I opened my Gift and searched the area for living minds, but found only those I’d brought with me. “Place seems safe,” I said. “Baldo, Coira – check inside.”
Seconds later Baldo came lurching back out. He doubled over and spewed steaming brown gunk across the white snow. Coira merely looked a little pale. “Chief, you’d better eyeball this mess.”
The iron-tang miasma of days-old blood hit me as I ducked under the low lintel and stepped inside. If this had been last year I might have joined Baldo outside. But I’d seen much worse.
My right hand started itching something fierce and I absently scratched beneath the glove while inspecting the wrecked home. A table lay overturned and broken in half amongst shattered pottery and a pool of iced stew. We found the sheep and goats, and the farmers too judging from the gnawed human hand by my boot. Gore and chunks of congealed flesh coated the walls, now frozen solid. It was some sort of beast’s macabre den.
“Send somebody to fetch Magus Evangeline Avernus,” I said to Jovian. “The rest of you stand guard outside.” My people looked grateful for that but the scouts hovered by the door, indecisive. “Well? Spit it out?”
“Begging your pardon, M’lord Magus,” a grizzled veteran in thick white furs said. “We was wondering if we should go on ahead, see what else we can find. Look for ambushes and tracks and suchlike.”
“You’re the bloody scouts,” I said. “You know better than anybody what needs done. That’s probably more use than standing around here.”
They were clearly not used to making their own orders, but after a moment’s confusion they bobbed their heads and then resumed their trek up the valley.
Alone in the house, I looked for signs of what had occurred. On impulse I slipped my right glove off and put my palm against the wall, pressing hard. Frost crunched but it was solid blood-ice beneath, and didn’t melt immediately at the touch. The back of my hand was now a hard black mass the colour and feel of wrought iron, and it was spreading up my fingers. As the frozen blood began to melt beneath my palm the itching disappeared and I felt a little faint, and a little hungry. I really didn’t want to think too deeply about what that creepy-as-fuck sensation meant.
Heavy footsteps crunched towards the doorway in a hurry.
I wiped my hand on my coat and pulled the glove back on just before Eva arrived with a naked sword in her hands. The blade was just normal steel rather than her old spirit-bound blade that had shattered on the heart of the Magash Mora – a blade that could cut through normal steel like it was soft cheese was a sore loss for anybody, as I knew only too well. She sheathed it and surveyed every inch of the slaughterhouse, pausing to examine scores and marks in broken wood and walls, and the wounds left in frozen flesh and bone.
“Daemons,” she pronounced. “I’ve seen madmen do much the same,” I said.
She pointed up to claw marks either side of wooden beams. “Did they also hang from the rafters like a bat?”
“Ah. That might explain our lack of local guides then.” Great. Flying daemons were just what we needed.
“Indeed. I will pass the word to watch the skies.” She made to leave but I stepped to block the doorway.
I grimaced and scratched my bristly chin. “I’m sorry for before. Nobody wants to be pitied. I was just lamenting my own lack of power. You’re a bloody fierce fighter and I’d rather have nobody else fighting at my side. I hope we can still be friends.”
Her green eye stared at me, face hidden behind the impassive steel mask. “When did we ever start?” She brushed past me and marched away to reorganise our army. In her wake she left a lingering aura of pain in my head, a weak taste of what she suffered every hour of every day.
What I really wanted to say was how bitterly I regretted what she’d had to suffer through, and how sorry I was that I didn’t, somehow, prevent it. But she didn’t need or want that. What would it solve? No, what she needed was a purpose – what’s the point of enduring all that pain and surviving for no good reason? It also might help if I wasn’t such a ham-fisted clod about it all.
I stepped out and eyed the wooden barn and fencing, then nodded to the farmhouse. “Burn it,” I said to Nareene. She whooped with joy and set about incinerating what was left of those poor bastards’ bodies coating the walls of their home.
The scouts found the remainder of our Clansfolk guides half a league further up the valley. Or at least we assumed the scraps of bone, chewed furs and broken steel laying in red-spattered snow were theirs. There were no other tracks, just the boot prints of three men churned up in a circle. One of the scouts pointed to a line of red stains heading towards the sheer cliff walls, and then continuing straight up sheer rock. Red icicles hung like bloody fangs from an outcrop far above our heads.
That night we set camp uneasily in a moderate blizzard, sipped our ale ration listlessly and slept fitfully. The sentries scanned the sky as much as the valley ahead. Despite our precautions, in the small hours of night I woke with a death-scream ringing in my ears and mind. On my travels I’d long ago grown accustomed to sleeping fully dressed (you never knew when you might have to slip out a window and leg it) so I grabbed my dirk, flung the sheath aside and raced out, magic surging through muscles and into my eyes, a little trick of body magic that granted keener night sight.
Bryden lurched barefoot from his tent, the lanky young git wearing a hideous yellow padded nightgown that moonlight stained the colour of piss. His head whipped to and fro, mouth gawping. Looked like he’d never been in a proper fight in his life!
My Gift located a fading mind all the way up the cliff face.
It was accompanied by something inhuman, and my sharpened eyesight picked out a black shape clinging to the rock, tearing at something with its glistening beaks.
The armoured form of Eva was already blurring towards me, a heavy war-bow fully as tall as herself already strung and an arrow nocked. She skidded to a stop, engulfing me in a wave of powdery snow. “Where is the enemy?”
I pointed to the black mass clinging to the rock far up out of our reach. As a knight, Eva’s physical senses and sight were superior to mine. She grunted. “Bone vulture.” In a single smooth motion she drew and loosed. A distant screech announced a hit. Pebbles clattered down the cliff, followed by a tumbling mass of feathers and snapping beaks. With only a single eye she was a better shot than I would ever be with two.
A shredded human corpse thudded to the earth beside us, the man’s hairy arse jutting naked from the snow. Our missing sentry’s trousers were down around his ankles from where he’d been squatting to dump a shite. It was a fucking embarrassing way to go.
The daemon fell nearby. Eva waved the wardens back, threw aside her bow and advanced on the squawking creature. She didn’t draw a weapon and she didn’t need one. I followed her, keeping her between that thing and me. I was squishy and soft and she was most definitely not.
The bone vulture wasn’t close to being a native animal. The thing’s bones were a hard outer sheath covered in iridescent feathers, and it had vibrant purple knives for claws. It looked more like a four-winged, feathered insect than a bird. One of its two heads shrieked and snapped at Eva, while the other lay limp and motionless with an arrow through its eye.