“Hid, didn’t 1?” The miner glanced at the sword. “Honest, sir, I thought you was one of the beast-things.”
His long nose twitched and he reached up to scratch it with his left hand. His right hand was missing, Konrad noticed. It ended in a stump. He must have lost it years ago, either in an accident or as punishment.
All the miners were convicted criminals, sent here to serve out their sentences. It was almost always a life term; few left the mine alive. They were never chained, because there was nowhere they could go. Beyond the mine lay hundreds of square miles of wilderness — and of beastmen. The prisoners could escape the compound without much difficulty, but it was not so easy to escape what lay beyond.
Konrad stared around at the devastation and the dead. He was still searching for Krysten, but hoping not to find her. The miner’s dark eyes followed his gaze.
Konrad looked away, then at his own left hand. His fist was clenched, still grasping Krysten’s worthless souvenirs that he had been holding when the knife was thrown at him. He dug the point of his sword into the ground, making a shallow hole, then dropped the trinkets in and covered them over.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It was dawn and we was getting ready to go into the shaft, sir, when the beastmen attacked. There was hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds. No way of stopping them. Never seen anything like it, had I? Hope I never will again. The guards, there was nothing they could do. Like I says, there was just too many of them. It was horrible, horrible.”
The miner’s nose twitched, and he shuddered momentarily as he told his story.
“They come over the wall, more and more of them, screaming and yelling, killing everyone what tried to stop them. The other miners picked up the weapons what the dead guards dropped, but they soon ended up just as dead. Couldn’t do much, could I, not without me hand?” He held up his stump.
“You seem to have handled that knife you threw at me,” Konrad remarked, thinking how he had been within a moment of dying, of being killed without even defending himself. His extra sight, his eye that warned him of danger, seeing what would happen before it occurred, had betrayed him again.
Over the years, Konrad had relied less and less on the future vision of his left eye. He needed no such warnings of danger; here in Kislev there was always danger. But there could be no ambush, no sudden assault, because there were few places that an attacker could hide out in the barren lands.
He had also become a warrior, a trained fighting man, and his combat skills were sufficient to defeat any assailant. He no longer needed to see what his opponent would do a split second hence. His reactions and instincts were enough to beat the best that the heathen hordes had to offer; he did not need another edge to his awareness.
“Good with a knife, aren’t I? Always have been.” The miner grinned, showing his stained teeth.
Konrad wondered what the man had been convicted of, and why he had lost his hand. He was most likely some cutpurse from one of the towns of Kislev.
“Go on,” Konrad prompted.
“Wasn’t much what I could do.” He shrugged. “Either hide or get killed. Lots of others had the same idea, sir. But it never did them no good, did it? They was found and murdered.” He sniffed, peering around at the carnage. “Murdered and worse. Me, I squeezed under a few corpses. That’s what saved me.” He peered at the smears of blood which stained his torn tunic, wiping at them with the thin fingers of his only hand.
“Lay without moving for hours,” he continued. “Then when I sees you, I figure you must be one of them. Felt bad about what I done, about hiding, about everyone else being killed — so I come after you. That’s about it, sir.”
He shrugged and studied Konrad. “How come you wasn’t killed, sir?”
Konrad stared back at the miner, not sure whether to believe his tale; but somehow he had lived, and that was all that mattered.
He did not know whether the miner recognized him or not. There was no reason why he should have done. To Konrad, all the slave workers looked the same. And to the miner, all the mercenaries were probably identical.
“I was on patrol,” Konrad answered. “When I saw the smoke, I came back.” There was no need for the truth, a simple lie would suffice. “What’s your name?”
“Name?”
“Yes.”
“Heinler, sir.”
There had been a momentary hesitation. Probably another lie, Konrad realized, but it was of no consequence. They both knew not to trust one another. His new companion was a convicted criminal, but the only difference between him and many of the mercenaries who had guarded the mine was that he had been caught.
“My name is Konrad. We seem to be the only humans for hundreds of miles. There’s no need to call me ‘sir’.”
“Sorry, sir. When you been a prisoner long as what I been, everyone else is ‘sir’.”
“Let’s see if we can find some water, Heinler, maybe some food.”
They searched the compound, but the well was polluted, full of bodies, and all the supplies from the quartermaster’s stores had been stolen.
The horses from the stables were gone, every human weapon was taken, even the stock of gold ore had been carried away. That had never interested the raiders before. Whenever they had raided a convoy, their only concern had been to slay not to pillage.
Konrad made his way to the southernmost of the three crags, and Heinler followed. They climbed the steps which had been carved out of the rock, up to where the remains of the watch-tower still smouldered, and where the burned bodies lay.
“They headed in that direction?” said Konrad, and Heinler nodded.
There was no sign of the marauders on the horizon. By now they had vanished towards Praag. Konrad realized that he and Heinler were trapped between the alien army and the land whence the hellhorde had emerged. Was this to be a re-enactment of the great invasion two centuries ago, just as the attack on the mine had been a repeat of the elimination of Konrad’s native village?
“Skullface,” said Konrad.
“What?”
“Did you see a tall man amongst the creatures? Bald, very thin? He would have been one of the leaders.”
“Er…”
“You’d have recognized him because he was unlike any of the others. He looked human, probably had no weapons. And he may have walked through the flames without being harmed. Did you see him?”
“Yeah, yeah! Saw him, I saw him!”
Konrad looked at Heinler, unsure whether to believe him. The miner had agreed too eagerly.
“Very tall, very thin, bald, looked human?” said Heinler. “Swear it was him!”
Konrad knew he had given too many clues, that Heinler was simply repeating what he had said; but it made no difference, because Konrad wanted to believe.
Yesterday the bronze knight; today, Skullface.
Konrad turned away, gazing towards the south again, towards the Empire, towards Ostland, towards the valley where he had been brought up.
“Was giving orders, wasn’t he?” Heinler continued. “He was the one what stopped some of the killing, what made the others take prisoners.”
“Prisoners?” demanded Konrad, spinning around, grabbing hold of Heinler’s tunic and pulling him close. “They took prisoners?”
“Yeah.” Heinler leaned back. “Honest, sir!”
“Who? How many? What for?”
The miner shook his head rapidly. “Dunno. A lot.”
“Men? Women?”
“Yeah. Men. Women. Both. Anyone who was still alive, not too cut up, seemed like.”
Konrad let go, and Heinler stepped nervously back.
There was no reason to ask about Krysten, to find out if the miner had seen her. He was bound to reply in the affirmative, knowing that was what Konrad wanted to hear. But it was Heinler who had volunteered the information about prisoners; he had no idea that Konrad had been looking for one particular person. There was no trace of Krysten anywhere within the burned-d
own walls of the stockade, which could only mean that the beastmen must have taken her.
Konrad wanted to believe that she was still alive, that he had a chance to make up for his betrayal in leaving the girl here. Yet if she were alive, it would not be for long. The creatures had only postponed her death, were saving her for some hideous purpose of their own.
“Looks as if we’ve got a long walk ahead of us, Heinler,” he said.
“What?”
“Unless you want to stay here, that is.”
Heinler stared down at all the bodies spread out in the compound below, and wrinkled his nose.
“Where we going?” he asked.
Konrad gestured towards the south.
“Wherever they are,” he answered.
They retrieved their weapons from Krysten’s room, because there seemed nothing more they could take. Everything else from the mine that they might have used had been looted.
Heinler’s dagger looked as though it had been made by the miner himself. The handle was a roughly carved piece of wood, the blade clumsily fashioned from a shard of metal. But no matter how crude, it was a weapon, it could kill — and it had almost killed Konrad.
The stiletto was slender but square-bladed, an efficient knife for stabbing through tough bestial hides. It had originally belonged to one of Wolf’s mercenaries, a silent warrior who would reveal neither his name nor his native land. He had been on patrol with four others, and they did not return. It was Konrad who had found what remained of them: four human bodies, plus the corpses of a score of the deformed invaders who had ambushed them. But of the silent mercenary there was no sign, nothing except his stiletto which lay on the ground a few yards beyond the carnage, its bloodied tip pointing towards the north.
Because Konrad had his own knife, which had served him so well over the years, he had passed the blade on to Krysten. Now it was his once more.
He and Heinler left by the southern entrance to the stockade, which had been completely demolished by the victorious assailants when they took their leave. Already the deserted stockade seemed to be decaying very rapidly. Some of the other walls of the fortress had collapsed while Konrad had been within the compound, and it was not merely because the flames had consumed most of the timbers. It was if they were totally rotten, as if they had aged a century in a matter of hours; the whole place looked as if it had been uninhabited and forgotten for countless years. Before long, everything manmade would have crumbled into dust and been dissolved by the elements.
The sun was lower, but burned almost as fiercely as it had done at noon. Konrad had always believed that there was only one girl he had ever cared about. Now he had discovered otherwise, and all that drove him on was Krysten.
There was no sign of the marauders, but it did not need an experienced tracker to follow their trail, the marks of their passing were easy to find. Every now and then, they came across a malformed corpse, one of the assailants which had died of the wounds it had suffered during the assault on the stockade. Many of the bodies looked as though they had been dead for days, even months; they were rotten and bloated, swarming with flies, crawling with worms and maggots.
It was almost as if the northern army were purposefully leaving a spoor in the wake of its passing, discarding unwanted booty, scarring the isolated trees with wagon hubs as though blazing a trail. There were wheel marks by the score, countless footprints, hoofprints, pawprints, and they covered a wide swathe of land. There must indeed have been thousands of the benighted creatures, but their speed was restricted to the slowest of their number.
Yet Konrad still felt as he had done earlier that day, as though he were the only living being left on the face of the world -despite Heinler being so close. It was as if they were simply travellers who happened to be taking the same route. They were not allies, all they had in common was the fact that they were both human.
Konrad kept on steadily marching, and Heinler matched his pace. The miner must have been tough. He only had one hand, so he must have done twice as much work with that limb as the other convicts did with two. Barefoot, his feet were bleeding, and he was limping slightly. Konrad’s boots were made for riding, and he was not used to being on foot for so long, but he tried to ignore the pain of his blisters and aching limbs. While the enemy kept on, he had to do the same.
Pushing on remorselessly, they closed the gap between themselves and the enemy. By evening, they could see the dust of the alien army on the horizon.
After so many hours, the invading forces must soon stop. Or, not being human, did they need no rest?
The distance between the thousands and the two narrowed. As far as the eye could see, from east to west, the landscape was infested by the plague of dark figures. It took a while for Konrad to realize that the swarm was separating, some of the unholy horde heading to the left, others to the right, the rest venturing straight ahead. They were dividing their forces in order to strike at several different points within Kislev, he supposed.
The country had three main centres of habitation: Praag, Erengrad and the capital city of Kislev itself. The beastmen and their allies would find the fortifications of the cities far more formidable than those of the mine, the defenders far more numerous, so perhaps their primary intention was to attack smaller towns and villages, spreading fear and panic across the land.
Or possibly the outlaw bands ahead were only the vanguard for the greater pestilence that was yet to come, the tens of thousands of malevolent entities who were to follow…
But all that concerned Konrad was to identify which evil echelon had taken Krysten with them.
After several more minutes, he observed that the legions ahead had come to a halt. There was a gap of at least a mile between each of the three main sections, and so it was unlikely that they had only divided to make camp. They must have split their divisions, as he had suspected, ready to go off in different directions at dawn. Until then, like any other battalions, they lit fires and seemed to be settling down for the night.
For the first time in hours, Konrad allowed himself to stop. He sat slowly down, giving his throbbing ankles and knees, his aching calves and thighs, his tortured feet, the rest that they craved. Heinler sank down next to him, breathing heavily. Blood oozed from his feet into the dirt. Konrad did not even want to think about removing his boots. They were damp and sticky inside, and his feet had squelched with every step he had taken.
“We’ll wait until it’s dark,” he said. “Then we’ll go on ahead.”
“And?”
The miner still did not know why Konrad had been following the heathen horde, although he must have guessed. He could not have failed to notice Konrad’s reaction when he had revealed that the invaders had not slain everyone within the stockade, that they had taken prisoners. But he had followed Konrad without question, and he had said nothing. Neither of them had spoken until now; there was nothing to say.
“And then we’ll see if they have some food and water to spare,” Konrad answered.
There had been plenty of both on the route from the devastated mine, if one knew where to look — and Konrad had known. The foraging skills which had helped him survive in the past could never be forgotten. But he had not wanted to stop, to lose valuable minutes. Food and drink were of little consequence compared to what he must do.
His mission was the only sustenance he needed to keep going.
And it was not food he wanted from his ruthless foes. He intended to scour every camp, from one end of the line to the other, until he found what he was searching for.
He sat and watched the sun go down, impatient for the night.
He did not want Heinler with him: he was not a fighting man. The miner did not know how to move invisibly through the dark; he could not ambush guards and silently slay them; he was unaware of the subtle techniques involved in creeping through an enemy camp, slitting every throat without waking those who were next about to die.
But the miner was himself asleep, and so Konrad lef
t him where he lay and advanced through the blackened night. Only the stars shone down. It would be several hours until Mannslieb shed its nocturnal glow over the landscape. Morrslieb might rise before then, but the lesser moon would provide little illumination.
Leaving his shield and helmet behind him, and clenching his axe in his right hand, his sword in his left, Konrad made his way cautiously towards the flickering flames of the most westerly campfire. He tried not to think what the barbaric army might be devouring. As he crept on, he inevitably remembered the way that his native village had surrendered every night to the beast-men, and the same must have been true in so many other parts of the world. Daylight was for humans, but in the blackness the same lands became the domain of the deformed forest dwellers.
Here, however, the hour of the clock made no difference. Because the enemy were creatures of darkness, that did not make them creatures of the night. There were enough of the savages to venture forth at any time; they did not need to hide amongst the shadows. They regarded the north of Kislev as theirs — and now, it seemed, they intended to take over the rest of the country. And beyond…
The night was filled with loud noises and strange smells. The alien army was half beast, half man, and the sounds and odours that emanated from the camps were a mixture of both animal and human. There was laughter and screams; inhuman laughter, human screams.
Even in summer, the Kislev nights were cold. Konrad was used to them after so long, but he suddenly shivered. He realized it was the screams that had caused the chill which he felt from his neck to his toes. He recalled the victims of the atrocities in the mining compound. They must also have screamed, screamed long and loud in ultimate pain — those who had not had their tongues severed or their throats torn out.
Tonight, Konrad vowed, some small measure of justice would be exacted for the hideous tortures inflicted earlier this very day. He had slain goblins by the score yesterday, and now it would be the turn of the beastmen. The slaughter would be less spectacular than the mass killing he had accomplished previously, yet it would be no less effective.
[Konrad 02] - Shadowbreed Page 4