The Black Library Anthology 2013-14 by Various

Author:Various [Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Anthology, Short Story, Science Fiction
Publisher: The Black Library
Published: 2015-05-15T07:00:00+00:00

THE LAST MAN

C L Werner

THE STREETS OF Wartenhof were a foul mire of mud and icy slush, desolate and deserted. Shuttered windows faced the troop marching through the town, the door of each hovel locked and barred. The soldiers of the Nachtsheer, calloused veterans long in the employ of the tyrannical Voivode Malbork von Drak, took a sardonic pleasure in the fright they evoked in the peasants. To them these people were little more than dumb animals, creatures to be subjugated. Mercenaries from realms as distant as Nordland and Solland, they felt neither kinship nor pity for the people of Sylvania. It was why Count von Drak employed them. Foreign troops wouldn’t balk at any atrocity that was asked of them.

The lean, russet-cloaked man who accompanied the black-garbed Nachtsheer almost wished he could share the mercenaries’ callous disregard for the denizens of Wartenhof. It was well enough for the soldiers to sneer at the fears of peasants, at the impotent hostility that shone in people’s eyes when they saw them approach. For them, the town was simply another posting, a place that would be left behind and forgotten when the crisis was over and new orders were issued to them. They didn’t call this place home.

For Vincent Rabe, it was different. He’d spent all his life around Wartenhof. As far back as could be remembered, his family had lived in the town. His father had been a forester in the service of the ruling cneaz and his father before him. Vincent was the fifth Rabe to hold the posting, acting as steward of Cneaz Vaclav Rezachevici’s extensive holdings. It was a position of honour and respect, even if it made him the sworn adversary of every poacher in the district. The resentment of poachers, however, was something he could accept. The scorn of his neighbours was something different.

A bitter smile crept onto Vincent’s lean features as his gaze strayed to the cross chalked across the door of a nearby hut. Every day there were fewer neighbours to despise him for colluding with the Nachtsheer, and fewer ears to listen to his protests that he’d been seconded to the brutal mercenaries by order of Cneaz Vaclav.

‘Quiet as a tomb,’ one of the Nachtsheer cursed, spitting into the slush of ice beneath his feet.

‘Keep it that way,’ snarled the commander of the squad, a burly Ostlander named Andreas. The soldier’s hair was parted by a livid white scar, the legacy of a boyhood encounter with a goblin’s knife. A collection of leathery green ears hung from his belt, a silent testament that he’d revenged the injury many times.

Vincent could tell from Andreas’s voice that the soldier was uneasy. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand why. Plague was abroad in Wartenhof. Normally, the Nachtsheer would simply cordon off an infected community and let it starve. Here, however, because of the strategic location of the town and the influence of Cneaz Vaclav in Drakenhof, the mercenaries had been compelled to take a more intimate interest in the town’s fate.

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