Shattered Shields - eARC

by Jennifer Brozek

  “What’s that?” Jurgen’s head whipped toward the sound as he freed himself from a tangle of dead bodies.

  Ambros shook his head before realizing Jurgen wouldn’t see the gesture. “Let’s go the other way.”

  They climbed back down the hill, where Ambros once again opened the lantern’s hood. They moved away from the dreadful sounds they heard and found a dying horse lying atop its dead rider. The animal’s legs were shattered, slick with blood.

  The horse wheezed and blew, too weak to scream. Jurgen’s lip trembled.

  Ambros went to the dead knight and found the sword lying under his cold body. He pulled it free and examined it, finding no eitr. He took the sword to Jurgen.

  “You know what to do.”

  Jurgen tried to take the sword in two hands, but the grip was too short. He knelt beside the horse and stroked its neck. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”

  He stood and raised the sword. Ambros watched because he felt he should. When it was done, Jurgen turned to walk away, sword still in hand.

  “Jurgen,” said Ambros.

  The giant shook his head as if waking from a bad dream. He threw the sword down and walked on.

  Kaspar whistled like a nightingale. It wasn’t a half-bad call, but Ambros never thought anyone would mistake it for a real bird. He and Jurgen went to the sound. They found Kaspar crouched over a headless peasant, a pitchfork still in his grip.

  Kaspar gave Ambros one of those looks he could never understand. It was as if he wanted the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. Finally, Ambros gave up guessing. “What?”

  Kaspar gestured to the severed neck. Ambros still didn’t understand. He shrugged.

  “Someone took this head after the battle,” Kaspar whispered.

  Once he pointed it out, Ambros saw how fresh the blood looked, and how little had poured out of the wound. He lowered his voice. “How long?”

  “Minutes.”

  They heard another voice, this one sweeter than their own. It was the voice of a woman. “Manfred! Otto!”

  “Looking for her sons,” said Jurgen. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. In the lantern light, Ambros saw tracks on the giant’s dirty face. Jurgen loved a fight. He hated to kill animals, even for mercy.

  “She shouldn’t be out here alone,” said Ambros. He thought of his mother, whom he had left with her new husband ten years ago. By the time he heard of her death, the murderer was already gone, conscripted.

  “Forget about her,” said Kaspar. “She’s none of our concern.”

  Ambros didn’t like it, but he knew Kaspar was right. The eitr from the mace was as good a find as they had ever had, but its presence hinted at more. One well-armed knight seldom went to battle without others at his side.

  They resumed the search. Ambros heard the jingle of coins as Jurgen took a purse from a fallen soldier. Kaspar brought a dagger back to examine under the lantern, but it was only silvered, not enchanted. He made it disappear wherever it was he kept his other blade. Ambros had never figured out whether it was tucked into his belt or hidden up a sleeve. Sometimes he thought maybe there were several knives. Sometimes he thought maybe Kaspar was a magician.

  They reached another edge of the battlefield, where they found fewer and fewer bodies until only the dew-kissed grass lay before them. They turned back, heading toward the center of the conflict they had heard from a safe distance the night before.

  They found a crater where some spell had turned the men standing there into a thin red spray surrounding the blast. Nearby they found the hacked bodies of men who had died long before the battle began, their withered flesh gray and tough as leather.

  “The necromancer’s men,” whispered Kaspar. His sudden appearance startled Ambros. One look at Kaspar’s face told Ambros that he had come to the lantern not to frighten him but for comfort. Dangerous as he appeared to others, Kaspar was no less dreadful of the enemy.

  “It can’t be,” said Ambros, without much hope. “It was only last fall they found him at Whitepool.”

  “Who else conscripts the dead?”

  No one, thought Ambros.

  Jurgen came galumphing over, his thick hands cupping some small treasure, a terrifying grin on his face. Ambros knew the expression indicated joy, but only because he had known the man since they were boys.

  “Eitr!” cried Jurgen. He held out his hands to reveal four talismans and a ring, all with intricate traces of silver-blue metal.

  Kaspar shushed the giant.

  Ambros raised the lantern over the jewels. It was indeed eitr in the filigree and mixed into the lacquered ornaments. Set upon the ring was a brilliant blue stone that drew Kaspar’s hand like a moth to the light. He hesitated before touching it, deferring to Ambros and his athame.

  Producing the bowl and flask once more, Ambros bent to do his work. Sometimes he had wondered why Kaspar did not simply kill him and steal the athame for himself, but he suspected the older man feared the magic of the ritual knife.

  Ambros had feared it, too, at first. But once he learned its simple function, and his aunts had drilled him in the careful handling of the liquid eitr, which must never touch his skin, he shed some of his fear. Yet he knew the others watched him work as if he were performing magic. The truth was that he had simply learned a chore. He was privy to no mysteries. He knew no secrets, except the one: it is power to let others believe you know mysteries.

  He laid the bowl on the ground and studied the ring. This one was tricky, because the filigree completely encircled the ring, winding around either side of the gem. Fortunately, there were only a few dead-ends in the design. Ambros could draw a single stroke across most of the eitr, losing only the smallest fraction inert.

  After plotting the course in his mind, he placed the ring on his thumb and set the athame against the filigree.

  “What are you doing?”

  So close and unexpected, the woman’s voice startled him. With a silent prayer that Jurgen and Kaspar stood ready to defend him, Ambros continued to draw the tip of the athame across the eitr. He dared not spare the woman even a glance lest he lose the rest of the precious material.

  He heard Jurgen stomping nearby. “You stay back,” he said. He sounded so angry that Ambros knew he was frightened. “Go look for your husband somewhere else.”

  Ambros couldn’t stand it any longer. He peered to the side, hoping for a glimpse of the woman. What he saw almost made him drop the ring into the bowl.

  His first impression was of a famine-thin woman wearing one of the wide skirts he had seen only in puppet shows of noble ladies. But it was not a skirt that hung around her waist. They were bags, all of different colors and materials. One was a burlap sack stained dark red with its bulbous contents. Another looked like silk, and upon its surface grew the blood-red impression of a human face: chin, cheeks, nose, and brows.

  All together there were five or six bags hanging from the woman’s waist, each sagging with the weight of a human head, fresh carved from its body.

  The woman didn’t look strong enough to carry so much weight. Her limbs were reed thin, although Ambros saw tough sinews beneath her parchment-colored skin. Her hands were dark with blood, her naked feet stained black. Only her hair seemed out of place, long and dark, combed and clean as if just dried from a river bath.

  “Go away!” Jurgen insisted.

  “Hush,” said the woman. “Let him finish.” Her voice was soft as a summer breeze. Somehow it calmed Ambros even as her appearance horrified him.

  He finished his tracing, leaving only a few short curls of eitr remaining in the ring’s shallow trench. The woman stepped closer. Jurgen moved to block her path.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  “Nnn—” Jurgen began to protest, but he couldn’t finish even such a short word. He stepped aside.

  Ambros smelled blood and corruption as the woman moved closer.

  He poured the precious eitr into the flask and sealed it. He returned the bowl to the b
ag but kept the flask in hand.

  The woman was much shorter than he’d first thought, the top of her head barely as high as his chin. Her face looked younger, too, except for her sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.

  She moved closer still. Jurgen raised a hand to grab her, but he withdrew it as if touching some unseen nettles. He sucked his fingers and stumbled back, eyes wide.

  She moved her face close to Ambros’s face, as if to kiss him. He felt dizzy, confused, unable to resist. But she did not touch him with her lips. She sniffed at his neck, then lower, above his heart.

  “You have a talent,” she said. “You are worth something more than these other scavengers.”

  “What do you want?” said Ambros. “Why are you taking these heads?”

  Before she could answer, Kaspar’s knife appeared at her throat. His fingers clutched her hair and jerked her head to the side.

  “No!” cried Ambros. For no reason he could understand, he feared for Kaspar, not for the woman he threatened.

  “She’s taking them for ransom,” said Kaspar, his lips close to the woman’s ear. “Isn’t that right?”

  She smiled, her lips as sharp as Kaspar’s blade. “No,” she said, drawing out the syllable long and slow. “Not exactly.” She looked at Ambros, seeming unconcerned about the knife at her throat. “Do you know what I’m doing?”

  Ambros had no idea. His aunts had told him many mad stories, and like everyone he had learned even more tales of witchcraft from the pantomimes of traveling players. Then he remembered another puppet show, one about the necromancer, who lopped off the heads of his foes only to gather them afterward.

  The woman’s gaze pierced his thoughts. As her thin smile widened, Ambros felt as though she had somehow seen his crazed suspicion. If she said it aloud, if she proved she could read his mind, he knew he would go insane. To save himself, he said it first.

  “You are conscripting soldiers.”

  Her smile widened more, impossibly more, and she bit her lower lip like a girl flirting with an older boy. She nodded, despite the tight dark line Kaspar’s knife pressed into her skin.

  Ambros raised the flask of eitr. “This is worth many bags of coins.”

  “It is worth far more than that,” she said. “It is worth a man’s life. A lord’s life. A thousand lives.”

  “Take it. Just take it, and leave us in peace.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” snapped Kaspar. He slashed his knife across the woman’s throat and shoved her to the ground.

  Ambros gasped. Jurgen hopped and babbled, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.” Even Kaspar paled as he looked down at the woman, realizing he had done a thing more dreadful than murder.

  The woman struggled for a moment, her body rising and falling as she tripped over the wet bags hanging from her waist. Her hand went to her throat, or so it seemed until she finally stood to reveal no blood flowing from her neck. No wound at all. She blew upon a whistle of bone.

  Ambros heard no sound, but the hairs on his nape stiffened like pine needles. He felt a sudden warmth nearby and looked up at the closest hillock.

  There stood a mastiff as large as a wild boar. Ambros blinked, unable to comprehend the other thing that was wrong about the beast. Before he understood, a man’s head fell away and rolled down the hill toward him. Ambros felt all his muscles spasm at the sight of what lay beneath the place where the head had been.

  Where a dog’s neck should be, a great vertical maw ran between the mastiff’s shoulders. Dagger-sized teeth interlaced as the weird mouth closed like a bear trap where it had a moment earlier held a man’s head in place.

  “Otto,” said the woman. Ambros turned to see her point at Kaspar. “Fetch.”

  The mastiff charged. Kaspar stood fast. Holding his knife before him, he looked not at the beast but at Ambros. “I’m sorr—” he tried to say before the monster struck. Its wide maw opened, engulfing Kaspar’s head.

  “No, dog, no, dog, no, dog, no!” Jurgen screamed. He fell to his knees.

  The woman pointed again. “Manfred, fetch!”

  Jurgen never saw the second mastiff coming.

  Ambros stared aghast at his friends’ bodies. The mastiffs lingered near them, their headless bodies grumbling as they struggled with their meals. Instead of swallowing, the mastiffs opened their hideous maws. Kaspar’s head appeared first, wet and bloody as a newborn, rolling until it faced forward before the jaws clamped down to hold it in place.

  The man’s eyes blinked twice, then opened wide to look at the woman.

  “What is his name?” she asked.

  “Kaspar.” A moment later, the second mastiff choked, and Jurgen’s face appeared upon its shoulders. Without waiting for the question, Ambros said, “Jurgen.”

  “Kaspar, Jurgen, heel.”

  The mastiffs obeyed, their human heads sniffing at the woman’s dirty ankles.

  Numb with terror and some nameless other emotion, Ambros turned, expecting to see a third mastiff rushing toward him. Again, the woman looked inside him and found his thoughts.

  “You are not for the dogs,” she said. “Come.”

  She offered him her bloody hand. Looking down at her, Ambos remembered looking up at his mother as she pulled him across that first battlefield.

  “Come,” the woman repeated. She took his warm dry hand in her cold wet hand and drew him away from the headless corpses of his friends. “I shall present you to the earl.”

  Bonded Men

  James L. Sutter

  A single arrow in flight is almost silent. Put a thousand of them in the air at the same time, however, and the whole sky sizzles like bacon fat on a skillet.

  Crouched low, Coreo listened to that hiss, the sound of clothyard shafts piercing the very air itself. At last they hit, deadly metal drummers beating their thunderous tattoo on the thin layer of wood protecting the warriors.

  “You love this part, don’t you?”

  Coreo looked up at Jain. The taller man’s shield overlapped his own, forming a roof over their heads.

  “You’re smiling,” Jain said.

  Coreo shrugged. “As a child, I’d sit up all night listening to the rain pound the roof. It’s soothing.”

  Jain laughed and reached down with his free hand, stroking the back of Coreo’s neck. “Only you, Coreo. Only you.”

  Up and down the lines, screams rang out or died in bloody gurgles as the barrage found homes in flesh, yet the area just around the two warriors was a sea of tranquility. Packed tight beneath the canopy of their shields, the two hundred men of the Bonded Legion showed no signs of the panic reigning elsewhere among the troops.

  “Hey, Coreo!” A grizzled soldier a few men over from their position stood with his tower shield held casually overhead, as if it were no heavier than a parasol. “When are you going to get Jain to leave off with that oversized butcher’s cleaver? Makes it look like he’s compensating for something.”

  It was an old joke. Coreo reached out and pointedly grabbed Jain’s meaty thigh. “Trust me, Barcas, it’s not compensation—it’s an advertisement.”

  Barcas laughed. “I’ll believe it when I see it!”

  “The hell you will!” That was Barcas’s own partner, a spearman named Hosch. His elbow caught Barcas in the ribs.

  “Besides,” Barcas continued, ignoring the blow, “it’s not size, it’s how you use it.” Barcas was a dagger man, who did his fighting up close and personal.

  “Just keep telling yourself that,” Jain said.

  From the center of the shield wall, Captain Dorson’s voice cut them off. “Infantry’s broken ranks! They’re charging!”

  The waiting was almost over. Coreo looked to the other men. Some stood stone-faced. Others bore crazed grins. Coreo felt himself fall into the latter camp.

  Jain caught his eye and leaned in, kissing him quick and hard. “Luck.”

  Coreo considered grabbing the big man’s blond ponytail and bringing him down for another, but Dorson’s bellow rang out again.

  �
��Shields down!”

  With a roar, the men of the Bonded Legion dropped their shields and leapt to the attack.

  It was not the first exchange of the day. Already, the bodies of the enemy’s giants—sent in first to soften up Loremar’s lines with their huge spiked flails—lay putrefying in the sun’s heat, their armor-clad forms providing makeshift fortifications. To either side, battle lines stretched across the field of knee-high grass, Loremar’s soldiers a wave of green and black uniforms crashing against Eron the Pike’s black and crimson. Horns and shouts split the air as spears pierced or splintered and both sides got down to the bloody business at hand.

  There was no way to tell what was happening in the rest of the battle, but it didn’t matter. If there was one thing the Bonded Legion could count on, it was that wherever the empire sent them would be the hottest part of the fight.

  Ahead, a wall of men charged, racing across the last hundred yards of open field like a flash flood. Next to Coreo, Jain unsheathed his huge two-handed sword and lifted it over his head, screaming a wordless battle cry. The sight lit a fire in Coreo’s chest—it was at these times that he loved the big Northman most. Unsheathing his own sword—a short, wide-bladed weapon made for punching through leather and mail—Coreo joined the group’s howl; a wolf pack descending on their prey.

  Then the lines met, and the two charging forces became a seething, whirling mass of flesh and steel.

  Unfortunately for Eron’s men, chaos was where the men of the Bonded Legion did their best work. Even as the enemy commanders tried to maintain cohesion, the legion disintegrated, each Bonded pair spinning off to follow its own unique tactics.

  Jain charged into the fray, massive shoulders swinging more than four feet of blade in a glittering arc, not so much slicing through the advancing footmen as smashing them out of the way. Coreo, sword in his right hand and a round fighting shield strapped to his left arm, slid in easily behind him, guarding the taller man’s unarmored back. A blade came in from the side and he turned it easily, then stepped forward and rammed his blade into the wielder’s stomach. No need to get fancy—a gut wound was almost always fatal. As quickly as he’d moved in, Coreo recovered, resuming his position in Jain’s blind spot, turning with him as the big man continued to reap his bloody crop. He caught a brief glimpse of Barcas and Hosch, the latter using his spear to drag an officer from his horse while Barcas made short work of any who got too close, his twin daggers already dripping red. Then the crowd swirled again, and there was only the red and black of Eron’s men.