“Taking a stroll in the woods?”
“Lieutenant going to teach you to shoot?”
The last was an allusion to the marksmanship contest that the Foragers had lost to the Skywatchers the previous week. Most people still could not understand how it happened. Weasel and Leon were the two best shots in the regiment. Rik had his own suspicions. There was very little Weasel would not do to win money even if it meant betting against himself. Rik was certain that the former poacher had somehow persuaded Leon to go along. The scrawny little lad had always been malleable by any evil influence, particularly when ill-gotten gains were involved.
“I’ll teach you how to sit on a bayonet,” bellowed the Barbarian, who had lost quite a lot of copper betting on his friends. It was still a sore spot with him.
“Hush,” said the Sergeant. “There will be time enough to pay them back in months to come.” It sounded like he had a plan.
Weasel loped towards them from the tent village of the camp-followers. His tatty green uniform looked worse than ever as it clung to his long lean frame. He appeared to have lost his hat again, and his narrow, bald head on its long neck made him look even more rodent-like than ever. The nostrils twitched in his huge nose as if scenting for danger.
“Nice of you to join us,” said the Sergeant. “Any later and you would be competing with the Barbarian and Gunther for a place on the whipping post.”
“Just making sure your wife was satisfied,” said Weasel. He was one of those who, without having any rank whatsoever, still managed to wield a great deal of influence in the regiment. It came by way of his involvement with the Quartermaster’s countless black-market schemes. Still, he must have been feeling particularly cocky today, or even he would not have taken that tone with the Sergeant.
Sergeant Hef raised an eyebrow. Such talk was water off a duck’s back to him. He and Marcie had been together as long as anybody could remember, had numerous sprogs and, as far as anyone knew, had never even looked at anybody else from the day they met. It would take more than Weasel’s leering insinuations to upset him.
“With the rabbits,” said Weasel, with a comedian’s timing, his tone all wounded innocence. “With the rabbits I sold her. Not what these dirty-minded louts were thinking at all.”
The Sergeant shook his head. “One day you’ll dig your own grave with that tongue of yours,” he said.
“It’s the only digging he’ll ever do,” said Gunther. “Never seen that one do a lick of work.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Weasel. “Tupping your girlfriend is work.”
Gunther’s face congested with rage. His hand went to the butt of his pistol but somehow Weasel’s long bony fingers already contained a knife.
“That’s enough the pair of you,” said the Sergeant, in a voice that let them both know the fun was over. For such a small man he had a lot of authority. “It’s stripes on both your backs you’ll be getting if you keep up this nonsense.”
Weasel gave him a wink. Gunther subsided into the muted fury that was almost perpetual with him when he was not quivering in awe and fear of his angry god.
“What the hell,” said the Barbarian.
“Look, Rik, a dragon,” said Leon. Somehow despite his veneer of streetwise sophistication, something in Leon’s voice made it sound as if the dragon was something wonderful he was seeing for the first time.
“I see it, Leon,” said Rik. He was a little annoyed. Like most of the Foragers he preferred his nickname to his real name. The other one brought back far too many bad memories.
The whole unit looked up as a dragon passed overhead, silhouetted against the greyish clouds. The wind of its passage ruffled their jackets. Its vast wings, massive as the sails of a caravel, cast a huge shadow on the land below. Its long serpentine neck stretched forward at full extension and the great triangular head briefly gave it the look of a spear in flight. Its rider’s polished armour glittered in the dim sunlight. It was moving at quite a pace as it spiralled in to land within the massive stone walls surrounding the Redoubt.
A mutter passed up the line of Foragers. It had been a long time since any of them had seen a dragon, since before they had been dispatched to this benighted strip of borderland, and Rik wondered what message its courier brought. He knew they were all thinking the same thing: war.
The Sergeant just shrugged and said; “We’ll know soon enough.”
They passed the camp followers washing linen in the stream and carrying buckets of water back to the patched tents and hastily built hovels that were home. Small dogs and spine-backed wyrmhounds romped in the muck. Mud clung to the women’s bare feet, and dirty-faced urchins to their shawls. Most looked hungry. It was not much fun being a soldier’s brat. Still, Rik thought, most of them had it better than he did at their age. The streets of Shadzar, the Place of Sorrow, had been hard on orphan boys, particularly on one thought to be the bastard get of a Terrarch.
Shoulders straightened and even Weasel stopped whistling as they reached the village around the Redoubt. Most of the regiment’s officers were quartered in the Inn or the low stone built houses and the Terrarchs were always sticklers for discipline. The ten storey fortress loomed above them, rising from a walled promontory that added thirty feet to its height.
Atop its tower the huge black banner from which the regiment took its name flew proudly beside the Red Dragon of Talorea. The regimental flag showed a beautiful naked woman with the wings of a dragon and a rune- encrusted scythe in her hand; Arazaela, the Angel of Death. Beneath her were inscribed the words Death’s Angels All Are We in the high tongue of the Exalted. Rik could not make out all the details at this distance but he could picture it well enough. Its replica fluttered on the standards of all nine companies.
Those banners had flown over a thousand battlefields in the five centuries since the regiments founding and would doubtless fly over a thousand more but Rik’s heart did not lift at the sight. In this he knew he was among the minority of the men. He took no great pride in walking among the Angels.
Tall scarlet-jacketed officers strode back and forth, stick-lean, their narrow ageless triangular faces covered in that expression of bored haughtiness that seemed moulded onto their features at birth. Their long pigtails of fine hair swung like the tails of stalking cats as they walked. He fought down old hatred and old fear at the sight. His own face bore a resemblance to theirs, the same finely sculpted features, the same cold purple eyes, the same ash-blonde hair, the same narrow chin; a gift from his unknown father, the only patrimony he ever got from him.
He was not sure whether the frosty looks directed at him were a product of his imagination or simple reality. Perhaps it was merely in his mind. The Terrarchs looked that way at everybody. They were the lords of creation, and had been since they conquered Gaeia a thousand years ago.
The acrid smell of wyrm filled the village air. As the men passed, ferocious hunting ripjacks lashed their long tails and slammed themselves against the bars of their iron cages, each a wingless, blood-mad, bi-pedal dragon in miniature. Hunger and hate burned in their tiny snake eyes. They raised themselves to the height of a man on huge hind legs that ended in massive claws and razor sharp dagger-like spurs. They made what looked suspiciously like obscene gestures with their tiny vestigial forearms.
Their long necks undulated serpentinely. Rik smelled the stale blood and meat on their breath as it emerged from enormous snap-toothed mouths that could take off a man’s arm at a bite. He felt the furnace blast of their ferocity. Their alien masters loved these hunting wyrms. Years before, Rik had seen a group of Terrarchs run down condemned prisoners with a pack of them. It was something he had never forgotten. There had not even been enough of the bodies left over for burning.
The Foragers fell into a neat line in the square across from the Inn. Just beyond it was the ditch with its earthwork bridge that surrounded the Redoubt. A group of Terrarch officers mounted on destriers jogged across it and rode by. Servant girls came and went carrying burdens of laundry and food under the appreciative eye of the soldiers.
Lieutenant Sardec emerged from the Inn. He moved along the line inspecting the humans with those curious cat-like Terrarch eyes. In his red uniform with its gold braid, he looked less like one of the Chosen of God and more like an emissary of the Shadow. Try as he might, Rik could not push that particularly heretical thought from his mind. He told himself it was merely his own dislike talking; the product of the endless vendetta the officer seemed to have with him.
Sardec must have sensed the thought passing through his head because he paused in front of Rik. “A button
