Mark of Damnation by James Wallis

Author:James Wallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2003-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Leaving It Behind

He rode long into the night. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the countryside for miles around: fields divided into strips and ploughed, the bare earth black in the moonlight, pastures and commons dotted with sleeping sheep, rabbits that scattered away at the disturbance, villages lying silent and ghostly, bathed in pale shadows. Once a deer looked up from the road ahead and leaped away.

Above him the sky was full of stars and constellations: the scorpion, the serpent, the gibbet and the axe, brilliant in the darkness. He hoped to see a ring around the moon or another sign of good luck, but there was nothing like that this night. Sigmar’s birth, so the priests said, had been heralded by a twin-tailed comet blazing in the heavens. Hoche had never even seen a shooting star.

He stayed on the main road, eager to put miles between himself and Altdorf. Later, he decided, he would take one of the tracks through the Reikwald forest, to avoid pursuit. It would be safe enough. After all it was Mondstille, and even bandits had families, homes and a need to celebrate the passing of the year.

The air was cold in his lungs, his face numb from the wind and the night, the horse warm and vital as it cantered under him. He wrapped his cloak around him and grinned into its woollen folds. The world outside the prison felt so vivid. It filled him with the strength of its sensations and the energy of freedom. He wanted to stand in the saddle and shout. He could sense every muscle in his body wanting to be used and stretched, tested and exercised, and he laughed out loud: let the witch hunters come. He could dodge their bolts, parry their spells, duel armies and leave them broken and beaten.

He felt as if he could run alongside his horse for miles, leap trees, chase the deer and outpace it, catch it up and lift it over his head, tear its neck open and let its blood pour over him, bathing in its heat, letting it splash into his upturned mouth and drinking it down as the beast thrashed its life out.

He stopped abruptly, his horse standing in the road. Where in hell had that thought come from?

The moon set and an hour later the sun rose, staining the eastern clouds with pink. He stopped by a stream and splashed freezing water on his face, gasping, then scrubbed fiercely at his skin with his cloak. After two months underground he would be filthy and he did not want people to remember him. He rummaged in the saddlebags, finding bread, boiled eggs and cheese, and ate while the horse grazed on frost-rimed grass.

He knew his horse was tired, and so was he. His muscles had atrophied while he was in prison and it would take work to rebuild his strength, no matter how energised he felt from his escape. But every mile he put between him and Altdorf widened the circle that pursuers would have to search.

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