malnourished. Calard cut it down in midair, and it fell in a bloody heap to the floor. Calard glanced
around him, getting a sense of their position within the common room.
‘The kitchen,’ he said, indicating towards it with a nod. ‘That’s our best chance. There must be a
back door.’
Both Calard and Raben were splattered with blood, and while most of it was not their own, neither
man was uninjured. Raben risked a quick glance back towards the kitchen. It was at least ten yards
away, and they were now completely surrounded.
‘We won’t make it,’ said Raben.
‘Stay here and die then, damn you,’ said Calard.
With a roar, he forced the enemy back, swinging his swords around in a pair of deadly arcs. Taking
advantage of the space he had created, he leapt atop the bar and ran along its length towards the back of
the inn. Peasants reached for him but his blades sliced out, keeping them at bay. He leapt off the far end,
slamming a pair of enemies to the floor. He came to his feet in the kitchen doorway, blades at the ready.
The kitchen was disgustingly dirty, and rats scuttled in the shadows, but it was free of foes. He spotted a
door on the far wall.
Glancing back into the common room, he saw Chlod emerge from beneath the bar, scurrying under
tables towards him.
‘Quickly!’ Calard shouted. Peasants were close behind his manservant, their red-rimmed eyes wide.
Raben was standing alone, surrounded. He turned on the spot, holding his sword at the ready as
peasants closed in around him, too many to hold off alone. Briefly, Calard’s gaze met Raben’s across the
room. He saw the outcast mouth a curse. The peasants attacked as one but Raben had pre-empted them
and was already moving. He swayed aside from a vicious blow and launched a lightning counter that took
off an arm at the elbow.
Calard shoved Chlod into the kitchen.
‘Unlock the door!’ he ordered. Calard stepped back to give himself more room to swing as the
enemy came at him. The first through the doorway was hacked almost in two as he cleaved it from
shoulder-blade to armpit. He dragged his sword free and waited for the next to enter, but the peasants
hung back, none willing to be his next victim. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Chlod at the back door,
and began to edge towards him. The peasants came after him, spreading out, but they were wary now of
his blade. There was a commotion behind the peasants, and he caught a glimpse of Raben barging his
way through the press of bodies.
‘Wait,’ he ordered Chlod as he heard the bolts of the back door sliding open.
The knight burst into the room, but the leg of a chair wielded as a club struck him, and he stumbled.
Three peasants were on him in an instant. Without thought, Calard moved to his aid. He hacked into the
bare back of one of the peasants crouched over the outcast, severing its spine. He kicked another away,
sending it flying face-first into a bench top, bringing a pile of dirty pots down with a crash. He slashed at
another, and it reeled backwards with a screech, blood spraying from its neck. The peasants had now
circled around them, filling the kitchen.
Calard gripped Raben under the arm and helped him to his feet. Blood was dripping from bite
wounds on his cheek and neck. The outcast knight had lost his grip on his sword, and drew a slender
knife from his boot.
‘You should have gone without me,’ said Raben. ‘I would have.’
‘And that is the difference between your kind and mine,’ said Calard.
The peasants came at them in a rush. Two died to Calard’s bastard sword and another to Raben’s
stabbing knife before the two knights were overwhelmed.
Seeing his master disarmed and dragged to the ground, Chlod slid back the last bolt on the door in a
rush and threw the door open. The cold night air washed in and without a backwards glance he bolted
out into the darkness.
Before he had made two yards, a hand locked around his throat. His legs went out from under him,
and he was hurled back into the kitchen. From the floor, he looked up to see a gaunt peasant appear in
the doorway. His eyes widened as the figure came into the light.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Chlod, scrambling backwards on his hands and knees.
The figure was covered in crude tattoos and wore a necklace of fingers around his scrawny neck.
Splinters of bone had been pushed through the skin of his forearms. He looked down at Chlod and
smiled, exposing stained teeth that had been filed to points.
‘Hello, Chlod,’ he said.
CALARD’S ARMS WERE wrenched behind his back and his wrists bound with tough, sinewy cord.
‘Chlod,’ he said. ‘What in the Lady’s name is going on?’
His manservant stood nearby, shivering, his eyes wide and staring. He avoided Calard’s gaze as he
too was bound.
‘By all that is holy, I swear–’ said Calard, but his words were cut short as a hastily tied noose was
looped around his neck. A foot between his shoulder blades pinned him down as it was yanked taut,
making him gasp for breath.
Alongside him, Raben was suffering similar treatment, held face down on the floor while he was
trussed up like a prize hog.
The tattooed leader of the peasant rabble barked something indecipherable in a repulsive, guttural
tongue and Calard and Raben were dragged to their feet. Another barked order and they were hauled
out into the night. The tattooed peasant followed, holding Chlod tightly around the back of the neck.
‘We’ve missed you, Chlod,’ he hissed.
VII
FOR OVER THREE hours they were dragged through stinking marshes and haunted forests by the loping
parade of filthy, cannibalistic peasants. Their captives were not the feral brood’s only spoils; they had
hastily ransacked the larder of Morr’s Rest, filling sacks with cheese and bread, meat and wineskins.
Corpses had been mutilated and dismembered, and several of the sacks were now soaked through with
blood, stuffed with human body parts.
They kept off the roads, hauled along paths overgrown with thorn-bushes and rushes. Occasionally
they were forced into the open, scurrying across muddy fields filled with rotten crops, watched over by
the silhouettes of scarecrows. Sometimes they could see lights in the distance, but their captors seemed
keen to avoid areas of habitation, and veered away from them.
They trudged knee-deep through vast tracts of swampland, beset by great clouds of stinging midges.
They climbed from this stinking morass as the ground rose, and their pace picked up again as they ran
through an abandoned village that had been left to rot. The peasants seemed more at ease here, speaking
amongst themselves in their low, ugly tongue. Calard was poked and prodded by peasants whose eyes
gleamed with hunger.
Feet slapped loudly on the roadway, which rose steadily, winding its way through the dead village.
Soon they were in the countryside again, leaving the decrepit houses behind them, but their progress
continued upwards, the muddy roadway clinging to the steep sides of a hill. A crumbling, six foot wall ran
alongside the high side of the road.
They turned through a decaying stone gateway overrun with thorn-bushes and ivy. An ancient gate
hung on rusted hinges, and the procession of peasants passed through. Calard noted the hourglass carved
atop the archway as he was bustled through beneath it.
‘A Garden of Morr,’ he said.
They rose above the cloying blanket of ever-present fog and Calard was afforded a clearer view of
their surroundings. The graveyard reared up before them, clinging to a hilltop riddled with tombs and
mausoleums. It was massive and sprawling, a veritable city of the dead; tens of thousands were likely
buried here. The graves lowest on the hill were packed in tight and marked with cracked headstones and
slabs worn smooth by the passage of time. Many had clearly been desecrated and dug up. Winged,
skeletal statues being slowly strangled by ivy stood over some, while in other areas mass pit graves were
commemorated with little more than crude epitaphs scratched into stone slabs. Large family mausoleums
protruded from the hillside as they climbed higher, the richer tombs carved deep into the rock cliffs.
Black roses grew in abundance, their petals soft and velveteen, their deadly thorns curved and shining
silver. They exuded a heady, sickly-sweet aroma.
Ravens perched in leafless, twisted trees clinging to the hillside, staring down at the procession
passing below. Images of death were everywhere, from carved hourglasses and black roses on tombs
and opulent facades to extravagant sculptures depicting the god of the underworld, Morr, in his various
guises
The peasants became more animated, cavorting and leaping, grinning and guffawing. More of the
depraved creatures joined their group, though Calard had no idea where they had appeared from. Within
the tombs themselves, perhaps.
Feeling eyes upon him, he looked up to see a child clinging to the base of a cracked, moss-covered
statue. The child – he could not tell if it was a boy or a girl – was clearly starving, little more than a
skeleton encased in skin, its head too big for its frail body. It stared at him with red-rimmed eyes and its
flesh was covered in open sores. Something about the child’s intense gaze made his skin crawl. It hissed
at him, baring small, pointed teeth.
Calard grimaced as his captors yanked at the noose around his neck, jerking him onward.
Ever higher they climbed, then down into the yawning mouth of one of the larger crypts. They passed
under a lintel carved in the likeness of Morr, arms outspread as if in welcome. In was cold and dank in
the low-ceilinged burial chamber, and it smelt of wet earth and things long dead. Roots hung through
rough-hewn roof, like grasping, skeletal arms.
A massive sculptured sarcophagus dominated the tomb. The heavy lid, carved to represent a
serenely posed knight with arms crossed over his chest, lay cracked and discarded on the floor.
‘What is this?’ said Calard through clenched teeth as he was dragged towards the casket.
‘Get in,’ hissed one of the peasants.
He strained against his captors, fighting against them as they tried to haul him towards the open
casket. Had they dragged him all this way just to bury him alive? He was far bigger than any of them, and
they struggled to make him move, but his face began to turn purple as the noose around his neck
tightened.
‘Enough,’ hissed one of them, breaking the deadlock by kicking Calard hard in the small of his back.
He staggered forwards into the casket, and looked down into it, gasping for breath.
Bones and rotting cloth had been pushed roughly aside, and he saw that a hole had been smashed in
the bottom of the sarcophagus. He could feel a slight breeze coming up through the hole, bringing with it a
foetid stench of decay.
One of the peasants crawled in, like a spider, and disappeared down the hole.
‘Bring them,’ came its voice, from the darkness.
‘Lady, protect your servant,’ breathed Calard.
THE ENTIRE HILL was riddled with tunnels, and they were dragged deep into the labyrinth. Chewed bones
were strewn across the floor of these tunnels, and the way was lit by stinking candles burning in carved
niches.
Faces crowded around to look upon these newcomers, from tiny children to ancient crones, and
Calard realised that there must have been many hundreds of peasants eking out a horrid existence down
here beneath the earth. What better place for them to call home than a graveyard, he thought darkly.
All of the inhabitants were starving. Their eyes were dull and lifeless, as if any hope that had ever
dwelt there had long faded. Tiny, shrunken babes, too weak even to cry, were held to the bony chests of
mothers unable to produce milk to feed them. Most of the peasants were stooped and hunched, their
bodies and faces malformed and ugly from generations of inbreeding and malnutrition. Many were
missing limbs, and more than a few bore evidence of leprosy and the wasting sickness. They were a
pitiful bunch, and even Calard, who was generally inured to the fate of those of low birth, found himself
disturbed. Hands covered in dirt reached for him as he was dragged deeper beneath the ground, touching
his face and clothes in wonder.
The procession gathered a sizeable entourage as Calard, Raben and Chlod were led into the depths
beneath the Garden of Morr. They crowded after the captives, straining to see. Every side-passage was
filled with staring faces. Children ran behind them. As they descended further, the catacombs carved by
the hands of men gave way to naturally formed caves, their walls slick with moisture.
At last they came to a rocky cavern at the dark heart of the hill. Hundreds of stubby candles lit the
area with a flickering orange glow. It was cold and moist, and an acrid stink hung in the air. Looking up,
Calard could see that the roof was a seething mass of furred shapes: bats.
Rock formations jutted up from the floor and hung from the ceiling. In places these had had come
together, forming slick-sided columns. Drips fell from the ceiling like rain, causing ripples in milky pools of
water that gathered in hollows.
Dozens of natural windows looked down into the chamber, each crowded with the graveyard’s
inhabitants, who bustled for the best vantages.
Calard and Raben were dragged towards a natural stone platform in the centre of the cavern. An
empty throne was carved into the rock at the centre of this platform. Hundreds of human skulls were
piled up around it.
Seated on the roughly hewn steps below the throne was a figure that Calard at first mistook for a
dusty corpse.
Almost imperceptibly, the skeletal figure raised its head to regard their approach. Thick matted
clumps of grey hair hung down over an overly long, ashen face. That face was ancient; so deep were its
lines that they looked as though they had been carved with a chisel. Clouded eyes glinted in deep
sockets.
Calard and Raben were forced to their knees. Their weapons were tossed to the floor nearby, and
the clatter they made reverberated sharply off the cavern walls. Chlod tried to hang back, his head low,
but he was shoved forwards to stand alongside his master.
‘What have you been keeping from me, you little toad?’ said Calard out of the corner of his mouth. It
was the first chance that he had to speak to Chlod since their capture. The hunchbacked manservant
made no answer.
‘Quiet,’ said a voice, and Calard was cuffed across the side of the head.
