01 - Honour of the Grave Read Online Free

seen, in the corner of her eye. Emerging from a blind spot behind a
rock outcropping was a huge cart. Angelika had to pause and compare it with the
size of the figures around it to get an accurate sense of its scale. Its wheels—she counted a dozen, then recounted and corrected the figure to ten—were
greater in diameter than the height of any nearby orc. Its surface was a flat
platform of long planks, somewhere between eighty and one hundred feet long. It
boasted neither rails nor sides. Over a hundred sweating, bare-backed orcs,
suffering under the lashes of multiple drivers, pitched forward in a series of
great, uneven lurches, dragging it behind them. In the middle of the cart there
towered an enormous wooden figure. The figure, depicting an orc with gaping
mouth and antlered helmet, terminated at the waist, which was flush with the
planks of the cart. It looked hollow, like it had been knocked together with
nails and scraps of board. The eyes on its squarish face were set on different
levels, and several of its large, triangular teeth had already fallen loose and
were dangling from the round cave of its stupidly open mouth. Angelika could not
tell if the splotches of dark on the figure’s surface were paint or dung or
mildew.
    Her knees felt unsteady, and a voice at the back of her head told her to run,
but Angelika kept looking at the thing, confident in the half mile of distance
between them. The big figure had only one arm, and this was a separate, levering
piece, attached with a big wooden pin to its shoulder. This moveable arm
terminated in a great round hammer, its striking surface easily eight, perhaps
even ten, feet in diameter. Chains held it up, in ready position. Angelika,
squinting, thought she could make out a pulley contraption set into the platform
of the cart, to which the chains were fixed.
    Several dozen orcs, all tiny to her eyes, milled around the figure. One in
particular seemed larger than the rest, and stood at the cart’s forward edge,
fists at hips, watching the slave orcs as they strove to yank his conveyance
onward. She saw that his foot stood on something, and that the something was
moving.
    It was a familiar, squirming sack, dyed purple and splotchy, its drawstring
now trailing down over the lip of the cart.
    So they had not killed the boy yet. It did not take brilliant deduction to
realize that the orcs intended to perform some kind of ceremony involving their
big crude statue. It would entail placing Franziskus under the hammer’s shadow,
then loosing the chains, so it would fall upon him, pounding him to paste.
    Angelika turned to go. Now she had an interesting fact to share with Max for
his imaginary book. It would not be necessary to stay and watch the ceremony.
She could imagine the results with sufficient vividness. She crept quietly along
the flattish projection of rock she’d been standing on and down to a trail
through the brush and bramble. The trail forked two ways, up towards a mountain
switchback, or down the face of the hill to the pass. Up around the mountain lay
her route to town, and Max, and her money and a hot drink and a softish bed.
    She took the trail’s downward leg. Angelika had never heard of a thing like
the statue. Maybe she could make some more money by making a sketch of it, to
sell to scholars or something. Max would know of such scholars, perhaps. They
were the sorts of people he was always drinking with. Angelika had heard maybe
that there was a market for information. It would be especially true, wouldn’t
it, when it was information on the Empire’s most dangerous enemies? Yes, she was
pretty sure of it. So, the reason she was getting closer was to make a sketch.
For the money.
    Stunted, leathery-leafed trees lined the trail, and Angelika kept low behind
them. It was not hard to match the cart’s slow progress. If anything, Angelika,
the thumps of her heart radiating up through her chest, wanted it to go faster.
    A dried,