Chel collected the sticky bone spear from the doorway and crept inside, feeling every hunched step pulsing along his body. He needed a long rest. And a bath. And something to eat that wasn’t cannibal cuisine.
He peered around the hide and into the hall. Spider remained closest to the matriarch, his empty palms still front and centre, his words loud and insistent. He’d had little luck convincing the Nanaki to stand down, but he’d stalled violence for a time at least; surly grunts from the matriarch punctuated his broken appeals. All were congregated on the far side of the fire, and Chel crept behind the closest low table, hefting the spear in his good hand. He had a low opinion of his hand’s coordination, but his experience with the wolves had taught him that sometimes it’s enough just to have a sharp thing on the end of a stick to hold out in front of you.
Foss, Lemon and Whisper were herded together and surrounded by at least three Nanaki hunters. Rennic had another three around him, and Spider had two, plus the matriarch and what looked like her bodyguard, paying him close attention. Loveless was almost his side of the fire, still held fast by her erstwhile dance partners, her face dark as a thunderstorm. The crew’s packs and equipment lay piled and propped at the edge of their original table, now only a few paces from where Chel hid. He squinted. Their odds were not good. He needed a plan.
Spider tried negotiation again, rattling out another burst of syllables in the unfamiliar Nanaki tongue. The matriarch snarled, spat and jabbed a gnarled finger at Tarfel’s former resting place by the instruments. She was midway through her point, whatever it was, when her dark eyes flicked to where she pointed, and she tailed off. The creases around her eyes stretched then scrunched, and Chel tensed. He still had no plan.
‘Rat-bear!’ Spider roared, his eyes darting around the room. ‘This is the time!’
Chel still had no plan.
The room erupted into multi-lingual shouting and the clatter of shifting weapons.
‘Rat-bear!’
Chel still had no plan.
Spider’s hands dropped to his waist, and the Nanaki surged toward him.
Chel drove himself upward and hurled the spear with his good arm, realising he was screaming as he did so. The weapon flew from his hand, arcing through the air and passing well wide of any of the Nanaki. It whistled through the group, touching nothing, before glancing against the wooden wall and clattering to the floor.
Chel paid it no heed. He’d kept moving, his eyes alone on the equipment by the table. Spider, too, had been unfazed by the spear’s sudden arrival, and from the corner of his eye Chel saw crimson sprays erupt as Spider slipped the spears of the approaching hunters and tore at them with his hooked blades. The eyes of the rest of the hall were still on the bouncing spear, the gurgled shrieks of the stricken hunters melding into the background chaos.
Chel’s hand closed on the scabbard propped against the table, and he spun and flung it across the hall, offering a small prayer to the Shepherd that Loveless had been watching.
She had been watching.
What followed was a tumbling cascade of violence. As the Nanaki reacted too slowly to the carnage in their midst, Loveless caught the hilt of her blade with an extended hand. She flicked the scabbard away as she turned against the man holding her, twisting in a scything motion that ended with her elegant sword hacked into his neck. He fell away, screeching and clawing at his rupture, and she kicked off his collapsing form to drive her blade through the lung of his companion as he lurched to intercede.
Spider leapt from his first victims toward the Nanaki surrounding Foss, Lemon and Whisper, while Loveless advanced on those around Rennic with a dark fire burning in her eyes. The hunters beyond had realized the danger, but they turned too late to confront the new threats at their perimeter. Foss erupted, his thick arms wrapped around the heads of two of his former captors before they could bring their spears around. Lemon darted between them, grabbing the bone tips of their weapons as they struggled, crushed and blinded, and guiding their wild thrusts into each other’s gut.
Whisper had sprung from the reach of the hunter who swiped at her with a cleaver, hopping up onto a table then away as he slashed after her with clumsy strokes. Chel, inured to further horror, lofted an axe toward her, possibly one of Lemon’s. It crunched into the table between her and the hunter. For a moment, both stared at it, then as the Nanaki charged forward to cut off Whisper’s reach, he jerked sideways then downward as a bone-tipped spear burst from his sternum. He collapsed, gasping and gurgling, revealing Lemon behind him. She gave a thumbs up, then swung on.
At the hall’s far side, Rennic stood with a broken spear in his hand, hot blood running from cuts to his cheek and chest and a comatose hunter at his feet. Two more Nanaki closed on him, their aggression tempered by the havoc in the hall, the shouts and screams of their compatriots. One turned as Loveless arrived with fury, the hunter’s skull almost split in two by the venomous blow. The remaining hunter cursed and whimpered, then turned to run. Rennic ran him through with his broken half-spear.
Close movement caught Chel’s eye, a burst of motion in the firelight. The matriarch was sprinting toward him, pacing a clear path through the carnage, murder in the dark creases of her eyes. Chel was the only thing between her and the doorway. He stood, weaponless, as she bore down on him, the long spear in her hand level with his gut.
He ground his heels into the earth. ‘Come on then, you crusty old fucker. Come on!’
Her eyes widened, and she stumbled on a loose hammer from Lemon’s pack. Chel watched the gleaming spear-tip as it lurched toward him, pushing himself aside as it whistled past. For a moment he locked stares with the matriarch, then he grabbed her jacket with his good hand and smashed his forehead against her nose as hard as he could.
The pain was excruciating, bright blooms across his broken face, purple explosions before his eyes even as his sight went dark. He blinked hard, fighting back tears of shock and pain, feeling the woman sag in his grip as he swayed on his feet. His vision cleared enough to see another swing of the spear coming at him, half-hearted, and he leaned into the matriarch as the weapon flapped against his back, then drove his knee into her abdomen.
She collapsed into the dirt, and to his shame he kicked her on the ground, jaw clenched, spittle flecking his lips.
The hall was quiet, aside from the groans and gurgles of the injured. Spider strode up to him, knelt and without ceremony carved open the matriarch’s throat. Chel wobbled, the reality of the situation, and his actions within it, flooding into him as the adrenaline departed. He considered vomiting again.
‘I’m impressed, rat-bear.’ Spider said, wiping his blade on Chel’s shoulder. ‘Now where’s my fucking knife?’
‘Sod your knife,’ Rennic said, looming behind him, glassy-eyed and bloody. ‘Where’s that bastard prince?’
***
By the time Chel returned to the hall with the shivering Tarfel in tow, the Black Hawk Company had rolled the Nanaki bodies over to the far end and out of the doorway into the cold. Foss and Lemon were at work turning the bloodied earth where they’d fallen, a well-intentioned if futile endeavour; the floor of the hut would likely be forever marred. Tarfel sat straight down by the fire as Rennic stoked it. He did not look at Chel.
‘We should bury them,’ Chel said, his eyes fixed on a trailing foot that jutted beyond the hanging hide. Rennic shot him a fierce glare. ‘They’ll draw the wolves, if nothing else.’
‘We should burn them,’ Loveless said from at his elbow. She was no less bloody than Rennic, although little of it seemed to be hers, but her clothing was torn and she smouldered with quiet rage. Her scabbarded sword was back at her side. ‘We should torch these miserable fuckers, and this whole sick fucking graveyard with them.’
Spider picked at his teeth with the point of the now-returned knife. He met Chel’s questioning look and leered. ‘Passed on your findings, vis-à-vis dinner.’
Chel looked around the hall. None of the others seemed to have voided their stomachs at the news, or at least if they had they’d cleaned it up with the bodies. The tables that hadn’t been overturned or forcibly cleared during the earlier carnage now stood empty, as did the spit over the fire. At least there had been fish.
‘We’ll burn them,’ Rennic said. ‘But not tonight.’
Whisper ducked through the hide behind them and strode over, her fingers and hands twirling their signal dance. Chel tried to parse the movements, hoping to discern meaning, but these were not the obvious mimes she’d offered earlier. Each shape was distinct, one- or two-handed, hanging for an instant before the next followed. He gave up and flicked back to the reactions of the others. Rennic and Loveless were attentive, but Spider wore a scowl. They made fleeting eye contact, and for that moment they shared a mutual frustration at their incomprehension. Then Spider turned his head and spat by his boot, and their connection was over. Chel hoped it was a positive sign.
‘Well, that figures,’ Loveless said as Whisper’s hands stilled. She slumped back onto a table, her righteous fury draining.
Rennic nodded. ‘Should have fucking seen it. Too late in the year. I said it was too late in the year.’ He turned to Spider. ‘This is your mess, Spider. You let us sit here, drinking and eating, in the company of fucking monsters.’
Spider sprang forward, the pointy blade tight in his grip. ‘And that’s where you’d have fucking died, Beaky, if the Spider hadn’t swooped in and cut you fuckers to safety. Where’s the fucking thanks there?’
‘A situation entirely of your making! We trusted your judgement and that fucking pile of human waste over there is the result.’
‘And who tipped these fuckers off to the princeling’s tribe? Strikes me you should be showing a little more gratitude, Beaky, for even having a job in the first place. Not like anyone else will work with you, is it? You should be giving thanks for scraps from the Spider.’
Rennic waved a contemptuous hand and strode away, and Whisper followed. Spider stalked off in the other direction, knife clenched beneath white knuckles. Chel stood beside the table, looking from one to the other. He felt completely lost.
From the table, Loveless tilted her head his way. Her scar shone livid in the firelight. ‘Those body parts you found, cub, in the lake. They’re Nanaki too.’
Chel grimaced. ‘So they did eat their own. Was that why there were no very old or young?’
‘Not exactly. Whisper reckons different sept. Probably the original owners of this place.’
Chel sat down on the table beside her. He felt nothing at their proximity. ‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck indeed, cub. This bunch were probably outcasts already, waited until the first of the snows then came raiding as the other septs moved downslope. Looks like they were planning to wait out the winter here, piled high with family meat. Until we came dancing into their laps.’
‘Fuck,’ Chel repeated. ‘Think they would have attacked us anyway? Even if they hadn’t seen the prince?’ Tarfel sat cross-legged before the fire, cloak wrapped twice around him. He was pouting and avoiding Chel’s eye.
Loveless tilted her hand: maybe, maybe not. ‘Risky for them either way. Bunch of armed strangers, not much coin, and Lemon is wretched stringy. May have been planning to wait until we were good and shit-faced, or fully comatose, then take care of us in the quiet of the night. Cannibal cocks.’ She spat in the direction of the corpses. ‘So perhaps golden boy did us a favour after all. Once they saw his complexion, they showed their true colours.’
Chel was quiet for a moment, face scrunched in reflection. ‘Why does Rennic hate that song so much?’
She turned to look at him, a surprised frown creasing her brow. ‘You would have to ask him that,’ she said, holding his gaze for a moment. Then she looked away, staring into the fire, and Chel realized that was all he’d get.
‘Fucken cannibals, man!’ Lemon strode over, one of the jugs of spirit, somehow unscathed, dangling from her hand. ‘Fucken honest-to-ancestors cannibals, like I said. Not that any of you wankers believed me, eh?’
Chel spread his hands. ‘I believed you.’
‘Aye, right, but only ’cos you’re almost as gap-skulled credulous as Prince Gormless over there!’ She thumped down on the table between them, shunting them further apart, then proffered the jug to each in turn. ‘No? Bollocks to you. It’s the perfect time for more drinking. Ugh, wee bear, you smell of sick.’
Returning, Rennic kicked out some turned earth and shunted a table aside from the fire. ‘Listen up, pustules. This has been a catastrophe, and I expect you to be offering up some prayers of thanks to your creator of choice that you live and are, in most senses, whole. We cannot afford another fuck-up like this, as at the very least I will run out of words to describe the depths of incompetence.’
‘Aye, fair play, boss, this was just bad luck, eh?’
Rennic pointed his glare at Chel, who shrank against the table. ‘Oh, there’s no such thing, Lemon. Now get to sleep. Tomorrow we burn this fucking place to the ground, and the ghouls with it, and we go on our way and never speak of this again. First watch is Spider, first watch of Spider is Foss.’
From somewhere beyond came Spider’s snarling retort, but Rennic ignored it. He swept his gaze around the shattered hall, blood-streaked and quivering with suppressed fury.
‘Tomorrow is another day. And if it’s anything like today I’ll kill the fucking lot of you myself.’