The hound attacking Oskar got its teeth into the artilleryman’s boot and dragged him, screaming, from the saddle. Giano fired at it, but missed. Veirt surged forward and hacked at the beast, cutting deep into its shoulder. The hound turned and leapt on him. Veirt stuffed his mail-clad fist in its maw and stabbed it through the neck.
Nearby, Ulf swung his maul again and this time crushed his creature’s skull. The brute dropped at his feet, oozing grey matter and noxious purple fluids.
Reiner charged Franz’s beast, roaring, but missed as he checked his swing for fear of hitting the boy. At least he’d got the hound’s attention. The hound leapt at him, shaking off Franz at last. Reiner barely got his blade up in time. He caught the thing on the breastbone with a jarring impact. It bowled him over and slammed him to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. Fortunately, it was caught on the point of Reiner’s sword, and couldn’t reach him with its teeth or claws. It would likely kill him anyway. Its entire weight was on the sword, and the pommel was pressing into Reiner’s ribs. Reiner could hear them creaking. He couldn’t draw a breath. The creature’s foetid drool dripped onto his face.
Something leapt out of the darkness—Franz! The boy hit the beast in the shoulder and toppled it to one side, stabbing at it in a frenzy. The beast snapped at him, and rolled on top of him. The boy shrieked like a girl as the beast’s teeth clashed an inch from his face.
Reiner struggled up, sucking air. He swung wildly at the creature’s head. His blade whanged off its skull, stinging his hand, but doing little damage.
“Come on, you mangy beast!” He stabbed it in the shoulder, again doing nothing. The hound looked up at him, snarling, and crouched to spring, but as it did, Franz stabbed it in the neck, directly below the jaw. The hound yelped, and a river of blood drenched the boy’s arm. The beast collapsed on top of him, crushing him.
“Get it off,” he gasped. “I can’t breathe!”
“Stay there a moment,” said Reiner, looking around. “Safest place for you.”
The melee seemed over at last. Veirt stood over a dead beast. Oskar was getting unsteadily to his feet. His boot was shredded, but the flesh beneath it thankfully only scratched. Behind them, Hals was helping Pavel up.
Pavel clutched his face. The left side was red and slick. The hound the two pikemen had fought lay with a foreleg in the air, their spears sticking from its ribs.
“All right,” said Reiner to Franz. “All clear.” He rolled the hound off the boy and helped him to his feet. His arm was crimson to the shoulder.
“Any of that yours?” asked Reiner.
“Mostly the hound’s, I think,” said Franz.
Reiner chuckled. “Game little scrapper, ain’t you?”
Franz looked embarrassed. “You came to help me. I couldn’t just stand by while…”
Reiner was embarrassed in turn. “Aye aye, enough of that.” He shot glances at Erich, still on his horse by Lady Magda, and Gustaf, who was untouched. “I could wish all our fellows felt the same. Didn’t swing once, did you?” he snarled at Gustaf.
“I’m a surgeon. Who would patch you up if I got hurt?”
“Leech!” called Veirt. “See to the wounded.”
Gustaf sneered smugly at Reiner and hurried to Pavel, his field kit over his shoulder.
Reiner watched him go. “There’s a fellow I wouldn’t mind finding dead in a ditch.”
Franz grinned. They looked up at the sound of raised voices.
“And where were you, then?” Hals was shouting at Erich. “Standing right there with yer spear at the ready and not doing nothing while we was getting slaughtered. Pavel’s lost an eye, y’snot-nosed jagger!”
“Don’t you dare take that tone with me, you insolent peasant.” Erich raised his spear as if to strike the pikeman.
Veirt stepped in the way. “Don’t you try it, my lord.”
“Insolent or not,” said Reiner joining them, “he isn’t wrong. You hung back almost as much as the surgeon here.”
“I killed my one.”
“I killed your one,” Reiner countered. “You could have at least tried for another.”
“We were ordered to protect the lady.”
“Ha! I wonder do you obey all orders so literally?”
“Do you question my courage, sir?”
“Less of it!” growled Veirt. “All of you. These hounds don’t travel far from their masters. Do you want raiders breathing down our necks?”
He spoke too late, for as the men grew silent, harsh voices and the sound of tramping boots reached them. They looked toward the road. Flickering torches and hulking shapes were pushing swiftly through the woods.
“Blood of Sigmar!” swore Captain Veirt. “Tie off your wounds and mount up, on the double.”
Gustaf finished wrapping a bandage around Pavel’s head and closed up his kit.
“What about me?” asked Oskar, plaintively pointing at his leg. “Look at all this blood.”
“What blood?” asked Gustaf as he packed up his kit. “I’ve had fleabites that bled more.”
The men hurriedly mounted their horses, but Franz’s was dead, its throat ripped out by the monstrous beast, and the mule carried too much to take a rider. No one looked eager to share a saddle with him.
“I don’t need a knife in the ribs if he gets the wrong idea,” said Hals.
Reiner sighed and offered Franz a hand up. “Come on, lad.”
Franz grabbed his kit from the dead horse and swung up behind Reiner, but sat far back on the saddle.
“Hold tight,” said Reiner. “It might be a wild ride.”
“I… I’ll be fine.”
There was no time to argue. Before they had all turned their horses, huge almost-human figures crashed out of the darkness, roaring and swinging enormous weapons.
FOUR
A Breath Of Fresh Air
There were a few moments of nightmarish confusion as the men savagely spurred their horses away from their pursuers and the company plunged into the darkness of the tangled woods. Trees seemed to spring out before them and roots rise up to trip them, and Reiner swore he felt the raiders’ hot breath on his neck, but at last they burst out into the open fields and the horses stretched into a headlong gallop. Pavel and Hals, who had never ridden faster than a trot before, didn’t like this at all, and clung to their horses’ necks with death-grip terror, but by Sigmar’s grace they didn’t fall, and the company soon left the raiders behind.
Veirt took no chances. He kept up a punishing pace for a good hour until they had left the environs of the farming village far behind and reached an area of low hills and deep, wooded ravines. They filed into one of these, walking the horses down the centre of an ice-rimed stream for nearly a mile, until Veirt found a flat, pebbly stretch of riverbank and told them to put up their tents.
It was a sorry camp. Veirt allowed no fire, so they dined on cold rations while Gustaf cleaned and bound their wounds and a light snow melted on their horses’ sweating flanks. Pavel’s sobs and his cries of, “It can’t be gone! I can still feel it!” as he held his hand over his missing eye were not an aid to digestion.
Reiner’s newfound friendship with Franz didn’t change the boy’s mind about tenting alone, and while the others bundled into their sturdy tents, he curled up best he could under his cloak, propped up at one end with his short sword and at the other with his scabbard.
For the next two days it got colder and colder as Lady Magda led them higher into the foothills of the Middle Mountains and the rain of the flatlands became wet, clinging snow. It was as if each gain in elevation turned back time, as if spring were becoming winter instead of summer. Gustaf had them smear their hands and faces with bear fat to prevent frostbite, a disgusting but effective trick.
Veirt, a native of Ostland, seemed to blossom in the cold, growing cheerier and more voluble the more bitter it got, telling stories of forced marches and desperate last stands, but Giano, from sun-baked Tilea, hated it. His usual cheery disposition soon
became replaced with angry snappishness and long, whining reminiscences about the beauty of his homeland and the warmth of its sun.
Pavel’s empty eye socket grew red and choked with pus. He developed a fever that had him screaming and gibbering in the night and waking the others up, which did nothing to lighten the general disposition of the group. During the day he couldn’t sit astride his saddle, so Ulf knocked together a simple stretcher out of saplings and twine that dragged behind his horse. Gustaf bound him into it and packed him in snow to keep him from burning up. Though it pained him, Reiner begrudgingly allowed that Gustaf did his job well, even changing the dressing on Pavel’s eye at every meal stop. Hals was unusually quiet during his friend’s sickness, his normal flow of insult and wit frozen with worry.
The tiny mountain villages they passed through were all deserted, and most destroyed. Axe-scarred skeletons lay between the houses, picked clean by crows, and it was obvious by the many tracks of unshod hooves that Kurgan raiders passed back and forth through the area constantly. Reiner expected the villages to be picked as clean as the skeletons, but Hals, who, being a peasant, knew the tricks of peasants, showed them how to find hidden caches of food and liquor under dirt floors and at the bottoms of wells.
They made camp outside one such village two nights after the fight with the beasts and, armed with Hals’ knowledge, went searching for hidden food to supplement their meagre rations.
Reiner, Franz and Hals were prying up the flagstones in a cottage kitchen when they heard a woman’s scream. Fearing that Lady Magda was being attacked, they dropped the stone and ran out to the steep, twisting track that served the little settlement as a high street. The scream came again, from a shack further up the hill. They ran to it.
Hals was about to kick the door in, but Reiner stopped him, and motioned for him and Franz to circle around the tiny, tumbledown place. “Block the back door,” he whispered. “If it has one.”
Reiner waited at the front door as the others crept through the muddy yard. The cry came again, but muffled this time, and then a male voice. “Hold still, curse you!”
The voice sounded familiar. Reiner stepped silently to an unglassed window and looked in. It was dim inside, and hard to see, but Reiner could just make out a pair of legs in torn woollen hose lying on the floor, and another pair in breeks lying on top of them. A male hand fumbled at a belt buckle. He couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he recognised the body. He’d been looking at it for days.
“Schlecht!” he roared. He ran to the door and kicked it in.
Gustaf looked up from where he lay on top of a wild-eyed peasant girl on the dusty wood floor. Her skirts were rucked up around her waist and he had his knife under her jaw. Splotches and smears of blood surrounded her.
“You filthy swine,” growled Reiner. “Get off of her.”
“I… I thought she was a raider,” said Schlecht, pushing hurriedly to his knees. “I was… I was…”
The back door burst in and Franz and Hals entered.
“What’s all the…” Hals broke off as he took in the tableau. Franz went pale.
“You rotten little…” Hals stepped forward and kicked Gustaf in the face.
The surgeon fell off the girl, and Hals pulled her to her feet. There were bloody cuts on her chest. It looked as if Schlecht had carved his initials there. Reiner shuddered.
“Here now, lass,” Hals said softly. “He can’t hurt you now. Are you…?”
The girl wasn’t listening. She screamed and lashed out, striping Hals across the cheek with her nails, and dashed for the door. Reiner didn’t get in her way.
Hals turned back to Gustaf, who was sitting up groggily “You filth,” he growled. “I knew what you were the minute I laid eyes on you, and I’m ashamed of myself that I didn’t kill you then.” He kicked Gustaf in the face again and raised his sword.
“No!” cried Gustaf, crabbing backward. “You daren’t! You daren’t! I’m your surgeon. Do you want your friend to die?”
Hals checked his swing, knuckles turning white on the hilt.
“He’s right,” said Reiner, though he hated to say it. “We need him. All of us. We’ve the whole trip to do again, with who knows how many raiders in the way. We’ll need someone to patch us up.”
Hals’ shoulders slumped. “Aye,” he said. “Aye, yer right.” He raised his head and glared at Gustaf. “But when we get back, don’t expect to live long enough to spend yer reward.”
Gustaf sneered. “Do you think it wise to threaten the man who will tend to your wounds, pike?”
Hals rushed the surgeon again, but Reiner held him back. “Ignore him, lad. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
Hals snarled, but turned toward the door. He motioned to Franz. “Come on, lad. Let’s get a breath of fresh air. It stinks in here.”
The two soldiers walked out. Reiner joined them, turning his back pointedly on Gustaf.
As the sun reached noon the next day, they saw the whitewashed stone walls of the Convent of Shallya on an outcrop above them. It shone like a pearl.
“Don’t look pillaged from here,” said Hals.
Pavel, whose fever had broken that morning, and who sat swaying and fragile on his horse, grinned. “Pillaged or not, we’re here at last,” he said. “Now we can get this whatsit and go home. I just hope the trip back don’t cost me my other eye. I won’t be able to see all me gold.”
“It is an hour’s ride from here,” said Lady Magda. “The path is narrow and winding.”
Oskar shielded his eyes against the noon-day glare. “There is smoke. Coming from the convent.”
Veirt squinted where Oskar pointed. “Are you certain?”
“Aye captain,” said the artilleryman. “Campfire or chimney it might be.”
“Could be the nuns,” said Hals.
Veirt gave him a withering look.
The revelation of the smoke lengthened their trip up the mountain to two hours, for they went at a walk, with Giano and Franz spying ahead on foot, scouting each bend in the path for enemies. There were none, though they found evidence of recent passage: gnawed bones, prints in the snow, a discarded jar of wine shattered on a rock.
Reiner caught Hals looking uneasily at these traces, and smirked. “A messy lot, these nuns.”
About three-quarters of the way up, the trail was joined by a much wider path winding around the mountains from the south, and on this wider path were countless snow-filled foot and hoofprints going in both directions, indicating that large groups of men and horses travelled it with some regularity.
Veirt eyed these signs with grim interest. “Must be a nest of them further up.”
“Not in the convent?” quavered Oskar.
“You only saw one column of smoke?”
“Oh yes, of course.” Oskar looked relieved.
At last they reached the narrow shelf of rock upon which the convent was built, a sort of landing before the wide path continued up the stepped hills into the mountains. There was evidence that the forces that travelled up and down the path often made camp on the ledge—scorched circles of old camp-fires, bones, rubbish.
The convent’s white walls extended from the cliff edge, which looked east toward Smallhof and Kislev, to the face of the mountain, cutting off the tapering end of the shelf. But the appearance of gleaming perfection that the walls had given at the base of the hill proved an illusion up close. They had been shattered and blackened in many places, and the great wooden gates hung off their hinges in a jumble of charred timber. The convent buildings rose in three steps behind the gates, with the spire of a chapel of Shallya highest and furthest back. Even from a distance Veirt’s men could see that entire place had been gutted, walls burned, roofs caved in, garbage scattered about. The thin column of smoke still rose, seeming to come from the third step.
Giano made the sign of Shallya as he looked at the wreckage and muttered under his breath.
“It appears that Baron Albrecht’s information was correct,” sa
id Erich.
“Aye,” said Veirt.
Reiner looked to Lady Magda, expecting a reaction, but the sister seemed made of iron. She gazed at the wreckage with tight-lipped stoicism. “The crypt we must enter is beneath the chapel,” she said. “So we must get beyond whoever has lit that fire.”
“Very good, my lady,” said Veirt, and turned to the men. “Dismount, you lot. Ostini, Shoentag, have a look and report back.”
As the men dismounted—much to the relief of Pavel and Hals, who rubbed their aching backsides vigorously—the mercenary and the boy tip-toed through the gate and disappeared. While they were gone, the party found a hidden corner in which to tie up the horses and then refreshed themselves with a drink of nearly frozen water from their canteens. Reiner could hear the ice sloshing around in his. Veirt ordered Ulf to set up Lady Magda’s tent, and suggested to her that she wait while they saw to any difficulties, but she refused. She seemed as eager as the rest of them to get this whatever-it-was and return to civilisation. She declared that she would come with them.
Franz and Giano returned shortly.
“Six,” said Giano. “Big boys, and with the big swords, hey? Northers?”
“Kurgan,” corrected Franz. “Same as we faced at Kirstaad. They look to be foot troops. No horses I could see. No fresh droppings.”
“Two walking around,” continued Giano, making a circling motion with his fingers. “Four in garden, eating.”
“You sure that’s all of them?” asked Veirt.
Franz and Giano nodded.
“Right, then.” Veirt hunched forward. “We take out the two on patrol as quiet as shadows, got it? Then everyone with a bow or gun will find good vantage on the four in the garden and put as much iron into them as we can. These lads are tough as your boot. If we have to come to grips with ’em I want ’em well peppered, you mark me?”
A chorus of “Ayes” answered him.
“Right then; commend your souls to Sigmar and let’s be at it.”
01 - Valnir’s Bane Page 4