MERCS:

  Greenblade | Twerk | Sharptooth | The Hoffmeister | Pecs | Fortune | Mental | Tree

  Ashlyn picked her way down the mountain, disconsolate after another exploration had come to nothing. She had lost all enthusiasm for their mission now. She hadn’t realised quite how difficult a task it would be, searching across a mountain range for the Blood Fiends who had attacked Mer Khazer. She had imagined it would be a relatively simple process of searching the sky for one of the Roc birds the Fiends had trained to carry their weight. But they had seen nothing since they had arrived in the harsh, uninhabited northern reaches of Gal’azu.

  Sharptooth gave a low growl, as he did from time to time, responding to some sound that was beyond the hearing of his human companions. His ears flicked up.

  “What is it, boy?” Twerk asked him.

  Without warning, the young warg bounded away down the narrow mountain trail.

  “Sharptooth, get back here!” the gnome demanded. He was ignored. “Oh shit on it!”

  Tree sprinted after him, and Ashlyn shared a collective relief with the rest of her companions that the Hargon scout had given chase. They were exhausted. The air here was thin, and sometimes Ashlyn would feel so dizzy she would have to sit and rest for a while.

  Still, they picked up their pace, if for no other reason than they wanted to find out what was going on. Certainly, Ashlyn had reached the point where she craved some action over the endless walking with no end product.

  Turning a corner, Greenblade had her answer. Three figures waited for them. Tree stood in the middle. On one side, he had hold of an adolescent boy, who looked more than a little alarmed at his predicament. On the other, the scout tried to fend off the excitable warg. It didn’t look like Sharptooth was trying to attack the newcomer, but he was more than a little interested in him. He was jumping up, making noises which may have been playful, but to someone meeting a warg for the first time, were no doubt terrifying.

  “What do we have here?” Mental asked.

  The boy looked up at her. He had bright blue eyes, while his skin was as dark as an Alinko’s. “Gishu,” he said.

  “What?” Mental asked.

  He put a hand to his chest. “Gishu.”

  “It’s his name, I think,” Ashlyn said.

  Wilson succeeded in pulling Sharptooth away, making the interrogation less frenetic.

  “You can understand us?” Tree asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We are not here to hurt you. We have come looking for Blood Fiends. You know about them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait. Gishu, do you know where the Blood Fiends are?”

  “My people know. I can take thee to them.”

  “Take thee?” Fortune repeated with a frown. “A strange turn of phrase for a young sapling.”

  Tree shook his head at the merc. He turned to Gishu. “You mean you can take us to the Blood Fiends, or to where your people live?”

  “I mean to Varena. Where my people live.”

  Gishu’s people lived halfway up the next mountain. Caves provided a natural shelter, but they had done much to improve their homes. Rough rock walls and ceilings had been smoothed and decorated; the floor was levelled and covered with straw and rushes, keeping in the warmth of their fires.

  When the Apples sat down with them, they soon learned why they had chosen this location.

  “We are safe from the birds here,” a woman named Yaiza, not much older than Ashlyn, told her. She had the same unusual combination of blue eyes and dark skin as Gishu.

  “The Rocs?” Ashlyn asked.

  “Yes. They cannot reach us.”

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  “Are the Fiends with them?”

  “Yes.” She pointed towards the other side of the mountain. “Sometimes they take our people, when we are out foraging. Our people help them with the birds.”

  “You have family with the Fiends?”

  “Yes. They take younglings whenever they can. They are easier to control.”

  Ashlyn didn’t like the sound of that at all. But she was confused. “What are you doing here?”

  Now Yaiza looked confused.

  “On this mountain? How did you get here?”

  The woman nodded in understanding, waving a hand at her people. “We are Sargassians,” she said proudly.

  “Sargassians?”

  The woman looked disappointed. “The Sargassian people came to Gal’azu and made a great empire. It fell to rampaging goblins, orcs, and other monsters. Many died. Our ancestors had to escape. They came here, where the greenskins would not follow. Ye know nothing of this?” she asked, visibly upset.

  Ashlyn thought about it. She considered the barrows they had found. They were evidence of a civilization that had existed long ago. “Maybe. We have found some remains, I think.”

  “The Crimson Palace?” the woman said eagerly.

  “No. I don’t think so. A great hillfort, and burial mounds.”

  The woman shrugged, unsure. Ashlyn didn’t know what else to say. She thought of showing her Greenblade, but doubted that would advance the conversation in her favour.

  “Gishu tells us your home is called Varena.”

  “Yes. It means Far From Home, in the old tongue.”

  “Old tongue?”

  “We keep alive our old tongue, in the names we give to our children, and our homes. It is the language the first people spoke when they arrived in Gal’azu, from across the sea.”

  Ashlyn nodded. If Yaiza was talking about a time before the Sargassian Empire, which had probably fallen centuries ago, it was well beyond any history she knew. “Mer Khazer,” she said.

  “Mer Khazer?”

  “What does that mean? My friends found an inscription with those words.”

  “That is the name of the sea. The sea we crossed to get here.”

  “Huh.” So Stiff had accidentally named his inland town after a sea. Sounded about right. “Yaiza, we have come here to kill the Blood Fiends.”

  “Thou can do that?” the woman asked. She sounded more doubtful than disbelieving. An important distinction in Ashlyn’s mind.

  “We have already killed six.”

  Yaiza looked impressed.

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Not many more. Less than thirty.”

  “Oh.” Thirty. Thirty was more than six, and they’d barely survived six. “How many Roc birds?”

  “Four, I think.”

  Four was better news. “Will your people help us? Show us where they are?”

  “Yes. I can do that.”

  Ashlyn and Tree followed Yaiza around the mountain. On the other side, the Blood Fiends had their home in a col in the mountain range. The surrounding peaks protected the space from the worst of the weather, and a pool provided them with clean water. A large, rock-built dwelling was presumably home for all of them, including their Sargassian slaves.

  Yaiza pointed across to the farthest peak. It rose tall and straight into the sky. “The Rocs have their eyrie on top of it. The Blood Fiends must provide them with a lot of food every day. They need meat. That is how they keep the birds loyal to them.”

  Ashlyn and Tree spied on the settlement for a good while. A score of Sargassians were busy with chores in and around the col. Fiend hunting parties came and went. It seemed their lives were dominated by the need to secure food. And now, the Fiends had lost six warriors, but still had four Rocs to feed. Perhaps they would fly out again soon, on another long distance raid? That might be their chance to attack those that remained.

  “If they have to, they will feed our people to the birds,” Yaiza said. “The ones they value the least.”

  Ashlyn felt crestfallen. They would have to act soon. But they counted twenty-seven Fiends. She and Henning struggled to come up with a realistic plan to kill them.

  “Poisoning the water would also kill the Sargassians,” Tree mused. “It might be possible to poison the bird food only. But that would still leave the Fiends.”

  “Twenty-seven is just too many,” Ashlyn said. “Perhaps we could attack and retreat to Varena, drawing the Fiends onto our defences?”

  “Very risky,” Tree said. “We’d have to do it without Mental. When she gets the battle rage, she doesn’t retreat.”

  Mental was arguably their best fighter, so that would be a loss. Ashlyn imagined trying to retreat back up the mountain from the Fiends, while Rocs flew overhead. She shook her head, defeated. They’d walked all the way to the freezing north, miraculously found their quarry, and in the end it looked like they were going to give up.

  “If we hit while a group is out on a raid, it would be more like twenty-one to deal with,” Tree said. It sounded like he was clutching at straws.

  “Thou cannot do it,” Yaiza concluded, in a voice that said she’d known all along.

  “Maybe we can come back one day, with reinforcements,” Tree suggested.

  They all knew that wouldn’t happen. Killing the rest of the Fiends wasn’t a priority now they were far from Mer Khazer. The Apples would, inevitably, be drawn into missions closer to home. It meant the Sargassians would have to continue to live in the shadow of the monsters.

  “Is there anything else we can do for you?” Ashlyn asked the woman.

  Tree shot her a warning look, but Ashlyn felt too ashamed to simply walk away.

  Yaiza’s eyes lit up. “We cannot forage this way. But on the other side of our mountain, in the valley, an ogre has made their home. We are too scared to go that way as well. It doesn’t leave us with many options. We have to hike longer and longer distances. That is how thou found Gishu.”

  Ashlyn nodded. “So getting rid of this ogre would help?”

  “Yes. And there is only one of them. Kind of.”

  Ashlyn followed Yaiza’s directions, leading her squad into the valley where the ogre was said to have his lair. She didn’t think finding an ogre would be difficult, and indeed, it wasn’t. They followed the sound of shouting, and growling, emerging through a stand of trees into a clearing.

  There they found a large brown bear savaging a large creature that lay on the ground—presumably, the ogre. The bear turned towards them when it heard their approach. It roared a challenge, spittle flying from its maw. It stood to its full height, close to seven feet, an impressive physical specimen. If she hadn’t recently fought Blood Fiends and Rocs, Ashlyn would probably have been more scared than she was.

  Behind the bear, the ogre clumsily struggled to its feet. Ashlyn gasped. It stood even taller than the bear, a grey-skinned mass of muscle, with thick limbs. It wore bits of piecemeal here and there, the most oversized armour she had ever seen. But her gasp wasn’t caused by its size.

  The ogre had three heads.

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