the Wild couldn’t cross running water without enormous effort or the water’s Hermetic permission. There was no power on earth that could take him in bright sunlight, in the middle span of flowing fresh water.
And if there was such a power, he had no chance against it anyway.
Then he went the rest of the way across and took the road north.
The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Robert Guissarme
Robert Guissarme was tall and cadaverously thin despite his intake of mutton and ale. Men said that his appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for gold. He called his company of men a
No one knew much of his birth. He claimed to be the bastard son of a great nobleman, whom he was careful never to name – but he was known from time to time to lay a finger to his nose when a great man passed him on the road.
His sergeants feared him. He was quick to anger, quick to punish, and as he was the best man-at-arms of his company none of them wanted to cross him. Especially not right now; he was sitting fully armed on his charger, in deep fog, looking at a pair of peddlers who had passed them the night before, and who now stood in the middle of the road. They had been carefully butchered, flayed, and then set on posts in the road so that their heads seemed locked in endless screams of abject agony.
Since yesterday, he had pushed his convoy north-west along the bad road that connected Albinkirk to the east – to the Hills, and then over the mountains to Morea, and the land of the Emperor. He’d started his convoy in Theva, the city of slavers, and had pushed his men so hard that their horses began to fail. As for the long chain of slaves that was their principal cargo – he no longer cared much whether they lived or died. They had been entrusted to him in Theva; a long line of broken men and women – some pretty, some ugly, and all with the blank despair of the utterly beaten human being. He’d been told that they were a valuable consignment, being skilled slaves – cooks, menservants, housemaids, nurses, and whores.
His company had treated them well enough on the long trip west. Well enough, despite the frowns of the Emperor’s Knight – a pompous bastard too proud to share his meals with a mere
But when they passed Behnburg, the last town before Albinkirk, and found the town’s garrison and population huddled within their walls in fear of un-named terrors, he’d started to hurry west, leaving the rest of the spring flood of merchants to hurry along in his wake. A dozen with wagons and good horses had paid him in gold to stay with his convoy.
He’d only taken the job transporting slaves to pay his passage – rumour had it that the fortress convent at Lissen Carak was offering payment in gold for monster-hunting work, and Guissarme needed the work. Or his company did.
Or perhaps they could manage a little longer. He sat his charger, at eye level with the corpses who had been killed, he now saw, by the act of their impaling.
He’d heard of impalement. Never seen it before. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
He was still gazing at them, rapt, when the arrows began to fall.
The first hit his horse. The second struck his breastplate with enough force to unseat him and sprang away and then he was falling. Men were screaming around him, and he could hear his corporals shouting for order. Something struck him in the groin and he felt a hot, rapidly spreading damp. Heard the sound of hooves – heavy horses moving fast, although with an odd rhythm. He couldn’t see well.
He tried to raise his head, and
The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter watched the arrows fly from the woods that lined the road with a sort of hopeless, helpless anger.
It was so
Chained by the yoke around his neck to the women front and back, he couldn’t run.
He didn’t have the words, but he tried all the same.
‘Fall down!’ he shouted. ‘Down!’
But the panic was already coming. The terror – he’d never felt such terror. It came directly behind the arrows, and washed over him like dirty water leaving fear behind. The two women to whom he was bound ran in different directions, stumbled, and fell together, taking him to the ground with them.
The arrows continued to fall on the soldiers, who mostly died. Only a small knot of them were still fighting.
Something – he couldn’t see very well in the late morning ground fog – something came out of the fog moving as fast as a knight on a horse and slammed into the column. Men and horses screamed anew, and the terror increased to the point where his two companions simply curled into balls.
Peter lay still and tried to make his head work. Watched the creatures coming at the column. They were daemons. He had heard of them in his home, and here they were, and they were feeding on the corpses. Or perhaps the living.
A wyvern fell from the sky on the blonde woman ahead of him, its beaked head ripping at her guts. The woman behind him shrieked and got to her knees, arms extended, and a gout of pure green passed inches over Peter’s head and slammed into the thing, which gave off an overpowering smell of burning soap.
It pivoted on its hips like a dancer, the action ripping the screaming woman under its forefoot in two and snapping the chain that connected the slaves. The end of the chain whipped around the creature’s leg.
The wyvern unwound the chain fastidiously, using a talon, and the woman at Peter’s back cast again, two handfuls of raw spirit shot out with an hysterical scream. The wyvern screamed back as it was hit, hundreds of times as loud, snapped its wings open and flung itself on the woman.
Peter rolled beneath it, the newly snapped end of the chain running through his yoke, which caught on a tree root and wrenched his neck. Free, he was on his feet and running into the fog.
A flash, and he was thrown flat. Silence – he got to his feet and ran on, and only after a hundred panicked steps did he realise he was deaf and the shirt on his back was charred.
He ran on.
His mouth was so dry he could not swallow, and his thighs and calves burned as if they, too, had been burnt. But he ran until he crossed a deep stream, and there he drank his fill and lay gasping until he passed out.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Ser Alcaeus rode up to Albinkirk on a blown horse, with his destrier trotting along behind him. He’d lost his squire and his page in the fighting but his valet, a boy too young to swing a sword to any effect, had somehow survived with the pack horse.
Alcaeus pounded on the town’s west gate with his sword hilt. A pair of scared looking guards opened the main gate the width of one horse to let him in.
‘There is an army of the Wild out there,’ Alcaeus gasped. ‘Take me to your captain.’
The captain of the town was an old man – at least as fighters went – grey bearded and tending to fat. But he was booted and spurred, wearing a hauberk of good iron rings and a belt that showed his paunch to unfortunate effect.
‘Ser John Crayford,’ he said, holding out a hand.
Ser Alcaeus thought it unlikely that the man had ever been knighted. And he wondered how such an ill-favoured lout had come to command such an important post.
‘I was with a convoy of fifty wagons on the Behnburg Road,’ Alcaeus said. He sat suddenly. He hadn’t intended to sit, but his legs went out from under him.
‘The Wild,’ he said. He tried to sound sane and rational and like a man whose word could be trusted. ‘Daemons attacked us. With irks. A hundred, at least.’ He found that he was having trouble breathing.
