In his dreams, he is back in his childhood home. He cannot recall the name of his village, but he remembers quite clearly the simple homes of timber and clay built amid the terraced mountains. The meat market with its buzzing cloud of flies and smell of blood mingled with sweat; the shrine to the Little Sisters, a leaning, poorly built pagoda festooned with prayer flags and flowers; the tea house, where the elders would sit and gossip and smoke and massage their gnarled hands. He remembers the feel of his bed, rough linen over hay, and waking up just before sunrise, rays of crimson creeping over jagged peaks, the light catching the water in the paddies, making the hillside gleam like splintered glass.
His father stands behind him, hand on his young shoulder, looking down with him over the fields.
Except...it is not his father behind him, not anymore. He knows that, as the grip on his shoulder tightens.
His father stands behind him, hand on his young shoulder, looking down with him over the fields.
Except...it is not his father behind him, not anymore. He knows that, as the grip on his shoulder tightens.
Dratha awoke, single eye blinking open in the half-light of his tent, hand closing tightly around the Book. Asa lay beside him, pale and smooth and beautiful amid the furs of his cot. He watched her sleep for a long moment, admired her fiery hair splayed out across his pillow.
Not every woman would accompany their man on campaign, but Asa was a nordling, and the nordling women were as brave as the nordling men, but half as stupid. Made them formidable warriors and dangerous friends.
Dratha frowned at the thought, thinking of the Over-Tyrant, rumors of whose insatiable ambition and unseasonable cunning were fast filtering south.
Silently, he slipped from his cot and dressed, donning weather-beaten leathers and a cowled mantle. The Book he placed in a specially-made holster inside his shirt, close to his chest. He slipped a patch over the ragged socket where his left eye had been before the goatkin had cut it out. Dressed, he grabbed his sword and his flask and stepped out of the tent.
The ragged column of northmen plodded up a thin dirt track, winding its way into the mountains. It was a smallish raiding party, not more than two hundred men and mutants. A mere splinter of the warlord Avikogerix's great horde, sent into the Teeth to test the strength of the Witch King and his storied Legions.
Dratha was hunkered down between a boulder and the gnarled trunk of a baya tree, an unlit pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth. Legion scouts and archers were likewise scattered out of sight in the scrub and rocks to either side of the path, bows and muskets aimed at the enemy column, awaiting the signal to fire.
Dratha studied the northerners, his single, glittering eye flitting from barechested brave to twisted mutant, his gaze appraising. Finally, it settled on a hulking beastman with an antlered head resembling a stag- albeit, a stag with bleeding lips and long, crooked fangs. Dratha muttered something in a soft, strange tongue, something that caused the legionaries crouched next to him to shudder and wince.
The stag-thing bellowed, eyes suddenly wild, and took the head off of the northman marching next to it with an angry swipe of its claws. The raiding party erupted into chaos then, as more and more of the beastmen began attacking their allies and each other with frenzied violence, their unexpected rampage spreading up and down the line of northerners like a virus.
Dratha gave the signal, and the legionary scouts opened up in a hail of arrows and musketry. The chiefs of the nordlings bellowed and tried to rally, but were shot down by their unseen enemies or cut down by their former allies.
It was over in less than an hour. The beastkin were dead. The northmen were mostly dead, though the more cowardly or intelligent had thrown down their weapons towards the end.
Dratha took a long drink from his flask, washing the Dalean brandy over his gums and relishing the spreading numbness. It burned deliciously going down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sauntered over to where the surrendered northmen were assembled, on their knees and surrounded by legionaries.
"Well," he said in the dialect of the northern tribes, "I am Othman Dratha, Lord of Sepulchrave, called the Witch King by your leaders. The Iron Legion is always recruiting, will you join?"
One of the northmen, a great gap-toothed warrior tattooed with the sigils of the northerners' heathen gods, spat at Dratha's feet, snarling something about never serving some upjumped hedge witch who defied the will of the stars.
Dratha frowned and shrugged.
Quite suddenly, the defiant northman screamed, then exploded in a shower of gore, bathing his comrades in blood and viscera. Gasps of shock erupted from the nordlings and legionaries alike.
"Any other requests for religious exemption?" Dratha asked his prisoners.