever intelligence the juggennath possessed — and Kali suspected it wasn't much — seemed to have been replaced by another.