He left the mare safely hidden in the woods and made several sojourns into the edges of the town where he would sit quietly in the corners of inns and drinking holes. On market days, he moved silently between barrows and stalls, listening to gossip, and, on the roads between the town and the local farms and villages, he tacked himself onto the ends of larger groups of traffic and listened to the stories that were spreading across the region.
Within a matter of weeks, as the days began to lengthen into a tired, pale form of spring, Gilead started to know who the enemy was and where he could be found. Whoever, whatever it was, clearly lacked Gilead’s skills. It did not avoid detection by tracking. It appeared to return to the same haunts over and over again, approaching the town from the same direction, being spotted, or imagined in a small area close to where Gilead had entered the town for the first time. The best, most reliable of the rumours all came from the same road into Bortz.
The spectre was humanoid, although its dimensions were exaggerated by the hysteria that had grown up around it. Had it been another elf, Gilead would have felt its presence. It had to be human, or some humanoid monster.
There were reports of it drifting away at twilight. It was said to be pale, deathly and ethereal, while being a strong fighter, and there were rumours of an impressive steed of the kind a warrior might ride.
Gilead spent two days in the woods tracking the creature. Its prints were clearly made by feet that were long and slender, large for a human man, but certainly not inhuman. Gilead tracked the horse, too, more often ridden than led, although, in the heaviest, most overgrown acres of the wood, two tracks wove side-by-side between the trees. The ground was otherwise undisturbed; there was no digging for roots to eat. Gilead found only the pale, scrawny carcasses of meatless rodents, bloodless and papery.
It was night when Gilead knew that he was close. It was the smell. It was like the smell of humans, but older and more decayed. There was a smell of dry graves, sepulchral, almost. There was a mingled scent of horse sweat, warm leather and grease. The earth smelled of a fire that had been lit and extinguished more than once, but which had cooked nothing, and of blankets used too often between laundering. Gilead almost mistook the whole for the smell of death, but human death did not smell like this, nor animal death, either. This was the antithesis of the death-smell.
Gilead ducked between the lowest branches of the trees that surrounded the tight, narrow area from which the smell emanated. He saw the horse, first, tethered to a tree, its head at full-stretch trying to reach fresh sources of grass to chew on. The horse looked up for the briefest of moments, and then bowed again to its purpose.
Confident the horse would raise no alarm, Gilead looked through the darkness beyond it to the curl of grey smoke that rose a foot or two above the tiny fire pit that shed the only light for miles. A figure sat, bent before the fire, its back to Gilead, its silhouetted elbow working small circles as its hands performed some monotonous task.
Gilead drew the shorter of his blades. There was little enough room to fight hand-to-hand, and none to wield a sword. He wondered for a moment whether a fight was necessary. Could he not simply kill the man, quietly, while his back was turned? It was not the elf way. Gilead would stand face-to-face with any foe, believing that his greater skill and longer practice would lead to the defeat of any opponent he met in mortal combat.
He ducked under the last of the branches overhanging the space in the wood that hardly qualified as a glade, making no effort to quiet his footsteps. Gilead noticed the gleam of metal in the dim firelight. The creature was polishing a large piece of armour, a cuisse or a pauldron. A helmet, adorned with a battered plume, sat on one side of the figure, and he appeared to be wearing a mail headpiece, although his chest and back were covered in nothing more than a loose shirt.
As Gilead took another step, the war steed’s head came up, and its ears flicked forward. The figure sitting at the fireside turned towards Gilead, stepping swiftly to its feet. It dropped the polishing cloth, and bent slightly at the knees to lower the section of armour that it had been polishing to the ground, keeping its gaze on Gilead.
Their eyes locked, and Gilead knew, at last, that this man had transcended human mortality. It had been a man once, but was no longer constrained by the passage of time or the decaying of the mind or body. This sham of a man, this facsimile of a noble knight, had faced death and been reborn. It was, perhaps, as long-lived as Gilead, and might live longer than any elf, unless Gilead could put an end to it.
The first blow came fast and cruel as the knight turned, swinging one foot high and wide to connect with Gilead’s shoulder. The knight had not removed his boots and a gleaming spur left a tight row of pinprick holes in the flesh of Gilead’s arm. The elf had expected to land the first blow, but he was quick to react, and blocked the knight’s kick just above the knee with his own foot, before too much damage was inflicted.
The knight was caught off-balance when the side of Gilead’s foot landed squarely against the inside of his thigh, and he had to wheel sharply to bring himself squarely in front of Gilead for another attack. Gilead brought his knife up, and wove quick movements into his assailant’s chest. The knight ducked and backed away from two of the passes, but a third made contact with the mail coif, covering his head and neck, but for which, the blade would have sliced a convenient artery in the knight’s neck.
The knight was strong and agile, and faster than any human, and it had been some time since Gilead had done serious battle. He had spent a considerable amount of time fighting humans, but always from a defensive stance, never intending to mark or maim, let alone kill.
Gilead caught the knight’s wrist as it propelled a roundhouse punch in his direction, but the knight was too quick, and twisted his fist, loosening the elf’s grip. Then the knight turned his back so that Gilead was behind him, at close quarters, and drove an elbow up hard under the elf’s ribs.
If Gilead had been human, that blow would have winded him and probably left him badly bruised with a couple of cracked ribs, but Gilead was not human.
Reflexively, as Gilead bent to lessen the impact of the blow, he thrust his knife-hand out, hoping to make contact with the knight’s hamstring. The knight had taken off most of his armour to clean it, so his legs were clad in nothing more protective than a leather-patched pair of breeches. He anticipated the elf’s move, however, and sat into the knife, so that the flesh of his buttocks took the worst of the injury, leaving his muscle and connective tissues intact.
The wound should have bled, fiercely, but Gilead was not surprised when his knife-hand did not come away slick and hot with fresh blood.
As the knight turned to face Gilead, a weak stream of dark liquid trickling down the back of his leg, the elf flicked his knife deftly from his right hand to his left, and thrust hard into the knight’s side before he had a chance to land another blow.
The knight barely faltered in his lunge towards Gilead, wrapping his arms around the elf’s waist and driving his protected head into his chest, bringing them both crashing hard to the forest floor. The mulch was not rich and thick on the ground as it might have been ten or a dozen years ago, and the pair fell heavily. Gilead, with his wiry frame, the tensile strength of his narrow bones vastly superior to a human’s, felt nothing very much, but the knight, landing hard, was winded. It gasped a stale breath of air up at Gilead, its eyes bulging slightly.
Only then did Gilead see the teeth. They were long and strong and as yellow as old ivory. In the split second the elf had to his advantage, he wondered whether this undead knight would bite him, whether one species could be sustained by the blood of another. Before the split second was over, Gilead rolled the body of the knight, until the elf was sitting on his chest, yanking the protective mail headpiece away to expose the knight’s head and throat.
Rather than resisting the removal of the small amount of protective clothing that might save him from the elf, the knight brought his feet up and dug his heels hard int
o the elf’s back, tearing Gilead’s shirt, and gouging long scratches to either side of his spine that would need good and careful cleaning if they were not to become infected.
The knight brought his hands up to grasp the elf around the neck. Gilead whipped his head around and brought it towards the knight’s face in a swinging arc, hardly able to believe that he had been driven to head-butting the creature. This was not dignified. This was not how an elf warrior fought.
Gilead jumped to his feet, freeing himself from the knight’s grasp. His shoulder smarted slightly, but adrenaline was kicking in and he felt no pain.
The knight did not stay long on the ground, and the two warriors were soon circling each other, marking out an arena in the tiny clearing.
As he stood, the knight grabbed his discarded mail headpiece and wrapped it around his right fist. Gilead threw his knife from one hand to the other, preparing to strike. His first swing was met by the mail glove, which shrieked with the impact.
Gilead turned, kicked high and then thrust low with his knife, but the knight saw the kick, and countered it with a low, lunging punch. Both combatants were unbalanced, and whirled away from each other to regroup.
Keen to gain some small advantage, Gilead unsheathed his sword. He would have to keep its hilt close to his body, and limit his movement, but he could keep the knight at a greater reach, and perhaps control the outcome of the battle.
The knight’s hand thrust down to the ground and scrubbed around for some kind of weapon. He was close to the fire, and a meagre pile of firewood. He picked a piece up, but discarded it immediately as useless.
As Gilead extended the tip of his sword towards the knight, ready to lunge, the knight’s hand fell on the cuisse that he had been polishing, and he brought it up like a shield, deflecting the tip of the sword, sending it out wide, where it peeled a ribbon of diseased bark from a tree at the edge of the clearing. Gilead pulled the sword hilt back into his body and adjusted his grip, wrapping his fingers firmly around the guard, shortening the weapon’s reach by several inches.
As Gilead worked his knife and his sword, flicking, extending, turning, jabbing, and, from time to time, sending the short knife away in stunning arcs to give it the momentum to do real damage to flesh and bone, the knight lunged with his improvised shield, parried, stopped the blades with his mail-wrapped hand, and sustained no penetrating injuries.
Gilead brought the knife across the knight’s cheek, taking off the tip of his nose, but he missed his eye entirely, and the wounds leaked only a little clear liquid. He brought the sword across the knight’s body at an angle and left a slice in his shirt, and chest, but, again, no real damage was done. Gilead wanted to see pink flesh and white bone, and was a little perturbed when he saw only a greenish-grey flap of skin.
After twenty or thirty minutes of Gilead’s fast-paced swordplay, and the knight’s impressive defensive moves, after battling it out in the clearing for longer than any fight should last, someone had to break the deadlock.
Gilead willed himself to succeed, but the pace and rhythm of the fight had begun to stagnate and the adrenaline in his system was long gone. He found it almost impossible to increase his pace.
The knight wearied of playing the defensive game and finally stepped things up. He let go of the end of the coif and let it drop in his hand so that he was holding one end of it. Without his head to shape it, the links of the mail fell into a rippling length of metal a yard long.
As Gilead thrust with his dagger, the knight swung the coif and brought it skittering against the length of the blade. The momentum of the swing wrapped the mail around the weapon and, to Gilead’s surprise, dragged it out of his grasp.
The knight dropped the coif in favour of the dagger. Both combatants had a blade, and the knight still had the advantage of an improvised shield.
Gilead, in a desperate effort not to lose the advantage, tilted his sword up in front of him and drove at the knight with the full weight of his body. The knight was recovering his footing having bent to pick up the blade, and was not ready for the onslaught. As he tried to remain standing, the knight dropped the heavy cuisse, and it crashed to the ground, tumbling over a pile of firewood.
At the edge of the clearing, the war steed made itself as small as possible between the trees, and lifted its head in a sympathetic whinny.
The elf and the knight fought each other in the tiny clearing for another hour. Blows were traded, blades were thrust and parried, and, once or twice, the knight and the elf were whisper-close to each other, the shorter knight’s glowing eyes, staring up into the elf’s steely ones.
Gilead had flashes of his shadow-fast capabilities, moments when he was everywhere at once, but still he could not best the fated creature that could not or would not die. They both bore wounds, some shallow and haphazard, others deeper and more threatening. The air was full of the grunts and cries of pain and triumph that punctuated their combat, and of a mixture of their scents; the sharp tang of adrenaline, the earthy blend of new sweat and old, and the sweet, clearwater smell that clung to the elf more strongly the harder he worked.
Then the dawn came.
Gilead did not see it, at first; he only heard it in the gentle early movements of the few creatures that still inhabited the woodland. Then he could smell the beginning of a new day, and feel it too. His senses better tuned to all things than a mortal man’s would be, the elf knew that the day was breaking. He also knew that with the new day would come the end of one or other of them. He knew that if he did not kill the undead knight, he would perish at his hand.
For the first time in a hundred years, Gilead wondered whether he could beat his opponent. If he did not, he would die on the blade of his own dagger, the weapon forged by his father’s armourer and given to him in a ceremony by his faithful companion, Fithvael, on the completion of his combat training.
A shaft of light found a low angle between the trees at the edge of the woodland and speared across the narrow clearing. Morning had broken.
REPARATION
Andy Smillie
Thorolf coughed, sending flecks of blood and filmy matter onto the dirt. Touching a hand to his aching ribs, he scolded himself for allowing the human to get so close. Human, the term barely applied to the gene-bulked creature growling at him from across the arena. The man’s, if he had been a man, musculature was swollen to insane proportions, his head lost between boulder-like shoulders. His nervous system had been replaced by a network of cables that poked through pallid skin like rusting veins, and his legs were powered by pistons sunk into the meat of enlarged thighs. In a century of warfare, Thorolf had yet to encounter such a nightmarish union of flesh and science. The chrono-gladiator had been quicker than his bulk belied, steaming into Thorolf to deliver a punch to the Space Marine’s midriff that would have killed him if it were not for the hardened bone structure and numerous implants his Chapter’s Apothecaries had gifted him. Even now, Thorolf knew his enhanced physiology was working to heal the internal injuries he’d sustained; his twin hearts pumping fresh blood to areas of trauma while his Haemastamen implant helped filter away dead cells.
‘We must keep our distance.’
Thorolf turned to look at his cell mate as auditory devices fashioned into the walls of the arena translated the lanky, blue-skinned xenos’s words into Gothic.
The chrono-gladiator rushed forward again, steam hissing from metallic vents sunk into its spinal column. Thorolf dived forward, throwing himself into a roll to evade the brute’s charge. The tau side-stepped left, flowing around the gladiator to slash a wide gash in its midriff as it thumped past. Thorolf was begrudgingly impressed; the tau wielded his weapon, a long pole-arm with a curved blade at each end, with enviable dexterity.
Ignorant of the wound, the chrono-gladiator reset itself and came at them again.
‘Aim for the cabling!’ Thorolf shouted to the tau and rushed forward to meet the chrono-gladiator head on, baiting him.
Nodding in affirmation, t
he tau circled round behind their opponent, whipping his blade up in a tight arc to slash through a host of the putrid tubes feeding the chrono-gladiator’s nervous system. Chemical-laden fluid spurted out from the severed cables, which writhed like pained serpents, spraying onto the tau’s exposed abdomen. Screaming in pain as the chemicals seared into his flesh, the tau dropped his weapon and stumbled backwards.
Pivoting with a speed that belied its size, the chrono-gladiator sunk a hammer-like fist into the tau’s jaw. The blow shattered the aliens mandible, caved the side of his face in, flipping him backwards through the air like a spent round.
Breathing heavily, the chrono-gladiator turned to face Thorolf. It fought to take a step forward as a shudder permeated its body, the vital fluid balancing its tortured musculature spilling out onto the ground.
Thorolf moved backwards, drawing the chrono-gladiator away from the tau, before darting around the walking-weapon to scoop up the tau’s pole-arm. Sticking one of the bladed-ends in the ground and snapping it off, the Space Marine fashioned himself a spear.
‘Your body has suffered enough. It’s time your soul bore some of the burden,’ Thorolf spat, hefting the spear and running full tilt at the chrono-gladiator.
The brute braced itself, flexing its biceps as it prepared to rip Thorolf in half.
A hair’s-breadth outside striking range, Thorolf threw the spear. The weapon hit home before the chrono-gladiator could react, punching into the soft flesh of the brute’s throat. Thorolf followed it in, diving elbow first into the chrono-gladiator and knocking it to the ground.
The Space Marine recovered first, righting himself and driving the spear further through the gladiator’s neck, pinning it to the ground.
Dark ichor ran from the gladiator’s mouth as it reached for the spear but again Thorolf was faster, hammering his fists into the brute’s deltoids and smashing its shoulder joints. With both of its arms disabled, the gladiator’s legs flayed helplessly, its torso twitching in shock as it died.
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