[Angelika Fleischer 01] - Honour of the Grave

by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead)

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  HONOUR OF

  THE GRAVE

  Angelika Fleischer - 01

  Robin D. Laws

  (A Flandrel & Undead Scan v1.0)

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering World’s Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  PROLOGUE

  Piled high, the corpses formed a bloody ridge. Arms and legs, some broken, others twisted, jutted out from the heap. Thickening blood dripped down from the uppermost bodies, running down mud-spattered faces and spreading through the fabric of tunics and leggings. It was early yet, and the stench of rotting had yet to rise up and overcome that of emptied bladders and evacuated bowels. The sky was red from distant fires. Crows cawed. Flies buzzed, ready to lay eggs, which would pop forth as maggots, which would feed, which would grow into flies, which would buzz elsewhere, to find more meat for more maggots.

  Angelika crept quickly but carefully forward, watching where each foot fell. It would be no good slipping in the mud, or hearing that awful, telltale slurking noise that informed you you’d just got your boot stuck. The orcs who’d fallen upon these soldiers and slaughtered them would have mostly moved on by now, having sorted through the corpses for weapons and armour pieces, the only varieties of loot they had any use for. But there could always be stragglers. Or her fellow looters. Angelika’s profession was not an elevated one, and you could never trust someone you met out here not to slit your throat for the trinkets you’d mined. You did not want to fall down or get stuck or become in any way distracted.

  Angelika Fleischer had blacked the pale skin of her cheeks and forehead with soot, to make herself harder to see from a distance. She was tall and her limbs were long. Raggedly cut locks of hair jutted from the top of her narrow, sharply symmetrical head. The irises of her eyes were dark, so much so that it was hard to distinguish them from the pupils. These unrevealing eyes sat high in her face, above imperious, down-sloping cheekbones. Her lips were thin and precise. A short, thin line of white scar tissue fissured from the right corner of her mouth, marring the icy perfection of her beauty. She wore neither earrings, nor necklace, nor rings on her fingers. Her tunic and leggings were of brown leather that had worn so soft it seemed at first glance like deerskin. They were stained in many places, and crisscrossed with rudely sewn patches and repairs. Both garments were immodestly tight, though she had draped a short skirt of gauzy rags around her waist. In this land, it was hard enough, and you did not want to give men in the taverns any further reason for annoying catcalls, which drew attention. The sleeves of her tunic clung tight to her arms, and ended in frayed cuffs several inches before her wrists. Gloves protected her palms, though she’d snipped away their fingers and thumbs, to leave her own bare and free to work.

  Work she did. She knelt down over a stray body, one the orcs had not tossed into the pile. It was hard to make out colours, with all the gore and mud, so she couldn’t guess the man’s origin or regiment. But from the cuff-frills, you could tell he was an officer. The breastplate was already long gone, so it was an easy thing for her to reach down and pluck off each carved ivory, gold-rimmed button, one, then the next, then the next. Angelika tucked the resultant handful of buttons into the soft leather pouch that hung from her belt. She yanked open the tunic to see if the man had a ransom wrapped around his chest—perhaps a money belt, or thin strands of gold. But no. She scuttled backwards to grab the heel of his left boot. For some reason, if it was in the boot, it would nearly always be in the left one. She wiggled the heel and twisted and wriggled and worked it off. In the handful of years Angelika had been making her living as a looter of battlefields, she had become very good at getting boots off. There, wrapped around his ankle, she saw a necklace of pearls and silver. She snatched it up and tightened her fingers around it.

  An exhalation of breath, made visible by the air’s increasing chill, rose up from one of the bodies in front of her. Someone was not quite dead. Angelika halted herself in mid-gesture, with the stillness of a hunted animal, her face remaining expressionless. Her eyes methodically scanned the tangle of corpses ahead of her. She saw the man who was still breathing. Heard him groan: a low, weak grunt. It spoke to Angelika of fear and disappointment. His throat was slick with bright-coloured blood and, as Angelika studied him further, she saw his tunic was also soaked through with red. He gurgled and his chest jerked slightly upwards.

  Angelika looked slowly around and moved towards him, gingerly finding solid footfalls in the few spaces the carpet of corpses offered. She squatted beside the man. His face was wide, his beard bushy and grey. The veins of his face lay close to the surface of his skin, mapping a lifetime of drained ale flagons. His right eye was pale blue. A black leather patch, studded with agates and with an opal in the middle, covered the left. She could easily tell he was a veteran campaigner.

  His living eye registered the sight of the woman kneeling over him, and he tried to reach a fleshy arm up at her. But strength had left him, and it sank back into the muck the moment he tried to raise it. He groaned again, making a sound that seemed to Angelika fretful, almost babyish.

  “Not me,” he said.

  “Yes,” Angelika said, but gently, “you.”

  She put the fingers of her right hand together and moved them slowly towards his face. She lay them softly against his left cheek. She felt the wet of the blood and the soft tangle of matted beard hair. She felt the coarser stubble on the part of his cheek the dying man usually shaved.

  “Not—” the veteran said, but then he deflated, and Angelika saw that his one good eye had gone blank. It wasn’t so unusual to find soldiers who hadn’t finished dying yet, especially against orcs. They were less than thorough with their defeated foes. After a human victory, you found most corpses stripped of obvious valuables, which was bad, but you faced less chance that the man you were searching would suddenly bolt up and clamp bloodied hands around your throat. It was a different set of complications, depending on which side won.

  She broke from her stillness and reached over to snatch the jewelled eye-patch from the dead man’s face. She tucked it into her purse’s wide, waiting mouth. She checked his tunic for buttons but they were nothing special. He’d spent all his vanity coin on the fancy patch, clearly. She half-straightened herself, casting her eyes about for an officer type. They were always the most lucrative.

  She heard another groan, behind her, and turned. A long, thin dagger was already in her hand. She saw nothing moving. Just the big ridge of piled bodies.
She watched a plume of breath escape from her lips up into the air.

  “Please,” a voice said. A young voice, male. Speaking the tongue of the Empire. It was not the kind of trick a brutish orc was capable of playing.

  Angelika remained still, kept her blade out.

  “Please,” the voice repeated. “Over here,” it said.

  Angelika’s eyes went to where the voice seemed to be coming from, but her feet remained planted in place.

  “Please,” the voice said. “I am stuck under bodies. Whenever I open my mouth, it fills up with blood. Someone else’s, I am pretty sure. Help me get out. Please.”

  Angelika knew the Empire, and in a past existence had learned to tell one accent from another. The young man’s voice came from somewhere up in the north-east. A long way from where they stood, close to the Blackfire Pass, between the southern flatlands of the Empire and the lawless reaches of the Border Princes.

  She still had not moved.

  “Please help me out,” the young man said. His voice was getting louder, finding strength. “My name is Franziskus.”

  “Franziskus,” she said, “shut up. You’ll bring the greenskins back.”

  “I’m over here,” he said, much more quietly. “Please. Quick. Under all this weight… My lungs—being crushed.”

  “Then don’t use them so much.”

  Angelika had pinpointed the location of the voice and began to step towards it. Finally she saw the movement. It was midway up in the stack of corpses, pointing upwards. She saw wriggling. And shoulders. Of his features, all she could make out was a helmetless head, a mop of what was probably blond, possibly curly, hair soaked flat with congealing blood.

  “Please get me out of here. See what part of me you can grab onto and then pull.”

  “No.”

  There was quiet for a moment, and in it Angelika could hear faraway drums.

  “No?” the voice finally said.

  “No. Now shut up before I open your throat, on the risk of your attracting orcs.” She’d moved closer to him, so she could speak more quietly. She could see his forehead now, and his eyes, though she did not think he could see her. He kept blinking his eyelids as more blood dripped onto his face from above.

  “Please, I promise you, I’ll be absolutely silent,” Franziskus said, also barely audible. “I foxed the orcs into thinking me dead, but I’m not injured. I’ll not be a burden to you. All I need is help out, then I’ll be on my way. Alone, no burden to you.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Are your ears, too, filled with blood, or are you always hard of hearing?” Angelika’s voice remained even, its tone flat and unenlightening.

  “But why deny me mercy?”

  A moving glint, high and to the left, caught Angelika’s eye. It was a pendant, bearing the holy hammer symbol of Sigmar. It was gold. The pendant hung from a clutching hand, out-thrust from the ridge of bodies. Franziskus’ squirming had set it to swinging, slightly.

  “Why deny me mercy?” Franziskus repeated.

  “Your throat remains uncut. Is that not mercy?” She rose up on her toes and plucked the pendant like it was a grape on a vine.

  “Why decline me the help I need?”

  Angelika began to look for other riches to pick from the corpse pile. Her eyes fixed on a cufflink, perhaps of silver.

  “Have you laid eyes on me?” she asked. She reached forward to grab a dead wrist with her off-hand. In the other, her knife sawed at cuff fabric. “What do you think I am doing here?”

  “Did I hear you comforting someone, just now?”

  “No.” She tore the cut fabric of the sleeve away and dropped it, with the cufflink, into her purse.

  “I am sure I heard this.”

  “Hope deceives you. You mistake my nature.”

  Franziskus stopped to breathe and Angelika carried on as if she would hear no more of him. She found a boot sticking from the mass of the slain and began to twist and pull at it. It was stuck securely to its master’s leg, and resisted her stoutly.

  “Then what is your nature?” Franziskus eventually asked.

  Angelika pulled some more at the boot. It would not be budged. She wrinkled up her nose at it. It was a flaw of her nature, she admitted to herself, that she was often too stubborn to give up a uselessly difficult task. If she fell into the same old trap, she could easily stand here for half an hour trying to get this one stupid boot off, even though she had no assurance that there was anything good inside it, and even though all around her there were hundreds of other boots on hundreds of other feet.

  She realized that Franziskus had said something else to her, but that she had not been paying attention and could not say what it was. She wrinkled her nose again, this time at herself, and then saw a crushed-up hat lying between bodies. It might have a hatpin on it. She yanked at it and, to control the extent of distraction he posed, decided to keep talking to the young man, to answer his previous question.

  “You mistake me for some kind of nurse or rescuer. I am here, Franziskus, to loot the bodies of your comrades.” She jangled her purse in his direction. “Medals, gemstones, coins.” She freed the flattened hat, but found no jewels or pins in its band. Instead, there was a small envelope of brown and waxen paper. She slipped open the flap and looked inside. It contained a darkish powder, one she recognized from the smell. This man had brought with him a little extra surprise for the orcs, and its waxy envelope had even kept it dry. But he had not gotten a chance to use it. Angelika tucked the envelope into the breast pocket of her tunic. The hat she tossed over her shoulder, and it splatted in the muck behind her.

  “Why?” he said. His voice’s pleading tone was gaining in insistence.

  She snorted. “Why do you think?”

  Franziskus began a greater flurry of wriggling, shifting his shoulders back and forth in the evident hope of sliding himself free. At the end of his struggle, he grunted. It seemed to Angelika that he had succeeded only in settling the bodies above him even more heavily upon his chest and limbs. He huffed whimperingly as Angelika removed a succession of boots, to find only a series of soaked and mildewy socks, each covering a set of toes half eaten by trenchfoot.

  “You think I am shocked,” Franziskus struggled to say. He stopped to gulp in air. “And shocked I am, I’ll admit. I am new to war, you see. This was my first battle.”

  “You should have stayed away.”

  “A man of my station is obli—” Franziskus cut off his own thought, as if suddenly aware of the futility of his line of argument. “Please, there is no reason not to help me. Please help me.”

  “Once,” said Angelika, pausing before the pile of corpses to decide where to start next, “I came upon a battlefield, and set about doing my business, and found a man, a big barrel of a sergeant, lying with a broken arm, pinned under a big piece of cannon. It had exploded at the seams, gone flying through the air, and flattened him into the soft earth.”

  “I have heard of such things,” Franziskus said.

  She surveyed his reddened face and leaned back against the bodies as if they were a brick wall, to rest up a bit. “He just needed it rolled off his arm, and he called to me, and I had not been doing this for long.” From her new vantage point, she saw a hand with a fat ring on it, and reached forward to work it down over the knuckle. The blood that slicked the hand made it easier work than it otherwise would have been. “I was reluctant, because he was a big man, but he pleaded with me as you’re doing now. And I went to him, and helped him, and rolled the cannon off his arm. And then, with his good arm, he grabbed a sabre and tried to spit me with it, cursing me as a looter and the desecrator of his comrades.”

  “But I won’t do that.”

  “So you say.”

  “I am of noble birth; my word means something.”

  “Perhaps you even believe that, in your current straits.” She moved away from the stacked bodies to the scattered pile of dead opposite it, where it would be easier to system
atically search each corpse.

  “Do you believe in nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  While he mulled that over, Angelika found a headless artillerist and rolled him over on his back, for better access to buttons and belt buckle.

  “You care for nothing but gold?”

  “What else is there?”

  “I am only a fourth son but still, my family can pay a good reward if you free me.”

  “How great a reward?”

  “Greater than an assemblage of medals and cufflinks.”

  Her tongue darted along inside her cheek. She shook her head, moved on to another corpse. “I believe only in gold I can place immediately in my hand.”

  Franziskus began to breathe quickly in and out, in the manner of a crazed horse or dog. Angelika stood up to survey other areas of the battlefield, to see which might be safely ripe for plucking.

  “Then, in general pity’s name, I implore you. As one child of Sigmar to another.”

  Angelika rounded on her heels, towards him, and for the first time spoke with heat in her voice. “Your gods and heroes mean nothing to me. They are fairy stories only, tales we tell one another to persuade ourselves that we are more than just meat and bone. All is blood and corruption on this plane, and what lies beyond it is naught. And man—man is nothing more than a finer-looking orc, wrapped up in brocades and finery and books and music but a ravening savage nonetheless. I clean up after what you nobles do, with your never-ending wars of loot and conquest. It’s as close as I’ve found to a worthwhile pursuit in this stinking charnel house of a world. So do not speak to me of pity. It is a word without meaning. It is a lie.”

  Franziskus listened as Angelika paused to recover her expended breath. “Your words are well-schooled, your accent refined. How did—”

  She heard mud squishing under boots and glottal growling in the orcish tongue. She pushed her arm through the pile of cadavers and clamped a hand over Franziskus’ mouth. She cursed and said, “They’re coming back.”