‘Behind you!’ screamed Sofia, and the knight spun his sword with a glittering flourish, reversing the blade and ramming it upwards beneath his right armpit. The charging creature was scaled and horned, with more limbs than any natural creature ought to possess. It defied any easy description, but died just the same as it spitted itself on the knight’s sword.
He surged to his feet and Sofia saw they were surrounded.
A ring of slavering beasts, thirty at least, and the brief ember of hope in her breast was snuffed out. The smaller beasts lurked behind the biggest creatures, and their grunting, hooting barks were filled with monstrous appetite.
Sofia felt the thunder of hooves pounding the sodden earth.
And a skirling shriek echoed over the steppe in time with a host of whooping yells, the sound as wild and unfettered as any heart in Kislev. Her heart soared, recognising the sound at the same time as the riders charged from the storm.
In they swept on steeds painted with mud and coloured dye, winged lancers riding high with rain-slick cloaks streaming like crimson gonfalon. Braided topknots and drooping moustaches were glorious as they rode the beasts down with kopia lances lowered. Feathered wing-racks bent at their backs, shrieking in the wind of their charge.
The circle of monsters broke apart, two dozen skewered in the first crashing impact of pennoned lances through mutant flesh. The rest fled into the storm and the painted riders gave bitter yells as they pursued, slashing their curved szabla back to split braying skulls. Winged lancers had once laughed as they killed, but few in Kislev laughed now.
The knight lowered his sword as the lancers rode the last of the beasts down, stabbing the blade into the red mud at his feet. Sofia let out a shuddering breath, and Miska looked up at the lone knight with wonderment.
A giant Gospodar warrior on a towering horse in the black and silver of Tor broke away from the main body of riders to rein in his mount before the knight. He sheathed a heavy straight-bladed sword, an enormous six-foot pallasz, across his fur-cloaked shoulders.
Sofia had seen none his equal. Even Pavel Leforto – Olric rest his uncouth soul – had not been proportioned as copiously.
‘Levubiytsa!’ yelled the man, climbing from his horse with surprising grace and planting hands like forge-hammers on the Knight Panther’s shoulders. ‘I think you try get yourself killed, yha? You should wait for rest of us, eh?’
‘You are correct, Tey-Muraz rotamaster,’ said the knight, and his accent was that of the Empire’s greatest city. ‘Yes, I should have waited, but look. There she is…’
The knight nodded in Sofia and Miska’s direction, and the giant turned to face them. His long moustache was braided with silver cords, and his glowering, wind-burned features opened with understanding.
‘So it seem at least one god still listen to prayers, my friend,’ he said, smoothing out his long hauberk of riveted iron scales and pulling his fur-lined greatcoat across his enormous girth.
‘You are Sofia Valencik?’ he asked in her mother tongue.
She nodded. ‘Yes, but how could you possibly know that?’
‘Because I told him,’ said the knight, removing his helm.
Sofia’s heart lurched at the sight of his face, thinner than she remembered and framed by hair that was now silver. It was a face she had last seen twisted in grief as he told her how Ambassador Kaspar von Velten had died at Urszebya.
‘By the gods,’ she said. ‘Kurt Bremen. How can you be here?’
‘Because I came back for you,’ he said.
They left the dead to the steppe, even the fallen riders.
By rights each horse ought to have been loosed into the steppe with its rider enshrouded on its back, free to chase Dazh’s fire until there was no more earth to ride.
But the lancers could not sacrifice even a single horse to a steppe burial, and after yelling the names of the dead into the wind and pouring koumiss on the ground, the riders turned their mounts westwards.
The fifty-two survivors of the attack were hoisted onto the backs of the lancers’ horses and Sofia and Miska rode on the back of Kurt’s enormous gelding.
Ten miles through the rain, they entered a fog-shrouded cleft in the earth, a steep-sided gully invisible from more than a few dozen yards away. The temperature plummeted within the dark walls of the canyon, and dripping daggers of ice hung from outflung crags of black rock.
At its base, the canyon floor widened, and Sofia saw scores of hide tents pitched in a rough circle around a grand pavilion of shimmering silver. Sheltered fires burned low in the mouths of caves, the smoke already dissipated by the time it climbed to the steppe. At least a thousand dispossessed warriors squatted around the fires, a dozen rota or more. Most were wounded, and all had the haunted look of men who could not yet believe their land was no more.
Sofia knew that look well. She wore it herself, etched into the lines of her handsome features and the grey in her hair.
They rose from the fires to greet the returning warriors, clapping the necks of their mounts and shouting the names of the dead as they heard them. The newly arrived riders dismounted and led their horses away, loosening their girths and grabbing handfuls of rough gorse to wipe the glossy sweat from their animals’ flanks.
A rider’s first duty was to his horse, and it was a duty every rider of Kislev took seriously.
The survivors of the beasts’ attack were directed to a series of fires, over which cook-pots of black iron bubbled with hot food. Priests and wounded men helped them with wooden bowls and what few blankets could be spared.
Sofia held back a sob that this was what the northmen had done to Kislev – pitiful survivors eking out their last existence in the ruins of their murdered homeland.
Kurt took care to dismount, and helped Sofia and Miska from the back of his horse. At least seventeen hands, it dwarfed the lighter mounts of the Kislevite riders. Its chest was wide, and the twin-tailed comet and hammer brand on its rump told her it had come from the Emperor’s own stables.
‘I call him Pavel,’ said Kurt, seeing her admiration for the gelding. ‘A stubborn beast, but loyal, and I’d wager he could match any steed of Bretonnia for speed. And he fights harder than any mount I’ve known.’
‘He’d have liked that,’ said Sofia, thinking back to the last time she’d seen Pavel Leforto and the harsh words between them. Pavel had been a crude and obnoxious drunkard, a man too passionately in love with his vices to be entirely trustworthy, but he had a heart as big as an ocean, and not a day passed that Sofia didn’t miss him.
Like Kaspar, Pavel had fallen to the blade of a Kurgan war leader named Aelfric Cyenwulf at the great battle fought in the shadow of Ursun’s Teeth. Kurt Bremen had slain Cyenwulf and the Ice Queen’s powerful magic had destroyed the Kurgan army. The people of Kislev celebrated the great victory, believing the armies of the north would not come south for years after such a bloody rebuttal.
How wrong they had been.
Kurt led Sofia and Miska to a low-burning fire where a slender young man sat cross-legged with his head hung low over his chest. He snored softly, swaying in his sleep with an open book in his lap and a quill still held in his fingers.
‘Master Tsarev, look who I found,’ said Kurt, with a gentle shake of the young man’s shoulder.
‘Ryurik?’ said Sofia, dropping to her knees and wrapping her arms around him. He awoke with a start and his bleary, exhausted eyes couldn’t at first comprehend that what they were seeing was true.
‘Sofia? Gods alive, is it really you?’ he said, looking up at Kurt. ‘Morskoi’s tears, Kurt, you found her!’