Bookshops & Bonedust （Legends & Lattes, #0）
Travis Baldree
Because right things happen at the wrong time.
PROLOGUE
“Eighteen!” bellowed Viv, bringing her saber around in a flat curve that battered the wight’s skull off its spine. She laughed and rammed her shoulder through its body before it could begin to fall, shattering bones in all directions. In two more steps, she’d already brought the blade back in an upswing, catching another in the ribcage. Splinters sprayed like woodchips from a felling-axe.
“Nineteen!” She grinned savagely, baring her fangs and forging ahead with massive strides.
Every breath sang pure and clean in her lungs, her muscles bunched and released in perfect rhythm, her blood roared in her veins. She was youth and strength and power, and she meant to push all three as far as they would go.
Varine the Pale’s army of gaunt, skeletal soldiers crowded amidst the bastion oaks, nimble despite their desiccation. They battled in deathless silence, short-swords and pikes snapping toward Viv, and she dodged or hacked them aside, relentless as the tide.
She was far ahead of the rest of Rackam’s Ravens, leading the charge. Old warhorses, the lot of them. Old and slow. They’d tried to keep the new blood in the back, but that wasn’t what she was built for.
Somewhere ahead, the necromancer lay in wait, and Viv meant to reach her first. When the stragglers finally caught up, they’d find her with her blade at ease and their quarry in a heap at her feet.
Her count increased with every stroke as she laid about her with her saber. Still not fast enough. She yanked her maul from its loop and went to work with both hands, crushing and shearing through the skeletal ranks with hammer and sword. Their shields were bashed aside. Their ring mail tore like paper. Their skulls collapsed like winter melons.
Harsh cries echoed behind her as Rackam’s crew dealt with the chaff she left in her wake or the wights that tried to flank them. Someone shouted for her to slow down. She huffed a scornful laugh.
And then her leg lit up with a cold fire that turned hot in half a second. She staggered and pivoted on the other foot just as a pike’s rusty head withdrew from a long wound in her thigh. It darted forward again, and she stared disbelieving as it disappeared through her trousers and into the meat of her leg in a perfect parallel slice. Then the blood came. A lot of it.
She roared, knocking the pike aside with her maul and following with an upward slash of her saber that ripped the wight in half. Its horned helm spun skyward in an absurd twirl. Viv would have laughed if agony hadn’t overtaken her when her weight shifted from the swing. Her wounded leg collapsed under her like a cornstalk.
Suddenly, she was on her side in the moss and muck, bleeding everywhere.
Another skeletal revenant loomed above her, curls of blue light flickering in its empty sockets. On its forehead Varine’s symbol burned bright—a diamond with branches like horns. It hauled a rusty tower shield into the air, preparing to bring the edge down in a crushing blow. The only sounds were the creaking of its sinew and Viv’s own ragged breaths.
She just caught the edge of the shield with her maul, knocking it to the side, but she lost her grip on her weapon. Tears of pain blurred her vision. Viv hadn’t managed to disarm the thing, though. Implacable, the revenant raised the slab of metal once more. This time, the angle was all wrong to shift the saber between her and the falling edge. In shocked disbelief, she could only watch as the steel dropped toward her neck.
A ragged cry, but not her own.
Rackam barreled into the creature with his shoulder. As the wight staggered back, the dwarf obliterated the thing with a single swing of his flanged mace.
He glanced down at her, and the disappointed grimace on his lips made her nausea double. “Hells-damned fool. Clap a hand to that. Stay put, and try not to die, if you can.”
Then he was gone, and Viv was breathless with shock as Rackam’s Ravens charged past in a line of blades and bows and arcane fire that leveled the foe before them.
They disappeared into the mist, and she was alone, staring in disbelief as her life pumped out of her leg.
* * *
“Still with us, hey?”
Viv groggily regained consciousness. She felt like she was going to be sick. Maybe she already had been.
The first things she saw were Rackam’s flinty eyes, glittering above the braids of his muddy salt-and-pepper beard. Viv shook her head and looked around; the edges of her vision seemed smeared with grease. Somehow, she’d braced her back against one of the oaks. She’d apparently also had the presence of mind to tear off the bottom of her shirt and bind her wound around a handful of moss. The cloth was soaked through, and the earth underneath was a churn of mud and blood.
At the sight of it, she began to drift, and Rackam brought her back with a surprisingly gentle slap to the cheek.
He sighed and shook his head.
The battle was done. If his presence hadn’t been enough to tell her, then the unhurried movement of the warriors behind him would have.
“I figured it when you signed on. Hoped I’d be wrong, but nah, I knew this was the way it would go. Younger is always dumber, and wising up takes blood and time.” He looked away, as though into some other possible future, then back at her. “Every new prospect, I give them even odds. I look at the hands, the arms. No scars? Then it’s even odds that the first one they get kills them.”
With one gloved hand, he patted her massive forearm. Corded with muscle, but the skin unblemished. Viv stared past it to the wreck of her leg.
Rackam stood, and she still didn’t have to look up far to meet his eyes. “Is this the one that kills you, then?”
Viv swallowed down her nausea and narrowed her eyes, feeling stupid. Feeling stupid made her feel resentful. And resentment was only a half step from angry. “No,” she said through clenched teeth.
He chuckled. “Don’t guess it will, at that. But you’re done for now.”
She blinked. “Did we get her?”
“We didn’t. Wasn’t even here, near as we can tell. Only a little trouble she stirred up just for us. We’re heading north. We’ll find her.”
Viv struggled to push herself to standing against the trunk with her left leg. The other felt too big by half, and every pump of her heart was a dark drumbeat all through it. “When do we leave?”
“We? Like I said, you’re done for now. They tell me it’s only a few miles to some sea town. I’ll send you that way. You’ll heal up, and we’ll pass through when we’re done. If you’re still around and able when we roll through, we’ll take you back on. Probably a few weeks. If you’re gone when we show … ?” He shrugged. “No shame in calling this the end of it.”
“But—”
“It’s done, kid. You survived a stupid mistake today. If you want to make another so soon after, well …” His gaze was hard. “Want me to tell you the odds I give on that?”
But Viv wasn’t a stupid orc, so she shut the hells up.
1
Viv lay on the floor of the tiny room. Well, almost on the floor. The place hadn’t been built with orcs in mind, and the bed was too short by at least two feet. Someone had wrestled the strawtick mattress onto the floor, and though her legs still went off the end, they’d positioned her pack so her foot was propped, keeping the wounded leg elevated.