by C. L. Werner
From the quays, a great stretch of crumbling warehouses and workshops sprawled, reaching back towards the city walls before completely slipping back into the mire that had devoured the shantytown. Here, a number of crude grauben hauses had been built, a structure employed by only the most backward and poverty stricken within the Empire. Little more than tents crafted from swamp reeds and driftwood, the tiny plumes of smoke rising from the structures suggested that they were not without their denizens, lairing within the mud like river vermin.
The two bounty hunters stared down on the miserable city from a small hillock. They were on foot now, their horses and mule left with a farmer some distance from the city, one whom the promise of gold and the threat of retribution had made certain to take good care of the animals. Ulgrin had grumbled about the tactic, but Brunner had informed his companion that it was unwise to bring the animals too near the blighted city. In a place as poor and desperate as Mousillon, horseflesh was as prized as Mootland steak.
‘Filthy looking place,’ Ulgrin commented, rolling his shoulders to ease the weight of his axe. ‘I’ve burned down goblin villages that were more pleasant to look upon.’ Brunner turned and stared down at the dwarf.
‘This place is more dangerous than any goblin hole,’ he told Ulgrin. ‘Keep your eyes and ears open. The people who live here are desperate, miserable and without conscience. They’d kill a stranger simply to boil the leather in his shoes.’ Brunner caressed the grip of his pistol. ‘Make no mistake, friend Baleaxe, you’re going to earn your thousand gold.’
‘You speak with the voice of experience,’ the dwarf observed, a tone of suspicion in his voice.
‘I do,’ Brunner returned, marching down toward the riverbank. ‘I have been here once before, though it was a long time ago.’
Ulgrin hurried after his companion, knowing that he would get no more from the close-mouthed killer. The dwarf was somewhat cheered by the notion that Brunner had risked the dread city once before and emerged alive. Then the relief drained from his heart as the dwarf wondered whether the bounty hunter had brought someone with him on that occasion as well, and whether his companion on that venture had likewise escaped the city.
A dirty, foul-visaged fisherman had ferried the pair of hunters across the wide expanse of the Grismerie, poling his flat-bottom skiff across mudflats where barely a foot of water covered the filth. For his services, the gap-toothed old wretch had been paid a pair of brass coins by the stern-faced Brunner, a pitiable sum back in the Empire, but something approaching a fortune for the dejected humans who cringed in the shadow of the cursed city. The fisherman had instantly thrust the coins into his mangy cloak, then shook his head as his passengers disembarked, hopping from the skiff to the rotten remains of a pier that lay close by. In his many years wrenching a living from the filthy waters of the bog, the old man had escorted only a few travellers into the city. He’d yet to see any of them leave. But, with the pragmatic survivor’s instinct that had kept the fisherman alive in so blighted an environment, he decided that the wanderings of fools were no concern of his. Without a backward glance, he poled his skiff back into the morass and toward the deeper, cleaner waters of the Grismerie’s far bank.
Brunner led the way, carefully negotiating the treacherous ruin of the old pier. Beneath the bounty hunter’s tread, the rotted boards groaned and bent, reaching down toward the bottomless muck beneath them. Once, pressing his weight upon a seemingly sound plank, the bounty hunter had been startled by a sharp crack. Instinct caused him to press backward, restoring his weight to his opposite foot. The board upon which he had pressed snapped as neatly as a dry twig, the jagged ends slipping down into the grey mud. Within a few seconds, the broken plank sank completely into the morass and was lost to sight.
Behind him, Ulgrin Baleaxe whistled appreciatively. ‘Wheew, now that’s some nasty stuff!’ the dwarf exclaimed. ‘Even the tar pits below Karak Kadrin don’t work that fast.’ Ulgrin leaned forward, spitting into the greedy slime.
‘Maybe you’d prefer to go first,’ Brunner commented, extending his hand to indicate the dozens of yards of treacherous walkway yet to be traversed. ‘I’ve always heard that dwarfs have a keen sense about unsafe paths.’
Ulgrin stepped back, setting the head of his axe against the pier, crossing his arms and resting them on the weapon’s butt. ‘That’s true enough down in a decent mine or tunnel. We can feel the changes in the rock and the air that let us know when somethings wrong. But with this.’ Ulgrin gestured with his bearded chin to indicate the bog all around them. ‘This isn’t so much earth as water masquerading as ground. Only men would be foolish enough to build in such a place, so I’ll be quite content to let a man risk his fool-all neck figuring out what can be walked on and what can’t.’
Brunner turned away, stretching his leg to test the plank to the other side of the recently created gap. Finding it firm, he stepped across and proceeded to progress along the dilapidated pier. ‘At some point Ulgrin, you do intend on earning your half of the bounty, or would that be an unwise assumption?’ the bounty hunter called back. Ulgrin bristled under the comment, slinging his great axe back over his shoulder and following after Brunner with awkward hops and leaps.
‘No dwarf ever accepted charity from anyone!’ Ulgrin snapped, fighting to maintain his balance as he jumped across another gap left by a rotten board. The dwarf stared at the hungry mud below him for a tense moment before regaining his footing. ‘And no dwarf ever took payment unless he earned it fairly.’ Ulgrin added, his voice somewhat uneven as he considered how quickly the plank had been devoured.
‘Don’t concern yourself on that count,’ Brunner stated. ‘Unless Mousillon has changed a great deal since I was last here, these mud flats are the least of what this city will throw at us.’ The bounty hunter pressed on, a series of jumps placing him several yards ahead of his diminutive companion.
‘Now there’s a pleasant thought.’ Ulgrin grumbled to himself. He stared back at the grey mire. ‘If that bastard had mentioned this gobbling muck, I’d have told him to go hang himself!’
A quarter of an hour later, the end of the pier was within a dozen feet. Several times the bounty hunters had suffered a close call, treacherous planks shifting or breaking beneath their weight. Twice, Brunner had had to lift Ulgrin from the filth, the dwarfs desperate cries alerting the bounty hunter to his companion’s distress. Only the timely speed with which Ulgrin had planted the head of his great axe into a support had prevented the dwarf from slipping entirely beneath the muck. It was with visible relief that Ulgrin beheld the relatively solid ground that rose beyond the end of the pier.
‘Tell me that we have to cross that filth on the way back, and I’ll cut your throat here and now.’ Ulgrin snarled, wringing yet another clump of mud from his beard. ‘If I never see this devils porridge again, that will be soon enough!’
Brunner ignored Ulgrin’s mutterings, his icy eyes instead watching the crumbling warehouses and dilapidated shops that crouched and slumped near what had been Mousillon’s waterfront. The killer smiled grimly as he spied a shadow move within the darkness of one of the doorways. ‘In a few minutes, you may be only too happy to see this sludge again. At least with it, you know where the danger lies.’
Ulgrin scratched at his unkempt beard, ignoring the other bounty hunter’s cheerless comment. As he pawed at the matted, muddy mess, his eyes fixed upon a small shape scrabbling across the mud flats. He pointed a stubby hand at the tiny apparition.
‘Looks like we should have engaged that cat as a guide,’ the dwarf laughed. ‘He seems to know the safe places.’
‘He’s not heavy enough to sink,’ Brunner replied, only shifting his gaze for a second to observe the small animal. ‘If he stops for a second, the mud will slurp him down just as hungrily as it tried to get you.’ The bounty hunter kept his voice even, his stare steady and regular. The last thing he needed was to let the three or four shapes he’d seen moving inside the wasted innards of a wine shop know the
y’d been seen. ‘Besides, he’s got problems enough of his own.’
Even as Brunner spoke, the dwarf watched in astonishment as a dark, loathsome creature wriggled its way across the muck. It was not entirely unlike the cave eels he’d seen beneath the Worlds Edge Mountains, but it was much larger and its scales much darker, its back sporting a fringe of spike-like spines. The ugly thing moved with a strange sideways undulation that kept only the smallest portion of its body in contact with the mud, lending it a speed that the bedraggled cat could not hope to match. The dark furred feline howled in fright as the grotesque snake-fish reached it, the creature’s long jaws snapping close about the animal’s scrawny neck.
‘Hashut’s bald beard!’ the dwarf swore. ‘What madness is this, where fish hunt cats?’
‘Better have that axe of yours ready,’ Brunner said, his eyes still studying the rotting structures of the waterfront. ‘We could be next on the menu.’
Ulgrin cast a curious eye on the bounty hunter, but did as he had been told, releasing the snaps that held his throwing axes in their holsters, firming his grip on his trusty great axe.
‘How many?’ the dwarf whispered.
‘We won’t know that until they attack,’ Brunner replied, taking the first step from the pier. His boot squelched into the muddy ground, but the earth was firm enough beneath his tread to walk upon. ‘Might be a dozen, might be a hundred.’
‘Damnit, Brunner!’ the dwarf hissed. ‘You’ve a bad idea of fair odds! I’ve met slayers who wouldn’t look for fights that uneven!’
Brunner lifted his repeating crossbow from its sheath across his back, ensuring that the weapon was loaded and ready. The smile on the bounty hunter’s face seemed only half-joking when he addressed Ulgrin’s concerns. ‘If things get too bad, we can always run. Then they might only get the slowest one.’
For long, tense minutes, the two warriors negotiated the winding, devastated streets of the waterfront. Everywhere the crumbling, decaying wretchedness closed in upon them, filling their lungs with the rank stench of rotten fish and human sewage. Vacant-eyed warehouses considered them like hungry giants, the broken boards of their walls grinning at them like jagged teeth. Workshops and what might once have been the homes of merchants and ship captains sagged and slouched at awkward, impossible angles, unimagined even by the eccentric architects of Miragliano’s famed leaning towers. A filthy thing Ulgrin took to be a scrawny dog scurried down an alleyway, the bony remnants of a fish gripped in its mouth, but when it turned back, the dwarf shuddered to see a child’s face, though he would still swear the limbs the creature loped away upon were not those of a man.
Furtive sounds, like the scrabbling claws of rats, followed the two hunters, dogging their steps like an audible shadow. Soon, Brunner and his dwarf comrade were catching glimpses of things regarding them from the narrow necks of alleys and the dark recesses of rotted doorways. They wore the most wretched of rags, mismatched scraps of cloth, fur and leather wrapped about scrawny limbs and twisted backs. Many faces were hidden beneath sackcloth hoods and thick scarves, others displayed their pock-marked, rash-ridden faces openly. The two bounty killers watched the ruins pressing in on them, having no idea how many miserable scavengers lay hidden within.
Brunner paused as they neared what had once been a cobbled market square. The stones were obscured now by the thick layer of semi-dried mud that coated them, the fountain at its centre long ago broken apart by the probing roots of weeds. A scraggly-looking man stood near the fountain, a long bill-hook clutched in his mitten-covered hands. The wretch turned his thin, boil-ridden face toward the two strangers. The eyes were as pale as boiled eggs, yet there was a cold, loathsome vision within them. The two bounty hunters simultaneously gestured at the dreg with their weapons, Brunner aiming his crossbow for the greasy forehead, Ulgrin hefting his massive great axe in a motion that promised a swift and messy demise.
The old wretch seemed unconcerned by the display, standing his ground with a deliberate calmness. As the two killers strode closer, they could smell the rotting odour crawling from the man’s diseased skin, see the watery filth oozing from his sores. The apparition did not seem to mind their scrutiny, favouring the two with a gap-toothed idiot’s grin. Brunner noted that the man’s eyes were focused intently upon himself, their bleary gaze matching his own icy stare. Then, for the briefest of instants, the eyes flickered, looking away from the bounty hunter, gazing instead on the ramshackle guildhall that fronted upon the square.
In an instant, Brunner spun, firing his crossbow as the first of the lurking ambushers leapt from the building. The target of his first bolt was garbed from head to toe in slimy rags and as the bolt smashed into its chest, the cry that sounded from the creature was more like the chirp of a frog than the scream of a man. A second bolt ripped through the throat of the wretch immediately behind the slimy frog-man, pitching him to the ground to gargle upon his own fluids.
Beside the bounty hunter, Ulgrin leapt into action, charging into the sudden surge of ragged attackers that swarmed up the narrow street they had so recently travelled. A ropy limb holding a fishbone knife flew off into the mob, even as its former owner howled in agony. The frenzied mob pressed forward, heedless of the dwarf’s brutal axe, stabbing at him with crude spears and such base weapons as bits of jagged glass and sharpened stone. Ulgrin sent a leprous woman’s head flying from its shoulders, only to have a spear-wielding hunchback push the still trembling body aside to stab at his prey. A twisted man with eyes on the sides of his head followed close on the hunchback, slashing at Ulgrin with a morning star fashioned from a belaying pin and a number of nails.
Brunner sent the remaining bolts from his weapon into the dregs swarming from the guildhall, dropping one with every shot. With the weapon spent, and no time to reload, he let it fall to the ground and drew his pistol from its holster, calmly exploding the head of a screaming wretch who hoped to cave in the bounty hunter’s skull with a stone hammer. With even this weapon expended, Brunner pulled Drakesmalice from its sheath, the sword slashing outward the instant it was drawn, spilling the guts of an axe-armed attacker.
A snarl that might have come from some feral beast, were it not for the few syllables of the Bretonnian tongue mixed into it, caused the bounty killer to twist his head around. The wretch that had awaited the two men in the square was now entering the fray, spinning the bill-hook with an elaborate, yet murderous, skill. Brunner watched the madman advance with misgiving. The bill-hook was effectively a polearm, giving the villain a much longer reach than the bounty hunter’s sword. And with a pack of howling peasants closing upon him, Brunner did not have the time to spend warding off the wretch’s attacks until he could move in for the kill. Snarling an oath of his own, the bounty killer palmed the small pouch of salt hidden within his glove. Puncturing the fragile bag, Brunner cast the grainy mineral into the face of his approaching enemy.
Brunner’s enemy gave voice to an undulating cry of such agony and mortal terror that even the two bounty hunters were momentarily stunned. The attacking mob fell away, creeping back from the ghastly tableau. As the wretch’s bloodied hands fell away from his face, Brunner could see the steaming muck that dribbled from his now empty eye sockets. Whatever mutating taint had afflicted the dreg’s eyes, it had reacted most spectacularly to the touch of clean salt. The screaming man crumpled to his knees, grinding his face into the muck in a vain, desperate effort to soothe his horrible injury.
The two bounty hunters used the momentary respite to retreat deeper into the square. Standing back to back, the two killers watched as their malformed attackers began to regroup. The mob spread out into the square, chittering and cackling with voices both mad and inhuman.
‘I thought you said you were going to make a break for it?’ Ulgrin mumbled to the other bounty hunter as the disfigured mob began to encircle them.
‘I reasoned that a braggart like yourself wouldn’t keep them occupied long enough to do me any good,’ Brunner responded.
&nb
sp; A huge, lanky brute with something crawling inside his mouth that was too thick to be a tongue was eyeing the bounty killer, a curved, scimitar-like blade fashioned from a piece of anchor gripped in his meaty paws. The dreg opened his mouth to shout some battle cry, or else to simply howl in animalistic fury, when a black-feathered arrow suddenly sprouted from his forehead. The big brute fell instantly crushing a smaller wretch who failed to leap away from the toppling corpse.
The mob set up a loud cry of terror and fear, racing back into rotted buildings and down narrow alleys, many of them dropping their makeshift weapons in their disorderly rout. Ulgrin set up a loud laugh, chiding the retreating murderers for their cowardice. Brunner paid more attention to the small company of armed men who had appeared on the other side of the square.
There were seven in all. Six of the men were on foot, garbed in suits of rusted chainmail over which they wore tattered black and gold mantles. Half of the force bore Bretonnian longbows, quivers of black-fletched arrows hanging from their belts, the other three carried antique halberds that looked to have seen a few too many wars in their centuries of use. The seventh man was mounted, his steed a midnight black that reminded Brunner of his own warhorse, Fiend. The plate armour that clothed the mounted knight was likewise black, and the tabard and caparison of man and horse, though in better repair than the liveries of the men-at-arms, was black and gold.