within his dwarf-forged weapon and was alarmed by it. Perhaps it smelled the blood of its companion on him.
Before Kormak could do anything, the wolf-man turned and fled, bounding away faster than a horse could run. It sprang over the wall of the village and raced off into the night. Kormak could hear its howling receding into the distance and knew that he could not overtake it.
He looked around him one more time and could see nothing but dead bodies and burning buildings. There was no sign of any further monsters so he strode over to where the headless villager lay. Beside him was a wounded man in the robes of a priest, a great gash torn in his flesh. Looking at his wound, Kormak knew the man did not have long to live. “What happened here?” he asked.
The priest looked up at him. “Massimo’s Wolves came. They killed everyone.”
“Massimo?” Kormak asked.
“Jaro’s henchman. The wizard. Moondog rebels, the pair of them. Kill them, Champion of the Sun. Kill them all.” He coughed blood and tried to make the sign of the Sun over his ripped chest. His eyes went wide and cold and Kormak realised that the last thing he had seen was the moon, an ill omen for a man of his faith.
Kormak picked his way through the ruins of the village, looking for survivors. There were none. The wolf-men had been thorough about their work. On his way back, he checked the body of the wolf-man he had killed. It still lay there, in a puddle of what looked like liquified flesh. The night-metal necklace glittered on its throat. Looking closely Kormak could see that it seemed to have fused into the flesh.
Kormak prised it free. It tingled in his hand as he touched it. He could feel the foulness in it, the taint of Shadow. It shattered when he struck it with his blade.
A wisp of ectoplasm drifted free and he ran his blade through it too, dissolving it and sending the bound spirit to its final death. Whoever this Massimo was, Kormak thought, he knew powerful dark magic.
He did not want to take his rest surrounded by the dead, and perhaps the wolf-man would return with companions.
In the distance Kormak could see smoke rising. There had been a lot of it since he had started riding through the Mountains of Darkness. Everywhere he looked there was burning and the signs of strife. It felt wrong. It was late autumn, not the time for local lordlings to be making war. He had seen more burned-out villages with the charred bodies of massacre victims strewn through them. He had seen farms and cottages burned to the ground. He had seen the flocks of sheep slain and left to rot.
He had been born in the mountains of Aquilea, a rough land, where clan feuds burned hot and long but he had never seen anything like this. Flocks were for rustling, not to kill and leave lying. This was more like the work of mad beasts than men. It was as if madness had struck right across the mountains.
He had seen their tracks, those of large, armed bands, leading away from the place where the massacres happened. Mingled with those of horses and men had been what looked like those of very large dogs. He guessed the wolf-men rode with the warriors.
Ahead of him he saw a body on the road. There was something about this that was at once repulsive and disturbing.
He reined his horse to halt and dismounted to inspect the corpse. He noticed the smell from many strides away, a peculiar mixture of rotting meat and something else, something suggestive of things long dead. He had a suspicion he knew what he would find even before he reached the body and he was not disappointed.
He knew the man, or he had known in him life. It was the robber-knight Wesley. His features seemed to have aged and at the same time putrefied. His body and his life had been consumed by the Ghul who had possessed him. It feasted on the life energy of its victims even as it took possession of their bodies.
The process was happening faster than it ought to according to the old records. Perhaps the Ghul had been weakened by millennia of imprisonment. Or perhaps some of Solareon’s spells binding it were still in place. In any case, this might perhaps represent a strange stroke of luck. If the Ghul needed to shift