‘Well, have you no answer?’ the bramble-spirit demanded.
Roggen turned in his saddle. ‘Be silent. I hear something.’ He hauled back on Harrow’s reins. The demigryph sank down with a petulant growl, tail lashing. He braced his elbow on her skull and cocked his head, listening. Sound carried strangely in this forest. Sometimes the source was closer than it seemed.
The bramble-spirit twisted, raising part of itself up. ‘The song… It has changed. Can you feel it?’
Roggen could. The trees shook slightly, the branches rustling. The whisper of the leaves was like voices, murmuring in growing fear. Harrow hissed. Roggen sniffed the air and patted her beak. Whatever it was, it was not the sylvaneth. ‘Yes, I smell it as well. Fire. And not the usual sort.’
It stank, like the forest. A cloying stench, like the pyres of pox-afflicted corpses. He knew that smell – balefire. He’d fought Nurgle’s slaves before. There were few warriors in Ghyran who hadn’t. Like the flames that had taken his hand, balefires twisted what they touched as they devoured it. Where the smoke went, sickness followed.
It was no wonder the forest was fearful – it was not so ill that it did not fear what the balefires would do to it.
‘Fire is fire,’ the bramble-spirit spat.
‘You know better than that, little spirit. This fire stinks, and not of smoke.’ His hand fell to the hilt of his sword. ‘I think I am not the only mortal in this forest.’
‘Rotlings,’ the bramble-spirit snarled in understanding.
‘Let us go and see if I am right, eh?’ Roggen urged Harrow into motion. She took off eagerly, sensing battle in her future.
‘You would confront them?’
‘It seems the quickest way to find what we seek.’ He bent low over Harrow’s neck as she surged through the wood. In the canopy overhead, he caught sight of pale faces. The outcasts were following him. Perhaps they already knew where he was going. Had they been trying to keep him away, or steer him to this point?
‘I am leading you to what we seek!’
‘You are not. At least not directly.’ Roggen glanced down at the tangle of bramble.
‘Answer me true, little spirit, or I shall toss you into the next stream we cross. You are leading me in circles. Why?’
The brambles contracted sullenly, their thorns scraping the cap over his forearm. Then, finally, in a small voice, it said, ‘I defend the Everqueen.’
‘And I serve her.’
‘Do you? This thing you seek is a poison. Better it be left in the dark.’
‘Surely it is safer in Alarielle’s hands than here, making the lands sick.’
The bramble-spirit gave a hissing laugh. ‘But it will not be in Alarielle’s hands, will it? You have not spoken to the Everqueen, meat, only her handmaiden. And they, like the seasons, turn as they will. Sometimes they blow sweet, and sometimes…’ The spirit subsided. ‘But such words are not for the ears of meat.’
Roggen frowned but did not reply. For his folk, the sylvaneth had always been a fact of life, remote and inhuman. But perhaps that was merely a mask they presented. Perhaps they were as prone to foolishness as any other peoples.
The thought was not a comforting one, and he quickly pushed it aside. Whatever the spirit’s worries, they were as nothing next to the thought that the servants of the Plague God might claim that which he sought.
‘Will you tell me your name now?’ he asked the bramble-spirit, as he rode. ‘It would be well to know it, since we are soon to go into battle together.’
‘We do not have to go into battle at all. They are welcome to the cursed thing.’
‘Then you would rather them have it? What would Alarielle say?’
The spirit fell silent. Roggen smiled sadly. ‘Very well.’
The ground turned to sludge beneath Harrow’s paws as they drew nearer to the source of the smoke. The trees and their tangling roots began to thin out, bending away to reveal a vast, rotunda-like glade. It was a veritable cathedral of wood, and the roots humped and coiled so that they resembled the stones of a nave.
At the end of that aisle rose a bubo of earth and rock. There was a wide gouge in its side, like a gangrenous wound. Piles of loose dirt and rock scattered haphazardly about. The stones which surmounted the bubo were larger than any man, and their flat faces were marked with strange, curling sigils beneath a shroud of yellowing moss. A trickle of gleaming water poured from between them to spill down the sides of the hummock of swollen earth.
As the water threaded through the worn runnels of dirt, it turned brackish and foul. Flies swarmed over it, their hum causing the air to quiver. Fleshy flowers the colour of rotting meat clustered about the base of the hummock and filled the glade. The air was thick with smoke and the sour stink of decaying vegetation.
Tendrils of balefire smoke wound through the woods opposite him. Roggen could hear the groan of falling trees. The ground shook with their dying. The bramble-spirit was keening softly. ‘I cannot hear the song. I cannot hear it,’ it wailed.
Roggen urged Harrow on. Mud splashed as she tore through the glade. She leapt up onto the hummock and scrambled up its slope to the stones. There was power in them; he could feel it. Though they were like healthy flesh grown over an infection. Whatever it was had burrowed beneath them and nestled below. But it seemed the Rotbringers had got to the infection first.
Quickly, he lashed his reins to his mangled arm and drew his blade. Like his armour, it was made from wood – in this case, the seedpod of a devourer plant. Thick, vein-like convolutions connected the dark blade to the hilt, and the pommel-stone was a milky-hued gem, uncut and heavy. ‘What are you doing?’ the bramble-spirit hissed.
Roggen ignored it. His attentions were fixed below, on the great hole that had been gouged into the hummock and the filthy labourers who clambered out of it, chortling amongst themselves. Two bore between them a heavy, oval-shaped scab of ossified roots. There was something within the tangle of rotting plant matter. An oily miasma seeped from it, and the air in the glade became close and foul as it was brought into the light. A sound like the buzzing of a thousand flies caused the air to tremble.
‘The axe,’ the bramble-spirit murmured, confirming Roggen’s suspicions. ‘They’ve found it.’
‘Aye, and they wouldn’t have, if you had not played me false. Now be silent.’ He clucked his tongue. Harrow leapt. She was among the half a dozen ragged figures before they could even react. Her great claws slashed out, snapping bones, tearing flesh. She shrieked and spun, sending broken bodies flying.
Roggen added his voice to hers, bellowing as he laid about him with his sword. The Rotbringers, clad in grimy hauberks and rusty helms, stank of something left too long in the sun. Ruinous sigils had been carved into their armour. Pestilential tokens hung from their clothing. Pitted blades, wielded in panic, hewed at Harrow to no avail. The blows glanced from her armour or missed entirely.
A horn sounded as the last of them fell. Roggen turned. Diseased shapes forced their way through the trees, wreathed in smoke. Crossbow strings hummed as he swayed to the side and kicked Harrow into a gallop. She sprang towards the newcomers, screeching. With cries of panic, they scattered. Roggen wheeled the demigryph around, hauling back on the reins lashed to his stump. He had the advantage, so long as they didn’t realise they had him outnumbered.
‘This is foolish! Let them take it if they would – they will remove it far from here,’ the bramble-spirit shrilled as the horn sounded again. Closer now.
‘No,’ Roggen growled. ‘I swore to claim it in Alarielle’s name, and so I will. Such is my oath, and so it will be done.’ A crossbow bolt glanced off his shoulder-plate, leaving a greasy mark. He urged Harrow towards the crossbowman who was hurriedly trying to reload his weapon with bandaged fingers. Harrow bore down upon him, crushing him to the ground with an almost playful leap.
A bolt thudded into a
nearby tree and Roggen turned. Several Rotbringers crouched behind a hastily assembled line of wooden shields, readying their crossbows. Cursing, he dragged Harrow around. He would not reach them in time, but would simply have to hope he could weather the storm.
‘Hold! Lower your weapons.’
The bellow came from behind him. As it echoed through the glade, the Rotbringers lowered their weapons. Roggen straightened in his saddle and turned. ‘Lady of Leaves defend me,’ he murmured as he saw the newcomer.
‘I think you are on your own, meat,’ the bramble-spirit hissed.
The Rotbringer was bigger than the others, swollen with a hideous strength and clad in pitted, rusty war-plate. The leather straps of his armour creaked audibly as they sought to contain that putrescent form. A bulbous helm, wrought in a vaguely fungal shape, nodded atop a flabby neck. Strips of mouldy silk hung from the top of the helm, and a rotting tabard, marked with a stylised fly, hung from the brute’s torso. A heavy sword, blunt-tipped and saw-edged, rested across the saddle-horn of his steed, and he clutched a mollusc-shaped war-horn in one hand.
The horse – if it could be called such – was a scaly, scabrous monstrosity with too many legs and a concave skull that was more mouth than anything else. A barbed, serpentine tongue flickered from the depths of that cavernous jaw and tasted the air. It pawed the ground with enflamed talons, growling hollowly.
‘You have killed my men,’ the rider gurgled in a voice like mud striking the bottom of a bucket. ‘Who are you to dare such a thing?’ The Rotbringer did not sound angry as much as congratulatory. Then, such creatures rarely valued the lives of their servants.
Roggen hauled Harrow about. The demigryph hissed as it caught the plague-beast’s scent. ‘Who are you to ask me?’ Roggen countered.
The Rotbringer cocked his head. ‘You wear heraldry on that tabard of yours. Are you a knight, by chance?’
‘I am,’ Roggen said. ‘What of it?’ Smoke hung heavy on the air. He could hear the crackle of flames and the groan of dying trees. Harrow clawed restlessly at the ground in no mood to stand still.
‘Only that we seem to be at an impasse, my friend,’ the Rotbringer said, chuckling. He hung his war-horn from his saddle. ‘As you are a knight, honour bids me offer you fair challenge. And bids you accept, I think.’
‘What do you know of honour?’ Roggen growled.
‘More than most. I am Feculus, of the Duchy of Bitterbile. Knight of the Order of the Fly.’ The bloated warrior raised his rusty blade in salute. ‘Might I have your name, good sir knight?’
Roggen hesitated in disgust. The creature before him was a parody of the knightly values his Order lived by. Nevertheless, honour demanded he answer. A knight could do no less. ‘Roggen, of the Ghyrwood March. Knight of the Order of the Furrow. In the name of the Lady of Leaves, I bid you leave this place, Rotbringer.’
‘Alas, I cannot. I am on a quest. A relic of my Order rests here and I come to claim it – and through it, my birthright. I come to claim the broken axe of my kinsman, Duke Goral of Festerfane, left to rot here these many years.’ He gestured to the lump of cancerous root matter that now lay abandoned amid the bodies of the slain.
Roggen hesitated, eyeing the lump. Harrow was swift, but not swift enough to outpace crossbow bolts. There was no way he could reach it and escape. ‘You understand, I think,’ Feculus gurgled, mistaking his hesitation for something else. ‘I suspect you are after the same thing, else why would you be here now?’
‘I understand nothing about you.’ Roggen leaned over the side of his saddle and spat. ‘I know that heraldry you wear, as you seem to know mine. You are the spawn of the Blighted Duchies. I heard tales of the fallen knights in my crib. Monsters and fools in service to daemons.’
‘As we hear tales of you – blind servants of a mad goddess. You sold yourselves to the queen of shade and sweet water, and for what?’
‘Better a goddess of life than a god of disease.’ Briefly, Roggen caught sight of tall, inhuman shapes moving through the trees. It seemed the sylvaneth had come to watch. Perhaps they hoped the intruders would slay each other. Or maybe they had simply been drawn by the scent of blood and fire.
‘The King of All Flies rules all things – not just sickness.’ Feculus’ steed pawed the earth and he slapped its scaly neck affectionately. ‘But I have little interest in theological debate. Let us settle this argument in the way of true knights – with blood and steel. To the winner, the spoils.’ He gestured lazily to the hummock. ‘My kinsman’s axe, Lifebiter, stews there, in a poor grave. The victor shall claim the honour of freeing it.’
‘Do not trust it – rotten meat lies,’ the bramble-spirit hissed. Its coils tightened warningly about his stump.
‘No. Rotten meat is honest, if not pleasant.’ Roggen had fought the warriors of the Order of the Fly before – they had been true knights, once. Twisted though it was, tatters of their ancient honour yet remained to them. Enough to make this an even contest, perhaps. He lifted his sword, copying the creature’s earlier salute. ‘Fine,’ he called out. ‘To the winner, the spoils.’
‘Excellent! It has been many a year since I last jousted with a worthy knight.’ Feculus jerked on his steed’s reins, and brought it around. ‘Fear not – my armsmen shall not interfere.’
‘The thought had not crossed my mind,’ Roggen said as Harrow took up a position opposite Feculus and his steed. ‘This is a matter for knights. Not low-born serfs.’
‘Exactly. I knew you understood.’ Feculus laughed gutturally. ‘I knew the moment I heard their screams that Grandfather had blessed me with a proper foe. These tree-kin are no fit opponent for an honest knight. Creeping, scuttling things.’
The bramble-spirit hissed in anger but Roggen ignored it. ‘Is that why you felled the trees and set them aflame?’ he asked. The smoke scratched his throat and he prayed silently for rain. Even just a drizzle to stir the air.
‘Only way to deal with such cowardice.’ Feculus laughed again. ‘Your folk do much the same, I hear.’
‘You heard wrong.’ Roggen lifted his sword.
Feculus kicked his steed into motion, his spurs drawing yellow ichor from its flanks. The reptilian steed lurched forward with a bellicose hiss, its claws shredding many of the fleshy blossoms that littered the glade. He gripped its sides with his legs and lifted his heavy blade in both hands as it galloped.
Harrow lunged to meet it, squalling in eagerness, every feather on her neck stiff and sharp. Roggen raised his blade, angling it parallel to the ground. He would have to be quick; precise. The chosen servants of Nurgle were blessed with an endurance beyond human. They could survive wounds that would slay a mortal out of hand.
‘This is madness!’ the bramble-spirit shrilled, as the two beasts slid past one another. The plague-thing’s barbed tongue drew a bloody weal along Harrow’s flank while the demigryph’s claws gouged a hunk of meat from the other creature’s side. Feculus’ sword swept down, nearly splitting Roggen’s head in two. He weaved aside and thrust his blade through a wide gap in the Rotbringer’s armour. Black ichor spewed from the wound and his sword steamed as he ripped it free.
Harrow shrieked and twisted, catching hold of the plague-thing’s rear legs. Feculus turned in his saddle, bellowing. Roggen grimaced as he managed to deflect the Rotbringer’s blade. The effort it took all but numbed his arm.
The bramble-spirit dug into the cap of his stump as if in panic. ‘You cannot beat him, fool! He is too strong!’
‘Either help or be silent,’ Roggen snarled. He rolled his stump, tightening the loop of the reins, preventing them from sliding free. He jerked Harrow’s head about and the demigryph snapped at the pox-knight, almost severing his leg.
As Feculus reeled, Roggen drove his sword towards another gap. But his blow was weak and the tip of his blade skittered short of his target. The plague-thing turned on Harrow, contorting itself with boneless
ease. Its barbed tongue raked across Roggen’s chest-plate, tearing his tabard and causing the ironwood to smoulder and bubble. The reins slipped loose from his arm as he jerked back, and he fought to hold on with just his legs. The plague-beast’s claws sank into the demigryph’s side. Harrow rose with a roar.
Off balance, Roggen tumbled from the saddle. He landed heavily and rolled aside, hoping to avoid the stamping feet of the two monsters. He held on to his sword – but only just. Feculus gave a shout of triumph and slashed at him. Roggen scrambled aside and the black blade dug into the ground. The pox-knight was too strong to parry.
As Roggen rose to his feet, Harrow knocked the plague-beast sprawling and pounced upon it. Staggering back, Feculus thrashed his way free of his saddle. Roggen flung himself at the pox-knight but Feculus spun, his sword looped out, nearly decapitating Roggen. The knight thrust his blade through a corroded hole in his opponent’s chest-plate and was rewarded with a groan. Feculus’ hand flashed down, catching hold of the blade.
‘A fair blow, sir, but for naught,’ the pox-knight hissed as he jerked Roggen forward, impaling himself further on the wooden blade. He raised his own sword. Roggen was forced to abandon his blade and leap aside as the blow shivered down.
Thunder rumbled overhead. A droplet of rain struck the back of Roggen’s neck as Feculus wheeled, laughing hollowly. He tore Roggen’s sword from his chest and tossed it at the other knight’s feet. He peered up at the sky for a moment, and then back at Roggen. ‘Fie sir, fie. Would you abandon your blade, like a coward? Pick it up.’
Instinctively, Roggen bent to snatch the sword up. He realised his mistake a moment later and twisted away from the blow that would have split his skull. Despite his speed, the tip of Feculus’ sword crashed down across his chest-plate and knocked him sprawling into the mud. All the air was expelled from his lungs at once, and he lay gasping in the rain.
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