“In fact, I found it lying in a footprint, in the mud.”
“On a battlefield?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t clear which of the bodies it had come from.”
Benno leaned forward. “You needn’t be afraid of offending us. We scarcely knew him. In fact—” He turned to his brother. “We can be frank here, can’t we, Gelfrat?”
Gelfrat grunted unrevealingly.
Benno turned back to Angelika. “Neither of us were raised alongside him. Our father has a number of sons, by a number of women. Though naturally it is tragic that Claus has died in battle, we Kopfs are born to fight, and thus to die. Claus was my father’s legitimate son; he lived on cakes and honey, while Gelfrat and I have had to scrabble and scrape. In his demise, either of us may find opportunity for advancement. Our father will have to reach down into the ranks of his many bastards and choose one to legitimate. Perhaps you have heard his name—Jurgen von Kopf.”
Angelika twitched her shoulder, dismissively. “He is a great man in Averland, I take it.”
“Great. And rich. The von Kopfs have for many generations served the electors of Averland, as statesmen and generals. It is our father who pursues this war against the orcs, and it is his victories that protect the Empire’s naked underbelly.”
Franziskus cleared his throat, as if asking permission to speak. “I have heard your father’s name. So you say it is not Count Leitdorf who presently leads the armies of Averland?”
“He has delegated the task.”
Angelika broke in. “My assistant’s interest in the intricacies of Averlandish politics exceeds mine.”
“Then I shall cut to the heart of the matter: Gelfrat and I don’t care if you had to saw off Claus’ arm to get the pendant. We merely need to find his effete, snuff-sniffing bones and haul them back to father for proper burial, in accordance with the family rites.” He interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “We are eager to please our sire. As we speak, other bastards also jockey to seize the vacant position of favoured son. Thus we are hungry to execute his wishes, and will react intemperately to those who decline to assist us.”
Before replying, Angelika took a slow sip of her brandy, and let it work its way through her. “It is always sad when sons grow up without the affection of their fathers. It makes them impolite. And grasping.”
Gelfrat balled his fist and stepped closer.
“Wait,” said Franziskus.
Benno put up his hand, showing Gelfrat the back of it. “Please, speak,” Benno said. “I did not catch your name.”
“My name is Franziskus.”
“You were with Fraulein Fleischer when she found our family emblem?”
“Ah, no, we met several weeks after that. Listen, you must excuse my friend’s sharpness of tone.”
Angelika made a coughing noise.
Franziskus pushed his chair back, attempting to strike a more casual pose. “I am recently of the Empire, and I am just getting used to the customs of the borderland. People here pay little heed to rank, and you must give respect to get it in return.”
“I’ll show you respect!” Gelfrat spat. He lunged at Franziskus, but Benno stood, interposing himself between his brother and the smaller man.
“No, Gelfrat. This fellow is right. I have tried to secure with knife-edged words what I should be accomplishing with silver.”
Gelfrat positioned himself toe-to-toe with Benno, bumping his half-brother’s breastplate with his own. Benno grinned at Gelfrat. He spoke through his teeth. “Remember what we agreed.”
Gelfrat stormed across the tavern, to the bar. He slapped its wooden top. “Give me ale!” he bellowed. Giacomo hastened to fill the order.
Benno retook his seat, cupped his right hand in his left, and addressed Angelika. “We will pay you a hundred crowns to lead us to the site of Claus’ demise.”
“Two hundred.”
“We are not rich men.”
“One hundred and seventy-five.”
Benno moved his head sorrowfully back and forth.
“One fifty.”
“One twenty-five.”
“Done.” Angelika proffered her hand, for shaking. Benno hesitated, apparently unused to performing the gesture with a woman. Gelfrat grunted.
Benno shook her hand. “We have an arrangement, then.”
To the settlers of the Castello del Dimenticato, the notion of a straight road was a civilised frippery. They’d clustered their shacks, sheds, and hovels haphazardly together. If a space between buildings continued for more than fifty feet, the locals called it a road. Homes rested on poor foundations, or none at all. Roofs slumped in the middle. Doors rested uneasily on yawning hinges. Most of the houses were made of hardened mud, reinforced by scraps of timber, but a handful of larger cottages were built of stone. Angelika and Franziskus stepped lightly along the meandering, dirty path that served as one of the town’s main arteries. Neither carried a lantern; they relied instead on meagre bands of light escaping from shuttered windows. They trod slowly, eyes down, alert for heaps of rotten food, spreading pools of urine, and for the turds of dogs. This caution marked them as more finicky than most of their neighbours.
Franziskus said, “I don’t trust them.”
“Good,” Angelika said. “You shouldn’t.”
“Yet you’ve agreed to accompany them.”
“Their money will look better in my purse than it does in theirs.”
“They are graspers and pretenders, frank in their lust for undeserved rank!”
“All rank is undeserved, so they are no worse than their so-called betters.”
“You say such things just to shock me.”
“Seeing as my new clients disgust you, you’ll naturally want to stay behind while I take them where they want to go.”
Franziskus stopped short. A woman posed in the open doorway of a stone house, lit by the firelight behind her. The edges of her flaxen hair glowed. She leaned languorously against the doorframe, cocking out an angular hipbone. She blinked her emerald eyes at him, then slipped back into the building, closing an oak door behind her. Franziskus stared at it. He shook his face from side to side, like a beagle, to wake himself from his trance. He turned. Angelika was waiting for him, in the middle of the lane, hands behind her back. A wicked smirk pulled at her lips.
“I’ve been boring you, I see.”
“No,” said Franziskus, too quickly and too loudly. He took several long strides to close the gap between them.
“Did one of the local rent girls catch your eye, Franziskus?” Her grin widened. “Which of them was it? Gisela? Teapot?”
He couldn’t help but turn back and look at the door of the building. “No, none of those. She was not of their—she was—
He started; Angelika had stuck him in the ribs with her elbow. “Go on, Franziskus. You’ve been a good boy ever since you first started tagging after me. You’re entitled.”
“No,” he said, eyes on the door.
She pushed him. “I know how men are. I won’t think less of you. Go on.”
Annoyed, he moved out of the range of her shoves. “It’s not that at all. I was merely… captivated by a moment of beauty.”
She uttered a throaty laugh.
“Not everything is ugly or some kind of cynical joke. I saw a woman who was beautiful. Such a person can stand in a doorway and not be a harlot. A man can look upon her and react without base and carnal lusts.” He marched past her. Without matching his increased pace, she followed. If she were lucky, his dudgeon would prove permanent, and, when she reached the hovel they’d rented, she’d find no trace of him. But Angelika had never considered herself lucky. She watched Franziskus disappear around a corner into the gloomy night.
She slowed her pace a little more, to savour this rare moment of solitude. She thought about going back to La Bara, but, for all she knew, the Kopfs would still be there. The hours she’d spent watching as the Averlanders filled their throats with ale had already been wearying enoug
h. There were other taverns, but they would also be full of sweating, shouting, farting men. It occurred to Angelika that she should just disappear from town and never come back, leaving both Kopfs and Franziskus behind. But night was not a time to travel through the wilderness alone, and she wanted those hundred and twenty-five crowns.
She rounded a corner. A figure appeared out of the darkness to pin her against a cold stone wall. Though he barely came up to her waist, he was stout and muscular, and held her fast. A reek of ale wafted up from him. He had her right arm pinned, so she couldn’t get to the knife on her belt. Neither could she reach the other one in the cuff of her boot. She grunted, trying to push off from the wall, but the bastard was strong and had a low centre of gravity. She twisted to look at his ill-lit features. She’d assumed from his belligerence and strength that he would be a dwarf, but now that she looked at him, she knew him for a halfling. He had a wide and beardless face, sunken eyes and a prominent brow, topped by curly locks. Both of his circular ears had large wedges cut out of them. The blotchy pink remains of an old burn marred his left cheek; a wide, red worm-like scar wriggled around his throat.
He pushed his shoulder into her and opened his mouth, letting his wide tongue come out to slurp up a skein of drool that had fallen onto his chin. “So who are we, girlie?” he asked, staring wild-eyed into her face. His voice was high and boyish, lending his lechery an extra layer of obscene menace. Keeping his shoulder pressed in hard, he waggled his broad hands at her, apparently searching for her breasts.
“If those hands go any further, I’ll cut them off.”
He grinned, but ceased his pawing. “Ah, girlie talks, does she? Girlie talks mean. I like that.”
Angelika squirmed. “Let me have my knife and I’ll really give you a thrill.”
He ground his shoulder into her kidney. A groan escaped her lips.
“So girlie, I haven’t seen you in town before. Tell me who you might be.”
She slid sideways along the wall until she had him off balance. Then she snaked forward to grind a thumb into his neck, digging deep into a pressure point. Grunting indignantly, he shifted his weight off her. She clamped her hands around each of his ears, held his face in position, and kneed him between the eyes. She wanted to do it again, but his skull-bone was hard and had hurt her knee. She let go of him, scudded back, and pulled out her knife.
Reeling back, he blinked tears from his eyes. Blood ran out of his nose and into his mouth. He wrenched a dagger from his own belt.
“I only asked you for simple information, girlie,” he complained, breathing tiny red bubbles, which quickly popped. “Now I’ll have to teach you a lesson.”
She thought of a retort but didn’t bother. Halflings were too easy. All you had to do was remind them they were short. She extended her legs, leaned back to widen her first swing, and waited for the little lout come to her. He wiped his mouth with his free hand. The blood was still flooding down—it covered his chin. He took a half-step at her and feinted, jabbing his blade like a pig-sticker. Angelika tilted her head to the side and clucked at him, wordlessly taunting him for the feeble move.
“Oh, you’re one of those ones,” he said, “who think you’re so…” He charged her; she dodged him but couldn’t get a decent opening. They circled each other in the middle of the lane, dirt scraping under the toes of their boots. None of the nearby windows were lit. But few locals would risk their necks to intervene in a scrap, anyway.
“You think I don’t know how to handle a knife,” the halfling said. “I just don’t know whether to cut you with my right hand, or my left.” He tossed the dagger back and forth from one hand to the other. Angelika watched the blade, not the man. She chose her moment and kicked out with her long and slender leg. Her toe caught his knife in mid-air, between right hand and left. It twirled end over end, up past the halfling’s head and into the darkness behind him. He looked up, disbelieving.
Angelika kicked him in the throat. He gasped and gargled. He spat up more blood. She dropped back into a defensive crouch. Her plan was to goad him into a stupid charge, then use his own momentum to plant her knife deep into him, just below the Adam’s apple. He reached to his right hip for a longer, sturdier weapon, a short sword. He copied her crouch and shifted his weight from side to side.
“AH right,” he said. “You’re not just any girlie. Someone taught you how to fight. Maybe I should have heard your name before.”
“They call me Bleeder of Halflings.”
He curled his lip. “There’s a difference between talking mean and talking smart.”
“Sorry if I seem suddenly unattractive to you.”
He hefted the sword in his hand, as if testing its weight. He stuck it up into the air, screamed a strangled battlecry, then turned his arse to her and ran across the lane, scattering up gravel and dust. He darted into the mouth of an alleyway. She sprinted after him but stopped short a good ten feet before the unlit alley entrance. She’d paid him back sufficiently; she didn’t need to kill him. Besides, it could be a trap: he might have any number of cronies in there waiting to leap on her.
Still, she hated to let such a thing trail off, without proper resolution. His interest in her name troubled her. She stood before the alley, panting, then decided to wait until her breath had returned to normal. She heard nothing, saw nothing, down the laneway.
“Angelika!” It was Franziskus. He’d come back for her. He seemed worried. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Of course,” she answered.
CHAPTER TWO
They rode through green flatlands, ice-topped mountains rising up on either side of them. The sun had just slid behind the peaks to the right of them, as they travelled south. The sky was yellow, interrupted by purple bands of cloud. Unseen birds twittered from the trees that lined the foothills. All day long, white bellflower blossoms had covered the grassy slopes; now the blooms had closed themselves up, against the fading light.
They were eight hours south of the Castello. The party would have made better progress, were it not for the typically Imperial attitudes of its leaders. They couldn’t just provide horses for everyone, that would show insufficient deference to hierarchy. The officers, Benno and Gelfrat, rode sleek and muscular stallions. Angelika, as a guest (or as a woman—it wasn’t clear which), had been given a pokey mule with a patchy coat and a resentful glare. The ordinary soldiers had to make it on foot. So did Franziskus, whose status lacked clarity. This situation meant that the party moved only as quickly as its slowest man—who in this case was a paunchy fellow with greying mutton-chops and a bad wheeze, named Ekbert. In a mixed group, the horses were an impediment: they prevented the group from moving up into the hills, where the going would be slower but safer. Angelika eyed the trees and remembered how the Averlandish forces had used them to ambush their orcish prey. She wanted to be up in the hills herself, on the good side of all that cover.
Angelika had offered Franziskus a turn on the mule; she hated the surly beasts, so it was no great sacrifice. Franziskus had been offended by the very suggestion. He still seemed piqued by their exchange on the street, the night before. Angelika wasn’t sure why he’d got so huffy, but saw little reason to tax herself puzzling him out.
Benno and Gelfrat kept themselves close at hand, riding to keep her flanked. It seemed they were worried that she might up and bolt on them. There was little chance of that: she hadn’t yet separated them from their coins.
Benno in particular had been giving her close attention. He’d slapped on some perfume that smelled like Araby spice. Angelika had given some thought to his new attitude and had not settled on an opinion about it. He was more fetching from certain angles than from others. The weak chin was a problem, but the spark in his eyes might compensate. She’d certainly bedded worse specimens. For the moment, however, there was business between them, and that would take precedence over any other stirrings.
Gelfrat’s odour had not changed since their last meeting. He still smelle
d of the Dolorosa la Bara. He took frequent pulls on his water skin, which probably contained something more than water. He’d begun the day’s travels with a blank and guarded expression, and had steadily grown more bored and petty with the death of each hour.
“You,” he grunted, interrupting Angelika’s uneasy survey of the thickening trees to the left and right. He had allowed his horse to fall back and was now riding alongside Franziskus. Franziskus craned a wary head up at him.
“Yes?”
“Where are you from?”
“From nowhere, like everyone else around here.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from nowhere.”
Benno pulled his horse’s reins and circled back toward his half-brother.
“If my accent offends you, I apologise,” Franziskus said, keeping his tone bland and even.
“I want to know where you’re from.”
Benno reached Gelfrat’s side. “Maybe it is time to find a good camp for the night.”
Gelfrat kept his eyes on Franziskus. “I want to know why he’s with us.”
“Because he is with her,” Benno said, jabbing a thumb in Angelika’s direction. “Let’s remain intent on our mission, shall we?”
Ignoring his brother, Gelfrat kept on, “You sound like a Stirlander. Why aren’t you in Stirland?”
Franziskus shrugged. Benno sighed and rode ahead, catching up to Angelika. She expected him to beg pardon for his comrade’s poor manners, but he said nothing. He fidgeted with his helmet strap and kept his eyes straight ahead.
“I said, why aren’t you in Stirland?”
Angelika saw movement up in the hills, to her right. She put up her hand.
Gelfrat was too preoccupied to see her signal. “I said—
Benno shushed him. Gelfrat’s muscles bunched up; red embarrassment flushed his face.
“What do you see?” Benno asked her.
“Figures in the trees.” With a flick of the head, she showed him where. Gelfrat kicked his horse. It bolted ahead. Benno followed. Angelika jumped free of her mule and ran to follow the two brothers; Franziskus came too. The soldiers stayed stupidly put. Soon, the officers’ horses were rearing up, refusing to press on through a scattering of large rocks. Gelfrat turned his horse around and rode back to their men. Benno calmed his mount, then leapt down from his back. He landed on his ankle, and exclaimed, more in surprise than pain. Angelika pointed up into the pines.
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