01 - Honour of the Grave (25 page)

“You’ve recovered your certitude, I see.”

“The Kopfs will have made their point and gone home. They won’t waste
resources with an orc army on the way. I’ll drop you there and continue on.”

“To where?”

“I don’t yet know, but there’s got to be some way to pick up the trail
again.”

“Lukas’ trail?”

“Who did you think I meant?”

“How will we find him now? We’ve been here for days. Toby’s had time to well
and truly hide him.”

“If you want to help me, stop reminding me of things I already know.”

“And if you do find him—you’re no match for Goatfield now. He’ll turn you
to pulp.”

“There will be no more frontal assaults, believe me.”

“But—you said it was folly. You said you’d learned your lesson.”

“It is, and I have. But, still, I can’t have a little worm like him staining
my conscience for the rest of my stinking days. I’ll find him, turn him loose,
and that will be the end of it, for once and all.”

“You can’t.”

“I’ve got to.”

The next day, they sorted through the ash for planks that had not burned too
badly, and they leaned them up against the pit wall, to make a ramp. Angelika
walked halfway up before growing light-headed. She lay flat against the boards
and slid down.

The day after, they were strong enough to get out of the pit. But then they
collapsed on the edge, panting and gasping. They lay there for a while, then
stood up, and tottered out of the clearing and into the woods. Franziskus had to
stop and sit on a rock. Wolves howled. They went back into the pit again to
sleep away the night.

The day after that, they got out, and kept going.

Crow calls echoed through the pass.

“Don’t say it,” Angelika told him.

“I had no intention of saying it,” said Franziskus.

They cleared the sides of the now-abandoned rock cut leading to the Castello,
and stepped into the basin, where the besiegers had been. Curls of fog hugged
close to the muddy basin floor; it lay trampled and scored with the crisscrossed
paths of a hundred carts. There were no more Averlandish soldiers, or their
auxiliaries. Absent, too, were the vendors, looters, spectators, whores and
flagellants. Trash heaps smouldered, the smoke conjoining with the fog. Wild
dogs, of mottled brown, grey, and black, fought over sheep bones and the
entrails of chickens. The wheel of an upturned, broken cart squeaked on its
axle; it was turning slowly, lazily propelled by a hot breeze from the south. An
old, plump woman, her hair a white and unkempt mop, sat in the cart’s meagre
shade. She wore a dirty lace shift that had fallen down around her waist, and
was banging a chunk of wood against the side of her head as she muttered and
sang. One of the smaller wild dogs, which had been losing his battles anyway, trotted over to her, and regarded her quizzically. She
snarled and it yelped away.

Up in the rocks bordering the basin, lonely figures prowled furtively.
Whether they were refugees staring down at the ruins of their homes, or timid
looters waiting for more smoke to clear, Angelika could not say. Whenever she
squinted to make them out, they hid behind trees or dropped low into the grass.

They looked to the Castello. It looked like the bottom of the pit they’d just
crawled from. Its walls were down; collapsed into a jumble of scorched timber
and severed planks. One of the wooden towers that once flanked the gate was now
a broken skeleton of bare and blackened supports. The other had disappeared
entirely. Inside the walls, the jumble of hovels and shacks Franziskus and
Angelika had so often threaded through was now only half recognisable. Many of
the small flimsy structures seemed to be missing altogether; others stood
half-smashed—missing walls or roofs. The occasional cottage of stone or brick
stood as before, but with its outer surfaces blackened, or its doors and
shutters torn away.

“Where did all the people go?” Franziskus asked.

Angelika shrugged. “North would be the only sensible direction. I wonder if
the Averlanders planned on sending several thousand refugees to swell through
their own border.”

The two of them made their way swiftly across the field, giving a wide berth
to the dogs and madwoman alike. When she reached a point two-thirds of the way
across, Angelika halted. She strode to a low mound of earth that was dry and
recently turned. Its shape was rectangular; it was about eighty feet long and
forty feet wide. Lime dust had been sprinkled on top.

“Graves,” Franziskus said. Angelika nodded. Then the young Stirlander saw a
small hand, twisted and broken, in the middle of the mound; it had been exposed
by the wind. The hand was a woman’s, entwined by a bracelet of copper discs.

Angelika and Franziskus looked at one another, sharing a silent
understanding: this was a battlefield she had no interest in plundering, and
there would be no need for the usual debate on the ethics of scavengery.

“How many?” he asked.

“Many,” she said.

They kept on, toward the broken town.

“It is madness,” Franziskus said. “How can man slay man, when inhuman enemies
wait to slaughter us all?”

“Absolutely—who needs orcs, when we have each other?”

They reached the boulder-lined road that led up to the front gate. It was
littered with cannon balls, the broken hafts from various pole weapons, and
countless arrows, most with burned tips. Angelika bent to pick one up, and show
it to Franziskus.

“They used archers to set the walls alight.”

She looked at the high rock wall that served as the fortress’ backdrop. Soot
coated it. “And there’s no back way out.” The cliff was supposed to provide
protection, but it had trapped the defenders inside. They approached the
collapsed, blackened walls, skirting a corpse clad only in a leather jerkin.
Dogs had already been at it: the leg bones were exposed. The travellers’
still-healing muscles rebelled as they clambered over fallen planks and into the
ruined town. They saw that it was true: many cottages and hovels past the
Castello walls had indeed been flattened by cannon fire.

“What was the point?” Franziskus asked, looking at a scatter of broken timber
that used to be a cramped and tiny hovel. Though he’d never spoken to the people
who lived in it, he remembered them as a large clan beset by unruly, howling
children.

Angelika kicked idly at a board, flipping it over so that its many nails
pointed dirtward. She shrugged. “Practice for the artillery? The joy of finding
an ideal target for cannon fire? Sheer malice?”

“The latter, I’d say.”

She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out: “Anyone here? Anyone
here?”

A crow alighted atop a mud-daub wall, where a thatched roof had been burned
away. It squawked a congenial hello at them and commenced to calmly groom its
wing-feathers.

They walked to their cottage, which was far from the walls, and found it
still standing, but stripped of rugs and furnishings. They’d lost nothing they’d
miss; its worn floor coverings, uncomfortable bedding and lopsided chairs had come with the place
when they’d rented it.

They made their way to the tavern. They found its sign, the one with the
wretch screaming in his coffin, broken in two and strapped to a dead man’s back.

“He must have thought it a valuable souvenir,” Franziskus mused.

They turned the man over; they recognised him as a regular occupant of
Giacomo’s benches but did not recall his name. Franziskus couldn’t find any
wounds on him.

“It was apoplexy, not a weapon, that killed this one,” Angelika said.
“Probably one of the Sabres came at him and he died on the spot, of fear. You
can tell by the way he’s all purple and splotchy.”

“As usual, you brim with charming information.”

To their surprise, Giacomo’s bar was largely unscathed, save for its missing
sign and a pile of broken glass beside its front steps. “Anyone in there?”
Angelika called. She moved up onto the steps, kicking aside the severed neck of
a brandy bottle. It landed in the heap of glass and shattered.

She stepped inside the tavern, Franziskus behind her. Someone had chopped
huge wedges from the top of the bar with an axe or hatchet. The tables were
overturned; the benches, missing. The shelves, naturally, had been stripped
entirely; the victorious soldiers would have greedily drained every drop of
alcohol they could find.

Angelika walked behind the bar. Flies buzzed around a bucket. She peered into
it. Giacomo’s head lay inside it, his face upturned and imploring. She frowned
and held up a palm, warning Franziskus to stay away, but he came to take a look
regardless. It made him blanch, but he succeeded in suppressing the urge to rush
outside and vomit.

“We should give him a proper burial, at least,” he said, when he was sure of
himself.

“I’m not sure it counts as proper, with only this much of him to put below
ground,” she said. “But he kept a decent brandy, and we should show respects to
someone, I suppose.”

They investigated Giacomo’s closet, where they knew he kept a spade, but it
had been ransacked. They used the end of a board to dig a suitable divot in the
resistant, sandy earth behind his place. Blocking her nose and breathing through her mouth, Angelika
went inside to claim the bucket. Returning with it, she settled it gently in the
hole. She shooed the flies away and laid a bar rag over the top of the head.
Though its use as a burial shroud could be seen as a desecration, she felt
reasonably sure that Giacomo’s soul would understand the gesture’s great
sincerity.

Franziskus mumbled the words of Shallya’s blessing, which he’d been taught by
his nursemaid, and used the board to paddle the dirt back around the bucket.

They headed in silence to the prince’s palazzo. Even from a distance, it was
plain to see that it had been gutted. Its roof was gone, along with much of its
front wall. The metal fence around the grounds had been uprooted—concrete
moorings and all—and carted off, leaving behind a trench of moist earth.
Angelika and Franziskus were about to pass it by when they saw a familiar figure
sprawled face-down in this new ditch. His right boot rested about fifteen feet
away from him, his lower leg still inside it. In a mocking gesture, someone had
repositioned the boot, so that the stump pointed up.

“Halfhead!” Angelika cried. She ran to him. When he stirred, she jolted.

“Accursed bastard dogs,” the gateman growled.

“We were about to pass you by. You’re lucky the back of your head is
distinctive.”

“Angelika?”

“And Franziskus is here, too. Do you want to roll over?”

“They’re the unholy farts of daemons, they are. My right leg. I can’t feel it.
How bad does it look?”

“I’m going to help you roll over.” She frowned meaningfully at Franziskus. It
took him a moment to figure out exactly what she wanted from him. Then he hopped
to it. He pinched the boot cuff gingerly and picked up the severed portion of
Halfhead’s leg. Then he set it respectfully behind a bush, where its owner
couldn’t see it. The absurd thought popped into his head that the poor fellow
might now have to rename himself Halfleg.

Angelika took Halfhead by the shoulder and turned him over in the ditch. His
face was pale. The tip of his tongue eked its tentative way out onto dry,
chapped lips. “Water?” he asked.

Angelika reached into her pack and withdrew her waterskin. She unscrewed its
pewter cap and poured some water onto the tail of her tunic, before dabbing it
onto his lips. Only when they were well moistened did she pour any liquid into
the wounded man’s mouth. She dribbled it in slowly.

Halfhead tried to lift his head for a look at his leg. Angelika leaned in,
blocking his view. He laid his head back down. “I said, how bad is it?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m surprised you haven’t bled to death.”

“My family, none of us is big bleeders. It’s an ancestral trait. We seal
right back up.”

“How long has it been?”

Franziskus spotted a pile of old sacks; presumably left behind by a
disappointed looter. He bundled them up and placed them under the gatekeeper’s
head.

“They attacked at dawn. Yesterday,” Halfhead said. “I think. I ain’t been
conscious the whole time, I don’t believe.”

“We have to get you somewhere out of the elements.”

“I took a smash on the head when the walls came down. Woke up later, with the
looting in full swing. They took everything, the ungodly swine. Stupid me, I
charged out of my hidey-hole, sword a-swinging, when I saw them working to bring
down the fence. Sigmar’s privates, what possessed me?”

“Men act rashly at times like this,” Angelika said. These words were not
especially consoling, she knew, but they were the best that came to mind.

“I suppose I was thinking I’d failed to protect the main walls, and I’d be
damned if they took Davio’s fence, too. So I came at them and of course it was a
dozen to one and they cut me down. I think I got a couple of them, though. Made
them pay for the stinking fence. They’ll melt it down for scrap, I know they
will. Accursed godforsaken fence.” He peeked around Angelika, at his leg.

“What of Davio? Did they get him, too?”

“I didn’t see it happen, but you can bet crowns to crayfish he got himself
away. If there ever was a man who knew how to regroup, it’s old Davio. I guess I
don’t have to call him prince no more, if the thing he was prince of is now a
pile of smoking rubble. My leg’s clean off, ain’t it?”

“From the knee down.”

“Good, because in that case I can get myself better and stick a peg on it.
And then I’ll find all of them swine who was tearing down that fence, and if it
takes me till the last of my days, I’ll gut them systematically. I memorised all
their faces, and if I get them all, I can be sure I killed the one who chopped
my leg.”