01 - Honour of the Grave by Robin D. Laws - (ebook by Undead) Page B

hard, and cleanse my debt of
honour.”
    Angelika turned her back, to spare herself the sight of Ekbert’s punishment,
but there was no escaping his cries, or the sound of wet leather crackling into
his flesh.

 
 
CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    With everyone now on foot, Angelika argued for a route that concealed them in
the hills. Benno insisted that they stick to the bottomlands, instead of
tramping through rocks and brambles. But then the sky began to rumble, and the
travellers could not be sure whether it was thunder, or the booming of orcish
war drums. They chose the hills.
    Ekbert trudged with laboured steps; his coat hid the spreading blood that
glued the shirt to his back. Gelfrat kept by his side, to steady the old man if
needed. Angelika protected herself from the sight of this, and what it aroused
in her, by keeping to the head of the party, alongside Benno. In today’s grey
light, he didn’t look good from any angle.
    About two hours into their journey, a drizzle started up. They took a
moment’s shelter beneath a tall and leafy oak; Gelfrat passed his wineskin.
Angelika took a sip, but it was rancid. She wished she’d thought to bring some
brandy.
    “It won’t get any drier,” she said, watching the sky darken. They pushed on.
The rain grew heavier, soaking through their cloaks and tunics. Angelika spotted
a small cave, and they all squeezed into it. Soon after they had arranged
themselves inside, spears of sunlight broke through the clouds, and the rain resolved
itself into a mist. Angelika reached out a hand, and declared it time to move
on. Benno plodded after her without comment, his soldiers trailing behind him.
    When there were about three hours of light left in the day, Angelika stopped
to peer up at the mountaintops. Landmarks were scarce here; one section of the
pass looked pretty much like any other.
    “I think I recognise that peak there, with the cleft in the middle,” she
said. “If I’m right, we’ve got about a league left to go.” She increased her
pace, thinking of the best spot to hide her pay. She’d decided that these
Averlanders were bad men—same as any men—but they would not try to cheat
her. She kept an eye for a trail leading down into the valley, finding one about
fifteen minutes into her search. She stopped to listen: she heard birdsong and a
light wind playing on tree branches. Satisfied that it was safe to descend to
open ground, she whistled a warning to the men behind her and took the path
down. It was a light trail, most likely made by boars or deer. Midway along, she
surprised a fat marmot, grey with a brown ruff at the back of its neck. It sat
up and shrieked angrily at her, but did not think to run until she stamped her
foot at it.
    “We could have eaten that,” Gelfrat said.
    “Are we here to dine on marmot, or recover your brother’s bones?”
    She reached the flat terrain of the valley floor and looked around to orient
herself. For many hundreds of yards, lightly forested slopes, dotted with
boulders and stones, gradually gave way to level scrubland, which extended all
the way across the valley to the hills and mountains on the pass’ opposite
side. She saw a curtain of rock ahead. Angelika kept walking, skirting the
grade, until she saw a place where the mountain rock descended to the valley, in
a sheer curtain of crumbling limestone at least forty feet high. A recently
fallen slab of stone lay at its feet, others teetered up on the cliffs edge.
Angelika knew this spot; it was her landmark.
    “How much further?” asked Gelfrat.
    “We’re there,” she said. She walked, hugging the cliff wall, until she stopped
at the edge of a bowl-shaped depression. It was an old sinkhole filled in by soil washed down from the hills. New
spruces, few of them higher than six feet tall, competed for space along its
slopes. Angelika waded into them, parting the young trees.
    “Wait,” yelled Benno, from the sinkhole’s edge. “This is