by Nathan Long
‘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 rooms. 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’s 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.’
Reiner stared at the girl for a long time. Revealing the girl’s secret would be more of a disruption than keeping it, and yet it went against every instinct he had as a gentleman and a lover of women to allow a girl to fight and come into harm’s way. He ground his teeth. He must think as a captain and do the thing that was best for the group, not the individual. It was better for the group to have more fighters and to work smoothly as a unit.
‘What’s your name, girl?’
‘Franka. Franka Mueller.’
Reiner sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘That was foolish of me. It would have been much smarter not to know you by any other name than Franz. That way it would be impossible to make a mistake.’ He shrugged. ‘Ah well, can’t be helped. Get your kit together, the rest are getting far ahead.’
Franka looked at him uncertainly. ‘So you won’t betray me?’
‘No, confound you, I won’t. I need you. But I make no promises for when we return to civilisation, I hope that’s understood.’
Franka saluted smartly, her lips twitching a smile. ‘Perfectly, captain. And my thanks.’
Reiner grunted and began gathering up Gustaf’s kit, trying to get the image of Franka’s naked breasts out of his head. It was going to be difficult thinking of the girl as a lad again.
THEY CAUGHT UP to the others a short while later.
Hals shot Franka a dirty look. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t murder you too, captain. You being alone with him and all.’
‘Less of it, pikeman,’ said Reiner. ‘I’ve listened to the las… to the lad’s story and I believe it. He showed me cuts on his chest like those Gustaf carved into that girl. It seems our surgeon had more wide-ranging tastes than we suspected.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Pavel. ‘But don’t expect me to bunk with him.’
The men continued following the distant sounds of marching. There were no stairs in the strange round tunnels, just sharply sloping ramps that connected one level to the other. The ramps were cut with toe holds that seemed to have been placed for beasts with four legs, not two, which set Giano raving about ratmen again. The marching continued to echo down from above them, and they climbed through five levels before the sound began coming from ahead of them.
‘Let’s increase our pace until we find the cannon tracks,’ said Reiner. ‘I don’t want to miss our way.’
They walked faster, though all were exhausted from their interrupted sleep. Hals hopped gamely on his makeshift crutch, while Giano kept a hand on Ulf’s elbow, for the big man hadn’t fully recovered his balance after his blow to the head. Oskar shuffled somnambulantly in the middle of the pack, at peace now that Reiner had given him another sip from Gustaf’s bottle. The journey was made somewhat easier because they no longer needed torches. The pale green glow of the walls was just enough to see by, though it gave them all a sickly cast that was unpleasant to look at.
A few hours into their march Hals found a broken cleaver discarded in a shallow alcove. It was enormous, the handle so big even Ulf had a hard time closing his fingers around it. There was dried blood caked on its snapped blade.
‘Ores,’ said Pavel. ‘Right enough.’
&
nbsp; Hals poked at the crusted blood. It flaked away. ‘No way to tell if this was dropped last week or last century.’
Reiner swallowed unhappily. ‘Well, we can’t be more alert than we already are, can we? Carry on.’
They resumed their march and despite Reiner’s words, the men were indeed more alert, looking nervously over their shoulders at every turn and jumping at shadows.
Reiner let the others get a little ahead and walked with Franka. ‘I still don’t understand how you became a soldier,’ he said. ‘What possessed you to take up this life?’
Franka sighed. ‘Love.’
‘Love?’
‘I am the daughter of a miller in a town called Hovern. Do you know it?’
‘I think so. Just south of Nuln, yes?’
‘Aye. My father arranged a marriage for me to the son of a Nuln wheat merchant. He hoped to win a better wholesale price from the boy’s father. I, unfortunately was in love with the son of a farmer who came often to our mill with his wheat—Yarl. I didn’t like the merchant’s son. He was an ass. But my father didn’t listen to my wishes.’
‘As fathers so often fail to do,’ said Reiner wryly, thinking of his own less than understanding father.
‘The merchant’s son and I were to be married last spring, and I thought I could bear it if I could slip away and see Yarl now and then, but then the hordes began their advance and Yarl was called by Lord von Goss to string his bow in defence of the Empire.’ She chuckled bitterly. ‘The merchant’s son got a dispensation because he and his father were provisioning the army. It came to me suddenly that I would be alone with that puny braggart while Yarl was away fighting, and that… and that Yarl might not come back.’
‘Such is the lot of women since the beginning of time,’ said Reiner.
‘Chaos take the “lot of women”, sneered Franka. ‘On the eve of my wedding I could stand it no longer. I cut my hair, stole my father’s bow, and ran off to Gossheim where Lord von Goss’s army was mustering for the march north. I enlisted as Yarl’s younger brother Franz and took his last name. It was…’ She blushed. ‘It was the best six months of my life. We ate together, tented together. Every happiness I dreamed marriage would bring, we had.’
