Annika came forward cautiously, a little stunned with the speed and ferocity with which Orion had dispatched the enemy. Not for the first time she wondered what he had done in order to earn the emnity of the Bishop. It seemed an extreme reaction to the cybernetic eye alone. She stepped carefully around the fallen and knelt down on the rough grass. The Vuldrock smelled of animal fat and smoke and it turned her stomach as she got closer. Almost gingerly she reached forward and touched her fingers to the unconscious mans temple and eyebrow.

The smell of smoke and sweat competed with the reek of stale beer and damp animals. There must have been thirty tribesman packed into the longhall, shouting to make themselves heard over each other and over the roar of the blizzard outside. Wulf stood on the dais shouting down at his thanes.

"Silence you dog faced curs!" he roared, brandishing a massive machine gun with a brutal looking glaive blade affixed as a bayonet. To punctuate the point he fired a long burst at the far wall, shattering a post into a pile of splinters and half deafening the halls occupants. Annika felt herself laugh in maniac excitement, after a moment the laugh caught and the rafters shook with the roaring laughter of the thanes.

"I am no coward and ill kill any man who says otherwise, and this is not suicide," Wulf roared. He waved a handful of documents, simple parchment now stained with grease.

"These are the patrol schedules for their fleet, we can be there for a week before they can bring their ships back to stop us!"

"Your bum paper tells you this?" Svain shouted to another round of uproariously laughter.

"These I have from a chieftain of the soft folk! He wants us to raid. This Engel seems to think it will help him, he hasn't known many Vuldrock! His pretty throat will be cut with the rest!"

Annika snapped back to herself, pipe smoke spilling from her nostrils. She leaped to her feet eyes wide as she found her form to small for her muscles, her tattoos were gone and her beard...  The Priestess blinked as she seemed to settle into her own body again. She spat into the running stream and recited a ritual of purification to center her thoughts. 

"These men are not here by chance," she told Orion, reaching down to draw a laser pistol from the cross belts of one of the dead Vuldrok.

"Someone invited them here, someone in Rochfort's court."