laugh. “This is why I don’t discuss religion with westerners. Someone always comes out looking the arse.” Unger straightened up, turned serious. “So you didn’t come here to be a crusader for your gods. Did you come for the glory, then, to further the greatness of your name?”
“No,” Cyrus said. “There’s a war going on back home. If that interested me, I could make a hell of a name for myself in Arkaria about now.”
“Ah,” Unger said, nodding sagely. “It’s the other thing, then.”
“What?”
“When a man leaves his home behind to travel a world away-as far as yours is from Luukessia-he’s either running to something or running from something. For you, it’d be the latter, it seems.”
“Where I come from,” Cyrus said, feeling the shame creep across his cheeks, “a man doesn’t run from anything. Not a warrior, at least.”
“Where I come from,” Unger said, “it doesn’t matter if you run away for a bit, retreat, you know? Stay in every fight and lose, and what does it get you if you get ground under and lose the war? But a strategic retreat,” Unger’s eyes lit up, “that’s saved an army or two. But that’s not you, I’d wager. Not coming at the head of an army. So what are you running from?”
There was a pause, a long one, before Cyrus answered. “A woman.”
“Couldn’t have been anything else, I suppose,” Unger said with a chuckle. “Only thing that can make a man run this far.”
“I don’t like to run,” Cyrus said. “I’d rather not have.”
“I’d rather not have an army of beasts ripping apart my Kingdom and its peoples,” Unger said darkly. “So if it’s all the same to you, I’m rather glad you ran and ran here. It may end up doing me more good in the long run than that army you wiped out at Harrow’s Crossing would have in your stead.”
They rode north for another few days, the ground getting higher and the air colder. Snow-capped peaks became more and more commonplace, and they passed through villages built on the sides of mountains, where people greeted them with all the fanfare due an allied army on the march. Cyrus looked into their faces, the men dressed in the garb of farmers and goat herders, the women drab, wearing skins that were faded and worn, and the children dirty from their day of activity. He looked upon them all and saw himself somewhere else, with a woman of his own, and children, and he wondered where that could possibly be, the place he saw.
On fourth day after they left Scylax, they passed through a village with gates of wood, each post carved into a spike as a fortification. “This is the village of Shaheer,” Unger told him. Over their days of travel they’d spoken at some length, and Cyrus had managed to keep his emotions at bay thanks to Unger, who kept his mind focused on other things. “It’s the next village ahead that we’re going to. This scourge seems to have stopped in the valley over the next mountain; they only took four or five villages, one keep that we know of.” Unger’s face darkened. “Of course there are other towns north that we can’t hear from; likely as not, they all fell first-if these things came from the north.”
Deep in the mountains, they had reached a point where going outside at night, the temperature would fall enough for Cyrus to see his breath. During the days, the air had picked up a chill that Cyrus knew had nothing to do with the season-summer was in full bloom back at Enrant Monge, after all. The altitude and the cold together conspired to remind Cyrus of times long ago-
The ride got harder. They went north again, this time over a pass that was relatively clear, a contrast to the times when they’d trudged their animals up hills and winding roads. When they reached the crest of the pass, they stopped. To either side of them were mountains, one double peak to Cyrus’s left, and a particularly tall mountain to his right, one that seemed miles high. Looking ahead of them, he could see hints of snow still patchy on the ground in the valley below, some of it obvious and hiding in the shadows of little forests that dotted the valley. The smell of pine needles was strong in the air.
“There,” Unger said, his finger extended, pointing to a collection of houses in the distance, miles away and nestled in an uneven fold of green ground next to one of the patches of woods. “That’s the village that’s held by this scourge. It’s called Pinrade, and it used to have about five hundred people living in and around it.”
“Do you think they’re all dead?” Cyrus asked. “That these monsters killed them all?”
“My instincts from fighting these beasts when we clashed with them tells me yes,” Unger said with a nod, “every man, woman, child and animal that remained in that village is dead.” He kept an even expression. “But I’d surely like to be proven wrong.”
“You intend us to move directly toward it?” Cyrus asked. “Or perhaps have something more subtle in mind?”
“We have an army in place in the valley east of here,” Unger said. “Not the full force available to me-that’s lurking a little south of Scylax, gathering along with additional conscripts we’re pulling from the reaches of the Kingdom-but a decent-sized force of five thousand or so that is battle-hardened. We’ll meet up with them and probe north a little, see how firmly dug in these blighters are.”
“They didn’t look capable of doing much digging,” Cyrus said wryly.
“Aye, but they come in force, making digging in irrelevant. They overwhelm you with numbers, crush you under the weight of so many of them.” Unger shook his head. “I have my doubts about doing this with five thousand, but it’s a fraction of what we’ve thrown at them so far.”
“How many men have died thus far?” Cyrus asked.
“I fought them with ten thousand men,” Unger said. “We met them on bad ground-for them, not us. They kept coming until I called the retreat, and never once did they show hesitation, even when the ground was covered with their dead.”
They moved east once out of the pass, down to some even ground, using a forest for cover as they left the road, the pace slowing as they made their way along a line avoiding the village by giving it a wide berth.
“Our men will be encamped a few miles from here,” Unger said.
“Are you sure they’re still there?” Cyrus asked. “I mean, if these things are as bad as you say they are, what’s to stop them from sortieing out and slaughtering your men?”
Unger chuckled. “Nothing, I suppose, but they won’t have gotten this army without a fight. So far they don’t seem to do much sortieing; they come in force, move in on a town, and swarm it. They sit there for a while after, like nothing’s happening … if you look at the town from a distance, you’ll see them … not exactly making merry, because these things don’t ever look happy, but they wander the streets, almost as though they’re strutting around their new conquest.” Unger bared his teeth in a feral grimace. “Bastards.”
They came up over a rise and stopped, all in a line, and Cyrus’s eyes widened in shock. Unger cursed, again, louder this time, and Cyrus made a gesture for him to shut up, which the King of Syloreas did, oddly enough. “Bastards,” Unger said quietly. “Bloody bastards. It would appear you were right.”
“I don’t want to be right,” Cyrus said. “I want to be wrong.”
The rise led down to an empty, flat plain, hidden from the sight of the village of Pinrade, still several miles away. A full-fledged camp had been set up in the area-and it was completely, utterly destroyed. Tents were shredded, pieces of their occupants strewn over bloody ground. Bodies were scattered all over the site, both humans and the creatures that Unger called the scourge, their grey, pallid and naked flesh obvious against the clothed and more pink human bodies.
“No campfires,” Terian said from next to Cyrus.
“They were told not to build any,” Unger said, still seething. “These were experienced men. They knew how to keep out of sight.”
“If that was a village of men in the distance,” Cyrus said, “you wouldn’t have thought it possible to keep an army out of their sight, not for weeks at a time. What made you think you could do it with these creatures?”
“Because they’re animals!” Unger shouted, his words echoing across the slaughter below. “They’re not men, these things, they’re less than criminals, they’re beasts, fit to be harnessed to a plow and forced to rip the ground of our fields. They’re mindless, thoughtless animals, lower in mean intelligence than a dog, and worth less in value of life than fifty mutts.”
“And apparently possessed of the same instincts,” Terian said, “if they tracked your people down and wiped them out.”
“Aye,” Unger said. “And I’ll kill them like a rabid one, without mercy or emotion.”
They wandered down the hill among the dead. Cyrus watched as the horses snorted, their exhalations sending little clouds of breath into the cold air.
