He briefly entertained saving her life for the loyalty it might buy, but there was not time and death was a constant companion both in Carngrad and out in the Spoil. There would be other times and other lives. She had made the choice to come with him.
Her hands twitched feebly.
Do you hear wings?
They are gone.
Not them. Her expression went slack as the life drained from her face and her eyes rolled back in her head. Her fingers, barely moving, made one last phrasing.
The Gatherer comes.
He had heard this before, from others as they died, that they could hear the suggestion of wings as the Great Gatherer came for their soul. Some claimed that if your hunt was worthy he would add your soul to his eternal Pick of treasures. Those who were unworthy would find only suffering as they writhed in torment upon the thorns of his tree. Lock intended to put off both that meeting and its judgement for as long as possible. He was a good hunter, but he would not be content meeting the Great Gatherer until he was a great hunter.
Claw died moments later, as the Eightpoints day plunged into twilight. Lock granted his remaining companions a short respite to dress their wounds and looked out over the fractured plains of the Bloodwind Spoil. The wind was rising and it carried the taste of rancid copper and dead flesh…
A storm was coming.
He smiled; the furies might have killed his brethren, but the storm foretold what lay ahead for the Splintered Fang. The change of weather meant that the plains would soon be at their most treacherous, but he would risk them to get ahead of his foe and for the glory of the hunt.
‘I cannot hear you.’ Ophidia moved closer to the warrior and he bellowed into her ear.
‘We need to halt, or this storm will be the end of us.’ She could still barely hear him over the roar of the rising wind. The weather had turned murderous shortly after their departure from Carngrad and what had begun as a march to glory had quickly turned sour. Light and time had no meaning out in the wastes, simple playthings for the forces that had distorted the Eightpoints. Day was night, night was day, all was red, all was black… It was dizzying and sickening. But the Splintered Fang, possessed by zeal and hatred, pushed on. Ophidia, at their heart, exhorted them to greater efforts with fiery rhetoric and brazen threats.
She hesitated for a moment as one of her warriors narrowly avoided being speared by a lance of thorns thrown by the gale. She ached to plunge her blade into the hearts of the meddlesome crows and hold the Fang in her hands. But it would not do if her warriors perished before even laying eyes on the foe.
‘Just a little further,’ she yelled, the wind whipping up the cloak of snakeskin she wore around her shoulders. Her tall, slender form was every bit as commanding out here in the barren lands as it was surrounded by the Splintered Fang’s trappings back in Carngrad. Her people feared her and loved her. She cared for neither, only that they obeyed. ‘We need shelter.’
‘Scouts have already gone ahead,’ said Atracus. ‘They should be back soon.’
Time passed and they did not come back. There was absolutely no sign of their scouts. Ophidia pushed the party onward, keeping to the rocks and shadows of high cliffs to shield them from the worst of the storm, but there was no safety. By the time the warband found shelter, every warrior was soaked in blood and ichor. Several had been wounded by flying shards of purple stone, and one of their number had been stripped to the bone by a cloud of buzzing crystals.
They sheltered for a time in the lee of a blasted ruin which none of them could identify. Darkness closed in again and the temperature plunged so low a skin of ice formed on the walls. To counter the freezing conditions, despite the risk it posed by signalling their location, a fire needed to be lit. Even with the horror of the storm and the missing scouts, morale remained high, buoyed by the promise of death and spoils. Ophidia, however, was restless and irritable. ‘We must press on! Vengeance will be ours!’ She muttered the words over and over, and the mantra was picked up and echoed by her fanatical followers.
The scouts were still nowhere to be seen and after the group had rested for a short while, Ophidia demanded that they gather up their weapons and forge onward. It was only once they had departed the ruins that they discovered the clear message left for them in the wake of the storm.
A black, gnarled tree, like a skeletal hand clawing at the sky, stood in their path. A pair of severed heads had been pinned to its trunk, serpentine daggers thrust through their open mouths. The hair of the dead scouts fluttered like grisly pennants in the howling wind. The bodies to which the heads had once been attached were nowhere to be seen. Ophidia crushed the twinge of doubt she felt at the death of her warriors and hissed in fury. This was now about revenge every bit as much as glory. Doubt was weakness and weakness was death. The warband echoed her rage and they pressed on, hungry to draw the blood of their elusive foes.
Night fell sooner than anticipated, and they lost another of their own in the murky gloom with only a strangled cry to mark his passing. A second dropped in a fountain of gore, her throat opened with a flash of dull steel and the whisper of feathers, her attacker gone in the shadows and creeping fog. Questing tendrils of vapour thickened the darkness and filled it with half-seen horrors, shambling figures and whispering wraiths.
The Splintered Fang became wary of the open spaces where an enemy might approach unseen from any direction and pressed themselves into the valleys and narrow spaces, following a crazed spider web of fissures. Yet another of their warriors fell to a gossamer noose that dangled slender and unseen. The cord snapped taut and the victim was lifted kicking and thrashing out of sight. Seconds later, their screams were replaced with a devastating silence.
It was with a sense of relief that they welcomed the returning light, pale and insipid. With its coming, the warband left the fissures behind and found themselves in a grove of grotesque trees.
The mist crawled after them like some sentient, formless thing, spilling around their ankles and rising like a tide. The growing light was the colour of old blood and spoiled meat, and gave the crooked trees clawed and murderous shadows. There was no true dawn in the Bloodwind Spoil, only the promise of bloodshed.
Ophidia was seething; the deaths of the scouts and losses in the fog had shaken her warriors’ faith in her, and she could see the growing doubt in their eyes. Not doubt in themselves, but doubt in her. It would not take long before one of them questioned the worth of the raid. When that happened, she would have to kill them, or they would quickly escalate to challenging her leadership. That was how leaders died. It was, after all, how she had taken her position. She needed to give them something and it needed to be soon.
‘Atracus,’ she said, her tone hard and commanding, ‘we should be close. Get above the fog and see if you can spot the slave train.’ She waved at the largest of the nearby trees.
Atracus grunted and Ophidia watched as he made his way cautiously through the grove towards the tree. The landscape of the Eightpoints was as hostile as its residents and every bit as mercurial. There was a high probability that something angry and predatory had made the grove its lair and Ophidia was confident that Atracus had no intention of becoming its prey. She kept her eyes keenly on him as he approached the tree with his daggers held low in a hunting stance.
Nothing leapt from its twisted boughs or emerged from the mist to challenge him. Ophidia heard his hiss of annoyance and watched as he tapped the black trunk with the tip of a blade. It sounded as hard as stone and she could see the studding of brutal thorns. She moved across to join him and squinted upward. For a moment, she was sure she could see rags hooked on the higher spines.
The air went very still, like a held breath, and the mist settled into a calm haze around their knees. Ophidia sniffed and noted for the first time the sharp, metallic tang of copper laced with the sweet stink of corruption.
‘Death happens here,’ she mu
rmured, more of an observation than a statement to anybody who was listening. ‘This is a killing ground. We should move on swiftly before–’
There was a soft thump behind her and she turned just in time to see Atracus fall backwards, a throwing dagger buried in his neck. She drew her own curved, wicked blade, poison glistening on its edge, and took a defensive stance.
‘Splintered Fang,’ she roared, her voice carried like an endless echo around the grove. ‘To me! To arms!’
The first of the Corvus Cabal emerged from the gloom, rising from the carpet of mist like an aquatic predator. He pulled the dagger from Atracus’ throat and with an avian screech of battle-cant, spun to attack another of the Splintered Fang.
He was only the first. More dark figures detached themselves from the shadows and rose from the fog, but Ophidia also saw movement among the highest boughs of the trees as angular silhouettes revealed themselves to be warriors rather than branches. Her heart raced as earlier tension gave way to murder-lust. Reaching up, she carefully uncoiled the familiar from around her neck.
‘Kill them, my love,’ she crooned and set the creature on the ground. It disappeared beneath the mist and with sinuous ease slithered towards Atracus’ killer. Concealed by the smothering fog, the serpent went unseen by the feathered warrior until it buried its fangs in his leg. He screamed and tore the snake free, ripping away a chunk of his own flesh as he did so. The familiar delivered a swift bite of retribution to the Cabalite’s hand and he flung the reptile aside. Ophidia glanced askance at her pet, seeking satisfaction that it was unharmed, and dived into the fray.
It was impossible in this horrific half-light to determine just how many of the Corvus Cabal they faced. They moved through the fog and shadows with such ease that Ophidia could not be certain. The one her familiar had bitten was already down, twitching and gurgling as the venom closed his throat and bloated his tongue. After a few moments he spasmed and arched his back with an audible crack, his body stiffening as the snake’s poison completed its work. She was confident that her pet would go about its work without her instruction, and concentrated instead on the slaughter of her enemies.
There would be no quarter given by either side and the sibilant prayers of the Splintered Fang mingled with the harsh, guttural croaks of the Corvus Cabal as battle was joined in earnest.
The uneven ground of the grove was soon strewn with bodies and soaked with the blood of both warbands, which the hard earth drank thirstily. The stench of death, offal and fresh meat filled the hollow, dizzying and heady. It was, Ophidia thought as she spun away from the lunge of a Cabal warrior, intoxicating.
She laughed and with a savage whoop of joy, closed in on her foe.
Lock was also laughing. His plan had worked and the Splintered Fang had been steered, through the Cabal’s murder and machinations, into the Gatherer’s Grove. For a time, he had feared they would be too stubborn, too determined, but when the warband had taken refuge in the fissures, he knew that they would find their way here.
His blade moved faster than the eye could follow and he glided between his enemies like a dancer. His balance had been honed by days upon the rooftops and he wore the shadows like a cloak, never staying in one place. Strike, fade and strike again. His blade went up automatically to lock with the paired daggers of a Fang who sought to slice him open, and he leaned forward until he was virtually nose-to-nose with his enemy.
‘Time to die.’ He spat into the woman’s face and shoved her knives aside. He drove a kick into her knee and his boot-claws mangled the joint into a bloody ruin. She cried out and fell, and his reverse swing lifted the top of her head off before she could make any effort at putting up a defence. She stared up at his face, her eyes slowly losing their focus and light as Lock’s spittle ran down her cheek. He looked back at her with affected disinterest before turning to the rest of the Cabal. He let out a piercing, avian shriek and its meaning was clear, even to their enemy.
Break them.
The Splintered Fang outnumbered Lock’s warband, but in the mist and shadows the Corvus Cabal could play to their strengths. They needed to divide their enemy, fragment them so that their numbers counted for nothing. Pick off the weak and the solitary, take them apart piece by piece. Strike, fade, then strike again.
The response he received infuriated and angered him until he could barely see straight.
Too many. Withdraw.
Fight.
Too many.
Fight.
We die.
Gatherer takes all.
The exchange took less than a heartbeat but by the time it was complete, Lock had appraised the situation. His small band had not been at their best since the skirmish with the furies and they had been outnumbered from the outset. Though the storm had taken its toll on the Splintered Fang and careful ambush had further thinned their ranks, they still had the advantage. But he would not easily get this opportunity again. He gestured for his survivors to press the attack.
The Splintered Fang could not know how few they were.
He withdrew to the edge of the hollow and the relative safety of the trees, circling and looking for an opening. One of his warriors had managed to pull a Fang away from the warband and Lock smiled grimly as a thrown blade from above plunged into his eye socket, killing him instantly.
It could still work.
Lock let out a throaty, avian call and sprang back into the melee. The cry was taken up by his survivors and it echoed weirdly around the hollow, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The illusion was maintained awhile longer. Strike, fade, then strike again. His blade sang out, glanced from a pauldron, sent a dagger spinning into the air and nicked the flesh of an unarmoured thigh. The wounded warrior cursed and lashed at him with a wickedly studded flail, but he was no longer there. Lock rolled into the mist and circled again.
Prey, he signed. All prey.
Take eyes.
Take teeth.
Take bones.
Gather it all.
The battle raged on, growing more desperate and disparate as it dissolved into individual melees. Lock lost track of his warriors as he danced and weaved his way through the storm of blades, everything dissolving into a whirl of shadows, blood and violence. Time stretched out and finally, as the clash of steel and iron slowly abated and the cries of pain, rage and fury died away, Lock paused. His blade was notched and his tunic torn and ragged, but miraculously he had slipped between the venomous knives of the Splintered Fang without harm. He raised his head. The feathers in his hair hung limply round his blood-spattered face and he pushed them out of his eyes.
Two.
That was all that remained. He was alone with the woman in the snakeskin cloak. The priestess who had willingly led the Splintered Fang into his snare. She looked every bit as battered as he felt. Her silvered armour was dulled and dented, and a long cut ran from her brow to her shoulder. He took some small satisfaction from the fact that he would be the one to end her.
She would make a fine trophy to mark this great hunt.
After the pale, insipid gloom that had prevailed, new light chose that moment to blossom in the sky, dispelling the shadows and driving back the coiling mists. It stained the tortured clouds like blood and molten gold, but it was enough to reveal the truth. Enough to uncover the bodies of the dead and dying, and enough to dispel the illusion of the Corvus Cabal.
Lock watched Ophidia look around the grove and smiled at the fury that ignited behind her dark eyes.
What had appeared to be warriors waiting in the shadows were nothing more than silhouettes of tattered rags, no doubt stripped from the Cabal’s own dead. The figures lurking in the trees, poised to strike, were revealed as the brutalised bodies of the Splintered Fang lost during the journey. She spied the headless body of one of her scouts, his empty hood stuffed with a filthy cloak. The bodies had been arrayed on the highest b
ranches to appear as ambushers, but in the cruel light they looked more like a presentation of trophies. The Corvus Cabal had made a mockery of them and Ophidia would see them answer for it.
She kept an eye on the smirking warrior who was circling her lazily and looked about for her familiar. It lay not too far away, its serpentine body wrapped around a Cabal fighter with its fangs buried in his throat, clearly its final act. The Cabalite’s sword had torn its belly open and split it in two right down its spine. Insult upon insult; the death of her pet stung her more harshly than the deaths of any of her warband.
‘Vengeance,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper, but still loud enough that it carried across the distance separating her from Lock. ‘Your agony will be exquisite and your death, when it finally claims you, will be a gift to the Coiling Ones.’
‘You have lost. Accept your own death.’ Lock stood firm, his sword held at his side, and he fixed her with a cool stare of open and eager challenge. He might have been tired and alone, but the battle had done nothing to diminish his arrogance. Ophidia let out a sibilant hiss before she lunged at Lock with blistering speed, her crescent knives flashing wickedly in the bizarre half-light that had broken out over the grove.
Lock danced back, his swords weaving in tight circles to keep his enemy at bay, and the grove once again filled with the sound of clashing steel. He parried high, turned, blocked low, lunged and parried with his off-hand sword. The tip of a dagger scythed through the air barely an inch from his face as the priestess unexpectedly stepped inside his guard, sidestepping his attack and forcing him momentarily off balance.
Before he could recover, the priestess ducked, bending almost double, and arched her leg behind her like a striking snake. Her heel struck Lock in the forehead with a sickening crack and he staggered. The impact popped a small blade from the toe of her boot and she used the momentum of the kick to launch herself into a spinning tumble.
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