03 - Liar's Peak

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  “Why?” blurted Filch. “They’ve all gone on to attack the interior, haven’t they?”

  “They’ll hit whatever targets arouse their lust for rape and pillage,” said Angelika. “What about your home village? Has it been razed to the ground, and all its people driven out?”

  The three brothers exchanged perturbed glances.

  Angelika took this as a “no”.

  “Then you may have bigger worries than a couple of scroungers,” she said.

  Curran got close enough to breathe onto the back of her neck. He smelled of chives and butter. “The man whose body you desecrated was my dearest friend. He led the toasts at my wedding.”

  “If we are ambushed by barbarians,” said Angelika, “I trust you’ll cut our bonds and hand us back our weapons.” Angelika’s blades were in Filch’s belt; Deely bore Franziskus’ sabre on his back. “If it comes to a fight, you’ll need our aid.”

  “I see no difference,” hissed Curran, “between them and you.”

  The encampment of the Gerolsbruch Swordsmen lay a few leagues to the north-east of the vineyard, in a hollow shrouded by ancient willows. The men roused themselves at the sound of pounding hooves; Jonas and Emil rode back in. At Jonas’ command, Emil called for Pinkert. Pinkert hopped to it: “yes sir?”

  “You were raised near here, yes?” asked Jonas, still on his horse.

  “That’s right. Over that way.”

  “Any villages which might have halflings in them?”

  Pinkert contemplated for a moment and pointed to unmarked spots on a map Emil unrolled for him. “I forget the names of the other two,” said Pinkert, “but the likeliest one is called Hochmoor.”

  After another hour’s walk—which Angelika and Franziskus could have made in forty minutes, without short-legged halflings as pacers—they were led along a dirt road up a gentle hillside dotted with low, shambling hovels. These were of two types: stone houses with thatched roofs, in the standard style of Stirland peasants, and also squat wooden structures built right into the hill, as halflings did. The stone houses occupied flat shelves of cemented earth carved out from the hill. Some boasted untamed wildflower gardens, or jostled for space with ramshackle poultry coops. The flat shelves of lawn in front of the halfling dwellings were strewn with the remnants of ale casks, broken down for firewood. Amid their unkempt flowers lay emptied brandy flasks and the odd shattered wine bottle.

  Angelika counted a few dozen of each type of house as they were prodded up the roadway. A wooden arch spanned it, staffed by a trio of bored humans, who lolled torpidly on stools. One leaned near a bristly, twine pull-cord connected to a bronze bell dangling from the arch. It was clear to Angelika that the war had not yet touched the place; if it had, its sentries would not be so blasé. They would not last long if the enemy arrived. They stood as the party approached. To Angelika’s surprise, it was Deely who told them to be at ease. She’d taken Curran for the leader. Apparently his authority was unofficial.

  “Welcome to Hochmoor,” chirped Filch, as if Angelika and Franziskus were their willing guests.

  The windows were shuttered, the doors slammed tight. No children played on its emerald slopes. An escaped chicken clucked desolately from the top of its coop, vainly begging for a safe return to its imprisonment.

  “Turn and walk backwards,” Curran ordered.

  Franziskus complied and Angelika reluctantly did the same. Curran placed the head of his spear at her throat. Deely’s spear kept a less menacing distance from Franziskus.

  A few hundred yards further up the road, Curran placed his free hand to the side of his mouth and called out to the villagers locked inside their homes. “We caught some,” Curran cried. “We caught the looters.”

  Windows opened. Heads, human and halfling both, popped out from behind doorframes. Some villagers seemed confused or frightened. Others joined Curran in his righteous exultation.

  Angelika searched for a means of escape. Curran’s spearhead kept close to her throat. The halfling trio walked her and Franziskus backwards up to the very end of the road, which terminated at the gates of a decrepit stone fort on top of the hill. Angelika was not especially good at judging the age of buildings, but this one had to go back several centuries. In its prime, it would have served as a stout retreat for the entire village in times of war. If invaders came today, they’d have an easy time passing their way through its ruined outer walls.

  Several grim-faced human men joined Curran’s procession. Angelika and Franziskus were led through the outer gate and into an equally worn-out inner keep. Curran gestured them onwards through a metal doorway into what might once have been an armoury. The men hauled the door shut, locking it with a heavy key. The room was bare; its stones, at least, still held firm to their appointed places.

  Deely stood on tiptoes to peer at them through a barred panel in the middle of the door. “Spend these few moments searching for sincerest contrition,” he said. “The tribunal will take but an hour or so to convene.”

  “Don’t waste your sympathy on them,” said Curran. Deely detached his child-like fingers from the bars and disappeared from view.

  Angelika got to work searching for loose stones, but found none. “How’s your head?” she asked Franziskus.

  “It wishes to remain attached to its body.” Franziskus inspected the door, finding it all too sturdy.

  “I agree with it wholeheartedly.” Angelika paced. “I refuse to be executed by halflings. Maybe we can break out as we’re led to the tribunal. Or at the proceedings themselves.”

  “Or it’s Deely who’s right, and we should express contrition and seek their mercy.”

  Angelika bleakly laughed.

  “It is not us they truly seek vengeance against,” said Franziskus. “It is the barbarians—the savages who made this war on them. How many men do you think they’ve lost? We must make them see that, whatever crimes we have committed, we are not the enemy. Beheading us will not return their beloved dead to life.”

  Angelika crossed her arms. “I won’t bow and scrape to Curran, or any bully.”

  “He’s not a villain. He’s a decent townsman, scourged by grief.”

  “He stuck a spearhead in my face.”

  Franziskus attempted to take her hands in his, but she resisted, turning away from him. “I’m not asking you to prostrate yourself before them, or to beg. Just let me do the talking. Sheathe that cutting tongue of yours.”

  She nodded, but he was by no means certain she could bring herself to do it.

  The Gerolsbruch Swordsmen, now incorporating a third of the Chelborg Archers and nine soldiers separated from other units, marched east, towards the mountains on a route set to take them past the village of Hochmoor. Jonas rode in front of the column whilst Emil paced his steed so that he was sometimes at the rear, other times beside the middle ranks, and, on occasion, at his superior’s side. Like most sword companies, the Gerolsbruchers cultivated a reputation as a high-spirited bunch, but now they were silent. Dark clouds clung to the sky like a low ceiling. Sparks of lightning skittered through them, but the threatened thunder never came. Heavy winds flapped at the soldiers’ cloaks. The swordsmen, who took a peacock’s pride in the splendour of their wide-brimmed hats, had surrendered to the grabbing wind, folding them away in their packs.

  They came to a river, and traversed alongside it. The river had ebbed down below the limits of its marshy banks. Cat tails, swamp gorse, and other wetland weeds, dried brown by the high summer sun, spiked up along them. In the far distance, ahead and to the right and left, rounded hillsides sloped.

  About half an hour before, Jonas had become aware of a nervous mannerism: he caught himself repeatedly gazing through his spyglass, directing it compulsively toward the horizon. Eventually he sensed that the men grew more quiet each time he did this. He’d accordingly resolved to keep the device in its place, hanging from his saddlebag, until confronted by something genuinely worth looking at. The mere cry of faraway wolves, for example, provided
no justification for panic. Now that he was first lieutenant, it was Jonas’ duty to present an image of solidity and dash to his men, even when he did not truly feel it. Most especially then.

  Jonas tensed. Hunched figures skulked in the reeds ahead. He saw a horned helmet and a barbarian shield. He tore his sword from its scabbard. “The foe,” he called. His eager horse responded, plunging headlong toward the stand of rushes. His swordsmen followed, blades out, screaming.

  Confronted with the oncoming hooves of Jonas’ steed, the would-be ambushers turned and fled. One fell under his horse’s churning legs. Jonas kept on, pursuing the second of them, leaving the trampled barbarian to be pierced by the points of his soldiers’ swords. Desiccated weeds slapped into his legs as he charged through them. Two Kurgan stood in the river’s calf-deep waters. One resumed his flight; the other threw back his head and roared in defiance, standing to receive Jonas’ charge.

  Jonas’ steed crashed boldly onward as the Kurgan lofted his axe. Water sprayed the air. The fleeing barbarian slipped below the river’s surface to swim for the other shore. Jonas reached his quarry and let his reins drop free to swing at him two-handed. The blow rang off the enemy’s ox-horned helm. The helmet fell down over the enraged man’s eyes; Jonas wheeled his steed to come in for another pass. Already his men were wading into the shallow river, ready to engage. Jonas rode past the Kurgan as he struggled to see, driving a mortal wound into the flesh of his back.

  On the other side of the river, the Kurgan climbed onto the banks. In the rushes there, the Chelborg Archers saw two more barbarians about to aid their comrade. Swiftly, they drew their bows and sent arrows slicing across the river at them. One found its mark between the shoulder blades of the swimming barbarian; he slumped. His fellows abandoned him, darting across a brushy field.

  The wading swordsmen made to pursue, but Jonas held up a hand to halt them.

  “Our post awaits us in the mountains,” he said. “This bunch is but poor meat for our hungry blades.”

  The men hurrahed him, and they continued on, cheered by their brief and sudden win.

  The escaped Kurgan lay flat in the grass. They had shamed themselves. They should not have run from an enemy, even when they were only a pair of warriors, facing an entire company of black-and-yellows. It was better to die than to flee. The two of them, if any of their tribesmen had seen them, would now be branded as mutaa—cowards, less than men. Women would spit in their faces. Men would treat them as dead.

  They rose and surveyed the brambly field around them. They stood, then slowly crept back toward the riverbank. The enemy army was disappearing from view ahead. They would follow it and attack.

  They opened their throats and bellowed then turned and ran at speed toward the riverbank.

  Behind them, a fiendish and familiar tattoo pounded out: the hoof beats of their chieftain’s eerie steed. The barbarians stopped in their tracks. As if from nowhere, as shadows pass across the sun, Ortak Nalgar appeared, booming toward them.

  He stood six feet and four inches tall. From his towering helmet, a rack of twisted iron antlers grew. Behind it flowed a mane of pitch-dark hair. Plate armour shielded him from head to toe, covered in a raised ornament of thorns and serpents. Jagged spikes sprouted from his knees and elbows. A pair of gargantuan swords crisscrossed his back.

  His mount was sized to carry his mammoth frame. It was not a horse, not exactly. In the sockets of its eyes, green orbs glowed. When it rode its master to battle, its cries were those of a roc or eagle. It was watchful, and malignant.

  As their war-chief came at them, the smaller of the two Kurgan conceived an idea. He turned on his companion and drove the three spikes that protruded from his wrist-guard deep into his throat. He held on tight as his battle-brother convulsed and died. The Kurgan felt no qualm—this man was, after all, a mutaa. A coward.

  The dead man flopped at his feet. The barbarian steeled himself as his chieftain approached. Ortak Nalgar slowly dragged a well-notched greatsword from the rough sheath across his back.

  The Kurgan spoke: “Oh mighty chieftain, this man was a mutaa, so I slew him. I saw him run from black-and-yellows, across this river.” He pointed.

  Ortak Nalgar turned his helmeted head. He saw the enemy warriors.

  He looked at the living man’s boots. They were coated with the same river mud as his slain comrade’s.

  Ortak Nalgar muttered a low command to his mount, not in the language of the steppes, but in an older, inhuman tongue. The horse-thing snaked its head forward, clamped its jaws around the marauder’s throat, and viced them shut. It shook its muscled neck; a grinding sound followed. The creature snorted and dropped the mutaa’s carcass to the ground.

  The Kurgan had a word for the weak, lazy, doomed men of the civilised lands: they were merely turm. Ortak Nalgar watched the last of the turm as they crossed the horizon.

  He’d received commands from Vardek Crom, the Chief of Chieftains, who had defeated the leaders of all the tribes, including Ortak Nalgar himself. He had business in the mountains. He had gathered many dislocated tribesmen in the hours since the battle; they would come with him.

  But first he would follow those turm, and see where they led him.

  Angelika and Franziskus spent several hours in their makeshift cell, tensely resting themselves. Finally, the snap of a key in the door lock brought them to attention. Angelika pressed to the wall by the door frame, in case whoever stepped through it was sufficiently incautious to let her out behind him.

  Curran inched prudently in, preceded by his spear. Angelika shifted instantly to a pose of casual boredom, and pretended to have been startled by his entrance. He edged into the room, spearhead trained on Angelika, but alert to Franziskus’ position, too. Deely followed, to put his spear at Franziskus’ back. Angelika couldn’t help but admire their technique. Rustic townsmen they might be, but they put to shame many of the supposed professionals who’d tried to keep her prisoner. They were good because they were unsure, and so remembered to fear her.

  The halflings prodded their prisoners out into the old fort and through its broken entryway. Gathered around it were dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, townsfolk, divided equally between humans and halflings. The human men wore unassuming, colourless tunics over plain leggings while their women dressed in drab and sack-like frocks. Their halfling counterparts preferred more elaborate garb, adding ruffles, fringes, lace and embroidery patterns to the outfits of male and female alike. Every garment, whether humble or showy, exhibited the fraying scars of repeated mending.

  Whatever good impression their frugality conveyed was, to Angelika, dispelled by their apparent desire to kill her. Women beheld her with seething rage; some spat as she was pushed out into the courtyard. Clean-faced children stared out with bald curiosity from behind the skirts of their mothers. The men grumbled to one another; Angelika, heard the word “strumpet”. The people pushed so tightly around her that Curran had to shout at them to make room. So much, thought Angelika, for avenues of escape.

  Townsmen dragged two long and battered benches from the fort out into the dirt. Children and an elderly woman lunged for them, but Curran shooed them off, declaring the benches as seating for the tribunal. Seven villagers shouldered through the crowd to take their seats. Angelika’s hopes sank when she saw women among them. Though esteemed as the more forgiving sex, Angelika was well-acquainted with the vindictiveness of wronged women. If these were new widows, the sentence would be death. Overall, the tribunal consisted of four humans and three halflings—only three of them male.

  Rickety chairs were provided; Franziskus and Angelika were shoved down into them. Angelika’s was sized for a halfling. Though shaped for an expansive backside, its legs were short, forcing her to sit with raised knees, like a mantis. Filch again showed off his mastery of knots, tying both prisoners’ wrists and ankles to their chairs.

  Curran led the proceedings, an unfairness that came as no surprise to Angelika. A lengthy preamble laid out the ru
les, the clauses of the village’s ancient charter that granted them the authority to mete out any sentence to defendants of lowly rank, such as themselves. Curran would declare the charges against them; they would be permitted to speak in their own defence, or to admit fault and plead for clemency. Then Curran could, if he so desired, question them to clarify their testimony. Witnesses might then be summoned by Curran to rebut any factual claims she or Franziskus might make. Then the tribunal would decide their fate. They could be acquitted, banned from ever again entering the village, maimed, or put to death.

  To refrain from saying that it would be a great favour to be eternally disallowed from again setting foot in Hochmoor required self-control of monumental proportions. Angelika congratulated herself for successfully exercising it.

  “Do the defendants have any questions regarding the rules I have just laid down?” intoned Curran. Angelika nodded distractedly, intent on studying the seven jurors, to see how they regarded him. She hoped for looks of boredom or, better still, of strained forbearance. Unfortunately, they all seemed rapt and attentive, and respectful of her prosecutor, Angelika shifted uncomfortably against the ropes that bound her to her chair.

  Curran told the jurors how he and his brothers had gone out to recover the remains of the heroically slain, only to discover two grave robbers desecrating the bodies. The jurors recoiled on their bench, lips curled. Behind them stood Filch, who seemed excited, and Deely, on whose face Angelika read the only mercy in the crowd. She wondered if Filch still had her daggers, and where Franziskus’ sabre might be. Then she saw the hilts of her knives sticking up from Deely’s belt. Could she maybe contrive a demonstration that would get her out of the chair, where she could seize a hostage?