Franziskus sniffed; his nose had started running.
Jurgen pushed past Angelika. She dived at him, knocking him off course. He stumbled into a wall. She charged him. He clamped hands on her shoulders and tossed her aside. She fell into Franziskus, blocking his charge at Jurgen.
Lukas stood, waiting. His father strode at him. Angelika leapt on Jurgen’s back. He bucked her off. She landed on a table. He flipped the table away from him, rolling her off it and onto the floor. Franziskus dropped Toby’s knife and thumped both fists against Jurgen’s back. Jurgen whirled, head-butted Franziskus, sent him wobbling. Angelika crawled up, throwing her arms over the upended tabletop, hauling herself to her feet. Jurgen kicked the table, sending it sliding into its neighbour, and pinning Angelika between them. She fell back, trapped, head lolling.
Franziskus ran at him. He turned. He grabbed Franziskus by the collar and the belt. He threw him over past Angelika.
He approached Lukas. “You think I want to do this,” he said. “I do not. It is because I love you, my son, that I must.”
“She’s right—you’re not merely stubborn. You’re crazed,” Lukas said, his newfound composure cracking. He backed away. He bounded over a broken table. Jurgen leapt after him. He turned and punched his father in the jaw. His finger bones crackled like leaves in a fire. Face drained, he nursed his hand. He turned to run. Jurgen tackled him. He fell.
From Angelika’s vantage point, the two momentarily disappeared behind wrecked furniture. She’d wiggled herself out from between the tables pinning her. Father and son came up again, Jurgen clasping the boy from behind, lifting him up, mighty arms around the boy’s neck and chest. “I love my son,” Jurgen choked, “so I give you your honour back.” His eyes were wet.
In both hands, Angelika held a spindle from one of the broken chair backs.
Jurgen constricted his grip on Lukas’ neck.
A snapping sound rang through the tavern. Lukas went slack. Jurgen turned him around, held him. He pulled open one of Lukas’ eyelids. He made a noise midway between an ordinary sob and the neigh of a horse. Gently he laid Lukas’ body on the tavern floor, taking care to keep him clear of the various patches of blood that adorned it. Tears flooding, he turned a hate-frozen visage on Angelika and Franziskus.
“You made it happen this way,” he said.
“No,” said Angelika.
“I was not supposed to be the one to do it,” he said.
“Maybe that should have told you something.” Her hand wandered from the snapped chair spindle to the dagger dropped first by Toby, then by Franziskus.
“He was supposed to do it himself. You put ideas in his head. You’re to blame for this.”
He stepped on heavy feet toward her. She coiled up, sprang, hurling herself through the air. She planted the dagger in the side of his neck.
She crashed into a cart laden with stoneware. Plates and mugs fell all around her. He tottered at her. Red liquid erupted from the wound. “I thought we were fighting unarmed,” he said. “Is that honourable?”
“I don’t believe in honour,” Angelika told him.
“Ah,” he nodded. “I thank you regardless, for the favour you’ve done me. A father should not outlive… Pardon my…” He reached for an overturned chair, righted it, sat down, blinked, and died. His head slumped to his chest.
Angelika waited. “It’s safe now,” she said, after it was clear that Jurgen was finished.
Lukas sat up. He spoke to Angelika, but his eyes were on his slain father.
“Did we plan that?” he asked.
“Plan what?”
“When he had my neck, and you made that snapping noise—what was that?”
“A piece of chair.”
“When you made the noise, I knew what to do—to play dead, as if we planned it. Did we plan that?” He spoke as if mesmerised.
“We didn’t plan it. It’s just that, when the moment came, you understood.”
“It’s as if we planned it,” he said. With movements slow and stunned, he went over to his father. He knelt beside the chair and pulled Jurgen down into his arms, cradling the man’s head in his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he told his father. His face contorted. “I wasn’t what you wanted. I wish I was.” He bawled the words; they were hard to make out. Angelika wished she couldn’t hear them at all.
Franziskus surveyed the carnage and thought it remarkable that he felt no great urge to vomit. He told himself that he was getting used to such sights, and, for this freshly-acquired hardness, begged forgiveness of the mercy goddess, Shallya.
Angelika found an undisturbed chair and eased herself into it. She assured herself that she would soon find the energy to search the mercenaries’ corpses for saleable items. She would not try it with Jurgen’s body, so as not to upset the boy. “I just want to sit here for a time,” she heard her voice saying. She looked at her arms and counted the cuts, looking for injuries serious enough to warrant bandaging. She looked over to Franziskus, who was likewise covered with welts and bruises. A nasty, rattling sound assailed her and she looked about to see what it might be. After some blurry thought, she isolated it as the issue of her own tortured lungs. Franziskus’ breath was even more laboured than her own.
Bells rang out, outside in the street. There were shouts. Franziskus hauled himself to the door. The cries grew louder. Now that she was again ready to pay heed to the world outside the tavern, Angelika realised that the orcish war drums had increased in volume. They were very close now. Maybe just a few miles away.
Franziskus appeared in the doorway, panting. “Evacuate—we’ve got to evacuate! Marius has pulled his forces back, north of the city. He’s going to let the town fall!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Grenzstadt burned.
The three of them—Angelika, Franziskus, Lukas—huddled on the far side of a low, uneven stone wall that separated one stretch of grassy, bumpy sheep pasture from another. They were a mile or so from town. On the other side of the wall, a runtish orc, scarcely bigger than a goblin, prowled and snuffled. They kept their heads down and waited for it to go. It trundled up to an abandoned farmhouse and disappeared through an open door. They calmly sat as it banged around inside. Angelika popped her head up to see it wander back toward town, where its fellows would still be rampaging. When it was far enough away, she stood to watch smoke clouds drift up from the ruins. Making out details of the destruction was difficult from their present position. Large gaps had been pounded in the walls. One of the south towers had somehow been rocked on its foundations—perhaps by some primitive war machine, or enormous battering ram—and had fallen into the town. It was the tower where Benno and Gelfrat had died.
Angelika tried to remember her south Averlandish geography. If she recalled correctly, there was a river a dozen miles up, a tributary from the Upper Reik. Marius’ forces, which had bypassed the city in a heedless rout, would most likely retrench there, to meet the orcs when they grew bored with smashing empty buildings and were ready to continue their push up into the Empire’s belly. Messengers, she reckoned, would already be on their way to the courts of Wissenland, Stirland, and the halflings’ Moot. Reinforcements would come from Averheim and from Nuln. Despite Marius’ folly in plotting against his own general on the eve of battle, the orcs would, in the end, be repulsed. She declined to speculate on the precise cost in lives. The toll would be paid mostly in the blood and flesh of peasants, townsfolk, and common soldiers; it was always they who took the brunt when games of power played out.
Lukas asked her what would happen, and she told him about the river, and the reinforcements, and how orcs fought badly in water. Typically, they rushed in with lunatic abandon, obliging their enemies by drowning in great numbers.
Lukas nodded. “An encouraging thought.”
“In war, the less stupid side eventually wins.”
“Thank you for saving my life,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Do either of you have a weapo
n I can borrow?”
Neither did. Franziskus’ rapier had been wrecked back in the tavern; Angelika had left her last knife in Jurgen. “Why?” asked Angelika.
“I’ve made a decision,” Lukas said. “I’m going north. I’ll find the troops. I’ll locate the Sabres. It’s me who should lead them now. I am the heir; it is my blood. So say the ancient laws of my lineage. If anyone attempts to stop me, I’ll fight them. Then I’ll lead my company against the greenskins, when they come.” He waited for a reaction.
“Why?” Angelika asked, after a pause.
“It is what you said. I should do something useful for someone.”
“When did I say that?”
“The Empire must be defended. What else could be more useful?”
Franziskus cleared his throat. “But, Lukas. You’re no trained warrior.”
The boy held his look of determination. “Battle will test me. I’ve seen the two of you. Henty and the others, they were stronger than you. You fought them and won. My father, he outmatched you, too. Yet you didn’t flee, even when you could have, to be free and clear. All that you’ve done for me—what will it matter if I wasn’t worth saving in the first place?”
Angelika gazed away in the opposite direction. A rain of fine ashes fell. She brushed them from her arms. “Don’t look to us as exemplars of anything. A corpse robber and a… a…”
Franziskus completed the sentence for her. “And a deserter,” he said.
“I know what I saw. What I will do now, I do to honour you.”
She shoved him into the wall. She grabbed him by the ears. “Do nothing for honour!” she cried. “Or for us! Are you doing this to impress us? Is that it?”
He writhed away from her, stepping back over the low wall. He sucked in a breath, marshalling steely calm. “I do it because it must be done.”
“And who do you do it for?” she demanded.
He thought for a moment. “Myself. I do it for myself.”
She turned from him. “Good. That’s the answer I’ll accept.”
Lukas stood there.
Franziskus leapt the wall. He clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Farewell,” he said. The two junior nobles embraced; Angelika huffed disapproval. Franziskus broke the embrace and studied Lukas’ dirtied, resolute features. “What you do now—you are braver than me.”
Lukas gently smiled. “I’ll try not to be too brave. So one day we can meet again.” He moved toward Angelika. He said her name.
She held him off with a warning hand. “If you think this is your chance to grope me, you haven’t been paying attention.” Lukas forced a comradely laugh. “Go,” she said. “Get going. And if you get your head removed, don’t come whining to either of us about it. We’re off to find new idiots to rescue.”
“Even if you won’t admit it,” Lukas said, “I owe you everything.”
“Oh, sod off.”
She started walking south. Lukas waved and said goodbye and she did not turn back. Franziskus returned the gesture for her, and then hurried to catch up, leaving Lukas to watch them depart.
They walked back toward the mouth of the pass, seeking cover whenever they heard the hissings and growlings of straying orcs. They passed overturned carts, half-eaten livestock, stripped bodies and smouldering cottages.
They travelled without speaking. In his mind, Franziskus turned over various ways in which to broach the subject of Marius and Elennath, and their almost identical scars. A matter of interest lay therein. But, seeing the black mood that had descended on her, he could not conceive of a way to ask.
At dusk, they reached the pass. The mountains looked different, with so many of their trees burnt, and the brush gone. The forests would regrow, Franziskus thought. The occasional fire kept them strong.
“Which one,” asked Angelika, “do you feel sorry for—Benno or Gelfrat?”
Franziskus thought for a while, as they walked. “I don’t think either of them,” he finally said. “What about you?”
“I’m not certain.”
They kept going.
In a gully, they came upon the corpses of cavalrymen, twisted in amongst the long limbs and muscular bodies of their dead stallions. Angelika waded into their midst. She bent down to unbuckle the belt of a rider skewered to his horse’s haunch by a long, crude lance. His sabre had never cleared its sheath. She pulled it out now and admired it; it was a display piece, with a hilt of filigreed brass.
“Now this is the sort of battle that profits a looter,” Angelika said.
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