Page 38 of Swordheart #1

“I can’t believe there’s corpses in my wagon,” said Zale the next morning, hunching their narrow shoulders up around their ears. “I keep thinking about them being right there. Under the seat.”

“I’m wondering how we’re going to get them out of the wagon,” said Halla. “Without being caught.”

“You know,” said Sarkis, “I’ve killed hundreds of people—possibly by this point thousands—and I’ve never had this much trouble with two dead bodies before.”

“Perhaps you should take this as an incentive to give up killing,” said Zale.

“It certainly takes a lot of the fun out of it.”

“Who knew that it would be so difficult to find a small pond?” moaned Halla. “There’s hundreds of them. I know there’s hundreds of them. But where are they?”

“One north of here,” said Brindle, not turning his head.

“Eh? How do you know?”

“Smell it.” Brindle tapped his nose. “Smells like ice.”

“Ice has a smell?” said Zale.

“Gnoles say humans can’t smell,” muttered Brindle, rolling his eyes. “Not just saying. Yes, rat-priest. Smells like cold tin.” He tilted his head back and sniffed. Halla could see his black nostrils working.

“I’ll go look,” said Sarkis, sliding off the wagon.

He came back a few minutes later. “It must be farther back than I thought, because I didn’t see it. But there’s a track into the woods a little way up from here that we can probably get the wagon down.”

When they reached the gap, Brindle looked at it thoughtfully, then nodded and steered the ox toward the overgrown track. “Good road,” he said after a moment. “But not used much.”

“Could be one of the pig roads,” said Halla.

“I mean, not made by the pigs, but this is the acorn wood everybody fattens their hogs up in, and then you have to go get them out again. And if they don’t want to come out, you need to get a wagon up there so you’re not carrying a slaughtered hog for miles.

But you only need it a couple times a year. ”

“Are we going to be tripping over all the local swineherds?” asked Sarkis.

“I doubt it.” Halla shook her head. “It’s too late in the season. Everybody slaughtered their hogs already. Any left out now are starting to lose fat.” She frowned. “I won’t swear there’s not a sounder of feral hogs in the woods, of course…”

“There are,” said Zale. “We get reports at the Temple. Somebody tried to bring an action against a pig farmer saying his boar went feral and mauled their son, but without tracking down the boar to check the brand, they couldn’t prove whose boar it was.

And the army says it’s not their job to kill livestock and the paladins won’t do it unless the boar’s possessed and the Squire here doesn’t hunt, so…

” They shrugged. “The case was dropped.”

“Pond,” said Brindle, nodding ahead of them.

“You smelled this from the road?” said Sarkis, impressed. The pond was little more than hollow filled with leaves and slush. Tracks in the frozen mud showed that the pigs had been using it to drink.

“Surprised you didn’t, sword-man.”

“Well,” said Sarkis, looking at the pond, “I suppose it’ll work. If the pigs dig them up, they’ll vanish just as effectively into a hog as a pond.” Zale made a small noise of dismay.

Sarkis had to use the camp shovel to make a hole in the slush.

It was normally for digging small, impromptu latrines and occasionally for covering over campfires, but it did well enough.

Brindle got out the hatchet and set to work beside him.

Between the two of them, they slowly chopped out a corpse-sized hole in the ice, while Halla collected pine boughs to cover over the bodies.

Zale looked slightly green, but unlocked the wagon and pulled the door open. “I am starting to feel like a murderer,” they said.

“This wasn’t murder,” said Sarkis. “It was killing. And they started it.” He grabbed one of the sheet-wrapped bodies by the head. Brindle grabbed the feet.

“Hold on,” said Halla, as they were carrying it toward the ice. She pulled out a knife and sliced off a bit of the sheet’s hem.

“Eh?”

“There’s a dancing rat embroidered in the corner. Bit of a giveaway if anyone finds the bodies.”

“Must your Temple put rats on everything ?” grumbled Sarkis, dropping the body into the trench in the ice.

“Our god is a rat! It’s what we do!”

The second body followed the first into the ice, sans decorative rat.

“Right.” Sarkis dusted off his hands while Halla dragged pine branches over the bodies. “There’s that sorted.”

“It doesn’t look very well disguised,” said Zale dubiously. “It looks like somebody chopped up the ice and then put branches over it to hide something.”

“Yes, well. Doesn’t your practical rat-god teach you how to hide bodies?”

Zale sighed heavily. “No,” they admitted. “Although I am starting to believe that was a severe oversight. I shall bring it up with the bishop.”

“You do that.”

“I’m sure it’ll be better after it snows a bit,” said Halla.

They climbed back on the wagon. Brindle clucked to the ox and it began moving, following the track deeper into the woods.

“Don’t we want to go back?”

“Can’t turn a wagon here, sword-man. Got to find a wide spot.”

Halla frowned. “There must be one nearby. You don’t make a wagon road without having at least a place to pass. Otherwise if you meet someone coming, one of you has to back up for a long way.”

Sarkis grunted. He had never given it a great deal of thought.

The supply wagon for his band, once they were big enough to have one, had been handled by the quartermaster.

Beyond determining if a road was wide enough for a wagon, Sarkis had little to do with it.

He’d always praised the woman as a miracle worker, he just hadn’t realized what sort of miracles she’d been pulling off.

“We could cut down some of these trees,” he said. “Make a space to turn around.”

Halla and Zale both looked at him as if he had casually suggested burning the forest down.

“… what?”

“To cut another property owner’s trees without permission is worse than poaching,” said Zale. “Men have been hanged for it.”

“If they try to hang me, they’ll get a surprise,” said Sarkis.

“Yes, but…” Zale looked at Halla helplessly. “Without explaining three hundred years of forestry laws, I’m not sure how to express this.”

“You’re allowed to collect fallen deadwood,” said Halla. “That’s everybody’s right. But cutting a living tree is like killing a shepherd’s sheep. They belong to somebody.”

“We’ve already killed a couple of people. I don’t think cutting trees is going to be that big a sin.”

“No, but…” Halla waved her hands. “Whoever owns these trees didn’t do anything to us!

And if it’s a tenant, they have to inform the landowner if they’re clearing and if the landowner finds the trees cut, they’ll think they’re stealing and they might turn out the tenant! People have lost their homes for less!”

“Takes a long time to cut a tree with a hatchet anyway,” said Brindle. “Lot of chopping. Lot of noise. Lot of noise next to dead humans. ”

“Fine, fine.” Sarkis held up his palms in surrender. “We don’t cut down the trees.”

“There’s got to be a turnaround up here somewhere,” said Halla.

The sides of the road began to rise. Brindle shook his head, but kept the ox plodding forward.

“There’s got to be…” Halla started again, and then trailed off. Her lips were pressed together, the thin upper lip jammed into the full lower one. Sarkis realized, with surprise, that she was angry.

“Of course I’m angry!” she said when he asked. “Someone didn’t do their job! You build a road, you have to put a spot to turn around. It’s just… it’s what you do. There’s got to be a spot.”

There wasn’t. The embankment on either side grew steeper and steeper, until it was nearly shoulder-high on Sarkis, even sitting on the wagon. Trees leaned over the road, their bare branches laced tightly across the sky.

“It’s a hollow way,” said Zale. “One of the old, old roads. People passed here so often that they wore a groove in the earth.”

“It looks like a tunnel,” said Sarkis, loosening his sword. “And it feels like a trap.”

“It’s just the acorn wood,” said Halla, but she didn’t sound as sure as she had a few minutes ago.

“Better hope an ox doesn’t meet a hog on the road,” said Brindle. “An ox might get… upset.”

Sarkis pictured the ox panicking. It took some mental effort.

But assuming the ox was like a horse, and tried to get out of the way of a threat, or tried to run…

He pictured the high-wheeled wagon tipping over and being dragged sideways through the hollow way by the panicking animal, or getting hung up in the shafts and breaking legs…

No, that was not a good thing. And if the ox decided to attack instead of run, the situation wasn’t going to be much better.

Sarkis didn’t want to think about an ox trying to gore a boar that was trying to gore an ox, all while dragging the wagon yoke behind it.

“I see light,” said Halla, pointing. “It opens up there.”

Brindle urged the ox to greater speed, which was largely an exercise in futility.

They reached the end of the hollow way and emerged, blinking, into the sunlight.

They were no longer in the acorn wood. They were halfway up a hillside, near a drop-off. Hills stretched out around them, blazing orange with fall color, set against a steel-blue sky.

Zale and Halla went very still. Brindle halted the ox.

“We’re out, right?” said Sarkis. “We can turn around?”

“Out of a hollow, sword-man,” said the gnole. “But into something worse.”