The dead could not stop him.
He hit the vampiric steed hard, ramming his blade through its neck even as the great beast reared up. Metzger wrenched the sword clear, severing the horse’s lower jaw as the steel cut through the meat. Any natural beast would have fallen but the great black stallion reared again, kicking out for the warrior’s skull. Metzger ducked beneath the hooves, thrusting the point of his sword in through its cage of ribs and into his heart. He clung on to the hilt as the beast thrashed, its immense weight impaling the creature on Metzger’s sword. The steed tossed back its mane, a gurgling cry escaping its ruined mouth as it fell sideways, dead again. Metzger dragged his sword free and turned on its rider.
Before he could cut the vampire down the air around him shivered and thickened with smoke. A moment later the beast was gone and in its place a bat flew erratically up into the sky.
“Bring it down!” Metzger bellowed. Spears launched, falling short as the bat fled the battle.
Before Kaspar Bohme could reach his friend’s side he saw the vampire transmogrify, shifting shape to flee. He felt a surge of anger that there would be no single death to win the day, knowing that it condemned more good men to dying. He turned his back on the fight and rallied the Silberklinge. Three of them were on foot now, their mounts cut down beneath them during the slaughter in the valley.
The horn of Ableron’s knights sounded again, cutting across the low moans of the zombies and the clash of steel.
The remaining riders of the Silberklinge responded to the call, bringing their mounts about and galloping back to bolster the defence of the foot soldiers. Bohme and the rest continued to fight like daemons, opening the path through the dead wider and wider, allowing the knights and the infantry to adopt a proper defensive formation that held firm as the enemy were cut down, their fall met by ragged cheers from the foot soldiers as they too understood that the day was won.
It took the living less than an hour to drive off the dead, but at such a cost it did not bear dwelling on.
Their vampiric master did not return.
In the lull that followed the slaughter, they were left with too much time to reflect upon the ramifications of it. Behind them, the supply wagons smouldered, their food gone. Their most immediate concern though, was water: the barrels had burned leaving them with nothing to drink.
The men sat in clusters, tending to the wounded, stitching and bandaging shallow wounds. More than a dozen though were not fit to be moved. This presented a dilemma for Metzger: did they leave them behind in the heart of hostile territory or sit with them while they recovered, sitting ducks? Bohme knew it wasn’t ever as simple as either or, but the new boys didn’t. They saw the badly wounded and would judge Metzger on how he treated them. Bohme remembered seeing the old man weep as he was forced to cut the throats of three of his own men rather than leave them behind, and didn’t dare to think what such an act of honest soldiering would do to the morale of the raw recruits.
For every enemy they had cut down, one of their own had fallen.
All but a baker’s dozen of the knights had lost their mounts, including Ableron’s men.
More than two hundred of the militia had fallen.
Worse, another hundred of the boys from Grimminhagen had fled in fear from the field.
The survivors were subdued as they went about the business of assessing the damage. They were a long way from home, in a wilderness that did not welcome them, without water, and to a man, wounded. The experienced warriors would ride on, without question, they were soldiers. They followed orders even if those orders took them to their deaths. That was the soldier’s lot. They died for what they believed in. It was the others, the butcher’s boys and the stable lads and all those who had marched with such fire in their bellies, those were the ones Bohme worried about. Now that the fires were burned out and the game of soldiering had come to a brutal and bloody end, what would happen? He had been through enough fights to know that some of those who had fled would return, shamed by their cowardice, but the others were gone, good lads turned into deserters by fear. He hated the truth of that knowledge as he thought about the young lad. The boy was gone. He would come back or he wouldn’t.
That did not change the fact that desertion was a crime punishable by death.
That was the harsh reality of it.
Every soldier relied upon his sword-brother. It was more than just a lesson in brotherhood, those swords were all that any of them had as an ally against death. They needed to be able to count upon the men at their sides unequivocally. There could be no lingering doubts.
Those doubts were precisely what this skirmish had put into the mind of each and every one of the men left behind. Who could they trust with their lives when it came right down to it? The answer was no one.
An army could not withstand such a canker eating its way through the ranks, Bohme knew. What he did not know was how to cut it out.
He sought out Metzger and found him walking among the corpses of the enemy, revulsion on his face. “Will this threat ever cease?” the old warrior asked. Bohme had no answer, at least none that he wanted to voice. “We need to burn them,” he said instead, offering the simple expediency instead of a true answer. Metzger nodded and summoned the nearest foot soldiers to see to it.
They found Cade, Cort’s youngest brother, lying in the dirt. His leg had been severed above the knee where the dead had cut him down from the back of his horse. He had lost a lot of blood and there was little that could be done for him save cauterising the wound with flame or slitting his throat.
Bohme looked around for Cort and saw him stitching a wound in his shoulder with a thick steel needle. He called his friend over. Seeing his face, the knight understood, or at least thought he did. Then he was faced with the sight of his little brother lying helpless, delirious with the pain as his courage threatened to give out. “Do not scream, little wing,” Cort said, kneeling down beside his kin.
“Cort? Is that you?”
“It is.”
“I cannot see you, brother. Am I dying?”
“Yes.” Their could be no lies between them now, at the last.
“Can nothing be done?” the wounded knight asked between clenched teeth.
“Precious little,” Cort said, truthfully.
“I would be whole when my spirit crosses,” Cade said, his words barely a whisper as the pain swept them away.
Cort looked up at Bohme, his eyes red-rimmed with uncried tears. Bohme nodded, and collected a brand from the smouldering ruins of the supply wagons. He fed it to the flames, stoking the life back into its charred stump. By the time he returned Cort had torn away the garments around his brother’s severed leg. The others held the young knight down. Cort held out his hand for the flaming brand and warned Cade, “this is going to hurt like hell,” as he rolled the fire across the bloody flesh until it blistered and blackened into a hard crust. The air stank of the bitter sweet tang of burned meat. Not once did Cade cry out.
Bohme saw why. Death had taken him even before the first lick of fire had touched his flesh. There was mercy in that.
He laid a comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder. “He is gone,” he said simply, and left Cort alone to mourn his brother in peace.
It was the same all across the field. People he had laughed and joked with only the night before lay lifeless in the dirt. The lucky ones tended deep cuts and shallow gashes, each one insisting they were fit and that the wound looked worse than it in truth was. Bohme knew better. They were fighting men and that made them liars when it came to their injuries. None wanted to be left behind.
Bonifaz walked up beside him. His face was braised and swollen from the battering he had taken but the young fighter was in as good spirits as his nature ever allowed. He itched at the twin scars on his cheeks, digging the caked blood-rust out of the whitened wounds and then knelt beside one of the corpses of the damned. As he opened his mouth to say something more it sprouted a mildewed bone shaft where his
tongue ought to have been. The bone spear emerged from the back of his neck, splitting the vertebrae. The shock registered in his eyes even as the blood bubbled up out of his throat and he fell.
Bohme threw himself forward as a second bone spear whistled an inch away from his ear. He hit the dirt and rolled.
Skeletons reared up in the dirt, their silhouettes picked out by the sun as they hurled the rest of their bone spears down into the valley below.
The dying was not done for the day.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bloodstained Hero
The Secret Places within the Howling Hills, Middenland
The Endless Winter Night, 2532
Wolfgang Fehr ran through a world of shadows and half-truths where images glimpsed out of the corner of his eye became the beasts of his imagination, hungry to hunt him down and consume him.
His dreams were haunted by deformed faces.
The skin slipped away from chins and jaws like wax and milky eyes stared into him while bestial growls mocked.
They were the manifestations of his guilt, he knew, but knowing did nothing to banish them.
He stumbled on, knowing that he could never turn around and go back. The sure and certain knowledge that he was alone in the wilderness of the damned ate away at him like a canker. He had left the crusade, abandoning his sword-brothers to the rusted blades of the beasts they sought. He had failed them. It was as simple, and yet as profound as that. There could be no excuses, no forgiveness. He had failed his friends.
Twice he had stopped running and turned to look over his shoulder, not in fear but in longing, wanting nothing more than to return to the fold, to go back to the easy camaraderie of the men beneath Metzger’s command, but he could not. The penalty for his desertion was death; there could be no forgiveness for his cowardice. Over the days and nights that followed one truth became clear to the young soldier: he hated himself for what he had done.
Tears of rage stung his cheeks as the bitter wind curled around him, its caress harsh.
And so he ran until he could run no more.
He took shelter against the leeward side of a huge boulder, using its bulk to shelter from the teeth of the wind. The night was black and bitter cold, so far from even the nearest farmsteads that the stars, a thousand points of light for the dispossessed soul, offered the only light. He heard movement in the undergrowth, ignoring it as the more restless daemons of his psyche, and set about finding food. It was unforgiving countryside. He could not subsist on dead leaves and mud. He found blue berries clustered on the vines of a bush. He could not bring himself to care as he stuffed them into his mouth and bit down on the bitter juices, swallowing the mouthful whole. His stomach cramped in revulsion, but he stripped another branch of the small berries and forced them down his throat. A few minutes later he threw them back up again as his stomach purged itself.
Primitive instincts took hold. He crawled on hands and knees gathering the twigs and kindling he needed for a fire.
When it was lit, he crouched over the small pit and offered a prayer to Morr for the souls of the men he had abandoned, begging their forgiveness. There was no divine revelation, no sudden warmth in his heart that told him the dead forgave him. He rubbed his hands briskly over the fire.
He heard it again, a rustle in the bushes. The sound was too substantial to be the wind through the leaves. He felt his heart trip a beat against his chest. “I can see you,” he called out, his voice crackling like the flames. Fehr pushed himself up to his feet, grabbing a brand out of the fire. “Come on then,” he called, his voice full of false bravado. Still the sounds of movement ghosted around him, their maker always just out of sight. He struggled to see beyond the red glow of the fire, but the relative brightness of the flame left Fehr night-blind. He slashed out with the branch, stepping forward, almost into the fire. The flame trailed through the black without revealing any of the night’s secrets.
Fehr spun left and right, brandishing the flame like a weapon.
It all happened so fast. In the cackle of the fire he heard a low-throated growl filled with menace and hunger. He lunged towards the sound, and as the fire in his hand spat and popped eating away at the branch, the yellow eyes of a feral wolf blazed out of the darkness, frothing jowls peeled back on vicious fangs. The wolf pounced, teeth tearing at his throat as the shock of its huge weight took him off his feet. Fehr lost his grip on the firebrand as he fell, sprawling backwards. It guttered and died in the mud. He thrust his arm up desperately, screaming as the wolf’s jagged teeth sank into the soft flesh of his forearm.
For a moment they were locked together, beast and man, and Fehr saw his eyes reflected yellow in the beast’s ravenous gaze every bit as feral and wild as the wolf’s.
Fehr tore his arm free of the wolf’s mouth, shredding the muscle agonisingly, and reached around, grasping either side of its head in his hands as it snapped and snarled. Ignoring the agony firing his flesh, he sank his fingers into its eyes, forcing them deeper and deeper until he felt them rupture and the wolf’s growls became yelps and finally whimpers as he robbed it of its sight.
The animal reared away from his clutches before he could snap its neck, and loped off blindly into the dark.
Fehr rolled over onto his back, panting and shivering as the adrenaline slowly left his body. In its place came pain. He didn’t dare move. He lay in the dirt, pressed close up beside the huge rock, staring up at the stars and yet blind to them through the haze of pain. He heard nothing beyond the mocking of the fire, but as far as he was concerned any night predators were welcome to feast on his bones, such was the depth of his self-loathing. It was another lie he told himself though, his desperation to cling to life betrayed that much. He did not want to die, not on the battlefield, not here like some piece of carrion. He felt out the extent of the damage the wolf had done to his arm. His good hand came away sticky with blood. Muscle and tendon were ruined and hung in ragged tears. The pain as his fingers came into contact with the shredded flesh was indescribable. He had nothing with which to stitch the wound or staunch the bleeding. Biting down on the agony, Fehr pulled his shirt over his head, tore off the sleeve and used it to bind up the wound. In less than a minute it was clotted black with thick, sticky blood.
As the night wore on the blind wolf’s baleful cries haunted him but the wounded animal did not return. It would find its feed elsewhere or it would die. In that way they faced the same fate, man and beast.
Deep in the dark heart of the night Fehr lapsed into unconsciousness; it could not be called sleep.
Fehr woke to the first fat drops of rain falling on his face. The weather worsened, the blustery winds gathering momentum. The cold and wet seeped through to his skin. For a moment he was utterly lost, and then it all came back to him: the ambush, his panic and flight, the wolf. He cast about in the darkness, looking for his sword. It was over by the fire pit. The fire, as pitiful as it had been, had burned out while he slept. Pain flared through him as he reached down too quickly, stretching the new wounds. He almost blacked out with it, sunbursts in negative erupting across his vision, black holes of agony that threatened to overwhelm him. Fehr slumped to his knees, clutching at his stomach as he heaved his guts out into the charcoal of the pit.
He wiped the spittle from his lips with his good hand and crawled away from the pit.
He sat with his back against the stone, the sword across his lap, while the rain streamed down his face.
He had never felt so completely alone.
A jag of silver lightning split the sky. Three heartbeats later the distant rumble of thunder rolled across the hills. The elemental rush made the darkness and isolation easier to bear. Fehr pushed himself to his feet, cradling his damaged arm as he strapped on his sword-belt. The makeshift bandage was stiff with dried blood. He needed to find water; the wound needed cleaning and redressing, otherwise the germs the wolf carried in its saliva would fester and the wound would become gangrenous. A second spear of lightning forked across the
bruise-purple sky. Wolfgang Fehr imagined the shapes of so many unnamed daemons out of the shadows thrown down by the wrath of nature.
He started to stagger, trying to keep low, his body bent over to protect his arm. His head swam sickeningly.
The thunder chased him.
He didn’t know whether to seek high ground or low, whether to seek shelter in the trees or stay in the open. This time the lighting was so much closer that it seemed to leap from the ground into the sky rather than the other way around. There was no lag between the flash and the bang as the thunder cracked. He felt it like a physical blow, like hands on his chest bowling him off his feet. Fehr stumbled and fell to his knees. He looked up in time to see a three-pronged fork of lightning lance deep into a promontory of rock, splitting it asunder with the sound of the mountain itself dying. Stone split and crumbled, a landslide of scree tumbling down from on high. Fehr lurched to his feet as another bolt of lightning tore up the sky and in its afterglow he saw, beyond the ruined spike, the silhouette of an old abandoned fortress. Without the intervention of nature he never would have seen it. He ran towards it, thinking that the dilapidated towers offered salvation.
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