“Contessa! Please, I would be dishonored forever if anything happened to you,” Beaumont called from the edge of the roadway. The half decayed corpses lay where they had fallen, shattered by lances, or crushed beneath horses hooves. More than a few had been blasted by pistol fire. The zombies and skeletons would have been almost immune to such weapons under normal circumstances, but the pistol balls that had been used were of struck silver, each impressed with the hammer of Sigmar and blessed by one of his priests.

Camilla lowered her twin pistols and allowed her horse, a rangy Arabyian rather than the massive destriers the Brettonians favored, to carry her back towards Sir Beaumont. Squires were already heaping the dead into piles and bringing forth faggots of dried timber for fires. The sky to the west was already darkening and it would be hard riding to reach any safe place by nightfall.

Beaumont was a shadow of his former self. Gone was the neatly pressed tabard and painted lance. His armor was scratched and dented despite his squires constant efforts to buff it and his lance was of plain oak, green and cut from whichever glade had been handy. The other half dozen knights with him were similarly drab, weeks of hard fighting haven worn off the peace time polish, if not the chivalric core of the men. The squires were a mix of hard faced veterans, and bright eyed boys, the later replacements for the fallen.

It had been nearly three moons since Cydric’s death, though part of Camilla’s mind refused to accept that he was gone. Without a body there was no sense of finality no closure, just a gaping wound where her lover had once been. After the lifting of the curse they had scoured the inner keep for days, searching every passage and crevice for signs of Cydric, but not a thing had been found. After ten days, even Camilla had been forced to give up the search as hopeless.

“Ze Frauline ist not concerned with your honor sir,” A voice replied in Riekspiel sharp enough to make every word a whip crack. The words came from tall lean man replied from his seat on a fallen log that lay beside the road. Pipe smoke wreathed his head, curling around the distinctive hat of a Sigmarite Templar, or a Witch Hunter in the common parlance. Matis Von Koneinswald lifted the pipe to his lips and drew back, the smouldering flame in the bowl illuminated his craggy features for a moment before fading. A heavy wave bladed zwieldhier was propped against the moss covered stump. The massive sword seemed to large for someone as skinny as Von Koeinswald to wield, but he fought with a fury that would have impressed Norscan berserkers. 

“I thank monsieur for his opinion,” Beaumont sniped, though his heart wasn’t truly in the jibe. They were all tired, and all wary of the coming darkness.  Camilla had written to Matis a few days after Cydric’s death, describing the dark form which had fled the apparitions womb when Camilla had withdrawn the blade that transfixed her. It had been on her mind merely to report the problem to the Sigmarites and then depart, but without Cydric she had found herself listless and without direction and thus had still been lingering under the counts guest right when Matis arrived a week and a half later.

Matis was a scholar of sorts and had access to the records of the Temple of Sigmar and he believed that the spirit was the soul of an ancient necromancer from Araby who had been killed during the Crusades of Beaumont’s ancestors. By using his dark arts he had implanted his soul into his slayers wife’s womb, hoping to be reborn into the world. They ploy had been forestalled by the thrust of a faithful retainer who recognised the fell working of magic upon his legie lord’s wife. The husband, driven mad with grief had become the beast Cydric had slain. Removing the sword had lifted the curse, but freed the ancient lich to travel the world once more. Rumor said that strange lights had been seen in The Forest of Chalons and that dead men had been heard chanting an ancient and accursed name.  Even before Matis arrived to impart this information, reports of the undead moving had been received from all over Aquitaine. At first isolated travellers had been taken in the night, but the creatures had grown bolder, attacking isolated villages and swelling their numbers with the dead. 

The Lords of Aquitaine had at first dismissed the problem, blaming, at first bandits, and then the unscrupulous ambitions of their fellow Lords. Even know, when the problem could no longer be denied, most of them remained in their castles, attempting to defend their own domains without stirring themselves to aid their neighbours, so strong was the hatred and distrust of their fellow magnates. Years of peace had given honor obsessed men too long to sharpen their own grudges, and do the cancer grew.

Despite Beaumont’s objections that it was no place for a lady, Camilla and Matis had begun ranging the countryside, tracking and destroying bands of the undead and trying to learn what they could. The count had been generous in rewarding her for lifting the curse on his castle and had provided her with gold and the offer of noble title. The gold she had accepted, but the title, which she suspected was little more than a trap intended to allow him to marry her off, she had spurned, much to the horror of the assembled knights and ladies. The wealth she had used to buy horse and new pistols as well as to keep the tiny Sigmarite chapel in Bordeleaux blessing bullets night and day.

“Mademoiselle Aqua!” A voice called from the light woods that bordered the road. Behind the trees rose a modest hill that was crowned with ruins of age tumbled stone. It had been a castle once but long abandoned for its lack of water. The undead had made their lair in the place, at least until Camilla had ridden past alone, drawing the creatures out and precipitating her current not-quite-argument with Beaumont.

Mademoiselle Aqua. Mistress Blue. In the early days when it had just been her and Matis she had worn a blue cloak, merely because it had been handy but the name had caught on. Camilla didn’t personally care for the name, but it had been hard, was still hard, to care about much of anything with Cydric gone.

“If you object to my actions Sir Knight, you and your kind escort are more than welcome to depart,” she said with a slightly waspish undertone. Beaumont colored but she wheeled her horse to the source of the call before he could reply. A pair of woodsmen in leathers and green cloth were emerging from the trees. Both had long bows slung across their backs and swords at their hips, weapons of far better quality than a Brettonian villan ought to wear, but horses were not the only thing money could buy. Both wore a band of blue silk tied around their right arm. Three other men, dirty unwashed and wretched were with them, all clutching farm implements as improvised weapons.

“Mademoiselle, we found these hiding in a cave, they are from the village that was destroyed, shepherds they say,” the older of the two woodsmen said. All three men climbed over the fence and promptly fell to their knees on the dusty road. 

“Mademoiselle Aqua! We wish to swear our fealty to you,” one of them blurted out, the others were nodding so vigorously Camilla was afraid they might do themselves an injury. The regional accent was thick but after three months she found she could understand it nearly as well as anything that was spoken in the capital. She grimaced, if these men were from the village it was possible that their loved ones might be among the corpses being piled for the pyres, she hoped not.

“Contessa,” Beaumont began stiffly, “You cannot keep enrolling serfs they belong to their lords if…” Camilla held up a gloved hand to silence Beaumont. Matis snorted in amusement and blew out another cloud of smoke. The Knight was happy to provide his ‘escort’, Camilla though he was even pleased to have the chance to fight the undead that his Lords turned their blind eyes to, but he was still a noble at heart. It rankled his soul to see peasants abandoning what he saw as their proper place.

“For now you are welcome to travel with us,” she told the kneeling serfs.

“We have food and ale. In the morning you can decide if you want to join us,” she told the men in what she hoped was a compassionate tone. They would swear then, whatever she said. There were nearly a score of them now. Former peasants and foresters who had lost everything and decided that following her and fighting the undead was preferable to a life of penury. The ate well and she armed them with real steel, which was better than most Brettonians ever got. Beaumonts assertion that she was harboring runaway serfs might be true, but it was hard to care too much about what the future might hold. If the Lords came out of their castles to claim their serfs, maybe they would kill a few undead in the process. Not that Camilla would surrender men who had sworn fealty to her without a fight of course.

The squires had finished piling the bodies and were setting torch to timber. Thunder crackled overhead, though it was doubtful it would bring any rain. It had been a dry spring and the early summer had been beset by nearly continual cloud cover with afternoon storms that bought ferocious lightning without rain. Matis thought it was some spell being worked to allow the undead to move without fear of sunlight. Camilla privately suspected it was the melancholia in her heart writ large.

“We had best camp in the ruins,” she called turning to one of the gruff former pesants who was dressed in leathers and a mail coat.

“There is no where close enough to reach before we lose the light and I dont want to be on the road if the lightning strikes,” she explained.

“M’lady,” the peasant said, knuckling his forehead and turning to bellow orders to his fellow voulnteers. It was laced with profanity and invictive so vile that it made even Camilla wince, but the men were moving, leaving the road and picking their way up the hill, leading their few draft animals and the single cart that held most of their supplies.

“Would you care to join us Beaumont?” Camilla asked as she turned her horse of the road and started up the hill.