Chapter 65: The Ogre Gate

Chapter 65: Chapter 65: The Ogre Gate

The alert came at dusk, four days after Morrow arrived.

GATE BREAK — MERRIDAN PORT, TERMINAL FOUR. B-RANK. ALL CLEARED GUILDS RESPOND.

Terminal Four was a city of steel boxes: ten thousand shipping containers stacked six high in long, narrow canyons, red and blue and rust-brown, with the great gantry cranes standing over them like the legs of giants. The gate had torn open in the middle of the stacks. By the time the Threshold Guild arrived, it had been pouring for six minutes.

Ogres.

They came through in a stream, three meters tall, grey-green and slab-muscled, swinging clubs made of ship’s chain and the doors of crushed cars. Goblin runners scrambled ahead of them over the container tops like monkeys, shrieking. The dockworkers who’d made it out huddled behind the terminal’s chain-link fence, and above them, on the elevated highway that ran along the port, a crowd had already gathered with phones held high. A news helicopter circled overhead, its spotlight sweeping the stacks.

And in the middle of the yard, ducking under a gantry crane, came the warlord.

It was half again the size of the others, and its skin wasn’t skin. It was iron: dull grey plates fused across its shoulders, back, and skull, studded with rivets like the hull of a ship. In one hand it dragged a ship’s anchor on twenty meters of chain.

[Iron-Hided Ogre Warlord — Grade: B+.]

The Link snapped open over the yard, red markers everywhere. Morrow stood at Elias’s elbow with his lantern lit, looking out at it all with an expression of mild, courteous interest, as if it were a crowded train platform.

"Aveline, the warlord. Marcus, cover her." Elias was already moving. "Tobin, Lena, the fence. Keep them off the dockworkers. Hana, stay central. Morrow—"

"I’ll stay close to you, I think," Morrow said mildly. "I’m not much use with a sword."

"Then stay behind me."

He went into the stacks.

The first ogre came around a corner of red steel with its chain club already swinging. Elias let Stoneform roll over his forearms and took the blow on crossed arms. The granite cracked, but it held. He stepped inside the swing and put his fist into the ogre’s knee with every point of Strength he had. The knee folded backward. He hit it again on the way down.

Behind him, he heard Morrow say politely, "Good heavens."

Aveline met the warlord in the widest canyon of the yard, between two walls of stacked steel.

She didn’t wait for it to come to her. She walked straight at it with her shield up and her sword low, and the warlord saw her coming and laughed, a sound like a cement mixer, and swung the anchor.

Twenty meters of chain came whipping around in a flat arc. The anchor tore the corner off a container as it passed, peeling the steel like foil, and hit Aveline’s shield full on.

She went backward six meters, sparks spraying from her heels. Then she stopped and set her feet.

The oath took it. White fire flickered up her blade.

She went in. Her first stroke hit the warlord’s iron forearm, rang like a bell, and bounced off without leaving a scratch. Her second found the plate over its ribs and skidded away in a shower of sparks. The warlord laughed again and backhanded her into the side of a container hard enough to dent it inward in the shape of a knight.

"Hide’s thick," Marcus said through the Link, calm. "Plates over everything. But it’s grown, not forged. Where it bends, it’s thinner. Elbows, neck, backs of the knees."

"I can’t reach the neck," Aveline said, pulling herself out of the dent.

"Then I’ll bring it down to you."

Elias, fighting two ogres in a canyon three rows over, glanced up through the Link and saw where Marcus was: in the cab of the nearest gantry crane, forty meters up, with his rifle slung across his back and his hands on the controls.

"Marcus," he said, "do you know how to drive that?"

"No," said Marcus. "But it has levers, and I’ve got a good feeling about the red one."

The crane groaned. Its trolley shot along the boom with a scream of cable, and a forty-foot container swung out from beneath it on its chains, fully loaded, sweeping down out of the dark like a pendulum the size of a bus.

It hit the warlord square in the back.

Steel met iron with a sound that shook the whole yard. The warlord pitched forward onto its hands and knees, and its head came down to exactly the height of a knight’s sword.

Aveline was already moving.

She cut for the neck.

The warlord was faster than it looked. It twisted, and her burning blade hit the thick plate of its shoulder instead and bit a finger’s width deep. The warlord roared, and its free hand closed around her.

It lifted her off the ground in one fist, armor and all, and squeezed.

Elias felt her plate crack through the Link. Not a sound but a feeling, a pain like a rib going. Then the warlord swung her like a child swinging a doll and slammed her through the side of a container.

Straight through. Steel tore. She went in one side and out the other in a burst of split rice sacks and hit the ground beyond, and she didn’t get up.

"Aveline," Elias said.

Nothing.

Hana was already running. She came around the end of the stack at a dead sprint with her grey skirts hitched up in both fists and dropped to her knees beside the knight. Her hands found Aveline’s chest: the breastplate caved in, the ribs beneath it worse.

"Forty seconds," she said to nobody. "Thirty-nine." She laid her palms flat on the dented steel.

[Rewind: Target restored to its state 41 seconds prior.]

The breastplate pushed back out with a groan of metal. Aveline gasped and sat up.

"Stop letting it grab you," Hana snapped. "Go."

The warlord was rising. The container that had knocked it flat slid off its back and crashed into the stacks. It shook its iron head, swung the anchor around, and turned on the two women.

And in the canyon behind it, very softly, someone began to sing.

Morrow had come up the row behind Elias, unhurried, lantern held high. He was singing the same song he’d sung over the Pierce graves, low and patient, the same few notes going down and down. It wasn’t meant for the living. But the living heard it anyway.

The warlord’s swing slowed. Its arm drooped as if the anchor had suddenly grown very heavy. Its tiny red eyes, deep in the iron plates, went heavy-lidded and half closed. For three long seconds, the great iron head nodded forward like a man falling asleep on a train.

"Thank you, Keeper," Aveline said.

She came up off the ground with every blow she had swallowed burning white along her blade. Marcus’s rifle cracked from the crane in the same instant, and the bullet struck the seam at the base of the warlord’s skull a quarter-second before her sword did.

The seam split. The blade went through.

The warlord’s head hit the ground first. Its body followed a heartbeat later, and the impact rang through every container in the yard.

[Iron-Hided Ogre Warlord (B+) has been slain.]

[Gate collapse in 5:00.]

For one second, the yard was quiet. Elias let out a breath.

Then the Link lit up red.

Not at the gate. Everywhere. Three hundred ogres were already loose in the stacks, and with their warlord dead, they didn’t scatter. They went mad. They poured out of every canyon at once, roaring, toward the only lights they could see: the fence where the dockworkers huddled and, beyond it, the highway, where the crowd still stood filming.

The horde kept coming.

Tobin met the first wave at the fence with a cleaver in each hand and cut down four ogres in as many seconds. Lena stood behind him with a crowbar she’d found somewhere, guarding a dockworker with a broken leg. Aveline was on her feet again, staggering toward them, too slow. In the crane, Marcus swung container after container into the canyons, and every one bought them a few seconds and no more.

Elias fought in the middle of it all. Stoneform on his fists, Quick Step carrying him from one wall of steel to the next. He broke a knee, a jaw, a forearm. He took a club across the back, and the granite there cracked like eggshell.

It wasn’t enough. It was Millbrook all over again, only bigger.

A section of the fence went down with a scream of tearing wire. The dockworkers behind it scattered. On the highway, a pair of goblins reached the top of a support pillar, and the crowd’s cheering turned, all at once, into screaming.

"We can’t hold this," Marcus said. "Not with six. Not with seven."

Elias turned, looking for Morrow, and found him.

The old man had walked out into the middle of the canyon, past Aveline, past Hana, all the way to the warlord’s fallen body. He set his lantern down on the steel decking. Then, slowly, with a small grunt of old joints, he knelt beside the great iron head where it lay on its side, and he laid one thin hand flat on its brow.

The lantern flame turned blue.

"Elias," Morrow said quietly. "You said you needed an army. I believe I can offer you a start."

He looked up at the highway, at the phones and the cameras and the news helicopter’s spotlight sweeping over them.

"But I should warn you," he added. "Your people up there are not going to like what they see."