Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

“Draw circles bout yourselves!” Manfried shouted before seeing the towering abominations.

“Use fire on’em!” Hegel shouted, spinning into a crouch and leaping at the shape blocking out the moon beside him.

Sheer idiotic rage allowed the Grossbarts to act, everyone else catatonic. Heinrich and his disciples chanted from across the campfire, the enormous twins among the company and devouring two slaves apiece with the maws on their legs. Magnus thrust his left arm at Hegel, the snarling rat-hand snapping its jaws over his head.

Hegel’s pick went into Magnus’s groin with a dull thunk and he jumped back, blood jetting into his face. Then the monstrosity’s leg kicked out, the mouth on the sole of its hairy paw just the right size to bite off Hegel’s head. Galvanized by the Grossbarts’ heroic charge, the remaining men took action: a Syrian pederast jumped under Magnus’s extending leg and deflected the foot before it could decapitate the saint. The mouth snapped over Hegel’s head and the unbalanced beast stumbled back. Before the child-rapist could move, jaws behind Magnus’s knee opened and bit off his face, chewing the man’s triumphant smile as he fell dying to the sand.

Brennen swiped a hand at Manfried, the Grossbart parrying three of the sword-sized claws with the haft of his mace. The pinky talon, however, went under Manfried’s weapon, through a gap in his plate, and the claw sunk through his mail shirt as though it were knit of yarn instead of iron. The force of the blow sent him rolling ass over head across the sand, his mace flying into the sky. Before the creature pounced a figure flitted in front of its sole eye, scrambling away into the darkness. Bellowing with every mouth, Brennen forgot Manfried and pursued the fleeing coward.

Looking back, Al-Gassur could not even piss himself before a huge hand closed around his left leg, the teeth thereon holding it tight. Brennen lifted his victim to drop the morsel into the central mouth on his cyclopean face but then the satchel housing Barousse’s relic slipped through Al-Gassur’s torn breeches and dangled beside him. The mock-Arab noticed this and invoked the name of the captain, slapping the bag into one of the mouths. The lips encircling his leg parted in surprise, and Al-Gassur fell to the sand.

The witch-born beast howled in Al-Gassur’s face, dozens of mouths blowing the stink of his own death upon him. The beggar saw the bottle tumble out of the ripping satchel, and the small vessel containing his brother’s heart blazed with a pale yellow luminescence as the glass shattered in the gnashing teeth of Brennen’s hand. Al-Gassur closed his eyes, unaware that the loop of cable on the bottle’s neck slipped down a prodigious tooth and cut into its gums as the monster chewed glass and glowing relic.

Just as there exist dark things that traverse oceanic abysses as if they were dry land, so too do fell beings troll the skies as if they were seas. The releasing of the artifact from its glass prison brought the attention of one of those, which might otherwise have failed to notice the object from such a distance. With the speed of God it descended from the heavens in pursuit of the shimmering prize for which all vile powers lust. Before Brennen could swallow the scorching relic a shadow even the moon feared to illuminate plucked him up with the ease of a falcon snatching a rodent. Blood splashed across Al-Gassur and he opened his eyes to see the beast vanish, but before the first syllable of thanks could leave his lungs the spool of cable he had attached to the bottle, and his thigh, burst from his satchel. Bonded to Brennen by the suddenly taut line, Al-Gassur shot into the sky and out of the knowing of the Grossbarts.

Two more convicts were torn apart by Magnus’s voracious legs and right arm, the rat-faced left hand intent only on devouring Hegel. The creature had regained its balance and pressed forward, murine jaws tearing into Hegel’s left hand and coming away with the Grossbart’s two outer fingers and sword. Hegel responded by burying his pick in its snout but the arm drew back and Hegel released his weapon lest he be pulled any closer to the behemoth.

Drawing his prybar, Hegel jabbed the comparatively normal but massive hand snatching at his face. Then the other arm returned, the bestial face wielded like a club. Hegel sprawled on the ground under the impact but rolled away before the toothy feet could fall. He spied Manfried’s mace on the ground beside him and snatched it, but this distraction enabled the three-eyed horror to focus fully on its quarry, all other victims forgotten in its rage.

The pick-skewered rat-hand leaked blood from its clamped jaws, but as it fell they again sprang open to rend Hegel’s exposed back. Manfried swung his ax over his prone brother’s head, exploding rat teeth and severing the lower jaw. Magnus’s mouths shrieked and he threw himself atop them, desiring only to crush and chew their defiant bones. Rodrigo snatched Hegel and Raphael seized Manfried, each jerking a brother in a different direction. The beast crashed to the empty ground, two pairs of men spinning almost out of reach.

The jaws on Magnus’s left elbow tore into Rodrigo’s leg, taking away a massive dripping chunk. Had Raphael not already lost his left hand it would have disappeared into the snapping mouth that grazed his bandaged wrist. The skeletal outline of Magnus’s face twisted toward Manfried and Raphael, the warped nostril billowing, two eyes shining black and the third yellow. The remaining two prisoners, one a hardened killer who had that very night determined just what the Grossbarts were after in his homeland and the other a young Moslem noble who had never struck a foe, swung their swords into the backs of Magnus’s ankles. The biting teeth on the creature’s feet kicked as Magnus tried to right himself, legs as thick as tree trunks pumping the air as the convicts hacked.

The four men near Magnus’s head and arms scrambled back only to leap again into the fray, the downed creature’s bellows of fury turning to wails as ax and sword and mace fell on every limb. A foot found the noble’s chest but his last blow cut the mighty paw free and the young man fell backward, the jaws gnawing his bare chest despite being severed. Tendons popped in the other leg, the more seasoned prisoner dodging the deadly kicks as he cut ever deeper. The mangled rat-head became mush under Hegel’s mace and then came loose from Rodrigo’s stabbings, and Magnus’s right arm flew off at the elbow from Manfried and Raphael’s onslaught.

Swaying in the moonlight, Heinrich called his son’s name over and over but his child had departed, taken by something even fouler than he. Staggering toward the Grossbarts and their followers he raised his dull scourge, grief dampening his cheeks for the first time since abandoning his humanity. Poor Magnus bawled as the bastards dismembered him, the child rolling toward one group only to have the other hew into his exposed torso.

With the arm removed, Manfried pressed in to hack the thing’s head open when the barbed scourge whipped around his face and pulled him off the beast. Heinrich’s stench blinded them as he swung the flail around at Raphael, but then both he and Manfried turned their attentions to the possessed yeoman. Heinrich fell into the arms of his acolytes as Manfried’s ax cleaved into his shoulder and Raphael’s sword slit open his belly. He cackled even as black slime bubbled from his wounds, his assailants returning to their task.

“Burn it!” Hegel told the two prisoners. “Oil the mecky fucker!”

“Don’t let them!” Heinrich shrieked at Vittorio and Paolo, who still hung back.

Hegel had noticed Magnus’s fresh wounds healed quicker than new ones could be made. The severed rat-hand had melted into bubbling filth at their feet and a new, placenta-veiled bulge quickly grew from the stump. The Egyptian criminal helped the noble throw the rear paw off before it ate its way to his heart, but then the foot turned to ash and hooked toes burst from Magnus’s gory ankle. Aghast, the younger prisoner had the sense slapped into him by his murderous countryman.