Negotiations Ch. 04

A/N: No porn in this one, just the dreaded plot rearing its ugly head. If you are looking for the a quick and dirty fix you have to go to previous chapters.

--------

If the orcs pursuing them seemed to previously fly over snow drifts with the fleetness of hunting dogs, now that nothing could be done other than wait for the inevitable, the whole horde is apparently waddling through molasses.

Pike walks down their thin line next to Theobald, watching him speak quiet words of encouragement to the men. The pale guards are warming their wax covered bowstrings, arrows planted at their feet, with grim detachment, the caravan men waiting next to them are pale and silent, fingers white around spear shafts and ax handles. Conversation is sparse and muted; nobody has the stomach for unnecessary chatter. A few of the men they pass mumble quiet prayers to the Mistress of Fate, She-who-weaves-the-thread and the Lord of Masks, Him-of-the-falling-dice. The beginning and the ending, the two sides of the ever spinning coin. Creation and destruction. Rebirth and death.

Pike raises a quiet prayer to the Dawnflower, asking for protection and comfort.

Your cool hand on their sweaty brow on the eve of battle, your strength to fortify their hearts in the fray, your smile and warm embrace to comfort them on their final journey.

Grog jumps on top of the barricade of overturned carts and barrels full of copper sheeting, and bellows a challenge in the lengthening evening shadows. Pike steps up next to him, shield and mace at the ready. This is where their hammer will fall, where battle will be joined most fiercely.

The gray overcast sky, whose clouds have brought sleet and snowstorms for the last three days, has ripped open, and the pink, indigo and orange of the setting sun paints the snow-covered peaks of the alabaster sierras with the bright red of arterial blood. The orc hordethrows long shadows over the pale blue snow, just within bowshot reach.

"Safe your shafts; the wind is too gusting. Ain't gonna hit jack shit, boys. Wait until you cansee the white in their eyes."

The percussive crack of a gun shot makes Pike wheel on her heel, heart beating in her throat.

Of course Percy is nowhere to be seen, but a young Guardsman has unpacked a long musket and is scanning the enemy line through his scope. Theobald and Agnes have taken up position next to the boy, talking quietly.

"If there is a bone caster or shaman among the vermin, he has to go first. Then the war chief and any berserkers."

The musket barks again and one of the orcs fall heavily into the snow, his leg kicked out from under him. A roaring bellow is raised from the war band, echoing from the grey granite of the valley walls, dozens of spears and ax heads rhythmically hammering against shields and breastplates, a throbbing counterpoint to their chant:

Sword time,

Ax time,

Shields splinter

The musket cracks again and the ululating wailing about to reach a crescendo is cut short when the head of the one leading the chant, explodes in a cloud of blood and bone splinters.

Slowly first, then gathering speed as best as possible in an uphill climb through hip deep snow, the orcs lumber forward. The gun fire behind her picks up pace, as their sniper is reloading as fast as he can and guardsmen and mercenaries recurve bows and crossbows.

Pike tightens the straps holding her shield to her forearm, hefts her mace and takes her placenext to Grog.

"Listen, buddy. If this goes sideways you grab Papa Willhand and that Monk, Percy asked us to get, throw them over your shoulder and make for Whitestone. Get your fun in now cause there will be no heroic charges for you later. You hear me, big guy?"

"But Piiiiiike ..."

"Don't you start! Papa Willhand made the Steak-and-Ale pie just for you, because he knows you like it and he shared his good booze, too. The least you can do is help him over some snow drifts."

Pike wags her finger at the Goliath. "Don't pout either. Here come your playmates and they are all yours."

Two dozen orcs are charging up the winding cart road, fetishes and scalps streaming from their spear shafts, while the rest of the war band is trying to scale the side of the steep incline, through bare willow scrub and deep snow.

The first three orcs stumble and fall, crossbow bolts blooming like bizarre red flowers from their bodies, but the rest jump over their fallen comrades and keep coming, snarling with blood lust.

A javelin whirrs over her head, another she bashes to the side with her shield, sending it spinning into the falling dusk.

Grog bellows a challenge next to her and Pike finds peace. In the cold, feverish clarity of the sword dance she feels closest to Sarenrae. She is well aware of the inherent irony of being nearest to a goddess of healing and redemption during an act of destruction and bloodshed.

Nonetheless this is the purest form of prayer she knows, no base impulses of malice and cruelty, no nagging self-doubt, no city to protect, no friends to disappoint with weakness and absence, no boy with blue eyes, smiling enigmatically, but offering no answers, just the beautiful clarity of the task at hand and the bloody, terrible elegance of motion and force that is war.

The first orc to clamber onto their barricade is bodily dragged off by Grog with a triumphant roar, and thrown face-down into the snow, before his ax comes down and takes the top of the head off in a shower of blood and brain. A second is pushed back off the barricade by three mercenaries with longspears, blood dripping from his stab wounds. A third thrown back. A fourth.

Then the rest wash over the barricade, a howling tide of muscle, dirty leather armor and sharp blades.

Pike steps into the ark of the sickle sword, aimed at the weak point in her armor between pauldrons and gorget, hammers the rim of her shield upwards against the down coming arm, feeling the crack of breaking bone more than hearing it.

Her mace whips around and smashes against the knee joint of the Orc, who collapses sideways with a howl of pain, as his leg bends in a way it wasn't meant to. She has half a heartbeat to register the fear in his eyes, as her momentum carries her through her form and her mace comes down, caving in his chest, creating a pulped mass of blood and bone splinters.

No time for triumph or tragedy, her heart beating in her ears like a war drum, she pivots on her back foot and ducks just in time to let the war hammer whistle over her head. She stumbles backward, takes the second blow with her shield, a needle of white hot pain lancing up her arm into her shoulder, as the shear momentum of the war hammer drives her to one knee.

Pike draws from deep within herself, from the quiet, light-flooded memory halls, opens the door to the song of the weave, the golden, clever bird drill that is her patron goddess, tugs on strings of might and maybe, in that fuzzy, unformed shadow realm where possibility condenses into reality, where the great rivers of the arcane and divine have their headwaters.

A summoning circle of golden runes flashes into existence and for less than a heartbeat, the eyes of her opponent glow with divine fire from the inside, then the fire flickers and fades, taking the spark of life with it.

The warrior tumbles face first into the snow and lies still.

Pike stumbles to her feet, nursing her shield arm against her chest, takes a moment to assess her surroundings; to her left an orc is kneeling on top of a pretty, young stable hand she knows by sight, twisting his blade in the boy's gut. Judging from his quiet whimpering and the amused chuckling of the orc, the poor kid is still alive.

With a silent snarl, she drops her shield and grips her mace for a powerful, two-handed overhead strike, ignoring the shooting pains in her left arm. The world seems to slow down, her boots crunching in the blood-stained snow, the cold air burning in her lungs as she rushes forward.

At the last moment the orc notices movement out of the corner of his eye, interrupts his sport and throws himself to the right, so the mace smashes his, no her, collarbone and shoulder joint instead of her head.

Pain explodes in Pike's left arm, her mace dropping from her nerveless fingers, as she fights down the nausea and blackness creeping into her field of vision. When she has regained her composure, the boy is motionlessly curled up in growing pool of red, his tormentor whimpering in the snow next to him.

With trembling fingers she reaches for her golden memory halls and the divine gate therein once more to summon forth, healing, mending, relief for her arm and the pale boy, lying so still in his bed of blood and snow.

Before the incantation can complete her helmet is yanked backwards, the chins strap digging in her flesh, a jagged dagger reaching for her throat. Her right gauntlet snaps up catching her opponent's wrist, while she throws her body backwards against his legs, hammering her shoulder upwards into the exposed groin.

Limbs intertwined, they both go tumbling into the snow, rolling down the road. Teeth are snapping shut centimeters from her nose, carrion breath and saliva spraying in her face, the tip of the dagger scratching over her gorget.

Pike is far stronger than any girl of her size has any right to be, but her left arm is throbbing and she has been running on fumes for weeks now, the bone-deep exhaustion and weariness of first the dragon wars and now the famine, crisis chasing crisis, is beginning to tell. She is losing ground. The orc is leaning his full body weight on his dagger with a triumphant grin, intend on driving it into her face like an icepick.

With a groan she gathers what strength she has left, hammers her armored knee upwards into his stomach and tries to roll out from under her opponent but the orc is holding on like a vice.

Her forearm is trembling and the knife point is hovering centimeters from her eyes.

Suddenly her enemy gargles, vomiting forth a gout of blood, as a sword blade protrudes from his mouth like an obscene tongue.

Exhausted Pike wipes blood from her eyes, let's her head fall back into the snow and just breathes for a few seconds. When she has heaved the corpse of her fallen foe off herself and stumbled to her feet, her rescuer has already rejoined the fray.

The tide has turned.

Grog's roaring battle cry is echoing from the granite peaks, his great ax whirling as he drives three orcs before him.

Theobald and Agnes have teamed up, longsword on the right, rapier and dagger to the left, dispatching orcs with a grim economy of motion.

The arrow volleys at point blank range into slow moving targets have done terrible execution. More than a dozen orc bodies litter the incline below the battlefield, slowly staining the snow crimson red, not counting the fallen on the road leading to their barricade.

The rest of the war band has carved a bloody path through the defenders, but their superior numbers are beginning to tell, as groups of twos and threes fall upon the surviving orcs, blades flashing.

With a trembling hand she strips the gauntlet from her left hand, already beginning to swell up like a red-blue sausage. Broken.

Fighting down the pain, she draws deep from the well-spring, which flows from her heart and brain, golden rune circles flashing around her arm, as bone realigns and knits and swollen tissue and tortured nerves are given relief.

Grog and half a dozen Pale Guardsmen are mopping up the last resistance, as the final survivors of the war band run for their lives. Sell-swords, guardsmen and wagoners alike are tending to their fallen, while others are dispatching wounded orcs. Picking up her mace, she staggers towards the long line of wounded being collected in a hastily assembled field hospital.

***

"Johann, more hot water. I suppose asking for clean linens would be overly optimistic?"

"The answer is the same as the last three times." The hulking barber surgeon presses a tankard of hot broth in her hand. "Here, drink this. Can't have you collapsing on us now, we still have four more guys to go and Marten has started bleeding, again."

Pike sighs quietly. "How inconsiderate of him."

She wipes her bloody hands on a rag and rises slowly, her whole body aching. It's cold and windy in their improvised lean-to, night has fallen and the oil lamps are throwing flickering, dancing shadows on the canvas. Outside a wolf is howling, a sound filled with pain, a sound fit to make the soul freeze.

She hobbles over and sinks to her knees next to the makeshift bedstead of a balding mercenary. His breath gurgles in his lungs and reaches out for the well spring in her soul, though it has shrunken to a meager trickle.

She has poured too much of herself into the broken vessels of their wounded, and the strain is beginning to take its toll. A faintly glowing rune circle blinks into existence, hovering over the hairy chest of the motionless mercenary, as her senses reach out, feel the hastily beating heart, the black growths in his liver, the gnarled muscles, the wrongness of punctured arteries leaking blood into his left lung.

She wrenches the universe sideways, forces the flow of time up an infinitesimally different path, as arteries and capillaries reknit themselves and Marten coughs up red-tinged saliva.

Her field of vision contracts, blackness seeping in from the edges; and she wipes away a trickle of blood escaping from her nose. Only the meaty paw of a hand on her shoulder prevents her from toppling face first into a bucket full of bloody bandages and vomit.

"Alright. Time for a break. Go out and get some fresh air and something to eat. Look after your pop-pop maybe." Johann shoves her towards the tent flap none-too-gently. The wolf outside has taken up his song of pain again, drawn out ululating, wailing, animal noises, bordering on agony. Pike can hear low laughter in rough voices. "Maybe have a look what those fucking ingrates are up to now."

"Make up your mind, please. Either I take a break or I babysit your idiot friends?" Pike gripes as she stumbles out of the tent.

The night is icy cold and crystal clear, stars spilling over the sable black of the night sky like an emperor's treasure trove. Most of their people are huddled around the watch fires for warmth but a few are repacking the carts or tending the draft animals in the flickering torch light.

Pike looks around for Grog and finds his hulking, black silhouette among a group of men, standing in a circle around a dark bundle in the snow. One of them does something, the glint of a dagger, red in the torchlight and the bundle, no ... the orc, rears up against the boots pressing him into the snow, howling like the souls of the damned.

Pike takes a step forward, when a voice stops her.

"I wouldn't do that."

Theobald is sitting in the wind shade of the tent, a bottle of sharp-smelling whiskey at his feet, longsword, oil and whetstone in his lab.

"You wouldn't stop an outrage?"

The old warrior is not impressed.

"These are the fruits of wrath. The wages of war. Not so popular among the bards and storytellers but no less real for that. They like the flying banners and polished armour but seem less inclined to sing about the burning cities and screaming children." The whetstone rhythmically scrapes over steel.

"I don't stand for sadists among my people, but every man in that circle has lost someone today."

He nods to a line of still figures in the snow, blood-stained cloaks drawn over empty, staring eyes. "With the exception of your big friend maybe."

"They have a right to their vengeance. Better they get it out of their system before we return to civilization. Or do you want them to take that home with them? The rage. The hate. To their families? To their children? You are warrior; you are telling me you have never dinned from this dish?"

Pike thinks of a Duergar with a slit throat thrashing under her boot, thinks of blood on Vax's blades, Grog's terrible red grin, the smell of searing flesh and black smoke, Percy whispering:

"Take his tongue."

She thinks of her terrible savage joy in the sword dance and the metallic taste of blood on her lips.

She thinks of all the hate and secrets she keeps hard and silent in her heart, a black thorn bush bearing ghastly fruit.

"The art, Master Theobald, is in not letting it rule you."

She shoulders through the throng of men, comes face to face with the man, the boy, holding the knife. For but a moment she stares into the face of a ghost, before recognizing the elder brother of the boy who was slain in front of her eyes but hours earlier. Judging from the crushed shoulder joint, she also has met their victim before.

She keeps her eyes averted from the bloody crater between the legs of the orc and extends her hand: "Give me the knife, Wilfred. This will not bring your brother back."

He turns his head, his eyes the color of flame at its hottest point. She has starred down dragons and not blinked but the empty, burning hate in this kid makes her soul freeze. "Carefully now, Pikeypants." Be very careful, now. It probably should give her pause how much the voice in her head sounds like Scanlan, but strangely enough it's only comforting.

"No. But you might have if you weren't too busy with other things."

Shame curdles thick and heavy in her belly. "I'm sorry I saw him too late, but we had so many wounded, I couldn't waste so much of my energy on ..."

"...him?" His eyes flash dangerously and Pike bites her lip hard. Smooth talking golden girl.

She rarely has missed Scanlan and his silver tongue as badly as she does now.

"There are rituals we can try, when we are back in Whitestone I can ..."

"Horseshit." His eyes are bright with unshed tears. He is leaning in close, his nose only centimeters from hers, so she can smell the cheap rotgut on his breath. Grog is looming in the background like a thundercloud, but she gives him a barely perceptible shake of the head. Not yet.

"Nobody is going to pay for a resurrection ritual for some stable boy. I certainly can't. But this animal will." He stabs his gore smeared dagger towards the whimpering creature in the snow before them and turns away from Pike towards his victim.

"I will cut her open from cunt to eyeballs and make a tea cozy from her entrails."

She gently grasps his wrist. "I can't let you do that."

His head whips around like a startled cat, teeth bared. "How are you going to stop me holy woman? How?"

She can feel the mood shifting around her, the barely contained violence in the crowd around her and very consciously does not reach for the dagger on her hip. They are heartbeats away from spilling blood. Grog is only three steps away, so there is no real danger, but this could turn very ugly in a hurry, if she can't find the right words.

Crunch. The sickening sound of a head being crushed like an overripe melon bursts through the tense silence.

Grog gives her an apologetic shrug, lifts his boot from the smashed head of the corpse and wipes the sole in the snow.

"Show is over boys. It was fun while it lasted, but I was getting bored anyway."

His left gauntlets close around the knife blade and squeezes, crushing the cheap steel faster than any hydraulic press, but his voice is surprisingly gentle, when his right falls on Wilfred's shoulder.

"Ain't nothing to be done about it now, boy. Let's all have a drink of my ale and pour a cup to thin air for the fallen."

The intimidating presence of the hulking goliath and the prospect of drink seems to have done what her words could not and the crowd starts to break up, following Grog, who is steering the blindly stumbling Wilfred to the ale casks.

Pike and the mutilated corpse, lying still in the snow, stay behind. Torchlight is glinting off something in the dead woman's right hand. When she bends down and pries open the clenched fist, she finds a crudely carved cave bear tooth, a lock of fine red hair tied around it.