Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

His body lay heaped like a hillock on the plain south of Grey Vale. Dead, too, were the trolls, the wargs, the firbolgs, and the wild orcs. Dead were the murlogs of the Western Wyld, the drakes of Wyrmloft, the fang spiders of Widow’s Vale; dead were the spotted gnolls, the snaking basilisks, the lion-maned manticores, and every other fey and foul thing that had joined the giant’s Horde. Bloodeater princes lay gutted amidst piles of pale-skinned thralls. Bone-hags sprawled under pestilent cloaks, their bony fingers still clutching their futile talismans. Whole clans of ogres were scattered in pieces around their fallen chieftains.

  Dead. All of them, dead.

  The Brumal Horde was defeated, vanquished, utterly destroyed. Corpses, both monster and mercenary, littered the earth to the very limit of Tam’s sight. Smoke from the burning forest obscured most of the battlefield, and soon became so thick the band was forced to close their eyes and cover their mouths to avoid choking on the oily fumes.

  Tam heard Gabriel swear under his breath. “Doshi,” he growled, “take us down. We can’t fly in this, and I’d like to know what the hell happened here.”

  Once they’d landed, Gabe and Moog went in search of answers. “Don’t go far,” Gabe warned them before he left. “Once this smoke clears we’ll head for Slowhand’s.” He offered Rose a wan smile. “No need to keep Wren waiting longer than she already has.”

  Doshi and Roderick remained with the ship, while Tam shouldered her bow and set out after her bandmates, who picked a slow path through the carnage.

  Woodsmoke prowled the battlefield. It stung her eyes and scoured her nostrils, but she much preferred it to the sword-metal tang of blood layered beneath. Sounds echoed from all around them: harsh laughter, snatches of song, dying groans, and the wailing cries of the mortally wounded. Somewhere near (or far—it was impossible to tell), a man was calling out in search of missing comrades.

  There were mercenaries roaming the murk. Some were alone, gibbering quietly to themselves or their gods, but most were celebrating. They staggered among the littered corpses, pointing out goblins they’d hacked to pieces, urskin they’d slain, kobolds they’d bashed brainless with their shields.

  A column of Agrian regulars with long spears and square shields tramped past, followed shortly after by a file of whooping Carteans on sturdy steppe ponies. Their leader, a man with raven’s wings tattooed across his chest, dragged a shackled saurian on a chain leash behind him.

  The battlefield was already swarming with those who preyed on the dead. Alchemists came to harvest organs, priests to gather souls. Thieves crept from corpse to corpse, rifling pockets and looting weapons, cloaks, belts, boots, and anything else they could pawn back in town. Claw-brokers, on the other hand, sought prizes of a different sort. They sawed at horns, snapped off claws, pried away scales, and claimed every exotic pelt they could find.

  The scale-merchants had arrived as well. Tam saw trains of captive monsters being led through the smoke. Any creature fortunate enough to survive the day would be taken south to Conthas and sold off to wranglers in search of arena fodder.

  And, of course, there were crows. Everywhere Tam looked were bloodied beaks and glassy eyes, black feathers mired in pooling blood. Her uncle had once likened the battlefield scavengers to distant relatives showing up at a funeral: There’ll be more of ’em than you can count, he’d told her. Nothing draws a crowd like a free lunch.

  And what a feast, Tam thought, picking up the pace so as not to lose the others in the gloom. She nearly tripped over a hydrake’s severed neck. The beast was surrounded by scores of dead warriors, their bodies scarred by the thing’s corrosive bile. Three of its seven heads had been cut off, while a fourth hissed fitfully, not quite ready to believe it was doomed.

  Rose led them through a forest of felled treants whose limbs were scattered like brush after an autumn storm, then over the strewn rubble of shattered gargoyles. Harpies and mangled wolfbats lay where they’d fallen from the sky above. A rot sylph was moaning in the mud; the venomous sack of her abdomen had burst and was oozing noxious fumes.

  “This way,” Rose said, steering them clear.

  The band found themselves meandering through a herd of slaughtered centaurs. In their midst lay the bodies of trampled mercenaries, and Tam gasped when she recognized the Halfhelm twins, Milly and Lilly, among the dead.

  What if Bran is here somewhere?

  The thought terrified her so much that she resolved not to glance at the pale-faced corpses any longer, lest she find her dear, dead uncle gazing back at her.

  What looked like a hump of foothills up ahead resolved into the mountainous body of the giant, Brontide. The ruddy bronze flesh of his arms and legs was scored by hundreds of stabs, slashes, and bleeding cuts. Even still, the champion of the Brumal Horde wasn’t quite dead yet. He groaned piteously and clawed at the blood-soaked earth by his sides. His weapon—a ram’s-headed maul the size of a toppled tower—had fallen beyond his reach.

  This battle, Tam concluded, would have been a sight to behold—as epic in scale as the one in Endland six years earlier—but she was not so foolish as to wish she’d been here to see it. Bard or not, she’d have been hard-pressed to find the grandeur in this, to siphon a few scant nuggets of glory from the blood-soaked mire of such wasteful devastation.

  “Bloody Friggin Rose, is that you?”

  A man detached himself from a gaggle of mercs standing around the corpse of a brumal mammoth. As he drew near, Tam recognized Sam “the Slayer” Roth from the road to Highpool. The man’s plate armour was scuffed and dented, stained across the chest by something green. The bottom half of his beard had melted away, and he was limping, using his fabled greatsword as a crutch.

  “Sam Roth.” Rose halted, dragging fingers through the scarlet tangle of her hair. “Still breathing, I see?”

  “Ha! Just barely!” The big merc rapped an iron-shod fist on his breastplate. “A blightbulb threw up on me! Would’ve turned me to slop if I hadn’t been wearing this. I’m sorry to say my horse didn’t fare so well, the poor wretch.”

  Poor wretch is right, thought Tam, recalling how the animal had struggled so mightily beneath Roth’s considerable bulk. Imagine carrying this fat fuck all the way here just to get puked on by whatever the heck a blightbulb is …

  “What happened here?” asked Freecloud.

  Roth frowned. “You don’t know?”

  “We just got here,” Rose said.

  “Just got here?” The man’s bushy eyebrows nearly leapt from his face in disbelief. “Gods of Grandual, woman, you’ve missed the greatest battle since the Reclamation Wars! A bloody massacre is what happened here!” The Slayer spread his arms to encompass the ruin surrounding them. “It was beautiful!”

  “Did you see the Simurg?” asked Freecloud.

  “The Simurg? Frosted fucking hells, are you still on about that?”

  “We killed it,” Rose said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, without the barest hint of conceit. “And the Widow of Ruangoth brought it back from the dead.”

  Roth looked skeptical, like a man who’d been told drinking a goblet of urine was the secret to eternal life. “I … er—didn’t see the Simurg, no,” he muttered eventually. “Too busy running down real monsters, I guess.”

  “It looks like you slaughtered them,” Brune said.

  “We did!” said the Slayer. “The forest caught fire. Not sure how, or who got it started, but I’ll buy ’em a keg of Kaskar’s finest if I ever find out! The whole of Grey Vale went up in flames just before dawn. The Carteans had scouts in the hills thereabouts, but the Han claims it wasn’t his boys who started it. By sunrise half the Horde was running wild on the plain, while the other half were busy finding their way clear of the trees. When they did, the buggers were burnt up and half-dead already! There was infighting, some said. Monsters killing monsters …” The merc fingered the frayed edge of his acid-eaten beard. “As I said: It was beautiful.”

  Behind him, one of the mercenaries used an axe to hack off one of the mamm
oth’s tusks.

  “How bout a druin?” Rose asked. “Did you see a druin?”

  The Slayer’s eyes flickered to Freecloud’s ears. “Nope. Though there was an Infernal!”

  “Seriously?” asked Cura. “What did it look like?”

  Roth drew himself up, as if impersonating the demon itself. “Big flaming bastard with spikes all over and a tail like a morningstar fixed to a chain. Fought with a burning net and a hammer made of molten rock. I figure the fucker killed half a hundred mercs before Ironclad brought him down.”

  “Ironclad?” Relief and disbelief laid claim to the divided halves of Tam’s heart. Her uncle was alive! Or had been, anyway. “Did Bran Hashford survive, do you know?”

  The man’s armour clanked when he shrugged. “Didn’t see, I’m afraid. But Branigan’s a tough old bugger—I’d wager he’s around here somewhere. Listen.” He clapped Rose on the shoulder. “I could swap tales till I’m blue in the face, but we’d best leave a few for the bards, eh? We’re bound for Coverdale and a cold pint, then on toward Conthas in the morning. I’ll see you ’round?”

  “See you ’round,” said Rose, though her reply was drowned out by a sudden outburst of Brontide’s whimpering.

  “Maiden’s Mercy!” shouted Roth as he limped back toward his men. “Would someone put that whining shit out of his misery?”

  Rose squinted through the ash-flecked breeze at the injured behemoth. “We’ve seen enough,” she snapped. “Let’s get back.”

  The rest of them followed. Tam spotted the remains of a massive golem. The stone construct had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Freecloud paused to kneel by its head, reaching out to graze fingers over the weathered rock. The sigils carved into the pits of its eyes were dark and lifeless.

  “Is it one of Contha’s?” asked Cura.

  “It used to be,” said the druin. “But it was runebroken. Masterless. No longer under my father’s control.” He said nothing more, only stood and hurried off after Rose.

  The band picked their way through the wreckage of a crashed skyship. Its mangled sail snapped and sparked, while the duramantium rings of its tidal engine spun in lazy circles, humming and sloshing; another broken thing with an aching song to sing.

  Soon after, they came across a woman kneeling in the sludge. She was sobbing over a corpse wearing a veiled purple cowl. Tam immediately recognized the Prince of Ut, who had refused to take on the marilith after Fable’s fight in Highpool.

  Rose came to a halt, lowering her head in deference. The warrior’s gold crown was askew, his famous green steel falchion resting in the mud near his hand. His chest armour was caved in, a crimson footprint left behind on the enamelled gold plate.

  A dozen other mercs were dead nearby. Tam recognized Lucky Star among them, and the body of a creature that looked a bit like an owl but mostly like a bear lay in their midst, wheezing quietly through a chipped beak.

  Tam returned her gaze to the fallen Prince. Here was one of Grandual’s most celebrated mercenaries, now dead and cold in gathering dusk. Just a few miles south, his peers would be toasting their victory in taverns or around crackling bonfires. Would they remember him tonight? Would the bards sing of how nobly he’d fought? How grandly he’d died? Or would his death be nothing more than a sombre note in a thousand glorious songs?

  At least he has someone to mourn him, she thought, glancing briefly at the woman weeping over him.

  The others had begun trickling away when something tickled Tam’s awareness. “Not weeping,” she murmured.

  Brune looked over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “She’s laughing.” Tam pointed at the woman on her knees in the muck, who was just now rising, and turning, and grinning with the hollow humour of a leering skull.

  “Hello, Rose,” said the Winter Queen.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Black Magic Woman

  Tam hadn’t even blinked before Rose had Thistle from its sheath and flung it, spinning, at the woman’s head. Astra moved even before Rose let go of the blade, stepping casually from its path.

  “Don’t bother,” said Freecloud, before Rose could try again with Thorn. “She’s a druin. Or she was, once. You won’t hit her if she knows it’s coming.”

  Rose glared sullenly. She lowered her weapon, but Tam had no doubt she’d try again if her adversary was fool enough to let her guard down.

  Astra was dressed more regally than she’d been at the lake, prompting Tam to wonder where an undead sorceress stopped off for a change of clothes. A Narmeeri crypt, by the look of it, since her body was bound in black cloth stitched with arcane red script. Strips of black silk draped from scalloped pauldrons on either shoulder, stirring languidly on the fetid breeze. Her jet hair climbed through a wrought-metal crown whose tines twisted like flames above her brow, and her pale ears hung limp to her shoulders. At the druin’s hip was a long blade in a lacquered black scabbard that looked like the evil twin of Freecloud’s Madrigal.

  Her eyes were the bruised violet of grapes gone sour, and fixed solely on Rose. “You should be dead,” she remarked.

  “Says the woman who spent the last thousand years in a tomb,” Rose drawled. She cast a cautious glance into the gloom around them. “Where’s your pet?”

  “You mean Hawkshaw? I sent him on an errand. Oh,” she said breezily, when Rose’s expression soured, “you mean this pet.”

  A flick of her wrist summoned a gale that slashed through the curtain of smoke and ash. Golden twilight flooded the plain, gleaming on blood-slick scales and glinting along the edges of shattered arms. But then a shadow blotted out the sky, and the Dragoneater touched down like a cyclone, dead feathers raining from its wings.

  Tam stood rooted by its white-fire gaze, helpless to do anything but wait to be devoured, but then a moan from Brontide drew the Simurg’s attention. It skulked over for a closer look, dragging its dusky plumage like chains in its wake. Every step it took caused a tremor beneath Tam’s boots.

  When Brontide caught sight of the Simurg, he froze. His hands—so huge they could have slapped castles to rubble—began trembling, and he drew a rasping breath.

  “Please,” he managed, before the Simurg’s lion-lizard jaws closed around his throat. Tam heard the wet crunch of cartilage breaking, saw blood foam between the monster’s teeth, then looked away as it pulled Brontide’s throat apart in grisly strands.

  Someone, somewhere, was yelling. Many someones, actually. Through the haze of falling ash, Tam saw mercenaries running for their lives toward Coverdale.

  As if Coverdale is far enough, she thought morosely. As if anywhere is.

  Astra’s voice brought her back to the battlefield. “They still get hungry, you know. The dead, I mean. I have no idea why.”

  “What do you mean they?” asked Cura. “You were dead as a boiled egg until six years ago, remember?”

  The druin’s head tilted a fraction. “No, I do not remember being dead. I was murdered by slaves as the Dominion burned around me, and I woke to find the ancestors of those slaves floundering in the empire’s ashes. My husband”—she spoke the word with disgust—“who’d promised that he and I would live as gods forever, was dead.”

  “He had it coming,” Rose said in an obvious effort to goad her. According to Tiamax, Golden Gabe was famous for doing the same to his enemies—which was probably why he had a reputation as an arrogant asshole.

  “I agree,” said Astra. “Although Vespian, not unlike my more recent husband, had his uses. I did love him, once.”

  “Before he sacrificed your daughter?” Rose asked ruthlessly. “Before he robbed you of the death you so obviously craved? Before he committed genocide against his own kind to keep that awful sword a secret?”

  Astra flinched, and when she did some spell of glamour faded for just an instant, showing Tam a glimpse of the Winter Queen’s true face: withered eyes and sickly flesh that peeled like birch bark from a yellowing skull.

  “The Archon was a fool,” hissed the druin
. “He summoned a power beyond his comprehension. Tamarat isn’t merely a sword. It’s a sliver. A living fragment of the Goddess herself. And he bound it to me. Fed me to her like tinder to the flame. I did not ask—”

  Rose threw her other sword.

  This time, Astra moved a fraction too late. But she did move, so the blade only scored the side of her head instead of slicing it into halves. She hissed in pain, and one of her white-furred ears landed in the mud near her feet.

  Though she tried to stifle it, an incongruous giggle slipped past Tam’s lips. Cura shot a dark look her way, while Freecloud winced (out of empathy, perhaps) and looked to Rose.

  “Nice try,” he said.

  She grimaced. “Not nice enough.”

  Astra seemed not to have noticed her missing ear, but was outraged nonetheless. Her hands spasmed into claws at her side. She dragged them up—slowly, as if through water—and the corpses around her lurched to life.

  Up came the Prince of Ut in his wine-dark cowl. Up came Lucky Star, wielding half a spear in one hand and half a shield in the other. A shirtless northerner with a blue stripe across his eyes staggered upright, and a red-haired woman bearing a spiked flail but missing most of her jaw stood next to him.

  Cura drew a pair of wicked knives. Brune gripped his twinglaive with both hands. “How is she doing this?” he asked.

  “Necromancy,” said Freecloud.

  “You don’t say?” Brune snapped. He waved a hand at the woman’s new bodyguards. “I meant how’s she doing this. Most necros can barely make a skeleton dance. The best can turn a crowd of corpses into mindless zombies. They don’t use people like puppets, and don’t bring something the size of a fucking village back from the dead!”

  “It must have something to do with the Goddess,” Freecloud guessed.

  “You mean the Winter Queen?” asked Cura.

  The druin’s ears signalled no, but he said nothing more.

  “Were you leading the Horde, then?” Rose asked the sorceress. “If so, you did a piss-poor job of it.”

  Astra shook her head, a gesture made somewhat ridiculous by the bobbing stump of her absent ear. “I was more of a patron, really. I offered Brontide a safe haven in which to gather his strength. Once he had, I urged him to attack Cragmoor. I assured him of victory, and promised eternal life to those who fell in battle.”