Free Forged in Battle by Justin Hunter - (ebook by Undead) Page B

“Late!” it hissed. “We wait!”
    “I’m here now,” Eugen said.
    “We wait!” the thing said, but its tone was almost
celebratory, as if waiting was a pleasant experience in itself.
    “We’re agreed?” Eugen tried to say to the thing, but it was
involved in a strange dance, stamping its hooves and shaking its curled rams
horns to either side and jiggling the rattle. The dance lasted for a few
minutes, and Eugen felt his skin prickle and realised that he’d been surrounded
by a ring of horned figures. His horse sensed this too and snorted nervously,
then the shaman’s dance ended suddenly and it shook his gruesome rattle in
Eugen’s face.
    “Agreed!” the shaman told him, its face so close to Eugen’s
that he could see the goat lips curl back from the teeth in a gruesome smile.
    “I will do what we agreed,” Eugen said slowly and
deliberately.
    The shaman shook its horns and started to stamp backwards.
“Waiting for you!” it called out and Eugen saw the circle of warriors disappear
as well.
    Eugen let out a long sigh of relief. He hated dealing with
creatures like these. They had different understandings of a pact. They were
just as likely to eat you as wait to eat a hundred people tomorrow.
    When Eugen turned his horse it reared up in terror.
    Eugen had to fight to bring it back under control and then he
saw what had terrified the animals so. Standing not two feet behind him was a
huge beast, almost tall enough to look Eugen in the eye. The creature had bull’s
horns which swept forward in a deadly curve and a shaggy mane of knotted fur
hung down over monstrous knotted shoulders. What made it most terrifying of all
was that the whole creature was an albino: head to foot it was stark white.
    The snout opened in a snarl, and Eugen swallowed. As if in
answer to his prayers, the beast took a step backwards, still facing him as it
paced away until its ghostly white form disappeared from sight into the
shadows.

 
 
CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    For a thousand years, under the dripping stalactites and the
crude cave paintings, legends had been told about that which had been stolen.
From the high peaks of Frantzplinth, beastmen warriors had stood on the rocky
crags, their manes ruffling in the mountain winds, their horns stark against the
thin, blue heavens: staring down at the curve of the river, and the brown
irregular shape of fields and farmsteads, and the semi-circle of the
thousand-year man-camp.
    Now, as the sun’s rays caught the peak of Frantzplinth, those
warriors took their shields from the crude racks. Ancient banners of stretched
manskin were taken from the cave walls. The poles of heads, some dried and
crinkled with age, stared with sightless eyes as the migration gathered pace.
    The beast herds moved down ancient mountain paths and began
to flow together, ancient animosities laid aside for the common cause. They
flowed together like streams running into a river, growing in strength and
momentum, until a mighty flood flowed silently through the high mountain
forests.
     
    In the Jorg family mill, a few miles east of Helmstrumburg on
the Kemperbad Road, Andres Jorg woke with a start and found that he’d fallen
asleep across the kitchen table. Bright sunlight streamed in through the open
shutters.
    His neck was stiff, his back ached, his mouth tasted of stale
spirits and his head felt as if a dwarf had been hammering it all night. To top
it all his leg was aching. Not his actual leg, but the leg he’d lost more than
twenty years ago on a surgeon’s table while stray cannon and gunshot whizzed all
around. From his knee downwards, there was no shin: just a finely polished piece
of oak, shod with a steel cap.
    Andres pushed himself up, stumped over to the water barrel
and took the dipper and drank it dry. He drank another one, and felt a little
better, cursed the spirits he’d been drinking.
    Never again, he told himself, as he’d sworn so many