Runefang

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  “Another of my men expired, your lordship,” Ottmar reported. The sergeant’s leg was stiff, wrapped tight in leather thongs to keep the bones straight. A goblin axe had worked terrible mischief on him, but somehow the old soldier had pulled through.

  “That brings your command down to fourteen,” Ernst said. They’d left a lot of good soldiers behind in the village and still their strength was being leeched away.

  “Thirteen,” Ottmar corrected him. “I don’t think Felix will last the night, not with a goblin arrow skewering his lung.”

  Ernst nodded. It was a terrible thing, to linger on in such a condition, dying from your wounds, but still desperately, hopelessly clinging to life. “Thirteen then, plus Marshal Eugen’s three knights, the cook and his ogre, Skanir and ourselves.”

  “My knights may not be of much use,” Eugen said. “The other ox from the supply wagon died. Our destriers are the only animals in camp strong enough to pull it. Either we leave the wagon and most of the supplies behind, or we put two more of my men out of the saddle.”

  The baron bit back a curse. He’d been counting on using the wagon to move the worst of the wounded. The thought made the decision for him. “Then we’ll have to use the destriers. It is still a long way to the river and we can’t leave the wagon behind. Your men will have to take some of the coursers.”

  “What about your champion, that man Kessler?” Ekdahl did not turn as he asked the question, keeping his face turned towards the darkness.

  “The templar was killed in the battle,” Ernst answered. “Kessler is taking his place as bodyguard to the crone.”

  Ottmar grunted, spitting into the blazing fire. “I don’t envy him the job,” the sergeant said. “I’d rather be back with the goblins than shadowing that witch.”

  Ernst laughed. “Actually, he suggested it.”

  Kessler stepped away from the black shroud of the tent as he finished assembling it, grunting as he inspected his handiwork. He reached out his hand and pulled back a fold of the heavy cloth, holding it wide to allow entry to the enclosure within.

  A faint, appreciative smile briefly suggested itself on Carlinda’s pale face, and then the augur carefully removed the blankets from the back of her horse. Kessler could see the animal shudder at her touch. Even her horse was instinctively repulsed by her presence, the priests of Morr having only taught it to repress its instincts, not deny them. He wondered at that, and questioned again why he had felt compelled to linger around that same presence. He was not a deep man, given to profound thoughts and imaginative insights, yet he felt he knew why just the same. It chilled him, chilled him in a way that Carlinda’s eerie presence failed to.

  The woman paused before entering the tent, bowing before Kessler. “Thank you,” she said, her voice as soft as a winter whisper.

  “It is only right that I show you courtesy,” Kessler replied, feeling colour pulsing into his scarred features, “after all you have done for me.” He nodded his head towards the centre of the camp where the moans of the wounded rose into the darkening night. “I should be over there with them after tangling with that troll,” he said. “Instead, here I stand, fit and firm as the day I first took up the sword.”

  Carlinda’s sombre gaze looked into his, catching his eyes and holding them with their compelling intensity. “The priests of Morr have taught me many of their secrets. There are rites, powers that can be invoked to ease the suffering of those soon to pass through the Gates of Morr. Some of those powers are of benefit to the living as well as the dying.”

  The swordsman sighed and looked away. He didn’t like her talk of spells and magic, calling upon the powers of the gods. It was too much like witchcraft for him. Perhaps a more cultured mind, a more learned mind, could understand the difference, but to him all the supernatural arts were nothing more than sorcery, the stuff of warlocks and wizards. For all that he had benefited from it, it still made him uneasy, evoking a superstitious dread almost as primitive as the horse’s instincts. He did not like to think of the magic that had allowed him to recover from his wounds. Even more, he did not like to think of Carlinda as a witch.

  “You had best retire,” Kessler said, hastily turning away from the talk of magic and gods. “The baron will want to make an early start tomorrow, put some distance between us and the goblins.”

  Carlinda continued to linger. “What about you?” she asked. “You’ll have even more need of rest than I. It takes more strength to march than it does to ride.”

  Kessler’s hand closed around her arm, gently guiding her into the tent. Even through the heavy, coarse cloth of her vestment, he could feel the coolness of her skin. “I’m taking the templar’s place,” he told here. “I’ll stay out here and make sure you are not disturbed.”

  “No one in this camp would speak to me, much less disturb me,” Carlinda said, her voice coming to him from inside the tent. He could hear her rummaging about in the darkness, making her bed. There was no scorn or self-pity in her voice, simply a statement of fact. She had lived too long as an exile to be hurt by the ostracism of her fellow man. “Except for you,” she added.

  Kessler stiffened, shifting uncomfortably from one leg to the other. “Someone has to look after you with the templar gone,” he said, “and I feel I owe it to you.”

  “There’s something more than that,” Carlinda persisted. “You don’t look at me the way the others do. You look at me almost… almost as if…” She broke off, catching the tremble in her words. “Do you find me repulsive, Max Kessler?”

  “You are a handsome woman,” Kessler replied awkwardly.

  “Something need not be ugly to be repulsive,” she said.

  The words cut into Kessler like a knife. He held a hand up to his mangled face, the face no woman could look at without horror. Maybe you didn’t need to be ugly, but it certainly helped.

  “They say you are touched by Morr,” Kessler said, his pain feeding cruelty into his words, “that you are a thing of Death, that no living creature could bear to touch you or even look at you. Maybe they’re right. Maybe that’s why I don’t look away. I’ve faced death so many times in the arena that I no longer recognise its horrors. I’ve killed ten men for every year I’ve drawn breath into this twisted carcass of mine. I guess me and Death are old friends by now.”

  Silence stretched across the minutes and Kessler began to repent the callousness of his words. He was unused to speaking to a woman, any woman. He didn’t have the tongue for subtle words and flattering praise, for empty reassurance and impossible hope. It had been a long time since he’d had any hope to call his own. That had been cut away along with his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last, trying to make the apology less gruff than it sounded. “Forget the bitterness of an old bastard who’s seen too many winters and not enough springs.”

  Carlinda’s face appeared as she pulled back the tent flap, a white moon against the darkness of the cloth. Her features were drawn, haunted, her eyes pained. She stared into Kessler’s face and he could see the hurt in her eyes deepen. “You wish they had killed you?” The question struck him like a physical blow, so abrupt did it come, so keenly did it cut.

  When he answered, it was with a slow, measured pace. “They did,” Kessler said. “I was only seventeen. My father was a militiaman in Rabwald, and wanted me to follow in his step, but I wanted better, needed better. So I took up with a merchant caravan as a guard. The pay for that one trip was more than my father would see in a year. Of course I never saw any of it. Halfway to Nuln we were attacked by goblins. The lucky ones were killed. The rest of us they captured and dragged back to their caves. There’s only one thing in the world a goblin enjoys and that’s causing pain to something else. They enjoyed me for a long time.” He felt his ruined face again, imagining the hot knives grating against the bones of his skull and jaw. “Somehow, I survived and crawled back to civilisation. The chirurgeons did what they could, but some things just can’t be fixed.”

  “But you
were alive,” Carlinda pointed out.

  “What came after wasn’t living,” Kessler scoffed. “I couldn’t show this,” he shook his hand before his mangled face, “without children running away screaming. Men shunned my company and women sickened at the sight of me. The only one who would have anything to do with me was the baron. Maybe it was pity, but just the same the baron gave me something to latch onto, something to fill that big empty hole the goblins left inside me when they cut away my face.”

  “By killing.” There was no recrimination in her voice as she said it.

  Kessler laughed, but the sound was hollow even to him. “A lot of men would still be alive if the gods had let the goblins finish the job.” He shook his head, playing absently with the black tassels dangling from his sword. “It’s not a substitute for living, for having a real life, but it’s something to find pride in: Max Kessler, the Baron’s Champion.”

  Carlinda reached a hand through the black mouth of the tent, touching Kessler’s shoulder. There was no mistaking the unearthly cold behind her touch, but he did not pull away. “So much hurt, so much loneliness,” she said. Kessler felt her fingers kneading his flesh, sending little icy tingles flashing through his body. “We could almost be the same.”

  His first instinct was to laugh at the idea that the powerful, deadly swordsman was the same as the small, hermit witch, but as he saw the earnestness in her face, Kessler found it impossible to find any amusement in her words. He closed his hand around hers, feeling the warmth drain from his fingers as they clasped.

  “You don’t have to stay outside,” Carlinda told him. He started to pull his hand away. Her grip tightened, became desperate. “Please,” and Kessler felt himself shudder at the wretched, grovelling that was woven into the plea. It had been a long time since he’d felt pity for anything, man or beast.

  He allowed himself to be drawn into the darkness of the tent. What came was too desperate, too needy to be called love. They were two lost, forsaken creatures trying to forget their aloneness in each other’s arms; two broken, ruined souls trying to make themselves whole. Instead of filling the emptiness, their pathetic embrace only reminded them of what they had lost, what they could never have again. Yet even that miserable echo of life was more than they had before.

  It was long into the night before silence returned to the Crone of Morr’s black tent.

  “Grimnir’s beard! That smells good!” Skanir said, extricating himself from the nest of blankets that covered him. As soon as he did, dull pain throbbed in his head. He raised a calloused hand to gingerly examine the huge knot he felt rising from his scalp. A goblin had cracked his skull with its sword, nearly penetrating the steel helmet the dwarf had been wearing. Even so, the blow had darkened his vision, making his head swim with a befuddled confusion. In such a state, he couldn’t have warded off a determined cave rat much less a pack of howling goblins. Before they could overwhelm him, however, Eugen and his knights had come to his rescue, driving the determined greenskins from their crippled enemy. Eventually the remorseless steel and thick armour of the knights overcame the ancient hate of the goblins and they had broken before the assault. Skanir had tried to recover his hammer and pursue the cowardly grobi, but the effort was beyond even his dwarfish constitution and he had succumbed, wilting to the bloodied floor of the plaza like a weary flower.

  The next thing that had intruded upon his senses was the thick, meaty smell that wafted across him. At first he was not sure if it was a real odour or simply a phantasm of his imagination, some echo of a dream that lingered in his waking mind. But, no. As Skanir drew in a deep breath of air, the aroma was still there. Cursing the aches and pains that still beset him, the dwarf resolutely pulled himself from his coverings. He found that he was in a small wagon, the walls lined with shelves, the roof studded with hooks from which dripped a riotous array of pots and pans. It did not take any great exertion of his intellect to realise that he had been billeted with Theodo Hobshollow, in the halfling cook’s cart.

  Skanir crawled to the mouth of the cart, peering from the opening. He could see a great cauldron set over a roaring fire, boiling water bubbling over the lip and sizzling as it struck the flames below. Theodo was standing on a big wooden stool, a stained apron covering his foppish vest and vividly stripped breeches. The halfling was stirring the contents of the pot with a great bronze fork, sometimes pausing in his labour to fish a hand into one of the pockets on his apron and add a dash of herbs or a pinch of spice to the stew.

  The ogre was sitting near the halfling, the better part of an ox lying beside the hulking monster. The ogre noisily chomped on the leg he had torn free from the carcass, his massive jaws crunching against the bone with every powerful bite. An unsightly patch of leather was stitched against Ghrum’s neck, bandaging the terrible injury he had suffered in his battle with the troll. Skanir nodded his head in grim appreciation. Few creatures could expect to recover from such a wound, but ogres were notoriously robust and difficult to kill. Certainly, the experience had done nothing to stem his prodigious appetite.

  Again the heady aroma drifted to the dwarf. Biting down on the pain and dizziness that swirled through his head, Skanir lowered himself from the cart and staggered towards the cauldron. There could be no question, his nose hadn’t betrayed him. He looked up at Theodo on his stool, Skanir’s face a mixture of respect and shock.

  “Surely that isn’t kulgrik I smell?” he finally asked.

  The halfling diverted his attention away from the boiling cauldron, smiling down at the dwarf.

  “I am pleased to have my talents appreciated,” Theodo beamed, “especially by one of the mountain folk. After all, your people invented the art of kulgur, though there are terribly few who appreciate the culinary discipline outside the mountain halls.” Theodo gestured towards the tents around them. “I fear that troll meat will never catch on with the Empire.”

  Skanir grinned beneath his beard. “Just as well,” he said. “It’s a hard enough delicacy to come by as it is, and not to be squandered on those who don’t appreciate it.”

  Theodo hopped down from his stool, wringing his hands in the folds of his apron. “You’ll join me then? Good, I was despairing of eating it all by myself and… well, troll doesn’t agree with ogres. Gives them gas, you know.”

  The dwarf glanced aside to where Ghrum sat. The ogre had removed the head from the carcass and was staring contemplatively into the glassy eyes of the ox while gnawing at a rib bone. “More for us, then,” Skanir said. Theodo hurried back to the cart, pulling a pair of plates from a small box fixed to the side.

  “Quite so, quite so,” the halfling agreed. His eyes lit up as he saw Skanir produce a small silver knife and fork from a pouch on his belt, fixating for a moment on the elaborate workmanship of the cutlery, his mind turning over a mental list of silversmiths and money lenders who might be interested in such bric-a-brac. Theodo shook himself from his avaricious stupor. “It would seem such a shame to waste any more of it. I had to leave most of the troll behind in the village, but I made sure to carve off the flanks and thighs. Even the best cuts, however, would be a bit much to manage on my own, and, of course, one can’t let troll meat sit uncooked for too long.”

  Skanir nodded, appreciating the slight shudder that went through Theodo. The regenerative properties of troll flesh were legendary and never to be underestimated. There were many stories of dwarf chefs who returned to their larders to fetch a chunk of troll meat only to be confronted by a furious, fully regenerated troll.

  Theodo led his guest to a large box lying on its side. The halfling threw a chequered cloth across it and began setting down the dishes. Skanir only half-watched him, his eyes lingering instead on the animal tethered to a post behind the cart. The mule matched his baleful glare.

  “Won’t be done for some little time yet,” Theodo was saying. The halfling removed his apron, tossing it into the back of his cart. His fat little hands darted into the pocket of his vest, removing a set of heavily-use
d cards. “I thought we might do with a bit of diversion while the troll finishes cooking.”

  Skanir didn’t attend the halfling’s words, instead concentrating upon his stare-off with the mule. The animal pulled its lips back, displaying its blunt teeth in what seemed to him like a mocking sneer.

  “Your ogre doesn’t like troll,” Skanir observed, facing Theodo once more.

  “How does he feel about mule?”

  The ruins of Murzklein were three days behind them when Ekdahl abruptly called a halt. Ranging ahead of the column on one of the few remaining horses, the scout came galloping back in haste, eyes scanning the trees and underbrush with obvious alarm. Savagely, he reined his horse in before Baron von Rabwald’s, dismissing courtesy and decorum as he quickly snapped his report.

  “Orcs!” Ekdahl gasped, stabbing a hand over his shoulder to indicate the trail down which he had charged. “A camp of them laid out along the path!”

  “Waiting for us?” inquired the baron.

  Eugen shook his head, even as his hand fell to the sword sheathed beside him. “Orcs don’t wait,” the knight said. “They are many things, but patient isn’t one of them. If they knew we were here, they’d be on us already.”

  “Then we might surprise them.” Ottmar and the other foot soldiers had clustered around the baron and Ekdahl, nervously listening to the exchange. “Not much of an advantage, not against orcs, but we can use everything we can get.”

  Ernst shook his head. “We can’t risk a fight,” he decided. “We’ll have to go around. Our duty is more important than killing a few greenskins.”

  “Begging your pardon, baron,” Ekdahl said, “but going around might not be terribly wise. If even one of those orcs catches our scent they’ll be on our tail until they overtake us or we drive them off. Either way it will still come to a fight. If it were my choice, I’d prefer to have it here, when they aren’t expecting it.”