Blyseden rephrased the question. “Are there eleven others like you who want a job?” he asked.
The ogre pondered the question for a moment, or perhaps it was thinking about something else. There was absolutely no way of knowing what was going on behind the idiot glitter of the thing’s eyes.
“Yes,” it said eventually.
“Good,” Blyseden said with a nod. It wasn’t the first time he had dealt with ogres, but somehow they seemed to get stupider by the year. “What weapons will you bring?”
“Edged steel,” the ogre told him. “Iron clubs. Teeth.”
Blyseden nodded. Judging by the hemispherical muscles that bulged around the ogre’s jaws, its teeth would probably be sufficient on their own. It would feed well after the slaughter was done, that was for sure. .
“I will pay one penny a day,” Blyseden told him, “and a share of the loot.”
“What share?” the ogre snapped out the question as quickly as the closing jaws of a trap.
“You and all of the other soldiers divide three-quarters of it amongst yourselves,” Blyseden decided. “The final quarter is mine.”
The ogre lapsed back into silence. After a while, drool started to seep from one side of its mouth. Blyseden waited.
“One silver penny a day,” it eventually said, “each, and food: meat. The rest is acceptable.”
“Acceptable,” Blyseden said, “for soldiers who have fought before. Have you fought before?”
The ogre looked at him, and, for a moment, Blyseden thought that he could detect a flash of contempt in the shadowed caverns of the thing’s eyes.
“Yes,” it said.
Blyseden thought about pressing the issue, but decided that he didn’t have time. Anyway, this creature was obviously battle-tested. It wasn’t just the brutality of its movements or the pale scars that criss-crossed its slate-grey hide. It was the way that it had known exactly what it and its fellows were worth.
“Good,” Blyseden said, nodding. “Tell me your name, and the clerk will get you signed up.”
“Gorfang,” said the ogre, and with a single step it was looming over the clerk. The man whimpered and drew back.
“Sign Menheer Gorfang onto the roster, Tubs,” Blyseden told him.
The clerk swallowed and started to write down the terms. The feather of his quill shook even when he had finished. Then he looked up at the ogre with the bright, panicked eyes of a rabbit in a snare.
“You…” he said, and then stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “You have to make a mark here,” he finally said, pointing towards the bottom of the parchment.
Gorfang said nothing. He merely reached down, plucked the quill from the clerk’s trembling fingers, and, to everybody’s surprise, signed with a clearly legible initial.
“Thank you,” the clerk squeaked, as the ogre returned his quill.
The ogre ignored him and turned back to Blyseden.
“I am hungry for today’s meat. Can I take this one?” He pointed to the clerk who, with a final, terrified whimper, slid off his stool in a dead faint.
“No,” Blyseden told him. “No man flesh until I say. I will send beef later.”
The ogre shrugged, and marched out of the inn. Humans, he thought, no sense of humour.
“Most noble of commanders, it is as the poets say. Only in war can a man truly find the truth of himself. I and my esteemed brethren have followed this maxim from the lands of our birth in beautiful Tilea to the miserable dankness of your lands, and it is that which brings us here today.”
The Tilean finished his speech, and, with a gesture that had doubtless been practised in front of a thousand mirrors, he swept off his hat and bowed.
“You want to join up?” Blyseden asked.
“Of course.” The Tilean’s perfectly-waxed moustaches twitched at Blyseden’s bluntness, but he let it pass. He expected nothing else from the beefy-faced denizens of the Empire.
“You can see from my bearing that I am a veteran of a thousand desperate actions,” he explained, “and my brethren are almost my equals. In Remas, I learned the best, the most noble art of swordsmanship, and excelled above all others. In Quenelles, I fought single-handed against a Bretonnian knight, and showed him the true meaning of chivalry. In Nuln, I shot in the tournament of artillerists, and demonstrated to the experts how a true marksman behaves.”
“Did you win?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In these actions, did you win?”
“I acquitted myself,” the Tilean said haughtily, “with distinction.”
“Well,” Blyseden allowed, “I suppose you’re still alive. This job might not be one for gentlemen such as you, though. It is more a matter of husbandry. Those who we slaughter will hardly be up to your level.”
The Tilean grinned.
“Saving yourself, most honoured of commanders, who ever is?” he asked. “That is why we have travelled so far, braving all the hardships and terrible cooking of this soggy land. It is always in search of the most righteous opponent. The knights of Bretonnia know something of this, too, although their understanding is clouded by superstition.”
“What I want to know is,” Blyseden asked, “if I tell you to kill somebody, will you kill them?”
“My blade has known little rest in its lifetime,” the Tilean assured him. “The steel thirsts for the blood of my enemies, or, for a small consideration, of yours.”
Blyseden grunted.
“That will do. How many are you, and what weapons do you carry?”
“There are two score men in my company, all armed with the rapiers and daggers of our profession. More than that, we are armed with the cunning of a fox, the hearts of lions—”
“And the tongues of fishwives,” one of Blyseden’s guards interrupted, and his comrade laughed.
“What?” the Tilean asked.
“Relax,” the guard told him. “Just a joke.”
He shifted and glanced quickly at Blyseden. Blyseden studiously ignored him and watched a rat scurrying along one of the ceiling beams instead.
“You called me a fishwife,” the Tilean reminded the guard, “a woman.”
It was said mildly enough, but suddenly nobody was laughing.
“I said you had a tongue like one,” the guard said, embarrassed into defiance.
The Tilean nodded with a gentle understanding. “Choose your weapons,” he said.
“Don’t be a fool,” the guard said uneasily and shifted his grip on the haft of his halberd. He looked at Blyseden again, but his commander was idly cleaning his fingernails.
“You call me a fool, to boot,” the Tilean mused. “Very well. I choose the weapons that we are both comfortable with. En garde.”
“Look, friend—” the guard began, but it was too late. The Tilean was already moving. The sleeves of his shirt billowed out in just the fashion that his tailor had intended, and the gold filigree of his rapier caught the light in a way that would have delighted the jeweller who had made it. The Tilean was moving in what could almost have been a dancer’s pirouette.
The razor-sharp tip of his blade cut through the guard’s throat like a branding iron through snow. As the man fell back, arterial blood spraying those who stood around him. The Tilean struck again, the blade blurring as he sliced a series of cuts onto the dying guard’s chest.
The remaining guard looked at Blyseden for guidance. Blyseden just shrugged.
“Elegant,” he said, and the Tilean brought his blade up in a complex salute. The spray of blood from his victim’s severed arteries had already slowed to a trickle, and the man lay in the wetness of his own ruin, twitching out the last seconds of his life beneath the dead weight of his unused halberd.
“Those are my company’s initials,” the Tilean said, gesturing to the twin Vs that he had cut into the guard’s chest, “Vespero’s Vendetta.”
Blyseden nodded.
“A copper penny each a day,” he said, “and your share of the loot.”
&nb
sp; The Tilean, who had produced a stained silk handkerchief to wipe down his blade, pursed his lip.
“It is a fair offer,” he said, “but my brethren might feel insulted if you offered me, their beloved leader, only a copper penny. For the honour of the company we should make mine gold.”
Blyseden glanced down at the cooling corpse of the guard at his feet.
“Far be it from me to risk insulting your men,” he said. “You, personally, will be paid in gold, as you suggest. Now, if you would just sign the parchment, Menheer Vespero.”
The clerk sat staring numbly at the corpse at his feet. A splatter of blood was drying on his face, but he made no move to clean it off. His ink pots, quills and parchments remained in front of him, untouched.
“Tubs!” Blyseden snapped at the man.
“Allow me to practise my penmanship,” Vespero cut in smoothly and, dipping a quill into the ink, he wrote his own contract.
Blyseden checked it and signed it. If he was relieved that there was nothing that needed to be corrected, he didn’t show it. He decided that if he ever wanted to insult a Tilean, he’d wait until the man was chained up first.
“Why are you here? Cook, is it?”
The halfling who stood before Blyseden scowled. He didn’t have the face for it. His fat cheeks grew as red as a clown’s, and his double chin bulged, so that he looked like a small, angry frog, not that anybody was likely to risk pointing that out. The blood of the guard who the Tilean had killed was still wet on the floor, a reminder of how mercenaries reacted to insults.
“I thought you wanted soldiers,” the halfling said, “not cooks.”
Blyseden shrugged.
“That we do, but an army needs cooks. I thought that’s what you came for.”
The halfling’s cheeks darkened from red to puce, and he acted. He might have been as round as a cannon ball, but he also moved with the speed of one. His bow was in his hand before Blyseden’s remaining guard had a chance to react, the bowstring already humming. The halfling’s arrow zipped past Blyseden’s left ear and disappeared through the entrance to the hearth room. There was a squeal and a thunk as the arrow buried itself in a wooden beam.
“Want me to cook that?” the halfling asked, gesturing after his arrow.
Blyseden turned to peer into the hearth room. The halfling’s arrow still quivered in the wall, and a rat was skewered on its hardwood shaft.
“I see what you mean,” Blyseden said. “You’re hired.”
The halfling grinned in a wide, white crescent and stepped forward to sign the contract. As he did so, one of the men Blyseden had positioned outside burst into the room, a wild expression on his face.
“What is it?” Blyseden asked impatiently. At first, the man merely opened and closed his mouth like a landed fish. Then he found his voice.
“More recruits, my lord.”
“Well, show them in.”
“I can’t… I mean, you’d better come and meet them,” the man said, and, before Blyseden could answer, he hurried back outside.
“You just can’t get the men,” Blyseden confided to the halfling, as, curiosity getting the better of him, he stalked outside to see who had turned up.
By the time the week’s hiring was done, Blyseden had recruited every mercenary, cut-throat, and beggar with a sword in Averland. At almost two thousand men, he was pleased at the size of his force. When he had last seen them, bivouacked outside of the city walls, they had been an impressive array, formidable, even.
His master, however, was not so sanguine.
“Are you sure that it will be enough?” Averland asked Blyseden after he had shuffled through the contracts before him. It had taken him until midnight to read through them all, questioning each detail, but Blyseden didn’t mind. At least he hadn’t quibbled over the cost.
“I think that it will form a solid enough core, my lord. Ungrol and Belnar, especially,” Blyseden said. He was bundled in a fur cape against the cold of the fireless audience chamber, but even so he shivered.
Averland wore only his tunic and hose. Lost in his world of calculation and obsession, he had no time for the cold, and he had only called for the single lantern in order to see the contracts that Blyseden had brought him.
“A core,” he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth.
“Yes, my lord. With you permission, I will continue to recruit as we make our way south. It will save on wages if we hire nearer to the battlefield.”
“If you’re sure,” Averland said, sounding unconvinced. “You have no need to worry too much about the cost, as long as the job is done thoroughly.”
“Thank you, my lord, but a good workman does not squander his resources.” Especially, Blyseden silently added, when his share of the loot is a mere quarter.
Averland didn’t acknowledge the response. Instead, he pushed the pile of contracts away and slumped back down into his throne. Blyseden, who was growing used to his master’s idiosyncrasies, merely stood and waited to be dismissed.
“Do you wonder why I alone am prepared to undertake this great mission, Blyseden?” he asked.
“No, my lord.”
“Well, I do. It is so clear to me what my duty is. I mean, I don’t pretend to be any sort of saint, and Sig-mar knows I have my weaknesses. For example, I am a coward.”
Blyseden opened his mouth to reply, and then decided not to. Wherever Averland was, it was somewhere far, far away from the room where he sat.
“I always have been, I suppose. Just the way that I was made. I never really had the talent of making friends, either. I don’t know why.”
Blyseden remained silent.
“But this task, this duty, it is so clear to me what I need to do that I have never had any doubt about it. I wonder why the other electors haven’t done the same. The Strigany are such a blight on our lands, such a horror. None of my noble cousins would tolerate witches or mutants, so why Strigany?”
The elector lapsed into a silence that lasted for so long that Blyseden thought that he must have drifted off.
“I think I know why it is,” he continued, his voice as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “It’s because they have been bewitched, ensorcelled. The only reason that I have escaped is because the spirit of my mother watches over me. I can see her even now.”
Averland nodded towards the darkness, outside the cone of light that the single lantern cast, and Blyseden felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. For a moment, he knew, he just knew, that, if he turned, he would see the wraith of Averland’s parent.
He shuddered again, and kept his eyes fixed on the lantern.
“She was a saintly woman, my mother, but they told such lies about her: terrible, terrible lies, filthy lies.”
Despite the passion of his language, Averland’s tone remained eerily calm.
“It was all the Striganies’ doing,” he went on, as if discussing nothing more controversial than the last night’s dinner. “They wanted to destroy her. They hated her. They hated her so much.”
Averland sighed.
Blyseden wondered if he should say something. He decided not to.
“They did it by whispering and lying, and sorcery,” Averland explained. “They even got inside my head once, making me see things that weren’t there. They did something to me, made me wrong. Can you believe that?”
Averland, remembering that Blyseden was there, looked up, and the mercenary realised that silence would no longer suffice.
“I know that they are an evil folk, my lord,” he said carefully.
“Yes,” Averland said, nodding gently. “Rats. Vermin. Filth. Cancer. Parasites.”
The elector count’s voice faded as he ran out of epithets. Then he leant forward to rest his head in his hands.
“You’re dismissed, Blyseden,” he said. “I will keep in touch by courier. And Blyseden?”
“Yes, my lord?”
“May Sigmar go with you.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Blyseden said, a
lthough he didn’t plan on it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Drop an Empire cat and it will land on its feet. Drop a Strigany cat, and you will land on your head.”
—Empire saying
Most of the Empire’s settlements had been created by the same natural forces that had created its forests, mountains and rivers. Marienburg, for example, had been formed by the flow of the River Reik. Its treacherous currents and shattered islands had drawn the first settlements of smugglers, and then their comrades, and then the merchants and artisans that the growing community had needed, and eventually the merchants themselves.
Talabheim, on the other hand, had been forged by stone rather than by water. Its sheer cliffs had made it a natural fortress for the first ragged hunters who had stumbled across it, and it had been inhabited by their ancestors ever since.
Then there was Nuln. Until the dwarf technology of black powder had fallen into the hands of man, the confluence of the embryonic iron and sulphur trade routes had been irrelevant. Then, the first cannon had been cast, and suddenly the village of Nuln had grown into the very arsenal of the Empire.
Flintmar was different. No trade routes fed it, or rivers, or roads. It guarded no mountain pass or rich farmlands. No religion found relevance in it, and no king had ever wanted it.
It was no more than a wasteland of sour water, bitter growth and constant, swarming mosquitoes.
Although there was no logical reason for it to exist, Flintmar did exist, the only settlement in the Empire to have been created by pure, unadulterated politics.
As the Strigany had arrived at this miserable place of exile, Flintmar had sprung up as suddenly as fungi on a forest floor, and, already its squalor was enough to equal any other town in the Empire.
No paving stones covered the mud of its roads. Its shallow latrines were more often than not open pits with perhaps a scrap of old canvas for privacy. Dogs roamed through the encampment, looking even leaner than usual, and clouds of flies had already begun to join the swarming mosquitoes that had gathered to add to the misery of the place.
That was Flintmar, a fitting tribute to the character of the man who had created it, and who, even now, was willing its destruction.
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