Shadow Chaser tcos-2

by Алексей Пехов

“The same on our side, commander, the houses are empty. No damage, nothing broken, food on the table, but the soup’s cold.”

  “I’m sure it will be the same in the other houses, too, Milord Alistan,” Honeycomb shouted to the count.

  “Maybe there’s a festival of some kind, or a wedding?”

  “We don’t have any festivals,” said a warrior with a lance. “And weddings aren’t held early in the morning.”

  “Orcs?” Lamplighter asked.

  “It can’t be. Cuckoo’s just down the road. The Firstborn would never dare attack a village so close to a garrison.”

  “Urch, Kassani, check the tower!” Fer ordered.

  The tower was close by, only ten yards from the road, at the edge of a field. While the lads were checking the houses, three of the mounted soldiers had kept their eyes on it, holding their crossbows ready. An archer could easily be hiding up there.

  One of the soldiers started climbing up the shaky ladder, with a knife clutched in his teeth, while another held his crossbow pointed straight up in case an enemy head should suddenly appear in the square hole in the floor. The soldier with the knife clambered up and disappeared from view for a second. Then he reappeared and shouted:

  “No one!”

  “Is there anything up there, Urch?” asked Fer, raising his visor.

  “A bow, a quiver of arrows, a jug of milk, commander!” Urch replied after a brief pause. “Blood! There’s blood here on the boards!”

  “Fresh?” shouted one of the sergeants, drawing his sword.

  “No, it’s dry! And there’s only a little bit, right beside the bow!”

  “Kassani, what is there on the ground?”

  “I can’t see anything,” said the soldier below the tower. “Just ordinary earth, and we’ve trampled it.”

  Ell rode across to the tower, jumped off his horse, handed the reins to the soldier, then squatted down on his haunches and started studying the ground.

  “Harold,” the jester called anxiously, “can you smell anything?”

  “No.”

  “I think there’s a smell of burning.”

  “I can’t smell it,” I said after sniffing at the air. “You must have imagined it.”

  “I swear by the great shaman Tre-Tre, there’s a smell of something burning.”

  “Blood!” shouted Ell. “There’s blood on the ground!”

  The elf jumped onto his horse and galloped across to Fer, Alistan, and Miralissa.

  “He was killed on the tower, probably by an arrow, and he fell.”

  “I see,” said Milord Alistan, tensing his jaw muscles. He pulled his chain-mail hood up over his head and put on a closed helmet with slits for his eyes. As if on command, Ell and Egrassa put on half-helmets that covered the top part of their faces.

  “There’s something bad here, oh, very bad!” said Lamplighter, looking round nervously for any possible enemy.

  But the street was as empty as the houses around us. Not just empty, but dead. There were no birds singing, no cows mooing in the barn, no dogs barking.

  “The dogs!” I blurted out.

  “What do you mean, Harold?” asked Egrassa, turning toward me.

  “The dogs, Egrassa! Have you seen one? Have you heard them bark?”

  “Orcs,” one of the soldiers said, and spat. “Those brutes hate dogs and they kill them first.”

  “Then where are the bodies? Did they take them with them?” asked Marmot.

  “Some clans do that,” Kassani said, climbing into his saddle. “They make ornaments out of dogs’ skins.”

  “Urch, come down!” one of the sergeants shouted.

  “Wait, commander, smoke!” cried Urch, pointing toward the center of the village.

  “Thick?”

  “No, I can just barely see it.”

  “What’s burning?”

  “I can’t see for the roofs of the houses.”

  “Come down!”

  Urch climbed down the ladder and got onto his horse.

  “We move forward. Stay alert. We cover our back,” said Fer, and lowered his visor with a smooth movement.

  “You know, Harold,” the goblin said in a whisper. “I’m beginning to feel afraid that we’ll run into orcs.”

  “Me, too, Kli-Kli. Me, too.”

  * * *

  We caught the charred smell twenty houses away from the site of the fire. A huge barn belonging to a well-to-do peasant was burning. Or rather, it had already burned down. What we found was a heap of ash, still smoking slightly.

  The smell of smoke and ash was mingled with the smell of burned flesh.

  “Check it,” Fer rumbled from under his helmet.

  One of the soldiers covered his face with his hands and walked to the extinguished fire. Walking across the cold embers and stepping over burnt-out beams, he stirred the ash with the toe of his boot and ran back to us. His face was pale.

  “They were all burned, commander. Nothing but charred bones. They drove them into the barn and set fire to it. More than a hundred of them.”

  Someone sighed loudly behind me and someone else swore.

  “How could this have happened?”

  “Someone will pay for this!”

  “Stop sniveling! Forward, at a walk,” Fer said harshly. “Crossbowmen move up into the front line.”

  “What about the dead, commander?”

  “Later,” Fer replied.

  We found the other villagers on the small square, where there was an inn and a wooden temple to the gods—more than twenty-five corpses. All the bodies had been gutted, like fish, their heads had been cut off and heaped up in one big pile. The stench of blood and death hammered at our nostrils and the buzzing of thousands of flies rang in our ears. It looked as if a crowd of insane jesters had run through here, splashing blood left and right out of buckets.

  One of the soldiers dismounted and puked violently. And to be quite honest, I almost followed his example. It cost me an immense effort to keep my breakfast in my stomach.

  Things like this just shouldn’t happen. Things like this have no right to exist in our world!

  Men. Women, old people, children … Everyone who had not been burned in the barn was lying in the square, which was covered in blood.

  “There,” said Marmot, with a nod.

  There were seven bodies hanging on the wall of the inn. Their hands and feet had been nailed to the planks, their stomachs were slit open, and their heads were missing. Two women had been hanged on a rope thrown across the sign of the inn, and their bodies were swaying gently in the light breeze.

  I heard a chirping sound and turned my head toward it. A small creature with gray skin, no bigger than a baby, broke off from devouring flesh and raised its bloody face toward us, blinking eyes that were like red saucers. A second one noticed that we were watching it and hissed maliciously.

  A bowstring twanged and the first creature squealed and fell, pierced through by an elfin arrow. The second scavenger went darting away and Ell missed it. It disappeared behind the houses, chirping viciously.

  “Gkhols, a curse on them!” Deler growled.

  “The corpse-eaters are already feasting…”

  “Take down the bodies,” Fer ordered his soldiers.

  They started cutting through the rope holding up the two women and taking down the seven bodies off the wall.

  “I don’t like the smell of this place,” Kli-Kli groaned.

  “I don’t either, Kli-Kli.”

  “The ears have been cut off all the heads,” said Eel, examining the corpses dispassionately.

  “The Grun Ear-Cutters,” one of the soldiers told us. “This is their work.”

  “Ear-Cutters?” Hallas repeated, raising one eyebrow.

  “Punitive detachments. They like to collect ears.”

  “I see.”

  “Fer, tell me, could anyone have been left alive?” Alistan Markauz asked the commander of the column.

  “I doubt it,” the Border Kingdom warrior sa
id somberly, watching his men carefully setting down the dead bodies removed from the wall. “Hasal, how long ago did this happen?”

  “Yesterday evening, commander. The ash from the fire is barely smoking, the blood has all congealed.”

  “We need to get to Cuckoo as soon as possible; we can still overtake the Firstborn and have our revenge.”

  “We need to check the rest of the village; the orcs could still be here,” Miralissa said with a shake of her head.

  “Why, Tresh Miralissa? What would they be doing here?”

  “Who can understand the Firstborn, Fer? Farther on the street divides, which way do you intend to lead the detachment?”

  “One-Eye, you’re from here, aren’t you?” Fer asked a soldier with a black bandage over his left eye.

  “Yes.” The lad’s face was greener than a leaf in spring. “My aunt, my sisters … Everyone…”

  “Pull yourself together, soldier! Where do these two streets lead?”

  “They run separately to the end of the village, commander. The rich people lived farther on, and the orchards start there…”

  “I’m thinking of dividing the detachment into equal halves, Milord Alistan. We need to explore both streets. What if there is someone from the village still alive, after all?”

  “Dividing up your forces may not be wise.”

  “But even so, I think it’s the best way.”

  “Act as you think best, you are in command here.”

  “Grunt, Mouth, take your platoons down the street on the left. Eagle, Torch, you come with me.”

  “Yes, commander.”

  “Ell, Honeycomb, Hallas, Eel, Harold, Kli-Kli, go with Grunt,” Alistan Markauz ordered. “Lady Miralissa, Egrassa, Marmot, Lamplighter, and I will follow Fer’s detachment.”

  “Is it a good idea to split us up, milord?” Deler asked peevishly, testing the keenness of his battle-ax blade with his thumb.

  “We can’t weaken one of the detachments. They might need our help.”

  “Let’s move,” Fer commanded. “Mouth, we’ll meet at the end of the village.”

  “Yes, commander.”

  “If anything happens, blow your horns,” the knight said, and started his horse.

  “Mind your beard, Beard-Face!” Deler boomed to Hallas.

  “You worry about yourself,” the gnome replied good-naturedly, adjusting his grip on the handle of his mattock.

  We moved into the street, following the two platoons of Fer’s somber and wary soldiers.

  “Crud, Brute,” the sergeant said to two twin brothers, “go in front, thirty paces ahead, where I can see your backsides. Keep your eyes peeled. If you see anything, come straight back.”

  The two soldiers moved ahead on their horses, trying to spot enemies.

  Ell also urged his horse on and rode alongside the sergeant, holding an arrow in the string of his bow.

  “I reckon this is stupid,” Hallas grumbled. “Why would the orcs wait about for us to come and tickle their bellies?”

  “The Firstborn are capable of any filthy trick, master gnome,” said one of the soldiers. “And the Grun Ear-Cutters are the worst of all.”

  “Harold, Kli-Kli, stay behind me. If anything happens, I’ll take them on,” said Hallas.

  “You’re our little defender,” Kli-Kli giggled, but he followed the gnome’s advice and held Featherlight back a little.

  The two scouts moved along slowly in front of us, but the street was calm and quiet.

  The neat little houses with shutters and doors painted blue and yellow looked ominous, as if there was some threat lurking in them. The street widened out and the houses and fences painted blue and yellow became larger. The gates of a house where there were sunflowers growing in the garden had been knocked down and were lying on the ground. Somebody had used an ax to good effect here. There was a human body, bristling with arrows, lying on the porch. Like all the corpses in the village, it had no head. I looked away—I’d seen enough dead bodies for one day.

  The houses on the left of the road came to an end and the orchards began. The thick bushes along the road oozed menace—an entire army of orcs could be hiding in there, and archers could easily be concealed in the branches of the apple trees, with their dense greenery. The soldiers kept a careful eye on the hedges, but the only movement was a startled wagtail that fluttered up off a branch and flew away behind the trees.

  We had almost reached the end of Crossroads—three houses on the right, a small field, and then a forest of fir trees. On the left there was a field of cabbage, and Kli-Kli remarked that it would be a good idea to pinch a couple of cabbages for supper, the peasants wouldn’t have any use for them now. The goblin hinted clumsily that I ought to steal the cabbages, but after what I had seen in the square, my appetite had been completely destroyed, and I told the goblin so without mincing my words.

  Disaster came when no one was expecting it. The immense gates of the last two houses suddenly collapsed and arrows came flying out through the dust raised when they hit the ground.

  Screams of pain, the rustling of swords being drawn, the whinnying of horses.

  “Orcs!”

  “Firstborn!”

  “To arms!”

  “Sound the horn!”

  A war horn sounded and then immediately fell silent when an arrow hit the soldier blowing it in the throat. He dropped the horn and fell under the hooves of his horse. Another horn sounded, and from somewhere behind the houses we heard the clash of weapons. We couldn’t expect any help; the other detachment had fallen into a trap, too.

  “Some thieves we are!” the jester shouted, gazing at me with eyes wide in horror.

  My memory of what happened after that is not very clear, and yet only too clear at the same time. I was myself, but I could see myself from the outside at the same time, as if watching what was happening around me. The entire battle is etched in my memory forever—it was like something happening in a nightmare, in a dream that is frozen in the frost, carved with an ax on separate blocks of ice.

  Bowstrings twanged again and the orcs drew their yataghans and threw themselves on us. They attacked in silence, and that was probably the most terrifying thing that happened to me that day. They say fear has big eyes—in those first seconds it seemed to me that there were a lot of enemies, far more than there were of us.

  We were at the very end of the detachment, and so the brunt of the first and most terrible onslaught was borne by the soldiers of the Border Kingdom … and Ell. I saw an arrow lodge in the eye slit of his helmet, I saw the elf leaning back, tumbling over …

  The small number of men with crossbows started firing, and a few orcs fell, but the others came at us in silence.

  The Borderlanders met the orcs with steel, repulsing the attack with swords and lances. The raucous din that filled the air was indescribable—oaths and screams, the clash of weapons, groans. The orcs were not deterred at all by the fact that their opponents were on horseback. One of them hurled himself at me. I fired and missed, then fired again and the ice bolt hit the Firstborn’s shield, releasing its magic with a ringing sound and transforming my enemy into a statue of ice.

  “Honeycomb, cover me!” I roared, trying to shout above the din of the battle. I had to reload the crossbow as quickly as possible.

  The orcs were still busy with the men up at the front. They weren’t really expecting an attack, and that gave those of us at the back of the column an extra twenty precious seconds to shower a deadly rain down on the Firstborn.

  I don’t think I have ever loaded a crossbow so fast in life. Put the bolts in the channels, pull the lever toward me, take aim, hold my breath, press one trigger, then the other.

  The battle moved from the street into the cabbage field, and before the orcs could reach me, I had taken down four of them, another three bolts had missed, and two had just bounced off our enemies’ armor as if it was enchanted. One of the orcs tried to break through to me, but he was stopped by Honeycomb’s ogre-hammer.
The heavy flail caught him in the side and flung him away.

  Bang! My ears were struck by a strange new sound.

  Little Bee reared up in fright and I crashed to the ground. I had to roll aside in order to avoid my own horse’s hooves.

  Jumping up off the ground, I found myself face-to-face with a massive orc. I had dropped the crossbow when I fell and there was no time to get my knife out. The Firstborn was clearly intending to remove my curly head and cut the ears off it. His yataghan whistled repulsively. I pulled my head down into my shoulders and my enemy’s blade passed over it, merely ruffling my hair.

  The battle was raging on all sides, our enemies were pressing hard and the men were all busy trying to survive, so I couldn’t expect any help. The orc struck again, and in reply I dropped to the ground, rolled over in the dirt, grabbed the nearest cabbage, and flung it at my opponent’s head. The Firstborn contemptuously knocked the cabbage aside with his yataghan, slicing it neatly into two halves. I had to jump back again, this lad was incredibly agile and—

  Bang! I heard that loud sound again.

  Something went whistling past me and the orc’s head flew apart as messily as a ripe melon from the Sultanate, spraying me with hot blood.

  I turned toward the sound. Hallas was standing on the ground, with his precious sack now dangling on his stomach. He was surrounded by rapidly thinning, bluish, foul-smelling smoke, and he still had his pipe in his mouth. In each hand my savior was holding a short, thick object that looked very much like a miniature cannon.

  I’d never seen a wonder like that before.

  Meanwhile three Firstborn came dashing at Hallas, realizing that he represented the greatest threat to them. Without any fuss, the gnome threw his terrible little cannons aside, took out another two exactly the same, raised one of them to the smoking pipe in his mouth, lit the fuse, and pointed it at one of the orcs rushing toward him.

  Bang!

  The enemy performed a most amusing aerial kicking movement and fell down.

  Bang!

  A hole the size of a fist appeared in the second orc’s coat of mail and he swayed and collapsed facedown in the dirt.

  The third orc stopped as if he was suddenly rooted to the ground, and was immediately run through with a lance by one of Fer’s soldiers.