CHAPTER NINETEEN

Skinning the dead wolf took a lot longer than Rudi had anticipated. He knew what to do, but the carcass was far larger than anything he’d ever handled before. By the time he was finished he was sweating from the exertion, and his arms were caked in blood up to the elbows. He rolled the heavy pelt into the stream to get it as clean as possible, and jumped in after it.

“Hey!” Hanna flinched away from the splash, and wiped the sprinkling of water from her face. “Watch what you’re doing!” She was teasing rather than reproving though, and she watched him scrub the gore from his skin with an expression of tolerant amusement. “Do you always take a bath with your clothes on?”

“Saves time with the laundry,” Rudi replied, ducking his head under the fast-flowing water. He shook his head, which forced her to retreat from the shower with another squeal of exasperation. “Besides, there’s your reputation to consider.”

“How very gallant.” The light tone left her voice. “Although there’s precious little of that left now.”

“Only in Kohlstadt.” Rudi gestured expansively at the landscape surrounding them. “And it’s a big world. Gerhard and his lies won’t travel far.”

“I hope so.” Hanna went back to scrubbing the blankets they’d taken from the wolf. They looked no cleaner than before, but at least the smell was less noticeable. Rudi waded out of the water, and retrieved his pack.

“I won’t be a moment,” he said, finding a bush to hide behind. He stripped off the sodden shirt and breeches, and exchanged them for the clean ones from his pack. He felt invigorated for the first time in days.

“That’s as good as they’re going to get.” Hanna eyed the blankets critically, and hung them over a branch next to the fire. It had burned low during the night, but the core of embers still glowed, throwing out a fair amount of heat. Rudi hung his wet clothes next to them, and retrieved the pelt.

“You should take a swim,” he suggested. “Freshen up a bit…”

“So you can get a good eyeful?” Hanna asked scornfully. “I don’t think so. I saw you staring at my legs yesterday.”

“I wasn’t!” The unfairness of the accusation threw him completely. “I just meant…” He shrugged, at a loss for words. “Do what you like. I’m going to check the snares.”

He strode off, seething, his momentary flash of contentment now a distant memory. The girl was impossible! Perhaps when they reached Marienburg they should go their separate ways. It wasn’t as if they had anything in common, really, beyond their immediate predicament.

His mood improved a little when he discovered that three of the snares held rabbits; the second was still twitching. He snapped its neck before retrieving the simple trap and returning it to the pouch on his belt. The familiarity of the routine was comforting, and by the time he returned to the makeshift campsite with the coneys hanging from their accustomed place at his side he was almost cheerful again.

“How did you do?” Hanna asked. Her hair was damp, but he refrained from any pointed comments about her bathing in his absence, mainly because he couldn’t think of any. He held out the furry corpses.

“Well enough. These will last a couple of days if we cook them first.” He began skinning them, and spilled their little cargo of entrails into the fire where they hissed and popped.

“Good.” Hanna indicated a small cloth-wrapped bundle. “I found a few edible plants too. Not exactly a banquet, but at least we won’t starve.”

The odour of cooking meat was almost a torture to Rudi’s empty stomach, but after what seemed like a lifetime the rabbits were done, and the two companions tore into them with an enthusiasm which would have drawn a sharp intake of breath around most of the dinner tables of Kohlstadt. Rudi gave up the idea of rationing for the time being; there were plenty more rabbits where these had come from and they had a lot of hard walking ahead of them. It was best to replenish as much energy as they could.

Soon their stomachs were comfortably full for the first time since fleeing the village and they still had the third rabbit left for later. They gathered their possessions together and set out along the stream again. By this time the morning was well advanced, but there seemed no point in hurrying. Rudi was acutely aware that for the first time in his life he was travelling through terrain he didn’t know, so he was determined to be cautious. After all, the wolf came from somewhere, so it was a reasonable guess that its rider would be somewhere in the vicinity too.

They reached the far border of the patch of woodland without further incident, shortly after the sun had passed its zenith and was casting shadows behind and to the left of them rather than ahead.

Rudi hesitated, looking out over what seemed like miles of open moor. The stream still hurried on beside them, disappearing into the distance, a thread of silver among the greens, browns, and occasional patches of vivid purple, white, or yellow wildflowers. Though he knew they had to go on, he felt uneasy with the unfamiliar terrain.

“It’s beautiful,” Hanna said beside him. Rudi glanced at her, surprised, and then back at the scene of desolation before them. It had a kind of grandeur, he supposed, but the open sky, speckled with a few wisps of cloud, seemed huge and threatening.

“We’d better take some firewood with us,” he said. “No telling what’s out there to burn.”

“Looks like plenty of brush and scrub,” Hanna said, but not forcefully enough to constitute a serious difference of opinion. “Might be a good idea to take a few logs with us if we can find some.”

They turned aside from the bank and moved off a little deeper into the wood, paralleling the boundary of the copse. Out here on the fringes the going was easy, and Rudi was surprised at how little brushwood was left lying on the ground.

“You’d think we’d have found more than this,” Hanna said after some time, staring at the meagre collection of sticks they’d managed to amass.

“Someone’s been here ahead of us,” Rudi said. He pointed to a booted footprint. “Picked the area clean.”

“There must have been quite a few of them,” Hanna said quietly. Rudi nodded.

“I think we’d better go.” The more he looked the more footprints he could see, milling around in confusion, until it was impossible to tell which direction they’d approached or left from. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. That meant whichever path they chose to take ran an equal risk of running into whoever had left them. Or whatever… There was something about the size and spacing of the prints that wasn’t quite right. A few moments later his suspicions were confirmed by the impression of a large canine footpad. “I think these are goblin tracks.”

“You think?” Hanna asked, a little nervously. “Don’t you know?”

“I’ve never seen any before,” Rudi replied, trying to keep his voice low. His father had spoken about goblins and their habits a few times, and Littman had been full of stories about the ones he’d battled, but try as he might he couldn’t recall much useful information. They were slightly smaller than humans on average, he remembered, but vicious and cunning. They preferred to rely on ambush or vastly superior numbers when facing a foe.

He turned to scan the undergrowth. He could see countless places to conceal himself without much difficulty. Then he calculated that the number of tracks indicated a fair-sized warband, a dozen of the creatures at least.

A stronger patch of sunlight indicated the direction of the forest’s edge, and he began to move towards it. Hanna followed. The main thing, he thought, is to get out of the trees. Goblins didn’t like direct sunlight, they preferred to lurk in the dark places, so they ought to be safe from pursuit if they got onto the open moor. They could pick up the stream once they were beyond the tree line…

“What’s that?” Hanna pointed at a strange lump lying ahead of them, dappled by the shadows of the leaves overhead. It looked like a diseased plant growth of some kind, or a rotting log, but as they moved closer Rudi got a clearer look at it and froze.

“Wait.” He held out an arm to bar her way, momentarily distracted by the sensation of something soft and yielding as she walked into it. Ignoring her faint annoyed sigh he focussed on the thing on the pathway ahead of them. The colours had fooled him for a moment but now his sight had adjusted, and he could clearly make out the shape of a head and arm sprawled out on the dirt, the dark green of the flesh blending into the mud-brown tunic and trews the thing wore. “It’s a goblin!”

“Is it dead?” Hanna asked, craning her neck to see. Rudi shrugged, and fitted an arrow into his bow. Killing the wolf had boosted his confidence with the weapon. He really ought to be able to hit a stationary target from this close.

He drew and loosed in one fluid motion, and almost against his expectation the shaft thudded home in the goblin’s torso. The body shuddered briefly from the impact then lay still, instead of spasming and shrieking like a live target would. It hadn’t been shamming then, hoping to lure them closer before launching an attack.

“I think so,” he said laconically, amused at the girl’s expression. He nocked another shaft before advancing. Even though it had genuinely been dead there could be others lurking in ambush, using the corpse as bait in a trap. With his ears straining for any tell-tale rustling in the undergrowth he crept forward until he was standing above the cadaver.

Up close it was even more hideous than he’d imagined. A large head with a flattened nose and a wide drooling mouth was attached to a scrawny body. Had it been standing, the skull would have appeared too large for the torso supporting it. Sharp teeth, more like fangs or tusks, were revealed by the drooping lips, slack now in death. With a grimace of disgust he bent to retrieve his arrow.

“And I thought its blanket smelled bad.”

“What killed it?” Hanna asked, walking up to him, and looking down at it curiously. “Some kind of animal?”

“I can’t see any tracks,” Rudi said, his sense of foreboding returning stronger than ever. The only footprints he could see in the carpet of loam were their own, and the goblin’s. Judging by the spacing, and the length of the creature’s legs, it had been running when it died. He looked at the body again. There was a dark discolouration on its back and its tunic was charred. As he bent closer there was the unmistakable smell of burned flesh.

“Sorcery,” Hanna said, making the sign of the dove. Rudi looked hard at her, and she flushed. “What else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He was going to regret asking this, he knew, but… “Does anything seem familiar about it?”

“What’s that supposed to imply?” Hanna snapped, and he took an instinctive step backwards.

“Nothing! I just thought… Well, you can read.” The thought came from nowhere, the perfect way to mollify her. “You must know a lot of things. Stuff I’ve never even heard about.” A faint part of his mind remembered Gerhard’s words about Greta. There were certain books. He wondered if Hanna had read them too, or had even been aware of their existence.

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Her tone was still waspish, but less defensive. “There are some colleges of magic which use fire as a weapon. I imagine the effects would be something like this.”

“So we might be dealing with a wizard.” The thought was hardly comforting. He remembered a band of roving adventurers who had wandered through Kohlstadt a year or so before, and spent the night at the tavern. One of them had been a wizard, a thin, pale-faced young man who’d said very little, but somehow seemed more dangerous than all his heavily armed companions put together. The largest and most belligerent of the group, who’d been trying to pick a fight with Big Franz, had sat down and shut up after the young man had said a few quiet words and had seemed positively nervous for the rest of the evening.

“Maybe.” The thought seemed to interest Hanna. “At least we wouldn’t have much to worry about then.”

“Why not?” Rudi asked, not caring how naive the question made him look. Hanna gave him a pitying glance.

“Because the only sort of wizard likely to be wandering around the back end of nowhere killing goblins would be part of a mercenary group. We’d be safe enough with them.”

“Unless they heard we were wanted for heresy,” Rudi pointed out mildly. Hanna flushed, turning the body over with her foot, and unnecessary vigour. “What are you doing?”

“Just seeing if there’s anything we’re missing,” Hanna said, but the dead goblin looked even more repulsive lying on its back. For the life of him Rudi couldn’t understand what she was getting at. After a moment she turned away and headed for the light at the edge of the woodland.

Rudi watched her go, nonplussed for a second. Then he hurried after her, trotting to keep up. He’d almost reached her elbow when she stopped suddenly.

“Shallya’s mercy!” There was no need to ask what had shocked her so profoundly. Ahead of them was a clearing littered with corpses like the one they’d just seen, but this time there was no doubt as to what had killed the greenskins. Raw, bloody wounds marked their corpses, where they’d been hacked, slashed, or bludgeoned to death. Some bore the unmistakable stigmata of claw or fang, others seemed to have simply been ripped apart. “What could have done something like this?”

Rudi had a terrible suspicion he knew. Sure enough, as they picked their way across that churned and bloody ground, he began to pick out the prints of cloven hooves.

“Beastmen,” he said. He glanced around, looking for some sign to confirm it, like the shaggy corpses in the glade where his father had died, but if the goblins had managed to kill any of their assailants the marauders had taken the bodies with them. So they’d probably got away with no casualties, he thought, as beastmen didn’t seem to be sentimental.

“Do you think they followed us?” Hanna asked, her face ashen. Rudi shook his head.

“Why would they?” he asked reasonably. “They’ve obviously passed through here ahead of us anyway.” Another thought occurred to him. “That’s assuming they’re the same warband.”

“Oh come on!” Hanna was scornful. “We haven’t had a beastman incursion around here in decades, and now two warbands turn up at the same time?”

“It’s possible,” Rudi said. Then he shrugged. “So long as they stay out of our way I don’t really care.”

“Come to that, neither do I.” Hanna squared her shoulders and started walking again. She picked her way fastidiously through the corpses. Rudi followed, keeping a little tension in the bowstring, ready to draw and shoot at the first sign of movement, but none came.

As they left the shelter of the trees and he felt the warmth of the sun on his face a faint sigh escaped him. It struck him how tightly his body had been wound. Hanna glanced back into the shade behind them with undisguised relief.

“I think we should get as far away from here as possible before night comes,” she said. Rudi nodded, and returned the arrow to his quiver.

“I think the stream’s that way.” They angled away from the stand of trees rather than following it back to the water, so it was some time before they had the comforting torrent of water at their side again. It was only then, as he watched a twig whirling past on the current, that Rudi realised they hadn’t remembered to pick up any firewood after all.