“Where now?” Hassel asked from beside the bole of a huge tree.
Cale had seen Hassel check it a few times before approaching, and they saw no sign that it was anything other than an ordinary tree, doing ordinary-tree things. Like shifting slightly in the wind, or attracting moss. Still, they all kept nervously glancing up at the branches.
The lady elf hunched over Hassel’s shoulder, her grimy gown still glittering a little in the late evening light.
“To the left—the standing stones there, do you see them?”
“Check it out, Hassel,” Barden ordered.
Hassel threaded through a narrow and stony track in the woods, trying his best to slip through the underbrush without much noise.
Tracking side to side across the path, he moved into the deep shadow of the stones, through the narrow gate between them. The circle was clear, floored with springy green turf and open to the sky. But trees, ordinary trees and not stomping monsters by the look of them, ringed the circle beyond the fence of stones.
To Cale it looked like the pictures of Stonehenge, but more precisely cut and intricately carved. And smack in the middle of a forest instead of a grassy field.
With the trees and brush growing around them, the place seemed all but impossible to find from outside, unless someone took the path they had. Hopefully the shitheads and the elves back behind Cale would take a little while to find them in this thick copse, though that seemed like hoping the rain wouldn’t be quite so wet, or the sun all that hot.
Barden, as if reading his thoughts, was looking behind them now that she’d scoped out the magical stone circle. “Not a bad blind, sir, and easy to defend, while the ammo holds out.”
Cale couldn’t meet her gaze right now. Not since she’d had to pull him to his feet and give him a little pep talk earlier. Yeah, she was ready for that next level of leadership. She could drive her very own platoon nuts insisting on full packs, map memorization, and extra mags of ammo.
They might call her Barbie behind her back, but Barden was high-speed low-drag and cool under pressure.
But what would he do without his Ccorporal?
He didn’t want to think about that. It wasn’t something that needed solved right now.
So, he pointed at the stones and said gruffly, “Spread ’em out, Corporal Barden.”
Then he made his way across the circle, maybe fifty meters, and crouched beside one of the upright stones. Marines crept through the gate and fanned out around the perimeter, though like him, they could not hope to push through the brush and actually guard the perimeter.
“Alright, what now?” Cale asked.
“Now?” Lady Wíela asked.
“Yes, now. What now? Where do we go from here?”
Lady Wíela closed her eyes and lay her head back, looking up into the slowly darkening sky. Just to the east, the sky had started to go purple, a few bright points flickering to life in the heavens.
“Well?” Cale prompted again.
“According to the stars,” she said, and peered off toward the east, over the tops of the trees on that side. “It is three weeks until midsummer. On that day, we must watch the upper faces of the leaning stones. The one on which a lizard scampers upward, then widdershins, at the moon’s highest light, will mark our way in. The earth under will have aligned—”
“We don’t have three weeks.” Cale leaned his back against the cool stone. He was in a foreign land with foreign rules. Don’t just smack your head against the door, he thought back to his leadership training. Understand the problem first. Learn everything you can about your situation if you have the time for it. Then make a plan of action.
“Is it just a hidden door, or is there some kind of portal that opens?” Cale’s voice was calm. He was surprised by that.
“Portal?”
“Like we came through, to get from our world.”
“No, no, it is a regular tunnel entrance. My grandmother carried me out through here when her husband the King was slain in his sleep, beginning this unholy struggle.”
“You’ve been right here before? You know this castle, and you know the grounds, then?”
“Well enough to get you this far, and inside, if we can survive long enough for the door to reveal itself.”
“We can’t—that’s not going to happen. We may as well wish for Shane and Rashad and Peridot and the little squeaky orphan girl and Grumbly Runt himself to come on down here, guns blazing, and rain hellfire down on all the elves and human mercenaries between us and the tree.” Cale had a grim smile that caused the normally implacable Lady Wíela to take a step back from him.
“Perhaps we can lead our enemies away from here? Maybe back into the woods, or down onto the plain. We can circle back in stealth when the time is ripe?”
Cale shook his head. “No, that’s a good plan for a wood elf who can hide here, and a shit plan for us. We’ll wear ourselves out, might get caught in the open and fucked up. And we can’t waste a bullet from this point on.”
No, if they were going to do something, it would be now.
“Perhaps. . . .”
“No more perhaps.” Cale shook his head and patted his vest pockets absent-mindedly, then stopped. “Are you sure there’s a real door somewhere here? And the problem is just finding it?”
“Yes. But it cannot be opened until a midsummer’s moonlight is shining on it and—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cale dug out night-vision goggles and strapped them on. He clicked the goggles down and took a look around.
“Cale of the Marines, what are you doing?”
The stones glittered faintly, their intricate designs catching starlight. Or maybe they glowed a little from within, he couldn’t say. Looking up and down, Cale examined the stone nearest Hassel, then moved on, working clockwise around the circle.
“Cale of the Marines?”
Ninety degrees away, facing east and out toward the plains, he stopped. Then he stepped back, then forward, closer again.
“Well, well,” he breathed softly, noting just a slight hint of light. “What do we have here?”
He slipped his bayonet out of its sheath, now with everyone watching him, and fixed it to the muzzle of his M27. He thrust the blade through the overgrowth on the far side of the stones, and the sharp clink of steel on stone echoed across the circle.
Now everyone stood and turned in that direction.
Cale moved the bayonet around, testing the edges of what he had found, checking where the blade kept going, sinking deeper into overgrowth. Once, it stuck into the bole of a tree and he had to yank it back out. When it seemed he had the shape of it, he stepped a pace or two off, gesturing for everyone to join him.
“Who’s got C4?” Cale asked.
“Two bricks, but no blasting caps,” Barden said, and shook her head. “Rashad had them.”
“We used all ours on the Ospreys.” Diaz said. They were not at all equipped for this kind of thing. Hell, they were only still on their feet thanks to their ability to buy provisions near Hilltown. Otherwise, they would have run out of food days before. Ammo and everything else expendable was running way low. With all of four full drums of ammunition, Hassel was their only gunner capable of suppressing fire. Barden was down to a magazine and a half.
“Same,” said Lomicka.
“Alright. Let’s plant what we’ve got. Barden, Diaz, and Lomicka, one round each of high explosive.” Three grenade launchers firing on the C4 should give them a crude blasting cap. “Fire on the same mark, and let’s see if we can blow the door.”
“It’ll draw a lot of attention, Staff Sergeant.” Barden wasn’t arguing, exactly. But she had a point.
“Hassel,” Cale barked. He was starting to see everything form up in his head. That clarity and energy that came with seeing the path ahead sizzled inside of him. “You’re fastest. Hunker down in the path outside the circle. When we blow it, chuck a willy-pete grenade out into the woods as far as you can, then run after us. If we’re lucky, they’ll think the explosion here is a distraction for whatever we’re doing with white phosphorous over there.”
“Aye, Staff Sergeant.” He had one of the incendiary grenades, and cadged another one from Antoine. Waiting only for Cale’s nod, he slunk out to the circle’s gate and beyond.
Cale ordered everyone behind the stone slabs for cover, backs to the blast, while Doc Dooley packed bags of saline around the C4 to direct more of its force against the stone.
“As soon as you fire, drop flat,” Cale told Barden, Diaz, and Lomicka. Fifty meters away was outside the lethal range, but it was going to ring some bells.
Any farther away, they might miss.
His team leaders looked at him expectantly. Barden, hair slightly caught in her straps, Diaz, dark brown skin smeared with mud and a slight grin of being resigned to whatever happened next, and Lomicka, a snarl on her lips.
“Let’s keep our jaws open like the mouthbreathers we are!” Cale shouted. “The moment you see open tunnel, move by team.”
Then he held up a hand.
They all waited in the silence of the stone circle for a moment, until Cale heard the explosion and thump of a distant grenade.
“Fire,” Cale ordered calmly.
The soft triple-foomp of the team leaders’ grenade launchers broke the peace of the glade, followed half a second later by overlapping blasts—one sharp, then another one enveloped by the deep, throaty bass of C4 detonating, then a third sharp explosion nearly lost in the cacophony.
Cale was tossed back against the soft grass, mouth open. His helmet smacked the ground as a cloud of saline and rock shards flew overhead between him and the stars.