by Nathan Long
‘Hold tight,’ said Reiner. ‘It might be a wild ride.’
‘I… I’ll be fine.’
There was no time to argue. Before they had all turned their horses, huge almost-human figures crashed out of the darkness, roaring and swinging enormous weapons.
FOUR
A Breath Of Fresh Air
THERE WERE A few moments of nightmarish confusion as the men savagely spurred their horses away from their pursuers and the company plunged into the darkness of the tangled woods. Trees seemed to spring out before them and roots rise up to trip them, and Reiner swore he felt the raiders’ hot breath on his neck, but at last they burst out into the open fields and the horses stretched into a headlong gallop. Pavel and Hals, who had never ridden faster than a trot before, didn’t like this at all, and clung to their horses’ necks with death-grip terror, but by Sigmar’s grace they didn’t fall, and the company soon left the raiders behind.
Veirt took no chances. He kept up a punishing pace for a good hour until they had left the environs of the farming village far behind and reached an area of low hills and deep, wooded ravines. They filed into one of these, walking the horses down the centre of an ice-rimed stream for nearly a mile, until Veirt found a flat, pebbly stretch of riverbank and told them to put up their tents.
It was a sorry camp. Veirt allowed no fire, so they dined on cold rations while Gustaf cleaned and bound their wounds and a light snow melted on their horses’ sweating flanks. Pavel’s sobs and his cries of, ‘It can’t be gone! I can still feel it!’ as he held his hand over his missing eye were not an aid to digestion.
Reiner’s newfound friendship with Franz didn’t change the boys mind about tenting alone, and while the others bundled into their sturdy tents, he curled up best he could under his cloak, propped up at one end with his short sword and at the other with his scabbard.
FOR THE NEXT two days it got colder and colder as Lady Magda led them higher into the foothills of the Middle Mountains and the rain of the flatlands became wet, clinging snow. It was as if each gain in elevation turned back time, as if spring were becoming winter instead of summer. Gustaf had them smear their hands and faces with bear fat to prevent frostbite, a disgusting but effective trick.
Veirt, a native of Ostland, seemed to blossom in the cold, growing cheerier and more voluble the more bitter it got, telling stories of forced marches and desperate last stands, but Giano, from sun-baked Tilea, hated it. His usual cheery disposition soon became replaced with angry snappishness and long, whining reminiscences about the beauty of his homeland and the warmth of its sun.
Pavel’s empty eye socket grew red and choked with pus. He developed a fever that had him screaming and gibbering in the night and waking the others up, which did nothing to lighten the general disposition of the group. During the day he couldn’t sit astride his saddle, so Ulf knocked together a simple stretcher out of saplings and twine that dragged behind his horse. Gustaf bound him into it and packed him in snow to keep him from burning up. Though it pained him, Reiner begrudgingly allowed that Gustaf did his job well, even changing the dressing on Pavel’s eye at every meal stop. Hals was unusually quiet during his friend’s sickness, his normal flow of insult and wit frozen with worry.
The tiny mountain villages they passed through were all deserted, and most destroyed. Axe-scarred skeletons lay between the houses, picked clean by crows, and it was obvious by the many tracks of unshod hooves that Kurgan raiders passed back and forth through the area constantly. Reiner expected the villages to be picked as clean as the skeletons, but Hals, who, being a peasant, knew the tricks of peasants, showed them how to find hidden caches of food and liquor under dirt floors and at the bottoms of wells.
They made camp outside one such village two nights after the fight with the beasts and, armed with Hals’s knowledge, went searching for hidden food to supplement their meagre rations.
Reiner, Franz and Hals were prying up the flagstones in a cottage kitchen when they heard a woman’s scream. Fearing that Lady Magda was being attacked, they dropped the stone and ran out to the steep, twisting track that served the little settlement as a high street. The scream came again, from a shack further up the hill. They ran to it.
Hals was about to kick the door in, but Reiner stopped him, and motioned for him and Franz to circle around the tiny, tumbledown place. ‘Block the back door,’ he whispered. ‘If it has one.’
Reiner waited at the front door as the others crept through the muddy yard. The cry came again, but muffled this time, and then a male voice. ‘Hold still, curse you!’
The voice sounded familiar. Reiner stepped silently to an unglassed window and looked in. It was dim inside, and hard to see, but Reiner could just make out a pair of legs in torn woollen hose lying on the floor, and another pair in breeks lying on top of them. A male hand fumbled at a belt buckle. He couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he recognised the body. He’d been looking at it for days.
‘Schlecht!’ he roared. He ran to the door and kicked it in.
Gustaf looked up from where he lay on top of a wild-eyed peasant girl on the dusty wood floor. Her skirts were rucked up around her waist and he had his knife under her jaw. Splotches and smears of blood surrounded her.
‘You filthy swine,’ growled Reiner. ‘Get off of her.’
‘I… I thought she was a raider,’ said Schlecht, pushing hurriedly to his knees. ‘I was… I was…’
The back door burst in and Franz and Hals entered.
‘What’s all the…’ Hals broke off as he took in the tableau. Franz went pale.
‘You rotten little…’ Hals stepped forward and kicked Gustaf in the face.
The surgeon fell off the girl, and Hals pulled her to her feet. There were bloody cuts on her chest. It looked as if Schlecht had carved his initials there. Reiner shuddered.
‘Here now, lass.’ Hals said softly. ‘He can’t hurt you now. Are you…?’
The girl wasn’t listening. She screamed and lashed out, striping Hals across the cheek with her nails, and dashed for the door. Reiner didn’t get in her way.
Hals turned back to Gustaf, who was sitting up groggily. ‘You filth,’ he growled. ‘I knew what you were the minute I laid eyes on you, and I’m ashamed of myself that I didn’t kill you then.’ He kicked Gustaf in the face again and raised his sword.
‘No!’ cried Gustaf, crabbing backward. ‘You daren’t! You daren’t! I’m your surgeon. Do you want your friend to die?’
Hals checked his swing, knuckles turning white on the hilt.
‘He’s right,’ said Reiner, though he hated to say it. ‘We need him. All of us. We’ve the whole trip to do again, with who knows how many raiders in the way. We’ll need someone to patch us up.’
Hals’s shoulders slumped. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye, yer right.’ He raised his head and glared at Gustaf. ‘But when we get back, don’t expect to live long enough to spend yer reward.’
Gustaf sneered. ‘Do you think it wise to threaten the man who will tend to your wounds, pike?’
Hals rushed the surgeon again, but Reiner held him back. ‘Ignore him, lad. Don’t give him the satisfaction.’
Hals snarled, but turned toward the door. He motioned to Franz. ‘Come on, lad. Let’s get a breath of fresh air. It stinks in here.’
The two soldiers walked out. Reiner joined them, turning his back pointedly on Gustaf.
AS THE SUN reached noon the next day, they saw the whitewashed stone walls of the Convent of Shallya on an outcrop above them. It shone like a pearl.
‘Don’t look pillaged from here,’ said Hals.
Pavel, whose fever had broken that morning, and who sat swaying and fragile on his horse, grinned. ‘Pillaged or not, we’re here at last,’ he said. ‘Now we can get this whatsit and go home. I just hope the trip back don’t cost me my other eye. I won’t be able to see all me gold.’
‘It is an hour’s ride from here,’ said Lady Magda. ‘The path is narrow and winding.’
Oskar shielded his eyes against the noon-day glare. ‘There is smoke. Coming from the convent.’
Veirt squinted where Oskar pointed. ‘Are you certain?’
‘Aye captain,’ said the artilleryman. ‘Campfire or chimney it might be.’
‘Could be the nuns,’ said Hals.
Veirt gave him a withering look.
The revelation of the smoke lengthened their trip up the mountain to two hours, for they went at a walk, with Giano and Franz spying ahead on foot, scouting each bend in the path for enemies. There were none, though they found evidence of recent passage: gnawed bones, prints in the snow, a discarded jar of wine shattered on a rock.
Reiner caught Hals looking uneasily at these traces, and smirked. ‘A messy lot, these nuns.’
About three-quarters of the way up, the trail was joined by a much wider path winding around the mountains from the south, and on this wider path were countless snow-filled foot and hoofprints going in both directions, indicating that large groups of men and horses travelled it with some regularity.
Veirt eyed these signs with grim interest. ‘Must be a nest of them further up.’
‘Not in the convent?’ quavered Oskar.
‘You only saw one column of smoke?’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ Oskar looked relieved.
At last they reached the narrow shelf of rock upon which the convent was built, a sort of landing before the wide path continued up the stepped hills into the mountains. There was evidence that the forces that travelled up and down the path often made camp on the ledge—scorched circles of old camp-fires, bones, rubbish.
The convent’s white walls extended from the cliff edge, which looked east toward Smallhof and Kislev, to the face of the mountain, cutting off the tapering end of the shelf. But the appearance of gleaming perfection that the walls had given at the base of the hill proved an illusion up close. They had been shattered and blackened in many places, and the great wooden gates hung off their hinges in a jumble of charred timber. The convent buildings rose in three steps behind the gates, with the spire of a chapel of Shallya highest and furthest back. Even from a distance Veirt’s men could see that entire place had been gutted, walls burned, roofs caved in, garbage scattered about. The thin column of smoke still rose, seeming to come from the third step.
Giano made the sign of Shallya as he looked at the wreckage and muttered under his breath.
‘It appears that Baron Albrecht’s information was correct,’ said Erich.
‘Aye,’ said Veirt.
Reiner looked to Lady Magda, expecting a reaction, but the sister seemed made of iron. She gazed at the wreckage with tight-lipped stoicism. ‘The crypt we must enter is beneath the chapel,’ she said. ‘So we must get beyond whoever has lit that fire.’
‘Very good, my lady,’ said Veirt, and turned to the men. ‘Dismount, you lot. Ostini, Shoentag, have a look and report back.’
As the men dismounted—much to the relief of Pavel and Hals, who rubbed their aching backsides vigorously—the mercenary and the boy tiptoed through the gate and disappeared. While they were gone, the party found a hidden corner in which to tie up the horses and then refreshed themselves with a drink of nearly frozen water from their canteens. Reiner could hear the ice sloshing around in his. Veirt ordered Ulf to set up Lady Magda’s tent, and suggested to her that she wait while they saw to any difficulties, but she refused. She seemed as eager as the rest of them to get this whatever-it-was and return to civilisation. She declared that she would come with them.
Franz and Giano returned shortly.
‘Six,’ said Giano. ‘Big boys, and with the big swords, hey? Northers?’
‘Kurgan,’ corrected Franz. ‘Same as we faced at Kirstaad. They look to be foot troops. No horses I could see. No fresh droppings.’
‘Two walking around,’ continued Giano, making a circling motion with his fingers. ‘Four in garden, eating.’ ‘You sure that’s all of them?’ asked Veirt.
Franz and Giano nodded.
‘Right, then.’ Veirt hunched forward. ‘We take out the two on patrol as quiet as shadows, got it? Then everyone with a bow or gun will find good vantage on the four in the garden and put as much iron into them as we can. These lads are tough as your boot. If we have to come to grips with ‘em I want ‘em well peppered, you mark me?’
A chorus of ‘Ayes’ answered him.
‘Right then; commend your souls to Sigmar and let’s be at it.’
FIVE
Heroes Don’t Win By Trickery
THEY ADVANCED CAUTIOUSLY through the forecourt, weapons at the ready, Lady Magda and Pavel, still too weak from his fever to fight, at the rear. There were burned stables to the left and the remains of a dry storage to the right, shattered oil jars and empty sacks of grain lying among jumbled timbers. The main convent building faced them, a two-storey structure clad in white marble where the nuns had once taken their meals, and where the library and offices of the abbess and her staff were housed. Its walls still stood, but black smears of soot above each smashed-in window gave evidence of the destruction within. The walls were daubed with vile symbols that Reiner was glad he didn’t understand. Decaying corpses in nuns’ robes were scattered around the yard like rotting fruit fallen from some macabre tree. Oskar shivered at the sight.
They crept up wide curved steps that led to the level of the convent dormitory, where the nuns and novitiates had slept. The building was fronted by a small plaza. Neither had fared well. The dormitory, a wide, half-timbered, three-storey building, had lost its left wing to fire, and the right was sagging badly. The plaza seemed to have been used as a latrine and dump by the raiders, and was filled with rotting food, broken and burnt furniture, rusting weapons and excrement. It smelled like a charnel house that had caved into a sewer.
Giano stopped them on the last step before the plaza and they crouched down. He pointed up to the next level: a ruined garden, reached by another set of curving steps, and surrounded by a balustrade that looked over the plaza. Over a row of high burnt hedges, they could see pikes pointing up to the sky, with long-haired skulls spiked on top like totems. ‘They making the camp there,’ he said. ‘Behind hedgings. Patrol walk around edge.’
Veirt nodded. ‘Right. Ostini—no—Lichtmar and Shoentag, I want you up in the dormitory. There should be windows in the third floor that overlook the garden. If not, get on the roof. You cover the boys at the fire. Ostini, you join ‘em once we’ve finished off the patrols.’
‘Surely it won’t take seven of us to kill two men?’ said Erich.
‘They are hardly men,’ said Veirt. ‘And I hope seven of us are enough to take them out one at a time. Now here is what I want to see.’
As Veirt laid out his strategy they saw the first of the raiders pass. He was an intimidating sight, a shaggy-haired giant in leather and furs, a head taller than Ulf, and unnaturally thick with muscle. Fetishes and charms dangled from braids in his beard, and the scabbarded sword that hung from his belt looked taller than Franz—and probably outweighed him too.
After waiting for the second raider to pass they hurried to their positions—Oskar and Franz running low for the dormitory door, and the rest heading for the steps that led up to the garden. Pavel, armed with one of Reiner’s pistols, stayed behind with Lady Magda.
There was a smashed statue of Shallya directly below the balustrade that edged the garden. A blow from above had sheared it off from shoulder to hip, so that what remained was a sharp shard that pointed at the sky, while Shallya’s serene face looked up from the rubble at the base of her pedestal. Giano touched his heart with his palm when he saw it.
‘Heathens,’ he muttered. ‘Desecrate the lady. Blasphemy.’
Reiner smirked. ‘A mercenary who venerates Shallya?’
‘Always I fight for peace,’ said Giano proudly.
‘Ah.’
While the others pressed against the wall on either side of the steps where they wouldn’t be seen, Reiner and Giano tiptoed up to the garden le
vel. On its east side, it overlooked the cliff, and here the balustrade was lined with tall columns. These had once been topped with statues of Shallyan martyrs looking off toward the heathen wastelands, but the raiders had pulled them down, and the columns were empty.
Reiner eyed them uneasily. Veirt had asked him and Giano to climb the first two, and he didn’t like the idea. It wasn’t that they were hard to climb: they were wreathed with sturdy, if thorny, rose vines, which made for easy hand and foot holds. It was that they sat on the very edge of the cliff, and though Reiner wasn’t terribly afraid of heights, clinging to a column by one’s fingers and toes above a four hundred foot drop to jagged rocks would give any sane man qualms. It might have been his imagination, but the wind seemed to pick up just as he began his climb.
At last, well after Giano was already perched on his, Reiner pulled himself on top of the pillar. He swallowed. The top had looked wide enough when he was on the ground, but now seemed to have shrunk to the diameter of a dinner plate. He crouched down, knees trembling. Fortunately the briars were thick around the capital, so unless someone was actually looking for them, they were hidden from the ground. What was going to make them conspicuous was the blanket.
With a look to make sure the raider guards were out of sight, Reiner pulled his blanket from his pack, unrolled it and—holding firmly to a twist of vine—flipped one end over to Giano. The mercenary seemed to have no fear of heights. He reached out over the chasm and caught the blanket without a quiver. He gave Reiner a grin and the circled thumb and forefinger.
Reiner’s pulse beat against his throat. If the raiders spotted anything, it would be the blanket, drooping between the two pillars like festive bunting. At least the sun was at such an angle that the thing cast no shadow over the walk.
He had little time to agonise. Just as he and Giano set themselves, the first of the raiders came around the high hedge and started toward them. Reiner crouched lower in the briars and gripped the blanket with both hands. He watched as the raider walked along, gazing idly out over the cliff at the endless forest below, then reached the steps and turned to walk along the balustrade that looked over the plaza, oblivious to the men above and below him.
