Swords & Dark Magic Read Free Page A

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 the flies buzzed thick as black smoke. The forest came to a stumpy end beyond that. A few small fields of crops to the left, and ahead and to the right stood some kind of temple shrine, a stone edifice not much bigger than the altar stone it sheltered on three sides. Surrounding it was a burial ground.
    The riders saw a man and a boy in the yard, digging pits, each one marked out with sun-bleached rags tied to trimmed saplings. A mule and cart waited motionless beneath an enormous yew tree.
    “That’s a few too many graves on the way,” Sergeant Flapp muttered. “Plague, maybe?”
    No one commented. But as they rode past, each one—barring the captain—fixed their attention on the two diggers, counting slow to reach…five.
    “Five flags.” Flapp shook his head. “That’s probably half the population here.”
    A small girl walked the street a short distance ahead