The other servants made no comment. They would not dare, of course, in his presence but he knew from his sources that her companionship provided no domestic scuttlebutt in the corridors. Why would it? Nobles, in particular, royals, had a habit of demanding services far more intimate from servants. Gossip is not born in the commonplace.
Her whisper drifted in the baking air. ‘You hate this.’
‘The heat?’ He snorted. ‘It is the only weather I know.’
‘Not the heat, as you know quite well.’ It was uncanny how a hoarse monotone could yet convey chastisement. ‘The waiting.’
He rested his head against the chair and raised his eyes to the deepness of the sky. The same sky that sat above all countries, above all people, and some more specific than others. ‘You think you can read my mind, crone, but you are wrong. Not the waiting. Waiting lies within the course of every strategy.’ He frowned at the sky. ‘I hate the not knowing.’
She gave a soft grunt. ‘And the not controlling.’
‘I would that I could control you and your prattling tongue.’
It was even more irritating when she did not reply. He let the silence draw out, as if it had not irked him.
‘And you miss him.’
He cursed inwardly, as much at the involuntary start her words had given him as at the suspicion that she could read his mind after all. He turned slowly and looked at her for a long moment. Her gaze never wavered from the horizon but the slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth hinted that she was aware of his stare.
‘On pain of death, do not ever say that in the presence of anyone,’ he rasped. ‘Especially him.’
****
Pain thumping and rebounding within his skull, Brann forced open his eyes and found himself lying in hell.
The stench of gore was so pervasive that he could taste it filling his throat; enough to make him retch, had he not become accustomed to the sensation that seemed half a lifetime before. He heaved at a body – cold, clammy, and limp and as naked as he felt himself to be – to force its weight away from his chest. It slipped from him with a wet slither, allowing him to drag in a breath of welcome depth. Pain flared across his ribs as he sucked in the air, but a pain of a battering and, thankfully, not of broken bone. It was not so much the breaking that worried him, but the piercing and tearing it so often caused inside. Bones could mend, but blood coughed up all too often prophesied the end. He twisted, feeling lifeless limbs shift beneath him, to look further around. He was in a pit as deep into the dry crumbling earth as his father’s mill had been tall. The darkness of night above was tinged with the glow of fires beyond the lip and either the flames or the moon or both combined to lessen the gloom just enough to reveal the silhouettes of arms and legs and bodies and heads, a layer of nightmare shapes with the promise of more hidden beneath.
Low voices approached and Brann lay still, tense and alert. A glow grew brighter at the lip of the pit until the flickering light of a torch brought the detail of the scene around him to his eyes in all its stark gore. Faces stared back at him, some hacked almost beyond recognition as human, while others appeared ready to start a conversation until he saw the eyes, cold and dead as stone. Limbs were strewn at angles, attached still to bodies or not; skin was rent and pierced, and everywhere, coating all, was blood, a dark lubricant that saw the corpses – stripped of everything whether of value or none – shift as, with a scrape of movement at the edge of the pit and a harsh slap on impact, another body was flung onto the pile.
A long moment of silence and shifting shadows was broken by a grunt of satisfaction.
‘That’ll do for today. Tomorrow will see us fill it enough to put the dirt back in over them, then we’ve done our bit. I’ll put the stew on to heat, and you two can start sorting their gear. We’ll divide it once we’ve eaten.’
A harsh laugh and a younger voice: ‘Sounds good to me. It’s hungry work, this. Bodies are heavier than I thought.’
A third voice: ‘But worth it for the loot. Don’t matter that the bodies are heavy when the loot pays you back. You city cut-throats are all the same when you come to this – you don’t realise you can’t just leave the dead in an alley for the watch guards to pick up in the morning. Now you know why I told you it’s good to stick with the sergeant who’s the best cheat at dice. Won us a pit to fill, didn’t he?’
The first voice was further away, presumably at the stew pot: ‘Say again that I cheat and you’ll be in the pit yourself and as dead as the others.’ The sergeant finished with a barked laugh.
The torchlight started to recede but Brann forced himself to lie still; steeling himself against rising bile at the feeling of a cold arm pressing against his face, and waiting until the pit returned to safe darkness. The voices were still relatively close.
‘Of course, boss. You’re just very good at it. But before you start rolling those dice again, I want my name on those black weapons.’
Brann’s eyes jerked wide open.
The sergeant’s voice: ‘Good try, but we all do. I’ll take the sword. You bastards can roll the dice for the axe and knife.’
The young voice: ‘I am happy with the knife.’ A snicker of a laugh. ‘I like knife work.’
‘And the axe is fine for me. So we’re agreed. We can roll for the rest.’
The sergeant grunted. ‘You can sort the rest now, or the food will be ready before you’re done. Get your arses over here. You can use the knife tomorrow. At least the black one won’t take you four tries to cut a throat like that blunt apology for a blade you were using today.’
Brann growled as rage flared, overwhelming the horror and disgust prompted by the gore-smeared bodies pressing around him. He made to rise, but his left arm gave way beneath him as a shock of pain ran from his elbow into his shoulder. He could make out the dark shape of a wound on the arm, and a burning on the side of his ribs led tentative fingers to the split skin of another long gash. Either the bash on his head that was causing the headache or the loss of blood had been the reason he had passed out and appeared dead. Either way, it had saved him from being finished off by a looter’s blade. He had to hope it hadn’t been blood loss, or the strength to even escape the pit would have drained from him with it. He grunted softly. There was only one way to find out. The pain wasn’t enough to stop him from forcing movement had it been necessary, but while he had another good arm, there was no need.
Brann rolled to his right and pushed himself against a torso, chest hair slick and matted with blood and the jagged end of a rib pressing against his hand, and levered himself into a crouch. He tested his legs beneath him. They ached, but only through the stiffness of immobility. Hands and feet slipping and slithering on corpses, he moved towards the side of the pit. The body parts shifting beneath him made progress awkward, but the slick covering of stinking fluids saw them move quietly – just a squelch or a small slap as cold flesh met cold flesh. With almost every movement, his foot, then a hand, then a foot slipped between bodies – corpses that clung on, unwilling to let him go. His head told him that they were dead, that they were empty pieces of meat and bone, that they could not hurt him. But the feeling that they were trying to drag him down among them, to lose him in their midst and accept him as one of their own, overwhelmed him. Panic rose and he started to scrabble faster, one foot sinking even deeper into the grasping cadavers. He dragged in a gasp and forced himself to stop moving, desperately trying to control his impulses. He could feel his leg encased for most of its length against still, cold, wet dead skin. But it was the stillness that he forced his thoughts to accept. While he didn’t move, nothing else did. There were no spirits trying to pull him into their embrace, no fingers grabbing his ankles. He slowed his