[Blackhearts 01] - Valnir's Bane

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  “Captain,” called Hals. “Found a room of sorts. Might do for a surgery.”

  He was sticking his torch into a round opening in the tunnel wall. Letting go of Ulf’s makeshift stretcher, Reiner joined him and looked in. The hole opened into a round, curve-walled chamber with eight smaller chambers branching off it like the fingers of a glove. Reiner took the torch from Hals and stepped in. A chill ran up his spine. At some time in the past the chamber had been occupied, though by who or what he couldn’t say. The walls were carved with jagged, geometric reliefs that Reiner could make neither head nor tail of. A few warped wooden shelves leaned against them, with a scattering of cracked clay jugs and bowls upon them. Reiner poked the torch into each of the eight chambers. They were small and nearly circular, the floors calf deep in scraps of cloth and straw. Reiner wrinkled his nose. They smelled of dust and animal musk. The whole place gave him an uneasy feeling, but it was dry and flat and there appeared to be no danger.

  “Excellent,” he said with more enthusiasm than he felt. He waved the others forward. “Come on, in we go.”

  Pavel and Hals limped in first, followed by Gustaf and Giano, dragging Ulf. Giano grimaced. “You see. Rat-men. We find nest.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Reiner. “Anybody could have made these holes.”

  “Looks more like orc work,” said Gustaf, toeing aside a broken jug. “Crude stuff.”

  Pavel and Hals exchanged a nervous look.

  “Only orcs?” said Hals dryly. “That’s a relief.”

  “Can you no see?” asked Giano, pointing at the walls. “Look. Rat faces. Rat bodies.”

  Reiner looked at the reliefs again as Franz and Oskar entered. The designs might have been rat heads with wide-set eyes and sharp fangs, but they were so abstract and poorly carved that they might have been anything.

  He waved a dismissive hand. “Orcs or rat-men, whoever lived here is long gone.” He stuck his torch upright in the mouth of an unbroken urn and turned to Gustaf. “Surgeon, what do you need of us?” He was trying his best to be bright and efficient like a good captain should, but his head ached abominably and his stomach was churning from all the blood that ran from his nose down the back of his throat.

  Gustaf left Ulf on his blanket in the centre of the floor and opened his kit. “Decide who is most injured. I will work from worst to least. If someone can break down these shelves for splints it would be a help. And if someone can sacrifice a shirt, I am running short of bandages.”

  “I think Franz must be seen to first,” said Reiner. “He is losing blood.”

  “No!” said the boy, white-lipped. “I am fine. I can attend to myself.” He limped hurriedly to one of the little chambers and disappeared inside.

  “Come back here, you little brat,” barked Reiner. “You are in no way fine.” With a grunt of annoyance he followed the boy into the room.

  Franz was bracing himself against the wall with one trembling arm, his head bowed to his chest. His breath came in ragged gasps, and he pressed his left elbow against his side. The cloth of his shirt made a wet, squelching sound. “Get out!” he gasped. “Leave me be.”

  Reiner glared at him. “Don’t be a fool, lad. You’re grievously injured. You must let Gustaf have a look at you.”

  “No,” whimpered Franz. “He… he mustn’t. No one…”

  “But lad, you…”

  The boy’s knees gave way and he slid down the wall to sprawl on the floor.

  “Curse it,” said Reiner. He returned to the main chamber. “Surgeon, the boy’s collapsed.”

  Gustaf rose from examining Oskar’s wrist. “I’ll see to him.” As he passed Reiner, he raised an eyebrow. “Your nose is on sideways, captain. I believe you’ve broken it.”

  Reiner raised his hand to his face. “Ah. That would explain why my head feels as big as a melon.”

  “I’ll set it momentarily,” said the surgeon. “In the meantime, if you could rip your shirt into strips.” He ducked into the small chamber with his kit.

  Reiner joined the others on the floor and took off his jerkin and shirt. The air in the chamber was stuffy, but much warmer than that in the mine. It was almost comfortable. Hals was sawing at his spear with his dagger, trying to fashion it into a crutch. Giano was breaking the shelves into usable lengths. Oskar rocked back and forth, holding his arm. Pavel was pressing a rag of shirt against his mouth. His upper lip was split to his nose and bleeding freely.

  He grinned at Reiner, showing red teeth. “And I didn’t think I could get any uglier.”

  “Maybe y’ll lose the other eye,” said Hals. “So y’won’t have to look at yerself.”

  Pavel chuckled. “I can only hope.”

  After a short time Gustaf returned. Reiner thought there was something odd about his expression, a suppressed smirk possibly, but the surgeon always looked like he was stifling an evil thought, so he couldn’t be sure.

  “How’s the boy?” Reiner asked.

  Gustaf’s smirk broadened for a moment, then disappeared. “He sleeps. I gave him a draught. He was clawed along the ribs by the hound, then a sharp stone became lodged in the wound during the fall. Very painful. I removed the stone and bound the wound. He will be weak for a while, but he will live.” He snorted. “If any of us do.”

  “Brave little fool,” said Reiner with grudging respect. “He tries too hard to be hard.”

  “Yes,” said Gustaf, then crossed to Pavel and took out a needle and thread.

  Just as he crouched down, Ulf suddenly jack-knifed into a sitting position, flailing and roaring. “The beasts! The beasts!” He clubbed Gustaf and Oskar with his wild swings. The others edged away from him.

  Reiner stood. “Ulf! Urquart! Calm yourself. The hounds are gone.”

  Ulf’s fists slowed and he blinked around him. “What…?”

  “We fell. You don’t remember?”

  “I… I thought…”

  “You’ve hit your head,” said Gustaf, as he recovered himself. “How do you feel?”

  Ulf rubbed his eyes. He swayed where he sat, as if drunk. “My head hurts. Eyes blurry. We fell?”

  “Down a tailings pit,” said Reiner. “We’re all hurt.”

  “But at least we escaped the hounds!” laughed Hals.

  Gustaf looked in Ulf’s eyes. “You are concussed. Let me know if your vision fails to improve.” He returned to stitching up Pavel’s lip.

  “But where are we?” asked Ulf, suddenly anxious. “Where is the Kurgan warband? Have we lost them? Can we get back to where we were? Are we lost in here?”

  “Shut up, fool!” shouted Reiner. “I don’t need two Oskars on my hands. Gustaf will run out of elixir.”

  He groaned. The engineer had said too much. He could see anxiety spreading from face to face.

  “Calm yourselves,” he said. “All of you. Yes we’re in a tight spot, but as Hals just said, we have escaped the hounds, so we’re better off than we were, right? Now, I don’t know where the warband is from here, or where here is for that matter, but someone made these tunnels. They must lead somewhere.” he fished out Veirt’s compass again. “And for the moment they lead south, which is the way we want to go, so all is not entirely lost.”

  He closed his eyes for a second and almost forgot to open them again, he was so weary. “I say we rest here,” he said at last. “There are rooms for all of us. When our surgeon has finished doctoring us we will turn in, and decide a course of action when we wake and can think straight, fair enough?”

  He sighed with relief as he saw the men nodding and calming themselves. “Good. We’ll set two watches. I’ll take the second if someone feels up to taking the first.”

  “I will,” said Gustaf quickly. “I am the least wounded of all of us.”

  Reiner nodded his thanks, though he was slightly puzzled. The surgeon had never volunteered for watch before.

  They made a curious discovery after Gustaf had bound and set all their wounds and breaks and they had settled into the eight little r
ooms. The darkness was no longer absolute. They had expected to be plunged into blackness once Gustaf stationed himself in the main room and snuffed the torch, but a faint light, so dim they were at first not sure it was there, illuminated the chambers. The greenish luminescence seemed to come from the walls, or more accurately, from the slick glaze that covered the walls.

  “That’s a small blessing,” said Pavel from his and Hals’ chamber.

  Yes, thought Reiner, as he lowered his head carefully into his nest of smelly rags. At least we will be able to see what ever cyclopean horror slithers out of the tunnels and kills us.

  An agonised scream jerked Reiner from a dream of dicing with a mysterious opponent. He knew the fellow was using loaded dice, and yet he kept playing, kept betting, though he lost every time.

  He blinked around in the green murk, for a moment at a loss as to where he was. The scream came again. He recognised it as Gustaf’s voice this time. Gustaf! Gustaf was on watch. They were under attack! He jumped up and grabbed his sword, and almost fell again, his body ached so much in so many places. It felt like he was bound in iron ropes that tightened with each movement.

  He forced himself to move through the pain and stumbled out into the main chamber. The others were peeking out of their rooms as well, weapons in hand. Oskar wasn’t there.

  Reiner limped to the tunnel, but a horrible rattling groan echoing from Franz’s chamber stopped him. Reiner turned, and he and the others crowded into it, ready to fight.

  A confusing tableau met their eyes. Franz was pressed against the wall, eyes wild, one hand holding his jerkin closed, the other gripping a bloody dagger. Gustaf lay at his feet in a pool of red, clutching at a wound in his throat that would never close. As Reiner watched, his arms relaxed and flopped loosely to the ground. The room filled with the smell of urine.

  “Sigmar’s holy hammer, boy!” said Reiner, aghast. “What have you done?”

  “He…” said Franz. He seemed not quite awake.

  “He’s killed our only hope of getting out of here, is what he’s done,” growled Hals angrily. “Stupid little fool! I ought to ring your neck!”

  Franz hugged himself. “He tried to… to put his hands on me.”

  “That again?” said Hals. “Well it won’t fly, lad. You were with us when Gustaf went after that poor girl. He don’t care for boys, no matter how unmanly they are.”

  “Who care what the fellow do!” cried Giano. “If he want to eat you, you give him you arm. We need him. How we be now if he not fix us up, eh?” He spat on Franz’s boots.

  “Gustaf knew the way out,” said a voice behind them. It was Oskar, clinging to the wall, looking too alert for his own good. “You remember. There was some obstacle further on. He wouldn’t tell us.”

  “He wouldn’t tell us, so we wouldn’t kill him,” said Hals. “And now this fool has gone and killed him!” He balled his fists. “I think it’s time we show this mewling baby what it means to be a man. I say we give him a few hard lessons, hey?”

  “No!” said Reiner. “We’re all hurt enough as it is. It’s a bad thing he’s done, I admit. But we need all the hands we have, and…”

  “Shhhh!” said Ulf, from the door. “Do you hear something?”

  They all fell silent and listened. There was something, more a vibration in the rock than a heard sound.

  “Into the tunnel,” said Reiner.

  They tiptoed into the hall, leaving Franz with Gustaf’s corpse, and stood, ears cocked.

  The sound was louder here, a rumbling murmur. The vibrations seemed to be coming from above them and far forward. There was a song over the murmur, a harsh, angry chant.

  “The warband!” said Oskar. “It must be!”

  Pavel grinned. “Never thought I’d be glad to hear Kurgan marching.”

  Reiner smiled. “Right then, get your gear together. We leave immediately.”

  They re-entered the round room. “Go when you’re packed,” said Reiner, stepping to Franz’s chamber. “I’ll be along shortly. I want a word alone with young Master Shoentag.”

  “Aye, captain,” said Hals.

  Reiner entered the chamber as the others began collecting their things. The boy was inching painfully into his leather doublet, teeth clenched, his feet pulled fastidiously back from the puddle of blood spreading from beneath Gustaf s corpse.

  Reiner folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “All right, laddie. Let’s have it.”

  Franz glanced up at him, then away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t play the fool with me, boy. I know there’s more to this than there appears. Hals was right. Gustaf fancied girls, not boys, so your excuse won’t work this time. What did he want from you? Was he blackmailing you?”

  “No,” Franz said, surly. “Why… why would he?”

  “That’s for you to tell me. My guess is he found out something about you while he was doctoring you. Some secret you want hidden.”

  The boy, clutched his knees and stared at the floor. He didn’t answer.

  “Come now, lad,” said Reiner kindly, “I’m no raving Sigmarite. I’ll not turn you over to the witch hunters, but if I’m to lead you well, I need to know who I’m leading: your strengths, your weaknesses, the little things from your past that might trip us up in the future?”

  Franz just sniffed miserably.

  “So what is it?” Reiner asked. “Do you bear the brand of some heathen god upon you? Are you warp-touched? Have you a second pair of arms? Or a mouth in your belly? Are you a lover of men?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Franz. “I can’t.”

  “Oh come, it can’t be worse than what I’ve just said. Just tell me and be done with it.”

  Franz’s shoulders slumped. His head touched his knees. Then, with a sigh, he climbed painfully to his feet. He looked to the door. The others were filing into the tunnel. When they were gone he turned to Reiner. “Do you promise to tell no one.”

  “I make no promises, boy, so I never have to break any. But I can keep a secret, if there’s a reason to.”

  Franz frowned at this, then sighed again. With reluctant hands he undid the ties that held his shirt together and pulled it open. His chest was bandaged from his armpits to his belly.

  Reiner grimaced. “Were you wounded so badly?”

  “The wound is bad,” said Franz, “but the bandages are only partly for the wound.” And with eyes lowered he tugged the tight bindings down to his ribs.

  Reiner gaped. The boy was deformed! Two plump pink protuberances rose from his chest. By the gods, Reiner thought, the poor lad truly was warp-touched. It almost looked as if he had…

  “Sigmar’s balls! You’re a girl!”

  FOURTEEN

  Come Taste Imperial Steel

  “Shhh!” whispered the girl harshly as she tugged her bandages back into place. “Please don’t betray me! I beg you!”

  “Betray you?” said Reiner. “I ought to thrash you!” Reiner was deeply chagrined. How could he, a connoisseur of womanhood in all its forms, have been fooled this way? How could he not have known? Now that the truth was revealed it was so obvious as to be painful. The beardless jaw, the slight frame, the full lips, the large, dark eyes. Why, he had seen girls disguised as boys in plays who were more convincing. It must have been, he decided, the audacity of the thing that had made it possible. A man simply could not accept that a woman would disguise herself as a soldier, or could live a soldier’s life, so any faults in the charade, any uncertainties about her sex, were dismissed before they could be considered, because one would never even think to contemplate that a soldier could be a woman.

  He shook his head. “What do you mean by this foolishness, you lunatic child? What possessed you to engage in this pitiful charade?”

  The girl raised her chin. “I do my duty. I protect my homeland.”

  “Your duty as a woman is to give birth to more soldiers, not to take up arms yourself.”

  The girl sneered. “Really? And do
the harlots you consort with in the brothels of Altdorf perform such a duty?”

  The question caught Reiner off guard. He expected the girl to cower before him, not counter his arguments. “Er, some do, I suppose. I’m certain they do. But that’s beside the point. What you have done is a perversion. An outrage!”

  “You sound like a fanatical priest. I thought you were a man of the world. A sophisticate.”

  Reiner flushed. She was right. In the theatres and brothels he had frequented before being called up he had known women who dressed like men and men who dressed like women and had thought little of it. He was more outraged at being tricked than by what she had done. But he was still troubled. “But women aren’t cut out to be soldiers! They are too weak. They can’t do the work required. They haven’t the stomach for killing.”

  The girl drew herself up. “Have you found my soldiering lacking? Did I lag behind on the trail? Did I shirk my duties? Did I flinch from danger? I admit I am not strong, and I am nothing with a sword, but what bowman is? Was I less of a soldier for that?”

  “You were,” said Reiner, feeling at last on solid ground. “For look at the trouble you’ve caused. The nonsense about not sharing a tent, not allowing a surgeon to heal you. And you have killed fellow soldiers twice to keep them from revealing your secret—the poor fellow you were jailed for murdering, and now Gustaf.”

  “I did not kill them to keep my secret,” said the girl sharply. “I would have been angry at them had they betrayed me, but I wouldn’t have killed them.” She looked Reiner in the eye. “I told the truth in our prison. When my tentmate learned my sex, he attempted to force himself upon me, thinking I would do his will in order to keep him quiet.” She shivered. “Gustaf tried the same, only worse. He said he would give me another reason for my bandages. He tried to cut me, with his scalpel, as he had that poor girl.”

  Reiner winced. “The monster.” He looked up at the girl. “But, you realise, if you had been a man, neither of them would have tried anything. The temptation would not have been there.”

  The girl clenched her fists. “No. They would have only assaulted peasant girls and harlots instead, and no one would have stopped them!” She calmed herself and hung her head. “Forgive me. I forget myself. I know I don’t belong in the army—that my presence is a disruption, a crime.” She looked up at Reiner pleadingly. “But are we all not criminals? Are we not a band of outlaws? Must you cast me out for it? In all other things I am a good soldier. I beg you, don’t tell the others. I couldn’t bear it if they turned on me, or worse, treated me like a porcelain doll. Let me serve out at least this mission. When we return to the Empire, you may do as you wish. I will make no complaint.”