‘Urgh,’ he said.
Sasha bustled over and examined him. She shook her head. ‘It’s become infected. You’ll die if this isn’t treated.’
Jerek scowled. ‘Then we’ll turn this village upside down. Any of the locals got a problem with that, they can go fuck themselves.’
Brodar Kayne sighed and pulled the filthy dressing back down over the festering wound. Back out into the rain. Again.
And to make matters worse, he needed to piss.
‘Empty.’
It was dark within the modest dwelling, the fire in the small hearth having burned out long ago. Clothes were scattered across the floor. A chair was upended next to a table covered in the abandoned remains of a meal. Thick black flies hovered over the table and crawled over a large ham that had begun to putrefy.
‘They didn’t even stop to lock the door,’ said Sasha. Her face was troubled.
‘I don’t reckon we’ll find anything in here.’ Kayne turned and walked back outside. They had searched half a dozen homes already, and every one of them had been abandoned. Jerek and Isaac emerged from a nearby building. An angry shake of the Wolf’s head confirmed that their search had also failed to turn up anything useful.
‘Looks like they all just upped and left.’ Kayne’s body was trembling again and he had begun to sweat. His insides felt as if they were on fire. For once he was grateful for the rain, which cooled his burning skin.
‘Kayne,’ Jerek rasped from across the way. ‘You should see this.’
He hurried over to where the Wolf crouched over a row of mounds in the earth. There must have been a dozen of them, at least.
‘Graves,’ Jerek grunted.
He examined the mounds. They looked fresh, and shallow, as if whoever had done the shovelling lacked the time to make a decent job of it. A couple of the mounds had been disturbed: the graves had been dug up and since filled with rain. There was no sign of the occupants.
Sasha bent over one of the empty graves and stared into the filthy water sloshing around within. ‘What’s happening in this village?’ she whispered.
There was a scrabbling sound. The mound Jerek was crouching upon suddenly shifted, sending wet earth sliding away. The Wolf leaped backwards just as a hand emerged from the soil, grasping wildly at the air. The other hand followed a second or two after, pushing up through the earth to clutch and claw like the talons of some wild animal.
‘Someone’s alive down there,’ Isaac exclaimed. He scrambled over and began scooping away dirt. ‘Don’t worry — we’ll get you out of there!’ He reached down to try and take hold of one of the flailing hands.
Brodar Kayne felt a deep sense of foreboding. Everything about this village felt wrong. You didn’t reach his ripe old age without having a good instinct for this kind of thing.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, lad…’
With a blood-curdling moan, the head of the villager burst out of the ground. Worm-eaten eyes stared from his ruined face with undisguised hatred. The villager opened his mouth unnaturally wide, revealing a cavernous hole full of maggots and broken teeth. Isaac yelped in surprise as the thing grabbed hold of his arm and pulled itself out from the grave.
‘Fuck this,’ Jerek snarled. He barrelled into the creature, slamming it down onto the ground. His head snapped forwards, shattering the thing’s nose. It moaned pitifully as he dragged it along the ground for a few yards before bringing his boot down repeatedly on its head, breaking its skull open. One more stomp and its head collapsed with a sickening crack. It twitched a few times and went still.
Sasha screamed. Kayne glanced across to see a rotting figure lumbering towards her. He closed his eyes for a second. I thought I’d left this shit behind me. He tugged his sword free of its sheath.
A crossbow bolt thudded into the villager. It staggered from the impact but otherwise displayed no sign of having felt the quarrel. Sasha looked at her crossbow in disbelief.
‘Strollers, we call them up in the High Fangs,’ the old barbarian said. He raised his greatsword high in the air, swept it around and cut off the creature’s head in a single swing. ‘They appear sometimes after an abomination shows up in one of the Reachings. They’re none too bright and stubborn to kill, but they’re slow. Take off their heads and they die easy enough.’
Isaac had stabbed another of the shambling things multiple times, but it kept on coming at him. ‘The head, lad,’ Kayne shouted.
Sasha raised her crossbow again and fired.
The bolt sailed through the air and would have taken the creature dead in the back of the skull had the Wolf, who had been busy smashing another into the side of a tree, not inadvertently stepped into its path.
Brodar Kayne froze. Time seemed to stand still.
The bolt sank into Jerek’s shoulder in almost the exact spot the Watchman’s quarrel had struck a week before.
‘Fucking whore,’ Jerek snarled. His face was rage personified. ‘You’ll pay for that.’ He stalked towards her.
‘I didn’t mean-’ Sasha began, but his backhand snapped her head around and knocked her to the ground. He reached behind him, pulled an axe free with his good arm.
‘Jerek.’
The Wolf spun around. ‘Stay out of this, Kayne.’
‘I can’t do that.’
His old friend scowled. Blood ran down his arm from the bolt in his shoulder but he hardly seemed to care. ‘You gonna try and stop me?’
Kayne shrugged. ‘I reckon I will.’
The Wolf chuckled, a horrible grating sound devoid of humour. ‘Always the hero.’
‘I ain’t no hero and I never claimed to be. I’m an old man trying to do the right thing in what little time I got left. I ain’t letting you harm the girl.’
‘You’re half dead, Kayne.’
‘And you’ve only got one good arm. Hardly a duel for the ages.’
Jerek snorted. ‘Like in the sagas of the great Highlanders of old? I reckon we’re both too old for that shit.’
‘Aye.’ The sword quivered in his hands. His arms were shaking.
Brodar Kayne had lost count of the number of men he had killed over the years. The young and the old, good men and bad men both — the latter when he could, but the Shaman was a capricious master and it wasn’t for his champion to decide right from wrong. He had been the Sword of the North, a man feared and respected in equal measure.
The time was well past when he took pride in any of that, but facts were facts. He had never lost a fight, though others had possessed reputations to rival his own: Borun, his sword-brother; Mehmon, who had been as hard as the ice that covered his Reaching before he had grown old and soft. The Butcher of Beregund was said to be peerless on the field of battle, and if there was one Highlander he would have relished matching steel against it was that murderous, raping bastard.
They were hard men all, but he wouldn’t have backed any of them against the one staring him in the face just then. Jerek was as relentless as the Reaver himself, and as tough and brutal a fighter as Kayne had ever known.
He drew a deep breath and gasped at the pain in his stomach. Readied himself for a fight he was certain would be his last. The sword hilt felt slick in his fevered palms.
Jerek’s eyes narrowed. ‘Fuck this,’ he said. He lowered his axe. He turned to Sasha, who was struggling back to her feet. She had an angry red mark on the left side of her face. ‘You ain’t heard the last of this. For now, keep the fuck out of my way.’ That said, he stormed off into the night.
Kayne heaved a weary sigh and let his sword dip towards the ground. That didn’t go too badly, all things considered.
They walked over to Isaac. The manservant appeared to be unharmed. He had succeeded in lopping off the head of the stroller that had been attacking him and was scanning the area for more of the creatures. ‘I think I’ve read about these things,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, when enough wild magic is present, souls will cross over from the realm of the dead and return to their former bodies.’