“You’ll ride at my side,” said Wichtig, not wanting to go alone, “or you’ll find a new master.”
Wichtig pointed Bl?d at the hill and the beast plodded on, wuffling its complaints, footsteps sounding strangely spongy. Opferlamm followed, though none too quickly. The number of shattered and torn bodies increased as they rode. It looked like the very earth joined in the battle and attacked the Gottlos troops. Horses, too, were littered among the partially buried corpses, though none showed the terrifying wounds the people bore.
“This isn’t a hill,” said Opferlamm.
“Of course it—”
“It’s a burial mound.” She gagged, and puked semi-digested porridge down the length of her right leg. “We’re riding on thousands of corpses.”
Thousands? The girl was right, the ground was more flesh and savaged bone than soil and rock.
“How many soldiers can Dieb Schmutzig muster?” asked Wichtig.
“Maybe five thousand?” Opferlamm gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Useless twit,” muttered Wichtig as he crested the mounded dead. Turning Bl?d in a complete circle, he surveyed what he could through the curtains of blinding rain. “I can’t see more than a dozen paces,” he said to Opferlamm as the young Swordswoman arrived at his side.
Lightning shredded the sky, lighting the world in strobing white and the red and brown of commingled mud and blood. For a thousand strides in every direction, corpses lay sprawled and broken, shredded from the inside out. Their armour—those few wealthy enough to have any—was burst from within. From atop the piled dead, they saw long stretches of bubbled earth. Straight lines cut the mud where stone and bone alike ran like thick blood. The dead caught in the wide strips of oblivion were unlike the others. They were twisted, melted, ravaged by chaotic delusion run amok. It was impossible to tell the remains of men from the corpses of their horses, so fused had they become.
No tree stood.
“That’s impossible,” said Opferlamm. She squinted into the sky.
Wichtig glanced up at the roiling clouds. “What is?”
“The lightning lit something from above. I saw a shadow. Huge. Above the clouds. Wings.”
“What the hells are you babbling about?”
“Dragon.”
“No such thing.”
Opferlamm looked at Wichtig like her teacher had gone mad. “What’s not sticking possible?” she screamed.
“Calm yourself.” Wichtig reconsidered the straight lines of malignant devastation. Dragon. He swallowed.
Again lightning ravaged the sky and this time he saw it, the shadow of something huge, wings spread, gliding above the clouds.
It would have to be…the wings…straight lines…death in the sky…
An animal scream of purest agony and terror broke his thoughts, scattered them, sent sanity sprinting to hide in a ditch.
“What’s—”
Something fell kicking and twisting through the clouds and Wichtig, neck craning, watched.
“It’s a horse,” said Opferlamm, also following its descent. “How did it—”
Is it going to land on—
It crashed to the earth three strides away with bone jarring force and showered them in mire and horse guts.
Sitting atop Bl?d on this mound of corpses, Wichtig suddenly felt very exposed. There, a few hundred yards to the south, he saw a farmhouse. Where total devastation reigned, it still stood.
“We have to get to that farmhouse.”
Without waiting to see if Opferlamm followed, Wichtig drove Bl?d forward with a scream, kicking the beast ever faster as it raced down the awkward slope of ravaged dead. Bl?d stumbled at the bottom of the hill. The beast was just recovering when its front legs found some hidden pit and it pitched forward, bones snapping, head smashing into the sodden soil. Wichtig jumped, rolling free, and continued toward the house at a mad sprint. Not once did he look back at his horse. Even over the bone shaking roar of thunder, Bl?d’s screams were deafening. Wichtig left them behind. I’ll find another damned horse. This time he wouldn’t name the damned thing.
Lighting flashed, setting the world afire, and a monstrous winged shadow swept over Wichtig.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
There is a rare and peculiar breed of Wendigast who believe they gain strength and wisdom from those they devour. While they are more common among the northern Verschlinger tribes than the city-states, it is the Wendigast of the Basamortuan Desert that are most interesting. There, in the endless dunes, the practice of devouring human flesh is reviled far beyond what the mores of the desert tribes would suggest. Anyone even suspected of cannibalism is slain. This practice is most extreme among the Etsaiaren tribe. For thousands of years, the Etsaiaren have gathered the corpses of cannibals—and Cotardists, though I fail to see the connection—in Santu Itsasoa (translated as The Sea of Souls). The dead and undying are lashed to cactuses by their innards and tendons, always facing toward Geldangelegenheiten.
As the Etsaiaren are murderous savages, I have never been able to learn why they should so revile cannibals.
—Geschichts Verdreher - Historian/Philosopher