by A. C. Cobble
But down below, they hadn’t taken time to disassemble the structures or douse them with oil. Sloppy work, he thought. Someone had been in a hurry and the results were evident.
The sporadically burning huts wasn’t what drew his gaze, though. It was the seal-skin clad, heavily bearded, Coldlands raiders. They were battling the fires, trying to extinguish the flames. Whoever had started the fire hadn’t finished the work and now their enemies looked like they may salvage what was left behind. That is, if McCready and his men hadn’t come across the place.
Since the initial assault on the shore where the raiders had gathered to repel the fleet from Enhover, they’d seen few of the warriors. It was assumed they had either fled, protecting the leaders, the elders, and the sorcerers of the society, or they were dead.
“Do you think they ambushed another squad?” wondered his second in command, Sanderford. “Caught them in the act, so to speak, and killed them? What do you think, McCready? Did another squad get sloppy and got themselves killed?”
“I think we should be quiet,” he hissed.
His gloved fingers drummed nervously on the rock he was crouched behind. Were they seeing the results of a trap sprang by the Coldlands raiders? Or maybe another squad had been lazy and simply left after a desultory attempt at arson. It wouldn’t be the first time on the campaign they’d found someone wasn’t thorough about doing the grim work.
He sighed. Either way, they had their orders. A dozen raiders below, and thirty men in his command lurking in the woods behind him. They had surprise on their side, and he could see no reason they should not engage.
His group was four squads thrown together, three times as many as regulations said he should account for, but it was war. A bloody, village to village campaign. In war, you had to adjust to the field in front of you, they’d told him. He supposed that was true, though when he was a boy, when he signed up to be a soldier, he’d never thought war would be like this. Occasionally, they had met Coldlands men with steel and fire. But after the initial battle, the organized groups were few and far between. The Coldlands’ spears and hatchets had posed little match for airships, cannon, and bombs. Without surprise and the advantage of attacking an under-defended city, the bulk of the Coldlands’ army was killed in a few short hours.
More often than the scattered raiders who escaped the initial conflict, McCready’s squad had found and butchered Coldlands women and children. He and his squad killed them in their villages and then destroyed the evidence. Not because they were worried about being caught, but because their orders had been to leave nothing, and no one, behind. They would destroy any vestige that these people ever existed within the frozen forest. Every structure, every man, every woman, and every child.
He did not relish killing the women and children. He hated it. Hated it with every breath in his body, with every beat of his heart. He hated what the Coldlands folk had done to Northundon, though, too. His family, his friends, his home. He hated that if he and the other soldiers were not thorough, it may happen again.
Patrick McCready turned to his second in command. “Send out the scouts, a pair each north and south. Tell them three hundred paces back from the edge of the village. When they meet on the other side, have them come back. If all is clear, we’ll split into two groups. We’ll surround the place and swoop down on my signal. Standard orders, kill everyone, burn what’s left.”
This second in command grunted and McCready gripped the man’s arm. “These are raiders, Sanderford. This is a good, clean fight. Tell the men that. Tell them we’re facing the spirit-forsaken bastards that razed Northundon and filled it with ghosts.”
His second nodded and crab walked back to where the men hid amongst the frost-covered trees.
McCready returned to his study of the village below. An hour, maybe, before the scouts circled the place and returned. An hour to watch the activity below, to see if it really was only warriors they’d face, or another village filled with women and children.
He raised his arm and then dropped it. In the woods around him, men began to move. Stalking silently at first, they would approach as close as they could. Twenty paces out, they would break into a charge. They had the raiders outnumbered, but Coldlands folk fought like banshees. They had to. Enhover’s men had come to seek retribution for Northundon and they wouldn’t rest until every son and daughter of the Coldlands was lying dead in the snow. McCready gripped his sword and crept closer, his men fanning into a wedge behind him.
A pair of them carried wood and brass blunderbusses, but the temperamental firearms were hell to fire in the cold. Like as not, they’d shatter and do more injury to the man holding it than the intended target, but McCready had decided it was worth the risk if it gained them an extra step or two of surprise. Nothing shocked a man into inaction like the explosions of those things on a cold, black night. He murmured a silent hope for the fools who’d volunteered to operate the firearms, then he chopped his hand over his head.
The blunderbusses discharged, the crack of the exploding gunpowder shattering the night air. McCready couldn’t see if they’d hit anything, but a dozen heads snapped to look at him and his men bursting out of the snowy woods.
Looked at them long enough that they didn’t see the wave coming behind. Didn’t notice they’d been surrounded until the first length of winter-cold steel slashed into an unsuspecting raider’s back. The man shrieked a long, pitiful wail on his way to meet his ancestors.
Then, McCready was amongst them, and the sergeant didn’t have time to consider their mission, he could only fight for his survival. Coldlands raiders, even surprised and outnumbered, fought like the angry bears that populated their forests.
One man, a thick red beard sprouting around his face, the rest of him covered in seal skins, charged directly at McCready. The man’s mouth opened and he bellowed an unintelligible war cry. The warrior pulled two axes from his belt as he ran. His eyes blazed with manic fever.
A berserker. Hells.
The man would have no concern for his safety, no instinct to protect himself. He’d keep coming until he died. And against two axes, McCready couldn’t parry blows from both.
In the six running steps he had to decide, he realized there was only one choice. He had to act fast, he had to meet rage with rage. McCready swung, trusting the length of his sword against the man’s axes, trusting the berserker would have no thought of defense. A surefire way to lose against such a mindless opponent was to cower before them. The way to win, the only way, was to attack first. Fighting a berserker, you had to kill them before they could kill you. There was no other choice.
The man’s red beard framed a wide-open mouth, white teeth, and a pink tongue. Not once did the berserker’s gaze fall to the flashing silver steel that skewered his body. He kept coming, his body twitching when the blade pierced him, but his eyes never lost their bright madness.
McCready kept going as well, throwing his body against the larger man, shoving his blade through the berserker’s body and then crashing against him. It felt like he was running into a wall. The man was as tough as a gnarled oak, raised in the Coldlands, bred to survive the harshest of treatment.
McCready grappled with the berserker, letting go of the hilt of his sword as he couldn’t free it, and slapping his arms up to try and deflect the pair of descending axes.
He caught one of the man’s forearms, slowing it, but the other came down and the axe head clipped the back of McCready’s arm. Sharp pain lanced into him as the cold steel cut through the layers of his woolen coat and tore into his flesh.
He lurched to the side, kicking with a booted foot, trying to slow the man down. His hand flailed and then grasped his sword. He tore it free and scampered away.
The berserker kept coming, giving no thought to his wound. His mind had lost all sense of rational thought, but his body was losing blood, fast.
McCready had stabbed straight through the poor bastard and the man could only chase him a dozen steps before he
faltered and coughed, blood clinging to the vapor in the night air as it left his lungs.
Stepping back, McCready watched and waited, his bloody sword gripped in his hands.
The berserker stumbled after him, but it was clear he was expended. The wound was fatal. Another half dozen steps and the man from the Coldlands fell to his knees. He dropped his axes and gripped his bleeding torso. He glared at McCready, defenseless.
“You shouldn’t have come to Northundon,” snarled McCready. He raised his sword and crashed it down on the top of the man’s skull. A foolish blow, he would have told the green recruits in his squad, but he didn’t care. To the corpse at his feet, he declared, “I hope you enjoy hell.”
The dying fires lit the cold northern village and the carpet of bodies scattered amongst the buildings. Raiders, this time, and not women and children. A dozen of them, dead, but they hadn’t gone down easy. Even surprised, they’d taken half a dozen of McCready’s men with them to the underworld. Another half dozen had suffered wounds severe enough they might not survive the next few days.
Tugging on the bandage that had been wrapped tightly around his arm, McCready tried not to think about how close he’d come to being one of those men who wasn’t going to make it.
He eyed the interior of the hut they’d cleared out for triage. Small, but clean and warm once they’d started a fire. He decided he would give the men another two or three hours and then they’d have to move. The unassuming hut, along with the bodies and every other item they found in the village, would have to be burned. Those were the orders — burn it all.
“Pat,” called Sanderford from the doorway of the hut.
He turned, looking over the prone forms of his wounded men and the bent backs of those who tended to them.
“You need to see this,” said the soldier.
Sanderford, a gruff veteran, a man who’d seen action in the constant skirmishes against Finavia, repurposed to unleash those years of frustration on the Coldlands. The man could have been a sergeant himself, if he’d wanted the responsibility. In Sanderford’s eyes, McCready saw a look that made his blood run cold. This was a man who’d killed children. This was a man who was so numb to the world and its atrocities that he no longer felt any of it. At least, he usually didn’t.
“What is it, Sanderford?”
“Come see, sir.”
Following the man into the bitter cold night, McCready smiled grimly when he saw his men hard at work. Despite the brutality of the quick fight, they were relentlessly disassembling the structures in the village. They would tend to their wounds later, both the physical and emotional ones. For now, they just wanted to be done with it and get out of the cold.
“Here, sir,” remarked Sanderford, gesturing toward the central hut in the village. The chief’s domicile, McCready thought it might be. The exterior was blackened from fruitless attempts to fire the thing. The earth before the door was stained with blood. Several people had fallen trying to protect it, guessed McCready. Where those bodies were now was a mystery. Perhaps they’d only been injured and fled? Fled who, or what, he didn’t know.
When he entered the hut, though, he reassessed.
The room was large, the walls arching to form the ceiling overhead. Frowning as he glanced over the open space, he guessed the hut was almost exactly thirty paces across. Similar to what he’d found before in some of the villages. Thirty paces across, the floor flat earth, cleaned and smoothed. The walls and ceiling were fashioned into one continuous piece. There was no other support within the structure for the roof. The level of engineering required to fashion the place showed skill that wasn’t exhibited in other buildings within the Coldlands’ villages. What knowledge of geometry and architecture the savages had, they’d saved for these large huts.
Against one wall of the room was the slumped body of an old woman. He walked to her and saw the crone had seen more winters than he cared to guess at. She must have been dead several days, but her condition hadn’t been much better before. Killed when the rest of the village fled, he wondered? They’d seen it before, with some of the old folk. The villagers knew their elders would only slow their flight. They killed them quickly before fleeing, rather than letting the old ones die slowly out in the snow.
Or perhaps she was something else?
He looked over the rest of the room. Scattered around the floor were nine wooden bowls. Inside of them he saw what had unsettled his man Sanderford. Each bowl contained a pair of hands, a pair of feet, and what he guessed upon closer inspection was a tongue.
There was no blood on the floor of the building, just what he’d seen outside the doorway. Had the limbs been removed out there, and if so, where were the bodies? He frowned, stooping to look closer at the floor. There was blood there, he realized. A straight line, thinner than the width of his finger. It must have been carefully dribbled from a spouted container, he thought. He followed the line between two bowls, then saw that where it wasn’t scuffed by boots, the thin line of blood formed a pattern. Careless footsteps had marred the design, both his men and whoever had been in the building before, but there was enough remaining he could guess what he was seeing.
“A valknut,” he murmured.
“A valknut?” questioned Sanderford.
“Three interlocking triangles,” explained McCready. “It is a holy symbol for these people. Like the circle for the Church.”
“What does it mean?”
McCready shrugged. “Fetch me my pack, will you? I want to sketch this. And Sanderford, no one else enters this building.”
“I don’t understand, sir. What is this?”
“Sanderford, this is what we’re meant to destroy,” stated McCready, standing straight and letting his gaze rove around the room. “We’re not ransacking the Coldlands solely out of revenge. We’re doing it to wipe the scourge of their sorcery from the face of this earth. You saw the shades in Northundon just as clearly as I did, man. Where do you think they came from?”
Sanderford’s mouth fell open and he staggered back. “Sorcery, in here, sir? The body parts, are they…”
“I don’t know, and that’s the way we’re meant to keep it. We’re to make sure no one knows, that no one knows ever again. Get my pack, Sanderford,” instructed McCready. “Leave it in the doorway. Don’t come back in here. No one else is to even approach this place until I’ve finished.”
The enlisted man scampered out into the cold night and McCready resumed his study of the room. A valknut, he was sure, had been traced on the floor in blood. At the nine points of the three triangles a bowl was set with the hands, feet, and tongues inside. He had no idea what it meant, but it didn’t take a wise man to understand it was bad. Three triangles, three points each, three items in each bowl. Interlocking trinities, auspicious numbers to the Coldlands folk. He shuddered. He truly didn’t want to know what it meant.
He leaned over one of the bowls and fought to swallow the bile threatening to burst from his throat. The dismembered limbs, the tongues, were recent. Maybe two days ago they’d been piled into the bowls. It was hard to tell because the cold would preserve the flesh, but two days made sense. It was two nights ago his men had fallen on a village just five leagues west. His squad and two others had butchered a hundred men, women, and children there. The flames from the village had risen twenty yards into the sky. The glow may have been visible from leagues away.
Had some ritual been performed in this village in response?
The cold block of fear in his gut was only assuaged by the simple fact that they had not encountered a shade when they’d rushed into the village and fought the raiders. There were no shadows stalking the huts, there was no unexplained supernatural attack. Whatever spirits that had been called in the room had not been called to torment McCready’s men.
It was cold comfort.
At the far side of the hut, directly opposite of the entrance, he saw a block of wood. It was cut, planed, and polished with a care that he hadn’t seen elsewhere. Wincing
, he overcame his hesitation and approached. An altar, if he had to guess. Perhaps where they conducted whatever occult rituals took place within the hut?
Except, the top was bare.
Behind it, he found a row of cabinets and a short table set with open boxes, discarded linens, and other debris. He frowned. He drew his belt knife, and using the tip, he began rifling through the pile.
Underneath of one wadded bit of rag he found a bone stylus and a sealed jar. Ink, he guessed without opening it. A stylus and ink, and none of the preserved hide the Coldlands folk used to write on.
Some of the linen was stained with blood, and one of the boxes was solid wood, hollowed out to hold one specific item. A dagger, he wondered? Maybe one they used in their dark rituals, how they severed the body parts in the bowls? Though, the box was empty, and there was no dagger anywhere he could see. He looked up on the wall and saw pegs that had been hammered into the wood and mud surface. Pegs to hang some decoration or totem, but nothing was hanging there.
McCready turned and surveyed the hut and the body of the old woman lying against one wall. With little doubt, it was a sorcerous chamber. The mysterious bowls and pattern on the floor made that clear enough. But the only occupant was dead. All of the implements and artifacts had been removed. He wondered — removed by whom?
He thought back to the agitation they’d witnessed when they first saw the Coldlands raiders clustered together in the village. Those men had been upset. They’d been trying to put out the fires.
McCready’s fist smacked painfully into the wooden wall.
Those raiders had not set the fires, they hadn’t attempted to destroy the items stored in this hut, and they certainly had not fled with them while McCready and his men observed. If anything, he suspected they’d been sent to recover what was held in this village. McCready could feel the truth of it. The raiders had been sent to recover artifacts from the village before Enhover’s soldiers arrived. Except, someone had gotten there first, and there were only two forces moving through the icy woods.