Interlude
It was good to finally feel proper cold, even if it was a month later than it would’ve been at home. Nyndstir hadn’t seen home, of course, in almost a decade, but he still compared most everything to it.
And right now hireling work in the baronies was freezing dismal, mostly because he hated being near the glowing-eyed bastards in robes.
Glowing eyes, glowing mouths, glowing Cold-damned skin. Un-freezing-natural, he thought, as he spent the greyest part of dawn trudging along with other swords-at-hire while one of their employers rode in a large, boxy wagon behind them.
He started to feel uneasy as soon as they came upon the bodies. Not because they were bodies. Nyndstir Obertsun had seen enough corpses, made enough, woken up next to them, spent time on ships with them. The form of a man that had once been quick and was now gone to the Cold had no effect upon him.
Nyndstir felt fear because he knew what was coming.
The wagon creaked to a halt and the hirelings spread out along the road. An odd lot: barony men, one other Islandman, a smattering of dark-skinned Concordat, fair-haired Keersvasters. Only about a dozen men. Not counting what’s in the wagon, he thought. If they’re still men.
The sound of the steps lowering, the soft footfalls as the sorcerer made his way to the front of his men, the sound of the contented sigh as he looked upon the bodies. “Three more for our cause,” he said, almost brightly. “Strip them.”
Two were greenhats, Barony Delondeur’s guardsmen in cities and towns big enough to need them. Quickly the mercenaries pulled off their armor, their weapons, laying it all carefully aside. The third was a thin, wiry man, probably in his thirties but looking older, with a nasty wound in his side. One of the greenhats had his head bashed in, while the other looked like a spirit of the night air had grown claws and ripped the side of his neck and top of his shoulder open.
Nyndstir didn’t assist in stripping the bodies. There was a hierarchy to these things. Men with his experience didn’t pull the shit jobs. They stood around till there was something to kill.
He made himself watch as the sorcerer drew signs over the bodies, the sickly yellow runes hanging in the air. He’d seen this once already, and found it made his stomach uneasier than the worst sea voyage he’d ever had, but he’d be damned before he’d turn away from it.
The sign drawn over the thinner, unarmored man dissipated like smoke.
The sorcerer frowned, leaned over the body again, and drew his hand through the air. Nyndstir heard words on the wind, an obscene whisper he didn’t want to listen to.
Then a tiny chime, like some silver bell on a dancer’s scarf, and again, the sign vanished, carried away as if by a breeze.
Nyndstir worked awfully hard to keep a smirk off his face, but he found he liked seeing the sorcerer failing. He just knew better than to be seen liking it, so he stared hard at the dirt while he felt the tension around him thickening.
“What trickery is this?” The sorcerer ‘s whisper was barely audible, yet something about it raised the hair all down Nyndstir’s neck.
The sorcerer, a slight figure who hadn’t lifted a hand at real work that any of the men had seen since he’d been hired a few days hence, knelt on the ground. He extended one finger, a tiny beam of light projecting from it, and used it like a hook to rip the shirt and coat straight off the corpse. It came away like paper.
But where his finger touched the dead man’s flesh, nothing happened.
He spread his fingers wide, and the glow around them intensified. He began muttering in a harsh and guttural language, and the world seemed to vibrate as the words spilled into it. Yellow light gathered in a cloud around the body as he spoke. He brought his hand down, smacking the flesh of the dead man’s chest.
And once again, his power vanished like morning mist.
He stood up, squaring his shoulders. “You,” he said, suddenly whirling on Nyndstir. The Islandman reflexively hefted his axe. He’d seen the sorcerer do terrible things, but he wasn’t going to stand around with his hand on his stones while they were done to him. “Hack that body apart. Spread its pieces where you will as I attend to other business.”
Nyndstir stood still for a moment, hands wrapped around his axe haft. “I’ll take it off there,” he said, jerking his head to the side of the road behind him, where a copse of pine stood in the near distance.
“No. I want it done here. I will not ask you twice.”
The Islandman stood on edge for a moment. I’ll die someday. Maybe soon. But not out of sight o’water, he thought to himself, and so he nodded, spat in his hands, and wrapped them around the haft of his weapon, the smooth, familiar hardwood worn into grooves where his fingers sat.
He looked down at the body, thankful, at least, that it spared him the sight of the other bodies, and what was happening to them even now. He heard it, the sick, impossible sounds as the sorcerer did his work, the ripping of flesh, the grinding of bone, the squeal of metal. He focused on the body before him. That wound in its side was gruesome; what swords did to unarmored flesh was never pretty. Nyndstir decided that this one must’ve killed the other two men, though he wasn’t sure how. But the thought comforted him.
I don’t know who you were, you poor bastard brother of battle, Nyndstir thought as he lifted his axe, but you’re better off than the frozen sods you took with you. He raised his axe.