The nightmare apparition – naked body, heaving chest, and snarling face caked and smeared and matted in mud and blood, and broken bone in hand – that he must have presented as he rose to his feet, eyes glaring from a head lowered from effort and shoulders hanging low to one side to favour the left arm held tight to his chest, was reflected in the dread filling the stare of the man who must have been the sergeant. The man froze, a ladle dropping against a rock with a dull clang that alerted his companions.
His reaction stopped the other two also, despite their backs being towards Brann, giving him a moment to absorb what lay before him. The sergeant, crouched beside a steaming pot suspended over a fire, was a wiry veteran, with little hair and fewer teeth. The fact that he had reached this age told of skill with arms or ruthless guile, either of which was as dangerous as the other. The other two, a skinny youth and a taller man, broad of shoulder and girth, were closer to him and had been moving items from a heap of all the plunder stripped from the bodies and sorting them into smaller specific piles.
‘Son of a poxy whore,’ the sergeant breathed.
The other two turned.
The youth’s eyes widened, and his voice was shrill. ‘The dead. Gods save us. The dead are rising.’ He had been handing Brann’s axe to the other man when Brann’s appearance had frozen them, and it hung forgotten in his hand.
Brann growled at the sight.
The broad man tried to speak, his mouth working soundlessly.
Brann started towards them, the stiffness easing from his legs with every step. His movement broke through the men’s shock but, before it could turn to panic, the sergeant recovered enough of his senses to growl at the other two.
‘Back-from-the-dead or never-dead, make sure the bastard stays dead this time. I want a head to fall.’
The boy hefted the axe but still hung back, waiting for his companion to move. Clearly the sort who preferred his victims with their backs to him. His voice was still high and shaking. ‘Should we get help?’
The brute beside him grabbed the nearest weapons to hand: a halberd with a broken tip and an axe-blade with more nicks than edge, but no less dangerous for either. ‘And let them demand a share of our loot in return? Help me gut him and we’ll get our dinner in peace.’
Brann’s eyes narrowed. For all his initial dumbness, this one’s nerves had steadied the quickest. He was the first threat. He angled his approach towards the youth, panicking the boy even more as he fixed him with a stare that seemed intent on him alone. With a roar, the burly man shouldered the youth to the side, sending him staggering, and raised the pole of the halberd high to strike.
Brann’s grin was savage. They may be useless and unskilled, or they may be anything but. Regardless, they were better one at a time. ‘Got you,’ he said, his voice rough and dry.
The man’s eyes widened in surprise, for an instant, before he started to swing the weapon. In that instant, Brann was inside his swing and the jagged end of the shin bone had buried half of its length up under his ribs. Brann had spun away and towards the youth, the bone pulling with it a sprayed crescent of blood before the body had even started to collapse. A wild swing of the axe, born of panic, was easily avoided and the bone was left a hand’s width deep in the youth’s throat as Brann closed his fingers around the familiar haft of his axe and pulled it from already nerveless fingers.
The sergeant spat and crouched, a sword drawn back in readiness. ‘You won’t catch me by surprise, bastard.’
Brann stepped forward and, in a blur, raised the axe high with both hands, gritting his teeth against the sharp agony of the stretched wound along his ribs. As the man swung his sword up to parry the downwards swing, Brann changed to slide one hand up towards the dark metal of the head of the weapon, grasping the wood and slamming the shaft end first into the man’s face. The sergeant barely had time to register his smashed nose and shattered teeth before the axe swung and his head bounced in the dirt beyond the firelight.
Brann, his chest heaving, looked down at the corpse. ‘That was what you said you wanted, wasn’t it?’
He sat the axe against the ground and rested on it. His wounds had sapped his energy, but he had proved that the blood loss wasn’t life-threatening just yet. He needed clothing – he could wash and attend to his injuries once he was safely clear of the area – and, looking around, it was clear that the looters had been diligent enough to provide him with a large selection. He had another concern first, though. You can’t meet an attack so easily with a tunic or a pair of boots. He wiped clean the black axe head on a ripped tunic and moved to the pile of sorted weapons, grunting in satisfaction to see the distinctive black metal of his sword and dagger. Lifting them to one side, he turned to the next pile, one of weapon accessories: scabbards, belts, sheaths, and the like. The three men may have been callous, but they had certainly been meticulous. It didn’t take long to find his belt and the strapping and sheaths he had become accustomed to using to fasten knives to each of his forearms, between his shoulder blades and on his lower legs, inside his boots – he always felt better if a blade was to hand, no matter where that hand may be. His sheaths had been near the top of the pile, so he guessed his knives would be likewise in the heap of weapons. He must have been one of the more recent bodies to have been dragged to the pit.
He chided himself. Of course he had been. If he had been brought earlier in the process, he’d have wakened under a layer, maybe several layers, of corpses. Unless suffocation had seen to it that he never wakened at all. He grunted in annoyance. His thoughts were slow and he needed to be away from this place as soon as possible. Ensuring his main weapons were always within reach, he quickly flicked through the assembled collection of edges and points and soon had assembled his collection. Now for clothes.
As he straightened, the wind shifted and drifted smoke in his direction. There was a strong smell of burning meat, but there was too much smoke for it to have come from campfires. Some of the corpse collectors apparently favoured pyres over pits.
He tensed. The smoke was not all that the shifting wind had brought his way. A sound, no more than a scuff of boot on a loose clod of dirt, mixed for a moment with the crackling of the late sergeant’s cooking fire. He crouched, feeling for his sword and axe, his eyes straining to see beyond the fire’s light. He cursed himself, not only for the time he had taken but more now for his position – he was perfectly lit beside the fire, whilst those approaching could be encircling him and approach from any or all angles with little warning. He whirled back and forth, fighting to see, but all he could discern was a shadow, then two more, slightly vaguish, and all from the same direction as he had heard the noise. He bent his knees, pushing through the pain in his left side to hold the sword forward to parry and the axe back to strike. This time he might not get away with using one weapon.
‘Steady,