01 - Honour of the Grave (12 page)

“Only in my shoulders, elbows, knees, chin, calves, my scalp, and my innards,
and the part of my skull that joins my nose to my forehead. Let’s go.”

“I got a hit a few times, too.”

She lost her footing and slid, making a fresh mark on the hillside, nearly a
yard long. “You’re not saying that all it takes to break you is an elf and a
couple of halflings?”

“They have two months’ start on us, we can afford to stop and rest for a few
hours.”

“The question is, how much of a head start do we have on Benno and Gelfrat?”

“A salient point,” said Franziskus, redoubling his efforts. By scrabbling
quicker, he found it easier to keep from slipping. Hands perched on hips,
Angelika waited for him on a ledge, above. Water dropped down, hitting the rocky
shelf she was standing on. It splattered into a shallow depression, where it
collected then overflowed into the brook. The water hammered down past a chunk
of sheer rock more than twice Angelika’s height. It reminded her a little of a
face, with two deep-set eyes and a leering mouth. She tested it for handholds,
but it was wet, and slippery with moss. They would have to skirt the streambed,
and head off to the north slightly, where the going was less steep. Franziskus
reached her side. She showed him where they’d have to go: a tangle of thorny
briars, stunted spruce, and convoluting pines.

Franziskus frowned at the forbidding vegetation. “Do you truly think this is
the path they’d choose? Wouldn’t they look for something easier?”

“They might climb down again, and stick to the lower woods,” she mused. “But
look.” She pointed to a strip of yellow fabric that was tied to a bare and
crooked pine branch, about twenty yards over and thirty yards up. “Someone
passed this way.”

She jumped down from the wet rock, into a mess of dead, dry weeds. They
climbed through the brambles, stopping periodically to untangle their clothing
from barbs and prickles. After nearly an hour of heavy exertion, the terrain
flattened out again. On this plateau, the trees were straighter, the bright new growths at the end of each branch longer and healthier. Over
on the rocks was another pool; alert grasses rose tall around it, through gaps
between sheets of stone. Franziskus patted the ground to see how dry it was,
then stretched out on it, with his head to one side and his mouth panting open.
Angelika sat with a piece of fallen timber as her backrest.

They heard a snuffling sound. Angelika straightened up. “What was that?”

“I didn’t…”

They listened—nothing.

Angelika relaxed. “An animal, I suppose.”

A branch snapped. She jumped up. So did Franziskus. They put their backs
together defensively. He drew Elennath’s sword; she, her knife.

They held their breath and listened to the distant chirping of birds, and the
waterfall booming into the pool below.

“Why do my guts suddenly gyrate?” asked Franziskus.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She did not admit that she shared the feeling.

Her ears popped. Her tongue tasted metallic.

“Something is wrong,” Franziskus said.

“Sssh.” The backs of her hands felt hot suddenly; they had turned red and
blotchy. She checked Franziskus’ hands; they were the same. “Franziskus, in
your travels, have you ever encountered Chaos?”

“No,” he said. Not long ago, they’d run into an undead thing, but he didn’t
think undead counted. Chaos was a force people talked about, at night, when it
was time to tell scary stories. It was not a thing a good person could speak of,
with any certain knowledge. It was especially not a thing you were supposed to
meet up with, even when you were deep in a mountain wood. “It might only be
sorcery,” he said.

“Oh, only sorcery! That’s all right, then!” Angelika’s knife shook nervously.
She tightened her muscles and shouted into the bush. “If you’re going to come,
come!”

She heard a dry, rattling laugh. It seemed to be coming from just over her
shoulder. “Do you see anything, Franziskus?”

“No.” A gust of wind came and tossed grit in their faces, it seemed to be
blowing in all directions at once.

“I spit on the gods and minions of Chaos!” called Angelika. “A pack of
pustulated cowards, that’s what you are! I dare you to stand and face us!”

An object rolled from the trees. Thinking it might be a bomb, they ran from
it, and hid between some trees. The object lost its momentum and bounced to a
stop about fifteen feet from where they’d been. It was not a bomb.

“It’s someone’s head,” Franziskus said.

Though it was hard to tell without looking closely, Angelika did have
experience with dead bodies, and parts of them, in various stages of decay. This
one seemed human, and it had been dead for three weeks, give or take. She was in
no hurry to confirm her suppositions by poking it from up close.

“We must flee,” Franziskus whispered.

Something made a snorting noise. They turned to see a grey shape dashing
their way. It stood upright, like a man, and had a man’s torso and arms. But its
head was like a mountain ram’s, with two hooked horns rising from the middle of
it. From each horn, on threads of fibrous pink flesh, hung unblinking eyeballs.
They bobbled erratically as the creature lurched in to swipe at Franziskus’
head with a crude wooden club in its human-like fist. Franziskus ducked. The
club smashed bark and green wood from the pine behind him. Franziskus dodged. It
opened its mouth, and foggy breath rolled over them. It stank, making their eyes
water.

“Beastman!” Angelika shouted, identifying her enemy. The beastmen were the
most common, and lowliest, of all the Chaos gods’ servitors. They walked like
men, but wore the faces and hides of animals. They had other powers, besides.
That was all she knew of the things.

The beastman swung the club downwards at Angelika. She capered out of the
way, but the weapon managed to graze her ankle, sending pain shooting through
her foot and up into the bones of her leg.

It feinted at her. Finally it occurred to Angelika to use the weapon in her
hand. Franziskus hadn’t tried a strike with his sword, either.

“Die!” Angelika screamed, and pitched forward, both hands wrapped around her
knife-hilt. The creature swiped at her but missed. She lost her balance, nearly
colliding with a tree.

Franziskus lunged tentatively, but it was as if he had to struggle against
the wind to get at the creature. It was his fear of Chaos that was holding him
back, he concluded. He clenched his teeth, shook himself, and pointed his
sword-tip at the creature. Then he jerked forward, but involuntarily caught
himself short. The beastman turned and bared its goaty teeth at him. Franziskus
felt his mouth go dry.

Angelika ran shrieking at it, dagger held double-handed, and this time she
hit it, catching it just below its sternum. She felt her dagger bite through a
tough wall of hair and muscle, then plunge more readily into innards and
viscera. She tore all the way down to the beastman’s gut, then withdrew her
knife. It was thickly coated in dripping blood, as were her hands and arms,
right up to the elbows.

The beastman, gutted, wobbled before them. Crimson chunks of flesh fell out
of it, like sailors leaping from a sinking ship.

“You’re not so tough, are you?” said Angelika.

Like tentacles, severed intestines shot from the creature’s gaping body, and
wrapped themselves around her. Two of them encircled her throat, trying to
strangle her. They seized both her wrists, and slurped bloodily around her
waist. Franziskus recoiled, and shielded his face with his arms. Angelika
summoned the last of her breath to blurt out, “Snap out of it! Hit it!” Then she
succumbed to blackness.

The monster hopped up and down ecstatically as it squeezed the life from
Angelika. Franziskus saw Angelika’s face turning blue. He leapt up and, with the
tip of his sword, speared her attacker through its right eye. Jelly popped from
the eye and oozed onto the blade. The beastman turned to see Franziskus
shuffling to keep his hands on the hilt of the rune-incised sword he’d liberated
from Elennath. The creature hissed at the blade, and backed away from it.

Franziskus took a moment to theorise that the runes spelled some kind of
elven charm inimical to Chaos. Then he shouted, shouldering all his weight into
the sword hilt. He forced the blade in. He felt resistance when the tip reached the bone at the back of the beastman’s skull, but a moment later it
fell forward, as it punched through. The sword now skewered the monster’s head
entirely. A gobbet of still-pulsing brain matter dangled briefly from the tip,
before dropping to the forest floor. The intestines constricting Angelika lost
their vigour. They slid limply off her, leaving gelatinous trails of gore on her
skin and clothing. Franziskus pulled the sword out. The beastman staggered, its
hoofed feet stamping in a jagged half-circle. It turned its antlers to fix
Franziskus in the gaze of their eyeballs.

It roared and lurched at him, weakly waggling its deflated viscera.
Franziskus slashed at its neck. It spun around, spraying blood on the trees.

Angelika coughed and wiped her hands on the tails of her tunic. She launched
herself upwards and stumbled behind the creature, gasping and wracked with pain.
She felt herself blacking out again, then realised that she was still fighting
the thing; it was as if she was propelled by instinct alone. It thrashed; she
held onto it. She grabbed one of its horns with both hands and let her legs fly
free, so that she became a dead weight. She heard a thud and was dimly aware
that she’d hit the forest floor. Her eyes blinked. She’d pulled it down with
her. She willed her reluctant hand to seize her boot-knife. Then she fell
forward, and stabbed her weapon deep into the Chaos thing’s neck. Its body went
slack; she stepped aside to let it fall prone. It had stopped moving, but she
hacked its head off anyway, just to be safe, then pitched it far from the body.

She floundered off, away from Franziskus, to double over and retch. But even
though she felt sick, nothing would come up. Finally, leaning against one
another, they took fear-drunk steps to the stream, which proved easy to reach
from this elevation. They splashed chill water on their faces and sat on the
cold damp rock.

Franziskus was the first to find words. “We’ve got to leave here, at once.”

“We didn’t go through
that,
just to turn tail and slink off.”

“If Chaos is here, it is certain that Lukas has long since been devoured. We
must also assume that there are more here, and that they’ll soon be upon us, to
exact revenge for the one we’ve slain. We must go, at speed!”

“We need to check if the head it tossed at us matches what we know of
Lukas. If so, we’ll go.”

“No, we must flee, regardless. These are not Averlandish soldiers, or
halfling mercenaries. This is Chaos!”

“We killed that one, didn’t we? It didn’t seem to like your elven sword.”

“We’re lucky to be breathing!”

She ducked her head into the pool, then shook it, sending drops of water in
all directions. “To save a noble’s son from Chaos creatures—can you imagine the
reward for a deed like that?”

“Your brain is still addled, from the strangulation.” He cast a nervous
glance at the woods.

“He might still be alive.”

Franziskus twisted around to face her. “By the gods, I think I understand.
That rescue instinct of yours—it has come upon you again, hasn’t it?”

Her shoulders indignantly straightened. “Now that’s a load of rot!”

“Why else would you, of all people, be so intent on confronting Chaos?
Suddenly, for no good reason, you intend to risk your skin for some fellow you
don’t even know. As you did with me!”

“You’re the one who’s addled,” she said, marching toward the severed head.
“Which side of my supposedly contradictory personality are you arguing with,
anyway?”

“In this instance, not even the most stringent code of valour would command a
pair of ill-armed persons with no experience in these dark affairs, to get
themselves in a fight against Chaos.”

“I agree that proving one’s valour is foolish. Fortunately, that is not my
aim.”

They stood at the foot of a trail that wound circuitously up to what looked
like a cave, two-thirds of the way up one of the range’s lower peaks. For much
of its length, the trail was a groove through the rock—currently dry, but cut
by the rushing waters of a million spring melts. At other points, it became a
ledge that wound precariously around the mountain. The higher it got, the more
gaps appeared in it. A persistent, screaming wind dusted the path with snow from the surrounding
summits.

“I did not mean to suggest that you were wrong,” Franziskus said. “I merely
express regret that you are right.”

“You saw it, too,” Angelika said. “That spoor over there, it could only have
been the steaming dung of a Chaos beast.”

“Indeed.”

“And if I were a Chaos beast, and wanted to keep a captive to torment, and
eventually eat, that cave up there would be my lair.”

“Which of us do you seek to convince?”

“You can stay here, if you want.”

“This is still the very peak of folly,” Franziskus replied, “but I won’t wait
down here while you get yourself killed or captured.”

She leapt into the empty streambed. Only a thin layer of sand, interspersed
with sharp pebbles, covered its naked rock. Embedded in the stone beside her,
Angelika saw the shell of an ancient scallop, turned to stone by unknown magic.
The trail was far from straight. It zigzagged, as the spring flood-waters did
each year, following the route of least resistance, and seeking out the weakest
veins of rock to slowly buff. It was steep at first, but then it evened out, as
it curved around to the other side of the peak. Angelika and Franziskus had lost
sight of both their original vantage point, and their destination.

“Are you sure this is all part of the same trail?” he asked her.