Wurts, Janny - Wars of Light & Shadow 03 by Wurts Janny

Author:Wurts, Janny
Language: eng
Format: epub

When the last wound was treated, the last shattered bone strapped straight, and the final posset doled out to ease suffering agony into sleep, the imprisoned wounded from the Havens were left to themselves.

Late day sun slanted down from the heights, adding the scent of rancid felt to the reek of astringent herbs. Breezes bowed the tent’s door flap and billowed the saffron and rust patterns encircling the fire-blackened ridge post. In whispers thrummed to fear, those men still awake began to speak. They compared observations and quickly came to realize that, except for the fact no man in their present company bore a leg wound that would impair his ability to walk, neither rhyme nor reason attended their selection. Some had been taken in acts of rank cowardice, playing dead beneath the bodies of fallen victims.

Others were singled out who had fought in cornered courage in some small grotto or tide-washed ledge.

”Why were we spared?” they asked, haunted over and over by the five hundred and forty of their fellows who had at one stroke been most pitilessly dispatched beneath the Wheel.

They numbered twenty-five, that had braved the landing at the Havens and lived.

For his spree of unbridled killing, the Master of Shadow had lost one, taken by surprise when a headhunter knifed him from under a splintered shelter of beached planks. Two other scouts had suffered slight wounds in the course of their murdering work among the fallen.

Those had been left to wait, bleeding in stoic patience, until the dark-haired man finished his ministrations to the enemy.

”What if we’re to be sacrificed in some ugly rite of magecraft?”

said a veteran with a crippled hand. In the dimness of the tent as the day failed, eyes flashed and looked away while the boy in the corner, in tearing, sad sobs, finally wept himself into exhausted dreams.

Night fell over the Vastmark coast before Dakar the Mad Prophet mustered the courage to emerge and walk the site where the fighting company camped at the Havens. Amid the banked, rocky corrie set back from the cliffs, he threaded amid the cookfires of the clan scouts mustered to serve their liege lord. He overheard the talk, the coarse jokes, the jagged intervals of quiet someone always jumped to break with a laugh, a story, or a boast. The day had been won. In the specter of widespread death, men celebrated and affirmed their ties to life. Being clansmen well hardened to the hatreds of entrenched feud, the odd complaint arose amid the brosy glow of satisfaction.

”There were fourteen other inlets like this one,” someone grumbled. ”It’s a living oddity, why our prince should’ve left those alone. We had enough archers. Raids could have been launched on all of them, with three thousand murdering townsmen left lying as wyvern bait tonight.”

”Good thing his Grace is beyond earshot,” somebody else ventured from the sidelines. ”Mood he’s in now, he’d be like to knife you on reflex for loose talk.”

Dakar edged off from the circle of scouts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.