The warriors jumped down off their horses: Two of them ran to the houses on the left side of the street, and two to the houses on the right. The first soldier in each pair carried a crossbow and the second a sword. The swordsman ran to the door of the nearest house, kicked it open, and jumped aside to let the other man in. The warriors of the Borderland worked as precisely as one of the dwarves’ mechanical clocks.
The seconds dragged on, and I was beginning to think the lads must have fallen into the cellar, they were gone so long. The same thing was happening on the other side of the street. Eventually the men came out of the houses and walked back.
“Nobody!” said a soldier from the first pair.
“The same on our side, commander, the houses are empty. No damage, nothing broken, food on the table, but the soup’s cold.”
“I’m sure it will be the same in the other houses, too, Milord Alistan,” Honeycomb shouted to the count.
“Maybe there’s a festival of some kind, or a wedding?”
“We don’t have any festivals,” said a warrior with a lance. “And weddings aren’t held early in the morning.”
“Orcs?” Lamplighter asked.
“It can’t be. Cuckoo’s just down the road. The Firstborn would never dare attack a village so close to a garrison.”
“Urch, Kassani, check the tower!” Fer ordered.
The tower was close by, only ten yards from the road, at the edge of a field. While the lads were checking the houses, three of the mounted soldiers had kept their eyes on it, holding their crossbows ready. An archer could easily be hiding up there.
One of the soldiers started climbing up the shaky ladder, with a knife clutched in his teeth, while another held his crossbow pointed straight up in case an enemy head should suddenly appear in the square hole in the floor. The soldier with the knife clambered up and disappeared from view for a second. Then he reappeared and shouted:
“No one!”
“Is there anything up there, Urch?” asked Fer, raising his visor.
“A bow, a quiver of arrows, a jug of milk, commander!” Urch replied after a brief pause. “Blood! There’s blood here on the boards!”
“Fresh?” shouted one of the sergeants, drawing his sword.
“No, it’s dry! And there’s only a little bit, right beside the bow!”
“Kassani, what is there on the ground?”
“I can’t see anything,” said the soldier below the tower. “Just ordinary earth, and we’ve trampled it.”
Ell rode across to the tower, jumped off his horse, handed the reins to the soldier, then squatted down on his haunches and started studying the ground.
“Harold,” the jester called anxiously, “can you smell anything?”
“No.”
“I think there’s a smell of burning.”
“I can’t smell it,” I said after sniffing at the air. “You must have imagined it.”
“I swear by the great shaman Tre-Tre, there’s a smell of something burning.”
“Blood!” shouted Ell. “There’s blood on the ground!”
The elf jumped onto his horse and galloped across to Fer, Alistan, and Miralissa.
“He was killed on the tower, probably by an arrow, and he fell.”
“I see,” said Milord Alistan, tensing his jaw muscles. He pulled his chain-mail hood up over his head and put on a closed helmet with slits for his eyes. As if on command, Ell and Egrassa put on half-helmets that covered the top part of their faces.
“There’s something bad here, oh, very bad!” said Lamplighter, looking round nervously for any possible enemy.
But the street was as empty as the houses around us. Not just empty, but dead. There were no birds singing, no cows mooing in the barn, no dogs barking.
“The dogs!” I blurted out.
“What do you mean, Harold?” asked Egrassa, turning toward me.
“The dogs, Egrassa! Have you seen one? Have you heard them bark?”
“Orcs,” one of the soldiers said, and spat. “Those brutes hate dogs and they kill them first.”
“Then where are the bodies? Did they take them with them?” asked Marmot.
“Some clans do that,” Kassani said, climbing into his saddle. “They make ornaments out of dogs’ skins.”
“Urch, come down!” one of the sergeants shouted.
“Wait, commander, smoke!” cried Urch, pointing toward the center of the village.
“Thick?”
“No, I can just barely see it.”
“What’s burning?”
“I can’t see for the roofs of the houses.”
“Come down!”
Urch climbed down the ladder and got onto his horse.
“We move forward. Stay alert. We cover our back,” said Fer, and lowered his visor with a smooth movement.
“You know, Harold,” the goblin said in a whisper. “I’m beginning to feel afraid that we’ll run into orcs.”
“Me, too, Kli-Kli. Me, too.”
* * *
We caught the charred smell twenty houses away from the site of the fire. A huge barn belonging to a well-to-do peasant was burning. Or rather, it had already burned down. What we found was a heap of ash, still smoking slightly.
The smell of smoke and ash was mingled with the smell of burned flesh.
“Check it,” Fer rumbled from under his helmet.
One of the soldiers covered his face with his hands and walked to the extinguished fire. Walking across the cold embers and stepping over burnt-out beams, he stirred the ash with the toe of his boot and ran back to us. His face was pale.
“They were all burned, commander. Nothing but charred bones. They drove them into the barn and set fire to it. More than a hundred of them.”
Someone sighed loudly behind me and someone else swore.
“How could this have happened?”
“Someone will pay for this!”
“Stop sniveling! Forward, at a walk,” Fer said harshly. “Crossbowmen move up into the front line.”
“What about the dead, commander?”
“Later,” Fer replied.
We found the other villagers on the small square, where there was an inn and a wooden temple to the gods—more than twenty-five corpses. All the bodies had been gutted, like fish, their heads had been cut off and heaped up in one big pile. The stench of blood and death hammered at our nostrils and the buzzing of thousands of flies rang in our ears. It looked as if a crowd of insane jesters had run through here, splashing blood left and right out of buckets.
One of the soldiers dismounted and puked violently. And to be quite honest, I almost followed his example. It cost me an immense effort to keep my breakfast in my stomach.
Things like this just shouldn’t happen. Things like this have no right to exist in our world!
Men. Women, old people, children … Everyone who had not been burned in the barn was lying in the square, which was covered in blood.
“There,” said Marmot, with a nod.
There were seven bodies hanging on the wall of the inn. Their hands and feet had been nailed to the planks, their stomachs were slit open, and their heads were missing. Two women had been hanged on a rope thrown across the sign of the inn, and their bodies were swaying gently in the light breeze.
I heard a chirping sound and turned my head toward it. A small creature with gray skin, no bigger than a baby, broke off from devouring flesh and raised its bloody face toward us, blinking eyes that were like red saucers. A second one noticed that we were watching it and hissed maliciously.
A bowstring twanged and the first creature squealed and fell, pierced through by an elfin arrow. The second scavenger went darting away and Ell missed it. It disappeared behind the houses, chirping viciously.
“Gkhols, a curse on them!” Deler growled.
“The corpse-eaters are already feasting…”
“Take down the bodies,” Fer ordered his soldiers.
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