Authors: Miles Cameron
‘I’ll leave Sauce and Bad Tom. They’ll stay on their guard until we send them a relief,’ he said. The discovery of the killings in the steading had interrupted their
muddy trek to the fortress. They’d been riding since the second hour after midnight, after a cold camp and equally cold supper. No one looked happy.
‘Go and get me the master of the hunt,’ he added, turning back to his squire. When he was answered only with silence, he looked around. ‘Michael?’ he asked quietly.
‘M’lord?’ The young man was looking at the door to the steading. It was oak, bound in iron, and it had been broken in two places, the iron hinges inside the door had bent where
they’d been forced off their pins. Trios of parallel grooves had ripped along the grain of the wood – in one spot, the talons had ripped through a decorative iron whorl, a clean
cut.
‘Do you need a minute, lad?’ the captain asked. Jacques had seen to his own mount and was now standing at Grendel’s big head, eyeing the spike warily.
‘No – no, m’lord.’ His squire was still stunned, staring at the door and what lay beyond it.
‘Then don’t stand on ceremony, I beg.’ The captain dismounted, thinking that he had used the term lad quite naturally. Despite the fact that he and Michael were less than five
years apart.
‘M’lord?’ Michael asked, unclear what he’d just been told to do.
‘Move your arse, boy. Get me the huntsman. Now.’ The captain handed his horse to the valet. Jacques was not really a valet. He was really the captain’s man and, as such, he had
his own servant – Toby. A recent addition. A scrawny thing with large eyes and quick hands, completely enveloped in his red wool cote, which was many sizes too big.
Toby took the horse and gazed at his captain with hero-worship, a big winter apple forgotten in his hand.
The captain liked a little hero-worship. ‘He’s spooked. Don’t give him any free rein or there’ll be trouble,’ the captain said gruffly. He paused. ‘You might
give him your apple core though,’ he said, and the boy smiled.
The captain went into the steading by the splintered door. Closer up, he could see that the darker brown was not a finish. It was blood.
Behind him, his destrier gave a snort that sounded remarkably like human derision – though whether it was for the page or his master was impossible to tell.
The woman just inside the threshold had been a nun before she was ripped open from neck to cervix. Her long, dark hair, unbound from the confines of her wimple, framed the horror of her missing
face. She lay in a broad pool of her own blood that ran down into the gaps between the boards. There were tooth marks on her skull – the skin just forward of one ear had been shredded, as if
something had gnawed at her face for some time, flensing it from the bone. One arm had been ripped clear of her body, the skin and muscle neatly eaten away so that only shreds remained, bones and
tendons still hanging together . . . and then it had been replaced by the corpse. The white hand with the silver IHS ring and the cross was untouched.
The captain looked at her for a long time.
Just beyond the red ruin of the nun was a single clear footprint in the blood and ordure, which was already brown and sticky in the moist, cool air. Some of the blood had begun to leech into the
pine floor boards, smooth from years of bare feet walking them. The leeched blood blurred the edge of the print, but the outline was clear – it was the size of a war horse’s hoof or
bigger, with three toes.
The captain heard his huntsman come up and dismount outside. He didn’t turn, absorbed in the parallel exercises of withholding the need to vomit and committing the scene to memory. There
was a second, smudged print further into the room, where the creature had pivoted its weight to pass under the low arch to the main room beyond. It had dug a furrow in the pine with its talons. And
a matching furrow in the base board that ran up into the wattle and plaster. A dew claw.
‘Why’d this one die here when the rest died in the garden?’ he asked.
Gelfred stepped carefully past the body. Like most gentlemen, he carried a short staff – really just a stick shod in silver, like a mountebank’s wand. Or a wizard’s. He used it
first to point and then to pry something shiny out of the floorboards.
‘Very good,’ said the captain.
‘She died for them,’ Gelfred said. A silver cross set with pearls dangled from his stick. ‘She tried to stop it. She gave the others time to escape.’
‘If only it had worked,’ said the captain. He pointed at the prints.
Gelfred crouched by the nearer print, laid his stick along it, and made a clucking sound with his tongue.
‘Well, well,’ he said. His nonchalance was a little too studied. And his face was pale.
The captain couldn’t blame the man. In a brief lifetime replete with dead bodies, the captain had seldom seen one so horrible. Part of his conscious mind wandered off a little, wondering
if her femininity, the beauty of her hair, contributed to the utter horror of her destruction. Was it like desecration? A deliberate sacrilege?
And another, harder part of his mind walked a different path. The monster had placed that arm
just so.
The tooth marks that framed the bloody sockets that had been her eyes. He could
imagine, far too well.
It had been done to leave terror. It was almost
artistic.
He tasted salt in his mouth and turned away. ‘Don’t act tough on my account, Gelfred,’ he said. He spat on the floor, trying to get rid of the taste before he made a spectacle
of himself.
‘Never seen worse, and that’s a fact,’ Gelfred said. He took a long, slow breath. ‘God shouldn’t allow this!’ he said bitterly.
‘Gelfred,’ the captain said, with a bitter smile. ‘God doesn’t give a fuck.’
Their eyes met. Gelfred looked away. ‘I will know what there is to know,’ he said, looking grim. He didn’t like the captain’s blasphemy – his face said as much.
Especially not when he was about to work with God’s power.
Gelfred touched his stick to the middle of the print, and there was a moment of
change
, as if their eyes had adjusted to a new light source, or stronger sunlight.
‘Pater noster qui es in caelus,’ Gelfred intoned in plainchant.
The captain left him to it.
In the garden, Ser Thomas’ squire and half a dozen archers had stripped the bodies of valuables – and collected all the body parts strewn across the enclosure, reassembled as far as
possible, and laid them out, wrapped in cloaks. The two men were almost green, and the smell of vomit almost covered the smell of blood and ordure. A third archer was wiping his hands on a linen
shirt.
Ser Thomas – Bad Tom to every man in the company – was six foot six inches of dark hair, heavy brow and bad attitude. He had a temper and was always the wrong man to cross. He was
watching his men attentively, an amulet out and in his hand. He turned at the rattle of the captain’s hardened steel sabatons on the stone path and gave him a sketchy salute. ‘Reckon
the young ‘uns earned their pay today, Captain.’
Since they weren’t paid unless they had a contract, it wasn’t saying much.
The captain merely grunted. There were six corpses in the garden.
Bad Tom raised an eyebrow and passed something to him.
The captain looked at it, and pursed his lips. Tucked the chain into the purse at his waist, and slapped Bad Tom on his paulder-clad shoulder. ‘Stay here and stay awake,’ he said.
‘You can have Sauce and Gelding, too.’
Bad Tom shrugged. He licked his lips. ‘Me an’ Sauce don’t always see eye to eye.’
The captain smiled inwardly to see this giant of a man – feared throughout the company – admit that he and a woman didn’t ‘see eye to eye’.
She came over the wall to join them.
Sauce had won her name as a whore, giving too much lip to customers. She was tall, and in the rain her red hair was toned to dark brown. Freckles gave her an innocence that was a lie. She had
made herself a name. That said all that needed to be said.
‘Tom fucked it up already?’ she asked.
Tom glared.
The captain took a breath. ‘Play nicely, children. I need my best on guard here, frosty and awake.’
‘It won’t come back,’ she said.
The captain shook his head. ‘Stay awake anyway. Just for me.’
Bad Tom smiled and blew a kiss at Sauce. ‘Just for
you
,’ he said.
Her hand went to her riding sword and with a flick it was in her hand.
The captain cleared his throat.
‘He treats me like a whore. I
am not.
’ She held the sword steady at his face, and Bad Tom didn’t move.
‘Say you are sorry, Tom.’ The captain sounded as if it was all a jest.
‘Didn’t say one bad thing. Not one! Just a tease!’ Tom said. Spittle flew from his lips.
‘You meant to cause harm. She took it as harm. You know the rules, Tom.’ The captain’s voice had changed, now. He spoke so softly that Tom had to lean forward to hear him.
‘Sorry,’ Tom muttered like a schoolboy. ‘Bitch.’
Sauce smiled. The tip of her riding sword pressed into the man’s thick forehead just over an eye.
‘Fuck you!’ Tom growled.
The captain leaned forward. ‘Neither one of you wants this. It’s clear you are both
posturing.
Climb down or take the consequences. Tom, Sauce wants to be treated as your
peer. Sauce, Tom is top beast and you put his back up at every opportunity. If you want to be part of this company then you have to accept your place in it.’
He raised his gloved hand. ‘On the count of three, you will both back away, Sauce will sheathe her weapon, Tom will bow to her and apologise, and Sauce will return his apology. Or you can
both collect your kit, walk away and kill each other. But not as my people. Understand? Three. Two. One.’
Sauce stepped back, saluted with her blade and sheathed it. Without looking or fumbling.
Tom let a moment go by. Pure insolence. But then something happened in his face, and he bowed – a good bow, so that his right knee touched the mud. ‘Humbly crave your pardon,’
he said in a loud, clear voice.
Sauce smiled. It wasn’t a pretty smile, but it did transform her face, despite the missing teeth in the middle. ‘And I yours, ser knight,’ she replied. ‘I regret my . . .
attitude.’
She obviously shocked Tom. In the big man’s world of dominance and submission, she was beyond him. The captain could read him like a book. And he thought
Sauce deserves something for
that. She’s a good man.
Gelfred appeared at his elbow. Had probably been waiting for the drama to end.
The captain felt the wrongness of it before he saw what his huntsman carried. Like a housewife returning from pilgrimage and smelling something dead under her floor – it was like that,
only stronger and wronger.
‘I rolled her over. This was in her back,’ Gelfred said. He had the thing wrapped in his rosary.
The captain swallowed bile, again.
I love this job,
he reminded himself.
To the eye, it looked like a stick – two fingers thick at the butt, sharpened to a needlepoint now clotted with blood and dark. Thorns sprouted from the whole haft, but it was fletched. An
arrow. Or rather, an obscene parody of an arrow, whittled from . . .
‘Witch Bane,’ Gelfred said.
The captain made himself take it without flinching. There were some secrets he would pay the price to preserve. He flashed on the last Witch-Bane arrow he’d seen – and pushed past
it.
He held it a moment. ‘So?’ he said, with epic unconcern.
‘She was shot in the back – with the Witch Bane – while she was alive.’ Gelfred’s eyes narrowed. ‘And then the monster ripped her face off.’
The captain nodded and handed his huntsman the shaft. The moment it left his hand he felt lighter, and the places where the thorns had pricked his chamois gloves felt like rashes of poison ivy
on his thumb and fingers – if poison ivy caused an itchy numbness, a leaden pollution.
‘Interesting,’ the captain said.
Sauce was watching him.
Damn women and their superior powers of observation,
he thought.
Her smile forced him to smile in return. The squires and valets in the garden began to breathe again and the captain was sure they’d stay awake, now. Given that there was a murderer on the
loose who had monster-allies in the Wild.
He got back to his horse. Jehannes, his marshal, came up on his bridle hand side and cleared his throat. ‘That woman’s trouble,’ he said.
‘Tom’s trouble too,’ the captain replied.
‘No other company would have had her.’ Jehannes spat.
The captain looked at his marshal. ‘Now Jehannes,’ he said. ‘Be serious. Who would have Tom? He’s killed more of his own comrades than Judas Iscariot.’
Jehannes looked away. ‘I don’t trust her,’ he said.
The captain nodded. ‘I know. Let’s get moving.’ He considered vaulting into the saddle and decided that he was too tired and the show would be wasted on Jehannes, anyway.
‘You dislike her because she’s a woman,’ he said, and put his left foot into the stirrup.
Grendel was tall enough that he had to bend his left knee as far as the articulation in his leg harness would allow. The horse snorted again. Toby held onto the reins.
He leaped up, his right leg powering him into the saddle, pushing his six feet of height and fifty pounds of mail and plate. Got his knee over the high ridge of the war-saddle and was in his
seat.
‘Yes,’ Jehannes said, and backed his horse into his place in the column.
The captain saw Michael watching Jehannes go. The younger man turned and raised an eyebrow at the captain.
‘Something to say, young Michael?’ the captain asked.
‘What was the stick? M’lord?’ Michael was different from the rest – well born. Almost an apprentice, instead of a hireling. As the captain’s squire, he had special
privileges. He could ask questions, and all the rest of the company would sit very still and listen to the answer.
The captain looked at him for a moment. Considering. He shrugged – no mean feat in plate armour.
‘Witch Bane,’ he said. ‘A Witch-Bane
arrow.
The nun had
power.
’ He made a face. ‘Until someone shot the Witch Bane into her back.’