The Grim Company tgt-1 Page 13

  Sudden screams filled the air from the direction in which the girls had fled. The grunts and roars of savage animals punctuated the obscene sounds of tearing flesh. Yllandris felt sick.

  ‘Looks like the Brethren caught up with your girls, Mehmon. That’s that.’

  Krazka turned and faced the war party. Most of the warriors had watched the confrontation unfold in silence. He raised his bloody sword high in the air and then pointed it at the gates.

  ‘The show’s over. We attack now and kill every last man, woman and child within these stinking walls. No mercy.’

  No mercy. Yllandris took a deep breath, glanced at her sisters, and prepared to bring the King’s justice to Frosthold.

  The sounds of clashing steel rang out ahead of her. Snow continued to fall, obscuring her view of the fighting, but it was clear that Frosthold’s defenders were offering scant resistance. Mehmon had not been lying. Famine had brought the town to its knees.

  A shape loomed out of the darkness up ahead. It was a cart, overflowing with snow from which frozen limbs jutted out at odd angles.

  A corpse wagon, Yllandris realized. They had piled the dead on the back of the cart but lacked the strength or will to carry them away.

  They passed a cooking pit. She glanced down and saw the bones of various animals, most of them oddly sized. It took a moment before Yllandris realized they were the remains of the town’s dogs. She half expected to see a human thighbone or skull among the grisly remains, but it appeared things hadn’t quite become that grim. Not yet.

  To her left, Shranree was breathing heavily. The woman was winded already by the short walk from the town gates. Flanking their circle to either side were the sorceresses from the two Reachings. They were a motley collection of the young, the old and the ancient: soothsayers and healers and wise women from numerous backwater villages and towns hastily assembled for the war party. In Heartstone, sorceresses lived alongside one another and formed a permanent circle out in the Reachings, they were permitted to gather only for specific occasions.

  Sorcery was tolerated and occasionally even honoured, but it was not liked, and it certainly was not trusted.

  A grunt ahead drew her attention. One of the town’s defenders was running towards them. The filthy furs he wore engulfed his wasted body, but there was fury in his eyes and he had an ugly club raised and ready to strike.

  Old Agatha raised her walking staff, mumbled a quick incantation under her breath, and then pointed at the man with a bony finger. Fire leaped out from her extended digit and wreathed him in red flame. He screamed once and then toppled to the snow with a loud hiss. The flames sizzled out almost immediately, leaving a charred mess of bone and roasted flesh.

  One of the sorceresses from the East Reaching retched. Yllandris narrowed her eyes. He had been coming straight at her. Had Old Agatha not acted…

  I would have done what was necessary. The future Queen of the High Fangs will not perish here in this forsaken place.

  ‘Stop!’ Shranree hissed suddenly. The group halted abruptly. ‘Magic is being worked ahead of us,’ she explained. ‘I can sense it. Sorceresses from the Reachings, now is the time.’

  Yllandris felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. The tang of magic was in the air. There was a flickering in the distance, and phosphorescent green globes of energy suddenly appeared in the black sky, moving closer at terrifying speed. She held her breath.

  A translucent blue barrier sprang into existence above the heads of the sorceresses. Yllandris watched the women from the Reachings straining with effort as they maintained the magical shield above them.

  It was not a moment too soon. The globes splattered down and struck the barricade, where they exploded into bubbling ooze that hissed and popped. One of the women from the Lake Reaching slid on a patch of ice, causing the section of barrier above her to wink out of existence. Green slime rained down, covering her head and shoulders, which began to steam. She uttered a high-pitched shriek and clawed madly at the corrosive material, but it had already eaten through her flesh and was now dissolving bone and sinew.

  Yllandris tore her gaze away from the terrible sight. There was a glimmering in the sky up ahead, and then more globes were rising in the air to arc towards them.

  ‘Sisters, lend me your power!’ shrieked Shranree. In response, Yllandris drew upon all her magic, felt it shoot down her veins and make her skin prickle with energy. It begged to be unleashed. Instead she held it there, until she felt Shranree’s gentle probing. With a shudder, she surrendered the magic.

  Shranree’s head tilted back in exultation. She raised her arms high into the air, fire dancing around her hands. Euphoric with the accumulated power of her sisters, she thrust her arms in the direction of the enemy circle ahead.

  Motes of orange streamed skywards and then disappeared. All was silent. Nothing seemed to happen. Yllandris glanced at the round little woman and felt her lip curl.

  You exhausted us for that? A pretty display of dancing lights? You aren’t fit to lead this circle, you useless lump of-

  Glowing spheres of golden fire suddenly appeared in the sky. There were thirteen of them, forming a pattern hundreds of feet above the town. The central sphere floated directly above the spot where the green globes had appeared. It vibrated violently, seemed to shrink down on itself-

  A towering pillar of flame roared down from the sky. They were bathed in a warm glow as superheated flame incinerated everything it touched.

  The other spheres began to vibrate and then they, too, transformed into columns of raging death. The entire northern half of Frosthold had become a furnace. Yllandris’s breath caught at the sight of the devastation before her.

  Shranree clapped her hands together happily. She wore a self-satisfied smile on her glistening face. ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame we had to lose a member of the Lake Reaching circle. Such are the perils of carelessness.’

  Yllandris stared again at the unfortunate sorceress who had slipped on the ice. The body had stopped twitching and now the corpse lay huddled up on the snow like a child. She had barely been more than a girl — a couple of years younger than Yllandris herself. Fortunately, the look of hatred she shot Shranree at that moment went unseen by the senior sister.

  ‘We should begin cleansing the rest of the town-’ Shranree began, but she was interrupted by shouting. Fleeing the carnage to the north, a mob of Frosthold’s defenders appeared, rushing furiously towards them.

  Bestial shapes suddenly emerged from the shadows and several of the shouts turns to shrieks, but even the intervention of the Brethren couldn’t stop some of the mob from reaching the sorceresses.

  Starving men and women fell, torn apart by magic. A warrior managed to bury his axe in the head of one of the East Reaching sorceresses. Two more grabbed Old Agatha and dragged her away from her sisters. They beat her into the snow with their spiked clubs even as magical flame stripped the flesh from their bones.

  Madness, Yllandris thought. They have gone mad. A woman lunged at her, a long gutting knife in her hands. She evoked enough power to thrust her attacker away from her, but her reserves were nearly empty and the effort almost made her scream. Her attacker hit the ground. There was a blur, and suddenly a snow leopard had its jaws locked around the woman’s skull.

  ‘Retreat,’ Shranree cried, and they fell back. The bulk of their own warriors had caught up with them by now. They met the desperate men and women of Frosthold head on, cutting them down without mercy.

  The sorceresses retreated until they were almost at the gates. They were safe now, shielded by lines of their own warriors. With the town’s circle burned to a crisp and their chieftain already captured by the invading force, Frosthold’s defenders were lambs to the slaughter, caught between the fires raging in the north of the town and the warriors under the command of Krazka and Orgrim to the south. Desperate and weakened from lack of food, they fell like wheat before the scythe.

  Yllandris tried to catch her breath. Th
e sheer carnage had shocked her. Breathing deeply, she examined the smattering of structures nearby. The taverns, longhouses and other important buildings were all in the centre of town where the remnants of the fighting were taking place. There was nothing here but modest homes and hovels. She saw a small face peek out from behind the door of one and then dart back inside.

  Shranree hadn’t missed it. ‘The worst is over,’ she said. ‘We are victorious. Now we flush these rats out of their holes and snuff the life from them. Spare no one.’

  The senior sister turned and launched a ball of flame at a nearby cabin, where it exploded in a storm of fire. Screams echoed from within and then slowly died. Shranree clapped her hands together again and waddled off in search of more targets. The other sorceresses followed her for a time before breaking away to hunt their own prey.

  Yllandris looked around. There, over near the wall: a small hut with a faint wisp of smoke curling from its roof. Someone had been foolish enough to forget to extinguish their hearth. Foolish… or so desperate for warmth they kept the fire going even with a murderous army on their doorstep.

  The young sorceress felt increasingly uneasy. Highlanders followed the Code, a set of rules meant to uphold the martial tradition that had made the warriors of the High Fangs feared throughout the known world. That way of life had existed for centuries. And then the Shaman had come, and though he had created the Brethren to defend them and ensured their freedom from the tyranny of other Magelords, he had altered the Code.

  The Shaman had decreed that strength was the only true virtue. By its nature, weakness invited the imposition of will from the strong. The weak deserved neither sympathy nor mercy, as their very existence was akin to that of a deer providing sustenance for the hunter. The weak became strong or they perished. That was the natural order of things.

  Yllandris was strong. She had refused to be weak, had broken the insidious shackles of a troubled childhood to achieve true greatness. Was she not a living demonstration of the Shaman’s ideology? She smiled to herself. One day I will be the Shaman’s ultimate lesson. The last he ever learns. I wonder if he will appreciate the irony.

  Her power burgeoned, the magic sufficiently recovered from her earlier exertions. Blue flame flickered around her hands as she approached the hut. Let Shranree and the others deal death from afar. Yllandris would deliver this particular lesson personally.

  She struck the door with such power that it tore away from its hinges. Then she stepped inside the hovel and raised her glowing fists.

  She lowered them again when she saw the terrified eyes staring up at her. There were three of them: two girls and a boy, none older than eight winters.

  Their mother lay next to the hearth. The woman knew she was there, but she was too weak even to raise her head. The entire family looked near starved. The children shrank away from Yllandris to huddle closer to their dying mother as if she could protect them. The boy was too afraid even to look at her.

  The ultimate lesson…

  Yllandris felt her body begin to tremble. She turned away and stumbled out of the hut. A warrior emerged from the home opposite, his sword bloody and a wide grin on his gap-toothed face.

  ‘More in there?’ he asked jovially. ‘I’ll deal with them.’ He nodded respectfully and made to walk past her into the building.

  Her force-shove sent him flying forty feet through the air to crash into the side of the town wall. Bones cracked. His lifeless body slid to the ground.

  Yllandris pulled her cloak tighter about her and before she knew it she was running, tears streaming down her face and turning to ice on her cheeks. She reached the gates, ducked outside them and then sank down onto the snow, silent sobs racking her body while inside the city blood continued to flow and fire consumed everything it touched.

  Sudden motion caught her attention far above, and she looked up with wet eyes to catch the dark shadow of something huge and inhuman. It circled once, moving at terrifying speed, and then whirled away eastwards.

  Its passing left her shivering uncontrollably, and not from the numbing cold.

  More Haste, Less Speed

  The sun was at its zenith by the time the small band finally approached the Tombstone. The massive column of basalt jutted out from the small outcrop of hills surrounding them, and was visible from a good few leagues away once a gap in the ridge line finally opened up.

  To the west, a day’s ride on horseback would carry them back to Dorminia. The city was too far away to be seen from this distance, but the dark line of the Demonfire Hills was visible even to Brodar Kayne’s ageing eyes. Small villages and towns dotted the ancient road that ran all the way from the city to terminate just below the mine ahead of them. He and Jerek had followed the same road only a month past. The last stretch of their epic journey had turned out to be fairly pleasant, all things considered. For one thing, no one had tried to kill them.

  He couldn’t say the same for the Badlands a couple of days’ ride to the north. A vast, treacherous stretch of country filled with hidden gullies, the Badlands were haunted by gangs of bandits that preyed on the Free Cities of the Unclaimed Lands to the east — and, when they could get away with it, those settlements in the small hinterland that swore allegiance to the Grey City. The bandit tribes that pursued a life of lawlessness in the Badlands had to choose their targets carefully if they wished to avoid deadly retribution.

  ‘Carefully’ had not included a pair of ragged Highlanders passing through, at least not at first. Kayne and Jerek had left a trail of bodies in their wake as they fought their way south through the Badlands to the Trine. That particular part of their trek had taken many weeks.

  North beyond the Badlands, many days’ travel further still, and through places he would as soon forget, the land began to rise. The temperature dropped, becoming cold and then bitter, and slowly the High Fangs emerged, marking the place where the very world ended. It was an enormous country of sheer ridges and plunging valleys, fast-flowing streams cold enough to freeze a man to his bones and forests of snow-capped pines so tall they towered over anything built by the hands of men. It seemed like another lifetime away.

  Or at least it had, until Borun appeared like a ghost from his past.

  What were they doing this far south?

  He supposed he ought to have asked before the encounter had taken its inevitable turn for the worse. The fact was, a meeting between him and Borun was only ever going to end one way.

  Jerek strode beside him in silence. The Wolf looked almost content, which wasn’t something you could say about him often. Nearby, Sasha struggled along with Vicard, who had been whining ever since Kayne had taken his pouch away from him. Isaac ambled along at the rear of the band, whistling a jaunty tune. He’s an odd one and no mistake, the old barbarian thought. There was something troubling about the man, but nothing he could quite put his finger on.

  Sasha stopped suddenly, flicking sweat-matted hair away from her face. ‘The Rift is just ahead,’ she said.

  From his current vantage point, Kayne could just about see the top of a wooden tower protruding from the yawning pit that opened before the Tombstone. Dark smoke and noxious fumes rose above the pit, staining the sky above a murky grey. A huge pile of earthen waste dominated the eastern side of the chasm.

  ‘According to the brief Garrett provided, almost a hundred men work the Rift,’ said Sasha. ‘The Augmentors could return at any time, so we’ll need to make this quick.’

  ‘What about the Watch?’ asked Vicard. ‘There’s sure to be a few soldiers around.’

  Sasha’s eyes narrowed as she searched for any sign of movement around the edge of the chasm. ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Brodar Kayne flexed his neck. ‘I reckon the Wolf and me can handle a few of those red cloaks, if it comes to it,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to stay out of the way if there’s any trouble, lass,’ he added. ‘Keep an eye on that one.’ He nodded at Vicard, who shot him a dirty look. Sasha didn’t look too pleased either.

/>   Isaac raised a hand to get their attention. ‘I’ll fight. You might need the help.’

  ‘Where’d you learn to handle a blade?’ Kayne asked. ‘I thought you might struggle to tell one end of a sword from the other, but you held your own back there and no mistake.’

  The manservant shrugged. ‘I like to read. Swordplay isn’t so different to any other craft. You just need to pay attention to the instructions.’

  Something about Isaac’s words struck him as being off, but once again Kayne struggled to pinpoint exactly what it was. ‘You’re a fast learner, I’ll give you that,’ he managed. ‘How did you end up at the depository anyway? The Halfmage don’t seem like the most grateful employer, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  A bland smile appeared on the manservant’s face. ‘He’s not as grouchy as he appears. Sometimes his worries just get on top of him, you see. Especially his- Oh. Oh, no…’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Kayne asked in sudden alarm. Isaac wore a look of such concern the old Highlander was certain he had just spied an army of Augmentors marching down the road towards them.

  ‘I forgot to leave his ointment behind,’ Isaac groaned. ‘He’s going to be furious! I knew I’d overlooked something.’

  ‘Ointment?’ Kayne asked, puzzled.

  Sasha coughed unconvincingly. Everyone turned to look at her. ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ she said, ‘but we have important business ahead of us. Let’s get that over with and then we can all return to Dorminia and whatever urgent matters await us there. The Halfmage can look after his own arse until then.’ Without another word she set off towards the Rift, dragging Vicard along behind her.

  Jerek rubbed at his beard thoughtfully. ‘Bitch has a point,’ he said, and followed after her.

  Kayne glanced at Isaac, who still looked crestfallen at having committed such a heinous error. With a sigh, the ageing barbarian set off after the rest of the group.

  The Rift was much larger up close than it looked from a distance. The chasm spanned a good eighty feet across and ten times that in length, a vicious scar in the earth belching foul gases that made the eyes sting. Worse than the gases, though, was the stench. The odour was unmistakably that of death, as if something huge rotted at the bottom of that stygian pit. Brodar Kayne squinted down into the depths of the breach but saw nothing but darkness at the bottom. Just as well, he thought.