01 - Honour of the Grave (5 page)

“Surely even you do not take the side of the orcs,” Franziskus said. He was
not as adept as Angelika at keeping his footing on their precarious lookout
spot. He hugged himself tightly to a tree as the soles of his boots slipped
against a mossy plane of exposed rock. His cheeks had drained of their usual
apple-skin colour; he might, it seemed, be suffering from a touch of vertigo.

“I’ll admit I speak in the short term. I wouldn’t like it if the orcs won the
war, and smashed civilisation altogether. Who would I sell my goods to then?
Individual battles, though, are a different thing. After the Empire wins, they
strip a battlefield clean. Why, by the time those sergeants leave, I’ll be lucky
to find a glass eye or a brass nose-hair trimmer. They won’t search the orc
corpses, but what do they have on them, anyway? Worthless blades, bone
necklaces, and little leather bags full of owl pellets! Now, if it had been the
other way around, the orcs would only take the weapons and armour pieces,
leaving me with plenty of purses, jewels, and lengths of gold chain to sort
through at my leisure.”

“Sort through with bloodied hands.”

“No one asked you to come along.”

Franziskus gave her another characteristic frown. He returned his gaze to the
battlefield, mused a while, then started up again: “Luckily for you and for
everyone, a string of orc victories is now quite unlikely. The old black and
yellow are on the march again. Averland will push the accursed greenskins deep
down into the pass.”

“So an optimist would say. Me, I’ll wager that there will be plenty of
bloodshed to go around. You’ve heard the same stories I have. The orcs mass in
the south, their armies daily swelling.” Spotting a faint path that wound
through a thicket of boulders, she let go of the tree, and dropped down. Without
looking back to Franziskus, she embarked on the treacherous path, holding her
arms out like wings for balance, as she carefully put one foot in front of the
other. She heard scraping on the rocks behind her: the sound of Franziskus
keeping up.

“These men might face setbacks,” he said, “but all we’ve seen for weeks are
Averlandish victories. Can’t you see what must have happened?” His ankle trapped
between rocks, Franziskus pitched abruptly forward, and made a quick though
graceless adjustment. It left him unsteady but upright.

“No, but I sense you’ll correct my ignorance.”

“The count must be well again.”

“The count?”

“Leitdorf, the Elector of Averland. He must have recovered from his latest
bout of melancholy. Surely you know of him?”

“Mad Marius, you mean.”

A soldier turned toward them and Angelika froze. Franziskus did the same. The
soldier was about two hundred yards off, and seemed to see little threat in
them. He gave them an indifferent up-and-down, then returned to his task:
refitting a wheel to a cart’s axle. Angelika resumed her journey through the
boulders.

“So it’s Marius I have to blame for my slim pickings these past few weeks?”
she said.

“It can only be so. Everyone knows that strange moods rule Marius Leitdorf,
as he rules Averland. At times he burns across the field of battle on his mighty
charger, sword swinging right and left to cleave his foes. Yet when he is
gripped by some unquenchable gloom, he retreats to his flame-blackened castle,
and locks himself inside his moldering library to brood. When last I was in
Averland, wagging tongues had it that he’d cloistered himself again, that his
functionaries had fallen back into corruption, and his soldiers, into laxity and
drunkenness. But look upon those heaps of stinking, slaughtered orcs and the
tiny tumbrel of slain Averlanders. That’s not the work of a demoralised force!
Only one explanation is possible: Leitdorf rides again!”

They came out of the rocks and onto a grassy incline. Gravity tugged them,
and it was hard not to go rushing down the slope to the flatland below.

“This is your chance to join them, then,” Angelika said, “and fight at your
beloved Leitdorf’s side.”

Franziskus turned his head away from her. “I am from Stirland, not Averland.
And I reek of failure. I am not worthy to fight under a hero as great as he.”

“Pah! Your hero is a butcher. You’re too far back to see him dearly.”

“Someday,” Franziskus said, “you’ll understand.”

“I understand only too well as it is.”

They reached the battlefield’s edge, where some crows tugged peevishly at the
tough green flesh of a gaunt, beheaded orc. About eighty yards off, their bolder
compatriots flapped around the cart loaded with human casualties. Hornet-clad
soldiers kept them at bay with thrusts of their polearms. A sergeant spotted
Angelika and Franziskus and waddled in their direction, waving his arms. The
wind blew his way, so it took a while before Angelika could make out what he was
saying.

“Away, away!” he shouted, in a town crier’s cadence. “We have no need for
doxies here! Nor their panderers!”

Angelika felt her fingers wrap tight around her knife’s hilt. She hated to be
mistaken for a camp follower. The sergeant kept on toward them. She braced
herself. Franziskus raised a hand lightly to her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
“No one calls me a whore,” she hissed.

Franziskus stepped around her. He returned the sergeant’s wave. The man’s
square head and jowly jaw was characteristic of the southlands.

“You mistake our intentions, sir,” Franziskus said. “We are merely travellers,
passing through. We’ll not disturb you, or your men.”

“Halt right there,” the sergeant said, reaching for the sabre that hung from
his belt. Franziskus stopped, and the Averlander left his weapon in its
scabbard. “You there. Why do you wear the coat of a Stirlandish officer? Did you
bring an honest man to grief?”

“No sir, I did not.”

Angelika noticed a tremble in Franziskus’ chin. Despite herself, she felt
embarrassed for him, and hoped that the sergeant wouldn’t remark on it. She
reminded herself that Franziskus’ misfortune was none of her business, and that
she should make an honest run for it if the Averlander decided to chop at him
with his sabre.

“Did you perhaps lift that coat from a fallen officer? Eh, border rat? I’m
told an expeditionary force from Stirland came to grief around here—and not
too long ago, either.”

Franziskus tensed his jaw to end the quivering. Now his eyes began to betray
him, by blinking rapidly.

“I bought it from a peddler,” Franziskus said. “Not knowing what its braids
and epaulets signified. I merely thought it would be a warm coat.”

The sergeant pulled his sabre slowly from its sheath. “It will not warm your
worthless hide, border rat. Drop that coat right here. Then be on your way.”

The Averlander’s attention was fully on Franziskus, so Angelika could sidle
over. Her blade was out, resting against her palm and wrist, shielded from the
sergeant’s view. She checked the other soldiers, marked out their positions, and
estimated distances and running times. She calculated the arc of a throw that
would send the point of her dagger into the side of the sergeant’s neck. She
edged into the best position to make the throw.

Franziskus shrugged his shoulders, letting the coat drop from them. “You are
right, sir,” he said. “I haven’t the honour to wear this coat.”

If Angelika were in his shoes, she thought, she would throw the coat over the
sergeant’s head. Then she would stab him hard, three or four times, before
getting out of there. But Franziskus just took the garment and folded it over an
extended arm for the obnoxious man to take. The sergeant slid his weapon back
into the scabbard and regarded Franziskus. He didn’t touch the coat draped over
the young man’s outstretched arm.

“You wouldn’t be a deserter, now, would you?”

“No,” Franziskus said.

“Because even if he’s been marked down as dead, a man still has a duty to
return to his unit.”

“I wouldn’t know that, sir. Like you say, I’m just a border rat.”

As they walked toward the Castello del Dimenticato, it seemed to Angelika
that Franziskus was shivering more than his sudden lack of a coat warranted.
Though the wind was a little sharp, it was a sunny spring day, and she’d been perfectly comfortable
without an outer garment of any kind. A piercing comment came to her tongue, but
she let it sit there, rather than give voice to it.

They’d quartered themselves at the Castello for nearly a month now, and had
come to know it well. It was a walled town in the middle of nowhere, populated
by people for whom anything was a step up. It was located just inside the gullet
of the Blackfire Pass, south of Averland.

Their destination sat at a remove from the pass proper. It was hidden in a
nearby basin where a quartet of lesser mountains met. Angelika and Franziskus
dawdled along a rocky trail that connected pass to basin, taking care to avoid
the many fist-sized stones strewn across it. An ancient cut in the rock, about
twenty feet wide and at least forty high, loomed over them, sheltering the
trail. Eroded crisscrosses from an ancient excavation marked its rocky surface.
Though Angelika was no expert in such matters, she knew it had to have been made
by dwarfs. Perhaps there had been diamonds or gold in the rocks, thousands of
years ago, giving the dwarfs good reason for their excavations. They were gone
now, at any rate, as were any traces of riches in the nearby hills. The founders
of the Castello, however, had reason to appreciate the old handiwork. The cut
provided the town with an easy approach to the pass, hidden from the view of any
orc armies that might happen to rampage their way up to the Imperial border,
which lay less than a week’s ride north. Several residents of the Castello—including the cackling old man who’d rented them their small hovel—had assured
Angelika that orcs had never spotted the Castello, and would continue to miss it
in the future. It seemed a perfect perch from which to launch her looting
sorties. She regretted not settling in it sooner.

The two wanderers reached the point where the rocky course opened into the
muddy basin. The town sat flush against a cliff face on the opposite side of the
basin. To reach its gates, they still had to cross half a mile of wet earth,
denuded except for weeds and hardy grasses.

The Castello’s walls were twelve feet high and made of salvaged wood,
reinforced on the inside with bands of rusted steel—also salvaged. They were
grey from weathering and their planks were uneven, so that the tops of the wall reminded Angelika of
an orc’s jagged tusks and teeth. Large boulders had been arranged on the field
to direct enemies toward the front gate. Towers stood on either side of it, so
that defenders could fire bolts from crossbows and ballistae on any orcs, skaven
or bandits who might try to overrun it. As far as Angelika could gather, the
Castello had never been seriously threatened. It looked stronger than it really
was. If she were given the task of breaking it, she would do it with fire.

The founder was a former mercenary named Davio Maurizzi; she’d seen him from
a distance a couple of times. Some called him a “border prince”, which was a
tide anyone who lived in these lawless lands could claim for himself, especially
if he occupied a defensible position and had a few men willing to pick up swords
on his behalf. Maurizzi was Tilean, which explained his town’s strange foreign
name. Apparently it meant Fortress of the Lost, or some such thing.

Arriving at the gates, they shouted up to the guardsman. He was called
Halfhead, because he had a scar that ran all the way from his crown to his jaw;
it was a souvenir of when he’d been clouted full in the face by an orcish
war-axe. He should have lost half his head, but didn’t. The gate was open but it
was the custom to shout up and pay respects anyhow. Halfhead smiled down at her,
idiotically.

As they passed through, competing smells from four or five stalls reached
them. The town’s vendors all clustered by the gates, so no one entering or
leaving could avoid them. Food sizzled on iron plates, heated by coals, or
boiled in pots suspended over logs whitened by low flame. There were soups and
bratwursts and schnitzels and noodles (both northern and Tilean-style) and
charred medallions of meat that were supposed to be beef. Angelika’s stomach
churned; she’d had a bad sausage here, not long after they first arrived. Even
though she knew that the fare in the tavern was not cooked under cleaner
circumstances, her gut wouldn’t permit her to sample any of these wares. Anyway,
her appetite hadn’t yet recovered from the sight of the dead and lime-caked
orcs. A draught of liquor was what she needed now. She wended her way through
the stalls, reaching the staggering laneway that would take them to the town’s
least despicable tavern.

Franziskus, who had paused to contemplate a pan-sized, crispy schnitzel,
broke away to catch up with her. He did not have to ask where they were going.

The Dolorosa La Bara shuddered at the end of a laneway, its dirt-grey timbers
leaning slightly to the west. It was a one-storey structure large enough to
accommodate a hundred drinkers, provided that they were willing to cluster a
little. A faded sign hung above its creaking double doors; on it was a painted
image of a coffin, its lid closed over the vociferously protesting form of a
mercenary, clad like a jester. His wailing head, clawed fingers, and shoeless
feet protruded from the casket, which was pierced through by a mammoth spike.
Droplets of red blood shot from the point of impact—the artist had obviously
relished this gruesome detail. Later hands had touched up his work, so that the
blood stayed fresh, even though the rest of the cartoon had faded. Angelika had
heard various translations of its Tilean name, ranging from the Not Quite Dead
Tavern to Painful the Coffin. None of them seemed exactly right to her, and the
Tileans in town never deigned to provide an accurate rendition, so she stuck
with the foreign name.