No new enemy emerged from the shadows, and Sig slid from her saddle and approached the entrance. There was a long rasp as her longsword slipped from its scabbard. Cullen tugged his spear from the dead man and joined her in the approach to the Kadoshim’s lair. Keld was at his shoulder, his short-handled axe in one fist, knife in the other. Behind them Elgin and his warriors dismounted and followed.
A dozen paces into the tunnel a torch-sconce was hammered into the stone wall. It flared and sputtered, below it the remains of a burned-out fire. A spit rested above the fire and a pot sat beside it, a few cups of wood and leather about it. No one was there. Keld crouched to touch the ash and embers and his hounds padded past him. Together they stopped, sniffing the air and their hackles rose. As one they growled, a low, savage snarling. Keld looked back at Sig.
‘It’s here,’ he breathed.
A thrill of excitement threaded through Sig, everything around her becoming a little sharper.
Six years gone since the kin last hunted a Kadoshim to bay and killed it.
Cullen swept past her – an unblooded hound eager for the kill.
Sig grabbed his shoulder with her iron grip and scowled a warning at him.
She strode past him and Keld, following the tunnel as it twisted deeper into the hillside, sloping gently upwards. Torches flickered periodically, light then darkness. As she climbed higher the air seemed to thicken, a smell of things long dead, a corruption in the air.
The tunnel opened ahead and Sig came into a small chamber. A single shadowed exit on its far side. A fire-pit sat in the middle of this chamber, embers still glowing, and around the edges furs and blankets were splayed, a rack of weapons, spears and rusted swords leaned against one wall, though there was no sign of the living. Cracks in the wall oozed damp earth, worms as thick as rope were wriggling within it.
‘Fifty-two,’ Cullen said, counting the furs spread about the chamber’s edges. He shared a look with Sig and Keld.
Never this many. So, the rumours are true.
‘A better fight, if they’re all here,’ Cullen declared, not able to keep the grin from his face.
Sig gave him a flat stare.
The hounds growled, paws splayed as they half-crouched, hackles a ridge upon their backs, lips curled to reveal sharp teeth. Keld hissed a command. Then a tendril of sound drifted down to them, emerging from the darkness of the exit on the far wall: voices, joined together, chanting, a cadence to it rising and falling. They set a chill trickling down Sig’s spine, and behind her she heard muttering amongst Elgin’s men.
Sig strode into the darkness, the chanting growing louder as she climbed higher, past another flickering torch. She felt her flesh goosebump, a creeping dread seeping into her, thick in the air, making her limbs grow heavy. The urge to stop and go back wormed into her mind.
Something is at work here.
‘Truth and Courage,’ she hissed at the darkness and saw either side of her Cullen and Keld straighten at those words, the Order’s battle-cry and mantra. And then, in front of them was an arched doorway, a form silhouetted against the fire’s red glow. The chanting was loud, echoing down the tunnel, filling Sig’s head and heart with dismay.
Go back, go back, fear’s voice whispered in her head.
‘Truth and Courage,’ she snarled back at it and surged forwards. The silhouette turned, a man, head shaven to scabbed stubble. His mouth opened at the sight of Sig storming out of the darkness, hounds and warriors about her. A spear in his hands levelled at Sig but her great sword was already cutting upwards, shearing through the shaft, lopping half of his hand off with it. The man stumbled backwards, amputated digits spinning through the air, his eyes fixed on the stumps where his fingers had been. A roll of Sig’s shoulders and her sword came back down to chop into the meat of him between neck and shoulder, a wet sound like an axe cleaving damp wood, bones cracking, and the man was falling back in a spray of bloody froth. Sig ripped her blade free and stood over his twitching corpse.
A circular chamber spread before her, high and wide, the roof hidden in shadow and smoke. Braziers of fire belched red light, casting misshapen shadows. A crowd of men and women at least forty-strong gathered around a dais at the chamber’s centre, chanting in a tongue Sig had never heard before. They were all shaven-headed, and Sig glimpsed the gleam of chainmail and weapons.
These are not disgruntled farmers, or deluded dissenters, Sig thought. More like warrior-acolytes.
Upon the dais was a wooden cross-frame; a figure was bound wrist and ankle upon it, a man stripped naked.
And close as a lover to this man stood a figure, tall, head shaved, its skin pale as alabaster, mapped by dark veins. It wore a shirt of rusty mail, a sword sheathed at its hip, and from its back great wings of leather and skin were furled. Power and malice pulsed from it like a heat haze.
Kadoshim.
Something inside Sig leaped at the sight of it, a jolt of hatred racing through her, burning away any remnants of fear that lingered in her veins. Once she had seen these Kadoshim in their thousands filling the skies above Drassil, and since then she and those like her had hunted these dread creatures, over a hundred years of blood and war. At first the fighting had been constant, but in the last score of years the Kadoshim were rarely found – so much so that her Order was questioning whether the creatures had been brought close to extinction in the Banished Lands.
Not extinct yet.
As Sig stared, the Kadoshim thrust a knife into the belly of the prisoner, a gush of blood and coiled entrails splashing from the gaping wound. There was the sudden rush of blood-stink and hot metal in the air as the man screamed his agony over the fevered chanting from the crowd.
Then the Kadoshim saw Sig and the shadowed figures of her companions behind her. Their eyes met and the chanting about the chamber stuttered and died.
The Kadoshim pointed its blood-slick knife at Sig, faces turning.
‘Kill them,’ it rasped.
CHAPTER SIX
BLEDA
Bleda stood upon the walls of Drassil, looking down at the weapons-field below. All manner of warriors were training, learning the craft of spear, bow and sword, as well as other things.
‘Strategy, they call it,’ his friend Jin said as she pointed to a shield wall that had formed near the centre of the field. She was a ward of the Ben-Elim, too, taken the same day as him. That had been grounds enough for a friendship.
‘Cowardice is what I call it,’ she continued, head cocked to one side as she considered the warriors far below. Her jet hair was short-cropped to her head, the sharp features of her cheeks and the slight hook of her nose reminding Bleda of the stooping hawk that was the sigil of her Clan. ‘A warrior should stand one against another, whether with bow, spear or blade. That is skill, that is honour. Not that! Hiding behind your weapons-kin, hiding behind wood and iron!’