“A true Kazarkhan must be an alchemist. He must know how to combine fire and water, summer and winter. He must know how to show mercy to those he has vanquished while showing justice to those who have vanquished them.”
– From the Catechism of the Kazarkhan On the day after the battle, the morning sun rose to reveal a day as fine as any the Strigany had seen since arriving at Flintmar. Autumn still lay heavy in the air, but the sky was the deep, endless blue of a perfect summer’s day, and the southern breeze was as warm as any embrace.
Some of those who had survived took the fine weather as a good omen, a celebration of their victory.
Others took it as the god’s mockery of their loss. In one day, they had almost been annihilated, almost. Only the will of Ushoran had saved them, but, lost in the misery of their ruined lives, not many found it in their hearts to thank him.
Bodies lay everywhere, tangled together in the cold intimacy of death. Young and old, Strigany and mercenary, man and woman; in the heat of battle none had been spared.
Then there were the wounded, the constant, wailing, weeping wounded. They called out for aid that only a few of their fellows could give. The petrus stalked amongst them, tending to their wounds as tirelessly as the crows tended to the bodies of the dead. There was an abundance of carrion birds, but there were too few healers. Always too few.
There were even prisoners to be dealt with. Most of the mercenaries had managed to flee, disappearing off into the endless wastes of the moor to find whatever fate awaited them. Others, too badly wounded or too shocked to run, had fallen into the Striganies’ hands.
It was their screams that finally woke Brock on that terrible, beautiful morning.
He emerged from the black depths of a sleep that had been more like a coma. After he had set his men to rebuilding the barricades the evening before, he had returned to his wagon to make tea from some of the painkilling herbs that Petru Engel had provided him with.
That was the last thing he remembered. He sat up, blinking in the gloom of his wagon, trying to remember where he was. His back ached, and he realised that he must have collapsed before making it to his hammock.
He enjoyed a moment of perfect, carefree peace. Then, the memories of the day before, and the responsibilities ahead, rushed over him, and he lurched to his feet.
Every muscle ached. Every joint was stiff.
“By Ushoran, I’m too old for this,” he muttered.
As he pulled on his boots, he heard another chorus of screams, animalistic in the abandon of their misery, and realised that they must have woken him up. He stretched, ignoring the pain, and then stepped outside his wagon.
The sunlight was bright enough to make him squint, and he had to blink a couple of times, before seeing the extent of the ruin that surrounded him. Hardly a wagon remained unturned. Hardly a yard of mud was visible beneath the tangled corpses and strewn belongings. Where once the muddy streets had been alive with his people, now, they were alive with little more than crows and swarming flies.
He staggered back against the door of his wagon. Had this been victory?
“Good morning, Kazarkhan.”
Brock blinked again, and turned to see who had addressed him. It was Mihai. His red hair was clotted with dried blood, and he was pale with exhaustion. The twins stood behind him. One had his arm in a sling. The other was staring through the walls of a wagon and into the distance.
Brock looked at them, and realised that yes, this had been a victory. After all, they were alive.
He gripped Mihai by the shoulder, and shook him, wanting to make sure that he was real. Then he smiled.
“You made it,” he said, breathing the words.
Thank you, Ushoran, Brock thought. Thank you for saving my son.
“Yes,” Mihai shrugged. “I’m alive.”
The two stood awkwardly for a moment. Another chorus of screams floated through the air, and both men turned, glad of the distraction.
“What the hell is that?” Brock asked. “Are the petrus up to their old tricks?”
Mihai shook his head.
“I don’t think so. At least, not from where those screams are coming from.”
“Where’s that?”
“The amphitheatre, where the prisoners were. That’s why I came to wake you.”
Brock looked at his son, and scratched his chin.
“Oh? We’d better go and have a look, then.” He paused, turning back. “By the way, how did you do it? To turn those giants against their masters must have taken some persuasion.”
“Oh, we just grabbed their handler. When you have the bull by the balls, he will follow.”
Brock laughed.
“You’re a real Strigany, all right,” he said. “I’m proud of you, do you know that? Not just because of yesterday, either. I mean…”
Brock trailed off, lost for words. Another peal of screams cut through the air, and he shook his head.
“Ah hell. Let’s go and sort this out.”
The four men set off through the bright sunlight and dark shadows that lay among the ruins of the camp. At first, their going was slow. The way was choked with debris and bodies, and none of them wanted to step over the dead. They soon became less squeamish, however, and found themselves climbing over the drifts of bodies as easily as they scrambled over the ruined wagons that lay shattered or burned all around.
As they drew nearer to the amphitheatre, Brock remembered it as the bloody testing ground where he had fought barely two days ago. Had it been only two days, he wondered, as he nodded to the Strigany he passed? It seemed more like two years, two lifetimes. He brooded on the thought, as he marched to the middle of the amphitheatre. Then he stopped, and a look of puzzlement creased his brow, as he tried to understand what he was seeing.
There were perhaps a hundred captives, perhaps more. Where once the mercenaries had strutted, now they cowered. Their uniforms, which had been confections of male vanity and martial style, were torn and ragged, and the men within them looked as bedraggled as peasants.
Flies swarmed around some of them, worrying at the dried crusts of their injuries. Others, although apparently unharmed, sat lost in the depths of their shock, as pale and unmoving as the dead.
In the centre of this miserable collection of broken humanity a mob of self-appointed executioners was busy.
Brock didn’t recognise any of them, although they were Strigany, right enough. He could tell by their loose-fitting clothes and their sharp features. He could also tell by the traditional slaughter frame they had erected among their captives. It was a simple enough thing to use and to transport in a wagon, just three poles with a winch at the apex, and the carcass of the animal hanging down from it.
Brock watched the butchers going about their bloody work, and for a moment he forgot about everything but the rumbling in his stomach. He should give the order to start preparing food for the survivors. Stew would be best, hot and easy, and nourishing. The gods knew they would need their strength in the hours ahead.
Then the scream came again, shrill enough to cut through his confusion. One of the Strigany butchers stepped away from his work, and Brock recognised the neatly dissected carcass for the animal it was.
“Stop!” he bellowed. The butchers turned to look at their Kazarkhan, knives and cleavers in their hands. When they recognised Brock, they lowered their tools, although with a reluctance that Brock was keen enough to note.
He marched through the captives, Mihai and the twins at his back, until he stood before the slaughter frame. Incredibly, the mercenary that hung from it was still alive. He glistened pinkly in the brightness of the morning sun, his body covered in blood.
Brock saw the bundles of muscles that twitched, as the man writhed in blind agony from side to side, and, with a rush of nausea, he realised that he was not looking at bloodied skin. He was not looking at any skin at all. The man before him had been flayed alive.
The Kazarkhan’s face hardened, and he looked again at the people who had done this. They returned his appraisal, and, although some of them looked uneasy, none seemed ashamed.
“Who,” Brock asked. “Who told you to do this?”
“I did, Kazarkhan.”
The voice seemed genuinely cheerful, and so did the old woman who had spoken. She stepped forward from behind one of her helpers, a stooped and wiry figure whose tiny body was lost within the black sack cloth of her robes. Her face was liver-spotted and sharp, and the weathered lines of it were creased.
She was perhaps eighty, Brock estimated, and, from the innocent joy that glittered in her eyes, she might have been interrupted while playing with her grandchildren, or gossiping and sewing with her friends.
The flensing knives in her hands, though, showed that she had been practising another craft altogether. Brock stared at the blades. The bony claws of her fingers were splattered with droplets of blood from her handiwork, and, despite her age, her grip on her weapons seemed sure.
“What do you think you are doing, grandmother?” Brock asked, forcing himself to use the honorific. If, as he suspected, this woman had been driven mad, it wouldn’t do to provoke her.
“Oh, I’m no grandmother,” she sighed, and, for a moment, the warm good humour that twinkled within the wrinkled pouches of her eyes dimmed. “I am a crone. Crone Maria, from the caravan of Domnu Malfi. As for what am I doing, well Kazarkhan, that’s obvious. I am extracting retribution, just as our Lord Ushoran would have us all do.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the mob that had gathered around her, and Brock fought back the urge to tell them what he thought of their retribution. They were armed. Their blood was up, and, now that he thought about it, there was a hint of madness about more than one of them. It was in the fever that burned in their eyes, and in their deafness to the screams of the man they had been torturing. Most of all, it was in the way they held themselves.
“We have all suffered, crone,” he said, at length, “but there will be no execution of prisoners while I am Kazarkhan. Is that clear?”
He locked eyes with the old woman. She didn’t seem particularly perturbed, just carried on smiling and nodding, and, suddenly Brock found himself wondering why he had been so upset. He had been overreacting. He must be overwrought, overtired.
A gust of wind set the hanging man spinning again, and he recovered consciousness for long enough to call out for his mother. His voice sounded too high-pitched for a man, and, Brock noticed that Maria, not content with skinning him, had removed other parts of his body too.
With a lurch of understanding, he blinked, and, feeling like a sleep walker who awakes to find himself standing on the edge of a precipice, he looked back at the crone.
“It is bad that you have done this thing,” he said levelly, “worse that you think that I, Kazarkhan, chosen of Ushoran and our people, could be persuaded with some witch’s charm. I have told you,” he said pausing, and turning to face the gathered mob. “I have told you that there will be no execution of prisoners. I am Kazarkhan. You will obey.”
They looked at him sullenly, and Brock was suddenly glad to have Mihai and the twins at his back. These people were like dogs whose bones had been taken away.
No. No, that wasn’t exactly it, Brock thought. What they look like are the mobs we had to fight through to get here: sullen, vicious and cowardly.
His disgust for them flared. They were Strigany. They should know better. They should be better.
“But Kazarkhan,” the crone said, her voice soothing with all the tones of sweet reason, “we aren’t executing them. I have learned some small skill as a midwife. I know of the humours and their rhythms, and of what will kill and what will not. I am merely exacting retribution. Whether they live or die is in the hands of their gods, weak and pitiful things that they obviously are.”
Again, Brock felt himself wanting to agree. Again, he resisted the temptation. It was Mihai who spoke.
“Excuse me for asking, most honoured crone,” he said with a polite bow, “but do you have any news of Chera, from your caravan? Did she survive the battle?”
Maria turned to him, and her eyes blinked in recognition.
“Yes, she is well, well and happy. I am sure that she will have some happy news for all of us soon.”
“Happy news?”
Maria nodded.
“It was about time she was married.”
“Married?”
Maria winked at him.
“Don’t look so shocked,” she said, “and don’t look so upset. There will be plenty of girls for you. After all, you are the hero of this battle.” Mihai felt his chest swell. “You are the tamer of the giants, the lightning from the clear blue sky.” His back straightened. “You are the saviour of our people, chosen by Ushoran to be the vessel of his divine will. Make no mistake, it is through you that Ushoran saved us.”
In that moment, Mihai knew it to be the truth. Kazarkhan was one thing, but what was a title compared to the reality of their god’s will?
“You who are the saviour of our people,” Maria continued. “You know it. You can feel it. You can feel it in the beating in your chest,” she whispered, “in the air in your lungs, in the ground beneath your feet. It is the will of Ushoran. It is the force of destiny.”
As the crone spoke, Mihai listened to his heart, listened to his breath, and felt the world that spun beneath him. He believed.
“In fact, take this,” Maria said, continuing with the smooth confidence of a cobra who has hypnotised its prey. “I will give you the honour of taking retribution from those who would destroy us all.”
The mob cheered Mihai as he reached out to take the knife, and, although it was shrill, the sound of their acclaim was sweet, so very sweet.
The hilt of the flensing blade was warm in his hand, the weight comforting.
“Mihai,” Brock said, “there will be no execution of prisoners here.”
Mihai turned to regard his father, and his eyes hardened with resentment. The contempt he has for me, Mihai thought, for me! A man, and not just any man, but the hero of the battle, the chosen of Ushoran. He is jealous. That is why he hates me, why he has always hated me.
“Are you sure there’ll be no execution of prisoners, Kazarkhan?” Boris piped up, his tone light, but his eyes wary, “not even for the hero of the bottle?”
“She said the battle,” Bran corrected him.
“Then she got that one wrong,” Boris said, “or, maybe she hasn’t heard about what happened in that tavern by Altdorf.”
“The bottle was the hero of that one,” Bran said. “He may be the vessel of Ushoran, but he still puked like a sewer.”
Mihai turned on them, annoyed by their prattle. Perhaps he should stop hanging around with them. They talked like fools.
“Mihai,” Brock said softly, “listen to your friends.”
“They are nice boys,” the crone added, her tone layering the words with a dozen different meanings, none of them good, “entertaining, but, there will be time for them later.”
Suddenly, from nowhere, the urge to use the crone’s weapon on his father burned through the confusion of Mihai’s thoughts. He had no idea where the impulse came from, but it was as bright as a wrecker’s lantern on a dark night.
After all, he was the chosen of Ushoran, so, why not?
The answer came to him in a sudden, terrifying memory of the things he had seen with Dannie in the lair of the Old Father. The pallid, broken things that had once been human, they had been the chosen of Ushoran too.
Mihai shook his head, suddenly appalled at the murderous impulse that had almost seized him. The crone’s expression hardened as she felt her grip slipping, and she took a step back as Mihai advanced, blade outstretched. It wasn’t the crone he was aiming for, though, it was the hanging man. As the mob looked on, Mihai lunged forward, putting the man out of his misery with a killing stroke.
He shuddered as the mercenary’s life flowed out of him. Then he turned to face the mob.
“He was dead already,” he told them, “but you heard the Kazarkhan. No more killing of prisoners.”
Then he turned back to face his father. Suddenly, he was exhausted and his hands were trembling.
“Well done,” Brock said, and Mihai heard the pride in his voice. “As for you, crone,” he said, “many of our people have need of your healing skills. Go and tend to them.”
For the first time, the woman’s good humour vanished, and her tones curdled with the darkness that had lain beneath.
“You are lucky, Kazarkhan. Not many are as lucky as you. These people are not. After all, you still have your son.”
She looked at Mihai with the look of a butcher appraising a lamb, and then bundled up her blades and slipped away.
Brock watched her go. Then he turned on the others she had assembled.
“Go,” he told them, “and make yourselves useful.”
They turned, and, with barely a mutter, sidled out of the amphitheatre. Brock watched them go. Then he saw the faces of the mercenaries, who had been watching him, watching their fate be decided.
“Sorry about that,” he said with a wicked grin, “but you know how women are when they get in a mood.”
Nobody laughed. Nobody smiled. He didn’t blame them.
“Stay here,” he told them. “Stay quiet. There will be work for you. In time you’ll be set free.”
They looked at him as dumb as a herd of sheep. Brock shrugged. He had more important things to think about now.
“As to you three,” he continued, turning to his son and the twins, “maybe you should stay here. Make sure nobody else gets any ideas.”
“Even though I’m the chosen of Kazarkhan?”
Brock’s mouth opened as he turned to his son.
Then he saw the grin on his face, and the two of them started laughing. It was the last time Brock was to laugh in a long time. In the aftermath of their victory, his first priority was to deal with the dead, and dead there were aplenty.
Almost a quarter of their number had been killed, or wounded so badly that they were to die over the next few days. The Strigany custom was to bury their dead, to bury them deep, but the marshy ground, and the numbers involved, made that all but impossible.
Then there were the flies, and the rats. Nobody knew how so many had gathered so quickly, but, on the day after the battle, the ruins of the Striganies’ encampment was swarming with vermin, eager to feast on the bodies of the dead.
It was Domnu Malfi’s caravan that provided the solution, in the form of the corpse powder they had used to burn the plague victims of the Empire. The bodies were stacked outside the camp, like so much soggy cordwood. Some of them were already beginning to stink, the gas of their decomposition enough to turn even the strongest of stomachs.
They stank even worse when they were burned. By that afternoon, the greasy smoke of their burning flesh hung in the air, soaking into hair and clothes as deeply as any liquid. The worst thing about it was not that it smelled bad, but that it didn’t. Far from it. As the bodies of their kin crisped and carbonised, the Striganies’ camp was filled with the mouth-watering smell of roasting pork.
Few of those who engaged in the gruesome task escaped without nightmares. None of them ever touched pork again, an aversion that they passed on to their children.
The toll on the wagons had been even higher, although most of them, could be repaired. As the bodies burned, so the Striganies’ carpenters worked on the wagons, with an urgency that reflected the new idea that had taken them after the horrors of their victory in battle.
It was an old idea, an idea carved into the beam of every wagon, but, suddenly, everybody was talking about it as though it was an idea that they had just discovered. It raced through the conversations of the traumatised survivors of the slaughter, like the seasonal fires that race through the Reikwald in summer.
It was a clear idea, and it was as simple as it was impossible.
It worried Brock no end.
They had to flee, of course. There could be no doubt that, although they had driven off the mercenaries, they hadn’t broken them. Brock knew full well, from his younger days, how things would work. The mercenaries who had fled in such terror the day before would by now be back in their camp, like dogs who had retreated to lick their wounds. However, as the ale flowed and the coin jingled, they would regain their courage, even as their leaders recalculated and planned for their next attack. Brock knew that the next attack would be the end of them.
So they had to flee, of course they did, but to flee to Mourkain?
He had called on Petru Engel, in the dark, silent hours of that night, to talk his people out of this madness. Apart from the sentries, who were stationed on the rebuilt barricades, the camp was slumbering, everybody exhausted by the weight of the day’s harrowing work.
Brock knocked on the petru’s door, and wasn’t surprised to find the old man waiting for him, bright eyed within the confines of his wagon.
“Good evening, Kazarkhan,” he said, nodding to Brock, who nodded back as he sat cross legged on the floor.
“Good evening yourself, petru,” he replied, and took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Where’s Dannie?”
“He’s out visiting,” the petru said, looking strangely nostalgic as he accepted the tobacco pouch from Brock, and started to fill his own pipe. “He’s found himself a woman. I’ve had to stop training him, it’s got that bad. His head seems full of wool.”
Brock lit a match, and leered into the sulphur flare.
“If I remember rightly, it isn’t a surplus of cotton wool he’s suffering from,” he said. He drew on his pipe and blew a smoke ring up into the wooden beams of the wagon. “Still, I’m sure she’ll take care of it soon enough. He’s a good lad. Good prospects of becoming a petru. Did well in the battle.”
“He’s not the only one,” Engel said, returning Brock’s tobacco, and drawing on his own pipe. “Mihai is quite the hero. The giants’ handler is still around, by the way, wanting to be paid.”
“We’ll pay him, I suppose,” Brock decided. “It’s just a shame he lost both of his beasts. They might have come in useful.”
“They did come in useful.”
“Ah yes, the stew, are you sure that was all right?”
The petru shrugged.
“Meat is meat. After all, they were no more human than a monkey, and that’s no more human than a cow.”
“It was a fine meal, anyway,” Brock said, although the smell of burning bodies had made more than one of his people vomit up the stew, almost as soon as they had swallowed it. Thank Ushoran that task was ended.
The two men smoked in companionable silence for a little while longer.
“Yes, Mihai did well,” the petru mused. “You must be very proud of him.”
“I’ve always been proud of him,” Brock said, his beard bristled defiantly, even though he couldn’t quite meet his old friend’s gaze.
“Yes, well,” the petru said, studying the glowing bowl of his pipe. “The past is what we want it to be. The future is what we make of it.”
Brock grunted.
“One day, I’ll find you short of a saying. Then I’ll worry.”
The petru blew a perfect smoke ring, watching it as it floated up, and then dissolved.
“You would have good reason to. Our customs, our tales, our words, they’re our strength. They’re what makes us better than the peasants, stronger, but everything has a price.”
“Prices are for those who are willing to pay them,” Brock said, pleased to have remembered the saying in time. Lacking Engel’s skill, he usually couldn’t come up with them until it was too late.
“Oh, we’ve been paying all right,” the petru told him.
Brock looked at the old man, but his face was veiled beneath smoke and shadow.
“Have you heard the nonsense people have been talking?” Brock asked at length. “About returning to Mourkain?”
“Since I was born,” Engel replied.
“You know what I mean,” Brock said, fidgeting on the hard wood of the wagon floor. He felt a bite of cramp in one of his thighs. By the gods, he was getting soft in his old age.
“Ah yes,” Engel said, nodding. “Before, returning to Mourkain was a dream, not a plan.”
“Mourkain, of all places,” Brock scoffed, “a name from stories and nursery rhymes.”
Engel shrugged.
“And why do you think that it’s in those stories and nursery rhymes, Kazarkhan?”
Brock looked at him suspiciously.
“Don’t tell me you believe in all this nonsense. Leaving the Empire, leaving civilisation, and for what? So that we can go and live in a place from a story.”
The petru studied his pipe before replying.
“And yet,” he said, “and yet Mourkain is real. As real as you, and you are in a dozen stories already, oh mighty Kazarkhan.”
Brock snorted.
“In fifty years, when the stories have made me into one of the gods, what will I be but dust and bones? No, when you petrus say that Mourkain existed, I believe you well enough. It is where our people were born, where our great lords taught us the arts, but, in the same stories, it also says that Mourkain was smashed by the orcs, and that we were scattered across the world like chaff on the four winds.”
“You remember well,” the petru told him mildly, “apart from the part that says that, one day, we will return.”
“One day,” Brock scoffed. “One of the things I’ve learned is that, what orcs smash stays smashed. Mourkain stood thousands of years ago. What will there be now but fallen stones? Everything else will have been plundered, even the bones.”
“What else will there be?” Engel replied. “Oh, nothing, nothing much, just dirt.” His eyes glittered as he spoke. “Just soil and land. The stories also tell us that the land there was as rich and as black as treacle cake, so fertile that you can grow three crops a year.”
“I don’t remember that,” Brock said, frowning.
“Us petrus tend to stick to the livelier tales around the campfires,” Engel said. “It keeps the ale flowing more freely, and the tobacco, of course.”
Brock handed him the pouch and watched him refill the pipe.
“So, maybe the land was rich,” he allowed. “Our ancestors had arts of which ours are a pale reflection.”
“You did learn the tales well,” Engel said complimenting him on his word perfect recitation.
“But that was thousands of years ago. What will be left of those farms but fallow ground and silt from the river?”
Engel looked at him, his face carefully blank.
“Sometimes,” he said at length, “I wonder if we are quite as superior in intellect to the peasants as we think we are. Nothing but fallow ground and silt from the river indeed. Why do you think the place is so fertile in the first place?”
Brock opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. A sudden suspicion had dawned on him.
“Tell me,” he asked, “what do you and the other petrus think of this madness? Surely you can’t think that leaving the Empire and hurling ourselves into the wilderness is anything more than collective suicide?”
“I wouldn’t presume to speak for the other petrus,” Engel said smoothly, “although I don’t suppose many would think that staying here would be anything other than death.”
“Yes, of course,” Brock said, exasperated, “but there are other places to go. The Empire is surrounded by wildernesses. We could even disappear into the Reikwald for a while.”
“We could,” Engel said, “but what story do you think the survivors will tell, back in the Empire? Of how they were out manoeuvred and outfought by a bunch of Strigany? Or that we had the Dark Gods on our side?”
Brock shrugged.
“The latter,” he said, “which is all to the good. Let them fear us.”
Again, Engel paused and looked at his Kazarkhan.
“Maybe we should have this conversation when you aren’t so tired,” he decided at length. “It may have escaped your attention, but there are three emperors at the moment, all of them vying to be the only one. How long do you think it would be before they realise what an easy victory against the ‘Dark God’ wiping us out would be?”
Brock shifted uncomfortably.
“You might be right. If they disbelieve the stories.”
“If’ doesn’t come into it,” Engel told him, relieved that the Kazarkhan was finally seeing sense. Sometimes it was like getting blood out of a stone. “The Elector Count Averland might be a lunatic, but most of his fellows aren’t. When they come, it will be cautiously, and it will be with state regiments, not a rag bag of misfits and cut throats. Not that Averland’s rag bag of misfits and cutthroats won’t finish us off, anyway, unless we start moving.”
Brock sighed.
“You might be right,” he allowed, “but, even so, Mourkain’s at the bottom of the world, even below Araby. How will we find the ships to take us there without traipsing back up through the whole murderous length of the Empire to find a port? Marienburg’s the nearest by my reckoning, and that’s a thousand miles away if it’s a yard.”
“Might as well be a million as a thousand,” Engel said, “but it makes no sense to take ships. We have our horses, our wagons, and our feet, if it comes to it, and we know the way. It’s over there.”
The old man pointed towards the south, one bony finger outstretched towards the door of his wagon.
Brock gaped at him.
“Across the Black Mountains?”
Engel just smiled, blew a smoke ring, and said, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
“Ye gods,” Brock said and rolled his eyes.
“Of course,” Engel told him, “we are still at war, and you are still Kazarkhan. When all’s said and done, the decision is yours.”
“Well, that’s all right then,” Brock said sarcastically, “and, if I decide to stay here, you and the rest of the petrus will be happy to obey, I suppose.”
“Happy to? No, but obey we will. You are the chosen of Ushoran. We have no choice.”
Brock heard the truth of it in the old man’s voice. If anything, it made the inevitability of the decision even worse. At least half of his people were too old or too young, or too sick to travel at all, let alone to face the howling wilderness of the Black Mountains. They had no maps, no guides and no equipment with which to face the sheer cliffs and black voids of the chasms.
Then there were the things that lived within that terrible wilderness, things desperate enough to make the mountains their home, and vicious enough to survive in them.
Brock sighed, and tried to blow a smoke ring. A sudden gust rattled beneath the door of the wagon, blurring the smoke, and sending a shiver down his spine.
Of course it’s cold, he thought. Winter’s on the way. Perfect, damned perfect.
“I’m too old for this,” he muttered. Petru Engel barked with laughter.
“Isn’t everybody, Kazarkhan? Isn’t everybody?”
“We’ll see. I’ll call the council tomorrow night, and we’ll see.” As she stalked through the night, as fleeting as an owl’s shadow, Maria’s face was twisted with an embittered passion. Ever since the idiot Brock had kept her from her rightful victims, she had been in a foul temper, and the day’s work had done nothing to improve it.
It wasn’t only that she had enjoyed paying back a little, oh so very little, of what the peasants had made her people suffer. It was also that she’d been denied the use of their fresh, juicy entrails. Ripe and clean, and sliced from still living bodies, the organs would have been rich in the humours her potions required.
Of course, she thought as she shifted the soggy satchel she wore beneath her cloak, I can use scraps of the dead, but they’re never as good. The potions never lasted as long, and they were never as strong.
She paused at a crossroads, her nose twitching like a rat’s as she peered up and down the paths to make sure they were empty. Her hatred eased for a moment, soothed by thoughts of her darling Chera. Ever since she had found the girl as a babe, she had become the star around which the dark matter of her withered life revolved. The peasants had done things to Maria that meant that she would never have her own flesh and blood daughter, but, by Ushoran’s venom, she thought, Chera was the only daughter a mother could need.
The crone smiled at the thought of her little one grown up enough to be finding a man. It would be a wrench to lose a part of the closeness between them, but Maria had made more terrible sacrifices in the past for a lot less.
The trouble was, she thought, her smile twisting once more into a smirk of contempt, men are all idiots, even Dannie, apprentice to Petru Engel, and the only one who was worthy of her precious.
The crone, thinking back to the methods she had used to restore Chera’s beauty, spat with disgust. She couldn’t help herself. It was only the stupidity of men that had necessitated her terrible mission on that night.
Tonight, as she had stalked amongst the bodies of those who had died of their injuries, after the conflagration of the mass burnings, she had helped herself to what she needed, safe in the knowledge that the rats would get the blame. The rats and the other, worse things that had emerged from the night to join her in her carrion work.
Some of the creatures had known her. They had slunk away at her approach. Many more had not, though, and, emboldened by the fresh meat on which they had been feasting, some of them had fallen upon her.
Even now, the creatures’ erstwhile comrades were feasting upon the cooling entrails of those who had made the mistake of turning on Petru Maria. That was just as well, she thought. By the time morning revealed the feasting, which had taken place among the remains of the dead, there would be no sign of exactly what things had been sating their appetites.
Ghouls, Maria thought with a rare shudder. If ever there was a warning of what carelessness could create, it was the nasty chores she had to undertake among the revolting creatures.
Still, if her people needed medicine then medicine they would get. None would know by what grisly craft she manufactured her salves and medicines. They would assume that they were no more than the herbs, and the perfume the crone used to mask the smell of the other ingredients.
Maria shifted the weight of her satchel again, and slowed as she approached the circled wagons of her caravan. Malfi had taken to setting his own guard, as well as the ones he had to provide for the perimeter, and she didn’t want to waste any time on him. Luckily, the man was huddled over his fire as closely as a hen sitting on an egg. His face was bent over the glow of burning peat and his arms were wrapped around it. Maria hardly even had to tiptoe to pass him unseen.
When she was back in her wagon, she dropped the satchel onto the floor with a damp thud, lit a lantern, and lit a small stove to start boiling water. She had a long night ahead of her.
She was bent over the pot, muttering to herself within the sanctity of her wagon, when the hairs suddenly pricked up on the back of her scrawny old neck. She whipped around, a knife in her hand, and then hissed with relief when she saw that it was only Chera.
“Poppet,” she said, “what are you doing sneaking up like that?”
“I’m too nervous about tomorrow to sleep,” Chera told her, no apology in her voice. She was staring at the grisly mess of entrails that Maria had been mixing into her potion.
“What are you making, Maria?” she asked, the accusation in her voice all the more irritating because it had the right to be there.
“Oh, just some medicine.”
Chera’s face hardened, her eyes turning cold.
“Those are human organs, aren’t they?”
Maria grunted and turned away, but Chera was not to be so easily dismissed.
“They are, aren’t they?” she said. “I recognise them.”
Maria sighed and shrugged her bony shoulders. It was probably as well that the girl found out, anyway. She would have to make her own concoctions in the years ahead.
“Yes, my love. Yes, they are.”
Chera sat down uninvited on Maria’s bed, and gazed at the heap of revolting ingredients.
Maria considered lying to soften the blow, but the time for that was over. After all, Chera would be a married woman tomorrow. It was time for her to start facing the realities of the world.
So, instead of lying, Maria told her exactly which ingredients her art depended on.