Emil pulled his helmet from his head and bowed it down.
“We’ve got to find Baer,” Jonas said, plunging on into the field of slaughtered men. He stepped over a toothless Kurgan, its visage fixed in a final glare of intermingled joy and hate. Jonas wondered how these men thought, how they were driven to such madness. Supposedly, the Kurgan considered warfare and pillaging to be acts of worship, which would win them the blessings of their corrupt and feral gods.
Jonas waved the drummer, the weather-beaten Mattes, to follow him.
“I’ll assemble a party to look for the others, sir,” Emil offered.
“I’ll do it,” Jonas replied, impatiently. “I want to do it.” Without Baer, his first command would be lost before it started.
Emil followed after Jonas as he wove his way between the slain. He stepped on a hand, and its owner hissed. It was a barbarian with blood oozing from his chest and side. Jonas stood back as Emil finished him with a sword-thrust to the throat. This pause gave the drummer time to catch up, and the three swordsmen plunged further into the corpse-field, bringing with them the kettledrum’s rap-tap-tap.
To their left, he saw three men approaching. Their gaits and frames were well-known to Jonas: three of the missing men. Behind them, Jonas beheld a series of black mounds. Squinting, he saw that they were dead horses. Jonas pointed. “That must be where we first hit the enemy’s flank,” he said. He leapt over bodies to move quickly to the three men. Indeed, he recognised one of the lifeless cavalrymen. This was the spot.
“Where’s Baer?” he asked the men.
In unison they shook their heads.
He pushed past them, then stopped suddenly short. At his feet lay the wracked and torn body of the huntsman, Nathan Baer. An axe-blow had torn him open from hip to shoulder.
Jonas dropped to his haunches beside the poor fellow’s remains. He wiped his hand wearily across his face, pushing back loose strands of hair. They smelled of smoke.
Where was he going to find someone who could scout the mountains for him now?
CHAPTER THREE
Angelika Fleischer looked overhead to the cloud of converging crows. The black birds were peeling off now, diving down to the earth below, a sure sign that the commotion of the battle was over. She’d never seen so many carrion birds gathered at once; in the Blackfire Mountains to the south, they were neither as numerous nor as fast to gather. She guessed that she and Franziskus were still a league or so away from the main site of the engagement.
“You seem uneasy,” she said to Franziskus.
“We’re travelling at speed to a place where a gigantic plume of black smoke fills the air,” replied Franziskus. “Where carrion crows circle to feast on the flesh of the dead. In what way could these facts possibly breed unease?”
“I liked you better before you discovered sarcasm.”
Strapped to his back was a sabre, a weapon heavier than the rapier he’d favoured when Angelika had first met him.
She grinned puckishly, an expression Franziskus had learned to dread. She would tease him, and he would take her too seriously, and wind up flustered and blushing.
“Franziskus, Franziskus… I’m startled.” She spoke with mock innocence, also never a good sign.
Franziskus wearily humoured her. “Startled?”
“Ever since my announcement, I’ve been observing you keenly. But you’ve yet to leap out of your skin in celebration of your hard-fought victory.”
The young Stirlander’s feet hurt, they hadn’t stopped to rest or eat for many miles. Their canteens were in need of filling, too. “If I’ve won any victories of late, I regret to say they have not greatly impinged themselves upon me.”
“All the time you’ve had yourself clamped to my side, you’ve been at me to abandon my livelihood. Now that I’m about to do it, I think you should at least perform a little jig of happiness or what-not.”
“Perhaps I’d feel greater jubilation if we weren’t currently speeding to another cadaver-strewn battlefield.”
Franziskus laboured to accept this teasing with good grace. It was, he reminded himself, her only way of showing affection toward him. Any straightforward expression of comradely feelings would be, in her eyes, an admission of weakness. If there was one thing he’d learned during their awkward partnership, it was that she would never allow herself to depend on anyone, even slightly.
Franziskus knew that beneath it all Angelika had a good heart; he had seen her act selflessly, even heroically, on numerous occasions. Mind you, she complained the entire time and then denied that she’d done anything at all, but nonetheless she had time and again demonstrated her potential for redemption. It was his profoundest desire not only to protect her from harm, as she had done for him, but to dissuade her from her loathsome trade.
Now suddenly his tireless exhortations had finally achieved their desired effect, or so she claimed. Franziskus had long awaited this day, and now that it was imminent, he felt none of the satisfaction he’d always imagined. He had to admit that over the course of the journey north, he’d been positively sullen company. Or, rather, he was prepared to admit such a thing to himself. To Angelika he would make no such concession. The ring: Franziskus knew what it looked like; she’d shown it to him, once, in a moment of giddy abandonment. She’d gone so far as to let him hold it, as they sat by the fire on a chill summer night. It seemed pretty, to be sure, but Franziskus had never seen the value that men attach to certain stones and metals. Perhaps his upbringing, amid the trappings of wealth, had dulled him to the allure of mere adornments.
“You don’t believe me when I say I’m quitting?”
They’d already had this conversation a hundred times in the weeks of travel up the pass and into Stir-land. “I will judge your actions when they, in fact, occur.” he said.
A note of offence crept into her voice. “You think I’m lying to you?”
“No, to yourself. I am but a collateral recipient of any unfounded claims.” Franziskus smiled. He rarely scored as well as she in their verbal fencing matches, so any clear hit was a thing to be savoured.
“My goodness,” tut-tutted Angelika, recovering her air of good-natured repartee. “Were I capable of feelings of guilt, I would in all likelihood be feeling them now.”
“On what grounds?”
“All this time, you’ve been working to infect me with your idealism, yet I fear the interchange has gone the other way: I’ve turned you cynical.”
“I’m not a cynic. I’m a sceptic. There’s a difference.”
“And what would that be?”
“A sceptic would say that the mere intention to quit means nothing, until virtuous action is in fact taken. A cynic would say it doesn’t matter.”
Angelika nodded thoughtfully. “I will contemplate that distinction, my friend, when I sit at nights in my cosy cottage, a fire blazing by my feet, a cup of brandy sitting at my elbow. Perhaps I’ll get me a kitten to play with.”
“Now you’re mocking me.”
“Not one bit. That’s precisely how I mean to while away the rest of my days. I don’t see what’s so incredible about it. Aren’t you tired of sleeping on hard ground and waking up with cold in your bones? Of tramping through pine forests and up the sides of mountains? I want to be able to go inside when it rains. To light a fire when I’m chilled, without having to worry about attracting a host of enemies. I’m sick of having to fight for my life, and of getting dragged off onto wild crusades and goose chases. Many of which were at least in part engineered by you, I hasten to add.
“You may think me some kind of restless freebooter, but I swear to you, I’ve counted my days in coins of gold, and now, in this ring”—he patted her pocket—“I have all that I need to get out, for good and ever. I’m sorry if that interferes with your plans to die alone and unmourned on top of some wintry peak, Franziskus. I’ve tolerated your judgement of me when I was rifling the purses of slain men, but I scarcely thought you’d be fixing me in your faultfinding glare no
w that I want to give it up.”
They’d stopped walking and now stared at each other uncomfortably. Franziskus was taken aback by her vehemence; she seemed to be, too. “I’m sorry,” she said.
These last two words were so shocking to Franziskus that he had to concentrate for a moment, to be sure he’d heard them. Then she turned away and increased her speed towards the crow cloud.
Franziskus felt ashamed. He knew, in truth, why he was unhappy. There were at least two reasons, neither of which he’d dream of admitting to her. One impulse was completely unworthy, the other less so, but at any rate, he had spoken selfishly, and done a disservice to them both. “Of course it is right that you should want to leave this miserable profession of yours,” said Franziskus. “I apologise if I offended you.”
“How could you possibly have done that, Franziskus?” she asked.
They walked in leaden silence for twenty minutes through the eerily empty fields of Stirland. On a normal day, these lands would be alive with farmers and livestock. Now the rolling pastures were eerily absent of all activity. Even the bees and butterflies had abandoned the air.
“We’re going the wrong way,” Franziskus said.
Angelika pointed unerringly to the distant battlefield. “We haven’t wavered, Franziskus.”
“If you want to quit, quit. Let’s turn around. Let’s simply go.”
Angelika shrugged and continued on. “You may, as always, go where you will. As for me, fate has given me one last gift—from what we’ve heard, a battlefield bigger than any I’ve ever seen. One last harvest, Franziskus, and then it’s over.” She increased her pace to a rapid stride.
“Angelika!” Franziskus sprinted to catch up. “I remember someone telling me once—or perhaps it was dozens of times—that fate never has our best interests at heart. I don’t suppose you recall who it is who always says that?”
She spat dismissively. Though not aimed in his direction, Franziskus nevertheless had to turn to avoid the spray. “You well know, Franziskus,” she said, into the wind ahead of them, “that when I speak of fate, I do so metaphorically. There is no such thing as destiny. Life proceeds by accident and mishap. Some suffer, some prosper, nothing really means anything, and no curse awaits us on that battlefield ahead.”
They came upon a silent farmhouse, its stone walls scorched by fire, its thatched roof consumed. Flies buzzed around a bull’s severed head. From the state of decay, it had been dispatched no more than a day ago. Angelika crept up a worn pathway to pause before its shattered gate.
Franziskus’ premonition of doom redoubled itself. “You don’t mean to go in there?” he asked, under his breath.
She drew her dagger. “Is a sacked home different than a battlefield?” She stepped over the flattened gate and into the yard. A smallish well stood in a rock garden beside the house. Franziskus reached into his pack for his canteen, then asked Angelika for hers. “We’re running low,” he said.
Angelika stepped up to the farmhouse door, which was half way ajar. As she drew closer to it, strengthening winds seized it and slammed it against its frame. She started. Franziskus, halfway to the well, paused. “An omen?” he asked.
“No omen tells me what to do,” replied Angelika, grabbing the door and stepping through it. Inside she found a family of half-burnt corpses, a man and a woman old enough to be her parents, and a woman about her age. The marauders who’d killed them had then arranged them in an obscene manner. Angelika was hardened to the aftermath of violence, but this appalled her. Franziskus appeared over her shoulder, and winced.
“Why do they do this?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“To show their hatred of mankind,” Franziskus answered.
They made the wordless decision to disentangle the bodies from their disgraceful positions. Though the raiders had set the place alight, burning off the roofing, the fire had consumed only sections of the farmhouse interior. Chairs and a chest by the far wall were deeply scorched, but other furnishings near the door had been spared by fickle flames. Franziskus found blankets on a bench in the untouched area and placed them reverently over the dead. Outside the distant noise of feasting crows grew louder.
Angelika had yet to search the farmhouse for loot. “There won’t be anything in here,” she announced. “The warriors of Chaos will have scoured it well.”
It did not seem to Franziskus as if the marauders had done anything but kill and desecrate the occupants, then spark a half-hearted fire. He did not, however, argue with Angelika’s decision to leave it uncombed.
“Now that we’re nearing civilization, perhaps it would be best if you stopped using that word,” Franziskus said.
“Chaos?” During their time together, they’d grown all too familiar with this awful force.
“Here in the Empire, most folk fear to even call it by its name,” said Franziskus.
“Wisely so, perhaps.”
These days, The enemy is the correct euphemism.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
As they drew closer to the place of battle, bodies began to appear in the pasturelands, like scattered seedlings. A few were dead Chaos troops, pierced by arrows or downed by sword blows. Though normally a marauder could be counted on to possess nothing of value, Angelika paid special heed to these, as some would be carrying sacks of booty taken in previous stages of their invasion.
She rolled each dead marauder over, the especially muscular ones requiring considerable effort on her part. Franziskus, as was his custom, withheld his assistance while she robbed the dead. Instead, he stood watch, the quiet of the scene doing little to calm him. Angelika grunted in disappointment each lime she pushed a Kurgan over. She hoped they’d leave sacks or purses pinned beneath them, but after half a dozen tries, none did.
Most of the dead were ordinary Stirland folk in farmer’s garb. These Angelika hesitated to disturb. Many had been subjected to extraordinary mutilations, as if their attackers despised them for the crime of living. None of these poor wretches could have offered a meaningful defence to the onrushing horde; they were slaughtered for sport. Angelika moved on, in hope of finding soldiers, who were both more likely to have valuable items still on their person, and less troubling to disturb.
They walked along a soft, grassy ridge overlooking a narrow gulley. Improbably, a small herd of sheep still grazed down there, nonchalantly feeding amid a collection of tiny corpses. For an instant Angelika thought they were the remains of armed and armoured children, but then she understood: these were halflings. The area just to the south was crawling with them. Angelika rubbed her hands together in anticipation of profitable labour and searched out an easy path down the hillside. To strip dead halflings of their belongings would cause her no qualms. Many people of the Empire regarded this diminutive race with fondness, at least in principle, but, having met several of them, Angelika harboured no such sentiments. In her experience, the little blighters possessed all of the mendacity and spite of regular people, compressed down to fit inside their freakishly small frames.
She looked back at Franziskus, who’d staked out a high vantage on the ridgeline, to survey the area in four directions. Annoyed, she beckoned him down. He wavered, then obeyed, crashing through a stand of goldenrod. She waited for him.
“If anyone was coming, I wanted to see them,” he said.
“And up there, everyone would have seen you,” she replied. “For miles.”
“If there’s trouble, don’t we want to see it coming?”
“Stand out like a beacon and you’ll attract it,” she said, making straight for a halfling, who lay on his face under a broken shield. “We’re not in the mountains anymore, where there’s cover everywhere and always a higher spot.” She knelt over the halfling and yanked a fat-hilted dagger from the fellow’s belt. Soft blue gems encrusted its pommel; she squinted at them as they caught the sunlight.
“Of course, you’re right,” Franziskus murmured, looking away from her.
“Of all people, yo
u should be the last to want to make himself conspicuous in Stirland,” she said.
The remark stung Franziskus. So she had remembered his situation, after all. Franziskus had been down in the Blackfire as a junior officer in the Stir-land army. When Angelika rescued him, his entire regiment had been wiped out in a battle against orcs. Though his comrades were all dead, duty compelled him to return home for reassignment to a new unit. Instead, he’d stayed behind in the wilderness, with her. Franziskus was a deserter. His parents had every reason to believe him dead. Franziskus did not wish to be returned to either his superiors or his family.
If Angelika quit, he had no place to go.
Angelika shoved the dead halfling over, looking for a purse. Human soldiers typically kept chains of gold or other small treasures in their boots. Halflings, annoyingly, had no need of footwear, instead preferring to gambol about the battlefield on nothing but their hirsute, bony-soled feet. She unbuckled the halfling’s undersized hauberk, then reached down the front of his tunic, where she found a silvery locket. This she added to her purse. Then, ducking down, she moved to another halfling body, bypassing the mostly naked remains of a Kurgan axe-man. She found no weapon on this next halfling, whose round face looked disconcertingly childlike.
Angelika had his breastplate half unbuckled when she abruptly froze.
She held up a hand of silence, to warn Franziskus.
“We’re being watched,” she hissed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Angelika flattened herself on the ground behind a row of tall, dry weeds. She seized Franziskus by the (oat collar and pulled him down next to her. With a flick of the head, she directed his eyes to a smoothed knob of grassy rock rising from the lip of the gulley. The spot stood about twenty yards away from them, to their right, there were another seven or so up the gulley slope. It poked up from the ridge line like a boil on a plague sufferer.
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