by David Guymer
And to the victor, the spoils.
The mounds of bodies grew higher and closer together as Kolya and Makosky rode on. The savagery of their slaying seemed to increase correspondingly. These Kurgan had seen the brutality of death before it found them, and not all of them were dead. There were at least two men writhing about that Kolya could see, viscera-soaked and wailing like newborns. Makosky spat on a dying northman’s forehead. Kolya shuddered, clutching at Kasztanka’s mane.
Chaos had come to the oblast. Not its armies, they had been and passed, but Chaos itself. The essence of it. The Time of Changes. Kolya could feel it in his bowels, and somewhere in that clangour of combat the Blood God was laughing.
‘Enough, Boris,’ Kolya murmured.
Through the blizzard, he could just make out the battle ahead. Grey figures both mounted and on foot swirled through the snow. Horses brayed. Screams disconnected to any obvious living thing were birthed, beaten bloody, and then buried under shadowplay swipes of wood and steel.
The business of calming Kasztanka’s nerves left Kolya no room to notice his own. He had been resigned to this fate since before the Tobol Crossing. Kislev was the land, and the land was beaten. His family in Dushyka had mourned him when he had ridden out with the rota, but he had not thought to mourn for them and had likely outlived them all.
But now that his moment was here he found that this headless chicken was not yet ready to stop running.
He didn’t bother to pray. When a fool prayed to Ursun it was his own arm that got bitten. Instead, he filled his lungs and issued the war cry of Dushyka. Stefan would know what it meant.
‘Dzie dobry,’ said Makosky with a wild smile.
It meant goodbye. Or alternatively, die well.
Kolya supposed that it did not matter.
Both men noted the crest of orange hair that emerged from the grey of the melee, though neither gave it any mind as they kicked in their spurs and charged.
‘Pull it. Do it fast.’
Stefan Taczak gripped the pommel of his saddle, the kvass still hot in his mouth, as the lancer tightened his grip around the brush of fletching sticking out of his shoulder. Stefan tensed against the pain but didn’t cry out. That had come earlier, when the two men had removed pauldron, bevor and rerebrace and wielded knives to his leather aketon and furs to expose the wound to the cold. Worse was coming. The shaft was lodged in his gardbrace, but the head had not gone far enough through the bone to penetrate the back of the piece.
There was no way to remove the plate. The arrow would to have to come out the same way it had gone in.
The lancer teased the shaft to unfasten it from the bone. Stefan’s chest heaved and he pulled back, but the second man had his horse beside him, an arm tight around his waist. A wooden cup appeared at his lips and kvass spilled down his chin. His shoulder felt as if it were being levered from his neck. He screamed through his teeth.
‘Faster than that, damn it!’
With a spurt of blood and a shredding pain, the shaft came free. Stefan slumped against Biegacz’s neck and there, he shuddered. Again that wooden cup appeared before him, but this time he found the strength to turn it away. There was a battle still to be fought, and he had already drunk more than his share.
With trembling fingers he picked at the strappings of his gardbrace and let the piece fall. After the pain he felt hollow, as if this was a dream or he had just been woken from one. With a hiss, he hoisted his left arm so it lay across the saddle and his hand could grip the pommel. The lancer with bloodied fingers, a short man with a snow-leopard pelt over his shoulder, took Biegacz’s reins, but Stefan warned him off, then sat up and handed the lancer his szabla so he could handle his own reins.
‘I am a marszałek of Kislev. I will not have my own horse led for me.’
Meanwhile the second lancer, an older rider in cunningly filigreed but painfully dented three-quarter plate, swung down from the saddle and set about recovering the discarded pieces of Stefan’s armour. The sight of it, the pride, wealth, and beauty of Dushyka just lying there, turned his stomach and made his shoulder throb anew. He said nothing though, merely grunted gratitude as the man secured it amongst Biegacz’s saddlebags. As long as her rota wore it with courage, then Kislev lived.
‘Did you hear that, marszałek?’
A shrill cry carried through the snow and the dulled murmur of distant battle. The cry of a chimera. Stefan mouthed a prayer for his brother. And for Kislev.
Kolya and Makosky charged into the hated Kurgan. There was no cohesion to the Kurgan’s ranks, and the two lancers punched through, men falling under their hooves like so many matryoshka dolls. Their wings wailed like dying men. Kolya belted out his war cry as he lashed out with his pallascz. The huge blade was for stabbing rather than slicing. It had no cutting edge and without the power of a charge was essentially a six-foot steel mallet. A northman with a bearskin cloak and a flail staggered into range, dazed, blood streaming down his face from the backswing of Makosky’s nadziak. Kolya hacked his pallascz across the man’s skull, then parried a groin-stab from an adze. He jawed the marauder with a booted stirrup and, with a shift of weight and a yell, bade Kasztanka to side-step into the man, trampling him and throwing down those beside him. He was getting bogged down, but through sheer force of will and ferocity, Makosky had driven himself a horse-length ahead.
‘Back,’ Kolya yelled. They were too lightly armoured to survive a melee, and their weapons were not designed for that style of attritional combat. He slid his weight back across the saddle and drew on the reins. Kasztanka whinnied in fright, trailing coloured ribbons like a prize mare to market, as she tried to turn through the raging crush of northmen. ‘Withdraw and charge again.’
But Makosky was not listening. His nadziak tore a fistful of blood from a Kurgan’s face and cast it over the melee. His horse managed another step.
‘The blood of Kislev returns for you, daemon!’
The press before the former trapper thinned. The Kurgan fought with a demented savagery, like rats fleeing a burning tirsa, but Makosky forced his horse in and through them. And then Kolya saw it, the killer that passed raspotitsa on its own road of blood and looked in no mood to be halted now. Its look was one of stony-faced barbarity, so accustomed to slaughter and pain that it felt neither the dead that piled around its feet nor the blades that found their way past its enormous axe. The glowing light of viscera-red runes only made the weapon look even more hellish than it already was. The fighter slammed the flat of that axe into the legs of the marauder beside him. Both knees shattered, the man’s face becoming a rictus roar as a cannonball fist crushed his groin, doubling him over and hurling him back. Its hard face was crossed with brutal tattoos. One eye was covered with a patch. Its orange crest of hair was torn, its bare torso covered in cuts old and new.
It was a dwarf!
Kolya’s mind whirled, the dwarf’s axe moving so fast it defied the injunction to be in one place at one time. Kolya might have thought it some runic illusion but for the death it reaped. A northman in blue-painted leather armour raised his twin swords in warding as the dwarf’s aura of steel came upon him. The man fell apart like butcher’s cuts. The dwarf’s one eye was a cut gem of fury. It no longer recognised friend from foe.
‘Boris! Stop!
Too late.
The dwarf ducked the swing of Makosky’s nadziak and the charge of his horse and, with such casualness that he seemed to be fighting through something thinner than air while all around him laboured, swung back with his axe to tear out the lancer’s entire right side between hip and ribs. Blood fanned from the wound. The horse charged on until Makosky went down like a felled tree.
‘Gospodar,’ Kolya roared, thumping his breastplate for emphasis as the dwarf came on.
It was still too tight for Kasztanka to turn. In panic, he had her side-step away. The dwarf’s axe cut through a spear-armed m
arauder, then wove around his falling body to strike at Kolya. Kasztanka reared, spooked by the blood reek of him, and the dwarf’s axe clove through her fetlock instead of Kolya’s knee-joint. Screaming, she made a three-legged jerk backwards, thrashing her bleeding stump until, unbalanced and terrified, she fell chin-forward into the snow.
Holding her to the end when he might have jumped clear, Kolya went down with her. His cuisse buckled around his thigh, but did not break. His feathered harness snapped and jackknifed over him as the side of his helm hit the back of a fallen Kurgan’s adze. He felt none of it, but his heart cried with hurt as he drew his leg out from beneath the struggling horse. She kicked once more, and then she whom he had loved since she was a foal, she who had so often been brave when tormented by wicked spirits, was at peace.
Weeping tears of rage, Kolya swept up the adze that he had landed on. It was an unfamiliar weapon, a long wooden haft with a curved blade at the top. It could have been a rock and he would have blessed Ursun for its delivery. Hatred filled him, made him so hot that his skull buzzed with it. All that he had persevered for through devastation and damnation had been taken away. His stinging eyes found the dwarf.
Let every spirit that had ever plagued Kasztanka know.
He would have blood for this.
‘What is this?’
Stefan Taczak stared around the Kurgan camp in disbelief. Surrounding a firepit, and the bodies of the handful of guards the northmen had thought sufficient to defend it from an impassable and already-conquered steppe, was a half-ring of wagons. There were five of them in all, open rear sections turned into unroofed cages by hammering long spears point-down into the boards. Furs had been draped over the outer side of the cages to protect the occupants from the worst of the wind and snow. That in itself was reason for confusion. The Kurgan would not treat even their own wounded with such consideration. But it was those occupants that dragged open his jaw.
A boy in the torn vestments of an initiate of the cult of Dazh lay apparently sleeping in the corner of one, beside the hooded and trembling figure of what appeared to be a cave-goblin shaman. There was an ogre firebelly, sitting alone in a wagon filled with the chewed bones of what might once have been five or six other men. There was another goblin, a beastman bray-shaman, a mutant sorcerer, college men from the south with foul-smelling robes and haggard beards. Stefan mumbled an oath to Ursun. The Shirokij wise woman had been but one of many. This warband had been pillaging sorcerers and scholars from all over Kislev, even stealing from their own and carrying them north.
Why? What awaited them there?
‘The King of Praag, marszałek.’
A hunchbacked old crone with ice-white hair pinned with a glittering jet spider brooch crouched by the bars of the wagon that she shared with the cave-goblin and the initiate of Dazh. It stank of excrement, but the filth did not seem to touch her. Her layered skirts were of black silk. The curve of her spine gave her the appearance of a hunting insect, an impression compounded by the glittering, almost faceted eyes that peered out from their ancient web of lines. The way those eyes pierced him was a reminder of why even the Ungol shunned and revered their wise women in equal measure. Theirs was the power to perceive taint in all its hidden forms. Small wonder then that Kolya and Makosky had been so keen to put themselves out of sight and out of mind.
‘Marzena,’ Stefan murmured, averting his eyes from the hag’s stare. He had the itching sense that judgements were being passed on his soul. ‘Forgive me, wise woman, that I do not show greater respect. I fear that if I dismount, I will not be able to climb back up.’
The wise woman cackled. ‘Do I look like a tzarina to you, Stefan Taczak? Is the weakness of your body all you can think of? Has it been so long that you have forgotten to heed the words of your wise woman?’
‘No,’ said Stefan, quickly signalling to his two lancers to find a way to get the hag out. There was no obvious gate in the wall of spears. The goblin shifted to the far side as one of them picked up a fallen battleaxe and tested its edge. ‘Forgive me again, Marzena, but Praag does not have a king.’
‘You could once both wield a blade and guide a horse. This is the Time of Changes. Does denying it let you raise your arm again?’
Stefan shook his head.
‘Hurry then and free me. It is not you that the spirits showed to me.’
‘We have pursued you all the way from Uvetsyn.’
Marzena gave a delphic smile of daggered teeth. ‘Did you think you were the only one?’
Kolya pushed through the press of northmen, just one more screaming warrior in the churn, and swung his stolen adze for the dwarf’s head. The dwarf smashed an axeman’s shin with a single kick, rolled from the stab of a horseman’s spear, and met Kolya’s adze mid-stroke. On colliding with the dwarf’s rune-axe, his primitive weapon simply shattered. Bits of iron flew from the useless haft of wood before Kolya could throw it down and stagger back, his buckled cuisse refusing to bend properly at the knee. A Kurgan berserker saved his life, charging into the dwarf’s path with a short spear. His life ended with a tearing of meat and a bone shudder. Kolya ducked behind the man, and bent to take the axe from the warrior with the broken shin just as the dwarf ripped his rune-axe from his enemy’s gut and kicked the dead man aside.
Kolya dragged a northman between them and shoved him into the dwarf’s path. The man practically fell onto the dwarf’s rune-axe and Kolya swung for the dwarf’s temple while it was stuck in the marauder’s belly. The dwarf was quick though, too quick for one so huge. He tilted back his thick trunk of a neck, Kolya’s axe shaving the bloodstains from his beard, merely grazing his temple and instead slicing through the thong that secured his eye patch. The scale of black leather flapped to the ground to be trod into the mire by a Kurgan warrior who was mercilessly hacked open.
The dwarf clapped his hand to his gaping socket and roared like a bull.
Kolya chuckled blackly, spinning his axe until it hummed. He favoured the axe no more than the adze, but in his wanderings he had been forced to defend himself against worse with less.
‘I have fought your kind on the plains of Zharr, dwarf. I do not fear you.’
Muscles flowing like plates of molten rock, the dwarf charged.
The rune-axe struck Kolya’s blade like a boulder from a catapult and threw him a foot through the air with a titanic clang of metal. He stumbled, ears and fingers ringing in tune, holding onto his wits only just enough to dodge the follow-up that would have severed his elbow had he been a second slower. Kolya ducked and spun low, sweeping for the dwarf’s ankles. The dwarf jumped the blade, landed his lagging foot on the axe, then kicked Kolya hard enough across the jaw to shatter half the teeth on that side. For a second it felt as though his neck was going to tear away from his shoulders, but then the rest of his body screwed into the air and he was sent piling into a group of Kurgan warriors.
That seemed to be enough for the northmen. They had just seen one dwarf demolish their warband and a rota of Kislevite lancers at the same time and they did not like it one bit. One by one, they began to break and run.
Kolya pulled off his helm and spat out teeth, searching through the blood and guts for another weapon. By the stinking remains of a Kurgan horse, he found a bow and, after rolling over it to put its bulk between him and the dwarf, a quiver. The fletches were globbed with blood, but they would not have to fly far.
Retreating, he nocked a shaft to the bow and drew back. It was a horse-archer’s bow, a composite recurve of maple, horn, and sinew, designed to pack maximum power into something that could be fired from horseback. It was still less powerful than a proper longbow or crossbow, but more than enough to drop a dwarf at ten paces.
The dwarf jumped onto the horse’s flank and Kolya loosed.
The arrow punched the dwarf’s chest, the force pushing the dwarf’s shoulder around to the left, but did no more obvious damage than that. Cur
sing, Kolya nocked a fresh arrow, drew, and fired again. Again, the arrowhead thumped into the iron of the dwarf’s pectoral muscle. The dwarf’s bruised lip curled into a sneer as he jumped down from the horse.
Snarling, blinded to the fur-clad men in full flight all around by his hunger for vengeance, Kolya prepared a third arrow. This one he aimed right between the dwarf’s eyes. He drew back until the recurved ends groaned and his fingers shook with the strain.
Shrug this off, you murderous dastard.
‘Kolya, you will hold!’
The sound of his name on a harsh, woman’s croak made him flinch. His fingertips trembled on the bowstring. He didn’t release it, but nor did he lower it. The dwarf leered, but he too did not move, as if Kolya’s arrow had him pinned. Instead, he ran his thumb down the blade of his axe until it bled. Kolya met the dwarf’s stare, fire on rock. Acid burned inside his arm. His fingers were numb. He would do it. He would do it now.
‘Do as you are told, child,’ spat the hag again.
‘Please, brother.’ Stefan’s voice. ‘It is Marzena. Do as she says. Can you not see it is a dwarf?’
‘This is not a dwarf,’ Kolya growled. ‘It is a fiend from the frozen depths of the Wastes.’
With his one baleful eye the dwarf glared. Blood trickled from the gaping socket of the other. And suddenly, Kolya could match it no longer. With a distraught cry, he let his arm drop and loosed his shot into the ground. The dwarf just grunted.
Snorting in disgust, Biegacz picked his way through the snow and into the ring of corpses. Stefan guided him with one hand on the reins. Behind him, the old crone Marzena rode side-saddle in a nest of black skirts and spiderweb hair. Kolya emptied the remainder of his quiver and dropped his bow. He had never disobeyed a wise woman since he had been a boy. The dwarf shifted his stance so that his axe could cover the three of them equally and growled like a beast.