Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,4
heavy pick.
Stepping outside, he glared up at the bright sun for a moment before walking to where Snotty was readying the cart. The three digging tools thumped onto the bed in a cloud of dust. “Five you say?”
“Five!”
“Bring us two casks of water.”
“I will.”
Graves went out back behind the shed. He eyed the heap of slabs, dragged out five—each one dressed into rough rectangular shapes, sides smoothed down, one arm’s-length long and an elbow-down wide—and he squatted before them, squinting at the bare facings. “Best wait on that,” he muttered, and then straightened when he heard the boy bringing the cart around.
“Watch your fingers this time,” Graves warned.
“I will.”
Graves moved the pick and shovels to the head of the cart bed to make room for the slabs. Working carefully, they loaded each stone onto the warped but solid planks. Then Graves went around to the mule’s harness and cinched the straps tighter to ease the upward pull on the animal’s chest.
“Five,” said the boy.
“Heavy load.”
“Heavy load. What you gonna carve on ’em?”
“We’ll see.”
Graves set out and Snotty led the mule and the creaking cart after him, making sure the wooden wheels fell evenly into the ruts on the road, the ruts that led to the cemetery.
When they arrived, they saw Flowers wandering the grassy humps of the burial ground, collecting blossoms, her fair hair dancing in the wind. The boy stopped and stared until Graves pushed the second-best shovel into his hands.
“Don’t even think about it,” Graves warned.
“I’m not,” the boy lied, but some lies a man knew to just let pass. For a time.
Graves studied the misshapen lumps before them, thinking, measuring in his head. “We start a new row.”
Shovels in hand, they made their way into the yard.
“Five, you said.”
“Five,” answered the boy.
It took most of the morning for the riders to reach the floodplain. The trail leading down into the valley was ill-frequented and there had been no work done on it in decades. Seasonal runoff had carved deep, treacherous channels around massive boulders. Snake holes gaped everywhere and the horses twitched and shied as they picked their way down the slope.
The cooler air of the pass gave way to cloying heat in the valley. Broken rock surrendered to brambles and thickets of spike-grass and sage. Upon reaching level ground, the trail opened out, flanked by tree stumps and then a thin forest of alder, aspen, and, closer to the river, cottonwoods.
The approach to the hamlet forked before reaching the bridge. The original, broader track led to a heap of tumbled blackstone, rising from the bank like the roots of shattered teeth with a similar ruin on the other side of the river. The wooden bridge at the end of the narrower path was barely wide enough to take a cart. Built of split logs and hemp rope, it promised to sway sickeningly and the riders would need to cross it one at a time.
The man who rode behind the captain was squat and wide, his broad face a collection of crooked details, from the twisted nose to the hook lifting the left side of his mouth, the dented jawline, one ear boxed and looking like a flattened cabbage, the other clipped neatly in half with top and bottom growing in opposite directions. His beard and mustache were filthy with flecks of dried spit and possibly froth. As he guided his horse over the bridge, he squinted down at the river to his left. The remnants of the stone pillars that had held up the original bridge were still visible, draped in flowing manes of algae.
Horse clumping onto solid ground once more, he drew up beside his captain and they sat watching the others cross one by one.
Captain Skint’s expression was flat as her face, her eyes like scratched basalt.
“A year ago,” said the man, “and it’d take half the day for alla us t’come over this bridge. A thousand Rams, hard as stone.”
The third rider coming up alongside them, a tall, gangly woman with crimson glints in her black hair, snorted at the man’s words. “Dreaming of the whorehouse again, Sarge?”
“What? No. Why’d ya think—”
“We ain’t Rams anymore. We’re goats. Fucking goats.” And she spat.
Dullbreath and Huggs joined them and the five mercenaries, eager for the respite the hamlet ahead offered them—but admitting to nothing—fell into a slow canter as the track widened into something like a road.
They passed a farm: a lone log house and three stone-walled pens. The place stank of pig shit and