As she watched, one of the creatures, a nightmare of goat and man and daemon all fused into one writhing form locked its jaws on a man’s throat and shook him as easily as a terrier shaking a rat. The victim fell back with a gurgling scream and the beast came with him. There was a crunch as the man’s body hit the ground, crushed beneath the weight of his assailant, and with a wet tear that Hilda could hear even at this distance it tore out a mouthful of flesh, swallowed it, and then caught sight of her.
She screamed as it bounded forwards, pink fangs bared in what looked like a smile, but it wasn’t a scream of terror. She had recognised the man that had been killed, and her cry was one of pure, blinding rage.
She rushed forwards to meet the thing, the other women following behind her. When it was in range she jabbed at it with the pitchfork. It twisted to one side, avoiding the thrust and grabbing at the haft. But Hilda was too quick. She reversed the weapon before the beast could close its grip, and used the blunt end to punch it between the eyes. Wood bounced off bone and it staggered back with a snarl of surprise.
Hilda reversed the pitchfork again and this time when she struck the vicious serpent’s teeth of the tines found their mark. They punctured the beast’s hide and slipped in between its ribs with every ounce of Hilda’s twelve stone of weight behind them.
The beast vomited out a spray of blood along with its final scream. Hilda, struck with a sudden vision of what it would have done to her daughter, screamed back as she twisted her weapon free of the lice-ridden body.
She grimaced at the stink of its filthy hide, and then the even greater stink of its green guts as she struck again and opened a cavity in its belly. Filthy thing, she thought, and saw that some of the other women had reached the gate. But now the men were jumping down from their perches and shooing the women back as they fled.
Hilda felt a moment’s rage at their abandonment of the gate, but then she saw the dark shapes that were scurrying amongst the houses and realised why. The beasts had breached the wall somewhere else, and were free within the stockade.
“Back to the granary,” she cried, suddenly terrified that one of the foul creatures might get there first. The doors were strong, but they were only wood, and if one of these horrors got in amongst the old women and children…
Refusing to think about that, Hilda led the charge back to the granary. Within a dozen steps Johann, her husband, overtook her. His eyes were bright and his skin was as pale as it had been when he’d had the ague last winter, and for the first time in his life he looked afraid.
“I told you to wait inside, woman,” he barked at her.
Hilda didn’t deign to reply. Instead she concentrated on the sprint back to the granary. She reached the door of the granary and turned her back to it. The rest of the townspeople milled around her, confusion and then horror sharpening their voices as they realised that Elder Rijkaard was dead. One of the women was already keening as the beasts swarmed through the gates, which had now been torn off their hinges, and surged towards them.
They were a nightmare in the noonday sun. Although the beasts had fallen silent as they gathered for the final onslaught the air still buzzed with their presence. Clouds of flies swarmed around them, feasting on filth and mucus and wounds, and blood-glutted ticks burrowed busily through their matted fur.
Most were goat-legged, and all sported horns above faces made more horrible by the occasional hint of what might once have been humanity. But if their flesh still bore clues to what they might once have been, their slit-pupilled eyes burned with what they were now.
They were remorseless, rapacious, reviled. They were death made flesh and sent into the world. They were the enemy.
“Hilda,” Johann said, turning to look at her. “I love you.”
It was the first time he had said it, and now that he had she wished that he had not. The desperate truth in his voice sounded like a death knell.
“Never mind that silliness now,” she snapped at him, and scolded herself for the rush of warm tears that slid down her cheeks.
And then the beasts were upon them.
They came in a rush, roaring in a chorus of hatred that blended into a tidal-wave sound of bestial fury. Hilda peered from between the men who stood in front of her, and as beasts struck the defenders she was crushed back with the rest towards the granary.
In the pack she couldn’t see much of the onslaught. The occasional flash of sunlight on a raised blade. A gout of blood, black and ruby against the clear blue sky. A flailing limb, a snapping jaw full of razored teeth.
Even as she was crushed further back Hilda could hear that they were losing. The human voices seemed to do nothing but scream with agony whilst the beasts seem to do nothing but roar with blasphemous exultation.
In the sweat and the panic she realised that the bodies were now packed so tight that she could no longer lift her weapon. She turned to Johann, who stood beside her, their shoulders crushed together.
“I love you too,” she said, but before he could reply the crush slackened, the beasts drawing back.
At first she thought that the drumbeat was the sound of her own heart, but as it grew louder she could hear the sound of marching boots and the sharp, clear sound of men barking orders.
The crush eased further and Hilda elbowed forwards. Soon she was standing amidst a tangle of bodies, men and beasts lying side by side. She stopped to dispatch a wolf-faced thing which was still spurting arterial blood from a gash in its neck, and when she looked up it was to see the rout of the enemy.
If the beasts had stood their ground the carnage on both sides would have been awful, but trapped between the anvil of the defenders on one side and the relentless marching column of soldiers that had appeared behind them they panicked, tearing at each other as they fled.
The soldiers made no attempt to pursue them. Instead they slaughtered those too slow to avoid the churning steel of their first rank, then stopped in the town square. They formed a neat square box of men and muscle and cold, hard steel.
Hilda walked forwards, hardly daring to believe that they had been saved. As she drew closer to the soldiers she could see that they were not what she had expected. They were dressed in rags more than uniforms, and they had the scrawny frames of vagabonds rather than the well-fed beefiness of state troopers.
Not that it mattered. All that mattered was that they had arrived in time.
As she stood gawping, their leader strode out from amongst their ranks, swept off a hat that had enough feathers for a brace of geese, and bowed.
“Good afternoon, madam,” he said. “Might I enquire if this fair town is Nalderstein?”
“Yes,” Hilda said, and found that she was rearranging her hair. “Yes it is.”
“Excellent,” Erikson beamed, and for the first time Hilda realised what a bright shade of green his eyes were. “In that case we have arrived at our new posting. My name is Captain Erikson, late of Estalia and Marienburg, and this is the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig.”
“Very pleased to meet you, sir,” Hilda said and curtsied awkwardly.
“Maybe you should see to the children,” Johann told her, and she almost smiled at the jealousy she saw in his eyes. With a last look at Erikson’s ragged gallants she went to deal with the moans of the wounded and the crying of the children.
So much for the romance of war, she thought, and started tearing up cloth for bandages.
A hundred miles distant in Hergig, and secure in the cool vastness of the baron’s council chamber, the blood and the sweat and the dust of a hundred Naldersteins were marked on a vast vellum map that had been attached to the wall.
Cloth-tipped pins marked every settlement in the barony. Green marked those that were guarded, white marked those that had been left to their own defences, and red were the epitaphs of those known to have been destroyed.
Ganamedes was sitting alone in the hall, the low afternoon sun casting the shadows of the pins across the map. Every day more and more of the p
ins turned red. The depressing markers were scattered across the land like boils on a plague victim.
Some of the settlements they had lost had been tiny hamlets of no more than a few families. Others had been prosperous towns with their own markets and mills. Ganamedes wondered how many of the inhabitants had been killed and how many had fled.
He didn’t look up when the doors opened. It wasn’t until the clip of boots stopped behind him that he realised these men weren’t the servants. When he turned he found the provost marshal standing behind him and, behind the provost marshal, two other men.
“Good afternoon, Ganamedes,” Steckler said, and as soon as Ganamedes heard the sorrow in his voice he knew that he had been found out. To his surprise, the only thing he felt at this fact was relief.
“I want to see the baron,” Ganamedes said.
“Maybe later,” Steckler told him. “First of all we need to ask you a few questions. They’re about certain things we’ve found in your quarters.”
“Let me show you where the rest of the books are,” Ganamedes told him, and sighed at the feeling of an immense weight being lifted from his shoulders. “You won’t have found them all.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Steckler, whose men were nothing if not thorough. “And if you wouldn’t mind…”
He dropped the manacles onto the table in front of Ganamedes. They were silver, and beneath the dents and scratches sigils had been etched deeply into the metal. With hardly a heartbeat of hesitation Ganamedes snapped them closed about his bony wrists, and shuddered with revulsion as the enchanted metal narrowed around them in an almost organic movement.
The material was as cold and sinuous as a serpent, and it wriggled and squirmed about the contours of the old man’s wrists until it was snug.
“Here,” he said, holding his bound wrists up to display that none of the sigils was yet glowing a warning. Not yet, anyway. “Lead on. I’ve been wanting to get this over with for a long, long time.”
Steckler, by contrast, had only just begun to dread what they were going to have to do to the silly old sod.
He stood back as the two guards grabbed Ganamedes’ bony elbows and pushed him forwards. He stumbled and Steckler cursed them.
“No need for that,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Let’s just go to his quarters and see what else there is to find.”
The pile of incriminating materials sat on the plain wooden table that ran along one wall of the torture chamber. They lent an incongruously civilised air to a place which was otherwise as businesslike as a blacksmith’s forge.
It was well lit with half a dozen oil lamps. The walls were smooth granite and the floor was a neatly tiled slope that angled down towards a gutter. The fireplace was a simple, unadorned hole in one wall. Even on this warm night flames licked at the tips of the iron implements that were racked in front of it, and the glow of the iron and the crackle of the fire was making every man in the cell sweat.
There were only the three of them. Steckler and the baron stood on either side of the fireplace. Ganamedes sat before them, his ankles and wrists now secured to an iron chair that was bolted to the floor. Of the three men, he looked the least concerned.
“You should have told me earlier,” the baron said reproachfully. “If you had volunteered the information…” He trailed off, and for the first time Ganamedes saw him at a loss. It was a strange experience. The baron had fought and schemed and bluffed his way to his position, a ball of energy who was as positive and direct in his manner as a beam of sunlight.
“I wanted to tell you,” Ganamedes said. “That’s why I did it. I wanted to help. And, your lordship,” he lowered his voice, “I have succeeded. As soon as Steckler arrested me I understood that it had been there all along.”
“What had been there?” the baron asked.
“The answer,” Ganamedes said with the wild-eyed joy of the religious convert. “The key to our victory.”
All three men turned to look at the evidence which had brought the baron’s most trusted advisor to this iron chair. There were half a dozen scrolls, yellowed and stained by the ages, a pile of books and a folder of bound woodcuts.
“There is nothing to be gained from the study of such abominable works.” Steckler shook his head. “They are damned, as are all those who touch them.”
The baron, who had been about to open one of the books, stopped himself. He drew a dagger instead and flipped open the front cover. There was a crude sketch of some monsters feasting upon human remains. The next page was covered in an indecipherable scrawl, blotted here and there with stains.
“Don’t look at that, my lord!” Ganamedes told him, panic edging his voice, but it was too late. The baron had already turned the next page.
Ganamedes and Steckler felt the air boil and catch in their throats. The oxygen in their lungs seemed to burn away and they were suddenly both gasping for air. Pressure crushed in on them, and their skin suddenly itched as though termites were burrowing beneath it.
Only the baron, who was looking at what the book revealed, wasn’t gasping. He was beyond that.
The blood had drained from his face to leave him as pale as a corpse, and his eyes bulged like those of some deep-sea fish which has been dragged to the surface. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and Ganamedes saw that they were already pink with blood.
“Close the book!” Ganamedes yelled at Steckler who was staring at the baron in horror. A low, animal whimper was escaping from the knotted sinews of the baron’s throat. It came from a place beyond physical pain.
“Steckler!” Ganamedes screamed despite the feeling that his lungs were about to burst. “Close the book!”
The provost marshal looked at him stupidly, then understanding dawned. He crossed the room, pushing through air that felt as heavy as treacle, and slapped the cover of the book closed with the back of his hand. It shut with a loud snap, and the baron fell back into Steckler’s arms.
“What have you done to him?” Steckler asked and staggered back beneath the baron’s weight.
“I told him not to look,” Ganamedes whined.
“That’s right,” the baron growled. He clapped a hand on Steckler’s shoulder and struggled to stand back up on his own two feet. “He warned me. Better late than never, Ganamedes.”
The baron attempted a smile, then wiped away the red flecks of blood on his moustache from where he had bitten his tongue.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Ganamedes told him miserably. “I didn’t see what you were doing.”
The baron wiped his face with a handkerchief. When he finished he cast a nervous look at the book. Then his expression hardened into one of defiance and he went to lean against the table upon which the cursed thing lay.
“Are you all right?” Ganamedes asked him, scarce able to believe it. “The thing inscribed on that page. It is a—”
“I know what it is,” the baron snapped. “No need to harp on about it. Instead, let’s assume that I don’t want to read any further. Why don’t you tell me what you have learned from these cursed things?”
So Ganamedes nodded, chewed on the dry meat of his tongue to get the saliva flowing, and told him.
If the wind hadn’t fallen then Erikson wouldn’t have heard the screams.
It had been blowing through Nalderstein for days, this wind, a dry, withering constant that chapped their skin and kept them squinting. It made their nerves itch and their thirst for the daily wine ration a virtual constant. The townspeople called it the harvest wind, and even as it leathered their skin they welcomed it. It meant that the wheat, golden in the fields beyond, would be dry enough to harvest at its prime.
But for once it had stopped, a brief pause as if it had been catching its breath, and in that moment Erikson heard the high-pitched cry for help that came from one of the barns that lay to the east of where they had been working on the stockade.
“Hear that?” he asked Gunter. The two of them were stripped to the waist, as were the half-dozen other men who were
working on this section.
“No, captain.” Gunter shook his head as the wind howled back into life.
“It may be nothing,” Erikson admitted. “But let’s go take a look anyway. Men, to arms.”
There was a scurry as the men dropped timber and hemp and raced to snatch up their weapons. Erikson didn’t wait for them before setting off at a trot towards the direction of the cry, his own sword unsheathed and held ready.
“There it is again,” he said and came to a stop outside the first of the barns. Unlike the solid block of the granary, the doors on this building were loose-slatted and held together by no more than a twist of rope. Even that had been untied, and now the door rattled in the quickening wind.
“Could be the enemy,” Gunter said, and drifted to the other side of the door. Erikson licked his lips, took a quick glance behind him to make sure that the men were ready, then kicked open the door.
There was a shriek as he booted open the splintering timber and leapt into the gloom. Vast stacks of hay lay all around, and bars of sunlight streamed in through the slatted walls to light up clouds of swirling motes of dust. There was a moment’s silence, then a sudden cry and a rush of movement from the shadows that darkened one of the corners. Erikson turned on his heel, and the bright steel of his sword blurred back as he prepared to slash down onto the shape that hurtled towards him.
He recognised it for what it was a split second before it barrelled into him. Despite the animal desperation in its eyes and the wordless cries it was making, this was no monster. It was a young woman. That was obvious from the curves that were revealed by the ragged remains of her clothes.
“Are you all right?” Erikson asked as she froze in front of him, her expression an appalling mask of horror. For the first time Erikson saw the blood that had trickled down from her nostril and the dark bruise that covered one side of her face.
Broken Honour Page 15