Ships from the West

light fires when between the lines, and thus their camps had been chill and cheerless, their food ration scarcely less so. By the time the horse lines were pegged out in the wooded ground at the foot of the bluff and the animals hobbled and deep in nosebags, it had become almost fully dark, the last light edging down behind the jagged sentinel bulk of Candor-wir behind them, and the seven stars of the Scythe bright and stark in a cloudless night sky.

The troopers' young officer, a lanky youth with straw-coloured hair, stood watching the line of lights glittering on the world perhaps ten miles away to the north and west. They arced across the land like a filigree necklace, too delicate to seem threatening. But he had seen them up close, and knew that the Himerians decorated those ramparts with Torunnan heads mounted on cruel spikes. The bodies they left out as carrion within gunshot of the walls.

'All quiet, sir', the troop sergeant told his officer, a shadow among other, faceless shadows.

'All right, Dieter. Turn yourself in as well. I reckon I'll watch for a while.'

But the sergeant did not move. He was staring down at the Thurian Line like his officer. 'Funny, behind the walls it's lively as an ants' nest someone has poked with a stick, but there's not hide nor hair of the bastards out here. Not one patrol! I haven't seen the like, and I've been stationed up here these past four years.'

'Yes, there's a bad smell in the air all right. Maybe the rumours are true, and it's the start of the war at last.'

'Saint's blood, I hope not.'

The young ensign turned to his sergeant, his senior by twenty years, and grinned. 'What's that? Aren't you keen to have a go at them, Dieter? They've been skulking behind those ramparts for ten years now. It's about time they came out and let us get at them.'

Dieter's face was expressionless. 1 was at Armagedir, lad, and in the King's Battle before that. I was no older than you are now and thought much the same. All young men's minds work the same way. They want to see war, and when they have seen it, they never want to see it again, providing they live through it.'

'No glory, eh?'

'Roche, you've been up here a year now. How much glory have you seen?'

'Ah, but it's just been this damn skirmishing. I want to see what a real fight is like, where the battle lines are a mile long and the thunder of it shakes the earth.'

'Me, I just want to get back to my bed, and the wife in it.'

'What about young Pier? He'll soon be of an age to sit a saddle or shoulder a pike. Is he to follow you into the tercios?'

'Not if I can help it.'

'Ah, Dieter, you're tired is all.'

'No, it's not that. It's the waiting, I think. These bastards have been building things up for a decade now, since the Torian Plains battle. They own everything between the Mai­vennors and the Cimbrics, right up to the sultanates in the Jafrar, and still they want more. They won't stop till we break 'em. I just want to get on with it, I suppose. Get it over with.'

He stopped, listening. In the horse lines among the trees the animals were restless and quarrelsome, despite being as tired as their riders. They were tugging at the picket ropes, trying to rear though their forelegs were securely hobbled.

'Something in the wind tonight,' the young ensign said lightly, but his face was set and hard.

The night was silent save for the struggling horses. The sentries down at the lines were trying to calm them, cursing and grabbing at their skewed nosebags.

'Something,' Dieter agreed. 'Sir, do you smell that?'

The ensign sniffed the air doubtfully. 'There must be an old fox's den nearby. That's what is spooking the horses.'

'No, it's different than that. Stronger.'

One of the sentries came running up to the two men with his sabre drawn. The metal glinted coldly in the starlight.

'There's something out there in the dark sir, something moving. It was circling the camp, and then I lost it in that gully down on the left. It's in the trees.'

The young officer looked at his sergeant. 'Stand to.'

But the nickering of the horses exploded into a chorus of terrified, agonising shrieks that froze them all where they stood. The sentries came running pell-mell from the horse lines, terrified. 'There's something down in there, Sergeant!'

'Stand to!' Dieter yelled at the top of his voice, though all through the bivouac men were already struggling out of their bedrolls and reaching for their weapons.

'What the hell's going on down there?'

'We couldn't see. They came out of the gully. Some kind of animals, black as a wolf's throat and moving on their hindquarters like men. But they aren't men, sir.'

Horses were trying pitifully to drag themselves up the rocky slope to the bivouac where their riders stood, trailing their picket ropes. But their forelegs were securely hobbled and they reared and screamed and tumbled to their sides and kicked out maniacally to their rear. The men could see the black berry-shine of blood on them now. One had been disembowelled and was slipping in its own entrails.

'Sergeant Dieter', the ensign said in a voice that shook, 'take a demi-platoon down to the horse lines and see what is happening there.'

Dieter looked at him a moment and then nodded. He bawled out at the nearest men and a dozen followed him reluctantly down into the wooded hollow from which the hellish cacophony of dying beasts resounded.

The rest of the men formed up on the bluff and watched them as they struck a path through the melee of terrified and dying beasts still struggling out of the trees. Two men were knocked from their feet. Dieter left them there, telling them to unhobble every horse they could. The terror-stricken animals mobbed the men, looking to their riders for protection. Then Dieter's group disappeared into the bottomless shadow of the wood that straggled along the foot of the bluff.

A stream of horses was galloping up the slope now as they were loosed of their restraints. The men tried to catch and soothe them but most went tearing off into the night. The men gathered around the ensign were as much baffled as afraid, and angry at the savagery of the attack on their horses. Many of the mounts that had escaped were bleeding from deep-slashed claw marks.

A single shout, cut short, as though the wind had been knocked out of the shouter.

'That was Dieter', one of the men on the bluff said.

There were alder and birch down in the hollow below the bivouac, and these began thrashing as though men were shaking their branches. Cursing the darkness, those on the hill peered down the slope, past the keening, crippled horses that littered the ground, and saw a line of black figures loom out of the trees like a cloud of shadow. The smell in the air again, but stronger now - the musk-like stink of a great beast. Something sailed across the night sky and thudded to the ground just short of their feet. They heard a noise that after­wards many would swear had resembled human laughter, and then one of their number was pointing at the thrown object lying battered and glistening on the earth before them. Their sergeant's head.

The things in the trees seemed to melt away into the dark­ness, branches springing back to mark their passing. The men on the hill stood as though turned to stone, and in the sudden quiet even the screaming of the horses died away.

The lady Mirren's daily rides were a trial to both her assigned bodyguards, and her ladies-in-waiting. Each morning just after sunrise, she would appear at the Royal stables where Shamarq, the ageing Merduk who was head groom, had her horse Hydrax saddled and waiting for her. With her would be the one among her ladies-in- waiting who had chosen the short straw that morning, and a suitable young officer as escort. This morning it was Ensign Baraz, who had been kicking his heels about the Bladehall for several days until he had caught the eye of General Comillan. He had accepted his new role with as much good grace as he could muster, and now his tall grey stood fretting and prancing beside Hydrax, a pair of pistols and a sabre strapped to its saddle. Gebbia, the lady who was to accompany them, had been assigned a quiet chestnut palfrey which she nonetheless eyed with something approaching despair.