Before he could continue, however, a single, shrill voice cut through the silence of the amphitheatre.
Everybody froze, including the elder. Then the voice came again, and all heads turned to see who had spoken. When they saw, nervous laughter rippled around the amphitheatre.
The raven whose voice they had heard sat perched on one of the railings, looking curiously around at the gathering. It opened its mouth to craw again, but, before it could, somebody threw a boot at it and, with an angry squawk, it fluttered away.
The elder pursed his lips, shrugged, and then turned back to Dannie and Chera. “For Ushoran’s blessing,” he intoned, and, as the two offered their hands, he expertly whipped the tip of the blade across the pads of their thumbs. It was neatly done, deep enough to draw a few drops of blood, but no deeper, and he held out the chalice to receive their offering.
“In Ushoran’s name, I pronounce thee man and wife,” he cried, and the deathly silence was replaced by a howl of approval from the assembled Strigany. Brock grinned, as widely as the groom, and, the ceremony complete, stepped forward to slap Dannie on the back, and shake Chera’s hand.
“My blessing too,” he said.
As the next couple stepped up to be wed, he was happy to see that, raven or no, Dannie and his bride only had eyes for each other.
Quite right too, Brock told himself. After all, this superstitious nonsense was nothing but silliness for bored old women.
Even so, as more ravens gathered to perch on the top of the walls that contained the amphitheatre, he couldn’t help looking nervously up at them from time to time. At first, there were a dozen, and then a score. As proceedings dragged on, the black-clad visitors assembled in their hundreds. They sat around the back wall of the amphitheatre, unseen by most of the people, who were squashed into the seats below.
Only the petrus seemed to notice them, occasionally flashing furtive glances up towards the birds, as cautiously as debtors who have spotted a bailiff.
As Brock shook hands with the next couple, he had a sudden feeling of absolute relief that they were leaving this terrible place.
Whatever awaited them on the road, it couldn’t be worse than what had happened to them in Flintmar.
EPILOGUE
“The joy of a market place is that you pay for what you get. The curse of life is that you get what you pay for.”
—Strigany saying
In the past days, autumn had suddenly withered beneath the relentless advance of winter. Last week, the wind that had howled over the battlements had carried with it the brown leaves of the dying summer, and the last migrating birds. Now, it blasted the battlements with ice and sleet, which meant that the battlements were no place to be, even if you were huddled in a cloak with plenty of gin inside of you.
That’s what Halberdier Jensen thought, anyway, which was why, tonight, he was sitting inside one of the towers that led onto the section of battlements he was supposed to be patrolling. He had relieved the last sentry at dusk, and, ever since then, he had sat poking at the brazier and puffing at his pipe. The tobacco smoke danced merrily around the shadows of the little room, before being shredded and whipped out of the doors onto the battlements, or down the spiralling staircase that led up to them.
Jensen watched the smoke and huddled deeper into his cloak. It was cold up here, and lonely, but, by Sigmar’s left ball, it was better than being in the hall.
His lord, the Elector Count of Averland, had never been much of a one for bonhomie, Jensen reflected sourly. He didn’t drink or whore, and, not only did he not do it, but he didn’t seem to want anybody else to do it either. Then there was the penny pinching: the fines for worn-out equipment, and the rationing of everything from straw to lamp oil. Even Jensen and his comrades were given no more than one ration of beef a week, and where would their lord’s pallid carcass be without them to guard him?
Jensen spat into the brazier as he contemplated these injustices, and snuggled even deeper down into his cloak. He knew that things weren’t like this in the courts of other elector counts. Some of the lads who had been to Stirland said that the men who served that elector count ate beef every night, and had ale with every meal.
Even though Averland had always been a swine to work for, the past few months had made his castle the most miserable place that Jensen had ever lived in, and, Sigmar knew, he’d lived in a some awful places.
It had all begun with Averland’s crusade against the Strigany. At first, Jensen, as well as the rest of the men, had welcomed the opportunities that the licensed persecution had seemed to offer. The Strigany were renowned for the extent of their stolen wealth, and turning them over promised to be a healthy way of supplementing a halberdier’s meagre income.
Unfortunately, the Strigany hadn’t been so easily turned over. They had been quick, and, even when they hadn’t been quick enough, they had been ferocious.
However, their ferocity had been nothing compared to the elector count’s. He had taken to flogging every man whose patrol failed to kill enough Strigany, and, as the amount of Strigany they killed was never enough, almost all of them had been flogged.
It was only when the captains had started inventing fictional caravans and notional battles against them that Averland, Sigmar cripple him, had relented. Not that this hadn’t cost the captains and their men; even though the caravans had been imaginary the loot that they were supposed to share with their lord had still had to be found. More than one merchant’s caravan had been “mistaken” for a Strigany one, and that had started to cause its own problems.
Jensen wondered, for the thousandth time, if it might be a good idea to leave Averland’s guard. He had joined up because he had thought that it would be easier than life in a free company or a state regiment. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He especially wasn’t sure after the news that had arrived three days ago.
It had been borne by a ragged rider on the back of a winded horse, and the man had been half dead with fatigue, as he had stumbled into the elector count’s audience chamber.
He hadn’t stumbled back out again. He had been carried, as dead as a coffin nail, his body covered in a sheet. According to Averland’s personal bodyguard, the messenger had died of a heart attack, although, according to one of Jensen’s cronies if it had been a heart attack it had been one brought on by being beaten to death.
The Strigany, it seemed, hadn’t just survived the cull that Averland had planned for them, but had turned from hunted to hunters, and had annihilated the army that Averland had sent to slaughter them. There had been all sorts of wild rumours about how they had done it, from summoning daemons to buying off the mercenaries, to using magic to turn the attacking soldiers into crows.
Jensen didn’t believe any of the stories. He didn’t really care about them, either. All that he cared about was the mood that had pervaded the castle since the news had arrived. It made the ice-laden winds that howled outside seem positively toasty, and everybody was silent and snappy, and on edge. They all knew that it was only a matter of time before the lit fuse of Averland’s personality resulted in…. well, who knew what the carpet-chewing maniac would do next?
“Jensen! What are you doing skulking in here, you rascal?”
Jensen, who had been wrapped too deeply in the warmth of his cloak and the comfort of his mutinous thoughts to hear his captain’s approach, sprang to his feet and clipped off a salute. The effect was rather spoiled by the pipe that remained clenched in his teeth, and the stained blanket he was wearing over his shoulders.
“Evening, sir,” he said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “I’m assigned guard duty tonight. Got the skeleton shift.”
The captain strolled over to the brazier and opened his hands over it.
“Don’t try it on with me, Jensen,” he growled, his face a brutal mask of reflected fire and black shadows, “I wrote the rota.”
“I’m not trying it on, captain,” Jensen told him, wondering how much hatred he dared put into his voice. All officers
were turds, but this one really took the biscuit.
“Get out onto the battlements where you’re supposed to be,” the captain told him, before sitting down on Jensen’s chair and fishing out his pipe. “Well, get on with it, man!”
Jensen didn’t quite dare not to salute as he shrugged his cloak up around his shoulders, picked up his halberd, and trudged out into the night.
In the blast of frozen night air, he almost lost his footing on the ice that covered the parapet, and he cursed loudly and long. The hail that had been falling earlier had turned to sleet, and he hadn’t walked a dozen paces before water started to trickle down into his boots.
What a complete waste of time this was. The city that lay beyond the castle was as dark as a forest. Nobody was mad enough to be out on a night like this, especially nobody whose business required a torch. The courtyard on the other side of the wall was hardly any more lively. A single torch burned in a glass case by the stables, the light barely enough to illuminate the cobbles beneath it, let alone the rest of the yard.
“Sigmar curse them all,” Jensen muttered democratically, and sidled into an abutment that arced out over the wall. The extra height of the battlements here meant that it was slightly less exposed than the rest of the wall. As long as he kept his eye on the door that led back into the tower, he wouldn’t be caught unawares by the stinking duty officer either.
If only it wasn’t winter, he’d desert like a shot.
He was deep into a plan of shipping out to Lustria, supposedly a land of gold and constant sunshine, when the sleet petered out and the wind softened. Stamping his feet against the cold, Jensen sidled back out onto the battlements proper, and, using his halberd as a walking stick, he walked the length between the two towers. When he reached the second, he turned back, and had taken a dozen steps when he saw that he was no longer alone.
At first, he mistook the apparition that had appeared on the parapet for a shadow, except, of course, that shadows didn’t tower up into the night from cold stone. Nor did they blot out the light that glowed through the cracks in the tower’s door.
“Hello?” Jensen asked warily, and the thing turned to face him. It was a dark, misshapen mass, the silhouette more gargoyle than human, although, that it was real, Jensen no longer had any doubt. Its eyes, slits in the darkness of the night, shone as silver as dead moons, and, even through the damp blanket that he had wrapped around his face, Jensen could smell it. It stank even worse than it looked.
Despite the cold, Jensen began to sweat. He suddenly remembered the stories about the daemons that the Strigany, Sigmar rot them, had used against Blyseden’s army. It seemed that those stories hadn’t been so exaggerated after all.
Another man might have fought or run from the abomination that appeared before them, but Jensen was too old a lag to make either mistake. Instead of panicking, he saluted.
“Pass, my lord,” he said, and bowed.
The twinkle of the thing’s eyes disappeared as it turned away, and loped down the battlements towards the tower. Jensen watched with something approaching pleasure as it tore open the door and lurched inside. He saw a brief image of the thing’s outline, huge and malformed, and, beyond it, the terrified face of the duty officer as he leapt to his feet. Then the brazier was kicked over, and, after a short, piercing shriek, the battlements were as dark and as silent as they had been before.
Jensen fished his pipe out of his pocket, and bent over so that he could light it in the lee of the wall. When it was burning merrily away, he resumed his pacing, a slight smile on his face.
He had a feeling that, what with one thing and another, life in the late elector count’s castle might be about to improve.
Ushoran moved though his quarry’s fortress with lethal assurance. Even though he was beginning to recover from the worst ravages of his exile, he still wore his stealth as effortlessly as a cloak, and it was only when he chose to let them that the unfortunate inhabitants of Averland’s domain saw him.
At first, his haste made him merciful, and he killed only when it was necessary or convenient. Occasionally, he would pause to tear open one of his victim’s minds before dispatching them, and, soon, he was navigating through the elector count’s castle as effortlessly as his oldest servants.
After the first few rooms, though, as the murderous rush of his attack began to slow, Ushoran found his attention being caught by the tapestries and the sculptures with which the elector count had decorated his lair. It was crude, barbaric stuff, primitive beyond belief compared to the treasures that had once adorned his own palaces.
Still, after so many years, he gloried in his capacity to savour more than blood and terror, not that blood and terror didn’t remain as savoury as ever, of course.
There was the room full of serving maids, for instance, bent over their sewing, as docile as a flock of lambs ready for the slaughter. He hadn’t been able to resist. Then, there were the guards who had been half asleep in their beds. He had painted the room with their blood, great sprays of velvety redness that he had splattered across the stonework with the inspired frenzy of the true artist.
For a while, he had been in danger of losing his head, not so much a stoat in a warren as a fox in a chicken coop, unable to stop killing until the farmer came for him. With the rebirth of his pride had come a modicum of self-discipline, however, and so, with barely a quarter of the castle’s inhabitants slaughtered, he had made his way to the Averland’s inner sanctum.
There were a dozen guards in the antechamber. They wore full armour, and, when he fell upon them, they reacted with disciplined rage, instead of the panic that Ushoran had encountered so far. It was all the same to him. They died just as pathetically easily as any mortals.
When he had finished with the last of them, a six foot-tall Reiklander whose neck he had snapped as easily as a chicken’s, Ushoran lifted the door from its hinges and prowled into Averland’s audience chamber.
It was a cold place, the fire unlit, and only a single lantern burning to illuminate the faded tapestries and worm-eaten furniture. Yet Averland, who sat slumped in the throne of his ancestors, looked no more cold than he looked afraid.
“It’s you,” he said, as Ushoran approached him, as silently as spilled oil. “I wondered how long it would be before you arrived.”
Ushoran paused in front of the man and regarded him with pink-eyed curiosity.
Averland looked away.
“I don’t like your eyes,” he whispered. “They look like eyes that see things.”
“Look at me anyway,” Ushoran told him, and, to his surprise, he found that his lips formed the words as well as his mind. His voice was nothing like he remembered it; it lacked the razor smoothness or the commanding boom, sounding reedy, as dry as dust, and as passionless as the wind that whined through the cold depths of Averland’s castle.
Somehow, Averland managed to disobey the command. Instead of looking, he started to sob, drawing his knees to his chest, and rocking back and forth in his throne. Ushoran watched him curiously then reached out, extending a single talon to slice a tear drop from Averland’s face. Tears. He remembered them from the old days.
“Why did you hurt my people?” he asked, his voice wheezing through spitless vocal chords.
“Because,” Averland answered, and now he did look up, into the glittering deadness of his persecutor’s eyes. “Because I had to. Don’t you understand? I had to.”
Ushoran understood, and with that understanding came the decision that death was too good for this upstart mortal.
He had failed with the girl. He had meant to stop her heart and bind her half life to his, but his appetite had overwhelmed him at the crucial juncture. With this one, though, he would not fail.
He extended his talons and went to work.
* * *
For the first time in millennia, he threw back his head and laughed. The sound echoed through the cold stone passageways of Averland’s keep, freezing the inhabitants with the desperate, mindless
terror of cornered animals. They remained crouched and paralysed with terror, as Ushoran stalked out of their fallen fortress and hurried away to the south.
The leisurely progress of the previous weeks was gone. Instead, he twisted and turned, struggling within his skin, as his bones grew and tapered into wings, vast enough to lift him into the sleet-ridden sky. Now that his duty of vengeance was discharged there could be no more delays.
His people were awaiting him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Earl graduated from Keele University in 1994, after which he started a career in sales. Having worked and travelled in the Balkans and the Middle East, he now lives in England.
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