‘What in Morr’s name is going on?’ came a slurred a voice. Calard looked over his shoulder to see one of Merovech’s knights stumbling down the stairs, a drawn blade in his hands. He was clearly still the worse for wear from the night’s drinking, and he was followed by several of his comrades, all in various stages of dishevelment. Other guests of the inn were emerging from their rooms, their faces drawn and pale.
‘We are besieged,’ said Calard.
The banging at the door subsided, and Calard edged towards it, listening intently.
‘How did they get into the compound?’ said one of the knights.
‘Someone let them in, most likely,’ said Calard, glancing around. ‘The innkeeper would be my guess.’
‘What?’ said a voice. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘Do you see him here, or any of his staff?’ said Calard, gesturing around him. ‘They are probably all holed up in the gatehouse.’
‘The bastard’s sold us out to Mortis,’ growled one of Merovech’s knights. At mention of the name, Chlod whimpered.
Several of the other guests began to speak at once, their voices rising in panic.
‘Quiet,’ snapped Calard.
In the ensuing silence, they could all hear shuffling around the exterior of the inn. There were scuffling noises at the walls, and Calard looked up.
‘They are going for the second floor windows,’ shouted someone, and Calard quickly looked around him. There were over half a dozen armed men in the main room of the inn now.
‘You three,’ he said, jabbing a finger a cluster of men holding weapons. ‘Get upstairs and barricade the windows.’
‘I’ll be damned if I take orders from–’ snarled one of them, but Calard cut him off.
‘Do it!’ he thundered. The man looked like he was going to argue, but the others saw sense in Calard’s words, and hurried up the stairs. Calard gestured towards other men with his sword. ‘Get those tables on their sides to block the windows! You and you, help me slide this one in front of the door!’
Unseen by Calard, Raben staggered unsteadily down the stairs into the common room, one hand pressed to his temple. He had a sword in his hand, and his eyes burned with cold fury. He moved purposefully towards Calard as he heaved at a heavy oak table, positioning it to block the front door.
A shuttered window suddenly exploded inwards amid a shower of splinters, and feral peasants began clawing their way through, howling and braying like demented madmen. A table propped against another window was shoved aside, and more of the cannibalistic rabble began clambering inside.
‘For the Lady!’
Calard leapt forwards and brought his sword down on the head of the first peasant to scramble through, cleaving its skull down to the teeth, spraying blood.
He smashed another peasant back with the pommel of his sword, but dozens more were straining to get in. He could hear banging from upstairs, but that was soon drowned out by shouting, the clash of weapons and the sickly sound of blades hacking into flesh and bone.
Hands clawed for him and he stepped swiftly away from the door, slashing with his sword. A clutch of fingers dropped to the floor, twitching.
Chlod backed off, looking around frantically for an escape route. He ran behind the bar and tugged at the cellar door, but he could not lift it.
The front door was ripped off its hinges and tossed aside suddenly, and a flood of peasants streamed in, scrambling over the table slid up against it. Some carried crude clubs and rusted farm implements, while others seemed intent on killing with nothing more than tooth and claw.
Chlod dropped to the floor and crawled under the bar, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.
Calard found himself fighting side by side with Raben and two other men. Despite the knock Calard had given him, the outcast knight fought with poise and control. He was fast and deadly, his timing impeccable. Calard was careful not to turn his back on him.
The devolved peasants came on like a living tide, scrabbling over tables and sending chairs flying, forcing Calard and Raben back against the bar. For every one of their number that was cut down, two more squeezed through the windows and clambered through the gaping door.
The room was filled with their stink, a mixture of sweat, rotting meat and wet soil.
It was not long before they started to attack down the inn’s stairs.
‘They’ve taken the upper floor,’ said Calard.
One of Raben’s knights was knocked to the ground and brained with what looked like a human thigh-bone.
‘This is hopeless,’ growled Raben. ‘There are too many of them!’
‘I have no intention of dying here,’ said Calard, kicking a twitching corpse off his blade. ‘The Lady is with me.’
Raben ran another peasant through, then spat derisively. ‘The Lady forsook this place long ago.’
One by one, the inn’s defenders were dragged down, their heads smashed in with sticks and their throats ripped out with blood-stained teeth. The peasants descended on them like starved beasts, and screams rang out from those not yet dead when the cannibals began their gory feast.
‘There must be another way out,’ shouted Calard, now fighting back to back with Raben. The notion of fleeing from mere peasants wrenched at his sense of pride, but it would not serve the Lady’s purpose if he died here.
Calard was wielding his bastard sword in one hand now, and had drawn the Sword of Garamont with his other.
A screeching, near naked peasant leapt at Calard from atop the bar, its body scrawny and malnourished. Calard cut it down in midair, and it fell in a bloody heap to the floor. Calard glanced around him, getting a sense of their position within the common room.
‘The kitchen,’ he said, indicating towards it with a nod. ‘That’s our best chance. There must be a back door.’
Both Calard and Raben were splattered with blood, and while most of it was not their own, neither man was uninjured. Raben risked a quick glance back towards the kitchen. It was at least ten yards away, and they were now completely surrounded.
‘We won’t make it,’ said Raben.
‘Stay here and die then, damn you,’ said Calard.
With a roar, he forced the enemy back, swinging his swords around in a pair of deadly arcs. Taking advantage of the space he had created, he leapt atop the bar and ran along its length towards the back of the inn. Peasants reached for him but his blades sliced out, keeping them at bay. He leapt off the far end, slamming a pair of enemies to the floor. He came to his feet in the kitchen doorway, blades at the ready. The kitchen was disgustingly dirty, and rats scuttled in the shadows, but it was free of foes. He spotted a door on the far wall.
Glancing back into the common room, he saw Chlod emerge from beneath the bar, scurrying under tables towards him.
‘Quickly!’ Calard shouted. Peasants were close behind his manservant, their red-rimmed eyes wide.
Raben was standing alone, surrounded. He turned on the spot, holding his sword at the ready as peasants closed in around him, too many to hold off alone. Briefly, Calard’s gaze met Raben’s across the room. He saw the outcast mouth a curse. The peasants attacked as one but Raben had pre-empted them and was already moving. He swayed aside from a vicious blow and launched a lightning counter that took off an arm at the elbow.
Calard shoved Chlod into the kitchen.
‘Unlock the door!’ he ordered. Calard stepped back to give himself more room to swing as the enemy came at him. The first through the doorway was hacked almost in two as he cleaved it from shoulder-blade to armpit. He dragged his sword free and waited for the next to enter, but the peasants hung back, none willing to be his next victim. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Chlod at the back door, and began to edge towards him. The peasants came after him, spreading out, but they were wary now of his blade. There was a commotion behind the peasants, and he caught a glimpse of Raben barging his way through the press of bodies.
‘Wait,’ he ordered Chlod as he heard the b
olts of the back door sliding open.
The knight burst into the room, but the leg of a chair wielded as a club struck him, and he stumbled. Three peasants were on him in an instant. Without thought, Calard moved to his aid. He hacked into the bare back of one of the peasants crouched over the outcast, severing its spine. He kicked another away, sending it flying face-first into a bench top, bringing a pile of dirty pots down with a crash. He slashed at another, and it reeled backwards with a screech, blood spraying from its neck. The peasants had now circled around them, filling the kitchen.
Calard gripped Raben under the arm and helped him to his feet. Blood was dripping from bite wounds on his cheek and neck. The outcast knight had lost his grip on his sword, and drew a slender knife from his boot.
‘You should have gone without me,’ said Raben. ‘I would have.’
‘And that is the difference between your kind and mine,’ said Calard.
The peasants came at them in a rush. Two died to Calard’s bastard sword and another to Raben’s stabbing knife before the two knights were overwhelmed.
Seeing his master disarmed and dragged to the ground, Chlod slid back the last bolt on the door in a rush and threw the door open. The cold night air washed in and without a backwards glance he bolted out into the darkness.
Before he had made two yards, a hand locked around his throat. His legs went out from under him, and he was hurled back into the kitchen. From the floor, he looked up to see a gaunt peasant appear in the doorway. His eyes widened as the figure came into the light.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Chlod, scrambling backwards on his hands and knees.
The figure was covered in crude tattoos and wore a necklace of fingers around his scrawny neck. Splinters of bone had been pushed through the skin of his forearms. He looked down at Chlod and smiled, exposing stained teeth that had been filed to points.
‘Hello, Chlod,’ he said.
CALARD’S ARMS WERE wrenched behind his back and his wrists bound with tough, sinewy cord.
‘Chlod,’ he said. ‘What in the Lady’s name is going on?’
His manservant stood nearby, shivering, his eyes wide and staring. He avoided Calard’s gaze as he too was bound.
‘By all that is holy, I swear–’ said Calard, but his words were cut short as a hastily tied noose was looped around his neck. A foot between his shoulder blades pinned him down as it was yanked taut, making him gasp for breath.
Alongside him, Raben was suffering similar treatment, held face down on the floor while he was trussed up like a prize hog.
The tattooed leader of the peasant rabble barked something indecipherable in a repulsive, guttural tongue and Calard and Raben were dragged to their feet. Another barked order and they were hauled out into the night. The tattooed peasant followed, holding Chlod tightly around the back of the neck.
‘We’ve missed you, Chlod,’ he hissed.
VII
FOR OVER THREE hours they were dragged through stinking marshes and haunted forests by the loping parade of filthy, cannibalistic peasants. Their captives were not the feral brood’s only spoils; they had hastily ransacked the larder of Morr’s Rest, filling sacks with cheese and bread, meat and wineskins. Corpses had been mutilated and dismembered, and several of the sacks were now soaked through with blood, stuffed with human body parts.
They kept off the roads, hauled along paths overgrown with thorn-bushes and rushes. Occasionally they were forced into the open, scurrying across muddy fields filled with rotten crops, watched over by the silhouettes of scarecrows. Sometimes they could see lights in the distance, but their captors seemed keen to avoid areas of habitation, and veered away from them.
They trudged knee-deep through vast tracts of swampland, beset by great clouds of stinging midges. They climbed from this stinking morass as the ground rose, and their pace picked up again as they ran through an abandoned village that had been left to rot. The peasants seemed more at ease here, speaking amongst themselves in their low, ugly tongue. Calard was poked and prodded by peasants whose eyes gleamed with hunger.
Feet slapped loudly on the roadway, which rose steadily, winding its way through the dead village. Soon they were in the countryside again, leaving the decrepit houses behind them, but their progress continued upwards, the muddy roadway clinging to the steep sides of a hill. A crumbling, six foot wall ran alongside the high side of the road.
They turned through a decaying stone gateway overrun with thorn-bushes and ivy. An ancient gate hung on rusted hinges, and the procession of peasants passed through. Calard noted the hourglass carved atop the archway as he was bustled through beneath it.
‘A Garden of Morr,’ he said.
They rose above the cloying blanket of ever-present fog and Calard was afforded a clearer view of their surroundings. The graveyard reared up before them, clinging to a hilltop riddled with tombs and mausoleums. It was massive and sprawling, a veritable city of the dead; tens of thousands were likely buried here. The graves lowest on the hill were packed in tight and marked with cracked headstones and slabs worn smooth by the passage of time. Many had clearly been desecrated and dug up. Winged, skeletal statues being slowly strangled by ivy stood over some, while in other areas mass pit graves were commemorated with little more than crude epitaphs scratched into stone slabs. Large family mausoleums protruded from the hillside as they climbed higher, the richer tombs carved deep into the rock cliffs.
Black roses grew in abundance, their petals soft and velveteen, their deadly thorns curved and shining silver. They exuded a heady, sickly-sweet aroma.
Ravens perched in leafless, twisted trees clinging to the hillside, staring down at the procession passing below. Images of death were everywhere, from carved hourglasses and black roses on tombs and opulent facades to extravagant sculptures depicting the god of the underworld, Morr, in his various guises
The peasants became more animated, cavorting and leaping, grinning and guffawing. More of the depraved creatures joined their group, though Calard had no idea where they had appeared from. Within the tombs themselves, perhaps.
Feeling eyes upon him, he looked up to see a child clinging to the base of a cracked, moss-covered statue. The child – he could not tell if it was a boy or a girl – was clearly starving, little more than a skeleton encased in skin, its head too big for its frail body. It stared at him with red-rimmed eyes and its flesh was covered in open sores. Something about the child’s intense gaze made his skin crawl. It hissed at him, baring small, pointed teeth.
Calard grimaced as his captors yanked at the noose around his neck, jerking him onward.
Ever higher they climbed, then down into the yawning mouth of one of the larger crypts. They passed under a lintel carved in the likeness of Morr, arms outspread as if in welcome. In was cold and dank in the low-ceilinged burial chamber, and it smelt of wet earth and things long dead. Roots hung through rough-hewn roof, like grasping, skeletal arms.
A massive sculptured sarcophagus dominated the tomb. The heavy lid, carved to represent a serenely posed knight with arms crossed over his chest, lay cracked and discarded on the floor.
‘What is this?’ said Calard through clenched teeth as he was dragged towards the casket.
‘Get in,’ hissed one of the peasants.
He strained against his captors, fighting against them as they tried to haul him towards the open casket. Had they dragged him all this way just to bury him alive? He was far bigger than any of them, and they struggled to make him move, but his face began to turn purple as the noose around his neck tightened.
‘Enough,’ hissed one of them, breaking the deadlock by kicking Calard hard in the small of his back. He staggered forwards into the casket, and looked down into it, gasping for breath.
Bones and rotting cloth had been pushed roughly aside, and he saw that a hole had been smashed in the bottom of the sarcophagus. He could feel a slight breeze coming up through the hole, bringing with it a foetid stench of decay.
One of the pe
asants crawled in, like a spider, and disappeared down the hole.
‘Bring them,’ came its voice, from the darkness.
‘Lady, protect your servant,’ breathed Calard.
THE ENTIRE HILL was riddled with tunnels, and they were dragged deep into the labyrinth. Chewed bones were strewn across the floor of these tunnels, and the way was lit by stinking candles burning in carved niches.
Faces crowded around to look upon these newcomers, from tiny children to ancient crones, and Calard realised that there must have been many hundreds of peasants eking out a horrid existence down here beneath the earth. What better place for them to call home than a graveyard, he thought darkly.
All of the inhabitants were starving. Their eyes were dull and lifeless, as if any hope that had ever dwelt there had long faded. Tiny, shrunken babes, too weak even to cry, were held to the bony chests of mothers unable to produce milk to feed them. Most of the peasants were stooped and hunched, their bodies and faces malformed and ugly from generations of inbreeding and malnutrition. Many were missing limbs, and more than a few bore evidence of leprosy and the wasting sickness. They were a pitiful bunch, and even Calard, who was generally inured to the fate of those of low birth, found himself disturbed. Hands covered in dirt reached for him as he was dragged deeper beneath the ground, touching his face and clothes in wonder.
The procession gathered a sizeable entourage as Calard, Raben and Chlod were led into the depths beneath the Garden of Morr. They crowded after the captives, straining to see. Every side-passage was filled with staring faces. Children ran behind them. As they descended further, the catacombs carved by the hands of men gave way to naturally formed caves, their walls slick with moisture.
At last they came to a rocky cavern at the dark heart of the hill. Hundreds of stubby candles lit the area with a flickering orange glow. It was cold and moist, and an acrid stink hung in the air. Looking up, Calard could see that the roof was a seething mass of furred shapes: bats.
Rock formations jutted up from the floor and hung from the ceiling. In places these had had come together, forming slick-sided columns. Drips fell from the ceiling like rain, causing ripples in milky pools of water that gathered in hollows.
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