Beneath the Sickle's Swing
Ice and Snow

Smoke there was once, smoke in great billows and a blaze of fire belching out of bottomless caverns. Torches burned between chains. There was heat infernal and an infernal host among ragged shadows ebbed and flowed, crying praises to the majesty of our Dark Lord. The iron of the vaults and the topless turrets glowed cherry-red against endless night.

Then the Breaking came, and the Chaining. Then the turrets fell and the vaults were opened and the flames quenched. Then the Lord left, and dark was upon us.

Now where smoke was once, and fire, lies only ice and snow.

Thuringwethil:

– fighting and losing, losing terribly, a sea of smoke and fire – lightning vivid, a hammer shattering the dark – and bodies falling all around, the smash of iron and thunder, her ears assailed by screams –

– the Dark Lord on his knees, terrible in defeat –

– she took to wing. Not her huge, ragged wings that blotted out the stars, but wings soft and dark, mere tissues of skin. They were fighting and falling. She darted through the broken night.

Finally silence fell. Still she trembled in her lair. She was so thirsty.

Blood dripped through rent iron, puddling on ruined stone.

For so long, she lived off the blood of the battle: droplets spilt on stained stone, spattered across ruined walls. She fluttered between broken and rusting spires. The pits lay open, all but the deepest, and everywhere was treacherous: an upheaval of jagged slabs and gaping vaults and the corpses of the dishonoured dead. It was all frozen, all frosted over beneath that terrible white starlight: there was snow and the blood was black ice on the ground.

She licked it liquid, her tongue lapping fearfully at cold stone and metal. Sleeping, she dreamt of warm bodies and red fountains.

She heard their heartbeats first.

It had been so long. So long enduring in a frozen tyranny of silence. Flapping among starlit shadows, she heard pounding, drumlike through dark air, and thought at once of armies. In panic, she fled for the rusting iron of her lair.

She clung trembling to a spike. Slowly, so slowly, the drums approached...

Two of them. Only two. She heard their hearts and their footsteps, soft on feathered hoarfrost. She heard the hiss of their exhalation freezing on their lips. She heard the roar of red rivers pumping through narrow channels, and she salivated.

From black wells of shadow to star-frosted perches she fluttered, drawn irresistibly after heart-drums. Fearfully, thirstily, on silent wings: following wisps of body heat, of animal scent, traces of disturbed dark. Such creatures there had been before... penned up in the vaults, stinking herds of them... bleeding and wailing and breeding brutal children for the Lord’s flesh-and-bone hosts...

She remembered luring them to Him, those creatures. She had been mighty then.

One of them crouched below her, alone. Black ropes of hair fell away from its white neck. She saw herself falling ravenously upon it, flesh tearing, spilling scarlet lakes.

Her perch was icy under her claws. She dropped without a second thought. Her meal awaited below: blood, so much warm blood, liquid and lappable, sweet from the source, the first in a hundred revolutions of the stars. So thirsty, so very thirsty. The dark rushed up around her. She fell –

– and found herself drowning in a lake of cloth.

It smelled maddeningly of meat. She struggled wildly against dryness, screaming her fury and fear.

The prison’s soft folds fell open; she hurled herself blind into the Sickle’s brilliance. The words flew after her: “So it was only a bat!”

Only a bat.

So much more she had been, so much greater, before the Lord had gone over the Sea. So fierce in her hunger, so huge in her anger. She had sailed through endless night like the Dark Lord’s rage. Such creatures had fled screaming from the ragged shadow of her wings.

Resentful, Thuringwethil tracked the intruders to the rim of a broken stone staircase descending into the deeps of the pits. Frost glittered on the first step.

She settled under a nearby ledge and folded her wings around herself. She could wait. When they emerged...

... if they emerged...

Orcs:

Long ago, the world ended.

It ended in ice and stillness. There had been light: it was put out. There had been fire: it was extinguished. There had been screaming: it was silenced. There had been anguish: it lessened. There had been unending torment: it ended. There had been slavery: the chains were broken. There had been slave-drivers: they fell flaming. There had been an uncountable host: its remnants fled to hiding-places, scattered and afraid.

There had been prisons. Now there were ruins. The survivors combed through the wreckage and told dark tales of the world before its end.

“Pain and terror. That’s how He cut us out of quivering flesh – our Master, the Dark Lord...”

His shadow splashed huge against the broken wall. An uneasy whisper flickered round his little audience. He grinned at them, showing off his yellowed tusks.

The noise from the back cell had quietened. She had been screaming since three-meals-past and was weakening; he could hear her sobs. He shifted on his haunches and lowered his voice. “Taller’n towers, He was. We were slaves then. Born by the knife to die by it, we were. When the end came, we died... and He fell.”

“Hungry?” Vigorous nods from his scrawny audience. “Weren’t no hunger then. There was meat for the taking. ’Course, you had to take it. Had to wrench it from the bone, still on its owner, often enough. Still yelling, still fighting, ’cause only the strong survive. Orcish condition, that is. Down in the Deeps where the Master made us, weren’t no cold, no quiet, no stars...”

He sat back. Darkness pooled beyond the flickering fire. Far overhead, starlight leaked through a frozen crack in the vault. All was still.

“Ain’t none of that now,” he said. “He’s gone. The Deeps’re ours.”

The silence had gone on too long. “Hey, Curly,” he said. “Go check out back.”

He didn’t wait for Curly’s footsteps to fade. “There were others, ’course. Dark fiery spirits with burning whips. Wolves bigger’n Orcs, and not all beasts all of the time. Things like bats, but a thousand times bigger, with claws and teeth. Patrolling the Deeps and the Pits and Up Above, minding His business, holding our chains. His knives. Our makers. And here’s the thing.”

He paused.

“When the end came, not all of ’em fell. Some ran. They’re still here in the Deeps with us.”

“Down by the ice river, when it’s snowing and the stars are dark, the wolves go hunting.” He was mostly talking to fill the uneasy quiet now. “Used to be, Othrod’s gang lived south of here. Then a yellow-eyed wolf strolled in on its hind-legs –”

A shadow loomed out of the back cell: Curly, waving urgently. He leapt to his feet.

There was blood everywhere. She was awash with sweat, white as a day-old corpse on the ratty blankets. But her greasy plaits were bunched over her shoulder, clutched in the plump fist of the babe snug in her arms.

So small, this new girl-child of his. Her downy hair was crisp with drying blood. He held her cradled in the crook of his arm and combed carefully through stiffening strands, thinking of the girl who’d gone to Othrod’s boy, long ago.

Her mother looked on with glazed eyes. She was in a fever already. He saw another parting coming, the hardest of all.

One more, he’d said. One more, when Othrod’s gang went to the wolves. One more might cost him both of them. A babe needed a mother’s milk.

Curly tugged at his elbow. “Da, what’s she called?”