Wolf Riders by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2011-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

NO GOLD IN THE GREY MOUNTAINS

by Jack Yeovil

On the opposite crag, the seven towers of the Fortress of Drachenfels thrust skyward like the taloned fingers of a deformed hand. The sunset bloodied the castle as Constant Drachenfels, the Great Enchanter, had done in life. Joh Lamprecht had heard all the stories, all the songs. He knew of the long-lived monster's numberless crimes, and of his eventual downfall and defeat. Brave Prince Oswald and Fair Genevieve, his vampire ladylove, had ended the horror, and now the castle was untenanted, all but the most earthbound ghosts flown to the beyond. However, it was still shunned. No peasant of this mountain region would dare set his boot upon the path to Drachenfels while the stories were told in whispers, the songs remembered by ill-favoured minstrels. And that was what made the place ideal for Joh's purposes.

Big, slow Freder was too lackwitted to be concerned with superstition, and dark, quiet Rotwang too wrapped up in his own skills to take any notice of the rumoured creatures in the darkness. Which left only young Yann Groeteschele to be frightened by the old legends, the shadows and the night winds. Joh could count on the young bandit's unswerving loyalty for as long as Groeteschele's fear of him outweighed his fear of the name of a dead sorcerer. That should be a considerable time.

Groeteschele had only heard the songs about Drachenfels' Poison Feast and the Sack of Gisoreux, but he had been present when Joh broke the back of Warden Fanck and led the mass escape from the penal quarrypits of the Vaults, to the South, and in the Loren Forest he had held down the writhing body of Guido Czerepy, the silk merchant, while Joh tortured out of him the location of his hidden cache of gold.

In the still air, the rattle of the coach was audible from several miles away. Joh keened like a crow, and Rotwang answered from his position of concealment down by the road. Joh tapped Groeteschele, and indicated the youth's crossbow. The lamps of the coach became visible in the evening haze. Joh felt the old excitement in his vitals, and gripped the hilt of his curved sword. He had taken the scimitar from the corpse of a slain envoy of Araby, shortly after relieving the man of the jewelled tokens of esteem he was bearing to the Imperial Court, and found it a more satisfactory item of killing steel than the common straight sword of the Old World.

Groeteschele slipped a quarrel into his crossbow, and steadied it against his cheek. Joh kept his eyes on the coach. As robberies went, this was simple. Three times last year, he had held up the same coach - carrying gold from the Kautner seam down from the Mountains and through the Reikwald Forest to Altdorf - and the trick had been easier each time. Once the miners had paid their tax tribute to the Emperor's collectors they were hardly disposed to buy guards to escort it to Karl-Franz's coffers and so it was placed on the regular mail and passenger run.

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