Chapter I: Introduction
distracted it so I could get the kill-cut in. Made me lucky. I want her to come. I won’t go on without her. Ranald favours her.” “She won’t get any coin, if that’s what she’s thinking,” Broch growled. “I’ll give her a few of mine once we’re rich as princes,” Franz smiled. Broch shrugged. “Be your own fool, then. Come on!” They set off, Broch and the manciple leading the way, followed by Grunor, stomping along. Franz and Imke brought up the rear. The rain stopped suddenly after fifteen minutes, and the ruins around them began to steam and billow up mist that softened the edges of the stonework and made ghosts out of the taller ruins. The silence was unnerving. But for the gurgle and chug of water draining down to ground level through old pipes and broken spigots, there was unearthly quiet, as tense and bewitching as the enfolding mists. “It’s like the land of the dead,” Imke said. “Cold and drab and numb. It’s like Morr’s realm, where the souls flit like bats.” “It is the land of the dead,” Franz replied. “This is what life after death feels like. I know. I lived here all my life, and now that life is gone and buried.” “You were here when it happened?” Franz nodded. “Did you lose...” “Mother, father, two sisters.” “Why do you stay?” “There’s something I have to do. Something I want to find.” “What’s that, Franz Falker?” He looked at her. “You give me something first. Like who you are or what you are. Like why a common rag-picker has a nobleman’s dagger in her leg-sheath and knows how to use it.” “I’m a hunter,” she said. “What you might sniffily call a tomb robber. Mixing with the rag-pickers was a useful way to get in here.” He stopped and gazed at her, disgusted. “That makes you no better than a carrion eater. Ransacking the dead for loot.” “I don’t care what you think,” she said, striding on past him. “You owe me and you won’t say a damn thing about this to your sell-sword comrade.”
He nodded. “As soon as that debt’s cleared, you and I will have words again,” he assured her. “And I was so enjoying our conversation. You were going to tell me what you were here to find.” “It’s nothing.” “Tell me, Franz Falker,” she said, lancing him with her intense eyes once again. Franz shrugged. “My father’s shop. He was a cobbler. I want to find his shoemaker’s tools, and maybe some wooden shapers and some good leather. The folk in the camp are crying out for good shoes, or at least someone who can repair what they have. I have the skills and if I could find the materials...” His voice trailed off. She was staring at him. “That’s your ambition? Your destiny? To make shoes for the wretches out there?” Franz nodded. Imke shook her head and walked on. When he caught up with her, she whispered, “By the way, watch this manciple closely.” “What? Why?” “I don’t think he’s all he seems. He has marks on his hands, sigils... runes, I think. He’s been careful to conceal them, but I noticed his manner. He’s not as holy as he likes us to think.” Grunor had come to a halt in a mist-choked void between two tumbled walls. Rainwater gurgled. He sniffed the air. “Vermin,” he hissed. “Not this again,” Broch said. “What are they? Size of a man, you mad runt?” “Smells that way,” Grunor replied. There was an odd note of fear in his voice. Broch took a step forward. “You talk so much-” The first rat appeared, silent, looming out of the vapour. Broch gasped and swallowed. Suddenly, Grunor’s madness seemed like sanity itself. The rat was upright. Its eyes were bright. It clutched a bladed weapon in its forepaws the way a grown man might hold a lance. It was indeed the height and bulk of a man. So were the other six that loomed from the mist all around them. “Holy Ulric’s beating heart!” Broch howled in disbelief, drawing his great sword. “Form a circle! A circle!” But Grunor had already broken forward, screaming, his axe swung up high to strike as he charged the monstrous vermin. His madness had been made flesh. The things began to chatter and pipe, darting forward to attack. The noise they made was fearful, and all the more so because of the shrill chattering that answered it from the mists around them. Franz’s sword was out. Broch had already engaged, slamming his great sword at the nearest mangy black hide. Grunor had struck well, and his bloodstained axe had raised a cacophony of injured squeals. “Get behind me! Behind me!” Franz yelled at Imke as a rat-thing powered towards him. Imke had her estoc out already and was stabbing and slicing with expert strokes. Franz struck off a rat’s head with one clean blow and, spattered by the foul blood, looked round at the manciple. The young priest was yelling at them to protect him, his hands raised, palms visible. Franz saw the symbol carved into the flesh of the maniciple’s palm. It made him shudder. He’d seen it twice before. Once on the hood of the beast-thing in the ruins. And once on the banners of Surtha Lenk’s host as they stormed the walls of Wolfenburg. Franz winced as a rat-blade scythed through the meat of his left arm. He wheeled and speared the thing through the torso with his sword point. He knew for a certain thing that the real enemy, the worst fiend of all, was right amongst them, but there was nothing he could do. The rats were all around him, the rats as large as a man that had haunted Grunor’s nightmares, charging out of the smoke-mist, swarming, skittering...
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