He stiffened as he caught an unknown scent.
Another beast.
One whose noble heart pounded with ancient blood.
An old and awesomely powerful predator.
Prey-fear surged in Khar-zagor’s limbs, and he scrambled from the edge of the hidden gully, fleeing back to his herd in terror.
Sofia hurried through the campsite, her meagre bag of medical supplies clutched tight to her chest. Kurt walked with her, as did Ryurik, already scrawling in his book.
‘Perhaps you will get to pen that historical epic after all,’ said Sofia.
Ryurik smiled weakly. ‘Let’s just hope there’s someone left to read it.’
Boyarin Wrodzik looked back in annoyance, but said nothing as he led them through the campsite towards the shimmering tent of silver at its heart. His lancer’s coat and finely cut tunic of emerald silk had once been richly ornamented, but had long since succumbed to the ravages of the steppe. One of the legendary Gryphon Legion, Wrodzik had spent years fighting for various elector counts in the Empire until the threat of Aelfric Cyenwulf had drawn him back to Kislev. In the wake of the Year That No One Forgets, Wrodzik renounced his duty to Emmanuelle of Nuln and swore to remain at the Tzarina’s side.
He had arrived at Kurt’s fire only a moment before, barking that he and his healer woman must come with him. Now.
A krug of weary kossars surrounded the tent at the camp’s centre, each man swathed in furs and bearing a recurved bow of horn at his back. Their axes were enormous hewing weapons, too heavy for most men to even lift, never mind swing in battle for hours at a time. Many bore hastily bandaged wounds that ought to have seen them carted off to a field hospital, but the grim set of their moustachioed faces told Sofia they would sooner cut their own throats than forsake this duty.
A shimmer of hoarfrost clung to the silken fabric of the tent, like morning mist at the last instant of its dissolution. The kossars nodded to Wrodzik and pulled back the thickly-furred opening of the tent. Sofia shivered as frigid air sighed from within, together with the sharp tang of fruit on the verge of going bad.
Inside, a diverse group awaited: armoured boyarin, steely-eyed kossars, black-cheeked strelsi, bow-legged lancers and bare-chested warriors with curved daggers sheathed in folds of flesh cut in their flat bellies. Nor were women excluded, for Kislev was, above all others, a land where prowess had the final say in deciding whose counsel was worth heeding. At least three of those closest to the centre of the tent were armed hearth-maidens.
They all looked up as Wrodzik led Sofia, Kurt and Ryurik within, and she felt the weight of their last hopes settle upon her. Hope for what, she didn’t yet know, but she intuitively understood that much now depended on her. Like the kossars encircling the tent, these warriors were blooded and drained by utter defeat.
‘Why am I here?’ she asked, as Wrodzik gestured for her to approach.
‘You are a healer, yes?’
Sofia nodded.
‘So heal.’
‘Heal who?’ said Sofia. ‘You all need a healer’s hand.’
‘Me,’ said a feminine and regal voice from the centre of the warriors’ circle. ‘They want you to heal me.’
Sofia moved closer as the warriors parted and her lips opened in shock when she saw the speaker: a woman with cut-glass features of aloof majesty and alabaster skin threaded with branching black veins. Hair the colour of a waning moon spilled over her shoulders like drifts of melting snow.
‘Tzarina Katarin!’ said Ryurik, almost dropping his book.
The Ice Queen of Kislev sat on a simple camp chair, holding a glittering sword of unbreakable ice before her. The tip of its sapphire blade was driven into the earth, and she rested her hands across its silver hilt. Sofia imagined the Tzarina’s grip on the sword was the only thing keeping her upright.
The Ice Queen’s sky-blue dress was torn, but remained a fantastical enchantment wrought from ice and velvet, silk and frost. Hung with glittering mother-of-pearl and woven from winter itself, it suggested fleeting vulnerability and eternal strength at the same time.
‘Oh, my queen,’ said Sofia, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘What have they done to you?’
The herd laired in a fire-gutted human settlement that had died in a long night of howling madness and feasting. Smoke still curled from the blackened timbers of the ataman’s hall as Khar-zagor scrambled up the inner slope of its defensive ditch and over the splintered timbers of its outer palisade.
Khar-zagor kept his gaze on the dark earth.
He did not like to look up.
The sky of Kislev was too vast and too empty. He craved canopies of dark, clawing branches, the rustle of wind-struck leaves and the darkness of wild, overgrown places. Out here on the oblast, the sky merged with the wide horizon, where distant steppe fires razed the wild grasses and the land withered beneath the hooves of the gods’ children.
Leather-winged harpies circled overhead, hungry to scavenge the bones piled before the new herdstone. Ungrol Four-horn’s hunt-beasts squealed as they perched on tumbled ruins and loosed crooked shafts into the cold air. The scavenger beasts were too high to be troubled by their poorly aimed shafts, but the harpies screeched in frustration at the taunts of the beasts below. Khar-zagor ignored them, skirting the many snorting, heaving piles of bull-horned gors made sluggish with this latest feast of flesh.
The bigger beasts gathered at the centre of the stanitsa, around a carved menhir the one-eyed giant had ripped from the cliffs over Urszebya. Cairns of skulls and the bones of men, women and children sucked dry of marrow and licked clean of meat surrounded it. Ancient human script had been cut into the towering, fang-like megalith, but smeared faeces and daubed runes of power obscured most of it.
Curled around the menhir’s base was a monstrous figure the herd knew as Bale-eye. Three times the height of even the largest minotaur, its rune-scarred flesh was a mottled patchwork of ever-shifting hues and runic brands. The insane giant’s single, sorcerous eye was shut and its horns gouged troughs in the earth as ropes of drool formed acrid puddles around its bovine head.
Khar-zagor had found Ungrol Four-horn defecating in the bowl of a shrine to the household spirits within the remains of a stone-walled grain store. Fire had destroyed its roof timbers, and the smell of roasted harvest grains mixed with beast excrement was a heady mix of territoriality and hate.
‘Where meat? Where ravager pack?’ demanded Ungrol Four-horn with one of its two shaggy, horn-crowned heads. The second head drooled over his shoulder, chewing the mangy hair like rotten cud.
‘Meat gone. Pack dead,’ answered Khar-zagor.
Four-horn cocked his head to the side, the splintered horns bound to his distended skulls gouging the matted fur of its twin. The second head bleated in anger, but the speaking head paid it no mind.
‘Dead? How dead?’
‘Humans. Fast riders with screaming wings kill pack with horse spears.’
Four-horn quickly grasped the seriousness of his words. Both heads nodded, and Khar-zagor saw that the strapped horns seemed less bound to him than grown into his flesh.
‘Come,’ said Ungrol Four-horn, loping in the direction of the ataman’s hall. ‘We tell Outcast of fast riders. You know their scent?’
Khar-zagor nodded, keeping behind Four-horn. ‘Followed it. Found human lair. Found she-champion that leads them.’
Ungrol Four-horn gave a bray of bitter laughter.
‘Outcast be pleased if you right.’
‘Khar-zagor never wrong. Was her.’