The mob cheered Mihai as he reached out to take the knife, and, although it was shrill, the sound of their acclaim was sweet, so very sweet.
The hilt of the flensing blade was warm in his hand, the weight comforting.
“Mihai,” Brock said, “there will be no execution of prisoners here.”
Mihai turned to regard his father, and his eyes hardened with resentment. The contempt he has for me, Mihai thought, for me! A man, and not just any man, but the hero of the battle, the chosen of Ushoran. He is jealous. That is why he hates me, why he has always hated me.
“Are you sure there’ll be no execution of prisoners, Kazarkhan?” Boris piped up, his tone light, but his eyes wary, “not even for the hero of the bottle?”
“She said the battle,” Bran corrected him.
“Then she got that one wrong,” Boris said, “or, maybe she hasn’t heard about what happened in that tavern by Altdorf.”
“The bottle was the hero of that one,” Bran said. “He may be the vessel of Ushoran, but he still puked like a sewer.”
Mihai turned on them, annoyed by their prattle. Perhaps he should stop hanging around with them. They talked like fools.
“Mihai,” Brock said softly, “listen to your friends.”
“They are nice boys,” the crone added, her tone layering the words with a dozen different meanings, none of them good, “entertaining, but, there will be time for them later.”
Suddenly, from nowhere, the urge to use the crone’s weapon on his father burned through the confusion of Mihai’s thoughts. He had no idea where the impulse came from, but it was as bright as a wrecker’s lantern on a dark night.
After all, he was the chosen of Ushoran, so, why not?
The answer came to him in a sudden, terrifying memory of the things he had seen with Dannie in the lair of the Old Father. The pallid, broken things that had once been human, they had been the chosen of Ushoran too.
Mihai shook his head, suddenly appalled at the murderous impulse that had almost seized him. The crone’s expression hardened as she felt her grip slipping, and she took a step back as Mihai advanced, blade outstretched. It wasn’t the crone he was aiming for, though, it was the hanging man. As the mob looked on, Mihai lunged forward, putting the man out of his misery with a killing stroke.
He shuddered as the mercenary’s life flowed out of him. Then he turned to face the mob.
“He was dead already,” he told them, “but you heard the Kazarkhan. No more killing of prisoners.”
Then he turned back to face his father. Suddenly, he was exhausted and his hands were trembling.
“Well done,” Brock said, and Mihai heard the pride in his voice. “As for you, crone,” he said, “many of our people have need of your healing skills. Go and tend to them.”
For the first time, the woman’s good humour vanished, and her tones curdled with the darkness that had lain beneath.
“You are lucky, Kazarkhan. Not many are as lucky as you. These people are not. After all, you still have your son.”
She looked at Mihai with the look of a butcher appraising a lamb, and then bundled up her blades and slipped away.
Brock watched her go. Then he turned on the others she had assembled.
“Go,” he told them, “and make yourselves useful.”
They turned, and, with barely a mutter, sidled out of the amphitheatre. Brock watched them go. Then he saw the faces of the mercenaries, who had been watching him, watching their fate be decided.
“Sorry about that,” he said with a wicked grin, “but you know how women are when they get in a mood.”
Nobody laughed. Nobody smiled. He didn’t blame them.
“Stay here,” he told them. “Stay quiet. There will be work for you. In time you’ll be set free.”
They looked at him as dumb as a herd of sheep. Brock shrugged. He had more important things to think about now.
“As to you three,” he continued, turning to his son and the twins, “maybe you should stay here. Make sure nobody else gets any ideas.”
“Even though I’m the chosen of Kazarkhan?”
Brock’s mouth opened as he turned to his son.
Then he saw the grin on his face, and the two of them started laughing.
It was the last time Brock was to laugh in a long time. In the aftermath of their victory, his first priority was to deal with the dead, and dead there were aplenty.
Almost a quarter of their number had been killed, or wounded so badly that they were to die over the next few days. The Strigany custom was to bury their dead, to bury them deep, but the marshy ground, and the numbers involved, made that all but impossible.
Then there were the flies, and the rats. Nobody knew how so many had gathered so quickly, but, on the day after the battle, the ruins of the Striganies’ encampment was swarming with vermin, eager to feast on the bodies of the dead.
It was Domnu Malfi’s caravan that provided the solution, in the form of the corpse powder they had used to burn the plague victims of the Empire. The bodies were stacked outside the camp, like so much soggy cordwood. Some of them were already beginning to stink, the gas of their decomposition enough to turn even the strongest of stomachs.
They stank even worse when they were burned. By that afternoon, the greasy smoke of their burning flesh hung in the air, soaking into hair and clothes as deeply as any liquid. The worst thing about it was not that it smelled bad, but that it didn’t. Far from it. As the bodies of their kin crisped and carbonised, the Striganies’ camp was filled with the mouth-watering smell of roasting pork.
Few of those who engaged in the gruesome task escaped without nightmares. None of them ever touched pork again, an aversion that they passed on to their children.
The toll on the wagons had been even higher, although most of them, could be repaired. As the bodies burned, so the Striganies’ carpenters worked on the wagons, with an urgency that reflected the new idea that had taken them after the horrors of their victory in battle.
It was an old idea, an idea carved into the beam of every wagon, but, suddenly, everybody was talking about it as though it was an idea that they had just discovered. It raced through the conversations of the traumatised survivors of the slaughter, like the seasonal fires that race through the Reikwald in summer.
It was a clear idea, and it was as simple as it was impossible.
It worried Brock no end.
They had to flee, of course. There could be no doubt that, although they had driven off the mercenaries, they hadn’t broken them. Brock knew full well, from his younger days, how things would work. The mercenaries who had fled in such terror the day before would by now be back in their camp, like dogs who had retreated to lick their wounds. However, as the ale flowed and the coin jingled, they would regain their courage, even as their leaders recalculated and planned for their next attack. Brock knew that the next attack would be the end of them.
So they had to flee, of course they did, but to flee to Mourkain?
He had called on Petru Engel, in the dark, silent hours of that night, to talk his people out of this madness. Apart from the sentries, who were stationed on the rebuilt barricades, the camp was slumbering, everybody exhausted by the weight of the day’s harrowing work.
Brock knocked on the petru’s door, and wasn’t surprised to find the old man waiting for him, bright eyed within the confines of his wagon.
“Good evening, Kazarkhan,” he said, nodding to Brock, who nodded back as he sat cross legged on the floor.
“Good evening yourself, petru,” he replied, and took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Where’s Dannie?”
“He’s out visiting,” the petru said, looking strangely nostalgic as he accepted the tobacco pouch from Brock, and started to fill his own pipe. “He’s found himself a woman. I’ve had to stop training him, it’s got that bad. His head seems full of wool.”
Brock lit a match, and leered into the sulphur flare.
“If I remember rightly, it isn’t a
surplus of cotton wool he’s suffering from,” he said. He drew on his pipe and blew a smoke ring up into the wooden beams of the wagon. “Still, I’m sure she’ll take care of it soon enough. He’s a good lad. Good prospects of becoming a petru. Did well in the battle.”
“He’s not the only one,” Engel said, returning Brock’s tobacco, and drawing on his own pipe. “Mihai is quite the hero. The giants’ handler is still around, by the way, wanting to be paid.”
“We’ll pay him, I suppose,” Brock decided. “It’s just a shame he lost both of his beasts. They might have come in useful.”
“They did come in useful.”
“Ah yes, the stew, are you sure that was all right?”
The petru shrugged.
“Meat is meat. After all, they were no more human than a monkey, and that’s no more human than a cow.”
“It was a fine meal, anyway,” Brock said, although the smell of burning bodies had made more than one of his people vomit up the stew, almost as soon as they had swallowed it. Thank Ushoran that task was ended.
The two men smoked in companionable silence for a little while longer.
“Yes, Mihai did well,” the petru mused. “You must be very proud of him.”
“I’ve always been proud of him,” Brock said, his beard bristled defiantly, even though he couldn’t quite meet his old friend’s gaze.
“Yes, well,” the petru said, studying the glowing bowl of his pipe. “The past is what we want it to be. The future is what we make of it.”
Brock grunted.
“One day, I’ll find you short of a saying. Then I’ll worry.”
The petru blew a perfect smoke ring, watching it as it floated up, and then dissolved.
“You would have good reason to. Our customs, our tales, our words, they’re our strength. They’re what makes us better than the peasants, stronger, but everything has a price.”
“Prices are for those who are willing to pay them,” Brock said, pleased to have remembered the saying in time. Lacking Engel’s skill, he usually couldn’t come up with them until it was too late.
“Oh, we’ve been paying all right,” the petru told him.
Brock looked at the old man, but his face was veiled beneath smoke and shadow.
“Have you heard the nonsense people have been talking?” Brock asked at length. “About returning to Mourkain?”
“Since I was born,” Engel replied.
“You know what I mean,” Brock said, fidgeting on the hard wood of the wagon floor. He felt a bite of cramp in one of his thighs. By the gods, he was getting soft in his old age.
“Ah yes,” Engel said, nodding. “Before, returning to Mourkain was a dream, not a plan.”
“Mourkain, of all places,” Brock scoffed, “a name from stories and nursery rhymes.”
Engel shrugged.
“And why do you think that it’s in those stories and nursery rhymes, Kazarkhan?”
Brock looked at him suspiciously.
“Don’t tell me you believe in all this nonsense. Leaving the Empire, leaving civilisation, and for what? So that we can go and live in a place from a story.”
The petru studied his pipe before replying.
“And yet,” he said, “and yet Mourkain is real. As real as you, and you are in a dozen stories already, oh mighty Kazarkhan.”
Brock snorted.
“In fifty years, when the stories have made me into one of the gods, what will I be but dust and bones? No, when you petrus say that Mourkain existed, I believe you well enough. It is where our people were born, where our great lords taught us the arts, but, in the same stories, it also says that Mourkain was smashed by the orcs, and that we were scattered across the world like chaff on the four winds.”
“You remember well,” the petru told him mildly, “apart from the part that says that, one day, we will return.”
“One day,” Brock scoffed. “One of the things I’ve learned is that, what orcs smash stays smashed. Mourkain stood thousands of years ago. What will there be now but fallen stones? Everything else will have been plundered, even the bones.”
“What else will there be?” Engel replied. “Oh, nothing, nothing much, just dirt.” His eyes glittered as he spoke. “Just soil and land. The stories also tell us that the land there was as rich and as black as treacle cake, so fertile that you can grow three crops a year.”
“I don’t remember that,” Brock said, frowning.
“Us petrus tend to stick to the livelier tales around the campfires,” Engel said. “It keeps the ale flowing more freely, and the tobacco, of course.”
Brock handed him the pouch and watched him refill the pipe.
“So, maybe the land was rich,” he allowed. “Our ancestors had arts of which ours are a pale reflection.”
“You did learn the tales well,” Engel said complimenting him on his word perfect recitation.
“But that was thousands of years ago. What will be left of those farms but fallow ground and silt from the river?”
Engel looked at him, his face carefully blank.
“Sometimes,” he said at length, “I wonder if we are quite as superior in intellect to the peasants as we think we are. Nothing but fallow ground and silt from the river indeed. Why do you think the place is so fertile in the first place?”
Brock opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. A sudden suspicion had dawned on him.
“Tell me,” he asked, “what do you and the other petrus think of this madness? Surely you can’t think that leaving the Empire and hurling ourselves into the wilderness is anything more than collective suicide?”
“I wouldn’t presume to speak for the other petrus,” Engel said smoothly, “although I don’t suppose many would think that staying here would be anything other than death.”
“Yes, of course,” Brock said, exasperated, “but there are other places to go. The Empire is surrounded by wildernesses. We could even disappear into the Reikwald for a while.”
“We could,” Engel said, “but what story do you think the survivors will tell, back in the Empire? Of how they were out manoeuvred and outfought by a bunch of Strigany? Or that we had the Dark Gods on our side?”
Brock shrugged.
“The latter,” he said, “which is all to the good. Let them fear us.”
Again, Engel paused and looked at his Kazarkhan.
“Maybe we should have this conversation when you aren’t so tired,” he decided at length. “It may have escaped your attention, but there are three emperors at the moment, all of them vying to be the only one. How long do you think it would be before they realise what an easy victory against the ‘Dark God’ wiping us out would be?”
Brock shifted uncomfortably.
“You might be right. If they disbelieve the stories.”
“If’ doesn’t come into it,” Engel told him, relieved that the Kazarkhan was finally seeing sense. Sometimes it was like getting blood out of a stone. “The Elector Count Averland might be a lunatic, but most of his fellows aren’t. When they come, it will be cautiously, and it will be with state regiments, not a rag bag of misfits and cut throats. Not that Averland’s rag bag of misfits and cutthroats won’t finish us off, anyway, unless we start moving.”
Brock sighed.
“You might be right,” he allowed, “but, even so, Mourkain’s at the bottom of the world, even below Araby. How will we find the ships to take us there without traipsing back up through the whole murderous length of the Empire to find a port? Marienburg’s the nearest by my reckoning, and that’s a thousand miles away if it’s a yard.”
“Might as well be a million as a thousand,” Engel said, “but it makes no sense to take ships. We have our horses, our wagons, and our feet, if it comes to it, and we know the way. It’s over there.”
The old man pointed towards the south, one bony finger outstretched towards the door of his wagon.
Brock gaped at him.
“Across the Black Mountains?”
Engel just smiled, blew a smoke ring, and said, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
“Ye gods,” Brock said and rolled his eyes.
“Of course,” Engel told him, “we are still at war, and you are still Kazarkhan. When all’s said and done, the decision is yours.”
“Well, that’s all right then,” Brock said sarcastically, “and, if I decide to stay here, you and the rest of the petrus will be happy to obey, I suppose.”
“Happy to? No, but obey we will. You are the chosen of Ushoran. We have no choice.”
Brock heard the truth of it in the old man’s voice. If anything, it made the inevitability of the decision even worse. At least half of his people were too old or too young, or too sick to travel at all, let alone to face the howling wilderness of the Black Mountains. They had no maps, no guides and no equipment with which to face the sheer cliffs and black voids of the chasms.
Then there were the things that lived within that terrible wilderness, things desperate enough to make the mountains their home, and vicious enough to survive in them.
Brock sighed, and tried to blow a smoke ring. A sudden gust rattled beneath the door of the wagon, blurring the smoke, and sending a shiver down his spine.
Of course it’s cold, he thought. Winter’s on the way. Perfect, damned perfect.
“I’m too old for this,” he muttered. Petru Engel barked with laughter.
“Isn’t everybody, Kazarkhan? Isn’t everybody?”
“We’ll see. I’ll call the council tomorrow night, and we’ll see.”
As she stalked through the night, as fleeting as an owl’s shadow, Maria’s face was twisted with an embittered passion. Ever since the idiot Brock had kept her from her rightful victims, she had been in a foul temper, and the day’s work had done nothing to improve it.
It wasn’t only that she had enjoyed paying back a little, oh so very little, of what the peasants had made her people suffer. It was also that she’d been denied the use of their fresh, juicy entrails. Ripe and clean, and sliced from still living bodies, the organs would have been rich in the humours her potions required.
Of course, she thought as she shifted the soggy satchel she wore beneath her cloak, I can use scraps of the dead, but they’re never as good. The potions never lasted as long, and they were never as strong.
Ancient Blood Page 28
