The woman didn’t seem to find this odd. “If the Earth Spirit was willing to crush it,” she said, “it would have. It remains unwilling.” She shrugged bony shoulders. “Perhaps the site has some holy importance of which I am not aware.” The woman’s robes clung to her gaunt body, hollowed from malnutrition. Her face looked like a skull with skin stretched too tight across it, her eyes pinpoints of madness in deep sockets.
Stehlen had seen this enough times to know what she was looking at: These were Geisteskranken riding the last wave of power before the Pinnacle took them. Of course Morgen sent them here. They were dirty. He’d want them as far away as possible but wouldn’t see the contradiction, the sheer hypocrisy of using their madness for his own purposes. What he hated about them made them useful.
“There seems to be a lot,” said the short man, sneering, “of which you are unaware.”
“I’m aware of how much you stink,” said the woman. “Eat snot.”
“And apparently unaware of your own stench.” The man grinned red teeth as he dug into a nostril with relish.
The two sat in angry silence, pretending to ignore each other though they shared the same dying fire.
Stehlen drew a knife and moved closer. She’d open their throats and leave them kicking in the mud.
The woman flinched at something, glancing into the sky. “Drache will snap soon.”
“You’re one to speak, Earth-Whore.” But the priest huddled deeper into his robes, squatted lower.
The priestess grinned like a sunken skull, thin hair pressed against her scalp in greasy strands. “You didn’t have much trouble ripping the demons free of several thousand Gottlos troops.”
“Go rut a tree.” The man sagged, reaching a hand toward the fire as if he might draw some vestige of warmth from it before it died. “It was easy.” He glanced at the priestess. “Shall I show you?”
“The earth will crush you like the worm you are.”
The man shrugged, mad eyes sweeping the black sky above. “She’s going to kill us. I can feel her hate.” He laughed, a racking cough. “She tried to drop a cow on me. If she’d bothered to kill it first, I wouldn’t have heard it coming.”
The woman searched the sky with sunken eyes and even Stehlen found herself checking to see what might lurk above. She saw nothing.
Knife ready, Stehlen ghosted closer. Whatever the two Geisteskranken thought flew above was likely a figment of their fragmenting minds. She wasn’t worried. It will die with them.
“She likes the sound things make when they fall to their death,” said the woman.
“We should kill her before she kills us.”
“How?” demanded the priestess. “She hasn’t twisted back to her human shape since we left Selbsthass.”
Shite, there’s a Therianthrope up there. Apparently one near its own Pinnacle. Shape-shifters spent more and more time as their spirit animal before they cracked.
“Together we could defeat her,” said the priest, finally digging a nugget of snot from his nose and holding it aloft to show the woman before sucking his finger clean.
The priestess grimaced. “Really? She hasn’t set foot on the ground in days. You know what that means? It means I can’t touch her. The sky is dead to me.”
“Well I can kill her—”
“Good luck with that.”
Almost within range, Stehlen decided she’d learned all she would from these two bickering fools.
“Shite,” said the priest. “So what are we going to do about those damned Swordsmen?”
Stehlen stopped, holding her breath.
“Go into that farmhouse,” said the priestess, “and exorcise them.”
He shook his head, lifting filthy hands as if to ward off the woman’s words. “I’m not setting foot into a little farmhouse with the Greatest Swordsman in the World. Exorcisms take time. He’d run me through before I finished.”
The Greatest… Wichtig was in the farmhouse? Stehlen’s heart kicked in savage fear. I sent Lebendig in there. Alone. She remembered the exhausted sag of Lebendig’s shoulders as she rode away. Wichtig. Lebendig. Who was she more scared for? If the carved toy was to be believed—and Stehlen did believe—Wichtig was badly wounded while Lebendig still recovered from whatever that numen sheltered in the oasis of trees did to her. And the Swordswoman was angry. She wanted to face Wichtig to prove something, either to herself or Stehlen. The Kleptic wasn’t sure.
But Wichtig is the Greatest Swordsman in the World and Lebendig is…my love.
Stehlen stood torn, wanting to kill these two priests and wanting to rush to that farmhouse to kill someone and save someone else.
The ravaged landscape made all too much sense now. These two deranged priests—along with whatever Therianthrope flew hidden in the clouds above—killed thousands of Gottlos troops here. Geborene Geisteskranken at the Pinnacle. She couldn’t leave them alive. They were too dangerous.
Gods, how long had she been here listening to their insane drivel when she should have been killing them?
Lebendig will be fine. She had to be.
Swordsmen. The priest said Swordsmen.
Kill them fast and go.
Decision made, Stehlen crept forward. Three heartbeats and these two hearts would never beat again.
A huge rock, a third of her own height and twice as wide, reared from the mud, blocking Stehlen.
“You cannot harm the Earth Warden,” said the rock in a voice like a landslide.