Angelika hopped down, asking Franziskus to come and help. He followed, less sure-footedly than her. Together they turned the dwarf onto his back. A blot of crimson stained the rock he’d lain on and a matching wound blemished his forehead. It wasn’t an arrow that got him; he’d fallen and bashed in his skull.
The dwarf’s lips parted and his left eye slowly opened. He groaned. Feebly, he closed his right hand, as if he hoped to grip his axe-haft. The weapon lay under him, still stuffed into his belt.
“No,” said Angelika. She drew back from him. “No, no, no, no, no…”
The dwarf gurgled out a stream of red saliva and some barely audible words, which neither Angelika nor Franziskus understood.
“Don’t you dare,” Angelika said, her lips barely moving. “Finish up and die.”
“Human scum,” the dwarf mouthed, switching to Reikspiel.
“What do we do?” asked Franziskus.
Angelika could not move.
“Our fight… your fight,” said the dwarf. “Without us… Chaos wins…”
“This was not our intent,” Franziskus said. “We took you for Kurgs.”
This angered the dwarf, and he tried to sit up. He slumped down, the back of his skull hitting his stony pillow. The dwarf tried to remonstrate but was having difficulty speaking.
“It was a blunder of war. But once the first arrow flew, you would not relent.”
“Never…” A fresh spurt of blood gushed from his mouth into his curly grey beard. “Once attacked, never relent.”
“We can get you to safety,” Franziskus said.
“You must pay,” the dwarf stammered, his voice growing weaker.
“That wound is bad but you may recover. We’ll bandage you up. Get you home.”
“I will kill you. My brother will kill you. My son, and the sons of his sons, they will kill you.” He pointed to his brain. “I enter you in my book of grudges. All of you. You black and yellows, each will pay.”
Franziskus knelt closer. “Listen. You can’t be saying that. I understand that you’re angry. That your head throbs, and you’re not thinking clearly.”
“For what you’ve done to us,” said the dwarf, “you must die. Your fate is as clear as the water of Ulreid’s Stream.”
“They will not patch you up, you understand, if you’re threatening to kill them.”
“I am Hrund, son of Thorhal, and I will not lie, for any reason.”
“Don’t you see I’m trying to help you?”
“I place a grudge on all of you. Patch me or leave me, you all must die.”
Franziskus saw that the dwarf was marshalling a wad of bloody spit to hock in his face, and reared back to avoid it.
Angelika rubbed at the bridge of her nose. She shook her head.
Franziskus pulled her aside. “We can’t just leave him here.”
“No, we can’t,” she agreed.
He saw the look on her face and knew what she meant. “No, Angelika. You can’t…”
She moved further off. “We’ve got to finish him.”
“The dwarfs are our allies.”
“Not this one. Not now. We can’t have him crawling his way back to Zhufbar, or wherever he’s from, to enlist his kinfolk in a vendetta. He’s seen our faces.”
“He’s delirious.”
“Delirious with vengeance. He’s not joking, Franziskus. We’ve got to do it.”
She drew her knife and moved back toward the dwarf.
The dwarf appeared to find a grim amusement in his predicament. “You’ll not give me a fighting chance?”
“If you survive this, and find us again someday, will you give us a fighting chance?”
Hrund, son of Thorhal, laughed up another mouthful of gore. He shook his head.
“You have to admire his honesty,” said Angelika. She edged closer, preparing to stab down at him.
“Angelika…” said Franziskus.
“Very well,” said Angelika. “I will give you a fighting chance. You’re lying on your axe. Stand up, Hrund, and you can die in battle.”
Hrund tried to lift his body up off his weapon. He quivered. Then the tension ebbed from his body, and he collapsed against the rock.
Franziskus’ heart soared, believing that the dwarf had expired.
Hrund’s chest panted shallowly up and down.
“Curse it,” Franziskus said.
The dwarf chuckled, or wheezed, or perhaps both.
Angelika hefted her dagger.
“You never kill, except in self-defence,” said Franziskus.
“Which this is.”
“He’s no threat to you now.”
“If he lives, he will be.”
“In war, soldiers must sometimes kill the wounded. It is something I’ve never seen you do.”
Angelika shifted the knife uncertainly from hand to hand. “I’ve never been implicated in a dwarf-killing before.” She moved toward Hrund.
Franziskus stayed her hand. She was about to argue, until he unsheathed his sabre. He hopped onto the rock beside Hrund and hacked at his neck with an executioner’s stroke. The first blow killed him, but Franziskus kept at him until his head was struck from his shoulders. He turned to Angelika and said, “I am, as always, here to protect you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On the distant horizon, thick folds of naked granite pushed high into a sudden blue sky. Closer by, more than a dozen callow peaks jostled against each other. Centuries of whipping wind had carved their sandy stone into evenly rising mounds. Points adorned each summit, like the tips of meringues. Needled trees and bushes had taken stubborn root in their ever-eroding soil; bare, narrow trails wormed through them. In their folds and crannies, Angelika saw hundreds of hiding places.
Spyglass in hand, Jonas surveyed the expanse. “Sig-mar’s blood, do these mountains go on forever?”
“We don’t want to go all the way to the Kurgan lands, do we?” said Angelika. She stood at Rassau’s side, along with Franziskus and Emil. Filch had somehow attached himself to them. Emil pierced him with a hot-poker glare, and he drifted off, as if hunting for edible mushrooms. If such things existed here, a halfling would be the one to find them.
It had been three days since the dwarf-kill, all hard journeying. The company had seen neither dwarf nor Kurgan. Nor had Angelika found the opportunity to safely rifle the lieutenant’s personal effects.
Jonas had called the company to a halt after a long slog over a chalky escarpment. They’d used ropes to climb it, up one face and down the other, with metal tent pegs as their pitons. He’d proclaimed it a miracle, a gift from Sigmar, that not one of his men had fallen. These were stout, square-headed men of Stir-land, not nimble mountaineers.
Now they were stopped on the sides of a rocky sluice, across which a fast trickle of cold, clear water skittered. It barely possessed the depth to fill a canteen. Silent, dust-caked men bent over it to slap its contents into their mouths. Those ordered to stand sentry watched their mates drink, waiting anxiously to be relieved.
Jonas shoved the spyglass back into his pack and sighed. “If honesty is a virtue, I’ll be virtuous,” he said. “I haven’t the faintest idea where to head, or what to count as our destination. We’re to go into the mountains and harry any regrouping Kurgs. Well, it’s been days since we’ve seen any. I reckon this is why I’ve brought you along, Angelika. Where do we find them?”
“Right here,” she said. With the toe of her long, slim foot, she pointed to a round rock in the middle of the stream. It stood above the others, out of place. A band of mud ran across its exposed side. “See that dirt on it, there? That’s from where it used to be lodged, in the bottom of the stream. See how it’s lying on its side? How the part that’s been polished smooth by years in the water is now partly in it, and the rough bit that anchored it has been dislodged?”
Jonas nodded. “Someone knocked it out of place, while walking across here.”
“And recently,” Angelika said. “That mud’s not entirely dr
y yet.”
“Could it be more dwarfs?”
“They’d never leave such obvious signs of their passing. Dwarfs can be surprisingly light on their feet, especially up here on their native ground. If they’d been by here, they wouldn’t want you to know it.”
“Well, good,” said Jonas. “None of us are in the mood for more dwarfs.”
The company had yet to shake its melancholy in the wake of the gorge incident. Angelika had expected them to easily shrug off their accidents of war, but instead they’d been dismally determined to reproach themselves.
“If only,” said Jonas, “we could find some of the accursed enemy scum, and give them a solid trouncing. That’s what the men need.”
“Careful what you wish for,” said Angelika.
Jonas bristled. He’d been no less touchy and peevish than any of his men. “Nothing would please us more than to subject the foe to the full brunt of Sig-mar’s righteous hammer.”
Angelika gestured to the maze of mounded peaks, “Take another look in that spyglass, lieutenant. Every shadow you see, every recess in the rock, every hollow—it could have a nice, fine nest of Kurgans in it, massing for the next great march on civilization. You were sent here to patrol? If I were you, this is exactly where I’d start.”
“Then patrol we shall,” said Jonas. Angelika could not tell if he was irked by her, or by the complexities of the task. “So advise us, then. The Gerolsbruch Swordsmen are no borderers. The men are trained for open battle in full formation, not patrols.”
Emil cleared his throat. “I’ve assigned men patrol duty before, sir.”
“Yes, of course,” said Jonas. “Break the men down into units. Make a map and mark out quadrants to scour. If there’re Kurgs here, we’ll flush ’em out.”
The sergeant nodded and went off to fulfil his orders.
“If the Kurgs do stage a second wave assault,” said Angelika, “and they’re anywhere near here at all, I can’t imagine them not coming through these hills. They’re so much easier than anything to either side.” She pointed out the rougher terrain to east and west. “Even if we don’t stay here, we should lay down some traps. Make them pay a heavy toll to use this route.”
“You know traps?”
“My main interest is in avoiding them. The goblin ones are particularly nasty. But to disarm a trap, you’ve got to know how to build one.”
“Then I’ll send you out with a patrol, to do that. Now if you’ll excuse me…” He left, catching up with Emil.
“He’s decided this is somehow my fault,” said Angelika.
“Not at all.” Franziskus knelt to fill his canteen. “You’re too much the lone wolf to understand a man like that. He’s worried for his men.”
“Always looking for the noble motive, Franziskus.”
“Not to mention, awed by the enormity of his task.”
“It is fairly hopeless.”
“Thank you for offering to build those traps.”
“Why?” Her voice dripped suspicion.
“I am heartened to see you doing your part.”
“Am 1?”
“I knew you couldn’t resist, when it came to it.”
She threw her hands up and backed away, nearly tripping over a wayward root. “Oh, no, don’t you dare. Don’t you think it for an instant. You can go ahead and care about these soldiers and their mission. In fact, for you, I recommend it. But me, I am not forming a scintilla of an attachment. You understand?”
“All I said was—”
“It’s about the ring, Franziskus. About the ring, and only the ring.”
As instructed, Emil made a map of the mound range. Each hill he gave a name, each beginning with a different, consecutive letter of the alphabet: there was Mount Apple, Mount Barley, Mount Cabbage, and so on, up to Mount Lemon. The names offered a glimpse into the sergeant’s mind: apparently he was mostly thinking of food.
Angelika went up the south face of Mount Eel with three swordsmen and a straggler: broad-faced Madelung, leathery Mattes, bug-eyed Saar, and the moustachioed Pinkert, who hung back from the rest of the group in order to ogle her from a distance. Though thick around the face and shoulders, Madelung could have been Franziskus’ slightly younger brother. Mattes was the company drummer.
Saar kept his eyes on his toes and said little; he was not a swordsman, but a handgunner. Pinkert she maintained a close watch on, deciding which of his fingers she’d break if he tried to grope her.
They’d been up the side of Mount Eel for more than three hours before the subject was broached. She’d already shown them how to step lightly onto dried vegetation, to dampen telltale snaps and crunches. She taught them how to hold the branches of spruce trees as they moved through them, so their brushings would alert neither enemy eye nor ear. When Madelung, heaving himself up a slope, dislodged a boulder the size of a bread loaf, she gave them a climbing lesson, teaching them to identify dangerous spots, and to pick a zigzag route around them. Even lecherous Pinkert listened to her with quiet attention. Whenever she taught them something, she could see the mental effort on their faces, as they committed each tiny lesson to memory.
“Now that you know all this, you’ll teach the others. Yes?”
They assured her that they would.
Now they stood on a slope covered by a dense copse of leafy bushes. “First thing before laying a trap,” she said, pointing into the bushes, “is to check it isn’t trapped already, by somebody else. So take out your sabres, and comb your way fastidiously through it, parting the leaves from each bit of trunk. Study the ground cover. If you see anything that raises your hackles, back slowly away.”
The men searched the bushes, as she commanded. When it was plain that there were no traps there, she continued: “Next thing is to think like the enemy. Which way will he come from? Your traps are no good if they’re pointing the wrong way.”
Any enemy troops, they figured, would most likely be headed downslope, after having come down Mount Fennel and then up this hill’s far side. Angelika agreed. They’d brought with them a pack full of sharpened stakes, which they’d hewn from a pine log found down by the stream. “From what I’ve seen of Kurgs,” she said, angling a stake above the ground, “they move none too cautiously. They’ll be waving their axes in the air and rag-tagging their way down this slope, showing off for their lunatic gods. So, just like we’re setting these stakes to receive a charge, we can angle them up like so, to catch ’em in the legs or belly. Their own momentum will drive the stakes in. Don’t be miserly with the stakes; the denser you lay them in, the likelier you are to impale yourself a Kurg.”
They got to work digging. She showed them to make the holes deep, so the stakes would provide resistance when a body hit them. She made them pack the dirt in tight around them.
“Good thing someone here knows what he or she is doing,” muttered Mattes, the drumsman.
“Careful,” said Madelung.
“We’ve all been speaking too careful, if you ask me,” said Mattes.
“Maybe no one did, though.”
Angelika reposed on a bit of flat ground. Even though it was more productive to supervise and teach the men when they went wrong, she hated sitting still and watching someone else work. “If you’re worried I’ll repeat what you say to the lieutenant, you can rest easy,” she said. “I’m no tattle-tale.”
“Never mind us,” said Madelung. “The dwarf incident’s got us all uneasy.”
“And the previous fiasco, so many of us killed by so few Kurg,” said Mattes.
Madelung pulled a knifing finger across his throat.
“What?” demanded Mattes, shifting forward, impinging on the younger man. “You won’t be telling me to shut it, would you?”
“Both of you could go ahead and shut it, far as I’m concerned,” said Pinkert. “Pointless gibber accomplishes nothing. I propose a contest for who can recite the filthiest limerick. The winner gets to sit out while the others work.”
Saar broke his conspic
uous silence. “I was afraid to say it, seeing that Rassau was never my commander till a few days ago. But compared to the officer of my old company, he’s got me scared. He don’t know what he’s doing.”
“So what if he doesn’t?” asked Madelung, voice breaking. “He’s the only commander we got, and let’s say for a minute he is lacking experience. If we undermine him, it’ll only get worse.”
Mattes turned himself around, to face Angelika. “He listens do you, though, don’t he?”
She got up and brushed the dirt off her leggings. “I’m just the scout.”
“But he does listen to you,” Mattes persisted.
“He asks for my advice and he takes it or he doesn’t.”
“But you do know what you’re doing.”
All four of the men had rolled up from the digging positions, and knelt around her. “Tell them,” Madelung said. “Yes, we’ve had setbacks, but the lieutenant—that doesn’t mean he don’t know what he’s on about.”
Disliking their supplicating arrangement, Angelika bent her knee alongside them. “Listen. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. All of you were in that fight, near the fort, back in Hochmoor, yes?”
“Indeed,” said Madelung.
“I don’t suppose any of you happened to see the moment when I crashed down on top of that chieftain.”
They all shook their heads but Saar. “I saw it. I was, ah, between opponents.” He pulled back from the others as if expecting to be called out as a shirker.
“When the chieftain got up, you didn’t see him bend clown and pick something off the ground, did you?”
“No,” said Saar.
“And did you see anything come flying out of my pocket?”
“Like what?”
“Like a small object, perhaps.”
“No, I didn’t. But if it was small—I was mostly looking out to make sure no marauders was going to smack my head open. I could have missed it. Why?”
Angelika paused for a moment to mull the wisdom of her next gambit. She was impatient to make something happen. Perhaps it was reckless, but the cautious approach was getting her nowhere. Maybe if word got around, the guilty party would smoke himself out. If there was such.
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