CHAPTER ONE
Slenn shivered as he picked his way across the battlefield, making his way back to the area he had left the night before with the aid of macabre markers. There was No Head, one severed arm still raised to ward off the blow that had claimed both hand and head. They turned left, following the line of his stump until they came to Third Eye, a hulking Yorughan warrior felled by a crossbow bolt sunk up to its fletching square in the middle of his forehead, drawing his eyebrows in to give him a look of startled disapproval. It had been a fine shot, and Slenn often wondered what had become of the archer who’d loosed it; although chances were he was lying dead somewhere close by.
As battlefields went, Tulkauth was almost claustrophobically compact: a shallow, natural bowl in the landscape. It wasn’t his first battlefield by any stretch, and he’d picked over enough corpses to know that the fighting had been fierce and brutal. The battle had ended with some sort of explosion that had tossed the living and the dead into great heaps, and those corpses that hadn’t been dismembered or charred beyond recognition all bore evidence of heavy and sustained combat. He’d had to cut the fingers from more than a dozen bodies where they’d died with sword in hand, still fighting even as their guts slithered out.
He paused as he reached his area, turning to wave at the three others who had followed him through the silent landscape. They returned the wave and raised their hands in a gesture of good luck before heading off to their patch. As a rule, none of them spoke while they worked; it wasn’t as much of a concern here since there were no survivors, but on other battlefields that Slenn had harvested he’d had to run the gauntlet of stray carrion beasts of every description—or worse, the provosts of the victorious army and their equally vicious dogs.
Slenn waited until the morning mist rendered the others into shapeless shadows before turning aside and picking his way past the body of a mostly fleshless Yogg, its right arm draped across its barrel like rib cage and its bony fingers just as he’d left them, silently pointing the way back to where he’d ended his search the previous afternoon. He smiled at his handiwork and made his way to the edge of the crater, the familiar thrill of excitement starting to
course through him. The ground here was glassy and brittle, and punished the careless with clouds of glittering dust that got in everywhere and quickly abraded skin. The bodies of the fallen had been unceremoniously dragged away and dumped in hastily covered pits in the aftermath of the battle, making for a truly treacherous landscape where a single misstep could spell disaster. But that same danger had kept the others away, which meant the centre of the battlefield was his for the picking, and his alone. This was where the blast that had crisped so many of the bodies had originated, which meant the bodies with the best kit were likely to be close—assuming that they had survived the conflagration. All he had to do was keep to the narrow ridge that wound between the pits and avoid falling into any of them. The steep walls were as crumbly as the dirt that covered them and climbing out would be all but impossible. He shivered at the idea of drowning in sand, slipping deeper with every struggle until he became one with the dead below.
He pushed past a particularly bloated body, wary of disturbing any of the vermin within lest they interpret it as an invasion of their territory, but nothing stirred. He paused and squatted on his heels a few paces beyond the corpse, studiously avoiding looking at its distended features.
It was quiet here, silent save for the intermittent dripping of unseen fluids and occasional dull whuff of escaping gases within the piled bodies. A few yards in front of Slenn’s boots the ground began to visibly slope away, but to reach that he’d need to pass through a pearly layer of mist, a far denser barrier than what clung to the rest of Tulkauth, and one that stubbornly defied what little sunlight managed to pierce the clouds above.
Nothing stirred around him. No flies, no flesh borers, no crows. No rats, not even the warped and scaled ones that were so prevalent in these parts. There should be something.
Battlefields were normally a banquet for vermin, and the absence of one kind was normally an invitation for another to swarm in even greater numbers. He chewed his lip for a few moments more, on the cusp of turning away when a pattering sound reached him. He glanced down and caught a glimpse of a small, mottled shape
running up the slope before it disappeared between two bodies, a long and hairless tail leaving a brief trail behind it.
Slenn exhaled and stood up, shaking his head at his own paranoia before heading down the slope, placing his feet carefully as he pushed into the unmoving mist lest he tumble forward and impale himself on some discarded weapon or ragged bone. He had a good feeling about the morning, that his luck would finally turn. All he needed was one good find that would pay off the last of his debts and put him in Boris’ good books. The man was a felon of the highest order, but he looked after those that proved themselves.
He didn’t look back, and so didn’t see the same mottled rat reappear between the corpses, thrashing and biting at itself in mindless agony in the moments before its skin sloughed off; nor how its rapidly liquefying organs poured from it soon after.
He moved down the slope, treading carefully as he passed through the heavy, clinging mist. It stirred lazily as he pushed through, the touch making his skin tingle. It felt like thick smoke in his throat, but cool and soft at the same time, a balm after the choking dust and not entirely unpleasant.
An alien landscape awaited him beneath it. The light was softer, diluted by the mist so that it seemed to come from all directions at once, leaving no shadows at all, the lack of contrast making the blasted ground look stark and unearthly. Twisted corpses that the gravediggers had missed lay scattered about, skeletal arms and bare ribs thrusting from the ground like burnt shrubs. He slowed as he came to a dozen or more ash-coated figures that lay in an untidy heap, legs and arms intertwined as if they had turned to flee at the same moment. He edged closer, suddenly convinced that they were about to turn on him; but when he was a few yards away from the silent tableau they collapsed with a soft sigh, falling into themselves and leaving only a fine soot that was almost indistinguishable from the mist above.
He covered his mouth with his neckerchief and moved on through the pall of silence, closer to the heart of the crater. The occasional boulders that he passed resolved themselves into clumps of fused flesh and metal, the tangled and unrecognisable remains of
the gods alone knew how many Yogg and human soldiers, all finally equal in death.
He’d be the first to admit he was no warrior, but he’d seen his fair share of fights and the aftermath of even more; yet nothing compared to what he saw now as he slowly edged forward. Fiery blasts left bodies broken and shrunken, so he knew that the melted remains that he saw were the remnants of many such bodies, so closely packed in their last moments of life that they had fused together; but in so doing some had defied the full ferocity of the blast. His gaze lingered on a nearby lump, following the strange, folded contours before he finally understood what he was seeing. He looked away as he saw it for what it was, but he knew the fleshless face, mouth open in a silent scream, would haunt him for some time.
He stopped and rubbed his own face with tingling hands. He had a job to do and hadn’t come here to gawk or scare himself like some wandering child. He set down his pack and adjusted his belt, slipping a pry bar and sharpened chisel into the loops. There had to be something good around here. If flesh could survive, metal and gems certainly could too.
He adjusted the neckerchief as he moved to a pile of dust-covered flesh. He planted a foot on it and plunged the pry bar into the centre of the mass, grunting with effort as he began working it back and forth. There was a reason that the gravediggers hadn’t bothered trying to move them, and he was sweating heavily before he managed to pry the first of the bodies apart.
The diffused glow around him brightened marginally as he worked his way across the crater, the only sign of the day passing outside of that strange and hidden world. He stopped when his arms were starting to ache and sat down to drink greedily from his canteen, sighing at the cool relief it offered. He hadn’t realised how painfully parched his throat was, and the beer tasted cooler and fresher than it had a right to—not that he was complaining about that. He had a few things to show for the morning, mostly deformed jewellery and few dozen gold teeth, but nothing like what he’d been hoping for and certainly nothing that justified his aching arms and the danger he was putting himself in. He stashed the bag
and canteen and stood again, disappointment weighing heavily on him as he made ready to make his way back to the patch he was supposed to be clearing. He looked around one last time, and with the sun having moved further across the battlefield, he saw an odd shadow cast where he’d only expected a heap of spoil from the pits. He cupped his hands next to his eyes and squinted at the shape the shadow had outlined, and the hitherto formless mass slowly resolved itself into what looked like several figures encased in a mound of sand and grit. Intrigued, he swung his pack over his shoulder and carefully made his way over to them, picking his way between two of the larger pits and testing the ground ahead of him with a thin rod. It was slow going, and despite his careful approach his footsteps were making the sand run from the figures entombed within it, revealing a small group of ash-covered figures that the diggers must have missed. He could see sheets of ash sliding from them as he drew closer, tiny avalanches steadily eroding their features into anonymity. When the ash eventually crumbled, it was to reveal the remnants of blackened skeletons and armour, some of which still held equally blackened flesh. That wasn’t what interested him, but rather the figure they had been facing when their world ended.
The Yogg wasn’t particularly large for his kind, although he would have towered over Slenn in life. The explosion had torn away at least half of his torso and his pose echoed so many of the other figures that Slenn had seen, arms raised in a vain attempt to ward off the fatal blow. The ash had cascaded from his face at Slenn’s approach, leaving his skull exposed, and Slenn smiled under his neckerchief as he noted the fine, gold inlaid carvings that decorated the tusks jutting from its heavy jaw. Work like that fetched a good price among certain collectors, especially if it came from a Heart Taker.
It wasn’t the explosion that had slain the Yogg mage, though; Slenn’s money was on the four-inch crescent that had split its forehead. Without flesh to hide it, he could even see the canyon that bisected its cheekbone and nasal cavity, probably when the sword had been drawn back after the deadly blow. He shivered at the thought of the level of violence that went into delivering a blow like that and turned to look at the skeletons around him. Had one of
them delivered the fatal stroke? He turned back and studied the ground around him, noting the scorch marks that radiated outwards from the body like a star, the melted and reformed rock gleaming like scar tissue. This was it, the origin of the blast.
Slenn shivered as he looked at the Heart Taker again, noting how both forearms ending just below the elbows. Whoever had delivered the killing blow had chopped through both in the same stroke instead. He paused with one hand on its tusk, scuffing the melted rock with the toe of his boot. Whatever had killed so many here had happened quickly, even before the body had a chance to fall. At least it was quick. He pulled the tusks and patted the Yogg’s broken forehead, which shattered at his touch, making him start.
Shaking his head at his own foolishness, he moved past the gruesome figure and turned his attention to a clump of largely unidentifiable remains behind it. He pulled the loose parts away with his hands, then dug the pry bar in. It was hard work separating them, but one good thing about the bodies having being baked hard by the fire was that they weren’t bloated and leaking like those he’d had to contend with on other sites. Dealing with aching arms and sweat was far easier than working amidst a cloud of bloatflies.
He’d just pried a warped breastplate from the mass when he caught the gleam of something wedged beneath it. He set the gilded breastplate aside; whole, it might have fetched a good price, but it was hard to sell armour that had so clearly failed its previous owner. He eased the bar back into the pile with far greater care, working it back and forth until he could get a better idea of what he was dealing with. Something round and golden. A crown? Slenn grinned under his handkerchief and fought the urge to rush. One careless stroke could halve the value of something—or worse, attract Boris’ ire.
He sat back on his heels and rubbed his tingling arms. It wasn’t a crown—not that he’d ever seen one in real life—but it was clearly something special. He would have liked there to be a few nice gems, but it only had what looked like silver or perhaps iron plates bound to a golden headband with copper wire of some sort. He lifted his canteen out and poured a small amount of beer over some of the small plates, washing at least one layer of muck from them, just
enough to reveal the angular script carved into each. It was definitely Yogg. He licked his lips and moved to carefully slip a small knife under it, but even with such caution he still yelped like a kicked dog when a purple-hued spark leapt from the band to his blade, numbing his fingers. He squatted back and tried to shake some life back into them, the discomfort lost beneath a rising excitement. If it had magic, this was the find that would make him.
He wrapped the knife handle in cloth and tried again. This time there was no spark, and the congealed muck released the rest of the crown without too much of a struggle. He shuffled back a few paces and set it down on some clear ground, then sat back and tried not to weep.
It was a fantastic piece, clearly valuable, only it would have been more so were it not for the smooth-edged break in what he took to be the front, largely because of the two cloudy gemstones on either side of gap. He glanced over to the Yogg wizard’s broken skull and back again, the images of what must have happened on that day assembling themselves in his mind.
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